My Life on a Cassette Tape

I ran through the streets, covered up once more. It was an unfortunate state of affairs that I had to leave the three mares after making sure I had sorted everything with the recording, but I had to get to the bottom of this and fast. I had felt... something. I had initially identified it as my own lust taking over, but that wasn't it. Not entirely at least. I had done something that involved random ponies who had never asked for it. I had been prodded, but I had taken the direction even farther than had been intended. Than I wanted.

Breaking free from the houses of Ponyville, I poured on the speed despite my burning lungs. I had to make it before something else happened. Before me the castle loomed up, casting odd shadows. No longer did it seem menacing, but a beacon of hope. The benefits of not trying to attack it.

I slammed through the doors, calling out as I tried to catch my breath, "Twilight!" I frantically looked around. The alicorn in question flew out into the halls. She swooped down and caught herself, landing on her feet in front of me in an impressive display. She looked over me, her expression expecting to find a massive gash across my face or chest or something.

"T-Twilight..." I managed, and then...

"I'll give you this one chance. Submit and I'll go easy on you." A voice, one blue with black hair, said in the distance. I swung around, the sluggish darkness around me moving like wet cement. I looked all over, but saw nothing. "You are incompetent. You could've saved her!" Something tugged at me, pulled at something beyond even my being.

"I'm taking what authority you never could use." I felt myself shooting through the space, though nothing seemed to move. "I'll end it, all of it. Nothing left to give hurt to anypony." The world suddenly shifted cold, biting at me with all of its ferocity. I tried to huddle in a ball, but the world held my limbs back, the sluggish space around me holding me fast.

"I didn't do this for me!" I felt another jerk, and fell through the cold into oblivion.

I slowly came to, blinking away the small amounts of crust that had formed at my eyes. I looked around, finding myself in the castle. I slowly sat up, looking around as I tried to gain my bearings fully. What had happened? I retraced my memory as best I could. There was the castle and then Twilight... and then... a voice? It sounded familiar... yet distant. I threw it from my mind, not because I felt it unimportant, but because that way lay madness.

Standing up, I tried to think where I might find Twilight in the expansive corridors of the castle. I had a general idea where her study was from where I believed I had woken up. A lot of the rooms in this place were hard to distinguish beyond judging the quantities of books in them. This one had a moderate level of books, which really wasn't much to go on on its own.

Fortunately for me, Twilight entered the room, seven books floating around her, one of them getting read while another was actively being written in. She was absorbed in her world as her reading material switched off multiple times while she continued to scribble away. Eventually she did look away from her books towards the couch I had been left on, lighting up when she saw I was on my feet.

"Crescendo, you're awake!" She floated her books neatly over to a table, walking over to me, craning her neck around to look over me as she approached. "You had me quite worried when you collapsed in the main hall, but you seemed physically fine to most of my scanning spells. Are you alright?"

"I..." My vocabulary failed me as I tried to piece together my thoughts. A few moments later I plopped back down in the couch, resting my head in my hands as I tried to figure myself out. "No... no something is very wrong." I admitted, not sure what to make of the world that I called my own. "I... I used my artifact... but this time it was... it didn't feel like I was using the artifact. It was almost like some other pony was using it through me." Twilight remained silent for a few moments before placing a hand on my back.

"It's alright, we'll work this out." She said in as close to a mothering tone as she could manage. I could tell she was doing her best to emulate what she thought Celestia would do - which was good since the genuine article might be sending me into banishment about now.

"Wait..." She stood up, moving away from me. "Wait, somepony else... somepony..." I looked up to her as she brought over a piece of paper, looking it over a few times before her eyes lit up. "THAT'S IT!" She shouted, grabbing the paper from her own magic with a wide smile across her features. She looked to me, her expression reading as profound happiness and concern all at once. "You need to follow me, now!" She darted off, leaving me behind before I could respond.

I followed her, running through the castle's many corridors. I realized we were moving to the lower levels, descending at a constant yet gradual pace. Floor by floor, going far deeper than I had realized the castle went. Eventually, she waited at a door, allowing me into a rather large room. All across the space were metallic bars that jutted out towards the center. At the very middle of the room, suspended in midair by no discernable means, was the notebook that Silver had used as his artifact.

Twilight closed the door behind us, an action which caused a network of arcane runes to trace across it before fading out of sight. I looked to the alicorn, she simply looked at the notebook, looking at it like she had spent a lot of time doing that in recent days. Considering the type of pony Twilight seemed to be, that was very likely.

"I've made some very interesting discoveries with this artifact." She began, moving around the room, following a circle that was traced into the floor. "It has a variety of enchantments and other intricate spellcraft woven into its very essence." She lit her horn, touching a hand to the glow, causing her fingers to emanate a small, yet perceptible glow. She extended her glowing digits towards the notebook, plucking at something invisible.

