Dusk sat, his legs more giving way than bending. His breath remained calm, measured, and he had to chalk that up to not really believing what the spell had returned to him. Just to be sure, he ran it again, praying to the sun that it would change.

After getting the confirmation that it hadn't, he changed the spell to make sure that it was working, focusing on the current time.

A positive, so the spell was working as expected.

"Okay, okay, so, what exactly does that mean," he said, speaking to himself. "The spell is working, confirmed. It returns that my time is no longer there. That means that whatever sent me back either erased any way I could have had back into my own time, or that it... it..."

He took a deep breath, working through the hitching to say, "It means that my time doesn't exist anymore."

He sat there for a long time, looking over the circles absently.

"Hey, at least I'm an alicorn," he said, sniffing and wiping away his tears. "If nothing else, I can just, like, wait until I get back. I mean, that's pretty much what Luna did, right?"

Flapping his wings, it took him a second to get them working together to generate enough lift, but soon he was back on the roof. Narrowing his eyes, he gazed towards the Canterhorn.

"So, I don't see any struts or walls," he said, chewing on his bottom lip. "That might be some foundation work, that slab there... So I'm looking at the first fifty years of Canterlot's construction, tops, which makes this sometime around..." He paused to run through his mental history. "thirty or so years after Luna's banishment. They're probably still living out of the canvas town that Celestia set up at the base of the mountain."

He licked his dry lips.

"So that should be, what, nine hundred and seventy years until Luna's return," he whispered, looking at the space Ponyville should have been, would be.

He gazed for longer than he cared to think about, glancing up at the sun and guessing that it was around five in the afternoon. Taking flight again, he cruised around the castle and looked over the area, taking in once again the sights of the area.

"Alright, it looks like the Everfree is just starting to reclaim the building," he murmured, flying low into the gulch that ran around the plateau the castle sat on. "The stream is still here, that's great as long as it stays pure." Tilting his wings, he flew along the wall until he came upon a cave opening. Glancing in, he nodded as he looked over the Tree of Harmony.

"There's Celestia and Luna's cutie marks," he said as he examined the tree, "but it seems as though my own has yet to grow into existence.

"It also seems as though the Elements have been returned to the boughs," he said as he looked over the branches. "Maybe as some sort of recharge after banishing Luna?" He reached up to touch his own Element, Magic, but frowned as it pushed away his hoof with a barrier. "I wonder if that's because it's charging, or if I've been detached as a part of being flung into the past?"

He sat there for a while, his hoof touching the trunk just below Luna's mark before he shook his head and returned to his patrol of the outskirts of the castle.

He returned to the courtroom once he finished, dropping through the hole in the ceiling and flaring his wings to hover to a landing. He looked over the circles once again before banishing them from the stone.

"Alright, so, all I need to do is wait," he said, glancing around the crumbling room. "Maybe I could hibernate? Is that a thing alicorns can do?"

He walked through one of the doors leading from the room, walking along a dusty hall littered with spiders until he found a decently sized room with a sturdy door. Walking through it, he took one look at the bed before teleporting it away. Utilizing a simple cleaning spell, he laid on his hooves and glanced around the room, before using a stray piece of rubble to chalk a circle around himself.

"Alright, since this is just a test, let's set it for, say, fourteen hours," he mumbled, setting sigils around the circle to keep him in stasis for that amount of time. "I should wake up nice and fresh in the morning, and I'll be able to see if that's a feasible way of passing the time."

Tossing the rock to the side, he laid his head on his forelegs as a pillow before channeling power into the circle. He was out before the spell finished, descending into a dreamless sleep.

**** **** Fourteen Hours Later **** ****

Almost like he was blinking, Dusk Shine returned to consciousness, taking a moment and starting to yawn before he flinched. There was a thick crust of saline sediment across both of his eyelids, and his mouth had also been cemented shut. Working his tongue he eventually built up enough moisture to lick his lips, parting them with a groan.

He swiped away the crust over his eyes with a hoof, blinking roughly and gazing around the room. His entire body hurt, from his cramping legs to his burning nose, and as he snorted he noted with detached horror that he'd dislodged a spider's web from one nostril.

His entire skeleton creaked as he limped his way to the courtroom, his wings as well as screaming as he took off into the morning sky towards the thin stream in the canyon.

He barely managed to lower himself fifty yards before his wings gave out, and he plummeted nearly seventy yards before splashing bodily into the water.

