Luster burst out from whatever had been crushing her. The mare found herself surrounded by several colored boxes and large dusty books. Wherever she was, it stank of dust and incense, and the light coming in was strangled by the piles of forgotten objects blocking the only window present. With her aching muscles, the mare pushed her way through the flood of boxes and pushed open a grated door holding everything in a small space.
"Feels like this place is flooded in cardboard," Luster mumbled to herself.
With some effort of wading through the 'ocean', Luster managed to reach some wooden stairs leading towards the right into a gap in the wall. She pushed open the blackened, cobweb-covered door and was greeted with an ear-bleeding screeched created by the rusted door hinges. The door opened up to a circular area filled to the brim with a wide variety of things, all bringing a wide variety of colors. Flowers, plants, and cloth hung from hooks and pots and chains at irregular intervals, all connected to the ceiling or the creaking, wooden support arches. Some had grown so much they wrapped around each other in a loving embrace and crawled along the brown ceiling. Various alchemical glassware rested on tables and shelves, some still warping the air with haze from the heat they held and belching the smoke of their burnt contents.
Luster could walk around more easily in this area, noticing that her hooves were resting on a Saddle Arabian carpet along the length of the ground. She bumped her head against a pile of transparent boxes filled with a wide variety of what the mare considered to be ingredients. Feathers, scales, jars of various liquids and powders. In fact, a lot of these ingredients were either haphazardly strewn about the room or growing in some crack in the wall or through the carpet. A yellow-tinted window hung above the only barely visible sink that was buried underneath pots and plates. Another was in the wall directly opposite it and yet another leading outside. It was laid diagonally with the rest of the building.
The mare saw something growing in a pot between two neglected books and pulled them aside. There were bright, golden flowers growing there. Tiny motes swirled about the golden mist surrounding the flowers and its stems.
"That's a Sun's Tongue," Luster stared in awe. "These are incredibly rare. Why is it just left here?" Luster pondered.
She heard angry shouting outside the building getting louder, and she tried to hide in response. Instead she got buried by a pile of damaged books covered in tiny plants and soil.
"I told you to keep that teleporter spell accurate. It sent me five hours away!" a person complained. Luster recognized it as BasKas.
"That's in the general vicinity, isn't it?" another voice complained. "And what happened to my house?!"
"Must've been the pony. Why'd she land in here?!"
The other voice brushed the avian off, and Luster found herself freed from her imprisonment. The one who saved her was an aged unicorn scowling at her. He wore a tan suit that was off of his coat's color by a few gradients. The white, black-dotted shirt beneath was ruffled, and no tie was visibly present. His mane was a mess, like a minotaur ruffled them up. His eyes were a dark shade of blue-green. A weird color to Luster.
"And who are you?" he asked the mare.
"O-oh!" Luster hurried to her hooves. "I-I'm Luster Dawn: Student of Princess Twilight."
The stallion looked back at BasKas who kept his wings crossed. "Never heard of her," he spat out. "Now get out out of my house."
"Alright, but before I leave, is that a Sun's Tongue?" she asked.
The grumpy stallion's eyes brightened a bit. "It is. Rather uncommon, but I'm surprised a city pony even knows anything plant-life." He pointed at BasKas. "This idiot doesn't even know what spinach is."
"Hey! I don't eat vegetables!" the avian shouted angrily.
"You should. It's good for your body."
BasKas rolled his eyes and grabbed Luster, lifting her, rotating her in the air, then dropping her back in front of the grumpy stallion.
"Hey-!" she said.
"Where are you going?" he asked her.
"I'm leaving. He doesn't want me here."
The avian shook his head and rested it on his 'fingers'. "She's the one who can cast spells without runes, Fizzy Bubble," he sighed.
The stallion's gaze jumped between both. "You can do that?" he asked Luster.
"Y-yes. It's basic magic. We learn how to do it in magical kindergarten," she said. "The princess also taught me... What are you doing?"
Fizzy held a magnifying glass in his magical field and stared at Luster's horn. The mare realized that his magic was transparent, but distorted everything around it like a heat haze.
"Your horn is spiraled," he gasped. "Impossible. What kind of mutation happens to the horn?!"
"It's not a mutation." Luster raised a concerned brow. "Every unicorn is born with this kind of horn."
"No. We're all born with rings on the--Where are you even from?! How can that even be a natural occurrence?!"
"She's not from around here," BasKas said.
"Why thank you so much. I couldn't have determined that on my own," Fizzy said with just a teeny modicum of sarcasm. He turned back to the mare. "Unicons are born with rings on their horns. That helps absorb and keep the magic within us. It also provides us with telekinesis, but there's absolutely no way that a spiral occurs naturally."
"Well, Princess Twilight taught me otherwise." Luster poked at her horn with a hoof, tracing the indents. "Our bodies absorb magic, but only unicorns are capable of properly shaping it. When we use spells, the magic goes through our horns, and at certain points, we have to focus or defocus or change the magic at various points."
"I assume sometimes you need to repeat a pattern several times a minute at points while keeping the rest static or free-flowing?" Fizzy asked. He was becoming curious. "Do you have a demonstration to give me? I heard from the bird that you could teleport without a rune fused to you."
"Well...I can't teleport myself right now. I used my magic too much, but I could teleport something small like those yellow flowers," Luster suggested.
The stallion nodded. "Teleport them to my hooves."
Luster focused her magic and did just as she had suggested. She wheezed from the exertion but still smiled at the success. "There...What?"
