Equestria Girls: Cataclysm

“So, Twilight,” Twilight prompted herself. “What’s the plan?”

It would have been nice if she had answered back. In response to the silence, Twilight sighed.

It felt like she’d been walking for hours. The sun was getting fairly close to the center of the sky at this point, so that assessment sounded accurate to her.

The road was pretty long, and seemed to just go on and on. There had not been any forks in the road that she'd discovered yet, so for the most part there was little to think about except her own discomfort. She had plenty to kick herself over for that, but at least a broken bone didn’t seem to be on that list.

As the aches kept her company more intimately the longer she walked, and with little else to do but walk, Twilight’s mind shifted to other things, like the plan she had just prompted herself for. When that failed to present itself immediately, she reviewed what all had happened so far for more insight.

“What a stupid thing to have happen. Stupid way to die.” Twilight punctuated the statement with a swift kick to a rock in her path. It bounced and scattered down the road for several meters before falling still. “I’m glad no one was around to see that. If Spike was-“

If Spike were here, he’d be dead.

The thought struck her suddenly, and she nearly stumbled. Her joints ached in protest, and she hissed quietly as she forced herself to continue, rather than dwell on that thought. “Alright, Twilight, think. What now?”

And think she did. Another flick of her hoof sent the rock she had caught up to skipping further up the road.

“I need to figure out where Canterlot is. That's the biggest priority right now. I don’t know where I am, so if I can figure that out…oh, but how? It’s not like I have a map…”

Twilight gave her wings a tentative flex. The stab she received from the movement made her eyes water, and she very slowly completed the motion, just for the sake of gauging how likely flight was. "Not soon" was the answer, decidedly. Had she been thinking about it at the time, maybe that cliff she’d thrown herself off would have made a good vantage point for identifying her surroundings…

No, you know what would have been a really smart plan? Actually looking around when I could see everything. I had a chance to use that place to the fullest, and not only did I blow it, I don’t know how to go back.

Twilight shook her head - her neck did not agree with that, but she suppressed the wince. "Less kicking self, more planning. Focus." She huffed, and continued on with her thoughts. “I’ll just keep following this road and ask for directions. There’s got to be someone out here, right?”

Even as she said that, though, she realized that in all her time walking, she hadn’t seen a single car drive by. The wooded area that the road cut through had yielded to a massive clearing around her, and not one vehicle had passed her in either direction.

While this was troubling, Twilight didn’t know enough about roads and human cars to be able to judge it as much more than inconvenient. What she did know, though: she had a limited time window here. If she didn’t make it back in three days’ time, the portal would close, and it would be another month before she could pass through it again. While that wasn’t necessarily the end of the world, the other things on top of this made it seem a lot more distressing than it already would be.

What had even happened to the portal? She had blown up, and while she was no expert on her own physiology as an alicorn, completely incinerating her implied a lot of force and a lot of heat. Did the portal survive?

“It must have survived,” Twilight answered her growing worry, failing to squelch it before it could grow further, which it proceeded to do. “It’s a statue and it’s highly magical, and I’m just a pony. It would have had to be a pretty big explosion to blow up a statue.”

It would have had to be a pretty big explosion to incinerate me completely, too...

A swift kick sent the rock she’d been pursuing farther than it ever had, momentarily escaping her sight. “The portal has to be fine. It’s a relic, those don’t just break, and if it did, it could be reformed. Everything that magically potent is fixable.”

Did the school survive, though? Were my friends there when that happened? Did they-

”Stop,” Twilight hissed, stomping her hooves as her steps took on a fervent intensity. She squinted her eyes tightly closed, willing her thoughts to stop tormenting her. They did not stop.

Who would have blown up a statue in front of a school? And why? It was a Saturday, but it was a highschool. That was a known hangout spot of my friends, and other kids hung around it too, even after hours. How many more people than just me had died in that moment? Had they been aiming at the statue in particular? Had it been aimed at the school, and it just coincidentally hit right next to the statue? Was I the target? What if they're dead because of m-

The solid surface that Twilight ran headlong into evoked a loud “OW!” Twilight opened her eyes, rubbed her muzzle, and shot an accusatory glare at whatever she had impacted.

