Chapters Resident Canterlot
A My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic Fanfiction
Co written and edited by DaedaltheusXIV and RazortheAwesome
DISCLAIMER: This is a non-profit fan based work of prose. My Little Pony: Friendship is
Prologue:
“I’m so sorry,” said Fluttershy for what seemed like the thousandth time to
“It’s no problem, Fluttershy,” replied Twilight for the forty-seventh time as the train rolled on up the mountainside ever closer to the city of Canterlot that was barely visible above the tree tops. Twilight’s eyes occasionally drifted back and forth across the landscape, watching the same looking trees pass by the window for the past several hours as she and Fluttershy went to join their friends at the palace. Princess Celestia had thrown another Gala event for the kingdom, just like last year. Ever since their first Gala just a few years prior however, each one had gotten bigger and bigger. Apparently, this year, the entire kingdom itself was to be engulfed in festivities with an entire street carnival to fill all the thoroughfares of the city and spilled out to the land just outside the castle. Twilight herself looked forward to seeing the Princess again and spending some more time with her at the Gala, which now took an entire week to celebrate with all the new events, shows, and parades. So what if we’re a few days late, Twilight mused, at least they would be there in time for the Grand Finale, a fireworks show combined with a live performance by the Wonderbolts. Rainbow Dash talked only of that event for months now, and at each time talked about how great it would be to see such a spectacle as that.
“Are you listening, Twi?” Fluttershy asked, nudging the lavender shoulder of her friend a little bit, jarring her from her staring out the window.
“Huh, what?”
“Oh, um, do you think that our friends will be mad at us for being late to the celebration?” Fluttershy asked timidly. “No, I’m sure that they will understand,” she replied, “after all, they know how important it is that the ducks made it to their new home and that you needed help managing them.” Twilight hid her upset from the yellow Pegasus. Why Shy didn’t ask Dash for help was beyond her. After all, the two were usually together around Ponyville, visiting with Pinkie Pie and the Cakes when not working around Shy’s cottage or managing the weather. Shy had helped out more with the weather than before since several of the pegasi had moved away from Ponyville and out of the remaining pegasi left in town, most were managing their own lives. Some were married and dedicated time to raising their new families so help was needed wherever it could be found, even from the weakest flyer. Nevertheless, Twi questioned how in Equestria she could have helped with migrating ducks, even Ditzy and her clumsiness would have been better suited at helping ducks switch homes. Four days late for a celebration she waited for all year long for and still, despite that, she found her anger subsiding with each passing moment. She could barely remember the last time she spent this much time with Fluttershy, well, sans all of their friends together, and found herself able to take what she could get from the situation at hoof. After all, even if she missed the first four days of the Gala this year, there was always next year.
“Well, we should make it just in time to catch the end of the Carnival and still make it in time for the Finale,” Twilight said with some frustrated enthusiasm and watched the yellow Pegasus’s eyes became bright at the notion of the Carnival and then shrink away at the notion of the Finale. Twilight remembered almost immediately how much Fluttershy hated loud noises, particularly those of the fireworks used at the Gala. “Oh…right,” she added.
“Hopefully they won’t be nearly as loud this year,” joked Fluttershy, enticing a slight bit of laughter from the lavender unicorn. Twilight just looked to her friend and smiled before she turned her head back to look out the window of the train again and noticed that the trees were not moving past the window nearly as fast as before. Huh, that’s weird, she thought, it’s almost as if the train is slowing down. Just few mere minutes after she finished that though, the train came to a complete stop with a slight jolt and then remained entirely still. “Are we at the station already?” Shy asked as she looked out the window with Twilight, expecting to see the station or at least some semblance of the city to be there. However, Shy only saw the same trees that Twilight saw and began to hear the rising chatter of some of the other travelers making their way to the city and beyond. Without saying a word, Twilight left her seat and proceeded to move towards the direction of the engine, hoping that the engineer would have some answer to this sudden stop. Confused, Fluttershy followed Twilight as she left the car and trotted towards the engine only to see the engineer already standing there.
“What’s going...?” Twilight began to ask the engineer, who looked a little confused himself and slightly worried.
“What do you mean problem?” she said, “We can’t be stopping now that we’re so close and besides, what is this problem that is forcing us to stop anyways?” The engineer didn’t say a word, and instead led both Twilight and Fluttershy around to the front of the engine. Upon seeing it, the yellow Pegasus squeaked an almost inaudible ʻoh my’. The steel beams of the track were torn from the ground and twisted into elongated curves, which reached upwards and sideways. Twilight could only stand in shock-filled awe at the sight of the rails twisted like that and almost immediately began to think to herself about what could have done it. She glanced over at Shy and noticed that she too must have thought of the possibilities and could tell almost immediately that she thought of some horrific monster by the way she shrank in fear. Twilight shook her head at that and walked back into the passenger car with a confused look on her face as she walked past the now roused guests, each one with a more concerned look than the last. Within the span of a few moments Twilight reached her and Fluttershy’s seats, took the saddlebags from underneath them with her telekinesis and carried them back outside where she gave Fluttershy hers.
“We’re not going onward, are we?” Fluttershy asked with a look of concern on her face as she adjusted her bag.
“We can’t let something as simple as…” the second those words left her mouth, she immediately regretted the choice of the word ‘simple’ to describe steel tracks being bent back upwards and twisted. Her mind raced with a better answer before simply letting out a sigh and looking the yellow Pegasus in the eyes. “Look, right now it’s the only way to get there on time unless you want to get back on the train and wait to find another route, forcing us to be even more late than we already are.”
“I guess not,” the yellow pony squeaked before stepping forward to head off into the forest ahead with her head hung low as Twilight followed closely behind. The engineer did not protest decision, after all, who could blame them for wanting to reach the festivities as soon as possible but then again...
“What in the name of the princess could have done that to the tracks?” he asked aloud, his eyes fixed on the twisted metal of the tracks arching upwards to the sky.
***
“If we just follow the tracks, there’s no way that we can get lost,” Twilight Sparkle reassured Fluttershy, who questioned if they were on the right path. “It’s simple logic really. This is the route that the train uses to reach Canterlot, therefore if we follow it…”
“I know that Twi, it’s just ... that it’s so quiet,” Fluttershy said, stepping on the beams while Twilight walked along side of her, her eyes fixated on the path ahead.
“Well, of course it is Fluttershy, it’s a forest, and it’s supposed to be quiet.”
“No, there’s supposed to be the sounds of animals, and don’t you think that if there was something wrong with the tracks, then we should have at least run into somepony that would be coming out from the castle to fix them?” Once those words hit her ears, Twilight suddenly stopped and directed her attention to the nearby trees, her eyes darting around and her ears twitching as she searched for a sound. Fluttershy was right, there was not a single sound coming from within forest that surrounded them.
After a few seconds of intense listening, the only sounds that Twilight could pick up amongst the silence were the subtle rustlings of the leaves and the occasional moaned creak of a tree branch. However, even amongst the silence of the forest, Twi swore that in the far off distance, there was the mild humming of something with a frequency not unlike the sound of an air raid siren. Nevertheless, even that faded out with time as though it simply was not there anymore.
“You’re right, there’s nothing out there, except for...” she stopped mid-thought as a smell that seemingly half lingered in the air suddenly hit her senses at last instantly wrinkling of her nose. “That smell of…of something but I can’t quite put my hoof on what it is,” she said, prompting her companion to begin to sniff the air around her and wrinkle her nose upon finding it as well.
“It kind of smells like something’s burning,” Shy timidly replied and quickly followed up with a look in all directions for the source of the smell but to no avail. With no other ideas of what to do, she flapped her wings and rose up above the treetops for a better look to see if she could spot the source of the smoke and disappeared from Twilight’s view into the thick canopy. That was the one thing Twilight found annoying about the forests surrounding the castle, the overall tallness and thickness of the trees. It made the walk through them all the more unpleasant with the near sunset availability of light and cold temperatures that seemed ever present. She recalled very briefly of a time she went camping in the woods as an excursion during her studies as a filly, recalling a near freezing cold night and rather unpleasant meeting with a wild bear she had been forced to ward off. However, her memories were interrupted with the revelation that more than five minutes passed and still Fluttershy lingered above the trees.
