Trinity

by Freescript the Bard

Crossing Auras

---

Cloudlight had no idea what he had done.

As soon as Cloudlight had shoved the stone orb from its perch, it fell to the ground with such force, it shattered the stone tile around it, creating a crater for it to rest in. For a long moment, nothing happened, and Cloudlight snickered to himself at his apparent mischief and rebelliousness. After a few seconds of this, Cloudlight realized that his action had no consequence. Anyone would have cared was long dead.

Well... he sighed to himself. This was rather pointless and unfulfilling.

With a shrug to shake the unfulfillment from his shoulders, Cloudlight floated himself down and trot for the door, wondering if there was a kitchen in this palace where he could find food. Another grumble from his vacant bowels reminded him yet again how hungry he was. Yeah, yeah. I hear you, he silently berated his stomach. Yet the rumbling noise continued, and even began to increase in volume. Cloudlight stopped and flicked his ears. The noise was still there, but his stomach had ceased growling. If that isn’t me, then what...?

The white pegasus turned around slowly. The stone orb he had pushed over was shaking and bouncing in its crater, vibrating rapidly and making a clamorous rumbling. As Cloudlight watched, the intensity of the shaking and the volume of the noise increased, threatening to throw the stone from the indent in the floor. Around the orb, shadows seemed to collect into an amorphous mass, but did not hinder the visibility of the orb itself.

Following his better judgement, Cloudlight began a hasty backward trot for the door. Whatever he had started in his innocent vandalism, he didn’t want to be around to see the result. When it seemed the shadowy stone was about to fling itself from the depression, he turned and made a full gallop for the door.

Cloudlight was just about to exit to apparent safety, when suddenly, everything stopped. Blinking in confusion, he turned around to see the stone had ceased all movement. Even the shadows had disappeared. It sat where it was, still in embedded in the floor. “Whew...” gasped Cloudlight with relief as he smiled. That could have ended much more worse.

crack...

Cloudlight flicked his ear at the small sound. His face fell. Uh oh.

CRACKA-BOOM!!!

With a concussive blast of sound, the stone orb shattered in its crater. While the shrapnel only carried a few meters from the site, the noise it made was equivalent to something that would have leveled the palace. Cloudlight ducked and covered his head with his large wings, even though there was no roof to collapse on him. His ears folded back, the sound of continuous thunder blasting away at his eardrums, rattling his spine.

Cautiously, Cloudlight peeked out from beneath his wings. Several feet above where the stone had exploded hovered a point of intense deep purple light that stained his pure white coat and feathers. Around the innermost corona of the light, Cloudlight could make out the same shadows that had enshrouded the orb.

The light very wrong to Cloudlight, and very bad. Almost malevolent in nature. What have I done? He lamented as he crawled backwards through the open door and out of the room. Blaze is going to kill me...

---

“I am going to kill him.” The temperature around Blaze seemed to escalate with his frustration

Rowan raised an eyebrow at the diminutive unicorn. “Seems a tad dramatic, don’t you think?” The earth pony made his way out of the alley, leading the pair back to the main road of the citadel. Above them, the raging thunder from Cloudlight’s mishap continued. ”Besides, it might not be as bad as it seems. You shouldn’t be so hard on him.”

”And if he gets us killed?” Blaze challenged.

The giant earth pony considered this. ”Then you can berate him in Elysium.”

”Fair enough.”

Making their way back to the main road, the two ponies kept silent as they made their way closer to the sound as quickly as possible without running. Cloudlight hadn’t spoken to them since his panicked cry earlier, which either meant he was too busy, too scared, or too… dead, to communicate. Rowan shook his head. No, I can definitely still feel his mind. He’s alive. He took a moment as he ran alongside Blaze to probe the mental link with Cloudlight. Alive. Very scared and panicked, but alive.

The two continued until they reached the courtyard. By the time they reached the center, they could see a very clear corona of sickly purple light glowing from the top of the palace. The noise was still very loud and there was no sign of stopping, but the condition seemed to be steady, not increasing or decreasing any more than it had began.

