It made little sense to stay awake. Awake, a mind could be dogged by concerns, fears, worries, a million petty guilts and private shames. One could, perhaps, be forgiven for a longing to close one's eyes and simply drift away. But what refuge was there in sleep? The terror and guilt of the real world faded away indeed, but only to be replaced by the more amorphous, more cruelly inventive phantoms of dreams.
And these in turn drew a great deal of their power from one's real fears; they could amplify the grim facts of waking life into something truly ghastly. You might flee from the miserable dream into the miserable reality, or from reality into dream, over and over again – but waking or sleeping, there was no escape from the coldness and hardness of the truth. No escape except... no, she told herself, she would not consider that.
And why not? a subconscious thought responded. Don't you just wish it was over?
Her own reply was immediate and indignant. Absolutely not. As soon as the words formed in her mind, however, she realized that they did not carry the force of complete conviction; it was easy merely to say No, but significantly harder to say No and whole-heartedly, unambiguously mean No.
Unburden yourself, Twilight Sparkle.
It was an invitation to speak, but she sensed there was another meaning behind it.
Her mind began to emerge from its fog, back into awareness, and Twilight found herself seated on a park bench by the fountain in Ponyville's town square. When did I come here? I don't even remember getting out of bed... She looked up at the sky, wondering what time it was, and saw only a dim gray blanket of cloud. No, wait – it was clear, and full daylight, but the stars were out in the blue sky... or was that the moon up there instead of the sun? A feeling of vertigo and unreality came over Twilight as she grasped the truth: it was day and night, clear and cloudy, all at once; she was seeing every sky that had ever appeared over Ponyville simultaneously, all fading together into a gray half-light.
Lowering her eyes, she saw something very similar in the buildings. Town Hall stood before her, but it was more than the proud edifice she saw every day – at one moment it seemed to be a pile of brick, stone, and lumber, not yet assembled; at the next it was old and decayed, the wooden beams rotten, the bricks and plaster crumbling and flaking. In the statue atop the fountain, Twilight could see both the uncarved block of granite it had once been, and the broken and pockmarked wreck that it would someday be. From the corner of her eye she noticed Sugarcube Corner sitting at the far end of the square, looking very plain and unremarkable, as it must have looked before Carrot Cake bought the place and redecorated it as a gingerbread house; by the time she turned her head, it was back to its old self, or at least the self she recognized. Then she blinked, and for a split second it appeared as a charred, burned-out skeleton of blackened wood and bent rebar.
The town was not changing around her, but her perspective was. Past and future gleamed translucently through each other. There were buildings here that had been torn down decades before she had been born, let alone moved to Ponyville; there were others – not yet built, perhaps not to be built for centuries – that towered in the far distance. And even these last were capable of ruin; Twilight's eyes insisted on seeing them both as gargantuan, pristine obelisks of glass, and as emptied-out hulks, caving in on themselves, their walls of windows shattered. The very street she stood on had once been unpaved and dusty, and someday there would be grass and weeds growing without restraint between the formerly neat cobblestones.
And then things did change, and she leapt to her hooves, utterly startled. The buildings were all gone, every house and office and place of business – even the bridges over the stream that ran through the town. Nothing remained but empty stone foundations. She wasn't sure which was worse: to have seen the grotesque or pathetic destinies of the buildings about her, or not to be seeing them at all.
A stray thought drifted into Twilight's mind.
This thing all things devours:
Birds, beasts, trees, flowers...
Or was that a thought? Was it even inside her head, or was it –
"Gnaws iron, bites steel,
Grinds hard stones to meal..."
Now it definitely wasn't in her head; it resonated in her ears over the faint rustle of the breeze. It seemed to be coming from everywhere that her eyes weren't looking. A voice of infinite calm.
"Slays king, ruins town..."
It spoke slowly and deliberately, as though it were reciting a well-known quotation, but Twilight didn't recognize it from anything she'd ever read.
"And beats high mountain down," it concluded, directly behind her.
She turned, and saw it – him – leaning over the back of the seat she had just left, his eyes closed and his head draped low over his crossed forelegs. "An old riddle, and deservedly famous," he said. "I would ask you whether you'd like to hazard a guess, but there's no point to that. You know the answer, I'm certain."
Her first impression was that he was black all over, head to tail, but that was wrong. His body was crisscrossed by a pattern of green lines, so thin that they could only be detected by their pale glow. He did not appear to have a mark on his flanks; instead, the lines divided all his coat into neat rectangles, like mortar between bricks. These bricks themselves were not precisely black; they too glowed, almost imperceptibly, like the dullness of dusk seen through a darkly colored stained-glass window. And like that stained-glass window, each appeared to have an image on it that it was too dim to see – Twilight thought, but couldn't be sure, that some of the images might be moving. The motif continued, by some means she could not guess at, into his mane and tail: dark, incomprehensible pictures separated by lines of glowing green... and when he raised his head and opened his eyes to look at her, Twilight felt a sudden, brief wave of nausea sweep over her as she saw that even his irises carried the same pattern.
He stood before her in the form of an earth pony, but Twilight sensed that within him lay a vast, dormant power, of a kind that she had never encountered. She could feel it radiating out of him – neither conventional Unicorn magic, nor the shadow magic of King Sombra, nor even the chaotic sorcery of Discord; this pony was something entirely other.
Although it took all her courage, she managed to speak a sentence. "Who are you?"
He smiled, revealing a mouthful of perfect, gleaming, impossibly white teeth; perhaps on another stallion, it would have been handsome. "I, Twilight Sparkle, am Éadóchas."
Despite the smile, his face and voice carried a tone of solemnity – and urgency. "We have a common enemy," he said, "you and your friends and I... and the six of you have no chance of overcoming it by your own power, or by any power you know. I alone can help you defeat it."