Eclipse Born

by Seeking Dusk

Forest Mystery

“Please, Mr. Caleb!” Sweetie Belle pleaded, her watery eyes eroding my will.

“Ah know ya ain’t a pony, but you can help us find our special talent anyway!” Applebloom said, adding her own eyes to the assault.

“I dunno,” I had said, trying to retreat, fearful of the warnings I had gotten about the group. “I’ve got stuff doing and I’m not really the best person… I’m not even a pony. I’m a human, we don’t get cutie marks. And I said drop the mister.”

“That’s the awesome part!” Scootaloo insisted. “You can help us out different from everypony else. With your human per… per…”

“Perspective,” Sweetie Belle supplied.

“Yeah, that!” Scootaloo nodded. Thankfully she was too ‘tough’ to actively try the cute eyes approach. She was cute enough without trying. Damn, this was why these three got away with things.

“I’m not joining your club,” I said firmly.

“Then what about being a consultant?” Sweetie asked.

I barely got out of becoming a crusader when they tried, and that was when it wasn’t possible for me to get a cutie mark. Looking up at their eager, or in Scootaloo’s case; demanding and accusatory, faces, I didn’t think I was weaseling out of this one.

“Who are you, mister!” Scootaloo said, jabbing her hoof at me. Rainbow Dash would be proud; she molded Scootaloo into a mini version of herself. “What do you know about humans and why don’t you have a cutie mark?”

“It would help if you didn’t stand on me,” I grunted at them. Finally realizing they were using me as a foot, no, hoof mat, the fillies scampered of with hasty apologies. With their weight gone, I managed to get myself back on my feet. I gave myself a quick once over to make sure I’m not bleeding or injured in anyway. That passive magic protection thing really was useful. Unicorns and humans might not have one as potent as pegasi or earth ponies, but Lord knows the number of spills I’ve had would have torn my palms up pretty good otherwise. Back to the matter at hand, I glared at the three apologetic fillies.

“Didn’t your parents ever tell you not to recklessly toss yourself at peo- ponies? I could have been hurt!” I demanded.

“Well, there was that time when we tried to get our hoofball cutie marks,” Sweetie Belle squeaked softly.

“An’ that time when we tried fer our tackling cutie marks,” Apple Bloom added. “Ma sister was mighty upset when she found out about it.”

Right, it was always the cutie marks with them. I’m surprised they didn’t tackle each other to see if they could get a cutie mark in both tackling and being tackled. Yeesh… what if they gave me a cutie mark in being tackled? I’d been at the receiving end of their ‘affections’ quite a few times this week. “As I’d expect them to be,” I responded to the, every bit the responsible adult. “It’s not right to go around tackling.”

“We said we were sorry, mister,” Scootaloo said grumpily. “What’s your name anyway?”

Well, crap basket. I looked over at Lyra, who was being somewhat uncharacteristically silent through this all, then back at the curious crusaders. For some reason, letting them now I was, well, me, didn’t strike me as a good idea. They badged me enough when I wasn’t able to get a cutie mark. “I’m… Devoted Heart.”

Lyra burst out laughing. Apple Bloom gave her a weird look. Sweetie Belle smiled at me. “Nice to mean you Mister Heart,” Urgh. I could feel my manhood being assaulted. “What are you doing in Ponyville? I’ve never seen you before. Did you just move here?”

“I’m… part of the group that’s studying humans,” I sighed. No, I wasn’t lying to little girls. Shame on you for insinuation that. “And just ‘Devoted’ is fine.”

“You’re trying for your cutie mark in human-stuff too?” Apple Bloom asked eagerly.

“Anthropology,” Sweetie Belle corrected. I raised my eyebrow at her, surprised that she remembered the word. I’d only mentioned it to her once.

“Whatever,” Scootaloo said, waving her away. “So did you mean Caleb? He’s the human it’s all about!”

The next few minutes were… interesting, as I got to hear all about myself from the perspectives of three fillies. Honestly, I wasn’t sure how to take it. They did seem to think I was pretty awesome, so that was a plus. And they also thought I was weird, but in a good way. As they continued to unknowingly regale the subject of their spiel with their opinions and observations, I was alternating between faint blushes, confused looks and glaring at Lyra who was having far too much fun with things.

