//------------------------------// // Chapter 38: Curses, So Many Curses // Story: The Enforcer and Her Blackmailers (Enhanced & Augmented) // by scifipony //------------------------------// My head wasn't the only one's to snap around; we all looked behind in unison. At Shining Armor's voice, even the burnt and bloodied pegasus gasped and fluttered in confusion. Ailing and in pain, which was plain from the frown creasing her face, she nevertheless lifted her camera having gone completely OCD. A network of writhing vines and greyed rainbow tree bark spread, rapidly cloaking the stallion. Like a puppet, it pulled him upright. Celestia's solar cutie mark filled his entire flank, with prominences meeting and overlapping his spine and tail, and probably his stallion parts. With no intrinsic magic to stop the infection, the unsaturated prismatic apparition positioned itself and faded quickly as we watched, absorbing into his fur. While he stood perfectly well, he looked ill. A rivulet of blood dripped where Twilight had kicked his nose. His stomach visibly quivered; he gulped, looking ready to vomit. Sweat beaded on his face and his light blue eyes had trouble focusing on those ponies he had recently threatened to kill. He lowered his head, pointing his horn. His mane slipped over his eyes. His horn didn't light. He tried harder, grunting. No magic. The curse's host had hit his head. Shining Armor had a concussion. I snorted and said—because the absurdity of it made me—"Oops!" The whole crazy day, and the pain, and the impossibilities came bubbling up. I looked skyward. Shining Armor's glowing red Shield dome had vanished, replaced by a deep blue normal dawn sky, which might last forever. Switching his cutie mark had canceled his spell as thoroughly as it had extinguished Celestia's earth-sourced fire. A mental dam broke. I giggled, wobbling and almost falling over. Which would have hurt. Citron walked over, lifted a hoof, and swept Shining Armor from his hooves. I heard a shutter click. Incidentally, he pushed the stallion away from the pavilion that was becoming rapidly engulfed in flames. Twilight yelled, "Hey!" and dashed over, glaring at Citron as he backed away. She levitated her brother. Taking the cue, we all backed away from the fire—and narrow-eyed Twilight. Out of breath and a bit giddy from laughing, I said, "I'm done. Streak's literally toast. I haven't broken the curse, Princess. It attached itself to your cutie mark!" I took a deep breath, sobered. It all started flooding in. "I can never switch it back. Not ever." I blinked away tears of frustration "I'm going home, then I'm leaving Equestria. Good riddance to you, Princess. I'm done saving your flank." She put out a hoof, which I walked into, of course. I gasped. There might have been no part of my body she could touch that wouldn't hurt. "We need you, Starlight." I scoffed. "I will give you anything you want, if you stay." "Except power." Lowly, her violet eyes hard, she said, "I will make you my heir, if that's what it takes." I scoffed again. My lightheadedness receded. That probably meant I was about to collapse. Any normal pony would be in the hospital. I tried to pull free, but she caught me again with her wings, making it hard to retreat. I noticed where she looked. Her eyes went from Shining Armor's new mark to her new one, then to mine, which was also new, before coming back to spear my gaze. "Is it permanent?" She would ask that question! I lowered my head to the ground and moaned. Could my life get any worse? With the sun stalled west of Saddle Arabia, making the noon there permanent, how far did I have to go to find the never-ending dawn between night and day? How many weeks would it take for Equestria to freeze and Saddle Arabia to burn? The only good weather would be at where either the early morning or late afternoon provided an oasis made of sunlight. I knew my ultimate destination and expected I would have to fight desperate ponies the rest of my life. Could it get any worse? Yeah, you bet ya! The cutie marks might revert to their original owners. I'd have a crazy cursed alicorn chasing me, again, out for blood. She'd plunge the world into eternal night and day on either side of the globe, only with me too dead to care. I sat beside the unconscious stallion. I looked into the cutie mark, finding its glow immediately. Was there anything different about it compared to what I'd learned about Sunset's in all the observations I'd made of hers? Beyond the sense of the attributes and proclivities its presence permeated its host with? I focused deeper. I was new to cutie mark magic. Every observation brought new discoveries. It interfaced with the nervous system, but how? What did any of it mean? Thanks to circumstance, I actually found some milestones to trace. I'd walked up to Shining Armor's Shield dome. I'd seen its intricacy. Layers upon layers of interconnections, tightly woven. Besides providing toughness, intuition told me it provided mechanisms. When I cast Shield it lasted until I stopped casting. His Shield continued to exist on its own. That mechanism was known as reciprocation. Like the pistons on a locomotive, energy reciprocated back and forth through the system, conserved as forward motion, lost only to friction. A spell could be created analogously. Motivate, which any unicorn other than me could use to roll wagon wheels, was a prime example. I focused on the very center of the cutie mark, that part which stretched like taffy when I pulled upon it. I pushed my awareness in until I was once again in a wet world filled with electricity and fleshy wonders that were mental metaphors for organs, nerves, muscles, and bones. I