It was late winter in Equestria. Ponies – with the deep freeze behind them – were out and about, enjoying the milder temperatures and lengthening daylight hours. The weather teams had long ceased any kind of snowfall, allowing the overburden to melt away naturally, and permeate the air with a wet, lively smell. Today was something special though; a time of rebirth.
But to a griffon named Gilda who was flying the skies north of Canterlot, it was known as that holiday. In all of her times of learning about Hearts and Hooves Day – during her school years and after – the griffon always scoffed at the idea of lovey-dovey letters and boxes of chocolates that didn’t hold much weight beyond their calorie count.
That was as far as she ever considered it. She did not view herself as a creature of such sop and sentimentality; she was a creature of action and drive. Right now she had more pressing matters to occupy her.
Gilda watchfully scanned the skies, looking for any signs of trouble. She bobbed and weaved around the puffy scattered clouds, using them to throw off her possible pursuer. The next cloud useful for cover was a cirrus layer at a much higher altitude, so she climbed up through the frigid, buffeting wind shear. She started to regret leaving her leather jacket back home, even though she had a perfectly normal, all-natural fur coat to protect her from the elements.
The griffon was about halfway to the cloud layer when she felt a presence climbing up quickly from behind. The closer the presence got, the quicker Gilda’s heart beat. Just a little closer, she thought tersely, waiting for the pursuer to get close enough before taking action. Once she could hear its flapping wings, the griffon snapped to her left, deftly dodging the attacking pegasus.
Pfft, amatuer.
The turquoise pegasus shot past, but not before lightly managing to slap her wingtip against Gilda’s own, shouting a jovial “gotcha” before disappearing into the clouds above.
“That makes it two-and-two, Gil!” came the taunt from above, muffled by the clouds surrounding its own. “One more and I win!”
“You mean one more and I win!” she hollered back up. The griffon smirked and began counting down from ten in her head. While counting down, she continued to lazily climb into the heavens. Once zero was reached, she aggressively flared upward into the cloud cover.
Enough games, Dusty. Time to show you how a hunter really plays.
Gilda didn’t bother with silence, losing a shrill eagle’s shriek and letting her ‘prey’ know exactly what was going down. In any other situation, discretion would have taken precedent over valor, but she had already eaten that morning, and scaring the horsefly was just too much fun. It also felt right to the griffon, being able to do exactly what she was built to do.
Gilda kept her head on a swivel, squinting out into the surrounding milky-white haze for any signs of movement. If I were her, what would I do? Gilda thought about her old flight camp bunkmate, Rainbow Dash, and how similar her new friend was to the technicolor flier. Namely the fact that neither of them could sit still for longer than ten seconds. That ruled out Dust doing anything as sneaky as hiding in the clouds. So Gilda climbed ever higher, ascending past the cirrus clouds and into the blue beginnings of the stratosphere, giving her opponent no place close to hide.
At this altitude, Gilda could now feel a sharp chill in her joints, and a nagging feeling of exhaustion from the low oxygen density at altitude. All feelings that the flier was more than used to, from flying on a daily basis.
She smiled. The sky was her true home. While most of griffonkind had come down from the skies and craggy aeries to set up large city-states ruled under one banner, Equestrian pegasi had retained their old ways to a degree, by maintaining the ancient city of Cloudsdale and setting up smaller cloudstruction communities around the country. Some of the more well off pegasi even had one-off floating houses of their own design. One, of few, things that Gilda truly appreciated about Equestria.
But it wasn’t just her sky at the moment. A quick glance behind and below revealed that her prey was trying to turn the tables once more by silently sneaking up from behind. Gilda deftly looped and rolled over to face her opponent. Out of options, the pegasus charged headlong, her trademark green and gold contrail already forming behind.
Whatever the outcome, this was going to determine the victor of their little game. It was sudden death, and neither party was terribly keen on keeping up their end of the wager. They both rapidly closed the distance, and much like the jousting pegasi of old, neither wavered from their course. She looked for any signs of hesitance in her opponent, but the griffon could only see determination written into her features, equally matched by her own determined stare.
When only a scant few meters of separation between them, Dust made her move. She pitched upward, trying to gain the upper hoof in a vertical fight.
