1234andynguyen - Well, they couldn't stay mad at one another forever ; ) We'll still have to see about that though; I won't spoil things one way or another.
The it - Why thank you. Though if you think about it, aren't all chapters that aren't either the first or last chapter technically filler?
WTA WWAR3A1 - It really has been. Far too long, and I'm sad it too me so long to get back to it. Thank you though, I'm glad I'm alright as well. another inch or two, and I might not have been.
Dragoul Mayol - It'll do that from time to time. I try to keep more ups than downs, but if it was all ups, it wouldn't be as interesting to read.
A/N - Hey there, everycreature! I hope this latest chapter finds you well, and I hope you enjoy this latest installment. In the words of the Doctor; Always try to be nice, but never fail to be Kind!
Once again I awakened in the void of deep space, looking around to see distant galaxies and swirling, stellar nebulae all around me. "Greetings, Sir Marshall." An increasingly familiar voice said from behind me. "I wished to speak with you about the events of the day today." Nightmare Moon had become quite demure and polite in the short time she had been trapped within my mind, and I had to wonder if my own subconscious was somehow influencing her in a way that perhaps even she wasn't aware of.
The sound of her voice caused me to turn around, which was an act of thought more than any physical movement. "Hello, Night." I greeted the darkly beautiful mare. "I'm sure you've got a lot of questions, and probably a comment or two as well, so feel free to lay it all on me."
The mare approached slowly, treading on nothing at all, though her hooves seemed to create small, rippling wakes in the nothingness as she approached as though she was walking on a shallow pool of water. "Firstly, I would like to know what that pink creature whose dilemma I aided you with is. She cannot be a pony; the things I have seen her do through your eyes are simply impossible. There is no magic known to me that could explain some of the events I witnessed, particularly not the magic of earth ponies." I couldn't say I blamed her for thinking this way, as Pinkie was a complete oddity that even the incredibly intelligent Twilight had failed to so much as scratch the surface of.
All I could do was give the dark mare a light shrug. "To be honest, I don't think anyone really knows how she does it. I don't think that's a mystery that's likely to be solved. As a matter of fact, from what I've been told, the more you try to scrutinize Pinkie, the more of a mystery things seem to become." I let out a soft chuckle as I rubbed the back of my head. "She really is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside of an enigma."
Nightmare Moon gave me an understandably flat look as I finished speaking. "I see. Very well then, since I do not wish for either of us to end this night with a headache, I believe we should move on to the next topic." The scene around us shifted to another sight, one that was familiar yet foreboding. "I believe you had questions regarding the artifact that I used against you." The setting Nightmare Moon had caused to materialize within the dream realm was that of the chamber where I had last seen the mare when she still had her physical body, the room where she had tried to torture both myself and Twilight.
While I could see the reasoning behind this particular backdrop, I couldn't say I was happy with the choice. I decided to do my best to ignore it though, and instead focused on the present, and the questions I did indeed have for Nightmare. "I think the first question would have to be how you managed to control the power of the artifact. And as a follow-up, do you know of any way to suppress the effects it had on me?"
During the course of my conversation with Nightmare, which felt as though it lasted for several hours, though was likely to have only taken minutes of real time, I would learn more of how she had manipulated the artifact itself. It turned out that the faction of ancient humans who had created the artifact, the temple and many other such relics were xenophobic toward the other races, and had done much to their magic items to ensure ponies and other beings could not manipulate them. However, according to Nightmare Moon, she had found a way to match her own energies to those of the artifact closely enough that it allowed her to manipulate it.
Unfortunately, neither she nor I had any idea how this new information would help me to control my own, enhanced body. From her own understanding, human magic and pony magics were similar, though fundamentally different in a few, key ways, which likely explained why I had been able to heal myself with my own magic when Starswirl had warned me that such a thing should have been impossible. It also seemed Nightmare had been studying me in the time she'd been in my mind, and it turned out that the artifact was not producing a continuous, magical effect to enhance me, but had performed said enhancements directly to my body, whereupon the magic had faded and left me in my current state permanently.
