Why?

by The 24th Pegasus

Rating: teen
Tags: Original Character, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, Slice of Life, Sad
Length: 4304

As an orca pony swims one night among the fiery monuments of a global conflict, she finds a sailor freezing to death in the arctic cold. She has only one question for him.

I have lived my entire life among the ice at the top of the world with my pod. I knew little of the world outside of the ways of We of the Sea, and as a filly, that suited me just fine. But one day, the steel whales came, and on their backs, they carried creatures not unlike myself, yet wholly different. For while I swam in the sea, they walked on the land and flew through the air. Yet they reminded me of my kind, so curious, so tragic, and so infinitely precious. Where they did not understand, they sought to learn with a foolish stubbornness. Where they wandered far from home, they extended their hooves in friendship.

Where they waged their wars, they fought with a violent savagery that was frightening to me.

As I held a dear friend close, the breath fleeing from his body, I only wanted to know one thing.

Why?

Cover art and inspiration by JhonnyRebel. Pre-reading provided by djthomp.

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Russian translation of this story can be found here, courtesy of NovemberDragon!

Published 2017-02-19 23:10:01 UTC
Last updated 2017-02-19 23:10:01 UTC

We of the Sea

Why?

The 24th Pegasus

I was only a filly when the first of the steel whales swam through our waters. My people watched them with awe and fear, flattening our ears at the horrible rumble that carried across the surface and echoed off the ice. The Matriarch kept the pod away, saying that they were dangerous. We would watch them skim the surface of the water when we came up for air, yet we always stayed at a distance. They were taller and longer than any whale I had ever met, and they spewed black clouds into the air from their blowholes. My friends and I would dare one another to swim closer to the whales against the Matriarch’s wishes, seeing who was brave enough to swim the closest. We’d follow their wake for some time, but even though we were faster than them, they never seemed to tire.

The steel whales were rare in those days. It would be many nights before we would happen to come across one, and whenever we did, I would pursue it in excitement and curiosity, but my fear would keep me far away. I had heard that She-of-the-Deep-Current had swam too close to one of the whales, and it had bitten her, almost killing her outright. Two of her friends were able to bandage her with seaweed, the only reason she didn’t immediately bleed to death. To this day, she bears the scars across her hide: a pair of straight lines on her left, and her dorsal fin crushed and flagging to one side. It was not a fate I wished to bring upon myself.

But as I matured, I felt myself becoming more and more daring. The rebellious teenage years made me forsake the Matriarch’s warnings, and every time I saw one of the whales I worked up the courage to swim closer. I began to notice their details, the pockmarks in their steely blubber, the heavy chains that hung from their nostrils. Their steel chins crashed through the roughest of waves, refusing to simply duck under the water and ride out the storms like I did. And on their backs, they carried great cities, towers of steel, within which I began to see creatures not unlike myself, yet wholly different.

They were smaller than us, shorter, and had four hooves instead of two and a set of fins. They bounced around on their hooves, and their tails were horribly deformed masses of hair instead of broad flutes and powerful muscles. Some of them could even fly like gulls! I watched in amazement from afar, and if I lingered too long, they would notice me and wave. I’d duck back under the water and swim away, suddenly feeling very uncomfortable, but the land-walkers never ordered their whales to follow. I would watch from beneath the surface as the steel bellies of their steeds would swim away into the horizon, and their thrumming would cease to hammer on my eardrums.

Time passed, and I saw more and more of the whales and their strange riders. Bigger whales would paddle across the surface, carrying bigger cities and billowing more black clouds. Smaller ones, too, began to appear; the calves of their larger mothers, perhaps? These smaller ones moved with a surprising quickness, and I found it difficult to keep up with them when my friends and I felt the urge to race them. The whales started exploring the waters, too, no longer simply moving across the horizon, chasing or fleeing from the sunrise or sunset, but venturing into the ice floes at the top of the world.

