The Witch and the Warrior
Cloudkicker was struggling with acupuncture. She was struggling so much that she hadn’t used any needles, beds, or even other ponies. She remained firmly in the theoretical book-reading stage, with a side of coffee and cookies on a plate next to her.
Even the theoretical stage – which in theory was the easy bit – still made her burn and sweat, because all she had to understand the universe with was Cloudkicker, and she wasn’t sure the tool was built for the job. Rather like trying to crack a walnut with a receipt for the hammer she’d sold to buy the nut in the first place.
Like a lot of Cloudkicker’s profound fads, acupuncture had seemed like a good idea at the time. It sounded witchy. Well, everyone knew witches stuck pins in ponies, at least. Probably not to cure them, but so long as it was generally witchy… well, not black-as-midnight witchy, not as such, but occult enough to count. Definitely your genuine mystical, what with the flowing chi and pinpoint meridians and stuff. Practically magic.
Trouble was: she was still stuck reading about it. Cloudkicker almost always got stuck at the reading stage. For one thing, she wanted to get the meridians of the pony body positioned exactly right before she could cause any nasty accidents. So far, no two books had agreed on where they were.
Other trouble was: a little Cloudkicker at the back of her mind kept telling her it was all a load of horse apples. She wiped her brow and tried very hard to ignore it. After all, the books on acupuncture were very clear on the fact that it worked.
So were the books on astrology. And dowsing rods. And parapsychic card-guess testing with clever teenage horses.
Cloudkicker blew between her lips. She sort of hated but sort of appreciated the Little Cloudkicker in her head, She Who Liked To Kick Back Against Ideas To Test Them. It’d just be nice if the Little Cloudkicker would wait for her to learn said ideas first.
A few yards ahead and a half-yard down – Cloudkicker lounged on a private cumulus cloud, close to the grass – several fillies gambolled and giggled in the traditional rough-and-tumble play of the pegasus pony. The fact that they were doing it on the ground because two out of every three were only “honorary” pegasi was just a quibble.
Nominally, Cloudkicker was babysitting them. Only, she was the sort of pony who tried to read and live her life at the same time. Rumour had it she’d passed her Flight Camp exam with her nose glued to the Cloudsdale Guidebook. She’d only stopped making a habit of reading at the breakfast table after the unfortunate incident of Buttered Dictionary Day.
Nearby, her little sister Alula screamed her head off. The little monster couldn’t actually thump anyone, so she was making hundreds of decibels do the work of punches and kicks. She’d probably be a drill sergeant when she grew up.
By the sound of the mud squelching and the occasional shriek of pleasure, they were playing Hit The Soccer Ball And Do Tackles A Cloudsdale Pro-Wing Wrestler Would Be Proud Of.
Cloudkicker glanced over the top of her book for a couple of minutes. Judging by this sample size, Alula was nought-for-nought on basic piled-up-leaves goal-scoring, but several million points ahead on fouls.
Hence Cloudkicker’s grimace. She didn’t like rough-and-tumble. Whenever she saw her sister tackle and noogie one of the others, she winced.
Then before they could spot her, she hastily went back to memorizing chakras… or was it ley lines… no, that was geography, not pony biology… or was she mixing that up with jet streams…?
Then the book whacked her muzzle. It did this because Alula’s ball had whacked its spine first.
The ball bounced back. Irritably, Cloudkicker rubbed her own nose. Listening to children at play was fine, so long as you were out of ballistic range.
“Kicks!” shouted Alula, unapologetically. “Throw me the ball! Throw me the ball!”
“Alula…” said Cloudkicker, sternly. It was no good. She knew it was no good, because it was Alula.
“Throw me the baaaaaaaallllllll!”
“What do you say?”
“Noooowwww!” moaned Alula. She always got upset when ponies tried to make her put on civilization.
Her unicorn friend Dinky, who would often gladly put on civilization on other ponies’ behalf, hurried over and picked up the ball, bowing her head profusely.
“Sorry, Miss Kicker,” she mumbled. “We didn’t mean to disturb you. Are you OK?”
“Hm, what?” Cloudkicker shook her own face back into position. “Er, yes. Fine, fine. No lasting damage.”
Dinky gave a bow that was almost a kowtow. It was so gratifyingly refreshing a sight that someone could easily forget she’d done nothing wrong in the first place.
“DINKY!” shrieked Alula, who was already running into position. “THROW THE BALL! THROW IIIIIT!”
“Mmm, better do what she says,” murmured Cloudkicker, “before she explodes.”
“Thank you, Miss Kicker. Coming, Alula!” One kick and gallop later, the fillies were out of Cloudkicker’s immediate life once more, though not out of sight, hearing range, or future nose-banging opportunities.
Despite the throbbing nostrils, Cloudkicker settled back into a kind of peace. After all, the sky was shining, the sun clear and cool, the trees sang, birds grew towards the sun and all that…
She heard distant voices shout: “What were you doing over there?” That was Alula, or at least her idea of a covert conversation.
Dinky’s voice: “Oh, just making sure the book didn’t accidentally hurt your sister.”
“Puh, I barely touched her. Some pegasus. Can’t even shrug off a little papercut. Cotton Cloudy, pass the ball! Pass the BAAAALLLLLL!”
Another thoughtless comment, on a long list of lifetime comments. Cloudkicker had long since gotten used to them. At least when her little sister blurted them out, she had an excuse. She was a kid. She didn’t know any better, despite Dinky’s frequent efforts to show her an example of what knowing any better looked like.
Occasionally glancing up at the shrieking fillies – mostly because of worried duty’s prodding – Cloudkicker otherwise skimmed the pages. Looking for magic.
Young Cloudkicker hadn’t started out looking for magic. A meal would’ve been nice, though.
She shivered in the cupboard. It was made of ice. Pegasus ponies could walk through clouds, and through walls made of cloud, which was what their homes were invariably made out of. And so her parents had made this cupboard specifically of ice, so she couldn’t do that little trick. So she stood and shivered.
She’d stopped crying out at the door years ago. It never made a difference, and it gave her a sore throat. Instead, she waited patiently. She wished she had a clock in here with her so she could tell when her hour was up.
