And One Glance Back
"Truly, my pupil—" Starswirl took one of his big, dramatic breaths. "—this is a moment that will live in the annals of history."
Clover hid her grin. It seemed like every other day around here held that sort of moment. "Of course, sir," she said, using her magic to leaf through his notebook. As usual, he'd only given her the thing two minutes ago, and whatever spell he was talking about filled every inch of paper from top to bottom and for page after page after page.
A clearing of throat made her look up. Starswirl was giving her a half-glare, the kind that only set her mane to smoldering rather than outright singeing it. "And don't you take that tone with me, Pupil! These are the secrets of the universe I'm uncovering here! You should feel yourself privileged that I allow you to observe!"
That made her swallow. "Yes, sir." And she did feel privileged—honored, even. Every morning when she awoke to the mountainous view outside her window, her astonishment hit her right in the horn: Starswirl the Bearded, the Court Mage of Unicornia, the greatest wizard to ever hold the title, had picked her out of all the applicants to be his pupil, to study his methods, and to succeed him someday.
But that wouldn't be for quite some time, she knew. Probably not until His Majesty retired and Princess Platinum took over the kingdom. Decades in the future.
"So!" Starswirl shook his head, the single bell on the crown on his hat jingling, and stepped into the circle of chalk he'd drawn on the stone floor of his workshop. "This initial experiment will be a simple one, for even with a work of genius like this, it's best to begin slowly."
"Forgive me, sir." Clover had skimmed through about ten pages and was only now getting an idea of the spell's parameters. "I can't be reading this right. Are you really proposing—?"
"Time travel, Clover!" His face lit up like a foal unwrapping birthday gifts. "With this spell, I can leap back to see the first primitive villages of our eohippoid ancestors, or plunge ahead to see what marvels await us three hundred years from today!"
Her magic faltered at the thought, and she had to reach out quickly to catch the book in her hooves before it could begin to fall. "That...that's impossible!"
"Ha!" His face tightened into one of his full glares, and Clover winced away from the heat of it. "The impossible is our business!"
She looked from her mentor to his notebook and back several times before she could find any words. "But sir! The basic principles of entropic—!"
"Enough!" He stomped a hoof. "I have gone over every phrase and clause of this spell at least four times, Pupil, and I'm here to tell you that I've overcome the objections of both magic and science! This spell is like nothing any unicorn has ever attempted before, but I have every confidence that it will work exactly as I've outlined it!" His horn began to glow. "Now! For my initial experiment, I shall hop forward two hundred years, then hop back to this very room thirty seconds from now!"
"Wait!" Clover fumbled to get the notebook reopened. "Sir, nopony doubts that you're a genius, but—"
"The future's a much safer destination than the past, you see." The light of his horn brightened, sharpened, grew till its glare pushed against her like a wind and Clover had to hold up a hoof to shield her eyes. "Changing something in the past could have repercussions in our present! But a quick look around the future—"
"Sir! For such a gigantic step, we should—!"
"You must have vision, Pupil!" The stones began to shake under Clover's hooves. "Ha! I made a pun!"
"Starswirl! Please!"
"Thirty seconds, Clover! Begin...counting...now!" And a flood of radiance burst over the room like the Unicorn Council had dropped the sun directly on top of her.
It vanished instantly, and Clover pitched forward as the force that had been pushing her back vanished as well. Scrambling upright, she brushed her mane from her eyes and stared at the chalk circle, the stone inscribed within burned as black as coal. She blinked at it, then realized that a part of her mind was counting, had been counting, in fact, since Starswirl's last shout.
Fifteen seconds...twenty seconds...twenty-five seconds...thirty...
Thirty-five...
Forty...
Forty-five...
Two days later, Clover looked up through bleary eyes as the door to Starswirl's workshop swung open. Springing to her hooves, she almost called out his name, but it was just the guard again, a fresh pot of coffee floating in the glow of his horn. "Oh. Yes. Thank you," she muttered.
