//------------------------------// // VII - Equus ferus caballus // Story: Here Comes the Rain Again // by A Hoof-ful of Dust //------------------------------// They were falling, falling from the top of the mushroom. They fell through the layer of rainclouds, the sound of the storm deafening around them, the trees rushing up to meet them. We escaped, Twilight had time to think. At least we were free. And then over the howling wind and pouring rain came the sound of Luna’s wings unfurling. The whole world tilted, and Twilight held tightly to Luna to keep from falling off as she leveled out of her dive and began to climb back up into the air. “Yes!” Twilight shouted, “Yes! We’re above the trees! We’re outside the spores!” Her horn lit up with a beacon of light. “Our magic is back!” Luna broke through the clouds, out into the calm above the storm. She flapped her wings, suspended in the air. “I have never been so happy to see the moonlight,” she said. “Me either,” Twilight agreed. “But it has been night for far too long. Wouldn’t you agree?” “Yeah,” she said, nodding her head, droplets of rainwater falling from her mane. “Then let us make it tomorrow.” The sound of wings drew their attention back in the direction of the mushroom. Pegasi were ascending through the clouds, flying in chaotic overlapping paths like a nest of furious bees. “We must land!” Luna cried, and Twilight redoubled her grip. They flew back into the storm, and the skies were filled with rain and wind and swarming pegasi. They hurled themselves towards Luna, flying at her like arrows. Twilight threw up a magical barrier around her and Luna seconds before a dozen pegasi collided with it, rocking her on Luna’s back. The glowing shield flickered, difficult to maintain with little preparation and violent testing of its boundaries. Another wave of pegasi slammed into it, and this time Twilight lost her grip of the spell completely, the roar of the rain once again filling her ears. She concentrated on reforming the sphere, but still more infected pegasi were descending on them. Twilight was too late. They crashed into Luna, aiming for her wings, her horn, her head. Luna made a rapid twist to avoid them, but they struck from all angles, and then instead of flying with Twilight on her back she was falling with Twilight beneath her. Twilight saw through the chaos Luna’s eye roll back in unconsciousness. “No!” she shouted, and spread her wings. She held on tightly to Luna and once more the violet magical bubble surrounded them. She needed to slow down before they landed. Pegasi hammered the bubble, and Twilight grit her teeth. No, she thought with each blow, no you won’t. The canopy was approaching from beneath, faster than it should have been. It was going to be a rough landing. Twilight dropped the shield and unleashed a spell with such intensity and ferocity upon the trees that tiny bursts of light flashed in Twilight’s eyes. She made a monumental effort to pull up out of the dive she was in with carrying Luna’s limp weight, buoyed by magic, and then they crashed to the ground amid scorched trees and burning leaves. Propping herself up with her front legs, Twilight turned in an arc as another great gout of glowing purple fire erupted from her horn, burning back the forest. Try to cage this, she thought with a certain satisfaction. “Twilight,” coughed Luna. Immediately forgetting the blaze around her, Twilight dropped down close to her. “Yes, Luna?” “Alicorn…” she breathed, “…magic.” Each word was a struggle. “But,” Twilight protested, “I don’t— You have to!” But even as she said this, she saw it would be impossible for Luna with the injuries she had sustained in the fall. “I don’t know how,” she blurted. “You do,” Luna said, resting a hoof against Twilight’s chest, “you have always known. Forget what you see…” She turned her head to the side and coughed again. “…And hear Equestria. It will remember what it was.” Twilight rose to her hooves, barely registering the pain in her broken leg. She took a deep breath, closed her eyes, and exhaled slowly. With that breath out, she pushed everything from her mind: the heat of the fires around her, the jungle, the darkness, the rain, the colossal mushroom, Luna’s broken form at her hooves, everything. She emptied her mind of hundreds of spells memorized, searching for a time when she had performed magic by will alone. The spark that had awakened in her during her entrance exam was there, her link to the unformed raw heart of magic itself. For just a second time stretched on, reducing motion to stillness, burning heat to freezing cold, sound to silence. In the space between two heartbeats, Twilight heard the faint whisper of Equestria that was. She opened her eyes as scores of earth-bound ponies crashed through the charred clearing in the forest, the second wave of attack from the giant mushroom, but Twilight saw none of them. Before her were rolling green hills, clear skies full of stars, and the lights of Canterlot Castle twinkling in the distance. She rose from the ground, graceful and calm like an air balloon taking flight. Everything before her was surrounded in a brilliant white nimbus, but she found she could dispel that glow with the lightest of thoughts. The sky became clear, the grass, the stars, the mountain in the distance, and then Twilight was back in the clearing, now free of burning trees and pouring rain. Grass lay beneath her hooves, wet with evening dew. She could see the stars in the sky through a hole in the clouds, although the storm raged around her still. Her leg was whole. The horde of charging ponies with orange fungal growths had vanished. And Luna stood beside her. Twilight embraced Luna in a fierce hug. Luna hugged her back. “I knew you could do this,” she whispered. “What… was it that I did, exactly?” “Uncovered the natural state of the world. Equestria has waited ten thousand years to be itself again, with this unnatural forest growing over it. It wants to return.” Luna looked up at the sky and closed her eyes. When she opened them, the storm was no longer there. It didn’t blow away or vanish in a magical flash: it was simply as if it never existed, free of dark clouds, falling rain, and diving ponies. “Where are the ponies going?” Twilight