Chapter 2 - Just a Little Kindness
This was Twilight’s chance. Now she could finally prove herself that she could be just as merciless as Lyra. In her mind she prepared herself and quickly repeated the instructions for a magical barrage.
Step one: Gather energy.
Twilight closed her eyes and tugged her internal reservoir, letting the magic flow through her body and into her horn.
Step two: Face target.
Still with her eyes closed, she towered over the covering Pegasus, who tried to scramble backwards from the lavender glow.
Step three: focus on will to hurt target.
This was the critical part of the process. A Unicorn might have a certain innate power, but effective punch of a spell, especially when attempting to hurt the target , was just as much influenced by the emotional situation of the caster.
Step four –
She just couldn’t do it. On look into those eyes and her whole determination to harm the Pegasus was gone.
Instead she collapsed to the floor in a sobbing mess.
She was such a failure to falter at an elementary task like that. No wonder nopony ever wanted to have anything to do with her .Why couldn’t she have never been born? The world would be better without her and –
A soft voice broke into her misery thoughts. “Shhhhhh. Calm down. Everything will be okay.”
O shush you! , Twilight thought, before realizing that the voice didn’t come from her head. No, it came from the Pegasus that had bent over her and was caressing her back with a concerned expression.
Twilight wanted to yell at the mare to leave her alone, but when she opened her mouth, only more sobs came out.
The Pegasus continued with her caressing for a few minutes, before standing up and looking Twilight directly into the eye.
“Don’t worry. Things will be just fine.”
“How can you say that? You don’t even know me!” Twilight snapped.
The Pegasus was slightly taken aback by her reaction, but answered nonetheless. “It can’t be that bad, can it?”
“It is worse.”
“Why?”
It was but a simple question and it an incredible amount of underlying emotion, all of them overshadowed by the desire to understand and help.
“Because I am a total failure”, Twilight answered and once again broke into sobs.
“What makes you think that?”
“I am useless.”
“That is not true. You have your own unique talent that makes you special. How could you be useless with that?”
If that was supposed to ease Twilight’s pain, then it utterly failed.
“That is just it! I completely fail at my own special talent.”
“Hey, -“, the Pegasus tried, but Twilight interrupted her.
“No! Look! -” Twilight turned to let the mare see her flank “- My special talent is supposed to be magic. And yet I completely fail at it. I fail at the lousiest spells. Hell, I can’t even bring myself to blast one worthless, stupid Pegasus.”
“I -“
“And don’t get me started with ‘I am sure your special talent shows out in some way’! It doesn’t!”
“No, I -”
“And why are you even still talking to me? I just called you stupid and worthless. I don’t deserve your kindness.”
The Pegasus fixated her with a stern gaze. “Because, -“ she said with a completely calm and sure voice, “- you are not a bad pony.”
Twilight was dumbfounded. “How can you say that? I just –“
“I know what you said. But you didn’t mean it. You sort of apologized afterwards. A bad pony would have not done that.”
“But when you bumped into me, I wanted to strike you simply for being in my way! How can that not make me a bad pony?
“And yet you didn’t. You earlier said that your hesitation was a sign for your lack of magical talent. I know several nobles with next to no magical talent that wouldn’t have hesitated a second to throw me down the entire street.
A single bad decision does not make you a bad pony, especially if you reverse it before you take action.”
Prologue - To quell a spark
Darkness lay across Equestria.
-
It covered the continent entirely, from the Dragon Mountains with their snowclad peaks to the wide and untamed ocean.
It covered the frozen wasteland in between, that not ten years ago had been a colourful, lively paradise. Now it was utterly uninhabitable and only very occasionally crossed by the most daring of travellers, and those who feared her more than death from freezing.
When the darkness had first spread, winter and icy cold following it's wake, ponies had fought. They had fought for ever inch of farmland destroyed by frost, for every plant succumbed to eternal night.
Many had died in those first month after nightfall and soon voices had arisen, proclaiming the inevitable end of all intelligent life within the span of a year.
Yet now, eleven years later, most of ponykind was still livid.
Of cause some ponies continued to inquire that being penned up in the few left cities under her iron rule, barley surviving with the monthly food supply was no real living, but they mostly got ignored.
Normally these ponies tended to die a quick, mysterious death within a week's notice.
There were also those who tried to make the most of the situation for personal gain. Most ponies though just struggled to somehow adjust to eternal night and survive.
There was no way to escape the darkness, after all, as it was omnipresent.
That is to say almost omnipresent.
It was almost too slim to notice any difference.
The Dragon mountains, the wide ocean and the wasteland - they all stayed dark as ever. But in Canterlot, the biggest city and mighty capitol of Equestria, just under Nightmare Moon's very nose, something pushed against the darkness.
-
And darkness made way.
-
It did not make way to a large group of ponies that had gathered around a bonfire to celebrate the holiday of Nightmare Night used to have taken place on that day. Since sunset eleven years ago, gatherings of more than four without supervision were forbidden. Also, since sunset, nopony had dared let alone wished to celebrate Nightmare Night.
It did also not make way , as one might have expected, to a sole adult carrying a torch to navigate the dark streets and alleys. Burning materials were precious these days and solely used to keep homes or greenhouses warm enough for ponies and plants to survive. They certainly weren't wasted for a bit of light when wandering across the city. Besides, the ponies in Canterlot didn't need light to find their way. They had gotten used to the darkness.
No, the darkness made way to a three-and-a-half year old lavender unicorn filly, who sat in the backyard of her family's mansion. Despite city's protection the air was freezing - cold enough for the ground she was sitting on to be covered in snow - but the filly did not feel any of it.