“Fluttershy!” Twilight called out to the trees, hoping that amongst them her friend would appear to her. “Fluttershy!” she called again, this time with much more force and loudness to carry her voice out to what she hoped would allow for her friend to hear it. To no avail, the silence persisted without even the slightest reply from Fluttershy, causing Twilight to begin to panic. “Fluttershy, for the love of Celestia would you please answer!” she screamed and began running further down the railroad tracks, following each bend until she tripped over one of the railroad ties and landed face first on the ground.
She looked up from her place on the ground, rubbed her forehead with a hoof and then picked herself up onto her feet again to look around. Twilight took in a deep breath to scream again for her friend when a very loud, squeaking scream echoed through the forest towards the direction of the tracks that Twilight was originally heading towards. Twilight gathered herself again and took off down the tracks until she found Fluttershy standing where the track turned at the point where the forest broke open for a moment.
“Fluttershy is everything all right?” she asked, finding her friend staring off to the distance, her eyes wide with shock and a sense of fear. Twilight watched Fluttershy slowly raise a hoof in the direction she faced, forcing Twilight to look the same way and caused her jaw to drop at the sight before her eyes. There, just beyond the next few hills and within the great mountain range above Ponyville, the city of Canterlot burned with great plumes and columns of black smoke pouring forth. The smoke, not in unison but fractured throughout the large metropolis, rose upwards and dispersed into an unlikely and unprecedented cloudy sky. Twilight’s eyes darted around the scene before her, looking for any signs of the fire that may or may not be raging throughout the great city of Canterlot, only to see brief patches of what may or may not have been fires. There was a sort of glow from behind the fortress walls of the city, but much like the smoke that rose above the columned towers and facades of money of the old and decadent buildings of the city, it too was fractured.
“What in the name of Celestial could have happened to Canterlot?” she asked aloud to which Shy barely responded with but a slight shake of her head. Suddenly, the bursting and pulsating sound of a siren echoed forth from the city and lasted for several minutes as the two looked on. Within a few more minutes of blank staring into the burning city, the siren cut out. Twilight stepped one hoof forward towards the city, but as she did, Fluttershy immediately jumped in front of her, a rather worried look in her large cyan eyes, her pupils almost dilated as she continued to shake her head back and forth.
“Fluttershy... We have to continue onward into the city, I mean just look at it,” said Twilight, “we have to make sure that the princesses and our friends are all right.”
“That’s just it Twilight! Look at the city!” Fluttershy protested in what vaguely sounded like yelling as she began to shake where she stood. “Who knows what caused that or even if whatever it was is still there...” she gulped, “waiting for us…” she trailed off into a muffled meep and cowered before Twilight.
“We have to continue onward and assess the situation. Our friends might be in danger,” Twilight stated before side steeping around the yellow Pegasus cowering before her and continued further along the railroad tracks. Within seconds, Fluttershy appeared next to her, her head hung low as the two pressed onward to the burning city of Canterlot. The stench of the smoke grew stronger with each step they took towards the city and the two ponies found strange objects scattered about the tracks. Random bits of armor and bizarre cylindrical cartridges that weren’t much larger than bits strewn about the ground proved to be the most things until they turned around the last bend. The pair came to the straight away towards the city and found a derailed locomotive and cars, water spilled out amongst oil and grease. The coal spread out before them in a mound falling shortly down the sloping green hill and the track too look similar to that of the first track they encountered before departing from the previous train. Fluttershy cautiously walked forward to look inside one of the fallen passenger cars while Twilight examined the tracks and the engine, her mind drawing some conclusions but still had one question echoing consistently throughout her mind. It was almost too obvious that the tracks were twisted by magic, given the clean breaks and the lack of physical marks, which would indicate that some kind of animal or pony performed the Heraclean task. More importantly, it was that the performance of the task occurred as the train left and that the rails were uprooted when the train was on top of them. Still, why on Celestia’s green Equestria would something like this be done, especially when Celestia knows how many fillies and foals were present on the passenger cars.
“Twilight!” Fluttershy screamed, catching the attention of the lavender unicorn. Nigh instantaneously, she ran to her friend who simply lay down in front of the exposed rear door of one of the passenger cars. Inside the car lay the bodies of several ponies, each strewn about the car. The most disturbing part of the entire scene however, was that each one was burned, the charred bodies visibly days old. The yellow Pegasus began to cry loudly as her friend held her close to her, the tears making no sound as they rolled onto the grass beneath her. “There were ch….ch…children in there and… and…,” she cried even louder as Twilight tried consoling her, but to no avail. It was all too bizarre for words to even comprehend at the moment, given each of the stranger and stranger occurrences that lead up to this point at the bridge just before the entrance into the city foregrounds and then the Wall. The tracks, the bodies, the bizarre cartridges scattered about and the burning city all meant something terrible took place here, but why in Celestia’s name had she not been notified earlier about it, or maybe she could not have been notified. That thought crossed her mind several times now, as she looked onward towards the wall and the bridge to reach it along the tracks, finding that there existed very little of what one could call the bridge to Canterlot anymore. With a concentrated thought, she instantaneously teleported both her and Fluttershy across the river and along the tracks leading to the Wall.
“C’mon Fluttershy, we have to keep moving,” Twilight said, giving her a nudge and trying to get Fluttershy from her state of timid lockdown on the ground.
“We can’t, Twilight, this is something really terrible that we’re heading into,” Shy continued to cry until at last she began to hiccup and cough from her several minutes of sobbing.
“Fluttershy, we…we…” she could not think of any more words that she could possibly say that would convince the yellow Pegasus to move onward and simply rested her head against her friend’s until she felt Shy begin to calm down. Fluttershy stood up after a few more moments and just stared at the Wall off in the distance before letting out a sigh.
“Promise me that everything will be all right, Twilight,” she said, a rather defiant tone present in her voice that nearly caught Twilight by surprise.
“Fluttershy, I…”
“Promise me that we’ll find Dashie, Applejack, Pinkie and Rarity and everything will be all right, Twilight.” There was a moment’s pause before Twilight spoke again and finally let out her own sigh and placed a hoof on Fluttershy’s shoulder.
“I promise, Fluttershy,” she said as the two got back up and walked forward towards the gates leading into the city of Canterlot within the Wall. The Wall, built shortly after the entire changeling-wedding incident as a means of further security to guard the expanded city, stood nearly six stories above the surrounding area and encompassed most of the city. A significant portion of the city remained with its back to the mountains and possessed no real need for a wall to spare it from any intruders. The Wall, white stone and mortar, proved a testament of pony engineering and architectural feat unlike most seen since the time of the construction of the Great Canterlot Library.
Twilight and Fluttershy approached the large metal doors along the track which, usually open to all receiving passenger trains and the like, were shut, something that Twilight expected given the sights and sounds that the pair found emanating from within the city limits. The large crossbeams and bolts were drawn shut and a significantly large chain wrapped around the large brass handles with a padlock nearly the size of a pony’s head attached to it. Twilight moved Fluttershy away, who was presently examining the engravings of the two princesses on the doors and began to work her magical talents upon the door. The chains, surprising enough, came apart easily enough and the bolts were removed far easier than she anticipated, no doubt to her impressive skills, she thought. The crossbeams required a small amount of effort, given their impressive size and with that, she gave a final shove of magic and the doors to the city swung open into the city of Canterlot.
RESIDENT CANTERLOT
Resident Canterlot
A My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic Fanfiction
Chapter One:
Twilight Sparkle and Fluttershy walked into the city and almost instantaneously,
“It just looks like everyone left in a hurry,” Fluttershy murmured into silence of the station as Twilight dedicated partial focus onto the article.
“Yeah, and this article is no help either,” she replied, “It just mentions something about the arena being quartered off and something about the fall of the Canterlot Radio Center.” If nothing else, it was clear that, from whatever happened here that all Tartarus broke loose in the city of Canterlot, and whatever it was prompted the closure of the city to the remainder of Equestria. Eventually, after a few more long moments, the two preceded further into the station under the brick arches into the main atrium, the clouded light shining dimly through the stained glass windows in myriads of greens and blues depicting the time since the building of the grand station. Fluttershy and Twilight walked through the turnstiles, letting out a slight metal ʻplinkʼ with the turns of the metal rods and walked out into the city of Canterlot proper.
