//------------------------------// // Inside the Library // Story: There's More to Life than Books and Cleverness // by Quill Scratch //------------------------------// The first thing Moondancer noticed about the Golden Oaks library was the warmth: it flooded her, filling every inch of her body in a matter of seconds, her skin tingling with the wave of heat that rolled across her back and burrowed into her shoulders. She hadn’t realised quite how numb she had become out int he cold, but within just a few moments the prickling sensation of blood rushing beneath her skin was almost overwhelming. The warmth was, of course, due to the fire that blazed in the far corner of the main room. It flickered and licked at the air, almost like a tongue that was lapping up the cold, and filled the room with warmth in much the same way that one might fill a beaker with a chemical. The second thing that Moondancer noticed about the library was that, instead of having books on the shelves, the library floor appeared to be piled with stacks upon stacks of books, climbing up towards the ceiling in haphazard towers. Moondancer was no expert (although, with the amount of time that she had spent in libraries, she might as well have been) but she was pretty sure that this wasn’t how a library was meant to work. As the door shut behind her, she heard the faint but unmistakeable sound of a small bell ringing, and looked up to see one hanging from the doorframe. it was strange: she hadn’t noticed it on her way in. “Hello? Sorry, the library is closed for business today.” The voice sounded… familiar. Almost as if Moondancer had heard it recently, though she couldn’t imagine where she might have come across the Ponyville librarian. Instead, she shrugged, and simply called back: “Do you mind if I stay here for a while? There’s a terrible storm out, and I’m afraid I’ll get lost.” “No problem!” The voice was cheerful, and somewhere in the room with her, although with the stacks of books all around Moondancer couldn’t possibly see where it might have been coming from. “Hold on, I’ll be with you in just a tick. I just have to find—” There was a loud thud. It wasn’t a single noise: it was made of a whole number of tiny little thuds, each one crashing out throughout the empty tree, echoing off rounded walls and adding to the cacophony; it was the unmistakeable sound of a tower of books falling over. But in amid that sound was another—the lightest of yelps, and the softest of whimpers. The voice went quiet. Moondancer waited for a moment. The voice didn’t return. “Hello?” She stepped forward, tentatively feeling her way through the room, almost afraid that another stack of books might fall, and maybe this time one might fall on her. “Are you alright?” “I- I’m okay,” came the reply, muted and muffled, and Moondancer turned immediately and walked towards the source of the noise, some small distance to her left. She weaved in and out of the towers, until at last she came upon a stack of books in a clearing, out from which a single, lavender wing protruded. It was a bad thing, Moondancer decided, that her first thought was: Pegasi aren’t usually librarians. It was worse when she corrected herself: Librarians aren’t usually pegasi, for although she had at least avoided one potential fallacy she did unfortunately realise that her observation could be construed as racist. So she very quickly distracted herself from that train of thought, and instead thought: I wonder if she needs any help? Wrapping her magic around the pile of fallen books, Moondancer felt the brush of a second aura against her own. She was so surprised that she nearly lost her grip, but managed to hold on just in time to stop them from crashing to the floor. The pile was heavy—much heavier than she’d anticipated, and she was worried that perhaps she had taken on more than she could chew. She was, after all, one of the most powerful unicorns she knew, and she was starting to struggle so much that she wasn’t convinced that even a unicorn who could match her for power would be able to lift it with her. And yet, the books moved. Slowly but surely, the pile rose, wrapped in a shroud of light pink and lavender auras, and Moondancer could feel that she wasn’t pulling her own weight in this endeavour. In fact, she would be willing to bet that whoever this other unicorn was, they would be more than capable of lifting this pile without her help, although she certainly didn’t want to do the pegasus trapped below any harm by testing that hypothesis then and there. Except, the mare under the books wasn’t a pegasus. And when Moondancer saw those dark, purple eyes staring up at her, she very nearly dropped the entire pile on purpose, just to see if little miss Princess even needed her help in the first place. She didn’t, though. Instead, she simply finished helping Twilight move the books, before turning sharply towards the door and walking determinedly