I paced back and forth in Twilight Sparkle’s sitting room, waiting for the Princess of Friendship and erstwhile bearer of the Element of Magic to come to a decision. For sure, this wasn’t a decision Twilight could make lightly, as the memories alone of the last time something like this happened were likely to be uneasy ones. The question? “Will you help me get over my thaumaphobia by teaching me to understand and use unicorn magic?”

See, both of my daughters were born unicorns. They got magic surges like every other baby unicorns. When you’re a thaumaphobe—for very legitimate reasons!—it’s kind of hard not to flinch every time one of them accidentally blinked herself on top of one of the cabinets, or ended up walking through a solid wall into the neighbor’s apartment. Now that they were five, I wanted to be able to interact with them without having an anxiety attack every time they practiced magic or had another post-infancy magical surge.

That’s why I came up with this transformative potion. It allowed me, if only for a few hours, to become a unicorn again. I could see the world as my daughters see it. If I learned to use magic for myself, I’d be able to practice with the girls. What better way to kick this fear of magic in the teeth than to be able to do magic in a safe environment with ponies who I know would never hurt me? I needed to be able to look at the pointy ponies and not see Aqua Regia behind their eyes.

The sitting room door opened, and in stepped Princess Twilight. “Good morning, Silver,” she said, offering a warm smile. She gestured to one of the room’s couches before sitting down herself. “It’s so good to see you again.”

“Yeah,” I replied, sitting down opposite of her. It was unfairly paranoid of me, but I couldn’t deny that my eye drifted up to her horn for a moment. “I don’t think we’ve actually seen each other face to face since Pinkie threw that “It’s a girl!” party for Cadance and Shining Armor.” I frowned for a moment before looking away. “Or was it the time I proposed the Genesis Project to Princesses Celestia and Luna?”

“It’s actually been longer than that,” she agreed, rubbing her chin with her hoof as if deep in thought. “It had to have been just after the summit a few years ago. I remember seeing you with your two fillies.”

Her horn lit, and an image of an exhausted-looking me was projected on the wall. In that image, two unconscious unicorn fillies were draped over my back. I watched the image, drinking in the details. The Silver Script of the past was sporting a unsurprised mixture of singed fur and mane, as well as a few spots where sick had matted into her fur before she could get back to her apartment to wash it out.

For a short moment, though, the eyes of my daughters were wide open and staring right at me, like four inky pools of the abyss. The Silver in the projection turned to regard me with cold, lifeless eyes. Her mouth opened, but instead of speaking, her tongue boiled out of her mouth in rivulets of vitreous black liquid. Still, the words were plain on her lips. “I left them to die.”

I blinked as the image returned to normal before fading away. What was that? I wondered, rubbing at my mildly sleep-deprived eye. Some sort of hybrid manifestation of my sleep deprivation from working too hard on Genesis and my own inherent distrust of magic? There was no way to know for sure, but I put it aside nonetheless. Twilight was a good, smart mare; she’d never torment me like that. Thinking she would is what led to that whole mess years ago.

Twilight watched me intently, seemingly gauging my reaction to her use of magic. “You’re definitely doing better with your fear response,” she comments before looking away. “That being said, you have to realize that it’s impossible to learn practical unicorn magic without a horn, nor do I have the experience or practice necessary to teach you griffon or goat magic. It’s not like I can just arrange for you to swap bodies with somepony every time we have a lesson.”

I figured she’d say something like that, which is why I came prepared. “Twilight, Twilight, Twilight,” I chided, dipping my muzzle into my saddlebag, withdrawing a potion flask. “Someone once said that one sure mark of a fool is to dismiss anything outside of their experience as being impossible.” A smirk split my face as I held the flask between my forehooves. “Do you think I would have asked you if I didn’t already have some sort of plan?”

Her eyes flicked to my flask with mixed suspicion and wonderment before a confused look crossed her face. “Didn’t you once go on public record stating that your transformatives couldn’t successfully give a non-unicorn a functional horn, just as they couldn’t give non-pegasi flight-capable wings?” That confused look sours as she realizes that I was trying to keep my work low profile. “I can understand lying to keep your research safe, but you couldn’t have even told me in our correspondences?”

I shook my head, popping the top off the flask and taking a swig. “I don’t have a dragon to securely send messages, Twilight. Anypony could intercept my letters, and as foal-proofed as my own study is, it doesn’t have anywhere the security as the labs provided for the Genesis project,” I said with a pleading tone, even as my wings pulled painfully into my body and a single point of boiling agony erupted in the center of my forehead. “I’m too high profile as it is thanks to my gene therapies and Genesis; if word got out that I could let a pony spend even a few hours in the horseshoes of one of the other races, can you honestly say those who would aim to misuse it wouldn’t take undue interest?”

