One

While the trip via train only takes a matter of hours, walking to the capital from Ponyville is much less direct. The distance paired with how terribly out of shape Twilight was made the journey drag on. It wasn’t until late afternoon on the fourth day that she finally passed through the main gates into the city.

Unlike Ponyville, which was largely left intact by whatever befell Equestria, Canterlot wasn’t so lucky.

Entering Canterlot, Twilight encountered death and destruction for the first of many times that day. The Upper District was a bloodbath, the streets and buildings painted a mix of brownish crimson and alien green by the slaughter. Dozens of corpses lay strewn about in the open across the main courtyard, most being Royal Guards. Some looked to be burnt by magical fire, their body’s charred, and their once golden armor blackened and peeling. Others looked to have died through more conventional means, though little evidence remained of what could’ve been the cause. Their corpses have long since rotted away. All that remained were skeletons.

The District’s infrastructure hadn’t fared well either. There wasn’t a single building that had been left in one piece. All the doors and windows were smashed open, and all the interiors looked like they were meticulously ransacked. There were tracks leading out of every house, hoof-like, yet uneven, as if there were holes in their hooves. It was unlike anything Twilight had ever seen in her life.

It wasn’t the alien tracks or all the death that got to her, though. It was the countless drag marks that led out of the buildings that did, all of them leading in one direction. Canterlot Castle.

Twilight didn’t want to know what came of the residents of Canterlot. Everything was telling her that she needed to run away and never come back. That there was nothing good inside that castle. She knew deep down she was better off turning around and leaving.

But Twilight needed answers, and the only place she would find them was in that castle.

As she left the Upper District behind and found herself entering the castle grounds, Twilight was shocked to find them devoid of the horror that she had encountered in the other parts of the city. There were signs of a battle, but there were no bodies.

Approaching the castle’s primary entrance, Twilight found the large doors knocked off their hinges and lying on the floor. The interior was pitch black, which shouldn’t be possible with how much natural lighting the castle had.

Something about that sent a shiver down her spine. The temptation to flee back to Ponyville was ever enticing.

Twilight swallowed her fear, knowing the answers she wanted lay ahead, and marched forward. She cast a light spell to navigate the unlit halls. She followed the drag marks that stained the castle floors. The castle was unnaturally quiet, with only the sound of her breathing and the echoing of her hooves breaking the silence.

She stopped in her tracks when Twilight horn’s glow shined on something stuck to the wall. It was an emerald green, semi-transparent pod. Looking about, she found that there were more pods leading down the hallway, farther than her eye could see.

Twilight approached the object to get a closer look, only to catch sight of something floating inside. Something large. Pony-sized.

Upon coming to that realization, Twilight rushed the cocoon, hoping against hope that whoever inside was still alive.

She screeched in terror as her horn’s glow shined off of the stallion’s face. A pair of dilated, greenish-yellow eyes stared back at her. There was no life to his gaze, no sign of consciousness. He was long gone.

His skin was withered and translucent, like an apple that had been sucked dry by a fruit bat. The pony’s once vibrant coat had been drained of all it’s color, being replaced by a mixture of brackish green and brown hues.

Twilight desperately tried to rip her gaze away from the shrivelled up cadaver, only to spot a mare floating in the pod next to his, her body in the same state. Everywhere she tried to look for relief, her eyes fell upon a different mummified corpse’s face, their dead eyes staring blankly back at her. Twilight spotted familiar faces mixed in with the dead. Old classmates, castle staff she had known since she was a child, even some residents of Ponyville.

Visions of the ponies she grew up amongst being forcibly dragged from their homes, being placed in these cocoons, and drained of their life essence until all that was left was a shriveled up corpse flashed before her eyes. She could handle death, but this was too much.

She trained her gaze on the floor beneath her hooves and trotted forward. As she avoided the dead stares of the surrounding ponies, Twilight struggled to banish the thoughts of what these ponies had to endure out of her mind. She tried to focus on her main goal; the throne room. She didn’t have the whole truth yet, but Twilight knew she would find it there.

She caught sight of a glint of light down the hall. Believing salvation lay ahead, Twilight kicked up the pace, galloping desperately towards the illumination. She screeched to a halt as she reached the source, which revealed itself to be her final destination. Sunlight filtered through the open doorway, the towering main hall doors having been battered down much like the main entrance.

Twilight peered inside, finding the room in a state of disarray. Many of the beautiful stained glass windows lay shattered on the castle floor, glimmering dangerously in the light that filtered in through a massive hole in the wall.

Like the halls she fled from, Twilight found the ceiling lined with those pods. Only this time, with the sun’s rays leaking into the room, she could see all of their faces. Hundreds of them. Amongst them were dozens of familiar faces. Her friends, Spike, even her parents and older brother. They all stared back at her with the same blank, yellowish-green eyes, judging her for abandoning them to a fate worse than death.

As she stared at the horror that surrounded her, Twilight’s eyes flickered across her mentor’s throne. It was then she noticed the silhouette of a body laying before the seat. She rushed towards it, fearing the worst. She spotted a few pieces of faded scroll scattered around the corpse as she approached it. More features became clear as she drew nearer. A long, pearly white horn, adorned with an anti-magic ring. A pair of wings, larger than the average pegasus. Hooves sealed in chains. A faded pink mane blowing in the breeze.

There was no doubt about it. This was Princess Celestia’s final resting place.

As she looked down upon her mentor’s withered remains, it dawned on her. That terrible truth, the one that Twilight had sought since she awoke, was in her head this whole time. It was buried deep in her subconscious under multiple layers of trauma, regret, and despair, completely forgotten by the mare to save herself from the pain.

The memory flashes before Twilight’s eyes. She was at a picnic with my friends when she received an invitation to her brother’s wedding. The brother who Twilight used to be so close to, yet had dropped contact with her and didn’t even tell her he was engaged. She was indignant. So much so that she refused to go.

Most of Ponyville was there when it happened. The attack.

Nobody knew what happened, or what attacked the city, but by the time word had spread to what was left of the town, Canterlot had already fallen.

Twilight locked herself away in her study while everypony else evacuated. She watched Canterlot burn from her window, powerless to do anything. She couldn’t save the ponies she loved. She was back to being a scared filly, hiding under her bed and waiting for everything to pass.

She had damned everypony she held dear in her life to a slow and painful death. Even worse, they, whoever these unknown foes were, made Princess Celestia watch while it happened.

Twilight’s face twisted into a look of agony as she fell to her haunches before the decayed corpse of her mentor, and wept.