Science
Why does the wind blow?
Scientists are well-equipped to answer this. We can tell you about the collision of rising hot air and falling cool air, and then about density and gravity, and then about thermal expansion and the bouncing of gaseous molecules. For every phenomenon that occurs, we understand it by understanding the phenomena that combine to produce it, exploring back along a never-ending chain of cause and effect. We understand the mechanism by which the wind blows, and the mechanisms that cause those mechanisms, and the mechanisms that are caused by the wind as well.
But that doesn't feel good enough.
Are we only ever to know the world in terms of one thing causing another? Even once we can perfectly describe every natural law in existence, we still will be powerless to explain why we were given these natural laws in the first place. If the gravitational constant was different, yet all other laws of the universe were adjusted accordingly so that the math remained seamless, science would have nothing to say on the matter. All science amounts to is a tool, founded upon the assumption that the world is cohesive and consistent, to explain parts of the world using other parts as a basis.
And a powerful tool it is. But my questions - questions like why is the sky beautiful, or why were we given this world instead of one of the infinite other potentially consistent worlds that only a god or an artist could imagine - belong to a different domain.
I want to know the meaning of all this. Not just how it works, but why.
I put down my quill and frowned. It was no use. Even trying to distill my thoughts into writing couldn't get the euphoria I had felt during the day's flight out of my head. The Verdandi was grounded, out of power and after sundown in the Aldenfold's southern foothills, and collectively we had decided to get some rest before deciding what to do about it in the morning. But spending a week in a cave being maybe-dead hadn't done great things for my sleep schedule, and any hope I had of defying that was completely shot by the memories of the Aldenfold buzzing around in my head.
Soaring through those mountains, macrocosms and microcosms of environments all mish-mashed together in an unending slope... I felt like I had been touched by something primal. There was no way to articulate it without feeling impossibly silly and presumptuous, and such feelings were responsible for a mountain of discarded drafts next to my borrowed desk already. I mean, I didn't even know whether there was something magically special about those mountains, or if this was all in my head.
Either way, a well of restlessness pumped through my limbs. Just earlier today, I had known my purpose after a lifetime of searching: find Starlight and Fluttershy, save Coda and the pink flame, stop the war and stand up for the places I had visited so I could one day embrace them as home. I thought that this was the answer to the question that drove me out of Icereach, that spurred me to fly on and see the world, and for a few precious hours, everything had made sense. But now, it felt like I had just glimpsed the answer to a far greater question, one I didn't understand well enough to put words to.
What had I learned? What was it I wanted to know? Why had that flight felt so special? If I understood myself as much as I thought I did, then how come something could unexpectedly mean so much to me? And what did it mean, anyway?
Was I thinking in circles, understanding less the faster I went, succeeding at nothing save for confusing myself? Or was I like a marble in a funnel, orbiting faster and faster the closer I got to the center, this busy, dizzy train of thought a sign that I was so close to something I needed to find?
Think. Put your thoughts into questions, Halcyon. Do this empirically. I wanted to know... who made the world the way it was. And what they were thinking when they did it.
Taking a deep breath, I summoned my focus, crumpled the previous sheet and started again.
Corsica slumped over a desk, her horn glowing for light, her chin resting heavily on a hoof and her eyes as close as they could functionally get to the paper.
It was night out, and she was supposed to be sleeping, but she felt a rare desire to do something, and the past day's flight across the Aldenfold stuck out in her mind as an event in severe need of questioning. Arrayed before her were a series of sketches: she didn't like drawing ponies, but was great with depth and perspective, and had a pretty good visual memory, so capturing and reproducing the terrain of the Aldenfold had been her first task.
The mixed environments themselves were one dilemma. It was heavily documented that this mountain range was steeped in magic, starting with the strange storms that gained in intensity as they fell down the cliff face. What would one of those storms be like to experience up in the mountains? Plenty of the sights she had seen showed little sign of being blasted by blizzards: none of the trees showed branch distribution bias that could have indicated extreme winds in a prevailing direction, and the presence of sand should have been unthinkable. But it was hard to focus on what kind of magic could have caused that when her attention kept being stolen by the sight she had seen from the peaks.
