Perfection is Cold (and I Am Hot-Blooded)
FIVE DAYS EARLIER
“Jingle bells, Twilight smells, Pinkie laid an egg!” sang Rainbow.
“Apple Bloom! Fell off her broom! With Sweetie Belle the witch!” sang Scootaloo, wearing goggles.
From the mountaintop, they looked down on the frozen sea of clouds, and then looked up at the midwinter’s night.
As loudly as they dared, they sang the chorus together: “OH! Windigo! In the snow! Don’t you spoil our fun! We’ll warm our hearths! We’ll wear our scarves! Sing hymns to EVERY-ONE!”
Then they cocked their ears.
Far below, triumphant crashes announced the awesome avalanches they’d just set off. Both pegasi laughed.
“I told you we could do it!” Rainbow rolled between fits. “Twilight was right! Loudest voices in PONYVILLE!”
“YEAH! I bet she heard us from HERE!” Scootaloo coughed and thumped herself until she stopped.
Of course, Rainbow wasn’t totally reckless. The mountains were miles from Ponyville, or any settlement for that matter. Yet she hoped Twilight couldn’t hear them. She’d already endured enough lectures on why supersonic speeds and snow-mares didn’t mix.
“Hey, look at this slope,” said Scootaloo, leaning over the peak; Rainbow panicked and drew her back a bit, both hooves over her chest like seatbelts. “Betcha we could use this as a killer ramp for a scooter trick.”
“A flying scooter trick,” corrected Rainbow. “Instead of falling at the end, we could shoot up and hit the moon.” Or until Scootaloo complained of chills. High-altitude temperatures were harsh.
Scootaloo’s ears drooped briefly before shooting up again. “Yeah! If you gave me a boost, I bet we could make a mile.”
“What, straight up?”
“Straight up, straight ahead, whatever!”
Rainbow thought it over long enough to cringe. The thought of all that air below Scootaloo, a pegasus whose flying skills were on par with an electric fan’s… One slip-up…
“I like the way you think, Squirt,” Rainbow said. To show willing, she ruffled Scootaloo’s mane until the foal fought back. “You sure we’re not really related?”
“Ha! Don’t worry. I could do this jump by myself.”
Rainbow laughed this off.
“I mean it!”
Rainbow’s laughter ducked down to a humble titter. “Yeah, right.”
“No, really! One day, I’ll get up here by myself to start the trick. I wouldn’t need you helping me. But you can watch, I mean. I want you to watch.”
“Heh, OK Squirt.” It was a good line. It suggested agreement without technically making any.
“I will!” squeaked Scootaloo, turning around. For a moment, the fire that kept Rainbow Dash going twenty-four-seven burned in her eyes instead.
Then Rainbow finally noticed something: “Your eyes are puffy. Those goggles fit?”
Scootaloo’s hooves lifted them, twitched with the sudden cold, and rubbed her swollen eyes. “It’s nothing. Just… hay fever.”
“In the middle of winter?” Rainbow leaned closer. “You sleeping all right? Only last time your eyes were puffed up –”
“No! I learned my lesson!” Scootaloo batted her hoof away. “I never have bad dreams anymore. I remembered what you said. Honest.”
“Well… OK.” Rainbow rubbed her mouth thoughtfully. “You know there’s no shame in having bad –”
“I know!”
Scootaloo’s little wings hummed with effort. Her gaze swept across the clouds. It didn’t take a Luna to see her dreams, of flying with proper pegasus wings over the whiteness.
Rainbow clamped her own mouth shut. The question lurked in her head.
Perhaps she should tell Twilight about this kind of thing? Scootaloo’s weirdness was… getting weirder, especially in the run-up to Hearth’s Warming. When the Fires of Friendship had to be relit, and presents given, and time spent with family so that arguments could be refined, well, emotions were Twilight’s thing, really. All Rainbow could think up was… um…
“Hey,” she said. “Wanna try flying over the mountains? If we sing as we go, I bet we’ll set off dozens of avalanches.”
Scootaloo hopped up, nodding.
Rainbow supported Scootaloo single-hoofedly, of course. Yet when they flew over, Scootaloo’s tiny wings didn’t beat as strongly as usual. She barely sang, too. And from the sound of it, below the clouds, they only set off a couple of avalanches at most.
THREE DAYS EARLIER
“Rainbow Dash?” said Scootaloo.
“Haha! Whoa! Don’t move around so much! I’m tickliiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii-I’m trying to steer here, OK?”
“Oh, sorry.”
On Rainbow’s saddle, Scootaloo settled down again. Rainbow heard her gasping at the gusts in their wake. The clouds far below always tempted Scootaloo to fidget, but who could blame her? Below the clouds: winter storms. Whereas up here: tranquil blue.
It was one of their regular flights. Sooner or later, Scootaloo insisted on flying. It was her pegasus right, apparently. And Rainbow fancied the occasional flap, so why not?
“What’s up, Squirt?”
Surprisingly, Scootaloo didn’t answer right away.
“Squirt?”
“Sorry, Rainbow Dash.”
“You OK?”
“Yeah! I just wanted… You ever heard of something called Fumble Winter?”
“Fimbulwinter,” Rainbow corrected.
Scootaloo groaned in disappointment.
“I’ve heard of it,” Rainbow said, playing dumb. “What is it?”
Scootaloo breathed deeply, the usual response before trying to wow her “big sister” with something she’d learned. “Well… I found out about it once.”
“Yeah?”
“It’s like… just before the end of the world, there’s supposed to be this ultimate winter, right? Like eternal night, but waaaay colder.”
“Uh huh?” Rainbow already knew the story. “Wait. The end of the world? That’s kinda gloomy for you.”
“Oh, you know.” Scootaloo sounded too flippantly cool to Rainbow’s ears. “It’s like… In Fimbulwinter, all the pegasi who ever lived come back to life, and they train in the cold, and they turn into like super-pegasi so that, when the end of the world comes, they can fight off the Monster and save Luna?”
The Monster. Oh, Rainbow had heard of that one. Some guff about a giant moon-eating wolf, or something. She’d never believed that part, though she’d remembered it and used it in various scare stories.
“Well, what if you don’t come back?”
Rainbow looked down at her shadow on the cloud field below. The only shadow.
“You serious? Scootaloo, you know it’s just a story, right?”
“Yeah, yeah, sure.” But Scootaloo didn’t sound convinced. If anything, she sounded preoccupied. “I just wondered… Can non-flying pegasi come back?”
Rainbow chuckled. That little worrywart!
“Why not?” she said. “One: it’s a story. Two: pegasi is pegasi. I told you before flying’s just a perk. An awesome perk, but still. You stick with me, Squirt, and we’ve got more than enough pegas-awesomeness between us to beat Cloudsdale combined. Relax. Take in the sights.”
Endless cumulus. They descended; this close, Rainbow could hear the blizzard howling below the surface. Boy, they were pulling out all the stops for this Hearth’s Warming.
“So these super-pegasi are, like, the perfect pegasus ponies, right?”
“Scoots, seriously. Chill. You’re better than perfect, ‘kay?”
Finally, Rainbow sank into the whiteness. Oddly, she forgot everything else that day, including the tricks they’d pulled off, but that conversation stuck. It was like she sensed something bigger lurking below the surface.
ONE DAY EARLIER
On the fringes, blizzard clouds still assaulted the earth with flurries, but most of the sky had been cleared. Even some of the snow in town had been swept aside. Apparently, Diamond Tiara had requested a party for Silver Spoon today, and when her dad was as filthy rich as Filthy Rich, that sort of fatherly devotion found its way to the weather factory. Usually via Equestrian chequebook.
Even now, Scootaloo could see ponies with snow shovels crisscrossing the streets. To Rainbow behind her, it looked a little like Winter Wrap-Up, only more half-hearted and with more grumbling.
