Stellaura felt a smile grace her muzzle, a muzzle that was more accustomed to timid frowns on a regular basis, as she stepped out from indoors and into the largely shaded garden courtyard of her expansive home.
Elinora’s palace had a few such courtyards like this, but for Stellaura this particular one was her favourite. Like the others it secluded her from the myriad politics and affairs of Marecca, but she also was the only one that ever seemed to frequent it.
The cloistered sanctuary of a courtyard consisted of a wide open space of desert sand dominated by an artificial oasis shaded by date trees and fed by the palace’s intricate aqueduct systems. The sky was fairly cloudy but not an unpleasant sight with the radiant sun burning bright hot amidst the gathering banks of clouds as it always did.
Giggling, the Alicorn filly quickly set about her usual favourite activity when she visited the courtyard.
Stellaura found many months ago that the sand was of just the perfect consistency for building. In combination with the water from the pond, she could build almost anything she could imagine, from little villages and fields, to cities and entire kingdoms using bits and pieces that the trees dropped as architectural elements.
Today, the young princess decided that Marecca, as she knew it both from what she’d been taught and from mornings spent viewing it on the heights of her home’s balconies and parapets, would be her newest project. With a bucket and the land-shaping power of telekinesis at her disposal, Stellaura got to work with relatively euphoric glee characteristic of foals her age.
In a very short span of time especially by her own race’s temporal perception, Stellaura had constructed herself a resplendent city of true majesty. The sand of the oasis was now dotted with defensive battlements, and neat grids as well as almost haphazard side alleys that surrounded great minarets, cupolas, and even the great ziggurat-shaped representation of Marecca’s Hanging Gardens. While all impressive, there was also with a newfound sense of intricacy with this newest creation.
The inspiration had ignited in her mind without warning or origin point, and Stellaura nearly brought the flat of her hoof to her face over having not thought of it in the many other sessions of play and building leading up to this point.
All along miniature Marecca’s streets, boulevards, and thoroughfares were the highest quality representations of its citizens and market stalls that Stellaura could muster. Were the material not sand and the pony miniatures more true to the appearance of their living inspirations, one could be forgiven for mistaking the princess’ city for the actual city, as if stolen from a diminutive alternate reality.
Whilst admiring her creations, nearly beaming, misfortune befell Stellaura. The clouds above had achieved a critical mass, and with that mass came the inevitable downpour that forced the Alicorn filly to retreat to the shelter of the nearest courtyard arcade. Stellaura grew despondent as she witnessed the events now unfolding before her, the steady pitter-patter of the rainfall on sand, stone, and leaves punctuating every passing second.
The date trees had proven traitorous, embracing the life-giving rainwater above in its many torrents willfully in the way that all plants did, yet also serving to concentrate much of the aquatic downpour onto specific regions of Stellaura’s Mini-Marecca.
Mini-Marecca’s great Hanging Gardens were the first to topple over in a pathetic lump of sand that gradually washed away down into the pond of the oasis along with many of the sand citizens and smaller buildings nearest it. Rivulets of brown and green, sand and leaf-laden water erased the neat grids of the streets and city blocks.
Distressing to Stellaura even more so than the loss of the Gardens was the minarets that dominated the skyline of her creation. They fell and vanished into the sand from whence they had come, without the dignity and grace with which they had previously risen.
Stellaura’s final straw for the release of her own torrent was the demise of her home as she had known it. The palace washed away in parts unlike the similarly-sized Hanging Gardens thanks only to its placement away from the date trees. Roofs and entire sections first, then the foundations at last gave way underneath the surviving structure as the barely held together and equally barely recognizable sand structure inexorably slid down into the pond.
Blinking through eyes that were difficult to see with through the downpour and the tears, Stellaura saw the palace remains vanish and dissolve into the water with finality before she bolted out of the courtyard that had likely seen the departure of its only and final visitor.
Elsewhere in the palace home, Hasad paused from his present deliberations with precognition. He readied his shoulder as he always did in episodes like these.