A Beginner's Guide to Heroism

by LoyalLiar

III - The Only Certainty

Chapter III
The Only Certainty

When we reached Wintershimmer’s laboratory, we found yet another unexpected guest waiting for us. I found myself briefly admiring Wintershimmer’s cool, as he handled her presence with a far more even face than I did for the equivalent mare unexpectedly in my quarters.

Queen Jade loomed in the middle of my mentor’s relatively small sitting room, quietly waiting. I took note of her green crystalline hoof tapping on the carpet, betraying irritation despite her straight face. Her expression only darkened when Wintershimmer directed his candlecorns though the doors on the far wall leading into our ‘practice chamber’, and then began his arthritic walk over to the elaborate wooden rack where he usually rested his traveling coat and his signature staff.

Of course, if I hadn’t read Jade’s anger off her face, I also probably could have guessed she was irritated by the fact that she was wearing her full armor and carrying her sword, despite the apparent peace one would usually be afforded inside one’s own palace. I admit I didn’t see the point; a scarred, piercing-gazed alicorn queen doesn’t really need armor to look dangerous. It didn’t hurt that she was generally considered to be at least slightly insane.

The mare in question directed her attention to Wintershimmer. “Have you made any progress?”

“I’ve only just arrived in my laboratory, and haven’t even changed my coat. I’m certain you have at least one working eye to observe these facts, Your Majesty. Please do take care to exercise the brain that organ is ostensibly attached to.”

Only Wintershimmer would dare talk to a sitting monarch that way. Some ponies might call it bravery, and some might call it foolishness, but I tended to think it wasn’t either. For Wintershimmer, it was about reputation. He had made himself indispensable to Jade in no small part because he was the only other mage of Star Swirl the Bearded’s caliber in the world, and thus the only suitable archmage for Equestria’s foremost political rival. Also, it didn’t hurt that he’d convinced the Queen that his magic was the only way to revive her husband from his coma of fifteen years.

Jade shook her head, clearly hearing me. “I don’t care what it takes; I just want Smart Cookie healed.”

As I mentioned, the ‘Smart Cookie’ in question was exactly the same one famously misattributed with a leading role in driving away the windigos that haunted what would become Equestria. After the nation was founded, eighteen-ish years before my confrontation with Jade in Wintershimmer’s quarters, Smart Cookie was chosen as their diplomatic envoy to the Crystal Union.

He was also pretty much the only choice: the unicorns of the Diamond Kingdoms had been at war with the crystal ponies for decades, so that ruled out Princess Platinum or Clover. And Commander Hurricane killed Queen Jade’s father, which as you can imagine, makes for phenomenal friendships. That left the earth ponies, and of the two who mattered, Puddinghead was about as politically appropriate as a whoopie cushion on the witness stand at a murder trial. Even had Puddinghead not been a universal punchline, Cookie was the natural choice since he had already established ‘personal relations’ with Jade.

‘Personal relations’ led to marriage, and then as it so often does for significant political figures, marriage led to heart-rending tragedy. In this particular case, seventeen years before the day we’ve been talking about, Smart Cookie, Jade, and Wintershimmer had all traveled to Everfree City to meet with the Equestrians. At the time I knew nothing of what exactly transpired on that fateful day in Equestria, but I had seen the consequences firsthoof. Jade lost a wing, and Cookie fell into a twenty-five-foot-deep pit and a coma. One was far easier to extract him from than the other.

In contrast, Wintershimmer escaped unharmed, killing at least a few of the rebels himself. Anything you can infer from that statement about the distribution of power in the Crystal Union is almost certainly correct.

Since decades-old politics is only slightly more fun than putting rocks into the frog of your hoof and going for a cross-Equestrian sprint, I promise there isn’t going to be a quiz. All you really need to understand is Smart Cookie was in a coma, and Queen Jade wanted Wintershimmer to fix it.

“Are you certain your research is the fastest way to help him?” When I write that question, it probably sounds like a really caring, desperate question. It wasn’t. If anything, it was a threat.

