Twilight found herself lingering behind at the Hayburger House for a second, third and fourth milkshake before eventually deciding to head out and get on with her day. She’d finally managed to get some time to herself, after all, and while she didn’t feel great about manufacturing a reason to avoid Spike, she wasn’t going to waste it. It was with a melancholy mood that she stacked her cups, crumpled up her assorted wrappers and took her tray to the bin, doing her best to ignore all the looks and stares she was attracting.
As she took to the air, she felt more and more that she hadn’t been handling the day very well. Even ignoring how her discussions with Fluttershy had gone, she had to ask herself why she’d even felt that she couldn’t tell Spike about her concerns about dream magic. She’d never shied away from confiding in him before, and while Luna might have supplanted him as her primary confidant, that shouldn’t mean that she trusted him any less.
Honestly, she had maybe… sort of… overreacted to the whole thing. Probably, if she’d confided in either one of them to begin with, they’d have told her not to worry about it.
That was, typically, the advice she got from just about any of her friends, actually.
“Twilight,” she said to herself in a poor mimicry of Spike’s voice. “You’re making a big deal over nothing. Most ponies never even saw Discord use magic.”
Her sigh was lost to the wind as she passed over the brown eyesore that was even now being deconstructed without her. Imaginary Spike was right, of course, and the fact that Twilight had been fighting her natural inquisitiveness to reject it was a clear sign that she should have gotten a second opinion or just listened to her first one. It was just… Discord was still a sore spot for her. Even if she accepted that nopony was likely to actually connect the two of them, she still didn’t want anything to do with him or his magic.
Honestly, she should probably just go back to helping excavate the palace ruins just to take her mind off it all instead of overthinking it to death, but she’d never been very good at not thinking and she’d already arrived at her destination anyway.
On the outside, Rainbow Dash’s unfinished tower wasn’t much different from Applejack’s, where Twilight and Spike had spent the morning, the most obvious difference being the lack of several dozen workers shuffling boxes around. Truthfully, Twilight wasn’t entirely sure what Rainbow Dash would actually do with a tower, as her cloud house was fairly large and extravagant and still only the size of a house, but they could hardly exclude her. If the most important point hadn’t been to make them feel at home, it would have made a lot more sense to just give each of her friends a suite in the palace.
Really, there were several issues with the whole thing, and Twilight supposed that that was another thing to look into while she was in Canterlot for the Celestias’ coronation; some kind of transportation magic to connect not just the towers, but ideally something to bring Applejack into town, too. Spells for portals did exist, so it should be possible, though she’d never properly researched them because they were something of a white elephant from a practicality standpoint. That said, with the power inherent in the ponies that would be using it, there was a good chance that they could make it work.
It wasn’t until Twilight was gently landing in front of Rainbow Dash’s unfinished tower that Twilight realized exactly the direction her thoughts had been taking her. “Ugh,” she groaned, facehoofing. “I’m really bad at this whole friendship thing, aren’t I?” she asked the empty street. “The coronation is going to be the one day when we’re all going to be able to get the group together and here I am planning to spend it all in the Canterlot Archives when I could do it literally any other time.”
The empty street made no comment.
“…And now I’m talking to myself because I didn’t want to tell Spike about dream magic,” she groused, making her way into the unfinished tower.
The unfinished tower that had a pair of guards at the door.
“I’m… just going to pretend that didn’t happen and and keep my monologuing internal for the foreseeable future,” she announced to nopony in particular and slunk inside, closing the door behind her.
Where Applejack’s tower had been a network of rooms packed solid with large boxes and furniture salvaged from the ruined palace, Rainbow Dash’s had a large, open space in the center that would connect what counted for floors in the structure. This tower, too, had been filled with boxes of odds and ends, though in a bit of irony thanks to the smaller back streets, the larger space had been packed loosely with items on the smaller end of the scale, none larger than a pony.
Twilight’s eyes lingered on the boxes. The larger items in Applejack’s tower had been nothing special, but here… She didn’t have the itemized inventory on hoof, but somewhere mixed in among all these boxes would be what remained of her books, notes and other personal items. She hadn’t been through here at all so far, and there was a part of her that suspected she wouldn’t like what she’d find if she did.
Still…
No, she’d come here for a reason, and she did her best to push all her idle thoughts one way or the other out of her head. It was time to do magic.
No—wait—it was time to hopefully not do magic, the first step of which was to only sort of do magic, which meant—
Okay, fine, she wasn’t fooling anypony, least of all herself. Intent was a significant part of magic anyway, so lying to herself about it would have a good chance of invalidating the whole thing. She’d just have to try her best and talk to Luna about her misgivings later once she actually knew if there was anything to have misgivings about in the first place.
