Forward

by Fantasmagoria


Through the Fabric

As much as planning to travel to an entirely different planet an immeasurable distance away is a somewhat heavy subject to contemplate, upon awakening to a magnificently positioned sunbeam aimed directly into her pupil, Twilight Sparkle reflected that it made little difference when it came to such mundane tasks as getting up in the morning.

As usual, Spike was still snoring blithely away, even though she had told him the night before what this day was going to involve.  As helpful as he was, a morning dragon he was not.  She briefly considered turning him out of his basket, but thought better of it when she considered it would only prevent her from getting some coffee in her system as quickly as possible.

Considering how early she had been up for her first Winter Wrap Up two years ago, this was abysmal.  Staying up all night working on advanced mathematics in relation to space-time fluctuations really hadn’t helped, but being this far behind the curve for what was pretty much going to be the greatest achievement of her entire species was a bit beyond the pale.

She could see by the clock on the far wall of the tree that she still had an hour and some change before she needed to be ready for the chariot Luna was sending, as she had decided that making the first interstellar teleport in history merited commissioning a government chariot.  Given the small size of Ponyville, and thus the quite rapid pace of gossip in said town, it was going to be hard to keep people from speculating as to why the Crown would be collecting Twilight on this particular morning.  Fortunately, since this wasn’t exactly the first time the nation’s Diarchs had dropped in on Ponyville since their new librarian had arrived, the topic would hopefully be shelved before anyone got any ideas.

Twilight knew she was being paranoid to think that anyone in their right mind would guess at what she and Luna were planning to do today, but the fact that she was already so nervous that even her telekinesis was shaking was probably not helping.

The cup she had brewed at least ten minutes ago finally finished, she got up and went about gathering up what she thought she might need.  Planning for something that had never been done before was somewhat of a dubious task, but Luna would probably have some suggestions of her own, and being over-prepared never hurt anyone.

When the knock came, she was ready.  With a deep breath, and a quick nod of her head, she walked out her front door with what was at least a bit more confidence than what she woke up with.

Watching her tree disappear behind the chariot, Twilight Sparkle sincerely hoped she would see it again, and hoped the two pegasi pulling her through the sky couldn’t hear her hammering heart.



“You are shaking less than I was expecting.”

“I tried not shaking, but I don’t think that’s going to work,” Twilight replied somewhat tersely as she attempted to slide her saddlebags off without dropping them from her nervous shivers.

“Your anxiety is to be expected, but you can rest assured that I won’t let anything happen to you.”

Twilight turned from her bags and looked over at her research partner with an eyebrow raised.

“Well, I will do everything in my power to try and lessen the chances of anything happening to you.”

“I guess this would be one of those times where immortality comes in handy...”

“It does have benefits in terms of removing the danger from certain situations, yes.”

Bags unpacked and the contents laid out on the floor of Luna’s bedchambers, Twilight looked at what Luna had laid out herself, and was somewhat embarrassed to find her own collection to be much larger.  She’d tried to keep herself to a tight weight allowance, which only required transcribing passages from a half-dozen weighty tomes onto scrolls small enough to fit in her bags.  It only took an hour or two.

Luna smiled at her though, and nodded toward what she’d brought.

“You have done an admirable job of packing light, or at least as light as I would expect you to.

“I think these will actually come in handy,” she continued, unrolling a few of the scrolls to check their contents.  “We may need some reference material on geology at the very least, given what we saw in my observatory.”

“I am sure you have brought only what you felt absolutely necessary.  At least, I would assume so given that you can still walk while carrying it.”

Luna chuckled at the deadpan she received from her research partner before turning regarding the star charts spread around her own chambers and the numerous stacks of notes piled on top of those.  While she silently seemed to take stock, Twilight looked around as well.

She had been in Princess Celestia’s bedchambers before, and while her mentor’s room always seemed perfectly well-kept, Luna’s room had the look of someone who didn’t have time for such things.  The floor was mostly clear besides some sheets of notes that appeared to have fallen from their original surfaces, but there seemed no rhyme or reason to the way any of Luna’s posessions were arranged.  Vases, precious stones, some items of jewelry, all sitting on whatever surface appeared to have been free at the time she received them.

On her walls, however, and continuing up across the domed ceiling, was a complete representation of the night sky.  The really incredible thing was that Twilight knew from experience that these were the stars currently hidden by the bright light of the sun, and that meant that all of these surfaces were spelled to show the sky currently overhead.  The moon was obviously not visible right now, but thinking about it reminded her of the other reason she had been up late the night before.

“Before we do this, I want to clarify something.”

Luna turned to face her and tilted her head to the side slightly, indicating for her partner to go ahead.

