Chapter 1: A Day in the Life
The day dawned, years later. The sun rose, but, as had been usual for a while now, its light fell on no one.
Well, almost no one.
It fell on a unicorn mare, sleeping peacefully in her temporary safe house, snuggled up to a small cloth doll. The mare had lived for years in the shell of Canterlot, ever since that fateful day where all but three had turned into vampires. She was a mare who had once been the personal student to Princess Celestia, until Celestia had vanished. She was a mare who had that day killed her parents after they attacked her.
She was Twilight Sparkle, all grown up.
Twilight slept on, tired out by a night of excitement. It was late in the morning (or perhaps early in the afternoon) when she finally woke up. She yawned, stretched, got out of bed, leaving her Miss Smartypants doll on the bed, and called to her assistant and only friend:
“Spike!”
There was no answer. Twilight sighed. Spike was even less of a morning person than Twilight. She trotted over to the basket that the baby dragon slept in, and picked him up in her magical aura. She shook him gently. Nothing. She shook him a bit harder. Spike jerked awake and looked around the room in panic, reflexively expecting vampires to be there and attacking.
Twilight gently set him down. “Come on, Spike. It's already late. Food run today. You know that.”
Spike gave her a Look and sighed.
“Okay, Twilight, don't get your tail in a bunch. I'll hold down the fort.”
Twilight smiled at him and said: “Okay. Time to break out the checklist.”
She magically grabbed off a counter a piece of paper with a list of what she needed to do to get ready to go outside. She then proceeded to get ready, checking the paper to make sure she hadn't missed anything on the list. Twilight liked checklists. They allowed her to order her life, and reminded her of things she otherwise might have forgotten. Twilight didn't like the chance of her forgetting something.
She put on the saddlebags she'd use for the food/books.
“Saddlebags, check.”
She strapped on several (sheathed) knives that she'd spent years magically enhancing to be suited for the use she put them to.
“Okay... knives, check.”
She then took four sharpened stakes and strapped them to her legs.
“Stakes, check.”
She then got a collection of throwing stars that looked like Celestia's cutie mark.
“Sun Shuriken, check.”
She covered it all with a brown cloak.
“Cloak, check.”
She took another checklist from the same counter.
“Checklist for the stuff I'm going to do while I'm out, check.”
She rolled up the first checklist, put it back, and walked towards the door. She stopped when Spike called out to her:
“Uh, Twilight, don't you think you're forgetting something?”
Twilight turned back to the little dragon. She whipped the checklist back out, scrolling through it to find out what she might have forgotten. She found it, and giggled in embarrassment.
“Oh... right! Breakfast!”
Twilight walked into the kitchen of the house that she and Spike had commandeered (It wasn't like the previous owners would be missing it-they'd been turned into vampires like the rest of Canterlot). Spike watched her go and facepalmed. It wasn't that Twilight was absent-minded, it's just that when it got to stuff she thought was important (like killing vampires and going on that library run she wanted to do after she got food), all other stuff became trivial.
Like eating, for instance.
Twilight called out from the kitchen: “Spike! I have rubies for you!”
Spike couldn't get in there fast enough. “Coming, Twilight!” he called out, and went to breakfast with her.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________
It was a factor of how weird Twilight's life had become that she had killed a pony when she went out to get food, and didn't even consider it worth cleaning up the floor.
She had gone to the closest food store that still had stock, which was still a good few miles away. Twilight had emptied out many of the stores in Canterlot, and time had done a number on much of the stuff that remained. It was about time for Twilight to move on. She had decided on a place out in the country, where food was actually grown. A city whose infrastructure had completely died was not the best place to hole up. Cities depended on the country.
But, for now, some food remained, and Twilight went to stock up. She had a rather uneventful trip, as vampires didn't come out during the day. Sometimes she found some hiding in the shadows, and indeed, often she hunted them during the day, but not this day. When she got there, however, was a different story.
When she got to the store, Twilight crossed the item 'get to food store' off her list, magically opened the door, and walked inside.
The first thing she was aware of was an intense stare, which made her very uncomfortable. All the stares she had gotten since she was a filly and still Princess Celestia's student had been when a vampire was about to attack. On reflex Twilight took out one of her Sun Shuriken and magically hurled it at the vampire.
