Predictions & Prophecies

by Kinrah

1 - The Book

It was scheduled to be a light rainstorm over Ponyville. A lot of traders had prepared for it, the pegasi in charge of it were all pumped up, and the town was generally ready. However, by the time the morning rolled around, it became quite evident that something somewhere along the line had Gone Wrong, leaving everypony with patchy cloud coverage and a soft westerly wind. More than anypony else, it confused the weather patrol, as they swore blind that they’d set up the storm which was now missing, and annoyed the traders, who, having expected to keep their merchandise inside and away from the marketplace, were in a panic to get their stalls out in time for the morning rush. Fortunately, the reveal had come early enough that most of the townsponies had just about managed to get their schedules back on track. This included the pegasus Rainbow Dash, whose schedule was not only back on track but also through one of the windows of the library for the fifth time in three days.

“So let me get this straight,” Twilight Sparkle said blearily, rubbing her eyes, and fully aware that her mane had frizzed. She’d had a late night of studying and being woken up relatively early by a pony breaking into her house - again - was not, never was, and never would be on any of her to-do checklists. “You were practicing and misjudged your aim, so you hit the window instead of the clouds you’d set up.”

Rainbow, on the floor buried beneath the contents of the bookshelf she’d hit, groaned and nodded.

Of course it was. When was anything else ever the excuse? Sighing, Twilight looked up at the smashed window passively. She hadn’t the concentration nor the energy to summon up a repairing spell at the current moment, hiring somepony to come and replace it would take too much effort, not to mention great expense, and she didn’t have anything to board it up with. Unless Rainbow was willing to park herself in the window frame until she’d worked out what to do with it, it was going to have to stay smashed.

“And you couldn’t practice anywhere that wasn’t near the library?”

It was a different question every time. There had been ‘What were you trying to do?’ and ‘How exactly do you misjudge your aim?’ and ‘Why oh why do you keep hitting the same window?’. Twilight really didn’t know why she bothered, because the response was almost always exactly the same. The window hadn’t even originally had glass in it, it was just open, but she’d had it fitted with some proper glazing when she realised that it let all of the heat out in the winter. A side-aim of the action was to try and deter a certain pegasus from entering by means other than the door, but apparently Rainbow Dash liked scattering books and glass all over the building whenever she felt like it.

“Everywhere’s above your library, Twilight. I can’t help it.” Rainbow stood up and shook, sending a shower of glass sparkling to the ground. Twilight instinctively ducked for cover behind the table in the middle of the room. “It’s a good thing I’m invincible!”

Twilight’s mouth opened and closed a few times, before her brain decided that a comment like that wasn’t even worth responding to. Sighing again, she walked over to the door, unlocked it, pushed Rainbow out, and locked it again. There was only one thing certain about today: she needed more sleep.

Going upstairs and climbing onto the upper deck, she glanced at the prone form of Spike, who was quite happily snoring away in his basket, apparently having not heard a thing. It was fine for him, he was a dragon, and they were reknowned for sleeping through everything. Twilight, on the other hoof, had trained herself to wake to loud noises, when such things usually meant Pinkie Pie setting off a firework outside, Spike belching a letter from the Princess in his sleep, or the usual, everyday occurrence of Rainbow Dash arriving inside by means other than the door.

Pulling herself into bed, she made a mental note in her thought journal to make the tree even more Rainbow-proof, before closing her eyes.

It was a more respectable hour when she woke again, now feeling a great deal more refreshed. Her mane was still frizzled, but a short bath and a quick session with a brush in front of a mirror took care of that problem easily. Downstairs, Spike was already up, holding a tray with her breakfast - buttercups on toast, lovely - and staring at the mess on the floor.

“Did Rai-” he began.

“Yes,” Twilight said immediately, taking the toast. “Thank you, Spike.”

“Did she-”

Crunch. “Offer to help? No.”

Leaving Spike to start cleaning up the piles of books on the floor, Twilight stared at the window, racking her brain for the spell matrix for Reconstitution. (Take the parts and recreate the sum! Do not mention existence of this spell to the Canterlot Guild of Artificers, disbanded CE 731. Perfect reconstruction not guaranteed. Not intended for archaeological purposes. Do not under any circumstances use on magical artefacts. The city of Manehattan is not responsible for any damage caused by unauthorised casting of this spell.) Levitation, teleportation, most magic she could recall in a flash. Her special talent was magic, after all; where for most unicorns much beyond levitation and a special talent spell would be exhausting, she manipulated magic like it was an additional limb… yet she could never remember Reconstitution.

