Maudlin
“You’re applying force to the gem at the wrong angle. Tilt your hooves thirty degrees clockwise around its surface normal and push forward.”
The first words she ever spoke to me came from a disembodied voice from behind me. I had lost the better part of an hour attempting to dislodge minerals for inspection, progressing slowly and accumulating sweat. Alone, in the dark depths of a cave, I had no choice but to obey.
One push in the specified direction, and the gray fell without resistance, nearly missing my startled hooves. In flight it rotated to reveal a concealed gemstone’s shining beauty. I shuffled it into my saddle bag, and turned around with a worn smile. “Thank you.”
The first time I saw her, she nodded at me, her face emotionless. With a beige coat, stubborn lips, and an unstyled mane, she was no pageant’s radiant flame, but among rocks, surfaces deceive.
Silence grew in the air. I wrinkled my brows, and as she avoided my gaze, I stretched out my foreleg. “My name is Rose Quartz.”
She eyed my hoof, but made no contact. Eventually she responded with a deadpan, “Maud Pie.”
Apparently satisfied, she nodded once more, turned, and trotted away.
I entered the cave before the sunrise, aware that the season’s weather would interfere with daytime research. As a faint click-click grew louder, I realized I was not alone.
A faint smile tugged at my lips as a familiar earth pony entered my field of view. She stopped her work to greet me, neither facing me nor speaking, the pause sufficing to acknowledge my hoofsteps and welcome my presence.
“You’re up early,” I observed. She did not reply in words, but why would she? As I discovered, she reserved speech for the far and few between moments closest to her heart.
Sometimes we spent hours side by side, and she would not speak a word. I confess I cannot say the same of myself; the quieter a pony is, the more she can listen. A wiser pony would have pondered the asymmetry, but Maud was wiser than me.
I sat beside her, and her ears tilted back. She resumed tapping at the crystal between her hooves, each sequence of clicks splitting it up to reveal fractal symmetry. She arranged the pieces in front of us at evenly spaced intervals. “A crystal lattice,” I remarked.
She nodded, and flashing a slight mischievous grin, she said, “Not just crystal.”
I paused, watching her work breaking up and placing the next piece, mulling over her comment in my head. Just a lattice? My eyes darted over the grid she formed with the pieces, and it clicked she was replicating the molecular structure on the macro scale. “A mathematical lattice, then. An abstract structure with an intuitive geometric interpretation”.
Another nod, any trace of mischief gone along with all but the faintest trace of emotion. She turned towards me, although she kept her eyes glued on the wall of the cave beside me. “Nopony could count every atom of the smallest gemstone, but everypony can understand a grid. What seems like infinity in the natural world is nothing more than the simplest pattern replicated at every integer scale.” She paused. “There is beauty in that.”
For everything about myself I freely shared, and every question I asked to trivial one word replies, Maud only ever asked me a single question.
“Why are you here?”
I did not reply at first, baffled by the question. Was this an academic inquiry about my rock-related research interests? A philosophical musing about purpose in life? I had no baseline for Maud questions.
“Ostensibly, to study rocks. I’ve been exploring the town’s caves for years. I once tried my hoof adventuring away from home, but throughout the crises – first Nightmare Moon, then Discord – I realized there’s no place for me all alone. With my family in town – with you in town – there’s no place I’d rather be.”
I caught no emotion as she digested my reply and sealed my fate.
“My exploration here is temporary. My research for my Rocktorate requires exploring across Equestria. After a few more weeks here, I’ll be heading off to the caves of Our Town.”
It was my turn to nod and wait to digest the statement.
I stretched those few weeks of togetherness, but the calendar caught up. On the outskirts of town, I laid eyes on a familair mare with a packed saddlebag.
“Maud?”
She turned, expression illegible, sharply contrasting my bleeding emotions. “Do you have to go?” I whimpered. She nodded. “Could I… could I come with you?”
She shook her head, kicking the dirt as she sighed. “Life needs me to follow the rocks, but life needs you to follow your family. Our paths are intersecting but not identical. Don’t give up your life to chase after somepony else’s.” She opened her saddlebag with her mouth and fished out a small piece of quartz. “For you.”
From the pinkish tint I recognized rose quartz. Tears flowed freely as I confessed, “I love you, Maud.”
The stillness of the silence that followed wrung my stomach. After the eternity between heart beats, she shifted. “Okay.”
I wished nothing more than to hug her, cuddle her, kiss her, dedicate the rest of my life to loving her. Occupying the nebulous territory between family and friendship, love and desire, the wish never left me, lurking in the backrooms of my brain up to the present.
I wished to chase after her and let that night mark the first of many in a love story.
Some wishes do not come true.
She turned to me and pierced my eyes with hers. Despite the gravity of the moment, I was far too in love to feel anything but transfixed by the first time I saw her beautiful irises. “Good luck, Rose Quartz.”
She nodded and trotted away, her posture a bit more slouched and pace a bit slower than I had ever seen.