Exploring the tower a little, Twilight decided that the ground floor wasn’t really suitable for her purposes. True, it was only loosely packed, but that was actually a mark against it, as it meant that no matter where she went, there’d be potential collateral nearby. Writing the ground floor off, then, all it took was a few flaps of her wings to take her up through the center area to the second floor, which she discovered to be not only empty and untouched, but unfinished besides, not being so much a room as a perimeter of outer walls with waxed canvas tied over the top, protecting it from the elements.
This was much more like it, she decided. Picking a spot out in the open, she sat and prepared herself. While the concept was simple and she’d become quite adept at manipulating her magic inside of an area before for the sake of teleportation, purposely flooding an entire space with it wasn’t something she’d ever actually had cause to do.
Slowly, at first, but ramping up quickly, Twilight lit her horn as if she was going to cast a spell, felt the thrumming in her skull, let her magic pour out and… waited. That was the best word for it. She wasn’t pushing it out or shaping the magic as it left her, and in fact she had to hold herself back from doing so. Instead, it was actually more like holding her breath or halting in the process of popping her ears accompanied by a shiver along her spine as if she were yawning.
That… wasn’t a bad comparison, actually—yawning. There was a part of her that was stretching wide to let the magic seep out of her, and it was slowly ceasing to resemble spellcasting at all. The glow of visible magic around her horn faded, but the amount of magic flooding out of her only grew. It wasn’t often that she actually got to appreciate the amount of power that she actually had at her disposal now, but as the familiar feeling of magic began to spread throughout the room, saturating it over the course of minutes to a point that would take an average unicorn years of regular living and then surpassing it, she couldn’t help but get caught up in the sensation of it.
It… caught her by surprise, a powerful feeling of home having crept up on her in ways that she hadn’t expected. It wasn’t the sort of thing that ponies consciously recognized, let alone set out to do, but with the amount of magic that she was flooding the room with, pushing it deep into the crystal around her, the difference was like night and day—literally—and it triggered in her an overwhelming nostalgia. She hadn’t even realized it, but that comforting atmosphere of home was something she’d been missing. For a while she just sat there, soaking it up, basking in the memories and emotions that had been stirred up.
She was reminded her of her old tower in Canterlot, of course, and a little bit of the library… but there was also that morning she’d woken up at the site of the old castle after she’d wiped it off the face of Equus by bringing down the stars. From there, there was the hole that Luna had made and how it had led down into the Desert of Dreams. It was all connected.
Twilight opened her eyes to find the entire space transformed around her, and she had to admit that no part of her was actually surprised. On some level, she’d known exactly how this would go, all of her caution and wariness breaking through the denial she’d been so carefully cultivating.
That said, transforming the expanse of crystal into a replica of her old library sprinkled with bits and features of other homes she’d had in the past had not been what she’d intended.
She was about to scramble to put things back to the way they’d been when a curious thought stayed her hoof.
Those weren’t real books on the shelves, were they?
Spike was still trying to work his head around what had happened when a bleary-eyed Ember wandered past him and began shuffling around in the kitchen getting herself a glass of water, but it wasn’t until she was on her return trip that she actually noticed him. “What are you doing here?” she asked, eyeing Spike with suspicion. “I thought you were supposed to be working?”
It took him a moment too long to decide how to answer, and he defaulted to snark. “I decided that you were right.”
“Of course I’m right!” Ember asserted with pride before taking a sip of her water. “What am I right about?”
“That stealing is bad and that we should leverage the benefits of pony society in order to get what we want,” he explained, reminding her of her sarcastic comment from the night before.
Ember deflated. “I don’t wanna be right about that.”
“Are you sure?” Spike asked, raising one eye ridge at her.
“Yes!” Ember huffed, throwing her arms up in the air. “What does that even mean? How in the rockslide are we supposed to ‘leverage the benefits of pony society to blah blah blah. What do we actually do?”
Spike couldn’t resist delivering his next line with a smirk. “Well, the first step is clearing this place out, because they’re delivering it at sunset.”
Ember gave him a disbelieving look. “Okay, but seriously, if you’re not gonna help steal it, you’ve gotta come up with some other actual solution or I’ll do it without you.”
Spike fell into a bit of a sulk. “I’m being serious, here! I did the leveraging thing and Twilight gave me the Primordial Ring of Ashmund, totally legally legit and above-board. All I have to do is burn the invoice the next time I’m in the records room and no one will ever know.”
Ember kept giving him that uncertain look. “Really, actually seriously?”
