//------------------------------//
// Pt.1 - Chapter 10 
// Story: The Starlight Broadcast 
// by ponyfhtagn 
//------------------------------//

Twilight passed her entrance exam.
Because of course she did.
Twilight now went to Celestia’s School for Gifted Unicorns.
Because of course she did.
And every day when Twilight got home she would use what she had learned to try and hatch the dragon egg hidden in her toy box. And nothing ever happened.
Because of course it didn’t. Of course.
“Egg did not respond to student,” Twilight muttered to herself, turning the pages of her text book. “Egg did not respond to student…”
“You seem pretty distracted,” said the filly next to her. “No wonder you only got 97% on that quiz yesterday. You should pay more attention.”
Twilight closed the book. “Thanks, Moon Dancer. Pay attention? If only I had known it was that simple.”
Moon Dancer was the other smartest pony in the class. Twilight was sure they could have been great friends, or even fierce rivals, but Twilight didn’t seem to have the energy for that sort of thing… or school in general. Funny how something that once meant so much to you could suddenly just seem so… distracting.
“I’m sensing extreme sarcasm,” Moon Dancer said. “My instincts tell me to just leave you alone, but… You’ve been trying to read that book upside-down this entire time.”
Twilight looked down at the textbook and blushed. She rotated it around and cleared her throat. “Yes. Well. I was… looking at the diagrams to see if they presented any new information from… a different angle.”
Moon Dancer did not seem amused. “This is science class. Not art class. Scientific diagrams are not subjective.”
Twilight groaned and slumped on the desk. “I wouldn’t expect you to understand what I’m going through. You already have your cutiemark and everything.”
“Yes,” Moon Dancer said. “So? I would have thought an educated pony such as yourself would understand the simple nature of cutiemarks; that they arrive in their own time and that nothing we do can prematurely force them into being, so there’s no point in being upset.”
Twilight huffed. “Well of course I understand that. And I’m not upset.”
“Simple application of the behavioural sciences tells me otherwise,” Moon Dancer said with scepticism. “You have been… sulky.”
“I’m not sulky,” Twilight said. “Why would I be sulky? I have everything I ever wanted and my future success is guaranteed. I have access to all the best books and curriculum and foal-grade lab equipment. Why would I be sulky?”
“I don’t know,” Moon Dancer said. “Perhaps we should collect data and perform an analysis. When was the last time you felt happy?”
Twilight thought about it. The answer was probably when she had bested the sphinx outside the dragon egg hatchery. Of course she couldn’t tell Moon Dancer that, so she went with the first instance prior to that.
“Probably… When I was first told I would be taking the exam to enter this school.”
“Why?”
Twilight shrugged. “Because it’s the thing I wanted the most.”
“And now you have it,” Moon Dancer said.
“Yes.”
“But you’re sulky?”
“Yes.”
“Well.” Moon Dancer shut her textbook. “I am forced to conclude that you are insane.”
“Noooo…” Twilight moaned softly into the desk.
They both looked at each other and smiled.
“Maybe this isn’t what you really wanted,” Moon Dancer continued. “That’s why you’re sulky.”
“But what else is there?” Twilight asked. “I worked so hard to get here. It made my parents very happy. I’m already doing so well.”
“I guess you were right,” Moon Dancer said. “I don’t understand.”
“I don’t understand either…” Twilight said.

It didn’t matter if Twilight was ‘sulky’. Ponies would ask her how her day was and she would say 'good.' She’d regale her parents with enough scientific jargon that they’d get confused and agree that she’d had a busy and productive day. Then Twilight would take the stack of books she’d checked out of the school library and go up to her room to perform more studies on the dragon egg.
Twilight worried that Cadence and / or Shining Armor knew about the egg. They must do. A thing like a dragon egg couldn’t rightly sit in a house all day without some pony knowing it was there. Did Cadence know? Twilight could never accurately say…
It was a problem for another time. This evening was Twilight’s time alone with her books and her dragon egg. Her chance, once more, to do… something.
“Moon Dancer was right,” Twilight said, unpacking books onto her bed. “I need to collect more data.”
She had brought home Warhock’s book; The Living Spell. In it Warhock proposed a method for reading the magic of spellwork laid down by others, without (if correctly performed) damaging or polluting the magic in question. A way to see and to feel magic, and thereby to read magic and further understand it.
Warhock warned, however, that by performing the spell you would be filtering the threads of spellwork through your own mind and perceptions, which was likely to cause… ‘consciousness-expanding and possibly dreamlike experiences and reactions.’
