//------------------------------// // Chaos // Story: Equestria: Origins // by Monaki //------------------------------// "...lestia... Celestia... CELESTIA!!!!" the sound of a pony's concerned voice broke through the Celestia's dazed mind. "Huh? Wha? What happened?", the fair-skinned pony muttered out as she tried to open her eyes. "WOAH!", she shouted as she pushed herself away from the blob of purple in front of her. Shaking her head, she tried to get her eyes to focus, and stared back at the strange pony who had woken her up. Slowly, Celestia's eyes gained focus while the panicking purple pony kept fussing about her. "How many hooves am I holding up?", the purple pony frantically asked. "Two?", the white equine muttered in a confused voice, trying to come up with an answer that would calm the inquisitive being in front of her. "That can't be right...", the lavender pony answered, as Celestia's double vision started to fade back into one, showing the pony holding one leg up. "How are you feeling? Do you feel okay? Is that scratch hurting?", the new pony kept up a barrage of questions, double checking on anything that could have gone wrong as she fussed about Celestia, poking and prodding her. "Cewestia?", came a small voice from beside her, still hiding underneath her wings. "Are you okay?", Luna asked, still shivering over the entire ordeal with the wolves. Giving her a small nod, Celestia quickly focused her attention to the pony fussing about her. "Who are you?", the white equine asked, tilting her head a bit, a few strand of hairs falling over her eyes. "Who? me?", the pony in question asked, looking up from her work on examining the state of Celestia's wings. The pony in question was a soft lavender shade of purple and stood at the same height as the taller white alicorn. Her fur had a healthy sheen to it and on her flank, sat a strange starred mark. The new pony also had a set of wings, each one's length reaching to just about as tall as she was. Her mane seemed a bit disheveled, but her eyes were so... captivating. They sparked with a hint of curiosity and... familiarity? "My name's Twilight Spa... errr just Twilight.", the pony answered, snapping Celestia out of her daze as both the ponies fluttered their wings nervously. After staring at the fidgeting pony for a while longer, Celestia seemed to accept the answer and looked around. It didn't seem like she had been out for long, given by the still-smoldering bodies of the timerwolves lying lifelessly on the ground. The two wolves that she hadn't managed to stop had each had a large hold boring through their torso, with the edges of the hole blackened and still aflame. "They called it 'magic' ", Twilight answered, as if reading Celestia's mind. She picked up a glowing tablet with her teeth and showed it to the other alicorn. Celestia stared at the screen in front of her. In it, there was a perfect replica of herself, spinning in slow circles with pointers pointing to separate points of her body, naming them in an odd dialect. Oddly enough, as she looked closer, she began to naturally understand the words as if she had been taught how to read the language since she was born. One of the arrows pointed to her wings, noting that they should be capable of flight given enough training. Another pointed to her horn, with the arrow only labeled as "magic". "What kind of magic?", Celestia wondered out loud. From what she understood, magic was not a very specific term. However, thinking back, the bubble she had erected at a time of great desperation did indeed seem... magical. "I'm not quite sure...", Twilight answered, fluttering her wings nervously, "I only know that it tends to stuff like that...", she paused, looking pointedly at the lifeless lumps of wood, "when released.", she finished off. Tearing her eyes off the lifeless logs sitting against the wall, the white pony shook the strange feeling of guilt from her. "Did you just wake up too?", the curious white pony asked, changing the subject. "Yeah, I woke up just as I heard you yelling. I rushed here when I thought somepony was in danger.", Twilight answered. After running a full check over on the injured pony, both ponies stood to their full height and got ready to move. Luna, with her smaller legs and tiny wings, had to sit on Celestia's back in order to keep up with them. Together, they looked through several rooms, looking for anything of use. Food itself was not in short supply, though, since food happened to be growing everywhere through the floor and infesting the entire building. Other than the tablet that Twilight had initially found, none of the other tablets appeared to light up. They came across several rooms similar to where Celestia first woke up, but all of the other rooms were graveyards. None of the panels were operational and the only thing occupying the caskets were corpses and skeletons. After walking past a couple of rooms, they came across a room that was completely dark. There was a strange repeating sound of squeaking. As they walked into the room, the ponies slowly walked closer and closer to each other, their hooves clacking on the floor being the only sound they could hear other than the speaking. As Twilight and Celestia walked closer and closer to each other, they accidentally bumped into each other, and both squeaked as they jumped apart. For some reason, Celestia felt her face get hot and tingle, but ignored the feeling in favor of staring into the strange quiet darkness. Soon enough, walking straight