Equestria Girls: Cataclysm

The Princess of Friendship's hooves clopped quietly in the halls of Canterlot's royal castle, accompanied by the rhythmic sound of her saddle bags' material rubbing as she cantered as quietly as she may. It was early enough that the sun had only just been raised, and while there were no rooms with sleeping occupants down this hall, she nonetheless did her best to keep her brisk pace as inaudible as possible. An old habit, and perhaps a silly one, but one that so far had only served rather than hindered.

A pair of guards stood outside of the royal treasury, already at attention when Twilight arrived. This combined with the door being ajar suggested the room was already occupied, and it didn't take her peeking in to know who it was. "Good morning," Twilight said, chipper despite the hour.

"And a lovely morning to you as well," Celestia replied, with a smile as warm as her tone. "You know that you didn't need to send in a formal request for this, yes? You hardly need my permission to visit your friends."

Twilight smiled sheepishly as she stepped into the room properly. "Yeah, I know...I just wanted to make absolutely sure that it was alright to use the mirror. I still feel weird about helping myself to something like the treasury."

"It's more than alright, Twilight. I appreciate you letting me know in advance, but as I said, you don't need my permission for this. They're your friends, not mine."

Twilight nodded and slipped her saddlebag off for a moment, giving the contents of one pouch a thorough yet speedy inspection, followed by the other.

As she did, Celestia's gaze flicked briefly to either side of her ex-student, and then the door. "Will Spike not be accompanying you?"

Twilight shook her head. "Not this morning. I wanted to, but I felt bad about how late he stayed up last night going over petitions for me. I didn't have it in me to wake him up. I'll bring him in tomorr-"

"This is the correct day," Celestia replied quickly with a raised hoof. Twilight relaxed as quickly as her head had shot up, a fear soothed before it had been expressed. "As of last night, you will have three days before the portal closes."

Twilight heaved a sigh, sagging slightly, before perking back up again. "Okay, good. I'll be back to get Spike after he's had some sleep. It's been a couple of months, and I wouldn't want him to miss out on seeing everyone again, but he needs at least some sleep."

"Will you be staying for the full duration of your window to the human world?"

"Hopefully!" came Twilight's upbeat reply, as she fished out her checklist of things she wanted to do while she was over there. She read out its contents to Princess Celestia, who nodded along as each point of interest was covered, one after the other.

Twilight wasn't sure why she was nervous about this visit. Perhaps it was because she realized that it had been months since she last saw everyone from Canterlot High, and felt on some level that it was a failing to leave her friends cut off from her for so long. Were she paying attention, she might have deduced that this was the most likely motivation for Celestia coming down to see her off personally. Sometimes it was just easier to soothe Twilight not by openly discussing the issue, but by distracting her from it by letting Twilight focus on something she decided was important. That usually meant reading off a list. Most found this tiresome, or annoying, and the lists themselves were seldom necessary.

It never stopped her, though. A list meant a course of action, a course of action meant a strategy, and strategy meant she could adapt to whatever happened. It was security. Silly, perhaps, but to an insecure Twilight, very important, and so Celestia listened to her every word as though each narrated step was a vital part of a process that she had to be there to witness.

"-and if there's time left after that, we can..." Twilight put a hoof to her chin as her gaze found the ceiling, contemplating this eventuality. "...I'm not sure, actually. I'm sure we'll make it interesting, though. Even idle time with them is fun."

"Of that, I have no doubt. Should I expect a letter about how it goes?"

"Of course!"

The readiness and sureness of the answer made Celestia smile a bit wider. "I'll be looking forward to it. Now, are you all packed?"

Twilight checked her bags, again. This was the fourth time, and just like the other three times, nothing had changed. "Yes- I think." Fifth time. Never skip the fifth time. "Yes, I'm ready."

"Did you pack a lunch?"

"That was number seven on the checklist," Twilight chided lightly, despite herself. "We're going to get lunch while we're there, remember?"

"Oh, I do. I'm just making sure that you remembered," came the teasing response, and Celestia chuckled at the ever-so-slightly indignant expression that briefly flashed across Twilight's face (You think she'd forget something on the list?!), which was thoroughly erased by the gentle hug that Celestia pulled her into with one wing. "Have fun, Twilight. Send my regards along to your friends in the human world, and don't miss the portal. Remember: full moon."

"I'll remember." Twilight returned the short but sincere hug farewell, and stepped up to the mirror. She did not stop despite the apparently solid surface quickly approaching, and as her nose reached the glass, she passed straight into it, causing the rest of the surface to ripple like water that had been waded into.

Princess Celestia let loose a soft sigh as she watched Twilight pass from sight. A fleeting memory of a bouncing, bubbly lavender filly on her first day to class played from a fond place in her heart.

