Alien Vs. Predator: Equestria

Through what had to be nearly a dozen refracted lenses, a green eye, magnified to a disproportional size from a certain point of view, stared up at the night sky. Spike pulled away from the telescope for a moment, blinking away a slight haze as the world refocused to its normal magnification. He looked over his shoulder to his sole companion on the oak home's deck, sitting comfortably on a small sofa. The lavender unicorn gave him a small smile for no purpose other than a subtle reminder that she was pleased simply by his presence, and then turned her eyes, devoid of any visual aide, back to the starlit sky.

Spike did so as well, peering back through the telescope to continue searching for the star he'd been tasked to find. What was it called again? Beetle Juice? Something like that.

He'd been at it for quite a while. When Twilight had invited him up to her observatory for the night, he thought it would be fun. And while learning about the stars was interesting, it wasn't exactly like he thought it would be. Twilight however, seemed right in her element. Spike guessed that it was since he had finally taken interest in a subject she very much liked, and that, for once, she had the chance to be the teacher instead of the student. It was just that her methods needed polishing. Spike had little teaching experience himself, but he was still pretty sure that taking a rookie astronomer, giving him a fairly common telescope, pointing to a sky filled with millions of twinkling lights and telling him to find a 'big, bright red one' wasn't exactly a professional technique.

He had painstakingly searched the sky for, like, at least a whole fifteen minutes, and found a few noteworthy celestial bodies, among them, the brightest, Sirius, and the biggest, or as Twilight explained it, the one that looked the biggest from Equestria, Canopus; he had yet to find one that met all three criteria.

So, onwards he scoured, searching for the star in question. The anxiety he was feeling was offset by the serenity of the night, and he eventually found a kind of calm washing over him. It was so peacefully quiet. All of Ponyville's inhabitants had gone to bed for the night, save the owls and the crickets. Twilight's pet was contentedly hooting from his perch just inside the open window, and the crickets were serenading the moon with their own rhythmic, nocturnal song. It immediately made sense why Twilight would spend so many nights up here, not necessarily star-gazing, but simply contemplating everything beneath the dancing, twinkling dots above.

Spike slightly twisted the swivel on the optic's base, loosening it just a bit, and continued moving his focus farther to the right in the pursuit of completing his assignment. He was just about to give his eye another break, when something caught his eye.

"I found it!" he said excitedly, "A red one!"

He tightened the swivel, locking the optic in place, and stepped away from the eye piece, motioning for Twilight to come and see. She did so, lifting herself off the patio furniture and trotting over to look up at the sky through countless lenses. She scrutinized and observed for a few moments, but then shook her head.

"Mmm. That's a planet, not a star," she patiently allowed Spike to look back through the glass as she explained, "See how it moves on its own, while the others all move the same way."

"Darn," grumbled Spike upon realizing she was right, "The universe is just too big."

Twilight giggled a bit to herself.

"I mean, how can one pony even remember all the stars? It's like an ocean of glitter up there."

Spike sighed as he leaned heavily against the balcony's guardrail, causing it to bend slightly.

"It just takes time, and a lot of patience," said Twilight, nuzzling him a bit for encouragement, "It took me a whole week to memorize all the constellations."

Spike sighed again. There was no way he would be able to match Equestria's finest student's intellectuality. At this point, just completing the simple task of finding this star was seeming impossible.

"Can't you just help me?" he petitioned, "You already know all this stuff, and I'm just now starting. Besides, I think we'd both rather not be out here 'til dawn."

Again, Twilight smiled, and in a magenta aura, spun the telescope's swiveling base to the southwest. She adjusted the focus and elevation, and within a minute, gestured for Spike to take a look.

What he saw was indeed a big, bright, red star.

"Huh," he said to himself, "so that's Beetle Juice."

"Betelgeuse," corrected Twilight, "and yes. It's one of the most famous stars in the night sky, mostly because it's easily identifiable," Spike groaned at the falsity of this statement, "and because it's a part of something much bigger."

"The galaxy?" asked Spike sarcastically.

"No," said Twilight lightheartedly, "that's a bit bigger than what we're looking for."

"No kidding."

Twilight noted the disgruntled tone in the drake's voice. She would have to step up her teaching game to keep her new student interested.

"So, now, how about you try to find another star," she anticipated Spike's groan, and before he let it out, completed her sentence with, "It'll be right by the one we just found, just a bit lower. It's called Rigel. It's about as bright as Betelgeuse, but smaller and bluish white."

Spike nodded before he stuck his eye into the telescope's eye piece, and began diligently searching.