Wintershimmer groaned, focusing on the queen with unsettling yellow eyes. “It seems today will continue to be defined by a need to repeat myself. What Coil and I are doing here is not trivial.” He looked up at her, and spoke to her with a bluntness that would probably have gotten anypony else in the world decapitated (in case it wasn’t clear that I’m serious about her being crazy). “Under normal circumstances, arcana—or what the unwashed masses call unicorn magic—does not heal wounds. That magic belongs to the earth ponies, and their so-called endura. What I am working towards is not some simple charm or petty parlor trick like Star Swirl and his imbecilic apprentices play at in Everfree City. This magic will change the course of history. However, if I am forced to rush it because of political obligations or inconvenient pressures, it will kill me, and with my death, all hope of returning your beloved to you will be gone. Do you understand?”

Jade glared. “I do not appreciate—”

“Come back in an hour’s time. Whether this first attempt succeeds or fails, I will have far more to tell you.” Wintershimmer’s magic opened the doors out of his quarters, and he gestured pointedly with his billowing horn. “Thank you for your visit, Your Majesty,” he added, as she stormed out of the room.

I waited for the doors to close before I spoke up. “You have such a way with mares, Wintershimmer.”

Wintershimmer replied by looking at me flatly. “Coil, I am ninety-seven years old. Are you certain that is a line of logic you wish to begin pursuing with me?”

“Tell me more about the Summer Lands spell,” I said, perhaps a little too quickly.

“Threshold of Summer,” Wintershimmer noted.

I frowned. “Isn’t it bad luck to name a spell before you’ve actually cast it?”

“Luck is a word the weak use to describe their lack of control over their own lives. It does not apply to wizards.” Wintershimmer frowned. “Now, listen closely.”

I’ll spare you the density of our discussion of magical theory, and summarize in a couple of simple points—the actual spell is in my grimoire if you’re interested in that, though as you’ll shortly learn, I can’t exactly recommend using it. The premise is somewhat simple. The Summer Lands do not exist in physical space. In contrast, ponies do take up physical space. Thus, you need to map some real piece of land to a given portion of the Summer Lands if you want to be able to travel there with your physical body. This is exactly the same idea as making a bag bigger on the inside than the outside, or as some ponies like to do, make a broom closet-sized room into a palace.

Once you’ve got a piece of space folded up enough to serve your purposes, you need to actually map it to ‘space’ in the Summer Lands. That’s the hard part; it’s necromancy, and not of the Foal’s First Seance variety. You’re reaching into the land of the dead, effectively blind, and grabbing the end of an infinite space, then dragging that end back into the real world and attaching it to an existing spell.

Complicating that is Haversack’s Law of Nested Auras: ‘the magical flux of a closed aura must be zero, or the spell will enter an entropic, self-consuming state’. In laymare’s terms, if the horn casting a spell is completely enclosed by a spell, that spell isn’t going to last long. That’s why it’s really hard for a unicorn to ‘fly’ with telekinesis, and it’s also one of the reasons Threshold of Summer requires two skilled necromancers to cast. One holds the spell open from the outside, and the other is able to enter.

As we were having the conversation I just summarized, we stepped through a subtle archway and into a chamber adjacent to Wintershimmer’s library, consisting of a floor of heavy gray flagstones that stood out against the usual sapphire flooring present in the Spire or the wooden boards of the preceding room. It was utterly empty, though the scorch marks and cracks in the boring stone told more than a few stories about the room. As we continued our discussion of the magic involved, I retrieved a protractor, some powdered diamonds, and a bit of dragon bone marrow that had remained relatively undisturbed by my earlier encounters with Union City’s finest from my bags, and set about drawing the angle-perfect diagrams necessary for the spell. The candlecorns, who had entered the ‘pratice room’ ahead of us, watched me work. I was grateful they didn’t try to help. Their expressionless attention was unsettling enough at a distance.

What many ponies do not appreciate about the process of magical research is that ninety-nine and a half times out of a hundred, it is mind-numbingly dull. There’s a lot more measuring angles and drawing perfect circles and measuring out exact amounts of alchemical components than there are legendary duels and daring adventures and heroics.

