Umbra
"Are you absolutely sure you don't need any help, Twilight?"
Looking into those inquisitive green eyes, filled with an innocent desire to help his surrogate mother, the only parent he'd ever known, Twilight Sparkle felt her resolve wavering, just for a moment. Should she really go through with this?
She'd come so far, and made so many quiet sacrifices already...no matter how she looked at it, she had come much too far to just let it all go. The answer, the answer she'd been looking for so long, was just within her grasp. She had an obligation to knowledge, to Science, to her mentor...and to herself.
"No offense, Spike, but I really think I need to be alone for this. As much as I value my number one assistant, this is one experiment I need to undertake on my own."
Seeing the little dragon's eyes softening at the reminder that he was dear and special to Twilight, she knew he would agree to almost anything she might ask of him. As bad as she felt about excluding him from this, and, in essence, lying to him, her work must come first. Especially this work that might potentially provide the ultimate reward...
"Well...okay then. I'll just be up here, minding the library while you work."
Giving Spike a reassuring smile, Twilight inclined her head in thanks before turning around, heading for her underground
lab, going over the upcoming procedure in her mind.
Heading down into the murky depths of her laboratory, Twilight unthinkingly focused her magic and snapped the door shut behind her, locking it at the same time, before just as unthinkingly, she extended her power to light the candelabrum hanging from the wall. Smiling in quiet satisfaction as the candles cast a dim, flickering light upon the earthen floor, she reached at last the self-same floor, the sound of her hoof-falls muted a great deal on the dirt.
Surveying the ground imperiously, feeling at peace and entirely in her element in the midst of the shelves and shelves worth of arcane tomes, she cleared her mind of everything else but the task at hand. Extending her magic yet again, the glow of her horn lending a faint purple glow to the room, a small silver dagger seemingly lifted itself from a shelf, drifting slowly but deliberately towards the purple pony, who looked impressive and more than a little ominous in the dim twilight of the underground, she murmured almost inaudibly: "Volo...scio...panto..."
The language, like the origins of this last, great ritual, was ancient almost beyond reckoning. By rights, it had no claim to the title of "language" any more, having survived only as the smallest scraps, in wildly disparate sources, like the ritual itself.
Through years and years, since her earliest days of whiling away her life in the dusty reaches of the Canterlot libraries, ever since she had become aware of certain hints that seemed to repeat themselves throughout her books, she had been searching for the whole story. And while a full account was nowhere to be found, she felt now that she has enough to reconstruct the essentials of what was needed for the end result.
"Volo scio...verum."
Gritting her teeth and knowing what was coming, she still could not help but wince as she forced herself to guide the silver knife, making a fairly deep and wide gash on her flank, right across one of her cutie marks.
Gasping from the pain, knowing that it was a mark of success, that she must offer her spirit and her essence freely and without hesitation in order to reach her goal, she focused her magic to make a particular sigil, siphoning the blood that throbbed forth with every heartbeat and guiding it into the shape she wanted on the floor.
After a minute or so, as she was starting to feel dizzy from the loss of blood, and surprisingly from keeping the shape of the sigil so intently in her conscious, she relinquished the thought and took a step into the very middle of the shape. The blood still seeping from her wound, she positioned herself so that the blood would flow right into the stylized eye that formed the focus of the circle. "My blood in exchange for sight...my essence in trade for knowledge..."
Drawing on her considerable stores of raw magic, she felt herself becoming lighter, and noticed a peculiar nimbus starting to envelop her. She had only ever read about this kind of magic expenditure, and as focused and serious as she was in regards to what she was doing, she could not help herself from becoming giddy at putting this extremely advanced theory into practice.
Feeling strange, and sensing that the air around her was starting to take on a wholly unfamiliar character, strange thoughts were starting to seep into her mind. She felt...old, ancient, like she was made out of stone, and rock, and earth.
Swallowing her apprehension at this strange turn of events, she raised her voice a bit, following her ritual towards the end: "Volo scio...universum!"
At the last word, she felt her voice changing, drawing in a different voice besides her own. A very different voice indeed, unlike any pony voice she has ever heard before. Unlike any living thing she has ever heard or read about before, for that matter. It was like the grinding of an unfathomable clockwork, like the groan of the sea against rocky shores.
Only just collecting herself, fearing above all else that she would blow this one chance, this one shot that all these years of preparation had propelled her towards, she noticed again how light-headed she felt. Sparing a glance, she looked to her flank and found that her hind leg was almost completely crimson.
