Twilight checked her list again and sighed.
It wasn’t that she wasn’t excited for Winter Wrap Up. Truth be told, she was actually looking forward to it. Come the day itself, no doubt, she would be up bright and early, happy as could be, ready to face the day and its many challenges.
Her first Winter Wrap Up in Ponyville had been rough at first, but by the end everything had straightened out. So it wasn’t that—the Mayor had already asked her to help organize things ahead of time this year, and she was confident that all of the kinks in last year’s assignments had been ironed out.
No, it wasn’t the practical that nagged at her, as she sat at her desk. The candles flickered, casting their unsure light on the scattered papers. Lists, diagrams, a half-finished letter and the missive it was a reply to. Twilight Sparkle’s life was an odd mixture of business and sluggish rest.
Which, she supposed, described Ponyville as well. Bustling life without the chaos of Canterlot. Activity without the demanding drive of purpose. Neighbors who idled in the street and farmers who worked until the light died. This and that.
And her, in the middle of it, at the center of town like a spoke on a wheel, doing… what, exactly?
Twilight sighed and picked up the quill with her magic. It was her favorite quill, one of the old ones. The feather was Celestia’s actually, though she would never tell anypony this. It had been a wonderful gift, and one that she hadn’t understood at all.
She understood later, of course. But it was the not-knowing in the moment that always came to mind when she used that quill.
It was, in fact, the not-knowing that bothered her in general. That first Winter Wrap Up she had been so eager to understand how the earth ponies did things with the changing of the seasons, but with all of the distraction and her own disconnection, she still didn’t feel that she really understood.
And that bothered her. Because it was like the quill. Or like any gift, really, that was given without a tag to say from whence it came. It was beautiful, yes, and good—yes, all the things which she could say about it were positive, but it was fundamentally incomplete.
But there was nothing to be done about it. Perhaps another go around would solve things.
Perhaps.
At any rate, it was growing late. Twilight stacked the papers on her desk into some semblance of order and blew out the candles. She stretched and went in search of Spike, only to find him laying on his back reading comics on her bed. She chuckled.
“I’m headed out, Spike. No plans tonight?”
“Nope!” he said, tilting his head back to see her. “Where are you going, though?”
“Applejack’s,” Twilight said, entering the room and retrieving a nice dark purple scarf. Another gift, this one from Rarity. “She wanted to have a little get-together before Spring starts and she’s too busy to see us properly for awhile.”
Twilight looked at herself in the mirror a moment. She was not vain by any means, but she liked to look orderly. A place and time for all things. Sort of.
“Sounds fun,” Spike said, flipping a page. “Gonna be coming home?”
“Not sure,” Twilight said softly. “You’re sure you’ll be okay? You could go over somewhere. I’m sure Sweetie is probably bored. Or you could come with me and spend time with Apple Bloom. She’ll be busy too, you know.”
Spike flipped another page, and she thought he’d not heard her at first. Shrugging, Twilight looked at herself at another angle and then decided that she looked well enough to brave the chill of evening.
It was hard to strike a balance between looking out for him and being smothering. She still wasn’t very good at it. But she tried. The thought of him sitting home alone in the library bothered her a bit, but if he was happy?
“Can I read on the way over?” Spike said suddenly.
Twilight blinked. “Sure,” she said, a bit too quickly.
She couldn’t help but look him over. He had grown, hadn’t he? Not enough to make their old arrangement unfeasible, but enough to notice. Sometimes, she looked at him and it was hard not to wonder how fast he would grow, and even now she wondered how we would get around the library in only a year or two.
Twilight shook her head. “Sorry, yes, you can. Ready to go? You should wear a hat.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Spike said, waving lazily as he sat up.
She smiled.
In the warmth of Applejack’s family home, in between ciders, in between raucous stories and great empowered oaths of solidarity, Twilight sighed a soft and somewhat lonely sigh. Her host heard it with her heart.
“What’s troublin’ you, Twi?”
Twilight gave her a wan smile. “I’m not sure I could articulate it, really.”
“Well, that’s a mighty shame, it is.” Applejack pulled up a chair and sat beside her at the table. The others were absorbed in a tale of Pinkie’s that was mostly incoherent, and yet managed to entertain regardless. Inexplicable, yes, but all that she did touched upon that inexplicable.
Applejack nursed her cider for a bit, and then she began to prod. Gently, but insistently. “So. Anxious over Winter Wrap Up?”
“Not exactly.”
“Ah. Everythin’ comin’ together with the plan, then?”
“Oh, yeah. I finalized everything, really. A place for everything, and everything in its place. All of the machinery of life, et cetera, ad infinitum. I’m not entirely sure just why I’m so glum, to be honest. I guess… Well. Do you remember my first time through this season?”
