• Published 14th Jul 2013
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The Education of Clover the Clever - Daedalus Aegle



Some people think lectures and classes are for educating. Star Swirl the Bearded has no patience for those people.

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Chapter 15: Practical Applications - Prism

Come with me, for a while, and see the world as Star Swirl the Bearded sees it.

Nine hundred and seven years, five months, twenty-eight days and eight hours.

It is a time that calls itself morning.

It’s a poor substitute: there has not been a true morning for many decades. But it will do.

End rest cycle. Commence waking cycle.

Canterlot House currently contains four sentient lifeforms, eighty non-sentient animal lifeforms, two hundred and ninety-one living plant and fungi lifeforms. Microscopic lifeforms, macroscopic lifeforms, metascopic and transscopic lifeforms are all within normal parameters.

Current experiment count: fourteen.

Current experiment count that Clover knows about: eight.

Body check: all components are functioning normally.

Mind check: Consciousness at 99.9985% efficiency over four iterations running in semi-parallel.

Senses #1-13 functioning normally, senses #14-16 are held in reserve, and sense #17 is grounded for bad behavior.

Mind cages 1-4 are secure and sealed at full power. The forces bound within them are securely contained, and any suggestions from them to destroy everything can safely be ignored.

Mind cage 5 is still empty. Note to self: find out what happened to its inhabitant (priority: Low).

Decay in the laws of physics and magic since yesterday: marginal.

Open your eyes. Examine immediate surroundings. Immediate surroundings appear normal.

Stand up. Examine hat and robe. The comfort and protection enchantments are holding steady within the fabric and the stitching. The bells are still anchored and mobile, with their alarm spells active. The sequins are still content.

Schedule for today:

Eat breakfast.

Torture the test subject in the high-security lab and see what happens (ongoing).

Appointment with Clover's first client. Assist her as far as teaching permits.

Debrief Clover and review the lessons of the appointment.

Eat lunch.

Prepare for impending assassination attempt (ongoing).

Mail check. Compose a reply to the crystal researchers in the Zebrican diamond mines about their latest findings.

Eat dinner.

Stellar cartography (ongoing).

Sleep.

Schedule does not appear to have been sabotaged overnight. Schedule approved.

I commence with the plan for the day. The break room and I approach one another until we meet, and I make my porridge. I sit down to eat.

Clover is not here. She has been fussing over her plan for this appointment all 'morning'. She cares far too much.

Her reasoning for this scheme of hers makes no sense to me. While I try to teach her the great nature of magic on the grandest scale, she remains myopically focused on very small things, like ponies. Not even ponykind as a whole, but individual ponies. As if the world will be changed by her persuading one pony at a time that their lives can be improved by a simple application of unicorn spellcraft.

I try to get her to think bigger. But now she is running around upstairs, exhausting herself to make a good first impression on a pony she may well never see again.

She doesn’t listen. The more I push her, the more she pushes back.

I don’t know what to do about her.

Once I fought an assassin with a mind-spell. The moment he entered my home his thoughts were not his own, and he saw himself fight a mighty battle that exhausted all his skills and all his tools before it ended, in victory. He saw my broken body lying beneath him, and my magics begin to crumble. I observed him quietly as he left, never looking behind him.

He returned to his clients in triumph, expecting to be given a king's ransom. He was never heard from again.

I did not intend for that, and I informed his clients of my displeasure in a memorable manner. I doubt they would be so foolish again. Nonetheless. I won't do that again.

Upstairs, I hear Clover move a table two feet over, groan in frustration, and move it back. That table likes to hold crystal constructs, but it does not like to display them. Attempting to make it do both will only make it resist.

After so many years I find myself playing teacher to a young pony who is not fit for nor aware of the task before her. I am unsure she ever will be. When I try to teach her she instead tries to persuade me to speak more to other ponies.

This is not sensible magic.

I finish my breakfast, and enter the high-security lab. There is work to be done, even if there is no point in doing it.

The cage is holding. The magical sensors report nothing out of the ordinary, and the suppression field prevents the test subject from reaching outside the cage with any form of magic he may possess.

