At about six the next morning, Twilight decided that they had waited long enough. She yawned over her Runic Arcana primer, bags under her eyes. "I'm so excited, I couldn't sleep," she grumbled.
Totality took off her glasses and rubbed her eyes. "Neither could I. I kept wanting to turn on the lights and read the book. I should have just done it."
She laid on her stomach on the floor, flipping slowly through the old book and jotting down notes. She used a sheet of paper instead of her notebook, as she planned to eventually destroy the information in the end.
"I should tell you now that while I'm familiar with most of the principles and processes in this particular ritual, I've never done anything this big before."
Twilight had forgotten to formally ask Totality if she'd agree to sign on to performing the ritual, but she appeared to be genuinely fanatical about it. "What kind of rituals did you do?" asked Twilight absently.
"Nothing with higher life forms. I worked in a very small scale with substitutions. Like I'd bring a dead beetle back by sacrificing a small tree. It was proof of concept level stuff. If we pull this off, it'll be my magnum opus by a wide margin."
The two of them studied their books in lazy silence until Totality finished her notes. She closed the book and her eyes and laid her head down on the floor.
"Mkay," she mumbled. "I got the shopping list. It requires a significant amount of blood, so my thought is that with only two donors, we should start harvesting blood ASAP so our bodies have time to recover sooner for more harvesting later. We have to make about a hoofsized blood crystal as a stand-in for Spike's heart. The blood seals are probably going to require the most blood though."
"Virgin?" enquired Twilight.
Totality squinted up at her in confusion at the seemingly arbitrary question. "Uh… no?" she shrugged.
"I'm talking about the blood," clarified Twilight flatly.
Totality's eyes widened. "Oh, yeah, I knew that," she laughed awkwardly. "It doesn't specify, so it probably doesn't matter."
Twilight rolled her eyes. "Well, isn't that a blessing then?" She closed the primer and let it thud on the coffee table. "What else do we need?"
"The body. That's another thing we should get sooner."
"Why?" shrugged Twilight. "It's not like he's going anywhere."
Totality rubbed her muzzle. "Because we have to grow cloud moss spores on his bones to facilitate his rapid new flesh growth, and that could take a few days."
Twilight closed her eyes in exhaustion. "I bet I could speed that up with a spell but sure, we could dig him up tonight. Well, in the meantime let's get bleeding."
Twilight dug out her phlebotomy supplies and tossed them on a metal tray on the table. Then she got several empty flasks and lined them up at the ready.
"Wow. Needles," mused Totality. "Wish I'd had this stuff when I was little. Then maybe I wouldn't have a big scar on my foreleg."
Twilight cleaned her skin with disinfectant and unceremoniously stuck herself with a needle faceted at the end of a tube. She placed the open end in the mouth of a flask which sat on the table, braced in a little stand. She unkinked the tube and the dark red fluid began to race into the bottom of the flask.
"We could use electrolysis to speed up the crystallization," proposed Totality, lazily watching the blood level rise.
"Nope," yawned Twilight. "Spell."
"Oh, right. I keep thinking in terms of my own limitations. I forget I'm working with a walking grimoire. Maybe this whole thing won't even take that long."
Twilight filled the first flask completely with blood. She switched over to a new one while Totality corked the other.
Totality sat at the table with eyes closed, her head propped up on her hoof when suddenly she heard a thud. Her eyes shot open to see Twilight slumped motionless over the table. "Oh, shit," she muttered, stumbling out of her seat. She yanked the needle out of Twilight's leg with her magic and then applied pressure to the hole to get her to stop bleeding.
Twilight woke up on her bed in a puddle of drool. "Umph, Totality?" she mumbled, confusedly looking about the room.
"Oh, there you are," said Totality, who was sitting at the table with both of their new books. "Drink that water." She pointed to a big jug on her night stand.
Twilight floated the jug to herself. "How long was I out?"
"Almost two hours." Totality raised an eyebrow. "Guess who came by."
Water began to spill down Twilight's front before she took a break from it.
"It was Big Mac," continued Totality. "I told him you were… out. He seemed distraught and then left.
"Damn it!" she slammed the water down. "He's going to think I'm avoiding him." She rubbed her face in her hooves, frustratedly trying to restart her brain. "Okay, c'mon." She looked back at Totality and sighed, thinking. "Huh… I just got it."
