It was a rare sort of unicorn who found themselves managing the weather. As she found herself steering an obstreperous cloud into position, Rarity’s thoughts on nominative determinism were not fit for print.
“If you could kindly take your place, just so,” she murmured to herself — and if the murmuring had a distinctly plaintive edge to it, well, who else was there on that hillside to hear? — and she nudged it carefully, ever so carefully, till it fitted corner-to-corner with its fellows in a cloudy checkerboard straddling Ponyville’s skies.
She brightened, and dared breathe out. The morning’s labours could have been described as unspeakably wretched, if one was both feeling polite and understated, but all finally seemed to have been made well. All was neatly arranged. Nothing was dispensing rain or thunderbolts with wild abandon. She’d done well at last.
A light breeze blew into the clouds at the edge of the pattern, pushing into its neighbours.
Its neighbours pushed into their neighbours.
Rarity glimpsed the cascade a moment after it properly got started, when the front of grumbling, bundled-together clouds was already rolling across the sky.
“No. No, no, no. Cease.” Her horn blazed as her magic stabbed out to try and afix the clouds in place and arrest their advance. The force of her magic jabbed up into them and, rather than stop them, forced the centre of the whole roiling cloud-mass up. Its front line bent round into a concave arc, annexing yet more clouds and leaving the middle to thunder upwards. By way of insult, that inspired the whole formation to start decanting rain again — perhaps it was a stress response for clouds, who could say — and from the distant waterlogged streets of Ponyville, there came scattered yelps and curses.
Rarity stared at it. A morning’s work, gone up in smoke just like that.
She could have wept, she really could.
Perhaps she would. Her chaise-longue and ice cream were beyond the reach of easy retrieval, but she could improvise.
Before Rarity could decide which of the hillside’s bushes could be best reclined upon for howling purposes, she heard hoofsteps and somepony approaching. She turned to see Sweetie Belle trotting up towards her.
The filly’s expression betrayed a certain wariness, as if she was approaching something along the lines of a slumbering bear, or a carriage of explosives. But for all that, she approached. Rolled-up papers poked out of the saddle-bags slung over her back.
Rarity’s gaze flicked up to the sky again, as she was suddenly, excruciatingly aware of the dismal artistic example she was setting. Perhaps there was time to fix things in her remaining microseconds before conversation commenced. Her horn lit up, and clouds started moving in patterns indescribable.
“Rarity?” Sweetie ventured. Overhead, lightning contrived to blast up.
“One moment, Sweetie. I’m in the zone, as it were,” Rarity lied. Maybe confidence could be infectious. Maybe if one said it, one’s brain would sign up to the latest trend. It was a fairly feeble avenue, but frankly, she wasn’t sure what other avenues she had left.
“I’m, um, I’m not sure you are.” Sweetie looked up at the sky. “This isn’t anything like your usual zoning.”
“An artiste’s method can be mysterious at times. Bear with me, I pray.”
“It’s just, I think Ponyville thinks you’ve declared war on it.”
“Critics can be a terribly harsh breed. If they say that, then I say into each day a little rain must fall.” A streak of honesty compelled Rarity to add, a moment later, “Some days, more than usual, and with the potential for unexpected snow flurries and hailstones.”
“You do clothes, not weather, and your cutie mark’s all wrong. Rarity, stop it! Look!”
Sweetie yanked one of the pieces of paper from out her saddlebag and brandished it in Rarity’s face, who found herself looking at a sketch of a dress.
A fairly practical number in russet and dark green, comfortably loose about the legs and rear, but the artfulness of it showed in the golden stitching around the front, spreading out in the shapes of fronds and delicate flowers. Rarity’s gaze focused on its cut and shape, as she hunted for all the terms she thought might apply to it. There was a science to dressmaking, a whole discipline full of distinctions and jargon, and she knew in her gut that there were ways to delineate this dress …
… But they just eluded her. Like something under rippled water, whose outline she could apprehend but whose details defied her attention.
She realised she was trembling and tried to will herself to stop. For these sorts of occasions, one had to present their bravest face. Past the sketch, Sweetie was watching her wide-eyed.
“I’m sorry, Sweetie,” Rarity stammered eventually. “I … I don’t know what to make of this.”
“But you did this!”
“What? How could I?” Again, that indistinct something, lurking below the surface or past the horizon, like a gathering storm. “Sweetie, I’m sure I’d recall sketching something like that. It’s … it’s surely not the sort of thing I’d usually do.”
