In my life, there have been many things that brought me joy. Getting my cutiemark, graduating from flight school, opening a self-owned business, hooking up with my long time gryphon friend. So many cherished memories, so many things to look back on and smile. The one that I think fondly of the most though was that day I met my daughter, Scylla - that little ray of sunshine that caused me so much trouble, but brought me so much happiness.

My name is Pathfinder, I’m a pegasus, and it might be boasting, but this is how I became the father of the best, and most unique, young filly a stallion could ever ask for.

It all started on a beautiful sunny day in Equestria, around Haysead Swamp. I had taken a day to go out to update the inventory of my shop. I’m a map maker, and every year or so, I have to go around and make new maps so that they are accurate for my customers. Equestria is such a chaotic kingdom that it almost feels like new cities and locations pop up out of nowhere from time to time, so making sure my maps show the proper lay of the land is something my customers appreciate a lot.

“This looks like a good spot,” I said to myself, flying high above the swamp with my quill and clipboard in hand. I was trying to find a good angle to make my illustrations from, as well as a good starting point for my drawing. As any artist knows, the first pen stroke is always the hardest. “Now I just need…”

I looked around left and right, knowing what I was looking for had to be somewhere close by. It only took a moment, but I soon found a nice patch of cumulus I could take advantage of. I wasn’t part of any weather team, but they wouldn’t mind if I relocated a cloud for a while, not in this out-of-the-way place.

I flew over to commandeer the white cloud, brought it back to the spot I picked out, and then laid myself across it, belly down. There was nothing softer in the world than a patch of evaporated water, and so I often rested myself on one as I looked over the side and did my work.

Setting my clipboard sideways in front of my face, holding down the piece of parchment it held with one hand while readying my quill in the other, I got started on my map. The first thing I did was look over this side of my perch, taking in the details of the land beneath me before focusing on the piece of paper, quickly scribbling in whatever details I could remember from my short glance. I would repeat this process over, adding in new details with each glance and filling in the white sheet with as much black ink as I thought it could hold.

The amount of features I made was excruciating, much more than most would need to navigate the swamp, but that was necessary. This was a master draft which I would take back to my shop and duplicate an untold amount of times, with slightly less detail on the ones I sold my customers - enough that the maps could be used for their intended purpose, but not so detailed that they could be used to count how many trees were in the swamp.

This was a large, time consuming task that spanned most of the day just to get a portion of of what I needed. It was my special talent though, so letting the day pass by while I turned the world beneath me into an illustration in front of me was something I enjoyed doing.

That was, however, my personal opinion, and not one often shared by others. That wouldn’t have mattered in ordinary circumstances, but Haysead Swamp was not the safest of places. Just to stay on the safe side, I had hired an associate of mine to accompany me on the trip, and as expected, a little over an hour later, just as I had finished detailing the the first part of the swamp, my lovely assistant let herself be know.

As I inspected my work, making sure that I had captured the image of nature below, a vision of beauty brought itself before my eyes.

“Are you done yet?” asked a mildly annoyed gryphoness, arms crossed as she glared at me with one eye, the other covered by an eyepatch.

“I just finished this spot, Anya” I replied, blowing on my paper very lightly to dry the wet ink that remained on it. “Now onto the next one.”

“You know, I forgot to ask.” said Anya, her talon tapping on her bicep, “How long did you rope me into this?”

“Just eight hours,” I said with a slight tone of timidness. Gryphons were not the type to enjoy the aspects of a full day’s work, even as a favor for a friend and former lover.

Anya was easy to predict, as the huff she released from her beak had been anticipated. “And why do you need a bodyguard for this?” she asked, displaying the patience of a mountain, for a gryphon at least.

“You don’t want something to happen to your favorite pony, do you?” I said, playing coy, “For all we know, a manticore could leap out of the forest right now, and without your protection, I’d be helpless.”

