What Shall be True

“No…that’s not it…no…no…oh, where IS IT!?”

Twilight sat in the midst of a storm of levitated books, barely glancing at each one before turning to look at another. And another. And another.

Spike simply sat by the front door of the library, doing his best not to get in the way. It had been a while since Twilight had tried to move him thinking he was a book, so he trusted his luck enough to take a long, slow sip from his cup of coffee as he watched the manic mare.

“No, no, no! Ugh! This is hopeless!”

“What are you even looking for?”

“Isn’t it obvious, Spike!?”

He glanced around the room, the air thick with rejected books. “Uh…not really.”

“URRRGH!” The flurry of magic-enveloped tomes resumed.

The front door opened, nearly squishing Spike before the pony in question slipped inside.

“Oh! Hey, Spike!”

“Hey, Pinkie. What’s up?”

“Oh, my Pinkie sense was telling me there was a soooooper-duper doozie coming from around here, so I thought I’d check it out! Where’s Twilight?”

Spike simply pointed a claw into the main room of the library, before taking another sip of coffee.

“Oh, wow! She looks preeeetty focused! Did her future self show up again to deliver a message and warn her of a future disaster only to get sucked back into the future before she could say anything useful?”

“No, nothing like that. It sounds like she just lost a book or something.”

“Oh! Well, that’s not so bad.”

“Not so bad!? NOT! SO! BAD!?!?!?!” Twilight let out a howl of rage and frustration as all the books in the air suddenly flew outwards and crashed into the various walls. She rounded on the two of them. “It’s AWFUL! It’s a catastrophe! It’s the worst possible thing that could ever happen EVER!!!”

She flumped backwards onto the floor.

“Well…maybe you could find another copy?”

Spike glanced at Pinkie. Then set his mug back down on the ground and snatched up his Twimergency Gear from the corner.

“Another…copy…?”

“Yeah! I’m sure there’s one somewhere!”

Twilight stoop up and just stared at Pinkie, eyes twitching with rage. “That book…was a compendium…of Star Swirl’s unfinished works…from almost two thousand years ago…uncovered just last month…and personally delivered to me…by Princess Celestia herself…and you seriously think…that there’s another copy just LYING AROUND SOMEWHERE!?!?!?!”

Pinkie shrank under Twilight’s gaze, and Spike retreated into the tied-up pillow-and-helmet body armor.

“Maybe not…”

“OF COURSE THERE ISN’T!!!” Twilight employed the Royal Canterlot voice, which left Spike all but flattened against the door with his ears ringing and a bad case of double-vision. He made a mental note as he peeled himself off of the door to add some earplugs to his Twimergency Gear.

The books picked themselves back up as Twilight resumed her search. “Which is why I have to find that book as soon as I possibly can!”

Pinkie picked herself up, looking somehow deflated, until she got an idea and perked right back up.

“Maybe we could help you find it!” she offered. “Where did you put it last?”

The swirl of books stopped, and Twilight’s wings fluttered themselves in frustration. “I don’t have time for your useless questions, Pinkie.”

Pinkie looked pretty hurt, so Spike instead picked up the torch. “They’re not useless, Twilight. After all, we might see something you overlooked.”

“Yeah! We’re just super-sleuthy like that!”

Twilight turned to face them, the books setting themselves on the ground. “Well, I’d set it on my nightstand last night because I fell asleep reading it.”

“And when did you notice it was gone?”

“This morning, when I was having breakfast. I had an idea for how to finish one of the spells, and looked for the book to double-check myself, only to find it wasn’t here!”

“Didja check your nightstand?”

Twilight was about to yell at Pinkie again, presumably to remind her that she wasn’t that stupid, before realizing…

“Um…no…”

With a brief flash of purple magic, Twilight teleported away. Then, from her room, there was a shrill cheering and the distinct sound of a very happy Twilight.

Spike just shrugged off his Twimergency Gear and started picking up the books that now littered the floor. Knowing Twilight, she’d be too busy to bother cleaning the place up, so the duty fell to him.

…and of course his mug had broken, coffee spilled all over the entryway.

There was another flash of magic as Twilight teleported back into the main room, her beloved tome clutched snugly under one wing. “Pinkie, you’re a genius!” she cried, throwing her forelegs around her.

“Heeheehee! Glad I could help, Twilight! Now, go finish that spell!”

Twilight smiled like a maniac, leaping off of Pinkie Pie and speeding over to her desk and flipping through the pages of the priceless book as she went. Once she found the right page, she immediately snatched up a quill in her magic and began her work.

Spike finished sweeping up the broken bits of coffee mug into the dustpan. It wasn’t a total loss. He could probably guilt Twilight into fixing it back up, once Star Swirl’s spell was off her mind.

The next step was the books, and it was nice of Pinkie to help. Even if she did occasionally jump up in the air, jittering like a snowflake in a hurricane, before looking around nervously. Spike couldn’t help but be nervous himself. Pinkie was right, her Pinkie Sense was going off the charts. And if something that bad was coming here…Spike shuddered as he shelved the book he was holding.

They had nearly gotten all the books reshelved when Twilight spoke again. “I think…I think I’ve got it!”

“That’s great! But…got what, Twilight?”

Her stomach groaned as she put the finishing touches on her spell, and she stepped away from the desk with a soft sigh. “It’s a divination spell that Star Swirl had been trying to finish. If I’m right, it’ll display an image of the future, and you can set it to however far in the future you want to see. But he’d never quite gotten it to work.” Her stomach roared angrily at her to stop her little history lesson and get some food. “Um…gimme a second…”

She trotted into the kitchen, quickly assembling a sandwich and gulping it down almost in the same motion, before resuming her speech.

