Star Swirl the Bearded’s Guide to the Arcane Arts

by Midnight Quill

Prologue: About Magic itself

Magic is present in a vast amount of locations. It would be too much to use the word “everywhere”, but be sure that you may find magic in the utmost extraordinary places you can imagine. It lingers in every cave, every sea, every straw of grass and every living being.
Magic is the key to the mystery of life, and the understanding of magic, to which I have now devoted so many nights in the candlelight, the key to understanding our own existence.

What is magic?
I encountered the question for the first time in magic kindergarten, when they taught us the basics about our magic and why there were three differed kinds of ponys:

“Unicorns”, our teacher told us, “can directly use magic and manipulate and create things with their mind.”

(At this point, just imagine my enthusiasm as I realized that therefore I was meant as well.)

“Pegasi”, so she went on, “can rise and fly in the skies without much effort, walk on clouds and change the weather. And earthponys, earthponys”, she repeated, “are entirely one with nature. They feel it when it comes to an animal feeling good or bad and the same with a plant. They select the soils on which they grow our grain, and when an earthpony says that a soil is good, then I bet my last feather on it - (it should be said at this point that our teacher was a pegasus) - that the soil is as good as they say.”

“And what about alicorns?”, one of the fillys asked.

“Alicorns, my dear Sunflower, are legends. Same like dragons or sirens. Those are tales of old times, told by old ponies in the warm light of a fireplace.”

Oh, if only she had known.

But back to the initial, the one true question: What is magic?
What gives a pegasi the ability to fly? In what language does the soil speak, when it talks to an earthpony? And what power does a unicorn may posses, so it can create things out of nothing?
To this question I have devoted, how already told, many, many days and nights of my long life and I only found it right at the end of said life to write down all my experiences and to share them with the world.
So that this book may answers many questions for the reader, but at the same time motivates him to make a few new ones.

Star Swirl