“As interesting as this is girls,” I said, interrupting them as they started on my computer, “Lyra and I have something we need to do.” We were nearing the edge of town proper, on the street that would lead out into the White Tail Woods so we could poke around and try and figure out what Daisy had seen.

“What’s so important here in the woods?” Apple Bloom asked, looking past Lyra and I as if the answer was waiting just down the road.

“Well, Daisy said she saw and felt some strange things when she was picking wild flowers, so Devoted Heart and I thought we would look into it since we didn’t have anything major doing,” Lyra said.

“Maybe we shouldn’t…” I started, recalling the impulse issues this trio was known for.

“What sort of things?” Sweetie Belle asked.

“Nothing for-” I tried.

“Lights and sounds,” Lyra said, tilting her head and shrugging slightly. “Oh, and a chill.”

I facehooved; grunting when I hurt my muzzle again. “Why, Lyra, why?”

“Weird stuff in the woods?” Scootaloo said, turning to her compatriots and grinning broadly again. “You know what that means?”

“CUTIE MARK CRUSADERS MYSTERY INVESTIGATORS YAY!”

Sweet Lord my eardrums. Even my vision swam for a moment. The three fillies ran off before I could react. I glared at Lyra, to which she replied with a sheepish grin. “Whoops?”

“Ugh… come on, let’s see if we can find them before they do something disastrous or get into some major mess. Hopefully it will just be tree sap.” I didn’t hold out much hope. Admittedly, in the short week I knew them they had managed to get themselves covered in tree sap four times, two of those occasions in the same day. But this was different. There was something weird happening in the forest, and they were living breathing weirdness seekers. They had a sixth sense for it. Suddenly worried, I trotted off.

“I really should have known better with those three,” Lyra admitted as she matched my pace. “I’ve never actually done much with them, but I hear all the stories.”

“Yeah, well, retrospect,” I grunted at her, stumbling slightly when I tried to increase my pace. It seemed like the LLMFI still has some bugs in it at the higher speeds.

“Don’t worry,” Lyra said. She quickly continued when I shot her another glare. “Not tempting fate this time. The Crusaders, from what I heard, are actually pretty capable fillies. And Apple Bloom has been taking martial arts classes. She’s got talent.”

“Ponies have martial arts?” I asked, stumbling again.

“What did you think I was doing on Thursday nights?” Lyra asked with a wry grin.

Huh. Lyra was a martial artist. Learn something new every day.

----------

White Tail Woods were far more extensive than I first realized. By this point, I was hoarse from yelling for the girls, and even Lyra was getting a bit frazzled after tripping over her fourth root. I was keeping count. It was currently four to twenty seven. There was a reason my ha- mane was filled with bits of plant pieces. To make matters worse, there was some sort of… miasma in the air. The deeper they went as they searched, the more the woods like the edges of the Everfree.

“How could they have disappeared that quickly?” Lyra moaned. “They didn’t have that much of a head start on us!”

“You ask me like I know,” I retorted. I snorted with frustration. As if turning into a pony wasn’t enough, now I was searching through the supposedly safe forest looking for the three most reckless kids in the entire town while keeping an eye out for something that scared a mare that regularly visited the area. While vague, the description of the lights and sounds Daisy described were all we had to go on, and to be honest, the feeling was starting to get to me. My tail and ears wouldn’t stop twitching and itching.

“This day started so normal,” I started to complain. “Just like all the other days that came before. But instead of being home, reading books, studying lore, the world’s conspiring to damn me more and more!”

“Caleb! Lyra!” a familiar voice called out to us. Our heads pivoted towards the sound together, and Twilight appeared just a few feet away in a flash of purple light and the pattern of teleportation magic, Spike on her back, saddlebags around her barrel. “What’s going on? Daisy told me about strange things happening here in the woods.”

“Twilight!” I said, tossing my forelegs around her neck in a hug. “I am so so glad to see you! Please tell me you can cast a locator spell to find the Crusaders or something!”

“Hey! Careful!” Spike said, clutching Twilight’s mane as my sudden action almost knocked him off his seat.

“I might be able to… wait, what’s going on?” Twilight said, confused. “And why are you hugging me? Not that I don’t feel appreciated by it.”

“The Crusader’s heard about the weird things and decided to try and get their cutie marks in being mystery investigators,” Lyra said as I let go of the confused mare.

