Amber woke up with a gasp, like any other morning. She rolled to her hooves with a yawn and stretched out. She could smell her own sweat, the sharpness of her hooves as they moved. She shook herself as she rolled out of bed. Her ears flicked towards the little sounds in the library that she could identify. The tap-tap-tap of a raccoon on the roof. The click-click-clack of a squirrel in the walls.
They were quiet noises, but felt oppressively loud with nothing to compare them to. She shook her head again, going to the window and peering outside. The world was lit in that early-morning grey. She could see the familiar streets around the library, mostly empty save for a pair of joggers that passed each other with a wave.
"Get it together." Amber reached with her magic, getting the water going and soon hopping into the shower to be doused with the stream of heated water. The warmth, the pressure, all of it brought a comfort to her. She cleaned herself with an equal desire for self-care and to finish, stepping out into the open air of her room and beginning to dry.
She stepped out of her room with a smile, ready to crash into Comforting. Comforting hugged Amber warmly. "Good morning! Now, who's ready for lesson number two." The number two exploded all around Comforting in a wild display of the digit. "Ooh, fancy."
"I'm ready!" Amber beamed in a rush, hugging back Comforting and picking her up to spin around. "I've been waiting for this."
Comforting landed gently. "You know, I'm larger than you, and you still pick me up." She giggled at the idea. "I love it."
Amber waved a hoof at Comforting. "That only works because you want me to pick you up. If you didn't, I bet I couldn't." She considered that thought and rolled her eyes. "Obviously you could still toss me around, but you don't do that. But, I'm ready for the next spell. Am I making sense?"
"You are." Comforting rolled a hand through her hair as she picked Amber up in her arms, cuddling her as they floated along. "Have I mentioned how adorable you are? Not today? Well, easily fixed." She smooched the top of Amber's cheek and placed them in the magic room, runes still on the blackboard. "It's time for a new spell," she sang, drawing her book of spells from nowhere.
Amber bounced in place with excitement, just watching, eager to see. "I'm ready."
"Ahem!" Comforting held up the book. "This one is a little more complicated." She winked at Amber. "But I think you can do it. This one's trickier, because it's really the start of a spell, and you have to make up a bunch of spells out of it. You liked summoning things, but only summoning one thing at a time, and only for as long as you focused on it? That's a drag, right?" Comforting opened the book and showed the first page.
The runes read 'creation', but that was hard to read from Amber's angle, though it could be guessed.
"So!" Comforting hopped back down, dancing behind Amber with a grin. "If you have enough energy, this allows you to create anything you can dream of, including copies of ponies, even yourself." Copies of what she was speaking of appeared around her, but only for a moment or two. "Trick is, you have to finish the spell with what you want. That means you'll have to make a 'summon pizza' spell to summon pizza, but the pizza you make won't have the limits of the starter spell. With me? Make sense?"
"Uh." Amber shook her head slowly. "I don't think I can do that. That's not simple, at all." She held out her hooves in front of her, watching her legs tremble.
"Don't be scared." Comforting took Amber's shaking hooves in her hands, rubbing gently. "I'll be here. Let's start and see how it goes, hm?"
She darted to the board and got to scribbling runes. "Here's the start of it. It's not that super long." She paused when she was done, writing 'pencil' on the board. "Got that?"
Amber watched carefully, trying to memorize it as she approached. She was pleased to find she could remember it well enough to try it again. She played the magical music over her horn, but nothing happened. The magic just lingered a moment, then faded away, leaving her with nothing. "I thought I did it right."
Comforting wagged a finger. "I said it's not done. You have to add what you want to make on the end of it, and that's the tricky part. Each thing you want to make has its own magical word. The more complicated the thing, the more complicated the word." She hiked two thumbs at herself. "Want to make another me? That's going to take you too long to figure out."
Amber considered Comforting with clear doubt. "Is there even a word for you?"
"Sure!" Comforting revealed it in an electric ticker over her head, moving far too quickly to memorize as all the runes involved scrolled past in a hurry. "See? Super complicated, which is why I'm so proud of you for trying it out."
"Right." Amber shook her head with a grumble. "Okay, let me try." She tapped her chin with a frown. "But how do I start? I don't know the word, the magic word, for anything at all."
"This was easier in the old days." Comforting put her hands on her hips. "They used to have libraries of this. What you need is to learn to see, magically, so you can start examining things around you and sussing out their words."
"How do I do that?"
Comforting smiled at Amber's eager question. "Easily enough, once you're willing to try, which, of course, you are." She waved a hand across Amber's eyes. Amber's vision was pushed to a new place, seeing things in a whole new way, magic flowing through all living things. Even things that were not alive had magic, but that magic was still. The life of the object gave it an edge, a flow that was, at the same time, stationary.
