Author's Note

This is an odd start to something I've actually never done before. I am trying to combine aspects of a mythological world that has been sitting within my mind now for some 30 years. The main protagonist is essentially a means for me to explore an escapism from a hellish existence, to one of peace and understanding. I'd be very tempted to know what anyone thinks of this, if they even think of it at all.

This prologue is an attempt to describe in an amount of detail the "world" from which the human protagonist has come, and his insertion into a parallel universe which he clearly cannot yet comprehend as being equestrian. The building of this relationship and his attempts to recuperate and integrate with the utterly polar existence in Equestria will follow in succeeding chapters.

Prologue.

“This must be what a parallel universe is like', I thoght [sic]. Everything looked the same, but I suddenly felt like it wasn't. Like everything had been taken apart, brick by brick, flower bed by flower bed, and put back together in the wrong order. Just like me.”

― Jordanna Fraibergberg

The man in the ragged, burnt uniform sat within a crater that had been formed at some stage by an artillery shell. He was surrounded by a sea of death, mud and profanity, all of which he had become all too used to. It wasn't that his current situation didn't bother him, he had simply become accustomed to being in these kinds of fixes. He managed an indignant sniff and sat there observing the rising water within the shell hole. He found it strange that just as someone could develop muscle memory, they could also learn to experience horror and trauma and yet keep those somewhat corralled at the back of their consciousness.

Christ, he was tired.

It had been a solid two day action and nobody had even had so much as the suggestion of rest. As the sergeant in the platoon, the younger adepts all held a high respect for him. In the two hundred and fifty solar cycles he'd been fighting, he'd never attempted to rise above his current rank. The concept of being in a situation where he could not physically drag a wounded comrade to safety was anathema to him. His genuine concern and care of the members of his platoon served thus as a double edged sword - on the one hand his loyalty earned him a great deal of respect and trust, yet the concern he held for the others had caused him a great deal of personal trauma. It had brought him to within an ace of being killed on too many occasions for him to be able to count.

He shook himself from his reverie and glared angrily at the ersatz coffee he'd been trying to imbibe. Try as he might, the rain found the fucking canteen anyway. Not that it mattered a great deal - the coffee available this far forward tasted awful anyway. The running gag among the troops was that they took the water that the REMFs used to boil their socks, and then carried that up to the lines. Certainly the luke-warm, brown liquid he was now staring at in his battered canteen looked for all the world like diluted shit. He'd not tasted diluted shit before, he thought to himself - but he was prepared to hazard a guess that it tasted very much like what he now stared at.

This fucking rain. This fucking planet.

He looked down once more to stare idly at the way the heavy rain hammered the pool at the bottom of the hole he found himself in. Other adepts had also sought some kind of shelter, both from the elements and from the attentions of the enemy. Since achieving either end was proving difficult, he sat safely enough within the shell hole as it filled with water and tried as hard as he could to stop the water diluting his canteen of boiled socks any further.

Following two days and nights of intense fighting, the wounded had finally been able to be dusted off and for now at least their ceaseless moans and hallucinatory exclamations no longer assailed his ears. This did little to alleviate the horror of listening to the death rattles of others still out in no mans land. It helped less to see pieces of what had once been humans still scattered around the parapets.

In the back of his mind, an old quote flickered briefly in his consciousness, something about war having many faces but all of them being ugly. Taking a brief respite from the mediocre coffee, he scratched enough of the mud from his ID to read his full name and blood type. "Rolltagen, Karn O+" he muttered. At least he was still in his own skin, he thought darkly. Following the opening of the main offensive in his sector, several of his friends were no longer in theirs. He laughed bitterly to himself - one had to, after a while. So many years, so many friends, so many ghosts. It seemed to have been thousands of years that the forces of order and chaos and battled over this now accursed and barren wasteland. 'What the hell for' was the question the survivors found themselves asking.

Not for coffee-flavored shit and a wet arse, at any rate.