Oh. Right. Her cheeks flushed red with embarrassment, despite the fact that nopony could possibly know the error she’d made. Reconstitution. Difficult to remember, also incredibly uncomplicated. Closing her eyes, she concentrated, and the glass on the floor glowed briefly and vanished, reappearing as a solid pane in the empty frame. Except for a single sliver right in the middle.

Frowning, Twilight stared at it for a moment, wondering. Something had gone wrong with the spell, that was evident enough. She double- and triple-checked the matrix. No mistakes there. No sign of the last bit of glass anywhere on the floor, and Spike hadn’t said anything (despite the hardiness of dragons, he would notice). That couldn’t be right. Unless… she shook her head, and suddenly realized it could only mean one thing: Rainbow had walked out with a bit of glass stuck to her somewhere. Not that the hotheaded pegasus was likely to notice - having crashed enough times she probably considered ‘pain’ as something somepony else had - but nevertheless it was still dangerous, and she didn’t want to have to retrieve it from Ponyville Hospital.

“Spike, I need to go and find Rainbow Dash,” she started, without turning around. “She’s still got a bit of the-”

“Oh no!”

There was a crash behind her, and she flinched, finally turning around to see what she’d dreaded; Spike had fallen off a ladder, along with the contents of another set of shelves.

“…window.”

“I’m okay!”

It was at times like these where she’d normally call her friends over to help and to have tea, and they’d happily and willingly assist Twilight in restacking the bookshelves, in what was akin to a bonding session that happened mostly every other week. However, she knew three of them were unable to help out - Applejack had her hooves full with preparation for her family’s upcoming reunion, Rarity had a huge dress order to take care of, and that was an understatement, and Pinkie Pie was scheduled to leave town in a few minutes’ time, having offered to ‘supervise’ a shipment of treats that were on their way to Hoofington in reparation for the Mirror Pool incident a few days prior. That just left the two pegasus ponies, Fluttershy and of course Rainbow Dash herself.

Well, she needed to talk to Rainbow anyway about the glass. Since she wasn’t a pegasus, Twilight couldn’t actually go to the organisation of cloud structures that the racer called home, and most other pegasi wouldn’t go near there either, for reasons only described to her as ‘booby traps’. Yeah, that had started happening too, ever since Rainbow Dash had been introduced to the Daring Do novels. The lavender unicorn was glad that her friend had discovered the joy of reading, but there was taking it too far, and then there was installing cloud tripwires everywhere. Hadn’t that been fun to sort out when Fluttershy found them. It was pretty much only Rainbow who knew the safe routes in and out. Well… almost only Rainbow. There was one final option.

Instructing Spike to resume the cleanup, Twilight seized two blank pieces of paper and a quill. Scribbling out two quick letters, she sealed them in a pair of envelopes, carefully wrote ‘RAINBOW DASH, 17 SOMEWHERE, PONYVILLE’ on one, did the same for Fluttershy on the other, added some stamps and headed for the front door. For all the pegasi who wouldn’t go near Rainbow’s home, there was one pegasus who always braved the odds and won. Through rain or snow or gloom of night… three, two, one…

Knock knock.

And she was always bang on schedule. Twilight had often speculated on Ditzy Doo’s uncanny ability to remain precisely to schedule when everything else was falling apart, and by extension the rest of her family at the post office, but seeing as the last time she’d actually investigated such a thing she’d almost been eaten by a hydra in a swamp, unless it was vital she know, she left well enough alone. The inner workings of Ponyville’s postal system was one such mystery. As long as it worked, everything was fine. Don’t break what isn’t broken. Observe it, and it will change. That was one of her favorite Star Swirl the Bearded quotes.

