Black

"Twilight, I sure do wish y'all would get whatever is botherin' you off your chest, 'cause you standin' around and bein' pensive as all hell ain't gettin' these apples down."

Scolded hard enough to visibly wince, she turned to Applejack with a sheepish smile. "Sorry, I'm just thinking about something."

"No kiddin'? I'm listenin'." She hefted a bushel of apples up and into the old red truck's bed. "And don't ya dare clam up, either. Ain't seen ya like this in a while." She leaned against the side of the vehicle and doffed her hat, looking up at the cloudy morning sky.

With a sigh, Twilight screwed up her courage – but not before looking down at the jewels in her palms. "I said something yesterday that's really bothering me. Did anyone tell you what happened with Fuyu?"

"'Bout the Mayor? Yeah. Heard it from Pinkie." The blonde folded her arms and glowered. "Damn that woman. Stickin' her nose in where it don't belong."

"I guess. When I was covering for her, I insinuated that Fuyu's crystals were edged because she was a Princess." While collecting her thoughts, she glanced down at her own again, paying special attention to the gold trim. "Maybe...maybe I wasn't wrong."

Applejack straightened up, eyes bulging. "Say what?"

Twilight walked over and stood on the blonde's left. Based on her body language, a ramble was coming on. "Remember when Shining got married and I became a Princess? Remember after the ceremony when Celestia took me aside?" She turned her palm and showed Applejack her purple crystal. "That's when she gave me the trim. 'The distinguishing mark of a Princess of the Realm', she told me. I've been trying to figure out why the amulet gave them to Fuyu, but I have no answers."

"Well, does Fuyu have any idea? Couldn't hurt ta ask." Applejack blinked at the firmness of Twilight's head shaking. "Why not?"

"I said I didn't have answers, but I have theories. When I left Ponyville after Trixie attacked, I went looking for the national magical artifact registry – which, by the way, is technically classified, so I didn't tell you any of this." Movement off to the right caught their attention and forced the librarian to pause. It turned out to be a flock of birds. "I wanted to find the amulet."

The blonde nodding, shifting her weight to get a little more comfortable. "I've heard this part. Then y'all talked ta Celestia and she acted all weird, right?"

"Yes!" Twilight threw her hands up in frustration. "I was just happy that everything was all right when I got back, and I didn't want to make a scene at the party for Fuyu's sake, but the Princess was acting so weird. That's where my theories come in. I think she had something to do with that amulet. Maybe it was in the registry and got out of her custody somehow?"

"Could be. So what if she lost it? I lose crap all the time." Applejack chuckled lowly, only to shrink back and fall silent under a withering glare.

Twilight's tone was just as grave. "Fuyu said it was her amulet. That's the problem. Why would Celestia have it if it originally belonged to Fuyu?"

"Uh...well..." Applejack stared off into space while searching for an answer. None would come. "Whoa. I don't get it either. Hey, what if they got into a fight and Fu got banished or something? Does that make any sense?"

"I would have heard about a fight between Princesses." Collecting herself with a deep breath, Twilight leaned against the truck again. "And on top of this, Fuyu says she remembers being in the Castle, or at least the gardens. Damn it! They're connected and I can't figure out how!"

The blonde had figured something out by this point, something that made her eyes bulge with surprise. "Uh oh."

"What?"

She snapped her fingers. "The party! Fu and the Princess talked for dang near a whole hour! I bet she knows what's up and she can't tell ya."

"Of course!" Twilight visibly perked up and deflated again just as quickly. "She's in the Order now. Conversations between its members and the Princesses are considered official business. Even if I wanted to ask her what they talked about, I can't. I'd end up in jail."

Applejack patted her on the shoulder. "This is messed up."

"Oh, it gets worse. Why did she know who I was? What is that black goo? How can she sense other people's magic? Ugh!" Twilight hid her eyes and continued to groan. "And what really gets me is that I can't make myself tell Fuyu any of this. She's dealing with enough as it is. All my crazy ideas would completely freak her out." Her hand fell away abruptly. "Wait...no wonder she's seemed so stressed out the past couple of weeks. She's had to hide whatever the Princess told her."