"Whomever this 'Princess Twilight' is, she's a master of magic the likes this world has never seen!" Fizzy looked like he was going to explode from the excitement, but it didn't take long for him to mellow out. "But there's too many oddities."
"How so?"
"I could see your magic. Magic is colorless. It has always been that way." He demonstrated this by showing the same hazy effect around the pot of Sun's Tongue as it levitated around the room. "But yours has color. I assume that identifies it as your own magic rather than you just ejecting the magic your body has already store."
Luster, concerned, tried remembering what was taught to her about magic. "That's old, but I was taught that, yes. It mixes with the magic our bodies naturally produce. It doesn't change anything, though."
The grumpy stallion nodded. "And you've always lived like this? No changes at all?"
"Yes."
"I see..." Fizzy looked at his house's entrance door. "Which part of Canterlot did you live in, if you lived here at all?"
"I was in the castle," Luster said. BasKas and Fizzy stared at her. "What? It's true. When Princess Twilight chose me to be her personal student, I went to live in her castle."
"And yet you don't recognize anything here at all?"
Luster shook her head. BasKas started whispering to the stallion. "She sounds crazy, and yet..."
"And yet everything she's doing and everything she is proves otherwise." Fizzy rubbed his chin. "You were right. I am very intrigued in this pony." He looked at Luster then back. "Doesn't seem to have much of a personality, though."
"Maybe because we haven't seen anything done yet." BasKas bounced up. "Oh right!" he bellowed.
He pushed the grumpy stallion into a pile of jars. "You're lucky I enchanted these to all stay in place!" Fizzy cursed.
BasKas grabbed Luster and nearly threw her into the ceiling with the speed and strength at which he lifted her up. "Tell me what was in the castle. I must know!"
"Wh-Right n--"
"Yes!" BasKas shouted in Luster's face, deafening her momentarily.
"Let me go, then!" she said. "You're hurting me."
"Oh." He dropped her and stood in place, his body shaking with anticipation. "I'm just really excited to hear about it."
The grumpy stallion placed some books back in a column and grunted. "Yeah. Sure. Why not. Let's see what she has to say about the walls," he scoffed. Fizzy sat down and floated a clean bottle of water his way.
"Well, after I got past the first barrier, I teleported into the castle itself. That place is huge," Luster said.
Fizzy coughed and sputtered some water up. "You got inside of it?!"
Luster nodded and continued her tale, explaining in as minute detail as possible. She was thankful that Princess Twilight was such a stickler for details and had her constantly repeat what she said several times until she could give as detailed an image as possible. BasKas seemed to be daydreaming about the throne room, judging by his half-closed, fluttering eyes and gentle swaying. Whatever race he was, Luster found it to be both intriguing and disorienting.
Fizzy had paled considerably and was slumped over while BasKas was sparkling with glee at the details he was told.
"Wow. I never imagined they'd enchant their castle to that point. You even went to the peak, where the throne was. Amazing!" BasKas said in awe.
Luster was confused. "What? No, I went to the base of it. Not the peak."
"The castle is enchanted, so it stands to reason that you probably hitched a ride on one of their many, many flows of magic when you teleported," Fizzy explained. "More of the fact being that I'm shocked that you were even capable of such a feat." He grabbed a brown bottle with a foul smelling liquid within it and took a swig.
"Are you an alcoholic?" Luster asked in disgust.
The stallion burped and placed the bottle back on the cramped sink. "No. I just like the flavor of fermented berries. One drink tends to be enough outside of food." Fizzy smiled contentedly while the flavor still stuck to his tongue. "So, you'll be staying with us for the time being until we can figure out what in the world you are."
The two watched BasKas tapping his fingers together while he wandered about, unaware of his surroundings. The avian ended up climbing the stairs to the next floor, leaving the two ponies alone.
Fizzy sighed. "So, you gave me your name, and I'll give you mine."
"But BasKas already--"
"I'll give a proper introduction!" Fizzy shouted angrily. Luster had leaned back from the surprise. "I'm Fizzy Bubble: A sorcerer of Equestria."
Luster's chest heaved while her body tried to recover from the sudden trauma it was subjected to. "Sorcerer? Is that another type of wizard here?" she asked.
Fizzy shook his head. "No. Our ways of doing magic are far different. Sorcerers don't use runes directly fused into our bodies. We use runes as well, but on physical objects, and they're usually made from various different materials before they're painted on."
"What exactly are these 'runes' everypony keeps mentioning?" Luster asked. "I know that old magic used to have ponies physically tracing runes in the air with their horn, but since we can use our horns for that, the method of physically tracing has been forgotten."
Fizzy chuckled. "You're very accepting of the situation you're in to talk so casually with me and to stay in a place like this."
Luster looked to the side. "Am I...not supposed to be? It's not like I have a choice. I just want to find the princess and know why I'm back here. You also didn't answer my question."
"After you answer mine: Every member of the royal families that have reigned in that mountain up there," he gestured with a hoof. "have always had a symbol or an element tied to them. Your princess must have one, too."
"Is it that important?" Luster asked.
She received a nod. "It's either directly related to the cutie mark or something else entirely."
"At least they still call them cutie marks," Luster thought. "It was a six-pronged star with five stars in the gaps."
"A star?" Fizzy scratched the back of his head and mumbled to himself. "I've never heard of any of the royal family having a star as their symbol. I mean, obviously excluding the sun." He pursed his lips and shrugged. "Curiously curious."
"So?" Luster spoke with a growing irritation. "The rune thing?"
"Of course." Fizzy muffled a cough and straightened himself out. "Runes."