A car had stopped in the road, and she hadn’t noticed it right in front of her. It was orange, and had colors painted on its flanks (Do cars have flanks?) that was vaguely reminiscent of a jungle cat of some variety. It sat directly on top of the line in the center of the road - one of the few things that Twilight knew about driving told her that cars were supposed to stay on either side of that line to avoid collision. That might explain the rest of what she saw.

As Twilight stepped around to the other side of the vehicle, she heard a faint crunching. Looking down and lifting a hoof, she saw glass stuck to the bottom of it. Glancing around, she saw glass and small shards of debris scattered all around where the vehicle sit.

It’s front end was deeply compressed, far more heavily damaged than Twilight has ever seen another car - it looked like it was made of cardboard and someone had squished it a bit too hard against a solid surface, causing it to buckle and fold in on itself. All of the windows and windshield were shattered, likely making up for most of the glass on the road.

Twilight could only stare as she stepped around the wreck, taking in the damage in morbid awe. This car was larger than she remembered…no, she was just looking at it from a lower perspective than she was accustomed to. She glanced back down again, mindful of glass or bits of metal, when her eyes found something and she stopped.

On the pavement just outside the door closest to her were a hoofful of tiny golden cylinders of some kind of metal - brass, maybe? She had no idea what those were.

What really caught her attention was the red fluid on the ground beside them in a puddle, and the shape of a human shoe print in the center of it. It was mostly dried, more a paste than a liquid and more brown than red, but Twilight knew blood when she saw it.

Several seconds passed in silence as Twilight parsed this, concern all but audible on her expression. She cast a glance into the car, and then propped her hooves up against the wrinkled door so that she could rise up and view inside. The places where humans sit were empty. The interior was somehow even more mangled than the exterior of the vehicle, but showed no sign of recent habitation.

Twilight let her hooves fall back to the pavement, ignoring the protest of her joints as she picked up the pace. She eyed her surroundings with newfound urgency as she went.

Finding someone out here was now doubly important. They might be hurt.

An hour passed. Perhaps it was two; it was hard to tell for certain.

This road didn't seem inclined to take Twilight anywhere in a hurry, much to her annoyance. She had been keeping an eye out, but she had seen no further signs of any other humans in the area, wounded or otherwise.

"I suppose that blood was a bit old," Twilight muttered to herself, huffing a bit from the exertion. Her walk resumed at a much more sluggish pace for a while as she tried to regain her stamina, her body vocally reminding her through every stiffening joint in her legs that she was not exactly in the best condition to be doing cross-country.

Not that she'd ever really been in the best condition to be doing cross-country. She's a bookworm-turned-noble. Stamina wasn't exactly her thing.

The road ahead abandoned pretenses of cutting through clearings and decided to cling tightly against the border of trees. To her right was open field, but should Twilight set one hoof off the road to her left, she would be in a ditch, neck-deep in shrubs and tall grasses where they separated mankind's claim from that of nature.

Something else appeared along the road, and this time Twilight was significantly more observant and spotted it in advance. It was another car - a more square one this time, colored a dark blue that reminded her of Luna's mane. A van, I think? Or are those the ones with the open backs? I don't remember.

This time, though, she was not in any danger of running into it unless she somehow stepped off the road and threw herself upon it.

The previous car was in quite bad shape, but this one was an absolute wreck. Some churned up earth leading off the road lead to its current resting spot, and it was not hard to see that the vehicle had rolled before it came to where Twilight found it. Every square inch of the vehicle was crushed, dented, or broken in some way, with the sole exception being the windshield, which appeared to hang on by a thread, more cracks than actual glass. Its paint job was stained black across its front, and the metal appeared to be burnt and smoke-stained in that area, where Twilight assumed something had caught flame at the time of accident.

