It was like walking into a blast furnace. Rainbow Dash’s eyes instantly brimmed with tears, making it that much more difficult to see through the heat-distorted air. Rivulets of sweat started running down her already damp fur. Her wings automatically began pumping a cooling breeze across her body.
And then the smell of rotten eggs mixed with crushed brick hit like a physical force, burning her sensitive nose. Grit scraped between her teeth. Her throat hitched as her stomach clenched, making it painfully clear that whatever was fouling the air disagreed with her system.
She hacked and spat and tried wiping the blurriness from her vision to see what was creating such intense yellow and red glows, but the heat and steam made it impossible. Her throat hitched again, refusing to take in the polluted air. White sparkles ate away at the edges of her vision. She needed to find clear air, fast.
Her wings took on a life of their own, pumping skyward as if trying to detach from her sides. The steam thinned. The heat lessened a bit. She could finally blink without tears flooding back in. When she could breathe without retching, she hovered and looked down.
“Brimstone Lake,” she said, awestruck. The entire length of her rainbow mane tried to stand on end. “I’m actually looking at Brimstone Lake.” Her insides tingled, swirling hot and cold, fright and excitement.
A massive expanse of shifting, scorched earth roiled and rumbled below. Cracks opened and closed in rhythmic waves, releasing small geysers of molten rock and steam. Jets of white, yellow, and red flared upward through the vapors like curtains of solid light, dancing along the crackling waves. This was why the Moonspire Run was legendary to sky ponies; the shifting lava below the surface created intense air currents normally found only over active volcanoes. And nopony was crazy enough to fly into one of those.
The constantly moving lake of stone and flame below was meant to be impassable for unicorns. The foul air and intense heat made it a herculean task to concentrate and focus on magic. Even if a pony came prepared with a teleportation spell, it was impossible to judge the distance to the far side through the haze, and materializing in the middle of an active lava field was not an attractive concept.
For pegasi, it was different. The cycling updrafts over Brimstone Lake’s tide provided a way for an expert flier to conquer the third barrier, if they were brave enough to fly that low. Rainbow Dash looked toward the Moonspire. It seemed much larger than it had from the Pinebone Forest. She could just make out a large, silver crescent moon on its surface through the heat waves. A faint haze swept out in a wide circle at ground level around the dark pinnacle.
“One chance,” she mumbled. She remembered a snippet from an old camp song about the Moonspire Run. “Surf brimstone waves, go straight, don’t turn; fly too low and you’ll get…” She swallowed the lump in her throat. “Burned.” She pressed her lips together in a tight frown and took a deep breath. “But if Spitfire did it, then I can too! Wait, where’d she go off to?”
Rainbow Dash scanned the lava field for the yellow and orange streak of her opponent. Nothing. She looked up through the haze. A tiny, flickering yellow speck circled high against a sky tinted red from volcanic dust. It was weaving in an odd, elliptical pattern: slow, turn, fast, turn, slow again. She looked back down. A bright wall of translucent yellow and red light was racing across field toward her.
“Oh no,” Rainbow Dash said. That’s why Spitfire was circling strangely; she was timing her approach to the wave. Rainbow Dash didn’t have much experience with thermal surfing, but she did have enough to know she was too close to the ground to catch this wave; she needed a steeper angle. If Spitfire caught it and she didn’t, the race was over.
Rainbow Dash couldn’t peel her gaze away from the lightning-fast wall of hot air churning toward her on streamers of yellow and white light. The sheer magnitude of it made her dizzy. The tiny thermal waves she once tried riding out in the Snowsand Desert were nothing compared to this. They were like riding Scootaloo’s scooter, whereas this was like trying to rope a wild dragon.
If she wanted to win, she had no choice. The incredible speed the wave would give was required to make it through the high winds over the third barrier, the Quicksalt Flat. She shuddered. Just thinking the name gave her chills. In her peripheral vision, she saw the circling yellow speck of Spitfire suddenly stretch into a long, fiery streak toward the wave front.
“Hailstones!” Rainbow Dash said. She flipped and dove toward the same point where Spitfire was aimed. She pumped her wings and concentrated on her sky pony magic, willing it to boost her speed even more. She strained, putting forth every ounce of effort she could, but Spitfire’s angle was steeper and faster.
Spitfire crossed the boundary of Brimstone Lake two pony-lengths ahead, just as the wave ebbed and reversed direction. Her yellow wings flared and caught the leading edge of the rolling thermal.
“Yee-ha!” Spitfire shouted. She threw a look back at Rainbow Dash. “Tough break, Rainboom girl!” The words dwindled away, drowned out by the rising hiss and roar of the wave carrying her away like a cork on a rampaging river. Rainbow Dash was only slightly behind, but was battered by the full updraft of the thermal’s main body. She blinked and suddenly found herself a thousand feet in the air, and rising.
