"Maud? Maud!? Where are you!?" Fault's panicked voiced echoed through the small cavern.
Cliff's eyes were scrunched tightly closed, a mask of concentration on his face as his horn glowed against the surface of the now dormant obelisk. "Kid, please be quiet! She's obviously not here," he grunted in frustration as Fault's fearful echoes bounced around the small, clearly Maud-free space. "Let me try to re-activate this thing!"
"WHAT!?" Fault squealed. "And get us sucked into oblivion too? Are you crazy!?"
"We can't just sit here and do nothing," Cliff rumbled darkly. His horn's corona pulsed, magic flowing around him and probing the glowing red sandstone crystal.
Fault blanched. "Seriously Cliff! Don't do this! The wild Everfree magic might interfere and cause something to explode! Or make this cave crumble! Or get us pulled into another disk of magic and ground into pony pancakes! Or-"
"Fault!" Cliff's voice broke through the miasma of panic. His piercing gaze caught Fault's shrunken pupils and held them steady. "You need to go for help. Fly back to Ponyville as fast as you can, and get in contact with the Princesses. Whatever this artifact is, it's clearly magical and I just don't have the expertise to understand how it works or how to operate it safely."
"But... but-" Fault hyperventilated. "She's just gone! How do we know she's even still ali-"
"Fault!" Cliff shouted with the strength of an echoing rock slide, forcing his panicking companion into momentary silence. "Maud needs our help. She needs you! Get the Princesses as fast as possible! Get going!"
"R-right. Okay. As fast as possible. I can do this." Fault breathed. A moment later, his wings buzzed to life and he streaked out of the cave in an ocean-blue blur.
Cliff let out a long sigh, then turned his attention back to the obelisk. "Wherever you are, Maud, just hold on, okay? We're coming. Just... hold on..."
Maud's breath came in short gasps as she reached the base of the aquamarine obelisk, partly from the heat, and partly from the mote of panic rising in her chest. She collapsed into the sand, catching her breath, her sides heaving as if she were running a marathon. She pressed herself into the side of the structure, hiding in the few hooflengths of shade it offered. It was the only place she could see for miles upon miles that had any protection from the merciless sun.
Taking stock of her situation, Maud slithered one of her hooves into her front pocket, and let out a breath of relief as she felt the comforting presence of Boulder still with her. She was grateful he hadn't fallen out of her pocket when she had spun through the portal. Other than her pet rock, she had very little to work with. She still wore her frock, now sodden with sweat, draped over her frame with suffocating pressure. Its dark navy color absorbed a substantial amount of heat from the sun, but despite her discomfort, she didn't dare take it off. While her gray coat could offer some protection by itself, the sun's piercing rays would still burn her skin quite badly if she was exposed for too long.
Besides that, she still had a small water saddlebag she had been sipping from throughout the expedition. The water bag was lined internally with silicone, forming a watertight seal, and had a thin tube that curved out from the underside and hooked onto the front. It was designed for hikers to turn their heads back and easily grab a sip on the go, which she had been doing ever since she had filled it when she woke that morning. By now, it felt considerably lighter. She eased the water bag off of her flank and opened the rubber nozzle to inspect what she had left. She frowned, a thorn of fear stabbing into her heart as she noted it was less than half full. She didn't have much more than a single glass of water left, and she was already feeling quite thirsty.
Maud stoppered the container and contented herself with a single, small sip. She would have to make it last as long as possible, since she didn't know how long she would have to endure this crushing heat. Despite resting in the shade, her forelegs already felt like they were spitted over hot coals. She glanced down to see the sunlight scorching her fetlocks. With a small gasp, she realized that her area of shade had shrunk to half its size. The sun was nearing its zenith, its light searing directly down on top of the obelisk, evaporating the small patch of relative darkness in which Maud cowered. Soon she would have no shelter, at least until the sun moved on and began to set.
With a grunt of exertion, Maud pushed herself to her hooves. Now was not the time to sit around, allowing the heat to sap her strength and drain her water supply. She needed to act. The turquoise obelisk she rested against was the same shape and size as the one in the cave, so perhaps they were connected somehow. Maybe she could open a portal back home.
Her hooves ground into the stinging sand as she trudged around the perimeter of the monolith. As she rounded the corner of the shaded side, her aching eyes fell on an inscription embedded in the turquoise stone. She quickly scrabbled to the center of the obelisk's base, and squinted her eyes at the bright aquamarine surface. Her breath caught as she surveyed the symbology.