No one was inside of this one, either, and much to her surprise, she didn't see any blood here, inside or outside. It was a surprise, but a welcome one - anyone in this wreckage would have been killed had they lingered.

"Why is everyone getting into wrecks?" Twilight thought aloud. She peered out into the field, and once again saw no one out there.

The interior of this vehicle, as expected, was in utter shambles, but Twilight inspected it anyway, searching for...she wasn't quite sure. Anything, really. She was sick of harboring endless questions and was desperate for something that might fill in the growing gaps in her knowledge about the situation in this world.

Most of what she found was ruined or destroyed by heat or the trauma of the crash that had left this vehicle in such a state, but one thing caught her eye, beneath one of the seats. She eyed the jagged metal around the wrecked, doorless entrance to the back, and very carefully leaned forward, till she was able to grip the object of her interest enough in her teeth to give it a good yank. The sound of ripping paper made her wince, but there was no way to get it out without causing damage to it, so rip it did.

The remains of a newspaper finally came free after a careful game of tug-of-war with the corpse of this vehicle, and she spun it around in her hooves so that she could see the front of it. The paper was torn up, but skimming over it, Twilight found one entry that was mostly legible.

EDITORIAL: FORGET DRUGS OR MYSTABLE, THESE ARE GAMER RIOTS

...Twilight's expression contorted in a combination of incredulity, skepticism, and profound disappointment at whoever wrote this article. Almost against her better judgement, she kept reading.

It was about what she expected it to be: the writer offered no reservations about their stated opinion on video games, and proceeded to blame recent riots on account of video games being the root cause of all degeneracy and...well, frankly Twilight didn't pay much attention to it, this was utter tripe. Though, that one detail did not escape her notice. It was present in the headline, and though the shock of the rest of it had momentarily blinded her to it, further mention did not slip past her so easily.

Riots?

Twilight furrowed her brow, and tried to think back on her time at Canterlot High. Try as she may, she could not recall any mention of riots, or any sort of public disorder, for that matter. In fact, from what she recalled, everything seemed quite peaceful, and that made a lot of sense, considering how much there seemed to be a 1-to-1 pony-to-human ratio going on. There wasn't any trouble like this back in Equestria, so how could there be something like that here? Perhaps that was more bold of an assumption than she realized at the time...but that didn't make much sense to Twilight. She had seen no indication that it would be anything but what she had come to believe, up until this particular piece of media had challenged her on it.

Twilight tried to salvage any other useful information out of this paper, but sadly, every other bit of text was fragmented, distorted, or otherwise ruined, providing no meaningful insight into anything else that may have been written. The most she gathered was that this paper was published two months ago, in mid-January.

Upon learning that, Twilight's brow furrowed again, and gave the wreckage another glance.

People are blowing up schools, there were riots going on at one point, and there were multiple wreckages on the road, which have been here for two months and never got cleaned up.

This was a lot of weird, scary things starting to pile up. She wasn't a fan of the picture that it was starting to paint. Not a fan at all.

Twilight turned and resumed her walk down the road, feeling increasingly uneasy as time went on. She stopped, however, when she saw a wasp nest.

Twilight never considered herself much of a nature pony, but she also didn't dislike any particular aspect of nature. Wasps, despite the universally poor reception, were actually okay in Twilight's book. She had read about them before, and she found them every bit as fascinating and interesting as she did bees, though they obviously weren't quite as useful for things like food. She didn't want to mess with them, of course, but Twilight thought wasps were fine. They were quite cool, actually.

Had the road gone straight instead of bent, it would have gone straight through the nest. The structure had every indication that it was a wasp hive, right down to its rounded shape and the way that it was stuck between two trees that came together, except that the trees were completely subsumed by the structure, leaving only a few branch tips visible where the paper had been woven around them. The hive was the size of a small cottage, large enough to fit millions of properly-sized wasps in its catacombs and tunnels.

