Seashell (print rewrite)

SEASHELL

Excerpt I
From the journal of Sunburst, November 22, YS 1328:

Other ponies tell me they think I’m crazy to volunteer for duty on the Seawall.

Maybe they’re right.

Normally, being posted to the Seawall is really only one of two things: either a punishment for somepony who screwed up, or the exact opposite, something specially requested as an opportunity to earn a great mark of honor by doing what few are willing to do.

Well, I’m not being punished, and at this point in my career, there are easier ways to earn recognition and a sense of honor. The only explanation that leaves, I suppose, is some sort of crazy.

Exactly what kind of crazy is a bit of a mystery, even to me. I can’t explain why I volunteered when the posting came up. The best I can come up with is that maybe I thought it could quench, at least for a while, the sense of restlessness I’ve always felt. Maybe I thought it would help bring me closer to understanding what kind of place in this world it is that a mare like me really belongs. I’m not sure why I would think such a thing, it was just something deep down in my gut. I don’t even know why it felt like it made sense, but it did, so here I am.

Whatever somepony’s reasons for ending up here, it’s a job best suited for those who are comfortable with solitude and austerity. That much is obvious to anypony. The Seawall is on the extreme west of our continent, well outside the boundaries, nebulous as they are, of Equestria proper. It’s a lonely curiosity ~~more or less in the middle of nowhere.~~ No. Not ‘more or less.’ It IS in the middle of nowhere. Or, being on the sea, maybe it’s just on the very edge of nowhere, which makes it even further away. At least the ‘middle’ would be halfway from the far edge. This is the far edge.

As such, the most distinguishing feature here, more than anything else, is a sense of sheer loneliness. There’s only one other pony around, and she seems as content with silence as I am. I’m alone, more alone than I’ve ever been in my life, and knowing me, that’s saying something.

I don’t say it in a bad way, either.

I love this place, this Seawall.

But why? To understand it and why it exists, I suppose the question to start with is who would build such a thing in the first place. It was constructed by the old unicorn kingdom about two thousand years ago, long before all three types of ponies lived together. Why they built it, we no longer know. Maybe the motivation was as simple as what it seems like: fear of an invasion by sea. Invasion by what or whom? Good question. We still don’t fully understand what’s out there. Back then, with certain magics and clever devices we’ve never fully rediscovered after the fall of the old unicorn kingdom, maybe they knew more. If so, it’s unsettling to think they were afraid of it—whatever ‘it’ was.

There’s also the other possibility, maybe even more sinister, that it was built for the opposite reason: to keep ponies from leaving. Fleeing to the sea and taking one’s chances might have been the only way to escape the powers that ruled the land in those days.

I’m no archaeologist, but I think it was probably used for both. It was good for both, so I don’t see why it wouldn’t have been. The unicorns did fear invasion and the loss of their power, and they did more or less think they owned the earth ponies at one point.

But that’s ancient history.

Now that those dark days are a millennium behind us, it’s not much use for anything now but keeping two ponies here, waiting and watching the sea.

The wall itself isn’t a very large structure. Most of the coast is mountains with their sides eroded and pounded by waves until they’ve crumbled away and formed sheer cliffs that drop almost vertically into the water. Nothing could get past them, except maybe birds and pegasi. The wall really only fills a gap of a few thousand feet from one rocky embankment to another, plugging up the single usable passage from the sea to the inland for dozens of miles. There were fortified access doors along the bottom of the wall, once, when there used to be a permanent garrison here to guard it. Later, I guess probably when the wall was abandoned, the doors were plugged up permanently with stone and the peculiarly excellent strong concrete famous in ancient unicorn construction, which cut off access to anypony who couldn’t fly or use magic. It may have also been able to stop ponies even if they could do those things, because there are old remains of crystal pylons along the wall’s top. They were probably using barrier fields or anti-magic to seal it up even more. Fortunately, those are long gone, so I have no trouble flying back and forth over it now.

That’s how I know that the beach the wall cuts off from the inland is sandy and beautiful. My favorite thing to do here is to walk along the beach, just listening to the waves. They’re like a heartbeat—the heartbeat of the whole planet, rolling and crashing and receding, endlessly, back and forth, forever.

Sometimes I close my eyes and lose myself in the sound of the waves, and it feels like I lose myself in all of existence, like I’m a part of them and they’re a part of everything, and none of it, none of us, are ever really separate. I… don’t know how to describe it, at least not any better than that. But eventually I have to open my eyes, and let the waves be the waves, and I’m just me again. I suppose that’s the way of things. None of us can really be other than what we are.

But here in this place, I can feel like it for a little while.

It’s a feeling that I know will always live in my heart now in some way. I can never forget now.

Still, the beach would be even more beautiful if it got more sun. That’s the thing about this place—it’s unbelievably cloudy! Every day is overcast, Celestia’s sun hidden behind a thick sheet of steel-colored clouds. The ocean is an endless natural factory for them. Moisture rolls off the water on the cool Western breeze, condenses, gets trapped by the mountains at the edge of the land, and hangs here to blanket the coast. With no pegasi around, the weather is completely unregulated, and as much as I would like to help the sun shine a little more sometimes, it’s much too big a job for me alone. It’s also not why I’m here, anyway, so it’s best not to get drawn into trying to interfere. I just have to take whatever comes, rain or shine (mostly rain).

