Shadow Prophet

Shadow smiled when he saw an extremely... well... pissed Twilight Sparkle banging at his door. He unlocked it and swung it open.

"Good morning. What can I do you for?"

This sarcastically cheery greeting angered Twilight further. "Have you been following me?" She asked.

"Nope. But I did predict your future yesterday, and now you're assuming I've been watching you long enough to develop a probability calculation as to what you would do this morning. So you're here, following the prediction perfectly, as time would have it."

Twilight seemed about to pop from anger, but then she froze, and began to smile. "No," was all she said.

"No?"

"No. You said I'd chase you. So I'm not going to. Poof. There goes your little psychic theory."

Shadow Prophet instantly recoiled from her, as though she had whipped him. "No. No! Don't do that! You have to chase me!"

Twilight smirked. "Stop it. You lost. There is no way one can tell the future, and now you see-" Twilight's lecture was cut off by a tremendous thunderclap that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere; there wasn't a single cloud in the sky.

"There it goes," Shadow said as the thunder slowly died away.

"There what goes?" Twilight asked, worried. It sounded like something had just exploded.

"The universe."

That was the end of the line for Twilight.

"How long would you recommend treatment, ma'am?" the nurse asked politely. Inside she felt like she was about to explode. Here she was, clearly talking with the newest Princess of Equestria, with everypony, even the crazies, staring dumbfounded at her. The obvious question on everyone's mind was, What in Celestia's name is Princess Twilight Sparkle doing in the mental hospital? It was clearly answered by the tied up blue stallion she had hovering behind her, but it was nonetheless a very strange thing to see.

"I'm not crazy! I'm telling you!" Shadow complained.

"Oh, I don't know. After you hear this, you might be able to decide," Twilight replied, ignoring Shadow. She moved him up to the desk next to her and asked him, "What did you say was happening?"

Shadow rolled his eyes, as though she had asked him what two plus two was. "The structure of the universe is collapsing in on itself due to the creation of a temporal paradox, made when you refused to chase me through town under the impression that I was a stalker."

"And why, exactly, was the result of that incident a paradox?" Twilight calmly asked.

"Because all time is a pre-decided progression. When you strayed from your pre-determined timeline, it caused a rip in the fabric of space-time."

Twilight looked at the nurse and smiled. That was all the proof of his insanity she needed to give. The nurse looked baffled by all this timey-wimey talk, and eventually gave up trying to decipher the stallion's strange words. She said, "Mmhm. Well, I think I'd... better go ask the, uh, doctor. Doctor Brownhoof. He might know." She spun around and trotted through a thick glass door which only allowed a blurry and distorted vision of what was on the other side.

She tapped somepony on the shoulder, who turned around. She said something to him, and he said something back to her. She led him back to the front desk, and a brown stallion watched and listened as Twilight asked the same questions and Shadow Prophet replied with the same answers. Once they finished, the doctor said, "Hmm. I'd say for starters he should definitely stay the night. We'll test him and ask him questions. Then we can come to a conclusive and more accurate estimation as to how long he should remain in treatment."

Shadow was extremely annoyed by how the doctor spoke of him in third person, as though he wasn't right there, listening to the whole thing.

"Thank you, doctor," Twilight replied with relief. She levitated Shadow over the desk and plopped him down into a chair. Her aura faded away, and she happily trotted off out the door.

The nurse turned to Shadow, and saw him spinning wildly in the chair, holding on to the edges. She stopped it and used her teeth to untie the bonds around his chest.

"I'm not crazy, you know," he said as he shook himself out of the loosened rope.

"Mmhm," the nurse replied, obviously not believing him. Shadow stopped, looked at her a moment, then went back to escaping Twilight's bonds.

Meanwhile, in Ponyville...

Boom! The explosion rocked Twilight, who was almost at her castle, to her core. She almost fell over. She immediately darted her head around. In the Southeastern part of town she saw a large cloud of smoke rising up into the air. She instantly spread her wings and shot towards it.

Once hovering over the site, she gaped. Below her was a meteor the size of her palace, maybe bigger! She slowly lost altitude and landed on the ground, folding in her wings. Already on her fur there was a thin layer of soot, but she seemed to not notice. The only thing she was paying any attention to was how the giant meteor, of all the places it could have landed, it was right on top of Town Hall. During lunch break. It was almost a miracle that not a single pony was in the building at the time the meteor had crashed.

Twilight waved some smoke out of her face and edged forward towards the giant rock. She gasped as she saw a small spot of blood very close to the boulder. There were no ponies around it, though, so whose blood was it?

Twilight heard the flapping of very large wings, and turned to see Princess Celestia and Princess Luna landing at the site. "Twilight, do you know what this is?" Celestia asked.

Twilight looked behind her at the boulder, and the small puddle of fresh blood. "No. It just came out of nowhere. There was no warning... I didn't even notice it falling."

Celestia and Luna examined it for a moment longer, then Luna recommended, "I think the first step would have to be getting it out of the way."

"Yes," Celestia confirmed. "We must use all our magic to lift this meteorite out of the town. We should put it down near the Everfree, far away from everypony." Celestia looked at Twilight Sparkle for confirmation, who nodded.

Together, they flew into the air and channelled all their combined magic into lifting the giant rock. It was still a hard task. The thing was even heavier than it looked, which, when you considered how big it was, was certainly saying something. The boulder levitated, slowly but surely, off the ground, and it took about ten minutes to move it to the edge of Ponyville. The princesses released their magic, and the rock landed with a loud thud!

Twilight didn't consult the other princesses, she just turned around and flew back to the rubble of Town Hall. Landing at the site of destruction once again, she ran around the debris to the place where the blood was. She looked over the the area nearby that had previously been covered by the meteorite. There didn't appear to be anything much there.

Then she saw it. Something completely impossible, it defied the rules of logic, physics, time. All of those were tossed out the window into a tornado when Twilight saw it. With effects that great, the actual physical item wasn't much. Ten blue hairs sitting on the ground, their roots having been ripped out.

Twilight remembered Shadow Prophet's story. He said a boulder had landed on him. He said he had had to pull his tail out from under it. That was years ago in a rock farm in Phillydelphia, but here in Ponyville that same boulder had fallen out of nowhere and even left the remnants of Shadow's struggle to escape it.

"It fell through a hole in time. One of many. One of many already here, and one of many more to come..." Shadow trailed off, sitting on the edge of an old mattress in the South Wing of the mental hospital.