To Bring Light to Eternal Darkness

by scifipony

Rating: teen
Tags: Adventure, Princess Celestia, Drama, Original Character, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, King Sombra
Length: 36188

Before Equestria was even a dream, when mares are second-class citizens, a pony with a solar cutie mark tries to help her brother become a mage. She doesn't realize that she and the sun have an appointment with destiny. [Sequel Notification]

In the days before Equestria was even a dream and mares are second-class citizens, a pony with a solar cutie mark, Sunny Daze, decides to help her brother become a mage. She doesn't realize that she and the sun have an appointment with destiny.

Sequel novelette: https://www.fimfiction.net/story/430769/to-keep-light-in-eternal-darkness

Accepted for an Equestria Daily Story post on September 24, 2017.
Shelved in the Royal Canterlot Library on August 12, 2019.

The Teen rating is for 10th century AD gender issues faced by a mare that are no longer experienced by the characters in modern (show canon) MLP.

Thanks to DoContra for pre-reading, plenty of suggestions, and copy-editing assistance. Thanks to Equestria Daily submission editors for a lot of stuff I fixed after they pointed out I missed it!

Published 2017-09-24 18:40:06 UTC
Last updated 2024-02-28 21:18:39 UTC

Propriety

How I earned these? Really?

I did say I would answer any one question.

I never wanted to nor asked for nor dreamed of earning these. You don't ask for nightmares. It took plenty of work and cost me everything. The best place to begin telling the story of how circumstance destroyed the pony I was and hammered me into the pony I'd become, I guess, would be the day I read something I shouldn't have in public...

I trotted through the broken night with a quarter-bale of alfalfa and a bag of salad herbs in my magic. Night had lasted more than two days by then. It didn't bother me much because while my breath puffed as little clouds in the chill air, the scent of an impending frost smelled festive when combined with the wood smoke drifting lazily from the foundry chimney. Also, the street cloak that propriety demanded all mares wear protected me from the cold.

I'd seen far longer stretches without the sun.

My horseshoes clicked on the cobbled road that led from the earth pony caravan market through the center of town. As I approached the gnarled central posting tree, I saw milling stallions nattering away, their horns creating firefly orbs of white, gold, crimson, and emerald as they gestured and argued. Some wore heavy blue-cloth work vests. The elders wore purple or gold silk. Some resilient fellows wore nothing but their cutie marks. On days like today, I appreciated the warmth of my cloak; I appreciated it less on sunny days, especially after two days without night.

Somepony had enchanted the branch above the bulletin board to cast a brilliant white glow to illuminate a notice lettered on yellowed parchment. The four silvery diamond-studded darts that tacked the announcement to the wood certified it was endorsed by Queen Platinum.

I imprudently slowed. You see, I knew how to read and once you learn that trick it's really hard to control the magic. Words speak in your head unbidden, and I wasn't a shy filly to look away. Doubly cursed if you heard my Da talk about it: neither illiterate nor shy.

The broadside read, "This decree, endorsed by Her Majesty the Queen of Her Dominion of Unicornia, from the Collegiate of Mages, herein commands that a'noon of the coming day all unicorns with magic strong shall submit bodily to examination for thaumaturgy and predilection to matters celestial in the pressing matter of day and night."

I spotted further details in smaller print, but as I came to a halt to squint, somepony yelled, "You! Mare! What's your name?"

I glanced and saw a shadowed red-robed stallion step out of the night, a propoli, a member of the propriety police.

"Staring at stallions—" he continued, making everypony look at me.

I didn't bother to be outraged by the accusation. None of the stallions were older colts and none were cute; all males my age were in school or toiling in their father's wood shop, gristmill, or smithy. No. I bolted.

He hadn't expected that. Mares are raised to be timid. But timid is not in my nature, so I ran and he didn't give chase until I'd galloped down the first street. Ponies jumped from my path, warned by the clatter of my hooves. By the time I heard him shout "Stop!" a block behind me, I skidded around a corner.

I found the spice market, an alley between wooden buildings with golden fabric draped between roofs to ward off the sun—when there was sun. It bustled with mares in dark mares-cloaks identical to mine except by the stealthiest of flourishes, like a chocolate spider-lace hem, or a black button that might be considered indecorous if used in profusion, or some fabric color between the indigo of my cloak and coal black. Mares and fillies flocked around stalls that sold fragrant black pepper, golden-brown sumac, red cinnamon, and a profusion of custom mixes like "Sky-fire Chili Soup Delight", beside stalls that sold gem encrusted silver and gold jewelry, and others selling gleaming copper pots and pans. Gray threads of sandalwood smoke and other incense wafted in the air to swirl as I passed. Most of the sellers were themselves mares.

I threw my load behind a stall with a thump. Nopony, not even the few stallion purveyors, said a word.

I had bent down to lower myself so I was no taller than the average mare by the time the propoli arrived. One look at the huffing red-robed stallion muted everypony in a wave down the alley to the next street. We all stared…

And continued to stare as the stallion quickly stalked down the alley, momentarily in my face then past me, trailing a scent of having eaten too much garlic, and out.

One mare said, "He should get himself a useful job."

Another chimed in, "Like digging ditches!"

"His wife probably terrorizes him; takes it out on us," said a third.

A wave of laughter cantered through the crowd, along with the sound of beads and necklaces clattering. Most mares wore their wealth, unlike me; I had none. The bustle returned, annoyance vanquished. The activity drew the citrusy-woody scent of frankincense my way.

I grabbed my bale and the herbs. I bowed to Rose Hips, the tea purveyor, and saw her soft smile and twinkling magenta eyes in the hood of her cloak, illuminated wanly by her ruddy magic.

Before leaving the way I came, I looked down the alley. I didn't meet Da's amber eyes even though he looked up the alley from his kiosk selling wooden dishes at the end. Even in the everlasting night, his snow-white fur and the golden aura projected by his horn—both so much like mine—were hard to miss, as was his frown.

I slammed open the gate to the family compound and skidded to a halt, breathing rapidly outside of our small wooden house. The family was fortunate enough to have a mud-brick wall around our meager crumb of town property, but Da had never made enough to improve on his wife's dowry of a simple traveling factor's lodging in a distant arid land.

A wan light flickered in a window.

No, no, no, I thought, worried I'd been recognized and beaten home, wishing I'd been quieter. Then again, I'd heard that many of the propoli were cracked-toothed old codgers and just maybe a bit deaf. A good mare didn't get noticed by anypony, so I didn't know for sure.

I lowered the bale and salad bag to the ground as I crept to the window and peered through the wavy smoked glass.

"Summer Daze!" I cried loudly. My baby brother looked up from his book to the window before I rushed inside.

"What are you doing home?" He lay by a flickering candle, a copybook open before him.

I was ten minutes older than my brother, but those ten minutes made all the difference in his health and stature, considering the circumstances of our birth. In comparison, I made him look like a runt. Well… I actually did that to most everypony, but in his case he was below average in most every measure. We shared a long horn of eight turns, but he had a peculiar coat of sunflower-yellow fur that stuck up in bristles, which accentuated his spindly legs.

And then there was this:

"I got a headache," he said, hiding his nut-brown eyes under a fan of lime-green bangs with a hoof, nudging his ebony-rimmed spectacles which then fell to the earthen floor. He slid a folded twine-bound sheaf of paper towards me. "But I got to bring home another treatise."

He opened his copybook to a page written in his flowing horn calligraphy. It read, "Magical Escapements."

"Escapements?"

"Like the ticking parts of a clock. Catseye Marble is teaching how to make spells last longer and how to trigger one on cue, but everypony's horn-lights flicker too much. It gives me a migraine." He massaged the pink blaze between his eyes.

I glanced at the dancing flame of a crooked bayberry oil candle I'd made last week as I said, "But really, you were just having trouble understanding what he was trying to teach?"

He sighed as I tossed my cloak aside and thumped down on the floor in my cotton shift. Besides giving us life, Mare bequeathed us one other thing: our name. I was Sunny, with a blazing white coat and a pink mane, and he was Summer with a yellow coat and a lime-green mane—but we both were also named "Daze."

That described him more than I, though Da would disagree. (If anypony should wonder, "Daze" is short for "dazzling," not "dazed.")

Yet, unlike me, Summer Daze was certifiably brilliant—once he understood or cared to understand. But never with practical magic. Never that! He could not levitate. He couldn't even cast Illuminate. If he had to heat a rock or shiver on a cold night, he'd shiver. The phosphorous-sulfur match he'd lit the candle with lay blackened on the floor and displayed tooth marks.

He'd solved the problem of being bullied by the colts at school—because he had long written with a pen in his mouth long after everypony else had learned to levitate theirs—by learning Dictation. The convoluted spell enchanted a quill to read his lips and transcribe what he said. Of course, using Dictation meant stuff often came out phonetic. It was worse if he didn't understand the word, said the wrong word, or muttered to himself.

It created the situation where together we learned to read, and I learned to proofread. I loved him for this and much more.

"And what part was Catseye Marble covering when you left?" I asked, sliding the book between us.

He tapped the temple of his glasses with a hoof to flip them into the air and catch them on his nose, then pointed.

We studied together until Da dropped the quarter-bale of hay on the floor behind me. As I jumped up, he plopped the net bag of salad herbs on top.

He said, "I found this outside."

"I'm sorry," I said, glancing at Summer who turned a page with a hoof, not even noticing Da. "I got distracted."

We stared at my baby brother. He was unique. I had to learn what he needed to learn in order to to teach him, and when he understood and intuited the arcane implications, he taught me in return, as best I could understand impractical magic. Twins. Two bodies, one brain.

"I wish—" Da began. He never liked the situation.

I looked down into his amber eyes and repeated his favorite saying. "Wishes do nothing except make the wisher crazy."

Da sighed. He accepted the situation as best he could.

Mare had died an hour after giving birth, leaving Da with no extended family and no means other than his wood carving trade. He never said it, never would say it, and I never asked, but I sensed he was glad my brother and I shared a quest for knowledge, though it made me as peculiar a mare as my asocial baby brother was a peculiar stallion.

Da said, "Umbra was the propoli chasing you."

Him. Young. Wealthy—enough so that his family owned a slave. I shuddered at the idea, but some ponies were cold... You could consider him handsome if you liked the dark horsey type; I preferred pastel ponies. Everypony said he wanted to run the town, but the town elders wouldn't let him.

Da turned over the salad herbs. "He said you had carrots in your bag. I told him you hate carrots."

I looked at the carrots and chuckled.

"It's not funny! You are hard to mistake even in the dark and I'm not even sure if you've stopped growing! Stallions are noticing you're different. And I don't mean just extraordinarily tall. I won't be able to afford to pay for you to be married if this keeps up."

I raised my chin and walked snapping my tail to the tables where a basket contained the dark black spoons and bowls I'd carved this morning. While we often worked with juniper, cedar, and acacia that grew in the nearby mountains, the ebony Da traded for was exceptionally hard to work even with enchanted steel chisels and gouges, but I could carve most any pattern. I never explained to Da that I only used metal tools for the final finishing work and instead used magic, heat, and water to pretreat and distort the wood. I suspected he'd say I was taking shortcuts or compromising the quality of our work. I always produced more than Da could imagine getting; between us we made a good living, though I knew we could do better. "We aren't hurting."

"Dowries are jewelry, bits of silver or gold, or—" he waved a hoof "—houses, not spoons. Please don't make yourself too expensive. You don't want to be a second wife or never married."

I tilted my head side-to-side thinking I liked "never," but I understood Da's narrow-eyed glare, grabbed the salad and the bale and trotted to the kitchen to make supper.

Breathless

During supper, Da spoke about a new commission for cedar table legs. At the end, I pushed my bowl back and forth between my hooves waiting for him to ask what crime I'd committed, or to mention the Queen's broadside, but instead he dashed off to inventory the wood curing in the woodshed.

While I washed up, I stared at Summer, his eyes magnified through his spectacles as he picked at his food and read, typically oblivious to news that would affect him as well as Da and me. Suddenly he looked up and said, "I think I figured out Teleport. It uses the chaotic butterfly escapement you explained to me."

I gasped. The wooden bowl I had been washing bounced off the wall and clattered to the kitchen floor. Shaking, I rinsed the dishes and drained the suds away before barricading myself in the curtained-off extension to the house that served as my room.

For awhile, I amused myself with the elementary potion chapbook Summer had transcribed for me, fiddling with glassware to distill some sprigs of lavender in water into a glowing purple scent globe. Eventually, I shoved that aside because I couldn't concentrate; I kept thinking about "thaumaturgy and predilection to matters celestial."

I scrounged up my astronomy book, one of the first Summer had copied, full of funny typos, big words explained for young colts, and scribbled sketches that were just good enough to give the gist of what I hoped were faithful to the illustrations in the original book. I loved this book. I'd learned all the constellations and star names, the behaviors of the stars and nebulae that ebbed and flowed like friends and siblings in the sky, and how the seasons worked. I pushed open the shutters on a window, breathed in the chill air, and stared at the twinkling heavens and the smooth white surface of the moon. I had loved to lie on my back in the compound and stare up at the night, pointing stuff out when Summer would pay attention, but that had been before day and night had broken.

Thaumaturgy wasn't the science of magic. No. It was the performance of miracles.

Sure, I had heard of the spell Teleport. Everypony knew the Queen could do it. Even beginning magic books discussed it as a culmination of principles, the elements of which were a master achievement that almost nopony attained.

If Summer Daze said he understood what the spell meant that meant he would soon perform it. He would perform the miracle of transforming himself into pure magic and back again.

I looked at the sky and felt the hair on the back of my neck began to rise. It was almost as if I were surrounded by the mildest of caressing breezes that unsettled my mane and tail. I felt a connection to the stars, sensing more about them than my eyes could tell me: little unheard voices. A nonexistent touch of a hoof saying in gesture, I'm going to take that path now. More so for the baleful unmoving moon. And the sun... Thinking about it, I knew it brooded impatiently below the eastern horizon, radiating heat—as well as distrust of its pale ivory sibling.

My fantasy felt like an omen.

"Thaumaturgy and predilection to matters celestial," I said aloud. "The pressing matter of day and night."

Summer Daze would never ever learn to carve. One day a stallion would ask Da to have me marry him, and Da wouldn't refuse even though the loss of my productivity would drive the family into penury.

But Sunny Daze could perform the miracle Da required. The Queen's broadside was an advertisement for a wizard. The Queen paid her wizards—probably paid them very well. Right?

I made plans to take Summer Daze to the "examination"—and to somehow keep him on track.

Other than the small epicyclic movement of the wandering stars, dawn came in utter darkness. The town elders paid colts to run about town banging pots when the clock tower struck 6:00 AM. I'd heard that in the capital, the Queen's minstrels paraded through the streets singing and playing their flutes.

The clatter of copper pans worked well enough to make me dive out of bed, heart racing. Even inside, my breath formed clouds before my face. Day three of no sun. I folded my sheets, then raced around heating the cornerstone crystals using the household spell Friction, then rousted Da with hot tea, strategically letting Summer sleep. He'd passed out sprawled in a heap of books on a tattered carpet in front of his bed and would continue to snore for hours. Da wouldn't notice because I'd brought his carving tools and the blocks he'd stacked in the shed last night and got him explaining the new project, cutting a sample, and getting caught up in his art. As the hours passed, the goatherd came by with milk, the baker dropped by vending honeyed pistachio cakes (the ones with the powdery green crystal swirls) that Da ate absently, and I managed to washboard some clothes while loading his wagonette for today's delivery to Fenugreek, the village a dozen miles south on the road down into Heartstrings Valley.

I had Da packed and harnessed and clip-clopping down the road by 9:30 and dove to wake Summer, feeling like the veritable lord of time. The last time I’d met with my friends, at the Pistachio Festival, Green Leaf had overheard a stallion talk about how “uncomplicated” mare-work was.

Running a household, even without foals, requires a level of planning and juggling some stallions refuse to notice. Telling a mare she's invisible is both a compliment and an insult.

My filly-friends and I had exploded in laughter, as I did right now while beginning to manage my baby brother, levitating his bowl of oatmeal, nuts, and goat milk while heating it, arranging a spoon, chin towel, and hoof spoon just right so to signal to him he should eat and to prevent a tantrum, and selecting specific books while dragging him physically out of his book-pile to the table. I laid out the astronomy book, and the new one on escapements turned to the butterfly page, and a math book that had a chapter on calculating celestial epicycles. Summer cooperated by letting me dress him in a scholarly-looking black wool smock by pulling it over his head as he used the earth pony hoof spoon to eat while murmuring how interesting the pages I had opened for him were.

I was breathless.

Those combined achievements allowed me to throw on my mares-cloak and dash out. I found my friends, the sisters Dell (Bran, Fern, and True), amongst the other basket weavers in a circle warmed by the orangey glow of cornerstone crystals at Wicker Square. As I splashed the communal crystals with Friction, I learned that their brother Win had gone after dinner to the Council Paddock out by Brotherhood Woods to get a feel for the ley-lines near there so he would know how best to perform. Ferndell giggled that Win thought everything was a competition.

Yeah, but I wondered... what if more than one capable wizard existed in the High Desert? Windell might be right! Another worry.

I rushed off to the confectioners and bought a carob-cinnamon nut bar. Crunchy but filled with sedge honey, it was finicky Summer's favorite; one of mine, too, so I bought myself one to munch as I stopped for laundry soap and a smelly citronella pot to repel night bugs that began to swarm and buzzed maddeningly by your ears when you tried to sleep.

Back home, I found Summer waving a leg, the loop of the hoof-spoon still snug on his hoof, composing a spell mnemonic. His forced rhyme of "soar" and "far" made me cringe, but he continued with different words. I removed the spoon and went to wash the empty bowl, thinking it was best to see the examination as a competition.

As I dried the dishes, I asked, "Tell me about Astrolabe."

"That's why you wanted me to review epicyclic math! It's a star finding spell..."

I often made a study of ponies. It was how I knew that I could learn the location of the examination from Win by finding his sisters, who'd always be in the square this day of the week. It was how I got often-stubborn Sunny swiftly prepared for today so far as such could be done.

I packed up the books in his saddle bags, inserted the carob snack with an admonishment that it was for later, when hunger might make him cranky, and got him trotting out of the family compound behind me. Best to be early to see who arrived and to prepare ourselves, he and I, on site. I sensed the both of us needed to be ready.

Summer said, "School's that away."

It was, but I was headed for the south of town, near the downhill road. A natural bowl in the earth made a passable amphitheater within a circle of trees that helped muffle the noise of debates, military drills, and the occasional civic theater that the Queen deemed important for her subjects to watch, meaning stallions-only. Didn't the Queen, a mare, sense some dissonance in such restrictions? Inevitably, some mare reported the gist, probably from a brother or husband. Hiding in the woods would be dangerous.

I said, "There is an examination you need to attend."

"Awwwwwww." His monotone demonstrated he didn't understand the emotion he expressed fundamentally, but was practicing stating frustration and stubbornness in a socially acceptable fashion as I had taught him. It was better than the way he used to rock endlessly or make like a mule and stubbornly whine even in crowds. He added, "I'd rather be in school."

Which, considering how much he disliked dealing with the colts in school... I wasn't taking a chance Catseye Marble might think him too young to answer the summons. Summer was socially challenged but old enough magically. "It's a place where there will be lots of ponies who only want to speak about spells and magic. You might make some friends."

"Friends?" He scoffed and it almost sounded natural. "Ponies who talk about silly things and do frivolous things together? No thank you. I'm done playing."

I nudged him on the shoulder and he staggered a few steps ahead of me. "These ponies are different. You'll find them more like me."

"Really?" He turned and set his brown eyes on me. After about twenty steps, he looked forward and said, "There's nopony as smart as you, Sunny Daze."

That definitely wasn't true. It didn't stop me from breaking into tears, either. I quickly pulled the floppy-tipped hood of my mares-cloak forward so it hid my face and kept my sniffling to a minimum.

Sovereignty

I stood behind my baby brother who knelt in front of a book. He grumbled about how silly it was that I wasn't allowed to be seen reading a book in public, but he played the game, reviewing topics aloud while I illuminated his book with my horn and scanned the growing crowd.

A few stallions had brought their wives to serve them while they awaited the start of the event, but only I provided light for my charge. You would barely believe the High Desert was considered a hot desert region considering how cold it was. The wool smock I'd dressed Summer Daze in was barely enough. Another day without sun and we'd suffer a hard frost.

Dozens of stallions arrived. It was a night-time parade of glowing orbs of light at the tips of pony horns, like flower petals of pink, blue, amber, and green floating on a steady breeze. Despite the wan light, I could recognize some ponies. Only Windell was younger (by a month) than Summer. A couple of colts a year older talked together. The rest were adults, with a third being elders whose Illuminate flickered as much as their arthritic gait hesitated. Thousands and thousands of unicorns lived in town. Half were mares; obviously most of the remaining stallions didn't consider they had "magic strong". I snorted. A passing brown stallion looked.

To Summer, I said, "I wonder how many decided they weren't unicorns."

His brow furrowed.

"The broadside invited almost anypony." Even mares. "Never mind. Most everypony here I've heard has either a reputation for magic or one for a big ego."

Summer Daze said, "Or both."

Startled, I studied my baby brother. He never seemed to notice other ponies, but then I could not attend school with him to see how different he was in class because, naturally, mares aren't schooled. Maybe Catseye had socialized him more than I knew. He was indeed studying the crowd, and now looking down the road toward town where I saw a cyan pony with a golden mane and tail, and a matching gold stripe that meandered around his neck and underside. The stallion trotted up notably without students in tow. His golden eyes lingered on my brother and he gave him a puzzled look—but Catseye didn't deign to look at me as he passed, which was proper, of course, but subtly infuriating all the same.

