In the dark, a pair of green lights flickered into life and rose through the air, stopping a little below head height. As they approached and they passed underneath a lone beam of cold daylight, they were revealed to be set into the eye sockets of a wolf skull.
The wolf skull passed from the light and was followed by an arched neck of tarnished grey metal, leading into two scorched armour plates over its shoulders. Within its rusted steel ribcage, several gears turned perpetually, clicking, bouncing slightly and continuing as a pair of pendulums in its core swung together.
Ticktock-ticktock.
Ticktock-ticktock.
The wolf's forelegs, twin spars extending from the elbow joint, ended in four knife-tipped claws arranged around a central foot, a four point star.
With every step forward, the claws closed up as they left the ground, opening up, foremost pair just before, on the downward step to land with a grating clank. Within the wolf's frame, a single shaft below the spine turned, driving the rear legs along in time with the forelegs, a precise machine.
A green glow surrounded a bronze armoured chest plate, and hovering, it approached the wolf which stood now stationary. The chest plate slotted into place and a similar shield was levitated over the wolf's sparse hindquarter, blocking the driveshaft and subsequent interlocking, complex gears from view and offense. The ticking of the wolf’s clockwork heart was dulled slightly by the encasement.
Ticktock-ticktock.
Ticktock-ticktock.
With a deafening screech, metal shutters closed over the skylights that had provided the room’s only luminescence, releasing a veil of darkness over it. Once again, the twin green glows of the wolf’s eyes were the only visible thing.
Slowly they swept from left to right, then darted upwards, the rapid motion making the antiquated metal of the beast’s neck growl. On a gantry above, where the green eyes were now transfixed, a match was struck and a cigarette lit.
In the dim light of the match’s flame the instant before its inevitable extinction, a pair of glasses and several strands of mane were silhouetted, and a small smile turned up the corners of their owners’ face.
Still the Wolf stared up at the figure, though it was lost to the blackness. A stern voice echoed around the room. The Wolf raised a metal ear in attentiveness, otherwise unmoving, bound.
“Find the librarian.”
The Wolf crouched, and in an instant bounded away, its sudden motion drawing bark-like sounds from its joints.
From the high gantry floated down a single used match, snapped slightly in the centre. The shutters above again screeched open, and the figure was gone.
I used to love moving house, it felt like going on an adventure, travelling to a new land.
Packing everything into boxes, counting books, attempting to carry bedsteads downstairs, hauling large cupboards and bookcases out of windows... It's tough work - even for an earth pony! Rearranging things had always been a favourite thing to do once my surroundings became dull - moving some shelves here, putting my bed against that wall and so forth, and moving house was no different. It provided new variables to play with, more or less floor space, higher or lower ceilings, larger or smaller windows to work around.
The setting however, was always the same. The towers, spires and curtain walls of Trottingham provided a comforting and regular backdrop to wherever my family and I moved to, their smooth white limestone and deep red brick a bastion against unfamiliarity.
It came as a shock to me therefore when my father, Spring Drive, returned of an evening to tell us we were moving beyond the city's great walls.
"To the counties and towns beyond?" I asked him. He shook his head, and told instead of the mainland, a growing town named Ponyville, and our future as Citizens of Equestria.
I am Torchlight, adolescent earth pony. Male, maroon coat, blue eyes. I adapt well to change, and for that the image of two leaves, one green and another brazen by autumn rest on my flanks. I don't sing, I'm afraid, and I hope that doesn't disappoint too greatly. I know how everypony likes a song every now and again.
I used to love moving house, it felt like going on an adventure, and this time I really was travelling to a new land.
Life in this 'Ponyville' would have a lot to live up to.
* * * * *
It certainly didn't need to try. The moment our luggage caravan rolled into the town, we were set upon by a veritable horde of ponies greeting us and wishing to show us around. One beige mare with a blue and pink mane threw a basket of random confections into my lap with a huge grin, her mint-green unicorn companion waving as we passed by.
