Up Where the Air is Clear
When she was younger, Rainbow Dash had tried to fly to the moon a few times. Not the sun — it was too bright — but yes, all the way to the moon. The scientists had said it was impossible, but who were they to tell her what to do? She was Rainbow Dash! So one Friday night, a young Rainbow Dash had snuck out of her room, gone outside, looked at the moon, and simply started flying straight up. How hard could it be?
Unfortunately, as she kept climbing, the air got thinner. Her lungs started burning and there was less air to flap against. Even Rainbow Dash, even at that age, had known when to admit defeat. She went back home, vowing to try again later, and definitely do it that time. When her second, third, and fourth attempts had yielded the same results, Rainbow Dash was forced to concede that the eggheads were right for once.
But the feeling of it being hard to breathe, of it being hard to fly, had stuck with her. If she ever wanted to push herself without special equipment, all she had to do was fly straight up. In her youth, Rainbow Dash hadn’t even considered the idea. Why would she want something to be hard? Then she grew up, joined the Wonderbolts, and realized that high-altitude flying was a simple way to quickly deprive the body of just enough oxygen for easy endurance training.
It was just before 6 AM and Rainbow Dash was cruising at over sixteen thousand feet, as she had been for almost twenty minutes. Of course, “cruising” was a relative term; although she kept up a good, constant speed, each flap was an effort, each gasp of air a labor. But while it was hard, it was the good hard, the exertion that brought on a runner’s high, the feeling that you were working. The air she sucked down poked lightly at her throat and was just cold enough to keep her awake without being frigid. When coffee was unavailable, this was her caffeine. And if she’d made a mistake and flown so high that she was at risk of blacking out, she had a small tank of an emergency oxygen supply, just in case her vision started going wonky.
Birds almost never flew this high up, whatever sounds that managed to claw their way up from civilization below were drowned by the wind, and there wasn’t even much of a smell. Rainbow Dash was in that autopilot form of flying, where you don’t need to worry about anything as long as you keep your altitude right. With silence all around and flight not needing her attention at the moment, she focused on her heart. She felt it beating throughout her whole body, although it didn’t pound. Pounding implied a hard impact. This was the steady thrum of a locomotive’s pistons: a rhythmic beat that slid smoothly from peak to peak, full of effort and might without feeling strained. If she blotted out the winds, Rainbow Dash could almost feel the blood rushing through her veins, the vitality it carried that made her feel alive. It was powerful and heady, a bizarre mixture of wine and nectar and energy drinks. It didn’t always come, but whenever her wingbeats slowed, Rainbow Dash zeroed in on her memories of that feeling and picked herself back up again.
Glancing up for a moment, Rainbow Dash wondered if she should tell Twilight about the stars up here. With no clouds or light pollution, they were more… vivid, somehow. Sharper, cleaner, crisp dots instead of tiny smudges. There were even stars she couldn’t see below, dotting the sky in a vague belt. Then there were the colors, the blues and reds that had seemed to be plain white when seen down below. Rainbow Dash knew she was nowhere near the edge of the atmosphere, yet the expanse above her was so massive, so all-encompassing, so overbearing that she felt like she was at risk of falling up into space. It was a shame she only got that feeling this far up this far up. Rainbow Dash kept telling herself that one night, she’d fly up and just stargaze, and yet she rarely got around to it.
As she tilted into a long, wide turn, keeping her breathing measured and steady, Rainbow Dash switched her attention to her wings for the fifth time this session. Not on the flapping; that was trivial. Rainbow Dash focused on the feeling of the way the wind curled around them, how it grabbed at her feathers with ethereal fingers and broke like water over her patagium. She knew the air was thinner up here, and yet she couldn’t describe how the wind felt different. The closest she could come up with was the difference between oil and water, only with air and not as intense. In other words, it was barely a sufficient description at all. Rainbow Dash ground her teeth again, lacking sufficient air to groan, and beat her wings a little harder for a few moments.
To take her mind off of her utter uselessness at wordsmithing, Rainbow Dash looked down. Even her keen eyes could barely pick out the little clusters of lights that marked the villages scattered across Equestria’s countryside. As the towns grew further away, the sharp clusters dissolved into amorphous blobs. They were still shrouded in dwindling darkness; sunrise was a few minutes away for them. The horizon was positively huge at this height — over a hundred and fifty miles away, if she was remembering her tables correctly. To some extent, Rainbow Dash had always known she was small, yet whenever she was up this far, it was a bit of a shock to recognize certain buildings and landmarks, now so tiny, and see just how small she really was, especially in conjunction with the sky. Not that that was going to stop her. She wasn’t going to let a little thing like the vastness of the world crush her ego.
Hitting the end of her turn, Rainbow Dash leveled out, heading into the brightening sky of the east. It was technically cheating, but so what? Any pegasus could do it. All they had to do was fly up. Cloudsdale experienced it daily. There was nothing wrong with this.
Rainbow Dash flew on, and although it was nominally several minutes to sunrise below, the first edge of the sun slipped above the horizon and bathed her in golden light. She blinked once, twice against the sudden brilliance in her face as her eyes adjusted. After flying in darkness for so long, the sun’s rays were another shock to her system, jolting her to go just a little bit faster and harder.
The sun hadn’t risen for anypony else yet. Not for Twilight and the rest of her friends, not for Spitfire and the Wonderbolts, technically not even for Celestia and Luna. Over all that she could see, only the very crown of Canter Mount was illuminated by natural light; the city itself still glowed from lamps and magic. Every inch of land lower than it was still waiting for the sun to appear.
Up in the sky, the edges of the highest clouds glowed a pale gold as they caught the sun’s rays and were thrown into sharp relief against the shadowed ground. Rainbow Dash breathed deeply. The thin air wasn’t any different from what it had been a minute ago, but being bathed in daylight in spite of the night below, being the only pony in Equestria bathed in daylight, was one of those intangibles that rejuvenated her, just a little.
And so Rainbow Dash flew on through the liminal dawn, beating her wings against what little air there was as the sun rose just for her.
