Of Hooves and History

by Ahmad J Charles

The Empty Tree House

Besides the peace and tranquil of the forest came a sense of being enclosed as well. Unless you had a really good eye, trees and shrubs could end up all looking the same. So, we split the workload. I focused all of my attention on the tree trunks, while Sunny examined the ground and rocks for any markings. Izzy offered to hold the map and keep us on course, while listening for anything amiss. Soon the infamous phrase rang out.

“Are we there yet?”

“Nope,” I repeated for the tenth time, examining a tree trunk for any carvings. “This will take some time.”

Izzy groaned a little, but I ignored her and kept studying. Eventually, after half an hour of going every which way, I found the first rune engraving – in the shape of a backwards number 1.

“Too far west,” I announced. “We’re heading towards the sea.”

We turned around and headed back, this time turning slightly north. I heard a slight “hmmm” from Sunny, but no words came out. Moments later, I spotted another marking on the back of a tree stump, a letter M.

“Eoh – horse, which could mean –” I began, before Sunny gasped in awe, pointing. “Look! Markers!”

It took a moment for my eyes to notice it in the leaf litter, but it soon became noticeable – three football-shaped stones jutting out of the soil in a row. A one-minute walk in each direction revealed another. And a little further out I spotted another rune with the letter R. Piece by piece, we worked out the path. Izzy had her ideas too – she cut a credit card-sized section of bark out of a tree every ten to twenty meters once we established a path.

And not a moment too soon, either! The forest got denser and denser as we closed in on the tree. Seeing through the leaves became increasingly difficult. Now every tree looked the same, and we had to constantly step over logs and duck under fallen branches. Izzy was getting tired, too.

“My head feels sore,” she moaned, rubbing her forelock.

“It’s ‘cause you’re suspending that map for so long,” Sunny remarked. “Let Aiden hold it now.”

With the lidded eyes of a migraine-bearer, Izzy floated the map over to me, and I gently plucked it from her magical grasp. Sunny kicked aside some leaf litter and dead branches to unearth anything below – and we soon found another row of three pointy rocks. And right in front of it was a birch tree with two carvings.

“Birch and sun,” I stated.

“That means we must be close!” Sunny exclaimed. “It’s now afternoon, so the sun’s rays should be split soon.”

Stepping through the dense undergrowth, a soft rippling sound cut through the noisy chatter of birds and other treetop creatures. It was too easy to recognize – flowing water.

“There’s a river here?” Izzy blurted in surprise, before catching sight of a rune herself. “Backwards 1. Must be close… there!”

She eagerly pointed to two trees with a vine arch over it, with long leafy branches hanging down, intertwined by thicker vines growing up from the ground. Bordered on either side were car-sized boulders, and the amount of low-hanging branches of a decent thickness were minimal. It was obvious that this was an entrance of sorts.

“Hey, look,” I said, noticing two runes that further cemented such a theory. “This means land or estate, and this one –”

“– Means a gift,” Sunny finished. “Got your blade?”

“Yep.”

I pulled the dagger out of its sheath and delivered a couple swift short hacks to the vines, cutting all the knots and loops. Sunny gave it a hard kick, and the severed vines jiggled loose. We pulled them free and tossed them aside, taking care not to leave any low-hanging loops that could trip us. Sunny and I brushed the leaves aside to reveal a sight that fit my description to the T.

A river ran in an S-shaped curve alongside a large old oak tree, with the afternoon sun shining on it, casting a large shadow that split the sunbeam into two.

“Where the sun is split by a rift,” Izzy breathed, gazing in awe at the tree and its surrounding bushes.

Stepping through the archway, we carefully descended down a rocky incline and powered across the grass, only to be stopped dead in our tracks as we realized we had to cross the river. It wasn’t that wide – a little over two meters – but all that remained of the bridge were rotted timbers and a rusted-out frame.

“Looks like we’re going to have to jump,” Sunny grimaced. “If we don’t make it across it shouldn’t be fatal – the river doesn’t look that deep.”