“Anyway, I’d looked the spell over and over the past few days, because there was something that struck me as kinda familiar about it. Like…I had the missing piece somewhere in my head, but I couldn’t remember where it was.” She assembled another sandwich as she talked, and took that brief pause to gulp it down.

“Gosh, you sure are eating quite a bit. You sure you’re okay?”

“I’m fine, Pinkie. I just didn’t get a chance to eat breakfast earlier because I was looking for that book. Anyway, where was I?”

“Couldn’t remember where it was.”

Twilight tilted her head slightly, rubbing a hoof on her chin as she tried to remember for a brief moment. “Oh! Yeah. Then…out of nowhere…this flower pot falls and lands right next to me!”

“Just like that time with the bandage and the time spell and the birthday present and the ice cream!”

“Ugh…can we please not talk about that ice cream…”

“Exactly like that! And that’s when it clicked! The time spell we used then, and the divination spell in the book, are fundamentally similar! The only difference is that we’d be going forwards in time instead of backwards, and creating a window instead of actually going there! So with that in mind, I was able to change the time spell we used in the Future Twilight debacle and then use it to fill in the gaps with the divination spell!”

“Makes sense to me!”

Twilight finally caught sight of Spike, who was struggling to get a book onto a high-up shelf. Casually, she just smiled and levitated it the rest of the way for him.

“Didja ever find out why the flower pot fell?”

“No.”

“It might’ve had something to do with all the noise you were making…”

“Well, you should credit that flower pot with your discovery!”

“Pinkie, I don’t think that’s how copyright laws work.”

“Well…they should!”

The two of them shared a brief laugh, before Pinkie’s Pinkie sense interrupted it by nearly throwing Pinkie to the floor.

Twilight just stared at her. “Wow…”

“Well, that spell thing wasn’t the doozie! But whatever it is, it’s on its way here!”

Spike immediately glanced around, as if expecting some horrific monster to crash through the windows right that second.

It wasn’t a horrible monster that roared in a moment later. It was Rainbow Dash.

Crash! “Hey, Twilight! You okay!?” She skidded to a halt on the main floor.

“I’m fine, Rainbow Dash. But I couldn’t say the same for my window…”

She glanced back at the new hole in the building, then shrugged and turned back to the group. “What was all that shouting earlier?”

“Oh! She was looking for a book and got a little frustrated and there were books flying everywhere and she started twitching but not in the Pinkie Sense way and then she started yelling in the Royal Canterlot voice before—“

“Pinkie! Simple…answers…”

“Okey-dokey-lokey!”

Rainbow just sighed. “Awful lot of yelling over just one book. You probably shook up half of Ponyville.”

“I know, I know. But considering that it was to finish a divination spell thought up by Star Swirl the Bearded himself, I think I can live with that.”

Rainbow just looked at her, screwing up her face. “A divini…divi…”

Twilight sighed. “A spell that lets you see the future.”

“Oh. Oh! Oh, this is gonna be good. I’m gonna go get the others. I bet they’ll wanna see this!”

“Wait! I have to make sure it…” Rainbow flew back out the window, leaving only a quickly-fading rainbow contrail behind her. “…works…first…”

Twilight deflated. Great. If she screwed up, now she’d have an audience to her humiliation.

“Don’t worry, Twilight,” offered Pinkie Pie, placing a hoof on her shoulder. “You can just test the spell before Rainbow Dash gets back! It’s not like you can only cast it once, right?”

That perked her up. She looked over at the book of Star Swirl’s notes, with a few notes of her own slotted between the pages. It simply sat there, open to the right page with the finished spell sitting right on top.

“You’re right!” She immediately darted over to the book, using her wings to speed her along.

She looked back over the spell, subbing in the right numbers wherever necessary. Then she turned back around to face an excited Pinkie and a bored-but-intrigued-looking Spike.

“Okay…I’m going to use the spell to try and see five minutes into the future.”

Twi glanced at the nearest clock, recording the time in her head.

11:37.

She turned to face it. She wanted to see if her spell worked right after she cast it.

“Stand back, everypony.”

She closed her eyes, and focused.

Focused harder…

She tried to imagine the formula in her mind, and concentrate on it. She could feel her horn buzzing with power, power that was wrapping itself around her and enveloping her entire being.

Harder…

She could just feel it…the realm that contained all of time and space, which she had only tapped into once before. She could feel space warping around her, as she pressed harder and harder against it to reach into that realm.

Just a little more…

Her magic was just pressing through the wall, and bonding to the time beyond it. She tried to focus the pressure in front of her, so that would be where the window would form.

This was the go/no-go point. Once her own magic mixed with the timeline, she wouldn’t be able to pull it back.

But she was confident. She knew this would work.

So…close…

With a crackling pop, she felt the fabric of reality give way, her magic piercing through into the infinite timeline beyond. Reaching through that little window she’d created, she steered her magic to aim her target.

Five minutes from her current temporal position.

She felt her magic touch it. Press on it. Bond to it.

That was when she felt the tug.

The pull, like the magic she had extended was pulling her into the ether.

It came again, harder.

No.

This wasn’t supposed to happen.

She tried her best to pull back from the spell, but there was no way that was happening.

She felt her magic flailing, splaying off course as she lost concentration.

Just…pull harder…

She strained as hard as she could to cancel her spell.

She failed.

Was pulled into the portal she’d made…

…and collided headfirst into a bookshelf.