“Never answer an anonymous letter.”

- Poni Berra

“How could you answer it? You wouldn’t know where to send the answer!”

-Hasty Harness

Twilight Sparkle was a pony of routine. She could wake up without an alarm spell, attend to her morning ablutions, prepare the library, and open for business all on schedule. She didn’t even need a checklist. It allowed Spike to sleep in as he preferred, and kept her on schedule.

The rays of the sun beamed in through the window, warming and comforting her, and making the dust motes dance in and out of the light. From her perch on the second floor, she focused her attention on the door lock and felt her magic slip it out of the groove. It was nine o’clock, and another day had begun.

The staccato rapping at the door shook her out of routine and reverie. None of her regular borrowers or researchers would knock on the door when they knew the library was open. Indeed, nopony in Ponyville would. So who was it?

Twilight opened her mouth to yell, “It’s open!” but remembered Spike and went down to open it herself.

The stallion there in front of her—no, not worthy of the title of stallion, barely out of colthood—stood shuffling his hooves and fidgeting, never looking in the same place for more than a half second. His coat was the color of corn silk and his mane was cropped short. As near as Twilight could tell, somepony had just slapped a bowl on top of his head and shaved everything else. His bangs covered a good portion of a squat horn.

He turned to face Twilight at last, displaying the largest, thickest pair of spectacles that she had ever seen. “Can I help you?” she asked.

“Yes, I’m looking for…Princess Twilight! Oh, wow, it’s really you, Princess Twilight! Um, your majesty, I mean, um, I’m honored to meet you.”

“Calm down. You don’t need to kowtow.”

“To what?” he said. “Oh, wait, I know that word. Right, I should expect you to be smart like that. I would like to—that is, er, may I come in?”

Twilight tried to put a laugh and softness in her voice. “The library is open to the public.”

As he walked by, she took note of his cutie mark, a quill pen and glasses. Though it was impossible to tell, of course, she got the impression that it had appeared only recently.

He rotated in place, his mouth agape at the quantity or the organization of the books. Twilight approached with heavy footfall to get his attention.

“Oh, right. So I came across something in research—“

“Hang on. What’s your name?”

He rubbed his hoof against his side, offering it for a shake or a bump, then decided that he would be better served by bowing, then gave up on both. “I’m Hasty, your highness. Twilight. Princess Twilight, sorry. Hasty Harness. I’m a scholar at Canterlot. Student, really. I mean, I’m not in your class by any means, but I do research.”

“I got that. Really, you don’t have to be nervous.”

From above, Twilight heard the sound of blankets being tossed aside, followed by the clatter of something being dropped in the bathroom. A minute later Spike, rubbing the sleep out of his eyes, ambled down the staircase with a toothbrush clutched in his claw.

“Twilight? Who’s this guy?”

Hasty resumed his expression of awe, but this time it was more wide-eyed than open-mouthed. “A d-d-d-dragon?!”

“Yes, Spike is—“ Twilight began, but was cut off by the scrape of Hasty’s hooves sliding across the wooden floor of the library.

“Stay back, Princess! I will fight off the dragon even if it takes my life!” He charged his horn with sparkling light.

“Look, Hasty was it? Spike isn’t dangerous. Well, he can be, but not to me.”

Hasty pulled off his saddlebag and let it flop to the ground. He fired a bolt of magic at Spike. It bounced off his leathery skin and struck one of the bookshelves, dissipating and shaking the books out of their perfect wall alignment.

“Princess, take to the sky before he captures you and takes you back to his lair! It’s what dragons do!”

With amusement in his eyes, Spike spread his mouth into a grin. But his expression fell when Hasty fired a second bolt. This one went off target and struck Spike on the claw, causing the toothbrush he was holding to drop to the ground.

“Really? Dude? I’m going to have to wash that now. Seriously, what is your problem?”