“Yes!” Spike insisted. “Really, actually seriously!”
“Wait, if you’re serious and it’s all legal, why would you need to burn the proof?” she asked.
“It’s totally legal!” Spike insisted. “It’s just that nobody actually knows it happened—it’s called bureaucracy.”
Ember took a long moment considering Spike before she seemed to give in and believe him. “So… that’s it? No raid under the cover of night? No danger—no daring escapes?” Crossing her arms, she looked away and scowled. “I don’t think I like bureaucracy.”
“I don’t think anyone likes bureaucracy.”
To Twilight’s incredible disappointment, no, the hundreds upon hundreds of objects she’d conjured up to fill the shelves of her library simulacra were not real books. Oh, they looked like books and they smelled like books, certainly; they were even filled with print. The text was perfectly formed and legible, with chapters, sections, paragraphs and sentences. Subjects performed verbs modified by adverbs and adjectives were attached to nouns in chains like so much hearth’s warming tinsel, and all of it strung into something that even resembled a collection of narratives. The subjects of those narratives might even have been taken from her actual books.
It was unfortunate, then, that it all amounted to so much nonsense. Worse, it had taken Twilight half of a chapter on the magical capabilities of hercules beetles for her to realize it.
In her defense, they did appear to have horns if you squinted hard enough.
Twilight tossed yet another book into the growing pile of useless paper and let out a huff of annoyance. What had started out as a comfortable memory of home had turned into something more resembling a nightmare. This, she decided, was worse than a room full of her mother’s books, and with a stomp of her hooves, every last one vanished, leaving behind an array of empty shelves.
So… was that it, then? Hypothesis confirmed, time to get back to work? Once again, she was about to return the room to how she’d found it when she found herself hesitating, eyeing the empty shelves.
Thirty seconds later, she was downstairs opening boxes and casting them aside, looking for her real books.
Rainbow Dash wasn’t using this place anyway.
Spike had spent the afternoon clearing space for all the things that were due to be delivered at the end of the day and managed to drag Ember along in the process. Unfortunately for Spike, since the whole excuse for the situation revolved around his lack of furniture, there wasn’t actually that much to do, meaning Ember got to stand around feeding him snark for the most part.
“I still can’t believe you spent most of your life sleeping in a basket,” she said, giving the offending accessory a kick. “That is so demeaning, even for you.”
“That would mean more to me if you weren’t literally sleeping on a pile of rocks in the basement,” he shot back, nudging her out of the way of his sweeping. “It’s not like I don’t have a spare bed.”
“Sleeping on piles of things is what dragons do,” she retorted offhand, not allowing herself to be distracted from the subject of his old basket. “Hey, you don’t use this thing any more—do you care if it gets burnt?”
Spike gave the basket a look, considering the question. He wasn’t really attached to it and he’d let it get dusty, but… “Are you just going to burn it out of misguided offense, or is there an actual point?” he asked, eyeing her warily. “I’d rather not have a scorch mark on the floor, so if you’re going to burn it, take it down to the basement.”
Ember made an annoyed grunt and snatched the basket up off the ground. “Oh come on. You act like I’m some wild animal that’s going to mess the carpet. Just because you live in a stupid flammable tree doesn’t mean I can’t be trusted not to burn it down. Look, I’ll hold it up in the air while I do it; I just want to practice.”
Spike looked at the basket she was holding aloft, then at the light fixture right above it and raised an eye ridge.
Ember followed his gaze to the light fixture and scowled. “Ugh, fine,” she said, tossing the basket away with a huff. “Aren’t you supposed to be all encouraging and grit? You are the worst magic teacher in the world.”
Spike winced just the tiniest bit. He’d gotten used to ignoring Ember’s insults, but maybe she did have a point, there. He glanced around the room to make sure there wasn’t anything that really needed to get done, but there really hadn’t been anything to begin with, so he set the broom aside, dusted himself off and made his way over to pick up the basket. “If you want to practice, we can do that—but downstairs.”
Ember ripped the basket out of Spike’s grip and grit her teeth, looking like she was going to snap and yell, but she managed to keep ahold of her temper. “I can do it myself,” she growled out, but instead of storming off, she just stood there looking at him. Slowly, she seemed to calm, but her scowl didn’t fade. “You know, I’m the one who grew up with my mountain of a father trying to keep me from ever doing anything interesting, but somehow it’s you who can’t seem to escape someone’s shadow.”
Spike stood still and attempted to unpack Ember’s unexpected eloquence. “What?”
