The hotel with its smooth and skillfully crafted oaken decorations was almost as homely as the Golden Oaks Library back in Ponyville. Rarity and I had both had a good sleep, neither waking up over the course of the night as far as I could tell. However, I had a nagging feeling that something was missing – I couldn’t remember my dream, even though the emotions it had left in my mind were still somewhat present. I had woken up sweating and shivering, which was very odd considering how warm and comfortable the bed was.
After forcing myself out of the bed, I walked towards the sole window, a fairly large one at that. What I saw made my eyes open wide in amazement – Celestia’s sun was just rising. As the giant ball of light and fire slowly crept up from the horizon, the city and the endless fields surrounding it were gradually lit up. It was like a blanket of brightness was slowly dragging itself across the view, wrapping the world into its loving embrace.
“Already up, Twi?” came a soft voice from behind me, followed by a long yawn.
“Yes,” I mumbled, my eyes fixed at the view in front of me. Strange emotions surged into my mind. I had been wanting to enjoy this moment of serenity alone, though Rarity was perhaps the only pony I could have wanted to share the moment with. She’d certainly appreciate the beauty of the morning just as much as I did.
“Good. I’d have hated to wake you up like last morning, darling. How did you sleep?”
“Well, I guess…” I replied. I didn’t remember a thing from the night, so I had probably been fast asleep for its entirety. However, I did feel a bit exhausted despite having rested for over ten hours.
“Splendid! So did I. It’s not every night that you dream of mysterious woods in the far North. Quite the landscapes! I must admit that you were right about the scenery being even more beautiful than here, Twilight.”
Woods… woods. Yes. A bit of the dream came back to me – I had indeed been in some kind of forest. I closed my eyes and focused my mind on the glimpse of the dream, trying my best to grab the memory and pull it into my active mind from the depths of my subconsciousness. The information was there, but it seemed lodged somewhere deep down, causing my efforts to remember it become difficult. I could sense that at any moment, the dream would pour into my mind and-
A shiver went down my spine, causing my concentration to falter. Out of the blue my mind had become clogged, my brain sending panicked impulses to every inch of my body. The already dried sweat started to build up again.
“Twilight?”
“Huh?” The irrational fear lingered in my mind, but when I let my grasp of the dream go, it retreated back to the far reaches of my head.
“You have that ponderous look on your face again.”
“It’s early in the morning and I’m watching a sunrise unmatched by any I’ve ever seen. Of course I’m pondering, Rarity,” I said with a sigh. The excuse was probably good enough; it was half of the truth, after all.
Rarity joined me in front of the window. The shine of the rising sun created beautiful contrasts on the mare’s body as even her smallest details cast a dark shadow on her coat. I noticed the corners of her mouth turning upwards as she laid her gaze on the sight I’d been admiring for the past fifteen minutes. Her mane was still hanging straight after the night – and seeing how astoundingly it reflected the rays of light pouring in from the window, I had to wonder why she even made it each morning. I couldn’t help but think how good Rarity looked without all the fluff and makeup. It was weird to see her naked liked that.
But no matter how much I tried to enjoy Rarity’s company and her beautiful form, feelings of dread and anxiety started to creep into me. What do I even feel towards her? And what was the dream about?
We stood still for a fair while, just watching as the sun rose higher and higher in the sky. We would have stayed there for a much longer time, had the train towards the Crystal Mountains not left in such an early hour.
After finally getting our faces away from the window, we ate breakfast in the dining hall of the hotel. I knew that the precious paintings and colorful tapestry would likely be our last encounter with anything high society, but didn’t dare tell that to Rarity. I was certain that she wasn’t going to appreciate our method of travel to Lily Valley at all.
The walk to the train station from the hotel wasn’t long. It was apparent from the get-go that this ride would be nothing like the luxurious one we used to get to Hoofington. Even from the outside the row of boxcars and wagons looked dilapidated: they were made of battered steel, the red paint on their surfaces more or less flaking off. The smell of burning coal clearly indicated that this train had no magical spell matrices to help its ride. Rarity had a very unsure look on her face, making me a bit worried of her mental state. This was doubtlessly a nasty surprise for her.
Rarity grimaced as we stepped inside the train, her eyes wandering around the ragged surfaces and dull colors. She visibly shook as we made our way through the bare brown hallway full of dirt and trash. But as we reached the cabin assigned to us, she could contain herself no longer. “Sweet Celestia! How can they do this to us! Just look at those bunks! Look at them!”