Twilight stepped in front of Hasty and spread her wings to make a stronger barrier. “Spike, go upstairs. I’m going to have to try to take care of this. Now, listen. Spike is my assistant. I’ve known him ever since he was born. He’s technically a dragon, but he’s harmless. Stop antagonizing him.”

The whine of the next spell that Hasty was preparing to cast tailed off to silence, and he stared at her. “You have a dragon for an assistant? That is just amazing! You’re incredible.”

“Mister Harness, was there a reason you came here?”

“Oh, right.” He turned back to his saddlebag on the floor, which had scattered scrolls in a haphazard arrangement in and around it. Pulling them all back into slots and pockets, he said, “I came across something in my research, and I had to bring it to you.”

“Why don’t we go into one of the private study rooms to discuss it?”

Ponies were starting to file in to the library, dropping off books for return and browsing around for others, or just taking them off the shelf to read. Twilight gave a small sigh and put the extra work she had to do out of her mind.

The library, on initial view, looked much smaller on the inside than it did on the outside, but there were many hidden wings and rooms, to say nothing of secret panels and alcoves containing mysterious books.  Twilight had always felt at home there. If she, given a hollow tree, had been tasked to design a library, it would have come out just as Golden Oak had. The shelves followed the contours of the wood which spoke of the decades of growth. Whoever it was had worked with the tree, not against it, even when they had built the projecting wing over the roots. Twilight led Hasty to this wing and paused to look out the large window covering the entirety of the back wall. With plenty of natural light, the ponies had the perfect environment for intellectual discourse.

“Now,” Twilight said, “begin at the beginning.”

Hasty reached into his saddlebag and pulled out a scroll wrapped tightly in a red ribbon. Twilight could see the yellowed edges of the paper and concluded that it was very old. As was the case for many such scrolls, it bore a mark of identification on the outside. This was wise. A pile of scrolls could be identical, and if a pony wanted to pick one out, she didn’t want to have to open each one.

He did not open this one, but only lay it down on the table between them.

“A while back I was doing research on the Tale of the Three Tribes as part of a project for Hearts and Hooves Day, when I—“

“Hearth’s Warming Eve.”

“What?” he said. “I mean, I beg your pardon, Princess, but what did you say?”

“Hearth’s Warming Eve. You said that you were researching the Tale of the Three Tribes for Hearts and Hooves Day, but it’s a tale associated with Hearth’s Warming Eve.”

Hasty stared out the window. “Oh!” He drew out the syllable for a long count. “That does make a lot of sense!”

Twilight let her mouth drop, but then she waved a hoof and said, “Go on.”

“Well, as I said, I was doing research on the Tale of the Three Tribes, and—you know that story?”

“I think everypony knows that story.”

Fiddling among the items in his saddlebag, Hasty was making more of a racket than the library was used to, and Twilight’s eyes drifted toward the clock. “It all began with a mysterious blizzard that overtook the land and threatened to topple the peace that the three tribes had, precarious though it was.”

“Yes, I know.” Twilight raised her voice in intensity if not in volume. “What does that have to do with you?”

“Ah, yes, see, I was trying to fill in the end of the story.”

“What do you mean? We all know the end of the story.”

“Do we?” For a moment, Hasty had an edge to his voice, as if he were in a study meeting trying to figure out the best way to proceed on a project. But then he came back to himself and resumed his rambling. “That is, I always wondered how it went from the cave, where Smart Cookie, Pansy, and Clover the Clever formed their friendship, to the formal society we have. And where did Princess Celestia and Princess Luna come from? Were they part of the tribes? Were they from outside? In my opinion, there is a lot left out.”

For the first time, Twilight was more interested in what he was saying than in getting him out. She looked him over once more, but saw no signs of a great original thinker. Of course, she herself tried to look more friendly than smart, so looks could deceive. “Did you come up with this idea yourself?”

“Yes, actually. I had questions about the story and nopony could answer them.”

“All right.”

