Pale wings against a dark sky
From a high tower
Twilight Sparkle, Imperial Magister and Princeps Scholaris Solaris, walked briskly down the street, her nose firmly ensconced in a book. Ponies parted before her like the tides parted for Nile Strider in the legends of old. Bakers scrambled out of the way, loaves and baskets teetering precariously in their haste. Dray-ponies and hauliers skidded to a halt regardless of their heavy wagons. A few brave foals trailed in her wake like ducklings on a river, but none of them dared reach out to touch the golden hem of her white robes.
Twilight Sparkle, of course, noticed none of this. She was reading A Musing on Magical Moths and their Mysterious Migrations by Dustwing Antennae, and she had finally reached the part that described the annual extinction event of the Lunar Lace-Winged Moth. Eyes huge behind her round spectacles, her lips mouthed the words, even as a taxi-carriage collided disastrously with a vegetable stall as it swerved out of her way.
“Once the mating dances are complete and the eggs are laid, the adult moths join as one great swarm and fly directly upwards. As the moon rises, the Lace-Wings fly toward—” A momentary pause as her hoof caught on a cobblestone, “—The great glowing orb. In one vast white cloud, they fly until they are exhausted, sometimes for up to six hours at a time.”
A colt galloping too fast after a ball galloped across her path, only to trip and go sprawling at her hooves. Taking in the sight of the white-robed wizard sweeping towards him, he cringed into himself and began to stammer out an apology —
“Please excuse me, Magister—”
But she simply stepped over him as though he was not there, her eyes flickering voraciously across the page, her voice unbroken.
“And then, one by one, they begin to die. The very strongest moths have been known to reach a height of a quarter-league above the ground before their strength gives out.” Twilight Sparkle paused, and as she finally read the sentence she had been searching the whole book to find — the last eighteen books, for that matter — a beautiful frisson of excitement tingled in her fur. “The reason for exact reason for this bizarre end to the Lunar Lace-Winged Moth’s ten-year lifecycle is not known.”
Finally, she looked up from her book, a broad smile spreading over her face. Bulldozing her way through the crowds thronging the marketplace as though they were mere ghosts, Twilight Sparkle bent her steps toward the palace and home. She had found her next research project.
~
It was difficult, Twilight mused, when she was once more safely alone in her tower, to be intelligent. It was especially difficult to be as especially intelligent as she was. Her towering intellect placed her as far above the general populace in her thinking as her actual tower did in height.
Twilight Sparkle, Princeps Scholaris Solaris, had graduated from elementary school at the age of four years old, from high school at the age of six, and from Canterlot University at the tender age of nine. Her cutie mark appeared shortly after her graduation, when she invented a spell to hatch fossilised dragon eggs. Having single-hoofedly turned the tides on the dragon extinction rate, it was judged necessary to harness this vast intellect for the good of the nation, and the Princess herself took an interest in the prodigy.
After three years as the Princess’ personal student, Twilight Sparkle had cured two different types of cancer of the blood, invented a form of two-way scrying ball that allowed the users to speak to each other from a distance of several miles, and completed three unfinished spells created by the ancient mage Starswirl the Bearded. At this point the Princess gently suggested that there was a limit even to what she could teach Twilight, and the twelve-year old filly was given an annual research grant in perpetuity and unleashed upon the best and brightest of Canterlot’s academics to tackle any question they cared to throw at her.
And that had been interesting, for a few years. Professors and doctors of every type had brought her the questions that had plagued their careers, and she had solved them. The variety had been fun.
But eventually, even the more obscure and difficult problems began to seem…familiar, somehow. It was all becoming a matter of rote. Receive a query by post. Meet with the relevant experts, inform herself, and read and read and read and read until she was an expert too. And then sit down with the problem, isolate herself with it, live it and breathe it and turn it over in her head and examine it from a thousand different angles — and then, in a flash of brilliance, the answer would come to her and it would be solved. The subject was different, every time. But the outcome was the same.
Twilight Sparkle could do anything, achieve anything, given enough time.
And it had somehow all become very passé.
So she had tried to freshen things up. Tried to shake up the formula. She had gone off-script, stopped accepting requests for her research projects and just…gone rogue. And that had been interesting too, for a year. She had delved into questions that had always niggled at her. The finer points of illusion magic, why exactly lightning contained so much thaumic energy.
She had fine-tuned the art of teleportation to reduce energy leakage and allow mages to travel further in fewer jumps. She had invented a spell to reduce or even eliminate premature hair loss in elderly stallions. She had solved every problem anypony cared to throw at her, and several that nopony else had thought of yet.
