"Here comes another battle!"

"Get the cannons out!"

"Watch out!"

Bombardic was a unique, large town where most surviving ponies of Equestria lived. It was a large platform built in-between cliffs and held up by cables on its four corners. Two bridges led out to the walls that had been turned into a literal anthill from the necessity of mining. Most of the town was made from stone and the few bits of wood were grabbed by scavengers that risked the surface. Why would the ponies be foolish enough to make a town above a nauseatingly high precipice? Because it was the best way to avoid angry ejge and dragons fighting and the easiest way to acquire sunlight and water for crops and the populace. The town's underside also held many lens tubes which focused light a million times over, making even the weakest of candles into a deathly laser, but these were recent additions to their defenses. Older ball turrets remain that launched steel-fiber nets with rocket-propelled javelins as nails to plaster a dragon against the wall or far away where they would plummet to their doom.

Four towers stood tall at the corners of the town, informing ponies of any encroaching battles or territorial dragons and alerting the populace. No magical bubble protected Bombardic. There was no one strong enough to create proper magic anymore, and the alicorns of old were now gone...if they even existed in the first place.

"The dragon queen is coming! Get your lances and armor ready to kill her alleged 'ascended'," somepony hissed.

Twilight Sparkle was one of the survivors of the upper lands, but they were only faded memories of her youth. The only landscape she knew now were the colors of stone and the inside of caves, and she felt she was all the better for it. Her hair was always a tangled mess she fashioned into a more jagged appearance near the front so that it hung to the left of her head and left the right alone and bare. The back of her head was left alone as it did not impede her eyesight, but it was not well kempt and jutted in almost all directions imaginable. It was just a dirty, dry mess. Her left eye was gone after dodging a fireball just in the nick of time, and the burn scar was now hidden by her fur that was forced to grow back. Her back wasn't so fortunate, and several lines of naked fur remained after her many battles against ejge and dragon alike, and she no longer had a tail as it had to be cut off when a dragon decided it wanted a snack after attacking the city. Twilight still hoped it got a nasty hairball out of it.

"Save them, my brothers and sisters! The dragon queen heard of new magic taken from the lands above!"

Twilight's cutie-mark was also a pair of long claws clamped into a dragon's skull, and she was one of the fiercest warriors alive, having lived past the life-expectancy of twenty-four by three years. The mare suited up in a suit of armor comprised of metal plates on the outside and dragon leather on the inside. It might not have been of best quality as knowledge of tanning and smithing using traditional techniques had been lost, but the new techniques were more than adequate and, perhaps, even better now than they ever were before. This was an age of technology, not magic. Magic was practically dead, but that didn't mean unicorns couldn't still use it for one thing.

Twilight hurried over towards one of the two gates where draco-ponies were swarming from and found a bit of amusement in seeing the many turrets on the wall shooting explosive cannonballs and throwing those outside of the blast radius off the stone bridge. Said bridge was thirty-five meters wide, rounded up, so quite a few ponies would be more than capable of walking on it.

"Twilight? What are you doing here?! Shouldn't you be with the wizard to travel back in time?" an orange pony protested.

"They'll come to me, Oryx! I'd rather have the memory of helping you fight off these invaders than leave like some coward!"

"Well said!"

The draco-ponies on the bridge were corrupted ponies with draconic traits such as fire breathing; scales pushing out from under the fur; and long, reptilian tails taken by the self-proclaimed 'Dragon Queen' who believed that the essence of dragons would save ponies and let them live forever as a new and improved species, but only under her rule, and Twilight really didn't care about her or her philosophies. She wasn't strong enough to fight the crazed 'queen' off on her own and so relied on her comrades, but she knew that fighting her off was enough to keep proper ponies free from whatever mindless influence she had on them.

Twilight took out her spear made from pure metal and pointed it at the would-be invaders and focused the magic from her horn, through her foreleg and into the weapon. The blade head was cut in half and placed above the shaft in a ring-bayonet fashion, leaving a hollow portion running through the rest of the body. A ball of magical energy fired out from the spear, exploding amidst the draco-ponies and tossing them around like ragdolls.

"Good shot, Twilight!" Oryx congratulated.

A pony atop one of the towers started ringing a bell and shouted to everyone. "The Dragon Queen is coming! The Dragon Queen is coming!"

