Still shaking a little bit from her nightmare, Twilight decided against returning to sleep right away. Instead, she untangled herself from the bed and got up to walk around the castle hallways.
The castle was large and spacious, hallways just small enough not to seem empty and cavernous. It always made Twilight feel large and important to walk down them, especially when she was a little filly, and walking through them alone at night just amplified the feeling. It felt like the halls had been made expressly for her, and as she walked the familiar halls called up happy memories of her childhood and her tutelage with Celestia, and the teachers at the School for Gifted Unicorns. The halls were quiet. In this section of the castle, there were not even guards at this hour. Which was why Twilight was surprised to hear a cry that echoed up from the floor downstairs. Heart thumping, she raced to the stairs, where she could make out some light below.
She practically tumbled down the stairs, hooves nearly tripping themselves in their haste to be down, horn already beginning to charge. She was almost as the bottom of the stairs when she remembered that she had wings, and started to flap them, but stopped when that caused her to stumble and almost fall flat on her face. It was unimportant now, regardless, as she was already at the bottom of the stairs homing in on the light pouring from the door of one of the rooms off the downstairs hall. She briefly considered teleporting toward the door, but decided that it wouldn’t get her there much faster at the rate that she was moving, and that she would much rather save the charge in her horn for whatever lay within anyway. She could hear grunts and pants of frenzied exertion from within and skidded into the pool of light coming from the doorway, mind working furiously, ready to cast a sleep spell, a telekinesis spell, a teleportation spell, on the objects in the room or on herself, depending on the situation. No situation she had considered had prepared her for what was actually within, though, and her horn stopped glowing as its charge slowly receded.
She saw her mentor, the mare who had taught her most of the magic she knew (outside of books), the mare who, incidentally, happened to rule over the land of Equestria, wreathed in a flurry of feathers and magic. Small points of fiery orange sparked near the tips of a spell which seemed to change direction and target faster than the eye could see, surrounding the three other figures in the room. White wings, tips somehow shiny in the late light, slashed just past the throats, sides, and backs of the three figures, which appeared to be white, eyeless ponies, a unicorn, a pegasus and an earth pony. Their motion, hypnotic, continued for several breathless moments, illuminated by the light in the room and the schizophrenic spell. The three figures stood or hung motionless, illuminated by the same light, which danced in strange ways across their backs and blank faces. Then, everything stopped, and there stood Celestia just as Twilight remembered her, wings by her sides, lit only by the lanterns in the room, breathing heavily. She exhaled briefly and powerfully and turned to Twilight, smiling slightly.
“Hello Twilight.” she said, warm voice only minimally punctuated by deep breathing. “I didn’t expect to see you up this late. But I suppose you aren’t a filly anymore, and can keep your own hours.” She made a quick kind of stretching motion with her wings and some pieces of metal clattered to the ground. Twilight eyed them curiously.
“Oh.” Celestia said. “I see you’re wondering what my wingblades are. I suppose it makes sense, given that the last time I used them any more than ceremonially was over 700 years ago, that they would have become some obscure piece of history.” She paused and eyed her longtime student. “Suffice to say that they are weapons like those that the pegasi of old used to use for battle, specifically crafted for me.”
Twilight just stared at her quizzically. The idea that a weapon had been specifically made for the stolid and peaceable alicorn she had looked up to for her whole life was almost as outlandish as the idea that she was able to use it.
“Wingblade battle routines were actually so beautiful and graceful that they remained a form of dance a couple hundred years after the fall of the empire,” Celestia mused, “Really, I’m surprised that you haven’t read about wingblades in any of your books.”
Twilight had, but it was another thing entirely to see them in action. None of the books she had read on the subject had contained pictures, so she had always imagined wingblade routines as some sort of primitive jab-slicing motions, and the wingblades themselves as crude moils, not carefully crafted, wickedly shiny blades. She was suddenly struck by the notion that perhaps this sort of artificial primitivity was what others grafted onto the classical conjurers, and why they didn’t put nearly as much stock into them as Twilight did. She felt suddenly embarrassed at the ridiculousness of her preconceptions.
“Not to mention they make great exercise.” continued Celestia. “Want to try some simple ones with me before I turn in and leave the night to my sister, who so generously deserves it?” she asked.
Twilight could hardly refuse the princess she looked up to so much, and besides she was not about to pass up a chance for knowledge (which, she had been forced to grudgingly accept over the past year, did sometimes come from things other than books), so a few moments later she found herself next to the princess, watching and mimicking her as she gave instructions.
“Crouch down,” said Celestia, head turned toward Twilight as she bent her legs and flattened toward the ground, “and spread your wings out above you, like this.” An enormous volume of feathers sprung from Celestia’s back, as if all Fluttershy’s birds had taken flight at the same time.
Twilight spread her own wings, thinking of how she’d seen Rainbow Dash in this position quite a few times, whenever Rainbow was preparing to fly fast, or run fast, or do something else fast (which meant whenever Rainbow was about to do anything, pretty much). She doubted that Rainbow knew the first thing about wingblades, but maybe it was somthing instinctive. Twilight back felt strangely bare, and her wings quivered a bit in anticipation.
“Now do this.” said Celestia, and she waved her wings counterclockwise away from her in two quick strokes, first the right, then the left, using the power they generated to rear up slightly onto her hind feet.
Twilight attempted to copy her, but she flung her right wing out too far, tipping her further back on her hooves than she had intended. She tried to rebalance in her sweep with her left, but that sent her even further back and tipping toward her right. Her wings fluttered in front of her and she managed to set herself straight again just in time to fall over onto her back.
Celestia laughed politely. “Sorry Twilight Sparkle, I forget that even though you are the most talented unicorn I have ever seen, you have had your wings less time than most pegasus foals. I think we can safely end the lessons here tonight. Would you care to continue tomorrow?” she asked as she extended a hoof toward the prone Twilight.
Twilight nodded numbly, ashamed by her clumsiness. She accepted the hoof, which lacked the gold shoes her mentor usually wore, and clambered back to her own hooves. Celestia gently removed her hoof from between Twilight’s, and began walking toward the door. Halfway through, she stopped and turned back.
“By the way,” she said, her left violet eye and side of her face framed between the doorway and her tall body, half-shadowed by its distance from the lit room, “I’ll talk to you more about this tomorrow, but I meant to tell you that I need to talk to you and your friends about the elements in the next month or so.” her face seemed a bit contorted, perhaps from the strain of speaking backwards through a doorway. “You might start thinking about returning to Ponyville to give them my invitation.”