The Needle

by Rambling Writer

2 - Following the Thread

Before Daring knew it, four days had passed and the would-be adventurers were sitting in the bar one last time, surrounding a map. They were all packed for twenty days’ travel and camping, all bundled up in thick winter clothes, all with their own accoutrements for their own roles on the trip. They’d all showed up right on time. Daring had a good feeling about this.

She was already glad she’d hired Windrose. Reading a map was a skill all of them had, but Windrose was picking up on little ins and outs that even Daring had missed. Windrose was laying out their current route to Needle Vale with an almost lazy ease.

“Honestly, we barely even need to do anything for the first few hours,” she said. “Just follow this road-” She traced a dotted line away from Light’s Edge. “-and it’ll take us to a few miles south of the Eye.”

Fallende snorted. “Why would they name the route to Needle Vale ‘the Eye’?” she half-mumbled. “Too easy. Buncha predictable wusses.”

“Then you might not want to go to the Crystal Empire anytime soon,” Stalwart said. “They name their things after crystals and gemstones like you wouldn’t believe. Assuming they don’t just take a perfectly ordinary, everyday thing and slap ‘crystal’ in front of it. Crystal ponies, Crystal Palace, Crystal Heart, Crystal Fair, Crystal Princess… And Cadance isn’t even a crystal pony! Why is that, anyway? Seems tribalist to me. You’d really think the crystal ponies ought to have one of their own for a princess, and instead they get-”

“What about this path, here?” asked Rangifera, interrupting Stalwart’s rambling. She tapped another line that took a considerably more direct route from Light’s Edge to the pass. “It’s a lot shorter.”

“It’s shorter, but it’s not faster,” said Windrose. “Look.” She traced the line across the map slowly. “It crosses contour lines like crazy. We’d have to scale five or six cliffs. It’s really just an old road that was built by some reindeer warlord in the past and now used by adrenaline junkie mountaineers. It’s not even paved. Trust me, there’s nothing out there.”

“Right.” Rangifera glanced at Daring and shrugged.

“And once we get to Needle Vale… Well.” Windrose’s eyes flicked the vaguely-defined space northeast of Light’s Edge. The detail on the map dropped off, leaving a space so sketchy Daring thought it should probably just be replaced with a text box saying Terra Incognita. “We’ll see.”

Daring leaned forward and examined Windrose’s path more closely. It looked easy enough: a straight-ish, level-ish “road” that swung by the Eye on its way to another town, forced there by cliffs. At least her expedition would start with minimal fuss. “Alright, last chance. Any objections? No? Then let’s get going.”

---

Setting off always sounded far more epic than it looked. Purple up the prose all you want, describe the scenery and implications all you want, go into great detail about each party member all you want, it really just boiled down to a group of people walking out of a town.

And so, with the teeth of the mountains on their left, they walked out: Windrose in the lead, easily carrying a good chunk of the team’s bags, a folded map stuffed down the neck of her fur coat. Daring not far behind her, a few extra-personal bags slung over her withers. Stalwart Shield, walking with an easy pace but eyes constantly flitting about, ready for danger. Fallende, hauling her own climbing gear and other similar equipment. And Rangifera brought up the back, a spear bumping at her side and a few sparks dancing along her antlers.

The slopes weren’t too bad around Light’s Edge and the road gently meandered across them. It needed some maintenance; thin, scraggly grass was poking up through the cracks between the cobblestone, and every now and then, Daring felt a stone shift beneath her hoof. But it was clean, and the heating enchantments to melt the snow on it were still strong enough that Daring could feel them through her furs if she concentrated. There was hardly any traffic, which suited Daring and the others just fine, thank you. Even the weather seemed still, so Daring thanked the fates for an easy start.

Everybody walked along in mostly silence — the “we don’t have anything to talk about, so why bother?” kind that didn’t need to be filled. Every now and then, Windrose would announce that they’d gone so-and-so miles and only had this-and-that many to go. Nobody objected, so Daring let her keep it up.

They were about halfway to the Eye when Windrose slowed her pace enough for Daring to catch up. Windrose cleared her throat. “Okay, um, Daring- Is, is it okay if I call you ‘Daring’?” Daring nodded, and Windrose continued, “Well, it’s, I’m not really in any position to be… making criticisms like this, but…” She swallowed. “Just what do you think you’ll find?”

“Dunno. Isn’t it exciting?” Daring grinned. “There aren’t many things that are this unknown anymore. Whenever we find whatever it is that’s in the Needle, we’ll be the first people ever to see it.”

“Soooooo…” Windrose hitched some bags further up her back. “We don’t even have a plan beyond ‘go in there and blunder about’.”

