In the final accounting of things, it was a bad piece of chalk that killed Queen Platinum.
The fatal experiment began like many others: in the lowest level of her palace, where the thick, iron-rich rock acted as a shield against stray magical fields. Sometimes the rock protected the rest of the palace from the results of her experiments; mostly, though, it kept ponies from knowing about them in the first place, for not all of her research was strictly legal. Not that anypony could arrest her, but she liked to imagine herself a beloved queen, and rumors about dark magic and wicked experiments would have detracted from her image.
So she experimented in the basement.
The stale air wafted around her when she arrived in the room with a flash. It had no door – she had to teleport every time she came and went. Her eyes adjusted to the gloom, and she worked her mouth to try and rid it of the fetid taste that grew here in her absence. After a few seconds she realized she was stalling and got to work.
The room around her was a perfectly sealed vault, a hollow space twenty paces on a side, with a high ceiling and flat, polished floor. Bookshelves crammed with tomes lined the walls, and cabinets held a small fortune of magical implements and ingredients, but the center of the room was bare. She needed the room to move around.
Experimenting with dark magic required wards. When drawn correctly, wards created a threshold across which most magical effects ceased to function, and for this particular experiment only a basic one was necessary. Queen Platinum could have drawn it in her sleep. She barely gave the motions any thought as she snatched up a piece of chalk from a bowl and began scribing her design on the floor.
Normal chalk is composed of countless tiny skeletons, the remains of microscopic sea animals that lived, died, and fell to the ocean floor millions of years ago and slowly fused into a solid mass. It is approximately as common as mud and has no special properties whatsoever.
The stick of chalk Queen Platinum held in her magical grip, tracing elegant spirals across the floor, was not normal chalk. It was unicorn chalk, and it was made of unicorns – specifically, a severed horn that had been ground into a powder, mixed with a binding agent such as beeswax or tempera and allowed to harden.
Queen Platinum finished the circle and stood back to admire her work. The intricate ward could have been a piece of art, composed of delicate loops and whorls that intersected each other at dozens of points around its circumference. The curves were perfect to an unnatural degree and spoke to years of dedicated practice. Anything less, in an experiment like this, risked disaster.
Her inspection found no flaws, and the ward was indeed perfectly drawn. But she failed to consider the chalk itself.
Queen Platinum knew how to make unicorn chalk, but she was a busy pony and couldn’t exactly go around chopping off unicorn horns herself. Nor did she ponder where the chalk – or, really, the vast majority of her spell components – came from. She had ponies to get those sorts of things for her.
The arcana dealer who supplied her chalk was not an honest pony. He had discovered, years ago, that by mixing a bit of bone in with the powdered unicorn horn he could make more chalk with fewer ingredients. Bad enough, but this chalk had a special flaw: a flake of bone somehow survived the grinding process and found its way into the mix. It settled into the middle of the mould with the hot beeswax binding, and when the stick solidified it sealed the flake within. For years the queen used the chalk without any trouble, slowly wearing it down until she exposed the thin bit of bone.
When she drew this ward, the bone itself scraped along the floor, leaving for a short stretch a line that seemed as perfect as all the rest. But without the power of the unicorn horn, the circle was broken before it even began.
The nexus of the experiment was a simple candle, and she set it in the center of the warding circle. There was nothing magical or unusual about it except for a slight infusion of lavender oil, which filled the room with a pleasant scent when burned.
The lavender oil wasn’t important. The queen just liked how it smelled.
Queen Platinum lit the candle with a spark from her horn and carefully stepped out of the warding circle, making sure not to smudge any of the lines. She closed her eyes, focused on the energy flowing through the candle’s wick, and used it as a conduit to something much higher, darker, and more powerful than the simple world in which she dwelt.
The candle’s flame turned a cold, sterile azure, a visual artifact of the otherworldly energies flowing into the room. Slowly, Queen Platinum relaxed her magical grip on the flame, letting it burn hotter. Tiny sparks, so bright they left glowing afterimages in her eyes, sprayed out of the flame. New flames emerged where they landed on the stone floor, and soon a cold blue bonfire blazed in the center of the warded circle. It outshone all other light in the room, erasing every other color, painting the world azure and black.
Still good. Queen Platinum let out a shaking breath and stepped back to wait for the fire to burn a larger hole between the worlds. The energy in the room began to build, and she tasted it on the back of her tongue, a faint metallic flavor reminiscent of blood. Unpleasant, but she had long ago learned to ignore—
A spark jumped over the warding circle. A tiny flame, no larger than a match head, sprang from the stone where it landed. Queen Platinum stared at it for a full second.
She felt the fear first – as soon as the spark jumped over the line, before her brain even had time to comprehend what just happened. To realize she had drawn a flaw in the ward, and that she stood mere feet away from an unconstrained wellspring of dark magic. That the itch on her coat wasn’t just her imagination or drying sweat; it was the spell knocking at her skin, looking for a way in.
She pivoted toward the emergency teleportation circle carved on the wall behind her. This took another second.
By the end of the third second, she made it halfway to the circle. Her horn flashed as she attempted her own teleportation spell, but the glow around it faltered, sickening, ghastly and rotten. It dripped down her face, searing away her eyelashes, and the spell melted. Not even an alicorn could cast a spell so close to uncontrolled dark magic. And she was no alicorn.
Behind her, the fires surged higher. Where there had been one spark, thousands now danced and skipped across the stone floor, leaving bobbing trails of flame behind them.
When the fourth second passed, she was a step away from the emergency circle, her hoof stretched out to touch the rune at its center. The fire had spread all around the room and licked at the stone beneath her. It crawled along the ceiling overhead. She felt its cold touch upon her hooves.
Five seconds. Her hoof smashed into the rock wall hard enough to split. The circle flared, and in the blink of an eye Queen Platinum vanished, sucked into the wall like a stone sinking into water.
In the fraction of a second before she disappeared, a wisp of azure flame touched her flank. It felt surprisingly cold and not painful at all.
The next few seconds were spent inside the wall. The spell slid her through the spaces in the rock, in the vast gulfs between the iron and carbon and silicon atoms that constituted the seemingly solid matter. The experience was like being squeezed through an impossibly fine mesh.
On the far side of the wall, Queen Platinum emerged as though being birthed from a stone womb. It dropped her on the floor with a muffled thud, bruised but otherwise intact, except for the small, dark patch on her flank where the azure flame had touched.
The palace trembled. In her laboratory, the runaway experiment consumed every organic item the flames touched, and then they began to eat away at the rock itself.
Queen Platinum noticed none of this, for she was already screaming.
It was a long while before she stopped.