Banishing fear from her mind once again, she took hold of the massive amount of magic she had drawn from her deepest stores and formed the sign in her mind yet again. It was heavy, so massively, fundamentally heavy, like trying to bend iron with her bare hooves.
It might have taken a second, or a minute, or a week; in her incessant fight to control her magic, time and place faded away until, at last, the circle...existed. Expelling it from her mind into the physical world, she took a second to admire the brightly glowing purple shape that floated just above her head, an entirely unearthly phenomenon.
"And now...for the hard part." she thought to herself with a grim chuckle, as she started the struggle to push her condensed magic into the ground, and unite it with her blood. In the dark, windowless room, entirely alone and starting to grow weak from the loss of blood, there was no way to tell how long it took to force the sigil into place, moving at an almost tauntingly slow speed. All that kept Twilight going was sheer will. The will to know.
At last, she saw the sigil touching the ground, and suddenly melt into the ground with no effort at all. Almost stumbling from the sudden release of the tremendous mental weight, she looked down at the intermingled purple and red glowing sign on the floor, realizing that this was the point of no return. If she did this...she committed to the ritual, and to whatever end it may come to.
In truth, there was no question in her mind, and as she lifted the silver dagger from the floor, where it had been discarded, she closed her eyes as she let it hang above the center of the circle, before driving it full-force into the very middle of the center eye.
She knew at once, to her almost obscene exhilaration, that it had worked. For the first time in aeons and aeons, she, Twilight Sparkle, was on the verge of ultimate knowledge...a secret greater than anyone of ponykind could have imagined before.
At the sound of a singular note that seemed to span every frequency, every strata of the earth and the heavens, she felt her Self ascending, the world going black around her, leaving her with the feeling that she was suspended mid-air in a starless night.
And then...she saw. For the first time in her life, the veil was drawn aside, and she could see everything. It was...indescribable, and upon seeing Equestria all at once, seeing the world and the intricate lines that held everything together, the lines of emotion, of love, of friendship, of enmity and greed that bound the world together in unpredictable ways, the threads of life that shone brightly, yet from afar, through the endless dark of whatever plane she was in. And...
Gasping at the grandeur of what presented itself to her next, she saw...the sun, and the moon, and the world, and...other spheres, and she could see the lines, the clockwork of the universe, and it danced before her eyes, arranging itself and rearranging itself for her, and it all seemed so organized, so elemental.
Taking it all in, it brought tears to her eyes to think of how she could have missed the single organizing principle that was behind it all...the simplicity of the unending complexity, the harmony of the all-encompassing chaos. She must share this everyone as soon as she could. She has to let everypony know the Truth.
Almost at once, at the apex of her experience, when the music of the cosmos was singing through her very being, and she felt on the verge of understanding absolutely everything, it was all blotted out in an instant, and the absence of that unearthly music left her feeling frozen in place, a sadness beyond understanding permeating her entirely and utterly.
Replacing it all, shining through the darkness at an impossible scale were...eyes. Eyes like blue sapphire stars cutting through the darkness.
"Twilight Sparkle..." A voice spoke...or it might not have. It might have been inside her head, but for some reason she knew it was inextricably linked to the eyes, and the eye-straining faint outline of an even deeper darkness that surrounded them. Though she had no conscious reason to do so, she felt at once terrified, a terror beyond imagination, and she started struggling to move, but she could not.
"You were almost right before, Twilight Sparkle. The culmination of you ritual was, for all intents and purposes, the point of no return. Out of respect for your will, and your ability, and your future, the things you will go on to do and learn, it has been decided that you should be offered a final chance to end this ill-fated journey into places you were never, ever meant to go.
There is one thing left...one thing that has been kept from you, without which nothing else will make the slightest bit of sense. You have seen far too much, far too quickly, for your mind to comprehend on its own. With this final piece, it will all make sense. But be warned: nothing good will, or indeed can, come of it. You have been warned.”
She had no idea who it was that was speaking in such an unnatural voice, a voice she would have described as deep and melancholy and filled with an ineffable sadness, had she been able to call it a "voice" at all.
Somehow, she knew whoever it was to be benign...or at least, not in any sense of the word malicious. And she also knew it to be truthful, in the way only those possessed of illimitable knowledge could. How she knew this was entirely beyond her, but the fact remained in her head all the same.
The fact also remained, that it felt like this was the natural culmination to her life. Her loneliness, her obsession, her drive to study magic, her talent for putting together the pieces and understanding the whole, her vast magical abilities and capabilities.