When we reached our new home, a two story thatched dwelling set back from the town's long main street, (though for a time I thought it was a single long town square... on occasion the geometry of Ponyville defied my understanding), an official-looking pair stood outside the door.
The crowd of eager townsponies behind us still, we dismounted our cart and the two ponies, an elegantly aged mare wearing glasses and a brown stallion with messy hair, trotted over.
The bespectacled mare spoke for the both of them, "Good afternoon to you all! My kindest felicitations extend to you in gratitude for choosing to make Ponyville your home, be sure that you are very welcome here. I am Mayor Mare, and this is my subordinate, Time Turner. Mister Turner, if you will." The mare motioned towards the brown stallion and stepped aside.
Time Turner grinned so wide his cheeks encroached on his eyes, took my father's right hoof between both of his own and shook it vigorously, before gravity claimed hold of him and he had to stand properly to regain his balance.
"This is brilliant! Speculator Drive, your investigations into the inner workings of advanced timepieces prove fascinating study, I'm overjoyed that you're here! I am Time Turner, Ponyville's official timekeeper and general timey-wimey pony... Wow, you're even from Trottingham!"
Time Turner spoke with the most enthusiastic Trottingham accent... Not only was it strangely nice to hear somepony without the nasal accent as Ponyville's citizenry seemed to share, I felt so inexplicably encouraged and uplifted by his outburst to my father that I stepped forward and introduced myself automatically, returning Turner's hoofshake as it came.
"Torchlight, eh? You look to be the same age as my apprentice, Minuette. I'll get her to say hello!” Time Turner then exchanged similarly enthusiastic greetings with my mum and little sister, what an extraordinarily friendly stallion!
Mayor Mare tapped her right forehoof a couple of times and the timekeeper leapt to attention and produced a pile of parchment rolls.
"These are your citizenship papers; I just need each of you to sign here... Here and ah, do you have a quill..? Excellent! Now these ones are just copies of the land deed... Fantastic, all done!"
Time Turner suddenly looked over towards the town’s proud windmill and a momentary frown passed over his features. Then, grinning again, he turned and dumped the completed papers onto my back before turning away, and once more addressing my father.
"I must leave now, my job involves a lot of running I'm afraid," He said as he began trotting away. "As I'm sure you well know, Mr Wick, time waits for nopony!" The Ponyville timekeeper reared and started away at a canter, his final word lost to the air.
The Mare cleared her throat and smiled at us from behind her half-moon glasses. "That appears to have concluded our business for today; though that was possibly the easiest welcoming of new settlers I've seen through in some time..."
A wave of chuckles passed through the still-gathered crowd of Ponyville citizenry. Though slightly thinned out now, it remained significant in number and several pegasi now hung in the air above them. Among the ranks I noticed the beige and green pair from earlier on.
"Come on Everypony, let's clear out and give the poor folks some space to get settled!" Mayor Mare waved at the crowd and they dispersed without a grumble, the Mayor herself starting off in the same direction Time Turner had left in.
"Celestia knows you're going to need it once Pinkie and Applejack find out somepony new has moved in while they were away... Good afternoon everypony, I look forward to seeing you around the town!" With that, she left while we puzzled over her preceding... Warning? My parents returned her farewell, and we set about transferring our precisely packaged possessions into our new home.
* * * * *
The next morning, breakfast time chatter was normal, my parents and sister excited about seeing Ponyville properly, arranging furniture and all the sort of just-moved-in things ponies talk about. Offering small asides on where our accumulated clutter could go every now and then, I watched and listened while munching through an energising bowl of alfalfa.
My father; tall, broad and with several days’ worth of beard growth upon his muzzle, then from behind his copy of the Ponyville newspaper; ‘The Foal Free Press,’ (which had nearly come crashing through the front room window on delivery, saved only by my mother’s kinesis magic), leapt at the opportunity to tell me I should try and get a job to support myself while he re-established his business here.
Spring Drive’s Clockery was, despite how much Time Turner had known about my father and his research, only a small family business, and was just one of many like it in Trottingham, owned by the many ‘new mystics’ or ‘Speculators’ of clockwork automatonatry and timekeeping.