The second the two of them stood outside in the daylight of the city, neither of them could nor wanted to believe even for a fraction of a second what they saw. Carriages and small carts were wrecked in shambles in the intersections of the major roads before the station as well as small fires at some corners, but that sight paled in comparison to the bodies strewn about the street before the station, some burned and others with holes in their foreheads. Fluttershy looked on with horror while Twilight stood in bewilderment at the sight of the bodies of nearly three dozen ponies laying the streets.
“Twilight,” Fluttershy said as her friend continued to examine several of the bodies with the holes in their heads. “Do you have any idea what happened here?” she asked as Twilight turned to face the Pegasus with a stern look that practically screamed ʻwhat do you think?’ to which Shy could only turn her head downwards. Twilight, after a few more moments of looking over the bodies, began to walk further into the city of Canterlot, her head held high with confidence that the Princess would have an answer to the situation. Fluttershy followed close beside her friend, a slight smile upon her face brought upon by her friend’s ever-present confidence. Truth be told, however, behind that air of confidence, Twilight Sparkle was, without the slightest doubt, afraid of what they might find inside of the city once they moved towards the castle. This was especially true since she understood that in order to get to the castle, they needed to pass the arena, and given what the paper revealed about it being closed off, her confidence began to wane with each step she took.
As they moved down the road, the two ponies found that most of the carnival fare, the stands and other minor attractions, were abandoned or otherwise strewn about in place with missing planks of wood and other pieces. They found the windows of the nearby buildings boarded up with thick planks of wood on the inside of the shop windows and some where it was clear that something shattered the glass, leaving dark blood on the broken shards on the shops displays. Other shops and buildings burned with brilliant blazing fires, which explained some of the smoke that poured forth into the sky from the city. However, after about twenty or so minutes of walking through the city, the pair come to the crossroads of Trottingham and Vanguard when they saw Canterlot General Hospital for the first time or at least what remained of CGH.
The tall white building off in the distance appeared as though a large portion of its upper floors had been destroyed and a large fire still burned at its base while an ambulance bay, visible at the distance of three blocks, burned brightly. Concrete barriers spread across Vanguard Street with sandbags filling the gaps between the barriers where necessary with a few carts were overturned for what appeared to be added measure. There was clear evidence though, that this defense did not fare so well against whatever it was that assaulted the barrier and had made it through by the presence of strewn about armor and more bodies of guards hunched over the nearby newsstands and tables. This spectacle distracted them for a moment as the pair continued on further until finally turning a corner and found themselves within two blocks of the castle, but also directly in front of the arena.
The arena was built in the shape of a coliseum and was used to host a myriad of earth-pony and unicorn based sporting events. The structure stood nearly twelve stories tall with a steel frame and several glass windows of significant size along its façade at the different levels. The main entrance, though, was boarded up with several planks of wood, with several carriages pressed squarely against those and barriers to help hold them in place. In paint, above the doors, read the words ʻKeep Out! Containment Zone Overrunʼ and next to that read ʻFor all evacuations, please proceed to the railway stationʼ. Fluttershy looked on at the boarded up entrances and exits with some level of intensity, checking various points at each doorway available to her.
Twilight watched her friend with growing intensity until she noticed that she had pressed her head against a small portion of the joined wood planks and her ear twitched. Her ear twitched slightly more with each passing second until finally it pressed itself completely against the wooden planks.
“Fluttershy, what is it?” Twilight asked while her friend continued to press her ear against the wooden planks. After a moment of listening she pulled away quickly to look at her friend.
“There’s ponies in there,” she said, “I can hear them shuffling around in there and pressing against the doors.” Twilight looked at her friend, approached the boarded up arena entrance and placed her ear against it in the hope of hearing whatever it was that her Pegasus friend heard. She waited for a few moments until she too heard the muffled sounds of ponies behind the wooden planks and hoped for some point of space between the boards, but found them to be thoroughly placed over each other in such a manner that prevented no points of view into or out from the entrance. Twilight looked away and witnessed Fluttershy trying to find some manner of prying the boards away from the wall, but there was something clearly wrong with the situation. The rest of the buildings they had passed that were boarded up had the boards on the interior, but this arena’s boarded entrances were done on the exterior, which drew but a single conclusion: something was meant to stay inside.
“Fluttershy, wait!” Twilight yelled, albeit subdued as Fluttershy attempted to pull away a board, “I don’t think that we should pry away the boards.”
“What do you mean, Twi?” Fluttershy replied, her big round eyes in bewilderment, unsure of what she meant, given the situation at hand. “There are ponies in there, clearly trapped ponies that need our help,” she added, drawing forth a sigh from Twilight who shook her head in response.
“Fluttershy,” Twilight started but immediately found herself at a total loss of words. After all, how could she explain it all so delicately. Something clearly was wrong, though given the entire situation, that would be stating the obvious, and Twi knew that. However, the arena just looked wrong, more wrong than the rest of the city. The boarded up buildings became a commonality at this point, but the boards on the arena were on the wrong side. In addition, it was not just this one entrance but several of the other windows high up on the rest of the arena shared this trait. Combined with the words ʻContainment Zone Overrun,ʼ Twilight’s mind was immediately flooded with images of illness, that there was some kind of pestilence that ran rampant through Canterlot and that the ponies behind the arena’s sealed entrance carried it. Her mind continued with further images of Fluttershy and her being overtaken by the sick ponies and thereby catching the disease with the potential to allow it spread outside of the city and infect all of Equestria. While she fully understood her friend’s sympathies for the ponies behind the boards, the possibility of the global pandemic leading to utter extinction of the pony race was something she could not risk in any situation. Then again, was it not her purpose to help those in need? After all, that was what she had done for the past several years, saving home and crown many times over. So was this the right thing to do? Conflicted, she ultimately settled upon the notion that this was the proper procedure to follow given the unknown situation at hoof and chose her words with precision and the utmost calculative care. “Fluttershy, I know you want to help those ponies behind this boarded up entrance,” Twilight stated pedantically while pointing a hoof at the boards.
“Yes, they may be hurt or frightened,” her friend replied, still making an effort at prying the board loose from its position on the entrance door.
“I know but... What if the thing that’s responsible for causing this,” she waved her hoof around towards the surrounding smoldering architecture and city, “is behind those boards.” Suddenly, the bright eyes of Fluttershy darted back and forth between her friend and those boards, torn between the possibility that she was right and her desires to help others. There was of course, that subtle hint of fear at doing something that might endanger the lives of thousands and given her nature, this prospect terrified the yellow Pegasus. “Look, don’t you sometimes lock dogs in cages or other larger and dangerous animals?” Twilight asked her friend, stepping carefully away from the boarded up arena.
“Yes, but very rarely,” Fluttershy responded with a slight squeak, following her friend’s action of moving away from the entrance.
“Well, you do it when the animal is especially dangerous or capable of threatening others, correct?” the unicorn asked, watching her friend start to understand the point that she was making at the present. “The similar principle could be applied in this situation if we treat the arena like the cage and the boards like bars on said cage, correct?” In Twilight’s eyes, she saw that her friend finally understood the point she was making. Poor naïve, Fluttershy, Twilight thought, so concerned with the helping of others that she merely acts upon it without even pressing logic into the situation. Truth be told though, and Twilight knew this fully well, Fluttershy was a rather brilliant Pegasus, but chose to hide it due to her shyness and general habit of when she did show some brilliance, it was rather rude, in a fashion ala Rarity and the Gala dresses.
Fluttershy continued to drift away from her friend until her back was fully turned and appeared to just stare off into the distance towards the Castle.
“I suppose that you’re right, Twilight,” Fluttershy stated solemnly, though of course to Twilight there was no supposing to the matter. “Should we just continue on to the Castle then?”
