Magic Tricks

by ferret

Trixie Discovers Denial

They found Trixie cowering in the corner of what was left of her house. Searching blindly forward, she had found her parents silent and unresponsive, lying prone on the scorched wood floor. But when she could not revive them, Trixie backed away from them in fear until her rump hit the wall and she could go no furhter. The explosion had been upward, so while it annihilated her roof, there were still walls to bump into, down at the level of a small filly. Trixie was far too magic blind to notice herself, that anything above shoulder level was no longer a barrier between her and the town, and the trees and the night.

She had wedged herself behind a bureau drawer, crying helplessly and staring forward with blank, unseeing eyes. When the other ponies made their way through the wreckage, they surrounded her, but at a distance. She could hear them milling around. She could hear that they thought she was strange, and wrong somehow. They called her a demon, a monster. She was ready to believe that they were right though. Trixie had done something very bad, and hurt her parents. There was something wrong with Trixie, that scared her just as much as it scared the milling crowd.

Trixie went willingly when they came to take her away. She let them put a bridle around her face and something on her horn that made her dizzy, and made everything feel dead around her. It was frightening and foolish to obey them, but Trixie didn't know any better, and she was desperate to convince someone to help her parents. They didn't want to talk about her parents though, or talk about anything, like about where they were going or what they were doing. Trixie could not see where she was going and that alone made her hoofing precarious, if they would stop pulling her along so roughly, so urgently. Yet the more she clumsily fell over, the more it seemed to take the edge out of their voice, that undercurrent of fear. Trixie didn't want to be scary. She didn't want to be a monster or a demon. She just wanted to be Trixie, the happy one she was yesterday.

Trixie didn't know they had locked her away in a small room, until the townsponies had left her, and shut the door behind them. She explored the full length of it, discovering herself in an earthy cellar from its smell and the feel of dirt beneath her hooves. Trixie was sure there was a window overhead, or at least an alcove that the barest tip of her hoof could find, but her vision was still nothing but a grey haze. She couldn’t even make out changes in light level at this point.

Besides the window, Trixie found nothing but smelly barrels and the stairway to the locked door. She walked around the dirt floor trying to find... something she wasn’t sure she was looking for. She was just so bored! She lay there and cried, but no pony came to comfort her. She kept feeling like her parents were there, just past the reach of her hoof, but no matter how she tried to reach them, all she could find was more of this endless, featureless emptiness she saw, that smelled, and felt like a root cellar. She stopped trying to run forward, and just pressed her head against the cool dirt. If it was there, and she could feel it, then Trixie wouldn’t feel that emptiness before her, nor the urge to run into it, just to see if maybe they would be there this time, to catch her in their arms.

Trixie didn't know why they put her there at the time, or that the only reason they didn't use the town jail, is she was small enough to slip through the bars, but Trixie did know that she was down here because she was being punished. She couldn't stop her horn surge, and now her parents were hurt. It was just like when she went on timeout, when she got angry and used bad words on accident, though in this case the adults who brought her here had a cold tone in their voice that she hadn't ever heard before. Trixie’s very first taste of the hatred and fear for what she is.

Trixie spent days down in that pit. Nopony came to check on her. Nopony could decide what to do with her. She had never been so hungry in all her life, but when she cried for her mommy or her daddy, it just made her lonelier and sadder, and hungrier. She stopped crying after a while because there was just no point, and just sat there staring listlessly forward again. There was nothing to see, because her eyes didn’t work anymore. Maybe that was why her parents didn’t come save her, because they couldn’t see either, so they couldn’t find where Trixie had been hidden. Maybe that’s the only thing that was wrong with them.

Trixie recalled the feel of their warm, limp bodies, the way they crackled and sparked when her hooves touched them, and smelled like burned hair. She recalled the deathly stillness in them that made her back away in fear. No rise and fall of any chest. They didn’t feel like mommy and daddy anymore, so maybe... maybe they weren’t just... just hurt. Trixie wished they weren’t there at all, that what she found had been life sized pony dolls, who happened to be the same size as her parents, and also warm for some reason, just a trick of the mind to beguile her. But as her punishment continued, she was more and more certain that they were now among the ranks of the ponies in town who didn’t get up again.

Trixie had seen things die before. Trixie had seen ponies die before. Everypony out here had. The monster would come and tear out the buildings trying to pull ponies free so it could eat them up, and it would be driven back with spears and stones and mommy’s magic, until it fell down and died, but sometimes it would get the ponies and sometimes it would leave them behind. Sometimes it would leave pieces behind.

