“Found anything interesting?” the bicorn lord, Sastrugi asked his serfs. Their dejected looks told him all he needed.
The areas they explored now, so far from his “kingdom”, were foreign and untouched by their hooves. Old ruins of cities from before the polar storms had hit, surrounding the landscape in snow and burying it for nearly two centuries. His crew would dig, find treasures of the past - toys, jewelry on skeletons, the occasional intact piece of pottery or house - and bring them back with him. Collecting the strange was Lord Sastrugi’s past time, after all.

Today was no exception, supposedly. They had found the remains of fence posts and stone buried under layers of snow; the stronger knights dug their hooves into the ground to find the edges of the old world. the bicorn trotted through and used his magic to map the ground. However, beyond an occasional tossed stone or two and what looked to be remains of markers, this particular area seemed desolate. Taking out his map, the king made marks and followed the edge of what was once a fence, mumbling to himself. A graveyard? Unattached to a church, no doubt, or had a mountain or glacier moved over it?

How pointless. Graves and bones would do nothing for him, and mausoleums only held importance to those who remembered the faces etched in the walls. This hadn’t been established land in a while, and perhaps in a few decades, Lord Sastrugi could build this way out… and just as a graveyard by itself was useless to him, a full one was even more so. He decided to repave this place, demolish it, and leave it for another historian to fit the puzzle together. Dead ponies were worthless ponies.

He was just about ready to shove it into the bottom of his priorities and summon the knights to leave when Pigeon Toed spoke up. “The snow’s moving!” the unicorn squeaked.

His twin, Crows Feet, narrowed his eye and held his wing over his head. “No, something’s coming out.”

A green hoof erupted from the snow just then. Putting away his map, Lord Sastrugi approached, and soon the hoof became plural as a unicorn… no, alicorn dug herself from the snow. Her eyes were as green as jade, her fur pale mint, her hair soggy and brown. She pulled herself mostly free, a tired and confused look on her face.

Lord Sastrugi contemplated only for a moment. He was a bicorn, sure; but everyone knew a true kingdom was lead by an alicorn.

… “Perhaps,” Sastrugi mumbled under his breath, “a dead pony isn’t so worthless after all…”