The Twilight Zone

Life isn't always fair.

Some ponies are gifted with talents more special than our own. Others go their whole lives wearing a frown because of the hand they were dealt.

Some ponies are born into rich, loving families who eat together every evening. Others are born into broken homes, forced to hear their families argue day and night.

Some ponies live in mansions, while others live in cardboard boxes in alleys.

Life isn't always fair, not to everypony. But death does not discriminate.

Death does not care whether you were rich or poor, a success or a failure, lived the good life or the bad.

Death welcomes all ponies into its cold embrace, a release from the cruel world that once held them.

When one pony dies, another is born. That is one of the many ways this universe stays in balance.

But what if a pony refuses to die?

Some have returned from the precipice of death to tell tales of the incredible distances they had to travel to return to their friends and family. On the edge of a knife, where one slip could end their journey right then and there, these ponies have returned from a place that goes by many names: Limbo, Purgatory, the Dreamscape, or the Nightmare Realm.

This place that mirrors the pony who travels along it, is where we find...

"...Twilight Sparkle."

A sliver of light in Twilight's darkness opened up to reveal the giant face of a certain draconequus.

"Discord!" gasped Twilight. Though she was confused, she knew Discord's appearance only meant one thing: chaos.

"What are you up to this time?!" she demanded.

Discord lifted up a finger, the universal sign for "hold on a sec." Twilight noticed he was wearing reading glasses and his eyes were scanning the floor under her hooves. She looked down and realized she was standing in a huge book, which itself was lying on an enormous table.

"Hmm?" hummed Discord, now done with the sentence he was reading.

"W-where am I? What's going on?!" Twilight asked hurriedly.

"Well, you've just rudely interrupted me reading this book. Are you happy?" snarled Discord.

"Uh...no?" said Twilight. She was so confused! "What are you doing reading a book? What's going on?!"

"What? The Spirit of Chaos can't enjoy a good book?" asked Discord as he took a sip of his coffee mug. "Aah, coffee. It's terribly delicious, it's like they had me in mind while they were making it!" Discord chortled to himself.

Twilight surveyed her surroundings. It looked like she was in a library, but the floor, the walls, and the ceiling were all pure white. It seemed to be just a white room with bookshelves, and the books floated between the shelves as if gravity had no effect on them. A million thoughts ran through her head, the first being that Discord had somehow escaped his stone prison again and she was caught in one of his illusions. Still, she knew he wouldn't be wasting his time reading books when he could be wreaking havoc across Equestria. She couldn't wrap her head around it!

"'She couldn't wrap her head around it!'" repeated Discord from behind his book. "Twilight, I thought you were smarter than this. You must be able to see that what's going on isn't real."

Twilight's confusion only grew as Discord flipped to another page in his book and pointed a finger at a sentence.

"Ahem, 'What happens when a unicorn breaks their horn?'" read Discord.

Twilight froze. She looked down and let her eyes swivel back and forth as thoughts ran through her head. When a unicorn's horn breaks, her connection to the world's magic is cut off and the magic inside her becomes unstable. With no way of exiting the body, the magic starts causing damage to its host until it's eventually released in waves of heat. During that time, the unicorn in question is essentially radioactive to her surroundings and must be quarantined until she either stabilizes or...dies. And that doesn't take long...

"'Twilight...broke her horn.'" continued Discord, pausing for dramatic effect.

"So I'm...dead?" Twilight almost squeaked the last word fighting off a tear as the realization struck her.

"No." answered Discord. "Well, not yet at least. It says here you're in a coma. That's not so bad now, is it?"

"A coma?" sniffled Twilight. If she wasn't dead, that meant she could still return to her friends and family. But to do that, first she had to know where she was. "Discord, where am I?"

"In a hospital." he answered promptly. Twilight looked at him incredulously. "Oh, you meant here? Didn't you hear the whole spiel on your way down? '...a place that goes by many names: Limbo, Purgatory, the Dreamscape...' et cetera,"

"So...I'm in between? Then I can go back..." Twilight thought about it for a moment. "But where do I start?" She looked around hoping for some kind of door or something, when Discord picked her up from her tail and dangled her over his coffee mug.

"WHA-WHAT ARE YOU DOING?!" yelled Twilight, panicking.

"Don't worry my dear, I'll be watching over you." As Discord let her go, she saw the back of the book he was reading with the author's photo on it. It was a very smug-looking brown pony with an ordinary black mane, wearing a tacky ruby-encrusted hat. Before Twilight landed in the coffee she saw his pen name, and wondered how anypony would publish something written by a ...psychopath?

SPLASH

...

"AAAH!" Twilight gasped as she came up for air. It was much harder to swim in coffee than it was to swim in water. Twilight could barely stay afloat, coughing and spitting out coffee as she swam to the edge of Discord's mug. What she reached, however, didn't feel like ceramic. She picked herself up out of the coffee and shook herself off, pulling her wet mane away from her eyes to reveal a sight that practically gave her diabetes.

Pastries and sweets as far as the eye could see. Everything in this world seemed edible. Twilight was standing on a graham cracker bridge overlooking the stream of coffee she'd just emerged from, and the road ahead was paved with hard candy and lined with candy canes on both sides. She could see a castle in the distance and figured that had to be her destination. As she approached the candy road she heard what seemed to be a loud buzzing in the distance, getting closer little by little. She figured she didn't want to be present when the source of the noise caught up with her, so she headed down the road at a brisk pace heading for the castle.

The road arched over a hill, and when she reached the top she saw how far the castle actually was. With no mode of transportation and the buzzing noise approaching behind her, Twilight wasted no time and set off.

