Astral Spark, a student at the University of Canterlot, has a problem. Time started to stop for him, and each time it's getting longer.
Time. It's the thing that makes everything tick. When Astral Spark, a student at the University of Canterlot, experiences brief glitches, stops in time, is it a sign that time itself is breaking down?
It’s funny how peaceful everything is when you slow down, like way down. The madness of daily life, of personal worries, of friends and families all ceased to exist when the world itself paused. In a way, it’s really quite beautiful, something that I had never quite noticed before.
Of course, being roughly one second away from getting impaled by two thugs in a dark alleyway tends to change one’s perspective of the world. In fact, I’d rate this as the second worst experience I ever had, right behind that one time when my elementary school teacher accidentally wrote my name as Asstral instead of Astral. The name never quite seemed to leave the memories of my peers.
I lowered my left forehoof, and along with it the only piece of accessory I had on me besides my gloves; a small, golden wristwatch with intricate patterns carved into its dial as well as woven artfully into its buckle. The markers on the watch did not abide to conventional means, and instead was replaced by cryptic symbols that were reminiscent of Zebrican glyphs.
Don’t ask me what it meant, since I’m still trying to work that out. All I know thus far was that it was a pattern or a cycle of some sort. The first time the stop had happened, it only lasted an hour. I spent most of that time stumbling around in a panicked frenzy. The second time lasted longer, about a day. While I was certainly much calmer than the first time, it would be prudent to say that I had been... unproductive.
I blinked and shook myself out of my thoughts. I looked forward and saw a knife mere inches away from my neck. Just below my head, a single droplet of sweat lay suspended in the air.
“That was too close,” I said, breathing a sigh of relief and carefully sidestepped away from the predicted trajectory of the blade. The two thugs who stood in front of me, completely frozen, looked almost comical in their enraged expression. One was a stallion, while the other was a mare. Both wore a simple jacket made out of fine textile. It seemed that in Canterlot, everything was fancy, even the criminals.
In a quick, efficient manner, I searched both would-be muggers and looked through their pockets. I came away with a few spare bits and a small knife. Shrugging, I patted the heads of the two ponies and trotted out of the alleyway, where puddles of water still remained on the ground from the storm scheduled by the weatherponies this morning.
The noise of a bustling city was gone. I don’t mean that like the way it was muffled by elegant walls in the dwellings of the wealthy, or from that of a sound barrier. I mean it was just completely absent. Two times, and yet I’m still not used to the fact that the only sound I can hear is that of my own hooves’ clip clops across the tidy cobblestone pavement.
After a while, I reached the one place I always came to when I needed some stress relief; Donut Joe’s. I walked into the small shop and plopped myself onto one of the free spots in the room. I levitated a trio of fresh, chocolate donuts from behind the counter, right in front of the frozen Donut Joe who looked like he was having an animated expression with a younger mare that had a six point star as her cutie mark.
I chuckled internally. After all these years, good old Joe was still trying to hit up mares a millennium younger than him. Trying being the key word used here.
I downed my, well, I guess you can say lunch, and stood up and trotted outside. I took a glance at Joe again, and after a few moments of hesitation, flicked a few bits onto the counter. It would just be mean to not repay him for the sugary goodness he unwittingly provided.
I stepped outside and took a deep breath of air, feeling much more refreshed than I was earlier. I looked down at myself, and saw my azure coat was marred with scratches and scraps. No doubt, my emerald mane was also in a disastrous shape. For once in my life, though, I really didn’t care. After all, there was nopony to care about the way I looked.
The afternoon sun was warm, but in a detached sort of way. The hunger I had contracted earlier died down with the donuts I ate. During my last two ‘freeze’, I found out that normal attributes from before the freeze will be kept constant during this time, so it’s highly unlikely that I’ll die from hunger. Despite so, one can still feel hungry, if only due to psychology of a pony’s mind.
Besides, hayburgers are still so Celestia damned good, and I’m definitely not about to pass up free food. I’m also pretty sure that I’m breaking a ludicrous number of rules just by being here, in this impossible, frozen space. Especially intriguing was when I jumped off a ten story high building (purely by accident), and came away with only a few bruises.
