//------------------------------// // Magic // Story: Forever Twilight // by BlazzingInferno //------------------------------// “Mr. B! Mr. Belvedere!” Belvedere’s eyes fluttered open. Cornice’s pale yellow face floated over him, illuminated by moonlight. “Wha… Cornice? What’re you doing in my bedr—?” “You mean your office?” she shouted. His whole body suddenly and painfully reminded him just where he’d nodded off. Aches shot up his twisted back, all the way from his still-sleeping hind legs to the cheek he’d pressed against the desktop. “Ugh… what’d I—ah!” The office chair swiveled as soon as he moved; prompting his front hooves to sweep across the polished desk in search of something to steady himself. Cornice put a leg against the chair to halt it, but never broke eye contact. “What’s gotten into you? You’re not eating, as clear as I can tell you’re not working… Unless you’re trying to pass off a medieval castle as a civic center.” She nodded to the walls covered in paper. The moonlight made the papers shine, the dark pencil lines making up the stone wall were now a silvery white. “Well?” He stared at the papers. “Cornice…” “Who was it? Favorite grandma pass away? Secret girlfriend dump you?” “Cornice—” “Because something big obviously got to you. First you cancel all your meetings and hole yourself up in here, and then… whatever this is.” He nodded. “I… there’s this image in my head—” “There’s a half dozen expensive rulers in your desk drawer; they’re for drawing stuff to scale, not life size.” She stepped in front of him, her eyes boring into his. “This looks… this looks crazy, Mr. B. Head-in-a-thundercloud crazy.” He barely heard her. Even with her blocking the view, all he could see was paper and the stonework it represented. “It’s… I know how it looks, Cornice. Please just let me explain… once I figure out how to.” She reached forward and grabbed his hoof. “Please don’t be crazy.” “I… don’t think I am. I just… you ever have a really, really bad nightmare?” “Like thinking how hard it’s gonna be to find a new job that’s even half as cushy as this one?” “Like when you wake up… you didn’t really wake up… like the horrible thing you left was real and—” He saw her eyes grow wide. She really did think he was going nuts. “I had this bad dream, but there was this image in it that I just can’t shake: this… stone wall. It’s like when I’m in the zone, drafting something, and I the only way that bridge or building is getting out of my head is if I put it on paper… I’m just trying to do that for the dream.” She kept her eyes locked on his, unmoving and unblinking. “When’s the last time you went home?” He could only stare back, blankly. “Uh…” She rolled her eyes and gave his foreleg a tug. “C’mon, Mr. B. Let’s get you some decent shut-eye. That’ll help you get this out of your system.” He didn’t feel like arguing, not this late at night, and not with his ever-attentive secretary. Somehow his shaking legs held him upright, and Cornice’s wing provided the forward momentum. “You can just call me a cab.” “Oh no, no smelly cabs.” “Don’t tell me you’re carrying me.” “Pfft, to your place way out on ‘money hill’? Just keep walking.” One wobbly step at a time, he passed through his office door and into Cornice’s domain. Potted plants stood guard outside his office door, and photographs lined the walls, none of them defaced by drafting paper. He paused for a moment to stare at the nearest one, the pivotal moment in his young career when he’d posed next to Princess Celestia herself as Canterlot castle saw its oldest wing, now freshly retrofitted, reopen for business. That contract built this office building. The dozens that followed filled it with fellow architects, shrewd businessponies, and one indispensable executive secretary. “Almost there, Mr. B. I’m not carrying you an inch, but I’ll drag you a couple feet if that’s what it takes.” “Feet? We’re not even to the elevator yet.” “Just keep walking.” Cornice’s own desk drew closer, a slightly smaller version of the massive slab of wood he himself fell asleep behind. The similarities stopped there. Photographs girded her desktop, along with numerous tasteful knickknacks from the far reaches of the architectural world. How she got anything accomplished with the comparatively minuscule portion of free space she’d left herself he’d never know, but then again she wasn’t the one fighting off mysterious, paralyzing grief. “Here you go, Mr. B. Home away from home.” Belvedere followed her gesturing foreleg to the small, nondescript door behind her desk. “That’s a supply closet, Cornice.” She arched an eyebrow. “Maybe on the blueprints it is.” His magic sputtered to