The chapel in Bluestone Manor was a relic of an older age, built centuries before the line of Blueblood became a true noble house. It existed principally as a fane for ancestor worship. Fanciful scenes decorated the spandrels, and the ceiling was a work of intricate fan-vaulting. Unlike conventional Equestrian chapels with their colorful iconostases along the interior, each wall of the nave bore a long stone ambry, lined with recessed arched compartments. Each compartment held a bust of a long-defunct member of House Blueblood. They were prayed to, celebrated, and remembered. Hundreds more busts and other relics lay in the manor crypt; they were displayed in the chapel depending on religious requirements.
The line of House Blueblood was many and varied. Among the visages were Quirt the Vehement, the fervent cleric who stopped the Bovine Civil War from tearing early Equestria apart, Mansefurd the Heterodox, who established the Eight Minor Schools of Philosophy, Wise Keppar, the explorer who wrote her Book of Places as she mapped out the known world, the stern faces of Auric Auricsson, and his son, Auric, son of Auricsson, the unparalleled beauty of Princess Platinum IX, and her Diamond Daughters, Lattice, Brilliance, and Adamas.
One bust had been removed from its compartment and placed on the altar. Prince Platinum III, the Patron Prince. The bust gazed ahead solemnly, as his distant ancestor, Duke Polaris Blueblood, surveyed his preparations.
Polaris’ ritual circle was plain and unpretentious, little more than an enclosed octagram connecting eight candles. Between the circle and the altar was a steel bowl of water, in which floated a lone lily. Aside from the ancestral bust, the altar also held a potion of rejuvenation for use after the ritual, and a lamp of clarified butter with a wick of dried thyme, the family herb. Presently, it wafted thick, fragrant smoke through the chapel.
Polaris turned his head, and his vision went wavy and unfocused. He recast Peppendale’s Minor Cantrip of Alacrity. The exhaustion did not leave him, but the spell strengthened the connection between mind and body, allowing him to mentally push himself through the ritual. He had been awake for seventy-two hours, performing a mixture of physically punishing calisthenics and mentally taxing Brahman meditation, all part of the vigil before the summoning.
Before the cast, he had a final preparation to make. He took a list of private sins and burned it in the butter lamp, letting the ashes crumble into the lily pool, praying to the old gods as he did. The names of Lamrei the Originator, Glashtyn of the First Seas, and Wayfaring Enbarr passed his lips.
Many mages—one or two of them his former tutors—would have turned their noses up at such a setup, for being vague, philosophically inexact, and thaumaturgically inefficient. They would replace the lily pool and butter lamp with Oil of Inflorescence, they would deride the chapel, prayer and ancestral busts as mere superstition, and offer a mathematically correct sacrifice of roosters in place of the more personal oblation that the Duke of Blueblood had in mind.
They were fools. For all their insistence otherwise, thaumaturgy was not a science. It was barely a discipline. It was mathematics in the days of stone tablets listing Pythagorean triples, discovered through trial and error as much as logic. They thought they could understand magic. Hubris! Magic as ponies knew it was not a set of logical operators, it was a cookbook bequeathed by ancient and nigh-incomprehensible demiurges.
They were cowards. They eschewed what magic would not fall within their rules, that which might harm the caster, that which could not be scaled up or down or crossways in a comprehensible manner. If it could not be occluded, combined, or dispelled it was treated with fear and suspicion, only added to a mage’s repertoire if she could at least feign understanding. What parsimony! What contemptible stinginess, to disregard tools to further a great cause until safety and comprehension are utterly assured!
Polaris was no savant. He knew not why eggs turn opaque and solid when heated. This would not stop him from making an omelette. He chose his spells from older grimoires, from a time where mages were unafraid to grope blindly. Magic had its own soul, and it was as mischievous as the souls of art or mathematics.
Polaris knew that if you asked much of magic, you must be prepared to give much in return.
The last sunlight of the afternoon fell through the stained-glass windows of the chancel, spreading a blaze of color over the altar. The chapel was now utterly silent. The rest of the manor was well-guarded. Though Rarity was not a trained mage, she had been taught enough magecraft to tell a wand from a ward, and used her minor magical skill to supervise the array of guardian magic that kept Bluestone Manor unmolested. In addition, Polaris’ Caucasian Shepherd, Kuschel, roamed the halls, as well as the manor familiars.
The familiars were items enchanted by ancestor spirits, predecessors who had been martial champions and commended their spirits to defend House Blueblood forevermore. The animated robes of Mave the Marvelous whorled with dire spellcraft at her disposal, the nigh-indestructible barding of The Implacable Vambrace stood vigilant, and the roving swords of the Three Quiet Brothers slunk through the shadows.
