An Equestria Covered in Ice

by Solaris Vult

Chapter 5: Following in the Tracks (Part 1)

The buildings here were taller. It was hard to navigate the rolling dunes of snow that had settled in every crevasse here, everyone was knee-deep in it, and it was growing painfully cold. The wind was kicking up and another storm was on its way. Petrochem and Basalt were both swaddled in layers of thick cloth, neither could feel their hooves on the snow, they had been walking for hours but had barely made any progress, Twilight’s Tower didn’t look any closer than it had been. They had hobbled their way over collapsed buildings and trudged their way through thick snow-filled valleys between towering buildings, everything white from the years of snow.

“Are-” Basalt began, huffing, tired and cold, “Are you sure… Whatever is… In this… Tower-” He stumbled, falling down in the snow and rolling down the snow dune they were attempting to crest.

“We need to keep going!” Petro said, sliding down to Bas and helping him get back to his hooves.

“It… It’s so fucking cold.”

“Let’s get inside a building, start a fire!”

“If we keep stopping we’ll not make it to the Tower before our supplies run out!” Ethylene said, as she pulled herself up the side of the hill of snow.

“Ethyl is right, we need to keep moving, sooner we do, sooner this will be done.” Basalt huffed, working his way up the dune again. Eventually, they reached the top of this pile of snow, it didn’t take long, only a few minutes, but those few minutes felt like days. Once at the top, they saw more snow… They were at the same level as the tops of the buildings, at least at this point in the city, the buildings getting taller the deeper they went. Snow and ice covered every surface as far as they could see, so, just more of the same as they had already encountered.

“Feels… Feels like we aren’t making any progress.”

“Petro,” Basalt replied, “We just need to keep moving.” And with that, he slid down the dune, nearly hitting a twisted piece of metal that rose out of the ground. There were hundreds of these strange metal poles with bits of frozen glass on their ends.

“Ethyl, what are those?” She asked.

“Streetlamps, they illuminated the roads at night,” Ethylene replied. Together they pushed onward, following the road, which had become a rolling sea of snowy hills, they tried to go around the hills whenever possible, trying to climb them was murder on their legs. Ethyl was in the lead, pointing the way she felt was the safest and quickest.

They regrouped at the bottom of the hill and worked their way toward the tower again, “Snow here is thick and lightly packed, watch your step,” Ethyl continued. Almost on cue Basalt slipped and fell into the snow again. Petro moved to help her brother up but also fell into the snow with a shout, disappearing into the white. “We need to continue. Petrochemical?” Ethyl said, sounding as concerned as a machine could, turning back and seeing Petro still missing. She trotted up to where the two had fallen, then slipped and fell into the snow herself.

The drop was short but rough, and the three slowly got to their hooves. They had fallen into some kind of dark tunnel, a tiny patch of snow breaking their fall. High above dim light shone down on them from the hole that they stumbled into. “Where… Where are we?” Petrochem asked, “Ow, fuck!” She stumbled, trying to get to her hooves.

“Unknown…” Ethyl replied, “Appears to be an underground road.” The tunnel they were in featured several rusted and crumbling wagons, and the tunnel itself had suffered the effects of time, caving in in some places, such as the hole they had fallen through. The floor of the tunnel littered with broken chunks of brickwork and rusted pipes that had fallen from the ceiling, in some places crushing the wagons. There were bones too, lots of them.

“Don’t suppose you can get us back up?” Basalt said.

“My wings are non-functional, remember.”

Petrochem tried to get back up but something cracked beneath her hooves, she looked down to see she had landed on some pony’s skull, fragments of bone had cut into her hooves and she was bleeding profusely. She quickly wrapped the wound in cloth and shouted, “We need to get out of here!” Starting to panic.

“Do- Do you think we can, build stairs, or something?” Basalt asked.

“There is likely an exit back to the surface if we follow the tunnel.”

“I- I don’t like this place,” Petrochem said, looking at the field of bones.

“Petro, we need to keep moving,” Basalt said, helping his sister back to her hooves.

“Look at them all…”

“I know, who knows how many bones are up on the surface, buried under the snow.”

“W- What if not all of them are from before, what if some of them are new!”

“Calm down. We’re not dead yet.”

