The rising sun once again found itself at odds with a certain unicorn mare as it rose into its position in the sky. Somehow an errant ray of light was beaming straight through the windows of the sleeping car and straight into her eyes yet again. An intense battle of wills raged between the massive star and the unicorn too comfortable to move from her current position. Eventually, during a stroke of brilliance, Mayberry simply rolled over. Before she could congratulate herself on outsmarting the sun, the mare found herself falling off her bunk.
The Apple family was already up, rising before the sun having been ingrained into them during their foalhoods. Now the family was having a quick meeting on how they were going to start out the new cider operations and how soon they could get everything that was needed for cider production. For the most part, many wondered how quickly they could get things set up. The Brothers, Flim and Flam were noticeably absent from these discussions.
Hard Cider was in the middle of a long-winded lecture of the intricacies of cider making to his nephew, Braeburn, whose eyes were starting to glaze over partially from the old stallion going a little too in-depth and boredom when a loud crash resounded from the mare's section of the sleeping car. Grateful for any reason excuse himself from Hard Cider who didn't even notice his absence, ranting on at length about automation in cidermaking to a pole.
After a quick knock on the door to the mare's section, Braeburn stuck his head in and promptly had to suppress a fit of laughter. Two earth ponies, one tan mare and the other a light blue, were in the process of extracting a suitcase from a rather embarrassed Mayberry's horn which had punctured through to the other side of the case. Now, both of the earth ponies had a hoof on the unicorn's chest and pulling with their teeth in unison.
Braeburn, having guessed where this was going, smartly stepped to the side of the doorway as the suitcase suddenly came free. True to his guess, the three mares rocketed apart, the unicorn flying backwards to land upright on one of the beds. The two other mares were propelled backwards towards the doorway. The light blue mare found herself lying in the hallway with a bemused Braeburn who offered her a hoof up. "Ah was comin' to check and see if you ladies were up yet, but it seems rather unnecessary now. Breakfast should be arriving soon."
Back in the cabin, Mayberry was extracting herself from the pillow now impaled on her horn. The night before one of the twins had asked her if longer than average horns ran in the family. She'd no idea how to respond to that so she had merely suggested it had actually come from her mother's side. Then the Twins breached a subject she was fascinated by and yet simultaneously frightened by: magic.
Considering she had a horn, Mayberry figured that as a unicorn, she should have some magical abilities. Fleur and Fancypants had used it effortlessly when she had breakfast with them. The mare had wondered just how much unicorns could do with their magic. Fleur had mentioned that one of the Princesses had used it to banish her sister to the moon at one point. At any length, Flim and Flam had merely mentioned using magic to start up the machine. She wondered how exactly magic was used to run something like that. Was it similar to a boiler, utilizing magic to heat water instead of using fire to heat the engine?
The unicorn's stomach rumbled at her, reminding her she hadn't put anything in it since the night before. She'd had tried something called hayfries. The taste had been an experience in and of itself. It had smelled very similar to french-fries from back home and the taste was somewhat similar, however there was still the underlying taste of hay to the food. Surprisingly enough it tasted considerably better than the time she had some fall in her mouth as a kid during a Halloween Hay-ride. Mayberry attributed that to the fact that she probably had a taste and dietary needs more fit for an equine.
She trotted to the dining car to grab her some breakfast. On her way there, she glanced out one of the windows. The sun was well on its way to it's zenith. The trains path had taken them out of the mountains and into the valley the evening before. They'd passed through the rather large town of Ponyville just as everything was getting dark, so she had never gotten a good view of the place she had tried to escape too originally. Now the train was zipping past some wide-open plains of grass. Resuming her march to satisfy her stomach, Mayberry wondered what Appleloosa would be like.
Eventually, the cream-colored unicorn made her way to the dining car. She stopped with her magenta eyes wide open. The wooden car was filled with wooden tables with wooden benches for seating. Couple with the fact that the car was filled with fur-coated ponies with long tails made out of the same fibers, the dining cart looked like a pyromaniac's dream-come-true. This rather drastic observation would probably been overlooked if it wasn't for the twin monstrous stoves heated by fire merrily belching a fat column of smoke out through a chimney in the roof. As Mayberry watched, the smokestack's joints would occasionally release a tiny spurt of smoke into the air.
So distracted by the potential for disaster this particular wheeled firetrap posed, the mare almost missed what many of the ponies were eating. Eggs. Not a single piece bacon or sausage to be seen as some tiny part of her had held out for, though she briefly wondered if she asked for such if the ponies could really claim the moral high ground while they were eating the unborn offspring of chickens. Even so, her stomach wasn't relenting. It wanted something in it plant, animal or otherwise.
She faded into the back of the line without drawing any undue attention to herself. Even now, she couldn't bring herself to stop avoiding attention as much as possible. Some of the issue was even now, after several days of talking to and generally interacting with these ponies, who seemed nice enough, Amber couldn't bring herself to trust them. Through no fault of theirs, she admitted. It was mostly due to the fact she still felt at odds with this world. So many things were unnervingly similar to her world and yet so different. Not too mention she still immensely freaked out by her own body. Each time she had woken up, she had hoped she would be back home, but a look into a mirror or a simply at what should be hands dismissed that.
