It was amazing how different the sky could look when you were traveling down instead of up. It was a good thing Sky wasn’t afraid of heights anymore. The whole world stretched out below her, for so far that she imagined she could see the curve on the horizon. All around her she felt the wind, a thousand different twisting currents moving down from the Arctic towards the desert. The books on weather engineering spoke of such patterns. She hadn’t read them, though, and wasn’t particularly interested in their manipulation just now.
Sky didn’t need to change the weather worldwide, or even regionally. A change like that might take hundreds or even thousands of ponies, and she didn’t have resources like that. Sky only had herself, and that would have to be enough. You’ve never given me anything before. She prayed, though she didn’t have anybody or anything to pray to. Not her father’s god, that was for sure. Maybe Lonely Day had one she could borrow. If I’ve ever earned anything, I’m cashing in.
There was no reason this should work. The few books she had bothered to read suggested making weather could take years to learn. Even gathering a few clouds should’ve been beyond her.
Yet there was fury in the sky. Had she taught the clouds to feel that way? Fury might not be the right word. Maybe righteous indignation was better. As her wings cleaved through the sky, the clouds above grew darker, and the wind began to rise. Somewhere above, she heard the first distant peal of thunder, shaking her deep in her chest. It wasn’t a large storm, but it didn’t need to be. A few blocks would do.
Even from up high, she recognized Main Street, and the bank where a terrified little girl was in danger. Maybe she would spot Wanderlust on her way down, maybe she wouldn’t. He would have to wait.
The storm followed her. Was it merely the current of air towing it behind her, or was it her will? It didn’t matter. In front of the huge dark anvil was a little white cloud, one she hadn’t gathered into the massive storm. She had to take special effort not to let it be swallowed, since she had no idea if she could take the fury from the storm once she had given it.
It occurred to her that for the first time in her life she was flying into danger instead of away from it. Nightmare hatred waited down there, a will that had tried and failed to twist her thoughts against her friends. Could it come after her again? Let it try. She wasn’t alone this time; this time she had the sky.
As she ate the meters she could see the little crowd gathered around the bank. She couldn’t hear a word they said over the terrible roar she had called down. Either something had heard her prayer, or else Sky had a talent for this weather stuff. Unlike the little cloud she shepherded, the storm as a whole didn’t travel down with her. Within it, winds rose to gale-force, and rain began to pour. The first bolt of lightning struck the ground far below, than an instant later she shook again with the force of thunder.
Gunfire sounded from below her. Glass shattered, and a small explosion shook the bank. Had they noticed her yet? She would have to make sure they did. “Another one, right there!” The storm roared in acknowledgement, and she was suddenly almost blinded. Lightning struck a parked car far below, just beside the bank. A full tank of half-spoiled gas exploded into an orange fireball, shattering nearby windows with the force. Was the storm actually listening to her?
Riley was there, struggling to hold onto the roof of the building under the force of the wind. She concealed much of her body in a thick jacket, though her strange changeling features were still visible in her face. For once, Sky hardly noticed. She could see Dean on the street, cowering in an alley. She heard banging on the door. As she got closer, she heard Carol's voice. “We must destroy it! She and her kind would drink all the life from the world and enslave us!”
It was beyond bizarre to hear somepony voice the fears that she had felt every time she looked at young Riley. Now that she considered them, they sounded absurd! The poor child really would be dead if they caught her!
“Riley!” Lightning flashed across the sky. This time it struck a metallic figure at the top of the courthouse, causing it to glow and distort. Sky didn’t watch though. Instead, she pulled into a painfully sharp dive, pushing the cloud to a stop beside the building. She used the cloud to slow her fall, colliding with it and soaking the rest of her momentum. She emerged from within with bits of it clinging to her face, clambering to the surface and searching wildly for the changeling.
The door banged open, and Carol stood there, looking on in shock. Behind her was the hulking form of Abrams, his expression strangely dark. The nightmare was here.
There was a four foot lip around the edge of the bank. Easy for a human to hop over, but nearly high enough to stop a pony completely. “Get on!”
Riley hurried to the edge, staring at Sky and her cloud and the raging storm just behind her. Sky felt the sprinkling of rain on her back; if she waited too long, her little storm was going to ground her as much as the ponies that she expected to be following. If Carol was leading this group, then she was probably from Equestria, which would make her a vastly better flier than Sky herself.
Could she quell the storm Sky had summoned? Could she fly in it? Sky didn’t want to stick around to find out.
“I can’t fly!” Riley’s wings briefly flexed on her back, folding and unfolding.
