//------------------------------// // Chapter 33 // Story: Ghost Lights // by Winston //------------------------------// Ghost Lights Chapter 33 There's a reason most unicorns never really develop a wide range of magical ability beyond one particular talent. As it turns out, it's because it just plain isn't easy. Firsthoof experience taught me so on day one hundred and sixty eight. Azure completed modifications to her transformation spell and we were ready to try it that morning. We were standing inside the middle the barracks, facing each other, preparing for the first attempt. I took a deep breath. "Are you sure this is going to work?" I asked. "Are you sure you want to ask questions like that?" Azure responded. I opened my mouth give her some kind of smart response, but nothing came out. I was silenced for the moment. She was right, and besides, the question was more of a formality borne out of my own anxiety about the unknown than a matter of not trusting her. "It either is or it isn't, and doubting won't make it any better," she continued. "If it doesn't work, it'll feel sort of funny for a second but nothing bad will happen. I messed up on myself trying to become a pegasus the first time around and I was fine, remember? Besides, pegasus to unicorn is actually a pretty easy adjustment from the original, so yes, I'm sure. Now, how long do you want?" "Four or five hours for a first time, I guess," I said. "That sound good?" "Sure." Azure nodded. "Umm... you've never had a bad reaction to getting zapped with unicorn magic, right? Not nervous, panicky, anything like that?" "Not that I get... 'zapped'... often, but no, I'll be fine," I said. I was confident about that, at least. I'd had medical magic used on me in the past and grown used to it. "Good," Azure said. "It's just a thing that should be asked because some ponies freak out a little bit. Stay calm and remember not to be alarmed if this feels a little weird, 'cause it might, especially a spell like this." "Alright. Thanks for the warning." I nodded. "Okay. Here it goes." A look of determination mixed with concentration and thought set into Azure's face. I braced myself a little inside as her horn started glowing, though I tried to relax my body and not tense up outside. Bright light started to envelop my body. It flooded into my eyes, making everything look hazy and glared out, so I closed them. The light dimmed from white to a diffuse dark red through my eyelids, not bright enough to be uncomfortable. I'm not sure how to describe the moment of transformation other than to say it felt like a weird twisting sensation in my back, rippling through my muscles and bones and then surging up my spine and in my forehead, like nothing I've ever felt before. It was painless, but unfamiliar in a way that would have made me worry if I hadn't known exactly what was going on. I placed my trust in Azure and just went along, trying not to think too much about it. It only lasted for a fraction of a second, anyway, before things felt something like normal again. The glow of magic faded and my vision turned black under my eyelids. I waited for a few seconds to be told I was in the clear. "All done!" Azure announced. I opened my eyes. The most immediate thing I noticed was a just barely visible slight yellow fuzziness right at the top of my vision. I impulsively rolled my eyes upward and looked, crossing them slightly and feeling some minor pain as I tried to focus on what it was. I couldn't make it out, exactly, but from what I could tell it was clearly something sticking out of my forehead. Azure giggled at me. "You know, it's traditionally considered impolite among unicorns to try to look at your own horn without a mirror," she informed me. "Mostly because you end up making funny faces and it's bad for your eyes." "Oh." I stopped trying, convinced after a moment that she was right and I wasn't really getting anything but eyestrain from it. "Well, you tell me how I look with this thing, then." "You look... ummm... well, the same, really, just with a horn but no feathers," Azure informed me. When she mentioned 'no feathers', I couldn't stop myself from instinctively trying to feel for my wings. Only in that moment did it fully hit me that they were gone. When my brain tried to tell them to move, there was no response, no feeling. The muscles that drive them wouldn't flex because they weren't there, my shoulders and back were smooth and lacking any appendages. I've heard that amputees sometimes suffer from a phantom limb syndrome that can drive a pony nuts, but fortunately it didn't seem to apply in my case since I wasn't really an amputee, per se. It was more like my wings had been temporarily substituted out from ever having been a part of my body at all. I guess that since that included the wiring being gone, there was no residual signal to become a problem. The next thing I did was reach up with my right foreleg and feel for my new horn. It was where I expected to find it - although not having any experience with such things yet, I did manage to immediately jab myself in the ankle with its tip. Like most unicorn's horns, it had a fairly well-rounded point that wasn't very sharp and certainly not enough to drawn blood easily. It just caught me suddenly and put pressure at the sensitive seam between skin and hoof, causing enough pain to make me flinch and withdraw my leg reflexively. At that moment, I also became aware that I could feel something I never had before, the sensation of tactile feeling coming from a point beyond the curve of my forehead. This excited me. I could actually feel my new horn! I focused my attention on that spot and realized that it was