//------------------------------//
// 2 
// Story: Thunder and Hail 
// by Trixie_L 
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	It's a bright day in the Canterlot town center. Vendors of all sorts line the sides of the streets and the air smells of baked goods. The stage is prepared, the curtains drawn. A small crowd has gathered around for the show. I'll make it a show they'll never forget.
“Come one, come all, come and witness the amazing magic of the Great and Powerful Trixie!”—cue the fireworks, loud and bright flashes of yellow, orange and white in all directions, spiral trails of blue and green sparks left behind as rockets sail into the sky. The crowd gasps, oohing, and ahhing at the dazzling display. It cost me half the bits I earned from the last show, but it had been worth it. 
“Watch in awe as the Great and Powerful Trixie performs the most spectacular feats of magic ever witnessed by pony eyes!” The inflection was deliberate, practiced—masterful. In these rare moments of performance I had to establish an image of myself as a great and powerful sorcerer. I wanted them catch even just the slightest glimpse of the awe and wonder that the sorcerers in my mother's story filled me with, even if that was only part of my true motivation.
Dark clouds gathered around the stage as I summoned them in preparation for the next trick. Fillies and colts recoiled in fear of the uncertain as lightning flashed, thunder boomed, and coils of chains extended themselves outwards from tall wicker pots. I could feel the magic flowing through my horn, I could imagine it traveling through the air unseen. I was the puppeteer in control of it all. The crowd cheered as the chains took the shape of familiar creatures; a timber-wolf, a dragon, and a snake. I grinned as the wind blew back my cape. Several tricks later and I was feeling on top of the world. My final display was a magic-assisted firework show of my dreams: Trixie, the great unicorn, powerful sorceress, defeating an ursa major. I left the stage behind a veil of smoke to an ecstatic crowd. It wasn't always this easy to impress an audience—Canterlot was kind to the talent, they understood the value of a show-mare. I collected my bits, packed up the cart, and left to attend to my real reason for being back in my home city.
Filled to brim with the best magic students in Equestria, the Royal Academy had been a venerable institution since long before the rule of Celestia. Standing tall above the rest of the city the Academy loomed over all but the castle. It was intimidating to visit. My mother served the Academy for the majority of her life after attending it, but not many ponies know what she did. She belonged to a secret society that was not-so-secret but cleverly disguised. Founded by Princess Luna before her exile, the Royal Academic Society for Advanced Magical Studies was a faculty group who studied dangerous and dark magic. I'd visited the Academy with my mother several times before her death, and though I was never a student I was always allowed free access to the libraries within. It was a gift from my mother who said that I'd always find value in it.
The books in the library contained enough wisdom to found a kingdom, and in the past they had been used to do just that. Sorting through them was not an easy task, but the librarians were always eager to help. There was a book I had been searching for years in a “small” collection of the RASAMS archive for a book written by Star Swirl the Bearded. The collection was 10,000 books, of which over 1,500 were written by Star Swirl himself. Star Swirl had been a genius in several facets: he was a renowned herbologist (though for some reason the librarians told me there was controversy about some part of this, and his books on herbology have been banned in the past), he was able to write countless spells, craft magical amulets and artifacts, and his magical ability was second only to that of an alicorn. You would expect this genius to title his books appropriately, but instead I found such titles as The Tangled Menagerie of a Summer Lampoon which is all about the artifacts one might find at the bottom of deep rivers flowing through Equestria if one were able to cast a certain spell to breathe underwater—the process of which he outlines in the book Cautionary Tales of a Broiled Lily which, naturally, came shortly before his little-known novella entitled simply: Eeee.
In the story that my mother would tell me, I can only imagine that in its details she saw the struggle between students of magic and those who would squander a unicorn's talent for materialistic reasons. I saw in the story something else. My mother told me that I would be a great and powerful sorceress someday, but in my most honest moments I had to admit to myself that it didn't come naturally. I was not possessed of the same talent that my mother was naturally born with. I was lacking, a failure as a student of magic; I couldn't even attend the Academy. It was hard not to feel like a pony destined to achieve only mediocrity. But there are other ways to increase a unicorn's power.
Somewhere  around 600 books into the collection I had finally come across a book, Principia Magicum, discussing magical artifacts of old, amulets of all types, and other objects of great power. It was far from the first book of it's type I'd seen. Years passed as I split my time between searching for magical objects, reading about them, and performing to earn enough for my travels and to support myself. My mother had a collection of powerful objects which I was never allowed to touch or play with, and in them was a small metal cube. It was gray-colored, unblemished, and as lusterless as it was uninteresting—except now I was reading about it in Star Swirl's book. This artifact would be so easy to find I could leave immediately to get it. Doing so, however, would require seeing dad once more; and worse, actually speaking to him.