The Horn That Wasn't There
“Hey Emerald, your horn is glowing again,” said the light brown mare sitting next to me at the outdoor cafe table.
I blinked a few times, coming back to this reality. “Huh, oh? It was?” I had gotten lost in some music coming out of the cafe’s speakers, a spacey thaumatronic song I was very familiar with.
Ginger Lane shook her yellow mane and nickered softly. “Good song?”
I blushed a little under my green coat, looking away so I wouldn’t display just how far gone I’d been. “Yeah, pretty good. I’m always into those crystal-tuned synthetic tones.”
Ginger rested her muzzle on her hooves, taking a sip of her coffee through a straw. “What’s it like? To do magic, I mean?”
I looked back in the earth pony’s direction. My horn was still--I assumed--softly glowing at the tip, as I could still see the rippling overlay of that….other space. “I, well… it’s hard to describe.” Mainly because I actually couldn’t do any spells at all, not being entirely a unicorn, but that was something I hadn’t gotten to telling Ginger yet. We’d only known each other a few weeks, and I’d only moved up to Seaddle shortly before that.
She smiled, ears perked and alert. “Well, give it a shot? I could read a book about it, but I always love to hear things straight from a pony’s mouth. Sometimes explaining it even helps that pony to understand it better themselves.”
I took another sip of coffee, and leaned back on my haunches. Trying to focus while the elsewhere effect faded was difficult. “So, I’m not that good of a unicorn, I guess. I can’t do spells very well, and have barely any telekinesis.” Ginger nodded; that was one of the first things anyone noticed about me, was how I didn’t open doors or pick things up with my horn.
I was about to continue, when there was a shout from behind me, “LOOK OUT!” As I turned to look, a ball of red streaked out of nowhere and crashed into me. I went tumbling out into the street, hitting my head sideways against the stone. Dazed, I started to get to my hooves, disentangling myself from a red pegasus colt.
The colt shook out his wings and stood up, grinning sheepishly at me. “Are you okay? Sorry ‘bout that, I was practicing my flying and hit a bad pocket of air.”
I passed my forehooves over the rest of my body. “Um… a bit bruised, but I don’t think anything’s broken.” I looked behind me. “Except for my coffee cup.”
“Oh Lunes, sorry about that. I’ll pay you back sometime, don’t have any bits on me right now. I’m Fireball.” He offered a hoof, which I shook briefly.
“Don’t worry about it, wasn’t even my cup. I’m Emerald Perigee. Nice to meet you, wish it was less jarring of circumstances.”
He flexed a wing experimentally, then winced. “Yeah, maybe I should walk for a bit. Nice to meet you too! I still owe you one. I’ll run into you again, I’m sure… much slower next time.”
I smiled at this. “Probably for the best. See you around.” Fireball nodded, and trotted off down the street.
As I got back to the cafe and picked up my chair, I bent my head down to sniff at the spilled coffee. “Oh well, no big…” I started to say, then felt something give way on my forehead. “...loss,” I finished, looking up at Ginger, who was staring at me with a curious expression, both shocked and concerned.
“Oh hon, what happened to your… horn?” She trotted up next to me, running a hoof across my head. I glanced down past my muzzle and noticed something green. On the ground among the broken shards of the mug, and the brown pool of coffee, lay a chunk of my horn.
I winced, trying to remember stories I’d read of horn-related injuries from other unicorns, and how they reacted, so I could form a realistic response. Instead I just felt a queer twist in my mind as her hoof passed through the space where the tip was. I grabbed her hoof with my own and pulled it gently away. “Don’t…do that. Please. Could we go back to my place for a few minutes? I can explain…”
“Are you sure you can walk?” she asked, genuinely concerned. Very likely, she expected me to be in shock or falling over, or maybe having some sort of destabilized-magic sickness.
I picked up the bit of my horn that had broken off, and stuffed it into a saddlebag. “I’m fine. Just a bit of a headache from getting knocked into the street.”
We walked down a side street, taking the quieter (and less populated) back way to my apartment. Ginger continued to comment, “You’re...taking it better than I’d expect. A loss of magic, almost like a loss of a leg… they do grow back, right? Please tell me they grow back?”