I designed this cage to hold creatures made of pure aether, after an unfortunate encounter in the Umbra persuaded me of the need for such. It took me years to locate sufficient quantities of Hadium to complete the design. The calculations alone were the work of a doctoral dissertation.

I feel pride flow into my mind, and banish it. It will not do to be anything but vicious here.

We watch Clover through the surveillance mirror.

Clover is getting on my nerves. I had hoped that this would put me in a proper frame of mind to torture the test subject. Instead I find that my heart is not in it, and we are both watching her through the surveillance mirror. She runs back and forth, trying to make Canterlot House hospitable, trying to make me popular. It boggles the mind.

What is she thinking?

This is getting me nowhere. “Turn off,” I say, and the mirror, keyed to obey my voice, goes black. “She just doesn't know when to stop.”

The test subject remains uncooperative. After days in the cage he is weak and growing increasingly desperate for his freedom. He begs me for his life. He pleads with me to let him return to his family. When he is not lashing out in pain and anger, he tries to find my weak points. Understanding now that I am not going to let him out, he tries to find some way to make me relent.

He is fighting for his life against a force he cannot understand. Nothing has prepared him for me, but he is not going to die quietly. Unlike me he is a complete innocent, only doing what is in his nature. Like a child. He appeals to my equinity and my compassion for my fellow ponies.

This is not going to work for him because I am not a pony.

“She’s losing patience with you. Even your own student, she’s coming to see it too… Everypony gives up on you in the end, don’t they?”

Yes. I’ve realized that.

Clover’s client arrives, and I leave the high-security lab for the break room. Clover leads her in, and upon seeing her I detect that she is under the spell of a Gemini spirit: a creature from beyond the world of mirrors who wishes to take the place of a pony. The effect is subtle, but it can be seen in the eyes.

Clover is not responding. She is nervous. Stage fright? I speak to the client, and she lays out all the clues. I wait for Clover to pick up on the signs and suggest the diagnosis but she does not.

No, of course she doesn't. Clover believes this is my client, not hers. She is not watching the client, she is watching me. She is afraid I am going to do something to ruin it.

The student believes she can teach the teacher. She believes she is going to open my eyes. She sees the world all wrong, and fights back against my lessons because she believes she needs to teach me.

She probably wouldn't even have a pony-sized Hadium cage in the high-security lab.

I ask the client about her recent history. She has not traveled anywhere, which means the Gemini must have been brought to Cambridle by somepony else. That is cause for concern, assuming the world doesn’t end tomorrow for other reasons, and once the current business is over I will investigate it. For now, I give her the amulet enchanted with the seal of binding, and explain how to use it. Clover says nothing. The client leaves.

I was once poisoned by a most ingenious method which evaded my safeguards from a distance of five hundred miles. The assassin almost succeeded in killing me. It took me months to track him down afterward, and every step of the way he had left behind traps in ambush to finish the job.

After that I covered my entire home in a permanent barrier to neutralize every deadly poison and venom known to ponies, griffons, and every other sapient race. Well, every one I could get hold of. The only exception would be the venom of an elder dragon lord, and none of them are known to exist at this time.

Perhaps I should look into the possibility. It is probably only a matter of time before one emerges, and when that happens some enterprising assassin may attempt to retrieve a sample.

Thank the heavens for the solitary nature of dragons. A dragon in alliance with any other creature would be a fearful foe indeed. Not since Belekos, the Jagged King held all dragons under his command has such a thing been seen, and those who stopped Belekos are





I go upstairs to meet with Clover. We speak.

Clover is unhappy with me. She is reaching her breaking point, and I don’t want to break her but if she does not withstand me then she will never get to where she needs to be. I need her to be stronger for what is to come. Someday she will stand upon the breaking point of the world itself, and it will be upon her that any hope of holding the world together will rest.

“I try to help you,” she says to me. “You don’t seem to like it. The more I help you, the worse you get. I think you want me to hate you. I think you’ve set me up as some sort of challenge to be overcome.”

“Not everything is about you, Clover.”

“You’re giving me nightmares, Star Swirl!”

Words are weapons. I have magical barriers that resist poison, cuts, and hammer-blows, but not words. Words derive their power from history, and without realizing it Clover stumbles upon a history that cuts and kills.

