Myinnkyun
The waters of Myinnkyun’s harbor are deep and clear. A pony standing upon the rickety wooden dock feels as though they walk across a high bridge that spans an immense gulf. Even at noon, the burning tropical sun cannot plumb the harbor’s depths – sight fades past a few yards, past the dock’s pilings, past the schools of silver fish that flicker and flee in the space of a breath. All else vanishes in an emerald fog.
The waters are filled with every manner of lost thing. Cargo dropped by careless stevedores. Driftwood carried by the tides. The rotting remains of the schooner Venture, sunk in a summer hurricane. An ivory pen, flung by the mayor in a fit of pique. Rotting scraps of thatch housing. Crabs who poke at all these things, and make within them homes.
There are bones in here as well. Two colonies’ worth of bones. Two hundred lives, brought here by fate and fortune, by dreams of warm sand and clear skies, by the allure of salt water and the heady promise that here, on this shore, they will find what eluded them in all their other ports.
Hope makes ponies invincible. It is what gave them the strength to conquer the world.
But here, in Myinnkyun’s sheltered harbor, encompassed on the east and west by tall cliffs that curl around the port like a mother’s arms, nothing remains that resembles hope. There are only shattered houses, broken and leaning against each other for support, and a long picket wall that once protected the colony from the endless jungle beyond. Now it is gap-toothed and ruined, piled high with sand and beach sedge, and with every passing year another piece of it falls and is swallowed by the dunes, and soon only the crabs will remember it exists as they knock against its buried timbers with their claws, making burrows, putting it at last to some better use than its creators.
* * *
Can a town dream?
A town breathes and grows. Towns live and die. A town’s ponies can dream, and what is a town? It is not a spot of earth or collection of buildings or a point on a map; a town is its ponies. And it must be agreed that the whole can do all the same things as its parts.
So Myinnkyun slumbers in the tropical sun, and if its ponies still dream in their watery cradle, then Myinnkyun must dream as well.
* * *
There is a great house on a hill in Myinnkyun, looking out over the waters of the bay. It is porticoed and gabled, and along the roof is a walkway from which the house’s master sometimes stood and watched the sea, as though she were a captain, her house a ship, and this walkway a crow’s nest. From here Peridot watched the storms, and kept careful count of the boats laden with her treasure as they pulled into port.
The front door has fallen off its hinges, and the beach has crept inside. The floorboards have gone gray and dry. Sand sieves between them in dark lines that run the length of the room. The walls, made up in plaster and board by ponies too stubborn to adapt to the tropical weather, have long since rotted away, and only decaying beams remain to support the upper floors.
There is a set of stairs leading higher. They are weak, and only a foal or pegasus can use them anymore.
* * *
The Customs House was the largest building in Myinnkyun. It stood guard at the end of the docks, ready to intercept cargo as it came ashore and claim the crown’s share of tax. The mayor lived on the second floor, and the guard kept their barracks in a long row house to the side, and it was here that ponies made their final stand.
The Customs House is cinders now. Black stumps protrude from the gray sand, discoloring it with their shedding ash. Years of storms have swept the rest away.
Sometimes the wind carries away the sand, revealing bits of trash amidst the ruin: a guard’s spearhead, a minotaur’s nose ring, a foal’s coral rattle. Scraps of paper that somehow survived the fire, filled with ledger lines accounting Myinnkyun’s profits.
In time the winds return, and sand consumes these things again.
* * *
Beyond the fragmentary wall, beyond a hundred yards of bare sand, the jungle rises like a wave. It washes from the mountains in the distant island’s heart, lapping here at the edge of pony civilization. The shadows are verdant and thick within.
To the ponies of Myinnkyun, the jungle was the wellspring of all their fears. Its shadows held every manner of secret and nightmare, monsters that lurked beneath their windowsills and scratched at their doors. They thought, in their folly, that the jungle held their doom. They barricaded themselves against its darkness, and gave free reign to the darkness in their hearts.
Now, the jungle echoes with distant thunder. Drums pound out a rhythm in the night, and the orange light of a thousand bonfires paints the clouds with false evening glow. Laughter, songs, howls all spill out from the native revelry.
And Pony Island belongs once more to the first people.
* * *
In Peridot’s home, on the second floor, a bed still sits neatly made.
The sheets are crusted with salt blown in from the bay. They are frozen in place, and Peridot, who slept on the floor at the foot of her own bed, would smile to see them so preserved.
The window beside the bed is open. Not broken – open. And on the windowsill are rough gouges where a pony’s hoof has scraped. A single rosy feather, the same color as the dawn, is still lodged in the window’s track, where a careless pegasus lost it in his hurried haste.
* * *
In the waters of Myinnkyun’s bay, two hundred souls lie dreaming. They dream of love, and friendship, and the hope that brought them to this distant shore.
They who are dead no longer dream of fear. They have forgotten the murder, and why anypony would ever want to kill in the first place. The warm water cradles them, and their dreams are the ocean, and slowly they join with it. They are at peace.
Peridot, and Littlemoth, and Dawn Patrol, and Moonstruck, and all the other ponies of Myinnkyun, who bound their fates together in life, now reside together here, at the bottom of this vast bay. And when all of life’s dreams lay before them as a feast, they do not bother to remember the last days of Pony Island, for
there is nothing else
which could matter less