Twilight followed the guards through the palace, resisting the urge to scuff the shiny marble floors. They hadn’t put a limiter on her horn, but that could change.
“We’re here,” the lead guard said, breaking the silence. “The throne room.”
The towering double doors loomed above Twilight. She sent a quick pulse at the door, her horn flickering on and off so quickly no one spotted it. The thing was stuffed full of a bunch of sloppy enchantments piled onto each other over and over again, and held together only by immense magical power.
Then they opened. The guards stood at either side of the hallway.
“So, do I go in?” she asked. They weren’t treating her much like a prisoner. It was weird.
“Yes,” the one with his back to a painting of the Princess said. Twilight shrugged and walked forward.
Opulence. It was the first word that came to her mind, a word from a half-remembered book in an old study. ‘Throne room’ was a lie of omission. That implied the throne was the focus.
This room had pillars engraved with runes that looked accurate at a glance, and which a pulse she wasn’t about to risk with the Princess in the room and staring at her would probably show manipulated at least trace amounts of magic. The rest of the room was decorated in gold and marble and detailed paintings. With the addition of the stained glass windows and domed ceiling, the whole place screamed of misspent wealth.
A loud thud startled Twilight, and she yelped and turned to the sight of closed doors. She reluctantly faced back to the Princess, who still hadn’t moved.
“Come closer, Twilight.” Twilight flicked her ears back. The Princess knew her name.
Twilight drifted across the floor, hooves softly clipping against marble. She didn’t have the urge to scuff it anymore, and ducked her head as she approached. The Princess was—well, not evil, but definitely not good, and even knowing as much as she did, Twilight couldn’t suppress a feeling of awe at finally seeing the Princess up close. She looked so...regal.
But then, so did the rest of them.
Twilight stopped a few feet away from the Princess. She was imposing, her face stern but benevolent, and didn’t betray any emotion other than calm.
Then the Princess sighed, and the mask crumbled away. Twilight instinctively shied away. The Princess’s expression was unreadable. Not inscrutable, for that would imply a blankness. The Princess wore a face that Twilight knew was full of meaning, but all of it was meaning she couldn’t comprehend, like an old tome of necromancy written in demonic tongues. It looked...alien. Like she wasn’t even a pony. Not really. Just an imitator, living in a disguise that was almost perfect.
“Can you tell me why, Twilight?” the Princess said, her eyes locking onto Twilight’s as she made the mistake of glancing up.
She was caught. It was like a spell, except she didn’t feel the subtle buzz of magic. She was caught in the Princess’s unreadable gaze, and she couldn’t look away. Twilight knew what happened to ponies who read cursed books in languages they couldn’t understand. They got away with a few burns and some scarring, if they were lucky.
Nothing happened. The air rang with silence. A flood of hopes and fears emerged, were squashed, and rose up again in Twilight’s mind. Then she realized the Princess was still waiting for an answer.
“I needed money. So I stole things.”
The Princess didn’t even blink. “I don’t want an account of your crimes. I already have those. I want to know why.”
“I’m just a thief. I got successful, found some blueprints, and wanted somepony to do something with them. They kept getting destroyed, so I kept making more,” Twilight said with a shrug. Hopefully the Princess would take the explanation, and Twilight could engineer an escape attempt from whatever cell they tried to put her in. There was a lot she could do with magic.
“It’s possible that you just wanted to see what would happen,” the Princess said pleasantly, taking a sip of tea. There hadn’t been any cups in sight a moment ago. “But I doubt it.”
Twilight stayed silent. When lying your way out of a situation, it was always better to have more information. The more the Princess talked, the more chance she would reveal why she was really talking to Twilight, and the better the explanation Twilight could make up.
“I’ve lived a long time, Twilight. I’ve known more beings than the average pony will see in their entire lifetime. Ponies—all beings, really—fall into certain categories. There are those that blur the line, that subvert my expectations, but those are rare, and it’s the exception that makes the rule. I think I know where you fit, but I want confirmation. So speak. Tell me why.”
