Featherflit's Narrow Escape

Chapters

Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8

Chapter 1

Featherflit’s outstretched claws closed on the dragonfruit. The squishy flesh gave beneath her talons, and she sucked in a breath. It was perfectly ripe. Saliva flooded her mouth as she looked at the pink and green rind, and her pale tongue touched the outside of her beak just once. Once she plucked it, there was no going back. She narrowed her eyes for a moment in thought, then shut her eyes and huffed air out through her nostrils. No. There was no way she was giving up now. She needed this dragonfruit. Her artistic career — no, her very self-respect — depended on it. She had come too far, invested too much, to turn back now. And she couldn’t wait any longer; she was all out of food. It was now or never.

Keeping one clawed hand on the fruit, Featherflit widened her stance. She bunched her hind legs and tensed her hooves so she would be ready to leap. She glanced up at the sky; it was a muted purple-blue today, with a few clouds scudding across the distant horizon. Clear weather. No wind to interfere with her flight. She spread her creamy-white wings as wide and as high as she could, all her power focused in her shoulder blades. She was as ready as she’d ever be. Time to pull the plug.

In one fast motion, Featherflit snatched the dragonfruit from its stalk. She shoved down as hard as she could with her hind legs, propelling herself into the air, and at the same moment she snapped her wings down. She was up! She beat her wings frantically, trying to push herself away from the earth beneath her as quickly as she could.

For a moment it seemed that everything was going well, that nopony had noticed. The dragonfruit was safe in her claws, she was gaining altitude rapidly — might she actually get away with this?
A tremor ran across the ground where Featherflit had stood a heartbeat before. The soil split and the earth groaned.

Featherflit was high enough now to see the whole island beneath her; not a large island, but grassy and round, with boulders scattered on the turf and a profusion of dragonfruit trees spreading their feathery fronds everywhere she looked. But the island was shaking, and the waves were growing in size. The water to the north of the island heaved and then a huge head smashed through the surface. The creature blinked its small black eyes for half a second. Then that monstrous head tipped back, its blunt muzzle was cracked almost in two by its gaping jaws, and it began to bellow.

Featherflit flinched at the sound and began to flap faster. “Oh, horseapples.”

The screaming roar of the monster below nearly knocked her sideways with its force, but worse still was the reaction it produced on the island. The trees below began to shiver. Featherflit bit her lower beak and flapped with all her might. One glance down showed her all she needed to know. Those graceful palm-like fronds were unfolding to reveal the scaly little beasts sleeping beneath, hideous dragon-insect hybrids with sharp little teeth that Featherflit knew were much stronger than thin hippogriff hide. As one, the dragonflies spread their translucent green wings. Featherflit felt the stinging glare of dozens of slitted emerald eyes and then the air filled with the dreadful buzz of their wings.

Featherflit threw herself westwards, praying that her head start would be enough to save her. But the bugle of the earth monster was still ringing out below her, and to her horror, she heard the crunching sound of rock on rock. That could only mean one thing. The earth dragon was getting up.

She tried to increase her speed again, but the wind was roaring in her face and tears were beginning to sting her eyes. There were limits to how fast even fear could make you.

The drone of the dragonflies grew louder behind her, and Featherflit’s breath hitched in her throat. She clamped the dragonfruit to her chest and tried to make her body a straight line. Aerodynamics would make her faster, right? Right? Something had to!

The earth dragon below her finally paused for breath, and Featherflit clearly heard the drag of it inhaling. Her mind racing, her eyes widened in recognition of the beast’s intentions, and she flung herself to the left. Not a second later, a blast of blue-green fire screamed past her, close enough to scorch the tips of her primary feathers. Featherflit’s jaw gaped as she watched the stream of fire die away. She hadn’t known they could breath fire! That wasn’t fair play at all — they lived underwater, for Novo’s sake!

The hum of dragonfly wings grew closer than ever. Featherflit risked a glance over one shoulder and immediately wished she hadn’t. The first of the repulsive brown creatures was almost upon her, its clawed forepaw reaching for her tail. With a small cry of alarm, she whisked it away from the outstretched talons and banked hard to the right to try and shake it. But she lost precious meters of her lead and then the others were surrounding her.

Desperately, she kicked the grasping claws away from her. She clamped her wings to her sides and tried to barrel roll, but the dreadful sight of the horizon spiralling in front of her filled her throat with the acrid tang of vomit and she hastily flattened out again. “Leave me alone!” she howled, plunging to avoid another one as it came in for the kill. “It was just one fruit! Surely you can’t need every single one?”

The dragonfly’s only response was a howl, a shrill counterpoint to the receding roars of the earth dragon behind them. The other beasts behind it took up the cry, and the hum of their wings was almost deafening.

Featherflit tightened her fist around the dragonfruit and tried to focus. Think, Featherflit, think! At least she was now out of reach and out of range for the earth dragons. They had no wings and in any case were far too cumbersome to become airborne. But the dragonflies remained a significant problem. They were still hot on her tail and showing no signs of tiring. She had been planning for weeks, just skulking around the islands trying to learn anything that might help her in her theft. There had to be something that she had picked up.

She tried to list her knowledge rationally. She had flown due east from Mount Aris. It had been a long flight, over three days, and she had been forced to snatch what sleep she could while aloft. The earth dragon islands had been the first land she saw, clustered together on the blue water like apple pips scattered on the ground. The earth dragons dwelt together in the shallow sandbanks where the water was warm, feeding on the tropical fish that dwelt there. After seeing them sun themselves every day, moving when the sky was overcast, she was pretty sure they also fed on the sunlight picked up by all those leaves. She had not known they could breathe fire, but that was useful knowledge; file it away for later, Featherflit.

And the other factor: the dragonflies. They were the islands’ only inhabitants. Featherflit had seen a few ungainly teenage earth dragons with the gauzy remnants of gossamer wings hanging in tattered strips from their calcifying scales. If they were anything to judge by, it seemed that if the dragonflies would become earth dragons themselves if they survived long enough.

In the three weeks she had been here, she had been largely ignored by the inhabitants of the islands.The earth dragons took almost no notice of anything above the water, of course, but she had expected more hostility from the dragonflies after first seeing them. But they seemed to grow used to her, and as long as she kept to herself, they hadn’t bothered her. They were more focused on sunning their long gilttering wings and squabbling with each other. The only times they had taken notice of her was when she ventured too close to the dragonfruits; she had tried several times to pluck one, and all the dragonflies nearby had lifted their heads and hissed at her until she nervously sidled away.

The dragonflies fed on the dragonfruits, which seemed to grow almost indefinitely, turning from pink to green to black. When they were almost the size of Featherflit herself, they would fall from the tree and break open on the soil, full of crunchy seeds. Every time this happened the dragonflies swarmed over the fruit, fighting for the round black seeds, each one as big as a fist. Featherflit had never seen the dragonflies show interest in any of the smaller, ripe ones that she had recognised from the illustration the librarian had shown her.

“The dragonfruit,” he had announced in that papery voice of his, white beard swinging underneath his beak with ever word. “Very rare, extremely valuable, found in only one place on the planet. But I believe that would achieve the intensity of colour that you say you’re looking for.”

Eyes narrowed, Featherflit spiralled left to avoid the fangs of two more dragonflies and turned her mind at last to her painting; her beautiful, indescribable masterpiece. Featherflit had been painting since she was a hatchling, and she almost exclusively painted her one great love: the sky. Featherflit firmly believed that the sky was the perfect subject; it had so many faces, one could never get bored of it. Hippogriffs were dull in comparison — each had only one hue in their coats. But the sky had hundreds; every day it would show her a different palette, and every day she would strive to capture its beauty. Sometimes she would give her paintings accents, little touches to further emphasise the beauty of the heavens. Mount Aris, the sea, a soaring hippogriff; each were only details designed to set off the glory of her beloved stratosphere. Her home was stuffed to the brim with hundreds upon hundreds of her paintings, each showing a different variant of the sky’s endlessly variable expressions. There were stormy paintings filled with heavy grey clouds and wind-tossed rain. There were blazing orange sunsets and glorious blue afternoons, moody purple twilights and gentle yellow mornings. Hippogriffs often came to buy her work, and she nearly always let them choose the ones they wanted.

But Featherflit’s current project was different. She remembered the morning she had seen it as clearly as if it was still before her. She had gotten up extra early, before anyone else in the city was awake. She had gathered her brushes and paints, and settled herself on a particularly comfortable cloud facing the east. There she had waited for almost an hour, shivering and sipping from her flask, but when the light broke over the eastern horizon, she knew at once that every second had been worth it. The dawn spread gentle rosy talons over the mountains of the ocean, an orange glow spread across the sky, and Featherflit had readied her palette. But then the sun had risen a little more, and the most wonderful unearthly pink had flooded the sky, a hundred shades of it colouring the air and the clouds, and Featherflit had stared in horror at her inadequate paints. She had nothing that could make the colours she saw! The beautiful pink sky only lasted a few minutes, but Featherflit had remained transfixed, staring in mute anger at her paltry collection of colours. They would not do. She had to commit the beauty of that morning to canvas, she knew it. Even if it cost her hundreds of bits, even if it took her months of searching, she had to do it. And once she had done it, she would put the painting on the wall in her own bedroom, safely away from the art gallery where buyers came to browse, and she would never sell it, even if she lived to be a thousand.

Another claw gouging across her flank snapped Featherflit uncomfortably back to the present and she gritted her teeth and upped her pace again. “Oh, go get the dragonfruit,” she rasped, trying to mimic the librarian’s aged voice. “Young thing like you, it shouldn’t be too hard.”

The dragonfly behind her sank its teeth into her tail hair and Featherflit hissed in frustration. “It shouldn’t be too hard. Yeah, right.”

She tried once more to think of what she had observed on the islands. The ugly dragonflies sunbathing and buzzing from island to island in search of warmer sleeping spots and ripe fruit. The ponderous earth dragons, wingless and rocky; hardly dragons at all in the traditional sense. The parents lived in the sea; the hatchlings lived on the parents. There was no crossover. A thrill of recognition as the pieces clicked into place. That was it. Excitement bloomed hot in her stomach and her breath came faster. Here goes.

She snapped her wings inward and plunged towards the ocean. She had to squeeze her eyes almost entirely closed against the howling wind, and she heard the scream of the dragonflies as they tore after her.

Her teal mane-feathers were whipping almost painfully in the gale. Featherflit’s heart thudded in her chest as the sea loomed larger, larger, until it entirely filled her vision, but she held her nerve. Just a little longer, just a little more.

Then at last, finally, when she was within claw’s reach of the surface, she flared her wings out as wide as they would go. The force nearly pulled her bones from their sockets, but she stayed aloft and just managed to level out. Her hooves skimmed the surface of the water and she held her breath as she pumped her wings, trying to regain a little altitude.

Behind her, she heard the garbled shrieks of the dragonflies as they tried to pull up, but chitin is less dextrous than feathers, and just as Featherflit had hoped, the dragonflies weren’t able to make it out of the dive in time. She heard the wet plops as they hit the water, and her grin was wide and fierce. She looked back once more, to see them paddling miserably in the choppy water, their wings too heavy for flight. In the distance, their parent earth dragon began its ponderous way across the ocean to collect them.

Featherflit beamed and turned her beak towards home. She could hardly believe her luck. She had done it!

Author's Note

This is my first fanfiction published on fimfic, so I would love to hear any feedback or if you enjoyed it!

Chapter 2

There it was. Almost black against a flawless blue sky, Mount Aris loomed tall and forbidding before her. But Featherflit’s heart sang within her and gave her wings fresh strength. She was exhausted, near collapse, but she beat faster, and a breeze seemed to spring up from nowhere to help speed her home.

Mount Aris grew to fill her vision and she looped down to meet it, happy to slide through the mountain’s rising thermals on outstretched wings and let them do most of the work for her. She ran a gentle thumb over the scaly rind of her precious pink cargo. She had achieved the impossible. Featherflit the artist, returning triumphant from an adventure nopony else had ever experienced, that even Queen Novo’s own elite guard would have struggled with.

She circled the curtain wall as she descended, her eyes drinking in all the details of home. There were the familiar streets, the gardens and parks, and beyond the city, Harmonizing Heights, where she had once painted a particularly fantastic sunset. But most importantly of all, there was her own beloved leafy roof. The huge tree spread its arching branches, glass cleverly fitted into the glass between them to create the light-filled rooms she so loved. There waited her paintings, hanging neatly in the gallery for buyers to browse. There waited her home and the soft embrace of her own bed, splattered with oil paint and chalk, but hers nonetheless. And there waited her inner sanctum, her sacred place — the studio where her paintings were conceived and birthed.

Now that she was closer she could see that there were far more hippogriffs than usual out and about, many of them clutching bundles of belongings. A few of them looked up called out to her, but Featherflit wasted no thought on it. There was time enough to catch up with friends later, after her painting was complete. And maybe after she had a nap, too — her limbs were leaden and she felt ready to drop.

