//------------------------------// // 4 - The Grand Design // Story: The Ninth Enchantment of Mage Meadowbrook // by Thornwing //------------------------------// Bowed in shock, Starswirl hastily replied, “My apologies. I come as per your summons, but I am at a loss to perform the ritual.” Celeste fell back on her haunches, a look of pity and sadness settling in across her stern gaze. “I see now. You have failed as my Champion.” She covered her face with her hooves and let out a tiny whimper as her eyes filled with tears. “All is lost. My time is done. My sister will be swift in her wrath to exact her revenge.” Twilight and Starlight apprehensively approached the dais, coming to a stop next to Starswirl in quiet reflection. The seconds ticked by. The only sound that permeated the silence came from the soft flicker of magical torchlight wafting from the wall-hung braziers decorating the outer ring of the cavern and the plaintive moans of the Priestess. Only Starlight finally mustered the courage to ask, “What seems to be the problem, other than you can’t seem to find your staff? It’s not like it’s the end of the world, right?” Her self-inflicted panic voice took over. “Or is it? Please tell me it’s not the end of the world?” She grasped at Twilight’s mane to steady herself with the nearest object available for support. “It might as well be. Without my staff, I fear it is the end of unicorn magic as we know it.” Celeste dropped to the ground, burying her head even further beneath her forehooves, and began to wail inconsolably. “Maybe the three of us could help?” Twilight said, looking on with an awkward half-smile that did little to help reassurances while adjusting her mane to pull away from the clinging hooves of Starlight. Celeste immediately perked up. “Oh, would you?” She hopped to her feet, extinguishing the waterworks in the blink of an eye, or at least what the pair of glowing eye sockets approximated in her case. “That would be delightfully helpful. How soon do you think you’ll return? My power wanes with every passing moment. I can hardly see a partial glimmer of the future now, much less a full view of the present.” “Uhh,” Twilight said, exchanging her grin for a sheepish frown, “I’m not sure what you mean.” “What she means,” Starswirl interjected, suddenly waking from his momentary lapse of devout concentration, “is how soon can we return with the Fork of Destiny and perform the ritual to restore it to it’s proper place atop the Altar of Magic.” “Precisely right, my Champion.” Celeste clapped her hooves together in an encouraging display of foallike excitement. “And the sooner you return, the sooner all magic everywhere can be restored to its rightful owner, …I mean, owners.” A slight hesitation and waiver in her voice beguiled the sudden change of demeanor. Starlight took a step forward, cutting across the line of sight of the others. “Wait a second. I thought the map sent us here to solve a friendship problem, not to track down some ancient relic and return it to some Priestess living in the basement of Princess Celestia’s castle—” She waved a hoof and gave a quick sideways nod in Celeste’s direction, “—no offense.” Lowering her voice to a whisper and cupping a hoof to her jaw, she continued, “How do we we even know she is who she says she is?” Twilight gently brushed her aside and took a step forward. “I think what Starlight means to say is, we’re willing to help, but we don’t even know where to start looking, or exactly what we’re looking for, or exactly when or how it was lost in the first place, or a whole lot of other things I’m sure I’m forgetting right now. Who do you think might have taken it? Could you help point us in the right direction?” “I believe I can help with that,” Starswirl said. He cleared his throat and stepped up onto the dais. “If my recollections are correct, I presume that High Priestess Celeste is none other than the Fate of Power, an ancient pony demi-goddess tasked with safeguarding the Altar of Magic and the power stored in the Crystal Caverns beyond. It mentions as much in my history. The more I recall of my previous visit to this place and the vision I experienced from so long ago, the more I see the connection to the pony that stands before us. The Fork of Destiny, the instrument by which all magic in Equestria is derived, seems to have gone missing from this chamber. If it is indeed lost, we must find and restore it to its rightful place atop the Altar of Magic, or else magic as we know it will soon cease to exist.” Starlight shook her head. “That still doesn’t sound like a friendship problem to me.” “No, but it certainly sounds like something we should help with.” Twilight glared over at Starlight, surprised and a little worried at her tone. “Our quest is more important than a simple friendship problem — Equestria’s magic hangs in the balance!” Starswirl said, giving dramatic emphasis to the last part. “My champion is correct,” Celeste said, rising from the ground and walking toward the