A crack of thunder shattered the moment nearly as effectively as it did every window on this level of the castle.

In an instant, the doors to the treasury were gone, ripped from their place by a gout of brilliant heat and light, along with the door frame they were attached to and about six inches of masonry to either side of it. Thick stone burst away and exploded in a suffocating plume of dust that spilled up and down the hallway like a tidal wave, the reverberations able to be felt across the entire castle, and further out onto the streets outside the royal grounds. The earthquake was brief, but the roar continued to echo throughout the castle as it shook on its foundation for nearly half a minute after. Dust rained from every ceiling and every fixture rocked and threatened to fall from their places, if they weren't blown from them entirely. Lines and symbols normally invisible to the naked eye flared and burned brightly as they did their best to hold the castle together, spitting white sparks in places from the strain.

Guards were scrambling well before the rocking stopped, and it wasn't hard to see the damage when they arrived. The walls between the treasury and the one across the hallway had become piles of scorched rubble, and flames danced across every surface, turning the air thick and dark with an ever-thickening curtain of smoke and dust. The blast had blown a thick, deep pit into the solid stone of the treasury floor, the semi-circle nearly filled in again by the ceiling where it had come down, exposing the rooms above with their dividing wall hanging precariously over the gap.

Luna was moments behind the first responders, roused violently from her slumber by the sound of their castle being blown apart. She was in a battle stance, looking to her battered and bleeding sister as she pulled herself from a pile of rubble with near-hysterical concern, but whether it was from the ringing in her ears or the distance of her mind, Celestia could not hear the flurry of words she was certain came from her sister's moving mouth.

All she could think about was the empty, mangled frame of the mirror where it had been embedded into the wall in the back of the treasury, and her precious ex-student that had passed through it only seconds before.

Twilight's plans had fallen through before, many times. They'd fallen through quickly many times, too. However, never before had she ever had them go so spectacularly wrong so incredibly quickly.

The colors she saw weren't ones that Twilight recognized immediately, nor did it dawn on her that she was seeing anything, nor experiencing much at all. Everything was spinning, nothing had a shape. Her thoughts were movement and felt like a fluid, sloshing around as wildly as her perspective did.

Somewhere between an eternity and a few seconds later, when she could dedicate enough brainpower towards an objective, she tried to piece together what had occurred.

She had stepped into the portal, experiencing the vertigo and spin and swirl of grays that she had come to expect, and she had braced appropriately for it. A hoof entered the mirror, and a shoed foot exited it - pony in, human out. She didn't lose her balance, only had to swivel her arms briefly, and she took in a deep breath. She had begun to think something, but the thought never finished.

It took a second. Two, at absolute most. She couldn't have even completely passed through the mirror before...something hit her. Twilight had no idea what. She didn't see it. She hadn't even taken in the sight of Canterlot High in front of her. Her hands never quite arrived where they were intended to at her hips, almost making it there when the sky fell and crushed her flat.

'What happened?'

It was said in her voice, but Twilight didn't...hear it, per se. It was about this time that she cast her focus outwards, rather than inwards, and like a switch had been flipped, the tornado stopped and her surroundings came into focus.

Saying anything surrounded her was a misnomer, however. Nothing really felt like it had any distance from her - nothing was "close," but neither did "far" carry any meaning. Still very disoriented, Twilight could barely comprehend it. There was nothing for her to latch to gain her bearings, and left to nothing but the torrent of her thoughts, Twilight began to panic.

'Where am I? What is this? What happened? Did I break something? This has never happened before, where's the human world? Did I go off course? Was this a mishap? Oh no, did I do this? Did I forget to turn off my enchantments? I don't know what I could have forgotten, I was so careful but I knew I forgot something! It must have been bad, what's going on?! Is this a portal-in-a-portal situation? Have I been expelled out of existence?! Am I lost forever like this?! What’s going on what’s going on wha-'

'No,' came the rational part of Twilight's mind, seizing control of the spiral. 'Think. I am here, I am...somewhere. Here? Don’t know here. Find out what 'here' is.'

Forcing herself down this path of logic, Twilight remembered something like this vague environment she found herself in, back when she had first ascended. When she'd asked Celestia about what they had experienced together that day, it'd been explained to her as a sort of in-between space, situated just behind reality. She compared it to the stage with the curtain still closed, beyond which the rest of the world lie. That place was bright blues and whites, and many colors and orbs swirled about, alongside any images and scenes that were thought up as they were needed, seemingly of their own accord. It was pleasant.

This was not that, and certainly not pleasant. The colors here were dark, muffled, and muted. The navy blue was smeared with grays and blacks, and the backdrop felt turbulent, equal parts churning waves and the storm that stirred them. It felt uneasy.

The similarities were enough that Twilight recognized this behind-place for what it was, but alien enough that it took her some time to do so. No diagrams or symbols assembled themselves to help Twilight understand anything either.

