Ghost Lights

by Winston

Chapter 9

Ghost Lights

Chapter 9

---

I woke up at sunrise the next morning. Azure woke up shortly after I did, mostly because I didn't give her a choice. I'm sure she'd have liked to sleep in but I shook her insistently enough to make it clear that this was not an option. I relented a little bit once she was up, though, and and spared her enough time to make a cup of coffee using a coffeemaker that the hotel had supplied with the room. After that, we got our things together, checked out, and quickly ate breakfast at the same restaurant we'd had dinner. The ponies working there were very surprised that we were there so early, and I think they actually had to open before their usual hours to accomodate us. Azure left them a big tip for the trouble, and we started walking again.

This little town we'd stumbled into was on the outer edges of the Equestrian heartland of settled and well-tamed farm country. As we continued northwest from there, it could be seen that a few ponies lived in the more remote areas beyond, carving out little farms and cottages here and there, but the roads became less distinct and the settlements became fewer and further between with more forests and wild lands separating them. Once again, around mid-morning we stopped to eat a little bit from the grasses of an open meadow to keep up our energy for traveling.

We found and followed what looked like a little cart trail of two dusty parallel dirt tracks worn into the ground that led northwest. Around the middle of the day it took us down into a valley between two highland areas where there was an interesting sight - the ruins from part of an old aqueduct.

It was only a fairly short section that was left. Most of it seemed to have fallen apart (or been deliberately taken apart to recycle the stone, more likely) over the centuries. I flew up to get a better look at it for a moment. The conduit for the waterway was on top, supported by arches made of stone blocks. The bridgework was built so that the water could pass over the valley we were walking through, and continue on the other side of the higher land beyond. Presumably once the duct reached ground level on the other side, it would transition to underground pipeworks instead of an open-air waterway. As we passed between the arches, I recognized the origins of the style, in the massive constructs of precisely cut rock held together with thick, strong cement.

"It's old unicorn empire," Azure said out loud, confirming what I already knew. "Wow... I've read about these ducts they used to build... It never really hit me that they were so big, though!" She stared up at the massive scale of it, looking a little awestruck.

"It's impressive, isn't it?" I asked. "That ancient ponies could build something like this?"

"Sort of an unfortunate thing that they had to," Azure said.

"I guess things were different back then," I agreed. "I suppose they were just trying to get out from under the hooves of being dependent on the pegasus empire for rainwater."

"Yeah," Azure agreed. "You can tell the pegasi didn't like giving up control, either." She pointed to the side of one of the arch supports, where a thin vertical groove ran up the side of the stone all the way from the ground to the very top. There were others like it at intervals all down the length of the aqueduct. "Somepony probably scavenged the metal centuries ago, but those were for lightning rods. Looks like the unicorns expected the pegasi to try and knock out the duct with a lightning attack at some point."

"Heh. Aren't you glad I'm not pirating and hoarding rainclouds and making you pay up for water?" I asked.

"Eh..." Azure shrugged. "You don't really seem the type."

"I don't know..." I said. "I've done some cloud pushing. It was a part-time job in high school before I joined the army. If I'd gone a different way in a different time, I could have ended up on a crew maurauding the skies and holding the rain hostage."

"I think the weather service frowns on using those cloud-wrangling skills for cut-throat extortion these days, though," Azure said.

"Probably." I nodded. "I never tried it. I do know that the earth pony farmers got pretty upset whenever we were late with their rain deliveries, though. I can only imagine what the reaction would be like if they were getting squeezed for half their crop in order to make sure the rain kept coming."

"Bad day for them, I guess. Then it'd get worse, because the unicorns would probably take the other half for making the sun rise and set on time," Azure added.

"I'm kind of amazed there's any earth ponies left, when you think about the history from before Equestria," I said.

"Well, there's always grass," Azure said. "Nopony can really take that away, at least. Speaking of..."

With that thought, we took a quick break for lunch, grazing on the vegetation of the valley in the shadow of the aqueduct overhead. We didn't really discuss old history anymore beyond that. After we were done eating, we moved on and left the old ruins behind in our continual push northwest.