Suddenly the room came alive. The notebook flew open, its pages zipping past, blurred lines of script leaving before they had had a chance to be read. In an instant, the pages stopped and the room was filled with lavender and cyan lines. The lines crossed through the room, overlapping with each other in curves, straight lines, waveforms, and shapes that resembled cursive lettering that flowed on and on. All these lines, at one point or another, connected to a metal rod and the notebook. The room was filled with it, the immense structure of arcane drawings beyond my small understanding of thaumaturgical principles.

Twilight waved her still glowing hand through the air, and soon the space around the notebook was filled with rings of circling letters and symbols whose meaning was beyond me. I simply watched slack jawed as various concentric circle spun about like a glowing gyroscope, all centered about the notebook, whose surface glowed.

Bolts of magic crackled across its surface, occasionally jumping from the paper's surface to one of the rods with a menacing hiss. The entire effect gave the room the feel of static electricity stuck in honey and the smell of ozone with a slice of lemon. I looked to Twilight, hoping she'd catch onto the fact I was thoroughly lost.

"This is what we call an 'arcane matrix'." Twilight explained as she moved over to a machine, flipping a switch which sent out a small spool of paper rolling out with scribblings across its surface. "When an item is enchanted, the only way to tell exactly what has gone into it is one of these, though - depending on when it was enchanted - the particulars might be harder to suss out." She looked over the slowly elongating stream of paper.

"What... exactly does that mean for my problem?" I asked, watching another cyan bolt connect the book to a metal rod. She looked back to me, and then again to the book.

"I've spent a while trying to pry apart this artifact's arcane essence. Even a high intensity field has yielded only the barest minimal of information on it. I can confirm certain parts of it though." She turned off the machine, pulling the stretch of paper out, bringing it over to me. Unfurling it, I looked over it, finding a variety of data streams on it, from a waveform to a bar graph to a series of colored dots. Twilight helpfully gestured to one side of the paper, which was covered in typed arcane runes. I looked at her with an arched eyebrow.

"I know it makes little sense to you, but either way, this string of arcane symbols is a very interesting enchantment, one that I think might have something to bear on what you're talking about." She traced a finger along the length of the paper as she spoke. "This is all fairly odd hat enchantments - hard to find anypony who'd use something like this anymore - but this bit is recognizable as a 'restructuring protocol' of sorts.

"Most old artifacts had something along these lines. Essentially, if the artifact were to be broken apart without its arcane essence being disentangled, decompiled, and broken; the artifact would put itself back together after a while." She explained.

"Alright... so indestructible after a fashion, all well and good..."

"That's not all, though." Twilight cut back in. "This particular artifact actually has..." She pulled the roll of paper along, bringing me farther and farther down the line of text as it trailed up the long sheet, "two of those enchantments." She pointed out the segment of arcane runes that did in fact seem much the same to my untrained eye.

"Now, having dual restructuring enchantments isn't too out of the ordinary - it makes doubly sure that your artifact isn't going to be broken apart easily. It's basically like having a chain on your door as well as a deadbolt - or maybe just two deadbolts." She then ran her finger farther down the line. "The thing is that this second enchantment has a very distinct deviation, one that I've been having a very hard time placing.

"It isn't as if you can deviate too far from the normal restructuring enchantment. You start fiddling with the runes too much and you find yourself straying closer to a mending enchantment or a healing artifact after a while. But somehow this is neither of those, and yet is fundamentally a restructuring enchantment with some odd modification added on, which should mean it is one of those two spells.

"I've scoured book after book, and yet nothing has come up! I tried comparative analysis to homophonic rune sets, and yet I found nothing!" She then looked to me with an expression of equal parts excitement and deep rooted concern. "But then you... you might just have found it for me. No reading required!" Twilight's horn burst to life, and suddenly a flash filled the room.

Blinking away the spots, I saw her holding a book in her magic. Maybe there was some reading needed. She was flipping through the pages at a furious pace. I watched as she finally found her place and turned the book to face me. I looked over it, and then at the scroll of paper. Her magic highlighted a segment on each.

"You see, I've been trying to find something that matches the print of the rest of the artifact's distinct power. I focused on its ability to warp reality, to take advantage of the arcane energies within everything that is alive - and some things that aren't traditionally seen as alive. No string of symbols matched with what we have here." I blinked, looking at the pair of glowing symbols. "Except..."

"Except those runes weren't part of the reality warping..." I muttered, looking at the heading. 'Principles of the Hypothetical use of the Arcane for Resurrection by Means of Enchantment and Runes.' "It's... a resurrection enchantment?"

"Not exactly." Twilight admitted, pointing out various points on the line of symbols. The commonalities were numerous, but the differences weren't exactly few and far between if I was honest. "The restructuring enchantment and the hypothetical resurrection enchantment are very much born of the same root. Fortunately for us, resurrection via enchantment was never successfully executed.

"It was supposed to manage it by using a preservation spell in tandem with a thaum aggregation spell. In theory, after a few centuries at the normal background level of twelve Nyxls, you should have enough energy to cast the spell."

"You're throwing around a lot of terms that sound like they should mean a lot to me." I said blandly. Twilight blushed lightly before clearing her throat.