Scootaloo hopped down from the window and sat up to Rainbow’s table. Of course, Rainbow had ordered compacted cloud versions of her furniture and floors, just for today. Scootaloo had trouble with the more conventional cloud type.
“Pretty neat view, huh?” Rainbow raised a mug. “Aero-cappuccino? Trust me, it’s better than it looks.”
Scootaloo chewed the inside of her cheek; she was looking at the brown sloshing inside her mug in the same way a wine connoisseur would look at vinegar. “Really?”
“Why not? You’re old enough now.”
“Yeah. By about nine days.”
Rainbow poured it anyway and gulped her own in one shot. She knew Scootaloo would drink it if she saw Rainbow drink it first.
And… there! Scootaloo dropped her mug and choked and spluttered. Beautiful.
“Yeah, it takes everyone that way first time.” Rainbow sipped her own nonchalantly. “You get used to the rainbow kick.”
“Rainbow!” Cough, cough, splutter. “You could have warned me!”
“Could’ve. But where’s the fun in that?”
Even Scootaloo’s eyes watered. Out of pity, Rainbow slid a glass of apple juice across the table.
“OK, seriously,” said Rainbow to Scootaloo’s rapid gulping throat, “you did handle it better than I did. First try, I had to drink a whole gallon of apple juice.”
Scootaloo thumped the glass on the table, surfacing for a breath. “Wow. In… ouch…” She massaged her throat and tried a laugh somewhere between the weeping. “Incredible.”
“Ah, we tried stuff like that all the time. I always won, of course. Everyone else had Hot Tongue for the rest of the day. You wanted to see every colour of the rainbow, you just asked them to open their mouths.”
“How’s mine?” Scootaloo wiped her eyes and gaped as widely as possible.
Rainbow was vaguely aware that most ponies would find such a move bad table manners, but she shrugged and looked in. Most ponies were not the Big Dashinator.
To her surprise, not a single colour presented itself other than the more visceral pinks and reds. “Actually, fine. Not… bad.”
Scootaloo closed her mouth. “But you did fine when you were as old as me, right?”
“Yeah, sure.” Rainbow glossed over all the foalhood jokes about being “rainbow outside, rainbow inside”. “I had tons of friends back then.”
“I’ll bet!” Another tentative sip was not followed by the dramatics of earlier, though that might have been because most of the cappuccino lay dead on the floor where Scootaloo had spilled it.
Rainbow knew enough to acknowledge skill when she saw it. “You might get some fans of your own someday, with a stomach like that.”
“Fans?”
“Er, friends. I meant friends.”
“Right.” Scootaloo coughed. “Um. You still up for that mountain trick tomorrow?”
“Are you?” Rainbow grinned. “That’s the stuff! Fly up to the sound barrier and then fly right through. In fact, you’re getting better at that too. Almost as good as me, ha!”
“Ha.” Scootaloo buzzed her wings, more for show than anything. She didn’t seem entirely enthused by the slight rise she achieved with that much, and plopped back down again. A lead pipe would have been more graceful.
Rainbow checked the floor beneath before she remembered the modifications. Perhaps she was worrying too much, but then Applejack and Rarity usually said the opposite.
“Nice digs,” said Scootaloo, looking around.
“Huh? Oh yeah. You know.” Did she know, though? It wasn’t as if Rainbow had hid the moving van with all the new compacted cloud, but then she hadn’t exactly gone round telling all and sundry.
Too late, Scootaloo added, “You think I could have a house like this?”
“Absolutely!” said Rainbow, wondering how much money Scootaloo actually had. She tried to think: did Scootaloo even have a job yet? Maybe at the weather factory, that was where most pegasi ended up –
Rainbow cut the thought off immediately. Thank goodness she’d kept her mouth shut. To make sure, she refilled her mug and took a swig of the cappuccino. Anything to keep her big mouth occupied.
“Rainbow Dash?” Scootaloo took a deep breath. She was gearing herself up for something.
Oh Celestia’s wings, thought Rainbow, she wants a Talk. Applejack said every filly wanted one when she got to A Certain Age. Crud, crud, crud, what did pegasi want to know when they got to this age?
In a panic, Rainbow threw out, “Yes you can, but it helps to get both your ages first.”
“Wha!?”
Rainbow’s mother had said it once, though she had no idea what the question had been. “Nothing. Sorry. What were you going to ask?”
“Um…” Scootaloo shuffled on her seat, occasionally smoothing her mane down. Since Scootaloo’s mane looked like a feather caught in six gales at once, it was more for effect that anything else.
“Yeah?” Rainbow tried to sound encouraging. So far, she’d avoided saying anything more serious than, “You’re a year older, congrats kid!”
“Well… about those super-pegasi things. You know?”
Oh. Rainbow drooped with realization. She was still going on about that old fairy tale?
“Yes, what?” she said as though from rote.
“Well, they’re supposed to live among the stars, right? Not down here? Not in the real world, right?”
“What?”
“You know, because of the divide or something.”
“Again: What?”
“Perfect pegasi aren’t allowed in the real world?”
“Really? No one told me.” Valiantly, Rainbow tried to laugh it off, only for Scootaloo to open her mouth again with serious intent – “Scoots, seriously. What the hay is with you? It’s a story. End of.”
Rainbow peered closer. Yep. Scootaloo’s eyes were still puffed up, still betraying the bad dreams she must be having.
“Yeah, but the end of the world –” began Scootaloo.
“Where are you getting this stuff? The end of the world? Seriously? Nutcases on street corners talk about the end of the world. Chill, OK? Chill. Have some more aero.”
They sipped the new round of aero-cappuccino.
It took a while before Rainbow realized something. After all, Rarity had warned her about this. Kids started changing when they got older. Talked in roundabout ways. Embarrassment, she’d said.
Rainbow really, really wished she’d remembered how she herself had been at that age. It was like she’d never really grown up. She could’ve sworn it wasn’t this hard.
“‘Perfect’ is overrated, anyway,” she said, hopeful she’d nailed it. “When you got friends and family, you don’t need ‘perfect’.”
At this, Scootaloo’s ears rose. “What d’you say?”
“Well, look at Rarity and Sweetie Belle. They fight like cats all the time. Think they need to be perfect ponies or something? Nah.” Rainbow quaffed the rest of her drink, splattering much of it on the cupboards behind her. “Well, they could probably stop arguing so much, and maybe not steal each other’s clothes, and what’s up with all the tickets they keep buying? What kind of contest is that?”
Scootaloo gave her a look an everymare might give to a nuclear physicist. It occurred to Rainbow this wasn’t quite striking the right tone.
“They’re fine the way they are.” Rainbow sipped, realized her mug was empty, and hastily refilled it.
“Really?” said Scootaloo, suddenly rising and hopeful. Now that was much better.
“Yeah. Once sisters, always friends, right? Come rain or shine. Even to the end of the world, if you want.”
Rainbow gave her a wink. Unexpectedly, Scootaloo’s rising hope stopped. If anything, the filly… mare, sorry…? If anything, Scootaloo sank back down in gloom. She even shook slightly as she held out her mug for a refill. Wow, she really was taking to that drink pretty well…
Scootaloo drew the cup to her mouth. She shook so much, droplets flew out for freedom.
“Ha,” said Rainbow, “you getting the kick again?”
Scootaloo was still shaking. Her mug almost cracked on the cloud table top.
“Scoots, what’s up? You look like a leaf in a hurricane.”
Another gulp, another slam of the cup.
“Um…”
“Seriously, what? Too much rainbow extract?” Rainbow’s mouth moved, but her mind said: Scootaloo’s got something on her mind. I’ve seen this before. Pegasi waiting for a contest, or a Wonderbolt waiting for a show. This is a total jitters situation.
Scootaloo steeled herself. About to tell a great secret, she opened her mouth, breathed in deeply, buzzed her wings and then stopped when this almost lifted her off her seat. She didn’t seem totally comfortable with her newfound near-flying skill.
