Darkest Before Dawn

by Sessalisk


Chapter 9

Darkest Before Dawn

by Sessalisk

Chapter Nine








It was four hours past sunrise and small mountain of books lay in front of the bed. Their subject matter varied widely, but they all had one thing in common.

She was going to be tested on them.

Twilight sat at the edge of the plush mattress, resting her chin on the fancy bedframe. Occasionally a book glowed and lifted into the air. She flipped through them zombie-like, not absorbing a single word. She sighed and rubbed a hoof over her bleary eyes.

Exams were four weeks away and there was so much to study, more than every other school year she’d ever had. Combined.

Better to cram now than later, Twilight told herself. She didn’t want to stay up the whole night before the exam and then fall asleep while she was being tested. It had happened before.

I can’t sleep anyway, she thought. She told herself she had insomnia. Her eyes felt awfully dry, though. She closed them for a moment to moisten them.


-Brrriiiing!- Brrriiiing!- The alarm clock ran shrilly.

“Urgghh...” She blinked her eyes open and noticed no change in the quality of light. There was a strange pressure on her horn. Oh no! Am I late? She had set her alarm clock to two in the afternoon. It shouldn’t be dark already. In fact... it shouldn’t be this dark ever.

Oh no... she thought. Am I blind?! Could too much studying do that?

There was a panicked flash of light from her horn and she yelped and fell backwards on to the bed - a light spell in the enclosed space of a textbook was very bright indeed. There was a thump as the heavy tome fell to the ground. It appeared that A Brief History of Royal Politics by the ancient pony scholar, Falada, had somehow ended up over her head before she’d dozed off earlier that morning.

Twilight levitated the fallen textbook off the floor. Her head moved slightly as she traced the book’s path through the air, and pain shot up the side of her neck. She rubbed the muscles with a hoof and realised just how stiff and sore they were. Her chin hurt a little too. She’d slept in an awkward position at the end of her bed, with her head propped up on the bedframe, and now she was paying for it.

For one, she realised as she tumbled off the springy mattress, her legs were asleep.

Twilight’s stomach complained loudly at her for skipping both breakfast and lunch. Dinner wasn’t for another four hours and lunchtime was over, but there were leftovers most days anyway. Without any further fuss, she made her way to the palace kitchens.

A green-maned earth pony was casually wiping down the skillets. Her coat was aquamarine, and her cutie mark was a bright blue flame. She looked bored.

“Hi Spirogyra,” Twilight said to the fry cook. “Is there anything left from lunch?”

“Just this stuff.” She gestured at a counter laden with covered dishes.

Twilight helped herself to a bowl of savory chestnut soup along with a serving of alfalfa sprouts and something the earth pony called “coleslaw”, though it was quite unlike any she’d had before and appeared to have been made from apples.

She went back to her room and was dismayed to find that, in the fifteen minutes that it had taken her to get food, the room had been cleaned and organised. There had been a system for those books, and now it was in disarray. On top of that, she knew most of the palace servants fairly well, and all of them by name. If she had nothing better to do, she would occasionally help them mop, or sweep; she usually enjoyed their company, and never felt like she was getting in the way like she did when she tried to help out in the kitchens. Whenever they tidied up her messes, she was always a little uncomfortable about it afterwards. It was a bit like having a bunch of good acquaintances who were obligated to pick up after her whenever she made a mess.

The books whizzed through the air as Twilight rearranged them into the proper order. Math, then history, then magic theory, then... Back in November, she’d made a number of fairly arbitrary reasons for the placement of each subject. Math first, because then she would have a clear and logical head when looking at history, practical magic last, because that was the most fun, but those were the only two reasons she really remembered.

When she was done she pulled Magic, the Basics from the stack and began to read, slurping at her soup as she studied.

“What is that awful noise?” a colt’s voice said from outside.

Twilight looked up from her book. “Huh?”

A white unicorn colt peeked his head through the open door. He had light blue eyes and his mane was the rich colour of honey. He looked a little older than her, but didn’t have a cutie mark.

The colt glanced at her mane and examined her cutie mark from where he stood. “Oh,” he said. “It’s you.

Twilight tilted her head to the side and tried to remember if she’d met him before. “Do I know you from somewhere?”

The colt made a noise of disdain. “You are Twilight Sparkle, a unicorn of Canterlot and the Princess’ catspaw. I know of you, although it is clear now that, even though you are in cahoots with the Princess, that you are still a commoner.” He nodded his head graciously. “You may call me Prince Blueblood.”

Twilight realised she’d just been called a tool, but that didn’t seem very important in the face of the much larger revelation. “Princess Celestia has a son?” she gasped. Shouldn’t he have wings too?

Prince Blueblood sniggered. “Yes...” he said to himself. “Definitely a commoner.”

Twilight narrowed her eyes. He could be pulling her leg. It wasn’t impossible that he was a visiting relative of one of the nobles. “How come I’ve never seen you before?” she asked.

“I am not a frequent visitor to the castle.” The way he said it was as if coming to Canterlot palace was a big step down from wherever he had been before. “My duties are elsewhere.”

Duties? “How old are you?” If he was really related to the Princess, then maybe he was a lot older than he looked. He could be seven hundred years old and trapped in a colt’s body.

“Old enough,” he said, with a sniff. He looked down at the soup she’d been drinking before he’d walked in. “And just a friendly tip - if you have a horn then it might not be in your best interests to eat like an ill-mannered earth pony.”

“Well I thought I was the only one here...” Twilight levitated her bowl of soup into the air along with a spoon. She scooped a little soup from the bowl and did her best imitation of a “dainty” bite. “Happy?”

The colt just blinked. “You can use magic whenever you want?”

Okay, now he was just mocking her. “Why don’t you just go away?” she said. “I have studying to do.”

Prince Blueblood puffed out his chest and pouted. “I am a prince and I will go where I please, when I please.”

A look of irritation crossed Twilight’s face, and she briefly considered yelling at him before she realised she could just make him go away. Her horn flickered as she lay a support of magic along the ground. She lifted Blueblood easily - he protested loudly and she felt him fighting back uselessly with his own power, attacking the bonds that held him rather than her - and placed him outside her room. “Bye,” she said to the shocked-looking colt as she closed and locked the door.

Well, he definitely wasn’t seven hundred years old. His magic had been half-formed and unfocused, like hers had been before she’d learned her first spell. It wouldn’t surprise her if he wasn’t aware that he was using any at all. She ignored the shouted insults coming from outside her door and she turned back to her theory book.

The difference between a mediocre magic user and a master is proper focus, she read.

“You insolent peasant-girl! My auntie will be hearing all about this!”

Auntie, Twilight thought. Now that was interesting. She took a purposefully-loud slurp of her chestnut soup and continued to study until he went away.


When the time came, Twilight reluctantly peeled herself away from her books to pack her bags and clean herself up for dinner. She dragged a brush through her mane and tail and made sure to get all the dirt and debris off her hooves and coat. By the time she got down to the dining hall, she would have to clean her hooves a second time, removing any grit that had gotten on them on the way. The degree to which aristocrat ponies fussed over mealtime hoof hygiene was almost absurd. With few exceptions, they were all unicorns; it wasn’t like any of them even ate with their hooves anyway.

She trotted through several ornate hallways and corridors and down one stairway to the large dining hall and found that the colt who had called himself Prince Blueblood was already seated at the Princess’ table. Beside him was a deep-chested stallion who Twilight could only assume was the colt’s father. The colt had an odd smile on his face as he saw Twilight approaching. It reminded her a little of an expression she’d heard about a cat who had just swallowed a canary.

