“Why do you keep talking to him like that?!”
“Honey, I have no idea what you—”
“You know exactly what I mean!”
“Now listen here young filly, you can’t talk to your mother like that.”
“Oh, so it’s fine if you do it, but if I do the same thing it's suddenly bad?”
“Yes! You can’t talk to your parents that way.”
“It’s very troubling.”
“Are you kidding me?! You absolute—”
The attic door swung shut with a bang as Flash Sentry closed the hatch. He brushed his wavy mane back with his wings and released a long heavy breath as tension slowly drained from his body.
Straightening his jacket, he trotted away from the door and further into the old crawlspace of his foalhood home. It was, unsurprisingly, dusty and had the telltale scent of mold permeating the air of the room. Dust motes clung to every available surface giving the whole place a grungy feel. Towers of boxes sagged from the weight of gravity and poor insulation that couldn’t keep the dampness out. He meandered through makeshift corridors between containers, keeping his wings tight to his body to avoid them touching the old boxes.
An unease he felt caused Flash to hang his head downwards, glancing at the thick layer of grime that coated the wooden floorboards. He pressed his left forehoof into the soot. Lifting it up, he saw a perfect outline of his hoof in the dust. He snickered as a sense of foalishness overtook his previously demure mood.
Stepping into the previous imprint he had made, he placed his right forehoof close to the first. Moving carefully, he made a game of getting his rear hoofs to land in the hoofprints he left behind. Step by step he continued gaining in speed until, inevitably, he tangled up his limbs and ended up tripping over them, falling onto the ground with a loud fwump.
Snickering at his antics, he found himself looking at a nearby wall of boxes. A quick skim of the titles caused his prior grin to flip. The containers were all labeled after his family. ‘SWIFT SENTRY’, ‘GOLDEN WING’, ‘STALWART SENTRY’, and ‘LEAD SENTRY’ covered some of the packages in his mother’s blockish, scribbled wingwriting.
Most of them read ‘FLASH SENTRY’.
As he scrambled to his hooves, he felt an uncertain feeling grip him as he looked over the chests that contained his old mementos and toys from back when he had been a foal. All neatly packed away and placed somewhere no one would have to look at them. Flash tried not to dwell on the meaning behind that sentiment.
That strange feeling became mucky as he tried to recall what was inside. No matter how hard he tried to wrack his brain, it all just became a blur in his memories. A streak of black ink smeared across a page like when he wrote his guard reports too fast.
Reaching out with a hoof, he pried out one of the boxes, careful to not collapse the stack. He placed his wings on the edges of the box giving it an experimental yank. It slid out easily enough, but his nerves at potentially causing a collapse caused him to shove it back into its proper place.
Continuing onwards, he trotted around the box wall and came upon a strange sight before him.
Bathed in a stark beam of light was a dollhouse.
From his vantage point, he could see it was three stories high and bright pink. It was modeled after an old Canterlot home, something that would have towered over him as a foal, but barely came up to his breast as a stallion. There was a dignity to the toy as it stood pristine and without a speck of dust upon it in a room of decaying refuse. But that same dignity gave it a sense of foreboding as Flash found it odd how new it seemed in this space that was so rarely visited.
Coming fully around the corner and tilting his head to one side, Flash tried to recall who could have owned the dollhouse. His sister Swift was the most likely contender, but she had grown up despising anything that had been considered a ‘filly’ toy. His brother was in the same boat, and the toy looked too new to have been owned by his parents.
Could it have been his? Flash thought, perusing his foggy memory for a hint of the dollhouse’s origins.
With curiosity driving him forward, he approached the toy, its presence growing bigger as he got closer, his perspective shifting downward. Unease gnawed at him, but he pressed onward, a strange compulsion driving him towards it.
As he arrived at the stark white door of the dollhouse, Flash found the toy building towered over him, his head now lower than the top of the door frame.
He spun in circles inspecting himself. He was the same proportionally, but he had, in fact, shrunk down in size. Compared to the towering walls of the attic and stacked boxes he was barely taller than the molding at the base of the floor. Struck by a blind panic, he galloped away from the house but skidded to a stop as he realized that he was not growing back in size. A panicked realization made him consider that even if he reached the attic door, he could never open the hatch when he was smaller than the mouth grip.
Turning back around, Flash cautiously trekked back to the house, his ears pinned down to his head as he took in the now terrifying presence of the building.
With surprise, he saw silhouettes through the ornate curtained windows that he hadn’t noticed earlier. Surprise turned to stark relief as the sounds of revelry drifted toward him. As orange light spilled from the house and bathed him in an ethereal glow, he couldn’t help but feel glad that there were other ponies present.
Flash stood before the door, perking his ears at the sound of laughter emanating from beyond the solid wood. He raised his hoof to knock but found himself stopping just short as an inkling of fear dripped into his thoughts. He didn’t know what was happening to him and there was no guarantee that the strangers inside would help him. Even worse, said strangers could be the reason he had become this small in the first place, which soon caused him to tense in place, his imagination running wild at the possibilities of what these ponies might do to him.
But as the torrent of nightmarish scenarios overtook him, he realized that he had no other options available to him. He either took the chance with these strangers or hoped that one of his family members remembered about him and came up to the attic to check. When he laid out the options like that, he realized there was actually only one.
Steeling his nerves, he rapped on the door three times, the bang sound echoing off the wood.
The door swung open. Standing past the threshold to Flash’s shock was a ponyquinn. It was an earth pony model covered in purple fabric stretched tightly over some unknown material. Gaps in the fabric showed metal joints at key points in its body. It had no facial features or discerning qualities as it was missing a mane, tail, and cutie mark. More disturbingly, it held the door open with an outstretched hoof, staring forward with its unseeing head as if it had been what had opened the door.
The ponyquinn tilted its head at a 90-degree angle. “Are you Flash Sentry?” A squeaky voice asked.
Incomprehension freezing him in place as he placed the voice coming from the ponyquinn, Flash answered with an uneasy voice, “Y-yes?”
Lunging forward, the ponyquinn grabbed Flash by the front of his jacket, its featureless face too close for comfort. “Then come on in!”
With a powerful yank, Flash was pulled into the house, too fast to even scream. As he crossed the boundary between the attic and the dollhouse, the door slammed firmly shut behind him, sealing his fate.