At the Inn of the Prancing Pony
Chapter 11: Border Crossing
Midnight stared intensely at the piece of paper which was attached to the stripling birch tree with magical stickum. She tilted her head first one way, and then the other.
“They got my nose wrong,” she finally concluded.
“WANTED!” proclaimed the text above the blurry image of a mare’s face. “FOR TOP-SECRET CRIMES AGAINST THE MONARCHY!”
She pointed at the sketch that was supposed to represent her cutie mark. “What...” she sputtered. “Why would anypony think that a stein of beer looked like my beautiful and scientifically accurate cutie mark?”
“Perhaps the artist looked at it, gave up, and drew what he’d rather being doing at that moment,” suggested Firebelle.
“RETURN ALIVE OR SLIGHTLY CONCUSSED FOR A VALUABLE CASH REWARD OF B50.” There was a helpful illustration of a mostly empty bag of bits alongside this encouraging text.
“It’s just another bad attempt by Blueblood at driving me towards the Inn. Nopony would try and capture a capable unicorn for fifty bits. That’s just sad.”
“Actually, I think it’s sort of sweet,” said Hope. “He’s trying to keep you from getting hurt...in the saddest, most incompetent way possible.”
Midnight turned away, sighing. “We should move on.”
“Right,” said Firebelle, taking the lead. “The border’s less than a thousand strides west of here. Do you happen to know a secluded spot we can make the crossing? I mean, regardless of the state of that poster, we don’t know if Blueblood himself has given up the hunt.”
“I’ve never actually been this close to the border before...Hope, do you have experience with this area?” She asked, turning to the earth pony.
“I...what?” asked Hope. “You lived in Horn’s Reach. The actual name of the town was Horn’s Reach, as in the literal furthest point that the authority of the horned breed could extend. Did you ever even leave that lab of yours?”
Midnight stopped for a second to soak in Hope’s expression—it was the most frustrated she had ever seen the usually placid earth pony, and she was responsible. She didn’t feel very good about it, but at the same time it was immensely satisfying.
“Yes. Twice,” Midnight said, sighing and trying to hold back a smile. “I was quite busy, you see. Working on the aqua regia. Shame you didn’t come along sooner.”
Celestia sighed in frustration. Sure, she had a clear memory of what this part of the countryside looked like from above, thanks to her tussle with Kammy the Dragon, but not only would it be a mistake to reveal intelligence only a pegasus would possess, but also that intelligence was seventy-five years out of date, and notably lacking in political borders and four-color shading. “I’m perhaps better able to tell you where to go to not be in the vicinity of the border,” she admitted sheepishly at last.
“Great, that’s just great!” exclaimed Firebelle. “That’s like half my planned advantage in hiring you two in the first place!”
“Hire? Does that mean we’re getting paid?” Hope asked with a smile.
“It’s more like ‘hire’ in the technical sense. Like hiring a cab.”
“You have to pay for cabs.”
Midnight stepped forward. “We could have purchased a map if this had been a known issue.”
Firebelle laughed. “Lampyran maps consist solely of the nation of Lampyra, surrounded by a great expanse labeled ‘Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.’”
Hope raised an eyebrow.
“We didn’t mean you, personally,” Firebelle quickly added.
Midnight snorted in frustration. “But now we have to cross,” she addressed them. “So, the best course of action is just to do it.” After a pause, Midnight raised a hoof. “Sorry...in my opinion, it would be best.”
“No, no, of course you’re right,” said the pegasus. She looked at the cart. “Let’s see...trading. Yes, we might just get away with that. Keep the weapons well hidden, though.”
The trio crested the top of a low hill, and looked down at the rolling landscape below them. There were large splotchy areas to the north and south that were blackened and devoid of all vegetation.
“Wow, what happened?” asked Firebelle. “Looks like a forest fire!”
“Yeah, if a forest fire was capable of flying from place to place,” Midnight said with a roll of her eyes.
“Ivan,” said Hope.
“Ivan?”
“Yeah, that mad band of adventurers I escaped from were going to loot the tomb of the ‘ex-dragon Ivan’ after they were through with Horn’s Reach,” Hope explained. “Given their utter disregard for anypony’s lives other than their own, I gave even odds that they’d end up liberating this Ivan character rather than defeating him.”
The reactions of the pegasus and the unicorn could not be any more different from one another.
“Wow!” Firebelle exclaimed. “A dracolich! I would have given anything to see some genuine adventurers fighting one of those! That must have been epic!”