One hour for talking back, two hours for arguing, three the instant she shouted or screamed. At least she was getting better these days. These days, they hardly put her in here at all.
Still, her tummy rumbled. Roast alfalfa with cloud cabbage soup was never her favourite dinner, but it filled her up and she liked the idea of being filled up. She also liked the idea that this time, if she was good, she’d get second helpings and a chocolate oat ice cream. More importantly, if she was good, she didn’t get the cupboard.
Someone knocked on the door. Her mother’s voice asked, “Are we ready to behave ourselves now, Cloudkicker?”
Although he didn’t speak, Cloudkicker’s father would be there listening. He listened like Cloudkicker herself screamed: with great intensity.
“I only wanted –” Cloudkicker began, loudly.
“I said, are we ready to behave ourselves now, Cloudkicker?”
Cloudkicker swallowed. She’d nearly earned herself an extra two hours. That was Bad. What was she thinking!?
“Yeah, Mom!” she shouted. The voices always sounded muffled through the door.
“Cloudkicker, what have we told you about shouting when you’re not supposed to?”
Holding her breath, Cloudkicker willed her memory back into place. Why did she still feel like arguing? She knew it didn’t work. There was no sense to it.
In more reasonable tones, she said, “Yes, Mother.”
“That’s better. Out you come, then.”
One of the good things about ice was the brightness. Stepping out into the kitchen didn’t need all that squinting and wincing nonsense. Besides, pegasi were tough! They didn’t give in to anything! Yeah!
Her mother and father peered down at her. She could’ve sworn she’d gone through a growth spurt lately, but her parents always seemed too tall.
“Now,” rumbled her father, while Mother blinked slowly and coldly, “what have we learned about being good?”
Cloudkicker held the stare a little too long. She remembered herself and looked away. Direct eye contact was all right so long as she did it to someone else. It showed she was a tough pegasus.
Glacially, she marshalled her memory back. “Don’t go off with bad ponies.”
“Good girl.”
But a bit of Cloudkicker insisted: What’s so bad about Derpy? She’s always so friendly. And Fluttershy’s OK. At least she never teases me about my face.
Something must have shown on her face, because her father’s darkened. Cloudkicker suddenly realized she’d been staring at him and hid her gaze around her hooves instead.
“Cloudkicker,” her father sighed, in a voice that instantly made her brains go light and her heart grow heavy, “why do you make us do this to you all the time?”
She nearly gasped. She hadn’t even realized she’d been doing it again.
“I just wanted to hang out with –”
“No lies, please,” said her father gently, and horror crept up and grabbed her. She hadn’t even realized! “You always want to act like you know better, but you’re too young to understand. After all your mother and I have done for you, this is how you repay us? By defying us? By throwing our hard work back in our faces?”
Cloudkicker’s mind reared and screamed. She could’ve sworn it hadn’t been like that – hadn’t Derpy asked… something? – but there it was, plain as the muzzle on her face: something deep down wanted to hurt Mom and Dad. It was there, it was Bad, it was because –
“And now we will have our family time together, like we should,” said her mother, in her best now-that’s-all-settled voice.
There! Cloudkicker’s heart felt as though something had kicked it. She was screaming in her own head. After all, family was a good thing. Everyone said so – at Flight Camp, at home, around Cloudsdale. She’d wanted to run off and do something else with other ponies. How could she?
I hate family time! But that was Bad Cloudkicker talking. At least these days, she was getting smaller and smaller. Cloudkicker felt oddly proud about that.
Family time mostly involved her parents talking about incomprehensible things while she sat there wondering what to do. They didn’t seem to want her to do anything, though. Dimly, she remembered trying to leave family time years before, and had been sternly told to stay where she was. She still fidgeted, but quietly, in case they heard her.
Eventually, her mother told her she could go up to bed, and no sneaking out at night to run around like a feral foal, or they’d know.
In her room, Cloudkicker stared at a soccer ball in the corner. She used to play it once, long ago, until she was a bad pony and had it confined to her room. Although… she couldn’t remember what she’d done that was so bad. Derpy had been involved somewhere, and some other classmates. Maybe she’d kicked the ball through a window? Or hadn’t come when she’d been called? For some reason, memories broke up and tumbled together in her head. She was so stupid.
For a few days, she’d tried bouncing the ball against the bedroom wall – the ball had been specially enchanted so it wouldn’t go through clouds – but the noise had earned her a lecture and a three-day loss of dinnertime privileges.
If this was being a good girl, then why wasn’t she happier? She just seemed blank. Well, apart from the screaming Bad Cloudkicker in her head, but hopefully she’d shut up soon.
Sharpness struck her face. It suddenly felt funny.
After a while, for no reason she could understand other than it helped her feel better, she started quietly banging her head against a wall.
Meanwhile in the summer-kissed park of the present day, Alula was – unsurprisingly – having a heartfelt discussion with her archnemesis.
“Nothing wrong with the way we’re doing it,” she barked.
“No, not wrong, per se,” said Dinky placatingly. “I never said there was anything wrong with it.”
“Then what’s all the fuss about?”
Dinky smiled, as only she could when she knew darn well she’d already explained all the “fuss” repeatedly and some time ago. True to form, she resisted the urge to tilt her head and see if she could spot daylight coming through Alula’s ears.
“I was thinking we could do it different,” she explained. “You know, like play eleven to a team, with proper – I mean, with more organized goals, and somepony keeping score for us.”
“Why?”
“Because that’s how soccer is normally played, you see.”
The other foals crowded around, some red in the face. Running around kicking a soccer ball was all well and good, but for halftime entertainment a “discussion” (Dinky’s word) and a “load of rubbish nonsense stuff” (Alula’s words) just couldn’t be beat.
“Well, my way’s better,” said Alula, in the miffed tones of one determined to prove it to themselves.
In the crowd, Pipsqueak raised a hoof. “Please, Miss…”
“We’re not in class, Pipsqueak,” said Dinky gently. “You don’t have to use honorifics.”
Some of the foals gave her suspicious looks. She realized with embarrassment she was letting her intelligence show. Again.
“I mean you don’t have to talk like that,” she translated. Most of the suspicious looks drifted off like warded spirits.
“Please, M– Alula,” corrected Pipsqueak. “She’s got a point, M– Alula. When I was in Trottingham, M– Alula, all the colts used to pick teams.”