Luckily it was barely deep enough for him to stand in, and he took a massive breath once he breached the surface, coughing and hacking as the freezing cold water leaked down his nose and into his throat.

"Hibernation not viable," he croaked out, before taking a drink of the water he was immersed in. It was gritty in his mouth, but so much better than the dry desert his tongue had become overnight. He let the water flow into his nostrils before blowing them back into the water, cleaning them of any residual spider occupancy. Blearily, he looked up into the pale blue sky.

"No wonder Nightmare Moon was so mad at everything when she got… when she gets back," he remarked to the sun.

He remained in the stream for a bit, finding a place where the current was strong and standing there to rinse the dust off of his body, before he flapped his way back to the roof near the hole. Landing, he didn't bother trying to stay on his feet, instead letting the momentum roll him onto his back. Splaying his legs and wings, he sighed at the warm embrace of the sunlight.

His stomach took the moment to remind him that mornings were the time ponies usually broke their fast.

"Dusk Shine's field notes, day two," he said out loud to nothing. "Hibernation attempt did not actually put the subject into a true stasis, merely consuming magic for a period of fourteen hours to put the subject into a dreamless state. This resulted in the subject's form reacting accordingly, i.e. nutritional loss and normal bodily strain from remaining still and casting for so long."

Wincing, he stretched his legs as his stomach rumbled again. He ran a hoof over his chest, finding himself dry enough after his freezing bath.

"End field notes for the morning of day two," he murmured as he sat up. Getting to his hooves, he stretched his wings as well, making sure they wouldn't fail him again before he made his way to the other side of the gorge surrounding the castle.

Keeping his ears trained on the forest, he sighed as he looked over the low-growing greenery and detritus spread around the base of the trees.

"I hate the taste of grass," he muttered as he lowered his neck to begin grazing, trying to keep to the patches of clover but using the wild grass as filler. Taking the time to look for any other foodstuffs, he found evidence of young tubers and some not-quite-ripe strawberries. He even found some young wild carrot stems topped by tiny white flowers but shied away from a large patch of onions. He also took the time to gather a bunch of oak acorns lying on the ground for preparation later.

Looking at the acorns floating in his aura, he munched on a mouthful of grass thoughtfully before he used his magic to gather a bunch of the longer green blades. Concentrating, he attempted to weave them into a simple bag that Rarity had coached him through.

Letting the magic dissipate, he smiled a bit when it didn't fall apart right away, before 'sticking' it to his side with a spell and filling it with the acorns.

He grazed for at least fifteen minutes before the bland taste of grass finally turned his stomach enough that he couldn't eat anymore. Looking around, he found a dead sapling and pulled it up, splitting it into a series of staves and marking the various vegetables around so he wouldn't have to look for them again.

Walking back to the side of the gorge, he flew down and sipped from the flowing stream, no longer gritty from his landing in it. Smacking his lips to fight off the chill of the water, he looked around the gorge and sighed, looking up at the still morning sky.

"What am I doing?" he asked quietly. "I can't go into stasis, and I can't travel along a path that no longer exists." He glanced again at the sun, the body that had at one time been given to him. "Am I just waiting, just existing, until my time comes around again?"

He gazed down at the stream for a while, watching leaves and sticks flow past him, the occasional silver gleam of a fish's scales.

"Alright then," he said, standing and widening his stance, steeling the heart beating so erratically in his chest. "So be it. I will live and thrive until my existence comes back into the world, and I can go back to my friends and subjects, the little ponies that make life worth living."

Nodding, he took a moment to use a hoof to process the acorns in the bag, shelling them and breaking them into small pieces, before he used his sticking spell to connect the bag to a side of the small river. He then spread his wings, catching the air with them and shooting into the sky and dropping into the hole in the ceiling with a single beat of his wings.

"First, I need to secure a place to grow some of the food I found in the forest," he murmured, trotting through the opening that led further back into the castle. "Luna's gardens should still be in the center of the castle’s walls," he muttered to himself, "maybe they left behind the tools I'll need to set up something sustainable."

He found the area where the garden had been, and even a shed leaning against one of the surrounding walls, but both were empty. A large water pump was situated beside the shed, the head covered in such rust that he wasn’t sure it would work at all. The ground itself was another nightmare, overgrown with weeds and a sprawling species of thistle that made his skin itch horribly when it pricked him.

