//------------------------------//
// CHAPTER XXXVIII: Heavy Lodestars 
// Story: Special Illumination 
// by ponichaeism 
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	Over the sea of cornstalks came a short sharp whistle, signaling the end of the harvesting time. Starswirl plucked a few last ears of corn from the stalk he had been working on and dropped them into the bushel on Clover's back. She grunted with the extra weight and her knees threatened to collapse on her, but she eventually straightened her legs and lifted the bushel up.
"The trick to keeping balance," Starswirl said, "is in knowing when to fold like a reed and when to stand like an oak."
As she groaned under the weight, she rolled her eyes up to look at him, then shook her sweat-dampened red hair out of her eyes. 
"Well, is it oak-ay if I bend like a reed right here, then?" she asked sarcastically.
"Ah, humor! Not much, but it's a start. Come, let's go home."
As he headed down the path between the shorn rows of corn, she waddled alongside him, taking enormous yet very slow steps as she shifted her weight to keep the bushel on her back from spilling. 
"I can take the load from you, Clover," Starswirl said as he ambled lightly beside her, matching her pace. "But I need to know if you can take the load from yourself, first."
"Sure I can. Want me to drop it right here?"
"That's not what I mean. It is only your mind making that bushel into a load that it becomes so."
As she stuck her trembling foreleg out and chewed her lip as she struggled to shift her weight onto it, she said, "Starswirl, right now the only thing sounding like a load is all this advice of yours. It sounds like a load of--"
"Wit, Clover, is the rapier to the crude bludgeon of vulgarity. Only one of those is used for sword fighting in the halls of royalty, and I'll leave you to figure which one."
"Oh, you think you're so witty, with your dumb jokes?"
Starswirl lifted his head back and held it up high. "I can be witty, if I so chose. The real question is, how would you know when I have made a cutting witticism?"
"A what?"
"See? The defense rests."
"Well good for you, but my back is tense and aching, so can de tense rest, too?"
"Your back, Clover, is only telling you it is sore. Like so many other things I try and tell you, you are perfectly free to ignore it as well."
"Ignore it? But it hurts so bad!"
"That is just your deeper mind, Clover."
"Deeper mind?" she asked. "Did you ever tell me what that is?"
"Ah, the deeper mind. Another fruit of the Academy. It was conceived by a gifted alchemist and doctor by the name of Paracoltsus, who noticed one of his patients would start to describe every symptom old Para named. Eventually, Paracoltsus made his own up, and to his surprise the patient started suffering from those as well. That is when he realized that below our conscious minds, there must be another force at work, a deeper force than our own thoughts. When ponies are startled, it is their natural instinct to flee, is it not, despite their own thoughts? That is the ponies' deeper mind wresting control of their body from their higher thoughts."
"So I have this....other mind inside me?" she asked.
"Everypony has another mind within them, Clover. It is tied to the world of skin and bone, of tree and stone, and will resist any attempt you make to forsake it in favor of a higher calling. If we are the radiance of the Harmony, the deeper mind is the product of the stuff we are cloaked in. Right now your deeper mind fears its own pain, and it is crying out because of that. But you don't need to listen, Clover. Your body is not you, merely--"
"One small part," she said. "I got it already."
They approached the faded red farmhouse, its nearer side concealed in shadow as the sun sat right above the ridge of the roof. Few ponies had returned from the field yet, and the yard was almost empty save a clucking chicken. As Starswirl's higher thoughts sensed an opportune moment to do some sneaking, his deeper mind set his heart thudding.
"Wait here," he said.
Clover gladly shucked the bushel off her back and sank to the ground, sighing loudly.
"If anypony asks," he whispered, "I've gone to find Lockhorn."
The wizard approached the open barn doors. 
Loudly, but not too loudly, he called, "Lockhorn?" 
No answer came back to him, so he crept around the open doors and peered into the darkness beyond, shaded from the sun save a few scant rays coming in through cracks in the wood.
"Lockhorn?" he called again, stepping forward.
As he waited for the inevitable voice to ask him what he thought he was doing intruding, his eyes darted to every corner of the barn and took in anything and everything they could. But he didn't see anything of special interest, only tools hanging on the walls, bales of hay stacked in a corner, the hem of a cloak hanging out from under a tarp--
His eyes went back to the cloak while his thoughts went back to that night in the woods, when he had seen the ponies performing their ritual. The cloak was hanging off a crate covered by the tarp, and atop the crate he saw a bulge that might just be a ram's skull. 
So what does this mean? he asked himself. He has the ram's head on the side of his barn, so this wasn't unexpected, but if he has the skull, does that make him the leader of the worshipping ponies? 
No, I didn't recognize the voice....
Wait, yes I did, come to think of it, although it wasn't in the forest, it was in the town hall. It could very well have been Pasture Allfields.
So Pasture is the leader, but Lockhorn has the idol they use to summon the earth being?