This earned mumbling approval from the others. If anyone knew how to play the manly sport of soccer, it was a born-and-bred Trottinghamite, even if it was squeaky little Pipsqueak who had to skip and jump just to reach everyone else’s eye level.
“There’s nothing wrong with the way we’ve been doing it!” announced Alula, someone to whom public speaking came naturally – the trick was stopping her from doing it in private. “It’s easierwhen it’s just you against everyone else. Then you don’t have to remember stupid stuff like who’s on your side and all that, so you can foul everypony. It’s purer,” she added, realizing too late that “easier” sent the wrong impression.
“Yeah? Well, I’d like a challenge,” piped up Rumble, a colt who in many ways was of Alula’s breed, and not just because he too was a pegasus with wings. “How about two teams? Me versus all of you.”
Alula bristled. “What, why?”
“So that way, it’s fair.”
Jeers and laughter batted him down.
“Oh no,” snapped Alula, thoroughly enjoying herself. “If we’re talking fair, I reckon it should be all of you versus me. And that’s when you can get some grown-ups to help you.”
“Yeah, right,” scoffed Rumble. “Like you could beat a grown-up.”
“I can! I beat Kicks all the time.”
“Yeah, right. She lets you win. I bet you anything.”
“You mean like your brother lets you win.”
“No, he doesn’t!” Rumble’s voice was shrill with the certainty, chief among them that he didn’t deserve all the giggles he was getting. “I let him lose!”
Like a council spokespony who could happily wait through the entire council session if necessary, Dinky patiently let the giggles have their say and then cleared her throat. “And the important thing about teams –”
“Now hold on, who said anything about teams?” Alula jumped back into attack mode.
“– is which ponies are going to be the captains.”
Alula opened her mouth. Thought dropped on top of the crowd of foals. Alula shut her mouth.
“Captains?” she said suspiciously.
Politeness itself, Dinky nodded, the better to encourage her enemy’s ego. “Uh huh. They get to be in charge.”
“I CALL DIBS!” In some narrow respects, Rumble was a very fast thinker.
“Oh no, you don’t!” shrieked Alula, ever the runner-up. “I call dibs, and anyway it’s my soccer ball.”
“Well, I called dibs first!”
“Well, I did it properly!”
“What do you mean ‘properly’!? You can’t call dibs ‘properly’!”
“That’s all you know, and that’s why I’d make a better captain than you!”
Dinky beamed, both at the prospect of helping friends and at the superior knowledge that only Alula and Rumble would fight over something they could both do anyway. “So that’s settled then. Alula and Rumble are team captains.”
Among the crowd, a few disappointed groans tried not to be heard.
“Who are you going to pick, captains?” Dinky added, keen to steer them to the next hurdle before they could object over the last one.
“Me first!” yelled Alula. “I get to pick first!”
Rumble opened his mouth to protest, but Dinky was quicker: “That’s fair, since Rumble called dibs first beforehand, you should get the first pick, Alula.”
For a moment, Alula glowered in readiness for another argument, but Dinky simply gestured to the other foals in a way that not even the most well-rehearsed royal vizier could manage. It definitely impressed the Queen.
Now it was Alula’s show. She rubbed her hooves with glee. This was what it was all about. Arguing and letting ponies like Dinky give her some support was all well and good, but this was leadership.
“All right, then,” she said. “Everypony stand in a line. Fat kids at the end, please, where I can see you.”
“Aw, man…” groaned Snips.
Picking teams proved harder than they’d thought. The good news was that, captains included, they had twenty-two foals, which divided neatly into two teams of eleven. The bad news was…
“Er…” she said.
“Choose fairly,” advised Dinky, so sweetly it was lovely poison.
For once, Alula and Rumble found themselves sharing a look of fellow feeling. It would have been nice if it had been a good feeling.
The others watched them nervously, trying to work out their sociopolitical school playground rankings.
“Fair, fair, fair…” muttered Alula to herself.
A quick headcount produced eight pegasi, six unicorns, and eight earth ponies, but six colts and sixteen fillies. The fair way was to split them in half and have each team be evenly matched, except Snips and Snails – the only two unicorn colts – didn’t want to separate, the earth ponies all wanted to stick together, Lemon Daze – an earth filly – burst into tears because no one counted her as a pegasus, Rumble and Scootaloo got into an argument over whether flying skills mattered to the definition of “pegasus”, and both captains refused to play if Lickety Split wasn’t on their team.
“I don’t mind swapping halfway,” said Lickety Split, spinning a ball of his own on his nose.
“Yes, but who with?” cried Alula in despair. “No one else is as good as you, apart from me!”
“And me,” muttered Rumble.
“That’s right, and team captains can’t swap teams!” Alula glanced at Dinky’s direction when she said this, and the answering nod was imperceptible to anyone who wasn’t expecting it.
“OK,” said Lickety Split reasonably, “then I can’t play.”
“But that messes up the teams!” cried Rumble. “You can’t mess up the teams, man! That’s… that’s messed up!”
Snips boldly stepped forwards. “Ladies, ladies, I get the hint. I’ll take one for the team and swap with Lickety too.”
A lot of gazes either bored into his or quickly ran away.
“That would be a fair solution,” said Dinky with a straight face. “The talent evens out, then.”
A lot of gazes relaxed, and their owners agreed, several in desperation. Snips swelled with pride, which was quite impressive given his starting point.
Alula leaned over to Dinky. “Evens out?” she whispered. “You mean between them, you’d get one average player?”
All Dinky did was hum to herself and admire the sky, because what a pretty summer sky it was, wasn’t it?
They did get the teams sorted eventually, though the selection process offered quite a nice view of how Alula and Rumble’s minds worked. Pegasi and particularly strong earth ponies got selected early on – Lickety Split being Alula’s first pick, with Scootaloo being Rumble’s – then unremarkable unicorns like Sweetie Belle and Sun Glimmer, then either unimpressive earth ponies – Pipsqueak hoorayed a little too enthusiastically for someone picked so close to last – or any pony who seemed dangerously intelligent – Twist ended up low on the list simply for wearing glasses and being a known question-answerer in class, signs that, in a simple village in another time, might have marked her down as a witch in need of a quick dip and later a front-row seat to a bonfire.