“You’re a mile up in the sky,” Anya said, wildly exaggerating the distance they were from the ground, “A manticore couldn’t even get you up here.”

What she said was true, as a manticore’s wings were visual at best, but there were plenty of reasons to have a strong, attractive gryphon around when doing your work.

“But Anya,” I said, looking as pathetic as I could before her, “Don’t you want to protect your helpless pony friend from the dangers of the big, scary world?”

“Not particularly,” Anya replied, not seeing the what dangers could really threaten me from my perch.

“Then… don’t you want to earn ten bits an hour for sitting around and doing nothing?” That got Anya’s attention much more than any hypothetical monster ever could. Sometimes, you had to remind a gryphon that they had something to gain, as even strong friendships with them didn’t matter much when put up against money.

“You know,” Anya said, gently taking me by the jaw into her razor sharp talon, “You better be glad that you’re cute, cause if you weren’t, that racist remark would have cost you some skin.”

Anya might have played it off like the money wasn’t important, but just as earth ponies tended to be good with plants, and unicorns could inherently cast spells, some level of greed was common to see in a gryphon. She was a treasure hunter by trade after all, so acquiring large amounts of gold wasn’t something she was particularly against.

Then again, I really was just teasing her. I didn’t think money alone, and such a small amount of it at that, would have convinced her to come. It was more a combination of the two reasons. I was her friend, and she didn’t want to see me come to harm, but she couldn’t do it for free. ‘Pro bono’ just wasn’t a term gryphons understood.

“Look, if you’re bored, then go on and stretch your wings. I’m just gonna move this cloud over to the river at the edge of the forest and continue drawing there.” I told her, assuming that was the reason she came to bother me, which was entirely understandable.

Anya let go of my muzzle, giving me a slight look of concern - the kind that you give to someone when you don’t want to show that you care, but are unable to hide that you in fact do. “Are you sure you’ll be ok?”

There were legitimate reasons I hired Anya for jobs like this, as wild beasts tended to live in places like Haysead Swamp, and I had had more than my fair share of close encounters. If I stuck to the outskirts, and stayed in my patch of cumulus though, I shouldn’t have been in too much danger.

“I’ll be fine,” I reassured, “Consider it a paid break, and come back in fifteen minutes.”

“Fine,” Anya said, already flapping her wings to make some distance between herself and I, “But I’m not responsible if you do anything stupid while I’m gone.”

“What was that?” I said, pretending not to hear her as I repositioned the cloud, “I thought you were going on break.”

Anya puffed up in that adorable way gryphons sometimes did when they got angry, and then turned to fly off into the distance. She knew well what I was doing, that unless I pissed her off for a while, she’d be too worried about me to enjoy her time off. Didn’t make me any less a jerk in her eyes though, and I expected to get punished later for it, but if it made her happy, I didn’t care that much.

A few minutes later, I was back atop my cloud, looking down on Equestria and all its splendor. Pegasi got to see views like this everyday, but few ever truly took the time to take it all in. A pony who was skilled in drawing could see it for what it was, a beautiful landscape that should be admired and appreciated. While map making isn’t what most would call ‘art’, I see it as no less when recreating a view like that.

“Back to the drawing board,” I joked to myself, beginning anew the process of copying by sight the world around me.

A few minutes passed, with the river below providing a steady amount of background noise to keep my mind from being distracted. The sound of the running water was calming, pushing every other sound out as I worked my craft. The proper ambiance can help a pony out immensely when drawing, and I was making strides in my progress.

“If this keeps up, I could be done with the whole thing today,” I said to myself, voicing how impressed I was with my own work.

It was odd for me to talk to myself, but it was probably just an unconscious action to break the quiet. Still, I found it a little funny that I had muttered aloud what I could have easily just thought out in my head. It was enough to get a small chuckle out of me. I was having a very nice day, relaxing in the sun, enjoying nature, and getting my work done. It was all very pleasant. That was… until I heard a laugh echoed back at me.

