A Summer Feather
By OnlyInhuman
The brightness of the great orange sunlight that draped over the beach was eclipsed only by the brightness of the faces of friends at play. As the sun laid to rest in some forgotten place over the ocean, what remained of the receding waves lapped at the feet of a small band of fillies dutifully but fruitlessly filling the moat of their sand castle. In the world they lived in, time was null and all was well. Elsewhere, in the world of reality, however, many tired beachgoers were languidly packing their things. Exhausted or bored, the guests slowly left, the first stars piercing the sky like cracks in glass.
“Sweetie Belle!” An elegant, older female voice resounded amongst the crowd. One of the fillies at the sand castle quickly swiveled her head around to its source.
“Coming, Rarity!” she replied hastily. “Let’s go,” She spoke, turning to her two friends.
“Aww, now?!” Applebloom sharply asked.
“Yeah, now! Do you want to get grounded again?” Sweetie Belle said, returning the sting of Applebloom’s words as she began to walk up the beach.
“Hmph,” she complied for lack of a retort.
After one final look, two of the three fillies abandoned their creation and began to make their way up the beach with the other scattered beachgoers. Not a few moments passed until they turned back to see their friend still perfecting one of the towers, almost perfectly silhouetted by the falling sun against her back.
“Are you coming, Scootaloo?” Sweetie Belle asked, curious and concerned.
“Oh, no you guys go ahead, I think I’ll stay here for a little bit,” Scootaloo brightly replied.
“Ya sure? Your parents won’t be mad?” Applebloom inquired.
Scootaloo was silently still for a moment. She fidgeted her hooves about and her eyes nervously flit senselessly around. She had never gotten used to telling people about that part of her life, not even her closest friends.
“Ya know, I don’t think I’ve ever met your parents, Scoot,” Applebloom interjected.
“Yeah, me neither,” Sweetie Belle responded.
“Well, you see,” Scootaloo stammered, “I, well… I don’t live with my parents,”
“Really? Why?” Applebloom continued.
Scootaloo took a deep breath, and suddenly the words spilled rapidly over her tongue.
“They left a long time ago. I was told they’re going on a really long vacation and they’re not coming back, but they’re happy now, and they’d want me to be, too.”
Her two friends were dead silent for a moment.
“Oh, ok, well then won’t whoever it is be mad?” Applebloom said.
“No, they never care; they have other things to take care of.” Scootaloo told her.
“Well, all right then, see you later, Scootaloo!” Sweetie Belle exclaimed, waving as she walked away.
“Bye, Scoot!” Applebloom waved as well.
“Bye, guys,” Scootaloo softly said.
Once again, she was alone. She was in her own world, her own dreams. Nothing could touch her then. Nothing could hurt her now.
The tide was nearly out now, and Scootaloo’s mind snapped back to the task at hand. The last of the hoofsteps slowly died and fell away into the encroaching evening. The sky’s purple hues grew deeper as the sun fell beyond sight over the sea. A deep, calm sleep fell over the landscape. The waves bellowed their inhales and exhales in a celestial rhythm.
Scootaloo meticulously fashioned the finishing touches on her creation. She smiled with wonder as her imagination took form before her eyes. She could be whatever she wanted here. The waves would never judge her or attack her, and the rising moon would always shine its warm glow of approval over her own little dream.
The peace was shattered by a shrill cry. Scootaloo froze. She was not truly aware of how deep the silence was until it was broken. She listened. It came again, from not too far up the shore. She rose, with timid interest approaching the source of the sound, sinking slightly into the wet, cold sand with every step. It was a broken sound, soft, tinged with pain and desperation, like something sweet long since defiled, and it grew louder as she grew nearer.
Finally she arrived at what she heard was the source of the sound. She looked about, seeing not a single pony as far as she could see. The chirp came once more, pulling her attention to her front hooves.
There before her laid a bird obviously on the verge of death, crying helplessly into the night. Scootaloo gasped and stepped back. Its wing was bent backwards in an unnatural position. Several feathers lay strewn haphazardly near it.
After a moment, Scootaloo knelt down next to the bird. Sand caked its feathers, which were matted and fraying. Its breaths were short and shallow, sporadic and punctuated by increasingly weaker pleas for help.
Scootaloo hesitated for a moment. She knelt, at that moment a stone, a statue of shock, and the night air and cold beach froze her. She slowly reached out her hooves to the creature, shaking with cold and fear. When the tip of her first hoof touched the bird, it let out a shriek, sending Scootaloo’s hooves quickly away. But again she touched it, and this time it lay still, whether out of comfort, fear, or hopelessness. She cradled it in her hooves, its delicate body as frail as paper.
The bird’s breaths grew steadily more shallow, and its cries more faint. Scootaloo began to hyperventilate as she turned up her head to look about, letting the faint beginnings of a cry for help escape her before seeing that nopony was there to help her. She didn’t see a soul on that beach to offer a saving grace, only the blue-white glow of the moonlight draped over the world and the black shadows on the sand.
She looked again at this desperate creature in her hooves. Its dark eyes looked up to hers, it gasped, its gaze pleading to her to live, to let it live to see day again.
“Come on, come on!” Scootaloo pleaded
“Please don’t go, please, please!” she begged.
“You can do it, please, just lift your wings and fly! It’ll be okay, I promise. It’ll all be okay… please… stay with me.”
She was powerless, no matter how hard she tried, how much she begged, how much she wanted with all her heart to let it fly into the cold night air, she could not grant its last wish.
And she wept. The first tears, one by one, welled in her eyes and slid down her face, falling like stars on the sand, leaving a brief spot for a mere second before melting into the soil. She whimpered, her small voice cracking and choking in her throat.
“Please…” she asked one more time.
The bird only looked up at her face, wracked with grief and wreathed in a halo of stars. In an instant, the light left its black, beady eyes, and the bird in her hands became layers of skin, feathers, and bone. Scootaloo gasped, and for one more second the world was silent. Then the tears came again. They streamed down her face rapidly now, and her whimpers became sobs. She placed its lifeless body on the sand, pressed her front hooves to her face, and wept as her cries were swallowed by the infinite emptiness of the night.
On the spur of a thought, she began pawing at the ground, digging a small hole in the wet sand. After only a few moments, weeping still as she toiled, it was several inches deep. Acting quickly to avoid it filling with water, she cradled the body, wet with her tears, in her hooves one more time and placed it tenderly there. She covered it with sand, leaving a small, but visible mound. As a last thought, she walked up the beach a few yards, grasped in her mouth a stray leaf that drifted somewhere from inland, and placed it on the grave as the only suitable headstone she could find. It wasn’t as green as it once was, and it was torn on one side, but at just the right angle it caught the moonlight beautifully.
She stood up. She looked down at the pathetic grave she had fashioned, sniffling intermittently. She closed her eyes, and she never looked back. She walked into the emptiness, her numbness assuaged by not a single gust of wind or scattered, falling raindrop.