Prince Blueblood didn’t say anything to her as she sat down. He just kept smiling infuriatingly. After a while, all the sounds of polite conversation went silent, which was how Twilight could usually tell that the Princess had arrived. There was a scuffling sound as chairs were pulled back and everypony stood.

“Twilight Sparkle.” Princess Celestia’s voice carried across the hall. “May I have a word?”

In response, some twitchy thing in Twilight’s chest sank down deep into her stomach. What made her think that it was a good idea to be rude to her nephew like that? Would she be banished? Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the colt’s smirk grow wider. The white stallion beside him looked a little puzzled, not seeming to know what was going on at all.

As the Princess lead Twilight into the hallway, her stomach filled with dread. Her mind raced with a thousand and one excuses that she could use to explain her behavior that afternoon. Would the Princess believe her if she said she had an evil doppelganger? What if she said she ate a bunch of snack cakes and the sugar made her aggressive? What if...

“I am not angry with you, Twilight Sparkle.”

Sometimes when grown ups said this, it meant that they actually were angry, but they wanted a proper confession before they started yelling. The times that this wasn’t the case, it usually meant that they were going to follow it up with, “I am just disappointed.”

Maybe if the Princess took pity on her, she might only be exiled for a year or two rather than her whole life. “I’m so sorry and I wasn’t sure he was your nephew and I didn’t even know you had any siblings and -”

The Princess grinned, and her eyes were full of mischief.

What sort of grown-up mind game was this?

The blank look on Twilight’s face must have said it all, because the Princess replied with, “My young nephew claimed that you spat upon his royal authority and nearly killed him with your magic. He claimed that he fought you off, horn and hoof, in order to escape and find me immediately. You must have used great and powerful magics in order to chase him all that time and not be detected by any of my guards. Those would some very impressive spells, indeed.”

Twilight blinked. “I-” Well clearly those were exaggerations, and some of it wasn’t even remotely true, and if she denied it she would be on the defensive and it would seem like she was even more guilty... and was that praise at the end? Why was the Princess smiling?

“During dinner I will give you a stern talking to,” said Princess Celestia. “And you should probably be very sad about it.”

Huh?

The Princess nodded. “Why yes, you should never have attacked my poor innocent nephew, who has not once in his life, embellished a story.”

But that wasn’t true, Twilight thought. That was the exact opposite of what had happened. He’d just - Ohhhhh. “I should be very sad about it, you say.”

“Yes,” the Princess said with a mock-disappointed shake of her head. “That was a terrible thing that had happened to my sweet and unfortunate nephew, and one should show the proper remorse. It is only fitting.”

“I see,” Twilight said, trying not to let the smile reach her mouth.

The two of them returned to the dining hall and sat down at the table. Princess Celestia scowled at Twilight. “You! My once-faithful student! You come into my home and attack my own flesh and blood? I should renounce you on the spot!”

“I didn’t meeeaaan toooooo! Boo hoo hoo -snerk- hooo...” Twilight’s body shook with silent laughter as she buried her face in her hooves. She could only hope that it was being interpreted as sobbing. “I made a mistake! I will never doooo it agaaaaiiiin! Waaahhh!”

“What shall I do with such a foul, murderous miscreant! Shall I banish you to the depths of the sea? Launch you in a flaming catapult across Equestria? Maybe the belly of a shoggoth is the only place where you belong!”

“Noooooo! Please forgive me, Princess! I will repent with my body and my soul and flagellate myself so hard that euglena will seem moderate in comparison!” Twilight peeked out over her hoof and saw that everypony was staring at them, and most were rolling their eyes, but Prince Blueblood looked extremely pleased with himself. “And every day I will sacrifice one of my ancestors to you!”

“Very well. You may live.” The Princess cackled, which sounded very strange coming from her. “For now.”

Many of the adults groaned. Prince Blueblood, however, seemed content with this, and his father continued to wear an expression of polite befuddlement. Twilight was beginning to wonder if the stallion had any other emotions in his repertoire.

With that, dinner was served, and the rest of the meal was conducted in relative peace. Between courses, the white colt would sometimes shoot Twilight smug sidelong glances, ones that she reciprocated with a sweet smile of her own. The whole thing really had been far less messy and nowhere near as painful as anything that had happened to her at the start of the school year. If only she had been lucky enough to have her classmates fabricate stories about her to the authorities rather than take matters into their own hooves.

There was still an hour of daylight after the meal had ended, but Twilight followed the Princess to the chamber where she did most of her paperwork anyway. A lot of it was simply signing go-aheads for minor projects, but occasionally there would be something that required a bit more thought. Princess Celestia always made sure to explain the relevance and infrastructure behind each document as she worked. Twilight found this trick rather impressive, since she found that it was a little difficult to simply read and listen to music at the same time. The only way she could explain away the Princess’ ability to simultaneously read through a thirty-six page document and give a coherent lecture about public sanitation was that magic had to be involved somehow.

“Is Prince Blueblood really your nephew?” Twilight said to her, once they were in the relative privacy of the office.

The Princess toted a large bundle of scrolls beside her, glowing softly yellow. “In a fashion.” She lay down on a carpet next to the fireplace and began sorting through the stack idly. “We are about fifty-or-so generations removed, and only on my mother’s side anyway.” An inkwell and a quill floated over from a shelf on the wall.

“I didn’t know you um... had a mother,” Twilight said as she sat down next to the Princess, a little further away from the roaring fireplace. It sure was odd keeping one of those in May, when the weather was balmy at its worst.

“Everypony has to come from somewhere.” The Princess’ quill made scratchy sounds on the parchment.

“How come...” Twilight wasn’t sure how to broach the subject gently and tactfully. “Prince Blueblood doesn’t have wings. The stallion beside him, if that was his dad... He didn’t have any either.” Maybe blunt could work too?

Princess Celestia chuckled. “Yes, that was his father at the table. We share some blood, but we are not very much alike. My ancestors were unicorns just like you or him.”

Then why are you different? Twilight wanted to ask. Why are you the only one? Is it your father? Who was he? What was he? But she said none of those things. Instead she said, “Why haven’t I met Blueblood before today?”

The Princess scribbled at the end of the scroll, a flourish Twilight had come to associate with her signature. “The circumstances are a little complicated, and I doubt you would be interested in a millennium of genealogy and family squabbles. The laypony’s version might be that the need for a hereditary ruling class is somewhat obsolete. Although the bloodline still remains, lines of succession and inheritance are no longer as important as they once were.” The scroll rolled itself up and floated over to a basket far away from the fireplace. A new scroll found itself in front of the Princess.

Twilight nodded, waiting for the Princess to go on. Conversations could be kind of slow when the Princess was working.

 “It wouldn’t be very good to have the entire royal family known as a bunch of layabouts, needless to say. Centuries ago, I gave the Blueblood line a stretch of land to rule as their own duchy - them working as dukes and duchesses under me while holding the title of prince and princesses. It is far from a perfect solution, but it seems to be the one that has worked the best over the years.”

“Oh, that explains what he meant when he said he had duties.”

The Princess looked up from her paperwork at this. “Surely not,” she said. “I will have to have a word with his father about that later. There should not be any duties more involved than fetching the tax return forms.”

“Why?” asked Twilight. “Is he um...” Perhaps there was a polite, or at least non-condemning way to say it. “Unfit to rule?”

