//------------------------------//
// Flight Lesson 
// Story: The Tiniest Changes 
// by Venlinelle 
//------------------------------//

“This is completely unnecessary.”
“Um, no, this is definitely necessary, and you’re smart enough that you agree with me.”
Starlight gulped, looking down at the cloud she stood upon and wondering when her luck would run out and find her plunging to her death—or worse, plunging to failure. “Stupid enough, maybe.”
She stood next to Rainbow Dash on the highest cloud for a hundred miles: a thin, semitranslucent cirrus that curled off into nothingness a foot in front of her, beyond which she could see nothing but open sky, hazy ground, and, far below her, the peak of the Canterhorn rising out of a much lower layer of clouds. She’d been dragged here unfairly and against her will, because—
“Come on, you have to learn this at some point,” Dash said, rolling her eyes. “Twilight started practicing before you have.”
“That’s not true at all! I can already fly! This is silly!” 
“That’s like… like… saying you can bake because you can buy a pie from Sugarcube Corner,” scoffed Dash. “Sure, you can lift yourself or whatever, and it’s a fun party trick, but it’s not flying. Here, watch!”
The cyan pegasus leaped casually off the cloud, allowed herself to fall in a reclined pose for three seconds, then spread her wings, caught the air, and swooped back up through the center of the cloud, leaving a neat hole in the center. “See?”
Starlight sputtered. “I can do that! Almost as quickly, even; that’s how I got up here. Here, watch.”
She stepped to the edge of the cloud, only to find herself blocked by a blue wing. “Nuh uh.” Dash shook her head. “No magic, right? So unless you’re gonna show me up by flapping, we’ll start with something more basic. And it’s still not the same.”
“Is too,” Starlight argued, apparently having chosen to retreat to childishness rather than advance to hysteria. “I can move through the air with magic, I can maneuver in any direction with magic, I can walk on clouds with magic!”
“Right.” Dash pointed a wingtip at her skeptically. “And can you feel the air rushing through your fur?”
She couldn’t; the levitation spell blocked almost all sensation. “Well, no, but I—”
“Can you bust a cloud?”
“...Not without a spell, but—”
“Can you fly faster than any pegasus other than Derpy or Bulk Biceps? Can you nap on a cloud without panicking? Can you dive, feel your eyes tear up from the speed, do a sonic rainboom, and brake yourself so fast you almost pass out but then bring yourself up just in time to feel the blood get back to your wings?!”
Starlight frowned nervously. “Should I be able to do that?”
“Uh, well, maybe not that last one. I have to save some awesome for myself. But you get what I mean! You need to learn to use those wings.”
She was right, obviously. Starlight was stalling for time partially because she knew Rainbow Dash liked to feel like she’d won an argument, but also, if she was honest, mostly because the thought of stepping off that cloud without her horn lit terrified the living daylights out of her. Not that daylight was alive; she’d asked Celestia. Still, enough was enough, and she was pretty sure the air up here was thin enough that it was actively unhealthy.
“Alright. So what do I do?” She swallowed, pawing the cloud that was so thin she could see straight through it. It was like being supported by a spider web. “Just… jump?”
Dash looked at her as though she’d grown yet another set of limbs. “Don’t be silly. You’d never make it right now; you don’t know how to flex your radius joints independently, or angle your primaries, or decide how much of your tertiaries to expose, or, uh, choose when to, um…” She shook her head, raising her wings. “Nah, you’re right, that’d take too long and I’m getting bored. Let’s go!” And, with that, she gave a powerful flap, producing a gust of wind that instantly tipped Starlight off the edge of the cloud. 
“AAAAAAA!” 
Starlight plummeted.
Instantly, her horn lit, ready to gently slow her fall and lift her back up to the still-terrifying but stationary surface of the cloud. But as she spun and caught a glimpse of Dash’s expectant face (amidst the many glimpses of every body part she possessed, some of which she hadn’t even realized it was possible to face with her eyes), she forced herself, with considerable difficulty, to dim her horn and think. 
They were multiple miles above the Canterhorn, itself multiple miles above sea level. At terminal velocity, plus an extra couple seconds for her increased friction profile given her new wings, she had a reasonable amount of time before she had to slow herself down. 
First, she needed to stop spinning. Hesitantly, she focused enough to extend a wing, and was jolted as she began spinning even faster in the opposite direction. Duh. She’d obviously been right about the reduced oxygen levels at this altitude. She habitually extended her other wing to place it in front of her face in embarrassment—and rapidly stopped spinning, and started falling even faster than before, this time with a world-class view of the snowy, unnaturally sharp peak below her. 
	Yay?
