Gilda's Wrath

“Okay, Spike, could you pass me the maticore tears?”

Spike cluelessly blinked back at his mentor.

“The blue one!”

“Oh, right…”

His mind was not on the task at hand today.

Perhaps it was simply a side effect of last night’s after-hours study session, but Spike could swear that the floor beneath him rumbled every few seconds. He held a keen eye on the window, cautiously watching for anything out of the ordinary. The birds chirruped, the sun blazed, the grass whistled in the wind; first impressions seemed to indicate that everything was normal in Ponyville today, pleasant even.

But he couldn’t shake the feeling that he was missing something. He hoisted up onto the windowframe, pressing his scaly snout to the glass, and that’s when he saw it.

Too busy carefully mixing potions, Twilight didn’t see anything, but she certainly heard it, and grumbled, forced away from her work for the fourth time this morning.

“Spike, is that the sound of-?”

“Ponies running away in terror? Sure looks like it…”

The unicorn huddled in beside her assistant to get a good look. Surely enough, a pack of ponies were stampeding through town, calling out in plaintive horror, carelessly upturning flower stalls and trampling flower beds as they made their desperate flee.

“What in Equestria is going on out there!?” Twilight snapped her potion book shut and stormed down the stairs to investigate.