Darkest Before Dawn

by Sessalisk

Chapter Seven

This chapter is dedicated to the three Isaacs in my life. Rest in peace.

There was sleet pouring from the sky, and the roof was slippery and treacherous that evening. There was no sign of the downpour letting up.

Usually when the weather was bad like this, the Princess would take the night to teach Twilight about other things, literature, history or even politics.

Twilight took a good look around at all the glass windows and felt herself fill with apprehension. “Are you sure this is a good idea, Princess?”

That Sunday, for some insane reason that Twilight could not comprehend, Princess Celestia had decided that, despite the weather, they would continue with their magic lessons. Indoors. In a room filled with priceless antiques and paintings.

“Certainly,” the Princess said. “I have full confidence in your abilities.”

There was the flash of a spell, and Twilight sent the full force of her magic through her horn. The room filled with the aroma of gingerbread; it started off tantalising but soon became cloying, overpowering. Her nose tingled, but she rode the wave of her own energy, pushing it through her horn, letting the gingerbread fragrance become stronger and stronger, until it wasn’t so much a smell as it was the concept of a smell. She kept her breaths deep and even, just like the Princess had taught her and breathed in the pure idea of it.

She held on, letting the thought feed the magic and the magic feed the thought until she felt the flood of her power turn into a trickle.

“Do you think they would have any gingersnap cookies in the kitchens right now?” Twilight said, once the last of the magic had faded away. They definitely wouldn’t have gingerbread in February, but gingersnap was the next best thing.

“Why don’t we check?” said the Princess. “That was very good, by the way. I was starting to crave cookies myself.”

Unlike at school, the palace kitchens didn’t run all night and day. Twilight knew that most of the kitchen staff lived in the royal castle, and there were usually at least a few cooks on call at any given time, in case there were important ponies like the Princess who wanted midnight snacks.

The full staff was present when Twilight and the Princess arrived, which was not unusual at this time of night. Typically, though, she found that they cleaned and closed up shop, rather than baking at full force like they were now. She thought she’d been imagining it when they were approaching the kitchens, that it had been the lingering effects of her spell, but clearly she hadn’t. She had smelled gingerbread because they were baking it.

“I’m sorry Princess,” said the head chef, who would have normally gone home by now. “But everypony in the palace seems to want gingerbread tonight, of all things. I’m afraid we’re very backed up.”

“That is quite alright, Praxis,” she said with a gentle smile. Princess Celestia winked at her pupil.

Twilight’s mouth was agape as she watched one of the cooks casually grate zucchini into a mixing bowl. Things like zucchini, lemons and strawberries were practically worth their weight in gold this time of year; the only way anypony could get ahold of any was if he or she was wealthy enough to own a conservatory or a greenhouse. The cook squeaked when she saw that the Princess was watching, and began stammering apologies for using such an expensive vegetable.

“Wonderful! Cherry Tart, you’ll certainly have to let me try some once you’re finished,” she said.

“*squeak* O-of course, Your Majesty.” Cherry Tart’s horn glowed and she began to grate with vigor. “Ohmygosh the Princess knows my name!”

Twilight looked around at all the ponies who were making things that looked and smelled like gingerbread. “I did that?”

“Is there a counter-spell? I don’t want to be mind-controlling everypony...” Twilight said. “That seems kind of evil overlord-y.”

“You might not have noticed, my faithful student, but there are still ponies washing dishes or taking out trash.” The Princess gestured with a hoof. “Your spell was certainly suggestive, but if you had cast a spell to control minds, half the palace would be here, either trying to bake, themselves, or fighting over the batter.”

Twilight made a hmm... noise. “That actually sounds kind of good,” she said, thinking of the special chocolate chip cookie dough Dad would sometimes make. “The, uh, batter I mean, not making everypony fight.”

The Princess had a cook whip up some gingerbread dough (without the raw egg), and Twilight snacked on it as they made their way back to the room.

“You have mastered the ability to channel your power without causing chaos, and I believe that the time has come to start teaching you a new lesson in magic.” The impact of this statement was spoiled a little by the gingerbread dough stuck to the side of Princess Celestia’s face.

“The next thing you must learn will undoubtedly be more difficult. You must learn to keep your magic in check at all times.”

“I do not believe that this will be safe to practice indoors, so lessons will end early for tonight.”

“Okay,” Twilight said. “There’s some, um, gingerbread dough on your face by the way.”

Princess Celestia’s eyes crossed as she looked at the glob of brown dough on her cheek, then she laughed.

After Twilight had packed her things, she went to wait for the Princess to lock away her magic for the week. Experience had taught her that she was going to hate what was about to come next.

“Farewell, Twilight Sparkle,” the Princess said to her in the atrium. “I look forward to seeing you again on Friday.”

“Oh, how thoughtless of me.” Princess Celestia left and returned with an umbrella, the functional, but unfashionable kind that came without a saddle. It was a unicorn umbrella. “Hopefully next week’s lessons will come with better weather.” Twilight saw a faint smile on the Princess’ face as she turned to leave.

“Guys!” she said to the identical-looking door guards. “It’s almost Monday and I have my magic! Look!” She opened the umbrella and and held it in the air.

The face of the guard on the right was as expressionless as ever. “Er, congratulations Ms. Sparkle.”

“Congratulations,” said the guard on the left. Twilight couldn’t recognise his voice.

She marched out into the freezing rain, twirling her umbrella and not caring how cold or wet it was. She had books to shelve and this night was going to be a good one.

The next morning Twilight made a point of putting on a button-up uniform rather than a magnetic clip-on. She’d mostly outgrown the ones Mom and Dad had gotten her at the beginning of the year, and it was a very tight fit. She hoped the buttons wouldn’t pop off. Still, there was a warm fuzzy-feeling that filled her chest as she stood in front of the mirror, wearing the first proper uniform of that year she’d put on herself.

She marvelled at the ease of all the things she normally took for granted. True, she had her magic at the palace, but she never had any sort of routine there. She would wake up whenever she felt like it and plan her day on the fly, around whatever the Princess had decided they would be doing that evening. Packing her saddlebags and quadruple-checking their contents only took two minutes. Brushing her teeth was no longer a slow and clumsy affair. By the time she was ready to go down to the kitchens, she found that she was already twenty minutes ahead of schedule. This is amazing.

She stood in front of the doors, the stupidly obedient doors. She didn’t ask them to open; she just opened them. There was a goofy grin plastered on her face. “Good morning, Mr. Misiurewicz!” she said to the orange stallion. The last part of his name was long and unwieldy, but Twilight liked to say it just to prove that she could. “Nice to see you.”

“Good morning,” he said in his funny accent. “You are here bright and early today.”

“The Princess gave me my magic back!” she said. She screwed up her eyes and the books all flew out of her saddlebags in an orderly line, circled once overhead, then rearranged themselves neatly back in the bag. “Ta-da!”

“Very good!” Benoit rapped his hooves on the floor a few times. “I have some magic myself.”

