Chapter 1: Foal
YOH 1450: Colton, 50 years Before Luna's Return
High on the slopes of Mount Avalon, the multi-hued towers and white and gold spires of the City and Palace of Canterlot looked down on the green and pleasant hills of the Vale of Avalon, spread out far below. The towns and villages were strung out like beads along the lazy curve of the Crystal River, flowing from the fabled Far North, and the River Avalon, which rushed down from the mountain heights to join the Crystal. Far on the horizon, on a clear day such as existed this late autumn day, one could spy the great flood of the Muddy, flowing down from the Great Plains far to the West, which the Crystal joined south of the new town of Ponyville. Upon that confluence, the Crystal and Muddy merged to become the mighty Motherwater, which rolled down in majesty all the way to the embattled Gulf.
The mountains and rivers outlined and defined the Vale of Avalon. The mountains rose high from the more gently rolling hills. Those mountains were mostly bare, especially in late fall, but the hills and dales beneath were still quite green, though the trees were still afire with a speckle of late autumn leaves.
The rivers made the rich bottomlands wherein were the fertile farms that fed the national capital. A network of roads -- some of them even paved -- linked villages and towns. Along these highways rolled wagons, drawn by Pony teamsters or hired Oxen, bearing goods from settlement to settlement.
The rivers also served as highways. Along them plied the boat-Ponies, crewing rivercraft ranging from rafts and flatboats, all the way up to steam tugs towing strings of barges, and the queenly white or gaudily-painted shapes of passenger steamboats, paddle-wheels churning the waters. Smoke drifted across the river. The Century of Industry had well and truly come to Equestria, ushered in by the power of coal-fired, smoke-belching external combustion engines.
Steam had come to more than the riverboats. Across the Vale there snaked the steel webwork of the new railways, upon which crawled the puffing forms of steam locomotives, pulling trains of passenger and freight carriages. These had linked the lands more fully than they had ever been united for the thirty-nine centuries since the Cataclysm.
Steam locomotives were still a very new thing in Equestria; they had first been built but three and a half decades ago, on the Eastern Coast. There were many Ponies alive who remembered a time before they existed; who had never seen such an engine until well after they had found their Marks.
The railroads had grown in importance, displacing older modes of long-distance transportation. Their growth had been rapid enough, but the pace had become positively frenetic in recent years; under the lash of war.
For, three years ago, the Southern Coastal cities had risen in revolt, their leaders spurred on by a strange sect which conspired with the Formless, shadowy amorphous beings such as the Realm had never known, but which bore a dreadful resemblance to certain creatures hinted at in the legends of the fallen North-Realm. It was by far the worst war the country had endured for centuries: not since the chaos of the 13th century had so many Ponies fallen in battle, and the effort of waging this war strained every national fiber.
Just last year, a raiding army of Formless and their Pony minons had swept north and reached to the very gates of Canterlot. They had somehow managed to catch the Guard by surprise: the main armies of the Realm were fighting in the field far to the South, and only a heroic effort by Princess Celestia herself and a scratch force of citizen militia had managed to stave off disaster. Here and there, the Vale of Avalon still bore the scars of that attack.
For many centuries, Colton -- a town on the River Avalon, where the foothills began to rise northward into Mount Avalon -- had been a natural river-port, and terminus of the long-distance caravan trade. From there, the road wound up the slopes of the mountain to Canterlot herself.
At Colton, the goods were transferred to waggons which were better-suited to climb the mountain -- light carts pulled by athletic Earth Ponies, or Pegasus-drawn air-vans. Sometimes, these cargoes were bought and sold by merchants in the town; sometimes merely warehoused or carried from vehicle to vehicle. In either case, the Ponies of Colton made their living by serving this freight trade.
In the past few decades, Colton had becomme a major terminal of the railroads. It was here that Ponies and cargoes disembarked from the passenger and freight trains, to ultimately be carried to Canterlot. There were plans, eventually, to run the railroad up the mountain all the way to Canterlot, but these had been put on hold by the demands of the War. When this happened, no doubt, Colton would find new ways to profit.
The town had already greatly profitted by the coming of the railroads. A vast complex of intersecting tracks; of switches and turntables and platforms and warehouses, had grown up outside the old center of town. This was supported by a wide variety of hotels, from palatial to flop-houses, and a tremendous amount of new construction to support the workers and entertain both train crews and passengers.
Inevitably, this had meant slums.
One such slum was called the Steel Triangle. It was south of the main town, wedged between the railroads and the docks, bordered by warehouses and light-industrial factories. Here there were some shabby streets, inhabited by shabby Ponies, many of whom would do just about anything to earn a few bits. They both catered to and preyed upon the more middling sorts of passengers, and the railway-workers, whose hungers and thirsts were often of a rough and ready manner.