“You did! I saw you! Carrot Top came in just yesterday, looking for something to wear to some kind of farmer’s gala, and she wanted something in burgundy, and you convinced her that russet was more her colour, and you were sketching that with her, and she approved and said she’d get the downpayment to you today, and you only stopped to tell me to cut it out when I was trying to get a cutie mark in Opal-Taming, even though I think I was kind of getting there, and also I don’t think she’ll be able to get the downpayment to you today anyway because main street’s flooded and there’s angry ducks from Fluttershy’s everywhere —”
Sweetie, who’d gradually turned puce, took a moment to catch her breath. Rarity could only keep staring at the sketch. Above, clouds cacophonied unheeded.
“I don’t entirely grasp any of this,” Rarity said in a small voice. “There was … Twilight happened upon me earlier and she said something was wrong, something about my cutie mark. She didn’t seem to think I’d done a stellar job with the sky as well.” After a moment’s reinspection of her work, she added softly, “For which one may forgive her.”
Just her art. Just her life’s labour, that she’d (surely) been refining all her days. Just her soul given external form, inspiring swearing and dismay in all who saw it. Why wouldn’t she forgive Twilight? Rarity couldn’t help but feel a bit tepid on the subject herself at this moment.
“Twilight explained something about it,” Sweetie said. “She said — well, I think she said, she was rushing around a lot and looked kinda panicked — that she’d done something to mix up your cutie marks, and she was trying to think up ways to fix it. And um, till then …” She floated out a couple more rolled-up papers from her saddlebags and proferred them.
Rarity unrolled them and studied them in silence, her mind seeming to splinter in different directions. One, running over the old dress designs and fixating on them more than she really felt she ought. Another, helplessly yearning to get back on with the task of sorting the weather just so, hoping that this time would be the charm. And yet another turning over Sweetie’s words, mulling over them from all angles.
What to say to that assertion? That some fundamental part of your very self was wrong, that some foundation stone you knew to be a foundation stone had apparently just been swapped around?
“Oh dear. Consider what sort of world we live in. Consider the sort of mischief we know can be done with cutie marks. I can’t rule it out,” she muttered to herself.
“Huh?”
“Succinctly put, Sweetie.” Rarity released a laugh which had a hint of sob about it. “Oh stars. Your… ah, your mission to attain a cutie mark? Are you so sure you want to pursue it, Sweetie? They can be such trouble.”
This just got her an exasperated look. Other ponies had their own foundation stones. And she studied her own, as bright and ever-present and background as it ever was, like the light of the sun.
And it said to her, fool around with those clouds up there
“I can’t bring myself to feel that that’s the case,” Rarity said quietly. “I know what my cutie mark is. I know I’m destined to leave my mark on the heavens, to put it poetically. But how I’d love you to be right. I’d hate to be this dreadful at something I was born to do and be. I’d hate to have lost my art like this.” Her voice dropped. “If I’d ever had it at all.”
A pit of misery was hard to lose oneself in when Sweetie Belle was involved, especially when her involvement took the form of yanking out all the dress sketches and all but whacking Rarity with them. “You’ve not. I promise,” she said, with the utter and urgent conviction children could bring to bear. “And you’re going to get better. Twilight’s on it. Trust Twilight.”
And no matter what her cutie mark was telling her, that was something Rarity struggled to dispute. “Is she helping the others as well?” Rarity asked.
Sweetie nodded. “They’re all in the same boat.”
And Rarity’s heart stung to hear it, the notion of her friends in that sort of unsettled state. But Providence had steered the best of unicorns to their aid, to both apparently cause and fix the problem, and that was a cause for comfort.
She looked up, like a moth eyeing up the candle flame, to where the clouds had contorted themselves into shapes hitherto unknown to ponykind. Again, that disconnect; again, that surety that this was what she was for, to arrange the weather into forms both pleasing and practical; again, the shapes of the dresses like silhouettes behind curtains.
What did she know? Deep down, what did she truly know?
To make her art, and trust her friends. As guiding lights, they may have sometimes steered her to indignity or confusion or disappointing galas, but they’d never steered her wrong.
“Tell me … tell me about the designs, Sweetie,” Rarity said, as her horn flickered to life again. “Let me keep at this, and I’m quite certain it’ll turn out aesthetic, one way or another. But keep me rooted, and we’ll see what follows.”
And as Sweetie hesitantly began by saying that this one looked like it was blue, apart from the sash, Rarity turned her attention back to the sky. A little horizontal whirlwind and a high-up snow flurry had ended up at cross-purposes, and she disentangled them. A sort of stripey cloud whose exact descriptor temporarily eluded her at this time found itself laid carefully flat. The little whirlwind picked a fight with one of it, and she turned to shoo it off, even as designs churned in her head for realisation.
Whether in or past the clouds, she’d find her foundation yet.