Twilight’s expression softened. “You’re protecting your daughters...”

As my wings finished absorbing back into my body and the spike of bone completed its shaping, I nodded. With just the slightest motion, I was painfully reminded of my lack of wings, but that wasn’t nearly enough to distract from what I was now feeling. With every movement of my head, I could feel the ebb and flow of magic all around me. Even ignoring the gigantic beacon of magic sitting across from me, there was still a lot of magic moving all around me.

On some base level, I knew I was feeling a mixture of the Castle’s ambient magics—being magical in origin and all—as well as Equestria’s own native magical field. It was like being deaf, only to be able to suddenly be able to hear. Magic was all around me, just as it had been the day I first got here: a comforting reminder that not all magic was out to hurt me. At the same time, though, all of those instances of traumata and irrational fear screamed in the back of my mind.

How overpowering it all was must have either shown on my face or in my breathing, because the next thing I knew, Twilight was right beside me, a reassuring hoof firmly between my shoulder blades. “Breathe, Silver. You’re safe here.” I looked into her eyes and saw her the soft smile, and knew it was true. I could accidentally blow off my own horn here and I’d still be in good hooves. “It’s pretty intense, isn’t it?”

I swallowed the lump in my throat and nodded. “It wasn’t at all like this when I was in Lyra’s body,” I pointed out, staring up at the tip of my newly grown horn. “Every seems so much more vibrant...” My ears twitched each and every way, tugged in several different directions by my new state of awareness. “The crystal all around us is singing with magic, and you yourself are like a blinding beacon—no, a nova—of magic. How can I not have noticed any of this before?”

Twilight seemed to ponder my question for a while before settling on an answer. “I think that you never really noticed when you were in possession of Lyra’s body because you’d already had some of her memories and mannerisms imparted by the redundant memory backup all unicorns have because of their horns.”

Again, her horn lit up, a representation of Lyra Heartstrings appearing on the wall along with the words experience, and passive awareness. “Lyra was born a unicorn, and as such, is used to the presence of magic everywhere. Like most unicorns, it’s just a sense that they tend to focus inward for spellcasting to such a degree that everything ‘outside’ of them barely registers unless they actively look for it.”

“Kinda like the imprecise scrying those goons used the night they took me from my dorm room,” I remarked, a tear welling up in the corner of my uncovered eye. “The mage who was with the griffons wasn’t sure if I was alone or not, because Blossom and I had shared the same bed that night. We just seemed like one mass of magic.”

A nod from the princess confirmed my suspicions. “I suppose the logical first step would be to train you to shut out everything that is irrelevant,” she said. A smile creased her face, and then she clapped her hooves together. “I’ve never taught a pony magic before; teaching an adult could definitely be fun.

~ 05 ~

Throughout the scattered encounters over the years, Twilight and I had many such sessions together. We started with the basics of levitation first, and then branched out into advanced manipulation. Likely due to my own specialization in alchemy and being a pegasus at heart, I took easier to the manipulation of fluids and air compared to fire and earth. Don’t get me wrong, starting a fire or using tectonic forces to bring up a slab of granite for protection was relatively easy, but you couldn’t always be able to pull up rocks to protect yourself, and involuntary arson could easily be achieved without better control of flames.

If there’s one thing I do know about all this time practicing magic and being exposed to it in a safe domain definitely is doing a lot to supplement the therapy I’ve been receiving. Granted, my new therapist doesn’t know about the full extent of my ‘exposure therapy’, only that the famed Princess of Friendship is helping me; if I told her I was getting more comfortable with magic by becoming a unicorn, she might just have me committed... again. Needless to say, by the time my girls were ten, their mom was no longer flinching involuntarily when they’d use their magic.

I spent whatever time I could practicing in private, though potion stock limits, motherhood, and my own obligations as the primary alchemist in the Crystal Empire often meant I’d have days or weeks where I’d be unable to take the potion and keep my skills sharp. Once or twice a year, I’d travel down to ponyville on the pretense of Seeing Lyra, Bon-Bon and my god-daughter Honeydew. We’d spar a bit, talk theory, and then see if there was any new magic I could pick up. I’d never win, not for lack of trying, and I never really picked up more than telekinesis, and a range of air and water manipulation spells, but it was fun.

Today was the tenth anniversary of this whole arrangement, and Twilight had decided to do something special to commemorate it. As she led me down to the large room that had served as our practice chamber for many years, I couldn’t help but ponder what Twilight had planned. I mean, for all the times we’d sparred together since I became proficient with the domains I’d managed to learn, there were always two glaring problems that prevented us from having a real duel. Because her magic was goddess tier and therefore leagues above my own, Twilight always had to hold back to make things ‘fair’. Likewise, I couldn’t fight with the ferocity of the scared and confused mare all those years ago for fear of hurting my friend and a Princess of Equestria.