There were a whole class of Ponies living there who were criminals, or almost criminals, or whom at least considered criminality but a normal means of earning a living, even if they were not currently engaged in any illegal actions. There were cheap landlords and shabby hoteliers and flophouse-owners; saloon-keepers and pawnbrokers; dance-hall girls and outright floozies; many big surly stallions with no visible means of support, and -- far too often -- scrawny, sallow Ponies of all ages and both sexes, who plainly had not seen a really good meal in a while.
These Ponies -- a seemingly-limitless and persistent underclass, such as one finds in the worst parts of any large or rapidly-growing town -- did whatever it took to survive, as long as it did not involve any protracted intellectual or moral effort Those amenable to such self-discipline left the Steel Triangle as soon as they could afford better lodgings; for Equestria was not and never had possessed a strict caste system, such as trapped the deserving in hopeless poverty. Thus, good times or bad, the Triangle was a perpetually-festering cesspool of sin and misery -- pettier by far than the slums of a great city like Manehattan, but nevertheless sufficiently squalid and vile, on its own small scale.
One might imagine that this condition would have been relieved by the war, as the armies of Equestria were recruiting almost anypony who could be persuaded to get into ranks and push a pike or wield a crossbow or serve a cannon. One would be quite wrong.
The Ponies of the Steel Triangle were not particularly patriotic, though some would at times use patriotism as an excuse to do something cruel to a foreigner. Far too many were violent: but most of these would rather engage in petty thuggery than submit to military discipline and expose their own hides to harm from the weapons of the Gulf Rebels. Sometimes, they would enlist for the bounty, then desert at the first available opportunity.
It must not be assumed that the denizens of the Steel Triangle were monsters. Mostly, they were amoral, and somewhat greedy, and not very competent at surviving by honest means. This sometimes led them to acts of violence; most often, it led them to slowly abuse and degrade their own better natures, until they were not much better than the nastier members of less-favored species in their behavior.
Such it was, such it is, and such it ever will be, whenever and where-ever there be slums.
One such dweller in the Steel Triangle was Beryl Stone.
Beryl Stone had seen better days. An Earth Pony, she had come of a family who had split their efforts between root-farming and rock-farming in the Eastern White-Tails, within a half-dozen miles of the small town of Nickerlite. They had not notably successful at either enterprise, and young Beryl had sought success in the great wide world. She had gotten no farther than Colton, where her possession of youth and a solid sort of beauty, coupled with a certain absence of morals, had led her, at but fifteen, into one of the oldest professions.
Which in turn had led to her current situation.
Beryl was not really all that old. She was in point of fact but twenty-five, which normally would be fairly young adulthood for an Earth Pony mare.
But Beryl had plied her trade for the last ten years, and engaged in many of the associated vices. She had taken to drinking; to smoking; to riotous living even beyond the normal requirements of her fall. Experience had worn hard lines into her light-blue face, and the person who lived beneath her long, straight dark-blue mane was no longer even remotely innocent. Her trade had become rougher and rougher, a path of descent which even her sometimes muzzy mind knew would lead to no happy conclusion. She had dreamed of becoming the pampered mistress of some rich merchant; her reality was lifting her tail for a succession of off-duty railway workers and soldiers on leave.
Nevertheless she had seen one hope: the war itself. The war meant that Ponies swarmed through Colton; Ponies with too many bits clinking in their purses, lonely Ponies in need of company far from their homes. Beryl was willing to provide such company, in return for some of those bits. Which meant that, if Beryl used her money wisely, she might be able to lift herself out of the Steel Triangle.
Such was the theory. The practice was rather more difficult.
For Beryl liked the wild life. She had not left her mostly-respectable but boring life on the Stone rock and root farm to live a more expensive respectable but boring life in Colton. She liked to drink, she liked to sample various drugs, she liked fancy (and often terribly gaudy) clothing, and she liked to party, even when she wasn't being paid for it. This mode of life took money, and put her in mental states where she wasn't entirely careful about what she did with any other monies.
Admittedly, since the start of the war, she had made more money than she had ever seen before. The war had been mostly good to her, though there had been some terrifying moments when she hid from the Formless troops gliding through town on their way up Mount Avalon, in a manner that still sometimes gave her nightmares.
After that terrible time, though, reinforcing Royal Guards had garrisoned the town, and Beryl had earned money handsomely under the grunting bodies of their officers. She had made even more on the side, when she had helped some friends of hers fence some small valuable objects that drunken Guards had let go astray, and she seriously considered after that buying into a fencing operation. Briefly, the skies had seemed the limits for the ambitious and unscrupulous mare.