“Clover. Listen very carefully because this is important. You are never to say that word in my house again. Is that understood?”

She does not understand.

“This isn’t like you! You can do good things, Star Swirl! You can bring so much light to ponies, I don’t know why you fight it so!”

She thinks that darkness is evil and that bad dreams have another name. She thinks that light is good and that the sun is real. She thinks she believes in my inner goodness even as she curses me with words she does not understand. I cannot make her see and if I cannot teach her then the world is doomed to end in ice.

“You wanted to be my student? Well, this is it. You are free to leave. I was always expecting you would.”

She glares at me, and I see a hint of the strength that made me hope for her. “I'm not going to give up on you.”

But she does not understand.

It is no wonder she believes in the light. She has not been burned by it. She has not stared down the sun and seen it break. The Princesses are gone.

She is a pony, a thing that grows and lives and thrives and withers and dies, while I am a constellation, an imagined picture made up of imagined lines between points of light in the sky. I need her to see but she can’t or won’t and I can’t make her and we fight like ponies and we hurl bitter words at each other and she doesn't know the words even as she speaks them and she curses me even as she thinks she is being kind and I feel an old hatred waking and something hidden stirs within me and then

the

world

is

fire.

“Go down to Saddle Arabia. Go to the deep desert and stand in the open sands at mid-day. Ask them how much they love the light.”

I leave Canterlot House.

I command my blood to calm as I set out across the storied streets of Cambridle town. I let my thoughts flow outward while a dizzying array of spells and physical reactions collide within me.

It is a spring day and the sun is moving across the clear sky. Its passage is marked by the magical residue of the communal channeling by the Council of Horns in the Tower of Westmanester Palace, a hundred miles to the south. A gathering of 24 high-ranking unicorns who act in concert to move the sun and the moon across the heavens: a highly ineffective arrangement, but one which is the source of the Unicorn King's power, and for all its flaws it keeps one third of pony society functioning.

The Council of Horns is a desperate attempt to keep the mechanisms of the world moving without their power source, and strains those mechanisms as a result. Within a few centuries, if they continue in this fashion, the movements of the heavens will fail entirely. Night and day will lose all meaning. The fabric of magic itself will fray and unravel, and all matter will fall lifeless and flat.

It is a low priority, since there are many other things that will end the world long before then if they are not attended to.

The trees are blooming. Springtime means the plant armies are preparing to resume their seemingly-benign campaign of world domination. Every year hundreds of thousands of ponies are assaulted by biological artillery fire that assaults their eyes and muzzles, rendering them unable to fight, and yet ponies do not realize they are at war. Plants are unimaginative conquerors for the most part, incapable of devising any plan more sophisticated than “spread”. Yet they have been astonishingly successful.

The plants believe nopony realizes their game, but I am on to them, oh yes.

I wander through the streets of Cambridle, following the cobblestone patterns I know well from my youth, when I was only a student. I watch the ponies as I pass by, and they pretend not to watch me.

I have a spell that is half-written, which I have long since realized I will never complete. Even in its unfinished state it is the most powerful spell I have ever written. It has reached deeper than any spell before it, and has touched some part of magic that even I cannot comprehend.

A spell to set destiny itself back on its proper course.

I can take destiny apart, but it seems I cannot put it back together. I don't have what it takes. It speaks of a mind of many minds, and I do not understand it.

My hooves carry me along streets I walked a hundred years ago, when the only ponies who knew me were my fellow students. I cross the intersection of Mane Way and Saddle Road and see the memorial to the Great Ink Shortage. They credit me with using up all the ink in Cambridle, even though the shortage was caused by war rationing.

(Well, I may have taken slightly more than my portion. But really, the other students hardly even wrote notes.)

A sculpture crafted and a mock epic poem composed in honor of their desire to pin their grudges on the mad wizard of Edinspur.

These are the ponies Clover wants me to help. Thousands of ponies going about their lives aimlessly, with no greater purpose than themselves.

While I try to teach her, she finds herself a young stallion to swaddle up against. I don’t like him. He is going to break her heart someday. She is not strong enough. Not yet. Possibly never.

These are the ponies she wants me to grow closer to.

If they break her now, will she stand for them when the time comes?

