Cast-Iron Cast-Offs

by Cast-Iron Caryatid

【Schrödinger's Dawn】Chapter 1 - Horns Are Magic

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It all started years ago, when I was just a teenaged filly studying under Celestia.

Yes, Rainbow Dash, I’m telling the story. No, you can’t. Ugh, okay, fine, you can tell parts of it, but wait your turn; it’ll be confusing otherwise.

As I was saying, I was a teenaged filly, and I admit to being kind of… spoiled. The princess—yes, Princess Celestia—had taken me in as her student a few years before then, and I had my own tower and everything. If I’d had any idea that I’d have to leave all that behind, well, we’d all still be sucking sunshine.

Like I was saying, though; I was pretty spoiled. I had my own tower in the palace, and it was filled with books. Just, completely wall-to-wall books. That was the kind of filly I was, my metric for having everything I wanted was books. Still is really. I mean, friends are great and all, but they just can’t compare to having the whole set of encyclo—ow.

Anyway, it wasn’t unusual for me to stay up late into the night reading, which I suppose is how I got into stargazing. There was always something magical to me about the perfect silence that filled the world when everypony else had gone to sleep. For a lot of my fillyhood, the stars and moon were all the company I had or wanted.

Imagine the look on my face when I found out there were books about the stars.

Thank you Pinkie Pie; demonstration was not required, but it certainly is effective.

Now, I was a filly, and later a teenager. We all were, back then, and teenagers are known for nothing if not a tendency towards being a little… rebellious. There is a possibility that my growing fascination with the night might have had something to do with my mentor being the pony manifestation of the day. I honestly don’t remember. If it did, though, it failed completely.

Celestia didn’t mind it at all. In fact, she encouraged it. She even arranged for me to have all the best telescopes, sextants and astrolabes. One of the happiest moments of my fillyhood was when she surprised me one summer sun celebration with a Sextans DX5, and I was up until four in the morning setting it up.

No, it was a telescope, not a sextant—and stop giggling, you guys aren’t teenagers any more! It’s just a brand name based on the constellation. Yes, they sell astronomical sextants too.

I was the happiest filly in Canterlot that day… but there was just one problem.

Do you know when astronomical twilight starts during the summer solstice at Canterlot’s altitude? Yes, thank you, Nightmare Moon. Four freaking ante meridiam in the morning. By the time I had it all set up, the night was already over. I… I just about cried myself to sleep.

Okay, fine, I did cry myself to sleep.

I never really got over it, either, and I actually never even used that telescope all that much as a result. Celestia had no idea why I had suddenly became sullen during our lessons. It wasn’t her fault, and I didn’t really blame her, but it was hard not to resent her just a little once in awhile.

Really, our relationship didn’t turn sour or anything. I never sat outside her chambers swearing vengeance on all she held dear—I mean, other than that one time she stepped on Smarty Pants, but that was years before. It was a doll I have. Used to have, I mean. I might have overreacted, but I was like, ten, give me a break.

But no, I didn’t hate her. If anything, I just looked at the sun as a problem I had to solve.

That’s right, Pinkie Pie, solve it I did.

What? No, of course that isn’t the ending! And stop interrupting me, okay? I’m trying to tell the story!

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Years later, it was hearths warming eve and puberty had introduced its own brand of problems into my life, which is why I had a stallion tied to my bed and wasn't taking 'no' for an answer.

“Stop struggling!” I insisted hotly as I tied his leg to the bedpost. “Just relax and let it happen! It’ll all be over soon.”

The stallion’s name was Null Set. He’d been my personal guard for the past few years, and was… well, kind of a wet blanket. Trust me, when the reclusive unicorn nerd in the tower thinks you’re a downer, maybe you should rethink your life.

It wasn’t just his personality that gave me that opinion of him, though. Being a wet blanket wasn’t just his calling in life, it was also his special talent and his job, and I resented him for it. A lot.

Now, you might have guessed, but I’m not your average unicorn and I never have been. I got my cutie mark when I had a magical surge that turned my parents into potted plants and hatched a dragon egg. I was… I am powerful, but if you think I just waltzed into being this confident scholar of magic, you’d be disappointed.

