Song Of The Sunsparrow

Nearly three weeks had passed since Twilight Sparkle’s terrible nightmare. Not a lot had happened in the mean time. In fact, so little had happened that she had nearly forgotten that the haunting event had ever occurred. Nearly. Every time the last fringes of recollection were poised to leave her, she would feel a little twinge of pain in her chest, then it all came rushing back in a whirlwind of potentially traumatizing images and sensations.

But nothing was wrong. It was only a nightmare. Of course, she should probably have realized from past experience that Nightmares were very much real. But nothing was wrong. She repeated it to herself over and over like a mantra. ’There is nothing strange happening here.’ she thought, ‘it was only an unusually vivid nightmare. Completely normal.’

Except it wasn’t. And Twilight Sparkle was about to become intimately familiar with that particular fact.

For the past few weeks, Twilight’s friends had begun to suspect that something may be wrong, but she was adamant that everything was fine. Obviously, they didn’t believe her. Eventually, they saw fit to have a little get-together and secretly plot to manipulate their friend’s personal life. Uh... Sorry. I mean, they had a little get-together and decided to try and cheer up their friend by throwing a party for her.

Unfortunately that plan fell through because of the arrival of a new pony. A party was still had, but a certain pink pony couldn’t resist placing a ‘Welcome To Ponyville’ party as her first priority. It was a nice party, but things got a little weird at times. I would know; I was there. It was my party, after all...

Providence, Mendacity, Enmity, Axiom, Deadline, Genesis. My name is Dusk Star, and this is my story about how the world ended. Better take a seat; this’ll be a long one.

Chapter One: Providence - Sunday, August 13th 1004 CR

New World

Related Soundtracks:Theme: #02 - New World

“Twilight, darling, I’m so sorry about your party. You know how Pinkie gets when there’s a new pony in town.”

Twilight rolled her eyes as her and her unicorn friend walked through the streets of Ponyville. She might have been a bit socially awkward, but that didn’t mean she hadn’t figured out what her ‘party’ was actually for. “It’s fine, Rarity,” she said in response, “I think I’ll be able to manage.”

“Oh, but I know how much you were looking forwards to it.”

In an attempt to satiate her friend, Twilight saw fit to simply respond with, “I’m sure there’ll be another chance very soon.” She then added under her breath, “There always is with Pinkie...”

“At least I’ve heard this new stallion’s good looking, if a bit brooding,” Rarity continued, having either not heard or chosen to ignore Twilight’s last comment, “Ohh, I should have worn something...”

Twilight chose to ignore her exuberant friend’s ranting. She was getting tired of all the fuss the others had been making that it was a welcome change. Of course; she just had to be reminded of that. The recollection came accompanied with a sharp intake of breath, cutting Rarity off mid-sentence.

“Are you alright, dear?”

“I’m fine, Rarity,” Twilight reluctantly answered with a sigh.

With some hesitation, Rarity asked, “It’s... That nightmare again, yes?” Twilight ducked her head with a scowl, her ears laying flat. “All I’m saying is, perhaps you could speak with Princess Luna about it. I’m sure she could—”

“There’s nothing wrong with me!” Twilight suddenly interrupted. She paused when she realized what she had just yelled, taking note of the numerous ponies looking in her general direction with no small amount of concern. She started walking again, this time at a much faster pace.

Due to her shock at the sudden outburst, Rarity stayed frozen in place for a moment longer before running — In as ladylike a fashion she could manage — to catch up to her friend. “Very well. I shall leave the topic be for now. But please, if you continue to have these... ‘episodes’, at least consider getting some professional help.”

Twilight sighed and slowed her pace to its normal speed once more. “Okay, Rarity. I promise.” She thought for a moment before adding, “but I’m not going to Luna. She is a Princess of Equestria, and goodness knows she has more than enough on her plate without being bothered with the nightmares of a single silly unicorn.”

