As much as he’d wanted to, Shining Armor had parted ways with his sister on the road back to Canterlot. There were guards in Ponyville who could look out for her. The Human endured the long march without complaint, even when a crowd had gathered to gawk at the spectacle. The guards has shown them off, but ponies would talk, and rumors would spread. The news of what had happened would come out eventually.
Armor pitied whatever pony would have to make that announcement.
It would probably be him.
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It had been so long since anyone had needed imprisonment, Armor, his prisoner and his retinue had to consult a map to find the prison block. When they’d descended to the lower levels, it turned out the bars had been removed long ago and the cells converted to record storage. After a very awkward talk with the clerks in charge, they’d all turned around and looked for a garden shed to empty out.
It was the closest thing with a door they could lock.
Once they found a padlock.
And screwed on a latch so the lock had somewhere to go.
Armor graciously allowed the human a few minutes to clean up and have a bite to eat. It gave him time to rush back to his office and give the dusty records on past interrogations a last-minute once-over for advice on how to proceed.
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“No, no, no, no, no…”
Spike was idly watching Twilight tear through the library shelves, picking and discarding books one-by-one. Her selections went into two piles – the first had been handily labeled 'useful.' The second, the ‘no’ pile, was…every book she’d looked at so far.
“You know Twilight, maybe if you tell me what you’re looking for, I could help.”
“I…don’t know what I need. No, no, no, no…”
“…Then how are you going to know when you found it?”
Twilight’s horn crackled with power, and the book she’d been levitating shot upward to impact the ceiling. It stuck there even after the glow dimmed, and Twilight turned away from the shelves to flop dejectedly into a chair.
“It’s a subject that…hasn’t come up in Equestria for a very long time. I can’t find anything on it. I thought I’d find some kind of record, or even just a reference, but there’s nothing.”
“Does this have something to do with the Solar Guard visiting ponyville? Is there a monster on the loose?”
Yes, Spike. Twilight thought. There’s a monster on the loose…
She reached up to feel in own horn in sympathy. Long poems and odes, both flowery and raunchy, had been written on the horns of unicorns. She knew about the biology behind the almost crystalline structure of the bone, and a little about the way the core of it extended into the unicorn brain. She’d read almost every metaphysical primer on it, and how it drew in and interacted with magic.
And trying to imagine losing it…what would she be without it? A little piece of bone that made so many wonders possible. But when she needed it right now, there wasn’t a single shred, the tiniest fragment of a spell of any sort that could help determine the identity of a murderer.
Twilight was used to being afraid.
But being...useless…
Even Far Sight, who specialized in such things and a friend of Malachi to boot, wouldn’t be able to tell if he’d been in that house this morning. Because of the human’s strange aura, she could throw spells at him until her horn ached, and get a big…fat…nothing?
“Nothing…”
“Twilight?”
“Nothing!”
“Oh, okay.”
“That’s the answer! NOTHING!”
Spike fell over and crawled for cover as an arcane cyclone began building within the library. Twilight’s laughter shook the floorboards, and the glow from her eyes lit up the room. She began to float, buoyed by the ambient power she was unleashing, and suddenly vanished with a -pop-.
Meanwhile…
Preceded by the sound of her horrifying laughter, Twilight burst back into reality in the dining room of the North Yoink watchtower. Protective wards sizzled and cracked and did nothing to block her arrival. The ponies, hardened soldiers all, were frozen in shock at the sight of Celestia’s apprentice who appeared among them while cloaked in amethyst flames.
“OhheyFarSightIneedtotalktoyoulet’sGO!”
Twilight and Far Sight winked out of sight, leaving the rest of the Everfree watchponies to sit in shock just long enough for their dinner to get cold.
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“So…”
After being abducted through time and space by a madpony, Far Sight trotted alongside the now-calmer Twilight Sparkle through the streets of Ponyville. The sun would soon set, and despite the earlier pyrotechnics, the majority of ponies were off the streets and likely to be busy tucking themselves in.
“What did you want to talk about?”
“Nothing!”
“Um…”
“Oh, I didn’t mean that there was nothing I wanted to talk to you about. I wanted to talk to you about something, which just happened to be the absence of something, so I guess I wanted to talk to you about nothing after all!”
Utterly confused, but following the unicorn on sheer momentum, Far Sight soon found herself standing in front of a small cottage with a pair of the Solar Guard standing watch. It was only then that Twilight seemed to sober.
