Broken

The cyan streak shot through the sky at an incredible speed, as if attempting to make an observer think that they were gazing upon some strange and unnatural comet, with enough free will or sense to change direction mid-course. The pegasus swerved this way and that, occasionally making a swift and abrupt change in course, at times more than 90 degrees within the area of a sewer grate. The freedom of being propelled by the great, powerful wings she possessed in any direction she chose exhilarated the adrenaline-filled mare.

She zipped all the way across the continual expanse of blue sky until she hovered delicately over the sea of now infinitely small trees. How different it was up there, where even the greatest of things appeared no bigger than the smallest feather in her down, and she flew above it all, as queen of the world so far below her.

And yet there was still that little tingle in her breast that spoke of something greater, something more, the voice of the fallen Icarus telling her to climb higher, to reach some new height of which she had never imagined was possible. Even now as she soared so high in the sky, the only solitary creature besides the uncaring wisps of cloud that occasionally rolled by, she looked further up to the infinite sun, seemingly unchanging in its constant glare, and took the light shining into her eyes as a challenge.

She flapped her wings fast enough to make a hummingbird envious, and quickly elevated higher than she had ever dared to go, feeling herself have to breathe harder, flap faster, and pump harder as she went higher and higher. As the blue pony looked down now she could see both Canterlot and Ponyville before the horizon cut off the known world.

She had to flap harder now, to compensate for the pure lack of air so high up in the sky. Looking up at the sun, so infinitely high now, she realized it was in pure futility that she was desperately trying to make it up the the omniscient aura in the sky. However, the determined pony continued to the best of her abilities, pushing her every limit, and past any inhibition she might have had before, higher up in the great expanse of blue.

Then she broke.

Not like a celery stick bent too far that suddenly snapped, but something far different, more like the small error in a machine that causes it to break, not in flames and fractures, but with a cease of motion. And so it was that the poor mare mid-flight simply ceased to run, wings suddenly limp at her side. Her vision was slowly obscured as her velocity dropped exponentially, and suddenly the ever present sun, previously mocking her with its stoic gaze, became blocked out by the numerous black dots swimming across the cerulean mare.

At last she reached her apex, and in that moment she experienced a sort of pause in reality, in which she was still too dazed to contemplate the particular peril of her predicament. It was only when she noticeably began her descent that she understood the foolish position she had put herself in. Her multicolored mane whipped at her face as she finally faded away to the warm embrace of unconsciousness.

Unbeknownst to the poor equine, her temporary relief from reality would not affect the outside world, which had cruelly decided to continue her descent even as she slipped out of consciousness. She plummeted towards the surface faster than any of her previous failed endeavors, the force of the fall tearing off loose-hanging feathers from her trailing wings. She finally stopped in her disastrous fall only when the water of the lake near Ponyville came to meet her with a sickening smack.

The impact hit her like a wall, which ironically, was the next thing she saw, when she finally woke up in the Ponyville Hospital.