Clover the Clever was surprised to find the castle maid standing outside Star Swirl’s office. Usually, the maid would have done her rounds by now.
“It’s an open-door policy if you want to go in,” she said.
The maid turned to her with frightened eyes. “It’s not that. I already went in there. It’s just he asked me to step outside, and, uh…”
From behind the oaken door, they heard Star Swirl humming to himself and the patter of hooves across flagstones. Despite the humming, however, he seemed to be a hair’s breadth away from shouting. Something crashed inside the study.
“Is he working on another new spell in there?” asked Clover with a sinking heart.
“I don’t know,” said the maid helplessly. “Begging your pardon, Miss, but to be frank, I thought you’d know about it, Miss.”
“Hello?” said Clover to the door. There was no answer. "Odd..."
Clover concentrated, and with a flash of light, the door lay open before her.
A cloud of dust blew over their faces and stung their eyes and throats until they coughed and wept. When the dust settled, Clover peered into the room and darted back as Star Swirl swept by with the duster.
“Now look, I nearly had it!” he bellowed angrily. “I’m sure I would’ve gotten the hang of it if you hadn’t opened that door!”
Star Swirl danced from shelves to desk to floor to windowsill, lashing each one with the duster as though it had done him a personal wrong. As he did so, clouds of grey rose up in protest and settled with unerring precision on every other thing in the room, waiting for him to start again.
“Confound it! I get the principle well enough: cleaning is essentially to move the dust from one place to another. It just won’t move the way I want it to!”
The maid stared helplessly at Clover, who recognized the signs. Interrupting Star Swirl was a shot above spilling onion gravy over the Princess’s gowns on the pyramid of sackable offences, and would probably get a servant executed to boot. Clover coughed as loudly as she dared, which was about three decibels.
“Master,” said Clover, bowing low, “I think it would be best not to delay your spell-casting any longer on this one.”
“I assure you, Clover, that this will not prove to be much of a distraction at all.”
“Master, please look at the hourglass on your desk.”
He did so. He turned back to her and his lip curled.
“Ah. Yes,” he said slowly. “The, uh… timer for this task has indeed overrun. Er, well done for pointing that out, my dear student. Yes, I believe I have indeed met my quota for this particular experiment. Maid, as you were.”
The duster floated across the room and rammed itself into the surprised maid’s mouth. She bowed to him briskly and hurried about the desk and shelves.
Star Swirl ignored her and settled onto the desk with his hooves in his face. As the maid swept by, however, he glanced up to watch her work with narrowed eyes and muttered something under his breath.
Nopony spoke for a long while. Star Swirl had his back to Clover, who was trying her best not to make a move. Long hours indoors seemed to have focused his hearing to supernatural levels. A mere breath would have him rounding on her with eyes popping.
“There you are,” said the maid, trying not to quiver in case weakness provoked him. “Clean as a whistle.”
Star Swirl pinned her with a glare, his teeth crushing each other, and began to shake. The door slammed on her way out.
Clover sighed to herself. How many days was he like this now? Once, he would have cheerfully chatted with the servants, evidently hungry for any unlikely source of inspiration. As tactfully as she could, Clover approached the hunched figure and carefully avoided stepping on the hem of his robe. He didn’t like having the bells jangled by accident.
“With all due respect, master,” she said, “I cannot fathom why you seem so interested in…”
“In what, exactly?”
Clover swallowed the obvious response. In replacing every member of staff who happens to walk by your door.
“In experimenting with non-magical activities. It’s not like you at all.”
She was surprised to see his bushy eyebrows rise overhead. Star Swirl swept the desk clear of scrolls with his leg and looked up at her expectantly.
“Clover, my dear, I am not experimenting with earth pony skills,” he said cheerfully. “I’m improving them, and with that most subtle of all powers: magic! When the future comes, it will ride on a wave of new unicorn dreams and ambitions, led by the brightest and the best ponydom has to offer, and backed up by the unlimited reach of this wondrous organ!” He gestured to his horn. “Meaning no disrespect to the other tribes, but given our natural powers, we will inevitably render their special skills useless in the not-too-distant future. Have I not proven, over and over, that magic can do anything you wish, given time and hard work?”
He swung back to his desk, and began looking for his quill. Clover wasn’t sure whether pointing out that it was on the floor would do the slightest bit of good.