Except these weren't properly-sized wasps, not at all. From where she stood, the wasps buzzing around from that structure numbered only in the half dozen range, more likely inside the structure, but the ones visible to her were roughly the size of a filly - maybe a little less, maybe a little more. Twilight couldn't get a clear sense of scale, and had absolutely no intention of getting one. Their stingers were quite visible as they buzzed around, distending from the tips of their thoraxes like a dagger, and given what she knew of wasp proportions, those things were potentially bigger than her horn.

"What the buck?" Twilight could not stop herself from uttering, as she stared in a mixture of bewilderment, fascination, and horror.

That wasn't normal. Absolutely nowhere had Twilight seen anything like this before. Supersized wasps were something that she expected more to see in Equestria, but only of some kind of magical bend; superwasps that had a proper palace with a queen that wore a crown for her giant wasp head and held open court with her subjects. That sort of thing didn't exist in the human realm, and it made this seem even more alien the longer she looked at it. Those were just wasps, and they were huge. No whimsy, no magical twist, and no precedent.

Wracking her brain, Twilight couldn't think of any insect that got anywhere near that size in this world, never mind wasps. What was this?

As she realized that the size of prey for wasps of that size could easily extend into the vicinity of pony-sized, Twilight took this opportunity to stop inspecting and to immediately vacate the area, following the road the way she had been going.

"What is going on?" Twilight asked herself, as though expecting herself to have any better insight. "Schools getting blown up? Riots? Abandoned wrecks? Giant wasps?"

She turned her head as she moved along, and she saw a house fly the size of a cat sitting atop a small tree that struggled to hold its weight. She didn't stop- if anything she just moved faster, her canter becoming a gallop.

Forget unease, Twilight was scared. She had no idea what was going on anymore, just that she was deathly afraid for her friends, and felt a stronger need than ever before to find them. She had to get to Canterlot.

Finally, Twilight saw something ahead that inspired hope: a simple wooden structure stood in a field, surrounded by a chain-link fence amidst a handful of tinier structures around its base. The main structure was a tower, a series of stairs leading up four flights before ending in a small lookout post at the top, extending well above the tree line and providing ample vision for a wide area around, where rangers could monitor the horizon for signs of forest fires.

Fire lookout tower. With her wings too aching to fly, this was exactly what she needed.

Twilight galloped up to the fence, hooking her horn in the links of the gate's fence to give it a yank, but found it wouldn't budge. Frowning, she stepped up closer, giving the lock a good once-over. A padlock like this wasn't going to come off easily, and definitely not without magic, which she simply did not have here in the human world.

Instead, she stepped back down, took several steps back, and charged at the gate, leaping up into the air and giving her wings a good couple of solid flaps. It hurt, even just to gain a little bit of altitude, but she got enough lift to be able to jump atop the fence, and then more carefully lower herself before dropping on the other side of it. Landing the three or so feet below sent a stab of pain all the way up her legs, and she nearly fell over then and there.

Everything hurt. Everything ached. She could barely keep up this pace, and it was catching up to her quickly, but what choice did she have? She needed this. Her friends needed this.

It was at that point that Twilight realized that there were no less than 4 flights of stairs awaiting her, and she felt a pit of dread drop into her stomach. "This is going to suck a little," she whimpered, and got to work climbing.

Turns out: she was right. Flight of stairs one was alright. Flight of stairs number two, it was starting to get a bit harder. Flight of stairs 3, her knees were really starting to ache, but she pushed on, finally making it up to the final floor of the tower and onto the viewing platform with only a little cramping.

A walkway wrapped all the way around the top of this level, surrounding a room with a door leading in. As Twilight stiffly hobbled over to the windows, she propped herself up fully to be able to see over the wall and peer inside-

She got a brief view of a shaded human face staring straight at her from the other side of the window, eyes as black as pitch. The window shattered, and a figure burst through it.