The Princess shook her head. “He is young and arrogant.” It was almost imperceptible, and anypony who didn’t know her would not have recognised it, but her voice sounded strained. It was almost as if she was remembering something painful, and with a great effort of will, locking that memory away where she didn’t have to think about it. “But that will change, and that is not the issue. All royal heirs must passively observe rulings until they come of age, at which point they will be sent to study in Canterlot. Only after years of study and experience are they allowed to take on official duties of any import themselves. Laws change. Ponies change. Even traditions change. An isolated duchy running on antiquated traditions, hearsay and the whims of a child-ruler would be nothing short of a disaster in any organised country.”

Twilight didn’t know much about that, but she nodded anyway.

“Experience, the depth and breadth of it, is always the issue with new rulers,” she said simply. Princess Celestia looked apologetic as she returned to her work, as if she was sorry she couldn’t give the discussion her full attention.

“I didn’t mean to distract you so much,” Twilight said, aware that she had pulled the Princess away from something that she needed to do.

“That’s quite alright,” the Princess said kindly. “I do enjoy the occasional break.”

“What’s that you’re working on now?” Twilight asked.

“Plans to build an affordable housing complex near Canterlot University,” the Princess explained. “You see...”

Twilight spent the rest of the sunlit hours learning about municipal housing and earthquake hazard bylaws. It didn’t seem like it would be interesting, but Princess Celestia would occasionally pepper a dry bit of legalese or technical jargon with funny, and occasionally disturbing, anecdotes about why these things were so. Twilight learned that it was important that buildings weren’t erected near seismic faults, not just because of earthquakes, but because calydonian boars (among other things) loved denning in them. On one occasion, a two-acre construction zone had been trampled into mud and matchsticks, and the boar had only stopped because he had somehow gotten a water silo stuck over his head like an oversized bonnet.

When night fell, the time came for the lesson on tranquility, or whatever it was.

“You’re making good progress,” Princess Celestia said. “A calm body and a calm mind-”

“Make a stable groundwork for magic,” Twilight finished. She knew the idiom well. Ms. North Star quoted it constantly.

“Indeed.”

Twilight sighed, slightly irritably, as she closed her eyes to meditate. A big stack of books. Unread. Waiting for me to read them.

“Prepare yourself,” the Princess said, and Twilight felt the drumming of her own heart as magic coursed through her veins.


Twilight left early that night, as she did on all Sundays, and cantered her way back to school. She wondered if both... princes? was that the right term? Dukes? were going to be there on her next visit. She hoped not.

It was selfish of her, and she knew it, but she liked being the only kid at the palace. Being surrounded by grownups, ones who all knew her and were (mostly) nice to her made her feel a little grown up herself. She didn’t want to have to share that with another foal, especially a snotty one like Blueblood.

Twilight stopped by the kitchen floor before she went up to her room. It was one in the morning by then, but there were always at least three ponies on duty at all times. Surprisingly, the cafeteria was bustling with older students. There were twenty to thirty taller colts and fillies, seated in front of books and papers and diagrams. They passed around suspicious-looking thermoses, pouring dark liquids and sipping at them with unhappy grimaces.

“What’s in there?” Twilight asked a green filly.

The filly poured herself a little paper cup of the dark syrupy stuff and passed her thermos to a nearby colt. She levitated the cup next to her lips, and knocked the drink back so fast that it seemed as if she didn’t want to taste it at all. “Death Tea,” she replied. Underneath the filly’s left eye, there was a tiny muscle spasm.

“What’s that?”

“You steep a pound of tea leaves in enough water to make a single pot of tea. The stuff you get, you can’t rightly call ‘tea’, ‘coz it’s blacker than death itsellf.”

Twilight made a face. “Blech! That sounds bitter.”

“It is,” said the filly. “Tha’s why you add an equal volume of sugar.” The filly’s eyes kept darting to a table nearby, one where a number of other students were studying... and twitching.

Twilight nodded and let her get back to her books.

“Pass the espresso, Tisamenus,” somepony said behind her.

Isn’t caffeine teratogenic?

The opposite problem was generally what plagued Twilight on Sunday nights. Try as she might, she wouldn’t be able to sleep until well-after sunrise, and by then, she would be nodding off in her classes. The Princess had given Twilight an old folk remedy, one that she had initially suspected of working on placebo alone.

As soon as she got back to school after her lessons, Twilight would have a big bowl of hot oatmeal with sliced bananas and almonds and then chase it down with a glass of warm milk and another of chamomile tea. It was weird, and she hadn’t expected it to work, but for some reason it would put her out like a light.

Strawberry Phrase, the night cook, already had a pot of oatmeal on the stove. “Hi, there, Twilight,” she said. “The usual?”

“Yes, please.”

Twilight ate quickly and returned to her room, only bothering to set her alarm clock and brush her teeth before she crawled into bed. She was asleep as soon as her head touched the pillow.


Monday progressed as usual, but in Language Arts on Tuesday, something odd happened. Twilight looked up from her notes on synecdoche and saw that the pencil in front of Rune was scratching at the paper in slow and ponderous strokes. This would normally not be any sort of news, but today, the orange filly wasn’t actually touching her writing implement. The pencil glowed. Twilight noticed that several of her classmates were staring too.

She’s got her magic back too?

“Good job, Rune!” Ms. Lida said, cutting herself off mid-lecture and startling the filly.

Rune’s pencil hit the floor with a clink. After a while, it became clear that she wasn’t going to pick it back up.

Beside her, Echelle’s horn glowed and the pencil floated back to Rune’s desk. Everypony was watching, but neither of them said anything.

Ms. Lida was silent for a moment, then went back to talking about how figures of speech worked in poetry and prose. She stammered slightly as she spoke, and did not make eye contact with anypony.

Echelle whispered something to Rune, which Ms. Lida very obviously ignored. The orange filly made the slightest of nods at whatever Echelle was saying to her. She held her pencil once again, this time without magic, and began to write.

Twilight didn’t bother asking Rune about it. Experience had taught her that the only answer she would get was silence. Instead, she went to Echelle.

The lesson ended and Elsie waved goodbye to Echelle as she went off to her next class.

Twilight looked at the grey filly. “What was that all about?”

Next to Echelle stood Rune, not saying anything. It seemed like the two of them were planning to walk the same way to Practical Application. The tall orange filly stared dispassionately at both Twilight and Echelle. “I forgot something,” she said. “You go ahead.”

“I’ll save you a seat!” Echelle called out to the retreating orange figure. She turned to Twilight. “Could you please be a little more sensitive next time? It’s bad enough Ms. Lida called her out in the middle of class.”

Twilight didn’t really understand what she’d done that was insensitive, but her apology was almost automatic. “Sorry, I-”

Echelle shook her head. “It’s not me you should be apologising to.” She took off her glasses, polished them on the side of her vest, and sighed. “There are four weeks left,” she said. “Four.” She was silent for a moment. “She needs to learn a year’s worth of magic or she’s going to get held back again.”

So that confirmed it. Rune really had failed a bunch of times. Twilight wondered how many of the older fillies and colts she’d seen cramming on caffeine highs the night before had been her classmates once.

Echelle must have misinterpreted the look on Twilight’s face. “Do you remember how lonely and homesick you were at the start of the year before you knew anypony?” she said. “Can you imagine if it was like that every year? If it happened to...” The grey filly trailed off, looking reluctant to finish that thought.

“I guess,” Twilight replied, not sure what to say to that. “Have you tried asking a teacher for help?”

“They won’t do anything,” Echelle said. “They don’t even want to talk about it. I don’t know why, since I-” She stopped herself mid-sentence, looking shy all of a sudden.

“Huh?”

