Terra Incognita

by Carabas

Rating: teen
Tags: Comedy, Other, Starswirl the Bearded, Adventure, Equestria Girls
Length: 7091

In a bygone age of Equestria, the great wizard Starswirl the Bearded and his apprentice forged a gateway to another world.

In a bygone age of Equestria, the great wizard Starswirl the Bearded and his apprentice forged a gateway to another world.

The less said about how well they actually fared in said world, the better.

Cover art from the gallery of auren-dawnstar. Proofread by themaskedferret.

Reading by Kate Walker.

Published 2016-04-20 14:50:01 UTC
Last updated 2016-04-20 14:50:01 UTC

Meadowbrook's Memoirs

Author's Note

Following extract taken from the personal memoirs of Meadowbrook, dated at approx. 30 PPE (Pre-Princess Era).

Meadowbrook's Memoirs

...upon our return to Starswirl’s tower from the assorted affronts to life and limb that we’d found in the Eldritch Wynd, my master immediately sequestered himself away in his private study with the bevy of Antlertean trinkets, documents, and field notes he’d taken during the whole horrifying experience. He had research to do and ideas to pursue, he said, and any apprentice fool enough to disturb him would find themselves tied to a stormcloud by their tail until they’d finished reflecting on their error of their ways or they’d sneezed all the lightning the cloud held, whichever came last.

This happily didn’t interfere with my own designs at all, which were to sequester myself away in my own room with several bottles of liquor, some light licentious fiction, and other such objects that could help soothe my new intake of mental and emotional scars whilst waiting for whatever patches of my hide had proven all-too flammable to grow back. I’m sure becoming the apprentice to a unicorn sage who uses the phrase ‘Onwards, Meadowbrook, and stop bleeding so much!’ as other ponies may deploy a comma seemed like a sensible idea at the time.

Regardless, convalescence passed, and what had been a happy period of detached and danger-free comfort soon became tinged with no small amount of anticipatory dread. Any time that Starswirl the Bearded spends in prolonged contemplation of some future experiment or adventure invariably bodes poorly for my future happiness and good health, and no less than two weeks had passed before he burst forth from his study in search of the most naturally-talented magical apprentice-cum-craftspony around. Regrettably, said apprentice-cum-craftspony was myself, and thus one fine morning, I found myself being walloped into consciousness with a rolled-up set of design notes to the siren song of, “Wake up, apprentice! I need you to be passingly useful for once in your life!”

Upon full assumption of consciousness, I got the chance to inspect the designs, and what I saw there bewildered even me. The mirror the sketches described was a great and ornate thing, finely engraved all over with a complex network of runes and sygaldric markings, with dense annotations in my master’s execrable hoofwriting spidering across any blank space available. Some of the runes were known to me. I recognised one set from the portal my master had made for the Breezy folk in the previous summer. Others were beyond my ken, undoubtedly dredged up from some obscure corner of my master’s memory. And some seemed truly alien, possibly influenced by Antlertean script taken from the documents my master had unearthed in the Wynd.

Naturally, being a sensible unicorn stallion with some lingering and much-abused sense of self-preservation, I enquired as to what the mirror was intended to do. And naturally, being the obdurate bastard that he is, my master declined to spoil the learning experience. All I had to do was build it exactly to the design with my natural talent for craftsponyship, he said, and to not bollock around with any part of the design lest he transform my body’s solid matter into liquid and teleport me directly into a dragon’s fiery colon where I would spend the rest of my brief and regrettable existence as a practical demonstration in phase transition.

Excitement always brings out his most creative threats, I have found. Regardless, thus suitably motivated, I got to work. Glass, surprisingly, had rarely come up in my previous projects. However, the fundamentals weren’t too hard to grasp. The workshop happily had ample stocks of quicksilver, and the rollers that my master had once used in his brief and disastrous effort to make himself a more efficient laundry system could be repurposed into churning out and refining a suitably pure piece of plate glass upon which the quicksilver could be painted. All else—the spun silver-and-crystal alloy for the frame, the rubies to contain the enchantments, the dreamsteel for the runes and filigree—all that was a mere matter of sweating, bleeding, and occasionally weeping over a forge for the next month. Familiar foal’s play which doesn’t merit much recounting, though I don’t mean to brag.

Who do I kid? These are my memoirs, I’ll brag as much as I like, I’m brilliant.