Twilight did not remember moving, but the next thing she knew she was slamming against the railing a flight of stairs down, which was the sole reason she did not go flying over the edge and plummet 3 stories. Wild eyes shot up the way she came, and she watched the stocky, overweight man pick himself up off the ground and began to stagger down towards her.

Nothing about him was right. His eyes seemed to absorb all light, and his clothes were covered in something like gray grease, to the extent that she could not tell what color their clothes were past the ashen slime that soaked them. The teeth in their snarling mouth were alarmingly visible against the black interior, making the snarl seem like it glowed in the dark. Glass pierced their skin visibly, and blood ran down their arm where they had been sliced open from wrist to elbow by the glass they'd pulled themselves over in the window frame, but they did not seem to care. They looked too angry to care.

"Stay back!" Twilight shrieked, but did not wait to see if they would listen, scrambling back towards the stairs leading down behind her. It was good that she did, because the man charged.

To call either of their movements collected or composed was being generous, but in the case of the figure, it would be an outright lie. Their legs were uncoordinated, and before Twilight's eyes they threw themselves headlong down the stairs, where they tumbled down each step and crashed into the wooden railing that Twilight had been at moments prior.

Twilight was a pony, half this man's size in height and a further third their size in total mass. This man was rather round for a human and was completely incapable of arresting their descent. Where Twilight had been halted, they went straight through the railing like a wrecking ball.

They vanished from sight. There was an incredibly long second of silence, followed by a heavy, wet smack.

Twilight did not look immediately. She clung tightly to the rail where she had backed away from the charge, pupils mere pinpricks, heart hammering in her chest and hyperventilating as she sat there, trying to process what had just happened. When her brain failed to bear this burden, Twilight timidly leaned to one side, poking her lavender head through the rails to peer down, to see if her eyes could do what her brain could not.

The base of the tower was covered in cement, which the heavy man had landed on. A spray of blood was visible where they landed, but they were already on their feet, seemingly unfazed by the three-story drop that had stripped all the skin from their back, which lay where they had landed like the molt of a lizard, except dripping with blood. Despite the visible vertebrae poking through their discolored back muscles, the man had no trouble picking themselves back up and, upon seeing Twilight peering down at them, stood at the closest point that they could directly beneath her and grasped and clawed at the air wildly, like an petulant child that insisted on having something being held from their reach. A petulant child with a grown man's face contorted in nigh-bestial rage, huffing and snarling and spitting black foam all the way down their shirt, try futilely to reach and kill the pony three stories above them.

"What," she whimpered, momentarily choking on a sob. She tried again, though her voice cracked violently as she shrieked, "What are you?!"

The man did not answer in any meaningful way, simply continuing to claw and swipe violently at the air at a far-too-distant target. They seemed completely oblivious to the direct path up that was just a few yards to their left, in the form of the stairway up.

Twilight's teeth ground together as her terror turned to fury, and her horn lit up brilliantly- the shadows beneath the lookout tower were momentarily expunged as a magenta streak blazed through the air, slamming into the figure and blasted their chest open like a flower. There was a splash of blood and viscera, and they fell back hard enough that they did a flip, landing face-first in the grass, where they moved no more.

For a long while after, the world was utterly and completely silent. A pool of red began to grow beneath the figure where they lay, splotches of oily black streaking through the blood as the corpse rapidly emptied itself onto the ground.

Twilight knew what a zombie was. She had not seen one herself personally, but she knew of their existence...though, truly, it was hard to imagine somepony who didn't know of them, at least tangentially. Everyone knew their sunken faces, their hungry blazing eyes, and their insatiable hunger for flesh. While this did not match up with the nigh-skeletal, luminous-eyed figures that Twilight had become versed with back in Equestria, she knew enough about the (presumed) mannerisms of an undead to know one when she saw it.

Twilight released her chokehold on the railing as she picked her increasingly stiff and trembling self up from the ground, practically dragging herself up the stairs. It felt as though there was fire in her joints, and her legs threatened to lock up and cramp completely at any moment, but she grit her teeth and pushed her way back up to the top of the lookout post, peering out across the world as far as she could see. The earth laid itself bare to her, and she witnessed it with a newfound determination that tipped well past the point of desperation.