Dinky was rather miffed to be among the last four. Her companions included Snips – who kept kissing what in theory were his muscles – Twist – who looked like she was waiting for her appointment with the executioner – and Snails – who was either trying to achieve enlightenment or training to be a table, and had to be called twice just to get him to snap out of it.
“Wuh-what?” he said, blinking.
“Teams!” declared Alula.
“Oh. Right. Good idea.”
A while later, Alula shrieked, “SNAILS!”
“Hm, what?”
“You’re on MY team!”
“I am? Oh, good. Thanks.”
Another while later, Alula yelled, “SO GET OVER HERE ALREADY!”
Dinky waved a hoof in front of him, then shook her head. “I think that’s the best we’re gonna get.”
“He’s in goal,” said Alula at once. “Out of the way.”
After Rumble gave in and took Twist, Dinky was picked last for Alula’s team. She wondered if she was being punished for something, though not half as much as Rumble when he groaned and had to admit that, as the only remaining player, Snips had to be on his team, even though Rumble clearly would’ve preferred the empty air next to him.
“But, but I wanted to be on Snails’ –” Snips began. Alula’s flamethrower glare instantly provided a terminal solution to his complaint, for which he was suddenly and urgently grateful.
As everyone else set up the “proper” goals and discussed tactics (along the lines of “Kick ’em where it won’t leave a mark and pretend you thought they were the ball”), Alula briefly glanced up at the distant figure of her sister. Still reading on her cloud. Even when Alula watched for a while, Cloudkicker didn’t look up.
She snorted. Reading! What was so great about reading? If anything was as un-pegasus as it was possible to get, it was reading. Trying to be smart.
Then she corrected herself. Being smart was OK. In war, pegasus tactics had demanded pegasus smartness. But being intelligent – that was the word! – was something else entirely. It was, well, going around wearing glasses at ponies and babbling. It was Bad. Worse than Bad. It was downright Uncool.
Guiltily, she glanced at Dinky. Well, OK, intelligent stuff wasn’t too bad for some ponies, maybe. It definitely wasn’t her, though. It wasn’t Alula. Anyway, it was kind of dumb, when you thought about it.
Then someone yelled out, and Alula stopped thinking and started doing. She knew where she was, doing things.
That evening, Cloudkicker and Alula flew home. Not to Cloudsdale.
Theirs was a little way out of town, on the other side of Whitetail Wood. The place was a small hamlet called Squelch, said to be one of the most boring places in Equestria outside of a pencil factory. (This was true: some ponies appreciated the need for carefully placed territorial markers on crisis meeting maps, but few ponies appreciated the Vanhoover HB as a weapon of war, said to be lethally accurate at ten paces if wielded correctly).
Squelch wasn’t lethal at ten paces, though it could be a cure for insomnia after ten hours. It largely sat there and was rained upon. The very ponies who lived there had a permanent “rained-on” look, as though their very souls were being hopelessly drenched.
It wasn’t big, and it wasn’t wealthy, and often it wasn’t even on the map. The only reason its existence would be noticed by anyone – this included the ponies who lived there – was because it had by some incredible fluke been the birthplace of the greatest playwright of all time.
Everyone had known him and still remembered him as the Great Bard, which was more a title than something his parents had actually put on a birth certificate. Back in the early years of Celestia and Luna’s reigns, he’d been unusual for writing plays dedicated to both, at a time when writing to Celestia alone – being senior – was custom. Luna, after all, tended to get his references. Everyone loved and quoted the big “What a piece of work is pony” speech – largely to note how weird it sounded in parts – but only Luna had realized the rolling list of praises was, in fact, total snark.
Even then, the Great Bard had left for Canterlot before he could do any literary damage. He’d learned, lived, and presumably loved a long way away from Squelch. He’d certainly thrown in plenty of snark at Squelch’s expense, too, though only he had ever laughed at that. Snark rolled off Squelch’s back like custard off a dead duck.
There was at least a small tourism industry for fans and admirers of the Great Bard, but that largely consisted of a guided tour for the cottage he’d been born in, which he’d also left in a hurry. It wasn’t a thriving industry. It was just something that stopped Squelch from sinking completely into the mud of history.
Alula hated the place. For her, its biggest crime was that it wasn’t Cloudsdale.
Cloudkicker loved the place. For her, its one redeeming feature was that it wasn’t Cloudsdale at all. In fact, it was as un-Cloudsdale as it was possible to be.
A good place to be a witch.
Cloudkicker’s bedroom wasn’t merely untidy. “Untidy” suggested she could still sleep in it.
What Cloudkicker’s bedroom had was everything a witch wanted, and nothing she really needed:
A cauldron, empty. The ceiling burned brown directly above it. The floor had ash on it; Cloudkicker had only tried lighting the thing once, and thankfully Alula had learned survival training and quickly found a raincloud to put it out.
A cat bowl. The cat had run away three days after she’d bought it. She’d never liked it, anyway: witches, she knew, didn’t have small ratty things that went cross-eyed before clawing anyone within spitting range.
A broomstick. Although that was purely for show.
A big book of spells. Actually, there were a lot of books in Cloudkicker’s room, great towers and plains and canyons of books, most of which were covered in dust and plates full of rotten fruit. She had a lectern for any particular book she wanted to read. Currently, it served as home for an antique astrolabe she couldn’t figure out, and which was rusted stiff in any case.
A crystal ball. Cracked, after she’d tried helpfully to make it float in an ominous way.
A circle chalked into the floor for summoning demons. So far, all it had summoned was an extra cleaning bill that was wasted, chiefly because the cleaner never turned up.
A horseshoe on the back of her door. This was the third one because the others had somehow rusted to pieces within months, one after the nails melted. In theory, a horseshoe on the door kept bad influences at bay, but it didn’t work because Alula kept stealing it. Mostly, Cloudkicker herself used it against Raindrops in the monthly shoe-toss.
A pair of pony skulls under a large mirror. Fake, of course. The skulls were made of whitewashed wood – Alula’s proud arts and crafts project, and Cloudkicker had felt generous enough to keep them – and the mirror was made of cheap tin foil stretched behind a sheet of pegasus-made ice. If she squinted, she could just about tell what colour she was.
