The Elements Of Elements

by Estee


This Platinum Cape (Trixie)

The typical first reaction of a pony who got a look at the inside of the caravan was to ask if a book had recently exploded.

In this case, 'typical' didn't represent a particularly large sample size. A rather small one, actually. For all intents and purposes, Trixie effectively lived on the road, and it was a lifestyle which didn't exactly help when it came to forming the kind of relationships with other ponies which would make her think inviting somepony inside was a good idea. Even on those rare occasions when she both felt the need for a more temporary form of companionship and was in the right place to arrange it, the meeting would typically take place at the other pony's residence or workplace: there simply wasn't that much room in her caravan and much like her chosen life, Trixie's personal style of itch-scratching interaction tended to be regrettably mobile.

But for the rare pony who got inside, even for a few minutes...

There would be notebooks. Dozens of them, as many as Trixie felt she could comfortably haul, a quantity which she always swore would be enough to get her through the longest trips without overflow, at least this time. And inevitably, she would reach the point where she was once again proven wrong, with every blank page filled, ideas still streaming through her head, and nowhere to record them but... the walls. There was always the walls, along with the ceiling, the undersides of what scant furniture she'd been able to cram into the limited space and, on one particularly desperate day, the interior of her hat. And whenever she reached a new settled zone, her first act would be to find a stationery store, buy new notebooks, transcribe everything, ship the best of it to her personal central hub so she could visit it if the need truly arose, edit and index and scrub down the walls while swearing that her latest purchase would last this time.

It wouldn't. Her mind wouldn't allow it. For Trixie dreamed. She dreamt of magic, even while awake, and those dreams needed to be captured, imprisoned in ink to keep them from getting away. Once, during the most desperate of her nights, she had left the fully ink-covered interior and spent hours under Moon sketching in the dirt around her caravan, trying not to listen to the growls which sometimes seemed to be getting a little too close to the road, focusing as much of her attention as she dared on the crystallization of the dream, knowing she was close enough to the next settled zone to grab some fresh paper and come back by late afternoon. And then it had started to rain.

Eleven hours crouched under the best shield spell she'd been able to raise, trying to block every last thought-destroying raindrop. Because it was what her mark asked of her. Trixie wrote on the walls because writing had to be done.

And tonight, she was in the caravan because that was where the most recent writing was. She just didn't want to be, in case any residual magic had soaked into the wood. But she was out of notebooks and she didn't trust herself to memorize everything she'd written down, not when a single error could...

Deep under Moon again. Trixie was often awake under Moon, something which had begun when she was a foal and never really changed since, to the point where her mother had joked that half of her daughter's mark was simply for being awake at all the wrong times. But the truth of the matter was that Trixie had chronic, cyclical insomnia, something no medicine ever worked on for more than a few weeks before her dreams once again sent her out of rumpled blankets in search of something she could write on. She was used to working on very little sleep, mostly, although collapses under Sun always happened eventually. She traveled under Moon and tried not to think about how close some of the growling was, that there was nopony in the world who knew just where she was or could come to help her and, if the growlers managed to breach the road's defenses, whether she could make that last dream work in time to save her life.

She was working by firelight, a tiny, flickering glow within the wooden walls making the freshest of ink glisten. It normally would have been the glow of her horn's corona, but Trixie wasn't going to use her field until somewhat later in the process. All of her devices and conveniences (three) had been removed from the caravan, temporarily abandoned in the mud. Everything portable which she suspected might have absorbed a few stray thaums from proximity to repeated magic use was gathering stains outside and tonight, that included her hat. It was her, a few specialized tools designed to be operated by mouth alone, her cape, and a tiny spool of fine-spun metal wire.

That last was deceptively quiet as it rested in its place on the little table. It didn't jitter. It never jumped. The only way it moved was through her own efforts. She would be perfectly all right as long as it stayed that way.

Those who entered the caravan often asked if a book had recently exploded.

One mistake, and whoever was unlucky enough to find what was left of her home would be asking the same question about Trixie.


There were three ways to improve field strength, and two of them worked. Or at least, there had been three up until this night, the final hours under Moon when Trixie's dreams were on the verge of leading her to a fourth.

Field strength was fixed at birth, and there was just about nothing to be done about that. Field dexterity... simple (and then increasingly complicated) practice served to improve that, and Trixie did what she could there: the books which lied about being able to make her stronger were occasionally surprisingly good at allowing her to manipulate a larger number of objects than ever before -- the masses of which would inevitably add up to her rated maximum lift.