But the guard didn't set the pot down; instead, he turned sideways and announced, "Her Royal Highness, Princess Platinum."
Clover blinked, and the daughter of the Unicorn King strode into the room, her face as always perfectly composed. Her magical aura, though, seemed a bit rough around the edges to Clover's senses, and her voice wavered when she asked, "What news, Clover the Clever?"
Wishing she could be anywhere other than where she was, Clover sighed and levitated Starswirl's notebook from the table, several sheets of her own notes sliding onto the floor. "Here." She flipped to the second page and tapped a hoof against an equation near the bottom. "Maybe his pen slipped while he was figuring the initial entropic value, but this decimal point is in the wrong place. He then used the incorrect value throughout the entire series of calculations, and while I'm still not sure the exact effect it would've had, whether it would've sent him forward two thousand years or twenty—" She stopped and swallowed against the sudden tightness in her throat. "If he was able to come back, Your Highness, he would certainly have done so by now."
Silence seeped slowly into every corner of the room. "Then he's...gone?" Princess Platinum asked.
Uncertainty squirmed through Clover's middle, a little voice in her head telling her that if their positions had been reversed, if she had become lost in time and Starswirl had remained here, he would have already begun planning her rescue. "If I can rework the spell, start at the beginning and try to follow his process using the correct value, I might be able to—"
Something crackled in the workshop behind her, sudden flashes spattering across the walls; Clover spun, saw a ball of lightning spinning into place above the charred remains of Starswirl's chalk circle. "Starswirl!" she cried, rushing forward.
A figure popped out of the air, and her mentor's voice shouted, "Hold, Clover!"
She froze in her tracks, her jaw dropping. It was Starswirl, all right, but his proud, snow-white beard was streaked with gray, his face thin and wrinkled, the single bell at the peak of his hat now joined by at least a dozen others all around the brim. "I've much to say," he was going on, the words, she now noticed, creakier than she remembered, "and not long to say it. For traveling forward in time, it turns out, is the simplest of matters: we all do it every day a second at a time, and speeding up that process is mere foals' play. Traveling back, however, is nearly impossible, and I've spent decades developing this spell that I can only use once and only for a very few moments."
A gasp beside her, and Clover glanced over to see Princess Platinum staring at Starswirl. "But what—?" she began.
"Forgive me, Your Highness." He bowed. "In brief, I'm doing well and serving in the court of the Royal Pony Sisters. They're a force for great good in the world, and I'm assisting them." He smiled, a softness in his eyes that Clover had never seen there in all the years she'd been his pupil. "Of course, the two of you have quite of bit of good yet to do here and elsewhere, and I...I'm proud of you, Clover. You're a wonderful pony and a wonderful wizard, and you make possible all the wonderful things that are yet to come."
Clover could only stare, and lightning began swirling around him again. "So heed me one last time." He nodded to the notebook, still floating in the flex of Clover's magic. "Leave that spell alone and focus on what's important in the here and now. And have a good life, Clover the Clever!" He winked, his bells tingling. "Because I've read about it in the history books and know that you will!"
The lightning surrounded him with its flashing, then scattered into sparks, the center of the workroom as empty as it had been a moment before.
The lump in her chest as tight as a fist, Clover blinked as the afterglow faded from her retinas. "Thank you," she finally managed to get out.
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Ooooo, that was great. It ties a number of things together very nicely.
6064036
One of my favorite things:
About my brain is the way it just spits this random stuff out sometimes.
Mike
Heh, I was on a reddit thread a little while ago where I kvetched about the atrocity that is the MLP timeline and used Starswirl as one of my points of contention. This does a fair job of rationalizing some of it.
6064559
One of my favorite things:
About fanfiction is the way it lets us all get into the act of trying to patch the parts of the continuity that need a little patching.
Mike
Oh, nice! That does fit well.
6064986
Thanks!
I probably could've done a little more with it, but I was determined to stick to a 24-hour writing time.
