//------------------------------//
// FlarBlaz 
// Story: Book 1 - The Behemoth came to Canterlot 
// by Equimorto 
//------------------------------//

Burning. The entire room was burning. The entire house, possibly, though she couldn't see most of the rest of it save for what she was occasionally able to spot through crumbling portions of the burning walls of the room she was in. The fire did not hurt her, but she did not consciously realise that. It was just another fact, an accepted bit of knowledge in the back of her mind. Nevertheless she did notice something was wrong, or at the least off. It wasn't something anyone else could have noticed but her.
Things were different when she played them back. Every time. Every time she did something different, and every time the world was different too. She was trying to get out and the room wouldn't let her, and that didn't make sense. A support beam that previously fell in her path didn't fall the next time, when she took a different route. Something else would fall instead. She would rewind, and once again things would be different. Of course, it was possible that subtle movements on her end could be causing different parts of the unstable structure to fail at different times, but it seemed unlikely for that to happen so frequently.
She thought and she thought what the reason could be, playing the scene over and over, and the more she did the more she noticed things wrong with it. The rooms past the room she was in didn't look right, and neither did the room itself, and was it even her own house? The walls didn't always look the same, the fire spread in different ways. Where had she been coming from? She turned around and she didn't recognise the space there, and she didn't remember getting there. Finally she realised that the heat was missing. It should have been hot, but the temperature was normal. There wasn't even any smoke, and she definitely didn't know where she was.
She was dreaming then. Having a nightmare, maybe. It was strange to know it like that. Usually the knowledge would wake her up, or make her fall into a different dream. Usually it would be a sudden realisation, not a conclusion she arrived at slowly through critical thinking. But nothing was changing, and despite the fact that she knew she was dreaming she didn't have any control over the dream itself. She was stuck there, almost kept there she felt. But that was a silly thought to have. Dreams worked in weird ways and it wasn't her place to judge them.
Knowing then how things were, that she was in a dream and in no real danger, she began to simply head for the door. The fire still did not hurt her, and though she faced some resistance in trying to walk through it nothing fully stopped her from doing so. She reached the door where her mind had arbitrarily placed it, opened it, and stepped through to the strange town on the other side of it.