"A thaum is the fundamental, indivisible unit of magical energy. A Nyxl, though a tad archaic, is a unit of measurement equivalent to the flow of one thaum per second - the average energy used when a unicorn's horn glows without using a spell. The typical thaumatic flow through the world averages about twelve Nyxls." She explained before pointing back to the book.

"The enchantment was supposed to take in that flow passively, basically building a dam in one area so that more and more energy would be available for the enchantment to fire off its effect." She pointed at a diagram which showed what I could only assume was a tomb with what I guessed were the arcane batteries - or dams - that would be used.

"It was theorized by those who crafted the enchantment that it would take roughly four Apocs of arcane energy to bring life back to a corpse." I gave her a look. "Eh... the theoretical amount of energy it would take for Celestia to move the sun four degrees across the sky at a rate of one degree per second." That... that was likely a lot of energy.

"You're throwing a lot of 'hypotheticals' and 'theoreticals' in here, should I be concerned by those?" I asked, well and truly out of my depth.

"Well, it is particularly hard to get Celestia to demonstrate moving the sun at one degree per second just for science's sake - sort of how it is fairly hard to test an enchantment that is supposed to resurrect a pony after centuries of power aggregation within a reasonable time frame." Twilight pointed out. "We do have it on fairly good authority, though, that pumping four Apocs of energy into a corpse only gives you a very magical corpse. Perhaps a thrall, depending on if you applied it towards necromancy.

"Either way, that being the case, this enchantment string is fairly... well, it is not exactly standard. It is like the resurrection enchantment, but it is also very much not the resurrection enchantment." She looked me over, making sure I was following. Surprisingly I was still on the same page - at least I thought I was. Same chapter at least. Definitely the same book. I was likely in the same library as her.

"Looking over both of these enchantments with comparative analysis and based off what I know... I can come to some conclusions." She walked off with book and scroll, looking between both as she apparated a notepad to take notes.

"Our artifact here has ditched the aggregation mechanism, meaning its effect is either cast when sufficient power has been used on it or when certain other conditions are met." My eyes fell on the floating artifact, watching wheels of magical sigils float around it. Twilight's voice slowly faded into the background as I stared, as if by simply looking at it I'd unlock its mysteries. I could tell the Straight Record to make it so. I could also use it to fuck Twilight.

I closed my eyes and clenched my fist, taking deep breaths. I steadied myself, focusing on the sound of the thrumming magic that pulsed through the room in a cloud of citrus-lightning scent. I felt something. It was as if there was a small voice calling to me from the artifact. I spoke in tones I knew, but couldn't let myself recognize.

I was broken from my revelry by a tap on the shoulder. I flinched back, and saw Twilight, now standing at my other side, having walked all the way around the room, looking at me with deep concern across her features.

"You... you aren't alright." She stated. There was no question, it was a fact to her. I couldn't help but agree. "Cress... what... what kind of 'somepony' is using the artifact?" I thought on this for a second, trying to organize what thoughts or feelings I had on the force that felt so much like another will.

"Somepony... very horny I suppose. A pony that gets a high from control." I said simply. "Similar enough to me, yet... I guess a sort of exaggeration of many aspects." She nodded slowly, letting me continue. Unfortunately I had nothing else. Despite trying to focus on it, nothing more came to me.

"There... there's something else." I began. She motioned for me to continue, but I wasn't sure how to say the next part without sounding completely looney. "I... I'm not sure how to explain it, but... but I've been seeing things. Well, the same thing at different times." She again motioned for me to continue. She wasn't making this easy on me. "Eh... it's... well, I basically only get to see these... eyes. They're angry. I can feel their anger just hitting me like a blast of hot wind."

"Do you recognize the eyes?" She asked. I blinked at her, the question striking me as odd. I had expected her to pass it off as nothing, but somehow she was asking me clarifying questions as if I was saying reasonable things. "Sometimes... well, the arcane energy field doesn't exactly exist within time. It can act like it, convincingly so most of the time, but in reality it exists outside of time.

"At times, very rarely, the field can... interact in a very odd way with ponies. Many times it does so with ponies who are at the center of a lot of magical energy. Celestia and Luna have experienced it more than once in their lives, and I've had it happen at least once that I can confirm.

"Most ponies will call them visions. It isn't exactly the most accurate of descriptors, but it is functional. In the end, the arcane field can provide us brief glimpses or feelings about the future, both near and far. And, seeing as you carry some fairly high power artifacts on you like a wallet or phone, I can only imagine that you may have become an unintentional nexus of a great deal of arcane potentiality. It wouldn't surprise me if you're being subjected to these 'arcane premonitions'.

"Now, it isn't as if the premonitions are completely set in stone, but in the end, they usually do give a good indication of where things might head without any course corrections." I could only imagine she had been waiting for somepony to spring that lecture on, it felt a bit too well together. Then again maybe she just had an organized thought process.

"That all being said, do you happen to recognize the eyes?" She asked again. I sighed, and nodded. It wasn't hard to recognize them. I pulled back my black hair as I figured how to frame this.

"Yeah... yeah, I know who the eyes belong to." I looked Twilight dead in the eyes. "It's me."