It did reinforce my theory that time was in fact moving, but at an extremely slow pace, that is except for the bubble that I somehow maintain about me. Anything that I touch becomes trapped in my little bubble of ‘normal’ time, which was why I always wore my gloves. Otherwise, everypony I accidentally made contact with would be suddenly unfrozen. If my personal experiences were anything to go by, that would be a very bad idea indeed.
I trotted around a corner, and stepped onto the newly constructed Luna Avenue, which runs parallel to the Celestia Avenue. A dozen new shops were already ready and opened on this street, seeking to take advantage of the popularity generated from its namesake. Shopfronts boasted hoity toity clothes, high-end restaurants and even a few bookshops.
It was also the quickest route to the Canterlot Archives. The road lay ahead of me, filled with unmoving traffic. I trotted in between legions of business ponies, civil servants and customers. I stopped when I walked past a rather pretty mare, with a butter coat and pink mane. She was currently being stared down by a lousy looking stallion blocking her path.
I tasted something rotten in my mouth. With a small prod, I unbalanced the stallion’s hoof and tilted his body sideways. Looking at my handiwork, I nodded in satisfaction and continued onwards. That pony was definitely going to get a nice, unsteady surprise when time unfroze again.
The number of ponies started to taper down, being steadily replaced by stoic looking guards and obnoxious noblesponies. Beautiful ivory towers flanked the road, and shop fronts were transformed into grand gardens and mansions. Finally, even they disappeared when I approached the sacred grounds that housed the royal sisters that ruled the land of Equestria.
As I approached the Canterlot Castle, I glanced at my watch again and juggled a few numbers in my head before nodding in satisfaction. If my calculations were correct, I would have at least a few days, maybe even a week. More than ample time, if I can use it correctly.
Perhaps this time, I can finally get some answers.
The sound of my hooves clip clopping against the marble floor rang out, if only to fill the silence and nothing more. I wiped a dainty little napkin at the corner of my mouth, relishing in the sweet afterglow of a slice of ‘Celestia’s Conquest’, Canterlot’s finest diabetic inducing pastry. As the nobles liked to put it, it was tout simplement délicieux. Prench has never been a particular strength of mine, but it seemed to impress the ladies well enough.
I trotted up spiral shaped stairs, heading up towards the Royal Canterlot Archives. I gave a sympathetic pat on the shoulders of a pair of guard ponies dutifully standing near the entrance. If only they knew how easy I could get in. My smile disappeared as I reached the grand, golden doors to the entrance - closed doors, should I add. I tried to push it open, but to my forever disappointment it didn’t budge a single bit.
“Horseapples,” I cursed under my breath as I looped back to the pair of guard ponies. An uncomfortably long search later, I came away with a small ring of weirdly archaic looking keys. I turned it around to what I presumed was the correct key, and stuffed it through the lock. A few scattered memories of how the old archive keys worked, combined with a little trial and error was rewarded with the sound of a small click.
The doors opened silently – as had every door I opened so far. Within the large chamber, an hourglass statue sat in the middle of the room, with rays of light caught frozen above it, filtered from the glassed dome ceiling above.
What I was most interested in, though, was the numerous bookshelves that extended from the centre in a circular fashion with a cluster of bookshelves bearing a tag that described the knowledge they held.
The forbidden section – one of the few places a student didn’t have access to – was in front of me, completely open and available for viewing. This was where Starswirl’s more… experimental spells and theories were stored. Of course, the one area that interested me was time, one of his more mysterious studies. I felt a smile beginning to form on my face. Surely, if there was an answer, it would be here.
I delved into the not insignificant amount of reading materials, scanning through the numerous treatise, theorems, observations and other pieces of texts that only those with the academic rigour of Canterlot University’s students can achieve.
Flipping through pages after pages, I felt confident.
The last book was closed forcefully, and I tossed it onto a pile of books that had been increasing in size until it reached it's current behemoth state. It was the last one to go through, and I was both grateful and disappointed that no more tomes greeted me.