When I was young I was at war with almost all the world.

I have seen creatures that these ponies would not dream of. I have faced monsters that would destroy everything. I have fought against creatures that would turn a pony against themselves.

I had an argument with a professor, and it culminated in the destruction of the university's oldest building, and a pony torn out of time.

I once stared down the Sphinx, and challenged her to destroy the very land beneath us, for there was no other way for her to defeat me.

I have uncovered secrets forgotten to the world, and pierced into the hidden thoughts of monsters. I have touched evil, and in so doing, allowed it to touch me.

I have traveled across the world seeking hidden knowledge and power, while they happily spend their entire lives in a twenty-mile radius from the house where they were born.

I do it to protect ponies. To protect them.

Why?

Because there are countless universes scattered across a space beyond space, linked together by a shared idea.

Ponies.

The universe cares for that idea. Believes in it. Every star is an eye, and those eyes are watching that idea unfold. Why?

Because on a little world beset by dangers there lives a little people, a people full of flaws and insecurities. They are petty and vain, foolish and short-sighted. They hurt each other, and they help each other, and they find troubles and they find happiness together. They fall and they crawl and they climb and in every last one of them is the possibility of completion.

They are weak and foolish and greedy and vain and ungrateful and interested in nothing but their own small pursuits, and they are the thing which matters most in the cosmos.

A people as full of potential as they are flawed, in a universe full of peril.

Because somepony needs to see that the idea can unfold.

Because there needs to be a world for her to return to.

I have hunted for the solution for decades. Through history. Through magic. Through diplomacy. Through music. Through time.

The Unicorn King. The Sirens. The spell I cannot complete. Clover.

Clover.

I failed Clover like I failed the rest. I can’t teach her. The gulf is too wide. I can’t carry her across.

“You could always kill everything and set the world back to where it began,” a thought in my head speaks.

It was possible that she could have set the world right again, back on its best course. But I could not lead her there.

I will fail Clover as I have failed everypony else. She did well, all things considered. But that's what happens when you ask the impossible.

Even if ponies survive, I am not going to live to see the return.

Somewhere in Cambridle there is an assassin plotting to kill me.

Maybe it's time to stop resisting, and let the Griffon King light the fires of war to consume the world again. Maybe that's better than eternal winter.

Nine hundred and seven years, five months, twenty-eight days, and five hours.

I will not live that long.

The false day is passing. An assassin is waiting to kill me.

I suppose this is as good a time to die as any.

I turn back towards Canterlot House, to take what comes.

– – –

The house is empty when I enter, except for a touch of fate.

Something is about to happen. The silence is watchful.

I step into the high-security lab, and that’s when I hear Clover’s voice call out to me, and I freeze.

Clover is lying in the cage alone, with a black eye, tears streaming down her face. She is shivering in the cold and clutching her cloak right around her.

“No...” I swiftly cross the floor towards her. “Where is Mister Sprout?!”

“He ran away.” Clover’s voice is quavering, afraid, with a hint of sob and stutter. “Professor, I’m so sorry, I shouldn’t have...”

I clench my teeth and storm around the cage, examining the spells. The cage is locked. The spells are unbroken. The only way the cage could have been opened was from the outside.

“What did you do?”

“I – I went into the private lab,” Clover’s voice said. “I know I shouldn’t have, Professor, but I was so upset, I wasn’t thinking straight! Or… that’s not true, I wanted to spite you. I went inside and I saw Mister Sprout in the cage, and...” She looks away, her face filled with shame and regret.

My own voice is harsh. “Tell me everything.”

She sniffs, and nods. “I saw him, and he begged me to let him loose. He looked so sick, and weak… like he was on the verge of passing out. He needed help. And I thought you were wrong about him. I’m sorry! I opened the cage and let him out.” She gave a grim little chuckle and touches a hoof to her black eye, wincing at the pain. “So much for sick and weak. As soon as he was out he attacked me, and threw me in the cage and locked me inside. Then he ran out and disappeared. He’s gone.”

I nod. “I'll catch him again.”

“I hope you do,” Clover says, a hint of anger beneath her pain. “You were right about him, professor. That wasn’t a normal pony. No earth pony could move like that, and his face…” She shudders.