towards it… “Where are you going?” “Anywhere but here,” Moondancer answered, the words coming out of her mouth so quickly that her tongue nearly tripped over them. She rounded one last tower, and gripped the door in her aura, ready to leave. “But what about the sto—” Wind battered her face; snow catching on her skin and sticking like small pellets of ice and pure cold. She felt a familiar magic pull the door from her grasp, and slam it shut: the wave of heat rolled over her again, and she just stood in the doorway for a moment, blinking. “Stay,” said the voice, now just behind her. “I’ll make us both some hot cocoa, if you’d like? I’m pretty sure I have a few marshmallows left over…” “None for me, please,” Moondancer replied, quietly. “Just the cocoa. I’m not too fond of marshmallows. They’re too sweet and sticky.” There wasn’t a response, though she could have sworn she heard the mare behind her nodding, just slightly, the rustle of a mane bouncing up and down with a bobbing head, followed by the soft tap of hooves on polished oak floor. She turned, as if to say something, but by the time she had turned her head all that was left of Twilight was a tail swishing its way through a kitchen door. Moondancer’s first thought was to follow, but she quickly dismissed it. This was her first opportunity to have a look around the Golden Oaks Library, and she wasn’t going to waste it. Quickly breaking into a quiet trot, she zig-zagged through the stacks of books until she found her way to the edge of the room. The bookshelf was almost empty, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t wonder about their style. They certainly weren’t the pristine shelves she was used to in a library—instead, they were these strange, rounded hollows in walls, almost organically shaped (which made sense for a library that was, quite literally, a living tree.) But still, the shape threw her: she didn’t quite like the idea of the space at the ends being wasted, even if it did make the whole thing look rather nice. Keeping the shelves on her right, Moondancer trotted around the edge of the room. It was a rough oval, much like the trunk of the tree outside it, but something about it felt almost too large. It was as if this kind of space wasn’t quite small enough to fit inside a tree, even one of this size, and the fact that she could see staircases branching off of it made her question the very nature of the building she was standing in. She had always read that it was centuries old, and the kind of magic needed to do something like this was certainly a relatively recent discovery—much more recent, at least, than this tree. She wasn’t entirely sure how they had done it. Twilight might know. But then, did she really want to hear the answer from Twilight? “Moondancer?” “Cocoa’s ready,” Twilight said, her voice cracking a little but still sounding mostly perky. It seemed as if she wasn’t all too pleased that Moondancer was here, either. “When you are, I mean.” Moondancer nodded (to herself, more than anything) and turned back the way she’d come until she came across the door to the kitchen. Ducking through it, she found Twilight sitting at a table with two mugs of warm, steaming liquid before her. Tentatively, she sat down opposite the mare she had once called friend, and picked up her mug (as requested, no marshmallows), raising it to her lips. “So…” Twilight’s voice filled the heavy silence between them, but did nothing to make it any lighter. “What brings you to Ponyville?” “Plunder vines destroyed my house,” Moondancer replied simply. “Came to stay with Lyra for a few days, until it’s fixed.” Twilight looked surprised. She set her mug down on the table, and rested her elbows, propping her chin up on her hooves. “Nopony ever told me that those vines had spread as far as Canterlot,” Twilight replied. “I mean, it should be obvious in hindsight if they somehow managed to take Celestia and Luna, but I guess I just didn’t give much thought to it…” “Well not all of us can just up and move to Ponyville,” Moondancer said, before covering her mouth with a hoof: that had come out much angrier than she had anticipated. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to say it like that.” Was she angry? Stupid question: of course she was angry. This was the mare who had single-hoofedly crushed her dreams of friendship just a few years ago, and who had then gone on to be crowned Princess of Friendship. How was that fair? How was it fair that Twilight Sparkle could just abandon her friends and move to a whole new town, only then to spite them all with her brand, shiny new title. “No, it’s okay,” Twilight replied. “I understand. I didn’t even tell you girls that I was leaving.” “Did we really mean that little to you, Twilight?” Where did those words come from? Pull it together, Moondancer—you’re not some sappy foal, and you certainly shouldn’t care. Friendship isn’t for you, remember? You don’t need