Northern Lights

It seemed five days as a pony still wasn’t enough time for me to learn how to walk properly. As the guard lead me down a spiraling staircase into the bowels of the castle, I found myself tripping over my hooves what felt like every second step. Thankfully the guard was there to caught me each time with a flare of his wings.

“Do you need me to carry you?” he offered after the ninth trip.

“If you do, I won’t get better,” I said, dusting off my foreleg. “How much further is it to the bottom?”

“At our current pace, two minutes.”

I put on my most convincing smile. “That’s barely a power walk. I can make it.”

The guard rolled his eyes as we resumed walking. If I were human still, my boast would have held some water. I was deceivingly fast for how bookish most of my interests were and could outpace most people at walking speed alone. But I guess power walking didn’t transition well to this new body of mine. Or maybe it was just my lack of practice. Glancing down at my legs, they did seem pretty long for my body, especially compared to the strong, stocky build of the guard.

I wonder if this body is still growing? I pondered. On Earth I was eighteen years and eight months old. How did that convert into pony years? Was I still four months shy of my nineteenth birthday, or younger? The princess probably has a spell to determine age. Maybe I can ask her if I have the time.

I stumbled off the final step and looked up from my thoughts. Before me were a pair of heavy iron doors inscribed with dozens of symbols glowing in violet light. Some of the symbols were similar to common ones found on Earth: I saw a star, a triple spiral, and something vaguely reminiscent of a tree. The rest had a few familiar extensions and base shapes, but there were also many alterations that threw me for a loop.

Ri, do you have an idea what these symbols mean? I asked inwardly. Once again I was met with silence. Another question for the princess, then.

Though I tried to sound confident in my thoughts, the constant silence made my mind wander. Ri was the only friend I had in this fantasy land and I’d made her go silent. What if she never spoke to me again because I thought when I should have acted?

I closed my eyes and took a few slow breaths to divert my thoughts from another breakdown. Instead, I turned my mind’s eye to my usual stress-killing thoughts. I saw my family and I gathered around the table to enjoy my father’s newest dish; I heard Catherine practice her flute in her room; I saw Elizabeth and mom laugh at a video; I saw my grandmother in her reading chair, dressed in the beautiful silver earrings of her youth; I saw Emily smiling at me the first time we met...

Keep your end goal in sight, Tyler, I told myself. One problem at a time. Talk to the princess now, patch things up with Ri, and then get home.

The guard gave me a quick glance to make sure I wasn’t about to trip over, then tapped his hoof against the iron doors. “Princess Twilight, you have a visitor.”

There was a muffled shuffling from behind the doors. I took a step back and, for some reason, my mind fantasized all manner of magical experiments going on inside the room. This made me realize that, in all this time, I’d never given much thought to what exactly those experiments were. Since Twilight was my best bet in getting home, I might have to educate myself on the method.

The doors open enough for princess Twilight Sparkle to poked her head out. “Tyler? What are you doing here?”

“I need to talk to you.” I looked past Twilight to examine her workspace, but from this angle I only saw the wall. “Unless this is a bad time?”

“This is as good a time as any. Please, come in.” Twilight nodded to my escort, who stood off to the side before her horn lit up, and she closed the doors behind me.

Twilight’s lab was about as hectic as I imagined. It was a spacious room it by numerous orange stones fixed onto the walls. There was a work table covered in notes, journals, reference books, and a number of crystals. Some of them I recognized from when Twilight had taken me for a walk through Canterlot, but others were new.

To the right was the skeleton of a Sky Serpent, held upright like a museum display. Its wings, with finger bones similar to a bat’s, were spread out in display, and the skull’s jaw was opened to expose the fangs and, surprisingly, molars. As much as I wanted to look at the macabre sight, I turned away and focused on Twilight. Even though she wouldn’t talk to me, Ri saw the same things I did, and I wasn’t going to make her look at one of her dead.

Twilight moved towards me with a glint of concern in her eyes. “How are you holding up?”

“As well as I can,” I replied. “I just realized that, in all the excitement since my arrival, I never told you exactly how I came to Equestria.”

Twilight looked puzzled and worried by my statement. “Please don’t tell me you lied about finding Ri, because that would make your situation with the princesses worse.”

“No, I didn’t lie. There was just more to say,” I explained. “When I picked up Ri’s necklace, I didn’t instantly come to Equestria. I found myself in some vast space filled with those same three colours in the sky,” I glanced over at Twilight’s desk. “And those crystals,” I pointed a hoof at a collection of pink, purple, and blue crystals of varying sizes.

Twilight took a step towards me. “Are you saying you were surrounded by pure magic? What happened next?”

“They started to change me.”

“Was it the blue magic?”

“At that moment, I was more focused on the fact that my body was being played with like clay than the colour responsible.”

“Right, sorry,” Twilight said. “I just asked because it would help me confirm that pure magic did this to you.”

