When Sparks opened his eyes again, he had to stop and stare for a moment before he could be sure he was still standing in the same room. The operating table, the dead stallion, the scattered tools and broken cabinets... everything was gone, whisked away as if it had never been there at all. The furnishings that had now replaced it seemed almost quaint by comparison: a wooden-framed bed made up with spotless grey sheets, a rickety side table, a window with a dim ray of light sneaking in through the gap in the curtains. What had moments ago been a nightmarish operating theater was now just an ordinary room. Almost a familiar room, somehow.
Sparks straightened up from the crouch the blast had pushed him into, and with his heart pounding in his throat he faced the door. The wood was flawless, the hinges dull but clean and unbroken. He grasped the knob with his magic, and it swung open easily with only the tiniest of squeaks. Good sense told him to wait until he could piece together what could’ve caused all this, but overwhelming curiosity pushed him forward and forced him back outside. Without the immediate danger of the walking, breathing dead, he found himself much more willing to duck out from his hiding place and look for clues about the bizarre twist his night had taken.
The hallway was still dark, but not so much that he couldn’t easily find his way around. He craned his neck up to look for the broken overhead lights, but all he found was a smooth plaster ceiling. Instead of technomagical bulbs, the hallway was lined with old-fashioned oil lamps, all of them filled up with fuel and not a single one lit. He definitely wasn’t in the hospital anymore, and that meant he was definitely safe from that awful mare that had chased him back into the OR. The warmth of that thought did wonders for his nerves, but with it came a new and perhaps even more pressing question: if he wasn’t in Canterlot General, then where in Equestria was he? And what kind of building in the nation’s capital city would still depend on gas lamps without so much as a whiff of magical backup?
“Hey, Sparky!”
Instinct told him to jump at the sudden call, but a strange union of rationality and forgotten memory settled him down soon after. That shout wasn’t born from anger or bloodlust. It sounded innocent, even playful. Sparks looked down the hall and zeroed in on a tiny figure waving at him from the far end, but he couldn’t make out any details from this far away.
He squinted his eyes and took a few steps forward, and suddenly a blue-coated unicorn colt who couldn’t have been a day over eight crystallized into view. Sparks came to a stop, and the colt’s face split behind a gap-toothed grin, his eyebrows vanishing beneath his messy fringe.
“Yeah, you!” the colt shouted. “What, didya think I was talkin’ to the wall? C’mon, egghead!”
The colt waved again and pointed down the hallway next to him, and Sparks racked his brain for some sort of concrete memory to connect with him. He knew he recognized the kid from somewhere: that brash look, that excited tone, that cheeky grin he never went without. Who was he? And why was he so sure he’d chased after him like this before?
“C’mon!”
Without waiting for a reply, the colt darted out of sight into the other hallway. Sparks stared at the spot he’d left for a moment, then picked up his hooves and started running, his mind spinning and his chest prickling with some unidentifiable pain. He skidded around the first corner just in time to see the colt’s bushy tail disappear around the next one, so he kept going, always a step close enough to tell where the kid had gone and a step too far back to catch another good look at him.
“This way!”
Sparks ramped up his pace and pushed himself nearly into a sprint again, but no matter how fast he ran, the gap between him and the colt never got any smaller. Sweat began to bead at his temple and drip into his eyes, and the hairs in his mane itched with heat. It had been freezing inside the hospital a few minutes before, but in this place it was scorching, and with every new hallway the heat only got more intense. Instead of snowflakes, all he could see through each window he passed was an otherworldly red light that spilled across the creaking floorboards and dyed the overcast sky an angry shade of maroon.
He rounded what must’ve been the dozenth corner the colt had led him past, and without warning a wall of scalding air stopped him dead in his tracks. This wasn’t right. It wasn’t normal for a building to get this hot. As the colt bounded away again, Sparks slowed to a walk, about all he could manage through the oppressive heat he could see distorting the air in front of him. Ahead of him, the entire hallway was flooded with red light, all of it seeming to shine in from a floor-to-ceiling window set right in its center. He pushed his way over to it and looked outside, and for just a fraction of a second, he felt cold again. It took precisely that length of time for him to realize what he was seeing, and that same period doubled for him to realize it was real.
Outside the window, the city of Canterlot was on fire.