Trixie recalled the vernanaught whose powerful jaws that could break a pony in two were a mercy after it had enveloped you in its acidic spittle. The ponies the... pony pieces left behind had been made black, and crackly. Trixie knew what it meant when a monster came, that ponies weren’t going to get up again. Trixie knew what it meant, but she wished she didn’t know.

She just started crying again. Because somewhere in her tortured little mind was the thought that as long as she cried, her parents would be there to help her, somewhere even impossibly distant, alive. And if she ever stopped crying, that meant giving up, and letting the monster get them. Trixie never wanted that to happen. Trixie’s voice gave out. She wanted to die then, so she just lay on her side and—and her magic was stopped, so she just lay there. She must have slept after that, because she felt... better when she woke up. Just sort of less hurting, like she was floating kind of. Like things just didn’t feel all that bad.

Trixie’s state of shock gave her more long hours between sleeping that she could spend finding things to do, such as the thing stopping her magic from happening. Trixie's life was saved, because she found that thing on her horn incredibly fascinating. The magic dampener was, by outward appearances, a ring made out of what looked like black ebony, with a complex pattern carved into its surface. Trixie could not see it physically, of course, but she could feel its effect on her magic, and thereby see how there was so much more to it than just a little ring.

The dampener had inside it a vast and twisting labyrinth, that the magic from her horn vanished into, every time she tried to use it. Trixie had never even seen a horn suppressor before, and in the night which turned into nights, of boredom and hunger, Trixie occupied herself by summoning the magic in her horn, as she had been so accustomed to from a very young age, and watching it vanish into that labyrinth. Every time it did was like a brief flash of light filling the maze, and Trixie felt like she was starting to understand how all the twists and turns kept her magic lost and hidden. In particular, one repetitive pattern she noticed was a series of three counterclockwise spirals which occasionally, randomly it seemed, had a clockwise spiral in their midst.

Were Trixie an unlucky pony, they would have left her alone while she in her childlike innocence corrected the errors in the very magic dampener that was keeping her powerless, turning all the spirals around and sealing her fate. Luckily, they came to kill her before it could happen. Trixie's sight had begun to return, but she could still only make out vaguely pony shaped blurs of color, that came to take her out of the cellar. Even frontier ponies did not have a large number of ways, or any very sophisticated ways to execute ponies. This town had settled for a method that Trixie was not going to like at all. One that condemned none of them individually, since nopony could tell from whom the fatal blow had come. Far from the painless thaumaturgical overload executions, once carried out in ancient times for prominent enemies when Equestria was at war, these ponies just tied Trixie to a post and started throwing rocks at her.

Trixie was getting scared when they again forced a bridle on her, and when they led her outside to face the teeming crowd, the whole village gathered there to see her. The crowd was so big, and shouting so loud, and still shouting that Trixie was bad and needed to be stopped. She had stopped though, and wouldn't ever do it again. She shouted back at them that she was sorry and stop being mean to her, but she couldn't yell very well because of the restrictive headgear. When she tried to move against the halter, she quickly discovered it had been closely bound to a building foundation. Trixie had enough freedom to sit and stand, and that was about it.

Merely trapped there surrounded by all that anger, Trixie was terrified, but that fear turned to white hot panic when something heavy just barely missed hitting her head. Then another rock came out of the blue to strike her side, leaving a deep bruise and a harsh scrape all along her barrel. She tried to summon her magic, but the dampener was doing its job well. She tried to evade the rocks, but they just kept coming, and tied as she was to the support pillar, there was no escaping them. One hit her temple making her ears ring, but thankfully it was only a glancing blow. It was only a matter of time though, before one incapacitated her, or worse.

In the seconds Trixie had to live, she knew only magic could save her from these evil ponies and their rocks. But to do that, she had to make the thing on her horn stop eating it. She covered her head with her hooves, trying to make herself small as possible. Bought her another few, precious seconds, and amazingly, mercifully, the rocks stopped pelting her. Was it because they hesitated at harming what looked like a helpless little filly cowering from their ire? Was it something in their hearts that told them she wasn't a monster, that she wasn’t only disguised as somepony’s filly, in order to kill other ponies with monstrous flares in the night?

