The day that Lord Tirek came to Cloudsdale began as a peaceful one.
His arrival had not been heralded by any of the foreboding signs that had followed before so many other monstrosities. There were no riots. No unnatural storms. No stars falling from the sky. No blankets of darkness to cover the land. No armies swarming in from land or sea or sky. Not so much as an unscheduled cloud marred this perfectly ordinary day.
The arrival of the centaur on the cloud city was a surprise to those unfortunate enough to be in the residential area where he landed. It was rare enough to see a non-pegasus pony in the skies, but a creature as bizarre as Tirek? To encounter such a demented fusion of pony and minotaur? No, that was an event nopony had ever imagined.
For the first few moments, the monster did nothing, allowing curiosity to draw more of the pegasi out of their homes. Already did fearful murmurings run through the crowd that had gathered for the spectacle, and Tirek only smiled as their fear mounted.
Every crowd has that first pony who acts and pulls in all the others. The first to cheer, the first to applaud, the first to boo… or the first to flee. And by saving grace of herd instinct, that first pony’s action spread nearly instantly across the gathered ponies.
For all its faults, the ponies’ skittish nature had helped them survive as long as they had. Were it a being other than Lord Tirek, their escape may well have worked.
As it was, it did nothing but spice their magic with the taste of fear.
The red and black beast’s maw gaped open far wider than it had any right to, and the pegasi felt a force pull against their hearts When Tirek breathed in they were torn; their pegasus magic ripped from their bodies and their very destinies stolen from them in attempt to sate the boundless hunger of Lord Tirek
And so the pegasi fell through the clouds.
Tirek stalked through the city of Cloudsdale, consuming all magic within his sight. With each meal the range of his feasting grew. The pegasi rallied against him, of course—they were a race of warriors, and had been since time immemorial—but they could no more stop him than mayflies could stop a hurricane.
Other pegasi were swept into the path of lightning bolts. Ponies armed with blade and spear were drained dry before they could even try to touch the centaur’s coat. Weatherworkers were thrown into their own half-formed tornadoes. Even attacks from below the clouds were useless when wide sheets of taffy glued the brave and useless warriors’ feathers together, locking them into a directionless glide.
A city of ponies is a city of magic. It was only by molding clouds into denser cloudstone that pegasus houses could hold their shape in face of the wind; it was only with unicorn help that books, weapons, and clothing could be supported on that insubstantial mist; it was only through earth pony breeding that there existed plants that could grow on clouds. Magic alone is the only reason that the sky had ever held food, medicine, visiting dignitaries, the Equestrian Games, or even the machinery of its own weather factory.
The endless gullet of Tirek devoured it all.
Cloudsdale was a large city, and Tirek’s presence sent waves of destruction before him. Where he walked it deteriorated and collapsed, and, as with any large structure, all that surrounded it was damaged in turn. The supports sunken into the foundation cumulus dissolved while anchor-clouds collapsed, leaving nothing to guard against the growing chasms that ripped apart street and house alike.
For centuries the delicate spires and corinthian columns of Cloudsdale’s architecture had been its signature; such was its renown even those in foreign nations would recognize its image on sight. It took not even an hour to reduce them to ugly cirrocumuli.
When faced with such disaster, it was only natural that many pegasi would try to flee. The evacuation efforts were extensive.
And futile.
Those who tried to leave could not drag themselves more than inches through the air; the clouds upon which they had stood had become gummy, stretchy masses that could in no sense be considered clouds. Their struggles and cries for help could not be heard over the laughter of a mad god.
In a matter of hours, Cloudsdale was no more, and its ponies, dead.
Those few that miraculously lived through the crash were near-universally crushed under the falling rubble, with only those entangled in those ridiculous cloud traps surviving in any amount worth noting. Those already in the air at the time of the attack had been the only ones with an opportunity to escape. Only a small number took this chance, the vast majority diving back into the city to save their friends and family.