Corsica's drawing, as faithful as her memory would allow, showed a distant, gradually curved horizon, and stars shining through a black-tinged sky. The horizon was the first thing that struck her as odd: it didn't look infinite, and wasn't as high in her field of view as it should have been.
Conventional wisdom held that the world was flat, but finite. Material about the edge of the world was hard to find in Icereach, but she read up a bit on it in Ironridge: in the north, the edge curved out from the Aldenfold in a semicircle. She suspected the world as a whole was circular, and the Aldenfold just cut off roughly two thirds of it that the north was unaware of - it was almost obvious enough that she was surprised the existence of the south was treated like a secret.
The conditions of the edge itself were harder to get hard data on: rumors of magical storms, desertification, infertility of all life, and great cracks and canyons were all documented in various places, but she hadn't had luck finding firsthoof accounts beyond those of solo adventurers. Nothing from professional surveying teams, and nothing from anyone who claimed to have been to the very precipice. But, either way, it existed.
That meant there were two possibilities for the distant rim she had seen from the peak of the Aldenfold: either it was the edge, or some other rise tall enough that she couldn't see past it, like another Aldenfold that divided the world into three, rather than two. Either way, if she could see it from the Aldenfold, then anyone could see the Aldenfold from there.
In the north, her perception of the Aldenfold had always been based on its initial cliff face, which was just a fraction of the real thing. Since she had spent her entire life in the shadow of the cliff face, it was conceivable that she simply couldn't see the full mountain range past that cliff face, and thus never realized how tall it was. But was the Aldenfold really visible from anywhere in the north, all the way to the edge of the world?
If that was the case, she expected she would have at least seen mention of it in an account somewhere. Maybe it was the kind of thing everyone took for granted and nobody talked about, but it still felt like an odd omission. Maybe it was possible that the surface elevation of the north was much higher than in the south, and thus the Aldenfold didn't appear as tall there?
Maybe.
All this was ignoring the matter of the daytime stars. In order to see that, they must have been nearing the edge of the atmosphere. Would even that much height serve to make the Aldenfold distinguishable from so many thousands of miles away, though? Several triangles occupied another sheet of paper, calculations accompanying them and determining that a few dozen miles wouldn't nearly be sufficient to view the edge of the world from the angle she had drawn. Even at several hundred miles tall, that would be pushing her suspension of disbelief, and there was no way the Aldenfold was several hundred miles tall. And even if it had been, how would everyone have managed to breathe?
...However they managed it, they did so at a height that was high enough to see the stars. Corsica got up, pushed in her chair, took a last look at her work, and left her room, deciding that the ship's airtightness deserved an inspection.
Working hypothesis: the view from the top of the Aldenfold was an illusion.
Corsica stood in the frame of the ship's main entrance, studying it as the door hung open. While it did look designed to be airtight, there was a big difference between keep-the-heat-in airtight and spaceship-grade airtight. This door was sturdy, but not nearly sturdy enough to nullify all risk of blowing outward in a zero-pressure environment.
What was more, across from her was the ship's panoramic window on its starboard flank. Corsica wasn't an expert in the field of pressure-resistant windows, but her gut told her one this big and flat would be the ship's first failure point for sure.
She had no easy explanation for what could have caused the alternative, but it was clear that this craft hadn't actually just been to the edge of outer space.
"So what are you doing here?" a voice said to her side.
Corsica turned her head. It was Papyrus.
"Isn't that my line?" She shrugged. "Just checking on the ship. Sure looked like we flew high today."
"Oh, I didn't mean out of bed," he said, taking a few steps closer and stopping at an angle to her, appearing more interested in the wall than in Corsica herself. "I meant on this journey. Writs of Harmonic Sanction aren't exactly trivial to obtain, and there are precious few ponies who would actually use one instead of selling it. I've never been able to figure out your heart's desire, and now I'm all the more curious."
Corsica didn't look at him. "Then you'll just get to stay that way. I've told you before, I'm just not that ambitious. Believe it or not."
Papyrus's eyes glinted. "Everyone has ambitions."
"And what are yours?" Corsica continued to stare out the door, unbothered.