“Rainbow Dash…” Scootaloo peeked up through a hanging tuft of mane, her head was so low. “I… uh…”
“It’s OK,” said Rainbow at once. “I’m good. Hit me.”
“Um… I’m sort of in a contract kind of thing…”
“A new job?” Rainbow relaxed. Better the devil she knew, after all. “You got a new job?”
“Yyyyyeah, yeah! A new job. Whew! Well! You know! I’m taking a new job, and, um, I just wanted to know – If I didn’t want… you know… like… um…”
A really bad case of total jitters, Rainbow thought. She wondered if she should put a hoof on Scootaloo’s own, or something.
Pfft, nah. Anyone who could down an aero-cappuccino like water – boiled water, maybe, but details schmetails – could handle a new job.
“Cool! Congrats, Scoots!” Rainbow raised her mug, sloshing it and staining the cloud floor below. “And no problem. You don’t wanna do it, just say so. Gotta do what’s best for you, right?”
“Right. Right.”
Now, what would Rarity say? Ah. Rainbow refilled her mug and Scootaloo’s. Outside, a few flurries crossed the window.
“I’m right behind you, Squirt.” She raised her drink. “You’re gonna knock ‘em dead.”
“Yeah. Knock ‘em… dead.”
Yet they sipped in silence. Rainbow didn’t get it. She was sure she was doing all the right moves, yet Scootaloo still looked worried. At least she’d lost the jitters. Maybe that had just been the drink?
It wasn’t until much later, when Rainbow was dumping the stuff in the sink and flapping up to bed, that she realized she’d never asked Scootaloo what the job was. Oh well. She’d ask in the morning at some point. Probably something boring, like a courier job. Every pegasus did it and grew out of it.
OK, most grew out of it.
Rainbow sank into the pillow. Yeah, probably a courier job, otherwise little – sorry, big Scoots wouldn’t think about bailing out…
PRESENT DAY
Midday. Rainbow Dash woke up, which wasn’t surprising. She held the Cloudsdale record for longest sleep-in without getting fired.
But she woke up to a heatwave.
The familiar white of her bedroom blazed, hurting her eyes. While she struggled against a cosy promise of more sleep time, she sat up. Sheets stuck to her before sliding off. Her windows shimmered and blurred so much she tried blinking it out of her sleepy eyes before she realized it wasn’t her.
Heatwave? In the middle of winter?
Well, sure they didn’t get snow every day, but the “sunspot” days were just for contrast, or to warm a really heart-warming scene. Anyway, they weren’t scheduled for this week… were they?
Groaning, she flapped off the bed, sagged beneath her wings, and picked up the almanac on her bedside table. Sleep hit her eyes hard, though. She could barely read, and didn’t understand the few words she did: “contor”, “win sheer”, “poresssure”…
Her ear twitched. Someone shouted her name outside her window.
She looked out. There was Ponyville all right, under perfect blue skies. A perfect green country day. No snow: they did sweep it away sometimes, for special occasions.
“RAINBOW DASH!”
There! Right below her window, where her cloud mansion cast a shadow over the hill bearing her mailbox, on a scooter revving to go and with a helmet blue as Rainbow’s coat, smiled the bright, sunshine face of –
“SCOOTALOO!?” Rainbow leaned out.
Scootaloo held up the scooter. “Mountain day! You ready to try out that new trick?”
Oh yeah, now Rainbow remembered. She glanced up at the midday sun.
Huh. That was Scootaloo, sure enough. Winter heatwave or not, the little tearaway would try anyway. Mountains, midday… the trick! They were gonna do the trick! This she understood!
“Ha! I was ready before you suggested it,” called down Rainbow.
“YEAH! You are beyond awesome, Rainbow Dash!”
And then it seemed like no time at all, and they were on an island peak, amid a sea of clouds like hot snow trying to reassure her this was still winter. Just winter at a temperature she liked. Overhead shone the perfect sun.
“All right, Squirt!” she bellowed. “You up for this?”
“All the way up, and all the way down!” yelled the bundle in her grip. Scootaloo adjusted her goggles. Of course, Rainbow was too cool to need goggles this high up.
To her surprise, she saw the goggles fall away. They’d been thrown. They vanished into the clouds.
“Scootaloo?” she said.
“It’s OK. I’m ready to push myself all the way.”
Rainbow remembered her own foolish youth, going without goggles this high in the stratosphere, stung by a thousand slicing winds.
“You’re sure?”
Under Rainbow’s grip, Scootaloo tensed what little muscle she had, ice-hard. “110%, Rainbow Dash. You’ll see. I’m no ‘Squirt’ anymore.”
“Er… OK. You asked for it.”
Scootaloo probably knew her own strength best. Or at least her own mind, and they did say “mind over matter.”
“All right!” Rainbow lazily adjusted her wings to a lower angle, ready to drop. “Operation: Avalanche Arrowhead! Five, four –”
Scootaloo snickered like a foal who knew what she was getting for Hearth’s Warming.
“Two, one, BLAST-OFF!”
The air around Rainbow flapped and slashed under her suddenly motor-strength wings. A solid wall propelled her down, punched her through the field of gravity. The air screamed around her, the cloudscape inched upwards and then sped up and threatened to slam into them with its sheer plains, and then…
THUMP!
All wheels of the scooter hit the slope, engine roaring, wheels squealing on the ice. Rainbow felt the swerve. The aftershock tried to wrestle Scootaloo out of her grip.
Then Scootaloo began flapping too, a tiny breeze in Rainbow’s face. No way that weak little propulsion would make much difference under this momentum –
It did.
Rainbow snapped back into place before she even realized they’d slalomed too smoothly down the mountain. Scootaloo giggled and flapped harder, correcting jolts even Rainbow had to muscle through between the howling air resistance and the eddies sucking at her ears.
“Wow,” Rainbow murmured under the screaming sky. “You’re… good.”
“I have the world’s best teacher!” shouted Scootaloo. “WOOHOO! LOOK AT THE SKY!”
Rainbow had neglected goggles more for show than anything. Through tears stinging her eyes, she squinted up.
There was a dark star. As it grew, the dark star spiked. Those might have been wings, but those might have been legs, and that spike might… definitely was a horn.
The flapping form of an alicorn. Dark as a vampire, armour like the shadow of a sapphire, eyes focused as arrows…
“Luna?” said Rainbow.
Blue magic swept over her vision: a telekinetic spell. Rainbow’s wings slowed. Their fall slowed. The two pegasi were yards away from the sea of cloud, and then Rainbow spotted a rocky outcrop.
Luna wanted them to stop? Well, OK.
“NO, DON’T STOP!” shouted Scootaloo.
Rainbow thrust her wings in reverse, trying to slow down without breaking bones. The outcrop rose before her like a claw. Luna landed at the tip, waiting patiently for them to crash into her.
“NOO!” Scootaloo’s screaming became hysterical. A tiny hoof whacked Rainbow in the face.
“Scootaloo, are you nuts?” Quickly adjusting, Rainbow added, “I need to focus! Stop squirming!”
The rush became a slide became a skid that was still too fast. Luna lowered her horn, aimed between Rainbow’s eyes, then lowered again…
Then…
Empty air.
Cloud below.
No weight between Rainbow’s legs. Scootaloo!
Rainbow flapped to a halt. She spun round in time to see Scootaloo levitating under Luna’s spell; the princess regarded the struggles coldly.
“Princess Luna!” Rainbow even forgot to bow, flapping back. “What the hay?”
“Apologies for the interruption, my loyal friend,” said Luna. She glared at Scootaloo. “But I have grim business here.”
“Put her down! She doesn’t like it!”
“Things are not as they seem, Rainbow Dash. You have woken up to a stranger.”