I sighed. Might as well give the full explanation, then. “Normal unicorn horns do grow back, with the help of dedicated specialists and lots of spells. This one, however, will not.”
“How does that even work? What do you mean? Aren’t you a unicorn?”
I shook my head. “I am not technically a full unicorn.”
She stopped on the street, and I stopped too, not wanting to push on ahead. “So you just… go around pretending to be one? Why? Isn’t that a little like lying all the time?”
She’d really hit me hard, even if by accident. “It...sometimes does. But it’s easier than...well, really standing out and attracting a lot of unwanted attention. Let me… let me just show you, when we get inside.”
We walked in silence for a few more minutes, while my mind went in some uncomfortable directions and she thought about it. Finally I got open the door to my apartment and we sat down together on the couch.
“I guess,” I started, “it does feel like lying, just a bit. I want to show you what’s going on, and tell you the truth. I’m going to feel all self-conscious about it unless I do.”
She nodded, expression hard to read. “I don’t understand, but I’m willing to listen. I mean… why would you go through the trouble of impersonating a unicorn when you’re not very good at it?”
I chuckled at that, and she smiled a little. “Got a point there. So. This will… require a bit of stimulation.” I grabbed the remote control for my stereo system, letting the crystals inside warm up before selecting the spell matrix to play a specific song. Soft synthetic sounds wafted out of the speakers, building slowly in layered complexity.
“What does this have to…. oh.” Ginger started to say, then stopped as my ‘horn’ started to glow again. “What...is that?”
I didn’t need a mirror to know what she was seeing. My horn was glowing again, but this time the upper half was visible, not being hidden by the broken prosthetic. A tiny sphere of light spun at what would be the tip, with spiraling lines of glowing energy tracing downwards into my forehead. Everything spiralled in continuous motion, one helix in either direction, giving the impression of energy traveling both up and down between my head and the point. Subtle glows within the cone pulsed to the bass beat of the music. The glows were many colors blending into pure white, unlike most unicorn magic shining a single color.
I lifted my hoof and pushed against the side of the fake horn. It slipped off the glue holding it in place, and fell onto the couch. My eyes were closed, but I didn’t need them to see. Waves of energy pulsed all around me, colliding with each other and bent around the pony sitting next to me. I could see her form and posture in the way lines of force bent in her presence, and how she created new waves from within. Her coat was transparent, and I could see within her core a tightly-packed knot of energy that sent pulses into her hooves and throat.
I opened my eyes again, the other space overlaid on top of the physical. I had some practice in seeing both at once, but it remained a bit disorienting. The ‘real’ world lagged behind by about half a second, enough to be distracting if anything moved too fast. “That’s my, um, actual horn,” I said quietly.
Ginger leaned back away from me on the couch. I thought she was distancing herself, but she was just getting a better look. “It’s...beautiful,” she finally said. “Though I still don’t really understand.”
I nodded. “I was born an earth pony. Though my mom was a unicorn, and my dad an earth pony. Usually children come out one species or another, the genetics are probably complicated. I’m one of those...complications. Not really earth, not really unicorn. The horn just...showed up one day, and I put on the fake one to cover it, changed my name, moved to another place… it kinda changed everything.”
She reached out a hoof to try and touch the swirling cone of energy. I leaned away. “Please don’t, it feels… weird. That’s one of the reasons I wear the false horn. The other is, well… if I looked like an earth pony most of the time, but then the horn started glowing...I’d attract too much attention.”
She shrugged. “It doesn’t bother me, but I can see how it’d be out of the ordinary enough to get ponies wanting to study it. So, it’s not always there?”
I nodded. “It only shows up sometimes. I’m able to make it glow with certain kinds of music. I’m a terrible unicorn, though, because I can’t actually do spells. Can’t even levitate things.”
Ginger sat foward and patted my hind leg. “That’s rough, stuck between being a strange earth pony or a kinda powerless unicorn.”
“I guess I’ve gotten used to it, and at least there are some unicorns out there who aren’t very good at magic. Besides, it’s not totally useless.”
Her head tilted sideways, a gesture I always thought was cute. “What /can/ you do with it, then?”
I thought for a moment. This was the harder part to describe. “I...see things. The world, but not the world. It’s like… a different layer of the world. I’m pretty sure I’m actually seeing, well, magic itself.”