I'd made the right decision to keep Summer Daze from school today.

Not five minutes later, more than a dozen stallions in pale blue robes and conical blue hats decorated with stars and comets marched up as a group.

Two propoli accompanied them, one of whom was Umbra. The dark gray, shaggy black-maned stallion had the hood of his red robe up, but he turned and smiled directly at me. Crimson magic illuminated his face, making his black horn glow red. Locks of black hair that pushed up his hood, together with black sideburns that framed his face, gave him a stately malevolence. "The Twins," he remarked in his deep voice.

Didn't he realize that he was supposed to enforce propriety, not break it? His magenta gaze made me shudder.

When the "contestants" began to file in, I shoved Summer Daze's books into his saddle bags and lifted him to dash to the end of the queue, which, since I'd arrived early enough to camp near the entrance, put us fifth behind Windell's minty-green flank. The pale-blue cloaked "mages" that together composed a "collegiate" formed a gauntlet of evaluating eyes with the first, a young blue-green stallion taking notes on a parchment scroll with a quill that had a blue metallic sheen resembling that of a moth's wing.

"This is Summer Daze, colt of Snow Frost," I offered when it was our turn. Never timid, I added, "I'm Sunny Daze, filly of—"

"No," said Umbra, stepping out from the amphitheater and marching through the gauntlet toward me. "That is improper!"

The mages looked at him. A blue stallion with a small waggling white beard produced what I instantly recognized as the Queen's broadside. "The Queen's—"

"Just no," said the propoli. "No mares allowed."

At least I was a "mare," not a filly.

The chief mage's voice lowered. "It reads 'all with magic strong' not 'stallions with magic strong.'"

A chill shot up my spine. I'd been right!

The mage turned the broadside about, highlighting the phrase in a blue glow, finishing with "—and this is the signature of Her Majesty Queen Platinum XI of the Crystal Hoof Dynasty in Her own magic." With his last word, the curlicue script at the bottom ignited with a crackling pop into a silver-white True Words flames.

Of course, I thought, all Umbra had to assert was that mares could not have "magic strong." He didn't, which was terrifying in retrospect. What did he know about me?

Instead, he planted his hooves in a not-to-be-budged stance and said, "Unmarried mares are not allowed to associate in public with stallions. It breaks the laws of propriety."

"Dare you publicly defy the will of the Queen?"

The crowd behind me gasped and began muttering.

One of the other mages nudged the leader as Umbra replied, "Never. It is written in the dowager Queen's Treaty of the High Desert that as an autonomous region we may make certain laws as peers of crown."

Umbra turned and grinned at me.

Reflexively, I scoffed. "Propriety indeed!"

I immediately regretted it. My horse brain if not my intellect instantly recognized I'd publicly shamed and insulted a propoli—were all proprieties equally enforced, of course. They weren't. Which made it worse for me.

I started to shake, which I tried to hide by speaking to Summer Daze. "Do what you are asked. Ask questions if you don't understand. My brother, you have no excuse for impolite behavior today, which means that you will eat that carob-cinnamon treat I gave you the moment you feel hungry."

"Yes, Sunny Daze."

The Collegiate and Umbra had argued while I spoke, but when I lifted my head, the leader's sad deep blue eyes met mine. He said, "I'm sorry." His sincere tone and the anguish etched in his face jarred me.

In the sudden isolating quiet that took over the scene, silent but for the sound of crickets, I whispered, "Don't be. It doesn't matter that I have 'magic strong.' I'm a mare."

I turned and walked through a different gauntlet. This one wasn't silent, but with the propoli present it was just barely audible.

"Stupid mare," and "Doesn't know her place," were their favorites. Less favorite were, "Who would marry her?" But the "Why didn't Snow Frost lose that useless foal in the desert when she was born?" almost made me cry.

Almost.

Instead it made me stupidly angry. I glanced back up the queue and found Summer Daze standing defiant. His unusual brown eyes met mine, his longer-than-most horn looking sharp. I still had my horn lit so he could read my face. He nodded, as if acknowledging my anger, and entered the Council Paddock.

I loved my brother, more so now than ever, but I also knew his limits. It would have been best that I could have accompanied him; I wasn't surprised I couldn't.

I'd already done things I would regret today. I hoped nopony saw my sly smile. Maybe I could do more.

I didn't intend to be caught, though.

Aversion

It took awhile for me to double-back from the road into town, once I was sure no propoli followed me and nopony coming from town would see me pick my way into the rocks and brush. Wearing deep dark blue helped. As my eyes better adjusted to the moonlight—I dared not use Illuminate—I found an earth pony path swimming in the shadows and winding between small boulders and skeletal plants.

Earth pony sharecroppers farmed all of our trees both down- and up-mountain and had a settlement about a mile downhill from the Council Paddock. They traded their share of crops farmed on the more arable land below the spring for unicorn-manufactured tools and utensils. I remembered a time when I saw more farmers in town, but the broken diurnal cycle the last few years played havoc with their efforts to grow things. The few recent encounters I'd had in the market had been with resentful types selling high-priced food at low margins, which meant I couldn't dicker much.

Summer's history books talked about unicorns being tasked with raising the sun and the moon, about that task being a pact that kept the pony tribes of Unicornia in peaceful coexistence. From what little I saw, it was more complicated than that. Da had once said the High Desert had a separate pact with the pegasi because greater Unicornia had fought with the tribe.

I saw no earth ponies as the dirt turned to grass beneath my hooves. It crunched in spots. I may have been wrong about the frost. Prickly small-leaf acacia shrubs gave way to more lush tamarix as well as fragrant cedar and juniper nearer the spring.

I'd carved all of it.

Leaves rustled in a sad-sounding whistling wind. A faint creosote and evergreen smell spiced the cold air as I slowly walked through shifting moon-dappled shadows, treading carefully. Each time a twig snapped, I froze, but I heard no answering movement. When the ground began to slope down, I began to hear voices from the paddock. The growth thinned to an irregular path through clumps of trees and brown crunchy-dusty cedar sheddings around the rim.

I ducked behind some bushes from where I could see and not be seen.

Below, the mages had set a table in front of the stage, behind which they all stood. The leader, who had apologized to me before, opened two massive tomes—one bound in metal and wood, another in basketweave wicker. He read while the others studied the crowd. A few hundred candidates reclined along the terraced bowl. This gave me an excellent view of their flanks. Most wore cloaks that deprived me of a view of their cutie marks, something that fascinated me more than their muscles.

None were mares.

A few, like Summer Daze, stood.

One mage walked the paddock perimeter and lit the cornerstone crystal outcrops at the four compass points. I ducked back as that illuminated the convocation with an eerie orangey glow that cast four distinct shadows. Most of the ponies swished their tails; ear flicks seemed contagious. Nerves, no doubt.

The mages had the candidates introduce themselves. Most rambled on about status, wealth, military prowess, or social connections. Then my baby brother spoke.

"I'm Summer Daze. I do complex magic because nothing else is interesting or worth the effort."

In the awkward silence that followed his brevity, a mage started, "Is that all—?"

"—I'm done."

Though a wave of nervous laughter rolled through the crowd, I smiled as many of the mages nodded. Summer had chosen not to waste their time. I doubted it was his intention to demonstrate empathy... but still.

Good job, my baby brother, I thought, and settled down for a long cold wait.

Even after Summer's demonstration, it was the better part of an hour before the mages spoke to a crowd that refused to completely hush even for them. Their spokespony said, "The first requirement is strong magic. If you don't—"

Windell, a minty-green black-tailed pony in a red flannel-hooded shirt, shouted, "What's in it for us? Your broadside was amazingly devoid of detail."

The more elderly blue white-maned pony, who seemed to be the leader, lowered his hood. "The Collegiate of Mages is responsible for raising the sun and the moon."

I heard a pony nearer my hiding place say sotto voce, "Good job you're doing there, sirs."

The mage heard it, as did everypony else. Over the laughter, he added, "We offer advanced schooling and personal tutors!"

Summer Daze's ears perked forward.

"That's all?" Windell interrupted.

"Qualified ponies will be invited to join the Collegiate." He quickly added, "And it pays well."

The audience nodded.

"But the offer requires that you demonstrate talent and that your magic is strong enough to aid the needs of the Queen. If all you are inclined to practice is everyday magic, or spells you mastered years ago, or you haven't tried to improve your skills since you learned them, then you should leave now. You face rigorous training and will need to rejoice in research and sometimes fruitless experimentation, often in subjects you have no native talent in. Beyond strong magic and stamina, we are searching for ponies attuned to nature or the sky. It is no dishonor to leave if anything I've said is unattractive or seems arduous. We have searched for a year and have found only two who we have invited to join us in the capital, and none who fit our most dire need."

Somepony shouted, "To raise the sun?"

The crowd murmured when the mages said no more. Over the course of minutes, most of the ponies shuffled out to the right of the stage, many complaining amongst themselves, leaving twenty-six. Summer's yellow fur and lime-green mane stood out at the far left of a mostly horsey-colored cohort of the hopeful that gathered in the front and center. His ears followed the mage who proceeded to call names alphabetically and ask each candidate to demonstrate his best spell.

I saw ponies blast rocks with Force, push ponies away with Shield, and dig holes with Excavate. Two others used Transfigure, one to change sticks into a hammer and the other rocks into a foal's lamb pull-toy. I could see that the practitioners of the last spell could have benefited from studying escapements; both objects faded back to their base state in less than a minute. There was a reason nopony made things for sale using transfiguration.

It was about this time that I realized my brother was gone. I stood, heart racing, causing the branches around me to rustle. I stretched to see the entire shadowy bowl below me, but I could not see Summer Daze anywhere. Had he lost interest, I should have seen him retreat into himself, the way he sometimes slumped wearily. As one student cast an illusion that turned the red-brown desert cobble under-hoof to dark-veined white marble tile, I realized I would have had to have seen him trotting for the exit.

This meant he had cast a spell, and it wasn't Teleport because the one thing I knew about the spell was that it sounded like a lightning strike. But what?

I ducked back behind the cover of the leaves and reviewed the spells we'd tried together. Aversion was one I had learned existed one day when I kept finding myself hungry, having repeatedly gotten up from my plate of shredded oats. Summer had cast it on himself while he sat next to me.

Funny colt.

I looked methodically at each pony and was sure I saw each—but come to think about it, when I'd understood the effects of Aversion and applied willpower, I'd always seen my oats; I'd just not wanted to look at them. Letting my eyes go unfocused, I ought to have seen something amiss.

Nothing seemed amiss, though I noticed a gap in the center of the table where the leader had been standing. He now walked to join the other mage doing the testing. I saw nothing interesting on the table; the big open books there were too far away to read even a title.

I wracked my brain. He had to be present. Had he cast an illusion so he couldn't be seen? We'd cast several types together, but they'd become progressively harder the more complicated the scene being masked had become. Generating a facsimile of a wall, or making the ground look like white marble (now faded), was a two-dimensional illusion.

We had both created examples of those illusions the first night we learned the base spell. I wasn't good at it, probably because I had no interest in hiding stuff. Casting an illusion around an object, which I succeeded in doing once around cornerstone crystals, required concentration and good perceptual skills. I ultimately failed to make it convincing because the cornerstone cast light and making something bright appear dark didn't stop it from casting light and shadows.

Which is why casting an illusion on yourself to disappear is something that just won't work. You'd have to remain still. Moving about would change the angles of reflectance and distort the illusion, making it easier to detect and see through, and make it very vulnerable to the mirror trick to focus on imperfections in the imagining clause. Worse, if somepony moved behind the illusion and you didn't notice and correct for it, or you simply stepped on a stick and made a noise...

Then what had Summer Daze done?

Something.

Something I'd probably helped explain to him.

Something I'd had no real interest in…

I sorted through the what-ifs, trying to figure out what had happened. Time passed as a purple pony named Rouge conjured a straight length of rope from his saddlebags that was magically tied into a double-hitch knot when it appeared. That was actually very impressive as it required him to coordinate a transformation along an unknown conformation of a volume. The middle-aged pony might be better at magical equations than my brother!

It was while the leader checked Rouge's red basket-weave saddlebags for an untied length of rope that I noticed something in my peripheral vision. It appeared that a page of the left tome, the grimoire with the metal lock on the rough hewn timber cover, was settling into place. When I squinted, it even seemed as if the buckle had shifted, but I kept on looking back to the leader who jotted on a levitated scroll. Uh oh—

The examiner called out, "Sunny Daze."

The mages looked around. The leader shook his head as in disbelief. He too appeared to realize my baby brother's yellow fur and lime-green mane were hard to miss had he walked by. He asked tentatively, "Sunny Daze?"

I heard my brother’s voice, “Um—“

Suddenly, the mage to left of the gap with the books jumped back with an unstallion-like shriek, stumbling away. The mage to the right looked at his fellow mage—his brown face and a very bright yellow star on his forehead clearly visible in his hood—and a heartbeat later gasped and backpedaled into his neighbor who whinnied.

Summer said, “I’m here.”

And now I could see through the illusion, given sufficient clues even though my eyes kept on wanting to wander away. I saw a semi-transparent view of my bespectacled brother with a quill dancing before him; the pink blaze on his forehead helped me center my attention. That meant he was casting at least Aversion, some multi-phrase transform of Illusion, and Dictation. No, wait. The buckle and the quill, even his walking around, had to have made noise. Now that I thought about it, there was a compound spell… Right: Don't See, Don't Look, Don't Hear. He had tried discussing it with me a month ago. The technicalities had made my eyes cross. Had he?

The leader, the blue stallion with the white beard, said a few conjuring words, reared and flicked with his hooves. Summer Daze became fully visible. His red feather quill fell over on his notebook where he had been—surprise, surprise—copying down a spell.

Well, here was to hoping it wasn't a secret spell.

Summer Daze focused on the mage leader and said, "That was a nice trick. How did you do that?" Not I'm sorry. No nervous laughter. No red-faced embarrassment. Just, How'd you do that?

The mage trotted over and looked at the notebook, the quill, and Summer in that order. "Good enough," he said and waved my brother back into the audience.

Summer Daze said, "But I'm not done—"

As I clacked my forehead with a hoof, the mage levitated closed his tomes, stuffed the notebook, spectacles, and quill into Summer's saddlebags, and pushed him with a blue shield spell until he got the idea. My baby brother shrugged, trotted noisily (since it was now dead-silent in the paddock) to his spot at the left of the candidates, and took out his carob-cinnamon bar. Incongruously, this meant him reaching his muzzle into the saddle bag then holding the confection with the frog of his hoof like an earth pony. Typical Summer Daze, he noticed none of the stares that earned.

Five more demonstrations and they winnowed the group down to four: Rouge, Windell, somepony else, and Summer Daze. The others departed, grumbling, one pair saying loudly that the whole process was rigged.

I felt rather proud. Not that Summer Daze had planned to show off—he was incapable of thinking that way—but that his nature had helped him succeed.

The next part was as curious as it was unexpected. The leader explained that the Collegiate was going to raise the sun.

I immediately edited that to try to.

As the mages formed a circle around the four, the leader added, "Listen and feel the magic. If something makes sense or moves you, join in when it's the right time."

No spell.

No magical equations.

No poetry.

Nor an admonition to watch and keep quiet. With an offer like that, I too joined in from afar, listening as the ritual began with chanted words.

The chant—it could barely be called a song—evolved into leader-and-follower response verses. All the candidates joined in, even Summer. It devolved into throwing as many different words of the same meaning as conceivable at the ritual.

Some of the mages began to sway, as if going into a trance.

The composition enticed the sun to rise into the sky, praising the orb's beauty and brightness, and the sky's expanse and blue color, treating it alternately with words that described a lovely daughter, a beloved wife, or a secret lover. In that last I actually blushed, but it all fit, meshed like the gears of a clock, and described a stark loneliness and longing, of a bringing to fruition what was supposed to be, of what needed to be, of what could no longer be left incomplete.

Interspersed were the mnemonics for the practical spells mares often used: Levitation, Motivation, and Sliding. How odd.

Bits alluded to sparkling diamonds and to a wagon. With a growing feeling of elation, I understood they meant a crystal celestial chariot for the most powerful female essence in our world! I shivered all over with breathtaking certainty. It spoke of chariot for the sun that required unicorns to pull it.

My fur stood on end.

The Sun. I felt it near. I turned eastward. There. I felt it as I sometimes thought I did. It was coy. Hiding, hovering just below the darkness of night. Impatient but stymied by…

I did not know by what.

My breathing synchronized with the chant that beat an unseen drum for a ritual evocation of a spell that was also a song. I felt the pulse of... Was it sunlight? It warmed my skin; my body began to sway; it made me want to dance—though I knew better than to do that hiding amongst the trees and bushes.

Still—

The imagined glow of the sun filled me. I felt lighter. Like I expanded into a void.

But I felt stymied. Or rather the sun did.

And it was a big reason for Sliding. The sun wanted to move one way, but if it would only detour the other…

"Just go this way," I said, reflexively casting a spell I used often to push large planks and blocks of wood across one another in the woodshed. A wave as numinous elation flooded into me. The part of me still grounded in the real world hoped I spoke in a whisper because I felt as if I were floating.

I followed Sliding with Motivate.

The all-encompassing warmth made me wonder if I actually glowed. My eyes had closed of their own accord. None of what I felt could be real... Still, it felt like my magic streamed from me, holding me up, buoyant, as in a bath. I heard the branches around me clack and the leaves rustle. The wind had picked up, brushing my mane against my neck. The weight on my hooves became less and less. Without volition, my lighter forequarters lifted, and I involuntarily began to rear.

"You!" a harsh deep voice yelled. "What vile impropriety are you committing, hiding like a thief in the bushes?"

Umbra.

The trance snapped like a porcelain teacup crushed under-hoof and I flung my magic who-knows-where. I fell back to all fours, but my knees didn't hold and buckled. I folded downward. It was as if my elation had sapped my essential vitality; in an instant I'd essentially gone from prancing through an exciting morning to dragging my hooves after days of insomnia. I crashed amongst the snapping sticks and slid away from the ridge and the paddock. The propoli stood in his red cloak on the path around the upper edge of the paddock, looming above me, leering.

Lit by his crimson magic, his dark gray face, burning magenta eyes, and voluminous black lion's mane formed an apparition that frightened me to the core. I bucked—cracking branches, bruising my legs—desperately twisting to get myself upright.

In the paddock, I heard a roar. Screams of joy. Cheers.

And no wonder. As I stumbled upright, I saw an amazing sight. The sky had turned orange and red. As the propoli and I stared in amazement, past the stage, beyond the golden clay roofs and red-striped white awnings of the distant town, behind the blue-forested Deep Dark mountains that I could now see were shrouded in mist, the sky lightened to yellow and turned blue. In a few more moments, a beautiful sun surged upward and traveled at least a quarter way up into the sky before I had to release the breath I'd held in shock.

"They did it," I whispered.

Umbra rounded on me. "And you, you stupid mare," he raged, "with your hubris and unmare-like pride—you could have defeated their entire spell! But I saved it."

He levitated a rope and tied a hitched-lead around my muzzle and behind my ears with a painful snap. "Do not use your 'magic strong.' I know you, Sunny Daze. This time you can't run away and lose me in the spice market. My word counts. Don't make your punishment worse."

He eyed me, looking for a response. Since my mouth was tied shut, I settled for a slight shudder.

He grunted and led me slowly along an earth pony trail like a slave, past the paddock, and up the graded road toward town. The sun quickly heated my indigo cloak. Soon we encountered ponies and the candidates who'd queued up earlier. In the morning sunlight, anypony could easily identify me. All stared. I kept my chin raised, if for no other reason than it made me taller than the propoli.

As we walked down Market Road into town, he said, "Looking at stallions? You should have been married off long ago to a strict husband who could take advantage of that 'magic strong.'" He chuckled at a no-doubt-salacious stallion thought I feared to characterize further.

I shuddered again.

Lucky

Da whistled as he unpacked our shabby wagonette with rust-rimmed pony-height wheels. The instant he saw us at the gate he whinnied and dropped a log.

Seeing the disappointment in his amber eyes, mine flooded with hot tears of shame. I ripped the lead from the propoli's nonchalant crimson magic and galloped inside. I pulled the drapery closed on my meager space and dived onto the hay-stuffed mattress that masqueraded as my bed. The rope banged when it hit the wall.

How could I think that anything I'd done could benefit the family now that I'd shamed myself before the entire town? A mare had her place in mare society just as a stallion did in his, but I had an unbecoming pride that made me think I was better than any mare or stallion in ways that were dangerously unfeminine.

Nopony good would want to marry me. I ought to have acted normal for Summer Daze's sake today. He would soon become a stallion, the next generation of the family, the pony who would care for Da. Umbra was right. It was hubris. Summer Daze had proved himself capable in a surprising fashion I'd been too blind to see. I may have saddled him with the burden of being seen as manipulated by a mare. I should have left him to muddle through. I'd not only meddled, but possibly hurt the family's reputation—well, probably hurt it—and maybe hurt his future chances of making a living.

What have I done?

I'd put my desires selfishly ahead of everypony's. I needed to stop thinking and start doing only what I was told. That was a mare's best choice.

Tears flooded out of me, hot and salty, and I felt this strange pain in my chest: my heart breaking. I had no right to complain.

Every storm does pass. The new sun warmed the chill out of the room, and I escaped into dreams of a yellow and green stallion king who reared and raised the sun.

"Sunny Daze!"

I woke at the sound of Da's voice. My red shame instantly reared. I rolled off my bed away from him and hid my face under my legs.

Da's voice didn't sound angry, and it took my racing mind a minute to decipher that he had said, "You are a lucky mare."

