A Shimmering Intellect

by DungeonMiner

Chapter 17

Sunset landed hard and rolled down the mountainside. She skipped across untouched snow and fell off a four-foot ledge into a drift three feet deep. As the world stopped spinning, the first thing she did was check herself. Two arms, two legs, four hooves, no hands or feet, a full tail, horn, and ears; she seemed in one piece. She wasn’t wearing her supplies anymore, though. That was worrying.

“Flash!” she called, pulling herself from the snow. “Flash!”

The terror pumping through her mind thrummed to life again as her worry for Flash burned like a solar flare in her heart. Did he make it through the teleport? Was he hurt? Did he get merged with his pack?

“Flash!”

“Over here!” came the weak reply.

Hearing his voice helped to smother Sunset’s fear. She looked but didn’t see anyone, and had to climb out of the snow, but she finally saw the waving, yellow figure of Flash in the distance.

The unicorn made her way back, trudging through the snow and feeling the cold bite through her fur. She should have put that coat on before teleporting, especially since now she didn’t know where her bag was.

“Are you okay?” she yelled as she got closer, trying to speak over the wind drowning her out.

“I’m in one piece, but I think our supplies are trashed,” he said, holding up a canteen sticking through the wall of their cooking pot.

Sunset nodded and shivered. “I think you’re right. We’ll have to head back to the Crystal Empire.”

“We need to salvage what we can,” Flash said. “I don’t think we’re going to be able to make it with a hatchet and one coat between us.”

Sunset nodded and shivered again. “Let’s see what we can find.”

“Go ahead and start looking,” Flash said. “I’m going to try and make us a shelter to use. We won’t last long without some heat, and you’ll be dripping wet after searching through the snow.”

He didn’t say she should have brought her coat, which would have been a well-earned “I told you so,” but Sunset was thankful for it. For now, she just needed to focus on getting what remained of their supplies. “I’ll be back.”

“Try finding our tarp first,” Flash said. “I can do more with that.”

Sunset nodded and began to cast a locating spell to find the tarp. A magical tug downhill pulled her in that direction, and she started moving down the mountain until she found the folded tarp and the tent peg magically bound in its corner. She could remove the peg, but it would mean she would tear a hole into the tarp if she did.

Sunset sighed. How badly had she messed this up? It was her fault that they stayed the night in the Doctor’s lab. If she had thought about this better, they might not have gotten captured by all the golems in the first place.

She returned to Flash, who used the pot to dig out the snow. “I found the tarp,” she said, coming up to the hole flash was digging. “It’s either going to be stuck folded up, or it’ll have holes in it.”

Flash looked up and grimaced as he saw the mess. “It’ll work, but it won’t be as effective. The next thing we need is that brazier you talked about.”

Sunset nodded and returned with it a few minutes later.

“Great,” Flash said, standing in a hole so deep it revealed the stone beneath the snow. “Go ahead and drop it in here. Try to find some of our firewood and the rest of our supplies,” he said before taking off his coat and passing it off. “Take this too. Hopefully, we won’t need to keep trading off, but you need it more right now, anyway.”

She pulled on the coat and began searching.

As Sunset searched, her mind wandered. She should have played this better. There was something she could have done, a spell she forgot about, or something. Should she have, though? She could have fallen back into her old self and had the Doctor wrapped around her hoof, but was that the best thing to do?

She found her own coat, with a piece of firewood melded into both sleeves and some food.

Was she any better than the Doctor if she fell back into her old self? Sure, a crystal in her head wouldn’t be manipulating her, but she did try to lead an army to conquer Equestria. She even counted on Celestia caring too much to send her guard after innocent teenagers so she could hold her own army hostage. If she started heading back down that path, down that slippery slope, she had no idea how far she’d go.

Sunset shook her head. She left that behind. That wasn’t her past anymore. She couldn’t face those shadows again.

She found a few logs, a handful of charcoal bricks, and her bedroll, torn perfectly in half as if cut by a scalpel with an infinitely thin blade.

Was there a right move at all? Could she do what needed to be done? Was falling back into her old ways the only way to move forward? If Sunset had to return to being that rotten version of herself, could she do that and come back?

She wanted to say she could come back like there was no problem, but the rest of her wasn’t so sure. She had a hard time building a habit of doing her laundry every week; how was she supposed to dip into her old life and come out unscathed?

She found Flash’s bag, also cut in half by the atomic edge, but she grabbed what she could and dragged it behind her as she turned around.

Sunset returned to the camp to see Flash laying large blocks of snow onto the edges of the tarp, which he had transformed into a tent, being propped up by snow walls.

“Did you find them?” he asked as he saw her.