No-pony was quite certain when the first clockwork device was created, as timepieces full of cogs and gears and wheels had existed in large cities for as long as anypony cared to remember, but in Trottingham a rush of inventions based on the finer workings of these clocks had begun.
Oil streetlamps that were turned on and off at day and night by clockwork cycles, printing presses able to produce legible, un-splattered newspapers or documents scribed by pinpoint accurate clockwork automaton machinery, self-loading ferrotype and calotype camera obscura equipment and of course the mass production of what my father’s papers called ‘Heliosynchronous Pieces of Analogue Timekeeping;’ or rather, the common twelve-hour cycle clock, heralded the start of a new era.
Speculator Drive, as he was now known in Trottingham, had originally been a repairpony, sporting a cutie mark of a pair of loose bolts and an adjustable spanner, and he ran a small spare parts and hardware shop running repairs on carts and generally anything that required fixing.
I was at the time, just a foal, a little under ten years old, and it would be another five years before my sister was to be born.
Mother, Emerald Flame, a unicorn and surely too glamorous for my earth pony father and I, helped around the shop or in the nearby fields with the Sprout family, who owned most of the land we had lived on. Life was calm and simple.
That was, until somepony cantered in one evening, hurriedly requesting of my father to look over a copper box, several inches square with a clock face on each opposing side.
Dad was, he always told us, looking below the counter for a piece of paper to take down a name and address from the pony with the box, but upon looking up, he was gone and the box remained, ticking along faintly, mysterious and inviting.
Drive’s interest was piqued, and so the next day he set about removing the casing, being initially baffled at the interior workings, and scratching his head.
Being by no means the first ‘Speculator’ – the title given to those who fiddled with clockwork mechanisms, he took the box to the Guild of Speculators who maintained the Orrery at Greenwhoof Observatory for advice.
From the inner workings of the copper box, with it’s strange dual-pendulum arrangement, and with the assistance of the Speculators (who were just as intrigued by the box as he) my father ‘reverse-engineered’ clocks that could keep an accurate count on everything from half-seconds and the cycle of the phases of Luna’s moon, to more superfluously what day of the week it was.
After several days, Spring Drive left the Observatory titled a Speculator, and returned to rename his shop and begin work on more clockwork devices, based on those of the copper box.
Spring Drive’s Clockery was moved time and again, building in interest as word of father’s writings and inventions spread, out of the Sprout family’s town of Foalborn, to the Whitestable Port, and before long we found ourselves living in a townhouse in north Trottingham, that copper box of clocks and mystery ever resting on a mantelpiece or father’s desk, ever studied and scrutinised.
* * * * *
Dad’s work ethic and attitude therefore caused him to be especially pushy about my prospects for employment, as he was being now. He noted that on a trot earlier around Ponyville, he had seen ponies around my age working in shops, and that the eldest daughter of Ponyville’s founders, the Apple family, practically ran the enormous orchard that supplied most of the town’s export wealth all by herself, so it should be easy for me to find something to do to earn my keep.
“What are you going to do, sit upstairs on your ass, hoofing through some poorly hidden issues of Saddlemares?” Dad laughed and gulped down the last of his tea.
“I know where you keepmmmf,”- he began again, fortunately being cut off by mum dropping a drying up cloth over his eyes and stuffing a slice of bread into his mouth. What a wonderful thing magic is!
“That’s quite enough, leave poor Torchy alone, he’s grown up and can do what he likes,” said mum, walking over and kissing my on the head. Father resurfaced from the towel draped over his head and laughed sharply.
“Ah-ha! He’s more than capable of getting a job for himself then!”
I stuck my tongue out at him, and stood up to get a bottle of Sweet Apple Acres brand apple juice. I was stopped in my tracks however by a sudden burst of multi-coloured light flooding in through the gaps in the kitchen window.