Papyrus shrugged. "I'm just in it to learn the meaning of existence. A humble goal, really... Of course, I already had my writ, so there wasn't much opportunity cost. But then, when is there ever?"
Corsica snorted. "Liar. You couldn't get a more generic answer than that."
"Fine," Papyrus sighed, "I was in it to see the look on Butterfly's face when she saw I stowed away. Which wasn't as interesting as I'd hoped, now that I've seen it... Satisfied?"
"No," Corsica said. "But I didn't care that much anyway. Why do you keep calling her that, anyway?"
Papyrus looked wounded. "Corsica, Corsica, Corsica, you can't just expect me to spill all your best friend's secrets just because you asked nicely. I mean, who would do such a thing? Besides me?" He flicked his tail.
"Whatever." Corsica rolled her eyes. "So, what do you think of these mountains? Are they an illusion? Somehow made of magic? I'm trying to see how our ship didn't explode from atmospheric pressure differentials."
"What do I look like, a scientist?" Papyrus shrugged. "They're certainly magical, though. Want to see a cool trick?"
"Do I?" Corsica raised an eyebrow.
"Look over there." Papyrus pointed over her shoulder. "See that light?"
Corsica looked. They were at the edge of a meadow, perfectly flat and without hills, though the grass soon gave way to a forest. And in the center of the forest, something was glowing with a faint, midnight-blue light.
She nodded. "What about it?"
"The last time I was around these parts, I recall quite a similar landmark," Papyrus said. "Perhaps even the exact same one. Feeling up for a walk? If that light turns out to be coming from a meteor impact thingamajig, we'll know for certain." He gave Corsica a knowing look. "But if so, what are the odds that we could spend an entire day flying through uncharted territory and pop out within a stone's throw of the one place within a thousand miles of here yours truly has been before? Why not a mile to the west, or twenty, or a hundred? Because Ironridge isn't due north of here; we've skewed substantially to the east. And at a suspiciously perfect angle, to boot..."
Corsica squinted. "You've been here before, you say. And you haven't just been up and down this entire mountain range?"
"Can't say that I have." Papyrus looked smug. "Perhaps I'm off my rocker, but that's why I offered a way to be sure!"
"...Alright." Corsica got to her hooves, sizing up the jump to the ground. "I'll take you up on that."
The Verdandi didn't have any lights on, but the stars were bright enough in the sky that Corsica had no trouble making it out as she trudged toward the forest, Papyrus leading the way.
Her hooves felt so strange on the grass that, after a few steps, she stopped and removed her shoes. Concrete and metal, brick and cobblestone, Icereach and Ironridge had nothing that even remotely compared to what she felt now. The ground was soft and almost spongy, cushioning her steps like slippers and brushing her fetlocks with dew. She poked at it. It tickled, and was slightly pliant beneath her hooves.
Papyrus glanced back, giving her a look.
"Sue me," Corsica snapped, turning her focus back to the ground. "I've... never walked on dirt before."
Papyrus snickered.
Note to self: this was actually pleasant. She had always known what dirt was, of course, but always assumed it would be like the packed earth of the Icereach yak fort training grounds, which was basically stone with slightly better traction. Here, though, was a material that gave just a little under her hooves, yet sprung back, unlike snow. And it smelled fantastic. Why wasn't this used for floorings in Icereach? Maybe it didn't survive so well in the cold?
Acting on instinct, ignoring the fact that Papyrus was watching, Corsica crouched down, tipped over and rolled, wanting to feel it with more than just her hooves. She twisted her spine back and forth, rolling and rubbing, feeling it against her sides and back...
"Oh, you poor, deprived soul," Papyrus said, shaking his head.
Corsica glared at him, still upside-down. "Don't try me."
He shrugged and kept walking.
Corsica flipped herself upright, feeling... good. And a little wet from the dew, but it was warm enough here that wetness was pleasant rather than a bother. And maybe just a little bit silly, not that she particularly cared what anyone else thought of her rolling in the grass. On a good day, why shouldn't she savor new sensations?
...Her coat was slightly muddy now. Maybe that was a reason. Oh well. Not like there wasn't a cure for that.
