//------------------------------// // 【Schrödinger's Dawn】Chapter 2 - Go For the Eyes, Boo // Story: Cast-Iron Cast-Offs // by Cast-Iron Caryatid //------------------------------// ❍ “Hah,” I laughed, falling back on the cold stone floor of my tower.  “Haha.” I was giddy, light-headed, and completely out of it.  I didn’t even have the presence of mind to record the precise time for my records, but I knew it was close to two in the afternoon; Princess Celestia was holding court, and all of Canterlot had just been plunged into night.  “Hahahahaha!” I laughed. And I laughed. And I laughed. I’m told the royal guard had to break down the door to get in, but I don’t remember it.  All I remember is laying there on the floor, looking at the stars through one of the holes in my wall, and laughing like a madmare. Success was a wonderful, wonderful thing.  I would never be the same again. ❍ I woke up in a dimly lit hospital room. My parents were furious, both at me and at Princess Celestia for letting me ‘run wild,’ as they called it.  The spell I’d developed was one thing, but when the guard breaks into your bedroom to find a traumatized stallion strapped to your bed, well, that’s the kind of thing they tell your parents about. Shining Armor, my brother, took it especially badly.  He was a lieutenant in the guard by then and I still don’t know what he must have thought when he read the report.  His little sister; abusing the stallion who was assigned to protect her, causing panic in the streets of Canterlot, and unrest all across Equestria in wake of the news. My spell had lasted for a full day, leaving Princess Celestia to lower and raise the sun again for Hearth’s Warming day completely blind; plenty of time for word to get around, though now things were mostly back to normal.  A quick glance outside told me that it was already night again the day after I’d cast the spell. The hospital wanted to keep me for another day to monitor my recovery from magical exhaustion, since I was so young.  My parents weren’t happy about that.  They were torn between wanting to baby me due to my condition, and wanting to have a long, stern talk about stallions and thirteen-year-old fillies, and the hospital wasn’t really the right venue for either one. Eventually, they said their goodbyes, promising to be back first thing in the morning to pick me up… and promising to be back first thing in the morning for that talk.  Shining Armor hesitated, staying behind for a moment just to look at me, but finally he too left, not having said a word the entire time. In the wake of their departure, I lay in conflicted silence.  Okay, maybe tying a stallion up, casting dark magic on his horn without his consent, filling him with more magic than his body could handle and then taking a hammer to his horn was… okay, it looked bad—it was bad, but couldn’t they see what I’d done?  All I had to do was look out the window at the sparkling night outside my window to know that what I’d done… it was right. It was my destiny. I know, I know, at that age fillies tend to think that every third thing is their destiny, but I can’t explain it; I knew that I could never go back.  I was changed. I’d had no idea just how much. Some time after my family had left, there was a simple, light knock at the door.  I knew that knock, and swallowed nervously rather than answer.  As always, the door opened anyway and Princess Celestia entered the room. I hid my muzzle under the covers of my hospital bed as she calmly walked in, closed the door, and approached the bedside.  She didn’t seem angry, but she was Princess Celestia.  She’d sat court for longer than I’d been alive; you didn’t just know when she was angry, that wasn’t how it worked. My heart sped up a little as she sat down next to the bed, looked me in the eyes, and asked one question. “What did you do?” Unbidden, a smile stretched itself across my face, and I couldn’t contain it.  Of all the thing she could have asked, she asked the one question that nopony else had; the one question I desperately wanted to answer. My smile faltered as I realized that it was being asked by the one pony I didn’t want to tell. Princess Celestia noticed, of course, and attempted to reassure me.  “Know that I will hold nothing you tell me against you, Twilight.  I already know about the dark magic you used on Null Set, and we’ll talk about that.  If this was more of the same, I will not be happy… and we will have a much longer talk… but I must know; what did you do?” I was far from reassured.  Ironically, having to tell Princess Celestia that it wasn’t dark magic made it harder somehow, because it meant telling her she was wrong. In my conflict, I pulled the sheets back up to my mouth and mumbled something. “What was that?” Princess Celestia asked, nothing but kindness in her voice as she leaned in. “I made the sun invisible,” I managed to squeak out in the tiniest voice I could manage.  “Sort of.” Princess Celestia pulled her head back, blinking in surprise.  “You what?” she asked, though she had clearly heard me. Hesitating only the barest moment, I lit up my horn.  Being that I was in the hospital for magic deprivation, I’d obviously been told not to cast anything, but I was a filly and this was Princess Celestia I was doing it for. A thin, transparent sheet of magic appeared in between the two of us, flickering intermittently once in a while. “Issa invisibility spell that goes between things instead of on things,” I explained, waving a hoof out the side of it.  Knowing that Princess Celestia was seeing only an empty bed made me a little more comfortable, but no sooner had I thought that than the field flickered away, revealing me once more. “It’s really hard to cast,” I said, looking away.  “I made a bubble and cast it as big as I could… it was really big, I guess.” Princess Celestia was, in a word, dumbstruck.  She just sat there, processing the information for a good long while… and then she laughed. It wasn’t much, just a chuckle, but it broke the tension in the room.  “Oh, Twilight Sparkle…” she said, shaking her head.  “What am I to do with you?” Not realizing the question was rhetorical, I searched for an answer, but came up emptyhooved. “Well,” she said, getting up, then pausing briefly to shake her head and chuckle once again.  “That is a load off my mind.  I shall let you rest, since I’m sure you aren’t supposed to be using magic right now.  We will talk about the dark magic when I see you again, but for now, I have a sun to set.” The timid smile I was wearing dropped off my face.  “What?” I croaked, the word barely reaching beyond my lips.  Princess Celestia hadn’t heard, and I began to panic.  I glanced over to the window I’d been stargazing from earlier, but nothing had changed.  I could see canis major clear as night.  I felt goosebumps crawl up my back. “What—what did you say?” I said, louder, but Princess Celestia was already halfway out of the room.  “P-princess, stop!” I shouted after her, finally getting her attention.  “What did you j-just say?” I asked, stuttering as my mind raced.  No, surely I had just misheard her.  She had to go raise the sun, right?  Surely? Princess Celestia glanced out the window, one eyebrow cocked in question.  “It is nearly six in the evening,” she said.  “After a short walk back to the palace, I shall set the sun and dine.  I’m sure the hospital will have something prepared for y—is something wrong, Twilight?” I reached one hoof up to my eyes. “No…  It can’t be…” ❍ ‘Sun-blind’ they decided to call it, though I would have preferred ‘star-struck,’ I guess it’s better than something with my name in it like ‘Sparkle Syndrome.’  It was the spell I had cast, etched permanently into my eyes.  The doctors were helpless to do anything but diagnose it, which came down to just reading back what I had said in a clinical tone with a few extra syllables—and that was the good doctors. Some of the ponies we saw didn’t even believe me, claiming that it was clearly a trauma-induced delusion; they even had the gall to offer prescriptions to ‘fix’ the issue.  Others suggested that the ‘darkness’ I described was a more usual kind of blindness; either macular degeneration as a result of retinal burns or simple photokeratitis that would go away in a few days’ time.  These were harder to refute since there was some evidence that physical damage had played a part in what had happened, but my eyesight was fine—better than fine, if you asked me, but nopony did. Regardless, neither type could explain my ability to unerringly point out stars in the afternoon sky, nor were they very receptive to that fact, being that they could hardly corroborate my observations themselves.  Eventually, somepony would inevitably suggest that maybe I was just lying, and then we’d leave with a great deal of cursing from my father. As shaken as I was the morning after the discovery, my parents had settled firmly on the doting end of the scale, though we still had that talk about what it was proper to do with—and to—weak-willed stallions. Princess Celestia and I also had our talk about dark magic.  She wasn’t pleased that I had gotten into some of the books I had without her guidance.  Not only that, but I had misused the knowledge I’d found in them, which as it turned out was the only danger the so-called ‘dark’ magic posed.  Being a teenaged filly, I had wanted to object, but there wasn’t much I could say; I’d pretty unambiguously failed that trial. As for me, personally… I was in shock for weeks after the fact.  I simply had no idea how to react.  I well and truly liked what I saw, as I always had, but at the same time, there was no shortage of ponies telling me I was damaged.  I already had to deal with my horn braces, which were a pretty rare thing to see, and now I had glasses on top of it to complete the image—all for a condition that most ponies wouldn’t even believe was real. Right.  