group. “But it seems as though my sister’s influence still holds sway over your traitorous friend here. Perhaps she already knows what became of my staff and is currently tasked with leading you all astray.” She leveled a glare directly at Starlight. “What say you? Are you unicorn, or are you… Earth?” “Pretty sure I’m a unicorn, at least last I checked.” Starlight lit her horn and teleported to the other side of the dais. “Yup, still a unicorn.” Celeste flashed a growl and spun around to face Starlight, her horn bursting into flame. “How dare you, insolent foal!” “Hold!” Starswirl shouted. “Let’s be civil here. I’m sure we can find a solution if we hold our tempers and work through the problem together.” Celeste extinguished her horn and gave a snort that billowed out of her nostrils in a puff of smoke. “Very well, but I still don’t accept her as one of my own — not until she proves herself worthy.” She circled back around to face Starswirl and Twilight. “You understand your mission, Champion, and the urgency with which it much be undertaken. I trust you know where to find my staff, and if not, you can extract the location from your friend here.” She spat out the final word with an emphatic spark of fire from her lips. Starlight plodded forward. “Look, I don’t know what you’re talking about, and I’m not sure I even want to go on this extreme scavenger hunt of yours until we get some real answers.” Celeste reignited a smaller portion of her horn. “One more word out of you, and I’ll reduce you to the ash from whence you came!” Twilight rushed forward. “I-I’m sure that won’t be necessary.” She motioned over to Starlight to cut out her antagonizing by motioning with her hoof horizontally across her neck. “Fine, whatever,” Starlight said as she strolled off toward the earth pony statue. “I just wish somepony would tell me why she’s so anti-Earth Pony — and — wants to kill me so badly.” “Hah!” Celeste retorted. “Don’t play games with me, young one. I’ve been at this for millennia, and I know my sister’s power when I smell it. Admit it! You helped her steal my staff, and now you come to gloat in triumph on her behalf. Devious witch; she always did revel in my misfortune.” “I have no idea what you’re talking about. The only staff I ever had was just some stick I found in the desert to make it look like I—Wait.” Starlight stopped, dead in her tracks. Twilight gasped. “The ninth enchantment of Mage Meadowbrook?!” Starswirl drew back, a questioning smirk upon his face. “The Fork of Destiny is certainly not an invention of Meadowbrook’s conjuring. If my memory serves, she only had eight grand enchantments to her credit,” he continued, adding to the side, “I, myself, have forty-two.” “So, the Staff of Sameness? My cover story was… real?!” Starlight spun around. “I used a priceless magical artifact to steal an entire village of cutie marks and didn’t even realize it was anything more than some twisted branch I found lying in the desert that I dreamt up some crazy plan to rule Equestria with? You’ve gotta be kidding me!” “So you finally admit to your crimes?” Celeste said, narrowing her gaze and shining a gleam from her glowing eye socket directly toward Starlight. “The light of truth always burns away the darkest of lies.” “Hey, that’s not what I meant, and stop it.” Starlight batted at the glowing beam of light with a forehoof. “Weren’t you acting all blind just a minute ago, or was that just another game of yours?” “She is blind,” Twilight said. The others cocked their heads in silent contemplation of Twilight’s interjection. “Let me explain.” She opened her wings and deftly rose to the level of the statues above. “The Fate of Power sees only through the mind’s eye,” Twilight recited as she floated over and hovered in front of the unicorn statue, pointing both there and at the pony below. The same hollow eye sockets in the towering form of the statue could be plainly seen upon direct inspection. “It’s the only thing I was able to read from the short glance I got of Starswirl’s book. I’m not sure how I knew what it said, and It didn’t really mean much to me at the time, until I noticed Celeste couldn’t follow our movement by anything other than sound or smell. Which also caused me to wonder how she suddenly regained the ability to track us once Starswirl recovered.” She floated down to the base of the statue, almost regaining the ground. “That’s when I saw the inscription on the base of this statue, which reads: ‘House Stella — Forever in service of Power’. And if all my study of ancient history and years of primary research on the life and teachings of the greatest wizard to ever live has taught me anything that could help in this moment, it’s that Starswirl the Bearded—” “—is the last surviving member of the Great Herd of House Stella, and by birthright, Champion to the Fate of Power.” Starswirl nearly choked on the words. The four ponies sat for a moment in quiet reflection. Thin shadows and tiny wisps of light danced along the walls, a dim reminder