The Mare in the Moon also revealed the reason for her grisly demise when Falathiel had severed her horn. It seemed that the unicorns among her followers had been supplying her with power to feed the spell that they had cast to return her to a physical form after I defeated her in Canterlot, and without her horn to act as a channel, she couldn't take in the magic needed to sustain both the spell, as well as her magically-fed corporeal shell. According to the mare herself, inhabiting my body had been an act of desperation, a final, fear-fueled attempt to avoid being cast down into Tartarus. An act I couldn't rightly say I blamed her for.
In addition to all of that, I also discovered that the mare seemed to be attracted to me in some fashion, though she didn't say so directly. I could see it in her body language; the way her eyes roamed over me when she thought I was distracted, the way she began to inch closer to me as we spoke, as well as a few other, subtle tells. I tried not to read too much into this however, chalking it up to an intense loneliness caused by a thousand years of isolation on the Moon.
The following morning saw me awakening from my conversation with Nightmare Moon beneath my favorite blanket, though I noticed a distinct lack of purple in that particular quilt. I hazarded a guess that Twilight had awoken early and extricated herself from the bed in order to start the day ahead of the rest of us. I further guessed that she was either off somewhere studying, or more likely, preparing an itinerary for everypony for the trip to Canterlot. The cute little bookworm liked to be organized to an obsessive degree, though she seemed to have at least a rudimentary handle on her borderline OCD-level tendencies to be organized… outside of a crisis at least, so I wasn't overly worried.
After spending a short time simply basking in the warmth and affection of my sleeping marefriends, I decided it was time to wake up properly, and so made my own way carefully out of the bed. Once free, I snuck over to my desk, and picked up the spellbook I had retrieved from the Everfree temple, as well as the much newer notebook I had been apparently translating it into, rather than simply copying it over as I had originally thought to be, then left the room. There were only a few pages of the book left to be transferred over, and I intended to finish doing so today.
How it all worked still wasn't exactly clear, but the spell that allowed me to speak in the language of the ponies, and understand their spoken language in kind also allowed me to both read and write in it as well, which was an odd concept, as Twilight had confirmed that the script I used when I wrote something down was indeed the language that they themselves wrote in, and not the English words as they appeared to be to my eyes, and even felt to my hands.
I was almost too lost in those thoughts to notice Twilight and Spring Leaf sitting in the living room, one to either side of the home's primary fireplace. They weren't too caught up in their conversation to notice me however, and Twilight called out to me with a smile. "Good morning, Blake. Did you sleep well?"
I looked up from the book as I heard my lover's voice, pausing almost in mid-step as I heard her. "Morning Twi, Morning Spring Leaf. How are the both of you this morning?" As I returned Twilight's greeting, I moved to the sofa she was seated on, and sat down next to her, wrapping an arm around the cute librarian's shoulders and hugging her close to me as I sat next to her, causing that cute giggle of hers to escape her lips.
Spring Leaf however, wasn't quite as amused, her eyes fixed on the ancient book of human magic I still had in my hand. "So uh… you still have that old book." She said, seeming unsure of what to say. "How uh… how long do you plan to hold on to it?"
It took me by surprise to hear the normally confident mare speaking so timidly, enough so that I turned my attention to her even as Twilight looked to me with that lovely, warm smile of hers. "Well, until I finish getting it translated into a language that Twilight and the others can read, at the very least. Why, is something wrong? It's not dangerous, is it?" Spring Leaf, or at least her former self, had been the one to show me the location of the book in the first place, so if it were dangerous, it would have made sense for her to say something before now.
The forest-themed mare rubbed one of her forelegs with the opposing hoof, and looked down to the floor. "N-no, it isn't that." She took a slow, deep breath in, and looked up to me. "You uh… you remember that trick I told you about? The one that Isabel's kin can do to give a spirit a body again? Well, that trick only works if they have a piece of the pony's original body to work from…" I stared at her for a long moment, either not comprehending, or not wanting to, I wasn't sure which.