The mare’s eyes went wider, and she resisted the urge to touch the glow again. “Woah. That’s very...trippy. How do you know that’s what you’re seeing?”
I turned my head to point my horn at her, closing my eyes for a moment and summoning the extra layer of vision. “Magic is everywhere in this world, it’s like… an energy field permeating all regular physical stuff. I can see it in my stereo, as the spells change song tracks. I can see it in you, in your particular earth-pony type of magic. It’s strongest in your hooves, and your throat--because of your connection to the land and strength in communication. In pegasi, magic streams off their wings in flight. And I’ve watched unicorns cast spells, which… look like complicated objects stretching off in more than just three directions. I can ‘see’ all of that, but I can’t do anything with it. It’s like an extra eye, but you can’t move things with your eyes, right?”
Ginger put a hoof to her cheek, looking thoughtful. “Hm, no, I guess you can’t! So, what does magic look like?”
I shrugged. “I don’t really know. All I can tell you is what I see--that my mind interprets this extra sense into colors and shapes to try and make sense of it all. It’s not as if that’s what it really looks like. Try to explain color to a blind pony, and you end up having to use the sort of words that only refer back to other colors. I try to describe magic in visual terms, but it’s not really visual. It’s… lines and shapes and false colors and sound and scent and overlapping light and dark ripples all together.”
“Wow, so no wonder you usually close your eyes when you’re ‘seeing’ that stuff.” She sat quietly for a few minutes, watching my horn’s glow shift and dance.. “Hey! Any idea why it responds to music? Especially certain types?”
I nickered. “No idea. I get a certain kind of emotional reaction out of this more relaxing, synthetic style of music. It reminds me of the moon and stars, in many ways. Plus, it often feels like, well… some of the ponies making this kind of music seem to really be tapping into something magical. Like they’re trying to put in musical terms the sort of pulses and patterns I see with my horn-sight. So… I guess it especially excites the magic because it feels like it’s coming from the same place.”
She smiled at that. “Huh. So, um, why don’t you try making this sort of music yourself?”
I cringed a little, inwardly. Ginger had accidentally hit a sore spot. For a long time I’d been searching for something I was actually good at, not just for a career but a greater purpose in my life. I had a very abstract cutie mark that showed up years ago, but I’m still trying to figure out why it did and what it means. I had always felt fairly useless as a unicorn, and tried hard to keep from standing out, as I didn’t want anyone to ask me to do something I couldn’t do. I guess in many ways I was still hiding from the world and what anypony would think of me.
I told her all of this, haltingly and awkwardly, cheeks burning. It’s not that I was afraid to open up to someone, even if I’d only known Ginger a few weeks. It was the embarrassment of realizing how ridiculous I sounded to myself, after trying to explain my objections to someone else.
She took it surprisingly kindly, listening to the ways in which I beat myself up over perceived blocks to progress that, from her perspective outside my head, seemed entirely artificial. Finally I threw up my hooves and sighed. “So… really, I guess there’s no reason I can’t at least try to create something. I have some of the equipment already, the rest is just in getting the right spellware installed. Is that… are you happy?”
Ginger leaned over and gave me a quick hug. “Em, it’s not me that needs to be happy, here, it’s you. Try it out, see what you can make, I’ll give you feedback as needed, but this is all for you.”
I hugged her back. “Yeah, I...thanks. I’ll see what I can do.”
I had found a job at a local cafe, but in my free time I was back at my apartment, poring over manuals and struggling to understand the workings of the spellcraft. There were so many knobs and variables to tune on the crystals to produced any specific synthetic tone. Subspells added reflective effects, echoes and fades, distortion and sharpening. An entire spell set was dedicated to recording the tones and playing them back, another for a visual interface that allowed for dragging modules around in a basic timeline. I had a more annoying time trying to adjust the finicky instruments to use with my hooves, rather than a unicorn’s more finely dexterous telekinesis. It took me the greater part of a week to bang my head against the technology before I could even start creating.
