Malignancy

"With such primitive means of spectra production, the Auroral Barrier Stations, then only thinly spread along our northern boarder, frequently went underpowered. With the result that, every few years, wild arctic storm-fronts burst through the aurora barriers. The worst of these so-called 'storm seasons' on record were in Anno Domina 236, 731-33, and 988 – this latter-most year we shall now discuss at length".

-- Prof. Tundra Flurry,

Before the Rainboom: Pre-Reformation Era Weather Management in Equestria (AD 1238), pp. 45-46

Chapter 1, Part 1:
The Pegasus Front

Manehattan Bay Province, East of Manehattan,
Sunday Evening (September 17th, Anno Domina 988):

Summer Breeze tore through the evening sky. Below her, the cloudscape blurred past; the yellows and reds and long shadows of sunset were rendered a dark, burnt orange as the pegasus hurtled through the air. A cumulonimbus cloud-mount rose up from over the horizon, obscuring Celestia's sun, plunging the world into purple twilight in the last gasps of day. Summer charged her flight aura, ignited it and kicked into an aileron roll. Leaving a spiral vapour-trail in her roaring wake, she shot toward the looming cloud-mount. Dim shadows of things moving within the cloud played at the edges of her perception. She pitched up hard, still spinning, her aura wreathed in twirling vapour like the white spiral cutie-mark on her flank. She raced up the vertical sides of the cloud toward the overhanging edge of the plateau.

Summer punched into the overhang, plunging up into the roiling mass, twisting vapour emanating from her outstretched hooves. She drilled her way upward through the dense cloud, straining, panting, her forelegs trembling. Her wings burned as she continued to flap and spin and hold her course true. Higher and higher, flapping harder and harder, fighting the biting wind and the falling air pressure and the electric sting of arcing static and the cold and the damp – her muscles screaming, the magic pulsing from her chest and the pit of her stomach, burning her up from the inside as air shrieked past her ears. She couldn't breathe, and grey darkness began creeping in at the edges of her vision, her body sang with pain, an explosion coiling within her, insistent, edging on desperation, uncontainable, straining-

The world exploded into view.

Release.

She gasped and went limp. As the cloudscape fell away below her, she was lost in the vast stillness of wild sky. Panting, gulping the thin air, her legs and wings heavy and spent, chest and stomach heaving. The icy air cooled her hot, damp, powder-blue coat. Steam curled off her body in sheets.

Gauzy wisps of cirrus glowed like auroras, green and purple-blue amidst the orange sky. Celestia's setting sun returned to her with the altitude. She hung, weightless, neither climbing nor falling, suspended. Equilibrium. Peace.

Summer had just enough time to sigh before gravity caught up with her. She began falling, her mane and tail whipped behind and above her as she tumbled, end over end, wings tight against her sides, down and down toward the broad, flat plateau of the cloud-mount. She stuck all four of her legs out to her sides, the wind tearing at her limbs, slowing her fall but increasing the speed of her tumbling. The wind stole her breath as she fell, further and further down.

She pulled her legs in and snapped open her wings to their maximum length, slicing into the wind, steering herself into a dive. She pitched up sharp, jarring her hard as she levelled out, carrying her momentum forward. Again, she was zooming over cloudscape, the roiling plateau whizzing past beneath her. The sun was again hidden from her by the cloud-mount's own horizon, washing out the sunlit world. Two sunsets in one day – the exclusive gift of flight.

As she flew, the surface of the cloud started to become more jagged and irregular, more solid. As she approached the centre of the plateau, more and more of its surface was made up of cloud-coral, ancient cloud-stuff: dense enough to support the weight of non-pegasi and hold heavy objects. Also becoming more frequent as she approached the centre, she began spotting wispy white ice-brambles, curly thickets of nephele-vines, the occasional lone helicon-shrub with their purple flowers and blue stems, and rainbow coloured coral blooms.

Pumping her wings to maintain elevation, and slow her speed, she approached the hippocrene in the middle of the plateau, shining with rainbow spectra, the edges of the pond thick with purple helicon flowers, scenting the thin air for miles. Flapping to a hover, she landed in a tiny clearing at the pond's edge, between two thick clusters of helicon. She stamped down the dead foliage and hard packed cloud-coral beneath her, and laid down to catch her breath.

Her breathing settled, she dipped her muzzle into the rainbow pool, and drank the sweet and spicy liquid, feeling its magic course through her, reinvigorating and intoxicating. Natural spectra. Nectar of the sky.

In pegasus lore, the First Flock was born from a lake of spectra at the centre of the Great Overcloud at the Beginning of the world. Summer licked the multi-coloured drops from her lips and scooted back from the edge. She rested her chin on her forehooves, sighing.

