Two Weeks

by NotARealPonydotcom

Two Little Words

Everything's blue.

Drifting, up, maybe down? I don't know, maybe to the left. Does it matter? I don't know. Where am I, actually? I don't know that, either.

There are a lot of things I don't know. 19 is still pretty young, for me at least.

Blue. Everything is blue.

Something shifts, in the blue, and I realize I can see something like a mouth smiling at me. At me? Yes, at me. There's no one else here. Or maybe there is. I don't know, I can't see anything behind me, and I don't think I have ears anymore, so I can't hear anything behind me.

"Hello," says the blue.

Oh. I guess I do have ears. I have a mouth too, I realize, and I open it to reply to the blue.

"Hi," I say to it, "what's up?" Casual. Friendly. "Where am I?"

The blue's answer isn't really an answer.

"In-between."

"In between what?"

Now there's definitely a smile there, shining white in the sapphire ocean around me.

"I think you know."

I don't. I don't know anything important. I never do.

Everything is blue.

I wake up before my eyes open, and for a minute I just lay there, breathing deep. I was dreaming, I know I was, I just have to remember, don't do anything else until you remember what you were dreaming about. It was important, I know, so I have to remember it. There was a smiling...being, I'm not sure it was a pony. I was in...an ocean? No, but something like it. Come on, Spike, you got this, just remember...

Something buzzes into my ear, and my hand automatically crushes it without hesitation. Wiping the dead bug's fuselage from my ear canal, I realize that I'm not in my bed at the library. In fact, I'm not inside the library at all. I'm lying on dirt.

"What the..."

I begin to sit up, and hear a crinkle in my hand. I realize that there's a piece of parchment paper gripped tightly in my claws, and when I relax the muscles in my hand they scream in protest, too used to being balled in a fist. I unfold the parchment and read what's on it:

Two Weeks

The hoofwriting's unfamiliar to me, and nopony I know writes in blue ink. The parchment's familiar, from the library, so I assume Twilight wrote it and used her magic to throw me off, for some unknown and seriously unfunny reason. Whatever "two weeks" meant, she'd tell me when I got back to the library. Speaking of which, where the buck am I?

I'm on the side of a dirt road, that's where I am. The road leads in two directions: to my left, a far-off mountain range, with no cities, towns, or rest stops in between; to my right, a forest, which reminds me of the Everfree, though it isn't. Behind me is the rest of the forest, and ahead, beyond the road, a herd of cattle are munching on small patches of flowers. I think for a moment about asking them where I was, but it takes me only two seconds to realize that when a dragon is walking towards you and you're a cow, you probably aren't thinking, Oh, he's just gonna ask for some directions, sure. Seems legit.

I stand up and stretch, popping my back. I can feel the discomfort from the night in the dirt dissipating, and I step onto the road to assess my situation, taking in my environment completely. Wherever I am, it isn't in Ponyville, or even near it. Guess I've got some walking to do. Twilight Sparkle certainly has some explaining to do, I think, when I find her and finish strangling her. I toss an imaginary coin and it tells me to go into the woods, since the path towards the mountains is long and deserted and I am a very lazy young drake. I make my way over to the forest's entrance, but when I reach the arch of trees serving as a gateway into the wood I lose my nerve and stop. For a full minute I simply stare into the forest, where it's most dark.

"So, Spike," I ask myself, "is this the Everfree, or are you really lost?"

No one answers. I shrug, and step into the forest, hoping the path isn't going to vanish and leave me stranded in the middle of nowhere. Not that I'm not there already. As I walk, I think of how I could have gotten here, and I realize I can't for the life of me remember anything from the night before. My last memory is of...the carriage. I'd gotten in a carriage, with Twilight and Rarity and everypony, and we were on our way to Canterlot for...I can't remember that, either. Dang.

The path is completely, utterly empty, save for the occasional marker, which is blank but pointing in the direction I'm heading, so I guess I'm going in the right direction. I try harder to remember what happened before now, brainstorming different scenarios that would leave me lying in the dirt by the side of a road in a place I've never seen before. The only thing that comes back to me is the suit I was wearing, which isn't on me now. Rarity probably designed it. So, a suit meant it was a party I was at? Maybe. Maybe this is some sort of surprise set up by Pinkie Pie. It isn't beyond her limits (in fact, I don't think she has any), but I doubt that she would do this to me without any clue it wasn't a real situation. Were we headed to the Grand Galloping Gala again? I doubt that theory too; Rarity refused to ever return to the Gala because of Blueblood, and she was there in the carriage. So, not the Gala, not a Pinkie Pie Party. What, then? A meeting with the princesses? Cadence and Shining Armor? My head starts to hurt as the forest lightens around me. I'm near the edge again.

I reach it and step out into bright, uncomfortable sunlight and for a second I'm blind. When my vision returns, though, the picture that appears out of the light is worth the sting in my eyes. A town, not more than a quarter of a mile away, sits peacefully next to the rest of the forest (which I guess is in fact the Everfree). I spot all the little landmarks that make Ponyville so unique and beautiful, including the Golden Oaks Library, where my dear older sister is waiting for me, probably giggling to herself about how brilliant she is to have left her "#1 assistant" in the one part of the Ponyville area he doesn't recognize. The branches of the hollowed oak swing in the breeze that's been blowing since I woke up, and they're beautiful and golden (hence the name).

And yet...

Something is off. I don't know what, not yet anyway, but something is off. The buildings look...larger. So do the ponies. Still, this can only be Ponyville: there's the library, and the river that runs through the town, and the mountain where Fluttershy had gotten rid of that dragon. There isn't another town with landmarks like that, not in the same exact spots. Or, I think there isn't. Cartography's not my thing.

I begin walking towards Ponyville (Ponyville?). In my hand, the parchment with "Two Weeks" on it crinkles each time I take a step. As I near the town, the oddities become odder, and suddenly I'm more than unsure that I'm returning to Ponyville at all. The buildings are definitely larger than I remember, and now that I'm closer to it, I notice there's an arch made of thin metal beams that didn't exist yesterday serving as the official entrance to the town.Of course, being me, I figure that my memory is screwier than I thought, and pass it off as a trick of the light. I reach the arch, and my tail brushes it as I pass under it. It's real. Maybe I was out on the side of that road longer than I thought. I look up at it as I walk under, and it's just as I accept that I'm not still dreaming that I notice the townspeople aren't who I thought they were.

The ponies looked weird from a distance, like I said. When I'd seen them before, I was standing at the edge of a forest that is now far behind me, on top of a hill that led down to the town (yet another unfamiliar feature to me). Now, though, I'm in the town limits, almost on what I believed a second ago was Mane Street, and I can see very clearly that the creatures I'd been watching from afar are not ponies at all. They are dragons. All of them.

I am not in Ponyville, I realize. Not the one I know. This is a town of dragons.

The ground slips away from me, and the last sensation I feel before I faint is the collision of my knees against the dirt road.