“Ah, but see?” He used his teeth to pull a coin out of a pocket (This alone, was impressive, since Twilight always had trouble removing objects from her pockets.) and threw it in the air with a flick of his neck. Suddenly it was spinning on his hoof. Twilight hadn’t seen it fall. “Magic!” he said.

She laughed in spite of the cheesiness of his trick. “Nice one! How did you do it?”

Twilight snorted but went on her way. It was probably hidden under his hoof when threw it.

The kitchen staff was used to her by now. When she asked for some food to take away, the stallion brought her back a thermos with one of the special lids, which of course she didn’t need anymore. She made sure the stallion was watching when she put it into her bag with her magic. Her grin kept getting wider and wider. She explained the situation, thanked him and headed down to Language Arts.

The door was locked, but that wasn’t a problem. It was probably an oversight by the Princess, but Twilight had found out fairly quickly that any classroom door would open for her if she asked it to, even ones that were supposed to be locked. She usually preferred waiting for the teacher to arrive first, but today was special. She was going to be the first one in class today. She was going to set up and ready before everypony else. It was going to be fantastic.

Twilight told the door to open and walked in. The curtains hung open, but the room was still a little dark. Before she was aware of what she was doing, she had already told the lights to brighten.

She put her horn against one of the suns on the wall and imagined that the room was brighter. “Hehehe...”

There was a steaming mug of coffee on top of Ms. Lida’s desk and a cardboard box on the floor beside it. She’d probably stepped out for a bit. Twilight peered inside the box and saw that it was filled with books. They already had all their assigned reading material, but occasionally the teacher would bring in more for extra credit assignments.

She decided to get a head start and floated a book (I, Krasue) over to a desk in her favourite spot in front row. There were copies of The Sturdy Colts underneath, an odd choice for extra credit reading.

Weird, she thought, as she glanced at the first page, Ms. Lida’s already marked it with red pen. She flipped through the book, skimming. Certain words were struck out, like viscera and blood and die, and all had scrawled corrections written above them. Sometimes, pages at a time were crossed out, with the simple word “sanitize” overtop the first paragraph. She gave a mental shrug and started reading in earnest.

Twilight was halfway through the third chapter when Ms. Lida walked in. Ms. Lida looked back at the door and mumbled something along the lines of, “I was sure I locked that.” She glanced over at Twilight reading quietly at her desk. The teacher was momentarily bewildered, but seemed to regain her composure quickly. “Good morning,” she said cheerily. “For showing up first today, you get a gold star!”

There were six charts on the wall with names on them, one for every class Ms. Lida taught. Gold stars were stuck beside every name, since Ms. Lida tended to give them to anypony who handed in their homework on time. At the end of every month, the teacher would put up a new chart and give a prize to the pony with the most stars. Gingersnap always won, of course. Then again, she didn’t have nearly as many stars as some student in a higher grade named, “Tisamenus”.

“The chart is very high and we wouldn’t want you to hurt yourself,” Ms. Lida said as the glowing star floated through the air and pressed itself onto the paper.

“I can use magic now, though!” She flipped through the pages of the book in front of her to demonstrate.

“That’s nice,” the teacher said, before looking properly at exactly what book Twilight had. “Oh dear!” There was a whoosh of displaced air as the book zipped back to her desk.

“Of course not,” Ms. Lida said, sounding aghast. “I would never add I, Krasue to the curriculum. I’m part of a group that make books safe for young unicorns, like yourself, to read.”

“Oh... I’ve already read all of The Sturdy Colts, though,” Twilight said, looking down at the box. “I mean, before today. Not all just now.”

Something about the idea didn’t sit well with Twilight. “Isn’t it bad to change what’s already written in books?”

“Where you would get that idea? The ponies who write books, that’s authors, always find other ponies to look through their work for them and help them to change the mistakes and make the books better. Those helper ponies are called editors.”

“I know what authors and editors are,” Twilight said. She almost said, I’m not a baby, but caught herself in time. “But then, that’s before they publish them, isn’t it?”

“Sometimes ponies notice mistakes, even after books are published, so they go back and change them. That’s why books have different editions.”

That was true, but there was still something that didn’t seem quite right. “But-”

Gingersnap walked into the classroom. She looked a little surprised - perhaps that someone had gotten to class earlier than her - and sat down a few seats from Twilight.

Ms. Lida sighed. “One day when you are older, Twilight, you will understand.” Her face had the “discussion closed” expression on it that grownups sometimes gave kids when they thought they were asking too many questions.

Twilight had an inexplicable urge to find a copy of I, Krasue and read every single page and decided to put it down on a checklist like the Princess had taught her. She pulled some paper, a quill and some ink out of her bag and caught Gingersnap staring at her obvious use of magic. Twilight smirked and did the book trick she’d done for Mr. Misiurewicz earlier. After reshelving all her books, she’d spent almost two hours practicing it in front of a mirror the night before. It had taken a lot of work to make the movements look smooth and effortless, and Celestia help her if she didn’t at least get to show it off.

Lunch and her other two classes had been underwhelming. Twilight had sat in the dining hall by herself, knowing that it would be awkward, but wanting to prove that she could eat like a unicorn in front of everypony else. Nopony cared.

Notetaking was much easier, admittedly, but she was sorely out of practice. The Princess had never asked her to take notes, and Twilight tended to finish most of her homework on Friday, before Princess Celestia had a chance to unbind her magic.

Twilight’s magical writing was slower and even less legible than her mouth-writing. Compared to the quick and easy way her classmates wrote, she felt like a tottery foal trying to keep pace with a herd of adults.

“Alright,” Ms. North Star said. “Who can tell me the difference between active and passive levitation?”

Huh. It’s not so much that the question was hard, but this was theory and they’d already gone over it with Mr. Yorsets. She saw a yellow foreleg rise into the air.

“Passive levitation requires giving an object commands, or directions before casting the spell. The commands and the path of the object cannot be changed once the spell is cast. Active levitation has no set commands and the object’s movements must be controlled in real time.” As usual, the colt spoke like a particularly dry textbook.

“Correct. Now why is it dangerous to use active levitation to move objects that are heavier than yourself?”

Gingersnap wasn’t in this class, so Twilight’s hoof shot up immediately, tying with Lexicus’.

Lexicus spoke before either Twilight or the teacher had a chance to tell him otherwise. “Unlike passive levitation, the opposing force of an active levitation spell is naturally centered on the pony who casts it. Actively moving a heavy object with magic is equivalent to doing the same with one’s body.”

“That’s correct,” the teacher said with an exasperated sigh. “But please don’t answer unless called.” Without looking, Ms. North Star drew out a diagram on the board and several equations accounting for the laws of motion.

She hoped the equations were just for flavour. Even with all she’d learned about math and physics in the last five months, Twilight had trouble working her way through them. She knew that the F stood for force, v was velocity, and t was time, but everything else was a blank to her.