“I SAID put her DOWN!” Big sister instinct backed off long enough for Rainbow to realize who she was shouting at. “Princess? Please? Before Scootaloo gets hurt?”
Only now she was closer, Rainbow Dash saw what was wrong. Luna stood regally, tall and proud. Yet she was covered in scars, slashed all over, as though someone had tried to turn her into a bloody tigress. Now Rainbow noticed, she saw the slight shudder of a muscle, the twitch of self-control stretched to its limit.
A frozen pause followed. Only Scootaloo struggled.
Luna lowered her to the icy ground. “This is not Scootaloo.”
And her horn fired.
“NO!” Rainbow threw herself into a dive before she saw Scootaloo’s body slump under the arrow.
Then she saw its face. Its open eye.
Yet where the other eye should have been, half of the foal’s face had shattered like a mere glass casing. Shards fell off around the impaling arrow. Scootaloo’s insides looked like compacted snow.
From the far mountain peaks, Luna’s voice echoed: “The real Scootaloo has been replaced by an imposter. I need your help to rescue her – AH!”
Teeth gritted, Luna almost fell to a knee. Her face curled up with pain. Along her body, the scars caught the sunlight with a sickening sheen.
“Luna!”
The heat, once summer bliss, now roasted with hell. Rainbow’s mind writhed under it.
“What is it? Where’s Scootaloo!?” And only when Rainbow spoke did she hear, feel, realize how weak she was.
“Where is she?” repeated Rainbow Dash.
Sitting up at the dining room table, Princess Luna hunched under the weight of many scars. She sipped her aero-cappuccino with the solemnity of a priest conducting a ritual.
Beyond Rainbow’s window, Ponyville bustled with ponies in snow boots, bobble-hats, and scarves.
On the table itself, the prone body of the fake Scootaloo: Rainbow looked past it to Luna, forced herself to. That body was right under her nose, and she sweated trying not to look down at the blue arrow sticking out of the face, or especially at the gaping half that still looked like Scootaloo.
“Let me gather my strength first,” said Luna. “It has not been an easy journey.”
Rainbow glanced at the scars. Now that her expert eye had a good look at them, they didn’t seem to be normal slashes. Nearly all of them were vertical, as though blades had rained down on her. Some sort of weather damage?
Could Scootaloo be stuck in a storm?
“I’ll show you strength-gathering!” Rainbow pounded a hoof in another like a fist. “Just point me where she is! I don’t care what’s between me and her!”
“Patience. We will leave soon. But you must understand what you’re up against.”
Cracking under temptation, Rainbow glanced down at the broken, white face. “What is that, anyway?”
“Pure perfection, solid and compact as glacial snow.” Luna sipped again.
“Enough riddles. What is it really?”
Barely a small pause on Luna’s part: small, but Rainbow could sense a feather in a whirlwind.
“A creature from my domain,” said Luna. “Created from Scootaloo’s hopes and fears like so many others. It has grown powerful enough to break through the divide between fantasy and reality.”
“The Tantabus?”
Luna shook her head. “If only it were that simple, I would not burden you –”
“Oh, princess, don’t start that again. You’re all right! You want something done, I’m right here.” As an afterthought, she added, “And my friends could do some damage too.”
Luna offered a gentle smile. “From the loyal pegasus, I would expect no less.”
Outside, the sun descended. Part of Rainbow wondered if it was supposed to be late afternoon already, but then she’d been distracted, dragging the fake Scootaloo and guiding Luna down the mountain.
“How did this happen?” said Rainbow.
Grimacing, Luna took another sip. The cappuccino had been a little past its best-by-date, by about a month or two. Rainbow never threw stuff out. Once she’d bought it, she’d stomach anything.
Memory flashed the last few minutes warningly at Rainbow. “You said Scootaloo created it?”
“Indeed. From her hopes and fears.”
“Scootaloo created a… what, a dream monster?”
Luna’s mouth twitched. “Yes and no.”
“That’s not an answer!” When Rainbow landed opposite Luna, her hooves thumped the table, her chair rocked under the shock, and Luna looked up sharply. “What hopes and fears, anyway? She hasn’t got –”
Honesty kicked loyalty in the shins.
“But she’s past all that,” Rainbow insisted.
“Oh?” Luna’s eyebrow rose like a stop sign.
Which Rainbow slammed against. “Well, she… she… she’s got the best ‘big sister’ in the world.”
The stop sign remained.
“And she’s cool!” added Rainbow hastily. “Maybe not when she hits a haystack or doesn’t quite pull off a trick, but… Hold on, I’ll try again. Look, she knows I got her back. She can’t fly well like I can… or at all… S-so what? She knows I don’t care. We’ve gotten over that.”
Luna broke off to take a sip.
“And even if I said she had any fears, which I don’t, why her? What’s so special about Scootaloo? Lots of foals have that sort of thing. They don’t have this.” Rainbow pointed at the body.
“Lots of foals? Including you?” said Luna.
“Er…”
It fought against every self-respecting “cool” instinct in her battle-hardened heart, but eventually Rainbow’s answer managed to wrestle its way up her throat to force her struggling lips to say, through gritted teeth: “Yyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyeeeeeeaaaaaah but-I-grew-out-of-it-fast-so-it-doesn’t-count-anyway!”
Luna levitated the mug into the sink. It rolled off the pile and crashed on the floor.
“Oh.” She blushed. “Apologies.”
Another flash fixed the cup and put it on the sideboard. Amongst the piles of plates.
“I wash up in my own time,” said Rainbow hastily, glancing around. This mansion’s room suggested a Colosseum refitted for a celebrity cooking show, albeit a celebrity with no cleaning skills.
“Appears convincing…” murmured Luna.
“Er, thanks? I made it myself.”
“Did you? Now, my impatient friend, it is time we rescued young Scootaloo from her prison.”
“About time!” Rainbow cracked her forelimbs like knuckles. “Point me there and get out of my way.”
“Know this: Scootaloo fell prey to her emotions. She would not need our help otherwise. But this will be more than a test of physical strength. Your heart must be strong too. Whatever you find, you must remain unbreakable.”
Rainbow waved her off. “Look who you’re talking to. Let’s go already!”
After a minute of defiant flapping, she added, “How do we get there, exactly?”
“The same way we reach all dreams.”
“Some magic night spell you use to dream-hop? A dimension-warping lightspeed blast? I’m game for that last one!”
“No.” Luna gestured to the door. “Sleep.”
“Oh… Yeah, um, that’d work too.”
It took Rainbow ages, though. She’d worked herself up to jitters. Fine for bed-tossing, not for sleeping.
She wasn’t scared. Absolutely not. Scootaloo was as good as rescued, fear-eating dream monster or not. When Rainbow came calling, no problems were left standing.
Except trying to sleep during a heatwave. Orange sunset: exactly the colour that always kept her awake.
Rainbow blinked. First time, she saw the Wonderbolts poster on her bedroom wall. Felt the bed pressing against her side. Then, again the second time.
Third time, she stood up.
Surrounded by darkness. No stars twinkled, no moon, no sun. There were mountains of jet. Fields of black grass. Forests of shadow.
And a million changelings, caught by surprise.
Of course. This was her dream. She’d dreamed of the changeling army every night. After all, it was one of her favourites; in Ponyville, days went by without so much as one butt kicked.
So this was where that faking freak had stuffed Scootaloo? Inside her, Rainbow Dash’s, dreamworld?
Instinct and habit tightened Rainbow’s muscles. Their fury overwhelmed even her own straining wings.
Rainbow had just enough civilized intelligence to shout, “Hey! Bugs-for-brains! Where are you keeping Scootaloo!?”
The frowns did not abate. Two million wings buzzed into life. Millions of motorbike-like muscles chainsawed the air with a noise like scraped rust.
“I don’t ask twice!” Rainbow crouched.
A million changelings… pounced.