So the Princess wanted...what? To know why Twilight kept trying to spread knowledge of the devices? Sure, why not. Maybe Twilight would learn why the Princess was destroying them in the first place.
Twilight opened her mouth, but the Princess spoke again before she could. “It would be best if you would refrain from lying. I can see it.” she dipped her head and took another sip of tea.
She hadn’t been about to lie, but maybe the Princess only knew lies when ponies told them to her. That wasn’t implausible, when there were techniques the guard was rumored to use that could extract memory directly from a pony’s head. With the fact that the Princess knew her name, and that creepy freezing thing she did when meeting Twilight’s eyes… She probably could easily tell when somepony wasn’t telling the truth.
Celestia’s guards had burned the papers. They’d smashed the devices. Twilight might as well tell the truth.
The Princess was still looking at her. She needed to say something. Anything.
She decided to start at the beginning.
A pony was screaming. It had been going on for hours. Twilight rolled over from where she was laying on the eaves, pressing her head into the filthy pillow she’d brought with her. She’d been expecting to have to wait a few minutes. Maybe an hour, measured by the clocktower in the middle of Canterlot. But it had been almost an entire day, and the sun’s light was dying.
First she’d peeked in a window and seen a pony sitting inside with a book, then when he’d left ponies had trickled by too far apart from each other for her to get lost as a member of a crowd, and too close together for her to safely break inside the house without somepony seeing her. Then an earth pony had kicked a unicorn’s head in and the whole area had been in chaos ever since. It had gotten so bad that Twilight had considered just finding another place.
Something was digging into her side. Twilight pushed herself up and flung a small, sharp piece of stone off the roof, then fluffed up the pillow, filling the air with a small cloud of dust. She coughed and waved at the air with a hoof, then settled back down.
She’d wait for the screaming to stop. Then she could check again.
Twilight woke up. The moon was in the sky, and her head was full of early-morning grogginess. She shook it off, then looked at the house across the street. It was similar to the one she’d been waiting on—they were both boxes made of gray and blue stone, haphazardly splashed mortar where the builders had found gaps, and windows made of shoddily enchanted quartz. The difference was the library. Only rich ponies kept books, which made sense. You only needed to read a book once to know what was in it. The smart thing to do would be to share them around after reading. Keeping a bunch of them was like displaying a vault full of money that only other ponies could spend. Selfish and useless.
Twilight peered at the ground below. No one was around. She stood up and shooed a rat away, which squeaked and tried to bite her, then leaped off the roof, leaving the pillow behind. Twilight’s horn flared as she levitated herself, slowing her fall enough that the drop was barely enough to even bend her knees. She often wondered why other unicorns didn’t do the same. There was a trick levitating yourself, a sort of twist you had to do that made it so focusing on yourself didn’t cause a feedback loop that knocked you out, but it wasn’t hard, not once you knew how to do it.
A pair of yellow eyes stared at Twilight from the other side of the winding street as she crept toward the house with the library. Cats were creepy at night. They could see magic as well as unicorns, which could be disconcerting when trying to position an inactive levitation field behind them, and at night their normal vision was many times better than a pony’s.
Twilight reached the house’s window. They were usually enchanted to sound an alarm when somepony tampered with them, but if you bent the magic of a levitation field just right…
The spells faded from the quartz, leaving it chipped and foggy. And breakable. Twilight turned around and bucked it, sending it crashing from its frame into the house. She froze.
A few minutes of stillness passed. Twilight breathed a silent sigh of relief and crawled through the window, turning her levitation on herself to make the small climb easier.
She landed on a braided carpet of dull reds and yellows, hooves positioned between broken shards of quartz. She looked around.