Rarity raised an eyebrow, yet remained true to her word and changed the subject. “So what do you think this new stallion is like?”

‘Well,’ Twilight thought, ‘It’s still better than the alternative.’ “I have no idea. I’ve never met him.”

“Lily was saying that he looked a little rough, but that he was still handsome, so he probably has a sort of roguish charm about him.”

Twilight once again blocked out Rarity’s words. Somewhere at the back of her mind, she briefly contemplated how a single bad experience with her idea of a ‘perfect’ stallion had the mare pandering after the nearest ‘rogue’. It really couldn’t be healthy. She was broken from her thoughts once more as the two unicorns reached their destination.

Sugarcube Corner had always fascinated Twilight. The building fit perfectly with what one might picture Pinkie Pie’s house as, but the building was owned by the Cakes since before Pinkie had even lived there. The two middle-aged ponies weren’t that vivacious, so one had to wonder where the design had originated...

The two unicorns entered the building, where they were greeted by the rest of their friends, minus a certain pink one. Numerous other ponies were milling about and enjoying the food or music. They were not enjoying the drinks, though that was likely because of the alligator in the punch bowl. All in all, a normal Pinkie Party.

Further in, they found Pinkie herself speaking with the guest of honor. Twilight had simply allowed herself to be led to that point, still caught in her thoughts about Sugarcube Corner. “There you silly-fillies are! I was starting to think you’d gotten lost or something, and that would be really bad, I mean, it’s really hard to get lost in such a small town, so if you had, it would probably mean that something bad had happened to you, and— Oh, right! Dusk, meet Rarity and Twilight!”

Dusk’s gaze shot straight to the purple unicorn. “Twilight?”

Twilight knew that voice. It had, after all, been haunting her for weeks. She looked up and found herself staring into a pair of dark aquamarine eyes. And she froze. It was him. She had hoped, oh how she had hoped that she could simply forget the whole nightmare business, but it seemed that fate had a different idea.

Dusk was likewise frozen, but he managed to put his sudden flood of emotions into one single word. “What.”

Rarity grinned, oblivious to the panic that was quickly filling the hearts of the two ponies. “Oh, Twilight, Dear; you know him! This is fantastic! Perhaps you’d like to introduce us?”

“...”

“Twilight?”

“...”

“Darling?”

~Sunday, July 23rd 1004 CR~

Dusk Star — though he had yet to acquire that name — woke with a start. His first thought wasn’t about the fact that he appeared to have awakened in the middle of an empty field, though it did mosey in at a close second, instead he considered why it was that he felt so incredibly sad.

Then the thought about the field caught up and he jumped to his feet. Unfortunately, that didn’t work and he fell over backwards. When he next opened his eyes, he finally got tired of whatever that weird furry thing on his face was and attempted to remove it with physical violence. Then when he recovered from that, he finally started to get what was going on.

The last thing he remembered was going to sleep in his bed the night before. He could recall flashes of a rather strange dream though. He thought he remembered... flying horses? ‘No,’ he thought to himself, ‘Alicorns.’ His train of thought ran off a cliff-face. How could he possibly have known that? It was almost as though he had memories that weren’t his own.

One part of Dusk’s mind was having difficulty grasping the realization. The other part was hoping that no one saw him beating on his own face. It took a few tries, but he eventually manage to stand up on all fours. It was... disturbing to him how natural it felt. “Must’ve been... aliens,” he hypothesized out loud, “screwing with my body, then dumping me in the middle of nowhere... Well I’ll show them...”

He stumbled forward a few steps before finding himself overcome with nausea. The world’s newest occupant swayed side-to-side a few times. He had exactly enough time to turn away from the nearest upwards slope before emptying the contents of his stomach. Having yet to eat anything, his body’s natural response to extreme stress devolved into scrambling madly in the grass in a fit of dry heaves.