life, and the door swung open on silent hinges. Instead of filing cabinets and boxes of paper products, Belvedere saw a small cot, a lamp, and a miniature fridge all miraculously tucked into less space than his own guest bathroom. “What in the…?” Cornice guided him through the door and sat him on the bed. “There’s some food in the fridge, stuff you like. You can even dip into my precious almond toffee if it gets you eating again.” He stared at his surroundings, unable to rectify them with what he knew he should’ve been seeing. “But… I oversaw the design for the whole building, Cornice. Every brick, every beam… this is a supply closet! The blueprints are in my office!” She patted the fridge, tittering softly. “Ever notice how when you’re ‘in the zone’ with some big project, your favorite snacks show up on your desk, and I’m always here if you need something, even if the sun just came up?” He lay on the bed, his near-perfect recall of his own building’s architecture shaken halfway to its foundations. “But… How…” “You’d be surprised what my corporate charge card can do. Now get some shut-eye. You can fire me tomorrow for misusing company funds.” His whole body melted into the mattress. It didn’t matter that the springs squeaked, and it didn’t matter that the pillow was lumpy. The cot felt like a warm embrace. “Fire you? I could kiss you…” Cornice laughed as she neared the door. “Don’t; you wouldn’t look good with a fat lip. Night, Mr. B.” --- Belvedere’s walk home took on a slower pace, thanks to his new collection of cuts and bruises from his tumble down the hill and his pounding headache thanks to his using magic. Twilight followed behind him, silent aside from quiet murmurings about enchantments, wormholes, alternate dimensions, and whatever other incomprehensible words he didn’t quite catch. Every time he tuned her out, whether to check their surroundings or just to think for a moment, her next heavy hoofstep pulled him back to reality and set his hair on end. The notion that he had a guest, that he was leading somepony somewhere, could barely drown out the survivalist tendency to flee whomever or whatever was following him. “How… uh…” He didn’t know where to start. He wanted to know everything, particularly how she possessed enough magic to teleport the two of them to safety. “Okay, okay, I know I’m rambling—” Twilight took a long, deep breath “—but I can figure this out. I can get back. I just need to calm down and think through the whole situation from the top. So… where are we going?” “Home.” He silently cursed himself. It’d been years since his last genuine conversation with another pony, but he could still do better than a one-word answer. “My home. My… house. I built it myself.” “Is it far? I don’t mean to complain, but… I’ve felt safer in monster-filled forests than out here.” “I wish I could say you get used to it, counting how many steps you are away from a rock you can crouch behind.” “You mentioned before that you live alone. Wouldn’t it be safer if ponies banded together?” He looked out over the valley, glaring at the wavering light of its many bonfires. “Most of them do, down there. I used to, too.” Twilight’s hoofsteps slowed, distancing herself from him. “Why… um… Why did you leave?” “I’m not crazy or dangerous, if that’s what you’re thinking… unless you’re afraid of building stuff, anyway.” He held his breath. Please don’t be afraid of building things. Please don’t be like the others. “How could a pony be afraid of that?” He couldn’t smile widely enough. “Do ponies create new things, where you’re from? What’s it like?” She let out a long, slow breath. “My world is so different… I don’t even know where to start. Ponies live in houses, cities, castles… One of my best friends designs clothing, and another one just built a new barn to hold her family’s farming supplies. So yes, to answer your question, I was actually conducting an experiment when—” Belvedere froze, his ears straining to pick up the softest of breaths, and his brain replaying the quiet snap of a twig he’d heard a moment ago. Twilight stopped too, right down to holding her breath. There wasn’t any cover for thousands of paces, not until they reached the big, leafless tree adjoining his house. Don’t just run, he told himself. You’re not alone. You can’t leave Twilight behind. His eyes flicked downward. “Your hoof.” Twilight drew a quick breath. “What?” He slowly raised one foreleg and touched hers. “Did you step on something?” “I-I don’t think so.” “Let’s just keep walking. Whatever it is, it might not be after us. We’re two hundred paces from that patch on the left.” Twilight’s gaze followed his own, facing down