She coasted in close to her tree and backwinged hard to slow herself enough to land. She touched down lightly in front of the door to her gallery, and with eager claws retrieved the key from its hidden spot under the grey rock in a nearby bush. She pushed the door open and shut her eyes for a moment as she breathed in that familiar smell of old canvas and the tang of oil paint, and a peaceful smile spread across her beak.

Everything was somewhat cleaner and neater than she remembered — possibly her father had taken advantage of her absence to break into her home and do a little spring cleaning. Featherflit smiled a little at the thought. She padded wearily through the wide gallery and headed for the stairs hidden behind the little curtain at the back of the room. Pushing it aside, she headed upstairs, passed the first floor by. She could rest and eat later; for now, she needed to get this paint made, before the dragonfruit lost any more of its freshness. It was already nearly three days since it had been plucked.
She elbowed the door to her studio aside, her claws still curled carefully around her prize, and entered her favourite place in the universe. It was just as she had left it; thank the stars that her father’s cleaning frenzy had not penetrated this far. There were all her beloved brushes, lying in piles scattered across the room, just as she had left them. The paint-spattered floor, the half-finished canvasses leaning against every available wall and surface, the wide windows streaming with afternoon sun, shelf after shelf of her own special paint mixes. And there in the centre of the room, illuminated on every side by the sunbeams flooding through the windows, was her masterpiece. It stood twice as tall as Featherflit on her hind legs, and three times as wide. Featherflit’s heart welled with emotion as she saw it. She grew excited about many of the paintings she worked on, but she really did feel that this view of the sun rising above the sea was something special. The ocean itself was almost finished, flooded with orange light and reflecting all sorts of dizzying refractions of light, just as Featherflit had seen. There were roughly blocked-out clouds waiting for their final details, and the top of the sky was ready too, tinged with purple and red. But closer to the surface of the water the sky was a pale and hesitant orange, marred with a few splotches of substandard pink — this one too red, that one to peach. Featherflit beamed. Her painting had waited so patiently for this moment.

Rummaging through her shelves and piles, she dug out a mixing bowl, her battered pestle and mortar, and a large flat cockle shell almost covered with a solid coating of dried paint. Humming to herself, Featherflit settled down to her work. She peeled the fruit, and carefully placed each green-tipped piece of pink rind into the mortar. She cradled the dripping flesh of the fruit in one claw and pulled the bowl closer with the other. She sniffed curiously at the dragonfruit. It smelled sweet, and unable to resist, she shrugged and allowed herself a small nibble of the moist flesh — absolutely delicious — before dropping it into the bowl. She put it to one side and began to grind the pink rind into paste. Finally, she mashed the flesh, mixed the resulting juice into the paste, and voila! All was ready. Carefully, slowly, she poured the thick mixture into the clam shell that served as a palette, and at last turned eagerly towards the canvas. She dipped her brush into that exquisitely pink paint, and held it ready over the marigold sky. She was just lowering her brush for that wonderful first stroke —

When the door to her studio slammed open and a frightened light-green hippogriff burst into the room, all ruffled feathers and wide white eyes with pinprick pulils. “Featherflit, Featherflit, thank the stars you’re alive! We all thought you were dead, we all thought he’d gotten you—”

Featherflit just barely managed to protect her precious clam shell of paint as her sister cannoned into her, tears streaming down her beak. “Woah, Flylight! Watch the shell, watch the shell!”

Flylight flung her arms around her, squeezing Featherflit until her eyes bulged and she squawked in protest. Her sister finally stopped, panting, and looked her in the face. “Where have you been? You’ve been gone for almost a month!”

“I told you I was going to the earth dragon islands,” Featherflit said defensively, trying to disentangle herself. “You knew I’d be away a while.”

“Yes, but there’s been so much happening since then,” Flylight sniffed. She clung to Featherflit’s arm with both foreclaws, as small and frightened as when they were chicks in the family nest. “There’s someone coming — to take our magic, to enslave us—”

Featherflit looked at her sister properly for the first time. ”What?”

“— the Cloud King — the Storm King — something like that — I don’t know, Featherflit, but we’re all meant to be evacuating! I waited as long as I could, tomorrow is the last day — I didn’t know if you were going to be back in time, and I was so scared for you!” Flylight’s voice climbed higher and higher, her words coming almost hysterically fast.

Featherflit hesitantly set her paint down and tried to think. Her mind was whirling. “Evacuating? Where are we going?” She cast around her, trying to calculate how long it would take her to gather her paints and roll up her favourite works. She found a bag in a pile of paint cans below one of the windows and started scooping brushes into it, but Flylight tugged at her pinion with desperate claws.

“There’s no time, Featherflit. We have to go now. We flooded the catacombs — Queen Novo is going to use the Pearl on everypony. We’re going underwater.”

Featherflit’s brushes dropped from her claws and she turned to stare at her sister. “Underwater?” she asked. “What do you mean underwater?” She let herself be tugged by Flylight to the door of the studio.

“I mean underwater!” Flylight half-sobbed. “Mum and Dad have gone already, you know! They wanted me to come too, they said the Queen would leave some guards out to let stragglers know what had happened, but I couldn’t bear to leave you, I couldn’t bear—”

Featherflit turned to look over her shoulder at her beautiful half-finished sunrise, the dragonfruit paint lying half-spilled on the floor where a stray hoof had over turned the clam shell, and her throat felt tight. “—But I—”

“—We have to go, Featherflit!”

Flylight hustled her down the stairs and out of the door. Featherflit looked up at the sky, beautiful as always. Cerulean and aqua blue today. Tears pricked at her eyes. To go underwater? Away from her beautiful sky, away from her paintings and her studio? Her chest constricted as that sank in. Not only would she lose the sight of the sky and the joy of her beautiful sunshine filled studio, she would lose her art altogether. How could she paint underwater?

She looked back over her shoulder at that friendly old aspen tree, at its sky-blue shutters and door. “Flylight, wait, I—”

“—There’s no time,” her sister said, dragging her by the claw after the stream of hippogriffs hurrying towards the castle. “There’s no time, we’re almost too late as it is.”

Helpless and numb, Featherflit let herself be towed. As the doors of the castle gaped to receive them, she turned for one last look at the blue firmament, her oldest and most beloved friend, and then followed her sister into the darkness.

Chapter 3

Featherflit loathed the oppressive shadow of the catacombs. She had never liked it down here, and after that one disastrous field trip that had ended in her hysterically screaming for her parents, she had never ventured back.

But now here she was, Flylight trembling at her side, huddled together in the caves beneath Queen Novo’s palace with about thirty other stragglers. The last of the hippogriffs, Featherflit thought to herself, realising that the macabre statement was true in more ways than one. Not only were she and her sister among the last hippogriffs to descend, if what the Queen was telling them was true, they were among the last hippogriffs in the world. The others had already become…something other.

“The Storm King is merciless, according to all reports,” the Queen said, her rich voice even fuller than usual as it echoed in the confined space. “He kills everyone who resists him, and from those who can’t or won’t resist, he takes their magic. He drains it from them and leaves them as helpless husks.”

One of the hippogriffs to Featherflit’s left let out a stifled sob, the sound quickly muffled.

“You know what that would mean for us,” Queen Novo said, sorrow writ large upon her face. “We would lose our flight, our spirit, our very souls. The Storm King’s forces are too strong to resist and he grows stronger every day. My scouts report that he is close to Mount Aris now, within a few days’ flight, and we must face the facts. Our kingdom does not have the strength to defeat him. We are a peaceful race and we simply do not have the numbers.”

The hippogriff who had sobbed before began to cry aloud, a long, broken stream of groans.

“I care about each and every one of you,” the Queen said, and Featherflit’s eyes filled with tears as she looked up at her. She was closer now to the Queen than she had ever been before, but she couldn’t enjoy the experience. It was horrifying that something that once would have been an exciting event now paled into insignificance, overshadowed by the horrible weight of everything Featherflit was losing. Even her triumphant return from the earth dragon islands seemed hollow; a foalish escapade that was could not offer her or her people any assistance.

“And that is why I will not risk even a single hippogriff,” Queen Novo went on. “We cannot fight, so we will hide. We will simply remove ourselves from the equation. The Storm King will arrive here to find Mount Aris empty and deserted. He can burn our homes and sit on my throne, but the real kingdom of the hippogriffs will be safe, where he will never find us.”

Featherflit’s stomach roiled within her. She felt like she might be sick. Her lovely home and all her paintings, burned? Her life’s work, gone up in smoke. She had been so very proud when she sold her first big painting and earned enough bits to put down a deposit on the aspen tree. Tears crowded in her eyes. She remembered the joy on her mother’s face when she had told her, how her father had struggled to hide his emotion. Flylight had screamed for joy at the news. Featherflit glanced sideways at her sister, who sat huddled under her own pale green wings like a seagull in a storm. She looked nothing like the carefree young mare Featherflit had left behind only a few weeks ago.

“I can promise you that we will rebuild,” Queen Novo said gravely, and Featherflit’s hopes surged for a moment, “Safely under the ocean. We will make our catacombs as beautiful as Mount Aris, and we will be as happy there as we have been here. I promise you that.”

“Will the transformation hurt?” an older stallion stood at the front of the crowd asked.

Queen Novo looked relieved at the slight change of topic. Featherflit couldn’t imagine how many times the Queen must have had to give this same speech over the past few days.

“It will not hurt,” Queen Novo stated. “I have undergone the process several times myself, and my own little daughter, the Princess Skystar, has also been changed. She is just as happy and full of laughter after the transformation as she was before.”

The hippogriffs around Featherflit nodded. They seemed happy to follow the Queen’s guidance, eager to rejoin their families and friends below. Featherflit tried to gauge her own emotions, but all she felt was numb. She could hardly believe that this was happening.

Suddenly, there came the sounds of scuffling and shouts from the corridor leading into the cavern. The hippogriffs flinched and exchanged fearful glances at the noises. Flylight cringed into Featherflit’s side.

“Stay calm!” Queen Novo pushed through the scrum of hippogriffs from the water’s edge where she had been standing, and put herself squarely between the doorway and her subjects. “Who goes there?” Her challenge rang out like the clang of a bell, and Featherflit admired her courage. Queen Novo seemed like the type of hippogriff who could face down an earth dragon and come out unscathed.

“Let me go!” an unseen voice shouted, and then at last the intruders came into view. Two royal guards were dragging a pale purple hippogriff between them, his white mane-feathers mussed and dirtied. “I won’t go down there!” His protests went unanswered, and the guards dropped him unceremoniously at Queen Novo’s feet.

She looked down at him wearily, but her face remained compassionate. “What is your name, young hippogriff?” she asked, gently enough.

The purple hippogriff scowled, and Featherflit felt her sister shifting uneasily beside her. It was clear Flylight wanted nothing more than to be gone. While Featherflit too longed for the return of safety and normality, she felt sympathetically towards the stranger. If Flylight hadn’t waited to tell her what was happening, she would have spent hours more painting, and the guards would probably have come to round her up too.

“My name is Sky Beak, your Majesty,” the male said, angrily brushing at the dirt on his legs. “And I have been bought here against my will.”

Queen Novo sighed quietly, but the sound echoed in the cave like everything else. “We are evacuating,” she said firmly. “That means everypony.”

“Even if we want to stay behind?” Sky Beak snapped, his eyes flashing with anger. He hastily looked away from the queen, lowering his eyelids as though he had suddenly remembered to whom he was speaking.

“Even so,” the Queen flared back at him, her crest rising on her head. “It only takes one straggler to be captured and tortured and then the Storm King knows the whereabouts of all of us. I will not risk all of my subjects for the sake of one.”

Sky Beak’s ears went flat back and he dropped his head at the word ‘torture’. It was clear he hadn’t considered that possibility. “But I would never reveal—” he protested weakly, but the Queen cut him off with a wave of her claws.

“You cannot know what you would reveal under torture, Sky Beak. I am the Queen of Mount Aris, and I speak for all of us. My decision is final. You will come with us into safety.” She paused to look around at the watching guards and civilians, and her eyes were suddenly terribly sad. “In time, we will all grow accustomed to our new life.”

“Please, your Highness—” Before she fully knew what she was doing, Featherflit found herself pushing forward, ignoring Flylight’s instinctive grab at her wing. Queen Novo turned to look at her, one eyebrow raised. Featherflit couldn’t help herself; she quailed before the regal visage that had watched every day of her foalhood from the stern-eyed portrait on the wall of her old classroom. She used to have nightmares that Queen Novo would find out when she had cheated on spelling tests and would have her thrown into the dungeons. Well, here she was in the catacombs already, she supposed. How much worse could it get?
“Your Highness,” she said again, fumbling for her words. “How— how long will we have to stay down here?”

