Featherflit's Narrow Escape

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.