The bringer of the sun opened her eyes.

Suddenly lifted from a seemingly long slumber, she struggled to breathe as her head began to muddle her vision and cause it to swim marathons in her eyes.

Shaking her head, her vision was flooded with green.

A sickly green.

This worried her.

And the bringer of the sun immediately noticed.

She was hanging upside-down, suspended in the air. Letting her head hang back, she looked toward what she assumed to be the floor beneath her.

She was hovering a couple feet above what the Princess recognized as a carpet from her royal palace. Raising a suspicious brow, she tried to rotate her head to better assess her surroundings.

Even so much as thinking of turning her head caused an immense pain to course throughout her body, causing the Sun Goddess to clench her eyes shut and grit her teeth violently, her head slowly curling to gaze back at her chest.

As she did so, the smell invaded her sinuses.

And for the first time in a long while, the bringer of the sun gagged in agony at the stench currently permeating the air.

She threw her head to the right and coughed, which graduated into a wheeze before the alicorn could almost feel herself on the verge of vomiting. Slowly shaking her head, she looked down toward her hooves.

They were coated, smeared, practically plagued with a disgusting green hue, as if her hooves themselves slowly grew rotten from the bottom up. Gritting her teeth, the Goddess focused on moving her right foreleg, intent on anything but sitting around like she was.

As she lifted it, a sticky residue stuck to her hoof, the alicorn giving a sickened look toward it, before she sucked in a breath, focused her strength, and threw all of her weight upward, her hoof becoming unburdened of the slime.

Shaking her now free hoof, she noticed the familiar glint of her royal ensemble were completely absent. Attempting to wipe away a small portion of the residue on her hoof gave the alicorn the discovery of her missing regalia. The alicorn frowned in frustration. This would be troubling.

Still hanging upside down, she used her free hoof to try to wipe away some of the slime coating the inside of her entrapment. She only succeeded in swiping a small portion, only large enough for one eye to strain through. Maneuvering herself around the claustrophobic prison, she stretched her neck, attempting to peer past the small amount of slime still clinging to her view-ports surface.

Her neck muscles strained, the alicorn princess threw her head back, in desperate favor of keeping the appendage attached.

Closing her eyes, she took a breath, before she grit her teeth and threw her weight into lifting her upper body up, the slime coating her entire body threatening to slam her back into failure.

Celestia was having none of that.

And as she shut her left eye, she bit her bottom lip until she swore she would draw blood and peered through her makeshift view-port.

And Celestia saw.

She hung on the ceiling of her throne room, desperate fear running through her veins.

A single stained-glass window was completely shattered, its pieces scattered wildly about as if somepony had been thrown through it.

And all around her were cocoons of sickly green hue, just as hers.

Celestia's heart beat out of her chest.

And she saw them.

And the Princess found herself unable to breathe.

Five figures, hanging unconscious inside their own imprisonments.

Five figures she could not protect.

Five figures she had failed.

The Elements of Harmony.

Author's Note

YES I'M NOT DEAD. I decided to pull most of the chapter I was working on to at least give you this small update. It has been three months since the last update, so I thought I might as well give you something to chew on. Not in a bad way, mind you. I didn't mean it bad.

Sigh.

I'm pathetic.