//------------------------------// // Manifest Dashtiny // Story: Appledashery // by Just Essay //------------------------------// When Rainbow Dash flew west of Appleloosa, she thought she understood what "vast" meant. She was horribly wrong. Beyond the Griffons' wind barricade, the world was completely devoid of sentient life. There were no roads, no fences, no boundaries of any kind. If the soil had only been a bit thicker, then Rainbow would undoubtedly have encountered no end of wooly grassland and unchecked forests. Instead, she found dirt patches and rocky valleys stretching as far as the eye could see. Sporadic tundra would occasionally blotch the landscape, but even then the vegetation was meager and shriveled at best. And yet, in a world devoid of ponies and filled with vacant spaces, Rainbow Dash got the rather unsettling feeling that this place once harbored civilization. This was made apparent by the random assortment of tall, jutting mountains. Only—they weren't mountains so much as they were gigantic boulders. There were no natural foundations to the structures. If anything, they looked as if they had been carved out of some continental body so ancient and forgotten that the original source had long-been worn to dust by time and decay. All that was left were these unsettlingly huge monoliths, and as Rainbow Dash glided closer to them, she could see the faint remnants of carvings... etchings... and the faint traces of murals. What they depicted—however—the mare was at a loss to tell. The designs were so old that the runes were practically indecipherable—assuming she even had the ability to ascertain their meaning if they were fully legible to begin with. And yet, these gigantic multi-story anomalies were a welcome respite, for the majority of Rainbow Dash's flight was... not so much spent in flying as it was in hiding. These deathscapes were vast, but they were not necessarily empty. Gigantic montrosities roamed the earth, hulking beasts that nearly dwarfed the structures themselves in their immensity. Rainbow Dash recognized a few of the beasts: hydras, manticores, and land serpents. Several other creatures—however—she only tangentially recognized from legend, lore, and no small amount of bedtime foalstories. Once or twice she flew high over what she suspected to be basilisks in tight, herding numbers. The fact that they could withstand pure daylight was a testament to just how far the pegasus had flown out of the good celestial graces of Equestria. The griffons' barricade was truly an alternative to Tartarusian imprisonment. Out there, no magic spell existed that could turn the beasts to stone from exposure to the sun. This meant that Rainbow Dash simply couldn't rest easy just anyplace—at least not within reach of the various beasts and their jaws. Some creatures Rainbow Dash simply had no way of recognizing. She observed beasts with elongated necks that trotted on four heavy limbs—thick as cedar trunks. Others shuffled about on two legs, resembling enormous birds with half of their body weight collected in immense, looming jaws that could easily gobble a grown stallion whole. She spotted beasts with horns, armored plates, and countless spines glinting in the sunlight. Some simply grazed on the sparse grass, which suggested a docile contentment, until she eventually spotted the beasts sparring over territorial control. When this happened, the air practically thundered from their whipping tails, and Rainbow flew faster and further west before her eardrums could pop. And yet, as the day passed over, and the sun bled into the gray horizon behind her, Lancie kept pointing onwards to their inevitable destination. It left Rainbow flabbergasted that Aatxe and his lair was situated so far beyond the reaches of sane civilization. Even a prison for forsaken monsters wasn't an obstacle to the Big Boss, and Rainbow Dash could only imagine what sort of power he possessed to allow his own broodlings to fly over the Griffons' barricade unchecked. "Perhaps it's a means of teleportation?" Lancie remarked. "Dragons are quite magical, after all, when they put their hearts and minds to it." "The only magical dragon I know is Spike," Rainbow hollered into the darkening winds. "And these creeps have nothing to do with him!" "Are you sure of that?" Lancie smirked. "For all we know, the little guy could be an inside agent working for Aatxe!" "Mrmffff..." Rainbow grumbled. "Well? Is it possible or isn't it?!" "How long has it been?" Rainbow thought aloud. "Two days? Two and a half? I swear, if Apple Bloom has croaked by the time I get back..." Lancie sighed. "You know, some ponies derail a conversation, and then there's you—who enjoys planting sticks of dynamite beneath the tracks." "Trust me, Lancie. There's absolutely nothing I enjoy about this whole cruddy situation." "Cruddy?!" Lancie grinned wide. "Look around you, Sparky! This place is full of discovery! Mystery! Terrible lizards!" "Yeah, well, it'd better be full of open plateaus where I can touch down and recuperate," the mare said. "Because this trip is going on for a lot longer than I hoped and I'm already running short of potions." "Well, at least you're admitting that some rest will do you good." Lancie clung to her side, smiling into the wind. "I'd say that's pretty healthy!" Silently, Rainbow Dash glanced down as she passed over another megastructure. An orange figure sat on the very top, waving her brown hat with a dark smile. "... ... ...on second thought," Rainbow's voice cracked as she looked ahead. "I think I can go for a little while longer." Lancie sighed. "Spoken like a true fossil." "Huh?" "Oh! Nothing!" He gestured. "By all means. Go west, young mare."