//------------------------------//
// The Pass 
// Story: Clear Skies 
// by Amber Spark 
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For most airship passengers, the North Unicorn Pass is little more than a break in the tail end of the Unicorn Range that passenger liners fly over at twenty thousand feet. While this part of the Range only reaches about seven thousand feet above sea level, I’d still wanted to try it. Minuette had been right. The actual maximum ceiling of the Wandering Blossom was about twelve-thousand feet. She couldn’t go anywhere near as high as a passenger liner, but she was still top-of-her-class and could easily go over the Unicorn Range.

The North Unicorn Pass is considered to be a proving ground for most small airship pilots in Western Equestrian. The pass itself was more than wide enough to navigate through safely, but hugging the contours of the gorge that made up the pass was quite the challenge. Ships twice the size of the Wandering Blossom had done it, so I should have no problem. 

As I dropped us to around twenty-five hundred feet, I had to keep reminding myself of that. To my surprise, Minuette was at my side in the copilot’s seat. In the hours since the Waystone’s little surprise, she seemed to have a change of heart about the whole ‘risky piloting’ business, though she refused to say why. I guessed it had something to do with my deal with her. I still didn’t know why it was such a big thing and I doubted I would find out. 

Anyway, I had more important things to worry about. 

The first thing I’d done was a basic sounding spell, a weak pulse designed to sense any other ships in the area. Granted, it didn’t even go a quarter of a mile, but it was something. The last thing I wanted to do was find another ship attempting the run at the same time.

Granted, there could be someone trying from the other side, but I couldn’t do anything about that, so I was just going to cross my hooves and hope for the best there.

“You’re sure nopony else is around?” Minuette asked for the third time as she peered through the forward screen and the streaks of rain.

“Positive,” I replied as I felt the Blossom buck slightly beneath us. The weather had picked up and we now had a steady fall of water with the occasional downpour. That didn’t bother me. The winds were what bothered me. A little. 

There were three traditions for those attempting the Northern Unicorn Pass run. First, stabilizing fins needed to be locked into a horizontal configuration. If either of those touched either side of the gorge, the run would be considered a failure. Second, the mainsail and the jib sail had to be used for propulsion until the three-quarter point. And third, no magic beyond what was built into the ship.

As I maintained our approach to the dark valley, the first flash of lightning crackled through the clouds overhead, lightning them up in patchwork patterns of gray and black.

“Moony…” Minuette whispered as she watched the light show. “You sure about this?”

In reality, nearly every run through the pass was done without anyone actually judging them. There were some ponies out there who lied through their teeth. There was no way to be sure anypony had completed the traditional run. The tradition hadn’t come out of that though. The tradition had come out of airship pilots wanting to prove to themselves they were capable, not to others.

Maybe I was doing this for the right reason. Maybe it was the wrong reason. 

At that point, I didn’t care. I was still doing this.

As for Minuette… well, she’d insisted on hitching a ride with me. She couldn’t back out now. 

Nothing but forest lay beneath us and the sun was beginning to fade. Two additional challenges were often added to the run: the light and the weather.

The ship rocked from side to side and Minuette let out a yelp. I ignored it and kept my hooves on the yoke.

“Uh, Moony?” Minuette said, tapping one of the panels in front of her. “According to this, the winds are gusting up to thirty miles an hour!”

“Blossom can handle it,” I growled as we reached the last mile to the entrance of the pass. It looked like a black slash through the granite of the mountains. 

“Can you?” she asked, her voice quavering.

“Yes,” I snapped.

I growled under my breath and shoved the throttle to three-quarters for a good ten seconds to give us a nice good head start. After all, tradition said that engines weren’t to be used in the pass. Didn’t say anything about before the pass.

I reached up with my magic and yanked two levers above my head, locking the stabilizing fins into the horizontal position. This setting was almost never used, unless a ship had to do a sharp ascent or decline, but they gave us a little room for error. It wasn’t like I’d need it. I knew what I was doing.

Lightning streaked through the sky, grounding itself on one of the huge mountains to starboard and filling the entire world with light. The thunder rattled both of us in our seats. Minuette quickly adjusted her seatbelt to the five-point harness configuration I’d showed her earlier. I didn’t bother. We would be fine.

“Moony…” Minuette whimpered. “I don’t think this is a good idea.”

“That’s nice.” I flipped the forward lights on as the hidden sun began to fall below the horizon.

“Moony, come on! We can do this later!”

“Nope. Doing it now,” I grunted as a tailwind caught us and yanked us forward.

