Chapter 1
Dripping.
The sound of water dripping, drop by drop, down the edge of the metal pipe and into the rippling puddle below.
I’m five hundred feet in the air.
Four hundred.
Three.
Where does the horizon end and the sky begin?
I don’t know. I wouldn’t know.
For me, up is down and down is up.
The ground rapidly approaches. I should spread my wings.
Or maybe not.
We’ll see.
* * * * *
“Twilight!” I shouted, banging on the window to her room on the top story of the library. I could see her in her bed through the glass, sleeping on her side and facing away from me. “It’s almost time! Get up already!” I continued to bang on her window.
The sun had just risen, and I had just finished my aerial exercises for the morning. Corkscrews, nosedives, loop-de-loops, figure eights, barrel rolls--everything and anything you can name, and things that don’t even have names. Not yet, anyways. I don’t normally get up this early, and I’m a pony who values her sleep. But today? Today was going to be special.
“Come o-o-on!” I shouted. “If you sleep any later, we’re going to miss it!” Twilight didn’t budge. The sea blue blanket covering her chest rose and fell at a steady pace, and Spike was sleeping just as soundly she was in his little bed next to hers. “You agreed to come!”
This wasn’t working. I needed Twilight for today. If she wasn’t there, everything I did so far would have gone to waste. The hours--no, days--of planning. Of practicing. Of goading and nagging Twilight into agreeing to coming. Today was the Alabaster Angel, a competition for non-professionals like me. Not major league stuff, but that didn’t matter. What mattered was that Twilight would see me in action.
I barged through her front door and flew up to her room, then pulled the covers out from under her arms. “Wakey, wakey!” I shouted.
Twilight grumbled, reaching for the sheets. Upon not being able to grab them, she rolled away, facing her back to me and rolling up into a fetal position. Light shined through the window, letting her hair gleam in the morning sun.
How cute. I couldn’t help but smile.
“C’mon, Twilight,” I said, gently rocking her back and forth. “It’s time to get goin’.”
Twilight scrunched her muzzle. She opened her eyes to a narrow slit, then shut them tight again. “If it’s the latest Daring Do book you want,” she said, “I told you, it’s coming on Thursday.”
“No, Twilight!” “The flight competition’s today!”
Even after all I did, Twilight did not seem very interested in the Alabaster Angel. I asked her, “Hey, wanna check out my flight competition? It’ll be totally awesome!” and she replied with a simple, “No thanks.”
“Hey, wanna check out my flight competition? There’ll be commemorative books and stuff!”
“Sorry.”
“Hey, wanna check out my flight competition? I hear Soarin’ll be signing copies of his new autobiography!”
“Ooh, I’d love to, but...”
In the end, I agreed to going to a public poetry reading with her so she’d come with me. She’s the bookish type, so I guess that it’d only be natural for her to want to go to something like this. In about a week from now, we’d be listening to something about the tortured soul of a pony born and raised in the darker parts of Manehatten. Her explanation of the event went soaring over my head, and the poems she quoted flew even higher.
For now, it didn’t matter. For now, it was just going to be me, her, and about a hundred other ponies drawing condensation trails in the sky with the tips of our wings or watching us from the ground below. That is, if we could arrive in time for it.
“Sorry, Twilight,” I said. With a heave and a grunt, I backed up by a few paces, then jumped up and down onto Twilight’s bed, bouncing her off the bed and onto the wooden ground below, where she landed with a thud.
She got the message clearly enough. Like a mother leading her sleepy child through her morning rituals, I helped Twilight, who was still half-awake and disoriented, brush her hair, eat her breakfast, and walk out the door. She told Spike to watch the library while we were gone, and the purple baby dragon gave us a salute as he sat at the table while messily eating a bowl of honey oat cereal and drinking a glass of orange juice.
The Alabaster Angel only came once a year, and luckily for me, it was just in the next town over, Fillydelphia. It’s a small place, like Ponyville. We boarded the train and arrived in Fillydelphia within a couple hours. Twilight, still tired, took a short nap on the train. I, on the other hoof, wondered if my practice would pay off. From the train, we headed straight to the Fillydelphia Oval Gardens, where the competition was being held.
The Gardens looked like a giant egg as its name suggested if you stared down at it from high above, and like the bottom half of a giant egg if you looked at it from the side. It was about the size of three Canterlot Castle Ballrooms if they were put side to side, and it had no roofing of any sort, making it perfect for today’s competition. Tall white pillars lined the entrance to the Gardens along stone walkways to the Gardens, spreading out from the Gardens in all directions like tentacles from an octopus. Between these walkways were soft grassy patches with a bunch of different kinds of flowers growing all over the place, and the sky above glowed a soft cerulean blue.
We passed through registration at the front gates--I got a number, and Twilight got an audience pass. She wouldn’t be with me with the performance. Of course not--she couldn’t fly. When we parted ways, though I caught a glimpse of her ticket. Section B, row 4, seat G. I’d know exactly where she was, even if I was flying from above. Twilight was here, and I was here. Today was going to go just perfectly.