I enjoyed a good two weeks of camaraderie until the blemishes became apparent. Sunset Shimmer had deigned to teach me spell canceling (finally).
Why? She admitted she had learned enough of how I conceptualized magic that she thought we could conceivably speak a common language.
Her technique involved feeding the spell the right wrong numbers—her term, not mine—until the spell became incapable of working. For her, she took the shape she visualized the spell as and pulled it inside out. Since spell casting was about accuracy and marshaling the numbers, how could numbers do anything but change range or targeting? I sensed she had an idea about transforming the equations, but that didn't feel right.
Then I had the bright idea of having her demonstrate spell canceling on me so I could see what she meant, using Force.
"I'm not good at that one."
I said, "Oh, come on. I know you have problems with Force, but you're not trying to cast it; you're trying to cancel it."
Her inability to cast Force showed there was a fundamental difference between her and I. Still, Force was simply folding Levitate along a couple axises and was conceptually easier than juggling objects, though using it consistently and forcefully did require practice. I wasn't asking her to cast it, just prep it. Spell bindings were visualization without doing the horn work, without gathering the splendors of magic to make the wish. After verbal cajoling, I got her to agree to do so.
We were outside the school, on the quad, under the shade of a tree on a hot afternoon. We planted ourselves facing off as if in a magic duel, though way too close. I opened myself up, clearing my horn of calculations, listening and observing, trying to monitor her magic as it formed, bloomed, and intentionally decayed.
That was the plan, anyway.
I watched the pulsating green shimmer of her aura light up at half a pony-length away. I could see the numbers circulating in the magical apparition encasing her horn, binding to the mnemonic, coalescing, becoming something. For a moment, I thought perhaps that was the point. I sensed the patterns of a field of force slowly distorting and collapsing even as Sunset grunted with effort, perhaps too loudly because other ponies started watching. I leaned forward, trying to understand the gist of it—
—when she fired a bolt at point blank range.
The physical shockwave pummeled the air from my lungs and lifted my forequarters. Forced to rear, legs against my chest, the impulse dissipated. I collapsed backwards, hooves up, laughing and soon crying at the same time, feeling as if tickled by a dozen feathers at every sensitive spot—including those. I gasped for air and could barely breathe and worried I might pass out. I'd let her shoot me twice now, and, frankly, was relieved she hadn't figured out her problem with Force. She groaned and grunted, and in my peripheral vision I could see her fighting to stop the continuous green auroral discharge.
But that wasn't it; it was fear.
She fought fear.
"Oh, Brandywine," she moaned as she rolled to her side, smashing herself forcefully to the dirt, and then, and only then, did it stop.
Fight reflex rolled me into a crouch, even as I took in great lungfuls of precious air. My former potions instructor galloped over, his black suit tails flapping. I thrust myself back up on all fours.
"She meant to do that! She just got a bit stuck. No harm done!"
"Shimmer," The pallid, faintly pink stallion with a long silky black mane said quietly with a faint sneer. He appraised Sunset Shimmer through narrowed eyes.
She rolled onto her stomach, dirty with bits of grass in her mane. "I lost control. Starlight was just tutoring me and I lost control."
I nodded.
She nodded, though I couldn't read her expression.
"The princess' tutelage isn't enough? Pity."
Her expression remained neutral enough, and I kept mine earnest enough, that the teacher accepted it and trotted off, unconvinced that Sunset Shimmer hadn't just tortured another student or that he hadn't just witnessed a duel. He looked annoyed that he hadn't caught her doing something he could report.
I suddenly understood, though. I'd forced her to cast the one spell she'd never get right and had publicly humiliated her. "I am really sorry!"
"It's not working any more," she said to the ground, hanging her head. Her mane covered her face like a limp yellow and red veil. "It was supposed to help me control thoughts of my past, but it didn't. Now I remember. I need a beer. And I'm going to have a beer." She stood, levitated the soil and bits of grass in her hair, and dashed the mess to the ground before stalking off.
Sunset Shimmer hadn't shouted at me.
Or blamed me.
She'd admitted to a teacher she'd failed.
And lied to deflect the blame from me!
She was ill. Celestia on roller skates!
It had to be my fault.
She got roaring drunk, which meant mopey and talkative and wobbly on her hooves. “Brandywine” was apparently a colt she had had a crush on, but she said nothing more about him. When I got her to bed, she wouldn't lay still. She just wanted to talk and talk and talk.
Mostly, this meant complaining about her and Princess Celestia's relationship, or lack of it. Or about the runt getting all the attention and Sunset Shimmer getting none, or Celestia refusing to discuss what she trained her for when she graduated next year After awhile, I levitated a text book over and tried to study, tuning her out, giving appropriate responses at the right moment, ignoring how after awhile she lay and shoved herself next to me, side to side. I let her have whatever made her feel better.
I could tell she felt very frightened. She expected to lose her position as Princess Celestia's student and felt powerless to do anything about it.
After an hour of her nattering on, repeating herself endlessly, I began to have enough of it. If she would only act instead of waiting to be noticed…
Ugh!
I closed the book and concentrated on the healing mathematics that had let me slip into Streak by gently offering to massage her back. It took a few minutes, but I soon sensed the great knots and aches all over her body. As subtly as I could, I set up the feedback loops and offered her tired muscles solace. Maybe it was her intoxication, but her muscles let my ministrations in. I kept it light, minimized the effort I needed to exert, and I kept focused on her voice, not letting my consciousness slip in any further than necessary.
I focused on her breathing through my contact against her ribs.
I focused on the slickness of the satin sheets, the stark white of the walls, and the moon through the balcony doors.