Rainbow shot forwards.
Any other dream, she’d take her sweet time punching their lights out, one by one.
Changeling faces blurred around her, too fast to keep track. Her strikes rebounded her into more faces, sent jolts down her legs, hitting more changelings, throwing her limbs round so she could seize that rebound for more swipes. Her leg cracked, but she hardly felt it.
“Get!” Smack! “Out!” Smack! “Of!” Smack! “My!” Smack! “WAY!”
Still more poured in. Still more. Their numbers mocked her. She struck back, harder and harder, faster and faster. Rainbow shot up from the swarming scrum…
“ENOUGH!”
…looked up.
Luna hovered overhead. A crescent moon hung behind her.
Her forelimbs reached up, plucked the crescent out of the sky. The silver scythe… slashed.
Down below, the buzzing stopped. All changelings froze, staring up at her. But Rainbow swore the blade had passed right through.
A million changelings evaporated.
At least, the top halves did. The bottom halves fell over, then evaporated.
Luna swung the crescent back into place. The sky engulfed it. Another stab of pain made her wince, but at least in this dream world the scars seemed to be shrinking.
Far below, the dark world stood dead and quiet.
“I should’ve done that,” said Rainbow. She didn’t even realize how childish that sounded until too late.
“This is only our reception. We cannot find Scootaloo in your dreams. Come.”
Falling from her combat high to a sudden cooling shame, Rainbow didn’t argue. She shadowed Luna, who turned and flew right towards the mountains.
She hadn’t thought. Sheer Rainbow Dash spirit had taken over: the joy, the angry, twisted joy of seeing Scootaloo’s kidnappers get what was coming to them.
“The world you are about to see,” said Luna, “is an intermediary, a dream between dreams. We must pass through it to find Scootaloo and rescue her.”
“Got it,” said Rainbow, to show the professionalism she hadn’t shown a moment ago.
“But once we leave your dream, we will be unprotected. The creature that replaced Scootaloo has left barriers in place. No matter how harsh or cold things become, you must never stop until you have broken through.”
“Broken through? Princess?” Rainbow looked at the dark land below. “Where is she?”
“In the middle of a blizzard. The colder the air, the harsher the wind, the closer you will be. Follow my lead. Never succumb to fear or pain. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” said Rainbow. Another act committed without a moment’s thought.
Luna seemed to be steeling herself, withers taut and legs braced as though against an invisible blizzard already arriving.
Then her horn slashed.
It tore the dream’s black sky like canvas. Rips spread and peeled back the dream, shredding it and shedding it, leaving them in a real snowscape. Mountains, forests, fields: all there. All covered in white.
Doorways to other dreams lined an invisible corridor through it all. As they passed between them, Rainbow saw all the dream doors were frozen shut, blue under the glassy ice smothering them.
Already, Rainbow’s body lost its warmth. Muscle memories of the changeling fight, and her boiling emotions: all thinned and vanished.
Up ahead, a swirling surge of clouds drew closer. It was a grey cliff. Winds tugged at Rainbow’s feathers.
“In that!?” Rainbow shouted; the storm’s low roar rose to a cold scream.
Luna tucked her head and legs in tighter, using her horn to spear her way through.
“I’ll take that as a yes.”
Snowflakes fluttered past, sticking to Rainbow’s eyes. She squinted. The world turned greyer and greyer. Then with a sudden wall of noise that was loud enough to push, she went in.
Rainbow flew on and on, gritting her teeth which froze and stung her gums. All was grey; she slammed her eyes shut, trusting her pegasus senses to steer her through knives of currents, keeping her on course. Ice clawed at her coat.
No! No popping of her eardrums would stop her. No vicious turbulence. No wall of outraged noise storming her ears until she had to close them like bomb shelter doors. Nothing.
Although… her skin felt scoured to the flesh. More and more, she curled up or retreated mentally from her outer shell, but there was nothing she could do for her wings, which flexed and burned with pain. They weren’t supposed to do that. She didn’t want them to!
If she could just snatch a breath… Shooting to the surface to breathe would only take a minute. Even her insides ached under the wind clawing its way in; there was no way to close her nostrils.
She stopped feeling her legs. Then her face faded. The storm left nothing but a warm core, and even gouged that, via the breach in her lungs. Every breath killed her, bit by bit. Only her wings burned in defiance, flapping less because she wanted to fly and more through sheer mechanical repetition. She couldn’t keep flying. Yet she couldn’t stop.
Anything civilized and rational vanished against the storm. Her mind broke down to the rawest impulse, a rod in the storm, but a rod buckling and bending, reaching its breaking point.
A few more flaps and she’d die. Nothing could survive this cold, which was no longer a mere state of the world, but a world itself. Not even time and space survived in it.
She didn’t know who she was, where she was going, why she was doing it. Just that she must.
And then… then…
She broke through. She was Rainbow Dash. Breaking through the dream. To the other side. To find Scootaloo.
Up ahead, she heard Luna’s wings. “We’re here. Brace yourself.”
Her flapping faded into the distance.
Exhaustion seeped over Rainbow as a damp force she couldn’t resist. Her side met a gigantic crystal, unyielding and unforgiving, with edges that cut her settling legs.
Slowly, the ache and the pain and the intrusive exhaustion burning away in anger, Rainbow Dash’s inner fires returned to keep her alive…
The fire’s heat became too unbearable; Rainbow’s mind finally woke up.
It felt like she was lying on a metal hull. Hooves scraped over solid flatness as she stood up. She flexed a few stiff limbs, feeling the cuts. Then she opened her eyes.
Her bedroom, yes. But unless she’d ordered extra-frozen clouds to replace the usual soft cumulus design…
She went to the window.
Whiteness above. Here, the sky was pure white. Not bright, though. Neither was it tinged with the usual cloudy grey that only pegasus eyes could recognize. It looked more like a canvas before a painter had gotten a brush to it.
Blueness below.
In the distance, a shadow landed in the middle of a huddle of rooftops, roughly where Ponyville should be. Yet there were no mountains, no familiar landmarks on the horizon. It was as if the world beyond Ponyville didn’t exist.
Was it Ponyville, though?
No noise. Anywhere. Not even the constant, distant murmur of a living town.
Rainbow shot outside at once, towards the rooftops. All blue. No exceptions.
She stared even before she landed. “Uh?”
This was Ponyville. The architecture looked right. The streets and stables were in the right places. She recognized the ponies. Even the air pressure felt normal. Ish… She folded her wings, massaging some feeling into them. Or trying to: neither the wings nor the legs moved the way she wanted. It was like she’d strapped them to puppet strings, and each string kept pulling her limbs at random.
This was Ponyville. Last time she’d checked, though, Ponyville wasn’t completely iced over.
Jagged, faceted ice encased everything like blue glass, cold to the touch. She even slid around a little where she was standing, though she wasn’t daring to move. The substance kept her off the earth and grass, a glass case against diamond-coveting thieves. It thickened so much around the timber cottages that she expected them to collapse under the weight.
Ponies were frozen, many in mid-gallop, some in mid-rear. Some screamed eternally out of windows. All were captured insects in cold amber.
“Scootaloo?” she said, or tried to. Her lips and tongue stretched over the word numbly, turning it into: “Sthckoo-da-woo?”
Silver light washed over her as Luna – scars wider and glistening disgustingly – approached. “One moment. The storm has left its mark.”
“That was a storm? I’ve never felt one like that!”
A corner of Luna’s mouth twitched. “Pity me, who had to face it twice.”
Magic tingled. Warmth came back to Rainbow. She tried to speak again. “What kind of nightmare is she having?”
Luna’s furious gaze swept over the nearby ponies.
A hint? Yet what was so offensive about frozen ponies? Frightening, worrying, and shocking, yes. But Luna looked as though she’d been personally insulted by them.
Luna gritted her teeth. “That storm will break through sooner or later. It wants something.”
