//------------------------------//
// Chapter One 
// Story: Schism 
// by Sev 
//------------------------------//

Chapter One

Twilight Sparkle eyed the overturned applecart in the gully with incredulity. “How in Equestria did you manage to pull that off?” she asked the larger, yellow mare beside her. Applejack chuckled nervously. “Thaaats a long story, sugercube. The moral of it is a lot shorter.”
“What's the moral?”
“Dont be practicing rope tricks while yer' tugging a cart full'of apples alongside a 30 foot drop”.
“Good moral,” Twilight said, chuckling. “you're lucky you didn't get hurt, AJ.  Don't DO stuff like that! Ponies don't usually come down this trail unless they've got some pressing reason to. If you'd fallen down with the cart, we might not have found you for hours.”
AppleJack waved a hoof dismissively. “Ah know, Ah know. Its just the start o' Winter Rodeo is comin' up soon an ah wanted to get in all the extra practice ah could.” she sighed, “now ah got this mess tah sort out instead. Even if you can help me move the thing, its still quite rightly busted, to say nuthin' of the apples.” The workhorse turned a circle and grunts, gazing skyward as though hoping to  find salvation in the clouds somewhere. “Big Macintosh is gunna skin me alive an' use my cutiemark for a wall decoration when he finds out the whole day's harvest is half crushed under kindling.”
Twilight smiled and nudged her friend. “Dont worry about it. I cant do much about the apples, but I can at least get your cart back on the road. Mending spells are my speciality!” Applejack raised a brow and smirked. “Aren't all spells your speciality?” Twilight chuckles, slightly embarrassed. “Well, maybe most, but I mean it. Fixing things is...comforting. You can really tell when you've gotten it right, you know? I like that.”
Twilight braced herself on the side of the ditch and spread her aura out around her, sinking tendrils of light into the dirt for stability. Her horn shimmered, and radiant energy rippled off its surface, convalescing around the fractured form of the cart below. She grit her teeth and pushed her head upward, and with a creak and a moan, the cart lifted from the ground. Applejack gave a little whistle as Twilight guided the wreck to the road and set it down, panting gently. “Never fails to amaze me, sugercube. Ah know exxxacctly how much that thing weighs. Hard enough to pull with wheels under it, let alone in big fractured chunks.”  Twilight laughed, “Thanks, but levitation isn't really a...graceful spell. Its not something I can really be proud of, magically.  Its kinda like...like pulling a big heavy object up a rope with a pulley, right?  It might be hard, it might take a while, but anypony can do it as long as they have the rope, the pulley, and a place to tug.  Levitation spells can lift more, with less work, but its still just brute magical force.” Applejack snorted, “That may be, but if it gets the job done, ah ain't complaining.”
Twilight fused the first wooden axel back together and situated it in place as AppleJack came back up the side of the dirt slide. She'd insisted on collecting the remaining pieces herself, wanting to be of some use while Twilight affected repairs. Applejack could've fixed the cart herself given time and tools, but she had neither, and considering she was already looking at a world of hurt for losing the day's harvest, letting Twilight at least repair the cart without visible signs of damage seemed the wisest course of action. “What was it ya were sayin' earlier? About 'knowin' when you've gotten it right'?” she asked, after dropping off part of a wheel.
Twilight moved on to the next trouble spot, systematically repairing as she moved around the cart. “When you start a project, like um..like building a barn. You usually have a plan, right?”
“Yeah, always. Measure twice, buck once, they say.”
“Well you do in magic too, only...” Twilight paused, searching for words, “only the plan doesn’t always have all the details. Any time you start something in magic, you have to make sure you've laid out a way to stop it after its begun. It doesn’t just turn off on its own. With construction and repair magic, like this, its really direct. I begin the mend, I stop the mend, the wood goes where I direct it to. But with some magic its so complex that you cant really know if your countermeasures are going to work the way you expect them to.  Does that make sense?”
“Nope.”
“Right,” Twilight made a face, trying a different approach. “Look at it this way, remember when I uh...had that little...accident when I enchanted my doll and made half of Ponyville go insane trying to chase it?” “HA, yeah,” Applejack replied with a humored snort. “Well, that was because when I cast that spell, I didn't consider how to cancel it. I wasn’t thinking ahead the way I'm supposed to, and I ended up in a situation where I couldn't get to the doll to remove the enchantment. If I'd had my head on strait that day, I could've built an easier dismissal into the enchantment when I cast it to begin with.” AppleJack snickered, “Or you might've just not done it,”. Twilight sighed and the canvas flap that covered the cart snapped into place. “Well, yeah, or that.”
“So how come Princess Celestia was able the cancel yer enchantment so easy?” AppleJack asked, stepping back as the last few bits of the fractured cart snapped into place. 
“She's Princess Celestia,” Twilight replied, smoothing out her now tussled mane.  “She raises the Sun in the sky every day with less thought than it took me to raise this wagon. I'm not much of an obstacle to her, plan or no plan. Maybe if I had a few thousand years to practice...and was a lot taller...” The pair of them laughed as Applejack slipped into the newly repaired harness and came up alongside her purple hued friend, who had already begun trotting toward Ponyville.
“TWIIIIIIIIILIIIIIIIIIIIIIGHT!”
There was something curiously comforting to Twilight about the sound of Spike screaming her name in a state of panic. Familiar, maybe, more than comforting. It wasn't that he was prone to doing it needlessly, in fact Spike was usually more level headed than most of Ponyville's local populous. It was more that suitable need arose more often than one might expect. It meant there was a job to be done, or a goal to be obtained, or a task to complete, and the simple linearity of that fact gave Twilight a sense of purpose she found appealing. Much like the simplicity of restoration magic, there was a joy in having a task with a hard, defined ending.
Of course, in the mean time, there was still a baby dragon running at breakneck speed and yelling in delirium that needed attending to.
“TWIIIIII-” 
“SPIKE!” Twilight yelled above him, snapping him to attention. She and Applejack had just gotten into town, still towing the empty, but mercifully repaired, cart behind them. “Whats gotten into you?” Spike had a scroll clutched in one hand, which he was waving frantically. Twilight followed it with her eyes for a moment reflexively before it made her dizzy and she shook her head free of the distraction. Applejack, rather used to diffusing panicking animals, simply grabbed the scroll in her teeth and put a hoof on top of Spike's head until his flailing subsided. It took longer than she expected it to. 
Twilight took hold of the scroll with a basic magical gesture and unfurled it in front of herself. “This is Palace parchment...when did this get here?” she asked Spike. He pulled his head free of Applejack's restraint.
“HOURS ago!  I've been looking all over town trying to find you! The Princess is  on her way!” At Spike's declaration, Twilight's eyes widened, and a shiver of fear shot down her back. Here? To Ponyville?  A sudden visit? She wasn't ready! 
“I'm not ready!” she exclaimed, and Spike narrowed his eyes. 
“Gee, ya think? If you'd told me where you were gooooing-” 
“Horsefeathers,” Applejack grunted, “she came out to help me an' ended up spending all afternoon fixing my cart. Aw Twi, I'm real sorry..” Twilight didn't hear Applejack's apology, or she likely would've assured her friend it was no fault of hers. She was too focused on reading the parchment still floating in front of her.