At first, I thought nothing of it. It almost slipped right by me unnoticed, and probably would have stayed that way if not for the fact that it didn’t happen once, but twice. That’s when I registered both laughs at once, the second one making me retroactively aware of the first one. In my head, I tried to make sense of what I heard.

I started off thinking that is was an echo of my own laugh, but that didn’t make sense. I was up in the air, there was nothing for my voice to echo off of. Then I thought that it was just my mind playing tricks with me, but that’s when the heard the laugh a third time. This time however, I wasn’t caught off guard by it, and that allowed me to hear the laugh clearly, it being the soft gigglings of a child, and a very young child by the sounds of it.

Suddenly wondering why a child would be out here so close to the dangerous swamp, I started looking around for the source of the giggle. I scrambled around my cloud perch, looking around all the edges, and even through the cloud to look directly beneath me. My eyes must have passed over the source several times, but one more giggle directed my eyes towards the river, and there I saw movement.

It was small, almost unnoticeable from my altitude, but a few feet away from the river was small parts of red. That was not a color common in nature, and especially in a swamp. It could have been a flower, but the splotch was too big for that, so what was it? Whatever it was, it was moving strangely, showing that it had a life of its own.

Now curiosity was probably not the best thing to adhere to in a dangerous place like this, but when another laugh came from the red dot on the ground, I found myself unable to just ignore it. Putting my things away, I flew down to see what it was, having to land my hooves in a patch of mud as I touched down, and for the first time in my life, I laid eyes on the most spectacular thing I would ever encounter.

Sitting there, playing in the muddy river bank, was a small foal with bright red hair. From the size of her, she couldn’t have been a year old yet, but somehow she had gotten all the way to the outskirts of the swamp. She acted like she didn’t have a care in the world, happily splashing around and getting covered in the muck. She didn’t even care that I, a pony she had never seen before, had just came out of the sky and landed before her.

“Well, how did you get out here?” I said aloud, as if expecting a response from this infant.

That got the child to look my way, and it must’ve seen something funny, because it let out a laugh much bigger than the other ones I had heard, while clapping cakes of mud together in its hands.

Seeing no immediate danger, I looked around my surroundings. If there was a child around here, then surely it’s parents were close-by as well. I couldn’t find another living soul though, and after carefully scanning the forest for a few minutes, I gave up.

“Ok…” I said, a bit worried for the foal at this point, “No parents… so did you actually wander out here?”

I bent down into the mud to observe the foal a little closer, refraining from touching it as I inspected its body for wounds or marks. Unfortunately, the mud covered so much of its body that it was hard to tell anything. As I watched the child play around, from a respectable distance in case its’ parents decided to suddenly appear, it slapped its hands back into the mud, and then turned its head when its’ hand felt something.

Still observing, I watched the child dig around in the mud for a few seconds, eventually pulling out a worm from the wet dirt. Then, without hesitation, the child started to move the living, wriggling creature towards its face while gradually opening its mouth. I could tell immediately what was happening, and reactively decided that the time for observation had ended.

“No!” I yelled, reaching for the child, believing that as the only present adult, I had to stop the infant from doing something disgusting, I scooped it up in my arms, and quickly placed my hand over it’s own to prevent the worm from being eaten.

The worm had been prevented entrance to the baby’s mouth, but that didn’t stop the child from still trying, and soon it was my hand that went inside instead. A part of it at least, being nommed on by the thankfully toothless jaws of the infant.

“Well, that’s better than you swallowing a worm,” I said, gagging on the thought. “But now we need to…”

With the child now in hand and off the ground, I was able to get a much better look at it, or at least a part of it that I hadn’t seen yet. Having been seated in the mud, the baby’s tail had been mostly obscured, but in my arms I could see completely the particularly non-pony tail the child had.