“Yes, yes we should,” Twilight responded as she took off down the street to the exterior of the Castle, passing more concrete barriers on either side of the street as she went, some looking as though they were pushed aside. The road leading from the arena to the Castle looked the same as the other roads the two ponies had seen until it got within two hundred feet of the castle wherein all other buildings just stopped and gave way to the circular drive around the Castle’s outer walls. The Castle’s Outer Wall rose up nearly thirty feet into the air and was topped with pointed crenellations, which allowed any guards to safely defend the area from behind the blocks of stone. The exterior walls nearest the large pearl-colored gate seemed spattered with what Twilight naturally assumed to be dirt from the circular drive, given that most likely somepony or a larger group tried to attack the Castle and was rather unsuccessful at breaching the nearly ten foot thick walls. As Twilight and Fluttershy drew closer to the large gate however, they soon realized that the brown stains were but that at a distance and were actually the remnants of aged blood splattered across pearl white walls of the Castle. Fluttershy shrank in fear while Twilight pressed onward, having seen a decent amount of blood and bodies. Already the sight of a little blood was nothing that was going to faze her quite so easily.
Unlike the city’s gate, the bas-relief gate of the Castle was left slightly ajar, just enough for a pony to force its way through without any troubles. The Castle grounds possessed a condition worse than most of the city the pair saw thus far on their journey. The once green castle grounds were found to be speckled with craters, some reaching as deep as twenty feet in the grass. Sandbags that were piled as high as four feet spread across the castle bridge over the short moat, though it looked to be about as helpful as the remainder of the embattlements within the city. Smoke rose clearly from the windows on the gilded towers of the castle and from all sides on the lower basement and side windows. The only visible window that seemed to be unbroken in any way was the large stain glass window over the grand entrance doorway leading into the foyer of the palace. Twilight, upon realizing that the door into the palace, an entrance with flanking twin staircases leading to it, was ajar, she immediately rushed forward, jumping over another set of sandbags and concrete barriers before disappearing into the palace. Fluttershy quickly followed suit and jumped over the barriers after Twilight, passing closely behind her friend into the foyer of the palace with a silent ʻswooshʼ sound, just loud enough to muffle the sound of something in the bushes outside.
Twilight rushed into the granite foyer of the palace. The oaken doors and high windows were either cracked or all together missing as though somepony or something rushed through here in a hurry, splintering them to bits and pieces. The foyer, large enough to hold at least three dozen ponies comfortably, was still lit with the fading daylight outside as it streamed through the broken glass and speckled the tiled floor with shattered colors of light. Fluttershy, landing with a delicately graceful tapping sound and walked forward a little bit into the foyer. She past two or three rows of columns before stopping to examine something on the ground.
“Twilight, come quick!” she called to her friend who, still staring off at the damage to the foyer, walked over briskly and quickly took interest in the dark pool of liquid before her eyes. “Is this blood?” the yellow Pegasus asked aloud even though the answer was fairly obvious to both her and Twilight given the color of it. Twilight, just to make sure, withdrew what appeared to be a ruler from her saddlebag and dipped it into the pool of crimson liquid, which upon retrieval dripped down slow and sticky until making a final ʻplinkʼ sound as a drop returned to the collective pool of blood.
“It clearly isn’t anything else,” Twilight responded, examining the ruler more closely. More specifically, she examined the blood on its edge before setting the ruler on the floor next to her.
“I know that, but... It’s just the amount is so,” Fluttershy paused to looked over the red pool that looked to be at least eight feet across at its widest point, “big.” Twilight looked back at the pool of liquid before looking around the immediate area for anything that may have caused the pool to be there at that location, but to no avail. All at once, there came a groaning sound from somewhere further along the row of columns near a fallen grey and lavender member, causing Fluttershy to jump into the air with a shriek and Twilight to raise the ruler in defense.
“Is somepony there!?” Twilight called into the room hoping to probe some sort of response from the owner of the voice, but there was only silence for the few seconds that followed her question.
“Twilight Sparkle... Is that you?” the voice replied, carrying a slight accent in her tone, which caught the ear of Twilight and made her to drop the ruler in recognition from it.
“Princess Luna!” Twilight screamed as she leapt over a small pile of debris to bring aid to the fallen ruler, who at last came into view of Twilight and Fluttershy. There she was, her navy blue body lying next to the fallen column, her left wing crushed underneath the weighty member with several pieces of luggage scattered nearby. Twilight immediately turned towards the fallen column and with a brief glow of her horn, the grey and lavender piece lifted upwards a bit. Then, with a quick jerk of her head, she threw the column with her magic back a few feet, freeing Luna’s wing.
“Princess, were you going somewhere?” Fluttershy asked, poking at a black case with her cutie mark on it and the Royal Seal of Canterlot stamped over it. The weary looking princess looked upward for a second before giving an exhausted nod and collapsed back onto the floor to which Twilight Sparkle tried to use her magic to levitate her up. However, the princess proved to be much heavier than she anticipated and in the end dropped her back onto the floor with another exhausted moan. With no other option, Twilight used herself to help prop the princess up onto her feet and then motioned quickly for Fluttershy to help her carry the princess. Twilight began to think quickly where she could take the princess for help, noting the completely bombed out hospital as a total loss and slowly began to mutter to herself about what to do.
“Princess, what happened here?” Shy asked, standing still and holding up the princess just under her broken wing.
“I had to…to… get out of the city,” Luna muttered, “I tried to…to… to leave the palace but by…by the time I was able to leave,” there was an even longer pause as the princess’s breath seemed to become harsher and raspy before finally she took in a deep breath to finish her thoughts. “By the time I was able to leave,” she struggled with her words and, if the two ponies helping her to walk around found themselves able to look at her eyes, they would have found them darting around as though searching for the proper words, not unlike her sister’s star pupil. “They rushed the palace,” she exhaled before nearly collapsing back onto the ground, prompting and immediate reaction from both the unicorn and the Pegasus that carried the alicorn to shift their weight as to best keep her from falling.
“We have to do something, Twilight,” Fluttershy said, a sharp tone of fright in her voice as she shifted her side a little bit as to make the task of carrying Luna easier.
“I know, Fluttershy, I know,” Twilight replied, thinking as fast as ponily possible, measuring each possible option before she suddenly remembered the most obvious one. “The palace has a small clinic, reserved especially for members of the royal family,” Twilight began, “it would be our best option at this point.” Fluttershy agreed as Twilight led them in the direction of the small clinic that was just down one of the adjoining hallways through another shattered doorway. The three ponies walked through the doorway into a dimly lit hallway with adjourning doors, most of them locked and others simply missing from the frame as they continued onward. They eventually turned right and found a doorway with the red words labeled ‘Clinic’ and ‘Pharmacy’ over it, but found the door locked like several of the others. Twilight immediately used her magic and unlocked the door only to find the room in complete chaos with equipment scattered about the white tiled floor.
Several of the beds in the room were either overturned or missing their mattresses, but that was not what drew the attention of the two conscious ponies. Of the mattresses that remained on their beds, most of them had dark stains in the shapes of bodies, though some just appeared as large dark swathes of something. Upon finding a relatively clean mattress, the one with the fewest stains, Twilight turned on the fluorescent lights to the room, revealing the chaos in full vibrant color. Scalpels, tissues, bandages, and medicines were strewn about the floor, most looking as though they were in mid use when discarded to the floor. Fluttershy immediately began to rummage through the various drawers and cabinets to look for supplies while Twilight tried to help the princess relax.
Luna repeatedly tried to fight through her own fatigue and exhaustion, but to no avail, and only collapsed back onto the bed each time. Twilight frantically searched the cupboards of the room hoping against instinct that perhaps there would be some measure of supplies left even though the room was in utter chaos. With each drawer she opened, there appeared nothing but empty bottles and boxes, fragments of medical equipment and at one point, a medical log. Twilight took out the medical log with her magic and checked through a few of its pages, but only found the names and numbers of various ponies serviced at this particular station, namely the castle court. However, at the date marked two days prior, civilian names began appearing in the register until finally, the pages ran blank except for ink stains and a few smudges. She threw the medical book backwards and nearly missed hitting Fluttershy who ducked at the precise moment to examine an open cabinet in the hope of some supplies. Against all odds, she found some unused bandages and a splint inside the cabinet, much to the jubilation of Twilight Sparkle, but there was still the issue of Luna’s pain.
