There is an airship in the sky, and it is burning. It wheezes, coughs, splintering wood, a crackling sound in the distance, a sputtering engine, a howling exhaust. The first smoke is wispy and white, hard hot breaths in cold air. The ship is wheezing, trying to catch its breath. The hull seizes and swells like a beating heart.

Twilight watches from the ground, and for a moment she wonders if the airship is coming alive. She wonders if she is witnessing a genesis, the shaky first steps of a newborn.

And then there is a shriek and a scream. And then the smoke turns black and thick as coal. And then the ship is brilliant with the oranges and yellows and reds of fire.

The pilot, if there still is a pilot, is losing control. The ship twists. Little pieces fall away from its deck. They are heavy and solid, wriggling and spinning. From far away, their forms are indistinct. They could simply be bits of mast and lumber, someone nearby says.

Twilight reaches for them anyway. She does not think. It is an instinctual action, a great loose net thrown into the air. It is also pointless. She is much too far away, and they all fall through unhindered.

The ship sputters. A brittle thunderclap sounds out overhead, and the airship flips onto its side. It spirals down, tumbles end over end, disintegrating in the air. It loses from, becomes a storm of wood and fire and smoke, a storm raging furiously towards the ground. Behind, it leaves a trail of smoke. The trail holds its shape better than the wooden frame of the airship. The smoke is a tight spiral, and then stretches long and languid overhead, a snake uncoiling in the sky.

Twilight is running now, not away but towards the airship. Already she is doing the calculations. [i]Size, model, and type of aircraft, total potential capacity, actual passenger capacity.[/i] Her legs are aching, burning. Her eyes sting with sweat. Her body is buffeted by ponies fleeing in the opposite direction. [i]Angles of descent and velocities, wind resistance, actual speed and acceleration, where in Ponyville it will land, what will be crushed.[/i]

It is a passenger ship, likely able to accommodate upwards of two hundred ponies. It will crash just outside of Ponyville. Time until impact—not nearly enough.

Twilight knows she will not make it in time to make any difference. Mathematics is a cold and exacting art, as Twilight herself once was. Uncaring for the hundred-some lives in that fiery storm cloud racing towards the earth.

She runs faster anyway. She closes her eyes, but opens her mind. She searches for a spark in the fire.

This is something she knows, something she is good at, something she is intimately familiar with. First, as a filly, she learned to find the spark in herself. Then it was only a murmur, barely noticeable, but alive. Now it is an inferno deep in her chest, ready to be pulled out and thrown into the world.

Twilight reaches out, searches the falling airship, and she finds nothing. She remembers, unbidden and without warning, her entry exam for Celestia's school. She remembers the terror of searching for the spark in her chest and in the egg and finding the world barren, finding herself barren. She feels that terror again now, as she sifts desperately through the flames, and the airship nears the ground.

She remembers the sonic rainboom, when the spark ignited. She remembers the years of training in the school afterwards. The instructors taught her self control. They taught her to find the spark in the world around her. First in her fellow students, and then in the class pet, and then in the plants of the school arboretum.

She remembers finding it in her new friends in Ponyville. She remembers finding it in the bond that formed between them. She remembers watching that spark grow and strengthen, something like new life. She remembers the schoolmates who questioned aloud whether she would ever find a friend.

Twilight forgets everything else, and she reaches into the burning airship. She finds it—the spark. Only one. A flickering candle in a lit furnace. Twilight envelops it. She remembers the joy of finding a spark in a place all thought barren.

The airship collapses, explodes. The heat singes her coat as she pulls a single foal, unharmed, from the flames. She holds the spark close, never lets go.