Lyra's World

A cutie mark is a funny thing. On the one hoof, it’s tied to your inclinations and talents, and appears as a representation of your spirit’s focus. So one might assume that a cutie mark is immutable, at least by outside pressure, and that the only way to change a cutie mark is to so traumatize a pony’s spirit that nothing is left but insanity. And that works! Insanity cutie marks are a thing.

But there are other ways to change them, directly, using magic. When that happens, a pony’s inclination and talent sort of changes with it. This takes weird magic, admittedly, that most unicorns can’t learn – the easiest way is a zebra potion based on Heart’s Desire. The Heart’s Desire potion adds random cutie marks, and they manifest mentally as a compulsion – it’s clumsy and straightforward, and even the pony experiencing it can recognize it as an outside force acting on them.

My cutie mark was changed by the mirror pool. Nopony knew what that meant. I didn’t feel any different, at first.

But when I went to the park – in a light sundress to cover my cutie mark, since I was kind of embarrassed about the whole ordeal – and sat on the bench, and summoned my lyre, everything just felt off. It started with the summoning spell – I’d cast the spell thousands of times, to the point where it was basically reflex, but this time it didn’t work. I tried it again, focusing on the steps and making sure to do them in order, and that time my lyre appeared. It took more out of me than it should have, because it’s always less efficient to do a spell by the numbers instead of just letting it flow through you smoothly.

I played a few simple chords, satisfying myself that at least basic telekinesis hadn’t failed me, and then tried to let myself drift off into the comfortable fugue state where I could sit and play for hours.

Instead, I found myself watching the clouds. For hours.

Every so often, I’d remember my lyre, and strum at it randomly, but there was nothing resembling a song.

That night, I locked myself in my room and pulled out all my old music books, and flipped through them one after another, reassuring myself that I hadn’t forgotten everything I’d ever known about music. I played through the exercises – arpeggios, chordal progressions – and then moved on to song after song.

I could still play. I hadn’t lost that. But before I got through my entire collection, I got bored. I wanted to stop. It took an effort to slog through the sheet music, and the hardest pieces, where the notes had to flow off the lyre too quickly for sight-reading, that I’d always just felt… it just came out as a muddled mess.

I threw my lyre against the wall, gouging a chunk out of the plaster, then screamed and flung it around the room, smashing it against the furniture and the walls and anything else that happened to get in its way. It wasn’t damaged or anything – the frame is a solid chunk of metal – but I put some holes in the walls, scratched up my bedframe, and only stopped when I shattered the window, and the cool night breeze ruffled through my mane and calmed me down.

I couldn’t be a weather pony. I didn’t know the spells! There were only a few that were good for anything except actually changing the weather, and that was done by professionals who did it for a living. There was no hobbyist weather-magic scene, because there was only one sky.

There was only one spell I knew that was even vaguely weather related. So I lit my horn, and cast Woodwinds.

I watched the clouds for hours today…
I watched them drifting by.
The sunlight shining through the gaps,
The soaring pegasi.

The wind whistled in tune as I sang.

The song that sang inside me
Has vanished into air.
I reach inside myself and find
There’s nothing really there

Except the clouds…

The wind gusted through my mane as I stuck my head out the shattered window, my hooves on the sill, the gentle tones building in a crescendo.

Except the sky…

The moonlit streets of Ponyville rippled, as the clouds drifted across the face of the moon.

Except the wind…

I leapt out the window, and a sudden flurry of musical wind swirled around me, setting me gently to the ground even as it tore flowers from the garden and straw from the roof. The trees bent, their creaking and the cracking of their branches forming a percussive beat.

Except the rain…

There was a faint flash of lightning from the dark clouds that now blotted out the moon and stars, and a few scattered raindrops pattered across my coat. The thunder rumbled through me, and, horn ablaze, I sang.

Except the stoooooorm!

Lightning flashed, once, twice, three times, leaving huge scorch marks in the cobblestones and the grass, and then a flash of rainbow light tackled me to the ground, ending the spell and the song both, as my horn was pressed painfully into the dirt.

The wind stilled, the music stopped, but the rain only got harder. When I came out of the daze from the spell backfire, I was lying in freezing mud, the only warmth coming from the pony pinning me to the ground.

“Lyra?” Rainbow Dash asked. “What are you doing?”

===

What I wasn’t doing was joining the weather team. They let me try again a few times under controlled conditions, but I could never get the Woodwinds spell to do the weather I wanted, which was kind of important if I was going to help them stick to the schedule. It didn’t even do the same thing every time. Worse, it had a tendency to pull everypony – or at least every pegasus – into a huge weather-themed montage and that’s something that’s only fun once or twice a year.

So there was no way around it. If I was going to get any use out of my new cutie mark, I was going to have to hit the books and learn some real weather spells. That, or stay in the Night Guard armor full time and learn pegasus-style weather management as a bat pony. I decided to go with the spells since if I did ever fix my cutie mark, I’d probably still be able to cast them, and maybe they’d come in handy someday.

“I’m not sure this is a good idea,” Twilight said, as she helped me find some books on weather magic. “When my friends’ cutie marks were switched, we fixed them by having them practice their old skills until they realized what they were actually good at.”

I blinked. “I thought you fixed them by completing Star Swirl’s last spell and turning yourself into an Alicorn.”

Twilight chuckled. “Other way around. I know you feel like you should be doing weather magic, but maybe you shouldn’t give up on music so quickly? You could join the Ponytones.”

“I understand what you’re saying, but I really don’t want to,” I said, flopping onto the couch. “Music just seems so tedious – I want to control the weather!”

“But don’t you want to want to make music again?” Twilight asked.

I had to think about that. “Not especially,” I said. “My career was going nowhere, and none of the things that were going well in my life had anything to do with music. There’s plenty of room for artistry in cloud-sculpting and other weather-related fields, so it’s not like I’m giving up on any of my dreams. I’m just flowing down a new channel, after the storm washed out the bank on the old one.”

“So if Zecora walked through that door right now with a potion that could give you back your old cutie mark, you’d say ‘no thanks’?”

I laughed. “Oh, no, I’d rather go back to the way I was instead of learning a whole new field from scratch. I hate studying!”

Suddenly, Zecora walked through the door, holding a basket with a strange glowing potion.

I gave Twilight a look. “Is that the strangely specific hypothetical you just asked me about a second ago?”

“Maybe!” Twilight said, setting the weather books on the reading table in front of the couch. “How do you feel about having your spirit ripped out of your body and cast into an abyss of endless chaos?”