Penumbral Prodigy

by JakTheYak

Every End is Simply...

Spookums followed Luna apprehensively. Where is she taking me? It had been barely a week since she had begun her study under the princess and she was already feeling out of depth. Large groups of ponies never gave Spookums cause for fright, they made picking saddlebags easier than a walk in a park; or breaking and entering an old-ponies home, but Spookums had only done that one as a challenge. After a scarce few paces the unease finally wore her down and she looked up to her mentor to speak,

“Hey princess, where are we headed anyway?”

Luna responded without pause. “To the library, you must begin read the fundamentals of magic before you can ever hope to become a unicorn worthy of any true note.” Luna didn’t see Spookums wince at her bluntness.

Spookums wasn’t illiterate, per sé, but her recognition of writing was limited to seeing a jumble of symbols and memorizing that specific shape relation to a spoken word. When Twilight had told her that words were all made up of smaller scribbles called “letters” Spookums’ jaw had dropped with the sheer ridiculousness the concept had seemed to bear. For goodness’ sake, it didn’t make any sense! That sounded like it would slow reading down to a crawl, and she had already begun to dread the inevitable lessons, the endless hours hunched over a table racking her brains.

After a few minutes of walking, a pair of doors, at least ten feet tall and colored purple, loomed over the pair.

“Princess--” Spookums began before Luna’s sudden interjection.

“You may call me Luna, my pupil.”

Luna wasn’t even facing Spookums while her horn glowed its deep midnight and slowly began to push on the doors, revealing a library that Spookums imagined getting Twilight all kinds of hot and bothered. The thought of a misty-eyed Sparkle caused Spookums to snort, earning her a wicked glare from her mentor.

“S-sorry... Luna.” The mare couldn’t look up to meet the angered Alicorn before her, settling on staring at the floor. “Well I guess this is go time then?”

Luna’s face softened, but only by a fraction of a degree, “Yes. You are going to learn, and you are going to prove that you can be just a worthy as anypony else. I have put my faith in you my student, and it is time for you to use the chance you’ve been given.”

The iron resolve in her voice made Spookums stand at attention, she wasn’t just going through the motions for her own sake anymore, it was finally time to make something of herself. Time to get down to business and show that even a reject as despicable and destitute as she could shine a bright as any star, with a bit of polish.

The two sat down in a shady alcove overlooking the library. “This is where I spent much of my time upon returning to Equestria. I had to relearn everything, everyone that I had known was gone. I was alone, but for my dearest sister.” Luna’s face bore a look of admiration and gratitude. “It was then that I realized something that had been lost to me in all my countless years.”

Spookums looked up from her Illustrated Fillies Alphabet, “What’s that, Princess?”

Luna’s magic enveloped the thin hard-cover and rotated it right-side up, smirking at the suddenly self-conscious pony blushing before her. “If you feel like no one appreciates you or the work you do, you shouldn’t look to yourself to find flaw. Instead look to others to find those who would love and cherish you for the pony that you are, not the pony they would want you to be.

Spookums mumbled to herself whilst staring intently at a particularly troublesome letter, hoping that squinting and persistence would make the letter change to make more sense. She still didn’t understand the need for all this, her way was far easier and didn’t involve dusty tomes that looked like an asthmatic death trap. She was ignoring the advice given to her. "“Yuh-huh. Ponies can be jerks sometimes I guess,” she muttered

“That is the letter ‘M’, Spookums, think of it as ‘N’s bigger brother. Bigger, quicker, but loves and looks over his little sibling.”

Suddenly Spookums’ eyes lit up with understanding “Whoa! That makes so much more sense. Why the heck’d they not just say it like that in the first place?”

---

Spookums quickly hustled from one side of the library to the other, picking up different tomes and giving each a skim looking for information. It had been just shy of a year since she had begun her tutelage under Luna. Things had most certainly not been easy, she was starting from a near insurmountable disadvantage. It had taken her almost four full moons to master reading, and even then, sometimes she would have to ask a librarian for help understanding what a word or passage meant. Despite all her handicaps, she had persevered with nothing but grit and fear of being put back out on the streets. She was flying from shelf to shelf and rocketing down rows on rolling ladders, Luna had given her the most difficult assignment to date, making a friend.

