Larkon was a mammoth who managed his time well. And thus because of the careful delegating of his time and work he now had a free day today to do whatever he wished. Stepping from his study and down the hall of his well kept home he pondered on how best to spend the day. His son and daughter were off doing things of their own, his wife was cleaning and preparing the dining room for lunch and dinner already, it seemed he would be on his own for this free day. Did he crack open one of his favorite books and relax in his library? Go on a pleasant stroll around the city and perhaps say hello to a few friends of his? Both good ideas. As his feet walked over the red carpet covering his floor he softly hummed to himself, an old folk song passed down through the ages about the passing of spring into summer. The song gave him another idea, why not visit Tarmok’s Hall and see if there was any interesting business going on in the senate? As the historian of their society it would inevitably be his job to record it anyways. And he did so enjoy debate and discussion, especially when he didn’t have to partake in it. He had a brief chuckle as he realized that he was still thinking of work and decided to do something somewhat related to it even on his free day. But you can’t fight your own passions.
The mammoth paused by the front door to his home and grabbed his boater hat off the hat rack with his trunk, but he stopped before putting it on his head. Thinking better he instead put it back on the rack and grabbed off his bowler.
“Much better,” Larkon smiled at himself in the mirror placed beside the front door. With a curt nod he pulled the handle and stepped out.
Rainbow Dash plugged her ears with her hooves and winced at the incredibly loud trumpet blowing. “Can you guys stop that?!”
The gatekeeper saw her distress and hastily waved the trumpeters down, the four other mammoths sheepishly putting their instruments away.
“I’m sorry, we wished to give you a special welcoming. This is actually quite the momentous occasion for us,” the gatekeeper said and coughed in embarrassment.
“Riiiight,” Rainbow Dash looked at him and the other mammoths. They didn’t seem particularly vicious to her. In fact her first impression was that they were kind of dorks. “Why’d you wanna make such a big deal about me being here anyways? And what’s your name, dude?”
“Ahem, my apologies, where are my manners? I am Mallom,” the big mammoth bowed to her. “And the reason for all this is, well, you’re the first creature to come here. Ever.”
“Ever?” Rainbow Dash scrunched up her nose, she found that hard to believe.
Mallom looked a little troubled at her questioning, he looked over to the other mammoths with him who merely rubbed their heads or awkwardly looked away. Finally he looked back at her. “There’s… a long story there. But please, won’t you come in and see our city? I assure you you will be treated well and our city is truly lovely!”
Well Rainbow Dash was hardly scared and she certainly wasn’t a coward so it’s not like she would turn away. And she could always just fly off real easily. She somehow doubted any mammoth could be called fast, there was no way she’d be caught if it turned out these guys weren’t on the level.
Rainbow Dash shrugged. “Fine by me. This is kind of why I’m up here anyways.”
“Great!” Mallom cheered. “Please, if you’ll allow me to I’ll take you right to our leaders! They must know of your arrival and they’ll take care of everything you need afterwards. The whole city has to learn about you!”
This was beginning to remind Rainbow Dash of her arrival at the Eternal Pegasus Empire. Except good. The idea of the entire city of mammoths reacting to her like this was actually pretty cool, she loved being celebrated after all. If these guys wanted to make a huge spectacle out of her and she got some kind of special treatment that was pretty much gravy. Center of attention, thy name is Rainbow Dash.
“Let’s go then,” Rainbow Dash grinned at him. “Lead the way.”
“Thank you!” Mallom said with a big smile of his own. “The five of us will escort you through the city.”
Rainbow Dash nodded. “Right, right, but won’t everyone else see me and try to talk to me or be really surprised and stuff?”
“Yes but they’ll know I’m doing official work. They won’t bother us but I’d expect quite a few stares if I were you,” Mallom told her.
“Heh, I’m more than used to that.”
As Rainbow Dash and her entourage walked down the road and into the city proper the gate closed behind her and she was able to take her first real look around the mammoth city. First off the road inside the walls was much better maintained, it was totally devoid of any weeds and the snow had been shoveled to the sides. There were trees lining it too along with patches of grass and even flower bushes, giving it all a much more spring feeling to the city than Rainbow Dash would’ve expected pretty much anywhere in the True North to look.
