NOV 12 Friday.

I move another piece on the board as Celestia calmly counters my move while still doing some paperwork on her desk.

I stare up at her but she just smirks a little without even turning, I let out a long sigh. "Five hundred and twenty-four to eight point five." I updated our score and started to reset the board. "You know, you can be pretty ruthless when you want to be, but I also think I'm getting used to this." I joke before making the first move of yet another game of chess.

She pauses at that. "I don't think I've been called that in a long time, but I can try harder if you like? It might make you good enough to demand my full attention." She jokes right back and I scrunch up my muzzle at the idea that beating her in chess could get harder. She giggles a bit, "That's what I thought."

I smile despite the teasing and dive headfirst into my thoughts while resetting the board. The past two weeks have been mostly relaxing if you don't count that one mare who is now on my shit list. I even got a pleasant surprise by having a meeting with Celestia earlier than I thought.

She's still going through her backlog of work but after some thought she decided to invite me anyway, with the caveat that she would have to work while we talk. It's not as relaxed or interesting as our normal meetings, which is probably why she schedules them in the first place, so she can actually focus on the meeting itself.

But it does give me time to think, not even about important things really. Recently I decided to start growing and familiarizing myself with fungi like I planned, and I started with Shiitake mushrooms because I was able to buy some at the market easily enough.

The Shiitake mainly feeds off of dead trees but can grow in most forests so it's easy to grow, in related news I found my hatred of mushrooms again. I never really liked eating them in my past life and I was so used to avoiding them that I never tried them in this life, so I did just that, I still hate them and would rather never eat them again.

On the upside mushrooms aren't that popular of an ingredient in Equestria, they have a more dangerous reputation, and to be fair there is a good reason for that. Unlike my old world where Humans would eat anything even remotely digestible this world's diets are more specific, and the vast majority of mushrooms are dangerous for Ponies.

Let's take Griffons as another example. Did you know that while Ponies and Griffons can both eat meat, the Griffons use several seasonings that are harmful to ponies? The same applies in the opposite direction, and this is also why every restaurant in Equestria requires menus to be very detailed about what every dish has inside it.

This applies to most species, but this world has long adapted to this. Back to the point though, my training in growing and breeding fungi has been a learning experience. First and foremost is keeping them contained, fungi have a tendency to spread spores everywhere and those spores can be hard to contain and separate from each other.

This is a pretty big problem when the fungi I'm working with can steal life magic, I do not want it spreading spores, so for now I'm trying to learn how to control that while growing them. I'm also thinking about a shield to help contain the spores, but that- "Hmm, what madness are you thinking about now?" My thoughts are interrupted by Celestia as she wins yet another game.

I smirk as an idea pops into my head. "Fungi breeding." I see her smile falter a tiny bit as she remembers the last time we talked about fungi. "I'm taking it very slowly though, and I make sure to be cautious. But that's all boring, whatever you are working on should prove more interesting, right?"

She smiles a little at my reassurances, but she also huffs a little at my question. "Well, sorry to disappoint you but that might be more interesting. I'm looking through a bill to modify the tax code for nobles, truly riveting." She says with thick sarcasm in her tone which gets a chuckle from me.

"Yup, you got me beat there. I'm also just going to guess that you're also trying to deal with loopholes that are most definitely accidents?" I move a piece while petting Philomena again as she rests in-between my front legs, while Entropy sleeps on my back acting like a mini ice pack.

She laughs at that and nods a bit. "By magic, you have no idea, the amount of times I've had to intervene in somethings like that is beyond count." I can hear the slight annoyance in her tone.

"That's why I just pay my taxes, it's not like I need even more bits. Why live lavishly when you can live happily? Or something like that."

She raises a brow in a silent question while signing a form. "What? I can't always have a perfect nugget of advice for the situation, I'm only a half-decent philosopher at best." I defend myself while trying to not lose another game so soon.

Her smile persists but it's become clear over the last hour that the conversation is not as active as normal, not that I mind, it's nice to just spend time with a friend. "I suppose so, but you do a lot better than most. And just between us, it's a breath of fresh air to have a rich pony just pay their taxes." She says while glancing over at me with her glasses covering her eyes.

A weak joke, or maybe that's not a joke, I actually can't tell with her sometimes. I pause for a moment while looking down at the board, "Anything I can do to help?" I ask a little suddenly, she looks over at me for the first time in a while looking a little surprised. "I've gotten decent at paperwork, and." I move another piece losing the game. "I think I'm done with chess for now."

