“Again.” Celestia had snapped in a long ago lesson, nudging her collapsed protégé with a golden shod hoof. “That spell shouldn’t have even touched you. Try it again.
“I’m trying!” Twilight screamed, surging to her hooves and glaring up at the Princess. “I can’t do it!”
Celestia’s eyes narrowed for a moment, then softened. “You can do it Twilight. I know you can do this, you have too.”
“Why?” Twilight asked, panting. The fire, the anger, had drained out of her at her teacher’s calm words. In its place, annoyance filled her, and a reluctant shame at having lost her temper with her teacher. “Why are you doing this to me. Princess, I can barely stand.” She ended with a sob, legs quivering.
It was true. They had been locked in this room for almost five hours, hours spent in what seemed to Twilight to be endless, sadistic torment. At first she thought that this would be a new way to learn, a fun method for applying her book smarts to the real world.
The lesson was simple. Celestia had locked them both in a small room, and laid several enchantments on the doorway. Anypony trying to pass through the doorway would receive several unpleasant, but harmless spells sent at them, which they would be stopped by unless they blocked the spells with a shield spell. In practical terms, it was almost exactly like the real world, where many magical effects would need to be contained and blocked while the spell was being used. Twilight certainly didn’t want to have her mane catch fire when she was trying to light a candle.
That was how it had started anyway. But five hours into being shocked, burned, chilled, pushed around, and been given a smart smack or two on the rump, Twilight was revising her opinion. This wasn’t training, this was torture.
“I am doing this because you need to learn it, Twilight. You are just too strong for your own good. If you don’t learn how to make strong, flexible shields, then you risk harming not only yourself, but everypony around you. All you are doing is throwing up walls around yourself, and walls are very strong, but they are rigid. A wall will only stop one thing, one magical effect, one spell. There are hundreds of thousands of different spells, and countless variations on how those spells are used. Tell me, how can you summon flames?”
“Well,” Twilight began, grimacing. “You can call up the fire from the Elemental Plane. You could, draw heat into the object. You could begin to vibrate the particles in the air above it, or in the object itself, depending on what part of it you wanted on fire. If you didn’t want to burn anything, then the easiest thing would be to call up an illusion of the fire, and then layer a geis of pain that gets stronger the closer you get to the fire. If you wanted to, and could control it, you could summon an Elemental itself, a creature composed of pure fire magic, and have it embody a vessel to bring the Plane of Fire to our world for a second or two.
“You could even do some stranger things. You could focus sunlight to create a very hot point, and shift that to start a fire. You would need to make the spell to do it, but you could link an already burning object to a normal one, and then have them share their properties. The first object would cool, while the second one heats, until they are both on fire, and they both heat up again. You could-“
“Stop!” Celestia giggled. She shook her head gently, and pressed a hoof to her protégé’s lips, stilling them. “That is what I mean, my faithful student. You can think of all these ways to start something as simple as a fire. Do you think that you can think of every possible way?”
“No, nopony can. There is always another way to do something.”
“Exactly. Twilight, dearheart, the way you are using shields, that will never work. You can’t think of everything, not even you are that amazing. So you have to stop as many as you can, and make your defenses flexible enough to stop those you can’t think of. Do you see?”
Twilight sighed, and slumped down until she was sitting on the carpeted floor. “I know that, Princess. I am trying, but I can’t do it. And every time it gets harder. Please, can we stop?”
She was begging, and Twilight despised herself for being so weak, but she could barely stand, and the shields she was casting were getting weaker and weaker, allowing more of Celestia’s attacks to break through. The Princess wasn’t impressed by the show of weakness though.
“Get up, Twilight.” She repeated, gently. “You must learn this. Your own power works against you here, there is no way I can let you learn any more powerful magic until you master this. Imagine what would happen if you tried to cast a summoning? If you can’t shield not only yourself, but the area, then you could summon anything, or you could be taken away instead. Teleportation? Without proper shielding you will not be in total control, and you could leave a leg behind, or teleport thirty feet underground.
“Every single spell that you have learned is simple, my student.” Celestia continued, sitting across from her pupil. “How to light candles, how to levitate books. These are basic spells, ones that you mastered without any effort. Your natural grasp of magic is astonishing, and you are powerful enough to rival Star-Swirl the Bearded. He had a problem with this lesson as well.”