Evidently the grey pegasus had had a good morning, Twilight found as she opened the top half of the door, if the direction her eyes were pointing were any indication. It had been explained to her that Ditzy suffered from a rare condition that for much of the time prevented her eyes from focusing in the same direction, resulting in each eye almost permanently pointing in a different direction from its twin. Some ponies made jokes behind her back, about the odd sight she made and about her apparent lack of hoof-eye coordination, but of all the things Twilight was, she wasn’t insensitive, and she’d found out after a couple of months in Ponyville that the mailmare just had few words to say to the jokers.

But today, both of her eyes were pointing in the same direction, straight at Twilight. “Morning, Twilight Sparkle!” she chirped.

The unicorn acknowledged the greeting and said hers in return. “Good morning, Ditzy Doo. Sleep well?”

“Sure did! Oh, you have a letter!” Ditzy flipped open one of her saddlebags and retrieved said correspondence. It looked like somepony had gone crazy with an ink stamp all over it; Twilight’s name was only just legible beneath it all. For a moment, Twilight considered it, wondering what in Equestria could have happened to it, before remembering that she’d seen this sort of thing before. Ah. She smiled.

“Tell Dinky she did a wonderful job,” she said, accepting the letter. (Top marks for effort, but restraint could use some work.) She brandished the two newly-written letters, and passed them through the doorway. “Could you get these to Rainbow Dash and Fluttershy, please?”

Ditzy carefully tucked the letters into her bag, and then started to salute, an action which Twilight quickly stopped. Every time she’d managed a salute in the past she’d managed it by poking her eye. The pegasus blushed. “Sorry.”

“No problem at all, Ditzy,” Twilight said. “Have a great day!” She watched the pegasus fly off, continuing her round that should take her to Fluttershy’s in fifteen minutes twenty two seconds, and Rainbow Dash’s a further two minutes forty-five after that. She didn’t know what she’d do without the postal system. Sure, Spike was a direct link to Princess Celestia, but only to Princess Celestia, and one of the ground rules that had been established on her taking on Spike as an assistant was that his ability was not to be used as a way to mooch off the official royal mail service. Besides, there were special protocols in place if an occasion arose that required hijacking the royal messengers.

Now, the letter. Nothing too fancy, a standard post office seal on the back, ink from the stamps running slightly where it hadn’t dried, envelope with the texture of something easily available at any good stationers. Unlikely to be anything library-related then. Personal mail was a safer bet at this point. Glancing back at Spike to make sure he wasn’t about to have another accident, she pulled open the seal and unfolded the paper within. Ah, an invitation to the charity drive at the hospital next Thursday. She remembered offering her assistance with that, good to get a reminder. Noted to thought journal; add to both calendars. Also noted; bump up the next reshelving day, and ask Rainbow Dash to find the time in her ‘busy’ schedule to assist.

Behind her, Spike lost his footing on the ladder again. ‘Great day’. Yeah.

By the time Fluttershy arrived, not long later, the cleanup had gotten nowhere, mostly because some of the older books had actually fallen apart, and once Twilight had calmed down from Crisis Mode, she’d busied herself carefully organising the pages into the right order and using Reconstitution to fix them. Spike had done his best, but no matter what he tried, he always managed to end up with more books on the floor than he’d started with - and this was in no way his fault. In between repairing books, and nipping out to the kitchen to put water on the boil for tea, Twilight had given helping him a shot, with exactly the same result. However, the damaged books were of higher priority, which was a bit obvious, seeing as there were some unique volumes in the library. Losing them would be catastrophic to the literary world. As soon as the problem had started escalating, she’d made the wise decision to remove the most valuable ones from the shelves and secure them upstairs. The world would have access to Equestria’s last first-edition copy of A Study in Mauve!

“Um, Twilight Sparkle?”

That said, a couple of the older ones had already bitten the proverbial dust, in particular the fifth century medical textbook Effective Combinations of Medicinal Herbs and Magicks, which had practically disintegrated. With any luck, its contents would have been analysed in the Canterlot Medical Journal, those that hadn’t yet become common knowledge or obsolete. Fluttershy cleared her throat. It did provide an interesting dilemma on the subject of attempting to reassemble what remained, though; were the fragments large enough to be Reconstituted, or would she have to use the dreaded book glue (ick)? A missing chip from a window might remain, sure, but there were recorded hazards when using it on ripped paper. Reattaching the pages to the binding was foal’s play. Finishing the jigsaw of page pieces? Not so much.