Ms. North Star pressed on. “Now who can tell me what the workaround is for this?”

“There’s a spell to counteract it,” Twilight said, after the teacher had chosen her. “You can use a spell to put all the force on the ground.”

Twilight felt herself fill with the warm glowy feeling of hard studying being paid off.

A large lump of clay landed on Ms. North Star’s desk, and Twilight watched as the teacher used her magic to smooth it out into a completely flat brick. The teacher placed a book on the desk beside the clay.

“You can cast the ‘Foundation’ spell to move an object of any weight, but keep in mind that it does require extra energy and concentration.” Ms. North Star’s horn glowed, but Twilight couldn’t see any obvious magic transpiring. “This is what happens if you don’t distribute the weight over a large enough area.” The book rose slowly in the air, and a circular indentation began to form in the clay, getting wider and deeper as the book lifted higher.

The book fell back onto the desk with a loud crack that made everypony jump a little in their seats.

“Now if you happen to be standing on something that starts shifting or sinking, it can be pretty dangerous. Not to mention you’ll probably lose your concentration and drop whatever you’re carrying, too.” She bundled up the clay and put it back into a drawer of her desk. “It takes a lot of practice and study to figure out exactly how wide you need to spread the influence of your spell. Too big and you’ll use up all your magic. Too small and you’ll end up making craters.”

Nightbreaker’s hoof rose into the air. “Ms. North Star, I saw you do that on your desk. It wasn’t on the ground.”

“You don’t need to use the ground,” she said, “or even force the spell downwards. You can use any neighbouring mass in any direction.”

“Oh!” he spoke again without raising a hoof. “So then you could make the radius of the spell really, really small and then aim for somepony’s brain and then lift a chair or something.”

What!? Oh for the love of... Why would you even want to do that?

“I can tell Mrs. Lonsdaleite must love you,” the teacher said. It was true. “Yes, technically you could.”

Elsie turned to him and snorted. “Dude, that’s way complicated. Just stick a pencil through their eye.”

“Who doesn’t always have a pencil?” Elsie floated about two dozen of them out of her saddlebags.

Real unicorns use quills, Twilight said to herself, thinking of all the ones she’d broken at the beginning of the year. In October, she’d tried using a pencil, but had bitten down on it so hard that one of her wiggly baby teeth had fallen out. It’d been a little traumatising.

The teacher cleared her throat. “If you two are done discussing the best way to give each other brain damage, we can continue on with the lesson.”

Ms. North Star took the class outside and in several trips, brought out what looked like Ms. Marie’s large collection of rocks, plus more rocks on top of that. Twilight really hoped that they wouldn’t be running laps.

There was a flare of light, and all the rocks crumbled into sand, then spread out into a flat, roughly circular shape, large enough for everypony to stand on. Ms. Marie isn’t going to be too happy about that.

The teacher explained the steps of the spell, and showed them how to change its diameter. “Feel the push of the ground against the edges of your mind,” she said. “If you can feel it pushing back, you know you’ve done it right.”

She made them practice casting the Foundation spell without actually lifting anything first. Without another spell it wouldn’t do anything, of course, but the teacher explained that it was just to get a feel for the magic. When Twilight tried it out, she was amazed to feel concentric circles of earth spreading out beneath her, like the rings of Saturn.

To carry something at the same time was another matter completely. Whenever she would lift one of the supplied rocks, even a small one, she would lose hold of her Foundation, or if she put priority on grounding the rock, the rock would rise for a little bit and then drop from the air. It was a little bit like a trick Dad had taught her, where she would lie on her back with her hooves in the air, and make clockwise circles with the hoof of her right hindleg, and then she would try to draw a 6 with her right forehoof. The circles she would make with her hind hoof would always change direction, no matter what she tried, and this was similar, except inside her head.

Lexicus and Enigma seemed to be the only two who were having any degree of success, although admittedly, it was not much. It didn’t look like Lexicus could expand the diameter of his Foundation spell any wider than about an inch, and Twilight saw him leave big pockmarks in the sand every time he tried to lift anything. Enigma could expand his spell a little wider, but when the sand sunk in, he would lose control of his rock and fling it halfway across the field rather than simply dropping it.

Rune sat quietly outside the ring of sand. One of Enigma’s rocks came close to smacking her in the forehead, but it exploded in a shower of gravel before it hit her. Her eyes went wide, and then, unexpectedly, she started to weep.

“Oh jeeze... I’m so sorry, Rune,” Enigma said as he walked over to her. “I didn’t mean to hit you.”

“You didn’t,” the teacher said, looking uncomfortable. “Next time be gentle with the lifting, Enigma, and don’t force it. Not every accident is going to be a near-miss like that.” She turned to Rune, not saying anything about the tears. “You might want to stand back a little bit more.”

This is pointless, Twilight thought, as the rock slipped from her grasp for the umpteenth time. When am I ever going to need to lift anything that big anyway?

It was getting cold, and by the time it was too dark to see, Ms. North Star let the class go early. Twilight had almost forgotten what it was like to have magic again, with all the senses that magic entailed. The air felt wobbly and tingly as sand reformed back into rocks.

She ate her dinner in her room while staring at a spellbook. Most of the fun of having her magic had worn off, replaced by the dull realisation that she was in the same boat as everypony else. If anything, all her classmates were in a schooner and having been in a drifting lifeboat for the last five months, Twilight had finally come across a pair of oars and was now desperately paddling to try to get onto theirs before her teeth and horn fell off.

Your talent is magic, Smarty Pants told Twilight as she reorganised her books for the second time that night. They were already organised, but when she didn’t physically have to walk over to the shelves, the activity became repetitive and soothing.

I know you can get better at this, Smarty Pants said from the bed. All you need is practice.

Twilight smiled. “You’re right!” She ran through the steps of the Foundation spell, back and forth until it was a pattern that she could ignore. The solidity of the ground drummed in her mind, tap-tapping in a rhythm all across her floor. She walked and changed the spell’s dimensions, feeling it slide along the walls and ceiling, smooth planes of support and mass. With hardly a thought, she poured power into the spell, making it huge, bigger than the entire building she stood in, then collapsing it, turning it into a small, tiny pinprick in the ground. She widened the diameter, then pressed against a spot on the stone floor, marking it with a hoof and her spell, then leapt through the rhythm of the magic in her mind, rivers of not-quite-sound and not-quite-light.

Concentrate. She was aware of the irony of subvocalising the thought. She used her teeth to take a book off the shelf, all the while, holding on to the spell. This was like her practice with the Princess, she told herself. She flipped it open with her hoof and began reading aloud; the spellpattern wavered in her thoughts. “Step by step, it must be done. And AC said, ‘LET THERE BE-’” She read until there was only the spell and her words, then stopped.

Carefully, laboriously, she began to go through the rudiments of levitation, working it through the pattern of her Foundation. Gaps in the spells naturally seemed to fit with each other. How hadn’t she noticed it before? These two spells were made to go together. The book began to rise. She gasped. “Yes!”