They were clumsy there, and again, they refused to simply swim under the ice to get to where they were going. Sometimes I would pull myself onto a floe and watch the whales break through the ice with their metal jaws, leaving a trail of shattered white amongst the blue behind them. At other times, the whales would stop completely, and some of the land-walkers would crawl along the ice like crabs on the seafloor. They would slip and slide, and I’d laugh at their clumsiness. I began to see the land-walkers and their whales not as something to be feared, but a curiosity to enjoy. They were inquisitive and surprisingly stubborn, even when they kept slipping and falling over on the ice. They sung to each other in squawky flat notes like the chattering of the gulls, but they could be beautiful when they wanted to. While I would normally slip under the ice and reappear someplace else when they tried to approach me, one sung me such a beautiful melody as it approached that I almost forgot to disappear until it was nearly close enough to touch me.

But their curiosity hurt them too, like using a knife to pry open a clam only for it to slip and cut your hoof. I once found one of their small whales trapped amidst the ice, unable to find its way out. It had ventured too far into the floes, and the shifting ice had blocked its way out. I watched it from a distance, sitting there, unmoving, as the ice floes gathered around it. If it didn’t move soon, it would be crushed by two icebergs on a collision course with each other. Some of their flying land-walkers circled the whale, probably trying to figure out what to do. Before they could be crushed, though, I swam in close, much closer than I’d ever gone before, poking my head out of the water almost immediately in front of the whale’s steel nose. Though I didn’t understand the language of the land-walkers, I splashed and sung to them until I had managed to catch their attention. When I saw them watching me, I swam toward a hollow floe off of the right of the whale and crawled onto it. They didn’t seem to understand me at first, so I slapped my flute against it several times, causing the thin ice to collapse a little bit. I kept crawling and slapping until they finally understood what I was trying to tell them; I saw the black clouds rise from the whale’s blowhole and it began to follow me, its steel nose smashing through the ice. After many minutes, the whale followed me into the open sea, and I heard the land-walkers on its back begin to cheer as the icebergs smashed together behind them in the space they used to be.

Two of the flying land-walkers hovered over the water near me, and I ducked halfway back into the waves in response. But they kept their distance, and I could recognize smiles on their faces, so much like my own. Like birds, they touched down on the ice next to me, and carefully approached. Their sharp voices grated my ears, but they spoke low enough that it was almost tolerable. Then one of them began to sing, and I felt myself drawn to their music and the happiness inside. The singing land-walker held out its hoof to me, and I hesitantly touched it with my own, flinching when it moved as if it was going to strike me. When it didn’t, I touched its hoof more firmly, and let the walker move it up and down in some sort of ritual. But, shy and confused at the sudden strangeness in my chest, I slipped back under the water again, leaving the whale behind.

But it didn’t leave in the days that followed, though it was more careful about the ice now. I came back regularly, and whenever I did, that land-walker that sang to me would always fly up with a new song. I began to feel comfortable around it, and I soon found myself crawling onto the ice floes and waiting for it to come to me. Though we couldn’t understand each other, we were able to communicate some in gestures, and just from being near it so often I learned that ‘it’ was a ‘he’. I gathered that he was the Patriarch of his pod, because the other land-walkers would come to him occasionally and say something in their language before leaving again to do things on the whale or the ice around it.

Underneath the heavy pelts on his hide, the Patriarch wore ornate decorations, shiny silver medallions and colorful ribbons. He would take them off and let me touch them, and I tied one into my mane and giggled when I looked at my reflection in the water. The Patriarch smiled, too, and he started giving me gifts whenever we would meet. Many of them were shiny bits of jewelry that I would play with and try on, and I’d show him the gold rings I’d pierced my fins with, offering them to him to touch. Sometimes he would bring me food, and after showing me it was safe to eat by taking a bite, he’d offer it to me to try. The things he gave me were sweet and succulent, surprisingly juicy and moist despite not coming from the sea. I would respond by offering him fish and kelp I’d harvested from the seafloor, along with clams that I would slice open in front of him to show that they were fresh. For some reason he didn’t seem to like the fish and clams that much, though he was polite and made sure to at least eat a few bites in front of me.