Then, before she could whine any more, we were in the North Unicorn Pass.

I had memorized the route to the North Unicorn Pass, but I quickly found that didn’t mean much when I could barely see beyond the prow of the Blossom. I swore and punched six buttons to my left, instantly overcharging the running lights of my airship. The canyon walls immediately burst with illumination as the forward lights attached to the bowsprit drilled through the rain and the dark. Minuette shrieked when the first turn came up, but I had enough warning to use the wind funneling through the pass to jibe port. I eyed the starboard fin and smiled when we cleared with plenty of room to spare.

“Why is this so important to you?” she cried as she held onto her seat, staring into the darkness.

“It’s a challenge!” I shouted. The roar of the wind was starting to get loud even through the slatted curtains forward and aft. “I like them!”

“Since when?” Minuette shot back as I jibed starboard to miss another cliff wall, swinging us around and making sure to keep the mainsail fully powered. She screamed as the port fin came within a hundred feet of the wall.

“Since a few years ago!” I shouted back.

She said something else, but I mentally tuned her out, focusing all my attention on the ship. In truth, I hadn’t expected to do this during a thunderstorm or at night. We’d hit a headwind that had delayed us by three hours and this storm hadn’t been on the schedule for the area. Then again, since there were no major cities in the region, pegasi tended to let the weather run a little wild. For all I knew, this was one of the wild storms the ATC back at the Vanhoover Skydocks had warned me about.

Maybe I should have turned back and done this another day. But trying to turn around with this much wind behind us would guarantee a quick trip into a cliff wall. Even trying to climb out of this would be risky, as the winds would get more unpredictable the closer we got to the top of the pass. In truth, it didn’t matter. We were already in it and I was going to see us through.

I had to perform two more last-second jibes, the Blossom shaking and rattling around me. It became almost like riding a series of white water rapids, desperately trying to avoid the big rocks all while trying to stay off the banks of the raging river. Only in this case, it was in three-dimensions.

The analogy became even more apt as I was forced to slalom through a narrow switchback. Minuette screamed as wall after wall spun by us. At this point, I had given up trying to control our speed and focused on just not hitting the walls of the pass. As we came out of the last one, it sent us directly toward another gray cliff wall. I swore and yanked back hard on the yoke. I saw the mainsail and the jib sail snap into the proper position, but I could already see it wasn’t going to be enough. The wind behind us was pushing us toward the wall too fast.

So I did something that most pilots would have called insane. 

I dropped the starboard stabilizing fin back to its vertical position and extended it as far as it could go. 

Instantly, the wind slammed into the new plane on the airship and the Blossom began to tilt hard to starboard. I could see from the way the rain moved that the canyon walls provided a sort of narrow airstream. All I needed to do was get my sails in that stream and we would skim the edge and have room to right ourselves.

Minuette was doing something. Again, I was only barely aware of her. 

Within thirty seconds of me releasing the fin, we were completely perpendicular to the ground. I grunted and wished I’d put on my five-point harness. I ignored gravity’s call on my body and collapsed the mainsail, letting the jib take the brunt of the winds as we slid closer and closer to the wall of granite.

“Moony!” Minuette shrieked. “Do something!”

“I’m doing it!” I bellowed back at her.

The airship jerked as we hit the airstream. I yanked down on the mainsail’s lever and it snapped open, sucking up all of that thrusting air and sending us rocketing forward. I yanked the starboard fin back into the horizontal position moments before as I heard a faint scraping noise. I didn’t let myself think about it. One thing at a time, Moondancer. One thing at a time.

I had made one final error though. The way the wind had been pushing at us didn’t suddenly stop the moment we hit the airstream. Instead of leveling out, the entire airship capsized. My seatbelt barely kept me in while various things in the wheelhouse crashed to the ceiling. I grunted and tweaked the sails before swearing and finally kicking in the rudder assembly. I hadn’t wanted to use it. It was a major mark of honor for those who made the pass if they could do it without the rudder, but I didn’t have a choice. I unlocked it from its normal tilt and allowed it to control both pitch and yaw as it slammed ‘up’ into position beneath the turbines under the stern of the Blossom.

It was enough.

With my expert hooves at the yoke and rudder, I managed to spin the entire airship the rest of the way, righting her just in time to jibe the next twist of the pass. I mentally did a comparison of the switchback we’d just gone through and the map in my head.

“Almost there, one last turn…”

Minuette said nothing, but I couldn’t spare the time to even glance in her direction. The final wall loomed up in front of us, a massive thing of gray granite and green lichen.

I jibed for what should be the last time.

