//------------------------------// // Chapter 6 // Story: The Archetypist // by Cold in Gardez //------------------------------// Starlight was waiting in the kitchen when I finally emerged, still slightly damp, from my bedroom. As promised, there was coffee. There was also a powder blue unicorn wearing nothing but a pleased smirk that she turned in my direction as soon as I dismounted the stairs. “Trixie!” I forced myself to smile. “So good to see you! How was your trip?” “Adequate,” she announced. “As usual my adoring fans turned out in droves to see me perform, but you know how it is being on the road, every night swarmed with crowds all chanting your name, begging you to perform feats of fantastic magical prowess. Well, you probably don’t know what that’s like, but it’s nice. Exhausting but nice. Being so amazing just drains all the energy right out of me! Why, by the last few nights only the thought of getting back to Ponyville kept me going. There are some things one just can’t do out on the road. I have to come here to do them.” She finished with a grin in Starlight’s direction. Starlight tittered. She blushed. She did her best impression of a sixteen-year-old filly. I rolled my eyes. “Yes, well, it’s wonderful to have you back.” I stole over to my coffee and stuck my muzzle above the mug, inhaling deeply of its beautiful scent. The last few sludgy neurons in my brain burned to life, and I took a deep swallow that stung my lips and tongue and throat and I didn’t care. Everything suddenly seemed better. Even having Trixie in my castle. A real smile replaced the fake one. “You’re welcome to stay as long as you like, of course. We have guest rooms.” “Mm, thank you, but Trixie doubts she’ll need them.” Trixie popped a strawberry from her bowl into her mouth and chomped it loudly. “I’ll probably sleep in my wagon. Or elsewhere.” “We’re going to go out first, though,” Starlight said. She plopped down beside Trixie and snatched a strawberry. “Visit some friends, shopping, that sort of thing. Maybe hit the spa.” Every part of that sounded nice. Especially the spa. It had been a while since I’d been there with Rarity, long enough that I shouldn’t have felt any guilt about the idea of tagging along. But that would mean hours away from research, from my books or asking more ponies about their dreams. More hours of awkward pauses and fruitless conversations. “That all sounds wonderful and we will be doing those things,” Trixie said. She upended the bowl and dumped the rest of the strawberries in her mouth, chewing them quickly down. “But first there’s something Trixie needs to show Starlight in her wagon. Come!” “Oh?” Starlight stood. “What… oh. Oh! Haha, yes, we need to, uh, go look at the thing. In your wagon. We’ll be back in a bit. But if we’re not don’t, uh, don’t come looking for us.” There it was again. That little green flame sparking to life in my chest. Before I could tamp it down, beat it back, it forced me to call out: “Trixie, have you had any odd dreams lately?” Trixie stopped. Her hooves skidded on the crystal, and she turned back to me so quickly her mane spun around, slapping against her cheek. She stared, mouth open. Beside her, Starlight froze. “I…” Trixie blinked. “No. No, of course not. What makes you ask such a… such a silly question?” “Just doing some research,” I said, ignoring the frown Starlight was shooting me. “If you do notice anything odd, please let Starlight or me know.” “Trixie will.” She stood still for a moment, still looking at me, and I waited for some follow-up. But eventually Trixie shook her head and turned. She flicked her tail at Starlight as she passed. Starlight waited until Trixie was down the hall. “Way to set the mood,” she grumbled. “Sorry, I didn’t know she’d respond like that. Do you think—” “Yeah.” Starlight blew out a huff. “I’ll ask her later. She’ll be more open with me.” Euphemism? My ears flicked. “And did you dream anything last night?” “I… Yeah. I was back in—” “Starlight!” Trixie’s voice rang down the hall against the crystal. “Trixie is patiently waiting for you!” “We can talk later,” I said. “No rush, right?” “Yeah. No rush.” Starlight’s horn lit, and she vanished in a flash, leaving me alone in the kitchen. Well, not alone. I still had my coffee. I topped it off from the turene and headed to the library. * * * It was roundabout lunchtime when my day got weird. I’d given up researching the clinical side of dreams. My library had the latest findings of the onieromantic community’s research, but the modern study of dreams focused on the magic of how they occurred. With Luna’s return scholars had rediscovered the ancient art of dream reading. It was a promising field for divination and prophecy. I ignored those books. I put them all back on the reshelving cart for later and went to the Psychology section. It was the psychologists who’d first proposed the archetypes, who wrote about them, and who seemed most convinced that they must be real things. I selected a book from the pile at random, Archetypes: The Language of Dreams, and began to read. As always, I lost myself within it. Something tickled my ear. I flicked it away. A few seconds later the sensation returned, and I set the book down. It was snowing in my library. A