"Hey, why don't ya tell her ya know...uh, something?" Applejack smiled nervously against the librarian's questioning look. "Just tell her you know that she knows, but nobody has ta tell anybody what they know. That way Fu can hide whatever it is without hidin' that she's hidin' it, and you can admit that ya have questions without really askin' 'em!"

"Wh-what?" Twilight brightened up when she got it, but the process took a few seconds. "Applejack, you're a genius! Why didn't I think of that?"

"No offense, Twi, but sometimes ya can't see the forest for the trees." They both laughed briefly. "Seriously, I think y'all could do with gettin' at least a little off your chests."

"Maybe so. Fuyu's still developing emotionally. She doesn't need to be dealing with my stress on top of that, so I'd have to be careful. I wonder if she's awake." Twilight drew her phone and was just about to dial, but couldn't make her fingers tap the screen. "Nah. It can wait. She hasn't gotten much time by herself lately, I don't want to bother her."

"Hey," Applejack hesitated long enough for her to look over, "What if you're right? What if they did know her before?"

Twilight slumped again and sighed. "There's not much I can do. I can try asking the Princess, but I already know I'll get nowhere."

"What about Luna? Y'all text each other a bunch, right?" Applejack asked, rubbing her chin in thought.

Instantly she smiled and straightened up. "You know what? That isn't a bad idea."

At that moment, Fuyu was in the rear entryway of the library tree with Spike, who was sliding on his shoes. "Just tell Twilight I'll be a while. I have no idea what Rarity wants me to do at the boutique."

She nodded. "Very well. I'll tell her if she calls."

"Cool. If anyone tries to return a book, they'll use the slot out back. I posted a notice on the front door." He jerked with surprise as a car horn honked outside. "That's her. See you later!"

"Goodbye." Fuyu watched him zip out the door and, with her magic, closed it behind him. "Finally," she sighed, her face darkening. Taking to the air, she floated with haste back up to the loft. Once there, she used her magic to lift her air mattress and retrieve the manila packet. It was unopened; she hadn't bothered trying to look at it until she could guarantee being alone, although she somehow knew her flying off at random would attract unwanted attention. Biding time proved easy. She'd been doing something like it for five years.

Inside the envelope was a neatly-stacked packet of documents which she slid out and held. The first was a cover sheet, and the few words, placed dead center, were enough to set her mind afire with stunned curiosity.

Project Winter

Compressed Magic Storage Report

"What is this?" Flipping the page revealed another with a single paragraph up top, hand-written in flowing cursive that she struggled a bit to read.

Your Highness,

As per your instructions, a preliminary study of the required amount of subjects to achieve saturation of the crystalline container unit has yielded a number of approximately 4,400. Our cross-department interactions with the Ministry of Interior has lead us to believe that they can supply the needed bodies from the prison system, with the caveat that so many executions at once may seem...conspicuous. The Ministry of Interior may need to be further employed to upgrade the sentences of more violent general population prisoners. The science has been done in this regard; we only need the corpses now.

"What?" She looked down past that paragraph at a regally-scribbled sentence, the only other text on this sheet. "'Do what needs to be done.'" Despite the lack of any other context, Fuyu still knew who had written it. "You! Is this what you promised me?"

Flipping this page lead to another with printed words and a diagram at the bottom. The diagram was the amulet – not the entire thing, but the central jewel and its immediate frame – and a few notes in the margins. The text wove a tale of how the crystal had been designed to act like the human skeletal structure, which to Fuyu's surprise was where the great majority of magic was concentrated. The jewel could hold a far denser amount of magic than bone, however. As she read, subsequent paragraphs detailed the process of converting people into fuel. "'Living subjects must be crushed under extremely high pressures. Deceased subjects leak too much magic in the first twelve hours to be viable.'" What she read next almost caused her to drop the packet. "'Sufficient crushing pressure yields highly-dense magical superfluid of a black color. For purposes of simplicity, we'll call this the 'black goo'. Testing on the goo reveals that its molecules react to electrical stimuli as well as exposure to external magic. It becomes rigid or flexible under the former, and soaks up the latter like a sponge.'"