Something stopped the rocks from coming, but what it was precisely, Trixie would never know, because in that moment she noticed that two opposing spirals in the dampener, if tied together, could form a self reinforcing circuit. Trixie didn't know how she knew that. It just seemed obvious. The clockwise spirals were like tiny cracks in a glass prison. Hoping against hope Trixie poured all her magic into the dampener straining to reach that which she sought deep within the labyrinth, before it could eat all her magic away. Making the tiny connection that could stop it from working.

The magic dampener exploded, sending white hot shards of molten glass in all directions. Trixie vaguely remembers some ponies crying out in pain, but there was only enough material to leave a few scars, on a few careless ponies’ hides. What immediately happened to her was a rush of power Trixie had never felt before, because she’d never worn a horn suppressor before. Her horn seemed like it was shining, begging to be used, to bring magic into the world.

The first thing she did was an ancient technique, invented time and time again by desperate unicorns being pelted by rocks. The barrage began again with a new, desperate fury, and she could almost see the rocks coming at her, not visually, but the force of their motion cutting through the air. A bubble of solid, raw, purple magic sprang up around her, and the rocks that had been hitting her, now bounced harmlessly off of it.

The rocks stopped then, and Trixie could hear the cries of argument, anger, fear and panic build in the crowd. It felt good to her that they were getting scared too, that Trixie wasn't the only one who had to be scared and hurt. She made to slice in twain the halter that was holding her to the post, only to find that the clumsy shield she erected had already done that for her. The rope was dangling loose from her bridled muzzle. Trixie didn’t want to run. She wanted to shout at them. To make them understand that she was just trying to protect herself. The rocks started at an even greater rate though, and she couldn’t keep her shield up, so Trixie did the only thing she could do.

Trixie fled.

No matter where she ran, she could hear angry ponies coming after her. Trixie couldn’t see, so she had no idea where she was running. All she could do was rely on her magic to push away ponies who came close, and to batter aside the hurled rocks and... pointy metal rocks that she didn’t recognize as spears at the time. They were angry at her because she did to her parents what the monsters did, and she didn’t mean to, but maybe the monsters didn’t mean to either. Maybe the townsponies were right in doing this. Maybe like the larkwagl, Trixie would start eating the ponies she killed, and they had to kill her before she did it.

Trixie didn't care if they were right though, or if she deserved to be punished. She didn’t want to kill ponies, or... or eat them, or leave pieces of them strewn about. All she cared about was not getting hit by more rocks. Trixie had to stop over and over again, to resume her shield and brace precariously, at more rocks headed her way. They were trying to pin her down, corner her so they could finish the job. Trixie wouldn’t let them though. She wanted the hurting to stop!

Finally she escaped the ponies, running blindly into some bushes that as her luck would have it, were at the very edge of town. There, Trixie knew there were no more walls for them to trap her against, so she gallopped as hard as she could through those bushes. And then through some trees, weaving unsteadily as she collided with the trunks. And then she fell into a creek. And then more bushes. Slipped in thick mud, but Trixie just kept going. Eventually, amazingly, the angry sounds faded away, and Trixie was fleeing in blessed silence.

Perhaps the ponies could have caught her, but they were no strangers to the dangers in these forests, and reluctant to risk forging out into them, if nothing else for fear that they would disturb a terrible denizen who would otherwise have left their little settlement alone. They were probably glad to see the forest take back the monster they thought it had spawned. Trixie was no monster. She was a pony. But they didn't understand that, and that simple misunderstanding—that almost cost her her life—was also what convinced them to give up pursuit, and saved her in the end.

Trixie didn't realize she had been crying, until she stopped running to catch her breath. The woods were grey, cold and deep around her, and there seemed like something lurking in every shadow and behind every blur that turned out to be a scraggly bush. Her hoof had sank into a mud puddle at her feet... and she was crying. Trixie didn't know why she was crying. She couldn't know why she was crying. She could not wrap her head around what transpired over the events of last week. Trixie hadn't done anything—O.K. Trixie had done something wrong, but it was an accident! They didn't think she would do it again, did they? If she doesn't want to, it won't happen again, right?

Trixie was upset and confused, and thought she was on the end of her rope. Foals didn’t run into the woods, not ones who came back at any rate. It was only a matter of time, she thought, before something caught the coppery scent coming from her bruised abrasions and decided to make a meal of her. She never thought she would see anypony ever again that night. In her short life remaining, Trixie was sure she would never so much as see the sun rise again. Being run out of town was the worst thing ever! Luckily, Trixie was no ordinary pony, and she would have many long years ahead of her, to get used to ponies running her out of town.

