Frostfire's Journal

Frostfire's Journal Session 5
Dear Twilight Sparkle,
Today, we left Ponyville to escort a caravan to Appleloosa. Dark Aether wasn't able to accompany us, since he got called back to the Ordium Aurora on some kind of urgent business. I was quite sad when I heard about this; Dark Aether is a Unicorn like me, and I felt that, even though we practice different types of magic, I could relate to him better than most of the ponies. However, when we were getting ready to leave Ponyville, we were introduced to Prenumbra, a unicorn cleric who would be joining us in the place of Dark Aether. I was quite scared talking to her at first; she seemed rather agressive; especially when it came to fighting evil. Eventually, I got over my fear of talking to her, and I found out we have quite a few things in common. Later on in the night, we sat down and talked about magic, while she showed me how to make certain divine scrolls. It was quite fun!
During most of the trip, Cookie Crumble was just staring off in the distance, mumbling to himself. She seemed really troubled, so I asked her if anything was wrong. She told me about being sent on a mission to underneath a temple of Applejack, and finding some really strange and evil stuff down there. In particular, she mentioned that there were Lacridaemons down there, and the one she found was the sister of the Hearld of the Eclipse. Why would Lacridaemons be down there anyways? I'm guessing the cultists are summoning Lacridaemons through a disturbing ritual, but why? There has to be more to this than just summoning Lacridaemons to cause chaos. Additionally, how did they manage to conduct this ritual beneath a temple of Applejack without anypony noticing until now? Also, why was Blaze acting so weird and hiding stuff from us? Could he actually be related to all of this, and sending us away from Ponyville so that Ponyville will be vulnerable to attack again? There is so many things I don't know right now. Maybe we will find some answers when we get to Appleloosa.
Your Faithful Student,
Frostfire
Session 6 Journal
Dear Twilight Sparkle,
After stopping some ponies from chanting weird and creepy stuff while we were sleeping, we continued our long journey to Appleloosa.  We had about a week before we reached the next town, Cactus Apple, meaning that I had a lot of free time on my hands.  Throughout the entire journey, Cookie Crumble was being weird about her silver (as always), so it was hard to talk to her.  I spent some of the time making scrolls with Penumbra again.  Divine magic is fascinating, how do they gain their powers by just basically asking for them?  
Anyways, with all of this free time, I began thinking about my times at Arcane Mage College of Canterlot.  Back in my times in the college, I attracted a lot of attention (mostly unwanted from fellow students), for my unique style of combining Fire and Ice magic, especially in the Magic Dueling sports.  I managed this style of magic by using the natural opposition of the two elements to my advantage, and using that unstable potential arcane energy to increase the effectiveness of the spell.  I was also known for using ice to freeze my opponent in place before striking them with a high power fire spell.  The dramatic temperature change that results works in my favor in this case by increasing the effectiveness of both spells.  However, I have been modifying spells that are already widely known and aren't designed to accomonadate this style of magic.  As a result, even though I have managed to make these spells more powerful, there is likely a lot of wasted magic potential.  So what if I designed a spell made specifically to take advantage of the unstable energy that results from the opposing elements being in close proximity?  I could then optimize the forumla to minimize the hindering effects of having the opposing elements of the same spell and maximize the beneficial effects.  But how would I do this? I had a full week to figure some of this out, so I started experiementing (and setting myself on fire or freezing myself accidently a few times).
After a couple days, I realized that the largest problem is that over time, fire and ice don't like being near each other, and one will cancel the other out.  This happens because the two elements are on extremes, like high energy and low energy, and when their energy collide, they will form a sort of medium energy, becoming rather useless.  This means that long duration frostfire spells are nearly impossible.  However, I might be able to figure out a way to prevent that energy from colliding long enough for that spell to take effect, or maybe even divert the energy caused by the unstability into the spell itself, creating a spell much more powerful than a similar spell that contains only one element.  I continued to struggle on this for quite some time until I realized that I have seen a spell that will be useful for this very thing before.
Back in my days in College, I remember a professor showing us a beam spell, a spell that creates a highly concentrated form of arcane energy and fires it in a straight line in a the direction you are facing, affecting and going through nearly anything in its path.  He said that this spell is based on based on a spell that you used to use, that fired a powerful beam of pure force, but this version worked with the more fundamental elements, like fire, as a beam of pure energy was beyond his abilities.  The cool part about this spell is that the concentrated energy had none of the physical characteristics of the element it was based on, but still had all of the magical characteristices.  For example, a beam of fire does not radiate any heat from the beam itself, but still sets things it comes in contact with on fire.  Since fire and ice counteract each other through physical means, like temperature, it won't be able to in this concentrated form  This means a Frostfire Beam spell could potentially be very powerful by divert the energy created by the opposing elements directly into the spell, since it has no where else to go. On paper, this seems almost ideal, I can keep all of the cool effects of Fire and Ice, and not only negate the loss of effectiveness, but also gain overall effectiveness!  Now that I have the spell in writing, I just have to test it.  However, as much fun as it would be, I can't exactly start setting trees on fire while on a caravan with other ponies, and I don't have access to any of the College's magical testing equipment, so I have no idea how effective it really is.  I'll let you know as soon as I find the results.  If we run into any more evil ponies, I might just test it on them.
Your Faithful Student,
Frostfire