“Fluttershy,” Twilight said as she magically took the bandages and splint from the yellow Pegasus, albeit rather forcefully and abruptly. “There’s a room down the hall to the right where there should be some medical supplies.” Fluttershy just nodded and within a few seconds, disappeared from the room into the darkened hallway until she was around the corner looking for the door labeled ‘supplies’.
***
“Princess, I know how this is going to sound, but where is Princess Celestia?” Twilight asked, a tinge of fear and confusion in her voice that wasn’t at all present with Fluttershy’s presence. Luna looked at Twilight, her eyes glassy as the tears welled up around the edges and within moments fell forth onto the tile floor. Twilight immediately understood the reaction. Celestia, kind and caring ruler of the land, must have succumbed to the threat that hit the city. “I understand, Princess, I understand,” Twilight responded to the emotions that the lunar princess displayed, her own tears appearing suddenly, only to be followed by short gasping breaths. Even though Twilight did her best to hold back her own emotions, the thought of her mentor and teacher being hurt or even worse, dead, a thought which her mind would not under any circumstances entertain, was too much to bear, even for her. The only thing that kept her from breaking down sobbing like Luna was the fact that she was still in her presence, and even then, it took every ounce of willpower she had to prevent herself from losing control.
“I tried to get her out,” Luna cried, each word falling short between her sobs, “but I couldn’t find her anywhere,” she finished, looking up at Twilight briefly before letting her eyes fall to the tiled floor, resuming her sadness. “The doctors took her away from me and then I didn’t see her anymore,” she said, still staring at the floor. “She cried out for me, telling me to leave the city and not look back, but how could I abandon my dear sister to this city? So, when I ran, I looked back. That’s when the pillar fell on me, after the explosion,” Luna added, wincing in some mild pain as Twilight examined her wing further and continued to listen to her story, assuming that the explosion she referenced was the hospital. However, upon reflecting on the Princess’s words further, that phrase ‘Doctors took her away’ nagged at her mind until she was forced to speak about it.
“Was Celestia, sick,” she began, “and does that illness have something to do with the attack on the city!?” she finished, drawing the attention of Luna who just looked at her, her pupils unbelievably small. She quivered a bit before finding the words to speak and looked her sister’s prized pupil directly in the eyes.
“You haven’t realized what happened to this place yet, have you Twilight Sparkle?” Luna asked, all notes of sadness banished from her voice as Twilight almost found herself inclined to cower at the tone her Princess took with her.
***
Fluttershy turned down one more another corner, then another hallway and sidestepped around various puddles of obscured liquids in the darkness of the hallways that lead to the supplies room. Twilight was wrong about its distance from the clinical room, and that worried Shy. After all, whatever horrible fate befell the city may have penetrated into the palace walls and still persisted within the stone. Finally, after what felt like several minutes, she came across the room labeled ʻSuppliesʼ on a small plastic sign that jutted out from the wall over the doorway. She approached the door when she noticed a figure standing at the end of the hallway, watching her. The pony’s face and general form were obscured in the shadows of the hallway, but the outline was nevertheless that of a pony.
“Oh, thank goodness,” she said aloud and slowly trotted down the hallway towards the figure, but paused when a second and a third emerged slowly from the doors near the first. They said nothing and just stood there looking at her. After a few short moments, they slowly began to move towards Fluttershy, but all the while said nothing to her. “Are you survivors?” she asked, slowly backing away and listening to the slow and off beat rhythm of their hooves hitting the ground. Something persisted in the rhythm of their steps, something that seemed foul, as though there existed something not pony in those steps, but she continued onward with her questions. “Did you see what happened to the city?” she asked and then added, “Won’t you at least say...” she never got to fully finish her sentence as a fourth pony walked into the hallway from a room with the light still on inside. Its face was missing a large section of flesh and what resembled blood dripped forth from a fleshy mass between the teeth of its skinless jaw. It turned to her, the maggots in its flesh wriggling across its cold, yellowish red, lidless eyes as it opened its mouth and emitted a gargled bloody moan into the air. Fluttershy’s eyes, wide with unprecedented fear, darted about the hallway until she turned completely around to the other end of the hallway and ran with unbelievable speed away from the four figures, her shrieking illuminating the hallway with each hoof fall.
Authors notes:
Because the exact layout of the city of Canterlot has never been fully described in the show, we have taken some rather extreme liberties with the city in order to make the story make as much sense as possible. Also, keep in mind that this takes place sometime after the Royal Wedding and the changeling incident so the city may have changed in that time, hence the presence of the wall. So yeah...
“Twilight Sparkle, I am going to be brutally honest with you and you must understand that everything I am about to say to you is true,” Luna stated, the tears in her eyes completely dried by that point. Twilight nodded in consent as the Princess took in a deep breath and prepared to tell her small tale of what happened.
***
The guards stood fast at the gate of Canterlot palace, using their own bodies on top of the barriers and boards that held the doors together at that point. Despite their best efforts, the boards cracked underneath the force of the creatures standing outside of the gate. The guards standing atop the wall and the pegasi flying above were firing down into the large rush of creatures that were attacking the palace doors.
“They’re thrusting against the gates!” Captain Sterling Blade, the current head of the Royal Canterlot Guard, shouted down at the ponies leaning against the gate. He jumped down from the wall, a slight clattering sound echoed forth from him as his armored body hit the ground and joined his fellow soldiers against the gates. “Hold the line, we can’t let them breach the walls!” he shouted to his fellow guards as the sound of explosions and screaming filled the streets and walls just outside of the gates. All at once, there came the screaming sound of a guard located far down the wall to his right as a zombie pony climbed up to the crenellation and began devouring the guard. Within a matter of mere moments, what was one zombie became two and soon there were nearly four scores of the wretched and rotting creatures crawling over the wall and filling the palace grounds. Captain Sterling Blade, a veteran of many great campaigns, who never once ran from the sight of an enemy, for quite possibly the first time in his life found his body from hoof to head filled with fear. He turned to his colts, the look clear upon his face as the near thirty guards, overwhelmed both at the gate and the walls, retreated to the inside of the palace.
Luna, who had been watching from her tower high above the palace, watched in awed horror as the gates burst forth and nearly a hundred fowl rotting zombies rushed forward. The slower guards, those trying to desperately gather their weapons were descended upon almost immediately, though she could not their screaming. The noise, the moaning, the incessant hunger of the horde overpowered any cry for help that may have been emitted in their last dying moments. Luna looked outward over her city, her sister’s city, a city she had not seen for over a thousand years, and beheld the horror of young fillies and colts being devoured. With her telescope she bore witness to the teeth sinking into the myriad of colored flesh and tore away large chunks, blood spurting forth from the opens wounds, sometimes in small flows and others gushing out. The bodies fell to the ground and twitched while organs and muscle were ripped clean from bone and blood.
Luna began to cry slowly as she watched the horror unfolding before her eyes, and though at any moment, during any horrible act of mutilation, she could have looked away, she did not. She found herself unable to look away as though something compelled her to watch the suffering of her citizens, and in the end she understood that there was nothing she could do. No magic spell, no universal cure for any great problem existed for this situation. She turned away, cursing the city and the plague of foul undead that besieged the palace before throwing her telescope down into the horde below. She descended from her tower into the foyer and watched as the guards barricaded the doors even further, piling up the barriers and tearing wood from the walls to reinforce the entrance.