It wants something, Rainbow Dash thought. So I was right. That was no ordinary storm. Well, she can handle that.
“Let’s not stick around,” said Rainbow, hoping Luna would get that hint.
Luna took a step forwards, yelped, and clutched her wings. Feathers stuck out at odd angles, some showing scars. Privately, Rainbow hoped her own body didn’t look nearly that bad.
“Uh, on second thought, you stick around and get your strength back. I’ll check Scootaloo’s house. Be right back.”
It didn’t take long: Rainbow had flown to Scootaloo’s house hundreds of times before. The cottage always struck her as noticeably small by Ponyville standards, nothing like Rainbow’s cloud mansion. But then, Scootaloo needed earth pony floors.
Uncomfortably, noises came from within. Raised voices.
A whip cracked.
“Work, you lazy foal!” shouted a voice like tundra nails. “Work! You think Luna wants your weakling hide? I said WORK!”
The whip cracked again.
Rainbow burst through the front door, along the hallway, into the bedroom she knew from memory…
What stood there looked like snow compacted into a changeling shape. At first glance.
Then Rainbow blinked. The blank “changeling eyes” were just like eyes on a marble statue. Skin smoother than opal. Almost a perfect, platonic form of sheer pegasus-ness.
“Do you want Luna to perish in Fimbulwinter? Then be a real pegasus! Fierce! Loyal! Strong!”
There was no doubt that this statuesque creature could fly. Even standing still, it was graceful flight incarnate, like a photograph of an albatross mid-dive. The model of a dream.
Outside, something crackled. Through the window, Rainbow swore she saw the ice thicken. Briefly, the howl of a hurricane rose and fell.
“Do it perfectly or not at all! DO IT!”
The creature cracked its whip.
In the bedroom, Scootaloo whimpered.
Gone were the bed, the wardrobe, all furniture. The entire bedroom was a gymnasium, stuffed with all manner of torture devices for the health-obsessed.
There! Scootaloo: tethered to a bar on one wall. Trying to hover. Flapping her wings as hard as she could. She could barely raise hooves off the ground. Her face creased with effort.
Growling, the creature raised the whip –
Rainbow moved.
The tug caught the creature off guard. It looked at its immobile whip. Then it looked back, at Rainbow Dash holding the other end.
Another mere tug, and Rainbow threw it out of the creature’s grip. She crouched, ready to pounce. Even shouting threats was beyond her now. She was already mentally pummelling that… creature to dust.
“Rainbow Dash!” It was Scootaloo. Eyes glistening with hope.
The creature stepped between them. “What do you think you’re doing?”
Rainbow aimed a punch –
Which hit empty air.
By the time Rainbow stopped stumbling and spun around, the creature phased back into shape. It moved like lightning.
“Rainbow!” yelled Scootaloo in a flurry of limbs. “It’s not what you think!”
“I don’t care!” Rainbow braced for punch number two. “We’re outta here, and no walking snow-mare’s gonna STOP US!”
She swung, missed, then immediately spun around for punch three, which met the creature’s blocking forelimbs like a sword sticking into a shield. Through the push and pull on both sides, Rainbow felt a strength even an earth pony would fear.
Well, that just meant new tactics.
“Scootaloo, hop on while it’s distracted!” Rainbow splayed her wings.
Eventually, she peered past to Scootaloo’s hunched form. “What’s wrong?”
Scootaloo peered at her own bruised forelimbs, at her chipped hooves, doing nothing.
“Scootaloo!” Rainbow and the creature broke off, circling each other on foot, their wings curled like scimitars.
The creature growled. “She’s paying off a debt. Don’t interfere.”
“Likely story.” Rainbow lunged, jabbing furiously.
Then Scootaloo, mane an utter mess of spikes, hopped forwards, tightening the tether. Her grip around Rainbow’s leg cut deep; both Rainbow and the creature stopped.
Scootaloo spoke as though in a frenzy. “Rainbow Dash, please believe me, I tried so hard, I just wanted to be awesome like you, but I know better now, honest, I really did listen to you!”
“Let’s go, Scootaloo! Before that thing gets a second wind.”
“But I can’t go!”
Rainbow began flapping her wings.
The creature snorted. “You should listen to the child instead of listening to your muscles. We might be matched in skill, but I’ll never allow a cheat to get away. You certainly won’t stop me.”
Yelling, Rainbow lunged forwards before realizing too late; Scootaloo’s grip and tether threw them both onto the floorboards. Rainbow’s wayward wing smacked a cycling machine.
Scootaloo sniffed. “I’m sorry, Rainbow Dash.”
Grunting under the smack’s aftereffects, Rainbow eased onto all fours. That storm had drained her worse than she’d thought…
“Sorry?” She frowned, concentrating through her throbbing concussion. “Why? Sorry for what?”
A scroll unfurled before her, dangled by the creature. Under its flexible feathers, the word “CONTRACT” stood out.
“For this,” it snapped. “A contract eight years in the making.”
Suddenly, Scootaloo let go. That was worse than the tight grip; the grip had possessed certainty behind it.
“You think you’re saving her from a monster?” continued the creature. “This is all her fault! One winter’s eve, eight years ago, this flightless fool looked upon you with envy and admiration. Her desire burned so bright in the mortal world that it was a shooting star in the darkness. From Luna’s stars, I came to investigate. We met in her dream that very night.”
“Horse apples!” Rainbow scooped up Scootaloo in one leg, but there was nowhere to go. The creature moved as it spoke, blocking the door. And she’d seen how fast it could move.
“She asked me for a wish. She wanted to be a perfect pegasus, there and then. No waiting until Fimbulwinter, even when I explained what that meant. Such a bargain meant she’d be excluded from glorious revival. Forever dead, come the end of the world.”
Rainbow stopped circling. “What’re you talking about?”
The words had to be wrested out of Scootaloo’s mouth. “No… I mean, I wanted to… Back then… I was really, really young, OK? I so wanted… Only…”
“Only I refused!” snapped the creature. “Much too young. Ah, but her birthday was on that day, so I waited until she had aged out of foalhood and crossed over into marehood. Ten nights ago.”
Rainbow glanced at the window. If she had enough speed, a head-start, or something heavy…
“Yet she signed the contract, then not a day ago tried to renounce it! NO ONE BREAKS A CONTRACT WITH ME! YOU WILL BE THE PERFECT PEGASUS, OR DIE TRYING!”
Howls rose and fell. Cold air spilled in. Most of the room iced over even as the two pegasi watched. The creature roared, raised its suddenly icicle-spiked whip…
Rainbow lashed out. At the cycling machine.
Shock crumpled her knees like hell, but the machine jumped up and crashed over the window. Or rather, over the startled creature.
It had shot over to block what should have been Rainbow making a break for it. Instead, it groaned under several kilos of exercising goodness.
Rainbow hugged Scootaloo tight and burst through the bedroom door instead, shattering its frozen hinges, snapping the tether clean off through sheer speed.
Rainbow’s reflection shimmered over the frozen streets and frozen ponies. Scootaloo struggled in her grip. The cold once more sliced its way through feathers and coat, Rainbow ploughed through air that thickened against her, under a sky too blank, with no idea what she was doing beyond getting away…
Black shapes erupted around her.
A million changelings buzzed into existence.
Rainbow almost dropped Scootaloo, she stopped so fast. They were the same changelings, all right. Only…
Where she’d hit them, chunks of layered black skin had broken off. Underneath, the same compacted whiteness shone.
All sides waited.
To Rainbow’s shock, she saw the fake Scootaloo at the front of the rank. Still with half its face missing. Still with the arrow stuck in its eye.
Through her glare, Rainbow wished death on the little fake creep; she even tightened her grip on the real Scootaloo. “Get lost! She’s coming with me!”
“CEASE THIS ATTACK!”
