//------------------------------//
// Stupid 
// Story: To Bring Light to Eternal Darkness 
// by scifipony 
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Like most buildings in town, a wall formed a compound around the propriety police building, except that one end was a wood-fenced demonstration ground, charitably; in reality, a small corralled dirt paddock.  Sometimes the propoli publicly admonished the fallen here.  At least once a year, they traded slaves here according to various local and Unicornian laws overseen in the High Desert by the propoli.

When Umbra pulled up, he called for a blanket.  A blue-faced propoli I didn't know, displaying a green-horn light, fetched a smelly black quilt and tossed it at me while averting his eyes.  The moon had hovered on the horizon for many hours now, but Umbra had refused to let me out of my rolling prison, which meant I was more smelly and dirty than before.  I tried to take my mares-cloak, but Umbra pushed it out of my magic with his own.  "No!" he said.

Evidence, I supposed.

After a hissed discussion with a third propoli, one with a purple horn light, he ordered me out of the wagon.

"Hobbled?" I complained, rattling the chains.

Purple magic levitated me out; I fought not to peddle my legs at the odd sensation.  Funny how I panicked when I understood I floated midair for real.

The three led me inside to a mortared stone room with a tan sandstone floor.  It had one small window the size of my face high on the west wall.  I could see the moon through it.  The blue-faced pony locked a cuff with a metal cable to my right foreleg and pulled hard on it to check the connection to the steel mount bolted on the floor.

Umbra, exhaustion in his voice, said, "This connects you to the ground.  It prevents Teleport from working by forcing the caster to move the entire earth the way he would clothes and things connected to his body."

I raised an eyebrow.  Did they really think I could cast that?

Blue-face explained, "The backfire when the spell fails would boil the garbage between your ears, so don't try it."

I felt my eyebrows rise.  Maybe they did!

As they filed out of the prison cell, I cried, "I really need to clean up!"

"Yes," Umbra said, "You do."  He slammed the heavy wooden door, leaving me in darkness but for the bright disk of the moon.

"Ugh!" I was so stupid.

I hadn't thought to ask to see my father, the town elder, or even the head propoli.  Was Umbra the head propoli?  I hadn't thought to protest my arrest either, or to state that Umbra had knocked me unconscious with a stone and kidnapped me.  Considering the crinkling noise my ear made, I had little doubt the fur around it was crusted with dried blood.

I had acquiesced like a good little subordinate mare.  Until today, I might have thought that was a good thing.

Did acting like nothing was wrong make it seem like I thought myself innocent and figured I'd be exonerated?  Or did it make it look more like I felt so guilty that I knew my protests wouldn't work?

I stuck with stupid.  And I was guilty—at least of the part of running away to a land of socially questionable ponies.  It looked really bad.

I stretched my neck out, moving around my chained legs, and found that the small pan of tepid water bolted to the wall lay just within my reach, but when I reached down to drink, my smell nauseated me.  The mages' tea had needed out during the ride.  The water was barely enough to wash my face.

I'd been given no bedding.

I had the choice of wearing the blanket or showing my cutie mark.  Wishing I knew conjuration so I could conjure water, I folded down on the hard ground in the pool of bluish light cast by the cold moon.  As I stared at it while thinking alternately about how to defend myself and about all my mistakes, I began to sense the orb "noticed" me.

Of course it had, I thought with frosty self-sarcasm.

In my hallucination, I'd cast Motivate on it.  Since the breaking of day and night, the orb that lit the night showed only a full disk and eclipses no longer happened.  It was said that the orbs of night and day had "grown suspicious" of one another and, as far as I knew, no longer moved in the same parts of the sky, though maybe the mages were responsible for that.  This "suspicion" had been enough of a thing centuries ago that it had made it into our outdated astronomy book.

I'd taken the "suspicion" thing as a metaphor.  Looking at the moon's wan imitation of the solar disk, "feeling" its cooling glow, the ambience it radiated wasn't comforting.  It was... baleful.

I shook my head.

Shaking made me think of cleaning a rug by shaking it, which gave me an idea.  I could pick of a bit of lint from my fur with magic...

I squirmed out of the blanket and let it drop to the floor.  Did I need to specify a single thing to pick out of my fur?  Levitation required you to calculate distance, weight, force, and vector, though I typically lazily guessed the latter three (as I suspected everypony did) and changed them to freely move things about.  As a foal, I'd done the math consciously and that was what made it difficult and unreliable—wobbly-broom syndrome.  My horn took care of most of the calculative burden now.

Distance was the problem since I wanted to apply the spell to every surface of my body at once, rather than nitpicking for hours.  Intuition chimed in, suggesting Friction, the practical magic I warmed cornerstones with.  It was a transform of the keystone spell Levitation, made to cause a rubbing sensation, heating things.  Combined...

It took a few minutes to solve the related magical equations together and to combine the resultant geometrical shapes the preliminary numbers brought to mind, spinning them in my head until their oblong spiked symmetry made sense.  Finally, I pieced together a reasonable trigger mnemonic with which to cast them.  Vague fiery digits spun through my line of sight, like hyperactive floaters that you saw when you stared unfocused at the sky.  They were not the blood of my body but the blood of my magic.  The phrases I'd composed for the spell were really bad poetry, but I had no plans to teach it to anypony—nor, as a rush of gathering magic flooded my horn, did I need to remind myself what preparation I required to cast it.

"Dry Clean!" I said aloud.  The gold glow of my magic aura bloomed around me.  With what felt like the rubbing of a dozen brushes, the spell went pop!  The noisome grime shot away and made a gummy thwacking sound as it hit the walls and ceiling.  Even my mane and tail fuzzed out.

I blinked.  They fuzzed out a lot.  My eyeballs burned, suddenly dry.

I heard hoof falls.

I barely had the time to snap the blanket to remove the grim that had peppered it and to toss it back on before a propoli slammed into the room.

"Magic is forbidden!  We told you!"  It was blue-face with his green horn light.

"Actually— You didn't."

"The cable—"

"Don't cast Teleport.  Check."

"Stupid mare."

My face burned.  His comment and my reaction did not bode well for my future.  At least the seething stallion didn't beat me.

Instead, he closed the door and lay across it.

I didn't like the impropriety of it, him alone with me.  My body went ice cold.  The quiet brooding sound of his breathing made my hide itch and tick.  Worse, to be away from him, I had to lay in darkness, shivering, my heart thumping in my throat.

Maybe one day I'd learn not to be cheeky, if I lived long enough.