“Plans fall apart too easily. This is more flexible.”

“I-” Windrose rubbed her head with a hoof. “Look. Needle Vale is something nobody really gets, yeah? And nobody has learned anything about it. Even though they’ve tried. But you- You’re going to… walk in and bumble about until you find something.”

She sounded quiet, like she was trying to avoid giving offense. Daring wasn’t offended in the slightest. “‘Bumbling about until you find something’ is the real name for what’s euphemistically called ‘research’,” said Daring. “Just think about Velcro. It wasn’t invented by some gal going, ‘I’m going to invent Velcro!’ It was invented by some gal going, ‘So why do burrs stick to my coat like this?’. No, I don’t think we’ll walk in there, dig around, and quickly find some magical artifact or whatever that’s the cause for the storms. But we have to start somewhere.”

“Well…” Windrose wiggled her ears. “Okay, but… I just- think-”

“Lemme ask you something. Do you think something’s up with Needle Vale?”

“Yes, but-”

“No ‘buts’,” said Daring, putting as much snap into her voice as she could without actually snapping the word. “Yes or no?”

Windrose grimaced a little. “…Yes.”

“So do I. Do you have any idea what that something is?”

“No, bu- No.”

“Neither do I. The only difference is that I’m trying to do something about it. I’ll get a better idea of the next step once we’re inside Needle Vale.”

After a moment, Windrose nodded. “Okay.” But her voice didn’t sound all that convinced. She fell back a little more. Privately, Daring hoped that whatever concerns Windrose might have, she’d keep them to herself. The last thing they needed was a Negative Ninny bringing everyone down, and if Windrose’s varied skills were even average, she’d be almost indispensable.

The hoofbeats of someone picking up their pace sounded. Daring heard voices behind her and swiveled her ears to catch them. “Listen, my concerned comrade,” said Rangifera, “don’t argue with Daring. It’s not a good idea.”

“Yeah, yeah, I know, don’t argue with the boss. But I don’t think-”

“I don’t mean in the ‘she hired you and can fire you’ sense, I mean in the ‘her concern isn’t yours’ sense. Why do you care whether she wins or loses? You get paid either way. Heck, you already got paid. Stop sweating.”

“I don’t think she wants you talking like that-”

“Talk however you want!” Daring hollered over her shoulder. “I’m a realist! I know most of you guys are just working with me for the money!”

“Excuse me, I’m not,” said Stalwart, trotting up to Daring’s side. “I actually do want to see what’s inside Needle Vale, actually. It’s just, a, um… a thing, you know? One of the great, ineffable mysteries of the world. And we are about to eff it so hard, it won’t know what hit it! …Why are you all looking at me li-” The pin dropped. Stalwart somehow managed to turn even redder and tugged her hood down as everybody else failed to hold in their snickers.

Once Daring had her voice under control again, she said to Windrose, “Okay, so she’s not. But I don’t care if you don’t care, so long as you do your job.” She took a few more steps, then asked, “Speaking of your job, how accurate of a map can you make during camp?”

“Ehm… Reasonably accurate, if the weather’s good. It can’t be super precise, not without more specialized tools and more time, even I’m not that good. But if you’re just looking for a ‘general idea’ sort of map, I can manage that.”

“A ‘general idea’ map was just what I was thinking of. We’ll be in the middle of a snowstorm, so I couldn’t really ask for anything more.”

“You’d think at least one of the groups that went into the Needle would’ve made a map,” mused Rangifera.

“Wanna know a secret?” Windrose said. “Mapmaking is kind of a crappy job if you don’t love it, especially this far north.” She chuckled. “You’re out in the wilderness a lot, but you barely get to appreciate its beauty because you’re too busy finding out how far this mountain peak is from that one. You need to lug around a lot of equipment all the time. And it doesn’t even pay all that much. Why do you think I need the money? No, I’m not surprised nobody else made maps.”

“So why do you do it?”

Windrose’s voice turned dreamy. “Because on the good days, it’s amazing. You do get to appreciate the beauty of the wilderness once you’re done mapping it. You get to go places nobody’s gone before. You get to know the land like the back of your hoof. Really-” She waved a hoof at Rangifera. “If you blindfolded me, I practically could cross Equestria by memory. I’ve been dang near everywhere.”

“Wow. Nice.” And, contrary to her expectations, Daring didn’t hear any sarcasm in Rangifera’s voice. “You didn’t work yourself out of a job or something, did you, my far-roaming frontiersmare? Chart everything that could be charted?”

“I wish,” Windrose said with a snort. “No, it’s… a long, complicated, and boring story involving freelancing, family problems, and the stock market. My life’s not really that interesting.”

