//------------------------------// // The Morning of the Magicians // Story: Oh! You Pretty Things // by Cosmic Dancer //------------------------------// From the oneiric field of the supercelestial sphere that girds the firmament, Trixie returned, one-by-one (and according to tokens perceptible only to wizards), his senses to their corporeal centers; thereby dropping out of the asanic sleep and returning his consciousness to the waking world. Acknowledging only for an instant the profound sadness that follows such an action, Trixie felt the warmth of the morning sunrays creep through his flesh (diffracted in some places by hoof-woven sheets), and smelt the sweet and subtle notes of Twilight’s aroma. His tourmaline irises scintillating in the light of day, Trixie opened his eyes to find himself, once again and as he suspected, in Twilight’s bed. The mare herself was not, though Trixie could sense her presence a few feet away (even with the ensorceled ring constricting his horn). Twilight was doing her morning reading in the quarters below the mezzanine that doubled as her bed chamber in the massive oak tree, where her devoted lover Trixie now laid. This was a position in which Trixie found himself with accelerating recurrence, and while the prospect disagreed with certain sensibilities of his, he had become more-or-less consigned to the fate of being Twilight’s ‘very special somepony’. He sat up in the bed, running a hoof over his matted mane and glancing lazily over the town shown through the window next to his mare’s bed. The curtain would have certainly been closed to preserve the sanctity of the ‘rites’ performed the night before, so Twilight must have opened it when she awoke, or afterwards to encourage Trixie’s own waking. Not very long ago, she would have simply told him to wake up if it suited her purposes; but Trixie had noticed, five months ago when they had become a couple in earnest, and again two months after that when they started making love, that Twilight was becoming increasingly sympathetic to his proclivity to sleep in (among other propensities she’d once found disagreeable). Trixie yawned. He had an inkling Twilight would trot up the stairs to greet him once he woke, but perhaps his intuition wasn’t as trained as he would have liked. His new relationship was getting in the way of his more routine magical training, or so he told himself; he had a habit of neglecting his spiritual regimen years before Twilight started coddling him. Trixie stood up , disentangling himself from the wisteria sheets and stretching his limbs, still heavy with sopor. Glancing back once at Twilight’s unmade bed, he smirked, playing back in his mind the hours that left it so disheveled. Reluctantly dismissing these thoughts, Trixie turned and started making his way down the stairs to the lower chamber, Twilight’s magical library (as opposed to the more generalized selection on the first floor), before he intercepted the mare herself halfway up the stairs. She smiled at him tenderly, with genuine love in her eyes, and Trixie attempted to channel his own love for Twilight into a comparable expression (though he found such emotions confusing and, consequently, frightening). He could rouse himself only to return her look of bounding affection with a smirk and glint in his eye; but Twilight knew him better than anypony else, and so could sense the tremendous effort he put behind this small gesture, and that meant the world to her. Twilight kissed Trixie once and embraced him, giving him another small peck on the cheek before saying, in a warm voice dripping with devotion, “Good morning.” “Good morning, Sweetheart,” Trixie responded, opting to use a less saccharine pet name for his special somepony than the preferred ‘Twinkie’ (which he learned early on ought to be reserved for more playful moments of tenderness). The moment sat for just long enough before Twilight pulled away from their hug and rested her snout against her stallion’s own, the tips of their horns touching, and asked, playfully, “Where do you think you’re going?” Trixie failed to answer in time, mistaking the jape for an actual question that required a thoughtful answer. Twilight, intimately familiar with the processes of Trixie’s mind, realized this, and giggled. “Come help me make the bed,” she asked, nuzzling him. “What makes you think I haven’t already?” he asked in turn, deadpan. Twilight smirked at him with a knowing look, and they ascended the staircase back into the bedroom. Twilight could easily fix the sheets with her magic alone, or have Trixie do the same, but she always insisted they make the bed together the morning after one of their nights with each other. Trixie’s first inclination was to suspect it was some sort of subliminal psychological conditioning she was subjecting him to, utilizing the hidden semiotic value of a bed disarrayed by lovemaking and the symbolism inherent in fixing it (as a part of the ‘reformation’ he was meant to be undergoing). But, thanks to Twilight, he began to see the value in second guessing such paranoiac notions. ‘Trixie’s problem is that he doesn’t realize he’s a genius; he thinks everypony’s as smart as he is’ he once overheard Twilight say, defending some paranoid delusion he had to one of her friends. Besides himself, Twilight was the only pony willing to call Trixie a genius and mean it. They had nearly finished making the bed, Trixie fixing the sheets on Twilight’s side and Twilight fixing those on Trixie’s side, when Trixie’s wandering attention latched onto the photograph Twilight kept framed on her bedside table. Taken about a decade prior, the