//------------------------------// // Chapter 6: The Pony in the Library // Story: Deathless // by Gaudior //------------------------------// “This makes absolutely no sense.” It’s afternoon; Twilight and I had spent a few hours taking a nice long nap, recovering from the night’s events and the carbohydrate coma resulting from our much-needed breakfast. Now we’re in my library, and I’m sitting in my nice Aeron chair, poking away at my workstation.   Twilight had spent at least thirty minutes just going from shelf to shelf, ogling all the titles along the walls, asking about my organization system and the ages of various books I had, especially the illuminated ones in the vacuum-sealed glass cases, which she found fascinating. I could tell she wanted nothing more than to take half a year to absorb everything in here, but she knew we had work to do.  With some reluctance, then, she finally brought herself under control and pushed an ottoman next to my chair so she could join me at my computer. Unceremoniously, she hopped up on it and curled up in the middle, folding her legs to one side so she could peer over my shoulder at the monitor. I keep expecting her to react somehow to human technology, whether with squeals of delight or a dismissive wave of her, ehr, hoof, but then I remember she’s been here before. Kind of anticlimactic, really, having a dimensional traveler in your house who’s not impressed by your mysterious alien ways. No longer distracted by Twilight’s antics, I frown and glance between the golden-inked square of parchment I’d used to summon Twilight and the virtual magic square I’d completed on the computer. I’d spent hours on the computer, making sure all the details were right, that all the arcane constructs added up, that all the symbols and glyphs intertwined just so. I’d copied the details to the parchment square with cautious, meticulous care. I’d triple-checked the glyphs and symbols after I was done. Hell, I’d double-checked my triple-checking. Twice. I’m not sure how many checks that is, but it should have been more than enough. And yet there’s absolutely no similarity between the two squares. The symbols are completely different, most of the glyphs don’t form mirror images the way they’re supposed to, and the square itself -- hell, it’s not even the same size. As far as magic squares go, it’s complete crap. And if I’m completely honest with myself… I don’t even think it’s my handwriting. “Absolutely no sense,” I murmur, repeating myself and absently flapping the parchment square in the air. “I have no idea where this came from. It shouldn’t even do anything.” “It had to come from somewhere,” Twilight mused, leaning in to peer a little more closely at the square. “I see what you mean, though. You said this square wasn’t complete in the source material?” “Yeah,” I say, grabbing my copy of the Book and thumbing through to the right page. “Chapter Sixteen: To Find and take possession of all kinds of Treasures.' Construct eleven, there: ‘For a Treasure hidden by a particular Person.’” Twilight and I both frown. Sure enough, although the pattern in the Book is incomplete, the virtual square on the computer screen had a perfect copy of the elements from the Book, and my hard work had filled in the rest. The parchment square, though, bore absolutely no resemblance to its virtual cousin. “I thought you said your soul was stolen by a demon, not a person” Twilight says, glancing over at me. “Wouldn’t that ritual have failed anyway?” “Nah. It’s in the details; lowercase ‘persons’ would just mean a human, but capitalized ‘Persons’ actually includes anything sentient for the purposes of the spell. See, it says here it only works if the treasure isn’t magically guarded, but that’s not exactly true, either. The Book lies sometimes,” I say, winking at her. “It constantly tests you, to make sure you’ve been paying attention to your studies. Part of the test is to know when it’s lying and when it’s not.” “What kind of crazy pony --” Twilight starts to say, then stops and shakes her head. “Never mind. This is a start,” she says, gesturing impatiently for me to hand her the Book. “You keep looking for ways to get me back home, and I’ll see if I can figure out which of these squares you actually used.” “You think that’ll help?” “It’s got to be a clue of some kind,” she says, arranging the book, the parchment square and herself on the ottoman. “We need all the help we can get, right? And if we figure out what went wrong --” “-- we might be able to learn how to reverse it. Right.” # # # “Would you look at that,” Twilight finally says, absently blowing a lock of purple mane from her eyes. It’s five hours later, it’s dark outside again, and it feels like I haven’t blinked for an hour, so any distraction from my lack of progress is a welcome one. I stretch in my seat, fail to suppress a yawn, and turn to her with an eyebrow raised. “Whatcha got?” “I found the magic square you used on the parchment. Well, squares. Sort of.” “What do you mean?” I ask, pushing back wearily from my workstation to get a better look. She’s created an immense amount of paperwork, torn through two entire notebooks, and has at least three separate pens of different colors behind