It was the same two elegant alicorns, the same sinuous dividing line, but the celestial bodies were reversed. The moon now rested at the top of the circle, an enlarged crescent with solid lines of power emanating from it. And below, a small, dully carved, simple circle depicted a dim sun.
The massive, blazing sun above seemed to laugh at such an idea, searing her frock, face, and fetlocks as she examined the inscription. It didn't make sense! The moon held aloft above the sun? The only two times that had ever happened in history had been during Nightmare Moon's two incursions. How did that explain these dunes? Or the other obelisk? Or the blinding heat? Anything that was happening?
Maud quickly turned away from the monolith. She needed to figure out what had happened and how to get back, preferably before her insides cooked or she ran out of water. Her bleary eyes fell on a small, tapered object resting in the sand a dozen hoofsteps away. A quiet surge of relief flowed through her as she recognized it as the core sampling drill. It must have been sucked through the portal behind her after she dropped it, and she hadn't noticed it resting on the other side of the obelisk. If it got her here, surely it could get her home.
She stumbled across the short distance to the drill and grabbed it in her mouth, before letting go with a wince. The burgundy mouth grip had only been resting in the sun for a few minutes, and it was already hot enough to give her lips a painful burn. She had to make do with her hooves, nudging the drill across the sand as fast as she could muster, digging a rough furrow behind her as she went.
Maud dragged her lifeline around to the shaded face of the obelisk. She picked it up in shaking hooves, silently grateful that whoever was in charge of the design department at Rock'd Inc. had deigned to paint their product a bright, reflective green that didn't absorb so much heat. She quickly bit into the mouth grip, cringing as her lips felt the heat radiating from the activation rune. The device whirred to life, and she pressed it as hard as she could into the same back corner of the trapezoidal face as she had back in the cave.
The turquoise turned out to be just as dense as the sandstone. It took her several painstaking minutes to push the drill a half inch into the material, not helped by her quivering and heat-exhausted weakness. She had to reset the position several times, letting out a quiet whimper of frustration on the third try, before finally getting traction. She reminded herself that the portal had activated after she had drilled only a half inch into the red sandstone in the cave, so she just had to hold herself steady for a short while.
But as she drilled ever deeper, past half an inch, three quarters, a full inch... nothing happened. Maud clenched her teeth, failing to hold back a groan of panic. Her breath heaved with effort, a bellows forcing the air of an active forge into her lungs. She made a split second decision to abandon this section of stone, and spent several more agonizing minutes shuffling to the opposite side of the obelisk. Maybe this world was... reversed somehow, and she'd be able to activate the monolith from the other end.
She figured out a more effective way to carry the drill, slinging it across her back and tucking the lime green portion through the neck of her sweat-drenched frock. Her entire coat had become matted and sticky, as if she had taken a shower in molasses. Her gasping breaths came quickly in a fruitless attempt to reduce the amount of burning pain in her lungs. After setting herself into position, Maud pulled the drill out of her frock, and spent the next several minutes trying to get the drill bit aligned properly. Her sloppy motions and panicked speed forced her to restart a full seven times. Yet after far too long and far too much strength spent plunging the drill an inch and a half deep into the aquamarine surface, Maud wailed in frustration and terror as she realized this wasn't going to work.
She let the drill fall to the sand. A moment later, her flanks followed it. She sat numbly, trying to process what had happened and what she could do. Where had the red crystal obelisk sent her? How had it formed the strange portal in the air? Why wouldn't the turquoise obelisk send her home, away from this hellish, empty desert? Her mind was swimming with questions, and Maud was too overwhelmed to answer any of them. So she did what she always did when her emotions threatened to spill out of her. She closed her eyes and began to breathe slowly and deliberately. It took considerable effort to direct her attention away from the scorching air, the searing sun, and the fluttering fear in her chest, but after a few minutes she felt more centered and the fog cleared from her mind.
Only one question really mattered. Should she stay here and wait for rescue? Or should she leave and search for help and shelter?
Maud looked out over the vast desert surrounding her. There wasn't a single landmark to be seen. No roads, no buildings, not even an outcrop of rocks greeted her eyes. She was in an utterly empty wasteland, with no clear direction to search. Yet she was growing increasingly certain that waiting for rescue was futile. She could hide in what meager shade the obelisk offered, but the blinding sand would still reflect the sun's rays, while the air would continue to burn her lungs from the inside out. She wouldn't last much longer here than she would trudging through the dunes. Fault and Cliff probably were looking for her, but she doubted they would know anything more than she did about how to activate a magic portal. If they went for help, it would take at least a few days to get any magical experts out to the remote ravine in the middle of the Everfree Forest, and by then she could easily be burned to a sun-bleached husk. As much as she disliked the idea, she knew there was only one course of action.