Instead of being comprised of a small nub covered but long strands of hair, the child had a thick, hairless tail that ended with a fish-like fin. On further inspection, I found out that the child had no fur either, no hair at all save for the red patch on her head. It was also at this time that I embarrassingly discovered that the child was a girl, my eyes catching this upon realizing that this odd mini-mare was without a diaper.

“Well aren’t you a strange one?” I said softly to the girl, managing to get her to drop the worm back into the mud as she continued chew on one of my fingers, “But this explains some things, I believe.”

I didn’t know much about the girl’s true nature at that time, but I was at least observant enough to understand she was some sort of aquatic pony. That better explained the missing parents, as the river was but a few steps away from where I found her. It was possible that they had put the baby there, intending it to be just for a brief moment, or that the girl had wandered ashore.

Assuming this to be so, I believed the best thing to do was to attempt to make contact with the baby’s mother and father. Of course, that was difficult, since pegasi couldn’t just go underwater to find them. I did have an idea how to lure them out though. A stupid, stupid idea.

With the girl in hand, I approached the river till I was right at the edge of the bank. Looking left, and then right, in a last attempt to see if the girl’s parents were around, I then went on to enact the only plan that came to my mind at the time. Taking a deep breath, I crouched down next to the water, and slowly lowered the small child towards it, all the while keeping a close eye on the girl to see if what I was doing was scaring her in any way. It was quite the contrary though, as when I got her close to the stream, she willingly placed her feet inside and splashed about. It seemed that she liked the feeling of being wet, so much so that I had to tighten my grip so she couldn’t slip away.

“I guess that proves you’re aquatic,” I said, glad that my assumptions were right, “I guess you’re some kind of fresh water sea pony. Now how about we tell your parents you’re here?”

The baby gave a delighted squeal from her mouth, almost like she could understand me. I was just happy that she hadn’t been frightened with me from the start.

So for a few minutes I dipped the child into the slow moving, slightly chilled river. Touching the water was enough to get me to shiver at first, but the girl didn’t seem to care about the temperature at all. That was good, as it was my hope that when she started splashing about in the water, it would attract the attention of her mother and father. To help with that, I took the opportunity to give the child a quick bath to remove all that mud off her body, which was an easy task, since her smooth skin allowed the water to slide the dirt right off her.

“That furless body of yours is really useful,” I concluded, not only because of its dirt-repelling powers, but also because I figured that it her skin kept her thermally insulated, kind of like a dolphin would be. With the grey muck removed, she even looked a bit like dolphin, save for that red mane of her.

Minutes passed, but there was still no sign of any other aquatic ponies. About now, I was getting worried, wondering if the infant had been swept downstream and washed up on the bank. The whole situation was getting tougher by the minute, and I was beginning to run out of ideas. My mind raced, focusing on how I would be able to return this lost child to where she belonged. It was so distracting that I didn’t even notice the large shadow moving in the water, heading directly for us.

“Come on, Path… Think… Think!” I whispered, not wanting to spread my panic to the baby as I took her out of the water. I thought about going upstream, or flying above the area to see if I could see signs of anyone in the water, but before I could act on those ideas, something else came to the forefront of my thoughts.

A large burst of water erupted from the river I had just pulled a little girl out of , caused by what I could hardly make out as a ghastly green figure leaping out of it. The moment was so fast as that creature came at me that I couldn’t see any details of it through the droplets of water spraying through the air - nothing except a frightful look of fury on its face.

I was frozen in time, mind stunned in fear, unable to control my body because of the now present danger before me. Unable to think, my body acted on it’s own. My wings spread wide, but not in order to fly as one might think. In their momentary state of independence, they decided that the better thing to do was to cover the front of my torso. My legs, instead of trying to run, just shifted my body sideways in a half turn. Both sets of appendages designed to flee from danger betrayed me, for reasons my terrified mind couldn’t understand. I didn’t realize it at the time, but my body knew exactly what it was doing, using itself as a shield for the tiny bundle in my ever-tightening arms.