photo depicted Trixie and Twilight together, both ten-years-old at the time, after the graduation ceremony of their first year at Celestia’s School for Gifted Unicorns. Each habited in the scholastic raiment of a first-year graduate, little Twilight Sparkle was gleefully laughing and hugging her friend and fellow student, a young Trixie Lulamoon, the aspergic child-prodigy and only five-point unicorn to attend the school in several hundred years; and whose neutral expression and dead eyed stare fixed on the camera seemed almost humorous juxtaposed to Twilight’s juvenile ebullience. Ultimately, the young Trixie wouldn’t go on to complete his education at Celestia’s School. This photo would have been taken about four years before Trixie left Canterlot, to go find his secret master on the so-called and whilom ‘Holy’ Island of the Unicorns. “It’s me and that student I used to tutor,” said Twilight, in a mirthful tone, stood beside Trixie and interrupting his reminiscence before it could reach its tragic conclusion. “What was his name?” she asked jokingly before sidling up to Trixie and pressing her body against his own. Trixie smiled and uttered a contented noise, then said, “Magic school, before I had descried the recondite arcanum of facial expression.” Twilight was the only pony Trixie felt safe enough around to joke about himself. “You were just happy as the rest of us,” Twilight nuzzled him. “You just didn’t know to show it,” she continued, reassuringly. “M-hm,” uttered Trixie, trying to interrupt before Twilight could tack on, ‘and that wasn’t your fault.’ She kissed his cheek, tenderly saying, “And that wasn’t-” “Has Spike gotten back from Rarity’s, yet?” Trixie interrupted, stepping away from Twilight and toward the doorway. Twilight, being not only very intelligent but also highly attuned to Trixie’s emotions, realized the stallion had mistaken her gentle reassurance for piteous condescension (as he was wont to do when it came to certain conditions of his), so she allowed him to change the subject. “No, he hasn’t,” Twilight answered, moving in to again nuzzle Trixie. “I was thinking that you and I could go get breakfast in town, then pick him up; because I don’t think he’ll leave unless I make him,” she said, only half joking. “Would you like that?” “I would, yes. Where shall we eat?” Trixie replied simply, still defensive but nuzzling Twilight in turn, and smelling deeply of her unwashed mane. “We’ll decide when I finish showering. And you know I take quick showers, so go get ready now, okay?” requested Twilight as sweetly as possible. Trixie always took much longer than her to get ready to go out, even for something casual, and they both knew it. “Alright,” he answered, after hesitating a few seconds. “Good,” Twilight kissed him once more on the mouth before trotting downstairs to her bathroom, and Trixie soon followed, descending the stairs to his destination below the roots of the Golden Oak. It confounded Trixie to try and think why Twilight chose to bathe and perform other menial tasks the way sub-unicorns (a term Trixie would regret using if he ever said it in front of Twilight) must. It was simple for unicorns—and especially so for Trixie and Twilight, who were learned in many schools of thought on magic—to become clean simply by willing it. Such spells, meant to ease the suffering of mortality, were the first to be codified after the practice of magic permeated all strata of Unicorn society (after an ancient and obscure event in Unicorn history known as ‘The Dying of Ulaam’). Whenever he asked, Twilight only said Celestia exhorted her to learn to live without magic, but that did little to slake Trixie’s curiosity. He assumed Celestia was one of the many foolish magicians his master spoke of: magicians who believed that it was the decadence borne of wanton magic use that led to the fall of High Unicorn civilization, and the desecration of the Holy Island. Trixie was all too willing to trust his master, and for the wrong reasons, that such beliefs were foolish; chiefly because it suited his own sybaritic predilections. Whenever he started in on this subject, Twilight often thought of pointing out how, when Trixie started his ‘reformation’ with her and wasn’t allowed to use any magic, he burst into tears on several occasions when he couldn’t perform even simple physical tasks without the use of spells and telekinesis. To do this successfully, of course, would necessitate calling upon a degree of self awareness in Trixie that his puerile worldview and fragile self esteem did not furnish him. Twilight was too kind-hearted to realize that consciously, but refrained anyway, because she didn’t want to embarrass him. Trixie had now arrived at his private quarters in the library basement, in a roomy alcove attached to the main chamber that housed Twilight’s various machines and contraptions. Another belief Trixie had inherited from his master was that machines had no real value, being only shallow, externalized reifications of the magical will; and that there was nothing a machine could do that a spell couldn’t do more efficiently and more gracefully. For similar reasons, he avoided all modern schools of material science, from physics to chemistry, and regarded them as degenerate shadows of the divine sciences and philosophies that precipitated them. But he had enough tact to keep these opinions to himself around Twilight, and doted on her genius and talent for such things, even if he didn’t care for them. Turning away from the machinery and his contemplation of it, he opened the door to his own little chamber, decorated with antique carpets