Life in the Air
Life in the Air
The light burning where my wings met my body made me smile. It meant I had been in the air for hours, nothing supporting me but my endurance. I may not be the fastest or the strongest or the most graceful, but if there was one thing I loved, it was staying up in the sky.
I thought back to why I was up here — as if I needed a reason. But as Pansy’s friend, being asked a question is among the simpler things that I’ve had to do. At least, it seemed simple at first.
What is it like to fly? That’s like asking what it’s like to breathe, what it’s like to have a dream.
I soared through the thin air, almost reflexively searching for the warmer updrafts that would allow me to stay up for as long as I could possibly want. The one I was currently in tickled my feathers as it lifted me higher.
This question was something a grownup should be answering, not me. But none of them would understand the question. Everypony we’re supposed to know can fly, so there’s no reason for the question to come up. But Pansy has those other two friends, the ones I help her sneak off to see, and they’re not pegasi.
And so now I was pondering the meaning of life.
That is what flight is to us. It is life. It is death. It is what we are. How do I explain the magic of a foal’s first flight? There’s nothing like it. I won’t ever forget my little sister’s. The air was dry, the sun was hot, making her a nice updraft, and she was hovering just a few hooves off the ground. I’ve never been so proud or so happy. I think Mom and Dad were crying. Pegasi have always considered it to be one of the great tragedies of life that almost no foal remembers his or her first flight.
I reached the point where the updraft stopped lifting me, so I turned my head and moved my tail to slowly bring myself to point at the next updraft. It was quite far away, but I knew I could make it without a single flap if I really tried. As I left the column of air, my wings found the most efficient shape for gliding through the thin air.
And how could I explain the final flight? I heard that unicorns burned their dead and that earth ponies bury theirs, but that just seems... crude somehow, disrespectful. When a pegasus dies, he’s sent on the final flight. As we are in life so we are in death. It is a very personal thing, the final flight. The pony’s family and friends all gather around the body and, together, lift it into the sky. Higher and higher they go until the ground is only a memory. And then they speak about the pony’s life, and the cloud from their breath wraps around the dead pony, holding him or her aloft. Our thoughts and memories made real carry them away on their final flight. Eventually, the winds bring them over the oceans, their final resting place. That way, they eventually become part of the clouds themselves. When a pegasus lands on a cloud, we know that our ancestors are beneath our hooves, giving us a place to rest. It’s comforting to know that one day I will support my fellow pegasi, that I’ll be appreciated forever.
The wind must be making my eyes water. So I reached out with the magic all pegasi have and directed the air to part around my head a little nicer. This mastery of the air is what makes a pegasus a pegasus. While griffins and dragons can fly, they just beat at the air with their wings. They move through the air, but they don’t fly.
There are some other pegasi who say that what I do isn’t really flying either, but they don’t see the pleasure of just allowing the air to take them where they want to go. They say it’s all about forcing the sky to do what you want, but I can’t see it that way. I search for the simplest path, the one the air wants me to take, and I take it.
Like how now there is a cloud in my path. It is still minutes ahead of and below me, so I closed my eyes and felt the air currents around me. Tilting my head and lowering my right hind leg brought me into a new path that would arc me around it. I didn’t worry yet about getting back on course; the sky would provide. It always does.
Out of the corner of my eye, by the edge of the Everfree, I saw a few ponies. I couldn’t tell if they were unicorns or earth ponies, but it barely mattered. I would stay in the air, and they would remain stuck on the ground. That was just how life worked.
What’s it like to fly? That’s like asking what it’s like to run on four hooves or see or hear.
I don’t know if it can even really be described to unicorns or earth ponies. Since they don’t have wings, there’s no way I can describe the sensations to them. With other pegasi, I could talk about how air flowing over my margins feels in a dive or how feathers rustling in the breeze let my wings know how to cut through the wind effortlessly. But anything like that would just be lost on a ground-pounder.