“Well... It should be okay to tell you, considering that... um...” Echelle lowered her voice to a whisper. She glanced around to see if anypony was listening. “I... go for extra help all the time.” The way she said it, it was as if this was equivalent to having an embarrassing social disease. Twilight had read the phrase in a book once, and wondered what kind of disease it referred to... Leprosy most likely. Logorrhea?

“That’s weird,” Twilight said as their classroom came into sight. She realised what her words might imply about a second after she said them. “Um... Weird that they won’t help, not that you... Not that it’s anything to be ashamed of.”

Echelle looked immensely relieved. “I’m glad you understand.”

Twilight didn’t. Not really. Still, this was far more than anypony else had told her about the whole thing.

They walked into the classroom and sat a few seats away from each other, waiting for the teacher to show up.

“Maybe there’s a rule about it, that you can’t ask teachers for help for other students?” Twilight guessed. She had combed through the student’s handbook several times and was well-aware that there was no such rule. Still, it could be one of those unwritten rules, like don’t make loud noises when others are sleeping, don’t destroy valuable things, or don’t eat your grandparents.

“That would make the most sense.”

There was the clip-clop of hooves as Rune walked in from the hallway and sat down next to Echelle.

“The weather’s been nice, hasn’t it?” Twilight said.

“Yeah,” the grey filly replied. “Not much rain or anything.”

There was an awkward silence. Demise and Ace walked into class together, chatting amicably.

“Yeah.”

It was a relief when Mrs. Londsdaleite arrived and the lesson started.


Most of the students in magic kindergarten seemed to take the upcoming exams in stride. Not even Gingersnap was panicking. Echelle looked more and more worried every day, but Twilight knew now, that it wasn’t for herself.

Twilight’s own lessons with the Princess seemed to be stagnating. She could bite down on any panic attack in a little over a minute, but that seemed to be the limit of it. She wondered if this was the extent to which it was possible to control her magic without reaching this harmony thing.

She’d given it a lot of thought, both during the week, and her time at the palace, trying to figure out what would allow her to achieve inner peace. Under her bed was a long list of all the most peaceful things she could think of: classical music, that fuzzy feeling before she fell asleep, hot cocoa, baby bunnies... and she still couldn’t really think of anything that was more peaceful than studying. The best solution she could think of was to drink hot cocoa during her lessons with the Princess and fall asleep while baby bunnies crooned Beat Hoofen to her, and this seemed even less like the correct answer.

Nopony had ever told her that meditation was so hard.

Two weeks from exams, most classes stopped teaching anything new in favour of reviewing everything that had already been learned.

“What is important when confronting any new danger?” Mrs. Lonsdaleite asked the class.

There was a long and drawn out argument between Gingersnap and Nightbreaker about exactly what all these things were. It ended in Mrs. Lonsdaleite chastising both of them.

The teacher told them that the exams would be different from what they were used to, that they would all be given separate exams at different times. Twilight figured that there must have been issues with cheating in the past. An exam schedule signup was passed around the classroom, and by the time the sheet reached Twilight, all the afternoon slots were taken. She sighed mentally and wrote her name down for the earliest timeslot. It’s not like this was one of those exams you could study for, so there was really no point in postponing it.

After lunch, Notation, Reading and Casting was frustrating.

“Sir, what’s going to be on the exam?” Tambourine asked Jazz straight out.

“A bunch of spells. They’re gonna be in glyph thingies.”

“Which spells?” said Enigma.

Jazz stared off into the distance, as if he was trying to recall them. “Ones you probably don’t know, I think.”

“But what kind of spells would those be?” the white colt said patiently.

“Oh, that’s easy. Hard ones, obscure ones-”

Tsunami spoke before the teacher had finished talking. “What are the names of the spells?”

There was a horrible silence after Jazz rattled off a long list of them. The few that Twilight recognised were all notoriously difficult. One of them was infamous for involving an infinite loop of commands that would theoretically take forever to complete.

Twilight had missed winter exams because she couldn’t use magic, but from her classmates she knew that they had been given several very simple (and obscure) spells to cast. All the instructions had been written in glyphs, and they had been graded on how well they had performed.

“We’re in magic kindergarten. There’s no way we can cast any of those.” Tsunami stared at the teacher in disbelief. “Are you messing with us?”

“Nah,” said Jazz. “Those’ll all be on your test.”

Across the classroom, Twilight saw Nightbreaker frown. “Can you cast any of them?” he said to the teacher.

“Nope.”

Several students groaned.

There had to be some sort of test within the test, a sort of puzzle. “Is this one of those tests that’s a secret test of character?” Twilight asked. Jazz had mentioned the Shiseisai spell, which, if successful, would kill everypony in a fifty foot radius, including the caster. There was absolutely no way that would be required on any legitimate exam. Perhaps they were expected to refuse to participate?

“No...” Jazz said, a confused look crossing his features. “That would be kind of a bad way to write a magic exam, wouldn’t it?”

“Could you at least show us how to do them?” Nightbreaker said.

“I would,” said Jazz, “but I don’t know how, myself. They’re pretty hard.”

There were several sighs across the classroom.

After that pointless lesson, Twilight walked down the hallway to the last class of the day, Control and Practical Precision. Ms. North Star was already there, surrounded by an incredible amount of paraphernalia, mostly food from the looks of it. There were bags of rice, sacks of potatoes, big balls of sticky dough, and a small basket of tomatoes.

Twilight suspected that the kitchens received about half their labour from Ms. North Star’s students. Throughout the class, she noticed that even though Echelle wasn’t there to encourage her, Rune was still making an effort to work on some of the exercises that Ms. North Star had given them.

Ms. North Star walked up and down the class, correcting her students’ techniques whenever she noticed a flaw.

Twilight pounded at a lump of dough, smacking it with brute force rather than any kind of finesse.

“You’ve definitely got some ‘muscle’ behind your magic there, Twilight, but that dough hasn’t done anything to deserve a beating.” Smiling, Ms. North Star picked up another blob and kneaded it gently on a desk with her own magic. “Push, fold, lift. Imagine that there are a lot of elastic bands in there that need to be gently stretched out or they’ll snap. It’s easy if you try.”

Twilight nodded and mimicked the teacher’s actions.

When the pinkish-purple mare got around to Rune, she stopped again. Twilight watched them from the corner of her eye.

A sharp knife bobbed in the air above a tomato, like a dippy bird over a glass of water. The knife’s movements were both very timid, and almost random. It missed constantly, clacking lightly against the wooden cutting board or stopping short of touching anything. Also, despite the sharpness of the blade, none of the rising or falling motions were forceful enough to actually cut through the tomato. The odd time Rune delivered a glancing blow, the knife would bounce off harmlessly, scoring maybe a nick.

“Uh,” said the teacher, sounding at a loss for words. “Just one good chop should do it. You don’t need to be afraid of the knife.”

Rune glanced up at the teacher. “That’s not wha...” She looked at her hooves. “Sorry.”

“Nothing to be sorry about.”

The orange filly blinked a couple of times, and brought the knife very slowly and carefully down on the tomato, almost squishing it in the process of cutting it in half.

North Star nodded approvingly. “Much better.” She moved on.

On the other side of the classroom, a yellow colt demonstrated that he could peel a dozen potatoes while rinsing rice at the same time.

“Well done, Lexicus,” the teacher told him. “But you should try to practice something that you find difficult. Challenge yourself.”

“But these are all elementary exercises.”

Show off, thought Twilight.

“Hm...” In one fluid motion, Ms. North Star levitated a large handkerchief out of her desk and tied it over his eyes. “How about now?”

All of the things that had been hovering under the power of Lexicus’ magic still floated. However, he didn’t do anything with them. The classroom’s tap continued to run, the water in the rice pot overflowing. Twelve vegetable peelers bobbed aimlessly in the air, right beside twelve potatoes. “I can’t determine the location of anything,” he grumbled.