Anyway, the mirror frame was fashioned, the mirror itself neatly inset, and near the end of the final stretch of spitting and polishing, my master was all but hovering off the ground with excitable hopping. The finishing touches were to be his, he insisted, as there were charms to be laid upon it that were beyond my ken as yet. I was welcome to stand by and marvel at his skill and take painstaking notes, though. As well as to hold and deploy Vanguard the guinea pig for the trial run. Enquiries as to how exactly Vanguard was meant to be deployed at a mirror were rebuffed, and so I wheeled the finished mirror out into the tower’s main room with nary a clue as to what would follow.

My master stood waiting, eager and armoured as if he was expecting a sudden fight. My mystification only increased, and was scarcely addressed when he motioned me to one side so he could perform his own workings. Spell-energies flared out from his horn and into the mirror, its surface all but breaking and rippling like water at his touch. Fire blossomed within the rubies as his magic took hold, and stirred the runes and sygaldry to life in turn. Yet more magic came from Starswirl then, in patterns and sequences beyond even my ken and in a volume I have rarely seen exceeded, even from him, flowing out at a steady, controlled rate for several long minutes. The mirror drank it all, its jewels and runes blazing with light, and for an instant in that enclosed room, I felt wind without a source whisper across my back.

And then, at long last, Starswirl’s outpouring ceased. He stepped back to regard the mirror, a sweat barely broken on his brow, and watched as the fire in the jewels and runes settled down to a steady glow. The mirror’s surface gave the odd soft ripple but was otherwise peaceful.

He grunted with satisfaction and then bade me stick the guinea pig through the mirror first.

I magically affixed the amiably-wheeking Vanguard to the end of a stick and pushed him beyond the mirror’s surface, the glass parting smoothly like liquid at his entrance. I did so with no little trepidation—I had no great wish to bury yet another little body, or dissociated bits thereof, in the tower’s garden, and for all he plays the callous curmudgeon, neither did my master, I suspect. I held the stick in place for a few moments, its other end and Vanguard lost to sight past the rippling glass, and then drew it back at Starswirl’s command. Vanguard remained where he’d been attached, quite unharmed for all that his wheeking had taken on a more discombobulated tone. Mutual sighs of relief were drawn, and after I returned Vanguard to his hutch, my master then declared that it seemed sensible to step through ourselves.

My master’s definition of ‘sensible’ is a very loose and broad one, containing multitudes of horror, and my protests pertaining to the briefness of Vanguard’s exposure being no basis from which to assume safety fell upon deaf ears. However, inelegant pleading did at least get me a frustrated sigh and my master’s best conjecture as to what the mirror actually did and where it led.

The mirror, he said, was a doorway between worlds. A bridge betwixt those realms of reality that had magic fit to receive one another.

After further queries and declarations of “What?” And “This still seems at odds with the whole notion of ‘sensible’!”, he grudgingly elaborated a little further. He enjoys his coyness—to a degree which has rendered him eminently murderable many a time and oft—but enjoys showing off his knowledge and cunning only a fraction less. The mirror was the portal he had crafted for the Breezy folk writ large, empowered to reach past the bounds of our world. The Antlertean designs he had unearthed informed the creation, undoubtedly devised by some of their own long-gone Mage-Lords in times when they walked the green earth of Theia and beyond. Perhaps some walked in this new land still, he said with highly inappropriate relish for the stallion who’d enlightened me as to what a pack of collective bastards the Mage-Lords had been in the first place. And if not them, then perhaps some undiscovered residue of theirs, and even if nothing was found there, what mysteries might there yet wait to be unsounded by the bravest and best of ponykind!

Such phrases have traditionally heralded pain and blood loss, but for all my protests based on mere common sense, my master would not be deterred. He was armed and armoured in my best artifice, he had a functioning mirror, he had a notebook and pen, he had a guinea pig that hadn’t instantly perished, and little else was needed in his estimation.

I was offered the chance to stay behind. There are occasions where I suppose he doesn’t actively want me to suffer too much or shoulder his risks, occasions which he invariably masks behind sulky hoof-shuffling and muttering to the effect that I’d probably just get in the way and if I got eaten by some incomprehensible horror from beyond Reality’s veil, he wouldn’t even be slightly sympathetic, and all that sort of thing.