She did toss the papers down after reading that sentence, snapping a rope of ebony out of her right palm to glare at it. "You're made of people," she hissed. "Is that why you yelled at me for food? Because you needed more of them to survive?" After dismissing it with equal ire, she snatched the documents up again and started to flip through them. Some of them comprised an extensive listing of people that had been killed – ten pages in all, with over two hundred names per page – while others confirmed her earlier suspicions. "'The goo is inert unless subjected to a constant electric current.' I already know that. 'Our experiments with the jewel bearers (who were less than cooperative) show the substance will readily suck magic from living creatures.' I already know that, too." The remainder of the stack was further information about the crystal in the amulet – how it reacted with the goo, amongst other things, and both turned out to be quite similar to each other, and an emergency source of fuel in case the amulet were lost – living humans. What Fuyu hadn't found yet was a mention of herself, something that annoyed her to the point where she began to skim through to find one. Page after page of chilly scientific notes and vaguely bureaucratic nonsense yielded nothing until the very last sheet she looked at.

Here was another scribbled note, in Celestia's handwriting. As she moved the page around, something in the top right corner caught her attention. After some trial and error, it finally showed up and became clear in direct light; a ghostly representation of the sun was embossed there, a shape roughly the same as her medal of the Order. "What is this?" Blinking, she looked at the note:

I am ordering Project Winter to be re-purposed. Twilight, I believe, will be fine. I need the being for something more important now.

"The...the being?" Dumbfounded, Fuyu let the packet slip from her hand as she sat roughly on her bed. "The being?" Magically she snatched the papers off the floor and stared at the cover sheet. "My name is-" Her eyes fell on the word, causing her to slump sadly. "Winter." Before she could get too much farther down her sad path, a question tugged at her brain. "Re-purposed? For what?" A search of the documents yielded nothing; as best she could figure out they had been arranged in chronological order. Her melancholy yielded to mild anger. "Am I ever going to get the whole story from you?" Gritting her teeth, she put them back into their envelope and stood up. Once they were again hidden, she paced. "What was I doing after you decided I didn't need to kill Twilight?"

For several minutes, she traced an unhappy path around the loft, grumbling lowly to herself in thought. Suddenly, another question popped up, one that froze her mid-stride. "Where did this come fr-" She knew that already. While her magical sensor detected Twilight as it always did when she was around, it had also picked up another source of power, one that had come almost directly underneath her last night as she stood on the balcony. Upon recalling the event, she realized she had tracked it all the way to the point where she'd seen Trixie under the lamppost and retreating. The spark had been one and the same. Every other tingling notice was either still, or too far away to be the one she'd felt moving around.

The pale woman's anger flared up again, though this time tinted with confusion. "How did she get this?!" Her first inkling was to call, but somehow she knew this would be dealt with best in a face-to-face conversation. She placed her phone in her pants pocket and hovered down the stairs, moving out the front door and staring down the street at the apartment building, whose top she could barely see. It took every ounce of restraint to not fly off at breakneck speed; her display yesterday had caused quite a stir, and she still wished to ingratiate herself to the populace. It had taken a backseat to what she'd just read, but still nagged at her enough to force her into a quick, low-altitude hover instead.

Never rising more than six inches off the ground, Fuyu shot down the street and crossed it to enter the building, shedding her decorum and launching herself up the stairs with frightening speed. Once on the second floor, she peered into the peepholes of each door until her eye detected Trixie through one, apparently napping on her couch. Instead of knocking, she twisted the doorknob. It was locked, so she used the black goo to defeat the lock and enter. The magician continued to snooze lightly as she walked up to the couch. "Trixie!" she bellowed.