“I know we’ve both had to hold back a lot in our sparring matches, and that’s always bothered you,” she said, pulling open the door with her magic. “That’s why I decided to spend some time poring through the records in Canterlot pertaining to the Old Coltosseum. They had many fascinating spells in place to keep all ponies, audience and competitors alike, quite safe. They’re not your garden variety wards, either; spells and impacts will dissipate harmlessly against the opponent, leaving only a lasting numbness at the point of contact.”

“An energy suppression field, then?” I asked, reminded of a dueling arena in a video game I’d played so very long ago. “Were either of us to wield blades, the wards would dull the blades so that neither of us would bleed or die, but still incapacitate us to some degree, right?”

Twilight nodded, before pointing to the wards inscribed in the four cardinal compass points in the otherwise circular room. “That said, the Coltosseum kept a firm boundary on what areas were okay for combat,” she explained. “There, the wards were usually just inside the walls separating the audience from the combattants. Anyone leaving the boundaries during a match would be numbed to the point of being unable to stand, and would either be counted as a forfeit, or technical knock-out, depending.”

A smile spread across my face. “This sounds fun,” I replied, dropping my bags just inside the door and taking my potion. “That solves the problem of not wanting to hurt you, but what about you? Your magic is probably strong enough to overload these wards and pop my head like a grape.”

“Celestia and Luna used to participate in the gladiatorial games all those centuries ago.” A wry smile could never hide her mental eye-roll from me; I never ascended to alicornhood nor received a title, but damned if I’m not the self-proclaimed Princess of Snark. Plus, as a mom, I knew when my kids would roll their eyes at me, regardless of whether or not they were looking at me. “There are certain rituals that they perform in order to suppress their magic, even today, they use them so that they can keep their skills sharp without destroying entire tracts of countryside.”

I wonder when I actually realized I was dreaming, remembering? I wondered as I mentally detached from my body to watch the upcoming duel. Was it that freaky thing with the projection, or experiencing a decade of memories in moments? The scene rippled even as I watched myself step into the sparring ring. The me of the past spouted off some witty line about her not being Rainbow, but Twilight still being way too slow. In a blinding flash, Twilight entered the ring opposite of her.

It’s all I can do but to watch passively as Silver starts her routine. Rather than making any immediate aggression, she slowly circled the perimeter of the ring. Her horn aglow, she began pulling moisture from the air, condensing it into globules of water, and then into javelins of ice. The dozen frigid projectiles orbited her slowly as she focused on Twilight.

Her alicorn opponent, as was Silver’s preference in these bouts, the first to take the offense. I could practically see myself consider my options when Twilight fired off a simple magic missile aimed directly at my chest. Ideally, what I should have done that day was coalesce all that ice into a sheet and redirect it. Instead, one of her own ice bolts swam into its path, blocking the shot at the cost of my own offensive capabilities.

Next, Silver fired off a volley of frozen spears, not at Twilight, but around her. Given that they were never intended to hit her, Twilight avoided the attack quite easily whilst holding her ground, seemingly ignoring the frozen spires around her. Her response to the attack? She opened a portal beneath Silver’s hooves, dropping her from the ceiling a few feet away.

The princess was not afraid to press her advantage; the moment Silver Script coiled her body in preparation to roll and cushion her landing, Twilight loosed a gout of flame from her horn. Silver barely had time to bring her remaining seven spears to bear, blocking the attack at the cost of her remaining projectiles, which disappeared into a burst of steam.

Hitting the floor in a roll, Silver poured mana into her horn, remembering everything she could about weather science. The air around them became hazy as she pulled what moisture was in the air down to the ground. A bank of fog settled over the combattants, and I couldn’t resist inwardly smiling. What came next was easily one of my most spectacular performances.

“So, Your Highness,” the me of the past had said, smirking, even as her next spell worked to excite the air between us and the remaining ice in the room. “You reckon you could lend me a lightning bolt? Mine’s on the fritz.”

Seriously, even to this day I couldn’t believe it actually worked. Silver ducked and rolled the moment she’d spoken, keeping the air between those points excited. Her roll couldn’t have come a moment too soon, because a bolt of lightning shot out from Twilight’s horn in the direction she’d been standing, Unfortunately for Twilight, the bolt decided that rather than a nonexistent person or the wall past them, the quickest way to the ground was to do a U-turn less than a quarter of the way there, taking advantage of the excited air molecules to guide its path.

What came next happened almost too quickly for me to comprehend, even after the fact. One moment, the lightning was dancing from icy spire to icy spire, and then Silver was standing in Twilight’s place the next, just in time for lightning to slam into her on all sides. With the magical dampening in effect, the attack wasn’t outright able to do her any lasting physical harm, but the numbness that encompassed her entire body didn’t exactly prevent her from dropping like a sack of electrocuted puppies. Face met crystal flooring nose first.

