//------------------------------// // 6: Climb // Story: Frequencies: To End The Signal // by Lord Destrustor //------------------------------// The wind howled furiously, scratching and scraping and beating savagely around. Screeching everywhere among the stones and rocks, carrying streams of sand so thick that light itself was obscured to a perpetual twilight. The curtains of grainy particles flew about, whirling up and down, twirling in every direction, none of whom were pleasant. The sound was deafening, howling as if to evoke a gargantuan bird voicing the anger of a thousand scorned demons. “We should have stayed in Appleloosa!" The normally distinguished voice had lost all its usual sophistication as its owner had to scream to merely be heard, the sing-song intonations replaced by a strained, hoarse shout. The wind kept screeching, nearly drowning out the voice as it added, “Braeburn warned us that there was a sandstorm coming!” “Hey! We all agreed that we had no time to waste for a ‘maybe’ storm to pass! It was a group decision!” That second voice sounded just as labored as the first, forcing its way up a parched, gasping throat. “That still doesn’t make it a good decision, Spike!” A gust whipped about, making the travelers tense up, bracing themselves against the push of the heavy wind, dense at it was with sand. It easily felt as though it was close to being composed of as much solid matter as air. The young dragon’s claws dug into the ancient stone, gripping tightly to compensate for the paradoxically abrasive lubrication of the loose sand roiling in every nook of the rugged hillside. His every scale felt numb, having been constantly drummed upon by the prickly wind for several hours. He could feel the thousands of microscopic impacts of the grains hitting his hide, beating a tempo of several hundred steps every second. His scales could take it, at least. Or so he hoped, at any rate. He could only imagine the discomfort his companions felt if even his steely scales were being battered to near-paralysis. Through the hastily-tied piece of cloth wrapped around his head to lessen the wind’s reach into his eyes, he looked ahead. Just a few feet in front, in the mineral mist of the sandstorm, two ponies preceded him. Both were hidden beneath makeshift robes of blankets wrapped around their bodies, an attempt to protect themselves from the sand blasting around everywhere. He had to look up at them, both being a bit further up the slope they were climbing. Although his diamond-like claws made climbing the moderate slope rather easy despite the conditions, he had elected to linger behind his companions in case one of them slipped. Though he wasn’t quite sure how much help he could actually be in such an event, it still seemed wise to the dragon. Hooves were proving objectively poor tools for the task. Although the scraggly surface of the hill was rife with literally hundreds of points of purchase, the loose sand sifting and shifting underhoof, in tandem with the terrible climate conditions caused both ponies to repeatedly slip and stumble on their climb. In order to counter the handicap of her natural buoyancy and lightness, Scootaloo had been saddled with the task of carrying the group’s water reserves. The extra weight thankfully grounded her, preventing the pegasus from being swept up in the storm. Unfortunately, it also took its toll on her stamina. The wind’s ululations went up and down in pitch, rising to shrieking heights before falling to low, rumbling depths. Not once in its recital of howls did it stop. “Can’t we just huddle up somewhere and wait for it to pass?” The white mare coughed for a moment after speaking. “Are you insane?” The filly’s reply was almost buried in the confines of the cloth wrapped around her muzzle. “If we did find a nice little crack with-AHACK- without wind we’d get buried alive!” “And it’s not like there’s any shelter around here anyway!” Spike chimed in, taking a moment to look around as best he could through the brown violent fog. “We’d be buffeted just as bad as right now!” Small stony spires stood everywhere around the three, small pointed protuberances sticking this way and that out of the general mass of the slope in various states of erosion. A momentary thought passed through Spike’s mind, who pondered Rarity’s theory about the region having once been a great body of water in eons past. Standing among the diminutive towers as he was, he could easily feel akin to a diver in the midst of a great field of volcanic chimneys or giant prehistoric polyps. He might actually have been standing on what was an ocean floor some millions of years prior. A long, possibly exaggerated, raspy whine from Rarity cut through the cacophony of the churning winds. Spike noticed he had lingered too far behind in his moment of reflection, prompting him to hurry forward again. Despite the cloth around it, surprising amounts of sand found their way in his mouth. As he was used to chewing much harder minerals, it was a mild annoyance at best for him; though judging from their coughs and sputters, his companions found it to be a bit more than that. A few minutes passed in the relative silence of the roaring winds and the soft grating rattle of the sand sliding around the travelers. A distant thunderclap echoed, the static discharge of a hundred million particles rubbing against one another for the past three hours. “This is unbearable!” “Relax, Rarity! We’re almost out of the storm!” “How would you even know that?” “Well I am a pegasus! I can… feel that sorta stuff about weather! Besides, we’re getting pretty high up; the wind won’t be able to carry as much sand up to our faces if we keep climbyaaah!” A small stone nearly collided with Spike’s head after Scootaloo slipped on it, sending her sliding down the windswept incline. Her frantic flailing broke one of the stone spurs before she managed to grab another properly, tightening her grip as she let out a grunt of pain. The rubble rolled downwards, scattered by the winds as it descended among the tiny towers. “Ow, ow, ow, ouch,” the pegasus hissed, her face buried in the crook of her foreleg. Spike and Rarity watched carefully through the brown haze, both having failed to react in time to the filly’s fall. They stared for a moment as Scootaloo, Spike taking a few steps in her direction in order to be more useful in case she slipped again. “Are you okay, Scootaloo?” Rarity asked, taking a moment to prop her hooves into a few choice holds of the stone floor. The filly shifted a bit to get a firm grip on the stone before shakily answering. “Yeah, I’m…” noticing her voice was barely above a hoarse whisper, certainly inaudible in the storm’s tumult, she spoke up louder. “I’m fine, I just ah… I think I broke that thing with my ribs, ow. I’ll be fine though, don’t worry.” She