"So, uh, Twilight," he began slowly as he stared skywards, "since you're kind of the star expert, at least here anyway...just how big is the galaxy?"

"That's a pretty broad subject," she said after a deep inhale, "could you narrow it down a bit?"

"Well, about how many stars are there? Thousands? Tens of thousands?"

"Billions," she said nonchalantly, while Spike shot her a look of disbelief with his spare eye.

"Billions?"

"Yep," she affirmed, "Around 300 billion to be exact."

Spike pulled away from the telescope again, and looked skywards with naked eyes.

"No way there's that many," he denied, "I can see maybe a couple thousand, but not billions."

"Look closer," she beckoned, "When you use the telescope, you can see more, and this is just a cheap one. Imagine how many we could see if we used one of the telescopes at the Canterlot Observatory. Those are at least fifty times more powerful than this one."

Spike tested her statement, and found it to be true. The stars that were visible without the aide of the optic were much brighter, and many more stars were visible in a regular light, with even more dimly visible. The harder he looked, the more he saw. They'd been right in front of him all night, he just hadn't been looking.

"What's really cool though," began Twilight from behind as Spike continued gaping up at his new realization, "is that some of those dimmer stars are actually whole other galaxies. And each galaxy might have even more stars than ours."

Suddenly, Spike felt very, very small, even more so than usual.

"So then, how many planets are out there, at least, in our galaxy?"

"Too many to count," Twilight said with a smile, "but there are more planets than stars. The universe is a pretty big place."

She was trying her hardest to use words that Spike would understand, and was finding that with her self-limited vocabulary, her descriptions were failing to adequately give tribute to their subjects. But it didn't matter to her listener.

Spike was silent for a moment, simply gawking upwards in awe. The night was quiet, and as Twilight watched her younger friend's revelation, she found herself receding inwards into a state of childlike nostalgia. She remembered the feeling she'd felt when her father had given her the same lesson she now bestowed unto Spike, the same feeling, she knew, the dragon was feeling now. That simple, uncorrupted appreciation, capable of only an innocent child. She missed it, as she missed the times when she was able to look skywards from her father's or brother's side, and simply appreciate the beauty of existence. Only now the roles were switched, and she was the one giving precious knowledge and inspiration to a counterpart, and though the feeling was not quite the same, she felt traces of it coming back into her heart when she saw the wonder in the dragon's beautifully verdant eyes, sparkling with the reflection of the sky he was so diligently watching.

But then, to her surprise, Spike asked the question she hadn't asked until a few years ago.

"Twilight," he began slowly, still looking skywards, "with all these stars and planets and stuff, there has to be another place like Equestria out there...right?"

Twilight recoiled a bit; this was a bit mature for one as young as Spike.

"I bet there is," he continued, nodding to himself.

"We just don't know yet Spike," she said a bit disheartened, "we haven't found any other planets that could sustain life. Planets like this one are so rare. Everything has to be perfect for life to happen."

"But you said it yourself," he countered, "The universe is so massive, there has to be someone else out there."

Slowly, mystified by his ideas of possibility, the drake persisted.

"I bet you a gemstone that someone, somewhere out there is looking up at the stars, and wondering the same things we are right now," there was a long pause, made lucid by the crickets' orchestra, before he continued, "I wonder what their home looks like. Do you think it's like it is here?"

He looked to Twilight, his eyes sparkling, but she let him continue without giving him an answer.

"I wonder what they're like. It'd be pretty weird if they looked like some of us, huh?"

Again, Twilight let him speculate without interrupting, a small smile across her chin.

"I wonder if we've ever met before, and we just didn't know it."

Twilight, without Spike seeing, slowly shook her head.

"I wanna meet them."

"Be careful what you wish for," Twilight rebutted, but the smile on Spike's face took away any serious advisement she had prepared.

"That sure would be cool," he said to himself.

Again, there was a short silence, filled with the unspoken questions behind Spike's eyes. It took a few moments before, reinvigorated, he looked back through the telescope, adjusting its elevation slightly. He'd obviously been inspired to continue in his astronomical studies, if his first lesson could indeed be classified as studies.

"Found it," he said confidently after a few moments, "That's Rigel, right?"

Twilight checked his work, taking a turn at the telescope, and much at the expense of Spike's humility, confirmed that he was right.

"Ha," he celebrated, "I'm gettin' good at this already!"

From within the house, Owlowiscious hooted a note of what Spike took for consent, but could have easily been a complaint regarding the noise.

