2.
Imagine the School of Friendship common room decorated for Hearth’s Warming Eve. Garlands and bows lit by strings of colored lights hung from the ceiling. Bells chimed merrily with every waft of air. A blazing fireplace boasting a massive wreath warmed the room. Mountains of presents surrounded an enormous pine tree festooned in red and gold. A brilliant heart crowned the entire scene.
Now imagine all that covered in purple goo.
I’d screwed up. No one could blame me for wanting to spend the winter with my classmates, but wrecking their holidays to do it? Yeah, I had to confess. Ponies are big on second chances so I doubted I’d get kicked out of school. The worst I expected was extra friendship lessons over the break.
Friendship lessons like how to make a bunch of creatures hate you with one stupid mistake.
Maybe that book Gilda gave me is right and friendship is magic because they didn’t hate me. They helped me clean. Yona and Smolder moved furniture around so I could get underneath, Silverstream and Sandbar rehung all the decorations that could be salvaged, and Ocellus shapeshifted into a mouse to find all the little corners the goo had slithered into. I scrubbed and mopped like crazy, trying to do it all myself, but they helped with the dirty work too.
Ocellus eventually got tired from the shapeshifting and went to bed. Smolder called it quits soon after. An hour later, we found Yona sleep-pushing a sofa around, so we got her to go back to her room before she started sleep-smashing anything. Silverstream didn’t stick around much longer either.
Which left me with Sandbar. And his stories.
“…Then I remembered that if you wash wool the wrong way, it becomes felt!” His eyes went wide.
“Yikes.” I swished a mop around a puddle of goo, trying to sop up the last of it. “So you accidentally turned your grandmother’s sweater into felt?”
“Almost! Lucky for me, she’d used cotton yarn.”
“That’s a relief.”
I probably sounded sarcastic, but Sandbar’s stories had started to grow on me. They were kind of soothing, actually. I didn’t know why. It could have just been that I needed to hear about ponies being nice and things turning out okay, but the easy rhythm of Sandbar’s voice didn’t hurt.
A tired nicker came out of him before I could ask for the next story. His eyes were half-lidded, and he was leaning on his broom. I roused him with a talon to his shoulder, startling him a little. “You look like you’re a few days past your bedtime.”
He yawned and set down his broom. “I guess I should call it a night.” While he started walking towards the door, regret hit me. I had kind of hoped someone would stay up with me. Sandbar obviously needed to get some sleep, though, so I held back from saying anything.
He got to the door and stopped. “Aren’t you tired too?”
“Not really,” I said, although my paws were sore from standing upright to use the mop. “Besides, there’s a lot left to clean up.”
“We can all help finish it in the morning.”
That made me smile. By then, I’d learned what to do with a gift. “All right, all right. Give me a few minutes to put out the fire first.”
I put away my mop and padded over to the fireplace. A few seconds passed while I broke up the logs with a poker before I realized Sandbar hadn’t left yet. I glanced up.
His brows were furrowed and his ears were back in a worried look. “Promise you’ll call it a night after that?”
“Yeah, of course.” I went back to the fire, which was already subsiding. It’d need some water to put it out all the way, though.
Neither of us said anything. I tried to think of a joke or a tease to break the silence, maybe make him want to stay so he could deliver some sort of comeback, but he spoke first. “Okay. See you later.”
He left.
Fatigue hit me. My paws and back ached for relief. I flopped onto the floor, stretching my wings to take in as much warmth as I could, but I still shivered.
Being alone had never felt like that. In Griffonstone, I’d prefer to be by myself rather than having to deal with other griffons. Even Gilda would get on my nerves after too long. At school, I’d occasionally get into a funk and need time to myself, but I never wanted my friends to be too far away. When I thought about what would happen if they really did leave me…
Eugh! Quit your whining already. You got what you wanted out of this little stunt. Even if you had pissed them off for good, so what?