As I mentally braced for the attack that was about to be inflicted on my being, a loud screeching hit my ears. It was a vicious cry, but its source was not the green monster mere inches away from landing its attack. It was from the ferocious gryphoness dive-bombing said creature, using her powerful battle cry to distract and confuse my would-be attacker as his violent splash shocked and mentally paralyzed me. The green creature didn’t anticipate a second person there with me, so when Anya drove her talons down into his torso, it was completely incapable of dodging her attack.

The creature yelled out in pain, sharp claws digging into his chest. Anya was grappling with him, flapping her wings around wildly as she brought her legs forward, proceeding to use her cat-like claws to rake the creature across any bits exposed flesh they could find. The green creature cried out in agony, lost within a spinning whirlwind of feathers, fur, and sharp objects attached to his attacker, and, seeing no other recourse, ran back to the water from which it came. Anya, not wanting to be dragged into the water, released the green monster last second, allowing it to escape once it was clear it was running away.

Just like that, the attack started and ended, taking only a few seconds to get from one to the other. I could never, and probably will never, understand how predatory creatures were able to act in a split second, but this is why I was thankful that Anya was willing to take these kinds of jobs.

Anya flew a safe distance away from the river, keeping a watchful eye on it as she made her way back to me. “Path, we need to go.” she said, believing that the green monster could be back any moment.

I heard her, but my mind didn’t register the words. Anya might as well have been taking to a statue, for all the reaction she got out of me. Luckily for me, Anya was a more hands-on kind of gryphon when push came to shove. Seeing my hesitation, she ran over to me, put her hands under my arms, and then flapped her wings to take us both into the air, unaware that she actually had two passengers in her hold.

“What was all that about?” Anya asked once she felt they were safely away from the river. As far as she had seen, there was no reason I had left the safety of my cloud.

Around this time, my senses started returning, and I was able to answer my associate. “The baby.” I said, blurting out the first answer that came to mind.

“Baby?” she said, “What baby?”

“This one.” I said, retracting my wings to reveal the little bundle of joy I was cradling in my arms.

“What the heck!” Anya yelled, to which the baby made a gurgling noise, apparently wanting to be part of the conversation too.

“It’s a long story,” I said, realizing only a moment later that a story that happened within mere minutes really wasn’t going to be that long.

“Did you steal a baby?!” Anya yelled again, drawing out more amused coos from the child.

“No!” I profusely objected, “I saw her near the water, alone, and when I tried to find her parents that thing you fought attacked me.”

Anya looked back to the river, and, unbeknownst to me at the time, spotted the green creature from before in the water along with another creature that it was holding in its arms. “Well, we can’t go back now.” she said, seeing only danger in this beast she had fended off only with the element of surprise.

“I agree,” I… agreed, likewise seeing going back as only putting the baby, and ourselves, in danger. For all I knew, that monster was the reason the child’s parents were separated from her, perhaps having done something unthinkable to them. “We’ll have to go get some help if we want to fix this.”

Anya sighed, but wasn’t so callus as to say no to helping an infant. “Okay, but you’re gonna owe me for this one.”

The plan was simple. Go back to town, find someone who could at the very least help us get the baby back to her kind, and then deliver her safely to those who could care for her. Little did I know that this was the start of what would be a great and lifelong adventure.

Author's Notes:

Commission for Scylla the Kelpie. Scylla wanted to do an origin story for their OCs, and so being their close friend (and taking a $10 bribe) I wrote up this first chapter. There will be more to come, but it will take a while to get back to this. Also, note that this doesn't mean I'm now doing commissions. I only accepted this because of my relationship with Scylla.

For those familiar with my other works, know that none of my usual subject matter will be in this. For those who don't know what that means, I would suggest you not look into it. NSFW stuff mostly, with heavy emphasis on the kind of stuff your mother warned you about.