The Queen looked bleakly down at Featherflit, who shuffled her hooves uncomfortably under the pressure of that weighty gaze. “Until the danger is passed,” the Queen said simply. Her eyes skimmed over Featherflit and away, and Featherflit had the strong impression that the Queen had not really seen her. She had just seen one of many subjects in a crowd, needing to be protected and corralled into what was best for them.

Featherflit bit her lower beak. “But—” The Queen’s eyes snapped back to hers like a whip, and Featherflit had to work hard not to let out a squeak of fright. “But when will it be safe?” she persisted, feeling unreasonably relieved once the words were out. It wasn’t like her to be so afraid; maybe the lack of sleep and the long flight back from the islands was catching up with her at last. But then again, it wasn’t every day that one got the chance to speak to the Queen. Some nervousness was probably to be expected.

The Queen sighed again. “It may never be.” With that, she brushed past Featherflit, and the other hippogriffs respectfully parted to let her through. She walked slow and stately back to the edge of the lake.

Featherflit watched her go, her heart sinking. Never? She would surely be able to fly and run and paint again. It couldn’t be true. In a few months, a year perhaps, this Storm King would have passed over like the bad cloud he was, and then the skies would be fresh and clear once more. She looked at the reluctant male, Sky Beak or whatever he had said his name was, and his eyes were flicking from left to right. He clearly wanted out. He met Featherflit’s gaze and the appeal was clear on his face. For one heady moment Featherflit imagined accepting that unspoken invitation, fleeing the guards and the caverns side by side with this stranger and heading back into the blue sky she knew was waiting for her. They could always return to the earth dragon islands to wait out this crisis, or see what lay beyond the eastern ocean — despite herself, her wings flared with eagerness — but then her gaze slipped again to her sister and she sighed and deflated. How could she ever leave her family? Her parents and Flylight would never recover from the shock of her betrayal. She turned away from Sky Beak, lowering her eyelids to shield herself from the sight of the distress that so closely mirrored her own.

“Step forward, my people,” Queen Novo said, turning to face them once more. “Step forward into our new lives.” She reached into a bag that had hung unnoticed beneath her wing and fished out a glowing sphere.

A murmur ran through the crowd at the sight of it; the Pearl of Mount Aris, the royal family’s oldest and most closely guarded treasure. The Pearl contained magic beyond knowing, according to the fairy tales Featherflit and Flylight had loved to hear in their younger years. The saga of Queen Regal Quill and the Pearl was known to every chick in Mount Aris. The carnivorous Eastern Oyster was the subject of many bad dreams, and was among the most popular costumes every Hallows Festival.

Queen Novo held the Pearl in both hands, rolling it between her palms. It glowed with an unearthly light, shades of pink and purple swirling over inside it as thought it wasn’t a pearl at all, but a glass window into a living universe. The shifting shades cast strange lights on the Queen, throwing her shadow tall and flickering against the cavern wall behind her. “Who will be first?” the Queen asked again.

“I will!” A voice cried out, and an elderly female stepped forward. Her coat was a dusky green, her mane a lighter shade of emerald. She spread her wings as she walked to the Queen, and Featherflit could see the tips of her feathers trembling. Was it fear, Featherflit wondered, or merely age?

As the aged hippogriff stood before the Queen, Featherflit felt a claw steal into her own. She glanced at Flylight, whose eyes were huge with unshed tears, and squeezed her sister’s talons.

The Queen dipped her head in salute to the older hippogriff. “Well said, Jade Breeze. Your bravery is commendable.” She ran a hand over the top of the sphere, her claws tracing invisible patterns on its surface, and a yellow glow began to build deep in its centre. The pink and purple swirls parted to make way for the powerful amber light. The patterns seemed to draw Featherflit in, and her perception of Flylight and the other hippogriffs began to fade as the Pearl sucked her towards it. The glow flared into white-hot brilliance and suddenly faded, leaving Featherflit blinking in the sudden gloom, trying to see what was happening. She dimly saw a blurry green shape falling towards the surface of the lake, and then there was a splash. Featherflit dropped Flylight’s claw to rub her eyes hard. When she opened them again, there was no sign of the hippogriff the Queen had addressed as Jade Breeze. Just ripples spreading outwards from the centre of the lake, and Queen Novo standing alone, calling for the next of her subjects to step forward.

One by one, other hippogriffs did, and Featherflit watched as the Pearl flared again and again. She tried every time to watch the transformation, but it was impossible to resist the hypnotic pull of the Pearl once it began. It dragged her vision in over and over. But in between the flares, she was able to study the surface of the lake. Nopony ever resurfaced.

The number of hippogriffs at the lakeside dwindled. There were only five or six left — Featherflit, Flylight, Sky Beak and the guards flanking him, and a small family of hippogriffs huddled around their crying chicks. Featherflit felt Flylight tensing beside her and cast an anxious look at her sister. She saw her sister opening her beak to speak, and put a cautionary claw on her arm. “Flylight, I’m not sure I—”

But Flylight cut off her whispered words before they were halfway out of her beak. “I’ll go next, Your Majesty.” Her tone was artificially bright, and before Featherflit could pull her back she was moving confidently forward.

Queen Novo graciously inclined her head, and Featherflit noticed with a shock how drained the Queen looked. Dark purple shadows marred the smooth white fur beneath her eyes, and she swayed a little on her hooves. The Pearl must take a toll upon those who wielded it.

Flylight bowed low in front of the Queen, and the Pearl began to glow once more. Featherflit stumbled forwards — once Flylight was gone she would have to follow — but as she was opening her mouth to call her sister’s name the Pearl flared again and Featherflit was pulled into those swirling depths once more.

When she reopened her eyes, she was lying sprawled on the floor at the Queen’s feet. She blinked and looked around her. “Flylight?”

The Queen gestured with a wing and a guard stepped forward to offer Featherflit his claw. “Let me help you up.”

Shakily, Featherflit accepted the proffered talon and got back up on her hooves. “Thank you,” she said, looking anxiously past the guard at the smooth black surface of the lake.

“Stratus Skyranger,” the guard said in a friendly tone. When Featherflit did not respond, he repeated it. “My name, I mean. Captain Stratus Skyranger, at your service, Miss—?”

“Featherflit,” Featherflit said at last, finally looking at the guard. His fur was a fetching shade of green, and his eyes were as purple as his mane, and big with excitement. Featherflit’s gaze slid away from him and back to the water, but the guard remained there, still with his arm extended towards Featherflit.

As Featherflit’s eyes combed the surface of the lake for what felt like the umpteenth time, there was a faint splash from the back of the cave. Featherflit stared eagerly into the shadows, and then, finally, a head broke the water. It coughed, and grunted, and splashed a little closer. Featherflit’s eyes went wide with horror as she looked at it.

The thing in the water had her sister’s colouring, true enough, pale green hide with purple fins the same amethyst colour that Flylight’s mane had been, but the similarities between her sister and the creature before her ended there. Where Flylight had soft fur and faintly ruffled feathers, this thing was covered with slimy wet hide as blank and featureless as the flesh of the manatee that had once washed up on the shores of Mount Aris. The other children had loved the fat, fleshy, apparently friendly thing, and had lavished upon it all the fish they could catch, but its smooth skin had repulsed Featherlight. She had avoided the beach until the manatee had regained its health and moved on.

The green monster in the water gurgled damply and raised stubby legs above the water, each ending in a repulsive, floppy purple fin. Featherflit shook her head in uncomprehending horror. How could her beautiful, spirited sister, as flighty as a dandelion seed, have become this wet, waterbound beast?

The thing now raised a long tail and thrashed it in the water. No wings, no legs. Just one long tail-body hybrid. Just like the manatee! Featherflit felt bile rising in her throat and clamped down on it. “Flylight?” she croaked, almost hoping that the thing wouldn’t answer.

That horrible smooth head swivelled to look at her, and as it watched her with her sister’s violet eyes, Featherflit saw a transparent second set of eyelids slide mechanically down over the irises. Her breath came faster as she waited in mute suspense to see if it would answer; if, indeed, it was even capable of answering any more. She wondered how she would bear such awful changes to her own boy.

“Featherflit!” the beast said in a voice as familiar to Featherflit as her own, and Featherflit reeled back in shock.

“Come on in,” Flylight said in the tone she used when she was searching for humour. “The water’s fine!”

Featherflit felt a tear trickling down her face. She recognised the voice, but all else was alien. She couldn’t even read her sister’s expression any more. Her beak was gone, replaced with a hideous fleshy muzzle like that of a pony. How would she be able to speak or express herself without a beak? Flylight had become a monster. Worse than that, so had every other hippogriff Featherflit had ever known. And if she didn’t accept the fate of becoming one of these beasts, she would never see any of them ever again.

There was a muffled noise behind her, a grunt and a shout, and Featherflit whirled to see Sky Beak, the white-maned male, thrusting the one guard who remained beside him down onto the floor. Then he took wing and darted for the cave exit. His voice echoed behind him as he vanished from view. “I’m not going down there!”

“Corporal Seaspray, Captain Stratus Skyranger!” The Queen’s voice was a lash cutting through the stunned silence Sky Beak had left in his wake. “Get after him!”

The downed guard stumbled to his feet and took off in haste, and after one last unreadable look at Featherflit, Stratus Skyranger hastened after him. Once they were gone, the Queen sighed and sagged to the floor. She ran a claw over her beak and rubbed at her temples. “What a dreadful day,” she muttered, seemingly to herself.

Featherflit exchanged a wide-eyed glance with the young parents beside her, who had finally managed to quiet their squalling chicks. Nopony had ever seen the indefatigable Queen Novo in this state before. She was so…so unreachable, usually, appearing high on balconies or surrounded by courtiers, always seen from a distance. Here in the caverns beneath the castle, acting as a rearguard for the very last of her subjects, she suddenly seemed like just another hippogriff. Tired and beaten down by the strain of these terrible events just like everypony else was.

A faint splashing noise echoed in the quiet, and Featherflit saw the creature that had once been Flylight sliding back beneath the surface. A second tear and a third dripped onto the short fur of Featherflit’s cheek. There was no way out of this. There was no other option. She had to face this, as much as her family and the Queen and everypony else already below had done.

“Your Majesty?” Featherflit said haltingly, reaching out a claw to the Queen. A simple gesture of support, of fellowship, just as the guard had offered to her a moment ago.

Queen Novo flinched at the sound of her voice. She stared blankly at Featherflit for a moment before gesturing the extended hand impatiently away. She rose unaided, her face carefully schooled back into its usual impassivity. “We must move quickly,” she said simply. “Time grows short.”

Featherflit nodded numbly. She knew Queen Novo was right. The Queen was a glacier, implacable and cold, quietly crushing every piece of resistance in its path. She could try and flee like Sky Beak had done, but what was the use? In the long term, she knew she wanted to be with her flock, with her family. Surely the Pearl would not change them inside as well as out. They would still be the same hippogriffs that she had always known and loved on the inside, even if on the outside everypony looked like disgusting fleshy monsters. Even if it meant they would never fly again.

Queen Novo drew herself up and held the Pearl out before her. The amber fire began to gather in its heart again, the whirling patterns of light shifting wildly on the walls of the cavern. Featherflit shut her eyes tight against it and spread her wings, trying to feel every bone, every muscle in her body. Her foreclaws flexed against the stone, gripping it tight — she would never grip anything else again. Her legs tensed, her tail thrashed from side to side, her beak screwed up against what she knew was coming. And most of all, her wings, her beautiful butter-yellow wings, those precious things that let her cut through the air and merge with her beloved sky, that could carry her above the clouds or anywhere in the world she pleased. All these parts of her body that she had taken for granted, that she had never thought she might have to say goodbye to.

A fuzzy feeling took hold of her, and she felt herself being lifted from the ground by gentle, unseen claws. The fuzziness intensified, all her limbs stretching and reaching for she knew not what, and then the blackness behind her eyes flared into blinding white. She cried out and she was falling, tumbling head over tail down. The shock of the icy water knocked the breath out of her and she instinctively tried to snatch another. Water flooded into her mouth and down her throat, but to her shock, she wasn’t choking. She panted for a moment, water rushing into her lungs, bubbles coursing upwards from her nostrils, and then gingerly, she opened her eyes.

Chapter 4

To her shock, it was no longer dark in the cave. It was almost as light as the afternoon outside the cavern had been. Though she knew rationally that she must still be in the caves beneath the castle, for a heartbeat she thought maybe she had somehow made it back. But water was coursing over her muzzle, unseen currents brushing her skin, and reality sank in. There was a strange sense of pressure all around, as though tiny hippogriffs were pushing her all over with their little claws. If flying was weightlessness, escape from gravity, then water was gravity’s revenge. Above her, a brighter light still played above the surface, pink and purple combined. Tentatively, Featherflit looked down at her claws. A cry of loss bubbled in her throat. They were claws no longer. Her limbs now ended in hooves as stubby as a pony’s, bright cyan fins flopping at their tips. Featherflit clenched her eyes shut again and pressed these hideous new limbs to her face as tears mixed unseen with the water surrounding her. She would never hold a paintbrush again.

