After a thousand years at the Everfree’s mercy, the Castle of the Two Sisters was in ruins; the roof of the main hall had caved in and several towers had collapsed. All in all, though, it could have been worse.
“Yeah—I think we can work with this,” Twilight mused as she walked through the central area where the Elements of Harmony had once sat on display.
Rarity made noncommittal noises. “Perhaps… but darling, I realize that you may not be entirely comfortable with your role as a princess, but claiming a castle in the middle of the murder forest where nopony can visit you is hardly the answer.”
“Are you kidding?!” Rainbow Dash said, flying above. “This place is awesome! It even has a moat!”
“It's not really a moat,” Twilight clarified. “It’s a gorge that runs around three-fifths of the castle. There’s a short drop in the back, but it levels out to an area that used to be a small town, which has its own wall, which is as much in need of repair as the rest of this.”
“Ahem,” Rarity said, not accustomed to being ignored. “Murder forest.”
“You do realize we don’t actually call it that, right?” Applejack said.
“We do now,” Rarity insisted.
“That’s not actually why I’m doing this, Rarity,” Twilight said, rolling her eyes. “It actually has very little to do with it.”
“‘Very little,’” Rarity repeated, raising an eyebrow at Twilight. “So it is part of it.”
“Very little,” Twilight repeated in turn. “It’s not like it’s going to stay inaccessible anyway,” she said.
“It’s not?” Rarity asked.
“No, it’s not,” Twilight confirmed. “I’m serious about this, Rarity. I do expect to end up doing a lot of the work just because I can, but this isn’t a weekend project. I have a budget and I expect I’ll have to bring ponies and materials in somehow. At the very least, I probably need at least a dozen ponies just to dust this place.
“As for how to get them here safely…” she added. “Well, pegasus carriage is the simplest way for small loads or ponies and we could always scale up that option with some kind of airship. That isn’t really in the budget, though. What I really need to do is have the road completely redone. Once that’s done, I’m pretty sure that I can come up with something to protect it.”
“Did Princess Celestia really agree to all of this?” Rarity asked, somewhat dubious.
“She did,” Twilight assured her. “This is Princess Celestia we're talking about. Are you really surprised?”
“I suppose not,” Rarity admitted, allowing the subject to drop for the time being.
The front hall ended with a large plain stained glass window and two stairways that lead up and around it to the throne room beyond.
“You know,” Twilight said, breaking the silence. “I would have expected you to be a little more excited about this, Rarity.”
“Oh, I am!” Rarity insisted. “The architecture! The tapestries! This a veritable gold mine of inspiration! It’s just…” She gestured vaguely. “The whole ‘murder forest,’ thing, you know.”
“Would you please stop saying ‘murder forest?’” Twilight pleaded, rather exasperated. “It’ll be fine!”
“You say that,” Rarity said. “But I’m sure Sunset Shimmer said the same thing, and she’s only just gotten out of the hospital.”
“Look,” Twilight said. “It’ll be a whole lot less murder-forest-y if I can just reclaim my magic, okay?”
“Will it?” Rainbow Dash asked. “I mean, I guess maybe the timberwolves might just disappear, but there’s still going to be manticores, rockadiles and ursas; they’re not just going to calm down because the murder forest isn’t pushing them to—y’know—murder any more.”
“Wait—hold up there, a sec,” Applejack interrupted. “What was that about the timberwolves?”
Rainbow Dash shrugged. “Well, I just figure, you only find them here in the Everfree, right? They’re probably part of its magic, or feeding on it or something.”
“Ah hope not,” Applejack said with some concern. “The timberwolves are an important part of the zap apple harvest.”
“Uhh, I hate to break it to you,” Rainbow Dash said, flying upside down to look at Applejack. “But your magical apples probably aren't going to be a thing after the forest stops being magical no matter what happens with the timberwolves.”
For once, Applejack seemed to be stunned into silence. “But—we can’t not have a zap apple harvest!” she finally insisted.
Rainbow Dash shrugged and kept flapping upside-down. “Hey, I like zap apple jam as much as the next mare, but it’s like… On the one hoof, you have the immortality and relative goddesshood of one of your friends, and on the other hoof… apples.”
