All was quiet in the spacecraft. The heat had finally diminished and the emergency lights had either broken or lost power along with the rest of the craft. Computer monitors displayed a random jumble of zeroes and ones onscreen, before flickering out. The only sounds were the spark of an electrical outlet heaving out its last breaths, or the slight groan of the craft as the damage from the landing took its toll.

Of course, there was still the faint thump... thump of the heartbeat monitor. The occupant of the tube remained motionless, as it had been for the past several thousand years. A bulky looking individual could be seen, once you made it out past the grime and dust covering the glass. It had a large, dome-like head with a torso so rigid and trunk-like, one had to wonder if it could move at all.

A desolate silence filled the craft, along with the break of noise from the occasional beep from the heart monitor, only now to be broken from a gentle hum of moving machinery. It soon developed into a full crescendo of spattering computer static and whir of complicated machine parts moving into coordination. Blinding white lights filled the hull. This light coaxed the other electronic components of the craft to life, as the din of mechanical ingenuity reached an all new high.

The hull began to shake as the craft was rocked on its foundations. Now pops and bangs from outside could be heard, as the long sealed door of the craft did its final duty of opening up.

The door pushed forward with the screech of metal on metal as it struggled to move. Extreme heat from the upper atmosphere–along with the heat shields failing miserably–had warped the outside of the craft to a barely recognizable form of what it once was. The door nonetheless succeeded in bending the metal aside and finally swung open.

Rays of sunshine, the first the inside of the hull had ever seen, peeked into the crack between the door and roof of the craft. As the rays brightened up the room further, lights from the ceiling burst and went out in the few short seconds they were on. Smoke poured from keyboards and monitors as sparks flew from screens. The craft was tearing itself apart as the door struggled to finish its descent to the ground of the new world.

All through the chaos, the heart monitor uttered its steady beat. With one final beep, the monitor hardlined. The one long tone rang out as the door finally reached the ground outside.

There were no inhabitants–living, that was. But for how long, no one could tell... until now.

A spark lit the inside of the tube, illuminating shadows of an individual dressed in a bulky suit. This spark was followed by another, with more joining in until the entire suit was ablaze with electrical light.

The body arched in the tube, arms flailing inside as its back bent forward and back from the powerful electrical current racking its body. After a few seconds, the electricity cut off, leaving the tube masked by darkness. All was quiet once more as the inhabitant laid still.

Faint at first, a couple of thumps from either side of the tube could be heard. Now it began to rock side to side as the occupant swung their body against either end of the interior. Though it was no use, for the tube could not move from its position situated to the floor.

A fist impacted with the glass, followed by another and another. As the first cracks appeared on the glass of the tube, a faint echo could be heard. Almost like screaming.

Explosion... screaming… so much pain… death.

Dead. No... no, not dead. Thinking you’re dead means you’re alive. So not dead. Not dead. That’s good.

Pain was the second signal that popped into the guard’s head. Also a good sign he wasn’t dead. Though now a certain pang of regret filled him as he almost wished for the sweet embrace of death to take his troubles away. Instead, he had to deal with this harsh reality of agony he now lived in.

His bones felt like jello that had been beaten with metal cleavers and then thrown into a woodchipper–which was on fire. Though now he was overdramatizing his condition. He was sure he didn’t have that many broken bones, after all.

A numb sensation came with the pain that spread from his legs to the bottom of his back. For a moment he feared he was paralyzed, doomed to never walk again because of some freak spine injury, but the prickly feeling that returned to his legs indicated that they had fallen asleep underneath some heavy object, and now that he was he could actually move, the pins and needles were just signs of his blood flowing again.

He almost chuckled in relief, or at least would have if it wasn’t for the fact blood clogged his throat and his mouth was sealed shut. Wiggling his tongue around, he attempted to clear his mouth to finally part open his lips. Getting enough moisture in his mouth to create some spit and swallow, he coughed and hacked out the dust that had collected in his throat. Groaning loudly, yet hearing no sound of his pained breaths, he coaxed his eyes open to inspect his surroundings.

The glazed-over look of his dead partner was the first sight he saw. The eyes were blank, not a living soul behind them, and his mouth hung open in a slackjaw look, blood dripping from the side along with a thin stream from his nose.

The younger guard stifled a scream. Not like it mattered much if he cried out or not. No one was around to listen anyway.