“Do you yield?” Twilight asked in a sporting tone, even as she pulled what remained of the water and ice from around her opponent. “I know the energy suppression field is in effect, but that still sounded like it hurt.” That sporting attitude vanished along with the fog as soon as she laid eyes on Silver. I couldn’t blame her, either. This version of me was sporting a gushing nosebleed, and a number of capillaries in her good eye had ruptured. “Hold on a moment, we need to treat that before you slip in your own—”

A chunk of ice slammed into her side, cutting off her comment. She looked at Silver Script in disbelief—a disbelief I shared, as I didn’t remember any of this happening now. The me in the dueling ring was pushing herself up onto her hooves, shaking away the ringing in her ears and showering the ground around her in blood. “I can still fight,” she said through a mouthful of blood. “Do your worst.”

Twilight’s magic seized hold of all of the moisture and ice in the room, drawing it around her in a coat of frozen armor to rob me of any more potential watery projectiles... except... “Silver, please listen to me; I’ve heard of ponies in better health than yours who’ve died of exsanguination through nosebleed,” she pleaded. “How long until your bad heart doesn’t have enough blood to pump to your brain?”

“You sent me there to die!” Silver snarled with a ferocity I hadn’t seen in myself since Ice Blossom’s death. “I went on your behalf, and what do I have to show for it?”

What was she even talking about!? The scenery around them warped and twisted. No longer were they standing in a room in Twilight’s castle, but instead a metropolitan, human city. It was the sort of down-town area that would have been packed, if not for the pitch black creeper vines snaking all over the place, razor sharp thorns gouging chunks out of brick and concrete alike.

Worst of all was the transformation of Silver. She took on a vaguely human appearance, from the waist up appearing quite human, if unnecessarily nude. I said vaguely because whatever had happened, she looked like she’d been bitten in half and then been grafted to a spider to keep her alive. All the while, blood continued to pour down her front, transitioning from red to inky black even as her breasts became coated.

Silver gestured her hands at a crater and ruined building in a near intersection. At first, it only looked like a pile of debris, until I realized that I was looking at bodies. A teenage girl who could only have been Rainbow Dash was impaled on rebar, having attempted to shield a girl whose head was crushed beneath a chunk of concrete that had been sent flying in some sort of explosion. Nearby was Rarity, missing half her face, a black barbed tentacle still wrapped around her throat, even though the tendril had long since been severed. Applejack and Pinkie were nowhere to be seen at all; the only sign that they even existed at all being a tuft of pink hair caught in a crack in the asphalt, and a cowboy hat abandoned at the edge of the crater.

“I died hoping to give Sunset and them a chance,” Silver howled in rage, her blood lifting off of her body in strips and taking on bladelike shapes. One gestured at place along the wall covered in creeper vines, where a human Twilight Sparkle lay slumped against the wall with a hole in her chest, Sunset Shimmer’s body draped across her lap. “You know what she did? She used her friends and their power to run away. She abandoned her body and this timeline to the eater of worlds.”

Twilight, who’d looked away when she saw the fates of her friends, widened her eyes in fear as Silver brandished a blade of blood at her. “That’s enough, Silver!” Twilight croaked, unable to look away from the monster that Silver Script had become. “I know you wanted to practice your illusions, but this is going too far, and blood magic is restricted for a reason!”

“Oh, I know,” not-me said in a sensual voice, licking the edge of one blade and splitting her tongue. “It always did have certain penetrative properties that other magic just couldn’t block. Why, I bet this arena spell won’t do you any more good than your ice armor.”

The monster parading about in my skin turned to regard me, looking in the direction I’d been observing neutrally from, even as Twilight was skewered inside her icy shell by more blades than a magician’s box. “You’d do well to remember this,” it said, my body flaking away in black flames. “You may have given yourself an edge by tricking the portal into allowing you your magic, and as they say, the right spell in the wrong place can make all the difference in the world. You will see Sunset Shimmer soon, and when you do, tell her that her efforts to thwart me have not gone unnoticed, and to prepare for unforeseen consequences.”

It smiled at me one last time as the last of its face burned away. “Now wake up, child of two worlds. Wake up and smell the spirit of hartshorn.”

Author's Note

So, we have our first dream sequence/backstory section. We all knew from the last chapter that something was controlling/manipulating Flash Sentry and two other Canterlot High students for reasons yet to be seen, but it would seem that Sunset Shimmer is not the only one aware of the timetravel tomfoolery, and this otherworldly presence is not amused. Hell, it wants Silver to know it, too; why else would it show the aftermath of its consumption of the world to Silver?

This is [what I consider] the first instance where the gore tag felt necessary