“Please don’t exaggerate,” Twilight said, facehoofing lightly. “Alicorns are not goddesses. Princess Celestia and Princess Luna just have cutie marks in very large-scale things that being an alicorn synergizes with.”
Suddenly, everypony had stopped and were giving Twilight strange looks.
“What?” Twilight asked, squirming under the attention.
Rainbow Dash did a small loop to bring her next to Twilight and patted her on the head faux-consolingly. “It’s alright, Twilight. You might only have a cutie mark in all magic ever, but we believe in you!”
Twilight scowled and whapped Rainbow Dash’s hooves away. “Fine, I’m one of them—but alicorns still aren’t goddesses. Not even close.”
“Can we get back to the zap apples?” Applejack requested. “’Cause Ah really don’t like the sound of this.”
“It might not be that bad…” Fluttershy suggested. “If Twilight regains the power of the Everfree, then she should be able to do whatever the zap apples need in order to grow, right?”
“Uhhh…” Twilight had no idea how she was supposed to do that. “Maybe?” she hedged. “Honestly, I’d ask Rainbow first.”
“Rainbow?” Applejack asked. “How do you figure?”
Twilight blinked. “Isn’t it obvious? All four stages are accompanied by weather phenomena and the zap apples are rainbow-colored. I figure it’s some combination of earth pony and pegasus magic that makes them possible. It might be that they have to come from the same source, but I doubt it. When you think about it, it really seems like the interaction of two different systems feeding each other.”
“You think it’s that easy?” Applejack asked.
“Well, it can’t hurt to try,” Rarity declared. “As Rainbow said, this is much more important than some apples, even if they are quite the exquisite delicacy.”
Applejack looked to Rainbow Dash with some concern, not entirely mollified.
“Hey, I’m willing to give it a shot if you are,” Rainbow Dash said. “If it works, though, you’re gonna owe me, like, all the zap apple cider.”
“If you can grow me zap apples on demand, Ah’ll rename the farm Rainbow Apple Acres,” Applejack promised.
“Oh my,” Fluttershy said, blushing, and Rarity wasn’t far off with her tittering. Twilight wasn’t nearly so affected, but she did have to clench her jaw and look away in order to control herself.
“Jeez, Applejack,” Rainbow Dash said, landing and throwing a wing over her back. “At least buy me dinner first, yeah?”
“I’m not saying that living in a castle wouldn’t be cool and all, but is this really going to help?” Spike asked once everyone had gone their own ways to explore the castle, he and Twilight searching for the castle library.
Twilight was slightly distracted in looking around, so just asked, “What do you mean, Spike?”
“It’s just—you said this is about sympathetic magic, right?” Spike said. “I guess I don’t see how living in a great big castle in the murder forest is gonna be at all similar to how Princess Amore’s sister lived. I got the impression she was more of a hut-on-the-plains pony.”
“It's not about sympathetic magic,” Twilight said, shaking her head as the two of them climbed some stairs.
“It's not?” Spike asked, confused. “But I thought that was what got all this started?”
“Sunset looking into sympathetic magic is what got this started,” Twilight clarified. “She’s an incredible liar, though. I’m not. I can’t just change who I am in order to sync myself up with the magic of the Everfree.”
“Then why bother with all of this?” he said, shying away from a dark alcove as they passed it.
“I’ve been treading water with my research and no amount of sitting around meditating on the forest is getting me anywhere either,” Twilight said. “I need to do experiments, and to do experiments, I need a lab.”
As expected, Twilight and Spike did eventually find a library up in one of the towers. It was comparatively small and out of the way, clearly a personal library rather than one that would have been available to the public, but it was possible that that was all that they had had back then.
It was also, beyond all expectations, full of books.
“Who would do this?” Twilight asked, brushing the dust off of an ancient book, On Levitation and the Art of Stonelaying. “Who would just leave all these books out here in the middle of nowhere? What if the roof had leaked or the animals had gotten in?”
“The same pony who left six ancient artifacts here?” Spike deadpanned.
Twilight rolled her eyes. “Okay, fine, we know who, but why? Princess Celestia is the one who taught me to take care of books!”
“She obviously didn’t think she needed them,” he said. “What’s the big deal? We get rid of books all the time to make room for new ones.”