“I’ve heard that term get thrown around a lot since coming here,” I said, seizing my chance at education. “Can you please tell me a bit about pure magic and why it’s so special?”

A spark seemed to light itself in Twilight’s eyes that reminded me of my first meeting with Ri. “Of course I can tell you. To put it bluntly, pure magic is magic in its most raw form. We don’t know where it comes from, only that it exists in tangent with everything else in nature.”

“And I take it it’s different than what you ponies use?” I asked.

Twilight nodded. “Right. We ponies all have different levels of pure magic inside our bodies, but thanks to special focal points, we can turn it into “refined” or “active” magic. Earth ponies and pegasi have their focal points in their hooves, which allows them to manipulate the earth and weather respectfully. Unicorns have our focal points in our horns, which is what allows us to cast different spells.”

“So how come, if you all have focal points, only unicorns can do stuff like levitation?” I asked.

“Again, that has to do with our horns,” Twilight said, gesturing to hers. “The process of funneling magic through a unicorn’s horn allows our idea of the spell to be imprinted into the raw magic, and thus give it purpose.”

Giving purpose to the purposeless, I mused. There was something almost poetic about that.

Twilight lit up her horn and levitated three crystals from her desk: blue, purple, and pink. “These are the three colours pure magic can take,” Twilight explained. “Depending on the colour, each one interacts with the world in a different way. Don’t worry, they are completely harmless in this crystallized form.”

She moved the pink crystal towards me, and an obscenely bright light began to glow from it. The edges were a shade lighter than my mane and the center looked almost white. Just like in the psychedelic realm, my eyes began to sting from staring too long.

“First up is pink magic,” Twilight continued. “It is the key component in making refined magic, sort of like how iron is needed to make steel. You can find pink magic at locations that give off or generate energy, like active volcanoes or fault lines.”

“So pure magic can exist outside of a living thing?” I asked while rubbing my eyes of any remaining discomfort.

“Of course,” Twilight said. “You won’t find too much of it in the wild because of these requirements, which is good. Too much pink magic in one place can result in a magical explosion if hit with the right trigger.”

“And ponies have this stuff inside them?” I asked in disbelief.

“Yes, but in healthy amounts, so there’s no chance of it getting set off if a stray spell hit you. This also means it probably had the smallest hoof in changing you.”

She retracted the pink crystal and moved the blue one forward. Its colour reminded me of the blue poison dart frog from South America; the edges of the crystal were deep blue, but as your eye traveled closer to the center, it steadily became the same colour as my coat. Just had to stamp your calling card all over my body, didn’t you? I thought bitterly.

“The biggest factor of your change would have come from the most abundant of the colours,” Twilight continued. “While pink magic affects energy, blue magic affects the physical form. Usually these interactions are tiny, like making a tree grow more fruit or a pony growing taller. Keep in mind that it isn’t the explicit reason why things grow, they also do that naturally. Blue magic just offers them a helping hoof.”

“I’d say this is a bit more than a “helping hoof,” I said, sweeping my foreleg over myself in emphasis.

A frown crept into Twilight’s chipper mood. “I know, and that’s why, despite these benefits, ponies try to avoid using pure magic whenever we can. When you get a large concentration of blue magic, the changes become more mutative.”

“How convenient that I should change into a pony in the middle of a pony civilization, and not some twisted hybrid of human and pony?”

“I think that has to do with the nature of traveling between worlds,” Twilight answered. “I was turned into a human when I went to Canterlot High. But when I returned to Equestria, I turned back into a pony. I think the random element in this case are your colouring and your transformation into a girl.”

Wonderful, I mused to myself. So not only did you paint your calling card on my body, you also took my dick because of the “random chaos of the universe?” Why couldn’t you have at least made me a unicorn so I could get something from this damned deal?

Twilight replaced the blue crystal with the purple one. Unlike the first two, its colour changed the more I looked at it. One moment it was bright lavender, but the next it was a deep, inky violet. The centre was an endless black that reminded me of Ri’s statement of darkness without sound, space, or life.

“The last colour is purple magic.” Twilight’s voice was like a rope pulling me from the abyss. “It’s less common than blue, but easy to find if you know where to look. Purple magic is attracted to the memories, thoughts, and emotions of intelligent beings. Once it’s found an abundant source of those things, its dedicates itself to cataloguing and organizing every memory and emotion it can find, even after the host has died.”

What a terrifying prospect, I thought. Your secrets could be on display for the world to see and you’d be powerless to prevent it, or the aftermath that would follow. “If purple magic is cognizant enough to do all this work, why is it considered wild?” I asked.

“Cognizant isn’t the right word for it,” Twilight answered. “Purple magic is listless. If it can't interact with any functioning memories, it goes dormant and waits until new memories come by for it to work on.”

“That sounds more like a parasite.”