“Yeah, but the current will sweep you like a runaway train,” I warned. “Flowing water is no joke. But this is a risk we must take.”

I volunteered to go first, since I could easily catch them if things went awry. With a quick warm-up stretch and a five-meter running start, I dug my toes into the bridge’s last remaining sturdy timber rung and pulled my feet forward half way to extend my reach as much as possible. My feet dangled slightly… and hit the soft grass on the other side. Immediately I hunkered into a squat and yanked my torso sideways to avoid tripping backwards and rolled out towards firmer ground.

“YES!” Sunny crowed, hopping up and down with joy as I rose to my feet. My hands, knees, and hair were streaked with mud, releasing a good giggle from Izzy.

“You next!”

Izzy did the same run-up, spreading her legs like a kid pretending to be Superman.

“Tuck your back legs in!” I ordered, and she listened, pulling them forward like a cat. However, her strength was less than my climber glutes, and her back legs slid on the wet grassy edge, plunging into the cold water. I held a smile as I gripped her front hooves and pulled her up.

Now it was Sunny’s turn. Following my same routine, she gently flexed her legs to ease out the soreness from all the trekking we’d done, and took a full-on sprint towards the river. Crouching at the same bridge timber rung I had, she sprung up with all the strength an earth pony’s back legs possessed, leaping forward in an arc like a cat. Her front legs slid into the soft earth as her shoulders pulled her muscular body even further forward, and hind legs slid under with a thud open landing right next to Izzy.

My mouth fell open in awe. Sunny really was athletic… just not in vertical climbing.

“Glad you made it. Now let’s find what Pixie Hollow has to offer.”

“What’s a pixie?” Izzy wondered.

The porch was elevated with a few wooden steps. I heaved myself up so as not the damage them, but Sunny and Izzy just happily trotted up. The entrance was adorned with a curtain long since faded and tattered. Izzy happily rapped the door’s old wooden beams with three knocks.

“Hellooooooooo! Anypony home?”

“It’s been abandoned for decades,” I chuckled, gently pushing it open with a shake and a screech.

I ducked my head under the doorway and we all stepped inside. The floorboards were split with plants growing out of them and creaked loudly with every step. But Sunny and I were in awe at the capsule of time that surrounded us.

The doorways were arched, and there were five rooms – a bedroom with an ensuite, a study, a living room, a kitchen, and a library. We split up to investigate.

I opened the room to the study, and it swung open so quickly the top hinge nearly popped off. I grabbed the door and safely propped it back up.

In the corner lay a pile of old books, some with half their pages ripped out, a picture frame facedown beside it. A rusting mirror was propped above a small dresser in an alcove in the wall. The desk looked mostly intact, with a half-chewed paper clipped to the writing slate and the dried-up inkwell still sitting atop the elevated shelf, lit up by the sunlight spilling through a small semi-circular window. The chair was propped against the opposite wall, its front legs broken.

“This must’ve looked so nice back in the day…” I sighed sadly, crouching down on the worn-out soap bar-shaped rug to look under the desk.

There was an old wicker footstool, fragments of a smashed ornate flower vase, and a tuft of horsehair, surprisingly well-preserved. I snatched a paper off the floor and gently pried it free from the frayed fibers of the stool, then set it aside for later.

Taking one of the books, I sat back against the wall and started to flip through it. Then another, and another. Most of it was botanical research and documented files of events in the life of its writer. After six books, I finally found a good lead: a report file folder with the title DIMENSIONAL SPELLS REPORT 005. I itched to read it but knew I wouldn’t understand a damn thing. Checking the rest of the room, I found a few more reports on powerful spells and the intricacies of magical connections to the natural elements of the world, and noticed a drawer under the desk. Pulling it open, I found a small chest – about the size of a pencil case.

“Bugger,” I muttered, noting the lock on it.

With seemingly nothing else in the room to investigate, I checked on my friends.