“It’s not the same thing, Spike!” Twilight insisted. “This is history!”
Spike shrugged. “It wasn’t at the time.”
“There you are!” came an annoyed shout from the stairs.
Twilight blinked, looking up from her book. “Rainbow?” she said, spotting her flying friend. “Was there something you needed?”
“Uhh, yeah!” Rainbow said. “It’s been hours. Everypony else has already gotten lost, found and lost again with all the crazy traps and secret passages in this place and it’s gonna be dark soon. We gotta get going.”
Twilight glanced around the room looking for a window to confirm that it really was that late, but there wasn’t one, which would explain it. “…Oh,” she said, not terribly bothered. “Sorry—though actually, your timing is just about perfect.”
“Come again?” Rainbow Dash asked as Twilight headed to the stairs.
“You’ll see,” Twilight assured her.
Making her way back to the front hall of the castle took next to no time at all once she knew the way. The castle may have had all sorts of twists and turns to get lost in—and apparently secret passages if the stories Rainbow Dash was telling her were true—but it was still less than half the size of Castle Canterlot. Actually, one followed the other, as the complicated layout was necessary in order to make full use of the compact space.
“So,” Twilight said, once everypony had been gathered. “As you might expect, having a castle in the middle of a—” She glared at Rarity. “—Murder forest… is a problem that Princess Celestia and Princess Luna had before. The solution that they came up with was to enchant the road out of the forest with a spell that would keep travelers safe with a magical barrier that repelled the creatures of the forest.”
“That’s great and all,” Rainbow Dash said and gestured out the door. “But in case you hadn’t noticed, that road is long gone.”
Twilight shook her head. “‘That road’ is three carts wide and made of pavers as thick as the ones used in this castle. It’s still there; you just can’t see it. Here, let me show you.”
Twilight stepped out the door and lit her horn, searching for the spell that the book that she’d been reading all afternoon had described. Without that description, Twilight wouldn’t have known what to look for—or to look in the first place—but now it came through clear as day. All she had to do was feed magic into it.
Lots and lots of magic.
The spell was a hungry one, easily taking in everything she could give it, unicorn magic or alicorn magic. In fact, it seemed to take the alicorn magic even easier than any of the spells that she had previously experimented with, which was a revelation. Slowly, she found that she was able to ease off on the unicorn magic entirely, which interestingly also seemed to reduce the conscious attention she had to pay to the spell.
As she continued to pour alicorn magic into the spell, two lines of pink magic burst forward from the door of the castle, running out over the grass and out to the ravine and stretching high into the sky until they faded away. Loose dirt and dust were thrown away revealing large paving stones two ponies wide, and even where the grass had taken root, it seemed to not want to be there.
“Woah,” Rainbow Dash remarked, and everypony else nodded.
“Come on,” Twilight said, starting down the road. “It looks like I need to walk the whole thing to get the magic to spread.”
None of them moved, however, and they weren’t just looking at the road. They were looking at her. “What?” she said, flattening her ears in apprehension of being stared at.
“Well… Look at yourself, darling,” Rarity said, producing a small hoof mirror for her.
Blinking, Twilight took the mirror. As expected, since she had reduced the unicorn magic that she was using to almost nothing, the glow around her horn had similarly faded to imperceptibility.
The glow around the rest of her? Not so much.
It wasn’t obvious at first; not like the nimbus of power that her horn produced when she was channeling magic through it. It was just the smallest, subtlest flexing of that aura that she’d seen when she was injured, softening her features and giving her an ethereal glow. It was the sort of thing that might even go unnoticed by somepony who wasn’t familiar with her and hadn’t just seen her come out of a dusty old ruin.
All, that is, except for the way it deepened and lifted her mane in a blatantly familiar way.
“Ah,” Twilight said, nonplussed. “Well, that’s awkward, though it does explain a few things.”
The sheer amount of magical energy that Twilight was feeding into the spell protecting the road through the Everfree was enormous. It made sense, then, that the effects would be similarly impressive.
It didn’t seem so at first, with the spell struggling to so much as peel back the grass that had grown over it, but as was the nature of alicorn magic, every bit she sent into the spell remained there, and soon, that compounding effect began to show.
