Twilight opens her eyes. Nothing. Pitch black. She looks around, and eventually looks down to find that her body is completely visible. “How odd.” Twilight thought. “There’s no light, but I can see myself.” She shakes her head, trying to snap out of this dream she imagined she was having, but to no avail. “Where am I?” Twilight thinks out loud. She hears her voice echo back to her, snapping her out of her sleepy haze.
The reverberations of her question give way to light. The dark peels away revealing a perfectly square room. A luxurious marble tile floor details the area, reminding Twilight of Canterlot’s castle. The walls are made of glossy white stone, with extremely detailed geometric patterns carved in with subtle gold inlays. The geometric patterns are symmetrical with the occasional symbol in the center. Upon further investigation, these symbols are familiar to Twilight. Her cutie mark is predominantly featured, with the cutie marks of other ponies that were important to her in her life. A grand majority of these ponies have passed long ago. Twilight braces for the impact of sorrow. A cold silence grips Twilight for a few seconds only to have no sad feelings pass through her. Twilight’s confusion is punctuated with a sense of claustrophobia. She was only a few feet from each wall, after all.
“Could it get any more cramped in here?” Immediately, the walls begin moving away from Twilight, growing the room. The pattern seems to expand outward, revealing even more cutie marks of distant memory. “What a strange place.” Twilight mutters.
“It sure is!” a voice echoes from seemingly nowhere. Twilight is surprised by the voice and looks around to see if anyone is in the room with her. No one. She looks up to the ceiling, nothing there, literally speaking. It’s completely white, as if the room just ends. Another peculiarity that Twilight realizes is the lack of a light source.
“What is going on here? Who’s there?” Twilight shouts.
“Oh great, an amnesiac that has no idea where she is.” the voice echoes again. Twilight tries to discern the position of the voice, but finds that it’s coming from all directions. This voice sounds incredibly familiar to Twilight. “Ugh, fine, I suppose I’ll just have to show you where you really are.” The sound of fingers snapping echoes through the room. The walls begin melding into a plain, dull, wall. Twilight’s cutie mark warps and extrudes, eventually forming a regular 4 panel window, with long opaque curtains. The window now acts as a source of light for the room, illuminating dust particles in a hazy amber glow. A door appears to her right. She looks to her left and notices a rectangular extrusion extending from the ground. The extrusion snaps into place and is suddenly covered in a wooden texture, a number of creases and lines forming on its surface. It’s a nightstand. A bouquet of flowers wink into existence, with a vase to hold them phasing up from the nightstand below. To the right of the nightstand, a hospital bed rises from the now ugly tile below. The covers hang limply from the bed, but they start to fill out with the shape of a pony lying on their back. Twilight screams when her own face emerges from the pillow to complete the body lying on the bed. The bedridden Twilight appears to be asleep.
“This, is where you are Twilight.” the voice echoes.
“No...this is, impossible.” Twilight mutters. “How is any of this possible?”
The voice lets out an exasperated sigh, “What is the last thing you remember?” Twilight pauses, she hadn’t even tried to remember. She remembers feeling mentally clear, casting a spell, and fighting a disgusting creature that looked like her. Twilight then remembers falling out of her bedroom window and falling several stories. The memory of hitting the ground causes her to completely lose balance and fall over. The sunlight completely fades from the room, leaving only a cold illumination from the moon.
Twilight reels from the events of the past few centuries. A downward spiral began, and she felt as if she was falling into her sorrow once more. Once again, however, she stops just short of feeling anything. She opens her eyes and collects herself once again. Seeing her unconscious body like that was definitely alien, but she has some bearings now.
“Alright, fine, I get it.” Twilight shouts to the ceiling. The pure white has been replaced with plain ceiling with a fan. “I’m in a coma, and this is happening in my head. I get that this is a dream and you’re probably my subconscious or something.”
The voice interrupts Twilight “Your subconscious?!” the voice blows a raspberry. “As if I would be so low as to be somepony’s subconscious.”
“Then get out of my head.” Twilight says with gritting teeth.
“Fine, I’ll physically manifest myself if it suits you. Hmph. Princesses.” A serpentine ghost erupts from Twilight’s horn. The form is like liquid suspended in midair, but as the seconds go by the liquid splits off six limbs, and begins to solidify and define itself. A lion’s paw, a bird’s claw, a hoof, a lizard’s claw, and a wing of both pegasus and bat pony take shape. Two horns jut out of the serpent’s head, one of which, immediately branches off and becomes an antler. “Miss me?” he said to Twilight.