Act 1, Chapter 18 - Dark Discoveries

Twilight stared at the open letter on her - Luna's - desk in the great suite that was her - Luna's - room. It was the latest letter from Shining Armor, and she didn't know if she wanted to open it.

Thinking of her brother made Twilight's heart ache. She felt childish, but he had left her alone. He had promised he would be there for her, and now he was on another continent fighting in a war that Cadance started. Twilight knew that Cadance must have had a good reason, and her brother was fighting for Equestria, but the logic didn't make her miss him any less.

She looked to the great windows of the main room of her home, eyes searching... On a distant hill across the city she could barely make out her parent's home, picking out the familiar lights against the night sky. The dining room was lit up, meaning her parent's schedule let them eat together tonight. Closing her eyes, she let herself slowly draw up old smells and sensations, perfectly preserved in her mind; The taste of mom's cooking, the smell of roast apples, dad burning potatoes on the grill, the clatter of silverware. The sound of her parent's voices, who she hadn't spoken to in more than a month. Her brother hugging her through nightmare-filled nights on his weekends, petting her mane, bringing her books. Tears pricked at the edge of her eyes, mind threatening to pull into the memories of those nightmares with no one to protect her from them.

'Call her, Twilight Sparkle,' The voice from her dream came unbidden again, and Twilight shuddered. She turned her eyes back to the unopened letter.

It was in a manilla envelope, stamped in bold letters was; 'HP-RPC-NEP-R:A Twi-Spa.' High Priority, Royal Palace Canterlot, Non-Essential Personal, Receiver: Apprentice Twilight Sparkle. The Palace received mail from the Pantheran front faster than anywhere else in Equestria, except Las Pegasus due to its proximity and size. This would have been packed in with other personal letters bound for the palace, always the first unloaded and placed in priority positions - barring an Essential letter of some kind that couldn't be teleported. This letter would have travelled seven-thousand miles over the course of only a week or so, along with the three others on her shelf.

Twilight took a breath, focusing on the letter again. She felt tears prick at her eyes, knowing how mean she was being to her brother. After all he did for her. What would Celestia say? Twilight didn't know, but she could imagine the disappointment in her wise eyes. Is her apprentice unwilling to open a simple letter? Then she would finally realize that Twilight was a worthless -

Twilight forced herself to stop, trying to halt her thought process, pressing her hooves against the desk until she could feel her joints aching. She took a large breath.

One. Two. Three.

An ache began to rise in her chest, she could feel her heart thudding. Twilight let the sensation stretch, familiar panic gripping her lungs until her mind grew clear. Her chest gave an involuntary heave, but she forced down the urge to breathe.

Celestia would not abandon her. She had told her many, many times. Twilight knew she just needed to stop being a dumb little filly, she shouldn't need gratification. She should be thankful for everything she has.

Her lungs burned.

Twilight knew she needed to open her brother's letters. She loved him. She was failing him by not opening them, with all he did for her. She wasn't living up to the expectations set by Celestia, by her parents, or by herself.

The urge to breath was growing uncontrollable, but she managed her countdown.

Three. Two. One.

Her breath came heavy as she nodded to herself, she opened the letter.

'Sister Sirius,' It opened. She almost frowned, what a dumb way to address it...

'I told you in my last letter that we arrived in Pan'tho Minx, and it's quite a sight. We've spent a few days in the naval depot, waiting for passage to the front. It hasn't been all that exciting, really - doubly so because we're not allowed out to wander the city, Sergeant Basalt says it might be a hazard, but I think he secretly wants to go exploring as well.

Still, I managed to ask around with a few of the legionnaires who have gone into the city and they say it's something else. In the spirit of your interests, I inquired after a Library in the city, or a book store, and apparenttly there are none in the city except for the King's! Sorry to disappoint, but anti-intellegencia edicts of the King mean I can't send you back any local novels, but I'll keep an eye out!'

By now, Twilight couldn't resist the soft smile on her face, reading her brother's uniform writing, knowing he was thinking of her. As much as a city without a library sounded like a travesty against nature, the idea of Shining combing through huts for a few books made her want to laugh. She felt tears prick at the edge of her eyes, a sudden ache in her chest.

Lowering her head slightly, Twilight kept reading, and despite her melancholy, learning about her brother's long, boring stay in the port made her smile.

Twilight wished he were here.