And now Twilight Sparkle was bored.
For the last three months she had been reduced to reading the most obscure books from the Princess’ library — the depths of her own long since having been plumbed — and answering whatever questions ages past had left unanswered.
Now even that was beginning to run dry. Oh, she was glad she had found the question of the lunar lace-wing moths. That would be an interesting few weeks. The extinction event would be coming up at the end of summer, just over a month away, so she would have plenty of time to study the pupae currently growing their wings. Finding the exact reason for their mass moonlit suicide would be a pleasant challenge. But however puzzling a question it was, it would be answered. They always were.
And she would be left behind, casting around in the darkness for something else to occupy her gigantic brain, the boredom almost a physical force, suffocating her until she could find something else — something new — a new question to answer.
It did not feel like a sustainable solution, but Twilight could not see another way. Learning was who she was. If she stopped…well, she might well die.
There was a research question that might well stump her. What should Twilight Sparkle do?
A hesitant knock at the door disturbed her melancholy, and she looked up sharply as a page hesitantly poked his nose into the room.
“Excuse me, Magister?”
“What is it — uh…Scootawoo?” That was a guess. All the pages who crept in and gathered up the dirty plates and mugs looked alike.
He coughed uncomfortably. “It’s Rumble, Magister. Scootaloo’s the orange one.”
“Right.” She was already turning back to the moths. Couldn’t he tell she had bigger things on her mind? She was going to need to get her hooves on some live specimens to study and keep in her room for a while. Perhaps the botanical gardens or the zoo might have some. And of course she mustn’t forget to rent out a hot air balloon for the night of the migration. Maybe better to keep one on retainer; it wasn’t certain to fall on a specific date…
“You’re wanted downstairs, Magister.”
Twilight glanced up absently, mildly surprised that he was still there. “Hmm?”
He shifted his weight from hoof to hoof. “You’re wanted downstairs.”
She barely heard him. “Good, good.”
The pageboy was beginning to pout. “Magister Sparkle, the Princess sent me up to remind you.”
Few things could permeate Twilight Sparkle’s brain while she was reading, but if anything could, it was the name of the pony who held the pursestrings to her research grant. “The Princess what?”
Rumble sighed heavily. “Princess Celestia asked me to tell you that Prince Blueblood’s engagement party is tonight. She wants you to come downstairs.” He paused meaningfully. “Now.”
“Blueblood’s getting married?” The news sounded familiar, but Twilight was still mildly surprised. “Who’d marry him?”
The Princess’ great grand-nephew was an insufferable bore, but Twilight didn’t necessarily mind that. Plenty of well-respected professors were deadly dull, and contemporary accounts said that Starswirl the Bearded was a conversationalist who could send people to sleep just by talking to them. No, being boring was not Blueblood’s greatest crime.
It was that he was stupid.
There was not much Twilight would not do for her erstwhile mentor, who not only paid out vast sums of gold for whatever Twilight’s project of the moment might be, but had also provided a willing ear to listen to hours and hours of Twilight’s wilder theories over the years.
Princess Celestia’s only great flaw, in Twilight’s eyes, was her inordinate fondness for her lump of a nephew.
The pageboy mumbled a name, in response to her question, but Twilight had stopped listening again. She sighed and brushed the dust off her robes. Time for an official appearance. She’d put in her thirty minutes of mandated courtier time, and then hopefully she’d get another couple of months to herself before it happened again.
~
Shuffling reluctantly into the ballroom, adjusting the collar of her white and gold robes, Twilight looked around at the heaving mass of ponies. Everyone was bedecked with their finest — rubies flashed and silk glistened, white teeth gleaming and hair piled into vast curlicued towers shining in the candlelight.
Twilight thanked her lucky stars that her magister’s robes were ceremonial as well as functional. Hopefully the tomato soup stain on the right leg from last week would be hidden if she kept her front legs close together. She really ought to ask the pages to clean it one of these days.
She scanned the crowd, hunting for the white form that would stand twice the height of anypony else in the room. The telltale waves of multicoloured hair caught her eye, and she zeroed in on the Princess.
“Twilight!” Princess Celestia looked up with genuine pleasure as Twilight approached. “I’m glad you could come. I was beginning to worry.”
“I’d never forget a night as important as this, Princess,” Twilight lied through her teeth.
The Princess hid a smile with her wing. “Of course not. Have you met my nephew’s fiancee, Twilight?”
Blueblood was flanking Celestia, and said something in his monotone voice — probably something about his cravat, or some other equally unbearable subject — but Twilight wasn’t looking at him. No, she wasn’t looking at him at all.