“I guess you could consider it a magical parasite, but it doesn’t hurt the host at all.”

“How kind of it,” I said. “So are there ways to remove pure magic? Aside from pink, it really doesn’t seem that helpful.”

“Unfortunately, it’s because of pink magic that it’s hard to get rid of the other types,” Twilight replied. “See, the colours normally exist in a symbiotic cycle of perpetual motion. Blue and purple magic coil around the pink and released and absorb ambient magic to feed the pink and strengthen its hold on them. These crystals were created from rare individual pockets found in nature.”

“That sounds just like what’s going on above the city,” I said, recalling how the lights in the sky looked more like thrashing serpents than an aurora borealis.

“Exactly,” Twilight replied. “Once the colours get together like that, it’s pretty much impossible to separate them.”

Well, so much for getting to be a human in Equestria, I thought. “Well, thank you for the lesson, princess,” I said. “This certainly gave me a better understanding of the situation. But to bring it back to my original point, pure magic is the reason why I’m here, and I think the psychedelic world I passed through was also comprised of pure magic. Is it possible for us to make a portal of our own and use pure magic to send me home?”

Twilight tapped her chin thoughtfully. “I don’t know. In theory, sure, but we’d run the risk of a magical explosion if something went wrong.”

“I understand,” I said as calm as possible. I was hoping that wouldn’t be the answer, however viable the idea was. If my one big idea was being pushed to the backburner, what hope did that leave for any future attempts at getting home on my own? “I’m sorry to have bothered your research.”

Twilight stepped towards me, concern written across her face. “Please don’t think that the princesses or I are overlooking you and Ri.”

“You don’t need to explain it,” I said. “You need to look after your own people before you look after a couple of strangers. I get it.”

“Don’t talk down about yourself like that,” Twilight insisted. “Sure, we’re focused right now on making sure the city is safe, but I’m also looking into ways of getting you home and Ri out of that necklace. Believe me, that will be the next thing we focus on once this crisis is over. I promise you as your friend.”

So we’re friends now, are we? I mused. It was cynical of me; Twilight and the princesses had been kinder to me than they had any right to. I shouldn’t be thinking like this—I need to stay on their good side to get back home... but still, all this waiting around while my family was no doubt worried sick was eating away at me.

I smiled and prepared a response to Twilight, but something on the workbench caught my attention. It was a glassy stone roughly the size of my head that resembled melted candle wax.

“What is that?” I asked, pointing to the substance.

Twilight looked at the object and frowned. “I wish I knew. It was found inside the Sky Serpent’s tomb, especially where their skeletons were grouped together. The shell is made entirely of blue magic, but the interior is filled with high amounts of pink magic. Too much to be anything natural this far away from a faultline. There were even traces of purple as well, but in amounts so small that I nearly missed it at first. There’s also something else that seems to have bonded to the blue magic, and I’m still trying to figure out what it is.”

I moved around Twilight to get a better look at the substance. As I did, I heard a sound that made my skin icy cold. It was very faint, like a whisper of wind through a crack in a window, but it rose and fell like the tone in someone’s voice.

“What’s that sound?” I asked, my ears pivoting around to follow it. The tone was becoming more frantic, as if it were afraid.

Twilight looked at me, confused. “I don’t hear anything.”

“There’s definitely a sound coming from this thing,” I stepped backwards from the glass-like pile, and the whispers ceased. “Try moving closer.”

Twilight shook her head. “I’ve been studying it for days and I haven’t heard anything.” I noticed a curious twinkle in the princess’ eyes. The kind one gets when they’ve suddenly had an important thought.

“Talk to me princess. What’s going on in that royal head of yours?”

“I don’t know, but we can easily find out.” Twilight levitated a large violet crystal from her workbench. At first glance I thought it was circular, but a closer look showed that the surface was made of hundreds of small hexagons. Inside was a flickering white flame, which seemed to grow as it got closer to me.

“Isn’t that the crystal you bought when we went into Canterlot?”

Twilight nodded. “It’s a Maegus Crystal. We use them to perform magical readings. You see, I think you might have a higher level of pure magic in your body compared to the average earth pony, so I’m going to use this crystal to figure out just how much pure magic is inside of you.”

Well, this is what I get for wanting to know how Twilight conducted her experiments, I thought, nervously shifting weight between my hooves. “This won’t hurt, will it?”

“Of course not,” Twilight assured. “The crystal will only read the magic levels in your body and make a projection that I can interpret.”

“And what about Ri?”

Twilight paused. I saw her ears fold slightly against her head. Was she feeling regret over whatever she did to Ri? Did she even know what she’d unknowingly put Ri through?

“She’ll be fine too,” Twilight finally said. “If anything, the crystal will help us see how much pure magic is inside of her as well.”

