"Well, sometimes the magic works. . . Sometimes, it doesn't." — Chief Dan George
After their grand day out, Trixie and Moondancer buckled down to do their homework. Their new office was hastily outfitted, and they (mainly Moondancer) were given basic training to operate the large-format map printer. Trixie was fascinated when the print head zipped back-and-forth across the page and maps began rolling out.
Although charting a direct route between their two henges was top priority, Ivan insisted that they carefully consider the broader context, potentially for hundreds of miles around. He was sure the ley lines had once formed a sophisticated network. That meant there could be intersections or crossings with other lines that were no longer active, but that they might want to reconstruct in the future. The distance between Castlerigg and Swinside being relatively short, they might not even run into this problem, but it had to be checked.
Furthermore, Lord Peter’s scholars were still looking for the broader patterns that might indicate how the network components functioned. What was the significance of a trilithon or a dolmen, as compared with a solitary menhir or a long barrow? Nobody was sure. The widespread assumption was that henges were the wellsprings of magical energy, and they ley lines carried it outward across the land, and that connecting henges together allowed them to reinforce one another and increase their power.
However, at least one of the scholars was very convinced they had it all backward, that long barrows were the origin. Neolithic people had worshipped their ancestors, he insisted, with magic power coming from the tombs of the ancestors, then delivered by ley lines to the henges where worshippers would receive and use it in their ceremonies.
As they all debated this one day over supper, Ivan had mused, “What if it’s both? What if earth magic comes up from the barrows, and celestial magic comes down to the henges? Just like two terminals of a battery. Then you build a ley line between them, and it’s like closing an electrical circuit. That’s how you get the power flowing, maybe?”
Moondancer objected, saying, “My coven raised a Cone of Power from Castlerigg, and Trixie confirmed it! That proves henges are the origin of the magic, not only an end point.”
Trixie fidgeted, wondering if her little white fib had sent the whole project careering down the wrong track. That was assuming this entire project had any basis at all, which she still hadn’t seen any real evidence of. She bit her tongue and concealed her doubts. “Worst comes to worst, I’ve made a lot of bits from this venture, and all the humans end up having to become ponies anyhow,” she silently considered. Yet, somehow the thought didn’t bring much comfort.
Out loud she said, “But it wasn’t a lot of magic. Not compared with what we have back in Equestria. Maybe we should look into the idea.”
Ivan scratched his chin. “Maybe… Maybe connecting a long barrow and a henge is something we should try as a side project. Most of the surviving barrows are down south, around Stonehenge and Avebury. There’s even some new ones built, that people can put their urns in. It turned into a bit of a fad, really.”
“Do you have the resources to do that?” Moondancer wondered.
Ivan smiled and answered, “Luv, we’ve got more resources now than we know what to do with. Volunteers, donations, equipment, you name it.” Then his smile faded somewhat. “But Lord Peter might have me running all over the country trying to stay on top of it all. I won’t be here at Castlerigg most of the time. The construction team here have already got the plans. I’ll just check in once in a while to make sure they’re on track.”
Trixie looked to Smithers, who’d been silent and glum for a while. “Smithers, will you be staying?”
He shook his head. “I’ve been recalled. The National Trust has thrown in the towel on Castlerigg, and I’m wanted elsewhere. I’m leaving in the morning.”
Trixie awwed. “I’ll miss you.”
Smithers shrugged and forced a wan smile. “It’s been an assignment to remember. And for whatever it’s worth, I wish you all the best of luck. I still can’t believe anything will come of all this, but I won’t complain if I’m proven wrong.”
In the next few days, the Low Nest Farm became a bustling place. Tourists and pilgrims once again came to Keswick. They came to see the restoration work being done to the Castlerigg henge. They were full of questions, and the question most of them asked was: “How can I help?”
Ivan recruited an earnest older couple named Blake to organize the volunteers who came to Castlerigg, as well as fend off media inquiries, so that Trixie and Moondancer wouldn’t be constantly interrupted. They assigned some of the volunteers to go inspect and photograph various points of interest between Castlerigg and Swinside. Any object of local lore along the path, any symbol on a map, or any visible disturbance of the land in the satellite images might possibly be the trace of a neolithic structure.
Moondancer had a growing stack of reference material: books of ancient lore, books of ritual magic, and treatises on neolithic monuments and ley lines. She tried to find correlations between the patterns on the maps and astrology, numerology, symbology.
Trixie also placed orders through Lord Peter for books of magic from Equestria, and was surprised with how quickly they arrived, sometimes within only a few days. She wondered briefly what lengths he’d gone through to procure them.
For a unicorn pony, basic telekinesis and lights were innate abilities, expressed as naturally as flight and weather manipulation were to a pegasus, or physical strength to an earth pony. A unicorn’s special talent, once discovered, enabled new abilities related to that talent. All these could be employed without formal study, and many unicorns never ventured beyond them.