Eventually, the line progressed to the point Mayberry could go ahead and order a plate of eggs and an apple fritter. Grasping her plate with her teeth, which drew an odd look from the chef, she trotted over to an empty booth, which a group of Apple family mares had just vacated. Upon setting her plate on the table, the unicorn mare found herself in a bit of a conundrum. How do you eat food with no hands? The caramel apples had come on a stick, the hors d'oeuvres at the castle and the meal at Fancy and Fleur's mansion having been vacuumed down as quietly as possible when nopony was looking. Now she found herself in public once again and no idea how to act.
Studying her plate, Mayberry decided that apple fritters were probably the closest to finger food she could get. Her hoof hovering over a one of the fritters, a new thought came to mind that proceeded to complicate things even more; how does one eat by hoof when one has been walking around on them. Mayberry cast her eyes over the rest of the ponies in the car. Most simply ate by hoof as she was planning on doing. However, her fellow unicorns, Flim and Flam, ate using their telekinesis to manipulate their forks. Feeling embarrassed, she simply decided to go ahead and eat the fritters by hoof, cleanliness be damned. Next came her eggs. Aping the earth ponies once again, Mayberry simply used her horseshoes to pick up a fork and used it as she would as a human. She managed to hide her awkwardness due to lack of fingers by using her mane as a curtain. With her plate cleaned off and her stomach finally silenced, the mare trotted up the passenger car. Maybe she could brainstorm on what she could do once at Appleloosa.
Twilight Sparkle circled around her lab once again. She had contacted the council of the Silver Pinnacle at the tower the order was named for. An imposing yet graceful sight, the tower shone a blinding metallic silver in Celestia's sunlight, and sent dazzling reflections all over the nearby country side. The tower was located on the mountain range opposite from the range upon which Canterlot was perched. With the width of the valley nation of Equestria between her and her mentor, Twilight felt quite odd.
Her Princess has tasked her with finding out who was utilizing the power of one of the world's magical nexus to penetrate the magical field known as the Veil. The planet's natural magical field, as Sparkle came to understand it, is what created the Veil. It acted as both power source and barrier. To be able to break through it required excessive amounts of magical power and the end result of doing so utilizing conventional means would be both highly unstable and very short lived due to using magic to manipulate the very nature of magic. Eventually the spell work would either fall apart simply due to the staggering amounts of magic needed to maintain it or sometimes the very elusive and fae nature of magic itself would cause it to become unreliable. Spells require definition of what the caster desires to be the result to work. Magic, especially the raw untamed magics of the world, defied definition on many levels. Despite their many years of study, the true nature of magic was still far beyond even the most intelligent and powerful of unicorns.
Twilight Sparkle acknowledged this and yet, if what Princess Celestia had said was true, then they had a spell caster out there who could not only pierce the Veil, but establish an anchor in the other world as well. To do establish an anchor anywhere required time, meaning the spell piercing the Veil had to be stable and exceedingly powerful. So powerful, she suspected, that it had a direct tap into a nexus. Directly tapping a nexus for, while not forbidden, was still frowned upon due to the fact much was still not known about them and how interfering with them directly might interfere with the world.
"Still it might explain why nopony felt such a spell." She pondered aloud to her empty lab. Upon her arrival at the Silver Pinnacle, Twilight had tried to find out what she could about who was doing what experiments. Several unicorn mages were experimenting with the classical elements of Water and Fire. Earth and Air magics were still very much the domain of the earth ponies and pegasi respectively. That fact seemed to severely irk certain members of the council, to have certain aspects of magic shut off to them due to race. This did lead to several earth pony and pegasus volunteers that worked with them and allowed the mages to study just how their magics worked.
A few ponies of that research team still suggested seeing if they could get one of the Princesses, who could purportedly use the magics of all three races, so they could study how the magic's worked in unison with one another. However the Princesses' busy schedules disallowed that.
Twilight had gone all over the silvery tower looking for ponies and answers. None had heard of a spell of such proportions ever being done and a few had pointed out that they should have felt the magical emanations. That had been a point that Twilight couldn't dismiss. Some unicorns were so in tune to magic that they could actually feel when it was being cast. Twilight was one of them and was quite certain the Princesses were as well. The Silver Pinnacle had the largest amount of these magic-sensitive unicorns in its halls.
Twilight had pondered for several days after her aborted attempt to find out who was casting the spell. She kept coming back to the point that none of them had felt anything. Eventually the lavender unicorn figured that she didn't feel the magical resonance from the spell most likely due it being cast far more subtly than was commonplace.
Sparkle was in the middle of trying to recall which mages hadn't been in the tower when she visited when the sensation overtook her. The sensation she had described to Pinkie Pie several years back as a combination of brain freeze from eating too much icecream and a tooth ache centered in her horn. Someone was using magic and a lot of it if she could feel it over the ambient background resonances created by the nexus her lab was centered around. The sheer amount of magic going into it was staggering.
