The Steadfast Sky : Chapter 8
The Grey Potter
http://cosmicponyfanfiction.blogspot.com/

Ponies always tell me, ‘Luna, don’t run!’ Yet here I was, galloping, laughing on the inside each time my hoof hit the cobblestones, giggling as the wind tugged at my mane. My friends ran beside me, actually urging me to go faster.

Teachers always tell me, ‘Luna, don’t shout!’ Yet here we were, talking fast on the top of our lungs, getting right to the point as we zigzagged through the city streets. I screamed every word and no one cared to stop me.

Celestia always tells me, ‘Luna, act like a lady!’ Yet there Celestia was, her perfect mane getting messy, my mane getting tangled. We splashed through a puddle and I squeaked with joy, hooves chilled to perfection.

This was how to live!

“Try and find a guard tower, one that’s built into a wall!” Discord shouted behind me.

“What?! Why would we want to go there?!” Celestia shouted back, over her shoulder.

“It’s our best shot at getting up on top of the walls, unless you want to go through the castle!”

“If you say so!”

We whipped around a corner and tried not to trip or slide or anything else that had slowed us down. The crowds of ponies were being smart and getting out of the way as we ran, some pointing and others shouting hard-to-hear words. All ponies were nice like that, except a very special few.

“Look, guards!” I shouted happily.

“Got it!” Celestia called back.

With a brief flare of her horn, Celestia slammed the guard’s helmets down over their eyes. Following me, Discord slapped the cobblestones. Ponies began to stumble as the rock became even more slippery. The two guards flailed at their helmets and fell to the ground before they even knew we had run by. I laughed as we kept galloping, unstopped.

Another corner, a market, and a long street later, Celestia began shouting again.

“There, a guard post!”

It was a tower like any other, but it had a sign out front with a painted on shield and star. Me and Discord stopped as Celestia charged in. There was another large flash of light, and we followed after her, running past whinnying Earth ponies scraping at their eyes.

“Over there! I found the way up!”

The entryway vanished in a flash as we began charging up the uneven ramp in wide circles. The occasional door popped up and vanished again on the right wall, but otherwise, there wasn’t much in the tower. There were no windows, only a torch every once in a while, which was very strange to me. Wouldn’t windows make it easier for the ponies to see?

“I hear hoofsteps,” Discord said.

“That’s just the echo of the place, right?”

“No, someponies are coming down.”

“Shall I blind them again?”

“Ooh, ooh,” I jumped forward as my sister and my friend started to slow down, “Can I try something?”

Celestia laughed nervously, “Luna, this isn’t the time for fooling around.”

“Get in the doorway, please!” I demanded.

Discord immediately scampered into a door, and Celestia hesitantly followed, looking down at me with one of her big word looks. ‘Incredulous,’ I think she would say. I didn’t let that stop me. I stood between them and let my magic come to me. It’s a pretty easy trick, really. I made the shadows move in front of us instead of behind us, and then pulled some other shadows around, hiding us in the dark corridor. Guards, coming from above, thundered down to the lower floor. I let the spell fade when they passed.

“Luna…” Discord started, staring at me, “You know shadow magic?!”

“Um, yeah, how’d you think I kept winning at hide and seek?”

“Luna! That’s cheating!” my sister shouted. She’s been doing that a lot today. Maybe later she’ll understand why I do it all the time. But first, I needed to reply.

“It is?” I said, “Well, according to rule seventeen, article B, part eighty: Nuh-uh.”

Discord snickered. “She has a point.”

“Oh, be quiet. Luna, if you could do that, why couldn’t we have used that to sneak out of the house?”

“Well that’s just silly,” I replied, “Who’s ever heard of a moving shadow in the middle of the day?”

“Look, guys, let’s drop it for now,” Discord laughed, “We’ve gotta keep moving.”

“O-Kay!”

We running up the ramp, still bursting with energy. Another patrol came up after us, and a different one came down again, but they could never see through my trick. Eventually, they stopped coming at all, and we slowed down. We were getting tired, after all.

“How tall is this tower anyway?” I asked, “We havn’t seen a door in forever. What do they have up here?”

“It’s a good thing, that means it really does go all the way up,” Discord replied. “We got really lucky there.”

“Lucky? Us? We’re like, a super duper team! Did you see how many guards we battled past?”

“I dunno, a lot of them?” Discord had a really silly grin on his face, looking out the nonexistent windows.

“A whole stinking lot of them!” I loudly pointed out.

“What, would have, happened,” Celestia panted, “If we, had been, caught? Oof, could this staircase, be any longer?”

“You uh.” Discord rejoined us in reality, looking back at my struggling sister. “You don’t really want to know.”

“Yes, I do. Tell me.”

“Celestia, are you doing alright?” Discord acted, “You seem pretty winded!”

“Don’t change, the subject,” she gasped for breath, “Though can we, maybe, stop for a bit?”

“Yeah, we can slow down.” He looked at me. “Luna, you alright?”

“Doing great!”

“I, am a lady,” Celestia huffed, “I’m not used, to all of this, exertion.”

“Yeah, yeah, so you’ve been saying… Oh.” He stopped.

“’Oh’ what?” my sister asked.

“We’ve made it.”

“Oh!”

The ramp ended, going right up into a large trap door. Discord walked up to it, placing his paw on the latch.

“Well, cross your…” He stopped, then looked at us, “Hooves, I guess.”

Discord nudged the door up. It didn’t move.

“Ahem.” He slammed his shoulder into the door and heaved his body into it. It rose a little. “Um, help?” Celestia and I fell in place beside him, pushing up as well. The door was silly in how heavy it was, but all together, we forced it open, and the light of day blinded us all.

