4 Hours earlier…

Celestia yawned as she made her way to the veranda where she and her sister Luna shared their morning tea. It was still dusk out but the two alicorns were about to change that. She found Luna sitting at the table where an elderly unicorn stallion was preparing their tea. On Luna’s head sat Tiberius, her pet opossum, napping peacefully.

“Ah, sister, just in time, I was just telling Kibitz here about my latest foray into the Dream-scape.”

“It must be a fascinating tale; it seems my dear adviser can’t contain himself.” Celestia grinned, knowing full well the real reason Kibitz was antsy.

The old cream colored stallion ruffled his mustache, “Not that I don’t appreciate a good tale but I simply must insist that I be excused. I’m already two and a half minutes behind schedule.” He pulled a pocket watch matching his cutie mark from his jacket and eyed it nervously.

“Very well, your excused Kibitz,” Celestia said as she took the seat across from her sister. “So Luna, how was your night?”

“Most exciting, five Tirek nightmares tonight and only three of them were Discord’s.”

Celestia smiled as she sipped her tea, “He must be feeling guilty still, hard to believe he actually has a conscience.”

“And just why is that so hard to believe?” a disembodied voice said.

The two sisters began looking around for the source of the voice, which they knew to belong to Discord himself. “Up here” he said, drawing their attention to the moon.  As they looked up, the moon rotated around to reveal a grinning, moon-shaped face of the draconequis. In a flash his face vanished returning the moon to normal while he crawled onto the veranda, appearing to lift the skyline of Canterlot as one would a stage curtain. “I’ll have you know I have a very good conscience, see?” He held up a small bird cage which contained an apathetic looking cricket wearing a top hat and a cane discarded on the floor next to it.

Celestia hid her eye roll by sipping a cup of tea at the same time. “Good morning to you too, Discord.”

“I couldn’t help but over hear your little conversation, mind if I join your little princess tea party?” Celestia wasn’t sure what annoyed her more, that he compared her and her sister’s bonding time to a little girl’s game, or the fact that he was technically correct in that they were in fact princesses having a tea party.

“I don’t particularly mind, but is there a reason you’re joining us? You usually don’t come to me unless you want something.”

Discord disappeared and re-appeared an instant later wearing what appeared to be an old sage’s robe and short white hair. Placing a hand on his forehead he said, “I sensed a great disturbance in the force, of magic.” Opening one eye, he continued in a far more casual tone, “and I thought I’d let you know.”

Luna spoke up for the first time since Discord arrived, “Care to elaborate, Discord, or do you plan on telling jokes all night?”

“As much as I would love to do that, I fear this is a bit of a serious matter.” That immediately got Celestia and Luna’s attention. If Discord thought something was serious enough to get right to the point, then it had to be dire indeed. “You see a few moments ago I felt a rather large shift in the flow of magic, as if it was all converging on one spot. In fact it’s still flowing and it’s getting faster. I trust I don’t need to tell you that this could result in a great deal of chaos, and not the cheeky and fun kind of chaos that I offer, but the cruel and tragic kind of chaos.”

Celestia paused and closed her eyes, she concentrated hard on The Weave, the fabric that was the magic of Equis, she couldn’t feel it like Discord but if she knew what to look for she could almost sense it. Sure enough, there was something strange about how it felt. Celestia couldn’t quite place it but she could only assume what Discord had said was correct.

“I can feel it, just barely, though I can’t say why, something feels different about The Weave.”

“So what does this mean, sister?” Luna asked. Luna, who had been a pegasus before her apotheosis lacked the thorough understanding of magic that Celestia, who had been a unicorn, possessed.

Before Celestia could answer, there came a grunting sound to her left. Looking over, they both saw Discord sitting at a school desk wearing a propeller hat and holding up his right arm with his left. Fidgeting, the ever joking draconequis waved his hand back and forth, practically jumping out of the desk.

Luna let out a sigh, “Discord?”

“It’s simple really; imagine a big pool of water.” Discord snapped his fingers producing filly-pool filled with water. “Now imagine that there’s a device in the middle trying to suck all that water in.” A small SCUBA tank appeared in the center of the pool with a vacuum hosed attached and began drawing in the water. “There’s two possible outcomes of this; one, all the water gets sucked in leaving nothing for the poor little kiddies to swim in or two, the device takes too much aannnnnddd….” The tank in the middle grew to a comically bloated size before it exploded, dousing the two princesses in water while Discord hid behind a little black umbrella.

Celestia and Luna gave the amused prankster a deadpan stare, their soaked mains clinging to the side and front of their faces. Tiberius, disturbed from his nap, shook off the water and scurried off to find a better sleeping spot. “Opsie, let me get that for you.” Discord said with blow-dryer in hand. With a gale force, Luna suddenly found herself dry but now had a frizzy afro for her trouble. Discord held up a small mirror, “you like?”