and furniture of seemingly foreign design and fabrication. In a nook opposite the door, and concealed by arras, was a featherbed heaped with silken sheets and two or three woolen blankets (which Twilight liked because, as she put it, they smelled like Trixie). It wasn’t much, but for Trixie, it was home. Besides the few comforts all ponies need to live contentedly were the tools of Trixie’s mission in life; the mission of all magicians—and ultimately, of all living things. Voluminous tomes anent the antediluvian metaphysics and theology of his Unicorn antecedents took the most prominent positions in his array of carven wood bookshelves and lecterns; their ideas transmitted in the primitive but sublimely complex ideograms his master had taught him to read and translate. In addition to these were many grimoires and other antiquarian treasures, redolent with the anagogic energies of the magicians who wrote and used them, written in many dead tongues it was Trixie’s pleasure to speak, and filled with the orisons and inchauntments wizards of yore perorated in sacred places locked away deep in the mind of their listener. (Many of the first variety were simply magical simulacra Trixie had made from books his master had collected over his long life, but even these had extraordinary value, for the texts were all thought to be lost with the Holy Island, forever. Twilight, once Trixie revealed the holy books to her, spent weeks trying to convince him to translate and donate them to the Royal Library, for a time, so copies could be made by the sciolists there; but just as his master before him had done, Trixie considered the knowledge within these texts forbidden to those uninitiated in the mysteries of the nigh forgotten High Unicorn religion, and its abstruse mandala of deities.) Besides the books were Unicorn halidoms from different eras and other relics—of variegated cultures and times—Trixie had collected during his bohemian travels as an entertainer; and stored in sturdy but not artisanal display cases stacked on one another (thus defeating the purpose of their construction). Elaborate decks of intricately painted cards sat on a bizarre analogion, as necessitated by his master’s method of sortilege, and other tools of divination were stored in mastercraft footlockers pushed against the walls where bookshelves could not have been. The walls themselves were all but plastered with alchemical and astrological rubrics and graphs, along with posters of the larger magic shows Trixie had put on—his favorite being for the week he spent performing at the Pandemonium Resort and Casino in Las Pegasus. A few chests were devoted to similar collections of his, such as the many occultic devices and apparatuses Trixie had found in curiosity shops all over Equestria; the most prominent being an old tepaphone he liked to tinker with, but could never seem to make work. In some places, the floor was littered with stacks of art books and little poetry booklets he liked to quote. After an indeterminable but not inordinate span of time spent pondering that tempestuous week in Las Pegasus, Trixie stepped briskly through his room toward his wardrobe, paying little heed to the many artifacts it was his good fortune to own and study. As he channeled his will through his horn, opening the doors of the wardrobe in the corner, his eye caught the single framed photograph he kept in his chamber, sat on a meticulously kempt fane between bookshelves. It wasn’t really a photograph, but an image captured magically and imprinted on a special sort of papyrus. It depicted Trixie, about nineteen years old, stood proudly next to his elderly, ailing master, in front of a tower constructed of black basalt on the eastern shore of the desecrated Island of Unicorns. Master was a unicorn, white of coat and with Trixie’s same dead stare emanating from crimson, cataracted eyes. He called himself (and until his exile, everypony else called him) Cosmic Dancer; but Trixie, and perhaps one other pony, knew his birth name to be Yisrach L’ulaamun. As several possible outfits for his and Twilight’s breakfast floated onto his bed (the arras now riven to reveal it), Trixie levitated the picture to his face and kissed the glass. Then he whispered a short prayer to whatever remained of his master, like a word on a wing to any plane or planes of existence on which that remnant now subsisted. Looking over the assorted clothes, Trixie put together a fashion-forward ensemble of newer, trendier clothes (as opposed to the ostentatious and nearly mediaeval cloaks and tunics he preferred,) because he thought Twilight might appreciate it (and he felt that was a sacrifice he could make, today). Clapping the hooves of his forelegs together, Trixie intoned a truncated but effective magical formula, and a translucent wreath of flame enveloped his egyptian blue coat for less than a second, painlessly licking away all that was unclean on his body and mane. Brushing the tangles from his hair and levitating the various pieces of his outfit around his physique, a thought struck him. “Oh! I nearly forgot to anoint myself,” he said whimsically, and out loud for no discernible reason, before taking a chest from under his wardrobe and opening it, to rifle through the pungent aromatic oils therein and find something suitable for the day. “Trixie?” Twilight’s voice penetrated the room from the atop basement staircase. “Are you ready, yet?” “Oh sh-” Trixie muttered, glancing quickly between his clothes, his perfumes, and his naked form. He thought for a moment, and answered, “Yes!” Twilight sighed heavily upon hearing the ensuing commotion.