faint dusting drifted across the crystal floor and piled against the edges of the bookcases. It melted where it touched my coat and left little beads of water to soak into the fine hairs. The subtle scent of primrose teased my nose. Ah. “Luna?” “That must be an engrossing book, Twilight Sparkle,” Luna said. She stepped into my library out of the thin air, as though passing through a doorway in the corner of my eye. One moment I was alone, and the next she was stalking like a panther between the tall shelves, blending with the shadows. There and gone. Only the steady ring of her silver shoes on crystal gave away her presence. “We have been here for several minutes.” I stood, because it was the polite thing to do for a fellow princess. “I’m sorry, books have that effect on me. Can I get you anything? Coffee or tea?” She swept out of the bookshelves like a storm, a rush of shadows and wind that forced me to turn away. When I looked again, she sat beside me on a pillow of her own, a silver-embroidered satin cushion that I was certain I did not own. “Thank you, but no. It would only keep me awake, and I hope to retire soon from this atrocious hour. You are well, I presume?” “Yes, I’m fine.” My eyes chose that moment to itch again,  and I had to resist the urge to clench them shut. I settled with blinking a lot instead. “And yourself?” “We are perfect.” It didn’t sound arrogant coming from Luna – to her it was a simple statement of fact. “But we are concerned with Discord.” I swallowed. “He really did something, didn’t he? To our dreams? You’ve seen it?” “He did. I don’t know what, but something has changed. I must find him.” “Good luck with that.” I closed my book before the light snow could damage its pages. I looked up, but there were no clouds in my library; the flakes seemed to materialize out of nothing. They fell heaviest around Luna and did not melt when they touched her coat. “I saw him the other day, but he won’t be found unless he wants to be.” “Oh, he always wants to be found, Twilight Sparkle. Everything he does is in pursuit of our attention, and what good is that if he’s not around to receive it? I think if ponies ever learned to ignore him he would diminish into nothingness.” “He said he wouldn’t do this.” The thought of his duplicity twisted my muzzle into a frown. “When we set him loose he promised he wouldn’t hurt ponies! He was supposed to be reformed!” “He may not think he is hurting anypony,” Luna said. “His sense of reality is twisted beyond your or my ability to fully comprehend. But already I’ve felt the landscape of the dreamworld changing. Whatever he did has twisted ponies’ dreams into something new. Whether it will be to their benefit or harm, I cannot yet say.” “We can tell him to stop. Order him to stop.” “It may well come to that. I doubt he will show himself while I am around, Twilight Sparkle, but when next you see him…” Luna trailed off, her head tilting to the side. Her ears flicked about, and she stood and sniffed at the air. “Er…” I stood. “Is everything alright?” “Can’t you smell him? The stink of his magic is here.” There was a dark flash that stole my vision away, and then Luna was gone. A blast of chill air and the ring of silver horseshoes on crystal came from the shelves deeper in the library. I trotted toward the sound. “Luna?” “Here.” Her voice came from a few rows away. I ran as quickly as I could, and found her standing between the shelves, a book floating in her magic. She passed it to me. “His work?” I accepted it carefully. It was a thick volume, wood paneled with an etched cover leafed with gold in the image of a stylized sun. But most odd was the crossbow bolt protruding from the spine. The shaft sank into the volume halfway to its fletchings. I gave it an experimental tug. It barely budged. “A joke of his,” I said. “Something he said to Starlight a few days ago.” I mentally added abusing books to the list of crimes he would have to answer for. “Hm.” She stared at the cover, the snorted quietly. “Let me guess. Don’t shoot the messenger?” “Yes, how did you—” I looked down as I spoke. The book’s title was in a variant of Old Equus, and it took me a moment to translate it in my head. “Ah. Of course.” The Celestial Messengers: A History. I looked back up to ask Luna if she had read it before, but I was alone again. The last lonely flakes of snow fell out of the warming air and began to melt. * * * Trixie’s wagon was parked beneath one of the castle’s overhangs when I finally emerged after lunch. It had a fresh coat of paint and new gilt all along the edges, so she must still be doing well. I thought I heard whispers from inside, but in my experience Trixie wasn’t the sort of pony who whispered, so I might have just been imagining that. The Boutique was open when I arrived. Rarity was inside, humming some quiet tune that tickled my memory. She gave me a little wave as I entered, then turned her attention back to the butterfly dress. It had grown overnight. A new frill of scales descended down from the hips, concealing the ponyquin’s flanks and thighs. I watched, silently, as she spent a minute sewing another orange scale into place with machine-like precision. There were thousands of scales like it. My mind rebelled when I tried to