The base of the western control tower was situated directly in the middle of the lobby, a hollow stalk rising from the floor to the ceiling and then beyond like a fancy, glass support column. Ordinarily, it was protected from pedestrians with a card-reader door, but that had been broken open, two heavily-armed unicorns standing watch outside.
"Shinespark?" one questioned, eyes shining in realization as Shinespark, Valey and Starlight approached. "Is that you?"
"You survived the dam?" The other pointed a hoof, jaw dropping hopefully. "We saw the flood, and thought everyone up there kicked it!"
The first rushed up to her, nearly taking her hoof and kissing it. "Please tell us you're here to take over! Braen's gone, and we're trying to carry out our final mission, but there's so much chaos, and this building is freaking me out! I know you're not technically part of the Spirit, but everyone else is up in the tower and there's a leadership spat going on and-"
Shinespark cut both of them off. "Stand down. That's an order. Whatever you're here for, you need to go home! Enough ponies have been killed already without this escalating any further!"
One pony happily stepped aside. The other hung his head, moving more slowly. "I... I really want to, but with Braen gone, this is when we need to stand up for her ideals most..."
"You just said she's gone, dude," the other pointed out. "She teleported off the moment we lost at the dam and just left her armor behind! If she can't put her money where her mouth is, why should we?"
"...I don't know..." The one who objected wilted, leaving enough room for Shinespark to push past and Valey to follow, slinking through the shadows.
"Go home!" Shinespark called back as she ascended. "The survivors need you! Help defend Blueleaf, or stay out of this entirely! The only way things can start recovering is if everyone stands down!"
The two guards looked at each other, and made no move to stop her. Eventually, one muttered, "Did she always have a brand?"
Shinespark galloped up the spiral staircase within the control tower, struggling not to slam into the walls from her speed and the tightness of the curve. She passed the level of the waiting room roof and kept climbing, surrounded on all sides by flurrying snow and winds that made the tower groan at its supports.
Eventually, the staircase let out into a disc-shaped observation room halfway up, another flight continuing up the shaft to reach the control room at the top. Manalights flickered upon the ceiling - apparently emergency power wasn't dead to the entire skyport, after all. Against one wall, crouched before an open access panel on a cabinet of manacircuitry, a burgundy mare with a familiar short manestyle worked, body shaking as her horn flickered in concentration.
"Grenada!" Shinespark gasped, noting that the rest of the room was empty and charging over to her half-sister.
Without a word or wasted heartbeat, Grenada dropped her work, turned around, and raced to Shinespark, burying her face in the orange mare's chest and sniffling. "I knew you weren't dead..." she whispered, barely audible over the winds outside. "When Braen went dull, I didn't think... didn't think that would happen because you died, so you'd have to do it consciously... Maybe to avoid a fall..."
Shinespark hugged her back. Valey whistled from the shadows, careful to stay out of earshot.
"Everyone's upstairs, aren't they?" Shinespark asked after too few seconds. "The power is on here. What are they trying to do?"
"I'm rerouting the emergency power," Grenada said, pulling back enough for her hardening eyes to be seen. "The upper districts won't get away with this. We're trying to open the roof shield on the airship hangar and let the storm do its work on everything inside. We think we can do it from here. Don't you worry. We're... We're staying strong..."
Shinespark's eyes widened. "No!" she protested, recoiling. "Grenada, Ironridge just lost a quarter of its economy and dozens of lives! The remainder of the Defense Force are massing at the border with Blueleaf, and if the Spirit attack the skyport in the name of revenge, they can strike right back even harder! More lives will be lost; civilian ones this time! And if we destroy the entire economy of Ironridge-"
"If we destroy the skyport, they'll get what's coming to them," Grenada interrupted. "That's what you always said. It's what you raised the Spirit and me on! Commander, this is our chance! We've always wanted Ironridge's economy to go back to the way it was, with Sosa at the top! And you said it yourself; the Defense Force aren't here! This is the best chance we've ever had to do this, and they just struck first! We already have nothing. If we don't, they'll just get farther ahead..."
"But Sosa isn't here anymore," Shinespark whispered, ears drooping. "There's no old way to go back to. Even before it was washed away, that was the reality. I said what I needed to to give the Spirit something to fight for, but it's never been possible to turn back time on a nation's economy..."
"Something to fight for?" Grenada was glaring. "So fight, then! If we're gone, or always have been gone, that's all the more reason to..." She broke off, choking on her words. "Commander, what happened to you? What happened to doing whatever it would take for Sosa? You're telling me not to fight back when they just wiped us off the map, after so many years of saying we had to keep going and never give up, and that nothing was the worst thing we could do! Why?" She fought back a sniffle and looked away. "That fire is gone from your eyes. It broke you, didn't it? We need you... Why did it have to be you...?"
"Broken?" Starlight stood up, climbing away from Valey and getting unsteadily to her hooves, feeling about to make sure she didn't whack into any obstacles. "She's trying to keep you safe, dummy! The Defense Force thinks Herman is dead! This stupid war could be over and you're trying to start it up again!"
Both unicorns blinked at her.
"Yeah, hate to burst your bubble on that..." Valey rose out of the shadows beside Starlight. "Maybe you didn't hear when I was trying to slap you out of your funk earlier, but we totally just spent a while clowning around looking for you in Skyfreeze, and we found a note from Herman up in the top saying he had bagged the Chancellor and taken him here. So with all the swords being pointed and the whole Blueleaf thing, I seriously recommend running away and not making this any nastier than it is."
"Herman is here?" Shinespark blinked, worry spreading on her face. "And he has Dior...?"
