“Are you sure about this, darling?”
Sunset Shimmer turned to face her friend. “Rarity, I need to do this. I’ve been gone so long, and Princip- Princess Celestia deserves an explanation for my… behavior.”
The fiery-haired girl sighed. “And… I want to see my family again. I can barely remember my parents after all these years…”
Fluttershy stood up. “We understand. I can’t imagine how sad I would be if I was in your shoes.”
“Just remember to come back before the portal closes,” said Rainbow Dash. “Oh, and say hello to Twilight for us!”
“And Spike!”
“Alright Pinkie, I will. Thanks girls.”
The six teens shared a quick hug.
“Okay, here goes nothing!”
And with that, Sunset Shimmer stepped into the statue…
-In another time, in another world entirely-
A yellow and orange unicorn tumbles, screaming, out of a mirror. Sliding across a well-polished floor, the mare crashes into a crystalline wall.
Groaning, she sits up. “Ohh... I forgot how weird that was…”
Sunset Shimmer attempts to climb to her feet, but quickly remembers that she has none.
“Hooves…” the unicorn mumbles to herself. “Hooves.”
Clambering onto all fours, she begins to pace around the room, relearning muscle movements not used for many moons. Once done, she begins to look at her surroundings.
“This must be Twilight’s castle. Either that or the Crystal Empire.”
Noticing a nearby window, the mare takes her first look outside.
The castle seems to be set in the middle of a desert. Sand stretches as far as the unicorn’s eyes can see. Roofs and pieces of buildings poke up here and there, giving the impression that they have been buried beneath the sea of brown. Not a single cloud graces the sky; the sun sits lone and imposing above the landscape. No greenery adorns the scorched earth, nor any sign of animals, nor even of water.
The land is dead; buried.
The little unicorn looks until she can look no more, her face an image of shock and loss. Screaming, she turns and gallops through the castle. Frantically, she searches through each room for an explanation, a sign of life, anything.
She finds nothing and no one.
Through her desperation, the young mare arrives at the entrance to the palace. The wooden doors are dry and brittle, but she shoves them open regardless.
Looking out into the buried landscape, the pony cries out:
“Somepony! Please, anypony, answer me! Please!”
She is rewarded with silence.
Tears flowing freely, she gallops out into the sand, shouting into the endless expanse.
And then…
A faint groaning reaches the mare’s ears. Abruptly halting, she listens.
“..leas…lesti…hgr…”
Spinning, the unicorn gallops towards the sound.
“Hello?! Can you hear me?!”
“n…ay…ack…”
She chases the noise to a long-collapsed structure. The wood has dried in the scorching heat, and breaks away easily as the mare breaks inside.
A blue stallion lays crushed under a fallen support beam. Instinctively, the unicorn reaches for her magic, levitating the beam up while pulling the stallion out manually. He has a musical note for a cutiemark.
“It’s okay,” the mare says, “I’ve got you.”
“N…no…get awaAAAAGHHH!”
The blue pony begins spasming, and flings himself away from the unicorn. His body contorts involuntarily, his limbs flailing randomly. She can only watch, too shocked to move.
Suddenly, the movement stops. All is still.
The stallion’s skin begins to ripple. Lumps appear, begin moving underneath his flesh. His head turns towards the yellow pony, eyes wide, mouth trying to form words, failing.
With a sickeningly wet ripping sound, the stallion explodes, and the mare finds her voice again.
Out of the ruptured corpse of the former pony are flung hundreds of little maggots. Propelled by the explosion, the land on the walls, ceiling, and floor of the crumbling abode. A dozen or so land on the screaming body of the little yellow unicorn. They waste no time, immediately beginning to bite and tear at her skin.
Fueled by instinct, the mare’s horn alights, and flames engulf the tiny insects. The mare clumsily gets up and rushes out of the building, then turns and ignites the dry wood. The structure soon becomes a blazing inferno, incinerating the corpse and all the tiny monsters that came from it.
Blood drips from the numerous bites inflicted upon the unicorn’s body, but she pays them no mind. The mare stands there, mind trying and failing to accept what she had just experienced.
Some time passes, the fiery-maned mare rooted to the spot. Eventually, however, she is broken from her stupor.
The ground begins to shake, sending sand flying into the air. Startled, the unicorn looks up.
“An earthquake?”
A quiet ‘shhishhh…’ reaches her ears; the sound of shifting sand. Turning towards the east, the source is made clear to the mare.
Against the horizon, the landscape appears to be undulating. Where once there was naught but flat, open desert, there is now a rippling sea of… something she cannot quite make out.
The unnatural movement is getting closer.
Panic once again flooding the unicorn’s mind, she begins galloping back towards the crystal castle in the distance. Her lungs burn and her wounds ache, sand kicked up from the earthquake and her hooves disturbing them, but she pays them no mind as she rushes away from this newfound terror. The mare dares not look behind; she does not need to, for she can hear the shifting sand behind her.
‘Shhishhh…’
It is getting louder, even as she runs as fast as her legs will carry her away from it.
‘Shhishhh…’
It is right behind her now. But, at last, the old wooden doors of the castle are in sight.
‘ShhiSHHH…’
The young mare at last reaches the threshold of the castle. As she crosses it, something dry and smooth brushes against the last hoof to leave the sand. Using her magic, she slams closed the door, without even looking to what horror she so narrowly escaped.
Limping now, the unicorn clambers her way back towards the room she started in. the painful cries of her lungs and wounds in her mind are now to loud to ignore, but even with the pain, she presses on.
At long last, she reaches the mirror room, and her salvation.
As she approaches the glassy surface of the portal, however, she happens to glance towards the open window through which she first viewed the desert landscape that had consumed this place.
Numbly, she makes her way over to it, and, bracing herself, she looks outside.
It appears to the mare that the sand has been replaced by oil, rippling in the sunlight.
Surprised, and somewhat relieved, by the seeming mundanity of it, she slumps down against the wall.
“Heh… heh… HEHEHE *cough*… AHAHAHAHAH!!”
Breaking down once again, the mare continues her mad laughter, fresh tears running down her face.
Her manic laughter is cut short, however, as a bout of pain sends her spasming against the wall.
Looking for its source, the mare glances towards her barrel.
Her wounds have grown larger. In fact, she can feel them growing, deepening even. Thousands of pinpricks of pain, all within her wounds, almost as if…
“No…NO!”
As she watches, dozens of tiny, black, shiny centipedes begin crawling out of the bloody holes in her flesh. Their exoskeletons shimmer like oil in the sunlight.
A memory emerges from the recesses of the unicorn’s mind. A lesson from long ago, carefully noted down by an eager student.
"All insects begin their life cycles as eggs, just like birds. However, these eggs are often laid many hundreds at a time, and are generally very small.”
One last echo of the memory emerged in the mare’s mind, even as the biting insects began to burrow into her lungs:
“Some can even be as small as a grain of sand!”