Sighing, he began by taking the weeds by the root. He spent much of the rest of his morning pulling out the worst of the species and simply chucking them over the wall, making sure to pull the dirt off the roots first.

Looking up into the noon sun, he wiped his forehead with a wing joint and once again flew down to the creek, drinking his fill and checking his acorns before coming back to the plot to deal with the itching thistle. He watched, dismayed, as several seed pods fell from the trailing vines and immediately started sprouting where they landed.

He slowed his work, taking the entirety of branches in his aura and clipping them, levitating them over the gorge before dropping them to the stone below. He made sure that the seeds could find no purchase in the hard rock, before piling the rest of the thistle cuttings there. He returned to the single massive stem, pulling out the entirety of the remaining plant before bringing it to the pile and burning the whole thing.

Once he'd assured that the embers had been doused with a spout from the stream, he returned to the outside plot again and looked over what was left.

A large yard, spotted with pits and several dead spots that the thistle had taken over. Maybe the size of a couple of professional buckball fields side-by-side. Almost a rectangular acre, then.

"I'll have to use some of what AJ taught me, but it should work for just me," he murmured.

His stomach then cramped hard enough that he winced before flying off into the woods, doing what the bears do best behind a bush before flying back to his plot.

"Alright, so I need to either find a chamber pot or," he shivered, "a garderobe, or at least find a place for an outhouse. First, though," he murmured, looking around the plot and locating the rusty water pump.

Cautiously pumping the handle, he found that it screeched like a banshee but did eventually manage to pull water through the spout, though it was a dubious brown color and he doubted that it was safely drinkable. It didn't smell foul though, and the ground around the drain that it splashed on didn't instantly rot, so he hoped it was just muddy. Not knowing how to fix it, he made up his mind to simply drink from the creek for the time being.

Checking the sun, he figured he would spend the rest of the day exploring the castle and seeing what had been left behind.

As it turns out, not much.

His trip through what had been the library netted him a single book, abandoned on top of a shelf, in old equish. Giving it a quick and dirty mental translation, he guessed it was a fiction piece, seemingly about a mare that worshiped Celestia a little fervently and eventually withered away. Sighing, he started to return it to the top of the shelf, hesitating before he instead moved it to the large desk that had been abandoned by the staff.

Blowing away the dust on the desktop, he gently placed the book in the middle of it and used a simple cleaning charm to return the book to a pristine state.

"You'll be the first of my collection," he muttered, sealing the promise with a simple enchantment to keep the book at its current state. "A book about chasing perfection and falling short."

He gazed at the simple cloth cover before snorting, walking out of the library and returning to his search.

At the end of the look-through, he had a running mental tally of what he'd found.

The single fiction book in the library; a maid's diary in middle-common equish; a large bolt of simple undyed cotton, thick and probably used for quilts; a damaged spearhead; a small anvil left behind in a forge downstairs, as well as a couple of pieces of firewood; a vault that was barren of anything besides a couple of golden coins; the two secret chambers off of the library he’d known about, containing the Diary of the Two Sisters and the Inspiration Manifestation, which he left alone after a brief mental tug-of-war; and the sealed rooms of Celestia and Luna.

For a long time he stared at those seals, wondering what would happen if he dismissed them. Celestia probably put them up herself after all, and she might have alarms attached to the spell-work.

In the end he left them alone and returned to the rooms of the servants, left dusty but well cared for after the thirty or so years since abandonment. Using the quilt material and some errant clouds, he made a mattress for himself and placed it in the room that had a sturdy door and well-kept shutters.

Opening said shutters, he used his wings to start moving the air around the room before using his horn to direct the air current, creating a vortex and using it to eject the insects and dust from the room. Plopping his mattress into the middle of the room, he levitated the wardrobe out of the room before using magic to open the doors.

Peering inside, he used the same vortex to blast away the same type of debris before replacing it in what he was now thinking of as his room.

"Alright," he said, laying on the overstuffed bed, looking around the bare room. "Could use some art, and probably some insulation spells before true summer hits, but it’s nice. Cozy."

He looked at a large bare wall, considering making a tally mark to signify how many days he'd been here, but discarded the idea when he realized that would likely just serve to drive him insane. Instead, he returned to the area where he'd discarded the weeds from his new garden and used a spell to synthesize a few sheets of basic paper.

His stomach growled again as he used some of the grass in the area to create a string for binding the bundle together.