They reached the edge of the forest. Corsica hadn't been in a real forest before, either, but at the very least she had looked down at the Night District from above, and this one seemed... strange.
The flora were vibrant, big and lush and in full bloom, with twisted trunks and titanic leaves forming a riot of life that spoke of little competition and infinite resources. Ironridge and its extreme tropical heat had produced a canopy that could perhaps rival this, yet the temperature here was downright pleasant, and there were no signs of industrial fertilizers or any other equine activity that Ironridge used to manage the forest for its fruit-growing empire.
Moreover, despite the sheer quantity of plants, none of them seemed to be fighting with each other. The trees weren't planted in any discernible pattern, yet there was room enough to move between them. Plants didn't compete to choke each other out, instead moving aside for each other like gentlecolts at a dignified party. Even the meadowgrass thrived on the forest floor, the canopy leaves leaving space so that just enough sunlight could reach it during the day. It was as if the laws of nature themselves had been rewritten, as if the principle of survival of the fittest no longer existed, as if the plants were imbued with the will and desire to exist in perfect harmony with each other, and had grown in accordance.
"...This isn't an illusion," Corsica muttered, putting a hoof against a winding trunk and finding it perfectly solid. "Certainly magical, but it sure is real enough."
Papyrus raised an eyebrow at her, as if that should never have been in question.
"What caused this?" Corsica asked. "Mister I've-Been-Here-Before-And-Know-Everything? Got any insight?"
Papyrus shrugged. "Perhaps a wizard did it?"
Corsica frowned. Something so anomalous had to have a better reason than that. Unfortunately, botany was just about the last subject Icereach would ever teach, so she didn't have the know-how to probe further... All she could do was keep walking.
The stars burned so brightly overhead, it felt like daytime, only if the sun's light was blue and silver instead of yellow and gold. What would this look like during the daytime? Optics and atmospheric science, she understood. Could she figure out anything about these mountains' unusual visuals by watching a few solar cycles, by setting up camp here and just hanging out for a week?
It sounded like a much more interesting way to kill time than her usual fare. Maybe she'd do that sometime.
Just as the source of the blue light was becoming visible through the trees, Corsica's hooves clinked against something hard.
She knelt down and poked it, the ambience in the air bright enough that she didn't even need her horn. It was glass, clear and smooth, covering the ground in a rippling sheet that thickened as it went forward. Was this natural? The hard layer blocked the grass and smaller shrubs, but some trees had forced their way up through it anyway, their trunks leaning in the direction she was going, even bigger and more vibrant than those at the edge of the forest, reaching and grasping to get closer to something at the center.
There was no detritus on the glass, Corsica noticed. Not a single twig or fallen leaf. Either this forest had a mechanism somehow keeping it immaculately clean, or these trees had never shed so much as a seed pod. Which possibility was more outlandish, she didn't know.
Finally, Papyrus stopped. Only one layer of trees remained, and Corsica passed him, stepping through into a clearing where the glass was too thick for even the trees to grow.
The majority of the clearing was taken up by a pit, the glass dropping down in a sheer bowl, and it was that bowl that held the source of the light. Spiraling, winding, twisting up into the air were threads of blue, dancing together into a helix, spreading out and becoming one with the night sky, which was so close and luminous Corsica felt like she could touch it from the tops of the trees. The light gradually rose and rotated, like filaments of flame rising at a hundredth of their normal speed, tracing an ever-changing pattern into the air. And it was for this pattern that the trees reached, their broad leaves seeming to strain at their stems to touch it.
Heart pounding, Corsica backed up a few paces, found the nearest tree trunk, and began to climb.
The stars were close. Just as close as they looked. She stood on a leaf, so strong that it barely bowed beneath her weight despite being connected by a stem thinner than her horn, reached up a hoof and batted at one, and it flowed around her like glitter suspended in water. Corsica sniffed, then stuck out her tongue, tasting the air.
Mixed with the scent of plants and life, it was there, a faint sweetness Corsica knew well from her time in Icereach's labs: ether. Hovering over this forest was a gaseous cloud of the same substance that flowed in a river beneath the chapel. The same thing Icereach thought it could use as rocket fuel.
