...and the Stream Babbled On.
The first thing Celestia noticed when she woke up was that the world was in a much sharper relief than she was used to. With her face pressed against the dry earth, she could make out thousands of tiny stone particles, each cast in a unique shape. That the universe was capable of creating such variety overwhelmed her mind at the same time that it overwhelmed her vision.
The white alicorn vomited up the salad she had eaten that morning and was forced to roll to avoid the mess. The sudden swirling of her vision caused her to vomit again, and this time she could not avoid it. Celestia sat there, reeking of her own digestive system, and tried to figure out what had happened.
First, she had to close her eyes to shut out the visual cacophony. This done, she tried to orient her brain and her stomach back into their regular positions; it felt as though the two had switched spots during her teleportation. Teleportation, yes she had been in the middle of a teleportation spell when…
“When what? What was different, it was the same as the countless other spells I've cast…”
Celestia did not need to open her eyes to acknowledge the silence that had so loudly responded to her voice. She could hear the occasional chirp of a bird, and the breeze moving along some kind of plant life. Somewhere nearby she thought she heard the babble of a stream. Slowly, the princess opened her eyes.
Again she was slammed with a level of detail that totally overwhelmed her visual senses. It was like she was under the influence of some sort of hallucinogen. Everything had such texture! The fine detail was disconcerting, but it was the depth of the world around her that made her sick. It felt like she had grown a third eye, her depth perception was like a hawk’s. She cast her vision down at one of her splayed legs. Celestia marveled at her fur, noticing, truly noticing, for the first time that she was a furred animal. Her entire body was covered in millions of tiny, fine hairs that together formed her alabaster coat. Her golden shoes were missing, and Celestia could see how her fur stopped at her well-trimmed fetlock and did not grow on her manicured, smooth looking hoof. It was like a marble sculpture, her hoof.
Despite the bizarreness of the situation, Celestia giggled to herself. Here was the great sun princess, lying in the dirt and ogling her hooves like some woodscolt who had accidentally ingested some magic mushrooms. The laugh did much to relieve her tension, and the princess felt that her stomach and head had settled enough to warrant an attempt at standing. Slowly, she got to her hooves.
While…something…had clearly messed with her vision, her limbs had not been affected the same way and the princess did not have any trouble maintaining her stature. She took a cautious step and found that if she did not focus too much on what her eyes were telling her she could walk with relative ease. She extended her wings and was pleased to discover that they were both in healthy shape. Steeling herself, the alabaster pony carefully began to look at the world around her.
Celestia was shocked by the variety of colors she saw. The hillside she had apparated next to was dotted with numerous browns and greens, greys and some restrained blues, yet none of the brighter palette she was used to. The number of colors had increased while the extremes of the pallet had decreased. For the first time, Celestia began to suspect that she was not in Equestria anymore.
The princess stood in a small, sandy open space at the base of the large hill. There were not many trees, and those that were present were twisted and fairly low to the ground. The plant life was mostly just low shrubs and bushes. Celestia took a sniff of the air and surmised that it was largely composed of sage. Turning her head slowly so as to not sicken herself, she spotted a thin, gentle stream rolling by. Realizing she was standing on a dry river bed, she approached the water with the intent of washing some of the sickness off of her chest and face. Dipping her front hooves into the stream, the princess attempted to lift some of the water out with her magic. The stream continued to babble on, ignorant of her interference. Celestia frowned. Lowering her head closer to the stream, she again tried to pull some of the liquid up and splash her face. Again, nothing happened. Celestia felt panic begin to bubble in her stomach as she concentrated harder on performing the spell. After several seconds of straining, she realized that her horn was not even glowing. The warm, comforting feeling of magic was not there.
“No magic…”
Celestia dipped her wingtips into the stream and splashed her face. The water should have made her feel refreshed and clean, but she only felt a hollow anxiety. She washed herself until her coat was free from bile.
“No magic…”
She looked up at the sun, and knew instantly that it was not hers.
“What is this place?”
Ten minutes later, the sun princess was walking down the streamside, curiously examining her surroundings and pondering her situation. It occurred to her that she might seek out help, but as she was not in Equestria anymore she was uncertain of what she might find. That there were other worlds, she knew. That these worlds were inhabited, she also knew. Her protégé and friend, Princess Twilight Sparkle, had proved to her as much by journeying to one such place on two separate occasions. But the world that Twilight visited had not been that much unlike Equestria. While this new world was inhabited by bipeds, “humans” Twilight had called them; they were not so different than her own little ponies. Indeed, if Twilight was to be believed, many were doppelgangers with Equestrian counterparts. Twilight and Celestia had concluded that this universe was likely a parallel world, a sister to their own plain of existence.