Totality blinked. '"Got what?"
"Your name."
Totality's eyes ping ponged around as if she were watching a fly buzzing over her head. "You didn't know what a totality was?"
"No, of course I know what a totality is," scoffed Twilight. "I meant that you look like a totality. Your dark body is like the eclipse and your bright mane and tail are like the corona."
"Eeyup," agreed Totality.
"That's really interesting," nodded Twilight. "What were we doing though?"
"Blood crystal. We have enough blood to start one. We got a flask and a half before you went down. We can still take more blood from you, we just shouldn't do it while you're so sleep deprived I guess."
"Okay, okay," agreed Twilight. "Let's start on that crystal and then eat something." Twilight got a bowl and emptied the entire first flask of blood into it. Then she focused on the center of the blood pool. A continuous purple laser shot from her horn into the bowl. She watched intently, waiting to see a crystal begin to rise from the surface of the liquid but all of a sudden, the blood caught fire. Twilight stopped abruptly and conjured an airtight dome over the bowl until the flames suffocated. Totality watched all the while with raised eyebrows.
Twilight grinned. "Well, that was an interesting reaction."
"I'll say," droned Totality. "Your blood must be at least eighty proof by this point."
Twilight levitated a pair of tweezers into the bowl and fished out a red crystal the size of a grain of rock salt. She floated it up in front of Totality's face. "Let me know if this is too big. I can shave it down."
Totality adjusted her glasses and squinted at the diminutive crystal. "No, it's good… That is if we want to bring Spike back in a cockroach body. Let's put your blood back in the flask and save it for painting the blood seals. Let's try using mine for the crystal."
"Sure," agreed Twilight. "But how are you feeling right now?"
"Better since I ate breakfast. I should be fine." She clopped her hooves together in anticipation.
Twilight got out a fresh needle and tube while Totality cleaned the vein on her uncut leg.
"You do it," asked Totality, presenting her leg. She'd never used a needle before and was unsure of herself.
Twilight quickly found her vein and pushed the needle in. She let the blood flow and in a few minutes they had two more full flasks. She reset the bowl and filled it with Totality's blood.
"Alright, let's try this again," whispered Twilight. She zapped the bowl with the same spell. Where the laser met the surface of the blood, a crystal began to rise. As it grew in size, the blood receded, absorbing into the mass. She stopped when almost all the liquid blood was gone.
Totality picked up the crystal with her magic to examine it. "Nice…" The mass was a little bigger than a golf ball, a knot of trigonal shaped points sticking out in all directions. She placed it back in the bowl and dumped the entirety of the second flask in with it. "Keep going."
Twilight hit the crystal again until all the blood was gone from the bowl.
Totality peered down approvingly. "We'll probably need at least one more flask's worth from me to get it to the right size."
Twilight nodded, "We'll wait a while before getting more blood. I'm gonna eat."
Twilight returned from town with a full saddle bag. "I got all the stuff," she shouted, pushing the door closed.
"Upstairs," called a faraway Totality.
Twilight brought her bounty up the spiral staircase to find Totality hunched over the table, manipulating a little paintbrush. She set the saddle bag down on the floor and looked over Totality's shoulder. She was painting a triangular formation of three little overlapping circles of Runic Arcana text and other symbols she couldn't identify. They were all meticulously scrawled in blood straight upon the wood.
"What are you doing?"
"I'm seeing if I still know how to make blood seals. Don't worry, this'll burn right off." She placed three green leaves she'd picked outside, one into each circle. Then she put a cracked, brown skeltal leaf in the nexus where all the circles overlapped. Her horn began to glow and suddenly an arc of lightning snapped from the tip to the carefully painted seals. The blood melted away instantly in a flurry of tiny red embers. The green leaves began to wrinkle and brown while the leaf in the center appeared to regenerate, flourishing to the point of looking like it was freshly picked.
"Wow!" exclaimed Twilight, lifting up the resurrected leaf. "That's amazing. It looks more like an art form than a discipline. It's so crazy that you can just reverse death like that."
"Yeah," breathed Totality. "But we killed three leaves to bring back one. So often unfortunately everything is contingent upon how much you like that one leaf."