Shoving upward with what little remaining strength he had, the younger guard got out from under the corpse of his old partner. While he felt slight guilt for his sacrifice, he knew there wasn’t anything he could do for the dead. Crawling as far away from the body as he could, the guard reached a stomach churning discovery when he stared at his hooves.

His disguise was gone. The black exoskeleton of his regular self was clearly visible, the hole-ridden surface having replaced the smooth, white exterior he had before.

"Damnit," he muttered. So far, no disguise was actually the bright side of the past several hours.

He stared at what was left of Canterlot.

The street corner that had bustled with life only a few minutes ago lay in ruins. Any remaining buildings had been reduced to skeletons with bones cracked to pieces like the glass shards covering the streets. Though that was better in regards to the few ponies that still had flesh on them, exposed tissue glistening like a sickening horror show as far as the eye could see.

Dust and rubble stood where the road used to be. Buildings had been ripped asunder from their foundations, with nothing higher than a pony's height still standing. It was like a giant hoof had crushed the entire city under its heel.

Which wasn't too far from the truth.

Glancing up to the sky, all that could be seen was a dark swirling gray. Whether that was dust kicked up from the crash or just a storm was still unknown.

The changeling spy hacked to clear his lungs and hefted himself to his hooves with a grunt. Still surprised I managed to survive such calamity with only minimal injury, he thought. Though I guess I can attest that to my superior protection of royal guard armor, distance from the crash, harder changeling skin, an entire brick store between me and the blast, and the dead remains of my partner.

Finally getting on all fours and panting from the exertion, he swayed to the side. Looking down, he realized he was still wearing his guard armor. Well, part of it. The entire left side where his partner protected him with was little more than scraps now. The cold metal of the armor dug into his chitin like broken spikes, small welts of green blood already leaking further. His wing was ripped in half, though he didn't feel any pain from it. In fact, he wasn't feeling much of anything.

"Must be in shock," he whispered, oddly not hearing himself say it. While the lack of hearing was strange, he concluded it was probably from the effects of the crash, and started on his trek through the carnage. It turned into a slow movement of one hoof in front of the other, wary not to stumble over any rubble.

I should have escaped somehow. But I couldn’t fly, because it takes over five minutes to take off this damn armor, and I was panicking and my cover would have been blown. That would’ve gotten me taken down by my now expired partner for sure.

Each hoofstep became a painful experience. The sharp debris that covered the ground cut into his hoof. Everywhere that could be seen there lay a sea of shimmering, broken glass from the countless windows that shattered from the blast. There probably wasn’t a single window left in all of Canterlot.

The changeling had no direction to move to. His brain too jaded to make a single coherent thought that didn’t die out in his muddled mind. The process of moving forward became all he could manage at the moment. What direction he was going or what awaited him didn’t matter.

The environment changed as he continued on his directionless journey. The ground had turned into a charred, black expanse of soot as ash drifted in like dark clouds. The buildings peppered out the further he traveled, no longer piles of wreckage, but too few foundations barely stood recognizable now. The landscape shifted from ruins to complete desolation in only a couple of blocks.

His wandering didn’t turn out to be as directionless as he thought, for his movements were being guided by a much more subtle source. The dip in the earth from the intensity of the meteorite’s crash allowed for him to go down it unknowingly, like water running down a drain. The closer he approached the site of the crash, the more intense the destruction around him became.

Soon, it was difficult to see three feet ahead because of the smog hanging over the street. Dust mixed with smoke quickly covered his body and blinded his eyes. Blinking did nothing to clear them–no moisture remained in his eyes. All he could do was keep his eyes shut and keep on moving forward.

With a surprised yelp, he fell, the ground crumbling underhoof. Tumbling downward, he slid across the bowl of what appeared to be an immense hole in the center of the city. It looked like the changeling had finally arrived at the drain.

The ground was impossibly hot. Any regular pony would have had their skin seared off in seconds. Luckily for him, a changeling’s exoskeleton is impervious to most extreme forms of heat and was mostly unaffected by the heat of the earth. It was the frigid colds that most changelings were susceptible to.

His already agony-wracked body took a new dealing of punishment downhill. His limbs were soon being shoved underneath him in a painful mix of twisted body parts as he plunged further down the hole in a painful tumble. The parts of his body not protected by his armor scraped against the sides of the superheated ground, while his armored sides impacted with every tumble.

With a final crash, he reached the bottom of the hole. It wasn’t really deep, more of a hundreds yards wide dip in the earth.