My bad side got control and scoffed out loud. I immediately whined, "Sorry, sorry, sorry. I'm so sorry. I'm a bad pony. And I won't—"

"—act so impulsively? A good idea. Living means surviving, my daughter. Summer Daze and I will survive without you—"

I whinnied and shot upright, heart thumping so hard it felt as if it would fly from my chest. Blood roared in my ears. My eyes burned. I whispered, "I'm to be publicly flogged?"

No, that would not divorce me from my family. Did Umbra hate me that much...?

Gasping, I cried, "I'm to be sold as a slave?"

Da stood frozen an instant, a pale yellow-maned alabaster statue, amber eyes wide. He blinked and raced around the bed, saying, "No, no, no!" He immediately leaned into me, his warmth holding me up as the surge of energy that had brought me upright dissipated in shakes and shivers. "No, my daughter. Never think that horrible thought lest you make it true. No, I said, 'Lucky.'"

"How could that be?" I remembered Umbra's hard magenta eyes. I remembered his leer when he caught me. Some criminals were sold. The worst affronts to society resulted in death.

"Umbra offered to marry you."

I made a strangled sound and my legs gave out. I thumped to the floor in a swoon Da was unable to stop. I lay sprawled, moaning. How could this be lucky!? spun in my head like a spell so flawed that its math reciprocated locking me in a phasing magic that would leave me catatonic until I exhausted my reserves.

Da levered me sideways so I reclined upright and folded himself beside me. When I blinked at him, still stunned, he added, "It is true that you would be his second wife, but nopony else is asking for you."

After being bridled and led on a rope for the town to see, who would?

"Though the dowry he demands is nearly ruinous, it must be done. His standing in town is good. His first wife, Gilt, is older than him and nearly died bearing their daughter, Aurelia. You may yet become his first wife." His embarrassed chuckle at wishing ill upon somepony signaled his desperation.

"I will not ruin this family," I said in little more than a murmur. Was it my selfishness talking? Or did I mean this? I spoke louder when I said, "I won't ruin it. I don't need ever to marry. I won't marry Umbra."

I heard him take a deep breath, then the clatter of his hooves as he unfolded himself. He sighed from above me. "That won't go over well."

"Marrying—"

"Having an unmarried daughter is a stigma, too," he said distantly.

I looked up. "But I can make up for it! I'm really good at working wood—"

He smiled and moved closer. He whispered, "I know you have been holding back and using magic to work faster so you can—"

I gasped.

"I've had to throw away few items in the last week—"

My face heated up.

"—because your technique requires wood with tighter grain and fewer knots, and you've gotten really good at it. Still—"

"That means you can work with me to perfect my craft! I can stay home and work more—"

In a lower whisper "—and build a dowry?"

"I wasn't thinking—"

Quietly: "—that? You don't understand business, my daughter. What happens when I can complete orders faster and improve my quality? My competitors begin to suspect my craft, cast aspersions. My customers begin to expect more and more. And when you leave my shop as you will when you marry—"

"But I won't marry. I promise!"

He shook his head, saying in a normal voice, "That's not your choice, Sunny Daze. It is mine."

"But—"

Again quietly, "And when you marry, your husband could make you my competitor. Best that it not occur to him."

"But I wouldn't!"

His amber eyes looked sad. "My daughter, this is the dilemma of a mare. Your grandmare explained it to your mother and your mother to me. When you foal, you have a family. Your mother moved from the capital, abandoning everything she knew."

Distressed amber eyes held mine.

After a moment, I looked away and said, "But I don't want to marry Umbra."

"Every stallion wants to be wealthy. Everypony wants to be happy. Every magician wants to control the heavens. But Sunny Daze, life rarely gives us want we want. Consider yourself lucky if it gives you what you need. You are lucky. Straighten your cloak and follow me."

When I stepped through the curtain, I froze. We weren't alone. Had Umbra been trying to eavesdrop—and surely he had been—he'd have heard everything I said.

What froze me though was that he sat at the table, beside Summer Daze, looking over his shoulder as my baby brother studied one of his notebooks. That Summer Daze had returned so quickly worried me.

The propoli had hung his robe on a chair. He wore only a silver satin tunic that accented his gray fur, revealing his cutie mark. It was a black marble that threw a conical shadow at a forty-five degree angle onto a gold oval of ground.

What did that mean?

My anger rose as he looked over Summer Daze like a father interested in his son's progress, but in my estimation more like a spider considering a fly. My baby brother seemed oblivious.

I cleared my throat, worried what might come out if I opened my mouth. Magenta eyes turned toward me. He smiled and stood, unwontedly restrained and quiet. He was fifteen years older than me and in his prime. I could not help but notice his muscles move under his metal-gray coat.

He noticed the play of my eyes across his body. He faced Da and asked, "About my proposal?"

"She should say. Sunny Daze?"

I looked to Da, to Umbra, to Da, and Umbra again. My face heated. I'm not sure whether it was anger, shame, embarrassment, or chagrin. "About marriage?"

In a relaxed friendly manner, the propoli said, "The deal I've proposed is excellent. The discipline you'll learn will help you grow and make you happier than you can know."

Da said, "It's a good match." Not great. Not wonderful. Good.

"Will you accept?" the propoli asked.

He wouldn't even say my name. Was I a thing?

To him.

To them both!

"No, I will not marry you."

He stomped his right hoof—lightly as if the gesture had barely escaped tight control. Ten heartbeats later, he looked directly at Da and said measuredly, "Not unexpected." He rubbed an itch on his muzzle with a knee, then added, "Not a total 'no,' either."

Da said, "I'd rather that Sunny Daze agree, too."

My breath hitched.

I looked at the pair. The stallions stood strong; they were the sun and the moon, day and night. Like those celestial bodies, they were forces of nature, locked in orbit, not entirely caring about the desires of the earth upon which they shone.

Umbra glanced at my father, then looked at me. His tail began to swish; he grunted. "Huh. Well. You need to understand the seriousness of your crime, young filly: an unmarried mare found lurking around stallions in an act of disruption. The impropriety is unmistakable. The deal I'm offering you is generous, more so now because I'm going to have to explain to my cohort what you have perpetrated and how it may be excused. I offer you a clean path forward, young filly—"

Through clenched jaws, I said, "My name is Sunny Daze!"

"A mare's name is meaningless. You will marry me; do not dawdle deciding. Do not force my position by further impropriety." He took a deep breath as he levitated on his robes and exited the house.

I caught the door and dashed outside. The sunlight dazzled me. Squinting, I shielded my eyes. Through tears, I saw his dark shape and crimson magic on the compound gate.

"Why?" I shouted.

As my eyes adjusted, his hooves made an ominous click-click on the rock and hard-packed dirt of the inner compound. His magic burned redly around his black horn as his face and magenta eyes swam into focus.

The door slammed behind me. "Why, the pony asks?" His teeth were clenched. I saw anger mixed with anticipation.

I reflexively nodded.

His magic caught my jaw. He jerked my face so I saw him with my left eye only. "You challenge me."

His smile became broader as I let him hold me.

"Ha! Maybe not. I want your 'magic strong.'"

I shuddered. He knew.

"I require a partner, but think carefully. A slave would do."

I heard the rattle of the door handle behind me, and he shoved my face away, hard. He was already trotting to the gate, opening it when he said, "Snow Frost, and you young filly, heed my words. It is a fair deal."

The gate spring snapped the door to the compound shut. He was gone.

My stomach soured. I dashed to the privy in tears.

Dangerous

Nothing but bile came up, and acid, adding to the already vile scents of the poorly-lit outbuilding. I scrambled out as soon as I could.

Fear of a dreaded future warred with what I'd learned from Da and my friends about marriage—that I had to accept what was negotiated for me. I mean, wasn't it something extraordinary that Umbra wanted me as a partner and accepted that I had strong magic?

My untrusting side argued I'd be locked into his goals and his agenda, but what mare had a choice? When she married into a family she became a member of that family. She lost her old family. Not just because she moved to another village, as Mare had, or because a mare's new husband chose to forbid contact—there were plenty of feuds in town—but because of foals.

I wasn't so stupid as to miss the us and them aspect. That explained Da's reluctance to further train me in the trade. That bespoke of him using the word "stigma."

I had to believe that the family would continue when I married out. I had to accept many things.

Nevertheless, I felt sick and shaky returning inside. Da carved a bowl out of black-streaked tan wood block in the light of a window. The curved chisel in his magic made ticking-chipping sounds. He clicked a horseshoe on the floor, implying I should join him.

The last thing I wanted to learn was a secret of his trade. I added confusion to my list of discomforts. I opened the kitchen faucet and poured a bowl full of water from the barrel that I had filled from the town well; I did that thrice weekly.

More work for Da. Summer Daze wouldn't do it.

I swished my mouth out and spat into the wooden basin. It drained outdoors with a gurgle.

Summer Daze asked, "Are you all right?"

I involuntarily gasped. Summer Daze didn't do common empathy. I braced myself against the sideboard as I looked at the table. With a shiver, I wondered what manner of changeling had replaced him.

His gaze met mine as the quill in his magic danced, skritching down the question he'd just asked. Since I doubted anypony but my baby brother could cast Dictation, he couldn't be a changeling. Today was a day of unexpected revelation, but changelings were the stuff of old mares tales meant to scare foals.

"I'm fine," I answered.

He ambled over. "I doubt that."

He examined my jaw, eyes large in his spectacles as he squinted in the uneven light that filtered through the under-eave vents. My jaw hurt; he paused while looking there.

Great. Bruises!

He sniffed my mouth, then looked at the expanse of my cloak from hood to tail. He examined a tiny rent in the hem and dug out a little twig with his teeth. He spat it on the floor, tilted his head and sniffed.

He asserted, "You were watching from the top of the paddock near the big cedar trees."

Was it an admission that he observed more than he let on? No, I decided. He had had to observe everything to cast his illusion.

When I took too long to answer, he answered for me. "You were."

I nodded.

He smelled my cloak and neck and stated, "Umbra did not touch you."

"Not physically. He showed that propriety at least."

Da had quietly entered the kitchen alcove, amber eyes wide. I glanced at him, then back to Summer Daze whose lips had become a thin line—the facial expression he displayed when his calculations missed what he had approximated.

He asked, "Did he hurt you?"

"Yes. The worm led me through town on a rope like an animal. He grabbed my muzzle in his magic. He proposed to marry me."

There! Now tears rolled down my cheeks.

Summer Daze blinked a few times, thinking it through. He grabbed a dish towel in his teeth and waved it before me.

I tossed it back on the sideboard.

"He hurt you because?"

"I was 'lurking.'"

He said, "An opinion biased in his favor." He nodded, turning back to the table. "Umbra is dangerous." In a moment, he was paging through the notebook again. He stopped on a half-written page; likely the spell or notes he'd copied from the grimoire.

Da and I looked at each other and simultaneously shrugged.

Cued by a forming yet fleeting thought, I looked over Summer Daze's shoulder. Odd. The spell looked like Motivation, but instead of rolling a pony cart, it had to do with blocks of crystal. In the center of what he'd copied, I read, "To adore the brilliance of the light that gives us warmth." Below it was scrawled, "We ask that you smile upon us and rise above the earth."

My fur stood on end as a chill ran up my spine to my scalp. Summer Daze had copied the spell to raise the sun!

I read the entire fragment. The next thing I knew, I had read it a half-dozen times, breathlessly, obsessively turning pages back, forward, back, forward... The strangeness fascinated me—captivated me. With each reading, the spell seemed more powerful. The words seemed to shift position, switching meaning, further explaining a concept that nevertheless flit away from my conscious understanding.

Was this the exciting frustration storied in ballads and tales about what a stallion felt courting a tantalizing but uncooperative mare? Umbra's magenta eyes flashed in my mind and broke the compulsion.

I began tapping my forehead with a hoof. Confusion... and now distraction. Enough! The thought that had brought me to look over my brother's shoulder was…

My heart raced. "Summer Daze, did you raise the sun?"

"No," he said, not even lifting his gaze.

Of course, he hadn't. What were the chances he was the one?

Da had stood looking over Summer Daze's other shoulder; he now looked at me, his eyes glimmering.

But, I thought, then asked, "Did you help raise the sun?"

"No."

I closed my eyes tightly, clenching and shaking. I really needed something to have worked out. My hope felt like a bug gazing up at a hammer head. "What happened with the mages? Why are you here so soon?"

He shrugged. "The Collegiate of Mages did not find what they sought. I decided to come home."

Smash! The hope that I might steer Summer Daze into a job where he might support Da and himself splattered into lifeless droplets of might-have-been. I felt like a rag doll thrown to the ground. No worse day had yet dawned. My life: ruined. I might have as well been dead.

I barely heard Summer Daze say, "I must work on Teleport, now. Remember, Umbra is dangerous."

Tears streamed down my cheeks and I moaned. I galloped into my room to hide from the world.

I had no idea how long I lay there, on my back, hooves up, wrapped in my yellowed prickly wool blanket. Thanks to my mares-cloak and the continuous sunlight of the broken day, I'd begun to sweat.

I didn't care.

I kept replaying what had happened, trotting down endless what-if paths that led nowhere. Hours passed in a useless shuffle, but it delayed my arrival in that cavern of despair within which my horseshoes echoed now.

I had to marry Umbra.

But… I would work to negotiate down the dowry he demanded! A dowry was my wealth as a mare in my new family—in theory; in practice, not so much. However, I could not allow my father and brother to be thrown out on the street to beg, either. I did have a negotiating advantage. Maybe. Umbra desired a willing partner, somepony who would willingly use her magic strong for him, somepony who could read and reason for him.

I could offer my willing service in exchange for him reducing the dowry he demanded. To ensure the continuance of my family, I'd willingly sell my body and soul. I'd willingly sell everything I'd learned from Summer Daze. I owed my baby brother that much to secure his future.

Why—why had the mages rejected him?

It made no sense. He'd demonstrated magic far more powerful and nuanced than the others, including Rouge with his spatial-coordinate-transformational conjuration. Stronger maybe than the mages, too. I agreed with Summer that the spell cancelling gesture was no more than a nice trick. Sheesh, the mages hadn't even gotten Sun Rise, or whatever they called the spell, perfected in the two years since the Breaking.

I scoffed. Leader and response choral chants? Really!?

Wait. Why had the mages rejected him?

Had Summer Daze not asked? So typical of my brother to lose interest and just wander off to find something more interesting. He'd said, "I decided to go home."

Oh, By Platium's Grace, that was it! He had simply walked off! In their elation, the mages had celebrated the rising of the sun. Ignored, my baby brother departed.

No, no, no! I had to find the Collegiate to repair their mistake. Our lives, our destinies, depended upon it! My blanket tangled up my legs as I fought myself free. I fell out of bed with a grunt, and scrambled to get my hooves under me.

Nightwalker

I tore out of the house, barely noticing that Da and Summer Daze had gone to bed. The sun had dipped to the west but, because the mages had cast Sun Rise in the early afternoon a'clock, it had to be evening. I softly shut the door and the gate, cushioning them as the first hissed into the jam and the second clicked into the strike. Nopony was out on the street, nopony but me.

I shuddered, remembering Umbra's deep voice as he warned: "Do not force my position by further impropriety."

Nightwalking—being alone, at night, wandering the street, unmarried, not escorted by my father or brother—was exceedingly improper behavior for a mare. It might even be a crime, though I knew of nopony who admitted to having been caught. I raised my hood, then pulled the ties so the midpoint of the hood caught on my horn before I snugged it to my throat. The overhanging sleeve of fabric shaded my face to the tip of my muzzle. It interfered with my sight, and it might hamper my spell casting, but it was something. I'd have given most anything to have had Summer Daze's Don't See, Don't Look, Don't Hear and the skill to cast it, but I'd have to rely on luck—and to sticking to the dried grass and dirt to muffle my hoofbeats while I avoided the broken poorly-repaired red and black cobbled town roads.

I didn't think to check the town clock tower until I was headed toward the Council Paddock. I jumped when it chimed midnight.

The entrance stood unguarded, so I walked in. Slowly. Rehearsing my plea. Figuring my negotiation points. Like how my brother was low maintenance. Give him a book, make sure he eats and sleeps, little more. Nothing more, really.

I went quietly, for surely everypony was sleeping. Waking them would be annoying enough, right…?

Looking down into the bowl of the amphitheater, I saw naught but swirling dust lofted by an arid breeze that whistled in the angled late-afternoon sun. The tables had vanished. Only a peppering of fresh horseshoe marks lying between clumps of dried grass indicated that anypony had visited here recently.

I had assumed they'd camped, but they were city-ponies. They might not do camping. That meant they lodged with folk in town. I hadn't spent any time gossiping since the Collegiate had posted their broadside. I'd have known "where" had my world not been turned upside-down.

Where could they be?

Of course! Obsessive Windell! He would have not only visited the testing grounds, he would have shadowed the mages wherever they'd lodged, just to see how they acted to glean any detail that might aid him in winning.

I raced to the Dells.

The basket-weavers were wealthy and it showed in the fresh whitewash upon the walls of their compound. The red tiles that topped them were perfect. Crusted with minerals, for sure, but none were broken. The pull bell on their gate gleamed.

I hesitated pulling the brass dewdrop. A'midnight had been fifteen minutes ago. I shook. I could wait no longer. I had to intercept the mages before they left town. I jerked the cord way too hard.

I heard the ding! from the street, and only then did I think how to explain everything. I had to assure that Windell didn't become envious and refuse to speak. And why was Summer Daze's sister asking? Right, he sent me—

The gate unlatched and creaked open in green magic. I caught sight of an unaccountably cute rumpled black mane and a minty-green face. I noticed a creme-white patch of thick fur that ran down his chest and between his forelegs. He wore only his cutie mark. His emeraline eyes went wide when he registered my mares-cloak and my lack of an accompanying stallion.

"Wha?" Windell cried and slammed the gate. "Who are you?"

"Sunny Daze," I hissed.

I heard retreating hooves and a whispered, "I'll fetch Fern."

"But I need to talk to you—" I said, my voice petering out.

A minute later, the gate creaked open to reveal a light green mare with a curly yellow mane full of clumps that resembled fiddleheads, wearing a worn purple nightshift. She rubbed a barely open dark-brown eye with a knee and said, blearily, "Sunny Daze?" Even the sound of my name sounded slow and sleepy. "Wha' time is it?"

"It's late. I figured out what happened with Summer Daze and the mages—"

Her wide yawn interrupted me. "I have a whole list of things that happened with the mages thanks to my pointy-headed brother. Can we go over it a'morning?"

"No, it'll be too late. I need to talk to your brother."

She yawned again, but opened the gate to usher me into the yard. Terracotta pots held small palms and various blue-green non-edible succulents. The white gravel looked freshly raked. "Aside from a lack of sleep, how can we be too late?"

"Can I please speak to your brother?"

She rolled her eyes, which sparkled in the sun. "Don't think you'll escape me gossiping about me chaperoning my brother and you late at night."

I had visions of a certain red-robed propoli. "Please don't."

"You're going to owe me a good story tomorrow."

"You wouldn't believe."

It must have been in my tone. Her eyes widened. "I'll get him."

I heard the crunch of hooves in the gravel and turned to face the brother and sister. Windell wore a white shirt, and he'd greased his black mane back. I found it funny how he slunk behind his sister, never quite looking at me. Coy. I'd never had an opportunity to meet a colt before, not one on one. Oddly, it didn't occur to me one would be shier about a meet-up than I was.

"Hi."

"Hi."

I got to the point. "Do you know where the Collegiate of Mages is lodging?"

"Lodging?"

Were all colts lost in their own world like my brother? "You know, like, staying in town?"

"Oh." His hooves crunched in the gravel as he approached. He glanced at me, peering up into my hood. "They're on a 'grand promenade.' They arrived just before the test and left immediately."

"What? Where?"

"Don't know. They packed up the wagons and rolled on down the main grade into the valley. Somewhere east from there, I think."

"They left immediately?"

"Yep."

"Oh, no!" I was shaking again. I didn't want to have to chase them all the way to the capital! "Thank you. Really. Gotta go!"

It didn't occur to me to wait for "morning" or go home to sleep. The further they got, the more likely I'd miss the road they took and the further I'd get into Unicornia, away from the safety of the High Desert.

I intemperately raced through town back toward the road that curved past the Council Paddock, no longer caring about the clatter my hooves made on the cobblestones—just about moving fast. I thought it was good, at least from what I'd overheard, that Greater Unicornia had no propriety police.

None.

Right?

Foreigners

I could gallop only so far. I ended up going the wrong way, twice. I even met my first Unicornian mare, a pink-maned pink merchant filly casting Motivate. She painted the wheels of her cart blue, driving a load of boxed goods and barrels at the speed of a trot ahead of her. She sported a cracked-egg cutie mark.

Yeah, she wore only her cutie mark.

The pair of blue fabric saddlebags on her back were each emblazoned with her cutie mark—which struck me as very risqué, though not so much if mares sometimes didn't wear clothes. I think we stared at each other until even a foal would realize it was rude, and we both broke into laughter. She'd seen the mages take Crest Highway east toward Five Waterfalls Township late yesterday. She pointed.

I trotted along in what had to be the very early morning a'clock. The sun had long ago tried to set in the west, then gotten stuck an hour before a proper sunset. It now bathed the world in the golden light that, over the past few years, had become what I thought of when I thought of daytime.

It was still hot. The pegasi saw that this part of the Heartstrings Valley got plenty of rain, so it wasn't a desert like the High Desert plateau thirty miles uphill behind me. Delicious looking green leaves danced and rustled in the breezes that tussled the canopy of the trees that lined the road. Woods dotted the landscape. Lush wild oats waved enticingly in the summery weather.

I took time to graze by the roadside, enjoying a nutty flavor you can't get from a bale. I even waded into a brook to drink deeply from the cool waters. The brook really did sound like it was chuckling, as was styled in the tales I'd heard.