“What else is new,” Spike muttered.

“Can we call it unknown effects or something,” I asked, trying to regain my dignity. “Just saying ‘weird things’ sounds rather… crass. Anyway, they ran off and we lost track of them. I didn’t even want them to come…”

“I’m sure they are fine, Caleb,” Twilight said, putting a hoof on my shoulder. “They play in these woods all the time. I really don’t think there is anything here that they wouldn’t be able to handle.”

“I’d be more worried about whatever they finds them,” Spike said in running commentary.

“Aside from whatever it is that scared Daisy in the first place,” I muttered, flicking my tail. The worse part? The pony form was starting to feel slightly less awkward, which was all kinds of wrong. I just wanted to get this sorted out so we could get back to sorting out the first issue. I wanted my pants god dammit!

Twilight looked around nervously. “I suppose you are right about that one.”

“Not to mention the stupid creepy vibes I’m getting just from hanging out here,” I muttered.

“What?” Twilight and Lyra said in stereo.

I raised an eyebrow at them. “You’re kidding, right? You don’t get that horror movie chill just from being here? Like scary story shudders?”

“No, I’ve just been looking for the Crusaders and the lights,” Lyra admitted.

“Seriously?” I looked at her with a gobsmacked expression. Had I just been imagining things this entire time?

“Is that why your ears have been acting up?” Lyra observed. She laughed nervously. “I thought it was a nervous quirk so I didn’t say anything.”

“You look like Pinkie when she’s getting one of her Pinkie Senses,” Spike pointed out. “And sorta stupid.”

“Bizarre… maybe I’m just-,” Twilight cut me off as I glared at Spike. I was doing a lot of glaring today.

“Wait, I want to try something,” Twilight said. She lowered her head slightly and wrinkled her brow as she focused. I heard a quick staccato beat of magic and she hit me with a pulse of purple light.

“Oi!” I yelped, flinching back, though it didn’t do anything more than rush over me in a quick ripple of warmth and pinch at my horn. Damn that was a weird feeling. I swatted at her with a hoof, which she managed to avoid since I was neither that coordinated nor really trying to hit her, before rubbing vigorously at the annoyance of a horn.

“Sorry,” she said, before firing off another spell. One thing I had learned while doing the theory of magic; Twilight was amazingly good at it. Extremely good. When she cast her spells, half the time I could hardly follow, not just the complexity, but the speed. She would blow through the patterns before I could even really hear them. Even the teleportation spell would normally have a casting time twice, if not three times as long and take much more focus if anyone else did it. She could pull it off while walking and talking.

I snapped out of my little reflection when Twilight suddenly gasped and reared up, throwing Spike from her back unintentionally, something he protested. Even after she got all four hooves back on the ground she was shivering slightly.

“What was that for?” Spike demanded testily.

“Sparkle?” Lyra said uncertainly.

“You okay Twi?” I asked, snorting slightly as if that would help ease the itch on my horn. I wanted my fingers back...

“Caleb, have you been actively trying to sense magic?” Twilight asked me, pulling herself together with a faintly visible effort.

“No, didn’t think I needed to,” I responded, confused. My paranoia was kicking up a bit. True, I could hear regular spells easily enough, but our magic theory opened my eyes to ways I could actively ‘listen’ out for magic. It was the difference between hearing the twinkle and song of a levitation and hearing and recognizing the beats and patterns that defined the spell. “Why? What’s wrong?”

“I… it seems as if your magic sensitivity is far more potent than I realized. It actually explains a lot…” Twilight shook her head. “Anyway, I want you to actively do it.”

“Why do I feel like this is… YEE!” I had started to open up my awareness as I spoke, and my comment got cut off in an unmanly squeak as shivers ran down my spine and I recoiled from the mix of dissonance and… I couldn’t quite pin it down aside from it felt extremely distasteful. I quickly clamped down on the sense as much as I could until it was back to just the chills of a horror movie. “What… the hay was that?”