A window. The glass had never been cleaned. Alula’s soccer skills were the reason it looked like a white cobweb.
A desk, somewhere under all the books. It rocked in high winds, even with the window shut.
A bed. She’d have to take that on trust, though, for the same reason as the desk.
A lamp. It didn’t work. The fireflies had escaped long ago.
A bunch of stuff, buried. Even Cloudkicker didn’t ask.
Rather understandably, Cloudkicker never slept in the bedroom. She just liked having one to call her own, though based on how it was used she had to call it a storage closet. Instead, she slept on a sofa downstairs. Derpy once recommended sleeping on a soft cloud outdoors, but that was in Ponyville, this was Squelch, and Cloudkicker preferred not to drown in her sleep.
Since she couldn’t live in Cloudsdale, Cloudkicker could instead have lived in Ponyville, Most of her friends did. All the same, it didn’t feel right, all those ponies crammed together in bright green spaces. Nice enough town to visit, but she didn’t want to live there.
At the end of the day, she came back to a quiet, boring, near-empty, unremarkable, and wonderfully unambitious corner of the world where the patter of the rain was the only thing that reminded her of her old home. Reminded her of one of the few nice things about it. Cloudkicker never got to sleep without the patter of rain.
Cloudkicker was there the day her childhood home was destroyed.
She had to be. She helped arrange it.
But the end had started before then. There were a lot of places it had started, technically, but it had really started when she’d moved out.
Shortly after leaving the courtroom, and shortly after she’d packed her things, taken a tiny sleeping Alula from her cot, and flown out of Cloudsdale, one confusing life stopped and a newer one started in Squelch. It involved lots of unpacking, list-checking, list-finding, list-checking-again, list-turning-the-right-way-round, and then stopping to figure out why Alula kept crying so much.
Later, Cloudkicker had opened her new cottage’s front door – Alula gurgling somewhere among the luggage – and found the Mayor of Cloudsdale herself on approach.
There must have been dozens of tasks the Mayor had in bulk, in paperwork, with which to occupy her time, but that was just it: time. Times. Times were changing in the cloud city. The Mayor had looked to neighbouring Ponyville (an earth pony settlement, so she’d had to look down) and seen the more down-to-earth approach of their mayor, mingling with her friends and other folk. Pegasus culture – so some felt – was losing its way. Hence she’d come out here, even though it took her technically outside her jurisdictional boundary, to settle the matter herself.
“Er, y-yes?” said Cloudkicker, frantically trying to remember the Mayor’s name. Hadn’t she served as the judge, or something?
Soft-spoken – the silent power of a gradual glacier rather than of flash thunder and bang lightning – the Mayor answered, “Good afternoon. I trust you are settling in comfortably?”
“Er, yes, yes. Thank you.”
“Excellent. I think it behooves us all to see this matter satisfactorily closed, so that we may properly start anew.”
“Uh huh…?”
“To that end, I am pleased to inform you that your parents have recently vacated your former home and relocated to a distant part of Cloudsdale.”
Cloudkicker waggled the front door instead of getting flustered. It didn’t seem to be helping much. The news picked like a scab at an old flesh wound on her soul. To say nothing of what her parents moving out had to do with anything.
“Fine, fine, fine,” she hazarded.
The Mayor’s eyebrow didn’t rise, but a genteel aura around her stoic face definitely suggested the elevation of eyebrowosity. “Perhaps we could persuade you to… return home? Now that the way is cleared?”
Then Cloudkicker shuddered. She realized what was being asked of her. Restraining order or no, the idea of going back…
“I am home,” she said stiffly, “thank you all the same. Sorry.”
Somewhere in the luggage, a little voice started whining, a noise which didn’t yet trigger traumatic flashbacks of pacifiers and diapers: Cloudkicker had only recently turned of age, after all. Lack of experience.
The Mayor took it a lot better than expected. She bowed as though she’d expected nothing less.
“I understand,” she said, smoother than white chocolate and cooler than chilled velvet. “Whatever is best for you both. I personally wanted you to know that the option was available, and that you have friends in Cloudsdale. Thank you for your time, Miss Cloudkicker.”
During the short speech, Cloudkicker’s mind raced, mostly running around and ducking and dodging the image of an old house, cloudy top to bottom, with an ice patio and a rainbow pond in the backyard. Bewildered thoughts panicked trying to figure themselves out, yet that remained. How was it the one thing she wanted to forget was the one thing certain in her life?
If only she could expunge it –
“Wait!” she called out.
The Mayor had barely stretched her wings. “Yes? How may I help you?”
Tapping her own teeth, Cloudkicker waited for the words to marshal themselves. It helped tremendously the Mayor had the patience of a melting ice rink.
“I don’t want to move back… I think,” said Cloudkicker, a mare to whom hedging came naturally, “but is there another way I could get thingy – erm, closure?”
Surprisingly, there was.
So that was why, a couple of weeks later and after all the paperwork had been shuffled about, Cloudkicker found herself standing on the edge of the cirrus-streaked garden fence, watching her childhood home.
On the outside, “The Eerie”, Shotland Shire Street, Cloudsdale – it was supposed to be “The Eyrie”, but the original owner had never been good at spelling, otherwise they wouldn’t have tried to pay off the More Gigged – was no different from the other cloud homes on either side, or along the street, or anywhere else in Cloudsdale for that matter. Ancient pegasi had learned to mould the clouds themselves into the building blocks of… well, buildings and blocks, and pegasi being pegasi, hadn’t bothered to experiment much. Curly bits, columny bits, gaps for windows, and a door you could soak up the rain with: warrior or weather patrol, pegasi had more interesting things to do than add to the arts of architecture.
On the inside… still no different from the other cloud homes. For instance, there was nothing particularly ominous about the kitchen, except as the graveyard of alfalfa, bread pudding, and cloud cabbage soup.
That was what creeped out Cloudkicker so much. She’d been inside other pony homes by now, and the sheer ordinariness of a place where… where stuff had happened was totally and utterly wrong. It should have been bigger, and darker, and spikier, and colder, and reeking of an evil smell, like the house inside her head.
