Salty Shores is a small mining town on the eastern coast of Equestria. One night, each of its salt reactors explode in quick succession, destroying the mines and much of the town.

There are no survivors.

The only suspect, labeled “dangerous” and “violent,” is placed under the care of an old scientist, working through the goodwill of the Equestrian Institute for the Sciences. Their guard, a young stallion of dubious origins, carries a shadowed past whose secrets even he cannot know.

A clinical case of psychopathy becomes something far more disturbing. A clean hospital becomes a place of darkness and despair. And in the place where it all began, Salty Shores quietly sits, burning in the embers of its own dead.

There is something lurking beneath the shores of Equestria. And now, it has begun to stir.