Another week, and I felt like I’d only just gotten the hang of simple melodies. Nothing like the complex multi-layered creations I knew well, but maybe just a single part of one. I needed many elements of the same type to overlap, fade in and out of each other, with a strong rhythmic beat to hold the structure together. I was so intimate with the sort of music I wanted to create, and it sounded so easy when I had the finished product to listen to. I was starting to realize that this sort of thing was much more complicated than I had thought.
One night, after several hours of frustration struggling against the limits of my equipment rather than actually composing, I crashed my hooves against my desk, shoving back and tumbling over backwards. I lay on my back, looking up at the ceiling, trying to remember why I was doing this at all.
I turned over and stumbled to my hooves, trotting into the larger living space. I bumped against the remote, glanced back at my room, and then tapped at the remote. Music swelled from the stereo, and I flopped onto the couch, eyes closing. This time, instead of just having the music in the background, I put more attention into what the background elements were doing, how they contributed to the whole. Then I opened my ‘other’ eye, concentrating on the stereo in front of me.
For the first time, I started noticing smaller variations in the overlapping fields. I obviously couldn’t attribute this to an increase in visual acuity, but the effect was like putting glasses on somepony who didn’t know they’d needed them. I could see how smaller bands of light caused interference in nearby patterns, and the echo effect over everything causing a perceptible shimmer. Knots of light that folded curves in and out of hidden dimensions were, I realized, parts of the spellsong that had notes going up and down the scale. They flickered back and forth, or spiralled in tight circles, depending on what the notes for that particular crystal-synth was doing.
I sat in stunned awe through several songs, watching the sound itself flow forth from the spell objects, watching them dance and interact in complex arrangements. Then I got up and raced back into my room, hitting play on my current melody. Immediately I saw the difference--my song was unpolished, with less elements--but I knew that this was a much better way to fix it. Without even looking at my equipment directly, I set the song on loop and tweaked with some of the enhancements, using my hornsight to mold and reshape the sound towards what I had seen it could be.
An hour later, I was exhausted and ready for bed, but jittering with energy at the same time. I’d discovered something new, a way I could compose but also check for quality easier. Shapes and lines of light danced in my head long into the night, even when I tried to will my brain to sleep.
The next morning I called in sick from work, feeling feverish in a different way. Just before waking I had a flash of a structure, interlocking loops and whorls of sound built around my simple melody. I could see how it all fit together, a complex machine similar to, but not the same as, the songs I already knew. The glittering multifaceted gemstone in my mind needed to be made, I couldn’t let it fade. I poured my concentration into the task, finding a neutral compromise between hornsight and eyesight so I wouldn’t fatigue too fast. One one level, I set up loops and beats, a traditional song structure, set into a timeline. On the other, I was coloring within lines that were already drawn, fitting a building to a blueprint, slotting stones into a crowning framework. I built the parts one at a time, then tweaked the settings of each until they ‘lined up’ into my idea. Too much reverb, and the whole thing quivered as if to shake itself apart. Too little distortion, and the links between were too brittle. Some things needed to be ‘foreground’ and others ‘background’, one side or another, in terms of relative volume and panning.
If I think about it now, I don’t know how I didn’t recognize what I was actually doing.
I don’t even remember eating or taking other breaks that day, though I’m sure I must have. I was on fire, feeling like something else had grabbed hold of me and wouldn’t let go until I satisfied it. My forehead was aching--I hadn’t used my horn this much in a very long time. I looked at the clock, and it was an hour past my usual bedtime. I played the song I had made one last time, sitting well away from the controls to avoid the temptation to tamper with it more.
I looked, and it was there. The machine was built, the structure shaky but holding. It wasn’t perfect, probably never would be, but it was something I was proud to have made. I didn’t want to declare it finished, but anything past that point would have been just polishing. I needed a second opinion, another pair of ears.
Ginger came to my apartment the next day after I’d gotten back from work. I hadn’t seen her in the last week or so, but she seemed rather excited to hear my progress.
She gave me a hug and flopped onto the couch. “Fire it up!”
I stood off to one side, not sure if I wanted to watch her initial reaction. I pushed play on the remote, and the echoing synths slowly streamed into the room.
I tried to just listen this time, but I couldn’t help it. In my other vision, I watched the structure slowly grew into being, and I got a little shiver from my mane down through my tail.
