Truth and Lies: Mistakes

Celestia shot upright in her bed, gasping for breath. Her head was relentlessly pounding. She rubbed her hooves into her temples in a futile attempt to relieve the pressure behind her eyes. The ancient alicorn had felt something she hadn’t felt in a long, long time. She had even nearly forgotten about it’s existence. Her eyes were wide in shock.

“The… vault… Somepony opened the vault!” Celestia cringed as her own voice caused white hot pain to stab through her brain. It felt as if somepony was standing on her head and drilling into her scalp with a jackhammer.

Whimpering, she helplessly curled into a tight ball and waited for it to pass. Tears welled up in the corners of her eyes, the pain was so intense. Luckily for the princess, it subsided just as fast as it had come.

Celestia panted as she tried to catch her breath. She felt drained. Not tired, but like her magic had been drained from her body. She couldn’t even move, much less cast a scrying spell to find who had been foolish enough to open the old archive vault. There were too many dangerous secrets in that vault. Any one of them falling into the wrong hooves could spell disaster for Equestria.

“Who... could have possibly been ignorant enough to open the vault?” Celestia whispered to herself. “It’s sealed with alicorn level arcane magic, just like the one here in Canterlot. Besides, it’s not as if there are any alicorns ignorant enough about it to have tried to-...” The alicorn seized up as realization dawned on her like the early morning sun.

“Twilight!” Celestia screamed and leaped out of bed.

“This is incredible! I’ve never even heard of some of these spells!” Twilight exclaimed as she read through the perfectly preserved writings of one of the greatest unicorns of his time. The alicorn herself was back in the vast library of the Castle of the Two Sisters, sprawled out on an old cushion she had cleaned off with her magic. The journal she had found was wide open on the floor in front of her.

Twilight flipped through a few pages, the corners glowing in a purple aura. Eventually the writings came to an abrupt end. The remaining third of the pages were left completely blank. She thumbed through them aimlessly, until something flashed across Twilight’s vision.

She stopped immediately.

“Hello… What have we here?” She looked over the vastly complex layout of the one page that had managed to catch her keen eye. It was odd, to say the least. The diagram of the spell circle showed relations to a summoning spell, but the center held a complex design she had never seen before. It confused Twilight to no end.

She lifted the page with the circle in an attempt to find some sort of explanation of it, but all she found were empty, blank pages.

Twilight hummed in irritation. Why would Starswirl create a spell circle this complex and leave out every possible bit of information on it? Furthermore, where were the runes? Every magically inclined unicorn knows a spell circle can’t function without proper runes to hold the magic in the circle. The circle itself was simply to channel the magic in whatever direction is required by the spell.

Without these two very important aspects, one or the other would simply be a pretty picture or an unreadable language. The spell would then either sputter out or explode, depending on what the function of the spell was originally intended to do.

But why was it just randomly placed amongst a sea of blank canvases?

Twilight chewed on her lower lip as she lost herself in thought. Her ever expanding knowledge of magic was then brought forth into the cascading curiosity that is her thought path. She knew exactly what the outer ring of the circle was meant to do. It’s design was intended to summon a solid object, be it organic or inanimate, but what it summoned and where it summoned it from was decided by the second and center layer.

The second layer, on the other hoof, was normally a representation of a certain point in space. This one seemed to be a representation of interdimensional travel. There was no way to tell what dimension, unless one knew what exactly the center layer represents.

And that was Twilight’s current problem. Without knowing what the center layer was meant to do, she couldn’t add the proper runes. This only seemed to frustrate the young alicorn further.

Based on her current knowledge of interdimensional magic, the placing of the runes would be fairly simple. The same goes for the summoning ring. The runes would be simply used to spiral the magic in a specific direction. What direction would be determined by the shape of the layers of the circle.

Twilight’s curiosity soon got the better of her.

She stood from her slightly comfortable cushion and walked to middle of the stone floor of the library. The journal floated next to her, suspended in her magic. Using a chunk of corroded stone that had crumbled from one of the many walls, she began drawing the circle on the floor. She copied each and every line perfectly on a much larger scale than in the book.

Next, Twilight drew ancient spell runes in two of the three layers of the circle. She was then left with the problem of the center, and final layer.

Twilight snorted in irritation and rubbed her temples as she stared at the confusing drawing. “What is it missing...?” Her eyes flicked frantically over the complex circle, as if the answer to her problem would just jump out and say ‘Here I am!’.

In a random fit of irritation, Twilight marked down three runes around the very center of the third layer of the circle. Each rune represented a limit to how much power would be allowed to flow through it. It was a safety precaution, just in case the spell was meant to summon something rather nasty.