I could have accepted. But as my grandmother Cowrie always said to me, “Meadowbrook, if you leave your transparently mentally-incompetent master to brave the dangers of an undiscovered realm past a portal replete with ghastly Antlertean magics all by his elderly and frail lonesome, then you don’t deserve to be called a pony.”

So I paraphrase somewhat. So what. My memoirs. And besides, if I had to admit to anything, it would be some amount of morbid curiosity as to what exactly might lie beyond the mirror I had fashioned. I informed my master that I intended to join him on this expedition, to much harumphing and the usual stern admonitions to try and not horribly die too much. I retrieved my own barding and travelling supplies and trusty enchanted hammer, mentally beseeched the Creator for a spot of mercy just this once, left more water and feed in Vanguard’s hutch in case our homecoming was delayed, and found myself out of ways to procrastinate. It was time.

Breath held, my master and I stepped past the mirror’s glass with the grace of stepping through water and tumbled through whirling chaos for a short eternity.

Chaos receded, and as my senses returned to me, I found myself lying on a sunlit grassy field. Nothing seemed to be trying to murder me at the outset, and so I permitted myself a period of post-discombobulation ascertainment, checking that I remembered what my name was, why I was here, what horrible life decisions had led me to this point, and that I still had the standard number of limbs.

The last of these proved trickier than expected.

A sensation of whole-body wrongness settled in as my senses finally resumed in full; my face felt somehow abbreviated, my limbs felt elongated and improperly-placed, and the extremities of said limbs felt — Equuish has a distressing lack of sufficiently strong synonyms for ‘wrong’. I regarded the end of one forelimb, and where a sturdy and sensible hoof had once been sited, there instead wriggled some horrifying, spider-like, prehensile assembly of digits such as exist on dragons or minotaurs. I stared at it whilst consciously not shrieking and holding it out at limb’s-length as far away as possible, and then turned away from it to regard the rest of myself, hoping for something better and receiving little but horror and disappointment.

Amidst a storm of gawps, horrified gibbering, and judicious patting of myself wherever I was sure the spider-digits wouldn’t do too much damage, I was able to ascertain the following. My rear limbs had also transformed, with their joints shifting and their hooves turning into a rougher, flatter, wedge-like cousin of my forelimbs’ own ends. My whole carriage had twisted upright away from a proper quadrupedal stance and into something that Nature had — for its own unknown and unquestionably terrible reasons — intended to be bipedal, and staggering into said stance involved more falling over than I care to recount. My tail had seemingly vanished off the face of the earth. My face had shortened, flattened, in the manner of a stuffed ape specimen my master had once acquired and then drunkenly set on fire as part of a failed attempt to develop a more efficient hearth. Worst yet, my horn seemed to have vanished altogether, and when I tried to reach out for my magic, I got a painful twinge across my skull and little else. It was like having a limb torn away — no, worse — and I could only hope that this was a short-term effect, like having a magical inhibitor shoved into place.

A few vestiges of my original form thankfully remained, upon which I could fixate and thus retain sanity. My dark green mane remained and still tumbled down around my withers. My hide was still forest-green, though the tone had for some reason been conveyed to bare skin rather than hair. Even my barding remained, albeit reshaped to fit my new form. No mere random body this, into which my consciousness had been shoved. This was me, my form, translated in some fashion by either the latent magic of this new realm or by the magic of the transportation. But by what means, and for what purpose?

Assuming he had likewise arrived and survived the transportation, there’d be at least one unicorn around here who might be able to shed light on the situation. And so I steadied myself, turned around, and walked forth to find Starswirl.

Involuntarily greeting the grass face-on was a recurring problem for the first few minutes, before I started to get to grips with the strange gait this body compelled. After the undignified first while, however, finding my master proved easy. He was in the same field, already up and moving and testing his own new body’s gait around a great standing stone. The standing stone shimmered with magic, and on its surface I recognised the same portal-energies that had first sent us here. My heart-rate settled somewhat upon perceiving a way home from this bipedal and magicless hell.

My master seemed to have undergone the same changes I had, receiving a similar upright carriage, flolloping and be-digited limbs, and a flattened and hornless face half-hidden by an expanse of silver-streaked auburn beard. His grey hide, building-sized hat, and layers of barding and robes had similarly been converted. And when he saw me coming, instead of the concerned queries as to my good health or bafflement as to what was going on that other ponies might have produced, he instead began loudly crowing about how it had worked and his genius was once again provenly peerless. Unquestionably Starswirl.