That pony never learns! Gilda thought as she mirrored her move. They both clawed for altitude, but the ultra-thin air made that a challenging task. Lightning was the first to falter, her small, hummingbird like wings flapping wildly and out of sync.
Gilda’s much larger wings still had some juice left in them, which she used to pull up in front of Dust. The pony looked down from the endless blue abyss and immediately reached out both hooves to finally win the mock-combat. But before hooves could touch, griffon talons wrapped around each leg. Their owner only had one thing to say.
“Gotcha.”
The pegasus shot back at her with a cocky smirk, having absolutely no intention of making her defeat easy for the griffon. “Then let’s see if you can keep me!” She stopped and folded her wings to her sides.
Gilda smirked and did the same. Without propulsion, whatever upward momentum they still had quickly bled away, leaving them hanging in the air for the longest of seconds. The two creatures of the sky hovered in place, on the roof of their world that was blanketed out below.
Then they fell. The thin air caused them to quickly pick up speed. At first, there was little sound, but that quickly changed the further they fell into the atmosphere. Then the shearing jetstreams caused them to enter an uncontrollable, spinning freefall. Their world lost any semblance of up or down, but that simply didn’t matter.
Copper eyes stared into similar golden ones, each just daring the other to flinch and let go. “You gonna give yet, dweeb!” Gilda shouted over the sounds of rushing air, trying to see if the pony was willing to separate, completely forgetting about her own grip on the pegasus.
This drew out some sarcasm from Dust. “I don’t know? Think you could release your death grip on my hooves, ya trotter!”
Gilda groaned inwardly at the derogatory slur that Lightning Dust playfully shot her way from time to time, and fired back with an epithet of her own. “Not yet, birdwatcher!”
They were now nearing warmer air masses, and their terminal descent slowed slightly. Deciding that enough was enough, they both began to work on recovering from the death spiral, with corrections happening on both sides. Once the horizon stopped whipping around, the griffon finally let go of the hooves in her grasp.
“About time you let me go, G! Any longer, and my hooves would have fallen off!”
“Ah, you just had to stop flailing around first, D!”
They both fell comfortably now, with legs splayed out to stabilize, and savoring the feeling of weightlessness. Gilda took this time to look south and noted that she and Dust and almost matched the altitude of the permanently snow-capped Mount Equus. She had completely forgotten about the pegasi created clouds below, and only remembered when the world was enveloped in white.
Pegasus and griffon alike both fell headlong into a puffy white cloud, leaving vague impressions of themselves on the surface. Then a pawful of talons shot up out of the larger hole and gripped the edge, quickly joined by its sister. Gilda hoisted herself up and spat out a beakful of cloudstuff. “Phah! Smokey. Must be from Detrot.”
Pulling herself the rest of the way out, Gilda shook out her wings and feathers and padded over to investigate the smaller hole. “Yo, Dust? You alive in there?”
Gilda waited, expecting the pegasus to come shooting out of the hole with her usual gusto and bravado, but felt a slow seep of worry enter her system. She knew that Dust was a risk-taker much like Rainbow Dash and liked to push her boundaries at every turn. The fact that, instead of letting the pegasus have her victory, Gilda had basically goaded her friend into their spiraling freefall weighed on her mind.
“Alright Dusty, time’s up!” she called, trying to hide the quiver in her voice. “I’m coming in!”
Gilda began furiously digging at the fading imprint with razor-sharp talons, sending little tufts of cloud flying back between her legs. She quickly gave that up to simply part the cloud and pull herself deeper in – cutting Dust with rapidly flailing shears would only make the situation worse. When she reached where the pony should have been and found nothing but a shrinking hole in the cloud, Gilda began to feel frantic. “No, no, no no no!” she muttered, frantically starting to dig through and try and find the missing pony.
Her mind flashed back to an earlier time, the last time she had tried that stunt. Then it had been Dash’s deep magenta eyes she had been staring into on the way down. It had been Dash’s rainbow mane that streamed in the wind after she let go and they separated, the pony’s raspy laugh cutting through the roaring wind. And it had been the blue pegasus she had grown so close to that never came up from the clouds.
