//------------------------------//
// Chapter 12 
// Story: Ghost Lights 
// by Winston 
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Ghost Lights

Chapter 12










After Silver Star and Meadow were on their way, I gave Azure the grand tour of the Seawall and the surrounding features. Admittedly, that doesn't take very long. We started in the small stone barracks by unpacking our bags and settling in a little bit. After that we headed back outside. I flew to the top of the wall and called down to Azure to follow. She teleported herself up and stood next to me.

She gasped when she saw the ocean for the first time, and stood there staring at it for a while without speaking.

"I know exactly how you feel," I told her. Years ago, when I first saw that endless blue-green water stretching away forever past the horizon, I was just as struck. I couldn't get over the vastness of it, how it seemed impossible but there it was confronting me with the reality of how small I actually am - how tiny all of us are. We think our pony cities are such great accomplishments, such huge feats of construction, but this ocean could effortlessly flow over them and swallow them all up, all we've ever created, and it would be like none of it ever existed.

Azure kept staring out at the ocean, and her eyes narrowed a bit like she couldn't believe that this was actually real. "I want to see it up close," she said.

I nodded. "Well, then let's go do that." I took off and flew down from the wall to the ground at the far side, heading for the beach. Azure teleported herself to the ground and started walking. The soil was mostly sand beneath my hooves, dry and sort of loose up here by the wall but a little wetter and heavier as we got close to the water. The line of the high tide was demarcated by a band of thin deep green filaments of seaweed and pieces of broken seashell litter that had washed up, the fragments polished and the corners worn down until they were rounded and smooth in the tumbling action of the water. We passed that and there was nothing but fine sand, in a perfectly flat plane left by time and the waves.

Closing in on the sea, I noticed how we broke the perfection of the sand's flat surface and left a trail of hoofprints behind us. Some part of me felt for a moment as if it wasn't right for us to disrupt nature's work by trampling on it. At the same time, though, it seemed arrogant to think that two small creatures like us would really change it in anything but the most fleeting, insignificant way. The next cycle of the tides would erase these prints, restoring that pristine state.

Another few feet and we were close enough that a wave surged forward and gently washed over my hooves and ankles with cool water, leaving my fetlocks wetted. I closed my eyes for a moment and stood still in the embrace of the sea. It was cold but it was alive and vital, liquid rushing around my legs. The ebb and flow welcomed me home once more.

When I opened my eyes again, Azure was standing nearby, staring down curiously at the water. She leaned her head down and stuck out her tongue to taste it briefly. I looked at her strangely, wondering what she was doing.

"Heh, just checking," she said when she noticed my look. "Guess the books were right. It does have a lot of salt. Just seems kinda weird that there's more water here than I'd have ever believed existed but none of it's any good for us."

I laughed and nodded in agreement. "Yeah, no kidding. Fill up on this and you'll be sorry."

"So what are we supposed to drink?" Azure asked. "Meadow said there was a spring to the north, but I didn't think to ask where exactly."

"C'mon, I'll show you," I said.

I started walking north along the beach, with Azure following me, until we reached the end of the Seawall. I continued along the little strip of beach still left between the ocean and the vertical rocky cliffs edging the mountains. After a few hundred more meters I found what I was looking for, a small rivulet of water falling down in a little channel that time had eroded into the rock. It flowed along and fell into the ocean in a small thin waterfall that left a little brackish water pool at its base. I leaned forward and tasted the falling water. It was cold and completely fresh. The taste was as if it had just been distilled, much superior to the tapwater available in Equestria.

"Here." I showed Azure. "This is what I usually used a lot on my tours before this. I think it's rainwater from up on the mountains that gets channeled down into a pretty constant flow. There's also a few other freshwater springs scattered around. Most of them are fine to drink from. I can't really remember where they are just off the top of my head, but I'm sure we'll find them eventually. We've got nothing but time for the next few months."

