In which Wilson meets land, but gives no formal greeting.
Pride in the tide, the moon will not hide, for the ocean is her plaything, Water deep blue, whom time never knew, will cease its weighty resting, Moon full of love, in ink-sky up above, extends soft hands for greeting, And shorelines flee to the sea-foam’s glee, unprepared for violent meeting.
Tidewaters rose, scouring beachheads of white and brown and black with their borrowed power. All that stood against the might of gravity was washed away, torn from the land of the terrestrial and sucked beneath into the swirling blue half-light of the deep. Sand, coconuts, palm fronds, driftwood, shells, the occasional corpse—none were safe as long as the moon exerted its forceful tearing and tugging and dragging, threatening to rip all that is, was, and will be into the oblivion of indiscriminate vacuum.
And yet those who walk the earth feel nothing.
Monstrously gentle, La Luna Belleza hangs on rope weaved from the stars, dead to the universe at large but gleaming with gorgeous life to all who observe from below. Only the immortal can truly appreciate the moon for what it was: an equal, a rival, a lover, and a friend.
If Wilson could, he would have loved the moon, but he couldn’t.
Water lapped upon land’s doorstep, and he was displaced, crunching and pushing sand aside at every fateful meeting.
Rush forward. Pull back. Rush forward. Pull back.
Rush forward… Roll back.
The night was young, and the moon was full, and the endless cycle of greeting the shoreline then kissing it goodbye continued. Movement was constant, not disturbing in the least. Wilson was not seasick.
Wilson had no stomach.
Time, the great irrelevant beast, passed, and the tide ran back to Mother Ocean with many a new playmate in its soggy clutches.
Wilson was not among them. Fading blood dried slowly in the stagnant, tropical night, and the stars spun overhead: a gleaming show of light meant only for the gods.
Wilson was no god. Wilson had no god. Wilson did not see.
But the show happened nonetheless, and all that mattered was he was there.
He was there for the whirling dance of starlight through space.
He was there when Granny Moon met Mother Ocean in a slow, enveloping embrace, wrenching the shining matriarch from the sky an inch at a time.
He was there as light crept over the horizon, beating back the lovely, gripping darkness.
He was there for the heralding of life—seabirds and crabs and odd, prowling boars. Kicking about dew-drenched sand under the rising sun, snuffling and snorting at his blood-streaked form, and rooting, pecking, heckling along the beach, they searched for a meal, each passing Wilson by after only a brief, intimate examination.
Wilson was inedible.
Time stomped ever onward, and all was well and good—for Wilson was there—until along came The Whistling.
Long and sad, The Whistling was.
Somber notes rang out amongst the waves, casting clouds over the sun and blotting out the obscenely cheerful blue sky. All that heard It trembled and cried along with the lonely, keening howl; all except Wilson.
Wilson just sat because Wilson couldn’t move because Wilson was immortal, like the sea and the moon and the stars.
The Whistling approached, and along with it came a voice:
“Livin’ on the edge—you can’t help yo’self from faaa-lin’
Livin on the edge—you can’t help yo’self at a-all!
Livin’ on th—Hello! What’s this?”
Wilson was kicked, plowing a shallow channel in the grit and bright white bird-scat of the beachhead. One, final Whistle tore the ocean air, and then all that was left was the voice.
“A… hoofball? What the hay?” Another kick, softer this time, and Wilson rolled mask-up, red blood of LIFE glaring at the now overcast sky. A figure loomed above, stringy, matted hair hanging like a cascade of moss from a wrinkled, elongated muzzle. Pointed, asymmetrical ears swiveled backward, and a pair of enormously expressive eyes widened in shock. “Oh Celestia, is that blood?”
Yes. Yes it was.
Very observant.
Wilson was lifted. Bits of sand clung to his surface like apes clutching at the sides of a hot air balloon. Some fell, screaming their silent screams all the way down, and soon Wilson found himself surrounded by scratchy, green burlap.
Motion. Undulating and bouncing and swaying—like the waves—he moved again to the soft *phut-phut-phut* of footsteps in sand. Soothing…
“Hello?! Is there anypony out there?! Are ya hurt?!”