“Far Sight, this is where…it happened.”
“Twilight, I want to help, but I told you before that my magic doesn’t work on Malachi. I’ve heard that even the Princesses couldn’t manage to enchant him with a simple translation spell until a month after he arrived!”
“Ah, but that’s what I’m counting on! There are very few suspects, and if you cast a clairvoyance spell, and find nothing, that tells us something, you see? Err…what I mean is, process of elimination!”
“Yes…yes! I understand! Brilliant!”
After a few minutes of swapping thaumaturgical equations to determine the ideal spell to use, and another ten minutes of wrangling with the stone-faced guards, the two unicorns stepped carefully into the empty house.
The guards had cleaned up somewhat, clearing a path that they followed to the bedroom. Twilight’s breath was stuck in her throat, and while she really didn’t expect to find a corpse waiting for her, the dried blood was enough to make her step out of the room for a breath. She kept her thoughts on the spells in her mind, and as far away from the blood on the ceiling as possible. She did not want to know what had been required for it to get up there.
“Are you ready?”
“…Do it.”
Far Sight’s own aura was…strange. It was blue and faded, like her blind eyes, but there was a depth to it that seemed to make the room’s shape twist and grow in strange ways as her spell encompassed it. Twilight supported her with Clover’s Ambient Amplifier, a spell normally used to filter out stray magical influences during delicate spellwork. Ironhorn was a unicorn and had died a sudden and violent death, so there was sure to be a strong imprint of his last moments. She just had to sort it out from among the currents of magic from the rest of the world.
Twilight tugged at the threads the spell envisioned for her. A prickle of old lightning was carefully grounded. Her nose wrinkled at the bitter tang of medical magic, and practically swam through the fertility wafting in from the large number of Earth Ponies that lived and farmed nearby. She could pick out Applejack’s own work, apple and sweat and a touch of hay, mixed with a tiny current that was gleaming and sharp on her tongue. Rarity.
Twilight held the sense-memories of her friends close, drinking as much as she dared to gain strength without becoming distracted. Feeling lighter and warmer, she gently pushed them away and continued her search for the taste of murder.
If they took too long, the wash of magic that came when Luna raised the moon might destroy what they were looking for, but between the two of them, the image soon came into focus.
“I never thought I’d be so glad to see something so horrible…”
Steeling herself, Twilight opened her eyes. On the bed, a silhouette that could only belong to a human half-sat on the outline of an old unicorn. His hands were on his Ironhorn’s throat, and his weight alone mush have stolen the breath that wasn't strangled away. Ironhorn was old, but his death had taken time enough to deeply stain this room with pain and fear.
As she studied the grisly sight, a tiny part of her mind noted that this murder didn’t have much taste at all. Everything she felt had come from Ironhorn. Had the human not felt anything at all, at the moment of murder? In the next moment, the image rippled and vanished, drawn into a mirror Far Sight had insisted they bring along. It would capture and preserve the memory for other unicorns to pore over.
Their duty was done. The room was quiet and still once again, and there were no more words as they stepped outside to let the guards bar and block the door once more.
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A little while later, Far Sight was sleeping, hopefully soundly, in the library’s guest room while Twilight paced. A bit of dragonfire had sent the mirror and a quick message on its way. She was sure that it would exonerate Malachi. His presence would have surely disrupted the currents of magic to the point that the royal unicorns would recognize if he’d been anywhere near the house at the time of the murder.
The response was curt – there was no longer any reason to hold Malachi, and he would be released shortly. After a detailed examination, the image was determined to closely match the human named Bruce, and the pegasi were now out in force to search for him. Twilight ignored the briefness of the message to carefully and quietly dance on the spot. They’d done it. A friend was out of danger. A terrible day had been brought to an end on an upswing. Twilight could relax as she slid into bed, a little sore after such detailed spellcasting. Armor would catch the killer, and all would be right in Equestria once again.
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A dozen kilometers away, a squadron of Pegasi circled over a nondescript patch of forest. Snap Shot signaled the dive, following the lights set below to guide them in. A local pony had called it in, they said. Out foraging in the woods, he’d tripped over something and ran back to town as far as his legs could carry him.
The guards stepped well away as Snap Shot spread his wings and brought them down hard. A long and steady gust kicked up leaves and blasted away loose soil, revealing what had been hastily covered over in the shallow pit.
“Call the castle. Tell them we’ve found Bruce.”