'This is behind the curtain. This world’s must be different. So behind it must be...'

A world came into focus. A blue and green one, round, visible in its entirety despite its vast size. Earth.

'The stage. Right. So...I definitely made it to the human world, but- wait, hold on, what happened when I arrived?'

Nothing manifested from the non-space, but her gaze found something seemingly on its own. A fireball, dispersing. A crater, glowing white hot and billowing a plume of smoke like a monument to destruction.

'I exploded.'

She let that sink in, for a while. She watched the scene, which replayed itself a few times for her, like it knew she was watching. Something dark and cylindrical streaked in from above at alarming speeds, arriving in the instant Twilight took a breath. Fire washed out, a crater expanded. It didn't click, so it played again. And again. And again.

There was nothing in the crater that she recognized. There was no purple of any shade, much less her own. Not a scrap of feather, not a lock of hair, not a strip of her bags or any of the various books or supplies or just-in-case ointments she had brought, like the sunscreen she wanted to try out, or the scarf that Rarity had given her months ago in case the wind was too brisk, or the bandages in case her delicate human fingers got cut, including ones shaped oddly in case it ended up in an place where the joints would bend over and disturb, or the spare brush she got that had never been used for pony manes so that it wouldn't mix anything in with human hair. None of her lists or backup lists.

Gone. All of it was gone. Everything.

Something rose up from deep inside of Twilight. She couldn't name the exact feelings, but among the cocktail of emotion that bubbled from the depths, what stood out was incredulity, and a steadily growing sense of outrage that almost glowed with intensity. As seconds crawled by, it did glow.

She exploded. Seriously? Seriously?

Everything had been fine. Everything was normal. There was no worry in her heart, any anxieties having been gently put to bed by Celestia, who she had just spoken to seconds before. It was just going to be a three-day visit to her human friends at their school. Everything about what she had been lead to believe taught her that it was going to be okay, as it always had and always would.

Then, in an instant, it ended. Everything about her was completely consumed in a ball of flame she had no chance to see coming, and it arrived too quickly to stop. She had no chance.

'Are you BUCKING KIDDING ME?!'

Twilight screamed into the aether behind the world, and she kept screaming - she had no lungs here, so she did not stop. She raged like she had never raged before, her soul and heart roaring a deadly blaze like a heartbroken sun, fury at the injustice sending ripples across this uneasy cosmos as it finally hit her.

She was dead. She died. She watched herself be completely destroyed, down to the last strand of hair on her then-human body. Her conversation with Celestia had been the last one. The time she saw Spike that morning, sleeping in his bed, would be the last time she saw him. The "goodnight" she had given to her friends with a sleepy wave of the hoof was the last they would ever see of her again.

She was nothing now, just a memory in the minds of everypony she had left behind. She would be mourned, and she could never ease the pain of her friends or her family, or tell them what she would have told them, had she only known this moment was coming. She couldn't tell any of them how sorry she was to leave them behind. She couldn't tell them how much she loved them and what they had meant to her. She could never say thank you. She could never say goodbye.

The tears came as readily as the screaming now. Her heart fell to pieces, as did Twilight.

She wasn't ready to die. It came so suddenly, and now she was dead, gone forever. It wasn't fair. It was incredibly, devastatingly, despair-inducingly unfair, and it didn’t matter at all, because she was dead.

And yet...

Twilight grew very, very still; her soul was still ablaze, but the fury and grief had quieted, giving this thought the room to expand upon the point that it had boldly interrupted her for.

She was dead. And yet, she was here. Not Elysium, or its gates, or whatever came as part of due process of the afterlife that awaited every pony. She was here, behind the veil, looking at earth - the world that she was, in some way, still a part of. Not Equus. Not being weighed for the quality of her life, or finding her spot amongst her ancestors where they roamed freely in those rolling hills of radiant winds, and not meeting the other princesses in their ivory palace.

She was here. Observing earth. Questioning her place now, and her own ability to question.

Why?

...

...

'Alicorn.'

She did not have eyes, but Twilight felt them close as though she did. Tension began to untie itself from her as she felt the wings she did not physically have expand out to their full not-length on either not-side of her, and then gently close around herself in soft embrace.

Because she was an alicorn. A princess never dies till her reign is complete, and Twilight's had only just started. She was an inseparable, unbreakable part of the world, and no trauma could rend her from it without meaning. Harmony existed beyond the material, and she was more Harmony than any amount of flesh or feather.

She wasn't dead, not truly. She couldn't be dead. It was, in fact, impossible, because she was right: it wasn't fair. It was injustice. Harmony would not will it so.

This was not the end. It wasn’t her time. Harmony would decide that, not some random fireball.

