The Olden World

by Czar_Yoshi

With History And Silence

Only a week into the Immortal Dream's flight west, the scenery changed.

The ocean had been endless, a two-week crossing above the mountains, but the Equestrian side fell away early, a long, pocketless desert shore that was free of coves and bays appearing on the horizon and running southwest to northeast. The ship hovered lower to observe it as they passed, noting another set of train tracks running along the water. Gerardo surmised that this must have been a further-west portion of the tracks near Griffonstone, and a long discussion ensued about whether there was a land bridge against the Equestrian sea all the way across the south side of the Aldenfold. The north side of the mountains, everyone remembered, had been nothing but sheer cliffs all the way along.

It was a sandless desert, the ground made of cracked, parched clay and errant boulders instead of drifting dunes. The clay was so flat, it took a full day of flying for them to lose sight of the shore, and a dim gray line to the far, far north warned that the Aldenfold wasn't so far away after all. Sometimes, Valey, Harshwater or Gerardo would fly alongside the ship, dipping down to the surface and investigating the ground, but it was the same every time: ancient, withered stumps, obtuse boulders and endless fields of clay. But every once in a while, they found a line of ground too straight to be a natural formation, slightly more stony than the area around it, and hypotheses were floated that they once were roads.

The more they flew, the more they saw that indicated the area could have been populated before a thousand years of erosion and weather. Storm surge gullies appeared, and they widened into a fragmentation of the strata of the land, producing colorful sloped cliffs where red and orange rocks mixed with the gray. Some of those cliffs held more tangible ruins in their lees, buildings that had once been dug into the sedimentary layers and now existed as heaps of lonely tunnel supports, made from sturdier rock and left behind as their tunnels were weathered away.

Another time, they passed a dried riverbed, the shadow of a dock laying on one side. By now, the land had lost its flatness, and Gerardo pointed out how the hills were steeper to the south: this river had once flowed north, towards the Aldenfold. Its flow predated the mountains themselves.

From the deck of the Dream, Slipstream and Nyala discussed the world's geography, the pegasus lecturing on how much further west the sea extended to the north. Once upon a time, there might have been a coastline north of here instead, fueling trade and an economy... Would this have been Equestria's point of contact with the Empire? Both institutions long predated the Aldenfold. Shinespark's knowledge of world history only traced back about eight hundred years, and Gerardo's drifted into legend around a thousand. Maybe the mountains had cut off that access. Maybe they had changed the weather, and were the reason the area was a desert. Whatever the reason, looking so far into the past left the ship's crew feeling smaller than the cracks in the clay, even though they knew the cracks only looked small because of the distance.

The desert lasted for four and a half days of flying, and Gerardo was loathe to admit they were on a schedule and not stop to investigate the area more. At least half the crew wanted to see how it intersected with the mountains, but in the end they pressed on, reaching a tiny strip of green separating the desert from another sea.

It was during this crossing that their course finally drew too far to the north, and the Aldenfold proper came close enough to observe. They spent a day skimming the shoreline between it and the inland sea, wondering if the desert they had passed had once been an island or a peninsula. If they flew far enough south, would they find it connecting to whatever mainland was west of this second sea? Or was it completely isolated, only accessible over land by someone who was dogged enough to cross this new shoreline?

Gerardo speculated the latter, due to the train tracks. No one would build tracks along this shore: the mountains sloped straight into the sea, not a perfect cliff like the northern side, but an angled drop, as if they were sculpted first and then the basin filled up against them. Finally, Shinespark skimmed low enough to confirm with her altimeter that this water level was higher than the ocean around Kinmari: it was a proper inland sea.

That led to even more speculation about what the world used to look like, especially after Shinespark decided they were far enough west that they would have been overland north of the mountains. Indeed, about a day after she started commenting, the mountains grew a proper shoreline rather than jaggedly meeting the water, thick forests and groves of pine trees separating sandy beaches from the Aldenfold's forbidding slopes. This belt of land was lush and green, and so were the mountains, receiving all the rain that the desert wasn't getting. Once upon a time, if this had been the southern shore of the northern continent that was now mostly wasteland and then Varsidel, would all this rain have blown north, making those wastes more habitable?

Maple told stories to pass the time about the lands around Riverfall, and Amber joined in. None of them really knew what the wastes were like beyond a mile or so, but Gerardo backed them up with ease: the lands north of the Aldenfold and east of Riverfall were a shattered landscape, in some places lush and in others sparse, like someone had taken a cosmic trowel to the bedrock and sliced and tossed it a bit before fusing it in place however it landed. Maybe the creation of the Aldenfold had involved an earthquake, and the land had never properly healed... though according to the griffon, untamed wilderness wasn't something that needed healing at all.

They spotted smoke one dawn, a village more remote than even Riverfall. Amber was on watch, and she fetched Maple and Valey and the others, and Gerardo lowered the ship so they could have a better look. It was a wooded hamlet, with log cabins and dirt roads, and they passed close enough to see big-faced stallions and mares with feathers in their manes staring up at the Dream like it was an incarnate god. Nyala noted that if an archaeologist ever explored that village in the distant future, after it was only a ruin too, perhaps they'd find carvings of the ship and be left scratching their heads about just what the ponies saw.

Shinespark adjusted their course slightly to the south, keeping pace with the shoreline instead of the Aldenfold wall. She counted days on a ledger, computed carefully their speeds using Valey's restored terminal, and tried to produce miles from there, tracking their progress and measuring when they would need to hop back across the Aldenfold to come out near Ironridge.

Why not jump across earlier, Gerardo asked, why wait until Ironridge?

The answer Maple gave was simple: it would be a daylong detour at worst, and she wanted to see Starlight's old village.