Despite her precautions, Twilight was shivering. There were a number of ways this could go wrong and every one of them shifted through her head. Her thoughts were abruptly interrupted by a tugging in her mind. Remembering it was the magic she had absorbed from before, Twilight let it pull her gaze toward the circle.

A feeling of warmth and comfort washed over her, calming every fear that had reared it’s ugly head. Something caught her eye that she hadn’t seen a moment before.

“The center circle is reversed… That means it reverses polarity the moment the magic reaches the center.” Twilight whispered to herself. She scratched her chin thoughtfully. “That means my runes are wrong.”

Twilight trotted to the center ring of the spell circle and erased the three runes, before redrawing them in reversed order. She looked it over again to make sure she wasn’t forgetting anything, but nothing else caught her attention. Satisfied, she resumed her place outside of the drawing, making sure she had a clear way of escape beforehoof.

The lavender alicorn let out a deep breath as she readied her magic, her horn slowly glowing brighter as she channeled intense amounts of magic into it. It was an easy feat for an alicorn such as herself.

“Here goes nothing…”

Twilight angled her horn toward the drawing of the summoning circle and charged up even more magic. A vortex of her own power began spiraling around her, increasing speed with every passing moment. Wind from the vortex kicked up dust and debris, as well as forcefully blowing the pages of the aged journal, which was still floating in her aura.

She grit her teeth as she released the pent up energy. A beam of pure purple arcane power arked from her horn and funneled itself into the circle. The runes ignited the same color purple as they forced the magic to bend and shape to their specifications.

But something was off. Twilight could feel it in the way the spell latched onto her magic and forced it from her, like a starving changeling would if it were stealing love. She gasped and tried to cut off the flow of power from her horn, but it was no use. She tried yanking her head away, but it held her there.

Twilight panicked. “No! No no no no! L-let me go! No!”

Her vision began to blur as more of her reserves were drained, forcing her to her knees. Her breathing became labored as her strength was drained by the second. She could no longer focus on the spiraling vortex of power that steadily grew from the circle she had created and soon all she could see was the stone floor as it rose up to meet her snout.

She blacked out.

Twilight moaned as her peaceful sleep was interrupted by a bright light. She didn’t want to get up. The blankets were so warm. The mattress was so soft. She tossed and turned in her struggle to stay asleep, pulling the blankets over her head.

She groaned when her efforts grew fruitless. Throwing off her warm cover, Twilight sat up in her bed. She yawned loudly and rubbed the sleep from her eyes, while stretching her painfully stiff wings. If there was one thing she hated about having wings, it was how cramped they could get if one didn’t move them often enough.

Which meant stiff wings was an everyday morning issue for Twilight.

Twilight held her head in her forehooves and yanked it to the side, sighing as she felt the kink in her neck pop. “Ahhh… Much better…” She finally opened her eyes to take a look at her surroundings. Her eyes snapped wide open in surprise. “W-why… Why am I in Celestia’s bed?”

She glanced around frantically, searching for any sign of her former mentor, but she was alone. She rubbed her temple as her sluggish mind attempted to wrap itself around the situation. She didn’t remember being in Canterlot last night.

Memories of a crumbling castle and an ancient book drifted lazily through her mind. Something clicked. “The spell!” Twilight screamed. She frantically searched her horn for any injuries and checked her arcane reserves. Nothing was damaged.

This only served to confuse the young alicorn.

“Could I of dreamt it?” Twilight asked herself, while rubbing her horn with a forehoof. She glanced to one of the windows. A thick golden curtain covered it, but light still leaked through the fabric.

It’s definitely morning. What happened?

It was at that very moment that Twilight felt something shift in the bed next to her. She squealed in surprise and fell out of the bed, only to land in a heap on the floor. Unluckily for her, Celestia had wanted hardwood floors for her personal chambers. Her cherished head smacked against the hard surface, causing her vision to swim along with dull pain.

“A-are… are you alright?”

Through the swiming of her mind, Twilight thought she had heard a voice. That couldn’t be right, could it? She was alone, wasn’t she?

“Are you hurt?”

Twilight groaned and looked up at where she fell from, noticing the soft sheets wrapped around her hind leg. She then looked up at the small pony standing at the edge of the mattress with a worried look on his face. He was familiar, but only slightly. His coat was a deep blue, almost a navy, and his mane was a dull silver. His gray eyes stared down at her.

Twilight’s eyes grew wide as saucers.

There’s a foal in Celestia’s bed with me! Why would I have woken up in Celestia’s bed with a foal!? Is he mine!? Am I a mother and I completely forgot the last however many years!? If not mine, who’s is he!? What’s going on!?

She screamed.