in the darkness, the ponies were able to see a bright light at the end of the tunnel. As they got closer to the source of the light, they walked faster and faster, getting more and more excited to see the light of day. Soon, they could see the sound of the squeaking. The door had been left open and flapping, causing the un-oiled hinges to make the noise. They could feel the wind on their manes and the natural light bathing them. When they arrived out the door, the natural light blinded the ponies. They squinted in order to see what the surroundings were like. As they did, they saw the most chaotic sight they had ever seen. The building they had been in appeared to be raised on top of a floating island, hovering several hundred feet above the surface of what appeared to be a wasteland. Below them lay a dead city, the only remaining remnants of greater skyscrapers being the bent and rusted metal frames lying on the ground. The metal wireframes were the only thing remaining of the city, as a large portion of it had been buried under shifting sands. As they looked further, they see the shadows of other floating land masses in the distance, some of them flourishing with forests on top of them, while others were simply empty and sat in the distance. The ponies could feel the sun beating down on them, and as they looked up to the natural source of light, it strained their eyes. However, the sun itself had taken up a quarter of the sky, and was most likely the source of desertification due to their apparent proximity to the sun. Suddenly, they heard a loud noise from behind and the alicorns looked back alarmingly. "Meteor shower forecasted. Raising shields now!", a mechanical voice called from behind the ponies. An electric blue transparent shield popped up in front of their eyes and raised all the way around what they could see to be the edge of their island. The shield stretched overhead, completely encasing the entire structure and island with a bubble. Looking up to the clear blue sky, they could see tiny specs of fire rapidly getting bigger and bigger. The specs of fire soon became so numerous that they blotted out the sun and covered the sky in a sea of fire. As they approached, many of the other floating islands took on their own defensive measures. Some of the islands also had bubble shields, but what was on them was too hard to distinguish. The group of islands that had forests on them suddenly danced to life, with the forest itself growing rapidly and surrounding the island with a dome of biomass shielding. As the meteors impacted on the islands, the islands shook and the shields took the damage. The first meteor approached their own shield and crashed upon their shields. Fire spread across the shield, bathing their vision in angry red as heat washed on their faces. The ground shook as if it was falling out of the sky, with each impact from the celestial beings displayed a great brilliance of lights on the blue shield. The shield itself, however, held strong as it blocked each impact. After fifteen minutes, it seemed that the firestorm had simply disappeared. The islands returned to their normal state with shields powering down and forests returning to normal. However, as the chaos resided, what had been the bright, unyielding sun turned into a chilly dark. A large moon rolled over the horizon and appeared to be eating up the sky, casting a dull glow on the land. As the moon approached its zenith, it occupied a quarter of the sky. With the moon's arrival came a large crashing sound. Looking down at the earth again, a tsunami of water travelled with the moon, standing at least a hundred feet tall. The water consumed all in its path, stopping for nothing as it enveloped what used to be a desert in its maws. Then, as quickly as the strange changes came, they stopped. The water kept travelling behind the ponies, leaving a strange calm before them. The moon shone over the horizon, sitting at the highest point in the sky. Below them, what was land previously was now a calm ocean of water, with the peaks of the skyscrapers just breaking the water's surface. The scene before the ponies was bewildering. What used to be a desert had transformed an ocean and what used to be an unbearably hot sun had become a large, round, disk of moonlight in the sky. As the night began to settle in, the temperatures dropped rapidly, leaving the ponies shivering in the night. "I... just don't know what went wrong. How could this possibly happen?", Twilight muttered to herself. "We need to head inside. We'll spend the night here and decide upon an action tomorrow.", Celestia declared, turning around and walking back to the broken down building. "At least the building has shelter and some form of food...", Twilight noted, also agreeing as she walked back inside. As the two other Alicorns walked back to the building, Luna stared up at the moon, mystified by its appearance and glow. Her large eyes reflected the moon and she sat there for a while, awed by its beauty. "Luna!", came a voice from inside, breaking the little alicorn's focus on the moon. When she followed the voice back into the building, she saw that Twilight and Celestia had settled into a well-lit corner, keeping a small distance between each other. Luna giggled as she ran in-between and squished herself into the slot between the two larger alicorns. The two large alicorns stretched out their wings and covered the bundle, leading them all to a fitful night, wondering what the next night held for them.