That time Dash’s fall was stopped by slamming into some compacted cloudstruction that had been illegally dumped in an otherwise normal cloudbank, and the griffon vividly remembered carrying the unconscious body of her closest friend to the hospital. Even after assurances by the doctors that Dash would be just fine, Gilda couldn’t stop blaming herself. She knew the risks, and she knew Dash, but stupidly went through with it nonetheless.
Nobody could possibly understand what she was going through, what their little stunt really meant to her. It wasn’t even really a stunt, it was-
She was spared any more thoughts by a cold, electrifying pain on her flank.
The griffon practically launched out of the hole with a loud shriek, flailing about in mid-air before her feline instinct righted her and landed her in a low, wide crouch to face her attacker. Her fur and feathers had puffed out instinctively, her wings out wide, and her tail sticking straight back with its tuff all fuzzed out. She glared at Lightning Dust, her provoked snarl drowned out by the pony’s raucous laughter.
The horsefly was holding up a shod hoof and tried to contain her laughter. “Heh heh heh, uh… gotcha.”
Gilda’s tail switched back and forth dangerously as she glared at the equine prankster, her talons digging furrows in the cloud. The innocent prank, combined with the annoying laughter, only served to remind the griffon of a more recent time with Dash – the last time. A simple hoofshake had her on the floor with screaming pain in her talons. Like most things, Gilda laughed it off – never telling anypony how she truly felt.
This time the griffon didn’t hold back. When she spoke, it was with venom, her voice distorted by the low growl already rumbling out of her syrinx. “Why did you do that!”
“Oh come on!” Dust exclaimed playfully even while she instinctively backed up. “It was just sticking out there! I couldn’t resist!”
“You shocked me!”
“It was a joke, Gil; just a harmless little swat on the rump, that’s all!”
Gilda snarled, then turned and marched away.
Dust took off and came after, hovering a fair distance away from the irritated predator. “Look, uh, I didn’t know about the static, okay.”
The griffon grunted an affirmative.
“Um, y-you’re not gonna turn into a cryfoal over some lame prank, right?” Lightning tried, hoping that humor would have some effect.
“No,” Gilda growled before stopping near a rise in the cloud embankment. She closed her eyes before taking a deep breath and letting it hiss out her nostrils. She was not going to let her temper get the better of her, not anymore. After one more calming breath, she shook out her head to settle her feathers, the shiver running down the length of her body. “N-no, I won’t.” She idly played with a feather on her head, adjusting where it sat. “I just… had a bad experience. Bad memories.”
With her friend finally seeming calmer and looking less frazzled, Dust landed on the cloud herself a few feet away. “So… who won?”
Gilda sighed softly, still not looking directly at the pegasus. “You did, Dusty. You won.”
“Oh come on!” Dust tried to argue away a free win. “You’re the one who grabbed my hooves. You won.”
“Does it matter?”
Dust balked at the question, a stricken look on her face. “Does it matter!? Course it matters! Our dinner bet is still on, and somebody is going to buy.” Lightning Dust hoped to lighten the mood by mentioning food, but the response left her more miffed.
“Since when are you a pony who turns down a free lunch, D?” Gilda asked idly as she settled down on her forepaws.
Dust just shook her head and dropped her wings to her side. “Geeze, G. Why’d you get so moody all the sudden?”
“Like I already said; it’s nothing.” Gilda dismissed the question with a wave of her paw. “Just thinking about old times with Dash, ya know.”
The pony gritted her teeth at the mention of the name. Even though her academy wingpony was in the right, and she herself was being reckless, Rainbow Dash was still part of the reason why she got booted in the end.
“Look Gil, you need to move on from her, okay.”
“I did,” Gilda stated. “But our little freefall back there reminded me of something. I tried the same thing with her once, and… it didn’t end well. She got a pretty nasty wing injury and couldn’t fly for a month. I remember it really well because in celebration of it fully healing, she decided to turn downtown Cloudsdale into her own personal racecourse, got both of us nicked by the guards, and up on charges and legally grounded for the next three months while we worked off the resulting community service. She moved to a small earth-pony town without any restrictions after that.”
“Wait,” said Lightning Dust with a frown as she trotted up beside the griffon. “Are you telling me that little Miss Goody-Goody-Four-Shoes has a record?”