Halfway through the song, as the underlying beat starting to kick in, I was distracted by a gasp from Ginger. Looking over at her, I stiffened in cold shock. Her eyes were closed, but just above her forehead was a faint spot of glow and spiraling lines of energy. It looked just like my own horn, though a bit fainter. I closed my eyes and used my own internal sight, and saw magical energy leaving ripples spiralling around the same spot.
It was an effort to say nothing until the song reached its climax and then faded out. Ginger opened her eyes and looked at me, with my mouth still hanging open. “Em, I thought you said you couldn’t do magic. That, dear, was a spell.”
I sputtered out a “What?!” before recovering. “I can’t do spells. I’ve tried. It’s like trying to walk against a windstorm. Too much incoming to push anything out. It’s just too--”
She held up a hoof to stop me from babbling on. “Doesn’t matter. You just did.”
“That’s impossible.”
“No, obviously not. Look at it this way. A spell, far as anyone knows, is just a specific pattern of magic that influences the outside world in some way. Right?”
“I guess so, yeah.”
“It’s just a matter of will. Unicorns have it easy, their horn already acts as a direct focus of their will. Yours is different, I’ll give you that, but you can still use what you see. You made music based off the patterns of magic you ‘see’, right?”
“Yeah, I….had a particular structure show up in my head, and I recreated it in the music.”
She grinned, and I felt a little funny inside. “So. You used what you saw of magic in the world, used your will to create a specific pattern around it, and it then influenced the world. How is that surprising?”
I stared at her, having no reply.. I hadn’t thought about it this way. Of course it wouldn’t work on me, since I was creating the structure directly. “What, um, what was the effect?”
Her eyes were bright as she put a hoof on my shoulder. “I saw what you see. For just a few seconds, I saw magic.”
I shook my head. “That’s… still impossible.”
“Why? Do you deny it? You were staring at me after the song finished. What did you see?”
I blinked away the afterimage still stuck in my head. “I, well… you had a horn. Like mine. Just for a few seconds, but it was there. I could… see the magic around you changing, too.”
“There. So it was a spell, embedded in the music. We’ve gotta test this on others sometime. Does it work any time the song is played? Does it only work if you’re physically nearby? Could you do that to an entire roomful of ponies?”
I shook my head. “Hold on, hold on. You’re getting way ahead of me here. I want to take this one step at a time.” I was shaking. This was too good to be true. It couldn’t happen again, could it? “Let’s have you listen to the song again. You aren’t still seeing the, um, magic, right?”
She brushed a hoof through the space above her forehead. “Nope, doesn’t feel weird when I do this. So that’s good, it wears off when the song is done. Why don’t you go into another room, or better yet, listen to an entirely different song on your headphones? Just as another test.”
I tossed her the remote. “Good idea. Hit play when you’re ready, I’ll go into my room.”
I tried to pick something in an entirely different genre than the song itself, something that wouldn’t usually cause my horn to glow on its own. Even with that, I still caught a brief flash of light if I turned my head towards where the stereo was in the other room.
Several minutes later, I trotted back into the living room. “Did it work again?”
Ginger was grinning. “It totally did. And I saw… something else, too. Hard to describe, but when I looked at the stereo itself I think I saw the...well, shape isn’t the right word for it, but yeah, shape of the spell itself.”
I nodded, impressed. “That’s the shape I saw too, that I tried to recreate. I don’t know where it came from, but….” I trailed off, because she was staring with her mouth open, pointing with one hoof towards me. Then she burst out laughing.
I turned to look at what she was pointing at, and she just laughed some more. I felt a little irritated, as I didn’t think it was something I’d said. “What? What’s so funny?!”
She jumped onto her hooves and grabbed my head with a forehoof, turning it to one side. “You didn’t recognize it? It’s...right...there!” Her other hoof jabbed my flank, and I got the cold shiver again, all the way down my body.
The shape, the form I’d painstakingly built into the music itself--interlocking circles, lines, and arcs--it looked like my cutie mark.
Of course it did.
Author's Note
(PS: Yes, I'm fairly aware how cliché it is to have your first story be your own personal OC, as well as having that OC be different in some way to the established ponyverse. Being aware of the tropes doesn't mean you have to avoid using them.)