I clip-clopped past fields plowed in precise parallel furrows. Cold-hardy cabbage and kale grew in purple and dark green profusion. In one field, I saw early-rising earth pony stallions— one tan, one yellow—eating apples. They stared at me as I cantered on down the deeply rutted road.

They were, of course, hornless, but it was hard to escape the creepy sensation that they were somehow maimed. I knew that earth ponies had no horn, but I'd never really studied what they looked like before. The ones that sold vegetables at the farmers market were stallions and a good mare didn't look too closely at male strangers. These two were hefty, muscular farm-hoofs. Being in a foreign land made me aware of everything—like the violet and crystal blue color of their eyes—because I knew I knew so little that anything could be dangerous. I had to look.

It was an excuse to stare anyway.

Unseen insects went buzz-buzz-buzzzz. Loudly. Gnats swirled in occasional clouds.

The water-fed lushness—and the folk that lived amongst it—looked very alien indeed.

About the time I noticed a group of daubed-mud-and-lumber thatched cottages around the bend, I saw light-blue ponies milling around them. As I picked up my trot, they resolved into blue-robbed mages. Their two-wheeled pony carts were painted the same shade of blue.

I tried to go faster, but my legs felt leaden. I settled for focusing on my question and slowing my breathing such that I might speak intelligibly.

When I came close enough that the clatter of my hooves reached their ears, one mage left the group. Large multi-pony caravan tents stood nestled between the trees, each striped blue and white with gold fringe. Silver Unicornia unicorn-bust flags waved in the breeze. A few mages did calisthenics and stretched while others executed a smooth flowing dance that reminded me of butterflies on a breeze.

I recognized the white-bearded blue stallion I'd identified as the leader yesterday. With his hood back and no hat, I saw his short cropped bristly mane. I had long ago lowered my hood as an accommodation to a humid heat that left me perspiring. As I came up rapidly, I said, "I am sorry to bother you, sir, but—"

He was of average stallion height, but he still had to look up at me with his deep-blue, practically indigo eyes. "Meeting you again, Sunny Daze, is surely no bother."

I stopped with my mouth open, non-plussed, my mind scrambled. He had met me once, a mere mare. He'd met a hundred other ponies afterward, and he'd remembered my name?

He chuckled. "It's been a long journey if you trotted all this way during a'night. May we offer you breakfast?"

I stepped back. Foreigners. They had different ways and didn't know what was improper for a mare—

—A High Desert mare, anyway.

"No? Well, the offer stands. I am truly sorry that custom prevented you from being tested. I presume you traveled here so you can participate in the Five Waterfalls examination?"

"I— I— Mares don't do impractical magic."

His laugh came out as a snorted whinny. "Impractical magic? Like raising the sun? All the queen's subjects are valuable, Sunny Daze. I smell the magic in you. If you can read—"

I nodded.

"And you have 'magic strong', the queen commands you to be tested." He grinned. The glitter in his eyes looked sincere, benevolent even.

I swallowed the lump in my throat. I was a High Desert mare and I had responsibilities. And a purpose. "Thank you, sir. You are very kind." I raised my hood and felt a bit more protected, mayhap more confident, though instantly hot. I added, "But I am here at considerable risk to ask in stead for my brother—"

"Summer Daze." He gazed up into my hood at my unusually long horn. When I didn't reply, he added, "You're fraternal twins, aren't you?"

"You remember him?"

"Remember him? Reminds me of myself at his age. Always my nose in a book. Were it not for my parents' annoying interruptions, I would have starved. You can be trained out of it if somepony insists on teaching you the rules of social contact, and the benefits you'll accrue. Being drafted as a squire helped, too. Really, though, a surprising book found in a deep dark library stack is still a good way to disappear for a day or two." He grinned wistfully.

I found my hoof tapping as he rambled. The instant he stopped—"Why didn't you accept him into the Collegiate?"

"The examination wasn't precisely about accepting—"

"He's qualified."

"Oh, very much so."

I felt my frown grow and my head tilt. "Then why did you turn him away? His age? Couldn't pay admission? That he didn't help raise the sun?"

"We don't know why that worked, except that it wasn't the petitioners."

"Why did you turn him away?"

"Have you spoken with your brother?"

"Yes."

He shook his head, waggling his beard. "Hyperfocus can be a curse."

I huffed. I thought about my baby brother and recalled what I had concluded: He'd wandered away, bored. I pushed back my cloak; sweat dripped down my neck. I wished I could throw off the cloak altogether, all the way to my cutie mark like the pink mare, but, even though it was perfectly normal here, I'd never be able to do it. I'd be ashamed. I looked down apologetically and said, "Yes. I did ask. He told me his magic hadn't helped to raise the sun and that he had decided to head home."

The blue pony nodded. "You have that all correct. What else did he say?"

"Nothing."

He laughed. "Wait until I tell Tin Whistle about this. He'll start hitting his head against a tree. Tin—"

"What's so funny," I asked so soberly it sounded like a statement.

He faced me. "Didn't he tell you that we offered him an apprenticeship in the Collegiate in the capital? He said, 'Thank you, but I think my sister is in trouble.' He just walked away…"

Suddenly everything coming into my head stopped making sense. His voice turned into a whining buzz as he finished, and his words repeated and repeated, not making sense because how could they make any sense? I stood unblinking, and soon my sight also blurred. Then a shaft of sunlight through a wind-tussled tree's canopy speared me in the eyes and caused the world to whirl around...

Enchantment

When I woke, I found myself on the grass. I had... fainted.

I smelled strong tea before I opened my eyes, and found a stone bowl designed to be heated by horn filled with an oat porridge mixed with nuts and sliced hoof-sized red berries. I looked up to see that an itty-bitty cyan mare tended to me—somepony had lent her one of the mages' robes to protect my High Desert sensibilities. Her blonde mane kept falling across her eyes and I tried not to laugh. I felt dizzy and woozy and a bit giddy. She pushed her locks back repeatedly as she levitated me gently and set me reclining with my legs folded under me, the same way she reclined. She levitated a tea cup and urged me to sip an astringent concoction that gave off a sharp scent of ephedra and other medicinal herbs. I accepted that until I found the strength to levitate it on my own.

We didn't say much.

There wasn't much to say. I didn't want to learn how a shameless Unicornian mare lived—lest I end up hating the restrictions of my own folk... more. And I had good news to carry home! I didn't want anything to get in the way of that. The porridge was crunchy, milky, and sweetly fruity. I learned a new word: strawberry. I declined to be tested that afternoon. I'd have gotten up and headed back into the mountains that very instant, but I was totally exhausted, if at least no longer woozy.

I declined staying in one of their tents. It made me nervous that ponies here associated by a totally different set of social rules; I did not know what was and wasn't proper for them, or if they knew what was proper for me. With stallions wandering freely about, I'd never sleep comfortably.

I accepted a "boxed lunch" in a cute little black- and red-lacquered balsa crate (with a haystack inlay in golden oak wood) and a fine earthen jug of water, after the head mage politely and sternly insisted, and a simple blue fabric messenger bag to carry them in. I found myself a sheltered shady spot in the trees on a hill above their encampment. A cool breeze flowed up to where I lay as I settled, yawning widely. Pink and yellow butterflies fluttered around clumps of dandelions and orange strawflowers that proved tasty and sweet. The gentle hiss of the cool grass waving near my ears rapidly lulled me to sleep.

Sleeping during broken days is always strange. You could have been asleep for an hour; you could have been asleep for a day. You can't tell without a clock, which few ponies can afford to own. Certainly, the sun hadn't moved. The light filtered through my eyelids. Comfy, I didn't want to get up.

I got the clue it was afternoon a'clock before I opened my eyes. I heard a familiar chant in leader-follower phrasing and found myself skipping ahead, seeing in my mind—and reading—the magic cursive of Summer Daze's notes. I looked.

In a roadside field of grass, where the mages had formerly pitched their tents, I saw their wagons, the tables from a'yesterday, and the dozen blue-cloaked mages in front of a winnowed group of six ponies.

One was actually a mare! No chance she would win.

Today, however, over a hundred townsfolk watched, a mix of unicorn merchants in white or yellow linens and, segregated in a cluster off to the right, a sprinkling of earth pony farmers in red or grey flannel.

Wait…. What? I squinted.

One of the six contestants was an earth pony!

I blinked for awhile in disbelief. No, he really didn't have a horn. A set of brass and iron charms and the dozens of blown glass potion bottles uncorked before the brown-spotted white pony asserted something extraordinary from a tribe whose chief attribute I'd been taught was brawn not brains.

In the crowd, stallions and mares mingled indiscriminately.

I closed my eyes and shook my head. I didn't want to understand these ponies' challenging strangeness. I already knew how false hope could shred your heart. Da was right about hope and wishes. He always said, "Wishes do nothing except make the wisher crazy."

Very true.

I thought the chant might lull me back to sleep, but it did the opposite. I had used the branches of an oak tree to shade myself in relative darkness. Now my fur stood on edge with the feeling that the sun played peek-a-boo with me. I knew exactly where it was, and it had nothing to do with the pinkish light filtering through my eyelids. Though I could barely hear the words of the mages' ritual incantation, waves of magic buzzed like bees all around me. It felt like static on a very dry day. It made the hair of my mane crackle and spread.

"Ugh! So annoying!"

Covering my ears with my hooves didn't work either because, like an annoying ditty, it replayed in my head unwonted. With growing exasperation, I levered myself up intending to escape the magic's radius of effect. With my cloak snugged tight and the gifted messenger bag tight on my right side, I found myself unsteady. Worse, it felt that I swayed this way and that—influenced by the chant.

Absurd, of course. It was probably a lingering effect of exhaustion and the ephedra tea. As I braced against the oak, I caught a glimpse of a familiar shade of red through droopy branches that wasn't the red of a farm-hoof's flannel.

My heart raced. I shoved myself upright, frightened, suddenly convinced I'd seen a propoli. I stumbled into the sun, tripped and fell into a bush of brittle branches that made a cacophony of crackling noises as I scrambled erect and galloped away into the woods. With an embarrassing lack of grace, I threw clods of dirt and ripped up dandelions behind me.

My lack of grace made me certain that an enchantment was on me. I sensed its origin as I would a poke from a stick. It made no sense; I was more ready to think it was something in the tea.

Why would the sun enchant me?

I sensed... How could I know she wanted to shine 'benevolently' on me? How could she even seem like a pony-like presence? How could she be a mare?

Disoriented, I tripped over a gnarled protruding root and scraped my shoulder on the rough bark of a tree, ripping my cloak. My legs crossed. I went down and slid across a patch of ferns that made fizzing sounds as they dragged me to a stop.

I was going mad.

Imagine for a moment that you had told another pony a joke... A moment after delivering the punch line, her eyes grow big and she falls over laughing. In that instant you know exactly what your friend thinks and feels, demonstrably. This—this was that same certainty of connection implanted in my head, like a smile or a laugh without intervention of sight or sound. Mind-reading... mind-talking!

The presence sensed I understood her. She pleaded. This felt like encountering a friend in need—with friend being the frisson leading to recognition when you see somepony you know and recognize her need when you see her frown, an askance look, or a sigh when she is about to ask for a loan of a bronze bit to be repaid next week.

It was absurd.

It was madness.

I flopped amongst the prickly ferns desperate to get up. I tried to ignore what I sensed, but how could I? You can ignore a soiled smelly beggar jingling an empty cup; you can make him invisible... Sure, you can. You avert your eyes, you keep talking, colluding with your friend—but you know you're wrong because everypony feels something, otherwise why would you be ignoring it?

I felt this. I had tears in my eyes. By Platinum's Grace, I felt this.

It did not matter if I were a mad-mare or hallucinating. This felt as real and as right as ignoring the beggar and making him invisible was wrong.

I could play along or fight myself, and fighting this was already beginning to hurt. I felt a bruise tightening from my shoulder across my ribs from my fall.

I took a long deep breath. I rolled until I knelt and squirmed to orient myself in the dappled shade. The sun glimmered and blinked at me as the leaves above rustled. "What?" I asked.

This wasn't a pony; the sun did not speak. Instead, I felt her searching, like when you look for that word on the tip of your tongue, and you find it, and you associate it with a memory, and…

As a foal I'd knocked over the laundry wringer trying to master washing clothes. I'd jumped away but tripped. The wooden wash basin, weighted down by the iron wringer, trapped my tail.

Nopony was home. I wailed for what seemed like hours unable to move, sure that I'd lose my tail, that no pony would marry poor crippled me, and that I'd undoubtedly starve. I'd had nightmares for months.

The memory of the washer falling over with a bang and the subsequent drenching splash of hot soapy water was again vivid.

"You're… stuck?"

Huh! Of course the sun was stuck—and she knew I'd seen that she had been stuck previously, and she knew I'd helped unstick her.

Well, the sun was wrong about that. That was all a hallucination.

How could I have made a difference? I'd read in Summer's astronomy book that the sky was at least a hundred miles up (probably more). I raised a hoof and eclipsed the sun with little margin. A bit of trigonometry and a bit of algebra and... I could, and had, pushed a four-wheeled wagon loaded with dense hardwood logs using Motivate, but the disk of the sun was was not only out of the inverse-square range of my magic, it was city-sized.

I couldn't move that.

"How?"

I'd first lifted a broom with magic when I was three. Da was clapping his hooves together. He was so very happy with me because I'd persisted and persisted, trying until the straw lifted, and, wobbling precariously, the broom-head took the broomstick with it.

"Try?"

I felt a pulse of warmth. So she wanted me to try? I'd heard it whispered that Queen Platinum was a tyrant; the sun surely was!

I listened for the strands of the Mages' chant. As the breeze passed through the woods, so did the "music," growing louder and quieter as the woodland breathed. I felt my ears rotate and strain, trying to grasp what they could.

The stanzas of the music, the words that seemed suddenly animated and alive, struck deep into my head.

My reading of Summer Daze's notes flashed by behind my eyelids. Words. Letters. Numbers. My body went rigid. All my muscles locked. The arcanae that wove the spell Sun Rise on page caused the memories of the words once again to shift position, switch meanings, swim through deep seas of understanding, and hint at concepts that flitted away from my grasp—building power. I felt my horn heat up. My brain exhaled connotations and implications and allusions until it was…

…emptied. My body again relaxed and all at once my brain...

...inhaled the magic electricity I'd earlier sensed.

It slammed into me like a fast moving, sky-filling, sun-obliterating, desert lightning storm—the type you smell as moisture and ozone, and hear only moments before it drenches you, roaring like lions ready to eat you as it plunges you into midday night, working to shatter your eardrums with thunder. My heart raced anew as my fur rose, but the cryptic knowledge I'd learned from hearing the mages' song and reading Summer Daze's notes insulated me from the brunt of the magic. It was like hiding in a sturdy house with rain crashing against the shutters and hail rattling the roof. Immense power flowed around me; I sensed the rightness of it—and its accessibility.

Its origin frightened me. The enchantment drew magic from the sun. Was it the mages' doing? Was drawing magic from the sun their mechanism of control?

My legs unfolded and I found myself upright, lifted as my weight slowly evaporated. Wobbly though I was, I found myself dancing to a strange rhythm, an ethereal pulse in a swirling field of numeric magic potentialities that I saw in my mind, like burning cinders in digit form caught in a dust devil whirling around me.

The magic buffeted me physically like a wind, forcing me to shut my eyes. Calling it a wind belittled this; it was a scirocco, and like the arid scirocco screaming down a wadi, it grew hotter as it buffeted my mane.

I felt lifted, buoyant. My front legs rose. A strange joy filled me. I sensed the sun and the sky as if it were a place I could feel manually with the frogs of my hooves. To one side of the sun, I also sensed a brooding presence. A recalcitrant moon, which I had to ignore because I smelled smoke.

The heat surrounding me turned into crackling fire. Though it did not bite me, my cloak caught. I heard the fizzling sound of burning wool.

"Too hot!" I said as I fought against the enchantment for fear that the fire might next consume me.

Snap.

The direction of the magic switched. A cooler wind blew from behind me, though I still heard a crackle of flames. With it came the thick scent of burnt clothing, wood, and the scorched ferns below me. I shook myself, as to shake off the rain, and I felt my cloak part and fall away.

Enclosed in the magic pulse of this ethereal zephyr, my perceptions crystallized as my weight vanished. I was no longer earthbound. I peddled my rear legs but touched nothing; and I didn't care. I was in a dream. Or an hallucination. Why would I care?

Eyes still closed, I saw nothing.

But, with my neck stretched and my tightly shut eyes fixated on the westering sun, I saw far more than the pink filtering through my eyelids. I "saw" a celestial land that sparkled like diamond. I saw brilliant crystalline valleys and mountains all in parallel rows. I could not comprehend what I saw; the shifting spell words in my mind collided together and my virtual eyes quickly dazzled. Tears streamed down my cheeks, there to boil into salty-flavored steam.

But… I didn't need to see more. I'd seen cubes of crystal, piled oddly. I could see that the sun needed to go away from them, not towards them…

Again.

I cast Motivate, though how could I push a city-sized orb of fire—in a sky a hundred miles up but near the horizon many thousands of miles away—in a direction it didn't want to go? Perhaps it was the pulse of the zephyr of magic that beat my mane across my face and my tail across my flank. As much magic as I threw into the spell from the depth of my heart, magnitudes more from another source followed it as if I were a general calling the charge and the magic was my army.

And still the moon brooded, stubborn, unmoved, envious—insulted. It had never set yesterday. The mages had neglected that because, I guess, without the moon illuminating the night sky on the other side of the world what harm could result?

Together, the two celestial objects stood opposed, mutually stuck, the moon willfully obstructing the path. The celestial bodies rested on the same horizon, close to one another, jostling like resentful siblings.

And if one went this way and the other that way...

I reached out, found their ethereal surfaces, one cold and one scorching, one stony and one fluid, and… pushed… them… apart.

The petulant moon pushed back! The brat!

Nettled, I pushed again, shoving up on the moon and down on the sun, on and on and on, until something broke. (That something would be me.) All my magic, indeed my very essence, streamed from my body like water from a broken dam until, like the reservoir behind the dam, I was emptied. Via my magical view of the celestial world, I saw I'd flung the moon into the sky whilst the sun sunk gratefully below the horizon.

I sank back to the ground, drained, limp, paralyzed, the light beyond my eyelids now dark. I barely had time to worry that I might be dying before something hard struck me in the head.

Cad

My stomach slammed into throat the instant I woke. Heart racing, I clenched my jaw to clamp down on my nausea even as I rolled and hit my head on some wood, adding to the already intense ache pounding there. A rocking motion drove my muzzle with a bang into the side of what had to be a wagon—judging by the squeaking of springs and the thump of wheels against a rutted road, and the snap of leads and the clatter of metal links against the tack. As I tried desperately to scoot back, my flank hit wood siding immediately. Chains rattled. I rode in a tall wagon barely large enough for me scrunched up. I found myself hobbled. Restrained, too sick to stand, my innards spasming at every shock, I splattered myself.

A crust of tears and dirt glued shut my eyes. My eyelids felt like they were ripping as a pulled them open. The acid smell made me want to retch again and I gagged repeatedly. The moon overhead provided sufficient illumination in the dead of night for me to see the steel cuffs and chain that hobbled me front and rear. The wagon banged over a rock and I struck my head again.

Pain spiked me through the eyes. I was no longer inebriated by the mages' tea, or enchanted. I wished I was.

I'd been struck unconscious behind my right ear. Dizziness made me think concussion. As I struggled to focus, I saw myself. I wore my mares-cloak like a blanket; the reason: that was unreal...

Fire had burnt off all the hems and totally consumed the hood of the cloak, leaving the rest full of burn holes like bubble cheese. The blue messenger bag had escaped the fire, but its contents—the lacquer box and jug—lay smashed in a corner with it, the remnants bouncing in concert with the squeaking springs.

The logical part of my mind wondered about my captor; the attack on my possessions seemed particularly vicious.

The rest of my mind shied away from recollections of marshaling magic (how was that even possible?) and sending it into the heavens. I'd be a mad-mare if I allowed myself to contemplate that any of that had been real.

The wagon's slat siding had the pronounced, dashed grain of local High Desert wood. I recognized the vehicle as a hay or grain hauler.

For a few minutes, I breathed in and out through my nose, despite the smell—in and out slowly—until I forced my stomach to calm. My anger grew.

I knew this about the wagon: the brake's location.

I pulled it with same viciousness as the attack upon my things and body. My magic flowed the way cold honey barely flowed, but I managed.

The wheels locked. The rig slid and fishtailed, slamming whomever pulled it hard into the harness. I heard a pony whinny and stumble, spitting choice words and vulgar improprieties.

Unfortunately, I also recognized his voice.

Umbra ripped himself free of the tack and a heartbeat later appeared over the dash, his black front hooves hooked over the side as he screamed, "You stupid mare!"

I stared as he raged, more numbed then frightened by his vitriol in comparison to what had happened today. Involuntarily remembering that I'd been drawn into a ritual to lower the sun and raise the moon seemed less surreal. I'd at least learned that my brother's future would be assured. In comparison, finding myself ponynapped seemed completely mundane.

When his rage ran its course, I asked, "What have you done to me?"

"You've run away. You've interfered with the raising of the moon and the lowering of sun. You've consorted with foreigners!"

By consorting, he did not mean innocent socializing. "I did not! It's rude to even say that!"

He spat on me. It hit my nose. I gasped and scooted back against the rear of the wagon and the busted gifts that rested there. My eyes went wide. Shocked, I didn't even think to wipe it off as he sneered, "And there's the proof. Your illicit earnings—"

"That was a gift from the Collegiate—"

"Tell me another story!"

"They wanted me to stay and recover from my travels before returning home, but I wanted to leave so they insisted I take food and drink—"

"Don't insult me!"