There’s a word I don’t think I really understood before. Infinity. Forever and ever. Yeah, I thought it was a lot, but I don’t think I quite grasped how many lots infinity was. There’s a word for that kind of nonunderstanding, and Celestia would probably have it. But I couldn’t think of it then. The only word I had for the moment was Infinity, because I finally understood what it meant.

The sky was infinity. When we stepped up out of the tower, I looked at the sky, and I saw no end. No corners or cut offs. Just blue. Not like a painted on blue where you can still see that it’s paint. It was an impossibly flawless blue, untouchable and unreachable. Forever and ever. Ponies could move through the sky? I felt like they would get lost the instant they stepped off the walls.

It was like, a void. Except it had stuff, and the stuff was blue?

I feel like Celestia would have the words for this, I just felt silly for trying.

Speaking of my sister.

“Oh my goodness…” Celestia sniffled, wiping her face on her fetlock, “Oh my goodness, it is true. There is a sun… It’s gorgeous…”

I flipped around, trying to see if the sun was true, and grabbed my eyes as it stung me. The sun was apparently a black hole in the sky that burned a shadow in my eye, suggesting that it was orange. My sister must have gone crazy, that thing is not pretty at all.

“Guys,” Discord whispered, eyes glues upward as well, “We’ve gotta keep moving.”

“Yes… yes, let’s keep going.”

We walked on top of the walls, and that was impossible too. Walls have a top, that’s why they’re walls, right? Walls are supposed to hit a ceiling or a roof. If they didn’t hit a roof, then they would be partitions. That’s what Celestia said.

I guess we have to call them walls, because there’s no way the poor things could ever hope to reach the sky.

Towers peppered the clouds, another sea beneath the sky expanse, and the walls circled and waved in patterns, all connected, with a little sunken pathway on top. All paths eventually reaching the final border, the last wall that we walked on top of.

And beyond that, there was nothing. Forever.

I heard the phrase ‘end of the world’ once. I think it fits the hoof. Nothing beyond this island in the clouds.

“Look,” Celestia squeaked. There was a speck on the sky. A string of little horse-drawn carts floating in the middle of nowhere.

“That must be the supplies!” Discord started to run forward again, trying to figure out a way around the paths. “C’mon, let’s go!”

Discord had his eyes glues on the carts. Celestia returned her eyes to being glued on the sun, though I dunno how she was able to look at it so long. So, instead of looking at either of those things, I had my eyes glued on a tower, where a tiny little worm seemed to be sprouting. It spread its itty bitty wings, then began to fly.

“Hey Celestia, what’s that?” I asked, trying to point to it with me hoof.

“Hm…?” she blinked slowly at me, then looked where I pointed. “Oh, what is that?”

“Hey, why are we slowing down?” Discord ran back to us, making a pouty face, “C’mon, we gotta catch that cart!”

“There’s something… coming towards us?” Celestia said.

Discord took one look, then shouted, “Morons! RUN!”

I’m not sure what happened then. Rocks burst around us, and the creature flew over us in a flash, a huge version of Discord. I was in the air, between the two infinities, unhurt, but with nothing to hold me from falling.

I paused midair, yellow glow around me, Celestia trying to keep her hooves on a crumbling wall, and failing. Discord grabbed her tail as she skidded off, and he quickly followed behind her.

Hm.

It’s a weird feeling, falling.

I thought running made a sort of windy noise, but falling drowned out everything. The stone rushed by me fast, blurring together. I twisted my neck and looked over to the sky horizon, completely still. For a second, I thought the gray clouds were ground, a different kind of stone. I had always wondered what they felt like. I hoped they weren’t solid.

Something grabbed me. Discord’s uneven front feet had me around the waist, his eyes screwed tightly shut. His wings snapped open. I felt like I was yanked upwards, body snapping like a rubber band. My head hurt, but the roaring wasn’t stopping, no matter how much Discord flapped his wings. Celestia dropped by us, chomping onto Discord’s tail as she passed. His face screwed up like his eyes and he opened his mouth to yell, but no sound came out, lost in the wind all around us. His wings trailed behind him, trying to flap, unable to slow us both down.

We hit the clouds together. I gasped a few breaths of thick, greasy air before we dropped out the other side. A few clumps of gray clung to Discord’s feathers, but otherwise, the clouds hadn’t slowed us at all.

I looked at the uneven dark green blur beneath us and wondered. If that’s the ground, and we’re not slowing down, what should I be feeling right now? My brain didn’t seem to have a reply.

Where I looked, the ground and clouds began to glow a patchy gold. Celestia’s horn glowed brightly, forehooves tightly gripping her head as she tried to concentrate and encircle us with her light. I pawed it, hoof passing right through. It was nothing but air.

Discord stared at the light, like I did, face blank. He spun on Celestia, let go of me, and thrust his paws forward. The light turned solid, into a sparkling rubbery substance. The wind stopped, Celestia’s eyes snapped open.

Things went mute right before we hit the ground. The bubble buckled, squished, slowed, sunbeans holding us tightly in the center. My nose gently touched the ground, pressed flat under the magic shield. For a moment, time stopped, and I realized something important.

“Hey look! The green stuff everywhere is grass!”

“What!?” Celestia squeaked.

We shot back into the air, Celestia screaming the whole way.

“Why?! Why why whyyyyy?!”

“Oh sweet life it worked!” Discord shouted, punching the air. “It worked it worked it worked! I’m a genius! Ahaha! AHAHAHAHAHA!”

I began laughing too, laughing and screaming and everything else as we flew, smacked into the ground again, and bounced off into the unknown.