Holder's Boulder
It was not a sound that woke Maud in the earliest hour. Rather, some notion spoke with a small voice in the back of her mind and coaxed her eyes open. But in that moment, the sight of the farmhouse's loft cast surreally in vivid moonlight drove the notion from her consciousness.
She swiveled her ears a little, but only heard the slow breathing of Limestone from the upper bunk across from her own. Indeed, she only heard Limestone. Maud sat up as much as the low-built bunk-bed allowed, and focused on the lower bunk across from her.
Marble was not there.
Was this unusual? Though Maud and her sisters had shared this loft for much of their lives, she realized she did not know. Mother had once described her sleeping "as like a stone," and though Maud took more than a little pride in this, she now wondered if there had always been some odd nocturnal habit of her sister's.
Treading soft to keep from waking Limestone, Maud slid from beneath her blanket and made to descend the stairs. But there was that notion again, speaking in its own quiet way and telling her legs to turn toward the window at the room's far end.
This was indeed an unusual night—one that saw the arrival of two gut feelings within minutes, neither regarding geological matters. Maud decided to play along.
She stood now with her nose nearly touching the glass, and the perfect circle of the moon, low in the sky, painted the north field in odd zebra stripes of off-white light and deep shadow. The longest, smoothest of these shadows bisected this picture, and its tapered end pointed directly at the window from which Maud now gazed. Its source: The tall, egg-shaped stone that stood upright at the field's edge—Holder's Boulder.
In the farthest part of that shadow, near the base of the Boulder, something moved.
In the day, a movement as slight as this might have been missed. But the scene now was so still that the window might have been mistaken for a painting, if not for that movement. Maud blinked and refocused on that spot, willing her eyes to adjust further. The shape below took another step toward the Boulder.
Marble...
With less heed paid to the noise of hooves on floorboards, Maud turned and made for the ground floor. A shaft of moonlight lit a narrow path from the stairwell to the main door, and in a matter of seconds, Maud had burst into the north field and galloped to the foot of the Boulder.
Marble was not there.
To a more active imagination than Maud's, it might have seemed as though the Boulder's shadow, still darker than darkness in her eyes, had swallowed her sister up. Maud looked left—right—telling herself to keep calm.
From the house behind her, something broke the night's silence—something between a clank and a ping.
Metal striking metal.
Maud pivoted about and sprung back to the door, skidding to a halt within the threshold and swiveling her head to and fro in the darkness. There—the sound again, from the storage room behind the wood-stove.
Of all the farmhouse's rooms, this was the least used. Little more than a large closet, it was built close to the wood-stove to keep winter's damp from damaging the contents. The walls were covered in shelves overcrowded with spare tools, seasonal supplies, and myriad things put there with temporary intent but never moved since. On the floor at the back sat a wooden box with a hinged lid, held shut by an old brown padlock. This had been there as long as Maud could remember.
In her initial rush, Maud had made do with moonlight, but now had to fumble around the small mud room for lamp and flints as the hammering noise quickened. At last, Maud took the lit lamp's handle in her teeth and made her way to the room. The hammering had stopped just as the wick flared to life, but now the door was ajar. As she approached, there came other sounds—a crunching, a ripping. Maud flung the door aside and cast lamplight upon the scene within.
On the floor by the old box—a pick-axe and a padlock's twisted remains—a chaotic scattering of brown-yellow shreds—Marble crouching down—holding a thick hardbound tome against the floor. Marble seized a sheaf of its leaves in her teeth, ripped them out with a jerk of her neck, and shook the wad about, dog-like.
In a flash, Maud put down the lamp and leapt upon her, seizing her by the shoulders and shaking her until the mangled pages dropped from her jaws. Maud shouted into her sister's face as loud as she dared. "Marble! Marble, stop!"
Marble did not resist, but stared straight through Maud. Her slack, drooling mouth made only a low gurgle.
"Marble, look at me!"
A blink, and another. As Maud watched, Marble squinted, looked around, and finally met her gaze. In the manner of one just awoken, Marble worked her jaw and mumbled groggily—"M... Maud?"