I huffed. "You could just ask them!"

"Foreigners. I have no need. I've got the evidence!" He jumped back, and I heard him rattling the lever to unjam the brake, making the suspension creak and wagon shake, before harnessing up.

"Are you crazy?" I asked.

"You will be punished for your crimes. I warned you!"

The wagon jerked. He grunted and strained loudly, but got it going. Why he didn't use Motivate to at least overcome inertia surprised me. Maybe he felt that acting like a big strong earth pony made him more stallion-like.

As we began to bump along, I rubbed my nose against the wood to remove the spittle. He continued, "Of course, you could agree to marry me—"

"Never!" I yelled. Impelled by the sheer gall of the cad, I found myself upright, barely able to stand thanks to dizziness and the pain, but I glared and yelled again, "Never!"

His robe had been tied to the hoofboard of the wagon. He pulled with only his cutie mark on. Perhaps he'd thought taking the wagon to follow me was a good idea when going down the mountain from the High Desert plateau. Not so easy going uphill, was it? Sweat lathered him. He proved muscular and horsey smelling, but he was determined and he got us up to a trot.

He glanced back. "Do you realize you're wearing nothing but your cutie mark? Do you even care? Don't make it worse by using magic." His crimson aura made his magenta eyes glow while his black lion's mane and dark grey fur blended with the darkness. He levitated a stone. "I have battle magic."

"Throwing stones?" I scoffed, refusing to look for my ratty cloak. My hide ticked and I felt cold like I'd never felt it before. My cutie mark was showing. I neither ducked nor hid.

He looked forward. A moment later, a wheel hit a big rock and I tumbled over, striking my shoulder and flank.

At Five Waterfalls Township, he'd thrown a stone at my head. As I jostled and moaned from the combined pain of my injuries and the indignity of it all, I had no way to break free of the hobbles. Were my magic strong enough, I'd be able to escape the wagon, but not to flee. I had zero energy. I felt sick and chills began to make me shiver. I had no battle magic. In fact, I felt like the last of my magic had gone into pulling the brake lever.

I recognized the spreading canopies of widely spaced acacia trees and recognized the mountains ahead. We were headed back to the High Desert. There was nothing I could do, other than moan and bide my time.

Stupid

Like most buildings in town, a wall formed a compound around the propriety police building, except that one end was a wood-fenced demonstration ground, charitably; in reality, a small corralled dirt paddock. Sometimes the propoli publicly admonished the fallen here. At least once a year, they traded slaves here according to various local and Unicornian laws overseen in the High Desert by the propoli.

When Umbra pulled up, he called for a blanket. A blue-faced propoli I didn't know, displaying a green-horn light, fetched a smelly black quilt and tossed it at me while averting his eyes. The moon had hovered on the horizon for many hours now, but Umbra had refused to let me out of my rolling prison, which meant I was more smelly and dirty than before. I tried to take my mares-cloak, but Umbra pushed it out of my magic with his own. "No!" he said.

Evidence, I supposed.

After a hissed discussion with a third propoli, one with a purple horn light, he ordered me out of the wagon.

"Hobbled?" I complained, rattling the chains.

Purple magic levitated me out; I fought not to peddle my legs at the odd sensation. Funny how I panicked when I understood I floated midair for real.

The three led me inside to a mortared stone room with a tan sandstone floor. It had one small window the size of my face high on the west wall. I could see the moon through it. The blue-faced pony locked a cuff with a metal cable to my right foreleg and pulled hard on it to check the connection to the steel mount bolted on the floor.

Umbra, exhaustion in his voice, said, "This connects you to the ground. It prevents Teleport from working by forcing the caster to move the entire earth the way he would clothes and things connected to his body."

I raised an eyebrow. Did they really think I could cast that?

Blue-face explained, "The backfire when the spell fails would boil the garbage between your ears, so don't try it."

I felt my eyebrows rise. Maybe they did!

As they filed out of the prison cell, I cried, "I really need to clean up!"

"Yes," Umbra said, "You do." He slammed the heavy wooden door, leaving me in darkness but for the bright disk of the moon.

"Ugh!" I was so stupid.

I hadn't thought to ask to see my father, the town elder, or even the head propoli. Was Umbra the head propoli? I hadn't thought to protest my arrest either, or to state that Umbra had knocked me unconscious with a stone and kidnapped me. Considering the crinkling noise my ear made, I had little doubt the fur around it was crusted with dried blood.

I had acquiesced like a good little subordinate mare. Until today, I might have thought that was a good thing.

Did acting like nothing was wrong make it seem like I thought myself innocent and figured I'd be exonerated? Or did it make it look more like I felt so guilty that I knew my protests wouldn't work?

I stuck with stupid. And I was guilty—at least of the part of running away to a land of socially questionable ponies. It looked really bad.

I stretched my neck out, moving around my chained legs, and found that the small pan of tepid water bolted to the wall lay just within my reach, but when I reached down to drink, my smell nauseated me. The mages' tea had needed out during the ride. The water was barely enough to wash my face.

I'd been given no bedding.

I had the choice of wearing the blanket or showing my cutie mark. Wishing I knew conjuration so I could conjure water, I folded down on the hard ground in the pool of bluish light cast by the cold moon. As I stared at it while thinking alternately about how to defend myself and about all my mistakes, I began to sense the orb "noticed" me.

Of course it had, I thought with frosty self-sarcasm.

In my hallucination, I'd cast Motivate on it. Since the breaking of day and night, the orb that lit the night showed only a full disk and eclipses no longer happened. It was said that the orbs of night and day had "grown suspicious" of one another and, as far as I knew, no longer moved in the same parts of the sky, though maybe the mages were responsible for that. This "suspicion" had been enough of a thing centuries ago that it had made it into our outdated astronomy book.

I'd taken the "suspicion" thing as a metaphor. Looking at the moon's wan imitation of the solar disk, "feeling" its cooling glow, the ambience it radiated wasn't comforting. It was... baleful.

I shook my head.

Shaking made me think of cleaning a rug by shaking it, which gave me an idea. I could pick of a bit of lint from my fur with magic...

I squirmed out of the blanket and let it drop to the floor. Did I need to specify a single thing to pick out of my fur? Levitation required you to calculate distance, weight, force, and vector, though I typically lazily guessed the latter three (as I suspected everypony did) and changed them to freely move things about. As a foal, I'd done the math consciously and that was what made it difficult and unreliable—wobbly-broom syndrome. My horn took care of most of the calculative burden now.

Distance was the problem since I wanted to apply the spell to every surface of my body at once, rather than nitpicking for hours. Intuition chimed in, suggesting Friction, the practical magic I warmed cornerstones with. It was a transform of the keystone spell Levitation, made to cause a rubbing sensation, heating things. Combined...

It took a few minutes to solve the related magical equations together and to combine the resultant geometrical shapes the preliminary numbers brought to mind, spinning them in my head until their oblong spiked symmetry made sense. Finally, I pieced together a reasonable trigger mnemonic with which to cast them. Vague fiery digits spun through my line of sight, like hyperactive floaters that you saw when you stared unfocused at the sky. They were not the blood of my body but the blood of my magic. The phrases I'd composed for the spell were really bad poetry, but I had no plans to teach it to anypony—nor, as a rush of gathering magic flooded my horn, did I need to remind myself what preparation I required to cast it.

"Dry Clean!" I said aloud. The gold glow of my magic aura bloomed around me. With what felt like the rubbing of a dozen brushes, the spell went pop! The noisome grime shot away and made a gummy thwacking sound as it hit the walls and ceiling. Even my mane and tail fuzzed out.

I blinked. They fuzzed out a lot. My eyeballs burned, suddenly dry.

I heard hoof falls.

I barely had the time to snap the blanket to remove the grim that had peppered it and to toss it back on before a propoli slammed into the room.

"Magic is forbidden! We told you!" It was blue-face with his green horn light.

"Actually— You didn't."

"The cable—"

"Don't cast Teleport. Check."

"Stupid mare."

My face burned. His comment and my reaction did not bode well for my future. At least the seething stallion didn't beat me.

Instead, he closed the door and lay across it.

I didn't like the impropriety of it, him alone with me. My body went ice cold. The quiet brooding sound of his breathing made my hide itch and tick. Worse, to be away from him, I had to lay in darkness, shivering, my heart thumping in my throat.

Maybe one day I'd learn not to be cheeky, if I lived long enough.

Impropriety!

Somehow I slept. I woke with a gasp when I caught myself in a dream floating in the deeply green woods above Five Waterfalls Township, engulfed in cooling flames, consoling a frightened crying sun.

I blinked and looked around, and remembered where I was.

The moonlight illuminated a gray stallion laying against the door. His black mane was dark as a shadow cast by the moon. Magenta eyes focused on me and he swished his tail, twice. Umbra's teeth gleamed as he grinned; in my imagination, they were sharp and wolf-like.

My ire returned. "Why haven't I spoken to my Da? I want to talk to Elder Golden Lantern. You assaulted me!"

A silver chain around propoli's neck ground against the wood as he pushed himself up against the door. He used his magic to snap the wrinkles from a robe that looked grayish-red in the light. He sighed for effect before saying, "Your father arrived an hour ago."

"I want to talk with him—"

"Impatience is unbecoming a beautiful mare."

"The impropriety of that statement is only exceeded by the indecency of you being alone with me in this cell."

"With my future second wife, I can make an exception."

"I will not marry you."

"Your father had a different opinion once I explained your options."

My concentrated derision escaped in a snort that steamed out of my nostrils in the cold air. I levered myself off the stone floor, certain I'd feel less vulnerable when I looked down on him. As I rose, my eyes passed through the shaft of light from the moon.

With a shock, my neck prickled and became covered with goosebumps. I stopped and blinked into the dazzling light. Had the orb given me a look of hatred?

It had! Its blank face held no solace.

My impromptu change in trajectory tripped me up. Before I realized it, I swayed left past the tipping point. My blanket dragged against the wall and slid the opposite direction. As I jerked my legs wide to prevent myself from falling, I reached for the blanket.

"Nah uh!" Umbra warned. "No magic!" Surprisingly, he'd swooped in while I'd moon-gazed. My heart stuttered as he leaned in, pushing me up bodily. When I jerked back, he pressed further, slamming me against the stone wall, pinning me between the heat he radiated and a mortared uneven surface that gouged at my side.

"Stop that! Stop that!"

"Why?" He pressed in. "You'll fall over when you learn the options I gave my new father-in-law. It would be a shame if you limped before the town elders or were lame at your wedding." His chest expanded against my side as he breathed. He'd used a rose powder to mask his horsey stallion scent, but I could nonetheless smell a cumin and cayenne odor on his breath as he spoke.

I wished suddenly I hadn't cleaned myself.

I heard a distant pop through the door. That got my momentary attention as my ears pivoted toward the odd sound, but he continued speaking in a low voice he must have thought seductive. With the pressure against my body, I started worrying that it had been some time since I'd visited a privy.

"—wealthy enough to keep you comfortably."

"What!?" I glared, but it wasn't me he was looking at; just some goal in his head. I heard another pop less distant, but it didn't register on him and I shook my head against the distraction.

He said, "Of course, I haven't read the charges into the town register, yet." He rubbed against me very slowly and said. "I could be convinced not to."

I pushed sharply with my shoulder and flank and shoved him away. For all his muscle, I greatly out-massed him. Our eyes locked as I said, "And I have to marry you to prevent that? Isn't that improper, too?"

He smiled. "Magic strong and smart, too. But, it's my word against yours and ponies have noticed your strangeness around town. I have plans. Harnessing your attributes would benefit me, and that's not even considering your physique; you'll throw many a strong colt."

Now I was shaking. Fear speared my heart.

"It's a better choice to do my bidding than to suffer the consequences. You don't want to be sold as a slave—"

"What!?"

"—and I'm not sure I'd be able to afford the price you'd fetch. I'd try, of course."

"But I didn't do anything wrong! You—you accosted me!"

He stretched his neck a bit to one side and examined my right ear. His magic scuffed my fur before he pressed hard, making me yelp.

Outside, I heard another loud pop, almost a rumble as he said, "Strange, no blood any more. That spell you used?"

His aura made his horn look red. His brow furled as he muttered something that rhymed, ending with Soothe. A warm tingling announced a spell that dissolved the ache and pressure. "Barely a bruise, now."

"I won't marry you."

"And here I thought I was being nice."

"I did nothing!"

"Ah, but if I read it into the registry, you will have and if you don't recant, we won't be able to even sell you as a slave. Am I really such a bad alternative?" As he spoke, he approached and, without a by-your-leave, nuzzled me.

Thunderous lightning struck inside my cell. A spherical aura shaped like an expanding soap bubble of blazing bronze appeared with a blast of air. It popped between the propoli and the window, shoving the husky stallion face-forward into my ribs, mashing his voluminous black greasy mane against my throat. My hide ticked at the disgusting sensation.

Summer Daze appeared, ribbons of frost steam rising from his hide, a final crackle of blue electricity grounding into the floor. His eyes narrowed when he saw Umbra. He bellowed, "Impropriety! Impropriety!"

My jaw dropped. I'd never heard him raise his voice, except for the rare times as a foal when he'd injured himself.

By the time the propoli recovered from his stumble, Summer had turned flank. He aimed a buck at the stallion's right temple. Spindly-legged and non-athletic as my baby brother was, Umbra managed to dodge, but crashed hard into the door and had to dance to remain upright.

Summer continued bellowing, "Impropriety! Impropriety!"

He delivered the phrase each time with the same monotone—like he understood how to use the tool yelling represented but not the emotion of anger that colored it. I found myself in tears and shaking—and very proud.

Then it struck me and I gasped: He'd used Teleport to search the building.

Umbra cast Illuminate; his dark horn lit with a ruby light to show his attacker. His eyes went wide. I saw his panic as Summer kept bellowing.

As Umbra muttered, his Illuminate flickered.

I cried, "He knows battle magic!"

Summer Daze didn't miss a beat as he bellowed. As Umbra lowered his head to point his magic-reddened horn, I threw myself across my brother, but—

Summer Daze had anticipated my action, leaning toward me so I barely shoved him aside but instead helped him rear. The magic the propoli cast made a bang. A bolt of red flashed toward my brother who stood on two legs, flicking with his hooves; in that instant a wave of dizziness rushed through me and apparently Umbra. The bolt curved sharply upward and hit the ceiling, blackening the stone and peppering us with tiny bits of rock.

In an instant of frightening insight, I sensed Umbra's overpowered Friction-like spell—equations, vectors, numbers, mnemonics, cylindrical-shaped control points, and all. When Summer Daze had continued copying the head mage's spellbook, the mage had reared and canceled all his spells with a potent gesture. My brother had figured out the "nice trick" sufficiently to cancel the blast's forward vector.

"Impropriety! Impropriety!" he continued to shout.

As Umbra sidled past the door, he cried, "Stop yelling, you imbecile! You'll ruin everything!"

My brother continued.

Another propoli threw open the door—an old palomino with white-shot golden fur covering his face and gray-streaked brown bangs drooping over his eyes. More hooves sounded, galloping down the hallway.

I heard Da call, "Sunny Daze? Summer Daze!"

I yelled, "Da! Help us! The propoli attacked me!"

The elderly but beefy propoli blocked my father so I only saw his red-robed flank. A rainbow of horn lights lit the hall. "You're not allowed back here!"

I heard a scuffle. The elder looked back into the cell. "Son, you're not allowed in here either!"

Summer Daze continued to bellow.

Trying not to smile, I said, "You've permitted that blue-faced cad and Umbra in here alone with me! My brother is protecting my honor and won't stop until propriety is restored! Get that blood-boated flea of a molester out of my cell!"

"You've done magic. We can't leave you alone."

My brother continued.

The elder shouted at Umbra, "Get out!"

Having recovered his wits, Umbra said, "I'll handle it; I'll handle her!" and galloped down the hall.

The door banged shut and I heard a latch.

Sunny Daze stopped and faced me. "The butterfly escapement chaotic key won't allow me to specify an arbitrary object."

I stood blinking at him.

He actually rolled his eyes, an amazing sight that showed how far he'd come all by itself. "My spell can teleport only me."

That was a relief. Were he to help me escape, he'd become a fugitive, too. I explained what happened, Umbra's advances, my travel to Five Waterfalls Township to contact the mages, the good news they'd told me, the medicine-laced restorative tea, the hallucination of conversing mentally with the sun and my flinging the moon into the sky, then being stoned, hobbled, and carted away.

As I finished, I found myself silently staring at the moon; she insisted upon glaring back at me.

"Sunny Daze."

I blinked, momentarily surprised I was in the cell again, and looked at him. He had listened studiously—throughout my recounting—though he had started nodding his head when I spoke of raising the sun. He asked, "You lost your cloak when you raised the sun and lowered the moon?"

"It got burnt off when she—" I stopped myself, again pulling my eyes from the moon, shaking my head. Ridiculous! Not she, but it, "Of course not. I found it burnt." I pointed at the scorch on the stone ceiling. "Umbra must have burnt it. He destroyed the gifts the mages gave me in a fit of spite, after he had heaved a stone at my head to make sure I didn't fight him when he hobbled me. He's a bad pony."

"The propoli showed us the broken gifts. Umbra said you wore nothing but your cutie mark. He insisted you had no cloak when he captured you. It frightened Da."

"B-but, but that's not true." Was that my voice cracking?

"Umbra lied." His flat words were an assertion of absolute reality with no hint of doubt. "He, however, reported that you were inebriated and that he had pretended to—to— seclude—"

"Seduce?"

He nodded. "Seduce you and that got you to get into the wagon."

I blinked. A tear rolled down my cheek. Thanks to the mages' tea, I didn't have any idea what was true. Would I have?

No, I—never! Not with that foal stallion. "My head. He stoned me."

Summer Daze drew me into the moonlight and examined me closely. "I see nothing." He touched spots with his hoof. It hurt, but nothing like it had.

"He healed it. Some spell ending with Soothe. Last a'night I used a spell that cleaned away the crusted blood."

"His word against yours."

I moaned as it hit me. "Umbra stalked me, figured out my strengths and weaknesses, and trapped me into becoming his possession." Something deep within refused to submit. I found myself again staring at the moon.

She did not submit. Never did. Refused to. In this, she and I were sisters.

"Sunny Daze."

Frustration welled up. "I did nothing wrong!"

Not exactly true. It would have been proper for me to make the trip only in the company of my father or my brother. Doing otherwise left me vulnerable to aspersions or manipulation, both of which now afflicted me, which was why it was improper.

My celestial sister blurred in a veil of tears. I felt her crystal prison, full of immobile blocks and frustration; not so much unlike mine.

A hoof pressed against my face; I refused to move until the pressure began to hurt. Forced to break my stare at the face of the moon, I wiped my cheeks, blinking at the unfairness of it all. I hadn't been in the cell and now I was again. A faint wind must have been blowing through the small window for now I felt my mane settle against my neck and back. I looked into my baby brother's eyes.

He asked, "Where is the sun?"

For no good reason, I felt a sudden warmth, like a strong hug. I traced the glow and shifted around and pointed below the horizon opposite the shaft of light entering the cell. "She's there."

Summer Daze smiled, an incredibly rare and confusing display of sunlight in the dungeon gloom. He repeated, "'Thaumaturgy and a predilection to matters celestial in the pressing matter of day and night.'" As I blinked at his non-sequitur, he added, "Do not agree to anything under any circumstance."

Before I could ask him why, a pony-height sphere of amber formed and lightning swirled around him. He teleported away with a bang.

Thaumaturgy wasn't the science of magic. No. It was the performance of miracles.

Evil

"You are a stupid and stubborn filly, and will make a difficult sister. I should let you get yourself killed."

I had been locked in a staring match with the malevolent moon. It had erased the misery of my present, at least. I blinked and looked as the door latched, and, as my eyes adjusted, I saw the middle-aged mare who'd spoken. Her fur was the golden color of ripe wheat; she had a mane and horn the color of blood. In her fine black mares-cloak, I could easily guess this was Umbra's solution to guard against me performing magic.

His wife.

"Nice to meet you, too, Gilt."

She levitated a scroll out in her emerald-color magic, unrolling it and passing me a quill in the vicinity of my mouth. "I do not desire another slave; our household cannot afford the price. Sign this marriage contract and I will take you home."

"I will not marry Umbra."

"I keep a clean and proper stable, despite his ambitions."

"And what about mine?" I spat back.

"Beyond shared wealth and foals?" She sighed and let the scroll roll itself back up with a thwack. "I am fine with Sol Umbra not getting everything he wants. Go ahead, get yourself killed. But do not use magic."

She illuminated the cell with a greenish light and I held her gaze until I finally had to look away. She had that matriarch-thing down; it probably had something to do with raising foals and dealing with a problem husband. I said sheepishly, "Um. Nopony has let me use the privy—"

"What?" Her eyes narrowed and she pointed at a large round river stone in the corner. "Nopony explained how...? Stallions!"

She explained the... she called it a "facility" with an air of dignity I sensed was part of her fiber, not an affectation. The smooth rock snapped out of its grooves and grated against the sandstone floor as she pushed it aside before she turned away so I could use the foul-smelling thing. It occurred to me that somepony had to have decided to explain how it worked to her, too. Was this what a husband talked about when he returned home from work?

When Umbra and the white-faced palomino chief propoli showed up hours later, I immediately jumped up and complained how I'd been attacked and entrapped.

The old pony would have none of it. When I demanded to talk to the town elders, he shouted me down and told me to act like a proper mare, shoving me against the wall with his magic when his voice didn't cow me.

He opened a tome and looked at Umbra.

Umbra looked at Gilt who shook her head.

Umbra's dark gray lips thinned in anger. With a faint snort, the propoli straightened his robes with his magic and read the charges into the town register.