The buildings she looked at as she walked by them were just as large as they needed to be for mammoth use. She really felt small walking down this street, side by side with the mammoths with their oversized buildings looming over her. It didn’t take more than a second for her to fly up and keep at eye level with Mallom.
“You guys really need a lot of lumber and stuff for your buildings. Just saying,” Rainbow Dash told him.
“One of the downsides of being so large, yes,” Mallom smiled uncomfortably. “Especially in a fairly scarce place like this. Many of our buildings are partially or completely made of stone that we mine from a nearby quarry.”
Rainbow Dash nodded along, still checking everything else out. She glanced at the other mammoths walking with them who had remained mostly silent so far even though she could feel the excitement rolling off of them as well. Were all mammoths this big? They really made yaks look like—well, ponies. Their trunks too looked really strong and dexterous, none of the creatures that frequented Twilight’s school had an appendage like that. And those tusks looked pretty dangerous too.
Rainbow Dash narrowed her eyes as she looked closer. Or the tusks would be dangerous if the tips weren’t filed down to a blunt end. She checked from mammoth to mammoth and all of them had their tusks filed that way. She wondered why, maybe it was a cultural thing?
Looking back at the gate she then turned her head to Mallom. “Hey so, your job is to watch the gate?” She asked him.
“Yes,” he nodded.
“And I’m the only one who you’ve ever had to open the gate for.”
“Yes.”
Rainbow smirked. “Heh, sounds like you and your friends have a pretty sweet job.”
Mallom smirked right back up at her. “Yep.”
Rainbow Dash heard a gasp of surprise and looked over Mallom’s head to the right side of the street. Another mammoth was standing there and holding a broom in his trunk, it looked like he had been sweeping the sidewalk right up until he saw Rainbow Dash. She waved to him and he slowly waved back, as if unsure of what he was seeing. Unlike the mammoths escorting her he was also wearing a large shawl draped over his back. So now she knew they at least wore some clothes. Getting curious about something else she went back to speak to Mallom.
“So how many mammoths live here? I mean it’s not that early, shouldn’t more of you be out?”
“Mammoths are not early risers generally speaking. We’re also still on the outskirts of the city where only a few live and work. However there are thousands of us in this city, it’s just most live across the river,” he explained.
As they walked further down the road she saw that he was correct. She spied more and more mammoths either walking down the roads or sitting on the porches of their homes or working outside of other buildings, seems the city was just about starting to wake up completely. Which meant they were all out just in time to see the amazing pony from Equestria flying by. Most of their reactions were the same as the other guy but a few of them actually smiled widely when they saw her and were much more enthusiastic in their waving. Rainbow Dash also saw the first few women mammoths gathered in a cul-de-sac they passed, they were talking to each other at first and when they saw Rainbow Dash and her procession began speaking in hushed whispers before running off down other roads. Gossipers. Rainbow Dash had a keen eye when it came to people like that thanks to all her time spent with Rarity.
She noticed that the women seemed a little shorter and less heavily built than the men, with long eyelashes and lipstick on, but their woolly fur came in the same shades of brown.
The city was getting more colorful down the road too. Not just because of the grass or the flowers but from paint and art. Buildings started to come painted in all colors of the rainbow with murals of flowers and landscapes on the walls, there were statues placed on the sidewalks and in small parks and other areas. Statues of a mammoth balancing on one leg while also balancing a ball on his trunk, others of two mammoth children flying kites, and still more of more “artistic” stuff like a bunch of pieces of metal twisted together in a spiral. Her group walked beside a long building that had its wall facing the road turned into an elaborate piece of art with a green meadow and skyline painted on it and a bunch of mammoths frolicking in the grass.
It really made the city look so nice and happy compared to the other places she had been in the True North. This really was more like being in Equestria than anything. A couple of times Rainbow Dash even spotted some chalk drawings on the ground and road near some houses, the artistic works of some children no doubt. Rainbow Dash had to smile, she wasn’t worried in the slightest anymore, this was a good place.