Captain Sterling Blade, who was still overseeing the operation, gave Luna a brief salute before returning to his duties, a look of shame ever present on his face. From there Luna entered the hallway that led to the Grand Ballroom to check on things there, watching as guards looked out through the stained glass windows, waiting for the moment when anything would pounce through or try to attack the palace. She saw several of the guards tending to the wounded, nursing various scrapes and other cuts, though some looked worse, much worse. She passed one soldier, a pegasus with his right wing wrapped up but the bandage on it oozed with a reddish yellow puss and his eyes looked vacant, an almost dulled grey with dark circles under his eyes. She passed right by him and walked right into the grand ballroom entrance when she heard a loud bang come from behind her and looking back saw the sickly pegasus laying on the floor with a hole through his skull. The responsible soldier, a new recruit with a dark blue coat and light brown colored mane who had joined the guard only the week before all of this had happened, looked towards the princess and mouthed the words 'I had to' before dragging the body away down one of the adjoining corridors. Despite what she had just seen, Luna kept on moving and walked into the ballroom where dozens of ponies sat around, waiting out the disaster while others did their best to aid in the soldiers’ efforts to better improve the security of the room. The sun was setting on the second day of the terror of Canterlot as Luna watched over her citizens, the children playing and their parents passing around simple smiles as they tried to keep their fear hidden from their children. Luna saw one guard in particular, Lieutenant Thunderlane, motioning for the Princess to come with him to the Radio Center. Luna entered the slightly darkened room, maps of Canterlot hung about the walls and were placed on tables, while dozens of military grade radios decorated the remainder of the open tables.
“What is it?” Luna asked, a puzzled look upon her face as Thunderlane picked up a radio and began to tune the equipment to the proper frequency, delicately turning the tuning knob until speaking.
“Come in Canterlot Radio Center, this is Palace Military Headquarters, do you read, over?” Thunderlane spoke as Luna stood next to him, waiting for something to happen. Within seconds, sound burst forward, albeit broken with loud banging sounds and the ever constant moaning of the undead. “Commander Aberdeen, are you there?” Lieutenant Thunderlane asked and waited for the response from the other end of the communication link.
“I donʼ t know who Aberdeen is, but I can tell you now, he’s more than likely a zombie,” a rather familiar female voice replied through radio as the sounds of more dying zombies filled the air.
“Who is this?” Thunderlane demanded as Luna moved in closer to speaker as though intrigued by what she was hearing.
“This is Vinyl Scratch,” she began, “you know, DJ Pon-3, organizer for all of your radio programs and Music Monday’s host… Gah it does not matter! Weʼve been overrun over here and weʼre trying to make our way out of the radio station.” “Whoʼ s we, are there still military personnel remaining?” Thunderlane asked, the static becoming more severe with each passing second.
“It’s just me and some big red pony that’s been helping us out quite a bit, haven’t you big guy,” she began as a barely audible ʻEeyup,ʼ could be heard behind her through the static followed by another loud bang noise, “But we aren’t sure how much longer we can...” and at that point, the static burst through the radio and there was nothing but silence from the Radio Center. Lieutenant Thunderlane just put down the radio and stared at the floor, as though waiting for something more to happen, but found all efforts to be in vain. Luna, with no words, returned to the ballroom and looked over the ponies, trying to think of some encouraging words she could give them in this time of need but found herself to be utterly at a loss for them.
Speeches were not her forte per say, she was more comfortable working with the political side of ruling Equestria, working from behind the scenes and helping where she could without being seen. After all, speaking to large crowds with kind and reassuring words was more of her sister’s game. It was at that point when she realized that she should go to her sister for advice on what to do. Princess Luna turned down the hallway towards her sister’s throne room, which was lined with sandbags and various guards standing watch at the windows. She approached the intricately carved door when there came a sudden screaming sound from within, prompting her to rush the door and break it down. Inside, several guards towered over the recently re-deaded corpse of a zombie while Celestia cowered near her elevated throne, as though waiting for something more to happen. With the sight before her embedded into her eyes, Luna ran up to her sister as quickly as she could.
“Are you all right, my sister?” Princess Luna asked Celestia, who resumed sitting naturally in her throne, though her left wing was folded down over her back left leg and she still seemed to possess a tinge of fear.
“Yes, it just came through the window without warning, but the guards were able to subdue it rather quickly,” Princess Celestia replied as more guards rushed in and upon seeing the broken windows began to board them up to the best of their ability with the available materials and equipment. “Do you have any more news about the city?”
“Weʼve lost the Radio Center and the Arena has been sealed off from the
“Do not despair my dear sister,” Celestia stated as she jumped down from her throne and placed her head next to her sister’s. “There is always hope that things will get better and that tomorrow holds the salvation of today.”
“I understand, Celestia, I understand,” Luna replied as tears began to well up in
“What is it, Captain Sterling Blade?” Celestia asked, dismissing Luna who walked
The following morning, Luna awoke to a relatively calm and quiet palace with even the horde below dispersed greatly about the ground below her tower window. She walked down the stairs into the foyer of the palace, the guards removing some of the boards as she walked by due to the overall lack of the living dead being outside prompting them to do so. From there she proceeded into the ballroom, the sun streaming through the haphazardly boarded windows. If Luna squinted she could just barely make out the outline of Canterlot General Hospital in the distance. Smoke continued to rise from the building in the distance, but that was expected due to the vast number of fires inside of it due to the military’s constant attacks on what the maps and everyone made out to be Ground Zero. She yawned and looked over the crowd of still sleeping ponies before looking back at the windows, and what she saw then made her hope that her eyes were betraying her. Four creatures were crawling up the windows and examining the places where the boards were placed across.
“Everypony!” she screamed as loud as she could in the royal Canterlot voice,
“Get her into the medical treatment center, now!” one pony shouted as Celestia sat upright and saw her sister.
“Run, Luna, run!” Celestia shouted as she fell back down onto gurney. With the sight of her sister being taken by the medical squad burned in her vision, Luna froze in place. She could not move, she did not want to move. Every part of her mind was flooded with conflicting thoughts and emotions about what to do, and time seemed to slow to a crawl for her as she began to contemplate all of them. More than anything she wanted to stay with her sister, and every ounce of her being told her that she had to. Celestia was her dearest sister and she could not just leave her like this, especially not now. However, she also knew that there was nothing she could do for her that the doctor’s could not. As skilled as she was with magic, even she did not know how to heal or fix what was happening. At the moment though that did not matter to her, as even being there with her sister would have been enough. However, one more thought plagued her mind as well, and that thought was of what her sister would have wanted from her. She had known her sister Celestia a long time, far longer than any other pony, and she knew what Celestia would have wanted from her in a situation such as this. More than anything, she would have wanted her to be safe above all else. It took all of her willpower to do so, and she did not want to, but nevertheless she knew that both she and her sister knew that this was best for both of them. She ran.
Luna turned away from the room and ran as fast as she could, rushing past guards and ponies alike while trying to avoid the zombies that now filled the room, tears fell from her eyes the entire way. Luna ran all the way to her room and gathered a couple of bags with incidentals and paused when she found a picture of her and her sister. The two sisters were sitting on the Ferris Wheel, a new attraction acquired for last year’s Gala/Carnival event and hugged each other, wide smiles stretched across each other’s faces. The tears in Luna’s eyes fell as she stuffed the photograph into her bag and ran down the stairs, her two bags held closely to her sides by her magic. She reached the foyer and heard the guards shouting various commands to each other along with details of the incoming horde. Some stated that it was coming from the area around the hospital as she stopped for a second only once to just look back at the palace behind her and heard the screams of her ponies, her beloved subjects when suddenly there came the explosion. The explosion deafened the sound throughout the palace and shook the entire building, knocking Luna to the ground and before she could recover, there was a smaller cracking sound. A large column in the foyer came down on top if her wing, pinning her to the ground and as she let out a scream she saw more guards rush past her, shouting ʻhold them backʼ and ʻwe can’t let the palace fall.ʼ Eventually the pain overcame Luna as she just quietly accepted her fate to die alone in the palace foyer and tried to remain still as she heard the undead near and mill about the palace around her. She played dead, pretending to not exist, waiting and hoping that at last there would come the sweet release of death and the nightmare would at last be over, but on the fourth day, she heard the sound of her sister’s star pupil enter the palace.
***
Twilight, unable to cope with the Princess’s words, threw up in a waste paper basket in the room. While this sort of behavior would have normally been considered out of character for her under normal circumstances, she couldn’t help herself now, especially after hearing something so horrifying. Upon finishing, she looked back at the princess. Luna recognized the anger in her sister’s prized pupil’s eyes and watched her as she wiped the remaining spittle from her lips and walked slowly back over to the injured Luna.