"Your eyes are glowing." Comforting poked a finger against one of Amber's eyelids, pulling it back. "But there you go. Now you've felt that. Get it?"
Amber scrunched her eyes shut, shaking her entire form before she blinked them open, normal vision returned. "Wow. So, um." She focused on the feeling she had just experienced. It took several tries, but she eventually pushed herself back into that strange space, to see magic around her. "I love it." She wandered away, magic in her eyes, literally.
Comforting inclined her head. "Guess this lesson's done." She zipped to the door and closed it behind her. "Have fun experimenting."
Amber kept her head lowered, trying to process what she was seeing, but it wasn't easy. There were a lot of things all around her, and they all seemed to be made up of so much. It seemed the deader and simpler something was, the easier it was to get a grasp of the magic in it.
Which is why she was drawn to a little ball. She couldn't pick it up, it seemed stuck to this big sheet of magic that was more complicated. So she ran her hooves over the ball instead, inspecting it. It had a few streaks of magic, all the same. "Comforting, how do I turn this back into runes?" But Comforting wasn't there. Or at least she didn't respond. Amber continued anyway.
Flipping back to normal vision, she could see she had been examining a doorknob, all made of iron. "Not alive, never was." This made sense to her.
She pushed herself back into that other mode of seeing, the magical one, and noticed all those lines were doing a sort of loop. "That's neat." She reached out with her magic, pushing against a point on that loop, where she saw something more complicated happening. She tugged a little on that bit, and that did something. A hole grew around it, and a string of runes started to twirl out.
"Oh, awesome!" She was so excited, she felt she could squeal, but that wouldn't do. Instead, she kept her magic on the thing, seeing what else happened as she turned her magic on, and off, and on again. "It's like a program."
So it was that when the first customer came in, Amber was ready to greet them with a smile, and offer a doorknob.
The pony was quite baffled at this offer. "What door does this go to?"
"None, anyone you want?" Amber giggled a little. "Your choice, but it's yours now. Enjoy! Can I help you find a book?"
The pony hefted the knob in their hooves. "No. I got it. I can read just fine, but I don't understand why I have this. Did I win a prize?"
Amber shook her head, clearing her mind of the wonder of the moment. "O-yeah! Yeah. Congratulations. You're at the library. That knob is like the books you'll be reading, opening doors. Get it?"
"No."
Amber gave a softer smile, raising the knob with her magic. "It's the sort of thing that doesn't make sense until you see how it is." She got up from the desk, and trotted around the side of the desk. She tucked the knob away, laughing tensely. "Now, go ahead. Feel free to ask if you have any questions. We're here to help."
Comforting put her hands on Amber's shoulders from behind, almost getting kicked for it. "As you just learned, shoving your head into the magic too eagerly can leave you thinking magically, and not very normally. Keep that up for too long and too often and you'll be like Screwball. Don't do that."
Amber paled with horror. "I didn't think that was even possible!" She turned and hugged Comforting around the middle. "But you helped me keep from going down that path."
Comforting ruffled the top of Amber. "You did that yourself. Feel free to look, but only a little. You're not here to rediscover all of pony magic all at once. Today, you figured out doorknobs, and I think that's pretty neat. More importantly, you know how to learn, so you can do more, later, a little at a time."
"But," Amber squeezed more tightly, "I wanted to learn about that."
Comforting chuckled with a knowing nod. "You want to know everything, but you can't. For one, that would be boring, and two, your brain isn't big enough for that." She grasped Amber by her temples, rubbing gently. "I want that brain to keep working if we can, hm?"
"Yeah, yeah." Amber blew a raspberry, rolling her eyes. "I get it. I need to learn one thing, then move on to the next thing."
"And how you handle each of those things matters." She tapped Amber's nose. "And no hurry. One thing a day is already a brisk trot. Now, truly, we're past the point you had one of these." She dug about in her sides and found a book. "Here we are." She shoved it against Amber's front.
Amber took it in her magic, lifting it up and flipping it open, but it was blank. "What is this? Why's it so heavy?"
"Because it's important to you, and it's what you chose." Comforting twirled, dancing away, waving as she vanished into the bookshelves.
Amber squinted at her new tome. "Uh." But it clicked a moment later. "Oh!" She pulled out a pen and got to working busily, jotting down the spell for a doorknob, just the doorknob part. "There we go." With satisfaction, she got to work, being the head librarian.
Comforting popped into being with a name badge on her chest. Clearing her throat, she approached one of the ponies looking lost. "Can I help?" She did work there, and was ready to do her part to make that library a success.