"Looks like my magic should be conserved until a steady supply of nutrition is secured," he said with a frown, floating his new journal through the window back to his room. "On top of that, I should locate some hemp for my plot, as it can be turned into paper easier than most other plants."

He took a moment to consider some of the other uses for similar plants, taught to him by a certain yellow pegasus after seeing one of his mini-breakdowns, but he discarded the thought.

For now.

Shaking his head, he flew out to the forest and used the rest of the day to graze from the clover and grab some likely candidates for his burgeoning garden. Eating his fill, he found a downed tree and used his magic to form a few tools from it, most importantly a canteen and a cask he could fill from the stream.

The rest of the wood was formed into various handles and rods, with some nearby stones melded together and turned into the heads of the tools. At the end of the exercise he had a shovel, a rake, a large flat blade, a water bucket, and a simple plow.

Flying his items over to the plot, he placed the roots and vegetables inside the castle along the floor, and stored all of his tools easily within the leaning shed.

He glanced over the plot once more, taking a moment to run his hoof through the topsoil and smile, before he flew down into the ravine and filled his cask and canteen. Pulling his acorn bag out of the river, he tried a piece, his mouth smacking as he took in the… flavor. Flying back to the castle, he stopped at the forge for a moment to scrape up some of the carbon burnt into the stones.

Returning to his room, he used a small amount of his water and the soot to create some ink, snacking on the tasteless acorn pulp. Plucking a few of his own loose feathers, he sharpened the largest one’s barrel into a tip before dipping it into the ink and bringing it to the first page of his journal.

Journal of the Crown Prince Dusk Shine, once-attendant to the Sun and the Moon

The writing here marks the end of my second day, here in the past ages of a great country I knew as Equestria. As far as I know this is still Equestria, currently under the leadership of Princess Celestia, First of Her Name, Last of Her Name. I say past ages, as I was initially born in the nine-hundred and seventy-ninth year of the Golden Age of Celestia.

Indeed, I am a traveler of time, though there is no longer a time for me to travel forward into. If I must hazard a guess, I would guess that my arrival here in the past served to sever the timeline I traveled into from my own, creating an alternate existence for me to live through.

How immodest that must sound.

I found a way to shatter timelines, and instead of feeling any sort of elation or sense of achievement, I feel only loss.

I have mistakenly left behind a family, a group of friends that may as well have been family, as well as the entirety of a country that had been entrusted to me by the Royal Sisters.

Yes, both of them. Luna returns at the thousandth year, though I cannot tell if Celestia meant this to be or stumbles across the knowledge of it through some act of divination.

Regardless, that is obviously not the case anymore. At the moment I reside within the abandoned castle, left behind by Celestia after the banishment of her sister. While the Everfree forest does become dangerous and overgrown in the coming centuries, at the moment it is not uninhabitable. For the foreseeable future, I will reside here.

I spent most of the first day poorly, I will admit. After a brief examination of the grounds of the castle, I secured a water source before holing myself into a safe room and attempting a magical hibernation.

It did not go well.

Most of the second day was spent foraging, where I found some root vegetables and berries to augment my diet of clover and wild grass (which still tastes of vapid green water, ugh). I weeded an area that used to be a royal garden, as well as digging up a thistle plant that seeded and grew duplicates of itself rapidly. The first sign of the Everfree's corruption, perhaps? I burned the plant on the stone of the gorge.

After foraging and once again eating my fill of clover, I took some samples of the wild vegetation in the area and synthesized some tools. I suspect much of tomorrow will be taken up with planting and some stretching of the Earth Pony magic that resides within my body.

For the moment, however, my eyes grow strained from attempting to write by horn-light. Consider this the end of my second day.

Rubbing his eyes with a hoof and taking a sip from his canteen, he made motions to set aside the journal and quill, before scribbling in a last note.

PS, I suppose; I found no sign of a garderobe, thank Celestia, but also no other sign of a bathroom. I suspect the castle mainly functioned off of a chamber pot system, but no such pot remains. I will make some attempt at an outhouse, away from the castle walls, but for the time being, am relegated to using the bounty of the forest.

Ah, toilet paper, I will miss you so.

With that last note, he set aside his writings, before heading back out to the forest one last time before bed.

Author's Note

Alright guys, the second installment is in and ready to go. The next chapter will have Dusk's first interactions with the ponies of the current times, as he tries to figure out exactly when he is and how much he can get away with. See'ya then