“Until we get to the Needle, we’ve got time,” Daring said encouragingly. “We could use-”

“No, trust me, it’s boring. Unless fiscal analysis is your idea of a good time.”

Daring assumed gauging the value of the latest artifact she’d recovered didn’t qualify as “fiscal analysis”, so she said, “Not really, no.”

The group walked in silence for several moments.

“You’re awful quiet back there, Fallende,” Stalwart yelled. “I don’t think you’ve said a word yet on this trip.”

Fallende shrugged. “I’m not a talky person.”

“Fair enough. I never really had that problem, you know. I like to talk. Sometimes it seems like words just… They’re leaping straight out of my mouth and I can’t control them or which direction they’re going. I was never really cut out for guard duty back when I was in the Guard, I’d always try to make conversation with passers-by and tourists, which is a bit of a no-no. This one time, it was at a Grand Galloping Gala, oh, eleven years back, I think it was, and…”

---

The miles slowly rolled by. The sun’s rise slowed. The slopes slowly got steeper, the trees more gnarled. The wind that whipped down from the peaks wormed its way into Daring’s clothes, through her coat, to scrabble at her skin. Whatever good atmosphere that had hung around from Light’s Edge had long since dissipated in the sharp chill. Daring realized she was tugging her wings close to herself.

Not far ahead, the increasingly-grassy road jinked to the left, then curved long and slow to the right. Daring looked up the mountains to her left. Somewhere, beyond those peaks, was a mystery that needed to be solved. And they just needed to find the way-

She sensed it more than saw it, a skill born of countless years of pathfinding. A path through the forest, visible only as a strip where trees refused to grow, three or four ponies wide. It shot off northerly, perpendicular to the main road, and climbed the mountain slopes. Daring slowed her pace and pointed. “There,” she said to her followers. “Do you see it?”

“Yep,” said Rangifera, coming to a halt next to Daring. “Think that’s our way into Needle Vale?”

“Probably. Windrose? Could you check the map?”

“Sure. Give me just a sec…” Windrose pulled the map from her furs and rubbed her chin as she looked at it. “Boom…” She tapped a point on the map. “…boom…” She pointed at a mountain peak to the southeast. “Boom, boom…” She repeated the process with another peak, this time due south. “Boom boom!” Grinning, she pointed at the faint, faint glow that marked the Crystal Empire far to the southwest. “Perfect. Needle Vale is due north, everybody! Follow that path.”

Daring almost flew — literally — down it, but she couldn’t leave the others behind. She almost sprinted down it, but the snow was too deep for that. Rangifera and Fallende took point, their antlers shimmering as they wove a spell to melt the worst of the snow.

“A literal path to the unknown, eh?” chuckled Stalwart. “Things couldn’t be much easier for us, right? Although I suppose they’ll get much much much harder once we’re in that snowstorm. Maybe it’s supposed to balance out somehow. Personally, I’d prefer to have the harder parts be first, so…”

Daring tuned Stalwart out and glanced at Windrose. To her surprise, Windrose was looking over her shoulder, staring thoughtfully at their footprints as she walked. She turned to Daring and whispered, “So… if few ponies — people — go to Needle Vale… who or what made this path? This… isn’t natural.” She traced the path up and down, a mostly straight line, and kept frowning.

The first thing that came to Daring’s mind was that it didn’t matter. But it only took a little bit of thought for her to realize that, yes, it did matter, it mattered a lot. Because if she was going to uncover whatever general weirdness was going on in Needle Vale, she needed to know the specific weirdnesses and how they fit together. “I’m not sure,” she admitted. “Let’s ask the mages.” Her own experience with magic, barring the usual pegasus stuff, generally boiled down to how long artifacts could retain their magic and befuddlement at how many powerful enchantments had been lost since those artifacts had been made. She nudged Stalwart, jolting her out of her automatic-speech fugue. “Stalwart. You know magic, right? Know of any natural magic that could’ve made something like this?”

“Well, ahm…” Stalwart looked up and down the path. “Ley lines would be the obvious culprit,” she said. “But they’re usually more obvious. They cause landmarks like the Crystal Mountains, and, ah…” She swept a hoof around them at the towering cliffs. “And even then, they cause plants to grow, not die.” She lowered her head, so far that the tip of her horn was beneath the surface of the snow, and cast a few spells. “I can’t feel any magic that’ll cause us to drop dead mid-stride, if that’s what you’re wondering. Well, I don’t think I can. Earth magic’s always been probably my weakest point. I wonder if it’s because I’m a unicorn, but…”

Daring and Windrose exchanged glances as Stalwart kept talking. Daring shrugged, but Windrose’s frown deepened. “Rangifera! Fallende!” she yelled. Rangifera looked back, her antlers still glowing, but Fallende just made a vague affirmative grunt. “Either of you know a thing about magic creating paths like this?”