“But master,” she said, “the unicorn tribe has tried to replace the other tribes for millennia. Golden Bag proved in his Conjecture that sovereignty over the powers of the three tribes is exclusively theirs. Even winged unicorns and alicorns cannot match the earth and pegasus ponies in their respective –”
“Golden Bag is a hack,” said Star Swirl to the desk, “in both senses of the word.”
Clover gasped. “You don’t really mean that, master? You were his student.”
She was met by a chortle at the dim-wittedness of apprentices everywhere, and frowned only when she was sure he wasn’t looking at her. Is this even the same stallion I met twelve years ago?
“Master, I must speak my mind,” she said.
“Speak away, young foal.”
Clover blushed. I forgot you used to call me that, when I was starting out. “Marilyn is extremely capable at her job because –”
Star Swirl met her eye. “Marilyn?”
“The maid, master. She’s good at dusting because it’s in her special talent. I don’t know how cutie mark laws work, to be honest, but I do know that they have something to do with the fundamental nature of the pony in question. It’s not a question of magical application, master. It’s a question of minds, and beliefs, and fears, and hopes, and loves, and dreams. No amount of magic can do more than tap at the surface of that.”
Star Swirl regarded her with a strange expression. His mouth seemed to be clamped firmly shut beneath the beard, but his ears were twitching randomly, and his cheeks and eyes seemed to be wrestling with something below the surface.
“There are spells to control love and dreams,” he said slowly. “Those limits can be transcended, but with the right spells, of course.”
“That’s forbidden magic, master!”
“So you don’t deny it, then!” Star Swirl nearly knocked the desk over in his haste to point a hoof at her. “There is a way!”
“No, master. It’s superficial. The real nature of the pony remains untouched underneath.”
“Now you’re just making excuses.”
“I mean it, master.” Despite her trembling knees, Clover insisted on standing as tall as she could and didn’t look away. “You can make them behave as if they loved something, and you can make them have dreams, but you can’t change their real loves or their deepest dreams. What makes a pony special can’t be touched at all by magic.”
Star Swirl stared at her for a long time. His eyes were yellowed and pulsed with veins.
Eventually, he looked away and scanned the shelves for books. He stroked his chin thoughtfully. “I will prove you wrong, young foal. Heh,” he said in a mirthless voice, “I must say, this has been an unusually insightful discussion from you, hasn’t it? But I claim it again: I will prove you wrong!”
She didn’t like the way his eyes flashed when he looked at her.
For a brief moment, Clover felt herself on the cusp of something much more unpleasant than she was used to. It was as if a stranger had just appeared in Star Swirl’s place – no, as if someone she knew and didn’t like was there in his stead. He’d given her a look she didn’t like at all, with all the warmth of an iceberg closing in.
“Master?” she said.
“I’ve just had an idea.” Star Swirl turned to his shelves and began summoning books left and right. “Don’t you worry, my dear student. I think I can resolve this issue with ease later today. I will send the mareservant of the castle for you when I’m ready.”
“What about the spell you were trying –”
“I SAID I’LL SEND FOR YOU!”
She barely had time to register the glow of magic around her body before she hit the balustrade outside and the door slammed shut behind her.
Clover picked herself up and stared back at the oaken door, listening to the shuffling of hooves as Star Swirl readied his desk for studies.
Princess Platinum was right, she thought. He’s losing himself. If he’s trying to replace all the other tribes with unicorn magic, then who knows what other ideas he might develop? Who knows what he’ll experiment with next? I have to watch my master more closely.
She glared and punched her own forehead. Don’t you dare think that way, Clover! Whatever else he’s done, he’s still the brilliant mind you know and love. He's just... distracted. Ambitious. He'll snap out of it, I think.
She trotted down the corridor. There must be a way to help him. I wiped the last part of his Serpent Summons Spell, and he didn’t notice. If I recruit Marilyn in on this, then perhaps she can smuggle out his books for me to peruse. I only need to make sure he won’t do anything dangerous…
A distant door slammed.
Several hours passed.
From the doorway, a gruff, lowly voice said, “I think I have it. 'From one to another, another to one, a mark of one’s destiny'… Hmm... Yes... Now, what rhymes with ‘one’?”