The note was on the pillow beside Twilight Sparkle’s head when she woke. She sat up and stretched before picking it up. A message from Spike, no doubt, or one of her friends. She yawned and considered slumping beneath the covers for another ten minutes, but finally curiosity won out and she unfolded it with her magic. Her reward was a single line of gibberish. She blinked and rotated the paper, but that solved nothing – from every angle the characters on the page remained incomprehensible. They were like no language she had ever seen. She peered at the page, turned it over, inspected it for any other mark, even sniffed and tasted it, but it was only paper and the strange symbols were the only writing on it. She chuffed in quiet annoyance and carried it downstairs. [hr] “So it was just, like, next to you when you woke up?” Spike said. He had his frilled apron on, and held a pan over the stove as he made them pancakes. “Mhm.” Twilight took a tiny sip of her coffee and closed her eyes to savor it. She liked to pretend her brain in the morning was a dry sponge, and coffee the life-giving fluid that swelled it with thought. “That’s creepy,” he said. “What’s it say?” “I’m not sure. It’s some odd language, or a code, perhaps.” The note was laid out on the table. Her investigative spells had revealed no author, no history, no touch other than her own. It was as if her dreams had given birth to it. The twenty-two glyphs written in a single line tugged at her mind, teasing at her memory like fragments of a song half-heard in the marketplace. She stared at them again. “So what’s it mean?” Twilight blinked. There were pancakes steaming on her plate. She hadn’t even noticed Spike finish cooking breakfast. “Nothing, probably. It’s just a prank.” All the same, she kept the note. It was too intriguing to discard with the morning’s trash. [hr] That evening, Twilight sat with a book, but she did not read it. It wasn’t the book’s fault – it was [i]never[/i] a book’s fault – but she couldn’t seem to muster the interest to plow through more than a few sentences. Never had the history of the Griffin Republic seemed so dull. After reading the same page for the fourth time, and remembering not a word, she sighed and pushed it away. The note weighed too heavily on her mind. She floated it closer. Its twenty-two characters seized her eyes, and she read them, over and over. In time, the sky outside her window grew gray and light. Her candles, unneeded, burnt themselves down. Still she read. [hr] They were letters, she decided. Part of a cypher. Each of the twenty-two symbols corresponded with a letter in the Equish language. She had no idea what they sounded like so in her mind she mapped the sound of each familiar, native letter to one of the strange glyphs. A simple, straight-forward substitution. As an experiment, she picked up her quill and wrote the word [i]Quill[/i] with the new letters. It seemed surprisingly natural. Almost legible. “Quill,” she whispered. But her tongue formed the word not with the shapes of Equish letters, but rather this new script. The sounds twisted in her mouth, dripping from her lips like drool. They sounded the same and wrong and weird and [i]perfect[/i] to her. She said them again, louder: “[b]Quill[/b].” As she spoke, the quill she used to write seemed to shift. It bent, drinking in the light around it. Her mind bent with it, seeing it anew. [i]Quill[/i] changed, and her understanding of [i]quill[/i] changed, and she changed as well. She smiled. [hr] She spent the day naming every item in her room with the new alphabet. Each item became greater, darker, more perfect in the telling. Shadows welled up from the cracks in the floor, smothering everything, until only one item remained untouched. She froze, seized by a sudden realization, briefly afraid of it like a foal of the dark. But fear was for foals. She was a princess, now. She could only ever be greater. She inhaled and viewed the old world for the last time. “[b]Twilight Sparkle[/b],” she said. In time, the being that had been Twilight Sparkle, but now was something so much more, left her room to its darkness. She had to find her friends. They needed perfect names as well.