But then, as it seemed, cruel fate had turned against her. Really, as even she realized during the rare moments in which she was being honest with herself, it had been her own fault. She had gotten greedy, and in a manner that every Pony whore knew from the start was dangerous.
Like any other mare, Beryl spent three days out of every three weeks in her Cycle -- the period in which she emitted marescent and became extremely attractive to stallions, especially lonely, weak-willed drunken stallions. Like any mare who could afford it, Beryl normally used Suppressors to dampen her cycle, and like any mare with common sense, Beryl was normally very careful not to have unprotected sex on her Cycle, unless she wanted to conceive a foal. Which Beryl definitely did not want to do, especially not when it looked as if she was finally succeeding in her self-chosen career.
Her more normal behavior, in fact, was to drench herself in marescented perfumes when off her Cycle, but bathe clean, use Suppressors and mostly stay at home when she was on her Cycle. This ensured that she was sexually-attractive when there was little risk in her entertaining stallions, but less attractive (and off work) whhen the risk was greatest.
The thing was that, with all the troops in town for an unknown amount of time, which might end any day, Beryl was tempted to earn some extra bits. So, on her Cycle, she did not take Suppressors; she did not stay home; instead going out to entertain an especially large and rich party of Guard officers -- some of them Pegasi stallions, back from the front.
The next month, her Cycle did not come.
She knew what that meant.
She was pregnant.
She could have disposed of the child.
Abortion was always legal within the first trimester, often legal within the second trimester, and forbidden only in the last five months of a Pony's eleven-month pregnancy. It was true that some surgeons refused to engage in the process out of moral reservations, but it was also true that other surgeons had less scruples, especially as it was generally legal.
Indeed, in a neighborhood like the Steel Triangle, a mare with the connections of an experienced whore could find surgeons who would abort a foal even in the last five months of pregnancy, for a few extra bits to cover their legal hazards.
Yet Beryl could not bring herself to abort the child.
Why was that?
One might imagine that Beryl, despite her debauchery, was not quite so abandoned to common equine decency that she would kill her own foal.
One might well be right. Though Beryl had done things that most Ponies would consider worse; and would in the future do some things that Ponies would consider far worse, than procure a medically-unnecessary abortion, this was her own foal. Many mothers will abuse others or even themselves, before they will let their own foals be harmed.
Yet many otherwise kind and decent mares do choose abortion, when they find themselves about to become single mothers. They prefer their own well-being and future plans over the lives of their unborn children.
Indeed, sociobiology supports such a ranking of moral priorities. The mother has proven her fitness to survive; should her unborn foal seriously threaten this survival, spontaneous abortion is likely. Among technological sapients, such as the Ponies, this extends to social survival and artificial abortion. Such calculations, after all, are what drive Darwhinnian natural selection.
It is simplest, and probably most accurate, to state that in the winter of 1449-50, when Beryl found herself with foal, she simply felt like keeping it. She certainly did not think of her decision as morally based: she had long since concluded that morality was a lie told by hypocrites and believed by patsies.
One could argue the motive to be a sudden surge of decency from deep within her character. One might consider it the manifestation of a well-hidden heart of gold. One could even contend that it was the upwelling of a deep desire for reproductive success, subconscious but no less strong.
However, what was far more likely was that Beryl simply acted on a whim -- and then stuck with it.
Beryl was not particularly strong-willed, in the sense of choosing a long-term goal and perservering toward it in the face of adversity. Had she been a strong-willed, long-term thinker, she would never have picked her profession, nor stayed so long in the Steel Triangle; she would at least have worked her way up to become a pampered Canterlot concubine, rather than a working-class whore.
However, Beryl was wilful, in that she quite commonly chose courses on sudden impulse, then stuck with them even against the best advice, provided that they didn't involve too much active effort on her own part. This tendency had been the despair first of her own farm family, and later of a succession of Ponies who attempted to aid her in her chosen profession.
Equestrian pimps and madams are limited to persuasion rather than force, and when Beryl got in a certain mood, she could not be persuaded to change her course. In some ways, she actually might have done better in a crueler culture than the one in which she found herself.
In the end, Beryl always did just as she pleased. And in this case, what pleased her was to bear a baby.
So she decided not to abort.
Beryl formed her design in the early months of her pregnancy, when it was still easy, with only the cessation of her Cycle and a number of odd hormonal changes to bear. Beryl but dimly grasped the theory of what was happening to her, even when the doctor explained it to her -- she had never been the brightest or best-educated of Ponies.
However, she had seen her mother go through more than one pregnancy, and she knew in general the sorts of things that were likely to happen. And she had been a tough farm filly, and was still stoic in some crucial ways. She was thus, not as shocked or bothered by the changes in her own body as might have been more sheltered mares, carrying their first foals.