He couldn’t identify the source of the blaze, but at this stage knowing the cause would hardly help anyone. There wasn’t a house or building in sight that wasn’t swathed in writhing red flames, that wasn’t collapsing into cinders or crumbling away into ash before his very eyes. From this vantage point, he could even see portions of the building he was in, and he watched in mute horror as a bell tower across the street splintered at its base four stories below and toppled towards the burning wing over to his left.
The tower touched down with a blast of superhearted air and a stomach-churning crunch, its tremendous impact enough to cleave through two floors and nearly knock Sparks to the ground. By the time he straightened back up again, his heart had sank. That wing was where the little colt had run off to. He would’ve been there himself if he hadn’t stopped to look out this window.
With watery eyes and aching, smoke-filled lungs, Sparks staggered around the corner and yelled out for the colt whose name he’d never even asked for. In the distance he could see the inferno the tower’s demise had spawned, and in front of that a small figure staring into it, untouched by the flames but only a few short yards from where they were chewing at the demolished ceiling and crawling across the floorboards towards him.
“Kid!” Sparks said, coughing from the exertion and from the smoke clogging up his throat. “Kid, c’mon, we gotta get out of here!”
At the sound of Sparks's voice, the colt slowly turned around, but he made no motion to come back towards him. His eyes were rimmed red from the blaze, but no tears were dripping down his cheeks.
“You’re such a baby, Sparky,” he said. “What’re ya afraid of?”
Sparks opened his mouth to speak, but his throat seized up and he dissolved into a coughing fit again. The colt shook his head, and a smirk played across his lips.
“You know what Miss Heart always says. You can’t fail unless you don’t try.”
The colt’s smile vanished, and suddenly his eyes were black as coal. “Have you tried yet, Sparky? Have you really tried?”
“What... what are you...” Sparks tried to say. The colt shook his head, and his smile returned.
“Honest, Sparky, just do it,” he murmured. “I trust you, Sparky. Didn’t you trust me?”
The flames were inches behind the colt, practically licking at his heels. There was still time for Sparks to sprint forward and grab him, but he couldn’t move now even though his life probably depended on it. He’d finally remember where he knew the colt from, and the thing standing ten yards away couldn’t possibly be him.
“C’mon, Sparky...” the colt said. The flames were upon him, surrounding him, batting at his tail and dancing around his hooves...
“Come on and play.”
The wind roared in triumph, and the flames finally caught. The colt went up like a lit match, the fire enveloping him and swallowing him up in the time it took to blink, and Sparks collapsed as a thousand screaming voices tore into his ears. They were coming from everywhere, from every room he’d passed and every hallway he’d left unexplored: the sounds of colts, fillies, adult mares and stallions burning and suffering in incomprehensible agony. He couldn’t speak, couldn’t move, could barely breathe as the noise pounded him into the ground and ballooned inside his throbbing skull.
And behind it all, behind the sounds that came from everywhere and from nowhere and from deep inside the recesses of his mind, he heard something else. His mind recognized it from sometime long ago; his body trembled at it in this hellish building. He looked up at the colt down the hallway, saw his mane and tail dissolving into ash, felt his stomach turn over as the scent of blistering flesh stabbed into his nose. He watched. And he listened. And he finally figured out where the noise was coming from.
As the flesh melted off him and his figure was whittled down to blackened bone, the little colt stared at Sparks with sightless, empty eye sockets—and laughed.
He didn’t have enough strength left to run, so Sparks crawled down the hallway and away from the fire, scrambling on his hooves and knees without a clue where he was going and half-delirious from the smoke. The pulsing in his head was getting worse. Getting louder. The walls were on fire, and the walls were glowing, and his hoofsteps were echoing and he couldn’t move fast enough to get away from them.
He grabbed onto a doorknob and pulled himself upright, and the echoes seemed to be right behind him. He ran blindly, deafly, dumbly in any direction he could, and the pulsing around him shook the whole building. In the distance, an explosion rocked the building and sent him stumbling forward, and a fresh wave of heat told him that he had maybe a few seconds before he and that colt shared the same fate. He stopped in the middle of the hallway and turned around, and framed by a wall of unbroken flame advancing down the hallway, he saw a soot-caked stallion sprinting towards him.
He had only moments to pick out details: white eyes, brown coat, grey shirt splattered red and black. The walls flashed. The stallion tackled him hard enough to knock his breath away.
And as they both flew backwards tangled in each other’s legs, the glowing light obliterated the flames around them and sent them flying forward. Sparks's head cracked against the floor, and the world around him went dark.