//------------------------------//
// Chapter 2 
// Story: Quantum Stopped 
// by CroakyEngine 
//------------------------------//

The sound of my hooves clip clopping against the marble floor rang out, if only to fill the silence and nothing more. I wiped a dainty little napkin at the corner of my mouth, relishing in the sweet afterglow of a slice of ‘Celestia’s Conquest’, Canterlot’s finest diabetic inducing pastry. As the nobles liked to put it, it was tout simplement délicieux. Prench has never been a particular strength of mine, but it seemed to impress the ladies well enough.

I trotted up spiral shaped stairs, heading up towards the Royal Canterlot Archives. I gave a sympathetic pat on the shoulders of a pair of guard ponies dutifully standing near the entrance. If only they knew how easy I could get in. My smile disappeared as I reached the grand, golden doors to the entrance - closed doors, should I add. I tried to push it open, but to my forever disappointment it didn’t budge a single bit.

“Horseapples,” I cursed under my breath as I looped back to the pair of guard ponies. An uncomfortably long search later, I came away with a small ring of weirdly archaic looking keys. I turned it around to what I presumed was the correct key, and stuffed it through the lock. A few scattered memories of how the old archive keys worked, combined with a little trial and error was rewarded with the sound of a small click.

The doors opened silently – as had every door I opened so far. Within the large chamber, an hourglass statue sat in the middle of the room, with rays of light caught frozen above it, filtered from the glassed dome ceiling above.

What I was most interested in, though, was the numerous bookshelves that extended from the centre in a circular fashion with a cluster of bookshelves bearing a tag that described the knowledge they held.

The forbidden section – one of the few places a student didn’t have access to – was in front of me, completely open and available for viewing. This was where Starswirl’s more… experimental spells and theories were stored. Of course, the one area that interested me was time, one of his more mysterious studies. I felt a smile beginning to form on my face. Surely, if there was an answer, it would be here.

I delved into the not insignificant amount of reading materials, scanning through the numerous treatise, theorems, observations and other pieces of texts that only those with the academic rigour of Canterlot University’s students can achieve.

Flipping through pages after pages, I felt confident.





The last book was closed forcefully, and I tossed it onto a pile of books that had been increasing in size until it reached it's current behemoth state. It was the last one to go through, and I was both grateful and disappointed that no more tomes greeted me.

I stretched, relishing in the satisfying crack and stared out an adjacent window numbly. Despite knowing why, I was still a little startled to see the sun still high up in the sky, as it was that very morning. Or, at least, I think it was this morning. I felt utterly exhausted, after what felt like days of studying (if it was indeed that long, I honestly wouldn’t be surprised). Not physically, of course, but mentally. I would expect that at that moment, I could name any twelve theorems of Starswirl the Bearded in explicit detail, from the law of the conservation of arcanes to the rule of singularity.

At least I would likely ace the upcoming test on Starswirl’s theorems. In fact, I could probably recite the whole first volume of Starswirl’s observations backwards.

Despite the mind-boggling amount of information I seemed to have absorbed, all of it was useless to me. There were surprisingly few texts on the subject of time, most of them being mysterious ‘riddles’ left behind by the enigmatic Archmage, and almost none on frozen time. The significant piece of information was a prototype spell that allowed for a small bubble of space to travel at a slower rate of time, but that was about as detailed as it got.

I sighed internally. It was worth a try, I thought sullenly. I mentally crossed out ‘searching for information’ and moved on to the next one; tell Princess Celestia. I grimaced a little. This was not going to be fun. Since the return of Princess Luna, she had been utterly preoccupied with looking after her sister.

I prepared to leave the room, walking past the hourglass. However, a small, minute movement caught my attention. I crept closer to the hourglass and lowered my eyes to the chamber with sand in it. I froze, my eyes widened.

A thin trickle, no thicker than a line, dropped down into the chamber waiting below. I slowly backed away, eyeing the impossible object with caution. No way. There was no way the sand was moving fast enough for that to have happened. Unless… Hesitantly, I took off the glove from one of my forehooves, and gently pressed it against.

For a moment, nothing happened. The rate of the sand falling hadn’t changed which causing me to frown. I was prepared to dismiss the hourglass completely, when I realized that I have been trying to take my hooves off, without any success.

All of a sudden, the hourglass exploded, but there was no broken glass. A tidal wave of sand seemed to phase through the glass, rushing out through invisible openings, way more than what could’ve possibly been held within it. I opened my mouth to scream, but the sand clamped shut my mouth as if it was a pair of strong hooves. The sea of sand soon covered my whole body, leaving only my head visible.

Soon, that too was covered, and I let darkness consume me.





After an indiscernible amount of time, I woke again.

What does it feel like to die? Philosophers and common ponies alike have wondered for millennia what it would be like to die. Some think that it will be a forever ongoing slideshow of the pony’s greatest achievements, suspended in a dream like ethereal space. Others thought that it would be darkness, and that the pony would know no more after the Grim Reaper herself consumed the victim.

Well, I offer an objection to both theories, because the moment I should have been dead, suffocating under the magical sand, all I could feel was a slow, aching pain. My joints hurt, as if they had been twisted and beaten harshly. My back felt as if it suffered a thousand years of labour with no rest.

I also felt cold, almost freezing in fact. That’s certainly weird. Surely being buried under a literal mountain of sand would make for a warm death, unless this was somehow a side effect of that. With that thought, I realized that I could move my body, if only tentatively to avoid more pain.

I raised my head.

And promptly froze in shock. No. There was no way he was here. No, it was impossible. For what I see in front of me, was the very manifestation of corrupt magic and ill virtues. An obscure legend, cast away by the annals of history. The few magic-users who knows about him also knows this:

Whatever you do, don’t be like him. Do the exact opposite of what he did.

The pain was beginning to subside, and I managed to look down at myself. For the first time, I realized that my normal colour was replaced by a pale, silvery coat. I wore a blue robe, and I could feel a hat above my head. The sound of bells jingling filled my ears as I tried to move away from the abomination in front of me.

Wait. Bells, blue robe, Sombra, grey hoof. I shakily reached for my chin, and felt a rough, uncut beard attached to the end of it.

It was then that Sombra spoke, in a voice smoother and gentler than I ever could've imagined.

“Hello, Starswirl, we meet again.”