"What goeth here?"
At the sound of this new voice, both mares turned to the doorway, where their Father stood, bare-headed and haggard-looking from sleep. Without waiting for response, he crossed to the near edge of the book's strewn wreckage, put out a hoof, and turned the now nearly empty cover so that the lamplight reflected from the bold, silver lettering on the front:
Ϸe Journall of Holder Cobblestone
He looked to Maud, then Marble. His lips were tightened in anger, but his brow was creased by sorrow. "Who hath done this thing?" His voice faltered only a little.
"She was sleepwalking. She didn't know what she was doing." Maud semi-consciously decided not to mention that Marble had done this with her eyes open. The matter was already complicated enough, and at this hour it was unwise to trust all of one's own senses.
"Is this true, Marble Pie?" Father said.
A nod.
"Return to your room—both of you. We shall discuss this on the morn." His words were ominous, but his voice was of one trying to accept some great loss.
Avoiding the others' gazes, Marble hurried toward the door and vanished through it, her hooves somehow making no sound on the bare floorboards. Maud did not follow, but looked toward the journal's remains, considering.
"Well, Maud?" Father said.
"I have to put these away in case of mice." Maud began scooping up the piles of torn pages and placing them in the open chest. It was half full of parcels and other books, and Maud placed the piles neatly on top of these, so no bits would fall into cracks.
"Very wise. Until the morn, then." Father turned and departed.
At last Maud replaced the heavy lid and turned to leave, but as she lifted her forehoof, her eye fell upon something stuck to its edge—one last paper shred. With care, she placed it down in the lamplight, spread it flat, and silently read the three words on its near face:
a great Eville
She paused, considered. Then she reopened the lid and placed the scrap alone in a clear spot so she could easily find it again.
As she replaced the lamp and ascended the steps to the loft, she turned the last few minutes' ramifications over in her head. They were all serious, and none involved her one expertise. Still, as the first discoverer of the night's events, she felt a certain responsibility for righting them, or at least trying to steer events toward some peaceful resolution.
As she crawled into her bunk—the lower one, to be closer to the Earth—she had already set upon a plan.
* * *
Silence at the table.
Father and Mother chewed their porridge more slowly than Maud had ever seen, and she could not decide whether they were punishing Marble with silent suffering, or unable to find proper words for such a strange and terrible thing. Marble, doing her best to hide behind her mane, hunched with her knees bent as if prepared to bolt. Across from her, Limestone crouched in her seat, as if coiled to spring over the table and wreak the same destruction upon Marble as Marble had upon the journal.
"I can mend it."
All heads turned to Maud. In that moment, the air felt a little less close, and expressions grew just a little hopeful at the notion of any mitigation.
"The journal," Maud said. "I think I can fix it. I know I'm home to help with summer chores, but I would like some time at the end of each day to work on putting it back together."
As she spoke, her gaze moved from Father to Limestone and back. These two exchanged a questioning glance, then looked back to Maud.
"I have many times thought to peruse all the writings within yon chest," Father said. "'Tis a trove of family history, its contents irreplaceable."
Marble shrank back farther.
Father went on. "And the journal of Holder is truly the cruelest loss that might have been, for if any of us thought to read it, we had hitherto believed there would always be time enough.
"But as always, we must give heed to practical matters. Limestone, will this reconstruction allow enough time to finish the season's work?"
Taking her time, Limestone chewed, swallowed, and cleared her throat before answering. "Yeah, I think so. That's if the rest of us don't mind working a little harder." Her knife-gaze passed over Marble as she said this.
Marble stared into her porridge.
"Very well, Maud," Father said. "You will have the time to mend Holder's journal."
* * *
Father had a small writing desk, but it was nowhere near broad enough to spread all of the scraps upon, and so the storage room's bare floorboards would have to suffice for Maud's workshop. This would be troublesome for most ponies, but accustomed as she was to kneeling on stone, she had no more discomfort on boards than on a feather bed.