Polaris was ready. He cast a ball of light to hover above the casting circle, knelt before the lily pool, and closed his eyes.
“On the spirits of my ancestors, I call my soul forth so that I might offer a portion and summon a mighty Servant.”
He opened his eyes. The lily had disappeared from the pool, leaving a strange, glassy surface in its place. Below the surface, a simulacrum of Polaris looked upwards, smiling at his true self. The image extended his hoof, raising it through the surface of the pool.
Polaris drew the Platinum Razor from its sheath, and sliced through the spectral limb with a single stroke.
He screamed, as much from shock and reflex as from pain. The ritual circle blazed with ultramarine light. His blond mane whipped around his face from the winds that now howled inside the chapel. The flames of the eight candles and the butter lamp doubled and then tripled in size before exploding in a shower of yellow light. A hole seemed to tear within reality itself, linked inextricably to Blueblood, pulling the very breath from his lungs.
In seconds, it was over.
The stone floor was warm beneath his belly. He opened his eyes, and closed them again. When they next opened, he was unsure how long he had lain in place. It took three attempts to climb to his hooves. He caught a glimpse of his face in the lily pool. His eyes were sunken and glassy, his mane seemed brittle and aged, and his limbs shook with exertion. He coughed, feeling tar stir deep within his lungs, and squealed from the pain that wracked his ribs.
The ritual would not permanently damage his soul, souls being marvellous things that regenerated quickly. But damaging a portion of his own soul was excruciating, and took a toll on the body that could kill a lesser stallion. His mind felt weak and clouded. All he wished to do was curl up beneath soft blankets until the pain went away.
A figure stood before him, though in his exhaustion he could not make out who it was. A white hoof proffered a bottle to his lips. Rarity, of course. She had come in now that the ritual was complete to aid him. He took the bottle and sucked the peppery liquid down greedily, feeling strength return to his limbs as it slid down his throat. He coughed again after draining the bottle, but this time there was no agony, and it actually seemed to dislodge the catarrh from inside him.
“Thank you, Rarity,” he croaked.
He heard a cheerful, almost musical laugh. “I think you’ve got the wrong mare, you have.”
Polaris looked up. Before him was a white-coated unicorn, a mare with green eyes and a curly, cherry-red mane that barely reached her neck. She wore a chainmail hauberk over quilting and a threadbare, well-weathered hooded travelling cloak.
He stared at her. He looked back at the ritual circle. It was empty. He looked back at the mare. “Who are you?”
The mare ignored him, instead picking up the Platinum Razor, which had fallen to the floor. Her eyes lit up with cheer as she surveyed it.
“It’s been a while since I’ve seen this, it has.” Her accent was an odd one, a lilting, playful sound. The closest Blueblood could think of was a Caerfilly accent. “I knew cherrywood charcoal was the right thing for the forge. The enchantments are still as strong as when I first cast them.”
Something clicked within Polaris’ mind. “You’re Saber.”
The mare shrugged. “Apparently so. Grail War, Servants and Masters and all that lark, I’ve got all that rolling about up here now,” she said, tapping a hoof to her head. “You’d be my Master, then?”
Polaris blinked. “This is wrong,” he said. “The summoning was wrong. Who are you? I was trying to summon Prince Platinum III as my Servant!”
The mare goggled at him, and the burst out laughing. “What, wee ‘Poncey’ Platinum? Why were you trying to summon him?”
“He stopped the minotaur invasion! Ruled the greatest expansion of art and science in Equestrian antiquity! Owner of the Platinum Razor! He founded the Hornblade Knights!” sputtered Polaris.
The mare shrugged again. “Well, all that’s true but he was still a bit of a daft tit, I’ll say. Not the brightest lad, but knew well enough to stay surrounded by clever folk, eh?” she said. “Glad to hear his chivalry club took off nicely, the little moppet was so excited when he told me about starting it. Come to think of it, I did give him the Platinum Razor, after I didn’t need it any more. He must have been a score old, back then.”
Blueblood stared, and said nothing. Then he said, “Who are you?”
Instead of replying, she took the empty potion flask in her hooves. She rolled it from hoof to hoof, testing its weight, and tossed to Polaris.
“Catch,” she said.
Blueblood caught the flask in his magic field. Both halves of it. He looked closely. The flask had been bisected from neck to base with impossible precision, in a cut so smooth that it appeared to have always been thus.
The mare was holding the Platinum Razor, and smiling. He didn’t even see her draw it.
“Who am I? Oh, I’m just a simple lass from Ceffyl Dwr, I am,” said the mare. “You can call me Castellan.”