She wept for a few seconds before she remembered that it did not end there. She blinked the tears away and turned her gaze over her shoulder. Beyond the floating fin that had once been her beautiful feathered mane, she saw two enormous fins trailing in the water where once her wings had joined to her body. Instinctively, she tried to flap, and although the fins twitched and trailed through the water, she could barely feel them. It seemed as though there were muscles and nerves in the foremost edges of the fins, and there they ended. Her beautiful wings had become mere flaps of tissue. Horrified, she tried again and again to beat her wings. The spasmodic movements of their remnants sent her spiralling and rolling through the water, and it was only then she turned her attention to her legs. Or rather — her lack of them.

Where once her barrel had turned smoothly to flank, her proud cyan and seafoam-green tail wafting behind, was just one dreadful long limb ending in a another flared green fin. Featherflit opened her mouth to scream, and to her shock she heard herself loud and clear as the bubbles poured out of her open beak. She had expected the oppressive weight of this hated water to rob her of her voice as well. As her voice tailed off, she remembered the final horror that had been visited upon Flylight, and she raised her dreadful new nubby legs to her face. Sure enough, her tough, sharp beak, so capable of tearing fish open or cracking nuts — it had gone. Replaced by a smooth blank parody of a face, a featureless muzzle soft as a pony’s. She felt…empty. This was no longer her body. She was wearing a stranger’s skin. She sobbed again, and put her arms over her head. She didn’t want to think about it any more. Oh, sky above, why had she done this to herself? Her mother, her father, Flylight — were any of them worth the loss of her sense of self? Who was she without her wings, her body? Even her art and her talent had been stripped from her. All those years spent honing her skill and improving her paintings were wasted. She would never be able to draw again. Even if she were to give up on painting and try rock carving or drawing in pencil, she would never be able to wield any sort of tool in these useless finned hooves. Her life…everything that had made her life living rather than mere survival, everything that had given her a sense of meaning… it was all gone. Snatched away from her. Even her name was wrong, now. She had no feathers; she would never fly again.

Another flash of light above her, and the young mother from the family above dropped into the water. She looked at her new hooves and gave her fins an experimental flap. Featherflit stared in silence at her. But the new arrival to the water did not scream or cry. She looked at her new body in mild discomfort, but soon bobbed back up to the surface and held out her arms to receive the first of her transformed chicks.

Featherflit tried to think, but it was like flying through fog. She couldn’t see what she should do. She could swim back up to the surface, plead with Queen Novo to turn her back, to restore her to herself. But the Queen would only refuse. She could throw herself onto the rocks — and presumably, flop and gasp like a fish out of water — and wait until the Queen was forced to transform her back or watch her expire. But Queen Novo had been very clear that every hippogriff was expected to follow her into her underwater exile, and she might well just let Featherflit die rather than let her escape and potentially reveal their location to the Storm King. But was life really even worth living, trapped under the ocean, no flight, no art, no sense of self?

Featherflit was slowly starting to try and push herself towards the surface when she felt a touch on her flank. On what had been her flank. She flinched and looked around.

It was Flylight, her new face unreadable but for the familiar eyes, which were the same as they had always been. “Featherflit,” she said softly, and again to Featherflit’s surprise the sound carried clearly across the water.

Featherflit began to cry again. The water was already salty, even without her tears. It stung her eyes, and then those same second eyelids that she had seen on Flylight slid down automatically to shield her. They were transparent, and stopped the saltwater from stinging her eyes, but they were so alien and horrible that Featherflit cried even harder. Flylight’s eyes were sad and soft too, but Featherflit couldn’t even tell if her own sister was weeping; it was impossible to see if somepony’s eyes were watering when everything was water.

“Oh, Featherflit,” Flylight said gently, pulling her into a gentle embrace. The touch of her fins was clammy and repulsive, but Featherflit felt too confused to recoil from it.

“We — we’re disgusting, Flylight!” she sobbed out at last. “We don’t have any feathers!”

Flylight laughed, a little edge of hysteria in the sound. “We look like Mrs Sandtail’s old parrot — the one that plucked all its own feathers, do you remember?”

Featherflit choked on a sob and began to laugh, sending bubbles swarming upwards. “Stars, you’re right! Oh, for Novo’s sake, Flylight, what have we done to ourselves? We look like the children of a plucked parrot and a fish!”

Flylight hugged her closer, and Featherflit buried her face in her sister’s shoulder, feeling as though it was Flylight and not her who was the elder sibling. “We’re never going to fly again,” she whispered.

“No, we probably aren’t,” Flylight agreed quietly.

“I’ll never do another painting.”

“No, probably not.”

“I’ll — I’ll never even see the sky again.” Featherflit’s voice cracked on this last statement and she wept harder than before.

Flylight tenderly wrapped her wing-fins around her. “Oh, come on, Featherflit. That part isn’t true. We’re sea-hippogriffs now, but we can still swim up to the surface, can’t we?”

Featherflit raised her head at last as a sliver of hope dawned at last. “Really? You think so?”

Flylight gently wiped Featherflit’s face — another caring gesture that would be as useless down here as grooming one another’s feathers, Featherflit suddenly thought — and smiled. “Yeah, I’m sure we’ll be able to.” She paused. “Look, Featherflit, I know it all seems hopeless; I hate this too.”

Featherflit nodded, and raised her own legs to hug her sister back.

“But we’re still alive, still here, and everypony we know is still safe and waiting for us down there.” Flylight gestured into the depths below. “Queen Novo has made the best decision she can for us all. We’ll be okay. Life will go on. We just need time, I think. Time to adapt.”

Featherflit sniffed and rubbed again at her horrible soft new face. “Yeah. Yeah, I think you’re right.”

Flylight smiled encouragingly, though the optimism on her face was fragile. “Let’s go look for the others, shall we?” She held a claw — no, a hoof — out to Featherflit.

Featherflit tried to take it, but there were no talons left, only that nasty flapping fin at the end of her leg, so she had to settle for resting her hoof atop her sister’s for a moment. “Okay.”

Chapter 5

The sisters swam steadily downwards. Their progress was slow and uncertain, filled with awkward loops and floating as they tried to learn how to control their fins and long tails. Featherflit felt almost as though she were watching somepony else, dimly trying to control this body that wasn’t hers. But she tried to keep up with Flylight as they descended into the darkness.

There seemed no end to the vast underwater cavern, and the pressure on Featherflit’s barrel increased and increased until she felt like her lungs would burst. She glanced at Flylight, who looked only inches away from giving up herself, and decided to stay quiet. Uncertainly, she tried to flip a foreleg to propel herself towards Flylight, and extended a wing-fin to brush against her sister. The touch helped her to feel a little more in her own body. She took a deep breath to calm herself, and winced again at the feeling of the water rushing down her throat. Her every instinct screamed at her that it was wrong, that it would drown her, but her body accepted the water as though it were air.

It got darker as they went down, even to Featherflit’s keen new vision. They found that the best way of moving was to fold their forelegs close to their body like when in flight, and rely on their large tail fins for propulsion. Featherflit watched Flylight’s full-body undulations closely and tried to copy the motion. It felt a little like she had been transformed into a caterpillar rather than a sea-hippogriff. She said as much to Flylight, who gave a hollow laugh, though Featherflit had not intended it to be humorous. Their wing-fins were large and caught the water enough to impede progress considerably when they were spread, so Featherflit learned to keep them pinned back as much as she could, and utilise them only for stopping. At first she had tried to fold them up as she would have done her wings, but the fins had only rudimentary mobility, and all she managed to do was sway them uncertainly in the water. The failure had stung, but Featherflit swallowed the bitterness and accepted it as one more slap in the face from her strange new reality.

Flylight soon showed herself to be the stronger swimmer, and Featherflit began to struggle to keep up. She gritted her teeth and thrashed her wretched tail harder. She had always been the stronger flier. It was her who had taught Flylight to fly, for Novo’s sake.

Flylight turned to look back over her shoulder and skidded to a halt. “Are you okay, Featherflit?” With a flick of her tail, she was back beside Featherflit, extending a concerned hoof.

Featherflit pushed it away half-heartedly. “Of course I’m not.”

Undeterred, Flylight gently brushed at Featherflit’s crest with her hoof. “Let me help.”

Featherflit looked away. It hurt somehow, to accept help from her baby sister. “We don’t even know where we’re going.”

Flylight nodded agreement. “I don’t know how all the others got so far ahead of us. I’m sure we ought to have seen somepony else by now.”

They floated in place and Featherflit looked carefully around. All was the same midnight blue, fading to black at the limits of her vision. She had no idea how far up or down they were, or where. Had they somehow stumbled from the catacombs into the open sea? A flush of dread ran through her. Without the Queen, without the Pearl, all hope of returning to Mount Aris someday was lost. She and Flylight would wander the oceans forever, hopelessly lost.

Flylight edged closer to her, and the two drifted shoulder-to-shoulder, scanning the darkness for some sign of life. Time slowed to a crawl and Featherflit’s breath came faster. The pressure on her ribcage that she had pushed to the back of her mind came back with a vengeance. The darkness at the edges of her vision pressed closer. She clung to Flylight, her heart thrumming like a bird’s. They were trapped here, hanging in space, water pushing down on them from above, dragging them deeper —

“Look!” Flylight cried. Her voice was shockingly loud in the dead quiet.

Featherflit desperately followed her sister’s outstretched hoof. There, flickering in and out of existence, almost so tiny as to be invisible, shimmered a tiny light. Pink and purple, purple and pink. Relief welled in Featherflit’s breast. “It’s the Pearl!”

Flylight breathed out a long stream of bubbles. “Thank the stars!” She pulled away from Featherflit and thrust her purple tail-fin into her muzzle. “Here, hang on!”

Featherflit, pride evaporated, was more than happy to oblige. She instinctively grabbed at the fin with her claws, remembering too late that her talons were gone now. When her hoof-fins slid off, she winced, muttered an apology, and clamped down with her teeth.

“Gah!” Flylight’s face contorted as she swallowed her shout of pain back down.

“Sh-orry,” Featherflit mumbled around a mouthful of tail.

“It’s fine, its fine,” Flylight waved away the apology. “Just do what you can to help.”

Featherflit narrowed her eyes and nodded. Her gaze was fixed on the little distant light. They had to get there before it faded out of sight completely.

Flylight nodded her head once and then kicked out with her forehooves. They started at once into motion, and Featherflit’s muzzle was jerked upwards as Flylight began the rolling motion of swimming. Featherflit tried to streamline her body as much as she could and copy her sister’s movements. She wasn’t sure she was contributing as much as Flylight was, but between them they made decent progress and the light grew stronger.

Before long they could make out silhouettes. A party of about ten hippogriffs — no, Featherflit mentally corrected herself. Not hippogriffs any more.

The large figure leading the group, holding the Pearl aloft — that could only be Queen Novo. Her white coat and purple fins were unmistakeable, but Featherflit’s throat still felt a little tight as the Queen’s new shape came into clearer view. The Queen’s statuesque good looks were universally acknowledged as the standard for classical hippogriff beauty. But even she was reduced to an ugly, featherless, soft-muzzled thing.

Behind the Queen swam two male hippogriffs, a third purple-coated male between them. His white fins meant that he had to be Sky Beak. His head was down, his tail and wing-fins hanging limp. His spirit seemed altogether gone. The two males flanking him had to be the guards — what had their names been? — Stratus Skyranger and Seaspray. They had been fully armoured when she had last seen them, but now only their golden helmets remained. Clearly the hippogriff-proportioned armour was now useless to them. Bringing up the rear was the family with all the chicks, each of them now a tiny fish-tailed creature. One of the children was swimming in confused circles, still clearly unused to his new body, and another was fast asleep and being carried by a parent.

As they drew closer Featherflit released Flylight’s tail and tried to swim fast enough to draw alongside her sister. She didn’t want the Queen to see her being towed like a foal.

The guard’s heads swivelled towards them first, followed by the Queen. She dipped her head in mute greeting, and Featherflit and Flylight joined the back of the group. Flylight took Featherflit’s foreleg again, to help her on, and Featherflit let her. No one was looking, and she was so very tired. The exertions of the past few days had been greater than any in her life before, and her head swam a little. She tried to calculate how long it had been since she slept. Not since the dragon islands, if you didn’t count the snatched, fitful dozes she had slipped in and out of while on the wing.

The Queen led the silent procession deeper and deeper. More stragglers joined them as they went, but Featherflit didn’t recognise any of them. She assumed they were remnants of the group from the lake edge, lost as she and Flylight had been in this vast space.

At last, the darkness they were swimming into took form. A vast wall loomed out from the shadows before them. It stretched further in every direction than Featherflit’s eyes could perceive, but Queen Novo swam unhesitatingly towards it. The group hurried after her.

