Surviving Sand Island

by The 24th Pegasus

A Siren's Lunch

Rarity hadn’t even realized she dozed off until the loud splash of Melody returning startled her awake. For a moment, all Rarity saw was green scales and huge teeth, and she nearly shrieked in panic. Her brain, however, managed to catch up to what was happening before her lungs could empty, and so she only made a half-strangled cry of alarm and shrank back a few paces.

“Oh! Sorry, sorry!” Melody apologized, holding out both her cleft hooves and drifting away from Rarity. “I didn’t mean to scare you! If I’d known you were sleeping I would’ve come in quieter.”

Once Rarity took a few deep breaths to slow her racing heart, she managed to smile at the siren. “Oh, no, it’s okay, darling. I just wasn’t expecting you to return so suddenly. That’s all.”

Melody sheepishly smiled and drifted back down to Rarity’s eye level. “I’ll try to remember that in the future. Sorry…”

Now that she was well and thoroughly awake, Rarity sat down by the water’s edge and looked around Melody expectantly. “There was no harm done, apart from the damage to my nerves. Nothing that can’t be fixed with a good meal and some amicable company… right?”

“I’m not sure if I fit the part of the last one, but I did bring food!” Melody hummed to herself as she dropped a haul of the sea’s bounty on the floor of her cave in a raggedy net. “Clams, oysters, tuna, even crabs. All you can eat, and it’s all fresh!” Her scaly lips pulled back into a grin as she plucked a wiggling tuna from the pile, smashed its skull against the cave floor to kill it, and then tossed the meaty fish into her toothy maw. “Say what you will about being trapped around these islands for eighty years now, but at least the food’s always good!”

Rarity paled at the effortless slaughter of a fish that weighed significantly more than she did, especially when the creature’s blood and juices dribbled down Melody’s scaly chin. “Yes, I’m sure… you did manage to get some food that wasn’t meat, right?”

Melody blinked, swallowed the fish in her mouth and chuckled. “Oh! Right, silly me. I forgot you didn’t like meat. Yeah, I got some seaweed off the seafloor. That’s the best I could do, really. Unless you like algae slime, because that stuff grows everywhere!”

The siren nosed through the pile of food before she found a bundle of folded seaweed. Her hoof separated the weed from the pile of food, and she dropped the plant in front of Rarity. Rarity grimaced and looked over the slick and wet plant, almost certain she could see some sort of sea insects crawling through the leaves. She picked up a leaf of the weed and combed through it with her magic as best as she could, and only when she was satisfied that the plant was as clean as she could make it, folded it up and took a bite.

It wasn’t exactly bad, but it was definitely not something Rarity was used to. For one thing, the seaweed was overwhelmingly salty, having just been pulled from the sea and not even washed first. For another, it wasn’t as firm or consistent as surface plants; it was more slimy and mushy, and it seemed to break apart in Rarity’s mouth when she moved it with her tongue. Rarity knew that ponies elsewhere in the world liked to eat seaweed as a staple of their diet, but she had a feeling they didn’t just eat it raw as soon as it was plucked from the sea.

However, Rarity was starving, so she wasn’t going to turn down food, especially when the carnivorous siren had gone out of her way to bring back something plantlike for Rarity to eat. Swallowing the morsel, Rarity shivered but managed to put on a smile for Melody. “It’s… good,” she said. “Not exactly what I’m used to from the surface, but it’s a plant at least. That’s good enough for me.”

Melody shrugged. “If you say so. I prefer meat to plants.” She scooped up a few clam shells and tossed them into her mouth, where her macabre teeth made short work of them like they were potato chips. “Seaweed just gets stuck on my teeth and then I’m sucking at my gums the rest of the day.”

The siren even made a face to go along with it, and Rarity couldn’t help herself; she giggled at the absurd image Melody painted for her. “I wouldn’t think that sirens would eat plants,” she said. “You definitely have a carnivore’s set of teeth.”

“Yeah. I knew some sirens that liked to try and eat plants. ‘A balanced diet’, they called it.” Melody snorted and briefly paused to take another bite of her pile of seafood. “They were weird, but I guess that’s what some of us try to do to fit in better with pony society. Not all of us like being hunted and terrorized.”

“Hunted and terrorized?” Rarity blinked in surprise. “That’s exactly how our sailors feel about sirens! They all tell stories about how sirens use their voices to lure them to their deaths!”

Melody shrugged. “Some of our sisters are mean and violent. If all of us did that, do you think you’d ever be able to send things by boat through our waters? None of them would ever make it.” Melody frowned down the length of her scaly muzzle. “Most of us like to keep to more isolated waters nowadays. If we stray too close to your shipping lanes, then we’re attacked. The tropics are nice, because they’re not often traveled and there’s enough ponies and civilizations down by the shore for us to sing to and get our magic back.”

“I didn’t know.” Rarity took another bite of her salty, raw seaweed. “I mean… I’d only heard things from myths and superstitious talk. You’re the first siren I’ve ever met. I only had an idea of what you were like from talking with another pony I know who’d met some of your kind before, and they weren’t all that nice.”