She smiles wider and actually seems to take me up on the offer. "Well, I wouldn't mind somepony making sure I didn't miss anything." We both know she's much better at this than me, but I am bored so why not? I nod and she moves a few documents over to me. "Look at you, doing paperwork like a noble already, makes me think." She teases.

I roll my eyes before looking at the document, a tax exemption proposal, it's seems complicated but after several months of dealing with paperwork I can mostly understand it. "If you ever make me a noble I'm moving into the Everfree, permanently." I threaten, but that does nothing to her and I just start reading through the document.

We both lapse into silence, it's a calm thing and I find myself simply enjoying helping a friend for the day. After several minutes I finish the document and pass it back only to be given another. I take a moment to notice that Celestia keeps the paperwork very organized.

I smile again. "Have I ever complained to you about how unorganized Daisy truly is?" She shakes her head a little with a knowing look. "Great! So, I spent a WEEK organizing things, before that she literally just remembered where everything was, somehow." I take the chance to vent the little remaining frustration from that week.

She looks amused and lets me keep going. "Although, I will admit it's a little impressive. She truly did remember where every single thing was." As I'm talking about Daisy a thought strikes me. "Huh, right." She raises a brow at my face of realization. "I don't think I mentioned that I told Daisy I'm Veil Winter did I?" I honestly never really thought about telling Celestia as it makes little difference if I did, but I'm sure as hell taking this opportunity to mess with her.

She abruptly stops at that and looks over at me both confused and shocked. "What?" I just start laughing as I rarely see her this baffled. She narrows her eyes a moment later and watches me laugh far more than I should have, the past few weeks have been gloomy so a good laugh is nice.

She huffs and looks amused before signing. "If you're going to try and shock me, at least have the decency of bringing in a camera for some pictures." She smiles and seems to take it as a joke before responding in kind.

I recover after a moment and smile widely. "Fine, I am serious though, I did tell her." I drop my tone and make it clear that I am serious.

She looks at me again before realizing that I am in fact serious. "WHAT?" Her tone is now pure confusion as my laughter starts up again. I really need to start being a little more chaotic, it's so much fun.

time skip

I place another pot in my apartment as I make sure everything is here. I don't often get things shipped to my apartment, but I would rather not lug several dozen clay plant pots around the snowy city. As for why I need so many pots? Well, I want to contain fungi and wooden pots aren't the best for that.

Most fungi eat away at wood and while I could exert some extra control over the fungi while growing them to prevent that, but it would use more of my magic. So instead I got myself some clay pots, cheap, easy to buy in mass, and the fungi won't eat them saving me both magic and time.

Forty clay pots may not sound that heavy, but you'd be wrong, and I had to lug them up a few flights of stairs. I did remember I can lighten things, around halfway up, but none of that really matters, I have them in my apartment now. I just stack everything into my workroom for now and decide to work on something new.

I've finally found the rune used to add frost into my daggers attacks, and it also had some concerning implications but I'll get to that. The runic meaning for it is Imbue, about what I honestly expected. The runic context was a little hard to find, but I was able to find all of it.

I found both in an old journal from some researchers. Now, the rune works by adding another rune with some type of element and it lets you transfer that element into attacks. I already guessed this, but the runic context shows some light on the limits of this rune.

It can only be used with basic elements, ice, fire, air, water, that sort of thing. It has some connection to nature in the runes context so more complex elements won't work. On top of that the rune is not the best, it has a decent quality but nothing really exceptional.

The main limit is the fact that the rune was made for enchanting weapons, it probably won't work well in spells at all or if it's enchanted into anything that's not a weapon of some form it will most likely lose most of its effect. The rune is not as flexible as I'd like, but it's still useful and it gives me a few ideas.

The effect of the rune is also variable from what I learned. Let's take ice as an example, if I used a lot of magic to power the spell with this rune it would create ice shards and freeze a target, but if it's weak it would only really cool something down a bit. But this is just what I found in that journal so I'll need to test it myself, but I don't see much of a reason why they would lie.

Beyond that there is something else odd about it, it is one of the runes I have on my cutie mark. It's been more than a year since I even really thought about this, and after going through my runic library I found another rune that matched the ones on my cutie mark.

A total of four runes are now known, out of the fourteen in my cutie mark. In the order of discovery they go, Water, Wind, Imbue, and Earth. This discovery has once again sparked my curiosity about my cutie mark and what this could mean, I still don't have any answers though as it makes no sense to me.