her ears. Wads of crumpled up paper litter the floor by her ottoman for five feet in every direction, but cradled in her hooves are a stack of probably three dozen neatly aligned sheets, each with a sample square from the book filled out, crossed out, highlighted, categorized by colored sticky note and underlined. No doubt cross-referenced, too. Apparently, she’s very thorough. Twilight sorts briefly through her well-ordered paperwork and finally selects a page, checking a detail on the lined paper and then opening the Book to a specific page. “See here,” she says, pointing at the topmost and leftmost entries on the parchment square I’d used to summon her. “These match the operation in Chapter Twenty-Seven, and it even has the nonsymmetric glyphs scattered correctly here, here and… here. See?” “Chapter Twenty-Seven -- that’s visions, right?” I say, frowning. “Yeah. In this case, specifically visions of unicorns,” she says, glancing briefly up at her horn before looking back at me. “Which is close enough, I guess. Now, look at this,” she says, pointing at the entries at the top and right-hand side. “These are from Chapter Eight, though they’re reversed to fit into the square.” “Tempests?” I ask, and then I remember the weird, sudden rainstorm. “Right. That’s just… okay, we definitely had a rainstorm after the ritual completed, so you must be on to something. But these squares aren’t meant to work in tandem like that. Or, if they are, this kind of use is way beyond anything the Book talks about.” “Well, hold on to your hat, because now it gets interesting,” she says, her eyes bright with discovery. “It’s not perfect, but if you look here and here,” she says, pointing at my parchment, “you get exact matches, and if you play a bit of a word jumble you get the rest of the entries from this.” She uses her horn to flip to a page in the Book she’s marked with a sticky note. Chapter Twenty-Two. “That -- that’s not a good chapter, Twilight.” “Chapter Twenty-Two,” she reads aloud, her voice strangely excited. “This Chapter is only for Evil, for with the Symbols herein we can cast Spells, and work every kind of Evil; we should not avail ourselves hereof.” “Don’t tell me,” I say, glancing down the page at the example squares. “Construct Four?” “Construct Four,” she repeats, tapping the entry. “This Symbol should never be made use of.” And there it is, embedded in the parchment square between unicorn visions and a rainstorm. Chaotically, incorrectly, almost nonsensically, but it’s all there. “So what does that mean?” I ask, half aloud, half to myself. “That square is listed in the Evil section, but even so when they mention it they pretend like they’d rather talk about the weather. It’s like the bad guy that the bad guys are afraid of.” Twilight grins. “Don’t you see? We’ve already identified the other two operations. Unicorns and rainstorms, right? Well you made it rain and you saw a unicorn, so there’s only one other thing that happened upstairs, isn’t there?” I blink. “I brought you here.” “You brought me here!” she repeats, laughing. “It’s not evil - but the Book lies to you, remember? Whoever wrote this Book of yours knew exactly what this square did! They just thought that transdimensional portals were far too dangerous for novice sorcerers to create on their own. This is it, Harken. That square is my ticket home!” “Well paint me purple and call me a pony,” I say, letting her grin infect me. “You really do have a knack for this stuff. Let me see that.” She shoves the Book to the side of the ottoman, and I lean over, careful not to impale myself on her horn. I flip past the pages she’d marked, follow her notes, compare her results to the parchment square -- and it all adds up. Almost. “I think we’re close, but just knowing that this is the square that creates the dimensional rift isn’t enough. We need to find a way to aim it back at your home, and then we have to switch it from suck to blow. We don’t want to pull another unicorn to Earth.” “That had to be what the other symbols were combined for,” Twilight says, her eyes lighting up at the new challenge. “That Vision symbol… look! Construct Two: A Superb Palace.’ We can probably send me straight back to Canterlot Palace with this!”  I glance at her, doubtful. “I didn’t exactly picture you when I dragged you here, Purple. Are you sure we’ll actually get, uh, Canterlot? Or will we just get some random Superb Palace?” “Magic is the science and art of causing change to occur in conformity with Will,” Twilight says, perfectly reciting one of the key precepts of magical operation. “That’s how magic works on Earth. You got a random unicorn because you didn’t have a specific unicorn in mind when you cast the spell. But this time, we can will the vision to show us Canterlot!” “I…” I say, starting to object, but I have to concede her point. She really is an incredibly fast study when it comes to magic. “Yeah, that makes sense, but it means you’ll have to conduct the ritual. I have no idea how to visualize whatever Canterlot is.” She beams at me, and the relief and joy on her face is almost palpable. “That’s fine! Native magical rituals should be perfectly safe for me to cast since they don’t require any magic from