The first sign that she wasn’t just pouring water through a sieve came when she reached the ravine and giant blocks of stone leapt out of it to form a bridge. Centuries of wear were reversed in seconds; cracks were mended, gravel came together to fill gaps and even the grit and dust settled into the rough face of the stone to produce a flat, polished surface. It wasn’t anything she couldn’t have done with a bunch of levitation and that spell of Rarity’s, except that it was all automatic. She didn’t even have to know that the bridge had existed, let alone what it had looked like, yet there it was.
“Okay, now that was pretty cool,” Rainbow Dash said, looping around the bridge to get a look at it from the bottom.
Applejack, on the other hoof, looked a little wary as she crossed over it alongside everypony else. “Looks solid enough,” she reassured herself, running one hoof along the stone wall of the bridge, complete with mortar. “This ain’t gonna just fall again once we’re over?”
“There’s no reason it would,” Twilight said, turning around to look at it once she’d crossed to the other side. “I expect that’s just the road maintenance part of the spell. You certainly could do something similar and make it temporary to act as a sort of drawbridge, but it wasn’t mentioned in the book and I didn’t get the impression that it was that complex.”
“So, this is alicorn magic?” Rarity asked as Twilight turned and the group continued on, following a building wave of magic that was pushing aside large rocks and mounds of dirt that had settled to cover the road.
“Sort of?” Twilight said, not quite sure of the distinction. “I am powering it with alicorn magic and you probably wouldn’t want to try with anything else, but the actual spell is no different than any other.”
“But there’s no way a normal spell would have lasted this long, right?” Rainbow Dash said.
“I’m sure it helped,” Twilight said. “But there have been unicorn enchantments that have lasted for just as long. It’s a question of structure, not power. Alicorn magic is persistent in ways I still can’t explain, even when it shouldn’t be, but you don’t need to break the laws of thaumadynamics to cast a spell that lasts a long time; you just need to anchor it to something and give it a way to hold on to or replenish a store of magic.”
“Huh. Then how come it isn’t used more often?” Rainbow Dash asked.
Twilight shrugged. “Same reason cloud houses aren’t more common, even for pegasi; it just isn’t convenient in a mixed society like most of Equestria.
“If you go to Canterlot, you can actually buy a magic-powered blender, for example, but there’s no way something like that can run off of the trickle of ambient magic in the air and while producing magic from a natural energy source like geothermal is theoretically possible, there’s no good way to pipe magic to a house like water, electricity and gas, so in practical terms you pretty much need a unicorn to power it like with that cider-pressing monstrosity that the Flim Flam brothers built.
“Compare that to electricity, which we have dozens of ways to produce both on the ground and in cloud houses and it’s easy to see why it’s the more common and practical option. That said, we have much better ways to store magic than we do electricity, but it’s underutilized.”
“Well, that’s lame,” Rainbow Dash said. “Electrical appliances can’t reverse gravity like magic can.”
Twilight gave Rainbow Dash who was doing something akin to a backstroke in the air a dubious look. “You say that as if gravity is anything but a polite suggestion to you.”
“Eh, you know what I mean,” Rainbow Dash said, waving her hoof as if to say that the details didn’t matter.
“Well, I don't know what else to tell you,” Twilight said with a shrug. “Ponies are pretty self-sufficient. We all have our special talents and with that comes everypony having their own way to do things. Enchantments are out there if you know where to look, but big ones like this or the one that holds Canterlot up are only practical with an alicorn powering them.”
“Speaking of which,” Rarity interjected, still marveling at the way a space wide enough for a dozen ponies to walk side-by-side was being cleared before them. “How are you doing, Twilight? This is a lot of power you’re using; surely you must be getting tired?”
“I am beginning to feel the drain,” Twilight admitted. “But nowhere near what I’d be feeling if even half of what I was using was unicorn magic. This is huge. If I can replicate this level of control over the ratio of unicorn to alicorn magic in my own spells, it’ll be incredible. It’s no wonder that Cadance was able to fly here all the way from the Crystal Empire and then go back the same day.”
“Wait, she did what?” Rainbow Dash asked.
“Yeah. It took her the better part of a day, but she said that she came straight down over the Crystal Mountains.”
“That’s just not fair!” Rainbow Dash whined, then caught herself. “I mean, I could totally do that in half the time, obviously, but she’s…” Rainbow Dash gestured vaguely.