At least, if you’re not me.

Once we had the rather foul-smelling and dusty circle set up, there was only one more step. I whistled once sharply, and was rewarded with a sort of droll humming coming from the library. Then something glass cracked. Three heavy things fell from a substantial height. Or maybe it was four. I remember there being a long pause before the last one. I know I winced at the noises as Wintershimmer glared at me. I think I smiled back at him. Not like a ‘real’ smile, but the sort of awkward guilty expression a little foal gets when they’ve been caught with their magic around the cookie jar. I’m sure you get the point.

Then the doors flew open. What entered, however, was not a pony; in its shortest description, it was a flying rock surrounded by a pair of golden halos.

“Master, you called!” Its voice was tinny and inequine, but there’s only so much you can do when you’re synthesizing speech using a vibrating rock and two discs. “It’s been years since—”

“Angel, shut up.”

The rock in question was a golem, which I had named Guardian Angel. In a sense, it was my pride and joy: a truly sentient golem. Wintershimmer and I had toiled on it for months when I was younger, trying to replicate the work of the ancient necromancer Ouija the Whisperer, who first managed the feat of creating an artificial soul capable of learning, growth, and change. What we discovered was that there was a reason nopony had bothered repeating Ouija’s research before us.

Angel was capable of learning, but it wasn’t terribly good at it. Whether it was just stupid by lack of experience or I had made an error in its creation, I could only guess. My best hypothesis was that it had an extremely finite memory, as we discovered when my attempts to teach it how to serve tea caused it to forget how to fly.

As you might have gathered, it was literally as dumb as a rock. I frequently told it so, and perhaps unsurprisingly, it took no offense.

“Master, I observe that I have been shut up for some seventeen seconds now. Perhaps there is some purpose to your summons that I can perform simultaneous to my state of up-shuttedness. Thus, the efficiency of my service will increase.”

I sometimes still regret giving it my full vocabulary during its creation.

I took a deep breath and rubbed my temple. “Angel, I just want your stored magic. Then you can go.” That was Angel’s real purpose, once we figured out that it’s intelligence made it about as useful a servant as an unenchanted rock. I’d set it up with a few decently sized diamonds inside the rings of gold that let it fly, and whenever I had a day that ended with mana left over, I’d store it in those gems. They helped me get at least a little way around my casting problem; I could store an extra spell or two’s worth of magic in Angel, and then pull it out when I really needed not to pass out. The mana refill didn’t do much to make my legs feel any less woozy, or make my headache any better, but that was the cost of magical education.

“Of course, sir.” The stone at the center of angel hovered at about my eye level, and the two golden rings flanking it rotated, creating what you might imagine to be the shape of a gigantic bowtie. Wisps of blue arcana flew from my creation directly to my horn. The feeling was electric and exhilarating, like the tingle on your coat standing on a mountaintop in a thunderstorm—an experience I highly recommend. Contrary to popular belief, a bolt of lightning isn’t very likely to kill you at all. It’s much safer than many things an aspiring archmage will do in their career, such as wandering bodily into the Summer Lands.

“Thank you, Angel,” I told my pet rock. “Rest for today, and find me tomorrow to see if I have mana to spare to start refilling you. And bring the grimoire; you need work on your right halo.” Without further word, Guardian Angel resumed its normal configuration of halos and rock, and floated out of the magical testing room.

Only then did Wintershimmer speak up again. “Ready to begin?”

“Let’s change the world.”

No, I didn’t really say that, but for want of a perfect memory of my exact words, I figure it must have been close enough—the part of the young hero does involve a certain ‘seat-of-the-coat’ dialogue, and the cost of not always having a plan is sometimes coming up cheesy (or more often, narcissistic).

