//------------------------------// // Chapter 7: The Pony and the Ritual // Story: Deathless // by Gaudior //------------------------------// Six minutes to midnight. The wards are in place. I’m hanging back, away from the Circle so I don’t interfere with the ritual -- and, honestly, so I can watch Twilight while she works.  We’d gone over the process together a dozen times this evening, and when we were done, Twilight wrote up a lengthy checklist from all the notes she made during those test runs. She’s referencing it now as she prepares the Circle, setting the various paraphernalia in their proper places at the Circle’s edges and checking each item off the list with a number two pencil in her mouth. She really does have a knack for magic: when I watched her last test run, I was pretty sure I’d never enacted the ritual as cleanly as she had, and I’ve been doing these things for a year and a half now. I’m glad she’s up to this. I don’t know if I would be in her shoes. Assuming she wears shoes, of course.  I haven’t actually looked. Five minutes. Twilight takes the sheet of parchment I’d meticulously inked and places it carefully in the center of the Circle. We’ve both independently validated the square, and we’re as certain as anyone can be that it’s as accurate, considering we, uh, ‘extrapolated’ based on how the original square was derived from its original forms. I’m not entirely happy about using a square that’s got so much guesswork to it, but Twilight’s confident, and her insight on magic is consistently solid. It’ll have to do. Four minutes. With a lit incense stick in her mouth, Twilight leans over and lights the tiny brass brazier. Carefully placing the incense into a nearby holder, she begins the ritual invocation. Her voice is lower than I expected, a rich alto with hints of musicianship showing through in the way she can control her breathing to match the rhythms of the chant. If I weren’t so damned nervous I might actually be enjoying the show a bit. It’s not every day a sorcerer gets to see another skilled sorcerer at work. Especially one from another world. Three minutes. With deliberate movements, Twilight pulls a lock from her mane -- one that we’d previously cut and tied in place -- and places it in the Circle’s lead receptacle. Her dexterity with her hooves continues to be a mild obsession for me. I’m not sure why I don’t just ask her how she does it, but I haven’t yet, and now’s definitely not the time. If we’re lucky, I won’t get the chance. Two minutes. Wrinkling her nose briefly in distaste, Twilight takes up my obsidian dagger and slices lengthwise down the middle of her hoof, demonstrating that she does not, in fact, wear shoes.  A tiny trickle of blood begins to trickle through at the softer center. With fluid motion, she leans over the silver basin and lets a few drops of blood fall before returning the dagger to its place on the floor. One minute. Twilight raises her voice as she reaches the final verse of the chant, and a strange sensation, like the the gathering of an electric charge, pervades the room; the hairs on my arm stand up in anticipation, and I sway in place as the floor seems to move beneath my feet, but the shock never comes. The energy builds around us, but as I look up at -- “Twilight!” In the unsteady half-light of the candles, I spot an unwelcome new element to the ritual: a thick, faintly glowing golden cord extending from the parchment square in the center of the Circle to the tip of Twilight’s horn. She’s doggedly trying to finish the chant, but her balance is unsteady: her legs are splayed as if she’s braced on the deck of a ship in a hurricane, and her eyes are fluttering, as though she’s barely able to keep them open. And, worst of all, the smaller magical cord -- the one between Twilight and the scroll that’s keeping her alive -- is thrashing like an earthworm that’s just been cut in half. I scramble to her side and pull her off her feet, staggering backwards to control both her fall and mine. Only barely resisting me, her chant turns into incoherent mumbles, and as she tumbles to the floor with me the power in the Circle dissipates, and the cord between her and the parchment shrivels, fades and winks out of existence. “Twilight. Hey, Twilight,” I say, snapping my fingers and tapping her on the cheek to try to get her attention. "Talk to me, Purple. You here with me? Are you okay?" "I'm --" she gasps, starting to reply, but as she looks up at me she simply stops in mid-sentence, and whatever the next word was going to be dies in her throat. "Twilight?" "...fine," she finishes belatedly, still looking at me. Actually, it's closer to 'staring' now than it is to 'looking.' "Just... fine?" Abruptly, as if she’s just remembered something important, she looks away and scrambles unsteadily to her feet. "Seriously. I'm fine. No harm done, right? Right. Good. Okay! So, um, what are we doing again? Rituals! Right. Totally knew that. What happened?  