I felt the rising air before me and braced my wings into a new position just before passing into it. Then, I was in its grasp and being pulled upwards, ascending effortlessly. The gentle tug at my wings was always one of my favourite things; it let me know that something bigger than myself was on my side, helping me.
Of course, not every second of flying was like this. There were moments when the winds whipped around and fought against every flap, but those moments only ever made me appreciate how wonderful being in the air usually is more than ever.
I might be on to something there. It seemed almost like the sky was something alive, something pegasi everywhere can relate to. It’s almost like the sky is family, really.
Maybe that’s what I should tell Pansy to let Clover know, that flight is like being surrounded by a supporting family that wants to help you do whatever you want.
But that can wait a few hours. I want to spend more time with my family.
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- q97randomguy · 1.1k words · 22 1 · 524 views
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A lovely, short feelsy kind of story.
I definitely like where you went with that, and headcanon accepted as far as the final flight goes.
Another like and fave you have earned from me, q97. Keep it up.
3821898
Thanks! I actually had the idea for the final flight a while ago; there's a reference to it in Paradise Sundered in the chapter Perspective (I). I just couldn't go into the sort of detail about it there that I would have liked without breaking the flow of the story.
Wow. This is great. Beautiful, even. I like the idea of the "Final Flight," even if it does seem a bit far-fetched to me. (That is not a bad thing, of course.)
3825439
Thanks, Lonely. I'll say to you what I said to Cyne...
I wanted to craft a burial that was out there but relatable in some way. If I managed it, I did what I set out to do. They are, after all, what amounts to an alien society.
And thanks for the fav too!
3825468 You're quite welcome.
But that's why I like the idea... it's alien, but also familiar. It's vaguely reminiscent of ancient Scandinavian/Viking ship burials, in which the deceased (usually someone important, like a king) was put into a boat with their wealth and possessions, and the boat was set ablaze and shoved off out to the sea. Your idea of Final Flight seems not terribly different, in my opinion.
This was... nice. That may sound like it should have a but after it, but it really doesn't - this was very good. It was a pleasant read, introduced a very interesting idea (the cloud burial) seamlessly, and kind of thoughtful too. Reading it felt a lot like the picture used as your cover pic - kind of tranquil and separated. Have a upvote and a fave.
3852025
Thank you very much for your kind words. Maybe you'd like to check out its counterpart, Leaving the Ground Behind.
Alright, you wanted my comments, so I hope you're ready for it! I'm going to be honest here. I won't pander, I won't say things for the sake of it. But I'll cover most of my thoughts as I read through this.
Once again, I'd like to state that I in no way mean to be pretentious or sound like a knowledgeable fuck. Everything I say here is purely from a critical standpoint, and is from my own personal view of it. It certainly doesn't seem to reflect the majority of your other readers' views, so take what I say with a grain of salt!
Firstly, did I like it? Yeah. I kinda did. It's a short and sweet fic with a specific point to it, and you never really go out of that point. the point is, of course, to answer a rather unanswerable question, as the fic itself so elegantly states - what is flying? So everything about it is only of the opinion of our little pegasi up there. In that, I think you did a good job. You covered a lot of topics, you had some interesting things in there. But unfortunately, that lends itself to the main problem I had with it that prevented me from fully appreciating it.
There were too many things all over the place and just not enough room to work them up.
I felt primarily, there were a lot of ordering issues in this that prevented me from being able to get into the flow of the text and being lost in his thoughts. They leap back and forth, and they are interjected by a few choice paragraphs of how he felt as he was swept around. Normally, in a longer story, this wouldn't be too bad to keep and reinforce the tone. But in a story this short, it started to, well, distract me a little. Other things I noted that was odd was the way each piece of information was thrown in at what I personally would consider an odd place. The last 4/5ths of the story is not where I expect to find a rhetorical question, for example. Saying "I don't know how to explain it to these silly Earthicans" is not what I need RIGHT before the final closing chapter of the story. Stuff like that belongs at the start for the framing to set it, to let us know that he believes it is something unanswerable, and it's probably something more effectively just said once rather than multiple times.