“There,” Flylight whispered, pointing with her free hoof.

Featherflit strained her eyes to see whatever it was her sister was looking at, but could only make out shadows. “What is it?”

“A tunnel?” Flylight guessed. “An opening in the wall, at any rate.”

After a few moments more, Featherflit finally saw a dimple on the featureless black wall, and breathed out in relief. She prided herself on her sharp eyesight; relied on it for her art. But being down here was like having blinkers on, or having your senses wrapped in cotton; she couldn’t make out what she would have taken for granted above the water.

The Queen swam a little faster, and everyone hurried in her wake. Featherflit was received to see that she wasn’t the only uncoordinated one. Many of the group were receiving help from others. But everypony was at least trying — only Sky Beak hung limp between the guards. Featherflit wasn’t sure if he was unable or unwilling to swim. It wasn’t clear whether he was even conscious.

The tunnel entrance yawned before them, black and uninviting. The Queen plunged into its maw and the Pearl sent pink lights spinning over the uneven walls. Featherflit looked around hesitantly, but didn’t resist the pull of the group. She had come this far. There was no turning back now.

The throat of the tunnel opened wide to receive them. The darkness was almost absolute. Even the Pearl’s glow dimmed. Featherflit tightened her grip on Flylight’s foreleg. The passage tilted steadily downwards and everypony swam in silence; even the chick who had spent the entire journey exclaiming loudly about their new body was quiet and huddled close to its parents.

Apart from the slightly steepening decline of the shaft and the flickering light of the Pearl, there was nothing to show where they were or how far they had come. They might have been going for hours or merely minutes; the oppressive darkness dulled the senses and Featherflit could hardly tell which way was up anymore. She felt herself flagging, leaning more and more heavily on her sister, but was too exhausted to summon any more strength. Her reserves were gone. Both emotionally and physically, she was drained to the dregs. She had no more left to give.

She sank closer to the tunnel floor, scarcely moving her tail any more, and Flylight hissed quietly through her teeth. Featherflit looked up at her sister’s face and tried feebly to stir herself once more, but her limbs felt like they were made of lead.

“Just a little further,” Flylight whispered, her tone more strained than encouraging.

“I can’t,” Featherflit heard herself mumble. “I can’t.”

She drifted lower again, and with a grunt of frustration Flylight hauled her onto her own back. Deep down, underneath the exhaustion, Featherflit felt the sting of embarrassment. The last time she had given Flylight a piggyback ride was when she had been a chick of less than seven summers.

But it felt so good to let her eyes drift closed at last, and she stopped trying to fight it.

As she drifted in and out of consciousness, she heard snatches of distant conversation, lowered voices, a foal crying. Then a flash of light beyond the protective darkness of her closed eyelids, and she blinked and tried to drag herself into wakefulness.

They were clear of the tunnel at last, and a vast open space stretched before them. Flylight’s back was warm beneath her, though she swam much slower now. Pools of orange and pink light pierced the gloom, and as Flylight swam slowly forward Featherflit saw small groups of hippogriffs huddled around vaguely phosphorescent corals.

“Family?” A voice challenged them.

“We’re looking for our parents Dawn Dancer and Skylark,” Flylight said, her voice cracking with fatigue.

Featherflit looked through half-shut eyes at the guard before them. Like everyone else, she looked like she was about to keel over. Only the golden helmet remained of her armour, like Stratus Skyranger and Seaspray. “I think I saw them over that way,” she answered Flylight, already turning away to the next group of new arrivals.

Flylight swam on, and Featherflit let herself drift away again. Let the ocean carry her into sleep like a gull on a wave.

When she next stirred, gentle hooves were lifting her. Flylight was stroking her forehead and slipping a some sort of slimy lump underneath her head as a pillow. She heard them saying something, but she couldn’t rouse herself enough to hear it properly. Ah well. Time enough for that later. Now all she wanted to do was rest.

Chapter 6

When Featherflit woke, she opened her eyes expecting to see sunlight streaming in through the leafy windows of her bedroom. She rubbed slowly at her face in confusion; it was still dark. Had she woken up too soon? It was the slippery touch of her hoof-fins that bought it all back. She refocused her eyes and looked sharply down at the offending limbs. “Oh, shit.” Somehow she had hoped it would all have gone away by the time she woke up.

Someone stirred beside her and Featherflit looked over. Flylight’s new face, not so alien as it had been the first time she saw it, looked back. “Hey,” she said softly.

Featherflit grunted in response. She wanted nothing more than to pull the blanket over her face and sink back into sleep.

“Mum,” Flylight called. “She’s awake.”

Featherflit sighed and sat up. Her new tail was very flexible and seemed to bend almost without limit in any direction she wanted. She wondered idly if she could tie her long, slender new body in a knot if she tried hard enough.

“We’re so glad you made it home in time, darling,” her mother said quietly from behind her, and Featherflit turned to hug her. Dawn Dancer embraced her warmly, wrapping yellow hooves and pink fins tightly around her daughter.

Looking over her mother’s shoulder, Featherflit took her first proper look around. They were in another huge cavern, the roughly circular walls hazy and almost out of sight. The floor dipped in a natural bowl-like shape, and the ceiling arched beyond view in the murky water above them. Families were scattered all around, each clustered around a small lamp made of phosphorescent coral lashed to a stone base. Some of the lights were pink, some orange. The little pools of light were the only illumination in the vast space.

Dawn Dancer pulled away from her hug at last to look Featherflit in the eyes. “Oh, Featherflit, dear,” she said, her voice tight. “We really were terrified you wouldn’t make it back in time.”

Featherflit nodded. “I’m glad I did.” Although it would be easy to wish that she had spent just a few more days on the earth dragon islands, she was relieved that she had made it home in time to meet Flylight and make the descent. If she had arrived back home and found Hippogriffia empty and Mount Aris deserted, she didn’t know what she would have done. She might have spent the rest of her life searching for her sister and parents.

“Where’s Dad?” she asked now, looking around them for the familiar green-furred face.

“He’s queuing for food,” Flylight said. “We’ve only had what the Queen has been making with the Pearl.”

Featherflit nodded again. Gesturing seemed much easier than trying to formulate a viewpoint and say it aloud. She had slept a deep and dreamless sleep, and it seemed several hours had passed since Flylight had carried her down the tunnel, but she felt as though she had barely rested. It was hard to try and plumb the depths of her own feelings; it didn’t really feel like anything was there. Just a deep, numb exhaustion.

“It doesn’t look like much now,” Dawn Dancer said, clearly trying to strike a reassuring note. “But the royal guards say that Queen Novo has big plans for Seaponia — that’s what they’re saying we are now, you know, sea-ponies. Your father and a few others thought the new town should be named New Hippogriffia, but the Queen has decided on Seaponia.”

Featherflit managed another nod. She looked at the vast, barren rock plain stretching out before them. No sky, no grass. Just rock, surrounded by towering cliffs on every side. The flickering coral lights seemed terribly fragile.

“The Queen had the guards bring all sorts of corals and anemones from the bay,” Dawn Dancer continued. “She’s using the Pearl to make everything we’ll need — crops and food, the lights we have here, and I even heard somepony say she’s got an idea for lantern corals grown big enough for us to live in. I think with a little work, if we all join together, we can make Seaponia a — a lovely place to live.” Her tone was bright and brittle. “As lovely as Hippogriffia was. At least, if not more so. Don’t you think so, darling?”

“I’m sure we can, Mum,” Flylight said comfortingly, when Featherflit made no move to answer. “Queen Novo will make the right decisions for everypony.”

Featherflit gathered the blanket closer around herself and looked down at its familiar woven fibres. She recognised it as one of the blankets her grandmother had knitted for the family before her death a few years previously. The wool was engorged with seawater and looked like it was beginning to unravel. In the water it lent little warmth, but Featherflit held it close anyway. She wanted to rest again. To embrace oblivion and its dark peace for just a few more hours.

Featherflit watched with unseeing eyes as her sister and parents came and went around her, busying themselves gathering rocks to mark the edges of their campsite, trying to make some sort of shelter out of the woven seaweed blankets the guards brought for them, trying to bring a semblance of cheer to the dark cavern. She watched as the days slid past, as the Queen and her royal guard tried to be everywhere at once, the Pearl’s power flashing and flaring over and over again as it turned tiny scraps of coral to seeds to be grown into buildings, or sea cucumbers to edible plants. She saw them carrying the newly cultivated strands of mega-seaweed up the tunnel to the entrance cavern above Seaponia, to cover the wall and conceal the passageway. She ate food when it was pressed upon her, and listened to her family’s conversations.

“The Queen says we’re to call ourselves seaponies now,” Skylark said, sipping a little shellfish broth from the mollusc shell he held.

“But why?” Flylight demanded, “We’re hippogriffs.”

“She means us to set up a new life down here, darling,” her father said gently. “We should begin as we mean to go on, not by clinging to the past.”

Flylight asked the question that a little part of Featherflit, the part behind the numbness, wanted to ask. “How can you say that? We can’t change what we are, Dad!”

He spread his forelegs in a mute shrug. “We’ve already changed.”

Featherflit listened as the news spread between campsites that the caverns were cut off from the ocean outside. Mount Aris, it seemed, was a sealed bubble with no escape. They were safe from the Storm King, safe from the turbulent oceans he could command. Safe from everything.

Featherflit watched as the lantern corals planted on the ceiling of the huge cave grew and blossomed into glowing houses, each exactly like the others. They grew in concentric circles around the beautiful, luminescent sea-lily that the Pearl had transformed into a vast new palace.

Wrapped in her disintegrating woollen blanket, she followed as her family packed up their meagre possessions from the campsite and made the long swim up to the lighter regions at the top of the cavern, where the lantern corals grew. She followed as the guards directed them to the one that was to be theirs, and she let Flylight gently show her which alcove would be her room. She thought she even managed to mutter her thanks when Flylight and her mother managed to find enough woven seaweed blankets to make her a curtain for her doorway. Then she shut it on their concerned faces and went to the natural platform in the corner of the room and lay down. She rested her heavy head on it, drew the remnants of the blanket over her face, and let her eyes slip shut.

Days passed, or weeks. She supposed that she was losing her grip on the passage of time; it was easy enough in this constant twilight, with no sun or moon and only the inconstant flickering of the Queen’s prized phosphorescent plants. She ate the food Flylight brought and ignored the news she shared; crops beginning to grow on the sea bed, the spread of the luminous corals, the transformation of the cavern into a place of beauty. It all seemed useless. She felt like a foal again. Reduced to a childlike state. Here she was, living with Flylight and her parents, her paints and her precious studio gone. Probably by now they had been razed to the ground by the Storm King’s marauding army.

Her family each showed their concern in their own way. Her father tried to tempt her with the new delicacies the palace chefs were developing. It seemed every day something new had been created by the power of the Pearl. Her mother offered gossip and news of her foalhood friends. Some were pursuing new careers in fish-herding, shellfish-breeding, or coral care. The royal guard had a large number of new recruits.

Flylight was the most persistent. She came every day to Featherflit’s room and tried, gently at first and then with increasing urgency, to rouse her. “Come outside,” she begged again, pulling at Featherflit’s arm.

“For what, Flylight?” Featherflit snapped for the first time, roused at last to anger. “To swim in circles around our fishbowl? No thank you.”

Flylight looked both furious and desperately sad. “Well, its better than lying around in here forever. It’s been weeks since you went out!”

Featherflit turned her face to the wall. The last few strands of wool from her grandmother’s blanket drifted in the water around her. She remembered the ‘world’ outside; a dark cave, walls on every side, crowded with horrible hairless sea-creatures that looked like sick parodies of the hippogriffs she used to know. “I can wait for death perfectly well in here.” Her voice was stone.

There was a pause of disbelief. Featherflit waited for the storm to break. Flylight still somehow, incomprehensibly, managed to care about things in the way she had in the world above.

Flylight let out a breath, sounding more hurt than angered. “You mustn’t say things like that, Featherflit. You mustn’t think that way.”

She floated for a long time, waiting for an answer, but Featherflit slid her eyes shut, blocking out the sight of the murky room filled with water. With the soft bed beneath her, and the heavy new seaweed blanket to weigh her down, when she shut her eyes she could almost imagine she was in her own bed, in her own body. The way things had been. Behind her, she heard the quiet swish of the curtain swinging closed as Flylight left.

But now that she had set her mind to it, Flylight was implacable. Relentless as a glacier, she increased her visits. She came every morning and afternoon to Featherflit’s room and demanded that she come outside. At first Featherflit had vehemently refused. But gradually, as the days slid past, each as tortuously slow as the last, her sister began to wear her down.

“Come on,” Flylight carolled, bursting into the room in her usual cloud of light and energy. She had taken to the new fashion of weaving the phosphorescent algae around her mane-fins. “Today is the day! You’re going out!”

