The day began for the two the same way as the last four: Hot, sunny, and nothing in sight but salt and sparse rocks unto the horizon. To the south, there was salt. To the west, there was more salt, and dirt. To the east was sand, and that left north.
To the north, there was a chance.
The two, carried by three good legs and two empty stomachs, met the day the same way as the last four.
They walked, one lean and scrappy and limping, the other on his back beneath a ragged square of cloth, gangly and scrawny, and barely able to raise his little head. One didn’t talk, for his throat was too parched; one didn’t know how. Dust and blood sullied the coats of both.
One had bled, and one had come from blood.
The two walked, one carried by the other, out of the rocks that had kept them hidden from the baking midday sun, and met the day the same way as the last four. They waited until the fire above had lowered itself in the west, and set out in the cooling dark.
The day began the same as the last four, but the night brought something new.
It brought a rumbling in the earth, and the limping colt thought for a moment that he had felt an earthquake; he thought, for a moment, that he had witnessed something unique.
The rumbling grew, but not in the way the ground might before splitting asunder; it built slowly, and with it came a shape from the dark. Points of light showed great wheels, and claws, and guns.
The colt looked at the metal giant rolling across the parched, moonlit earth and knew terror.
He didn’t run. There was nowhere to go.
The giant came closer, its true enormity revealed. Then, a sun burst to life from out of the rumbling dark, and the giant stopped in the broad tracks it left across the salt.
The colt took a half-step backward in the swath of harsh, white light, and the little life on his back made a whinny of distress.
“Wait!”
A mare called out, her voice made to thunder as if from some unseen mouth on the metal giant. From an opening on the giant’s side, between the wheels, she darted forth and soared toward the colt on wings of midnight blue.
She landed nearby and trotted across the salt, and the colt felt something he had not felt for far too long.
The mare was short, but her wings accompanied a horn, and a long, wavy mane of magenta. “What are you doing out here, kid?” A large bottle floated in a cloud of bright, emerald green magic and opened as it came near the colt.
The colt ignored the bottle for just a moment, opened his cracked lips, and voice dry as the salt under his chipped hooves, said, “Can you nurse?”
“Can I nurse?” The mare trotted closer, and she looked up at the scrappy colt’s desperate eyes, and then at the little figure on his back. “How long since he last had anything?”
The colt shook his head, and the ache of thirst nearly made him fall. “Four days. Mom’s dead. She… she never had the chance to feed him, and I haven’t found anything he could eat… he… he’s my baby brother…”
The mare touched a button on the collar of her barding. “Carbide, prep the Sturnidae with the booster rig. Night, we’re going back to Cliffside. Got a newborn here, extreme dehydration, starvation. Colt’s in bad shape, too.”
The short mare came closer and forcibly pressed the bottle to the colt’s chapped lips, and then levitated a second canteen toward the little life on his back. “I can’t nurse,” said the small mare as the gangly little foal drank the precious water, “Not right away, but we can feed him something else. Don’t worry. Your brother will be fine, and so will you. What’s your name, kid?”
“Tin Snips.”
“And your little bro?”
He knew, then, what he had not known for four days.
The colt began to laugh, and tears left salty tracks down his cheeks. “I guess he needs one, doesn’t he?”
The Sturnidae, Tin Snips found, was a craft that flew low and fast above the salt flats, held aloft by magic and propelled by engines that spat cones of white-hot fire.
But for his little brother, the Sturnidae wasn’t fast enough, said the small mare, and she stood at the rear of the cargo hauler, wearing a tether attached to her horn, and from the device spilled a roaring plume that sent the humble hovercraft speeding across the desert faster than anything the colt knew, while Carbide, the pony made of metal, stood behind the arrow-shaped wind screen, steering the Sturnidae carefully around rocks and ravines of the sparse scrubland.
A grand plateau loomed under the moonlight in the distance, and from its top spilled a glittering waterfall. Tin Snips might have found it a marvel, once.
After four days of salt and merciless sun, he was more grateful for the cool water in the canteen between his hooves, the sheltering wing of the startlingly large indigo mare that rode the Sturnidae with him, and most of all, the bottle of pureed fruit that his baby brother suckled on, where he lay by his sibling’s side, wrapped in a linen blanket.
“Talk about déjà vu,” said the tall mare, easily audible inside the clear bubble that surrounded the Sturnidae and protected them all from the dust and wind.
Tin Snips looked up at the electric blue eyes and solid black mane. “What?”
The alicorn smiled down at the scrappy colt, then back at the small mare. “I met her not too far from here, about the same way we found you. Trying to cross the desert, half-dead… about your age, too.”
Tin Snips looked at the small, blue mare, pouring forth glaring fire behind the craft. “Who is she?”
“She’s my wife.”
“Oh.” Tin Snips nuzzled his baby brother’s back, and the foal looked up from his meal, eyes filled with wonder. “I wonder what we should call you…”
After four days of dying, Tin Snips knew hope.