A lot of discussion happened around the topic. Everyone knew it wasn't actually a one-day detour, since no one cared what they did north of the border and their main reason for haste was to get out of Equestria before anything could grow more complicated. Had they cared only about speed of returning to the north, they could have gone straight north from Kinmari and crossed into the ocean west of the Empire. But it involved Starlight, and everyone knew Starlight was the one who got the short end of the stick dealing with Chrysalis and Gazelle, and nobody wanted to be the one to make an argument against a plan that might be for Starlight's sake. But that left the decision of whether or not she wanted it on her, and that was a decision Starlight wasn't thrilled to be making. So she passed it off to Maple, and Maple said they should go.

Besides, they had a spare Writ of Harmonic Sanction in case they ran into border guards who didn't want Starlight crossing, and they had a sealed letter from Celestia explaining the situation, and they were still going to reach Ironridge before Celestia reached Canterlot, which was when she advised them to be clear of Equestria by. And with how busy Shinespark could be in Ironridge, and how Valey and Gerardo were planning to go off writ-hunting in Varsidel, and how Starlight might not be the happiest, being already known in any of their northern destinations, everyone knew the real unspoken plan: find out if Maple should take the writ and stay behind with Starlight in Equestria, and live off the map until Valey or Celestia or someone came through and they all got back together again. And to do that, they had to visit the town.

Because once they crossed the border, there would be no going back.

After the third week of travel, Starlight started describing the area around her old home so it would be easier for the navigators to find. They were still following the pine forest that stretched between the inland sea and the Aldenfold, the waters sometimes endless to their left, and other times with the shadow of land distantly visible, or even close. At one point, the waters grew narrow enough that two towers had been erected on the banks with villages on either side, lit fires at the top that were blocked and unblocked to send signals.

The trees were about right here, Starlight said, particularly on the southern side of the water. She knew there were mountains north of her home, where she had crossed, and also to the west, so this long, narrow sea couldn't continue past there. There were more villages to the south, and she wasn't very aware what was to the east, but one day the northern land strip ended and the Aldenfold went back to its regular, jagged seashore, and only a day after that Amber became convinced she saw the shadows of mountains in the distance to the west.

They were close. Starlight was almost back where she began.

The air was chilly and the mountains tall, their bases forested and their midsections rocky before snow started in the distance above. Starlight took to sitting on the roof of the bridge, watching the lands that were approaching and remembering the first third of her journey, before the mountains in the north and before even the caves through which she bypassed the peaks. It had been a warmer season when she left. She remembered the scent of frost stinging her nostrils on the coldest days of the year, and had stuck to valleys and the eastern faces of mountains all throughout the climb, wind constantly blowing in from the west.

It was a big part of why her village was warm enough all year round: cold winds rushed down this sea corridor, likely coming off the mountains to the west. But her village was properly in those mountains' lee, and she had made sure to keep that cover whenever she had a choice in which way she went. Looking down at the waters, they were choppy, the wind funneled into them by the steep slopes to the side. But if she had to guess, the cold season had come and gone while she'd been away in the north. Aside from more runoff and meltwater, the conditions in the mountains were probably about the same as when she had first departed.

For all the mountains cared, she had never been gone. She wondered if her village would feel the same...

The western wall drew closer, shorter and yet more sheer than the Aldenfold. Shinespark slowed the ship so that they would arrive at dawn, the eastern light shining down the narrow sea corridor and illuminating their endpoint with rosy pinks and golds. Here was where the sea finished, the southern shore close enough to see for a day or two and finally rising up to meet the mountains as well, two rivers feeding into it from the Aldenfold and the southwest. A dock was constructed at the bottom of the mountain wall, with stairs snaking up the Aldenfold's easier climb before departing in a trail to the west. Beyond a single, low-laying ridge, wisps of hearth smoke drifting up from a valley before the mountains resumed.

Tomorrow evening, Starlight might be back in Riverfall, or even Ironridge. But today, she had one place to revisit first. Sunburst wouldn't be here. Her old adoptive parents might be. One way or another, maybe she would find closure on what had started this all.

Comments

[Oberth Effect]

Starlight Glimmer flies west.

It's times like this that I wish I had the time and imagination to make a map.

Curious whether the remnants of civilization they saw in the desert was the same they saw in the Flame of Honesty's crystal palace. Probably no real way to tell, though.

[Phoenix Kitten]

Find them back where you began...

4.

[KMCA]

10062861
What are you counting?

[Boopers]

10062899
It's the final count.... up?

[Phoenix Kitten]

10062899
How many chapters until Gazelle happens.
Since we're going to Starlight's hometown... it shan't be long now I reckon.

[ZanyZapper]

10062857
Ikr? I'd love to see map. I can't quite visualize just how massive this world is. Either that or the Dream is really slow. The Hindenburg could cross the Atlantic in 2 to 3 days, and the Graf Zeppelin circumnavigated the earth in just over 12.

[Oberth Effect]

10062935
Did someone do something similar in the one of the Austraeoh books? It sounds vaguely familiar.

10063189

I think I’ll choose to believe that the world is unfathomably large. Makes for some more interesting possibilities

[Pluie]

10063240
I think there were quite a few instances of commentors counting "chapters since X" in Austraeoh.

[Venlinelle]

10063240
Well, Celestia did say the world stretched for “hundreds of thousands of miles,” which, if true, would make it many times larger than ours. Not to mention flat.
I’m not sure if she meant that literally, though, or, if she meant it literally, where the majority of that space is.

[sploopy slooder]

Starlights only been gone for like half a year-1 year tops, right? will she see her old adoptive parents? im sure that wont be awkward or heartbreakingly sad.