“Your magic sensitivity is higher than an average unicorn, even greater still than of an earth pony. I believe it’s because of its volatile nature. While pony magic tends to stay confided within our bodies when not being used actively such as for flying, interacting with the earth or spell casting, yours constantly ripples and surges in and around you.” Twilight looked thrilled as she warmed up to her subject. “I noticed it when you would try to get a feel for spells around you, and again when I just scanned you. While there is an influence of unicorn style magic radiating from your horn, there are still tendrils and ripples of your regular magic seeping out from underneath it. It allows it to react and interact with any ambient mana far easier than a pony’s aura would, which lets you sense magic easier.

“In fact, I think only alicorns like Princess Celestia and Luna would have a greater passive magic sense, since their ethereal manes would operate much like your rippling aura does! This explains so much about you,” Twilight was working into a fully fledged discourse. Pulling out a quill and parchment from her saddlebags she actually started taking notes. “Of course, this is probably a response to the low mana concentrations in your own world. It would also explain why your didn’t react well to initial treatments. Your internal magic, already strained from the passage here, was under constant pressure from the high mana environment of Equestia until you adapted.”

“Um, Sparkle?” Lyra said. She always used Sparkle to refer to Twilight’s more academically driven side.

“That’s it! You early records did show that the nature of your magic changed slightly over the first three days. It was probably assimilating the local mana and adjusting to fit it as much as it could. If you consider Clover the Clever’s seventh and eight theorems on Adaptive Magics and Starswirl’s notes on the Evolution of Inherent Thaumatic Identities alongside the propositions of forced mana reconfigurations…”

“Twi… we kinda…” I tried.

“No, wait, I need to write these down! If only I had my Thaumatic Scanner to give me a more precise reading,” she said, lost in a daze.

“TWILIGHT!” Lyra, Spike and I yelled at the same time. Twilight started and blinked.

“Sorry,” she said sheepishly.

“Yeah, well, whatever. What does it mean?” I asked her. “What’s with that… whatever it was I felt?”

“And why don’t I sense it?” Lyra asked.

“No offense, but you don’t the magic sensitive, or know the detection spell, to pick up on it, Lyra.” Lyra looked a bit cross, but fumed in silence. Twilight looked deeper into the forest. “But I can tell you this… There is something unsettling in the woods today…”

“Lovely… as if things weren’t ominous enough,” I muttered.

“Spike, take a letter,” Twilight instructed the dragon, levitating her writing equipment and a clean sheet towards the dragon. “I need to send a message to Princess Celestia.”

“Shouldn’t we let the others know about what’s going on?” Spike asked, snatching the supplies from the air. “Like Applejack and Rarity. They’d need to know what’s going on with their sisters.”

“I’ll have the princess sent them a message,” Twilight said. She still had an uneasy look. “I don’t like the feel of whatever this is.”

-----

Once the message was dictated and sent off, we were delving into the forest again, this time going straight for the heart of the weird magic we sensed. Especially, as Twilight pointed out, that the Crusaders weren’t likely to go anywhere else aside from the center of whatever trouble was going on. The really disturbing part was the way the woods warped the further we got. The idyllic and otherwise unremarkable forest was slowly changing.

The canopy was thicker and darker, casting strange shadows an all that was below it, the trees themselves looked sickened, the bark darkened in places, stained in others, a few oozing yellow sap. Strange plants started to spring up around the roots and even stranger noises echoed through the branches. It didn’t take us long to find the odd lights flickering among the trees that Daisy reported and the chill winds. The latter seemed to be the start of the same sort of pony-uninfluenced weather the Everfree had, the former a ‘Coronal Discharge of Concentrated Atmospheric Mana,’ according to Twilight.

They were actually somewhat pretty, once you got past the creepy factor the location gave it.

Celestia had sent a message back that she was informing the Crusader’s families, and also sending a team of pegasi and unicorns to aid us. As much as I would like to wait for the backup of the strapping royal guards, even I agreed that we couldn’t risk letting the Crusaders wait that long. Hence our journey into the unknown. Twilight was loving it. In an academic fashion.

“I don’t believe it… the White Tail Woods are… are turning into another Everfree Forest!” Twilight marveled. “None of these plants are natural! And they all grew without the influence of Earth pony magic!”

“It still weirds me out that you consider that natural,” I muttered.

“Twilight,” Lyra said slowly, “You could try to sound less happy about this.”

“What? Me? I sound happy about this?” Twilight said, stumbling slightly.