Then, a bolt of lightning crashed into the mountains directly above us. Minuette screamed. I swore and my hooves jerked on the yoke. Thunder—a hundred times worse because of the narrow space of the pass—pounded my flattened ears. I had no doubt that if the forward-screen in front of us had been glass, it would have shattered. A few rocks suddenly came tumbling down, nothing bigger than a pony, but even rocks that size could do horrible damage to an airship the size of the Blossom. I saw one clang off the railing on the forward port-quarter. I swore again when I realized my starboard fin was scraping against the cliffside.

“Dammit!” I roared and yanked the ship back from the wall. “So bucking close!”

And then, we were through and into the rolling foothills north of the Unicorn Range. Despite that, I couldn’t see a thing before us, except…

I frowned and squinted into the darkness. Out there in the storm, was a small dot of light, going in the same general direction as we were. Without thinking about it, I cut our running lights to low. I didn’t know why. Maybe I was just paranoid from that narrow brush with… well, probably not death, but at least inconvenience. 

Still, something about that light made me uneasy. I wondered what it was. Within a minute or so, the light ascended into the cloud layer and vanished from sight. I forced it out of my mind, returned the stabilizing fins to their correct position—though I would have to land tomorrow and inspect them—and tried not to focus on how I’d just royally screwed up. 

About how I’d failed. Again.

I rubbed my eyes with my hooves and turned to my copilot. “Sorry for the rough—”

The seat was empty. 

I froze for a second, my head spinning about. For a second, I was worried she had somehow gone overboard during my maneuvers, but as my eyes swept the deck, I saw Minuette down below, looking at me with an unreadable expression. She just stood in the rain, like it wasn’t freezing out there. 

Then she shook her head and headed to the lower deck. 

I blinked a few times, not sure what to make of her reaction. Yeah, that hadn’t gone according to plan, but we were fine. Maybe a little bumped and bruised, but fine. Why was she being so odd?

And what happened to the Minuette I remembered all those years ago? Back when nothing could take away that smile? 

Then I had to remind myself of what I’d seen today. I wasn’t the only one who didn’t want to talk about their past. It wasn’t like I’d told her everything. I didn’t intend to tell her everything. It wasn’t any of her business what happened between me and—

I stopped.

No, but maybe being a good friend would count. We had both fought in the Battle of Unity. We’d been on the front lines with everypony—no, everycreature else. And then… things had happened. Mistakes had been made. Not between us. Me… and others.

After that, I’d become a little obsessed with this idea. 

Maybe this was her way of bridging that gap. And maybe this is her reaching out to me and trying to get to know me again? No one had been the same after the Battle of Unity. For the most part, that was a good thing. 

And what had I just done?

To her eyes, I had probably nearly killed us both.

I facehoofed and took the time to neaten up the wheelhouse. I didn’t feel up to running the ship on autopilot tonight. So, I gently dropped the ship as I searched for a clearing in the forest below where I might be able to land the Blossom. It took me a good ten minutes or so, but I finally found a series of wet hills with only a few scattered shrubs.

Turning the crystal core into low-power mode, I brought the ship to a hovering stop on the leeward side of a larger hill. I dropped anchor—I didn’t want to actually put the ship on the ground with that sound of the hull being scraped still fresh in my mind. Then, I retracted the fins, turned off the main running lights, and engaged the low-level anchorage lights.

I took my time to secure the rest of the wheelhouse, but mostly because I didn’t really want to face Minuette right now. I had a bad feeling about this. Anything that could get Minuette upset was a pretty big deal. I probably wasted a good twenty minutes in the wheelhouse before I finally left, locking both doors with my magic. The rain had stopped and the sky was just a series of broken clouds.

I didn’t even notice the cold as I stepped down the slick stairwell and made my way to the lower hatch. I paused briefly before going through though, taking a deep breath of the alpine air. I may have been raised in a mountain city for my whole life, but this was a different kind of air. A wilder air, filled with pine trees, sagebrush, and the sound of nothing pony-made aside from the Blossom’s quiet crystal core. All sorts of animals and critters made noises out here, just living their lives and ignoring everything else. 

Sounded nice.

However, despite the serenity of the moment, I didn’t look up at the stars.

Another twist of magic and I was inside my ship. After locking the door, I slipped through the engineering section. There were a couple places where it looked like sparks had flown, but nothing overtly damaged from my run through the pass. I smiled briefly to myself, until I remembered what lay beyond the next hatchway.

I swallowed and wondered what Minuette had really expected out of this trip. 

Well, there was only one way to find out.