Blaze couldn’t make heads or tails of the light. It made him feel strange and alert, as if it was intentionally causing him to be anxious. There was magic in it, obviously, and a lot of it, but no spell structure the unicorn was familiar with. Of course, no one would just put a spell that conspicuous on just anything. What purpose did it serve, Blaze pondered, and why were the theatrics necessary?

”Blaze,” Rowan’s interjection drew the unicorn out of his private thoughts. ”Somepony just went into the palace.”

”What!?” Blaze eyed the entrance just in time to see one of the two great doors close. ”Are you sure it wasn’t Cloudlight?”

Rowan shook his head. ”I can sense Cloudlight’s mind three stories above the ground floor,” he replied. ”Her mind is different, and there’s no connection between us and her that we share with Cloudlight. I can’t even sense it anymore; she’s too far away.” A few seconds passed as Blaze just stared at the earth pony. ”You look confused.”

”You can sense Cloudlight and that other pony, tell where they are, and discern their gender with a passing glance?”

Rowan blinked. ”...you can’t?”

There were a few additional seconds of silence between the two of them, only broken by the constant thundering above. ”We should get going,” Blaze finally said. ”Let’s get Cloudlight out of there before he sends the whole place crashing down.”

---

Twilight trotted up the stairs carefully, her initial panic at the strange noise long settled. She still felt uneasy when she heard it; an unnatural thundering from above. Even this close to the source of the commotion, and even with her extensive knowledge of magic, the unicorn had no clue what kind of spell would have an aftereffect this violent. Whatever the spell was doing, the resulting reaction was generating a lot of excess energy in the form of sound and light.

More importantly, she wondered why it was still continuing. Normally, the excess energy of any spell would fade very quickly... often instantaneously. But for the past few minutes, it seemed to Twilight that the spell had peaked and remained constant, which was extremely unusual.

Her mind flicked back to Princess Celestia’s ominous warning of magical traps that had survived from the War of Sun and Moon. Perhaps one of the three ponies she had followed into the castle had set it off. Perhaps, her logical mind reasoned, the unusual behavior of the spell is a result of centuries of arcane exposure, introducing stray bits of random magic into the spell’s matrix and causing an abnormal effect.

The scholar allowed herself a small smile. Magic rust, she mused. I should bounce that theory off Princess Celestia. She would enjoy that. SHe stepped off the stairway onto a landing, continuing to move forward up the-

WHAM!
“OOF!”

“EEP!” Twilight jumped back in startled surprise as a large, pure white object slammed onto the landing, mere inches in front of her face. Instinctively, she leaped behind a pillar to conceal herself from the potential threat. The unicorn huffed and puffed, her heart racing as blood rushed to her head, carrying adrenalin to her synapses. Through one of nature’s earliest instincts, there were now only two things on Twilight’s mind: Fight or flight?

---

“OOF!” Cloudlight grunted as he hit the landing. In his haste in fleeing the strange lights and sounds of whatever he had set off, he had rushed a little too quickly down the stairs, and had little time to slow himself before slamming into the landing. Well that was less than graceful... he grumbled to himself.

Suddenly, his ears perked up, swiveling on his head. for a second, Cloudlight though he might have heard a small squeaking noise, then a soft scuffling sound on the stones. Probably just a rat... he shrugged, getting up and shaking his wings out, preparing to take flight again. Now to get out of here before something else happens to--

Before he could finish his thought, Cloudlight found himself scooped up off the ground by some unknown force and carried into the empty space in the middle of the spiralling stairwell, where the ground floor lay two stories below. “AAH!” he screamed, trying to move and escape, but Cloudlight found that his limbs, wings included, were restrained against his upside-down body. “What in the name of the Sun and Moon is happening!?”

“Maybe you could tell me that!”

Cloudlight blinked in confusion as he followed the voice to the landing where he had crashed. On it stood a lavender unicorn mare, glaring at him through purple eyes. The pegasus’s brain raced, trying to compute what his eyes were telling it.

“Guys?” he finally relayed across the link to Rowan and Blaze. “There’s a... mare.”