Spell books and study of magical theory fell into a different category. This was advanced magic, true spell-casting, and it often used poetry and rhyme, and occasionally symbols or songs, to evoke the imagination, emotions and inner vision of the caster.
Trixie had tried to study advanced magic in school, and she had learned the basics, but found it a slog. Her stage act leaned heavily on her innate, intuitive abilities. Now she had to dig into the textbooks again, and it was no fun. Moreover, it was hard to find anything that could be relevant, even tangentially, to the problem at hoof.
After a few days of spinning their wheels, Moondancer decided to visit the High Priestess of her order, to hold a confab with her and some other high-ranking Wiccans, to try and brainstorm some ideas.
Thus, Trixie was left alone at the farm. Oh, Mildred was still there, and the Blakes were there, and the volunteers and tourists milling about, but the team that Trixie had known since arriving at the farm had dispersed almost as quickly as it had come together. Even though Ivan and Moondancer were only a phone call away, Trixie was left feeling deflated and a little blue (in more than her usual, literal sense).
Left alone with the maps and books and all the dry archaeological studies, Trixie wallowed in failure. She sagged with her front hooves on the tabletop and her head resting upon them. The maps seemed to be mocking her with their symbols and lines, to all appearances drawn at random. The few ideas she’d had for attempting to correlate them with any form of unicorn magic had come to nothing.
There was nothing left for her to do here, so why was she staying? What was keeping her from resigning her position, taking the gold she’d earned, and returning to Equestria? She could go back to Hoofington; she could return home — in defeat. Her mouth puckered at the sour thought. She’d never been a quitter. And what would her human friends say?
She sighed and doodled idly on an otherwise blank sheet of paper. A pencil floated in her magenta aura as she magically scribbled. She’d always been a doodler in school, when she should have been paying attention to her classes.
Ivan. Moondancer. Smithers. Lord Peter. Katrina. They were counting on a miracle that Trixie — or anyone else — might not be able to deliver, that might not be possible at all. More and more Trixie had begun to suspect this entire endeavor was nothing more than wishful thinking. Where was the evidence that this entire scheme could work? The critics she’d seen on the telly nagged at her. What if they were right? What if this misplaced dream of turning back the Barrier only led humans to avoid conversion?
In her mind’s eye she envisioned hordes of humans overrunning the Conversion Bureaus as the Barrier approached — too late, far too late to convert them all in their millions, before it rolled over them and snuffed out their lives.
She looked at the paper. She’d drawn a typical Trixie doodle. When the other fillies in school had doodled, they usually drew ponies… or animals… or flowers… or hearts and rainbows… Trixie never did that. She only drew abstract doodles, filling empty space with ever-growing webs of interconnected dots, triangles, circles and boxes. It was a meaningless activity that required no thought, no imagination, and, most of all, no artistic talent. Zen doodles.
She stared at the doodle for a few moments, then her eyes drifted over toward the map on the table, the oh-so-neatly computer-printed map. Her gaze settled on a spot marked “dolmen”. She floated her pencil over to it and carefully drew a triangle around the spot. She scanned the map until she found a spot marked “henge”, and she drew a circle with a thick dot in the center. Then she drew a straight line across the land, connecting the two shapes.
She stared for a few moments at the map she’d defaced. She smiled. It was like drawing a mustache on a painting. A worthless and frustrating painting. It deserved to be mocked.
She added a thick, round dot on a hilltop, then began to make a line connecting it with the triangle — but it didn’t seem right. It was too far. She bit her lip and carefully penciled in a square box between them. Yes, that was better.
After making a mess of the map, Trixie gave up and went back to her room to watch TV. Even though it was often so confusing that she could only tolerate small doses, it was also fascinating. Before Convergence, black-and-white silent movies had been state-of-the-art, a recent invention in Equestria. Humans had left that technology behind over a hundred years ago. Given the limitations of electronics on Equis and in the Exponential Lands, it was questionable whether ponies there could ever advance in any similar way.
And so, all of these technological wonders would be gone in a few years, when all the world was converted to Exponential Lands. They would become the stuff of legends and myths. Unless…
Trixie shook her head and switched to the news channel. As she’d come to expect, it was all bad. There were more freakish weather events. More riots. More terrorism. More pundits trying to make sense of it all.
Trixie thought back to Nightmare Moon, Discord, the changeling invasion. Ponies had known terror when the sun didn’t rise, when chaos was unleashed upon the land, and when the changelings swarmed into Canterlot. And yet… They’d never known what was really going on. The changelings had been defeated in a day. Nightmare Moon’s endless night and Discord’s reign of chaos had each lasted less than a week. Equestria had never known anything like this slow-motion train wreck on TV in every home for week after week, month after month, while everyone watched in helpless horror as every detail unfolded.