She wasn't aiming very well, and missed, but the vampire hissed and recoiled anyway. The symbol of Celestia's cutie mark was anathema to them, and they always ran from it. Twilight retrieved the shuriken, split the creature's head open lengthwise, and chopped its gray matter into pieces. The creature crumpled to the floor, dead. Extensive brain damage, .r.e victim can no longer be said to have anything resembling a brain, was one of the few reliable ways to drop a vampire. They healed from most wounds, unless they were too big (hence stakes), or if the weapon was enchanted in some way to keep the wound open, like Twilight's knives were.
Twilight removed her shuriken from the vampire and used a simple cleaning spell to shine it up again. She didn't bother to clean up the vampire's corpse. She'd already decided that she wouldn't be coming back. There was no real reason. Most of the food had gone bad due to too long alone, gotten spoiled by the vampires, or been taken by Twilight herself before. She stuffed the remaining good food (she estimated enough for a few days) into one of her saddlebags, checked off “get food” from her list, and went on her way.
She had a new destination in mind.
Twilight cantered up the streets of Canterlot, pausing a couple of times to chase and kill some vampires. She'd put in time for that on the checklist, so it was A-okay in her book, and she knew that cleaning spell (actually, she'd invented it. She'd had too many situations she'd needed it in), so her weapons didn't stay bloody after she'd done her work.
Despite the distractions and sidetracks, she knew where she was going, and she headed there directly. She was going towards Celestia's castle, and she let nothing stand in her way, for more than a few minutes at least.
She reached the great doors of Canterlot Castle. They were in poor repair. Once, they had been so clean they gleamed, the image of Celestia's cutie mark emblazoned on them shining the brightest of all, a majestic reminder of the power Princess Celestia wielded. Now, their hinges had rusted over, and they were dull with age.
Standing by those dusty, faded doors, Twilight flashed back to a time when she was young, when she'd looked up to those gleaming, majestic doors, full of hope for the test she was about to take, the test that would see if she was worthy of Celestia's School for Gifted Unicorns. It had turned out better than she could imagine, and she had gained Spike and became Celestia's personal student.
But all that was in the past. The past before the Event happened. It was a happier time, sure, but all it did was sadden Twilight by reminding her of how much she had lost when Celestia had disappeared. Her mentor, her ordinary life, her parents- Twilight winced and shied away from continuing that thought. It was too painful. Twilight focused her magical energy on instead getting the doors open. It was hard work, as the hinges had been rusted shut, but Twilight was able to pull it open, though not without much effort, and walked into the palace.
It was a very good thing the palace was an airy place. Twilight hadn't really been there since Celestia had vanished and she had ran out, chased by most of the court, and she hadn't had a chance to do much about the vampire population.
Twilight cantered through the palace, single-mindedly focused on her goal. She thought of nothing but remembering the route that she hadn't walked in at least a decade, although Twilight hadn't kept good track of time after the Event. Which is why she was ambushed in a rather dark corridor by a vampire.
She heard a hiss, and barely manage to dodge to the side when the creature (which appeared to be a pegasus, although Twilight couldn't see much at all in the dim light) attacked, and it bucked her to the wall. She hit the wall right-foreleg first and slid down, barely able to think from the pain.
Even with that fogging her mind, Twilight managed to pull out a stake and use it to parry the vampire's strikes. She pushed the creature against the opposing wall and thrust the stake through its heart. Twilight retracted and cleaned her stake, while the vampire crumpled to the floor. Twilight put the stake back in its holster and saw to her injury, at least as much as she could. When she had confirmed that she would be mostly okay, she continued on her way, hobbling from the pain.
Finally, she reached her destination, a door on the west side of the palace. She paused to check that item off her list, and then gazed at it. It was small, and far less majestic than the great doors to the palace, but no less faded, and with hinges no less rusted. Twilight telekinetically grabbed the door, and pushed with all her magical might to get it to swing open. It indeed took a lot of her might- it had been over a decade since that door had been opened. But Twilight finally wrenched it open, and walked into the room beyond.
The room behind the old door was like an apartment, with a central living space and a connected bedroom. It was still bright and airy, and the colors everywhere were faded from long exposure to the sun. There were potted plants by the window, but they'd long since died, as no one had been there to water them. It was very dusty, and every step made Twilight want to sneeze more. A staircase wound up one side to a second level.
