The Path of Ascendancy

The most difficult thing in life is to know yourself.
—Thales

—||—

‘Worthless piece of shit….’ ‘You idiot…’ ‘How do you actually manage to live with that kind of disease?’ ‘You’re kidding, right?’ ‘Rest in peace, half-brother?’

…

I woke up with a jolt of thousands of volt electrifying tenderness.

Then I cursed.

“What a helluva a trip…” I clutched my head under the trauma I just felt. ‘Tried to’ was the more accurate word. Body was sore with voice still raspy as ever.

“I'm alive? Wha- hoof?” From my point of view, my hands were actually hooves that seemed to be thicker than the hoof from regular horses back on earth. And so with my foots, although they were still encased in a pair of black shoes that somehow also changed along with my attire too.

Still wondering why, standing up became the natural thing I wanted to do at that particular moment.

And I fell.

Looking at myself, the awareness of my situation then kicked myself in.

“I’m a pony. A talking pony… a talking pony?”

I breathed in and closed my eyes for a few moments.

'Am I really in that child show?' I smirked instead. And no, I wasn't an old lunatic who intensely adore a show that literally addressed for children. I just knew it because I occasionally saw some of the important episodes, and I smirked just because I was alive and healthy, more or less, simple as that.

'No wrinkles. Seems like that I'm also back to the mid twenties too. Still got this shitty voice though. Nah, need to be in front of a mirror, can't really say that while being a pony.'

“Well… here goes nothing.”

So instead of standing, I was forced to walk on four instead, just like that certain four-legged mammal.

"Left... right... front feet curved... "

After a few trials and errors I finally got the feeling of how to walk like one of those quadruped.

'Just like crawling, almost.'

I gazed at the sky above. 'Can't beat me with this kind of crap, heh.'

Darkness was currently covering the sky above me, but the stars, they shone like a million fireflies, that night. Added by the existence a full moon, you could say that the night was simply a beautiful sight to behold.

Still, I should get out from that particular grassland before something from the shadows pounced at me, or something real bad like that. But something was inside of my pocket. My suit's pocket, that also somehow fitted with my pony stature. A cheap suit I wore while one was going to be buried.

'Convenient.'

Rummaging my pocket with my right hoof, I finally picked the unknown item.

'A gem? Is this... really what it is?' And it sticked on my hoof. If you asked me how a being with hoof could grasp an item, I would just shook my head due to the ridiculous physics on that world. Maybe a sort of magical field since magic was actually common occurrences?

'Nicol Bolas's Gem of Becoming, yup. Is this really...? Seemingly just the mini version of it, heh.'

I stared intently at the gem. Its golden surface shone with dull light due to the darkness of that place.

"Can I even do actual magic?" I just facehoofed in my dismay.

Then there was it. 'A horn?'. Actual tears of joy just flowed from my eyes.

'Okay, let's just try something.'

To be honest, Nicol Bolas, a dragon-planeswalker extraordinaire, the worst bad guy around the multiverse, of Magic the Gathering, was a master of blue, black and red magic. And the Gem of Becoming was his source of power. So it was possible that I could at least cast any one of the spells from those particular color spectrum. I knew a lot and liked that game while I was still a human, so what? Back to the topic.

Blue was the magic to manipulate water molecules, minds, to counter the magic of the others or to banish anything to... honestly I didn't know where things would go if I casted a blue banishment spell to something, or to someone. At least for a period of time, unlike white magic that could banish things permanently. Oh, and my favorite of blue magic was that it could be used to manipulate temporal fields. Easy to say was that it could be used to fasten the time around the caster itself or around any given area. But beware if you just had limited lifespan, else you'll be grow old too quickly. Or you could just get temporally shifted, a.k.a. get chucked in a random timeline if something went wrong.

Black was the magic of death and decay. Used widely by those typical necromancers. Normally used to rip the living things' souls from their bodies and it could also be used to reanimate the dead with... black mana, and by placing their souls back in their bodies, albeit more crudely. And they would look horribly bad, and smelly. Great to insta-kill any living things within the vicinity of it anyway, aside from the user itself of course, but it had an inherent weakness: Unliving things such as mechanical constructs or artifacts won't be affected at the slightest by the black magic, or so I supposed.

And there was also red, the typical fire and flame magic. It mainly just used to burn things, no matter living things or not, obviously. And also occasionally to cast lightning and apparently earth spells too. Weird, since in the game that earth was also included in the red part of mana. A sort of telekinesis maybe? Didn't really matter.

'How about a simple telekinesis first? All unicorns on this world can naturally do this for the fuck's sake. Concentration...'

I closed my eyes, then I felt something pulled the golden gem that stuck on my hoof.

I opened my eyes again and found out that the gem was actually hovering in front of me, encased in a sort of hovering brown, glittery, light, things that had the same color with my coat, I supposed.

"Heh..." I just smirked again instead.

A thought struck me again this time.

'Is this just a colorless magic? This simple levitation thing doesn't really make a sense in a five-color spectrum of magic system anyway. Probably the horn's color is the one that influences it to have a sort of brown hue, the same thing would also seemingly apply to any other unicorn too.'

I shrugged.

I closed my eyes again to concentrate something about fire. Then I opened them.

I stretched my right hoof towards the trees that were approximately just a few hundreds of meters away from me, the gem was still hovering in front of me.

'Let it burn.'

A spark of flame went out from my hoof, it was actually a pretty small one as it launched itself off from my sudden burning hoof, but as it impacted the ground beneath the trees, you could even probably see the explosion very clearly from the castle which located at the side of a mountain that I glanced while I was enjoyed the scenery before, which that resembled like Canterlot, the capital city of the country where I was currently standing. That was probably really that city.

And of course I fell back due to the immensely shocking explosion.

"Shit."

A not so small portion of that forest was ablaze in that night's conflagration, just like a forest fire scene from a disaster news back in my home, that would also grow to eat away the rest of the forest and the grassland given enough time.

My eyes widen in shock, right hoof still burning.

So I quickly turned it off by rapidly shaking it. It didn't work.

"Come on, turn off." And the fire just vanished from my hoof.

I shook my head.

'I'm a dead man... stallion.'

Due to the obvious case that I was the one who burned away that forest, I woke up and trotted away with a pace when you ran away from a crazy, pink, psychopath, murderer towards the another castle that similar to a giant treehouse I also previously glanced before due to my position that was apparently located on the ground that was higher than that castle. The castle that located in a small village at the other side of that forest. Yup, you could guess what village it was, or was it a town? Nah, it didn't matter. The golden gem was still hovering above my head and slowly orbiting my horn in close circle without my awareness.