Did that explain the stars she had seen at the apex of the mountains? Perhaps it did. Those could have been not the normal stars in the night sky, but either itself, a layer in the sky they had approached closely enough to see. Of course, that begged the question of how it got there, and whether it covered just the Aldenfold or the entire world. It certainly looked like the cloud in this place was being caused by the blue light in the crater, but this couldn't be the source of all the Aldenfold's ether. Unless it was? Hard to tell.
Now that Corsica thought about it... Someone in Icereach would have known or said something if the night sky itself wasn't just a blanket of ether, right? It seemed too obvious to question before, but this was proven, right? Outer space, beyond the world's atmosphere, wasn't just an empty, black void... right?
Not like she could do anything about it if it wasn't. She turned her attention down to the pit. It was bright at the bottom, but it didn't particularly look like there was anything down there... Just light. Climbing down from the tree, Corsica trotted closer.
Ether didn't hurt ponies, she knew for a fact. It was still treated as a hazardous substance because it was known to produce an intoxicating, heavily addictive effect on batponies in liquid form, but to unicorns like her, it was inert.
...She wasn't that sure about its effects in gaseous form, or whether they had been much studied. For that matter, she wasn't even aware ether had a gaseous form. Although if they had flown near or through a cloud of it at the peak of the Aldenfold, hopefully Halcyon was alright... Maybe she'd check on her later.
But investigating the light came first. Corsica didn't feel a trace of weariness in her body; the slippery sensation she felt when it was hard to get herself to do what she wanted was nowhere to be found. The rising spiral was too far for her to reach from the edge of the pit, but the slope looked gentle enough that she could probably climb her way back out again...
Swallowing her reservations, Corsica slid down the wall and into the pit.
The light blazed around her as she skidded to the bottom. Papyrus was nowhere to be seen, and even had he been here, she doubted he could serve as the voice of reason. Her fur felt like gravity had been flipped, and a wondrous, lifting sensation coated her. A few paces ahead, the glass was blue, and the light was at its brightest.
But there was nothing else there. No source for the power she felt tingling along her spine. It was just there, springing into existence, slowly and purposefully and eternally.
If there was something here, acting upon the world in an empirically measurable, quantifiable way, she couldn't see it. Certainly, she could see the effects: the forest was real enough, and so was the ground beneath her hooves. And certainly, those effects weren't just spontaneous. They had a cause, and it was right here. But how did it work? What was going on in this place, and could it be replicated? Preserved, understood, applied?
Papyrus mentioned a meteor. Corsica didn't see one, but this crater and the glass around it could certainly be an impact site. Perhaps someone had already taken the meteor itself, and all other effects here were residual?
The blue energy continued rising, rotating, leaking into existence. If it was residual, this might change her entire concept of what residual meant.
Corsica considered touching the light... but she had probably pushed her luck too far today with hooves-on science already. Of all the ponies in the world, how many others had spent years studying ether and related phenomena in a facility with ready access to the stuff? If anyone was equipped to figure this out, it was her, so she needed to take her time and do it properly. And she really, really wanted to figure it out.
...She frowned. How long had it been since she last felt a sincere, legitimate desire to do something, let alone one this strong? This couldn't be all because of resting for a week. Was this place messing with her feelings, somehow?
And if it was, was messing with really the right phrase? Her feelings had never felt her own, not since she got her special talent. This felt more like she could desire and be curious normally again, more like fixing than messing with.
Acting on impulse, Corsica reached out and stuck a hoof into the source of the spiral of blue.
A sense of nostalgia poured into her, so powerful it knocked her entirely off her hooves and sent her rolling to the wall of the crater. Of longing, and love, and sacrifice, and selfless hope for the future. Of darkness and determination, of reaching out in the face of futility, of resignation and acceptance, of uncertainty and finality, and of the will to affect change in the world. Corsica stumbled to her hooves, and for the briefest moment, it felt as if she was hurtling through the emptiness of space.
This place... had been touched by a being of immense power, or an act of immense significance. And the land remembered, in the same way that you could go to the chapel in Icereach and tell that it had once been important to ponies who were long erased from history.
