Chapter 1

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Few awakenings are more shocking than being awakened by screaming. Especially when the screaming is unexpected and coming from people you know who are sitting all around you in a moving vehicle. I’d say it was the most disorienting experience of my life, except what followed immediately after topped it full-stop. Fortunately, the vehicle also came to a full stop without sending any of us through the windshield. It was a small miracle in the middle of a nightmare. I’ll get to that in a moment.

Lewis Caroll wrote that to tell a story you “start from the beginning and keep going until you get to the end, then stop.” Sound advice I guess, so here goes. My name is Zoe Vogel. I am a sophomore at Iowa State University, taking a summer course in archaeological field techniques at the University of Hawaii. Basically we have been surveying an area on the North Shore of Oahu in search of ancient settlement sites on weekdays and just being tourists on weekends. May 22, 2015 was one of the latter kind of days. We had managed to convince Doctor Carlysle to take us Mainlanders to one of those touristy luaus that they have at the big hotels. You know, hula dancers, fire eaters, a whole roast pig in an earth oven, the whole nine yards.

Anyway, we left around eleven and were driving back to campus when the funny business happened. The drive was about an hour long, so we got there a little after midnight. I was dozing off in the back of the van next to Trish Cochran when there was a flash of light, kind of like when someone takes a picture in a dark room. My eyes were closed, luckily, though I still saw stars. Night turned to day and what was supposed to be a manicured campus lawn turned into a tunnel of green jungle. I felt the van sway and fishtail as Doc tried to maintain control. Everybody screamed. I tried to cover my ears while holding on to the Oh My God bar above the window at the same time. My heart was in my throat by the time we finally came to a stop. I gasped, trying to catch my breath when the second shock just about took it away again.

Not only were we not in the same place we were supposed to be; we were also in the wrong bodies. I looked over at Trish to see if she was ok and had to do a double-take. Where there had been a mousy Asian girl with brightly streaked hair, there was now a mint colored pony with sky blue mane and tail. She was still wearing Trish’s hoodie and jeans, though they hung on her like a tent and the tennis shoes had fallen off onto the floor. Her dark green eyes were huge; not just from fright (though I could see the whites clearly), but just in general. She looked like the cutesy drawings of horses I had made as a kid. Trish’s mouth opened and closed like a fish out of water. I reached out an arm to comfort her and saw something that rocked me to the core. The arm that I extended in friendship was not the human one I was expecting.

I looked down at what I thought was my arm. Gone was the pale pinkish skin and shortly trimmed nails. In fact, one of the fingers was missing entirely. Instead there was a yellowish scaly appendage with three fingers and an opposable thumb-like thing. All of them were tipped with sharp claws. I withdrew my arm to get a closer look. They still moved like fingers. Huh. I reached up to scratch my head in puzzlement, only to find that it was farther away than I expected. Looking up, I found myself within just a few inches of the ceiling of the van. Odd; I was a respectable five foot six earlier and easily comfortable in the back seat of any car. Weirdly I was also leaning forward, as if there was a thick cushion between myself and the seat back. I turned to look at what appeared to be a couple of pillows covered in red, yellow, and blue feathers. It reminded me of the fancy feather cape that the old Hawaiian royalty wore. I shrugged. The cape followed my movement. As my eyes trailed the neared edge of the strange things, I realized something important. The feathery things had torn right through my sweatshirt. My marching band bowl game sweatshirt. My irreplaceable, once-in-a-lifetime-visit-New-York-City-bowl-game sweatshirt. It’s a wonder I wasn’t screaming along with everyone else.

I looked down at myself. Sure enough, my sweatshirt was in tatters. I could see the logo from the marching band on a patch on the floor. My chest was instead covered by what appeared to be a cloak or shirt of those same red feathers that the pillows behind me were. I reached a hand thing to my chest and touched them. It felt like stroking my own hair, or maybe the fur of a large cat. I felt around a little more just in case. Something rather important was missing, something I had been inordinately proud of: my boobs. Whatever had done this, it had taken my frickin’ boobs. I tried to facepalm and found that face and palm don’t connect when there is another new appendage in the way. Crossing my eyes, I glanced downward to find that my nose was no more. “What the?” I trailed off as I touched my new… beak. No wonder Trish next to me was speechless. I had no words to describe the wrongness I felt all around me.

I could hear hyperventilating coming from the row of seats in front of me. Who was sitting there? Oh yeah. Nic Buckley and Emmy Schneider, the other two students in our van. I leaned forward to see over the seat, not that I had to lean very far. On the other side of the bench seat were two more pony creatures. One of them sat up straight, stiff as a board. Even through a mass of curly pink hair I could see a sharp horn poking out between a pair of equine ears covered in fluffy blue fur. The ears twitched a little towards me as I tried to get a better look at the other equine. He was leaning really far forward and gasping for breath. At first glance he seemed to be the same pale tan color that the crayon box used to call “flesh”. Yeah, not politically correct or anything, especially considering that Nic had come into this world the color of milk chocolate. The way he was bent over, his face was hidden by his long forest green mane. A similarly colored tail poked out the top of his cutoff jeans.

I couldn’t see what was behind the bucket seats of the driver’s seat and passenger’s seat. That was where Doc and his teaching assistant, Adam Falk, were sitting. I poked at the latch of my seatbelt until it came undone. It took a few tries; something meant to be pushed by fleshy fingers does not react as well to sharp claws. Once freed from my encumbrance, I tried to climb over the middle seat. Emmy fell over sideways, like those goats on YouTube that faint when you scare them. Nic turned his head to see what I was up to, whimpered, and went back to his attempts at breathing. I pulled myself forward. My feet felt weird, but I paid them little mind for now. I made it halfway over the gap before I got stuck. A glance told me that I had brought the feathery pillow-cape things with me. I grumbled under my breath as I tried to push them back. They stuck to me like glue, but I managed after a few tries to get them to lay flat enough for me to get over the seat. I hoped that Doc and Adam were ok; I liked the professor and Adam had been nice enough to let me try flying the quadcopter he used to take aerial photos of the survey sites.

The front seats contained two more surprises. The airbags had deployed and then deflated to reveal two more non-humans. In the driver’s seat sat a large dog of some kind. He reminded me of the live action Scooby-Doo movies, except this dog was real. He looked like some kind of hound with dusty brown fur. He was still wearing the vest and broad brimmed hat that Doc wore on site. He was rubbing at his forehead with one paw, still recovering from the sudden stop. His other paw was on the ignition key. It looked like he was ok though. I turned to look at Adam. My view was blocked by a wall of bright magenta feathers. I could hear a series of cuss words coming from behind them. I paused to admire his creativity; I thought I had heard everything he had when Nic got the big ‘copter stuck in the tree at one of the sites. “Hey, you ok?” I asked.

He looked over his feathers at me, then past my shoulders. “How the hell did you get yours to lie flat?” Adam asked, staring.

“Huh? My what?” I looked over my shoulder at what I had assumed was chair padding or a pillow covered in feathers. “Please tell me those aren’t…”

“You’ve got fucking wings! Like these only bigger.” Adam said poking at me with a hoof. “And don’t you dare tell me you’re still normal, not looking like that.”

I fell back between the comatose Emmy and bent-over Nic. My wings pressed uncomfortably against the back of the chair. From here, I could see myself in the rear-view mirror above the dashboard. What stared back at me was nothing human. I was basically looking into the face of a bird of some kind. It mostly reminded me of a scarlet macaw, but as if drawn in a cartoon. I blinked; so did the parrot, with eyes at least as large as those on the horse creatures my friends had become. A proudly hooked black beak stood out in the center of my face. I opened my mouth to reveal a set of teeth and a blue tongue. Weird. There was a sort of crest of feathers on top of my head that stuck out kind of like my short hair had. The elastic that had held my ponytail in place now contained a handful of bright red feathers. My wings seemed to have three layers of color: the end feathers were blue, the middle ones yellow, and the rest red. I looked further downward and was surprised to see that the feathers gave way to fur about halfway down my body. The fur was a creamy tan and covered what looked like the butt end of a lion. My feet were now paws; flexing them showed that I now had retractable claws there too. I also seemed to have gained the additional appendage of a tail, a long leonine one with a tuft of fur the same bright red as my feathers. I looked like I had gone swimming in a paint factory.

Around me, everyone else seemed to be slowly coming to their senses. I heard unintelligible groans coming behind me from where Trish was sitting. I looked back to see her struggling with her seatbelt. I reached over the seat to lend a hand and she squirmed out of the seatbelt and as far away from me as she could reach. She was making these kind of horsey whinnies that you’d expect to see in a tv show. Her eyes were still huge and staring at me. It was as if she didn't dare to blink, lest I try to bite her or something.

“Hey, T. I know you are freaking out right now and so is everybody else, but can you at least stop that sound? It’s grating on my, uh, ears and making me even more nervous than I already am.” I said in as low and calm a voice as I could muster. Trish closed her mouth and stopped the horse noises.

“Z-zoe? Is that you? What’s going on? Why do you look like something that escaped from a pet-store? I feel like I could turn you into a stuffed animal for little kids or something.” Trish hadn’t seen the others yet. Come to think of it, she hadn’t even seen herself in a mirror.

“Yeah it’s me. I have no effin idea what is going on, but we’re not the only ones. The guys up here are plushie candidates too. This car looks like it came out of some little girl’s fantasy story complete with unicorns and pegasuses.” I gestured forward to where the others were sorting themselves out. “Wanna join us up here?”

“I really hope I’m dreaming, Zoe. I can’t feel my fingers or toes and I am sitting on something that was not there ten minutes ago. Help me out here. Did someone spike those drinks at the luau?” She tried to get to two feet and fell sideways onto my seat. I tried to suppress a snicker. She looked goofy with her butt in the air and that cute blue tail sticking out the back of her shorts. She glared at me. “So not helping, Parrothead. Are you gonna get me up there so I can see too or just sit there half in and half out of that seat staring at my behind and laughing?”

“All right, all right, I will help. Just… uh… don’t make any more of those horsey noises when I touch you okay? This is weird enough as it is.” I reached for her and carefully picked her up in my… hands? Bird feet thingies? Whatever. I did my best not to use my new claws as I pulled the two of us onto the middle seat between Emmy and Nic.

Emmy still looked stiff as a board, but as best as I could tell she was breathing normally. Her eyes were crossed as she stared at the horn that emerged between her curly bangs. I got the impression that she was doing her level best not to move now; it was not the same panicked freeze she had been doing before. Nic’s breathing had gone back to normal by that point. He was staring at Emmy. I wondered what had happened behind my back when I had been talking with Trish.

“Dude, do it again.” Nic said to Emmy.

“Do what?” Emmy said back.

“Do that thing you just did. You know, that little laser light show with the spike on your head.” He turned to me. “You missed it, Z. A bit ago when your butt was the only thing between us, she lit that spike up. It was kinda glowy blue like the LED on a computer screen or something. Then when she stiffened up again it went out. It was so cool!”

“I don’t know how I did that, Nic. It kinda just happened.” Emmy shuddered. “I don’t like this at all.”

I sat down on the floor in front of the middle seat and left Trish in the middle between them. My pony friends were so small their little hooves did not reach the floor when they sat on the seat and I was big enough to look at them in the eye from where I was on the floor. Behind me I heard Doc and Adam shift in their seats to look at us. We all kind of stared at each other in silence for a moment. Four little horses, one with wings, one with a horn, one dog creature and one pet-store griffon were sitting in a van in the middle of the jungle. It sounds like the build up to a really bad joke, I know.

“Now what?” I asked finally. I looked to Doc, who looked as shell-shocked as the rest of us. I guess I figured he was the adult of our group, being the only one who was an actual teacher instead of a student, but he was at a total loss.

“Uh, Let’s see if we can figure out where we are first.” Doc said at last. He glanced at Adam. “Have you gotten anything on the GPS? Even in dense tree cover there should be something.”

Adam shook his head. His yellow mane fell over his eyes. “I’m not getting any kind of signal here, Doc. None. Zero. Zilch. It’s as if there is nothing out there it can even connect to. I don’t get it. Even on Rapa Nui we got GPS. Crappy but there. Here? Nada.” He had a stylus pen stuck between his teeth; I guess that is what he had been using. “Maybe we should try outside?” The stylus pen fell out as he gestured towards the door.

“Sounds good to me.” Nic said. He reached for the sliding door next to him. His hoof barely fit the latch, but he managed to get the door sliding a little before it was stopped by something outside. He tugged at it a little, then decided he needed more leverage and slid out of the seat. He sat on the floor next to me and gave the door a shove. It moved a little. He pushed again, then again. It stuck. Nic grimaced and with an almost growl of frustration turned his back to the jammed door and gave it a good kick with his back legs. There was a screech of metal and instead of sliding, the door was wrenched from its track and fell with a thud on the forest floor outside the van. My jaw was on the floor, as was everyone else’s. Nic was staring at his feet in bald astonishment. I wondered what other surprises these new weird forms had in store.

The six of us managed to crawl out of the van without anyone else freaking out. I say crawl because only Doc could manage to move on two feet. It looked really awkward though, kind of like when a gorilla walks around on two feet. Apparently dog-apes are meant to be knuckle walkers. Everyone else walked on all fours. Including me. Somehow it was much easier to do if you stopped thinking about it and just moved. We sat in a circle between the broken door and the van. None of us really wanted to have our backs to the forest, but I sat there anyway next to Doc. From here I could see that the van was mostly intact, aside from Nic’s door. The trailer was still attached to the back, with all of our dig equipment inside.

Doc nodded to the trailer. “In there we have some supplies that would be useful I’d say. There are at least two machetes from when we were clearing brush around that housing platform. There’s a first aid kit in there too although I really hope we don’t need to use any of it any time soon. I think there’s a lantern and some flashlights there, in with our camping stuff. Rope and tarps too.”

“The big quadcopter is in there too, Doc.” Adam said. “I was going to tinker with it tonight. It should still have some spare batteries with enough juice for a flight or two. I’m not sure about the computer and the camera rig though. It would be a crapshoot whether we could get it through the canopy here long enough to take a picture and then get the computer running to download the shot.” He shook his head. “I would rather try it from a clearing anyhow.” Doc nodded in agreement. “Other than that, we still have the handhelds, though how charged they are I have no idea.” Adam finished.

“So why bother with the tech stuff? At least for now, I mean.” I said. Doc and Adam looked at me curiously. I flushed a little, but continued. “I might be able to get up that tree over there and get enough of a look around to at least tell how far we are from something like civilization. If nothing else, I could probably see the ocean or a river or something like that to get our bearings.”

Doc nodded cautiously. “If you’re willing to try, Miss Vogel, I won’t stop you.” He gestured to the tree I had been eyeing. “That one?”

“Yep.” I stood up and walked over. The branches started a few feet above eye level. I figured I could reach one of the lower ones by jumping. I looked down at my talons and at the retractable claws on my paws. I was still feeling a little shaky on them, but I figured it was worth a try. “Let’s see if these things work.” I jumped upwards and hit the tree without finding purchase. “Ooof.” There were snickers behind me. “I got this.” I backed up and gave myself a slight running start but landed ungracefully again. “All right, all right let me think.” I sat down again. An image snuck into my mind, of my roommate’s cat trying to get onto a high shelf she was not supposed to be climbing. That fuzzball could get into anything. I stood up and walked over to the tree again. In my mind’s eye, I saw that cat, ready to pounce. I remembered her pose and how her butt wiggled and she adjusted her paws before exploding upward. The next thing I knew, I had my bird feet wrapped around a stout branch and my paws dangling below me. My tail went back and forth as I scrambled onto the branch. With my talons digging into the bark I looked down to see the wide-eyed expressions of my friends. “Got… it…” I panted.

From here, the climbing was easier. The branches were closer together and as long as I tried to keep with the cat climbing method I did okay. I realized after a few branches that my wings could hold onto things almost like a hand, but with a much weaker grip. They couldn’t hold my weight, but they could move leaves and such aside as I climbed. So could my tail, with similar dexterity.

At last I poked my head above the crown of the tree. I looked around. Sure enough, there was the ocean perhaps a mile or two distant. Between us and the coast were a series of blocky overgrown structures, kind of like Angkor Wat with those jungle plants climbing over everything. I couldn’t see what would have been ground level from here due to all the growth, but I could see big stuff. The shoreline was vaguely familiar but that didn’t register at first. I followed the shoreline towards my left and found myself having a “Statue-of-Liberty-in-the-sand moment”. The view here could have come from any picture postcard from Waikiki, sans buildings. I was staring up at the monolithic shape of Diamond Head, the old volcanic remnant that defined the skyline of Honolulu.

I climbed carefully down through the branches until I sat on the one I had started from. I did not want to go all the way back to the ground yet; there was something about being up here that was strangely comforting. I looked down at my waiting friends. “Well,” I said, “I have good news and bad news. Which would you rather hear first?”

“Given that we can’t see anything except your fuzzy behind down here, I suggest you start with the good news.” Trish said, with a raised eyebrow. I didn’t know horses had eyebrows, but evidently big-eyed ponies did.

“The good news is I could see the coast. It’s a ways away but we could probably get there if we can get through the forest here. The bad news is, that’s the only good news.” I described what I had seen. Yep, those were definitely more raised eyebrows. Nic was shaking his head in disbelief and Doc looked very skeptical. “Look, toss me somebody’s camera and I’ll take a few pics to show you.” I said.

The others glanced at each other before Emmy grumbled “Ugh, fine. Just give it back to me in one piece, ok? She climbed back into the van and came out carrying a camera by its strap in her teeth. With Doc standing propped against the tree and me reaching out with a wing, he managed to pass it to me. I put the camera around my neck and started climbing back to where I had been before. I took several shots, wishing I could take a panorama of the view here. As it was I did the best I could.

After climbing back down, I tried to pass the camera back to Doc, but my grip slipped. I yelled for someone to catch it. The others rushed forward, but no one was close enough; I cringed and waited for the ensuing crunch, but to my surprise it did not come. A foot or so from the ground, the camera hovered in a bright blue glow, one that matched a similar glow coming from Emmy’s horn. She stared wide eyed at the camera before managing to gently set it down on the ground. “Hey dumbass. I said be careful!” She yelled up at me.

“Sorry.” I yelled out. Doc was already messing with the camera. Seeing as he was the only one down there with anything resembling hands, everybody else crowded around him as he previewed the pictures on the tiny screen. Just as I had seen, the landscape above the trees showed that we had found ourselves exactly where we had been last night when the weird shit went down.

Trish was the first to break the silence. “If the next words out of your blinkin’ beak are going to be ‘I told you so’, I suggest you stop while you are ahead, Birdbrain.”

“Now when have I ever said that to you guys?”

“Shall I mention the times by alphabetical order or by timing?”

“Enough!” Doc barked. Literally; it sounded like a dog barking but in human words. The forest around us fell silent. He glared at both me and Trish. “If we start arguing among ourselves, we will never figure out what happened or what is going on. Zoe, did you see any sign of people inhabiting those structures closer to the shore?”

“No, Doc. Or at least I could see none. Is that a good thing or a bad thing?”

“Both. Neither. It is a good thing in that we don’t need to be concerned about being discovered by humans who would wish us ill, but bad in that we have no real way to communicate with anyone outside of our group. I mean,we’re not getting any GPS signals and none of the cell phones we have with us are getting a signal, right?” Everyone shook their heads. “So unless we can get ahold of something like a satellite phone with power, we are more-or-less cut off from outside. In that case, our first focus should be survival. Water, food, shelter. No matter how much we might want to, we won’t be able to live out of the van and trailer forever. Now, any ideas?”

“We should see what all we have in our personal stuff too. Maybe there’s something we’re overlooking.” Nic suggested.

“It is a start, I guess. For water and shelter, we should see what if anything is intact up here before we venture down to those structures by the beach. If this really is where we thought we were last night, then this should be the entrance to campus. There were a lot of buildings around here, classrooms, labs, dorms, you name it. We can and should use anything we can.” Adam said. “I for one do not want to be soaking wet all the time from all the ‘liquid sunshine’.” He rolled his eyes at the term tourist sites use to describe the tropical rains that happen with annoying regularity on the islands.

We filtered back to the van to see if our personal stuff had anything useful. I doubted my bag did. I have a tendency to eat lightly and constantly, so my backpack was more likely than not to contain junk food or the remnants thereof. I did find my Swiss army knife though, along with a couple of unopened bags of beef jerky and a slightly crumpled bag of cheetos. Trish wrinkled her nose when I showed her. “Are you sure you want to eat that, Zoe? It smells… off to me.”

I took a sniff at the packaging. All I could smell was the spicy barbecue scent of the dried meat. “Seems all right to me, T.” I started to open the bag, but she forced me to stay my hand. “Hold off for now until we are done, okay? I want to see if the others found anything before you spoil my appetite.”

Trish didn’t have anything useful either; she was mostly carrying books. She looked about ready to throw the whole lot out, but I stopped her. “We can use these, T.”

“They are just novels and textbooks, though. How useful can they possibly be?”

“Tinder and kindling.”

Trish rolled her eyes but carried her bag of reading material out with her anyway. I had my jerky snacks and pocket knife in my claws when my eye was caught by something under the middle seat. I put my stuff down, reached underneath and pulled it out. It was a book of some kind, but not some flimsy paperback or cardboard hardcover. It was made of something like leather, but it felt strangely heavy. There was a sketchy outline of a horse on the cover. I was ready to add it to the kindling pile, but that image stopped me. The horse picture looked a lot like my friends. The drawing had the same short legs and rounded curves, and big eyes with eyebrows, but also had wings and a horn. It was too uncanny to be a coincidence. I brought the book with me when I came out. It was still light enough outside that even through the trees it was bright enough to read once I was out of the van.

Greetings, the introduction read. Welcome to the new world. You are probably scared and wondering what has happened to you and why you are in the form of ponies or other unusual creatures. Fear not. You are not alone. This guide is made to help you find your way in the new world that surrounds you and its new inhabitants. It contains survival strategies as well as information about your new bodies and their capabilities.

But first: a history lesson. On May 23, 2015, the heart of the Milky Way galaxy emitted a new and novel form of energy. This energy was unknown to humanity and has never been observed on Earth. However, a nearby universe, moving alongside our own, had contact with this energy as well as with Earth. The inhabitants of this other universe, known as Equestrians, adapted to use this energy, which they termed magic. When humans attempted to visit their world, the magic proved to be fatal to humans and thus it was determined to cut off contact.

However, the heart of our own galaxy’s surge of magic threatened to destroy humanity as it existed. Not wanting to witness the extinction of our unique species, the Equestrians opted to create an immense spell designed to transform the population of Earth into magic-compatible beings similar to those on their home world. Knowing that a sudden global species change would cause chaos, the spell was designed to occur gradually. Those most compatible with their new forms would change immediately, while all others were sent into the timestream so as to return to Earth when their bodies were ready.

You probably returned long after that initial date. Those of us who Returned immediately have done our best to rebuild a semblance of civilization in what remains of our great cities and nations. With luck you will benefit from this. If you find yourself in an isolated location, do not despair. Humanity is a species that has challenged nature again and again, surviving and becoming stronger every time. You are no different. Survive by any means necessary, friends. Remember, you are not alone.

The end of the letter was signed by someone named Archive. I held the book close to my chest for a moment. I hoped the pony author knew what they were talking about. I flipped through the pages a little before showing the book to the others. Sure enough, there were anatomical illustrations of the three kinds of ponies that had come out of the van with me. There were a few words that popped out. “Weather control”. “Telekinesis”. Most interesting of all there was “magic”, even on the pages about the ponies without horn or wings. I was about to look further when Trish called me out. “Hey, whatcha got there?”

I looked up from the book to find everybody else watching me. I gave a sheepish grin. “I found this in the van. Do any of you recognize it?” I passed it over to Trish, who shook her head. Similar negative answers came from everybody else. Even Doc looked confused.

“Hey look. It’s us!” Nic said. He held open the book to a page comparing sizes of the different creatures in the book. The three ponies were about the same size, all things considered, but the bird beast next to them was labelled as “griffon” and was bigger. The “diamond dog” was similar in size to the griffon. I guess that is what Doc turned into. My eyes drifted towards some of the other creatures though. My jaw dropped as I realized that there were a lot more creatures than I had initially thought about. There were sea ponies and zebras about the same size as the ponies, but there were also smaller creatures, including a little tiny butterfly pony thing labelled a “breezy” or “flutterpony”. At the other end of the scale there was an honest-to-god dragon, with enormous wings and an expression on its face that said “I can eat you at any time”. I hoped we wouldn’t run into a hungry one any time soon.

“We aren’t getting rid of that book any time soon, that’s for sure.” Doc said at last. I nodded in agreement. We sorted through the stack of books from everyone else’s personal bags. Most of them were standard fictional fare; romance novels, dime store mysteries, Harry Potter (Trish clung to that one and could not be persuaded to let go until we promised not to burn it). To her own surprise, one of Trish’s textbooks included a first aid guide that we dubbed useful and added to the “keep” stack. The only other things we considered safe were a couple of tourist guides (“they may give us an idea of where we could find useful stuff” as Nic pointed out) and a dog-eared book about eating your way across the islands, which also contained info about edible plants that grow wild around here. Emmy shrugged when we asked why it was in her pack. Whatever, it was useful looking so we kept it.

I was not the only one to have some food. Adam’s bag had a plastic tote full of trail mix (with all the chocolate bits eaten out) and Emmy had some dried fruit in hers. Not much to survive on. We decided to stick together as we made our way towards what Doc thought was the middle of campus. He and I used the machetes from the trailer to mark blazes on the trees as we passed and cut our way through vines. Seeing as we were not sure how much shelter there would be still standing, it behooved us to find our way back to the van eventually. The kindling books we left in the middle of the van’s floor and the keepers on the middle seat. None of us carried much for now.

We found our way to the remnants of the administration building. Part of the roof had collapsed and it was heavily overgrown, but we could still get inside. It appeared that someone before us had ransacked the place. It must have happened a long time ago, as there was a thick layer of leaf litter on the floor and not a single window was left intact. A lot of the wood had rotted away too, so we opted not to attempt any stairs, even metal ones. Water dripped down from the remains of a skylight and gathered into a pool in the atrium. It was a potential source of freshwater, though it looked like it could sour in a hurry if we weren’t careful.

Doc led our little group through a couple more buildings; the situation was the same in most of them. Many of them were nothing more than overgrown rubble. Those standing were the exception. There was nobody around except for the wildlife and it seemed intent on avoiding us. Given that two of us at least looked like predators, that was probably a wise move. Eventually we found ourselves in the student union building. Although the windward side had collapsed, the leeward side of the structure was mostly intact. More importantly, it was fairly dry inside and large enough for all of us to shelter comfortably. A pair of gnarled trees held up what was left of the roof on one side; I was pleased to note that it had a lot of climbable branches. The nearby courtyard even had an old rusty barbecue grill that we could use as a fire pit of sorts. By unspoken agreement, we settled down to rest. I guess changing into a new body takes a lot out of you because we all fell asleep pretty quickly. I woke up only once, after nightfall to an eerie sound echoing through the empty buildings. It was the keening howl of my diamond dog teacher singing to the full moon overhead.

Chapter 2

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I woke up to the sun streaming over my face. I wondered why I was not laying in my dorm bed on my back staring at the ceiling. Instead I was on my stomach and on the floor. There was clean-smelling leafy stuff underfoot instead of the flat mattress of the cot in my dorm room. I shook my head to clear away the cobwebs. Of course I was not in the dorm. We had been camping out at the site for the last few days, right? That must be it. Huh. I nearly poked an eye out trying to get my hair out of my face. No, wait. Not hair. Feathers. Any semblance of sleep dissolved instantly. That dream I thought I had about climbing a tree and seeing an overgrown Waikiki? Yeah, not a dream. I was lying here in the remains of the University of Hawaii at Manoa student union building with a feathery parrot face and a lion’s butt.

I looked around to see if the others were still asleep. Doc was; he was making these loud doggy snores that I was surprised did not wake anyone else up. He looked kind of cute with his feet sticking up in the air like that, twitching. Trish and Nic were also still asleep, as was Adam. Emmy, though, was nowhere to be seen. I got up carefully, trying not to wake any of the sleepers, and made my way out into the open courtyard. Emmy was there, carrying a bag of something. I startled her a bit when I emerged and the bag fell over, spilling a couple of ripe mangoes onto the ground. I stared. “Whoa. Where did those come from?” I asked.

“I… I found them.” Emmy said softly. She pointed towards a crumbling wall. “Over there. I could’nt sleep with the sun out, so I did a little looking around.” She shrugged. Her horn lit up with that bright blue glow and one by one the mangoes rolled back to her bag.

“Been practicing?” I asked. She nodded.

“I looked at that book you found yesterday.” Emmy said. “The part about unicorns had some basic exercises about learning how to use magic.” She gestured to her horn. “I … may have squished a few when I was picking these, but I can pick them up now if I concentrate.” She squinted a little and lit her horn, using the glow to pick up the last fruit and spin it in midair before returning it to the bag. “Want one?”

“Sure.” I said. She passed me a mango, with her hoof instead of her magic. I caught it and took a bite. It was tart and juicy, but somehow not as satisfying as I hoped. To keep my mind off that feeling, I asked her more about what she had read.

“There’s not much, but I think everyone should look through their section. I mean, there were only about a couple dozen pages about unicorns and basic spellcasting, but I learned a lot. Do you want it next?” Emmy asked. I nodded.

With book in claw, I retreated towards a large koa tree on the other side of the courtyard. I leafed through until I found a chapter on griffons. The first part was basics: bird head and front half and big cat rear end, with bird wings. The illustration looked more like an eagle than anything else, but the text noted that the bird half and feline half could each vary depending on the locale. It did not give examples, but I could imagine a snow leopard and snowy owl appearing in the Arctic, or a peregrine falcon and cheetah popping up in Africa. Eh, I guess a parrot griffon coming about in a tropical rainforest was not that unusual.