The beginning of the spell was slow. We started a magical current through the chalky diamond dust and bone marrow on the floor, and walked slowly around the circle opposite one another. At times, one of us would stop to put a precisely timed surge of magic into some part of the glyph. In the course of an hour, we’d built up a fourteenfold collapse in a Tourmaline Valley—basic magic for anypony who would even call themselves apprentice mages, albeit a lot faster than most such ponies could manage. Even with my problem, the little surges were simple enough not to leave me flaring up, since the amount of magic necessary was so trivial. Once the air between us in the glyph started rippling, like the hot air in a desert, we stopped. Walking around the circle was a distance of about three strides, but it would have taken me the better part of an hour to reach Wintershimmer if I sprinted straight through it.

The setup was ready.

Wintershimmer turned his head, shouting around the glyph to avoid his voice being lost in the huge distance directly between us. “Coil, begin Veil’s Procedure whenever you’re ready.”

I deliberately let my horn flare up; I wasn’t actually using the mana for anything just yet, but I knew the surge of darkness around the edges of my vision might spoil the spell. I stumbled when it swept over me; only in that moment did I realize how close I’d come to passing out dealing with Iconoclast and his lackeys.

Still, I had a job to do.

I turned my icy blue magic on the arcane circle, and focused on my favorite spell: the classic seance. Within the bounds of the innermost circle drawn on the floor, a star began to trace itself in a glow of pure blue magic. One point, then two, three, and on and on to seven. In the end, it matched my cutie mark. Then it shimmered, and burst. A void of darkness filled with blue stars filled the circle.

Darkness was lingering on the edges of my vision, like swimming too long without getting a fresh breath. I squinted to push it away and redoubled my attention. I was better than some feeling of fatigue, I told myself.

I was an idiot.

With the surge of my magic, the white circles rose up off the ground. One by one they stopped, creating an ethereal telescope of powdered diamond and bone marrow held in place only by the strength of the magical circuit we’d already set up. A perfect void within a perfect circle stopped at our eye level.

My hooves started to feel numb.

The circle shifted in place, rotating. It took only a moment, but it felt like forever, twisting until it hovered between us like a mirror, perpendicular to the floor.

“Ready, Wintershimmer? I’m not sure this is going to last long.”

“I’ll only need a minute,” the old stallion told me.

I lowered my head, pointing my horn directly at the hole we’d carved in space. What I got back was a burst of blinding light that I could still see burnt into my eyes even after I closed them and turned my head away. It felt like I’d summoned the sun into the middle of the room, but I couldn’t look. All I heard was the whoosh of a vacuum breaking. A warm, summer breeze swept through my mane in open spite of my being inside a closed room located in a city far into the frozen north of the world around the end of winter.

“It’s perfect!” Wintershimmer shouted. That was the last I heard of him, before he took a step towards me and we were suddenly the better part of a mile away from one another. The only sounds left were the mild breeze in my coat, and the ambient hum of magic.

The light finally faded from my eyelids, and I peeled them open to find the darkness I’d noticed earlier was closing in rather uncomfortably quickly.

“Wintershimmer! You might want to hurry up!”

It was a stupid thing to shout, but it was the best I could come up with. When I didn’t get a response, I walked slowly around the portal hanging in the air, looking at what was visible on Wintershimmer’s side.

The Summer Lands were… disappointing, if I’m being brutally honest. Just a sky with huge puffy clouds. Inside, Wintershimmer was walking on the surface of the clouds like a pegasus. His coat rippled in a wind far stronger than the breeze I barely felt. Around him, slightly transparent ponies had gathered, gawking at his presence and reaching out as if testing if he were really there.

“Wintershimmer, I’m not sure I can hold this!” I shouted at him.

He turned back to me, and for what I would later learn was only the second time in his entire life, he genuinely smiled. “I won’t be long, Coil. Just a few seconds.”

My horn sparked, and I know he heard it. My magic sounded like a crack of thunder. The smile on his face froze.

The Summer Lands disappeared. Folded space burst. Light and wind were gone, leaving Wintershimmer standing in the middle of what was left of our ritual circles.

Then he collapsed in the middle of a pile of inert diamond dust, coating his fallen body like snowflakes.

I fell to my knees, clutching the base of my horn; there was a long crack running down the side of it that throbbed and ached with every beat of my heart. Darkness swept over my vision for a few seconds, and without any sense of the world around me, I shouted, “Wintershimmer!”