Okay, that had to be the hard part. Flapping should be easy; pegasi weren’t supported primarily by their wings, but by magic channeled through their wings. Surely that meant that her wings would understand her intent and keep her afloat? She had some muscle memory at this point; it would be trivial to—
Oh dear, the ground was approaching. She imagined it waving at her as the mountain strove to encompass more and more of her field of view. Inhaling what fraction of a breath she could while falling faster than a train, she gave a hesitant flap.
The angle of the ground changed—very slightly. As the stared downward, it began to revert, so she flapped again. And again. The motions were awkward, uneven, and decidedly incorrect in a thousand ways large and small, but they also served, slowly and steadily, to increase the angle between her and impending death (or embarrassment, since she could stop herself, but it certainly felt like death was approaching). And if she estimated correctly, if she moved her wings just a bit faster, she should be able to…
Pain shot through one of her back hooves as it clipped a pile of snow on a cliff—then she was free. The tip of the mountain shot out of view behind her, and the slope plunged away below as she narrowly avoided impact. And she was nearly horizontal! She was still moving downward, but she was basically flying! Without magic! 
After an emotionally-electrocuting moment of grinning like an idiot, she noticed Dash waving at her from her right. She waved back, lost her balance, and did a few impromptu corkscrews before righting herself and resuming her shallow but blisteringly fast downward glide. She squinted; Dash was motioning between her forehead and her ears. What…
Oh. Concentrating on maintaining her wingbeats, she called up a direct communication spell. They must be moving too fast to talk conventionally without shouting. The roar of wind in her ears faded slightly.
She was immediately rewarded with a screech that sounded as if it originated inside her skull. “You are SO STUPID!”
Wincing, she adjusted the spell’s volume significantly downward. “I know!”
“You don’t do that, you don’t almost get yourself killed with some dumb—wait, what?”
Starlight’s smile had yet to cool down. “That was crazy! I should’ve stopped myself a mile back up! But I made it!” She let out an uneven laugh that was stolen away by the wind the second it passed her lips. 
She heard Dash clear her throat uncertainly. “Uh, yeah, that’s what I was gonna say. But… you did make it, and I guess it’s mostly my fault? Buck me, Twilight’s gonna kill me…” She flew down so she was keeping pace with Starlight from below, and flipped to fly on her back. “But you’re not out of the woods yet! Stop flapping so much!”
Starlight blinked (she hadn’t stopped blinking rapidly since she’d begun to fall, but this time it was for a different reason). “How much… not so much?”
“I don’t know, maybe half as frequent?”
She obliged. She didn’t immediately fall out of the sky, which surprised her until she remembered her thoughts moments prior on how pegasi didn’t really support themselves with their wings. She’d probably just been wasting energy in her panic. Below, the mountain was beginning to recede below the thin, patchy layer of lower clouds; soon, she’d pass over Canterlot. 
Dash gave a wave of approval from below. “Good! Now you have to change the angle of your thrust. You’re going straight forward, and you want to be going up. Bend your wings in just a tiny bit, so they aren’t spread quite so wide, and try to push down instead of back. I know you can do it! Just think about it, and it’ll happen.”
Shockingly, it did happen. Awkwardly and unevenly, of course, but still, Starlight quickly found herself rushing first straight forward, then upward, then steeply upward. The world slowly began to recede below her, and a memory flitted across her mind: herself, on the peak of a mountain enormous to a filly, leaping into the unknown, and realizing for the first time that for her, unlike for every other unicorn in the world, the laws of gravity were optional. The first time she flew, and how it had wiped every thought of Sunburst and cutie marks (for both were rampant at the time) from her head. The memory was alone at first, but it was quickly joined by more of the first flight, then several of later ones, images of all the beauty of the world she’d gazed upon from on high that most ponies would never be so lucky as to see, the awe of the rare acquaintance when they learned what she could do…
And, as she remembered, her panicked focus softened, and, beating her wings, she started to feel. She felt, for the first time, the flow of the air across her feathers, and her mind fizzed as an entire new category of feeling flowed over her all at once. She gave her left wing an experimental wiggle, then her right; what were awkward, useless motions on the ground here became the keys to control, to agency, to the exhilarating dance she partook in as she shot upward and drank in everything she could see. Every shade of blue and green, every snowcapped peak, every swirl of distant color and every familiar landmark, she drank in gleefully, and with every gasp for air, more sights flooded in to fill their place. She saw Ponyville, and Canterlot, and the dark mass of the Everfree, and the train winding its way through them all, like a map laid out before her.