Well, now she knew how to do it at least - as long as she didn’t move or start talking to herself.

Twilight wondered how difficult it would be to concatenate three spells at the same time. Surely there was a point where doing one spell would become as automatic as breathing or blinking and... oh darn. Now she was aware of her breathing and blinking; clearly she wasn’t going to get any more spell practice done that night because she would be too busy not letting her eyes dry out.

Twilight walked out to Ms. Marie’s class nervously. The teacher had gone easy on her because she didn’t have any magic, but with it back, what was stopping Ms. Marie from letting loose five months of withheld rage?

The teacher’s favourite boulder, the one with the 800 carved in the side, seemed to be whole and in one piece again. Her large pile of rocks looked perfectly intact.

Twilight looked at the rocks. How was she supposed to know what size she should choose? Next to her, Tambourine picked up a rock that was almost the same size as herself. By the time everypony else had already chosen, Ms. Marie was glaring at her.

“Uh...” Twilight clenched her eyes shut and groped around blindly with her magic. She felt for the biggest one she could find, and then, frantically, pulled. All of a sudden, the rocks disappeared. “Huh?” She opened her eyes and looked around. She couldn’t see them anywhere.

Suddenly there was screaming. Everypony was scattering and looking to the skies. Oh no... Ms. Marie is throwing her rock again!

Twilight ran, not knowing what else to do. There was a soft thunk as Ms. Marie’s rock landed right at her own hooves. Huh? She looked up.

Half the rockpile was suspended in the air, glowing in a web of magic. Ms. Marie’s horn looked like it was on fire. The rocks lowered slowly to the ground.

Ms. Marie picked her favourite boulder again, and stomped her way towards Twilight. “What is your PROBLEM!”

“I- I’ve never done this before.” Please don’t hurt me pleasedonthurtme.

“What kind of brainless, spineless blob of idiocy,” said Ms. Marie, “THROWS the rocks instead of picking them up!”

Ms. Marie slammed her boulder into the ground beside Twilight. “Pick up your Celestia-blasted rock and get running!”

Twilight swallowed and levitated the nearest rock - it was light, about the size and weight of a large watermelon - and she ran. This was harder than the other fillies and colts made it look. Her hooves were heavy and clumsy; every step was a burden.

A much larger rock whizzed through the air and landed about ten feet in front of Twilight. She stopped and put her old one to the side of the track.

“Pick them both up, dung-for-brains! I don’t care if Celestia herself comes down to this track! You keep running until I tell you!”

Twilight whimpered and lifted both rocks into the air. She put an unsteady leg forward. Both rocks together must’ve weighed as much as any one of her classmates plus their rock combined. Her whole body felt like it was made of lead, and the ache in her joints was unbearable. What if I... Class was two hours long; ten minutes had elapsed; it took two minutes on average to do a full lap, so there were 55 laps in the amount of time left. She screwed up her eyes in concentration and traced the cycles of the track in her mind.

She bit back her fear and kept focused. There was an empty feeling as the magic drained out of her horn. The rocks began to circle the counterclockwise route of the track, without any direction from her at all. Yes! Twilight galloped under them at her regular pace. The weight had left her body, every step she took was unencumbered.

She picked up her hooves with glee, and galloped past everypony else. Suckers!

After half an hour, Twilight was drenched in sweat and she was more than ready to collapse.

Uh oh. Twilight looked up at the the two rocks in the air. She’d forgotten about breaks. She tried to hold on to them, but the magical shape they had taken on under her own influence was strange and oily. They moved with a slippery, unstoppable purpose.

She glanced back at the rocks one last time, then staggered, exhausted, to the side of the field where everypony else was panting and massaging their legs. Her rocks kept spinning around the track.

“Um...” Twilight flattened her ears. “I made the rocks circle the track... fifty-ish times...”

The teacher blinked. “That was not the point of this exercise,” she said in a quiet voice.

Twilight braced herself for the giant boulder that would inevitably come crashing out of the sky.

“You vermin sure took your time figuring it out.” The remaining rockpile flew towards the empty track, fusing into rings, spires and tunnels.

“Those rocks of yours, move them through the obstacle course, spin them around the poles twice, down the tunnels and through the hoops.” Parts of the course began to move and shift around, making it impossible for any set of commands to account for all the changes. “Your break’s over! Get cracking!”

At the end of class, Ms. Marie rounded them all up into a group. “I’ve heard that you rockheads have been learning how to lift bigger things.”

“Yes sir,” they said in unison. Nopony had the energy for anything more than the most halfhearted of affirmations.

“Next class I want to see you all carrying weights heavier than yourselves. I don’t need to tell you what’s going to happen if I catch any cheaters.”

Twilight teetered back into the school, dragging her heavy hooves. She was actually looking forward to the four hours of mundane sciences - sitting, motionlessness, and no magic. Not in the mood to climb the stairs to the cafeteria, up to her room, then down again to Science and Mathematics, she took her lunch with her straight to the classroom.

She walked into the classroom and saw Gingersnap standing in the front of the room, horn glowing and squinting at the floor. The crimson filly didn’t even look up at Twilight as she approached.

Twilight looked down at the patch of ground Gingersnap seemed to be having a staring contest with. “What are you doing?” she said.

        “Ahhh!” Gingersnap’s eyes went wide, and she jumped half a step backwards. “Don’t do that!” the filly gasped, once she’d calmed down enough to talk.

        “Uh... Sorry?”

She looked up at the door and pulled it shut with her magic. The handle jiggled back and forth a few times, clicking, but never turning all the way. “How did you even get in here? That door’s supposed to be locked.”

“I can open doors, remember?” The door swung out into the hallway at those words.

Gingersnap made a sound of frustration and closed the door again. “I didn’t know that included locked ones. Hasn’t anypony ever heard of privacy?”

“Erm,” Twilight said, not sure if she should point out the irony and, perhaps, hypocrisy of that statement. “What were you doing in here anyway?”

“It’s none of your beeswax. I just like being early for class, that’s all.”

Twilight glanced at the floor Gingersnap had been staring at earlier. “It looked like you were casting a spell.”

        “Yeah?” she said. “What’s wrong with doing homework? I bet I do way more than you.”

        “You’re setting up a prank, aren’t you?” Twilight probed the ground with her magic, looking for a skein of spells or a trigger of some sort, but not finding anything out of the ordinary. She mustered up her courage, walked towards the most likely spot, and prodded it with a hoof. Nothing happened. “You’re up to something.”

“I’m up to something, Miz Hengstwolf? What’s with all the coming to class early and the spells? I bet now that you have your magic back, you’re stalking me and have some sort of awful revenge planned, or maybe you’re just trying to show me up.”

“That’s not it at all,” Twilight said. “My legs are just sore and I didn’t want to have to keep walking up and down the stairs to find a place to eat.” She levitated the paper bag out of her saddlebags and placed it on a desk, pulling out a carrotburger and hay fries. “See? Lunch. I’m not stalking you or doing any of those things!”