"Tried to tell you," Valey said with a shrug, rolling her shoulders. "Someone was a little too deep into panic mode to register that, apparently." She shot a glance at Grenada. "And for those who weren't on the dam, Herman was the one who made your district go blooie."
Grenada's gaze drifted downward in shock... before her determination redoubled. "Then it sounds like everything is going down in flames anyway. Commander... Braen... Shinespark..." Her watering eyes fixed on Shinespark, and she squared her hooves. "If things are this complex and tense, running away or standing down won't solve anything. We need to make our mark while we still have the chance. Go keep yourself safe. I... I care about you..." She sniffed again, turning for the staircase upwards. "And don't worry. If they've broken you and you can't go on, I'll fight for your ideals in your place."
"No!" Starlight hissed, starting in her general direction. "You idiot-"
"Woah, there." Valey reigned her in with a wing around the chest, pulling both of them back into shadow. "Kiddo, some ponies actually get attached to their homes and go maybe the tiniest bit bonkers when you turn that into a lake. Let's grab Sparky if we can and just get out of here, because this is way more trouble than it's worth."
Grenada didn't even have to reach the stairwell. An echoing voice called down it, "Hey, Grenada! Got the power working everywhere? We're ready to give this a try!"
"Yes!" Grenada called back, voice as loud as her small frame could make it. "Try it!"
"No!" Shinespark raced forward, knocking into Grenada and sending the mare crashing to the floor, not stopping or even slowing as she charged up the stairs. "Don't!"
"Aaand that's our cue to just bail," Valey muttered, instantly swimming toward the stairs down. "Who's outta here? We're outta here. Sorry, Sparky, but you can get yourself out of this..."
She passed by Grenada, meeting the mare's confused eyes. "She hit me," she whispered, not getting to her hooves.
"Welcome to instability city," Valey replied, backstroking so she could keep her eyes on Grenada. "Tip from a pro? If one of you can make Sparky generate that much drama, the top of this tower is probably literally going to explode depending on how many you've got up there. The smart thing right now really would be to run." She nodded at the stairwell. "And I'm not saying that just because you're cute. We might have that airship of yours up and running, and if Sparky explodes herself, we'll want someone who knows their way around it. But seriously, take care of yourself."
And with that, Valey and Starlight slipped down the stairs and were gone.
Shouts echoed down the stairwell. The open circuitry cabinet started to spark. Head spinning, Grenada struggled to her hooves.
Her side hurt from the abrupt landing, perhaps a little more than it should have. But then, her entire body was weary, presumably a function of the evening's stress that made her feel like she had walked a thousand miles and accrued just as many minor aches and bruises. The cold of the storm crept through the cores of her bones, and as she carefully paced back to the cabinet and nearby window, the winds howled just a little bit louder.
Everything should have been in order. Most of the skyport's remaining backup power reserves had been diverted to the hangar door; she had seen to that. There had been one power core in the central atrium she had been unable to access, but it shouldn't have mattered. The Spirit ponies upstairs just had to send the command...
Then, the storm broke. By some unknown force, as if it wanted everything that was about to unfold to be witnessed, the winds parted the flurried, leaving a clear tunnel of vision all the way from the control tower to a hump of glass and steel in the distance on the ground. It looked like someone had taken a barrel the size of three factories, turned it on its side, and buried it three-quarters beneath the snow and the earth. The airship hangar... The top could slide open, providing access for ships to fly in and out, but thanks to the power failure it was covered by at least a meter of freshly-fallen snow, no enchantments to keep it safe and unburied.
With a rumble she could feel more than hear, that snow covering shifted. A horizontal line appeared in the middle, then widened, as every emergency power source in the skyport had their reserves redirected to opening the door. Snow started collapsing, sliding in... and then the winds found purchase, tearing down the forming canyon and scraping the walls of show away. Soon, the opening roof was bare. The storm didn't stop there.
Like the claw of a titanic beast, the wind forced its way under the lips of the parting door. Pressures changed, the wind lifted up... and the roof, secured to its rolling tracks by gravity more than anything, began to rise.
Grenada's eyes widened in wonder as the sliding mechanism began to come apart under the violence of the storm, the wind pitting everything to widen the fault in the structure. Buffeted and improperly supported, the roof began to crack, distant booms ringing out as fractures appeared in the glass plates that spanned between supports. The roof halves began to rise like sails, supported by the wind, pieces splintering and spinning into the sky.
She wanted to stomp her hooves in applause, but found she couldn't. The storm's fury transfixed her, the scale of the destruction impossible to move in the face of. The largest building in Ironridge, the airship hangar, being systematically dissected by a force even greater... As more flakes and pieces of metal-reinforced glass began to crack off and blow away, each the size of a house, the tower groaned again around her, swaying. The lights flickered and went out.
Suddenly, Grenada's heart was pounding. There was a reason the skyport was closed for storms even when the power was on and the anti-weather enchantments activated at full strength. A denizen of the Earth District, she weathered Ironridge's storms underground, or beneath a protective barrier of insulating winds that trapped the jungle heat and reduced the wind and snow to breezes and heavy rains. Standing there in a tower on a mountain, so far from the crater's protection and staring the storm straight in the eye, it didn't feel like watching water fall from clouds. It felt like she had just made a deal with something infinitely powerful for it to destroy a different something she wanted gone... and now it was staring back, reminding her that she hadn't brought anything in payment.
With the precision of a veteran sniper, a jagged plate of glass from the disintegrating roof hurtled straight toward the tower, spinning like a diamond sawblade. It sheared straight through the shaft, halfway between the observation room and the boarding terminal roof, severing the tower so cleanly that Grenada barely even stumbled. As the world began to lean around her, the storm might have been laughing.