… not so soothing…
Moving became erratic. Bouncing and beating and thrashing, Wilson was carried onward on the back of some creature: a very old, excited beast.
“Blood… B-Blood means ponies—Hellooooo!—ponies mean *huff* ships—Any-*wheeze* Anypony?!—ships mean rescue—Please, answer me!”
The beach rushed by in a blur of bright, mingling colors while hoof-beats pounded along with the sound of the surf—all punctuated by the sound of yelling, panting, and whinnying.
Apparently, Wilson was on a horse. Why? Wilson didn’t know because he couldn’t know because it didn’t matter.
All was well.
“Please! *sob* ANYpony?!”
Quite well, indeed.
Eventually, the uncomfortable motion ceased. The sun, All-father and Life-Giver, was sinking, and the old, talking equine gave up.
“I give… I g-give up.”
He gave up, and under the dying light of another immortal, Wilson was carried into the dense foliage of the grand desert island: one of many.
Anonymous Island—population: one.
Wilson didn’t count himself. Wilson couldn’t count.
He was only on an island because the equine said so. He was “on an island” situated in the “middle of bucking nowhere” alone with “Sandcolt.”
The equine—Sandcolt—talked to itself quite a bit, not that Wilson could hear him.
Wilson had no ears, but nonetheless he was there.
“Oh Sandy, why? Why did’ja git yer sill hopes up and run around all day instead of gathering food?” Wilson’s perch swayed as “Sandy” ducked under an immense, toppled palm propped upon several of its steadfast brothers. “Now you’ll have to go ‘ungry, tonight, you foal, you…” Weighty eyes fell upon Wilson. “And so will yer odd guest.”
It had been many a month since Wilson had been addressed as one of the living, and now that he was considered alive he did what he did best: nothing.
Conversation often escalated from there.
“Oh no, don’t apologize,” the old creature continued on his own. “It weren’t yor’ fault. How was I s’posed to know ya weren’t from some rescue ship er’other?” Another jostle, and the jungle thinned, reverting into a small clearing plagued with one inhabitant. With a dull thump, Wilson was discarded upon the fertile jungle peat under a rickety lean-to. The small structure was blotted out the maroon-tinged sky, and, though it looked ramshackle and maybe a little unsafe, it was dry: weaved palm fronds and ashen moss made sure of that.
The equine loomed above, silhouetted in the dying light of Wilson’s first day ashore in ages. It was a light tannish color, not unlike his own sun-bleached surface, and sported a respectable beard, scraggly, white and rough to match its mane. Old, experienced eyes—the same color as the ocean—blinked, and Sandy Sandcolt snorted incredulously.
“I’m talkin’ to a hoofball… Luna-be-damned.” Sediment-caked muzzle met grit-coated stitch work. “A hoofball covered ‘n blood… that kinda looks like a face.” Sandy ran a hoof along Wilson’s seams, loosening bits of palm frond from the slit above his mask. “Soggy palm-leaves… as hair?” After a moment of contemplation, the tan pony chuckled and shook its misshapen head. “You’re an odd one, Sandy, imaginin’ things look like faces.”
Wilson found himself in the air again, hefted and flipped and spun about in one, deft motion before coming to a rest, still in the air, still between a pair of equine hooves, and still very much not alive. “Hold up, Sandy—whadda we have here?”
A beetle scuttled across the dirt below, leaving a trail of tiny footprints.
Wilson, nor Sandcolt, noticed.
“Wuh… Wuh-ill-sun?”
For a moment, they were one in the same for their obliviousness: except for one small detail…
“Will… Wilson.”
Hot breath blew against Wilson’s plastic shell, condensing and exaporating away in mere seconds, never to return, and he was turned mask-up once more. Sandy stared down at him with wide, quizzical eyes. They were so full of life, burning like twin stars of deep blue on the edge of catastrophic supernova: preparing to collapse into the void.
“Wilson?”
The light would soon dim. Flesh would rot, and teeth would crumble under the marching boots of time. Sandy—no matter the protest—would die one day… but not Wilson.