On the face of it, the remains of Holder's journal were a complete mess, torn and chewed not in the manner of someone angry, but one who wanted it rendered illegible. Many pieces were blotted with saliva, and the shreds of dozens of pages were mixed together. A jigsaw puzzle might be solved by starting with the sky pieces, but here Maud could only stare and wonder how to begin. A part of her found it a temptation to give the journal up as lost to history.
And yet...
a great Eville
The three words on that single scrap held her attention as well as any could, short of those regarding stones and their properties. Oral histories of the Pies and Cobblestones said a great deal about their origins and traditions, but none regarded Evils—great or otherwise.
The scrap lay before her, surrounded by one of only three clear spaces on the floor. The other two were a narrow path that led out of the room and a berth for the lone kerosene lamp with which Maud would have to make do. The rest was covered in the journal's remains, spread out so their shapes could be appraised at a glance. For tools, she had only carpenter's paste and old newspapers, so there could be little allowance for mistakes.
If she could have spared the effort, Maud would have frowned. It had taken long enough to set up this meager workshop, and she would have to pack it up again before bedtime, or else vermin would carry some bits away. She needed a method—some way to work efficiently. She sat, and she looked, and she thought.
Maud's small personal library included a few books on living with monomania. In these, the chapter most worn and coffee-stained was devoted to means of turning this weakness into a strength. This was why, years ago, she had wrestled her own mind toward the practical side of her obsession, and her academic rankings now proved it could be done.
But how to turn this to the problem at hoof?
Paper was made of hemp, which came from the earth. There—the connection. Maud shut her eyes tight and pictured the grey scraps as fragments of granite, broken by picks. When she opened them, she ran her gaze along the edges of the lone fragment, memorizing the lines of its ridges, then perusing left to right across the rest, looking for matches.
"Rock," she breathed. "You are rock. You are broken, but I will fit you together again."
And bit by bit, she did.
* * *
After affixing the last piece of the sentence, Maud had to lean back and blink hard, trying to banish the early symptoms of strain from her eyes and head. Inwardly, she scolded herself for not resting them. Still, it would grow easier as she practiced and the piles of fragments grew smaller. At last she looked down at her first small victory.
It is now most sertaine, what dwelleϸ wiϸin ϸe Egge-Stone
may spread a greate Eville hiϸer and yon.
It was not so difficult to understand if she read it aloud and pronounced the "ϸ" as "th." And despite its archaic diction, it was not metaphor or allegory.
Maud knew she should be in bed, for a farmer's day began at four o'clock in the morning, without fail. But looking from her meager progress to the piles of scraps still remaining, she wanted only to keep working. Her university classmates would call it rural superstition, but if Maud's guess about the meaning of "Egge-Stone" was right, there was a connection perhaps too dangerous to ignore. But literally piecing together more clues would take days or weeks, and it was no good raising the alarm on what might only be a coincidence. What should be done in the meantime?
Maud decided the next morning she would volunteer to work in the north field.
* * *
Most days, Maud bore no ill will toward any creature of the Earth. But this morning, the cicadas managed to make a nuisance of themselves. As Maud leaned low to take soundings by tapping of her hoof upon the ground, they got in her way and made such a din with their clicking and hissing and burrowing over and beneath the surface that Maud could hardly even place the north field's fault line.
Maud was not afraid: Though ugly, the periodical cicada was in no way a bad neighbor, for it did not sting, nor drink blood, nor carry sickness, nor destroy food, nor bite except in self-defense. But she picked her way slowly, for when the cicada brood emerges, it covers the ground and fills the air. This one had yet to do the latter: Its members still crawled from the peppering of tiny holes they had made that morning, then hurried off.
At last Maud abandoned her fruitless attempts. She stood straight up and regarded the swarm of stocky brown bodies that scuttled around her hooves. Such events were always accounted for in farmers' yearly schedules, but this time it was altogether unexpected. The local brood emerged every thirteen years, and for the first time this one was two years early.
For that matter, no cicada brood in the world emerged in the autumn.