The energy spiraling into the air, the fantastical plants and trees... had these emotions at their source?
Corsica frowned, and looked at the hoof she had touched the energy stream with. Emotions were the realm of psychologists, and had no place in explaining real-world phenomena like the forest around her. But she couldn't deny what she had just felt. Was it possible for feelings to act directly on the world like this? Even if not, it was certainly possible for them to be transmitted by touching a mysterious light. Either way, it felt like the branch of science needed to comprehend this, let alone explain it, didn't even exist yet.
Unless it just didn't exist in the north, and was common knowledge in the south... but that was a boring possibility. Why couldn't she pioneer it, instead? With Halcyon at her side. Ether was obviously related to whatever was going on here, so they had about the best background they could have. They could do it!
And besides, just being here made Corsica feel like she had no special talent. For a reward like that, almost anything would be worth studying.
She took a breath and sighed. First things first, see what Halcyon thought about it... or maybe check on Papyrus. He hadn't come into the clearing with her, she remembered.
After a slightly more difficult climb than she had intended, she made it out of the crater, and looked around for Papyrus. Before she could spot him, though, her eyes fell on something else: two little mounds of stones, stacked neatly beside each other near the edge of the clearing.
Corsica paced over and craned her neck to inspect them. They looked like... grave markers?
To an unknown mare, one read. To an unknown stallion, the other added.
...Corsica wasn't good with death, so she decided not to dwell too hard on them.
It didn't take too much extra searching to find Papyrus. He was hiding behind a tree, shoulders slumped, looking smaller and less arrogant than usual.
"Well?" Corsica asked, remembering why they had come here in the first place. "This your meteor place?"
"One and the same," Papyrus sighed, getting to his hooves. "Had your fun? Because now that I've seen it once, I've suddenly lost my appetite to come back here."
"What is this place?" Corsica asked. "You know something about it?"
Papyrus hesitated. "...You'd have to ask someone who was there when it mattered."
I stared at another sheet of paper, collecting my thoughts and about to begin again, when a knock sounded at my door.
My ears flicked. "Eh? Come in."
It was Corsica.
"Hey," she said, carrying herself straighter than her usual lounging posture. "You still up?"
"Can't sleep," I admitted, my window curtains open and my bracelet aglow. "You too?"
"Something like that," Corsica said. "Any chance you're thinking about the stuff we saw? During our flight, in the mountains."
"Yeah." I looked away. "Kind of hard to forget about after an experience like that."
Corsica tilted her head, trying to get a look at all my crumpled papers. "You trying to figure out how it works?"
"What it means," I corrected. "It felt like... I dunno how even to describe it. Why do you suppose these mountains are here? I bet someone made them, for a reason."
Corsica looked contemplative. "Dunno about that," she eventually said. "Maybe. But if you wanna know what they do, I've just been out scouting with Papyrus. Got some observations I'd like to hear your thoughts on."
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Oh well, this place again.
Loved this chapter - it's nice to have a group actually have time to explore properly, and see the after effects from The Olden World.
Papyrus is now mega sus, I don't like the implication that he's been to the meteor spot before or that he is good with ships - reminds me of a certain prince.
I hope Halcyon and Corsica finally get their chat - they have been dodging each other since the last act!
I love this story so much! It evokes such an adventurous spirit every chapter, and somehow nostalgia? I dunno, I just always look forward to reading this.
It's kinda cool to see the Aldenfold and the meteor, things that were largely either environmental wonder chapters or emotional parts, looked at with a scientific and philosophical perspective. I mean, do they have stars in the sky? It's honestly a good question, what with the edge of the world, Indus, and the ether.
Oh now that's just cute.
Oh
Oh, this place. I remember this place.
Awwww <3
So much science! You’re spoiling me.
I’m willing to bet that’s residue from the Immortal Dream. The magical thing that landed here and that Starlight embodies, not the ship. That’s pretty much how I remember it being described.
Oh, darling, you have no idea.
That aside, Papyrus being Gazelle is now so incredibly obvious that it can’t possibly true. It’s a Glimmer-being-future-Starlight sort of situation. But who else could he be?