“That’s the point,” said the teacher, as she turned off the water. “Now try peeling one potato.”

Eleven half-peeled spuds and vegetable peelers clattered to the ground and Lexicus grumbled under his breath.

Twilight watched him as she kneaded her dough.

Earth ponies and pegasi didn’t realise it, she thought, but using magic to do things wasn’t quite the same as using your body. Non-magic users always took it for granted that they could feel when objects they were holding touched something else. It was very important that unicorns could see and hear what they were doing, because they didn’t get any of that when they were using levitation spells. If she closed her eyes and concentrated, she could sometimes feel the relationship between whatever she was magicking at the time and the distance between it and anything around it. She’d learned in Mr. Yorsets’ class that this ability was something only unicorns had, similar to an ordinary sense called proprioception.

Lexicus spun the potato in a smooth and efficient motion, one that would have removed the skin in less than five seconds... had it been anywhere near the vegetable peeler. Twilight couldn’t help but giggle.

“Shut up!” he said. “I’d like to see you try.”

Wow, thought Twilight. He must have been really upset. Normally he would have said something like, “If one can’t express his or her amusement in silence, one should demonstrate that his or her talents are sufficiently advanced to invoke any sort of derision at all. I like using lots of big words. Blah blah blah.”

After class wrapped up, Twilight apologised to Lexicus, not wanting to have any bad blood between them. “I wasn’t trying to make fun of you,” she said. “I’m sorry if I accidentally insulted you.”

Lexicus sniffed. “Apology accepted,” he said stiffly.

Diplomacy, thought Twilight. The Princess would approve.

The next day, in Physical and Mental Education, there was an elaborate obstacle course set up by the time Twilight arrived. It had slides and tunnels, and looked like it might actually be pretty fun to play in on a more casual occasion. Ms. Marie stood off to the side of the field, counting and sorting rocks.

Rocks, rocks, rocks... Didn’t the beige mare ever get tired of doing things with them?

When the whole class had assembled, they moved on to their usual routine, running through the obstacle course with a large stone in tow. In front of Twilight, Rune carried a very small one, only about the size of her head. For some reason, Ms. Marie said nothing about this as she chased after them.

At the class’ halfway point, she stopped the exercise. “You have some tests coming up,” the mare said. “From the looks of all your sorry hides, you’ll be back in magic kindergarten again come September.” All the rocks drew in towards her, like bits of metal to a strong magnet. Her own boulder crashed into them and the rocks began to melt into each other.

Twilight had the sense that the heat convection should have literally cooked them where they stood, but the molten rock just reshaped itself harmlessly into an enormous black lump, as big as all the smaller rocks combined. It shone in the sun, much glossier than any of their practice rocks had been.

“This,” said the teacher, “is your test. You have to pick it up, three feet. I don’t care how. Then put it back down.”

“That’s it?” somepony said. Twilight turned around to see who had said it, but she couldn’t tell. She noticed that Malachite was, suicidally, whispering something to Pebbly Crunch.

“That, and thirty laps around the track.”

There was a collective sigh.

For the rest of the class, everypony took turns trying to lift the giant black rock.

Lexicus went first. He took a few steps back and lowered his head. There was a blinding white flash that forced Twilight to shield her eyes with a hoof. When the light died down she could see that the yellow colt’s face had turned a funny orange colour. His cheeks were puffed out and there was an intense look of concentration on his face, but the rock hadn’t so much as budged an inch. Muttering to himself, he walked away from the rock and plopped down on the grass with a frustrated sigh.

Elsie nudged Rune forward with her muzzle. The tall filly half-stumbled towards the rock, looking at it once, then looking back at the ground. She took a deep breath and closed her eyes. Rune’s horn glimmered weakly, but absolutely nothing happened. Looking back at Elsie she said, “I don’t think...”

Elsie charged, horn aglow. The dark blue filly ran smack into the shiny black rock, making it wobble slightly. “Stupid rock!” Elsie rubbed her horn with a hoof, having collided into it head on. She bucked the giant stone several times, which made loud thwack sounds, but this was even less effective than charging it. “Kapow!” she said to Rune. “Give it a try!”

“Um... No thanks.”

“You have to!” Elsie said, sounding determined.

The space around Rune seemed to waver slightly, and the filly was forcefully propelled towards the rock, one forehoof extended.  “W-what are you doing?”

“You hafta show that rock who’s boss,” Elsie told her.

Pebbly Crunch grinned. “Yeah! Do it”

Off to the side, Ms. Marie didn’t seem to care that any of this was going on. She was totally engrossed in some sort of spreadsheet. The mare didn’t even look up at them.

Eyes clenched shut, Rune’s hoof tapped lightly against the rock. She opened one eye slowly, while keeping the other closed, peeking nervously at the rock. It was almost like she expected it to bite her if she looked at it directly. “Is it... my employee now?”

Elsie sighed. “Yeah... Good enough.”

Tsunami had more success. The glassy thing wiggled a little when it was his turn, and it looked almost like it might have even tipped over; but before that could happen, the colt’s knees gave out and his forelegs went out from under him. “Can’t... *huff* do it... Too *huff* big.”

“This is how it’s done,” said Pebbly Crunch, once Tsunami had gotten out of the way. The magenta colt flicked his head casually. Nothing happened. “I said. This is how it’s done.”

“Oh, right,” said Malachite, as the air around his horn began to sparkle.

The rock glowed vibrantly and lifted almost a foot into the air.

Suddenly there was a loud crack as the huge black boulder split down the middle. “How many of you do you think will be allowed to take this test at a time?” hissed the teacher.

“I thought you said it doesn’t matter how we do it...” Malachite said with a squeak.

“You know what I meant!”

The two halves of the rock merged into each other, bubbling and shifting, dripping, writhing. This time, Twilight could feel the heat, like opening an oven door.

When the new rock lost its red glow, Twilight stared at the thing filled with an emotion that bordered between fear and disgust. Jagged tendrils jutted out at odd angles, and iridescent globules of black stone clustered together, giving off the appearance of dark tumours. Out of some sick sense of humour, Ms. Marie had given the rock a face, a twisted, nightmarish thing, flat and eyeless, filled with rows of curving, inequine fangs.

The new rock looked evil.

“Okay,” the teacher said casually. “Get back to work.”

Twilight looked up at the cancerous effigy and looked away just as quickly. It was irrational to be afraid. The sun was shining, she was surrounded by her classmates and this was just a big rock. There was nothing to fear, she told herself. It was just a rock.

She felt for the rock with her magic and upon finding it, recoiled slightly. Even without staring directly at it, the big rock gave off a distinctly sinister aura. Gritting her teeth, she spread a network of concentric circles around her, bracing herself against the ground. She wrapped her magic around the rock and pulled.

There were several gasps.

The creepy rock inched itself into the sky and Twilight almost let out a whoop of triumph. She craned her neck and tilted her head back to see exactly how well she was doing. This turned out to be a mistake.

An empty face grinned back at her, one that had far too many teeth. Even though there were no eyes, she couldn’t help but feel like it was staring into her, like it knew things, secrets, about her that nopony else knew. Twilight whimpered as she pulled all her magic inwards, toward herself and away from the... thing.

It slipped from her grasp and slid down towards the earth.

The ground shook, the vibrations travelling up Twilight’s legs and into her bones. Woozily, she staggered away, as far away as she could get. “Y-y-your turn, Tambourine...” she said.