“Found anything yet?”

“You bet!”

Izzy bounded back into the living room with an old, rusty frypan and some bottles of liquid and powders. Not exactly related to ancient unicorn magic, but it piqued my interest nonetheless. Sunny then emerged from the library with three books precariously balanced atop her lower back. Her face was ecstatic with joy.

“Aiden, I found so many great books! There’s one on Twilight Sparkle’s friendship studies from her time at school, a book on how to work with crystals, and one with cool diagrams about all sorts of transformation and the dimensional aspect of magic, and –”

“Hold it, hold it!” I cried. “Let’s go through this one at a time, okay?”

“And I thought I was eager and excitable,” Izzy cheekily remarked.

Sunny, Izzy, and I sat down on the creaky wooden floor and began to examine each of the books. In perhaps the most unusual inter-dimensional coincidence, they were all written in English (mostly). The runes made a comeback, with detailed symbols denoting certain aspects of conjuring up the various forces of magic – most of which Sunny could grasp the basic concept of. For me, it was like deciphering alchemic hieroglyphs. But then something caught my eye in a book about dimensional magic.

Elements relating to dark matter, bending the relative scale…

“I recognize some of this terminology,” I told Sunny, opening the dimensional spells report. “There should be something related to it in here. Cross-reference it.”

Sunny peered over at the document and checked the reference points in the book. “Most of this is beyond even my understanding, but what I do understand is there seems to be a method of harnessing the earth’s natural energy – to an extent – to aid in conjuring up a spell which would use a type of crystal to store and control the magical force that would bend the stable state of relativity in a highly concentrated space, while keeping a fairly consistent empty void at its epicenter.”

“Hmmm, so this would then mean a disturbance to the polar opposite end in my world, where the current state of matter and energy is kept in a complex, intricately interconnected web of stability that never lets anything foreign in. Keeping in line with the concept of an epicenter, then there would be a point where that would taper off to infinity, only to disturb the same point of its opposite and merge to a degree,” I theorized.

“How much sea is on Earth?” Sunny asked.

“Almost three-quarters of it.”

“Wow. Okay, so it’s likely there was a test relating to water… or something within the water, conducted when this spell was cast. Let me check.”

I glanced up at the golden rays of sun shining through the deformed window frames. The day was on its way out. “Try not to make it a lengthy process.”

Sunny flipped through a couple more pages, then examined the report’s descriptions of tests, her eyes flitting back and forth as she searched for terms and event description matches. Then she opened up a book on crystals and began to look through that one. I opened my mouth to protest about time but Izzy held up a hoof, and for the first time my unicorn friend looked assertive and commanding. Finally, Sunny gave a verdict.

“Some time ago, the Crystal Mirror was destroyed. It was a portal for Twilight Sparkle to travel to the human world – or at least from some of my father’s drawings, an alternate-looking version of it. Despite this, some of the crystal fragments were later recovered, and an attempt was made to re-assemble them, presumably in the hopes of re-establishing the inter-dimensional connection. To determine if the connection was correct – meaning, to the correct world, certain metrics were to be scouted for once the inter-dimensional link was established. Presumably these were materials or elements native to Earth. It seems somehow the energy on the other side got fudged and entered a place with a high concentration of abnormal activity pertaining to the behavior of those same natural elements. Instead of just pulling a sample to confirm the correct connection, everything relating to the metric scouting was pulled through the portal. That explains the underwater vortex.”

“But why though?” I asked. “Why that part of the ocean where I was specifically.”

Sunny shrugged. “A rotten bit of luck, I guess. But more probable is the materials which are in your submarine. There’s one place I know which would have knowledge of these materials.”

“Let me guess,” I mused, cutting in. “Zephyr Heights?”

“Correct-a-mundo, my friend! And that’s our next stop – or should I say step – to figuring out how this spell was cast, and if it can be successfully recreated in reverse.”

Author's Note:

I'll be super busy this month, so expect the next chapter sometime towards the end of August.