Karn was a somewhat unusual person to find in the middle of this particular nightmare. He was comparatively mild mannered, even for a veteran adept of some two hundred and fifty solar cycles' experience. As an order adept he was bound to fight to protect and preserve, a code he had tried and fought very hard to adhere to. After seeing this particular planet he was on reduced from a once thriving, simple farming society to that of a cratered, blood covered horror, he wasn't entirely sure it was worth it. At least if peace returned here someday, the blood and gore would probably provide farmers of the future with rich crops. He was inclined to be less bawdy and obscene than most of the other adepts he served with. He figured this to be a combination of his upbringing (his parents kept a very broad and well stocked supply of books and such at their farm house, and his father in particular preached exercising of the body and mind) and just his natural inclination. Be that as it may, he was more than capable of killing - and such had been his profession now for a very long time.

His comparatively sensitive mind leaped from this thought and back to the battered canteen he was consuming bad coffee from.

"Are you going to finish that fucking thing, or are you just going to hold it to keep you steady?" smirked another adept parked casually atop an old crate, just across from the growing pool of filthy water at the bottom of the shell hole. His interlocutor was another order adept - Coron. The way he seemed to be somehow chipper amidst the most unspeakable behavior that humanoids could possibly be capable of alternatively endeared and annoyed Karn.

"One knows not - but I can still safely say that it still smells better than you do, you bastard!" Karn laughed back at his friend. "Still, it's actually not too bad, as far as boiled underwear goes."

"Don't you mean socks? The major is keen on boiling his socks these days," Coron pointed out.

"Well, I figure this time they have gone for the high shelf gear. The taste makes me think they found a mechanic back there and boiled his underwear."

Coron stared quizzically at his friend for a moment. "So ... go on then?" he asked finally.

"Go on, how?"

"Well, does a boiled mechanic's underwear taste better than boiled socks?"

Coron was the one friend Karn had left from the first day he'd been posted. The two had been posted to the same unit, and the odd juxtaposition of their traits had welded a solid friendship. Karn's oddly philosophical view of the world, alongside that of Coron's harsh and darkly humorous one.

They had in fact been good friends now for some two hundred or more solar cycles in various hell holes. They both dreamed of a better life, should they live to the point of retirement from active service. Karn wanted to return to his parents' farm on Chronos IV, to his home country of Alsovia, and just live peacefully. His parents were also adepts, but had since been retired from the military and had taken to the farming game once more. Their old family estate was primarily a vineyard, but they also produced some very fine spirits. It would be nice to have a bottle or two here right now, regulations be damned.

Coron's dream was to return to the academy and retrain as a combat medic of all things. Though he was a man given to a dark sense of humor, when he had the chance to expound on his interests in medicine, even Karn was surprised at the academic depth his friend was gifted with - profane or not. Karn did in fact have quite a considerable grasp of human anatomy and physiology as well, but Coron's knowledge well exceeded his own. The fact that Karn was essentially an autodidact so far as his medical knowledge was concerned made this curious dichotomy of warrior and intellectual the more interesting. Who the hell had time to consider philosophy in a place where the man you were talking to could be atomized and sprayed all over you the next instant? Karn pushed these thoughts to the back of his mind, sipped his faux coffee and grimaced. The rain that had fallen into the canteen had essentially reduced the coffee it once contained to a cold, very slightly brown soup.

The rest of his company was currently keeping a low enough profile to prepare for whatever action the forces of chaos intended to bring their way. Chaos adepts were notorious for their treachery and their willingness to destroy anything and anyone who opposed their cause. As adepts they all had the ability from birth to absorb, convert and transmit energy in many forms. Some had a greater aptitude for this ability than others, and still others had particular abilities with some types of energy. Karn threw out the remainder of his cold coffee now mixed with rain water in disgust, and hooked the canteen back to his webbing.

Coron guffawed. "Ah, too weak a stomach for that stuff?"

"Not at all, I just feel that I've had my fill of boiled undergarments. It's too bad I don't have a cat's arse to lick or something, to rid my mouth of the taste of this 'coffee'. Do you know if they have warning labels on that shit?"

His friend laughed and shook his head. "You should've held onto that! Who knows when you'll get more of that in th- ... "

There was a blinding flash of light.

The air in Karn's lungs was immediately sucked from him.

He found himself being thrown backwards out of his muddy pit with enough force to make his heels strike his back.