Hasty just sat there for a moment before he realized he was being invited to continue. “So, right, it’s difficult to find accounts of the time other than the Tale, and that makes some sense, since if they were busy setting up the land of Equestria, they didn’t really have time to record that they were setting up the land of Equestria. The records I have found were more from after things were established, and were on the order of, ‘My grandsire told me these stories about his grandam, and I decided to write them down.’ But some of those said that there were some scrolls from that time still in the archives, so I went there.”

Twilight had a vision of him tearing around among the scrolls that she had spent so much time on, and she wondered if the archivists were still recovering. “And that was when you found this,” she said, laying her hoof on the scroll that still sat rolled up between them.

“Yes. I had to spend a good deal of time restoring the message on the outside of the scroll, and then translating it.”

“Translating? From all I know, the ancient Equestrians spoke the same language we do. There were a few oddities such as ‘thee’ and ‘thou’ in place of ‘you,’ but other than that it should have been intelligible. Are you sure you didn’t just have it upside down?”

“No, that wasn’t it.” Hasty’s ears picked up, then drooped. “Oh, you’re making fun of me, aren’t you? I’m sorry, I know that I’m not that good at this. But I’m telling you, translation was necessary.”

“I’m sorry.” Twilight looked over at him, hanging his head. She tried to see the scene from his perspective. Coming to see a princess, a name famous for research, a larger-than-life figure, it had to be overwhelming. She rolled her eyes and wished inside that she could get past her first impressions. Even though he was annoying, it was understandable. “All right, tell me about the translation. Please tell me that you didn’t actually write it on the back of the scroll.”

“Certainly not. I know all about preserving the past unaltered. No, here are my notes.”

He floated out of his bag another, more contemporary scroll, and Twilight got to compare the two. The original text was indeed in Equestrian, but it didn’t make any sense. It was gibberish. But on the newer scroll, amidst dozens of crossouts and scribblings, there was a message.

“You didn’t translate this,” she said. “You decoded it. It’s like a cryptoquote that some ponies do for fun. Incredible work” But her mind was focused on the text itself.

When her eyes lit upon the writer, Twilight gasped and dropped the paper back toward the table. She and Hasty both tried to catch it in their magic fields. The purple and the yellow clashed to make a white, and each of them withdrew their magic just as fast as they had extended it. The paper landed on the table with a soft tap.

“This is incredible!” she said. “We have almost nothing from Clover the Clever. If these are really her words…you ran a dating spell on it?”

“What?! I don’t know those—oh, you mean to find how old it is. Well, in truth, I can’t detect more than a few hundred years; it’s really a precision spell, you know.”

“Do you have any objection if I run one?”

Hasty oriented the scroll horizontally between them. “Go ahead. It’s not mine personally. It belongs to the archive.”

Twilight focused. It had been a while since she had cast this spell herself. Picking it up just as a piece of paper was one thing, but actually feeling the essence of the scroll was more taxing on her horn. She had to send a pulse of magic through the fourth dimension and try to pick out a dim image of when the scroll was first written. Once the pulse came back to her horn, she ran through some mathematical calculations in her head.

“It’s definitely over a thousand years old. Closer to eleven hundred. That doesn’t prove that Clover the Clever actually wrote it, but it’s evidence. If only we knew exactly when those events happened. I’m going to go ahead and open it.”

Still fearful of damaging the scroll, she took two books from a nearby shelf and placed on over top of the end. Then she rolled it out slowly like a poster, landing the other book at the other end to prevent it from curling back up.

“Whoa! This is an even bigger mystery.” Hasty stood up on his chair and put his front hooves on the table. With a bird’s-eye view, he pored over the scroll, which was nothing but a mass of purple ink. “Why would Clover the Clever want you to have a scroll that looks like it was used as a blotter?”

“We don’t know that it is for me. Didn’t you consider that the ‘new princess’ referred to might just as easily be Princess Cadance?”

“But she was already a princess before I knew her. You’re the only one who I found out about becoming a princess.”