Bookshelves stretched before her. If she could find some old ones, she could sell them, and if she found any with useful subjects, she could read them. The magic ones were useless, though; they all described magic with terms and math she didn’t understand. None of them addressed how the magic of a spell felt, how it twisted or bent or fractured. Books on medicine and maps were both useful and easy to memorize.
Twilight padded through the library, checking book titles in the soft purple glow of her magic. She had a time limit, and she wouldn't be able to return after this, not with the window broken. If she found a book for picking locks, that would make so much of what she did much easier.
There. That one had information on water wheels. Not the most useful, but there were some who owed them, mostly rich earth ponies who wanted to feel like they were unicorns. If she ran across a house with a broken one she could use the knowledge of how they worked to fix it for some money.
Twilight brought her levitation field to the book and activated it, then sent the book spinning in an orbit around herself so she wouldn’t have to focus too much on it and could keep reading titles. Unfortunately, most of the books here were about magic. Still, there was an interesting-looking one on herbology, another on medicine, and a thin volume about metalworking that she brought into her field’s orbit as well. No super old, expensive-looking ones in sight, though. She rounded a corner and came face to face with an old unicorn. He scowled and stomped toward her.
The books fell from her field. Twilight held perfectly still for a single moment, then let out a quiet scream, turned around, and leaped away. She wasn’t fast enough.
Something buzzed, and hot pain flashed through her. She stumbled and fell to the floor with a groan.
“Well, I’m glad that worked. That spell’s experimental, you know,” the stallion said conversationally. The world flipped over and Twilight was once again facing the old unicorn. He drew back a faded orange hoof, and it wasn’t until that moment that Twilight realized she couldn’t feel anything. She extended her field toward the unicorn, but it was wobbly. She couldn’t activate it. An attempt to get up was similarly futile. She opened her mouth, to plead, bargain, explain, she didn’t know what, but her tongue was just as numb. Fortunately, she could still scream.
The stallion scowled and she felt his field again. She positioned her own inside of it, trying to cancel it out, but the numbness affected more than just her body. A spell hit her.
“Ow.” She could talk again.
“What are you doing here?” he said, staring at her with green eyes narrowed in anger—and maybe a bit of fear as well.
Twilight brought her hooves under herself and pushed herself upright. She blinked. The library was moving. “Books,” she mumbled.
“Yes, that much was obvious,” he said, the acid in his tone obvious to Twilight even in her shocked state. “Which books?”
“Old ones. Valuable. And ones like those,” Twilight tried to point a hoof at the books she’d been holding, now scattered across the floor. “Stuff to read. Useful stuff.”
All of a sudden, the effects of the spell vanished. The stallion positioned his field to steady her, then laughed. “Just a thief! And I thought… Nevermind.” He pulled a kerchief from his coat and wiped at his forehead.
Twilight was once again frozen, but not because of any spell. This was simple confusion. Usually, rich ponies were more afraid of thieves than even the Royal Guard. The Guard couldn’t be bribed, were unstoppable machine-like forces of Celestia, and were armed with the strongest spells in existence, but they were utterly incapable of wriggling out of the iron grip of the law and would never kill an unarmed pony. On the other hoof, you could give a thief every bit you had and still get killed because she thought you might have more.
Unless what this pony did was so against the law that with all his money he wouldn’t be able to escape jail or execution.
The stallion put his kerchief away. “Well...I can’t have urchins scampering around, breaking windows, and stealing my books…”
Twilight edged away.
“But I can’t really do anything to stop that, aside from capturing any ponies who come sneaking in and calling the guards.”
She broke into a trot.
“I suggest you stop running.”
The trot became a gallop.
“I can perform that spell again,” he called.
Twilight slowed, then reluctantly turned around. The stallion appeared in front of her with an orange flash and a small bang, leaving Twilight blinking the stars out of her eyes and considering trying to make a break for it anyway.
He eyed her like somepony might look at an apple on the ground. Twilight squirmed uncomfortably under his gaze.