“Judging from the lack of disturbances, I doubt any living pony has come through this path in a very long time,” Ethylene replied. The path ahead was too dark to see, so Petrochem pulled out a small metal can filled with black goo and tried to spark it alight with her hooves. “Require assistance?”

“Y-Yes please,” Petrochem muttered.

Ethylene pointed her horn at the sludge and with a small flash of light it burst into bright flames, illuminating more of the disaster in the tunnel. “I- I wish I could do t-that…”

“I can teach you.”

“You- But, I’m not a machine?”

“You are a unicorn though, and it is a simple spell.”

“Really? All I know how to do with my horn is float things… And this,” She muttered, lifting a bone from the ground, and a few seconds later, the bone began to slowly melt into a thick black liquid. “That’s how I got my cutie mark.”

“You are a chemomancer, interesting, and useful. Now, picture in your mind the hydrogen and carbon in the oil splitting from each other and joining the oxygen in the air.”

“What?”

“Imagine the gel you produced mixing with the air.”

“Umm… O-Ok,” Petro closed her eyes, “Now what?”

“Make it a reality with your horn.”

“Sooo, like this?”

There was a sudden whoosh of flame and the oil on the ground ignited. “Woah!” Basalt backed away, tripping on some bones. Petrochem’s nose burned from the harsh smell of smoke. The air felt uncomfortably hot for a brief second before the icy cold rushed back in, and warm water dripped from the ceiling of the tunnel as the smoke melted the frost that had crept in from the layers of snow above.

“Good, but not all at once, ignite only a small portion of the oil.”

She took out an old metal can, filled with oil from a bone, and repeated the spell, this time on only a small bit of oil. There was a brief flash, and then a soft and warm glow as the oil was lit on fire. “Huh…”

With their makeshift torches, the three walked down the ancient tunnel, Petrochem’s panic was replaced by a curiosity with magic, “Be careful when casting a spell to not use up all your energy, most spells typically require an input of magical energy, although there are some that can actually provide more energy than they require, absorbing it from your target or the environment, however those can be even more dangerous to the caster than ones that deplete all their energy,” Ethylene explained, and Petro listened attentively.

“So, when you say that I can turn any organic matter into oil, does that mean I could, say, a living pony into oil?”

“Yes, but that would require a lot more power than you are most likely capable of, all living creatures conduct magical energy, and they subconsciously cancel out spells placed upon them, provided that the spell is weaker than the sum total of their magical energy they have in their bodies, that is one of the dangers of depleting your own energy reserves, is it makes you more vulnerable to other spells. The exception to this are spells that harmonize with a pony’s natural magical energy, such as healing spells. I still would not recommend attempting to cast a spell on any living creature unless you know precisely what it does.”

“Sush!” Basalt said, “Do you hear that?”

They paused for a second, “Yes, I do.” In the distance there was a murmur, it almost sounded like a pony speaking, echoing down the tunnels.

“Do you think it’s?”

“No, it’s just a pre-recorded message,” Ethylene said, “Listen.”

They walked toward the source of the noise, “To all ponies in the Generosity District, please evacuate to your nearest Royal Guard outpost in a calm and orderly fashion. I repeat. To all ponies in the Generosity District, please-” Built into the wall of the tunnel was a large box, several wires dangling from it, emitting those words over and over, a small light blinking on its top.

“This is a good place to rest,” Ethyl said.

“Why?” Petro asked.

“This system is clearly being powered, I can recharge here.” With that, Ethyl jumped on a nearby wagon and climbed her way on to the box, where the sounds of the pony speaking were suddenly cut as she removed a set of cables from the machine.

Petrochem sighed and planted herself down on the stone, kicking bones out of the way and pulling a pair of dried grass bars out of her pack. “Hungry?”

“Very,” Basalt nodded. They both took bites out of their food bars, eating slowly, enjoying the flavor while they could, they wouldn’t have another today, they needed to save their food. Eventually, Basalt broke the silence, “What are we doing?”

“What do you mean?”

“Like… I get we’re trying to get into that big tower in the middle of the city, but why are we even doing it?”

“Well, to learn about the past, discover some fancy machine, perhaps something to create infinite food or heat or something.”

“And, what purpose would that serve exactly?”

“I…”

“It feels like we’re just putting our own lives in danger for no reason, we’re going to die out here in the cold trying to get into some old stone tower.”

“Well, I mean it’s not like our lives in the village were all that interesting.”