Almost on instinct, I looked down to the book, and scanned the surface of it, looking at the black pony fur that covered it. In the same moment the implications began to dawn on me, I noticed that a corner of the macabre binding of the book's back cover was missing. With a yelp of shock, I released the book and tossed it away as though it had burned me. "That's your fur?! Why didn't you say so sooner?!" I started wiping my hands on the front of my shirt as though to clean them. "Gods, Spring Leaf. I never would have kept that book around if I had known it was bound in your fur…"
She sighed and nodded lightly. "That's why I didn't say anything before. I knew you still needed it, and I knew you would try to get rid of it if you found out, but I heard you were making some good progress with getting it copied. When you said you were almost done, I figured now was as good a time as any to say something."
I looked to Twilight, who returned my gaze with an apologetic one. "I'm sorry, Blake. I wanted to tell you sooner, but Spring Leaf made me promise not to until she said something. She told me parts of why she didn't want you to know, and it made sense to me, so I agreed." She sighed and looked down to the floor. "Isabel came to me with Spring Leaf's… 'problem' while you were still in the hospital, and asked about the book. I let her look at it, and she told me she needed a bit of the 'binding' off of it. I didn't find out what the piece was foruntil after she had already done… whatever she did to help Spring Leaf get her body back. I knew it was fur from a pony, that much was clear when you first brought it out of the temple in the Everfree, but I wouldn't have guessed it was from a pony who we might someday meet. I thought it was just some old, macabre relic from the past, like finding a mummy's canopic jars at an archeological dig site."
Of course, I didn't blame either mare for their actions. How could I? I could understand Spring Leaf's reasoning for not wanting to tell me the truth, especially given that my own reaction just moments before had all but confirmed her suspicions regarding how I would handle such news. And as for Twilight, she was just trying to be a good friend to Spring Leaf, and respect the former specter's wishes regarding something personal to her own past that she didn't want to openly discuss. All in all, I would have been hard-pressed to find a valid reason to be upset with the pair.
The conclusion took hardly any time at all to reach, and I smiled at the two mares as they looked to me with apologetic expressions. "It's ok girls, really. I understand why you didn't want to tell me." I stood slowly, and retrieved the book from its position on the floor, lying wide open with the pages face down on the floor. "I clearly reacted exactly how you were afraid I would, after all. Now, if you'll both excuse me, I think I'd like to get this finished so I can get this detestable thing out of my home, and away from Spring Leaf. Perhaps in a bonfire, where it belongs." There was an obvious shift in Spring Leaf's expression, moving from apprehension to relief and gratitude.
As I turned to make my way to the study to finish my work on translating the book, Twilight and Spring Leaf both stood, the latter excusing herself somewhat hurriedly while Twilight trotted up next to me. "Thank you for being so understanding. I wouldn't have blamed you if you had been upset with us. We essentially lied to you."
I smiled and patted the cute egghead affectionately. "You both had good reasons for keeping that from me, Twilight, so I can't blame either of you for it. I wouldn't even call it a lie, to be honest; you didn't say anything about it, but it also didn't come up either."
She smiled up at me as we made our way to the study, and I sat down in the comfortable chair at my desk with a soft groan of emotional fatigue. "Still, I appreciate you being reasonable." She trotted up next to me and looked at the notebook I'd been copying the texts into. "You know, I've never actually read any of this yet. I suppose I was waiting for you to finish translating so I didn't miss something that hadn't been written down yet. Would you mind if I watched you, and read along?"
The final portion of the translation took just under two full hours to complete, as I took time to go back through and double check a few areas that I wanted to make sure were correct. All the while, Twilight stayed silent, simply observing as she had said she wanted to. The only other sounds besides my own quill scratching against the paper of the notebook was Twilight's pencil making similar sounds as she took the occasional notation, likely jotting down page numbers and reference points so she could quickly find bits of text that were of particular interest to her. She hadn't had the little notebook she now possessed when we entered the study, and I hadn't seen or felt the burst of magical energy that would signal the use of a teleportation spell, so my best guess was that she had stashed a few of them around the house for emergencies, including here in the study.