Groaning, the changeling was sure that either his leg was broken, or his ribs. Or maybe even both. At this point he had descended into such a powerful misery from the constant pain, that he couldn’t even tell which part of his body was working or not.

The dirt blinded his eyes for a moment, but he still lifted his head off the ground, blinking lazily as his gaze refocused. A fuzzy, mirage-like object stood not too far away, the dust cloud from outside oddly not near it. Though smoke did pour from the top part of it.

Getting to all fours was not an option. His back leg couldn’t support the weight. The best he could manage was to hop and shuffle forward in an awkward stumble that was more of a crawl.

The closer he came to the object, the more he realized how strange it appeared. Not at all like a meteorite as he was expecting. It had oddly shaped structure, that was for sure. It was almost spherical, with a large bump on top that protruded from the rest of the craft. The ship’s wings were misshapen and barely hanging on, with one bent to such a degree it caused the entire craft to lean oddly on it. Much of the exterior of the craft had pockmarks created by large craters, while the vast majority of the spacecraft looked like it was melting, still red hot, with paneled sections of the craft already falling off.

It was definitely the shittiest spacecraft the changeling could have ever imagined, from any realm of science fiction. Like a chariot on its last leg, it seemed ready to fall apart at any moment.

The eerie silence in the center of the crash site was what the changeling found the most strange. After digging a hoof into his ear to make sure he had no wax build up, and instead feeling a copious amount of blood leaking from his eardrum, it clearly indicated that his deafness was the reason for the quiet.

A distant wind cleared the fallout from the skies for a moment, revealing a clear blue expanse of sky overhead. It was perplexing how pure hell had descended onto Canterlot, yet the skies above were in the same pristine condition as ever, not even scarred from the travesty that had befallen the capital city. The heavens stared down at their misery with the same bright and cheerful face as ever.

The changeling’s momentary glance up became interrupted by the earth shaking. The vibrations underhoof alerted him back to the ship, which had started to move, or at least trying to. The front door was desperately pushing forward, bending the superheated metals that had warped the front of the ship.

With a final push and screech of metal that was lost on his deafened ears, the front door of the craft fell with a crash to the ground, sparks flying from the scraping metal. The changeling was instantly blinded by the lights inside the ship, the intensity of the white light illuminating the entirety of the hole for a few moments. But just as suddenly as they came on, they disappeared like balloons being popped, leaving the craft’s insides brightened by only the outside light.

Staring down at the door, the changeling saw that it acted as a pair of steps as well, leading up to the craft’s entrance. Hesitantly, he placed a hoof on the first step, and then another, slowly working his way up the craft, his injured leg banging against each step and causing him to wince in pain.

Really, he wasn’t sure why he was going into the spaceship. Maybe to see what exactly was the cause of Canterlot’s destruction. Why it came here. Whatever the reason, he had the compulsion to know.

Making his way up the steps, he stood in the entrance of the ship that led to a main room of some sort. The only light came from the outside and the occasional fizz and spark from a computer monitor or broken wiring.

The most prominent visuals in the room were a large bank of computer monitors against one wall, most reduced to broken glass. On the ceiling was a latch to what was apparently a second compartment room. And along the circular sides of the room was a row of tubes that reached from the floor to the ceiling.

Curious, he walked to one of the tubes, and past the darkness he made out a figure in its hold. Peering in, he wiped a hoof across the glass, clearing away some of the dust obscuring the interior.

The best he could make out of the figure was a tall bipedal, nearly a full eight feet tall with a head that resembled a fish bowl. It’s skin was hard to make out, but resembled a rocky surface with abnormally large arms, a bulbous torso and tree trunk like legs. There was even a chest template of some sort, with pipes running from the bottom and along the figure’s sides. Any other details were lost to the buildup of grime that shrouded the interior in darkness.

Suddenly, a pair of eyes opened for the first time in thousands of years in a pair of sunken eye sockets. A rasping breath that drew no air sounded throughout the main room.

Unluckily, the changeling wasn’t able to hear this.

A fist struck through the tube behind the changeling, glass shards raining down on the floor.

The changeling never noticed the disturbance.

A mechanicalized scream echoed through the hull of the ship, tortured beyond the point of reason. Thumps from boots striking against the floor and glass being crunched beneath a heel reverberated eerily through the room, the noise growing closer and closer to the unsuspecting changeling until it was right over his shoulder.

The changeling never did hear his own screams echo through the hull.