“We survived though, and we helped our fellow ponies, this just feels like you’re doing something for the sake of it rather than thinking about what we should be doing.”

“Well, did you just want to sit around, outside the village, living in a metal hut?”

“At least we would have actually lived, I just… I get the feeling, we’re not going to survive this. And if we do, it certainly isn’t going to be worth the effort. I… I get the feeling you’re just doing this because you’re curious, and that curiosity is going to get all three of us killed. You know what some of the ponies have said about the tower, that it cuts out your soul and burns your mind.”

“Those old superstitions, they’re just ignorant nonsense thought up by ponies too scared of the big black tower. Look, I’m doing this one way or another, I don’t feel any allegiance to those idiots back at the village, they just wanted to sit around in their huts bundled next to their campfires while the world freezes around them. We all know the world wasn’t always like this, and if we knew why, then perhaps we could actually do something about it.”

“Petrochem, I’m going to be honest with you here, I really think you’re just being selfish about all this, you got unofficially kicked out of the village and now you’re suicidally rushing head-first into danger… I- I’m still coming with you, I can’t exactly turn back now, but I still think we’ve made a horrible decision.”

“Well thanks for your input.”

An awkward silence followed broken only when a beep echoed from Ethyl and she stood back up, “I am recharged,” She lept down from the machine on the wall and then quickly set into a trot, “Let’s continue.”

“Alright,” Basalt muttered, picking up one of the oil lamps in a hoof, Petrochem following behind.

“Ethyl?” Petrochem asked.

“Yes?”

“Ethyl, do you know for sure if there’s something in Twilight’s Tower that will help?”

“Why wouldn’t there be, Twilight designed everything that you see around you, before she became the sole princess of Equestria, few ponies working outside of weather factories didn’t even know what electricity was.” Petro just nodded, but something about Ethyl’s statement did little to give her any confidence.

They eventually encountered a big pile of wagons that had seemingly crashed into one another, the bones here were denser, there were also other bones that didn’t look like ponies, and more of them had clothing. Before they had seen the odd tattered bit of cloth clinging to a broken ribcage or pelvis, but here there were over a dozen pony skeletons wearing the remains of a black, white, and purple uniform of some kind.

“What happened here?” Basalt asked, looking at the broken pony remains inside the wagons.

“Something, that’s for sure…” Petrochem responded.

“These are Royal Guard uniforms, I assume-” Ethyl pulled herself over one of the wagons, “Yes, there are Royal Guard vehicles up ahead, they appear to have been blocking the road.”

There were four large wagons blocking the path, one of them was badly dented inward by a smaller wagon that had been crashed into it, there were several other guard bodies up ahead, and the corpses of numerous other ponies and creatures. The tunnel, just beyond the guard roadblock seemed to expand, going out in different directions, a large X-shaped crossing, with signs reading “Generosity District Tunnel 12”, “Honesty District Tunnel 13,” And “Magic District Tunnel 14.” The tunnel they just exited too had a sign reading “Generosity District Tunnel 11.”

“I assume we’ll want to go to the Magic District, but we should inspect the vehicles before we proceed.”

“Why?” Petrochem asked.

“They may contain maps, which will obviously help greatly in finding a safe route to Twilight’s Tower.”

“I see… Well, they all appear locked up tight.”

“It is normally illegal to break into a vehicle, but these would hardly count as vehicles anymore, seeing as they are not in working condition, thus I will simply break them open.”

Ethyl backed up, turned around, and gave a hard buck to the rear door of one of the guard wagons, the rusted metal shattering under her hooves with a horribly loud bang that echoed down the tunnel. The inside of the wagon was dusty and cold but in a much better state than the outside, the paint was flaking off the walls and everything had a fine layer of frost but otherwise looked mostly untouched.

Petrochem leapt backward in shock upon seeing the corpse in the wagon, it looked fresh, the pony’s eyes may have been rolled back and her mane may be just a little greyer and skin stark white, but otherwise it looked as if the pony could have simply been asleep. She was clutching a strange boxy device in her hooves as she had curled up in the corner. “This pony looks like she only just died…”

Ethylene stepped up to the body, “That is not true, it has simply been kept in a mostly sterile and frozen environment, not exposed to any of the cold-resistant bacteria that exist outside. Until now of course.”