I peeked inside our humble cabin from behind her. The walls were unpainted panels of bare planks and iron surfaces. The metallic parts looked weathered and rusty. The two bunks contained no mattresses or blankets, and a layer of dust rested on top of them. Not particularly inviting, I had to admit. The only thing in decent shape was the window – and if the rest of the train was of any indication, this was probably only because it had had to be changed after breaking.
“This is what the trains are like in these parts of Equestria. You’ll have to get used to it,” I noted with a dull tone; it wasn’t like I was excited of traveling in a garbage can like this myself.
“Get used to THIS?! How am I supposed to not think of the trainwreck this room has suffered, when spiders crawl on my hooves and the paint is falling off the roof on my head?”
“It’s not that bad…” I didn’t really believe that myself. It really was that bad.
“But it is! Why didn’t the Princess just send one of her chariots to fly us to our destination?”
“You know how busy she and her guards have been lately with the diplomatic situation in Gryphonia. She simply couldn’t spare any ponies to help us get there.”
“I know! But… but…” Rarity’s voice died down as she took a quick glance to her left, where a spider was indeed hanging from the roof. Right in front of her face.
“EEYUGH! SPIDER! GET AWAY FROM ME!” Rarity shouted, her eyes rolling back and her stature crumbling.
I caught my friend with a bubble of magic before she hit the floor. This is going to be a very long trip.
--
The train rattled in the darkness of a mighty forest. I couldn’t see much from the window – only a blur of tall, majestic pines and the occasional spruce. The setting sun only very briefly blinked from behind the green curtain.
Noticing my concentration failing again, I tried to get back to the book I was reading, Major Archaeological Finds in the Crystal Mountains. I tried and tried, but just couldn’t read more than a few sentences. I felt anxious about this whole situation, the stress of Rarity having infected me with equal amounts of negative emotions.
Rarity was frantically cleaning up our cabin, further hampering my attempts to read. She was wildly swaying around, sweeping every corner of the room with her magic. Even though the whole train was a mess, I had to give them that our cabin was quite spacious. If my friend could get this place cleaned, it would actually become quite comfortable. Well, dismissing the fact that the bunks were just hard slabs of iron.
“Done,” Rarity reported with a tired voice. “Now I can finally rest...”
She blankly stared at the not-so-inviting bunk, sighing. Rarity’s face looked stoic, but I could see her eyes were on the verge of wetting up as she laid down on the cold surface. I levitated a pillow from my saddlebag towards her.
“Oh? Where’d you get that, Twi?”
“Well… if you promise not to tell anyone…” I told her with a cringe.
She deadpanned. “Tell what?”
“I have used this pillow since I was a foal back in Canterlot. This is a bit embarrassing, but I have trouble sleeping without it. But anyway, take the pillow. I know you need it more than I do.”
Rarity raised her eyebrows. “Darling, I don’t quite understand how you have formed such a relationship with a pillow. However, it’s clearly quite important to you, and it’d be simply wrong for me to use it. It’s something personal that belongs to only you.”
“It’s a pillow. You can’t seriously think I would give it more value than your comfort, especially seeing how you could simply return it to me after the night.”
“But it’s important to you! It even reminds you of your family. I couldn’t even think of asking you to loan something like that to me.”
“Celestia-damnit, why don’t you just take it? It’s not like I’m going to need it now, Rarity! I never go to bed before the sun has lowered under the horizon!” This was turning extremely silly and frustrating.
“I can’t! It’s your personal item!”
Why does she make giving help so hard? I thought as I forcibly pushed the pillow towards Rarity with my magic. The argument was so utterly pointless that I had a hard time controlling my urges to just shout with all my lungs at her.
Rarity pushed it back.
My patience was over. With a surge of magic the pillow flew across the cabin and collided with Rarity’s face, making a loud thumping noise. I had caught her off-guard: her eyes opened wide as she fell onto her rump. Deciding I should go vent my anger off before my mane would burst into flames like it sometimes did, I opened the door to go for a small walk.
Of course, there wasn’t much space to walk in or things to see in the train. At least I could enjoy solitude for a moment, as Rarity hadn’t followed. I couldn’t comprehend her actions at all. Why was it so hard to her to accept help with such a thing? Why was she so stubborn to refuse? Am I a bad friend for getting angry at her?
I noticed how empty the train was when I walked from wagon to wagon. In the three ones it held, I only saw a couple of ponies. The last time I had been on a train to the North, there’d been many more aboard, but it was very apparent that this one was purely for freight purposes with the wagons added in to serve the few customers wanting a hitch to the Crystal Mountains, some of them perhaps mine workers returning from a vacation. Remembering how long the train had seemed from the outside, there must have been dozens of boxcars locked to each other.
