Coy Fish
Bluegill Brine was asleep when the rumbles started. They rippled through the water, then through her head and tail fins, tingling her scar until she sat up. Brine thought it was just a seaquake until she realized she'd been reclining on her back. Whatever quake was happening, it was coming from the Land. In Brine's experience, Land disturbing Sea was very bad.
The rumbles came again.
Gurgling with apprehension, Brine darted from her reef hovel, twirling around in the shallows. Night. No sun to act as a guide, but the Bright Tower on the cliff was still shining down. Brine found most Land things confusing and scary, but the Bright Tower wasn't one of them. Okay, maybe how it shined was a little confusing, but it definitely wasn't scary. Whenever the sun went down or the fog got thick or the clouds got stormy, the Bright Tower turned on and gave Brine something warm to look up to. Right now it was illuminating the source of the rumbles: a massive twisted machine barreling across the clifftop.
Brine gurgled with horror as the machine slammed into the Bright Tower. Metal on stone echoed over the water and a hideously huge crack split the point of impact, base to light source.
Brine had been a small fry when she first found the Bright Tower. She'd been less than three days hatched, alone and drifting. There had been other hatchlings with her, at the beginning, but they'd each been quicker or stronger and before long they'd swam off and left her behind. Nothing remained in the open water, not even waves, so the fry who would one day call herself Brine poked her head out of the endless water. Just to see if the world really had washed away without her.
It hadn't. Near the horizon, a tiny drifting flame caught her lonely eye. With nothing else to swim towards, she'd paddled hard and fast. Brine's memories of arriving in the bay were spotty due to how young and exhausted she was when she arrived. She had nopony to confirm this, but that first flame seemed to have broken away from the Bright Tower, not actually be part of the tower itself. She recalled it passing over her head as she swam, like a lantern in flight. Fantastical, but she'd probably never find out what it was. And either way, Brine had made it. Strength fully spent and coastline finally in sight, Brine had slipped under the breaking surf, light from the Bright Tower's beacon guiding her towards a seaweed bed in the soft sand below.
The mechanical monster was backing up, and Brine dared to hope it would pivot to go away. Then it rammed the Bright Tower again, tearing the wall away and causing the beacon's light to sputter. Brine gurgled fearfully, mournfully, and her scar throbbed as it always did when her heart rate was up. But the turmoil of Maretime Bay's only Sea Pony was drowned out by the roar of engines and crumbling of brickwork. Her precious Tower and the monster attacking it were both on Land. The one place Brine couldn't go, even if she had the bravery and brawn to defend the light. But she didn't. Brine had nothing. All she could do was bob like a helpless buoy as glass cracked and the beacon, the only companion she'd ever had, snuffed out forever.
Somepony was panic whinnying. It wasn't Brine, whose lack of lungs was already making her lightheaded and fuzzy from her head being above water this long. She ducked down and rubbed her eyes with her forefins, gulping gillfuls of water while trying to get accustomed to the sudden gloom. When Brine resurfaced, a second whinny had joined the first, both voices coming from two flailing, four-legged shapes clinging to the side of exposed rooms. The sight of them made Brine cower in the dark water, her inexperienced mind racing. She knew Land Ponies made machines. Every twelve moons they all gathered together to show off new ones made in the town's biggest building. So what was all of this? Machines... frightened Land Ponies... the Bright Tower... Brine's precious, obliterated Bright Tower...
Another rumble, the loudest and last of them all, frothed the breaking waves around Brine. She looked up in time to see the metal monster topple over onto the ground. The Bright Tower toppled too, but in the opposite direction: it was throttling down toward the bay. Brine couldn't physically scream, but the wreckage crashed down on top of her before she would have had time to anyway.
Brine was a small fry again. Watching the Land Ponies gathering for another annual machine showcase. She'd only been here two years, but both of the town's previous gatherings had been in the giant building further inland. Never on the beach. Some smirking red colt was settling down behind the wheel of the main attraction: a sailboat with no sails. Brine's instincts told her to stay away, far from sight, but curiosity was too strong to resist. Who knew when so many Land Ponies would be so near again? Beach gatherings didn't happen every year, after all.
And so Brine slithered through the muddy shallows. Flat on her stomach, far from the surface, yet close enough to hear the Land Ponies making excited murmuring sounds. Rightfully so, since the average everymare could only speculate on the inner workings of a sailboat with no sails! Brine, in a unique position to ponder, guessed that the boat moved with limbs like she did. Daintily, she drifted under its hull to explore, befuddled when she didn't find any fins.
The boat's propeller found her though.
Flesh flayed from fishbone as Maretime Bay went from having one Sea Pony to having three quarters of one. The shallows choked with red clouds and shredded scales so Brine's flailing, crippled retreat was more of a blind delirious dash. Her insides, better described as 'outsides' now, were searing and spasming from the sting of saltwater exposure. Then she finally went numb from shock.