She doesn’t know. I don’t know if I was reassuring myself or Ri, but the confirmation brought with it mixed emotions. It was a relief to hear that she was an obsessed and well meaning professor, but I still remembered the fear and anger in Ri’s voice from this morning.

You know nothing about what I went through thanks to your decisions!

I shook my head, hoping my discomfort didn’t show too badly. “So long as nobody is getting hurt, we’re good to go whenever you’re ready, princess.”

With a nod, Twilight pressed the Maegus Crystal against my left side. Its touch was icy cold, but fortunately I was a Canadian and had no trouble standing as still as possible despite its bite.

The white flame inside the crystal leaned towards me, as if trying to lick at my skin. When it threatened to touch the walls of the crystal, Twilight pulled the Maegus Crystal away and set it on the table. She then lowered her head and fired a burst of magic from her horn. The beam phased through the outer shell and struck the white flame.

It roared to life within the crystal like water poured on an alkaline fire and burst free of its prison. Once exposed to the air, the flames joined together to form a projection of an earth pony with a lump on its neck that represent Ri’s necklace. Its outline was white, but inside was a gathering of colours. Blue was the primary one, reaching from the pony’s nose to the tips of its hooves and the end of its tail. Interwoven among the blue were threads of pink darting around like fish in the ocean.

Purple magic dominated the pony’s cranium like a lake on a map. A few rivers trickled down to the necklace, which itself was an entire ocean of purple with only the faintest outline of blue, and no pink.

Of course, I thought as I looked at Ri’s hologram. Ri is just a mind trapped in silver, so of course the memory parasite would swarm around her. That’s probably why she’s still alive, so they can organize her memories to their heart’s content.

Too late did I realized what I was thinking and squeezed my eyes shut. Stupid! Stupid! I’m so sorry Ri.

There was no reply.

“Well, I was right,” Twilight brought forward a quill and parchment and began to sketch the image. “You have a lot more pure magic inside of you. Fortunately it’s only blue magic, which isn’t know for changing a subject twice, and the pink magic content seems average for an earth pony. The purple magic is the one that worries me the most. The way it links your mind to Ri’s is unlike anything I’ve ever seen purple magic do. Normally a unicorn has to direct it to link two minds together, but here, it looks like the purple magic has extended itself over the two of you.”

“Is that why I can talk to her in my mind?”

“Yes. The purple magic is acting like a current running between the both of you. When you take Ri’s necklace off, the current is broken,” Twilight tapped her hoof against her chin. “However, there could be other side effects from all this magic. I might need to run a few more tests on you in the future to make sure your body isn’t being affected in any negative way.”

“Besides making me into a girl pony, you mean,” I said, before something Twilight said caught my interest. “You said that purple magic can interact with memories even after the host is dead, right? Is it possible you could look into the mind of one of these dead Sky Serpents and figure out the specifics of how to operate the portal and contain its magic?”

Twilight frowned. “Purple magic can’t keep the memories from rotting away, only slow them down by categorizing them based on how important the subject found the memories in life. Since we don’t know how long the Sky Serpents have been dead for, there’s a good chance that what we’re looking for has already been rendered unusable.”

“Maybe there’s a higher chance than you think,” I pointed to the taxidermied Sky Serpent skeleton, still doing my best not to look directly at it. “Where did you find this particular skeleton?”

“In the same room as the portal.”

“This is a wild guess, but if this serpent died in the same room as a portal that can open doors through space and time, chances are it would be the top priority in his mind. Which means the purple magic could be keeping it alive for us to dig up.”

Twilight’s lavender eyes shifted nervously as she thought this over. “I suppose there isn’t anything wrong in trying. But I’ll be performing the spell alone. I need your mind here to act as my lifeline in case I get caught among the rotting memories.”

“Of course, your majesty,” I said. At this point, I wasn’t going to complain about being given the chance to help out. Plus, I felt that Ri would be off put if I forced her to look into the mind of one of her own dead.

Twilight walked over to the iron door and told the guards on the other side that she wasn’t to be disturbed. On her way back to the skeleton, her horn lit up as she levitated over books, an hourglass, and a purple magic crystal.

Her movements were like well oiled clockwork. As the book flipped itself in-front of her muzzle, the crystal unraveled into a long thread of purple that hovered between Twilight head and the skull. Finally, the hourglass floated to a rest beside me.

“If I don’t come back by the time the sand in this hourglass runs out, I need you to shake me as hard as you can and break my concentration,” Twilight instructed.

“Can do,” I replied. “Is there anything else you need?”

“Just make sure you don’t take me out too early. I don’t want to go through these decayed memories more than once if I don’t have to, so I’ll need as much time as I can.”

“You’ll get all the time you need and more.”

Twilight gave me an appreciative smile, then took a breath to steady her nerves. With a flicker of her horn, the hourglass flipped itself over, and the tips of the purple magic wove themselves between the serpent’s head and her own.