In which there is much bleeding, and Wilson is rescued from nothing.
“Wilson!”
Minnows darted about the shallow pool, weaving in and out and around green algae and sharp, igneous stone. Among the wispy green and silt-laden brown they swarmed—unaware of Wilson’s net.
Wilson had a net. He neither made it, nor purchased it.
He was given possession… a gift of sorts.
The net was Wilson’s because Sandy said it was, but he didn’t care, and neither did the minnows.
“Wiiiilsoooon!”
Weaved from palm fibers and sinew from a deceased boar, the net was a beautiful representation of craftsmanship, patience, and ingenuity—the traits of a creature with a lot of time on its… hooves.
Wilson had no hooves; Wilson couldn’t move, and yet Wilson was fishing.
He was fishing because Sandy said he was.
Hoofsteps in the sand. “How’s the fishing going, Wilson?” Sandcolt questioned, jovial. He loomed above, gazing into the tide pool at the minnows still relishing in their dim, thoughtless freedom. “Not so well, eh? M’done getting’ coconuts, so lemme give ya a hoof wi’that.” Down descended a tan muzzle, wreathed in scraggly hair, to grab the net between rotting teeth. A quick jerk of the neck, and five pounds of hoof-made rope, clinging mud, and wriggling fish sailed above Wilson’s fishing spot, landing in a neat heap on Sandy’s withers. “G’job Wilson,” the fishercolt praised, old eyes twinkling with comfortable dementia.
Three tallies. It had taken three tallies for Wilson to go from “hoofball” to “bumpy, round companion”: a new record.
It usually only took a few minutes.
Some would say Wilson had charisma. They would be wrong, of course. Wilson had no charisma: Wilson was without personality… but he was a good listener. When one is without the ability to hear, listening was the easiest thing in the world.
“You’re a good lis’ner, yeh know that, Wilson?”
He didn’t.
“The sun’ll be settin’ soon…” Sandy observed, gazing along endless blue horizon. Suddenly, his countenance became sheepish and he pawed at the sand, avoiding Wilson with his eyes. “I uh… I got something to give yeh.” Blushing and muttering, the elderly stallion kicked Wilson from his perch at the edge of the pool, and, carrying the net on his withers and a peck of coconuts at his sides, he juggled his silent friend along the path into the jungle, bumping and bouncing and spraying sand. The motion was irregular, not like the soft, drifting waves of Mother Ocean—uncomfortable; not befitting an immortal.
Wilson didn’t mind, however. He didn’t have a mind…
Yet, with a little help from the outside, he moved.
“Y’know I don’t understand you, Wilson.”
Blood.
“Yer bumpy an’ white, like a volleyball… tha’s a Gryphonic sport…”
Sliding and gliding, red and black, LIFE and death—Blood.
“But if yeh are a volleyball, then what’s up with the palm mane… an’ the blood, huh? What’s up with tha’?”
Sandcolt’s hooves were heavy, clumsy and uneven from countless years of growth, but careful, spreading sticky LIFE in all the correct places.
Places of wet-living gone dry; familiar places, old places, new places...
The mask, faded under the wind, time and the endless rocking surf, was returning. Wilson’s oval face—curved-olive eyes, straight, anxious mouth of nylon seams—grew dark once more under cover of moonlight.
“An’ how in Celestia’s sweet porcelain flanks d’ja get out here, in southern waters? Yeh oughta be frozen in a block a’ ice up in featherhead territory er somethin’ like that.”
The quadruped’s breath carried the scent of fish, raw and cloying, but that was not where he got the blood. No: he ate the minnows for protein on a barren island. The mindless don’t have LIFE for Wilson, anyway.
Sandy gave the traveler a gift from the pulsing veins of his left foreleg; a most intimate gift to a single, quiet friend: one that would only ever be appreciated in the elderly stallion’s own mind. Sandy loved himself through Wilson, and that was fine.
All was well in the deep, red night.
Flickering firelight cast ink-black shadows upon Sandcolt’s face. Flowing like oil, settling into the cracks and crevices of dry age like water seeping into the parched earth of an arid wasteland, the shadows waited.