Twilight pulled her attention away from the scroll to stare at Hasty again. “Did you think the writer of the scroll would know that about you?”

“Oh, good point again. But even so, what would she have done with nothing but purple ink?”

“Maybe not what I can do. I’ve seen this shade of purple before.” Her tone had a meaning and a purpose that Hasty could hear.

“You have?”

“Yes. It’s the same substance that was used in a potion that Zecora showed me once. And only alicorn magic can change it from purple to white. I’m going to have to try the same spell.”

Now it was Twilight who climbed up on the table and stared down. Hasty pulled back as Twilight prepared her dark magic. Clearly he had never seen this type of magic before, but Twilight couldn’t worry about that as she concentrated. The purple bubbles gave way to a black beam that scanned over the paper. She ended the spell with a snap and panted with fatigue.

Hasty’s voice shook as he got back into his chair. “That scared me a little. But it worked! At least it seems like it did.”

When he looked at the paper, the scroll had filled in with writing in a thin calligraphy. Twilight gave it a once-over before she read the actual words, and it looked to her like any other academic scroll, written with an eye toward legibility and preservation. The only difference was that instead of being black ink on white paper, it was white ink on purple.

“She really was clever, wasn’t she?” Twilight was speaking more to herself than hasty. “Anypony else would have only seen a waste scroll, but the pony who would recognize it for what it was would be the only pony who could reveal its secret.”

“So what does it say?”

“It reads, ‘Dear Princess Celestia’.”

“What?!” Hasty knocked aside one of the books holding the scroll down, making the corner roll up and across the paper. Twilight glowered at him, replaced the anchor, and continued.

“’Dear Princess Celestia, for in all probability it will be you who reads this, after which you will destroy it. Perhaps this is the hundredth time you have destroyed this scroll. I have no intention of telling you how many I have made, or the methods I have used to conceal them. It is my hope, of course, that only one of these reaches its intended target. And that, I’m certain I have no need to inform you of.

“’The tactics you are using will also not avail you. Starswirl the Bearded cannot keep his eye on me all hours of the day, and you are so busy now, are you not?

“’On the off chance that this is the one of many that does reach another princess, I apologize for the above, and I’m sure that any suggestion that Princess Celestia is other than the model of integrity will come as a shock. And for the record, I respect and honor Princess Celestia. She is a good princess and a fine leader. But I must follow my heart in this matter.

“’What is it like, I wonder, over a thousand years in the future? How many ponies are there now? Has the blending of the Three Tribes made Equestria into a paradise? Is every pony now a god unto herself? Such things are spoken of today, and I have no doubt that there will be progress, but the promise of this era does not resonate with me. Perhaps this is because I am one of the few privy to Celestia’s secrets.

“’And that is the message I wish to send down through the ages to you, a secret that she wishes to keep for your own good. But I am of the belief that the truth is always better than concealment, and so I will put the truth down on paper, in this magical ink.

“’You are not, future princess, the mere chance production of your parents’ meeting. You were planned, orchestrated, as much as any strategy in a long-term war. This is the plan of Celestia that I have heard of, and confirmed in her notes.’”

Twilight held out her hoof, and Hasty just looked at it. Because hooves have rotational symmetry, he seemed to think that it was being put forth for him to pay homage, and so he leaned in his head. Twilight still had her head down, but feeling his hot breath on her hoof jerked it back and looked up at him.

“What are you doing?!”

“I…I didn’t know what you wanted.”

“I was waiting for the next scroll.”

She stared at his eyes, wondering if the confusion he was evincing was real or feigned. Whatever his flaws, Twilight could detect no dishonesty. “There’s a reference number at the bottom of the scroll. It’s not written in the alicorn ink. Didn’t you go and look for it?”

“A what now?”

Twilight put her head back down and counted to ten. Then she looked up again. “Are you really a student? All right, fine. Let me explain. Scrolls are cut to a standard length. This way, when you roll them up, you can stack them on a shelf. Now, sometimes a writer has to go longer than a single scroll, as is the case here. So what they do is to put a reference number on the bottom of the scroll, so that whoever’s looking for the next one can find it. Haven’t you ever seen those numbers on the bottom of a scroll?”