No, my magic was actually something of a problem for me when I was younger, and for good reason. Like I said, I’d had a magic surge as a filly and princess Celestia took me in as her student to teach me to control my magic. What you wouldn’t know from looking at me today is that those magic surges got worse around the time my horn started to get more sensitive and I began to believe I knew everything. You know, the awkward years.

In my defense, I had actually read more books by then than some of my professors, so I was usually justified when I corrected them.

But yeah, with my magic surges, I was the kid in class with horn braces and a Celestia Wings™ backpack, and to top it off, my condition had gotten me saddled with mister personality here.

You see, the thing about Null Set was that he was a unicorn who couldn’t cast any spells. He was kind of like me, in a way, in that his magic was so good, it was a problem. Of course, I didn’t let little details like a shared disability ruin my rubbish opinion of him.

In his case, it was his horn that was special. He had a… well, it was a really, really great horn; magically superconductive. That horn alone advanced my knowledge of, um, a lot of things—magical things—by ten years. Its interesting properties were the problem, though, for the both of us. Like I said, of all the ways it was a magical marvel, it made it impossible for him to actually cast spells.

More importantly, it made it impossible for me to cast spells; at least, the kind of powerful, large-scale and overall delicate spells I was planning to cast that day. It was his job to ground my magical surges and prevent any repeats of the potted plant incident, but really, his horn didn’t discriminate and it wasn’t the sort of thing you could just turn off.

Which was why I was tying him to the bed.

Now, arguably, he wasn’t just there to satisfy magical safety regulations; he was also a member of the royal guard, but given that a thirteen-year-old filly was manhandling him with rope in hoof, I‘m guessing he hadn’t been hired for his physical fitness.

Issues of his physique aside, though, there was one bright side to having Null Set around, and it was mostly for this second reason that I’d risked getting caught with some very embarrassing books on knots.

“P-p-please get off me, miss Sparkle!” he whined, not exactly straining his bonds while trying to wiggle away from where I stood on the bed. “Little fillies shouldn’t be touching horns at your age!”

If I was right—and I was—he would make an excellent battery for the spell I wanted to cast.

You see, the pony body is largely unique in its ability to produce enough magic on its own to perform the various magical feats we do. Most other races have some magic, but they tend to use that magic to manipulate a second, external source such as with zebra shamanism and alchemy or griffin sorcery.

Regardless of the race, though, it’s the body that produces the magic, and the horn, wings, hooves or other specialized anatomy that we use to regulate and shape it. That was Null Set’s problem; he couldn’t regulate the flow of magic through his horn, and given the rate at which it passed through, there wasn’t much he could do to shape it either except to express it as light or heat.

Now, you might think ‘Hey, that isn’t so bad. Some less-scholastic ponies base their whole lives around spells like those,’ but he wasn’t so lucky. Any magic his body produced immediately left through his horn as a lukewarm effluence. It was probably why he was so scrawny for a guard.

I was going to change that, though. Well, I had devised a spell that would keep the magic from leaving his horn without my say-so for five minutes, anyway. He was going to stay scrawny; I couldn’t do anything about that.

The spell in question was harder to come up with than you’d think. It’s pretty easy to interrupt a spell a unicorn is casting; one good swat with a hoof and it all comes apart. It’s a more difficult skill to actually prevent magic from leaving the horn, but one royal guard unicorns do learn in their standard curriculum. None of that was any use when the horn in question kept absorbing the spell the moment it was cast.

My solution was a wicked looking black crystal that encased his horn; crystallized magic. Normally, even solid magic would have broken down from contact with his horn, but with a spell reinforcing its structure from the outside, it was the perfect way to plug his hole.

I never did understand why ponies get so heated up over ‘dark’ magic when it’s so useful.

Slowly, the room filled with a humming magic which left a tinny, metallic taste in the mouth thanks to my horn brace. “I said quit moving! You’re making me spill it all over!” I complained, the very process of doing so making it that much harder to hold our horns together.