For a moment, in his damp offering, Sandy was young.
The painter shook his weary head and showed off his perishing teeth with a lopsided grin. “Fine, don’t tell me! I’ll jus’ have ta wonder forever, eh?”
Forever was a long time, but Wilson supposed—he didn’t—that eternity was relative, so he was silent. All around, the sound of night ululated under the lusty gaze of the moon, pouring and filling and encompassing Wilson.
Noise flowing into blood; into mask; into face.
Sandy gave Wilson a gift, and, in return, he would receive what he needed most: virtual companionship.
And probably counseling...
Time crawled ever onward.
The cave was covered in tallies, lines in groups of five—four parallel and one striking through—that marked the inexorable passage of time. They coated the ceiling and the walls, stalagmites and stalactites, wood and stone, outside and in.
Magnificently flat, they were. Time was flat and Wilson was round; so he rolled along, leaving all who would know him behind.
Except Mother Ocean, and Matriarchs Sun and Moon: they were always there.
Wilson’s mask was new. New and beautiful like the 1976th, 1977th, and 1978th tallies, etched onto a palm log that was dragged inside the cave over one hundred tallies ago. Sandcolt’s blood was
and dark and everlasting and Wilson would love him if he could... but it was impossible. That was why the old equine was gone: left at first light one tally ago—left Wilson in the cave of time.
So Wilson waited.
Sunlight faded, returned, faded again, and in the night Wilson’s old charge returned. Slowly, sifting dirty, blood-caked hooves through ancient sand, he came, entering the cave like a crimson-splattered wraith fresh from the grave. Sandcolt stumbled dizzily, caught himself, and approached the log in the center of the cave; approached Wilson. Tradition was to be upheld.
Wilson sat sentinel to the recording, as he had done on many a day in the past and would continue to do every day in the conceivable future. Wilson sat… because he could not stand.
Sandcolt, ceremonial stone in hoof, carved three tallies into the rotting lumber of the once majestic palm tree that was now the temporary keeper of time: alone in the dark, bleeding silently. Soon the job was done, and Sandy settled onto his back with a heavy wheeze. His mane gritted and flowed upon the dirt, and with a turn of his head he cast leaden eyes toward Wilson, whose duty was finished for the day.
Wilson sat, and Sandcolt stared. They stayed like that for a long time.
Naturally, the mortal broke first.
“I had a wife yeh’know, and a daughter… pretty mares, the both of ‘em.”
Wilson didn’t know. He still didn’t.
The prone stallion shifted, eyes losing focus. His voice was weak: a whisper in the winds of waning existence. “Lane Dancer and Breezy. Lane named the little one—Sea Breeze—and I always thought it was just a li’l too romantic. Heh… My only companions were the breeze and myself ‘til you came along. How’s that for romantic?”
Raising a foreleg into the glowing moonlight, Sandy addressed Wilson with a look. “I did it yesterday, but I woke up. It di’n’t work, Wilson.” The aged colt was crying now, thin tears streaming from blighted, scarred irises, wetting the grit and the sand below. “W-Why? I don’t want this anymore, Wilson! Why di’n’t it work?!”
Wilson didn’t know.
A tally passed, and Sandcolt lived.
Mortals burned, and Wilson melted.
“Wilson? I’m goin’ out to the cave fer a bit. Don’t go anywhere, kay?”
Coals cooled slowly under the lean-to, and Wilson didn’t go anywhere. Smoke didn’t bother him, and he was far enough away from the glowing embers of last night’s warmth, dinner and protection that the eternal plastic of his dulled casing was safe from seeping away.
Not that it mattered, anyway.
The palm log had been exhausted long ago—a testament to the mercilessness of time—and Sandcolt found a new cave. It was halfway up the rocky mortal in the center of Anonymous Island, almost a tally’s journey up the cliff face and back. Sandy spaced his trips by seven tallies, keeping track on a shaft of driftwood until he would make the climb.
It had to be done, for it was tradition. Time must be catalogued; its sins recorded so that others may know how Sandy was wronged.