Twilight had only seen the place a few times before, and that when she was only a filly. But she knew where it was. It was her quarters as Princess Celestia's personal student. She'd been only a few days from moving into them when Princess Celestia vanished. In her haste to run away, to leave behind all traces of her old life, Twilight had not returned.
As she stood there, an older and wiser mare, she wondered about what might have been, had the Event not occurred. In What Might Have Been, she was still Princess Celestia's student. She was in the library upstairs, eagerly studying for a test Celestia had set her. She still had no social life, but it was by choice. She hadn't had almost everyone she knew turn into mindless vampires. She had full access to the library, and she mostly stayed there, sometimes reading outside in the shade of the trees on a nice day.
That Twilight Sparkle was a happier mare, but she did not exist. She had vanished from possibility after the Event, and had truly ceased to exist when she killed her vampirized parents. Twilight Sparkle as she was now did exist, and it was no use dwelling on dreams and forgetting to live. The Twilight of now had a life to live for, even if it was a crude facsimile of a normal one, constructed by a student out of bad materials.
Done philosophizing, Twilight walked up the stairs to the library. It was just as she had left it, all those years ago, if even more dusty than downstairs. Finally, the dust became too much for her and she sneezed.
“AH-CHOO!”
That, of course, just stirred up more dust, and sent Twilight into a sneezing fit. Eventually she covered her nose and the sneezes died down, and the dust settled once more. Twilight shook her head to clear it, and looked around her library once more.
There were books. That was the most important thing to Twilight. There were books on everything, from science to magical theory to mythology to architecture. It was Twilight Sparkle's idea of a smaller version of Pony Heaven. She smiled happily at the thought of all those books, and immediately got down to work reading them. She was looking for a spell that would help her out in her situation, like summoning sunlight, stakes, or making plants grow really quickly so that she didn't have to rely on food from before the Event, but she was happy to divert her attention to any spell that caught her fancy, including the one that summoned mustaches.
“Spike will love that one,” she thought, and giggled a little at the image of Spike with a mustache.
She made a note of several books that she wanted to read later, if she was ever to return (not likely), and read on. She read far later than she expected, and gasped when she looked up at the one glass wall of her library and saw how low the sun was.
“Oh, ponyfeathers!” she thought.
She needed to get back, fast, before the sun set. The vampires all came out when the sun set. Twilight grabbed the book she was about to read, stuffed it into her saddlebag to read for later, and left the library in a hurry, although she was careful to close the door to her apartments behind her.
She ran out of the castle, ignoring the stabs of pain from her leg, and back to the safe house as dusk slowly fell. She made it just as the last rays of the sunlight disappeared over the horizon. She dashed inside, telekinetically bolted the door behind her, and slid to the floor, her breath coming in gasps. She then locked the food and books in a place of safety, and carefully put her checklist where it was supposed to be. Spike approached, holding a stake of his own.
“Good, you're back in time,” he said, relieved.
Twilight nodded at him. “Are you ready?”
Spike replied: “Ready as you are.”
As if on cue, that's when the hissing started. Twilight unsheathed her stakes. It was nighttime. The time when the vampires were strong.
Time for her and Spike to fight for their lives.
An impact made the door shudder. It was a sturdy door, but doors are only meant to take so much abuse, and by the second hit, that door had reached its limit, again (by now, Twilight was pretty good at repairing doors). It shattered, and Twilight Sparkle swiftly shoved her stake into the vampire who'd done it. She then telekinetically threw the corpse back onto the crowd of vampires behind the door, and cleared them for a few seconds, but only a few.
A vampire leaped at Twilight, and nearly got a chunk out of her neck before she staked it. Another vampire lunged in, and Twilight threw a Sun Shuriken into the vampire's heart. Then another came, and Twilight was hard-pressed to avoid it. She decapitated the vampire with a knife. She was getting bloody, but she didn't care. She fired a magical bolt from her horn, frying the next vampire to come in. She flashed a Sun Shuriken around the crowd of vampires, dispersing them, for the moment.