From the inscription at the front of the obelisk, Maud dragged her front hoof deeply through the sand, cutting a furrow straight outward. She slowly scraped out a large, sloppy arrow pointing directly away from the turquoise face, then stood at its tip, inspecting her handiwork. If rescue did miraculously arrive, hopefully whoever it was would follow the arrow and catch up with her.
She did a final check of her inventory, the core sampling drill tucked into her frock, the water bag cinched around her barrel, and her pet rock securely in her pocket. Maud hesitated for a long moment, her hoof hovering above the sand, waiting to take the first step. She looked back at the aquamarine pillar, and a pang of longing swept through her. For once in her life, Maud didn't want to go on an adventure. Pinkie's smiling face filled her mind's eye, offering her a glass of lemonade and a cupcake. Her laughter flowed past Maud's ears, a fresh and cool, loving breeze. A moment later, the image evaporated in the heat, and Maud sighed. Her hoof pressed into the sand as she set off into the empty desert.
The blinding white sand glared harshly into Maud's shaded eyes, yet cushioned her hooves with surprisingly soft steps. The particles were of a finer grain than any beach she had ever stepped on, not quite as fine as powdery flour, but softer than Pinkie's floor when she spilled a bag of raw sugar in an attempt to craft a new rock candy recipe to share with her sister. The memory turned up the corners of her mouth for a little while, despite the flare of pain that arose from her cracked lips. She longed for another sip of water, but she elected to hold off for just a little bit longer. Her thirst was not yet truly unbearable.
The surface of the desert seemed mostly flat from afar, broken up by small, undulating ruffles of sand here and there, but as Maud dragged herself up the side of a dune, she groaned with frustration at the difficulty. The sandy waves were much taller up close, and she had to ascend many dozens of hooflengths to reach the top of each one, before sinking down into the following small valley. After three dunes, she allowed herself another sip of water, which quickly became a gulp before she could stop herself. She savored the momentary relief that even a lukewarm mouthful offered.
Every dune hid another behind it. Maud trekked over dune after dune, leaving a trail of hoofsteps and sweat in her wake. She felt like she was swimming through a very slow ocean, her head bobbing up and down, up and down. Occasionally, as she crested a sandy ridge, she glanced behind her at the turquoise obelisk shrinking on the horizon. Having previously towered many hooflengths over her, it slowly shrunk to the size of a sewing needle, ready to weave the sand and sky into one connected canvas. Each time she looked, she felt a tiny hope fluttering in her chest like a miniscule moth, a hope that she might see an aquamarine disk floating from afar, a beacon of rescue. Each time the moth fluttered a little bit more weakly, nearing the end of its short span of life.
Maud continued trudging slowly for several hours. As time passed, sweat dripped, eyes burned, and hooves grated, she began to slip more and more into memory. An especially steep dune became the sloped side of Holder's Boulder. She could almost hear her sister Limestone Pie yelling at Pinkie to get down off of the precious egg-shaped centerpiece of the family rock farm. As she slid down past the crest of the dune, she saw herself rolling down the old minecart tracks in the crystal mine below the nearby limestone quarry. Her ears echoed with the timidly amused giggles of her youngest sister Marble Pie. The memories kept her mind away from the scorching sun and scalding sand, her painful thirst, and the slithering serpent of despair slowly constricting around her spine.
She was broken from her reverie by a blazing light shining harshly into her eyes. With a start and a small vocalization, Maud realized that she had been trudging west this whole time, and the sun was now setting in front of her. She turned her head to look behind, searching the horizon for the turquoise needle. Her eyes slid along the barrier between white sand and blue sky, and she couldn't find any trace of the obelisk. With a sigh of resignation, she wrapped her broken, bleeding lips around the nozzle of her water bag and sucked a few sips. An ice cold chill of horror slithered down her spine when her suction was met with pressure, indicating she had drained her reserves dry. Such a chill would have been a pleasant respite from the heat if it hadn't come from the fact that she was already out of water. She quickly let go of the nozzle and licked her lips. Eyes downcast to avoid the sun's blinding rays, Maud picked up the pace.