really there, I could sense it. "Careful with that," Azure cautioned me. She sounded amused to see my reaction to having poked myself. "I can feel it!" I told her. "Yes, I'll bet you can. It's actually pretty sensitive underneath the hard outer horn casing," she said. "I probably should warn you - try not to hit it on anything, because it'll hurt." "Thanks for the tip." I nodded. We both just sort of stood around looking at each other for a little while after that. I wasn't sure what exactly I should do with my new-found unicornness. That was something I maybe hadn't considered as far in advance as I should. Although... there was the obvious... "So, uh, how do I magic?" I asked. "Yeeeaaahhh... kinda figured that question was coming. Let's go outside for that," Azure said. "Why?" I asked. "Because uncontrolled unicorn magic tends to... well... go places and hit things," she explained. "Trust me, my mom put up with a lot of broken glass and minor fires in the first few months after I figured out I had a magical horn." "Right. Outside it is," I agreed. Azure led me out the door and a good few hundred feet away from the building. I wondered if that much distance was really strictly necessary, but she probably just didn't want to take any chances. It was a perfectly fine day for the Seawall, anyway, cloudy as always but so far still dry and a little on the warm side with calm air. "So how do you... magic... the... stuff..." I started trying to ask, but quickly realized I didn't even have any terminology I knew how to ask with. "Sorry, I don't exactly know anything about this. What should I even ask first? Let's start there." "I understand. Hrmmm..." Azure thought for a moment. "I guess we can start with, how do you turn on the flow of magic through the horn. Most unicorn foals figure it out on their own, but since you've never been a unicorn foal, we'll have to get through that first baby step before we get anywhere else." "Right." I nodded. "Okay, so, you already said you can feel your horn. Focus on that, and... it's... well, it's... how do you describe what it's like to flex a muscle? Because it's sort of like that, only different, too. You'll be able to feel it when it happens, and when you get used to it, you'll learn how to control it very exactingly with a little bit of practice. I mean, it's like, you'll just 'get it' once you get it," Azure said. "You know?" "I think I understand what you mean," I said. "It's like how could you describe color to somepony who's colorblind, I guess. You'd have to experience it to understand it." "Exactly!" Azure exclaimed. "Sorry that's not more helpful. I'm kind of frustrated, actually. It's a level so basic I don't even know how to teach it, which feels weird." "It's alright," I said. "Maybe it's something I'll just have to figure out on my own." We hung out there for a while, not really accomplishing much for the next half hour or so. I tried concentrating on the way my horn felt, which made me acutely focused on my whole general forehead region, but that in itself didn't result in anything. I tried visualizing magic in my horn, but that didn't do anything any more than merely visualizing taking a step would make it actually happen. There was some other component I was missing, an action rather than just a thought. The trouble was how, exactly, to take that action. I tried flexing but just made the muscles in my forehead tighten up a little. I don't know how to describe what I finally did. It was what Azure said, like flexing, but different. It was an act, a conscious one, that involved my horn, but not quite the same as moving a muscle other than a sense of just instinctively 'knowing how to do it' in the same kind of way. I could certainly feel the difference between the active and relaxed state in my horn, though, just like there's a different feel in a muscle that's being held tense. Whatever it was, success was obvious because a bright glow of orange light suddenly flared from my horn. I was actually caught so much by surprise the first time that I stopped immediately and the glow instantly vanished. "Hey! Whoa! I think you're finally on to something there," Azure said, taking notice. "Try that again, whatever you just did." I tried again, and the glow lit up once more. This time I held it, now that I was less surprised and more focused. I kept at it for a few seconds before I relaxed - if 'relaxed' is really the right word - and let it fade. I kept doing it a few more times, on and off repeatedly before I stopped entirely, waiting for a clue about where to go from there. "Do that again," Azure directed me. "Hold it a little longer this time." I did what she said. As soon as my horn started glowing, so did hers. Suddenly I felt something pushing in a funny way on my horn, or maybe more accurately, almost into my horn. It wasn't a physical sense of being squeezed, but I could feel a kind of restricting resistance to the magical field it was emanating, as if I had to flex harder to achieve the same effect as before. The orange glow of my magic dimmed and shrank. The resistance stopped and released after a couple seconds, though, and my magical field sprang back to normal and felt much more easy-flowing again. "Alright. It looks like you have a strong basic aura," Azure said approvingly. "Which isn't too surprising since you had a lot of pegasus magic, too." "That's good to know, I guess," I said. "It means there probably won't be many spells that are out of your reach," Azure said. "Some unicorns are stronger than others, and unicorns that aren't strong enough aren't able to successfully cast certain kinds of spells because they can't generate enough magical