The Mayor and a few friends and neighbours were there too, watching. Some had been randos passing by. They’d just stopped to see what all the fuss was about.
Otherwise, the only souls there were the construction pegasi. Theirs wasn’t an arduous job, though it paid to have the sort of easily entertained mind a factory worker needed to avoid going insane. Today, though, they seemed more animated, jittery, and prone to looking back as if to say, “Are you really sure about this?”
Cloudkicker nodded.
Then she realized no one was watching, and waited till they were before nodding again.
They set to work.
Bit by bit, the old house came to pieces. Cloud separated from cloud, rainbow poured into buckets and carried away, chunks of ice shattered and ground into powder. Slowly, the pegasus home began its journey to weatherhood.
Cloudkicker watched the whole thing.
She watched as the patch within an hour became just a smooth gap on the cloudy surface of Cloudsdale, as if nothing had ever been there. Then she watched as the chunks were carried to the Weather Factory and ground into pieces and poured into vats and compacted into rainclouds and scattered over the soil far, far below, where they trickled through and were cleansed by the dirt into just… water. And a few rainbows that were taken down after a few days.
The crowd dispersed early, some grumbling at the lack of payoff. They were still wondering what all the fuss was about.
And there it had ended, and Cloudkicker went home, because Alula’s babysitter charged by the hour, and she needed feeding. Alula, that is, not the babysitter.
“Alula?”
“Yeah?” said Alula, with a trace of defiance.
Here and now, Cloudkicker gestured through the door to a bedroom where even now, new forms of life would spontaneously erupt, and occasionally combust.
“Don’t you think you should, um, clean your room a bit?” she said.
Rising to her full shortness, Alula stuck her jaw out. “Maybe. When are you gonna clean yours?”
Cloudkicker put on a smile she’d practised earlier and said, “A tidy environment is good for the… thingy… soul.”
“So I’m supposed to do it but you’re not?”
Bouncing back from whatever subconscious wall her mind had been knocked into, Cloudkicker rallied as only a carer could, who was used to this sort of thing. “Well now, I think it would be good for you, wouldn’t it?”
“Ha! Nice try! What do you take me for!?”
Not for the first time in her life, Cloudkicker had trouble dealing with the Alula mindset. Yes, she had an inkling that “do as I say, not as I do” would never go down as good parenting advice, but she also strongly felt that it was wrong for Alula to presume that, say, if Cloudkicker ate more cookies than greens, therefore eating greens was itself a bad idea.
And Alula fought back too much. Cloudkicker tried being nice, but Alula didn’t seem to get the concept. If you stood back to give her room, she just got up in your face.
Faced with this, Cloudkicker did what she always did when confused and vaguely upset, which was to immediately hit the reset button.
“Tell you what,” she said brightly, sliding past Alula and leading her downstairs, “how about we have a nice hot dinner of cloud cabbage soup?”
Behind her, Alula made retching noises.
“I got a better i-dea,” sang Alula in the dreaded sing-song voice that meant she’d found an idea lying in the dirt and liked how sharp it was. “Dinky told me about this survival-in-the-wild stuff, and old warrior pegasi used to do it all the time, and can we try it? It’s not raining that hard out.”
Bullets of rain chipped away at the windows they passed.
“Survival in the wild?” repeated Cloudkicker nervously.
“Yeah, like how old soldiers used to pick berries –”
“Mm, that does sound nice.”
“– and had to tell if they were poisonous or not by eating them. Some of them died,” Alula added, proudly.
Stopped at the bottom of the stairs, Cloudkicker’s brain struggled to think. “Er… fatally?” was all she could manage.
“Or we could go mushroom-picking instead –”
“Well, so long as it’s not poisonous berries.”
“– and see if any of the mushrooms melt our insides! Cos they’re toxic! They do that, when they’re toxic.”
Reluctantly, Cloudkicker asked, “This survival-in-the-wild stuff… it wasn’t about how not to do it, was it?”
“Or we could steal honey from ferocious hornets, and –”
“Look, um, Alula? I’m not saying no, or anything like that, but-but how about we just eat the cloud cabbage soup now – melt-free – and, um, think about doing all that stuff another day?”
Alula snorted like a backfiring steam locomotive. “What, are you chicken?”
“Got to plan ahead for that sort of thing,” said Cloudkicker primly. Buy a first aid kit, she thought. Or a shovel.
In the rickety little dining room (which for reasons of economy also worked as a lounge, hallway, and debating chamber), Alula rocked the chair hard enough to scuff the carpet. All things considered, Cloudkicker hadn’t done a bad job keeping the place tidy. The shelves and little ornaments, mostly with things like “From, Your Frends Inn, Ponyvile”, always gleamed and were now xenophobic towards dust, having never had the chance to meet any. The two of them could eat their dinners off the floorboards and white cloud carpet, so long as they didn’t mind bits of straw. And there was always the haybale furniture, which doubled as a larder.
Here and there, bits of Cloudsdale had crept back in.
When Cloudkicker entered bearing bowls, ladles, and a cheerful determination to put up with whatever her sister threw at her, Alula looked from the cirrus-silk curtains to the table and groaned.
“When are we gonna get our own cloud house?” she moaned.
“One of the days, one of the days,” said Cloudkicker soothingly. “We’ll work up to it.”
“Whhhhhhhhhyyyyyyyyyy?”
Cloudkicker paused until her brain pinged back from a distant wall. “Got to take it slow.”
“Pegasi always live in cloud houses!”
“Now, that’s not true, is it?” Cloudkicker ladled out a bowl of steaming white stuff with white bits in it which, because she couldn’t actually plaster walls with it, presumably counted as food. “Derpy and Fluttershy don’t, and they’re just fine the way they are.”
“I meant real pegasi,” moaned Alula miserably.
At times like this, Cloudkicker thanked her lucky stars she didn’t have a temper, horrible or otherwise. It made it so much easier to let thoughts of cold closets and a smack behind the ear float around her head. That way, they seemed so harmless.
But she tensed anyway, as though clenching her own heart before it could break out of its ribcage and bite someone. She doesn’t know what she’s saying, she told herself. I am not my parents. I don’t do what they do. I don’t want to.