“Describe him.”

“He had fangs, for starters. Big sharp fangs.” She gestures with her forelegs and the sight is comical in its disjunction to her surroundings. “But I don’t know, it all went so fast! One moment he’s lying there shivering in a pool of his own sweat and the next I’m pinned down on the floor, and my face is hurting all over and there’s blood in my mouth! And he’s dragging me by the neck and then he slams the cage shut and he smirks at me and he’s gone!”

“You directly disobeyed me, Clover. You know better than to tamper with experiments you don’t understand!”

“I know, I’m sorry!” she cries. “Please just open up the cage and get me out of here.”

“Hold on,” I said, and activated the magic runes. “I just need to shut down the sensory apparatus first to be safe. It will just take a minute… And while I have you in this position, Clover, we need to talk.”

“Professor!” she cried, then bit her tongue. “...Alright, fine. Look, I – I wanted to annoy you, alright? Because let's face it, you annoy me all the time. You annoy everypony you talk to. You think you're above it all but you're not, Professor. In the end I just couldn't stand it anymore. You hurt my feelings and you didn't care. So I wanted to hurt you back.” Her head dropped low in shame. “I'm sorry. I shouldn't have. And… I'm not sure I can be your apprentice anymore, even if you wanted me to. Which I'm sure you don't. I wanted to be a sorceress so I could help ponies… But the more I stay here… I don't like the pony I'm turning into.”

There it is.

Sorrow. Deep, bottomless sorrow wells up in me. A sensation somehow both dull and sharp, cold and burning writhes back and forth along my spine, and I only barely cut it off before it reaches my face. “I think you should reconsider, Clover.”

“I want to,” she sniffed. “I really want to. But I can’t help you, Professor. I've tried long enough. I just can't do it anymore.”

She has the face of a puppy, so desperately uncertain of herself, so eager to please that I can't bear to stay angry at her. My leg begins to move almost of its own accord to flip the level to open the cage. “Please hurry, it's cold in here.”

The mirror is still where I left it. It activates by my voice, a simple magical design, and watches over everything in the building. The runes register Clover's magical signature, and nothing else. They tell me that she is miserable and in pain, and that the shift happened quite suddenly. There was a moment of magical interference, a magical violence, and then she was in the cage. It happened about an hour ago, while I was out.

“He was very clever,” I mutter, and she nods. It is a very expressive nod, full of spite. “You couldn’t have known.”

“Couldn’t I?” she asks. “You tried to convince me, Professor. I just didn’t listen. I’m sorry.” She curls up, sniffing wetly, utterly miserable. “I guess I just had to disappoint you one last time, huh? I’m sorry… I guess we don’t make much of a team after all.”

It cuts. “Don’t talk like that, Clover.”

She doesn’t respond, only waits, shivering.

I take in the readings from the biometric scanners. The runes register Clover’s magical signature, unicorn magic, unique to her, and nothing else. Just as before they registered an earth pony’s magical signature.

“Professor?”

“Just a minute.”

“Professor!” She jabs her hoof against the cage and winces in pain as it clangs. Her face is streaked with tears. “Please stop joking around and get me out!”

“You're wearing that cloak. You know I keep telling you to throw that old thing away.”

“What?” Her face was perplexed. “Is this really the time for that, Professor?”

“It’s remarkable, really,” I said. “You look and sound exactly like her. You have her mannerisms down perfectly, even though you have barely seen her from a distance. You play on my emotions so skillfully, it’s like watching a dance. You have even copied her magical signature down to the microthaumic level, it’s a perfect match.”

I take a step back, take it all in. “Everything I have in this lab tells me that Clover is inside that cage… But you’re wearing that cloak. Clover’s cloak is enchanted. You didn’t know that, did you? Because those enchantments do not appear in my readings. Why is that?”

‘Clover’ is tearing up, her giant puppy eyes showing hurt and betrayal that her teacher is treating her like this. “Really now, you can’t continue pretending. Give it up.”

‘Clover’ stares at me in heart-wrenching sorrow. She bites her lip, and a tear trickles down her muzzle. Then, she begins to shake and shudder and wail in defeat and desperation.