It was probably best not to try it, really. Experimenting with magic was good, it led to new and interesting discoveries, but it was best saved for a particular time and place. “Twilight?” The basement was ideal for small spells, things that required the higher throughput of the capacitors or the added safety provided by the thaum drain, and maybe she’d try prodding Reconstitution down there. She’d read up on the documentation thoroughly first, as history had taught her. Make sure you understand things before you fiddle with them. (Star Swirl again, paraphrased.) She still didn’t see why some ponies blamed her for the castle music room. Trying new things in public was also a major no-no; it had taken her several hours to track down the creatures she’d accidentally transfigured into living oranges.

Something waved in front of her face as she tried to concentrate on the history book concerning the evolution of the city of Manehattan, and she swatted a hoof at it. She hadn’t read this one for a while, and was trying to read it and Reconstitute it at the same time. Go, multitasking! Normally, she wouldn’t try something like this, but she just couldn’t drag her eyes away from the words, jarring as it was when she picked up pages in the wrong order. It was useful as a comparison tool, though, comparing future situations to past ones; reading about the Great Fire in CE656 and then the cultural boom that immediately preceded it really illustrated the way even in the past things could change at the drop of a hat. Moments like that existed throughout history; Nightmare Moon’s banishment, the griffon wars, the-

Twilight’s thought train derailed and flew off a cliff. Somepony had nudged the book glue (ick). Oh. Fluttershy was there. Why was Fluttershy there? You invited her, dummy. Horseapples.

“Oh! Sorry! Good morning, Fluttershy!” Darn darn darn darn darn-

“It’s quite alright, Twilight,” Fluttershy said, retracting her wing away from the tube of (ick). “You looked busy, and I didn’t want to distract you, but…”

“No, no, it’s fine. I got carried away.” Twilight looked back down at the pages all over the desk, and the pitiful few which she’d rebound back to the spine. “It’s a bit more of a problem than I anticipated. Glad you could come and help. It’s not too much trouble I hope?”

The butter pegasus smiled sweetly, and Twilight heard a strange ‘hng’ noise from behind her, though when she checked she saw only Spike rearranging the books on the floor into neater piles. Weird. “Oh no, of course not. I’d just finished feeding the animals, and it’s always nice helping out here.”

Twilight’s thanks were drowned out by the sound of tumbling books as Spike overbalanced a pile and knocked it over. “Sorry!”

A great many things were odd about Ponyville. When she’d first moved to the town, Twilight had brushed it off; the ponies were crazy, the town was close to the Everfree Forest, an infamous source of wild magic, and she was experiencing culture shock having lived her whole life until then in Canterlot. She was noticing these things because she was too used to living her secluded life mostly in the castle library. But it had been well over a year since then, and things were still cropping up. One of her experiments had proved that something in the town was drastically affecting the laws of probability, but that was nothing solid to go on. That was far more likely to be the wild Everfree magic doing something unexplainable rather than the entire town being some sort of cosmic plaything. The result was the same, though. Unusual things were more likely to happen in Ponyville than they were in Canterlot.

The situation was fairly quickly described to Fluttershy, as the three of them rearranged the stacks. “I just don’t understand it,” Twilight was saying. “I have a diagram that shows where every book should be, in case this happens, and it’s not working at all.” Even to scale, it was a fairly hefty chart, but that was necessary to show the level of detail required. The only other alternative was a list, and both the unicorn and the dragon had discovered that staring too long at very long lists without interspersed pictures made their eyes hurt and every entry blur into a mess of ink and parchment. Staring at books could be done for a much longer duration, though Spike would eventually lose interest and without external stimuli, Twilight would fall asleep. Staring at charts and diagrams worked much better, and it was very simple to cast Erasure on them in the event that a book needed to be resorted. An alphabetically sorted list would be a nightmare to reorganize if even one entry was changed.

Plus, after the first time all the books had been knocked from the shelves - guess who - it had been discovered to Twilight’s horror that the previous librarian had used no such sorting system at all bar alphabetically sorted by title. It pained her to think that for years, Kraftable Kitchen Kookery had been on the other side of the library from Rainy Day Recipes, the two bestselling cookery books by Puff Pastry. Was even putting the same author’s books together too much to ask for? She’d vowed to give the previous librarian such a lecture, if she ever found out who’d actually occupied the building before her. She really hoped that wherever they were, they weren’t in an even bigger library. Shivers ran down her spine when she imagined the stallion or mare working at the biggest libraries of Equestria, Manehattan, Vanhoover, or - Celestia forbid - Canterlot.