Were we due a rainbow today? I turned back to look at the forecast on the back page of the Foal Free Press, but Dad was already in the process of doing so.
My sister rushed outside, excitedly chattering about rainbooms and pegasi, and abandoning the remaining breakfast we followed her outside, to find her, mouth agape as she stared skyward at three spreading ribbons of colour. What was that? Some sort of sideways strip-rainbow?
I didn't know such a thing existed, but then again I had lived near on two decades in always-cloudy Trottingham.
Pegasi may have a reputation for being proud and somewhat isolationist, but their decision to not deal with the Trottingham Archipelago's weather due to the gargantuan workload it presented was something I could definitely understand.
The multi-coloured ribbons didn't seem to do much after their sudden arrival, though they did feel nice to look at in a strange way, and so our over-breakfast banter rumbled on. I left my parents to it and began work on my room.
* * * * *
By noon the following day, I had managed to create a satisfying floor plan.
Ranked up against the leftmost wall I shoved two bookshelves, my bed was under the room’s central window. With some effort my desk ended up against the right wall, and I turned my attention to the several boxes of books and other random clutter.
Books are easy to arrange; names, numbers, volumes, editions. 'Daring Do and the Quest for the Sapphire Stone' and its subsequent sequels rounded out the first bookshelf, so I moved to shove the third box of books closer to begin on the second shelf.
The box proved unexpectedly hard to push, and in the instant I applied too much lateral force in attempt to get it moving, it caught on a floorboard and tipped over.
I expected, as you would, for a slew of books to cascade across the floor, not a bright pink blur to fly out and slam into the adjacent wall, its yell of "SURPRISE!" cut short by the impact.
Once its forward motion had been halted, the blur was revealed to actually be a mare, perhaps a year older than me, with an honestly indescribable mane style. It looked bouncy though.
When the mare had unstuck herself from the wall, she turned to face me, pulled an enormous smile and unleashed upon me an unprecedented torrent of words.
"We-just-got-back-from-the-Crystal-Empire-and-I-saw-the-Mayor-and-she-told-me-somepony-new-had-moved-in-and-then-I-saw-this-house-and-before-it-had- boarded-up-windows, But-now-it-doesn't-so-I-came-in-here-to-investigate-andHELLOO!"
This, I thought, must be the ‘Pinkie’ that Mare had told us of. Her palette was a clean giveaway.
“Ahh, hello, you must be Pinkie, the Mayor… told us that you might pay a visit,” I responded while the pink pony recovered from her outburst.
“I’m Torchlight, my family is downstairs at the moment; I could take you to meet them?”
Pinkie however was staring at my bookshelves, now looking overly serious and rubbing her chin. Why did that look so comical?
The pink mare rounded on me, grinning again, and began bouncing on the spot.
“Yooouuuu’re an EGGHEAD! My friends will love to meet you! Well, my very best friends, oh but everypony in Ponyville is my very best friend!” Pinkie’s voice gradually rose in pitch as she went on, and now somehow with each of her bounces, she appeared somewhere else in my room, the direction she headed marked by a trail of her colours.
“I’ll take you to meet Twilight! Ohhh, this is so exciting!”
“Who is Twi-” I began, only to have my words cut short as my breath was knocked out of me, as Pinkie suddenly appeared underneath me and sprung upwards, both winding me and slinging my incapacitated body over her back.
“TO THE LIBRARY!” she squawked, and in a measurement of time I believe is entitled ‘far too quickly,’ we were outside, travelling through my window and onto the nearest rooftop in a single… Pinkie-step.
Then the next, and the next, Pinkie’s leaps and bounds carried us across Ponyville’s thatched rooftops impossibly fast and yet strangely gracefully. Ahead of us, in a cul-de-sac to the side of the main street, loomed a significantly large tree that had several small windows, a front door and a balcony.
That didn’t faze me all as much as a domesticated oak tree should have done upon first sighting, however, as my attention was diverted skyward, towards the multi-coloured streak that had just decimated a small cloud formation, and was banking toward us at a frightening pace, lightning crackling around whatever headed the smeared spectrum.