Even though he was on the other side of the ocean, sometimes it was like I could hear Grampa Gruff’s voice keeping me out of trouble. The voice made a good point: I’d survived in Griffonstone by myself. Surviving as a grown-up would be easy if I had to leave.
When. When these creatures get sick of you and boot you out.
That I didn’t want to believe. My friends had stuck up for me through this screw-up. No way they’d just get sick of me.
You think trashing some holiday knickknacks is the worst you can do?
My mind raced with the terrible possibilities. I hugged myself and started to shake.
“Hey, I, uh…” Sandbar said from the door.
I swiveled around. A doofy smile played across his muzzle, and his ears partly covered his eyes. He might have been blushing. Two steaming mugs rested on a tray balanced on his back.
“Since it’s so cold outside,” he started again, “I thought you might get cold after you put out the fire. From the cold. Like, if a window got opened, and cold air came in, so, uh…” He cleared his throat. “Would you like some hot cocoa?”
My beak didn’t get into gear right away. Although the fire had died down, I felt a little overheated then, but I didn’t want him to go away. “Sure. Want a seat?” I gestured to the space next to me.
His smile turned a little doofier as he walked towards me and sat close enough that I could feel his body heat.
“It’s okay if you don’t want to tell me,” he said as he slid a cocoa to me, “but what was it like growing up alone in Griffonstone? I bet you had to be brave all the time.”
I snickered. He probably wouldn’t have called me brave if he knew how I spent my last night there. “Maybe later.”
For a while, we were quiet.
Drowsiness weighed on me, but Sandbar fidgeted with his mug. I thought he might calm down if I could get him talking again, and listening to him could perk me up. “Got any more stories?”
He thought for a moment. “Well, there was the Hearth’s Warming when my sister and I got each others’ gifts—”
“I remember that one, the tags were switched.”
“How about…the time it was supposed to rain, but I forgot my umbrella—”
“And the pegasi rescheduled because of parasprites.”
The doofy smile disappeared. “Yeah.” He rubbed his front hooves together.
Silence stretched out. I got close to asking him to retell the umbrella story, if only so he’d stick around, when his face lit up.
“Has anyone ever told you the story of The Olden Pony?”
“Nope, so I guess you have to.”
A crooked grin stretched across his lips. “I have to warn you, it’s a scary story.”
“Please,” I scoffed. “Nothing scares me.”
Silverstream’s word, “Ghosts!” rings in my ears while she cracks open the copper case. Inside are four necklaces like hers.
“Guess who’s going for a midnight swim!” she announces in a sing-song. “Normally I’d have to help you get into aquatic forms using my own necklace, but these are enchanted to work automatically. As long as one of the pearl fragments is close to your heart, you’ll transform whenever you get in deep enough water. You’ll be able to breathe underwater, and your aquatic forms will move, see, and hear better than if you went swimming normally.”
Apparently our regular eyes and ears aren’t good enough for underwater.
“This way we can all go to the charybdis den and see the ghosts! So who wants to go first?” She thrusts the open case in our direction.
“Are these things going to make us all look like you?” Smolder asks. “Not that that’s a bad thing. I just want to know what I’m getting myself into.”
“It works differently for every race. Ponies end up looking sort of like us, but you’ll turn into a cute pufferfish.” It takes Silverstream a second to realize what she just said. “Is that okay?”
“That’s the one with the spines all over its body, right? I guess I can live with that.” Smolder blushes, which the others probably take as embarrassment, but it’s more likely she’s excited to have an excuse to be cute in public. Seeing her wearing a dainty princess dress is a sight I’ll never forget…or blab about to anyone else.
“Yona and Gallus, you guys turn into…” An excited look springs to Silverstream’s face. She picks up one of the necklaces and holds it out to the two of us. “I just realized, this has never been tried on a griffon or yak. Ooh, we’re doing some science tonight!”
Yona leers at the necklace, probably thinking something like, ‘yak body best body,’ but she doesn’t make a move.
