Children of Darkness and Light

by Aquaman

The Mizuman

“I was outside,” the foal said. He was no more than five or six — barely two feet tall if he stood on his overlarge hooves, missing an incisor that a sprouting adult tooth had recently pushed out. Spike could see the tiny white bud at the top of the gap it should grow to fill, which itself should have been hidden behind chapped lips and an impish smile.

“I wasn’t … to be.” Spike’s translator stuttered mid-sentence, struggling to parse the colt’s hoarse, garbled speech. Spike left the device alone. The foal gasped for air. “Momma said there was a raid, but … no Dragons. Just one. I … to see it. I went outside.”

The colt’s lips had cracked and peeled apart, and his teeth were all visible in an involuntary skeletal grin. His milky, pupil-less eyes were sunken beneath sagging, blistered skin, and blood seeped from sores on his forelegs and chest that nurses sponged at as he spoke. He took several shallow, gulping breaths between each sentence. He had been found just over a mile from where the bomb had been dropped on what had once been Larimar.

“I looked down … caterpillar. Lotus didn’t. Momma told her to come get me. She … right at it. It was bright and hot, and I fell down. Lotus fell too. My eyes hurt. Lotus didn’t have eyes anymore.”

The colt fell silent. A few minutes ago, a nurse had told Spike that he’d been the youngest of six children, born to a seamstress and a cobbler living in the city’s mercantile district. Tomorrow, Spike would be informed by another nurse present that their patient had died in the night, and his bed had been filled by a filly of about nine who would not survive the week.

“Our house was gone. Momma was gone. I didn’t cry. I was brave. But I … find her. And the…”

The translator missed the colt’s last word. Spike didn’t. In a dictionary, it would’ve been labeled something like “masters” or “gods.” To a Mizuman, it meant only one thing: “alicorns.”

“They were flying. Faster than Dragons and … to the ground. There were two of them. It was loud. They were using … and hitting each other. They hit buildings too. They were so loud.”

Spike leaned forward — saw the nurse nearest to him glare, and lifted his claws in a gesture of peace. “Did you see where they went?” he asked. The colt shook his head — jerked in pain.

“They … for a long time. I think I fell asleep. When I woke up, they were gone. The ground was glowing.”

“From the bomb? The bright flash?”

The colt didn’t move this time. Spike saw the tendons in his neck flex — stringy, quivering, fit for a stallion ten times the foal’s age. “From them.”

Then the colt shuddered and coughed and choked, and a nurse ushered Spike out of the room, past beds and mats and patches of blood-streaked floor crowded with eyeless, limbless, faceless bodies. Spike asked if the colt would be all right. They told him he shouldn’t be here right now. He asked if he could come back tomorrow. They looked at him as if he’d lost his–