The grass on the side of the roads smelled of delicious mint, and each tree she passed by grew a different type of candy. Some grew gummy candy, others grew noticeably sour candy. One tree she passed by grew apples, then secreted caramel or chocolate from the stem! The rocks that decorated the road looked like different pastries as well, some swirled with chocolate and others were covered in sprinkles. Then, further down the road, she saw a beautiful, velvet rosebush and had to see if everything in this land really was edible.

The rose petals were soft and cool on her lips, the velvety red chocolate melting on her tongue caused her eyes to roll backwards.

"Mmmmm..." she moaned. It was delicious, but it felt odd. The sensation reminded her that this was all a dream, no matter how real anything felt. She tried to levitate the rose with her magic but found that only caused her a severe burning sensation under her horn. She clenched her teeth and rubbed at it, trying to soothe it.

Twilight looked up and noticed that the sun in this world was beginning to set, and her view of the castle disappeared behind a dense, pink forest. With her horn unable to produce or absorb magic, she wouldn't be able to produce any light once the Sun set.

Twilight hurried into the forest. The setting sun shone through the trees, creating a beautiful orange glow across the forest floor. All around her, the trees and plants filled her nostrils with the sultry, intoxicating smells of fresh-baked breads. The scents of ginger and warm, melty chocolate clouded her judgement as she lost her bearings in the sweet forest.

"Argh...where am I?!" Twilight said to herself. She looked up through the pink leaves and saw the sun fading behind the mountains. She had to get out of this forest immediately. She started running in one direction, but made sure she ran in a straight line so she wouldn't get lost. As the Sun disappeared, Twilight reached a clearing in the forest and realized she could still see.

All around her, the plants glowed softly. Twilight felt at peace just staring at all the different-colored plants. She moved into a different part of the clearing, where the moon shone bright on a field of glowing dandelions. The moon itself was a cheese wheel, missing a slice. The dandelions were pink and blue, and smelled of cotton candy. Twilight ran through the dandelions and watched as its seeds flew into the air, filling it with their sweet smell and colors. She was hypnotized, and didn't notice the small group of gingerbread men watching her prance through the cotton candy-lions.

"Uh...hi?" said Twilight.

The gingerbread men approached her cautiously. Twilight wasn't sure how to greet them. Were they hostile? Her question was promptly answered when they threw a ball of cinnamon in her face.

"AAAAAAH!" she yelled as she turned and started running. Twilight didn't get far, the gingerbread men lassoed her with licorice rope and beat her with lollipops before tying her to a candy cane and carrying her away. The gingerbread men were as short as Twilight, so she had to lift her head up to keep it from dragging on the ground. Once her eyesight returned, she saw they were dragging her back into the forest. It might have been a dream world, but the pain certainly felt real.

Twilight struggled until the gingerbread men reached their destination, a small village in the middle of the forest. As she expected, they all lived in gingerbread houses in the treetops. They dropped her heavily onto the ground and prepared a fire, and Twilight saw as they crushed fruits and berries and decorated their faces with different markings. They set up a stand over the fire, as if they were going to roast something, but she didn't see anything they could be roasting. Maybe they had it in their houses?

Twilight should have figured out sooner that gingerbread men wouldn't want to eat candy. She struggled in vain as they positioned her over the fire. They slowly spun her, chanting and dancing around her as the flames licked at her body. Was this how her journey was supposed to end? Eaten by cookies?! And the dreadful buzzing noise from before was here to bother her as well! It roared like a beast as it tore through the trees, finally revealing itself.

"AIEEEEAIAIAIAIAAIAAAA!" screeched a dark figure as it jumped in from the shadows and kicked her away from the fire.

Twilight landed hard on the ground, and the thing that had saved her landed directly over her. Before whoever saved her jumped away, she managed to see a peg leg and assumed she'd been saved by a pirate. She watched as her savior charged the gingerbread men, destroying them with a large sharpened candy cane. Once he had cleared away the gingerbread men around him, the fierce warrior threw a small package at his feet, releasing a smokescreen of sugary dust that glittered blue, green and red. Even though she couldn't see anything, Twilight could still hear the noises of her hero's noble, sugary weapon ending the lives of her captors. When one gingerbread man came into view, Twilight tried to summon her magic and was met with the same burning sensation from before. The gingerbread man charged at Twilight, but didn't get far as his head was knocked off his body by a lollipop mace. The fierce warrior emerged from his smokescreen with a red candy knife in his...hoof?! He started to cut Twilight free, but Twilight couldn't get a good look at him through the sugary smoke.

"Oh thank you! I can't thank you enough for saving me. My name is Twilight Sparkle and I'm trying to get back home, is there any way you could tell me-mmmffff!" the warrior silenced Twilight with a hoof-ful of taffy before cutting her loose from her bonds.

"Let's go before more of them show up." said the mysterious mare. Twilight inquired from this pony's voice that it was a mare, but she was wearing a mask and Twilight still couldn't figure out who her heroine was. She also realized that the buzzing noise she had heard in the distance was her new friend's mode of transportation, a colorful red locomotive with small front wheels and huge hind wheels, decorated with candies of every sort. Scrawled onto its side in white was what Twilight guessed was its name: "Cavity". And even though it was covered in sugar, it looked like a war machine that could have toppled the entire forest if she had commanded it to. Twilight tried to re-introduce herself as she boarded the machine next to her mysterious new friend.

"Well, like I was saying earlier, my name is Twilight. What's yours?"

The mystery mare removed her mask to reveal a scarred, milky eye. The rest of her features, however, were instantly recognizable.

"Pinkie Pie."