I flipped forward to a section about diet. The page noted that griffons were omnivores, like humans I guess, but that the feline part of us meant that meat was not only edible, but necessary for survival. I glanced at the unopened bag of jerky I had stuffed under a wing. It wouldn’t last long, but hopefully it would be enough until I could find some other kind of supplement. Maybe… yes. The text continued that if meat sources could not be readily consumed, fish or eggs could be added to one’s diet. Well that’s something, I guess. Though where I would find eggs on a place like this was a good question. As best as I could recall, feral chickens had been a problem on Kauai more than on O’ahu. Or at least in the touristy areas. Maybe out where we’d been working, but not here. But of course, that was then, not… however many years in the future we were.

Of course, this is an island; maybe I could somehow learn how to fish. That would be preferable; but we’d need some kind of equipment. A net would be safer than a pole; I used a pole maybe once in my life and that only resulted in getting a fish hook caught in my sister’s hair and both of us upending a canoe (we were barred from being in the same boat from that point forward). I knew we had rope leftover in the trailer. Maybe I could try to set snares for whatever critters lived here. Rats? Cats? Mongoose? Worth a try.

I wondered if Doc would have the same restrictions. Dogs, after all, are not usually known to be vegetarians (then again, they will try to eat anything). I flipped to the chapter labelled “Diamond Dogs”. To my surprise, there was some variation here too. As big as Doc and the other male dogs were, it looked like the bitches of his kind were even bigger. I shuddered at the thought. The sketched drawings showed Diamond Dogs that looked like pugs, doberman pinschers, and even a couple of unusual ones like malamutes and a shih tzu (that one was quite small; I wondered if there was a chihuahua version out there somewhere). According to the text, Doc’s diet would benefit from being augmented by an outside protein source. Great. I suppose I should offer him the other bag of jerky. Of course, if he knew how to fish, he could potentially teach me.

I flipped back to the griffon chapter to find myself staring at an illustration of a griffon in flight. I glanced back at my wings. They seemed much too small to carry an animal my size. I hoped the chapter would explain further. It did. Apparently, both pegasus ponies and griffons have a way of using magic that allows these absurdly small wings to carry them into the air. In addition and in defiance of everything I learned in meteorology class, we can land on clouds and pegasi can even manipulate them to rain, produce lightning, or even form structures given enough magic and time. Something told me though that our lone pegasus was not about to fly just yet. Nor for that matter would I.

Flight, apparently, was like magic in that it took a lot of little steps and practice before it could be relied upon to work. I glanced back at my wings again and watched them unfold and refold. Like the section on unicorns, the section on pegasi had a number of exercises that could be used to strengthen one’s flight magic and eventually get airborne. The griffon section did not have as much, but I figured I could try some of the pegasus ones too. It couldn’t be that hard, right? I flexed my wings again, trying to follow the diagrams in front of me. It was not until I looked up from the book a little while later that I realized that Emmy and I were no longer the only ones awake. Adam was watching me intently while eating his own mango. His wings were half-furled, as though he was not sure what to do with them quite yet.

“Hey man. How goes?” I said, closing the book and setting it aside.

“You were doing that for a long time, Zoe. What on Earth was that?”

“Wing exercises.” I said. “The book said that griffons and pegasus ponies can actually use these things to fly! Apparently it takes some work before it actually happens though. Wanna take a look?” I offered him the book. Adam backed away, to my surprise.

“There’s something about that book that I don’t like, Zoe.” He said, shaking his head. “It was way too convenient that it appeared right when all this happened. I mean, really. What are the odds of the precise book we needed to appear appearing right now?”

“Maybe it is not about odds, Adam. Maybe it is more like… magic.”

“Yeah, right. Magic. Sure.”

“You did see Emmy with the mangoes, right? That seems like magic to me. I mean carrying something without touching it with your body?”

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic to those who do not understand the former.” Adam stomped a hoof. “For all I know there’s some kind of reasonable explanation for all of this, not something out of a little girl’s fantasy story. Maybe there’s some kind of magnetic fields or chemicals that are interacting with our minds and we’re just hallucinating all this.”

I rolled my eyes. “I’ve never had a dream that lasted this long, Adam. Nor have I ever heard of a hallucination that resulted in something this persistent. I still have bruises from my attempts at climbing yesterday and I still felt them this morning. Look in a mirror. You’re not exactly walking around on two legs and waving as the world passes by with five fingers spread wide there. Like it or not, this… change. It happened, Adam. I don’t think there is any going back to the way things were a couple days ago. We might as well make the most of what we have now.”

“Speak for yourself, beaky. You at least have a way to manipulate things. All I have are these.” He stomped a hoof again. He glared at me, defying me to tell him otherwise. I would not give him the satisfaction. I just shrugged. Adam scowled and stomped off. He didn’t seem to notice that his wings were fluttering as he moved.

I turned back to find the book and noticed that during our conversation, Trish and Nic had taken the opportunity to borrow it. Despite having hooves as their only way of manipulating the pages, they seemed to have no trouble doing so. Trish was babbling excitedly about something at a speed that only a caffeinated chipmunk could understand. Nic was reading to himself quietly under his breath. He’d done that before with other books; that meant he was really interested and was trying to commit everything he read to memory. I hadn’t gotten to that chapter yet, but seeing as neither of them were carrying a mango, I decided to venture back to Emmy and grab them a couple for breakfast.

Before I got too far, I ran into Doc. He seemed restless and still half asleep. “Morning.” I said. Before he could respond, I opened the package of jerky under his nose. Whatever he had been about to say left his mind as the scent of the meat caught his attention. He was drooling. “Here ya go, Doc.” I said, passing him a handful of the meat. “This should hold you for a little.” Without further adieu, he stuffed it all in his mouth. He sucked on the stuff, savoring it as though it were some kind of rich candy. I ate a similar handful. Jerky never tasted so good. It took all of my willpower to reclose the bag and tuck it away under a wing.

Eventually Doc swallowed and came back to his senses. “Where is the book?” He asked. I gestured behind me with the wing not holding the bag of treats. He noticed Trish and Nic and nodded. “Good. Has anyone called it next? I would like to take a gander at it and see what it has to say about this.” He gestured with a paw. I felt faintly jealous that his clothes still fit. My instant growth spurt in the van had shredded everything I’d been wearing down to my underwear. The strangest thing was, I didn’t feel self conscious about being without clothing. In fact, my feathers and fur felt no worse than,(and in some ways a lot better than) my t-shirt and shorts. I was nowhere near as sweaty as I would have been dressed. What I envied about Doc’s vest was its pockets.

“I’m a little worried about Adam, though. We had a little… uh… falling out about the book.” I said, trying to be diplomatic. It is not exactly my strong suit. Doc’s nod said that he noticed. I blushed.

“I can see why. We heard your … discussion across the courtyard. Funny how sound carries isn’t it?” Doc smiled. “We are all dealing with this in our own way, Zoe. Adam has never been one to believe in fairy tales. Him popping up in the middle of one is bound to make him harbor doubts. Give him, yourself, and everybody else time. It takes some patience.”

Patience. Yeah, yeah, yeah how long will that take? I cringed. Not my strong suit there. The only reason that that did not come out of my mouth was that I had been forced to learn at least a little tact during the course of my twenty years on this Earth. Doc saw my expression and chuckled. “Think of it this way, Zoe. Patience requires practice and effort, just like how you were doing those wing exercises back there to try and fly. I saw your face when you were doing them; you can concentrate when you feel like it, and you can be patient when you feel like it too. Now, I am going to see about those mangoes that Emmy found. After we have all had breakfast, we should meet back at the van and start bringing anything useful back here. I don’t want to try and drive it unless I have to.” He nodded at me and we walked towards where we had seen Emmy last.

I wasn’t sure I could be patient around Adam. My best solution a the moment was to avoid him as much as possible. Luckily he seemed to have decided the same thing, so contact was kept to a minimum. Thus was the peace held. I ended up helping Emmy bring more fruit to the shelter before we joined the others back at the van. We ended up loading up everyone’s backpacks with whatever useful stuff we could find. To my surprise, Trish and Nic loaded up with more stuff than any of the rest of us, save Doc. They were nudging each other and adjusting the packs. I wondered what the guidebook had said about their kind of pony that made them so eager to carry stuff. I didn’t say anything, as I figured I would find out soon enough when I got a hold of the book again.

I did my best to carry my backpack, but I couldn’t get the straps to fit over my wings at all. In the end I did my best to balance the pack on my back between my wings and hoped I would not drop anything important. It took a few trips, but we got anything useful we could find out of the van and the trailer. Only the big stuff and the mostly useless electronics were left behind. We even took apart the seats so we could use the cushions as bedding.We were lucky; our van’s trailer had a lot of our camping equipment. We packed out a couple of tents, several sleeping bags and foam pads, a couple of solar lanterns, a couple of battered tarps, and some twine and rope. Add to that our digging tools: shovels, trowels, buckets for sand and soil, and some plastic bags and containers. I wondered distantly what had happened to the other van and its occupants; the other half of our group had the vehicle with the ground penetrating radar machine. Their trailer would have yielded much less useful equipment than ours. We’d seen no sign of them since our reappearance.

Back at our new base, we all did a bit of what my mom would have wryly called ”nesting”. In my case, it was pretty literal; I took my sleeping bag and used it to form a sort of bowl shaped nest on the ground. It would do for now, I thought, but if I get a chance I want to make a hammock. There was something about being on the ground that made me feel vulnerable. I somehow felt safer sitting in a tree than being on the ground. I figured I could manage to string something between the trees holding up the roof.

With our living quarters and personal gear sorted out, our next goal was finding a way to safely store food and water here. Ideally, the foodstuffs could be kept somewhere easy to access, but dry and out of the rain. The water needed to be kept clean and drinkable. Somehow or another, a waterfall had formed on one of the taller buildings a bit landward of our home base. Emmy had found it when she was messing with the mango tree and we used that to fill our water bottles. It tasted fresh and ran clear, but I would have much preferred a way to gather rainwater. There was no telling what little germies were swimming in the runoff. When I expressed that concern out loud, Doc shrugged and said that as long as none of us got sick, it would do for now. We used some of the water to clean out the containers from the van so we could use them for food storage and set up a sort of pantry in the dry space beneath an overhang.

Emmy’s “eating the islands” book was proving to be very useful indeed. It turns out there are a lot of edible plants in Hawaii. For example, I had never heard of a sea grape before, but Emmy had tried some when we had been out at the site and swore they were edible. She thought we could find breadfruit and if we were lucky there would be some other trees with edible fruits around here too. I was more curious as to why we were the only ones scavenging in this area. After all, there had been a couple hundred students on campus when we left, despite it being summer break. Yet we found not a soul here. Nor for that matter did we encounter anyone coming up into the hills from Waikiki or Honolulu. After all there was a tourist population in the tens of thousands on any given day, as well as the permanent population of the city. Surely someone was down there? Maybe they just didn’t think it worth their while to come up into the hills, though we certainly found it worth ours to be up here.

Chapter 3

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Over the next few days, we investigated the area. We started with campus, of course, guided by a battered map of the buildings from the bottom of someone’s backpack. Then we branched out into the surrounding neighborhoods to find places where people had once planted fruit trees. Not everything planted can survive on its own of course, but our mangoes were joined by guava, banana, and papaya. We did not venture down towards the beach just yet. Doc and I worked to make some kind of functional fishing equipment, so when the jerky ran out we’d be able to add fish and whatever else we could scavenge to our diets, but there was no feeling that we needed to hurry. Something about the ocean bothered me, but I couldn’t put a finger on it.

I don’t know about anybody else, but there was something about the remains of Honolulu that gave me the heebie jeebies. The idea of walking around a deserted city, even one that was falling to pieces, did not appeal at all. Not to mention that it was too quiet down there. The first time I went near there with Trish, we heard nothing but the distant surf; no birdsong, nothing. It was really eerie, like the forest around us was holding its breath and waiting for something bad to happen. No one wanted to go into Honolulu alone. We stayed on the inland side of the old H1 interstate that had separated the campus from the rest of the city.

I got a couple more chances to read the book over the next few days. We would each take it for an hour or two between scavenging trips, as someone would always stay back to keep an eye or two on home base. None of us went out alone; I spent most of my time with Trish, Nic, or Emmy. Doc took Adam with him whenever he went out. I kept a close watch on our stash of jerky. It was only a matter of time before it was gone, especially with two of us eating it. I did manage to find an alternate source of meat for the future though. One of the pages in the book described how to make a snare for catching small game. I set one up as an experiment to see what, if anything, I could catch. I came out with one of the biggest rats I had ever seen. I cached it in a tree overnight before I could stand to consider what I could do with it. It reminded me of the scene in Shrek where he and Fiona are eating rat on a stick. It was worth a try, I thought. After all, the ancient Romans used to eat doormice in honey when they watched gladiators in the colosseum. Rat on a stick should not be too hard, right?

Well, the first attempt went… poorly. Mostly because Nic came across me trying to light a fire using my old glasses as a focus for the sun and smelled the burning rat. That resulted in a stern discussion of how the winds blew around the island and the idea that cooking meat downwind of our home base was a much better one than the opposite being true. The rat was pretty fair though. It could have used some barbecue sauce. The snare also caught mongoose and a cat. I didn’t at first consider cat edible, but I had heard stories as a child from my great grandfather wherein he had referred to cat as “roof rabbit”. Oh, and it turned out there were still feral chickens on the island. I managed to catch a couple and keep them in a sort of coop in one of the intact buildings. They seemed happy enough to glean our scraps in exchange for the occasional egg, so it worked out for both parties. Doc approved of fried eggs, especially when added to a bit of meat for a sort of loco-moco.

We all did our own culinary experiments at one time or another. In the end, Emmy took over as the executive chef for everything save Doc’s and my meat adventures (we swapped that duty). Emmy was the one to figure out how to find wild herbs and even salt for flavoring. Her skill at scavenging and cooking definitely made those early days more bearable.

Eventually, Doc and I made a trip to a secluded cove on the eastern part of the island to test our fishing equipment. On the map, it was labelled as Hanauma Bay and was a nature reserve. I’d been there before to go snorkeling. One advantage to having fur: I wouldn’t be getting sunburned on this trip! Our nets worked pretty well considering how much we improvised in making them. The best prize was when a whole bunch of sea turtles came ashore to lay eggs and whatnot about a week after we’d started our fishing trips. We left most of them alone, but took the remnants of a nest that the birds had uncovered. I can’t really describe the flavor: kind of fishy, kind of salty, and with the sulfur-y taste that a lot of eggs seem to have after being cooked. I can’t agree with Doc’s assertion that they “taste like chicken”.

We did our best to make our shelter more homelike. Emmy had the bright idea of using a couple of downed coconut palms to shore up the exposed side of the structure. The coconuts themselves had a husk that could be turned into fibers if one had the patience to do so. I decided to practice my patience as Doc had suggested and did my best to make enough rope to build myself a hammock. Adam said he approved, because it kept me quiet. I ignored him. It took me over a week and a half to get enough materials for it. In the end, my hammock held me… enough.

I kept doing the wing exercises from the book. I even managed to practice gliding down from trees and low buildings around my cooking site a few times. I didn’t feel ready to try and walk on clouds or anything like that. It still seemed too unreal to me. Adam continued to show a complete disinterest in flying of any kind. I don’t know what Doc said to him, but whatever it was seemed to make him at least grudgingly accepting of the situation. He still resisted reading anything from the book as best as I could tell, but at least he stopped trying to walk on two legs around home base. I won’t say we were thriving. We weren’t. Not yet. But I hoped we would at least keep surviving.

Chapter 4

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We gradually became more creative when it came to building things and more adept when it came to getting food. Nic started a garden in the courtyard and experimented with anything we could find for him. Pineapples did okay, as did a plantain tree. Trish helped too, but she was more interested in making sure the buildings stayed useable. She took to exploring inside the many collapsed, overgrown, and abandoned buildings around campus, bringing back anything useful. I helped when I could, but I never felt safe going underground. There was something about having nothing between myself and the treetops that was comforting. Going underground… nope.

There was another reason I hated her claustrophobic adventures because of an incident that happened early on. Trish had managed to find the building that had once housed the music department. She had the bright idea to see if any of the old musical instruments in there could be useful for us. I was the one she chose to come with, probably because I was the only other one of us who knew what to do with chunks of brass and whatever other instrument pieces we might find. Piano wire, for instance, could be useful for snares. We went into the darkened building with a flashlight. There were a lot of nooks and crannies full of rotten wood; we had to be careful where we stepped. Hooves are tough. Paws… not so much.

The pianos in the practice rooms were long gone; strings snapped and wood fell apart, leaving keys scattered among the debris on the floor like lost teeth. I managed to salvage some wire, but not as much as I’d hoped. I doubted that anything else useful would be left, or at least that anything could still be playable. We found ourselves in a large room full of crumbling containers. Light broke in through the remnants of an old skylight. Through the wood of the large boxes, I could see glimpses of metal. We propped our flashlight so we could see well enough into the corners of the cavernous room. Trish gestured for me to help her move one of the boxes into the light. Between the two of us, the box fell open with a crash, revealing the mangled brass tubing of a sousaphone. Trish pointed to the large bell. “That would be something useful for our rain catcher, don’t you think?”

I nodded. “Let’s get another one just in case we can’t use this one. I don’t know how well this stuff will hold up after being in here like this.” We managed to find three more intact sousaphones; two were brass, the third fiberglass. As we prepared to carry the pieces out into the sunlight, I spotted a very familiarly shaped oblong box one one of the more sheltered shelving units. The wood and metal case was intact, to my surprise. I pulled it out carefully, avoiding the handles and rusty hinges. I carried it out with me and into the natural sunlight. Trish watched with curiosity.

With a deep breath I flipped open each of the clasps holding the instrument case closed. The hinges, though rusty, opened easily and I found myself staring at the silvery gray patina of a professional grade bass trombone. I wiped away the remains of the padding of the case to get a closer look. I would have expected the bell to be etched with some of the usual manufacturers marks, or something simple like a flower or plant pattern. Instead, this instrument had something totally different: an etching of waves surrounding the prow of a battleship, guns pointed heavenward. I could see a name near the edge, but I could not quite make it out until I wiped more of the grime away. USS Arizona. Ho. Lee. Shit.

I gently lifted the trombone bell out of the case; even through the years it still seemed to glow in the sunlight. I carefully dug through the rest of the case until I could pull out the inner and outer slides, then assembled the instrument. Only a mouthpiece was missing. I was about to look for one, when I realized that even if I found one of the right size to play this beautiful instrument, I no longer had the biological equipment to use it. After all, bird beaks don’t have lips.

The ship’s brass trombone fell from my talons with a clang. Luckily it did not fall far and landed lightly. I barely noticed. I was shaking too hard. This was a piece of history. Even more so, this was a piece of me. I’d been a trombonist. Not a great one, mind you, but a good enough one. I’d have certainly played my heart out just to touch something like this. Now everything about my personal connection to music had changed forever.

I had trained for a decade as a brass player, with the lip flexibility to buzz into the mouthpiece of my beloved low brass horns. Even had I turned pony like my friends, I still could have played; slides are more forgiving to fingerlessness than valves. My reach was even better now, but unless I figured out a way to vibrate this new mouth, I would never play again. The beautiful piece of history by my feet was nothing more than a piece of fancy artwork. Practically useless.

That was when the waterworks started. Everything I had been pushing to the back of my mind came out all at once. I had been so busy recently with the others trying to find ways to make myself at home, that I had never given myself a chance to think about my past life. Not my friends, my teachers and coaches, my family, my home, nothing. Now it all rushed back to me in a torrent: the view of mist rising over the cornfields at dawn over a cup of coffee, the exhilaration of marching pregame and halftime at the football games, the joy of landing at the airport and being greeted by my parents during winter and summer breaks… For just a little while, I felt isolated and alone with my memories and the loss. I crumpled back on myself, ending up sitting back on my haunches. I couldn’t take my eyes off the etched trombone. It represented everything I’d been, in a way. Musician. Artist. History dork. Tourist. Human. I mourned the last most of all.

I felt a fuzzy presence huddling up next to me. Trish was there; she drew me into a hug as best she could. I hugged her back and carefully wrapped my wings around both of us. I held her close while she whispered “It’s ok, let it out. I know it hurts, so let it out.” I sobbed into her soft fur as she petted the feathers on my head. When the tears were gone, she looked up at me. “I was wondering why you weren’t freaking out like the rest of us, Zoe. Have you been holding all… this… in the whole time?”

I nodded. “S-sorry. I don’t like to be such a … a … weakling.”

“You are not a weakling, Zoe. It’s not good for you or healthy for you to be holding back like this. You know, this whole time you have been everywhere, and helping everybody. Do you really think the rest of us are hiding the way we feel? That none of us have had our moments of nostalgia?”

I shrugged, but then shook my head. Trish continued. “It is not, and has never been, your job to shoulder all the emotional burdens of our group. It is not your duty to ensure we are all upbeat and optimistic. Yes, the attitude helps, but you can’t do everything yourself.” She lowered her voice. “I know you like being independent, birdbrain, but there is a difference between independence and being a loner. Just as you are here for us, we are here for you. If you let us be.” She hugged me tighter. I am pretty sure that grip became stronger since she became a pony. “We are all here for each other now, Zoe. You, me, Emmy, Nic, Doc, and even Adam. We need to have faith in each other and watch out for each other. Together.”

She held me for a couple more minutes before I felt better and that I could sit on my own again. I looked back at her in the sunlight and saw something I had never noticed before. On her flank was what looked like a tattoo on her fur. It appeared to be a trio of eighth notes with hearts as the round bits on the bottom. She saw me looking and giggled. “I know you were looking through the pony chapters of the guidebook, Parrothead, but did none of them tell you it was rude to stare at someone’s butt?” I blushed as she pulled me to my feet. “Now come on. Let’s get these big pieces back to camp.” She stacked the bells in one pile for her to carry and shoved the rest onto a tarp for us to haul together. It was unbelievable how much stronger she was than me, but I managed to hold my own. I left that wondrous trombone where it had fallen. I did not look back.

Chapter 5

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We scavenged as much as we could get from our side of the H1, the highway that separated University of Hawaii Manoa from the rest of Honolulu. Much of it had collapsed, but a large chunk just kind of fell over, becoming a wall-like barrier between us and what was left of the city. I didn’t know why, but none of us wanted to go over the remnants of the highway into downtown Honolulu, such that it was. It was surprising how much we actually found around campus and the surrounding neighborhoods. Even “student ghettos” here had a fair number of fruit trees and other useful plants growing wild. One by one we even managed to get into the old dorms to see if any of our personal possessions were left intact; I don’t think anyone found much, but I guess snorkel gear holds together better than suitcases seeing as I found mine. The plastic net bag was a pleasant surprise addition to Doc’s and my fishing gear. Any electronics were useless, and most clothing fell to pieces when touched. Of all the odd survivors among our stuff, hair bands were surprisingly durable and very useful for many of our projects. We were living off of what we could plant and what we brought out of the van and its trailer for quite a while.

At one point, Doc and Adam made it to Doc’s old house inland from campus. Neither of them said much about the experience, but when they returned, Doc clutched a locket in his paws. He looked like he’d been crying. Adam’s feathers had been mussed. I suppose he and Doc had a similar discussion to the one I had with Trish. Dinner that night was unusually quiet.

That was unusual. In some ways, dinner and the evening social time afterward were the best part of the day. None of us wanted to be alone after dark, so we often ended up crowding around the cookfire with whatever project we were working on at the time. It was a chore keeping everything dry enough to be comfortable, but none of us came out with trench hoof or whatever. Most of the books we had salvaged withered away in the humid air and fell apart no matter what we did to keep them in one piece. The Archive’s Guidebook remained intact. There must have been some kind of magic protecting it from the damp. Given how often it got passed around, it would have crumbled long before anything else. I’m not sure how, but Emmy’s well-loved copy of Harry Potter survived too. Maybe it had its own magic. Or maybe she was just fanatical about keeping it in pristine condition. Whatever. It worked.

One of the most entertaining discussions that came about from our scavenging and campfire chats involved speculation about celebrities. If I remember right, the first one was prompted by Emmy finding Trish’s copy of an old People magazine featuring the “Sexiest Men Alive” and a picture of Brad Pitt. Trish had dog-eared a page featuring Matt Smith from Doctor Who. We all did our best to ignore the blush that crept across her features. It turned her blue coat purple from ears to the tip of her nose.

“Do you think anybody in there came back yet?” Emmy asked, studying the, ahem, studs in the article. “I mean, what kind of body would he have?” She pointed a hoof towards Brad Pitt.

“With that face? I dunno. He would be a nice looking whatever he turned into.” That was from Adam. He acted disinterested, but I saw his wings rise briefly. Like a teenager trying to hide a boner, I thought. “No homo though.” He finished.

“Okay, what about her?” Emmy countered with a swimsuit shot of Rhianna, the wide grin on the celebrity’s face matching that on Emmy’s. That did it for Adam. He nearly knocked Nic over when his wings unfurled with an epic “POOMPH!”

“Um… er… ah…” We chuckled as he tried to get himself under control. Nic saved him. “I’d say she’d be an earth pony, or if you want to go more exotic a zebra. I think she’d totally rock stripes. As for him,” he pointed at Brad Pitt, “He looks like a pegasus to me. Rather flighty, you know.” Nic had a mischievous gleam in his eye as he listened to the protests of the mares. I’m not sure if they were protesting the “pegasus” bit or the “flighty” bit, but it was funny to listen to. Emmy said he would be a unicorn; Trish argued for earth pony.

That celebrity rag led to a discussion that kept us entertained for several nights running. Many of the rich and famous were hashed out as ponies or other fantastic creatures. My favorite part was the fact that everyone’s celebrity crushes and personal nerdinesses came out. Emmy focussed on the stars of the Harry Potter films (evidently Alan Rickman made a fantastic unicorn out of every goth-girl’s fantasy). Trish raved about Doctor Who (Matt Smith? Earth pony. Benedict Cumberbatch? Unicorn). Adam, it turns out, was a bit of a Trekkie (William Shattner went earth pony, Leonard Nimoy went unicorn, and George Takei went pegasus). Nic geeked out about the Marvel movies (Robert Downey Jr? Pegasus. Chris Evans? Unicorn. Chris Pratt? Earth pony. Scarlett Johansson? Pegasus.) All lamented that we would never see the release of additional movies and episodes.

As for Doc, he mostly listened quietly. He chimed in when he heard a name he recognized and restarted an ongoing debate with Adam as to whether Star Wars or Star Trek was superior (and for the record, they agreed that Mark Hamill and Carrie Fisher would be excellent unicorns. Harrison Ford, on the other claw, went pegasus). When talk started to slow down, he’d mention some actor or actress from when he was younger that I didn’t recognize but some of the others did.

As for me, I wracked my brain for anyone I could think of. I’ve never been much of a follower for celebrity culture, but I kept up with a few of my favorites. The part of me that still swoons over Jurassic Park nominated Jeff Goldblum for unicornhood. Most of my beloved country singers went earth pony, though Taylor Swift was a shoo-in pegasus. Eventually Trish got me to reveal my thoughts on my all-time favorite by prompting me to choose someone to join me in griffonhood. “Who would turn out looking like me, you mean?” Nods all around. I grinned. “Isn’t it obvious? If anyone went parrothead like me, wouldn’t it be the great Jimmy Buffett? After all, his fans have been calling ourselves Parrotheads for decades!”

When our favorite shows and movies ran thin, we branched out to other celebrities. We managed to agree on a few of them. After all, can anyone doubt that with his voice, Morgan Freeman would not come back as a dragon? The fate of Johnny Depp was hotly debated, with suggestions of all three pony races as well as zebra and griffon entering the conversation. We eventually compromised by deciding that he’d be a changeling so he could appear as anything he wanted. I remember Doc and Nic having a lengthy discussion about whether Arnold Schwarzenegger would reappear as a Diamond Dog or a Minotaur (I leaned toward the latter with Nic.) The game went on for quite a while even after the magazine bit the dust. As we all went our separate ways to bed one night about a week and a half after we changed, I heard Adam wonder out loud “I wonder if we could find another celebrity rag down in Honolulu…”

Chapter 6

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The next morning, Adam was nowhere to be seen. The rest of us had gathered as usual around the fire pit for breakfast and to make plans for the next round of scavenging, but he was gone. Doc was probably the most annoyed out of all of us. Adam had been his primary partner in the hunt for useful stuff. He declared that he would track down the wayward pegasus before he went out alone and got himself eaten or something similar. After a statement like that, there was no way we were going to let him go by himself.

In the end, we split up into two groups. Doc and Emmy headed out in search of Adam, while Trish, Nic, and I headed out in search of a better shelter than the battered university buildings. Nic had remembered something about there being old military bunkers left over from World War II being scattered around the island. Some of them would have been still in use by the U.S. military at the time of the Change, but others fell into disuse, or at least civilian hands. If we could get our hooves and claws into one, it could prove useful for storage and shelter from any storms that came in off the Pacific. If we got desperate, I knew there was one with a pretty hefty metal door at Kualoa Ranch, where we had been surveying. Unfortunately that was on the other side of the mountains and not within easy reach. The fact that the tunnel on the Pali highway had collapsed wouldn’t help matters if we had to get there in a hurry.