She smashes her head into the floor, a damp fleshy thmack, and a sickly green light ripples across her form and there in the cage is a black, pony-shaped insect, jagged and warped. Its chitinous frame is pockmarked and scarred, gaping holes mark its legs and atop its head sits a horn that is bent and curved and uneven. Everything about it speaks of weakness, exile, decay. I see myself reflected hundreds of times in compound eyes that show only bitterness, cunning, and exhaustion.

The biometric scanners screech and whine, faced with measuring a signature that violates all the principles of biology known to ponies.

“Cooperate,” the creature says, and its voice is as jagged as its body. Its natural form is not suited for the speech of ponies. It reverberates with the sound of a dozen voices, and forms the word with difficulty.

“Very good,” I say. “From the beginning, then. Where is mister Sprout?

Its throat clicks, and buzzes, and bubbles. “Nest.”

“And where is the nest?”

“Forest… Lake… Cave.”

“How many of you are there in this nest? Do not lie, for you will have ample opportunity to regret it.”

The creature makes a sound that may be a whimper, or may be a growl of defiance. “...Five.”

I nod, and quickly write a note on a sheet of paper, and teleport it across Cambridle to the city guard captain’s desk. I do not know what they will find there. With any luck my stern warnings to take no chances and bring overwhelming horsepower will suffice.

I turn back to my captive. “Now, you and I are going to have a long talk together.”

The creature hisses, showing fangs. “Release.”

I shake my head. “No.”

“Cooperate!”

“Your kind has been a mystery to us for millenia,” I tell the changeling. “You will be made comfortable, so long as you remain cooperative. I'm sorry, but I cannot let this chance slip by.”

He whimpers and he turns in his cage.

I stand by the desk and prepare an ample supply of ink and parchment. “Let us begin.”

– – –

The machinery of the cosmos touches every star, every pony, and every grain of sand. It is all connected, and I listen to it as best I can.

The false sun is moved along its ragged course across the sky above Cambridle, a blind eye that looks down upon the world without seeing. A dozen endings slowly grind their way towards us, and I try to catch as many of them as I can.

Nine hundred and seven years, five months, twenty-eight days, and three hours.

After a long and fruitful discussion I leave the changeling behind and I exit the high-security lab. I have learned much about my captive and his tribe, and I have only scratched the surface.

There is always more work to be done.

I realize that the house is too quiet in Clover’s absence.

My heart sinks. She is the most important work of all, but I do not understand her.

I do not know where she is, or what she is thinking. Maybe she has decided not to come back.

Maybe it’s already too late. Maybe the end was already written long ago, and nothing I do now can change it. I cannot see the end of all paths.

There are no promises.

You can only do what you can, and hope to live long enough that it will come to something.

There is always more work to be done.

I cross the alchemy platform in the center of the hall to retrieve a thaumic spectrometer.

I only barely hear the tink of something hitting the floor directly behind me, and then the explosion.

Author's Note:

Yes, as some had already guessed, he was indeed a changeling.

– – –

A song for Star Swirl.

From “Pyramid” by Jason Webley.

Tell me, Luna, what is coming down this river?
You’ve been watching so much longer now than I
Do you know, Luna, just what will this day deliver?
Does it work out tooth for tooth and eye for eye?

They started stacking up the stones the very day that you were born
No matter how you grew they would tower above
You could change your name, give up your home, and turn against your loved ones
But when you start your life anew does that long shadow follow you?

Who was it, Luna, that chose to resurrect you here for me, in scattered lines of poetry?
This distant, wistful girl I see reflected in your eyes?
Forgive me, Luna, all the ways I am mistaken, all the liberties I’ve taken
I projected you in costumes I don’t think were quite your size

Now here I’m climbing up these stones a thousand years from where you were born
Looking for a song that could take me to you
I have traced these roads, have seen your home in ruins, long forgotten
But you were not inside
You found a better place to hide

And tell me, Luna, when I’m gone, what will I want?
To be left at the bottom of a garbage bin, dusted off, and pulled up onto stage?
Will it please me when someone lights a candle and says my name?
Will I say leave me in my pyramid, blow out the flame and close the lid
The story’s done, why can’t we turn the page?