What Hath Joined Together

Chapter 19

                                                                                 What Lies Above

"Urgh..."

Letting the crystal fall to the desk, Twilight shook her head. No matter what she did to the white quartzite crystal, how she wore it, or what she thought while wearing it, she could not use it in the same manner that Amethyst had. Other than levitating it like any other object, it seemed unresponsive to any of her magical efforts.

Twilight jotted down more notes on a scrap of parchment. With a sigh, she looked up at her increasingly messier desk. One chunk of the white quartzite lay beneath her microscope, another beneath her magnifying glass. Bits of a torchgem lay next to their counterparts. The hammer and chisel were crossed uselessly over each other beside scattered parchment, translation guides, and one very ancient book with yellowed pages.

Twilight glanced over at the book from the library. Never would she have guessed that the Old Equestrian tongue would give her so much trouble. A little over two days since its discovery and she wasn't even halfway finished translating it.

Luckily, Twilight was not one to be bested by any book.

Twilight set her notes down and looked between the two crystals. I can't seem to get the torchgem to respond to my magic, either. I can't even get it to light! So how did Cadence and Shining get it to light up the hallways? And why does it only light up at night? Maybe somepony has to activate it? I'll have to ask one of the servants.

After taking a seat at her desk, Twilight decided that a quick break was in order. Her prior fatigue had vanished in the face of such an exciting discovery.

As she sipped her latest cup of coffee—the servants kept taking the old cups and bringing her new ones, so she had long lost count—her thoughts turned back to the match between Flash and Amethyst. While the scholar in her appreciated the demonstration of the algem's powers the most, the mare in her had... other ideas.

Snapping her wings back down, Twilight pushed those thoughts away, then looked down at her translation notes. The passage that she had struggled with last night had been fully translated, and, using inferences from the context of the book so far, had even been grammatically revised:

The day held no remorse towards the serpent, though the night did not feel the same. The serpent charmed both day and night, though the skies themselves were not pleased with him. But at the great meeting of the skies in the horizon, there came a new dawn, and the serpent was welcomed into the forest. Then, the night came to know the serpent, but not as the day knew him.

It reads like either a fairytale, something from a foal's storybook, or an allegory for something greater. And I would have thought the former, if it hadn't been for this, which I discovered this morning... Nightmare 'Boring' 'I don't need to hear you right now' 

Once Twilight set her mug down, she flipped through the tome to a particular page—only a few pages prior to her current bookmark. She replaced magic with her forehoof, smoothing out the yellowed parchment, until it lay flat.

There, at the very top-right corner of the page, was a small symbol.

When she first laid eyes upon it, Twilight, red-eyed and frazzle-maned, had grabbed the nearest tepid cup of coffee, gulped it down, then slapped herself.

The symbol had remained.

Quintessence, Twilight thought as she ran her forehoof over the symbol—an enlarged version of it this time, which she had carefully drawn herself. The primordial symbol of the ancient study of alchemy. A lost science, yes, and a very flawed one at that, but...