We had not managed to find a suitable place on our side of the mountains by the time we returned to our base on campus for lunch. There was no sign of Doc, but Emmy came back to report that he had tracked Adam to a gully that went under the H1, but had lost the scent due to the fact that there was a stream of water running through the culvert. He had decided to wait for the wayward pegasus there and would be back before nightfall. I guess he wanted to do some scenting down there to see what he could find food-wise. If there was something worth trapping, we would try and set snares again.

When we went out again in search of a bunker, Emmy went with us and Trish went out to join Doc. Emmy gave her directions to the culvert and Trish promised to meet us back at base in time to help with dinner, hopefully with Doc and Adam in tow. This time, heading in a different direction than we’d gone in the morning, Nic, Emmy and I followed streams up towards the mountains in the hopes that the higher elevation might give us a better view of the lay of the land. As we climbed, the air became somewhat thinner, but never lost that fresh scent of the ocean. Back when there had been lots of cars crowding the roads below us, it would have been tinged with exhaust. Nasty.

At one point, we stumbled onto the remnants of a set of stairs accompanied by rusty handrails. Emmy got excited and said that this was one of the best hiking trails on the island, but that it had been closed for a while when we had been doing our survey work before the Change. Locals called it the Sleeping Giant. The problem had been something about the trailhead being on private property rather than in the forest reserve below. Whatever; it made the going a bit easier as trees had not completely taken over the former trail. The view at the top was… well, spectacular. We could see the beach at Kailua in one direction, and the remnants of Honolulu in the other. Emmy seemed puzzled by something in the view though.

“Something is not right about the forest down there.” Emmy said after a few minutes of admiring the view. “It’s… different somehow.” She seemed at a loss for words.

“What do you mean?” Nic asked. “It all looks like forest to me. Trees that way” he gestured “and more trees down there.”

“That’s not what I meant. There’s a difference in the foliage. It is not as obvious at ground level, but up here you can see it. Below a certain, uh, altitude, you don’t see any of those big trees, you know, like the one Zoe has her nest in. Everything is smaller and kind of a greyish green instead of the vibrant color we see closer to our base.” Emmy pointed with a hoof to show what she meant.

“Could it be because it’s all growing over the places where people lived? I mean, concrete and asphalt are not exactly kind to plant life.”

Emmy shook her head. “Could be, but I don’t think that’s right. If it were, the color would be more patchy. Down there it looks more uniform, as though someone took a broom and swept the entire coastline clean.”

“Huh.” Nic tilted his head. “You know, I think I see what you mean. Do you think something could have happened, like a rogue wave or big storm?”

“Might could be.” Emmy said vaguely. Her eyes were distant as she thought.

We followed another trail down towards what had been Kailua and Kaneohe. Nic’s map showed an Air Force installation just east of the town further down the coast, so it seemed like a place with a potential for more substantial structures.

“I don’t… think… we will want … to climb like this… with stuff… on our backs.” Emmy panted after a while. I didn’t feel the greatest either, but the open air at the peak of the trail had invigorated me. Nic shrugged. He showed no ill effects and in fact looked as though he had been strolling along a city street.

“We will have to go back over that trail later.” Nic said. “Either that or we take the long way around by…” He checked his map, “Waimanalo Beach. At least there was a road, but it will take longer. It looks like it went through this area with some golf courses and then connected to the H1. We could follow that back.”

Emmy and I glanced at each other. She looked pretty beat, and, well, I don’t think that griffons were really meant for walking long distances. (Not that I had had any luck figuring out flying yet, but, hey, I kept trying the Guide’s exercises). “Let’s rest on this side for a while before we do either of them.” I said at last. “Going either way will take a while if we want to be back by supper, but no matter which way we choose, I need a breather.”

“Same here.” Emmy said.

We paused for a little while and ate a snack; the ponies had some fruit while I munched on one of my few remaining strips of jerky. I tried to eat downwind of everybody else out of courtesy, but I could see Emmy wrinkle her nose anyway. After a brief rest we decided to take the long way around. The old road would make things somewhat easier, and we would be going past Bellows Air Force Station. We figured this route would give us a better idea as to whether we would find any old bunkers or useable structures over on this side of the island.

The walk was certainly easier on the legs down here, especially since we stuck to the former road for the most part. There was not much of a breeze though. It made it feel more sticky and warm than on the Waikiki side of the mountains. I tried to distract myself by looking at the foliage that Emmy had noticed earlier. I saw lots of trees, but none of them were the giants like “my” tree back at base. Sure enough, something had scoured the area clean of vegetation at some point before we got there. There was also more sand down here than deeper into the forest. I felt it between my toes among the leaf litter.

For the most part the walk was uneventful. Bellows AFS proved to have a lot of open space, but a lot of the buildings had crumbled in the tropical wet. Most of the remainder were covered in a layer of sand that would not be easy to remove, even with our stash of shovels and Doc’s enormous paws. We ended up following the road all the way around and made it back to our base at around sundown. Doc was there, as was Trish. Adam was not.

After such a long trek, I was exhausted. Even so, that night I worried myself to sleep. What in the world had Adam been thinking, going off alone like that? There is safety in numbers, and the last thing we needed was to lose somebody when there were only the six of us. He also was the only one of us who knew about radios and his flying drones…

That night I dreamed of flying. It wasn’t just me in the air though. I found myself keeping pace with one of the quadcopter drones we had been using to take aerial photos with. It matched me, move for move, as I twisted and dove through the air. I did not mind. It was almost friendly, like a mechanical dog with wings. I was flapping lazily when I heard a tinny voice from the quadcopter say “base to Parrothead, base to Parrothead, come in please.” I reached for the drone, but it moved away. I tried to catch it so I could respond to the call, but every time it was just out of my reach. The third attempt resulted in me waking up after falling out of my hammock and onto the ground a few feet below. “Ooof.” I grunted.

I was the only one awake; the fire had died down to embers. I poked it with a stick and added a little bit of kindling to help me think. Adam was not stupid. In fact, he was probably the most logical out of our entire group. Unfortunately, that also meant that he was the least accepting of his current equine state. Why would he have wandered off alone, then? Unless… I headed towards the place where we had been storing most of the equipment we were determined to keep dry. Among those items were the walkie-talkies we had used to communicate between the survey sites. Luckily for us, their chargers were solar-powered, so we could still use them (if with difficulty for the ponies). There had been four of them in the van. Now there were three. I facepalmed. Of all the things to forget… I turned one on and turned the volume way down. “Parrothead to Birdbrain, come in please. Parrothead to Birdbrain, if you can hear me please respond.” I said in a low voice. I crossed my talons for luck.

The silence seemed to stretch as all I could hear were the sounds of my pony friends breathing and the snores of Doc. I waited for a few minutes. Just as I was about to give up and try again in the morning, I heard a crackly voice on the radio. “About time one of you thought to turn on a walkie. Adam here, and don’t you dare call me a bird brain again, Zoe.” I grinned before pushing the transmit button and sassing him back. “Until you prove otherwise, your little jaunt today earned you that title. It was pretty bird-brained of you to not even leave us a message to say you had a radio. You coming back?”

“Yeah, sometime tomorrow. Tell you all what I found down here. Now can I please get some shut eye, Parrothead?” Adam’s voice was muffled and he sounded tired.

“Yeah sure.” I said grudgingly. “See you tomorrow, and you had better have an explanation for us.”

“Yes mother. Out.”

I turned off the radio and left it back with the others. No use leaving it on all night. I used a chunk of charcoal to write out a short note on some bark saying that Adam had a radio and would be back tomorrow. Then I returned to my hammock and once again slipped into a sleep filled with dreams of flying.

Chapter 7

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I woke the next morning feeling refreshed and awake. Something about those flying dreams always made me feel more energetic upon waking. I also had not gotten tangled in my own hammock last night, which helps one’s sleep tremendously. Before I headed to the campfire to join the others for whatever breakfast they had managed to scrounge, I headed for the electronics stash to check the radios. All four of them were back in their places. So, Adam decided not to spend the whole night by his lonesome in the wilderness after all.

Sure enough, when I arrived at the cookfire, I saw Adam. His wing feathers were askew and sticking out on all directions. His mane also stuck out strangely and gave him a cowlick over one ear. One night away from Base had not treated him kindly. He didn’t say anything as I approached, but there was a platter’s worth of fruit on our makeshift table so I helped myself.

“There’s coconuts if you want one.” Adam said, waving a wing lazily at a pyramid of round brown shapes. “Lots of palms down there.”

“Is that why you wandered off? You wanted coconuts?” I asked.

Adam shrugged. “No, well not really. I needed time to think. I will tell you all when everybody is awake. I don’t really want to have to tell the story more than once. Oh, the coconuts I just kind of found when I was off on my own. They were just there for the taking. I thought I would bring them back as, well, a peace offering of sorts.”

“Well, thanks I guess. But you are not getting off the hook that easily. Not when you had all of us running around looking for you and worrying ourselves sick. Not to mention some strange stuff that we spotted from up there.” I said with a vague gesture towards the mountains.

That distracted him from his papaya. “What? Some strange stuff? What do you mean?”

“Oh no; you have to wait until the others are up and about. Tit for tat, you don’t get to hear our story until we have heard yours.” I watched him squirm a little at that. I changed the subject. “So have you figured out your wings yet?”

Adam groaned. His wings flared out a little, feathers sticking out like the seeds on a pinecone. “I can’t get them to lay flat half the time and these things won’t stay straight.” He poked at one of the wayward primary feathers.

I hesitated for a moment before answering tentatively. “You know… the Guidebook said something about preening and caring for feathers. It said, uh, that sometimes it helps to have someone else help, especially with the ones you can’t reach.”

Adam’s ears pinned back, but he waved for me to go on. “I still don’t really trust the Guidebook, seeing as we know nothing about the author and their motives for writing it, but I guess some of what it said seems like good advice. What else did it say that is making you blush like that?”

How could he tell? I did my best to return to a normal color. “Well, apparently among griffons and pegasi it is a way to express affection, kind of like when couples give each other a massage. Not that I am thinking about that of course, but…”

“You’re still turning funny colors.” Adam pointed out. “But yeah, I get your meaning. Maybe for this time it would just be as, you know, one freaky bird thing helping out one of her winged brethren. A favor now for a favor later?” He was not blushing, but judging by the way he seemed to shrink down he was definitely embarrassed.

“Well, if it’s ok with you?” He nodded and waved again. I took a seat behind him and started sorting through and straightening his feathers. He did his best to hold them out straight so I could see what his overall wings looked like. They were smaller than mine and the feathers were softer. They seemed more delicate, so I was cautious at first. I combed through his feathers with my talons, trying not to pull any out while he returned to eating. It was calming, just sitting there doing something mindless but at the same time exacting. We both let ourselves lose track of time.

“Awwww.” The drawn out word woke both of us from our reveries. There stood Trish, a mocking grin on her face. “You two make such an adorable couple!” She made kissy motions with her lips. Adam let out a horsey whinny and fell over backwards into me. A squawk of surprise came out of my beak and we both landed ass-over-teakettle with our wings spread wide. As quickly as we could, we both got to our feet and backed away from each other. Trish snickered and I felt myself flush again. I could see the others emerging from our shelter behind her. Doc looked amused, the other two confused. “Don’t worry you two. You’ll both get another chance to do your wing thing later.” Trish said, still smirking.

I was too embarrassed to say anything, but Adam rolled his eyes. “You are too much of a romantic for your own good, Missy Kissy.” His wings were now covered in dust from the fall, but at least most of his feathers were straight now. The ones that weren’t, he could probably reach himself. I turned away and started putting my own wings back in order. It reminded me of what my cat used to do if I caught her up to something. Just acting natural and grooming. That’s all that I was doing, really.

“Well now that we are all here,” Doc said, with a pointed look at Adam, “we might as well discuss our findings.” Nic did the reporting for our exploring group yesterday, ending with the puzzle of the difference in foliage between the lowlands and where we were and the large amounts of sand at Bellows. Doc and Trish talked about their discovery of more fruit trees, including the papaya Adam had been enjoying, and of the possibility of building a more permanent structure to augment the remnants of the university buildings we had been using.Doc had set up some snares around the culvert, having seen tracks of various smaller critters down there. All in all it was all pretty usual stuff for us, but we all wanted to hear from Adam about what he’d found.

“All right, so here goes. I went down there to see what was left of the city. It’s surprisingly intact, but something feels seriously off about the place. It smelled weird to start with. Really salty and gross, but it looks like somebody did something to shore up some places. I didn’t run into anyone there, though. Just weirdly shaped writing that glowed when I got close. Anyways, I just picked a direction and started walking. I figured I would hit the beach eventually, right? A lot of those fancy hotels aren’t there anymore. Lots of them have collapsed or look like they are about to. I spent most of the night in what was left of the Hilton. Ground floor was pretty grody. There was sand and dried mud everywhere. Not a window to be found and basically everything is at least partially buried. I did a little climbing where things seemed sturdy. The second and third floors are fairly intact, but I was nervous about going too high. The tallest stuff has mostly fallen down, but I didn’t want to find out by experiment that that place was ready to go.”

“Like I said, I did not find any recent evidence of people. Not a soul; it was really creepy. Even the writing looked like it had been done a long time ago. Not even animals wanted to be down there. It’s hard to explain.” Adam shivered. “I felt like a total intruder by the time I made it to downtown. You can still see a few remnants of stores and restaurants and such down there. We might want to see if anything useful is left. I bet there are some places with cooking stuff that we could use. Maybe more too.” He shrugged. “Yeah, I know I was a doofus for going out there alone; I definitely won’t be doing that again.”

“That’s all?” I asked. “All that fuss and annoyance for nothing but an empty shell with maybe some cooking equipment?”

“Hey, I was only down there for a day. Jeez, you would think I just came back from the dead or something.” Adam shot back.

“We nearly thought you had.” Doc said gravely. “I know you often feel like we spend too much time together as a group, Adam, but wandering off alone is not the answer. For any of us.” He looked at all of us individually. We nodded. “As far as we have been able to find, the six of us are the only sentient creatures on this island. We need to stick together and help each other. If we don’t, who will?” He crossed his arms.

“You’re right.” Adam said, his ears flopping over in shame. “And I am sorry I didn’t wait for any of you to come with me and for making you worry. I’m not used to being away from an easy way of contacting other people. I think I killed the battery on my walkie talkie too. Sorry.” He hung his head.

“Good. Keep that in mind for the next time then.” Doc said to Adam before turning to the rest of us. “Now, ladies and gentlemen, what should our next course of action be? Should we go down into Honolulu and see if there is more worth finding?”

“We might as well. I mean, if there is anything worth salvaging, we need all the help we can get. I for one would love to figure out a better way of keeping food up here. I know we won’t be able to use anything that takes electricity, but something like a Dutch oven for boiling things and cooking them in the coals would be useful. Heck, I would take a frying pan or something too. Also anything that could make our cooking area more permanent would be great.” Emmy said. She had started experimenting with her magic recently with a few simple ideas about how to cook. It hadn’t gotten much further than “fruit on a stick” and “toasted fruit on a stick”, but if we could find or make more utensils she thought she could make more of a variety. I wouldn’t have minded something better for cooking meat myself. I missed bacon.

“I wouldn’t mind getting more coconuts. They are really useful for things other than eating. If we are unable to find some kind of flatware and bowls we can use coconuts. The husks make great tinder for the fire too. No offense intended, but I really don’t think we should be burning our remaining books. It just feels wrong.” Nic commented. “Count me in for going down there and seeing what we can find.”

“I dunno. I guess I would be willing to look around in daylight, but count me out if you guys want to stay the night down there.” Trish said with a shudder. “There’s something about this whole situation that is giving me the heebie-jeebies.” She held up a hoof to forestall any comments from the peanut gallery. “Don’t ask me why. It’s not something I can really explain. The ground underhoof just felt wrong when we walked along the coast yesterday when we were exploring and it feels even worse by that culvert that leads into Honolulu.”

“Fine by me,” I said. “I couldn’t feel it like you did, but I believe you. I don’t trust an area that animals avoid completely. If there is something down there, it might be something that hunts by night, and I really don’t want to find out the hard way that something escaped from the Honolulu Zoo before we got here and has established a territory. I vote daylight only, coming back here by nightfall with whatever we find. If we find anything useful, that’s fine, but nothing’s worth dying or getting lost over. The city is not going anywhere fast.”

Adam nodded. “I do not want to be down there at night again, that’s for sure. Once was plenty, thanks.”

“All right then.” Doc said. “We’ll go exploring. Stick together everydoggy. A pack is safer than a loner any day.” He ambled towards the path leading down towards the culvert.

Trish glanced at me. “Everydoggy? Pack?” She mouthed at me. “Underhoof?” I mouthed back. She shrugged and looked a little embarrassed. Maybe Wonder Mutt was coping by thinking of us that way (or maybe it was just a dog thing). I stood up and followed Doc. The others trailed after us. WeI caught up with Doc at the culvert. He was looking down into it with some apprehension due to the fact that there was a stream of water running through it, but hearing us behind him seemed to strengthen his resolve. One by one, we splashed through the culvert to find what lay in the ruins ahead.

Chapter 8

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You wouldn’t think the distance across a highway overpass would be a stark dividing line between one world and another, but you would be wrong. The other side of the H1 felt very different from the Manoa side. It was eerily quiet and smelled strange. Home Base, as we had started to call our campus campsite, smelled like the sea breeze and the wild hibiscus and other forest flowers that grew with wild abandon over the old buildings. Down here it smelled most strongly of salt and fouled vegetation. The colors seemed washed out and faded.

The sounds of hooves and paws echoed among the stone and concrete buildings around us as we walked. Even the layer of growth couldn’t completely deaden the sounds of our footfalls. This had not exactly been the touristy side of town even when people lived here; it was a place where locals did their little errands like groceries and laundry. No fuss, just practical structures. They had been dwarfed by the towering hotels and skyline of Honolulu to the south of us.That skyline was now truncated, as though some giant hand had swiped across it. Everything still standing slumped towards the sea. By unspoken consent we headed in that direction. Doc led, his nose seeming to point the way towards whatever we could find to use. As Adam had said, there was a thick layer of sand and dirt everywhere. Sickly green-gray vegetation discolored the upper floors and facades above us. As we approached the beach, we could almost reach the second story of the buildings in some places where the dunes had piled up.

We circled around towards Waikiki, keeping the majority of the tallest buildings on our right. In places you could still tell what the buildings had looked like in their prime. Bright paint peeked out from beneath carpets of moss. Signs and building names appeared as indented shapes behind a curtain of lichen or other plants. We eventually stumbled out of the city and onto what had once been one of the world’s premier beaches. The change was astounding.

Where once families had played in the surf and built sand castles, there was now an open wasteland of beach. Instead of bathing beauties in bikini swimsuits and and hunky dudes in speedos playing beach volleyball, there was just that empty stretch of sand. Turning back towards the main thoroughfare, the buildings that had once housed luxury boutiques and tourist sundry shops now leaned drunkenly in multiple directions.If they stood at all. Gaping holes where weaker structures had fallen gave the boardwalk a look like an island tiki’s grin. Those buildings that had lower stories open to the air showed little. Whatever had filled the shelves of these places was long gone. If one went in, it seemed that one would be swallowed whole by the silence. None of us said a word as we walked towards downtown.

Whatever had happened to Honolulu had spared nothing at ground level, it seemed. We looked in through a few doorways and what was not scoured clean was buried. Near the end of the strip of beach between one of the former Hilton hotels and the remnants of the marina, I saw something that made my breath catch in my throat; it was a place that I had been to only once since coming to Hawaii, but it was dear to my heart all the same. I walked towards the remnants of a restaurant. Though the artwork above the entrance had faded to almost nothing, I could still make out the name of the place. I felt a chill go down my spine as I read “Cheeseburger in Paradise”. The words echoed in the space around me as I ducked inside. I barely noticed the others following me and calling for me to wait. I kept moving. The interior had been decorated with the standard tiki bar theme with palm trees and such. Most of that was long gone, but bits of plastic decorations remained here and there. On the far wall behind the bar, a rack of tiki mugs still hung.I found myself looking for something special that felt as though it were a lodestone drawing me forward, deeper into the battered building. A song echoed in my ears that drowned out everything else, seeming to get louder as I continued onwards.

The sand abated somewhat as I neared a set of stairs that led up to the second floor. I climbed up, testing the steps beneath my feet. The wood was surprisingly sturdy, having been preserved by the years of salty breezes blowing through the decaying structure. The dark interior probably helped too, by keeping sunlight out of this area. The second floor was littered with old beat-up furniture. I kept following that memory of a song around the veranda to a door that still had a plaque reading “employees only”. I shoved it open and found myself staring at a room empty of much of anything, save for another door that read “office”. I went in. The office was dark, but dry. The scent of sea salt was fainter here. The desk looked as though the wood would crumble at a touch, but I ignored that as my focus was on something that still somehow hung in a frame behind it. It was a record, its label long gone, but even through the grime I could see the faint lettering inscribed on its surface: a signature. For the first time since coming down to Waikiki, I smiled. The song in my ears reached a frenzied chorus.

I lifted the record off the wall and held it in my talons. The light revealed that it had been decorated with a sketch of a parrot alongside the signature. I tucked it under my wing to bring with me to where I could hear someone calling my name downstairs. Emerging from the stairwell, I was immediately face to face with a very annoyed herd of ponies. Adam was glaring the hardest. “What was that you said about safety in numbers and not wandering off?” He sneered. “What on Earth were you thinking going up there?” The song in my head died mid-verse.

I shrunk back and fell butt-first onto the steps. “Sorry. I… I just… I don’t know what came over me. I saw the sign and… and…” I blinked. “It was like I was being called by someone. Or something.” I felt the weight of the record under one wing. I pulled it out carefully and held it out in front of me. “It was… this, I think. It was almost like it was calling me from… some other place … or maybe some other time.” Emmy grasped it in her magic. I did not want to let go.

“I won’t drop it or anything, really, Zoe. Just let me see and I’ll give it back, okay?” Reluctantly I let go. She lifted it into the light to examine it for a bit before passing it back to me. “Are you saying that you ran all the way up there and took this silly risk just to get a record autographed by Jimmy Buffett?” She raised an eyebrow.

I shuffled awkwardly. “Well, since you put it that way, yeah I did. I can’t really explain it, but I saw the name of the restaurant and it reminded me of him and his music.” I didn’t mention the phantom music that had led me to the record, not when I couldn’t think of a way to explain it. I trailed off and looked up into the eyes of the ponies and dog around me. Trish kept my gaze the longest. She of all ponies was like me in the sense that music was in her blood. And on her butt mark. She was the one who gestured for me to tuck it back under my wing. She mouthed at me “we’ll talk later.” I nodded slightly.

“Just take it with you. You can make it up to us by seeing if the kitchen here has anything intact, okay?” Trish said out loud. She turned to the others. “If any of us feels a compulsion like this, we should follow whoever has it just in case they get into trouble. Zoe was lucky in that the floor and stairs stayed intact, but I really don’t want to find out by experiment if ponies can get gangrene and survive amputations. Now, let’s see about that kitchen.”

The kitchen of Cheeseburger in Paradise had made the standard burger and fries fare that the name implied. The grills were rusted clean through, though the stainless steel sinks in the dishroom were still completely intact. Shuffling around brought out some skewers that could still be usable as well as a few smaller pans. We headed back outside with our stuff. A few more former eateries along the beach yielded some metal spatulas and spoons as well as more pots. No big dutch oven appeared, but there was a hibachi place that resulted in three large woks that had Emmy over the moon. We used those to carry our findings back towards the H1, as it was nearing sunset. Despite my distraction, we managed to make it back to Base before nightfall. We spent the evening around the fire discussing plans for where to visit next. The best possibility seemed to be the enormous mall at the west end of Waikiki. It was two storeys, somehow seemed to be in one piece as best we could tell, and had housed loads of places to eat. It also helped that there had been a Wal-Mart on the inland side as well, so that was added to our list of shopping destinations too.

One thing that we decided that we needed before going back down was a way of carrying our new finds. The woks had worked alright for this first trip, but if Emmy wanted to use them for cooking, we needed something better. Gambling that we would find something else down there tomorrow was risky, but none of us could think of anything up here that would be simple to make and easy to transport, especially if we had to get it through that narrow culvert. Finding an alternate route to get from Base to Honolulu would be part of tomorrow’s task. If we could get under the H1 on the west side of campus, we might be able to hack a trail through the jungle (come to think of it, hadn’t the van done just that when we Returned?) Encouraged by our adventures, everyone headed to their sleeping places one by one.

I stayed by the fire alone for a little while longer, turning the record over and over in my claws. The signature and the sketch flickered in the light cast by the fire. For a moment, I could have sworn I saw the parrot smile. I guess having a beak myself made reading the bird’s expression easier or something. There was no way to tell which of his albums the JB had signed, but I would have bet my last strip of jerky that it had been Cheeseburger in Paradise. As I traced the signature, I realized that this was as close as I had ever been to seeing Jimmy Buffett perform in person. My dad had been a huge fan and had seen him in concert. I looked up at the stars, so many more visible now that the lights had gone out. “Wherever you are, whenever you are, whatever you are, Jimmy, I hope you are still strumming your tunes.” I whispered into the starlight. A meteor streaked across the night sky as I watched. I said goodnight and carried my signed album to my nest and fell asleep with it under one wing.

The next morning we all met up by the campfire with determined looks on our faces. Our priorities: find an easier way to carry stuff from Honolulu than tying containers to our backs with rope (it chafes rather horribly), get whatever survival gear we could acquire, obtain more cooking gear, and keep an eye open for evidence of any kind that someone of any sentient species was living around here. Heck, we were archaeology students; we would take evidence of anyone who had recently inhabited the area and then left. With that in mind, we took the underpass along University Avenue (partially collapsed, but useable) into Honolulu. Our goal today was the Ala Moana shopping center and whatever was left of the nearby Walmart. There was no way of knowing just how much usable stuff we would be able to find there, but we are all children of the Mainland; Walmart was basically a god of commerce at whose altar we worshipped.

The going was still tough through the jungle in order to get to the underpass. We passed the van’s stripped remains on our way down. It wasn’t entirely in pieces, but anything useful that we could pry out had already been carried to Home Base. By now, most of us could navigate the jungle around us fairly well (though Emmy still had trouble with directions). There is a certain trick to getting through the dense foliage. You basically have to look through the stuff instead of at it. The goal is to find openings that you can use when walking through. As long as you don’t get yourself caught up in any plants with thorns or vines it’s pretty easy..

The underpass had a small stream going through it. It was bigger than the one at the culvert, but since there was more room, it was easy to avoid by taking a path around the edge. The six of us kept going along what used to be University before following the breaks in the forest to Kapiolani Boulevard. The remnants of the roads made getting through the trees and plants here easier. So did the fact that the pattern of growth down here was less dense than it was at Home Base. The remnants of the city around us were still eerily quiet. Our footsteps along here did not echo as much as they had down by Waikiki due to the muffling of the denser plant life that sprawled over the surrounding buildings. It looked like a modern Angkor Wat with roots prying their way into the masonry structures. The masonry was crumbling as a result. We steered clear of the weakened facades.

It took us about half an hour to navigate our way to the old mall. There was no traffic, of course, but we had to weave our way through the labyrinth of what used to be hotels and such. None of us said much. We were all feeling rather subdued by the taller silent buildings. This had been a place where people had gone by the thousands on vacation, but now it was nothing more than a ghost town with spires that were slowly being eaten away by a dense forest.

We finally made it to the Ala Moana mall. The seaward side was sagging heavily around the remnants of the parking structure, so we agreed to avoid that area and focus our efforts on the landward side when we got inside the mall. The Wal-Mart was on the sheltered side, so we hit that up first. It was not in the best shape, but still looked relatively intact. Most of the shelves were empty and falling over. The few that were not sagged under the weight of whatever had once been there. We paired off and split up to find whatever we could. Trish and I found ourselves in what had been sporting goods. I doubted we could find guns or something like that here, but camping supplies have to be durable, as do fishing poles and lines. If Doc and I needed to supplement our diets with meat of some kind, fishing would probably be our best bet here. Fishing line would be stronger than my inexpertly-made rope for snares too.

Evidently someone else who had gotten here first had had similar ideas. There were no poles of the kind I had hoped for and learned with when fishing back home. We did manage to find a couple skeins of fishing line though. There were also a few canvas covers that had once covered one of the storage racks that seemed to be intact enough to use. I don’t know what else was usable there. Most everything was either too fragile to touch without making it crumble or too rusted and heavy to be moved. I admit I cast longing looks at what was left of some of those hammocks people would hang between palm trees, but the fabric had deteriorated to the point where it would not have survived the rough route back to Home Base. We carried our finds back to the entryway to meet up with the others.

Emmy and Nic were probably the most successful. Nic had taken her over to the section with automotive stuff and home improvement things. They came out like bandits loaded with plastic buckets and cords of various extension and bungee varieties. Apparently plastic works wonders when it comes to keeping things intact when kept out of the sunlight. Nic had also managed to find one of those big kiddie swimming pools, you know the plastic ones about a yard across and a foot deep? His idea was to add skids or wheels to it from one of the automotive wheel sales areas and use that to transport stuff back to Home Base. They had also found plastic containers that we could use for storage of whatever else we could find if we could not carry it all in one trip.

Doc and Adam took the longest. None of us could quite figure out why, especially when Adam came back empty-hooved. Doc had a sort of glazed look in his eyes as he cradled something in his paws. “We ran into… something that that stupid Guidebook failed to mention.” Adam said, rolling his eyes. “Apparently the reason why Doc’s poochy kind is called Diamond Dogs is that they are instinctively drawn to precious stones and metals. Apparently it makes them go absolutely gaga.” He sighed. “One more thing we need to add to the list, I guess. The jewelry section in its entirety.” He gestured a little with a wing. “I don’t think he’ll leave this building without it.” Nic chuckled and pulled one of the plastic containers over to Adam and Doc.