Fluttershy didn’t have any suggestions, so with no other ideas, Twilight put forward that they should try again, but slower and with great care. That didn’t work; as soon as the last book on the journalism shelf slotted into place, the whole lot came out again, nearly bringing the contents of the shelf above it were it not for quick thinking. So they tried it even slower. That really didn’t work.

“Ouch.”

“I’m not sure that was such a good idea…” murmured Fluttershy, helping her friend from the heap of books that had landed on her.

“I don’t understand it at all,” Twilight repeated, rubbing the back of her head where she’d taken most of the impact. “Unless Rainbow fundamentally altered the woodwork when she crashed, which I don’t see as possible, this shouldn’t be happening.” Then her eyes caught on something. “Spike, what book are you holding?”

“This one?” Spike lifted it up. It was a fairly old, red bound book, with a few signs of wear on the spine. From a distance, it looked like every other book in the library, but up close, it… something was odd about it. “Uh, I dunno. I think it’s the same one I found in that secret compartment.”

“That would be the same one with the mirror pool legend in it.” Twilight lifted it out of his claws and opened it up to confirm it. There was no mistaking the magic-written scrawl in which the passage was written. “Yes, now I remember.” She glanced over at the shelf in question. Since the discovery of the book, she’d taken a closer look inside the cubbyhole, but it had no more to yield. Actually, now that she thought about it, she hadn’t shelved this book, she’d left it on the table. So why was…? “Spike, this doesn’t belong on the journalism shelf.”

Her assistant blinked back at her. “Duh, even I know that.”

Fluttershy had caught the thread too. “I think she wants to know why you were holding it…?”

“Uh…”

“Well,” Twilight coughed, “While Spike remembers why he picked it up, let’s have another go, shall we?” She levitated the book back to the table where she’d left it. “Let’s try fiction, W through to Z.”

Halfway through the attempt, she took a step back, and reviewed the contents of the shelf. Call of the Beat, Wave, Sound. Thunder Dragon, Wind, Rose. (Equestria Without Magic series, Withers, R.F. - all out on loan.) Mirror pool book. Daring Do ser- “STOP.” She lifted out the offending book. “Spike, why did you put this on here?”

“I did?” he looked back towards the table, then did a double take. “I never went anywhere near it!”

Twilight walked the book to the table, set it down, then walked back. “Well, I don’t think Fluttershy did, and I think I’d notice if I picked it up and brought it over. If you didn’t, then-” she blinked, and the book was back in Spike’s claws. She shot a look over to the table - nothing. “How did you do that?”

“Do what?” Spike looked down, and yelped in shock, dropping the book with a solid thud. “Twilight…!”

Okay. This could be a problem. “Spike, don’t move.” Twilight did have an idea, and she really hoped that was what it was. If what she suspected was indeed the case, then it was fairly benign and otherwise accidental. If it wasn’t, she was going to leave nothing to chance. “Fluttershy, could you walk over there and fetch the book titled Security Charms and You, please?” She didn’t want to risk using magic right now, it might disrupt whatever spell was in effect. “I think it’s just a Return charm, but I’ll need to double check.”

“Wh-what’s a Return charm?” Spike stammered, eyes flicking between Twilight, Fluttershy, and the book laying upside-down on the floor.

“It’s a charm designed for forgetful ponies,” Twilight explained, slowly making her own way towards dragon and book. She’d done an entire essay on them. “A pony can never lose a charmed item, because it will always return to them.” Fluttershy quickly located the book and pulled it out of the shelf. “If it’s just a malfunctioning Return charm, I can dispell it easily.”

“But this never happened when I first found the book!”

