//------------------------------//
// We Encounter the Machines 
// Story: Her Eyes Reflect The Stars 
// by Lynwood 
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Dear Diary,

Something very, very strange happened today.

We spent the better part of the morning packing and breaking camp. Everyone was still feeling dour, but as we walked south, Four Score mentioned a song that he and I used to sing back during our school days. We spent a good deal of the day debating over and poorly recalling the lyrics to that particular diddy, which lifted everypony's spirits. In fact, Compass and Auburn's spirits were so lifted by our performance that they refused to speak to us. 

As we began to work on the twelfth verse, Auburn halted the group. I thought it was because of the singing at first, but when I saw what had made her freeze, my heart went cold. We had stumbled into the center of a rough circle of five rocky lumps that, of course, were not actually rocky lumps. On top of that, these lumps had no grass on them— they had moved recently.

As Auburn was beginning to navigate us out, they all began to shift at once. She loaded her spearzapper and I lit my horn, prepared to cast the only shield spell I know, but the machines only stood up. They were shaped like a cross between an insect and a pony, each a little larger than us, standing on six straight legs. Their oviform 'heads' had no features to speak of besides smooth stone, yet they looked at us with what might have been curiosity, tilting their heads this way and that.

After they had stared at us for a good long while, they began to close in. I nearly collapsed then and there but they stopped a dozen or so hooflengths away, encircling us. Then they moved as one, but only a little, and looked at us, waiting. We backed away from the closest ones, and they moved again. Compass noticed what they were doing first: they were corralling us to the south, effectively leading us towards the Horseshoe Ruins. We tested this by traveling at a steady walk, and they matched us, always staying only so far away.

We walked like that for the rest of the day. We saw nothing in the Fields save for one gruesome sight: Ash Children slaughtered so recently that the snakeflies still flew in clouds around them.

We made sure we were out of smelling range of the above before we made camp. Once we'd set up the tent, the machines seemed to understand what we were doing and gathered in a little pod behind us. They sit motionless in their cluster now, but we're all very nervous. No games tonight.

As a group, we discussed leaving while they were 'asleep'. Auburn thought that we could escape to the west, maybe, and Compass agreed that we should do something, but she thought we should go north. I spoke my mind. I said we had come this far, and that if the machines wanted us dead, well, we'd be dead. There was a reason for this. We have to find out what.

Auburn is sitting very close as I write this, pressed up against my side. She says that she still doesn't trust them. I can tell she's trying to be reassuring, but I know her voice by now. She's scared too. It's a good thing that she never unloaded her spearzapper. I can see the city's ruins on the horizon. We'll be there tomorrow.

The machines started whispering, but we can't make out what they're saying. I'm putting my journal away now. 

Signed,
Quick Quill