Tempo di un Temporale
 
When I was a filly, I thought flying was super complicated. And it is! You have to do all this stuff at the same time– stroke, balance, tuck, twist, rudder, even feather pitch. Feather pitch! I still don’t know how I figured that one out.
 
Hmm? Oh! It means twisting each individual primary feather to change how it bites the air. Like this. I know, right?
 
And that’s just my own body. There’s the air, too. Air is never just air; its speed, direction, temperature, humidity, even altitude– all that affects how your wings interact with it. How it flows over objects, or behaves at the edge of weather fronts…
 
It never came to me naturally. I learned it like you might learn to build a steam engine: know how each part works, and fit it together piece by piece until it’s doing what it’s supposed to do. I worked hard at it, but I was only a middling flier. Prim. Definitely timid. But if something unexpected happened, I was easily overwhelmed. It never felt natural. I actually walked a lot. In Cloudsdale!
 
My grades in flight school were sub-average.
 
So; I was on a summer retreat with my parents– they had a little cloud cottage over the Fetloch. Dad thought it would be a good place for practice; if I went out the front door, I had to fly. The mountains and the lake created lots of tricky little air currents and thermals. And the lake is right up against the Everfree, so we’d get uncontrolled weather coming through, adding to the challenge.
 
In between, Mom drilled me on all the procedural and technical stuff– lift-drag ratios, attack angles, SUA’s, the Bernoulli Effect, sideslip, boundary-layer control, VMC’s, camber, ground effect, secondary stalling, trim– Celestia’s beard! She was ruthless.
 
I hated it. It was all the things that that I was bad at, the things that I couldn’t get my head around. Which was the point! But even though my head was full to overflowing with procedures and terminology and physics, I still wasn’t getting it. I tried so hard! All the information was there, but I just couldn’t keep everything straight in anything more than a light breeze.
 
I started to believe I’d never understand, that I was impaired, that I should just bind my wings and go take up farming in an earth pony village somewhere.
 
On our last weekend at the lake, a storm came rolling out of the Everfree. A big one.
 
It was… I’ve never seen anything like it. It was like a wall, just a vast dark wall of tumbling cloud and sheets of rain, shot through with flashes of lightning. I could see debris near the ground, branches and dirt that had been swept up.
 
Dad knew we were in trouble. The cottage wasn’t going to survive that, and it was too late to outrun it. We left everything behind and dove for cover at the treeline.
 
I may not have been a great flier, but I knew how to tuck my wings and drop. My parents were on either side of me. But…
 
Well… you see, in a rotating supercell, the pressure drop in the center causes air to– argh, boring! Okay: There was a headwind– air being pulled into the storm. I was too light! My parents could tuck and fall, but I had to actually fly against it or be blown backwards. I beat forward as hard as I could! Mom and dad dropped back so I could grab dad’s tail. All I could think of was my parents swept away– my fault, my fault.
 
Still, we almost made it. We reached the treetops, but that last layer of air before the ground was unpredictable. We were slammed by a huge lateral gust, it scattered us like leaves. My parents crash-landed in the relative safety of the woods, thank Celestia! Dad broke his wing. I, on the other hoof, was thrown along the treetops, clawed by limbs and nearly knocked silly by boughs before a savage updraft threw me straight into the stormwall.
 
Chaos! Flashes of lightning in near-total darkness. I caught glimpses of swirling, shredded cloud and tattered curtains of driving rain. Near-constant thunder filled the air, defiant over the already deafening howl of the wind. A wave of hail broke over me.
 
I fought to gain control but I tumbled helplessly. All of my lessons were wiped away by fear and pain. For a brief moment I felt I was upright– then a stroke of lightning tore open the sky a wing’s breadth in front of my face.
 
Somewhere in my mind, I knew that I must be blinded by it, deafened. but what I saw, what I heard, was music.
 
The storm unfolded all around me as a titanic symphony. I could see it all in my mind’s eye like a score on a page: here, the sub-bass drone note of the wind; there, the staccato tympani of the lightning; there, and there, the massive melody lines of the major jetstreams, surrounded by a thousand harmonies of interacting air currents and countless little evaporating grace notes of eddies and turbulence. I could feel the sheets of rain and hail, countermelodies riding the current of the jetstreams. And this– all of this– flowing over my struggling wings.
 
I? …was a tiny little sour note, struggling against the vast score.
 
I thought, I can’t fight this. Why would I want to?
 
A ringing started in my ears, gradually replaced by the roar of the wind. Lightning flickered: my eyes had recovered. But I could still feel the massive Windsong, I could still tell where the currents of melody and harmony flowed.
 
I could be a part of this.
 
I tucked, dropped and let the storm have me.
 
Spreading my wings, I rode the melody of the jetstream instead of fighting it, flying by instinct. I could feel a thread of potential just there, and I rolled to one side, catching a swirling updraft as a crack of lightning flashed ahead of me. I let the current carry me to a countercurrent with a different trajectory. I felt my own notes intertwining with the Windsong.
 
I laughed like a crazy pony. It was so simple! All of that studying, all of that work, and flight was as simple as moving in harmony with the sky instead of fighting it.
 
I don’t really remember how long I danced with the storm. I was so overcome with relief and happiness and um… maybe shock and a slight concussion… that time became sort of meaningless. My mom says I drifted down from the remnants of the storm at twilight, floating like a feather with my eyes closed, my mane wrecked, and a peaceful smile on my face. They said I looked just like a part of the storm scud all around me. Mom flew up and let me settle onto her back like a snowflake. I remember snuggling up to her, sleepy and sore but feeling the beat of her wings, wrapped in the music of the Windsong all around us. I’ve never been happier.
 
Then dad made some dad joke to mom about catching a tempest in a teacup, and we went home.
 
Well, I mean; we went to the hospital first, obviously. But the nickname stuck.
 
What? Oh! Yes, sorry– it is a nickname, technically. I just think of it as my real name, so I always forget that new friends don’t know. My given name is um… yeah. Twilight Sparkle.
 
Yes, yes. I know. I think Mom hoped that it would help me turn out more like her? Boy, was she wrong about that!