The Mare Who Loved the Mountains

by Fiddlebottoms

This might seem mean, or maybe it rings all true

For so long they never knew time, the mountains dream.

They dream of fury and eruption and power flowing down their sides as they turn over fitful and restive. The dreams of young, ambitious ranges rage so hot they scar the sky and leave it black and bleeding acid upon the earth. These almost animal dreams--the first cannibal dreams--plague them madly as they scour the sky with fire and sulphur.

Their deep turning and twisting drives them and impossible restlessness fills them and tears outward and burns scalping and scalding burning hot screaming splitting and scattering the sky. The dreams of the mountains peel back their own stone skin and blacken it. The dreams of the mountains bleed them dry only to fill them up again and explode again and rage mounting higher and higher against the heavens.

The nameless mountains dream before naming ever was and their dreams reach so high they block the winds and their dreams reach so high that in their shadows a world dies. And the mountains dream an apocalypse that spreads as vast forests turn to dust as the mountains dream and rivers dry as the mountains dream and the river’s now exposed beds crack and wheeze and the mountains dream without mercy as life retreats into the sky islands, those last hideouts for the forests and bears and other things that once spread their empire vast in the shadow of the mountain’s dreaming.

And the mountains dream for so long they never knew time until their dreams calm and rest among the clouds which cool their brows. And the mountains dream of the life that crawls over them, lives a while and abandons them and then returns to crawl again. The life claws out pieces of the mountains to take away, to build the homes in which they will decline and perish as the mountains dream fires and storms and earthquakes and erosion and life and death across themselves.

And the mountains dream so long that they never knew time, but they know many names passing over them. They dream the kings and founders and race after race after race of crawling things, and each is swallowed in time and fossilized inside them or spat out in distaste and left to feed the next crawling things the mountains dream across themselves like a shroud.

And the mountains dream so long that they never knew time and all of this was but a blink of an enormous, all-seeing eye until a filly with a pink mane was bored.

---

And one day, the filly with the pink mane was bored. She was bored most days in the shadow of the mountain’s dreaming. Her family had come to accept her flamboyant ways, but they could never keep up with her. They tried of course, but life on the rock farm was demanding as they gathered little pieces of the mountain’s dreaming, and so the pink filly was left alone at night with nothing but the rocks and mountains for company.

The mountains dreamed all this idly, as they had dreamed many things since maturing, and took no notice when the filly asked about their birthdays. The filly’s parents were slightly more responsive, staring at their eldest daughter and imagining how insane she must be to ask them over breakfast when the mountains had been born.

With no answer forthcoming, the filly made her own and filled the calendar with names and dates that meant nothing to anypony and even less to the mountains who dream so long they never knew time, but she honored it and brought every peak its hat and cake every year.

Despite dreaming so long they never knew time and despite dreaming many crawling things across them and many languages for them, the mountains had never dreamt a cartographer so ferocious or dedicated as the pink filly, who found each knob and each outcropping and gave each a birthday and a name. Even if half the knobs ended up named “Mr Rocksby” with the last being Mr Rocksby DXXIV. The newly formed Rocksby clan dreamt themselves closer together, though spread apart temporarily, their stony caps leaning toward each other and new ridges forming over the millennia to unite them.

The mountains had also never dreamt themselves invited to a filly’s birthday party before, and even considered joining it by sliding down into the valley and crushing the farmhouse in which the party was to be held. These are the sort of jokes that mountains dream of.

Nor had they dreamt that they would be scolded by a filly when they did not appear at her party. Nor had they dreamt she would forgive them each year, urging them to come next year instead as she smashed left over cake into them at the After Birthday Party.

But, there is only so long a filly can spend on a treadmill. She knew what her parents knew, that she needed a friend her own age who could keep up with her, and since such was impossible in this isolated valley, she set out to make one.

The coffee IV made things easier as she spent her nights toiling, although the boiling hot liquid in her veins tore her up inside like the raging dreams of her mountain friends. She worked tirelessly, through night after night while the mountains dreamed over her.

In the same barn she’d held her first party, she carved a head of marble, but it never spoke. She made a skeleton of steel, but it never danced. She pounded rocks into a fine powder and made a cement heart that couldn't beat, let alone accelerate in joy, and carved crystal eyes that never lit up in surprise.

None of this slowed her, nor did the worried looks of her family. She tried again and again, gathering her materials while she climbed over the mountains at night, speaking into their dreaming with her machine gun mouth. Determined, despite all her failures, to make a friend through sheer will.

And the mountains had dreamed many things since never knowing time, and this Will to Party, this refusal to yield before reality, spoke to them. It demanded of them, just as the rage of their youth had.

And so, one night, after the pink filly had passed out at her workbench, it moved. Something that had never been before, started abruptly and pulled itself from the dreaming and through a long corridor that stretched deep beneath the mountains dreaming.

And the steel skeleton lurched upright and pounded its hooves into the earth, drawing clay muscles up to robe it.

And the marble head mounted itself on the skeleton, feeling the clay muscles sink into its base and turn it blindly seeking the will that had called it.

And the concrete heart, now at home in the steel rib cage, began to beat. Pushing no blood, but still pulsing with something taking form in the world.

And the crystal eyes, now at home in the stone face, began to blink and color and tear up.

And something was born, tearing itself away from her home and body as it stood at last. It was not the mountains anymore, no longer one of the immense dreaming. Now it stumbled alone and small and weak and scared and stumble-standing on four hooves.

Stumbled, but did not fall.

It looked around, seeing a world that was not dreaming any longer. It coughed, spitting out unneeded minerals. And it was--

No, it was not it, it was she--

And she grasped the blanket and pulled it over the shoulders of--

Of her sister.

Of her friend.

Maud Pie blinked again.

The world came into focus and the dreaming slipped away forever and she--

She was alive

Comments

[horizon]

Is it wrong of me that — in a story about a reality so fey that we accept, as perfectly normal, apocalyptic dreams of inanimate objects and a pony throwing them birthday parties and Maud Pie being a golem — what broke me out of my reading was a mere intravenous coffee drip?

But that feels nitpicky, so let me say that the rest held together excellently. I enjoyed the idea here and especially the way it shifts into its reveal.

[darf]

oh, fiddles. i missed you a lot. please don't leave like that again... you scared me very much :( i'm crying now because of this story, because of how beautiful it is--because i know i'm a stupid pink pony and you're as big of a mountain as you want to be. i love you, you stupid mountain. please be my friend. otherwise you won't be allowed to make me cry anymore.

[CrispySparrow]

yes.