“Now that you mention it, I have seen something.”

“And didn’t you ever wonder what they were?”

“I just figured they were a kind of monogram. I was hoping to make one myself someday.” Hasty shoved the anchors off the bottom magically, then eyed the number. “But why would Clover the Clever—or whoever wrote the scroll—put a reference number for a scroll that she wanted to hide from Princess Celestia?”

“Hard to say. But she was a scholar who followed rules. Possibly she didn’t even think about it. It’s not worth wondering about.”

“I’ll get the other scroll immediately! If I run back to Canterlot I’m sure I can find it.” He looked around as if he was expecting Princess Celestia herself to burst in and ask questions.

“No, don’t do that. I’ll take care of it. I mean, thank you for pointing it out to me, but since it might concern me I should be the one to look into it.”

Hasty’s face fell, but he nodded and plodded out of the room, leaving Twilight to reread the scroll.

Ridiculous, she thought. There was no way that Clover the Clever could have foreseen the ascension of a princess from a thousand years. But the magical resonance of the age-testing spell still stung her horn. But what could she do? It wasn’t like she could just close up the library and dash off to Canterlot.

Could she?

She walked out of the side room and let the door slam behind her. Overlooking the room that had been her home and business for the most recent years of her life, she considered. Ponies were milling about, no one taking notice of the librarian above. Spike knew the work of servicing the patrons, and any researcher who needed a consultation would have spoken with her already. Why not? Most days there was more time than work, and Twilight had plenty of idle time. She could move items on her checklist.

She hopped down, letting her wings carry her down, catching herself and taking a few steps forward to dispel her momentum. To her desk she headed, scanning her schedule and shuffling tasks into future days.

“Spike!”

He ran up. “Yes, Twilight? Was there a problem with that weird guy?”

“Spike, I’m taking the rest of the day off. You can handle things here, right?”

“Y-yeah.”

Twilight heard his hesitation, and before he could restore his expression she saw how wide his eyes went. “I understand. You wanted to say that I’ve never done anything like this before, right?”

“You caught that?”

She nodded. “I’m all right, but there’s something I need to take care of in Canterlot.”

“It’s all right. If anypony’s earned it, it’s you.”

Twilight raced to take care of the few jobs she could not delegate to Spike. Every three months, the Equestrian Railway published the schedule it would be following, and a copy was dutifully delivered to the library. Twilight found it and checked the time for the next train to Canterlot. Just enough time if she galloped.

Her mind was too busy with the routine of buying a ticket and boarding the train that she couldn’t focus on why it was that she was doing this anyway. But as she plopped into her seat and leaned against the window, feeling the cool glass against her cheek, it came back to her. She considered the scroll.

There was the possibility that it was a fake. Was there a way to falsify a scroll so that a mage would think it was over a thousand years old? Twilight could probably think of some, but it wouldn’t be easy. Certainly if it was a fake, it wasn’t Hasty who had perpetuated it. His ineptness and innocence had not been affected, if she was any judge of character. No, while it was physically possible to perpetuate a fraud of that nature, it made no sense. Even if it was a trap to get her out of Ponyville, a much simpler scheme would have worked. A clever trickster would have been simpler; a more inept one she would have detected. QED, the scroll was real.

She picked her head up. The train should have been moving by now, but still the station filled her window. By closing one eye and leaning down she could almost see the door she’d entered by. The flank of the conductor was sticking out, and his head bobbed like he was arguing with somepony. At last he pushed in, turned around, and gave the sign for all-aboard. The first burst of steam came from the distant engine, and the first knock of the wheels below her pushed Twilight on her journey.

If the scroll was real, there was also the possibility that Clover the Clever had been mistaken. If only she had the rest of the message, she could make a better guess. The psychology of it was all wrong. She had never known Princess Celestia to be anything other than the soul of benevolence.

