“Twilight? We're in Canterlot now, you should wake up.”
She felt a gentle jab on her side. The first thing her tired mind could comprehend were the immaculate locks of royal purple next to her. Then a sudden flash of panic overtook her as she heard the train's wheels screech and felt the deceleration push her into the backrest of her seat, but it passed when she looked out of the window and recognized the familiar scene of Canterlot Station. A steady rain pounded the roof of the carriage, creating a soothing hum. The few other ponies who were in the early morning train with them were gathering their bags and getting out their umbrellas. She hadn't meant to sleep in the train, but explaining what had happened to her friends had taken longer than she thought. Pinkie had kept asking about when she could throw a welcome party when Twilight was trying to explain that they should be prepared in case something happened.
“Oh. When did I fall asleep?”
Twilight gently shook her head and rubbed her eyes to force herself awake.
“Soon after we left Ponyville. I thought about waking you up, but you seemed so tired that I didn't dare.”
Rarity flashed a soft smile before levitating her saddlebags onto herself. She had surprised Twilight in Ponyville Station earlier that morning when she had turned up with a letter from Sassy Saddles. She hadn't been sure what Sassy had meant by 'Princess Luna left an express request for several sets of clothes for something else', but the request for help at the end was clear enough.
“Ah! There. I knew I had one.”
An umbrella, glowing with Rarity's magic, floated out of one of the bags. Twilight regretted not packing one herself because while she knew a spell to keep herself dry, she would have preferred the mundaneness of one. Spell always attracted attention.
A transparent, lavender-tinted dome appeared above Twilight with a crack as she cast the spell.
“Are you sure you don't want me to go buy you an umbrella? I know a store just down the street.”
Her friend was looking at the dome above her with one eye squinted and a hoof at her chin. They were on the street just outside Canterlot Station, where their paths would split. Twilight would go towards the castle and Rarity in the other direction, to her boutique.
“Rarity, it's supposed to keep me dry, not look good.”
“Hm. I suppose there is no convincing you. Well, ta-ta. And do come by in the evening, I know the perfect place to eat.”
“I'll do my best to make time for it. See you later!”
They waved goodbye to each other and Twilight set off towards the castle.
Someone knocked on her door a few hours later while she was relaxing.
“Twilight?”
She recognized Celestia's voice immediately.
“Come in.”
She jumped off her bed and landed on her hooves just as the door opened. Celestia walked in with her usual grace, but there was concern on her face.
“I spoke with Luna before she went to bed and there were some things she wanted you to know.”
She looked at Twilight as she spoke instead of looking around to see if the room was unkempt like she usually would have. It made Twilight perk up her ears and wonder whether something had happened.
“First, she wanted you to know that the tailor she took Anonymous to, Sassy Saddles, accidentally pricked him with a needle. The tiny droplet of blood she drew did not seem to affect her in any way.”
Maybe the effect only appeared if his blood was present in sufficient quantities, or maybe it had to be drawn with his approval. It could even depend on the time of the day. Or maybe it just did not affect anyone but alicorns. Twilight noticed she had been holding her breath while she thought and nodded at Celestia to tell her to continue.
“Luna also hoped that you could show him the device that brought him here. She... did not want to tell him that he can't return home and hoped it would be broken beyond repair so nobody would have to.”
“Well, I can talk about it with him. There's a lot I want to learn about it, too.”
Her mentor nodded absentmindedly while looking at the blue sky through the window.
“I sometimes wonder if I make the right decisions.”
Celestia slowly turned her head to look back at Twilight.
“He misses his mother, Twilight. Was the decision to keep him here the correct one? Who am I to say that he can't go back to his family?”
Her tone was something Twilight hadn't heard her use before, and she suddenly realized how little she knew about her mentor.
“I told myself that I cannot risk all of Equestria for one stranger, but... it is not only him. I did not think to ask about his family, his loved ones. Does he have a wife and foals waiting for his return?”
Celestia closed her eyes and turned her head to the side, but Twilight saw the wetness in her eyes.
“Is his brother waiting for him to show up for something they promised to do?”
Twilight understood.
She stared at the open book in front of her. It was supposed to be something easy to read to help her calm her nerves but she could not bring herself to read more than the first line. The printed words echoed meaninglessly in her mind as her thoughts were irresistibly drawn to the conversation she'd just had. She felt a surge of elation for being one Celestia had chosen to trust with her feelings, which then faded into puzzlement as to why the wise leader had reacted so strongly to the alien's homesickness, before settling into a gnawing unease about seeing the ruler of Equestria at the verge of tears. She hadn't known how to help her. She hadn't known what to do to make her wise and benevolent teacher accept the undesired consequences of her own decisions. She hadn't known how to act to ease her worries. She still didn't know. Maybe if she had been more thorough with the alien she would've known. Maybe if she had been honest with her and told her what Luna had said. Maybe if she hadn't left for Ponyville out of the blue last night, maybe she could've been there for support when she needed it.