“Is there a point to any of this?” Luna asked in the royal canterlot voice while Celestia, whom had already dried herself, stifled a giggle.

“Certainly, you see I highly doubt that there’s anything in the world that can hold all that magic, which means that whatever is doing this is about to go boom.”

“And how much damage would that cause?”

“None, I would think,” Celestia said after regaining her composure, “raw magic isn’t physical, us and our subjects might feel the shockwave of magic but it won’t do anything.”

Discord clicked his tongue, “My dear Celestia, weren’t you paying attention?”  He placed an arm around Celestia's neck and with his other hand produced a black rectangular object with different shaped buttons. Pointing the object at the pool of water he pressed the button shaped like two left pointing arrows causing the previous explosion of water to reverse. As the pieces of debris came back together to form the SCUBA tank, Discord pressed the right pointing triangle shaped button causing the reversal to stop and the event to play out as it had before.

“It’s riiiiiiiiggghht here.” He said, pressing a third button shaped like two parallel lines.  The tank, which had exploded exactly as before, was now frozen mid blast. Pieces of the tank hung in the air while water appeared frozen in a tidal wave rushing away from the center of the pool. “Now then, what do you notice about the middle area there?”

Celestia and Luna looked; the Sun Princess suddenly went wide eyed. In the center of the pool was a small radius of empty space where the water had been pushed away by the force of the blast.  If the water represented The Weave, then the area nearest the center would be devoid of any and all magic until the water/Weave returned.

Discord grinned, “I see you’ve caught on.”

Luna seemed to as well, “are you saying that if this…magic vacuum or whatever it is, explodes then magic will be pushed out of the area in the middle like the water was?”

“Correct, gold star for you!”

“I still fail to see the problem,” Luna said as Discord handed her a gold star sticker. “So there will be areas that lose their magic for a few moments. If your demonstration is apt, however, magic will quickly return just as the water did.”

“No, Luna, that is the problem,” Celestia said, her voice quiet and borderline trembling. “Even if it’s only for an instant, the damage caused would be unprecedented.”

“Indeed, apart from the obvious things like unicorns losing their powers, other creatures that depend on magic will be in danger. Enchantments will also fail, and unlike natural magic, enchantments won’t come back on their own. And I’d certainly hate to be a pegasus flying really high up when that happens.”

Celestia quickly stood, “Discord, how much time do we have and how big of an area will be affected?”

Discord popped in and out of existence again, changing into a costume. This time he wore a white lab coat with glasses. With him was a large machine of some kind with rotating spools and flashing lights. Celestia would later think it reminded her of the ones Twilight Sparkle kept in her basement. The machine spit out a long strip of paper that Discord tore off and read while holding his glasses with one hand.

“Assuming Tirek to be the largest know vessel for containing magic and how much it would take for him to pop like a balloon aaannndd the force such a pop would release, I’d say all of Equestria at least, perhaps even some parts of the lands beyond. As for the time, at the rate its going, I’d say we have a few hours at best. It really all depends on how large this vessel is and whether or not the being operating it can shut it off.”

“We have to assume that they don’t. Luna, how fast can you communicate with your dream magic? We need to make sure no pegasus is flying for the next few hours.”

“I fear I can’t reach every pegasus in time with such a message, sister. There is one thing I could do, though I am loath to do it. I could send out a subliminal dream.” Luna grimaced, as though the idea seemed to repulse her. A subliminal dream was like a subconscious message where in a subtle idea or suggestion could be planted in a pony’s mind. The pony would not remember the dream but the subconscious mind would and in that way, behavior could be influenced. Luna had discovered this ability by accident and she was horrified by it. Just thinking about what the Nightmare could have done if it knew how to utilize that ability made Luna shudder.

“Luna,” Celestia placed a gentle hoof on her sister’s, snapping her back to reality. “I would not ask you to do that, knowing how you feel about it. Surly there is another way….”

“Perhaps there is, sister but if Discord is correct, we don’t have time to find one. I will send out the subliminal dream en mass to every pegasus in Equestria to make them feel as though today would be a terrible day to fly. It won’t keep them grounded but perhaps it will make them want to stay close to the ground.”

“Thank you, Luna. Discord, you’re coming with me, we need to send out correspondents to make sure any wards that fail are re-established and…..what?”

Discord was massaging his temples and sighing. “Oh, just thinking about a quote I heard once, ‘Like a foolish pony who built his house on sand’ or in the sky in this case.”

“In the sky……by the stars, Cloudsdale!” Celestia raced back into the castle and into the throne room.  