At the tip of the filly's horn flickered a tiny spark, casting a small radius of purple light onto the ground.
It was, of cause a very poor source of light, compared to the sun that had once illuminated the entire country. Yet now, surrounded by eternal darkness in all directions it was something special.
Perhaps even rarer than the light was the spark flickering inside the small Unicorn, at the very centre of her soul and magic.
It was a spark young enough to be pure and unspoilt by the everlasting darkness and corruption and yet strong and bright enough to leap out into the world.
Exactly this kind of spark was, what she had spend endless years trying to suffocate.
She had mostly succeeded; there weren't many other sparks like this one out there.
Yet she was never really content. If just one spark survived and was roused properly, it could ignite into a fire. A fire that could spread. A fire that could eventually burn everything she had build in those eleven years since sunset.
-
"Are you sure about this?", asked the slightly older alabaster Unicorn colt sitting next to the filly.
His voice was a mixture of excitement and worry, both directed at his sister.
"Yes I am sure. Otherwise I wouldn't be doing this", she replied with absolute confidence.
"And you are completely certain you have everything under control? This is some pretty advanced magic."
The filly pouted. "You don't trust me!"
"It's not that, Twilight. I just don't want our garden to be on fire when you're done"
"Yes and I already told you that the spell is specifically designed to avoid that. It won't heat anything further than up to about fifteen degrees celsius. Seriously, Shining you worry too much. I've got everything under control."
"You can swear that this is completely safe?"
"I promise solemnly not to burn anything today." Twilight rolled her eyes, before adding a smirked "Probably" at her brother's expense. He was always so uptight and overcautious. Yet she still had a trump card to play. "You know, if you are so keen on clearing the garden by hoof, I can always leave you the snow in your half. You just have to ask."
"No no, no need," Shining replied hastily. "Just be careful!"
Twilight allowed herself a giggle. Her brother was quite predictable sometimes.
When he gave no further protest she raised her horn. "Alright, let's get started."
The flicker above her head brightened into a steady light, as Twilight concentrated on feeding energy to the spell.
At first not much seemed to happen, but after a few seconds the two siblings could feel heat radiating from the glowing violet orb.
Only now that the bone freezing coldness was replaced by gentle warmth, Twilight realized exactly how cold it had been earlier. She paused strengthening her spell for a few seconds to simply bask in it's light and let the rays of heat repress the numbness from her limbs. Soon, however, she couldn't take it anymore. She simply had to get on with her work, no matter how pleasant it might be to just sit and relax once a while.
She closed her eyes and brought the spell to full capacity. A sphere of violet energy radiated outwards from her horn and expanded across the area, simply evaporating the knee-deep snow in it's way to vapor within seconds.
Twilight opened her eyes and looked around. As intended the spell had stopped exactly at the property's edge, not touching the ground outside and leaving completely cleared, bare earth that was just beginning to unfreeze on the inside. Night Light could begin with the construction of the new greenhouse right away.
Twilight gave an excited squee. Magic was a totally awesome thing! She had just managed to do an afternoon's worth of work within a few seconds. And there were so many more possibilities. And all of it utterly complex, a puzzle just waiting to be solved. She could easily see herself spending weeks, if not month or years just committed to research on that topic alone.
Twilight felt a strange tingle to both of her flanks. She had a distant feeling that this should be really important somehow, but she didn't get to dwell on it, because in that moment something inside her unlocked and her eyes turned solid white.
Shining Armor had always known that his sister had a great potential for magic. But only now, that he was suddenly thrown across the garden by a lavender forcefield that had involuntarily lifted Twilight into the air and kept her suspended a meter above the ground he realized just how great it really was.
Wisps of magic cursed around the filly, who at this point was completely overwhelmed by the tremendous energies and well past any rational decision.
The magic veins leading to the horn on her head however were still set from the only recently cast spell and in that moment some instinctual part of her brain, in charge of preventing potentially deadly magic overloads, kicked in and pushed all the excess power into that one particular spell.
Her horn flared up brightly and with the sound of a sonic boom a violet wave of energy tore outwards. Whereas Twilight's first attempt at the spell had been controlled and even, a carefully calculated sphere, adjusted specifically for it's purpose and nothing else, this was a disrupted wall of clashing power, held alive by nothing but lot's and lot's of primal, unfocused energy. Unlike the first spell it didn't stop at the gardens edge, but instead washed over surrounding houses and continued past like nothing had been there at all. Only after several hundred meters in every direction the wave finally began to loose power and dissolved into small bands of magic that lingered for a few seconds before dispersing.
Even years later ponies would still talk about the day, when suddenly and accompanied by a bright violet light, the snow in part of Canterlot-east-resident-district had disappeared, to be replaced by moderate warmth and a low hanging cloud that would soon - for the first time in a decade - unleash the gathered vapour in gentle rainfall.
Shining Armor did not notice any of this. Instead, the moment the wave had vanished, he was already running over to his sister who had slumped down after her magic overexhaustion and was lying in the snow, unmovingly. "Twilight, are you okay?"
"I guess I am... ," came the weak answer, as the filly turned around to face him. "...Head hurts so much. What happened"
Shining took a slow look at his surroundings. "I guess you overdid that spell of yours a little," he responded at last. Then he noticed his sisters flank. "Looks like you also got your cutie mark."
"Really?" Twilight eyes filled with wonder. "What does it look like? Is it a good one? It's not weird, is it?" she asked, feeling too weak to turn around.
"No," Shining reassured her. "It is a star. A purple six pointed star surrounded by some smaller ones. I'd guess it's for your talent in magic. If you ask me, I'd say It's a pretty cool mark. And it fit's you."
"Wow"
"Twilight? Shining? Are you out there?"