An image of giant trilithons flashed on the screen, and Trixie perked up her ears to listen.
“Tens of thousands of pilgrims and protestors have flocked to Salisbury Plain, gathering here at Stonehenge to demand that this British cultural icon be rebuilt and restored to its ancient glory.” Drone video filled the screen, showing colorful throngs milling about, some carrying placard signs. The view then changed to reveal vehicles and tents sprawling outside the monuments. Narration continued, “Normally access to Stonehenge is restricted, except upon summer solstice. However, the authorities appear to have given up any attempt to control these crowds. Similar scenes have unfolded on smaller scales at neolithic monuments across the British Isles. In some places activists, unwilling to wait for action from the authorities, have already begun clearing brush and debris from around neglected monuments as Neolithic Fever sweeps the country.”
The view returned to a reporter on the ground alongside the familiar face of Ivan. The reporter spoke, “The idea put forth by Wiccan groups and the Kemetic Church, that restoring these monuments can reawaken Earth’s natural magic and hold back the Barrier, has fired the imaginations of many. Here today is Ivan McGregor, a self-described ‘geomancer’ who is supervising restoration work on the stone circle at Castlerigg. Ivan, what are your views on Stonehenge?”
Ivan responded, “For decades now our mandate for all these monuments has been to keep hands off, except for very carefully considered archeological digs. What people need to realize about Stonehenge, though, is that it’s already been tampered with, and it’s already been reconstructed once.” He waved his hand in the general direction of the giant stones. “What you see here was done in the 1950s. You can dig around the bases of those stones and find the modern concrete poured when they stood them up. So in a way it’s all a sham. It was done for a tourist attraction.”
The reporter prodded, “So what you want to do is a more authentic reconstruction?”
“Aye! So much archaeological work has been done since that time, and we’ve learned so much more about this site. We can undo all the damage from the 1950s and rebuild a much more accurate reproduction of Stonehenge in its heyday. Stonehenge was in active use for over a thousand years, and we now know it went through several phases of construction. Not to mention, the whole area around here is a wonderland of henges and barrows and other neolithic structures.”
The reporter pressed him, transparently reading a prompt from his smart glasses as he asked, “We’ve heard more expressions of skepticism from Equestria, from the unicorn experts on magic as it’s practiced there, doubting whether these efforts can have any effect on the Barrier, or whether humans are capable of working any magic at all. Katrina promised that evidence was forthcoming, but we still haven’t seen it.”
Ivan chuckled. “Skepticism doesn’t bother me. It’s something we’ve been used to since long before the Convergence ever happened. The Wiccans, the pagans, the new-agers, the astrologers and psychics and all the rest have always known there’s something more to this world than facts, figures and logic. There’s another world of lore, legends and magic that modern man has turned away from. In spite of all that skepticism, a few have kept the faith.”
The view returned to the studio, where the news anchor added, “Meanwhile, we’ve been informed that Princess Celestia has taken personal interest in this phenomenon and has dispatched a Special Envoy to investigate the claims.”
The news then went to a report on earthquake relief efforts in Guatemala, and Trixie switched it off. Ivan seemed perfectly happy to disparage facts, figures and logic when he didn’t have any to offer. Trixie just wasn’t so sure. She earned a living from making her audiences see more magic and wonders than she really had. It worked as long as the audience wanted to believe. With their fate bearing down on them, humans wanted desperately to believe.
As she mulled over these thoughts, her phone chimed. She slipped it out of her little purse and magically poked at it with the stylus. “Ahoy, ahoy!” she spoke into it.
A familiar and cheery voice answered, “Ahoy indeed! I say, that’s a peculiar greeting, Miss Trixie. Is that how ponies answer their phones in Equestria?”
She began to suspect she’d been misled by a certain prankster. “uhhh… Yes! Yes, it is. What can Trixie do for you, Lord Peter?”
Lord Peter explained, “I just wanted to inform you that a delegation of unicorns from Equestria are on the way to investigate our project, and they’ve expressed a particular interest in your experience at Castlerigg. I’m sure they will want to meet with you, as well as examine the site. You should expect them before noon Thursday.”
Day after tomorrow? Trixie frowned and asked, “How many are coming?”
“It’s the Special Envoy, Her Excellency Twilight Sparkle, along with a pair of assistants, as I understand.”
Trixie scowled. “Did you say Twilight Sparkle?” she inquired with deadpan tone.
“You know her? Ha, of course you do! She the Bearer of the Element of Magic, and you the Most Magical Unicorn in All Equestria: I’m sure you two moved in the same circles back home, eh wot?”
“Yes of course.” She forced out a strained laugh. “Haha! We’re colleagues! Rest assured, I’ll give Her Excellency Twilight Sparkle all the cooperation she’s due.”