When I finally closed that accursed book, and leaned back in the chair with another sigh, Twilight floated the original in her magic and turned towards the door. "Before we do anything hasty with this, I'm going to ask Prin- Err, Luna what she thinks we should do with it. This book may be a grisly relic, but it is still a relic, and she may want to preserve it somewhere."
As the lovely librarian turned to leave, she nearly ran face-first into Spring Leaf, who had opened the door to the study in the interim of Twilight's short monologue, and stood with polite silence to wait for her to finish. "Sorry about that, Twi." She remarked as Twilight yelped in surprise. "I just wanted to let you both know I made some breakfast. I figured you'd be hungry by now, so I made something simple."
Twilight and I both smiled at the warrior mare and followed her out of the study and back to the kitchen. Once there, I took in a deep breath, enjoying the scents of the meal that had been made for us. "That smells amazing, Spring!" I said with a smile before taking in another lungful of the pleasant aroma. "Let me guess; fried daffodils, pancakes with maple syrup and… Hmm, this last bit's kinda tricky. Some sort of potato with cheese and I think onions, so maybe some potato hash?" The olive-green mare stood with her jaw agape.
It was only a moment before Twilight trotted up to her with a giggle, and closed the dumbfounded mare's open mouth. "Blake has always had a keen nose when it comes to food." She remarked as an explanation.
Spring Leaf, to her credit, recovered quickly and shook her head in a gesture that I assumed was to clear her thoughts. "Right. That makes sense, considering he guessed my spread almost perfectly." Those last words caught my attention, and Spring Leaf giggled as she caught on to my puzzled expression. "You missed the berry topping for the pancakes and the tomatoes I put in with the potatoes. Otherwise, that was one hay of a good guess." As the freshly revived mare spoke, I grinned and moved to start brewing a pot of coffee for the day, a commodity that I was forever grateful for.
The three of us carried the meal to the dining table and set the dishes on the heat resistant, decorative trivets that always sat atop it. No sooner had we sat down and begun to plate up our own dishes than the rest of the house's occupants began to filter down from the bedrooms upstairs, mostly the Master bedroom. "Good morning, sleepy heads!" I called cheerily up to them as they made their way to the table and sat down.
Luna, who seemed particularly tired, yawned as she sat next to me, and looked to the steaming mug sitting on the table next to my plate. "We pray you tell Us there is more of that delightful elixir." She remarked, referencing the coffee she normally enjoyed with me in the mornings. I noticed she was slipping into the speech patterns she spent so much time trying to distance herself from, as she sometimes did when she was tired or distracted. "This past evening was quite fraught with unpleasant dreams that required more of Our attention than We expected." It took me a moment to realize that my lover had regressed back into using Royal pronouns to refer to herself by, a sign she was exhausted.
Noticing the truly weary state she was in, I leaned over and kissed Luna on the cheek. "Why don't you go and sleep a little more then, love? You clearly need it, and the train to Canterlot won't be leaving for a few more hours yet." I had been here long enough to have learned the basic schedule for the Ponyville station, and the first train to Canterlot wasn't set to run this early, as Celestia hadn't even raised the sun just yet. That slot was reserved for the train heading for Appleoosa and Dodge Junction, in the opposite direction. There was also a train to the Crystal empire, but it normally only ran on Tuesdays, Fridays and Sundays, as there wasn't a huge demand for travel between the Crystal Empire and Equestria proper.