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The sound of shattering stonecloud was far quieter than it had any right to be. There was something wrong about Cloud Break’s world being destroyed with so little noise.
The screaming of frantic ponies was more than enough to make up for it.
It was amongst these shrieks that Cloud Break flew with speed born of desperation. Everything had gone to Tartarus and he had no idea why, but he couldn’t bring himself to care.
Great fissures creaked up through the half-dozen spires composing the Towers of Weaving. With that terribly gentle *crunch*, a Tower shattered. The processing of silver lining bound the Towers together; the fall of one inexorably ripped the others apart, and in so doing were the vast vats of molten silver split open.
Even with the city falling on his head, he didn’t care. It didn’t matter what was happening, or why.
His daughter was out there. Chirpy needed him. Nothing else was important.
Cloud Break barely noticed the hundreds of tons of metal that made up Equestria’s supply of silver lining pouring to the earth around him, even when a close call ripped out some of his yellow tail. He barely noticed anything, really—Cloud Break was a janitor. He had never in his life flown as fast as he did today, and the whole of his attention was devoted to pushing himself to even greater speeds. Even he could ignore the screaming protests of his flight muscles when powered by adrenaline and fear.
Perhaps it was instinct that led him to clasp his raincloud-colored wings to his sides as he dove through a narrow gap between torrents of near-liquid metal. The inheritance of pegasi, as it were, that drove him to corkscrew away from a cloud house moments before it turned to purple goo. The workings of some racial memory of deathly battles and narrow escapes that told him to slip upwards just in time to avoid a family that the edge of the city.
Or perhaps his attempt to fly through a falling skyscraper machine and the wild, scrambling mix of running and flying that sent him safely out the other side was due only to a father’s resolution to reach his foal.
It didn’t matter.
Diving through the dispersing clouds in this madness was reckless, but the time it would take to bypass them was inexcusable. Luck was on his side, what little luck there was to be found that day; he broke through without crashing head-first into cloudstone or another pegasus.
He almost wished he had.
The community he had called home just this morning consisted of thousands of houses, arranged in lengthy sections bound together by a loose array of cloud bridges. It was a messy, disorderly sprawl that was nonetheless a beautiful part of the city.
Where there should have been rows and layers of cloud houses, there was shapeless fog. Signs were gone; the statues were gone; the precious greenery brought into the sky was nowhere to be seen. Even the destruction that tore through the rest of Cloudsdale was better than this.
All Cloud Break could see was smooth, featureless grey-white, broken only by the gaps where objects or ponies had fallen through.
Tears fell as he gazed upon what had once been his home. All he saw the emptiness. His parents, his brother, his friends… gone.
His daughter…
Light and movement pulled his gaze to the far corner of the district. Had he been so stunned by the completeness of this erasure that he had written off his own house as already lost? Cloud Break grit his teeth and forced energy into wings that had become so heavy that they must have been made of lead.
The sky was filled with the storm clouds and feathers of the groups of devoted soldiers who flocked the sky, engaged in battle against some manner of unreal monster. But even he could tell that they could do no more than slow it, and every passing moment resulted in another empty pegasus falling through the clouds. He couldn’t think of any other word to describe them.
But that was fine. Slowing it down was all he needed.
Cloud Break soared above the battle until he could dive down amongst the remaining houses. There were only a few dozen left, and he could tell that there had once been more from the crumbled remains that drifted past.
Garish colors painted the cloud houses, and Cloud Break steered clear of them—when he saw a pony half-buried in purple he shuddered at how close he had come to failure. He flew carefully between the broken pseudo-streets, trying to find a house that had drifted away from where it belonged.
He almost didn’t recognize it when he finally found it. His pristine white home was splashed with blue and green. Cloud Break could barely even enter with it covering his door; he was forced to clamber in through the window.
“Chirpy! Chirpy, where are you!?”
“D-Dad? DADDY!”
Cloud Break dashed into Chirpy’s bedroom; the standard filly furnishings stood out glaringly against the green that half the room had become. The same green that his daughter’s hind legs were sunken into.