output. It's like a muscle, though. You can make it stronger or gain more endurance by training, if you really work at it, but I don't think that's anything to worry about right now." "Alright. So what spell do I get to learn first?" I asked. "Let's start you off with the easiest thing there is," Azure said. "Simple telekinesis." "Awww." I feigned disappointment. "I was hoping for some sort of death ray." "You know, funny thing is, disintegration beams aren't actually all that hard," Azure told me. "But we'll save those for when you're maybe a little more advanced. Like, after you've learned how to handle magic well enough to be able to aim." "Oh. Yeah, good point." Azure levitated a small rock from somewhere and set it down on the ground between the two of us. She did something with her horn and a faint sky blue glow, the color of her magic, briefly emanated out of the rock. "I just infused some magic into this so it'll be an easy target for you to work with," she explained. "You should be able to feel it standing out pretty strongly from the background with your own magic, which will make it easy to reach out to and pick up." "Assuming I can figure out how to 'reach out' to things," I mumbled. "Eh, so far, so good," Azure said. "You figured out how to turn on your horn. You'll get this too. Once you've got a grip on telekinesis, excuse the pun, we can move on to another spell if you want." We never did move on, not that day. Getting magic to glow from my horn was one thing, but making it actually do anything was another. I spent the next two hours just working on causing it to have any interaction with the rest of the world. At first I felt like I was numb, getting no sensory feedback no matter how hard I tried. I couldn't actually tell if I was touching anything with it at all, but I suspected not. Little by little I started being able to perceive miniscule bits of tactile sensations, here and there in little flashes - the feel of sand, rocks, grass. They were coming through my horn, carried on the magical field that I was aware of emitting. I didn't have much control, though. It felt like trying to move unfamiliar limbs and not knowing how to make them go in the direction I wanted, so they waved randomly. There was no breakthrough moment, just a little by little improvement through trial and error until I was able to sort of direct my efforts deliberately towards a particular chosen spot. Even after I did, at first it was very tenuous, like things were slippery and just slid around and past me. Finally, though, I was able to get some sort of grasp on the rock that Azure had used for a target. The magic she'd placed in it seemed to make it stickier, somehow, clinging to my own magical reach more readily than the other things around it. I got a lock on it that felt somewhat solid, then strained against its mass. I tried pushing and pulling, at least as best I knew how, and after several minutes of effort, there was a small reward: a little twitch of motion. It wasn't much, but it was my first spell ever, and having accomplished it I suddenly felt very proud of myself. It was that thrill of discovery that nothing else in life can really compare to. I kept trying. After a few more attempts, I was able to do it again. It started getting easier from there once I started building on my successes. After several hours, the culmination of all this was that I was able to make the rock hover off the ground and slowly move it around through the air for maybe ten or fifteen seconds at a time. By then, though, the novelty was ebbing away. I was drained and just about had enough for the day. "I didn't know magic was so tiring," I told Azure after I set the rock down for the last time that session. "It uses energy just like any other activity," Azure said. "Also, you're just not used to it yet, like I wasn't on the first day I tried to fly. I don't think I've ever felt so wiped out. You're doing really well, though. I wasn't sure we'd even get as far as achieving any results with telekinesis." "Is it normal to get headaches? Or hornaches, I guess?" I asked. Both of those parts of me were in a fair amount of dull pain, but I'd only just then started paying much attention to it. "Yes, that'll happen after a lot of heavy strain," she said. "Sorry. But... uhhh... Hold on. Maybe this'll help. Hold your head still for a second." I did, and she stepped close to me, close enough that we were almost touching. She leaned forward and pressed the side of her horn against mine, then rubbed up and down rapidly, alternating sides between strokes. The spiraled fluting on our horns bumping against each other as one horn slid over the other created a buzzing rhythmic vibration with a pleasant massaging effect. She stopped after about a minute or so of this. The pain in my horn wasn't completely gone, but I realized that it was substantially reduced. "Feel any better?" Azure asked. "Yes," I said, surprised that it could be treated so easily. "What did you do?" "It's a simple trick, but a good one to know," Azure said. "A unicorn's horn is filled with porous microchannels that let it transmit energy. After a long time of heavy use, they get strained and start jamming up because they get stuck in an active state, like an overused muscle cramping up or having a spasm. The vibration helps shake them loose and clear things out so they can relax and drain." "Well, thanks," I said. "Don't mention it," Azure said. "I've had to deal with a lot of magic headaches. Besides, it's like you told me. All we've got out here is each other. If I didn't help you, who would?" I gave her a smile and nodded. I think it was a pretty good first day as a unicorn.