“You taught Star-Swirl the Bearded?” Twilight gaped.
Celestia smiled at her student, charmed by Twilight’s obvious awe. She knew that Twilight idolized the ancient stallion, and had even modeled herself after him as much as a filly was able to. “Of course. He was my brightest pupil, until a few years ago. It took him almost six hours to figure out how to weave a proper shield. I think I know a filly who can beat that record though.”
“Who?”
“You, Twilight.”
Twilight closed her eyes, and swallowed. That was… touching. She loved the Princess, she was her teacher, her friend, and almost her mother. To hear the Solar Queen say that she thought Twilight was even better at magic than Star-Swirl the Bearded…
Twilight stood, closing her eyes. Quickly, she deadened everything out, the smells and sounds of the room, the feel of the carpet. Everything. Soon, she stood inside the deep, dark quiet of her mind, staring into emptiness. Then, with deliberate care, she began to mentally flick through the pages of every book she had ever read mentioning shields.
It was all the same. They all described the same image, of constructing a mental wall, an impenetrable barrier around their minds. That is what Twilight had always done, but Celestia said that was wrong. She continued to go from book to book, each one passing in a single steady beat of her heart. Then, a small brown journal came to mind.
Twilight could barely remember when she had read the book, but she knew what it was. It was one of Star-Swirls many journals, records he kept of his experiments and experiences. This was one from near the end of his life, before his epic battle with the evil dragon, Fang. He talked at length about devising a way to stop dragonfire, something that nopony had ever been able to do. He reasoned that by creating a series of walls, weak, thin barriers meant to slow the dragons fiery attacks, would work about as well as a pane of glass worked to stop a stone.
Instead, he had spoken of a different kind of shield. He had talked about a flexible barrier, a bubble made from weaving many very weak shields together. One to weaken the heat, another to catch the magical force, a third to dissipate the collected energy, and more. All of them were simple, weak shields themselves, but Star-Swirl had said that they were like ropes, the more you wove together, the stronger they all became. He said that the way to make a shield like that was to picture…
Twilight grinned, letting magic burst from her horn.
Twilight’s mind conjured up the ghost of that long ago lesson, using it as a shield to distract herself from the blinding pain. It was pleasant, though at the time she had been miserable. She knew that the lesson was to force the students to become tired, to weaken themselves so that eventually, naturally, they throw up many very weak shields, blending them together rather than trying to shove all of their power into one. It was an instinctive defense, when the unicorn thinks that she is too weak to maintain a single shield, and while the technique and applicability of the flimsy defense was nonexistent, it did leave the mare with the knowledge of what a properly layered shield should feel like. While her mind was engage with this though, her body and her magics were acting with swift, deft movements.
It had been Star-Swirl’s writings that had helped her pass the first test, and now they would, they had to, help her survive this trial by fire. The ancient stallion had devised an ingenious method of visualizing the spell, holding a clear image of the way it would work in his mind, which made it infinitely easier. To Twilight sank into the memory, let it sooth her, while in the very back of her mind, the complex, beautiful image of a flower emerged.
The flower was, as it had always been in the recesses of her mind, a soft, pure white, like the paleness of snow, though without the glaring brightness. She had seen the real flower, Sun’s Breath, and knew that it was had amber petals, and a bright green stem that spoke of health and happiness and life. But in her mind, it was white, and it was suspended in a soft, golden shimmer.
It wasn’t simply idle fancy that had called this particular flower to mind. Star-Swirl had mentioned the use of a flower, the more complex the better, as a mental catalyst for shields. Modeling your defenses after the sealed petals, he said, was a perfect way to create many layers, all of which become stronger and less varied the more the outer layers are pealed away. He had also likened it to some of the ancient pony battle armor, and the interlocking scales that protected them, though not even the antiques of his time had survived for Twilight to examine. So Twilight modeled hers after flower buds. The more complex the flower, the more layers her shield would have, and there was no flower larger, more intricate, nor more beautiful to Sun’s Breath.
