Featherflit's Narrow Escape

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.”