“You k-kinda do, Twilight,” Spike said nervously from his perch on Twilight’s back, looking around with trepidation. He yelped when a pair of glowing eyes ignited in some branched and a harsh bird’s caw sounded.

“Well, this is astounding though! It’s not quite wild magic. Similar, but not the same,” Twilight said as her eyes roved all other, taking everything in. “We might be looking at the same sort of phenomena that caused the development of the Everfree Forest! Think of the academic progress, the knowledge we can glean from this!”

“Research later! Danger now!” I insisted. I was tentatively letting my magic senses work. I might not be able to actually cast magic yet, but I had learned how to work the ear/eye/nose that let me detect magic. While it was still giving me a cold feeling at the base of his skull and the feeling of the discordant magic was making my skin crawl and fur itch, and giving me a headache on top of it.

“I think we are getting closer to the center of whatever this is…” I announced. Tracking the magic was my job, since I was Mr. Sensitive. I was so thrilled to have that honour. I shuddered again as another weak pulse rippled through the mana I was sensing. It was like slime running over me. “I really don’t like the way this feels, and would really love to get out of here…”

“Just hold on,” Twilight said. It was true, what they said about a minute of real life experience being better than an hour of practice. I had gotten a better grasp of sensing magic just from exploring this place than I got from all of Twilight’s lectures and classes. Doesn’t mean I wanted the experience though. “We’ll be out of here soon.”

“It’s just getting a bit too… chaotic for me to handle comfortably,” I said, hissing a little. Dammit. If I was to go on this sort of adventure, I’d rather do it in my own body, rather than this pony one. It would be one less thing to worry about. My legs were throbbing from the times I tripped, distracted with focusing on the magic sensing as I was.

“Chaotic?” Spike said, looking at me suddenly. “You don’t think?”

“No, it’s not Discord,” Twilight said. “This magic feels nothing like his. He’s reformed, remember? It might be a type of Chaotic Magic though.”

Twilight’s natural magic prowess and muscle had proved to be enough for her to withstand the effects of the unknown magic phenomena. For Spike, his natural draconic resistance to magic was working in his favour. My non-native magic aura seemed to have some resistance to it as well, and more or less slipped through it, causing the unsettling feelings I had been getting just because it couldn’t match it properly.

Lyra had it the hardest. She had started feeling faintly dizzy and woozy after about five minutes. Twilight had started using a weak barrier to protect her, but strength of Twilight’s magic barrier was enough to cause the local mana dissonance to intensify and amplify the associate magic radiation, which started causing me to feel the effects of it and made strange sparks on Spike’s scales. Somehow though, Lyra found another solution. A weak harmonics spell; something she would normally use when singing casually or tuning her instruments. It rebuffed enough of the phenomena that she could continue.

Twilight had taken my description of the magic feeling dissonant and chaotic contemplatively. She admitted that while I It only made our efforts to find the Crusaders all the more vital.

“Twilight! Over there!” Spike said suddenly, grabbing her mane and frantically pointing. He leapt off her back and ran ahead of us, though we weren’t too far behind once we saw what he was pointing at.

The three fillies we were looking for; curled up and still under a tree.

“Apple Bloom! Sweetie Belle! Scootaloo!” Twilight called as she ran. Lyra was close behind her, though I followed more slowly. Twilight was checking their vitals, if I remembered my pony first aid Fluttershy taught me correctly, starting with Scootaloo. “This is not good… I think they are experiencing mana poisoning… it’s still mild though.”

“So they’ll be okay?” I asked as I tried to figure out how to do the same to Apple Bloom while Lyra took charge of Sweetie Belle. My hoof… I could feel through it, but I was too unfamiliar with it to really know what I was feeling. So I used my muzzle, trusting my nose to be a bit more sensitive. She was breathing, though a bit raggedly, and her heat beat seems a little slow, but I wasn’t sure.

“Mista… Devoted?” Apple Bloom asked weakly. “And Miss… Lyra? What y’all doing here..?”

“Shh,” I whispered to her. “Rest for now. We’ve got you.” Damn, I didn’t know what to do in this situation, really. Still, she closed her eyes again and seemed to slip back in a lack of consciousness. I really hold it was just sleep and not a coma or something bad like that.

“We need to get them out of here,” Lyra said quickly, picking up Sweetie Belle and putting her on her back. “This place was affecting me, an adult unicorn, I don’t want to think about what it’s doing to them.”