Every so often, she lifted her eyes to scan the horizon for landmarks. Each attempt was a letdown. The desert was empty, containing nothing except sand, heat, and pain. Each step caused her legs to slip in the sand, grinding painfully against the tiny yet tough grains and slowing her progress. Her hooves felt like they had been ground down to painful nubs. She imagined his must be what it felt like to experience erosion. Years of field work had accustomed her to long hikes and sore hooves, but being forced to walk for hours in a blazing desert was proving to be too much, even for her. Maud moaned quietly in pain, but didn't stop to rest. She kept on trundling up and down, cresting dunes and slogging through valleys, the pain in her hooves and joints an ever-present companion.
A growl startled her. Maud whipped her head around lethargically, searching for the source of the sound. A moment later she heard it again, and realized it was her own stomach. She idly recalled the last meal she ate, a few bites of grass she had grazed from the edge of an outcrop in the Everfree. Somehow the sensation of hunger was impossible to make out amid the torturous, hollow thirst crushing her from the inside out. A raspy sigh left her lips as she dropped her head once more. She could worry about hunger later, once she found a source of water. That was a much more pressing issue at the moment.
Lost in a dazed daydream about swimming in a Ponyville pond, Maud's hoof slipped on an especially steep sand dune. She stumbled in the parched powder, rolling onto her barrel as her sides heaved. She stared listlessly at the vertical horizon for several long minutes. As she breathed in the dry scent of the sand, she remembered through the fog rolling into her mind that white sand was usually made of calcium carbonate, implying that this parched desert used to be an ocean. A slow massacre of dead coral, broken shells, and diatoms, drifting lifelessly to the ocean floor for centuries, had eventually formed the sand that now grated her hooves and filled her vision with spots, reflecting the blinding sun. Eventually her puckered lips parted, and she dragged her swollen tongue across the dead diatoms, hoping in a fleeting part of her mind that some spirit of the ocean could provide relief from her agonizing thirst. Her wish was, of course, in vain. The marine corpses coated the inside of her mouth, sucking out any hint of moisture that was left. In that moment, Maud knew with cold certainty that she would soon share their fate.
Time seemed to pass in a blur. It could have been minutes, or hours, but when Maud again gained lucidity, the sun was in front of her, lowering toward the horizon. A massive red-orange smear, larger than the silhouette of Canterlot from Pinkie's bedroom window, her solar tormentor had begun to set, which offered a hint of relief. Her thirst, which she previously assumed to be at the limit of possibility, had somehow increased threefold. She wanted to wring her mind into a knot, just to enjoy the few drops of moisture that she could squeeze from the fog that overwhelmed her perception. Maud eventually found the strength to roll to her legs, and after a few minutes and a few tries, she managed to get to shaky hooves.
Just one more step. One more step. One more step. Maud repeated her mantra with single-pointed focus, following each mental statement with the actual motion. Her legs moved mechanically, following the simple instructions they were given. From a tiny corner of her mind, she knew she was delirious, but most of the lucidity she had left was dedicated to the simple, yet overwhelming task of taking just one more step. The fire in her joints had faded to a dull, comforting ache, and even her thirst seemed to have floated away into a vague cloud around her. Maud relaxed into a final jhāna of slow steps. The red-spattered dunes passed beneath her like ocean waves, painted by the setting sun.
Something twinged in Maud's consciousness. Something told her to come back to her body, to take control of herself once more, to look up. Too exhausted to raise her head, she lifted her eyes to the horizon.
Maud did a double take, a surge of energy flowing through her as she raised her head to look at a spot on the northwestern horizon. In her bleary exhaustion, she had almost missed a strange cluster of shapes. It looked like a set of pinnacles atop a mountain, just resting there in the sand. From this distance Maud wasn't sure if they were just rocks, or perhaps... buildings! She heaved an excited breath and began to trot towards the towers. If they were buildings, there might be ponies there! Ponies who could offer her water and shelter from the elements. Even if it was just a rocky outcrop, that could at least provide some shelter from these horrendous conditions. Maud suspected she would be inclined to head towards the sight even if it looked like an active volcano. She was absolutely sick of this empty, directionless desert.
After cresting several more tall, bleached dunes, Maud let out a wheeze of joy and relief. She could now more clearly see the cluster of buildings ahead of her. She was approaching a small town, and the hopes of safety and companionship sustained her and sped her pace. The next dozen dunes passed under her like waves at the beach, and before long she was approaching a sandy road leading into town.
