Amulet

The Amulet had taught Blue many things since her father died. It had told her where she could find shelter from storms when they came, how to get water from the drifting clouds when she was thirsty, what she could and couldn’t eat when she was hungry.

When she had made her way out of the Everfree it had taught her how to disappear into the background, away from ponies. When the Guard had first come it had shown her how to hide, how to sink into the shadows until there was nothing left of her but a soft red glow around the Amulet that it assured her that no one else could see.

She was doing that now, hiding in the shadow of the caravan she had been following for a week. The caravan’s wagons circled a large fire that ponies sat around, laughing and eating stew from the simmering pot resting above the fire. Blue sat behind one of the larger wagons, closer than she would have dared during the day, listening to the hum of conversation and the crackling of the fire.

You cannot join them. They would not welcome you.

They seemed happy. They had warm food and soft beds inside the wagons. Blue had snuck into one once, curiosity overwhelming her fear and the Amulet’s warnings. It was like a bedroom, with a small desk fitted into the wagon opposite a bed. It looked comfortable. She had stayed a long time before sneaking back out.

They are not what they seem. Listen.

The red glow from the Amulet grew more intense, and the hum resolved into distinct conversations, some loud and some quiet. Blue could make out harsh whispers, arguments kept hidden under a blanket of cheerful noise. Parents quietly scolded children, spouses argued in hushed tones. A knot formed in Blue’s chest.

We will stay for now. They can hide us, but only so long as they stay traveling. We will leave eventually.

The red glow dimmed, and the conversations faded back into the hum. The Amulet was right. Blue didn’t know these ponies, and she couldn’t trust them.

Ponies slowly dispersed, leaving the crowd for their wagons until the last pony doused the fire and took her leave. Blue kept waiting until the lights within the wagons had been put out and the noise had subsided before she crept into the circle and scavenged for food.

A bowl was resting near the remains of the fire, a still steaming helping of stew inside. Blue froze. They didn’t normally waste food. Had somepony forgotten?

We have been discovered.

Blue’s ears flattened against her head. She frantically searched for anypony laying in wait to ambush her as she backed away from the bowl.

A door creaked open behind her. The Amulet flashed and Blue’s wings burst into action, beating furiously as they carried her into the sky.

Twilight rolled up the parchment and applied a wax seal, setting it aside to be sent to Luna later. She had requested Twilight record her dreams to help with her investigation, and Twilight had gladly obliged. She could remember them easily enough, much unlike her normal dreams. Though, now that she thought about it, she hadn’t had a ‘normal’ dream for a while.

With that dealt with, Twilight turned her attention to the mystery on her desk. After two solid weeks of probing, she had determined that it did indeed have multiple enchantments. And none of them made any sense.

Twilight couldn’t even chalk it up to chaos magic. Chaos magic didn’t act like this. Chaos magic was energetic and unstable, raw mana without any matrix tearing holes in reality. The Amulet was just the opposite, with layers and layers of matrices without anything to fuel them. Most magical jewelry relied on the users' mana to fuel it, but most magical jewelry only had two or three enchantments. The Amulet had thousands. If it tried to utilize the users' mana, it would drain them of every drop of magic in their system in an instant.

She had seen Trixie use it, and since Trixie wasn’t dead, the Amulet clearly didn’t work like that. Even if Trixie had godlike amounts of mana, if the Amulet had activated even half the enchantments Twilight had identified she would have killed everypony in a ten-mile radius. There had to be a system of choosing which spells would activate, but Twilight hadn’t found anything like that. She had instead found that the Amulet was deliberately designed to disallow the user from using any of them.

There was no access point for any of the spells. They were all missing the crucial connection that allowed a unicorn to pour mana into the matrix. The only way for the Amulet to work was for a unicorn to add that connection into the matrix of whatever spell they wanted to use, and Twilight wasn’t going to stick her horn into that until she was sure it wouldn’t blow up in her face.

Which meant identifying every enchantment in the Amulet.

I can show them to you.

And then there were the occasional pulses of mana running through it with no apparent source, and fading too quickly for Twilight to trace what it had done. She extinguished her horn, pulling out of the confusing framework of the Amulet. She rubbed the base of her horn with a hoof, warding away a headache.

A knock at the door gave Twilight a welcome excuse to abort any further attempts at deciphering the infernal jewelry. Twilight re-ignited her horn, ignoring the dull pain it brought, and pulled open the door.

Starlight Glimmer paced nervously in front of Twilight’s study. She ran through the conversation with Trixie, searching for inspiration for her upcoming… conversation? Apology, maybe? Apologizing would definitely be involved, but did that make the whole conversation an apology? Warning? Harmony, that sounded melodramatic.

Did she even need to do this? Twilight was an alicorn, so she was some kind of moral paragon, right? No, Nightmare Moon was an alicorn and so was King Sombra, maybe, sources were unclear with him, but being an alicorn didn’t make Twilight a good pony.

She was a good pony, of course, but so was Princess Luna. What if Starlight offended Twilight by talking to her about the Amulet and she decided to throw her in the dungeons? What if...

Wait.

Starlight concentrated, sweeping an identification spell across herself. Sure enough, there were bands of emotion magic encircling her, designed to amplify anxiety. Starlight huffed, dispelling the magic with a flash from her horn. No piece of junk amulet was going to trick Starlight Glimmer into mistrusting her friends.