The brown, dark hallways were narrow, and as I trod through them I felt like they were trying to squeeze me in. Perhaps Rarity’s reaction had simply been stress caused by this sad excuse for comfortable transportation. I had seen her freak out because of lesser things.
After wandering around the train for some time I decided to return to our cabin. I was still slightly worried of what Rarity would say to me, but it wasn’t like I could hide from her in a small enclosed string of wagons. If I have failed terribly and ruined our friendship, then so be it, I thought while closing in on the cabin’s door. My heart pounded fast; I was afraid of having terribly upset my friend over such a small matter.
But as I opened the door, Rarity was nowhere to be seen. My pillow was still idly lying on the floor. I knew there weren’t many places my friend could be in, but still got instantly worried; you never knew what desperate mare could do. Has she jumped off the train to get rid of me? Oh Celestia, I’m a horrible friend!
“Rarity!” I shouted, emerging from the room. “Where are you?”
A weird sensation had started to fill me. I felt like a heavy weight had been put on my chest, making it hard for me to breathe. I started to frantically run around the wagon, taking a peek inside all of the cabins. The first yielded nothing. The second-
My gaze was locked at a large cardboard box standing in the far corner of the cabin. The room was exactly as filthy as ours had been, but I couldn’t comprehend why somepony would use a place like this as storage. The walls were completely devoid of paint, panels of bare tanned oak making them up. Wind blew through the partially broken window.
Except that it didn’t. It was silent. I couldn’t hear a thing – the rattle of the train, the sound of me gasping to inhale after forgetting to breathe – all gone.
A shiver went down my spine as I turned around. The train looked exactly like it had before, only it wasn’t moving anymore. I was assaulted by feelings of dread and wrongness. I knew this couldn’t really be happening. The train could not have stopped in seconds while I mysteriously lost my ability to hear. I exited the cabin into the dry hallway, my heart beating like my life depended on it.
I turned to my left and was paralyzed. There it stood in all its might, all its glory, stretching across the small corridor. My breath was taken away, terror filling every corner of my mind.
“Twilight?” a hazy voice called from somewhere. The image in front of my eyes warped and distorted, suddenly collapsing completely. I opened my eyes only to see the cold metal floor of the wagon. I tried to raise my head in vain. My neck hurt terribly.
I heard hoofsteps coming closer to me. “What happened?” somepony asked. Realizing the speaker was Rarity, I forcibly rose to a sitting position, causing my muscles to ache.
The white mare awaiting for my answer looked very distressed. “Uh… well… I entered the cabin with the box, and then-“
“What cabin?”
“This one, duh,” I said, frowning.
“Darling, I can assure that there are absolutely no boxes in our cabin.”
I turned around, noticing that I was indeed in front of the cabin that’d been assigned to us. The fact that I had hallucinated for Luna-knew how long suddenly struck me. At least Rarity was in the hallway, indicating that my trip to the imaginary land hadn’t been going on for my entire walk.
“Phew. I must have hit my head while falling or something like that. Even managed to have quite the nightmare while my lights were out.”
“A nightmare? It was not about our petty argument, was it?”
“No. In fact, you were missing in it, causing me to panic and stumble into one of the other cabins. One had a mysterious box in it,” I explained while trying to stand up and regain my composure. “All of the sudden I couldn’t hear anything. When I backed out of the room, I saw –“
A moment of silence ensued as I rubbed my forehead, trying to remember just what it had been. This can’t be true. You couldn’t have forgot something you saw only moments ago. But no matter how hard I tried to reach the memory from the deepest pits of my mind, I simply couldn’t. It was like somepony had taken an eraser and swept it from my brain.
“Well?” Rarity continued with an unsure voice. Her face had a look of worry on it.
“I don’t know what I saw. But it sure was a frightening sight, that much I can remember. Thanks for waking me up, Rarity,” I replied with a hint of confusion in my voice. My head was full of questions, but seeing my friend worry about my well-being gave some relief – at least she wasn’t having a grudge over our petty argument. I still had trouble trying to understand her weird behaviour, though.
Rarity smiled, comforting me a bit. “Perhaps we should go get some fresh air,” she suggested.
“Sure. It’d be nice after all of that,” I said, waving my hoof in the air. I felt an urge to hug my friend, but before I even had the chance to act, I mentally lashed at myself for even thinking of something like that. She’d just push me away. It’s certain that she hasn’t forgot our dispute yet. I really have to ask her about the whole pillow incident…
The hallway felt much less depressing as I walked behind the white mare. For some reason, my attention had completely shifted towards Rarity – the elegant style she trod with was something extraordinary. Her flanks swung from one side to the other with a grace matching that of the snobbish Canterlotian elite, forming wild images into my mind.