“...Come again?” Blaze asked, a little surprised.

Rowan however, simply let out a confirmatory vibe. “We saw her go into the castle when the noise started,” the earth pony reported. “What is she doing?”

Cloudlight glanced around, taking in the situation. “She’s got me restrained and hanging from my tail above a twenty-foot drop.”

There was a pause in the link. “My my, isn’t that going a little quick?” Rowan chuckled, much to Blaze’s unamusement.

“HEY!” Twilight shouted at the stallion above the ever-present thundering, trying to get his attention again. She wasn’t sure what to make of the odd white stallion. Even after she had threatened him and practically shouted in his face, he simply hung there, staring at her for a moment, then began looking around at his surroundings like a distracted colt in a lecture hall. “I asked you a question!”

When the stallion’s eyes snapped back to her, he gave a look that was more of confusion than shock. After a moment of further staring, he began to struggle against her binding spell again. “So... you’re going to try to scare a winged pony into submission by hanging them over a drop?” he asked curiously. “Not a very thought-out plan.”

Twilight simply glared. “That’s why I’m keeping you bound. It would be hard to fly without your wings.”

Cloudlight’s eyes widened. “Y-... you’re bluffing...”

“Try me,” the mare answered, briefly releasing the levitation spell. Cloudlight cried out in fright as he plummeted a few meters, only to be snagged up again by the unicorn’s magical field. “Now, who the hay are you and what’s that weird light up there?”

“You scream like a filly.” Cloudlight was too panicked at that moment to make out who had made this comment, but made a note to find out.

“I swear, it was not me!” the pegasus claimed, wriggling in his bonds. “I mean... I didn’t mean to do it, at least! I just couldn’t help myself! How was I supposed to know that orb-thing would break so easily!? I’m a victim of curious ignorance!”

The mare blinked at the stallion. “Orb-thing?”

“A big stone thing on top of another big stone thing!” Cloudlight tried to clarify with little success. “I don’t know what it is! Now let me go!”

Twilight gave another look at the stallion. In her body, the levels of adrenaline fueling her rampant interrogation were slowly dying away, letting sense creep back into her brain. There was really no point in tormenting this stallion aside from getting what information she needed in a timely manner without risking hostilities from him. In fact, it would have been faster if I hadn’t done this... she thought bashfully. Stupid, dumb Twilight... you overreacted again!

Manipulating the magic field around the stallion, Twilight brought the stallion over to the landing and released him from her grasp. Unfortunately for the pegasus, she had forgotten to turn him upright, causing him to crash to the ground head-first. “Ow...” he muttered, rolling over and rubbing his head. “I understand you are absolutely mad, but was that really necessary?”

“Oops,” said Twilight with an embarrassed laugh. “Sorry. I tend to be a little jumpy in tense--”

That was when Twilight got her first good look at his gigantic wings. Her jaw dropped at the sheer enormity of the feathered appendages as the stallion stretched, the wings unfolding to their full length. At first, she simply denied that a pony of any proportions could even come close to their size, much less the shorter-than-average pegasus before her. Then, as reality came back to her, Twilight’s mind began to become curious about the odd stallion.

“...Tense...?” the pegasus prompted.

“Situations,” Twilight finished, tearing her gaze away from the huge white wings. “I’m Twilight, by the way. Twilight Sparkle.”

“Cloudlight,” the stallion grumbled. A sudden spike in the thundering noise caused them both to look up and remember the presence of the terrible commotion. “Well, that’s my cue!” Cloudlight spread his wings and leaped toward the stairs leading down the spiral.

...only to have his tail snagged by Twilight’s magical grasp. “OOF!” he grunted as his face hit the ground for the third time in the span of a few minutes. This mare is trying to kill me!

“Not so fast, Cloudlight,” Twilight stated, giving him a smirk. “You caused this mess, so you’re going to come with me and figure out what it is and stop it.”

Yes, Cloudlight thought morosely. Definitely trying to kill me.

Comments

[Alicon Glactistar]

Nice chapter.