Just thinking about it made Spookums nervous, she wasn’t exactly the poster child of outgoing and approachable, and besides wasn’t friendship supposed to be Twilight Sparkle’s thing? Either way it’s not like I have much choice, I gotta find some of Twilight’s papers on the Friendship Sciences. Each paper was a mammoth in and of itself, with innumerable data tables and carefully constructed theses. It was obvious that she was reading Sparkle’s work, but for all its detail, Twilight’s work missed a level of practicality. Spookums had been made to write a few papers of her own, hers were almost always severely lacking in evidence, rather opting to make use of moral or emotional rhetoric to prove her point. She and Twilight had gotten in a tussle over it a few weeks prior. As she kept reading and moving on autopilot, Spookums began to remember the conversation.

---

“Spookums, I really think that you need to add more citable sources.” Twilight was becoming visibly frustrated with Luna’s student. For Celestia’s sake, Twilight had never been this unresponsive to advice. It was like Spookums didn’t even want her help at all!

“Yeah yeah, I know Sparkle, but sourcing is obnoxious and takes forever. Why should I bother when I could just say what I wanna say and convince people that way? I don’t remember Celestia ever citing her sources when she was giving a speech.” Spookums waved her free hoof dismissively while pouring over a new book.

Celestia and Luna were watching from a higher balcony smiling down at their shared pupils.

Celestia turned her head to look at her younger sister “Luna, my dear sister, I do see ever so much of our youthful selves in these little ponies.”

“Indeed ‘Tia, I believe that they shall make great rivals for each other, and push the other to ever greater heights.”

---

Spookums and Luna were within the Cosmodome, a giant domed building on the opposite side of the mountain Canterlot is built into. While the castle had an observatory built in to it, the Cosmodome was as much a place of arcane study as it was of astronomical. Spookums most enjoyed her time with Luna when in the golden halls and among massive lenses. It was here that they most often practiced the magical arts.

“Luna what will be working on today? Oh! Maybe mass deception or fine shadow manipulation? I’ve been practicing opening multiple portals at once, can I show you? Can I?! Please, please?!”

Spookums’ eyes lit up with the spark of learning that Luna had come to love coaxing out. The two had been spending ever increasing time here, Spookums was developing at a breakneck pace. Luna knew of a unicorn, named Starlight Glimmer, who was infamous for an exceptional control of magic. While having never seen the youth’s work first-hand, Luna inferred that she must have been highly motivated to progress so fast. Maybe an emotional drive based in prior experience perhaps? Either way it mattered not, for Starlight was not her pupil.

“Actually Spookums, my dear pupil, I wish to ask you if you have thought on the records I had found prior to our last meeting”

The light immediately faded from the youthful mare’s vibrant orchid eyes like mist over a lake in the dawn.

“Well I dunno princess, I guess I just kinda put it off to the side and kept working. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I am really grateful that you would spend your time looking through all of Equestria’s birth records to find try and find my birth name. I guess just having found out my parents had actually named me but never bothered using it was kind of a punch in the muzzle.”

Spookums had been sitting on her haunches, eyes had been glued to her hooves, which she fumbled with idly while explaining her thought, now she looked to meet those regal navy orbs that she was so utterly determined to see pride in. I guess Luna’s taken my edge off huh. Never really cared if anypony gave a damn before. As Spookums gave Luna a blank thousand-mile-stare, her mind continued to grind onwards in overdrive; she’s helped me so much and spent Celestia only knows how long pouring through records finding this for me, me. The undisputed queen-supreme of jackasses. I guess maybe I owe it to her to at least give the name a shot. Her attention snapped back, teeth grit, and she stood up to face Luna.