“Eh, it was all just juvie crap,” Gilda rumbled as her tail jumped about behind her. “Reckless flying, excessive speeds, trespassing, public nuisance, minor destruction of cloud-based property. Nothing major, nothing that would show on a Wonderbolt’s background check. She was young enough then that that stuff would have been sealed when it came time to matter.”
With a sigh, Lightning Dust leaned in and gave her griffon an affectionate nuzzle “I’m sorry, G. If I had known about that, I wouldn’t have-”
“S’alright,” Gilda replied before unfurled a massive wing and was draping over the smaller pegasus, pulling her down and against her before returning the nuzzle. “That’s not what’s bugging me though.”
Dust closed her eyes as she ran her cheek over the soft white feathers on the griffon’s neck and breast. In the few months that their relationship had been serious, it wasn’t often Dust had seen Gilda this way. Given how the griffon tended to let things fester, it was best to get it out of the way now. “So what is?”
“That silly little plunge we did earlier.” Gilda scratched the back of her head. “Well that kinda has… connotations in my culture.”
Lighting had stopped her nuzzling. She asked in a very guarded tone, “Oh?”
Gilda was now blushing. “U-um, you see, when one griff trusts another, and I mean really trusts them, they kinda… do that. What I’m trying to say is that I – ah screw it!”
At first, there was silence. Then Dust sighed. “It’s symbolic. It’s meant to symbolize taking the plunge in a relationship. It’s supposed to show that your partner will hold onto you and not let you go, no matter what is happening around you. They stabilize you and keep you in control, and you do the same to them. You’re supposed to see how close you can get to the ground before breaking it off as a sign of how far each of you is willing to commit to the other.”
“Y-you know what that means?”
This time it was Dust that was blushing as she glanced over at the face of the griffon shooting her the incredulous look. “Uh, yeah dude. You’re the trotter and I’m the birdwatcher, don’t forget. I know all there is to know about griffons, and their more romantic customs.”
“Wait, are you saying you-?”
“What can I say?” The griffon felt her partner scootch closer, pressing her whole body against Gilda’s own. Dust sighed in contentment under the warmth of the wing and snuggled against the warm spot it had left behind. “We’ve been together a while now. I just… wanted to see how far you’d be willing to go with me.”
Gilda chuffed and shook her head. “Well, griffons used to do it that way, but that tradition kinda died out when we left the sky. It still beats kissing, though,” the griffon stated with disgust.
Dust couldn’t help by smile a little, glad that her friend’s mood was lightening up again. “But Gilda, I thought you said you didn’t do lovey-dovey.”
“I’m making an exception for today.” She lifted her wing and gave the pegasus under it a gentle swat before muttering, “So just shut up and enjoy it, dweeb.”
Dust nuzzled her griffon again, working her muzzle along the border where feather turned to fur. She was quite glad that Gilda had calmed down and at least understood what had riled her up. Even so, there was one nagging question she had. “You had feelings for her too, didn’t you? That’s why you took the plunge with her?”
Gilda craned her neck to view her ‘special somepony’ and released a soft, weary sigh.
“Yeah. I never told her though,” murmured the griffon. “Our friendship was getting kinda rocky by the time I realized what she meant to me. Telling her would have only complicated things further.” She settled her head down on her forepaws.
A hoof slid across her withers and began to rub over the dense brown fur, but Gilda didn’t mind. In fact, she closed her eyes and leaned into it, the cat portion of her anatomy responding with a soft, rumbling purr.
“Ooh, I always wanted a kitty,” Lightning Dust joked.
“Don’t push your luck,” Gilda rumbled.
“Right.”
The midday sun shone down on the odd couple, melting their worries away and making them simply too comfortable to move. The griffon was almost asleep on her forepaws when she felt the pony beside her shift and lean in heavily.
“Gilda?”
“Mmm?”
“Do you have any idea how soft you are?”
“Don’t you dare go comparing me to fresh clouds on summer days or any of that other sentimental pony crap, you hear me?”
“Aw, but you’re my fuzzy little cat-bird; yes you are, yes you are!”
“Fuzzy little cat-bird with talons that’ll shred you…”
“You’re just mad because you lost and have to pay for dinner.”
“You’re just trying to get out of paying by forgetting who caught who up there.”
“Heh. Trotter.”
“Birdwatcher.”
“Love you.”
“Emph. Love you, too.”