My patience breaks. I snag the necklace out of Silverstream’s talons and throw it over my head. “What’s the worst that could happen?” I say as I fly towards the water.
The rest of the group follows, with Silverstream hastily passing out necklaces. A tease about Smolder’s imminent pufferfish-ification comes to mind, but I squash it. I’m not going to delay our trip when the shore’s so close and Silverstream promised us monster-killing ghosts.
Ghosts aren’t real, I know. I’m just playing along with Silverstream’s campfire tale.
I pitch down into the water. Cold washes over me, followed by swirling brilliance. There’s a sensation like when a leg that’s fallen asleep wakes up, except it’s all over my body. It stops almost as soon as it starts. The brilliance leaves with it.
My wings are gone. A pair of fins feel like they’re pinned to the back of my head. I can sense water flowing through new tubes in my body, and with a little squeeze I can make a jet to move. My skull feels like it’s been pulled all the way to my paws, except I don’t have paws anymore. Instead, tendrils covered in rippling suckers stretch in front of me. Two of them are longer than the other eight.
A squid. The crazy necklace turned me into a squid. At least I still have a beak.
Yona splashes in. A swirling glow surrounds her and turns her into a kind of fish I don’t recognize. She’s a thick disc with fins like a gull’s wings reaching up and down her backside.
Ocellus appears beside me, copying Silverstream’s seapony form. She says something, but her first words are a muddle.
“—turned Yona into a sunfish!” Ocellus exclaims, her voice suddenly clear. My ears must have finished adapting.
Yona flits around in a circle and says, “Yak body best on land.”
Called it.
“Maybe sunfish body okay for swimming.”
Ocellus rolls towards me. “And, Gallus, it looks like you’re a giant squid.”
“Really? I thought these were goldfish tentacles.” That gets some giggles from them.
“Technically, your eight shorter limbs are arms.” Ocellus shimmers, and suddenly a teal and pink squid floats in front of me. She holds up her two longer limbs, both ending with a meaty, sucker-covered bulb. “A squid’s tentacles have these large clubs at their tips.”
“Thanks, professor,” I say as she transforms back into a seapony shape.
More splashes come when Silverstream, Smolder, and finally Sandbar join us. We six gather into a rough circle.
“Which way to the ghosts?” I ask.
She grins and drifts into deeper water. As we catch up, she begins speaking in her story-telling voice again.
“Centuries went by. Knowledge of the charybdis turned to murky superstition, but the ban on sailing continued. The Mount Aris monarch became a figurehead, and a cabal of trading families rose to power. This story starts with two of those families, the Aurums and the Volares, trying to make an alliance.
“The Aurums were a wealthy family of miners who needed airships to sell their gold and silver around the world, while the Volares were a family of airship traders who needed money to expand their fleet. After many moons of intense bargaining, the two families made a deal to share their resources. To seal the alliance, one of the Volares’ sons, named Calamus, would marry into the Aurum family.”
While she talks, we glide along a seafloor covered with smooth pebbles. Silvery flashes in the distance could be fish darting away or glimmers of sinking trash. A fog far in front of us is speckled by hints of color.
“Calamus was a defiant boy about our age. He prized freedom and true love, so he despised the entire idea of arranged marriages. He tried everything he could think of to get out of his own betrothal, from running away with a traveling circus to paying a friend to woo his fiancée, but none of his plans worked. Feeling defeated, he decided that he might as well enjoy freedom while he could, so he took up risky hobbies like sky racing. Then, a few months before the wedding, he crashed during a race! Although he survived, both of his wings were injured beyond hope of healing.
“The Aurums almost called off the wedding. ‘Our beloved daughter won’t be stuck with a hippogriff who can’t even fly,’ they said.” Silverstream does a good impression of a stuffy aristocrat. “What they really wanted was a better deal, so the Volares convinced them to go back to the negotiating table. Meanwhile, Calamus grew depressed and wandered around Mount Aris aimlessly. One day, he made his way to a lagoon, where he saw a hippogriff swimming in the water. He fell in love with her instantly.”
