//------------------------------//
// Chapter 30: Epilogue? The Third Protégé (and Tears) 
// Story: The Enforcer and Her Blackmailers 
// by scifipony 
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The soft patter of hooves on the Saddle Arabian rug and the slight rustle of enormous wings caught me by surprise.  I had expected the door of iron bars that sealed the ancient entrance to the Star Swirl the Bearded wing in the Accadamie building to squeak.  

I closed the cinderblock-sized volume of Barthemule's original bound manuscripts and it made a satisfying whump.  I stacked, straightened, and inserted my copious notes into my denim saddlebags, using the levitation spell to mask queuing up the teleport spells I had let lapse after I allowed myself in before midnight.  I kept my pink quill floating.

A sweet voice asked, "Countess Grin Having, I presume?"

I glanced to the yellow skirt and hat on the floor.  They lay on a brown wool carpet woven with images of hour-glasses that matched the pony-sized bronze specimen in the center of the room.  It had proven useful to act as a noble castle guest while roaming the grounds late at night.  It wasn't, as her use of my title pointed out, presumptuous.  I still wore the one piece blouse culottes, and had my hair up in pigtails again, which helped her to figure me out.  I sighed.  She had probably attended my parents' funeral and had a reasonable idea of my appearance, though I didn't remember seeing her at the age of four.  In any case, I had no use for titles bestowed upon my parents after their death.  

"Yes, Your Majesty."  I bowed my head courteously as dictated by decorum, but didn't look back.

Princess Celestia walked around me and lay before me, and even so, the great white alicorn looked down on me with hard purple eyes.  "You've passed the test neither of the other two have passed."  

"A test?"  

My eyes gravitated to the fanciful solar cutie mark the size of my head on her haunch, but flicked up to her eyes when she spoke.  "I dangle forbidden knowledge before my special students and wait for them to break into the library to get it.  Sadly, neither Twilight nor Sunset have taken the bait my physician tailored for you.  Starlight—interesting choice of name, by the way.  Unlike Lady Aurora, it has a synchronous ring like prophesy to it.  Sunset, Twilight… oh, never mind."  

For a moment, she lay thinking, her fascinating ethereal mane suspended in the unseen winds of the magic pulse; streaks of blue, green, pink, and turquoise hair waved in ripples like a badly tattered flag, hissing and fluttering quietly.  When she spotted a scroll on the desk, she unrolled it before her, displaying a mug ring likely left by spilt cocoa.  "Where did you find this old thing?"  She lowered it and blinked at me.  "I mean, really, where did you find it?  It needs to be in a specific place to prevent a time paradox and I'd hate to have to break open a millennium-old diary to remember where to properly place it."

The thing had smelled of time.  Probably because of my work with Barthemule's mathematics, I sensed the imaginary number time-magic the same way I saw numbers in a unicorn's aura, or an alicorn's.  The alicorn's numbers were a magnitude more beautiful than she was physically, fluid and three-dimensional, amazingly simplified yet complex, flushed with fiery color.   Perhaps I could perform her simplification on Levitation.  It might make the spell instantaneous. 

I pointed with my quill, thinking how the drops of blood used to activate the scroll looked fresh, though since we were talking about time here, it could have been the blood of Star Swirl himself—or that of a pony not yet foaled.  It purported to allow a pony to travel back in time for a few minutes, but was scribbled with margin notes that made me doubt the cohesiveness and veracity of the otherwise simple spell mnemonics.  As Celestia returned it to a top shelf, I admired how the whole room smelled of time, from the age-yellowed magic-infused paper it contained to the musty aged buff color walls.

As she lay again, I asked, "Shouldn't you be raising the sun?"  The sky had become pale outside the window.

She chuckled.  "Clocks are not set by the rising of the sun, and for good reason.  Even I sleep in sometimes..."  Her expression hardened.  "I'm displeased at how you handled Sunset Shimmer, getting her involved with capturing Running Mead."

"Look no further than your own hooves, Your Majesty.  Had you been paying attention—"

"—to her drinking habit?  Students sometimes fail, my little pony.  I only teach.  Learning is up to them.  I had hoped that a certain friend might have grounded her."

"Should I have told her father or you?"

"Friendship is an intriguing magic, but the three of you show no inclination for it..."  Her voice petered out and she looked to her right, becoming thoughtful and considering her words.  "I once taught a former friend of yours—Sunburst."

I tensed.  Her eyes narrowed until her gaze rested on my flank.  

"When he got his cutie mark, at least six others got theirs, too, cued by an external incident that ended with the opening of a chasm from here to Tartarus.  Frankly, from his account of the day, I'm surprised it wasn't you who acted instead of him.  I can't understand how he got his cutie mark and you didn't, considering his description of your much stronger magic.  He proved a great talent in his field, but male and ultimately narrowly focused with inhibited magical abilities, and, oddly, as put off by friendship as you seem to be.  You—you are a generalist of the highest order, as proven by that cutie mark you bear.  Yes, the friendly thing for you to have done would have been to have found Sunset the help she needed, and to have waited for her to become well, and to have watched her become the friend you needed.  What you did worked well enough, and she survived.  'Scared sober' describes it.  She's hit rock bottom and has asked for help, and as a bonus she understands that if there's lesser evils in Equestria the greater ones can be both real an formidable.  And that, Countess, is why I train a new generation of heroes for Equestria."