After finishing the letter, Twilight penned her own reply, being sure to include every detail. When she was done, she bound the small stack of a few dozen papers together and retrieved her own manilla envelope, sliding them inside and sealing it, marking out who was retrieving it and writing out the proper code on the front for the mailponies. When she had finished she levitated it onto a circular table near the door, sure the servants would grab and send it to the right place when they came to clean.

She slid from the extremely oversized - but comfortable - chair situated at the desk and headed around the large, circular room until she arrived at the sets of tools left by Luna a thousand years ago. Twilight hadn't dared touch them during her time here, but every time her eyes passed that corner of the room, she felt a little drawn. A brief foray into a carpentry book had revealed the basic secrets of carving, and ever since she had an itch to try, at the least.

The work area had several large tables, each seeming to have their own purpose and domain. There was the obvious woodcarver's tables, an assortment of knives, corks, drills, fine brushes, and sanding equipment were all arrayed - perfectly cleaned, all made of glimmering white metal, almost like the shine of stars. Twilight had no idea what the material was, but it fascinated her with its eerie, soft glow in the nighttime - only responding when the stars were showing. As far as she could tell, they weren't enchanted, yet their edges remained sharp after all this time, blades unmarred.

The others all had other purposes. Hammers and even an axe, some clamps and grips, others had large canvas sheets of paper on an angular standing desk - although there were no designs that had been left, Twilight had already checked. There was a spinner for large chunks of wood as well, and some sort of small blast furnace that had not been initially visible. For glass, maybe?

An otter drawn in magic on the walls danced by, seeming happier than Twilight had ever seen it - not that such a design had actual intelligence. Was it made to react with happiness when you went to these tables? In any case, it did bring a smile to her face. Now... To find the right kind of knife.

Putting her hooves on the table and peering at its top, she carefully judged the set of seven blades. Each were small, some were curved sideways or on their hilts, others had strange, long serrated edges. One was almost conspicuously normal looking for a knife, its blade gleaming in the light of the stars. Nodding to herself, Twilight grasped the knife in her magic and drew it closer. She was surprised to see and feel a sudden rising aura from the blade, glowing with soft grey light as hidden spells activated, lightly feeling and sensing her grip. Then, it vanished.

There was a loud wooden click that startled Twilight enough for her to drop the knife, the blade falling point down - sinking an inch into the stone below her, a strange whistle following it in the air as it fell. The otter danced on the wall, chasing its own tail excitedly.

Twilight had frozen, breathing a little faster, she glanced around nervously, immediately spotting the section of wall that had slid slightly open, a seamless hinge along a section of stonework letting it just... swing open.

She stared, amazed, glancing down at the knife - embedded a few inches from her rear hooves. She discovered a secret passage! Excitement welled up in her chest. Anything could be in there... Lost secrets a thousand years old. Ancient experiments. Luna's advanced magical tomes - which had been conspicuously absent from the rest of the books here. Anything.... Giddy, Twilight pulled the knife from the stone with her magic, surprised to feel it slide like butter from its incision.

With the knife tight in her magical grip, she began to inch for the section of wall, tall enough for Celestia to go through with no issue, and wide enough for two ponies. She tried to even her excited breathing as she neared, listening for any odd noises on the other side.

There were long seconds of complete silence, the happy otter continuing to dance along the walls, a sword from the wall next to the desk now beginning to give chase.

Once she was sure she didn't hear anything, Twilight slowly pulled the section of wall open further, peering inside, her hoovesteps echoing through an empty stone room.

There were no lights, but Twilight could see clear as daytime. A small study lay before her, undecorated except for a softly smiling portrait of Celestia, a light of mischief and desire in her bright eyes. Several walls had been converted into solid bookshelves of stone, filled with a vast collection of blank books, all gathered by uniform spine colors. Blue was the most prominent, then red, then green, and finally a splattering of every other colour she could think of. Everything had a soft glow, the weavings of magic around the shelves one of preservation, the walls and floor were spelled against dust, the spell leaving an odd almost antiseptic smell in the air. There was a solid wooden door at the far end of the room with no handle.

In the corner of the room was another desk, this one facing the wall. Twilight gulped, noticing immediately the half-finished works strewn across its surface. Stacks of parchment and drawing paper were left haphazardly across its surface, organized in a way that only the mind who put them there could know. There were a few figurines on the desk, but they didn't look to be for decoration - they were miniatures of... Legion uniforms? Made of wood and metal, painted in different colours, arrayed next to each other. There was a thick manuscript at a corner of the desk, a cup sat atop it - thankfully not filled with thousand-year rot, instead it was clean.

