"It's me time!" Umbra had seen to her daughter's education, but it was finally time to spend a day to herself. "Thank you, lovely waifu." Or was that a husbando? Being a changeling, Shifting was both and neither. Preferring the female pronouns... "Waifu," decided Umbra with a nod.
It wasn't a long walk to get to the hourglass of a house. "Ponies live so on the nose." She went up to the door on the hourglass and rapped on it lightly. "Minuette?"
"Just a minuette," came a call from within. Minuette popped out of the window a floor up. "Hello! Oh, Umbra! Hey there!" She waved eagerly down at her shadowy friend. "How's it going?"
Umbra willed Minuette's book out to wag gently. "I'm ready to study your magic, and if you're open for it, having you around would be a help."
Minuette clapped excitedly, then vanished, darting into her house. Umbra could hear steps descending stairs and the door burst open in front of her. "Come on in!" Minuette waved into her home with a giggle. "I haven't had a guest over in a little bit, so pardon the mess."
Umbra stepped inside and saw... not a lot of mess. Minuette was a clean pony by habit? "Thank you for having me. I took a peek, and the way you have things laid out is both fascinating and confusing."
"Just like time itself." Minuette nodded firmly. "How it goes. Now, to preface, time only goes in one direction." She thrust a hoof forward. "Thataway! Trying to push it backwards is not easy! Things get odd. I can give you a few rules for that, or you can just swear that off and save a headache."
Umbra hiked a brow. "I didn't plan to do heavy time traveling, but now I'm curious. What are the rules?"
"Shoot, there I go again." Minuette threw a hoof across her front. "Oh well, my fault. Rule #1! If you were going to do it, you already did it. We only have one timeline, unless you really break something, so whatever changes you make are already made. Go back a week to pass yourself a note? You should already have that note, or you did not, in fact, go back a week and pass yourself a note. Can't find the note? You didn't go back a week." She seemed excited even as she went over the rules she said she would prefer not to. With a glowing horn, she willed her door shut. "Get it?"
"Huh..." Umbra sat beside a dining room table. "But what if you don't have the note and that's why you want to go back a week to give yourself the note?"
"Well, you'd better pass it somewhere you haven't already checked, because it's not in those places. You confirmed that. If you try to get it there, it won't work. More importantly, it already didn't work. Don't do something doomed to fail, silly." Minuette waved the idea away as her magic prepared some tea for them both. "But we're way ahead of ourselves. You don't know any time magic yet! We should fix that."
She grabbed her book back from Umbra's magic and slapped it down on the table between them. "Now, I said time moves forward, right? You can take advantage of that. Time loves moving forward. Pushing it that way is easy! The trick is that you don't have to push it all at once. In fact, it's rarely a good idea. Living life in fast forward? Nah, why?"
Minuette leaned in at Umbra. "Life is for enjoying, which is harder if you keep rushing through it. But for smaller things, it works pretty well. For instance... You can fast forward just yourself if you're pressed for, dare I say it, time. Get cleaning done in a jiff because you have forever to do it, and the rest of the world only saw a second or two." She clopped her hooves in a firm strike. "Just like that! It works for magic too. Work in some time magic and your spells can get a lot more done, faster, because the magic has more time, as far as it can tell, to get things done."
Umbra's eyes flashed with the dark pulse of shadowy magic. "You have captured my attention. How do I do that?"
"First step, enjoy some tea." Minuette shoved a teacup at Umbra with a giggle. "All good magic is done properly hydrated! Now, how are you at modifying spells? That's a personal thing, I've found. Some ponies love modifying spells, and it scares a lot of other ponies to even consider. Where are you on that scale?" She spread and brought together her hooves to the left and right in a simulated spectrum.
Umbra considered the spectrum and pointed a little to the right of center. "I've modified some spells, mostly to take the 'this is kinda evil' vibes out of shadow spells. They're good for nice things too!"
"Glad to hear it." Minuette inclined her head. "I bet time magic could be used for gross icky things. Magic is just a way to get something done. Up to the pony using it to decide if that's a nice thing or not. Now, since you've modified spells before, great!" She flipped through her book, willing it forward rapidly until she slapped down a hoof on the desired page. "Here."
"You strike me as a pony that'd only use it for good things."
"Aw!" Minuette sipped from her tea. "I try! I've heard good things about you. I looked you up." She wagged a hoof at Umbra. "I had to! You want to know about time magic and I just said that can be tricky, for you and the rest of the world, so I had to be sure I just loaned my book to a nice pony and not like, gonna regret it later."
"I'm bringing shadow back," laughed Umbra, sharp teeth on display. "And everyone will enjoy a nice sleep, at night. I'll scare away the nightmares, or make friends with them. Both have proven to be a possibility of late." She leaned in to look at what Minuette opened to. "It's a teeny tiny spell?"