Searing pain shot up his left side to his chest, and what seemed to be a thousand knives driving into his body was the next sensation he became aware of. He lay on the ground, winded and in excruciating pain. Whatever it was that had hit them had robbed his ears of sound and temporarily stolen vision from his eyes. As his eye sight slowly returned and his ears began to forgive him, he rolled onto his right side to instinctively prevent blood flowing to what may be his only good lung.

Across the now fully inflamed field before his stunned eyes, thousands of adepts of both orders battled. Bodies cleaved with every conceivable type of power, explosives from traditional chemical weapons and screams from the victims. Everywhere, men beat each other to death with whatever object they could find, burned each other alive, or blew each other to pieces with all manner of unspeakable weapons.

This carnage was different somehow, though.

Karn was no stranger to battle and sudden death - but this particular one had strangeness to it. It had an air of desperation that his shocked mind wasn't able to completely grasp. There was something new about this struggle, something odd with the way either of the extreme poles of order and chaos were fighting. Through the horror of war before him, he began to sense the combinations of order and chaos from the combatants combining somehow. Slowly at first, then accelerating, as if the joining of the light and dark energies was feeding on itself to become its own entity.

This was something new, something unworldly.

His ears slowly regained a sense of the warfare raging around him and he could begin to make out the roar. This was not the roar of soldiers fighting and dying, but the roaring birth of a new kind of horror - clearly something none of them had heard before. The wall of fire and fury continued its exponential growth, traversing the field and headed straight for him. Men in its path screamed and were consumed instantly by its power, almost as if some giant cauterizing demon was cleansing the surface of the planet from the pestilence it felt to have fouled it for long enough.

The wall of death, unstoppable in its insensible rage, stormed towards him. With the last remaining energy he could possibly summon - every last single screed of it - he shielded himself as thickly as he could. Death, he felt, was merely a fraction of a second away, and with his last attempt to dilate time, if for no other reason than to observe death's approach, he thought once more of Chronos IV. He wondered if news of the manner of his death would ever even reach his father.

The wall of hell reached him.

Karn could almost feel his existence vanish in its awesome power. He was able to maintain his form just briefly, through time dilation and shielding - his two prime abilities as an order adept. Such skills were as the wind to the overwhelming force he was met with. He became unaware of color, unaware of time, unaware of anything other than his quintessence, floating somehow, almost lost amidst ... what?

'I am here, but I am not here' he felt himself contemplating, as the new universe he found himself dismembered in swam around him, devoid of substance save for his own mind. 'Is this death? Is this the end that meets all things?' he pondered. Curiously, he felt no fear. How long was he disembodied thus for?

Gradually, he began to feel this tantalizingly loose sense of existence joined by a sense of self once more - subtly, slowly. His senses not yet returned, he began to feel once again some aspect of a humanoid form. The various extremities of his body slowly rejoined and reformed - yes, he was definitely alive, but how? Unable to view or make any logical sense of his surroundings, he struggled to regain composure as fear now began to return to him. This ability to sense danger, was that a good thing? Or a warning as to what he was about to endure next?

A feeling - such as he would expect to feel if a giant vice were to crush him - enveloped his form, and with a surprisingly heavy crash, he landed on something solid. The surface was hard, yet quite moist. 'Ah shit, I've landed back in the same shit hole I left behind.' Karn cursed to himself. The self-pity did not last long, as the pain of his experience finally began to register with his mind. There did not seem to be a part of his body that was not in agony.

He screamed.

His own screams of agony were, to his surprise, met with other startled screams from nearby. Though still half blinded he could not make out who they were. Blurry but startlingly colorful images danced around his agonized form. Although confused and tormented, he attempted to force his mind to take stock of his immediate situation. Given that his skin felt like it was burnt away, words and clarity of thought escaped him and he lay there panting and exhausted. He attempted to ask for medical assistance - but the agony in his chest produced merely a bloody gurgling.

Suddenly, to his surprise - itself a combination of terror but at least the consolation that he wasn't in this place alone - some strange voices registered with his auditory cortex. He also realized that not only was he still able to physically hear these voices, but clearly his Broca's and Wernicke's areas were functioning as the voices also made sense. He must have landed somewhere nearby where he left - these voices clearly belonged to people who spoke his own language. There was something there that his limited consciousness was able to grasp - if these are humans or humanoids, what was it about the tone of their voices that didn't seem .... right somehow? If they were not indeed humans, how was it that he and they spoke the same dialect? In the back of his mind, someone laughed - even through all of the shit he'd just gone through, Coron's God damn lectures about neurology had taken root.