Pinkie didn’t bat an eyelid and carried on bouncing us toward the house tree, until the lightning-clad object swooped in front of us, stopping abruptly as a pair of blue wings unfurled from its centre, pushing a blast of air across me that forced my eyes shut.
Pinkie seemed unaffected, and when I opened my eyes I was quite astounded. Instead of a dangerous looking freak strike of ball lightning, I was now looking at a light blue Pegasus, flying on her back just ahead of us, her… multi-coloured mane… floating softly around her head as she travelled, eyes closed, her wings lazily beating beneath her.
Pinkie bounced a little higher as she greeted the new arrival.
“Heya Dashie, whatcha doin’?”
“Morning Pinkie Pie, just busting some punk clouds, as I do… well, well, well, who’s this then?” This ‘Dashie’ flipped over and grabbed my head, pulling it close to her eyes and examining my face.
“Got a name, wise guy?”
Did this apparently brash mare have a problem? I hadn’t been physically accosted by anypony attempting to introduce themselves in some time.
I shook my head free, though the rainbow-mane Pegasus continued her scrutiny from a short distance. I prepared an indignant response but Pinkie answered for me.
“This is Torchlight, he has huuuunndreds of books, so I thought I’d take him to meet Twilight! Isn’t it fascinating Dash, their names sound the same, and they both like books! I’m surprised my Pinkie Sense wasn’t all over this!” For a second Dash’s eyes widened and her irises shrunk to a normal size, her ears standing straight, but she quickly reasserted herself and halted her flight, setting down on the thatched roof beside us.
We were about to reach the final rooftop before the square the oak tree stood in anyway, and Pinkie dropped carefully to the street, stopping once on a balcony on the way down to greet the pony who came out to investigate.
Once at ground level, I managed to pull myself off Pinkie’s back and reasserted my footing on terra firma. My innards felt like they’d gone through a washing machine, though that would probably have been better for me than the strange ride I’d been taken on, and I felt a little sick.
“Don’t just stand there, silly!” said Pinkie as she began to bounce off towards the tree, Dash following a second later, and so I did. I didn’t want to disappoint her and all, but at the same time I was pretty bloody sure mum and dad would have begun wondering what had happened to me, or if they had happened to be outside, how I had managed to get myself kidnapped at such a well-lit time.
I also wasn’t overly sure I would like to be introduced to any more new ponies today, much less one that likes books, because in experience, if somepony likes books, but dislikes something you like, the lines between ‘it’s my opinion’ and ‘you shouldn’t read that because it’s terrible, blah blah blah’ can become blurred all too quickly.
Once we reached the tree, easily identified as the town library by a sign bearing the highly imaginative Equestrian Library Conglomerate open book emblem, it turned out my reservations were rather misplaced.
After Dash had given the door a couple of knocks, and having received no rapid answer flown up and knocked on each window as well before vanishing with a yelp into one that suddenly swung open, the door opened, revealing as my eyes travelled down, first an unbrushed purple mane sitting scruffily about the owners’ horn like a poorly made birds nest, then a pair of closed eyes, a pair of glasses sitting askew on the snout below.
A mug with steam and the unmistakable smell of Pony Joe’s devastating ‘Dark Horse’ coffee rising from it floated lazily beside the lavender unicorn’s head, and gripped between the mare’s teeth was a copy of the fifth and final volume of one of my favourite works of speculative dark fiction.
In a flurry of movement, the apparently sleep deprived mare swung the book onto her back, and looked back at me with open eyes bearing a poorly disguised weight of fatigue. All evidence pointed to this being ‘Twilight.’ The lavender pony yawned and greeted us.
“Ahh, good morning Pinkie, when Rainbow Dash launched her assault on my house I thought something new and terrible was happening somewhere that needed fixing…” another yawn interjected on Twilght’s speech before she continued.
“…but who is this with you? Somepony new? I’m Twilight Sparkle, student of Princess Celestia and Ponyville’s librarian, do you need something?”