Featherflit hardly raised her head. She was so used to these interruptions now they barely registered. She opened her beak to repeat her usual flat denial, and then felt that same crushing weight of realisation that she no longer had a beak, and was no longer herself, and let the words go unsaid.

Perhaps encouraged by her sister’s silence, Flylight swarmed around the room in a flurry of activity, throwing open the seaweed curtains covering the window that Featherflit had not wanted and never looked out from. She dragged the blanket away from Featherflit’s unresisting hooves and unceremoniously turfed her sister onto the floor with a dextrous flick of her tail. Featherflit let it happen, registering with distaste that Flylight seemed more at home in her new body now. Featherflit still felt and moved like an alien in her new form, and she liked it that way. To grow used to this fleshy prison was to accept it, and she would never accept what had been done to her.

Flylight industriously tucked the corners of the blanket back under the edges of the heavy new sea-sponge mattress, and flicked her searching gaze around the room in search of more things that needed doing. Featherflit noted with silent satisfaction that she could find none; the room was bare and empty, because to fill it would be to establishing a permanent presence, a life down here. No. All the possessions she wanted were in her studio at home.

In the absence of further tidying, Flylight propelled herself towards Featherflit. “Right,” she said tartly, dragging at Featherflit by a fin. “This has gone on long enough. Mum and Dad are absolutely beside themselves with worry about you, Featherflit. Dad’s gone off his food like you have — yesterday at dinner he didn’t eat a scrap, just pushed his molluscs around his plate until they floated away.” She paused, and gave Featherflit a sharp prod in the stomach. “Not that you would know, because you never join us.”

Featherflit winced. She didn’t care what happened to herself any more, particularly — this was a half-life at best. But she did still love her family.

Flylight saw her weakness and homed in for the kill. “And Mum cries herself to sleep at night. And its just me left swimming, trying to keep us all afloat. You’re my big sister, Featherflit. You’re meant to look after me — not lie around in your bed for weeks like a giant sea slug.”

Featherflit sighed and tried to let Flylight’s words roll over her like the water. She knew she was hurting them, and that pinprick at her conscience was a sharper feeling than she had felt in eons. She shied away from it, reached for the familiar folds of numbness to wrap herself in. Let her rest. Hadn’t she done enough?

But Flylight wouldn’t let up. She leaned in closer, the fin of her forehoof tapping repeatedly against Featherflit’s forehead to emphasise her words. “You have been so selfish, Featherflit. We are a family, and a flock, and we have a responsibility to each other. You need to survive, or you’ll drag Dad and Mum and me too down with you. We need you here with us.”

Featherflit sighed out a long string of bubbles. Each one shimmered and spiralled like a butterfly as it rose. Little rainbows of light refracted from Flylight’s glowing algae garlands and sent colour skidding over the walls. Featherflit watched them, and that glimpse of colour made her ache for some paints — a pencil, anything — that might let her capture that moment of fleeting beauty in this dank place.

Flylight delivered another hefty kick to her flank with a hoof. “Are you listening to me, Featherflit? Get up.”

Featherflit tilted her head to watch the last bubble soar up to the ceiling and shatter into dozens of tiny versions of itself. She heard Flylight heave her own sigh and watched her slump.

She thought for a moment, and as Flylight turned to leave she put out a hoof. “Wait.”

Flylight swung back at once, hope alight in her eyes once more. “What is it—?”

Featherflit raised a fin to stop her. “I’ll come,” she said, the words feeling like lead in her mouth. She didn’t want to crush the fragile hope Flylight still had. She didn’t want to be the one to sink the family any lower than Queen Novo had already bought them. Besides, it was beginning to seem like resisting Flylight was almost more work than going along with her demands would be.

Flylight beamed and darted back to her side. “You’ll come?”

Despite herself, seeing her sister this uncompromisingly happy for what felt like the first time in years, a tiny smile worked its way across Featherflit’s own muzzle. “I’ll come.”

Before she could change her mind, Flylight’s hooves closed like an iron vice on her foreleg. “Brilliant. Let’s go.”

Featherlight took a deep breath as they crossed the width of her small room and Flylight lifted the curtain for her. She ducked her head to pass underneath, and they emerged into the larger living space that each of the family’s personal alcoves branched out from. Featherflit looked around herself, taking in each new detail. Flylight’s touch was obvious throughout the room in the garlands of glowing plants, as well as the dozens of pots of glowing algae and coral that clustered on every shelf and surface. Her mother had clearly been trying hard as well; the room was filled with simple furniture crafted from coral and stone. Nothing like the formal, dark walnut furniture her mother had favoured in her carpentry back home, but still with her distinctive style. And her father had been taken into account as well; there in the corner of the room, behind the dining table, was a small but well-equipped galley kitchen, with worktops made from large, polished slabs of rock, and coral cupboards that Dawn Dancer must have made for him. Sure enough, Skylark was in the kitchen, carefully pouring viscous jellies from different shells into a larger flat shell that was clearly serving as a mixing bowl.

He turned as they entered. “How was she today?” He paused as he took in Featherflit’s presence beside Flylight and his face lit up. “Featherflit, darling! You’re out of bed!”

Featherflit nodded, suddenly feeling a little shy. “Hi, Dad.”

Skylark abandoned his baking where it stood and hurried across to enfold her in a hug. “Dawn will be so relieved you’re up and about again.”

“Where is Mum?” Flylight asked.

“Meeting with Jade Breeze — you remember her, don’t you darling?” He said in an aside to Featherflit. “She was in your descent group. She’s been asking after you. She’s struck up quite a friendship with your mother; turns out she dabbled in rock-sculpting on the surface, and the two of them have been working together to see if they can take elements of sculpting and wood-carving to make a viable technique for working with coral. They’re thinking of setting up a business.”

“I’ve been over to her family’s lantern coral house as well,” Flylight added. “Jade Breeze’s granddaughter Windflow is our age, and she’s really nice — I’ve been helping her grow some algae of her own.”

Featherflit nodded, letting all the new information wash over. It seemed all of her family were finding their niche. Her father in the home, just has he had always been. Her mother moving from woodcarving to coral, and Flylight, who had previously struggled to choose a career, was clearly becoming more recognised as an authority on the new species of decorative undersea plants. She tried to think for a moment about what she would do down here, but the future was a dark, yawning chasm. What could she do but paint? She had no other skills, and she would never love anything else as much. She felt the tide of exhaustion and numbness threatening to rise once more, and looked over her shoulder at the inviting curtain to her room, ready to close behind her and shut out the world for her once more. But Flylight had still not relinquished her foreleg, and Featherflit supposed that was probably neccessary. She did want to go back to her room, where it was safe, where these questions about her future couldn’t reach her.

“Come on, sit down,” Skylark was saying, ushering them towards some sort of large sea sponge that was shaped a little like a sofa. “Let me get you both some lunch.”

Flylight tried to gesture him away. “No, Dad, we’re going straight outside. She’s finally agreed to; we need to get going before she changes her mind.”

Skylark paused, uncertain, but Featherflit sighed and swam for the spongey sofa. “I need to eat, Flylight.”

Flylight followed close behind and hovered nervously over the settee. “Alright — but be quick, Dad. I want to get this done.”

Skylark bought them a strange mush, which he explained was anemone mash. Featherflit nosed it dubiously around the bowl, but after seeing Flylight wolf hers down, followed suit. It didn’t taste bad…it just didn’t particularly taste of anything.

“I’ve been experimenting with all the new foods the Queen has created,” Skylark said apologetically. “But it’s so strange to cook without heat — I’m still adjusting.”

“No, Dad, its good, honestly,” Featherflit said in her most reassuring tone, and Flylight rewarded her with a beaming smile.

“Its so good to see you getting back to your old self at last, Featherball,” Skylark said, wiping surreptitiously at his eyes.

Featherflit flinched at his phrasing — she would never be her old self again — but before the meaning could sink in Flylight jumped in.

“I remember when Dad used to call you Featherball more than your actual name,” she said brightly. “When I was a little kid I thought it was your real name.”

Featherflit smiled too, relieved at a change of subject. “Well, I could have believed Baby Flybie was your full name; Mum called you that exclusively till you were at least twelve.”

Flylight giggled. “Well, I had to put my hoof down at some point; I couldn’t go to the big school still being called Baby Flybie.” She rose from the sofa. “Come on, Featherball, lets go outside. Its well past time you did. Honestly, its really pretty now. I think you’ll like it.”

Featherflit nodded and obediently slurped down the remnants of her mash. To her relief, it was getting easier to manipulate things with her hooves. Even the fins on the tips of her hooves could be useful for getting under the edges of delicate objects like the clam shell that served as her bowl. She passed the emptied shell back to Skylark and then followed her sister to the doorway. A seaweed curtain, similar to the one that hung across the entrance to Featherflit’s alcove, was the only form of door. Featherflit could hear voices outside, the shouts of children playing. It sounded…normal. Like a market day in Hippogriffia. She looked across at Flylight, who nodded encouragingly.

She squared her shoulders. “I’m ready.”

Flylight reached for the curtain and flung it aside, and Featherflit blinked, blinded by the sudden flood of light.

Chapter 7

Featherflit squinted in the glare. She felt exposed, her eyes unused to the bright lights after so long in the comfortable shadows of her room. As she adjusted and began to take in the spectacle of colours and plants swarming over the rocky surface of the cavern’s ceiling and walls, her mouth fell open. She had expected the barren, black cave she and Flylight had entered just a few short weeks ago, but the sight before her now was nothing like what she remembered.

The slender white sea-lily that hung from the very apex of the cavern’s ceiling was festooned with glowing blue vines. Purple starfish moved slowly over its surface, each emitting their own light and creating minuscule constellations. The white petals that served as gates to the palace were flung wide open, and a steady flood of seaponies flowed in and out of it, laden with bags stuffed with crops and goods to trade. The market was clearly resurrected and thriving.

All around the palace hung hundreds of black lantern coral dwellings, each decorated with different combinations of coloured coral or algae, all the windows glowing with the lantern coral’s distinctive yellow light. Fish swarmed everywhere, brightly coloured schools of them flickering through the town like butterflies. Foals were playing, tossing balls and stones back and forth between one another. Beyond the town, the distant walls of the cavern were covered with a riotous collection of glowing corals and soft-tendrilled plants. Barren patches of rock still remained, but the plants were clearly growing quickly. When Featherflit looked down, she could make out, far below them, not the grey rocky base of the cavern where they had camped for those dark first days, but gentle green fields rolling as far as the eye could see. Her eyes widened in disbelief; even with the powers of the Pearl, this was incredible.

“It’s amazing, isn’t it?” Flylight seemed to pluck the thought from her head. “The Queen’s thought of everything. Everypony’s been working so hard, but we’ve turned the cavern into a new place entirely.” She flicked her tail in enthusiasm as she spoke and drifted out of the doorway. “The corals and the algae dim themselves every twelve hours, so its exactly like having day and night — except its prettier, I think.”

“Where did all these fish come from?” Featherflit asked, turning to follow a school of the brilliantly coloured creatures as they soared past. She didn’t even recognise most of the species here.

“The guard caught a lot of fish before we came down,” Flylight explained. “The Queen used the Pearl to make all sorts of species; sweet-tasting ones, sour-tasting ones, all different nutrients. And the farms on the cave base are fully functional now, growing all the new crops — mostly sea-grass and kelp, though. The guard even managed to catch some dolphins, before we transformed. They’re being kept down in the fields. They say once we manage to tame them, we’ll be able to use them for ploughing and all sorts, to make things easier on the farm hippogriffs — I mean, seaponies.”

Featherflit smiled, so entranced by this wonderland of colour that her sister’s verbal slip didn’t even register. “It’s wonderful!”

“And this isn’t even all of it,” Flylight beamed, reflecting Featherflit’s enthusiasm back a hundredfold. “There’s a new forest growing down there too, coral-trees that the Queen made, and orchards too — and there’s miles and miles of tunnels down here that we can go and explore when you feel better. Imagine what we might find!”

Featherflit couldn’t imagine, and that made her smile all the wider. For the first time in what seemed like a long time, her horizons were a little wider than the walls of this cavern. “I never even thought the Pearl could have this much power,” she remarked, staring again at the utter transformation it had wrought. “The royals have barely used it for centuries — who would have thought that all along it could have done this?”

Flylight sobered. “Well, they say the Queen has nearly exhausted all her reserves. I saw her last week, over by the oyster farm, and she looked terrible, Featherflit. Just skin and bone. And the whole moral of the story of Queen Regal Quill and the Pearl was that the royals can only use the Pearl in times of the greatest need. Transforming the Eastern Oyster was meant to have nearly killed her, wasn’t it?”

Featherflit shrugged a wing-fin. “That’s what the legend says.”

“But then again, what is a time of the greatest need, if this isn’t?” Flylight added reflectively. “We would have all starved to death in here if the Queen hadn’t done all she has.”

