It just came to our houses and streets without anything. No prior warning, no evacuation, nopony awake who saw that nigh-unstoppable force, just a blue wave thrashing and drowning everything it touched. The community only remembers two dates — 31 January and 1 February 1953 — but our presence there was etched into eternity’s blanket…

What happened afterwards? Simple. Having lost everything but myself and my two waterlogged wings I had struggled in flying to somewhere farther inland, where fellow survivors passed their time while reconstruction and dyke strengthening (the Deltawerken) swept through affected regions. “We’re leaving nothing to chance,” muttered an earth pony. “Never again shall we…” Her further words disappeared under painful, continuous sobbing.

“Never again?” I inquired. She stood petrified with head drooping, the inconceivable casualties freezing her once-vivid brain solid.

“You see, in spite of how fast these replacements are popping up, and how much land we’ve ‘stolen’ from water, there isn’t much around now to cheer somepony up”, her husband explained. “You’ve got a pair of glistening rainbow eyes, why not make a rainbow?”

“Still young, haven’t had a cutie mark to cherish. And I haven’t been taught how to make rainbows yet.”

“You need sunshine, which we’ve got in abundance currently, and two plain white clouds. You fly ever-tighter circles around one, then when those droplets get on your nerves just dash to the other cloud and hopefully a rainbow will form. Now get out there!”

With those comforting words I soared into a sky that looked and smelled like cornflowers. (Ouch.) Fluffy clouds were sparse but definitely visible so I took position beside one, fixated on a similar object lying quite far but not too far away. Like accelerating protons in a synchrotron I thus twirled, spinning circles while attempting to crush the associated dizziness — “six, five, four” I counted down, keeping track of the target cloud. “Three, two, one, LOS!”

My heart could have bled there. So heavy and drenched I was exiting the spin that I could hear my heart beat, but I couldn’t hear it. Two things now existed in the universe, me and the target cloud, which I only had to crash into. Travelling at such high velocities (not approaching Mach 1 though) made steering impossible, and all I could do was wait second after second, heartbeat after heartbeat, hoping I had flung myself into some padding.

Thud.

I snapped out of my quasi-unconsciousness commanding my head to look behind — and there it was, a brilliant rainbow blazing through the clouds in flying colours, mesmerising me and shaping my cutie mark as well: a rainbow connecting disjoint islands. “These are rays of hope,” I pondered. “No, wait, fires of rejuvenation.”