When Applejack woke up, there was a tingle not unlike a silver bell.
Her head leashed around, surprising Winona, and she found that they were alone in the tent. She opened the tent's flaps... and got a faceful of bush in the face for it.
She grumbled. Setting up camp amidst bushes, while good to keep it out of sight, wasn't something she was crazy about.
Twenty minutes of cursing later, the tent had been packaged and she was outside the small group of bushes.
The moon, nearly absent, gave little enough light that even she and Winona were at risk of breaking a leg, so Applejack had to do something she had been dreading from the start.
She rummaged her bags until she found a necklace from which a heavy-looking metal box with a knob and a glass side in it. While the gem generated a reddish glow, three layers of colored glass changed its tone to white. It was also, Applejack had found, an overly strong beam, enough that she had only turned the knob up more than a notch with hostile intent.
She put it on and gave the sky a look, scanning for any looming shapes. When she had been allayed, she gave the barest of pushes to the lantern's knob, getting it to produce a somewhat discreet glow.
-º-
For the fourth time in the night, Applejack's head leashed around them and Winona growled. Neither saw anything, just like the other times.
After a moment of tension, Applejack relaxed her stance and looked forward again, then gasped.
The roc gave them his sideways look, eyelid appearing and disappearing quickly enough to be barely perceptible. He cooed and hopped to them, moving his wings for balance.
Applejack and Winona backpedaled, the first's hoof reaching the knob and turning it. The glow grew into an unbearable white wall and the roc flew away breaking several branches in the process, screeching as he did.
She turned it off and fell still for a moment, noticing that Winona stood in an odd angle. The lantern was hot, and most of its charge had been spent, but they probably had enough for the night and it'd recharge during the day.
She turned it on, at more reasonable levels, and saw that one of Winona's hind legs had fallen in a hole. Hadn't they stopped when they did, she would be treating a broken leg.
Once their breaths had returned to normality they kept walking, paying more heed to the increasingly common holes.
-º-
Hours later they found a river, this one deep and with a nearly vertical river bed. Both traits had luckily spared it from the moles, and probably kept it free from rocs.
They walked by it for a few minutes, searching for some kind of bridge, and found a small, metallic construction, Probably minotaur in origin. They loved their metal.
She aimed the light beam at a sign near it, in which the same message had been written in several languages:
A marvel of modern engineering!!
Troika River -The first artificial river made through purely mechanical means!!- will soon be joined by Troika vacations resort!!
Get your own beach home!!
10% discount if you buy one before the resort is finished!!
Any inquiries may be made within.
An arrow pointed to the rusted door, which had been shoved open long ago. She entered the building, annoyed by the clanks under her hooves (It just didn't feel right for her, to make metal floors) and scanned it quickly. While some windows had been vandalised, one thing had remained safe, probably because it was protected by a glass panel that, if she had had to guess, could resist quite a few hammer blows. The map was yellowed, but still readable.
It wasn't cartographically sound by any means, but the cartoonish bridge west of the cartoonish building with a "You Are Here" bubble, connected to it by an equally cartoonish path, couldn't be so far away.
She almost walked out of the building -Winona had waited outside, having an equal distaste for metal floors- but ultimately set up her tent inside, in a space from which the -metalic, of course- tables had been pushed, probably used for that very purpose before, and called Winona inside. The weather wasn't especially cold, but the alternative was either leaving her as roc prey or forcing her to sleep in cold metallic floor.