//------------------------------// // Trixie’s Darkness // Story: Magic Tricks // by ferret //------------------------------// Not every pony left that room unconscious. Some managed to control their crying and withstand the pain, until they were escorted out as nominally less failures than the ones who had. It was a way of training foals not to cry so easily, as their official rhetoric went, but really what it was was an initiation. New foals to the orphanage were second class citizens, both from the staff and from the other foals. Being shown such harsh discipline was merely a way to cement that. A warning really, to prepare them for a long frustrating life wasting away in a lonely, crowded orphanage. Trixie quickly learned she would not be adopted. She saw how urgently these foals needed to escape this place, and how bitterly they would fight each other, fighting in the most viciously clandestine ways to gain a better chance at adoption. Regrettably, even Trixie participated in it, sabatoging the future of others to get a ghost of a chance herself, all to no avail. The frontier was no place for a foal, a forsaken one much less so. There were a lot of ponies with foals out here, who don’t come home one day, and there were very few ponies with the time and resources to take on another foal as their own. Which is to say, foals had reason to fight one another, and a pecking order was quickly established out of sheer necessity—if nothing else—to end all the biting. And new blood landed solidly on the bottom of that order. You had no friends, you had no idea of whom to trust, and nopony had any idea of whether to trust you, so until you proved yourself to them, even for the best ponies you were their enemy. Trixie learned this as any foal did, the hard way. After the third time she had been caught breaking the rules, because of the misleading advice of a friendly face, Trixie learned not to trust when a pony tells you for instance, that you can get a candy treat for good behavior by washing out the bathrooms after curfew. The staff did nothing to curb this. Why would they? Far from it, they encouraged such wanton cruelty as telling with glee, a foal in tears, exactly why she has no chance of being adopted, or stealing food from a foal with no allies to defend her, because she was seen as an easy target who could be bullied without retribution, or telling her the best thing for her to do was climb onto the roof and jump, or accidentally pushing her down the stairs. One less foal meant one less problem for these beleagured and jaded older ponies. One more excuse to punish a foal for crying, however undeserved, made her much less likely to ever disobey them. Once you’ve broken a pony, they’re yours forever. The more they suffer, the more they will cling desperately to any semblance of security, even if that semblance is cruelty personified. The more power you take away from them, the less power they will have to live on their own, and the less power they will have to escape. The worst of it for Trixie was not the bullying though. She could never blame ponies for falling into such debauchery and ruin, for she too was drawn into it. Ponies bully because they’re forced to bully, because if they don’t, then they become a target for the other bullies. When caring and friendship are seen as weaknesses, you either show others you are not to be trifled with, or you get forced to wear the horn inhibitor, for using your magic to save yourself from falling down the stairs. Unicorns are very rare on the frontier. There is a good, if sad reason for this fact. So many ponies there are rejected by their own society for one reason or another. When this happens to an earth pony or a pegasus, it is over some petty crime or mental instability, but unicorns have a unique responsibility on their shoulders. Or, foreheads it might be better said. What Trixie means is, unicorns who go bad will most often burn themselves out in a blaze of glory, that leaves very little left over to retreat to the frontier. With your magic outside of you, it gives you a very intimate connection with the rest of the world and its workings, and it also leaves you with terrible vulnerabilities. If not wisely accounted for, these vulnerabilities will leave behind nothing but a quadruple of smoking shoes. And the wise unicorns never get exiled. Trixie was, in fact, an anomaly at the orphanage. Other unicorns, even foals, were so rare that perhaps one out of dozens could be found at this orphanage. Of the few ponies here with a horn, none had a greater mastery of the magical arts than the foal who would come to be known as the Great and Powerful Trixie. This gave Trixie the power and ability to help herself in profound ways, and like any power in the hooves of a child, the orphanage staff had to find some method of taking it away. The first time they put a magic dampener on her, she melted it right in front of them, out of sheer spite. This was a terrible mistake it turns out, because now they saw her as a formidable foe, and the next horrible thing that went upon her horn was much more expensive, high quality, and relatively foolproof. With no education in advanced magical models, Trixie was like a blind filly, trying