calculate how much time the whole thing could have taken. “It’s beautiful,” I whispered. She shook her head. “Not yet. If you could see the design in my mind, Twilight, ah… Well, maybe you will, if I finish this.” “What will you do with it?” “Oh, sell it, of course.” Her sudden, easy answer shocked me, and it must’ve shown on my face. “My passion is for creating dresses, darling, not hoarding them. If I kept every design that I thought was beautiful I’d need a separate warehouse. Once an artist creates something, it must be turned loose. And if that’s how you make your living, well, then you have to sell it.” “Sorry. You’re right of course.” I stepped closer to the dress and reached out a hoof. When she nodded, I carefully brushed the top of my fetlock against its scaled breast. The entire design shimmered as the scales shook. “It’s just… taking something so beautiful and selling for bits? I don’t know if I could do that.” “It’s a common sentiment, Twilight. But, unless they have a desire to starve, most artists accept the fact that they must assign monetary value to the things they love and then part with them. It hurts, but we call the artists who cannot do that amateurs.” “Oh.” I stepped around the dress, both to view it from all angles and also to buy some time to think. “Does it ever get easier?” “Yes. We call those artists whores.” “Rarity!” She smiled. “I’m joking, of course. Or am I? Isn’t there something unseemly about an artist too willing to sell themselves? Maybe I just think of them as prostitutes so I won’t be tempted to go down that route myself. So that I’ll never forget that it should hurt to give away something like this, even if it’s for all the bits in the world.” “Well.” I floundered for a response. “I don’t think you’re a prostitute.” “Aw.” She flicked me with her tail as she walked over to the divan and sat. “You sweet talker, you. So, what brings you to the Boutique? Aside from my company, of course?” I took a seat beside her. Rather than tea, she had made up a pitcher of lemonade, and she poured us each a glass. It was sharp and sour and cold and perfect for a hot summer morning. I drained half my cup in a single swallow. “Dreams.” “Again?” “Still. Discord did something to the way ponies are dreaming, and it…” I paused. My mouth suddenly felt dry despite all the lemonade. “Have you noticed anything odd, the past few nights? Any odd dreams?” “All dreams are odd. We’ve been over this.” “Yes, but… come on, Rarity. You know what I mean. You said you dreamt that design, didn’t you? What else have you dreamed?” “Well, I don’t normally talk about such things.” She took a sip of her lemonade, then leaned back to look at me. More deeply than usual – her eyes pierced me, reading me quickly and thoroughly in that manner social ponies have that I could never master. “You’re serious, aren’t you? This has you worried.” “It’s Discord. We should always be worried about him. Even Luna is getting involved now.” “I doubt we have much to worry about, then. Princess Luna always struck me as a very capable mare. If Discord is meddling with her realm, she’ll set him straight.” “That’s the hope.” I fidgeted with my lemonade. The condensation was making the soles of my hooves slippery, so I held it in my magic. “But I want to help her solve this, and that means figuring out what it is he did.” “Fine.” She let out a sigh so quiet I might have imagined it, and she stared at the dress across the room. “Last I dreamed I was weaving something. Something huge and fantastic and complex. It lasted for hours, but you know how dreams are, darling. It never evolved into anything. I was just stuck in that state of always weaving something. And I kept finding butterflies tangled up in my thread. Everything else was vague and shifting and impossible, like dreams always are, but the butterflies were so clear they seemed real. As real as that dress over there. And I remember being enthralled by their beauty, so entranced that I kept wanting to capture more and more. What do you think it means?” “Um.” I mentally reviewed my notes from Archetypes: The Language of Dreams, and came up short. “You like butterflies?” Rarity raised an eyebrow. “That’s it?” “I’m not trying to interpret dreams. I’m just trying to figure out if they’re changing, and what might happen to ponies as a result. It’s… it’s very frustrating working with something so vague, Rarity.” She scooted closer and placed a hoof on mine. “I know, darling. I’m sorry. I know how you are with science and stuff. Try not to let this bother you, alright? I’m fine, Sweetie Belle is fine, dreams are always a bit odd, and…” She trailed off. Her muzzle was just feet from mine now, and she stared into my eyes so deeply I started to grow uncomfortable. “Is everything alright, darling? You look like you’ve been crying.” “Oh, that.” I forced myself to smile. My lungs tightened. “No, my eyes have been acting up the past few days. Just allergies.” “Hm.” She squinted, then nodded. “You should try some butterbur leaves. That can help. I bet Fluttershy would have some.” I nodded. The tension in my chest eased. “I’ll do that. I was going to see her again today.” At least, that was the plan. When I arrived at Fluttershy’s cottage she was nowhere to be found.