The trouble was that, even with a candidate of one, Alula was still the least favourite sister Cloudkicker had. It was all too easy to imagine how much good it would do the little monster, to be put outside and told to fend for herself for a couple of days, see how she liked it.
How much good it would do, to serve her humble pie.
And that was the problem, and why Cloudkicker could never do it. Call it something hoity-toity like “humble pie”, and you could almost forget or even forgive the fact that you were force-feeding it to a child.
So Cloudkicker solved her immediate problem by becoming suddenly stupid. “Oh, they’re real pegasi all right. They’ve got wings.”
“I didn’t mean – You know what? Never mind.” Alula rolled her eyes and faced the prospect of eating the stuff in front of her. It was cloud cabbage soup. It was highly nutritious and promoted good strong pegasus bones and teeth. It also looked like PVA glue mixed with bleached custard. Strands became stringy and refused to break when she lifted her spoon and watched.
After a while, Cloudkicker felt that the sisterly thing to do was to talk nicely about nice things and make her sister feel nice about it.
“Alula?” she said as though seeking permission to interrupt.
“Mfght?” Alula had a mouthful of teeth concrete.
“Did you have a nice, um, playing time with your friends?”
Swallowing a lump, Alula grinned. “Yes, because I won.”
“But you had a nice time other than that, right?”
Grin vanished. Alula looked at her sister as though she’d dropped in from Planet Weirdo.
“Are you trying that ‘let’s be pro-social’ stuff again?” she said suspiciously.
“I was only asking.” Confused and vaguely upset already, Cloudkicker retreated to her dinner, admittedly with some reluctance: cloud cabbage soup was only ever a filler until she could find the will to flex some creative cooking muscles.
“They’re not very good at soccer,” continued Alula on her own steam. “Snips is useless. He thinks he’s hot stuff, but the ball barely hit him and then he ran off complaining and whining like a sissy.”
Cloudkicker immediately remembered a younger Alula screaming in tears after someone whacked a ball into her nose. That had been back in Cloudsdale Kindergarten.
“Not everypony’s like you, Alula,” said Cloudkicker, with total honesty. With even more total honesty, she added, “And that’s a good thing, that we’re all so different, isn’t it?”
“And he’s fat,” said Alula in between slopping mouthfuls. “He’s rounder than the ball!”
Cloudkicker tried to convince herself she’d just heard her sister say that. “Alula, that’s not nice. You shouldn’t make fun of, um, other ponies, even if they look a bit funny.” She checked herself. “I mean, even if you think they look a bit funny.”
Proudly, Alula declared, “They do look funny.”
“Well, you wouldn’t like it if somepony made fun of you for looking funny.” Cloudkicker touched her own face gingerly. “Maybe before you laugh at someone, you should, well, imagine how it would feel if someone laughed at you.”
Genuine confusion scrunched up Alula’s face like a page full of failed scribbles. “Why would they do that? I don’t look funny.”
“It’s what friends do.”
“What, laugh at ponies for looking funny?”
“No, that’s what friends don’t do.”
“But I don’t have any friends who look funny.”
“What about Snips?”
“Ha! He’s not my friend. He’s just somepony who hangs around with all the cool kids. Cos he wishes he was one.”
Cloudkicker struggled not to argue back. Why couldn’t she have had somepony like Dinky as a sister? At least Dinky had looked up the word “respect” in the dictionary. And could spell it.
“Er, are you OK, Kicks?” said Alula.
“Fine, fine, fine,” was the hurried little white lie. Well, sort of a lie. At least if the awkward silence held long enough, it’d become true.
Fineness, having run off and hid in the corners, came tiptoeing back.
Dinner finished. Cloudkicker practically jumped up and rattled the bowls in her keenness to wash up elsewhere.
“Right, right, fine,” she said, bright and brittle as a stained-glass shard. “Um. What shall we do now? For fun?”
Reading, surprisingly enough. In the dining room/lounge/hallway/debating chamber.
Cloudkicker lounged on one of the haybales. Alula, preferring the Cloudsdale touch, sat back on the only cumulus sofa Cloudkicker had ever procured.
One day, maybe, she’d get a house that floated. They could keep the Squelch cottage as a billing address, or something. If they waited long enough, they might get enough bills for a bonfire night.
Still, it was so rare for Alula to want to play with anything other than an Ancient Pegasus Empire “Gee, I K.O.!” action figure that Cloudkicker found herself placing a bookmark on her own spot and hovering over, fascinated by the novelty.
Alula’s gaze twisted upwards and beamed. “It’s about The Marshal,” she boasted.
Cloudkicker’s expectations sank back to normal. On a scale of 0 to 10 – 0 being complete ignorance, 10 being encyclopaedic knowledge – Alula’s grasp of general history was about negative-6. She knew things that nonetheless were completely untrue, such as that the Sister Princesses Celestia and Luna were really mother and daughter, that the country had been founded by windigoes, and that Ponyville had been founded in an epic battle, which had ended by finding the nearest timberwolf pack and setting fire to them for no reason.
When it came to specifically pegasine military history, however, Alula’s grasp was about 12.5.
“Well, you’re not really supposed to call it that,” pointed out Cloudkicker.
“What, The Marshal?”
“The Skittish Play,” corrected Cloudkicker, with more enthusiasm. “Hey, that’s an old play, isn’t it? One of the Great Bard’s masterpieces.”
“Yeah.”
“You know, when I visited Ponyville once, I played a part in The Skittish Play.”
Contrary to some nations, there had never – even in the olden days – really been any problems with females playing females in Equestrian theatre. However, although the Great Bard had written a few romances for paid drama onstage, he’d banned real couples from playing them, on the grounds that he didn’t want unpaid drama offstage.
“Yeah? What part?” Alula lurched round so that she didn’t have to decide between loyalty to her book and loyalty to a sister who was suddenly interesting.
Cloudkicker gave her a dubious look, as though predicting a prank. “I was one of the witches.”
“Why’s it called The Skittish Play?”
“Because the quality runs off and hides if you name it,” Cloudkicker recited, as one who had never understood the logic herself but didn’t want to let the side down. “So, you like it?”
“Uh huh. It’s got fighting in it. And ponies doing evil stuff to get the crown, and storms, and witches, and elven ponies who mess with pony minds, and there’s this sorcerer on this island who shipwrecks this ship with his magic, and then he turns his wife into stone, and there’s ghosts and blood everywhere, and a hunchback, and this nasty old general no one understands who tells the public ponies to get stuffed.”