Featherflit nodded. “I’m sure you’re right.” But looking around at the brilliant city the Queen had created from nothing, she felt that the danger must surely be very distant now. Both protected and trapped by the encircling walls of Mount Aris, nothing could reach them here.

Flylight swam a little higher and Featherflit watched as her sister circled the stalk that connected their lantern coral to the ceiling of the cavern high above. “I was thinking maybe we could get some of the blue vines from the palace and train them to grow around here,” she called down.

Featherflit leaned further out of the doorway to follow where her sister pointed. “I think that will look lovely.” She looked back out over the bustling city and the fertile land below. Her hooves itched to hold a paintbrush and commit this wonderful place to canvas. She nodded firmly to herself, and felt a little seed of hope sprout deep within herself. If the Queen could create all of this out of a dark and empty cave, surely she could find a way to make some paints that would function down here. Maybe she could ask Flylight for help; perhaps they could grow coloured algae on a surface in the right shapes — a living painting! Now there was a prospect. And those tunnels Flylight had mentioned held promise too. ‘Miles and miles’ of unexplored tunnels; there was a chance that one of them might just lead to the surface. A secret entrance where she could come and go as she pleased. A chance she could see the sky and its beautiful colours again, and still stay with her family.

“Featherflit!” Flylight’s voice called sharply down. “You said you’d come outside! You’re still inside the door!”

Featherflit looked down and snorted with laughter. Flylight was right. She had been so caught up in the colours, she still stood where they had started. The woven seaweed curtain hung heavy across her back. She looked down, and the green fields of kelp below suddenly seemed an awfully long way down.

“Come on,” Flylight giggled from above her. “Don’t tell me you’ve developed a fear of heights now!”

Featherflit waved a hoof to shut her up. “I’m coming, I’m coming!” She spread her wing-fins wide and flipped her tail to push herself away from the lantern coral.

Instinctively, she began trying to flap her wings, but Flylight’s laughter soon stilled her abortive movements. She had forgotten; being underwater was of course nothing like flying. She hung there effortlessly. Down here, travelling in any direction was as simple as walking on land had been.

But as she swam up towards Flylight, there were similarities that jumped out at her. Just as thermals could be used to rise and fall with ease in the air, there were eddies and currents in the water. Something as simple as a group of seaponies swimming past in the street could send a little current curling away, and that could be used to give extra lift and speed her own passage.

She was a little breathless by the time she joined Flylight above the roof, unused to exertion after all this time. Flylight’s green touch had extended here as well; more bright purple algae bloomed, their feathery fronds waving gaily in the current. Featherflit rested a hoof on the lantern coral’s stalk to stabilise herself. Its leathery surface was reassuring in this liquid world, where it seemed everything swayed with the water’s movements. Flylight was using her wing-fins to maintain her position, spreading them wide with just a little flick here and there to keep steady. After watching the way she did it, Featherflit copied her and spread her own wing-fins and hesitantly releasing her hold on the stem of the house. It was like trying to glide; one just had to remember not to flap.

The two sisters drifted side by side and looked out over the burgeoning settlement. More lantern coral houses were being grown on the edges of the town, and seaponies flitted everywhere between the dark stalks. Many of the adults were still slow and cautious in their movements, much like Featherflit herself, but the colts and fillies Featherflit could see held no such inhibitions. They raced in and out of sight, weaving between fish and corals alike in complex games of tag, and Featherflit smiled as their turbulent passage sent a pair of middle-aged mares spiralling in their wake.

“Do you want to go have a look around?” Flylight asked. Her voice was positively bubbling with happiness.

Featherflit couldn’t help but smile back at her sister. It seemed like she had spent months listening to Flylight speaking in whispers and refusing to answer. Resurfacing from the numbness felt like she was finally coming up for air. Not that she could come up for air, anymore, she reflected. Probably a whole lot of metaphors and sayings would have to be reworked.

“Not too much today, I think,” she answered. “I don’t want to overdo it.”

Flylight nodded. “Of course not.”

Featherflit let Flylight lead the way down from the roof and into the streets of Seaponia; if streets they could be called. The sea floor was leagues below, and the sea-hippogriffs — no, we’re seaponies now, Featherflit mentally corrected herself — were swimming and talking in the gaps between the lantern coral houses. Flylight obviously recognised many of the seaponies they passed, and she had a friendly smile and a wave for everypony. Featherflit, in contrast, found herself the target of more than a few stares.

“Why are they all looking at me?” she hissed to Flylight, after yet another group swam past them, muttering behind their fins.

Flylight looked surprised. “Oh! Are they looking? I suppose its because they don’t recognise you yet. We’re all living in much closer quarters here than we were in Hippogriffia, and everypony is pretty familiar with one another from working on getting the kelp farms up and running, and planting the corals on the cave walls.” She patted Featherflit’s wing reassuringly. “Give it time and keep coming outside, and I’m sure they’ll all get to know you again.”

Even Flylight’s gentle touch was enough to send Featherflit spinning off balance. She flapped hard to right herself and ended up spiralling even more out of control. She collided with the wall of a nearby lantern coral, and with a gentle creak, it swung a little on its stalk. The sound of smashing crockery from within made Featherflit wince and she thrashed her tail, trying to get upright again.

A curtain was dragged roughly aside and an angry stallion looked out. “If I have to tell you foals one more time, I’ll—” He stopped in surprise when he saw the two adult seaponies.

Flylight darted forward, her hooves spread in supplication. “I’m so sorry, sir! My sister’s still learning the ropes. Won’t happen again!” She hastily helped Featherflit back onto her belly, entwined their forelegs firmly together, and swam them both away.

Featherflit looked nervously over at Flylight, afraid she had committed some strange new faux pas. Flylight was swimming quickly, her lips pressed tightly together. But once they were safely out of sight around the side of the next house, she burst into laughter.

Featherflit stared, shocked, but Flylight leaned on her for support, laughing so hard she was shaking them both off course. Featherflit began to smile, too, and then both sisters descended into giggles.

“You wouldn’t believe how common that is,” Flylight finally gasped, wiping at her eyes. “I’ve seen so many people hit the houses and send them swaying all over the place. I can’t believe anypony even has any unsmashed plates left!”

Featherflit groaned and laughed again, covering her eyes in embarrassment. The idea of that poor old stallion carefully packing up all his best china, bringing it all the way down here without incident, and unpacking it in his fresh-grown house — only to lose it to her uncoordinated flippers! It was too much. The poor old guy.

“Come on,” Flylight said, patting Featherflit’s hooves with her own. “Let’s head to the castle and get you a quick look at the market.”

Featherflit nodded and tightened her hold on her sister’s forearm. “Maybe you steer me this time.”

“Definitely!” snickered Flylight. “I’d be drummed out of town if I didn’t safeguards the nations remaining plates from you.”

They continued towards the palace, joining the steady stream of seaponies on the major streets heading for the market. Flylight let Featherflit set the pace, and Featherflit deliberately took her time, looking at each of the lantern houses they passed. Every one was unique, even if it was only in a few tiny details. The placement of a plant, a few knobbles here and there on their dark, lumpen surfaces. Some were much larger than others, and upon questioning Flylight told her that the Queen had designed them to be grown to different sizes depending on the size of the family.

There were a few ponies heading away from the palace, too. One of the groups they passed was made up of royal guards surrounding a couple of well-dressed seaponies. Featherflit took in the guards’ new uniforms with interest. Rather than just their helmets, which had been the extent of the uniforms just after the descent, these guards were dressed head to tail in the traditional golden plate armour, now perfectly tailored to the long, elegant frame of their seapony forms. She wondered where they had gotten all the gold. Had they managed to retrieve and melt down the old armour? Surely there hadn’t been enough time to locate and establish a new gold mine down here.

Featherflit was so absorbed in looking at the overlapping scales of the armour that she was taken aback when one of the guards broke formation slightly to wave at her. She blinked and stared at him. Did she know him? His teal skin looked a little familiar, but it was so hard to tell under all that armour, and without a beak or feathers. She would have to relearn everypony’s faces.

“Wave back,” Flylight hissed. “I can’t believe someone’s greeting you after you’ve hidden for so long!”

Obediently, Featherflit raised a hoof and flopped her stupid fleshy fin at in greeting. “But who is he?”

“Captain Stratus Skyranger, idiot,” Flylight reprimanded her. “From our trip down here. Don’t you recognise him?” She sighed a little wistfully. “I didn’t know him up top, but apparently he was quite a looker, and he’s still quite attractive — don’t you think?”

“I don’t know,” Featherflit said doubtfully. “How can you like seaponies already? All my attraction is still geared towards feathers and beaks. I don’t know how to feel about all the smooth skin and translucent fins. Weirds me out.”

“Please,” scoffed Flylight. “You didn’t even like people back in Hippogriffia. You haven’t had a girlfriend since you were thirteen.”

Featherflit bristled — or she would have, had she still possessed feathers. As it was, she had to settle for flaring her wing-fins. “I’ll have you know my break up with Evening Star was very tough on me emotionally.”

Flylight nodded, her brow furrowed theatrically with mock sympathy. “Mmm, yes, I can see how falling out over who should have the last scoop of ice cream could leave you with scars that last years.”

“And even if I was ready for love again,” Featherflit said grandly, “It certainly wouldn’t be with a male.”

“I’m pretty sure the only thing you’ve ever been sexually attracted to is your paint pots,” Flylight mused, a malicious glint in her eye.

Featherflit snarled and tried to drag her foreleg away from Flylight, but Flylight’s work on the kelp planting had clearly give her some serious muscle. Featherflit ground her teeth together. To be beaten again by her baby sister was infuriating.

“Sorry,” Flylight said, seeing Featherflit’s expression shift into genuine annoyance. She let go and Featherflit, who was still pulling away, went tumbling head over tail right into the path of the seaponies swimming just ahead of them. She collided hard with a little filly who promptly burst into tears, and her furious mother snatched the foal up and began to scold Featherflit for her carelessness.

“Sorry, sorry!” Featherflit scrambled backwards, praying she wouldn’t trample any more small children on the way.

“Its careless young idiots like you who put us all at risk!” the foal’s mother snapped, her voice increasing in volume. “You all ought to be put on the edges of town until you learn how to swim straight—”

“Is there a problem here, Ma’am?” A stern voice interrupted, and Featherflit looked up gratefully to see that the group of guards had circled back around upon hearing the commotion. The one who had spoken was clearly senior — a huge plume made from a strange glowing variety of pink seaweed adorned her golden helmet, which was also inlaid with delicate designs in silver. Behind her, a pale pink seapony pushed some sort of floating device constructed of an open clamshell. Flanking the pink seapony was Stratus Skyranger and another guard who seemed vaguely familiar — Featherflit thought it might be the one called Corporal Seaspray.

The irate mare immediately looked chastened. “No, General — there’s no problem. This…young seapony just had an accident, that’s all.” Her eyes narrowed as she looked past the guard at Featherflit. “She just needs to watch where she’s going a little better.”

The General turned to Featherflit. “Very well. Everypony had better be about their business, then.”

Featherflit dipped her head obediently and hastily propelled herself upwards, away from the street level. Once clear of the crush of seaponies, she looked again for Flylight. She spotted her sister caught in a crush headed with renewed speed for the market, and called her over. It took Flylight a moment’s searching to spot Featherflit’s rooftop vantage point, and another few seconds to break free of the crowd, but once she was out she swam with impressive speed to Featherflit’s side.

“Gosh, I’m sorry,” she apologised immediately. “I had no idea you were going to crash into that foal.”

Featherflit laughed ruefully. “Me neither.” She paused, and seeing Flylight’s worried expression, waved her next apology away. “Don’t worry about it. But I think maybe I’ve had enough outside time for today. Enough crashes, certainly.”

“Of course,” Flylight agreed at once. “I shouldn’t have pushed for more. Tomorrow, maybe we can go down to the kelp fields? Its a lot calmer down there.”

Featherflit nodded. Seaponia was certainly much more crowded than Hippogriffia’s sprawling forest settlements had been. With everypony living on top of one another like this, as well as still learning to swim, accidents were bound to happen.

She peered down, past the bulbous shapes of the lantern corals, at the gently waving green fields below. It certainly looked more peaceful down there. Nothing but miles of kelp, susurrations moving in concentric patterns across the plants. There were even dolphins down there, if Flylight was to be believed. Featherflit had always like dolphins. She admired their drive to fly, even though they were water-bound creatures. She had put leaping dolphins into more than one of her paintings, as a counterpoint to the vastness of the sky. The little arc of a dolphin in the distance could provide a good counterpoint to a sunset’s blaze of colour, especially if the dolphin were silhouetted.

“By the way,” she added. “Which way is home?”

Flylight giggled again. “That way. Don’t worry — you’ll learn. Shall I give you a hoof again on the way?”

Featherflit smiled a little sheepishly. “Yeah, I think that’d probably be a good plan.” She linked her foreleg again with her sister’s and the two of them started for home.

