TCB: The Jig Of Life

by Madrigal Baroque

Let Me Live!

Two weeks later, they were on their way to the Barrier. Goodbyes were said, with promises to find each other in the new world, once they'd all reached the other side. (Most of those promises, sadly, would never be kept. They were made with the most sincere intentions...but no one had yet realized how the Earth territory claimed by Equestria was expanding tenfold, a hundredfold, to unimaginable distances.)

At the dockside, boarding the ship that was to take them away, their group was attacked before they even set hoof on the deck of the ship. Bottles wicked with flaming rags shattered on either side of the gangplank. One broke near Lilac, and she ran screaming up to the deck, tail blazing.

As Harmony rushed up the plank after her, a harsh scent assailed her quivering nostrils. It was an odor she hadn't encountered since her Squad days, and it brought back memories of an assault on a Family estate by displaced ex-tenants, The miscreants had been summarily dealt with, but the flames had resisted almost every effort to douse them, and the estate had burned to the ground. Half her team had been terminated before the flames finally died out, and after the few remains were analyzed the white coats determined the lethal accelerant to be a mixture of ethanol, calcium oxide and ascetic acid. Some wit in the lab dubbed it High Luminescence Gelatin with Lingering Incendiary Hazard. The knowledge of the specific mixture was highly suppressed, which meant it was wildly popular for a few years until one too many would-be arsonists set themselves on fire with no way to stop it. Only a sodium chloride suspension was effective against HLGLIH, and that was far from common knowledge.

What was widely known was the nickname given to the mixture.

Thick bluish-black smoke was everywhere. Somewhere Lilac was whimpering, and Chip was with her, cursing every baked good in his repertoire. The crew was trying to quell the spreading fire with extinguishers, with wet blankets, with canvas sacks…all futile, as well she knew. Nothing would put out the blaze except…

Sodium chloride suspension.

Salt water.

They were afloat in a bay. They were sitting in salt water. If they could dredge up enough with buckets–no, that would take too long. The ship would burn to the waterline unless they could pull up enough at one time to flood the deck…

Through the crowd she saw a flash of a crimson coat. Was it her granddaughter? Yes, there was her cutie mark, unmistakable even in the chaos. Three musical notes born up by a tornado–

Which in the bay would be a waterspout.

Harmony dodged through the legs of panicked ponies and around the humans who strove uselessly to combat the inferno and finally reached Madrigal. "Hell Jelly!" she shouted at her granddaughter's confused face. "Those…those gaejasigdeul are using Hell Jelly!"

Madrigal stamped in frustrated rage. "Hell Jelly? What the buck is that?"

Of course she wouldn't know. "Soak packing foam in synthohol. Add vinegar and limecrete dust, let sit overnight until it firms up. Smother so it can't get air, it die, but if get air again it burn back up. Got to scrape it all off and wash away with salt water."

She expected Madrigal to understand at once what needed to be done. But Madrigal was frightened, confused, and obviously out of her depth. She was intelligent, yes, and brave, but she was no military strategist.

Harmony, fortunately, was. Or had been .

After a brief, frantic attempt to alert Madrigal to the obvious solution, she lost all patience with the filly. There was no time to coddle her. Harmony whistled for the one pony in their group who would be able to keep her wits about her. Featherfall came at once. Tersely, Harmony ordered the ship's captain to get all the others below decks. She had to summon some of her Blackmesh authority to make him comply.

With that same drill-sergeant efficiency, she gave the two pegasi clear instructions on how to draw the air away from the deck to smother the flames, pull bay water up into a huge waterspout, and then flood the deck with it to get rid of the accelerant. Madrigal balked at leaving her grandmother alone on the burning deck, but Harmony was stern. "You fix fire," she yelled in her granddaughter's agitated face, "I fix me! Now do what I say before everypony die!!"

Madrigal launched herself into the air without another word of protest. Featherfall followed her.

It gave Harmony a glimmer of pride to know that even after decades out of the field, three children and ponification, she still had it

As the pair began circling the ship, stirring up wind and pulling drops of bay water into a gathering mist, Harmony found a patch of deck that wasn't on fire. She crouched down, ignoring the scorching heat as best she could. With fierce concentration she covered herself in the thickest hornfield she could generate. The heat eased off, cooling the breathable air trapped inside with her. And there was air. A little. Probably not enough.

Slowly the surrounding flames flickered out, the smoke dissipating with nothing to bear up the particles. Soot drifted down to cover the ravaged deck. Harmony tried to breathe slowly, doing her best to conserve her tiny air supply. Already the air tasted stale and thin. She began to feel lightheaded. Soon she would pass out, her hornfield would collapse…and she would either suffocate in the stifling near-vacuum outside or be drowned in the deluge to come.

Hurry, Maddie. Be quick like the wind you sing up.

The deck darkened as the last flickers died out. The cyclone surrounding the boat thickened, drawing up bay water. It was getting dark, too dark to see. Harmony squeezed her eyes shut and concentrated on keeping her field intact, on staying awake, on not dying.

Her head throbbed in time with her pounding heart. Her ears were roaring. She was sucking in useless breaths, her lungs scrubbing the last dregs of oxygen from the stolen air. She could feel herself slipping, slipping back into the blackness that waited.

If she died on this side of the Barrier, would she lose Equestria forever?

She couldn't die. She couldn't do that, not after everything she'd faced. She couldn't do that to her new family.

The words rang out from her very soul, her declaration from her half-remembered Conversion dream: I will not go! I refuse to fade into the dark. No matter the pain or hardship, whatever changes may befall me, I want to live!

Immediately she heard the response, a voice that came not from a fragment of memory but from somewhere other, somewhere now:

Well said.

Her hornfield collapsed just as the deck flooded.

The darkness opened up and swallowed her whole.

***

Author's Note:

Yes, Harmony is dying.

Again.

Read on, and learn how things play out.