Alula nodded in wicked approval.
“It’s historical,” she added, native of Equestria.
“Ah,” said Cloudkicker, spotting a rare flash of insight over the eternal battlefield of Alula’s mindscape. “It’s got fighting pegasi in it, has it?”
“Better! It’s got the Princess of War herself! Princess Martia!”
Deep within Cloudkicker’s mind, the echo of very old words said, Oh no, here we go.
“You know,” she said, hoping to stem the tide at its source, “the witches were very interesting too…”
“See, she’s like the Queen of Fighting. Every pegasus loves and respects her, cos she’s so cool…”
“…in this one scene, they meet Princess Martia and predict her fate. They said if she wanted glory…”
“…that’s why she did all these wars and conquests and enemies and stuff, and, and all the pegasi learned fighting from her, proper fighting, not just hitting each other with helmets…”
“…but had to pay a terrible price, because once she started fighting she’d never stop fighting. Oho, she didn’t like that at all, but then you can’t shoot the messenger, now can you…”
“…and they say when these two super-strong earth ponies cheeked her, she grabbed them and tied them to her club and dangled the club over her shoulder and they had to swing behind her wherever she walked…”
“…then, see, this one witch told her she couldn’t increase the number of centurions in her army without talking to the witches first. They predicted she’d go off the deep end. Of course, Princess Martia made her chop a stone in half, just to spite her, only this time she made her chop a stone in half with her teeth…”
“…the most awesome thing ever! She rocked!”
“…the most tragic thing ever. It’s, um, kind of sad, if you think about it.”
For the first time, sister met sister from opposite sides of the sea.
“What are you talking about?” said Alula, completely confused.
“Er, um, the same thing you were talking about, I think.” Cloudkicker shook herself down and stopped hovering, letting her wing muscles cool down. “Poor Princess Martia. I mean, she could have been a great leader all that time, but all she did was hurt ponies and tell them it was for their own good.”
“Again: what are you talking about!? She was awesome! And then she went and spoiled it by crying like some sissy at the end.”
“Because she was hurting ponies.”
“More like she chickened out. She could’ve won everything! And all those ponies should’ve said sorry for making a wuss out of her, not cheered like she was some big hero for getting cold hooves!”
Cloudkicker, to her own shock, briefly went cold all over herself. “Oh, you mean like ‘sorry, my brother fell on your sword’?”
Puzzlement blanked out Alula’s gaze. “What?”
“Or ‘O great smiter, why did we make you suddenly attack us’? That kind of sorry, you mean?”
“What?”
Intense concentration around Alula’s face showed nothing but a child lost at sea. Alula being the intellectual powerhouse and emotional sophisticate she was, she could get herself lost in a puddle.
The shocked cold, on unfamiliar shores, fled in embarrassment. Soon, the soothing waves reminded Cloudkicker’s soul there were better ways to live than by suppressing the urge to bang her sister’s head against something. Anyway, she was just a kid. Alula was still at that youthful, innocent stage where heroism was indistinguishable from psychopathy.
Cloudkicker found herself getting confused and vaguely upset again. “Never mind.”
They went back to their books, on far sides of the room.
Princess Martia was something of a sticking point between the two sisters. Apparently, she’d lived a long time ago, in those early days of Equestria when alicorns had been a dime a dozen, although a gold a gazillion was probably how they would have put it. And Princess Martia had always been popular among pegasi, who in any case rarely let go of their warrior roots. If she’d only been born before Equestria was founded (back when a statement like “peace between tribes” had been a side-splitting punchline), the warlike, warmongering Ancient Pegasus Empire – which had liked war very much, and monged it in huge quantities for eager and immediate export – would never have collapsed, except through sheer exhaustion.
In fact, there were basically two sides to Princess Martia: the one before the witches had said “ENOUGH!”, and the one after.
Alula liked the one before, because the one before had believed in tough love and honourable violence and sinking-or-swimming and training till hardly anyone had any bones left.
Cloudkicker liked the one after, because the one after had believed in… well, not that.
Besides, Alula’s obsession with the Princess of War was troubling. Yes, yes, yes, Cloudkicker believed in not forcing her own views on others and in ponies not being shackled to tradition and having the freedom to like what they liked, but deep down, she really wished Alula hadn’t turned out to like the sort of thing most traditional pegasi liked anyway. Especially the kind of pegasi who thought honour could be measured in punches and kicks.
To be fair, Cloudsdale was changing. There wasn’t that sort of thing these days, for the same reason the tribes no longer tried to beat each other up to show those numbskull earth ponies/brutish pegasi/snobby unicorns who was boss. It was more likely to show up in a propensity towards Action Mare dolls and naïve ponies dubbing themselves the Princess Martia of (insert pony town here). But it upset the Cloudkickers of the world, like seeing a tiger in a cage made of paper.
Alula flopped out of her sofa and scuffled over to the door. “I’m going to sleep.”
“Oh, good.”
“Princess Martia says it’s very important for warriors to get some sleep whenever they can.”
“Oh. Um. That’s good too.”
Want me to tuck you in? Cloudkicker could never bring herself to say it. Just imagining Alula’s face was enough to shut hers up.
Instead, she counted under her breath, then crept up and hovered outside Alula’s bedroom door until she could hear the squeaky snoring. She had a vague idea she was supposed to do motherly things, like tuck her in and kiss her goodnight, and compared those possibilities with the certainty of what Alula would do if she tried any of them.
Then the world went funny.
Cloudkicker grunted and thumped her own face. Spasms stopped. Stuck muscles unstuck. Thank goodness no one had seen that little embarrassment.
It would be nice to think her face going funny would come in useful someday. At least, it’d be nice to think all the teasing and torment back in her Cloudsdale Kindergarten had somehow been worth it. At least Derpy had been very kind.
That was a weird thought, now she thought about it… Or was she overthinking it…?
Then Cloudkicker remembered herself and went to her bed, which was the sofa downstairs. Sometimes, she didn’t know which of her thoughts she could trust anymore. All she could do was press on and hope it would all work out someday.