The fog in front of us parts, and what’s hiding behind it leaves my beak agape. Mountains of prickly bushes spattered red rise from the sandy floor, their tips of delicate green and pristine white stretching to the swaying navy blue ceiling above. Schools of fish swirl around us like pieces of a rainbow scattered into a whirlpool and dance with fronds of seagrass in the currents.
A snaggle tooth eel pokes its head out of a crevice to flex its jaw at us. Ocellus matches its shape and flits closer, but the real eel vanishes when she gets within a few yards. I guess it’s skeptical about whether friendship is magic. Ocellus rejoins us and transforms back into a seapony.
“This hippogriff was beautiful, but Calamus was attracted to her swimming more than anything else. It was taboo to even go into open water back then, and somegriff who ignored quaint traditions excited him. He couldn’t get her attention by shouting, so he started to jump up and down. Finally she noticed him and swam up to the shore. He started to talk, but instead of responding, she wrote a message in the sand: ‘I can’t hear you.’ She was completely deaf, and he didn’t know sign language. He left for home, totally dejected.”
“That’s dumb,” Smolder says. “Couldn’t he just write in the sand like her?”
“He could have, but he got discouraged. It felt like life kept throwing obstacles in his way.”
“Hippogriff boy being jerk,” Yona snarls. “Not good making everything about own problems.”
“Yeah, okay, that’s fair.” Silverstream seems a little nervous, but she continues. “His moodiness didn’t last too long, though. After…some introspection, he realized he had to change his ways. He found a book on sign language, taught himself the hippogriff sign alphabet, and went back to the lagoon. As soon as he got the swimmer’s attention again, he introduced himself and learned her name was Pelagica. Then he asked if she’d teach him to swim.
“She was ecstatic! No one had ever asked to swim with her before. She taught him swimming while he learned more sign language on his own. He also began practicing with her. One moonlit night, Calamus had learned enough to share all of his feelings with Pelagica. With a bouquet of flowers clutched in his beak, he asked her to marry him. And Pelagica said yes!
“The very next day, the Aurums and Volares made a new deal. Calamus’s arranged marriage was back on.”
The edge of the reef appears without warning, as if it’s interrupted by an invisible wall just a few yards from us. Beyond it is a silt-coated floor littered with cracked bones.
“Calamus galloped to his true love’s home on the outskirts of town. He explained, as best as he could, that he’d been betrothed to someone he didn’t love. His family couldn’t be convinced to call off the wedding, so the only option for him and Pelagica was to elope.”
“What did Pelagica’s parents say?” Sandbar asks.
Silverstream goes stiff for a fraction of a second. “Her family isn’t really part of this story.”
Which means she didn’t have a family. I shrug it off. All of this stuff is made up, anyway.
“Calamus was too recognizable for them to use airships. He’d learned that when he tried to run away with the circus. He and Pelagica decided instead they’d swim to Arbor Isle, build a raft on it, and sail away. All we know about the rest of that night comes from Coast Guard reports.”
We leave the reef. A faint but vast blackness appears on the horizon.
“A squad on patrol spotted something floating from Arbor Isle around midnight. They thought a dead tree had rolled into the water and ignored it. None of them suspected a raft. The decree banning sailing was still strictly enforced, so no hippogriff alive then had seen a boat on the open ocean.
“The squad chatted to pass the time until one of them noticed that the driftwood had changed course. One of the soldiers had a telescope he used to watch for approaching airships. They took it out to examine the driftwood and saw a raft with two figures aboard: Calamus and Pelagica. He steered the rudder with the sails full, while Pelagica emphatically signed to him. He seemed totally oblivious to her. Despite the couple’s strange behavior, none of the soldiers suspected anything amiss, so they set out to arrest the two for violating the ancient decree. They had crossed over Arbor Isle when their commander heard the first notes of a song coming from the ocean. Luckily for them, he knew the legends well enough to understand the danger…and that they could do nothing except watch as shadows swarmed below the raft.”