“Starlight? You’re doing amazing! I didn’t expect you to pick up on the finer controls that fast, I honestly kinda thought I’d have to help—”
“I don’t care!” Starlight shouted gleefully, any thought of decorum or politeness left far below on the ground. “I don’t have to! I’m FLYING! I can feel it!” She pulled her wings, already familiar to her, in tight, and angled upward and back. She was rewarded with a clumsy but exhilarating loop that pulled her stomach into her chest and her heart into her mouth. Laughter bubbled from her throat seemingly without end, infinite and accessible as the sky. “Rainbow Dash! I have wings and I’m FLYING!”
She could vaguely see Dash flying not far from her, keeping up effortlessly with her every inexperienced flip and spin and dive, but staying out of her way. If her brain hadn’t been stolen by the wind, she would’ve appreciated it. 





Sometime between three minutes and six hours later, Starlight collapsed awkwardly on a cloud, every muscle burning in protest. She wouldn’t have thought her knees would hurt after flying, but apparently she was wrong. Panting, she looked down at Ponyville—closer than the ground had been for a long while, but still a sizable distance down—and watched as Rainbow Dash landed gracefully next to her. She was in infinitely better flying shape than Starlight, but Starlight noted with dazed satisfaction that she was still breathing hard.
“Wow,” Dash said. “I mean, wow.”
“What,” Starlight panted. “Impressed… at my… amazing natural talents?”
“Ha, in your dreams. Just… Twilight told me you tended to go all in with things. I thought she was exaggerating.” Dash sidled up to her and flopped beside her on the ground, patting her with a wing. “I don’t even know if it was a good idea to let you land up here. You’re not going to be able to feel your wings for a week. Are you sure you can get down? I can carry you if I need to, but…”
Starlight grinned victoriously. “Oh, my wings are shot. But check this out.” She concentrated—a slightly more difficult task than usual—and her light blue corona surrounded her limp body as she floated into the air. “Not even a dent in my magic reserves!”
Dash gaped. “You can still do magic after that?”
She floated back onto the ground. Er, cumulus cloud. “Can I still do magic, she asks,” she said mockingly. “Now who ‘isn’t really flying?’”
“Yeah, yeah,” Dash grumbled, rolling her eyes. “I guess there’s some use to it if you’re tired or something.”
“Right? Imagine if I had to fight somepony in the air again! I could save so much energy if I didn’t have to keep myself up!”
Dash scooted up to the edge of the cloud, looking down at Ponyville in what looked like a comfortably familiar position. “I guess so. Hey, that reminds me. You fought Twilight in Cloudsdale in the past, right?”
Starlight winced. While the memory, from a purely magical perspective, filled her with pride, the more reasonable parts of her brain reacted… differently. “Er, yes.”
“So how in Celestia’s name can you fly with magic? Twilight could never do that- and I know she would’ve if she could’ve, even she’s not too boring to know flying is awesome.”
“Well…” Starlight sighed. Of all her magical achievements, ethical and less so, this really wasn’t one she liked to brag about. “If you really want to know? Dumb luck.”
Dash cocked her head, her mane flopping in confused solidarity. “Huh?”
“So… you know how unicorns have magic reserves? They refill automatically, and every unicorn has a different amount of magic they can draw on?”
Dash nodded. “Uhuh, and you can get more magic if you practice a lot, but it’s mostly fixed.”	
“Right. Levitation, and telekinesis more broadly, isn’t hard. Every unicorn in Equestria can do it, barring disability, and most can lift between one and five times their own weight. It’s why Twilight and I can levitate you.” She lifted Dash into the air briefly to demonstrate, giggling at the pegasus’s startled yelp. “Rarity probably could too, if she wanted. So it seems like it should be easy to lift yourself. But it’s not. The magic you’re maintaining on yourself interferes with the magic you’re casting to maintain the magic on yourself. It’s like a classical Mareray Feedback Loop, but instead of the input fueling the output, the corrupted output…” Dash’s eyes were glazing over. “Uh, nevermind. Think of it like… trying to build a house while only standing inside the house. You just get in your own way.”
Eyes relatively deglazed, Dash nodded. “Sure. So what do you do to get around that? It sounds like it should be like trying to overpower physics, or something.”
Starlight snorted. “We overpower physics all the time. That’s why we have manaphysics. But that’s the embarrassing thing about it—I don’t do anything.” She harrumphed softly. “I just have… more magic. My reserves are, or were, closer to an alicorn’s than a unicorn’s. Enough that I can overcome the interference loop and lift myself anyway.”
“So… you got lucky,” Dash said, shaking her head. “You’re right, that is embarrassing.”
“I didn’t say it wasn’t!” Starlight snapped. “But it’s not my fault. I mean, look at you—no normal pegasus can do a sonic rainboom, and you did one when you were a filly. It’s not—”
Dash stuck a hoof in her face. “If you’re going to say I’m faster than everypony else because of luck, shove it.” After a thought, the annoyance faded from her face. “And if I was… that would be okay, you know? I still work my flank off practicing more than anypony else. And I bet you did the same thing, right?”
