A Canterlot Unicorn in Princess Platinum's Court

PART ONE: THE PRINCESS AND THE WITCH

CHAPTER ONE v2

IMPOLITE SOCIETY

I was lying on the grass in the shadow of an oak tree, not entirely asleep but at the same time not awake. All around me was a great and overgrown valley. I could hear, but not see, a brook burbling nearby, and the whole of the sky was dominated by the Canterhorn, all but blotting out the sun with its bulk. Remembering all at once how I'd come to be there, I jolted to my feet. It was only then that I realized that I wasn't alone.

A mare stood expectantly some yards away. A helmet covered the whole of her head, with only a narrow slit for her to see out of, and with a spike on top to cover her horn - or at least I assumed, because she could as easily have been an earth pony with a fondness for sharp headgear. The whole of her body was covered in chain mail, and, strangest of all, she wore long, green ribbons all along her muzzle and sides. "Hail thee from Canterlot, fair maid, or yet farther afield?" she said, her accent thick and impossible to place. "Hark, for beasts and mongrels roam these hills. Make haste, lest the night catch thee out."

I didn't reply at first, being too busy staring at her helmet, but being quite sharp (if I do say so myself), I registered the fact that she was speaking in Old Equestrian, and without any fuss grasped the entirety of the situation; being that I was being accosted by either an ill-fated time traveller brought forward from, judging by her dialect, at least a thousand years previously, or else the poor thing was a madmare - a mad historian, judging by the accuracy of her getup - convinced she was in ancient Unicornia.

Belatedly, I said, "um, yes, Canterlot!".

The mare gave a courteous bow, ribbons fluttering elegantly in a sudden breeze that sent my magical senses prickling. She turned, then, and trotted imperiously in the direction of the Canterhorn, and I scrambled to my feet and followed.

We walked in silence for some time, and I became aware that the sun was not rising, but setting. Moreover, it was getting larger in the sky, and in fact was steadily falling. Moreover that, it was fall toward us. My host seemed unmoved by this sight, so I kept quiet.

And so it transpired that we arrived at the magnificent walled city of Canterlot, and I finally deduced that I had traveled into the distant past. In fact, I could put specific years to it, because Princess Celestia had torn down the walls of Canterlot at the start of her reign twenty six hundred years before I was born.

At this point I was having kittens, of course, for what I feel were perfectly valid reasons. Presently, my host drew up beside me and spoke, which startled me out of my skin, figuratively speaking.

"What sickens thee?" she asked. "Anguish suits not a mare so beautiful, nor fear, nor any malaise nor mania under the Sun-"

(It's worth noting that romantic poetry was very much in style at the time. Though to modern ears it may sound like she was hitting on me - and, in fact, that's exactly the conclusion I came to at the time - really that's just how they talked to each other in Canterlot twenty-nine hundred years ago.)

"-If any favor could bring ease to your heart, then only speak and it shall be done."

"Oh, no, that's fine," I said. Then, "it's just I said I was from Canterlot, but now I realize I was just confused and I'm not from Canterlot at all. I'm from somewhere else. Very far away."

"Ah!" she said, then lifted her visor to shoot me a winning smile. The moment she released it, it fell back over her face with a resounding crash, drowning out whatever she was saying. Without stopping or repeating herself, she finished, "-present yourself in audience before the Princess, that she may know tidings of our cousins."

I nodded, partly because I wasn't clear on whether I had a choice in the matter, mostly because of a hard-ingrained tendency towards obedience when princesses were involved.

By now my hooves were aching horribly, dust had caked itself on my hooves and fetlocks, and I was sweating in a most unpleasant way. I'd never walked from the bottom of the Canterhorn up to Canterlot itself, being privileged with the services of a chariot whenever I had to travel.  I felt that Canterlot must have been much higher in the air, possibly due to some sort of erosion - or, alternatively, it was distantly possible that I was out of shape. To make matters worse the sun had drawn very close, and seemed poised to set directly on top of the Canterhorn, perhaps Canterlot itself. Its heat was making itself known, and for the first time I could remember Canterlot was actually warm as opposed to some variation on "too cold."

And so, almost reflexively, I muttered a spell. It was a spell I'd cast just about every day since I'd learned it, something they taught in the third year at Princess Celestia's School for Gifted Unicorns: Solomane's Nameless Spell. It was a stupefyingly complicated affair, and yet drop-dead easy to cast; designed to bring the air directly around me to the optimally comfortable temperature, without keeping the air from moving naturally or altering the temperature of the air surrounding that air. Star Swirl himself once called it Solomane's greatest achievement. We rarely notice how much effort went into the simple things we use every day. Clocks, irrigation, the sun.

Obviously this turned out to be important later.

Canterlot itself had changed surprisingly little in the intervening millennia, at least on the ground. It ran out of horizontal space to expand to shortly after its founding, and since then it had really only ever built up. Many of the buildings were the same ones I'd grown up with, only shorter and covered in slightly fewer or more glittering jewels.

The palace, however, was different. A tiered hall of glittering marble a hundred meters high, streaked with veins of pink. The roof of each tier overflowed with greenery, trees and orchards practically spilling out off the edge. Seven towers jutted from the top, each topped with a gold dome. Two double doors, each tall enough to fit a dragon and wide enough for ten ponies to stand abreast, stood side by side at the end of a long and elegant bridge separating the town from the palace. Vines cast in silver crisscrossed the doors, which were dominated by two enormous knockers emblazoned with the symbol of the sun.

About as big as the biggest ordinary buildings I'd ever seen. Definitely larger than the Prench palace, and it certainly dwarfed the Trottingham Palace, which was a museum in the present - that is to say, the future. A palace fit for a princess, definitely.

It was, by my estimate, about a quarter the size of Princess Celestia's palace, not counting the gardens.

Hardly fair, since I was pretty sure Canterlot was a city state at this point whereas Equestria was an extremely wealthy, very ancient, very large principality with the benefit of quite a bit technological and magical advancement. Still less than impressive when you knew what would be there later.

The armored mare, and frankly at this point there was no sense not calling her a dame*, since that was clearly what she was, took hold of both door knockers in her magic, ringing them against the doors with a tremendous crash. We waited in silence, and I was about to ask if it was possible no one was home when the doors came open with ponderous slowness.

The dame in the lead, we entered the hall.