“Here, dude. Go fill it up with whatever he wants. Who knows, there might be something useful to us as a whole, or at least to Doc. Maybe we can use the less valuable sparklies as fishing lures or something. After all, play jewelry earrings already have hooks built in.” Adam actually smiled at that. Dragging the container behind him, he led Doc back to the jewelry counter.

“We still need an easy way to get stuff back to Home Base.” Trish said. “No offense intended, Nic, but I am not sure your kiddie pool idea will work. It’s too big and hard to move. We would need an actual wagon or something of that sort.”

“Did anyone check toys?” I asked. “There might be a kids wagon over there, or maybe just parts for bicycles that we could work with to make something useful.”

As a group we wandered in that direction. There didn’t seem to be anything intact with the bicycles themselves, though I did find an air pump that we could use if we did find anything with intact tires. The main toy section was nothing much to speak of, but Emmy spotted a door that led to the stockrooms in the back. We went through and found the room to be cavernous and rather dark. “Hold on.” Emmy grunted with effort a little before managing to light our way into the room with her horn. The bright blue glow was enough to let us see shapes at least. A couple of them nearly made us break out in cheers.

In what had been the section with gardening supplies, we found three hefty wheelbarrows with big wheels made for rough ground. Between the four of us, we hauled all three of them through the store and to the main entrance with the rest of our stuff. It took some experimenting, but we eventually figured out a way to make a sort of harness out of bungee cords and canvas that allowed us to pull the ‘barrows behind whoever was wearing the thing. Since Trish and Nic were the strongest, they each laid claim to one of the ‘barrows. Emmy and I would work with the other, though we could not seem to manage a harness that didn’t get in the way of wings. I would end up pushing from behind unless Doc was around to use it as a real wheelbarrow.

Speaking of Doc, he and Adam appeared a few minutes later. Doc was cradling the plastic container of jewelry to his chest like it was a small child. I could have sworn he was even crooning to it like he was singing it to sleep. He stopped when he saw us. He even growled a little. Adam slapped his face with a wing to get his attention. “Doc, heel. These are our friends, remember?” He somehow managed to pull the box out of Doc’s grip and put it into one of the wheelbarrows. To our surprise, he then dumped a bottle of what looked like perfume or shampoo or something like that over the thing. Whatever it was, it still smelled strongly of flowers. Doc reeled away, whimpering. Adam turned to us. “I know it doesn’t look nice, but it’s the only way he won’t get territorial over his gems and gold. Once his sensitive nose gets used to the smell he’ll be back for it, but I figure it will give us enough time to get all of this back to Home Base. We can work on the mall another day. Doc needs to get his stash home first.” We were a bit perplexed, but willing to test out our new wheelbarrow wagons on the jungle ground. Emmy took first turn at our barrow and Trish and Nic took theirs. Adam helped Doc back to his feet and the two of them took up the rear of our little column. We followed the roads back to Home Base with little difficulty until we hit the denser jungle on the inland side of the H1. It was harder to keep the barrows moving there, but we managed to haul them through with a lot of grunting and probably turning the plants around us blue with our language. After a few spots of Emmy shooing me away from pushing while she pulled, I kind of floated between all three pullers, helping out wherever needed and getting them unstuck whenever there was a particularly troublesome branch or other obstacle.

Tired but content, we brought our finds back to Home Base. Doc was still somewhat glassy-eyed, so Adam gave him his happy box and Doc ambled off to where he slept. We could hear him picking through the box’s contents once his nose recovered enough to open it (Adam had doused the interior pretty thoroughly too). With Doc distracted and Nic and Emmy making lunch, Adam, Trish, and I debated what else to do. We didn’t want to go back to the area of Ala Moana without the rest of the group and Adam still smelled like the stinky sweet whatever he had used to distract Doc.

“Why not try the paths around Diamond Head? I mean, there are the remnants of some of the old military stuff there from World War Two. Maybe there is something we can use as an emergency shelter or something like that there.” Trish suggested. I shrugged. It was as good an idea as any. Adam seemed interested too, if for no other reason than to get away from Doc once the diamond dog realized who had been behind the overly enthusiastic perfuming of his hoard. We grabbed some fruit kabobs from Emmy and headed off towards the southeast corner of the island.

There had been several hiking trails around Diamond Head before we had Returned, so it seemed to me that there would be a few places where we could get through. We slipped under the H1 using the culvert exit and wandered our way towards the landmark. This area had been more residential than anything else, so there were few tall buildings around us as we found our way to the old trailhead. There was a path cut into the side of the mountain with the remnants of a trail, so we followed that up and into the monolith.

For those who do not know, Diamond head is an old volcanic crater. It is that iconic mountain that shows up in all the touristy postcards in the background. Where there were still people here, there would be lines of them climbing up the hiking trails to get a view of Waikiki from what was practically a bird’s eye view. Well now we decided to get a real bird's’ eye view, at least in my case. Inside the crater the environment is vastly different then it is outside. It is much drier inside and there is more scrub grass than jungle. It reminded me more of the drier parts of southern California, or maybe even where I was born in Colorado. The humidity was the same as everywhere else though.

We ran across the remnant of the park’s ranger station in the middle of the crater. The buildings had crumbled, but we could still tell that they had been buildings. We even went inside the one that was partially intact. No one was there of course, but it was interesting as we could look at an old map that showed the many hiking trails and access roads that went around the state park. One of the ones that looked promising was a tunnel dug into the rock wall of the old crater. We decided to check it out.

It was dark once we got past the entrance, with the basalt walls seeming to eat away at the light from the flashlight I had in my pack, but about halfway in, we noticed something strange. At around eye level for a pony, there were marks cut into the walls. I would have guessed that they were from back when tourists throunged the area and left graffiti, but a closer look showed that the names were not entirely human. Nor would humans have written the same kinds of descriptions that were next to each name. Here is what a few of them said:

Amos Windsor, age 28, London England. unicorn, crimson and white

Roslynn Salama, age 15, Los Angeles California USA. pegasus, blue and green

Jim Andrews, age 12, Honolulu Hawaii USA, zebra

Sarah Beeman, age 36, Helena Montana, USA, pony, brown and gray

Jennifer Carlisle, age 27, Manoa Hawaii USA, diamond dog

There were about two dozen more that we could see, just like that, in English. On another wall, there were similar markings cut in what looked like Chinese or maybe Japanese. It wasn’t something I could read, but I thought Emmy could try to puzzle them out. She had taken Japanese as her foreign language at University of California. As faded as the etching was, it would not be easy. Overall there looked to be about fifty names. Judging by how far back the names went into the cave and how faded the deepest ones were, ponies who Returned had been coming here for years to add their names, hometowns and descriptions into the record. If nothing else, that told us that we were far from the first ones to make it here. Yet we still had not found any of the people themselves. Where had they gone? Honolulu had had a population in the hundreds of thousands and had hosted millions of visitors as well. Yet there were only fifty individuals who recorded their names for posterity here? It was a disquieting thought.

Trish, Adam and I retreated in silence. As we stepped out into the sun, we all let out a sigh of relief that none of us knew we had been holding in. As we headed up the trail to the main lookout point, Trish broke the silence. “Well, we know we weren’t the first ones here now.“

“Yeah,” Adam said, kicking away a tumbleweed that had blown onto the trail. “So what? None of them are here now, obviously. So what the heck happened? You would think they would have left some kind of note saying where they went if they went anywhere and we have found nothing like that. Zero. Zilch. Nada.”

“Maybe something big happened, like whatever changed the vegetation on the ocean side of the H1. If the last ponies here settled down by Waikiki or something, anything the ocean threw at them would be pretty rough on them. After all you guys saw that tv footage of that tsunami that hit a while back, right? Something like that or one of the hurricanes they get in the Caribbean could wipe a bunch of makeshift shelters clean off the map.” I said.

“Do you think that could happen to us too?” Trish asked with a slight shiver. “It’s not something I care to think about.”
“As long as we keep Home Base where it is for now, it should be okay, at least in the case of a tsunami or rogue wave. Storm surge too. I would want a more secure place in case of a big storm though. Those winds can be wicked.” I said.

“How do you know all that?” Adam asked. “You’re from the Midwest. Since when have you been through a hurricane?”

“I haven’t. A hurricane, any ways. I have had to shelter from tornadoes a few times though. A few of my friends went storm chasing every spring. I picked up a lot from them and dabbled in a meteorology class for a while. Wish it had taught me more about tropical weather in retrospect.” I scuffed a foot in the dust. “We’re almost at the top. Let’s keep going so we can see the view and be back to Home Base before sunset. I really don’t want to be out here after dark.” The others nodded their agreement and we started up the last stretch of trail towards the summit.

When we reached the observation area at the peak, we all three sat down to have a breather. It was not nearly as high as when Nic, Emmy, and I had climbed the Sleeping Giant, but the view was even better, as the sky around us was clear. We could see all along the coast almost to Pearl Harbor from here. The military base in the distance was a dark shadow; we put its appearance to the back of our minds for now as we looked over Honolulu. Below us, the beach was patchy and there was not much left of the breakwater that had helped protect Waikiki, but the terrain could easily have come off any number of movies from the “shipwrecked on a deserted island” category. We could see a little bit of smoke further inland from whatever Emmy and Nic were cooking, but that was the only visible evidence of someone living here.

For me, the wind at the top of Diamond Head felt like heaven against my wings. I opened them up to let the salty sea air waft through my feathers. After a moment’s hesitation, Adam did the same. I watched as he seemed to feel the air currents and shifted his wings. I don’t think he was even aware of it, but it seemed like the stronger gusts were playing with his feathers, trying to lift him off the ground from where he stood. Adam opened his eyes and noticed. He frowned and closed his wings. “We should go back down. I don’t want to be blown off the mountain.” He turned and trotted towards the trail. Trish turned to follow. “You coming?” She asked.

“I’ll catch up to you in a minute. Go ahead. I just want to feel the wind for a little while longer.” I said. She started down the narrow trail. I faced the wind again and opened my wings wide, attempting a few of the lift exercises that the Guide had included for pegasi and griffons. For a moment, I almost felt the wind lifting me off the ground before releasing the air pressure and settling me down again. I sighed and privately promised myself that I would come up here again to chase the wind.

Chapter 9

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We made it back to Home Base just before dinner was ready. Emmy had managed to make some kind of salad using some wild greens that she and Nic had found growing in some long-gone resident’s garden. When we asked what it was and if it was poisonous, she laughed and said it was perfectly safe and that she had tested it to be sure. We told them about the tunnel at Diamond Head with all of the names. Nic was enthusiastic. “We should carve our names there too.” He said. “I think we ought to leave our mark at least somewhere.”

“Before we carve our names anywhere like that, we should make sure it doesn’t have anything else first.” Emmy said. “I was reading the Guide when you guys were gone and it said something about how magic can be intrinsically connected with names and writing. I don’t want to carve my name somewhere only to find that I accidentally signed a contract to do something and been forced to do it by magic.” she shivered.

“That’s only in fairy tales.” Adam scoffed.

“What do you think we’re in, birdbrain?” Emmy countered. “Last I checked, the only stories involving flying horses were in either ancient Greek myths or fantasy novels meant for moony teens to fantasize about meeting their prince charmings. I know you don’t want to, but you need get it through your thick skull that all of this is real. Magic is real and little cutesy ponies like us can use it and have real results come from it. I don’t want to accidentally get myself killed or worse because we did not read the magical equivalent of the fine print.”

“Oh really, then why haven’t you been trying to find out a way to magic us off this island and back home? Or even a way to turn us back into normal people, huh?” Adam stood with his wings flaring, ready for a brawl. I’m not sure he realized he was doing it. Whether his conscious mind realized it or not, he sure reacted like a pegasus.

“Have you even looked at anything in the Guidebook? It would take someone with a special talent for magic to do either of those things, and if you turned back into a human being anyway you wouldn’t survive more than a minute before being torn to pieces by the magic that turned us all into creatures in the first place. Get your head out of your arse and deal with what is, not what you think it should be.” By now Emmy was shouting at Adam. Her horn held a glow that I could only describe as menacing. The two ponies circled each other, not breaking eye contact. Nic, Trish, and I stood aside, watching. I did not want to get in the middle of a fight between two magical ponies who didn’t know the extent of what they were capable of. None of us did.

The fight broke up before it could get physical by the looming presence of Doc. Evidently he had slept off his euphoria at acquiring his gemstone stash and had decided to come out for dinner. “Enough!” He barked. He reached out his long arms and shoved Emmy and Adam apart. The glow around Emmy’s horn subsided and Adam’s wings slammed into his sides in surprise. Doc grunted in satisfaction. “Break it up, both of you. The more we fight and argue, the harder it will be to stay alive here. There is safety in numbers, and unless you--” He pointed to Adam, “know how to cook for yourself and find food that won’t make you ill enough to make you wish you were dead and you--” Now he pointed to Emmy, “can magically gain a sense of direction that won’t get yourself lost again, I suggest you come to an accord. Right. Now.” He stomped his foot in the dirt to punctuate those last words.

Adam and Emmy both shrunk away from him. Both looked guilty as sin too. “S-sorry, Doc. I don’t know what came over me.” Adam said first. “I’ve just been so frustrated these last couple of days. It feels like everybody has been lecturing me and then going off and doing what I did initially to get lectured without getting in trouble for it. I guess the hypocrisy was annoying me.” He turned to Emmy. “Sorry for blowing up at you. You’re right; I should try reading the Guidebook. I still don’t want to believe it completely, but I’ll try to keep an open mind. I’ve just been a skeptic for so long that everything about all of this rubs me the wrong way..”

“It's strange for all of us. Heck, you and Parrothead Zoe were preening each other’s wings the other morning. It looked like you were adapting just fine. I have been spending almost every waking minute trying to figure out how to get the spike sticking out of my forehead,” Emmy gestured to her horn, “to do what I need it to do. I was worried -- am still worried -- about how safe we really are in this new reality. After all how do we know that the monsters from those old myths and stories didn’t appear too? I guess I was afraid we would find ourselves running into a gorgon or sea monster and not knowing what to do because it was all ‘just a story’ in our minds.” She shook her head.

“We are all working through this,” Trish said gently. She stepped forward and gave Emmy a comforting nuzzle. “I think every one of us has been thinking and wondering what is going to happen to us and whether we are going to see any of our families or friends again. Maybe instead of deciding what to do tomorrow around the fire, we should spend tonight thinking about and sharing with each other something of ourselves before all of this happened. I mean, I personally only knew Zoe before this, and that was because she found me on Facebook and we became pen pals.” She nodded towards me. “I didn’t get to meet any of you in person until the first day of class. So that’s what… a week of knowing each other as humans and almost as long now as something else?”

There were murmurs of agreement at that. Doc nodded towards the makeshift benches we had set up around the cookfire. We each took one along with a bowl of Emmy’s salad. After some awkward silence, Doc said “I might as well start, seeing as you all were my students. Still are, I guess. My name is James Carlysle. I was the professor of archaeology here at University of Hawaii for the last three years. My focus of study has been the settlement of Pacific islands by Polynesian boat travellers. I have worked on Easter Island as well as numerous islands in the south Pacific. I was married to Sarah, my lovely wife, for twenty years before she passed away due to cancer a couple of years ago. My son and grandsons all live in Seattle. I was considering taking up an opening at a university up there to be closer to them.

“My daughter, Mary, lived here in Honolulu. Her place… Adam and I found it. Nothing left really, but I did find this.” He dangled a gold locket on a chain. “It still has a baby picture of my first granddaughter in it. She would have turned two at the end of the summer.” He fell silent. There were tears in his eyes and Adam scooted closer and wrapped a wing around the Diamond Dog. Doc whimpered a little and said in a small voice, “I miss them so much.” We were all silent for a few minutes after that.

“I can go, I guess,” Emmy said into the silence. “My name is Emmaline Schneider. I was born and raised in San Matteo, California. I lived with my dad and his husband and my older sister, Virginia. Pop and Daddy were software engineers who met not long after Dad divorced Mom. Ginny and I decided we would rather live with Pop and Daddy because they lived closer to where Ginny and I were going to school than Mom did. Mom ended up moving to New York a couple years back, so we didn’t really see her much.” She hugged herself and shivered. “Ginny is still back in Cali studying marine biology. I swear that girl could swim before she could walk. Hope whatever she comes back as or came back as loves the water too.

“As for how I ended up here this summer, I’ve always thought that the way to the heart of a person is through their stomach. One of my professors believed that too and taught a course about culinary customs around the world. That got me into anthropology and since I needed a field study credit anyway, why not go somewhere with unique food?” She chuckled a little. “At least the magic stuff seemed to agree.” Sure enough, the mark on her flank was of a vine circling a platter of food. She nodded to Nic that he should go next.

Nic shuffled to a more comfortable position on his log. “All right. My name is Nicholas Buckley. I decided to come out here for field school for two reasons. One was to see the island and maybe get in some surfing and the other was to get away from my clinging ex-girlfriend. Best decision I’ve ever made. When one of my professors heard about this trip,he recommended me for it. He knew about Anne and how she had been stalking me, so I am doubly grateful to him. Here’s to you, Dr. Bartmann!” He raised a cup of water to the stars and drank.

After he’d finished his swig, he continued. “I used to spend my summers with my uncles on their fishing boat near LA, running charters for the rich guys who wanted to catch something that looked more impressive than whatever their buddies caught. They usually ended up drinking like fishes at the bar instead and we would let them pose with something interesting afterwards.” He shrugged and smiled. “My uncles taught me everything they knew about sailing and I read a lot of what other people wrote. That led me to thor Heyerdahl’s Kon Tiki, which got me interested in Pacific Islanders’ boats and sailing techniques.This was one of the best places I could find that could teach me more. Plus, this is where surfing was invented. I’ve always wanted to ride the waves on the North Shore.”

“So that’s why you’ve got a boat cutie mark?” prompted Emmy.

“I suppose so. I’ve always wanted to build my own craft and go voyaging. Never had the time or money to do it though. Figures.” Nic’s leg kicking the log in frustration nearly knocked it out from under him. Like the rest of us he was still trying to figure out his own strength. “You next, Trish?”

“Sure. My name is Patricia Cochran. I lived with my mom and my stepdad and our shih-tzus. I guess you could call me a bard, if we’re thinking in terms of D&D magic. I love how music can inspire people to do great things and wanted to be able to make my own and maybe teach others the same thing. I learned how to play a bunch of instruments: recorder, flute, clarinet, saxophone, trombone, ukelele. I played in high school and college for the love of music, but unfortunately that doesn’t translate into money.” She grimaced.

“I couldn’t play well enough to go professional and I wasn’t a good enough student to get into a program that would get me certified to be a music teacher, so I was stuck floundering a little in the school of education when I made a connection with Zoe, first on a D&D forum, then later on via Facebook. She told me what she was doing with anthropology and encouraged me to check it out. I thought, ‘why not? It’ll get me a social studies endorsement if I can get through it’, but that led me into how different cultures view and use music. Once I’d changed my major I talked to Zoe and found out that she was coming here, so I applied too. I guess that’s why my cutie mark is a double quaver.” The bottoms of the paired music note were hearts. I remembered the discussion we’d had in the music room. I suspected there was more to her talent than she thought, but I couldn’t say what it was yet.

I wrapped a wing around her in a sort of hug. “I can go next, if you guys don’t mind.” Trish nodded. “My name is Zoe Vogel. I was born and raised in Colorado, but decided to go to school in Iowa.” I rolled my eyes, “yeah unlike everybody else, I moved away from there and towards a fly-over state. Anyways, I moved away because I originally wanted to major in meteorology, but I ran into the problem that I can not for the life of me wrap my head around advanced math and physics. So I wound up failing those classes, but that same semester I found myself in a history class about Native Americans with a professor who also taught archaeology. I really liked the guy and took all of his anthro classes I could get away with before realizing I had enough credits to double in anthro and history. I just needed a field studies course, and unfortunately he wasn’t teaching one this summer. One of the other professors forwarded me an email about the field school here and I jumped at it. This summer, everyone in my family was doing something else anyway; my parents were going on a trip to Washington to visit my grandparents and my sister was studying abroad in Australia. I ended up here in the middle, getting their random text messages in the middle of the night. It was kind of annoying…” I paused with a sigh and Trish gave me a nuzzle. “But I miss them all the same. I’d do anything to get another message on that thing.” I pointed to the now-useless iphone still sitting in its case. “My dad is the one who got me into the music of Jimmy Buffett. I think that’s why I had that weird thing with that record. It’s the closest thing I have to something to remember him by.” I took a few deep breaths before I felt better. It helped having Trish next to me.

“I guess I’m last.” Adam said after a moment. “My name is Adam Falk. I was a grad student in archaeology and photography. Specifically my thesis was about the use of aerial photography via drones to pinpoint and identify archaeological sites without damaging the area around them. Doc recruited me to help with his survey of Easter Island a few years ago and I’ve been working with him every summer since. He’s the closest thing to family I have out here; I’m not really close to my parents or my siblings back on the mainland. They didn’t understand why I wanted to live out here Damn it, I was this close to my master’s degree too!” He shook his head in annoyance while we laughed. “I still think the name cutie mark is kind of stupid, so I will just say that my iconic ass has a picture of a flying camera because it would be too hard to draw a quadcopter on my butt.”

“Well, it suits you.” Doc said. “Every time we would go somewhere new, you always had a camera in hand. The first time we stuck a gopro on a kite to test that out, you were over the moon. If we manage to get you airborne with a camera, then you could be your own quadcopter!” We all laughed at that. Adam just blushed.

“Well I, for one, want to figure out these wings and how to fly on them.” I said, opening said appendages. “I feel like I’m on the very edge of grasping it but there is still something missing. I want to go back up to the peak at Diamond Head or maybe to the top of the Sleeping Giant again and maybe see if I can figure it out. Maybe you should come with me, Adam. Birds of a feather flock together and all that.”

Adam was quiet for a bit. “Do you really think we can do it? Fly with these little tiny wings, I mean. I just don’t think they were meant to carry something as big as we are. The physics do not add up to me.”

“Screw the physics. I already said I don’t understand the technical side of them anyway.” I said. “Besides, bumble bees are not supposed to be able to fly either, but they do. I feel like there is something missing for me as long as I stay on the ground. When we went up above the clouds I felt closer to that whatever it was than I ever have before. Maybe there’s something else I’m not getting here. I dunno. Faith, trust and pixie dust?”

Everyone laughed a little. I was glad the tension, though not completely absent, was lighter than it had been before. “All right, fine. I will go back up there with you, Parrothead. If you go splat, I have the right to say ‘I told you so’ when I meet you again in the afterlife.” Adam said.

“Bah, fine. Maybe I’ll be able to fly up there and give you the middle finger in return.” I said, then with a sigh, “I am never going to live down that nickname am I? After all, even before everything went haywire, people called Buffett fans Parrotheads. If it’s not too much to ask, could you come up with something else?”

“Sure. We can call you PH instead.” Emmy broke in. “It is faster to say anyways, and it’s not like you’re about to add another letter to that any time soon.”

“Nah, we already have a Doc.” I said.

We sat around trading stupid wordplay jokes and nicknames until we decided to turn in for the night and one by one headed towards our sleeping quarters. I climbed into my tree with the hammock nest hybrid. I caught Adam looking up at me speculatively.

“Hey, do you think we you could help me make one of those? I would like to try sleeping above the ground one of these days.” He said.

“Sure, unless you want to try playing with clouds like the horse birds in the Guide.” I said before making myself comfortable. Adam did not answer; he just grumbled something about cartoon physics and headed off to sleep.

Chapter 10

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The next morning, all six of us packed up for the trip to Diamond Head. We decided to try a slightly different route this time, with a walkthrough of what was left of Ala Moana Shopping Center. We were not planning on any major raiding, but it would give us a better idea of some of the stops we could make in the future. Doc’s unexpected reaction to gemstones meant that one of the things we wanted to check for was jewelry stores. For whatever reason, the sparklies made him happier, so we decided to at least make note of a few sources for future use. I still don’t get why the Guide had so little on Diamond Dogs and their hoarding instincts, but maybe the author had not met enough of them to know everything there was to know. It seemed harmless enough to us, so we let it be.

We made our way down University and towards the beach before turning towards the east and making our way through the pseudo jungle towards Diamond Head. Seeing as our goal was the tunnel, we were each carrying a backpack with snacks, a water bottle, and whatever light sources we could gather. Mostly that was our battered flashlights and a camping lantern that was solar charged from the trailer. With the six of us together, the group was a little more unwieldy, but we did okay. After about half an hour of walking, we stopped to take a break. Trish went into a copse of trees to, ahem, take care of business. We heard her shriek a couple of minutes later.

The five of us rushed into the trees to find out what Trish had run into. She was standing, frozen, at the sight of something in one of the trees. We all averted our eyes away from her; no one likes to literally be scared shitless and she was embarrassed enough as it was. In the tree above her dangled a skeleton that looked distinctly equine. It must have belonged to a unicorn, as the skull had a horn in the middle of the forehead. I carefully climbed the tree to get a closer look.

The pony had been caught between a couple of branches. Based on the angle of the skull, it had probably broken its neck upon landing there. The skeleton was clothed in the remnants of a leather flight suit. Goggles were visible around its head. I reached for the skeleton and caught my talons on something around its neck. I pulled out a chain with a pair of shiny dog tags. A few tugs and the chain broke and I let the identification disks fall into Doc’s outstretched paws. He held them in the light as he tried to read the name “Mary… C. I can’t make out the rest. It’s pretty much worn away.” He shrugged. “Do you think you can get her down in one piece, PH? We ought to do something for her, whoever she was.”

I nodded and did my best to extract the remains of poor Mary from the tree. It was not easy; she must have been there for a while and the branches had started to grow around the bones. Eventually the bones and the leather remnants were on the ground. We gathered them up to give them a more respectful resting place than in the branches of a tree.

The discovery leached the enthusiasm out of the group. We still made the trip to Diamond Head, but instead of joking and talking among ourselves along the way, we walked in silence. Doc and I took up the rear with Mary and her things piled on a large leaf that we were balancing between us. It was not easy to get through the cut path with our burden, but we eventually made it. Adam led us all to the cave. Before we went in, Doc and I decided to bury the remains outside a short distance away. It didn’t take long; Diamond Dogs can dig through just about anything and we didn’t need a large hole. We left the name tags on a wooden marker over the gravesite. None of us wanted to keep them.

We went into the tunnel in silence. The flashlights and lamp were lit by the time Doc and I made it in so we joined the others examining the carved names in more detail. Before long, I heard Emmy exclaim from deeper in the tunnel. “Oh my God.”

“What, what is it?” I heard someone ask; I couldn’t tell who it was in the echoing cavern.

“Listen to this:” Emmy’s horn lit up a lengthy description. “To those who Return to this place, know that you may be in great danger. The sea gives and takes away those who seek to rebuild this place. Those who have been granted the shelter of the highlands are safe from the beings that invade from the sea. Know this, former humans; I was the last of our colony and on this day, one thousand years after the Event that created this new world, I vowed to never surrender to the sea.” Emmy hesitated here; an expression of puzzlement on her face. “The name has been rubbed out.”

“Well that’s not creepy at all.” Nic said, rolling his eyes. “You would think a warning would be more specific.”

“Maybe it couldn’t be.” I said. “After all, if names have power like Emmy said last night, the writer probably didn’t want to write out what the specific name was, lest it attract whatever it was.Or maybe he didn’t know what to call the thing that attacked his colony. I don’t want to know, but we should take it seriously nonetheless.” I said.

“One thousand years … after the Event?” Trish murmured. She was still trembling from her shock outside. She had refused to go back to Base Camp to recover. “If it was a thousand years late when he carved this, and this is the oldest inscription -- it is the oldest right? -- then that means we did not Return until even later. How long were we in limbo then?”

None of us knew the answer to that. Maybe if one of us had been an astronomer who could plot the stars or something, we might have been able to figure out the timing, but none of us could be quite that precise.

Doc was looking at the rock around us, with the carved names. No; not looking; Doc was sniffing the rock. He even chipped a little bit off and tasted it. “I think…” He said, his voice echoing, “well I have a theory any way. I can tell how old each of these groupings is by the rock, or at least by the dust that accumulated in each cut. I might be able to estimate the ages of each group.”

We were stunned. That was new. Doc just shrugged. “One more thing for the Diamond Dogs entry of the book I guess. It is almost like I can… feel the rock and understand what it has to tell me. Every fissure in the surface, every cut tells me something about what happened… and when. I can even tell what material was used to cut these names. Probably a drill bit or something like that. Diamond tipped.” He licked his lips. “Don’t ask me how I know that; I don’t know either. Magic, I suppose.”

I nodded. There was enough of that going around between the wind sense that Adam and I were getting and the way the earth responded to Nic and Trish and Emmy’s horn stuff. It was weird, but what wasn’t these days?

“It will take some time for me to figure it all out though. We definitely will not get anything else from that line of inquiry today.” Doc continued.

The rest of us continued to explore the tunnel. The names were scattered all throughout the structure. We found no other messages, other than the sea monster warning. It was just a bunch of names, hometowns, and species. Most of them were in Latin characters, with the names and such that were not being clustered on the east wall near the entrance. Evidently that particular group had included a number of tourists from China or Japan.

One name we did not find was our mysterious Mary’s. Given where we found her, she’d never even made it to the ground, much less here to Diamond Head. If there had been others with her, they had fared no better. It appeared that the poor unicorn had died alone. It was a sobering thought. No wonder none of us felt like eating lunch.