Maud's knowledge of the creatures ended there, for this was the only relevance they had to her interests. She tried to think back to their last emergence, but time and monomania made detailed recall impossible. Was it normal for them to all move in the same direction once above ground, as they were now? She followed their path with her eyes and soon had her answer.
The cicadas were making for Holder's Boulder.
As Maud followed them, she had to tread ever more gingerly and fight back nausea when something crunched underhoof. Her pace slowed as she grew nearer the Boulder, for the swarm thickened to where she could hardly find a place for a hoof. All around the Boulder's base, they climbed over each other in their attempts to reach it, and the mass of their bodies formed a pile as high as Maud's belly. She swallowed her disgust and reminded herself they were harmless.
But why? Maud stopped a few leg-lengths from the stone and peered at its surface. She saw nothing that would interest a cicada, but... there. A jagged crack, almost too thin for the naked eye to see, ran almost straight up the side. It was not long in proportion to the Boulder—about the length of a pony, from nose to tail. But Maud could sense faults in any stone in the world, and this crack had not been there before.
"Maud..."
There was an edge of warning in the voice that spoke from behind. Without shifting her hooves, Maud looked over her shoulder. A little ways back stood Limestone, her face lined with annoyance at having to pick her way through chitinous bodies.
"I'm interested in Holder's Boulder," Maud said.
"Can't imagine why."
Maud took no offense. This was Limestone's idea of a joke.
"We know Holder found it in an abandoned dragon's nest." Maud looked to the Boulder's tapered crown. "I don't know of any natural process that could fossilize a dragon egg, but what about unicorn magic?"
"It still couldn't be a dragon egg," Limestone said. "Those are small, considering how big the adults get. If this was an egg, it was from something else."
"Why does an egg have one tapered end?" Maud said, now half-thinking out loud.
"So if it rolls, it rolls in a circle and doesn't fall out of the nest." Limestone did not say how she knew this. Her personality was of the charming sort that never revealed sources unless pressed. "Why do you ask?"
"Holder's journal mentions it. I was curious." Maud knew better than to go into more detail. If she got Limestone onto a tear of prying questions, she would have no answers beyond her own suppositions and a few ancestral words.
"Let me know when you're done fixing it," Limestone said. "If it talks about the Boulder, I want to read it. See you later." With this, she turned and picked her way toward the house.
Maud did not follow at first, but surveyed the Boulder again—the peak, the crack, the base...
The pile of cicadas. They reminded her of beach stones, worn oval by the ocean's tide.
It was wrong. Only rocks behaved like rocks.
Through her disgust, Maud raised a forehoof and lightly jabbed at one side of the piled ring. The massed brown bodies did not react, but a few tumbled down from the sides and lay still, with their legs in the air.
They were dead.
* * *
I dis-coverred ϸe Egge-Stone wiϸin ϸe watters of ϸe Pettrifyinge Welle.
Maud knew the Petrifying Well that flowed from near the farm's edge. At the age of four, she had immersed a toy stallion in a place where its water was calm and would not sweep it away. For years after, she had checked it once a month to watch the stony exterior form around it, then consume it until the toy had vanished beneath the new, oblong stone. She then plucked it out, named it "Boulder," and took to carrying it in her pocket.
"Within the waters," it read. There was indeed a place where the well was wide and deep enough to immerse Holder's Boulder. Now she took it from her pocket and regarded its smooth, tapered shape.
Might the two Boulders have formed the same way?
Of course, Holder put nothing in the well himself—just discovered the result. But he had taken charge of it, as another of Maud's pieced-together fragments showed:
As I am ϸe Lande-Hollder:—
so it be mine Duty to keep ϸe Egge-Stone.
Let none disturb it.
There it was: The command orally passed down generations, though at the cost of context. Holder would be glad of his descendants following his instruction... that was, until the last Hearth's Warming.
That day, as the Apples helped the Pies push the Boulder from the pit where it had fallen, Maud had a close look at its surface as it turned before their hooves. She could not have missed the crack now upon its surface. That meant it had appeared in the meantime.