“Whatever,” Gingersnap said. “You’re not supposed to be in here right now anyway, so you need to leave.”

“It’s a free classroom,” said Twilight, feeling petulant. “And if I shouldn’t be in here then neither should you.”

“Go fall off a cliff.”

Twilight ignored her, sat down at a desk, and began to eat her lunch. She kept her senses on the lookout for any sudden magic, but Gingersnap didn’t do much other than sit on the farthest side of the classroom from her. She smacked her textbook loudly onto her desk and flipped violently through the pages, sighing loudly and huffing the whole time.

When Mr. Few Colt walked in, Twilight took a few deep breaths and tried her best to look calm. Gingersnap was here too. He wasn’t going to... he wasn’t going to start preaching to them about latitudes and sines. He wouldn’t. It would be unconscionable.

He walked up to the front of the classroom and removed several books from a shelf. A piece of chalk hovered in the air and he started writing out the same formulas that Ms. North Star had drawn the day before.

All the teachers must be coordinating their lessons, Twilight thought. That morning, Mr. Yorsets had taught them about spell synchronisation. She let out a sigh; It didn’t look like Few Colt even cared that she and Gingersnap had somehow gotten into his locked classroom. He barely even noticed that they were there.

Mr. Misiurewicz showed up for class more often than not, but today did not appear to be one of those days. For the first three weeks of school, all they had done was arithmetic, and Twilight hadn’t been sure if Few Colt was anything more than just a glorified teacher’s assistant. It turned out that the two stallions taught their own respective classes, and Mr. Misiurewicz, unlike Few Colt, was simply not needed on the days that he wasn’t giving a lesson.

The classroom began to fill, and more and more ponies poured in from the halls. After everypony was seated, Few Colt cleared his throat.

“Today, class, we learn about Colton’s laws of motion and the laws of thermodynamics.” He did not ask anypony if they knew what they were. Instead, he tapped on the equations on board with his floating piece of chalk. “Colton’s first law, unless an unbalanced force acts on it, an object in motion will stay in motion, and an object at rest will stay at rest.

“Second, the change of momentum in a body is proportional to the impulse impressed upon it, which happens along the direction of the right line which that force is impressed.”

His description of the second law made almost no sense to Twilight, but the chalk rapped against the only equation on the board that she could understand, F = ma. Force equals mass times acceleration.

“Now,” he said, “this third law is not perfect, but we get from it the law of conservation of momentum, where in a closed system, no energy can be created or destroyed.”

He went over the laws of thermodynamics in pretty much the same fashion. Twilight saw Enigma waving his hoof madly in the air, but Few Colt didn’t call upon him until he was done with his lecture.

Enigma looked pensive, but Twilight could hear fear in his voice. “Mr. Few Colt, when you say a closed system, does that, um. Is the universe a closed system?”

“So then... that means...” The white colt went very quiet, and Twilight thought, for a moment, that he had lost his train of thought, or had run out of things to say. “The universe will eventually reach equilibrium. Everything that exists will just one day... it’ll just be heat?”

The teacher nodded, seeming reluctant to do so. “If this was an eventuality, it would take a very long time, many many times longer than my lifespan or yours.”

Why did he have to say that? Twilight thought. It would be true, even if he didn’t, and it wasn’t like anything good came out of knowing it. She worked on her magic with fervor. Nopony was one hundred percent sure where all the energy from magic came from, but maybe if she did enough of it, if everypony did enough of it, they wouldn’t have to worry about the whole universe becoming nothing but heat. Maybe everything would be okay.

Enigma approached her in the hallway the next morning. Outside of class, he and Sky seemed to be joined at the hip, but today, he came alone. “Twilight,” he said, his voice cracking slightly. His eyes were glassy and it was all puffy around them. His white fur did little to hide how pink his nose and cheeks were. “Could you do me a favour?”

“Would it be okay if,” he looked down at the ground, “if you took me to see her?”

“If I told her,” he said. “If she knew what was going to happen... it’s just... it’s stupid, and it’s not right.” He sniffled. “I don’t know what else to do.”

“I have to at least try. She moves the sun and the moon. If anypony could do something about it, it’s her.”

“Um...” Twilight looked at him and he looked away. She remembered the way he was after Sky had gotten hurt, but it wasn’t anything like this. It was like he’d given up hope. “If you want, you could just tell me what you want to tell her and I could ask her for you.”

Ms. Marie’s Thursday class was just as grueling as Tuesdays had been, and once again, Twilight was in no shape to climb the four flights of stairs to the dining hall, the one up to her room, and then the four down to Science and Mathematics. She knew better than to have her lunch in class before it started, though.

There was a pretty good chance Gingersnap would be there, doing whatever the heck she did in empty classrooms by herself. The room next door was the Language Arts classroom, and she knew that Ms. Lida didn’t teach on the afternoons when she had math and science. If she ate lunch in there, she wouldn’t have to go up and down the extra five flights of stairs. She could just go next door when the clock on the wall told her it was time for class.

Gingersnap was inside, horn lit up while staring fixedly at the floor. She must be one of those ponies who got anxious unless they performed specific rituals in each room, Twilight thought. Touching doorframes or counting the windows seemed to be the typical thing, though.

Twilight sighed, then closed the door as quickly and quietly as she could. She could have her lunch in the other classroom instead.

The next day, Enigma walked with Twilight to the palace after their lesson with Ms. North Star. Just about everypony had gotten the hang of the Foundation spell except for Demise, and, well, Rune, of course. Twilight and Enigma trotted together out of the school’s front doors, breath steaming in the cool night air.

“I can’t guarantee anything,” Twilight said. Grownups often said things like that when they thought something might go wrong. The Princess had explained that it was because saying something like that at the start made them less responsible if things went badly later.

Enigma kept walking, not turning to look at her. “I have to do something, even if it doesn’t work. Maybe she knows something that can help us figure it out.”

“I’ve never met her before. Is there, um, anything I should know? Like, does she hate it when you use certain words? Is there a royal etiquette I’m supposed to follow?”

“Not really. Princess Celestia isn’t very fond of ponies being overly-formal with her,” Twilight said, “but if we make it in time for dinner, you might want to be careful, since the court ponies can be a little uptight.” Their hooves clacked against the stone as they walked across a bridge.

“Start with the cutlery farthest away from you, and work your way to the closest ones whenever they bring a different course. Don’t just sit at any random table - gentleponies practically start wars over their seating arrangements, and when in doubt, just copy whatever the Princess is doing.”

“I see,” Enigma said, not sounding like he really cared about what the court ponies thought. He was quiet for the rest of the trip.

As both of them approached the dining hall, they were greeted by the sounds of eating and the tittering of polite conversation. The server ponies were dishing out salads, which Twilight had learned meant that dinner had only just begun.

