//------------------------------// // Chapter 1 // Story: To Her Own Rhythm // by mrscribt //------------------------------// Princess Mi Amore Cadenza peered frantically over her shoulder as she half ran and half flew toward the gates. With her wings helping her along she managed just enough speed to stay ahead of the trailing pack of monsters. She took a deep breath before turning forward again to her destination and its surprised sentries. “Open the gates! For the love of Celestia, open the gates!” It was just what the guards needed to pull them out of their stupor. The two unicorns had managed to crack the gates open just enough for her to squeeze through by the time she got to them, landing in an upside down heap on the other side. “Close the gates! Close the gates!” she shrieked. The guards bid as they were told, and the princess let out a grateful sigh. Immediately she felt horrible. Though they were oath-bound to protect the Royal Family, they were also a part of that same extended family. Given whom her father was, for her even more so. Duty compelled her to peek through the doors at the carnage on the other side. What she saw gave her hope, as the guards seemed capable of holding back the monsters. That could not last. “There she is! That’s her eye looking through that hole!” The monsters pushed but the guards held. Luckily, none of them were of the same heft as the guards, so the princess held out hope that they could hold for long enough. She needed to end this. She had the power, she just needed the space to concentrate. Gathering what wits she had about her, Mi Amore Cadenza, Cadance to those that knew her personally, focused her magic on a spell that she had very little practice with, particularly with such large groups. This has to work. If it doesn’t, I’m in sooo much trouble. As she finally put the finishing touches on the spell and cast it, her effort was rewarded with an ebbing of the monsters’ cries of, “I love you’s!” getting replaced by confused questions of what was going on. That faded out as the guards ordered them to head home. When Cadance saw through the spy-hole that the colts had gone, she cautiously opened one of the doors. The two guards stared at her. She immediately started to fidget. “So, uh, you couldn’t possibly, uh, you know, not tell anypony about what just happened…hehe? “Because, it’s just a teeny-tiny misunderstanding…and I, well I…ummm.” Cadance considered it unfair that two guards staring emotionlessly at a young princess could have such an unsettling effect. But her stomach dropped into her hooves when they both raised their eyes and started staring over her head. Please don’t let it be the Princess, please don’t let it be the Princess… Slowed by trepidation, the young princess nonetheless turned around. It was not her aunt. It was something far, far worse. “Oh hehe, uh…hi Daddy!” Explaining why a mob of colts had been after her to her father, who happened to be the Commander of the Pegasus guard, had been one of the more difficult endeavors Cadance had the misfortune of undertaking. Worrying that he might try to have them all arrested and her aunt finding out she had misused her magic was only part of the problem. The other, greater worry was that he might try to ‘help’. It’s not like I did it on purpose. At least not totally on purpose. How was I supposed to know the spell would work like it did? Well, OK, I probably should have figured it out, but I wanted a date for the dance! She was uncertain as to what went wrong precisely. The plan, after all, had been simple. As she had imagined it, all she had to do was find a colt who had a crush on her but who, because of her station, and because she was a winged unicorn, might have a teeny bit of hesitation to ask her out. She would use her magic to enhance that crush enough to help him overcome his fear, and she would then get a date. Simple. And if it were not for two problems which Cadance had decided to ignore, she might have been successful. The first was that she had never done anything like it before. This she justified in that there were plenty of things she had never done before, and therefore she would someday have to do it anyway. So it might as well be in time for the dance. The second was that she was not sure who might have a crush on her in class. And although she liked joking around with the boys in her senior year, she had no preference aside from avoiding her cousin Blueblood, who she found insufferable. So it was that when she snuck off to the park where the senior class colts gathered to play hoofball, she had only a vague idea of what she wanted to do. She watched and waited. What she had not known, what she could not know, was that most of the colts had at some point held a crush on the pretty, somewhat reserved but often outgoing winged unicorn. And although her magic usually would not rekindle those feelings, she had made the mistake of thinking that, if the spell did not work properly the first time, it was because of the large number of colts she was trying to use the spell on. So she recast it again, only this time pushing more power into it. And when that still did not work, she cast it again. The only observation she could make was that her classmates were not very good. In fact, they were playing far worse than the one other time she had bothered to attend. By the end of the game not one of the colts had yet to show any interest in her, so Cadance decided that, as the dance was the following week, she needed to do something more drastic. She stomped in applause. “Wooo! Wooo! You guys were great out there! Awesome! Just AWESOME!” A nearby filly looked over to her friend, “She knows they lost, right?” The colts however, heard nothing but Cadance. For the last hour she had cast love magic on them with her as the focus. It had completely ruined their ability to play, but the distraction of losing no matter how hard they tried had been enough to keep them from noticing the filly in the stands. That was no longer the case.