Applejack nodded. “I do.”
“Well, I was excited mostly because I had never seen how Earth Ponies cleared up all of the frost and snow before, and I was new in town. I guess to me it seemed like the perfect way to really, truly fit in.” She chuckled softly. “Kinda botched that one.”
“Ain’t true at all. Sure, you had a rough time of it in the beginning, but you brought some organization into the picture. We may hold our tradition dear, but we value good, honest work that’s efficient on top of it all.”
“Thanks.” Twilight smiled.
“But I do have a question,” Applejack began. “If you don’t mind, of course.”
“Not at all.”
“What’s so different in Canterlot? Just the magic?”
Twilight smiled even wider. “No, there’s far more to it then just ‘add magic’. Let me tell you what it’s like to welcome Spring on the mountain.”
*
Canterlot is a city of pageants, and the unicorns who first filed its streets were a tribe of ceremony. It is tempting to paint a disparate group with large brush strokes, yes, but in this case there is some truth to the sentiment that Canterlot is a city of unicorns, and that you can tell by the ostentatious nature of the place.
The turning of the wheels of the seasons is no different. When summer comes, of course, you have the Summer Sun Celebration, where the city is wide awake to greet Celestia as she raises the sun to thunderous applause. When fall drifts down, it is the custom of Canterlot’s citizens to walk beneath the falling leaves, and the Princess’ own walkways are open to the public for the Autumnal Procession.
Winter has Hearth’s Warming, of course, but it also is a season of street theatre and cozy parties as ponies make the most of the last few days of gentle fall air.
But you asked about Spring, didn’t you? Winter Wrap Up! It’s called the same thing.
It begins, as most things in Canterlot begin one way or another, with Celestia herself.
The Spring Festive is the beginning of a week of ceremony that ends in ecstatic joy. The invitations have always been random. A few hundred ponies are picked from the general hoi polloi, high and low alike, and are invited to a ball unlike any others.
Each one is different. But each one has the same dance: the one Celestia dances alone, gracefully. She does everything gracefully. Research tells me that some form of this dance, the Spring Festive, has been performed every year in predominantly unicorn-settlements since long before the tribes united.
Then comes the last airs. The pegasi, usually the Wonderbolts, perform for the city, and with tremendous skill they break the gloomy winter clouds to pieces.
Then, there is a ritual. Because this is a city of magic! The college of mages select a committee of their most accomplished practitioners who parade through the city in bright robes followed, again, by Celestia. The city guard follow, row upon row…
And then they chase winter away with a spell so great it requires a full circle of mages to complete. You can feel the air crackle with magic all day long, actually. The sun peaks through the clouds, and then the clouds that had gathered since the Wonderbolts melt away entirely, and the air is warm again. The world tends to glow, or seems to.
*
Twilight shrugged. “It can be exciting, but you don’t really feel the same sense of community.”
“Or maybe just a different sort of community,” Rarity offered from her right.
Twilight startled. “When did you get there?”
Rarity chuckled, and only now did Twilight notice that the others were all crowded around.
“You were so absorbed, dear,” Rarity said. “We simply had to investigate. I’d heard about this, but never from someone who actually saw it.”
“So, you’re sayin’ it’s all done like that?”
“Not quite. You’re thinking of the magic I do, right?” Twilight asked. They all nodded, except for Rarity. “Well, this is nothing like that. It’s not some trick writ large. It’s not just a flash and then the worlds slightly different. No it’s like… Like, imagine a wave. A tidal wave. Now imagine it was coruscating, that it’s all colored light and sound and heat—not too hot!—but like a bright, rainbow shattered summer day. It’s…” Twilight shrugged. “Hard to describe, is what it is. Could I get me one of those ciders?”
Applejack chuckled. “Certainly. Dash, you mind?”
“Nah, I got one,” Dash called over Pinkie’s bouncing mane. “But I get next story.”
“About what, some trick of yours?”
“Not this time. Maybe after. But if we’re talking about home… I am from Cloudsdale, you know.”
*
Winter in Cloudsdale is way different from winter on the ground. All of the seasons are.
First? It’s always cooler. Up that high, you never get those sweltering hot summer days you guys get down on the ground. Not in the same way.
But it’s more than that. I bet when you think of Winter, you think of snow, right? What kind of snow? The question sounds dumb. I’ll tell you what kind--dead snow. We used to call it that, but we didn’t use those words. People threw around bits and pieces of Old Pegas a lot in Cloudsdale, enough that newcomers pick up some vocabulary after only a week or two. But you’re gonna think of dead snow, snow on the ground, laying around in big drifts and coating everything. It’s still.