“Spike, relax.” Fluttershy passed the book to Twilight, and the unicorn flipped the book open to the correct page. “Old charms have been recorded as latching on to other ponies when they can’t find the original enchanter. Rainbow Dash must have reactivated it when she crashed into the bookcase, and you were just the first one to pick it up.” Bending down, she touched her horn to the offending book, hoping it was simple. Please, don’t let it be anything more than…

Return, revision four. Her eyes flicked across the relevant information in the book. Version dated from the 600s, around the time such enchantments were becoming popular… no additional binding sigil, so definitely a unicorn owner… Huh, that was weird. The charm had already been forcibly deactivated once, the identifier had been completely ripped out. Had the book been stolen? It certainly didn’t look pretty, she noted, as she gently unweaved the tattered remains of the matrix. No wonder it hadn’t responded well to being smashed into, the charm would’ve reactivated instantly. Who could possibly have done this? Whoever it was must’ve been in quite a hurry… There! Without the key threads holding it together, the charm dissolved. “That should do it.”

Almost immediately, Spike took a few steps backwards. “Are you sure…?”

One last double check, just to be sure… no additional enchantments detected. “It’s just a normal book now,” she said, lifting it up and examining it. “Thanks again, Fluttershy.”

“Oh, no problem at all, Twilight.” Twilight didn’t like imposing magical incidents like these on her friends, knowing that most explanations she gave wouldn’t interest them at all. A lot of the time, she was perfectly aware that she was saying everything for her own benefit and no more. That was another holdover from her time in Canterlot, where in most of her study situations she’d only had the sound of her own voice echoing around the library to keep her company while she read, plus it was proven that repeating things out loud helped the learning process. That, and sometimes new things arose just from hearing the words spoken rather than just reading them.

Phew! Situation solved. With any luck, that was the root cause and everything would go back on the shelves nice and neatly now. That was the way a lot of these things worked; resolve even the tiniest thing and the fixes cascade back up to the top. But now the book had her attention. What was it, exactly? Something about the charm’s weave had been familiar, like she’d seen it before. No title, no marked author, notes about various magical legends, artefacts, and spells inside… it seemed more like a notebook than a reading book. Or a workbook. There were many of those in the Canterlot library, and it had a similar constitution. But who…?

She needed a clear mind to look at this. Right now, there was only one way to guarantee that. The kettle should have boiled by now… “Fluttershy, would you like a cup of tea?”

Sometimes, it was honestly a mystery to Twilight why tea wasn’t used all across Equestria as a calming agent. Even the smell of it from the cup next to her on the desk was already working its own magic, cleaning up her thoughts and helping her organize them. It was also completely baffling how Rainbow Dash could actually dislike it. Rarity and Fluttershy had, like Twilight, been brought up in families that drank tea (though maybe not quite as much), the Cakes had introduced Pinkie to tea when she’d started working for them, and Applejack had gotten a taste for it during her brief time living in Manehattan, but Rainbow stubbornly refused to have any. Now that she thought about it, Rainbow had reacted the same way to reading for leisure before being introduced to the Daring Do series - that was something to look into, but that had only happened because she’d been grounded in the hospital, and the hospital had a tea ban, sad but very necessary. Only water and chilled fruit juice to be found there.

With the tea by her side, and with additional cups for Fluttershy and Spike by their sides (they were currently exchanging animal- and dragon-type stories), she was able to look once again at the Unknown Book.

First off, the cover. As previously noted, a deep red, with a blank title plate on the front. Spine showing considerably more signs of wear than observable from a distance; it had been opened frequently. A Dating spell estimated its age at about 350 to 400 years old, which was consistent with the Return charm, and it did match her memory of other surviving books from that period. Whoever had come up with the preservation spell that was weaved into most book-related paper created from about the third century onwards was unquestionably, undeniably a genius, though the same couldn’t be said of the ponies who refused to use it. On the back, not much else.

Inside was an entirely different matter. Along with the legend of the mirror pool/pond, there were a number of descriptions on half-finished spells, some annotated legends - including the thousand-year legend of Nightmare Moon, which was odd, as there was only one other book that mentioned that specific number - some anatomy sketches, diagrams of ancient magical artefacts - Elements of Harmony (what?), Firespeaker’s Staff, Alicorn Amulet? She’d have to look at that in more detail later… Huh, some of the pages from the middle were missing. That added a level of credence to her theory that it had been stolen. Taking a sip of tea, she turned a page, and very nearly spat it out all over the desk and the book, instead settling for gargling and choking on the mouthful. This was…!

