Standing in the doorway, Sumac hesitated to enter the wondrous classroom filled with the best and the brightest little unicorns. Nothing but unicorns in a bright, sunny classroom filled with the best, most wonderful learning materials that money could buy. Behind the desk at the front of the room was Princess Celestia, and she had a pleasant, sunny smile.
“Do come in, little Sumac Apple, and have a seat,” Princess Celestia said in the most inviting of voices. “Come in, sit down, and embrace your future.”
Something, perhaps his introversion, prevented Sumac from entering the classroom. He lingered in the door, uncertain, because this classroom was a little crowded for his tastes… plus, something seemed off. But what? Try as he might, Sumac could not remember why he was here. When had he come to Canterlot to attend Princess Celestia’s School for Gifted Unicorns? There was no memory of arrival, no trip by train, no thoughts of Canterlot.
Every student in the class had turned their heads and were now looking at him. Seeing all those eyes staring at him—staring into him—made Sumac want to melt into the floor. It was a special kind of awful, one he could never quite face, and he wanted to retreat. It was almost as if he was shrinking beneath their gaze, growing smaller, or the classroom was somehow growing larger.
“Sumac, do come in please, you are disrupting the class.” Princess Celestia was now commanding, but gentle, and Sumac felt bad for disobeying her.
But he still couldn’t move because he was rooted to the spot. “Why am I here?”
“Class, young Sumac Apple has mistaken Magical Theory for Philosophy.” There was a laugh from the alicorn schoolmarm and both of her front hooves came to rest upon her desk. “Shall we humour him? Hmm? Very well. Sumac Apple, you are here for the same reason that all of us are here. To achieve greatness. Isn’t that what you wanted? To be great? To become a great and powerful wizard?”
“Yeah.” Sumac licked his lips, shuffled a bit, and nodded just to be extra polite. “But… I had friends… there was…” He had to struggle to remember, there was something that was difficult to recall. Something that didn’t want to be remembered, and when he did, it caused him great pain. “There was Ponyville, and I had family there, and friends… I was already going to school.”
“Ponyville is a backwater.” Princess Celestia’s voice was still warm, pleasant, and sunny, but there was also something threatening about it, something menacing. “What could you possibly learn there? Are you not a gifted unicorn? You haven’t even learned how to control your talent there, so now you are here, where you can finally achieve greatness.”
“I had friends though… I was learning other things…”
“Friends who were not unicorns… and time spent learning trivial things is time wasted, time that is spent not learning magic. You were wasting your life in Ponyville, Sumac. A dreadful, terrible waste. That is no way to become great and powerful.”
First day in class and he was arguing with the teacher. This was pretty bad and reflected poorly upon him. Something unknown now gleamed in Schoolmarm Celestia’s eyes, something not nice, something that made his guts slither inside of him in a most unpleasant, most uncomfortable way. The need to obey was strong—but the need to question was stronger.
“Sumac Apple, you couldn’t control your magic so the decision was made to send you here, before you did more damage to your family and friends. Poor little Sumac Apple… potty trained, but not magic trained. Class, can you tell me where little unicorns who aren’t magic trained end up?”
In unison, as one, the class replied, “Magical Kindergarten!”
Something invisible grabbed Sumac and when he was yanked forwards, he yelped. The door slammed behind him as he was pulled through the room and while he whimpered in protest, he was slammed into his chair with a great deal of force. The class was laughing now, laughing, pointing, and teasing, and it was all too much to bear for Sumac, who was overwhelmed.
The sting of tears blurred his eyes and he sucked in great lungfuls of air, gulping, swallowing, trying to breathe again. Panic gripped him, squeezed him, and crushed his soul. The laughter of his classmates became distorted, unnatural, and Schoolmarm Celestia’s fiery gaze never left him. She never even blinked. Fear and rage were awful things for Sumac, terrible things, the worst things in the world, and rather than collapse inwards, he felt his temper rising.
When the first tear fell, his rage was already starting to bubble and he felt a hot snakey sensation in his guts. Humiliated, terrified, afraid, his rage overwhelming, Sumac lashed out with the intent to silence his classmates the only way he knew how.
“Being great and powerful isn’t about what you do,” the colt said in a shrill whine, “it’s what you hold back!”
Reaching out with his mind, the windows behind him shattered, imploding inwards into thousands of jagged shards that fell to the floor with a terrific cacophony. Schoolmarm Celestia was unmoving, a statue affixed behind her desk, watching, waiting, her fiery eyes never blinking or leaving Sumac. Reaching deep within, Sumac found his rage, his grief, his pent up frustrations, and with these things, he found power.
This power, he poured into his voice…
“You!” he barked the word at the filly sitting beside him. “Pick up that glass! But not with your magic!”
The exceptionally bright green filly hesitated, shook her head, and let out a whimper.
“Pick up the glass! Sumac poured everything he had into his words.
Even though the filly was shaking her head no, even though her eyes were pleading, her body betrayed her, and she slipped out of her chair. Jerking like a marionette, she walked over to where the shards of glass lay upon the floor, whimpering with every step, no doubt trying to resist the dreadful force that compelled her to action.