Trixie, the filly, finally concluded that it was just ponies overreacting again. It was the only way she could understand what was going on. Trixie didn't want them to have any good reason for what they've done. She wanted them to be simple, and petty and just plain mean ponies, who had it out for a sweet, innocent little filly who had done no wrong. They simply couldn’t be any good reason. That would mean she was a monster, that she was dangerous, that it would happen again. So instead, Trixie hated them, for ruining her life and stealing her parents and her house and her—her whole life! Now what was Trixie going to do? There was nothing she could do. She couldn't go back—the very idea of it terrified her. But where could she go?

Maybe Trixie could live her life here out in the woods. Like the wayward hero, in a story her mother had read to her, eking out a life in the frozen tundra. Maybe Trixie was that hero. Maybe she had to train to defeat the evil murgrath king, bringing 300 years of cruel, unending winter. Though this forest was more swampy, than frozen tundra. And Trixie certainly was a lot younger than the noble warrior Brightest Wish. Was Trixie to be climbing mountains now? Was she to be singing the heart songs of old, and vaulting chasms, and wrestling bears and—

It was about that time that Trixie noticed the growling behind her.

Author's Note:

Comments

[ferret]

6482205
It's just... Trixie's first person isn't exactly... first person. Even though it is?

6482141

Well, I don't believe Trixie ever referred to the planet's diameter directly, but you could make some educated guesses. You shouldn't, but you could. Given Applejack could see Ponyville on the horizon, if Ponyville is 2200 miles away, and she's 20,000 feet up in a tower above sea level, that puts the the planet at about a third the size of the sun, with a diameter three times greater than Jupiter, at least. If she were that high on Earth, she could only see about 111 miles away, putting Ponyville in the nearby suburbs of NYC. Either way, Ponyville would be visible before the rainbow came, and it was not, so the fact remains that the Sonic Rainboom was pulling some shenanigans right there. Before the rainbow started screwing with the fabric of space, there were mountains on the horizon anyway, so telling the curvature of the planet was a good deal more difficult.

[Reese]

6482354
Ah, interesting; I hadn't even thought of that. I was looking at two things:
"Perhaps the only outpost of ponies in all directions, that precise distance away."
and
"as far away from the benevolent celestial princess's embrace as possible".
Why that precise distance, and how did she know? And as far away from one point on the planet as possible while still being on the planet? A possibility that suggests itself is an antipode.

Oh, and FIMFiction didn't notify me of your reply here; I saw it after reading the new chapter. Hopefully that doesn't lead to me missing anything.

[ferret]

6482205
Wait, I don't think Second Person Anon is a real tense...

Anon's that green guy right

6482467
Ah, so you think Princess Celestia is powerless to reach across the solar system? But no seriously, that's a sort of good nitpick I suppose. It's supposed to convey that ponies don't travel much farther than that, at least not known pony civilizations. It's the rough limit of how far away ponies can get from Celestia, before something eats them. Has little to do with the actual planet's diameter.

[Reese]

6482608
Ah, thanks. :)

[Cross Lament]

What immediately happened happened to her was a rush of power

It double-happened to her!

I do hope she returns some day and slow-roasts her hometown...

[DracoDarastrix]

I'm glad I'm tracking this story. So far it's really good.

[ferret]

6483521
Don't worry, Trixie doesn't learn it until she gets to Canterlot, in a conveniently off camera scene so it still remains totally confusing!

6483577

6483793
Thanks!

[Jeff Gordon]

I like
Finally a good fic that puts down Twilight Sparkle. It was about time Trixie go to some respect.
Looking forwards to the layer chapters. Keep going!

Go f*ck yourself twilight.

[Emperor]

Hmm. So is this actually flat out AU for Trixie starting from pre-series (we don't really have much of a background for her so any past can be made up), or does it only deviate after a few seasons of the show? I can't really see Trixie with this kind of power ever needing the Alicorn Amulet, unless it was meant to refine her spells for greater effect instead of just a simple power boost.

[ferret]

6489316
Boy are you not gonna like all the lesbo Twixie smooching in chapter 3.

6489341
It was sort of rather terrifying what might have happened if the princess hadn't intervened and Twilight just kept going. It's a metaphor for all those bright minds out there who burned out because they were neglected by society, until they were reduced to writing my little pony fanfiction for a special talent.

6489383
Every fanfiction is an AU.