“Do you doubt my story, Twilight Sparkle?” Luna asked as Twilight got as close as ponily possible without touching the Princess, whom seemed unnerved by the lavender unicorn’s closeness. Twilight raised a hoof as if to strike the Princess where she sat but found herself unable to commit to the act and lowered her hoof and just stared at the ground. On any ordinary day the mere thought of hitting one of the rulers of Equestria would not have been entertained in her mind even for a millisecond, but today was not any ordinary day. “It is not in my nature to lie, Miss Sparkle,” Luna said, “and even if I was lying, I would not have been so elaborately specific nor would I have used zombies.” Twilight Sparkle understood this to be the truth but still, zombies seemed so medically and logically impossible that everything Luna stated should have been a lie. Twilight looked back at the Princess who just sat there on the bed as though none of her story was the least bit shocking.
“Not that I doubt it, itʼ s just that it...” Twilight replied before she turned around to face away from the Princess “it doesnʼt make sense,” Twilight continued with her back turned towards the Princess, thinking about what to say next with careful precision and forethought. “It’s just that you expect me to believe that in a matter of three days, the entire city of Canterlot,” she began and turned to face Luna again, who tilted her head and listened intently, “went from a bustling metropolis and the greatest city in all of Equestria to war zone filled with the living dead.” Twilight asked Luna who simply sighed and looked at her sister’s star pupil with sincerity once again. “I donʼ t expect you to believe anything, Twilight Sparkle,” Luna replied and attempted to stand once again, but found the pain to be too unbearable to move at the moment. “I expect you to see the truth, and the truth of the matter is that Canterlot is under siege by the living dead. If it were any other threat, we could have handled it but for every one of our soldiers or citizens they killed, their ranks grew in number and strength.”
“Then ... in a sense, if we take this seriously, it spreads like any fictional plague of zombies from films or books,” Twilight added, still believing the entire scenario to be overly ridiculous and impractical but entertained the idea of the story in hope of luring out the truth. “but that would have to mean that there exists a pseudo Patient Zero, the first infected that spread the virus throughout the city of Canterlot, assuming that it is a virus.”
“Our top doctors and scientists theorized that perhaps it was a transmittable disease of some sort, but never really clarified if it ever was a virus,” Luna said as she watched Twilight pace back and forth across the floor, her eyes darting back and forth several times every other second. “All they ever specified was that zombification is transferred via the saliva, but there is a problem concerning the existence of a single Patient Zero.” Luna folded her front legs across themselves and inhaled rather loudly before letting out a sigh. “At the time of the outbreak, we possessed several dozen maps outlining the positions of the undead and the points at which the highest number of encounters took place. All leads pointed, at the time, towards there being a significantly higher number of the infected ponies first appearing at Canterlot General Hospital. Within a few hours of the first reports, there appeared a series of spikes in reports of the events throughout Canterlot and then ... the fall began.”
***
A young stallion waited for his marefriend on the street corner just under the newly installed streetlamp, a toothpick situated between his lips that he motioned back and forth from one side to the other. Occasionally, he flicked his mane back and forth to ensure that he kept up an appearance for the pony he waited for. He waited and watched as other ponies passed him by, some tipping their hats and saying ‘hello’ whilst others just walked passed him and kept moving about. He craned his neck to glance at the clock tower three streets over to see the time as eight fifteen in the evening. He continued to look up and down the street, the sounds of the carnival coming from the district nearest the palace. She promised to meet him twenty minutes ago at this exact spot just as they did the night before and at the same time as before. He thought to himself about the possibilities of why she may be late, glancing over the obvious ones of caught in traffic since most of the taxi carriages were not even running due to the Gala Carnival. Then again, how in Tartarus could one possibly get caught in traffic if she was walking from her home to meet him there to go to the Carnival. He glanced up at the clock tower again to see that the time was eight twenty-three and when he looked back at the street, he saw her walking towards him. He gave a slight sigh of relief and rushed over to her but slowed down when he watched her walk down the street. There was a slight, how would he put it, wrongness to the manner in which she walked as though something afflicted her and within a few seconds, something nagged at the back of his mind.
‘What was wrong with her?’ he found himself thinking as he once again resumed his approach towards her when he saw the five or six other ponies behind her, moving in a similar fashion. Suddenly, the ponies behind her attacked the closest ponies to them, biting and tearing away at their flesh as their victims screamed in terror for help. Blood poured forth from their open wounds as he ran up to his marefriend and placed a hoof on her, which drew little to no reaction from her.
“Hey, we need to get out of here, right now,” he said as she turned herself to face him, which was when he saw her face for the first time that evening. There persisted the rumors of some kind of cannibalistic illness that sprung up earlier that day, as though from nowhere, but he dismissed them as just hearsay since most of the time, rumors came about during the Gala about various things. He looked into her grey eyes and examined her closely, though he found little to nothing unusual about her appearance except for one thing, just that one thing that he wished he saw sooner in the next five seconds.
One second, her head tilted up towards his and watched as his pupils slowly shrank into dots of fear, ringed with color and tears.
Two seconds, his hoof gripped tighter as though part of some unconscious reflex when she leaned forward towards the young colt’s body, a glassy look to her eye.
Three seconds, her mouth opened wide exposing her whitish-red teeth, the stench of death and freshly killed pony hanging about her breath, as she got ever closer to him.
Four seconds, he felt the teeth slowly pressing down onto his coat all while the scream slowly began to rise from his throat as he began to fall backwards.
Five seconds, there, on the streets of Canterlot, he found his throat pierced while he screamed out in pain and the blood exploded forth from his veins, a sort of reddish mist delicately dancing about the cold night air, painting the scene with carnage.
There at the base of her neck, bleeding and ringed with yellowish puss, existed a significant bite mark at the base of her neck and then the second and third marks on her legs. By the time the clock rang out the nine o’clock chime of nine bells, the street corner where the colt stood but forty minutes earlier teemed with the living dead, moaning into the night. The ponies that remained in the area barricaded themselves in the various businesses and small buildings about the street, boarding doors and windows to the best of their abilities with what they possessed. The newly formed horde of zombies milled about until they heard the sounds of the Carnival coming from several blocks over and saw the bright lights shining above the rooftops. The ponies in the buildings made sure to let the guards know, to the best of their ability that they possessed at the moment, but the messages were nevertheless delayed in making it to the guards.
The horde turned down the street into a crowd of onlookers, who at the time believed the zombies to be nothing more than overly enthusiastic participants in the Carnival, did not flee from the oncoming cannibals. Within mere seconds, the horde of perhaps twenty or more zombies nearly doubled in size and it took ten minutes before the crowds in all of their partying drunken splendor to realize the reality. With each passing minute, the horde grew as the citizens and guests of the Royal City of Canterlot fell into the ranks of the living dead as they marched slowly up the streets, ever looking for flesh and blood to consume. Within two hours, the palace was quarantined within a safe perimeter and a state of emergency for all of Canterlot was declared by Princess Celestia. Soon, the entire Carnival scene reduced into a nothingness of abandoned rides, food stalls, overturned tables, and splotches of blood sprayed in a myriad of patterns and sizes throughout. To look upon the city in this state, there was but one word to describe, one horrible word that none wished to use for the connotations and immediate theories that drew from it: Chaos.
Within the next half hour, the Princesses gathered up the leaders of the various military divisions and formulated some strategy to set up safe zones throughout the city, beginning with the hospital. Celestia, under much duress and heavy questioning immediately confined the rumors to be false that this was in any way, shape and or conceivable form related to Discord. After all, jokester that he was, there was no debatable streak of murder in his bones. The horde of the undead ponies remained ever present outside of the two newly set up safe zones, the Arena and the Palace, each within eye shot of each other, but there was something wrong with the whole set up, something out of place. Luna took notice of it first, with it being that the undead for whatever reason migrated to the Arena more so than the outer walls of the palace and called it to the attention of the others. The leaders theorized about the concentration of soldiers when the scientists, those that could be brought there in time without incident proposed a better theory to the situation.