The town was made entirely of sandstone, which wasn't terribly surprising, though Maud had no clue where the builders had quarried the necessary material. Strangely, the sandstone was a deep shade of orange, and it wasn't just because of the sunset light. Perhaps the sand was only white at the very surface, yielding more saturated colors of sediment deeper beneath the desert. The buildings were squat and cubic, stacked on top of one another and clustered together in rings. Many were capped with a tall, four-legged archway extending from the top, curving into a shallow covering. Maud guessed these must be something like balconies, but on the roof instead of the side of the buildings. The whole town wasn't more than a few acres; it would probably fit entirely within the Ponyville town center. Framing the road into town was a weathered yet elegant sandstone archway, unmarked and imposing.
As Maud stepped under the archway, her heart sank to her pulverized hooves. The buildings were utterly abandoned, and in a state of advanced decay. The desert wind had sandblasted the structures for years and years, eroding the walls and causing many of them to crumble under their own weight. The short streets were almost completely covered by sand, with chunks of cracked and weathered sandstone peeking through here and there.
Maud felt a wave of despair flow through her. Fighting it down, she reached into her pocket and pulled out Boulder, hefting him into the red-orange gleam of the desert sunset, taking comfort in his familiar weight. "Well, Boulder," she croaked, breaking the silence whether anyone could hear her or not. "I was hoping for other ponies, but we can at least find shelter here."
Her voice rolled softly through the dilapidated village. It joined with the quiet wind whistling through empty windows and gaping archways. Grains of sand blew smoothly across the road, creating a muted, subtle hiss. Maud found her pain and aching thirst recede, replaced by awe as she stepped over the bones of a dead civilization. As she wandered, her mind wondered. Who had lived here, and how long ago had they left? Why did they abandon this place? Where had they gone? There was nothing else on the horizon, no landmark to indicate where the residents of this hamlet might have traveled, or where she should head next.
Her next destination was very quickly chosen as she spotted a dilapidated water well in a clearing between several square sandstone huts. Maud's eyes widened at the sight, and she began to trot, then gallop. She drew up just before the well, her breath coming in gasps, hope filling her with energy. The well had once possessed a broad, angled sandstone roof, but time and erosion had caused it to collapse. It now covered almost the entire opening, leaving only a narrow window into the well. Maud put her eye up to the crack, and let out a strangled whoop as she spotted a shimmer at the bottom of the reservoir. She quickly crouched underneath the sandstone slab blocking her from accessing the life-giving fountain. Using every ounce of her considerable earth pony strength, she heaved.
Nothing happened.
Maud cursed under her breath, pulled the bulky drill from her back and laid it to the ground, then heaved again. Her back strained under the weight of the sandstone, but it didn't budge an inch. After several long seconds of effort, Maud collapsed with a grunt of pain and frustration. She regularly moved boulders three times this size with ease, and she couldn't understand how this relatively squat slab of stone seemed to be superglued to the top of the well. She was weakened from a day-long exhausting sandy slog, but it shouldn't have worn down her strength to that of a filly!
Maud tried everything. She heaved from every angle, pushing the slab from behind, pulling it from the front, standing on it and jumping up and down, even kicking the small crack in an attempt to break the slab in half. As the orange light faded to blood-red and the shadows of the crumbling buildings stroked the shelves of sand, Maud collapsed next to the impenetrable well. Her eyes rested hungrily on the small shimmer at the bottom of the pit. She had never craved anything in her entire life more than that sheen of water. Her lips began to tremble, and she let out several dry, choking sobs. Her eyes had no tears to offer.
Her head thumped to the sand beneath the well, and her gaze dragged along the dull grains until it rested on the fallen drill. Ears pricked and eyes wide, Maud felt a full, honest-to-Celestia smile stretch across her lips. She scrambled under the slab and grappled with the drill, pulling it up onto the well and positioning it against the crack in the sandstone. With a swift bite, the core sampler began to whir. The rotating teeth grinded as Maud pressed the cylindrical drill bit eagerly, desperately into the stone. She knew sandstone was a soft, sedimentary rock, formed from millions of sand grains melded together under heat, pressure, and time. It took no time at all to grind out a short cylinder from the malleable sandstone, and with only a single grunt of effort, Maud cracked the slab in two. As the halves fell away from the top of the well, she barked a wordless, parched cry of victory, disengaging the drill and shedding her water bag. She unlooped the rubber tube that carried the water to her mouth, and used it as a rope to dip the bag into the shallow water below.
The bottom of the bag splashed into about two inches of water.