Twilight's soul grew cool again, as relief washed across every part of her being, replaced steadily by a gray fatigue that filled her. Peace returned to her mind, of a sort, as she hugged herself in silence.

Some amount of time passed. Twilight didn't track it, if it was even possible to. However long it was, the Princess of Friendship's thoughts roused from their statue-like stillness and began to gingerly wander, like fillies that had been asked to sit for too long.

Earth sat before her, in all its...everything. Twilight simply gazed into it, mind still mostly numb, but after some time she realized that she found its presence quietly disconcerting. Why eluded her a little while longer, but eventually she concluded that it was because she didn't understand how to interact with it. Sure, she could see it, and it was definitely there, but that doesn't account for much when you're cut off from it by...what again?

Twilight's focus shifted to this vague sense of separation between herself and where she wanted to be. It was...thick. Like water, but pushing back at her the more she attempted to reach past it. It distorted to repulse her- or was that her distorting against it? She wasn't sure.

She didn't care. She wanted in. She needed in. Why couldn't she-

There. A hole in the barrier, less a gap so much as a weakness. It was thick, and soupy, but when she pushed against it, it gave instead of her. Before Twilight could consider what she was doing, she felt herself pouring through this space, and everything went white.

Twilight didn't have to be able to feel the ache in her body to know she had made a mistake. She did, though, which helped to drive the point home: she'd made a mistake. She'd made several mistakes, in fact.

Reflection is the first step in learning, so while she was on the ground in a heap of suffering, Twilight reflected.

Firstly, she never took stock to see where she intended to emerge. Had she studied her destination in any amount of detail, she would have seen that cliff that it was teetering on the edge of. Said study would have perhaps given her the foresight to angle her entry in such a way that she did not go flying off said cliff, or at the very least, it may have given her the warning needed to throw out her wings when she was able and perhaps stabilize her descent before it became an uncontrolled tumble. She did not do any of these things.

Secondly on her list of tactical errors: she did not consider where she was emerging and compare it to the location of where she had just been, prior to exploding. Had she done that, she may have thought better of this point in particular, and possibly found somewhere more convenient for her purposes. If nothing else, she would have an idea of where she was now, and where she needed to go. However, she did not.

Thirdly, and perhaps most grievously of all, she did not put together a plan ahead of time. Celestia had taught her to always think ahead when she was trying to plan something, and Twilight had not only not thought ahead, she also had not thought presently. She didn't think. She simply did, thus allowing the aforementioned list to be here, and be as long as it was. She knew better than that, but she allowed herself to be thoughtless, and now she got to feel all the wonderful pain that came with rolling down a cliff and sitting in an aching heap.

There was, of course, a plethora of other tactical blunders she had made - not considering how much time had actually passed since her intended arrival, not considering what circumstances might arise as a result of her entering the world in this way that weren't immediately obvious, considerations like a backup plan or contingencies in case any such plans didn't work out, or whether it was even wise to emerge in her emotionally exhausted state - but they could be all generally chalked up under point three.

'Well done, Twilight, a nice and orderly report of all your failings. If only it didn't hurt so much so you could actually learn from it.'

"Ugh..."

One hoof planted firmly against the ground beneath her, and Twilight paused, inspecting this hoof closer.

Humans don't have hooves.

…she could only note this for now. She didn’t have the mental capacity to ponder it further. Too much happening.

Twilight put forth the effort needed to extend this leg to its full length, painstakingly shoving her other legs beneath her in the process. Her back crackled and popped as she straightened it, and when she extended her wings, she nearly fell back to the earth from the jolt of pain that both struck her with.

“Ow.”

Yeah, that about covered it.

After a few long moments of tentatively, warily making sure that everything was as it should be and that nothing seemed broken (something she was only loosely confident on, but didn't pay to dwell over), Twilight took in her surroundings.

It appeared to be morning. The air had a bite to it, and if memory served, it was mid-spring...the month's name eluded her, she chased it a few seconds- May? Early May? That sounded right.

She stood at the base of a long strip of black stone with dotted yellow lines extending all the way along its length, stretching on in either direction for as far as she could see. One direction bent out of sight around the hills she had just fallen down. The other stretched out into some trees, where it also slipped from view.

A road. Going...somewhere. Presumably. Where? She didn't know. This wasn't the city, and she couldn't tell where the city was. 'Point number two...' She shook her head, and considered her next step: clearly, this was nowhere. Nowhere meaningful. She had to relocate. But where?

Flapping her wings once (and immediately regretting it), Twilight cast her gaze to the sky, finding the sun where it was still trailing up from the horizon. From there, her eyes found said horizon. She traced the land where it met the road, and she decided, arbitrarily, that this was where she would go. Even worlds apart, Celestia would still guide her.

And so, limping heavily and still in a daze from her fall, Twilight began to walk.