He blinked and darkness rushed in.

Something had happened. His head ached and a strange iron-like taste was in his mouth. Groaning, he stood up on his hind legs, kneading the side of his head that had hit… the ground… and there had been an explosion and…

“Luna,” he whispered.

Where was she? He blinked again. Why was it so dark? Maybe he hit his head a bit too hard. When he took a tentative step though his eyes slowly got used again to the almost-twilight around him and he found out the darkness was in fact receding, leaving behind the blanket of night like a wave leaves behind the ocean’s glistening shells upon a shore.

Carved through the outline of stark boxy shapes of Manehattan’s skyscrapers, the night sky shone for the first time inside the city that never sleeps.
A power outage of some sort? This, on top of everything else that… that happened.

A flash replayed behind his eyelids when he closed his eyes. The bomb. There had been a bomb. Somepony had… tried to blast the Princess away.

Why? It did not make sense. Nothing about this did.

“Hello?” He tried. No reply. The auditorium where the Princess stated her speech had been left desert. Or mostly so. A few ponies lay on the ground like him. Maybe they were still stunned. “H-Hey,” he repeated, falling back to his Southern drawl in the shock of the moment. But neither his parents were there – he was alone, alone inside this darkness that had grown to envelop Equestria’s largest town.

“Hey,” he repeated, stumbling forward until he reached one of the ponies still dazed from the explosion. A young mare, her coat a dazzling yellow even in the dim brightness of the swirling stars above. “Wake up,” he said, but only because his tongue was faster than his brain.

“Wake up,” he tried again – and this time his leg shot forward to wake her up but he hesitated because she was too still and why were there dark spots on her coat if she was not a spotted pony and why were those spots so sticky and glistening like-

The smell hit him.

Iron. The still-lingering hint of cordite.

Spoiled sweetness from where her bowels had spilled out.

“C-Celestia’s beard,” he cursed, covering his mouth with his hoof at the blasphemy. But his mother was not there to chastise him. And he had a sudden longing for his youngling years, back when the sun was in the sky and life made sense. “Ah’ll go git help!” He shouted at the unmoving pony.

How silly, she did not even stand up to say thanks. What a silly, silly mare.

And he was not a clever pony. He had no plan, except for that whispered by his burning heart inside his ears – run run run – and he followed it the best he could. He left the auditorium plaza – some other ponies lay sleeping on the side of the road and who knew what they were all dreaming about.

And there were flashes ahead.

Fireworks.

But fireworks used to be brighter and last for much longer, nothing of this rat-tat-tat-tat he heard that reminded him of the hoking noises his wrench made when it got stuck inside two gears. Rat-tat-tat-tat!

And screams. Scattered echoes for now, but there was something ahead – figures holding something and more of those fireworks and more of those screams.

He opened his mouth to call out for them but this time his brain did check in fast enough and he bit his tongue. Wait. Wait. Might not be the brightest of ideas. Might end up like those silly, silly ponies dreaming of empty things on the sides of the road.

He had parked his truck somewhere, didn’t it? Sure he could find it, he could turn the engine on and drive through the night and away from this cursed city. Sure somewhere else the sun was still shining, right?

Another brightness awaited ahead. Far from the fireworks, a blade of rusty light cut an alley in two.

He walked in, looked at the source of the light, and stood transfixed like one of them butterflies his aunt used to stick to the wall. From between two tall skyscrapers, a huge red moon hung from the sky, blood-red and spattered with craters like empty eyes.

Whispers rose to his ears, speaking in tongues he did not recognize.

Slowly he lifted a hoof to reach for the moon.

“Freeze!” Somepony shouted from the other end of the alley.

Author's Note

Thanks for reading! Please leave a review if the story is of your liking, I would love to hear your thoughts. Things will be getting a little darker from now on I am afraid.