“Spike,” she said, exasperation building into frustration. “Look at yourself! You grew up knowing how to do magic and only ever learned to do one thing with it! For Tartarus’ sake, you live in a wooden house, but you never even learned to un-burn things! Even I know that’s like… step two, and I only learned step one this morning. It doesn’t take a genius to guess why you never bothered.”
It was like sorting through a graveyard. It was a mess; a massacre of paper, cardboard and cork boxed up and filed away for her perusal. Books, it seemed, did not respond well to the kind of sudden shocks that were involved in the collapse of a building, and it seemed all the more senseless for how random the destruction was. Volume seven of the Encyclopedia Bitanica had come out of it all but pristine, while volume six resembled nothing more than a cabbage after Applejack’s pigs had gotten to it.
It was heart-wrenching… and she wished she’d done it sooner. Just sitting here going through books and other odds and ends that had been recovered felt like coming home. She had to admit that the magical saturation was part of it, but even so, this was something she’d been needing. It wasn’t happening quickly, but as she hunted through the boxes downstairs, picked out the ones with books in them and brought them up to properly sort through them, the shelves were slowly coming to look like a proper library, if one with a heavily abused collection.
Looking at the small collection of books she had recovered, it was easy to see why it hadn’t been a priority. Logically, it was hard to say whether or not there was really much point. Much like the furniture from that morning, even what was technically salvageable would probably just be replaced as a matter of course.
All except one.
Twilight ran her hoof over the torn cover of The Elements of Harmony: A Reference Guide. It was a book that she’d discovered had not had an entry in the library’s lending catalogue. She’d never brought the matter up with Celestia, but Twilight suspected that the elder alicorn might have penned it herself and placed it here specifically for her to find. Later, Discord had added a box to the front page where he had hidden the elements themselves, though there was no sign of it now. That last part wasn’t something she bring herself to be too torn up over, though it did bring up a point—could she restore books with dream magic?
Her immediate answer was no, considering the replicas she’d recently vanished. She gave the issue a second look, though, and… the answer was still no. Even if she took a book that was otherwise intact, with no missing pages, there was no guarantee that a word here and there wouldn’t be changed. Maybe something that had been smudged would seamlessly be replaced with nonsense, or perhaps it would be more insidious and passages that she disagreed with would be ‘fixed’; there was no way to know, and therefore she couldn’t trust it.
It was annoying, using magic that she didn’t entirely control.
Twilight stopped, stared out into nothing as she replayed that thought in her head, and blinked.
“Oh, come on.”
Spike had just finished sweeping out the kitchen and was considering going downstairs to explain to Ember that there was nothing wrong with having other aspirations than magic when there was a knock at the door, which could only mean one thing.
They were here.
After a brief conversation during which he had assured them that they had the right address, Spike brought the stallion in charge inside and showed him where things needed to be; the writing desk that had started this whole situation needed to go upstairs along with a filing cabinet and a shelving unit, while the rest would go in the main library area. The two of them were just coming back down the stairs to talk about that when Spike saw the workers outside beginning to open up the crate with the Ring of Ashmund in it, and he panicked, scrambling outside to stop them.
“Wait, wait!” he shouted, waving his hands in the air. “Leave that one in the crate!”
Everypony on sight gave him funny looks. “Yeah? You wanna explain how you want us to get it inside otherwise?” the stallion in charge asked, leaning on the door to the ex-library and giving the doorjamb a knock. “Unless you got a loading dock out back, we ain’t got a choice.”
Spike looked at the crate, then at the door. He was right; there was no way they could fit it through the door. Tartarus—he’d never seen it, but he doubted the Ring of Ashmund would fit even if they took it out of the crate, and even if they did, what had he planned to do? Hide it under the new coffee table? The door to the basement was even smaller!
“No, uhh…” Spike delayed, searching for an answer. All he could come up with was a half measure, though the more he thought about it, the more he could see possibilities of how he could make it work,. “It’s fine, just leave it out back; we’ll deal with it later.”
The stallions all glanced at each other and their boss, wordlessly asking if anyone was going to challenge it, but in the end shrugs all around seemed to be the consensus. “Alright, sure, but you’re gonna want to get a tarp over it before next week. I hear they’ve got a decent storm planned.”
Spike barely heard him and waved off the issue, watching the stallions get to work. He, unfortunately, didn’t have until next week. Twilight was going to be by tomorrow to pick him up again, and he suspected she’d notice a giant, wagon-sized crate out back behind the ex-library.
Thankfully, considering what the crate contained, he had options.
Twilight had tried to go back to sorting her ruined books and other possessions, but her mood had been soured by that one thought.
What was the difference between what she’d been calling ‘dream magic’ and the earth pony magic that she’d actually wanted to learn?