She calmed in stages. First she kept forgetting the point she wanted to make. Then she lay her head on her forelegs, mumbling. Then I heard the soft wheezing that meant she had slipped into slumber. I opened my book, having gotten into the groove of renewing the spell as it started to unravel, continuing the massage while reading.
When she gave a great big sigh in her dream, I looked at her and smiled.
***
Two days later I learned what Sunset Shimmer's "it" that "wasn't working" was; I didn't smile.
Nettle-ewe.
Somehow—and I fervently hoped it was from one of Running Mead's competitors—she had gotten a supply of the weed. Credit her for having decided to smoke it in the fume hood of her downstairs laboratory. I figured this out because the machine worked best when closed and she had used it open. She could hardly climb inside; it was too small.
I searched for and found a burnt leaf that resembled a prickly lamb's ear.
My fault, of course. I may not have willingly sold her on the idea, no more than I had willingly beat up Rye Bald, but my history had made me the pony who brought sickness upon any innocent in my life.
I didn't know how to bring it up, either. She was my host. She would brush it off. Regardless, I refused to tell her that brewing nettle-ewe as a tea made it more effective. If the merest idea of nettle-ewe tea actually excited me, I could easily imagine that whatever feeling it gave her had addicted her, and I didn't want to make that more intractable.
Why had this happened to her? If merit alone couldn't merit you the attention you wanted, you had to ask—but time and again, she refused to ask. I could not see why she would shy away from it, considering her personality. There had to be an intrinsic friction between the student and her mentor.
What occurred to me was that they both had solar cutie marks. There could be room in the sky for only one sun. I had observed time and again how cutie marks shaped ponies' attitudes and changed how they interacted with others. There was an imperious royal flavor to Sunset Shimmer's personality. I suspected that even if Sunset Shimmer's cutie mark were a moon instead of a sun, the relationship would still be destined to fail. The princess' name was Celestia after all. Nothing else reigned in that sky.
Cutie Mark magic was too subliminal, too insidious in its action. It took an outside observer to see the tyranny in it.
Under the stress of it, Sunset Shimmer was cracking.
Too many times over the next days, the only way I could get my roommate to sleep was to massage her, but only when she was intoxicated. I might have been encouraging her bad behavior for all that she never mentioned it when sober.
Then my life fractured.
Walking to the Tea And bakery near the banking district one morning, I realized I had company. A blue pegasus trotted near me, and gave a flutter to walk beside me when I glanced over. That she wore a white blouse and wore her mane pulled back into a bun gave me pause, but being dressed smartly like a salespony in a dress shop did not refine her common brusqueness into hauteur, nor suddenly make Streak's comportment more lady-like. The compact camera with a knob-sized lens was a weird accessory. I'd had the clothes, learned the act, and practiced the manners under threats more bruising than a whip; this wasn't it.
I flinched.
She was lucky that was my only reaction. A first rule for a pegasus fighting a unicorn in the fight arena is the Inverse Square Law. It applies to magic! The second is you don't make physical contact unless you're going to punch a hoof into a nose, jaw, or leg joint without missing.
This prizefighter had gone on to become a bodyguard. I had seen my employer stabbed by an assassin because inertia and insufficiently intense training prevented me from reacting in time or perfectly. I'd gotten that training, then a griffon attacked us.
In my mind, I pulled and swept her off her legs, stomped her wings, and flung her spinning through the closest restaurant doorway without regard that her six limbs and hard skull would strike the brass frame multiple times.Had I been guarding Carne Asada, I would have already teleported to the next street corner and been hustling her away.
Instead, I walked on by the café tables and striped-velvet wallpapers of the Tea And. A butter smell wafted into the street from the little shop. I sighed that I wouldn't be getting the strong tea and the croissant I had so craved to eat while studying my astronomy text, but, in fact, I was willing to keep walking around the castle without saying a word until I got to the next bailey gate so that I could leave Streak behind. I had begun to like her and Running Mead had made me a monster in her eyes.
"Grim—"
I cut her off, not changing my pace. "I quit."
"You can't do that."
"I can and I have. I quit."
"No, no. Ya don't understand. He sent me to tell ya that ya can't quit."
"Or what?" I intentionally slammed her shoulder to upset her gait, then with a hoof and some magic slid her in front of me. We stopped nose to nose. I hissed, "Or he will blackmail me? Let. Him. Try."
With a shrug, followed with a front and a back leg sweep and hold, all physical, I set her like a You-Can-Fly doll behind me, sputtering.
Muscles around my stifle joint and lower neck began to ache and I resolved to return to working out. The ivory tower had a gym that was so dusty, it probably hadn't been used in decades, and certainly had never been by its current owner.
A minute later, as I cantered toward the security of the gate, she landed with a thump in my path just out of earshot of the two unicorn guards. They did come to attention, however, as Streak said, "But I saw you k—"
"You saw nothing. If you think otherwise, you're a foal. I quit. You should, too, while you can... Excuse me," I said politely, bowing slightly as if I were speaking to a business contact, and ducked around the nonplussed pegasus to trot through the gate past a guard.
"Trouble, young lady?"
"I paid that bill," I muttered over my shoulder.
I quickly found an empty courtyard between buildings where I laid down on the grass because I was shaking. It wasn't as if I hadn't expected it to happen, or that I hadn't expected Streak to be the messenger, or that I would likely have to jettison everything and move on to another city.
No.
When she landed in front of me, I noticed her yoke cutie mark. All that her cutie mark represented had driven her into a life of crime. At least I'd chosen my cesspool. How many lives had a silly magical brand destroyed, or was destroying now? Running Mead's own had driven him to become a sociopath.
I rocked and grieved for Streak.