It had only been a few months since she saw everyone's beaming faces, talked to them, touched them, helped them through their troubles, and left them closer than ever before. When Twilight said goodbye to her human friends to return to Equestria, she had done so with a smile in her heart, knowing that she had sewn the seeds of friendship that had all but taken to the stars on nothing but its own power. Everything was okay. Everyone was happy. All was right.

Now here she comes, just a hoofful of months later, and the first thing that happens is she dies a spectacularly fiery death in the heart of an explosion centered feet away from the entrance to the school that they had all attended. When she recovered only by the grace of Harmony itself, Twilight found nothing but ruin and signs of devastation across the winding roads, whispers of riots and societal upheaval present in the abandoned papers and news clips scattered through the wreckage. Giant insects haunted the wilderness, not at all belonging to the land they claimed, and the only signs of humanity Twilight had been able to find were the dead that walked the earth.

It had only been a few months. In that time, the human world seemed to have gone completely and totally mad.

The only thing that horrified Twilight more than any of those things was that when she gazed out from the top of this fire lookout tower, no matter which way she turned, she saw nothing that resembled anything like a city, least of all one named Canterlot.

The Royal Guard that approached Princess Celestia saluted crisply to her. He received no other response beyond an even turn of the head to view him. While he found the gaze nor aura of the princess at all befitting of the embodiment of the sun, what with all warmth seemingly absent from both, the stallion had more than enough sense than to express such thoughts when the princess was clearly not in a good mood.

"We've just received word from the ministry of the arcane. They're sending several representatives and are already in the process of..." He glanced at the letter in his hoof. "'Allocating any and all resources necessary to fulfill the request of the crowns.' According to them, we'll be having company within the hour, after they've made their preparations."

It was not a request. Princess Celestia nonetheless gave this news a crisp nod, turning her gaze back to the treasury's significantly wider entrance, from which the last of the debris was being cleared out. Much repair work would have to be done to the ancient masonry, but such work was an afterthought compared to the repairs that Celestia had every intention of completing before a single brick was put back into place here, save for what was necessary to make this space safe to work in. "Any updates from medical?"

"Both guards positioned here were declared KIA this afternoon, Your Highness."

Princess Celestia did not physically wince at this. "I trust the news is on the way to their next of kin."

"Already delivered."

Celestia nodded, slowly. The solemnity of movement was the only emotion offered in this conversation. "Have the science teams anything to report?"

The Royal Guard shifted the papers in his hooves, viewing the next one in his collection. "Detailed analysis of the residue from the blast is still underway, but based on what they're saying in the labs, the compounds are nothing we have detailed record of. Definitely effective, though. Eggheads wouldn't have believed it wasn't magic if you hadn't said it was impossible." The paper glowed yellow and levitated from his hooves, and the guard let it go, where it hovered before the inspecting princess. "Preliminary reports give it a superficial resemblance to some of-"

"Who is 'Smithereens?'" interrupted the princess.

"An expert on demolitions, from Appaloosa. His family was the one responsible for the production of the blast charges used to hollow out the tunnels through the Appaloosan mountains during the original construction of the railway so it could reach Hilltop. His special talent is all things explosive, and it shows."

"I don't recall sanctioning their acquisition for this."

"He came to us, Your Highness. Apparently they were visiting Canterlot on business and volunteered his assistance when he heard that the castle had been attacked."

Princess Celestia did not physically smile at this. The paper she'd been inspecting floated its way back to the guard's hooves. "Please forward my personal thanks to Smithereens and ensure that he is thoroughly accommodated during his stay here. Keep me updated on the science team's findings."

"Yes, Your Highness." The guard snapped another salute, and departed.

