I felt the unnatural suppression upon my emotions once again. This time, however, I felt something inherently wrong. I tried to pinpoint the feeling, but I couldn’t. I tried to move, but I found myself unable to.
I felt a natural feeling of comfortable calm wash over me, and the world seemed to build itself around me. I felt fur against my side, before I involutionarily moved my head up, but not by my command. My eyes focused on a larger Princess Celestia, who was looking down at me with a smile.
“Are you ready for your first lesson, Sunset?” She asked, levitating a small book, titled ‘Compilation of Magic, Level 1’ over to the pillow. At that moment, I understood exactly what was going on, and tried to seperate myself from the memory of the filly, to take it in without letting it feel like it was me.
It was not too hard, and I soon found myself mentally seperated from the memory, looking through the young Sunset’s point of view as if it were a television. “Yes!” the young filly squealed, rapidly switching into bubbly excitement, and forcing me to struggle to ignore the rush of forced emotion.
“I see. You seem very exited for this.” memory-Celestia chuckled, “I suppose we could get started.”
Memory-Sunset forced another, more intense rush of excitement through me, and proceeded to stand, followed by a four-hooved hop. With the point of view forced upon me, the sensation of all this movement being done without my input was very weird, and I concluded that this would probably traumatize anyone with a weaker mind.
“If I’m going to teach you anything,” memory-Celestia continued, “You’re going to have to sit still long enough to focus on the lesson.” memory-Sunset stopped all too fast, and found herself tipsy from dizziness. She fell over, and I felt a blush form on her face, followed by a rush of forced calm and what must have been the sensation of embarrassment.
This felt all too convincing, and I felt like I could easily get lost in this, but the emotions running through me carried that distinct feeling of wrongness, and that fact made it easier to keep myself seperate from the memory I knew wasn’t my own, and hold a seperate thought process.
Memory-Sunset settled back into her previous position, but before the book cracked open, everything seemed to… fade out? However it happened, I lost all connection to the emotion from that memory, returning to the suppressed state I was growing used to in this state of mind.
It didn’t last long, as I felt emotion wash over me all over again, this time a combination of anger and sadness, and the world built up around me to reveal an older form of Sunset, though she must have been in the middle of puberty or something at around this time, in an argument with a tired, saddened looking Celestia.
As I resisted the tug of anger, which proved to be quite hard, I listened in on the event. “I want to learn the next tier of spells, but you keep putting it off! I told you I’m ready, and I meant it!”
This memory-Celestia was quick to respond, “I want to believe you are ready, but until you can prove it to me, you are not ready.” She sounded hurt. Badly hurt, even.
The anger flared to be even more intense than the excitement from before, almost leading me into a blind mental rage. I barely managed to resist it, but I managed to gain enough ground to pay attention to the conversation, though barely. “HOW DO I PROVE THAT I AM READY!? I CAN’T PROVE MYSELF IF I DON’T KNOW HOW!” memory-Sunset screamed to the point that her, and collectively my, throat hurt, making it harder to focus on fighting the bonfire of forced emotions I was being twirled on a spit over. I felt blood start to seep down my collective chin, signifying that memory-Sunset must have really made some noise.
“I’m sorry.” memory-Celestia responded simply, but sadly. Then the memory faded back out once more.
As I had concluded to be standard, the world started to reform again. This time, it was a large hallway of books… a library. This time, the emotions were primarily resolution and determination, but with a hint of fear. I found this much less distracting than the other emotions, so I didn’t resist it.
This memory-Sunset was reading under candlelight, taking an occasional glance at a pair of double doors located at the end of this bookshelf. I made myself catch the major details of what she was reading, as well as some of the minor details that looked to be more important than others.
As I pieced it together, I figured out that this must have been one of the memories leading up to the mirror incident, with details like ‘dimensional portal’, ‘opens once every thirty moons’, and a few lines detailing the theories of the consequences of entering the mirror prematurely, including exactly what I had seen when it happened.
I wasn’t able to catch too much more, as memory-Sunset heard the door open, and hurriedly replaced the book as her fear spiked, surprising and overwhelming me with the emotion, before it all fell apart.
I found myself back in the thin strip of hallway, with the feeling of wrongness all but gone. The fear remained, though, and was so intense that I couldn’t even lock up, my body once more falling to the floor feeling as if I were made of Jelly. I still couldn’t move, but now I knew it wasn’t from a lack of control.
I couldn’t even blink from the artificial fear, and my eyes started to water. I was adjusted to separating my emotions at this point, so I wasn’t truly emotionally paralyzed, as weird as it was and felt. I saw a blur of white legs, right in front of me.
“Hush, my child, mommy’s here for you.” Wait, WHAT? Daughter of the Princess? “Shh…” She cooed.
I saw a purple blob float behind her blurry white frame, before I felt her…
…did she just pick me up by the nape?
The more I find out about my predicament, the worse it seems to get.
Dammit.