I gasped. "I did not consort—!"

The head propoli shoved me into the wall with a bang, knocking my breath away. He growled, "Captured wearing only your cutie mark."

"Not true!"

"Bearing ill-gotten earnings—"

"Gifts!"

His quill scratched the paper loudly. "Admitted," he growled.

I stared in shock as Umbra read the final charges in.

The old propoli shut the book with a bang. He glared at me with dark blue eyes. "You, Sunny Daze, are evil."

"Evil? Evil? He entrapped me! Trying to force me to marry him!" I pointed at Gilt. "She has a contract—"

I felt a magic slap across the muzzle.

The crimson meant it had been Umbra. I turned to Gilt and said, "And he entrapped you the same way!"

It's hard to see light-color ponies turn pale because their skin color matches the fur on their face. In Gilt's case, her normally red skin under her gold fur turned her face ashen. She galloped from the cell in an impending storm of tears, intentionally knocking Umbra into a wall.

"Evil," the old propoli asserted as Umbra sped after his wife. "And you deny all of it?"

"I do!"

He stepped back through the doorway. "You have until dawn a'clock or sunrise to compose yourself, whichever comes first." He slammed the door shut.

I rushed to the door, shouting, "For what?"

It struck me. What did they do with criminals who refused to admit their crimes? You had to admit your crimes to be granted the mercy of becoming a slave.

That meant—

I felt punched in the stomach and began to retch.

Author's Note

A fast chapter for a long weekend. Next up, the world turns upside-down with the application of Impractical Magic.

Impractical Magic

The sun never rose.

It had been more than a day since I'd shared the hospitality of the Collegiate of Mages. As a pair of propoli I'd never met marched me down a hall into the frigid air, I realized I was wrong about how much time had passed.

Frost painted the dirt of the fenced paddock with crispy patterns of white lace. Glitters of moonlight sparkled off the eaves of the building and a tree at one end of the space. Little icicles. My breath formed clouds before my face and my nose burned.

The world had begun to freeze over. This type of persistent cold would soon kill even hardy cabbage and kale crops. The cold seeped into my bones, making me feel even weaker. I'd been given no fodder, just water. With day and night broken, there was always the worry that the world would get stuck permanently in one or the other state. Was this the beginning of Unicornia's eternal darkness?

It would be my eternal darkness soon, regardless.

Not that it mattered to me, but I did hope it fixed itself soon. I'd done all these stupid things so my brother would prosper. I didn't want that to go to waste.

My chains rattled as I slow-stepped to the center of the enclosure. Somepony had provided a heap of oats atop a crate. Though I thought I'd lost all my hunger, my body disagreed. I lowered my head to eat as the propoli attached my hobbles to a stake stabbed into the frozen ground.

When I looked up, it surprised me to see shadows in the moonlit dark beyond the fence. What was about to happen was unspeakable. Da had always said that. Few ponies were willing to witness it. He'd ordered us never to attend.

A'today, I had no choice.

I noticed a preponderance of mares-cloaks… There were others. All were hard to recognize in the dark. Nopony lit their horn. I did see three mares congregating together whom I could recognize by the way they shifted nervously, together—the sisters Dell. I hoped it was their outrage at what was happening to me that had brought them here.

Toward the edge of the paddock, I noticed a pile of rocks when I saw Umbra walking toward it. At the same time, some ponies lit a large magic lantern that illuminated the paddock with a glaring white light.

There, toward the edge of the building, I saw a white stallion with his head hung low. Da. I looked immediately away.

I was a bad pony. I'd done this to him because I was stubborn, willful, and too proud.

I did not realize the old palomino propoli stood beside me and I jumped when he unexpectedly said, "Do you recant your crimes?"

At that moment, with the image of my father burning in my mind, I almost did take the option of a life of servitude. Surely that would be less harsh on Da than forever losing his daughter as completely as he had his wife. My mouth hung open.

But, as I looked toward the elder levitating the town register, I looked beyond him to see a young stallion with a mint green mane, scruffy yellow fur, and a pink blaze between his nut-brown eyes. Those eyes locked on me.

Summer Daze shook his head.

Beside him, the propolis' lantern illuminated other stallions, each wearing light-blue robes. To a one, their faces registered shock as if they'd seen a ghost.

Soon they would.

I felt my lips bunch in anger. I took a deep breath and shouted, "Umbra entrapped me! I am innocent. I have committed no crimes to warrant the impropriety of your treatment of me, and certainly none to recant!"

"Evil," stated the propoli with finality.

I looked at the mages. Propolis stood amongst them—including blue-face—standing as escorts or, more likely, enforcers of propriety. What had Sunny Daze hoped? The Queen's servants were powerless against the laws and customs of the people of the High Desert.

Umbra paced around the pile of rocks. My "no" had visibly angered him. At least I had the sense that I'd frustrated the gray-furred propoli's meticulous plans—and hopefully ruined his reputation with innuendo. His crimson magic pulsed and fizzed around the pile of rocks as he clacked them about and glared at me with fire in his eyes. The aura around his horn made it look like a spike of red-hot iron.

The old palomino asked me, "Do you have any last thing to say? Do you wish to ask your family for forgiveness?"

The word forgiveness struck something sore and bruised deep inside my heart. The world was broken! How did trying to provide for my family become a crime? How did trying to assure that my brother succeeded and that my father wasn't ruined financially because of an unfairly demanded dowry necessitate this punishment?

I found myself... seething.

The world was broken and nopony was fixing it! I glared at the gathered audience, wishing them to realize how broken it was that they were even here to witness this.

In looking, my eye caught the face of the moon staring down at me.

In a shock of enchanted insight, I knew this was how she felt, too: broken, seething, ruined by the hubris of unicorn magic.

Lying opposite her brooded another broken presence. My gaze shifted eastward below the horizon.

Sadness and regret filled me no differently than the sun's warmth would have warmed me under the light of an unbroken summer morning. I was supposed to be a helpful sister. I was supposed to bask in the light of the ascended sun!

But, once again, she was stuck.

Like me, like the moon, she too was broken.

I felt a frisson of recognition, of somepony searching through my memories like the pages in a book, of my emotions being refined to suit not just her or me, but the two of us together. I remembered the sisters Dell and their brother together. I remembered Da, Summer, and me at the dinner table, laughing.

Together.

I—I belonged? ...to a different kind of family.

I felt the fur along my spine rise. A breeze gathered my mane and tail, one that would witness the passing of my soon to be broken body. I felt a beat, a pulse in this suddenly growing zephyr. It was the mages' music in the form of an auditory memory, of words shifting meaning and spinning like cinders in a dust devil through my mind, of the ethereal whirling shapes incantation offered a caster as handles to affect realty. My mane began to blow now as I realized I had experienced but one joy during this one horrible week; I felt my hallucination coming on again as inevitably as a dropped spoon will clatter on the tile of the floor.

I embraced it, even if it were all a delusion... like life was when you saw its very end—as I saw it now.

I was rewarded with icy concentration and a mind clear of naught but purpose.

The sun was stuck, so I grabbed the vague flattened oval using Sliding, felt my horn do the outrageous vector math that balanced equations affecting a improbable unmanageable city-sized target, and reached out with my miraculous tool; I touched fire and the wellspring of all life.

In an instant, heat filled my body with unbounded energy and a strange sensation of buoyancy. The magic connected like lightning from a cloud to a random unfortunate tree, forming in an arcane channel that tunneled through the heart bedrock of the Guardian mountains east beyond the horizon. The thrill filled me so fully, my eyes shut of their own accord.

My long mane now whipped me about my neck and back. I heard a sudden crackling. Once again, I heard and smelled roaring flames. In my fantasy, a bonfire consumed the final condescending decency provided me—the propoli's blanket.

My delusion enveloped me completely. I felt my forequarters lifted until my chains caught, rattled, then clanged.

This was my delusion, however. No cold iron would stand in my way! I pulled and smelled the iron scent of a forge. Like taffy, the metal elongated, ticking and complaining and popping, until I drew my legs free and the distorted links clattered to the earth.

One last gift for my brother. I inhaled deeply, lifting my hooves skywards. I shouted with all my might, "If have but one purpose left in life, it shall be to bring light to eternal darkness!"

Magic whooshed around me like the strongest of sciroccos. It roared! I thrust out my forelegs and marshaled it all with a flick of my hooves, striking the sun like a chisel hitting hardwood. It bit in; magic potentiality spiraled away like clouds of wood chips off Da's best chisel, and, like that, I felt the sun like a foal's ball between my hooves. I slammed it to the right, shoving aside an interposed pile of mountain-size crystal blocks placed there undoubtably by the moon to prevent the sun's ascension.

The sun thunked into another parallel valley in the sky.

With all of my strength, with the entirety of my being, I heaved upward, marshaling magic unquantifiable...

That may have been a mistake. I faded, my life bled fully into the magic I had performed.

Hmmm. Why had the light beyond my eyelids turned pink and brightened? As I settled toward the ground, I forced my eyes open.

"Huh. The sun's rising."

Below me, I saw Umbra with a brace of rocks whirling around his head. He screamed in his rage as his aura shifted the trajectory of his missiles toward my head.

Ponies shouted. Others screamed. Some slammed against the corralling fence. Dozens of auras bloomed about the propoli, a rainbow of combined magic, dazzling bright despite the glare of the sunrise.

It made me terribly sad to see my townspeople help him. It was the last thing I saw.

Dream

A hoof shook me awake.

Kind of difficult to do, you know… Since I was dead and all.

I had lost consciousness with the distinct impression that the mages and everypony else had lent their strength to Umbra. Bringing everypony the light of day had been a fantasy but having accomplished it in the insane depths of my own mind, I had nothing left to live for that I had not achieved.

Nevertheless...

I felt an urgent hoof pressing my shoulder. I smelled the lavender I loved to scent my room with and felt the firm hay beneath my shoulder that I stuffed my mattresses with. It crinkled as I moved. My thin linen sheet had slipped down to my mid-back. The sunshine filtering through my eyelids warmed the room.

"Sunny Daze?" Da. His voice cracked.

So, it all been a dream? That actually made the best sense: my worst fears made manifest. A nightmare, perhaps?

Good. It was over. Nopony alone could raise the sun.

Bizarre to even dream that!

I rubbed my eyes as I rolled toward the voice. "Did I oversleep—"

I gasped and grabbed up the sheet with my magic.

Besides Da and Summer Daze, a dozen stallions crowded the room, bodily displacing the purple room-dividing curtains and staring at me. Including the bedstead and the wardrobe—and the table stacked with my unfeminine copybooks and potions paraphernalia, not to forget the basketweave trunk the sisters Dell had traded me for breakfast bowls—the room had already been packed.

"What?" I asked.

The leader of the Collegiate cleared his throat. His white goatsbeard was trimmed and straight; his conical mage hat was placed just right. Deep-blue eyes accentuated his dark blue fur and severely trimmed white mane. He held a folded light-blue robe in his blue magic, the same robe worn by all the members of the Collegiate. He placed it on the bedsheets. "You may want to put this on."

I stared at the garment beside the flow of my long mane.

Flowing described my mane perfectlybecause it subtly shifted like a calm brook, almost a trick of the eye. I noticed a thick streak amongst the pink hair, like mud drifting in clear water. You might have expected any streak to have been gray, considering what I'd experienced, but it was a strange pre-dawn blue. My mind went blank.

Sunlight played on my mane from the partially open shutters of my window. It seemed to say, Accept it.

I looked up when nopony moved. Some ponies weren't perceptive. I had been put to bed wearing only my cutie mark. "Well!" I huffed. I lifted an eyebrow, raised a hoof, and made a spinning motion.

Summer Daze also wore a light blue robe, which caused me to whisper, "Maybe I am still dreaming."

He translated my gesture. "That means to turn around."

Amidst the sudden shuffle, I used my magic to throw off the sheets, fold them with a crisp crease, and slip the robe on in one deft five-second motion. I was always there when Da or Summer Daze called; I was good at this.

Breathless.

"So..." I said as the satiny fabric breezily fell and draped nicely down to my fetlocks. Somepony had noticed I was a giant. "I raised the sun. That wasn't a dream?" A chill galloped along my spine and felt my fur rise. I'd raised the sun.

I'd raised the sun.

I'd said it.

But was it true?

As they turned again, the leader introduced himself. "I am Rolling Rock, Acting Dominant Mage of the Queen's Collegiate of Mages. Yes, well, yes and no. Yes, you raised the sun, and no, not a dream."

A small awed voice inside whispered, I raised the sun...

Even after my time in the cell covered only by a blanket—manifestly never a dream—it still felt weird addressing strange stallions with my head uncovered; I resisted the impulse to lift the hood because their being in my room felt subtly rude, an intrusion. Deep inside, I felt ticked at how I'd been treated. I curtsied anyway. "I am Sunny Daze, filly of Snow Frost and Silver Crown." I added Mare's name... because. "Nice to meet you."

As I raised my eyes, the leader gestured me up, looking profoundly embarrassed.

I pressed him: I continued to bow. All stallions had an agenda; certainly I'd learned that much from Umbra. "What are you asking?" Perhaps courtesy could be secretly rude. Funny, bowing, I had lowered myself to eye level of all but three of the stallions in the room.

Summer Daze translated the confused silence. "They want you to join the Collegiate."

I eyed each stallion in turn; they all nodded. I stood and scoffed, looking down upon them again. "That is hard to believe. Mares don't do such things."

Another mage, one with a copper mane and verdigris fur laughed. "When visiting the far reaches of the empire, the Collegiate accedes to regional sensibilities." His voice made a slight whistle when he said certain words. "You met Flare—the blonde mare who made you breakfast in Five Waterfalls Township. Her area of research is smoke and fire magic. You will not be the only mare amongst our ranks. My name's Tin Whistle. I'm the regional recruitment officer." He reached out a copper-shod hoof.

I tapped it. "And... this means...?" I asked.

A third stallion stepped forward. He was as brown as eastern ironwood or caravan caramel with a chopped zigzag midnight-blue mane and coal-black eyes. A round yellow patch of fur blazed in the middle of his forehead. "I'm named Star and I'm a celestial mechanic. Please understand when I say this, but— we cannot accept you not saying yes."

Everypony nodded.

"Why?" I asked. "Summer Daze understands magic so much better than I do, and cares to. Sure, I can do a special trick, but my interest in magic doesn't go beyond the practical." Like teaching Summer Daze.

A plump teenage creme-color pony with oddly red eyes said, "We study magic and the creation of it. I am Seer Barthemule, the Collegiate's thaumatologist. I study cutie mark magic." He looked no older than Summer. He raised his robe to display an almost colorless tan magnifying glass in front of a red pony eye. His muzzle was white. That, and his spikey short platinum mane and pudgy features, made him look a bit like a mule. "May we see your cutie mark?"

I looked to Da who nodded.

By Platinum's Grace, everypony here had already well seen me wearing only my cutie mark if I had actually burnt the propoli's blanket to ashes, which maybe I had! I raised the robe to display my right flank to show a neat yellow sun in a manilla outline; it had tiny left hooked flares that curved right along the circle's edge. My fur was matted from sleep sweat, but who cared? Thanks to my giant body, my cutie mark was as enormous as the sun seen upon the horizon.

Feeling nervous being looked at, I blathered. "I got it one long night after day and night had first broken completely. Da was ill. Feverish. He kept talking about never seeing the sun again and endlessly repeating what to do when he passed. I told him the sun was about to rise, not so much because I knew it but because it simply had to or we'd lose him. And, within moments, it did. It shocked him out of his certainty that death stalked him. I remember him staring out the window fascinated by the rising sun. I later found I had this on my flank. It's the sun."

I worked not to smirk as one after another of the Collegiate stepped forth to take a good look. It felt good to be admired for something society said I had to hide, but I quickly dropped the robe the instant the last mage turned away. "Goes with my name. Mare named me right."

"May be Silver Crown did." Star said, "Maybe she didn't. Regardless, you need to know some basic facts about the heavens you have been so blithely manipulating: The sun and the moon are set in concentric crystal spheres that slide with a set coefficient of friction and are articulated at intervals with resonant—"

"You make it sound like the sky is some kind of machine."

"It is one. It is called an orrery."

I arched an eyebrow. "Next you're going to tell me that this 'machine' was created by a unicorn?"

Star's mouth dropped open.

"What?" I asked.

The mages whispered between themselves. I looked from one to another as Rolling Rock ushered Tin Whistle beyond the curtains, accidentally ripping the cheap purple fabric. "Sorry!" An argument began, abruptly cut off mid-syllable—probably by magic. After two minutes of me staring at the fidgeting mute stallions, beginning to worry I'd insulted somepony or some foreign social norm, the pair returned.

I swallowed hard. "Yes?"

Tin whistle said, "You need to join the Collegiate, now."

I frowned. "Why?" Right, they weren't telling me everything. "Because some power-mad unicorn made the heavens?"

I could see sweat bead on Rolling Rock's blue brow, which fascinated me. He looked at Da, then me. "Don't ever repeat that outside this room."

I added, "Except amongst the Collegiate?"

Verdigris-furred Tin Whistle rubbed a hoof down his Mohawk-cut copper mane. "Which is why you must join the Collegiate!" His whistling slur became more pronounced.

I shrugged and zipped my mouth with a gesture. "So I won't speak of it."

Star shook his head furiously. "No, no, no, no, no! Everypony who's ever raised the sun has—"

"—and the moon, and spun up the stars—" I twirled a hoof. Yes. I was messing with them, but a mare just can't say yes to any stallion's daft proposal without reason.

"—has been a member of the Collegiate."

"Controlled by the Collegiate," I translated and gave the barest laugh. "Until now. First time for everything." Really, if I had a choice, I didn't need any more ponies to control my life.

"You need to learn how to raise the sun."

"She's teaching me well enough."

"She...? The sun, right—"

"She's definitely a mare. Didn't you kn—?"

"—we have years of experience raising the sun."

"But you weren't good at it, and you definitely didn't know she was a mare."

"You need to be stronger!" Star pleaded. "You can't do this twice a day in your current state; it will kill you."

Da's amber eyes focused on me and widened.

"Once every three days works well enough. With practice I'll get better." I was a High Desert mare, an experienced buyer at the market and the caravan. I found it hard to respect stallions who didn't dicker well.

I gave them a hoof up: "How could you make me stronger?"

Everypony looked at each other and murmured jargon that made sense only to them. Star said, "There is much we could teach you."

"And...? Stuff you can't tell me about?"

Star nodded. The dark brown pony held his big coal black eyes wide, looking set upon.

That was a ploy.

I sighed and thought, You're losing your audience. Make an offer I might be interested in.

Confused silence.

I said, "I see no reason why I can't stay home and continue with my life, doing a special chore as often as I can until it's twice daily. The town has a perfectly good clock tower—"

A tiny pony who had been ignoring the conversation, and staring out the nearest window on my left, turned to face me. Reddish magic lit his shadowed face and it didn't match his violet eyes. He lowered his hood and said two words in a deep gravelly voice that belied his size. "Sol Umbra."

I shuddered with sudden cold.

When the other mages stepped aside, I could see the sinewy petit purple stallion. He had a simple bowl cut dark-purple mane with bangs that displayed deep crimson and a brick-red stripes. He raised an eyebrow.

I whispered, "There is that," and shuddered again.

"And angry members of your thought police," he added. He pointed at his horn. "A shield spell to keep us from being bothered or overheard."

Rolling Rock said, "That's Buster. His talent is battle magic."

Taking a closer look, I saw a fresh welt on his right cheek, then noticed a furless patch of pinker skin, like a healed burn, and a thin scar from his chin to his right ear, which was torn like a frayed rag. White hairs scattered around his eyes hinted that he was as old as Da.

I said the first thing that came into my head. "And you all raise the sun together?"

Rolling Rock said, "It's significantly easier with the help of Hibiscus Water and Flare, but... yes, we do."

Red-eyed seer smiled when he added, "The magic a pony does everyday has little to do with his special talent."

"Or hers. Tell me what happened with..." l found it difficult to say his first name, which I knew was another name for the sun. It seemed... sick, somehow. "—with Umbra."

Tin Whistle nudged Summer on the shoulder in a friendly fashion and Summer in return gave him a confused cross look. "This young fellow neatly swapped the vectors of Umbra's levitation spell and caused the rocks to loop upward and come down on his head."

"I prevented the unintentional consequence," said Buster.

Considering what I had begun to learn about my brother and the concept of empathy he was just beginning to master, I suspected he well understood what he had been doing.

"Sad," I whispered.

Some ponies didn't deserve empathy.

"Most of the townsfolk tried to knock the stallion down or deflect the rocks away from you." My breath caught as Buster added, "At which point constables charged you, and us, with clubs. I used a shield spell so we could gather you up. The townsfolk chased the authorities inside. Many ponies got hurt."

My throat closed up. Tears coursed down my cheeks. Was it the outrageous sentence they'd witnessed? The unyielding propolis in face of what I'd proven to be? Or shear High Desert orneriness finally winning out? I didn't care. I had been sure I was irredeemable and they had proven me wrong.

"It's not over yet," Buster finished by pointing at his horn.

Rolling Rock said, "We can protect you if you join the Collegiate."

The townsfolk were willing to protect me, too. I suspected there would be others who would be willing to "protect" me when they thought about it for a little while, the propolis, too. I could raise the sun, or choose not to. I was...

Valuable.

I gasped. Why had one pony suddenly wanted to marry me after he had first arrested and humiliated me? Because he'd witnessed my raising of the sun that first time near the Council Paddock... and had immediately dissembled, believably—at least to me.

It was all about controlling a resource. He— She who controlled the sun...

"Umbra," I sneered.

"We can protect you from him, too," the leader of the mages added, not intuiting my train of thought.