The cup drew Twilight's attention. It was ceramic and metal, solid and graceful. On the side was a single word; 'Moonbutt.' Moonbutt? Twilight blushed, immediately realizing what it was referring to. A gift from Celestia? It would make sense, given what she knew about their... their relationship, the thought of which made her blush deepen further.

Trying to push those thoughts from her mind, she shuffled closer to the desk, hearing a wooden click as the door slid shut behind her. She glanced back, feeling her muscles tense. She waited for something to happen, anything, but nothing came out to attack her, no hidden defensive spells flew out. Nothing.

She made it to the desk, clambering onto its solid wooden chair - which was far softer and more comfortable than wood had any right to be, but Twilight had grown used to that around Luna's former bedroom. It seemed Luna enjoyed resting her... her Moonbutt on comfortable chairs. Twilight smiled to herself, vowing never to repeat that joke out loud as she began to take in the desk's surface.

Raising the top paper revealed drawings of a breastplate in almost life-like detail, little notes scribbled around, math... Twilight found it hard to read the cursive Old Equestrian, but she knew math. Luna had been calculating angles and material strength, how much the designed breastplate would hold up against what seemed to be crossbow bolts and high-impact forces. She was surprised by the detail of the notes, the sight adjustments that were obsessed over through the next several pages, all for a few percentage points of improved protection. An entire new spell was layered into an old groove, the scribbled notes cursing their own writer for the flaw that had... cost many their lives.

Twilight realized what this was, and good humour left her. These were old designs for new Legion armour, it looked more... angular than the legion armour of today. This stack of papers was almost entirely dedicated to drawing out plans, enchantments, armour angles, and ensuring it was all scaleable. Twilight could decipher several of the enchantments, and understand their uses. Heightened hardness for some, others made the air thicker around the wearer, softening impacts by 'desperately needed degrees' the notes said. There was even a matched set of spells for the helmet and eye holes, making other helmets marked with the spell green if they also had the same enchantment.

Modern Legion armour was good, Twilight knew, but it didn't have half of these spells woven into them.

Flipping through more of that stack revealed designs for every occasion of Legion deployment, Twilight thought. Each had variants for earth ponies, pegasi, unicorns, and thestrals. Mountain Armor with spells that would detect if you were falling and make a cone of hard air facing toward the impact to break your fall, and spells around hooves to help avoid breaks, sprains, and slips. Jungle Armor with heat control and anti-bug wards, combined with a relatively simple temperature spell that would detect if the wearer was running a fever, and display a red strip across their helmet. Armour meant for deployment against the Zebras, specially spelled and prepared, replacing many of its hardening spells with guardians against heat, a filter spell around the helmet to keep out dust and chemicals, sections of the padding in the armour would dissolve into burn salve and foam in response to an alchemical explosion, which zebras apparently favoured.

These were not the sort of spells that were on modern Legion armour at all, instead most followed a similar pattern of enchantments to older versions, which were highly resistant to physical forces. This would have been on the bleeding edge of enchantment innovation at the time and was still advanced today - although there were modern and improved versions of several of these spells.

It was a labour of love, Twilight could tell that much. Months, years, of effort had been poured into these initial prototype designs, at least according to the dates on the papers. The most recent was dated to only weeks before Luna's banishment.

It was hard to tear her eyes off of that stack to move to another part of the desk, finding only more wonders awaiting her.

In one corner were of the C-shaped desk was a set of papers that seemed to be sketches of weapons, most utilitarian and function with only the most minimal decoration, while others were more ostentatious. In another section was a thinner stack of parchment filled with lines of verse and poetry, the uppermost one being... quite grim. Writing of whispers in the darkness, the Sun's own gaze hiding the horrors of the shadows from its sight, of a mighty fortress falling to sickness and betrayal from within.

Twilight looked away from the poetry after reading half of the poem, unable to bear it. She didn't delve further into that stack.

Twilight levitated a stack of sketches over, the one on top being of a familiar cottage - from the painting in Celestia's room, depicting a peaceful, serene pair of ponies relaxing next to a river under the shade of a peach tree, reading a book together. She flipped to the next, finding an ink drawing of a large castle, spawling and monstrous is size and scope, a city stretching around its great curtain walls, ponies made up of a few lines like ants in the streets. It looked almost drawn absent-mindedly, while in thought.