“Pick up the glass… do it!” Sumac’s spoken command was impossible to resist.
Reaching out, she prodded at the glass shards with her hoof, moving them into a pile, until one of them stood up a little from the others. Now sobbing, she blubbered, but could not resist Sumac’s words. When her fetlock wrapped around the jagged glass, she shrieked and ribbons of scarlet could be seen running down her hoof.
“So you do show power… but can you be great?” Schoolmarm Celestia asked in the iciest of tones.
“Put it in your eye,” Sumac commanded, and his words were every bit as cold as Schoolmarm Celestia’s. When the filly hesitated, bleating with terror, he shouted with all of the magic force he could muster, “Stick it in your eye! Now! Do as I say!”
With glacial slowness, the filly raised her foreleg and blood trickled down to the floor, splashing in terrible droplets that mingled with her tears. Rotating her foreleg, the point of the jagged shard of glass was raised, and was aimed at her face. She trembled, she shrieked, but she could not resist the compulsion.
“Do as I say.” Sumac, consumed by rage, could feel nothing else. No pity, no remorse, and but oh how he did revel in the fact that his new classmates were no longer laughing. Like the filly under his complete and total domination, his classmates cried, they whimpered, and were utterly helpless.
Schoolmarm Celestia waited.
With the glass now mere inches from the filly’s wide, terrified eye, his classmate’s shrieks of protest almost deafened Sumac. The pointed edge crept closer, closer, the filly’s foreleg having betrayed her, and Sumac gloated while revelling in what his power could do. He had always held back, he had always watched what he said, he was mindful of how he spoke to others—but not now. They wanted to see Great and Powerful?
He would show them Great and Powerful!
“Sumac, wake up!”
With a snort, Sumac tried to make sense of his surroundings and nothing made sense. His mouth was full of cotton it felt like, his ears had a dreadful ring to them, and his heart was certain to come flying out of his ribs at any moment. Legs flailing about, he was shook—hard—and he was almost certain that he could smell blood. Or could he?
“Kiddo, wake up! Wake up! You’re having some kind of bad dream! Snap out of it!”
Was he dreaming? Hard to tell. Lingering between the world of dreams and the waking world, Sumac was trapped in limbo, though he did not know this. The sound of his mother’s voice seemed so comforting, but there was power to be had—power to be taken! His psyche almost tore itself in two while trying to figure out which direction to go.
Real good—and a far more real evil—beckoned to him.
But what good was power without friends? Family?
“Kiddo! Come on, you’re scarin’ Mama!”
“No!” Sumac shouted, a command intended solely for himself and his body stiffened, seized by the power of his own magic compulsion. “Return to what is good! Do as I command!”
“Kiddo, things get weird sometimes. Magic does that. Welcome to unicornhood.”
Pressed against his mother’s barrel, lulled by the sensation of her beating heart, Sumac tried to sort out the contents of his head while also listening to his mother’s voice. They lay in the bed together and she was stroking the back of his neck while saying soothing, reassuring things into his ear. A heavy blanket covered him and was pulled over his head, blocking out the world.
“I’m not sure what happened, but it’s over now. It’s all over now.”
“Why do bad dreams happen?” Sumac asked, his muffled voice rising up through the blanket.
“Well, sometimes, for our own good. Sometimes we need to face things in a safe environment, and dreams allow us to do that. We face our fears, our troubles, our doubts, and when we do, when we are sincere, we can start to heal from things that have hurt our minds. I’ve had a lot of nightmares myself and I’ve had to face down a lot of my mistakes.”
“Evil feels good and that scares me,” Sumac confessed.
“Kiddo, yes it does. It is one of the greatest feelings in the world, and when you feel it once, you want to keep feeling it. Power is addictive. I think… I think I know that better than just about anypony I know. It’s a rush.”
“I used my voice to do bad things… in the dream I mean… awful things. I wish I didn’t have a voice at all. Any voice. Magical or otherwise.”
“Kiddo… I’m sorry, but I’m gonna be hard on ya.” Trixie hesitated for several long seconds before she continued, “Evil takes on many forms and some are far more insidious than others. It is deceptive and it worms its way through your brain. You have a great gift… and to not use it for the potential good you can do with it out of the fear of doing evil or harm… that is succumbing to evil, make no mistake. You have The Grift, Kiddo, just like your father. You’re stuck with it. But you don’t have to be like him.”
Even though he did not intend to, Sumac whined when he replied, “But it scares me!”
“Kiddo, you’ve had a long day. So much has happened today and when you finally got to take your nap, you had a rotten dream of some sort. So now the day feels longer and it’s not even done yet. Would you like some tea? A glass of milk, maybe? Want to rescue Pebble from the corner?”
Sumac wanted none of these things, at least at the moment, though he was thirsty and he longed to see Pebble. “Just a few more minutes here… with you… and then maybe some tea.”
“Okay,” Trixie replied while pulling Sumac closer, “just a few more minutes of snuggles for the both of us.”