I had always been good at observing ponies and figuring them out well enough to predict their behavior. I was learning unexpected, neigh unwelcome, lessons today. That colored my next words. "You'll protect me regardless of whether or not I join the Collegiate, won't you?"

When the other mages looked uncomfortably at one another, Buster said a matter-of-factly, "We have no choice."

"Indeed. Next subject. A unicorn created the heavens...?"

A resigned Star sighed. He fussed with his midnight-blue zigzag mane for a moment, then pointed at my father. "For his own safety, he must not hear this."

Da had turned toward the main room of the house when Rolling Rock's horn lit and a blue bubble surrounded my father. He bumped into a rubbery wall. Da rubbed his nose as he said something that was completely muffled. His amber eyes met mine and we shrugged. He sat.

Star said, "Let me tell you the story of Crystal Hoof."

"King Crystal Hoof? The Last King? Queen Platinum's ancestor?" I asked, never timid, today especially.

Half the mages glanced at the copybooks on the table, each clearly labeled on their spine with a title in Summer Daze's magical cursive. One read, The History of Magic. They all nodded.

I had read basic history and explained it to Summer.

"Queen Platinum's very distant grandmare was King Crystal Hoof's sister. Though a prince, Crystal Hoof was a member of the Collegiate; he manipulated us and used his considerable magic prowess to vanquish his five brothers to seize the throne.

"For all his magical strength, he was a feeble pony. He grew to loath the cold winter nights of our land. With the help of astronomers and physicists, he developed new magic to control the heavens. While his subjects faltered through lack of attention and heavy taxes, there was nevertheless a renaissance in the sciences and the magical arts.

"We learned that our world was just a small orb that orbited a distant glowing sun many hundreds of times wider than our world—"

I said, "But, that's not true—"

He held up a hoof. "The stars… They were suns unimaginable distances away. But Crystal Hoof was determined. Many thought him quite mad, though he was responsible for many of the fundamental treatises in thaumaturgy, including Prime Escapements there in your little library. He was obsessed, not demented. His attempts to control the seasons caused spontaneous weather events and earthquakes felt around the globe, but created only the most minor changes in the axial tilt of the world. For any other scientist or mage, this would have been a great accomplishment, but not for him. He considered himself too weak, though no unicorn could best him horn on horn.

"Through extensive studies of the three tribes, he formulated a theory of the Allunicorngasus, an amalgam of all the postulated magics of the earth pony, the pegasus, and the unicorn tribes. Commentaries saved from the Purges show that the Collegiate thought his thesis was superstition woven with threads of history, and barely plausible.

"He was the king, though. The Collegiate humored him.

"The tyrant invited to the court the strongest earth pony and the fleetest pegasus. In front of everypony, he lanced his own heart in his chest and that of the earth and pegasus ponies to create—by the vilest of magicks, death itself—a monstrous chimera."

I could barely breathe. I whispered, "How could this be true—?"

"He earned the title of tyrant. The Collegiate, to its enduring dishonor, missed its one chance to sunder the tyrant during his transformation. We found ourselves facing a resurrected, terrifically strong, winged-unicorn standing in a pool of his blood and that of the other two ponies."

I whispered, "This— this is not in the history books."

"The Platinum Queens don't want it remembered. In our most guarded histories, it figures prominently. The Last King thinned the Collegiate's ranks of dissent and set about his task of mastering the heavens. The Collegiate supported him, though he would not parcel out complete spells to anypony. He sowed enough dissension in our ranks that nopony shared enough that anypony truly understood what we were doing. One day, after individually testing us, he gathered us together to cast his Celestial Mastery spell.

"Initially, it failed.

"How could it not? We were a speck of sand trying to move a mountain, but he refused to fail. He drove his magic until it went from magenta to a sickly smokey green, what today we call chimeric magic available only to the strongest or the most evil—and expected us to follow his example. He threw one pony off a balcony who refused to corrupt her magic and cast along side him.

"By the application of all our magic and all our will we changed the nature of reality and the physics that supported it; we crystallized the heavens, though that was only the most obvious of many changes. The crack thundered around the world, breaking pottery and glass and deafening ponies and animals alike. The difference was immediately noticeable. The moon had become a strange featureless ivory orb in the night. Worse, or perhaps better, Crystal Hoof stood before us without magic, still a chimera but unable to fly. Even his quartz crystal cutie mark had disappeared from his platinum white hide."

Could a being be so powerful? I found myself shaking listening to the story. "Wait? Are you saying the sun and the moon used to raise themselves?"

Star nodded. "It is more complicated than that, but yes. In an instant, Crystal Hoof encased our world in a set of crystal spheres, one for the sun and the moon, and outer ones for the firmament. With the same foul magic, he wrenched the souls out of thousands of ponies—leaving them catatonic shells—each to provide the magic to light an individual star or a flowing tendril of mist in Milky Way or a nebulae."

"How horrible!"

"His sister, Princess Platinum, seized upon his weakness to imprison the tyrant and condemn much of the Collegiate, forcing her brother to assist the remaining few in learning the mechanics of the crystal spheres.

"It is a bizarrely complex orrery of gears, tracks, loops, ramps, ratchets, circular springs, and sliding crystal in which we live embedded, isolated from the greater heavens and the real sun and moon beyond. It took weeks to figure out how it worked, but only three and a half days for the thing to wind down and grind to a halt. Reports from explorers later confirmed that a month of constant night froze the land and the surface of the sea, devastating the opposite side of the world. We learned how to raise and lower the celestial orbs through unicorn magic quickly enough that civilization, though scorched, could rebuild. Since that day, the Platinum queens have fought many wars to maintain our independence from ponies and other civilizations who rightly fear us. Can the world do without us? No. The Queen's Dominion of Unicornia is the empire the Crystal Hoof dynasty developed to rule the world to keep the pony tribes safe."

I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. "Such a foul history. You— you really expect me to work with you to help raise the sun and the moon?"

"It is a history; it is not the present."

"Spawned in evil."

"I won't argue that. The crystal spheres are not intrinsically evil, nor are the gemstones that grow in our soil and interfere with crops, nor the pillaging dragons Celestial Spheres brought to life to eat them. Platinum's dynasty and our bad judgment saddled us with the responsibility to operate the heavens and to protect the world."

I thought about Queen Platinum and her tyrannical ancestor. She too was called a tyrant, but then in the High Desert all stallions considered any foreign power tyrannical... because. "The necessity is certainly not evil, but—"

"The job must be done," Rolling Rock interrupted, "and doing so benefits everypony. The mechanisms of the celestial sphere that control the planets, move the stars, and guide the sun and the moon are complex and become more so as they wear, which is where the Collegiate can help you."

Could—should a common pony like me weigh the morality of history and try to balance it? I didn't want to. I hoped I'd never have to. I greedily jumped at his distraction and said, "It sounds like you think the heavens are little more than—" I thought about what Summer and I had just learned. "—clockworks?"

I'd once snuck into the town clock building behind the brother of a friend to see the spinning wheels and massive gears powered by weighted pendulums contained within. It all suddenly made sense: "Escapements! The moving blocks and mountainous squared-off tracks… spring ratchets... it's basically everything that's ticking and whirring away inside a clock!"

"Crystal Hoof's crafted apparition made solid and permanent—"

"The sky needs to be wound daily!"

"Exactly. Two years ago, the orrery locked up. Sadly, over the centuries, fewer unicorns of the calibre of Crystal Hoof's Collegiate are trained—or survive the Queen's scrutiny. We need you, but not to help us. We agree that your special talent is in celestial mechanics."

The pale red-eyed pony, Seer Barthemule, nodded.

I blinked at them. I thought how I had known where the sun was when I needed to know for Da. "At the Council Paddock, I listened in the dark ready to help my brother if he lost focus, but when you started the ritual I forgot about all that. It felt—" I reared so I could gesture with my hooves, grasp a measure of distance between my hooves then shift right and up. "I pushed with Sliding and added Motivate; snippets of those spells' mnemonics filled your chant. I felt what I thought was the sun begin to move, but a certain propoli we've discussed found me, arrested me, tied a halter on me, and led me away." My face burned, thinking about how he had humiliated me by parading me in front of all the ponies in town.

"You felt it?"

Another said, "The sun?"

"I did." I really did.

Still rearing—despite having raised the sun less than half a day ago—I tried to feel her again.

It felt right.

Please

With the new model of crystal clockworks in my head to make sense of the parallel diamond valleys and ridges I'd seen in my vision, I imagined a gigantic machine of blocks and tracks that needed to be shifted, aligned, spun, and wound up.

There…

The sun. A spiral spring of condensed magic had run down within her crystal "chariot" woven of prismatic wicker and diamond planks. She rested near the horizon, waiting and radiating warmth. To the east, below the horizon, waited the ivory moon, her mood glacially blue but nevertheless anxious to be up and away. Unlike the sun, however, the moon seemed stand-offish.

All of it, the sun, the moon, the stars, the arcane machine of the heavens, floated in an electric sea of living, breathing liquid lightning—magic, light, and a hum that seamed like the song of a celestial chorus. In it, meanings and potential sloshed to and fro, becoming the wind I felt ruffling the fur on my muzzle.

The sun had spoken to me by making me remember events. I now perceived the crystal spheres by cues that played against my understanding of the clockworks I'd seen in the clock tower and my previous sense of a diamond landscape.

My senses crystallized and whisked my consciousness away.

At first I thought I wandered in a fog bank. But no, they were clouds and I flew through them without the aid of pegasus wings—or a body. When I concentrated on the sun or the moon, my view magnified to show snatches of a dizzying landscape without horizons that rose upward around me no matter which way I looked. I flew inside a bowl! Monstrous squared-off transparent valleys of diamond blocks sparkled below, refracting light in glimmering rainbows. The valleys and ridges flowed upward into the distance. The further I looked, the greater the number of clouds, but straining I saw that the valleys converged but never crossed. This then were the paths the sun and the moon took through the sky to describe the seasons.

I gasped.

They were wagon roads shared by two caravans: The sun and the moon—sometimes they would meet, mingle, perhaps flow over one another. Not a good design!

I finally found the horizon; after all we were inside a sphere that encased our world. Upside down from my perspective, I saw land that stretched as far as my clouded viewpoint allowed me to see, swaths of green and brown or blue, covered in places by lacy gossamer that stretched into the distance, clouds marshaled like armies into lines of storm clouds by pegasi or scattered puffy white clumps, all seen from the vantage of above the highest mountain top imaginable. I could see neither ponies nor the cities they built nor the fields they farmed. The world looked... pristine, beautiful.

I could get lost here, but I knew I mustn't.

I looked back at the sun—a glowing, throbbing swath of heat and light, swirling like a brilliant yellow egg yolk of incomprehensible dimensions. The intensity of the sight blinded me.

I slipped back into my blood and bone self.

"I feel her," I said and smiled. "I feel the sun."

I turned toward the window in the sunward side of the house on two legs. The shutters banged against the wall when I threw them open with my magic. Reaching with my forehooves, in my mind I latched on to the right and left side of the burning orb.

An orb at least the size of a city.

I felt a definite click in both hooves. "Oh my!"

Somepony said, "Lower the sun and raise the moon, please."

Maybe it was my imagination, predicated on my heart's desire, but there was that magic word in my vocabulary that nopony used with me.

Please?

My throat closed up; tears streamed down my cheeks!

I did as so courteously requested. Breathing in small gasps, my heart raced as joyful exhilaration flooded my veins. I felt sunlike warmth radiate from my body at the thought of what I would do. My mane and tail began to flutter madly and loudly as if blown by a strong wind. Caught in magic as fluid and buoyant as water, I felt my weight disappear. I felt suspended as I reached for the sky and inadvertently tapped my hooves on the ceiling.

That meant I self-levitated about a quarter-pony length in the air.

I smelled smoke—my new mage robes had caught fire! There was little I could do and not loose the thread of my purpose. Somepony quickly assisted; the burning fabric slipped away.

Again in the diamond realm, I saw the source of the magic flooding me. She welcomed me brightly. Using marshaled magic, I pushed down on the sun, felt how the clockwork she was embedded within resisted more on the left than the right, and ratcheted the mechanism appropriately using Sliding. I felt a springiness of the clockwork windings. I pushed down hard and left—blocks of maliciously placed crystal went flying—and away the sun spun, fully wound, to light the opposite side of the world.

Flames still crackling around me, my mane and tail still in furious motion, I reached for the moon and felt my viewpoint spin through the ethereal clouds, puffs and clumps of them streaking by as if I were truly flying. I would not leave out the malcontent his time. I felt my earthly body rotate midair to face east as my hooves scraped across the rafters in the ceiling. I threw open those shutters with a bang, too.

When the moon hove into view, I saw a totally different beast. Regardless of what the mages thought, I believed, in that moment, that my cutie mark demonstrated how little I had in common with her. Whereas the sun breathed liquid light and heat—and the earth reflected a patchwork of land and sea colors—the moon most resembled an orb of bone. It radiated a cold, bluish-white light. The orb, though dome-like, wasn't featureless. I saw tall pointy mountains and grayish seas that were either mud or dust, not water. I sensed her in all her desolation. Did the soul Crystal Hoof imprisoned in the moon... did she live a perpetual nightmare?

Unfortunately she—and some other power that I began to suspect helped her—noticed my attention just as I tried to hold her frigid surface. While it had taken me less than a minute to lower the sun, I struggled and wrestled to even grasp, let alone move the orb of cold light. It was as if I fought an angry screaming foal for a ball.

I couldn't fully marshal the lunar magic as I had with the sun. I cast Sliding and Motivate over and over.

Slowly, I visualized the paths and the direction of the seasonal adjustment to the crystal blocks, and the springiness of the clockworks. The fight turned into an immense battle of wills and magic. Somepony threw spells at me that unwove my own spells—but if this was something I was supposed to do, by Platinum's Grace, I would do it! Whomever the entity was that I fought, he or she tried to wield the moon as I had the sun with opposite intent. Eventually I exhausted it—and myself. It let go first. I tapped lunar magic cold as evaporating alcohol, as astringent as lemons, and as fleeting as the crackle of a leaf crushed under-hoof. It roared about me like a winter storm.

With a pull upward, a ratchet, and a spring load, I flung the moon into the sky. As an afterthought, I tossed the last of my magic against another level of crystal in the firmament, felt it as I might a well-balanced mill stone, and whirled it. This wound it up with surprising ease and it began to tick-tock, rotating the full sky into proper motion—a firmament filled with twinkling stars, eccentric planets embedded in their own spheres, and nebulae.

And I swooned.

I found myself crumpled on the floor, my chest aching as if half my ribs were sprained, and more exhausted than I would have been having pulled a cart of rocks up a mountain all day long. Blinking, I looked up and whispered, "I did it."

Moonlight streamed through the southeast window; the right shutter hung by one hinge. I smelled smoke, but faintly for some spell circulated air rapidly between the open windows. Concerned stallions hovered over me; they lit a rainbow of horns to provide light. Tin Whistle levitated a notebook, waving it wildly to fan air toward my muzzle.

The rough-hewn red-painted rafters looked scorched. I glanced at my bed; a puddle glimmered where it had been splashed with water. A few lines of smoke swirled up. Everything else had been shoved to make room when I had immolated. Somepony had thrown the purple draperies over me like a blanket—I smiled; it had obviously been done to protect my High Desert sensibilities, and that showed their respect. Fire had burnt the silky blue fabric of my mage's robe through in a few places, and singed it most every place else. Laying sadly discarded on the earthen floor, it was more black than blue now, and crinkled and bubbled where whole.

I looked at my audience. Star had fallen to the floor and looked like he'd been crying. Most of the other mages, including Rolling Rock, just stood in awe.

Da sat beside me. He held my right hoof between his two and shook it gently, if aimlessly. His amber eyes sparkled with moisture. "Thank goodness," he said. "Thank goodness."

"Had you worried, did I?" I grinned. "I've been through this before. I just didn't understand it."

Da shook his head. "You stopped breathing! They had to pound on you to get you breathing again. I though I'd lost you." His voice quavered and he stood shaking. "It was like the sun had come down to roost in my house—"

In our odd synchrony, Summer Daze and I whispered, "It had."

Da choked. "—then left, forever."

Rolling Rock added, "You're not going to be able to raise the sun and the moon everyday. It'll kill you."

I quashed a snappy Really? and nodded. I had to accept that. Well... At least trying to raise the moon had been terrifically hard.

Star got up and began pacing. He said nervously, "What you did, how you did it: this changes everything. Presenting you to the queen..." He huffed and shook his head, and huffed again. "We'll say you have no interest in politics. Strength in just one thing. A singular resource! We'll need to emphasize this. Since you command the celestial spheres, we're going to have rename you so your name sums up your value in one word that she can quickly comprehend, but to what? Sunrise? Daybreaker? Crystalina? Celestia? Heavena? Spheria…?"

He looked at his fellow mages and they nodded sagely as if they understood his logic. He faced me. "Crystal Hoof had a stamina you don't possess."

Despite sundering exhaustion, I pushed myself up, wobbling, saying, "No. No! Don't even think of murdering ponies to turn me into a winged monster!" I visualized pools of blood; nausea crept into my throat. "I forbid you!"

"Better to fear the Queen than us." The Acting Dominant Mage laughed, waggling his goat beard. "The Last King taught us many things, but the one we learned ourselves is that the magicks of all the pony tribes exist in the heart of all ponies, even in the heart of a unicorn. We will hire earth pony and pegasus tutors to find your inner tribal magic, that love that exists in the heart of all ponies. We will figure out how to provide you the endurance you need, without the magic of death. We must. It's why you must join—"

"No." With a sigh, I sat—because my shaking legs refused to support me—and raised a hoof. "I can promise to work with you, but I am a High Desert mare. I refuse to be controlled even by the most trustworthy of less than perfect choices. I'll work with you to move the heavens but you'll never make me an 'alicorn-gn-ga-gah—'

"Alicorngnathus—"

"Whatever, and you'll protect me from the improprieties of wrong-headed ponies who are trying to run my life. That's my offer."

I locked eyes with Rolling Rock. Those deep blue orbs were hard; he blinked as he thought about it—like a merchant who'd realized I'd left out something he could charge for later. "l—"

"If you try to coerce me in any way that goes against the spirit of my offer, my interpretation of it, I'll go my own way."

Buster said, "You and Queen Platinum will get along famously." His tone filled his words with equal parts speaking-truth-to-power and sarcasm.

Rolling Rock said, "This won't be easy."

"I'm a mare. Really, is anything easy? I promise to understand."

He raised a deep blue hoof. "Then so shall we. Deal."

I clacked hooves with him. "Deal." But because I had watched Da conduct business deals many times, I added in stallion-like fashion, "But we'll have that in writing before it is binding."

Da started laughing.

Star said, "So, Celestia—"

My neck nearly snapped as I looked at him. "My name is Sunny Daze!"

"My given name was Pace. Growing up brings responsibility and change."

I looked at Summer Daze, who had that determined expression I liked to consider to be his style of smiling. Da just shook his head, also with a smile, clearly overwhelmed by the events of the day.

I said, "Let's talk about that, alright?"

Star coughed. "Will you accept this new purpose in life?"

A purpose!? "Mares have a purpose in life: to raise foals and to keep their family." The import of the request and the respect it carried... Well, I just stared with my mouth open.

Da said, "I can't make this choice for you, Sunny Daze."

I looked at him, then at Summer. They both nodded.

They were right—they could not make the decision for me.

In a final act of resistance, neigh even disobedience, I lay back down, rested my head on outstretched forelegs, and fell instantly asleep.

They weren't going to take no, anyway, even if I didn't want to say yes.

For the record, the resistance I'd felt when I moved the moon was indeed the magic of another pony. However, By Platinum's Grace, she is another story.

Author's Note

That was the original end of the story. But wait! There’s more. An epilogue follows.

Beginnings (Epilogue)

I'll spare you the good-byes, the kumbayas of what looked to be half of the townsfolk—mares and stallions—and the signing of the scroll with my deal with the Collegiate, my codicil included. (I'd never held a real quill before or written anything other than to cross-out stuff with charcoal. A black ink blot now stained my flank, and I'll say nothing more on that subject!)

I also explained the proper way to address and interact with an unmarried High Desert mare. I desperately wanted them to know what they could expect me to do, like always wearing decorous clothing and associating only with stallions with my brother. I was unmarried—and not interested in changing that—and ponies would need to keep their innuendos or offers to themselves. I'd study. I'd raise the sun and moon, of course. I also gave a list of what I must refuse, simplified when Summer Daze would escort me, extensive when not. I gave the example of the pink unicorn dressed only in her cutie mark I first met in Heartstrings valley, and the gifts I got from Flare which Umbra subsequently broke (or maybe I did), and how nervous those situations made me. I acceded that I might feel freer in the presence of a trusted mare, were I to find any outside the High Desert that might earn my trust.

During the two a'days it took me to sleep, eat, and recover enough to travel, we’d come to believe we'd cowed the propolis into submission.

The mages provisioned their caravan of finely made blue wagons; a'dawn of the third day, we rolled along the downhill toward Five Waterfalls Township to pick up Smart Cookie, the earth pony potions practitioner I'd seen tested. In light of the Collegiate’s need that I have contact with the tribe, and that I'd now filled the position of spheres-spinner, the Collegiate had decided he was now an also must-have student.

The moon rested impatiently on the horizon in a dark sky full of twinkling stars. The trees downhill from the Council Paddock were faintly-conical silhouettes that rustled in a cold breeze blowing at our backs. I wore my mares-cloak cinched to my neck. I was as likely to wear another of the Collegiate's robes as I was to ever run the organization.

I sensed a flicker. It was as if something had crossed the face of the moon. I looked, but I didn't see anything, especially after my eyes had adjusted to the sudden brightness of looking at the moon.