So Twilight tested it first on an old music box.
She set the box down on her desk and cast a simple locking spell. The box would no longer open until provided with the correct magical sequence, which only Twilight knew. True, the spell was weak and could easily be taken apart by any magically skilled intruder. But for the purposes of this experiment Twilight would posit the question—What if somepony wanted to get the passcode without damaging or destroying the locking spell?
The answer was that they’d need to hack the spell.
That’s all Warhock’s flowery theories were, anyway. Spell hacking. But the passive nature of his work had allowed the book to escape further scrutiny and so it was freely available in—not common libraries—but certainly the kinds of libraries that Twilight had access to now.
She checked and re-checked the spell before shutting the book and focusing on her music box. Her horn began to glow and she closer her eyes to concentrate. It took almost fifteen minutes to correctly assemble the spell. It kept slipping away or falling apart, and even after Twilight had managed to assemble it she still felt the urge to deconstruct it and then build it back up from scratch. It was pretty advanced.
After coalescing and dismantling Warhock’s spell a few times she had to admit to herself she was just stalling at this point.
“It’ll be fine. I can handle it,” Twilight said to the thought of having wild magic coursing though her unprotected little mind. “Okay. Here goes…”
She brought the spell together again and cast it at her music box. The locking spell she had put in place not long ago was easily detected. It jumped out at her like a strong smell. At first she flinched away, then came back for a second pass. She focused on the lock-spell and opened her mind to it.
What she had first perceived as a smooth and stable little spell now drastically unravelled before her perception. It came apart not like a blooming flower but more like a frayed rope. There were threads and tangles spiralling off in all directions. As she pulled it apart she was struck by curious sensations—rough, excessive, sharp, dry, confusing, meaningless, hard to chew—the spell became an almost physical presence and yet she knew it was only an idea passing through.
Inside the spell she found the magical sequence for unlocking the box and recognised it correctly as the one she had put in place. At that point she extracted herself from the tangle of rough threads and shut down the spell. Her horn-light went out and her eyes snapped open to the darkness of her bedroom once again.
Twilight sat panting on her desk stool.
“Oh wow…” she whispered to herself.
Using Warhock’s spell to hack the magic of her own spellwork had been… intense. But more than that it had shown her just how fragile and amateur her spell had been. To her ordinary grounded perceptions she had thought the spell to be neatly and cleanly composed. Having delved into the thing itself she had seen every mistake, ever hesitation. It was like a line of ink and she had seen exactly where the pen had spluttered or the writer had paused too long and caused bleeding.
How could Twilight go on like this, knowing that under the surface her magic was such a horrifying mess?
She quickly undid the locking spell and reworked it again, paying extra super special careful attention to every minute detail of every stage of its composition. It took her almost half an hour before she was satisfied.
Then she brought Warhock’s spell to bear upon the thing and wailed in despair at the results. Now her locking spell felt chunky and truncated—artificial. Like cube after cube lined up against each other but held together by the flimsiest piece of string that ran through them. Twilight saw how the whole thing threatened to collapse if pressured in the correct way. It was most inelegant.
She pulled back, took the locking spell apart and tried again. Almost an hour’s work and now her spell felt like an unyielding lump of overcooked bread. There was no life to it, no flexibility, no rhythm. More over it was… ugly.
Twilight broke the spell apart and went to curl up on her bed where she rocked herself and whimpered.
“I’m the worst,” she said. “I didn’t know I was so bad. It’s disgusting.”
Twilight rocked back and forth in a shivering fit. She could feel an empty place inside her, growing larger and larger as the foundations of her world began to crumble away into the darkness. What was left if she could not do magic?
“Who am I?” Twilight asked the empty room. “Who am I now?”
She scrunched her face and grit her teeth.
“I am Twilight Sparkle,” she told herself. “And I… am a master researcher. When there’s something I don’t know I ask a book. So help me now if I abandon everything I know without even reading up on it first.”
So she unfurled from her panic and dragged Warhock’s book back over to the bed. Nervously she lit her horn for some light to read by, and tried not to think about the obviously ghastly state of the magic that now hovered above her head.
“…do not advise novices to examine their own spellwork, for it may appear grotesque and unpleasant due to its unrefined nature. Rather, practice instead reading the pre-enchanted wands at the back of the book.”
Twilight scolded herself for not reading ahead.
She flipped to the back on the book and found three thin wooden rods attached to the book by lengths of ribbon. A red stick, a blue stick and a green stick, each labelled with a question mark.