Kibitz jumped as she busted through the doors. “You’re Majesty, what’s…”

“Kibitz, clear my schedule, there’s been an emergency. I need you summon the Royal Guard, and send a message to the headmaster of the school for gifted unicorns to have Inkwell and eleven of their most experienced casters to meet here as soon as possible. They are going to have to raise the sun for me today. Inkwell knows how but she’ll need the others help.”

“Of course, You’re Majesty; I shall contact them at once.”

“As quickly as you can, Kibitz, we only have a few hours to evacuate Cloudsdale.”

Rainbow Blaze had to put up with a lot of things in his life. As head of the Cloudsdale rainbow factory, he had colts and fillies who acted nervous around him because of that stupid (and completely untrue) urban legend about what happened to bad little ponies who misbehaved.  As the father of Rainbow Dash, he was constantly bombarded with questions from fans and reporters who wanted to know about ‘the stallion that raised the mare’. And as one of the only ponies with a rainbow colored main, he suffered no end of teasing from peers calling his masculinity into question. Being woken up at six in the morning by a royal guard, told to pack only essentials and evacuate the city was a new one though.

Blaze looked over at Cloudsdale off in the distance, roughly five miles from where the refugee camp was setting up. More and more ponies were pouring in from the city, most of them pegasi and all told by officials to walk instead of fly.  Countless tents of different shapes and sizes littered the landscape. Some were filled with families tending to crying foals or keeping constant vigil of the line of incoming ponies no doubt looking for family or friends that were separated when the order to evacuate came down.  Others were housed by individuals or small groups of adults looking annoyed and frustrated.  Blaze couldn’t help but share in their confusion as no one was told exactly what the emergency was.

He was startled out of his ponderings by a pegasus tapping him on his withers.  With a start, he turned to find he’d been joined by his two oldest friends. One was a pale yellow mare with a lime green main and three red ribbons for a cutie mark. Though she appeared to be relatively young, her blue eyes betrayed her middle age status. The other was a stallion with a gray coat and silver main who sported a snowflake cutie mark. They were Red Ribbon and Ice Mane, whom Rainbow Blaze had been friends with for as long as any of them could remember.

“You’re so easy to scare, Blaze,” Red giggled.

“I…it’s called ‘being startled’, it’s an involuntary reaction and is completely different from being scared.”

“Yea whatever,” Ice grinned, “you have any idea what’s going on? I heard there was some sort of hazardous leak in one of the factories.”

“And I’ve heard everything from ‘it’s just a drill’ to ‘a massive outbreak of Poniebola.’“ Red added.

“I honestly have no idea,” Blaze sighed, “I brought my blanket and pillow just in case.” The three pegasi sat down in the grass and watched the scene unfold. None of them had any idea of what to expect or how long before they would see their homes again.

“Report, captain.” Celestia was doing her best to maintain the calm and sure tone expected of a leader but it was proving difficult in the face of a disaster that could take place any moment. Her command center was set up directly below Cloudsdale and on any other day she would have marveled at the view of the gorgeous cloud formations that made up the city’s underside. Now it just seemed like an ominous bolder perched precariously on a ledge and poised to fall at the slightest touch.

Captain Stalwart gave a salute to the princess as he relayed his message, “Ma’am! Roughly three-fourths of the city has been moved to the safe zone, the hospital and the elderly have all been cleared, it should only be another hour or so until Cloudsdale is fully evacuated.”

Celestia nodded, “Good, I just hope we have that much time.”

“Oh I’m sure we do,” came the voice of the playful in any situation Discord who was standing at a chalk board filled with complex equations, graphs and what appeared to be a sketch of a boat with a squirrel holding a fishing rod. At the bottom right of the board he circled the number forty two, “by my calculations, we should have several more hours at least.”

“Good, captain, please proceed as planned and let me know the moment we finish….” She felt it then, the wave of force that knocked her breath away. She had never felt anything like it in her long life but she knew what it was even if she hadn’t heard the sounds of hovering ponies falling to the ground and the screams of horror coming from outside.

Celestia looked at Discord who had a genuinely confused look on his face. He glanced back at his board, “ah, I forgot to carry the one.”

Bursting from the tent, Celestia looked around to see several ponies yelling and pointing to the sky. Looking up, she saw the mighty cloud city listing to one side, bits of debris already falling to the ground. “Captain, get everyone out of here, NOW!” The captain began issuing orders immediately but Celestia knew it wouldn’t be enough; there were too many ponies still under the city and a few still inside. Her breath was shortening and panic was slowly setting in, for the first time in nearly two thousand years, she didn’t know what to do.

