Featherflit's Narrow Escape

There it was. Almost black against a flawless blue sky, Mount Aris loomed tall and forbidding before her. But Featherflit’s heart sang within her and gave her wings fresh strength. She was exhausted, near collapse, but she beat faster, and a breeze seemed to spring up from nowhere to help speed her home.

Mount Aris grew to fill her vision and she looped down to meet it, happy to slide through the mountain’s rising thermals on outstretched wings and let them do most of the work for her. She ran a gentle thumb over the scaly rind of her precious pink cargo. She had achieved the impossible. Featherflit the artist, returning triumphant from an adventure nopony else had ever experienced, that even Queen Novo’s own elite guard would have struggled with.

She circled the curtain wall as she descended, her eyes drinking in all the details of home. There were the familiar streets, the gardens and parks, and beyond the city, Harmonizing Heights, where she had once painted a particularly fantastic sunset. But most importantly of all, there was her own beloved leafy roof. The huge tree spread its arching branches, glass cleverly fitted into the glass between them to create the light-filled rooms she so loved. There waited her paintings, hanging neatly in the gallery for buyers to browse. There waited her home and the soft embrace of her own bed, splattered with oil paint and chalk, but hers nonetheless. And there waited her inner sanctum, her sacred place — the studio where her paintings were conceived and birthed.

Now that she was closer she could see that there were far more hippogriffs than usual out and about, many of them clutching bundles of belongings. A few of them looked up called out to her, but Featherflit wasted no thought on it. There was time enough to catch up with friends later, after her painting was complete. And maybe after she had a nap, too — her limbs were leaden and she felt ready to drop.

She coasted in close to her tree and backwinged hard to slow herself enough to land. She touched down lightly in front of the door to her gallery, and with eager claws retrieved the key from its hidden spot under the grey rock in a nearby bush. She pushed the door open and shut her eyes for a moment as she breathed in that familiar smell of old canvas and the tang of oil paint, and a peaceful smile spread across her beak.

Everything was somewhat cleaner and neater than she remembered — possibly her father had taken advantage of her absence to break into her home and do a little spring cleaning. Featherflit smiled a little at the thought. She padded wearily through the wide gallery and headed for the stairs hidden behind the little curtain at the back of the room. Pushing it aside, she headed upstairs, passed the first floor by. She could rest and eat later; for now, she needed to get this paint made, before the dragonfruit lost any more of its freshness. It was already nearly three days since it had been plucked.
She elbowed the door to her studio aside, her claws still curled carefully around her prize, and entered her favourite place in the universe. It was just as she had left it; thank the stars that her father’s cleaning frenzy had not penetrated this far. There were all her beloved brushes, lying in piles scattered across the room, just as she had left them. The paint-spattered floor, the half-finished canvasses leaning against every available wall and surface, the wide windows streaming with afternoon sun, shelf after shelf of her own special paint mixes. And there in the centre of the room, illuminated on every side by the sunbeams flooding through the windows, was her masterpiece. It stood twice as tall as Featherflit on her hind legs, and three times as wide. Featherflit’s heart welled with emotion as she saw it. She grew excited about many of the paintings she worked on, but she really did feel that this view of the sun rising above the sea was something special. The ocean itself was almost finished, flooded with orange light and reflecting all sorts of dizzying refractions of light, just as Featherflit had seen. There were roughly blocked-out clouds waiting for their final details, and the top of the sky was ready too, tinged with purple and red. But closer to the surface of the water the sky was a pale and hesitant orange, marred with a few splotches of substandard pink — this one too red, that one to peach. Featherflit beamed. Her painting had waited so patiently for this moment.

