Lost at Sea
Chapter 6: Water, Water, Everywhere
Admiral Biscuit
One moonless night, Cloud laid on her back and looked up at all the stars. It was terrifying—it was as if she was floating in a void with nothing but tiny sharp pinpricks of light above her, and yet she was afraid turn her head away. She felt like she was the only pony there was, and everything else was her imagination. Maybe this was the only thing that was real. There might not even be a cloud underneath her back.
She thought that this could be death. She might have died in the storm after all, and this was the darkness that came after, and all she had to do was let go and drift off to freedom.
Sometimes the cloud under her felt less tangible, like it was slipping away. Maybe it was a ghost cloud, and she was just a ghost pegasus floating along on it.
Cloud closed her eyes, but the image of the uncaring stars was burned into her retinas, and she couldn’t unsee it.
She tugged some of the cloud with her wingtips, pulling it over her, digging herself into the cloud, becoming part of the cloud.
• • •
The nights were getting colder, and all she could do was burrow down into her cloud when the sun went down, inside a little bowl that would hold some of her heat in as long as the wind didn’t suck it right back out.
She had stopped counting moons. There was nothing but the clouds and the ocean. Land was a distant memory, something which might have been imagined. Every day was the same day, repeated and repeated and repeated and repeated.
Down below her, the ocean was almost black in the false light of the moon, and she sometimes saw large shadow-shapes moving just below the surface. Every now and then, a fountain of white would shoot up from the water from one of these shadows, and she was sure that it was something trying to catch her. Some leviathan of the deep that wanted to knock her cloud out of the sky and gobble her up.
Her cloud was high enough to be clear of them, she hoped, and if it wasn’t, she was too weak to fight them off, so she closed her eyes and tried to think of her friends back in Chonamare. Tried to imagine what they were doing.
Tried to remember what bread tasted like.
• • •
Cloud’s ribs jutted out from her barrel and her teeth felt loose in their sockets. She could wiggle them with her tongue and that didn’t seem right to her. Her mane and tail had lightened in the constant sunlight or because she couldn’t remove the salt that encrusted them, or maybe it was both.
Some of her feathers had fallen out, and she didn’t know if that was because she was moulting or if it was from her not eating enough vegetables and grass.
She climbed to the edge of her cloud and looked down at the emerald-green sea below her, her eyes searching for a school of fish or a few pitiful clumps of seaweed.
It would be easier to just stop looking. Easier to just sit on her cloud and wait for the end.
A group of silvery flashes that weren’t the sun moved below her, and she dove, speeding towards the water, effortlessly calculating how much she needed to lead the herring. She scanned the school, watching for open spots that might be caused by a shark or some other fish that was eating the herring and might want to eat her.
She held her forehooves out in front of her to break the surface of the water, and she folded her wings just before she hit. Cloud felt a fish in her mouth and squirted the saltwater through her teeth, then swallowed it whole as she was coming back up out of the water in preparation for another dive.
She felt better with a full belly, and climbed back into the sky, her eye on a distant albatross. Maybe it knows where land is.
Cloud climbed up until she was flying parallel with it.
She flew up alongside and he regarded her with a beady black eye and squawked at her, then turned his head forward and continued flying.
For most of the day, she flew alongside him, always keeping watch below for clouds so she’d have someplace to land. Her old cloud was forgotten—there was nothing there that she wanted, and making a new cloudhome would give her something different to do.
When the sun was only a hoofspan above the ocean, she broke formation with her flying companion and glided down to a thick cumulous cloud. It was big enough to build a cloud-mansion if she’d wanted to, but she didn’t. She found an outcropping near the west side of it and bashed a small depression in the cloud, then settled down for another chilly night adrift.
• • •
There was nothing but ocean below and sky above and some days she hardly knew the difference. The ocean was a reflection of the sky, or maybe the sky was a reflection of the ocean. It didn't matter, really.
One day, she tore off a little lump of cloud and made it into a kind of pony shape, and she talked to it, giving it a moment-by-moment description of her life. It didn't talk back, but that was okay. It felt better to be talking to something. Even if it didn’t talk back.
The next day, she thought it might be hungry, so she put a small herring on it and pushed it away.
She had never imagined that she would see land again. It was only a distant memory, and maybe not a real one.