Perhaps the crack had begun to form inside the Boulder when it had fallen into the pit and had grown wider as the heat and cold of seasons pressed upon it.
Perhaps.
Or perhaps something was inside, squirming against the stone.
"... A greate Eville..."
Maud's first thought was to show the others and try to convince them of the imminent danger. But what then? Would they flee and allow the "evil" to spread "hither and yon," as the journal said?
Would it be a waste of time?
This latter question was twofold. By now there might be no mortal means to prevent such a conclusion. If not, Maud's time might be better spent literally piecing together more clues.
As she thought upon this, her gaze flicked to and fro across the pieces on the floor. When it happened to fall upon one particular scrap, the matter was settled.
may be re-captured.
This was written on a sturdier paper than the rest. Perhaps Holder had been more well-off at the time of writing. Or perhaps because he considered the investment worthy.
Recaptured. Yes—that was it.
Maud set to work again.
* * *
The next day's chores included a routine trip to town for essential supplies, and Maud volunteered to go. She did not go to the supply shops first, but to the post office, where she sent a telegram to her sister in Ponyville:
UNKNOWN TROUBLE NEARING FARM STOP BRING MAGIC HELP STOP
As telegrams were charged by the letter, Maud had made this one as short as she dared. Her remaining money would go to the apothecary. Holder's journal specified a list of materials beneath the heading:
Herewiϸ: ϸe Means by which ϸe Eville may be re-captured.
Most would have had trouble with the archaic words—"Brimmestone" and "salt petere" were among the less obscure—but the rock farmers of southwest Equestria still informally used the old names for their tools. It was only when Maud showed the clerk a list of certain unicorn-enchanted materials that she met with difficulty.
The clerk, a bespectacled middle-aged stallion, perused the list once, twice, thrice. When he looked up to meet Maud's eyes, his brows were raised. "You'll have to sign a waiver for these," he said.
"Why?" Maud said.
"If they're mishandled, they can be very dangerous. May I ask what you need them for?"
"Rock farming." Though Maud hated lying, her manner made her quite good at it.
"Thought so. Here." The clerk produced a thick sheaf of papers. "These explain the effects of any misuse and absolve the makers—and us—of responsibility for any results. You'll have to sign them to show you understand this."
There was nothing on those pages Maud did not already know. She signed.
A few minutes later, as she started on the road back to the farm, Maud turned the few remaining possibilities over in her mind. With luck, her sister in Ponyville would bring help before Maud's plan had to be put into action. And there was business to settle with another sister, for Holder's journal had said something else:
Ϸe Eville abideϸ not in the air for long:—
It takeϸ soon a mortall Vesselle.
* * *
Maud knew how to approach Marble: from just the right angle so that Marble could see her, but not head-on. It was important to give neither of these predatory impressions—that of one sneaking up from behind, or marching up from the front to issue a challenge. Maud naturally walked with a slow, measured gait, and others wishing to approach her youngest sister found it a useful thing to imitate. But while it was usually best to begin conversations—if one could call them such—with pleasantries, Maud decided to open with what she judged Marble most wanted to hear.
"I forgive you."
Marble gave a quiet gasp and focused her gaze upon a loose stone near Maud's hoof. But she did not bolt.
"I'm making a lot of progress putting Holder's journal back together. I think I can save most of it."
Marble nodded almost imperceptibly and made a little sound of acknowledgement low in her throat.
Now came the difficult part. Maud had considered her words the previous evening, slept on them, and reconsidered before approaching Marble.
"I think everypony else will too, if they haven't already," she said. "I know they're not me, but I think they would anyway."
Marble said nothing. Maud waited only a moment before pressing on.
"There's something I've wanted to say. I've met a lot of different ponies at the university, and it's made me realize how lucky we are. We've never had much money, but we've always had each other." Maud knew how trite the words sounded out loud. And yet... "Some of them say they prefer friends, because those are the family you choose. So if you can rely on the family you didn't choose, you're lucky. That's why I would do anything for you. And I know Mother and Father feel the same. Do you understand, Marble?"
