Long Night 16th 3474 EE

Best solstice ever! Firstly, Luna reprised her meteor shower display, and if anything, it was even more spectacular than last time. She seems very pleased with its reception, and I'm fairly certain it's going to become a regular thing. Despite all the heartbreaks and trials of this last year, we've somehow made it out the other end. With any luck, this next year will be less fraught.

The power of the ecological management protocols we put in place have proved themselves once again. Even with the disruption caused by the battles during summer, and ponies still trying to find their place, we have bumper crops, and will easily be able to make it through the winter. Maresia's treasury is looking more stable, as that idea I had about bent light proved to be quite useful.

Where light enters a denser material, light bends towards the perpendicular of its surface. What's more, there's a clear and calculable relationship to the density of the material, or rather the difference between the densities of the two materials, and the angle at which the light bends. Craft an oblate spheroid out of water or clear glass, and it focuses light into a point.

I call it a lens, because the shape looks like a lentil seed. Some research shows the3 idea itself is not new, but ponies were more interested in playing with the pretty effects then trying to work out how it worked. I did, and it gave me a fascinating application. Use two of them together, one big one small, arranged so they both focus light on a point between them and it creates a magnified image in the smaller lens.

I'm still exploring the full uses of this idea, but one of my first applications, I'm thinking of calling it a tellascope, because it tells your eyes about things that you couldn't see before, is fairly easy to manufacture. Turning it over to the artisans of Shirefield gives us another export product. I also have to spend some time with my alchemical gear, figuring out better ways to make clear glass.

But it was while I was playing with mirrors and these new lenses that I created a parallel beam of light that seemed almost solid… and then it hit me! The key thing in a ritual diagram is the relationships between the nodes, not the medium used to join them. No physical substance could handle the proposed power of our design-based diagram, so the answer is not to use a physical substance!

No, not light, there would be too much leakage, but we have the perfect medium quite literally attached to us. The ley-lines connecting us to our celestial bodies carry vast power. If we can reverse thumaturge the arithmancy of how they work, we could duplicate it in the inter-linkage of the six nodes. Even better, the entire system would be portable, rather than a massive fixed ritual diagram.

The other half of the solution comes from the Solstice party, where I watched as a group of five fillies danced around Blueblood. He's growing up strong, and he's just so adorable! There were two pegasi, two earth ponies and a unicorn, and I was reminded of the other half of our problem, a creating a schematic diagram that would be stable and have a balanced number of ponies in.

Then I had an epiphany. There was one special solution to the pentacle design I hadn't considered before. The centre point of the diagram would be where the magic generated by the diagram would flow. Obviously, I left it empty, but what if there was a unicorn at the centre, riding the magic like a wood chip on a raging torrent, and controlling it through her linked amulet like a floodgate controlling water?

The five outer ponies would be linked in series, in a conventional pentacle, but this sixth pony would be linked simultaneously to each of them. She would hold the diagram together, and feed her own power into the pentacle, stabilising the amount of power of each type within the system. Like the keystone in an arch, or the central binding of an A-frame, she made the whole thing stable.

I worked through the arithmancy, then threw the idea at Luna and had her work through it independently. She came up with the same answer as I did, that the solution would work. With the anchor substrate being the racial consciousness of pony-kind, and the anchors themselves being personality traits, it was obvious the bonds would have to be emotional in nature, love or friendship would be our best bet.

That part of it is going to be difficult to achieve, finding six ponies, two of each type, all friends, with the personalities necessary to link to the anchors. The unicorn at the centre will have to be particularly powerful, as powerful as Luna before she became an Alicorn.

It may take us decades to find a group that matches the criteria, but we'll need decades anyway to convert this brief sketch of an idea into something we can actually craft, not to mention the crafting time itself. We may be able to test it at low power without them, using ourselves, since each of us carries three pony natures within ourselves, but to achieve full power, we will need the six ponies.

But none of that matters! We finally have a plan, and if it takes a century to put it all together, well, we have a century, and more. What we didn't have was a name. Since it's all about harmonising elements of personality to concentrate vast magical energies, I thought the name Harmonic Personality Thaumic Amplifier fitted, but Luna decided on a more poetic name, the Elements of Harmony, and gave me her best puppy-dog eyes look. So, Elements of Harmony it is.