Chapter 1: Mysterious Object
“What is that?” Twilight thought to herself while inspecting the mysterious object she had laid her hooves on. It looked like a silver coin with two red, horn-like things attached on the sides. It seemed like it had broken out of something else, but what could that possibly be? She had found it in the Canterlot library searching for some interesting new spells to learn. She put it in her bag not paying further attention to it, somehow though it seemed familiar to her.
She knew she could have asked Princess Celestia about the object and why it was lying around in there, completely covered in dust hidden in an ancient part of the library, but somehow something kept her from doing so. She had no idea what that feeling was and it did not matter to her at this moment.
After leaving the library, she directly took the train back to Ponyville avoiding any possible distractions. She was a determined pony, always focusing on the task at hand, letting nothing else get in the way of her and her studies. Sometimes, she regretted this trait of hers which had lead to neglecting her friends before. She was the princess of friendship now and had abandoned her friend, Moon Dancer, back then just because she was busy with her studies. “Unbelievable how much time can change a pony”, she said to herself. Time was flying by for her during the train journey while she was reading a book on alteration spells she brought from the library.
Once she arrived in Ponyville, she was eager to get to her house or rather the big, cold castle that had replaced her beloved Golden Oak Library which had been destroyed by Tirek during their battle. She let out a soft sigh while thinking about it, she still had not been able to get over it. She tried getting home secretly, without running into any of her friends in order to avoid getting her schedule for the day shattered by some spontaneous plans. Oh, how much she disliked having to rearrange her schedule due to some unforeseen events. After all, she had not changed too much over the years, she chuckled a little over that thought. Everything went well, occasionally some ponies were greeting her but none of their friends seemed to be nearby. Then she remembered, they all had some plans for today anyway. Fluttershy was having a tea party with her critters, Rainbow Dash and Applejack were practicing for the upcoming Running of the Leaves, Pinkie Pie was trying out some new cupcake recipes and Rarity was busy creating a new collection to present in Canterlot later this year. Now that she realized she did not need to fear running into her friends or at least knew they were not going to mess up her schedule, she felt relieved and quickened her pace in order to get home faster.
When she got home, she noticed Spike napping in his bed as usual. She carpeted him with his blanket and gave him a soft kiss on his forehead. Then, she left him a note reading “I’m working in the lab, please don’t disturb me. I’ll be back for dinner!”. Her laboratory was in the basement and was of decent size, one of the good aspects of her new home; one of the few. “Enough of the grieving”, she said to herself, “I need to get to work”. She adjusted her lab to be suitable for practicing some of her new alteration spells but also analyzing the object she found in the library.
“Maybe I should start with that” she thought and opened her bag with her magic and lifted the object into the air. A shiver ran down her spine, it felt as if the object just reacted to her magic. She shrugged it off as just being her imagination and carefully placed the object on a small lab table. She checked the object with a tool to measure magical emission and to her surprise the object turned out to be overloaded with magic energy. “What in the wide world of Equestria was this thing?” she asked herself. Now, she got curious - “what if she fired a magic beam directly at it?”. She fired a powerful burst of magic at the object, for a moment she felt a tingling sensation, there was a massive shockwave illuminating the whole room. The room was filled with blazing light, her eyes began to burn. She blacked out.
“What happened?” Twilight asked herself in confusion. The last thing she could remember was firing a magic burst at the object, after that her mind went black. “Where am I?” was the next question to be answered. She could still barely see due to being flashed by the blazing light. Her vision was kind of blurry and she could only make out silhouettes. She was not in her lab anymore, that was for sure. It was still daytime and she could hear faint noises in the distance, which seemed to be a gathering of ponies. She decided to wait a couple of minutes to recover from her fainting.
Once she regained her vision, she noticed that she did not recognize the buildings around her, she certainly wasn’t in Ponyville anymore. She decided to approach the crowd of ponies to ask somepony where she was and maybe get a clue on how she got here. After she walked out of the valley, she came to an unfortunate realization. This was the Crystal Empire, but not the one she was used to, what she saw looked older, almost ancient.
She remembered that she still had the object she was examining and after looking at it for a while, it felt like a punch in the face. "It was part of King Sombra's crown!" she screamed out in desperation. Apparently, it had sent her back to the time before Princess Celestia and Princess Luna had liberated the empire from his cruel reign. She was doomed.