Not only did her last sentence ring of equivocation, both the title and the substance of the statement seemed honed to set me off.  "You trained my parents!"

"I did.  The both, separately.  I later called them my friends."

"Yet you sent them to die, to become 'Heroes of Equestria'."

The princess looked at the floor, her ears folding down.  "By the time I sent them they already were heroes, and sadly, yes, I sent them off to die, bound and unable to help."

Bound?  Unable?  "And all I got was a lousy title?"

Still looking away, she said, "And a grant of the environs of Grin Having, and right to the third coin of all taxes collected, and a governing role."

"I understand what an earl is."

She looked up, ears perked.  "Do you?  An earl can also claim a right to captain one of my armies.  I had great hope for your parents' child, and, though she chose to runaway from her responsibilities, she has since demonstrated a unique martial prowess."

Meaningless babble, commanding armies or running towns.  "You hired Proper Step, didn't you?"

"He's the son of my Majordomo and came highly recom—"

"He was a mistake."

"Judging by the result I've seen of your career in Canterlot, I think he did an excellent job."

"You haven't a clue—"  I spat "—as to how or why I got Sunset Shimmer involved in capturing Running Mead, do you?"

"The more I learn about you the more interesting you become.  Yes, I interviewed Detective Fellows."

My jaw clacked shut.  Roller-skates.  Horse Apples and Her Majesty on roller-skates!

I checked the prep on my teleports, not that I expected I could outwit the most arch of archmages.  "So, you're going to imprison me?"

She snorted.  "The paths to enlightenment are diverse, my little pony.  There are benefits to working for an absolute monarch.  I make the laws you've broken."

In other words, laws meant nothing to her other than as tools.

Then, suddenly, I understood.  How had Running Mead put it?  This is an employment interview.  More blackmail, or just naked coercion?

"Countess—"

"Don't style me as anything I haven't earned."  And why, in Equestria of all places, wasn't there a mare-name for an earl?  I wasn't a count who happened to be a mare. 

"Starlight, then.  I'd like to make you my third protégé."

"I won't take Sunset Shimmer's place."

"Now you give me hope.  That's the first friendly thing you've said!"  She laughed that delicate laugh, misinterpreting me.  "I can surely teach three—"

"I won't take your blood money, either!"

She sighed.  "All of what I've given you up to this point may have been 'blood money', but this offer—this offer—you've earned.  Equestria needs independent thinkers."

"Sure she does.  Independent enough to see the tyranny of cutie marks and that of a leader who supports the stratification they cause?  I won't be co-opted into—"

She stood suddenly, towering over me at near the height of a horse.  Her magical majesty struck me dumb.  My needle must have struck home.  "I live to preserve Equestria!  She has unimaginable enemies.  And the worst will hit in four years—"

Then something happened.

In terror, I stood, knocking back my chair.  Not from awe, but from what choked off her words and that she didn't immediately realize what had happened!  The region around her mouth blurred as you might see an illusory lake over a hot desert.  Her voice became a garble of muffled sounds.

When she realized what I saw, her brow furled as she tried to shout through it.  Finally, she said, "—ruins.  It was all my fault."  Hearing her voice again, a stream of tears ran down her cheeks.  She added, desperately, tears splattering on the carpeting, "I train guardians for Equestria who may be able to do what I cannot."

I remembered Zecora's tale about the Everfree forest that implied there had once been two rulers in Equestria.  Two!  Worse, I remembered that Zecora had implied there was a curse.

That—what I had seen—that was a curse.  The princess was also under the influence of a geas that prevented her from fighting the curse.  

What could curse an alicorn for a thousand years? 

She was a regicide...

And, deep in my heart, I knew that at the root of the murder would be found the interaction between cutie marks and the hardship they caused.  I wanted none of it.  Let Sunset Shimmer and the runt deal with it, as damaged as they might be!

I touched my nose to my saddle bags and teleported to the royal gardens, two stories down outside the travertine stone walls of the Accademie building.  Surprised that I had succeeded and not encountered a counter-spell, I dove under the denim saddlebags.  The old greenskeeper watched with a straw in his mouth in the anomalously long pre-dawn twilight.  I teleported again and again, choosing buildings by shape and material to funnel the pops and confuse the ear of anypony who might follow me.

I used Don't See Don't Hear Don't Look to escape the castle grounds through the east bailey gate.  I didn't see any evidence of heightened security, yet.  I purposely ran into a mare in a red business suit, just to break the spell and make everyone wonder how they missed me, not to wonder where I'd appeared from.  I apologized and blended in with the early morning crowd.

I'd lost the yellow blouse by the time I hopped on a bus being pulled down the Ponyville Way toward Ponyville.  The sun had still not come up.  

I judged it a message from Princess Celestia, but I didn't understand its meaning.  What I did know was this: I had an insight into the true enemy of Equestria and now had the tools to dedicate my life to correct it.  

Ironically, it was what my cutie mark was telling me.


The End