After spending the next few minutes as a quivering mess on the ground, Dusk managed to pull himself together well enough to wipe the tears from his eyes and mumble, “Why does it feel like today should be a Monday?”

~Wednesday, July 26th 1004 CR~

Days. Days of nothing but walking. Dusk found that his new body had quite a bit of stamina, but it was quickly running out. Recognizing the equine nature of his body, he had taken to munching on bits of grass along the way. He found it interesting that it didn’t taste nearly as bad as he had expected. That’s... not to say it didn’t taste horrible, but that’s besides the point.

Dusk could tell that he was nearing his limit, but he kept going. There was one simple thing that kept him going; he wanted the truth. On his second day, he had spotted the shining spires of Canterlot about two thousand meters up the side of a mountain. It would have been hard not to, seeing as it was the single tallest landmark in Equestria. He didn’t know how he knew they were called that. He just knew. Just like he knew that Celestia lived in Canterlot, and that he didn’t like her in the slightest.

He didn’t know how he knew these things, but he really wanted to figure it out. It gave him something to focus on other than the fact that he was starting to think there might be a tiny chance that he wasn’t on Earth anymore. If he was honest with himself, he wouldn’t trust himself not to shut down completely if that turned out to be the case.

As he would soon discover, that was most definitely the case. For some time now, Dusk had been skirting the edges of a large forest. For all intents and purposes, it seemed completely normal. Sure, it was a bit dark, but all that meant was that the forest had a thick canopy. The grass was starting to get a bit old by this point, and Dusk was strongly considering making a quick detour into the forest to try and find something a bit tastier.

He altered his path so that he slowly began to close in on the edge of the forest. He noticed a young deer calmly nibbling on a plant, and wondered if it would taste as good to him as it did for the deer. There also may have been a stray thought about eating the deer. Horses could technically digest meat, and he had spent his entire life up to that point as an omnivore...

Even if he had decided to attempt it, it wouldn’t have mattered much, as a giant scorpion tail suddenly shot out of the treeline and impaled the deer through its neck. The deer scrabbled at the ground for a moment before the tail made a sharp motion to one side, snapping its neck. As the body went limp, the tail retracted back into the trees, dragging the broken corpse with it. It was all over in a matter of seconds.

Dusk stared for a moment in utter shock, his eyes wide. Without ever moving his gaze from the woods, he very slowly began to step backwards. When he felt he was a sufficient distance from the trees, he turned and ran in the direction he had originally been travelling. He looked back for a mere second to inform the location how he felt about what he had just witnessed. “Fucking nope!”

That night was probably the most terrifying thing Dusk had ever gone through. As a human, there had never once been a situation where he would describe his mental state as ‘prey’. To some, it may have been obvious in those first moments of waking, but in Dusk’s case,  it took a while to sink in; he was no longer in the body of an apex predator. In this place, he was the prey. And he sure felt like it too.

The moon was in its first quarter stage that night, but Dusk might’ve almost preferred if there were no moon at all. Maybe then he wouldn’t have been able to see the shapes in the darkness. Maybe they were really there, or maybe he was just seeing things. Either way, sleep wasn’t something that was very high on his list of priorities.

Through the entire night, Dusk had kept walking. The following morning found him barely able to take another step. With dark bags under his eyes, the unicorn eventually collapsed. As he unwillingly gave in to sleep, he rolled over to look at the sky. Directly above, the branches of an apple tree were silhouetted in the light of the orange clouds in the sky, reflecting the sunrise. As his eyes finally closed, Dusk had his first coherent thought in a while. ‘A decent breakfast would be nice some day...’

Dusk was pulled back to the land of the living a long while later by a gentle prodding sensation. He stirred a little, mumbling something incomprehensible. The prodding became a little more insistent. Finally, he opened his eyes, and found himself looking into the face of an orange pony. It took a moment to make its way through his sleep-addled mind, but the realization was suddenly kickstarted when the pony spoke.

“Y’all’re under mah tree.”