A pawing sound came from the windows that Spike had boarded over earlier that day, and soon enough those planks gave way, and a vampire lunged at Spike, who quickly and efficiently skewered it with his stake. He blew his fire-breath, which had the odd magical ability to transport things, at the next vampire, whose head found itself on a one-way trip to Princess Celestia's room, that being the place he was best at sending things to. Twilight joined him fighting by the window, and between them they had quickly cleared most of the initial crowd of vampires who had smelled the scent of non-vampire pony and were attracted to the house.
Time for a breather. Twilight relaxed temporarily, closing her eyes and taking a catnap while Spike kept watch. The next few vampires that came, he dealt with himself. Then, he woke her up to deal with the vampires for a while, while he caught forty winks. This was their routine, how they managed to stay up all night and fight vampires most of that time, although it had taken a lot of trial and error (Both Twilight and Spike still had the scars) to get it right. And so it continued, until it came time for what Twilight called the Midnight Crowd.
The hissing became louder than ever, and both Twilight and Spike needed to be awake to deal with this. A vampire lunged at Twilight's leg, barely missing, and got her spine sliced clean through at the neck. Spike dealt with two vampires at once, one with his magic fire and one with his stake. Twilight Sparkle staked four vampires at once, and then used her Sun Shuriken to carve through others behind them.
A cloud of dust was beginning to be kicked up from the dusted vampire corpses, making Twilight's eyes water and nose itch. But that was no big deal to her. It's amazing what isn't a big deal when viewed in the context of fighting for your life and the sanctity of your soul.
It took a while and many vampire corpses, but eventually the Midnight Crowd slackened off. Spike took up the vigil while Twilight rested, and then they switched off, and on again, until Twilight raised her eyes to the sky to see the first rays of dawn peeking over the forest. The vampires sent up a screeching cry and dispersed, attempting to get to places of safety and darkness before the sun fully rose.
Twilight cleaned herself, Spike, and their weapons with the spell, and then took off her battle regalia. She was exhausted, and the weapons weighed heavily on her. Spike yawned, and she mumbled “G'night” to him, and then walked to her bedroom, flopped into bed, and snuggled up to Miss Smartypants. She was asleep before she could see if Spike had done the same.
__________________________________________________________________________________________________
The day dawned. The sun rose, and as per usual, its light fell on no one. Well, almost no one. It fell on a unicorn mare, sleeping peacefully in her safe(ish) house. She was a mare who'd carved out a life for herself in the ruins of Canterlot, a mare who'd managed to live despite there not being much to live on.
What she lived on was about to run out, though, and so she had decided that she would go out to the countryside somewhere. To places where she didn't depend on what little the stores had been preserved for food. To a place very different than what she knew.
What she didn't know was how thoroughly her life would change. She didn't know the significance of the time, and she didn't know the significance of the place. Blissfully ignorant, she slept on, the change waiting for her in the town she had chosen.
In Ponyville.
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Nice....very nice
Awesome job, keep it up! I can't wait for more!
Wait I might be goin crazy but if this IS related to "I Am Legend" shouldn't this have a crossover tag?
5287512
Well, it's only the idea. It doesn't cross into the I Am Legend universe (otherwise, I'd need a human tag), it doesn't involve the I Am Legend characters, or all of the plot. The vampirization wasn't caused by a virus (the cause will be revealed later in the story), and the way it worked was different (Twilight avoided it by being in the right place at the right time).
So, I wasn't sure if there were enough similarities to add in a crossover tag.
5287870
5287512
I think it's fine right now, no crossover tag needed. The existence of good vampires and Spike (who isn't a dog) probably are enough differences from the movie, as well as a different plot. Right now, it's only "inspired", basically a similar concept, but overall different than the original work.
Frankly, this is basically your average zombie apocalypse, except you use vampires. Other than the name and "vampires" (Not even sure if they suck blood), it doesn't have enough to be an actual crossover.
5287870 Hm. Still, it's good to see a story like this for once.
5288028
I don't think Twilight knows either. After all, their only target would be her, so I don't think she's going to be willing to try any experiments.
If anyone is going to downvote this story, could you please leave a comment telling me why?
5298826 I have a feeling there's going to be one or two comments saying either: CAUSE I CAN, or CAUSE I FEEL LIKE IT.
5301989
And perhaps, one will have useful information.
5302639 I left a like, 'CAUSE I CAN.