“Twilight, you think you can put up a shield around them?” I asked.

“I can, but wouldn’t that cause-” Twilight started.

“The mana dissonance to intensify, yes,” I said sharply. “But Lyra’s trick is weak and only give a buffer. These three are kids. I’ll deal with the headaches and I think Spike can handle being sparkly.”

“Sure can,” Spike confirmed. Twilight swallowed nervously and nodded. A moment later, a pale purple aura surrounded the three fillies.

“Sa… saaa…” I hissed as a wave of nausea washed over me and my head felt like there was a troop of river dancers with spiked shoes going wild in it before taking the show on the road and trooping randomly across my body. Wincing, I screwed my eyes shut for a moment to adjust. When I opened them again, all three conscious people were looking at me in concern. “I’m fine. Mostly.”

“We have to get these three back to Ponyville,” Twilight said.

“Yeah,” I said slowly, nodding, but then I stopped and shook my head instead. “Wait… no.”

“No?” Lyra echoed. “We have the Crusaders, we need to get them to the hospital.”

“True, but we already came this far, and we are pretty close what feels like the core,” I explained. I exhaled slowly, trying to figure out how to deal with the pain the radiation of the dissonance mana was causing. Man I wish I could use one of those barriers, but barriers cast by external sources interfered with intrinsic senses.

Then why not cast it yourself? the though came. Why didn’t I try and cast it myself? Telekinesis was just a matter of copying the spell pattern I sensed. Twilight said my magic worked in subtly different ways.

“Caleb, it’s better we come back better prepared for whatever is there, no matter how close we are,” Twilight said firmly.

“We would be putting the Crusaders in danger if we keep pressing on,” Lyra added. “We can find a way back after they are taken care of.”

In the end, it was Lyra’s argument that convinced me. “Fine,” I conceded. I’d try the spell when we returned. “Help me pick up Apple Bloom and we’ll get going.”

----------

The Crusaders would be fine. The doctors and nurses at Ponyville General took charge of them as soon as we brought them through the doors, and tried to take charge of us as well, though Twilight managed to get us out of being forced to stay with nothing more than a quick check for injuries and, in my cause, a sharp rap on the muzzle from Nurse Redheart for putting myself in danger just hours after the last incident.

Wow, that certainly put it in perspective. My life just wasn’t normal anymore, was it?

Twilight shuffled us straight from the hospital to the Library. Summons had already been sent to the other Bearers of the Elements of Harmony (which was quite a mouthful, to be honest) in the form of the guards Celestia dispatched. Twilight split them between keeping ponies clear of the microcosm forming within the White Tail Woods and making the calls.

“It was a stupid move to pull back without learning more,” I reiterated as I watched Twilight assemble supplies for our second trek into the formerly tame woods, Spike perched on a table nearby. “What if the thing is getting worse, which it most likely is? It’s going to be even harder to get there.”

“I know that,” Twilight said irritably as she swapped out some of the contents of her saddlebag with the new items they assembled. “Spike! Can you look for my set of Etheric Resonance shards?”

“On it!” Spike said, hopping off his seat and running over somewhere.

“Then why do it? I get that the Crusaders needed out of there, but we could have pushed a little further,” I said, stomping a little. Twilight didn’t say anything, pulling two books from the shelves and scanning their contents. “It would let us be more prepared. So we have a better idea of what’s actually causing the dissonant mana radiation in the place.”

“The wellbeing of the girls was more important,” Twilight said firmly.

“Fine. I’m still going to be saying ‘I told you so’ when this goes south,” I grumbled. Actually, I remembered something I was avoiding. “Twilight; one more thing.”

“What?” She asked, getting a little frustrated.

“Sorry,” I said. She blinked. “About earlier, I mean. I’m still upset that you were enjoying it so much, but I still shouldn’t have yelled and stuff. But you do get caught up in things and lose sight of the issues and goals a lot of times.”

“You got that right,” Spike said, returning with a wooden case.

“It’s about time you ponied up,” Lyra added, following Spike into the room. She was sucking on a candy, probably picked it up when she stopped to let her roommate, a mare named Bon Bon, know what she was up to.