“Alright then, here’s the deal: I don’t like having urchins scurrying around my house, but I don’t feel like getting the Guard involved. If you and your friends around these parts will stay away, you can return every week for...let’s say ten bits.” He said it casually, as if ten bits was pocket change. It took a moment for Twilight to realize that to him, it was, which was the only reason she didn’t try to immediately escape.
She tried to affect nonchalance. “I dunno. Ten bits?”
He raised an eyebrow. “Based on your appearance, I’d say it’s a fortune to you. Am I wrong?”
Twilight hesitated. The stallion reached into his coat and took out a small round piece of gold, then flipped it over to Twilight, who caught it in her levitation field.
“You can keep that even if you refuse. No strings attached.”
A steady ten-bit a week? Not only would she not need to steal, for that much she could outright buy books. But… She didn’t know anypony in this area. The only reason every Guard didn’t have her description was because she traveled all over Canterlot, and sometimes the surrounding towns. His bribes would keep her away, but he’d probably still have ponies trying to pinch a small bit of his wealth to eat with.
She shook her head. “Can’t do that.”
He frowned. “Oh? Why?”
“Don’t know anypony,” she said.
His frown deepened. “I see…”
Twilight shuffled awkwardly and glanced toward the back of the library. She should have lied. Now he was going to take the—
“I have another offer,” he said slowly, as if tasting the words as they left his mouth. Twilight waited, ready to bolt if his field came an inch closer to her.
“You can’t keep anyone away from my house from out there, but if I teach you a few spells, you might be able to keep the other urchins away from in here.”
He was selling something. That way of making yourself hard to understand, and saying all in stages so the other pony would hang onto your other word...pure swindler speech right there.
He cleared his throat. “I mean… You can live here. If you stay awake in the library during nights, and if you’ll learn a few spells so you can drive intruders away, then you can stay here and earn those bits.”
That was easy. “Nope. Sorry,” Twilight said.
He looked confused. “Oh...alright then. My name’s Hollow Shine. Feel free to come back if you change your mind.”
Several weeks passed before her next visit, but Twilight eventually returned to Hollow Shine’s house. She’d intended to accept his offer then take the money and run, but he must’ve seen something off about her.
Ignored shreds of plaster dangled from the ceiling, giving Hollow’s sitting room the feeling of a rather roomy apartment or safehouse. Twilight danced from side to side in quick hops, ready to levitate herself in case one of the creaky floorboards underhoof broke.
A gold coin emerged from the dark folds of Hollow’s coat. He pressed it into her field, then began to speak before she could say anything. “This isn’t so you feel obligated or anything. You already gave me your answer, and that’s fine. Any time you’re down on your luck, feel free to visit. You can use the library, if you like,” he said with an offhand wave toward the left hallway.
It was a trap. Twilight knew it. Hollow knew it. It was the kind of trap designed to lure you in with promises of food or shelter, then snatch you when you got too close. Worse, it was the kind of trap that worked even better if you knew about it, because the promises wouldn’t vanish even when it ensnared you.
And it would be when, Twilight, realized during her sixth visit. She’d knocked, been flipped a ten-bit, walked to the library, and started reading just like she had the last three times. It had become routine.
On the tenth visit, Twilight accepted his offer.
After that, things moved quickly.
“We have a lot of work to do. You have an extraordinary amount of raw power, and that has allowed you to brute-force your way through spells just by throwing mana at it. Any other unicorn I could start off with the basics, but you have to unlearn before you can start.” Hollow raised his head from the lectern in front of him, the glasses he wore when reading making his eyes wide and buggy. Twilight stifled a laugh. Anypony who looked like that outside would’ve been mugged as soon as she stepped outside.
He continued talking, and Twilight tried to continue focusing. Books were better. Speech was rambling and disjointed. What could be said in an hour could be stated in five sentences in a good book. “You are so powerful, in fact, that you can just surround anything, even other sources of magic, with your own. It makes it more difficult to learn the proper way, and it makes it very hard not to cheat. Thus the circle.”