Buster hadn't missed it either. "Keep moving," he warned. His horn lit red as he prepared whatever battle magic he thought appropriate.

I found myself encircled by the mages, though being taller than them all, what good did that do? The wagons drifted to the rear, their springs squeaking as we increased speed.

Summer Daze was puffing to keep up. He nevertheless said, "You need to learn Teleport."

"You have way too much confidence in me."

His brown eyes gleamed in the moonlight as he gave me a look of incomprehension. "You taught me what I needed to learn it." A statement. Cause and effect. No excuses for me.

He had much to learn, as did we both.

Buster wormed through the crowd to my other side. He said, "The pegasi have been known to use nets. Be ready to dive under a wagon or dodge."

I nodded.

While the big yellow-eyed desert owls I'd seen mousing around town were notoriously silent, one could hear a tawny eagle flapping its wings. Something as heavy as a pegasus, or shaped as un-aerodynamically, could not be silent—though with the masking sound of the whistle of the wind, this one came close to being owl-silent. A dark low-flying shadow banked out of a wadi beside the road with a whoosh of a power-stroke. The pony streaked overhead in an instant, then shot upward on the other side of the road until his momentum ran out. I gasped at the suddenness of it. He studied us as we continued rolling, flapping his fabulous wings, pinions spread, once, twice, thrice, then dove toward the trees. I saw the barest dulled gleam off a helmet and got the impression of a crest.

Our pace increased and I had to watch my step on the rutted road.

Buster said, "We're being followed."

A glance showed me a herd barreling downhill toward us. They galloped, their hooves like the thunder of an onrushing storm. Intuition told me to look forward and I stretched my neck as I strove to see into the night shadows downhill.

I caught the small purple battle mage glancing at me. "Yes," he said. It sounded like a complement. "The pegasi will cut us off where those behind us will catch up."

Implied: We would still be in the High Desert not greater Unicornia. "Then we should stop."

"Agreed. Everypony! Stop and circle the wagons around Celestia. Summer Daze, Rolling Rock, prepare to protect against thrown spells."

As they treated me as the most precious of treasures while surrounding me, my throat closed up and I blinked away tears. My heart also raced at the threat of the oncoming herd—and a weird realization I could feel forming in my mind that conflicted with what I had always thought it meant to be a mare...

The pegasi figured out quickly what we'd done. A squad of six overshot us headed up the road with little more than a spooky hiss in the air. Five banked in a circle and landed ten pony-lengths downhill. Their leader remained airborne, his charcoal-dusted armor clanking occasionally as he flapped lazily, awaiting the contingent of unicorns, including one carriage.

Buster shouted, "What is the meaning of this, Stormrunner Hurricane?"

I caught a sudden scent of lavender in the air. I liked lavender.

The pegasus looked, then squinted. His hooves clattered when he landed pony-lengths from us, positioned so he could look between the blue wagons, chuckling. "My precious pinions! If it isn't Archmage Buster, the former defense-against-magic instructor at Platinum Academy. What trouble have you gotten yourself into now?"

My mouth dropped so hard it almost unhinged. The pegasus was a mare with an incredibly sweet voice—and it dripped with sarcasm.

Buster pointed uphill with a hoof. "I could ask Platinum's former ballistics trainer the same thing, sergeant."

She flared her wings. "Doing the honorable thing when an ally that values the pegasus tribe asks for assistance."

"Honorable? That again?" I could see he fought not to roll his eyes.

"You got that right, Buster," she said with a snap of her tail. "Honor applies to all sorts of relationships, and not just military!" Her nose wrinkled with anger that approached a sneer.

"I love you, too, Hurricane, but about the on-rushing stampede—?"

These two had a history beyond both teaching school.

"That's Lieutenant Hurricane to you, Buster." She tapped a medallion set in her breastplate with a vertical bar of brass or gold. "I graduated the academy and earned my Pegasus Air Brigade commission."

Buster smiled hearing her news... briefly. "Congratulations. And, uh, let's try to talk it through this time. But, um—stampede?"

She huffed. Considering how long it took for her to look uphill and say, "oh," I figured she'd huffed about talking it through. "Them? It's a police matter. Something to do with a kidnapping." She squinted at me. In the moonshine, I wasn't sure if her fur was light blue or gray, but her eyes were amber like Da's. Frazzled particolor hair stuck out of her helmet as a crest. She lifted a verdigrised-bronze horseshoe toward me. "From the description, her."

"Me?" I snorted. "Really!? Stormrunner Hurricane, listen carefully. The propoli charged me with crimes of which I am innocent, and when I refused to marry my accuser they convicted me. When I declared my innocence such that I could not be made a slave, they—"

I couldn't finish because the "stampede" arrived thunderously, drowning out my words, especially with the shout of the chief propoli as the wheels of his carriage scraped against the rock road.

"Don't listen to her lies!"

Lieutenant Hurricane fluttered aside to avoid pebbles kicked into the air, glaring at the unicorns. When two unicorns lofted stones in blue and amber magic respectively, she jumped into the air.

I noticed his black leonine mane before I recognized Umbra exiting the carriage. It wasn't him picking up stones; that aura would have been crimson. It didn't matter anyway: Summer Daze flicked his hooves and the implied upward vector in the two levitation spells reversed. The stones fell.

Bang! Thump!

A pair of stallions began hopping up and down yowling in pain, a white unicorn constable with the black band wrapped around his head and a red roan who looked like a roustabout The constable held his leg against his chest.

The ponies around me shifted. The delegation from town jerked closer together and somepony put up a glowing blue shield spell. Umbra jumped aside so he stood like a gray shadow to their left in the brush beside the road, glaring balefully at my brother.

"We don't hurt ponies," I whispered to Summer in the ensuing silence.

He replied, "Nopony threatens my sister."

"Wait for your cue."

"I can do that."

From above, Hurricane shouted, "Everypony! Stand down. Now!"

The five other pegasi had joined her, casually flapping above both groups. They wore lighter non-metallic armor—tight loops of something woven like wicker—but all carried a sheath of javelins, each with one at the ready. Without magic, don't ask me how that worked but—with Hurricane having been a ballistics teacher and the pointy evidence right before my eyes—I knew it did.

A third pony rose shakily in the carriage. The elder stallion had a deep yellow horn, eyes, and fur, and a blond mane. His face was practically white, but that testified to his age. I could see his brass lantern cutie mark as he swished his tail angrily and declared, "That mare is the property of the High Desert! I want her returned now!"

"I am nopony's property!" I shouted, my face heating up. I stepped forward but Buster and Star stepped in front of me and I butted into their warm bodies.

"Impropriety!" Umbra shouted back.

"You should talk! Inventing charges so you could force me to marry you or so you could buy me as a slave when you falsely convicted me—!"

"Whoa there, young mare!" cried Hurricane.

"And who threw the stones at me, Umbra?"

Hurricane said, "Whoa, whoa! Let's be civil—"

Umbra said quietly. "The charges were real."

"As was you seeing me raise the sun the first time and scheming to force me to marry you so you could control the one pony who ruled the crystal spheres?"

"Whoa, whoa, whoa! Raising the sun?" The pegasus hovered a pony-length above me so I could hear the sound of the air in her feathers. There was awe in her voice, and she did smell of lavender. "Did you say that you— By yourself?"

Golden Lantern cleared his phlegmy throat and said, "There is no conviction."

"Liar!"

The pegasus turned and yelled, "Some ponies are having trouble speaking the truth. Now, everypony, shut it!"

Golden Lantern returned, "You, mare, are under my authority and you will arrest—"

A javelin thwacked deeply into the road (and remember it was rocky), vibrating in front of the town elder's carriage. I'd barely caught the slight movement of the lieutenant's nose and a flick of a hoof to point.

It became silent enough to hear the wind rustling the brush and a lone cricket chirping.

"No pony dishonors the Pegasus Air Brigade. We are High Desert's ally, not—" she spat on the ground "—mercenaries to be ordered around. Who was kidnapped?"

"Nopony," I said over Umbra saying, "She was."

I don't think I'd ever heard as weighty a sigh as Hurricane emitted. With three subordinates covering her, she descended beside me, gesturing the Collegiate ponies away with her wings to make room to land, and motioned that a wagon be pulled out of the way. When Summer Daze refused to budge, she asked, "Obviously your brother?"

"My twin brother."

"A proper High Desert escort as I understand the concept. Have you been kidnapped? Really. I can handle my ex—he's a push-over—and get you away without a scratch."

Close up, I could see her crested mane was red, green, and blue. Her lavender perfume was strong, but her eyes were hard.

Summer Daze and I said "Nope," in unison.

She blinked and huffed. Her nose ticked and her nostrils flared.

She fluttered over to Umbra. "You manufactured to force her to marry you?"

"Whose ally are you?"

Tiredly. "Just answer the ques—"

"You lack all propriety!"

Golden Lantern said, "I commuted her sentence."

"All righty, thanks for the clarification." When the elder didn't continue, she made a circular motion with her hoof. "But? Kidnapped?"

Umbra spoke over the chief propoli and the town elder, saying, "She's still forfeited her freedom. She can make no commitments nor bind any contract. She belongs with the High Desert ponies. The Collegiate stole her from us."

I narrowed my eyes and said, "You mean from you."

Umbra said, "I am but a servant of the town and the High Desert." His magenta eyes seemed to glow in the darkness as he focused on me. "You belong to us."

Hurricane trotted up to the white-faced palomino chief propoli, still inside the carriage, waving away the surrounding unicorns. Like flies, they scattered. When she addressed him, he froze. "Have you investigated—" She pointed at me.

I opened my mouth when the realization I'd felt forming earlier finally set in. I could raise the sun. I was more than a mere mare. Or any mare. More than just any pony. In the High Desert. In all of Unicornia... Just existing, I had power.

I truly was no longer Sunny Daze.

"Celestia," I said.

"Have you investigated Lady Celestia's allegations?"

The chief propoli began sputtering. Perhaps mares scared him.

Umbra said, "That would be preposterous and would lack even a veneer of propriety."

"No, then. Not kidnapped." Hurricane fluttered back to me. "So, I'm thinking I'm going to send you on your way, but, you see, I have a problem also."

The blue-gray mare was average size for a mare. I met her gaze looking down at her. "And that would be?"

"You do know that the Collegiate is Queen Platinum's tool?"

"I refused to join the Collegiate."

That earned me a grin. "You get points for that. But, you know, there is a reason that the High Desert and most of the pegasus tribe won't work with the Queen except when they have no choice but to protect Unicornia, right? An earth pony province is in open rebellion as we speak and breathe. You go with the Collegiate, you leave the High Desert."

"This is a choice? I go home and I am a slave for the rest of my life."

Hurricane looked at the other delegation. Nopony spoke up. She looked back, her eyes locked on me. "It is a better choice than many ponies have been forced to make. There are degrees of freedom."

Freedom? Degrees? Perhaps freedom could also be made. "I can raise the sun. Nopony can do that."

She blinked. She blinked again, but didn't look away. "Queen Platinum better beware. But never forget, she has a thing for chains. Gold or cold iron, they're equally unpleasant."

Remembering the propoli's cell, the hobbles, and the chain, I shuddered. The Collegiate had spoken about "promising new members" not surviving the queen's scrutiny.

But—but I had melted away the propoli's chains.

I shook my head.

Golden Lantern spoke up, his tone derisive, "What would your father think?"

His non sequitur wasn't one. It was a threat, and suddenly I found myself sweating. It hadn't occurred to me they'd do something to Da when we had left him happily waving, content with a generous stipend from the Collegiate. But then, it hadn't occurred to me that a duly appointed supposedly honorable propoli would make it look like I had committed a crime in order to force me to marry him, or turn it into a capital offense to make me into his a slave, either.

I whispered, "He has my father."

Stormrunner Hurricane narrowed her eyes. She fluttered over to Umbra, who stepped further into the brush, causing sticks to crackle. "What do you think? Is the town elder threatening this not-kidnapped mare who happens to be able to raise the sun?" She raised her wings and looked enormous. She swished her tail in annoyance.

He gulped.

Nopony said anything.

"Gray stallion. What's your name?"

"Sol Umbra." He gulped again.

"Propoli Sol Umbra, so, you are the protégé of those old codgers, aren't you?"

A few townsponies gasped at her targeted rudeness, but Umbra gave his typical confident smile and a curt nod. He wanted to be town elder one day, but chief propoli was his obvious stepping stone.

"Good." The pegasus put out a wing that archly pushed up his propoli robe and touched his flank.

The unexpected gesture spooked Umbra forward onto the road, clattering toward us. I almost laughed, but then I realized she ushered him toward us, herding him with her wings.

Lieutenant Hurricane looked at the High Desert delegation and said, "Well, since you have acted dishonorably and lied to trick the Pegasus Air Brigade into your scheme, I am forced to balance all the powers at play here."

"You will do no such thing!" yelled Golden Lantern, rearing and putting his hooves over the side of the carriage. He left out the epithet mare but I could see it vibrating on his wrinkled lips. The horns of the unicorns surrounding him lit, but before anypony could complete a spell, javelins bloomed amongst the party. Two of the ten stallions spooked and ran away uphill. Jumping aside, another fell over and others scrambled into the brush, one tumbling into the wadi with a crash.

Hurricane said, "Dishonorable. Nor properly drilled. Don't escalate. Buster trained me well and I've exceeded my teacher. You didn't even wait for my proposal!"

"What proposal, mare?" This time the town elder sneered.

I felt cold. It sunk in: It wasn't the townsfolk who had made it unbearable to be a High Desert mare. It was these ponies who didn't see the value in traditions and used their positions of trust to foist their selfish plans on everypony in the name of propriety or societal harmony, even if it warped right into wrong. Golden Lantern, our protector? The audacity—no the impropriety of it, of all those trusted ponies using us—left me nauseated.

"Glad you asked, sir. The pegasus tribe has a stake in our lovely tyrant queen not gaining control over this fair innocent maiden. Lady Celestia has a stake in seeing that nopony hurts her father. You want to ensure propriety." She said that with deep sarcasm. "That said, I shall accompany the Collegiate and escort Propoli Sol Umbra along with Lady Celestia, ensuring no harm befalls her or him."

"You don't have the authority, Lieutenant Stormrunner Hurricane."

"Elder Golden Lantern, in that you are correct. But circumstances and my training dictate that I make this decision. I will send back a corporal to PAB Command Aloft for instructions and a request for proper replacement."

"We shall protest!"

"You do that."

She looked at the Collegiate. "I will broker the situation so all our interests are preserved. Do you have a problem with this?"

I hadn't missed that Buster had been giving his leader a whispered running commentary. Rolling Rock nodded and said, "It works for me."

I looked at Sol Umbra who smiled with his gleaming teeth showing such that it made them look lion-sharp.

I said, "Sure." This was a contract, so I added stoutly, "Yes, Lieutenant Hurricane. Seems equitable to me, if they don't harm or imprison my father or harass him in any way."

Golden Lantern asked, "Do I have a choice?"

Hurricane gestured. A javelin dropped toward her. With a upward bounce and curved swipe of her wing and a two-step, the weapon rolled, flipped, and clicked into place on her armor. She turned and jabbed Umber lightly. He whinnied and jammed himself close beside me. My hide ticked under my mares-cloak as if he had really touched my flesh. I felt the shocking warmth of his body and this time smelled curry on his breath.

The Lieutenant grinned. "A willful exchange of hostages is a time-honored tradition started by the Queens Platinum. No, your statement of blackmail leaves me no choice. No harm shall come to Lady Celestia's father—"

"Snow Frost."

"—Snow Frost as she stated. And I will protect your interests and those of my tribe. Do we understand each other?"

Golden Lantern took a deep breath. "Yes."

"Good. Make no mistakes and do not act dishonorably. Corporal Flint, you know what I need."

I said, "We're going to Five Waterfalls Township first."

"Thank you, Lady Celestia. Corporal, give the captain a full report."

"Yessir!" With a salute he shot into the sky.

"Buster, I think we should continue into Unicornia."

In moments, the wagons surged forward, springs squeaking and wood creaking, accompanied by the clatter of over a dozen sets of hooves. The remaining pegasi escorted us from above.

The lieutenant pricked Sol Umbra again when he hesitated, and hissed, "Watch yourself." He jumped ahead.

I turned to Stormrunner Hurricane and bowed my head. "I like the way you think." She was the first somepony I wanted to be like.

Honor. Protecting ponies. Protecting me. For a few moments I humored myself and imagined myself... not a queen and all the baggage that title conveyed—no, a princess... with my own royal guard. For a moment. I smiled. For a moment. I'd be delusional to think that would ever come to pass.

A'evening, after I'd raised the sun in Five Waterfalls Township, I realized something profound. I had found the first mare not of High Desert descent I could trust. That, beyond Umbra glaring at me when nopony was looking and my worries about Da, made me hopeful for the future. It would certainly be sunny.

- END -

Author's Note

That’s a wrap. I hope you enjoyed it. Time to up vote and to leave comments! Please follow me for news of sequels and other stories. Below is some inside baseball about this story, which will become a blog post, soon.

Secret Sauce and the Zen of Novel Writing

I wrote To Bring Light to Eternal Darkness as part of a cycle of stories. It is linked to Celestia and the Battle for Sunset by Celestia's recollections of her childhood, which was in part the inspiration for this novella.

By now you have figured out that this is a first story in the retelling of the events leading up to Hearth's Warming Eve. Stormrunner Hurricane and Smart Cookie have entered the stage. Mentioned were the Queens Platinum, the current Queen Platinum and her mother the dowager queen—also named Queen Platinum. Easy guess what the queen's daughter will be named and what her title is.

I threw in some heavy-handed foreshadowing that there is another pony, a "she", who strongly influences the moon. She even resents the sun, for whatever looney reason. It is a direction for the series, anyway.

I have been asked my plans for a sequel. I am certainly incentivized by the fact that any sequel I publish automatically qualifies for Equestria Daily's Story Updates posts. And I like the characters. Very much so. And my dear readers who have encouraged me—I like them, too.

That brings me to the title of this little essay. Specifically, the "secret sauce' part.

This novella had secret sauce.

I decided to revisit the theme of my first published novel: a woman's role in traditional society and the barriers that poses for her as an individual.

Don't get the basics wrong, here. Modern American society qualifies as a traditional society. Ask any woman who is trying to succeed at any non-traditional role. You'll get an earful that has become wholly and undeservingly cliché, heartbreaking volumes of which I won't repeat here because you've heard it. And I doubt you'd not have heard it because you're a fan of MLP FiM, a show that is both wonderfully subversive and ultra-feminist at the same time.

I'm a feminist writer first and an SF writer second. Read my other stories; their subversiveness should be apparent now that you've read this one. My first novel was characterized as Yentl in the future. (Yentl was a current movie at the time of its publication.) I wrote To Bring Light to Eternal Darkness when I decided I wanted to replicate the outrage of the downtrodden woman in that first novel, and the bittersweet triumph she earned for herself in the end against all odds.

And it was a #metoo moment, too. Note that I wrote all of To Bring Light to Eternal Darkness prior to the inception of that hashtag.

So... that's the secret sauce. It's both dark and savory.

Kim Stanley Robinson once lectured me and a cohort of the Clarion Workshop that you had to have a message when you sat down to write. If you know what you want to communicate to your audience, it is hard to get lost writing a story. Before I start a story, I like to have a reasonable grasp of the main character(s) of the story, a planned end to the story, and the story's message. I had that and more in this one.

It is no mistake that a mares-cloak resembles a certain garment in the real world. I wanted to tell the story of a teen who could have been happy growing up into a traditional role—but for circumstances—and was subsequently oppressed by those who would unethically manipulate and warp tradition for the reasons of getting and keeping power. Sunny Daze was and is a High Desert mare and proud of her heritage and culture. How living amongst foreigners, and the tastes of power she's gotten, will warp her view is fodder for future stories.

For insight into the backstory, understand that the High Desert is where Saddle Arabia (cough, Saudi Arabia, cough-cough) is today. I had originally named the High Desert The Hijazz, an MLP transmogrification of The Hejaz, but decided that was too heavy-handed and could obscure my attempt to characterize Sunny Daze's culture as good for those who conformed or didn't step on the toes of those in power. Such things are true of all societies.

Think about that for a moment.

As for a sequel, well... that's not so cut and dry. I am searching for the secret sauce for that one. I have the characters: a certain talented filly foal with lunatic tendencies, Celestia and Sol Umbra forced to act for each other's benefit to survive the scrutiny of a tyrant queen, and Stormrunner Hurricane trying to herd cats while balancing the needs of her tribe against the requirements of her honor.

That's the putative story. The message, though?

Yeah. About that...

If you have not followed me on FimFiction, I suggest you click the Follow button now so you will know when the sequel shows up. While you are at it, please add an upvote if you think the story deserves it. (I really think it does, but I’m biased.)

In the meantime, may I suggest reading Celestia and the Battle for Sunset? Celestia's backstory in that one inspired this one, and, like bookends on a shelf, it could be considered the last extant story in this cycle of stories.

If you want something edgy, something about a mare in a tough situation just trying to get along while finding herself stuck in events she'd surely want to avoid, read The Enforcer and Her Blackmailers. I'm re-reading it now and am surprised at its power.

Please leave comments, especially if you want a sequel.

To Keep Light in Eternal Darkness - Sequel Notification

TTo Keep Light in Eternal Darkness

MLP: FiM

Adventure

Drama

Slice of Life

Blue Moon is a blue orphan earth pony foal with a crescent moon cutie mark. Her talent for moving the moon interferes with day and night. Her life is about to change; when it means meeting a scary fire unicorn, she worries it's not for the better.

Celestia

Luna

Commander Hurricane

Smart Cookie

scifipony · 7k words  ·  19  1 · 192 views

Author's Note

A sequel has been released. Click the embed to read the novelette.