Her learning capacity had been described by her first tutor as breathtaking, and she had yet to find her own limits there. Her field dexterity was slowly, steadily improving. But her field strength was -- above average. Well above, actually. She would have easily been able to gain admission to the Gifted School if circumstances had permitted her to even try. It was more than enough for daily life, easily sufficient to tackle any number of spells, more than what well over ninety percent of the populace would ever be able to reach.

It...

...wasn't enough.

Because Trixie dreamed. All the time.

Half her mark: a stylized crescent Moon. The other half: an ancient channeling tool which nopony had created in generations: a device designed to allow fine focus for which the enchanting process had been lost. Because Trixie was a channel for magic.

She dreamed. And in her dreams, her horn's corona danced. Her field twinkled, spiked, flared, surged and dimmed, did whatever was necessary in order to bring about the new. She dreamed, and the world changed. There were times when she changed. When the most basic of concepts seemed to alter, when she could make fire which flowed like water, air with the weight of earth, stone that flickered with liquid heat. In her dreams, it was all so easy...

Trixie could dream of anything. They weren't always the things she wanted to dream of: there were times when ideas simply came to her, and just about as many when she found herself desperately trying to chase down a single desired concept only to find her path heading anywhere except her intended destination. But ultimately, she had dreamt into reality some of the most powerful, subtle, and complex spells ever to exist --

-- none of which she could actually cast.

Her field strength was well above average. She could do more than just about anypony else, could learn more than just about everypony else. But she wasn't an alicorn. The reach of her mark exceeded her corona's grasp.

Trixie dreamed of things she would never be able to do, and when she woke, her tears diluted the ink.

She had... learned to deal with it, or thought she had. Boasting, public display -- that helped. Let everypony see what she was capable of, so that they would never wonder what she couldn't do. It had allowed her to get on with her life, stay on the road, let the tears remain private -- for even in those rare times when she found somepony she could scratch the itch with, Trixie never stayed overnight. She had reached a state of rough truce with her own talent, where she could pretend it did not torment her too much... a truce which had held until the day the caravan had rolled across the border into Ponyville. And then she couldn't even pretend any more. Not after seeing the pinnacle, learning you didn't have to be an alicorn to possess the raw power of one, found the winner of the blood lottery and decided that one was fully unworthy of the draw, having all that strength and no dreams to chase down...

Her own field strength wasn't enough. She couldn't even pretend any more. She'd woken up crying every night for moons after fleeing Ponyville. She'd barely slept at all. Her confidence had suffered, and with magic... with her confidence ebbing, her performances had suffered. The crowds had begun to laugh at her errors, which had led to even less confidence and laughter at what was now public failures, and once she'd started to fail...

Trixie wasn't strong enough. Could never be strong enough on her own. And yet the dreams still came.

Three ways to make herself stronger, two of which were real. Field dexterity exercises never led to strength. Booster drugs... worked. To wit, the chemical-herbal mixtures provided an extra five to fifty percent of the user's original strength, a boost which typically lasted for about fifteen minutes. They always had some degree of visible side effect: Trixie had seen students in her own school using them to try and get past finals, both of whom had been forced to remove their sunglasses, displaying the blacks of their eyes to the entire class. And they put strain on the user's body, for the new strength had to come from somewhere. A five percent mix might leave the pony who took it slightly groggy for an hour or two after it wore off. The most common fifteen percent concoction, which Trixie had tried, left her light-sensitive with a twinging horn, a state which had lasted for three days. (She had tried it twice. On the first dose, she'd assumed she'd just gotten a mix which was slightly off. After the second, she'd decided she was on to a pattern and stopped there.) A fifty percent boost -- that pony would either be begging to die or no longer have any need to make the request. And that was assuming the mix had been right, for a truly wrong one might just kill the pony right there...

(She'd tried to dream of new mixes. It hadn't worked. Her talent wasn't for potions, and the zebras she'd consulted didn't know how to work with unicorns.)

And then there was a third. Trixie knew a lot about the third now, might know more about it than just about anypony alive, at least for those with lifespans which weren't potentially measured in millennia. That worked. It worked spectacularly. But...

...not yet. She wasn't willing to try that just yet. Because she was convinced that, knowing what was coming, she could stay on top of it, she could retain control, but -- not yet.

Instead, she dreamed. And her dreams had told her about the potential for a fourth.

It was only somewhat likely to kill her.


That which lived had the potential to channel magic. So did that which never had.