She also knew that it was bad manners to approach the Princess so brazenly when a meal was in session, but the sooner she did this, the sooner it would be over with. Enigma, at least, didn’t seem to notice any of the glares that the nobility were giving him.

“Princess,” said Twilight, “my classmate here is very worried about something and he wants to talk with you about it.”

“Why, certainly,” she said, putting down a forkful of kale and turning to the white colt. “Is this very urgent?”

“Please, you don’t need to bother with that,” said the Princess, and Twilight shot Enigma an I-told-you-so look.

Enigma got up again, then looked at the Princess awkwardly, not quite meeting her in the eye. “I...” It didn’t seem like he had the nerve to finish.

“If you would prefer to discuss the matter in private, this I can also arrange.” Princess Celestia gave him a soft smile.

He pawed at the ground with a hoof. “It’s nothing private,” he whispered at last. “It has to do with everypony.” His voice was stronger now. “I need to talk to you about entropy.”

The Princess sighed. “Peu de la Pouliche really needs to be more sensitive, sometimes.”

She knows about him? If Twilight’s head could have been punctuated with anything at that moment, her ordinary thoughts would have been afloat in a sea of exclamation marks.

The Princess looked at him, perhaps a little sadly. “Please have a seat and help yourself to the food.” Several servers had already brought chairs, plates and cutlery out. “This sounds like an after-dinner discussion.”

Twilight took her usual spot to the left of the Princess, while Enigma sat on the right. After the servers put platters down in front of them, she noticed that the colt didn’t touch his food at all. He was only pushing it around on his plate.

When the meal was finally done, the Princess stood up to leave, and Twilight followed, but Enigma was still staring down at his uneaten food.

One of the servers stood a polite distance away from him, clearly waiting for the colt to get up so she could take his plate away.

The Princess lead the two of them down a hallway, up a series of stairs, and in and out a number of buildings, to a part of the palace Twilight had never been to before. She stopped outside a large pair of doors where two white pegasi stood guard. The doors swung inwardly and she stepped into a spacious bedroom, decorated in whites and golds. Twilight saw that the window was wide-open, making the purpose of the guards rather moot. Perched on the window, was a large reddish-yellow bird. It crooned affectionately as the Princess walked into the room, and flew to greet her.

The Princess stroked the bird with a wing. “Why, hello to you too, Philomeena.”

Philomeena, as the Princess had called it, flapped its way back to the windowsill, fluffed its feathers and lowered its floofy body over its feet.

It took a while for Twilight to figure out that this was the Princess’ chamber. What had thrown her off was the empty cradle in the corner.

“Enigma,” said the Princess. “I believe you had a something you wished to discuss.”

The colt swallowed visibly. “In class we learned that over time, everything equalises, pressure, concentration, energy... and that you can’t undo it. Eventually all the stuff in the universe is going to be one... one homogeneous thing.” He pronounced all the vowels in homogeneous; it was like he’d never heard it or said it aloud before. “And then after that there can’t be anything anymore.” Enigma’s eyes glistened. “There won’t be any ponies, and there won’t be any animals or plants or stars. There won’t be anything... Everything will be dead and there would be nothing that could come after.”

His words made something crumple up inside Twilight’s chest. She didn’t think she should be here to see this. Enigma said it wasn’t private, but this felt private.

The colt looked down at the carpet. “There’ll only be darkness and... and heat.”

“My little pony,” said the Princess, “did your teacher not tell you how long this would take? That this would be not for at least ten to the hundred, literally a googol, of years?”

“Saying that it’s not going to happen for a long time doesn’t help. It’s still going to happen. Please, Princess. If there’s anything you can do to stop it, you have to.”

The whole time, Princess Celestia had been listening to him intently, nodding occasionally. It was as if this was the first time she had heard this. “There is an old adage that states that nothing can last forever,” she said. “There are theories that this even includes nothing.”

“I don’t understand,” Enigma said. “Are you saying that this is okay because things aren’t supposed to last forever?”

“Not at all,” said the Princess. “There is a popular theory, that everything that exists once expanded from a single point, billions and billions of years ago.” She sounded wistful now. Princess Celestia looked out the open window and into the sky. “One interpretation of this is that from this point onwards, all that is and was, will eventually become nothing but a dilute gas.”

Enigma nodded once, slowly, and Twilight quashed the urge to discreetly leave the room. She didn’t want to be here for this, but she knew that the Princess was about to say something important, something she would never repeat.

“This is only one leaf on the tree. Using spells and arcane equipment, an astronomer named Hobble found evidence of this expansion causing everything to expand outwards, even now.” Princess Celestia paused, perhaps to let the statement sink in. “There is a theory that once the expansion has ceased, all that exists will collapse inwards upon the point where everything began.”

“From a certain point of view, it’s not.” The Princess’ tail billowed strangely; it might have been a swish on any other pony. “Still, there is another scenario in which everything rebounds from this single point, crashing outwards in a wave of genesis, repeating a pattern of destruction and creation for eternity and forevermore.”

“Yes and no. The prevailing belief is that events would only reoccur on a cosmological scale. The little things, like history, life, the patterns of light in the sky, those things would alter drastically.”

“That seems like a really weird and complicated theory to believe in,” the white colt said. “I’m not sure it makes the most sense either. Isn’t there some switchblade thingamabob that says the simplest explanation is the most likely to be true?”

“Razor,” said the Princess. “One could say that the simplest explanation of all is that everything that exists will always continue to exist the way it always has. There are other theories, ones of other places outside of ours, kinds of energy that obey no laws known to ponykind, active creation and destruction by one or more deities... Any one scenario seems as improbable to a firm believer of any other.”

Twilight did not want to speak, but she knew that she had to ask now, or the moment would pass and she would never be able to ask again. “Which one is true?”

Twilight lead Enigma down a hallway to where she was pretty sure the Princess had taken them down before. The Princess had asked her to show Enigma the way back in case he got lost. She wasn’t entirely sure that she wasn’t lost herself.

“Is she always like that?” Enigma said her, once the Princess was out of earshot.

“Does she always, uh, I guess, give all those ideas and suggestions and theories, without actually saying anything.”

“Huh? She gave a lot of information,” Twilight said, somewhat defensively. Aha. East wing. Now I know where we are.

Enigma followed Twilight as she turned down a corridor. “Well, you know what I mean...”

“Mm.” She did not, in fact, know what he meant, but also didn’t want to look stupid by saying so. “So do you feel better now?”

“But at least you know it doesn’t have to be true, right? That everything dying and the world turning into heat, it’s not the only thing that can happen.”

“I still think it probably will,” he said. “But now that I know the Princess can’t do anything about it, I know I have to figure out how to fix it myself.”

“How?” Twilight said. “You don’t even know if that’s what’s going to happen, plus, if the most powerful pony in all of Equestria can’t ‘do anything’, then what are you supposed to do about it?”