“Some of it, I found maybe three pieces of coal, though, so I don’t know how we’ll make that last. I also found my own coat,” Sunset said before a spell split the tiny piece of firewood from her sleeves, leaving thin cross sections of wood surrounded by the plastic fabric.

“Well, the fire’s nothing to worry about. Come inside,” Flash said before waving her toward one of the shorter ends of the tent. He disappeared from view, and as Sunset came around, she stared into an archway carved from snow, leading into the room beneath the tarp.

“The holes in the tarp won’t help us keep the heat in, but they will let the smoke out, so that’s good,” Flash said as he set up the brazier. The room was out of the wind, which was nice, but she wasn’t sure snow walls would do much.

“Can you give me a spark?” Flash asked as he finished splitting one of the larger logs. The splits didn’t go all the way down the log; it stopped about three inches from the bottom, and Flash was piling and kindling onto the hole where the splits met.

“What, right in the middle of the log?”

“Exactly.”

“Okay,” she said hesitantly before she converted some of her calories directly into heat for the spark. A flame caught and began to burn, and Flash nestled it into the middle of the log.

“I saw this on the internet years ago. I think it’s called a Swedish torch or something to that effect. It’ll burn for a long time and only needs the one log.”

“Okay,” Sunset said as the tiny flame filled the room with heat.

“I really wish I had something to cover the floor,” Flash said. “It would help with the heat.”

“What do you need?”

Flash looked at her for a moment. “Um, just something. A carpet, furs, or something.”

Sunset sighed, muttering, “I’ll get you something, but you better start cooking.”

Flash nodded, then pulled up the pot again and began putting some lentils into it, trying to avoid the canteen.

Sunset, meanwhile, took a breath and began casting Goldenrod’s Instant Garden. The Create Body spell began filling the ground with twisting vines, quickly filling the space. While concentrating on her spell, she split her focus to cast a second spell. The Transform spell took hold, and the bed of vines transformed into a thick shag carpet, exactly to Flash’s specifications.

“Huh,” Flash said.

Sunset sat and sighed. “Alright, now I’m starving.”

“Food is coming up as soon as possible!” Flash said, turning back to the fire and the lentils in the pot. “Any chance you could use magic to fix some of the stuff around us?”

“Only if we break them first,” Sunset said. “I can’t remove the canteen, for example. Once the two are entangled, they count as a single object as far as magic is concerned. I can’t teleport one out of the other, but I can break the canteen into pieces and remove those pieces, but that’s it.”

Flash looked up. “Can you fix the holes in the tarp?”

“I can magically sew them shut, but I don’t think that plastic stretches well.”

Flash nodded. “That’s fair. Alright, get some sleep. The lentils will be ready when you wake up. I’ll take the rest of the watch.”

Sunset nodded, then pulled on her coat and rolled out her half-of-a-bedroll to lay down onto whatever remained.

“Are we even cut out for this?”

The thought tasted bitter in her mouth, but it sat there, demanding an answer.

Maybe she wasn’t the kind of pony that could do this. Sure, she had a few “adventures” in the human world with her friends, but nothing like this. Did the skills not translate? Was her problem that she didn’t actually have the tools she needed for this, despite what she thought? Maybe she just wasn’t as competent as Twilight thought. Perhaps not even as capable as Sunset herself thought?

She rolled onto her side.

Maybe she just needed to head home. After all, she had bills to pay.

And let’s be honest, she could barely handle that.

---♦---

Flash looked around their small shelter, deep in thought. They had to head back to the Crystal Empire as quickly as possible, and their bags were no longer in a state fit for the trip. They’d have to devise a different method of carrying their supplies. Luckily, they were heading downhill, so they could use gravity to help them.

If they could construct a sled, they could probably make good time, but that didn’t help their current problem of being low on food and fuel for the whole trip. The mountain’s vegetation was sparse at this elevation, and what Flash did find proved to be twisted, thin stumps so battered by the cold that Flash wasn’t sure they’d provide any heat.

At lower elevations, there were some better trees, and if they could live long enough to get down to one of them, Flash might be able to do something, but that was days away from where they were now, and the trees were still rare at that.

The worst part would be traveling across the vast plain from the foothills to the Empire’s bubble of warmth. The complete lack of anything that could be used as a landmark, much less a resource, meant that the last stretch of their trip would lack any possible resupply. They would have to find enough fuel before then.

As for food, they might be able to eat some of the leaves off of the shrubs up here, and they might be able to find some berries or something if they were lucky. He hoped there were some berries because he wasn’t sure that the leaves on the various plants out there were even edible for his pony body, but hopefully, Sunset could help him with that.

There had to be something they could eat. Rationing whatever they had would not be wise, just because they would need the calories to stay warm, even without mentioning the heavy marching through the snow.

