Rainbow Dash had never fought a storm like this before. That by itself said a lot. Sure, she’d battled rogue storms with her friends at the Ponyville Weather Control, and she even had to corral weather drifting in over the town from the Everfree Forest. Once, during a harsh weather training camp at Manehattan, she had to battle a Cat Two, and that had been a wild and fun time. But this storm put them all to shame.
And it wasn’t even because the storm was rough, either. As far as weather ferocity went, this was one of the more tame storms Rainbow had to fight in her life. Apart from a steady wind that occasionally gusted and some weak thunder rumbling through the clouds, it was only a heavy rainstorm. But the thing was resilient; Rainbow would even go so far as to call it defiant. The clouds absolutely refused to be broken and busted by her team, and they had to work exhaustingly hard just to punch a hole from the top to the bottom of the clouds. Instead of working with loosely-connected cotton balls like weather factory clouds were, Rainbow felt like she was trying to dig through damp clay with her bare hooves. She’d never dealt with anything like it before.
After nearly fifteen minutes of exhausting work, Rainbow finally had to call a timeout. Her nostrils flared with each ragged breath, and her chest heaved and compressed as she tried to get oxygen back to her muscles. Her team didn’t look much better; they were all lying down or sitting on their haunches, panting and trying to catch a quick break, while the rain and wind pounded them until they looked like drowning rats. If Rainbow felt tired, the rest of her team was so exhausted they could hardly move.
And what did they all have to show for it? Rainbow scowled at a tiny gap in the clouds not even wider than her wingspan. Even as she watched, the clouds started slowly creeping back together, trying to plug the hole. Rainbow simply couldn’t believe it. It was like the storm had a mind of its own and was desperately trying to prevent her from letting the moonlight through. She’d never encountered a storm this thick and stubborn before. It rested on top of the islands like a heavy quilt, too heavy and impenetrable to even clear a decent hole in the middle. How she even managed to fly through it earlier was beyond her.
“This isn’t working,” Rainbow grumbled once she finally had breath to spare. “We’re nearly over the ruins again and we don’t have anywhere near a good clearing to let the moonlight through.”
“Is weather control always this hard?” Stargazer asked. “If it is, then I suddenly have a new appreciation for my friends who work it.”
“That’s just the thing, it isn’t normally this bad,” Rainbow said. “Sure, storms made by the weather factory are a lot easier than natural storms, but I’ve fought hurricanes that yield easier than this stuff!” She slapped her hoof against the cloud she stood on and scowled when it sounded more like she hit wet mud than a soft cushion. “There’s something off about these clouds. They aren’t right.”
“Magic, perhaps?” Champagne said, her voice twisting her words with a thick Prench accent. “Could the clouds be magical in some way?”
Rainbow frowned and pressed her wings against the clouds, letting her feathers fan across their surface. After a few seconds to gauge the feeling in her wingtips, she nodded and folded them back against her sides. “There’s some kind of charm or spell on these, yeah. These aren’t natural rainclouds. They’re summons.”
“Summons?” Soft Step asked, turning her head to the side. “Like, magical unicorn stuff?”
“Weather magic isn’t just pegasus magic,” Rainbow said. “We’re just the best at it. Wizards and sorcerers can summon storms, too, but they can’t really control them. That’s why unicorns don’t bother and just leave it to us pegasi to manage, because we can actually control the weather.”
“Jeez,” Soft Step said. She shook her head. “They teach you that at the weather control?”
Rainbow smirked and shook her head. “Naw, I learned that from Princess Twilight. But if this weather is summoned, then we can’t really clear it with our hooves, because it’s not real weather. It doesn’t behave like real storms do. It’s just magic trying to pretend to be a storm. That’s why we’re having so much trouble with it!”
“So if it’s just magic…” Stargazer said, touching the surface of the clouds and frowning. “How are we supposed to clear it?”
“I… am not sure,” Rainbow admitted, frowning at the cloud she was sitting on… if she could even call it a cloud, now that she knew it wasn’t natural or manufactured weather. “The best way to do that would be to figure out what’s summoning the weather and deal with that, but for all we know that could be inside the tomb itself and we’d never be able to get to it. We’d need magic to clear magic.”
“Should we go and get Rarity?” Soft Step asked. “Maybe she can do something with her magic.”
But Rainbow shook her head. An idea was already forming in her mind. “No, we don’t need Rarity,” she said. Standing up, she stretched her sore wings and made sure her feathers were in alignment. She’d need them for what she was going to do next. “You three, make sure you keep that hole about a wingspan wide. Once you do, get ready to jump. I’ve got an idea!”
“What kind of idea?” Soft Step asked, watching Rainbow take wing and flutter upwards.
“An awesome one! You’ll see!” She began to fly straight upwards, yelling over her shoulder, “Get ready for a treat!”
As the clouds and her team dwindled beneath her, Rainbow felt her heart rate accelerate, and not just because of the exertion and thinning air as she flew higher and higher. Her wing had only healed enough to fly a few days ago, and here she was, already about to put it through its greatest test yet. She knew that it was probably a bad idea to try and push herself like this so soon after recovering from her injuries, but it was the only solution she could think of to clear the weather. Plus, if she could still pull it off, then she really was the awesomest pony in all of Equestria. Which she knew already, of course, but it never hurt to have some reaffirmation.
She climbed for almost three straight minutes, keeping an even pace to avoid tiring her muscles out too much. When she finally came to a stop several thousand feet above sea level, she briefly fluttered her wings a few times to hover in place and observe the world below her. She could vaguely make out the shapes of the other islands near the horizons where the storm had not yet reached them, but below her, the clouds were a solid layer of paste obscuring the shattered archipelago. They seemed to materialize out of nowhere to the west before drifting in as one whole piece. Only after they passed the archipelago did they start breaking up into something more natural looking, on their way to cover the other islands with rain.
Rainbow frowned. Why were the summoned clouds only summoned over the islands below her? Why not the other islands? It didn’t make any sense.
But that wasn’t her problem, she decided. The only thing that was her problem was clearing those clouds so the moonlight could hit the island. To that end, she quickly spotted the tiny hole in the clouds below her and adjusted her starting point accordingly. That hole was her target, and she didn’t want to think about what would happen if she missed. Normally that wouldn’t be a problem, but with the clouds acting like clay instead of clouds…
Swallowing hard, Rainbow folded her wings against her side and began to fall.
The air began to whip past her face almost immediately. The wind blew tears out of the corners of her eyes and tried to push her off course. Rainbow let it play with her body for a few seconds, let it get comfortable with her feathers, before she opened her wings and started to flap them. Even with gravity aiding her, she knew she needed to go harder, faster. Bit by bit, her airspeed increased, pushing way beyond the limits of what most pegasi considered physically possible. But Rainbow wasn’t most pegasi. She was Rainbow Dash, proud Wonderbolt and the only living pony to pull off a Sonic Rainboom.
The air around her started to charge with magical energy, but Rainbow continued to fly hard through the wind and the storm. She had to squint to see where she was going; she really wished she had some goggles to shield her eyes, because her natural protection simply wasn’t cutting it all that well. The tiny hole below her grew and grew, and she could see the rest of her team standing around it, watching her descend and watching the rainbow trail she left in her wake. Rainbow fluttered her wings a few more times and then held her forehooves out in front of her. She could feel the magic building around her body; she just hoped she timed it right.
The clouds approached her so quickly she didn’t even have time to think about her approach. Instinct alone guided her to her target, and with one final flap of her wings, she felt the sonic cone around her tighten, contract, collapse…