Rangifera tilted her head for a moment, then said, “Nope. Sorry.” Fallende, however, suddenly had her head up, and a few miniscule stars flew into the forest as her concentration faltered. She bit her lip, then said, “Stalwart. Can you take over for me for a second?”

Stalwart picked up her pace until she was between the two reindeer. “More than a second!” she said. Her horn started glowing and the snow in front of her started melting, just like Rangifera’s and Fallende’s. “I can do it as long as you like! We really should switch off, you know. It’ll keep us from tiring ourselves-”

“Yeah, yeah, shaddap,” Fallende mumbled as she dropped back. Once Daring and Windrose had caught up with her, she said, “I don’t know anything for certain, but there’s some legendary mumbo-jumbo about this. Old legends. The kind parents tell to naughty fawns to get them to go to bed.”

Daring folded her ears back, although she kept her voice level. “And you didn’t think to tell us this because…?”

“Because it has nothing to do with Needle Vale or weird weather, you idiot,” said Fallende flatly. “It’s about things like strange patterns in the forests, animals behaving weirdly, that sort of thing. If you hadn’t brought this path up-” She stopped, sucked in a breath through her nose, and started again. “There are… stories,” she said, “old stories, of a town of reindeer dedicated to studying magic, hundreds of years ago. They dove into the magic too deeply and it overtook and… twisted them. They became these… immortal things-”

“Like alicorns?” asked Windrose.

“Don’t interrupt me,” snapped Fallende. Windrose twitched and fell back a little. After a glare, Fallende continued, “But no. From what I’ve heard, your pretty pony princesses are… Their bodies are different but their minds are the same. With these deer, it was the other way around. Their bodies were the same, but their minds… It was like they… shattered or something. They just stopped caring about… about anything besides themselves. They were flighty, capricious, and just… off, you know? They became known as the Alver.”

Daring nodded, cataloging the information away for later. While she was eager to hear what the heck this had to do with the path, any little shred of mythology could help them unravel the story of Needle Vale.

“Now, since they were… almost-sociopathic scumbags, they were very self-centered. There’s a story-” Fallende stopped and frowned to herself. “Long story short, their queen had an entire forest burnt down because walking around it was too much work. And, somehow, that rippled through the magic of the earth that now, big plants just refuse to grow where the Alver like to walk, for fear of obstructing them and getting destroyed in retaliation. It’s why you can find weirdly clean natural paths in forests and where clearings come from: the Alver gather in those places, so plants stay out of their way. And it leads to things like…” Fallende gestured up and down the path. “…this. In those stories, the Alver walk here, and they walk here often.”

“Oh.” Windrose looked behind her and shrank an inch, licking her lips.

“Hmm.” Daring wasn’t sure what to make of the story. Simply discounting it out of hoof was the pinnacle of stupidity — she’d done that regarding the legend of Nightmare Moon, and, well — but something about it simply didn’t click. Like it’d been transplanted from elsewhere. Reindeer just weren’t as magically-inclined as unicorns (as far as she knew), and the idea of a group banding together and going nuts from magic simply didn’t gel with her, not the way most other facts-turned-to-legends she’d run into in the past had. Not the way the idea that something was in Needle Vale did. Still, that hardly meant it was impossible. She decided she’d grill Fallende on them some more the next time they came across something out-of-place, like this path.

“Personally, I don’t believe it,” said Fallende quickly. “It’s full of holes and just- unlikely, you know? I’d say this path was made by people going up and down to see Needle Vale, naturally beating it down over and over and over. Obviously.”

“Awful lot of people to come out this way for nothing,” muttered Windrose.

They lapsed into an uncomfortable silence, thankfully broken up in a few minutes when they reached the bottom of a low cliff, maybe forty feet tall. Some not-too-difficult hauling pulled them and their gear up to the top, where they collectively agreed to have lunch. Cutting into the mountains was a narrow cleft, maybe seven feet wide and winding enough to be all but invisible from the road.

“That looked a lot wider on the map,” said Windrose through a mouthful of cheese. “Like, two or three times as wide. But I guess if no one comes here, why map it?” She shrugged.