Starlight uncrossed her eyes from staring at the proffered hoof. “I guess, but—”
“So you shove it too! So you got lucky and you’re the most powerful thing since sliced bread. Big deal. You still worked for what you have. Hey, do you know what I thought when I heard from Twilight that you could fly back in that meeting?”
“I… prefer not to remember that meeting, if it’s all the same to—”
“I was so mad, because you had something I had when I didn’t think you deserved it. Do you get it? I was jealous of you.” Dash stared into Starlight’s eyes, willing her to understand. “And I’m awesome. So if I’m mad at you for being too awesome, own it.”
Starlight wasn’t sure if her oncoming headache was from her ill-advised flight extravaganza, or being the victim of Rainbow Dash’s attempts at reasoning. “...I’m sorry, I don’t know what you’re trying to say.”
Dash facehoofed. “Just because you got lucky with this one thing doesn’t mean you can’t be proud. Your life sucked! Treat it like a reward or something. Everypony has stuff because of random chance. Heck, Twilight became the god of friendship—”
“Princess of Friendship.”
“—After having friends for like. A year. Sometimes things just happen. And if they don’t suck, you might as well be happy about them.”
Starlight frowned her I-want-to-agree-but-for-some-reason-I-feel-bad-about-agreeing frown. “I think that’s… almost good advice?” She willed her wings to flex. They didn’t. She stood up anyway. “Thanks, I guess. I’ve been… Oh, nevermind.” She moved to begin floating down from the cloud.
And was promptly flattened into a Starlight pancake by Dash pouncing on her. “Oh no you don’t. You’ve been what?”
Starlight struggled for breath. “Let me go!”
“Nuh uh. This is my cloud, and you don’t get to leave until you talk about whatever you’re worrying about. I can see it in your eyes.”
“You can’t see my eyes! And this isn’t your cloud!”
“All the clouds in Ponyville are mine. Kind of. That’s not important. What’s wrong?”
Starlight gave up the struggle and relaxed in defeat into the surprisingly dry embrace of the cloud. “Fine. I’ve been worrying that… all of this is like that. Being able to fly, I mean. It feels like I became an alicorn by chance, rather than doing anything.” She flipped over, gazing intently at Dash. “Twilight became a princess after only having friends for a year? Well, I was a monster until a year before I ascended, and then all of a sudden I’m…” She was what? Royalty? Immortal? Possibly the second-most powerful being in the world? A nervous wreck?
Dash nodded slowly, seemingly realized that she was still on top of Starlight, moved, and resumed nodding slowly. “Okay. I wasn’t gonna tell you this, but it sounds like you need it. Listen carefully.” Starlight listened. “...You are really, really good at flying.”
It wasn’t what she’d expected to hear. “I… thanks? I think?”
Dash shook her head in frustration. “No, you don’t get it.” She motioned vaguely with her hoof, struggling for words. “You’re really good at flying, and even if you got a head start, you still basically only started today. You’re really good at making friends. You’re really good at magic, and saving ponies, and somehow getting rid of every villain we meet without having to rainbow laser their faces.”
“Rainbow las—”
“And you’re so good at empathy that you reformed yourself. I mean, come on! Do you know how cool that is? Well… I guess you do, you’d know better than me, which just means you’re being even dumber for not getting it! You’re a princess for a reason, Starlight. A lot of reasons. And if anypony thinks you got that because of luck, they’re gonna have to go through me! You included.”
Starlight was staring at her in mild shock. Rainbow Dash groaned. “Look, I’m not good at this, anypony in town’ll tell you that. If you really want to deal with your feelings and stuff, go talk to Twilight. Or Fluttershy. Or Pinkie. Or anypony who isn’t me. But since you’re here, you’re hearing it from me, okay?”
Starlight nodded hesitantly.
“So don’t worry about it. I don’t know what in Tartarus keeps giving my friends wings, but whoever it is, they’ve got pretty good judgment. Trust me.”
Starlight wasn’t sure if she could agree. But there were some benefits to being a former tyrant, and one of them was that she’d long ago been forced to internalize that just because she felt a certain way, that didn’t necessarily make it true. So even if she couldn’t agree with Dash… she couldn’t in good conscience disagree with her. 
Dash was still looking at her expectantly, so she swallowed, and said, “I’ll try.”
Dash beamed and leaped to her hooves. “Awesome! I can’t believe I did that, AJ’s gonna be so proud…” She noticed Starlight looking at her, unimpressed. “Um, and I’m glad I could help, too. What say we ditch this place and go to the spa?” 
It was comforting, Starlight reflected as she carefully followed Dash downward through the open sky, that some things really hadn’t changed.