Seeing Spitfire streaking away should have been devastating. Rainbow Dash should have screamed. She should have shouted. Should have cried. Ranted. Raved. Anything. Instead, her mind went blank. No words or discernible emotions existed inside her. It was as if pure instinct had become a separate personality and evicted her from her own skull.
Her wings flattened against her sides, spilling the updraft and leaving her in the stonehearted grasp of gravity. At the apex of her climb she flared her tail, letting the drag turn her to fall headfirst. Her sky pony magic swelled and expanded out, pushing her toward the ground faster than freefall. Her wings snapped out and began flapping, shoveling, attacking the air as if it were a mortal enemy.
The world around her jittered and shook as she accelerated through the rising turbulence. Details in the ground sharpened; the gritty texture of the charred earth, the brilliance of the glowing cracks, the swirling clouds of mist hissing up as if thousands of teakettles were buried under the surface. The only thing Rainbow Dash could see more clearly was the white cone of compressed air forming in front of her outstretched hooves.
A small part of her realized she was shouting, “Come on, come on, come on!” but she didn’t remember starting or even care that she was. Electricity crackled around her. Wisps of color fluttered at the edge of her vision like tiny rainbow ghosts. The ground was only a hundred feet away but her mind screamed to go faster.
The pressure of the air coursing around her was forcing her outstretched hooves together. She resisted, pushing back both physically and with her sky pony magic, driving the air aside. Parting it.
The world around her exploded. Every color of the spectrum burst out in a flat pressure wave. The noise and deep, physical thud jolted Rainbow Dash back to awareness. She yelped in surprise and wrenched her wings, forcing her body into a horizontal flight path a mere three feet from impacting the surface.
Glowing cracks of yellow and white flashed past on the ground below, flickering like an old movie projector. She realized she was moving fast. Very fast. She had flown this fast before, but only when she’d done the Sonic Rainboom. She risked a quick look back over her shoulder and saw a brilliant, glittering rainbow contrail stretching away behind her.
“Whoa!” she said. A colossal half-moon of rainbow flames flared several hundred feet into the sky from an enormous crater in the lava lake. It roared like an angry giant, the ends of the flame jets dancing like multi-colored faerie fire. “That’s new!”
She was only given a moment to admire her unexpected feat, as a huge wall of distorted air was chasing her, eating up her rainbow wake. A second thermal wave, larger than the first, was expanding outward from her Rainboom’s detonation point at a terrifying rate. Whether by instinct or luck she managed to angle her wings at the last moment and catch the front edge.
The world became a blurry tunnel as the wave added to her breakneck speed, intensifying it beyond anything she thought possible. A spiraling cone of red, yellow, purple, orange, blue, and green light formed in front of her hooves. The wispy filaments swept back, orbiting around her body and outstretched wings. Her cheeks fluttered in the assaulting gale. Her eyes were as wide as dinner plates. A combined scream of fright, surprise, and exhilaration rattled her clenched teeth.
A moment ago she hadn’t even been able to see the far side of Brimstone Lake, but now she was even less time than that from crossing it. The dusty haze whirling at the edge finally registered; she was on the verge of The Quicksalt Flat. She had a monumental decision to make: bank away and forfeit… or risk everything.
The Quicksalt Flat was a sky pony’s worst nightmare brought to terrifying life, due to the nature of their magic. Pegasus magic works in large part with moisture; the more humid the air, the stronger their magic is. It is how they can fly with such proportionally small wings and treat clouds as solid objects. In extremely dry air, sky ponies struggle to fly at all, and The Flat was worse than dry, it was negatively wet. A single grain of its magic sand would sap every drop of water from a pony in minutes. The entire sea of the beastly stuff in front of Rainbow Dash stripped all moisture from even the air above, effectively clipping the wings of any pegasus foolish enough to fly across.
And then there were the winds. A constant barrage of unrelenting downdrafts pushed everything toward the thirsty sand below. Flying across was impossible. All a pegasus could do was build up enough speed and hope it was sufficient to slingshot across like a stone. Rainbow Dash was confident she had more than enough speed, but at only twenty feet above the ground she was far too low to be sure of success.
An alarm in her head was blaring, “Abort! Abort!” and she was about to do just that, but a line of yellow and orange streaking high over the sand in front of her changed her mind. “No way,” she said through her chattering teeth. “I’m not quitting!” She narrowed her eyes and angled up.
The force of the wind hit as if she had flown under a waterfall. Any upward momentum she gained in that last second was killed. Sweat from exertion, fear, and heat from the lake had drenched her a moment ago, but as soon as she crossed the boundary onto The Flat her coat was as dry as a pile of dead leaves. She tried to swallow, but her tongue stuck to the roof of her mouth. Her throat rasped with every labored breath.