“Dear Twilight Sparkle,
I'm writing to inform you I will be arriving in Ponyville tonight, and hope to call on you at your home in the Library. There are matters of some personal importance I need to resolve, and I believe your insight to be of particular value. I will attempt to not disrupt your routine for long. Until we meet,
-The Princess”

Twilight's eyes lifted from the page just in time to see the last rays of the sun vanish behind the mountains surrounding Ponyville. She was still 20 minutes trot from home. “Go, sugercube. Ah got this,” Applejack insisted, nudging Twilight and snapping her out of her petrified stupor. Twilight couldn't grasp the words immediately to thank her friend, she was still getting over the personal failure of being late to a one to one audience with the princess at her own house, but AppleJack took her stammering to be thanks enough. Twilight grabbed Spike by a spine and tossed him up on her back, charging at full gallop toward home as her words finally caught up with her brain. 	“ohmygoshohmygoshohmygoshwhyTONIGHT?!” she spilled out, banking hard off a lifted stone wall to turn a tight corner. Clearly, athlete or not, watching Rainbow Dash and Applejack's techniques had rubbed off a bit. “If it had been tomorrow or yesterday or even this MORNING I could've gotten the place cleaned up at least! What if she needs my notes? I haven't organized my notes since yesterday!  That's an entire day's worth of notes!” she whips the letter out in front of her again, re-reading it frantically. “'Matters of personal importance'?! I've never had to help the princess with anything she found 'personally' important!  I mean important to Equestria maybe, but not to her, not directly!” 
“Im pretty sure things that are important to Equestria count as being important to the Princess, Twilight,” Spike said evenly. Having now succeeded in his appointed task of informing Twilight of the eminent arrival of the patron deity of Equestria, his panic had deflated and returned him to his general state of mild apathy and objective observation. “This isn't going to be anything you haven't done before.” He stroked his spines as he considered, “Though, I have to admit, that letter does seem a little rushed. She doesn’t usually put that much ink on the quill.” he makes a face, “I can still taste it, blegh.” 	
Twilight was about to summarily dismiss Spikes reassurance when something clicked in her brain, just as she was rounding Sugercube corner and coming into view of the library tree. She slowed suddenly. Spike blinked. “Twilight, I didn't say you should slow down!  You ]are late!” But Twilight was looking at the letter again. Spike was right. Too much ink, the letters were almost shadowed, rather than the thin, whispy ones Princess Celestia usually made. 
“Dear Twilight Sparkle...” Twilight read aloud, “That's different too. The princess always begins her letters with 'My dearest student'. Maybe sometimes 'Dearest Twilight', but never 'dear Twilight Sparkle'”. She continued down the page as she walked. “And here, signed 'the princess'. Not 'Princess Celestia', just 'the princess'.” 
By now they had arrived just in front of the library. There was one light lit inside, in Twilight's room. Beyond that, it, and most of Ponyville, was dark. 
“Do you think its fake?” Spike asks, hopping down, “But...but it came from the palace! I can tell! AND its on official royal parchment!”  Twilight looked up at the lit window, and her face hardened. “Spike,” she said firmly, “go to Fluttershy's cottage and stay there until I come for you.” Spike blinked in surprise, “but-” “No buts. Go.” The look on her face told Spike he shouldn't press the issue. But as he turned away, he looked back in concern. 	“You...don't think its the princess, do you?” he asked.
“I do,” Twilight replied, slowly opening the door, “But Equestria has more than one Princess.”
Twilight's tail disappeared into shadow as the door closed behind her, and Spike felt a chill run down his spines as the first beams of the Moon shown on his scales.