“My goodness!” Fluttershy exclaimed, setting her tea aside and quickly trotting over to thump Twilight’s back to clear her throat. “Are you okay, Twilight?”

A few more spluttering noises came out before Twilight was able to find her voice again. “Okay? This is amazing! This could be- no, this is the literary find of the century!”

“You said that just before you flooded the castle,” Spike pointed out.

“I-” What?! “Why does everypony keep saying that’s my fault?! No, this actually is! Spike, do you know what this is?” She shoved the book in his face. “Look at it!”

The dragon leaned out to look at her. “…It’s a pony with two heads, eight legs and four wings?”

Twilight’s face twisted in incomprehension. How could he not know this?! “Spike, this is a preliminary sketch for Stalleonardo da Colton’s Vit’hoovian Stallion! This must be his workbook!” She made a squeeing noise, and clutched the book close to her chest.

“Oh my,” said Fluttershy, putting a hoof to her mouth. “Wasn’t he a really famous artist?”

“He was the famous artist!” Twilight was slipping into Ecstatic Lecture Mode, but she didn’t care. “He was responsible for driving Equestria into a cultural golden age! Everypony knew his name! He was Princess Celestia’s first personal student!” Ooh, she felt lightheaded. Already, she could sense a growing bond with her predecessor. It had always been claimed that da Colton owned a workbook that never left his side, but it had always been unprovable as none of his surviving journals ever mentioned it. To think it’d been in this library - her library - this whole time! It made her giddy.

Trying not to hyperventilate, she placed the book back on the table and opened it up again. This was his writing. No wonder the weave of the Return charm had been familiar; in one of her lessons with Princess Celestia she’d been instructed to examine and write an essay on how his particular method of casting had prevented his paintings from deteriorating, and there was a little bit of flair that was unique to his spells. Even now, as she cast her eyes over the matrices within the book, she could see that flair emerging. It was incredible. She had in front of her a piece of real history that nopony had seen in years, maybe even centuries - Dating had estimated that the library tree itself was over a hundred years old, much older than Ponyville itself, and who knew when the book had been placed in the hidden compartment?

Wait, what was that? She didn’t recognize the bulk of this spell. Again, there was something familiar about the matrix, which meant she’d probably cast another spell with an element of it before, but much of it was new to her, and it had a one-word vocal component. Spells with vocal components were usually private, as even if you read it aloud, you’d have to know the precise inflections that it had been created with before you could cast it. The stallion must have really trusted in the security charm, then, because this spell’s inflections were all clearly marked. Anypony who could get their hooves on this book long enough to read it and understand the weave could cast it. Was this what the book had been stolen for?

Twilight had to find out.

It was a stupid, stupid idea. She knew that. The vocalization was in Old Equestrian. The matrix was patchy. Who knew what it could do? But she knew, from bitter experience, how to safeguard against a spell gone wrong. Besides, there was an element in the spell common to a spell she knew from somewhere, and all the dangerous spells she knew, she didn’t, because Princess Celestia had shielded her from actually casting them. Nothing could go wrong. Just in case, though, she advised Fluttershy and Spike to stand back, and lit up her horn. It wasn’t a complicated spell. She visualized the weave, double- and triple-checked it against the book, made the necessary adjustments to fix it, and steeled herself. One word.

“Prophetia.”

Clarity hit her like an anvil in the split-second before the spell completed itself. Prophetia, Old Equestrian for ‘prophecy’. Why hadn’t she said it out loud first?! Prediction magic was just as dangerous as time manipulation magic! That must have been the common connection, Star Swirl’s time traveling- She had to interrupt-

With a flash, there was no going back, the spell was cast, and she had barely enough time to process the images flashing in front of her before everything went black.

Author's Note:

So, a year happened. Funny, huh...? Okay, so here's the deal: The story is DONE. It is COMPLETE. So that means a new chapter a week, at least! No more procrastinating! It's been waiting far too long.

>Edited for missing italics.

Comments

[RTStephens]

As a long waited return, this chapter was pretty dull. It's basically a brief glimpse in the life of Twilight with a few oddities thrown in here and there. Gonna read the next part and see how I feel once I finish that.