"So, that's Betelgeuse and that's Rigel," began Twilight, pointing out the stars as she named them, "and that one's called Bellatrix, and that little one, that's Alnitak, and that one there is called Saiph..."

Spike droned out a bit as Twilight continued rambling, but he was quickly drawn back when he heard a distinctive rise in the unicorn's voice, indicative of a question.

"Hm?" uttered the drake.

Twilight sighed a bit.

"I said all these stars are a part of one constellation, and then I asked what they look like to you."

Spike looked to the collection of celestial bodies they'd been studying through the night, as well as the few that Twilight had recently pointed out, and after a short contemplation, reached a conclusion.

"An hourglass?" he proposed, unsure of himself.

Twilight opened her mouth to refute the answer, but shortly realized that the constellation did in fact resemble an hourglass more so than what it was named after.

"Well, I guess you're kind of right," she said, complimenting the dragon a bit, "but that's not what the first ponies that saw it thought."

"Well what did they see?" inquired Spike, looking at the sky above with both eyes.

"That constellation is Orion the Hunter."

Spike kept looking at the sky, his eye twitching a bit.

"I don't see it," he admitted, and Twilight, upon kneeling at his side, began pointing out the anatomy of the constellation.

"The hourglass there," she said as Spike followed the path her hoof outlined in the sky, "that's his body. Those three stars in a line, that's his belt. The arch to the right of his body is his bow, and the line of stars going down off of his belt is his sword."

Spike kept looking at the stars, mystified as he tried to imagine the constellation as a being.

"I still think it looks like a... hey, a shooting star!"

Twilight followed Spike's extended talon, and indeed saw a yellow streak darting across the inky black sky, coming forth from the center of the constellation they'd spent the better part of thirty minutes observing.

"Quick, make a wish!" said Twilight as Spike balled his fists and closed his eyes.

She turned her eyes back to the comet, but found it had...grown.

Immediately, her mind began racing to try to explain it. Then, she realized something. The tail was too short, the color was wrong, and it had lingered longer than any comet should. And still, the body of the phenomena was growing.

"Umm, Spike...I don't think that's a shooting star."

As she finished, the boards of the deck began to shake, and the crickets went silent. The dark of the night was illuminated a bright yellow, nearly as bright as the sun, and the pair's eyes grew considerably wider as they realized that whatever it was that was falling from the sky, it was headed right for them.

Spike ducked behind the guardrail, and Twilight tried to occupy as small a space as possible as the massive black object, trailing fire and debris, screamed earthward, shooting directly over the oak tree's branches less than a few hundred feet above the ground.

As it passed overhead, the ground itself trembled violently, and several of the lampposts below were extinguished as countless windows in the town shattered.

Twilight rushed back inside and to the back of the library, darting to a window to catch a fleeting glimpse of the falling object as its orange trail disappeared somewhere over the Everfree Forest.

Immediately, a panicked commotion broke out in the town, and above the roar of slamming doors and terrified citizens flowing out into the streets, Twilight heard a weak voice from the balcony.

"What was that?"

"I think that might have been an asteroid!" shouted Twilight over her shoulder as she watched a rising column of smoke and a slight yellow glow emanate from deep within Everfree's arboreal darkness.

"Are there any more!?"

Twilight ignored the question; she needed to take action, and now. This was serious, especially since she was a prominent leader in Ponyville, and the citizens would no doubt be looking to her for guidance in the wake of this near catastrophe.

"Spike, stay here!" she shouted upstairs as she trotted for the door, "Lock the door behind me!"

She pushed outside and into the street, only leaving until after she heard Spike secure the deadbolt from within. She broke into a trot, heading for the town square, but as she began to see ponies, her mind involuntarily began to try to explain what was happening. She lost all of her attention in her thought; she was oblivious to the frantic ponies vying for her attention, seeking some kind of an explanation for what had just happened.

An asteroid? That had to be it. What else could fall from the sky in a ball of fire? But then why was this incident ignoring all of the regularities the galaxy normally followed. Why hadn't she, or any other Equestrian astronomers, seen it before now? Normally, these things were like clockwork. From the phases to the moon, to the passing of comets, the stars had always been very predictable, almost down to the second. But, this object, whatever it was, was completely unexpected. Nopony had seen it coming before it came screaming in, but if it was indeed an asteroid, then they should have.

But, even then, it wasn't falling at terminal velocity when it passed over the library. It was going fast, but not nearly as fast as it should have been. And, on top of that, its angle of trajectory was so shallow. Any asteroid coming in at that angle should have deflected off of the atmosphere.