But the world Celestia now walked was unlike anything she had ever conceived of. The other Equestria had possessed magic, albeit in a restrained form. Celestia, who for a thousand years had been one of the most magical beings in existence, knew that this world was completely devoid of it. Her fascination with this fact helped to overcome the panic sewed by such a conclusion, at least temporarily. She needed to figure out where she was before she could consider how to get back home. Again she looked up at the bright orb in the sky.
“Who moves you? Or perhaps, what moves you?”
Her reverie was broken by a glimmer of movement in the corner of her eye. She turned and spotted a bird that had alighted on the branch of one of the low, gnarled trees. The tiny, blue-grey creature plumped itself up, taking on the appearance of a fat cotton ball. Celestia slowly approached. She called out to the bird,
“Hello little one, I don’t suppose you know where I am, do you?”
The creature turned its head, eyeing her with a beady black eye. Celestia paused. The way that the small black orb regarded her set something off inside of her. Something felt different about this animal. It lacked…character? She could not quite place what was wrong. Before she could approach any closer the creature flitted off, alarmed at her presence. She watched it fly away and again wondered what strange place she had stumbled onto.
She stopped to drink at the stream, before looking up and once again taking her bearings. The stream ran through down a clump of hills. They weren’t particularly large, but were tall enough to obscure her view of anything distant. Flexing her wings, Celestia leapt into the air with the intent of soaring to a better vantage point.
She hit the dirt hard, releasing a very unladylike grunt and jamming her swanlike neck in a very unpleasant way.
“Ohh… dear.”
She shakily stood to her feet and tried to work the crick out of her neck by turning her head in circles. When most of the pain had gone away, she tried flapping her wings. Slowly at first, then harder. When her wings were going at a full beat, she managed to kick up a lot of dust but her hooves did not leave the ground. After fruitlessly flapping for half a minute, straining to defy gravity, Celestia eventually stopped and her rump hit the ground with a final puff of dust. The princess looked forlornly at her wings.
“No magic…”
When then sun dipped below the tallest hill Celestia realized that she was going to spend the night in this new place. There had been days in her youth when she had slept out in the open, usually on a warm bed of grass with her sister Luna. But as a shiver went up her spine, Celestia pawed at the grainy earth with a hoof and realized that these conditions were not the same. It was unlikely that she would have a comfortable night.
Due to the nature of her station, the princess was unfamiliar with most survival techniques. She was far from stupid, or even naïve for that matter, but her repertoire of knowledge was geared towards managing the affairs of the state. Diplomatic disputes? No problem. Dealing with recalcitrant nobles? Easy. Tax laws? Well, not exactly a walk in the park, but manageable.
What Celestia did have was a voracious appetite for books. She had read her fair share of adventure novels (including those featuring a certain archeologist pegasus), and decided that the first thing she ought to do was to construct some sort of shelter. So, after taking a drink from the stream, she set about gathering large branches and sticks.
Looking around, Celestia realized rather quickly that this would prove to be a much more difficult task than anticipated. She did not see many large pieces of wood, and those that she did spot were crooked and bent, unsuitable for any manner of construction. Still, she did not see much choice in the matter, and if she was going to have some kind of roof over her head before nightfall she would need to put her back into it. She trotted up to the branch nearest her and grabbed one end with her mouth. Her face grimaced at the musty, earthen taste and she set about pulling. The branch was held tightly by the brownish-green scrub, and did not yield to her incessant yanking. After a few seconds of heaving and grunting, Celestia became aware of an unusual pattern of movement between her squinted eyes. Small, dark objects had begun to flit about rapidly, moving in jagged flight patterns. She heard the buzzing, but still did not realize what she had done until she felt the first hot needle jab her sharply in the flank.
The princess yelped loudly as the hornets set upon her, stabbing her graceful, feminine figure repeatedly with their stingers. A gentle tickling under her cheek indicated that one of the six legged demons had landed on her face, and she brought up a hoof to swat it off. The bug was faster though, and Celestia cried out at the hideous pain that engulfed the left side of her face.
The swarm pursued the princess as she fled in the opposite direction of their nest. In her haste and under relentless attack, the princess stumbled and fell head first into the the creek. Cold water splashed up around her, and she flailed about wildly in the two inches of slow moving liquid as though it were a raging river. Her flailing had some positive affect though, as the hornets finally ended their offensive and returned to the nest. Or perhaps they simply felt that the point had been made.
For a while, Celestia lay in the water in stunned misery. The cold stream felt good on her wounds. The left side of the Princess’s lovely face had swollen up, and she could not see out of her left eye. When at length the chilly water became unpleasant, the alicorn stumbled to her hooves for the second time that day and clumsily trotted out of the stream and onto the bank. She collapsed into the dirt, the fine material sticking to her white fur and staining her belly and legs an earthy brown.
With her good eye, Celestia looked up at the mocking, alien moon. Then the first tear came, and soon she was weeping. The heaving sobs eventually gave way to a dry stillness, and finally to an uncomfortable but deep sleep. From the top of a nearby hill, a pair of cat’s eyes observed the slumbering diarch cautiously.