The water sounds wrong here. There were bubbles snapping and creatures swishing in the reef, a noise so engrossing I didn’t notice it. Now all that sound is gone. I hear only a faint, vacant thrumming from the gloom we swim towards.
“The soldiers watched through the telescope from a safe distance. Incredibly, Pelagica’s signing began to affect Calamus. He started watching her, first just a glance, then long stares. Whenever his attention strayed, she’d regain it by crossing her arms over her heart, which meant ‘love.’
“His grip on the rudder loosened. With a cry, he leapt onto the sails and tore at them with his claws. The ripped sails collapsed, slowing the raft, while he stuffed shredded fabric into his ears. Even that wasn’t enough. The sound had to be overwhelming. His talons dropped to the floor of the raft, and he took a step towards the water.
“Pelagica stopped him. She hugged him tight, and he didn’t move except to clutch at his ears. For what must have felt like an eternity to them, they huddled close, their raft adrift on the water. Then, all at once, he relaxed. A look of mystified relief crossed his face while Pelagica cradled him.
“The soldiers heard the faint music end a few seconds later. Some of them prepared to fly out then, but their commander held them back.
“Calamus and Pealgica were signing to each other when wavelets first crashed against the raft. Neither of them seemed to notice when their raft started to slowly turn and sway. Then, without warning, Calamus grew still. He must have seen it first. Pelagica shook him, but he pointed behind her, and she followed his gaze. White foam sprayed from the water. Their raft rocked, drawn by something that had appeared out of nowhere: a massive whirlpool.
“She signed to him rapidly but he only shook his head in reply. Her wings sprang out. She took ahold of his arm. He pulled away and cradled his head. Slowly, he stretched his wings, revealing to her that they were ruined. He pointed to her, then to the sky, and turned away.
“To his and the soldiers’ shock, Pelagica grabbed him around the barrel and took to the air. The raft shattered in the eddies, and its fragments disappeared into the black water beneath them. They hovered low, as she struggled to carry him, and began to fly away from the whirlpool’s extent. Confident that they’d escaped the peril, the two shared a kiss.
“Then tentacles erupted from the water.
“The charybdis had grown since it’d first appeared at Arbor Isle. Scores of tentacles, each a hundred yards tall, chased after them. Pelagica ducked and weaved, but carrying a second hippogriff slowed her down to a crawl. She rose laboriously while the charybdis’s limbs surrounded them like the bars of a cage. The bulging tips met high above and came crashing down. Just before they reached the pair, she veered away and slid between two tentacles. She kept flying as hard as she could, not daring to look back.
“Which is why she didn’t see the last tentacle. The one that landed hard on her back and knocked them both into the water.
“The soldiers caught only a fleeting glimpse of the two before the charybdis pulled them beneath the waves. Even then, they clung to each other and struggled to escape. In vain.”
Silverstream slows down as we approach a cliff’s edge. The ground slopes up like an anthill, and I get the feeling this place has been dug out by something. As I focus on the distance, the other side of the canyon comes into focus. Not a cliff’s edge, then. The lip of a hole.
So this is the charybdis’s pit, minus the sea monster itself.
“Calamus’s and Pelagica’s bodies were never found,” Silverstream says. “They probably never had a chance after Calamus heard the charybdis’s song. It’s possible it was playing with them.”
We’re all quiet out of respect, but Silverstream’s gaze darts around the five of us. It takes me a second to realize she hasn’t mentioned what I want to hear.
“So, about those ghosts,” I say. “You know, the ones that scared off Mr. Grabby here.”
Her eyes gleam at me.
“I was just about to get to that. After Calamus’s death, the Aurums and Volares made a third deal, again to be sealed with an arranged marriage. No one ever saw the monster again, but on the night of the wedding, every hippogriff in Mount Aris heard the charybdis…when it cried out in pure terror.”