“Okay,” I said, drawing the word out. The pause word was meant to help me calm down almost as much as it was meant to give me a moment to think. “So, let’s take it as a given that there’s a letter for me that appeared out of one of your fiery sneezes. How did you know that’s what it was? Do you know who it's from? Is this a thing we have to worry about often? Can you...” I fumbled for a bit as my thoughts ran ahead of me. “Can you uh,… not um… receive mail...?”
I trailed off with a nervous laugh accompanied by a nervous smile. I looked down at the Dragon expectantly.
“I, uh,” Spike said. Spike tapped one of his claws against his closed maw and furrowed his scaly brow. “I guess, in order: I dunno! I dunno, it’s kind of rude to look at mail that’s addressed to you, right? So I didn’t look. Um…”
The little guy shrugged helplessly.
“I don’t know. I guess I could stop that from happening again,” Spike said. He seemed to spin on that thought for a bit, before his reptilian eyes became as wide as dinner plates. Spike looked at me with pure, unfiltered concern in his face. “But that would be horrible, you wouldn’t be able to get any of your letters!”
Uh. Yeah, that’s kind of the point.
I was pretty darn concerned about the prospect of things teleporting into my house without my consent — what if somepony tried to, I don’t know, “mail me” a bomb or a bucket of venomous snakes— but I wasn't really sure what else to say. I had no idea that this was a thing.
Was this a thing, another thing I’d have to keep in mind when dealing with my familiar? Were there more of these surprises in store? How many more would I be facing, weeks, months, or years down the line?
I felt a migraine coming on.
“Alright, Spike,” I said. “How about… no more ‘letters’ for the time being, okay? At least not until, uh,” my brain spun uselessly for a moment. To be fair, I was still using most of my concentration to hold up the spell around us. Large domes weaved out of mystical force and willpower weren’t exactly cheap in the brainpower department. Eventually I thought of something.
“It’s probably not a good idea to be accepting mail until we can figure out how to tell if it’s junk or not,” I said, nodding confidently. “Y’know, build a safe sender list! We don’t want people sending us magazines and advertisements and all that. Think of how much sneezing you’d be doing!”
Spike paused to consider that. I could almost see the gears turning in his brain. Finally he turned to me and gave a nod and one of those big innocent smiles of his.
“Wow, yeah that makes a lot of sense. That’s really thoughtful of you, thanks Twilight!”
I almost felt guilty for making up reasons to his face to get whatever the hay was going on right now to hopefully not happen again for a good long while. Almost. I took home security pretty seriously, and “Teleport something inside Twilight Sparkle’s house” was as big of a security vulnerability as they come.
Besides, while Spike was capable of intelligent thought and conversation, he was only about five months old. I spent half an hour yesterday explaining to him how the toaster worked. We hadn’t yet had a big talk about how the world was filled to the brim with terrifying monsters that were out to hurt you. Maybe I should pencil that one into the schedule.
I looked back at the little guy. Still smiling faintly, bright-eyed and tail-wagging again, full of hope and wonder and buckets of innocence.
Maybe not.
I stood there with Spike behind my shield for another half a minute, still absolutely flummoxed by the craziness of the whole situation.
Well, if something bad was going to happen, it probably would have already, I thought. With a focused thought, I released the shield spell, looking cautiously at the scroll that had spent the better part of a minute on my new floor.
I couldn’t be certain that it wouldn’t react badly to a spell being applied directly to the parchment, so telekinesis was out. Guess I’d have to pick it up and read it the old fashioned way. Carefully.
I walked over to the pantry and grabbed a pair of salad tongs with my left hoof. I carefully walked over to the scroll and gently, ever so gently, picked it up with the tongs. Nothing. I tried to open my arcane senses up a bit, going through a mental motion that was somewhat akin to stretching a leg forward, except all in my head, and almost instantly I felt the hot, unyielding radiance of the afternoon sun start creeping up my left foreleg.
Right. That’s magic alright, and now I had a pretty good idea who sent this scroll. Gulp.
I grasped one of the ends of the parchment in my right hoof and unfurled it.
And then I read it.
Dear Twilight Blackstone Copperfield Sparkle,
I hope this Sending finds thee well. In accordance with our bargain made several months past, I bestow on thee a task to fulfill: there is black sorcery run amok in Ponyville, and it is to the advantage of me and mine that this matter be quickly resolved, and be resolved by you and yours. Should this task be successfully accomplished, it shall be tallied against the seven favor debt that thou owe the Sunshine Court. Fail, and it shall not bode well.
There was no signature, only a blotch of yellow-orange ink in the shape of a burning sun. The ink was dry, yet hot to the touch, and a cursory sniff picked up a faint smokey smell— like fresh logs crackling on a fire. More than that, running the tips of my hoof over the insignia caused me to shiver violently. I felt it deep in my bones, my flesh, and my blood: I owed this being, and that debt was one that would be repaid.
I owed Queen Celestia of the Shiny Fae, Queen of the Sunshine Court, the Breaker of Day herself.
The terms of my bargain were hastily negotiated. I didn’t have much room to, since at the time I was too busy screaming “Somepony save my purple behind!” over and over at the top of my lungs. Negotiate? I was desperate and my graduation exam had been hijacked by some sort of hunter-destroyer demon, so the thought hadn’t even crossed my mind. Seven favors in return for surviving near certain death was a bargain as far as I was concerned.
My mentors had explained to me afterwards how foolish that was. The gist of the explanations ran from “deep regret” to “better off dead” to “wish I was never born”.
Oh well. Even if Queen Celestia left me high and dry at the time with a literally-just-hatched Dragon familiar and no hint as to how to use him to save myself, I still managed just fine. Asa it turns out, monsters don’t like blasts of Dragonfire to the face.
“Twilight, do you need me for anything else today?” Spike asked, visibly stifling a yawn. “I’m getting kind of tired, so I think I might go take a nap.”
And at the very least, I got Spike out of the deal.
“No, Spike,” I said. “You can go to sleep.”
The little guy yawned and waddled away. I heard the click-clack of his claws against the wooden floorboards, and the soft opening and closing of his bedroom door.
Right.
Work time.
I used the back of my hoof to brush some lathery sweat off from beneath my mane, before it got a chance to cling to the hairs (mostly purple, though with a brilliant streak of magenta hairs that ran down to my tail) and make it a matted mess. I ignored the pounding sensation in my skull, it would hopefully be gone in an hour or so anyway.
Keeping up an active defensive spell for more than a few moments wasn’t something I’d been able to practice all too often. For the majority of my tenure as a wizard in training, I always figured that if I needed to hide behind a strong shield for more than a few seconds, I’d be in a mess of trouble a few orders of magnitude beyond anything I’d ever expect to get into.
That opinion was swiftly and cruelly corrected during my graduation exam. My reward for surviving was admitted to the White Council of Wizards as a fully fledged member. I had spent what free time I could the last few months brushing up on my combat magic, but I was still a far cry from any of the junior wizards in the Council.
I contemplated contacting some of them for help. The letter had said something about black magic, and the Council very much cared to know about that sort of thing, in the same way that my lungs very much cared to be filled with air.
My pulse pounded in my head. Loudly.
I muttered a word and grabbed some aspirin from the medicine cabinet while the coffee pot floated over to me. I swallowed the pain meds with the scant few mouthfuls of cold coffee leftover— light roast, much more caffeine per unit volume and an excellent taste— before gently massaging my forehead.
Yeah, that’s definitely a migraine.