Tambourine took one look at it and bit her lip. “Can I pass?” she said to nopony in particular.

“No,” said Lexicus, giving the dark stone a very critical eye. It would have been him again next (assuming Malachite and Pebbly Crunch’s stunt had counted as one attempt).

Tambourine looked away and closed her eyes for good measure. Her horn glowed.


The days passed by quickly and Twilight found herself getting by with less and less sleep. A week from the exams, she sometimes had only four hours a night. She knew the material well, but she had to be absolutely sure. There was nothing worse than floundering on an easy answer, forgotten or overlooked at the last moment.

From the looks of it, she wasn’t the only one who was going sleepless. Most of the older students were all but zombies, running on caffeine, magic and fear; if they had been earth ponies or pegasi, they probably would have dropped dead of heart attacks ages ago.

The week before exams were scheduled, all classes were cancelled and everypony was given nothing but free study blocks until the time came to be tested.

As nervous and sleepless as Twilight was, she was glad that she hadn’t snapped. A senior student, a lime-green colt, ran through the hallway. He wore no uniform and his face was wrapped up in several neckties. It was a miracle in itself that he didn’t crash into anything or fall down the stairs. As he galloped he shouted, “Eureka! I’m naked! I’m naked! We’re all naked!”

Twilight looked down at the uniform she was wearing. “No I’m not!” she said back to him, but it didn’t seem like he heard.

On the other hoof, some of her classmates had taken to “worshipping” Ms. Marie’s demon rock. Sky, Nightbreaker and Enigma had created some sort of cult called the Stable of Darkness, where the three of them would prance around the rock during their breaks, singing songs and giving sermons containing nothing but cringeworthy geology puns.

“Our souls, once on a rock-solid firmament,” said Enigma as he bowed deeply to the monstrosity, “have eroded into a fine alluvium. They are full of fault. Please excavate us, oh Mighty Boo. Our souls are for shale.”

Twilight had taken to practicing any bigger and more destructive spells outdoors, but it was hard to concentrate when her classmates started singing What is the Opposite of Gneiss?. Ms. Marie’s rock still made her uneasy, but now whenever she looked at it, she thought of all those awful geology puns. She couldn’t help but smile a little.

Twilight made sure to have a good night’s sleep before her first test on Wednesday, the first full night’s sleep she had in almost a month.

As she walked into the classroom for her Practical Application exam, her stomach felt like she’d swallowed a tap-dancing carrot. She was ten minutes early, but it looked like everypony was already there, ready and waiting.

A panel of her teachers sat at the back, which included Mrs. Lonsdaleite, of course, Ms. North Star, Jazz, and Mr. Yorsets. They carried clipboards and wore deadpan expressions on their faces. Even Jazz looked serious.

“Um... Is this a written?” Twilight asked as she looked around for anything that resembled test papers.

Mrs. Lonsdaleite looked down at her dispassionately. “A practical,” she said. “Let us know when you are ready.”

“Now I gu-”

The room shimmered and Twilight felt an itchy, tingly sensation deep within her bones and underneath her skin. The walls around her warped, becoming brown and muddy-looking. A rich, earthy scent filled her nostrils and her own breathing echoed strangely in the room, some trick with the acoustics making the space seem smaller. Twilight peered at the walls more closely and saw that they were made of mud.

“Your objective is to get out of this hole,” Mrs. Lonsdaleite’s voice said. “You have twenty minutes.”

Hole? thought Twilight. She looked up and twenty feet above her, she saw that there was no roof, only open sky. Oh.

She looked around, taking in her new surroundings. Dirt, rocks, more mud. Some sticks... There was nothing she could use as a tool.

Not having anything better to try, she ran up against the walls, wondering if maybe she would just pass through. Her hooves scrabbled uselessly at the dirt, not getting any traction. It felt just like real dirt, she realised, and when she looked at her hooves, they had actually gotten muddy. Whatever this was, it was very realistic.

Twilight closed her eyes and tried to map out her new situation with her magic, and reeled back instantly. While the room looked, felt, smelled, sounded and probably tasted (although she wasn’t too interested in testing this theory out) like a real hole in the dirt, the magical shape of the room was still exactly as it had been. It made her head spin to think of it.

 “Okay,” she said to herself more than anypony. “I can do this.”

“Five minutes have elapsed,” said Mrs. Lonsdaleite’s voice. “Fifteen minutes remain.”

Eeee! The time limit! Don’t panic... Don’t panic...

What could she do? This was just a hole. There was nothing to use. She looked down at her hooves, caked with mud and wished that she had at least a towel to wipe them off or something. She wondered if she had brought one, or anything for that matter, with her, if she would have been allowed to keep it for the duration of this... simulation? Maybe I could have made a rope out of it too, she thought.

Twilight considered that option for a moment. As she peered up at the edges of the hole, she saw that there would have been nothing to tie the rope to anyway, even assuming she was physically fit enough to hoist herself up with her teeth and the traction of the wall alone. No... She would need a stairway or a ramp of some sort, but that was silly, there was nothing to make a stairway or ramp out of except...

Don’t discount the obvious solution.

The answer had been staring at her right in the face. She felt the urge to smack herself in the forehead, but with all the mud on her hooves, that might not have been the best idea.

She reached out for the edge of the pit with her magic, and was disconcerted to find absolutely nothing there, nothing she could grab ahold of anyway. The illusion of mud didn’t extend to the sort of... conceptual space that magic existed in.

“Am I not supposed to use magic?” Twilight said out loud. Maybe the whole setup was so that she would learn how to do things like an earth pony - as if she hadn’t been subjected to that enough.

Mrs. Lonsdaleite’s voice boomed from everywhere at once. “You may use whatever tools are at your disposal.”

This is hopeless, Twilight thought. How am I supposed to get out of this pit with no tools, no wings and no magic. 

“Ten minutes have elapsed. You have ten minutes remaining.”

“Ugh!” Out of frustration, Twilight closed her eyes and extended her senses to feel the threads of the spell she was under. She ran the tendrils of her own magic against the ley lines of the illusion, or whatever this was, tracing the pathways back to a section of the room that was curiously empty - shielded, perhaps.

Maybe undoing the spell counted as escaping the pit. It would certainly be thinking outside the box at least.

She tried to unravel the threads of the spell, picking it apart thread-by-thread, but there were so many, and she didn’t even know where to start. She wondered if this was how Blueblood had felt when she’d lifted him up like a rag doll. This was seriously advanced magic.

Suddenly, she had a stroke of inspiration. Twilight undid her vest and pushed it against the sides of the pit with a levitation spell. She knew somehow, that nothing had changed, but in front of her, the shirt pressed up against the wall of dirt, mussing it.

“Ah.” So it wasn’t that she couldn’t use magic at all, just that she couldn’t use it to affect her surroundings directly.

Twilight straightened out her vest, making the structure rigid and reinforcing it with her own magic.

“Fifteen minutes have elapsed. Five minutes remain.”

Better hurry then, she thought. Twilight used her reinforced vest as a shovel, dislodging and moving enormous clumps of dirt, starting from the very edges of the pit.

“Four minutes remain.”

A pathway cleared itself in front of her and she walked up and out, into the sunlight.

Her surroundings dissolved.

Mrs. Lonsdaleite scribbled something on to her clipboard. “Well done, Miss Sparkle. If a little slow.”

Twilight looked down at her hooves - they were clean. Even her vest was dirt-free. “What was that spell?” she asked.

“Something we all put together, with a little help from the Princess. It was not one spell, but many.”

“I did the sound effects!” said Jazz. “I mean...” He composed his face to look disinterested. “Indeed.”