A couple of kids ran out onto the street, giggling about something but stopping when they saw Rainbow Dash. She grinned and waved to them but they only stared back at her completely slack-jawed. It was likely they didn’t even know what she was. Once her group had passed them they all ran off again, probably going to tell their other friends about something very exciting.
Those were the first mammoth children she had seen and Rainbow Dash noted with some amusement that they were already bigger than yaks.
The yaks though… were they wrong about the mammoths? Had something else happened or had things changed in the time since the yaks came south?
Looking around she just couldn’t even imagine these guys being warlike, despite their size. The ones “guarding” the gate had no weapons, their tusks were filed down to blunt tips, she hadn’t seen anyone else who came remotely close to looking like a soldier or police officer or anything. They seemed more peaceful than most ponies!
“Are you enjoying the sights so far?” Mallom asked her.
She was, although the art and making stuff pretty was never really something she cared about it was still nice to look at. Fluttershy, Pinkie, and Rarity would be more into this. “Yeah, you guys have a really nice city.”
“Thank you,” Mallom beamed. “We do our best. You’ll get an even better look at things in a moment too, we have to pass through town square to get to the senate at Tarmok’s Hall. There will be quite a lot going on for you to see.”
As they passed a house that had its exterior painted bright pink she couldn’t help but believe him. “I’ll take your word for it.”
With everything to see she had almost forgotten that they were still in the cold north too, but a few icicles hanging from gutters and snow gathered on the roofs of buildings reminded her of that fact. It seems the streets had a service of mammoths working to clear them of snow early in the morning but there were still some drifts and piles along the side. When she glanced down an alley she saw a group of kids even having a snowball fight with each other.
It wasn’t much longer after that that they made it to the river Rainbow Dash had first spied from the cliff. Just like the buildings it was bigger and wider than she had first thought, somewhere between one and two hundred feet across. The water was calm and dark and she couldn’t actually tell which direction it was even flowing in or see more than a few feet into it. Their road also ended up going directly onto one of the bridges that spanned the large river, looking down in the direction of the lake and docks she saw another smaller bridge, and there were probably more in the other direction too.
The bridge was wide as well, enough where four carriages (designed for ponies at least) could have easily driven side by side on it with room on the sides left over. The dirt road also became brick once they got onto the bridge and the heavy feet of the mammoths clunked against it in rhythm. She spotted another mammoth walking up the bridge in the opposite direction, tossing snow off the ledges and into the river. Made sense. If the snow melted on here or then refroze and became ice it could make the bridge really slippery and dangerous.
Like the others he stopped in shock when he saw the blue pegasus waving at him.
“Up ahead you’ll see town square,” Mallom suddenly said. “It’s divided into two open areas centered around water fountains with the marketplace around it and our main roads branching off.” He pointed forward with his trunk. “Look.”
Rainbow Dash did, she saw an open area up ahead just off of the bridge with a lot of mammoths walking around it, and another larger area slightly past it. There seemed to be a lot of open shops and mammoths mulling around them while more played and talked in front of a large triple-tiered water fountain. The noise of a city now fully awoken with a populace going about their daily business started to come down the bridge.
When they finally made it to the other side of the river the roads stayed brick and very well maintained while the whole park area next to her with the fountain was covered in grass and wildflowers. And she noticed that it wasn’t just mammoths out shopping and stuff here either, she saw one guy juggling a bunch of huge beanbags off in the corner while kids watched, another who was doing portraits (painting with his trunk), and even a full blown band of five mammoths playing light music around the fountain.
“Is it always this lively here?” Rainbow Dash asked Mallom. This was almost on the level of a fair or festival to her.
“Around this time of year at least,” he replied.
Rainbow Dash was about to ask him for some more elaboration when some familiar gasps and the shuffling of big woolly feet reached her ears. She looked up from Mallom to see the mammoths that had just previously been enjoying their time in the park were now all crowding around the edge of the road and staring at her. Even the juggler and the other entertainers had stopped what they had been doing, Rainbow Dash had completely absorbed all the attention in the area.
As well over a hundred of the huge mammoths stared at her, Rainbow Dash blushed and cracked a crooked smile, waving slightly at them all.