Layer after layer of magical defenses went up around her, blocking out the power radiating from all sides. Some were targeted at the tendrils of darkness struggling to latch onto somepony before the holy light incinerated them. Some were targeted at the intense white light streaming off of the solar ray, and a few were meant to stop the flames that raged all around her from eating away at the grass about her.
Two things though, deserved the most respect, and the most protection. The first was obvious, the excruciating heat that rolled around her. Outside of the direct path of the attack, Twilight wasn’t in any danger of the focused light so much as the air that was heated by that same light. In the first moment after the light beam struck, there had been a second of emptiness, as all the air was seemingly sucked away. Then, with a boom as Acshina’s body was destroyed, air hotter than a furnace had blasted out from the crater. Twilight hadn’t been able to stop that first assault, and her breaths had been agonizing, so hot that they burned her sides, her mouth, her lungs. That was the first, and most immediate danger.
The second, and far more important one, was not a danger to herself at all. It was a danger to her Princess.
Even from here, far away from the radiant white alicorn, Twilight could feel the sun’s power consuming her teacher. Though Celestia stood with her wings flared behind her, mane whipping through the air and eyes set glaring at the blast zone, her wings were not quite as high as they were a moment ago, nor her mane as magnificent. Even if the sun itself was supplying the power, all of it, every last speck, had to pass through Celestia first, and there was no way anypony, not even a Princess, could stop that much energy. Not without help.
Twilight focused, devoting more and more of her shields to the Princess. It was painful, watching the boundaries of her shield slowly expand, encompassing more and more territory, snuffing out flames and cooling the air as it went. Without a moment’s thought, Twilight layered another spell, a ward this time, on top of her shields, and grinned as her special spell began to siphon off the excess energy in the surrounding area. It ate more and more heat, and fire, and with each lash of the dark tentacles, the shield grew faster and faster.
Twilight had to be careful now. She edged the spell forward, spending more energy holding it back now than she had pushing it foreward. She knew that there was no way she could touch the beam of power though. It was too strong, even for the Princess. To try and absorb all of that power directly would kill her, without even giving her enough time to scream. So Twilight skirted the edges of the attack, then let her spell expand again.
Yes, finally. She thought, a soft smile lighting her serene face. She could feel her now, Princess Celestia, feel her struggling to control the spell, to end it as soon as the darkness was crushed.
Celestia grunted, stamping her hoof hard into the soft soul of the hillside as she felt the disgusting power of the dark mare reaching out of its pit. Again she called on the Sun, disregarding the danger to herself, demanding that it help her annihilate this menace. Acshina had taken everything from her, everything. Her mother. Her sisters. Her family, her friends, her life. She had taken away Celestia’s ability to die, and killed her more surely than had her heart stopped beating. Now, this vile monster, this vessel, nothing but a shadow of its master’s true power, would suffer for its puppeteers wrongs. It was going to be destroyed more fully than anything ever had before.
Then, Celestia felt a cool, soothing sensation wash over her. It was a familiar presence, but not one that she had expected. She knew that Valiant Heart and Luna would try and stop her once they recovered, but this was neither. It was too fine, to complex, and too honest to be either of her beloved mares. This was the touch of a mind she had not communed with in years, and one that had never been so mature, so humble and filled with concern. It was Twilight.
<Princess! Celestia! You must stop!>
<No!> Celestia screamed back, enraged. How could she stop now? The monster was dust, no, less than dust. It was nothing anymore, nothing but the lingering strands of magic that had once held its body together.
<Princess!>
<I must end her! I must end this, now.>
<The sun, it is angry. You’ve awoken it, and it is hungry. Can’t you see that?>
Celestia whinnied, rearing back and lashing out with her hooves. Her golden tiara gleamed in the brilliant light, and for a moment she seemed to be recovered. Then, once more, fatigue washed over her like the tide. She came down hard, and her legs collapsed beneath her.
She landed harder, falling onto her side with a grunt of pain. The light was fading too, slightly. The edges of Celestia’s vision grew darker, taking even the purest sunfire with it into the black. She could hear Twilight still, speaking quickly and softly in the back of her mind. So like her, Celestia thought. Always thinking, always planning. Just like her sister. Her older sister.
The world went red. Then grey. Then finally, after an eternal moment filled only with Twilight’s whispered thoughts, and the warm blanket draped over her, it went black.