In the face of my initial bombardment of queries, he finally let his intransigent silence slip away altogether and, with smugness that was discernible even on his newly-alien features, spelled out what the portal had done. It had bridged worlds, leading to those realms half-described in old Antlertean accounts, and had incorporated elements both from their magics and some of Starswirl’s own devising. In addition to spells of translation and comprehension, it took the ungulate traveller’s form and shifted it so as to mirror that possessed by the most widespread intelligent inhabitants of this realm so as to aid communication and interaction absent undue suspicion. As the old Antlerteans must have once done, so would we. He admittedly hadn’t tested it for sapient non-ungulates, such as dragons and Diamond Dogs, and therefore didn’t exactly know how the portal would parse them, but was sure the likelihood of any of them ever going through it was next to non-existent. Furthermore, my master had seen the old spell mechanisms, and augmented them so as to produce suitable clothes in order to avoid even more suspicion, clothes being apparently common articles amongst this world’s denizens according to the Antlertean accounts. The lack of horns and consequent inability to tap into the world’s magic was something of a problem, he admitted, but there clearly had to be magic here for the portal to have tapped into that we could learn to access as well. And whatever other questions remained could be answered with sufficient exploration.

He could have bothered to reveal any of that before I stepped through the portal and into a form fashioned from nightmares, of course. One day, I shall stab him.

Regardless, that initial account given, he insisted we venture forth to discover what we could about this realm. The landscape around us, all rolling fields and hills and forests and distant mountains, put me in mind of Equestria and home. Perhaps it wouldn’t end too badly after all, I thought to myself with undeserved optimism. Perhaps I wouldn’t be assailed or set on fire. Stranger things had happened.

Thus reassured, my master and I set off through the grassy field and into the surrounding forest on yet another adventure. Navigating tall grass and then undergrowth on our stupid too-long legs and shifted centre of balance presented all manner of evident problems, but we mercifully cleared them and soon found ourselves in clear and open pasture surrounded by a short stone wall. And there, we met our first resident of this new world.

A tall, strapping, and chestnut-coloured stallion grazed to himself into the middle of the pasture, and looked up at our approach with brown and fathomless eyes. Thinking him to be some local magnate, or at least some source of information on the other ape-like inhabitants of this world, we immediately sprung forward to converse with him. Below, I attach the fruit of our first contact, as best I can recall and discern past the pen-scribbling my digits produced.

Starswirl - “Greetings, sir, greetings, and fear not! I come in the spirit of peace and harmony, representing the fair realm of Equestria on the other side of reality’s veil. Apprentice, get your notebook out, record this for star’s sake. Sir, I know not your name, but let me introduce myself as Starswirl the Bearded, First Sage and Guardian of Equestria, and let me count myself honoured to greet you. I ask for your name and position, so that posterity may record our meeting and carve it into history’s very essence as the spark that ignited the fires of friendship and harmony between our two great realms.”

Stallion - “Hello! New talky two-legs? Dobbin like grass! Good boy Dobbin!”

Starswirl - “What? I … ah, Dobbin, was it? Well, Sir Dobbin, I reiterate —”

Sir Dobbin - “New talky two-legs! Two-legs have apple?”

Starswirl - “I confess you bewilder me, Sir Dobbin. Are apples usually taken to meetings in this land between your bipeds and equines as a token gift? We are new here, and are unfamiliar with your customs, but let it not be said any son of Equestria was unwilling to learn and bridge divides.”

Sir Dobbin - “Apple in two-leg’s hands? In two-leg’s clothes?”

Starswirl - “This isn’t ... get off! Sir, this is my personal space and you trespass! Stop nosing around my robes! Shove off!”

Sir Dobbin - “Apple?”

Starswirl - “Remove your snout from my person, you gurgling quarterwit, or I’ll rend you atwain as I did the dragon that menaced Duncirrus! Or … well, if I had my magic at hand, I would! Get off!”

Sir Dobbin - “Strange two-legs has no apple. Dobbin eat grass!”

Starswirl - “Do not dare turn your back on me, you ant-brained —”

Myself - “Sir, I don’t think this is getting us anywhere. And it’s accursedly weird. Let’s just move on.”

Starswirl - “Don’t you interrupt history in the making, apprentice! That said, I —”

Sir Dobbin - “Yummy grass!”