“Oh my, this is problematic,” Discord said looking up at the falling mass. “I do hope our magic returns soon.”

Celestia could only watch, helpless as her little ponies ran in terror, dodging falling pieces of buildings slamming into the ground like meteorites. It was then that she heard a sound that made her heart truly stop. “HELP, I can’t fly, I’m falling!” Above them was a small pegasus colt who couldn’t have been older than ten was falling to the earth. He was flapping his wings to no avail, and begging anyone to save him from gravity’s cold indifference.

Celestia spread her wings and with a powerful thrust…nothing happened. It was as she feared, ponies were not capable of flying on their own. Like unicorn horns, pegasi wings, and by extension alicorn wings, were conduits of magic allowing for flight,  while the wings did provide lift and thrust, without magic, pony bodies were simply too heavy for wings alone to carry them into the sky.

The sun princess felt sick, watching the poor little colt tumble and flail as he fell. All sound seemed to stop save for the beating of her own heart, time seemed to slow to a crawl. Celestia closed her eyes as tears began to form, “please” she whispered, “please…..”

She felt it then, the magic came back. For an immeasurably brief moment she felt a euphoria like she’d never known, relief, joy, confidence, all restored in one instant when she knew, on a subconscious level at least, that she could act once again. And she wasted no time.

With the speed and grace of an ancient immortal, Celestia shot towards the falling colt. Appearing above him, she dove downward to match his velocity. He was a mere three feet from the ground when he felt himself embraced in the forelegs of the solar diarch. There was a flash of light and the next thing he knew, they were much higher than they had been an instant before but no longer falling.

Celestia knew they were not out of danger as there was still the matter of an entire city falling right on top of them all. With magic restored, she contacted Discord telepathically. Discord, we need more time, please, use your powers to slow the fall of Cloudsdale so the rest of my subjects can get to safety.

I’m already on it, nice catch by the way, very dramatic. Back on the ground, Discord adopted an uncharacteristically serious face as he raised his arms towards the city. With a flash, a wave of energy shot from his hands, growing in size as it traveled until it finally hit the city. At once, everything seemed to freeze in place. Rubble and broken pillars hung in the air completely motionless. Cloudsdale looked for all the world like an oddly shaped sinking ship, its western side pointing at the ground while its eastern side reached skyward.

Celestia, do be a dear and tell your ponies to move, Cloudsdale is quite heavy for a city made of clouds. Even in her mind, Celestia could hear the strain in his voice.

The colt she had rescued still clang to her, trembling and sniffling as she landed. Captain Stalwart and a second guard, Lieutenant Rampart approached her. “Shhh, its ok little one” she said to her young charge, “this nice stallion is going to help you find your parents.”

“Th-thank you, p-p-princess” the child said as she handed him off to Lt. Rampart.

“Captain, I’m going to go assist Discord while he holds the city in place. Keep everypony moving, we may only have an hour at best.” Captain Stalwart saluted his princess and marched off to perform his duties.  Despite his years of training and discipline, he could not help but smile to himself. Never had he been so proud to serve the princess.

Lieutenant Rampart cautiously approached the princesses and Discord, not wanting to break their concentration. Luna had joined with Celestia and the draconequis moments after she arrived and been appraised of the situation. She had been in Canterlot making sure the Pink Cross and other relief efforts were ready to go when the call for aid came in from towns and villages around Equestria. All three appeared to be deeply focused, even Discord albeit with a comical expression.

“Your Majesties? I have an update on the situation; everypony has been cleared out of the immediate area and accounted for. Injuries range from minor sprains to several broken bones, but overall no fatalities.”

“Are you absolutely sure there is no one left under the city?” Celestia asked not opening her eyes.

“Yes Ma’am, Captain Stalwart has guards posted at several overlooking locations. They all report the area is clear.”

“Very well, Luna, Discord, we’ve done all we can, now we must let Cloudsdale fall.”

“Are you sure you want me to let it go now?” Discord asked, “I don’t think I’ll be able to catch it again once I do, I don’t have the energy, plus that spell has a thirty minute cool down.”

“Yes I’m sure, we can’t save it now, and it would take too long to re-enchant everything. On three we will stop channeling our energy into you and you can let it fall. One, two…… three!” Luna and Celestia cut their connection with Discord who moments later lowered his arms with a gasp of relief.

All eyes were on Cloudsdale now, the royal sisters stood like statues, sadness clearly visible on their faces. Discord on the other hand was now in a lounge chair wearing 3-D glasses and eating popcorn.

With a thunderous crash, Cloudsdale, The Jewel of the Heavens and testament to Equestrian engineering, was no more. Next Chapter: 4 Picking up the Pieces Estimated time remaining: 16 Minutes