When the world came back to me, I felt myself breathe in a wheeze. The pain in my horn had only grown stronger, and my hooves were shaking too much to stand.

I hardly noticed any of it. Wintershimmer hadn’t moved; he still lay on his side in the remnants of our short-lived spell, his back toward me.

With all the strength I could muster, I pulled myself toward him. My muscles were screaming at me, but I had to check on him. When I reached his side, I saw him breathing, and I joined him in a sigh of relief.

“Wintershimmer…” His name ended as more of a groan of pain in my abdomen—a sort of ‘Wintershimmuuugh,’ or something similar. I was slightly worried when he didn’t answer, but figured he’d been knocked out by the magical surge.

That was fine. We had smelling salts in the same field bag I’d used to fetch the diamond dust, and the other experimental materials Wintershimmer had requested of me, even if the spell hadn’t lasted long enough for them to be of use. I spared myself a minute or two to catch my breath, and then limped my way up and across the room to where my bag sat. I grabbed the tin of salts, dragged myself back to Wintershimmer, and dropped them in front of his nose.

As expected, his face wrinkled up in disgust, and his eyes flittered. I think I gagged too; wyvern guano is foul stuff. But despite the expression I smiled. “Rise and shine, old timer. Sorry if that hurt a little.”

He didn’t answer me, which would have been fine, but he also didn’t even bother to glare at me. He just stared forward, vacantly, watching the wall.

My heart skipped a beat. I’d seen ponies like this before, and every single time it was a deliberate act on Wintershimmer’s part. Testing my theory was as simple as putting my hoof in front of his mouth.

Wintershimmer the Complacent may not have been the equal of Star Swirl as a magical teacher or theorist, but he was, without question, the greatest magical duelist of his lifetime. This ability centered around a single terrible spell; the same one with which he had threatened Emerald earlier that morning. I never knew if he gave it a name; only its purpose. The spell acted precisely as a simple seance cantrip, conjuring a soul from beyond the pale, save with one change. Wintershimmer did not reach into the next life.

He reached into his enemy’s body.

What he left behind when he finished was a husk. A hollow corpse that breathed, and ate and drank on simple instinct, but without the remotest shred of motivation or comprehension. The hoof was how he’d taught me to recognize a body stripped of its soul.

That day, on the cold flagstones of the magical practice chamber, Wintershimmer’s withered lips parted, and without focusing his eyes, he tried to bite my hoof. In that moment, I knew exactly what I’d done.

In a small stone room deep within the Crystal Spire, I killed Wintershimmer the Complacent, Archmage of the Crystal Union.

Only moments later, the candles of his four candlecorns ignited with raw power, ready to avenge their fallen master. The first blast of magic stole my consciousness outright.

Comments

[djthomp]

Glad to see this up, I've been looking forward to it for months.

[Dusk Watch]

Ah, the life of Morty. Now we begin to understand why he's such an complex character.

A note from the Editor:
I hope you enjoy this one, dear readers. There's been a lot of work here from several members of the talent behind the rest of the Price of Loyalty stories. Hats off to Loyal for his effort in crafting a large chunk of this story before publishing what you can already see. We are well on track for the planned update schedule and I hope you'll join us in a wonderfully in depth look at one of the more... interesting characters in this universe.

[Zevski]

Morty is an asshole, but an asshole that's fun to read about!

[Pega-ace]

Great work as always, LL. I know this will be a great story. (Because I've read a fair chunk of it. ) (But even if I hadn't I'd still be assured of its quality.)

To all the other readers, new or old, I hope you enjoy this fantastic tale! And another round of applause for LL!

[RexDraconum]

and his signature stave.

It's staff, staves is the plural.

[Pascoite]

7212860 "Stave" is also an acceptable synonym for "staff" (here's the definition), but it's an unusual enough usage that it easily leads to misunderstanding or the feeling it's wrong, like you've had, so I do think using it isn't the best idea.

[PonyList]

Jade lost a wing, and Cookie fell into a twenty-five-foot-deep pit and a coma. One was far easier to extract him from than the other.

What a line god damn