Petro’s eyes lingered on the pony’s literally frozen expression of fear and exhaustion. Then she looked elsewhere, at the device she was holding, “What’s this?”

“Firearm,” Ethylene responded, not bothering to look, “A ranged weapon, held in the mouth, activated by biting down on the trigger with your teeth.”

While Ethylene toyed with some of the wiring in the wagon, pulling open panels and ripping out the wagon’s innards. Petrochem carefully pulled the firearm from the dead mare’s grasp, brushing off the handle and putting it into her mouth, but right before she could try and use it, she felt it pulled out of her mouth. Ethylene carrying the weapon in her magic “It would be very dangerous to use it in an enclosed space like this, if you want, you may try outside, pointed away from anything you wish to harm.”

Petrochem nodded and took the weapon back into her grasp, trying to fit the big thing into a saddlebag, eventually giving up just putting it across her back. “So, what are you trying to do?”

“Get the power system back online, battery still has charge but several fuses were tripped, I cannot reach them from here so I cannot reset them, so I am simply routing around them,” She paused, “Come over here and watch… Out of this cable comes electricity from the wagon’s battery, and if I pull it out of this socket, and put it here, then-”

There was a brief spark of blue light around the cable, the wagon shuttered for a second, and then brilliant white light flooded the vehicle and everything was filled with a horrible buzzing sound. While Petro was blinded, she heard plastic clicking against metal, and suddenly the light was gone. “Lamps were active, shut them down to preserve your eyesight.”

Basalt walked in, “Is everything ok in there, I saw a bright flash!”

“Thanks, Ethyl, and Bas, but… What’s that sound?” Petro asked.

“Static, it appears the radio is also still active. Should I disable that too?”

“Please.”

Ethylene walked over to a button in the wagon, but before she hit it, a new sound filled the wagon, “This is Spring Wind, broadcasting on all frequencies, to any friendly ponies who hear this, my team is being chased by Hunters!”

“Wait,” Petrochem said. Ethylene let the radio continue to play.

“The Hunters have us cornered in the old Royal Guard Station by the entrance to Tunnel Twelve, we cannot fly out, they have the skies covered, and we can’t retreat underground-”

“Is that another pre-recorded message or is that real?” Petro asked.

“It is a live transmission as best I can tell.”

“Well, in that case, we need to head that way!” She said, pointing toward the sign saying “Generosity District Tunnel 12”

“Isn’t our current objective to get into Twilight’s Tower, that pony is not allied to us, and it sounds as if she was in severe danger.”

“I’m with Petro,” Basalt said, “Pony needs help, might even be someone exiled from our village.” Petrochem nodded in reply.

“I do not like this, the pony is not a confirmed friend of ours and her comments regarding these Hunters is concerning me,” Ethylene said, but before Petrochem or Basalt could retort, she replied to herself, “But I will follow.”

With that, the three got out of the vehicle and began sprinting down Tunnel Twelve, which was almost completely clear of bones and vehicles, with only the odd bit of pony remains lying on the floor or in a crashed wagon.

They saw something up ahead, and suddenly Ethylene stopped in place, “We cannot go this way.”

“What! Why?” Petrochem and Basalt said at the same time, turning toward their frozen companion.

“We cannot go this way, I am detecting high levels of magical radiation ahead.”

“There is a pony in danger, plus, we’ve already spent days next to the RTG and that had radiation in it.”

“That is both a shielded device and a very different type of radiation, magical radiation is far more dangerous, we cannot go this way.”

“Then we’re going to leave you behind.”

That got Ethylene’s attention, and after a brief pause, where she looked as shocked as a machine possibly could, she stepped forward, reluctantly, “I do not want to go this way.”

Basalt trotted back and started pushing Ethyl forward, who started in a reluctant trot. But now Petrochem was frozen, “What is it?”

Petrochem could only point as something shifted in the dark and moved closer… The bones were walking on their own, and they were coming toward them.

Comments

[Jinxed]

“The Hunters have us cornered in the old Royal Guard Station by the entrance to Tunnel Twelve, we cannot fly out, they have the skies covered, and we can’t retreat underground-”
I see you, LOTR reference.

[Eversong]

Necromancers?

[Solaris Vult]

11122561
Magical radiation... Sort of a combination of the Anomalies in STALKER, and Wild Magic in D&D/Pathfinder.

[Eversong]

11122622
Alright