After a while, the tunnel started to feel claustrophobic. I headed outside, with Adam in tow, to climb up to the observation deck that looked over what was once Waikiki. Feeling the fresh air revived my spirits somewhat and I was eager to open my wings to the wind. Adam was more circumspect, but he too seemed more interested in being outside than before.

We stood on the rickety platform, the wind in our faces. I opened my wings to get the feel of it through my feathers as I made my way away from the cliff face and into the wind. I stood on the edge of the observation deck and looked out over the world below. Without guardrails between me and that view, I felt as though I was the only one out here. The air played around my wings and tickled my feathers. I stretched them out to their full extent and felt… something. A press upwards from below my primaries. I closed my eyes in the hopes of focusing more on that sensation.

I lost myself in the feel of the wind as it flowed around and under my wings. I lost all sense of the ground and the worries I had held there. It felt as though I was experiencing freedom itself. I do not know how long I stood there, lost in that bliss, but a yelp from behind and… below me! Made me open my eyes.

About ten feet below me, I could see Adam standing wide eyed on the observation platform. His mouth was gaping in astonishment. I looked left and right, first at my outstretched wings, then down to see that neither my talons nor my paws remained on the platform. Looking down made me start to tilt downwards, so I hurriedly looked back forward. Maybe it’s like riding a motorcycle, I thought. You turn by leaning. Dad always said that you need to look through your turns and at where you are going. If you look down, that is where you will go. I looked to the right and felt my body adjusting into a slow wide turn. I managed to level out again. There must have been a thermal or something like that, because I was not having to flap my wings. They twitched every so often, as though adjusting themselves to the subtle changes in the air around me. I did another banking turn, this one to the left, and found myself facing the cliff. From this angle, I could hear Adam yelling. Sort of.

“Get… down… Doc… storm... “ I could not hear every word he said from below me, but I could make a few guesses. Besides, there were storm clouds gathering out at sea and I did not really want to see if the Guide’s “cloud walking” worked for griffons as well as ponies today.

At that moment, I was more distracted by another problem: namely that I was not certain how to get down safely. I looked down deliberately this time and closed my wings a little. I had drifted outwards from the platform and the wind had carried me farther than I thought. I flapped my wings to fight it and realized that I would hit the platform much faster than I anticipated. I scrambled to slow my descent as Adam gestured to me towards him. The last thing I saw before I hit the platform was the pegasus’ wide eyes as he realized that my landing was aimed straight at him.

What resulted was one of the most awkward positions I have ever had the misfortune to be found in. What is worse, the sound of my screeching as I tried to land and Adam’s horsey screaming attracted the attention of the rest of the group, all of whom came rushing up the path to the lookout to find out what was going on. I landed on top of Adam, slamming both of us into the platform against the cliff face. By the time everyone else got up there, he was flat on his back, wings splayed out, with me on top of him and both of us face to face. The forced landing had knocked the wind out of both of us, so neither of us could say anything as three ponies and a diamond dog nearly fell off the cliff laughing. Both Adam and I blushed furiously and separated as quickly as we could. It was more of a mad scramble than anything else, but it did the job.

“If you two wanted some more privacy, all you had to do was ask, guys.” Emmy said to us once she had gotten her voice back.

Adam and I glanced at each other and edged even further apart. That nearly set off the others again. “Let’s just head back down before this storm comes in all right?” I grumbled. The others snickered at my discomfort, but we all started back down the path to the interior of Diamond Head. From the corner of my eye, I saw Adam glance speculatively skyward before he brought up the rear of the group. I wondered if he was considering attempting a flight of his own later on. For now, it didn’t matter.

We took shelter from the rain back in the name tunnel. Emmy had not felt anything magical about the place, save for the fact that some of the names had been carved by unicorns. The note in the back passage was still a mystery to us; after all it was unsigned. We had no way of knowing who wrote the warning. So we made plans for the next few days, or at least floated ideas. Emmy wanted to bring the Guidebook here, as she thought it might have some spells or other magic that might interact with anything potentially hostile. Doc intended to return too, in order to attempt to work out via his rock sense the age of each group’s marks. Trish and Nic wanted to explore around the area a bit more, in case there were more tunnels that might be useful to us. If nothing else, they had the potential to provide better shelter than our Base Camp. I still disliked the fact that no trees grew here; how was a griffon supposed to nest underground?

As for me, I wanted to try flying again, but under more controlled circumstances. Adam was still embarrassed about what had happened (as was I), but he agreed to help me make a sort of harness that I could use to anchor myself to the ground while I experimented with flight. I figured that if anyone could rig something like that up, he would be the one due to his experience with building his camera kites. I did not want to say much to him about flying, but I knew deep down that he wanted to try it too. It was at that level beyond the logical one; more instinct than anything else. Adam’s skepticism was being whittled down, little by little, with each passing day and seemingly impossible occurrence. I was sure that I would get him airborne in time. For now though…

“Nothing happened between us. Really.” I said to Emmy and Trish. The pair of ponies had pulled me aside for what they loudly called “girl talk”. Ew. Not my preferential choice for an afternoon of sitting out a larger than usual rain storm.

“Up there? Of course not. Too windy.” Trish said, rolling her eyes. “We just want to find out if you had any… other experiences. Um, you know.” She at least looked uncomfortable. I gathered that she had never had any really serious relationships; I was the same way.

Emmy, on the other hand (claw? hoof?) snorted. “You might be able to fool everyone else, Parrothead, but there is definitely some chemistry going on there. I can see it, and so can Doc and Nic. Neither of them is going to say diddly squat about it unless it goes sour.”

I shook my head. “Nothing is going on. Nothing like that has even been considered to go on. You are a delusional romantic, Emmy.”

“And you are too innocent for your own good,or maybe just naive.” Emmy shot back. “I would bet you my Harry Potter book that he has the hots for you, and you for him. You are just too chicken to admit it.”

“I am no chicken, horn head.” I said. To my chagrin, my wings poomphed outwards, feathers outstretched. I probably looked more like said chicken than I had before.

Emmy laughed, which made Trish laugh too. I tried in vain to get my wings to behave themselves, but it only resulted in the feathers sticking out even more. I grumbled and fussed while trying to ignore the giggles.

Chapter 11

View Online

We decided to split up for the next few days. Doc and Emmy wanted to go back to Diamond Head and continue to decipher the riddle of the message and the names. The rest of us planned on raiding the remnants of the Ala Moana Shopping Center. Given that half of the place had been full of luxury stores or touristy knick-knack shops, we weren’t sure that there would be much left to find, but the restaurants might still have more cooking supplies and there was at least a few sporting goods places and housewares shops that might still have something we could use. It would be hit or miss no matter what, but better to search the mall and find nothing useful than to not search and miss out on something that could prove vital later.

Doc’s only request was that if we found more gems, he would be happy to have them. I suspected that would be an understatement, given how gaga he had gone over the crappy stuff from Walmart, but whatever.

After this, our next goal would be to check out the area to the west of Honolulu, especially around Pearl Harbor and the various military installations that ringed that side of the island. We thought there might be more intact stuff there due to the general ruggedness of military hardware. If anything could survive a long time, I would bet on something made for the military over most civilian stuff that did not cost an arm and a leg.

We decided as a group to meet up back at Home Base each evening to share whatever we found. The only bothersome part of all this was that we would have trouble communicating between the groups. We were down to just three working walkie-talkies with dubious battery life. We were not sure if we could recharge them without zapping someone, though Nic thought he might be able to rig something up using the battery from the van. (He was going to check whatever electronic stores we found for anything useful; it was a long shot, but why not?)

Our raid on the interior of the mall was rather disappointing. It seemed that most of the space was given over to fancy clothing stores that were of little use to us. We were able to build a nice stash for Doc (though why a mall needed twenty plus jewelry stores was beyond me). The food court and a few other eateries brought in more cooking materials including a couple more woks. Another place had something that made Emmy’s eyes bug out: a hand-cranked coffee grinder. We figured we could use it for seasonings, like sea salt or something, but she claimed that coffee grew wild in some places around here and she wanted to try and roast the beans. I don’t like coffee much, but the others greeted that with enthusiasm.

Exploring the big department stores was more useful. Some of the big ones had sections full of housewares and useful kitchen things. After washing, any flatware and plates and things like that were good as new. Surprisingly, we even found tupperware style containers intact. Otherwise it was more of the same that we had found at the Wal-Mart. Most fabric had rotted away, leaving empty hangers clanking together in the wind. Wooden stuff was fragile to the touch and liable to fall on you. We couldn’t reach the third floor in most cases, as there were holes big enough to see light through on the floor and roof above us. Adam and I did all the searching on the second floor, while Trish and Nic kept their hooves closer to the ground.

The only major sticking point we ran into during our hunt was when Trish had her own moment of awe. Adam and I were discussing the viability of moving one of the merchandise carts to the ground floor and thence to Home Base as an extra set of wheels when we heard Nic yelling for help from down below us. We slid down the escalators as quickly as we could to find him trying to draw Trish away from one of the stores. She was rooted to the spot, staring into the dark storefront. Nic was tugging at her and trying to get her to move as the floor above creaked. While Adam tried to lend a wing to Nic, I squinted into the remnants of the shattered window. Something seemed to shine despite the darkness, but from out here I could not tell what it was.

I took the flashlight from Nic’s pack and shined it into the store. Although it was a grimy and dusty as all the other places we had investigated so far, the glow of the flashlight illuminated a familiar shape. “Guys.” I said to the ponies standing behind me. They paused and looked at me. “Hold the light will ya? Something tells me she is not going to move unless we bring that out.” I passed the flashlight to Adam and carefully climbed through the broken window. I picked my way through the fallen display stands and other debris that covered the floor to find myself standing next to a display case still, by some miracle of fate, intact. Though the paint on the outside had mostly flaked away and the hinges and lock were rusted, I could still tell that the former had been bright blue and that the case had been done up to look like a phone booth.

I wanted to facepalm, I really did. But doing that after I had disappeared to rescue my Jimmy Buffett record would have been the pot calling the kettle black. I pulled the door off the display case, the old hinges giving way with a few tugs. The memorabilia inside the case had not entirely survived the test of time, but the object that I thought had Trish’s attention was intact. I wiped away some grime from a metal plaque to read: Eleventh Doctor’s Sonic Screwdriver, Doctor Who Season 6 used in episodes 4-9. I picked up the movie prop and carefully brought it into the light. I caught a glimpse of Trish’s face as I tucked it under a wing and picked my way out of the fandom and comics store. If she still had hands, she would have been making grabby motions with them. “You owe me one.” I said as I passed it to her. She wrapped her legs around it and cuddled it like a stuffed animal.

I saw the guys exchange glances. I would have bet my dinner that they were both thinking: Is that going to happen to one of us next? You first. Nope, you. Neither of them was going to come out and say it, of course, but I suspected it would happen over something as frivolous as what we had found.

The most surprising thing that I remember from our raid on the shopping center was that there were a few useful things in the sundries and souvenir shops after all. It turns out that when people made manly jewelry with shark teeth and Polynesian fish hooks, those things tend to survive, even being buried under a layer of sand. I, for one, intended to make good use of those fish hooks. After all, if the ancient people of these islands used them for a long time, we should be able to do the same. I planned on having a word with Doc about where we might have the best luck testing out our new toys.

The hike back to Home Base was both strange and satisfying. Strange because we all carried so little, but satisfying in that the stuff we did salvage was useful. We met up with Doc and Emmy around the campfire as usual. Emmy was trembling, though whether it was with shock or excitement at what she and Doc had found was hard to tell. We waited until after dinner to give Doc the results of our jewelry store raids, as we wanted to find out what he had discovered before the additions to his hoard sent him back to cloud nine.

“I’m not sure where to start, other than that I began by taking samples of the rocks around each set of names. I also took a few on the wall away from them as a control. I was able to identify three distinct groups at different times who left their marks. The oldest one is the one with the long message. As best I can tell, that group consisted of the writer of the message and four others scattered around the tunnel. They didn’t write their names as a group, so it took some searching. The second group is the seven names written in Japanese on the southern wall. Emmy helped me interpret. In addition to their names, that group made a note that they had arrived via a touring boat probably about a hundred to two hundred years after the first group vanished. Their message also warns to be wary of the sea. Below their inscriptions we found a carving under the moss that was similar to the Great Wave from that famous painting. A tsunami.”

Doc paused to gather his thoughts. I could see Nic’s eyes widening in the firelight. “A tsunami? That might explain the damage done to the plant life down below. Not to mention all the water damage in Honolulu, especially the way the water lines stretched up a storey or two on some of the waterfront.”

Doc nodded. “It’s a plausible theory. A tsunami or similarly large wave could do a lot of damage. It could also account for why we have not been able to find much that is not at least partially buried in sand and other debris. Whenever this event was, though, it was still a long time ago. After all, there was the third group as well. It must have been the largest. Twenty names suggests that there had been a rather large group here at one point, or at least that they added every member to the list whenever they Returned. The most recent one was cut about seven hundred years ago by my best estimate, though it could be off by fifty years either way.” He hesitated before adding in a small voice. “I missed her… by seven hundred years. Jennifer came back and I missed her completely.”

There was silence at that. Seven hundred or so years since Doc’s daughter’s group had left their names at Diamond Head? Yet we had found no evidence of ponies or other sentient creatures in this area through our wanderings over the past couple of months. Unless they or their descendants had moved to the other side of the island or over towards Pearl Harbor, we were the only sentient beings on Oahu. If anyone else had come back before us and after that last group, they were probably alone, like Mary appeared to have been, and had either not found the name tunnel or had not survived long enough to leave a trace there.

It was a depressing thought. When the silence got too oppressive, Adam broke it by talking about what we had brought back from the mall. The kitchen supplies were added to what we had salvaged from elsewhere. I caught a gleam in his eye as he mentioned offhand “oh, and we had another zone-out moment. Trish decided she could not leave the mall without bringing back a little toy.” He waved a wing at Trish, who looked slightly embarrassed.

“It’s not a toy, Horsefeathers. It is a collectable. It’s a prop from one of my favorite television shows, used by my favorite actor of all time.” She sighed. The sonic screwdriver was cradled in her foreleg.

Adam looked like he wanted to make more fun, but I spoke up before he could get a word in. “I think it’s not a bad idea. Think of it this way: each of us who finds something special like this is, in their own little way, preserving a little bit of the pop culture that made humans, humans. Terry Pratchett once defined humans as ‘Homo narrans’, or ‘the storytelling ape’. Well, we no longer look like apes, but we can do our level best to remember what people built and created. So what if it seems frivolous to keep a record that no one will be able to play or a prop that only worked in the movies! These are bits of our cultural heritage and reminders of the creativity that we once held in our hands.”

I looked over the others as they sat around the campfire. Adam was looking down at his hooves, blushing slightly. Trish was stroking the prop with reverence. Doc was staring into the fire and poking at it with a stick. Emmy scooted closer to Trish to get a better look at the sonic screwdriver. Nic was watching me. He saw me staring and looked away, up towards the stars. I wondered what they were all thinking. How could six people who were not even people any more preserve humanity? All we had were a basic knowledge of survival and a few odds and ends that managed to survive the collapse of civilization as we knew it. What did we have of literature? Of art? Of science? The answer was depressing: not much. We had Emmy’s copy of Harry Potter and my Jimmy Buffett vinyl and Trish’s movie prop. We had Doc’s locket and his stash of cut gems and jewelry. We would probably find more odds and ends over the coming days too, but it would be like if someone mixed together a dozen different jigsaw puzzles in the same box and then trying to assemble one of them when you could only grab a few pieces at random.

“Six beings may not a civilization make,” Nic mused, “but they can make a clan, a village, a community. If we continue to work together, we can make a go of it. I don’t know if our best efforts will be enough to make this place paradise, but we can make it a place we can live on and remember the way things were. I say when we find things that we want to keep safe, we should store them where they will stay cool and dry. We should preserve what we can of the stories that we told ourselves long ago. If anyone still has a way to write down what they remember, they should do it, or at least tell it to someone who can.” He nodded at Doc and me, since we had the closest equivalent to hands. He saw that I had my journal on the bench next to me. “If you want, we can start with me. I don’t really want to start with something personal. How about something older. Do any of you know the stories behind the constellations?”

We spent the remainder of the evening discussing the stories from ancient Greece that had named the stars and planets above us. With the only light coming from our campfire, it was easy to see the pale ribbon of the Milky Way as it stretched across the horizon. With the light pollution of the city below us a distant memory, the sky above sparkled with millions of stars. It was a fitting backdrop to the stories of heroes and gods. I could pick out a few: Orion and his dogs, Ursas major and minor, Cassiopeia and her court, and a few more. Not long before we all started to drift away to our sleeping places, I saw one last constellation that I recognized crest the trees. It was the Great Square that formed the body of Pegasus. I gave the original winged horse a salute with one wing before heading to my nest for the night.

Chapter 12

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We spent a few more days working around the shopping center before we made the trek to Pearl City and Pearl Harbor. We decided to go as a single group, with our carts. If there was anything worth finding, we would be able to bring it back to Base Camp and if there was nothing left to find, so be it. We made our way there on the ocean side, as the vegetation was less dense than it was further inland. Doc took the lead and carried a machete to use in cutting through any plant life that we could not brush aside. Nic and Trish handled our improvised carts while Emmy, Adam, and I did whatever we could to make it easier to get them from hither to yon. The walk itself was not bad, especially in the shade of the buildings that remained standing. The air for the most part was light and refreshing, with just a taste of salt.

The relaxed walk made the sudden feeling of wrongness at our destination all the more unsettling. Our surroundings went from thinned jungle threading between former buildings to an open wasteland. Tarmac was still clearly visible on parking lots and around the buildings that made up the deserted naval base. What little vegetation we could see was brown and nasty-looking. Even the dandelions, weeds that would grow anywhere, were wilted and rotting. Around us, the breeze off the ocean ceased, leaving the air feeling as dead as the land beneath our feet.

We all glanced uneasily at each other. None of us wanted to be here, but none of us wanted to look like cowards by being the first to say something about going back. Doc wrinkled his nose. “We should not be here.” He said in a voice somewhere between a growl and a whine. “The smell… I can’t describe how awful the smells here are. If you took a dead body, soaked it in fuel oil, and set it on fire, the odor downwind would only be a quarter of what I’m smelling of this place.” He looked ready to gag.

“Should we go back then?” Emmy asked. The magic around her horn flickered on and off as she made nervous little adjustments to her pack. “I don’t like this place either. It feels unnatural.” The others nodded at that.

“I still want to see if there is anything we can use.” Nic said after a moment’s thought. “Why not look around just a little? Leave the wagons here on the edge of the forest for now and just do a quick survey of the place. I don’t like the idea of coming all this way to leave before we even look around. I mean, come on. How bad could it be?”

I felt a shudder run down my spine at that. Whether Nic had ever heard of Murphy’s Law before this and just disregarded it I don’t know.. He sure as hell was tempting its application with that statement.

“All right, fine.” Doc said. “But I don’t want to spend more than a couple of hours here. No sightseeing, no playing tourist. We get in, look around, and get out. Got it?” We all nodded. Nic and Trish took off their harnesses and the six of us made our cautious way towards the harbor. The closer we got, the stronger that feeling of wrongness became. We started seeing what looked like scorch marks on some of the buildings, as well as bullet holes of various sizes. It looked like battle damage from some shoot-’em-up video game made for gunning down Nazis. What we saw could not have been left over from the big attack in World War Two; this was of a much more recent vintage. They were still sharply defined compared to the older pockmarks.

It was no more than an hour before we found the first body. It was barely more than a slightly equine shape among the silty deposits everywhere around us. We gave it a wide berth. The sand underfoot was soft to the touch and disturbingly left footprints behind that held their shape after every footfall. Doc ran some of it through his fingers. “Does not feel like sand. More like silt, but very fine.” He muttered. I thought for a moment he was going to taste it or sniff it, but he dusted it off as best he could. “Closest thing I can think of is volcanic ash. Not like the stuff from Kilauea, but more like what Mt. Saint Helens used to dust the US in 1980. I don’t get how it would be here though.”

His description of it as volcanic ash became unsettlingly relevant as we found more remains. As we got closer and closer to what had been the USS Arizona visitor center, they became more and more frequent. The bodies were held captive in a shell of dust in a way that made them look like the plaster casts in Pompeii. Most eerie of all was that although most of them were equine in shape, others, perhaps one in four, were vaguely humanoid. The latter gave off an even stronger feeling of wrongness than the former. I counted about twenty bodies of various configurations by the time we stopped.

We made it to a sturdy-looking structure that had been part of the visitor center, all feeling rather nauseated. It did not help that the breeze had started up again and was blowing off the harbor. The smell coming off the water was excruciatingly awful and it got even worse when the wind picked up. Everything was rotten that could rot. The glimpses we got of what was left of the USS Arizona memorial in the harbor showed that it was covered in some kind of greyish-black growth. The water was sludgy with ash and what looked like a sheen of oil on the surface. Something had happened here; something really really bad. If it had been a last stand for the previous colony, no one made it out alive. Remember Pearl Harbor, I thought. A rallying cry turned eulogy.

Some of the ashy dust became airborne. We took shelter from the wind on the leeward side of the building. “We need to get out of here.” Doc panted. None of us were inclined to disagree. The only problem was the way the wind had picked up and was blowing dust around. The stuff was so fine, none of us wanted to breathe it in. Yet we had nothing to cover our faces with besides Adam’s and my wings. We all huddled together in the hopes that the wind would die down again before dark. Adam and I took the outside, shielding the others as best we could. The feeling of grit between my feathers was awful, but our makeshift shelter mostly worked.

I watched the flying dust from between my feathers. There were times when it seemed to form shapes, as though I were watching a play performed by shadow puppets. I saw ponies of different shapes fighting strange things that rose up from nowhere. Some of them were humanoid; others were amorphous blobs or were shaped like quadrupeds. The ponies were armed. They fired guns at the strange things, making them disintegrate with each hit, but every time one went down another rose in its place. As ammunition ran low, the ponies retreated en masse. The invaders followed implacably. A last stand was made around a structure; the defenders were overwhelmed before they could flee. One lone survivor, a pegasus with batlike wings, escaped from the roof. It was carrying something that glowed red even among the gray dust. I swore I saw it look directly at me before it landed shakily somewhere in the jungle. The vision faded and the shadow play crumbled to the ground as the wind died. Once again the area around us was dead.

I got slowly to my feet and shook the dust out of my feathers and fur.The others did likewise and did their best to get themselves clean (or at least cleaner). We made our way back to where we’d left the carts in silence. Even our footprints from earlier in the day had been erased. We took nothing but the dust we could not shake and left nothing behind but footprints to hopefully be scoured away by the wind. Even so, that vision of the bat pony with the glowing red thing stuck in my memory. It was haunting; I wondered if it was something I had hallucinated in the dust or if there was something more to the vision. Magic, perhaps? If so it was much stranger and much more potent than I had ever seen from Emmy or any of my companions.

We all made our way straight to the beach upon returning to the ghost town of Honolulu. None of us wanted to waste precious fresh water on getting the corpse dust off of ourselves, so we made do with the salt water of the ocean. It worked like a charm, making us all go from zombie gray to our natural (for magical creatures at any rate) hues.

“There is no way in Heaven or Hell I am going back there.” Emmy said when we were all drying ourselves in the sun on shore. “That place is too weird and creepy.”

“I agree.” Adam and Doc said at the same time.

“Same. I’m sorry I wanted to drag you all in there behind me.” Nic said. He scuffed a hoof in the sand. “I just wanted to see what was causing that feeling we were all getting. I guess we found it.”

“Yeah.” I said. Then, hesitantly, I asked “did any of you see anything… strange in the dust storm back there? Like, I dunno, shapes or something like that?”

Everyone shook their heads. “I think the rest of us were all too busy trying to keep the dust from flying in our faces, PH.” Trish said. “You were actually looking out into that stuff?”

“Through my feathers, yeah.” I described what I had seen in the dust storm, especially the part about the thestral with the glowing red thing. I looked around at the others. Doc raised an eyebrow. Adam looked equally skeptical and the rest looked concerned.

“Maybe we need to get some food and fresh water into you.” Emmy suggested. “Seems to me you were seeing things.”

“Of course I was seeing things!” I said, my wings flaring. “I just told you I saw things in the dust! There was something about it that struck me as interesting and I thought I would see what you all thought.”

“Well, if it was all your imagination,” Nic said after a moment, “you sure don’t think small, PH.”

“No kidding. If I saw that it would give me nightmares.” Trish added with a shudder.

“So you believe me?” I asked.

“We believe that you think you saw something. Whatever it was, it only showed itself to you. Just do us a favor: if you want to go running off into the jungle in search of buried treasure, take someone else with you just in case, all right?” Adam said.

“Fair enough,” I agreed with reluctance. Telling the others about my vision only made it seem even less real to me. After all, what did I know of war beyond what I had read in history books? The fight I had ... witnessed … was too quick to be cinematic, but that meant nothing given the frame and timing of the medium. I was still worried. If it had been real, could something like that happen to us? I knew I would be seeing those dusky shapes in my nightmares for a while to come.

We spent most of the rest of the afternoon doing some additional gathering among the remnants of the hotels and shops around Honolulu. Doc and I set some more improvised fish traps off what was left of the jetty that had protected Waikiki’s white sands. We didn’t know if we would catch anything, but given that we wanted another alternate source of protein, it was worth the try. We would check the traps again in a day or two to see if they caught anything worth eating. Doc also checked our land traps, snaring a couple of large rats and a cat for us to roast when we had a chance to do so downwind from the ponies. If we were going to eat something from land, it may as well be from some invasive species, right?

Dinner that night was more subdued than usual. Given the shock of what we had found at Pearl, we all wanted to be alone with our thoughts. There was no late night stargazing tonight; by mutual unspoken agreement we all went to our beds early.

Chapter 13

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When I went to bed that night, I wasn’t sure I would actually get any sleep. Given what I had seen, I expected to toss and turn until I fell out of my hammock nest at least once before finally falling into an exhausted sleep just before dawn. Of course, with that prediction in my head I fell asleep almost instantly. What I did not expect was the dream that began immediately.

I found myself flying, really flying on my own two wings. It felt even more natural than the short spurts off Diamond Head, with my wings adjusting automatically to changes in air pressure and winds. I was soaring like the hawks I used to watch circling above campus on lazy summer days. It was not long before I realized I was not alone.

Beside me flew a smaller form, a pony of a sort I had never seen before in real life. A term popped into my head from Emmy’s Harry Potter book: thestral. It certainly reminded me of the ones in the books: it was shaped like a pony, but looked more emaciated. It was dark gray with a midnight blue mane and tail. The bat wings sprouting from its shoulders were larger than a pegasus’ wings and its eyes glowed gold like the coals in a fire and were shaped like a cat’s. If the Grim Reaper turned into a pony, he would look like that. The thestral turned and gave me a toothy grin that made its face look even more skeletal. His teeth were sharply pointed.

“I have been waiting a long time for someone to find my tomb.” The thestral said. Its voice grated against me like sandpaper. I flinched and my companion’s voice eased. “My apologies. It has been a long time since I have spoken to the living. I forget how rusty my voice can become.” Now it sounded like there was a layer of maple syrup between the sandpaper and my ears. “Better?” I nodded.

The thestral continued. “You saw my show among the sands today. You believed it, and want to know more, yes?”

“Yeah.” I said. “If I can know more about what happened, then maybe I can try to keep it from happening to my friends and me.” I shuddered a little at the thought.

The thestral nodded. “Those who do not know history are condemned to repeat it. I hope my insight gives you a fighting chance when those invaders return to attempt to claim this island for their own. I can not say when it will happen, but they will without a doubt return now that Ponykind has done the same.”

“Tell me.” I begged. “What happened?”

“They came from the sea. They were few at first, and their Master controlled the waters surrounding the islands. His minions saw the fruits of our labor and wanted it for their own. We appeased them with offerings at first. Fruit from our orchards and meat from our traps. The minions were satisfied at this; their Master was not. He demanded more. We offered jewels from the strongboxes and money from the bank vaults; he wanted none of that. He demanded that we sacrifice one of our own to him, a blood payment for the safety of our herd. We refused.”

“What happened then?” I asked. The two of us landed on a cloud overlooking Oahu in a way that made the land below us look like a map. I was too intrigued by the bat pony’s tale to consider our perch.

“He turned the sea against us.” I watched in horror as a great wave rose from the sea, engulfing the pony colony that had risen on the shore. It inundated the land as far as the H1, wiping the area clean of living things. Only a remnant population remained, centered around Pearl Harbor and the sheltered waters within. The inhabitants numbered no more than a couple dozen. I got the sense that they were mostly former servicemen and women from the naval base.

“We prepared to fight, my comrades and I. The waters of the harbor were protected, or so we thought. Then he changed tactics.” A sludgy film of oil skimmed across Pearl Harbor, starting at the entrance. It converged around a few boats and the USS Arizona memorial, subsuming them in blackness. The boats crumbled like used tissue paper, though the monument remained. From out of the sludge rose shapes. They were vaguely human in shape, but skeletally thin, as though they were only skin shrink-wrapped onto the bone structure. They moved in short, jerky motions.

The ponies fired at them with whatever guns they had, determined to make the invaders pay if they wanted a beachhead. Every hit shattered a humanoid, but they were armed too; their projectiles were more primitive, but every pony that was hit did not rise again. As the numbers of bipeds thinned, the amorphous blobs followed. They did not shatter when hit; they absorbed everything in their path. Rot trailed in their wake as they oozed towards the ponies’ shelter. Unseen by the ponies, other entities slunk around the perimeter, cutting the ponies’ escape route. By the time they were noticed, the shadows surrounded the shelter.