She was staring at the mare who stood beside him — a unicorn mare, impossibly lovely, with eyes bluer than the sky in summer and a mane of imperial purple, all curves and softness a shy, hopeful smile as she looked around at the ponies who had turned out in force to welcome her to court.
Twilight Sparkle looked at the mare, and the world around her fell away.
She gazed into the crystal-blue eyes of the most exquisitely beautiful pony she had ever seen, and blood pooled in her cheeks, burning hotter than her best spellfire ever had. She could feel her heart thudding in her chest hard enough to shake her ribcage. What…what was this?
The mare approached — what was her name? What was it? — and Twilight suddenly felt more out of her depth than she ever had, since her very first day at university, aged six and three-quarters.
“Magister Twilight Sparkle,” the heart-stopping mare said, and her fur was whiter than a glacier — whiter than a Lunar Lace-Winged Moth’s alabaster wings. “I’ve always wanted to meet you in person.”
Twilight’s heart stuttered at those words — heart-stopping, just like I hypothesised — and she wished she had paid more attention in those few cursory lessons on court etiquette. “M-my Lady, it’s a pleasure to meet you.”
But what’s her NAME? her mind screamed, and Twilight cursed her lack of attention to that wretched Scootawoo’s half-mumbled message. What use was an eidetic memory if it didn’t let her recall things even if they seemed unimportant at first?
The mare smiled, and Twilight looked at those shimmering pale hooves, almost as white as that soft, soft fur. She wished she had taken the time to buff her own dull-purple hooves more than once in the past six years…or, for that matter, to get some of the food stains out of her blasted white robe.
“I’m Rarity,” the mare said, and the sound of that name was sweeter than the hiss of a bunsen burner lighting up. “I am a lady, but not a Lady — not yet, at least.” She gave a little laugh, and Twilight hastily echoed it.
“Until…until the…” Stars, what was this function?”
“Until the wedding,” Rarity finished gently, every inch the Lady she denied being.
“Right,” Twilight said with relief. “Well, I’d be glad to show you around the palace, if you need someone to — to show you around.” It was a limp finish, and a limper offer — the palace would be dripping with servants and lackeys desperate for a chance to ingratiate themselves with the newest member of Canterlot’s lesser royalty.
“I’d like that. It will be good to have a…a friend here in court.” But her eyes lingered on Twilight’s as she said the word friend, and when she said it in that velvety voice Twilight couldn’t help but imagine with a delicious chill everything friendship with a creature as lovely as this might mean.
“I would be honoured to be your…friend.” She hesitated over the word, and to her shock, she saw pink tinge Rarity’s own cheeks.
“I would hate to detract from your studies,” Rarity said softly. “You’re famous for your diligence, you know.”
“For my prolificity,” Twilight corrected, a laugh bubbling up in her throat. “I’m anything but diligent. I never stick at anything longer than a few months.”
And just like that, the ice was broken. Rarity laughed too, and the sound was like tiny bells. “Well, I hope our friendship will be an exception.”
“It will.” Twilight made the promise immediately, instinctively. It was an impulse, ill-thought out — but as she saw the blush deepen under Rarity’s silky white fur, she thought it might be the wisest thing she’d ever said.
Friendship with Prince Blueblood’s fiancée — whatever friendship meant. Perhaps this was a research project worth truly committing to. Perhaps….perhaps this would be the challenge she had been looking for.
“Mademoiselle!” Somepony called to Rarity from the throng, and the mare smiled at Twilight and began to move away. Their conversation had already stretched beyond the limited time civility allowed, but it still felt like it was ending much too soon.
Twilight reached out a hoof to stall her, just for a moment. “I’ll see you soon, Lady Rarity.”
“Yes.” Rarity’s words could have been for anyone, but Twilight felt in that moment like that smile, those sapphire eyes, were for her alone. “That would be lovely.”
“I can show you my library if you like,” Twilight offered impulsively. Less than four people besides the servants had ever been admitted — one of those was the Princess and the rest were her own blood relations, but if ever anyone had earned the privilege it was this lovely stranger. “And we can get to know each other. Just the two of us.” No need to bring along Blueblood. No need at all.
The blush finally burst into bloom, two glorious red roses opening their petals outwards and upwards. Rarity dipped her head, hiding behind her long tresses, but it did nothing to conceal that beautiful flowering of the blood in her cheeks. “I…I will look forward to it, Magister Twilight.”
And then she was gone, with a final rustle of silk skirts, and Twilight was left staring after her, a small smile still lingering on her lips. Yes, the moths would have to wait. She had finally found a research project that was much more worth her time.
