Waiting

Normally, the life of a cloud is not very stressful. We don’t have responsibilities, we have nowhere in particular to be, and we just don’t have anything to worry about it general. We’ll get a little sad sometimes, that’s when it rains, and sometimes we get angry, hence thunderstorms, but our emotions always pass eventually.

We spend most of our lives drifting wherever the wind takes us, calmly minding our own business. We do our best not to bother anypony, and we don’t even put up a fight when the pegasi push us around and squeeze us together to their liking.

You could say we’re content to just exist and enjoy our lives until a pegasus comes along and kicks us into nothingness. And that’s what made my end so tragic. Not the kicking-- there wasn’t any of that. No, I wasn’t lucky enough to just poof away at the ends of a pegasus’s hind legs. The tragic part is what happened to me-- what I did-- in the final moments of my life.

It all started on what seemed to be a pretty normal day. I had been created five days earlier, which meant I was reaching about middle age, since clouds generally have a lifespan of a week and a half or so. From my limited experience of the world, and based on what I was told by other nearby clouds, that day was a fairly usual day.

One thing of note, however, was that the Equestria Games, which had been progressing since before I was born, were coming to an end. I was looking forward to the time I’d get to spend watching ponies after the Games ended because I’d been told that there were usually more ponies out and about when the Equestria Games weren’t keeping them all in the stadium. I think I would have very much liked to watch all the busy ponies bustling about in the city streets. All my life those crystal roads had struck me as quiet and deserted, almost longing to be used. Alas, it seems I was destined to never see the end of the games.

At the time I had no foreshadowing of the tragic end of my own story and I was elated to find that the wind had shifted such that I was being whisked along towards the massive Crystal Stadium, which is where I’d heard the games were being held.

It’s a funny thing, the anxiety to reach your destination when you have absolutely no control over when you’ll get there. Us clouds have no way of altering our own paths or our speed. It’s entirely up to the wind, so we each must find our own way to cope with the perpetual helplessness of our own existence. I hear a lot of clouds look ahead to where they’re going and then try to get themselves as excited about it as they possibly can. They claim the excitement and anticipation helps keep their mind off of just how helpless they really are. When I tried that, though, it just seemed like it made it take forever to get to where I wanted to be. The anticipation just made time pass even more slowly than it already does, and all that excitement just got tiring after a little while.

Instead I try not to worry much about destinations, and I prefer to spend my time taking in the view and doing my best to understand the wide world below. I’m told that outside the magical walls of the empire there is an Arctic Waste where there are other kinds of clouds that make things called ‘snow’ and ‘blizzards’. I’ve never been told what those words mean, but they sound vaguely scary to me. I like to imagine it’s some sort of lightning mixed with rain to make tiny little drops of electricity.

So anyway, I’d looked ahead out of curiosity and noticed that I would be arriving at the stadium sometime within the next few hours, so I got a tad excited at the prospect of seeing all those ponies I’d heard about gathered in one place. I couldn’t even imagine what it would be like, since had never seen more than maybe a dozen ponies at a time. I tried to think of how many ponies there would be inside. Two dozen? Fifty? Maybe even a hundred?

I spent some time considering what it would be like to look at a hundred ponies at once, but picturing them all was very difficult and I quickly tired myself out. Soon I released the mental image and went back to observing the abandoned streets below. They were entirely empty, which wasn’t a huge change from the usual. I’d normally see one or two ponies out wandering around, but I guess even the solitary stragglers were already in the stadium to watch whatever happens at the end of the Equestria Games. A hint of excitement pricked at the back of my mind but I pushed it away by focusing on just how lovely the flowers and the crystal street lamps looked today.

I watched my own shadow for a while, which is one of my favorite pastimes. It’s the only way I have of finding out what I actually look like, since ponies don’t tend to leave mirrors facing the sky for clouds to use. As I looked at my shadow I was once again faintly satisfied to observe that I was shaped more or less like every other cloud I had encountered in my recently-begun lifetime.

