Ponies of Fayra — Legend of Harmony

Reaching land after having successfully navigated through the Everfog, Cozy landed at a beach to rest her wings for a while, well, she contemplated the strangest things she had noted in the fog.

Having the compass to guide her, she was able to see how space was warped, and that within the Everfog what she had assumed was spatial displacement magic was actually warped space. Which is why she hadn’t been able to analyze it before. There simply wasn’t any spell or enchantment to analyze. The magic of the fog itself was entirely illusionary.

As Cozy trotted along the beach, thinking, she came to a glow berry cave that had quite obviously had an earth pony, a pegasus, and a bunny camping at it recently. Studying the tracks on the ground, she could deduce that either they had spent quite a lot of time camping in the cave or they had been exceedingly rambunctious.

Making her way into the glow berry cave, she noted that they had also harvested a rather substantial amount of glow berries.

Taking a nibble of one of the glow berries, Cozy made a disgusted face. “This magic is too wild, but it’s safe to eat, and if I snack on these, I’ll keep mine for longer.”

Once done filling up on what she considered to be subpar glow berries, Cozy followed the trail of prints rather than her compass, as the deep prints Cedar left were hard to miss.

Trotting and gliding through the forest, Cozy was reminded of the last time she was in the Everglow. She had been trying to live amongst the unicorns, but their insufferable pursuit of magic had made it immensely annoying, especially their tenancy to dust almost everything with magic identification powder.A substance that she found not only annoying but also saw it as a useless crutch that prevented its users from actually learning the fundamental skills of identifying magic themselves.

When Cozy had first learned of unicorns, she thought their interest in magic could make them exciting to live around as she had always enjoyed studying magic herself. However, it didn’t take long for her to realize that unicorns were too obsessed with easy answers and more brawn than intellect. Some of their janky shortcuts had proven amusing at first, but their lack of true understanding ultimately made them quite boring.

By the time she had left the unicorns to live amongst earth ponies, she had decided that calling unicorns students of magic would be an insult to her own scholastic pursuits in the field. Though even worse than the brutish sub-species of unicorns which had completely engulfed the zebras that had been the dominant Everglow type of pony before merging with the unicorns, was the pure-blood unicorns, who were nothing more than zealots.

They had lost all understanding of true magic and devoted themselves to their so-called Goddess of harmony. Which laughably promised to give only its faithful followers grand magic upon its return. Cozy wasn’t one to believe in deities of any sort, good or evil, but if she had to pick a side, she would go with the common unicorns’ belief that the so-called Goddess was actually a demonic spirit of disharmony.

Coming to a large clearing filled with viney mounds, Cozy’s attention was caught by a plume of pure magical energy being circled by Everglow guardians.

“That’s an interesting amount of pure magic. Almost like there’s another one of these weird cubes over there. The compass shows Zeph’s in the opposite direction of the plume, but a small detour should be fine.”

Making her way to the source of the magic, Cozy was intrigued to find hoof prints that matched Zeph and Cedar along with some type of pony she didn’t recognize the tracks for, leading into a building that had recently been damaged.

Finding a purple cube with symbols she recognized as being related to kitsony, Cozy took another part of her hair and sealed it.

“My guess is they figured out that the guardians are only attracted to pure magic and abandoned this thing here. I wonder if it was what Zeph’s compass was tuned to? If that’s the case, then they’re probably lost, unless the kitsony they’re with is guiding them.”

Seeing a faint glimmer of strange magic, Cozy made her way over to the corner of the room where she found a yellow gemstone buried under several layers of dust and vines.

“This is… incredibly complex magic. But it’s so weak. Yet has great storage potential. If I had enough pure magic, I could probably get it charged, but I’d need—a lot. Wherever the kitsony cube was originally being stored probably has enough stagnant pure energy, assuming the guardians haven’t cleaned it up already. But, is there truly any point… Casting some complex spell that I don’t even know what does?” Cozy laughed dismissively. “I have better things to do, but I must admit, I’m undeniably curious as to what this magic does. It would take a lot of glow berry extract, but I could probably use that too. So it’s not critical to do now—and ensuring Zeph’s safety is my priority. Even coming here to collect this cube is pushing things more than I’d like. Though it was hard to pass up another one of these cubes. Especially as if anything dangerous happens. They could be the difference between being able to save some pony or only being able to save myself.”

Making her way out of the building, Cozy glanced up at the guardians and smiled before using her abilities to funnel all the pure magic in the area into the gemstone she had found. Cozy had always appreciated the guardians. They were quite friendly as long as you didn’t disturb the balance of magic within the forest, so as far as she was concerned, helping them out a little was just repaying some past kindness.

With the pure magic gone, the guardians landed next to Cozy and bowed their heads before tugging on her and pointing off into the distance.

“Let me guess, you want me to clean up the stagnant energy wherever this cube was being stored?”

The guardians looked at her with a pleading stare until she sighed and took off in the direction they were pointing. As they flew, it wasn’t exactly hard for Cozy to figure out where they wanted her to go.

Making her way into the building, Cozy funneled the pure magical energy into the gemstone until the area was clean. Taking a close look at the stone, Cozy was disappointed to see that it still needed quite a bit more energy. “So much for seeing what this does, but on the bright side, this stone doesn’t leak much of any magic. So I shouldn’t have to seal it. Of course, that also means I can’t use any of the magic stored inside either. On the double bright side though, I can use the cubes to slowly charge it when I’m not using them. So perhaps, at some point in the future, I’ll know what these stones do.”

Coming back out of the building, Cozy was once more met by the guardians, who placed a blue flower in her mane. A symbol Cozy knew meant she had been granted the forest’s protection. Before bowing and flying off.

Not wanting to explain the flower, Cozy ate enough glow berries to make room for it in her saddlebags before setting off after Zeph once more.