I stretched, relishing in the satisfying crack and stared out an adjacent window numbly. Despite knowing why, I was still a little startled to see the sun still high up in the sky, as it was that very morning. Or, at least, I think it was this morning. I felt utterly exhausted, after what felt like days of studying (if it was indeed that long, I honestly wouldn’t be surprised). Not physically, of course, but mentally. I would expect that at that moment, I could name any twelve theorems of Starswirl the Bearded in explicit detail, from the law of the conservation of arcanes to the rule of singularity.
At least I would likely ace the upcoming test on Starswirl’s theorems. In fact, I could probably recite the whole first volume of Starswirl’s observations backwards.
Despite the mind-boggling amount of information I seemed to have absorbed, all of it was useless to me. There were surprisingly few texts on the subject of time, most of them being mysterious ‘riddles’ left behind by the enigmatic Archmage, and almost none on frozen time. The significant piece of information was a prototype spell that allowed for a small bubble of space to travel at a slower rate of time, but that was about as detailed as it got.
I sighed internally. It was worth a try, I thought sullenly. I mentally crossed out ‘searching for information’ and moved on to the next one; tell Princess Celestia. I grimaced a little. This was not going to be fun. Since the return of Princess Luna, she had been utterly preoccupied with looking after her sister.
I prepared to leave the room, walking past the hourglass. However, a small, minute movement caught my attention. I crept closer to the hourglass and lowered my eyes to the chamber with sand in it. I froze, my eyes widened.
A thin trickle, no thicker than a line, dropped down into the chamber waiting below. I slowly backed away, eyeing the impossible object with caution. No way. There was no way the sand was moving fast enough for that to have happened. Unless… Hesitantly, I took off the glove from one of my forehooves, and gently pressed it against.
For a moment, nothing happened. The rate of the sand falling hadn’t changed which causing me to frown. I was prepared to dismiss the hourglass completely, when I realized that I have been trying to take my hooves off, without any success.
All of a sudden, the hourglass exploded, but there was no broken glass. A tidal wave of sand seemed to phase through the glass, rushing out through invisible openings, way more than what could’ve possibly been held within it. I opened my mouth to scream, but the sand clamped shut my mouth as if it was a pair of strong hooves. The sea of sand soon covered my whole body, leaving only my head visible.
Soon, that too was covered, and I let darkness consume me.
After an indiscernible amount of time, I woke again.
What does it feel like to die? Philosophers and common ponies alike have wondered for millennia what it would be like to die. Some think that it will be a forever ongoing slideshow of the pony’s greatest achievements, suspended in a dream like ethereal space. Others thought that it would be darkness, and that the pony would know no more after the Grim Reaper herself consumed the victim.
Well, I offer an objection to both theories, because the moment I should have been dead, suffocating under the magical sand, all I could feel was a slow, aching pain. My joints hurt, as if they had been twisted and beaten harshly. My back felt as if it suffered a thousand years of labour with no rest.
I also felt cold, almost freezing in fact. That’s certainly weird. Surely being buried under a literal mountain of sand would make for a warm death, unless this was somehow a side effect of that. With that thought, I realized that I could move my body, if only tentatively to avoid more pain.
I raised my head.
And promptly froze in shock. No. There was no way he was here. No, it was impossible. For what I see in front of me, was the very manifestation of corrupt magic and ill virtues. An obscure legend, cast away by the annals of history. The few magic-users who knows about him also knows this:
Whatever you do, don’t be like him. Do the exact opposite of what he did.
The pain was beginning to subside, and I managed to look down at myself. For the first time, I realized that my normal colour was replaced by a pale, silvery coat. I wore a blue robe, and I could feel a hat above my head. The sound of bells jingling filled my ears as I tried to move away from the abomination in front of me.
Wait. Bells, blue robe, Sombra, grey hoof. I shakily reached for my chin, and felt a rough, uncut beard attached to the end of it.
It was then that Sombra spoke, in a voice smoother and gentler than I ever could've imagined.