“We’re lucky there’s a pass at all!” said Stalwart. “Can you imagine coming all this way only to have to climb over all the mountains ourselves?” She laughed. “That’d put a bit of a damper on the whole expedition, at least for me. It’ll be hard enough once we actually get inside and have to deal with the storms, so to have to climb big stinking mountains like these before we even get there? Can you imagine? That’d be so-”

Rangifera leaned close to Daring and whispered, “I forgot to ask, my likeable leader — we’re staying tonight in the Needle, right? Back in Light’s Edge, Windrose said it’ll only take an hour at most to get through there-” She nodded at the “pass”. “-assuming it’s clear, and I don’t want to spend hours sitting on a ledge above the Needle waiting for nightfall.”

“I was planning on going as far in as we could manage while it’s still light,” said Daring. She squinted slightly at Rangifera. “That’s not a problem, is it?”

“Oh, noooooo,” Rangifera said with a chuckle. “Just thinking ahead. I didn’t come on this trip because it was easy, no ma’am.”

---

When they’d eaten, they set off down the cleft, with Windrose taking the lead. It was wide enough that they didn’t have to, but they wound up going single file. The winding nature of the canyon amplified sounds again and again. The few times the group spoke, they had to keep their voices at almost a whisper to avoid deafening themselves. Channeled by the stone, winds whipped through the gap in both directions and lashed at their clothes.

Daring looked up. The walls on either side of them were sheer, almost flat, and the wind whipping through it meant even a pegasus would have trouble climbing them safely. The cleft was so deep that the walls seemed to lean inward and compress the sky into a twisting scar. Barely any snow fell into the gap, but that didn’t stop it from being very, very cold. Colder than the road, certainly. Like they were walking down the gullet of a frost dragon.

The dragon breathed again, harder than before, and Daring slammed a hoof to the top of her hood to keep it from being blown down. Suddenly, she stopped, her ears straight up. She swivelled them to the left, to the right- “Does anyone else hear that?” she asked.

The others stopped and listened. A quiet, high-pitched wailing rolled through the cleft, getting straight to their bones. “Wind’s picking up,” Fallende said quickly. “Not long now.”

“I’d give us ten minutes at the most,” whispered Windrose. “Let’s, let’s keep walking.”

One minute later, the amount of snow that made it down began to increase. Three minutes later, it was an inch deep and the wind was battering at their eyes. Five minutes later, Daring had passed around goggles for protection and everyone had their mouths covered with scarves or balaclavas. Seven minutes later, the cleft began widening. Seven minutes and five seconds later, the full brunt of the weather hit them like a sledgehammer. Clamping her wings tightly to her sides and shielding her face with a leg, Daring pushed her way through the cleft and the intense winds. Maybe, once she got out of the funnel-

After one of the longer minutes in her life, the winds slackened, even if that was only a relative term. Rather than battering her like river rapids, it felt like she was standing in a ford, being assailed but able to withstand it without too much effort. She took a breath; the cold didn’t stab at her throat quite so hard. She lowered her leg and took a look.

It was partially concealed by the haze of snow in the air, but it was undeniable. A long, thin valley lay before her, stretching out into the distance like a corridor. Its walls were steep and pointed as palisades, hemming them in and ready to skewer the unwary. The trees were sparse, barren, as effective shelter as a cocktail umbrella. Strange pillars of stone loomed out of the miasma like ghost ships in fog. It was hostile. It was unforgiving.

And it was exactly what Daring wanted.

“Ponies and gentledeer,” she said, grinning, “welcome to Needle Vale.”

Comments

[Geminii]

Loosely inspired by Annihilation.

Having read a synopsis for the movie, does this mean everybeing is going to die or be replaced by some kind of copy?

...wait. Everyone who went to the Needle returned. Or did they?

...Fallende's a copy, isn't she. Might not even know it.

[StubobNumbers]

9895203
"They're here already! You're next!" Thanks, now I am thinking of "Invasion Of The Body Snatchers".

[PresentPerfect]

One of the great, ineffable mysteries of the world. And we are about to eff it so hard, it won’t know what hit it!

This is inspired. XD

[Moosetasm]

One of the great, ineffable mysteries of the world. And we are about to eff it so hard, it won’t know what hit it!

I’m going to have to start using this masterful turn of phrase.

[FridayPie]

They became known as the Alver

IDW made deers kind of elv-ish.. and you make them Alder? (Aen Elle)

[Foxtrot-Mayflower]

“Fair enough. I never really had that problem, you know. I like to talk. Sometimes it seems like words just… They’re leaping straight out of my mouth and I can’t control them or which direction they’re going. I was never really cut out for guard duty back when I was in the Guard, I’d always try to make conversation with passers-by and tourists, which is a bit of a no-no. This one time, it was at a Grand Galloping Gala, oh, eleven years back, I think it was, and…”

SHE’S LITERALLY ME. Except the gender, since I’m a male. But otherwise NO DISTINCTION!