rose back to her hooves, still clinging to the spire for balance against the wind. She slowly made her way back up to where she had slipped, taking very careful steps along the way. Once she had caught up to her previous progress, she urged them to continue. “Come on guys, it won’t be much longer now.” It was hard to tell with the way the wind battered them every which way, but Spike could swear he noticed a slight limp in the orange filly’s steps. The following minutes passed as quietly as was possible in the maelstrom of sand, as the exhaustion of walking up a windswept hillside gradually asserted itself. They had been stuck in this storm for hours; three or four, as much as it was even possible to guess in the perpetually brown penumbra. The wind kept howling. It would almost have been tolerable if they only could have taken a few sips of water, but they refrained for the simple fact that the storm inevitably seized the chance to fill their mouths with almost as much sand as water; while Spike could have indeed elected to ignore the very slight inconvenience it brought to him, his water was more useful as weight for Scootaloo, and thus out of reach. Another crack of lightning brought a fleeting instant of illumination in the dim haze, although not much; merely akin to lighting a single candle in a cavernous warehouse. It would have been indistinguishable from the constant blur of shifting luminosity of the throngs of sand flying above if it hadn’t been immediately followed by the rumble of thunder. Come to think of it, Spike could barely hear the difference over the unending hum of the storm. Maybe there hadn’t been a single strike of lightning at all. As he took another step forward, hunched over in a practically quadruped stance, Spike noticed his limbs seemed a bit easier to see. After just a few more minutes, he was fairly certain of the fact that the ambient light was slowly rising in intensity. Minutes more brought a lightening sky, then a faint blue tint to it, then at last the sight of the unblemished playground of the sun. After climbing a few dozen meters more, the three came to a halt in the flat slope, a break in its fossilized continuity where it seemed to crumble and roil into a misshapen mound of broken rubble. They turned back on a ridge, looking at the golden-brown clouds they had just finally escaped. The agitated mass stretched to the horizon, an endless sea of twirling limbs of dust scattering and shifting with the winds. The distant arms of spiraling sand seemed like mere gentle wisps of fog, although they would likely be nothing but towering giants of abrasive fury up close. Clean wind gently stroked their skin as they finally removed the layers of protection they had been trapped in for the past hours. Rarity took a moment to do her best to elegantly spit out the sand in her mouth, resulting in something more akin to a sputtering whine. To his left, Spike heard the sloshing of a confined liquid, revealed to be Scootaloo in the process of taking a greedy swig of water. “Hey don’t waste it!” The filly glared at him for a moment, her cheeks puffed around her mouthful. She lowered the canteen, one eye still trained on him and her mouth still full. She then swallowed the whole thing with a wince, before spitting out some muddy drool on the ground. “Fine,” She spat, smacking her lips and rubbing her ribs gently with a soft grunt of pain. Both ponies then set about scrubbing the crust of sand stuck to their coats by hours spent sweating inside their blankets, while the young drake simply dusted himself. The lingering numbness of the sand’s assault was rubbed away, massaged into a welcome sense of comfort. It was short work, letting him finish some time before the others. He took the chance to once again check their direction as they might have been turned around in the storm; it was better to re-orient themselves as soon as possible in any case. “Hey… are your scales… shinier?” Scootaloo asked, squinting at Spike. Taking a look at his arms, he could indeed notice a gleam to his hide that he had rarely seen before. A glance at the ponies showed him that they hadn’t been so blessed; the parts of their coats that had been exposed to the winds were red and patchy. A great number of hairs had been sandblasted away, leaving the skin almost naked and definitely sore. “Oh, yes, perfect,” Rarity grumbled, “We get shaved while he gets polished. How splendidly fair.” “Hey, it’s not my fault!” “I know, I know. I just… wish we could have avoided that despicable storm.” They turned back towards said storm, its churning mass quietly rumbling in the winds. With the distance lowering the overall volume, the sporadic thunderclaps stood out much more, each one brightening a random part of the colossal cloud at unpredictable intervals. The wind still whistled around the travellers, albeit gently and soothingly devoid of sand. Rarity took her water back from Scootaloo, drinking some before putting it back in its place inside her bags. Somewhere beyond or under the sand sea lay Appleloosa, now as distant and unreachable as any lost city of legend; swallowed whole by the roiling murky ocean whose shore they stood on. The land itself might not have forgotten its life of old, the fury of a hundred billion gallons of water remembered by a hundred thousand tons of the bones of its inhabitants. Each grain of sand the ghost of a fish or anemone longing for the swaying tides, howling to remember. To be remembered. Scootaloo poked Spike, showing him the detector had stabilized once more towards the south-east. They would need to keep going soon. Rarity rose to her hooves, carefully beginning her ascent of the broken rubble leading to the summit of the hill. Scootaloo slipped the dragon’s canteen in his bag before following, occasionally grunting from the bruise forming on her side. Spike retrieved the detector, putting it in its place among his other belongings. He turned to follow them. A wave of lightning crackled behind him, drawing his attention in time to see a bright flash spreading among the brown clouds, the entire mass seeming to light up like a massive fireworks display and rumbling, growling in its fury. A pointless fury. A rage for a world long gone, a wail of despair at the helplessness of the ghost of something discarded by a changing world. A world that had changed millions of years ago, that had never stopped changing in the eons since, and had changed once more four months ago. It would always change. Were deserts such a bad thing? Should they all be destroyed, erased and prevented? If Spike failed, if the Signal was never stopped, would anyone cry over it ten million years in the future? “Spike! What are you doing?” “I’m coming, I’m coming!” The little purple dragon turned his back on the sandstorm and resumed climbing the hill.