Fortunately, Mallom was able to come to her rescue. “A momentous occasion, my fellows! Fear not, we have been blessed with a visitor! I am taking her to Tarmok’s Hall right now to meet with the senate. I’m sure you will hear more about this in the news tomorrow but for now, please, do not let her get such a mistaken impression of us. Say hello! Smile, everyone!”
That seemed to break the ice and soon enough dozens of mammoths were happily waving back and greeting her, their confusion and worries allayed by Mallom and the other guards escorting her. Funny to think that they might’ve been afraid of her. Well, that was too strong a word, perturbed might be better. But it was still funny considering just how big of creatures they were and she was just a single tiny pegasus. Although it kind of made sense. According to Mallom they would’ve all never seen any other creatures in their lives. And they didn’t even seem to have the sort of variance between tribes like pegasi, unicorns, and earth ponies did.
“Hi, it’s nice to meet all of you! You guys have a nice city,” Rainbow Dash said back to them as she flew beside Mallom, just trying to make a good first impression too and let them know she didn’t bite.
She would’ve liked to have seen more of what they were doing and everything but at the same time she didn’t want anyone to think she was some kind of intruder in the city. If she flew off alone to explore things she’d inevitably cause a stir.
Her procession left this area with everyone watching her the whole way and walked up between two large buildings that led into the larger area Rainbow Dash had spotted earlier.
“Welcome to the real town’s square,” Mallom said with a wide smile on his face as he stopped and allowed Rainbow Dash to get a full view of the busy square.
The first and most noticeable thing was that the fountain in the center of the square here overshadowed the other one in every way, shape, and form. First off the bottom section was the size of a pool all on its own with water jets spraying from the sides out of the mouths of sculpted fish. And where the other fountain was just one central fountain there were three total in this one, all of them rising high on bronzed metal in the shape of waves with individual pools of water at the top and waterfalls coming down. In the very center of the fountain was a golden ball on a pedestal shooting up an impressive umbrella of water that came falling back down around it.
There were way more mammoths around here too and unlike the other area just behind them the ground was all brick and stone instead of grass. Some mammoths were just walking in groups while she saw one with a cart set up by the fountain that was selling snowcones the size of her head, kids were running around kicking a ball back and forth between them, and one big building had an open storefront facing the town square that a stream of mammoths kept going in and out of. There were more roads and other paths leading from here and all were busy with mammoths right now. With her vision unbroken thanks to town square being a wide open area Rainbow Dash could also see far ahead to a very large building that was up near the north end of the city, it looked like it sat on a bit of a hill and overlooked the rest.
Her sightseeing temporarily ended when the attention of the crowd was drawn to her, and like before everything that had been going on came to a halt as the mammoths stared at her and the guards. Mallom had to wave and smile at them as the group started moving again, heading around the large fountain and to a road that went in the direction of the huge building Rainbow Dash spied.
“Hello everyone, hello! We have a very special day today!” Mallom said as he walked by with Rainbow Dash waving along as well.
She shot a smile at some of the more curious kids and they ran off in surprise with snowcones held in their trunks. Rainbow Dash snorted in amusement and kept flying beside Mallom’s head.
While they walked around the fountain Rainbow Dash saw another mammoth selling hats out of the back of a wagon. A wagon essentially the size of a barn for ponies. He seemed to be doing good business since she now noticed that a number of mammoths were wearing hats of all kinds, with top hats being the most common for guys, and sun hats with ribbons on them for the ladies. While she didn’t have an eye for fashion she did have sharp eyes and now with Rainbow paying attention there were quite a few other things she noticed about mammoth fashion. A number of the mammoths in the crowd were wearing rings around their tusks, or even had other types of jewelry dangling from the tips, and some had elaborately drawn tattoos or paintings on their tusks. Not everyone had accessories like this but there were more than enough for her to pick out.
She almost gawked in surprise when they walked past one young mammoth who had his hair done up in a big mohawk. Rarity would’ve been excited by all the new fashion and variety of styles.