"Gah!" She fell off in a heap, landing back up and gasping for air. "Fuyu! How did you get in here?"

The pale woman glowered down. "Do you think a door can stop me?"

Usually even and calm, Fuyu's voice was angry and cold and demanding. It turned Trixie's blood to ice. "Wh-what's this about?" she stammered, looking over her shoulder.

"You left the envelope on the balcony last night, didn't you? Is that why you went to Canterlot?"

Her heart froze almost as solid as the substance it was supposed to be pumping. Like a crab, she scooted away from the unhappy Fuyu until her back bumped against the wall under her window. "W-what a-are you talking about?" A writhing black rope shot out and wrapped around her mouth before she could scream at its appearance.

"You lied to me about your trip, do not lie to me again." Her every word was a double-bladed dagger of seething rage. She moved closer and knelt down before Trixie, who was too scared to tremble or even cry. "I felt you moving around. I know you did it. I want to hear you say it." The rope withdrew enough to clear the magician's mouth. "Choose your next words carefully."

Trixie had only enough composure for one. "Yes!" She closed her eyes and waited for the end to come, but all that happened was the complete retraction of the cold, black goo. Her eyes fluttered open and beheld a still displeased, but somewhat calmer Fuyu leering above.

"Get up." Fuyu watched Trixie obey with immediate haste, although her stance was tense and defensive. "I'm sorry. I..." Upon realizing she had just taken out her emotions on the poor woman, she sighed and looked away. "I read some awful things. I don't know what to think right now."

She began to laugh with excessive nervousness, desperate to defuse the situation. "I hope you know that old line about not shooting the messenger?"

Her words managed, somehow, to draw a smile. "I do, believe it or not." Fuyu sat down on the blue sofa and sighed again. "Where did you get it? Is it something you found?"

"I don't really know how to answer this without dying." Trixie was unwilling to approach, and decided to sit on the floor where she stood. "Caught between two angry women. I'm reminded of that one time I stayed a little too long in Trottingham and ended up dating."

"I'm not going to kill you." Fuyu folded her arms and settled back. "But I'm not leaving until you answer my questions."

"I was afraid you'd say that." More terrified of the possible death right in front of her than the possible death residing hundreds of miles away in Canterlot, Trixie cracked instantly. "I got them from Princess Luna. I don't know where she got them, I swear. Actually, I don't know a lot of anything, so that's a good reason to not impale me on a pike! Right?"

She glanced over with a darkly curious look. "Why did she give them to you?"

At last, the magician got up and came closer, wringing her hands with anxiety all the way. "I received a letter from her about a week ago." She pointed at the smartphone on the table. "That was enclosed. We've been in contact ever since. In exchange for keeping an eye on you and delivering things for her, I would get to stay out of jail."

Fuyu blinked. "What did Celestia say about that?"

"I asked the same thing. Apparently, her sister wasn't interested in putting me in jail either. I haven't any idea why." She sat down on the other end of her couch and sighed. "What was in those papers? I've never seen such anger from you. I mean, besides the time...you know."

"Not important. I want more." Her tone was terribly stern. "When will you see her again?"

"I don't know. She arranges the meetings." Trixie caught the pale woman staring at her phone. "I'm not going to call her now, if that's what you're thinking."

"There's too much for me to digest as it is." Fuyu stood up and turned her back. "Did Luna tell you anything about me that you didn't already know?"

"Not really, and believe me, I asked several times. I thought you were related to the Princesses, but she said no, and she also said your given name was Winter. I'm not sure how she knew that, but I didn't press." She tilted her head at the tension in Fuyu's stance. "Uh, are you all right?"

Fuyu snapped back at her, the gentle volume of her words only increasing the sting. "Of course not. Why did you think I was related to them?"

"Your crystals have gold trim. Only a Princess has that. Well, and Twilight, surprisingly."