None of the Land Ponies noticed the carnage below. Too much attention being commanded by the snazzy speedboat driving deftly down the coastline. Still, if any donned a snorkeling mask to look, they'd have seen chopped chunks of chum, some shredded scraps of Sea Pony tailfin, and an inky ichorous cloud billowing from the gutted gasping victim. Pale as a ghost from blood loss, the mangled mess of Brine's body sank into a hole in the nearby reef, darkness thick and inviting as a grave. There she huddled, arm across her chest to hold in the innards she still had. Sporadic spasms shook her body. Some were jolts from exposed nerve endings. Most were labored beats from her weakened heart.
Spiritually, Brine never really left that hovel. Physically, she slunk out from the reef a few nights later.
The Bright Tower was active that evening. Its light swept back and forth as it surveyed the bay. One pass refracted the water near the seaweed bed, where a starving Sea Pony tore a trembling mouthful of aquatic grass. From temple to tailtip, a clot of scaleless shredded skin disfigured the entire left side of her body.
Brine stayed away from Land for a long time after that.
The roar of continuing rubble jolted Brine back to her senses, and she dove down towards the sea floor with the Bright Tower's ruins still splashing down around her. Water rushed past her ears as she rocketed, loud but not loud enough to drown the roar of the pursuing wreckage nor the phantom remembered whir of boat propeller.
Never again.
Brine's scar ached from exertion, and knowing it was there supercharged her swimming.
Never ever again.
With the bottom of the bay suddenly in sight, Brine's instincts knew to start dodging. A colossal shadow loomed over her, so she veered hard to her right. An instant later, a section of wall plunged harmlessly into the sand where she'd just been. Brine breached upwards, rushing tailcurrent only barely rippling her headfin as she twirled deftly away. Other sections of the Bright Tower were spiraling down too, but none landed even close to nearby. Brine trilled in wordless celebration, back arched and face rapturously lifted to the unobstructed moon above.
Brine was a fish who had never been introduced to the concept of glass, so when a monstrous, invisible weight suddenly smashed her nose in she was too stunned to react. Before she knew it, Brine was pinned to the muck by a ring of window panels she could neither see nor understand. All she knew was they were hot. And heavy. And slowly squeezing the life from her gills as she feebly pushed against them.
Her scar ached. Everything ached, but still the panels didn't move. Brine flopped like the dying fish she was, gurgling with panic, then fury, then defiance of those uncaring, unknowing, unreachable Land Ponies.
Up above, on the cliffside of Maretime Bay, Sunny Starscout joined three gemstones together in ancient formation.
Brine gasped as a tangible pulse of energy fizzled the water around her. Was the world more luminous? Or was she more luminous? Brine felt like she'd just become her own Bright Tower, her own furnace of encouragement and resolve. Not that she was aware, but the ring of windows around her had indeed been the top of the lighthouse and her spot in their middle was where the broken former beacon had been. Unlike the former beacon though, Brine wasn't destined to be enclosed. With renewed strength, she heaved away the tower top and wriggled to the surface.
Somehow, the sky was bright when Brine broke the surface. Dawn? Magic? Both? She was too buzzed to make sense of the landscape. A blunted stump remained where the Bright Tower had been, but more gripping than that were the Land Ponies clustered around it: They were flying.
Okay maybe not all of them, but a good third were flapping wings Brine'd never seen before. It was dazzling for a creature of the sea to see creatures of the land become creatures of the sky. The world had changed, that much was clear. From her spot far below in the bay, Brine flapped her rapturous fins, wanting nothing more than to soar up and join them.
Nothing happened. She was still just a fish.
Some other ponies, ones who weren't flying, had magic swirls around their heads. Around their manes. Around their horns. Brine felt her own forehead, hoping for some surprise transformation there, but her face was featureless. Aside from the old scar that started near her cheek, anyway.
Brine's eyes burned, both from tears and air exposure. What force of nature was it that hated her so much? A grand thing had clearly just happened. A momentous, mystifying thing. But like every earthshaking event on Land, Brine was been left out of it. No, she was worse than left out; just like at the beach expo, she'd gotten curious and hopeful and the Land nearly killed for her daring to poke her head out.
Brine slipped back underwater, cursing the ocean even as it filled her gills and brought her breath back. Down she drifted to mingle with the broken ruins of the Bright Tower. They littered the sea floor, a reminder she had nothing to look up to now. All of Brine's hopes were sunken, down below in the mud.
She paddled listlessly towards her hovel only to find the reef wasn't there anymore. Scattered shells and chunks of coral drifted near an impact crater of broken brick. With nowhere to go and nothing left, Brine held her tail in her forelimbs. Would her own body dissolve too now? What else could possibly bring her any lower?
Something crinkled Brine's dorsal fin, and she reflexively spun around. She'd backed into the glass window ring again, now settled upright on the sea floor like a squat cylindrical fence. Since the panels were warm instead of scalding now, Brine reclined against them to watch the last of the Tower's detritus settle around her. There were books soaked to the point of illegibility. There were canned vegetables that Brine had no need for, even if she knew what they were. Clothing fell like snow along with shoes, hair ties, and even a set of roller skates. All meaningless belongings of whoever had lived here.
Brine tilted her head up, still able to see the soaring shapes of Pegasi in the sky. If there was any hope of salvation left, she felt it being carried away by the current, alongside all the scattered junk around her.
Then a rounded fishbowl, just big enough for Brine's head, landed in her lap.