SPOOT. SMACK. GAH.
It’s not hard to tell that things haven’t gone off to a particularly good start when it involves a rather peculiar noise, a facial collision with an incredibly hard object, a yelp of fright, and briefly getting urinated on by a passing squirrel.
But that’s exactly how things started for one particular unicorn.
His memory was a blur; the last thing he could remember was a vertical view of a forest, the full moon peeking over the tops of the gangly, splintered trees, and the shapes of what appeared to be another unicorn accompanied by some sort of bipedal creature standing before him. And then he blacked out.
***
His surroundings had changed considerably when he came to. For a start, he was now indoors. The colt craned his neck over to get a better view of his surroundings, before the idea of maybe trying to get up actually clicked in his brain.
His out-of-focus eyes scanned the place as best as they could – he appeared to be in a library. More than that, though, he couldn’t make out; the rows of books stacked on the blurred beige mess that was probably a series of shelves seemed to merge into one big patchy glob of green, brown, and blue. The two shapes the colt had seen earlier soon came into view, adding a healthy dose of solid colour to the not-so healthy overdose of visual barf.
The shapes were much clearer now: the taller one was, of course, a unicorn mare, purple of coat with a slightly darker, straight-cut mane and tail. The creature that stood beside her appeared to be a small, wingless dragon with an abnormally large right arm.
Actually, the dragon was holding out a perfectly normal-sized hand to help him up. Perspective is weird like that.
The colt raised a blue hoof, letting the dragon help him up, and immediately put his new-found perspective to good use by inspecting his surroundings once more. It was a library, alright – a library filled with books. A book-filled library that also happened to be a giant hollowed-out tree. A giant, book-filled, hollowed-out tree that housed a dragon.
Somewhere in the back of his mind, the words “fire hazard” fell out of a hat.
“Are you okay?”
The voice sounded warm and friendly, and it more than likely came from the mare, but it still somehow managed to frighten the life out of the colt stranger.
“Fire hazard?” he blurted.
“Uh. What?” said the dragon, raising an eyebrow.
The colt cursed the hat and tried again.
“I’m sorry. That I’m in your house. I’m probably trespassing.”
The mare and the dragon briefly exchanged glances. The colt looked down at the floor, near his left hind leg. “The squirrel did that. Not me.”
The dragon gave out a snort that was just a little too obvious. The mare, the more sympathetic of the two (either that or just better at keeping a straight face), instead gave a friendly smile. “Oh, you’re not trespassing. I brought you here.”
“You what?”
The mare wandered over to a desk embellished with books, quills and other assorted deskware organised with hairline precision. “I’ve been working on a new spell, but it required a special kind of plant.” Her horn glowed a bright magenta as she levitated the most prominent feature of the desk – an opened book titled “The Armchair Spellcaster’s Hoofbook, Volume IV” – and held it out in front of her, the magical aura that surrounded her horn surrounding it also.
She trotted back to the colt. “It’s called the Moonflower. Legend has it that it was a creation of Princess Luna’s, over a thousand years ago, as the nocturnal counterpart to the sunflowers created by her sister, Princess Celestia.” She added wistfully, “I’ve never actually seen one before, but this picture of the moonflower is just beautiful…”
The colt stared at the mare blankly.
“Uh. Anyway. It says here that the moonflower grows and blossoms only at night, and can be found near the Everfree Forest. So Spike and I were searching for the flower when we heard a sound…”
“It was really weird. It sounded kinda like… ‘spoot’,” said the dragon, whom the mare had addressed off-hand as Spike. “And then a smack. And a ‘gah’.” He punctuated his re-telling of the story with extravagant hand-gestures.
“So we went to investigate, and… well, we found you. Just lying on the floor,” said the mare. “You didn’t seem seriously hurt, so I thought you had just blacked out.”
“So we took you here so you could rest up,” Spike concluded.
The colt glanced downwards, then back at the pony. “Why was I on the floor, then?”
The mare rubbed her hoof against the ground sheepishly. “You were… a little heavier than I was expecting…”
Using her unicorn telekinesis, she sent the spellbook back to her desk, which, from where she stood, was almost all the way across the room. It sailed through the air and landed softly on the desk with expert precision.
“I’m glad you’re okay though,” said the mare. She held out a hoof. “I’m Twilight Sparkle. What’s your name?”
The colt went to shake her hoof. “Pleased to meet you, Twilight Sparkle. My name is…”
The colt stopped.
“My name is…”
An awkward silence swept over the room. The only sounds that could be heard was that of a squirrel scurrying past the front door, and a reader of this fan fiction mimicking the sound of a rhythmic record scratch and announcing that his name is “Slim Shady.”
Sorry. Getting off-topic here.
The colt made another attempt to break the ensuing silence, but all he could tip out of the hat this time was “um.” He would have started to really regret visiting that one clothes shop had he actually visited one lately.
“You…” stuttered Twilight, “… don’t even know your own name?”
The colt lowered his head and looked down on the floor, to which he was quickly becoming well-acquainted. He had half a mind to start counting the cracks and blemishes. “Not sure I’ve actually got one. I don’t even remember how I ended up by the Everfree Forest.”
Those last two words came as a surprise. He had no idea what this ‘Everfree Forest’ was, and yet the name sounded so familiar to him. It didn’t feel strange or new to him – it was as if he had known it for years. So did the name ‘Twilight Sparkle’, and, indeed, ‘Spike’. Though not so much the sensation of rodent widdle.
He raised his head again. “Where am I, anyway?”
Twilight Sparkle watched the colt sceptically.
“Something strange is going on in Ponyville…” she said idly. Ponyville – another key word (to use the term loosely) that made the colt’s ear twitch. “The gems, the hills, Pinkie Pie, and now… you?”
‘Pinkie Pie’. Twitch.
“What happened to Pinkie Pie?” asked the colt, perhaps a little too quickly. He added, “And what’s this about hills? And gems? And of what significance do I hold in this?”
Spike sputtered. “What did you just say?”
“I have no idea."
At some point during the colt’s bewildered barrage of questions, Twilight had begun pacing around in a circle. “I don’t know what part you play in this, but I know it can’t just be mere coincidence…”
She stopped mid-pace, yawned, and turned to the colt. “I’ll… explain everything to you in the morning. Right now, you should get some rest. That faceplant can’t have been very pleasant.” The colt rubbed his muzzle.
“You can sleep on the couch over there.” Twilight pointed vaguely somewhere behind the colt. As he turned around, a sofa floated swiftly and gracefully through a door and onto the spot at which Twilight had pointed. It landed without a sound.
“Your name,” the mare announced after some thought, “will henceforth be… Cerulean.”
“Uh?” said the colt. He turned towards a conveniently-placed mirror which, for a brief moment, seemed to glow red. “Oh. Yeah. That makes sense. Since, you know, I’m blue and everything.”
He looked his reflection up and down, half-heartedly ran a hoof through his floppy white mane (which still had bits of dirt and a couple of twigs embedded in it), and noticed that his cutie mark of a scroll looked identical to the cover of Twilight’s spellbook. It was an interesting observation, but he shrugged it off because it was clearly unimportant and completely irrelevant to anything ever.
“Cerulean,” he repeated to himself slowly, looking into his own reddish-pink pupils. “Yeah. I’ll take it.”
An hour passed, and the library was now silent. Everything was silent, except for the faint pitter-patter of a squirrel scurrying away, the distinct howling of a wolf in the distance, and a chilly breeze whistling softly and menacingly, as it brought with it an eerie omen of impending pain, agony, and despair.
The sofa was a bit creaky, too.