Silver: that was the most common carrier of thaums, magic surging through fine-spun wire. But it wasn't an automatic process: silver had to be treated before it would serve as a channel, and ponies had experimented for centuries trying to find the best means of creating that treatment. They had succeeded. Silver was stable. It was safe. Oh, it occasionally had problems if the enchanter was going through an off-day, the wire went out of alignment, or certain other spells were allowed to get too close -- but on the whole, silver was pretty much the go-to material for a device creator who needed that power to flow. And there were other materials as well. Gold: hard to work with and it only stored a little power, but a few ponies favored it for low-impact castings. Titanium: so hard to refine, and thus just at the start of its explorations. Aluminum was somewhere in the middle. Copper was generally for pegasi: magic which conducted instead of projecting found its best servant in a metal which did the same. Iridium: precious on a level which almost went beyond the realm of Trixie's dreams. But they all required their own spells before they would do anything. They all needed treatment.

And then there was platinum.

Platinum was the natural conductor.

You didn't need to treat platinum to make it carry magic. It would do so all on its own. Platinum would happily carry magic within itself, stored it... well, that was part of the problem, with a significant part of the rest coming when that capacity limit was ultimately reached.

Nopony had ever found a truly large deposit of platinum. There had been several suspicious craters doting the landscape where the metal might have once existed, although there were a few ponies still insisting those had been produced by meteors.

Platinum absorbed magic. Slowly, drawing it in from the very environment, microthaum by microthaum. And as the truest natural channel, it would carry that power wherever it was carefully directed to go, without losing any of it to maintaining the workings which were normally used to make channels viable at all. It made devices more efficient. They could be made with a lower power base, because the platinum would provide the difference. The owner never had to pay a unicorn for fresh thaums because given enough time, those devices recharged themselves. And given too much time added to an enchantment which was anything less than perfect...

Poorly-worked platinum... the best possible result was an explosion, one where all the magic stored within would randomly work itself out on anything in the area which had survived the initial blast: a backlash made somewhat more wide-ranging and decidedly impersonal. Worse things could happen. Worse things had happened. It didn't take that much research to find the legends or, in a number of cases, somewhat smaller craters. A few examples had been taught in school, mostly as sterling moments of Why You Should Never Do This. You needed to fill out paperwork when you were buying platinum, and most of it consisted of sworn declarations of intent (which Trixie had lied about) added to contact information just in case anypony needed to find what was left of your body. For that last, she'd simply given them the address of the caravan, at least for where it was currently parked.

Trixie had dreamed. Of devices (usually not her area: she could occasionally work with them, but enchantments were nowhere near her specialty) and conveniences and channels of all sorts. And her dreams had asked a simple question: what if platinum works with more than enchantments? It had to, right? It wasn't as if there had been devices just wandering by the earliest proto-mines. Platinum absorbed from everything: ponies who spent too much time around large quantities (which were hardly ever gathered) would complain of dizziness, find their magic weak and talents less likely to function. And if it could absorb from anything... well, all magic was ultimately the same, wasn't it? It was all thaums in the end. Platinum gave those thaums back to the operation of devices: the inanimate fueling the enchanted.

Why couldn't it power the living?

Let it absorb magic. Then let that power be channeled into her own field, and...


It had taken some time to plan out the details, along with most of her ceiling. Much of that time had been spent in doing research (Trixie was exceptionally good at research, to the point where she occasionally wondered if it was a minor aspect of her mark), and it had come as no surprise when legends in the form of the darkest campfire stories suggested she hadn't been the first to the idea. And because she traveled, she'd stopped at a few of the places where it had supposedly been tried before.

There had been an earth pony, a farmer. He'd felt that lacing the soil of his land with platinum wire would amplify the Cornucopia Effect, make the plants grow faster and provide a few extra harvests each year. Trixie believed she'd found that land, and refused to approach closer than three body lengths beyond the reach of the longest snapping vine. Even that had been abandoned after the middle ranks (which still somewhat resembled raspberries, at least in the way that the ocean during a storm somewhat resembled a puddle during a drizzle) flung their thorns.

At least one pegasus had supposedly made an attempt. Wrap the wire around this feather and that, then push everything she had into speed and fly. There was a legend about that, and it was the story of the first comet. Trixie had certain doubts about the veracity when it came to celestial origins and none about the former existence of that pegasus, not after she'd pulled the last surviving pinion cradle out of the canyon wall.

There had been a story about a unicorn who had cut open her own skin to wind wire beneath. It had been the one which Trixie had most been hoping wouldn't be true. It was, and the nightmares still hadn't stopped.