From within the depths of Pinkie burst forth a cheerful “Hiya Twi, just dropping in, gotta rush! Tell Dash I’ve some fun planned this evening! Bye!” She then grinned at me and vanished in a cloud of dust.
I was about to tell the bedraggled librarian, sitting there with one eyebrow raised, that I had very little idea why I was on her doorstep, that Pinkie Pie had decided to bring me here on the basis that I had a small collection of books.
However I was prevented from doing so, as Twilight gasped and shook her head, exclaiming, “Oh, my, where are my manners, I haven’t even asked your name! I’m afraid since our return from the Crystal Empire I’ve been catching up with things I should have been more prepared to have be set aside so suddenly… It’s taken me all night to reach even nearly as far through some of these books as I should have been yesterday morning, imagine that!” Twilight had a lot of devotion to her studies, that much was certain.
I introduced myself now I had an opportunity to actually talk, and added that Pinkie had very kindly brought me here, though honestly I didn’t know why. Twilight laughed, and took a sip of her coffee.
“Pinkie’s like that sometimes – no, that’s an understatement, she’s like that all the time. When I first met her, the first thing she did was scream, vanish, and organise a surprise party! Come on in Torchlight, I’ll see what we can do for you.”
Twilight backed away from the door and motioned me in with a wave of a hoof.
The interior of the Library was spacious to say the least, the lower floor hollowed out of the tree into a smooth circular annex, the comforting tick of a mantelpiece clock the only sound. Lining the walls were several alcoves each holding shelves full of books, more sat on elegant altars placed across the room, and there was a further pile on the Library’s central table.
At that table sat Rainbow Dash, apparently eagerly reading a ‘Daring Do’ sequel, hoofing over the pages at an impressive rate. She looked up at me as I walked near, winking and making an over the top hushing motion with a forehoof.
The shelved alcoves in front of me, above which the staircase rose, were each labelled with every avenue of knowledge one could glean from a book; histories, medicines, biographies, pony sociology and philosophy and the like, while to my left ran the fiction section of fantasy, adventure, and speculative stories about what the future may hold.
That last alcove had the least books in it, but closer inspection revealed that the books on the central table were volumes of the same series that Twilight was carrying the first of.
My interest was caught however the device sitting atop a full bookcase against the far wall. Central to it was a wood and brass clock, similar to those my father made, and it was from which the ticking must have been coming from, but surrounding the central piece lay a softly floating ring of fluffy white cloud, rotating slowly.
Twilight placed her copy of ‘Epic Pony War – The Distant Future, Volume I; Equestrian Wasteland’ on the central table and trotted over to me as I investigated it closer.
“That,” Twilight said, “is a thirteenth century Cloudsdayle weatherometer and barometer, Rainbow Dash here gave it to me after she and her weather team did tornado duty last year.” The purple unicorn braced herself against the bookcase to stand up on her hind legs, and pointed with her free hoof.
“You see, the clouds around the base today display the weather the Pegasi have planned for the day, while the clock-like face actually reads off other variables that can effect a Pegasus’s flight, like humidity and wind speeds!”
Dash turned around at that, tossing her mane out of her eyes as she spoke,
“Eeyeah, we already had a couple of normal ones up at the Weather Station, so when the bigwigs at Cloudsdayle head office sent me this as a sort of award or something, I tried to give it to Fluttershy, but she didn’t see much use for it and told me that Twi would love something like that, so here it is. Big flashy thingymajig.”
With that, she returned to her reading, but it left me with one question.
“If that’s a barometer and a weather thingy, and not a regular clock, then exactly-”
“Where is the ticking coming from? Oh, excellent! I do like you, top marks. A-plus!”
The interrupting voice, that of a stallion and sounding oddly familiar, came from the top of the stairs, and Twilight and I whirled around, Dash also once more breaking away from her literature to see who had spoken.
The stallion stepped out of the shadow at the top of the stairs and grinned at us.
“So then, shall we? Allons-y!”
* * * * *