her. Twilight was brushing her hooves against the floor, staring awkwardly down as if to avoid looking right back at her. There was a nervousness in her eyes, jittering and jumping as they were from place to place. She let out the lightest of laughs, but it was anxious and almost choked up. “I guess I, uh, wasn’t the best friend I could have been to you all…” she said, quietly. “It’s just… when I was a filly, I never really let myself make true friends. You girls were there for me, sure, but I wasn’t a friend to you. I cared more about the books and learning than I did about you. “Since then, I’ve learned so much. I mean, look at me.” Somewhat self-consciously, Twilight shuffled her wings a little, rolling her shoulders as she did so. “I’m the Princess of Friendship, now. How do I deserve that, when I treated my first friends the way I did?” Twilight stood, turning away abruptly, and Moondancer couldn’t help but wonder if she was trying to hide her face. “And the worst part is, I probably wouldn’t have even remembered about it if you hadn’t been here today. I’ve been a terrible friend to you, Moondancer.” Not quite sure what to do, Moondancer took a long sip of hot cocoa from her mug, letting the sugar roll around on her tongue once, twice, three times. And as she drank, she thought: she thought about her fillyhood, and the role Twilight Sparkle had played in it; she thought about her old friends, and the ways she had cast them aside after Twilight left for Ponyville; and she thought about her anger towards the mare opposite her, and whether or not it was really anger that she should have felt. “You can say it,” Twilight added. “I won’t mind. It’s no more than I deserve.” “I wasn’t thinking that,” Moondancer said. “I haven’t been the best friend to the others, either. Even when we were fillies, I was always more interested in…” She let her voice trail off. Interested in what, precisely? Was it the books? In some ways it was, of course, but there was a part of her she very rarely acknowledged, a part that told her the reason for her obsession with books and knowledge. And that part said that all she really wanted was to impress Twilight Sparkle. Nonsense, of course—at least, it was nonsense now. Now she learned for the sake of learning, to fill her life with some sort of purpose and, frankly, because she enjoyed it. But when she was a filly, she had always been shy and nervous, and have never quite been sure how best to make friends. And then she found Twilight… “… Books, I guess,” she finished, lamely, after only the briefest of pauses. Twilight might barely even have noticed that she had deliberated at all over her words; if she was lucky, the princess would think that she had merely lost track of her thoughts for a moment. Twilight snorted, and her breath seemed to almost catch the air on its way out and return it as a chuckle. “Tell me about it,” Twilight said. “Neither of us ever really cared for much else, did we?” And Moondancer was so very tempted to tell the princess that that wasn’t quite true, that she had cared about her when they had been younger, but the same small part of her brain that had kept that thought hidden all these years told her that this was probably not a good idea. She wasn’t even sure why, but she listened. “It’s good to know that one of us has found something else in her life,” Moondance said, not quite bitterly. “I haven’t done all that much besides studying since you left. Even when the changelings attacked last year, they caught me in the middle of a book. Good one, too—shame it got covered in slime.” “What book was it?” Twilight turned, a frown on her face. “I might have a copy, somewhere…” “Principia Mathematica,” Moondancer replied, almost automatically. “The Russell one, not Neighton.” Twilight stopped in her tracks, her eyes widening, and a manic grins started to spread across her face. Moondancer couldn’t help but smile back at her—the mare’s enthusiasm was contagious, even if it was for things most ponies wouldn’t think twice about. “Oh my gosh, I’ve always wanted to read that,” Twilight said, her voice beginning to gush. “Did you get to the proof of 1+1…” “Yes!” Moondancer cried. “That was probably the strangest moment of any mathematics textbooks I’ve ever read. The very idea that one could lay out a proof of that, from fundamental axioms…” “Okay, we have to get a copy in here,” Twilight said, her enthusiasm all of a sudden turning business-like. “I’ll go add it to the order form for this month. Won’t take a moment!” The princess popper her head around the door and, without even leaving the room, simply stood staring into the main room of the library, he horn lit as she wrote in some ledger that only she could see. Now it was Moondancer’s turn to raise her eyebrows in surprise. “You can write from a distance? Without seeing the parchment?” Twilight turned and, blushing, walked back to the table. “I, uh, figured it would be a