Starswirl - “You shut up as well! Apprentice, I suspect —”

Sir Dobbin - “Incidentally, Dobbin has this mathematical model describing magnetism that he has been working on for some time if two-legs would be interested in —”

Starswirl - “You know what, just come along, Meadowbrook. The equine inhabitants here are clearly too stupid to understand civilised speech or to not jam their noses into regions best left unexplored. Let’s find better company. And I'd stop taking notes on this if I were you.”

And so we moved on from the pasture, leaving Dobbin amiably chewing his way through the grass in our wake, and with the encounter tumbling through my thoughts as we walked. Perhaps Dobbin had just been his village’s idiot, but if he wasn’t, then what might that say about equines in this world? Were they merely among the near-sapient, like phoenixes or the apes of the legendary Dactylian Interior? Were this world’s caprids and donkeys and other kindreds similarly mentally diminished, and if so, did power rest with the bipeds whose form we mimicked? Dobbin’s unsettling vacancy had left me chilled, and that mixed with the line of thoughts to churn within me as we walked onwards.

Past the pasture, the land descended downwards past a small line of forest, and we could see the first sign of civilised habitation amidst rolling and patchwork farmland. Thatched wooden cottages nestled amidst the hills, smoke curling up from their chimneys into the sunny sky and bipeds mingling in the roads betwixt them. They were a curious sight to watch from afar, a mirror of what one might see in any Equestrian town merely rendered in bipedal form. Male and female bipeds in homespun clothing, which did indeed seem to be a universal accessory for them, chatted around market stalls and on doorsteps. The children aided their parents or played games in the dust, their laughter audible from where we stood. Toiling farmers heaved full sheaves of wheat from their fields to a central granary, some of them — I noted with another prickle of unease — employing carts pulled by bound and bridled horses. In the distance, too far to be seen clearly, there even seemed to be another biped patrolling the town’s outskirts. They did so while riding the back of a horse, both clad in mail barding. The biped clasped a long lance and bore a round shield at their hip, moving the horse onwards with twitches of the reins they bore.

It was as neat a demonstration as any of where power lay in this world, and scarcely different from our own use of chickens and or suchlike non-sapients upon further consideration — here, ponies were to them as such beasts were to us. But the sight was still not pleasant, and even my master moved onwards fairly quickly. For at some remove atop a hill overlooking this little township, there rose a stone tower, and there, he said with all confidence, was where someone with authority would surely be found.

We ventured closer to the stone tower, making sure to keep out of sight of the other bipeds and particularly the lance-armed rider. No sense in courting suspicion or sudden impalement, after all, not before my master had had a chance to win over the local leadership in his usual charming manner. Bracing myself for according impalement as we walked, we made our way to the tower’s base, where there sat a stout wooden door. It seemed reminiscent of the doorway to Starswirl’s own abode, though it wasn’t set in a mountainside, and I observed as such. My master appeared not to heed me, though, and instead rapped sharply upon the door with his clenched digits. A few minutes passed, in which we heard movement and muted grumbling from within the tower, and then at last the door creaked open to reveal the tower’s inhabitant.

Starswirl the Bearded met the gaze of Starswirl the Bearded, each mirrored in garb and beard and expressions of disgruntled disdain morphing smoothly into purest incredulity, and for a long moment, you could have heard a pin drop.

The Starswirl in the tower spoke first and sharply, demanding to know why some imposter had shown up at his tower uninvited and that an explanation had better be forthcoming lest we be struck down where we stood. My Starswirl immediately spat back that he could ask much the same thing of this poxy ape substitute for the real Starswirl, and that an explanation had better be forthcoming lest he called down fire that would harrow mountains down to bedrock. I interjected with a suggestion that there may be some harmless explanation at play that wouldn’t warrant any striking or harrowing on anyone’s part, and was told to hold my tongue lest I wanted it taken off me by both parties, whereupon they turned back on each other.

My Starswirl repeated his First Sage spiel, albeit with substantially less friendliness and more overt hostility, demanding to know who this imposter before him was. This realm’s Starswirl responded with something on a par; that he was Lord Starswirl of this township of Canterlot, mentor and advisor to Queen Sangréal of Equestria, and that he would have either my master’s true identity or his head, whether this was some Imperial plot to undermine the stability of the Kingdom of Equestria, &c. My Starswirl, veteran of many a skirmish with slavers of the Capric Empire and no keen admirer of all things imperial, demanded an immediate retraction of that latter assertion and also to know who in the hells Queen Sangréal was, lest he conduct aforementioned harrowing with all the magics at his disposal.