Twilight smiled slightly as she took the case and added it to her saddle bags. “Apology accepted. And I do get carried away sometimes. It’s actually one of the reasons I wanted to come back. I realized you would rather be human again if you were to help out on this matter.”

“You got that right,” I muttered. Then the implications of what she said hit me and I gave her a wide and hopeful grin. “Wait, you figured it out?”

“I did,” Twilight nodded happily. “It was actually pretty simple, once I paid attention to the spell structure. The morphic component you used was-”

“Theory later, just tell me how to change back,” I said, interrupting her. “We have things doing, remember?”

“Fine,” Twilight huffed. “It goes back to your magic sensitivity. You just have to focus on your own magic and personal aura, like you did when I performed the minor mana link.”

Nodding, I planted my haunches and closed my easy. It had gotten easier to slip into that meditative state; since it had literally being about the extent of the practical Twilight had let me do all this time.

“You should sense a passive spell aura around your magic. That is the spell pattern you made. It’s self-sustaining in the sense that it does not need and active mana source, it passively draws from you. You only have to disconnect it to reverse the spell,” Twilight said. “It shouldn’t be hard. It should be just pulling back the magic it is taking.”

It… was pretty obvious. In a totally easy to miss way, if that made sense. Rather than the regular ‘song’ of my magic I’d grown used to, it was like someone messed with it slightly. The patterns were subdued and another one that seemed remarkably similar was there instead, playing off it. It was still there, just somewhat covered. It was hard to fully wrap my mind around it. Either way, I reached out and found the core of my magic, and the places where its pulse was feeding the rhythm of the pattern around it, and pulled it all in.

Holy Hannah it hurt. It was like disconnecting it caused my magic to flare up, celebrating its emancipation from the bindings of the transformation spell. I was forced out of the introspective trance as my awareness was taken up with bright green light, a thousand jabbing needles and every nerve yelling at once.

Thankfully, it was only for an instant.

“We need to work on how you sever mana connections,” Twilight’s slightly amused voice commented.

“Maybe he just likes almost blowing up,” Spike said.

I opened my eyes, still half blinded from the flare, and managed to glare at him. Since I was still alive, it must have only been nine hundred and ninety nine needles. The room was slightly more disheveled than before, probably the burst of magic released when I ended the spell. I groaned slightly and rubbed my eyes. With a hand blessed with fingers.

“Twilight… you are brilliant!” I cheered. My precious hands, how I missed you! I scrambled to my feet, pressing a hand to my head from the mix of wooziness from getting up too fast and the sudden return to normal height after a few hours without it.

“Any side effects?” Twilight asked.

“Nope!” I said. Aside from lingering numbness, but fingers! I wiggled them a bit some. Actually, I took three steps over to Spike and gave him a dope slap, making him yelp. “That’s for saying I looked stupid in the forest, by the way.”

“Dude!” Spike scowled, rubbing his head.

“As if that hurt,” I said, rolling my eyes. “Alright! Time to get going, Twi!”

“So that’s what you look like naked,” Lyra commented suddenly. “Not bad.”

Comments

[LittleKhan]

Funny part at the end!

[Seirs]

I was wondering when the lack of cloths at the end would come up. Well played

[user123]

Reading the description, didn't the first eclipse happen durring discord's reign or the NMM incident?

[Seeking Dusk]

5322507 I wouldn't put it past Discord to have made a few, but he seemed to like Juggling them more than anything. With the way the celestial cycle works in Equestria, the NMM Incident was likely the first, and possibly one of, if not the only, eclipse they have seen.

[user123]

5324079
ouch, a reminder to the day she got possesed...

[shapeshiftingpedro]

5324143 And it'd definitely freak the ponies out when they learn eclipses happen every one or two years here. Not to mention that there's also the lunar eclipses.

[shapeshiftingpedro]

5410935 It's more of a pet peeve. That, and EqG is a mirror-universe (the producers thought they wouldn't get that pun past me! ) so... meh. I'll just consider this a minor variant.

The only problem I have is when an author tries to shove their headcanon down everyone's throats as 'holier-than-canon'; your comment showing that you aren't one of them.

tl;dr: It's okay, just remember that it's the "true canon", for later on ( or until disproved in later episodes).

[user123]

5411268
I see what you did there.

-Your Moon loving user, Nightmare Jerremy.