Sugar Hoof the Wizard Colt

by Furenstein

Life and Shadow

"You volunteered to watch over a baby pony, and you left him alone?!" Applejack yelled at her cousin, Braeburn.

"I didn't know he was some dangerous magical oddity!" Braeburn shouted back.

"He's a newborn with a firm grasp on writing, talking, walking, and even advanced magic, land's sakes Braeburn, it was obvious!" I drank from a box of apple juice while the two of them bickered.

We awaited the solar princess in Braeburn's tiny house. It was not big enough to hold all of us so we all had to stay uncomfortably close. Many eyes shot over to me in random intervals, except for one, Twilight Sparkle, as I had come to learn her name was, refused to take her eyes off of me.

My gaze met hers, "You can blink, you know." I told the mare.

"So you can teleport away? Not a chance." She said, refocusing her gaze.

I didn't tell her that I couldn't teleport, I knew a mark-and-recall spell, but that was about it. I think sorcerers can teleport at will, but the other six magic schools, zip. When you're a life wizard, you go into one of two professions, agriculture, or medicine. My youth was spent learning medicine, and I was good at it, so good in fact that I was made to do field work in hostile environments with a crack team of other wizards. Neither medicine or agriculture has any secrets for teleportation though.

Fluttershy, the yellow pegasus, watched me too. She held a different expression though, I couldn't quite tell what though.

"Could we skip this nonsense?" I asked to the room. "This princess of yours sent you to find me because of my magical surge over in the desert. Given her skill in solar magic, she's likely being cautious of an unknown magical oddity." I didn't mention how it would likely be very easy for her to best me in a fight.

"Um ... the Princesses just want to know if you're a danger to Equestria." Fluttershy replied.

"Have I done anything that makes me out as a danger to Equestria?" I asked Twilight.

She looked around, searching for an answer before she remembered the sugar incident.

"It's not even possible to add those spells onto food, that just happens naturally." She said, shaking a hoof.

"The ambient magic of the planet infuses itself into the food, much as it had my treants back home, all one must do is find out the spell, copy it, then add it to your object of choice."

The room was silent, before Rainbow Dash asked, "What's a treant?"

"A treant is a life minion, conjured from raw life magic and a tree. The middle child of the life minion family." This only made things worse.

"Explain this 'life magic'." Twilight said, levitating a scroll and quill to her dragon, Spike.

"You want a crash course on an entire school of magic?" I asked, wondering how I could even speak on such a subject, life magic as big as it is.

"A basics course, what was the last thing you learned?" Twilight asked.

"The last thing I learned about life magic... I haven't even been allowed in school since..." I remembered when it was, seventy years ago I was kicked out of college.

We were sent to a foreign country to find a rogue wizard who had gone mad after discovering something underground. She had found a secret bunker filled with lost knowledge of a long dead magic. Shadowmancy, a foul magic that was just as much in control of you as you were in control of it. She struck down my allies, and would've struck me down too if it wasn't for my skill in healing spells. I eventually beat her through sheer endurance, with her dead, and all my friends dead, I figured, what was the harm in just skimming over a few of those forbidden tomes.

A few turned into set, a set turned into three sets, three sets turned into a hundred, and pretty soon I had read every book and scroll in that dreaded place. I put what I learned to use, mixing life with shadow, into what I called, the resurrection spell. Necromancers could bring back the dead too, as skeletons, as zombies, ghosts, or wraiths, but they couldn't make a dead man alive again.

I heard gasps around me as I continued to remember that night.

My team had been returned to the living by my magic and for a while, my accomplishments were championed throughout the university, a cure for death. All was good until people began to talk about me, I looked different, my eyes more sunken in, my face darker, I looked weaker than the young man I used to be. A month later, my crime was discovered through the dean of the school doing a magical scan on me, and I was expelled and forbidden from returning.

The room had gotten darker and the fur on my body glowed a sickly dark green as my horn pulsed and throbbed with shadow magic, desperate for violence.

"I'm sorry, but I need to leave." I said, forcing my magic to expel into a combination of life and shadow, Braeburn's house didn't stand a chance. Wood and nails blew away in every direction and the apple trees in the surrounding orchard rose from their slumber and quickly subdued the ponies and dragon.

I had noticed something for the first time since these ponies arrived, the dragon wore a bag on his back, and from that bag radiated a magic signature that I had never seen.

Taking the bag from the dragon, he began shouting and thrashing about, desperate to get loose, "Hey, give those back!"

Emptying the bag's contents, I found five necklaces, a map, and a crown. Separate, the magic the necklaces and crown possessed was pitiful, but together as one, their magical signature rang stronger than even my own shadowmancy.

"I left home looking for one magical artifact, instead I found another, a matching set no less." I would need to examine these later. "Take the ponies and dragon into town, when their princess arrives, demand a ransom of one thousand emeralds for their safe return." That should keep her busy for a few minutes at least. Maybe she'll even get a kick out of it.

"Let us go!" I heard Applejack shout as she struggled to break free.

Rarity screamed as her fur was covered in dirt from the shadow treants.

I ran off north, using my shadow magic to move faster, my cool cowboy hat almost fell off of my head a few times while I ran, but I caught it everytime.

The fields of southern Equestria eventually gave way to dark forests as I was surrounded by a familiar magic in the forest, raw life magic.

Comments

[Blankz]

So this shadowmancy is a type of dark corruption magic? This feels either like the time when Stygian told his backstory, if the shadow was shadowmancy that would be interesting but my mind also points to Sombra, although it’s black/dark magic or something of the sorts, it could be possible that it’s connected in a way, it’s also likely one of those Magic’s where once you use it, it gets highly addictive or hard to control, thus a high chance of corrupting the person with each use, if you didn’t learn to stop using it unless for dire situations, I’m guessing Sugar Hoof isn’t a villain, atleast not intentionally one, but his Shadowmancy is trying to corrupt him to cause mass genocide or something, so I’m interested about this shadowmancy because it seems to likely become important overtime in the stories, dunno why I was typings about this, just felt like it.

[FridayPie]

Hmm.. the magic schools he describes somewhat sounds like ADnD concept but there never was a Life school. That is a divine domain of Conjuration there (and Necromancy in his case).

[StarzGecko]

He got away but I wonder if he can control the Timberwolf’s?