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// Chapter 3: Close Contact 
// Story: Search For The Spires 
// by Emperor123456 
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Twilight slowly opened her eyes and stretched her arms, shaking her head from the headache she had received from sleeping on the hardwood. Despite just sleeping she felt exhausted, she didn’t know what awaited her out there, and a destroyed cart on a major bridge didn’t bode well. In addition, an entire day of almost non-stop walking had tired her legs and parched her throat.

Twilight gave the cart she slept in another search, hoping to find something that she had missed yesterday. Although she didn’t find any food or water in the cart, she got some use out of the partially torn blinds, which were used to cover up the front and back of the cart. She tied them around her like a toga, as she had seen spike do with blankets when he was playing.

Even though the toga didn’t provide much warmth, it did shield her from some of the wind, and that would have to suffice for now.

She stepped out of the cart and looked out over the clouded ocean and bridge. Moving away from the cart she went to the edge and leaned on the railing of the bridge, scouting the horizon for a possible end.

‘There!’  In the distance she could just make out five enormous towers rising up from the horizon, each one of them broke through the clouds, and hid its top from Twilight. She stared at them with wide eyes, admiring their still majesty.

“Civilization...”

‘Marvelous, bridges that are multiple kilometers long and towers that reach into the sky. Architecture like that should only be possible with magic, and if they are powerful enough to build things like these, there may actually be a realistic chance of them being able to send me back to Equestria!’ Twilight wanted to break into a full on sprint, but she kept her slow and steady pace, not wanting to exhaust herself further.

When she passed the towers she noticed that they were positioned symmetrically relative to the bridge, as to form a sort of gate into the town. Beyond them a sprawling city laid over what Twilight was sure was at least four times the area of Canterlot, and it was a lot more tightly packed too. Several tall buildings poked out of the sea of brick houses, and docks extended off the city and into the sea, a few of the docks having ships tied to them and some having a sunken ship poking out through the water. She leaned on the railing and gazed at the city, drinking up its ambience and feeling a modicum of safety.

But the more she stared at it the more she could feel something was off, and then it hit her. Silence, total silence. None of the distant sounds and none of the smells associated with such a big city were present, not even the seagulls were to be heard. Twilights walk slowed down to a cautious trot, and halted almost completely when she reached the true gates that led into the city, the portcullis had been torn off from its chains and lay facing out from the city.

Just as she had guessed, there wasn’t a single living creature in the city. The market that met her after she passed the gate was just as deserted as the bridge. Shops and stalls lay abandoned, some of the wares they used to sell still lying around on display and some having fallen out on the road.

The city was sending shivers down Twilights back, and her mind was screaming at her to get away from it. However, Twilight wasn’t listening to her own sense of survival, and despite her hunger, despite her thirst, she ignored the food in the shops and went further into the city, searching for clues about what had happened.

Suddenly, Twilight heard a scream.

“Somepony is in trouble!”

Without even thinking, she ran for the sound, turning corners, running past allies and through shops. Eventually she turned a corner and saw the source of the noise, but to her horror she had come too late.  She saw a bipedal rotten corpse devouring a fresh body of similar appearance, spilling its guts on the pavement.

Before she fully could fully understand what she was seeing, the corpse turned its head around and stared deep into Twilight’s eyes.

A guttural growl came out of the zombies mouth, and Twilight started backing away. That was when the stench from the zombies mouth hit Twilight like a wrecking ball, stopping her retreat and almost causing her to vomit. The zombie took the chance and pounced at Twilight, closing the distance between them in an instant. Before Twilight knew it she was knocked onto the ground and staring straight into the zombies mouth.

Twilight’s world slowed down, and she saw the mouth coming down at her neck and did the only thing she could think of. She threw up her arms and willed her magic into them. Time slowed down even further and she felt the familiar arcane energies flow through her arms once more, although this time they weren’t as strong as she was used to, and created a ball of pink flame at the end of each arm. An instant later she fired off a gout of it directly at the zombies face.

The zombie was knocked off of twilight, and it emitted a high pitched screech as it flailed its arms around, the fire slowly spreading to encompass its entire body. Twilight was breathing fast, the spell having eaten up more energy than it ever should have. Even though she was horrified at how the zombie slowly died, she couldn’t take her eyes off of it, several question running through her mind.
‘Did I just kill someone?’
‘Oh Celestia, did i land in a zombie apocalypse!?’
‘What’s happening!?’

Eventually the zombie emitted one last screech, this one much louder than the previous ones, and collapsed on the ground like a puppet with its strings cut.

Immediately Twilight heard more such screeches rise up throughout the city, and she dove into the nearest building, a tall tower, and rushed up the stairs to hide on the second floor. 

x

She felt as if she had laid there for an entire day before she risked peeking her head through the window. When she did she saw that a horde of at least one hundred zombies had gathered where she had previously been.

At first glance, they weren’t even looking for her, they were just wandering about, and some had even started to disperse. But when she noticed the sounds from the floor below that sounded like footsteps, a lot of footsteps in fact, she was glad that she had pushed a cupboard in front of the door to her hiding place.

Each time she tried to do something to find her way back, the further away the possibility seemed. From simply finding a griffon town, to getting the help of a completely new civilization that possibly had a completely different language, and could be hostile to her. And now to get back to Equestria she had to find a city that wasn’t overrun with zombies on top of that.

Even the fact that she could still use her magic didn’t calm Twilight down, as thinking about it only served to remind her of the way the zombie trashed about and screeched before it died.

x

When dusk came, the last of the zombies had finally dispersed. Now was the time to get out of there. She sat down and went over her plan once more.

“Okay, I can’t escape without food or water from this city, however i saw quite a lot of food left over in the market i passed, and I should be able to find some bottled juice or alcohol.” Quietly she wondered what alcohol would taste like, and also marked it down on her mental list to avoid getting drunk if alcohol was all that she could find.

Ideally she would have had water, but she wouldn’t risk becoming a zombie herself if the water in the reservoir held the disease that caused the inhabitants here to turn.

“What I also need is information. Even if I escape from the city I would have nowhere to go, so I’d need to find an archive, no a town hall or something similar, it probably has more recent information. There should be clues there telling me what happened here and if it has spread to other cities as well, and hopefully an indication to a place not overrun by zombies.”