"She's a Princess by marri-" When it hit her, she stopped speaking and lifted her hand to stare down at her palms. "Why do I..." A deeply unhappy groan passed through her lips. "They're leaving things out again."

Trixie grew nervous. She decided to try and console her friend. "Luna says she's trying to give you the truth. It will take some time."

The option was distasteful, but Fuyu realized it was her best, if not only choice. "Very well. Let's keep this conversation to ourselves." As she moved toward the door, Trixie stood up and followed.

"Good idea! I'll try to urge her into giving me more stuff to give to you. I don't know how long that will take." They stopped in the small entryway. "I'm sorry. About everything. I'm in way over my head."

"I think I am too." Fuyu gave her an awkward hug and strode through the door. "I need to go. I have more reading to do."

Twilight returned to the library tree about an hour after Fuyu got back. After getting the door closed, an eerie silence swept over her. It made the hair on the back of her neck stand up, but she was unable to figure out why. From the quiet she knew Spike was still gone, but it was so quiet that she didn't immediately know if the pale woman were still around. Only after walking carefully into the kitchen did she find her, seated at the table with a book in her hand. "Oh! There you are. Didn't know if you were even home. Feeling better from yesterday?"

"Sorry, and yes, I suppose." She didn't look up. "How is Applejack?"

Something about her tone was too even; it made Twilight quiver as she went over to the fridge. "Fine, fine. We stopped for lunch, I'm heading back soon. You want to come along?"

She still didn't look up. "Yes."

Twilight had enough. There was such a concentration of tension in that single word that she shut the refrigerator door, walked over, and sat at the table. "Fuyu, listen, I know. I know about what happened at the party."

Fuyu was surprised enough to almost drop the book. "Wh-what?" she stammered, wide-eyed. Most of her brain was suddenly dedicated to figuring out how the librarian had gotten this information. "How did you..."

"Hold on." Twilight clasped her hands and took on a gentle posture. "I know you talked about something that can't be disclosed." She watched the pale woman deflate with what she hoped was relief. "I knew it. No wonder you've been so quiet. Er, more than usual. I assume, anyway, because I don't really know what usual is for you just yet."

Confusion and terror were fighting for prominence in Fuyu's brain, while relief was darting about outside the storm and looking for a way to wedge itself in. Before she lost control of her mouth, she decided to figure out what it was that Twilight knew. "Did you hear us?"

"No. But you two talked for a long time, so I'm guessing the amulet and your history came up." The librarian sighed deeply. "I have so many questions, but I'm not going to prod you for answers because you have enough to deal with. I mean, you're building a life from scratch. When you're ready, we can deal with this stuff."

"No, we can't." Fuyu looked away and down at the floor, more somber than Twilight had ever seen her.

"Was...was it that bad?" She watched the pale woman nod. "Oh. Wow. Okay, we don't have to talk about it if you don't want to. Just, uh, just know that I know that you know, and that it's fine."

Fuyu shook her head at the odd wording, but smiled. "All right."

"Good! Good. Still driving me nuts, though." She laid her head on the table and groaned. "Hey, there's one little thing I want to ask you," she said, tilting her head to look over. "If you can't answer it, just say so."

"Okay."

She sat up. "Did she tell you why the amulet gave you the gold edges on your jewels?"

The pale woman's eyes grew suddenly dark. "No. I wish she had, but she didn't."

"Uh..." The vague rage was making Twilight nervous. She withdrew until the back of her chair stopped her. "You look even angrier than you did this morning. What's wrong?"

Fuyu rose from her chair, picked up her book and snapped it shut. "You're not the only one without the whole story." Like a tiger, she stalked up the stairs. "Let me know when you're ready to return to the orchard."

"R-right! I won't be too long." Smiling wide despite the fact her friend couldn't see it, Twilight waited until she was out of sight to let her emotions change. "Good grief," she murmured while hugging herself. "What did you tell her, Princess?"

For the first time, thinking about that, and the situation as a whole, was making her bitterly uncomfortable.