Princess Celestia's focus shifted forward again to where her eyes had been facing. The frame of the mirror had been extracted from the wall of the treasury and was being attended by no less than a dozen specialists from multiple fields, all of which were singularly intent on mending the horseshoe-shaped purple frame to the relic that had been destroyed. It had only been a day, but already the condition of the ancient frame was nearly pristine. If not for the fervent chatter of the ponies attending it and the occasional flash of magic cast at it, one would think the it completely restored, save for its lack of glass.

Truthfully, Celestia did not need to know the exact details about what made up the blast that had rocked the royal castle, nor the myriad of compounds involved. Celestia likewise didn't need a report that she was likely to receive by nightfall on the nature of the weapon used, nor the fact that it was likely a weapon. She knew what the humans had in their many assorted arsenals, and had known for quite some time. There was no record to reflect this, however, which was what she intended to remedy. Should this information ever need to come to light, she would like the gap between what she ostensibly knew and what she actually knew to hold up to scrutiny, with the added citation of having experts look upon it with their own eyes being enough to dissuade undue questioning, or - Harmony forbid - investigation.

She also didn't need to be told that there was something wrong with the portal, whenever they did bring it back online. Celestia had slipped the material plane to inspect it, and she had not liked the instability she found in what had previously been a laser-tight focal point that the portal had been attuned to. She didn't know what it meant, however, and so she kept this knowledge to herself for now, allowing the experts beneath her to perform their various tasks and come to the conclusions she already knew on their own, so that they could strive for the conclusions she did not know and desperately sought.

Some part of Princess Celestia quietly resented the need to maintain appearances in a time like this. Her precious Twilight Sparkle was in peril in ways she did not fully understand, and she had to go through these practiced motions to make it look like everything was up to par for the judging eyes that would inevitably be cast her way.

She was worried sick for a mare that was like a daughter to her. She had gone to bed the previous night sobbing, her dreams unable to be fully wrung of distress even under the personal attention of an equally concerned Luna, and now she had to waste hours of her life standing here with her business face on, waiting for people to figure out things that she could simply tell them, dodging the ire of the vultures and jackals that stalked her shadow as they fished for signs of conspiracy or inadequacy in her every hooffall.

Celestia didn't care what those ingrates thought of her on a good day, and this was most definitely not one of those days. If they couldn't see how she had before and would gladly again break her back for this kingdom after all the times she'd shown willingness to, then they never would, and she had no interest in putting out effort to package her every intention with a cutesy little bow atop just the right wrapping to match their expectations of what a good ruler should look like. As if they even knew what that looked like.

The Princess of the Sun took a firm hold on the bitterness now that it had been roused from its warren, and then banished it to the vault in the back of her mind, where it would stay until her next moment of weakness. It, like so many other things in this world right now, was unworthy of her attention.

Until Twilight Sparkle was in her embrace where she belonged, safe and loved and home again, nothing else mattered.

Twilight had taken shelter in the living space present at the top of the fire lookout tower. There was little in it - a bed pushed into the corner, a pint-sized dresser, an empty bookshelf save for a single book, a few cupboards and shelves that had served as surface for the late forest ranger to lunge out of the window at her earlier, and a small hooflocker (no…human. Footlocker) at the base of the bed. A stove with a microwave atop it sat squarely in the center of the room, with barely enough room for a grown human to walk around without bumping something. Each wall was covered in windows and allowed full 360 degree view, even from inside. It was a cramped and incredibly utilitarian space that allowed the occupant to do precisely what they needed to do here and nothing else: eat, store their things, dress themselves, monitor the area, and sleep.

Twilight wasn’t sure what the ranger had been doing in here for the duration he’d apparently been trapped in this room before un-trapping himself, but there wasn’t much out of alignment that indicated activity besides a few greasy smears here and there. As far as she could tell, the zombie had just sat there in the middle of the room, doing nothing. Which didn’t sound unlike an undead to do, really.

The room was far too dark to see into; the full moon was doing its best, but it wasn’t its job to light up the room, nor did Twilight expect it to. She put her hooves against the shelf to reach the switch with her horn, and frowned when nothing happened. She tried it a few more times, but the lightbulb overhead failed to do much more than sit there, dark. Twilight cast a glance to the display on the microwave, and likewise found it to be blank and dim.

