//------------------------------//
// Prompt #349-One For The History Books 
// Story: Ponywatching 
// by ThunderTempest 
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The storm was massive, much bigger, and much more savage than anything the town’s pegasi had ever seen before. This was a true Wild Storm, a harkening back to the days before the pegasi controlled the weather. Weather magic arced around the clouds in translucent, flowing, jagged streams as lighting flashed and thunder boomed. A bolt of lightning struck the centre of the town, and as if that was the signal, the storm opened up the full might of its fury on the hamlet. Winds howled as they ripped and tore at the thatched roofs, lifting anything that wasn’t secured down. Rain cascaded down, drenching the streets in seconds, and water poured off the houses in miniature streams as the thunder rattled the windows and lightning lit the town like brief flashes of daylight. And through it all, ponies huddled in houses, holding their loved ones close. Foals cried and wailed at the noises made outside as their mothers desperately tried to calm them, older ponies sang songs and gathered together, fearing that this may be the return of the Windigoes, and those with pegasi friends and relatives prayed to Celestia for mercy from the storm’s wrath.

“Keep the storm from expanding!” bellowed a brown Pegasus as he bucked another bit of cloud into nothingness, straining to make himself heard over the wind, “Don’t let it get all the way down the valley!”

“Captain, we’ve lost Iridescence and Cloudy!” called a young blue Pegasus colt, barely able to keep his position in the storm’s winds.

“Dammit!” called the brown Pegasus, the weather captain for the region. “At this rate, we won’t have any ponies left to fight the storm. We need to stop this thing before it spills over into the rest of Equestria!” 

Just then, a lightning bolt arced out from the nearby stormhead, and barely missed the weather captain. Fortunately, the older Pegasus recovered quickly from his near brush with death, and furiously bucked the cloud into non-existence, the rest of the pegasi joining him, bucking and kicking with all their collective might, desperately trying to disperse the storm before it could do too much more damage. Even the young blue colt, who didn’t even have a cutie mark yet, and several others like him had joined in, all understanding the gravity of the situation. Every now and again, a bolt of lightning would tear outwards, and strike a pegasi, or one would get caught in a whirl of wind and smashed into something solid, or blinded by the rain and fall down, but the rest never stopped battling the freak storm. There would be time to mourn their loss later, after the storm had been taken care of.

-Time-

The next morning, Celestia’s sun shone through a still cloudy sky, crespular rays striking the hamlet...or what was left of it, anyway. The devastation left by the storm had been catastrophic. Not a single house was intact, many were flooded, and most had been struck by lightning at some point. The town hall was mostly intact, though, and it was here that the survivors of the storm gathered.

All one of them.