There was cold chaos, utter chaos when the abominable snow ponies invaded. The mudroom door blew open, allowing a gale of snow and anarchy to enter through the mudroom beyond, because the door had not been properly secured. With the snow-phoon came a flood of voices, excited, joyful voices of the abominable snow ponies that were invading. Swirling snowflakes blew in fantastic eddies and a stream of the most vulgar, most ear-blistering language flowed from Octavia’s lips in protest of the frozen backdoor invasion.
Sumac learned not one, but three new words to add to his arsenal of language.
Howling, panting, leaping about with frenzied glee, a ferocious abominable snow manticore spawn cannonballed right into poor Pinny Lane and knocked the giantess from her pins, bowling her over with a horrendous howl. Sumac, who had witnessed this assault, raised a weak, flickering shield around himself, and the rush of snowflakes caused showers of glittery sparkles when they struck the thrumming green field.
For invading his kitchen, Tarnished Teapot engaged the abominable snow Limestone and was forced to duck when she threw her wet, wadded up snow-encrusted scarf at him. Lateral movement saved him and when he caught the scarf, the abominable snow Limestone was ill-prepared to be whipped with her own hurled makeshift missile. A quick smart whip-crack right on the cutie mark sent the abominable snow Limestone scrambling, and she crashed into her abominable snow sister, Maud, sending spewing torrents of snow-gore cascading down to the floor.
“Back into the mudroom with all of you!” Tarnish bellowed while he glowered down at abominal snow Limestone. “You’d think that some of you were raised on a rock farm or something! Begone!” Holding abominable snow Limestone’s scarf aloft, he menaced the entire abominable snow herd with it.
So focused was Tarnish on the abominable snow ponies that he failed to notice the abominable snow manticore flanking him, and when he did by sheer happenstance gain awareness of the lurking, prowling snow beast, it was far too late to prevent the inevitable pounce. The mighty warrior was felled and collapsed into an ever-growing, ever-spreading dusting of snow upon the stone floor. Once felled, the abominable snow Limestone moved in for her revenge, which it seemed was to be served cold, as intended…
Supper had gone by in a blur that Sumac could scarce remember. Too much noise, far too many ponies. All of supper was one excited retelling of the day out, with a whole day of fun in the snow for the Pie family. Sumac didn’t mind listening, but all of this had been told with shouting and far too much overstimulating excitement. It was just too much for the little colt to bear. After his long day, after everything that had happened, it was all too much. As such, he was glad when supper had ended and the herd had broken up.
The much-needed quiet was a welcome relief.
“Vinyl… while illusion magic is magic and the standard approach applies, it is not enough.” While Trixie spoke, an apple sprouted legs and took off sprinting down the table with Boomer in hot, smoke-snorting pursuit.
Upon capture, the apple vanished entirely, leaving poor Boomer confused and distraught. Sumac, wrapped up in his poncho, allowed himself to smile at Boomer’s misfortune but paid attention to the magic lesson in progress, the quiet, peaceful, soothing magic lesson that kept his thoughts occupied whilst his mind relaxed. Blinking, Boomer waited for another piece of fruit to do something.
“For illusion, you can’t just focus your concentration and your will,” Trixie continued in a low voice and each spoken word sent hypnotic ripples over the surface of her hot chocolate. “Focus the senses, Vinyl. For visual illusions, focus upon what you want the eye to see and let your eyes do the work. They’ll know. We’re unicorns, and our sensory organs are all magical. They teach us that in Princess Celestia’s school. All of our sensory organs have a connection in some form to our horns. With the right alchemical concoctions, a unicorn can change what they see, and how they see it. This is also true for hearing, smell, taste, and touch.”
“And we have a magic sense.” Sumac felt silly saying it, because of course they knew it, but he couldn’t let the moment go by without mentioning it.
“So what you're saying is,” said Vinyl in Octavia’s borrowed voice, and whose muzzle was crinkled in deep concentration. “Is that I have to do that zebra zero focus thing and turn off my brain. The harder I think about it, the worse I’ll make the problem? I’ve got to let my ears shape the magic?”
“Is that so hard?” Trixie leaned forwards a bit towards Vinyl, smiled, and her ears pivoted forwards. “Your ears have a direct connection to your horn. Lie detection spells, roving ear spells, clairaudience spells, there are many spells that harness the magic of the horn-ear connection. You’re a sound engineer, Vinyl. This should be second nature to you.”
At this, Vinyl sighed and shook her head. “It isn’t. My ears are good, but I’ve never given them a direct connection to my magic before. At least, not that I’m aware of.”