Now as they left town square and went down a new road they had an entourage following them despite Mallom’s attempts to dissuade such a thing. Rainbow Dash was still looking all around at anything new and exciting, waving and smiling to any mammoths whose eyes she met. It became apparent to her quickly that they were heading in the direction of the large building she had seen, still visible on its hill.
Rainbow Dash flew up to one of Mallom’s big ears and whispered. “Hey, just going out on a limb here but is that Tarmok’s Hall up there?”
“You are correct,” he nodded.
“Cool. Also, who’s Tarmok?”
“Hmm,” Mallom gathered his thoughts for a second. “The short version is that he was a King of us mammoths in the past. Not our founder, but you could say he’s responsible for us being here.”
“Oh, so who’s the King now?”
Mallom smiled up at her in the same way a parent does to their child. “We don’t have Kings anymore, it’s just the senate. No single ruler is allowed among the mammoths anymore.”
“Gotcha,” Dash said and looked back up at the looming hall. She knew not everywhere just had one big ruler but personally she couldn’t imagine Equestria without Celestia on top. And so why did the mammoths change anyways? She wanted to ask him but the way he took his time thinking about Tarmok, and explicitly said his answer was the short version, made her think it would either take too long to explain or wasn’t something they wanted to share with her in the first place.
So they just continued walking and flying together with Rainbow Dash taking more sights as she got to feel more and more like a kid who wandered into giant land. The houses beside the road they were waking on now started to get bigger and nicer looking, the rich part of town maybe? They were still painted in all colors but some had large balconies on their second and third stories and even some gated yards with flower gardens and well kept yards. Rainbow Dash peeked into one for a moment and saw a mammoth watering some flowers with a watering can.
The commotion of so many mammoths following her only got the attention of more and more the further they went. A street musician playing an accordion decided to ditch his job for the day and follow her as well while another mammoth that had been acting as a living statue also joined in.
“We’ll keep everyone from entering the hall when we get there. It would get too crowded otherwise and there are already going to be a number of others in it,” Mallom said to her.
“I don’t mind a big crowd but I get your point,” Rainbow Dash couldn’t imagine what a room full of mammoths would be like. One of them could make a normal building back in Equestria crowded.
The road started to incline just a bit and Rainbow Dash got a better view of the hall. It looked like there was another wall built up around it with an opening for the road they were traveling on. Through that opening she could see the immense building, it stood on a huge foundation of cement blocks all stuck together with a large series of steps leading up it to the building’s entrance. On either side of the steps stood twin statues of mammoths rearing up on their hindlegs. There were several real, living, mammoths on the steps, talking or walking.
When Rainbow Dash and her group got into the grounds where Tarmok’s Hall stood she could now fully appreciate just how big it was. Each step leading up to it was almost taller than she was and the building was painted black with an upturned roof style that had a gold finish and more statues of mammoths at every corner. Despite there no longer being a King it was a pretty royal looking place. At the top of the steps sat a massive open door of wood painted a bright red. The top level of the hall facing her looked like it was made up mostly of open terraces, with red pillars holding up that part of the roof. The building as a whole was mostly rectangular but the side facing south had a portion cut out, and then another, giving it a leveled look if you were looking at it sideways.
It might’ve lacked the flourish and impressively pretty architecture of Canterlot Castle, or really any castle in Equestria, but the sheer size of it as just one major building gave it a grand appearance. The throne room of Canterlot Castle could almost fit in the doorway of Tarmok’s Hall. And Rainbow Dash was definitely the type of pony who agreed that big equaled impressive.
“Ready to go in? I can announce your arrival to the consulate and he will bring notice to the senate. I can assure you that you’ll be brought in immediately,” Mallom said.
Rainbow Dash grinned in anticipation. “Yep, let’s go.”
The mammoths that had been on the steps and around the hall finally noticed her and stopped what they were doing to stare. That seemed to remind Mallom of what he needed to do and he turned to the other four mammoths that made up their entourage and had them block off and try to disperse the crowd that wished to follow him and Rainbow Dash into Tarmok’s Hall. They then proceeded into the large palace of governance and for the millionth time in her life, Rainbow Dash was thankful she could fly, since walking up these big steps would’ve been a pain.