"Just my luck."

Human technology was incredible - had you told her it was just a unique breed of magic, she would have believed you - but apparently it was not immune to breaking down at the most inconvenient time any more than your average gadget back home.

No matter. Having become aware of what she had done a few hours ago (the grizzly scene of the beam impacting replayed itself, and she found it hard not to wince), Twilight decided to replicate it, on a much smaller scale.

She closed her eyes, and willed her horn to come to life. She felt the familiar pressure building from gathering energy, and she expressed that energy in a small, delicate bead of light resting on the tip of her horn. When she opened her eyes, the room was cast in a bright magenta glow.

Magic works. Magic isn’t supposed to work in the human world. Why?

Twilight was too tired from the incredibly draining day to speculate on it further. Her body begged her for rest, and she couldn’t keep it waiting much longer, but there was one more thing she had to do.

She willed her legs to yield, sitting down on the floor since there was no chair here, and found a piece of paper on the shelf in the corner, which she put a pencil to. There was only one thing in this world that Twilight found more comforting than a checklist, and today of all days, Twilight needed it.

Dear Princess Celestia,

While I realize that this letter has no way of arriving to you in my current circumstances, it’s my hope that I will be able to deliver this message to you in some way as a chronicle of what has transpired here in the human realm.

I don’t know if you saw or not, but I died. An explosion completely obliterated me seconds after I stepped through the portal, and while I was able to emerge again from beyond the veil, but it seems that the form the portal gave me didn’t persist once my body was destroyed, which I guess makes sense. It might make things more complicated going forward. I’m not sure how to interact with humans as a pony, and I don’t know how they’re going to react to me like this. I haven’t found any yet, but hopefully we can work out something despite the oddness of the situation.

Something terrible has happened in this world. Over the course of one day, I have died in an explosion, wandered empty streets strewn with wreckages of human cars, saw news articles talking about riots, identified a hive of supersized wasps that I cannot explain the existence of, and slain an undead version of a human that perished in the ranger tower that I am now residing in. As of the time of writing, I am unable to locate Canterlot, or any major population center at all. I’d hoped night would make it more obvious, but the horizons are dark. I don’t see any settlements out there anywhere, and without a map or directions, I have no idea where Canterlot is.

Magic works here. I don’t know how, but I shot a beam to destroy the undead ranger after it fell off the lookout tower. I can’t explain that, but the room is lit by hornlight as I write this. Magic shouldn’t be possible here, but then again, neither should undead, so it’s clear that magic is functioning here in some capacity, though I don’t understand how. I’ll have to experi

Twilight blinked when she realized she could not see. She glanced up and saw the only source of light to be the full moon glistening from the heavens amidst the stars, shining in from the window beside and above her, which did nothing to illuminate the paper on the floor.

Twilight’s eyes swiveled straight up, towards her horn, where light no longer shone. Her brow furrowed.

A headache was well underway, so rather than question it, Twilight forced the issue, pushing out a second bead of light to take over where the first had failed. As the pencil in her lips found the paper again, Twilight felt about four times heavier than she had when she started this letter.

So many things are going through my mind as I write this, I’m having a hard time stringing my thoughts together. I ache all over and it’s hard to think. I’m tired. So much has happened today, it’s been an awful day. I need to sleep.

I hope my friends are safe. When you get this, hopefully it’s because this is all done and over with and we found a way to take care of everything.

Your little pony,
Twilight Sparkle

The pencil clattered quietly where it bounced on the floor. Twilight willed her legs to serve her one last time, and they screamed noiselessly, but obeyed, pushing her not only off the floor, but also up onto the bed. It squeaked and creaked, and Twilight barely felt the lumps in the mattress through the fatigue that had descended upon her like a curtain. A few moments more was as long as the world of dreams was willing to wait.