Twilight had been wondering what it was. The circle on the floor had been on the floor when she’d walked in. It was drawn in gold, and red runes surrounded the outside in an unbroken chain. At least Hollow’s study had sturdy floors.
“You are going to stand inside of that circle whenever you practice magic, at least until you get the hang of the basics. Your ability has the potential to be an invaluable asset, but right now it’s a hindrance.”
Twilight shied away from the golden circle. Now that she knew what it was, she wasn’t sure she liked where this was going. It sounded too much like allowing somepony to put a limiter on her horn.
“That’s stupid. I can learn just fine like this,” she said.
“You’ll do it, or I’ll throw you out of the house and not let you back in.”
He wouldn’t really. “I don’t care,” Twilight said.
His horn lit up. “I’m not kidding.”
“...I’ll do it, but just one time,” she said defiantly.
Hollow Shine glared at her. “Get on with it then. And don’t smudge the ink. It could explode.”
Twilight gingerly placed a foot within the circle. Nothing happened. She could still feel her magic like normal. Her other hooves eventually joined the first. She moved her field around the room. Nothing felt different. She shot a questioning look toward Hollow.
He tossed a wooden sphere to the ground. It thunked against the floor. “Try levitating that.”
Twilight moved her field with more confidence. The runes had probably failed, or not been activated. She could feel her magic just fine. Then she tried to levitate the ball.
At first it went well. It slowly rose off the floor, then she spun it side by side. But little errors built up in its velocity, tiny flaws in how she handled the object that she couldn’t see, and thus couldn’t correct. After a few faster spins, it flew out of her field and whizzed sideways. Hollow’s orange-tinted field caught it before the ball could hit a bookcase and returned it to the floor.
“Yes, you can learn just fine like this,” he said flatly.
Twilight was used to a patchy sleep schedule. Safehouses were never permanent, and guards would often investigate places at odd hours. What she wasn’t used to was being nocturnal. Hollow apparently did intend for her to eventually defend the house during the night. Now though, she just read or practiced magic in another circle he’d set up for her in the library.
He’d just started to teach her runes when the guards came.
Hollow stopped talking mid-sentence, the piece of chalk—chalk for practice, ink for practicals, he’d said—fell to the floor, smudging the incomplete circle and ankh rune. An angry red rune lit up on his forehead.
He straightened. “Follow me. There’s something I need to show you.”
“Wait! What does the—”
“Follow. Me.” Hollow swept out of the study, Twilight following behind.
He led her down another hallway, into the library, and then rolled up a section of the rug, revealing a trapdoor. “Climb down there,” he said.
Twilight hesitantly undid the latch. The floor swung inward, revealing a brightly-lit ladder. Not wanting to chance it, Twilight enveloped herself in her levitation field and drifted down. She hadn’t yet figured out how to do it the ‘proper’ way, which Hollow Shine said would allow her to actually fly instead of just lowering her weight, but it worked, so she did it anyway.
Then she was in the basement. There was no other word for it. The whole place screamed ‘basement’. The cold gray stone that made up the square room, the harsh lantern light, the assorted wooden worktables and mechanical parts scattered over every surface…
Hollow darted forward and started rummaging through the strange contraptions of wire, magic, and gears on the tables, muttering to himself. “Quickly, quickly, I know it was right here...aha!”
He levitated a sheaf of parchment and two of the strange devices in his field and shoved them at Twilight. She took them in her own field and set them to orbit around her so she could concentrate on trying to understand what the hay was going on.
“Can you—”
“Yes, yes, I’ll tell you. What you have there is a device of mine I’ve been working on for decades. My prototypes were smashed and the blueprints destroyed because Celestia doesn’t want her little ponies to be able to live without her tyrannical rule. What you see here is a teleporter of things. Those are small, but they can be scaled up practically without limit. Practically free transportation of anything. It’s not limited by the number of unicorns who can perform a teleportation spell, or the amount of mass they can teleport; it just needs somepony to power it.
