The desert has long attracted thieves, raiders, and opportunists, each eager to plunder the riches of bygone ages. Time and time again, these outsiders need guides to find their treasures.
Sandstone Shine is one such guide. A young Saddle Arabian stallion, this time guiding a curious pony from across the sea. A crystal pony mare named Sapphire Oasis.
This story is a gift for my good friend Ahobobo, who did the cover art for it. It is part of my Long Dead Gods AU, but isn't connected to Vesperal Breeze's storyline within the same AU. The OCs were designed and written by me and exist in my AU, but belong to him.
Chapters (1)
So you did the opposite of Under the Influence: trade the surreal for what's lucid, the mystery for what's clear... stream-of-consciousness for more organized writing.
And you managed to pull it off well. You were able to keep up my hunger to figure out what in the world was going on (first by going for Sapphire and what she is before planting enough seeds that there's something else going on with Sandstone and how he has his abilities in the first place... pretty much keeping me hungry for one cake while promising me that there's still another one around the corner... well, that sounded better in my head, but Lee Child did a better job explaining his own analogy).
Alright, that was a tangent. But this fic, if anything else, shows how flexible you are and that you're certainly not a one-trick pony pigeonholed into one genre. That this is in the same AU but has almost nothing to do with Vesperal only brings the point home more: While I don't know if the sphinx is one of these aforementioned long dead gods, portraying him in standard combat versus the nigh-convoluted psychological(?) attack of Blood of the Bottle casts a new light on what I think is a cosmic horror setting. The trappings are there: strange destinies and extremely ancient gods and curses and magic and what-have-you, but you managed to bring in a relatively light-hearted tale (other than the identities of the main characters, there are almost no dark twists, and things play off more like a more introspective Indiana Jones film than a Lovecraft excerpt) with a surprisingly happy ending.
And of course, there's the worldbuilding that you put in seamlessly within: the desert, the creatures of said desert, and the backstory of Sandstone himself are woven in without having to break the narrative, which should be standard.
I don't have much else to say. You've got great promise if you can follow up surreal stream-of-consciousness stories with its polar opposite and still write it well. Thanks for the great story!
11100217
The long dead gods are very dead. Creatures like the sphinx construct are monsters and remnants Strength from Sand was the name of the God the Sphinx was a temple guardian of.
Blood of the bottle was a nightmare monster, agent of a dream aspect. Technically unrelated, hence the massive difference in theme.
Would you believe that these kinds of adventures are what came first in my vision for my AU, and Vesperal came later? I wanted a character that wasn't infused to be the "tutorial" character for the AU, so they needed a different form of power to slowly gain. The entire dreamwalking and psychic aspects of my world came in as a consequence of that.
Thank you for enjoying it, I am still very new to writing.
This was good - really good. You have a great way with evocative descriptions of the land and the characters; you don't just tell us what they're like, but actually make us feel the power of the land and Sandstone's complex relationship with it. The desert just is; it nor the creatures that inhabit it need an explanation, they simply are. Both Sandstone and Sapphire are also great characters - one, the rough and dull pony in both name and character, the other the gleaming gem fresh out into the world. Their banter together feels right; for lack of a better way to put it, there's a certain degree of awkwardness and indirectness that makes it feel "realistic", and so we don't get the sense of just infodumps being given but an actual conversation.
If there's one minor thing I'd critique about this, it's surprising that Sandstone doesn't even know her name by the time the story starts, but that's a relatively minor quibble in an otherwise great fic!
11102884
Working with graverobbers, he's used to "Don't ask, Don't tell" when it comes to names or personal details.
But yes, I needed a way to introduce it within the story. They hadn't had a real conversation other than the purchase of his services before the fic started.
I am glad you enjoyed it. I always worry about info dumps, and work hard to give only the information necessary for the plot while still further explaining my world.
This was good. Nice desert adventure story with a couple of good characters. Kinda want to see more of 'em. :)
I felt sorry for the sphinx. She was sapient, enslaved and alone, for centuries if not millenia. Perhaps she was arrogant, even cruel, but one could hardly blame a being made for violence, one that only knew duty and loneliness, never kindness. She could have attacked without warning, but she asked the ponies to leave first, and that shred of kindness may have been her downfall. Granted, once she marked them as graverobbers the ponies were comitted to a fight to the death. But I wonder if they would have attacked first if the sphinx had stuck to 'leave my home in peace or I must slay you'. It was just a construct, they might say, an imitation of life. Regardless, I would not have killed her, not even for a swimming pool full of gold.
The first part of this sentence seems... off.
11879012
I probably could've written "the family is".