At around six in the afternoon, Barley and Sugarpop crashed into the house, shaking and screaming. Sugar's hooves were covered in dirt and muck, and she just kept screaming that she'd dug something up. She was playing out by the river like she always did, was just looking for frogs, and she found something. Something, except then she saw a face--
When Oak Branch called in Streusel and the two of them managed to calm the children down, Barley only started crying. Through a wavering voice, he managed to say,
"I think we found a dead body."
There were sirens everywhere. Voices. Fuzzy pictures flicking past her eyes. But it was... distant, far away, as if she was under a thousand different weights, under the rush of mucky water.
As if she'd been buried alive.
Through her eyelids, which were heavy and wet with something cold, a sudden light burned red. All of her senses fell away to the color stinging her eyes-- so she opened them.
There were gasps and murmured voices, and there was a face in front of hers.
Twilight thought that face looked a lot like Applejack.
Cinnamon Apple looked back and forth between the pony on the hospital bed, and her own body. Between the muted peaches and whites of her own coat, and the explosive pop of that purple. The stone-cold blankness of her own flank, and the star etched onto the fur and skin. All of that was probably just a fad, some dye and ink-- but that didn't explain the rest of it.
Above her mouth, which was stuffed with a tube, and her gently closed eyes, was a horn. On her back, broken and bent, lay two feathery wings. The mare didn't even look like a pony anymore. More like a twisted mix of a horse, rhinoceros and a bird.
Not to mention that she'd been under that riverbank for a while; long enough that her lungs and stomach had been completely full of muck.
--And yet she was still alive.
Cinnamon felt like she was going to faint. She'd think herself crazy if all those other ponies hadn't seen this mare too. As it stood, she just didn't know what to think. The only explanations she had were that maybe some ponies had bred with some other things, or this was a genetic mutation, or she was some experiment escaped from a lab somewhere.
Somehow though, she knew that wasn't true.
The hospital window, fogged over with the dark of night, revealed a rolling landscape of asphalt, tall buildings, and technology Twilight had only seen a few times before. This almost seemed like the Canterlot High universe, especially since that "Cinnamon Apple" mare reminded her so much of Applejack. Maybe there was another mirror? She couldn't remember.
She only wished that her throat wasn't so itchy.
Twilight collapsed back into aching sleep before she could pry out the tube.
They all stared at her. Twilight blinked again. Her eyes still hurt, and she was confused.
"Wha--" Cinnamon started. "What did you say your name was?"
"I am Princess Twilight Sparkle, of Equestria. Please, tell me... where am I? Do you know what happened to my friends?"
None of them answered her.
Sprinter, an earth pony that looked too much like Rainbow Dash only without the "rainbow" part, laughed in her face.
None of them believed her until she ignited her horn with a crackle of magic-- then, in a moment of flurried panic, ponies ducked and collapsed to the floor, their faces white.
It would be a few days before they then brought her the book.
This was, Twilight learned, Equestria.
She gasped breathily, her hooves shivering over the tome at her lap. The pictures, painted accounts of alicorns and fantastical magic-users, should have been beautiful. For the other ponies in the room this should have been tale of mysticism and sorcery, of grand wizards which used nonsensical powers to vanquish evil. For Twilight, they should have been familiar, if hyperbolic, scenes from her home.
They should have been. They would have been, if not for all the blood and gore depicted. The paintings of ponies being murdered.
This was Equestria, and a lot had changed in the last ten thousand years.