All around Equestria unicorns ceased what they were doing in astonishment. Some of the more sensitive ponies even whimpered at the sheer volume of magic that was being drawn upon. Princess Celestia was at a meeting when the sensation over took her like a tidal wave. The officials and representatives, who had ceased their bickering at the twinges of magical resonance, rushed to their Princess' side who seemed paralyzed by the force. The guards, finally having something to do, leapt to the Princess's side to ensure she had breathing space.
In another part of the castle, a midnight blue alicorn leapt from her bed, yelping in pain. The outburst was shortly followed by a pain-enduced tirade that made the bat-winged Night Guards, who had been rushing to her aid, back away from the door in shock. Glancing at each other, the guards knew that their efforts to shield their Princess from the more boorish ponies was completely unnecessary as it seemed she already knew every single word they had wanted to shield her from. In fact judging from the language Princess Luna now used, they were witness to a few choice words long lost to the sands of time.
Abruptly everything went quiet in the room. Worried that something may have befallen the Princess of the Night, the two guards rushed to open the door. No sooner had the doorknob clicked open, they heard a sharp intake of breath from the other side. Wide-eyed, the older pegasus looked at his compatriot.
"I'm regretting this already."
Back in the meeting room, Celestia had recovered mostly from the initial shock brought on by the magical resonance's assault on her horn.
"Thank you, everypony, for your touching concern for my well being. Despite the circumstances, I am feeling much better now." Celestia had barely had time to give everpony present a genuine and very broad smile when the shockwave hit.
"CELESTIAAAAA!"
The force was enough to blow all the assembled ponies clear off their hooves. Pegasi in the air reacted as if an invisible wall had struck them. To compound upon the chaos, the windows were blowing out all over the castle. Picking up her dazed subjects off the ground and depositing them back on their unstable hooves, Princess Celestia bid them a hasty farewell and dashed off towards her sister's tower. Half-galloping, half-gliding through the halls, Celestia found the closer she got to Luna's room , the worse the damage became. Windows had been blown out of their frames and royal servants had been picked up and deposited in a very dazed state.
Upon reaching Luna's tower, Celestia started to add parts of the castle's actual architecture to the list of casualties. The decorative stone columns that once graced the hallway to Princess Luna's private bedchamber now littered the opposite end of the hallway. Bits of broken wood and cloth were mixed into the debris, the force having ripped furniture and the dark blue banners depicting a crescent moon upon a field of stars, Luna's crest, from their places. Luna herself was in the hallway, tending to her two unconscious Night Guards. They seemed to be okay, however the armor that had once adorned their bodies now rested among the pile of debris at the other end of the hall. Celestia could only guess they were "lucky" enough to have witnessed the Royal Canterlot voice being used at full volume.
Trotting up to her sister, Celestia heaved a sigh of relief. Her head ached abominably from the ongoing resonances, but as much as she wanted to find out about it, her sister came first. Giving her sister a reassuring nuzzle, who jumped at the sudden touch, Celestia couldn't help but give a small smile. No matter what airs she gave herself, Luna would always be Luna to her. Luna looked up from her guards with an apologetic look upon her face.
"I'm…..I'm so sorry, Celestia. When I woke up thanks to that spell, I lost control of myself."
"It's not too bad. While it's important to maintain control, under these circumstances, I fully understand how it must have seemed." Celestia couldn't bring herself to be mad at her sister for this incident. Had their places been switched, Celestia could only prayed that Equestria came out unscorched.
Abruptly, the two sisters broke their embrace as the magical resonance reached its peak. Luna spoke first.
"A thousand bits that Twilight is at this moment, has figured what this spell is about?" She couldn't help flashing an impish grin at her sister.
Celestia stiffened at first, then relaxed. Wafting her wings about to clear some of the dust from the broken masonry, she shook her head. "I don't think she's that fast...two thousand that she'll have a theory in her next letter." Luna looked skeptical so Celestia added an amendment. "And that's if she sends the letter within the hour. Luna smirked and after brushing her now dusty ethereal mane away from her eyes with a hoof, she extended it. The Sister's horseshoes gave a small bell-like chime as they shook on it.
******************
Minutes before Twilight Sparkle was rushing about her lab. She needed to finish preparing to initiate her newest spell. It was to be her crowning achievement. Despite the circumstances, she couldn't help but add a little skip to her pace. Who knew her work would prove useful before she even showed it to the world? Everything set up and in place Twilight double-checked everything. Then with a flash of her horn, she set her newest spell in motion. Now to sit back and let the data flow in. Checking to make sure everything was working properly, which included making sure her own nexus was still stable, Twilight gathered her thoughts. Despite no real leads as to who was doing this, Twilight would now very soon how they were doing it, which in turn reveal to her the why. Time to write a letter.
"Dear Princess Celestia…."
AN: In this story unicorn's horns are more than just a way to cast magic. They in turn almost act like an ear, "listening" for when magic is being used. Review your hearts out, maties!