"What on earth is that thing?" exclaimed one very excited female voice. Karn half tried to plead for help for his injuries once more, again with futility.

The voices surrounding him merely raised more questions. Why was he considered a 'thing'? Was he that badly injured? Why did the timbre of these voices register to him as female, and why were the owners of those voices so surprised to see him?

"I ... I think somepony had better get Twilight" whispered another, in a soft voice - was there a hint of horror in that voice? Still another inquired as to how dangerous 'it might be', and whether they should send for something called the 'Royal Guards'. By this time, the pain he was experiencing was being met with nausea and fatigue, until finally - almost as a benediction - he fell unconscious. As Karn's mind drifted into the blessed hole of painlessness, the last thought occurred to him: 'Royal what?'.

Karn floated within his mind, shared with his own nightmarish memories. Flashbacks of battles fought past, interposed with his most recently experienced tragedies, battered his inner mind and vied for power with his reason. He wondered which side would prevail. His mind fought for the blissful air of clarity, and in fighting to do so, finally broke the surface of the mire and he thought he had finally regained consciousness.

In his stupor, he thought he could feel himself being lifted by .... well, something. Clearly this wasn't a human. The feeling of thick arms - for this is what he supposed the limbs lifting him could only be - carrying him gently onto what appeared to be some kind of stretcher. Flashes of conversations reached his ears and he pondered them as best he could. The medical babbling of a group of those penetrated his mind, and he suddenly realized with a certain amount of relief that he was receiving medical aid.

A voice, sounding male, interrupted his contemplation. "Have you ever seen a creature like this before, Twilight?".

'Creature?' Karn pondered groggily. 'Who or what the fuck is Twilight? Clearly they aren't a medic'.

A soft and surprised feminine voice responds. "Wow! Actually .... yes! Yes, I have! But never here like this! I've never seen one look so ill before!" He could feel his heart hammering somewhat rapidly against his chest, and was surprised he could still feel that much sensation so clearly. Wherever he was, at least somebody recognized him, or at least what he was.

'Am I as badly injured as they seem to say?', thought Karn, 'but how so?' He was clearly in a very bad way; his own pain, increasing fever, what he supposed was hysterical blindness, these things informed him of as much. Was he physically still here? Where the hell was here, anyway? Concentrating as hard as he could, he attempted to reach out - to feel the fabric of space time around him - but his adept training failed him and he was met with silence from the natural world.

The male voice again interrupted Karn's thoughts. "We need to get this thing to the Ponyville hospital, let's see if anypony there can help determine what is wrong with it."

It? They had referred to him with the neutral pronoun before, but why? The curious juxtaposition of word parts - anyone with anypony. Was the fever he could feel cracking his bones causing his ego to crack with them? He felt himself being carried, gently but with some degree of physical strength. These strange beings with the large 'arms' (or at least such is what he assumed such appendages were) were taking him to a hospital, from what little he could understand. Attempting to crack his eyes, he was met with a blurry but certainly extremely colorful panorama. This was not Chronos IV. Almost laughing, he slowly attempted to crane his head around to view whomever or whatever was helping carry this end of the stretcher. A large, colorful blob met his vision. It must have been paying attention to him in his plight, for it noticed Karn's unseeing eyes attempting to focus.

"Whatever it is, it's awake! Can you hear me? Where did you come from? Do you feel any pain??" asked the blob. Karn attempted to mouth a response, but all he could manage was another gurgle.

In a brief moment of coherence, it occurred to him that not only was this place quiet, but there was no stench of war. Fresh, clean air met his tongue and nose. There was no stench of death, no smoke, no fire. The quiet, though - there was no tension to it, no feeling that a coiled spring was ready to be loosed. This was ..... peaceful.

He felt himself slowly falling into the abyss of unconsciousness once more. As his sense of hearing finally gave out, he caught the words of whoever was carrying the stretcher nearest his head.

"I hope we can save it".

Silence.

Non-existence.