With that settled, Starlight marched up to Twilight’s door and knocked firmly.

Starlight realized, as the door swung open, that she still had no idea what she was going to say.

“Hi, Starlight,” Twilight was surrounded by scattered notes, rubbing the base of her horn. “What do you need?”

Twilight’s normal organizational tendencies had apparently given way to the demands of her study of the Amulet. Books were scattered around in disorganized piles, burying half of the large desk occupying most of the room in an avalanche of parchment and bindings. Crumpled paper and spilled ink covered the other half desk, with the notes deemed acceptable stacked in loosely organised piles.

“Oh! Yes, well, it’s about the, uh, Amulet,” Starlight floundered for a moment, pulling together the half-formed threads of conversation she had discarded. “I may have neglected to mention a few details about it, not on purpose, just, I didn’t know for sure? Anyway, I was talking to Trixie, and the subject came up, and I found out Trixie had actually used the Amulet before! I mean, you knew that, of course, she told me how you got it off her, but that’s not really important right now because I think the Amulet is sentient and I found an amplification enchantment-”

“Starlight, breathe.” Twilight interrupted.

Starlight cut off, taking a few deep lungfuls of air before continuing at a calmer pace.

“While I was talking to Trixie, she confirmed a few of my suspicions about the Amulet. It was definitely messing with her emotions, and just earlier I found some remnants of an emotion amplification spell affecting me, probably from when I was holding it before I gave it to you.”

“Well, we already knew that it could use emotion magic. It’s worrying that the amplification spell lasted so long, though.” Twilight pulled a few notes from around her desk, wincing when her horn lit up.

“That’s not all. Trixie said it could talk. Apparently she had conversations with it. It’s sentient.” Starlight glanced at the Amulet, sitting on the desk beside an inkwell with a quill resting inside. The gem in the center glinted in the light.

“Are you sure? There’ve been some cases where a unicorn managed to get a spell to hold a basic conversation before.” Twilight scanned the notes she had gathered, grabbing the quill to make adjustments or annotations occasionally.

“Those only happened recently, and Codebreaker could only get the enchantment to respond with pre-determined statements.” Starlight pulled a few papers from a stack of notes she recognized to the left of the Amulet. “We’ve determined that the Amulet is at least four thousand years old. There’s no record of anyone attempting arithmancy that complicated until after Nightmare Moon’s banishment.”

Twilight looked back at the Amulet, and the central gem glinted again.

“Starlight, if it’s sentient then that just means I need to be careful.” Twilight said resolutely. “There’s a mountain of discoveries to be made with it still, and we can’t just throw that away.”

“I’m not saying we throw it away, but you don’t get sentient artifacts without some really dangerous aftereffects. I don’t think we should be running mana through it anymore.”

“That’s absurd, Starlight. Without a user, it can’t do anything. I’m not at any risk as long as I don’t wear it, and I wasn’t going to do that in the first place.” Twilight was starting to sound annoyed.

“What if it can do something? I never put it on and it still managed to cast an enchantment on me.”

“I’d notice if it tried to cast anything on me, Starlight. I know the risks, and I can handle them. I need to get back to this, okay? See you later.”

Starlight took the dismissal, closing the door behind her.

She should trust Twilight, right? That’s what friends did, trust each other. Some insurance wouldn’t hurt though, just in case.

Starlight trotted down the hall, cultivating a plan.

Luna touched down at the edge of the Everfree forest. She shook her wings a bit, sore after flying for so long. It had seemed improper to use her royal chariot for a personal curiosity.

She started into the dense foliage, walking until she was a way into the forest before coming to a stop. Luna charged her horn, fixing the parameters of what she wanted to find in her mind’s eye before letting the spell loose. An arrow of blue magic shot through the underbrush, leaving a glowing trail behind as it darted between trees towards its destination. A match, then.

Luna poked through the underbrush, following the arrow’s path until it came to a stop not far from where it had started. Lucky. The arrow floated midair in a small clearing, pointed towards a moss-covered tree. Luna poked at it with her hoof, and the false bark slid down rapidly, dropping into the floor with a solid thud.

Inside the tree was a dark, dusty room, holding only a toppled pedestal, empty rectangular case and the skeleton of a pegasus.

Luna examined the skeleton first. There weren’t any readily apparent signs of physical damage to the pegasus’s remains, which lined up with Twilight’s vision. This was what remained of Moody Blue, then. There was a faint magical signature still lingering on the bones, but it was faded enough that trying to identify what had been done to him would be fruitless.

The pedestal was mundane enough not to warrant further investigation. The case had an enchantment designed to suppress magic, but it had been shredded to the point where it was barely recognizable as such.

Luna fixated the tracking spell in her mind again, this time focusing on the faint magical signature the Amulet had left behind in the case. The arrow floating near the entrance spun around, refocused on it’s next target and started to fly towards it before it exploded into glimmering blue dust.

Luna paused, and tried again. The arrow re-formed, only to explode again the instant it started following the target’s trail.

Well, then. Luna charged the spell again, this time with a different target. The arrow formed and zipped back to point at the pedestal. No interference there. Another dissipated arrow confirmed that there would be no tracking the Amulet’s path with magic. Luna huffed.

There was nothing for it. Luna turned her attention back to the pegasus skeleton. A moment of concentration sent another arrow flitting through the sky, away from the Everfree. If she couldn’t find where Blue Sky had gone, she would find where she had come from.