Overall the story reads like as if I were reading an essay for school. It is structured somewhat in an argumentative fashion, whereby you present the issues one by one and then throw a lot of reasoning at it to explain it (or attempt to, in this case of 'I can't answer'). Things and concepts are repeated over and over to try to reinforce the point. This didn't really work for me, and doesn't necessarily work for the kind of story, in my opinion.
The framing you had with the idea of answering a question could have been glossed over as well. There was no need to bring up other names in a story like this. Not that you can't, but in this case I felt it was a bit of a clash because the focus never seemed to be his struggle WITH the answering of the question. It was just trying to work towards that last point of family, which would have been much more effective if it was a message shared between him and the reader, I feel. There's something personal in that that's nicer that us being eavesdroppers to someone else's curiosities, but it works both ways.
What I REALLY REALLY liked was just that one piece in the middle. The idea of the way Pegasi send their departed off is a very original and very creative concept, one that deserves to be expanded on and would work very well for a story such as this. When you try to answer an unanswerable question, you don't want to actually try to answer it. You might want to use stories to talk about things in parallel, or suggest moods or sensations through analogy. In fact, I can very easily see a VERY strong, very creative fic that ends up with the determination of 'it is impossible to answer' with nothing BUT a couple (2 - 3 at most) glimpses into the way flight is USED in Pegasi society. That way you can even show that it means something to them in a way that just means something without having to be 'a thing'. Landing on that final determination of 'it's like family' tends to weaken considerably when there's no thematic ties with whatever they'd just been talking about or going through. It certainly didn't have anything to do with the whole section of 'why earthicans won't get it!', and it's rather loose with the idea of the death and the first flight. What that speaks to me of is culture, and I preferred it if you had landed on that instead of 'it's family' which felt a bit out of nowhere by that point.
One example here is when you say "While griffins and dragons can fly, they just beat at the air with their wings. They move through the air, but they don’t fly." That is a set up for maybe one of these glimpses of the differences, but it doesn't really go anywhere. You leave it and then start to explain how the clouds and wind affects the pegasi in that moment, when actually what we are looking for is perhaps a comparison between the griffins and dragons and how it matters. Maybe something a bit more personal. Maybe if there wasn't even anything, you might have to search for something else. As I told Sai for his story, there's only so many times in one of these fics when you can explain how the winds feel against your wings before it starts to get old.
I think the part where you talk about the character's sister's first flight was also a great departure point too, but there was just not enough to really let me get a sign that it was anything SPECIAL. So I would have preferred fewer examples and exemplifications, but more time and more warmth spent within each to try to show what can't be explained.
As harsh as this assessment is, overall, as I said, I did quite enjoy it. Besides a few clinically-delivered lines that felt textbooky, and aforementioned niggles, the grammar (obviously) is perfect and some of the sentences are well structured and very clear and concise. There's no questioning the quality, but maybe just a little bit in how the information is used to best effect. There are a swirl of great ideas and very interesting concepts that I just wanted to see more of, and that glimpse into their life is the REASON, the ANSWER for them to fly.
And that is wot I think.
Please don't send assassins.
3969873
*sends assassins because I think I figured out how to fix it.
Dang it... now I want to try fixing it. Curse yoooooooou.
Welp, sucks to be an earth pony or unicorn. The story is honestly that good at making the feeling of flight feel so... euphoric?
Essential to living a satisfied life?
Enlightening?
Wright?
I expected to get high on rich sensory details and subtle cathartic cues, but the incorporation of little tangents like the idea of 'final flight' makes this piece ever richer!
4130193
What you did there... I see it.
From your comment, I am quite interested in what you think of my other story, Leaving the Ground Behind.
Finally, thanks for the watch!