“The lights of the Arena are attracting the creatures to the Arena,” a grey haired Pegasus began as he pointed out the window towards the illuminated area. “And judging from the reports from the survivors that we gathered thus far, it appears that this is what drew them to the Carnival grounds to begin with, the lights and noise,” he finished waving a bunch of papers around before being called away by a soldier in the next room. Celestia and Luna walked away from the room, Celestia's head hung low as she walked to the newly set up Command Center. A map of the city of Canterlot stretched out before them across one the of tables as soldiers read reports and applied pushpins to the locations indicated by said reports.
“What do we do now, sister?” Luna asked while Celestia stared at the ever¬-growing map of pushpins before her with a look of concern and puzzlement. “We can’t just turn off the lights right away,” she said, stepping around to the other side of the table, “they need the lights on in order to perform the operation as it is needed. Without the lights, the soldiers are literally fighting in the dark.”
“I know, Luna, but we still cannot have the zombies heading towards the Arena,”
“But they will grow tired within the hour, sister,” Luna said entering the foyer
“They could still see and would easily be able to tell when there was a threat that
***
Twilight once again found herself without words as the Princess finished her story and just stared at her when a second thought occurred to her. A thought concerning the city and how the two came to enter it with such ease.
“Princess,” Twilight began, “if the city was crawling with so many of those things by the first day, then how come Fluttershy and I were able to pass through most of the city so easily.”
“You mean that you two didn’t encounter any of the creatures when coming her to
“Twilight, get inside!” Fluttershy screamed, snapping her friend from her state of scared wonderment of the zombies that were but mere feet away. She turned to run into the room as they were within inches of her and just as one lunged for her, she slammed the door shut behind her. Shy shoved a small table against the door and Luna used her magic to levitate one of the larger and heavier cabinets to the same place. Twilight just sat there in awe while Fluttershy paced near the door. “I was looking for supplies when I came upon them,” she stated in panic while looking rapidly around the room before looking at Twilight with much intent. Twilight sat there, processing the sight she just bore witness to, the zombie ponies trotting down the hallway, those cold grey eyes and that awful stench that preceded them with each step. They moved slow enough but still possessed some speed when necessary, perfect predatory creatures it seemed but it still presented a scientific impossibility.
Zombies, by all medical accounts, and all historical accounts of Equestria, should not exist at all but that was not to say that they did not exist in literature. Many a times over, Twilight had read science-fiction novels wherein the aforementioned creatures roamed freely and terrorized the countryside, of which the most prolific of these books being the masterfully written work by Manewell something, she could not recall his last name at the moment. The book detailed, with disturbing accuracy the total takeover of Equestria by zombies and the campaigns undertaken to liberate the world from the undead hordes. However, that was entirely fiction, and this was the reality wherein zombies existed without the defense of a paper page to protect one from their vile infection and cannibalistic nature. She snapped out her fantasy stupor and resumed her normal state within the room and placed a medical cart on its side against the barrier.
“Hopefully that will hold them,” Twi said shaking slightly where she stood and nearly jumped when Fluttershy placed a hoof on her shoulder to calm her down.
“Are you all right?” Shy asked as a concerned look grew across her face but eventually wore off when Twilight shook her away.
“I’m fine,” Twilight said to the unconvinced Fluttershy, “no really I am perfectly okay, honest,” she added but then suddenly broke away into a long pause as though
She did not have long to grieve however as the sounds of the creatures throwing themselves against the barricaded door began to fill the room. The sound grew louder with each passing second until finally, Twilight approached the door and noticed that towards the middle appeared a fine crack that steadily grew in size. Within seconds, the wood started splintering and the crack spider webbed, an act that prompted the already scared Pegasus to shrink back in fear and sob a little bit.
“Princess, we have to do something,” Twilight said as Luna picked herself up from the bed and, after limping significantly to the door, placed her horn against the cracking wood. Within an instant, her horn glowed a vibrant royal blue, as there persisted a loud cracking sound, not from the door but from the walls around the door. In a matter of seconds, a large portion of the wall exploded forward into the hallway at the precise position of the zombie ponies, crushing them under the weight of the stone and metal debris that once made up the walls.
Without hesitation, Luna staggered forth into the hallway as Twilight followed suite, providing a living crutch for the Princess to lean upon when necessary while Fluttershy followed closely behind, checking quite frequently to see if there was anything following them. Luna led them down the hallway as neither Twilight nor Fluttershy dared not question the Princess, for it seemed as though she knew where she was going.
“We have to leave this place immediately before any more of those things come after us,” Luna said, wincing with each step until they reached the foyer of the palace and shut the doors behind them. With seconds, the trio reached the center of the foyer and suddenly, upon looking towards the hallway that led away into the grand ballroom, they saw the horde approaching. The trio turned away to flee out of the palace but saw even more of the creature pouring into the palace from the grounds, which presented the one truth in that moment: there was nowhere to run. With no other option, Twilight and Luna began fighting back and shot out short energy bursts from their horns to knock back the living dead but for each one that fell, three more climbed over the body until it too resumed its place amongst its comrades in death. Fluttershy cried as she hid behind the alicorn and unicorn for there was nothing that she, as pegasus, could do to make the situation any better or worse. The hordes continued to press forward on all sides without stopping, their collective moans echoing throughout the foyer walls and the surrounding hallways that fed into it.
“Where in Equestria could so many of the things have come from?” Twilight asked as one was within two feet of them when she knocked it back.
“They must have heard Fluttershy screaming,” Luna began, “they are attracted to noises, light and movement, like feral creatures on the hunt for prey.” She knocked
“I want to die!” Fluttershy screamed aloud, her wailing sobs nearly drowning out the moans as the dozens, perhaps even hundreds of zombies crawled forth to their location in the foyer.
“Donʼ t say such things, Fluttershy!” Twilight replied as she knocked back another
“Twilight, can you teleport into the courtyard behind the horde?” Luna asked, her face filled with the strain of trying to keep the shield raised against the mounting horde on all sides.
“Yes, but I can only take one other pony with…” she stopped and at that moment, tears filled her eyes for she understood what the implications of the princess’s words meant and that there existed no other option. “I can’t do that, Luna... I just... I can’t do that,” she sobbed as Luna placed a hoof on her shoulder and embraced her tightly, the moans of the horde growing louder and louder with each second. The shield started cracking, the sound of splintering magic filled the air as Luna let go of her sister’s most beloved of all students. Luna took off her crown and threw to the ground, causing it to shatter, leaving but a silver key amongst the shattered remains.
“This key will grant you access to all of Canterlot, so guard it well, Twilight
Inside the palace, Luna kept the shield going for a few more moments until she was certain that Twilight and Fluttershy had gone. From the direction of the grand ballroom, behind the horde, her eyes caught the glimpse of a pony much larger than all the others, a pony whose size and proportions were held by only one pony in all of Equestria, the one pony she hoped she would never see, not like this. At the sight of that, Luna dropped the shield and recalled a forbidden spell, one that her old masters, back when she learned the art of magic casting, told her to never use unless she faced the most dire of situations and bitter of ends. Luna concentrated the spell as the zombies attacked her
“I will not become like you!” She screamed as she faced down the horde in the direction of the grand ballroom. The larger zombie following them seemed to shake the earth with each step it took. Just as the first zombie prepared to take her flesh into its gaping maw, she activated the forbidden spell, but not without first letting a broad smile stretch across her teary face.
Twilight Sparkle stopped running for just a moment and turned back to look at the palace and witnessed a bright glow emanating from the foyer that she once stood in just seconds ago. Instantly, a bright flash filled the air with light and seconds later, an explosion shook the ground and sent thousands of pounds of stone, steel, and manner of materials into the air along with the bodies of hundreds of zombies. The blast knocked both Twilight and Fluttershy back as she watched the fireball reach into the cloudy sky above, the compounds of the blast mixing into a bloody rain of triumph and tragedy before her eyes. Dust filled the air and Twilight, along with Shy, continued to run out of the palace gates until she turned back once more, only to see that once where the grand foyer of the Royal Palace of Canterlot stood, there existed nothing but bloody rubble and a pit.
Princess Luna, royal sister and raiser of the moon, gave her life to save that of Twilight Sparkle and Fluttershy in the hope that they may save Canterlot from Tartarus on earth.