The view suddenly zoomed in and I found myself peering in at what appeared to be a meeting of the last survivors. Among them was the thestral, not nearly as gaunt as he was now. The ponies argued among themselves.

“Enough.” One of them, a grizzled earth pony said, stomping a hoof on the table. “We do ourselves no good by arguing. We need a plan.”

“A plan? To do what? We’re surrounded, Sarge. Any pony who sets one hoof out of a door gets squished.” A pegasus with a bandaged wing said.

“If we all stay here and do nothing, we all get squished.” Sarge said. “If we continue to do nothing, the enemy gets his tentacles on the Artifact and the whole island chain is lost. I need a plan, ponies.”

“I have an idea.” Every pony in the room turned towards the speaker, a pale blue unicorn. She turned to the only other unicorn in the room. “How much magic do you have, Winnie?”

“Some, Crystal, but not enough to teleport.” The other unicorn answered.”Why?”

“If we could create a distraction of some kind, preferably an illusion that is believable enough, somepony could make a run for it with the Artifact. If it can be carried far enough inland, the blobs should not be able to reach it before the sun returns and they dry out.”

“I hope you don’t mean run in the literal sense, Crystal.” Sarge said. “Those things won’t let anything out at ground level. So far, though, they do not appear to have any air support.” He turned to the pegasus and the thestral next to him. “What can either of you do to further this goal, gentlecolts?” The pegasus shook his head but the thestral looked thoughtful.

“If you trust me with the Artifact, Sarge, I am willing to try my hoof at flying it out.” The bat pony said gravely. “Vinnie can help with the illusion; the air is wet enough that he can probably contribute enough fog for me to slip away. I know I am not a strong flyer, sir, but I should be able to make it just far enough.”

No one in the group looked encouraged at this; I gathered that the thestral was not known to be a fast flyer. The big earth pony’s ears were flicked back in distaste, but he sighed and nodded. “All right, Slick. We all know we are none of us getting out of here alive, so I will take the slim chance that the Artifact will stay out of our enemy’s grasp by placing it in yours. Crystal, can you and Winnie create a believable illusion that can keep the uglies busy?”

The unicorns discussed this quietly for a moment before nodding. There was a brief acceleration of time as the survivors made their preparations. It was like a sports movie montage, but there was a feeling of despondence instead of encouragement. “They knew what would happen when our enclave was destroyed,” the skeletal thestral beside me said. “Their bodies could then be used as a tool for the invader to further his cause at the expense of the other living things on the island. Instead, Sergeant Kinerim decided to depart this world with a bang, destroying everything and everyone left in the bunker. A brave man; he knew the risk he was taking. He didn’t trust me; I had been a bum and a thief, but I was his last hope.”

The scene below me played out. The unicorns built an illusion out of magic and pegasus-generated fog. The earth ponies in the bunker rolled oil drums full of some kind of fuel into the center of the bunker. The sergeant tied a length of fuse to a detonator and, waving the thestral out through a hatch on the roof, set off his makeshift explosive. A fireball taller than any of the nearby buildings incinerated everything in its vicinity. The blast wind tossed debris in directions and shredded the blobs that didn’t burn. The airborne thestral was thrown clear into the forested area above the former naval base. He landed roughly, hitting a tree. The scene went black briefly.

“Sorry. I'm playing this through my memory, and I blacked out from the hit.” My thestral companion said.

“What did you carry with you?” I asked. He had fled the bunker with a heavy-looking pack on his back. His wings had struggled at first until the fire-created updraft carried him skyward.

“Records. A couple of notebooks from the ponies in our colony who had been interested in writing down everything that happened. I doubt they survived the years, but it’s possible. The identification tags from my comrades who fell in battle defending the bunker, when I found them. There were a few other items with names on them, so that someday someone could find their relatives and reveal their fates. Most importantly, I carried the Artifact.” A vision appeared showing a large glowing red stone set in gold. It looked like it had once been part of a larger object but had broken off.

“That doesn’t look natural.” I said. “Not even for a magical pony world.”

The thestral gave a dry chuckle. “It isn’t. It is not of this Earth. This artifact was brought to Earth by Equestrians sent millennia ago in the hopes of aiding our kind’s transition to Equinity. They hoped it could be useful in teaching your dragons their ways. Unfortunately, magic items tend to attract those who would use magic for their own ends.”

“Or who would stop at nothing to possess them.” I added. The thestral nodded. “So what happened to the Artifact?”

The Thestral waved a wing and the scene below us returned to life. It was a view of the harbor from high in the tree’s canopy. The area around Pearl Harbor was covered in a mat of ashy gray dust. The remnants of the buildings looked more like rectangular hills than anything else. The water seemed to writhe and boil and shadowy shapes oozed to and fro in a mesmerizing pattern. They tried to go further inland, but could not escape the moonscape their attack had created. The few remaining blobs retreated to the water or were melted by the sun emerging from behind the clouds

The thestral climbed down carefully from the tree. He examined his body; all four legs worked, but one wing was in tatters from the wind and its fingers crushed by the impact with the tree. Even through the haze of a dream, I could sense how painful his landing had been. The thestral carried his pack deeper into the forest and toward the hills above. There was another brief montage of his struggles to climb higher away from the devastation below before the scene stilled again. My guide and I watched as the thestral crawled into a cave beneath a rock overhang and fell, exhausted, inside.

The gaunt thestral who had guided me through the dream now turned back to me. “This is where the story ends, I am afraid.” He said. “The flight and climb were too much for my stamina. I hid the Artifact and my burdens in this shelter as best I could, then collapsed the overhang to prevent anyone from finding it without help. My task complete, I escaped into the Dreamlands to await someone who could find my cache and tell our story to others. When your flock came to Pearl Harbor, I chose to show myself to you.”

“Me? But why? I'm nothing special. Just a tourist with the luck to come out looking like something off of a rum bottle.” I said.

“Yet you have tasted the wind, though you have only been Returned for a few months. You and your companions have been to the sacred dry place and read the names. You braved the void that was once my home and came away with determination to survive that which we did not. The invaders will challenge you for the Artifact. They will destroy you unless you destroy it before they can get their hands on it. They may try to destroy you anyway in order to keep you from possessing it.” The thestral said.

“You… really believe I can do this. And that we as a group can survive.” I said, rather bewildered by his words.

“I do, young griffon. I am no clairvoyant, but I sometimes believe I can feel when a course will lead to a better outcome than the present. If you and your friends destroy the Artifact, the invaders will lose interest. After all, you pose no threat here. You are not armed with the weapons the military ponies bore. You can rebuild this place as a paradise for those who will Return in the future. However, no reward comes without risk. As long as the Artifact remains on your shores, it will attract attention.”

“All right.” I said. “Two things. How do I find the Artifact in the first place, and how do I destroy it in the second?”

“For the first,” the thestral said. He waved a wing and we once again had that Google Earth view of the western part of the island. “The cave entrance that I collapsed was located here.” He highlighted that point. “It would not surprise me if it is heavily overgrown. I marked it myself… in a way.” He gave me a knowing glance. I did not need a mind reader to grasp his meaning. He’d probably died not far away. “As for destroying the Artifact, I do not know for certain, but seeing as it is being hunted by a being of wind and wave, perhaps the opposing elements would suffice. It was brought here from the Big Island after being taken from its guardian at Hale Ma’uma’u Crater.”

“Oh? Oh.” My imagination flashed to the end of The Lord of the Rings with Frodo dropping the One Ring into the fiery lava of Mount Doom. I wondered how long the flight would be to get the Artefact to the fiery lava of Kilauea. I had better work on that flying. “I understand.” I said.

“Good. I wish you good fortune in this endeavor, young one. It is a heavy burden, but I believe you will bear it well. I have one final wish before I depart.” The thestral said.

“What is it?”

“When you find my bones, could you place them in the sacred place, at Diamond Head? And carve the names of my comrades from the pouch into the stone of the Cave of Names? They deserve to be remembered, even if I am unworthy of the honor.”

“Very well. One last question before you depart. What is your name, so that I may include it alongside your comrades’?”

The thestral hesitated before replying, “I am not worthy, but I will give it to you. My name at birth was Daniel J. Paxton. The name I gave myself at rebirth was Slickwing.”

“You got the Artifact away from the invaders. That’s worth remembering. I shall include both of your names. Fare thee well and sweet dreams Slickwing.”

“Fare thee well, Parrothead. May we meet again one day.” He seemed to fade away leaving only the landscape below. I watched as the island below recovered from the invaders’ assault. The forest grew back over the devastated city below, looser than in the hills above. Yet the empty gray of the wasteland around Pearl Harbor remained. Nothing would grow until the invader’s mark had been scoured away, a task too monumental to contemplate.

I woke with a start. The image of the map was still fresh in my mind. I scrambled to find a pen and my notebook. I did my best to draw a map with the approximate location of Slickwing’s cache before it slipped out of my mind. The dim moonlight was enough to see the black lines on the white page as long as I didn’t shadow it. I hoped I would be able to read it in the morning. My last thought before I drifted off to sleep was how am I going to explain this to everyone else?

Chapter 14

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My sleep was rough the rest of the night. Thoughts and worries kept running through my head as I tried to process everything that Slickwing had shown me. In the end, I realized that I had two goals: find the Artifact, and get myself into a good enough flying shape to be able to carry the relic to Hawai’i. I was not sure I could accomplish both at once, but how could I get the others to help? I had already planned to get more flying practice in at Diamond Head if I could, but I wasn’t sure who would believe me if I told them about Slickwing’s challenge. I hoped the thestral was telling the truth about this whole thing. The biggest question in my mind was is it worth the risk? I knew the answer to that; if it meant my friends would be safe from those things that attacked Pearl Harbor, I’d try anything. That last thought finally quieted my mind enough to get a little sleep.

“You look like shit.” Adam said as I lurched my way to our breakfast setup. “Get any sleep last night? I highly doubt it.”

“Gee, Sherlock. What brought you to that brilliant conclusion?” I snarked back, spearing a chunk of mango with a fork.

“You getting visions of doom and gloom like you saw someone die in front of you? I thought that was the only way to see bat-horses if you believe J.K. Rowling.” Adam said, tossing a chunk of fruit toward his mouth. It missed and slid down his front. “Damn, slick,” he muttered as he tried to clean it off with his wing.

“Ugh. Shut up.” I said in a voice that was almost a growl.

Adam looked like he wanted to take offense at that, but Doc pulled him aside to discuss something. I looked down at my plate and did my best to concentrate on my food.

“Is everything all right? You don’t look like you slept much last night.” Trish said softly. She nudged my wing aside to see me poking at my food. “Oh. It was that bad. I’m sorry. Is there something I can do to help?”

I glanced around at the others. None of them were paying us any mind. “Come over to my nest after breakfast and before we leave to do whatever we were going to do today.” I murmured. “There is something I need to tell someone,and you’re the one most likely to believe me.”

Trish’s eyes went wide, but she nodded. We spent the rest of breakfast in silence. The fruit felt like ash in my mouth; I tasted little of it. I tried to act as though everything was normal, cleaning up after my dishes and such, before going back to our sleeping quarters. After checking to see that the others were occupied, Trish joined me. “What’s up?”

“Remember how I said that I saw shapes in the dust storm by Pearl Harbor?” I asked. Trish nodded. “Well last night I had a sort of… encounter with someone who appeared in that vision. He was… not quite real, more like a ghost. And he told me more details.” I related the story that Slickwing had shown me in my dream. Trish listened attentively, nodding for me to go on when I hesitated. I finished, “so that’s it. I want to know where this leads, but I know I need to be able to fly and fly far in order to accomplish the end goal here. I’m not crazy, am I?”

Trish thought for a moment while I fidgeted. “No,” she said finally. “You aren’t crazy. I remember reading something about those bat-winged ponies in the Guidebook. They have some kind of unique magic that allows them to shape dreams and even use them to send messages across time and space. It’s impossible for us to know for certain what this ‘Slickwing’ guy was capable of, but I see no reason why he would not be telling the truth. If nothing else, if we find his body we can bury it alongside Mary’s. If he’s telling the truth, those records could be important too.”

“And the Artifact?” I asked. Trish shrugged. “Do you really think it could attract those… monsters back to the island?”

“I don’t know. None of us know for certain, but I would say better safe than sorry when it comes to magical gewgaws that we don’t understand. If we find something red and glowing , we shouldn’t keep it. I wouldn’t want it anywhere near me. I’m more worried about what might happen to you over the open ocean if you’re carrying it. There’s not a lot of land between here and Hawai’i.” Trish said.

“Yeah, I know. I just need to be able to fly enough to island-hop down the chain. I’d want to minimize the open ocean part as best I can. Maybe the others will have some ideas too, but I’d feel more comfortable telling them if you’re backing me.” I said.

“I will. It won’t do you any good right this minute though. Why don’t you take a nap while you’re in here.” Trish waved a hoof towards my nest. “Then when you’re feeling better, go work with Adam on flight training. The only way he'll get his butt airborne is if he is chasing you, so you might as well both get it figured out. If push comes to shove, and this Artifact turns out to be the real thing, two fliers working together would do better than one going solo. As for your treasure hunt, hold off for now. Obviously no one has found it yet, so it is still safe enough where it is. When the time is right, we will go play Indiana Jones and the Thestral’s Rock. Sound good?”

“Yeah.” I climbed up to my nest.”What are you going to tell the others?”

“For now? That you had trouble sleeping last night and I convinced you to go back to bed. Given how you look right now, they’ll believe it.”

I grumbled at that, but curled up as best as I could in my normal sleeping spot. Before my friend had even left the sleeping quarters, I was out.

***

I woke up a few hours later in a better frame of mind. Outside I heard Emmy making lunch. I climbed down and went out to lend a claw if I could. She didn’t say anything about my attitude that morning, but she raised an eyebrow when I asked what everyone else was up to.

“Doc and Adam went up to Diamond Head. Doc is going to do a few tests on the rocks; he wants to see if there are any old lava tubes that we could use as a bad weather shelter over there. Adam was going to keep him company and play around. I think he’s going to try and keep Doc from reading too deeply into the inscriptions in the cave with the names. I don’t know if he noticed his daughter’s name in there, but Adam’s scared of what might happen if he does. As far as I know, Trish and Nic headed north, something about fancy houses in the hills that might have more fruit trees that we could transplant.” Emmy said.

“So I get to be your camp bird?” I asked.

“You get to be my camp bird. Between my horn and your claws, we should be able to make this place a bit more liveable, especially if we want to make it our permanent base. I found this. It’s been stuffed under Adam’s cushion this whole time. No idea what he’s been using it for.” Emmy unrolled a map of campus with our location clearly marked. “I want to see if we can make not only comfortable and secure living quarters, but also a better garden so we don’t need to rely on foraging so much. The sooner we have a more reliable food supply, the happier I’ll be. I’d like it to be up here so it’s out of reach of the water, but we need to figure out an exact location. While we’re at it, we should figure out what buildings would make the best permanent shelter too. The ones we’ve been using are too exposed for my taste, and Adam says the dry season is coming to an end.”

I nodded my agreement about the weather and peered at the map. “Well, pass me a pencil if you would. I will see if I remember what buildings we explored right after we Returned. You do the same, and we can check with the others when they get back for lunch. Between the six of us, we can figure out where to go from here.”

Emmy nodded and sent a pencil my way in her telekinesis. “Lunch is almost done. Check your buildings off while I finish up.”

I tapped the eraser end of the pencil against my beak as I thought about where we had managed to break into during those first frantic days. The dining hall had been hit early, as had the library. The former had yielded some useful things; the latter had less. We had gone through the on-campus apartments and dorms to salvage whatever of our possessions had survived the centuries. It struck me that our efforts had not been very well organized. In our haphazard gathering sprees, there were entire buildings that had been left untouched. Some of them had been in pieces, true, but others had been judged to be useless, or too difficult to get into. By now, “too difficult to get into” meant “secure against the elements”. I circled a few of those places. Anything that had collapsed or was unusable got a big X. Smaller circles with initials showed who had searched where. I noticed Adam had marked a few places too, mostly the tall stuff that was still visible above the trees.

I stopped suddenly when I got to one part of campus. This was where Trish and I had been searching for sousaphone bells and brass instruments to use for pipe. I had a brief flash of memory of a building that had been falling to pieces, but still had some useful things intact. After my personal drama of realizing that I would never play my instrument of choice again, we had not gone back since. I wrote my initials and Trish’s along with a star. I added stars to a few other buildings that had not been revisited since the early days or that had only been visited once. By the time I had finished what I remembered, Trish and Nic had returned with more foodstuffs. Evidently Doc and Adam had taken their lunch to go and had stayed out at Diamond Head.

Trish tipped me a wink, so I passed off the map to Nic for his input and stepped off to the side with my former pen pal. “I think we found the place that you described.” She said in a low voice. “We made it all the way to the Bishop Museum. Not much left up there; most structures collapsed. Your bat ghost guy’s map roughly corresponds to an overhang a little further up. We didn’t try to break in; I wasn’t sure if you wanted everyone else to know about your little treasure hunt just yet.”

I let out a sigh of relief. “Thanks. For now it’s enough that you don’t think I’m totally crazy. Thanks for not letting anyone else in yet either. I don’t want to have to hear anyone calling me out for hallucinating or something like that.”

Trish gave me a mild glare. “You actually thought I would open my big mouth and tell everyone about your mysterious night visitor?”

“No, or not really. I’ve just been on edge all morning. I just have this weird feeling that the other shoe is going to drop soon, and it'll be something we are not ready for. It’s giving me the heebie-jeebies. I’m not sure what it is, but it has something to do with the wind. I can feel it and it’s making me restless. Adam thinks it’s just the season changing, but this feels less… natural.” I said.

“Well, up here we should be safe from the tsunami your thestral guy mentioned. It looks like everything has just been crumbling naturally rather than getting hit by something big like that. I don’t know of anything else that could do anything that big.” Trish said.

“We’re not a big colony,” I pointed out. “It wouldn’t take something huge to wipe us off the map.”

Trish shuddered. I understood that. No one wants to be reminded of just how tenuous life can be, especially on an island like ours. We had our reminders all the same.

The two of us made our way back to where Emmy and Nic were studying the map. They both looked up at our approach. “You want to have a look, Trish?” Nic asked. “Zoe was pretty thorough, but you might remember some things that she missed.” He had added his own marks to some of the buildings I didn’t remember having visited. Emmy had done the same; I had explained my system to her earlier and they had imitated it. Adam’s marks remained a mystery.

Trish sat next to Nic and I sat by Emmy. I turned to the latter. “Are there any buildings left that might work well for flight practice? I don’t really want to try anything above about three or four storeys. Anything above the crowns of the trees should work so I can feel the wind in my feathers.”

“Blow the last of the salt and that grave dust out?” Emmy asked.

I nodded. “I want to get some climbing in as well. If I can practice here, I won’t need to go all the way out to Diamond Head. Not to mention the landings will probably be softer than hitting rock bottom, literally.”

Emmy thought for a moment before turning away from me and surveying the truncated skyline around Base Camp. She seemed to be measuring the crumbling structures by eye before she said, “If I were you, I would try there, there, or there. They all are tall enough for you to catch some air, but not so tall you would completely wreck yourself if you landed bad.” She looked at the map. “Huh, looks like someone marked them already. Did you doodle the clouds??”

I shook my head. “Adam did. I wonder what he was doing. Anyway, I’ll check out the likeliest candidates this afternoon. I know we haven’t been risking a lot of the taller places since we don’t know how sturdy they are, but there’s no harm in seeing which one could work for this.”

“Take someone with you. That way if you feel like trying something crazy, someone can attempt to talk some sense into you. I know how you get, Parrothead. If that doesn’t work, that someone can run back here for help.” Emmy said, rolling her eyes.

“Okay. Want to come?” I asked.

Emmy shook her head. “No way, nuh uh, not for all the tea in China. I hate heights. My plan for the afternoon is to help Nic figure out where we want to farm. I can do that with my hooves on the ground.”

“Try the athletic fields.” I suggested. “You may not want to use the baseball diamonds because they are still pretty exposed, but the football stadium might be sheltered enough if the sea gets rowdy.”

“Or a big enough storm will swamp the place and turn it into a lake. That isn’t ideal for crops either. We will take it under consideration though.” Emmy said.

Nic nodded thoughtfully at the idea. “I’m thinking we want to have a few different areas under cultivation if we can. Some in the lowlands, but some up higher. That way we can work on keeping a variety of different things alive and not starve if something goes wrong at one location.”

“I’m no farmer, but it makes sense to me.” I said.

Nic chuckled. “Well I’m no farmer either, but it struck me as common sense. So you are going to try flying again?”

“Yep. Though today I want to figure out a good platform for takeoffs and landings.” Everypony around me snickered at that. “Yeah, laugh it up. I already knew that was the biggest thing I need to work on. Anyplace you want me to check out while I’m looking around? Otherwise I’ll just focus on the spots on the map here.”

No one added anything so I made mental notes based on the map. It would give me a place to start. Someone else broke me out of my thoughts. “If you’re going to go climbing, I want to come too. Two sets of eyes are better than one after all, and if we can manage to get into some place that’s mostly intact, we can look into using it as a better shelter. I’ll look for that while you have your head in the clouds.” Trish said. I nodded gratefully. It might give us a better chance to talk.

“All right, now that we know what we are doing and we are done with lunch, let’s get to it.” Emmy said. She sounded way too excited for this, but maybe it was being around Nic. She and he got along like a house on fire. I pretended not to notice and cleaned off my plate and Trish’s. The other two lingered over the map while we took care of our stuff and headed out into our urban jungle.

Navigating at ground level definitely was not easy. The trees obscured our view of all but the tallest buildings. Any roads that had existed before across campus were now at the very least buried deeply by leaf litter. Most were overgrown, with just the occasional tree-eaten road sign suggesting an intersection. A couple times we ran into rusted heaps of what had once been cars. They had been in place so long, it was impossible to tell what kind of vehicle any of them had been.

We made our way inside the first building on our list. It was as dark as a cave inside, and overgrown to boot. The roof was solid enough, but without a way to get up there, it would do me little good. There was no way of knowing if there was an intact stairwell that would get us up top.I mentally cursed myself for forgetting to bring a flashlight. Or Emmy. Her horn light would have worked too.

We did our best to find the rest of the buildings on the suggestion list. One or two of them were impossible to find due to the thick jungle. Another was similar to the first one in that it had eroded to the point that it was more a hill with a cave than anything else. By the time we had circled around towards the west side of campus, I was getting discouraged. So far, nothing was working as an improved version of the lookout at Diamond Head. I said as much to Trish, who didn’t look nearly as footsore as I felt.

“All right you big baby. There is only one or two more to check on this side before we can head for home. Jeez. Now I want you to fly too so that you will stop complaining about your aching paws.” Trish said. She rolled her eyes so far back I thought she could see her own skull.

“Ugh, says the pony with rock hard feet and the ability to walk across a small country without stopping to rest. I am absolutely not built for this shit.” I snarked back.

“Fine. It looks like we’re close to the entrance to, hmmm, the East West Center. Let’s see.” Trish walked forward until she hit a moss-covered stone wall. I followed her as we walked along it, but it soon became clear that the structure was long since fallen.

“Well this was a dud. So last one before we head home?” I said.

“Uh huh. It should not be far away. Follow the wall back that way and we should run into another structure in about a hundred yards or so.” Trish said. I followed her instructions.

Soon we came to an even more substantial wall. Unlike the previous structure, this one was intact. We found an entryway after some wall-following and discovered that the interior was lit by natural light due to a couple of intrepid trees taking over the courtyard and growing into the building. By now the trees held up the structure and parts of the structure held up the trees. Any stairs were long gone, but the tree had grown in such a way that the branches stretched to almost ground level and were close enough together as to make climbing possible.

“Now that is more like it.” I said and leaped onto a sturdy bough. I reached out and grabbed first one branch, then another. I barely heard Trish’s call to be careful as I made my way upwards. After a solid ten minutes of climbing, I felt the wind in my face at the top of the tree. The remaining roof was a patchwork of clay tile and soil that had been carried upward by the wind and held in place by the enormous tree. I could feel the wind off the sea and smell a slight bit of salt in the air. The view was pretty fair too. I could see our Base Camp due to the smoke coming from our cookfire. The H1 was a solid-looking wall that divided lush jungle from the more barren beach and hills of Honolulu. In the far distance, I could even see Diamond Head looming out over Waikiki like a benevolent giant watching over his charge.

I opened my wings and let the air run through my feathers, oblivious to everything except for how it felt to be nearly flying. If we ever decide to take over individual buildings as personal quarters, I call dibs on this place. I flapped my wings a bit before finding myself on the edge of the roof, looking out over the canopy. I heard a voice below me, but I could not make out any words. A couple minutes later, a familiar green and blue pony emerged from the building out into the open and stood staring up at me. She yelled something, but the wind carried her words away.

I smiled, took a couple more test flaps, then leapt off the building, wings outstretched. I tried to recapture the serenity and empty mindedness that I had felt the first time I had gotten off the ground. Apparently I got the latter right, because I opened my eyes to find myself airborne. Unfortunately it seemed that airborne is relative; I found myself gliding downwards in a spiral pattern. My eyes went wide and I started to flap my wings as I realized that the point at which the spiral ended on the ground was… right where Trish was standing.

“Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!” I was no ape, but apparently griffons can do Tarzan yells too. Mine was less majestic though.

“Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!” Huh, apparently ponies can do it too, because there went Trish.

Both of our yells cut off with a heavy “ooof” as I used my equine companion as a landing pad. Fortunately earth ponies are sturdier than pegasi and Trish was able to get to her hooves almost immediately. If she had still been a biped, her hands would have been on her hips in consternation. “Didn’t you hear a thing I’ve been saying for the last ten minutes? You were supposed to climb down, not try flying. We haven’t made sure this place is strong enough to not collapse before you started playing stunt griffon.” She continued to rant at me for a couple more minutes before I managed to get enough air back in my lungs to respond.

Once I had my wind back, I panted, “sorry, Trish. I couldn’t hear a thing from up there due to the wind. It’s perfect for practicing and the view is amazing. I want to go again.”

Trish did a facepalm (or would it be a face-hoof?) and mumbled something too low for me to hear. I suspect it was along the lines of “why me” or “you dumbass”, either of which would have been well deserved. “Fine, but now that we have your perch settled, what the hay do you want to do about your magic gewgaw. You and I both know there is no freaking way we can keep it a secret for long. Nic knows I was looking for something, but he doesn’t know what. I would bet my sonic screwdriver that as soon as word gets out, everyone is going to want in on your little treasure hunt. For goodness sakes, Zoe, they are archaeologists! Most of them came here to play Indiana Jones and search for hidden tombs and lost treasures and stuff like that.”

“Yeah, I know.” I said. “The problem is I didn’t think any of them would believe me if I told them my source.”

“Emmy will. She’s been doing enough magic with her horn to know it’s real and that it has consequences in the real world. Doc will, because he has been sniffing dirt and gemstones ever since we found that crappy stash in Wal-Mart and he figured out that gemstones attract magic. Nic will believe you because he believes in Emmy and Doc. So who are you worried about exactly?” Trish raised an eyebrow. She knew the answer; she just wanted me to say it.

“Ugh, fine. I’m worried about Adam. He’s been trying to poke holes in this whole change ever since it happened and has been letting his skepticism get in the way of learning what our new bodies are capable of and interfering when we try to find out on our own. Why should he believe me when he thinks the Guidebook is a lot of hooey and that we are all going to just wake up in our dorm beds tomorrow morning to find it has all been a freaky shared dream. So you tell me, Trish. Why should I reveal a magic treasure to our resident skeptic?” My wings flared as if to support my challenge.

“Because he’s been having the same dream visitor you have?” A new voice said from the jungle behind me. I whirled to find myself face to face with Adam. He looked like he had just caught my hand in the cookie jar.

“What the fuzz, dude. How long have you been standing there?” I stammered. I tried to get my wings to relax, but the feathers still stuck out everywhere.

“I saw you take your death jump and thought I would investigate.” Adam said, raising an eyebrow. “Seeing as the new practice spot did not come equipped with a landing pad, I thought I would be generous and ensure that you were ok if you happened to not stick the landing. Again.”

“Ugh, fine. Yeah, I am still trying to get the landing thing figured out, but what do you mean having the same dream visitor? Just yesterday you acted like you didn’t believe me when I described the shadow play in the dust. And now you say you have been seeing Slickwing in your dreams?” I said incredulously.

“Uh huh. I met him the night I spent alone in Honolulu.He’s been appearing regularly ever since, especially in the dreams where I am flying. He’s given tips and some coaching. He asked me not to tell anypony about the dreams because he didn’t want the invaders to learn that his magic was still active. I agreed. Late last night he appeared briefly in my dream to tell me he had shown you the stuff he’d told me and that he was releasing me from my promise.” Adam said.

“Oh was that all?” I asked, glaring at him.

“No. There was one other thing. He said that the Invaders were beginning to stir again and that we should get the Artifact away as soon as we can. He said that it would be either our salvation or our doom depending on if we could keep it out of the reach of the sea." Adam turned away and started walking.

Out of the frying pan... into the fire, I thought as Trish and I followed him back to Home Base.

Chapter 15

View Online

The three of us walked back to Base Camp in silence. I was feeling a mixture of annoyance and amazement. Annoyance, with some jealousy, that Slickwing had been tutoring Adam all this time, but had not done so for me. Amazement that Adam had known about this but had been able to keep it a secret from the rest of us for the last few months. All the while he had been acting the skeptic, while leaving the rest of us in the dark.