Eating proper meals with a nutritious diet had prompted a late growth spurt in her, and she now stood as an in between from Luna and Twilight. It was something she never let the Princess of Friendship live down, but nowadays the two now found themselves spending time enjoying each other’s company during magical experimentation; rather than just bickering for its sake. The two now only ever got in verbal slugging matches when they disagreed on how to run their experiments or write reports. The two were an amazing team, Spookums’ practicality perfectly balanced Twilight’s over-organization.

Spookums took up a regal stance, learned from observing Shining Armor. It had initially annoyed Luna that Spookums insisted on the more masculine stance, but as her features began to fill out from diet and rigorous mental, magical, and physical routine Spookums began to wear the stance well. Her chest was buffed out, hindquarters at a slight cant, and she wore a look of stern determination.

“Princess Luna of Equestria, I, Spookums of Manehattan herby accept your proposed change in title” her voice was deep, by the standards of mares, and imbued with a fair deal of gruffness.

Bowing forwards with one foreleg bent and tucked under her body, Spookums lowered her head to the floor before her mentor of a half decade. Luna followed suit, taking up her traditional royal stance, as though she were atop her throne before citizen and nobles of the court.

“Spookums, my most diligent and prosperous student,” -her royal Canterlot voice boomed across the Cosmodome- “I hereby proclaim you Lumina Whisp forevermore. Now rise, as a phoenix from the ashes. You are a new pony, far removed from the streets that reared you. I welcome you to the fold of nobility.”

Lumina’s eyes grew wide as she processed the tail of Luna’s statement. She quickly recomposed herself and replied evenly,

“My thanks Princess, but I must inquire as to what thee means in the ‘folds of nobility’. I have not heard of such a fold”- she stopped and snickered - “only of the folds upon the most prestigious forms of the nobility.”

Both mares lost their stiff composure at the crude jab at the high and mighty of the Canterlot Courts. Fits of laughing rung throughout the Cosmodome, warming the cold gold.

---

Hours of practice had past, with scorch marks and blobs of null-matter spattered across the whole of the Cosmodome. The two had been playing “Trounce the Tirek”, where one was the Tirek and had to avoid being atomized, banished to Tartarus, or meeting any number of horrifying arcane ends at the hands of the other. It was the first game the Luna had ever allowed Lumina to be Tirek, the princess was unsure if her decision was based in appreciation for her pupil’s considerable magical abilities, carefully sculpted and cultivated to meet Equestria’s needs, or genuine feelings that her apprentice was matured enough to be trusted out on her own. Whatever the case, she had invested five long years into this mare, and she was having no second thoughts.

“Lumina, I believe it is time for you to strike out on your own. Today you proved to me your maturity and clarity of purpose. It is time that you put the skills and lessons I have handed down to you to practical use. To that end, I am sending you out to the northern mountain cavern villages of the thestrals, known to the masses as bat ponies. You will be going to the city of Nox Arcana, it is a sprawling metroplex constructed along the cavernous veins of the northern mountain ranges all the way to the massive central ‘heart’ of the cavern network, which is used as a main hub of sorts. You will be going to that hub, and you will purge the filth and corruption of Nox Arcana, molding it into a worthy addition to the whole of Equestria. No longer shall my thestrals languish as ill-remembered and feared outcasts. That is your charge, for you shall clear the way for these wayward ponies. You know how to reach me, but do not dare return until your mission is complete.”

Lumina looked at her mentor with eyes ablaze with determination,

“When do I leave, Luna?”

“My Nightguard are preparing a chariot for you, and they will depart from the Castle observatory at midnight sharp. Be there and take whatever you need for a prolonged stay. You will be there for many years, as the thestrals have unfortunately not remained the proud servants of the Moon that I left them. A thousand years of lacking my guidance has not been kind to their morals, be prepared my student.”

With that Luna hugged her pupil as the warm oranges of sunset bathed the two. After a comfortable minute long embrace Luna pulled away. If it fazed Lumina, it did not show. I have done good work with you my pupil; you will do great things for Equestria.

Author's Note:

Hello once again all, sorry for the delayed upload. School is a butt that likes to gobble my time. I'll hopefully have the next chapter out by the end of November, but no promises ;) Feel free to leave a comment if you like, any advice is good advice.