“What in the hell was that..” muttered Alex as he jumped out of bed. He looked at his alarm, and then glanced at his sleeping roommate. 4:00 AM was much too early for any reasonable college student to wake up at, especially given that Alex was far from a morning person. Yet, as he jogged his fuzzy memory, he could recall vividly the reason he was so abruptly startled: he had just experienced what might have been the weirdest dream he could remember.
He tried to piece the details together. It was him, in a forest. That much he knew for certain. After walking what felt like hours, he came across a small moonlit clearing - perhaps ten times as big in area as his dorm room. That was when it started getting strange. Right by a small pool of water, he saw a small lavender horse staring at him.
He didn’t think to react - the thoughts of his conscious mind were completely absent, as was the case in most dreams. Instead, the horse - or perhaps it was pony - said something to him, and he walked over. What she (for her voice sounded like that of any human woman, allowing him to deduce her gender) had said eluded him, yet it was enough to get him to sit besides her. Looking to his right, he could see the resting pony had a dark purple mane, some kind of symbol on her flank, and a horn aglow with a distinctly blueish light. It must have been a unicorn of some kind, he concluded.
She lifted up her left hoof, and he followed suit with his right hand. The unicorn placed her hoof in his hand as she nuzzled up to the side of him. All Alex could focus on, however, was some kind of tingling sensation he felt buzzing around in his hand. Moments later, she put her mouth to his cheek as if she was kissing him, and the dream ended.
After drowsily rubbing his eyes, he put on a change of clothes and stepped out of his dorm room to the nearby bathroom through the hallway. Stepping towards the sink, he splashed some water in his face and looked up at himself through the mirror. He looked fine, though his left eye was bloodshot and the right appeared to have an iris of the color... purple. Blinking, he stared at the mirror once again. Still purple. He shook his head and sighed in disbelief, and headed back through the hallway to bed.
While in the hall, he came to two shocking realizations. First, everything he could see through his right, purple, eye seemed to exist just a few centimeters to the right. Rapidly opening one eye and closing the other, it was if the hallway was moving back and forth - or if he was seeing multiple worlds flicker back and forth. The second realization, and more troubling to him, was that the door to his room had closed and locked behind him, and that he was now stuck without a way in.
He tried turning the knob. Yep, it’s locked. Goddamn it. What the hell am I doing? Alex continued to mutter curse words to himself. Yet as he was about to knock and awaken his sleeping roommate, he noticed something. Closing his left eye, there was another door and doorknob just slightly behind the first one, which had then vanished. He blinked and closed his left eye again. Still there.
Oh well, best to give it a try. Alex, still puzzled, reached his hand forward in an attempt at opening the new doorknob. To his great surprise, it worked - but not in the way he had intended. As he stepped blindly through the door, he found himself encircled by some kind of creeping darkness. Everything vanished, and moments later, he found himself in a world very much different from that of his college dormitory.
When Alex awoke, he found himself in what seemed to be a grand library. It was two stories high, with wooden shelves, a wooden floor, and large glass windows nearest the ceiling, revealing a canopy. A treehouse, he concluded - or at least a house designed to look like one. Even the largest trees he’d ever seen weren’t this large in diameter.
He stood up and walked towards one of the shelves. It appeared to be categorized alphabetically, with a sign reading:
“006.5 Sorcery - 009.6 Spellcasting”
Alex chuckled, and reached over to take out one of the books from the shelf. Just then, as he began to pull out a book titled “Information Structures and Magical Algorithms for Dummies, part 1“, he noticed something odd. His right hand appeared to glow with a faint blue aura, and now that he was paying attention to it, it appeared to be buzzing ever so faintly. It felt like his arm had fallen asleep, yet as he tried to wake it up again, so to speak, the blueness grew and the buzzing became more vigorous.
He was nervous, very nervous. Someone must have been playing a prank on him, or maybe he was in a dream. But aside from the weird tingling sensation in his hand, and the weird books on magic, the world appeared too real. He pinched himself. At least he was able to conclude that he wasn’t dreaming, so he thought, but the question still remained. Where am I, and --
“Aaah!” A voice cried out. Alex turned around, and saw a purple mare running towards him. “What do you think you’re doing?” she yelled, looking at his arm - or more likely, his arm’s blue glow. He could have sworn that the figure yelling at him was the same pony from his dream, too. Yet in his dream she was peaceful enough, and here she seemed... violent, almost. Or at least, terrified. Despite his confusion, he had little time to think and react with the mysterious purple pony seemingly running towards him.
He put his right arm in front of his forehead, and slightly crouched down in a defensive position. His eyes peeking out towards the floor of the treehouse-library, he noticed that the blue light surrounding his hand had morphed into a sphere, surrounding his entire body and hopefully, protecting him from attack. Looking up, he saw the unicorn’s horn glow for a moment, and in that moment, his bubble burst - literally and figuratively. His blue sphere had vanished, and he appeared to be without energy. His knees buckling, he fell to the wooden floor.