After an hour or two-- I’m not very sure about precise time measurements-- my attention was drawn once again to the stadium as it was practically underneath me. I could hear an unfamiliar noise growing louder that at first baffled me completely. If I listened closely to it I could hear individual voices occasionally rising from its midst, shouting encouraging phrases, and then quickly fading back into the harsh fuzziness that made up the noise.

Realizing that this must be the noise of a ‘crowd’ which I had heard so much about, I finally allowed my anticipation to build. The breeze held true and it carried me slowly closer and closer to the stadium. Soon the wall which had been growing larger and larger in my perspective fell away underneath me to reveal the simply indescribable contents of the stadium.

For some period of time of which I am absolutely uncertain, my mind went into complete overload. I was simply unable to comprehend the unimaginably massive number of ponies that filled my view. The crowd’s roar grew two-- no, three-- times as loud once the wall was out of the way.

There were so many ponies to watch, so many different voices to listen to, I believed I had found paradise. It was as if my entire life up to that point had been some idle purgatory testing my ability to combat boredom until I had proven myself worthy enough to experience eternal happiness. At that moment I knew that I had found what I had been unwittingly waiting for ever since I first took flight. I knew that that would be the greatest, most triumphant, must satisfying, and most fulfilling moment of my entire existence.

And then, from the grassy field in the middle of the stadium, a small pointy object rocketed towards me. It passed through me like any solid object would. It didn’t hurt or anything, but after a moment I felt a sort of seeping coldness spreading from the hollow trail it had left in my poofy substance. Something deep inside me shifted and hardened and began to spread outwards. By the time it reached my surface I had lost most of my senses. My vision was gone completely and my hearing was muffled like I was encased in glass. I lost any idea of which way was up and I couldn’t tell where the breeze was taking me or even if I was moving at all.

Through my impaired sense of hearing I could make out a change in the roar of the crowd. Cheers of encouragement had turned to shrieks of terror. Suddenly somepony very near me-- closer than anypony had ever been before-- frantically shouted, “Steer it towards the field, away from the crowds!”

With a horrible sinking feeling I gathered that that pony was talking about me. In despair I tried to figure out what was happening and what I was doing to cause such panic, but I was lost. My short lifetime had not prepared me for the bewildering experiences I underwent, which I still do not understand. I abandoned all hope that I would make it out alive and simply prayed that whatever happened I wouldn’t hurt anypony.

My prayers were answered-- though I don’t know by who-- shortly thereafter. A few days before, I had let myself get caught up in pondering the meaning of life and why a creature as helpless as a cloud must be cursed with sentience, and I battled a short-lived bout of depression. That was the first time I rained, and there in the stadium it was the second. I still don’t know how, but I could feel my solidified body reverting to liquid. Little pieces of myself rained down, gratefully causing no harm whatsoever to any ponies they came into contact with.

Eventually there was nothing left of me. I had fallen from the sky in the form of raindrops which may very well have been the tears of my relief. I was a cloud no more.

So here I lie, absorbed into the dirt. I can see nothing, and I can hear nothing. I have no idea how long it has been since my death, and quite frankly I getting a bit fed up with all this nothingness.

Luckily for me I can still remember everything I saw in that glorious stadium, and I have as much time as I could possibly need to look through my memories and really make sure I get to know each and every pony. Plus, I’m probably going to get absorbed into the grass sometime soon, so I guess that’ll be pretty cool.

Author's Note:

I wrote this for the Equestria Daily Writer's Training Ground #018. The prompt was "Describe another pony's Equestria Games experience. It can be any pony not shown competing in one of the events in the episode, and can include both the event they competed in and what happened before and after during their visit to the Crystal Empire."

Um, I wrote about a cloud instead of a pony. I hope that's okay.

I don't have much else to say about this. Thanks for reading! I hope you liked it!

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