Rummaging through her shelves and piles, she dug out a mixing bowl, her battered pestle and mortar, and a large flat cockle shell almost covered with a solid coating of dried paint. Humming to herself, Featherflit settled down to her work. She peeled the fruit, and carefully placed each green-tipped piece of pink rind into the mortar. She cradled the dripping flesh of the fruit in one claw and pulled the bowl closer with the other. She sniffed curiously at the dragonfruit. It smelled sweet, and unable to resist, she shrugged and allowed herself a small nibble of the moist flesh — absolutely delicious — before dropping it into the bowl. She put it to one side and began to grind the pink rind into paste. Finally, she mashed the flesh, mixed the resulting juice into the paste, and voila! All was ready. Carefully, slowly, she poured the thick mixture into the clam shell that served as a palette, and at last turned eagerly towards the canvas. She dipped her brush into that exquisitely pink paint, and held it ready over the marigold sky. She was just lowering her brush for that wonderful first stroke —

When the door to her studio slammed open and a frightened light-green hippogriff burst into the room, all ruffled feathers and wide white eyes with pinprick pulils. “Featherflit, Featherflit, thank the stars you’re alive! We all thought you were dead, we all thought he’d gotten you—”

Featherflit just barely managed to protect her precious clam shell of paint as her sister cannoned into her, tears streaming down her beak. “Woah, Flylight! Watch the shell, watch the shell!”

Flylight flung her arms around her, squeezing Featherflit until her eyes bulged and she squawked in protest. Her sister finally stopped, panting, and looked her in the face. “Where have you been? You’ve been gone for almost a month!”

“I told you I was going to the earth dragon islands,” Featherflit said defensively, trying to disentangle herself. “You knew I’d be away a while.”

“Yes, but there’s been so much happening since then,” Flylight sniffed. She clung to Featherflit’s arm with both foreclaws, as small and frightened as when they were chicks in the family nest. “There’s someone coming — to take our magic, to enslave us—”

Featherflit looked at her sister properly for the first time. ”What?”

“— the Cloud King — the Storm King — something like that — I don’t know, Featherflit, but we’re all meant to be evacuating! I waited as long as I could, tomorrow is the last day — I didn’t know if you were going to be back in time, and I was so scared for you!” Flylight’s voice climbed higher and higher, her words coming almost hysterically fast.

Featherflit hesitantly set her paint down and tried to think. Her mind was whirling. “Evacuating? Where are we going?” She cast around her, trying to calculate how long it would take her to gather her paints and roll up her favourite works. She found a bag in a pile of paint cans below one of the windows and started scooping brushes into it, but Flylight tugged at her pinion with desperate claws.

“There’s no time, Featherflit. We have to go now. We flooded the catacombs — Queen Novo is going to use the Pearl on everypony. We’re going underwater.”

Featherflit’s brushes dropped from her claws and she turned to stare at her sister. “Underwater?” she asked. “What do you mean underwater?” She let herself be tugged by Flylight to the door of the studio.

“I mean underwater!” Flylight half-sobbed. “Mum and Dad have gone already, you know! They wanted me to come too, they said the Queen would leave some guards out to let stragglers know what had happened, but I couldn’t bear to leave you, I couldn’t bear—”

Featherflit turned to look over her shoulder at her beautiful half-finished sunrise, the dragonfruit paint lying half-spilled on the floor where a stray hoof had over turned the clam shell, and her throat felt tight. “—But I—”

“—We have to go, Featherflit!”

Flylight hustled her down the stairs and out of the door. Featherflit looked up at the sky, beautiful as always. Cerulean and aqua blue today. Tears pricked at her eyes. To go underwater? Away from her beautiful sky, away from her paintings and her studio? Her chest constricted as that sank in. Not only would she lose the sight of the sky and the joy of her beautiful sunshine filled studio, she would lose her art altogether. How could she paint underwater?

She looked back over her shoulder at that friendly old aspen tree, at its sky-blue shutters and door. “Flylight, wait, I—”

“—There’s no time,” her sister said, dragging her by the claw after the stream of hippogriffs hurrying towards the castle. “There’s no time, we’re almost too late as it is.”

Helpless and numb, Featherflit let herself be towed. As the doors of the castle gaped to receive them, she turned for one last look at the blue firmament, her oldest and most beloved friend, and then followed her sister into the darkness.