searched for anything that might not be permanent. Something that could renew a spell continuously, something that might wear thin and fail over time. Deep in the center, jags of lightning now and again would spider upward into a huge spherical submarine space. A sun, or a spark seen fractions of a hoof length away, radiated rays out to this internal universe. I magically squinted against the brightness, until I could delve deeper. My vision split into repeating fractals consisting of rainbow sparkles. Just in time, I stopped myself from iterating the function of violation and spiraling forever downward. The spell utilized a Mandelbrot set to stabilize itself. Relieved that I caught myself, I paused long enough to see change. Every few seconds, the colors shifted toward the red and the reddest layer at the center collapsed, spraying sparkles. The whole pattern adjusted and captured a fraction of the released splendors. Over a few cycles, I saw the whole magical process shrink. When that happened, the whole space I floated in shifted very slightly outward as the magical implied gravity or magnetism binding it in place decreased. I counted. And counted. And counted... And... and... and... ...... Fortunately, I had a young stallion with me, who like most, had limited patience. "Gelding, Gelding! Are you okay?" I think it was the pain on my withers as he hugged me that actually snapped me back. "Call me Starlight, please." Pony eyes of amber, blue, violet, and purple regarded me expectantly. I sighed. I checked my count and did a simple calculation. I said, "On the bright side, I now understand how Sunset cancels spells." Yeah. "Geometry." A totally different but equally mathematical representation of magic. Sunset might be a flapping genius! She'd asserted, if you could see the geometry of the spell, you could simply disrupt its shape. All I had to do was reach in and push the pattern of sprites holding both marks in place and they'd likely instantly switch no matter how far apart they were. I sensed contagious magic at work: objects in contact, magically displaced, always remained in contact. Quantum thaumaturgical tunneling. The marks knew their host—and would find them. "How long?" Citron asked. "There is a time codicil. No more than 36 hours plus or minus 5%. Considering how stretchy the tails were, I'd estimate the anchors could loosen catastrophically in as little as 20 hours." The princess asked, "So you have to recast the spell?" I nodded. I gulped as nausea rose and I felt a sense of doom lower over me. "Mark Swap—" Yes, I could name my own spell! "—is in the contagious family of spells. I think I can recast on either mark and affect both. I can't imagine it would allow me to cast on both simultaneously and asymmetrically, because if I could do that I might be able to create self-renewing anchors that expired asynchronously. If one mark is nestled and the other not, neither can return home. That would force the spell restart, making it permanent, but that breaks the wish predicate that requires the host connection to remain unfettered. No, Mark Swap isn't permanent. It simply can't be, best I can tell at this point." Celestia stated categorically, "Your special talent is cutie mark magic." I was marked, in more ways than one. I frowned. I had known all along that the insidious abomination would take over my life and lock me into a pattern I would be unable to change. I resolved to fight it. One day I would eliminate the scourge. The princess asked the big question: "Will you stay?" Was I going to let the curse take over again? I huffed. Instead, I asked, "What about the sun?" The Princess made that tinkling little laugh she made. "King Crystal Hoof broke the sky over 90 years before I was born. Before me, teams of unicorns raised the sun and the moon. I ended up learning I could raise the sun and the moon only because I got it in my mind that my brother ought to join that team, after Queen Platinum's magic recruiters arrived searching for mages in my town. My soon-to-be-adopted sister had learned she could raise the moon, and had fought raising the sun, which broke day and night. Only my special talent allowed me to overpower her, barely." "You do have a sister," I stated. Celestia nodded, looking down. "Luna is the Princess of Dreams and she loves the moon. After many years in Equestria, it grated on her that most ponies loved the daytime and cursed the darkness of night. All but the thestral pegasi, who lived in the Crystal Cave. She made them her royal guard. They considered her their queen. When a magical creature of her dream lands took advantage of her envy and she turned cruel, she suddenly eclipsed my sun. I tried for days to mollify her and compromise, but the world remained with a ring of fire in the sky no matter how I moved it. "In full truth, Luna is stronger than I. When Babbleloin earth pony rebels made her an alicorn, and she learned they had done so by murdering her unicorn and pegasus friends to capture the necessary magic, she turned the desert to molten glass in her fury. That's Green Glass Lake in Saddle Arabia. "We came to blows. My army of unicorns could not master her, so to save their lives I fought her alone. I had a plan. We had found the Tree of Harmony years before when battling another threat, and the power of our friendship had allowed us to harvest its fruit, the Elements of Harmony. We fought that night, and the battle destroyed our castle, which lays in ruins in the Everfree Forest." So the spirits had spoken to Zecora! The shaman been right about everything. "When I finally understood I could not prevail alone, I took up the Elements. I knew their power could not kill, simply