There were many stories, and about a third that number of true sites. They all ended badly.

But Trixie dreamed...


Part of the process was strictly mundane. For this, she was adding extra layers to her cape, an inner coating of insulating fabric, folded double, and then a softer piece to rest against her coat. The platinum would be sewn into the middle space. (She could sew, at least well enough for everyday purposes: it saved expenses when her traditional performer's outfit became damaged or worse, tomato-stained beyond all hope.) She'd decided to have the metal resting against her back and flanks -- but not too close to the hips, for the same reason she hadn't really considered using it in her hat. You treated platinum to carry only the magic you wanted carried (although those workings only operated on relatively small amounts), and that meant she could force it to not absorb from her -- but having it right on top of horn and mark had still felt like a truly bad idea.

But then there were the treatments to consider. Some of them were chemical, and those were fairly safe, as long as she left a door open to let the fumes out and the sounds of not-very-distant growls in. (She tried not to twitch at those growls. There were stages when twitching might be the last thing she ever did.) But others were magical, and to enchant platinum, even in the not-quite-raw state which was found in the best, most risk-taking thaumaturgy shops... it wasn't a casual process. The metal would eagerly pull in the magic, and in doing so, just might take the whole working apart. It might negate the safety aspects while leaving everything else intact, and there was a chance that the caster wouldn't truly find out until the power was tapped for the first time. There were ways to stay safe, but every last one of them required her absolute concentration, and the wild zone on both sides of the road wanted to let her know it was hungry.

(She could have pushed on for the next town, the one where she'd hoped to have a show after Sun was raised: she'd been close enough to make it. But she'd stopped. If something went wrong... well, it would be just her, the caravan, and perhaps anything which had breached the protections at exactly the wrong time.)

The wire had to be bent. Carefully. Some of those bends resembled stars, and her sense of humor was just puckish enough to have her place those formations under the shining ones on her cape. It had to be aligned, and in this case, it had to be done in a way which allowed a little degree of flexibility: no matter what she did, the cape would be far stiffer than usual, wouldn't move properly and there were ponies who would notice that difference if the illusion she was hoping to have running ever slipped. Creating a completely frozen garment would just make it worse.

There were procedures for all that. For treatment, for bending, for alignment. Tested ones. Dangerous -- but proven.

And then there was the dream. The thing no unicorn might have ever tried. Worked out from first principles to first application, initially attempted in what would potentially be the last seconds of her life.

The platinum would collect the power, store it. Trixie would pull that energy out, add it to that of her own field. And it would make her stronger. As strong as the dreams needed her to be.

Trixie stopped.

She looked at the carefully-bent wire. At the opened layers of the cape. At the little mirror near the tiny basin which served as both drinking bowl and to store her washing water. At herself.

Slowly, she backed away from the whole thing. Stepped outside, looked at where her possessions sat in the mud. The places where the wheels, forever breaking on the road and forcing her to try and master wheelwright skills along with everything else, were mired. The tomato stains on the caravan's walls, not quite washed off by the recent rain or her own desperate scrubbing or... anything. Anything she'd been able to try...

She gazed up at Moon, her oldest and most constant companion, and it still had no words for her.

For a time, she simply listened to growls and screeches, the sounds of little deaths in the night.

And then she went back inside.

Glow shone through the open door.


It had been her best performance in moons.

She hadn't done anything special yet, nothing over what she could normally do. You didn't lead off with the grand finale, for the rest of the show wouldn't be so much afterglow as afterthought. So far, it had been pretty much just routine -- except that they were routine things which she'd been struggling with in public, with her confidence so low. And now, with the illusion-coated cape seeming to shift naturally with her flamboyant movements, her confidence was back.

A few basic tricks, just to show everypony she had the basics. Pick out a seeming rube or two from the growing crowd (an earth pony majority town, a place she'd never visited before) and try a few casual insults, because there was nothing like cheap heat for luring in even more of a crowd and she could always let everypony in on the true joke at the end. Step it up, going through mid-level magics, and her field danced, her corona surged and dipped at need, she wasn't doing anything special, not for her, but the cape was on her back and...