“A dracolich!” Midnight exclaimed. “That’s just horrifying! Those things are nearly impossible to stop! That thing must have left a trail of destruction and devastation all the way into the heart of Unicornia! Please tell me that you warned my father of this threat during your interview with him!”
“By the gods,” Hope said with a distant look in her eyes. “He changed the subject. I was going to tell him. By all rights, that was the question he was supposed to ask me, but then he started challenging my intelligence and I had to defend it and...I never told him! How many ponies are dead now because I put my pride above my duty?”
“Whoa, whoa there, Hope,” Midnight said, putting a hoof on her withers to calm her down. “If that monster did go on a rampage, we’d know about it. There is no possible way that Prince Blueblood would have wasted time on us if there was a monster on the loose in his kingdom. The guy’s an idiot, but he does have his priorities straight.”
“Oh,” said Hope, feeling much better. “So I guess they must have stopped Ivan then.”
“Oh sure!” Firebelle exclaimed, belatedly putting her own hoof on Hope’s withers and shoving Midnight’s out of the way. “All somepony would have to do is find his phylactery and smash it. And in the stories of adventurers that I’ve studied, those immortality spells never work right on dragons. He was probably made so stupid by the spell that he put it next to his toothpaste or something. Besides, if a dracolich was really on an uncontrollable rampage, the magical residue would have been so severe that Sparkle here would be a raving lunatic from the feedback!”
Hope looked happily over at the unicorn.
“Random bouts of magic-induced insanity to warn you of danger,” Midnight said laconically. “Yet another valuable service that I provide to this team for no extra charge. Now with that out of the way, let’s cross this border.”
With all of the immense expanses of rampant destruction around them, it was perhaps understandable that it took until now for the three ponies to notice the one feature that lay in the largest patch of normal vegetation before them: right in front of them, commanding a view of the entire valley, was a unicorn outpost.
Three simultaneous sighs resulted from this revelation.
# # #
“So,” said the tall, thin, beady-eyed inspector at the crossing. “For what reason are you leaving this fair country of ours?”
“Why, trade of course!” exclaimed a too-cheery Firebelle, who was pulling the cart.
“Really?” asked the co-inspector, a small fat unicorn with a nasal voice.
“Chemical supplies.” Midnight stepped up to the cart, and pulled out a small barrel of paper packets, opening each to show powders or jars. “Copper bars, copper powders, phosphate salts, foil of aluminum, cyanoacrylate bonding agents, potassium cyanide and many other fine quality materials, along with beakers, jars, flasks...we even have a genuine bottle of whale oil that can be used for fueling very hot flames. Such things are expensive out in the reaches of other lands, and we are hoping to make a tidy profit and return immediately to the safety of our country.” Midnight rattled all this off without appearing to give her words a second thought, afterwards setting everything back into the barrel and putting it into the wagon. “May we go now, good sir?”
The inspector’s eyes had been glazing over during this speech, until he heard the word “flames”. “Wait a moment, now,” he said. “These aren’t no explosives are they?”
“Of course not. An explosive burns quickly. These things only burn like a camp fire. Constant slow heat. An explosive wouldn’t be worth transporting anyway, what with the danger of combustion.” By this point, Midnight had determined the stallion to be an idiot, and was simply waiting for the weight of his empty skull to cave in on itself.
“Look, I don’t care how explosives work, just whether anything you’ve got is on the banned list or not. Oh, and none of that is a ‘unicorn state secret’, is it?” He read the phrase off of a well-worn scrap of paper that he was floating in his magic. “It would be a big to-do for us if we let through anything that those earth pony savages could lob right back at us, you know?”
The co-inspector nudged the inspector and pointed at Hope.
“Can we have cabbages for lunch?” Hope asked brightly.
The earth shuddering, soul destroying groan that Midnight let out was carefully practiced, years of hate against stupidity in general lending a certain tone of impending doom to it. “Yes. We can have cabbages. For lunch. Now good sir, inspector, can we please go so I may feed my cart puller?”
The pair of unicorns looked at the pegasus that was currently pulling the cart.
“Alternate cart puller.”
“Oh,” said the two inspectors in unison.
The head inspector went into a tiny little shack that probably could not ever fit the fatter one, and came back with a bright orange decal, which was affixed to the back of the cart. “Congratulations, you passed the inspection by Station 35. Please remember us if you ever meet any government representatives looking for exemplary service.”
“Yeah, or we’re never going to get out of this stinkhole,” commented the co-inspector.
“Now, farewell on behalf of the Unicorn Kingdom. This here is the last bit of gen-u-ine civilizationne that you’ll probably see until you get back here. That’s Prench right there.”