“But what was the point?” Twilight said. “When am I ever going to be put into another situation like that, one where I can’t use magic except in very specific ways?”

“For the sake of an exam,” Mrs. Lonsdalite said simply. Her face was as still as a frozen lake. “If it were an ordinary pit, you would have dug your way out immediately. You would not have used any critical or lateral thinking.”

“Oh.” She wondered if all of her classmates would be put in holes, or if they would all be under the effects of some magical simulation thingy.

“When you leave, please tell Gingersnap that she may come in.”


Later that evening there was a history exam, one that wasn’t as... in depth as Twilight had been lead to expect. She didn’t even need to know the birth dates of Starswirl the Bearded’s fifth cousins! Even though they were mentioned in a footnote in one of the supplementary textbooks! No wonder her classmates hadn’t been bothered about studying for this one.

A few weeks ago she’d found out that the senior students weren’t given any tests at all. At the time it had struck her as very strange, maybe even ominous. How else were you supposed to finish a school year... she thought, or even just school, except with an exam?

Still, they all congregated in the cafeteria, never seeming to leave. In the past couple of weeks, Twilight had gotten into the habit of eating her meals in the dining hall, if only to listen to the older students bickering amongst themselves about immagic disruption and vorpal interference. While they downed truly staggering amounts of caffeinated beverages, they discussed cutting-edge magical theory and complex math. It was fascinating (even if she didn’t understand half of it), and Twilight would occasionally take notes on anything interesting that they said, making a list of things to look up on her next trip to the library.

Despite her obvious eavesdropping, none of them seemed to care that she was there, ignoring her unless she spoke to them directly. After a very annoyed response when she’d asked one too many questions, Twilight learned that they were more likely to tolerate her if she listened passively.

She had also learned that all this discussion and planning was for their end of the year project, a collaborative addition to the school’s magic system. Most of the current trouble seemed to come from the fact that there were centuries worth of spells inside the school’s walls. Many of them were faded or fraying, and weaving a new spell into this increasingly-convoluted network was extremely problematic. If there were any errors, even tiny ones, it could prove to be fatal: one wrong spell, and the school might melt, stop working or even vanish in a puff of illogic. Every little detail and equation had to be n-tuple checked for mistakes, n being the amount of times anypony could look at it until they screamed and tore their hair out.

Twilight knew this because she had seen Persnickety, an indigo-coloured colt in the fourth year. His cutie mark was a magnifying glass, and he was notorious for being extremely meticulous about everything. Consequently, he had been designated as the group’s spellcheck. In the last few weeks he had increasingly large chunks of his mane missing.

Twilight wondered what her own class would be doing, if they ever got to that point. The senior students were so stressed that she really wished she could’ve helped out somehow, but she simply couldn’t keep up with whatever they were doing. On top of that, she had her own studies to worry about.

Thursday’s first exam was a little like attending an ordinary Magical and Physical Education class, but with twice as many students. Like Twilight’s first exam, there was a panel of four teachers, one which included Ms. Marie. It was unsettling how the beige mare was so calm for this. She was usually only this composed before she did something terrible.

Echelle stood in front of the rock, not quite looking at it. “Could you please make it a different shape?” she said to the teachers. “Um... Law of con- consternation of mass or something. It’ll be the same weight... right?”

The other teachers (Mr. Benoit, a dark grey mare Twilight didn’t recognize, and Mrs. Lonsdaleite) all looked to Ms. Marie. Their expressions said nothing, but their hesitation to respond made it clear that she was the authority here.

“No.”

The grey filly didn’t say anything to that. She just took off her glasses, folded them, and put them into her pocket.

It took Twilight a moment to realise that, without her glasses on, Echelle probably couldn’t make out any of the more horrifying details. The black statue was most likely just a fuzzy and indistinct blur to her now. Lucky, she thought. Why can’t I have bad vision too?

Echelle lowered her head and all the muscles in her body seemed to tense. The rock rose slowly in the air - very slowly. It was hard to tell that it was moving at all, and after about two feet and ten minutes, Ms. Marie told her, “Good enough.”

Her other classmates had much less difficulty with this last step, although most of them never looked directly at the dark, glassy thing. Over the past few weeks, Twilight had watched them grow much better when it came to this simple type of levitation.

Nightbreaker, however, had brought a large suitcase with him. When it came time for his turn, he didn’t seem to be phased by the rock at all. He pulled out several sturdy-looking metal rods and supports, setting them all up in less than a minute. It turned out that the thing inside his suitcase had been a pulley. He lashed a number of ropes around the rock, wound the ropes into his pulley, and then around himself. Then he walked forward and literally hoisted the whole thing into the air.

“Why not,” said Ms. Marie. “Next.”

Twilight’s mouth hung open. That just wasn’t fair.

That was nothing compared to what happened during Rune’s turn. The orange filly walked right up to the rock and stared at it for a long time, not caring that it looked horrific. She turned to Ms. Marie. “I can do it.” There was a long pause as the filly looked down at her forehooves hooves and pawed at the grass. “But not in the way you want.”

Ms. Marie shrugged. “Okay,” she said. “Next time, bring a pulley.”

Ugh... What kind of mockery of an exam is this? Sky was next, and then it would be Twilight’s turn. She wondered if she would be passed if she just made an illusion of herself lifting the rock. This whole affair was incredibly stupid.

“Lord Boo,” said Sky, as she bowed low to the rock. “Bequeath upon me your unearthly blessing and all that schist.”

Twilight heard Enigma snickering behind her.

Mrs. Lonsdaleite momentarily lost her stoic expression. “Language!” she said.

Sky looked over at the yellow mare innocently. “Schist is a crystalline type of metamorphic rock.”

Ms. Marie was unfazed. “Carry on. We don’t have all day.”

The rock rose steadily into the air, reaching the three-foot mark easily. As it lowered back to the ground, Sky smirked. “See how our sacrifices had been for the crater good!”

Twilight groaned. She walked over to the rock, but didn’t look at it directly. The... the crater good, she thought to herself, rolling her eyes at the pun.

You don’t scare me, she told the rock. I’m boulder than I look, you lode of rubbi- rubble!

She giggled despite herself, which drew odd looks from both her classmates and the teachers. The rock was a little ridiculous, if she thought about it in a certain way, especially with the others worshipping it as if it was some sort of... Geode. Twilight cringed at her own bad pun. If she thought about the rock as a colossal joke, it suddenly wasn’t so scary anymore.

She braced herself against the earth and wound her spell around the rock. It floated higher and higher, reaching three feet without stopping or slowing. “I’m not afraid of you,” she told it out loud, staring directly into where its eyes should have been. “Chalk it up to guts,” she said. “I can be tuff too.” Twilight dropped the rock unceremoniously back to the ground and walked over to the side of the field, joining all her other classmates who had finished.

“You should join the Stable of Darkness,” Sky said to her. The filly dug inside her saddlebags and pulled out a greasy paper bag. SoD was written on it in black marker. “We have-” Sky peered inside the bag and frowned. “... We have a lot of crumbs.”

The aroma of stale cookies wafted over to Twilight. “I’m, uh... fine, thanks,” she said as politely as she could.

When everypony was done with the big rock, all of them ran around the track.

She finished third from last, only ahead of Lexicus and Sky. Hopefully the scores would be averaged out. She would get get a good grade on her levitation, a bad grade on her running, and then together they would make a mean of 72% or something.


The math, science, and language arts exams that afternoon were very straightforward. They were long and they carried on to the evening, but there was absolutely nothing on them that Twilight hadn’t prepared for, except perhaps the essay. To be fair, though, essays were impossible to prepare for.

