Twilight hunched down as her magical construct fizzled into nothing.
“Professor Radiance, I—”
“Yes, yes, you’re exhausted from trying to stuff every single book in the library into your head in three days. No, don’t look surprised, I know what you’ve been doing, and you should know that going through the most momentous and difficult occasion in your life without sleep is a terrible idea.”
The normally jovial brown earth pony’s face was now in a heavy frown, the contrast only adding to the effect. He stared at Twilight for several seconds as she drew herself into an even tighter ball. “You know the meditation towers are going to be sealed next week. So on top of having no sleep, you left this to the last minute,” he continued.
Twilight drew her head up. “I—I could—”
“Yes, I suppose you’d better,” the professor said, waving a hoof. He then walked forward until he was right in front of her. Twilight stared at the floor as she waited for him to continue his tirade, tracing a stylized rune with her eyes.
“Twilight,” he said. She looked at him again and was startled to see his face transformed back to his habitual smile. “I’m not disappointed in you. None of us are—not even professor Veracity,” he finished with a grin.
Twilight gave him a small smile in return, unable to help it. He always had the ability to give his students some of his drive with just a look. His class wasn’t Twilight’s favorite, but it was a close second.
“Now,” he said, switching to his lecture voice, “since you know what your mistake was, I don’t expect you to be repeating it in the future.” He waited for Twilight’s nod, then continued, “And so, because this is such a big occasion, you have my permission to cast that spell.”
Aware of how close she’d gotten to critically delaying her entire career as a mage, Twilight only nodded, then closed her eyes, focusing on her spell. It was one she’d made when she was a foal, cobbled together from hints in ‘forbidden’ books that she’d read anyway and her own desire to be able to read as many books as she could as soon as possible. It was a piece of mind magic that allowed her to put off sleep indefinitely. The only downsides were that she would eventually have to sleep it all off at once, as it became more taxing to use the spell the longer it was active, and that mind magic was commonly known as dark magic, its usage carrying a heavy stigma as well as an insane amount of regulation. She’d gotten off lightly as she’d been a foal and her parents had pleaded that she hadn’t known what she was doing, but if anyone caught her using it again she’d be thrown into the nearest psych ward and scanned for outside influence, then get saddled with a heavy fine for unauthorized use of dark magic.
She finished the spell. It would last for three days without being sustained, though she’d be able to feed it magic whenever she wanted without recasting it. “Done,” she said.
“Good. Now focus. You need absolute concentration to make that template,” the professor said.
With a deep breath, Twilight was once more only aware of the magic around her. She opened a connection with her horn and searched the Aether. After a few minutes, she found an isolated clump of magic and dragged it into the real world, and then held it all together before it could disperse into the ambient magic of the world. No one knew where magic came from, though there were many theories; most unicorns just called it the Aether and left it at that.
She twisted out the knot of magic into usable strands and imprinted a bunch of ‘move’ and ‘stop’ commands onto the drifting magic, then used mind magic to make the spell activate based on what she was thinking (Sure, it’s mind magic now, but make my own spell and it’s suddenly dark).
When everything was prepared, she brought it all together into a flawless thought template. She was cheating at this part; when she did it for real, the challenge would be having to fit it all together with individual ‘move’ commands.
“When you’re not reading yourself into a coma, you can be surprisingly competent,” the professor said, then pointed at the staircase spiraling around the side of the tower. “Up you go.”
Letting the practice construct dissolve into ambient magic, Twilight nodded at him and walked up the staircase, listening to the professor place sheets of metal down on the floor. After he arranged them, he would carve them with runes so that if Twilight’s meditation went wrong, it wouldn’t backfire and blow up the tower.
She opened a carved wooden door into a plain room. Unlike the rest of the tower, with its inlaid jewels and giant runes, this room had an unpainted plank wood floor and ceiling along with rough white stone for the walls and a single window. In the middle of the room was a magically suspended ball of light. She stepped into the room and closed the door behind her, then sat on the floor.
Twilight began stripping thought pattern after thought pattern into pieces, trying to get it over with quickly. A childhood of doing nothing but learning spells finally proved a disadvantage as she struggled with untangling threads of magic frozen ever more stiff as she reached older and older thought patterns. Eventually, she reached her core. It was the thought template on which everything was built, made on instinct when she was a filly. On close examination, without the rest of her thought patterns cluttering it up (she felt an unpleasant twang at having to think about how they were gone; she was already missing them) it was an extremely sloppy structure, leaking magic everywhere like a boat that was half boat, one-fourth sloppy patchwork, and one-fourth hole. Idly, she noticed that it had suddenly gotten a lot darker, but ignored it. Focus must come first.
She tore the final thought template apart like a scab and summoned a large amount of magic into the room for her new template. After adding each spell, she arranged the strands of magic into a semi-organized mess in the center of the room. Magic didn’t do anything on its own: it was just used as a power source. To be useful, the magic is funneled down and compressed and then explodes, but only through certain strands, and the shape of the strands determine what the magic does. Right now she needed to have the template funnel magic from the tip of her horn to the base when it detects her drawing on magic with her horn, and then read her mind for start and end coordinates, as well as speed, whether or not she wants to avoid hitting anything, and over a dozen other factors, and use many ‘move’ and ‘stop’ commands in conjunction with each other to most efficiently move the object without leaking too much magic.
Twilight grinned at the mess of magic in front of her. Most unicorns who took their magical studies this far took at least three tries to get it right. She planned to do it in one.