Some indeterminable time in the past, the lantern light had expired. As the wizard huddled in the darkness and tried to confront the base urges raging and storming inside his deeper mind, he realized he was terribly scared. Not just that he would lose the upcoming trial and be banished from town--or worse--before he could save it, but he was scared he was not strong enough to overcome himself. His fear looped back around itself like a knot and tightened with every pull. He feared he could not subsume his desire for Mareco, and thus he could not reunite with the Harmony, and thus he could not subsume his desire for Mareco; around and around in his mind those two thoughts spun, tormenting him more with every repetition. Thusly shaken, he did not dare pry open his deeper mind and instead he filled his head with memories of the Academy, and the finer points of rhetoric gleamed from the magnificent tomes housed there.
But like the paradox it was, the fear gripped him, perhaps helped on its way by the diluted hemlock coursing through his veins. He did not want to think about the notion he could not conquer himself, yet he could not stop thinking about it either, almost like his deeper mind was goading him into confronting it because it was confident it would win the struggle.
The greatest battle we will ever fight, he had once said, is the fight for control of ourselves.
I'm such a raging hypocrite.
What I said is true, no doubt, and yet I made it sound like I was the victor. Until today I thought I was, but with one ghost from my past I fall to pieces. Perhaps I wasn't the victor as I thought, I only merely deluded myself I was. That would certainly explain why I haven't reunited with the Harmony in seven years.
Such were the thoughts in his head for all the uncountable hours he spent in total darkness and solitude, until at last the oaken door creaked open again. A slanted ray of light from the corridor spilled in through the doorway and landed on Starswirl, who shielded his weak eyes.
"It's time," Ettin Arcadia said.
Starswirl planted his hooves on the ground and pushed himself up, but the tea had not wholly countered the hemlock's effects. His sluggish, half-sedated body flailed around before collapsing back to the hard dirt. The brawny stallion seethed, dragged the wizard to his quivering hooves, and pulled him out of the storage room. They stumbled along a stone corridor with an earthen floor.
To keep himself calm and give himself a modicum of focus and control, Starswirl repeated the names of the five attributes as a sort of litany against his terror:
Honesty, Fidelity, Generosity, Merriment, Loving-Kindness.
But no matter how many times he repeated them, the path back to the Harmony's embrace was still denied to him. He knew the words, but what they represented were alien to an addled brain wholly at the mercy of a deeper mind clinging so tightly and selfishly to the past. It would not allow him to see the Harmony's radiance manifesting itself in the material world, and to his eyes the material remained material.
Think, you foal, think!
Ettin hauled Starswirl up a set of stone stairs, where his wobbling knees gave out repeatedly; his cannons ached from constantly bashing against the steps. Ettin threw a door at the top open. The bright light beyond nearly blinded Starswirl. As his eyes reluctantly focused, he stumbled out into the large room that had just last night borne witness to the wondrous proof of the world revolving under him.
Always flowing, always in motion, he thought. As the world is, so must I be.
The heavy stares of four hundred ponies fell on him. Squinting against the bright light and the hemlock dulling his eyes, he noticed the benches had been dragged away from the wall and arranged in rows on either side of the room. The only two ponies not seated were Carmine and Clover, who instead stood against the back wall. Even though Starswirl knew it was futile, he reached out with the Harmony to see if it had miraculously reappeared.
It had not.
But he didn't need the universal connection to know how the townfolk felt, for it was plainly written on their faces: scorn and fear mostly, but some had softer features that displayed mere apprehensiveness about the whole thing. All of them, though, were engaged in either idle gossip or vague veiled condemnations.
Ettin led the wizard directly in front of a podium erected against the back wall. Orrin Tin stood behind it and faced the benches. The verdant stallion made a violent foreleg motion Starswirl took to mean 'Don't move'. The wizard found the task hard because of his body threatening to give out at any moment, but he gave it his best.
"Can somepony get him a chair?!" Jack Apple called from behind him.
"Nopony else gets a chair when they're on trial," Orrin Tin said, "so's I don't see why he should be getting any special favors. Now, can I have a bit of quiet, please?"
The murmuring died off and everypony's eyes went to the podium. The wizard tried to kindle love and kinship for the silver stallion, but found that he could not. The only thing in his heart was a resentment his connection with the Harmony had been stolen that paradoxically further divorced Starswirl from it.
Orrin Tin cleared his throat and declared, "Now, to the next order of business--"
Somepony's hooves scuffled as they abruptly stood up, then Lockhorn Plenty shouted, "No, not on to the next order of business. What about my fence, Orrin? Your little terror and her posse done snuck onto my property last night and started kicking it until it was a frightful mess!"
The silver stallion at the podium rolled his eyes. "You ain't got a shred of proof my Golden Vein did that."
He gestured to where she sat; as Starswirl turned his flushed, sweating head to look over his own shoulder, he spotted her in the front row beaming back at her father.
"Not a lick of proof," Orrin said.
Bitterly, Starswirl thought, Hypocritical much?
"I want to put it to a vote!" Lockhorn said.
Orrin Tin glowered at the crowd, as if to remind them he would be paying very close attention to whoever put their hooves in the air. "Alright, fine then. Who here thinks this is a matter to be settled by three? C'mon, don't be shy now!"
Starswirl glanced over his shoulder again and saw clearly how divided the town was: one third who had an air of farming folk raised their hooves instantly; another third with the appearance of rough and tumble miners kept their hooves down with set looks on their faces; while the last third looked undecided and split their indecision almost evenly. However, the count fell short of a one-half majority and Orrin Tin brusquely brushed the matter aside.
He cleared his throat. "Now, can we get on to real matters?"
Lockhorn Plenty stood defiantly for a moment, then dropped back down into his seat.
"Right then!" Orrin called cheerfully. "I'm sure many of you know we've got a little, heh heh, visitor with us. Now, he alleges his name is, uh, Starswirl? Do I have that right?"
The wizard tried to speak up, only to find his tongue in an uncooperative mood.
"What's that?" Tin asked, cupping his ear with his hoof. "Want to speak up a little louder? Or have you got something you want to be hiding?"
Very clever, Starswirl thought.
Summoning all his energy, the wizard raised his head and haltingly declared, "I am Stregone Starswirl, of the Republic of Varnice."
Orrin Tin replied, "Thank you kindly, but we didn't ask for your life story."
The townfolk tittered to themselves, and like a candle being lit in the darkness Starswirl realized with a jolt that was his way out. As the thoughts came alive in his brain he felt the sluggishness start to lift; he didn't know whether to attribute it to the hemlock finally being countered by the tea or his newfound confidence in himself, but his thoughts flowed freer than they had done in hours. He realized he must now put aside the guise of the mystic and don the garb of the scientist. Even if their methodologies heavily contrasted with each other, both made paeans to the mysteries of the universe and sought to explain them. The farther away he traveled from the Academy, the more he had lost himself in the numinous characteristics of the Harmony's mathematical perfection; slowly the knowledge--as opposed to the mere fact of possessing such information--that the Harmony could be manipulated like any other science had slipped away from him. He must not treat the five attributes as a mystical invocation, but rather as a scientific equation that needed to be mathematically solved.
Like the dawn of a new sun, hope came over him as he realized, between the division in the townsponies and the power of science, he might just stand a chance at winning this.