the caster. Besides, who wouldn’t want to conduct a powerful magical operation from a completely alien world? So all we have to do now is… what did you say? Figure out how to change it from suck to blow?” “Yeah,” I say, thumbing back to Chapter Eight. “Spaceballs. Movie reference. Next time you visit, give me a call and we’ll stream it.” “O… kay,” she says, looking at me with a strange expression on her face. “Just… you may have to wait a while. The portal on our side doesn’t open very often.” I swear she almost looks a little disappointed when she says it, so I grin at her and shake my head. “It’s a good movie. Well, it’s a bad movie, but it’s a good bad movie. It’ll keep. Just make sure you bring enough popcorn for both of us. Now, where were we?” “Chapter Eight!” she replies, her morale restored as she pulls the Book over to peer at it. “Hail, Snow, Rain and Thunder.” “That’s strange,” I say, getting a closer look at the glyphs in the squares on the page. “They’re all similar. There’s nothing here to indicate which of these might reverse the operation.” “What do you mean?” she asks, examining the entries a bit closer. “Every square is made up of glyphs, which represent words. The glyph that makes up the square for Rain is Takat,” I say, gesturing to the glyph in the square. “That’s… uh, roughly translated, immersed in, or overflowing. It has a magnitude and a direction to it, see? But none of these have a meaning that indicates a direction, and they’re all just general references to storms. The opposite ritual operation to Rain has to be somewhere else.” “Desert maybe?” she asks, double-checking her notes. “No, there’s no obvious references to desert. Stillness?” “What about -- wait, hold on,” I say, the echo of a memory sparking in my head. “Let me see the Book.” Twilight shifts back a little and turns the Book so I can flip through it. I scan through the pages until I stop at chapter Nineteen, and I tap the Construct I was looking for, though I blush a little when I suddenly recall why I remembered it. Oblivious to my discomfort, Twilight tilts her head to read aloud from the Book. “Chapter Nineteen: For every description of Affection and Love. Construct Nine: By a maiden in general.” She turns to look at me with a wrinkled nose. “Really?” “As if you wouldn’t have been curious enough to read it.” She harumphs at that, but I think I see her lips briefly quirk into a grin. Five glyphs make up the symbol, and I mouth the words softly as I read them. “Salom, arepo, lemel, opera, molas. I think this is it, Twilight.” “And those glyphs mean?” Twilight asks, scrunching up her nose and looking at me curiously. “It’s… a bit obscure, even for the Book,” I reply, still staring at the square. “Rough transliteration, ‘He distils peace unto fulness upon the dry ground in quick motion.’ Dry ground, contained and in motion. Sounds like the counter to wet, immersed and overflowing to me.” “That’s brilliant!” Twilight says, a bit of respect in her eyes. “We make a good team.” “Yeah,” I say, less than completely enthused. I’ve just put the rest of the puzzle together, but I’m not sure I like the picture it’s showing me. “What is it?” she asks, frowning at me. “We figured it out, Harken! I’m going home! This is great, right?” “Yeah, it’s great -- there’s only one little problem. Remember how the first spell I used still managed to evoke all of the other squares’ sub-effects?” “Sure,” Twilight said. “You saw a unicorn and it rained, right?” “Right. So the spell we have to add in order to switch from suck to blow? It’s a love spell. And it’s creating love ‘by’ a maiden, not ‘for’ one. That’s very specific Book language, and it implies that it’s going to affect the caster. We’ve already decided that you have to cast it, otherwise we’ll never get you to Canterwhatsit. So it’s going to create love… by a maiden. By you, for someone else.” “So… wait,” she says, interrupting me and straightening up on the ottoman. “I have to cast a love spell on myself to get this thing to work?” “It could be worse,” I say, deadpanning. “I could be ugly.” “Eww!” she says, laughing in surprise and nearly falling off the ottoman. “Who says it’ll make me fall in love with you, anyway?” “I guess it’s a risk you’ll have to take,” I say, waggling my eyebrows fiercely. “Just stop,” she says, still chuckling. “Besides, it doesn’t say what kind of love it creates. If I visualize my number one apprentice during the ritual, it may just enhance our friendship!” “Sure. Or it could make you drool lustfully after him any time you catch his scent. You want to roll those dice?” “Eww,” she repeated, only this time she looked a bit more rueful. “No offense, Spike. Is there a counterspell, at least?” “Sure,” I reply. “Chapter Ten, Construct One. Undoes all magics. You’ll have to wait until you’re home, though, otherwise it’ll destroy that scrollcase of yours too.” “Oh, that’s not so bad then,” she says, nodding to herself. “If you have a ritual for it, then I’m sure Celestia or Luna can remove the spell with their own magic once I’m back.” “Well then,” I say, pulling open a drawer and retrieving a thick sheet of parchment. “Let’s get this square drawn up. We might even be able to get you home before dinner.”