asked. “When they vanish.” “Back to where they were, prior to attack from the parasite. I imagine most of them will be in bed.” Twilight turned back in the direction of the giant mushroom, looking even more unreal and out of place against the backdrop of stars. She centered herself and saw in her mind the horizon as it once was, broken only by the distant mountains. When she opened her eyes, it had ceased to be. Luna learned down close to Twilight over her shoulder. “You truly are a most gifted student,” she whispered in her ear. “Well,” Twilight said with a smile, “some of that has to do with the teacher.” And little by little that night, they restored Equestria. Fluttershy turned the page of the book she was reading with her muzzle, careful not to disturb Angel. He had been a good bunny today and had eaten all of his dinner, which meant he could stay up as late as he liked—which meant he would stay awake fifteen minutes past his regular bedtime and then snuggle up next to Fluttershy and fall asleep. She kept reading, unaware that the previous night her tree-house had swelled its proportions over thousands of years, growing with her things still inside it like a seed sealed beneath frozen ground. “C’mon, one more story!” “I ain’t tellin’ you another story,” Applejack said with exasperated laughter, “you should be asleep. ‘Sides, you know ‘em all already!” “Pleeease?” Apple Bloom pleaded. Applejack sighed. She’d learned that trick from Rarity’s little sister, she was sure, who’d probably picked up the exact pitch to play on maximum sympathy from Rarity herself. “Fine. Just one more! Now,” she said as Apple Bloom settle back down on her spot on the couch, “which one do you wanna hear?” She told another Apple family story that Apple Bloom had to have heard at least a hundred times before. Halfway through Big Macintosh came inside from a final walk around the orchards, and sat next to Apple Bloom to listen. He had found nothing out of place with the apple trees: no sign they had been overrun by ravenous timberwolves who had systematically devoured all the fruit before their pack loped off towards Canterlot. “…And then she flies away from the zeppelin, seconds before it explodes!” Rainbow demonstrated by taking a quick zip around the room before landing back in front of her typewriter. “So, what do you think? Awesome or what?” Tank, her editor and pet tortoise, slowly blinked his eyes. “You’re right! It would be way better if she got to land and put on her sunglasses before the zeppelin explodes! You’re a genius, Tank!” Rainbow spun in her chair and started making the corrections to her novel, never knowing her cloud house had dissolved and been a part of the storm that lasted ten thousand years. “Pinkie,” yawned Mr. Cake, “what are you doing in the kitchen this late?” “Well, I was looking in the fridge for some yoghurt for Gummy because he likes to have a little yoghurt before he goes to sleep—that’s a funny word, yoghurt, why is it written like yog-hurt but nopony ever says it that way?—and, clumsy me, I knocked over the eggs, and so then I thought, hey, if you break some eggs then you’d better make an omelet!” “I… don’t think that’s quite the way that saying goes,” said Mr. Cake. “Just clean before you go to bed, alright?” “Okie-dokie-lokie!” Mr. Cake headed back upstairs, tired from a full day of his twins. The years’ worth of labor he had performed the previous night, hauling fallen trees to the heart of the Everfree Forest for a variety of mushrooms to grow on, forming a tower that stretched beyond the clouds, went unnoticed. Rarity lay in bed. Her eyes were wide open beneath her eyemask; she saw not the black silk but instead a dress, a simple collection of shapes and perhaps a hint of color and fabric. The design had been brewing in her mind for the past week, but seeing Princess Celestia the other evening had pulled all the elements into focus. The combination of elegance and simplicity was the perfect starting point for the kind of stitching she’d been wanted to try, and she could clearly see the line of the dress every time she tried to close her eyes… She sat up and pulled off the mask. Sleep later! Her muse called! She pulled on the robe she wore for late-night bursts of creativity, not as glamorous as the robe she wore in the mornings nor as luxurious as the robe she wore following a long bath but oh so comfortable, and sat at her sewing machine. When the dress was finished, she could even present it to Twilight as a kind of late going-away present. Surely she’d be attending some variety of functions during her time in Canterlot—she couldn’t spend it all studying—and the dress dancing in her mind’s eye would look so good next to the Princess. When she noted the clock later in the night, marveling at how fast time could pass by when one was “in the zone”, it never occurred to her that the opposite was true; that time could slow to make a single night last thousands of years. Spike looped the film on the projector and flipped the switch to start it running. “More popcorn?” he asked Owlowiscious, who hooted in in response. Spike plucked a single kernel from the bowl and tossed it in Owlowiscious’ direction; the owl caught it with one deft movement of his head. “Nice catch,” said Spike, and he slid the bowl across the floor. “There you go, buddy.” The titles of the film appeared on the wall, accompanied by a shrill organ flourish: I Was A Teenage Werepony. So far today, Spike had left his bed around ten, sung to himself as loud as he wanted while he swept the library floor, and bought a bag he’d had to carry over his shoulder full of unpopped popcorn kernels in addition the regular food he needed from the market, and now he was staying up with Owlowiscious watching old monster films. Being old enough to be responsible ruled. Spike poured a bowl of popcorn for himself and cooked it with a single breath, never thinking Twilight might be doing anything in Canterlot other than studying magic and protocol with Princess Celestia. Two ponies sat under night sky at Canterlot Castle, both sharing a blanket. “When should we inform them?” Luna asked, turning back to the stars. “Not just yet,” Twilight said, resting her head against Luna’s side. “They can figure it out on their own.”