“Did you see who was in the pushchair?” Flylight said conversationally, as they began to weave their way homewards between the stalks of the lantern corals. Featherflit noted that her sister carefully kept them above street level this time around.

“What pushchair?”

“The big shell that the nanny with the guards was pushing. Princess Skystar was in it!” Flylight bit her lip. “At least, I think it was her. This is my first time seeing her in seapony form. Yellow skin, blue fins, royal guards — it can’t have been anypony else.”

Featherflit nodded in interest. She hadn’t seen the infant princess in the clam shell, but she supposed it made sense. Royal guards would hardly be escorting an unknown entity like the pink seapony around the town.

It had been an illuminating first trip into Seaponia. The city itself was a thing of beauty, and for the first time in weeks Featherflit’s urge to paint and draw had returned. The seaponies she had encountered hadn’t been exactly friendly, with the exception of Stratus Skyranger, but she had crashed into them in both instances, so she supposed it was to be expected. As for Captain Stratus Skyranger, why he would be glad to see her again after their single ill-starred meeting in the cavern was absolutely beyond her.

Regardless, seeing Seaspray and Stratus Skywalker again bought back memories of Sky Beak, the young silver-maned hippogriff who had seemed as reluctant to transform as Featherflit had felt. She wondered where in Seaponia he was living. It would be good to speak with him about all the changes recent months had bought; she thought that he would be more able than Flylight to sympathise with her reluctance to embrace life down here. Maybe she would find him down in the kelp fields; he certainly didn’t seem like the type to have enthusiastically embraced the city living of Seaponia.

Chapter 8

Featherflit awoke early for once; and for the first time she flung open the curtain covering the small window in her room. To her surprise, it was still dark outside. Not the complete darkness of those first few days in the cavern, before the glowing corals covered the walls. But the light from the plants was very muted. The corals glowed a dim purple that seemed to pulse gently, like they shared a heartbeat. Little glimmers in the distance showed where the light reflected from the shining scales of the fish.

Flylight had said the plants operated on a twelve-hour cycle; Featherflit thought that she must have awoken before they reached their next bright phase. The dimmed radiance was less obviously stunning, but had a more subtle beauty to it. Featherflit’s hooves twitched again towards a paintbrush that wasn’t there. Compared to the nightscapes and star scenes she had painted in the world above, the vista of fish and purple corals curving across the cavern walls was comparatively tiny, but it still held an ethereal beauty. Featherflit could not deny that Queen Novo had done an incredible job in beautifying the cavern, and creating species that were as lovely as they were functional.

There was another added bonus of being up this early; nopony else was awake. The gently flowing water outside was completely empty. The lantern corals swayed on their stalks in utter silence; the fish were the only flickers of movement.

Featherflit couldn’t resist any longer, and with a swish of her tail, she was moving up and out of her window. There was no glass, of course; while her forest home had been glazed with the clearest, finest glass Featherflit’s limited budget had been able to afford, down here there was no weather to shield against, and all the houses were open to the elements. The cavern was so isolated from the wider ocean that all the currents in here were slow and peaceful. Perhaps in time, somepony would invent a method of blowing glass underwater. A windowpane might be pleasant for soundproofing and privacy, if nothing else. For now, it was as easy for Featherflit to slip out through the window as it was to use the front door.

She hung motionless in the water outside her bedroom, taking her time to drink in the peaceful sight of Seaponia at night. All was quiet and calm. She glanced down, hoping for a glimpse of the seemingly endless kelp fields below, but the pale lavender light illuminated only the town itself. The depths of the cave were dark and shadowed from her sight.

If not for the little motes visible in the water close to her face, Featherflit would have been able to believe the whole city was somehow suspended in the air. The purple radiance of the corals against the stark black of the stone could have been stars in the night sky. The fish could almost be clouds or some strange, alien species of bird.

She knew it was still very early, but she wanted to make a start. After so long trapped by indecision and lethargy, she was longing for a little action. She and Flylight had planned to go to the kelp fields; so to the meadows they would go. The sooner the better.

With a kick of her forelegs, she propelled herself around the edge of the house. She stuck her nose in through the nearest window and lifted the curtain. There was the darkened living room, the black outlines of her mother’s coral furniture alien in the shadows. It must be the next window. She flipped her fins and tried again. The next window revealed the sleeping forms of her parents, snuggled close together on their larger bed-platform. Featherflit smiled to herself and let the seaweed curtain fall. Getting to grips with the geography of a spherical house would clearly take a little more time.

She nudged the curtain of the final window aside, and at last she was looking into Flylight’s room. A blaze of light streamed out of the window, and Featherflit hastily heaved herself inside and tugged the curtain shut behind her. Flylight’s new potted algae clearly had not gotten the message on the twelve-hour light cycle.

Flylight was wearing an eye mask to protect against the illumination of her plants. Featherflit looked down at her sleeping sister, and felt a surge of protectiveness for her little sibling. Flylight looked so young when she slept. Like the foal Featherflit remembered her parents bringing to her that first morning. Flylight had been so small, fresh from the egg, still damp with glaire.

But Featherflit’s reflective mood soon passed; she wallowed enough in nostalgia over the past few weeks. She might not be fully reconciled to her new life, but she was determined to make an effort. And that meant getting out there.

She nudged Flylight hard in the ribs, and Flylight moaned and rolled away from the touch. Featherflit persisted, putting her muzzle close to her sister’s ear. “Psst!” she hissed. “It’s time to go.”

Blearily, Flylight fumbled with her sleeping mask. She finally managed to push it off, and blinked up at Featherflit. “Ugh…what time is it?”

“Time to go,” Featherflit repeated brightly. “Up you get!”

Groaning, Flylight let Featherflit push her out of the bed. “What a role reversal this is,” she muttered, rubbing again at her eyes.

“I thought I’d better make up for lost time,” Featherflit offered with an apologetic grin.

Flylight returned her smile, seeming to finally make it out of the fog of sleep. “Good idea. Stars, Featherflit, its good to see you being enthusiastic again.” She swam to the window and looked out. “But for Novo’s sake, its still halfway through the night!”

“Surely nopony can sleep for twelve hours straight night after night?” Featherflit asked. “Some ponies must get up early.”

“I’m sure some ponies do,” Flylight said, a tinge of grumpiness returning to her expression. “But I don’t usually get up four hours before dawn.”

Intrigued, Featherflit hastily joined her sister at the window. “How can you tell its four hours to go?” With no sun or moon to calculate by, she had assumed the twelve-hour light changes would be the only time measurement aid down here.

“Um…it’s the light level,” Flylight said, frowning out into the night. “The types of coral we planted up here glow brighter the closer we get to dawn. Its still dim, of course, or nopony would be able to sleep. But there is a difference. Keep an eye on it as we get closer to dawn, I’m sure you’ll see it.”

Featherflit looked closer at the distant plants and shrugged. “Maybe. But let’s make a start, shall we?”

“Don’t you want any breakfast?” Now that the first flush of waking was over, Flylight’s humour was returning, and a wry smile tugged at the corner of her mouth.

Featherflit thought about it. “Can’t we eat on the way? Or we could always just grab some kelp once we’re down there.”

Flylight gave her shoulder a playful shove. “If everypony did that, there’d be no kelp left by harvest time. No. We’ll find something in the kitchen.”

The two of them hastened to the kitchen, and after a hurried session rifling through their father’s neatly organised larder, as well as much hissing at each other to shut up and stop making so much noise, they were finally making their escape. Featherflit was almost disappointed when Flylight led the way out of the front door. Being able to enter and exit through windows was quite liberating, really.

They quickly dropped below the level of the town, and not long after that the glistening coral on the cavern walls petered out as well. When Featherflit asked why that was, Flylight shrugged.

“I think the plan eventually is to grow them everywhere. But they were most needed up near Seaponia. I suppose they haven’t gotten to this part yet.”

Featherflit squinted down at the murk below them again. She still saw only the shifting purple shadows of untold depths. The cavern might drop down forever, for all she could tell. “How long will it take us to get to the fields?”

“About three hours, I think,” Flylight said. “If we dropped straight down, we could make it in maybe forty minutes. But the sudden increase in pressure can make your head hurt; a lot of seaponies even fainted in the early days. Official advice now is to circle your way down.”

Featherflit frowned. Vertical dives did increase the pressure on your brain when flying, but she had done that plenty of times. Only little chicks were meant to avoid that more risky manoeuvre. And surely the water would support anypony sufficiently to make the dive gentle enough to cope with. It wasn’t like you could fall at any speed through water.

“Try it on your own time,” Flylight said sharply, seeing the scepticism on Featherflit’s face.

“Stars, somepony got out of bed on the wrong side today,” Featherflit rejoined. But she smiled to take the sting from her words, and was rewarded by Flylight’s laughter.

“Only because I was woken up in the middle of the night by you!”

Featherflit followed Flylight’s lead and let her set the course. They skirted the edge of the cavern for a short distance, before doubling back towards their starting point to begin their smaller circle again. All the while, they were slowly but surely working their way downwards.

Flylight didn’t seem much disposed to talking, but Featherflit supposed she couldn’t blame her. Flylight had never been much of a morning hippogriff. At any rate, Featherflit found enough to occupy her interest; the cavern wall was pitted with ridges and cracks, many of them more than four times the body-length of a seapony. The dark crevasses led away to who knew what hidden worlds, and Featherflit peered eagerly into each one they passed. One of these tunnels might contain her path to the wider ocean and the world outside.

After they had been swimming for an hour, the dim lights of Seaponia were almost out of sight, but there was still nothing visible below them. Featherflit felt strangely claustrophobic, for saying she was in such a large space. What if they never reached the bottom, and ended up stuck in limbo, suspended in the middle of an unknowably deep canyon? She considered asking Flylight if the sea floor was always so difficult to see, but feared to voice her foalish thoughts aloud. She thought she might die of embarrassment if her little sister had to comfort her. She breathed out a little stream of bubbles. It was fine. They’d reach the bottom soon enough.

Flylight kept them swimming in the same loose spiral. Time crept on. They swam down at a steady pace, but to Featherflit’s relief it began to grow lighter. When she looked up at Seaponia, though it was still blurry and distant, it seemed a little brighter than before.

As they went further, a little more of the cavern was revealed. The sea floor was still shadowed and beyond the range of her vision, but she could see more of the empty water in the centre of the cavern now, and a darkening in the distance that she thought must be the opposite wall.

Featherflit was watching it with interest when she saw a flicker of movement. The motion in such a large blank space drew her eye immediately, but she had to squint to see it clearly. The water made things further than a few hundred wingbeats away seem hazy. She peered closer, and could just about make out a pale shape with paler fins, swimming purposefully along. It was descending with considerable speed, almost vertically. She tried to shield her eyes with one hoof and looked again. “Hey, Flylight, you see that?”

Flylight followed her pointing and narrowed her own eyes. “Isn’t that the stallion who was fighting with the guards?”

Featherflit blinked. “Sky Beak?” She looked again, and supposed that the distant shape could be him. It had the same distinctively high crest as he did. But he was moving rapidly — soon he would vanish into the gloom beneath them. Flylight had said that swimming directly down was against the rules set by the royal guard, but Sky Beak didn’t seem too concerned with that. “Where do you think he’s going in such a hurry?” Perhaps, she mused, he was going to do some work in the fields. Though she certainly wouldn’t be sprinting there like he was. Or maybe, like they were, he was just trying to escape the hustle and bustle of the town before most of the seaponies awakened. A third, more thrilling possibility occurred; perhaps he was on his way to search the caves!

Flylight simply shrugged. “Whenever I see him, he’s always rushing somewhere, just like that.”

“And you’ve never spoken to him?” Featherflit demanded, irrationally a little annoyed at this oversight on her sister’s part. Now she would have to speak to him herself to solve the mystery. She wondered if he had already found a way out; surely not. If he had, why would he still be returning to Seaponia at night? He had seemed to hold little enough love for the Queen and the other hippogriffs.

“No!” Flylight answered with genuine shock. “After the way he acted above-water?”

Featherflit bridled at the veiled accusation. “Watch it; if you hadn’t been there I’d have probably done a lot worse myself.”

Flylight smiled. “Oh come on, Featherflit — you, fleeing the royal guard? Give me a break.”

“Its true,” Featherflit insisted. “I didn’t want to come; I still want to leave. Or that we could all leave together.”

Flylight made no answer, but her brow was furrowed with concern when Featherflit looked across at her. “Try… try to get used to it, Featherflit,” she said eventually. “The Queen says we’re going to stay down here for the rest of the year. Perhaps longer. She says its the only safe place for us.”

Featherflit made no further answer; the last thing she wanted today was to fall out with her sister. They continued their descent in silence. Featherflit glanced back at Seaponia several times as they went. Each time, the purple glow from above seemed infinitesimally brighter. Just as Flylight had promised. The lantern corals, still emitting no light of their own, were just black shadows against the sky.