“She’s what? You do realize that Cadance was a pegasus before she was an alicorn, right?” Twilight reminded her. “In fact, she grew up as the only pegasus in an earth pony fishing village; she might not get much of a chance to use her wings these days, but I guarantee you she’s done her fair share of weather work. It’s only me that—” Twilight hesitated, immediately conscious of the forest splitting before her, the glowing walls of magic to each side of the road and her own slightly luminous state. “…Well, nevermind,” she said, looking away, her cheeks slightly red.
“Ugh,” Rainbow Dash groaned. “Now I wish I’d talked to her about more than you staring at Sunset Shimmer’s—”
“Injury!” Twilight vehemently interrupted, breaking out in a full-blown blush. “For the last time, I was looking at her injury! Where else would anypony look in that situation?”
“Well, I was looking at you looking at her haunch, so I’m covered,” Rainbow Dash assured her.
“I’m flattered,” Twilight deadpanned. “Really, I am.”
“Wait—what?” Rainbow Dash said before her brain caught up with her mouth. “Not like that!” she hastily insisted.
The Everfree forest had expanded in the last thousand years, so the road ended before they were quite out of it. Fortunately, this last leg coincided with the existing path in and out of the forest. This made sense, in a way, because though the road predated the founding of Ponyville and thus there was no particular reason for there to be an entrance to the forest right next to it, there also hadn’t been any regular hoof traffic into the forest for a thousand years, so there wasn’t any other reason for a path to exist.
At the moment, Twilight didn’t really care about the coincidence and was just glad that she wasn’t going to have to hike through somepony’s fields to get home.
“Ugh, finally,” Twilight groaned as she passed through the way markers that signalled the end of the road and let go of the flow of magic she was feeding into the enchantment. The moment she did so, the inner glow that had been making her somehow more guttered out and she was just regular old Twilight Sparkle again.
She nearly collapsed in relief.
“Oh my,” Rarity exclaimed, catching Twilight in her magic. “Are you alright, dear?”
“I am sore in ways that I didn’t know I could be sore in,” Twilight said, attempting to describe the way she felt. “Literally; my muscles are fine, but it’s like I have a full-body hornache.”
“You are quite warm,” Rarity said, and Twilight flinched as she felt a hoof on her side. “Quite warm indeed.”
Twilight, however, was distracted by a different quality that had been revealed by the sensation. “That… is weird,” she said, and shook her head to test it out. A moment later, she wiggled her rear.
“What in the hay are you doing?” Applejack asked.
“My hair is sore,” Twilight announced, dumbfounded. “My coat, my mane and my tail—all of it.”
“…So, wait, does that mean that if you shaved Princess Celestia, she wouldn’t be able to raise the sun?” Rainbow Dash asked.
“Is that really what you got out of that?” Twilight flatly asked. “I doubt it anyway. It’s still a unicorn spell when it comes down to it, and I’m sure she’s put more than enough alicorn magic into it over the centuries that she could raise the sun with just her horn for years without appreciable degradation.”
“You mean to tell me that just about any unicorn could raise the sun, so long as the princess was providing the power?” Applejack suggested.
“It’s not quite that simple,” Twilight said, rubbing a hoof through her aching mane. “It’s a spell, not an enchantment, so it’s actually tied to her personally even if the alicorn magic makes it act more like an enchantment in certain ways. It’s not impossible that somepony could usurp the connection, but it’d require a great deal of skill and extensive familiarity with the spell. She could willingly pass the spell on to somepony else, I suppose, but I’m not sure when that would ever come up.”
“I mean, maybe she’d like to sleep in for once?” Rainbow Dash suggested. “It’s gotta suck never getting a single day off raising the sun for a thousand years.”
Twilight broke out into a yawn just thinking about it—or maybe it had something to do with the excessive amount of magic she’d pumped into the road to the Castle of the Two Sisters. Suddenly, she was really feeling it. “Well, you’re not wrong,” she said, glancing up at Canterlot in the distance. “With Luna back, she does have the option, but I’m not sure if she’d take it.”
“You think raising the sun might still be a touchy subject?” Rainbow Dash asked.
“Just a bit.”