During those first two trimesters, Beryl went about her business little-impeded by the developing foal. She continued her whoring, at first scarcely slacking off, and her bank account grew from the contributions of her military clients, for the Guard garrisoned Colton for a while, fearing future raids from the Formless. Beryl felt certain that she would keep on making money hoof over hoof, or, more accurately, tail over rump, for the duration of the war.
Things did not work out that well.
The first bad news came when the troops were called away from Colton, back to the front. Only a company remained as a detachment to guard the town. Suddenly, the whores of Colton found their services much less in demand, and were forced to turn back to railworkers and transients.
This development should have been predictable to Beryl, for the troops she entertained constantly talked to her about military matters, to a point that would have alarmed the Guard Watch had they been fully aware of it. But Beryl paid little heed: she was in an optimistic mood, and had always been good at self-delusion to convince herself that matters would turn out for the best.
The next bad news was even more predictable. As she got farther into her second trimester, and her fetus grew in size and appetite, she began to get sick more, eat more, and generally slow down. What was more, the baby began to show: her belly started to swell, and to her dismay, Beryl discovered that most stallions found her less sexually-attractive.
For these reasons, Beryl's income dried up, while her cost of living did not change. She spent less time carousing, but her own appetite increased, and she developed cravings for delicacies. She often found herself simply sitting alone in her room, entertaining herself as best she might. It was increasingly difficult to get comfortable, and she always felt like she had to use her chamberpot.
Her formerly-ample bank account was dwindling at an alarming rate. She knew she had enough to tide her through birthing, and for some months after, but the episode was eating up the funds she had hoped to use as her stake to rise in the world. Beryl was not a prudent Pony by any means, but she began to worry about her financial future.
By the third trimester, she was starting to regret her decision to keep the foal. Of course, by then it was too late to get a legal abortion, and she with good reason mistrusted the doctors who would be willing to perform illegal ones. Besides, she was still stubborn, and getting a late-term abortion would be both costly and mean admitting to herself that she might have made a mistake.
So matters dragged on into the fourth and final trimester. Among Ponykind this was for the obvious reason called the "birthing trimester," and it was normally an abbreviated one, lasting only an average of two months.
By the eleventh month of her pregnancy, Beryl was more than ready to bear her baby and reclaim her life. She figured that within the month after that, she could again pick up her professional activities, and thus easily pay for some filly to tend her child while she helped lonely stallions enjoy their stayovers.
The eleventh month wore on. And the child still did not come.
Beryl was first annoyed, then alarmed. She spent a good portion of her remaining funds on as reputable a doctor as she could find willing to treat her.
It was not until eleven and a half months of pregnancy that her contractions began, and this because a worried obstetrician, aided by a midwife, decided to induce labor. The birthing lasted almost a whole day, and was extraordinarily painful -- far worse than anything she had ever seen her mother endure. The agony became so intense that they anesthetized her; carefully, for too much in childbirth might kill the baby.
On November 11th, YOH 1450, Beryl Stone, aged 24, was delivered of an exceptionally large and heavy-boned foal. The bluish-gray infant, the first wisps of a dark gray mane wet with the afterbirth, opened its black eyes, bawling and thrashing its little legs about lustily, as is the nature of healthy Pony newborns. The obstetricial team smiled, breathing sighs of relief, at this welcome sight.
On the Primal Plains, Proto-Pony foals would have been able to stand up and walk with their herd within an hour or two, a necessary ability to avoid falling prey to hungry carnivores. In the Colton Hospital, such physical perfection was less necessary, but was still desirable.
They put the newborn in Beryl's forelegs as she came out from anesthesia. She blinked groggily, and for the first time beheld the face of her foal.
It was clearly a Stone. Its muzzle and jaw, unusually square and heavy for a newborn, and generally bulky build, were exactly like that of Beryl's father and brothers.
"Ooh," cooed Beryl. "You'll grow up to be a big fine stallion, won't you!"
And it was obvious that her quickening had come from a tryst with one of those Pegasus officers. The tiny wings, fluttering uncertainly at its sides, made that obvious.
It looked like a big, healthy newborn colt.
Which Beryl realized was unfortunate, as her further examination of her baby's body made it evident that it lacked one important feature of masculinity, while possessing the equivalent feature of feminity.
"Holy shit! He's got a cunt!" exclaimed the new mother.
Laughter erupted around the room.
"'He's' a filly, dear," explained the midwife.
"Well shit!" said Beryl, squinting at her baby far less kindly. "She's the ugliest filly I've ever seen. Like some crap that fell off a rooftop!"
Sensing her mother's sudden hostility, the little filly cried out in complaint, for more than one reason. She was hungry, and now she was being rejected.
Thus did Rooftop Stone enter the world.