This realm’s Starswirl then immediately let loose a bellow that could have sailed over mountains for Meadowbrook to come here at once, and then launched into another tirade that distracted me before I could get over my startlement and dwell on the implications of that. Magic, he declared, was the highest and rarest of endeavours on this world, and what little he’d seen thus far would certainly not be used casually for harrowing, let alone exist in the hands of some addled vagrant aping his betters.

At this junction, I feel it best to reflect on my master briefly. I admit that he is indeed a pony of no small brilliance — indeed, one of the most brilliant of this or any other age — but that brilliance is matched by lofty pride. That pride’s foundations aren’t as secure to him as he may wish, though, and thus whenever it is tested, he can only ever reply to that test. He is happiest when he is amongst those slower or less knowledgeable than him, whom he can advise and lecture without challenge. Set that challenge, however, or set him against an equal or superior in some field, and brittle wroth and attempts to assert his quality will follow.

It is a trait not entirely without merit, for all it may make him beyond insufferable, and it does come matched to senses of duty and compassion on occasion. It has driven him to many an endeavour which has benefited the common people of Equestria and beyond. It drove him to forge a permanent portal to a safe haven for the little Breezy folk in the face of all others thinking the technique impossible. It has driven him to defy odds thought unconquerable, uncover truths thought unknowable, face horrors beyond imagination without blinking, and protect many innocents thought beyond aid. It has driven him to be a true hero of Equestria and has, for all its constant ability to frustrate, made me proud to be his apprentice.

Alas, what it did on this occasion was drive him to punch the other Starswirl squarely in the teeth.

A fracas ensued when the other Starswirl fell back with a yelp, my master plunged after him, and was promptly seized by his beard and slammed face-on into the doorway. The other Starswirl tried to press his brief advantage but was promptly met by my master rising in a storm of flailing limbs and high indignation. He may not have been passingly proficient with the use of his new limbs, but he used them with enthusiasm, and in the face of a belligerent and bearded whirlwind of clenched digits, the other more practised Starswirl met a surprisingly equal match.

As a storm of yelps, flailing limbs, and beard-tugging broiled before me, I sought an avenue to physically intervene without getting my nose smeared across my features, found none, and settled for feebly pleading for harmony to prevail. That went as well as could be expected, and soon my attention was entirely diverted by the rising thunder of hooves at my back. I turned, foolishly half-expecting some sort of intervention on Dobbin’s part. Instead, I saw the rider from earlier, charging towards me at a full gallop with his lance levelled.

It was an unhappy outside insight into just how fast an equine could move. The lance head glinted like a sliver of night, and the thought of all the unhappy intersections of steel and flesh that could result sent me into a desperate sideways tumble as the rider thundered past. I sprung up in a wild scramble the instant after, grabbed my hammer from my belt, and held my free upper limb forwards, spreading the digits wide as a hopeless shield. The rider circled, sprung off the horse, and drew a long-hafted hammer from his own belt. In desperation, I blurted out that this had all been intended to turn out a lot more harmonious than had actually resulted.

The rider-turned-walker stopped and looked up to face me directly, a familiar look of bewilderment on his green-hued features. He reached up with his free hand and pulled down the mail hood covering his head, letting me finally get a good look at him.

And by the stars, I would have recognised that improbably handsome and chiseled countenance and lovely dark green locks and look of long-suffering confusion anywhere, even on a gangling ape-body. I locked gazes with another Meadowbrook.

Without the need for words, I drew out my drinking flask. He drew out a pipe and a pouch of tobacco leaf. And after a few minutes of swapping said items, mutually satisfying grumbling, and many exasperated glances in the direction of the Starswirls, we eventually judged our masters tired enough when they were capable of little more than wheezing on the ground and feebly tugging at each other’s beards.

We promptly bundled them up with minimal struggling and only token threats to punish us unto death for interfering and escorted them into the tower in search of a place where they could sit down and recuperate. A set of comfortably-appointed living quarters were found on the second floor, and the Starswirls were firmly set into chairs on opposite sides of the room. They glared daggers across the room at one another as they gathered back their breath, whilst I began an exchange of information with my counterpart.

