“How is that trouble?” she asks. Aside from the delivery, she wasn’t able to detect anything suspicious about it. So, she takes a guess at what’s worrying her. “Is it my past?”
Flitter shakes her head, eyes wide. “No. We’re… princesses. All three of us.”
Flutter snaps her jaw shut, and bolts into motion, food forgotten. “Quick! How do you hide a magic horn?”
Flitter looks in the direction of her sister’s tail, sticking out of some closet or another while the sounds of rummaging come from the same. “You don’t,” she states. “Wings we could hide, but… I mean, we’re pegasi, and everypony knows that.” She glances down. “He didn’t seem to notice Last One, so in theory, she could pretend to be a unicorn, but…”
“Come on!” Flutter demands, digging into another closet. “There’s gotta be some way to hide, disguise, or even remove this thing!”
“Don’t remove it,” she states firmly. “It’s… important.”
Flutter’s head sticks out of the closet again, one hoof wrapped around the doorframe. “Important? Like, politically important?”
She shakes her head. “Apparently. But not what I mean. It’s… pony part. If you remove it…” She shudders, looking at Flitter’s missing wing. “Huge risk.”
Flitter steps around to her other side, wrapping her wing around her. “You mean to tell us… If we try to remove our horns, there’s a good chance we’ll kill ourselves in the process?”
She nods. “Please don’t,” she pleads, looking up.
Flitter looks up at Flutter, who answers. “... Oh. Okay, then only to hide or disguise it. I don’t exactly want to die.”
“Yeah,” Flitter seconds. “No worries. Thanks for the warning- I’d hate to have found that out the hard way.” She shudders. “So… is there a way to hide it, or are we, um, stuck?”
“Magic,” she states simply.
Flutter’s head sticks back out of the third and final closet in the hall. “What?”
“Magic,” she repeats, looking back out at her. “That’s what Twilight called it.”
“Magic,” Flitter states. “We know nothing about magic. You?”
She shakes her head. “I don’t know.”
“Hold on a second!” Flutter states, dashing out of her closet and into another room. Moments later, she reemerges with a book, which she drops on the floor in front of her and Flitter. “Books! We can… study…” Sigh. “Might be… a long time before we can head back out again without being seen, but…”
She rises to her hooves, pulling herself gently out from under Flitter’s wing, and flicks open the cover of the book with the tip of a hoof. She searches down the page, then flicks to the next page to repeat.
“A… very long time,” Flitter states. “Our dad really wanted a unicorn foal, didn’t he?”
“Yeah,” Flutter agrees. “Only, as we kept telling him, all the books in the world are useless without somepony to demonstrate how to reach for it in the first place.”
Flitter sighs, stepping forwards to crouch next to her once again. “You hear that, Last One? The books won’t help.”
She looks up, and smiles. “I can work with this,” she states. All the symbols on the page had suddenly started making sense a few seconds before- she knows what the book is, what it talks about. “I saw lots of unicorns. I remember them using magic.” She looks back down at the book. “I can figure it out.”
Flitter blinks a few times. “Um, wow, um, okay. Um…”
Flutter chuckles lightly. “When you say it like that, it’s kinda hard to doubt,” she states. “Maybe you can teach us too, once you figure it out yourself?”
She nods, flicking to the next page. “Yes.”
“But that’s going to take a while,” Flitter states, looking back up at her sister. “So, food?”
“Right!” Flutter quickly vanishes back into the kitchen.
By the time Flutter announces the food is ready, she’s finished the book and moved on to experimentation. She hasn’t fully processed the contents of the book yet; there’s just so much information, especially compounded with what she remembers seeing the unicorns doing. But, it’s enough for her to try. All she’s really managing right now is to get numerous sparks of varying colors to fly from the tip of her horn.
“Hey, Last One?” Flitter asks, trotting up to her.
“Mm?” she asks, looking up without interrupting her efforts.
Flitter chuckles. “That’s a nice spark shower, but, uh… dinner’s ready.”
“Alright,” she states, rising to trot after the mare to the dining room. As she goes, she processes far enough to see why she’s showering sparks- and stops showering sparks.
By the end of the meal, she’s figured out basic thaumic channeling.
Flutter finally notices what she’s doing with her horn. “Uh… Last One?”
“Mm?” she asks, experimenting with four different colors of horn aura at once.
“What are you doing?”
“Exploring magic,” she states simply.
“Oh, um… You finished that already!?”
“Yes.”
“Wow. Um, would another book help, or no?”
“Probably.”
“Alrighty. We’ve got an entire library in here, so…” She follows the mare out of the kitchen, to the library.
“Mornin’,” Flutter mumbles, stifling a yawn as she walks into the library.
She doesn’t move, as any motion of her horn- right now- could throw off her latest experiment. “Good morning,” she answers.
Then Flutter blinks, hoof suspended inches away from the bookshelf. “Wait. We never gave you a bed to sleep in, did we?” She then turns towards her, and freezes. “What the hay…?”
Her experiment comes to a successful close right on time. She draws her horn out of a window in the fabric of spacetime, closing it behind her, as all the glowing lines, runes, and circles around her fade away. She looks up at Flutter and, with a brief pulse of her horn, makes that go away too. “I figured it out,” she states.
… Flutter’s head has ceased normal operation.
Flitter then enters the room, yawning, but also a lot more awake. “Oh! Last One!” She bolts forwards to wrap her in a hug. “Sorry we forgot about the bed! And…” Flitter’s hoof comes up to her forehead, feeling for her horn. “... is it just me, or are you just a pegasus again?”
“No,” she answers. “It’s still there. It’s just folded into the space between this world and the next.”
“What?”
Smile. “I can still use it, but nopony can tell I have it.”
Blink. “What-? That mean you’ve figured it out?”
“Yes.”
“Awesome! Can you do that for us too, or is it something only we can do?”
“I can,” she states simply, before feeding her power into her horn again. Both the two mares’ horns vanish in similar manner to her own.
Flitter feels briefly for her horn before resuming her hug. “Thank you! Now we won’t need to worry about that, at least.” She releases the hug. “Anyways, it’s my turn to make breakfast. So…” She starts towards the kitchen.
“Can…” she begins. She’s not sure how to phrase the question.
Flitter notices, though, pausing to look back, missing wing facing her.
“Can… Can you hold still for a minute, please?”
Flitter blinks. “Um… Sure.”
She nods, making her horn appear again. “Thank you.” She feeds it power.
It takes her thirty-seven and a half seconds to restore the missing wing, at the end of which Flitter’s brain has ceased normal functioning as well. And, she senses, the last of Flitter’s pains has gone away.
She makes her horn disappear again, before smiling. “There!”
Flutter falls on her side.
“Th-thank you,” Flitter finally states, flexing the no-longer-missing wing before she folds it. “U-um… I guess we can go talk to Cloudspear today. Maybe explain a… few things?” Shudder. “But thank you!” She snatches her up in another hug.