And nevermind the size of the object. She had only seen it for a fleeting moment, but she was sure it was large enough to rival the library in size. Anything that big falling from space should have caused an explosion big enough to level a substantial area, an area at least the size of Ponyville, but she hadn't even heard it land. She should have heard something akin to a bomb going off, but instead... she'd heard nothing.

She closed her eyes as she tried to remember exactly what she had seen. She knew it wasn't possible, but in her mind, she thought she recalled the object...changing direction. Ever so slightly, it had leveled off with the ground, instead of slamming into it along a straight path of trajectory. Gravity should have caused it to arc downwards, but instead...she was nearly positive that it had pulled up as it descended.

It was all very improbable, confusing and... unsettling.

When she looked up, she was in the square. The town's center was already filled with ponies, all of them woken up by the small earthquake caused by the...whatever it was, passing overhead. She began pushing through the crowd, trying to find somepony of significance, so as to begin to solve the problems created by this late night incident. She had no success, at least, until somepony grabbed her from behind.

She whipped around, pulling her tail free from the grip of whoever had tugged it, and saw, to her relief, a friend. Two, to be exact.

"Hey Applejack, hey Rainbow Dash," she said over the rabble of the crowd she occupied, "Some night, huh?"

"Y'all got that right," said Applejack, lifting her hat, which she still adorned despite the late hours, as she looked around at the substantial congregation of nervous bodies around her, "Long walk from the house to here in the dark. What the hay is all this about anyway?"

"Yeah, whatever it was, it woke me up!" complained Rainbow, scolding the universe for the inconvenience, "I never saw it though, but dang, was it loud! Did you see it Twi?"

"It looked like some kind of asteroid," Twilight said, eying her surroundings as she searched for some more specific faces.

"An asteroid?" questioned Rainbow Dash, "You mean, like, a comet or something?"

"Yeah," agreed Twilight as she spied a specific white unicorn through the crowd, "Hey, I think I see Rarity."

The farmer and the pegasus followed Twilight as she shoved her way through the crowd, explaining further her earlier observations in between apologies to those she forcefully displaced.

"Excuse me... Pardon me... Yeah, it resembled an asteroid, but, it was... different. Sorry sir, excuse me... Spike and I had a good look at it when it was coming  down... Oh, my apologies ma'am...It landed somewhere in the forest. We lost sight of it just as it passed the tree line."

They reached their goal, Rarity and her pink companion, just as Twilight was finishing.

"Rarity!" Rainbow called out, seizing the unicorn's attention.

She turned quickly, her mane a bit unkempt due to being aroused so early, but it was still obvious that she had tried to at least make herself look presentable, despite the circumstances. Pinkie Pie greeted them with a smile as well, her face lighting up when she saw her friends, her eyes as bright and her mane as curly as ever.

"Oh thank goodness," muttered Rarity dramatically, "You're up too. Do you have any idea why everypony is so frantic? This is a bit of an overreaction to a small earthquake, don't you think?"

"Earthquake?" began Twilight, only to have Rainbow Dash conclude her thought.

"That was no earthquake," shouted the pegasus over the commotion, "I felt it in the cloud home!"

"Yeah," reasoned Applejack, "and that's a good couple hundred feet in the air. She wouldn't have felt it if it was an earthquake."

"Well, then, what was it? I didn't see anything!" asked Pinkie, hopping into the middle of the five of them.

"I'll explain in a bit," promised Twilight, "Just, where's Fluttershy?"

"Knowin' that pony," started Applejack," she's probably hidin' out in her house 'til dawn comes 'round."

"Alright, well, we'll get her tomorrow morning before we start," said the lavender unicorn as she began pushing her way towards the fountain at the center of the square, her friends following her through the crowd.

"Start what?" asked Rainbow.

"Well, we can't just forget this happened. We have to find out just what it was that nearly took out the town, and make sure it can't happen again."

"Can't happen again?" questioned Applejack, "I thought you said it was an asteroid, a one in a million type thing. That it happened once is rare enough, so what makes you think it'll happen again?"

"In all likelihood, it was an asteroid," admitted Twilight, "but, it's just, it was a bit of a rebel asteroid, if you know what I mean. It didn't exactly follow the laws of physics. We just need to be sure that this isn't some kind of a repeatable phenomena."

They reached the fountain and found the mayor sitting on its pedestal, looking very tired and even more confused, but her face lit up when she saw Twilight and her friends approaching. She hopped to her hooves, and walked to meet them.