to find a bit she only once heard tossed on the ground, from very far away in a crowded city. Not to say this stopped Trixie, but it could take her a good amount of time to figure it out, and they all seemed to have their unique idiosyncracies, and it took her years of fighting them before she started to get good at removing them. To extend the metaphor, Trixie only figured out the secrets of what they put on her horn, largely due to being a blind filly the size of a house, who could blunder her way forward searching for that bit in great swaths, without worrying about what obstacles may be in the way. Trixie may have failed to mention, but she is very good at magic. It still took her years to do so. Years she spent under rules both cruel and arbitrary. The worst of them was the no magic rule. That’s right. No. Magic. Trixie wasn’t forced to wear those growth stunting contraptions, for no reason at all. She was forced to wear them as punishment, for toying with powers a foal should not possess. In the eyes of the staff at least, a unicorn foal was a disaster waiting to happen, a threat to their power that must be controlled, even if that control results in its destruction or death. For most of the staff, Trixie came to be feared and hated for her uncanny ability to get out of a horn restraint. For matron Night Tide, Trixie was an anathema. Trixie learned what matron Tide had done to those foals in that carriage very quickly, when she was defending herself in the lunch room with a levitated chair, and then something... some thing hit her. It wasn’t a simple knockout spell, oh no Night had to get creative. It was her special talent after all. You did not simply go to sleep when her magic touches you. You went into a slumber so deep and dark, that you were sure you would never awaken. It’s impossible to describe the horror that it filled you with, with this mysterious spell she devised. There were no nightmares, or rather there was only one very big nightmare. Just a dark, solid, black, pitless Nothing, that swallowed you like a yawning abyss, from which there was no escape. And then you’d wake up. It was a very demoralizing experience certainly, expecting yourself to be dead and gone, then suddenly being fine and dandy. Matron Night didn’t use a simple knockout spell because what she did have was so much more effective at disciplining foals. There was no fight left in you, when you awoke. There was no resistence, no defiance. You would do anything for anypony, never to feel like that again. If there is one pony Trixie will never mourn, it would be matron Night Tide, not because she was cruel, not because she wasn’t a pony, a very sad pony, who deserved to live, but because she took that spell with her to her grave. Worse spells have been, and will surely be created, but the world is a little happier place with that one gone forever. Between that and the midnight visits, it was clear Night Tide gained an unusually powerful hatred for Trixie. Perhaps it was what Trixie stood for, her continued defiance fighting the effects of that spell. Perhaps she saw a little bit of herself in Trixie, a unicorn whose powerful magical nature made her feared and dangerous. Trixie lost count of the times that spell took her down, and it was always because she used magic. It didn’t matter to the staff that it was to help somepony, or to save somepony, or even to save herself. Magic was simply forbidden, as a distrusted and feared act, that made foals too powerful to be controlled. Night took this a step further though. She would come into Trixie’s room and pull her from her bed and say horrible things to her. More often than not awakening with a horn suppressor on, Trixie was always too terrified to use her magic against the older mare. And the things she called Trixie. Unwanted, freak, no-good, terrible demon filly. The saddest thing is, she didn’t know! All that hatred was over mere cantrips, and Trixie’s true crimes went unseen by Night Tide. Trixie may not have survived another night, if matron Night Tide had known the true extent of the terrible fury of Trixie’s magic. How many creatures she’d killed, two very special ponies at the top of that list, who Trixie could never, ever see again. But her blissful ignorance didn’t stop Night from having a grudge against Trixie’s insistent, perhaps even compulsive use of magic. As a unicorn, she should have understood the need to work out one’s horn, but instead it was the opposite scenario. Night understood that need, and hated Trixie for feeling it, and hated Trixie for being capable, and for not just falling in line like the other foals. She... As an example, once Trixie had been awoken by the matron’s approach, and before she could escape, she was hurled unceremoniously against the wall, and Trixie’s head wrenched painfully downward, until her horn struck her own mattress. She was dragged by her head across it like a tool, hardly even awake yet, a terrible gouge left in her mattress from where her horn had been. A unicorn’s horn may not appear sharp, but its magic is especially shaped toward penetration, to the point that unicorns have trouble with anything that strikes their forehead getting summarily impaled by what should