“You don’t need to know how!” Lainey offered her foreleg towards the filly, even as the little mob poured out the opening on the roof. “Trust me!”
How did she know the changeling was going to be able to stand on the cloud with her?
Riley glanced over her shoulder, and her eyes widened. She jumped, little wings buzzing. She didn’t go up that high, but it was high enough. Sky caught her and tugged, finding her unexpectedly heavy. She would have thought those holes and such a small body would’ve meant she would be extremely light. Not so.
Still, she appeared to be correct about the clouds being able to support her, and the filly struck the cloud with a soft thump.
“Stop, pony! You have no idea what you’re doing! That abomination can’t be allowed to escape! You have no idea the horror she’ll bring!”
Sky ignored the shouting, ignored what sounded very much like gunshots, ignored everything. She rolled off the cloud and started beating her wings for her life, pushing against the cloud and shoving it back up and forward. The storm closed behind her, and the shouting and noise faded to the background. A quick glance over her shoulder proved that Carol wasn’t trying to follow through the gale.
She was panting with the effort of pushing an occupied cloud, but it didn’t matter. She would get Riley out alive, that was all that mattered.
She encountered no resistance for several minutes, flying with all her might and gaining altitude over the seconds. She kept her eyes alert for Wanderlust as she passed over the town, but saw no sign of him. Maybe he had seen and heard their conversation, and was wisely laying low. She didn’t have time to find out just then; unlike Riley, Wanderlust wasn’t helpless. He could handle himself.
She didn’t hear the changeling say anything until she started screaming. “Behind us!”
Sky looked, and froze for a second, dropping several feet once her wings stopped moving. She caught herself, rushing to catch up with the cloud.
Beneath them in the sky was a dragon. It wasn’t the way she had imagined dragons, not like they were in the movies she had started watching with her best friend or with Wanderlust. No, this dragon was of the sort Lonely Day had described, made entirely of flames and written over with runes. It opened its mouth and roared steaming breath towards them, almost as loud as thunder.
Thunder.
Old Sky might’ve left Riley behind, particularly after hearing the awful things Carol said about her. Old Sky would’ve turned her back on a threat like this dragon and not even attempted to reconcile it. They had sent a dragon after them into a rainstorm.
“Don’t fall!” she shouted, giving the cloud one last kick and pelting up and away from it, back towards her storm. Steam began to rise from below as well as orange light, along with the flickers of a very angry looking dragon. Its face already looked furious.
After being so low to the ground, it took Cloudy Skies a few moments to open up her perceptions to the sky again. She had precious little time, what with the terrifying monster twisting upward towards Riley with every second. It was clearly ignoring her. Behind her, she could see the little changeling peeking over the edge of the cloud in horror. It probably looked like Sky was flying away, abandoning her.
I’m sorry I’ve been treating you awfully enough that you’d think that, she thought, closing her eyes. I hope this is enough, kid! The currents surrounded her again, and again she was filled with the indignation of the storm. She felt its anger, wrath at some pollution beneath them. Was it the dragon? Not specifically.
It wouldn’t take much to change that. Sky twisted around in front of the storm, creating a vacuum to encourage it forward. She drew up the wind into another furious gale with her movements, compacting it still further. The interior of the cloud was now as black as the night sky, flickering with the near-constant sparking of electrical potential.
Thunder rolled across the earth, thunder Sky had called. From the cloud came a downpour the likes of which had been unknown in this part of the world since the world was young and giants walked with men.
She watched as a practical wave of water struck the dragon. It roared again, though this sounded far more like a screech of agony. Fire blazed white then blue, but the wave of heat wasn’t enough to quell the ire of heaven.
Sky had to fly for her life to escape the huge bubble of steam that accompanied the death of a fire-dragon, which was probably still hot enough to cook her alive in seconds.
There was no sticking behind to see what happened after that. She returned to where Riley watched. The transformation in her face was so significant Sky almost thought she had picked the wrong cloud. Riley didn’t look at her as though she were afraid Sky was going to hit her anymore. A significant improvement. “That was incredible! I didn’t know you knew weather magic already!”
“Me neither.” Sky pushed the cloud the rest of the way up, until they joined the celestial mass and vanished from sight of the ground. She left the storm to exert the rest of its rage on the earth, hopefully grounding any pursuit long enough for them to get far, far away. “Did you see any sign of Wanderlust?”
She shook her head. “N-No. He was on the radio one minute, gone the next. He went off only a little after you did!” She turned, gazing out at the vast field of clouds, stretching out from horizon to horizon.
The darkness of the storm was gone with the hatred from below. Up here, there could be only light. Only friendship?