“Not all of us are monsters,” Melody said, her eyes falling a little. “Ponies don’t usually care to find out when they find us in the sea. Even a mother and daughter aren’t safe if they cross with the wrong ship.”

Rarity chewed on the inside of her cheek; she felt like there was something more that Melody was alluding to. “How old are you?” Rarity asked her. “And… is that how you ended up here?”

Melody slowly nodded. “I’m a hundred and six,” she said. “I think. Around that. I’m barely more than a child. Most sirens live until they’re a thousand years old.”

That simple statement made Rarity’s heart nearly seize. “You’ve spent most of your life trapped here?” she asked Melody. “And you’re still only a child?”

“Relatively,” Melody said. “Sirens reach maturity around fifty, but yeah, I was… a lot smaller when I got here.”

“And how did you get here?” Rarity asked her. She had a feeling, though, that she wasn’t going to like the answer.

Melody looked away. “My mom and I were attacked by a hunting ship. She led them away so they wouldn’t get me. I swam as fast as I could in the other direction and I… I didn’t stop.”

The emerald creature’s beak-like mouth turned into a frown. “I swam for an entire day and night, and as soon as I approached this island, I felt something tingle my antennae. I didn’t think anything of it, but I rested here for a while, slept and hunted some fish, and then I tried to leave. But when I tried to swim away from the islands, I got stopped by some kind of shield after an hour.” Melody held up her hooves and looked at them. “I could put my hooves against the shield. It physically prevented me from leaving. But it didn’t stop me from getting in. And even when I tried to fly above it, I still couldn’t leave.”

Rarity swallowed hard. “By Celestia… you must’ve been so scared.”

“I was,” Melody said. “I was separated from my mom and I was still a kid. Small, afraid, and weak. And when my mom eventually found where I was, and realized I’d swam someplace she couldn’t get to me without getting caught herself, she cried. Instead of crossing the barrier, she told me she’d find some way to get me out of here.” Melody stopped talking and wiped at her eyes. “Eighty years later, she’s still trying. She comes by and sings sometimes so I’m not lonely, but she’s gone most of the year when the migration takes her away from these waters. I sing with her, too, but there’s nothing I can do. I can’t leave, and she can’t afford to get trapped inside with me. And that’s been my life for almost longer than I can remember.”

“Gosh,” Rarity breathed. “I’m so, so sorry…”

For a moment, Rarity saw something that looked like a flicker or hate or rage in Melody’s draconian eyes. It was the first expression she’d seen out of the siren that frightened her, if even for a moment. “It was ponies’ fault that I ended up here, separated from my mom,” Melody said. “I could’ve blamed you all for it, especially after having been stuck here for eighty years. But I don’t, because I don’t want to be like you.” Her features shifted into a look of disdain, and she shook her head. “Ponykind judges sirenkind off of the actions of a few individuals. Thankfully, us sirens don’t think like that.”

Rarity nodded. “I’m so very sorry,” she said again. “And I understand why you would think that. You’re right. All we ever hear about sirens is that you all are vicious and violent monsters. That we should fear you.” She sighed and fiddled with her seaweed. “I’m glad that I got to meet you and see that that’s not true at all.”

The compliment made Melody smile. “And I’m glad that I was right to take care of you,” she said. “It’ll be nice to have a friend on these islands. Trust me, it gets very lonely after a while.”

“Well, thankfully, I haven’t been alone this entire time.” When Melody raised a scaly eyebrow, Rarity correspondingly lowered hers. “You mean… you don’t know?”

“Know what?” Melody asked.

“There are other ponies on these islands,” Rarity said. “Stuck here, trapped, just like me! Surely you’ve run into them by now?”

“I saw pieces of a wreckage scattered everywhere,” Melody said. “But no ponies. Well, no living ponies. There were… there were a lot of bodies in the reef where the ship crashed.”

Rarity felt a chill run down her spine at that. A shipload full of corpses, already food for the crabs and other scavengers. “Some of us survived,” she said. “And we’re stuck here. We’re trying to figure a way out of here.”

“Good luck with that,” Melody said, shaking her head. “I’ve tried for eighty years. There is no way out.”

The slight smile and Melody’s confused look were worth their weight in gold to Rarity. “Not quite…”

Comments

[BroBpony]

The story is getting more interesting now. Liking it more.

[Eroraf86]

Poor Melody. But at least now we're one step closer to the reunion. Love your worldbuilding.

[Admiral Q Ponyform]

Well a new friendship can form.

[Mocha Star]

This is getting as deep as the ocean they're by.

[Flisky]

Something fishy's going on. If Melody didn't know about the others, she wouldn't have left the arrow. So who did? Unless she's lying, but why?

[zaponator]

8840200
She only said she hasn't met any other living ponies. I'd wager that when she found Rarity, she at least suspected that there might be one or two others and left the arrow just in case.

[Aurora Dimmet]

8840200

Maybe she's horribly ditzy and easily lost, and leaves signs for herself to know how to get back home.