Stop that. You can’t let the fact that she saved your life and comforted you at your worst moment cloud your judgement like that. You’re only friends, and you don’t want to ruin that.
I was anxious to feel the strange infatuation to Rarity bellow up like that again, but there wasn’t much I could do to restrain myself. I buried my feelings deeper into my consciousness, but it was a shallow grave.
The slightly stuffy air of the wagon switched to a strong, chilly breeze when Rarity opened the door in the end of the corridor. Where our wagon connected to the next, there was a small platform on the outside to stand on. Rarity grabbed the thin but secure iron rails with her hooves, raising her head towards the sky and closing her eyes. I was tempted to do the same, but I couldn’t bring myself to close my eyelids – the fear of afterimages from my hallucination showing up was too much.
“We are but two days from Ponyville, and already we’ve almost got killed by lightning, I almost lost my sanity when seeing this train, and now you experienced a disturbing hallucination,” Rarity said with sigh. “I really hope the Crystal Mountains are as beautiful as in my dream and in your descriptions, or else I’ll get very, very depressed.”
“Don’t worry, they are. The hike might be a bit hard for two unicorns like us, but I’m sure that we’ll get through that, too.”
“I suppose. But what will we do when we finally arrive to the excavation site? How on Equus are we going to identify the surface, artifact, door, or whatever it is?”
I smiled, seeing all the books I had taken with me on this mission with my mind’s eye. “We’ll just use the books and our wits to solve the problem. It will be tough, I know, but nothing we can’t overcome. When we work on it together, it’ll reveal its secrets to us in no time”
Rarity raised an eyebrow. “I don’t really know about that. I mean, sure, we probably are a decent pair for work like that, but I have no experience with anything older than Shakesponian plays, darling. And what about the missing archaeologists?”
“I have thought of that. My calculations indicate that the risk to life and limb is low, as whatever beast or other foul thing gobbled up those ponies has likely moved elsewhere. Predators have no reason to stay in one place if there’s no additional food, and a mountainside isn’t very rich in that regard.”
My friend still looked slightly nervous, but said nothing further. We silently stood there for a while, enjoying the furious breeze that swirled our manes around. Being so close to Rarity made my heart flutter despite my decision to try and keep my suddenly onset emotions at bay. I knew it was only caused by her saving my life, but no matter how hard I tried to rationalize it, I couldn’t stop the emotions from pounding my mind. I closed the mental door between my active consciousness and the absurd feelings, hoping they’d stay away for some time.
And so we continued our ride towards the sunset we couldn’t see, the wall of trees on both sides of the train swiftly racing past us.
--
The eerie light of my horn cast long shadows at the walls and floor, the dark forms dancing around the corridor as I trod on. I simply had to take a peek. Just to be sure.
Giving a painfully loud creak, the door opened. I didn’t want to wake Rarity up.
When I slowly slid the door out of my way with my hooves, the darkness of the room retreated little by little, the dim light of my horn starting to fill it.
A thick layer of dust laid on the floor, just like in my dream. This is not a good, Twilight. You can’t let silly hallucinations control your act-
I had to do it.
The door slammed wide open. In the far corner sat a sturdy-looking cardboard box. Suddenly, I found it hard to breathe. My hooves started shaking and my mind trembled under the impossible sight I was witnessing. I could see the light flickering – concentrating on even such a simple spell felt like an insurmountable task.
The train wasn’t rattling anymore.
I shut my eyes tight, fighting the vision back. I didn’t want to witness it again, no. As only the blackness remained, I started to feel the shaky movement of the floor underneath me again. I opened my eyes, gasping for air.
It was still there, but I felt like being in control of myself again. Breathing was now easier, the surprise of having seen the box no longer so strongly affecting my mind. Using spells would still be too much, but the cabin was partially lit by moonlight pouring in from the broken window. There was nothing I could to resist the urge of seeing what the mysterious container held, my inner curiousness taking the better of me.
With a single quick sweep of my hoof, the box was open. The moonlight didn’t reach all the way down, and thus I had to lower my head into it to see anything.
My nose touched something rough. I put my hoof in, grabbed whatever it was and pulled it out. The moonlight revealed what I was holding – a book bound in tattered grey leather. A cover picture was painted on it, depicting a pine forest in the foot of several sharp, snow-topped mountains. My hoof trembled, but I managed to keep my hold of it. Finding the final bits of courage inside me, I pulled the book closer to see the title.
There was none.