In this moment of absolute clarity, at the cusp of complete understanding, and feeling as though she was standing on the edge of a knife, at the point of an arrow, where to her life had taken her, denying herself the final piece of the puzzle would feel like a betrayal of everything she was.
Before she could speak up, she felt that chilling voice again, inside her head, whoever it belonged to obviously having no need to hear her decision spoken aloud: "I see. I hope it's worth it for you." The eyes in the darkness closed, and all was dark again. For a moment, darkness and silence enveloped her before...
It was beyond description. Even as she saw it, even as she heard and felt and tasted and otherwise perceived all her senses being assaulted by something beyond categorization, beyond labels, beyond words, she felt her mind give way to it, her psyche having no way to handle the magnitude of the thing.
Screaming out loud in fright and pain as she felt her mind slipping away, control being wrested from her like a dry leaf on a mighty spring flood. Looking upon the thing, the final part of it all, she felt a series of immeasurable pains as she felt like her whole nervous system was being ripped out of her body, slowly and quickly all at once.
She tried to move, and felt dimly that she was falling, and that the light of knowledge was fading. Her eyes...by Celestia, her eyes! Her mind, her magic, her eyes!! As she understood, as comprehension filled every fiber of her being, she knew why nopony had ever discovered this before, and why nopony might ever discover it again. It was too great and too hideously powerful: it was a searing, scorching blue sun, and she...was a pebble in its path.
As she fell, through the mind-numbing pain, her delirious thoughts wandered to Equestria...to her friends...to the princess... and in a moment of calm in the roaring storm of insight, she felt her love for all of them, and sadness at having let them down.
All the same...she was Twilight Sparkle, and the truth of the matter was this: no matter what happened from now on, no matter the price she had to pay, it could not have happened any other way. While indeed she regretted everything, at the same time...she could not in truth bring herself to regret a single step of her journey.
The setting sun was shining in through the open window, illuminating the clean, still impersonal room in the Ponyville hospital’s long-term ward. Despite the inherently impersonal nature of the room, the dusk-time light shone upon and brought into view several mementos of affection and care for the pony that seemed to inhabit it: a cluster of balloons, a flowers-and-butterflies print get-well card, and several books.
In a chair by the bed, taking a small break from reading to the purple pony that lay in the bed, sat a cyan pony with a rainbow-colored mane and tail, looking at her friend. Several months had passed since Spike had come running into the streets of Ponyville, shouting at the top of his admittedly diminutive lungs that something had gone horribly wrong with Twilight.
They’d only just managed to save her life. She had lost a lot of blood, and she had succumbed to a massive fever, prompting princess Celestia herself to make the trip from Canterlot in order to save her. She’d spent hours and hours in the emergency room with Twilight, while her friends had sat in anxiety and fear in the waiting room, trying to stay strong together in the face of an uncertain future.
The princess had looked grim when she came out of their friend’s room, announcing that she was going to be okay…to a point. As far as the princess could tell, the purple mare had done something unspeakably reckless, and entirely irrevocable. Something that had cost Twilight her memories, her mind as it was, her sight, and her magic, all in one fell swoop.
They might return some day, but Celestia had to confess she doubted very much whether her most dear and faithful student would ever be anything other than a shadow of her former self ever again.
Heaving a heavy sigh, Rainbow looked at her friend’s face, clean white bandages covering the disquieting sight beneath.
Truth be told, she was glad whenever she didn’t have to see those vacant, white eyes she knew was just out of sight beneath the bandages. Twilight didn’t seem to mind whether she had the covers on or not, more than she minded just about anything else.
So far, they had found only one thing that seemed to elicit any kind of reaction from her: being read to. And so, they took turns in reading to her a couple of hours every day, whenever they could, from whatever seemed good to them. Rainbow had read to her a lot, feeling obliged to do so as it was Twilight that had opened Rainbow up to the pleasures of literature.
And while she usually read from one of her adventure book series, taking in the new exploits of one of her many literary heroes and enjoying the soothing feeling of being able to share something at all with one of her best friends in the world, she had discovered that a particular book, stumbled upon mostly by chance, brought the most content smile to the purple mare’s face: the diaries of her second most admired hero, Star Swirl the Bearded.
“…and so, after ascending the familiar planes to a point far, far above, which the most ancient of tomes call the Ante-umbra, I opened my true eyes for the first time, and I saw the world anew. And I felt whole once more, having discovered a part of my Self I never knew was lacking. And in an instant, I knew what I was meant to do, and who I was meant to be, and I knew peace.”
