//------------------------------//
// Prologue 
// Story: The Murder of Starswirl the Bearded 
// by Inky Scrolls 
//------------------------------//

"What a beautiful day!"

I smiled contentedly, basking in the early autumn sun. Along with my mentor, Princess Twilight Sparkle, I was strolling gently along the Rue de Chamelôt towards the Château de Corrigéville, where we were expected for tea. There was one further member of our party - Twilight's idol, Starswirl the Bearded, with whom she was deep in conversation.

Perhaps I should explain.


* * *


A few months ago, Twilight had been teaching me more of the magic of friendship in our usual Tuesday morning lesson. It was a hot, humid day in Ponyville, with the pegasi holding back the rains till after the upcoming harvest. I had felt sticky and uncomfortable, and unable to concentrate. All I could think about was the end of the lesson, when I would be able to fetch a glass of cold water from the kitchen. I could tell Twilight was finding the going hard too; why she insisted we have the lesson in a south-facing chamber is beyond me. Finally, just before eleven o'clock, the princess uttered those magic words:

"Well, I think we're done here, Starlight. D'you want a drink of something cold?"

I nodded in approval. "Yes please, Twilight, that would be lovely. It's so hot today!"

We trotted down to the kitchen. The cool of the flagstones in the windowless hallway felt incredibly pleasant after the thick carpet in our classroom - ideal in winter, but most uncomfortable in the high days of summer. As we headed along the shady corridor, I noticed Twilight seemed rather lost in thought. She wasn't making her usual comment about how many Tuesdays there were left until we finished the lessons for Hearthswarming, or even noticing the slightly ajar door to the study as we passed by. She is usually so meticulous about such things, unable to bear doors being open when they should be shut, or a curtain out of place, or her regular routine being changed. But today she said nothing until we had fetched two refreshing glasses of water, and were sitting at the kitchen table to drink.

She frowned slightly before breaking the silence. It was so quiet, down in the servants' quarters beyond the thick walls of the rest of the castle, that I could even hear swifts calling to one another as they wheeled overhead. Eventually she spoke. "Starlight, I have a proposition for you."

This sounded most intriguing, so I said nothing but inclined my head slightly to indicate I was listening. She went on, "You know, of course, of Starswirl the Bearded, and of his time spells."

This brought back rather unpleasant memories of a, thankfully now distant, darker period in my life, and I couldn't help but feel some trepidation as to what she might say next. "Well," she said, evidently choosing her words carefully, "Starswirl is, by my reckoning, the most powerful and important wizard to have ever lived, and his life and times have always been of immense fascination to me. And I've often wondered, especially since you showed me what could be done with time spells, what it would be like if we could... well, visit him."

This was not at all what I had been expecting - though to honest, I hadn't really had any idea what she'd been going to say. Rather lost for words, I merely blinked uncomprehendingly. "B-b-but," I stammered, "I thought you told me that using magic to travel backwards through time was very dangerous, both for the past and for the present?"

The princess had the grace to blush slightly. "Well, yes, I suppose I did say that. But what I'm thinking of doing isn't so much to change the past, like you did..." - Here I grimaced - I'd been wondering how long it would be before she brought that little fiasco up - "...but rather merely to experience the past, to observe but not interfere, if you know what I mean."

I couldn't help but feel sceptical. "Doesn't that sound rather... impossible? How can you travel through time, interact with the ponies in the distant past, and not expect anything to change as a result? You've seen what can go wrong when that happens, Twilight. You've seen the horror that I- that can be caused by somepony meddling with things she doesn't fully understand. Would it really be worth the risk?"

Twilight stared into her glass for a long moment, evidently considering my point of view. "Well," she murmured, "there is one important difference."

"And what's that?"

"When you went back to the past to change my and my friends' destinies, that's exactly what you were doing. You were trying to interfere, to change things in the future. You didn't know how far things would go wrong, or how dangerous your actions truly were, but you did know you would change the future. You did so deliberately." She must have looked up and seen my sorrowful expression at this point, because she hastily went on. "Of course, you realised what you were doing, and stopped before it was too late. You've nothing to blame yourself for. But that's not my point - my point is that you only changed the future, or the present, or whatever, because you wanted to. If we went back in time to visit Starswirl, we would do so with the knowledge of how careful we must be. We wouldn't be likely to make such a terrible mistake. And if we did... then we can just travel in time to now, to this conversation, and stop ourselves from going."

This was all starting to sound rather complicated, and I was on the verge of pointing out that if we did come back to the present to warn ourselves not to go, we wouldn't go, and thus wouldn't warn ourselves, meaning we'd go, but decided there was no reason to. Twilight had evidently been considering this for a long time, and wouldn't be easily dissuaded. Besides, she was the princess, she was the one who'd been Princess Celestia's personal student, it was she who was the bearer of the Element of Magic... surely she'd know best. "Very well," I said. "Let's do it."

Twilight clopped her hooves together in foalish glee.


* * *


We formulated our plans carefully. After some weeks of intense research, and consultations with Princesses Celestia, Luna and Cadance, Twilight decided that we would go back to the year when Starswirl dropped out of the historical record, roughly two thousand years ago. She had two reasons for this; firstly, his disappearance shortly after our arrival would give us little chance to interfere with the work he did during his lifetime and, secondly, we may actually be able to discover what happened to him. The disappearance of one of pony-kind's greatest magic-wielders has perplexed generations of historians, and Twilight was hopeful that we may be able to discover why.

It was the morning of the last day of August that we made our final preparations. Twilight insisted that she couldn't use her real name, as that could cause confusion for historians of our present, and instead took the name Clover de Velours. She decided that whilst it would be safe for me to retain the name Starlight Glimmer, because - as she murmured blushingly - I wasn't sufficiently well-known enough to have appeared in either historical or contemporary textbooks, it would appear odd at the time for unicorns to carry names which were, after all, of Old Earthponese origin; thus I became Lumière Lueur, protégé of Clover.

Twilight also decided to refrain from all flight, and to travel everywhere wearing a long, flowing cloak, to hide her alicornhood. Despite the Alicorn Kingdom still being in existence at the time to which we were travelling, she was afraid that most ponies we would likely encounter would consider having both wings and a horn unnatural, and possibly see us as a threat. And as alicorn-burnings were not unheard of in the darker days of pre-Equestrian history, this was best to be avoided.

With one last farewell to Spike and our other friends, and a promise, on Spike's insistence, that we be back within a few seconds, Princess Twilight - or Velvet, as I was now to call her - cast an almost identical spell to the one I had used in my own forays into travel through time. With an incredibly bright flash, and a sense of watching the world passing by backwards in slow motion, we left our own time, place, and history, and journeyed possibly further than any other pony ever had: one thousand, nine hundred and seventy-seven years exactly, without ever walking a step.

I have not the time now (if you will pardon the pun) to go through everything that happened whilst we were in the past. Suffice it to say that we arrived safely, and discovered Starswirl the Bearded as we expected to in his now-vanished tower within what today is the Everfree Forest. After a certain degree of not unreasonable doubt, we were able to convince him of who we were, and that we were visiting him purely out of a personal desire to do so, and not because we wished to steal his ideas. In this account I am instead concerned with what, to me, was the most remarkable part of our visit: our stay at the Château de Corrigéville, our abrupt leaving therefrom, and the unexpected death of Starswirl the Bearded.