Twlight

I looked down at the huge library spanning across the large room and levitated my scroll and quill in front of me as I looked down at the purple dragon at my side.

“Are you ready for the biweekly reorganisation?” I asked him enthusiastically.

The young dragon rolled his eyes in my direction and said, “Twilight, you’re an Alicorn princess, not to mention the Element of Magic! Don’t you have a spell that can just do this by itself?”

“Spike, you know I prefer doing it book by book! Besides, this allows me to have a few hours of quiet time to myself! Celestia knows I need it,” I replied.

He sighed and walked towards a shelf lazily. “Just because I’m your number one assistant, I’ll help.”

I started taking the books off the shelves and checking the genres and the author’s first name to start the new sorting system I had devised last week when I heard a familiar burp behind me.

“Twilight, Princess Celestia has sent a message!” Spike called as he walked towards me.

“Thank you, Spike,” I replied and grabbed the message while I carefully placed my scroll on a nearby shelf.

The letter read:

Dear Twilight,

A situation has arisen, and I require the help of you and your friends. Please notify them as fast as you can and try to get here as soon as it is convenient. This is not an imminent threat, but I’d appreciate it if you could get on a train to Canterlot quickly.

Your Mentor and Friend,

Princess Celestia.”

“Do you think that this country could survive without you? Every disaster seems to need you to fix it.” Spike joked.

“Equestria stayed strong without my input for about a thousand years before I was born, Spike. I am sure that Celestia has multiple backup plans if I wasn’t around,” I stated faithfully, before adding, “Even if it seems like I save the country a lot.”

“Should I get the girls, then?” Spike questioned me.

“No need! I’ve been dying to test out a spell that should work with the map table; if it works right, it should deliver a message to them and tell them to come find me.”

I mentally constructed the spell in front of me and then weaved it, using the castle as an amplifier, before casting it across Ponyville.

I went back to organising my new library using the new system as Spike tried to assist me for about thirty minutes before I heard a gentle voice across the hall.

“Twilight, are you in here?” Fluttershy’s soft voice approached me, and I looked up to see the sunny Pegasus mare looking at me.

I smiled at her and spoke, “Yes, Fluttershy, I was just arranging the books while I waited.”

Fluttershy looked across the rows of books and spotted Spike arranging multiple books, so she waved at him.

As Spike waved back, Fluttershy turned to me and asked, “Why did you bring us here? My Cutie Mark just started shining, and I assumed the castle map wanted us to come.”

“The princess called for us; she sent me a letter that said we needed to get there as soon as we could.”

“Oh my,” Fluttershy seemed a bit worried. "You think nothing bad happened, do you?”

“She didn’t mention it; she just said to get there as soon as possible. Spike, do we still have a copy of the train timetable? I’ll need to double-check if there are any trains going to Canterlot today.”

“Sure, Twilight; I’ll go get it,” Spike said to me.

Spike scampered out of the room, and then a gravelly voice said behind me, “Yo Twilight, what’s up?”

I turned to look at the rainbow-maned mare and nodded at her. "Hey, Dash. I received a letter from Celestia asking for our personal attendance.”

“Do you know why she wants us?” Rainbow replied.

“I have no clue, but we’re going to her today.”

It took another fifteen minutes for the rest of the element bearers to arrive, and we all headed off to Canterlot on the train. Celestia had assigned us a personal guard to escort us to the castle, and we made it without incident.

As we walked into the throne room, we saw Princess Celestia rise from her throne and walk down the hall towards us. We bowed, but she gestured for us to raise our heads.

“I’m glad you could all make it here so fast; I trust you didn’t experience any issues?” she asked.

“No, princess,” I reply. "The spell you gave me to fix. I figured out the main issues in the way it was created and was missing a component, so I could gather the rest of us with ease.”

“It’s good to know you got that working. It could prove useful in the future. Now, for the reason I brought you here, I have an urgent issue that requires your help,” Celestia replied.

“Is it another monster or a universe-travelling unicorn bent on revenge? Ooh, is it a giant snake? Twilight is terrified of snakes!” Pinkie said with enthusiasm.

“I am not!” I replied, fighting against a blush that threatened to show itself on my cheeks.

“Please, Pinkamena; the situation is a bit too serious for us to be making jokes,” the Princess said, despite the upward twitching in the corners of her mouth. “Please take a seat while I describe the issue.”

Because of a lack of chairs in the throne room, we all sat on the floor while Celestia started pacing.

“The threat we are met with here is dark magic, one of which Luna and I had thought we had been rid of for all time; I’m talking about necromancy on an enormous scale.”

I gasped, but I was the only pony to do so as the rest of the group looked confused. I remembered the lessons I had through my time at school and the reality of the crime.

“I can imagine that everypony here, except for Twilight, doesn’t know what necromancy is.” Celestia looked grimmer than I had ever seen her as she spoke. “So let me give you a description of the magic:

“Necromancy is a concept that ponies have come up with since the dawn of our kind as it surrounds the defiance of the death itself; this is a noble concept itself, since every being wishes they can see their loved ones again. The problem is that because of the fundamental way that nature works, there is no way to retrieve the soul of the pony and therefore no point in attempting. We are born, we live, and then we die. There is no other way around this.

