After a good night’s sleep Twilight and I began creating a series of experiments, some to inflict upon myself while others were attempts to breakdown exactly why mana was poisonous to ponies. From theory and a little careful biology I had surmised that is was a magical conflict, but I wasn’t positive. Starting today though I would start experiment one: cut my mana intake by fifteen percent.
“Twilight, how am I doing so far today?” It’s been four hours since I took my mana injection. Personally, I’m feeling okay, but I need to know effects I can’t recognize.
“You’re a little jittery but otherwise fine Val.” She quickly returned to her experiment with a few samples I brought with me. According to Twilight, she was looking for specific components deep in the magical properties.
We had started several new experiments as well, and checked out at least seventy volumes about the magic of Equestria. From my point of view, I saw their magic like a current, something that was reflexively tapped into by unicorns when they cast spells. Then there was what Ruby told me, about the cloud walking pegasi and their innate weather control. What did an earth pony use? Did they use magic at all? Nothing I read could give me even a hint towards what earth ponies did with this magical current.
According to everything I could get my hands on, earth ponies cultivated the land; I couldn’t find anything else anywhere. I even asked Princess Celestia and Princess Luna about the subject, when they weren’t preoccupied of course. Unfortunately, they weren’t talking. According to Twilight, who had some experience with earth ponies, earth pony magic is probably subtle while pegasi and unicorns are obvious. I could make sense of it in my head, but writing it down was hard; it felt like I was back in magic theory, but taking notes blindfolded.
Thanks to Twilight, I could actually write a sound equation for unicorn magic in relation to my own. With a few books and a little demonstration from Ruby’s husband, he was on weather duty just outside Canterlot, I could write at least a theory about pegasus magic and its relation to unicorn magic. I’ve committed most of my resources to figuring out the variances with Equestrian magic, if I was crazy I’d put all my eggs in one basket. I am however, quite intelligent and know better. Well, I usually know better.
Some daily rituals never change though, and Twilight was willing to watch, eager to learn. I spent every day since I came here running alchemy studies, but I’m running out of stone. I’ll need to make a new one sooner or later, which meant growing more plants. I’m no gardener, but I’m not stupid enough to try and grow them where any pony could get into them.
“If unicorn magic is obvious,” she said as I worked on making some gold, “then your magic is something more than obvious.”
“Blatant,” I suggested as I stared at my, now pebble sized, stone. “I’m afraid I’ll need to make a new one soon,” I added with a sigh.
“A new what Val?”
“In order to do transmutations I need a philosopher’s stone, a sort of alchemical reagent I can use repeatedly. Each time I wear away some of its power, using it to make the transmutation occur. Since the properties of energy state that you cannot create or destroy energy, then I use this as a way of redirecting and converting energy into what I need it to do. Take this gold bar for example,” I pushed the newly fashioned bar towards Twilight. “By using magic filtered through the philosopher’s stone I can make iron transform into gold despite the physical properties that differ in both.”
“Does the gold you make have the properties of iron?” She poked the bar curiously with her hoof.
“No, it has the properties of gold. That’s the guiding force behind transmutations: the art of altering one material into another. Now back to the stone, if I’m performing weaker transmutations then I can use less of a powerful stone. It works perfectly in the other direction too, if I’m doing a complicated transmutation with a relatively weak stone I use most, if not all of it.”
“Then how do you create a stone?”
“A basic stone is just solidified and condensed elemental energy, but a more powerful stone requires other sources. In my research, I found that I could also collide weaker stones into more potent sources of elemental energy to create powerful stones. These ‘combined stones’ are unfortunately unstable, not useful for prolonged experimentation.”
“Can anyone use a stone?”
“No, you need training as an alchemist to use one. Before you ask, I don’t take on students Twilight.”
“Why’s that?”
“I’m a lousy teacher,” she gave me a skeptical look, “I’m always demanding absolute perfection of my students. Your final exam, as it were, would be to surpass me in theory and practice and that’s very difficult to do when I’m learning parallel to the student. As such, I also consider myself perpetually a student and unworthy of being a teacher. To be blunt, I have more of a hatred to the concept of anchoring myself to teaching; I doubt I’d learn anything other than what to teach and what not to teach. I’d never make any progress into the nature of sorcery like that.”
“But you’d become a better person wouldn’t you?”