be a blunt knob of a horn. It wasn’t nearly as good at sideways tearing, but the matron made it work, and when she dragged Trixie across her own mattress, Night hissed into her face, “You did this!” She forced Trixie against the tear, while Trixie tried so hard not to cry. “This is what you do, you little witch!” she asserted furiously. “You’ll never use your horn. All you can do is break things with it, and ruin things, and hurt ponies. I’m going to make sure of that,” Night said pulling Trixie eye to eye with a guiltily smug grin on her face as she said, “And there’s nothing you can do about it. Trixie said nothing. “Worthless!” Night shot out, throwing Trixie to the mattress and leaving her there, unfortunately sobbing now. “Stop crying!” the matron said in a deranged agitation, “You will not cry! You don’t deserve to cry, you horrible, horrible thing!” That was the last word Trixie remembered, until the matron’s spell once again sucked her into a screaming emptiness of lonely despair. They wouldn’t replace her mattress either, so Trixie had to sleep around the torn gouge from then on, a silly, stupid, harmless reminder of what she was capable—reminder of what had happened, through no fault of her own, to cause that to occur. Trixie was not alone in the orphanage. There were foals she swaggered with, and showed the world she was not to be trifled with, and there were foals she confided to in hushed tones when she was sure no other ponies could hear. There was all that strife and fear, but in it, as with all things, there was also camradery. She was something of a local hero among foals, for her defiance to the staff. But really Trixie wasn’t trying to be defiant; she had no idea what she was doing with herself. It was the simple fact that Trixie could not bring herself stop using magic. It was just too... useful! It was her special talent, after all. The shooting star on her flank was a cruel reminder, but it was also a comfort in a way. Trixie had something no other pony could match, one thing Trixie was unparalleled at, and foals came to respect her for this, for what she could do for them that a unicorn with mere mastery over levitation or illumination could not. Her life may have been a different story, had Trixie’s talents at the time also included teleportation. But alas, she was not talented enough to master a complex spell like that so easily. Unable to escape, her use to the foals and her status as iconoclast were directly offset by the trouble she brought to the orphanage staff, and matron Tide in particular really seemed to have it out for her. Trixie could not count how many times she was, in her moment of triumph, wracked by that spell, and whenever she came out of it, an eternity later, Trixie always had a suppressor on her horn. And then the matron would come for her at night. For all her bluff and bluster, Trixie was as broken as any foal in that orphanage. Her confidence was a sham, and her role as protector was an illusion and a lie. Even if she did protect many foals, it’s just what anypony would do were they in possession of her powers. The staff were very good at what they did, and Trixie was a very young foal when they got their teeth on her, so don’t laugh when you learn that she truly did think she deserved those punishments. She came to think the staff were being reasonable and she was the troublemaker, that there was something wrong with her that could not be fixed, something that doomed her to a life of endless opposition from the powers of authority. Even to this day, Trixie is not entirely convinced that is a lie. She may never feel good about herself again. She could have forgiven that though. She could have forgiven that spell. She forgave them for their desperate cruelty, both in foal and adult flavors. She forgave that land for being forbidding, and she forgave those few prospective parents so very few, who entertained adopting Trixie only until the moment they saw the horn on her head. Trixie could have lived with that, and she did live with that, and she even managed to make some friends in the process. No, what Trixie could never forgive them for, was they stole her childhood. One day, Trixie looked at herself in the mirror, and she didn’t see a frightened young filly anymore. She saw herself growing and changing, and blossoming into a young mare who could never, ever, ever be adopted. Thanks to that Tartarus spawned orphanage, every memory of the flexibility and vigor of her youth had been forever colored gray. That was when Trixie knew that she had to get out of there. No regular meal or stiff, ragged bed to sleep in was worth this. Good behavior allowing her to escape the wrath of the orphanage staff was a pale, thin, unfulfilling reward, compared to the dream of escaping the orphanage itself. So staring at that hopeless filly in the mirror, in the nadir of her foalhood, the young Trixie Lulamoon would begin plotting her escape, and the true beginning of her life. It wouldn’t do to just run away. You could die, and it was very easy to die out there. If you didn’t, or wouldn’t die, then they would catch you, and they were very good at catching you. No, Trixie needed somewhere to run to, somepony who would protect her. She