Could they glide down? If they could make a hang glider of some kind, Flash could use his wings to get them to a higher altitude, and then they could fly over the snow and the terrain to get there quickly. Of course, that would also put them into a lot of wind, which would sap away whatever heat they had. If there was some way to make a windshield of some kind, then it might work, but unless he knew for sure, it sounded like a great way of getting one of them frozen to death.

Solving this problem was fun to some parts of his mind. The part that loved the challenge of survival and loved using the knowledge he gathered. Yes, the rest of him screamed that this wasn’t a game. This was an actual life-or-death problem, and if he made the wrong call, they could both freeze up here and die.

Still, he’d be lying if he said he wasn’t excited by the prospect.

Was he messed up for that? Did something in his brain not work right?

He pushed the thought aside.

The fire had burned enough of the log that the flame fell into the split, and Flash could finally move the pot over the flame. Before putting the pot on the fire, Flash took a second to unscrew the canteen lid that fused with it and let out whatever water had been caught in the top dribble. He used snow for the rest of the water and set the pot to boil.

They could supplement rations with other food. Since Flash was a pony now, hunting was probably out of the question, but there had to be something they could have.

“My kingdom for a granola bar,” he muttered.

As the snow began to melt, Flash stirred the lentils so they wouldn’t burn while waiting for the water.

There had to be something he could do.

Was there something he was missing, an obvious answer he wasn’t thinking about?

And then he stopped stirring.

And smiled.

---♦---

Sunset counted until the end of Flash’s shift. She barely slept, and she might have very well been awake the whole time. Over time, she removed her coat and draped it over herself like a blanket. The little shelter Flash carved out for them held the heat better than Sunset expected, and she found herself glad for how cold the walls were just to even herself out.

But morning came, and Flash’s shift ended, and she shifted from her bedroll.

“Morning,” Flash said. “Sleep well?”

“Well enough,” Sunset lied.

“Breakfast is ready,” Flash said, “and I think I have a solution to our problem.”

“Which problem?”

“How we will get back to the Crystal Empire without freezing or starving to death,” Flash said. “I’ve been thinking about it, and I think our best bet is to use a sled. Specifically, one we can ride.”
Sunset blinked. “What?”

“We need to move quickly, and we’ll have to do it to carry whatever supplies we have. A sled should do both of these,” Flash said as he handed Sunset a spoon. “The pot’s a little hot, be careful.”

“A sled.”

Flash nodded. “I thought of maybe trying to make a hang glider that would take us down, but that has the risk of freezing us in the air. A sled doesn’t have that problem. We could also use a lot of the paths we’ve already traveled using a sled just because we’ll be traveling downhill.”

“And what about the narrow passages and the cliffs?”

“If we make the sled light enough for me to carry, I can move it, then our supplies. I have to fly up and down them anyway to collect all our supplies and rope, so I might as well add the sled to the list.”

Sunset paused. “You’re…serious about this?”

“Why wouldn’t I be?”

That was a good question that Sunset didn’t have an answer for. Yes, a sled would let them carry whatever supplies they had, and riding it downhill would be easier than walking. It made even more sense, considering they no longer had their bags. Carrying everything on a sled would make things far more manageable. Despite this, the image of them sliding down the mountain had a feeling of whimsy that Sunset wanted to rebel against. It seemed wrong somehow despite being a perfectly reasonable suggestion.

“It’s not all downhill from here. What do we do when we need to cross flat land?”

“I can try pulling it,” Flash said. “I’ll need a rope, but I can try flying ahead of the sled and pulling it behind me.”

“You’re going to try to pull it?”

“By air. I won’t have to push through the snow, which means I can push later on my hooves.”

“That’s going to be much harder than you think.”

“Probably,” Flash admitted. “But we’ve got to get there one way or another, so I will probably be pushing or pulling anyway. Besides, that’s only half my plan.”

“Half of it?”

Flash nodded. “I also want to make a sail for the sled.”

“A sail?” Sunset asked as the idea slowly took hold. “It could work so long as the wind blows in the right direction, but we can’t guarantee that.”

Flash smiled. “Yeah, that is the main problem, and if we can’t get it to work, then we’re stuck pushing. We’ll probably do it in shifts, and I can take one shift pulling by the air, one pushing, and you can do one pushing between them.” Then Flash’s smile got wider. “Now, could you remind me of something?”

“What?”

“Unicorns have magic. Earth ponies can make things grow. What is it that pegasuses do?”

“Pegasi,” Sunset corrected before her brain registered Flash’s question. “And, um, Pegasi can control the weather.”

Flash kept smiling.

Comments

[MoonlightRift]

Genius.