“Wahhhhh!” was Dusk’s only response before he jumped to his hooves took off face-first into said tree. “Gah! Sunnuva...”

“Whoo-whee... Easy there, Lightnin’ Hooves. Ah Ain’t upset.”

“Oh... That’s good,” Dusk responded in a slightly pitiful voice. He shakily got to his hooves and turned around to face the pony. It was around that moment that yet another piece of delayed information managed to sink in. He was looking at a small, colorful, talking horse. He was a small, colorful, talking horse. “Uh.”

“Y’all look mighty confused there. You lost, by any chance?”

“You could say that,” Dusk answered, deciding that it would probably be best if he didn’t look at the pony any more, as he could already feel his panic rising once again. That worked out fine, since the pony seemed to assume he was merely admiring the orchard that he had apparently wandered into in the night.

“Well if you were curious, this here’s Sweet Apple Acres; home a’ the best apples in all of Equestria!”

“Uh... G— Great. Which way to the nearest settlement?”

If the orange pony was at all off-put by his reaction, she didn’t show it. Maintaining her cheerful demeanor, she simply smiled as she pointed the way with one hoof. Realizing this, Dusk was forced to look at her, if only to find out which direction she was pointing in. Judging from the locations the sun had been rising and setting in, that would make it north-east. Forcing a smile, he gave her a nod and turned to leave.

Perhaps he would come back later and grab an apple or two, but definitely not until he was certain he wouldn’t be discovered by any more of this world’s residents. Information in tow, Dusk walked calmly away from the mare until he was out of her sight, then promptly ran as far away from the orchard as he could before being forced to pause and catch his breath.

Meanwhile, back at Sweet Apple Acres, the pony named Applejack had a sudden thought. “Drat! Ah forgot t’ask ‘is name...”

Dusk had managed to make it to the nearby town by sundown, having slept the majority of the day away. Under cover of night, he made his way into the town itself, and set about learning as much as he could. It helped that he continually got little bursts of info about things along the way. He discovered that the town was called Ponyville — a fact that he would have found amusing if it weren’t so damn terrifying — and he also discovered a library in a tree.

The library, he felt, deserved special attention. Of all the little snippets of info he spontaneously acquired, there was more about that library than anywhere he had been up until that point. He knew that the name of the Library was ‘Golden Oaks’. He knew that it doubled as a house. He knew that it had three floors — a basement, the public library area, and the living area. He knew that something about the building made him extremely sad.

Deciding not to dwell on the matter any longer, Dusk moved on. The sleep he got previously was good, but he was still mentally exhausted from the sheer shock of what he was experiencing. With that in mind, he set about trying to find shelter for the remainder of the night. As luck would have it, there was a house in Ponyville that was apparently vacant, and locks seemed to be lacking in the small town.

With shelter taken care of, Dusk spent his last moments before sleep planning for what would come. For as long as he could manage, he would do his best to stay hidden, and learn all he could by observing the town from the shadows. And that’s exactly what he did for the next two weeks.

~Friday, August 11th 1004 CR~

Skulking about in alleyways and stealing apples. That was Dusk’s life for the last fourteen days. He was getting sick of it, and that was very bad. That meant that his mind was drifting from what was really important. He was bound to slip up soon, and he knew it. He was getting complacent. So far, he had managed to find names for most of the things he couldn’t place — including what the small horses called themselves — and he managed to pick up most of their speaking conventions as well.

‘I’ve  learned a lot so far. Maybe I should try making contact soon,’ he thought to himself as he watched ‘ponies’ walk by him without a second glance. It was strange; it seemed as though simply being in dark was enough to make him entirely invisible to everybody else. He had also seen a pink one get run over by a cart, its midsection completely flattened, only to have it seemingly reinflate. ‘I’ll have to keep an eye out around that one, I think...’