I paused, making sure to fully comprehend this nugget of wisdom. “At first, I learned magic because I thought I was gifted. Then, after Arthas, I tried to understand magic to simply survive. After Kael betrayed us, I sought to prove we were more than our hunger for magic. By the time of the Nexus War and Kel’Thuzad, I saw only one obstacle in my people’s sordid lives: our addiction. I learned more and more about magic to help them, but struggle after struggle made me realize that I exist by learning.”
“Then what did you learn?”
The smile that slowly grew as I told her everything faded. “I learned that they can’t be saved. My people need it too much and they can’t accept that there’s any other way to grasp the same solution. In my desire to leave, I figured out that they only wanted the temporary solution to sustain themselves. Once I figured that out finding a better way seemed like a solution I couldn’t share it. I could never stand up to either the ridicule and scorn or the praises that my people would have.
We would go back to what we were, or at least kid ourselves a little, but we’d never be the same. You can turn back the hourglass as many times as you want but you can’t permanently change anything. Do you know why you can’t?” I cast Twilight a sly grin.
Twilight backed away a little and shook her head. “Why can’t you?”
“Provided the person you’re interacting with isn’t smart enough to figure it out, if you change something you alter the course of future events.” I grabbed a book about pony history and flipped open to a cluster of pages of notes that Twilight had added. “Let’s say we theoretically went back to when this whole ‘Nightmare Moon’ thing was about to happen and prevented it. The question isn’t if we would be here in the present. It’s more probable to ask what we would be doing in the present. By altering the past, we change the course of events. Do you really think we undo our own existence though? Perhaps it’s possible to create alternate timelines that way, one where we changed an event however, we are part of the original series of events and unaware of the change in information.”
“And here I thought I didn’t have anything other than my studies.”
“You learn when you can Twilight, and when you’ve had moments of ‘when’ like I have then you think about it quite a bit.”
“You mean time travel right?”
I nodded. “Of course, is it such a hard thing to grasp?”
“No I actually had a moment where I went back to see myself a week in the past. The spell didn’t last very long but I guess I made the events of that week happen because I went back in time.”
“And that sealed the loop you created.”
“Right, but, wait have you travelled through time?”
“Twice,” I said casually, “each time was to prevent the fabric of time from being unwoven.” I thought about it, about how hard it could actually be to explain the Caverns of Time to her. “I suppose I should start at the beginning.” I found it hard to really explain the caverns, but Twilight was a good listener. Occasionally she would ask a question, but I found it best to tease with a ‘what indeed’ when I wanted to avoid the question. To be honest, I couldn’t hope to fathom the intricacies of time travel like they could.
“So, correct me if I’m wrong, but deep in the deserts of your world is a temporally unstable cave system.”
“Well, basically that’s right.”
“They’re dragons that call themselves the Keepers of Time that work to maintain the true timeline in the caves and their leader is Nozdormu, a gigantic bronze dragon.”
“That’s right, and what else Twilight?”
“They um… they fight a different group of dragons that call themselves the Infinite Dragonflight as they try to undo key moments in time?”
I smiled and gave her some polite applause. “That was very good Twilight. Here I thought it would be hard to explain it to you.”
“What you didn’t explain is the complexities of the situation that you were involved in.”
“Oh, you mean the opening of the Dark Portal right?”
“Yes, you weren’t involved in the event when it actually happened right?”
“Well, during the time of Medivh and the Portal, let’s just say that I was a lot younger when that happened. I was about ten at the time, conjuring sparks and spooking the neighbors’ daughter with mostly harmless jets of fire.” I sighed. Deep down I suppose that sometimes I yearned for the simpler days of when I was a kid. “When the war reached Lordaeron, the nation closest to home, I was young and headstrong. That isn’t to say I was stupid. I knew that I couldn’t just tag along with soldiers like Sylvanas, who was dragged back home kicking and screaming at least twice. She eventually got her chance, but she got a little bitter from time to time.”
“What about your travel through time?”
“I’m getting there Twilight. I thought you’d need a little background from back in, what I like to call the ‘smartass years.’ My parents agreed I needed to broaden my studies of magic, they knew I wasn’t taking my lessons in Silvermoon seriously. I wanted to learn from a real school, I craved Dalaran’s vast resources.”
“You studied there right.”
