Wild Thoughts Ahead!

I've been busy with a potent combination of self-imposed guilt (also known as the famed 'writer's block') and actual work. Oh, and Dark Souls. Can't wait for the Remastered version to come out. It's been so long since I've played the first game on a system with actual controls.

Some time ago I started up a contest for the group Against Echoes. There have been a lot of submissions. More than I'd anticipated. Here's something: an excuse! I'd knocked out a good three-fourths of the submissions when a surprise power failure destroyed my document. Ha. Ha.

I'm almost done with the contest submissions. I've got my fingers crossed, and have three duplicates just in case my fingers turn out to be too weak to withstand the inevitable power of fate. One in google drive, one in a flash drive, and one that I'm editing on my computer. I've been forcing myself to get through them again, but for me, redoing something I've already completed gives me a huge headache. Plus there's the guilt from having missed the deadline keeping me away from my keyboard...

But just because I'm away from my physical fingers doesn't mean I'm away from my virtual one. Some other fimfiction stuff also happened when I could bring myself to get back online. I withdrew my story It's All Black for reason of being grossly incompetent. More than usual, I mean. Theorycrafting is not writing, no matter what you tell yourself. Speaking of theorycrafting, my fat thumbs typed up this:

“I can deal with my magic. I know how to use it,” I said.

Her voice cracked at me like a whip. “No. You don’t.”

She didn’t move. All the same, she seemed to stand more solidly, her face shifted to solid iron. “The first circle extends approximately half a body-length in all directions from the caster’s horn. If you are in it, you are dead.”

Her horn shimmered slightly, the energies within so tightly controlled I couldn’t make out the color of her field. In front of her, an illusory unicorn wavered into existence. It shifted hooves of solid shadow and nickered. Then its head disappeared as a sphere entirely too dark to be considered black flickered in and out of existence, splattering the room with dark goo. A series of rods made of solid light speared through its body before I could blink, keeping it from falling.

She met my eyes, capturing me in her gaze for a solid second before I managed to look away. It took less than a second before she finished obliterating the shadowy body.

My back hoof clipped the wall. I realized I was moving back, and stopped.

She continued speaking as if nothing had happened. “The second circle is less immediately dangerous. It extends about two body-lengths out from the horn and requires more effort to reach. The best wards might survive entire minutes from a concentrated attack within it. The third circle ends at around eight body-lengths. Most zero-point field manipulation fails. Two competent battle mages will most likely be able to trade a few attacks before one gains a measurable advantage. Attacks at this range take an order of magnitude more power and time to initiate.”

Was she trying to teach me now? I hadn’t even agreed to her offer yet. I opened my mouth to tell her so, but she continued to talk.

“Anything out of the circles uses more conventional tactics. Zero-point manipulation flung within spell envelopes. Curses. Hexes. Mindscrapes.”

I edged toward the door. “Sure. That’s good to know. I just...need more time to think about. So...”

She stood in front of the door, expression flat and unchanging. “You will give me your answer now.”

I scraped a forehoof against the floor. “But—“

She took a single step forward. The air seems to prickle around me, and I was uncomfortably aware that I was very much inside her first circle.

“You used dark magic.” she said.

How—she couldn’t have known. There hadn’t been anypony there. She was guessing. “I didn’t—“

“There is a residue on you. It is unmistakable. And it is forbidden.”

Okay, so maybe I tried a little cantrip I saw in a book. I’d go to a court—Celestia’s, preferably—and serve whatever sentence she gave me. I wasn’t going to leave my town. I’d just gotten up the money to pay for the house, and friends...well, they were a rare resource these days. I’d rather not lose the ones I had.

She must have read my intentions off my face. “The punishment for the practice of dark magic is death. Only battle mages may legally wield it, and only under extremely extenuating circumstances. If you choose not to join, I will have no choice but to remove the threat you pose.”

She let power flood her horn, and this time didn’t bother concealing it. It crackled at the edge of my hearing, giving me a sense of...well, it would sound silly if I said it out loud, but it gave me a sense of doom that I couldn’t shake. And her horn was—

My knees went weak.

Her horn was black.

Auras have meanings. An aura’s color can be used to roughly gauge that meaning. For earth ponies and pegasi, there’s a special stone they can touch to bring the color of their auras to light. For unicorns, all we have to do is will some power into our horns. A blue field means the wielder is good at more delicate stuff, and purple means the caster can put a lot of oomf behind their spells, for example. Black—well, there are only tales. Old legends. The loud whispers of foals. The exact details behind the meaning change in every telling, but there’s always a common theme.

Death.

The punishment for the practice of dark magic is death.

She wasn’t a recruiter. At least, not just a recruiter. She was an enforcer.

Death finally smiled. It wasn’t a nice one. “Have you decided?”

“I’ll go,” I whispered.

The working title is Battle Mages. A first-person fic based on the main character going to learn magic at a super-duper magic school? Man look at me being original as all heck. Maybe this will go somewhere.

Oh, and I've resolved to continue that necromancer/Twilight fic soon.