The Library
Zero hour + 6
She awoke with a start, rather than a jolt. Sitting up so suddenly woke a still partially catatonic Rainbow Dash. The words struggled to come to either of them as they both shared in a brief moment of sheer confusion, made the slightest bit even more distasteful with a hint of the lingering dread that still clung to the backs of their necks like leeches.
“E-everthing ok, Twilight?” Rainbow Dash asked with a hint of unease.
“...no. No, I don’t think that things are about to go very well for us.”
He was coming. HE was coming.
The purple one sprung up from her bed, racing to wake the rest of them up as quickly as time would allow.
Within moments, it was done. The ponies all shared a mutual look of uncertainty on their faces, still unknowing.
“We don’t have a whole lot of time. There may be a way to reverse the effects that we’ve seen take hold of so many others tonight, some sort of artifact. I’m not sure that we even have such advanced books on proto-Equestrian magic here at Golden Oak, we’d probably have to find a way to get to Canterlot’s Forbidden Archives… shit.” They heard it, too.
Rarity hazarded a quick glance out of the nearest window. Turned, dozens of them. Various states of dismemberment and decay. Even more alarming, various states of undressed. Her head felt a bit faint and she stumbled backward, knocking her hind legs slightly into the coffee table.
“We are so, so screwed,” she mumbled under her breath. “This certainly does not bode well.”
The front door began to shake. A low, thrumming hum began to buzz underneath their hooves, vibrating the wooden floors with growing intensity.
“That’s just it! You don’t even know the half of it!” Twilight yelped. “There’s some...thing coming, something bad. Really, really really bad. Like, almost as old as Luna and Celestia, totally malevolent and vicious, stronger entity that we’ve ever taken on before, bad.”
The door started to give.
“Fuck it,” Twilight muttered, defeated. “Get ready. We’re taking a little roadtrip.”
The room flashed a brilliant magenta, blinding with its radiance. In an instant, they all were gone.
----------------------------------
Ponyville
Zero hour + 6
“Well I suppose I should be thankful that at least the two of you seem to know what you’re doing!” Trixie managed to spit in between breaths as she and the obvious pair galloped for their lives through the center of Ponyville proper, chased almost relentlessly by a slowly-growing horde of the undead.
Roundhouse kicks sailed through already-torn flesh, breaking bones and sinew with laser-like precision. They were taking apart the ones who got too close, steeling their minds against the almost unignorable fact that they were butchering their neighbors.
“Do you think this is what we’d do, if we had a choice in the first place?!” Lyra shouted back, doing her absolute damndest to kick ass, take names and an additional thing that would be considered cool in this situation.
“This shit sucks!” Bon-Bon added, dodging a particularly lively pegasus stallion as he lunged for her throat. Two strikes at nerve centers at either side of his neck dropped him, paralyzing him from the shoulders down.
Suddenly, the flash. The hum. That ever-growing, altogether very menacing and alarming hum.
“Time...time to go,” Trixie said in a hardly audible voice. She felt it, too. Lyra paused. A turned one, practically tearing its own hanging entrails and genitals out of their places as it scrambled across cracked, blood-streaked cobblestones and bricks, shredding various now-useless organs and systems like zombie tartare. Another brilliant flash, this one a shimmering, jade-streaked cerulean. They, too, were gone.