The sun already below the plateau's edge, the first stars were now visible. From the ground, Celestia's sunlight would still be on the horizon, casting deep coppery tones. High in the clouds, though, the sun hidden from view, blue light and deep shadow ruled, broken only by the spectral glow of the hippocrene. Summer rested by the edge of the pond, thinking, preening her feathers, and taking the occasional nibble at the purple helicon flowers – sharp and bitter but with a peppery heat and a savouryaftertaste that lingered in her mouth and throat. Soon, Celestia finished lowering Her sun and saw to raising Her moon, the other sacred charge of Equestria's monarch.

Celestia's moon crept high enough to allow the Mare in the Moon to glower down on the plateau's sole pony occupant. Summer watched it over her shoulder as it rose over the tops of the helicon. A chill wind rustled her coat and feathers, causing her to fluff up her wings across her sides. It was hard to feel alone with the fearsome moon watching from the sky, intruding on Summer's sulking with it's disapproving glare. She stood and stretched her legs and wings, forcing her fluffed feathers back under control.

She flapped into the air and set off toward the coast.

She shot over the edge of the plateau, the cloudscape falling away below her to reveal the rolling farmland on the outskirts of Manehattan. Leaving the hippocrene, the light shifted to be dominated by silvery lunar light. Here, the evening winds were kind and cool and welcoming until she encountered the first gusts of sea breezes, salty and harsh and cold. Her coat fluffed in the frosty assault, especially around her chest and neck, but her well-conditioned feathers remained locked where she placed them. Soon, the stars faded from sight as the lights of the city came into view, burning into the darkness, rough and joyous and irreverent. She could already hear the bustle of city nightlife. She banked and descended toward the familiar skyline.

The outskirts of the city passed below her, then the bridges and the west river and she was over the city proper. She descended into the vast canyons of skyscrapers, awash in lights. She began passing other pegasi and slowed, flapping and banking around corners. Home – she could see it now. She slowed and descended, alighting on the roof of the highrise. She folded her wings against her body and caught her breath. At the roof access door she rotated out the combination with her hoof. Down three flights of stairs, an immediate right from the landing, and she repeated this with the door to her apartment.

"I'm home," she called, seeing the lights were still on.

"Hey," Gold Leaf called back.

Summer grabbed ten days’ worth of mail from her cubby by the door and carried it under-wing to the kitchen.

"Welcome back." Gold Leaf didn't turn around. She was leaning over a gadget on the kitchen table, her back to Summer.

"Thanks. Are there any cold ones?"

Gold Leaf stopped tinkering and looked up at the ceiling, thinking. After a moment she looked back down to her gadget. "Yeah, I think there are two left. Have one."

"Lovely." Summer opened the fridge with a wing and retrieved one of the two cold bottles of hard lemonade.

"Good work rotation?" Gold Leaf was again engrossed in her work on the small metal box on the table. Strewn out around it were bits of metal, wires, incomprehensible masses of gears and flanges, screws, tools, nightmarish cork-screw blades and rags covered in grease and vegetable pulp. Half a dozen tools were held suspended in the unicorn's magic. An easel beside the table held a large pad of paper with indecipherable scribbles and sketches, which Gold Leaf referenced with quick turns of the head every few seconds.

"Yeah, was alright," Summer breathed. "As good as could be expected. Now only barriers 84 and 102 are letting storm clouds through, and just small ones now, so…" she trailed off as she flipped through her mail. "Weather Command is starting to send the reservists home in small groups. Triple shifts should be over by sometime next week – if the Transportation Directorate ever stops freaking out."

"Mm." Gold Leaf nodded as she disassembled a gearing mount.

Summer set her mail and the bottle on the empty side of the table and sat down. She gripped the bottle with both hooves and levered the cap off with her teeth. She continued flipping through her mail with a wingtip: advert, advert, bill, catalogue, bill, magazine addressed to a former occupant, bill… and a large white envelope with silver bordering and the official wax seal of the Pegasus Tribe. Summer sighed and took a swig of the fortified lemonade. She flipped the pile of mail back on top of the ornate envelope.

"Euphony home?"

Gold Leaf took a moment as she tightened a screw and checked her scribbled diagram. She inhaled a loud, slow breath through her nose and released it as a sigh before speaking. "You know she hates it when you call her that, right?"

Summer looked at the ceiling and took another sip of her lemonade. "That's her name."

"Mm... not anymore. She, uh, had the final paperwork notarized yesterday. She is, legally, 'Silver Euphony' no longer." Gold Leaf looked up and caught Summer's eye. "You really should consider changing your name, Summer."