We tried to share our names with each other, but our tongues simply couldn’t make each other’s music. His was something short, choppy, and emphasized, requiring my tongue to move too fast and in alien ways to even come close to imitating. My attempts to teach him my name, She-of-the-Starry-Sea, ended with him making some sort of flat moaning noise that I would’ve taken offense to had he actually meant what he was saying. At least we didn’t need to know each other’s names to share our friendship, though it did make describing him to my friends in the sea a bit harder. Thankfully they understood more or less who I was talking about when I called him the Patriarch of his pod.

And then, one day, he left. I swam to my usual ice floe in the morning to see black clouds billowing from the steel whale’s blowhole again, and the land-walkers on its back were frantically moving to and fro and securing things down. The Patriarch came out to meet me one last time, and he offered me one of his medals to keep. When I finally understood that he was leaving, I slunk halfway off the ice as sadness gripped my heart. He saw how I felt, and I could see the hurt in his face; I think he’d been trying to tell me for a little while that he was going to be leaving soon, but I hadn’t understood him until now. He sung to me in a soft voice, and leaning over the edge of the ice, he pressed his lips against my cheek and stroked my mane. Blinking back tears, I pushed myself out of the water a bit to embrace him, and I nuzzled his neck for as long as I could before he gently pushed me away. He said something which I assume was a goodbye, and then he flew back to his whale, which began to rumble and swim a few minutes later. I slipped off my ice floe and followed the whale for a long time, but eventually I began to tire and I simply watched it go on without me.

Years passed, and I didn’t see the Patriarch again. I would return to the ice floes daily for almost six moons, waiting for him to come to me with a song, but he never did. Sometimes I would chase the whales, singing and splashing and trying to get their attention, but the patriarchs of those whales were not my friend. I knew he was out there, somewhere, but the sea is a big place, and I knew my chances of finding him again were as slim as finding a pearl buried somewhere in the seafloor.

In the meanwhile, the land-walkers raised all different kinds of whales. They kept growing bigger, and they started carrying boxes instead of cities on their backs, swimming in regular journeys across the sea. The cities on others became taller, and they grew more blowholes. They were deceptively fast for their size, many, many times the size of a baleen whale yet almost as fast as a charging shark. They carried big, flat boxes on their backs, and those boxes had steel tubes poking out of them. Some of the whales even learned how to swim from time to time; they were much smaller than their cousins, and usually rode at the surface, but occasionally they’d suck in water and dive surprisingly deep. If I stayed in one place for a moon, I was guaranteed to see at least twenty whales or more, where I used to only find maybe five when I was a filly.

I had already been a mother thrice over when I heard the cloudless thunder rumble over the water for the first time. Somewhere very, very far away, I saw flashes of light on the sea, and only after several breaths would the sound of thunder finally reach my ears. I floated at the surface for many minutes, watching the lights and listening to the thunder, until finally the noise stopped. In its place, a bright orange light erupted on the surface of the water, almost like a second sun, and a shockwave struck me in the chest along with a booming that almost ruptured my eardrums. I fled in a panic down beneath the water, and when I surfaced again, all was still and quiet.

The number of steel whales coming and going through the arctic waters increased dramatically in the moons following. Many of them were long and flat, carrying as many boxes as they could carry on their backs. Others were the towering cities of before with their flat boxes and steel tubes, and they traveled in packs like they were looking for something. Beneath the surface of the waves, the smaller whales prowled, and there was something menacing about the way that they moved and followed the flat whales. And often, late at night as I swam beneath the stars, I would hear the thunder and see the flashes of light somewhere on the horizon, an awful drum that troubled my heart.