My tired marefriend smiled at me. "Our thanks be to thee, dearest Blake, keeper of Our heart, but We shall…" She trailed off as she seemed to realize something. "Oh dear, am I truly so tired that I have been speaking in Olde Ponish?" She asked, her self-query punctuated by a deep yawn. "If that is the case, then I believe I shall take your advice, my love, and sleep a little longer. It will not do for me to arrive in Canterlot in such a state." Luna could have used the invigoration spell that she had cast on herself in the past, but I had advised against that some time before, as I had noticed that, while it let her stay up longer, it also wasn't perfect at replacing sleep. This imperfection in the form and function of the spell caused some issues, particularly with the ability of the recipient to focus, much as would be the case if a person or pony tried to replace sleep with coffee or other stimulants, though the effects weren't as quick to manifest themselves.
Once my clearly exhausted fiancé had left to return to the Master bedroom for more sleep, I looked to the others gathered at the table, including Mitta and Shimmer. "So, who all will be going to Canterlot today?" I asked, knowing that they were all aware of the plan to head to the Capitol city to observe the sending up of Snowdrop's final snowflake. Applejack was quick to volunteer, as was Twilight. "What about the three of you?" I asked of Mitta, Shimmer and Spring Leaf, though I was fairly certain I knew two of the answers I would receive already.
I was proven correct a moment later when Mitta gulped and shook her head alongside Shimmer's look down at the table. "Sure, I'll go Boss." Spring Leaf sounded as though she were back to her normal, chipper self as she spoke. "It sounds like fun, plus I'd like to see what the new Capitol looks like."
Mitta sighed softy, and looked up to me with an apologetic expression. "I'm sorry, Blake. I just don't feel comfortable being around that many ponies, especially if they're as uptight as you said they are. Besides, I promised Hammer Hoof I would help her out in her shop. She has a lot of orders that need filling." I had noticed that Hammer Hoof was just about the only pony outside of my home that Mitta really had any interactions with, even if I had only seen the two chat once or twice.
I smiled at her and nodded lightly. "It's ok, Mitta. I appreciate you offering to help her out while I was laid up in the hospital… again. And I'm glad to see that the two of you are getting along well enough. She has a good heart though, so I'm not surprised."
Mitta smiled gratefully at me, and Shimmer spoke. "I would like to stay here and look after your home while you're gone, Sir." She remarked, seemingly a little more confident now. "I believe it would be a good idea to have someone here. I also don't know what Canterlot may have in the way of detecting, or even repelling my kind, and if I were discovered there, it likely wouldn't end well."
Shimmer too was making a fair bit of sense, and I gave her a similar nod. "Alright, it sounds like we're all decided then. All that seems to be left to do is pack up for a few days so we can catch the train."
With that, the mares at the table dispersed, with Twilight and Derpy heading upstairs to pack while Shimmer likely headed off to find something to clean, and Mitta prepared to head to Hammer Hoof's, who was likely already hard at work, even if her shop wouldn't officially open for several more hours. That left me with Spring Leaf, who walked into the kitchen with me to clean up breakfast dishes. I cleared my throat softly as we moved about, cleaning up the mess before we left. "So… there's something I don't really understand." I remarked, waiting for the forest-themed mare to regard me, acknowledging that she was listening. "Your fur is olive green, but the fur on the book was black. Was that some aging effect, or was it dyed?" I asked, unsure.
The initial response that I got was a simple shrug from the sturdy warrior mare. "I can't really say, Boss." She stated matter-of-factly after a moment. "If I had to guess, I'd say that whoever… took it, probably dyed it to make it a color they liked."
It was a macabre thought, and not one I wanted to dwell on overly long, but it was also something that my curiosity wouldn't let me leave alone. "That makes about as much sense as anything else, I suppose." I said as I put the last of the pans into the drying rack. "Anyway, that's literal ancient history, so why don't we put those thoughts aside and get ready to leave?"
Spring Leaf nodded lightly. "Sure thing, Boss." She seemed to contemplate something for a moment. "There's something I want to know too." Her tone wasn't reassuring that it would be a happy change of subject. "The girls told me a bit about what happened to you before you came here. I want to hear about what you did to your dad."