The glasses. It only took a few days for it to become clear that I was going to need glasses.  Less than that, really, but I tried to pretend it wasn’t a problem.  As I said, my vision was fine, but I hadn’t been endowed with any great supernatural sight, either.  With no moon during the day and all the lights out because everypony else had sunlight to see by, I spent those days stumbling around, bumping into things and using light spells to read. As it turned out, though, there were light-amplification glasses I could get—not the cool kind the guard has that makes other spectrums visible, just the garden variety light magnifiers they give to old ponies who have all the diseases that the doctors had tried to tell my parents I had. To my dismay, this meant another round of trips to places that normal ponies never saw until they were old and gray; this time it was specialist medical suppliers that smelled like ointment and only reinforced the idea that I was defective.  Buying glasses in a stamped brown box next to catheters and stomach pumps was not exactly my idea of back-to-school shopping, nor could any amount of actual back-to-school shopping make up for it. For the first time in my life, I was less than enthused about the idea of going to Princess Celestia’s School for Gifted Unicorns. ❍ My parents were reluctant to let me return to the Princess’ care, but they didn’t have much choice.  Null Set was on indefinite medical leave, and I was no longer allowed near him anyway.  With him out of the picture, it would fall to Princess Celestia to keep both my magic and my behavior in check. They needn’t have worried.  If my parents thought that there was any chance of a similar incident, they didn’t understand how profoundly I was affected. That’s always the way of things, though, isn’t it?  What we worry about is never what actually happens.  My own fears of being mocked for my new condition never came to pass; not in the way that I’d imagined, anyway. As it was, everypony already knew that the princess’ faithful student had ‘gone Nightmare Moon.’  Usually, we had laws that protected juveniles in cases like these, but enough ponies had seen the event start at my tower or realized where it was centered after the fact for that to be a lost cause.  In fact, those laws probably did me more harm than good, because where fact ended, fiction began. I never found out what exactly it was they were saying about me, but it must have been pretty horrific.  Between the effect of the rumors and Princess Celestia taking over all my magical lessons—plus magical history and ethics—I became something of a ghost at the school grounds proper.  I ended up with only one or two classes there at a time, and nopony spoke an entire sentence to me if they could help it. What was worse is that I went along with it.  I was scared, broken and ashamed.  I didn’t speak up in class and didn’t stick around afterwards.  If I had classes on both sides of lunch or a break, I found someplace where nopony else went, and I waited.  Half the time, I didn’t even pull out a book to fill the time; I just stared out into space—the stars, sometimes, but a blank wall was fine too. As much as a teenaged filly can be said to have a purpose, I’d lost mine.  When you’re that young, years are lifetimes and I’d spent several on the spells I’d developed only to be met with both overwhelming success and absolutely no reason or desire to cast them ever again. If my new schedule hadn’t meant being with Princess Celestia for most of the day, I’m not sure what I would have done with my life. ❍ “Wait, ya’ll knew about Nightmare Moon?” Applejack asked. “I’m over here pouring my heart out about the absolute worst part of my childhood, and that’s your question?” Twilight said, a little hurt.  “Really?” “Aw shoot Twi, ah’m sorry, but you ain’t the one who made a gall dern fool of herself not half an hour ago,” Applejack said. Twilight gave a sigh, barely mollified.  “And no.  Um, no offense, your majesty,” she said, giving Nightmare Moon a nod of her head, “but nopony thought that the old mare’s tale was actually true.” Nightmare Moon was unconcerned with the petty details of her return.  Reaching out with one black-shod hoof, she took hold of the lavender unicorn’s—Twilight Sparkle’s—chin and turned the mare’s head so she could see her eyes. They looked like normal pony eyes, of course.  They were surprised at first, but quickly softened into an emotion which Nightmare Moon couldn’t place. She wasn’t sure what she had expected.  Black pools of stars?  No, in this world of eternal night, there would be nothing special about them. Looking into those eyes, Nightmare Moon was struck by a certain feeling of nostalgia… and something else she couldn’t identify.  Something she hadn’t felt in a long time.  Removing her hoof from the mare’s chin, she said one word. “Continue.”