One night, as I drifted through the waves, alternating which half of my brain to sleep, I woke to the boom of thunder close by. Jolted out of my rest, I waited for the right half of my brain to wake up before I started looking around. Within swimming distance, I saw a group of steel whales frantically fanning out, and in their midst, one of them began to keel over as orange light roared out of its city. Behind it, another blast of thunder shook the air and hurt my ears, and an enormous plume of orange and yellow light roared into the sky as the whale broke in two. I saw land-walkers jumping into the frigid arctic waters while the ones that could fly raced for the clouds. Their screams carried across the night, still except for the crashing of waves and the repeated booming of thunder from within the lit-up ships.

I pressed my hooves over my ears and dived beneath the surface, just trying to drown out the noise and the raw fear I could hear in the discordant screaming above. But below, I found only a trio of the small whales, their noses pointed at the flat whales on the surface. As I watched, one of them expelled a metal tube from its nose, which sped toward the underbellies of the whales far away. I watched it go, spewing bubbles in its wake, before it collided with the belly of one of them. I felt the shockwave pelt me through the water, and the tube made a bright flash of light where it hit the whale, throwing pieces of its flesh into the water all around it. When the bubbles dispersed, I could see an enormous hole in the whale’s gut, and water began to pour into it as it sagged deeper into the sea. And then, just like that, the submerged whales began to thrum again, and they started to move through the water, away from the others they’d attacked.

I surfaced again and watched the carnage in front of me. The first whale was already halfway submerged in the water, its nose reaching for the sky as it began to list helplessly. Pieces of metal and debris floated on the surface of the water, and even the very water itself was covered with that strange orange light. It was like the sun had woken up and decided to swim on the surface while the moon was still out, like it was jealous of the moon’s soft light. The faint blue of the ice floes had turned orange, harsh and flickering, an awful background to the cries of the drowning land-walkers.

I felt tears on my face, warm against the cold spray around me. Why had they done this? Why had the whales attacked each other? I’d seen the whales drown occasionally, usually in the worst storms, and I knew that the land-walkers could not survive in the waters like we could. But now the whales attacked each other, and the land-walkers were the ones who would pay the price. Even now, their screams and cries grew quieter as the whales just rumbled and popped on the surface of the water, occasionally adding another bright flash of light and a boom as they sank. Why would the whales try to kill each other, and kill all the land-walkers on their backs?

I drifted among the debris for a long time. Some of the land-walkers had found green things to float on, and they used sticks to push themselves closer together. I circled at a distance, wary of the little suns sitting on the water, but occasionally darting in to give a push to a green thing and help the walkers get closer together. They were shaking and their breaths made clouds, but they wrapped their legs around each other and tried to keep warm. Though they gave me some grateful nods, I didn’t stick around too long; there was something dark and thick in the water, and it tasted like poison and clung to my mane and hide.

But as I was leaving the land-walkers behind, I found one green thing all by its lonesome, on the other side of the groaning body of the first steel whale. Wondering how it’d gotten all the way over here, I swam closer and noticed that there was only one land-walker inside. It was shaking and its eyes were unfocused, and its mane was wet not only with the seawater but with blood. Its heavy coat was soaking wet, and it hung over the edge of the green thing like it was about to fall into the water.

My heart stopped as I got a closer look. It was the Patriarch, my friend I’d rescued from the ice floes. I frantically swam up to him and tried to help push him back into the green thing, knowing that was the only thing keeping him from drowning. But his limbs were locked stiff from the cold, and his mouth hung open, panting and dripping blood. It was like his entire mind had stopped working.

More tears fell from my face, and I wrapped my legs around his shoulders, trying to give him some support and warmth. The land-walkers didn’t have blubber like We of the Sea did, so even though I wasn’t cold, I knew he was going to freeze to death if nobody helped him. At my touch, he blinked, and I saw the faintest spark of recognition in his eyes. He mouthed something, too weak to even sing in his language, and he shuddered again. I could see the spark fading, dimming with the lights on the drowning whales.