But when I think of snow I think of storms.
Winter in Cloudsdale is the season of storms. All seasons in Cloudsdale are stormy, to a point, but winter is the worst. The skies get dark and the winds howl sometimes at night. Winter may be all lights and long nights by the crackling fire down here for you girls, but up there its when every pegasus buckles down for the long haul.
We work and we work. The neighborhood watches get drafted in shifts to keep the wild storms under control and let the normal weatherponies rest. When I was a filly, I remember my mom and dad would tuck me in sometimes during the winter and then leave and not come back until morning. I would sneak out and watch them go, but they didn’t know that. Sometimes they just sat around on patrol, sometimes they worked.
Earth ponies have log fires and decorate trees. Unicorn cities have big shiny magic and stuff. But for me? Winter in Cloudsdale makes me think of sitting in a little huddle on a storm cloud with a few friends in your civic weather team, sipping coffee brought up to you.
That’s what I did a lot, bringing coffee or soup up to my parents on the cloud. I mean, yeah, I moved not that long after I moved out, but the memories have stayed with me.
But there’s like an end to all that, right? There’s this night right after the worst of the winter storms, when things are looking up, and we all come together. Not all in one place, not at first. Here and there. Neighborhoods and civic weather teams, celebrating together. Families and cousins and old ponies on their own little clouds. Cloudsdale turns into a big scattered picnic, really. Warm drink and warm food, and a thousand little clouds. And when they’ve had enough of that they’ll push their clouds inwards and all the little islands meet above the city and it’s…
It’s nice. All of the little lights.
And that’s how we send winter out. One big last party before spring.
*
Twilight leaned back, smiling, nodding, eyes closed. She could see the great cloud archipelago slowly coming together as they shut out the howling winds of winter.
“Do you miss it?” she asked. “Cloudsdale, I mean.”
“Sometimes,” Rainbow said. “I mean, if I’m being honest. I like Ponyville a lot.”
“Well, Ponyville sure likes havin’ ya around,” Applejack said, and nudged her with a hoof before chuckling. “‘Fore you took over the weather here, it was right plum chaotic. I remember it.”
“Yeesh, yeah you guys would be toast without my speed,” Rainbow said and drained her glass.
“Pssh, hardly! We’d of figured it out one way or another,” Applejack said.
They fell to bickering with smiles, and Twilight hummed. Rarity smiled and looked over to her.
“You’ve seen ours,” she said. “Winter Wrap Up, I mean. It’s a pity. I would have liked a chance to describe it as well as these.”
“And I’ll have another chance at it soon enough,” Twilight said.
“Ready for the big day?”
“Checklist-wise? Yes. It’ll still be chaos.”
“It always is, darling,” Rarity replied, flipping her hair dismissively. “You’re a true blessing to this town.”
Twilight smirked. “You think so? I think I’m a bit of a recluse that ponies forget about, to be honest.”
Rarity rolled her eyes. “Twilight, you would think that. Ponyville loves you. We’re all huge Twilight fans.”
Twilight laughed again and reached for her mug. “You don’t have to make fun!”
But Rarity shook her head. “I am not. You’ve seemed a bit out of it, Twilight. Is something the matter?”
“It’s… it’s nothing,” Twilight said, shrugging. “I mean, yeah, I know, that’s not convincing at all. I guess I’m just a little homesick, is all.”
“Ah… It’s alright. You know that you have a home here, as well.” Rarity smiled and reached over to touch her foreleg. “Perhaps you should go home and visit your parents.”
“I’ve thought about it.”
“Hm. Tell me a bit about Canterlot,” Rarity continued. “What do you miss?”
“Lots,” Twilight said. “Oh, Rarity… I wish you could be there for May Day, the poles in the garden district… The plays they hold out in the park when spring is finally warm enough. The streets… I miss just being able to wander out into it all. I miss my mom and dad. I miss home, I guess. But…”
“But?”
“I like it here,” Twilight said. “I like Ponyville a lot.”
“We’re glad you do,” Rarity said softly. “There’s a rhythm to life here as well, you know. I may talk a big game, Twilight, but I do so love the slower pace of life. Frustrating? Sometimes it is, but more often than not it is relaxing. I’m sure you’ll come to love it to. I do hope you will.”
“I already do, I think,” Twilight said, watching Applejack and Rainbow Dash move on from bickering to feats of tipsy strength. Predictable, yes. But it never really got old. “I could get used to a different rhythm of seasons. A bit on Rainbow, by the way.”
“Rainbow? Well, I’ll gladly take that bit off of your hooves.”
Twilight smiled. “We’ll see.”