Magic… was magic. She was pretty sure about that. The only difference between the magic that unicorns used and the magic that earth ponies used was in the body of the ponies in question. Unicorns had horns and could shape the magic as it left them, while Earth ponies had a different set of internal channels for the magic and the ability to channel that same magic through their hooves, albeit with less control.
What, then, did it mean to channel magic through her horn without shaping it only to impress her will on it after it had left her? Tartarus, she’d stopped using her horn halfway through, so really, what difference could she even claim? At no point had she suspected that earth ponies had any control over magic after it left their hooves, but it made sense in hindsight, didn’t it? Earth ponies worked the land, dedicating years of their lives to family farms, workshops, stores or what have you; wouldn’t it only make sense that they were investing actual power into those things as well, not just providing the occasional infusion of magic into crop or craft?
It fit. It all fit—far too well to be ignored. In fact, just about the only thing that was puzzling her was Luna’s insistance that earth pony magic was difficult or boring. Luna was no slouch in magic. Was it possible that the difference in their experiences could be blamed entirely on a difference in approach, or was there more to it? Twilight had experienced firsthoof how badly things could go if she assumed that earth pony magic involved casting through her hooves, and the advice of a mortal earth pony was unlikely to be any help given the timescale that would be involved in forging a connection to the land, but she couldn’t rule out a deeper reason, either.
So, where did that leave her, then? She supposed that she could say that she had solved earth pony magic, but the mixed nature of her realization had kind of spoiled her enthusiasm and it would take a great deal more trial and error to properly feel out what she could use it for… and that was the other question.
What was she actually going to do with it?
It was a little jarring, Spike thought, to have things change so suddenly. The stallions that had come to deliver furniture and one excessively large ancient object of power had been good at their job, and hardly twenty minutes had gone by before the ex-library was empty again, save half a dozen new additions.
Spike had to distract himself from obsessing over the crate out back behind the library. He wasn’t sure exactly how he’d deal with it, but the specifics would have to wait until after dark when he and Ember could open it up and see how it actually worked. With any luck, he’d be able to use it to make himself twenty or thirty hooves tall and just press it down into the soil while still leaving it usable. Having a sort of magical circle that allowed anydragon who stepped into it to change their size and age would be ideal and keep the actual source of the power a secret, but who knew what actually counted for ‘wearing’ something you could fit an entire team of hippos through?
Even if that didn’t work, though, the fallback option wasn’t terrible. If worst came to worst, they could use their increased size to dig a hole down to the basement and put it there, and that wasn’t even all that bad an idea; it would certainly keep Ember from abusing the thing too much if any size she took had to fit through the basement door—though that said, it would also cause some logistical issues when it came to filling in the hole, which wasn’t ideal.
Well, no, the worst case scenario would be if they couldn’t get the thing to work. That… would be awkward. Hopefully it wouldn’t come to that, though, since Celestia and Luna had shown little doubt that he’d have been able to use it. Still, it’d be negligent not to consider what he’d do if it came to pass since he had nothing better to do right now.
His thoughts, unfortunately, were drawn to magic like a lodestone. Spike had never really gotten a handle on using his fire to send things to arbitrary places, but Ember, he was forced to admit, might be able to create a hole down to the basement with just her magic, and if she could do that, then she could fill it in again.
That was fine. It was good, even. They had a solution, even for the worst case scenario. Twilight would be proud.
Well, she’d be proud that they had a solution, anyway. As for the fact that he would have to rely on someone else to actually do it… that was just friendship, right? There was nothing wrong with people who are good at different things helping each other; in fact, he was pretty sure he’d dictated that very thing in one of Twilight’s friendship reports. Spike had always pictured himself becoming a knight one day, and while that didn’t make much sense in Equestria, it sounded like something that would fit right in whatever it was Ember wanted to build, so that was just fine.
That said, all of the speeches on friendship and self-esteem in the world couldn’t counter the memory from just a few hours ago of Twilight venting to Fluttershy about how none of the ponies she’d made demigoddesses of were living up to their potential.
Okay, so… maybe she’d be disappointed with him, he supposed. Maybe she’d always been. The idea didn’t freak him out like it would have, her, but he could imagine how enthusiastic she would have been if he’d actually been able to talk esoteric magic with her growing up. That… might have put him off it if it had ever come up, if he was being honest—Ember was wrong about that much—but, well… it wouldn’t hurt to have options, and if Ember got this over him, she’d never let him live it down.
There was plenty of time until nightfall and he’d listened to Twilight ramble on about magic for years; there was no way he wouldn’t be able to figure it out first.