Twilight shut the book with a slam. Her eyes wandered around the room, looking for distractions. The bed wasn't perfectly made. It glowed in her aura for a second and the sheets shuffled and straightened out. The quills and scrolls on her table weren't in order. They glowed in her aura for a second and arranged themselves into neat rows and piles. Her saddlebags were laying in a corner. They glowed in her aura for a second and flew into a closet. The coat hangers in the closet weren't spaced evenly. They glowed in her aura for a second and-
There was an alien, metal-framed device in the closet. The device that had brought Anonymous into Equestria through some arcane means. She picked it up with her magic and left the room.
Her hurried knocks rang on the door to Anonymous' room. She barged in without waiting for an answer. The alien was sitting at a desk, a pencil in his hand and some paper in front of him, and looking at her with an arced brow.
“Hi! I... brought this thing.”
The device, which she had been levitating behind her, moved between them. The alien said nothing. His brows scrunched momentarily as he looked at the thing, then rose as he recognized the object enveloped in the lavender aura. He stuck a hand out towards it, palm facing up.
“Can I take a look at it?”
Twilight hesitated for a second, but made the device float over to his hand. His fingers wrapped firmly around one of the tubes that made up the frame and she let her magic fade. The device fell a little before he could adjust for its weight.
“I've been trying to figure it out but I have to admit I've got no idea what it's supposed to do.”
He spun around so his body faced Twilight as well.
“Well, it is...”
He put both his hands on one side of the device and produced two snapping sounds before pulling out one of the two green boards that made up the thing.
“It is a bit hard to explain. But it is based on three very precise resonance circuits that create an oscillating electromagnetic field that seems to- do you have a multi meter? I need to check if these still work.”
He'd been examining the board as he spoke and tapped some components on it with a finger. They looked a little darker than the rest.
Twilight watched Anonymous' nimble fingers work with the meter, occasionally measuring some component and writing down the value. His explanation on how the device worked intrigued her. She drew immediate parallels to Mirehoof the Mysterious and his famous final theorem. Mirehoof had been an ingenious unicorn with a gift for more theoretical magic. His final theorem was about the very essence of magic itself, and it suggested that it had not one but three resonance frequencies. He'd theorized that the frequencies were not exact but shifted constantly and that no being could ever be capable of adjusting their spell fast enough to follow. But Anonymous had claimed that his device adjusted itself sixteen million times a second.
“Hey...”
“Hm?”
Anonymous looked up from the board he was holding.
“How did you come across the frequencies? You said you were doing something unrelated and just happened upon them.”
He looked at her silently for a moment, then turned the board around in his hands and pointed at a small metal box that was soldered to it.
“We found that. Well, that is a small piece of it, but we found something. It looked like a gray and black stone but on closer inspection we found that it had a flawless crystal structure unlike anything we had seen before and that it produced a signal on very specific frequencies when we ran a current through it. I noticed some oddities about the signal but since the frequencies were not anything useful to us at the time, we just wrote them down and moved on.”
Twilight looked at the small metal box. Inside it was something that resonated with the essence of magic. She felt a lump forming in her stomach as she turned her head a little and saw the bulges caused by veins on the backs of Anonymous' hands.
“Say, would you mind giving that to me for a moment?”
There were only a handful of substances that could resonate with magic. One of them was on top of her mind. Literally.
She ripped the board out of Anonymous' hands with some force. He protested, but she was not listening. She had to know. She had to be sure. If they'd been wrong from the beginning, if what was in his veins wasn't Equestrian magic... She ripped the tiny piece of metal off the board.
The board fell onto the ground with a clack. Twilight was staring straight ahead with unseeing eyes. Her mouth was left open and she was completely still, not even breathing. She had just seen a shard of a unicorn's horn inside a device from another world. Twilight did not understand.
Anonymous said something unintelligible as he bent down to pick up the circuit board. He studied it intensely, lifting it to within two hoof's widths from his eyes.
“Mmh. It does not look like you damaged it but there is no way to be sure without testing it.”
Twilight finally remembered to breathe as the alien carefully placed the board on the table next to him and fixed his eyes on hers. He looked irritated as he drew breath, but that turned into something she could not interpret as he held the breath for a second.
“Is there... something wrong? You look like you saw a ghost.”
Something wrong!?
“Eh.”
There was so much wrong that she couldn't even think straight.
“How- Don't you know what that is?”
How had it got there? What had happened to the unicorn? Where had they found it? Twilight felt like speech was too slow a method of communication as her mind raced on to raise even more questions.
“It is... some mineral?”
“No, it's...”
She tapered off and stared at the alien, blinking a few times in silence. He had raised one brow and tilted his head slightly to the side.
“It is a piece of someone's horn. A unicorn's horn.”
Had he really not known? She'd thought they'd somehow come across somepony and cut off their horn. But he really seemed to believe that it was just a piece of some rock. That, or he was the best liar she'd met. But it didn't look like that as he picked up the board again. Twilight waited quietly for at least a minute as he turned and moved around the board to make the light hit the shard on it in different ways.
“We thought it was soft for a rock but we never considered...”
He set down the board again and turned his head to look at Twilight's horn, his brows squished together. Then he froze completely for a second before his eyes went wide and became unfocused and his brows rose.
“No. That... makes too much sense.”
Turning around in place, he picked up a pencil and started furiously scribbling something on paper.