After a bit of discussion as we came upon the main path back to Base Camp, we decided to tell the others about the dreams and Slickwing’s cache. There was nothing else we could do tonight, but I suspected that the morning would bring the six of us on a treasure hunt to retrieve the remains of the thestral and his burdens. Sure enough, when the story came out around the campfire that night, the other three’s eyes glowed with enthusiasm. Emmy agreed straight out that our first priority once we found the stuff should be to get the Artifact off the island. Seeing as she was the most knowledgeable about this magic stuff, neither Doc not Nic doubted her. We decided to head out early the next morning.

That night, Slickwing appeared in my dream again. This time, he had a sort of puppet accompanying him that was shaped like a griffon. He then proceeded to use the puppet to show me the differences in how a griffon’s wings and body reacted to flight as compared to a pony. He helpfully included instructions on how to land properly on all fours. There was a mischievous glint in his eyes at that one, which told me the source of why I was getting that particular lesson. In the end, he reiterated the importance of getting the Artifact to the volcano before it attracted the attention and greed of the Invaders. I woke up the next morning feeling invigorated, but with sore wings as though I had actually been flying.

We all met up for breakfast as usual, but conversation buzzed with excitement. All six of us were looking forward to our little expedition. It would take us a few hours of walking to get to the place that Trish and Nic had found. While the others packed our lunches and whatever other supplies they thought we would need, Adam pulled me aside.

“Did he go to you last night?” Adam asked. I nodded. “Good. In that case, let’s try flying there. When the others get to your perch from yesterday, we should take off.” He continued.

I looked at him as though he had grown a second head. “You’re kidding me, right? You know I have yet to stay airborne for less than a minute without a strong wind and that my landings are more likely to hit someone or something else other than the ground.”

“Trust me. When I asked Slickwing to help you out, he said he would do his best to get you into flying shape. After all, it’s in his best interest to get both of us ready for the flight to Hawai’i. From what he told me, it will take both of us to make it.” Adam said.

I sighed. “And I thought I was supposed to be the optimistic one.” Adam just grinned and led me back towards the others.

I refused to do what Adam suggested unless we told the others what we would be up to. It was not that I didn’t want to try flying again; I did, but I figured the others should know just in case the lessons from last night didn’t work and I was forced to use someone else as a landing pad. Trish was skeptical, as was Doc, but Emmy encouraged us to try and Nic nodded along as he focused on making sure his saddlebags were cinched tight. No help there.

I sighed and followed Adam as he led the way to the perch I had found yesterday. I couldn’t tell how he was going to get up there; I had climbed. I doubted all the practice the bat pony had given him in his sleep would have included climbing lessons too. Imagine my surprise when he crouched, flapped his wings a bit, and took off from the ground. Seriously? Well, I was not about to let him show off without trying myself. I crouched in the position that the shadow puppet griffon had used, then attempted takeoff. It was aborted with a mouthful of leaf litter. I could hear Adam laughing above me. Douchebag.

Instead of giving him the satisfaction of hearing me cuss him out, I went inside and climbed up the tree again. I paused to admire the view and noticed that the others had paused in their trek to watch. An audience; won-der-frickin’-ful. “For the record,” I yelled at Adam, who was flapping just out of reach of the roof, “I blame you for this.” I jumped. Unlike yesterday, there was a bit of an updraft, or maybe it had been a different part of the roof, I don’t know. Either way, I did not start a death spiral with a conclusion on the ground. It was like my wings knew what they were doing this time, as though the shadow puppet lesson had instilled what I needed to know before I woke up this morning.

Adam looked so smug, fluttering there. I wanted to wipe that grin off his face so bad, but he didn’t stay still for long enough. He took off in the direction of the cache; seeing as Trish had mentioned that they had found it on the grounds of the Bishop Museum, I figured that as long as we landed in that area, we would meet up with the group again. With a couple powerful wing beats, I started to pursue. Behind and below me I could hear laughter and cheering, but that was soon lost in the sounds of the wind rushing past. There, right in front of me, was Adam, his neon pink rear-end and gold tail streaming in the wind teasing me. Something about that view excited the predatory instincts that must have come with the lion half, because I knew in a way I had never known that I was made for this. I felt the thrill of the hunt and the chase. It was exhilarating.

Adam weaved between clouds that I plowed right through. It appeared that while we were both made for flight, he was more agile and probably faster. No matter; unless his speed and agility came with endurance, he would tire before I would. My wings were bigger, made for gliding and conserving energy for a burst of speed at the moment it was needed. That moment neared as I recognized the crumbling structure dead ahead. We landed on what had been the front lawn, now partially overgrown, next to a Moai head like the ones found on Easter Island. Adam was laughing because he won. I didn’t care.

“I still don’t like you.” I said. “But thanks for the flying idea. I needed that. Just one question: why didn’t you hint to Slickwing that I was having trouble with takeoffs too? After all, this is the first time I’ve managed a proper four point landing.”

“I did. Two reasons: one is that your landings have been more dangerous to the rest of us up until now. The other is that Slickwing is kind of a dick. Unfortunately for us, he’s one of those guys whose sense of humor leans toward pranks and mischief. I can’t count the number of times he goaded me into doing something stupid during our training sessions just to see me reap what I sowed. Luckily every one of those things lent itself to a lesson of sorts, even if it was ‘do not fly into a mountain’. That one hurt.” Adam said. He rubbed his head as though it had been a physical event instead of a mental one.

“Oh.” I said. “If you see him tonight, can you trick him into giving me takeoff lessons then? That was impressive when you took off from ground level.”

“Um, yeah.” Adam said. He looked slightly uncomfortable. “To tell you the truth, that’s the first time I actually tried that. All my other attempts have been from altitude either back at Diamond Head or in my dreams. I’m just glad it worked. Don’t you dare tell the others or I will never send Slickwing back again.”

I chuckled. No one else was here yet, so I asked, “Besides flying, what have you been doing with Doc? He’s been kind of secretive about that lately.”

“Me? Not much to be honest. Doc, though, has been excavating. Specifically he has been digging a sort of shelter at Diamond Head that would be big enough for all of us, but is up higher on the slope than the Cave of Names so if there is a storm it should stay dry. It’s pretty impressive; he added a solid door and the tailings form a sort of ramp so that the ground pounders can get up there.” His eyes got distant for a moment and he shuddered. “We will need it sooner than he thinks.” Adam mumbled.

“You feel it too?” I asked.

“Feel what, that? Just nerves I guess. I have been getting these feelings about the weather. I know Doc jokes about me being a weather pony, but I have noticed that I can more or less predict what is coming. It is pretty subtle, things like changes in air pressure and moisture, but it is pretty accurate.”

“I’ve been getting it a little too, but not that strong. What’s it telling you?” I asked, a hint of impatience in my voice.

“I’m not completely sure. It feels like there is a storm on the way, but it feels heavier that the usual squalls here. There is a deep low pressure center to the west that I don’t like the feel of, but it’s too far offshore to do much of anything yet. What worries me is if it doesn’t stay there and makes a turn in our direction. If it does...”

“It could hit us, and something with a pressure center that low could potentially be as strong as an Atlantic hurricane. Odds that our shelter at Base Camp would survive winds from something like that are low.” Now I shuddered. I disliked the omen. “Do you think it will happen?”

“I hope not, but if this Artifact is as magical as you and Slickwing said,” he rolled his eyes, “then some monster that was chasing the toy could use the storm as a way to keep us on the island and prevent the return of the Artifact to Hawai’i. That could leave us as trapped as those poor guys at Pearl Harbor. A storm would give cover from the sun to anything that came lurching out of the sea too.”

“That makes sense.” I said.

Neither of us spoke for a little while. We both started randomly wandering around the grounds of the museum’s ruins. The exhibit halls were mostly gone, but the facade of the entrance building was largely intact. The name at the peak of the roof was readable, though obscured somewhat by the growth of plant life. The courtyard was as overgrown as the lawns of the homes in Honolulu and the grounds of the University around Base Camp. It was rather chaotic, but exploring kept our minds off the impending challenge of flying some magical trinket to another island until the rest of our companions arrived.

Trish and Nic led the way to the blocked cave. When we got there, Adam and I searched through the undergrowth until we found the remnants of Slickwing. We reverently wrapped what we could identify in what was left of the windbreaker Adam had been wearing when we all Returned. The bones looked pitifully small piled as they were, but we had promised to bury him at Diamond Head and felt that his help in getting Adam and me airborne was worth the effort.

Doc cleared away the debris blocking the entrance and we entered one by one, aided by one of our precious flashlights and Emmy’s light spell. It was not too big; once upon a time it must have been part of the museum’s maintenance building or something like that. Luckily it was large enough to accommodate four ponies, a griffon, and a diamond dog. We divided the room in half, with Emmy leading the way with Nic and Adam while I carried the flashlight with Trish and Doc. The light from outside barely lit any of the space, so the flashlight was welcome. We swept from the entrance back and forth deeper into the artificial cave. There was no sounds in here besides the sound of hooves and paws on stone and six creatures breathing. Not even dripping water could be heard as we searched. Back and forth, back and forth. The floor showed nothing of interest, so we repeated our sweep against the walls.

It was steady and methodical work, but the methodology was not much different than what we had learned at Doc’s field school. We looked for details, for the little things that were out of the ordinary among the dirt and the remains of whatever had once been in here before. After an hour and a half of painstaking searching, we found it. Near the back of the place, a loose stone gave way when Nic brushed against it with a hoof. Behind it was a cavity just large enough to contain a pair of saddlebags. They were much better made than our cobbled-together versions, and had a faint feel of magic that suggested that they had been preserved via magic. We opened one pocket to find it full of intact parchment and paper. We closed it again before checking the other side. There was a faint reddish glow visible between the folds. Hesitantly, Emmy opened the pouch with her magic to reveal a single item: a ruby the size of a human skull with golden adornments. It felt strangely hot to the touch, even in the dank dark room. I shivered and Emmy quickly refastened the pouch.

“I don’t know about you guys, but I want that thing kept as far away from me as possible.” Nic said, his voice shaky.

“Agreed.” We all said without hesitation.

Doc took hold of the saddlebags and carried them out of the cave, the rest of us trailing behind him. None of us wanted to be left alone with that rock. As soon as we emerged, there was a sudden feeling of dread. It felt like that moment when you are on a free-fall ride and your stomach suddenly makes a beeline for your chest as the mechanism lets go.

“We need to get out of here.” Doc said in a voice that would have fit the inhabitants of a graveyard. None of us disagreed. We all started walking back towards Base Camp. Adam and I didn’t feel like flying any more. The trek was quieter than it had been going out. None of us said anything; I kept thinking I was seeing the oozing shadows from my dream peering out from the undergrowth. It did nothing to ease my anxiety.

“I don’t want to take that thing into Camp.” Nic said all of a sudden. “There is no way I am ever going to sleep near it.” We stopped to decide what to do. After some debate, we decided to leave it for the night in one of the buildings we were not using that were still mostly intact. We could then retrieve it tomorrow. I suggested the music building; Trish agreed and the two of us took the saddlebags there. We left it among the remnants of human made music and locked it in one of the metal cages used to store instruments.

Dinner that night was uneasy. None of us wanted to say anything about the day’s exploring. Slickwing’s remains bore a silent witness to the way we ate in nervous silence and went to bed early.

Chapter 16

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The next morning, the sky on the horizon was a disturbing shade of red. Adam looked even more unsettled than he had last night; I was not sure he had actually gotten any sleep. “Red sky at night, sailor’s delight. Red sky in the morning…” He said at breakfast.

“Sailor take warning.” I finished. I could feel it more now too. There was a heavy tension in the air that did not bode well. The air was weighed down with moisture and the winds were strangely calm. At the distance out at sea, a mass of clouds etched with lightning was building to the south. It grew slowly, like Godzilla rising dramatically from the deep. Adam went to find Doc to persuade him that we should take shelter in the Diamond Doc’s tunnel at Diamond Head. I have no idea what he said, but it worked to convince our former professor.

Everyone gathered up everything they could carry in the wheelbarrows. Emmy’s favorite cooking implements joined Nic’s stash of seeds and our collection of fishhooks. Doc’s and my fishing nets and traps took up space alongside all the food we had managed to store up until now. The memorabilia we had salvaged from the van finished it all off. My Jimmy Buffett album and Trish’s sonic screwdriver were among them.

As soon as the rest of our group started moving, I pulled Adam aside and the two of us went to retrieve the saddle bags from the music building. As I retrieved them, Adam noticed the USS Arizona trombone I had placed aside months ago. He read the words inscribed on the bell and, without another word, slung the instrument over his shoulder to rest between his wings. The only thing he said was “Let’s go catch up with the others.”

The air smelled of rain as we made our way towards Diamond Head. The sunshine felt more ominous rather than less, as every chance we got, someone was glancing to the south at the growing mass of clouds building on the horizon. It made shivers run down my spine every time I looked, so I tried to concentrate on the path ahead. In the couple of hours it took to get our supplies and other items to Diamond Head, I had broken that promise to stop looking three times more than I expected. Having to heave the wheelbarrows up through the narrow cut was a welcome distraction. The six of us had to take them one at a time before we managed to get everything through.

Doc’s excavations proved to be a welcome sight. I could see where he had built a sort of earthen ramp up to a fresh tunnel above the cave with names. “We will have to leave the wheelbarrows here.” Doc said. One by one we unloaded each barrow and made several trips hauling our supplies into the tunnel. It was smaller in diameter than the name tunnel, just wide enough for Doc to move comfortably. It ended in a room big enough to hold a U-Haul van. Doc pointed out a few crevices that he had extended to provide extra air.

“Is there a way we can get out if something happens to that entrance?” I asked.

“Of course. I built an escape tunnel, but the first step is a doozy. Beyond that, I am your second backup.” Doc said.

“Okay, so how is the main entrance getting closed then?” I asked.

“With this.” Doc heaved a heavy looking piece of rusted steel. “I have one for the ramp entrance and another that we can use for in here to make a sort of airlock. The alternate exit has the same.”

“I can work the outer one, but the inner one can only be opened from inside. We will have to be let in.” Adam said.

“All right, so do we need a code word or something?” I asked.

“How about this, if any of us needs to be let in and the inner door is closed, you have to answer a question posed by whomever is inside. Get the answer right and we’ll open the door.” Emmy suggested.

“You have a suspicious mind. Works for me.” Adam said. After the last load had been carried inside we took one last look at the sky. “Maybe we should wait until this blows over before trying our epic flight.”

“We can try, but if any water ghouls appear to get that rock, I say we make a break for it. Alternatively, maybe we can use the winds to accelerate and sort of slingshot us in the right direction. If it is a hurricane, the strongest winds will be around that deep low at the center. It might be prudent to wait until that nears before taking the leap. ” I said.

“Agreed. Now, I think we have enough time to give a certain thestral some well- earned rest.” Adam picked up one side of the windbreaker with Slickwing’s remains and I carried the other. We scratched out a hole beside Mary’s marker and placed our flying teacher in the earth. I said something that I don’t remember over the gravesite, as did Adam. Just as we finished covering the grave, the wind picked up and the rain started. We hightailed it to the shelter, closing the outer door, then the inner door, behind us.

Our shelter was lit only by Emmy’s horn for now. She said she could hold the dim light for a while; we decided that when she got tired, we would use one of the precious flashlights. When that went out, we would either use Emmy again or light the other. Hopefully they would last long enough for the storm to blow through.

Then the wind started to make its presence known. Even through multiple layers of rock, we could hear it howling and shrieking like damned souls being torn to pieces. We could not hear the rain, but the smell of it was an ever-present odor of dampness. In the dim light, we stared at one another, fear and hope mingling in our expressions. The hope was that we would come out of this in one piece; the fear was that we would not.The stress was exhausting. One by one we dropped off to a sort of half-sleep, lulled by waiting.

I was close to succumbing to the lethargy, but Adam woke with a start and stared at me with eyes as big as saucers. “What is it?” I asked, suddenly interested.

“I had a dream from Slickwing. He says that the invaders are coming. They are using the storm as cover. We need to get that rock out of here. We’re in the eye of the storm. We won’t get a better opportunity.”

Adam’s yelling was barely audible above the wind. It was enough to wake Doc from his stupor. “You want to leave?”

“We have to. If we don’t get the Artifact off the island before the storm lets up, it will lead the monsters right to our shelter here. The sooner we go the better. Will you get the door for us?” Adam said.

“Of course. Here.” Doc passed me the saddlebag containing the Artifact. I made sure it was there. “There’s some other stuff in the other side to keep you from getting off balance. Good luck to both of you.” Doc murmured something under his breath to Adam, who nodded. Then he opened the inner door and Adam and I headed out. It closed with a heavy thud of finality behind us.

“Ready to go?” I said to Adam.

“No but we’ve got to do it anyway.” He replied. We opened the outer door, carrying the hope of our friends along with a power we did not understand.

Chapter 17

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The eye of the storm overhead made the center of Diamond Head’s caldera strangely calm at ground level. No wind disturbed the wet grass and the sun was visible. It would have been peaceful, but we could hear the howling winds in the surrounding storm. The sky above our heads was a strange color, an almost milky green, like Frankenstein’s monster. I’d seen that color before in the strong storms that sometimes dropped tornadoes back in the Midwest.

The storm was still moving though. By the time we got to the observation deck, it was like being in a wholly different world. The wind played tug-of-war with our feathers as Adam and I took the trail up and by the time we were on the exposed point it was very difficult to keep all four feet on the ground. We looked at each other before getting into takeoff position. We had to clear the rocks before we were dashed to pieces against them by these winds. As one, we both leapt into the air, our wings beating furiously to gain altitude. The rain pounded against us as we fought to get airborne. Eventually I caught an updraft on the edge and pulled Adam into it with me. If we could get into the upper structure of the storm, we might stand a better chance of getting through. It would be tricky.

Adam and I dodged and weaved through the clouds, leaving a trail of holes punched through water vapor and precipitation. The wind tried to throw us off-course again and again, but we managed to catch one of the strong southerly air currents that would force us away from O’ahu. By the time we reached the southern edge of the storm, I was gasping for air at the high altitude and the exertion. Adam was not quite so bad off, but then again he was not carrying the saddlebags. “All right, we made it this far. Now what direction do we need to go?” I panted.

Adam pulled out a tourist map of the Hawaiian Islands and a compass. Fortunately the storm had not turned us around as much as I’d thought it would. We looked to the south and east to follow the trail of shapes below us that were the other islands in the chain. Moloka’i, Lanai, Maui, Kaho’olawe, then, barely visible in the distance, Hawai’i itself. “Ready for some island hopping?” Adam asked.

“Probably not, but let’s go anyway.” I said after catching my breath. We headed east towards Moloka’i first, intending a brief touchdown and rest before tackling the next leg of the flight. I did not think we were likely to meet anyone there; it had not been a big tourist draw. Maui on the other claw was riskier. Lahaina had been big enough for a regional airport and my parents had gone up to Hana on their honeymoon a long time ago.

The landing on Moloka’i was not as rough as I expected. I tried landing with my paws first and bird feet second, with the end result of me falling back onto my butt rather than my face. Progress! Behind us, the storm was still churning, its winds twisting the clouds into a chaotic mass that looked even bigger from out here. If there was someone or something controlling it, they had not noticed that we were gone yet. I checked the saddlebags to be sure. The Artifact was still there. Out of curiosity, I checked the other bag. “Oh great. Emmy is going to kill me.” I said.

Adam looked at me askance. I pulled out what Doc had decided to include as “ballast”: Emmy’s copy of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. “Yep, if that does not come back, she is definitely going to kill you. Can I watch?” He asked. I rolled my eyes. We rested for a little while longer before taking off again towards Lanai. It was also lightly inhabited before the Event, so we doubted we would find anyone.

There was a mantle of clouds covering the island. It was mostly cumulus: fluffy and low-level with enough water to give the island a healthy dose of “liquid sunshine”. Before we attempted a landing on the actual island, Adam said, “hold up. I want to try something.” He assumed his landing position and carefully touched down on a larger cloud. To my astonishment, it held under his weight. He bounced a little, as though he was walking on a mattress before looking up at me. “Want to try?”

“How do I know it will hold for me? For all I know this is some kind of magic thing that only pegasus ponies can do.” I said.

“Nah, Slickwing mentioned that it is innate for griffons too. Or are you part chicken instead of part parrot?” Adam said.

“Well, seeing as you have finally showed an interest in ponydom, it would be rude of me to not take advantage of that.” I said.

“Hey at least it will be a softer landing.” Adam said.

I rolled my eyes but concentrated on landing on the cloud below me and next to Adam. I nearly took off again as the cloud bounced under my weight. It took a couple tries before I stood comfortably. “Man, why didn’t we try this before when we were practicing back on O’ahu? If nothing else it would have worked nicely as a crash pad.”

“And miss all your lovely one point landings?” Adam asked.

“One point? Are you referring to all the times I landed on my face?” I snarked.

“Nah. More like all the times you landed on somepony else.” Adam replied. He peered over the edge of our cloud to the island below. “Do you think we should go down there to check for Returnees?”

“Not today, I think. Maybe on the way back, you know after we have returned the rock of doom that is making some whatchamacallit from the Black Lagoon want to wipe our friends off the face of the Earth?” I said.

“All right, you made your point. Ready to go again? We have a couple more islands to hop before we tackle getting over the mountains to get your preciousssss to Mount Doom.” Adam asked, making a Golem voice with the last phrase.

“Give me another minute. I think I saw something.” I peered downwards towards the island below us. There was a distinct smell in the air. Smoke, mixed with spices of some kind. “I think there is someone down there. Whoever it is, they have a fire going, with cooking herbs.”

Adam shrugged. “If they are able to cook, that suggests they will survive long enough on their own for us to let them be for now. No offense, but if they are a pony, you would scare the fur off them, and if they are something predatory, they might see me as a free lunch. We can check on the way back.”

I nodded. The smoke had not smelled of meat, but no need to tell Adam that. We took off a little while later, winging our way towards Maui. Our plan was to land if we could and eat something to give us energy for the final stretch of open water that would get us to The Big Island. Unfortunately, the old saw that “no plan survives first contact with the enemy” held true for us. Maui looked… awful. Instead of an island covered in verdant green vegetation, all we saw were the black of oceanic basalt and the same shade of sickening greenish gray that we had seen at Pearl Harbor.

Evidently there had once been a colony here on Maui, but it had not survived the wrath of the Invaders. Unlike on Oahu, the entire island looked to have been infected, even the higher altitude areas. There was no way we were going to land there. Adam managed to commandeer us a cloud, but it was more fragile than the one we had found earlier. We landed cautiously; it held but we did not drop our guard. “I hope no one Returns there any time soon.” Adam said.

“I wonder if it affected the water around the island too.” I said. Molokini Crater just offshore had been one of the prime snorkel and scuba dive destinations in the entire island chain. I had been there a long time ago and remembered the reef there with wonder.

Adam shrugged. I knew it was a stupid question. It was not like any of us had shown any ability towards swimming in these new bodies. Heck, I doubted anyone existed anymore who could build a pony-shaped or griffon-shaped set of scuba gear. It would take some kind of weird magic any ways.

Despite the creeping exhaustion that was beginning to set in, we took flight from our sickly little cloud soon after. Neither of us said anything about what little we had seen of Maui. One thing was for certain: we did not want to see it happen to our home and friends on O’ahu. We flew in silence, the only sound being our occasional wing-beats. Neither of us looked back; if we had, we would have seen that the storm that had targeted our home island had changed course, moving against the trade winds to the east and south. Following us.

Chapter 18

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We managed to make landfall on Kaho’olawe. There wasn’t much here; it looked like pristine rainforest. Adam and I ate our rations and rested our eyes for a couple hours before being awakened by a cold rain on our faces and a screaming wind tugging at our feathers. We exchanged a glance. I could see the same fear reflected in Adam’s eyes as what appeared in mine. The storm was upon us, and we still had the Maui Channel to cross before we made it to Hawai’i.

“Let’s go before it gets too strong!” Adam shouted. I nodded and we both crouched and leaped into the air. I felt it tugging at my saddlebags as I threw myself into the wind. Adam squawked. I looked over my shoulder to see him struggling against the wind. I did a sort of cartwheel in the air to end up next to him. He looked terrified. I grabbed him and yelled, “hold on to my tail. I’ll pull us through.” He nodded. I felt a pinch as he grasped the tuft at the end of my tail in his teeth while I used my strong wings to power through the storm.

Below us I faintly saw black shadows prowling on the beach at Kaho’olawe. The feeling of wrongness and fear made me beat my wings harder. I wasn’t sure we would be able to use the storm winds the same way twice, but I did my best to keep the pressure behind me and off to the side so I could tack my way to Hawai’i. Just as I was reaching my limits, Adam and I broke through the storm to find ourselves above land once more. The low-lying areas were green and lush, but the highlands were a patchwork of black stone and tan grasses. Exhausted, I began to spiral downwards with Adam still on my tail. I landed roughly in an open area on the edge of the trees. Despite being cold and soaking wet, I fell asleep immediately.

***

The next morning we woke to find we were no longer where we had landed. I found myself in a wooden hut not much bigger than my dorm room back in Iowa. I was laying on a wooden pallet with a thin blanket covering me. I was dry now, but my feathers were a mess. Adam was similarly arrayed, though he seemed more awake than I did. His ears twitched as he listened to voices outside the hut. I tried to listen too, but it sounded like gibberish. By the expression on Adam’s face, he made sense of it.

“What is it?” I asked quietly.

“Shh.” Adam said. “I can’t understand both you and them at the same time.” He listened a bit more before turning to me. “In case you’re wondering, yes we’re alive. We’re on Hawai’i, probably near what used to be Kona. From the sound of it, the locals here speak a kind of Hawaiian Pidgin, so I can make most of it out.” He stopped as someone came in the door.

Our visitor looked like a pony, but she was white with black stripes that extended into her mane and tufted tail. Like ponies, she had a shape on her flank, but hers looked like a stripe pattern in the shape of a leaf. She wore a cape decorated with feathers, kind of like the ones the ancient Hawaiian chiefs wore, and large hoop earrings.

The zebra smiled to see me awake. She offered me a bowl of something and gestured for me to drink. I did. It tasted like some kind of tea sweetened with coconut milk. It soothed my throat as it went down. “Thank you. Mahalo.” I said, my voice still rough. She jumped a little at the sound.

“Chee! You… you speak the old tongue.” The zebra said, her English somewhat rough and overlaid with a strange accent. “I thought I heard your friend speak it too. Your kumu, your teacher, was very good. Was he one of the Old Ones from the Before? It been long time since new Old Ones come.”

“You mean English? We didn’t have a teacher of the sort you mean. It’s our birthspeech.” I said with a shrug. Adam nodded when I said nothing more. I figured I would let him reveal that he understood their Pidgin if he wanted the zebra to know.

“Ah, so you are Old Ones yourselves! Aloha! Tell me, were you alone?” She asked.

“No.” I said. I pointed to Adam. “He was with me. We have four friends who Returned with us on O’ahu. We flew here to return something to its place.”

“Ah, you were chosen to bear the Makana Stone back to its owner. It has been a long time since she has been at her full power. We have long been waiting for it to return.” The zebra said. She turned away. Her cape rustled as she moved towards the doorway.

“Wait,” I said. “Could I ask what name I should call you? Or, uh, title if you prefer?”

“Your caution is worth noting, visitor. Others call me Keeper of the Old Ways. You may call me Kahu.” She said. “If you will excuse me, I will let the others know that you are awake. I will return shortly, Keahi.” She turned to Adam. “And I know you were listening, Makani. You need not hide that you understand the New Speech.” She strode off, letting the tent flap slide closed behind her.

I turned to Adam. “She’s observant, isn’t she?”

“Cautious too. Did you notice? It’s like what Emmy was saying about names having power. She gave us a title to call her by, but she also gave us names. She didn’t ask for our real ones. Interesting choices too.” Adam commented.

“Yeah. She called me Keahi and you Makani. What do those mean, anyway? They sound Hawaiian.” I said.

“They are. She called you ‘fire’ and me ‘wind’. Seem fitting given how we got here and what we were carrying. I wonder who and what it belongs to.” Adam said.

“Yeah. Something tells me our journey isn’t over yet. Anywho, should we keep the names Keeper gave us? It’ll give us something we can use that isn’t our real names. Everybody back on O’ahu already goes by a nickname of one kind or another. Ours are the only ones that don’t get shortened.”

“All right, sound good to me. I’ll call you Keahi and you call me Makani when we’re out and about. “

“Deal. Besides, it sounds better than what I had come up with.” I said. Adam raised an eyebrow. I grinned. “I was going to call you ‘Whirlybird’ if you called me ‘Parrothead’.” Adam cringed at that, and I nodded.

I reached out a talonned fist and he gave me a hoof bump. We both got off of our beds and stood shakily on the ground. I looked at my wings and started to put them to rights. At the moment, they stuck out at all angles like the spikes of a pineapple. Adam snickered, so I suspected the feathers on my head were giving me a serious case of bed-head too. Not that he was in much better shape; his mane had a massive cowlick on one side.

“Hold on.” Adam said. “I’ll do yours if you’ll do mine.” He turned his back to me to show how much of a mess his were. Considering we’d both survived one heck of a storm, I was amazed that everything seemed intact.

“You sure? Remember what happened last time we did this.” I said.

“Yeah I know, but it might make that zebra more comfortable having us in the same hut if it looks like we are, uh, intimately concerned with one another’s well being. I’d rather not see us separated at this point.” Adam said.

I considered the point, then nodded. I fixed his wings as best I could and did my best to flatten out his mane too. Then we switched places and he straightened my feathers. We had just finished when Keeper came back. She gestured for us to follow her outside and we did, a little shakily. I carried our saddlebags. They had been left on the floor next to our cots.