Is it some sort of power sharing arrangement, to avoid consolidating too much power?
Or is Lockhorn actually Nightshade? Does he lurk in the shadows and create the apparition while the other ponies worship it? He seems to come from an old family, but he could have married into it, or perhaps some sort of memory enchantment....? It's unlikely, I'll admit, but I'm not ruling out some clever trickery.
If it was him, he had much to gain by splitting the town over my trial. Of course, so would Orrin Tin. I don't know enough yet.
Hmm, I should find out how many farmsteads have that symbol on their barn.


As Clover relaxed on the ground and enjoyed being free of a terrible weight on her shoulders, a voice called to her, loud enough to carry and yet soft enough to be not easily heard. Her ears picked up as she raised her head off the ground. Her eyes wandered over the barn rising above, through the shadows, over the chicken coop--
"Over here," Junior whispered.
Her head snapped to the source of the voice. She spotted the colt's head sticking up over the sill of a window in the squat farmhouse in the barn's shadow. Her body still ached badly, but something about the urgency in his voice gave her the strength to push herself to her hooves. After a wild glance around, she crossed the yard to the window. As she approached the window, she saw farther into the room; he was sprawled on his bed, his mangled, misshapen legs awkwardly sticking out behind him. Her heart gave a wrench in sympathy.
"I saw you got found out," she said as she reached the window.
He laid the crook of his forelegs over the sill and shrugged. "Ain't a new thing. Most days I don't even get past the first cornrow."
Clover glanced around again, as if the stallion in question would pop out of nowhere and yell at her. She asked, "If your papa is so worried about you getting out, why don't he lock the door?"
Junior Plenty nodded like he knew what she was talking about; plainly he'd thought the same thing many times. He replied, "Sometimes I think he does it intentional, just so's he can chase me down."
"Why would he want to chase you down?"
"I can't rightly say."
"My, uh....friend, Starswirl, he told me all about how sometimes ponies do things without even themselves knowing quite why. Their minds play tricks on them."
"If'n that's true, then I reckon he's feeling ashamed. Course, I should feel ashamed, too, but there ain't a thing I can do about that. So tell me, unicorn...."
He'd seemed so nice so far Clover got a bit miffed at being addressed by her race. She asked, "Yes, earth pony?"
"You ever watch the stars up on the tor over yonder?" he asked, nodding at the rocky outcropping in the distance, which gradually rose up from the forest before becoming a sheer cliff face as it looked out at the world at large.
"Huh?"
"The stars. Those big light-looking things in the sky."
"I know what the stars are!" she said, then grumbled at herself for shouting and cast another quick look over her shoulder to make sure they were still in the clear. "And I know what a tor is, too."
"I can't see many stars from in here," he said, gesturing to the broad side of the barn, which blocked most of the sky. "I ain't seen them in six months. I used to love looking up at the stars and trying to work out what they all said, like there were letters you could make if only you connected them. Sometimes I used to think they'd tell me what it is I'm supposed to do, if'n only I could read 'em."
Everything is connected, the voice of Starswirl said. We look to the stars to see our own future, because we are all part of one vast living universe.
All I want is to see them again," he said, frowning.
"Why are you telling me this?" she asked.
"I want to see the stars, unicorn," he said, his lower lip trembling. "But nopony'll let me out of my cage. So help a poor little earth pony out, will you?"
"How come you need my help?"
"You seen the size of that tor? All those rocks? You think I could get up there on a dinky little cart?"
"So you want me to carry you all the way up there?"
"Yes."
"And just why would I do that?"
His cheeks flushed and his eyes jerked away from hers. "Nopony understands what it's like to be half a pony," he said. "Can't do the things you used to be able to do. Nopony 'cept you, I reckon."
Clover tilted her head to one side and nodded as she rolled her eyes up into her head, telling him he had a good point without actually telling him. "I ain't ever been able to use magic," she said softly, "so I guess I know that feeling better than you do."
"Then come back here right around midnight and help me break free, just for one night."
Clover's mind screamed at her not to pay attention, to ignore it, because with the stallion lurking in the forest it was too dangerous to go out at night. But she wrote it off as her deeper mind trying to flee, and told herself she could control it. She was the master of herself. And besides, she convinced herself, Starswirl said the stallion was weak. Surely he couldn't make it this far out of town yet.
She spotted Starswirl coming out of the barn just then. 
Her eyes darted to the colt and she nodded. He smiled in return, and as she saw it contentment spread through her from her heart. She knew that must be what Starswirl had been trying to teach her a few days ago, about the healing powers of a good deed. And not only that, but for the first time she felt a sense of kinship with a pony who wasn't her father. She hadn't ever had a friend before, not with all the other foals terrified of being picked on by Golden Vein. But now there was a bond between her and another pony, a secret bond created by their own incompleteness. 
And she would brave the night to uphold her end.