Black Lotus
Chapter 1
"Everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real."
– Niels Bohr
Princess Twilight Sparkle walked toward the pond with slow, deliberate steps. When she arrived at its edge, she stopped and stood still in the lush grass, watching how the glass-smooth surface reflected a perfect inverted image of everything around. It was like a giant misplaced mirror set into the landscape of the surrounding meadow.
The water was so incredibly motionless and crystal clear that she felt a disconcerting sense of unrealness settling in after staring at it for a few seconds. Like the slow-building urge to scratch an itch, she began feeling a growing temptation to reach out and stomp it with a hoof so that she could break the impossible perfection of it. She wanted to hear a splash and feel the wetness and convince herself by seeing the spreading concentric ripples that this was ordinary liquid and nothing more, that the ordering of the world was still intact and the rules that describe it were still hard and fast—that they were still real, even here.
She didn't. Instead, she shook her head, then took a couple steps back and focused. There was a more important purpose here, she reminded herself, a better experiment to show what she hoped to find.
Twilight narrowed her eyes and concentrated while she looked out across the water. For a few seconds, the stillness of the reflections on the pond remained unbroken. Then, almost imperceptibly at first, tiny ripples began to distort that mirror image in perfect radiating circles, caused by small buds on thin green stalks that were breaking through the surface. While she watched, the stalks thickened and grew, climbing eagerly toward the sunlight in the clear blue sky overhead, while leaves like lilypads unfurled and floated in place around them. The waves became more pronounced in the disturbed water, and complex patterns of interference formed where the ripples expanded outward and hit each other.
As time passed, the prodigious growth of stems and foliage slowed and came to a gradual stop. Those ripples dissipated while the pond became smooth again... although Twilight knew they would never entirely vanish. Once set in motion, the water could never be the same as it was.
"A lot of things might never be the same after this," she whispered to herself, although she barely heard it.
The bud atop each stalk swelled and grew. The green petioles surrounding them opened, revealing perfectly black shapes within. Over the course of minutes, the shapes bloomed outward into petals and unfurled into perfectly black flowers.
Twilight relaxed her focus and watched for a while from the shore. The flowers waited on their stems sticking out above the water, motionless, with a presence that seemed completely natural. If she hadn’t just watched them grow, it would have been easy for her to assume they’d always been here.
It struck her that they were almost idyllically beautiful where they were, in fact. For a brief moment she thought about just leaving them alone. She could call off the plan and just sit here awhile enjoying the calm, letting this peaceful scene remain untouched. Maybe it would be better that way...
No. That wouldn't answer any of the questions. It had to be done.
After shaking off her hesitation, she reached out with her magic to grasp the nearest flower. She pulled upward, gently at first but then ramping with increasing force as she encountered resistance. It felt anchored to the bottom of the pond, and her horn began glowing more brightly as she pulled harder. With a sudden feeling of something snapping, roots yielded and broke free. The entire plant shot up to hover above the water, making a loud splash as it cleared the surface. New waves, much larger than before, radiated from that spot. The disturbance to the mud below stirred up a plume of dark silt that began spreading through the crystal water like a cloud of obscuring ink.
For a fraction of a second, Twilight manifested a magical force field along a two dimensional plane six inches below the flower she was holding up. The field, far sharper-edged than even the finest razor could ever be, passed through the stem and sliced it with a perfect molecule-fine clean cut.
There was a sudden feeling that she was holding less weight in her telekinetic magic, and the lower part of the plant dropped back into the water, splashing again. It made more waves that spread the cloudy mud further. A sudden sting of remorse for killing it, and for degrading the tranquility and clarity of such a beautiful pond, shot through her. She wondered why she hadn't thought to just cut off the flower in the first place instead of just crudely yanking up the whole plant.
But what was done was done, so she made herself push regret aside. She had the part that interested her, the only thing that mattered here. Keep the bigger picture in mind, she told herself. All the rest of this was, after all, a disposable means to that end. Very soon, this would be gone and it wouldn't matter.
The question of how far the limits of that disposability reached was troubling, though. How was this different from...?
She shook her head, admonishing herself not to be silly and sentimental. Of course it was different. It couldn't possibly be the same. This experiment would merely verify that obvious fact... or, at least, falsify some of the most troubling hypotheses...