the darkness and whatever monsters it might contain. Timbers were just the beginning. As a colt he’d heard stories, and as a young adult he’d heard screams. He stepped forward, and the dull scrape of his hoof against dirt prompted her to follow. She kept staring at the dark, the void that he’d seen rob young ponies of their lives and older ponies of their minds. “I build things too,” he whispered, breaking the tense silence, “I always have.” Twilight gave a small nod. “Your cutie mark is a right angle… how did you get it?” He blushed slightly. “I used to live with other ponies, down in the valley. My parents’ tent sagged right over where I slept every night, and one day I decided I’d break a couple branches off the nearest tree and improve it. After that I was doing it for everypony’s tent, and then I was carving rocks so they’d stack nicely. I even came up with a mix of clay and mud that filled in the gaps; I was going to make my own house with them. That’s about when the village elders came and told me to stop: stop ‘corrupting the pony way of life,’ or get out of town.” “They kicked you out for inventing masonry?” “They probably just wanted to scare me, but that’s when I left. I swore to them, to my parents, to anypony who’d listen that I’d be back when I could prove I was right, that we could all live better than scrounging for moss and living in tents.” “But… but isn’t moving from tents to stone houses enough? The pony who invented stoneworking in my world is in history books; he’s credited with helping bring ponies into the modern age!” Belvedere forced a laugh. “Modern age… Your world sounds like mine in reverse. The elders say our ancestors were obsessed with their own creations, that their hedonism destroyed the heavens and earth and that we’re stuck with what’s left over.” Twilight gaped at him, her staring contest with the void forgotten. “Do you think that’s true?” “Does it matter?” As they came to his doorstep, he hesitated. The stone walls curving away from him were rough and uneven in many places, to say nothing of the cracks in the mortar. Normally he’d look past these imperfections; he’d built this mighty fortress with his own hooves, after all. How did it look to Twilight’s eyes? How did this pony from a world that sounded so infinitely better than his own view his feeble, backwards methods? What would she say when she saw what lurked inside? She stepped forward and rested her hoof against the stonework. “This is wonderful.” “So are you,” he said, thankfully at a whisper that he himself could barely hear. He cleared his throat and pushed open the door. “Th-thanks. The inside is… something. I’ve been working on a few things besides masonry, I mean.” He hurried through the door and stepped aside, suddenly eager to see her reaction. Twilight stepped through the arched doorway, and her gaze immediately traveled upward, just like he’d hoped. A staircase wrapped around the circular interior, winding its way to a small landing just beneath the high canvas ceiling. The ceiling met an interior canvas wall at the center, a curtain that reached all the way to the dirt floor and hid a ten-hoofspan-wide column of space from view. The rest of the place wasn’t much to look at. A tangle of blankets lay nestled by the base of the steps, and his meagre supplies spilled across stone benches hugging the outer wall and the floor in between. “Well… this is it,” he said. There wasn’t any point in trying to hide it; he’d never considered the place a mess before, not until having company. Was he supposed to offer her a drink, or a meal? If only he had something to offer. “Would… Would you—?” “Is that a telescope?” He’d never heard the word before. “Maybe?” She trotted to the nearest worktable, the one closest to his bed, and peered through one end of a long, hollow branch. The crystals inset in its two ends gave him a magnified view of her pupil. “How did you make the objective lens?” “I… there’s some gem deposits up in the mountains where I harvest moss and roots. I scavenged some clear ones and figured out how to grind and polish them.” The telescope left the worktable in a purple aura, the eyepiece still pressed to Twilight’s eye. “So you just sit around here all day, single-hoofedly reinventing modern technology for fun?” “It’s not for fun. It’s just sort of what I do… I solve problems. I’ve been doing that ever since I got my cutie mark.” Twilight’s eyebrows rose. “Oh? What kind of problems?” He pointed to the telescope. “That’s for spotting food and water, and for keeping an eye on… dangerous things.” He trotted to another worktable and patted another hollow branch carved into a much more