We found ourselves in the middle of a group of about fifteen ponies of various kinds as well as a few zebras and a swarm of tiny creatures that looked like fairies but were shaped like ponies with enormous insect wings and antennae. Everypony around us watched us, most with wariness, but a few younger ones with curiosity too. Seeing as it looked like this was an entirely equine group, I doubted they had ever seen a griffon before.

Kahu spoke. I understood little of it word for word, but she was kind enough to interpret what she said afterwards. “Friends, these visitors have flown from afar, from past the cursed places from the island of the Old Ones. Once, a flying one bearing the wings of leather stole the heart of our protector, who has mourned the loss ever since. Now these brave souls have come to return what was lost. They landed here seeking guidance to the home of Mo’iwahine Pele. Brothers and Sisters, will any of you consent to be their guides through the passage to the Firelands?”

There was some uncomfortable shifting among the listeners before one of the tiny fairy-like ponies spoke up. Its voice was so high-pitched I could barely hear it, let alone understand what it said. A heavily-muscled earth pony bowed his head so he could hear the fairy pony speak more clearly. He nodded. The fairy pony climbed up his mane and took a seat between his ears. “Kahu, though I do not know the way, Kukala does. With his guidance, I, Pohaku, am willing to lead the visitors to the Firelands and beyond.”

“Very well, Pohaku. Come to my hut before you depart and I will give you the Old Tongue so that you might speak with our visitors.” Keeper said. The fairy said something and the zebra nodded again. “Kukala, I am willing to cast it upon you as well, though I do not know if the visitors will be able to hear you clearly.” The fairy pony nodded. Keeper led the pair to another hut. With them gone, the crowd dispersed. Adam and I looked at each other with a healthy glance of “now what?” Fortunately, and before we could get into any trouble with our hosts, Kahu’s ritual or whatever was complete and Pohaku and Kukala came out looking a little stunned, but otherwise okay.

“Keahi, Makani, these are Pohaku and Kukala. You may call them by those names. They will be your guides across the mountains to the place where Mo’iwahine Pele makes her home. Bring with you your saddlebags with the Makana Stone. They will carry enough food to make it there and back.” Keeper said.

Adam and I bowed our heads in thanks. “We thank you for your kindness, Kahu. Is there any way we can repay you for your hospitality?” I asked.

Keeper waved a hoof. “Return the Makana Stone to our Mo’iwahine. Her gratitude will be greater than mine could ever be. Now go before the storm returns to find you.” She turned away and headed back to her hut. Adam and I looked to the sky to the northwest and saw the dark clouds on the horizon.

“Best get moving.” Said a deep gruff voice next to us. Pohaku stood towering over us, a pair of enormous saddlebags on his flanks. Kukala sat between his ears with a similar set of bags on a smaller scale. They looked ready to take on anything the world might throw at them. I nodded and Adam and I followed the mismatched pair up a path that led towards the towering peak of Mauna Kea.

The road we followed wound around through the forest, but not nearly as much as something like a deer trail would. This was meandering with a purpose: avoid a dense thicket here, a large outcropping of rocks there. It was wide too; two cars could have passed by each other in some parts. Of course, I thought, I bet this was the original road that people built to get to the interior of the island. Once that thought passed, I began to notice little details that supported my theory. There were stone cairns at a few places where the path intersected others, some sporting remnants of metal sign posts. Once I caught a glimpse of words carved into the stone plinth at one intersection, though I could not make them out completely.

As we climbed in altitude, the air became cooler and the foliage thinner. Pohaku kept moving regardless, as stolid as his namesake. It was Kukala who called a halt for a midday meal halfway up the slope. Adam and I sat down gracelessly, glad to be off our feet for a while. Our wings were still sore from our big flight, so using them now was not much of an option. Fortunately we had spent most of our time back on O’ahu on the ground, so we were used to walking. Just not at Pohaku’s pace. I wondered if Trish could match him.

Kukala watched me with curiosity before he decided to approach. He fluttered onto my shoulder and said something. I caught maybe one word in three. “Slow down, if you please. I can hear you, but you speak so quickly I don’t understand.” I said in the clearest voice I could manage. Pohaku chuckled; evidently this was a common failing of his companion.

Kukala fluttered like his namesake, damselfly, in agitation, but slowed his speech. “What kind of pony are you, Keahi? You do not walk as Makani does and your wings are greater. Are you part bird?”

“You could say that.” I said. “I am a griffon. Half of me is a bird, but the other half is a great cat. This is why I must have meat to eat.” I pulled some of the homemade jerky Doc had made out of my saddlebag. Pohaku and Kukala both wrinkled their noses at the scent but Adam rolled his eyes.

“Your friends… though you eat the flesh of other creatures, they do not fear you? They do not fear that you will eat them?” Kukala pressed.

“As long as I find other things to eat, I would not even consider eating my friends.” I said. “As long as I can find smaller creatures on land or fish and other things in the shallows, I will not starve. I can eat the fruits that my friends harvest as well.”

“Would you eat spiders and other things that creep and crawl? Kukala’s eyes glittered. I could not tell if it was amusement or what, but Pohaku’s snort suggested we had gone beyond merely satisfying the fairy pony’s curious streak.

“Well, they would not be my first choice.” I said. “But I would eat them I suppose. Especially if they were cooked with spices or candied or something.” I shrugged. It nearly knocked Kukala off my shoulder. “So what about you? I have never met a pony like you before. All of my friends are bigger ponies.”

“Me? I and my family are Breezies. We carry pollen and nectar for flowers and eat that. Bugs are too big for me to eat.” Kukala said, his wings waving in the slight breeze.

Pohaku spoke up at that. “They are more likely to be eaten by those bugs. I have seen them get caught by spiders and birds. Breezies are real delicate and can rarely live on their own.”

“You lolo or something? Of course not.” Kukala said to his larger companion. “That’s why our colony lives with you guys. Big ponies protect little Breezies so little Breezies will pollinate crops for Big Ponies. It is, what you call it? A win-win.”

“Makes sense to me.” I said, careful not to shrug this time. Adam nodded. He hadn’t said much on the trek up here. I suspected he was worried about our friends back on O’ahu. We’d already been gone a few days and had no way of knowing if they were all okay.

“Ready to keep going?” Pohaku asked after a few more minutes. He shouldered his pack. Kukala fluttered his way over to the earth pony while Adam and I got to our feet and stashed the remaining snacks in our saddlebags. Before we left, I made sure the Makana Stone was still in mine. It was. We followed the road even higher until it widened onto a plateau between the twin peaks of Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa. The former had a slight dusting of snow on its summit.

“I forgot it snowed in Hawaii.” Adam commented. “I thought that was just a fancy name for shaved ice cones.”

I rolled my eyes. “Yeah, Mauna Kea is high enough that it gets snow every so often. Adventure junkies used to take helicopters to the peak and then snowboard or ski down.”

“You have got to be kidding me.” Adam said.

I shook my head. “Cross my heart and hope to die, man. I saw videos and pictures of people doing it online.”

“Well given that we can’t prove one way or the other any more, I guess I have to believe you for now.” Adam said. I just grinned.

Kukala watched the back-and-forth byplay with interest. “So you two really are from the time of the Old Ones? Wow! What was it like?”

Adam and I glanced at each other. I waved a wing for him to go first. He took a deep breath. “Do you want to know what it was like here, or where we came from? Neither of us were born and raised on the islands.” We did our best to keep up the pace as we talked, though I’m pretty sure Pohaku slowed down to listen.

“Both.” Kukala chirped. He settled himself more comfortably between Pohaku’s ears. It looked absurdly like someone sitting into a lazy boy chair.

“Well, when we came to the islands, they were a busy place. People came from all over to enjoy themselves. They would play on the beaches and shop in stores and simply enjoy themselves. People would stay for a few days or a week and then go back to wherever they came from. Lots of people came to Hawaii just to vacation.” Adam said.

“All right, so you came here to, uh, vacation?” Kukala asked. He looked puzzled.

“Sort of. Keahi and I were students in the ways of how people lived in the far past. We were part of a group that was seeking to understand the ways of the people who lived on these islands long before we did. Our instructor was teaching us about these ways and had been bringing us back to where we were living when everything changed.” Adam faltered a little at that last sentence, not knowing what terms the locals used for what the Guidebook had called “The Event”.

“Oh! I know that story! It was passed down from the first Breezies. The humans had no magic, so it became poisonous to them when it came to this world. Friends from a place where magic was everywhere cast a great spell that made it so that the people living here would not get sick and it turned them into ponies and sent most of them traveling through time.” Kukala practically glowed as he related that to us.

“Right, so we were traveling back at night and suddenly it was day and the road was gone and I looked like this and she looked like that.” Adam said, the words tumbling out of him like ice cubes from a dispenser.

“Okay. So if that is what life was like on the islands, what was it like where you come from then?” Kukala asked.

“I can take this one.” I said. “My family is from the middle of the Mainland. It took a long time to fly to the islands from there. The place where I was born is on the edge of a huge mountain range.” I gestured to Mauna Kea. “Kind of like that, only it stretches from horizon to horizon and in the winter, they would all be white with snow. I used to play in it when I was little. When I was ready, I left my home near the mountains and went further east for schooling. I went to a place where summers were green instead of brown and corn was knee-high by the 4th of July, as the farmers liked to say and the land was much flatter. Living on the mainland was very different. There were seasons more than there were here. Winter had snow and ice. Summer was hot. Fall had the leaves on the trees change from green to warm colors. Spring was wet and smelled of growing things. Every year had a pattern, so it was not hard to figure out when you were doing something.”

“We can tell when and time here.” Pohaku commented.

“Yeah, but it is more subtle here than where I was raised.” I said. I was about to say more, but then we emerged on the far side of the saddle between Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa. The contrast from one side of the mountains to the other was astonishing. While the side we had come from was covered in greenery, this side was a patchwork of tans and blacks. There was dry grassland interspersed with barren hunks of basalt from the volcano that had built the island in the first place. In the distance, shrouded in a mantle of steam, I could barely make out a crater.

Pohaku saw me looking. “That’s where we are going.” He said, pointing with a rust-colored hoof. “Mo’iwahine Pele makes her home there. From the crater she can direct the lava flows wherever she pleases and even make fountains burn in the darkness.”

I shivered. I had seen pictures of the famous eruptions with the fountains of lava that dwarfed the sightseeing helicopters that flew around them. I said nothing, only followed our guides down the slope towards the deep hole in the distance. It felt as though the ground beneath my feet was holding its breath. There was a tension in the air as we approached the crater. I wanted to run; run to anywhere but that portal to the underground.

Chapter 19

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Before long, we stood not far from the rim of Hale Ma’uma’u crater. Any remnants of the National Parks headquarters and Volcano House were long gone. Instead there was just a vast caldera. Adam and I glanced at each other. Now what? Pohaku and Kukala walked to the crater’s edge. They called out in their language. It echoed across the vastness below us. I wondered how anything could respond. Suddenly the ground beneath my feet began to tremble. I fell into Adam and we both tumbled to the ground as the earthquake rumbled beneath us. Only Pohaku remained standing with Kukala sitting between his ears. The former looked impassive; the latter looked nervous.

Before long, the cause of the earthquake emerged. I found myself staring up at a dragon the color of obsidian, with red and orange spikes along its back and eyes that glowed like the embers in a bed of coals. It had no wings, but otherwise looked like the classic dragon of European legend. Its long snout was ringed with enough teeth to give a shark a run for its money. I nearly wet myself with fear.

The dragon sized us up one by one. She recognized the locals and gave them a nod. Pohaku gave a bow in return and Kukala waved. “Welcome, young ones. I see you have brought me visitors. What importance do they bear to bring you the risk of breaking taboo? You know why I do not entertain visitors.” The dragon said.

“Mo’iwahine Pele, I do not bring just any visitors here. These two have flown a long way in order to correct a great wrong that was done to you and yours. When long ago, the heart of your domain was stolen from you, you vowed that none could return unless they bore tribute or the item that was lost to you. These visitors have found this item and wish to see it returned.” Hooves of Stone said.

Adam nudged me and I shakily got to my feet. The dragoness -- Mo’iwahine Pele -- watched with interest as I made my way slowly to the rim of the crater. I reached into my saddlebag and pulled out… the Harry Potter book. Adam facehoofed as I scrambled to pull the Makana Stone out of the other side while simultaneously trying to put the book back. After some fumbling, I held the large amulet out to the dragon.

“Ah! I see you tell the truth, Pohaku of the Northern Coast. Tell me, visitor with the head of a bird, where did you find this and how did you know to bring it to me?” the dragon said.

“Gracious Mo’iwahine,” I began, “When my friends and I Returned on O’ahu, my friend and I were visited in dreams by a pony with bat wings. He promised to teach us how to fly as long as we used this gift to see that something he once stole was returned to the volcano from whence it came. He believed that it attracted the attention of enemies from the sea that invaded his home and killed his comrades. When we Returned, there was no one living in what was once a great city and we feared that if the stone remained on our island, we would be the next victims of invaders both ruthless and heartless.” The dragoness nodded and held out a clawed hand. I placed the amulet in the center. Mo’iwahine Pele closed it in her fist and held the fist against her chest. I could have sworn I saw tears in her eyes.

“He was right, but also wrong.” The dragon said in a softer voice than I expected. “He told you to destroy the amulet by throwing it into the volcano, yes?” I nodded reluctantly. The dragon continued. “I thought as much. Destroying the Makana Stone would not have eliminated the threat. The magic it contains is the magic of the ever-burning flame. It was given to the first dragon here as a gift from her distant kin to control the great flows. It cannot be destroyed in such a way. By returning it to me, you have restored my ability to direct the lava flows away from the villages and to parts of the sea that are a threat. I can now rebuild the lava plains that protect the villages from the sea and its monsters as well as create new safe harbors for any sea vessels that seek shelter here. The Makana stone is everything the outsiders aren’t: Warmth, Earth, and Life. More than that, it is hope for the people of Hawai’i and encourages them to keep a light burning amid a dark sea.”

The dragoness held up the gem so its red stone caught the light of the setting sun before placing it in the center of a golden collar-like necklace. As soon as the Makana Stone was placed, the reason for her lack of wings became apparent. Stones from the crater floor rose up into a pair of wings with lava acting as webbing from the tips to her shoulders. She sighed in contentment and murmured, “I am whole again.”

The dragoness folded her new wings and turned to Pohaku and Kukala. “You were brave to guide these visitors here, young ones. I ask only that you guide them safely home. Bring them to the sailors on the coast and tell the captain of the North Star that he is to put himself at their disposal, thus repaying his debt to me.” Our guides both bowed to her.

Pele then turned to us. “Young visitors, I know you are cautious about names. This is wise when one does not know whom to trust. Will you entrust me with the ones you were granted at birth? I like to remember those who aid me.” Adam and I looked at one another, then beckoned the dragoness closer. She leaned toward us and we each murmured our names into her ear. She smiled and nodded. “Smooth seas and clear skies to you both. Oh, and if you find the one whose Harry Potter book you carry, please introduce me. It has been a long time since I got to enjoy the company of a fellow Potterhead.” She grinned. I wondered what Emmy would think of this. She’d be either thrilled… or petrified at the thought of meeting a real dragon.

Adam and I attempted Pohaku’s bow of thanks (not too well if our guide's snort meant anything) before following him and Kukala along a different path leading west. I looked back a couple times to see the dragon staring after us. Eventually she was lost to the steam and smoke of the caldera.

“So, uh, what’s her story?” Adam asked once we were out of earshot. “By the way she talked, she wasn’t born here.”

“You noticed?” Pohaku raised an eyebrow. At Adam’s nod, he continued. “I don’t know all the details, Makani, but I do know that you are right. She appeared out of nowhere as a young dragon a couple centuries ago. She was taken under the wing of the old Mo’iwahine of the island and taught its secrets. When the time came for her to take up her elder’s mantle, the old one went into a deep sleep beneath Mauna Loa. She slumbers there still, perhaps alongside her own mentor in the mountain’s heart.”

“Her own mentor? There has been more than one dragon here?” I asked in surprise.

Pohaku nodded. “It was well before my time that the first dragon appeared here, but we have tales of three great Protectors before the Mo’iwahine you met. It is said that the first one was here since the Beginning and was given the Makana Stone not long after. It was stolen from Mo’iwahine Pele not long after she took over from her predecessor.”

“Wow.” Adam said. I nodded. Although we still weren’t completely sure how long it had been since humans had disappeared, that suggested it had been… a long time. I recalled the guidebook saying dragons could live a millennia or more. Assuming a thousand years per dragon and that a dragon had been here since the beginning… you can do the math, even if Mo’iwahine Pele was only a few centuries old. We’d be lucky to reach half her present age. It made my desire to bring our friends back here even stronger.

Adam must have felt the same way, because he picked up the pace too. Pohaku kept up with us easily as we followed a trail leading northeast, towards whatever remained of Hilo. We ended up camping out that night not far from the old Thurston lava tube. As dusk fell, we could still see a faint orange glow from the direction we came from. Evidently Pele was not wasting any time in reclaiming her territory. I wondered if she would ever make the spectacular fire fountains Kilauea was famous for.

Chapter 20

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We continued our journey towards what was once Hilo. From what our guides said, nopony lived in the actual town, though a few vessels used the old harbor. If Hilo had endured anything like Pearl Harbor and Honolulu, no doubt living directly on the coast was considered too risky. Even when humans were still the dominant species on Earth, Hilo had been vulnerable to storm surges and tsunamis. It took about a day of walking before we reached our destination. The new town, which locals called Hilo Hou, was integrated into the forest above the harbor. A few boats of varying size and pattern were moored along a battered jetty. The largest was a catamaran with a pair of flags: one American, the other a jolly roger pirate flag. Somehow it was no surprise that Pohaku led us straight to that boat.

As Adam and I marveled at the vessel, Pohaku and Kukala had a few quiet words with an earth pony sailor, who then ducked into the ship’s cabin. Moments later, a brightly-colored pegasus came barreling out into the sunlight. He blinked as his eyes adjusted before focusing on us. “Well whip my withers and call me a donkey! The dragon finally found somepony willing to take a ride! Where did y’all come from?”

Adam and I were startled to hear normal English after hearing the strange local pidgin ever since we woke. “Oahu.” I gasped as he wrapped the two of us in a bear hug. The captain was stronger than he looked.

The captain released us. “All righty then, is that where you want me to be takin’ you? I’m up for quite a bit of a sail. Been getting a bit of cabin fever hanging around here too long.”

“Yeah.” Adam said. “Our friends are still back there and we need to check in with them. We should go and show them that we made it through that storm and are still alive.”

“Ha! You led that bit of a blow here? Good, by golly. A little shaking up every once in a while is just what this place needs. Come aboard the North Star and we’ll see what we can do about getting you back to your buddies.” The captain sent the sailor who had spoken with Pohaku towards the village with instructions to “gather the the rats”. The sailor headed up towards the town. By the captain’s grumbles, we gathered his destination was a tavern.

Adam and I clambered aboard. Pohaku and Kukala stayed on the jetty. “Would you like to come with us?” I asked. They both shook their heads. Pohaku stomped a hoof. “I am meant to keep my hooves on solid ground.” He said. “Best of fortune to you.”

“I hope you return to tell more stories.” Kukala said. “My kin and I are not built for sea voyaging, so I will simply wait and hope for your safe return.” The earth pony and the breezie stepped back and waved as the sailor brought two more ponies with him: another pegasus and a unicorn. As soon as they were aboard, the captain gave orders to cast off and make for Oahu. Adam and I did our best to stay out of the crew’s way as they dealt with the nuances of sailing. That meant we ended up standing next to the captain once the boat caught a northerly wind.

“So, you gained the blessing of Mo’iwahine Pele.” The captain said. “That sure is something special, especially for visitors who ain’t from this time. And from Oahu too! Let me guess, you found where the thief of hearts hid his treasure.” He paused when he saw the look of amazement on our faces. “Ha! I thought as much. Nopony can pull the wool over the eyes of Captain Bluegill. Of course,” the captain tipped us a wink, “nobody could do that when I was still Captain Lukas Schwarz either. So how did you do it?”

“It is a long story.” I said. Adam nodded.

“We have a long voyage ahead of us.” The captain said. He settled back on his haunches. “Time enough for a long story.”

Adam and I looked at each other, then launched into our story, starting with our Return. Throughout the course of the tale, Captain Bluegill listened patiently, sometimes asking questions. His sailors all seemed to keep an ear cocked in our direction too. By the time we finished, we were just off the west coast of Molokai. The sun was setting, so the captain had us beach the boat for the night. Adam and I helped his sailors pull the catamaran’s hull far enough so that it could not drift away while we rested.

“That was quite a tale, youngsters. I can see why the two of you want to return to find out the fate of your friends. Tell me, though: have you thought about what you’re going to do next?” The captain asked as we settled down around a small campfire.

“I haven’t thought about it. To be honest, I’ve been so caught up in the here and now, I’ve paid little mind to the next.” I said. I shrugged. “I guess I’ll just wait and see what’s left when we get back and then decide from there.”

“I want to go back to Hawai’i.” Adam said. “No offense to Doc and you and the others, but it’s lonely with just the six of us on Oahu. Most of what people built there is wrecked beyond use and we were barely scraping by with what we could find and what you could catch. If I go back to Hawai’i, I go back to being part of a community. I crave that feeling in a way I can’t define.”

“Herd instinct.” The captain commented. “It’s why I keep my boat along the coast rather than sailing further on a regular basis. Ponies ain’t meant to live in isolation. We depend on each other for safety, but also for sanity. I’ve heard rumors of ponies who Return alone losing their minds. Ever since, the ponies of Hawai’i have done their best to welcome visitors.”

“The ponies in the north seemed more wary and suspicious than welcoming.” I said wryly.

“When you landed, you were carrying with you a powerful piece of magic. They didn’t know if you brought them ill will or salvation. If you went back now, I suspect you’d find a very different reception.” Captain Bluegill pointed out. I nodded to show that I conceded the point.

“All right then.” The captain stretched a bit before settling back down. “I’ll stand first watch. Curly, you take second; Snow, third; Ruby, fourth. You can sleep a bit once we’re moving again. All right ponies and griffon. Sleep well!” The sailors all rolled up in blankets and fell asleep almost immediately. I pulled together mine into a sort of nest and started to drift off myself. Before I let sleep claim me, I heard Adam talking quietly with the captain. Though I couldn’t understand his words, they lulled me to sleep all the same.

Chapter 21

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The next morning, I woke to the smell of something sizzling on the campfire. One of the sailors, Snow I think, was cooking. I got up; he gave me a toothy grin showing a couple of gold teeth. “I got some fish in the nets yesterday. Wanna have some? There’s plenty to go around.” I licked my lips and nodded. Snow passed me a fish on a stick. It was the first fresh fish I had eaten since leaving Oahu and it was delicious. I ate two more before Adam stumbled over to the fire. He opted to avoid the fish, as did Ruby and Curly, but the captain and the other pegasus ate with as much gusto as I did.

“You guys eat fish?” Adam asked. “I thought ponies couldn’t digest it.”

“Ponies can eat meat and fish as long as it’s not too fatty. Most ponies avoid it altogether; we don’t need it to survive, but some pegasi still fish. It provides more energy than other things do, and we need as much as we can get when flying, especially when the weather is poor.” Snow said, licking the last bits of salt from his lips. “Of course, when we catch stuff to sell along the coast, the little stuff gets used as fertilizer, while the really tasty stuff feeds those who do need it, like your friend here.” He waved a wing at me.

“I guess. We just never had enough to spare for the ponies to experiment with our diets much. One more reason to not stay on Oahu.” Adam said.

“Well, let’s go find out if there is anyplace left to stay there first.” I said. We all finished our meal and then worked together to push the North Star off the beach. The sailors tacked our way west until we spotted the coast of Oahu on the northern horizon. As we approached, the view did not look promising. My heart fell a little as I saw that parts of the coast were splotched with a dead gray appearance. Captain Bluegill said not a word as he brought the boat in to a stretch of beach just east of Diamond Head. The beach he chose was somehow pristine enough to land safely. He and the sailors decided to remain with the boat while Adam and I took off to see what we could find, if anything.

We flew over the rim of the crater and landed in the dust not far from where we had buried Mary and Slickwing. The ramp of tailings that Doc had built up to the shelter cave had been scattered, but the platform was still there. Adam and I flew up and between the two of us managed to shove the outer door away from the entrance. The way was lit only by the light coming through the doorway. Adam and I walked over to the inner door. Adam knocked; I held my breath in anticipation.

Suddenly, as if from a distance, I heard voices coming from behind the door. They were muffled, but familiar all the same. “Who’s there?” Came a shaky voice that I recognized as Trish. “It’s us, Trish. Zoe and Adam.” I called.

“Really? Um, all right. If you are really Zoe, tell me what I was going to get as a tattoo and where after I got home from field school.” Trish said.

I thought for a moment, then smiled. “You were going to get a tattoo of ‘Eleven loves Trish forever’ done in circular Gallifreyan. You were going to get it on the upper left side of your chest because, and I quote your letter here, ‘that is the closest I can get to a tattoo over my heart’.” I could hear Adam smothering laughter and I could imagine Trish turning bright red on the other side of the door.

“Um… okay… you got that right, but how do I know that is Adam with you?” Trish stuttered.

“Is Doc there? I know more about him than anyone else.” Adam said. There was silence. Instead the door was shoved aside. In the hideaway, I could see three ponies: Trish, Nic, and Emmy. Emmy’s horn was flickering and there was a dead flashlight in the center of the room. Doc was nowhere to be seen. Seeing sunlight behind us, the others followed us to the mouth of the cave. We sat overlooking the crater.The others looked around, surveying what damage was visible.

“So where’s Doc?” Adam asked.

“We don’t know.” Emmy said. “He kind of went a little stir crazy after you left. Started talking about his daughter and how she needed him. During the lull, he shoved the door open despite our best efforts to stop him. I’m not sure where he went though.”

“The Name Cave.” Adam said. “That’s the only place I can think of that had evidence of his daughter. Her name was carved there from one of the old groups. I’m going down. Parrothead, do you think you can get everypony else back on solid ground?” I nodded. “Fill them in on what we found, wouldja?. I’ll come back after I’ve checked for Doc.” Before I could say anything he had glided down from the rickety platform.

“Yes, tell us everything. After all, you had five nights with Adam all to yourself” Trish said in a voice that was almost a purr. I rolled my eyes. I carried her down first, fear of heights be damned, just so I wouldn’t have to listen to the teasing. Not long after all three of them were safely on the ground, Adam came out of the Name Cave. He was shaking so hard I could see his feathers moving. I took a few glide-assisted bounds over to him, followed by three galloping ponies.

“What’s wrong?” “What happened?” “Are you okay?” “Did you find Doc?” The questions tumbled over each other as we approached. Adam nodded and crumpled to the ground, sobbing. I pulled him into a hug with my wings around him while Emmy led the others into the cave. I could see her horn flickering. I didn’t say anything, just let Adam cry into my feathers. A few minutes later, Trish came out. Her ears were drooping.

“What is it?” I asked, feeling a hole in the pit of my stomach.

“Doc… is gone. We found where he had been and there must have been a cave-in. Nic and Emmy are trying to dig him out now.” Trish trembled as she told me the news.

“Oh.” I said. “Goddamnit all. He was a good guy.”

Trish nodded. “There’s more.” She said. “I looked at the wall across from him. He’d carved not only the names of that Slickwing’s comrades from the records, but…” She took a deep breath. “He carved our names too. And our hometowns. He wanted… he wanted us to be remembered just like all the others who Returned here were. But he didn’t… he didn’t carve his own name. Just ours. ” Trish bit her lip. “It’s like… he knew.”

I opened my wings wider and drew her into the hug. Adam made room and I held them both close as the tears streamed down my face. I watched as Emmy and Nic emerged from the Name Cave, carrying Doc’s body. They saw us and gave a grim nod. Emmy looked exhausted from holding the light for the group ever since the last flashlight had gone, but she still had enough in her to help Nic dig a grave for our mentor.

When our embrace finally broke, I looked around at what we had. Judging by what the storm had done, the only things we had left were the precious objects and what little food we had carried to our shelter at Diamond Head. And ourselves. Our herd. Our family. “It’s time to go.” I said. “We should leave this place to the dead and rejoin the living.”

“Let me do something first.” Adam said quietly. I nodded. He vanished into the cave and came out with Doc’s field knife. Above the cave entrance, he carved “Ohana means family. Family means no one is left behind, or forgotten.” Afterwards he stuck the knife blade-first into the sand, its hilt within reach of anyone who came after. “Doc’s name is with ours now too.” He said.

With that,and a few words and tears shed over Doc’s grave, we left. Adam flew ahead to tell Captain Bluegill that we were going back to Hawai’i with him. I flew up to the shelter and retrieved our treasures: the seeds Emmy had saved from the fruits she had scavenged, the fishing nets and traps that Nic had helped me and Doc make, Trish’s sonic screwdriver, my Jimmy Buffett album, and the USS Arizona brass trombone that Adam had taken before we left. We left Doc’s stash of gemstones where it was. It felt wrong to take it with us. I scattered a few of the smaller trinkets over the sand of the grave. Maybe some future archaeologist would find them and Doc. The idea would have made our archaeology professor smile. I led our pony friends in silence to where the captain had moored the North Star. He raised an eyebrow at our approach, but said nothing.

As we set sail back to Hawai’i, I sat on the stern next to Adam. We watched the facade of Diamond Head recede in the distance. I sang softly into the breeze, my voice soon joined by the others’: “Aloha ‘oe, aloha ‘oe, Aloha ʻoe, E ke onaona noho i ka lipo. One fond embrace, A hoʻi aʻe au. Until we meet again.” I let the wind carry the song away as we left for our new home.

Parrothead in Paradise

by PastCat

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21