Keeping the flower held tight in her magical grasp, Twilight spread her wings and took flight. There was nothing immediately around the pond, just grassy meadows and gently rolling hills, but she knew what direction to head in, and before too long she started to see stands of tall trees. She recognized them as the Whitetail Woods and found herself overflying Fluttershy's cottage. The orderly rows of Sweet Apple Acres' orchards weren't far off from there. Clusters of homes and shops that marked the edges of Ponyville came into sight. Her home, the crystal tree of her palace, was visible shortly after that.
Upon arriving, she hovered outside one of the palace windows and opened it easily with magic. They all had thaumic shielding in addition to their physical locks to prevent just this kind of easy intrusion, she knew, but that was no issue to overcome here under these circumstances where control was hers to exert.
She flew in and landed in the familiar hallway leading to her bedroom. Small tapping sounds of her hooves against the hard floor echoed in her ears while she walked, seeming loud by contrast to the otherwise complete silence, and she was acutely conscious of the dark flower she carried next to her, floating in a soft purple glow of magic.
When she opened the bedroom door with a gentle push, it didn't make any noise. She took a few steps in and looked around. Everything was just like she remembered leaving it, ready for what she'd planned.
Broken seal indicator taped between the door and the frame?
Well, I just broke it here, of course, but presumably it should show as intact later if this works, so check.
Thaumometric readout still printing uninterrupted?
Check.
Sensors all in place?
Check.
It occurred to her to wonder why she was even doing this mental checklist. She wasn't really here, so it wasn't actually verifying anything that mattered. It did make her feel better, though, to have the security blanket of familiar habit and procedure.
Alarm units set? Temperature monitoring? Remote trip cameras?
Check, check, check.
Ready to take the last step?
...Do I really want to know what I might know after this?
She hesitated.
...Check...
In her mind, Twilight called up the form of the spell she'd felt during the... incident. At the time, just seeing it, feeling it, had left her burning with curiosity. It was strange new magic she'd never encountered. What was it trying to do, exactly? Testing it out for herself would settle what had really been happening, and in spite of whatever misgivings she had, that thought excited her.
The magical pattern grew, readying itself in her horn with the tingling feeling of a nascent spell. There was one last moment of hesitation, standing near her bed, before she targeted a spot a little bit in front of her in the open air. She gave the pattern a push, executing the casting, and her horn flared to life.
The spell felt like a scalpel slicing a slit through a sheet of paper—slicing through a paper wall that was all around her, unperceived until that moment when her magic made contact with it. Holding the spell active, she found she was able to grab the edges of the slit and pull it open into a hole with an outline that shimmered in faint multihued scintillations of light. She looked into it and saw nothing different, just the same room, but there was a strange sense of elsewhere, something beyond that paper wall... and it was disconnected, like there was suddenly a dead zone that her magic couldn't pass through.
It reminded her of when she was a little filly, the first time she'd looked out through a thaumically-shielded window and tried to use telekinetic magic to move something on the other side of it. Nothing happened, despite her best efforts and the certainty that she was doing it right, and she'd discovered after a moment of confusion that an odd numbing sensation was flooding through her horn. It was a feeling like reaching out into an infinite expanse of empty space and finding nothing there she could grasp or feel, no feedback to tell her anything. It wasn’t pleasant. That first time it happened, she’d almost panicked from a sense of disorientation, vertigo from feeling lost in what seemed like a directionless pure void.
Twilight shook her head and dismissed the stray recollection.
The flower. That's the point here. Don't forget that.
She refocused and floated it through the opening, pushing from behind as far as she could until her telekinetic magic was cut off when it moved into the space behind the hole. No longer supported in the air at that point, the flower dropped down and vanished out of sight—where it ended up, only time would tell.
With the task done, she relaxed and released the spell. When it wasn't held open, the hole collapsed back into a slit, then the slit merged back together and sealed up like it had never existed. That perception of the boundaries of the paper wall disappeared. The sense of elsewhere was gone.
Twilight turned and quickly exited the room. There wasn't anything left to do but wait and see what results, if any, were wrought. In the meantime, she could release control now and let whatever would happen, happen. She wouldn't be stuck here too much longer... or at least it wouldn't feel too long, anyway.
These things were funny like that. Time was pliable, and it was often hard to tell here that it was really even passing at all, but nonetheless it somehow moved forward in fuzzy ill-defined chunks easily enough when it was convenient.
She looked forward to the alarm clock going off soon so she could find out if the night's work had accomplished anything or not.