Difficult Castle

Starswirl tells me that a wizard my age should be able to navigate the castle without having to stop. He walks the euclidean staircases and yawning hallways with aged confidence, bending with the spaces as they twist and contort. “Thinking too much in the castle can be the end of a wizard,” he says, and I believe him. The more I try to wrap my mind around this place, the more I can feel it try to fold me into shapes that have never existed.

Starswirl walks me down the main hallway that leads sometimes to the alchemy wing, sometimes to the garden. The castle knows your intentions, but neglects to give you a hint of its own. I think Starswirl prefers it that way.

“This place is old, girl. Older than any of us by lifetimes upon lifetimes. You should be grateful.”

I bow and tell him that I am. “What will we be learning today?” I ask.

“We?” he says. “The only thing I will be learning is how to stuff that empty head of yours with theories and practice. You will be learning how to combat the dark and its fiends.”

He leads me through a door that twists entirely on a strange axis and I feel sunlight bloom over my face. We are in the garden, and it is beautiful. Hedges warp with impossible geometries. Flowers fractal with infinite petals. Birds fly in sharp, looping patterns overhead. The longer I watch, the more I feel the castle try to swallow me whole.

***

“Darkness,” Starswirl says, “was the first thing to know and be known. It is beyond anything that anypony can comprehend. It was born before time and waited solely for life to be born so that it could smother us.” He lifts a coin with his magic and sends it in a brief orbit. I listen to it sing through the air until it comes back into view. “Darkness is a cycle that is completed with such frequency and such haste that it cannot be measured. It is constant, and like beasts, it will hunt you. One day, it will take me away, and all that will be left is what I have taught.”

“How do we fight it?” I ask.

Starswirl coughs, and he sounds rickety and fragile like he is a crumbling building standing on the last of its supports. It goes on for a long time and there is spittle in his beard by the end of it. His eyes show a lost gleam.

“Viciously,” he says. “You must believe that your fight with it will last as long as darkness lasts itself. It is the same belief that will let you walk through this castle on your own one day, girl.”

“Is that how I know I’ll be ready?” I ask him.

“Perhaps. You must find the answer to that yourself. Now come along. I am tired. You have learned much for one day.”

***

Our lessons are slow and the progress of learning the castle is slower. I heard once that this place used to be filled with wizards and walking tomes and scrolls that fluttered from place to place on their own. Now, we walk along only cobwebs and the evidence that life once bloomed here.

The dining hall seats only ghosts, now.

We eat soup slowly close to the fire as the room undulates in glacial waves. It feels like we are in the guts of a great, folding monster. Starswirl lifts a shaking spoon to his lips, and half of its contents spill into his beard.

“I learned the path to the scrying room,” I tell him. Starswirl only nods. A pea makes a slow descent down the wiry hairs of his beard. The room forms a sudden crick, putting me 90 degrees from him so that I am looking down at his wide hat. It is so large that I cannot see the stallion beneath it. The room suddenly feels like it is filled by only me.

“Sir Starswirl?” I ask when the loneliness feels too much to bear.

“What is it, girl?” he grumbles.

“Why did you pick me?”

“What new nonsense is this?”

“Surely there were other wizards who were more talented than I.”

“There were.”

He takes another sip. I can hear soup splashing on the table.

“Then why me?”

“Because fighting darkness is not about talent. If it were, I would have won that battle. I picked you because you have tenacity, girl.”

“Because I wouldn’t leave you alone?”

“Precisely.”

“Surely you jest.”

“I rarely do.”

“Why is it only us in this castle, then?”

“I believe you know the answer to that question.”

“Because they weren’t tenacious enough?”

Even at our strange angle, I know he is smiling.

“Perhaps there is something in that head of yours, Celestia.” This is the first time he’s ever called me by my name. It is a moment I know that I will keep perfectly preserved in my head. “Now finish your soup, girl. It is getting cold and my bones aren’t aching any less.”

***

In the sixth month of our training, Starswirl disappears.

It is the feeling of utter solitude that alarms me to it, a jolt of electric loneliness that bolts me awake and into a panic in the dark.

I take to the hallways, trotting, then galloping through the infinite loops and stretched corridors that toy with my movement, splitting distances before cruelly multiplying them. I go everywhere and nowhere at the same time. His name echoes mockingly off the stones for minutes on end after I call it out.

Torches that once warmly lit this place in warm oranges become pinpricks of light, then nothing. I use my own light to find myself being cornered by this structure.

The walls are closer together. The doors get smaller. The roof grazes the tip of my horn. I manage to squeeze myself out and into the garden before the entire structure compresses me into nothing.

“Starswirl!” I yell again, and this time there is no echo because the space unravels into something so large that its proportions become planetary entities in their own right, leaving me standing on the surface of what I think used to be a leaf or perhaps a single blade of grass.

The only thing I can make sense of is the light of the moon that shines down from a place that would take eons to get to. But that only lasts for so long as what must be a cloud moves overhead, snuffing out the pale silver-blue that bathed this place.

Darkness reigns supreme.

I myself begin to break into pieces, small bits of myself giving in to this great and ominous being that aims to loosen the facets that hold me together. I think with desperation as my only fuel, spiraling, spiraling.

In the dark, I scatter into a million, million pieces.

I am my own galaxy of lost parts.

Until one of those parts glimpses an idea all on its own. An idea that is so wild, so brazen that it wills me to take this chance without a second thought.

Thinking too much can be the end of a wizard.

Through the dark and its infinite space, its infinite misery, I draw a leyline between the collection that is me and the unrisen sun that I know is on the other side of this void.

With a single thread of burning will, and perhaps stupidity, I pull.

I tell it to move, and it does not listen.

So I do it again.

And again.

And again.

I tell the sun that it and I are the only light in this universe, and that I have seen what it is to be alone in it. To come be a piece that fights the dark together. That it is better to die beside someone than no one at all.

And it moves.

Slowly, glacially, painfully through the cosmos, through the aether and the heavens until its light crests the sky above and with it its warmth. Its companionship.

The garden blazes to life. The possibilities begin to fade. Space starts to behave itself, settling into something normal for the first time since I set hoof in this castle.

Dawn is upon me and with it comes clarity and the fortune of self. I am whole again.

Birds sing, frogs croak, and there is the slow stomping of a hoof on stone.

It is Starswirl. He looks tired as usual, but there is a new glimmer in his eyes.

“Well done, Celestia,” he says. “Well done.”