I’ve learned to seize whatever scarce moments the sun pokes through. When they happen, they make an already beautiful and untouched land absolutely breathtaking for the few minutes that the clouds break. I always feel like the luckiest mare in the world to be here for those. The dew sparkles like diamond dust on the clover and heather, and the sand of the beach glitters in the light.

And truth be told, it’s nice this way. Scarcity makes the shining sun even more of a special treasure. The clouds keep the heat down. They make flying easier at certain times of day. The veil of darker, more washed and faded colors they cast over the land gives it a certain charm and a sense of mystery. This place is full of silently held secrets and it invites me to explore and discover them, one by one, in the course of time. It’s a place with a sense of truly being a far-flung edge of the world, one of the few remaining refuges away from it all. Sometimes there’s treasures to find, like the large beautiful shell I came across washed up on the beach just the other day. The intricate spirals and gleaming ivory mother-of-pearl iridescence it shines with are more spectacular than anything I’ve seen the artists of Equestria make.

And to think, some ponies would call this place bleak. Bleak! How could I ever think that? This place is a wonder of the world in my eyes. Everypony should be so lucky as to end up in a place like this at least once in their life, a place which enraptures them so.

Most important of all, the solitude suits me.

Sometimes I wonder if that’s why I was picked for the posting. Maybe they sensed it in me, scrying out in an unspoken way the true reason why I would volunteer. There must have been some reason to choose me over the hoof-full of probably more promising candidates with bigger careers to advance.

Then again, this isn’t an action-packed assignment, either.

I’m not even sure what I’m supposed to be watching for in particular. The orders are to “Report anything not usual in the coastal environment.” Vague, isn’t it? I wonder if the Princesses expect something to come from over the waves someday. Maybe we’re just here to be here when it happens. I suppose it’s possible. Nopony really knows for sure what’s out there, past the oceans. Could be nothing. There’s never really anything to report, anyway. It’s all pretty much the same: “It rained again today,” and so on. But that’s a good thing. That’s how I hope it stays: quiet.

Not that there aren’t some challenges here to test me, if I want something to do. There’s a pair of watchtowers on tiny islets out in the distance in the water. They’re a long way out and they’re nerve-wracking to fly to because if something happened on the way and I couldn’t fly all the way back, there’s nopony here to help. I’d be stranded, or fall to the sea and drown in the vastness of the ocean. But this tradeoff, paying for the freedom of wings by living with the risk of falling, is part of being a pegasus.

A real pegasus lives and dies on her wings.

A pegasus knows that what the endless sky gives, it can also take away in an instant.

And so, I’ve chanced it a few times. Yeah, maybe I know I shouldn’t, but what’s the point in living if I can’t feel alive?

The towers are made of heavy stone blocks, more old unicorn construction. They’re still standing, but were long ago abandoned and are in ruins now. Every time I’ve flown to them I’ve landed on their roofs and used them as observation towers to look out even further over the sea, into the great unknown expanses of the West. On the clearest days, sometimes I think I can see something out there… almost. I can’t quite tell, not even with the sharp pegasus eyes I was gifted to be born with and trained as a flight scout to spot the subtle hidden things. It’s not so much seeing something, exactly, as it is seeing the signs: the way there might be just the slightest unevenness in the horizon’s white haze, a subtle raggedness in the normally smooth gradient leading to the thin edge where sea and sky meet. It’s like there’s something secret hidden there, just barely below where the line of sight is blocked by the curvature of the planet itself. But no matter how hard I look, I can’t quite tell.

In a way, I also sense the same thing in my partner on this posting. She’s a unicorn. That’s how this posting is always assigned, one pegasus and one unicorn. Her name is Morning Mist. I’m not sure what her story is, but she seems to handle being here well. I think she might even be as happy as I am to be so alone.

Just as well, then, that most of our time is spent apart performing our respective duties here. Mine consist mainly of flying along the Seawall and the coast and observing, and hers of recording and sending back reports.

Sometimes, when I’m flying over the wall, I see that she’s teleported herself to the top of it and she’s staring out from between its low crenelations. She gazes out over the water deep into the west, past the islet towers, off into the horizon. She always has a sense of longing, as if she wants something so deeply it aches, almost like a sadness for something she hopes to see out there, some sort of an answer to the mystery hiding below the horizon. I see something in her during those brief moments, as restless as my own heart sometimes feels. Maybe that’s why we were sent here together. I think we’re more alike in some strange way than one would think a pegasus scout and a unicorn message-scribe would be. Maybe we’re here with one another because being here together is better than being restless and lonely alone.

I think that’s why we don’t talk very much, even when we’re together.

I don’t know what it could be that she searches for. Although I wish I did, and I feel like we’ve made our best efforts to be friends and trust each other, she hasn’t chosen to share much about herself with me. I understand that, though. I’m that way myself. I always have been. We both instinctively live behind veils. She seems to quietly hold many secrets. I don’t know what else could be among them. For that matter, I don’t even know if her posting here is a punishment, or an honor, or maybe both somehow. That isn’t my business, though, so I know I shouldn’t dwell on it. My job is to watch the Seawall, not to watch her.

Maybe someday we’ll be comfortable enough with each other to talk about ourselves. Until then, some secrets will just have to remain secret, or at least unspoken aside from the tiny glimpses we chance to catch.
 
 
I think that’s enough writing for today.