Mike
I wrote a review of this story. It can be found here.
6068142
This was originally:
Gonna be a blog post just presenting the problem that'd been bothering me for the past two or three years and then stating this possible solution. But as I was writing that, I started seeing the scene, started imagining dialogue and staging and all that sorta stuff. So I figured I'd just do it as a minific in a blog post--"There's no way," I told myself confidently, "that I can do more than a thousand words on this."
But that first scene went 790 words, and I realized that I wanted to do a second scene to show why Starswirl had developed the curiously-specific spell that Twilight uses in "It's About Time." So I resigned myself, set a 24 hour time limit--including the time I'd already spent--and this is what came out. If anyone wants to do anything more with the idea, feel free, but I've got magical squirrels calling me!
Mike
6070255
Ah, magical squirrels, the bane of writers everywhere.
6072461
I quite:
Enjoy mine, but then I've been writing about her for a baker's dozen years at this point, so it's probably a good thing that we get along.
Mike Again
With a bit of the mind-flip
You're into the time-slip...
6075324
When I was in junior high and high school:
We had a little local movie theater that showed "Rocky Horror" every Friday and Saturday at midnight. So when my friends and I would go to the theater to see Marx Brothers' movies and things like that, we would inevitably see the trailer for "Rocky Horror." And my friend Steve and I vowed solemnly never to see that film because we thought it was too terrible a pun when Bradford Dillman shouted "Great Scott!" after the trailer introduced the character of Dr. Scott.
That was 40 years ago, and I continue holding true to my vow. I have, however, seen "Shock Treatment," the sequel to "Rocky Horror." A friend of mine's wife has it on VHS, and she forced several of us to watch it one afternoon....
Mike
Well, that makes... an awful lot of sense.
Then again, making a frightening amount of sense is kind of what you do.
6119477
Well, you know what they say:
Take care of the sense, and the dollars will take care of themselves.
Or no. Wait. That's not quite right, is it?
Mike
6120365
We're talking 'bout, dollars and cents/
Dollars and cents!/
Them greenback bills with the pictures of the presidents~
6120509
When I was still:
Doing my radio show at 6AM on Saturdays, I used to open with Dave Frishberg's song "Zs." I'd completely forgotten he'd worked with Bob Dorough and the rest of these folks on the "Schoolhouse Rock" series!
Mike
Finally got around to this, and I'm so glad I did!
To be honest, the problem with Starswirl doesn't bother me, because I'm able to pass it off as a poor continuity error. But there are other errors I can't let go as easily, so I totally understand your frustration with it. I like your answer to it. It makes the pieces fit well together. I think my favorite bit was his line about how we travel forward through time every day, and "going to the future" is simply speeding that process up. Don't think I've ever looked at it that way. I also particularly liked that you squeezed a nice amount of heart into it, with him telling Clover he was proud of her, because he obviously got the chance to learn about all the good she did, despite him not showing her too much appreciation when he was with her.
6169080
Thanks!
A fair percentage of fanfiction, seems to me, begins with either the phrase "Here's why that happened" or the phrase "Here's something that should happened." This is one of my "why" stories.
Mike
6174044
Yeah, exactly. Especially if you expand "should" into "should/could/would". And we can't forget that great stirrer of the imagination, "What if".
This is brilliant and it needs more views.
Hmm. This had an interesting setup, and the question was (largely) answered, but it didn't quite stick in my mind. The writing itself was a pleasure to read, but... I suppose I'd have liked a bit more to have happened. Which would have made it a rather different story, I know, but still. At any rate, still well worth a like.
An impressive piece of work.
It's definitely a possibility!
8107775
And the rest:
As they say, is history!
Mike
That does wrap things up nicely. Once you introduce time travel, everything gets messy.
9616622
Thanks!
I revisited this idea from Starswirl's point of view after they brought the Pillars back from Limbo, actually. That story's called "Clover Honey" if you might be interested.
Mike
Cool concept!