exaggerated cone shape “This is for hearing timbers from further away—” he returned to the doorway and kicked the stone wall “—and this… well I guess this one is obvious enough. It keeps monsters out.” She nodded vigorously, her smile widening. “What else?” He couldn’t help smiling too. “Seeing and hearing from far away is nice, and so is having a safe place to sleep… but there’s one thing missing.” She followed his gaze to the canvas barrier hiding the very center of the room. “What’s in there?” “There’s an opening right next to you. You’ll want to shield your eyes.” He squinted as her hoof found the curtain’s edge. Even with his eyelids nearly closed, he saw nothing but dazzling white light for seconds on end. As his pupils narrowed to pinpoints, the garden slowly came into view: tiny shafts of verdant green, some nearly two inches tall, pushing up through the soil. Some even sported the beginnings of leaves. A beam of highly magnified sunlight shone from above, eradicating even the smallest of shadows. “A long time ago, I noticed how the biggest, tastiest plants grow where the sunlight is the strongest. The whole roof’s covered in little crystal mirrors that bounce light off a bunch of other mirrors suspended above the garden with rope. All that light gets beamed down here to help the plants grow faster and bigger. If this setup works, if I can get all the food I need with a little garden like this, then I just might have the biggest problem of all solved: how ponies can live in prosperity.” The curtain fell back into place, and the brilliant light vanished. Twilight stared at him, open-mouthed. “Wow. I… so your home is actually an example. It’s a model village with strong walls and a built-in food supply!” “All because my old village kicked me out. I kept thinking and thinking about how we shouldn’t spend the rest of our lives scavenging moss, living in fear of monsters, never trying anything new…” Her wings flapped for a moment, causing the garden’s curtain to sway. She tapped her hooves next, and a huge smile formed on her face. “This is like living in a history book! You’re on the cusp of reinventing pony society!” Belvedere chuckled. “That’s going a bit far. I hope I find some ponies who’ll agree, enough ponies to start an actual village. Lots of them won’t ever listen, not even if I drop a saddlebag full of fresh sprouts on their doorstep.” “How can you say that,” Twilight said, her eyebrows lowering, “how can you… Look, I’ve dealt with unreasonable ponies before, not to mention dragons, yaks, a draconequus… I can’t imagine any of them saying no to suddenly having food and shelter.” He scratched his head for a moment, partly to hide an eye roll. Alternate worlds aside, ponies just weren’t that nice. “Want to try out the telescope?” They ascended the staircase that circled the interior wall and stood on the landing just beneath an opening in the canvas roof. Twilight held the telescope in her magic, her eyes fixed on the valley before them and the blotches of black shadow that hid swaths of land. “Don’t you get tired, doing that?” he asked. “Hmm?” “You’ve been levitating the telescope almost nonstop.” Twilight glanced at the telescope and shrugged. “It’s not that heavy.” “No, but… I had to throw a big bag of moss and gems just before you arrived, and now my headache isn’t going to go away for days. Placing all the crystals for my garden took weeks because I kept passing out.” Her eyebrows shot up. She glanced at the telescope and set it in his hooves. “That’s… That’s… I can’t tell if that’s more fascinating or frightening. M-magic isn’t so scarce where I’m from. I guess that could be a dietary problem, or maybe because of the shadow things outside.” Belvedere’s eyes drifted to her wings. “Is that why you’re a… whatever you call a unicorn with wings, or a pegasus with a horn?” She glanced at them herself, her feathers twitching. “It’s a long story. I was born a unicorn, but after I completed an ancient friendship spell, I became an alicorn and a princess. That’s why I have wings.” “And that’s why your magic is so strong?” “Well, yes, and no. Alicorn magic is stronger, but I’ve never met a fully grown unicorn who couldn’t handle basic levitation. My friend Rarity is a seamstress, and she barely uses her hooves at all.” He held the telescope to his eye and looked away, if only to hide his frown. She and all of her friends couldn’t possibly possess thousands of times his magic potential, teleportation and other tricks notwithstanding. “So… was there a reason you mentioned using the telescope?” After a moment’s pause, he passed it back to her. “Take a look at the bonfires down there in the