Arcane

Twilight groaned and her eyes slowly fluttered open. A faint beam of sunlight filled her vision, causing her to turn her head away with stinging eyes. She closed them and rolled over on her other side trying to get back to sleep. She couldn't. Instead, she laid there unmoving without the strength to actually get up. In her stillness though, she noticed that her pillow and sheets were damp again. She must have had another nightmare that night and sweated, but she could never remember them no matter how hard she tried. After a few moments of laziness, Twilight forced herself to get off her bed and onto her hooves. With a loud clop, she landed on the floor then sluggishly walked to her bathroom.

Entering the bathroom doorway, the wood that Twilight had previously stood on turned to cold porcelain tiles, but in her drowsiness she barely noticed the change. Using whatever focus she had, Twilight cranked the water on hot and a minute or two later, steam began to rise in the air. With that as a signal that the shower was ready, she stepped into the hot streams of water. The scalding heat woke her up just as much as it relaxed her, and Twilight stood motionless as the water plastered her violet coat to her skin and soaked her mane and tail.

Following a bit of shampooing and rinsing, she shut off the water and stepped out into the steamy air. A white towel levitated from a shelf above her and Twilight dried herself, then tossed the wet cloth into the hamper. Smiling, she left the humid bathroom, and Twilight, while humming to herself happily, made her way to her vanity back inside her chambers. She looked over herself in the mirror and quickly fixed her messy mane and her knotty tail with a small brush.

She was fully prepared to take on the day and she certainly showed it. Whether it had been in helping a pony with finding a book, running errands, or simply reading, Twilight almost never lost her smile. By the time the town's clock struck three, she had nearly completed her whole day, or at least the part she had planned out.

Now, the sun had long descended beneath the horizon and the night shrouded Equestria with its cloak of darkness. Houses sat still and dim as tired ponies lied in their warm beds covered with down blankets, and the streets ran bare and barely visible by the light of the moon. With the country's inhabitants resting, the dirt had settled and the air ran its cool breeze through the drooping leaves of the forest's boughs. The same could be said for for Ponyville. The grass in the town square had begun to dew with small clear droplets of water that rolled down their smooth blades, and the crickets chirped rhythmically in the moonlight's shadows, completely unseen.

Everything was calm.

In the local library near the center of town, only one pony still reveled in consciousness. Twilight sat in the floor on one of her favorite pillows while reading a book by candle light. She was a very studious mare, and because of her position as the element of magic, she had quite a reputation in Equestria. She didn't know it, but her name was spoken in nearly every city, town, or village in the entire country, especially Canterlot. She was regarded as a very prestigious unicorn, but she didn't think of herself in that way; nevertheless, she was nearing the popularity of the princesses themselves. Her position as Celestia's personal protegee didn't quell those thoughts either.

What the majority wouldn't guess was that Twilight had a somewhat simple life with terrific friends and a quiet job. The mare that had helped defeating Nightmare Moon, saving the Crystal Kingdom, and reforming Discord was actually a young librarian with a healthy obsession of books. Twilight also played a momentous role in keeping Chrysalis from taking over Canterlot during Shining Armor and Cadence's wedding a few years back. True, she and the other elements had saved Equestria's hide many times over.

Twilight flipped a page.

The book she read was titled Preliminary Knowledge of Advanced Magic and Spell Forms. Celestia had sent it to Twilight in her response to the friendship report a couple days back with explicit instructions to read it and to sent a letter with her comments and questions when she had finished. In the recent weeks, she had studied nearly twenty books that she had received, practiced several spells, and lost a lot of sleep in doing so. Being the slight perfectionist and careful student that she was, Twilight also kept very detailed notes, and the quill that danced across a piece of parchment and the growing stack of papers could confirm it.

She took a break to look at the clock on the wall. Eleven forty-two. Twilight yawned involuntarily as sleepiness began to creep up onto her mind when she realized how late it had been. Time had a way of doing that. With a short sigh, she noted her page and closed the book, rolled up the parchment, and placed the quill along with the ink well on the small table next to her wooden podium. Twilight got up on all fours and levitated the tome that she had been reading into a small empty slot in a nearby shelf. Since all things were in their proper places, she sighed and sluggishly walked over to the stairs. Her horn glowed with a quick bit of magic and all the candles were extinguished.

The clip-clop of her hooves resounded throughout the vacancy of her wooden abode as she walked up the stairs, and the closer she got to her bed, the heavier her eyes grew and her head hung lower, but before she could reach the top of the stairs and enter her awaiting bed--

Thump!

The sound almost made Twilight fall down the stairs, and it eradicated every ounce of sleepiness in her and replaced it with adrenalin. Her ears shot up, her eyes opened wide, and she turned her head towards the dark library. Taking a few steps down, she squinted as she searched for the noise's origin. The darkness in the room made it nearly impossible to see, so she slowly walked back into the dim book-filled portion of her house. She cast a spell and a faint violet glow radiated from the tip of her horn, and the light intensified until it lit up the entire room, books and all.

She jumped from one of the last few steps and onto the flat floor below. Her first thought was to go to the door and see if somepony was outside. More than likely, they would have been a bit annoyed having to wait for her to respond to their knocking, and even though it was nearly midnight Twilight hastily walked over to the door and unlatched it. She turned the knob and opened it to reveal the cool outside and indirectly welcomed a wandering breeze that slightly disheveled her mane, but she saw no one. Twilight fully opened the door the rest of the way just to make sure and looked left and right, but found that not a soul was there.

"Anypony out here?" she asked.

With no response, Twilight quietly closed the door and re-locked it; afterwards, she turned to find something awaiting her attention across the floor. There sat the book she had been reading only moments earlier. She knew it was. Its blue cover and white spine had golden golden letters across them. They ware unmistakable. The amber light that shone from the text caught Twilight's eye, and she walked over to where it was and levitated it up to eye level. Twilight quickly examined it for any defects it could have suffered from falling of the shelf, but the expression of relief that she wore was replaced with one of confusion.

"How did you fall off the shelf?" she whispered to the book. Twilight didn't really expect it to answer her.

She levitated the book back into the empty slot and realized that it was impossible for it to have just fallen off by itself. Not only was it sitting completely on the shelf, but it was also pressing against two other books that would have kept it from moving anywhere at all. The only thing she could think of was a bit carelessness on her part; surely she hadn't put it up correctly. With the book back in its place, she ran through a quick mental checklist, and continued doing so until she knew that everything was in order. After she had finished, she nodded and walked back to the stairs with sleepy eyes, but before she could reach them she felt a cold chill run through her body and her withers stuck up from the back of her neck.

"I need to get some extra gems for the heating system." she said lethargically along with a shiver, yet the temperature in the room wasn't the slightest bit below seventy-eight degrees, her preferred temperature.

Twilight took another step.

"Augh!" She was knocked onto the floor and slid a few feet on her back with a sharp pain coursing through her body that emanated from her chest. She could barely breathe. Her breaths came in small, quick gasps, but her lungs refused take in the smallest amount of air. And within moments, everything went black and her body relaxed lifelessly on the ground.

...

Twilight.