“Visualise it. Imagine plugging in some sound equipment and then check out what works. Illusions are far simpler than unicorns let on. There is all of this talk of complexity and difficulty but most of the fuss is imaginary. Less thinking, more doing. Illusion is less cognitive and more visceral.”
Again, an apple sprouted legs and took off for a run, but this time, Boomer was wary. She watched, her eyes glittering with draconic intelligence, but then she just couldn’t help herself. Frills and spines set in the maximum aggression position, she attacked; just as before, the apple vanished, leaving behind a flustered dragon.
Everypony had their own approach to magic; Trixie and Vinyl both had different ways and means. Sumac had big thoughts and wondered if maybe schools were wrong to try and get foals to learn in one specific way, when maybe they would be better served by another method. He learned by doing, watching, and observing. Trixie would show him a few ways to deal with a magical problem and then get out of his way so he could figure it out. While this had worked for him so far up to this point in his life, magic instruction in Twilight’s school took a far different approach, methodical, with lots of theory, book learning, how and why, the nuts and bolts of magic. While Sumac was capable, he supposed, he felt that he did better by just doing things and then sorting out the fine details later.
Vinyl took a nuts and bolts approach, which made sense to Sumac. It was what engineers did, he reckoned. In preparation for crafting her voice, Vinyl delved into books and thoroughly investigated the hows and whys of illusion, of voice projection, of ventriloquism. In contrast, Sumac found that books were great things to turn to when the first attempt failed. For Sumac, failure was important. Every great thing started with failure, even if failure was sometimes awful.
Was being a pegasus pony or an earth pony this hard? Sumac didn’t know. But what he did know was that many unicorns forwent magic altogether and existed with the most basic of understandings. A little telekinesis for fine manipulation was all they ever needed or wanted. During his travels with Trixie, Sumac had encountered many such unicorns and he never quite knew what to think of them.
Magic had rules, many of them contradictory, and magic had effects, again, most of which were contradictory. It didn’t like to be studied, or measured beyond the most basic of observations. A thaumaton counter could measure the ambient levels of magic in a given area and that was about it. Beyond that, one ran into risks as magic would make a concerted effort to resist complex measurements.
“In your ear, imagine a sound that you want to hear and then project that sound.”
The sound of his teacher’s voice snapped Sumac from his thoughts. Teacher? No, mother. She had been his teacher, his master, so it was still easy to think of her this way. A good teacher too. When he wanted to investigate the tidal pools on the beach to look for sea monsters, she had encouraged him and never once said that he would never find an enormous sea monster in such a tiny tidal pool.
“But how?” Vinyl asked.
“Well, how are you projecting Octavia’s voice and everything else?”
For a moment, Vinyl sat in perplexed silence and then she replied, “I don’t know. It’s different. That sound exists. My voice… the voice I imagine myself having, that’s just it. How do I make imagination real?”
“Oh, that’s easy.” Trixie laughed; it was not a haughty sound, but a good-natured and pleasant bit of mirth.
Sumac watched Vinyl shake her head but could not read her current state of emotion.
“Imagination is the foundation of magic,” Trixie went on and she gestured at the burning fire. “If I imagine that something is burning hard enough, I’ll set it ablaze. Everything begins and ends with imagination. Everything is governed by this principle. If I make believe hard enough at something, one of two things will happen; I will either set it on fire or I will make a very convincing illusion that it is on fire.”
“I make things burn by being angry.” Vinyl’s blunt confession caused Trixie to sit back and there was a wet slosh from her cocoa cup. “All I have to do is get mad. I think about all of the unfair things in the world. The bad things. I think about how awful it is to be mute. Lately, I’ve been thinking about that bug bitch taking Sumac and the fires just start right up. I think about the big fight that day and how they were in our home. And most of all, I keep thinking about how horrified the ponies around us were because Tarnish was killing changelings rather than be horrified that there were changelings. I think about these things and the fires just start right up.”
In silence, Trixie nodded, and Sumac got the feeling that his mother understood.
Sumac knew of another way to start fires; one gave the molecules in the area to be ignited a playful tickle and kept doing so until something happened. Gaining molecular awareness was the first step towards becoming a wizard and Sumac had mastered this early on, but only because Trixie was a patient, dutiful teacher.
“Direct all of that same energy into giving yourself a voice.” Reaching across the table, Trixie gripped Vinyl’s fetlock in her own and gave it a squeeze. “Perhaps you can imagine telling those ponies off for being silly. For not having common sense. Imagine how good it would feel to rant at them for being stupid, because Tarnish was there to save them and the changelings were there to bring them harm.”
Vinyl was still for a moment, thoughtful, and she made a slow nod. “Thank you, Trixie, I’ll keep that in mind. That actually helps me out quite a bit.”