transform—though at the moment, to save Equestria and all my ponies, I would have killed even Luna and sacrificed my own life. I knew that I would have only one chance at corrupting them. The world would die as the lands froze on all sides of the world. It wasn't a matter of eternal night and eternal day on opposite hemispheres, with the sun stalled out on our horizon. No. The ring of fire didn't change no matter where I placed it. Crops wilted in the fields. Trees died. Lakes froze. I took the Elements and did what I thought I must. "I attempted to imprison her in the moon forever. The mare in the moon, that pattern of dark across the white face you see at night—that's my sister's essence. I broke Harmony. "What I bought Equestria was a thousand year curse. Twisted into discord, the Elements cursed both Luna and I. It turned me immortal, to force me to watch my friends, Equestria, and civilization die while I failed to age. Though I fought every day these last 998 years against the decline and fall of everything my sister and I had worked for, Harmony cursed me so that I could never fight the inevitability that, after a thousand years, I would lose it all. "It cursed Luna, for she shared fault as surely as I did. She awaits timeless, I hope, on the cold orb of the night. When she returns, scrying confirms that the magic of the Elements latent in her will take me and imprison me in her stead. Still tormented by her mania, she will stop raising the sun. The world will die. When I return a thousand years hence, what will I find?" Burdened by guilt and despair, Princess Celestia whispered a question. "Will you stay?" I answered, "Yes." "You asked about the thestrals. Her guard saw me prevail. They thought they saw me murder their queen. It did not matter that their queen was freezing the world, killing it. We fought a long and bloody war, and yes, I chased them out of Equestria. The curse prevented me from recording the history of that time anywhere but in my head. For all my attempts to eradicate it, a folk story persists in Equidor of a genocide and their homeland being the Crystal Caves of the Canterlot Mountains. It's all true, as far as it goes. Thanks to the curse, you are the first pony I've ever admitted it to." "Not a regicide?" The princess covered her eyes. She sobbed. "My sister! My Stars, goodness no." Twilight hugged her and they both sobbed. Citron stood. My ears twitched, and I heard it, too. "Ponies are coming." Of course they were. We didn't sit near a roaring bonfire—we sat near a castle structure half-engulfed in flames! I repeated, standing and almost falling over, "Ponies are coming! Celestia and Shining Armor have switched cutie marks. This is bad. Ponies will panic. They might challenge her as an imposter or corrupted!" (Discounting entirely, of course, that she had been corrupted.) I pointed toward the half of the pavilion not yet in flames. "Twilight, Citron, find tablecloths. We've got to cover them, now!" He galloped into the building, followed by Twilight into a further entrance. I heard his voice in the gum. "Won't tablecloths look weird?" "There's degrees of weird. Should you discover a Celestia-sized dress, bring it instead!" "Gotcha." Both raced back, coughing, carrying smokey-smelling white folded linen in their magic. Shining Armor was easy. Unconscious, I directed Citron to first tie his fore and rear hooves together, then to cover him up like somepony wounded. The princess soon wore an untailored horse blanket in a fetching off-white brocade pattern. To make the reason for the odd dress self-explanatory, I walked to Celestia's flank and rubbed my bleeding nose on it. More flooded out and I had to pinch it and hold my head up. The stain ought to answer casual questions. Royal Guard in armor rushed up first, followed by a fire brigade at a canter, pulling a yellow-painted pumper wagon. A unicorn set about conjuring water and others unreeled hoses. After answering questions and issuing orders, Celestia leaned over and said, "You are going to make a fabulous take-charge protégé. I wonder who will learn more, you or me?" When I grumbled, she said, "I don't want to get your hopes up, but... your father sent a communiqué before he disappeared. It said your mother had escaped with a head injury using her magic. This, I think is why she disappeared." "She's alive?" I gasped, electrified. Celestia looked down. "You don't cast magic with a head injury." I'd been struck in the head badly enough a few times that I lost my magic. "Usually you can't." "Right. But when you can, your magic is unfettered. Cast spells are unpredictable and go wild. She never returned to Equestria. Neither did your father, but about six months ago we found a lead. We think one of the crime families controlling southern Salerno might have him imprisoned up in the mountains. There's word of a spy who's a Hero of Equestria. The Five Doñas might think he'd make a great bargaining chip were we ever try to influence their enemies." "He's alive?" Tears streamed down my face. My nose, already congested from blood began to throb worse, if that were possible. A guard pony noticed. Celestia shook her head at him, and pointed for him to go with her muzzle. "Maybe. The Salernitanos have been hosting monsters and barbarians who can pay for secrecy. Waves of refugees from the region have resettled in Equestria over the last two decades, and their tales of the chaos are horrifying. I think the Prince of Storms might have a base there. It seems to me that it would be a perfect first place to send the Earl of Grin Having once I've raised an army for her to command..." Celestia had me under her hoof. I was really and truly ridden.