of the roiling ball of magical energy floating empty at its core above the Altar of Magic at the center of the cavern. Starswirl closed his eyes to concentrate on gathering memories of a time long ago. Twilight felt a small burden lifted in finally getting to the bottom of the mystery of Starswirl’s latest riddle — a sense of pride and accomplishment overshadowed only by the fact that they were no closer to finding and resolving the friendship mission they were supposed to be working on. Her attitude toward Starswirl had mellowed during the recent struggle. Having nearly lost him when she had only barely rescued him from a thousand year imprisonment in limbo served to put things into a different perspective. This was life and death, not just an argument about if, when, and where he should retire. The gravity of their new quest hadn’t been fully absorbed, and so she continued to struggle with her motivation both toward continuing the fight and reconciling her differences with her newly-found and nearly-lost idol. Starlight felt no less of a struggle. Both mentally and physically, there was a lot to process. The near-death experience in fighting with a literal demi-goddess triggered a reaction in her that she had thought long ago repressed. How she could freeze and not be able to stand up for herself in a moment of panic bothered her more deeply than anything else. All the crazy talk of saving the world and ancient spells and talismans went right over her head up until the moment it came crashing down on her. She was somehow involved, and not just as the pony come to save the day like she had become accustomed to after she had escaped the ponysona of her equality village experiment and near world ending tear through the fabric of time. No, she was accused of being back on the side of misguided trouble making, mixed up with the wrong crowd once more. In the back of her mind, the nagging thought remained, am I really good? She thought back to the time before her choices took her down a dark path toward enslaving other ponies through the removal of their cutie marks in a failed attempt at curing the ills of the world through equality. One fateful day, a few years after Sunburst had left her foalhood home town of Sire's Hollow to study in Canterlot, she recalled wandering away from her village in an attempt to find a new path. Alone, and without her best friend, she searched for anything to fill the gap in her heart, much less her blank flank, long past its prime in waiting for her own mark to appear. The thought crossed her mind that perhaps the idea to make everypony equal wasn’t her own. All she wanted was to be like the others her age, and without a cutie mark, she simply wasn’t. An idle thought, perhaps, when she found the staff and suddenly things came into focus — her cutie mark finally appearing in that very moment. The excitement she felt with the rush of emotions flooding through her, it would have been simple to overlook any foreign sensations or misguided thoughts steering her subsequent actions. It did seem strange, the coincidence that an object carrying the power of every unicorn in Equestria would fall into her hooves, and grant her the one thing she had been longing to discover as it did. Had it really been her choice to steal ponies cutie marks? Or had that choice been made for her by some other power? Or even the staff itself, what Starswirl referred to as the Fork of Destiny? Was the power it held something she had no ability to control? The crystals in the passageway seemed to call to her in much the same way. Overpowering her thoughts and guiding her actions, if not for the distraction that helped her break the enticing pull, if not for Twilight calling out to her, she might have been halfway to Manehattan by now with a large purple gem in tow. The thought that she wasn’t in control of her choices gnawed at her resolve to finish the friendship quest — or whatever quest they happened to be on. What if her whole life was no more than a lie controlled in every way by another? Now, more than ever before, she looked to Twilight as a mentor, inwardly pleading for an answer as to what she should do. “What are you waiting for?” murmured Celeste. Starswirl gasped, shaking his head and shuffling his hooves. “We best be on our way.” He motioned toward the passageway urging Twilight and Starlight to leave the magic sanctum. Like it or not, the girls acquiesced to the old wizard’s urging. The trio crossed the threshold into the crystal corridor with Twilight bringing up the rear. She glanced back over her shoulder, one final question for the High Priestess suddenly calling to her mind. In a blink, Celeste, along the entire ring of firelight, vanished into the darkness. Only the way ahead into the colorful, crystal-lined hall illuminated her view. With a momentary stutter in her trot, she quickly fell in line with the others and made her way through the winding passages and back up into the lower levels of Canterlot Castle proper.