"It sure is." Minuette waved over what was basically a little paragraph of magic. "This is made to work with other spells. It makes their time run faster. The rest of the world, unaffected, but for the magic, faster! The trick is learning how to work it into a spell. Showing is easier. Brought your book?"
With a puff of shadow, Umbra's book appeared. "Luna finally gave it back. I think she really liked it." She set the book next to the time book, flipping it open. "Looking for a specific spell?"
"Not a specific one... Hm... Find one that takes a while to get done, if you have one?"
Umbra considered that as she flipped forwards and back in her book. "Most of my spells are upheld ones. They keep doing something. Hm. Ah, the first." She turned to the shadow wall spell. "This one takes a moment to spring up, especially if you want a larger wall."
"Wall?" Minuette slipped around next to Umbra to view the spell the right way. "Ooo, creepy." She was looking at the shadowy runes, notably different from the other runes. Time runes had their own look, strange and hard to pin down. "Alright, so..." With a twinkle of magic, she produced her little modifying spell in the air over her, floating runes.
She reached up with a hoof and slapped the runes down on the existing spells. "You need the first part here... And the second..." She dutifully showed what the spell would look like, modified. "Once you've used this a few times, you'll get the hang of how to put it on other spells."
"One thing." Umbra pointed to the new spell. "If it's going faster, I bet it takes more energy to do."
"Very true." Minuette tapped at the resulting spell. "Can you cast this?"
"I cannot," admitted Umbra. "Your magic has some new runes in it. Is time magic forbidden like shadow magic?"
"Yep!" Minuette bounced in place a little. "You can cause a lot of headaches if you do it wrong, or a bad pony were to start messing with it. So they don't teach the time runes by default. You can't use it bad if you don't even have it."
Umbra raised a brow. "Who taught you?"
Minuette pointed to the hourglass on her rump. "I taught me. It's how I got my cutie mark." She beamed with a joyful pride. "And why Celestia took me into her school. Fun place, met a lot of good ponies there."
Umbra crossed her arms. "Jealous. No fancy magic schools for me, but I did have some nice tutors, like Twilight."
"Twilight! She's a princess now, you know? And! And! She was a classmate of mine. Gosh, I feel better about this." There was a blink, a shudder? "I copied the spell for you, for later." Her magic was gone, no longer glowing with the edits. "It's on page 64. For now, we have to learn some time runes."
Umbra blinked slowly. Was that? "Nice... You just time magiced."
"You noticed? Clever pony." Minuette seemed only amused. "I sped up me-time and did the copy and brought it back down afterwards. I'm glad you didn't get sick."
Umbra squinted at that. "Time magic is... Why would a pony get sick?"
"It's like being on a cart." She wobbled a hoof. "You have built in senses for time, and when it's thrown off, that can make you queasy. You noticed it, but you didn't get queasy, which is good! But some ponies may get queasy, or even make... a bit of a mess... Don't get mad at them, they didn't ask for it."
Umbra grunted at that mental image. "Uck... Time has its dangers." Even if it was just tossing cookies. "Is that the worst?"
"I wish." She threw that idea with a toss of a hoof. "And that is why you shouldn't time-zap other ponies willy nilly. Different ponies can react different ways. I'm alright with it, so using it on me? Not worried." She pointed back to that hourglass. "It's my destiny! Cutie marks are great like that." She then studied Umbra's mark. "And yours is a heart... made of crystal? Oh! The crystal heart, adoy! From the Crystal Empire... What can you do with that?"
Umbra peeked back at her rump. "I can work with crystals really well... But I'm not... Oh!" She stood up with a smile. "I can affect pony's hearts."
Minuette whistled sharply. "Like Cadance?"
"No... Not like that. I can help them be strong." Umbra thumped her own chest. "Determination and grit in the face of overwhelming odds."
Minuette's eyes widened. "Wow, neat!" She danced in place. "Wish you were around when that whole changeling attack happened. Ponies were kinda super scared... Um, me included."
Umbra set a hoof on Minuette's shoulder. "I haven't really heard that story. I think that's from before I showed up. So, time rune?"
"Time rune!" Her horn glowed as she conjured the first time rune over her head. "Here's one. It's about seeing time. Seeing time is easy, you're seeing it right now, passing by at a nice steady one second every single second. Magic! Work this rune into a spell to get a better perception of it, or to let a spell see and react to the flow of time."
The magic lesson began in earnest, showing Umbra how to form each rune in turn. "It's so nice to have a student. Most ponies get overwhelmed when I start talking about how time works, and then they wander off." She pouted a little, but it turned to a bright smile. "But not you, so listen up!"
Umbra was all too happy to pay attention and learn a thing. The wizard part of her was delighted to add to her arsenal the power of time itself.
And she made a friend. That was a nice bonus!