Maud's victory yell shifted to a strangled cry of frustration. The mostly dry well taunted her with barely a trickle, likely the reason the ponies living here had left. She ground her teeth and began shaking the hose. After a few shakes, she managed to turn the water bag on its side, dipping the nozzle into the shallow water. Her ears pricked at the quiet glug, glug, glug of fluid streaming into the open nozzle. It was a dazzling sound. Maud smirked as she savored it.
The first droplets were the sweetest thing Maud had ever tasted. Her heart soared with elation as she greedily guzzled down the few gulps she had managed to salvage from the failed well. All too soon she again felt pressure within the hose that indicated she had sucked every drop from the water bag. Holding onto the hose, she dipped the bag back into the shallow well. This time, the nozzle couldn't collect more than a trickle. Maud shook it around, then pulled it back up, gritting her teeth.
She stood, surveying the road. A few hoofsteps brought her to a chunk of stone half buried in sand. With a heave, Maud dragged it to the well and dropped it in. It cracked once against the bricks on the way down, then splashed to the bottom, shattering into several large chunks. It was just enough to raise the water level ever so slightly. After pouring down several hooffulls of sand into one side of the shallow pool to boost the water just a bit more, Maud was satisfied, and she again lowered her water bag. This time she was able to fill it about a quarter of the way full. She wished she could fill it higher, but for now this was the best she could do. Any more rubble or sand and the water would turn into a slurry of mud. She hoped more water would leak into the well over time. Maybe not much more, but the water she had already found must have come from somewhere.
She still badly needed water, but the only way she could think to get more was to crawl down the well herself and slurp up whatever was left. She knew she currently didn't have the strength to climb back out afterward.
The sun had stayed red on the horizon for a long while. It was ever so slowly inching down, seeming to take longer than it should. Rays of rosy light stretched through the arches atop the buildings around her, both crumbled and intact. Jagged, yet elegant shadows danced along the surface of the surrounding dunes. By now the temperature had dropped quite considerably, from "sweltering furnace" down to "uncomfortably sweaty." Maud recalled that desert environments with little moisture had trouble holding onto heat, and cooled down rapidly once the sun fully set. She could easily be subjected to temperatures near freezing if conditions were poor enough, and at this point Maud was ready to expect the worst. It was time to find some shelter.
Maud poked her head into one of the more intact buildings. A hunk of sandstone sat in the center of a roughly square room. Sand had piled up in the corners of the coarse floor, lit in one corner by a beam of dim red light emanating from a hole in the ceiling. A series of worn gouges were illuminated leading up to the hole, used by countless hooves to traverse to the upper level of the building. Maud squeezed through the small opening that served as a door and ventured carefully into the cozy space. It was even cooler than the environment outside, though she wouldn't have called it less than warm if she hadn't had a whole day in an oven to compare to. She noted a complete lack of windows, likely to minimize sun exposure and keep the temperature bearable during the day.
The sandstone chunk in the room's center couldn't be a piece of debris, as the walls and ceiling of this domicile were still intact. Maud figured it must have served as a rough, simple table of sorts. As she inspected it in the fading light, she noticed a series of symbols carved into the russet sandstone.
Maud's breath caught. Most of the symbols were unrecognizable, but the second-to-last one, the one that looked like an angular number 8, was unmistakably the activation rune inscribed into the mouth grip of her core sampling drill! The sandstone chunk wasn't just a table. It was a runic device!
With trepidation, Maud lifted a quivering hoof and touched it gently to the activation symbol.
Flashes of purple light danced rapidly across the runes, reflecting eerily onto the walls framing the compact space. A moment later, the final rune in the sequence began to glow a dull orange. Maud hesitantly raised her hoof toward the light, and felt a subtle yet pleasant warmth emanating from it. As the rune glowed more brightly, she realized it must be a heat source. Perhaps the ponies who had once lived here had used this as some kind of runic stovetop. In perhaps the only stroke of luck Maud had experienced all day, she had activated the device just as the desert's temperature indeed began to drop sharply as she'd predicted. After just a few minutes, the night's newfound chill had been chased away by the rune's inviting orange glow.
Maud chose the corner furthest from the door and closest to the heating rune, before curling into a ball on the rough sandstone floor. She barely had time to register the discomfort of resting on such a flat, hard surface before a tidal wave of exhaustion crashed over her. Amid the broken bones of an abandoned town, surrounded by a brutal and confusing desert wasteland, utterly exhausted and overwhelmed, Maud eagerly let herself slip into blissful unconsciousness.