In theory then these were clean and well-crafted spells put here for the purpose of being easy-on-the-eyes, or mind as it was in this case. Twilight hesitated only a moment before curiosity overrode fear and she tried Warhock’s spell on the red wand.
Twilight blinked tears from her eyes when she touched upon the spell. It was so beautiful… It drifted smoothly through her perceptions like a cool drink of chocolate milk. The components flicked past in perfect order and timing, like music notes in a simple lullaby. So pleasant and effortless the experience had been that Twilight needed to run the spell past a second and then a third time before she could look past the craftsponyship and begin to search for the intent behind it.
It was… similar to a locking spell. There was a magical sequence that would reveal something, but Twilight would not activate it without first understanding what it was. It felt… warm… and cosy. There was a smell like boiling water. Twilight thought she tasted melting ice cream, but did not know what it meant. The sensations danced before her, drawing her in.
She started to get flashes from her own memory mixed up in the precession. Her brother lighting a gloomy hallway for her when she had been younger and afraid of the dark. That time she had read a book on unicorn-powered magical batteries, prompted by her wondering how the streetlights in Canterlot worked. A lantern full of fireflies one evening in the palace gardens with Cadence.
“It’s a light spell…” Twilight realised.
She let go of Warhock’s spell and set about casting the magical sequence that she had seen in the code of the red wand’s enchantment. The sequence unlocked something—words began to appear in bright glow along the wand and then the entire stick flared with gentle red luminance. The now visible words said ‘Light Spell’.
Twilight stifled a tired laugh.
She had done it. She had decoded a spell and used it to solve a problem. The happiness welled up inside her and came out as tears. This was what she had been craving. This was what she wanted to do. What school had failed to provide her.
“I am good at magic,” Twilight whispered to herself. “I am. I am. I was meant to do this. I was. I will.”
It would take a lot of extra study but Twilight was determined to reach a state of perfect composition, so that her magic could be as beautiful and flawless as the light spell she had just experienced. She could only imagine how this kind of practice would expand her understand of magic and take her abilities to new levels
Twilight sighed in pleasant exhaustion. The light of the wand was so pretty. It sparkled at the edges of her vision and seemed to—
Twilight gave a sudden shiver. No, that wasn’t the wand now. Something was strange. Something was different. She looked down to her side where the new sparkling light was coming from.
“Oh my stars…” Twilight whispered, staggering to her hooves on the mattress. “Oh my stars it’s a star! It’s—” Twilight span in a circle. “I got my cutiemark?”
The sparkling glow began to fade.
“No, no, wait! What is it? What does it look like?”
Twilight grabbed up the wand with the light spell and ran to her bedroom mirror.
There it was—her cutiemark—a six pointed star—no, six pointed symbol—a hexagram? Like a diamond and a sideways hourglass. What did it mean? What had she been doing that brought it out?
“Magic?” Twilight said. “Problem solving? Spell hacking? Espionage?”
Twilight paced back and forth in front of the mirror, examining the new mark from each side of her body.
“Magic,” she said, assured. “And never giving up,” she added. “And doing things for myself. Not waiting on teachers and adults and fate to give me what I want. If I want something then it’s up to me to get it for myself. I’ve got to improve myself,” Twilight was muttering. “I’ve got a cutiemark to live up to now and only I can do what is necessary. To do whatever needs to be done.”
Twilight stopped pacing and sat in front of the mirror to look her reflection in the eyes. Such tired eyes—but determined.
“Magic,” she whispered with a grin. “Oh, just wait until I tell—” Twilight froze. “No…” she whispered. “I can’t. I can’t tell them about this. They’ll want to know how I got it—what it means. No… They’re going to find me out. They’re going to try and stop me. If I show them this they’ll just try and take it away from me, like everything else—the test, the egg, my respect—I won’t let them!”
Twilight threw the luminous stick up into the air where it hovered above her head. She dug in her wardrobe and came out with a plain dress she hardly wore.
“I have to hide it,” Twilight whispered, struggling with the dress. “I can’t let them know about this. I have to make them think they’re still in control.” She squirmed into the garment and returned to her bedroom mirror. “Time,” she muttered. “I still need more time. And then I’ll be ready. Then they’ll see the real me.”
She looked over at her toy box where the dragon egg was sleeping.
“…and I’m going to need all the practice I can get,” Twilight said.
So she brought down the red wand, returned to the book and started all over again.