“I’m glad I could help…”
Pebble’s bed could only be described as crowded, packed as it was with warm, fuzzy bodies. Well, there was one scaley body that was rather spiny, but it was warm and could be cuddled if you snuggled against it just right. Pebble, Hidden Rose, and Ambrosia were all up at the head of the bed, while Sumac, Boomer, and Megara were tucked in at the foot. The bed was long enough to give everypony enough room to stretch out lengthwise, but one had to be packed in tight widthwise.
Tonight, it was Maud doing the tucking in, but Cloudy was there as well.
“It has been a very long day,” Maud deadpanned and to Sumac, she sounded the way he felt about to day. “Gingerbread houses, visiting grandparents, visiting cousins, and there was a bit of a blowout. Megara got to play in the snow with Limestone, and Limestone it seems, has a new roughhousing buddy. All of you look pretty sleepy.”
Ambrosia yawned out the words, “I’m not sleepy,” in protest and fought to keep her eyes open.
“Pebble, you did something I’m proud of,” Maud continued in her cold iron monotone. “But you also did something I’m none too pleased about. I’m going to let that go though, and tomorrow will be a new day.” With every word she spoke, Maud poked the quilts with her hoof, stuffing them beneath the edge of the mattress.
When Maud tucked you in, it was difficult to move, or to even get out, but it was pleasant enough in a suffocating sort of way. Sumac felt the wooden bed frame creak when Maud reared up onto her hind legs and leaned against the firm but squishy edge of the mattress. She reached over the Apple twins, kissed Pebble goodnight, then did the same for both Hidden Rose as well as Ambrosia, both of whom giggled and squirmed from the affectionate gesture.
The wooden timbers below the bed creaked a little more when Maud moved down the length of the mattress to where Megara lay, and she stroked the manticore’s spiky poofy tufts of mane while looking into her eyes. For a moment, Sumac saw something on Maud’s face, some emotion, but he didn’t know what it was. It was gone in an instant though.
“Nutmeg, pay no attention to what ponies have to say about you. I’m sorry about today. All you need to do is focus on what we think about you, and we love you. My mother, your grandmother, she called you Nutmeg Pie, and I know my mother. She wouldn’t have said that unless she meant it, so I guess that makes you a Pie now—”
“Nopony better dare to challenge me or my word,” Cloudy muttered to herself beneath her breath.
For a moment, Maud paused, turned her head, and looked over at Cloudy. She said nothing, but blinked a few times, all while her ears pivoted in her mother’s direction. After a few seconds, her head swiveled about in an almost mechanical sort of way and she looked down at Megara once more. The stoic grey mare sighed, stroked Megara again, and then her ears relaxed their rigid posture.
“You can be a Teapot, or a Pie, or you can find your own way if that suits you. Family goes beyond a mere name, and when you grow up a bit more, I hope you’ll understand that. We’re all family, Nutmeg. Everypony in this bed with you, all of them are family. Everypony in this house right now, all family. Do right by them and they’ll do right by you.”
“Does that go for us?” Hidden Rose asked in a sleepy voice.
“Yes,” Maud replied with deadpan finality. “I wouldn’t have said it otherwise.”
Bending her neck, Maud leaned down, kissed Megara, and then peeled back the blanket a bit to find Boomer, who was already sound asleep. With a great deal of gentleness, she kissed Boomer as well, careful not to wake her, and then Maud loomed large in Sumac’s vision. She stared down at him and he up at her; there seemed to be some kind of exchange going on that Sumac just didn’t understand, something important and meaningful.
“Because of you,” Maud said in the softest of deadpans, “I have a better understanding of my mother, and that means an awful lot to me, Sumac. When I brought Tarnish home, my mother accepted him as her son. I didn’t know it at the time, but she taught me an important lesson. Now, here I am in a similar situation with you. I’ve made you my own, Sumac, and you are very dear to me.”
Before Sumac could say anything, he was kissed, and this robbed him of speech. All he could do is blink and look upward in silence. Cloudy said something, but he couldn’t make out what it was. Maud pulled away and Sumac wished that she hadn’t. With her hoof, she smoothed the quilts and blankets once more, covering Boomer, and then she was gone.
“Go on, Maud.” Cloudy gave her daughter a nod and moved to stand beside her. “I think I’ll read to them for a bit and watch them nod off.”
At this, Maud hesitated, and after several seconds she said, “I’ll think I’ll stay.”
In response, Cloudy smiled, which made the corners of her eyes crinkle, and she gave her daughter a full body-bump. “Fine then, suit yourself. Fetch me a storybook, Maudlin Persephone Pie, and be quick about it.”
“Yes, Mom…”