Overhead, the crescent moon faded in, glowing silver. Luna streaked round from behind it, then levitated it, poised, a spitting image of the Grim Reaper.
The army faltered… and then flapped and marched in mid-air, closer and closer. Rainbow spun to watch them all, hovering and wincing with pain with each flap. The army yelled and rushed back, though, when Luna’s scythe swung. The fake Scootaloo buzzed its wings anxiously.
Princess Luna held the fort right before Scootaloo and Rainbow Dash. She swung again, this time for emphasis.
“As Princess of the Moon,” she bellowed, “I command you –”
Crack!
The scythe froze, wrapped top to bottom in black whip. A whip that couldn’t possibly be that large. Quickly, she glanced from it to a white figure rising from beneath them all.
Black fizzed away, revealing the white glow of the whip’s true form.
From Ponyville below, the whip-wielding creature shot up, right in front of Luna. It even hovered with angelic perfection and graceful sweeps of its wings.
“No,” said the creature. “She will be the perfect pegasus, or she will die trying.”
A tug. Luna’s scythe did not move. Only when the creature tugged its own whip back did she stumble and break away.
“Oh boy,” muttered Rainbow Dash. If even Luna – Princess Luna herself – struggled against just one…
“Cold Standard,” snapped Princess Luna, righting herself. “I order you to cease this attack.”
“Your Highness.” Cold Standard bowed, but the whip remained raised to strike. “The contract must be honoured.”
“Silence! As Princess of the Moon…”
“As a Soldier of the Wishing Stars, this is my domain, not yours. The contract was made with me. The contract must be honoured, and nothing short of Equestria’s destruction will stop me. Stand down, ‘Princess’ of the Moon. I said STAND DOWN!”
Snowflakes and sparks flew; whip and scythe crashed, slashed, and dashed. Both Luna and Cold Standard vanished, phased back in, struck, vanished, like lightning trying to ambush itself.
“What’s going on?” Rainbow looked for a way out. A solid wall of changelings blocked them on all sides.
Below her, Scootaloo covered her own face.
“What’s wrong?” said Rainbow Dash.
Crack! Both Princess Luna and the Soldier, Cold Standard, phased back in. Whip and scythe locked together.
Luna nearly headbutted the Soldier, she was so close. “Look what your misguided anger has brought upon Ponyville! It was only my magic that kept it from spreading to the rest of Equestria. Don’t test me further.”
As Rainbow rapidly turned, trying to keep all the changelings in front of her at once, she saw the edges of Ponyville blur. Clouds faded in, swirling around them all.
“It’s trying to follow them in,” murmured Scootaloo. “It’s too early…”
Around her, the changelings looked about uneasily. Uncertain whispers flowed around as uneasy flurries of sound. A few even turned around in mid-hover.
From Rainbow’s warm, tight embrace, Scootaloo shifted weakly. Too weak for a foal. Even Rainbow felt the encroaching cold, first along her scars, flaring up as heated blades pressed against her skin.
“Let’s just go!” hissed Rainbow. “Scootaloo’s hurt.”
“By her own foolishness!” Luna broke off – Cold Standard yelped with the suddenness – and her imperial glare rounded on them. “Her own self-hatred and despair! She had every opportunity to revoke the wish beforehand. I advised her in her dreams, warned her this would befall us, fended the Soldiers off.”
“Soldiers of the Stars!” yelled Cold Standard, turning around. “Forward!”
A few ranks began to flap closer, but the rest still whispered and watched as the clouds encircled them and grew.
“Surely,” yelled Luna, oblivious to this, “you would have understood the risks! All rested on your resistance, Scootaloo, since you summoned Cold Standard here, and continued to do so even after all my warnings, for years and years! Did you not respect the divide between the heavens and the earth? Did you not understand the Soldiers of the Stars were meant to stay away? Instead, you pulled the thread and brought the whole tapestry down upon us, toying with forces you do not understand!”
“I didn’t want this to happen,” Scootaloo whispered.
“She’d never…” said Rainbow Dash, but just because the words had to be said. Through the painful cold, she felt Scootaloo slump in defeat.
Luna glared up at Rainbow’s face. “Her foalhood nightmares when she desired your sisterhood… Surely, they taught her the folly of obsession and cowardice. For dreams hold power! Power enough to shape life and death, be they pursued even unto the end of the world.”
Now the clouds swallowed the outermost rooftops, encircled the army, rising, blotting out the blank sky, towering over even those changelings who hovered highest. Overhead, the world reduced to a circle.
Luna cast an imperious glower at Scootaloo, as if the foal had insulted her.
Cold bit into Rainbow’s lips. Numbly, she managed to ask, “Luna… What are you saying?”
A howl echoed over the silence. Not the howl of a common wind, whistling or rushing, but the howl of the sky on the brink of death, echoing through layers of the mind, rattling the heart to its very core. It screamed of blood, ripped with ghostly teeth, and demanded fear from the very bone.
A million changelings turned to face the horizon. They shed their black skins like powder. An army of perfect whiteness surrounded Rainbow.
From the advancing cloud, eyes shone. They were two suns, almost at opposite ends of the world.
“What is this?” Cold Standard cracked the whip and raised it higher, but her face gaped with shock. “But he can’t be here! This isn’t time!”
Around them, the perfect white army shuffled uncomfortably.
“Why did no one tell me this!?” Cold Standard spun round.
As one, the white army flapped, trying to quash the cloud. Briefly, it drew back. Briefly. Then a low, earthquake growl shook the ice below so that a hum rinsed their ears, and the clouds slowly, menacingly drew closer. Almost like a predator.
“Hati!” cried Luna.
The two suns were almost eclipsed; whatever monster or Monster owned those giant eyes, it had narrowed them. No doubt at all: it knew that voice.
Luna pointed the scythe at each eye in turn. “My old foe! You have been awoken too early! Neither of us is ready for our final battle! Back, Monster! Back to your lair!”
Another – more defiant – howl rattled the ice humming like glass under the strain. Cliffs of clouds closed in, swallowing the million-strong army of white as they charged in. Luna shot up to the sky.
Scootaloo whimpered in the centre of it all.
Then she took a deep breath.
“All right,” she sighed. When Rainbow looked down, Scootaloo tried to look up at her. The corner of one eye glistened.
By now, a funnel enclosed the two pegasi. Rainbow landed hard on the last remaining circle of ice.
“What?” she said.
Scootaloo broke away, yet forced herself to stand before her, ready to take any punishment.
“I tried to stop it, honest I did!” Scootaloo sniffed. Already, her voice sounded crushed in her throat. “I asked Cold Standard to save you! I knew I shouldn’t have, but you were like my big sister, and I begged her not to freeze you. So I said, ‘No! I’ll make a new promise! I’ll stay here instead! I’ll train here!’ And she said, ‘Forever?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, forever, I don’t care if I miss the end of the world thing!’ I just wanted to save you. That was all!”
“You did –?” said Rainbow.
Scootaloo braced herself, just like that one night, when she’d finally admitted under the moonlight, with tears in her eyes, that she’d always wanted Rainbow Dash for a sister.
Finally, she said, “This isn’t a dream. It’s the real Ponyville.”
“The what!?”
“That place where you played with the fake me…” Scootaloo swallowed. “That was a dream just for you. I… I thought you might like somewhere warm and sunny all day, and you’d get to sleep all you wanted, and you’d have the perfect little sister! She’d do anything you wanted, and she’d never screw up, and she’d be awesome just like you.”
“What!? Why!?”
From the encroaching cloud, Luna landed hard behind Scootaloo, who winced and shut her eyes.
“So she could remain here to face her penalty,” bellowed Luna. “It was my intention to tell you the truth, Rainbow Dash, but before I left, Scootaloo pleaded with me personally. Out of respect for her wishes, I refrained. So she could tell you on her own terms.”