“Now they’ve found me. This rune,” he pointed a hoof at his forehead, “is an early warning system. I thought I’d been careful, but… I guess not. Take those papers, take those teleporters, and get them out there. Distribute them. Celestia can’t crush every advancement. Now go.”
His horn fizzed and sparked. It took a moment for Twilight to recognize the signature of the spell, and when she did it was too late. “Wait—”
She was in the alley behind the house. She crept toward the entrance of the house, pausing before rounding the corner. Voices. Clinking armor. A hoof pounding at a door. Twilight felt her heart beating faster. A quick peek—
Royal Guards. Three of them. She ghosted away, walking quickly but quietly in the opposite direction. Then she broke out into a gallop, the papers and devices held firmly in her levitation field.
She copied papers and mailed them to everypony who she thought might have the tiniest chance of seeing the implications. Nopony did anything with them, even when she personally gave them to a pony. She duplicated the devices and gave them to ponies as ‘enchanted artifacts’. They were all confiscated or destroyed. She broke into library after library and eventually learned the mechanics behind the devices, then created two large versions and sold them to a farmer as a way to quickly transport her product. Three years of dedicated research and work was destroyed by a contingent of Guards. Along the way, she’d used her magic to steal the entire fortunes necessary to complete the devices. Her latest attempt had finally led to her arrest.
And now she was in front of the Princess herself.
The Princess was frowning. “I think I see,” she said. Twilight stiffened as the Princess walked toward her.
“Why do you think I destroy those devices?” she said.
“To keep ponies relying on you,” Twilight responded without thinking.
The Princess slowly nodded. “It looks like that to you, doesn’t it. I—” She closed her mouth. Frowned. For a second, Twilight thought she could see a shadow flash across the Princess’s face, a twisted thing that laughed as it cried, digging phantom limbs into her fur—then it was gone.
The Princess’s face was hard. “I’d thought… No. I am sorry. But this is necessary.”
A pale glow faded into existence on her horn, a bale, cold light that mutated the darkness in the room instead of banishing it, eliminating every nuance, blending details into each other.
Twilight could feel the spell, some sort of modified transportation spell with immense power behind it. This time, she was ready. A pulse at the runic network built into the throne room gave her knowledge of hundreds of interlaced blocking spells. If she had a few days and the right equipment, she might be able to open them up enough to slip a short teleport though.
But there was another way. Twilight sent a series of frantic pulses at the network, backing away from Celestia until she found it: the key. For anypony else, it wouldn’t have mattered, but Twilight could feel the magic, mold her own so that it fit, and—slip through.
A blink, and she was connected to the castle in a way she’d never have thought possible. Scenes, sights, smells, and sound swirled around in her head, intermingling in a way that left her head spinning. She carefully shut out the scenes from around the castle. Feeling her way, she stumbled across several triggers, which linked up to—the castle had its own source of magic?
Twilight didn’t have time for all the laws of magic she’d carefully learned to shatter and rebuild themselves, and instead formed a teleportation spell and powered it with the castle’s magic. For a split-second, she felt something watching her, a tendril of a much larger consciousness that stretched toward her, rearranging her thoughts, trying to disrupt—
Then she was gone, and it felt like a huge chunk of herself had been brutally torn out and smashed in front of her. She stumbled on her hooves, her body feeling tiny and confining even after less than a second of being connected to the castle, but still had the presence of mind to make several quick teleports until she reached the safehouse. It wasn’t lit, smelled of mold, and the roof was crumbling around her, but after moving a heavy rock she found that the schematics were still thankfully intact. It would have been excruciating to have to redraw them from scratch.
She grabbed the satchel of papers and teleported, making jump after jump until she was magically exhausted in the middle of an empty town.
She’d forgotten it was night.