She flipped to the next sketch and immediately her cheeks grew hot again. It was a coloured drawing of Celestia. Many of them, actually, all across one parchment - of a specific part of Celestia; Her flank. From different angles, with and without tail, all in almost excruciating detail. Long legs, her rear muscled, large, pert and tight. Her Sun cutie mark stretched over every individual muscle, defining them. The drawings somehow made it even look as soft enough that she should be able to touch the page and feel fur. And what was between those legs... She swallowed thickly. Twilight stared for longer than she would ever admit, feeling guilt gnaw at her. She knew she shouldn't, it was bad for fillies to look at other fillies, but she was alone with no one to catch her in a room no one else knew about, with no teacher to whisper it in her ear. She levitated the page away from the others and resolved to keep it, putting the rest of the drawings back quickly, feeling the odd sense that she had been caught even with no one else in the room.

With her new freakishness hidden, she turned to other parts of the desk to distract from her own disgust with herself. In the next section were more designs, some for gem cuts, others for statues, and one a design sketch of a large building's facade. In another section, there were a collection of ritual circles drawn to paper, their uses so arcane that Twilight could only guess their most basic functions.

It took some time, but eventually Twilight exhausted what the desk had to offer for her. Her attention now went to the bookshelf, full of its rainbow of books, colour-coded and organized, each pristine.

She started at the top left, and levitated down a blue tome, opening it on the desk. To her surprise, it was a journal. Twilight hesitated... She wanted to read it, to know more. But would it be right? She was already snooping everywhere else, but these would be Luna's deep, personal thoughts. She struggled for long, long seconds before forcing herself to close the book. She'd ask Celestia about it when she woke up.

Twilight put the blue book back on the shelf and withdrew a red one, opening its first few pages to check its contents. She was much more pleasantly surprised with this one. It seemed to be a manuscript, half-finished and abandoned. This one was a play, depicting ancient earth pony kings in a great musical of drama, murder, and intrigue. She read a good bit of it before remembering to check the others. The next wasn't a play at all, instead it was a partially lain out book on the basics of Illusion Magic, the margins and layouts full of little notes and reminders about the content. The bits that were there were deeply insightful, in spite of the missing sections.

She quickly deduced the red works were cancelled, shelved indefinitely or for completion at a later date. The others were finished, ready tomes of all stripes. There were some magical instruction books that had almost had her salivating, not that she would - it might damage them. Finding new magical knowledge was an irrestistible urge to Twilight Sparkle, it scratched itches she knew she had, it completed her. Never was she more alive than when casting complicated magic, or learning it. This was a treasure trove, a veritable dragon's hoard of knowledge, both magical and otherwise.

Then, she checked the first of the few black tomes. Flipping open the first page revealed a simple, elegantly written title; 'Studies Into Necromancy.'

Twilight felt her heart speed up a bit. Necromancy? She checked the next black tome; 'Investigations of Blood Magic.' The next; 'Delving Into Darkness; Sombra's Studies.' While melodramatically named, she shivered at the potential contents of these tomes, there were only half a dozen or so, but these three were already grim enough, although she had no idea who this 'Sombra' was.

Twilight hesitated again, staring at the first page of the book on Necromancy. She ached for it. Her talent yearned to read these books. Celestia and her had not spoken of Dark Magic before now, although she had implied that it was going to come up in their studies at one point. She... She was just getting a head start, right? Twilight wouldn't actually perform any of the magic in here, of course.

Twilight flipped to the next page, surprised to note that the forward was written in Celestia's hoofwriting, and seemed to be some sort of list of sites and sources. A long compilation of tomes, some with real titles and others with just numbers, and a few locations - none of which Twilight recognized. Afterwards, the forward goes on briefly; 'Compiled, considered including Crystal Castle, but no relevant tomes were recovered before the disappearance.'

There were no scribblings in the margins, and as Twilight moved to the next page and began to scan down the first, elementary facts of Necromancy that were not intended as an instruction manual of any sort. It was more an effort by the sisters to compile their knowledge together, incredibly extensive as it was, and ensure they had no gaps and were ready for future users of the banned art.

Twilight did not leave the little hidden room until well into the morning.

Author's Note

So a very Twilight-Centric chapter, but we were overdue for one I think. This one is a bit slower, with no dialogue really. I hope it is still entertaining, and that all of you enjoyed!

As an explanation to the No Dialogue, I was originally going to put a scene after this one, but I didn't think it fit with the chapter. It will start the next one instead.