3/12

Stormfront grumbled at her but instead of pushing the point pulled up her clipboard and scanned it over. “Alright, far east walls has a clump of clouds. Good practice stuff for a newbie,” she said, then gave me a smile over the top of her clipboard. “But you really need to handle it alone,” she stressed, giving Angel Wings a pointed look.

I gave her a nod. “That’s a pretty good point.” I looked over at Celestia, unsure of exactly how to order my sovereign ruler and bride-to-be to let me handle the clouds on my own. “If you could, uh-”

“Got it,” she said mercifully, with a short nod.

With that, I stretched out my wings and started to fly. LIke your average pegasus, it wasn’t anything fancy, but I was good enough at it that I wasn’t concerned about falling. And yet, the thought of soaring over the massive expanse of air that seemed to stretch out forever just past the castle walls filled me with an awful, crushing dread. For the most part, I simply stuck to flapping carefully over the wall, dipping past the wall every few minutes to try and syke myself up.

The east wall was about as remote the castle got, stretching around the bureaucratic wing of the office and far away from any civilian visibility. Perfect for a newbie, you had to guess. And there, hovering just a few feet off of the wall, was a patch of surly-looking clouds, not yet rain clouds but a little too damp to be perfect puffy clouds.

Wings flaring out, a hovered to a stop on top of the clouds and gently set down on top of them. This was the point that I realized I didn’t actually know how to break clouds. Oh sure they gave you a quick breakdown in magic class back in a school. Charge the magic into the bottoms of your hooves and strike down, disrupting the basic structure of the cloud. But that was the roughest basics, and weather training was a surprisingly complex field. Screwing up my face, I looked down at the cloud and raised a hoof.

Swinging down my hoof, I gave it a solid thwack. The nimbus substrate jiggled underneath my touch, but nothing else of significance happened. Okay… maybe if I concentrated my magic? I’d never been particularly good at it, but I knew the tingly feeling that you got when you flew too far as well as anyone and focused that straining sensation into the tip of my hoof. Once I had gathered as much as I could manage into my hoof, I once again swung my hoof down.

I’m not precisely sure what happened next. My best guess is that I struck the cloud, but that although I had the magic to break up the cloud, I wasn’t using the physical force to break it up and move it away. So instead, the hoof became more of a spearpoint plunging me into the cloud, where I sank until the realization the cloud was going to consume me sent me into a panic spiral and I released the concentration of magic. With that gone, the only thing my body could do was resume its normal magical flow, meaning the cloud was free to interact with me like it usually does for pegasi.

So I was stuck. My front half was in the cloud and back half was dangling out top of it.