Through a mix of Meadowbrook’s explanations, his Starswirl’s occasional shouted interjections, and my Starswirl’s mocking challenges, It transpired that the realm in which we found ourselves was the Kingdom of Equestria, a recently-formed union of the horse-riding tribes in this part of the world in response to a great and terrible and ever-encroaching Empire. Their Queen, Sangréal, had led Equestria’s knights and mounted archers many a time and oft to defend the realm against the Empire’s advances and the monstrous beasts that infested its countryside. In her younger days, she had done so under the guidance of the famed adventurer Lord Starswirl, who had now withdrawn to a semi-retirement here in his township of Canterlot with his squire, Meadowbrook. He was as famed a scholar as he was a warrior in his heyday, and now sought the pursuit of his studies in peace, particularly the elusive and high arts of magic, and to eventually lay the foundations for a great school to pass on his knowledge to all future Equestrians.

Our own origins briefly brought forth incredulous suspicion from the other Meadowbrook — and on consideration, from his perspective, he could hardly be much blamed — before the other Starswirl began nodding and agreeing that the prospect was theoretically possible in what he had learned of magic’s potential. Their realm’s magic is a paltry thing compared to ours, latent and rarely able to be expressed in overt terms. Where it can, it oft must be channeled in prepared rituals and specially-crafted artifacts rather through direct personal means. It remains an obscure and rarely-explored field of study in their realm accordingly, rarely capable of delivering results worth the effort put into creating them, and Starswirl is one of its few scholars.

My own Starswirl, still disinclined to say anything helpful or in any way reconciliatory to his counterpart, yet clearly itching to be able to show off his own vast knowledge, grudgingly used me as a medium and bade me tell the other Starswirl about our own basic magical theory and expression. That explanation took a while, but it was delivered, and several interjections and comparisons drawn during it shed further parallels. Even the accounts of our realm’s Antlerteans had echoes in their own old folk tales. Tales of Fae, monsters wearing the skins of their kind like ill-fitting clothes, striking out from the deep forests to seduce and pillage and kidnap before vanishing with their plunder beyond all sight and recovery, rarely staying long in this magic-deprived realm. They had dragons of a sort as well, smaller and stupider and forced to make do with physical systems unsupported by much magic. Other sapients did not exist, and their neighbouring Empire and its subjugated realms and other exotic lands beyond the sea were all composed of the same bipedal species — ‘humans’, in the tongue of the Equestrians.

The awkward exchange of information went on long into the evening, until their (unguided!) sun fell below the horizon, at which point my Starswirl rose. He had learned much, he grumpily conceded between clenched teeth. But we had to depart at this juncture, he said, for he had an Equestria of his own to keep an eye on and we had spent long enough away from it on this endeavour.

It wasn’t a complete truth. But the sentiment at least didn’t draw many hostility from the other Starswirl, and there even seemed to be something like a glimmer of respect in his eyes. He did, however, speak forth about the portal my Starswirl had created, and to my and the other Meadowbrook’s amazement, they managed something approximating a civil and productive conversation.

It would be sensible, they agreed, if the portal would be limited in terms of the travel it could permit, in case it fell into unscrupulous hooves and hostilities ensued that the human realm couldn’t anticipate or properly protect against.— at least, until their own understanding of magic had properly progressed. Trusted groups could move between them, and the other Starswirl would site his planned school by the standing stone we’d emerged from in order to keep a proper eye on it. Regardless, enchanting the portal so that it would only be open for a select few days every thirty or so moons was agreed upon as a crude-yet-simple way of preventing most potential abuse, and my Starswirl swore he’d see it done. In time, when future generations in either world had arisen and grown wiser, perhaps the portal could be fully opened and friendship between the realms trusted to safely flourish. It was a cynical and fettering measure, but it was born of a moment of genuine co-operation between the two sages, and if that wasn’t a promising sign, I didn’t know what was.

We left then, and I exchanged a knowing nod or several with my counterpart. We knew the pains, and we’d be in touch. And I sneaked an apple from a bowl in order to give one half to his horse tethered outside. With a parting thanks of “Yummy apple! Good girl Chestnut!” we were off into the night, back through the forest and Dobbin’s field (“Other two-legs has apple? Yummy apple! Two-legs sure they don’t want to hear theory on magne—?”), and back towards home.

