The future

Equestria was experiencing a very deadly disease that could kill ponies in an instance if they went outside their houses. Everypony was confined to their homes, and they were starving from lack of food.

Ponyville had been totally destroyed by the disease called Stressed Death. If somepony got the disease from being too stressed out, they would start to rot from the inside out, and eventually, they would die a very slow and painful death. It even took the lives of princess Celestia and Luna.

The only pony that it didn’t kill was princess Twilight. She was immune to it because of her powers when she became the princess of Equestria.

Within the next few weeks, 100 ponies were dead. The few that were left went to other worlds and lands to get away from the virus.

Twilight was sitting in her castle all alone with her thoughts. Spike had left Equestria never to be heard from again, and she didn't know if he was still alive.

Everypony in Equestria had either left or died, so it was up to her to find a cure, and that was exactly what she was doing as she sat in her castle, for once it was not so loud.

As the days went by, Twilight decided that sitting on her rump in her castle, desperately trying to find something out about the disease or a potential cure from books, was becoming pointless. She’d have to go out there and observe this infernal disease first hoof in order to gather sufficient data to develop a cure.

Twilight got up from her seat, gathered a few things that would be required for her journey, and left the castle. As she exited the castle’s front doors, she looked back inside once more, taking in the grand hallways and the seats where her friends used to sit with her, illuminated by the sole ray of light coming in from the front doors. She had a feeling that she wouldn’t be back here for a long time.

As the doors closed with a resounding boom, the entire castle plunged into murky darkness once more.

As Twilight walked around the streets of Ponyville, death reeked in the air. Everywhere she went, she could see rotten corpses of ponies strewn about, swarms of flies attracted to the revolting scent and feeding on the bodies of the ponies. Every house she looked at, she could see the dust settling on the doorsteps of each house. Every alleyway, every marketplace, every park was devoid of the sound of ponies, only the buzzing sound of flies filling the deadly silence.

At this point, it was evident that every pony in Ponyville was dead. If Twilight wanted to meet survivors, she’d have to travel to other towns; a very time-consuming endeavor, considering that she could only travel limited distances with her magic or her wings. If it were Rainbow Dash, she’d have made the travel to Manehattan and back in ten seconds flat, but she was… she had been….

Twilight shook the thought out of her head. She couldn’t wallow in the death of her friend. Not when she had work to do, had ponies to save. She pulled out the map of Equestria from her saddlebag, thinking about where she should head to first, before settling on Canterlot. If anyone was alive in the capital of the country, then there would be hopes of restoring order to Equestria.

Before she left Ponyville, however, she made sure to take some samples of body tissues from the dead ponies’ bodies. Suppressing the urge to vomit, she carefully placed the seal in one of many vials she had taken from her castle, labeling the sampling location and date. However rotten the tissue may be, it could still be of help in figuring out the specifics of this disease. With her samples secure and stocked up on supplies, Twilight began her long trek towards Mount Canter.

It had been a long trek for Twilight. With the train system down due to the outbreak, Twilight had to walk the entire distance from Ponyville to Canterlot. She could have flown there, but she was afraid of breaking her vials of sample tissue in case she encountered some random turbulence while in flight. The constant jingling of the glass vials in her saddlebag was more than enough to remind her of the danger.

Thus it had been eight hours since Twilight left Ponyville, though the Sun never moved in the sky. Having lost its connection to the source responsible for its movement months ago, the Sun never rose, never set, just shining there in the sky, bathing the world in eternal daylight. Twilight trudged along the railroads heading north, simply putting one hoof after the other in front of her as she dragged her body towards her destination.

In the meantime, she continued to think. Think about finding a cure, trying to find out how the disease was transmitted from one patient to the other. She had so much that she didn’t know about the disease, and it had already claimed the lives of so many.

Twilight wondered when this epidemic would be over, and if it would be over how ponies would react to seeing all of Equestria empty because there were no ponies left in the world, the few remaining ones that left, left for other lands.

As Twilight arrived at her destination, she saw nopony in the streets, the smell of death hung in the air like thick fog, as Twilight walked through the streets of Canterlot. Canterlot was a terrible sight to behold, there were dozens of dead ponies laying in the streets, the shops were closed and they were never going to see the light. But Twilight kept on walking, as she got to the end of the street, she stopped and looked at the building in front of her, it had a sign on the door that reads ’Rarity’s second boutique’, Twilight looked at the sign and sat on the ground and just cried, she couldn't believe that her friend was gone, it had been 3 months since Rarity had died.