The Princess awoke before dawn, but she did not move from her spot on the ground until well after the sun had come up. That the object rose above the horizon without her command did not surprise her, nor did it provoke her curiosity anymore.
Celestia hated this place.
It was a juvenile notion, and a part of her felt that she should really be above such things. But the truth was, if she had possessed the energy, she would have angrily stamped her hooves and cursed at the world around her, like a petulant child that was denied ice cream.
The swelling of her stings had receded somewhat, but the Princess still couldn’t see out of her left eye. Besides the spots where the hornets had attacked her, the Princess was incredibly sore from her night spent on the cold, hard earth. Standing up proved to be even more difficult than it was when she was first dumped in this miserable world, but Celestia’s sense of survival compelled her to push on. After rising to her feet, she stepped into the stream and quenched her thirst, before going to the bathroom. The princess did not blush at being out in the open, because her sense of modesty was thoroughly trampled by the circumstances she found herself in.
After relieving herself, Celestia began to trot around in search of food. It had been almost twenty-four hours since she had last eaten, and her empty stomach added significantly to her state of misery. At first she nibbled on some of the grasses that had been growing on the river bank, but she found these to be tasteless and not very filling. Walking closer to the edge of the sagebrush, she spotted some delightfully green stalks with little yellow flowers on top. The flowers had spines around them, so these she did not eat. But she found the stalks and leaves of the plant to be quite tasty, and in a matter of seconds was gorging herself in a most un-princesslike fashion. Within the span of twenty minutes, she had burned through two large bushes of the plant. She was halfway through a third when she finally decided that her stomach could hold no more. Sitting back onto her flank, the princess admired the dozens of tiny yellow flowers that lay scattered around her, before letting out a mighty belch. She raised a hoof to her mouth and let out a giggle,
“Oh my, thank goodness Luna did not see that or I would never hear the end of it! And Twilight Sparkle, she would have had an aneurism!”
The thought of her sister and precious student filled Celestia’s heart with joy, quickly followed by consternation. How was she to return to Equestria? How were her little ponies dealing with her absence? What had happened that caused her to be here in the first place? And if there was no magic, how was she to get back?
For the first time, Celestia began to realize the gravity of her situation. She had faced many problems before, some extremely dangerous. But she had always had magic with her. And in the cases where she herself could not solve the problem, she had her family and friends to depend on. Here, she had neither magic nor friends.
“How am I going to get home?”
The princess sat and pondered her options. Her thoughts again turned to the idea of finding help, but she had still not solved the problem of where she was. And it now occurred to the alicorn that whoever she did find (if she could find anyone at all) would probably be unfamiliar with magic. Could there be an alternate way to get back? Celestia did not see how.
The pony realized that she had begun walking along the streamside again. Unable to formulate a better plan, she decided to follow her hooves’ instincts and continue her journey along the stream, to wherever that might lead.
For several hours she walked. Along the way, she continued to observe her surroundings as she had on the first day. The countryside was far from monotonous, and the princess once again found herself stunned at its restrained beauty and detail. The lack of vision in the left side of her face put a bit of a damper on her sight-seeing, but Celestia nonetheless drank in her surroundings with her good eye. She had spotted a pair of rabbits foraging, but upon her approach they broke for the cover of the sage and disappeared under the knots of dried branches. It was clear that the wildlife in this world was not as friendly as Equestria’s, although to be fair Equestrian hornets are just as hostile as the ones Celestia had encountered earlier. A bird circled overhead, but Celestia could not make out its details because it was so far away.
Towards the end of the day, Celestia found herself hungry and thirsty again. She drank from the stream and looked for some more of the yellow flower to graze on. It was twilight, and Celestia’s found that the hillsides and the plants on them cast odd shadows and obscured outlines. It was a strange sight, almost like a fog had been pulled over her previously excellent vision. Still, she managed to spot a clump of the plant and happily trotted over to begin eating. She bent down to take her first bite.
There was a gentle rushing sound, and a heavy object struck Celestia from her blind side. The princess did not yell because the air had been knocked out of her stomach. Then her brain registered that there were claws embedded in her body, and she sucked in a breath so that she could let out a scream. Before the air could leave her lungs, a vise-like grip seized the back of Celestia’s neck. The princess jerked, instinctively trying to buck her attacker off. The pressure on her neck tightened. Celestia’s good eye bulged in its socket and her tongue hung limply out the side of her mouth. Her face turned blue, but before she could suffocate there was a cracking sound and everything went black.
When the mountain lion had eaten its fill, it stuffed the remainder of Celestia’s body under a pile of dead sage brush and wandered off to find a warm place to sleep for the night. The crickets chirped and the stream babbled on.
Author's Note
Oh, I guess she didn't make it.