Now the train was picking up speed. On the edge of her vision, grass and trees flew by in a blur. Somepony up ahead had a window cracked, and the breeze was vibrating her feathers. Faster and faster as the engine picked up steam, and the blur became a haze as it mixed with the smoke from the train. It reminded Twilight of those nights when she would study all night and the book would be the only thing her eyes could see.

She stopped looking. She had to think. What if Clover wasn’t wrong? What if there was some great scheme, and Princess Celestia had concealed some dreadful secret from her? It meant reordering her entire outlook on life. In a somewhat literal sense, it meant questioning whether the sun rose in the east.

That triggered another thought. If learning this secret meant losing the love of her teacher and friend, was it worth it? Twilight had no complaints about the way she was treated by Princess Celestia—or anypony else, for that matter. Why change the situation? Even if she only acted as if the scroll were fake or its author mistaken, would she lose anything for it?

She was approaching Canterlot. The train had left the open plain and was working its way up the foothills. The designers of the railroad had, in wisdom, limited tunnels and bridges, keeping to the contours of the land. Only once was Twilight cast into darkness, the tunnel entrance approaching at such speed that it felt more like a lantern extinguished than forward motion. The air in the train felt compressed and the earthy odor of the mountain rock permeated the car. Then she burst out into the light once more.

No. Truth was paramount. As a researcher, as a scientist, authority had to yield to reality. If something was so, then not even Celestia could make it not be. Twilight was a princess of Equestria. If a pony of that rank couldn’t be trusted with the truth, then nopony could, and that idea grated at her soul. If anypony, even a bumbler like that Hasty fellow who showed up just a few short hours ago, came to Twilight for knowledge, she would not deny them. She was a bearer of the Elements of Harmony, and one of those was honesty. That included being honest with herself.

The train slowed. The buildings of Canterlot now loomed before her. They were set back far enough from the tracks that she could see each one in its entirety. As a filly, they had been the comforting pillars, the protective barricades that held her to the city. Now, she saw them for what they were, homes and businesses, the place where ponies lived and grew together. As a princess, it was her responsibility to make sure that living was as smooth as possible.

It was Celestia’s responsibility too. Twilight reached her conclusion. She would bring the matter to her old teacher’s attention, learn the truth, and be done with it.

The train pulled into the station. Twilight was impatient now. Of course, the train had to be stopped gradually or everypony would be thrown forward into the wall. But as the rhythm of the wheels broke into individual knocks, she wanted to leap off while it was still moving. Instead, she waited for the final moment when the train leaned forward, momentum deciding whether to send the wheels forward another turn before giving up and settling back a step. She gathered up her beongings and descended to the platform.

The train station was not as familiar as the buildings. When she lived in Canterlot, Twilight had few occasions to travel to other cities, and when she did, it was her mother and father who handled the details of travel. An exit sign hung against the far wall, and beyond that was a street that she could walk blindfolded. Here was the store where the keeper had once given her free candy. There was the bookstore where they didn’t mind if she just stood there and read a book from cover to cover. Over there was the doctor where they had taken Shining Armor after he had been injured from some rough play and she had held vigil with her parents.

Her parents. Twilight had not seen them in some time, and she decided that, if the matter of the scroll concluded quickly, it would serve her well to pay a call. Unannounced, she would not impose or stay long, but surely they would be happy to see her. Now the question was which to do first. At the end of the platform the road split. To her left was the first tributary that would lead to the great road toward the castle. To her right the boulevard to the residential area her parents lived in. She hesitated a moment.

“Princess Twilight!”

She heard the voice before she saw the corn-silk fur enter her vision. “Hasty?”

“I didn’t realize that we were on the same train. This is perfect! Now we can hunt for the second scroll together!”

Twilight sighed. Her plans were being put on hold. Next Chapter: Chapter Two Estimated time remaining: 22 Minutes