He didn’t try to hold back the tears as he dropped to his knees in front of her. “Oh, thank Celestia!” Cloud Break whispered in the absolute relief of a parent reunited with their child. “What happened? Are you hurt?”
She shook her head, her own eyes red from crying and her muzzle matted with tears. She really did look just like him, even down to her purple eyes. “No, I’m not hurt,” Chirpy Hooves replied. Her voice held the gasp of a pony speaking between weeps. “But I think I’m stuck, and I can’t get out, and, and, and you were gone and I didn’t know what to do and I tried to hide under the bed but then it turned green and I tried to crawl out and it fell on me and turned the floor green and you were gone and…”
He wrapped his forelegs and wings around her and held her tightly to his chest. Her sobs wet his coat, but Cloud Break paid it no head. “Don’t worry, my little songbird. You’re not alone anymore. I’ll get you out. I won’t let anything hurt you, alright?”
Pulling back just far enough to see Chirpy silently nod, he kissed her forehead. “Alright then, Songbird. Make sure you hold on tight, alright?” Another nod. With his daughter’s assent he rose to his hooves, hooked his forelegs around her, and pulled.
His daughter’s squeal of pain and the Moon-damned goo’s stubborn refusal to release her forced Cloud Break to lower her to the floor. “I-it isn’t working!” she squealed, wiggling in his hooves in an attempt to get some movement out of her legs. The motion only pulled her deeper into the muck. Too deep.
“Stop! Chirpy, don’t move, you’ll sink into it. I… I’ve got an idea. I’m going to have to get rid of that… stuff. I’ll be back in a moment, alright?”
“… do you promise?”
Cloud Break forced himself to smile so his daughter wouldn’t see how close to a panic attack he was. “I promise.”
When she released his hoof, Cloud Break barreled his way into the kitchen. He just needed something sharp enough to—
Screams.
Cloud Break had thought he had heard screaming in his return home. How naïve of him. The cries of his fellow pegasi seemed a chorus of singing angels when matched against what pierced through his ears and his soul.
Shrieks of agony, of damnation, of terror, of hunger; it was a cacophony that was horrific in its totality, consuming his every thought. Nothing other than the screams existed in his mind. Were a choir of the tortured dead to rise from their graves and croon doom to foals in their cribs, it would be a sound more pleasant than what shredded Cloud Break’s heart.
‘Tore’ would be a better word; deep within himself, inside the soul where a pony should never experience sensation, something ripped. A part of himself—his identity, his future, his light, his magic—slowly pulled away from him.
Slowly. So, so slowly. It welled out of his soul and into his heart, where it was dragged into his bones and muscles before seeping out of his skin. Every moment he felt further drained.
Of magic. Of strength. Of thought. Of hope.
The sound faded, and Cloud Break fell through the floor.
He didn’t remember much of the fall. Perhaps he had passed out. Regardless, the lashing of wind against his body pulled at his attention even through the ennui that gripped at him.
But his daughter was crying, and he couldn’t stop.
Cloud Break tried to flap his wings. It was as though he were pushing against a mountain, but he got a half-flap out of them—but it felt hollow. It was a motion without meaning. Empty.
There was no way he could fly. The sky would never embrace such empty wings.
His body protested every slight movement with the stubbornness of a hurricane fighting a weather team, but he managed to twist his torso enough to spin himself around.
Chirpy’s sobs broke through even the wailing of the wind against his ears. The sight of her cut into his heart. Her eyes were all but colorless and filled with tears, while that goo had captured her up to her shoulders. She fell along with him, teardrops streaming behind them as the two approached the earth.
Cloud Break didn’t look. He had eyes only for her.
Chirpy couldn’t cry. He told her he’d keep her safe.
His entire body protested with burning pain, but Cloud Break forced his wings to beat once. Then twice, then a third time. And slowly, so slowly, he pushed his way through the air towards his daughter.
He just had to reach her. As long as he could hold her, everything would be—