“I’m sorry, Rainbow Dash! I’m sorry!” Even through tight eyelids, the tears streamed down Scootaloo’s face.
“But…” Rainbow stared. “No…”
No… Scootaloo didn’t do this. Scootaloo scooted around and talked about how she hated lovey-dovey stories about “finding yourself”. Scootaloo, who knew she always had Rainbow’s back…
“I don’t understand,” said Rainbow, with the creeping dread that she did. “You wanted me trapped in a dream? Forever? With a fake?”
“I have my own opinion of her conduct.” Luna’s crescent-scythe materialized, ready to swing. “But that is irrelevant. Now you know the truth, Rainbow Dash. Now you understand. You and she are in the centre of it all. It is time for you to show inner strength.”
Another howl thirsted for battle. The clouds closed in. Luna vanished, scythe slashing.
Pure greyness engulfed all. Even Scootaloo began to fade, thinning to an outline, overtaken by a wall of cloud. Beyond them, the howls and the battle cries dimly broke through.
Just as the last wisps of Scootaloo faded, Rainbow reached forwards and grabbed the first leg she touched. Yanking the rest of Scootaloo closer, despite her yelp of shock, she sat down, trying to ignore the cold creeping further and further over her rump…
“What,” said Rainbow Dash, “the hay. Makes you think. I wanna be trapped. In a dream. With a fake!?”
“So you’d have what you wanted!” shouted Scootaloo, eyes clenched shut in absolute dread.
“What I wanted!?”
“SO YOU’D HAVE THE BEST SCOOTALOO EVER!”
Yet the more Scootaloo struggled to break free, the tighter Rainbow held on. More howls broke through. She thought she felt the slashes of invisible claws, rending her skin bit by bit…
“You stuck me in a dream with a fake!” Rainbow shouted over the wind. “What’s wrong with you!?”
“See!? You’d be better off with a better little sister than me!”
“Scared to tell me the truth?”
“NO!” The shout exploded with desperation.
“Yeah, you were! Don’t lie to me! Sisters don’t lie to each other!”
More and more, the invisible claws hacked away, making Rainbow shudder with each strike. The world beyond her and Scootaloo was pure noise. It didn’t exist: only their little corner of burning ice and struggling limbs.
Then Scootaloo collapsed onto the ice, all fight crumbling away. “I was stupid, OK!? I know better now! I know it’s OK not to fly, even if –”
“Even if Rainbow’s little sister should fly?” said Rainbow. Scootaloo-level thinking crept up on her, faster even than the cold freezing her muscles.
Both of them stopped struggling and huddled together. The cold was almost an icicle in Rainbow’s heart.
Despite her lips feeling like glass, Rainbow managed to crack a smile. “You bonehead. I don’t want a ‘perfect’ Scootaloo. I want the Scootaloo.”
“You’re just saying that! Don’t get sappy! It’s not awesome –”
“Please. I’m awesome enough to get away with sappy. So what if you aren’t a perfect pegasus like me?”
“But-but you said we had enough awesomeness between us. Between us. As in, not me on my own.”
Around them, the greyness retreated. Frozen ponies emerged like icebergs in fog. The ice began to drip and thin.
“Not cool,” muttered Rainbow.
“I’m sorry.”
“We’re sisters, aren’t we?” said Rainbow. She thought about Applejack and Rarity. “It happens. Apparently, a lot.”
“But you should have a better little sister.”
Rainbow shrugged to indicate that “should” was a word for less awesome ponies to fuss over.
“I’m sorr–”
“Stop saying that!” Rainbow crushed her head between her hooves as though trying to squeeze the sudden rage out of herself. More calmly, and with the crackle of thawing ice nearby, she said, “Look, rain or shine… uh…” How would AJ have put it? “…sisters love each other, right?”
Scootaloo flinched. “You said…”
“What?”
“You know. The l-word.”
“You mean love?” Even Rainbow had to admit it was foreign as muck in her mouth.
“Don’t say it!”
“You’re afraid of the word ‘love’?”
“Stop saying it! It’s… eugh!”
“Love, love, love, love, love. Lovey-dovey wuv-wuv.”
A titter escaped from Scootaloo. An embarrassed-beyond-belief titter, but a titter nonetheless. Overhead, the clouds parted enough to reveal starlight. Around them, thawing ponies shuffled and shifted as the ice retreated. Fresh panic seized Scootaloo, who seized Rainbow’s legs.
Rainbow freed one long enough to seize her in turn.
“They’re gonna be so mad at me,” said Scootaloo in fascinated horror. “So mad… Luna was using her Royal Canterlot Voice, she was so mad.”
Quickly, Rainbow shushed her own simmering anger on the matter. Unexpectedly, she felt Scootaloo push away, bracing herself, but now facing the nearest ponies as they defrosted.
And Rainbow understood.
A final howl died. Rainbow’s forelimb wrapped around Scootaloo and stayed there.
“It’s OK,” said Scootaloo, barely controlling her voice. “I’ll take my punishment. On my own. I swear.”
“Sorry, Squirt. You don’t get an option here. Sisters stick together.”
Scootaloo tried to round on her: tricky under the strong grip. “Why? Because they have to? You can’t still like me!”
“That’s horse apples. I just said the l-word.” Rainbow shuddered. “Don’t make me say it again.”
“But look what I did!”
What Rainbow saw was the last remnants of the grey cloud thin and vanish. On the horizon, normal, familiar hills and mountains returned. There was no ice in town, but many moonlit buildings dripped and shone with damp. She wasn’t sure how to begin explaining any of this. Just sure that she had no choice.
“Yeah,” she said, trying another tactic, “but every foal had fears and hopes. Even me.”
“Yeah, but you joined the Wonderbolts. You had fans! You said you were my age, and you had fans! You were going in the Wonderbolts no matter what. Everyone knew it.”
Rainbow checked. The nearest ponies still looked preoccupied with their wet coats…
She leaned down and whispered, “I had fans. You know what I wanted, though? Friends.”
Because the instant she stopped impressing ponies was the instant she found herself on her own. Cool as she was, even the teachers thought she’d been an arrogant little snot. But Rainbow suppressed the memories and the words she wanted to say. This wasn’t about her.
“But –” said Scootaloo.
If only Twilight had done this, Rainbow thought, she’d know what to say. “I know already! You’re sorry. You messed up. Big time. It doesn’t matter.”
“So if I blew up Equestria or something, that wouldn’t matter?” snapped Scootaloo.
Then Rainbow looked into her eyes. Scootaloo quivered like a cornered animal where she stood, stand defiant thought she did against the wakening Ponyville.
Rainbow stared out at the sea of faces, the march of hooves, the puzzled whispers coming towards them. She stepped into place beside Scootaloo, trying to pick her words with care.
“All right. If you’re as bad as that,” said Rainbow Dash, “then how’s this: I will personally never rest until I’ve turned you into the least bad pony ever.”
Scootaloo’s whole body focused on the ponies closing in.
“And I will not rest until I’ve made you so good, even the princesses would bow to you. And I’m not doing this for some so-called perfect sister. I’m doing this for you. How’s that for a contract? Deal?”
They met gazes. It became an impromptu staring contest.
“Deal?” insisted Rainbow Dash.
When it came, Scootaloo’s voice was a timid sunbeam through the clouds. “D…Deal.”
Rainbow looked away first, giving Scootaloo the win.
Both pegasi faced the moonlit crowds. Briefly, Rainbow swore Luna peered through that very moon, nodding once, as though from one sister to another.
Peace had finally returned. On the outside, give or take the angry ponies closing in. On the inside… she could tell it was still raging on. Through her hooves, she could still feel Scootaloo squirming in shame.
So Rainbow held on tight. Anyone could hold on when it was bright and sunny. Outside or inside. But in the bleakest storm, she thought, never let go. Outside or inside. Otherwise, what was the point of holding on at all?