A slightly deeper nod, a slightly higher "mm-hmm," and a little smile from Marble. But most of all, she met Maud's gaze as she did these things. Those who did not know her might not have noticed, but it was enough for Maud to know her sister really did understand.
Maud smiled.
* * *
Maud awoke.
This time she did not drift to wakefulness, but snapped alert when she saw the moonlight—weaker now, for it was waning. She sat up and looked to the bunk at her right.
Marble was gone.
Maud leapt from her bed, reached beneath it, and retrieved a small stoppered bottle whose contents she had mixed upon her return from the town. In seconds, she had thrown its carrying-strap over her neck, bolted down the stairs, and thrown open the north door.
Holder's Boulder was gone. Beneath where its egg-dome normally stood against the night horizon, a long, low, jagged silhouette of stone cast toothlike shadows in the moonlight. At its middle there was a gap where the light shone through, and in this strip of lit ground, Marble Pie stood still.
But something else moved.
Maud blinked, trying to focus. The indefinite thing that rose up from the Boulder's jagged remains—for that is what they were—did not stand against the dim light, but filtered it, as smoke or cloud would. But it was neither of those, for despite its pulsing and flexing, and extending and retracting of shapeless appendages, its dark grey amorphous form held together.
"Marble, get away!"
Though Maud cleared the field's length as fast as anypony coming to a loved one's aid, it seemed to her that she was nowhere near fast enough, for the thing had already begun to stretch itself longer and narrower—reaching toward Marble.
Just as the thing drew to within a foreleg's reach, Maud slammed bodily into Marble—not from behind, but from the left in a blow that threw her rightward to the ground. Maud stood tall in Marble's place and faced the translucent mass, just as it attacked.
Though the miasma struck out with a violent thrust of appendages, Maud felt no physical force. Where it touched her flesh, there was a profound chill, a sense of weakness, and a tingling ache of the sort accompanying the loss of circulation to a limb. It crept through her—across her skin first, then down her limbs, through her innards, into her brain.
At first, Maud did not struggle. She allowed the thing in more and more as it shrank in her vision, waiting until the last of it vanished into her chest. There came to her mind a notion, which put into words might have said: Move now. We must find more living beings.
It was then that Maud pushed back.
If she had tried to force the thing out, or fought for control of her whole body, she would have lost. Instead, she willed that her right forehoof reach to the bottle at her neck. There it was. Now, against the urging of the growing noise in her head, came the inch-by-inch struggle of lifting it up, pulling out the stopper with her teeth, and swallowing its contents in a single gulp.
Maud's last thought was of gladness that the thing had blunted her senses, for as it was, the concoction seared her throat as it went down. Worse was the ensuing absence of any feeling, or even sense of being, which now began in her gut and grew outward.
Inside her head, a voice not her own screamed in rage.
* * *
Six sets of hooves trotted from a train's steps with the momentum of purpose. Their owners did not wait for any reception, but turned south, led by one who knew the way.
Holder's Farm was not far by air, but the craggy landscape necessitated a winding path that curved south from the station, turned, and approached the Farm from the south. As the six drew near, their paces quickened. One broke from the others, galloped to the south porch, and hammered upon the door.
Silence.
No—a keening wail, distant, drifting upon the still autumn air. Six pairs of ears swiveled to catch its direction. It was the foremost pony who moved first, galloping around the house and toward the northern field.
There, the two halves of what had been Holder's Boulder lay bowl-like upon their convex sides. As the six visitors drew near, five more equine shapes grew clear in their vision.
The first was a middle-aged stallion, who leaned back against a small hillock, staring forward and barely drawing breath. All spirit was gone from his eyes. Near the ground between the Boulder's halves, three mares wept—the youngest silently curled on her side, the next-elder futilely hammering her forehooves upon the earth, and the eldest screaming anguish to the heavens.
In the midst of these stood a fifth figure, grey and still. As the visitors stopped before it, their expressions changed from shock, to confusion, to utter horror. For before them, its body twisted in agony and its face locked in a silent scream, was a perfect stone statue in the likeness of Maud Pie.