valley. Each one is the center of a village.” As she raised the telescope, he pressed down on its top edge, lest she raise it too high. “Focus on the village nearest to us, forget the one at the other end of the valley.” The telescope glowed purple, and Twilight moved it away from his reach. He stared into the distance with his naked eyes, knowing exactly what she was seeing up close: lean-to shacks and tents inhabited by bone-thin ponies stained with dirt, all encircling a big bonfire to keep the timbers away. At this range, she might even be able to see some of the mushroom plantations. She wouldn’t be able to make out the fine details of the far-away village without his more powerful telescope, thankfully; the stone altar and mass graves would be mercifully indistinct. “Most ponies live off of mushrooms, even though they're poisonous. Moss is too hard to farm, and scavenging is dangerous. It’s a balancing act, eating just enough mushrooms to keep breathing, but not so many that the hallucinations start; that’s the sign that you’re on the cusp of a fatal dose.” He’d spare her the details, the terrible stories of ponies chasing those death-heralding bouts of insanity, and the one village that revered the experience. She angled the telescope skyward next, as if she expected to find more than a pale ring of light shining through cloud cover. Sweat ran down her brow despite the chill in the air. “What about the clouds? How long will it be until the pegasi clear them away?” “How would they do that? I've only ever seen a pegasus reach a treetop before their magic gave out. The clouds are up there all the time, and the same goes for the sun. The only way to tell night from day is when the timbers start howling.” The telescope vibrated violently and flew into his hooves. “Hey, be careful with this.” Twilight paced in a circle, her breathing swift and shallow. “No stars, magic deficit, no weather, monsters everywhere, barely any light, mystery shadows, sun’s just a ring… What in the hay is this place? How did I even get here?” “You really don’t know?” “I-I thought I did. I thought I did. I—” she shuddered and wiped away a tear “—It’s all my fault.” “Do you want some water?” Again he silently cursed himself; he was about as comforting as a timber’s jaws. Twilight sank to the floor, her head resting on the lip formed by the outer wall. “I-I was trying to solve a problem, too. I convinced Princesses Celestia and Luna to… the sun looks different in my world: it’s whole and even brighter than your garden. At night, Princess Celestia lowers the sun while Princess Luna raises the moon, which is about as bright as your sun and…” Belvedere set the telescope down, the whole of his attention focused the wet trail left by her tears, and the quivering of her lip. He shifted his weight from hoof to hoof and, after a moment’s hesitation, finally sat down next to her. She gave a great sniffle. “I used to do research and conduct experiments all the time as a unicorn. I-I just wanted to do that again, to really dig deep into how magic works.” “What was supposed to happen?” “Teleportation, amplified by the magic of the sun. Nopony really knows how teleportation spells actually work, or why there are so many weird constraints on them like how the inverse square of the distance… I’m losing you, aren’t I?” “Teleportation, the sun, something something. You listened to me talk about my life-threatening hobbies already, I'll figure yours out.” She gave a faint smile. “Teleportation is a really, really complicated branch of magic. I created a spell to… slow down the process, to let me spend a full minute in wherever ponies who teleport actually go during the fraction of a second it takes for them to reappear. That’s how it should’ve worked, anyway. Considering you’re not used to seeing ponies popping in and out of existence, who knows what really happened.” “How can you fix it?” he asked, despite not wanting an answer. Finally somepony understood his passions, even if he couldn’t reciprocate. “I don’t know… but I’ll figure it out. I have to.” “You can stay here, if… if you want to, anyway. It’s no trouble.” She stared into the distance, unblinking. Belvedere frowned and looked away. So much for spending more time with her, for talking to somepony besides himself, for basking in the glow of her smile. “Sorry.” “What if… Hmm.” “What—?” Twilight turned back to him, eyebrows raised and eyes dry. “Could you help me with another experiment? It involves your garden.” A ‘yes’ was on his lips, but his apprehension won out. “My garden? There’s nothing magical about that; I’m no earth pony.” “Just follow me. I’ll explain everything.”