needed adoption, but barring that she needed an ally outside of the walls. Trixie found that ally in the circus. Their reasons may seem obvious in hindsight, but when the circus first came to the orphanage, Trixie was spellbound by the amazing feats they could perform. She wasn’t the only one, either. Every foal was mesmerized by the juggling and the tight rope walking, and the strangely wonderful ponies with mysterious abilities, and the laughing. Nopony laughed much at the orphanage, and when they did it was a cruel laugh at the irony of somepony else’s inferiority, but when Goobleberry got things rolling, it was just impossible not to laugh your head off. Why was the circus coming to this horrible place? There is no doubt in Trixie’s mind that those performers would have razed that orphanage to the ground, had they the power to do so. Perhaps in a way that’s what they did, because what they brought the foals was hope. Hope for something beyond these walls, a drive and ambition to be more, when the staff required foals to only ever be less. This is not to say the circus was recruiting, as they certainly did not give Trixie an easy time of it, but they were... representing the outside world. Showing foals that this isn’t all there is to life. There were always more escapees after the orphanage was (with most reluctance) forced to admit the circus to perform, and some of the escapees didn’t return to the orphanage. Trixie would like to think they made it, but she has performed for many crowds and... she would still like to think that some of them made it. It’s a big world out there. Her plan was foolproof. The circus would come to the orphanage, and Trixie would slip past the staff and, rather than running off screaming into the night, tempting as that may be, she would sneak into the tent of the ringmaster. There she would amaze him with her feats of persipacious prestidigitation, and secure a place for herself that the orphanage could not steal her from! Best laid plans, as they say. Trixie had made a ...friend, you see. A pegasus named Bit Bright, who loved the exotic thrill of the circus as much as Trixie did. Pegasi were... clipped in the orphanage. It’s not a permanent injury, so it was seen as an effective disciplinary measure. Just harmlessly snip a young foals’s flight feathers as they grow in, and they’ll run around your feet, instead of... flying off screaming into the night. Pegasi were even rarer than unicorns down on the valley floor here, as any pegasus with an ounce of common sense would take their chances with the gryphons in the mountain roosts. But they were here in small numbers, and they were a sort of foal who should never have been in this orphanage. Trixie always struggles to describe how wrong it is to clip a pony’s wings. Her horn suppressors were not really comparable: at once more unpleasant, and less soul crushing. The staff had to stop Trixie with walls, and barriers and guards, locking her down because of the fearsome power within her, just waiting to be released. A flightless pegasus has... no power within. She simply becomes unable to fly. This might seem self evident, but it’s more than simply stopping her from flying. Wings clipped, she tries to fly, and cannot, and it cuts to the very core of her being. There are no restraints needed. She has no power that must be withheld. She is just... broken. A shadow of herself. The only analogy Trixie could ever come up for this is if they ever decided to saw off Trixie’s horn. Trixie could not even... imagine what that would do to her. Pegasi never lasted long at the orphanage. An easy target for bullying, quick to fall ill, and slow to recover. There wasn’t much medical care for sick foals, beyond quarantine and isolation, and being expected to sweat it out in bed. Trixie didn’t remember many foals from the orphanage, because her friendships were always so short lived. She was a survivor, but they would come and... go, and so rarely would they go in a way that was out the front gates with a loving family. Sometimes they would simply disappear, and the orphanage staff would say that they got adopted, but the orphanage staff would never have adopted a foal, without loudly proclaiming their successes for all to hear. No, Trixie knew exactly what happened to those foals, and she saw those fascinating ponies with the tantalizing freedom of their limitless wings, most often get taken away quietly in the night. But Bitty was... also a survivor. She turned that hollow emptiness inside her into hot rage, and destroyed anyfoal who even thought about seeing her as an easy target. She was... strong, respectable. She was a pony Trixie came to look up to, and she would come to show a side of herself to Trixie, that no other pony got to see. Trixie didn’t understand why Bitty came to trust her so much, but after many nights of the poor filly crying herself to sleep with Trixie by her bedside, nights that Trixie never took to her advantage, Bit Bright knew in her heart that Trixie was somepony she could count on through thick and thin. Trixie had assumed the opposite was true, but... well, this may come as a shock to you, but on very rare and catastrophic occasions, Trixie has been wrong before.