The clouds parted in front of her like they were nothing, which they honestly were. To her, they really were nothing. She was a pony, sentient, alive, constant, with goals and wants and desires. They were clouds.
But sometimes she envied them.
It was a very minor, yet very bitter envy. It was bordering the edge of unsupportable, too. She could travel quickly, and she could go anywhere she wanted to, right? And she could appreciate the ground below, and the wind in her face, and clouds couldn't. What was there to envy?
Maybe that's simply what it was. They couldn't appreciate it, because that was it for them. They saw the ground, and the sea, and died peacefully knowing nothing but that. Of course it was stupid, but at her altitude, some stupid thoughts find their way to her mind.
The cloud she was lying back on was being finicky, making noises against the pure silence of the storm, breaking her concentration. But she refused to go back to the west and find another dense-enough cloud, so eventually, it blended in with the hum, and the silence returned. She wanted to close her eyes, but she couldn't. Not through this.
Above the clouds of a silent storm, few ponies knew, there were layers of fog. But it was different from normal fog - denser, like smoke, and its colours were constantly shifting when her back was to the sun. Not just the colours of the rainbow. Every colour she could recognize, and some she couldn't. It was more than mesmerizing. It was powerful.
It was only a silent storm that made her think so much about the trivial things, and it was definitely due to the magic, or so Twilight had warned her earlier that week. Wow, earlier that week. Another era, when the storm wasn't there. It seemed eternal.
She knew the thoughts were going to come because, four years ago, part of her training was 'attending' a silent storm. They'd traveled across an ocean and two deserts to get to where they saw it, and it made her cry. That was the last time she remembered crying, was four years ago. Nopony ever got to see above a silent storm, unless they were a pegasus curious and strong enough to find a way through the thick cloud layers and preserve their stamina enough to stay.
Suddenly, she saw a shadow appear above her head. Another pegasus? She turned behind her.
There, breaking the sun's rays into thousands of small, beautiful fragments in a halo around it, was the silhouette of a tree, rising through the thick fog like a phoenix from the ashes.
It was one of the least-likely things any pony, any sentient thing, could ever witness. Her eyes refused to blink, her stomach churned. In front of her, the tree's bark, strip by thin strip, began peeling from its body and dissolving into shards and then into nothing. Leaves fell silently, suspended by laws of gravity that don't exist, before curling and becoming nothing but air in front of her. From the center and spreading up and down like some plague, holes appeared, and chunks dissolved, and pieces disappeared little by little.
They were going somewhere, somewhere unknown. Somewhere she couldn't go. Somewhere the clouds couldn't go.
When it was gone, Rainbow Dash cried.