Several older turrets placed on the wall all focused on an incoming, sky-blue dragon with green spines running along her back and started firing at her. The dragon was quite thin with a very feminine build rather than the muscular, powerful build that most dragons preferred. She responded in kind to her attackers with large streams of flame, but the metal plates on the walls prevented any kind of permanent damage to the town's defenses. A beam clipped her left wing, slicing it off and causing her to plummet onto the bridge and slide off. She quickly grabbed onto the edge and ignored her subjects falling off because of her and their pleas for help. She frantically scraped at the surface of the construct to get back up on it and paused for a moment to catch her breath. She didn't have the luxury of such a thing and was attacked by all the cannons and ponies stationed on the walls and gate.

"Why do you attack me when I'm only trying to save you?" she roared.

"We don't need the 'help' you're trying to give us!" one of the ponies on the wall shouted at her.

A few more draco-ponies charged forward, with a few belching fire at the defenders of the gate, but their armor was strong enough to protect them, and Twilight took this opportunity to gallop through the flames and stab several through their throats and use the momentum to throw them off the bridge and into the dark abyss below.

"Twilight! Get back here!"

A white stallion with a sky-blue mane and tail and wearing a white robe galloped towards the gate while holding a ball of warping, blue energy in his foreleg. He was flanked by a unicorn, named 'Alberdere', and a pegasus wearing armor fashioned from whatever they had found on the surface. While the ponies called him a wizard, it was only related to his advances in the field of technology and how he used the magic flowing within everypony to power his devices. It did not have the same meaning as it once did in earlier times.

"The spell is ready. You need to use it now!"

The lavender unicorn turned around to face her comrades who nodded in approval while they kept the invaders at bay.

"Alright. Remind me what I have to do, Marble."

The spell had been acquired by scavengers hired to tread along the surface world and found an ancient library of knowledge where it was told a spell on time travel resided. Several scavengers had gone to get on request of this town, but not many ever survived the hellish, broken landscape before them. One group, however, did find the rumored, hollow tree amidst smoldering ruins long since abandoned. The tree was bunt to a crisp as well, but it seemed whoever lived here had placed almost all of the books in the library into the basement, where they were kept safe, and while most of those books have been taken now, the one holding a spell of time travel made by an unknown magician of the past was brought back to Bombardic where ponies spent several months trying to understand and decipher the runes.

"I'm going to send you back in time, approximately seven-hundred and eighty-three years. I don't know where you'll end up, but it should be in proximity to Celestia's home, wherever that may be. You'll only have a few months to do what you need to, such as convincing Celestia to prepare for the coming draconic apocalypse. If possible, you also need to warn the dragons. History books say we've lived in peace with them, and they fear the King Dragon, so if they all join together, then you just might stand a chance and stop any of this from happening when the King Dragon and Royal Ejge awaken."

"But what exactly do we do about the ejge?"

"I don't know! We still didn't know much about them back then apart from them being far more isolated than dragons." The stallion expanded the orb into a wobbling blue portal of swirling magic. "There. It's ready. I can't hold onto it for long. Just be aware that their technology is probably not as advanced as ours, so take that into account. We HAVE advanced quite drastically for our survival, after all."

"Why can't I take a group with me? Surely it'll be easier to take care of this together!"

"Because I only have enough power to send just one pony through, and a huge group of us will likely attract too much attention...maybe you on your own will attract too much attention...That's still a risk I'm willing to take with this endeavor. Plus, seeing as you have the most experience in the field of combat, you're most likely to be able to deal with whatever dragons and ejge are thrown at you."

Twilight rotated her shoulders in response, silently bragging about what Marble just said,

"But how will she come back?" the pegasi asked while she passed some saddlebags to Twilight.

"That's a matter for the wizards of old, Cinnamon. Just let her take care of everything."

The lavender unicorn nodded and jumped into the portal. Before she did, however, the Dragon Queen noticed the creation and shouted in horror.

"A time portal?! DON'T GO IN THERE, FOAL!"

Unfortunately, no amount of hissing or growling impeded Twilight's advance through the rivers of time, but where there is room for one boat, there is room for a second right behind it.

Author's Notes:

Disclaimer: I do not condone temporal paradoxes. You know me so you'll know how this works out (If you really want to know, in DBZ, when Trunks returned to his time, that wasn't a paradox that his timeline still existed).