In conclusion, it seemed as though the world ran on some sort of selective cartoon physics. Actually... ‘The colors are exceptionally bright,’ he thought to himself, ‘I wonder...’ He shook his head. ‘That’s absolutely ridiculous. Until I have a better explaination, I’m sticking with aliens.’ He was broken from his reverie as a familiar pony approached. He noted that the orange pony was accompanied by a light cerulean mare with the most obnoxious hairdo he’d seen thus far.

“Ah don’t get it,” the orange mare was saying, “Ah sent ‘im this way! How hard can it be to walk tah Ponyville from there!?”

“Maybe he made it, but he’s actually a spy, so he’s in hiding while he does his secret spy stuff!” the rainbow-haired mare replied.

Having found himself in the situation of her speculation being awkwardly close to the truth, he began to step forward; not only to make — sort of — first contact, but also to assure the mare the he wasn’t a spy of any sort. Even if he may have been spying a little. That idea went quite suddenly flying out the metaphorical window when the Pink One arrived.

“Or,” the mare started, “maybe he’s a two-legged hairless ape from another dimension who’s somehow taken the form of a pony in order to fool us all!”

The other two stood there for a moment before the rainbow-haired one one responded, “Right. Or that.”

“That’s the most ridiculous thing Ah’ve ever heard,” said the orange one.

There was ‘awkwardly close’, and then there was that. Dusk took it upon himself to vacate the immediate area. He bumped a garbage can. The moment the Pink One’s ears perked up and swiveled to face his direction, he knew it was all over. Neither of the other two thought it in any way strange when their pink friend suddenly hopped into the air and bolted for the nearest alley. They simply kept walking.

Meanwhile in the alley, Dusk suddenly found himself under attack by a few hundred words per minute. “Hi, I’m Pinkie Pie, what’s your name? I knew you were somewhere around here because my Pinkie Sense was going off like craaaazy, and it was telling me that someone new was in town but I couldn’t find you anywhere and at the same time, it was also warning me about a doozy, but I couldn’t figure out what that was about either, but then I found you trying to hide and came to say hi, so that doesn’t matter anymore because there’s a new pony in town and—”

“Party!” That had been the one word that for some reason kept coming to mind when he was around the pink pony, so Dusk finally just blurted it out loud in an attempt to make her stop.

“Oooh I love parties! I was going to throw you a surprise party, but then you started talking about parties and I forgot that it was supposed to be a surprise and told you about it!”

“Alright,” Dusk said, struggling to remain calm, “let’s make a deal. You can throw me a regular party as long as you promise to leave me alone until then.”

“Okie dokie lokie! Cross my heart and hope to fly, stick a cupcake in my eye!”

Dusk released a small sigh of relief as the Pink One — Pinkie Pie — scampered off. ‘Thank God that’s over...’

“Oh, but I need to have a name to put on the banner!”

Dusk flinched backwards so hard he nearly fell over as Pinkie was suddenly standing in front of him again. “Jesus! You scared the crap out of me!”

“That’s a weird name,” Pinkie chirped.

Dusk was really wishing that he had the capability to pinch the bridge of his nose. All of that fear, and this pony had somehow managed to override it with pure frustration. Then the realization of what she had asked caught up, and he was suddenly filled with dread. He had spent some time figuring out how the marks on every pony’s flank correspond to their name, but he had yet to determine a name for himself.

“Uh...” He glanced at his flank for a quick second, trying to quickly come up with something. ‘Star... Under a moon... Night...’ One of the many thoughts that didn’t feel like his own surfaced. ‘Dusk.’ “Dusk Star!” he finally blurted, “my name is Dusk Star.”

“Are you sure?” Pinkie asked, sidling up uncomfortably close to his face.

“Quite certain?”

“Okie. Dokie. Loki,” she answered skeptically as she slid offscreen, “Party’s in two days at eight o’clock sharp.”

Dusk stared on in horrified curiosity as the pink pony completely annihilated the laws of physics. “What the shit just happened?”