Maud hadn’t intended on passing through the Everfree Forest, but something had called her there. Specifically, the nearby escarpment gave off a strong scent of dumortierite quartz with only trace amounts of alkali feldspar. Not unusual for a granite formation, strictly speaking, but certainly on the high end of normal.
It also happened to be the most direct route between the badlands and Ponyville, which meant she would get to see Pinkie Pie that much sooner.
Mostly it was the escarpment, though.
Night had fallen by the time she arrived, so her research would have to wait, but that was fine. She didn’t expect the rocks would go anywhere overnight. Rocks couldn’t really move much on their own, except for sailing stones and tectonic plates, of course. For an escarpment of this size, it would take thousands of years of erosion before it moved a significant amount. Maud didn’t plan on staying that long, so she was pretty sure it would still be there in the morning.
She felt a poem coming on. Maybe she would write one before bed. She could call it “Geology is Slow Most of the Time.” Good enough for a working title, anyway.
The dilapidated ruins nearby made the most sense for a place to set up camp, even if she avoided sleeping in pony-made buildings when she could help it. Natural caverns were far more comforting, and her Maud Sense indicated one a short hike away. She didn’t mind the extra walking, but Boulder was already pretty tired, so she decided to investigate the ruins for his sake.
The bulk of the building seemed to be made of basalt and slate with marble and gneiss used for accents and detail work. Gneiss had fallen out of favour as a construction material a long time ago due to the frequency of toxic minerals in its composition. Modern buildings tended towards travertine instead, which meant this place had to be a few centuries old at least.
By far the most interesting feature she found was the shrine. The limestone base was as commonplace as mica in pegmatite, but the arms of the shrine held five metamorphic rocks carved into spheres. The sculpture didn’t depict anything in particular, so she had to assume the shrine was for the rocks themselves.
At a glance, Maud couldn’t tell why anypony would enshrine them like this. Sure, metamorphic stones were less common than their igneous and sedimentary cousins, but to dedicate a whole chamber to them seemed excessive. She could understand if they were suevite specimens or another impactite, given ponies’ cultural obsession with the worship of heavenly bodies, but all of the spheres appeared to be garden-variety, mudstone-rich schist.
Still, if somepony had dedicated this much effort to displaying them, they must have had some meaning.
“Wait here, Boulder,” Maud said, setting him down with her saddlebags. She scaled the shrine and picked one of the spheres at random, sniffing it carefully.
The rock gave off the inimitable odour of both divalent magnesium and trivalent aluminium, indicating an abundance of pyrope laced throughout. Mildly surprising at best; the majority of Equestrian schists were garnetiferous, after all. The only anomaly with this one was how much of the mineral was present.
There was something else, too, but she couldn’t pinpoint it. It almost smelled like ozone, which only ever occurred in rocks as a byproduct of certain chemical reactions and would never be contained inside a stone naturally. Curious, but not enough to get her to open it up.
Testing the other spheres revealed much of the same: heightened amounts of various garnet species with a secondary smell each time. The only differences were the smells themselves: apples, flowers, perfume, and…
A smile crossed her muzzle as she sniffed the last one. Smells like cupcakes.
She plucked the sphere from its pedestal and clambered back down the structure. She didn’t plan on taking it with her—these clearly belonged to somepony already, and Maud preferred finding her own rocks anyway—but having a little extra company while she slept would be nice, especially company that felt so familiar.
She returned to where Boulder had been waiting and patted him gently. “Good boy,” she said, then fished his nightcap out of her saddlebags. She brought both Boulder and the sphere near the base of the shrine, where she laid out her bedroll and nestled in for the night.
She still had a long hike to reach Ponyville, so it would probably be best if she skipped the escarpment and left first thing in the morning. She didn’t want to keep Pinkie Pie waiting.
Maud lay awake for a few more minutes, deep in thought. She eventually pulled the sphere closer, snuggling it as she fell into a cozy slumber.