After we'd both had a drink from it, we walked south, back down past the Seawall again to the opposite end. As we traveled, it could be seen in several places that there were arch-shaped uneven patches along the bottom of the wall, the remnants of holes where there used to be access doors that would let ponies on the ground pass through from one side to the other. They had long ago been filled in and blocked off, though, in the same style of old unicorn construction as the rest of the wall, large stone pieces held together with strong high quality cement. Other than those, most of the wall's surfaces were still pristine.

"It's interesting that there doesn't seem to be any evidence of damage and repair, on a wall like this," Azure commented. "Since it was obviously built to barricade against something, you'd think it would be attacked at some point."

"It's one of the great mysteries of why it's here," I said. "I guess the unicorns were scared of something, but I've never been able to figure out what it could have been."

Once we were all the way down at the far southern end, I had something else to show Azure. Where the wall meets the mountain rocks as they rise out of the ground, there's a sheltered little corner where a few plants manage to grow through the sandy dirt. There's also a scattering of a few small rocks laying loose in the dry sand, with sharp angular features that come to points. They're not there by chance, they've been left there over time by ponies at this particular spot.

The reason for them to be there is quite literally written on the wall. These are the pieces of stone that the teams of ponies that have been here have used to scratch in a long list that sits engraved there, at the little corner on the south end.

Azure looked at it with interest. "What is this?" she asked.

"The names of all the Equestrian soldiers that have been stationed here as watchers," I told her. "It's sort of an unofficial tradition, I guess. They don't tell you about it, but I'm pretty sure everypony does it."

There were pairs of names side by side in a vertical column, starting at the bottom and working upwards. At the end of the list as it stood at the moment were the names of Silver Star and Meadow. I picked up one of the stones littering the ground and scratched in my own name. It was sort of an odd and startling moment of realization, while I was in the middle of it, that this was the third time in my life I was signing this wall. No other name was on here more than once.

After I'd finished I stepped aside to make way for Azure, but she looked hesitant for some reason.

"What?" I asked her, offering her the sharp piece of stone. "Go ahead."

"You said it's for soldiers," she said. "And I'm... well, I'm not, really."

I rolled my eyes and laughed. "You're all the way out here, doing something even most soldiers wouldn't," I said. "Close enough for me. You've earned it."

Azure finally picked up the stone, levitating it using her magic, and expertly used it to etch in her name next to mine. Her penmareship was excellent and the letters were scrawled in elegantly and exactingly, almost as neat as a printed typeface even on the wall's surface of old weathered rock. Knowing her as the personal student of a princess, though, that kind of quality of writing didn't seem unexpected.

Azure stepped back and studied her name on the wall, still holding the stone hovering in the telekinetic glow of her horn. For a few seconds, the only sound was the distant lapping waves.

"I guess some part of me is here forever now," she said softly.

"Well... it..." I thought about that, and something about it didn't seem right to me. This place... it's older than any one pony could ever be, even older than Celestia or Luna. It's longer in time than we are, and it's bigger in history than any of us would ever be. No. The truth is, for better or worse, we're just brief visitors and nopony can stay here forever. It's much more the opposite, that its immensity will over-arch us all.

Someday, that list of names will weather away and erosion will erase every one of us, but the wall will still stand. It'll stand for thousands more years when we're long gone without a trace, without even the flicker of a distant memory, when even our bones have turned to dust and blown away in the wind.

This wall will forget us, but no pony who did a tour here will ever forget this wall. It isn't a place a pony stays with, we're not meant for that. It's a place that stays with a pony instead.

"Let's say it's more like now something of this place will always be with you," I suggested.

Azure just stared at the wall deep in thought for a little while longer, and said nothing. She dropped the rock back into the sand and started walking away, to cross the wall again and head back toward the little stone barracks. I followed her, feeling like that was enough exploring for now. Excited as I was to finally be here, it was just the first day, and I was still tired and ready to relax a little bit after the long journey out.