useful thing to practice,” she said, sheepishly, her blush deepening as she glanced up at Moondancer’s wide eyes. “Oh, stop it. You know that was something I always wanted to be able to do.” “Yes, but I never thought you’d actually do it!” Moondancer grinned. “Twilight, I know you probably get told this a million times a day, especially now you’re a princess and all, but you’re brilliant. You know that, right?” Twilight’s eyes dropped to the floor again, and she seemed to almost be trying to curl up in a ball on her chair. “You don’t have to say that, Moondancer. You were the only one at school who could even begin to keep me on my toes—I’m sure you’ve learned some pretty incredible tricks over the years.” “Not anything like that,” Moondancer said with a shrug. “I managed to learn a few tips and tricks for disabling spells a few months back, but I honestly never have much of a chance to use them.” For a moment, Twilight seemed to be lost in thought. Moondancer said nothing—she knew what it was like. And besides, she was sure Twilight would say something eventually. “Are you free tomorrow night, Moondancer?” Twilight asked, quietly. Moondancer frowned, but nodded: it wasn’t as if she had any plans beyond her usualy days in the library while she ws here in Ponyville, and she was sure that whatever Twilight was suggesting would be something she would be interested in. “My friend and I have a weekly reading session,” Twilight explained. “We just grab some cushions and some snacks and curl up by the fire with a few good books. I thought you might like to join us…” And once again, for the second time since she arrived, the image of curling up by a fire with somepony special popped into her head and wouldn’t quite go away. Moondancer wanted it—she wanted to feel the rise and fall of another pony’s chest as the pressed their side up against hers, and to enjoy the comfortable silence in the knowledge that there was somepony there with her, that she wasn’t just reading alone on another Friday night… And then, she imagined, that pony would stretch out their wings, and drape them across her back, pulling her into the lightest, softest hug. … huh. She’d never thought of that before. She wasn’t quite sure why, but she’d never really considered a pegasus for a partner. Although, in her defence, considering anypony for a partner was something she would never normally do—the idea was little more than an amorphous pony in her head. They could be anyone, except now, it seemed, they had wings. How very peculiar. “Yes,” she said, without really thinking about it. She frowned, quickly, and then decided that of course she did want to go. “Yes, that sounds wonderful.” Twilight smiled, a wide, genuine smile. “I’m glad. I’ll let Rainbow Dash know that you’re coming, and I’ll make sure we have enough snacks for the three of us. Rainbow usually eats more than her fair share, so make sure you get in on the food as quickly as you can.” Moondancer nodded, smiling. “You know, Twilight? I never thought it would be this easy to get back into the swing of hanging out with you. It’s… nice.” “Yeah,” Twilight agreed. “It is, isn’t it?” Moondancer drained the last of her cocoa and placed the mug down on the table with a sigh. “I guess this must be why you’re the princess of friendship, Twilight,” she said with a wry smile. “You’re just so easy to get along with.” “I don’t think so,” Twilight said. “I can be pretty unbearable at times. I think we just get on easily, that’s all.” “Yeah,” Moondancer said, not quite thinking about it. She did rather get on easily with the princess, even when, in the pit of her stomach, she resented the mare for everything she had done to her. And yet, when she was in the room, Moondancer couldn’t quite remember to be angry with her. Maybe it was their shared interests, or the ease with which they conversed. Maybe it was that she finally had somepony she could talk with enthusiastically about the things she had researched, without them dozing off the way Lyra and so many others had before. And maybe, just maybe, it was all those years of fillyhood spent trying to impress Twilight—all those years that made her hyper aware of all the mare’s likes, her dislikes, her hobbies and interests. And maybe, just maybe, it was the way the princess smiled—that bashful little grin that drew her eyes like sunflowers tracking the sun. It was an infectious smile: Moondancer just wanted to grin like a foal whenever she saw it, knowing that Twilight would be happier still to have somepony engaging in her interests, the same way Moondancer was glad to have Twilight share in her own. And it was still only a tiny possibility, but it might have been the way that she found herself wanting to curl up next to the princess, books held in their auras before them, and to have her wings wrapped over her shoulders… Yes, of course. It was merely that they had spent so much time together as foals. That was all.