I nodded. “I was happy in Dalaran, and most of the students I met shared a lot of my interests and curiosity. None of them delved into magic as deeply as I did though. I knew skilled and lazy sorcerers alike, and they each had their own ideas about magic. I studied all of them and as many disciplines of magic as I could.”
“You sound a little like me.”
“I was a lot like you if you spent more time buried in books and notes than enjoying the sun and spending time with friends.”
“Okay, so I was a lot like you.”
“When I left Dalaran, well, I didn’t leave on good terms. It was hard to garner favor when I returned. To them, I ran away when the enemy was at their doorstep. My personal instructor and a few colleagues defended me in my absence but my reputation was thoroughly trashed. I eventually got my old study back and returned to my experiments but then I got wind of Ulduar and the discoveries that could be found there.”
“So, what about your journey involving time travel?”
I realized she was perfectly willing to get to the heart of the matter regardless of where I tried to move the conversation. “Alright, alright, it was a few years ago when I was directed to the Caverns by Medivh’s apprentice, a human named Khadgar. Khadgar was more or less polite about everything with me; I have a copy of his convergence essays somewhere in here.”
“So what did you prevent?”
“The Dragonflight sought to stop the Dark Portal from opening, preventing the invasion of the Horde. At the time, two individuals led the Horde: Blackhand and Gul’dan. Blackhand was the Warchief of the Horde and Gul’dan was the leader of a group called the Shadow Council. Both met their end in due time and, from what I heard, they died in their ambition.”
“It sounds gruesome Val.”
“Not every orc is like them, Blackhand and Gul’dan were sick monsters and existence is better without them.”
“How?”
“Blackhand was killed by his second in command, Orgrim Doomhammer. Personally, I liked Doomhammer for one reason: he appointed Thrall the Warchief of the Horde.”
“Did you like Thrall?”
I nodded. “Like Medivh and Khadgar, I could have nothing but respect for him. There was only one thing that Thrall did that I didn’t approve of and that was appointing Garosh Hellscream as acting Warchief. Garosh hated everyone in the Horde that wasn’t an orc and I cannot accept a person like that as a leader.”
“Did you ever say anything to Thrall?”
“I did once and he told me that he appreciated my opinion and told me to get better soon.”
“Wait, you were injured?”
“It wasn’t the first time I felt like I was going to die Twilight.” I got up and went for one book, bringing it back over to the eager unicorn. “Here it is,” I added as I flipped through the pages.
“King’s Year 630,
I was visited today by, of all people, Thrall. He came to check up on me under the pretense of my recovery from the events in the Titan Stronghold named Ulduar. I don’t think he arrived at a good time though since I had heard only a few days ago about his appointment of Garosh Hellscream as acting Warchief.
“I told Thrall of my apprehensions of placing Garosh in such a dangerous position but he simply told me to leave it be and get better. At least he listened to my opinion.”
I turned a few pages further.
“King’s Year 631,
I received orders today from the ‘Warchief.’ I’m supposed to report to Orgrimmar and be on the first ship I can reach to march on Stormwind itself. Personally, I think Garosh has taken one too many blows to the head. We need to be more concerned with fighting Deathwing instead of destroying the Alliance, despite any misgivings we have for them. This can only end in disaster.”
I closed the book shortly after finishing that entry. “Our ship was attacked by a giant tentacled monster called a kraken and it went downhill from there. But I’m really getting off topic again.”
“I think I get enough of it. The Dragonflight wanted to stop the Dark Portal from being opened, which would stop everything that occurred because of its opening. In order to preserve the timeline you went back in time and stopped them.”
“I didn’t go alone; I rarely go gallivanting into the unknown without some support. Well, I only go off on my own when I’m ordered to and sometimes that’s unavoidable.”
“Ever since you started talking you’ve calmed down Val. I think the first experiment will be more successful than we initially thought.”
“That’s good news, after a few more days I think I’ll be more willing to trim the dosage more.”
“So what happened next…”
*****
We hardly spent any of the next few days experimenting. Truth be told, cutting my mana intake was working far better than I expected. We still ran some tests and made more speculations, but the majority of it was Twilight just asking me about my life. She didn’t always know when to stop pushing a question; we try to forget some things for a reason.
“I have a new idea,” Twilight said as she looked over from our massive chalkboard of equations, “what about if we approached this problem from a new angle?”
“What did you have in mind?”
“I’m thinking psychology Val. Let me send a few letters and we can get my idea under way.”