"This is a disaster," she started to say," they're all too panicked, I can't get their attention! If you have any ideas to quell this commotion, I'm all ears."

"With all due respect Mayor Mare," Twilight iterated, "it may be better if you left this to us. The Elements of Harmony, or at least, the five if us for now, will handle it."

The mayor nodded, nervously tucking a strand of her silvery grey mane behind her ear, and stood aside. Twilight took the opportunity, and stepped up onto the pedestal of the statue, central to the fountain, and turned to face the crowd before her. She took a deep breath in, and prepared a shout so as to seize their attention, but found that her own voice alone was not enough to carry more than a few feet deep into the crowd; nothing changed amidst the gathering of at least a few hundred frightened ponies.

She looked down at her friends, gathered in a crescent on the ground below her, and received a nod of encouragement from Applejack. They'd been friends for so long, she didn't need words to understand that they would help her this time.

The unicorn shouted again, simply yelling, "Hey!", but with the cumulative exertion of her friends, along with Pinkie's deafening bullhorn, they produced a sound strong enough to grip the attention of nearly all present, and eventually, a few hundred odd ponies' eyes were locked onto Twilight.

The unicorn took a deep breath. She was used to presentations, but not addressing crowds like these; that was something Celestia had always done whenever she would have had to. But, regardless, she managed to put words into sentences...loudly iterated sentences.

"Everypony!" she yelled, her voice cracking a bit, "I know this is a little confusing right now!"

"No kidding!" yelled somepony from deep within the crowd, prompting Rainbow Dash to grit her teeth in frustration.

"But rest assured, we have a plan, and an explanation!"

"We do?" whispered Pinkie to receive a shrug from Rarity.

"Well then what the hay is happening?" yelled another anonymous voice from the crowd.

"An asteroid..." Twilight paused, nearly feeling shame for not having a positive answer, "An asteroid landed in Everfree. That's why the glass broke, and the electricity went out, but we have a plan to fix it all. Tonight, I'll write a letter to Princess Celestia explaining what's happened, and get some repair crews out here to fix the damages. And tomorrow morning, we, as in the Elements of Harmony, will aide the Canterlot experts the princess will no doubt send in finding the asteroid's landing site, so that it can be studied and prevented in the future."

"How come we didn't see this coming?" yelled a stallion from within the crowd's center.

"That's why we'll have to study it!"

A thousand questions followed at once, until Twilight was completely overwhelmed by the apparent illusion that she had all the answers. Eventually, she and her friends again shouted over the roar of the crowd, and Twilight was again free to speak.

"So, as you can see, we have the situation under control, so if you could all return to your homes, and try to get a decent night's sleep, and please, let us handle it!"

There was much grumbling, and a slighter commotion, but regardless, slowly, the crowd began filtering back to their respective homes.

As the square was nearing empty, Applejack turned back to Twilight, just as the unicorn hopped down off the fountain.

"I don't know just how I feel 'bout this Twi," she said, scratching her forehead, "you said you weren't sure that this was somethin' normal."

"You're right, I'm not."

"Ya got any idea just what we're dealin' with here?"

"No," admitted Twilight as she too began following her own course of advice, heading back home, "but that's why we have to find out."

She turned back to face her friends, still very confused and very nervous.

"Don't worry," she said, forcing a smile, "we've dealt with things a lot bigger than this before. As long as we're together, we'll be fine."

This caused some smiles to come to their faces, but none were completely genuine.

"I'll get those letters to Princess Celestia as soon as I can. Then, we'll deal with things as they come. We'll just have to trust in the princess... and each other. I'm sure everything will be fine."

And with that, she trotted off, her friends doing the same, no doubt to spend the night trying to get some sleep.

****************

Meanwhile, on the edge of Everfree...

Fluttershy was up, restlessly trying to calm her animals down. The birds were fleeting about, chirping and squawking songs not of content, but of fear, while nearly every other creature was trying to find cover beneath any piece of furniture available. It took all of her energy to make sense of the situation, let alone deal wit it.

Needless to say, when her house started shaking in the middle of the night, and her bedroom window shattered, she'd woken with a start, as did her animals. Now, she was trying to calm herself down, while simultaneously trying to give her animals a docile state of mind. It wasn't working... with each second, the cries of the animals grew more intense, as did Fluttershy's pace of breathing.