“I don’t know just yet, but if there’s one thing I know for sure, it’s that no matter what, if you look hard enough you’ll always find answers. I just have to be persistent. Like Sky says, you sometimes gotta stick your hoof in the butt of life if you wanna punch the answers out of its throat.”

“Oops. Sorry,” he said. “I forgot how rude that sounds when you say it out loud...”

Twilight showed him past the two pegasus guards at the door. “I don’t understand how you two are friends,” she said. “I mean... you don’t seem to have a lot in common.”

“More’n you’d think,” he said, briefly lapsing into the informal kind of speech he tended to use around Sky. “Thanks for taking me to see the Princess,” he said. “I owe you one.”

“You know about Few Colt?” Twilight said to the Princess, once she’d gotten back. She’d wanted to bring up the issue before, but with Enigma there, it just hadn’t seemed right.

“I met him at a conference once, and offered him a job at the school after his career took a bit of a nosedive. I heard they needed a science teacher.”

“Oh yes, it was a bit of a fiasco. Nopony seemed very keen on hiring him at the time.”

“But... but why?” Twilight asked. “Don’t you know what he said? The things about- about the sun and the earth and- and...”

“Of course,” said the Princess. “It would be unprofessional to take such things personally, though. It’d be even worse to let them stand in the way of a good friendship.”

“Distractions aside, it’s about time to start your magic lesson for tonight. In addition to channeling the energy through your horn, you must also have peace of mind, calmness. Do not let any one emotion take control. Fear has its place, but for the sake of this exercise, you need balance.”

Twilight looked up at the Princess, confusion in her eyes. “That sounds more like some sort of zen exercise, not magic.”

“Necromancy?” Twilight guessed. “Turning lead into gold? A mass healing spell?”

Princess Celestia chuckled. “No, Twilight Sparkle. It is the magic that you find in others, the care and affection they feel towards you and you to them. The power of society, ethos, φιλíα.”

“That is what I hope you will learn one day. For now, though, we must focus on magic.” Princess Celestia closed her eyes and breathed slowly, in and out. “Clear your mind.”

She felt her heart race, an urge to gallop far away from wherever she was. No fear... Her magic bubbled and seethed, starting to pour out from somewhere deep inside her. No fear...

Her head jerked upwards. A blinding whiteness tore across her vision as her eyelids were forced open. She began to rise in the air.

Out of habit and practice, she pushed the magic out of her horn, casting the last spell she remembered using. She felt the earth stretch out beneath her. Her power forced the spell outwards, farther and farther until it touched a wobbly barrier on all sides. Water. She felt it go down, underneath, along inclines and slopes, pressing far and deep until the edges of the spells met and became one, a sphere.

There was mischief in the Princess’ smile. “You did not quite succeed at inner peace.”

“I could tell.” Twilight resisted the urge to roll her eyes, but she could not hide the feeling from her voice. “This spell you’re using,” she said. “The purpose is to make me feel scared, isn’t it?”

“So then... wouldn’t it be kind of pointless to go looking for balance and harmony and all those sorts of things? I’m not afraid of anything psychologically or intellectually, only physically.”

“That is a good observation,” said the Princess. “Still, the use of such exercises is not only to confront phobias or the traumas of one’s past. You must find parity within yourself. All things have their place, fear and joy, love and hate, Light and dark, sun and moon.”

“So...” Twilight trusted the Princess’ judgement, but this was all starting to sound a little mawkish. “I’m not supposed to just stop being afraid. I’m supposed to have some sort of... metaphysical... epiphany?”

“Balance is not the same thing as enlightenment,” said the Princess, probably sensing what Twilight was getting at. “Unless you believe life is nothing but strife and suffering, and don’t mind renouncing your desires towards anything worldly, I wouldn’t suggest trying for it.”

“How am I supposed to be balanced, then? If it’s not physical, if it’s not in my head and it’s not a feeling... What am I looking for? What am I trying to control?”

“Like I have said before, there is nothing to be learned from being given all the answers.”

“That’s not true,” Twilight said. “Let’s say I have a radio. It’s a complex device made by other ponies, one that I don’t know how to make myself. I don’t even know where to start. An unearned answer, in other words.”

“I take it apart and I find that inside it’s made of a bunch of metal things, and then I touch one of the metal things and shock myself.” Twilight spoke from experience. “I already know that this shocking thing is a battery, but then it also turns out I can touch the wires to it to transmit a current. If I try it next to another radio, then static starts to come out of it! By being given a radio, an answer, I just learned the basics of how radios work!

“If I had to get there on my own, I would’ve never done it.” She was aware she was lecturing, but she couldn’t stop. “I would’ve never thought, ‘hey, I should make a battery and then touch wires to it, and then find some sort of receiver to catch the signals its giving off.’” Twilight found herself getting more and more frustrated at the Princess’ line of reasoning. “You can learn things from answers too.”

“Delight, allegiance, truth, empathy, and altruism.” Starlight shone in the Princess’ eyes, and something else, something utterly alien. “Follow the sixfold path. The last step brings unity.”

Twilight had held the world in her magic earlier, but as big as it was, it was infinitesimal compared to what she was seeing now. Without changing in size, the Princess seemed to take up every corner of reality, authoritative... terrifying; there was no anger in her, or even impatience, only an otherness. Twilight recalled the second time they met, that fearful moment when she’d looked into the Princess’ eyes. She tried not to let her feelings show.

Princess Celestia’s expression softened. She didn’t change at all, but seemed to shrink somehow, and become ordinary. “The last step is up to you.”

Something significant had clearly passed, but Twilight had no idea what it meant. The Princess’ words had not made sense, nor had the moment of... whatever had just happened.

White wings spread themselves wide, gesturing towards the heavens. The Princess closed her eyes. “Clear your mind.”

By Monday, Twilight still hadn’t made much progress with the whole “inner peace” thing. She did find, though, that taking deep breaths and imagining that she was studying seemed to help her control the panic attacks. It was difficult to get involved in a pretend scenario while concentrating on a spell, but with the techniques she’d discovered, her shortest magical outburst couldn’t have been any longer than five minutes. Twilight had a feeling that this probably wasn’t what Princess Celestia had in mind.

She galumphed down the stairs to Mr Yorset’s class. Seven forty-five, she thought with glee. With her magic back, it was hard to believe how long it used to take her to get ready in the morning.

The classroom’s doorknob glowed magenta as she tried to turn it. It stopped before going all the way, locked. She could simply ask the door to open, but... an urge rose, one that told her to keep turning the doorknob. The thought was stupid, impractical and illogical, but she wanted to see if turning the knob enough could make it open anyway.

Twilight let out a little more magic, urging the knob to turn harder - nothing. Slowly, she dribbled out more and more force, far more than strictly necessary. There was a grinding, then snapping sound deep within the door. Uh oh. Why did I think that was a good idea?

Maybe she could fix it before class started. She tried peering through the keyhole, but the space was too dark and small to see anything. Her horn flickered as she sent out tendrils of magic to probe the insides of the door. The space grew around her senses, wide and jagged. There were cylinders around her, ones that seemed like they could move. Woven into the metal and wood, there were little nodes of power, curling around them like capillaries.