Panic began bubbling out from her chest when nearly all feeling vanished from her wings. She flapped like a maniac but met almost no resistance. It was as if the air had ceased to exist. For the first time, she felt like she was falling. She hadn’t ever really considered the word before, as falling was a normal part of flying. She had crashed plenty of times, tons actually, but that was different; during a crash she could still twist, turn, or angle her wings to help govern the impact. This felt absolutely out of control. Was this how wingless ponies felt all the time? She did not like it. Not one bit.
The crystal grains of the Flat inched their way up to meet her. She never knew something as benign as sand could look so sinister. She flailed her wings and hooves uselessly. The edge of The Flat separated itself from the distant haze at last; it ended abruptly where a lush field of green grass began. The dark curve of the Moonspire’s base thrust up from the field a mile further in, but Rainbow Dash didn’t think she was ever going to touch a hoof to either.
The sand was only three feet away, and rising faster.
She pulled her hooves up as high as she could and closed her eyes. “This was a stupid idea!” she said.
Two feet away.
She had done a lot of stupid things in her life: attacked a manticore, adopted a parasprite, sent Ditzy Doo to retrieve birds, and, of course, kicking a full-grown dragon in the face had to take the cake.
One foot away.
Cake! She would never get to eat cake at a Pinkie Pie Party ever again. She never apologized to Twilight Sparkle, Applejack, or Rarity for yelling at them.
Two inches.
And little Scootaloo… she only wanted a flying lesson, would it really be that-
Air filled Rainbow Dash’s wings.
She gasped and opened her eyes just in time to do one Super Speed Strut on the fringe of the grassy field and rebound into the air. She let out a rowdy cheer of triumph and was rewarded with a glint of sunlight from Spitfire’s flight goggles as they turned her way. Rainbow Dash had closed the distance between them enough that she could easily make out Spitfire’s open-mouthed look of shock.
Rainbow Dash grinned and spurred her wings even harder, more than she ever had before in her life. Spitfire’s lead shrank, but even though Rainbow Dash was setting new personal speed records, Spitfire wasn’t exactly poking along. At the rate she was going it looked like she was going to reach the Moonspire only a wing-length or two ahead of Rainbow Dash, but first was still first.
Rainbow Dash flattened her ears, stretched her neck, and reached deep into her willpower well for just one more ounce of speed. The twirling cone of rainbow light flared to life around her once again. She inched closer. If she reached out right then, she could have flicked Spitfire’s tail.
The Moonspire grew, it’s dark, faceted surface of carved obsidian seeming to rise up out of the gently rounded field. A wide, carved balcony curved around the side facing her, resting under a massive rectangular doorway into darkness so absolute it seemed solid. A silver representation of Nightmare Moon’s insignia blazed across its face large enough that most of Ponyville would have fit inside its circumference.
One quick glance was all Rainbow Dash gave the spire, since she was almost shoulder-to-hindquarters with Spitfire and still inching further forward. She closed until they were neck and neck, the wind making Spitfire’s image dance against the jittering background. They locked eyes in a sideways glance and blew past the spire, wingtips touching. A double rap of hooves sounded. Two clacks; one right after the other. Rainbow Dash knew she only touched with one hoof, but was hers first? Spitfire twisted and soared high above, turning in tight loops and laughing euphorically.
“Oh my gosh!” Spitfire said. “You made your own thermal wave! That was awesome!” Laughter gripped her again as she sputtered, “I-I’ve never seen anything like it! I can’t believe you did it!”
At first Rainbow Dash frowned, but then smiled and started giggling as Spitfire’s infectious laughter filled her. The race was over, and whatever the outcome was, the exhilaration of what she had just accomplished was overwhelming.
“I mean, look at that thing!” Spitfire said, gesturing toward the multi-colored wheel of fire still burning through the haze. “What are you going to call it? ‘The Sonic Flamebow’?”
Rainbow Dash looked back, but her eyes refused to focus. She let her forward momentum fade, and with it went the adrenaline rush that had been fueling her since the moment she entered the Pinebone forest. Every muscle in her body went slack as tension flooded away. Her legs went limp, drooping down and back into the slowing slipstream. Her wings ceased flapping and flattened into a gliding posture. She didn’t remember ever feeling so drained. Or thirsty.
Whoever won the race suddenly didn’t seem half as important as finding a cloud to take a quick nap on. She looked around through half-lidded eyes, but didn’t see anywhere to land except the soft, lush, delicious-looking green grass below. She hated grazing like a cow, but right now she’d eat anything. She dipped into a gentle descent and let her eyes flutter closed.
“Rainbow!” Spitfire yelled. “Look where you’re going! You’re getting too close to the-”
Rainbow Dash forced her eyes open just as the air left her wings. A monstrous gust of wind shoved her toward the ground. The crystalline sand of The Quicksalt Flat rushed up hungrily to say hello.
She flailed her legs and wings but couldn’t stop or turn toward the safety of the grass only a few feet away. She really, truly, hated falling. Really.
Everything went white.