The only thing I can say for certain is that all these runes are old, I don't have ages for all of them but the newest one is over eleven hundred years old as best I can tell. Runes are heavily reliant on good information keeping to remain useful, so out of all the runes made, only a fraction even last beyond a few centuries, let alone a millennium.

All these runes are old, they are also all in dialects that are dead now. Like I said I have no solid ideas about any of this, but I'm starting to think something higher is involved. I came to this world through unknown means, maybe reincarnation is just normal but that's not relevant right now.

Whether it's fate or Harmony, or something else altogether, something seems to be involved here. The simple fact that the runes on my cutie mark are seemingly still around despite how old they all are shows this is not random. So many old runes survived for thousands of years only to appear here, why?

It brings some disturbing ideas to mind. If I was placed here and this was all planned, then does that mean everything I have done is predestined? If that's true then fighting Fate seems like a fool's dream and I've just been dancing in something's palm while never knowing.

That's the thing though, I won't let this possibility stop me. I still don't know for sure if Fate can be changed, but I think it can, and I refuse to give up on that small hope. So once again I will do the only thing I really can do in this situation, my damned best despite all the troubles I will inevitably encounter.

If Fate has a problem with that Fate can go fuck itself, but enough about my internal problems and my tempting fate. The Imbue rune is interesting and something I immediately want to test, specifically how it works with other elements beyond ice, I also want to test how the material affects it.

I gathered a few things onto my desk, two seeds, two pots filled with soil, and my runic library. I want to start with something simple and plant both seeds to grow two wooden daggers, one from Iron Oak wood and another from Fire Blossom wood. Both don't have much magical capacity but they should be able to hold an enchantment.

My skill in life magic has never stopped growing and I've made sure to practice my skill in growing things in specific ways. At this point I'm able to grow identical daggers that look like they were skillfully carved, it's not perfect and plants with more magic are more difficult but I can now carve without tools. I also can do the same detailed work while decomposing material.

Back to my little experiment though. I detach both wooden daggers and place them on my desk before moving the pots, now I need a rune and a basic spell. I have the spell for the Frost dagger so I just modify that and dumb it down to be much weaker, I don't want to overload the materials I'm using.

The effect will be basically nothing, anything I hit will probably get a little warm at best. I move a ruby over to me and quickly enchant it to hold and gather magic before letting it quickly charge from the Iron gem. It takes me around half an hour to finish the spell and enchant the knives before linking them to the ruby.

I don't have a perfect test subject, so a small piece of Maple wood will have to do. I set the piece of wood down and activate the enchantment, something I did not take into account is how the Frost dagger protects the wielder. So when I pick up the handle of the Iron Oak dagger I feel a slight warmth spread into my hoof very slowly.

I drop the thing instantly, staring at it wide-eyed, it takes my mind a few seconds to put it together, and after checking I confirm where I went wrong. I may have been a little hasty it seems, part of the original spell on the Frost dagger was not just to protect against damaging the weapon, but also the pony wielding it.

A small fuck up on my part, and something I'll need to keep an eye on, best not to get arrogant and really fuck up. I make a mental note of that but this gives me another idea, this could have potential for some security measures. If I can make the effect ignore me while burning others that would be pretty nice.

Also new rule, never touch an untested invention with my hooves. I made some more notes about this idea in my bracelet before picking up the Iron Oak knife with my field this time. I smack the small hunk of wood and notice that it heats up a slight amount, but like I thought the effect is very weak, thankfully.

Next, I tested the Fire Blossom knife, and the effect is stronger, not by much but it does leave very slight char marks on the wood. It's commonly known that some materials related to a type of magic can improve an enchantment held within it, something that doesn't normally need testing.

But, I tested it anyway because I wasn't sure if Fire Blossom wood would have this effect, and I might, maybe, perhaps, want to mess around with knives and magic. I tested both knives several times but I didn't touch either of them again, one scare was more than enough.

After I'm done I decompose everything I can and disenchant the gem before putting everything away. Once It's all cleaned up I take a few more notes on ideas and possible complications before leaving my workroom to eat a late lunch with my gremlin of a feathery friend.

Author's Note

Thanks for reading. :}
Current year is 994

I decided to add something more relaxed before Shade's meeting with Twilight.

So, we're technically a few hundred words short, but 500k words. I'm just speechless, falf a fucking million?!!!

Sadly this seems to have snuck up on me and I have nothing planed. So, next chapter I'll be giving you an updated layout of Gaia's Eden, and I'm just going to throw in a Q@A

If you have a question feel free to ask away, no pressure though. Either way I hope you enjoyed this.