Why did you stop me?" I sit up and gaze at her, with my brows knit tight. "Twilight, what are you not telling me?" "It's nothing, really," she says, giggling nervously. "Just, um, adrenaline! Yeah. From the Ritual.” She backs a step away from me and and manages to trip over herself. "Nothing else, just clumsy, easily excitable ol' Twilight. N-not that I'm excited about anything! Totally calm. Really." I shut my eyes, put my hand to my brow and shake my head. "Twilight?" I ask. "Harken?" she replies, pretending to be engrossed by the cut on her hoof. "The love ritual activated before I stopped you, didn't it?" She gulps audibly. "Is it hot in here?  I bet it's just me. It is, isn't it? Just me?" "Twilight," I say, as calmly as I can. "Get it under control. You know it's the spell, not you." "I know!" she says, exasperated. "But you try to function when you suddenly realize that the pony next to you is your perfect physical and philosophical ideal!" Her eyes widen a bit. "Oh my God, I just said that in my out-loud voice, didn't I?" “Focus, Purple,” I say, putting a sharp edge in my voice to catch her attention. “It’s just a spell. Ignore it. None of this matters if we can’t get you home before that scroll runs out of juice.” “H-home,” she says, blinking. “Yeah. Oh God, Harken, I’m so sorry. It’s just so hard to think about anything but -- ehr, I mean, is there any way you can, you know… stop it?” “Chapter Ten, Construct One,” I say, grimacing. “Undoes all magics. Sorry, Twilight, but using that one might destroy your scroll along with the love spell. Using visualization techniques might work, but if they don’t… well, we can’t take that chance. You’ll just have to deal with it for now.” “I can’t even look at you without...” she says, briefly glancing at me before looking away and biting her lip. “How are we supposed to --” “Shush,” I say, waggling my finger at her. “We’re adults, we’ll manage. But we have to focus. That ritual tried to pull magic straight out of your horn instead of powering itself like it does when I’m in the driver’s seat. Can you guess why? Can we fix it or change it?” Twilight exhales, blinks again, and stares back at the ritual circle. “P-probably not. Powerful magical operations usually seek the closest, largest source of magic to draw additional energy from.” “So where does the magic come from when you’re at home?”“Equestria itself,” she answers matter-of-factly; having a line of rational questions to follow is definitely helping to clear her head. “But you raise an interesting question. Magic works the way I expect it to here -- I could levitate my fork at breakfast just like I usually do. Rituals work here, so there has to be a source of magic to find somewhere. Humans are non-magical, so it’s not tapping you, personally. So how does magic work in a world that actively depletes sources of magic?” I raise my eyebrow, and she rubs her chin with her hoof for a moment. “Your Earth sucks magic away… but does anyone know where it all goes?” “Just a second,” I say, turning to her. “Maybe we don’t need to know where it goes. Maybe we just need to know how it gets there.” She peers at me with a curious expression and raises an eyebrow to match my own. I stand up and walk away from the Circle, towards the ladder leading downstairs. “C’mon, Purple, I’ll show you.” Leaving the Circle and the attic behind, we head back to my library and I flick on my computer monitor. Twilight, close behind me, shuts the library door and gives me a curious look. “There are maps, I think -- hold on…” I say, pulling Twilight’s ottoman up to the desk and sitting in my Aeron. Once she’s curled up and comfortable, I pull up a web browser and start Googling terms. “Ley lines… world maps… Becker-Hagens… there! There we go,” I say, and I click on the biggest image I can find. She wrinkles her nose at the map. “Not a fan of the Kavrayskiy Seven projection, but what’s the node graph doing there? I don’t remember anything in highschool like that.“ “Ley lines.” I say, glancing at her and wondering briefly what bizarre series of events might have wound up putting a magical purple pony into a modern high school.  