[b]5. AIR RAY[/b] Although Air Rays are well established in Equestrian histories, many modern scholars consider the species apocryphal, and perhaps with good reason — for no species in pre-Unification lore has as varied a description and reputation. For example: Peony the Elder's [i]Natural History[/i] describes Air Rays as pony-sized swarms of predators, malevolent and cruel. Aristrottle's [i]History of Animals[/i] casts them as shy and solitary behemoths, remnants of ancient magical experiments. And Georges Hoovier's [i]Les Règnes Non-Chevaux[/i] claims that the Air Ray was a singular, immortal behemoth named Al'Ecsei, "son of the sky and daughter of the stars". Her Highness merely affirms that they (or it) are extinct, stating (as she so often does) that "there are bad dreams in the past which ought be left to slumber". About the only thing on which all sources agree is that Air Rays are as beings of elemental Air (the singular exception is Peony, who associates them with the humours of Void). They are invisible to the unaided eye — though in shape they resemble the common Ray of Frost, with a bulbous head, two broad wings, and a tapering tail — and feed upon cloudstrat. It is common for accounts of the Air Ray to note that they preferentially eat cumulonimbus; a notable exception is the second-century-BCE Lost Empire tragedy [i]The Wræth of the Skys[/i], in which the protagonist Sombra uses a cumulonimbus cloud to poison one. Their appetite is typically described as voracious — as in an old gryphon bawd boasting that Grover could drink "faster than Rays strip the heavens". Peony suggests that Air Ray feeding is the reason why no trace was ever found of the legendary Cloud Castle of Kathmun-Dew. And Hoovier quotes the creation myth of a Titmoose nest near Seaddle, in which the whole of existence was solid cloud until Al'Ecsei consumed enough of it to leave behind the clear sky, and excreted a pile which became the earth. Their relations with other elemental beings are surprisingly little mentioned. The anonymous Roamin work [i]De manibus Homini[/i] reports an eyewitness account of Air Rays and Earth Rays meeting at the horizon for revelry upon one particular Equinox Eve, and claims that the Scorching Ray is the Air Ray's natural enemy — although this is likely to be wholly fanciful, owing to its flagrant disregard of elemental affinity theory. On the other hoof, its assertion that "startled Air Rays are quicker than a Ray of Light" finds some support in Hoovier's survey of tribal legends. Pegasopolian lore places Air Rays as a parasite of windigos, tracking their movements and migrating behind them in order to devour their hatestorms. The pre-Unification foal's tale of "The Fate of Thunderbuck" concerns an ill-tempered stallion who built a cloud house in anger, attracting Air Rays which devoured his village. But Aristrottle dismisses this story as fanciful, and recounts speaking with the daughter of one Trailing Mist, whose beautiful singing enchanted an Air Ray; she doted upon it and gave it her construction cast-offs, until one day it saw her also feeding clouds to a baby windroc, and died on the spot of a broken heart. In [i]The Collected Exploits of Commander Hurricane[/i], she is said to have singlehoofedly frightened off an army of marauding Air Rays by drinking a barrel of rainbow juice and then passing gas in their direction. However — despite no shortage of tales of pegasus prodromes defending the walls of their outposts from Air Ray predation — her exploit is never known to have been repeated.