“The treaty agreed to by the three pony tribes.  It didn’t occur to me until last night, and it’s part of why I didn’t sleep very well.  That treaty was based on the the idea that each tribe was bringing an essential function to the table, but if the sun and moon can move on their own and are only assisted in that by ponies, that means that treaty was based on a half-truth.  That’s really the reason Princess Celestia was so worried, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

Luna said nothing more than that.  Her gaze remained locked with Twilight’s as the final piece fit into place.  It was a few seconds more until Twilight let out an awkward chuckle and rubbed the back of her neck with a hoof.

“Well...heh...no pressure, right?”

Twilight was hard pressed not to jump in shock as her partner laughed uproariously.  She still needed to get used to Luna’s unpredictable responses to humor.  The embarrassingly loud and raucous laughter continued for long enough to make Twilight feel awkward before she finally stopped and wiped a tear from the corner of her eye.

“Ah, what a wonderful way to dispel any lingering nerves before our trip!”

“Uh...yeah…”

“Do not fear, young Twilight!  The two of us together shall show my worry-wart sister soon enough that she had nothing to worry about all this time!”

She still responds to excitement by getting louder.  Noted.  Twilight tried not to giggle at the princess’s enthusiasm as she slid her saddlebags back onto her back and tightened the strap.  She was someone at a loss as to what to do next, but was interrupted in thinking about this as she was suddenly encased in a sphere of blue magic and held aloft.

“I realize this may not be the most dignified form of transport,” Luna said as she held the bubble of magic susptended beside her, “but it will have to do until we find another way to defend you from hostile atmospheres.”

The idea of being the first unicorn on another planet while inside of a bubble was indeed a little unappealing, but so was the idea of freezing or burning to death.  Or suffocating.  Or inflating like a balloon and popping like her research suggested would happen with no air around her.  She quickly decided this was something she should stop thinking about.

She looked over to Luna, and saw her strapping to herself a thick belt with a lopsided metal cage on the back that was shaped to fit the brightly glowing gemstone inside it.  Once she had it in place, she experimentally flapped her wings and then settled them over top of the belt, and did a few stretches to make sure it wasn’t too tight and also wouldn’t slip.

“I will have to thank the palace armourer for crafting this for me on short notice,” Luna said while giving herself a final once-over.

“Are you ready?” she asked Twilight, now looking back at her and making eye contact.

“Yes.”

Without another word, the princess levitated herself and her partner up to the center of her room, and then the glow of the diamond dimmed slightly as her horn lit brighter than Twilight had ever seen it, and her eyes opened to emit a glow to rival the sun.  A sphere began to form around the both of them, bright white and crackling with lightning.  Stray papers began to circle around the room as a breeze picked up from the now rapidly spinning ball of raw magical power now surrounding the two.

Twilight closed her eyes as the light became far too intense to look at, which allowed her to now pay attention to the tingling sensation that began to run up and down her body as her own magical anatomy resonated with the energy around her.  The sensation in her horn reminded her of her first real use of magic back when she had resonated with the Sonic Rainboom, except this went beyond even that. At the point where it started to become uncomfortable, the odd sensations and the brightness against her eyelids disappeared.  While the magical resonance was gone, the glow on her eyelids remained, but now it was of a different color.  She reminded herself to continue breathing as she opened her eyes and looked up at the sky.

She thought she would see stars, and she did.  However, while many of these stars were familiar, the shape of the constellations she could trace were slightly skewed from her memory, and thanks to her late night studying, she knew her memory was not flawed.  And most certainly the sun that warmed her world had never been the shade of blue of the one currently rising above the horizon.

Keep breathing.  Keep breathing.

Luna looked around her as Twilight examined the sky.  She saw that while the atmoshpere of this world felt bitterly cold, there were what appeared to be plants around them.  They were small and appeared somewhat like the cacti that could be found in the deserts of their own planet, but they were black rather than green.  She turned to look at the alien sun rising over the horizon, and despite the brighter color, it looked much smaller than the one she was used to.

These plants must be this color in order to obtain enough sunlight to live even with how far from this sun this planet seems to be.  This light feels far more intense at this distance than it should be, so this sun must be...more powerful somehow than Celestia’s…

While Luna was not having to remind herself to keep breathing steadily like her partner, she hadn’t felt like she felt now in nearly eleven-hundred years.  She herself could now remember prancing into her sister’s room like it was yesterday, grinning like a crazy pony and almost stumbling over her words from sheer glee.

She had done it.  After all this time, she was finally about to accomplish what she had longed to all those many years ago.

She lowered herself and Twilight’s sphere to the surface of this world so far from home, and the two looked at each other once again.

Twilight Sparkle, personal student of Princess Celestia, and Princess Luna, guide of the moon and shephard of dreams, had become the first two members of their species to set hoof on another planet.