“Must…lick…horn,” Pinkie thought, her face an inch from Twilight’s sleeping head and her tongue starting to slip ever so slightly from her mouth. Then she pulled back, jerking away so quickly that she was lucky not to have gotten whiplash.
“No!” she said to herself. “I promised Princess Celestia that I wouldn’t lick anypony’s horns without permission.” She didn’t particularly want to be turned to stone again, although she did admittedly doubt the level of strictness that Princess Celestia would truly be willing to show with regards to this. Would Celestia really leave her locked in stone for years like Discord? It seemed highly unlikely.
But Pinkie had still promised, and friends didn’t break their promises. Even if it wasn’t technically a “Pinkie promise,” she had still said the whole “stick a cupcake in my eye” thing, and sticking cupcakes in ponies’ eyes was serious business. If only somepony would let her lick his or her horn…
Backing farther away from Twilight’s bed and slipping out the window, Pinkie's mind went into overdrive. What exactly had she promised, again? “I promise not to lick any more unicorn – or alicorn – horns unless I have permission to.” Unless she had permission to…
Unless she had permission to…
“Eureka!” Pinkie shouted to no pony in particular. She had a plan, though it involved breaking into Twilight’s house for the second time that night. Eh…no big deal. If she was caught, she’d just claim that she was throwing a surprise slumber party or something – that excuse had always worked before.
Climbing back through another window, Pinkie began to search through the shelves of Twilight’s library. Where was that book? Climbing up a ladder to search the higher shelves, Pinkie accidentally knocked a book onto the floor. This didn't cause a particularly loud noise, but in the quiet space of the house, the drop may still have been noticeable. Pinkie froze.
A minute or so later, Spike walked into the room, rubbing his eyes in exhaustion. He had stayed up late reading the latest Power Ponies comic that night, and had only been in bed for about an hour and a half. Looking right at Pinkie, he asked, “What are you doing?” It didn’t sound accusatory at all, but more like a thing that he just felt he had to ask.
“Nothing. You’re still asleep,” Pinkie said, drawing out each word. “This is a dream,” she said, waving her forelegs around in the air in a mystical way. Unfortunately, this unbalanced her a little too much and she nearly fell off the ladder. “Oops,” she whispered to herself as she grabbed back on and tried to steady it.
“Oh, okay,” Spike said, having nearly fallen asleep where he stood. As he walked away, his eyes drifted farther and farther closed until he collapsed in the doorway to the room. It was at this moment that the ladder came crashing down, but Pinkie had already jumped out of the way and landed unhurt. Nevertheless, that had surely awoken Twilight, even if it somehow hadn’t awoken Spike.
Looking around and trying to decide what to do, Pinkie’s eyes locked on the book that had initially fallen to the floor. What luck! It was the one she’d been looking for, anyway. Quickly grabbing it, she raced out of the library just moments between Twilight entered the room and found it empty.
“This must be how Rainbow Dash felt when she was retrieving that Daring Do book from the hospital!” Pinkie thought to herself. Well, perhaps not exactly, but somewhere along those lines, anyway.
Before long, she had arrived back at Sugarcube Corner and raced to her room. Opening the book, she quickly found the spot where it said, “From one to another, another to one. A mark of one's destiny singled out alone, fulfilled.” While Pinkie didn’t have the magical ability to cast this spell herself, she had something else in mind.
Pulling a large pink eraser – the same color as her hair – from her mane, she carefully erased the next part of the spell, which had been added by Twilight: “From all of us together, together we're friends. With the marks of our destinies made one, there is magic without end!” Soon, there was no trace of it. Then she wrote it back into the book in her own hoofwriting…
Nothing happened.
Pinkie frowned. Surely that should have worked – it was all that Twilight had done, wasn’t it? What had she done wrong? The only significant difference that she could think of was the fact that she hadn’t actually cast the spell herself, but that should just mean that she wouldn’t need to bother with the whole going-around-town-and-reminding-her-friends-of-their-true-destinies thing, right?
Oh. Wait.
Pinkie picked her writing implement back up and dotted the “i” of "magic." The moment the pencil scraped the paper, there was a huge flash of light and she found herself lifted into the air. It was working! It was mildly disappointing that her friends weren’t around to witness her ascension, but they would see what had happened in the morning.
After a few moments in which she wasn’t sure whether or not she was imagining the highly dramatic music surrounding her, she was lowered back to the ground. Rushing to the nearest mirror in anticipation, she screamed in delight.
Now that she was an alicorn, she could give herself permission to lick her own horn!
Nearly shivering with excitement, she inched her tongue slowly out of her mouth and toward her new cranial appendage. This was going to be so amazing! What would it taste like? Maybe cotton candy? She couldn’t wait to try it!
But then, disaster struck. Just a few millimeters away from the base of her horn, her tongue stopped moving. “No!” Pinkie thought to herself. “NOOOO!” She tried to force it out more, even tried to push it upwards with one of her front hooves, but it simply couldn’t go any farther. “NOOOOOOO!” she screamed, loud enough to wake half the citizens of Ponyville.
For the rest of the night, Pinkie sulked in a corner of her room, devastated. The only consolation she could think of was the fact that, as an alicorn, she could probably do some sort of spell to lengthen her tongue or bend her horn once she learned how to do so. But it still didn’t help her now…
The next day, Pinkie toured the entirety of Ponyville, half-heartedly showing off her new form and receiving many confused congratulations from the townsfolk. This should have been a good day, but it wasn’t. Oh, it wasn’t. After the initial shock and surprise had worn off, everypony else seemed to have only one thing on their minds…
And no pony, not even Princess Celestia, would tell her how it tasted.
The End