There had only been time to run a few tests, for the process of proper working had taken her nearly all the way back to Sun again, and the true proof would only come when the results were used during a performance, when the true resonance of her emotions went into what she was hoping would be her boosted spells. But she'd been able to check enough that she'd been willing to risk going out in public without worries of hurting the audience. The enchantments appeared to have taken. The platinum had already pulled in a decent number of thaums, and didn't seem to be heading for an overload. None of the basic checks she'd run had led to an explosion. The power was just -- waiting. And when she'd tentatively tried to project her senses towards it, she'd felt something --

-- but then it had been performance time. And the resonance had to be right. The joy of being on stage. The basking in admiration, applause, notice, recognition. It was a crucial part of the working, that she be in the emotional state of living her dreams. And so the truest bench test was the stage test.

The micro-teleports were over, and Trixie gave a levitation tip of her doffed hat to the audience. She wasn't sure how many of them recognized what she'd actually done. She'd never been able to work out the process of teleporting herself, but objects... if it was exceptionally small, close, unshielded, and she knew exactly where it was... Trixie was fairly sure nopony else had figured out how to move something without having to personally bring it with them, and she was equally sure most of those watching her thought she was just making little illusions flash in and out, at least right up until the moment she blinked a quarter-bit off somepony's upturned hoof.

He gasped. She winked, flashed it back while maintaining the cape's illusion under all of their snouts, something so few ponies would be able to do given all the complex movements of simulated fabric and the need to have other workings going at the same time.

Applause broke out. True applause.

It felt good.

She felt like herself. For the first time in moons.

Trixie curtsied, and thought of a dream.

Her emotions arced, carried magic with them, channeled nearly every hope she had left. She tapped.

And there was something there.

She could feel it. The extra power. Not much, because she hadn't used too much platinum for the start and there had only been a few hours to charge, but the power was there and a portion of it seemed to be moving towards her. Trying to merge with her field. Becoming part of her own magic. Enough to push her past her limits, to cast the next spell, to make them remember and love her, and that love would feel so warm --

-- she felt rather warm, actually.

Especially along her back. And flanks.

And in the now-vast audience, somepony giggled, a split-second before Trixie smelled the smoke.

She didn't want to look, not in public. She had to look, especially with the heat building, and so she glanced backwards to see her cape in the first stage of catching on fire.

When she thought about the event, long after the show had failed and -- other things had also failed, she recognized that she probably should have screamed. Let ponies know she was in trouble, that she needed help. But she didn't want to break her stage persona, not even for that, and so she desperately tried to fully separate field from loaner thaums, reaching out to the platinum, trying to figure out what was wrong and fix it on the spot. But the smoke kept coming from the top layer, her back was becoming far too hot, and nopony in the audience moved to help her, because they thought it was all part of the act. And when her magic reached the platinum, she felt the power surging around and around, cycling while mostly moving past an exit it was unable to truly use, that cycling was getting faster and the moment she realized that was also the moment she felt the burn.

Her field tore the cape from her back, and ponies gasped as they both saw and smelled the results. She flung it into the air, as high as she could, getting it away from everypony before --

-- it didn't explode.

It did exactly the reverse.

She released what remained, unable to keep it levitated with the pain searing across her nerves. The audience stared at her, as the recognition that something had gone wrong began to spread.

Somepony laughed.

Then another.

More joined them.

They didn't all laugh, not while an off-duty nurse made her way to the stage and helped Trixie limp away. It was simply all she could hear.


She had taken the caravan just far enough down the road to be sure nopony in town would, or could, follow her. She'd parked, again in fresh mud, for it had begun to rain as she'd departed. And now she was in front of her little mirror.

Trixie wasn't looking at herself. Not yet. She was examining the burn plaster on her back. First-degree, the nurse had told her. The fur would grow back, and there would be no scarring. She had gotten the cape off in time, and the nurse had been very clear on what would have happened if she'd waited so much as three extra seconds. But beneath bandages and medicine, stars were temporarily embossed into her skin.

There had been very little to do while waiting for the hospital to release her, as nopony had asked about just what had taken place, not in an earth pony majority town with hardly a unicorn anywhere. The assumption was that something had simply gone wrong with her performance, and she let them make it. But it gave her time to inspect what was left of the cape after the implosion, conducting a silent postmortem on the failed enchantments right up until the moment somepony finally showed up with her paperwork, and then there had been a little more on the road, at least after she'd gotten out of tomato range. She knew what had happened.

The dream had been a true one. It simply hadn't had enough power working with the vision to manifest properly.

The enchantments were fine. The problem was with the pony.

There had been three ways to improve field strength, and now there were four. One didn't work. The second could kill her. The fourth was beyond her ability to execute.

Finally, she looked at the mirror, and never truly saw the pony looking back. She only saw the dream.

"Fine," Trixie whispered to herself. "So it'll just have to be the bucking Amulet..."