Shaking my head clear of the thought, I trace one of the lines across the cross-sectioned map of the world. “Places of power. About fifty years ago, occult researchers theorized that there might be a magical relationship between the locations of all sorts of ancient structures across the world. Megalith formations, pyramids, temples, all of that. They suspected those locations were built over places where magic was more easily accessible, so when they found a few local examples --” “-- they did what anypony would do by extrapolating their findings and applying it to your world’s geography!” Twilight says, finally catching on. She puts a hoof on my arm as her eyes flash with excitement. “So there’s a pattern? Those lines are your world’s network of magic? That’s great!” “Yeah,” I say, noticing a bit too late that she’s been holding my gaze a little too intensely. To be completely honest, her eyes really are -- I look away quickly, forcing myself to get a closer look at the map. “So… uh... maybe all we need to do is get you to one of these ley lines.” “Yeah,” she says, bringing her attention back to the monitor and rubbing her neck. “How far away are we from the closest one?” I scan through the results page and click through to a promising link: the ley line map is overlaid on Google Maps, and I smile as I realize just how close we are. “Not far at all. We’re here, see,” I say, pointing to my little slice of heaven just east of San Diego. “And that green line...?” “Yep,” I say, zooming in the map and pointing at the line where it intersects a road. “That’s a ley line, a big one. Goes straight from UVG-17 to UVG-15. We can go into town, then take this road here to Pine Creek road, and from there it’s a straight shot. No more than ten miles or so from my front door.” Twilight beams at me, but her smile fades a little as she processes the information more thoroughly. “So… what’s the plan if it’s not enough?” “We find a confluence,” I say, zooming back out on the map. “UVG-17 -- right there. Just south of the Arizona border.” I point at the map; no less than eleven ley lines converge at UVG-17, and I wink confidently at Twilight. “As much magic in one place as you’re ever going to find on Earth -- you’d be heading home in style. Take the 8 to Gila Bend, and then the 85 south to Lukeville. That’s a long haul, though. About three hundred and fifty miles... probably most of the day to drive it. Man, look at that terrain.” It wasn’t pretty. The confluence was atop Cerra Cubabi, a rocky, desolate summit in the Sonoran desert. I could ditch the car not far from an inspection station, but we’d have to do about four miles worth of hiking and climbing through rugged desert to get to the ley line confluence. I’m in good shape these days, and four miles isn’t much in a flat, straight line, but hiking through the Mexican badlands with a purple pony from another dimension isn’t my idea of a good time south of the border. I exhale, and Twilight peers at me. “So… we hope that one ley line is enough?” “Yep.” “Okay then!” she says, her manic smile telling me she needs a little reassurance, so I smile and nudge her shoulder. “It’ll be okay, Purple,” I say gently. “We got this.” Her mania fades, just a little, and before I can stop her she leans into my shoulder and shuts her eyes, nodding. Her warmth spreads down my arm, but her heart’s racing, and she’s breathing a little heavily. “You better not be coming on to me,” I murmur, nudging her gently and hoping to make things a little less tense. “I’m really not your type. I mean, really not your type.” She chuckles and looks up at me, glancing quickly into my eyes before looking away. “You have no idea how much I wish that was true right now.” “Right now? Forget what you want, and remember that it’s a spell and you’d kick yourself into next week if you gave in to it.” “Easy for you to say,” she says, letting her chuckle turn into soft laughter. “Seriously, could this be any more awkward?” “Sure,” I say. “I could let you have your way with me and then the spell could wear off.” “That’s terrible!” she says, laughing for real now. “You’re right, that would be more awkward.” “Let’s avoid it, then,” I say, turning my attention back to the monitor and transferring the geolocation information I need to my phone. “I don’t think either one of us would want to explain that to our parents.” “Definitely not.” Twilight’s still leaning on me, her shoulder square on mine, but I can feel her muscles finally begin to relax, and her heart isn’t pounding nearly as hard as it was. “I’m sorry I didn’t trust you before,” she says, looking absently at the monitor. I shrug. “Did I say I blamed you?” “No,” she replies thoughtfully. “No, you didn’t.” “Okay then,” I reply, looking at my watch. “It’s one in the morning, and we napped through midday yesterday. We can catch a quick nap, have a leisurely breakfast, be ready to roll by sunrise and have you at the ley line by six. That should get you back home in time for imperial second brunch or whatever it is fuzzy purple alicorns eat when they live in fancy palaces.” “I’m not fuzzy!” Twilight says, and she slides off the ottoman indignantly to emphasize her point with two stamps of her hoof. “But I will let you make me waffles as penance.”