“That was until the tribe wars. The battles against Earth Ponies were always considered the tamest, since everypony was terrified at the prospect of losing all food. Starvation was already an issue because of the Windigoes making the land unfit for growing food, and the death toll was rising like nothing else, so then unicorns attempted to exploit the magic in Earth Ponies to take advantage and solve two problems with one stone.

“They stole hundreds of corpses from the Earth Ponies’ graveyards and then loaded a spell into their deceased bodies. The spell would reactivate the bodies and force them to be under the command of the unicorns. The raised dead could use the bodies’ magic to grow the food necessary for the unicorns. They could not tire, they did not require substance, and they could fight as well as any other Earth Pony, if not better, since they felt neither pain nor fear.

“The Earth Ponies were furious, as they should have been, and went into a war that was one of the bloodiest, as the Unicorns decided out of desperation to use the resurrected Earth Ponies solely as soldiers against their own brethren. It was a slaughter for the Earth Ponies because they couldn’t bring themselves to injure their own brethren, and the reanimated corpses had no objection to doing so. The Earth Ponies had to run, but they came back in the middle of the night and slowly extracted the magic of the land and barricaded the unicorns into what essentially was their tomb as they starved to death slowly.

“I am sorry I had to explain that all to you, and if you please wake up Rarity, since this next bit is important, that would be perfect. My sister and I, when we took control over the land, ensured that all forms of necromancy were banned and that those guilty of committing the crime would be forever banished from the land.”

I looked around at all of my friends after hearing this appalling story to see their reactions; Rarity seemed to be extremely close to fainting again, Fluttershy was a mixture of pale with horror and green with sickness, Pinkie Pie and Applejack had their eyes turned down in consideration of their ancestors’ horrible fate, and Rainbow Dash seemed to lose some of her bravado.

“But what does any of this have to do with a crime?” Rainbow asked, her wings flaring up in annoyance.

“I was getting to that,” Princess Celestia said. "About ten years ago, the School for Gifted Unicorns had a twelve-year-old filly by the name of Blue Syringe attending. Unlike Twilight, she wasn’t attending for a love of magic but because of her fascination with healing.

“She was considered to be a pioneer and a genius in her magic and had already patented multiple healing apparatuses, such as the device that is used to measure the magic flowing through a unicorn’s horn. She had already gained her cutie mark, and it was the legendary Asclepius Wand, which is only provided as a trophy to those who are considered to be the next greatest healer through the years of our existence. Everypony had great hopes for the pony until an incident happened to her brother.

“You see, by no fault of anypony, the brother was playing on thin ice without anypony very close to him except Blue. When he fell through the ice, she couldn’t get him back up before he stopped breathing, and because it took too long, she could not resuscitate him. It broke her will entirely, and she hid herself in her room, refusing to eat or see anyone. Even when I attempted to visit, I was barred from her room.

“Nopony could have expected what she was actually doing in her room. One day, her parents went up to her room to check on her, like they had been doing for the months she had been locked.

“They found the door open, and in her place a note and her revived brother, the latter sleeping in her bed. Apparently, she had snuck into the forbidden archives to steal the resurrection spell.”

The girls and I gasped, and Celestia continued.

“She performed some modifications on the spell to make sure that her brother would remain alive indefinitely, and then she ran away into the wild, as she had known of the implications of what she did.

“Search parties were sent out to find her, but she was too clever to be captured, and we thought she had perished. But after five years of fruitless searches and giving up, I started receiving reports of miracle healings, and before I knew it, the healings started gaining in number. Through investigating the situation, we discovered that there had been multiple resurrections that had been cleverly covered up by lies, and of course, I put two and two together.

“I investigated in my free time, and I found information that linked to multiple ponies, which all seemed like they could be her, with all having high-level achievements in healing in some kind or another.

“That’s where you six come in, since I cannot freely roam the country, and I am not connected to the average populace as you six are. Therefore, you could gain information and assure her capture easier than I could.”

I spent a few short moments digesting the information before I answered the princess, “We won’t fail you, Princess.”

“I know you won’t, my student,” she replied with a graceful smile.

The six of us started walking out of the hall, and I started discussing with them the information we had, as well as how we were going to gather more.

“Cheese Sandwich might be a good bet. He seems to know everypony in Equestria and might have picked up a snippet of information. Pinkie, can you contact him?” I asked the party mare.

“Sure, Twilight!” She replied enthusiastically, even if she still seemed a bit shaken by the information.

“Applejack, your family is fairly spread out across Equestria. Do you think you could check in with them?” I asked my farmer friend.

“Yup, but Ahm going to need some time to do it,” she replied, her tone and expression grim and serious. Her attitude did not surprise me; Applejack valued family more than anypony else I knew, and hearing about the corpses of loved ones being used against the parents, siblings, and children of the deceased couldn’t be easy for her.

“For the rest of you, I’ll need you to check with anypony you can think of. We’re going to need information to help us, and I will go back to our castle and come up with a few ideas myself,” I spoke as commandingly as I could manage with my friends. We needed to be serious about this, and there was no time for sentimentalism.

We broke up into groups, each with our own ideas about whom to ask for help.

As I walked towards the train station, I couldn’t help but think this would not be an easy job.

Author's Note

The second chapter has been written and hoof read.
Thanks again to Professor_Wizard for checking and fixing my story for me.
The view points will alternate between Blue and the mane six.

EDIT: Grammar checked