The stallion beneath me whimpered in response.

Eventually, I got him all charged up, but it took a while. My own combination of exceptional magical reserves and pretty average horn meant that even going at it full bore, it took some doing for me to run dry. I wanted the spell to be as powerful as possible.

That was when I grabbed the hammer.

I’d left myself just enough magic to form the framework of the spell. The spell was complicated in its own right, but considering that it was wholly my own creation and the product of years of work, the only point of difficulty was making sure I remembered all the different corrections I’d made since… okay fine, I’m probably lucky I didn’t blow up Canterlot, but that’s not the point.

My horn glowed, and the spell formed—correctly, I might add. A tiny dot of darkness appeared at the tip of my horn like a doorway to the night. Sufficient magnification would have showed that it appeared to be exactly that; through it, you would see the world as a starlit wonderland.

Today’s experiment wasn’t going to require magnification.

I took a breath to brace myself, lifted my foreleg, gripped the haft of the hammer tightly in the crook of my hoof, and brought it down with all my filly strength.

Null Set’s head jerked to the side from the blow, and crystal shattered like glass. Magic exploded from the stallion’s horn, not in a stream or flow, but in a single bust as a burning ball like the sun itself that shot off in the direction of the blow. Suddenly, I had a smoking hole in the wall of my tower.

Panicking, I jumped off the bed and tried to rein in the ball of magic. Normally, it probably would have been impossible, but my prepared spell had latched onto it the instant it had appeared and it was through that connection that I fought to bring the errant sun in line.

I pulled as hard as I could, wishing I’d left myself more magic. I hadn’t been planning on having to play rodeo clown with the damn thing.

My struggling paid off. Though I couldn’t see the ball itself, I could feel it slowing in the grip of my magic. I redoubled my effort, growing light-headed from magic deprivation as I bottomed out my reserves just as it finally stopped.

I collapsed onto the floor of my bedroom, barely managing to hold onto the spell, let alone the ball of magic, but my work was done. Without any effort on my part, the ball sluggishly reversed its course, drawn back to the spell it was tethered to.

Since I no longer had a hold on it myself—and really, I was barely functioning mentally at all at that point—I gave a jump when a gout of molten stone spattered on top of my dresser, revealing it.

I was in awe. I had never seen anything like it before, and this from a filly who had an off-again-on-again relationship with magical surges. Almost absent-mindedly, I gave a nod of my head, releasing the spell from my horn.

The two motes of magic drifted together, one large and bright, the other tiny and dark. It was slow, at first, and I treasured every moment, burning the image into my eyes. Literally. We’ll get to that later, though. Regardless, it was worth it.

As the magic and spell drew together, they began to speed up. I swallowed, edging closer, holding my breath. Every time they halved the distance separating them, they doubled in speed, and so did I. I was a meter away when they finally snapped together.

Night exploded over Canterlot.

It was beautiful.

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“Twilight, you do realize you spent like, ten minutes of that talking about some dude’s horn, right?” Rainbow Dash said.

Twilight blushed a little and took a sip of her tea to cover it up. “I’m sorry Rainbow Dash, but this story is for Nightmare Moon’s benefit, not yours.”

“Yeah, sure,” Rainbow Dash said, waving a hoof in dismissal. “How do you even know she’s into horns?”

“Rainbow Dash!” Rarity exclaimed in affront, much to the obvious relief of Twilight Sparkle. “She has been imprisoned in the moon for a thousand years, my dear, I don’t think it really matters.”

“R—Rarity!” Twilight sputtered through her tea. She spared a moment to cough and clear her throat before resuming . “I’m talking about the magical theory that is the basis for everything we went through. That day changed my life!”

“There there,” Fluttershy said, consoling Twilight with a pat on the back and taking her teacup. “I’m sure you have good intentions, but I think you’re the only one who’s, um, ‘into’ that.”

The statement hung in the air as an awkward silence filled the room. As it stretched on, however, it seemed to change from an assertion to a question.

Slowly, in one synchronized motion, everypony turned to look at Nightmare Moon.