I didn’t know what to do, so I merely held him close and tried to sing to him, like he’d done so many times to me. There wasn’t a particular song I sang to him so much as it was just pure emotion. I sang of sadness, regret, and remorse. I asked him why land-walkers could do this to each other. I asked him so many questions, so many things I wanted to know, but I never got a response. Soon enough, he stopped shivering. After that, he stopped breathing.

I stopped singing and just looked at his face. It was a perfect face, but it was confused and lost. He hadn’t understood what had happened to him; maybe he didn’t know the answers to the questions I’d asked him either. But it was peaceful. In his last moments, I’d been there for him so that he didn’t die alone. We of the Sea didn’t let each other die alone, and though we were from two currents of life, he was a creature of the sea just as much as I was.

I slowly pulled him off of the green thing and into the water with me. The gulls would just attack his body in the morning if I’d left it there. He deserved to be buried here, in the world I loved, and the world I’m sure he loved, too. So I took him down into the water and braided his mane with seaweed and clamshells. I scrubbed the blood out of his mane with hooffuls of sand and coral. And finally, I kissed him and let him go into one of the trenches we used to bury our dead. He drifted down so peacefully, so quietly. Too quickly.

The answers I sought did not come to me for many years. Thunder rolled on the horizon for many moons, and the sun danced on the water night after night. It seemed like every night the steel whales would battle, and every night the land-walkers would scream as they drowned. The Matriarch kept the pod away from our regular territory in the north, because the land-walkers had drowned it in their orange lights and their blood. But some nights I would surface only to see the sun on the water and the thunder booming over the open seas, and I would shudder and hold myself tight as I tried to imagine just how many land-walkers and whales would lose their lives tonight.

And then, one night, it was over. The thunder was quiet, and the night was dark and still. The flat whales moved freely to and fro, and the submerged whales no longer stalked them. Whatever had happened between the land-walkers to cause so much misery, it had ended. The seas were calm and peaceful again, and once more, I saw land-walkers return to the ice floes in their small steel whales, curious about the world around them. And whenever they came, I was there to guide them, to make sure that nothing bad befell them. I would sing to them, and sometimes they would sing back. Every time we shared those moments, I remembered the Patriarch, and how the sea had claimed his fragile body, and I would sing in his memory.

I spent the rest of my life searching for the answers, but found the questions less and less important. The seas were open and free now, and pain and agony did not tread their waters. I grew to be an old mare, and then Matriarch of our pod, without knowing the answers. And I was okay with that, because instead of finding them, I helped the land-walkers solve their own questions. Eventually, the land-walkers learned to sing our songs, and I learned that they called themselves ponies, and they all had names as beautiful and perfect as our own. Wake Rider, Periscope, Sea Breeze; so many beautiful names. And their whales were not whales, but machines that they forged, machines they called ships. The whales were not alive, and they were captained by their patriarchs, and the ponies worked together to keep the ship afloat. And I learned that long ago, there was a great war between two shores, and while they fought it on the land, it was decided in the ocean. The waters of my home weren’t safe from the carnage, and it claimed so many lives, so many pony lives as they fought and died for what they believed in.

I never understood it. I did not understand why the ponies fought. But at the end of my days, I learned that the Patriarch, my old friend, fought for what he believed in. He captained a destroyer, a great ship built to protect the others. And though his life was stolen that night, two of the cargo ships in the convoy were able to escape because his destroyer scared the submerged whales. I cried because he gave his life so willingly to protect others. As I would have given my life for my pod as its Matriarch, so too did the Patriarch give his life for his. It was beautiful.

And finally, after many, many years, I finally learned his name. North Star. From his birth, he had been destined for the seas, to lead his pod across them to safety. And in his death, he fulfilled his duty, and surrendered to the world he loved.

I wept, because I finally understood.