As we walked, I couldn’t help but turn over what had transpired and what we had learned. There were implications aplenty, not least of which were the baffling mix of parallels and differences between our Equestria and this one.

The differences were not surprising. Indeed, they should have prevailed in all ways. Their world was a low-magic place, deprived indeed compared to our own. Their sun and moon moved according to natural mechanics, their weather blew as it wished, their farms were managed without any magical assistance. Only one sapient species had arisen, rather than the dozens that had managed on ours. What parallels could have been born betwixt that world and ours?

But parallels there were, inconsistent and scattershot and only occasionally direct, but parallels all the same, for no reason I could immediately see. There was a magical kingdom of Equestria, founded in the fires of friendship and hounded by a mighty and imperial foe. Those matching broad strokes existed. There was a Starswirl, who was a great and arrogant sage for all that he lacked magic and instead used only his blade and his mind. There was a Meadowbrook, but whose gift for crafting had gone by the wayside in favour of his other scholarly and martial studies. There had been a Hurricane and a Platinum and a Puddinghead, the last generation of rival horse-riding chieftains before their subordinates had convinced them of the value of co-operation — but there had been no great migration and no onslaught by the purely-magical Windigoes, for how could there have been in a world where magic was a feeble force? Why did these parallels arise in spite of wildly different circumstances and forces?

Only one thing came to mind, and that half-conjecture and half-remembrance of a night my master had gone too far through a bottle of liquor for his own good. There was one branch of magic he had long pursued, he had admitted bitterly and wistfully, and which yet eluded him. There was a rhythm to magic, he insisted, something which underlay it and amplified it in ways and bridged its seemingly incongruent parts. Harmony echoed in the things we did, echoed in ways we couldn’t foresee, and was a force unto itself. But for all he knew it was there, he went on to rant, he just couldn’t grasp it. There was some underlying poetry to the world that he simply did not fathom or apprehend, and if I was to do anything with my life, it would be to grasp it, to be a better wizard than he. At which point, somewhat mercifully, he threw up and then collapsed unconscious.

That encounter and those words rattled through my mind as we made for the portal home, and it struck a chord in me. Perhaps there was some deeper magical force of harmony at play here, conjuring results to a goal we couldn’t see — or without any goal at all beyond simply bringing worlds into unity and alignment according to its own processes. Why it had selected certain elements and left others to the mercy of the divergent forces at play in the universe were beyond my ability to surmise. Why were Starswirl and I integral to Harmony’s design, and why was the existence of an Equestria? Why weren’t the Windigoes? Who could say? Not Starswirl. And certainly not I.

I did raise the prospect as we prepared to step back through the standing stone. My master grumpily told me to stint my clep and that he'd replace my bone marrow with termites if I brought up this debacle again, and vanished right through the portal without another word. I dutifully followed and, in a short instant, found myself home and, best of all, in my proper unicorn form and with my horn and magic returned to me.

For a few moments, my master busied himself in front of the mirror, layering upon the enchantments he and the other Starswirl had spoken of. When they had settled in, he then sharply turned to me and demanded that I burn any notes I had taken. This whole affair didn’t deserve dwelling on, he snapped by way of explanation, and then he made for his bed.

A magic-deprived beating and the ongoing existence of a clear equal had stung his pride, but I doubted it would persist. Already, as he moved off, I heard him muttering darkly about certain magically-powered sirens for whom the world might serve as a suitable prison. He would undoubtedly put the mirror aside for a time, cover it under a sheet in a spare room and forget about it until the memory of humiliation had faded. Then its time would come again — and he would undoubtedly have ample time the rest of his life to devote to the other realm and its mysteries. Perhaps there he would even be able to find an answer to the question of harmony, and so achieve some measure of peace.

And true to his instructions, I did indeed burn my notes. But not, alas, before carelessly making copies and penning these memoirs based upon them. After all, no knowledge should be carelessly forgotten or put aside in the heat of anger. And if nothing else, my master may need to be made humble from time to time and capable of acknowledging he might not always perfectly prevail. And on reflection, I don’t know what ‘may’ is doing in that sentence.

And depending on when the portal next opens and based on a few discreet words shared with the other Meadowbrook while the Starswirls were talking, I might venture through for a little rendezvous of my own. Our own, rather.

Where’d be the sense in letting both Meadowbrooks remain virgins, after all?