"You think?"

"I do. 'Cyclone' or 'Spiral' or something. Or... 'Aileron' – that's pretty. Better match to your cutie-mark. Don't see what a white spiral has to do with 'Summer'."

"And yours has to do with gold or leaves how?" She pointed to the hammer and yellow gear on the unicorn's flank.

"It's different for unicorns." Gold Leaf turned back to her gadget.

"Euphony – or whatever her stupid name-of-the-week is now – is a unicorn."

"Yeah, exactly. House Silver disowned her, so she disowned House Silver right back. That's how it works. House Gold still loves me... Except for how I'm always cavorting with plebs and outcasts like the two of you."

"Well," Summer shrugged. "Better cavorting than canoodling."

"Oh yes," Gold Leaf said in a haughty, nasal, high-born Canterlot lockjaw – far more exaggerated than the accent with which she normally spoke. "They'd certainly disown me if they found out I canoodled with riff-raff. That, and all the carousing and mafficking I get up to with the filthy hoi polloi of this mud-pony city. It would put them right off!" She lowered the gearing mount back into the casing until it clicked into place. "Quite."

"Okay," Summer stood up, washing her hooves of the conversation. "And with that, this riff-raff pleb is going to her room."

"Mm-hm. Oh," Gold Leaf continued in her normal voice. "By the way, no, she's not home yet. Just leave the last hard lemonade for her. She'll probably need it for hang-over relief whenever she does get back. Hair-of-the-dog."

"Affirmative. Goodnight." Summer held the open bottle against her body with one wing and her mail under the other.

"Goodnight." Gold Leaf waved a hoof in the air without again looking up from her work.

At the end of the hall, Summer's room was sparse and clean, with a vanity and a large nest of pillows pressed up against an enormous window. Being on the fiftieth floor, the view of the canyon between the tall towers stretched all the way to water, the lights of the ships making the harbour look like another borough in its own right. The clouds, viewed from below, were dull, silver and flat, their features and characters hidden. Summer closed the door and set her lemonade on the floor.

Off in the distance, dark storm clouds rumbled above the horizon. At the "front line", as most weather ponies were calling it, were the wild storms which the entire might of the Equestrian Weather Service could only just hold back.

She dropped the mail on her vanity and pulled out the ornate envelope with her teeth. She threw herself down into her pillow nest and tore the envelope open. The beginning of the first page of the packet was written in blood-red ink, the letters bold and capitalized for an entire paragraph before settling down to normal black lettering. She scanned the form-letter to the bottom of the page and flipped. Her eyes scanned and picked out the important information. She passed over an address a second time, and she mouthed it, committing it to memory. Another page of normal black text, formalities, threats of penalties and punishments if she neglected her duty to the Tribe and the Flock. She sighed and took a long swig of the lemonade.

Setting the bottle back down and sitting up straight, she took a deep breath, determined. She flipped the first three pages off the top of the stack and came face to face with a glossy headshot of a green-eyed pegasus stallion. He wasn't smiling. One wasn't allowed to smile for one's official file photo. He was handsome enough. Forest green coat, periwinkle mane, muscular neck and a strong jaw.

She flipped the photo over. The next page had a series of photos of the same stallion, full body pictures that showed off his physique and wings. She lifted the page to look at the full page of text below – scanned for his height and then went back to look at his full body pictures in context. Another swig from the bottle.

She flipped several more pages, passing dental records, academic achievements, lineage charts. The last page before the next file was a letter written by the stallion himself. She didn't read it and flipped it over to see the next glossy headshot. This stallion was charcoal grey with a white and blue mane. He was shorter than the first, but his wingspan was far more impressive. He'd had braces – did that mean bad teeth ran in his family?

She rolled over and pressed her face into a pillow to muffle her frustrated scream, bordering on a wail – loud enough to hear from the kitchen, but muffled enough to not disturb neighbours in the units above and below through the thick floors. She threw the pillow across the room and flopped down onto her belly, face buried in the soft nest. She tried not to breathe, then held her breath.

She waited for her roommate to come knocking at her bedroom door to ask her what was wrong. No knock came. She waited long enough to hear Gold Leaf's hooves clacking across the kitchen floor, the sounds of the autoclave opening, closing and whirring to life, and then the sound of her hooves walking back to the kitchen table.

Summer rolled over and sighed. She chugged the rest of the lemonade. Then she got up to turn out the light. On her way back to her nest she kicked the stack of papers, sending them flying around the room, half a dozen glossy head-shots and information packets and personalized letters fluttering to the floor. She didn't clean them up until morning.