She was just beginning to feel faint, when suddenly, her animals ceased their racket. Most of them hid, but others tried to flee, scampering away as if running from some unseen predator. Fluttershy's eyes widened in confusion, wondering what had caused such a thing. It was so quiet all of a sudden, going from earsplittingly loud to deafeningly quiet in a second; not even the crickets were stirring. She knelt down to look beneath the couch after a moment, and saw a pair of beady eyes looking out at her in the darkness.

"Angel?" she said quietly, gently coaxing with a maternal tone, "What's wrong? Come on out. I'm sure it was just a quick storm. There's nothing to be afraid o..."

She was cut off by a sound, a terrifying sound, coming from outside. The animals ducked deeper into their respective hiding places, and Fluttershy stood up and wheeled around like lightning. She could still hear it echoing across the silent forest, bouncing in and out of the trees as it receded into the distance.

It was definitely some kind of animal, but unlike any animal she had ever heard. A mix of a roar and a scream. A pained scream, feral and savage and angry, as if it were a challenge and a death cry all at once. When she heard it again, her heart nearly stopped.

Whatever was causing the sound was persistent. Its vocalizations varied, ranging from long, deep roars to high, short, shrill screams. Yet, despite every instinct in her body telling her to join her animals and hide, she went to the window to try to identify this unknown creature; perhaps it was foolish curiosity, or perhaps it was the fact that the creature sounded to be in pain, but regardless, she found herself staring through a shattered pane of glass in her kitchen at the evanescent world outside.

The full moon lit up her yard and garden with a radiance akin to dusk, but it wasn't the lunar light that caught her attention. There was another glow within the trees of Everfree.

It was subtle and soft, emanating a soft orange essence from deep within the trees' clutches, illuminating the trunks of the trees closest to its source.

"A forest fire," she thought to herself, but when she looked closer, any motivation she'd had to intervene left promptly.

At first, she thought it was just the tall flames dancing in and out, but then she heard the scream again, and realized that what was moving in the trees, whatever it was, was the source. And, it was locked in some kind of struggle.

Her vision was restricted by the trees, and flickering flames allowed her to see for only seconds at a time. But occasionally, the flames would rise up behind the entity, silhouetting it for moments at a time... whatever it was, the creature was massive, at least twenty feet tall in her estimate, yet frighteningly thin. It writhed this way and that, screaming or roaring periodically as it tore and pulled at something, or at least, appeared to. Every primal fear in her body was telling her to run, but Fluttershy remained hypnotized. She wasn't the only one that was so; everything was so quiet. The forest didn't even make a sound, as if even the wind was locked in the terror wrought by the unknown entity struggling within the tree line.

Slowly, she began backing away from the window, now genuinely afraid as yet another scream emanated from the forest. As the scream slowly waned, another sound was added to its now distant echo, only this one was familiar. Fluttershy recognized it as the groan of twisting metal, and as it registered in her mind just what she was seeing and hearing, she grew more confused, and even more afraid.

The moan of the grinding metal and the guttural roars alongside ear-piercing screams resonated through the cottage, and oddly enough, the eerily reminiscent thought of an animal caught in a trap came to Fluttershy's mind. But she wasn't quite sure that trying to help whatever it was was a good idea. The moan of the metal grew and grew, as did the animal's wails, until suddenly, Fluttershy heard something snap. She identified the sound of a metallic clang, followed closely by another short, feral vocalization, a mix between a growl and a roar.

For a moment, there was silence, but then something huge began tearing through the trees as it apparently ran from the flames. Trunks could be heard snapping like twigs, and Fluttershy could see the massive tops of the trees, illuminated by the moon, bending and swaying as they marked the path of the previously struggling creature as it fled deeper into the woods.

Fluttershy remained frozen in the kitchen window, unable to move. First, the sounds had been so loud, so unsettling, but now... it was deathly quiet. Nothing dared make a sound; not even the fire crackled. It was a horrible, terrifying silence, but no matter how hard she tried to break it, she couldn't even bring herself to flinch. It wasn't until one of her birds squeaked that she finally snapped out of her trance.

Immediately, she remembered to breathe, and began hyperventilating as she collapsed into her sofa. Her animals made a point of staying in their hiding places; it was good too, because even if she wanted to, Fluttershy didn't feel able to tend to them. It was going to be a long, sleepless night of trying to figure what had just happened, and just what was responsible.

After all, nothing she knew of could make vocalizations like that, or displace trees as easily as it had, or was as big as it appeared to be as it fought to escape the flames. The flames... she hoped they wouldn't catch before morning, because she was not going out in the dark. Not after what had just been let loose in those woods.

Just what was it? And what was it capable of?

She shuddered to imagine.