She thought, for a moment, that something was alive. The metal shifted and warped. Etheric light brushed against her own magic, feeling broken and strange. It was shouting an urgent message that she couldn’t understand (the instructions felt like they were in another language), but the door seemed to be responding. Intuitively, she felt a kind of meaning, that something was wrong, not the way it was supposed to be. The door appeared to be fixing itself.

Twilight let out a sigh and withdrew her magic. She immediately suppressed the urge to find out exactly how much damage the door could repair. “Door, are you able to open?” she said.

Gingersnap was standing in the back of the room, staring at the floor, clearly doing magic of some kind. Twilight just ignored her and found herself a seat near the front of the class. She flipped open her history textbook to the chapter they would be looking at next class, Foundation and Empire. Only five minutes later, halfway through Commander Hurricane’s founding of Pegasopolis, Gingersnap yelped and began shouting.

Twilight looked over her shoulder and shrugged. “My parents told me that I shouldn’t judge anypony for things that they can’t control. It’s okay.”

“Well,” said Twilight, “every time I’m early for class, I always see you going into different rooms and doing your ‘routine’ in them. You don’t have to be embarrassed, but I won’t tell anypony either.”

Gingersnap narrowed her eyes. “This is the part where you get me to do your homework for you, or give you four bits a week.”

“Nothing? Wait... actually... You should probably see somepony about that. From what I read, you can’t really get rid of your compulsions unless you ask for help.”

Gingersnap looked as confused as Twilight felt. “Wait,” she said, after a pause. “You think I have OCD?”

The crimson filly started to laugh, and then stopped. She looked like she was thinking, considering something. After much deliberation, she said, “You know, I hadn’t thought about it much, but now that you mention it, I think I might.”

Gingersnap started to snicker. She covered her mouth with both hooves, looking like she was trying hard to stop, but it just wasn’t working. She fell to her side and started guffawing, biting the back of a hoof in a vain attempt to stifle the laughter.

Twilight did her best not to step on the filly’s thrashing tail as she walked over. “I know you must be happy to know what’s been bothering you the whole time, but-” She looked at her classmate, now feeling unsure about the whole situation. “Hey...” she said. “You’re pulling my leg, aren’t you?”

That sobered her up. “You said.” She pulled herself to her feet and looked Twilight square in the eye. “That you wouldn’t tell.”

“That was when I thought you had a problem,” Twilight replied, unfazed. “Now I know you’re just being a jerk.”

Twilight resisted the urge to stomp a hoof. “It matters because you won’t tell me!”

“Why do you need to know so badly? Would it kill you to mind your own business?”

If Twilight was honest with herself, she knew that it probably didn’t make much of a difference whether she was told or not. It didn’t seem like Gingersnap was doing anything bad or sinister, just embarrassing. Still, the fact that she was being so secretive and defensive about it was... infuriating.

“You have to mean it.” The red filly shook her head. “You can’t tell anypony at all. If you do... I’ll...” Twilight couldn’t divine whether that was a reproof or a regret. Gingersnap did not finish the thought.

“I swear on my life, then. I swear upon the sun, the moon, and the will of the Princess.” Twilight took a deep breath and tried to recall the whole thing to the best of her ability. “Should I renounce my oath, may I suffer, may I flounder, may I rot. I swear-”

“Okay, okay, I get it.” Gingersnap looked down at the floor. “I...” She breathed in and out a few times, as if to calm herself down. “Oh, so help me Celestia if you tell, I’ll...” She paused. “I’ve... been... having trouble... with a spell.”

Twilight raised an eyebrow. “You’re messing with me again, right,” she said. “Is that all?” She glanced at the clock. There were about twenty minutes to class now.

“What do you mean ‘is that all’?” Gingersnap glowered at her. “Not everypony has magic as their special talent! Not everypony can learn spells perfectly on the first try! Some of us have to work at it.”

“Well yeah. I have trouble with magic too,” Twilight said, remembering not only her lessons with the Princess, but the entire week before. “Was that a Foundation spell you were doing? Everypony was messing up on that one.”

“Um.” Despite the unassuming nature of the word ‘um’, her tone implied that Twilight was an imbecile. “Everypony was not messing up. It’s such an easy spell. Everypony could cast it right away, even Ace and Echelle. I saw it myself.”

“What do you usually do when you try to learn a new spell?” Twilight asked. Maybe there was a problem with Gingersnap’s process.

“I just learn them,” she said, scuffing a hoof. “I don’t think about it. I can’t remember.”

Gingersnap tossed her mane. “I don’t know why I keep talking to you if you’re just going to keep repeating what I say.”

“How can’t you remember, then?” Maybe this would work better if she was as clear and composed as possible. “Do you black out or something?”

“Don’t you think I know that?” Gingersnap snorted. “We go to the same school, you know. Learning and memorising are the things I’m good at, not, I don’t know... doing magic the ‘correct’ way.”

“Well then maybe that’s why you stink at it.” Twilight was completely out of patience. “You won’t let anypony help you. You’re stuck and set in your ways and if you keep it up then you’ll fail all your classes and flunk out!”

“Ugh!” Twilight stomped back to her desk. “Go back to being lousy at magic, then. Just pretend I’m not here.”

The filly took a seat in the front row on the opposite side of the classroom. “Class is about to start anyway.”

After five minutes, still nopony walked in, especially not Mr. Yorsets, who seemed to be chronically late.

Gingersnap stared at the book at her desk, not looking up. “So um,” she said in a small voice. “How would you do it?”

“Define a small area and project onto that space,” Twilight said, also not looking up. She heard Gingersnap sigh.“You could also imagine you’re looking at something with your magic, except your presence is more solid and less involved. Be one thing pressing flat against the ground or whatever.”

Twilight kept reading her book. “Mmhm.” Trying not to make it obvious, she peeked over the cover and saw Gingersnap looking back at the ground, performing some sort of magic.

It was hard to see; it was overshadowed by the intense look of concentration on the red filly’s face, but Twilight detected the barest traces of a smile.

(A big thank you goes to plen-omie, feotakahari and Mystic, who have been helping me edit. I’d also like to thank Kuroi Tsubasa Tenshi and crowind, who helped decide which images to use this chapter.)

AN: I realise that Ms. Lida’s “sanitize” is not in accordance with the British spelling I’ve been using, but I figure that (being an American show) ponies themselves are more likely to use American spelling than British. Also, for clarity’s sake, I’m just going to use American terminology for things, thus not even the narrative refers to zucchini as courgettes.

The text Twilight is reading was not written by me. It is from the short story, The Last Question.

This document was initially posted on Google Docs. There are a couple of formatting issues due to FIMFiction's font size restrictions and stuff. The original story can be viewed here:

Darkest Before Dawn

by Sessalisk

Chapter 7