Firebelle pulled the cart across the imaginary line of the border. Midnight then turned around and faced the two unicorns. “Just...just stand there for a bit,” she said, sitting down and raising her forehooves to frame them. “I just want to remember you two...just the way you are.”
The two unicorns accordingly put on their best dumb smiles.
“And...perfect! Thank you.” She walked quickly away. “Two perfect idiots,” she mumbled. “Preserved for posterity.”
After trotting to the edge of the forest, Midnight looked to Hope, took in a deep breath, and spoke. “Are we all that bad, Hope?”
Hope looked at her with worried eyes. “The part that troubles me is that everypony keeps asking me that question. As if they didn’t know for themselves. Do I have to say that ponies are good for them to be good? I sure hope not.”
“Well...I’m sorry. I guess after Muddy betrayed me without a second thought, I suppose that I have a much diminished view of my own race.”
Hope looked away. “I couldn’t hope to guess as to Muddy’s motives—”
“Oh, I can,” Firebelle interrupted. “The Prince treated him like his foster son. I heard he even raised him from birth. How long have you known him?”
“Seven years, he was in and out of Horn’s Reach since I moved into the place and put out an ad for a...well, for a unicorn that could help me with moving delicate things.” Midnight sighed. “I recall now that Uncle offered to send me one of his servants to work for me. I turned him down, because I knew he’d just steal any of my discoveries and take credit for them himself.”
“Well, I suppose Muddy will have to stand for one of the exceptions,” said Hope. “But I do believe in general that all ponies want to be good, and simply have to be shown a good example to aspire to.”
“I will do my best to keep that in mind,” Midnight said firmly, with a nod.
Firebelle frowned. “I don’t think you’ve been seeing the right parts of the world, Hope,” she said. “There’s plenty of good examples out there, and I fully intend to become one of them—at the Inn.”
Hope and Midnight shared a look of foreboding at that sentiment.
The hills continued past the border, and into the west. Dimly visible on the horizon was a green band—the entrance to the Everfree.
“Keep sharp, minions,” Firebelle instructed the others. “This ground we are crossing is cursed.”
“Curses are merely unexplained scientific phenomena,” said Midnight in a tired voice. “I have yet to see one that is anything but child’s play...” Just as it seemed that Midnight was being a bit too harsh, she grinned. “I look forward to seeing what this one is like.”
“Oh, you won’t like it, I promise you that,” said Firebelle. “We are standing on some of the most fertile ground in all of Equestria. Seven different families and two co-operative ventures have tried to settle this land since the fall of Celestia, but none of them have thrived.”
Celestia bent down to examine the soil. It did indeed appear to be perfect for farming. “So what happened?” she asked.
“Fighting,” answered Firebelle. “Insults building to epic feuds, leaving every group fleeing the area before they were forced by the curse into killing each other! This area is saturated...with the Spirit of Disharmony.”
Celestia raised an eyebrow. “Nope,” she said. “Definitely not Him.”
“Uh...you sure?” asked Firebelle.
“Positive,” said Celestia. It seemed pretty obvious to her what was happening: big brave stallions too proud to admit that they couldn’t stand up to the fear of living next to the Everfree decided to use the excuse of a “curse” to cover why they slunk back to their homes with their tails between their legs. “There’s another explanation,” she said, “although it would be unkind of me to suggest it.”
“They genuinely wanted to kill each other?” Midnight asked curiously.
“Well, that’s what they said,” Firebelle replied. “I mean, why else would they leave a place like this?”
An unearthly howl chose that moment to rush down the landscape, emanating from the forest.
Despite her bluster, Midnight slowed and stopped, looking quite shaken. “What was that?”
“Timberwolves, probably,” answered Firebelle.
“Oh, of course. Timberwolves. Naturally.”
“Are there a lot of them in the Everfree?” asked Hope.
“Oh yes,” said Firebelle.
“Do they ever leave the forest?”
“Sometimes. Especially when adventurers are camping outside, for some inexplicable reason.”
Hope looked at the forest, then north to a vast swamp, south to an imposing rock gorge, and finally back east towards Unicornia. “Everypony who wants to be an adventurer goes through the Everfree to Hoofington, right?”
“Right,” answered Firebelle, not sure where this line of questioning was heading.
“And if they’re coming from Unicornia, they’re almost certainly passing through this very spot, yes?”
“I suppose so.”
She looked at the Everfree again.
“Oh no...” Midnight whimpered.