Her classmates discussed their exams, gossiping and speculating about how any one of them might have fared. Infamously, Nightbreaker’s Practical Application scenario had involved escaping some sort of sea monster; instead of creating a makeshift weapon or even talking to the beast, he had broken through the shielding around his examiners and smacked them around with their clipboards until they ceased the simulation. They upped their security after that, and obviously, he had gotten an A.

Demise, on the other hoof, had been given an extremely easy test, one where he just had to walk across the room and leave through a door. He spent nineteen minutes searching the room for traps and obstacles, and when he had less than a minute left, he panicked and dashed to the door. It turned out to be locked, and with only twenty seconds, he had no way of opening it.

On Friday morning, Twilight walked into Control and Practical Precision expecting to be doing a week’s worth of kitchen prep in half an hour, or something else along those lines. Instead, somepony had set up a number of carnival games. Most prominent was the “electric wire”, a test of coordination and stability where the participant had to trace a hoop of metal along a twisted length of charged wire. If the pony got the hoop to the end without ever having touched the wire, he or she would get a prize. If not, the device would emit a loud buzz.

Electric wire was inherently a unicorn game, since it was almost impossible to see the wire properly if the hoop was held in the teeth. Modified hoops designed to fit on hooves or (in the case of earth ponies) tails were usually just as troublesome, since the wires were often very long, and walking backwards or on three hooves added another level of difficulty in itself. Twilight had never played electric wire, not seriously at least; the last carnival she’d gone to had been two years ago, before she’d been any good at magic.

Ms. North Star explained the whole thing to her, which was frankly unnecessary. It had been immediately obvious what the test was supposed to be.

Twilight picked up the steel hoop and began to run it along the wire.

-Bzzt-

“Uh, how many tries do I get?” said Twilight.

Ms. North Star’s voice was even as she spoke. “Twenty minutes’ worth of tries. Start back at the beginning.”

Ten minutes later, Twilight had finally succeeded in “winning” at the test of coordination. She wished she’d known about it a week ago, yesterday even. It just wasn’t fair getting tested for something like this when she’d been lead to believe that the exam would be about something else entirely.

Next, they had her toss darts at some balloons, and after that, attempt to right a bottle using a modified fishing rod. These things were fun when she did them at a carnival, but they decidedly less-so when she was being marked on how well she was doing.

She left the classroom feeling mildly perplexed.


That evening, Twilight only had Jazz’s exam left. She had written down every spell he’d mentioned; she’d looked all of them up in the library; she’d even gone through the trouble of practicing every spell she could find, excluding the one that should have, by all rights, killed her.

Still, that didn’t help when over three-quarters of the spells he had mentioned didn’t appear in any books at all. In the last week, she’d taken advantage of the cancelled classes and had gone down to both the public and the university library. Whatever spells Jazz had in mind, they were very obscure indeed, for she couldn’t find them there either.

In their own attempts to study for the upcoming exam, her classmates had run into the same problems. Many of them hoped that either they’d misheard, or that the teacher had misstated the names of the spells. The second theory was somewhat doubtful; Jazz often referred to important concepts as “thingies” or “stuff”, and on occasion, would forget his own name, but he had never, to her knowledge, used incorrect terminology for anything.

When Gingersnap had gotten the nerve to actually ask him for an itemised list of the spells, it turned out that they hadn’t misheard. It was impossible that any first year student could be expected to cast even one of them.

Twilight just hoped that they would be grading on a bell curve.

She and her classmates lined up outside of the door. The norm for any magic-based tests was that they would be judged individually. So at ten to five, Jazz surprised everypony by letting them all in at once.

Twilight walked in and saw that there were desks set up.

 The desks had papers on them.

Oh Celestia, thought Twilight. It was a written exam.

“You can all have a seat,” said Jazz. “In like ten minutes you can start. Uh. Don’t peek or I’ll give you zero or something.”

At exactly five, Twilight flipped open the first page of the test. She took a moment to read the first question.

1. In ordinary writing, describe the steps that the spells require the caster to take.

And underneath was the list of spells that Jazz had given them, their glyphs written neatly underneath.

Twilight buried her face in her hooves and groaned. She wasn’t the only one.

In all likelihood, the spells had been made up for the purpose of this exam, and probably didn’t do anything meaningful when cast.

“Are you guys okay?” said Jazz. “Oh wait. I mean... No talking!”

It was a good thing Twilight had studied her glyphs.


It was late by the time Twilight got down to the palace. Most of Twilight’s classmates were spending their last night at the school; a lot of parents would be showing up for them on Saturday morning. The school year was technically over, and her exam results would be mailed in two weeks, but the Princess had requested one last meeting before the summer.

On the rooftop, Twilight described everything that had taken place during the exams - Ms. Marie’s rock, the senior students and their project, how her classmates had performed, all the little things that had blindsided her. When she’d finished she was winded and a little lightheaded. There was a short pause as she caught her breath. “Are things like this every year?” she asked finally.

“I have never had the experience of being a student at my own school,” said the Princess. “But I do know that things will get more difficult and even less straightforward as you progress.”

Twilight blinked. “Less straightforward?” she said. “As in, even more weird than trapping me in a fake hole?”

“Yes.”

“Argh! How am I supposed to study for that?”

“Not all knowledge is facts and memorising. Throughout your life you will have tests that surprise you, tests that confound you, and tests that you won’t know are tests at all.”

Princess Celesta had said the word “tests” so much that it had lost all meaning to Twilight, and she said so.

The Princess chuckled lightly. “Quizzes and exams are not the end measure of learning, only a check to ensure that you have been.”

“So what does that mean for all the magic you’ve been teaching me?” said Twilight. “Are you going to test me on that too?”

“As your teacher, I am satisfied with your progress.”

Twilight looked up at the Princess, into those eyes that had seen so much. “I...” She looked away. “I’ve been cheating in my meditation.”

“Cheating?” said the Princess. “I wasn’t aware that was possible.”

“Um... Well, you see...” Twilight took a while to gather her thoughts. “I haven’t been trying to find harmony or inner peace... Well I have, it’s just that it wasn’t working... and... so I made a list of things... and even though...” Her ears flattened. “I... Instead of trying to be one with the universe, or whatever I’m supposed to do, I’ve been thinking of studying and books instead.”

“It’s not cheating if it actually worked.”

Wha- “Huh?”

Princess Celestia looked amused rather than disappointed. “Thinking of calming things is a good way to control panic attacks. You can also count, take lots of slow deep breaths, or even rationalise your emotions.”

Twilight stood there with her mouth hanging open for a good twenty seconds before she replied. “But... But you said! You said I needed inner harmony!”

“You do,” said the Princess. “There are many ways to achieve that. Perhaps you are not quite there yet, but you’re well on your way.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You will.” Princess Celestia smiled, not unkindly. “Patience is a virtue.”

Twilight just nodded, knowing that anything she said to this would have made her sound stupid or immature. She stifled a yawn. Even a full night’s sleep couldn’t undo nearly a month of enforced insomnia.

“I think we’ll call it a night,” the Princess said.

“Okay,” said Twilight, secretly grateful. “Um...”

“Hm?”

“Next year, I was wondering...” she said

“About what?”

“Could I be in a normal room? Not in the teacher’s lounge, I mean... If that’s not too much trouble.”

Twilight wasn’t sure why, but she didn’t think she had ever seen the Princess look more proud.


(A big thank you goes to plen-omie, and Mystic, who have been helping me edit.)

End of Year 1.

Also, thanks to anyone who’s bothered reading this far! And sorry for the delay.