//------------------------------//
// Beginning (Revised) 
// Story: Keys, Suits, and Swords 
// by Silent Ghost 
//------------------------------//


~~~>><<~~~

Twilight stood on the balcony of her castle, the crystal walls and gold railing of the castle sparkling softly in the bright moonlight. The balcony offering an impressive view of Ponyville, Fluttershy’s house off in the distance and the Everfree Forest that loomed close by and went over the horizon. 

Twilight’s eye was pressed to the eyepiece of the tripod-mounted telescope. The magically levitated quill wrote furiously on the floating scroll, drawing stars and the constellations they made. 

With her eye still pressed to the eyepiece, Twilight rotated the telescope towards the moon, the magnification allowing her to view the landscapes of the asteroid-battered surface in great clarity. “Oh wow….”  She whispered, her magic levitating the parchment inside, setting it down on the desk and grabbed another from a neat pile. “This will make for some excellent lunar charts.” she said, the quill beginning to draw out the landscape. 

Twilight slowly shifted towards another part of the lunar surface, her focus interrupted as a bright flash streaked past her view. “Huh?” she said, perplexed, removing her eye from the eyepiece and scanned the night sky for the bright streak of light. With a confused expression on her brow, she returned to peering through the eyepiece, the halted quill resuming its drawing. 

Another streak of light flashed past, Twilight following it with her telescope as it travelled through the sky before fizzling out. Smaller pieces followed suit, more and more zooming through the atmosphere and disintegrating.

“What the…?” Twilight said, walking over to the railing as the streaks of light increased in number and size. Focusing her telescope of the meteors, she tracked them as they flew across the sky towards the Frozen North. “Wait….” She pondered, “These….these aren’t….”  

As she followed the meteorites through the sky, she felt something. A presence. It felt magical. And powerful, very powerful. Twilight knew that all beings and objects generate a magic field, but this was nothing she had ever felt before, this felt more powerful than all the princesses’ magic combined, and yet it felt contained, handled. Twilight followed the objects as they trailed through the sky, crashing to the surface past the horizon with a bright flash. 

Twilight stared at the mountains, perplexed as to what those objects were. She trotted inside, levitating another parchment from the pile and dipping the quill in a small vial of ink, and started to write “Princess Celestia, I have news….”