//------------------------------//
// Sonnet XIV 
// Story: Oh! You Pretty Things 
// by Cosmic Dancer 
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Trixie awoke, choking for air as a cascade of blood pounded through his head. His heart felt as though it would burst for the vigor of its pumping. Only a moment passed, though, before this condition ameliorated and his bodily functions recapacitated. Nocturnal panic attacks, Twilight called them (though this one wasn’t ‘nocturnal’ in the strictest sense); it was a condition Trixie had suffered since his master first initiated him into the High Unicorn mysteries. The attacks, which now rarely afflicted him, seemed to come on with stress, or anxiety; though Trixie seldom acknowledged to himself or others that he felt either way.

For many years, the symptoms presented themselves after a fashion so as to lead Trixie to believe his body was failing to breathe when he fell asleep. He thought the last-minute realization of this is what woke him, only seconds after falling asleep. It wasn’t until many years after the onset, during Trixie’s second or third night with Twilight, that she noticed he was sleeping for forty minutes at a time before waking. 

Over the years, Trixie had spent many hours in thought, trying to ascertain the origin of the condition, that he might concoct a solution. Even at the age of sixteen, Trixie was already a powerful magician when Master initiated him into the mysteries, so the ensuing ecstasies and apocalypses exerted such a strain on his mind that his body nearly died. And, just as the rapture had a physical effect on him, so to did his spirit flash like a beacon to the beings that subsisted in the supersensual plane beyond the stars, where dreams are woven. According to this information, Trixie theorized a magical parasite hooked its teeth around him, that day, and was attacking him whenever he dreamt. 

Trixie had his own misgivings over this theory, the most prominent being this: the notion that his master wouldn’t have foreseen such a danger and taken precautions against it before initiating the young magus. But, there again, Master was one of the great ethicists of his time, and understood that, sometimes, the only way to help somepony is to hurt them.

All Trixie’s musings on the attacks became moot when he recalled the only method of both testing his theory and excising the parasite lay in a magic ritual Twilight would not condone. He assumed she wouldn’t, anyway. Celestia had instilled in her apprentice the same fear of eldritch unicorn sorceries that the alicorn herself entertained (along with many modern magicians).

Trixie’s master had impressed on his young pupil an abhorrence for modern thought on magic. Though Celestia promulgated the ideas to many generations of unicorns during her long reign, they began with her teacher, Starswirl; who was the first to eclecticize the ancient teachings on magic with the degenerate, materialist philosophies of his time. The ancients understood, and rightly, that magic was not a tool through which to profane the will, but bridge from darkness to light, from ignorance to knowledge; the key by which the mind is unchained. This was also Trixie’s feeling on the matter, in contrast to his peers (except, maybe, one other).

Twilight was the most gifted and intelligent magician of the modern school, as far as it concerned Trixie, and even she struggled to allay the base superstitions that material magic had introduced to her. It would take a couple years, at least, of Trixie’s sophistical arguments and dialectic in favor of the ancients’ philosophy before Twilight would be ready to accept the edification offered by the High Unicorn religion.

But, even if that weren’t the case, necromancy, the conjuring of lower spirits, the invocation of planetary intelligences and other ancient magical practices were illegal to perform in Equestria; and some would be necessary for the ritual to deliquesce the magical parasite precipitating Trixie’s ‘nocturnal’ panic attacks.

Trixie roused himself from the bed and sat before his carven analogion, on which lay a suit of cards, each bearing a unique, intricately painted and highly symbolic ideogram. As was the High Unicorns’ design, the entire deck was magico-religious map of the universe; not the universe in the profane sense, but the philosophical universe, as a macrocosm of the magician. Modern magi scoffed at the notion, unable to divorce the truth from the image of the archetypical donkey ‘fortune teller’.

Trixie stacked the suit and placed it beside four other stacks of cards: three other suits and one stack of cards without a suit. He shuffled the suitless cards until he deigned to cut fifteen away from the remaining seven, and delicately configured the former on the analogion. The cards, of course, could be used, by ponies of little imagination, according to what was popularly called ‘divination’. But Trixie, being possessed of an especial genius, understood the cards to be, like the horn of a unicorn, a symbol or set of symbols by which the will could be made manifest.

Master said that, for a magician learned in all the complexities of the system, the cards could be just as powerful as the horn. Trixie, feeling the weight of the ring around his own horn, wished he had paid more attention when his master passed down his knowledge of the cards. The greatest phenomena Trixie had ever been to affect through them was rainmaking, or thought implantation. If Twilight could sense these spells though the ring (and he doubted she could), she never mentioned it to him.

Even when Twilight allowed Trixie free use of his magic, she would still set aside a time at the end of the day when he was expected to enumerate his every use of magic, and provide reasons for doing so. If he lied, directly or by omission, he would get an earful, and possibly have his ‘magic privileges’ revoked. Twilight was one of the few ponies who put any faith in Trixie’s photographic memory, so the usual excuse of ‘I forgot’ rarely saw success.

As he configured the cards on the analogion, Trixie’s mind wandered back to that first initiation, six years ago. When he emerged from the vault, it was as though he had forgotten all he thought he knew or understood about the world. In thoughts and images that once brought him solace, he saw only boundless and unmitigated hostility. It was as though the entire world, and all things in it, were but one massive and multiplicitous organism, that felt nothing for him but all-consuming apathy.

Gradually, this feeling receded, but just as the tide recedes to reveal the shore changed, so too did Trixie find himself irrevocably evolved. A serpent’s egg hatched in his mind, and he understood himself not as ‘Trixie’, but as a being expressed through ‘Trixie’. This notion (and the feeling accompanying it) came and went, of course, but in his most delicate moments he could look in the mirror and see somepony else; the world would become a harsh, alien place, and whenever Trixie felt something, he would feel himself feeling it, and feel himself feeling feeling it, and so on, ad infinitum. 

When this quiet horror of dissociation crept into him, few things gave relief. The phenomenon was well documented in what texts remain of the High Unicorn libraries, but thousand-year-old tracts provided little succor in the throes of an existential attack. He couldn’t speak to Twilight about it. How could he? It would only worry her, and he was willing to suffer in silence if it meant Twilight could be happy. 

Besides, it was enough just to be near her. The thoughts that drew him into that dreamy milieu of disconnection from the world were banished when Trixie could focus on Twilight. His love for her possessed that peculiar gravity, that could draw him away from the high and lofty, down to the safe and sensual.

Trixie often thought of himself as a dreamer, or someone trapped in a dream, wandering a bizarre, illogical landscape; and Twilight was the fine, silvery cord tethering his soul to a world where things could make sense.

Trixie cast his gaze at the fifteen cards, now fully spread on the analogion. The first card of the configuration was the sixth (or seventh) in the sequence of the suitless cards. It depicted a king and queen facing one-another, and between them lay a great egg girded by a coiled snake.

‘The Lovers.’