The Changing of the Guard: An Alternate History of Earth and Equestria (1901-1914)

by LordVetinari

Prologue: Dreams In the Darkness

Prologue: Dreams In the Darkness

It was the nightmares again. Their figure twisted and turned in her bed, her face contorted in what seemed to be horror and pain. It was so real...so, vivid.

“No...no...,” she whispered, her voice cracking somewhat in fear and terror.

They'd been coming to her for what now was almost two weeks. Every night, they depicted the same things. A field, where poppies bloomed, their red petals waving in the light wind. This was how it began, always so calm and peaceful. She could see the fields stretching off into the distance, the lines of flowers turning the land into a field of red. It seemed so perfect, so content.

And then, the nightmare began. Dark shadows, of tall, lean gaunt figures, marched across a muddy field now, in a disorderly line. Silently, they made their way through a fog, ghostly shapes receding in the distance. Then, a steadily blinking light seemed to come from across the field, and the figures stumbled and fell, their bodies twisting in violent, jerking motions. No sound came, and it was as if some thresher had reaped them from a field, obliterating them in an instant.

Now the sleeping figure's mental image began to run, stumbling through holes big, uneven, filled with water, slime, and decaying remnants of the shadowy figures. She was running, not knowing where to go, or what to do, but to get away from this unknowable carnage, so real, yet so dreamlike. Words emanated, words not in her voice, not in any voice she had ever heard. Sounds of battle, sounds of death, sounds of pain, sounds of sorrow, sounds of a world gone mad.

She kept running. Overhead, shapes moved, unrecognizable, silent as a grave. They burst into silent fire and crashed into the ground, flames spouting from their carapaces, more of those gaunt shapes, now inside dead or crawling out. The dream was increasing in pace. Images were clearer and more muted at the same time. The pained look on a body, the twisted wreckage of a town, vast metal machines crawling across the land and spitting death.

Now she was running as fast as she had ever run. The images flashed past, barely registering anymore as figures, slowly becoming more and more nightmarish in appearance. A skull loomed out of the darkness, its grinning visage swallowing her whole. Down she fell, down, down, down into something she could not understand.

The mental image of the restless figure came to, and found itself in a serene scene once again. Now, where death in its uncensored form had been, stood the poppies again, waving in the breeze, their petals twisting in the wind. Nothing but poppies, twisting in the wind. The dark shapes gone, no more death, and destruction, just the eerie, silent world of poppies, spreading to the horizon. Like something had gouged a wound in the soil, and the poppies had sprung forth, as some representation of the earth's wounded state, like living blood.

And so, Twilight Sparkle slept on, her mind a morass of calm and confusion, waiting for the dawns early light to bring her comfort. For in her mind, she knew that days of comfort were shortly drawing to a close.