“Sorry, Wilson, but you know you can’t come. Just… guard the coconuts. I’ll be back tonight.”
Scarred hooves trudged away, kicking aside the driftwood counter and disappearing through the low, prickly underbrush toward Mt. Mortal. Sandy hadn’t bled in over a hundred tallies, and the long, sickle-shaped scars would fade in about a hundred more.
Wilson’s mask had begun to chip away since first gift, but that was of little consequence.
All was well.
The sun traveled across the sky, reaching its vertex and dipping back toward the ocean, and Wilson felt nothing. Ashes, still warm, stirred softly in the breeze.
A bird cackled, and Sandcolt returned early.
“Fire!Fire,fire, fire, fire,fire,fire!”
Sand sprayed over Wilson’s mask as the yelling colt skidded into camp, eyes wild and hooves flying. He was bleeding again: the red fluid drenched his withers from a gash hidden beneath his frayed mane. Wasting no time—the monster would be proud—Sandy clutched at the fire-stones with invisible fingers, bringing them to bear on the ashy pit… only to freeze.
“Kindling!”
Moment’s later, the equine returned with a muzzle-full of dried palm fronds and mosses. Spitting them unceremoniously into the pit, he nearly buried Wilson in his scramble to retrieve his fire-stones again.
*CRACK* Stones met in a violent crash, and sparks rained upon Sandy’s dead fire.
“Light damn you.”
*CRACK-CRACK* More sparks, and still nothing.
“LIGHT! WRAU-GH!” The stallion let out an unearthly yowl of frustration, bringing both stones—one midnight-black and the other a shining silver—together one final time.
The ebony stone shattered, showering sparks and slivers of jagged rock about the camp. Wilson was peppered with flying splinters, and Sandcolt was bleeding from his nose.
But then there was fire.
Screaming in triumph, Sandy snatched a flaming palm frond from the pit and darted away, breathing heavily through his bubbling, bleeding nostrils. Thumping hoofbeats faded into the distance, and the relative silence of the island returned.
Fire crackled in the pit, eating away at what little kindling Sandy had left behind, and Wilson lay on his side… or his face? Wilson was a lumpy sphere, but a sphere nonetheless.
Wilson had no sides. Wilson took no sides. Yet Wilson was often SET aside.
The sun sank lower, and in the growing twilight, an orange-red phenomena grew brighter to the south. Excited shouting rode the sea wind inland, and, though Wilson could not hear it, it spoke the prophesy of an end… and a new beginning.
“Help! Help! I’m right here! Please! I’m right HERE!”
Wilson was alone.
Night had come, and the orange-red light still burned on the southern sands of Anonymous Island.
Sandcolt no longer prophesized on the beach. The ailing, bleeding stallion was gone, and Wilson could not feel lonely. Wilson could not feel, and that absolutely didn’t make him sad. It wasn’t wrong… but it wasn’t right, either.
An animal wailed in the distance, and choruses of insects cried their sympathy to the humid night.
Wilson was alone and he could not mourn, so the jungle mourned for him.
Dawn was almost upon him when the voices came.
“Helmspony, Richter! We don’t have much time left before the tide recedes! Get back here!” shrieked the first female voice ever to grace Wilson’s mask, cutting through the grieving creatures of Anonymous—now Wilson’s—Island.
“The old pony said something about a colt named Wilson!” rumbled a second voice: deep, gruff, and unmistakably male. “There could be somepony else out here!”
“Three minutes, Richter!” cried the first, fading away, “And then we’re leaving with or without your fat flank on board!”
“Aye, Sister.” The gruff voice grew louder, sanding the trees with its abrasiveness; its newness. Dirt shifted and bushes cowered away as small impact tremors shook the camp.
A monster was coming.
Tremors grew louder, and an enormous figure broke through the tree line. Enormous and green, somehow it failed to blend in with the green of the jungle. In moments, it was upon him.
“Hello? Is there anypony there?”
No, there wasn’t. Earthy eyes suddenly alighted upon Wilson’s mask, and the behemoth let out a surprised grunt.