---

On our third day out, I found a landmark that was familiar to me from the first two times I'd made this journey in years past. It was an ancient henge of standing stones in the middle of an otherwise clear grassy field. There were sixteen upright rectangular shaped stone blocks, arranged to form a circle about twenty meters wide.

It was a sight I was glad to see, since it meant that I knew about how far along we were. Finding it on the morning of day three meant that we were easily on track to reaching the Seawall on time - maybe even a little ahead, with a bit of luck.

Azure found it interesting as well. We stopped for a few minutes to look around, during which she did something with her horn. It glowed briefly, but there was no other apparent effect. "Nope. These weren't used for magic," she said while she assessed the old rocks.

"Why? Could they have been?" I asked.

"Well, from what we know, these kinds of stone rings are originally earth pony construction," Azure said. "So usually they wouldn't be. They were originally just solar calendars used by farmers for telling when the solstices and equinoxes happened by the placement and angles of the shadows they cast. But they haven't been needed for thousands of years, so they were abandoned and sometimes groups of unicorns who came along later reused them as convenient magical focus points for casting spells that take a lot of energy. They're well grounded and the mass of the rocks can soak up and hold a lot of energy. They used them like big capacitors."

"But not this one?"

"Nope. Not as far as I can tell." She shook her head. "There's no... you know... residue left behind in it. No signature."

"I guess I wouldn't really know," I pointed out.

Azure slowly walked in a circle around the stones, looking briefly at each one. I flew up to the top of one and perched on it. The surface was cut to a precise horizontal flatness, though now it was slightly rough under my hooves, worn with age and encrusted in patches with thin growths of lichens that were whitish-grey, green, and orange over the darker base color of the rock.

Something about that place was comforting in an unexpected way. The way these stones had been here for thousands of years unchanging seemed serene and stable. There was also the surrounding area, a flat open field in which any approach was visible for a very long distance. It made me feel safe, appealing to my primal herd animal instinct as a horse to be somewhere that nothing can easily sneak up on me. There was restful quietness there, no worries and no fears. Even the mystery of it, the enigma of questions like what ponies put up these stones so many thousands of years ago and how did they manage to do it, had a kind of charm and fascination that imbued the whole location.

Because of this, we ended up lingering there a little bit longer than I'd planned, but there was no harm done since we were still slightly ahead of schedule anyway. It was nice to have a break and recharge a little bit while we could. Finally, though, we had to keep moving on. There was still a very long way to go.

From the henge of stones, I led us due north for a short distance. Another useful thing about this landmark was that I knew that just a little way in that direction we'd find an old flatstone-paved road left from the era when the unicorns had controlled this land. I'd used it the previous two times I'd come out here, because I'd discovered that it led away northwest towards where we were going. If we followed it, it would take us a good part of the rest of the way toward the Seawall without much effort.

I found the road I was looking for easily enough. It was in bad condition from not having been used much in almost a thousand years, with the paving stones nearly buried with age in the ever-engulfing dirt and with all kinds of plants and grasses growing in the gaps between them, but it provided a reasonably straight and level path to follow with no trees or other obstacles in the way and no risk of getting seriously lost, so it was still very helpful.

Would the unicorns who'd built this road, probably to expedite their military movements and protect their borders against the other races, have ever imagined that a pegasus would be traveling it more than a thousand years later with a unicorn friend? I thought about that often while we spent the rest of that day, and the next couple of days afterward, walking on it.

Comments

[Silver Flare]

The Seawall seems really tough to get to. I would think, with regular Equestrian patrols being stationed there, that there might be a designated road. Maybe waystations maintained for travelers, if not an actual train stop or something. Perhaps it will become clearer when we reach the Seawall itself. Or perhaps Equestrians simply don't mind old-school travel.

I don't mean to sound as though I'm not enjoying the story. Because I am.

I was just curious.

[Grollo]

5821189
Well, it's a pretty remote place. Several days march outside Equestrias borders, so far off from civilization that you only send to ponies that stay for six months at a time. They don't even send supplies there, the pair has to eat grass. Setting up way stations for a biannual trip to a place that needs no supply lines seems a bit excessive.