The dream ended, and Princess Celestia opened her eyes. The night was almost over, she knew it. After thousands of years of doing the same job every day, she had developed some sort of sixth sense which warned her when the time of raising the sun was near. It was like having a silent clock alarm inside your head.

In a moment, she would have to raise the sun and replace her sister as the watcher of Equestria. But she still had a few minutes left, and she was very tired. The party after Cadance and Shining Armor’s wedding had been marvelous, but also exhausting.

The light of the almost hidden moon was entering through the window, illuminating the room and coloring everything in a silver tone. Celestia closed her eyes again and rolled in her bed, comfortably wrapped in her warm blankets.

Then, she opened her eyes once more, and she saw, in her pillow, right in front of her nose...

The Princess screamed with all the strength of her lungs and jumped out of the bed. Bad move. The enormous spider was startled by the noise and sudden movement of the blankets, and it started to run through the entire room at highspeed, moving its crab-like legs in a way that made Celestia scream again.

Immediately, two unicorn guards entered in the room.

“What’s the matter, Princwhoa!”

Celestia jumped at the arms of the guard, who couldn’t cope with the weight of the much bigger alicorn (we’re not implying that the Princess was fat) and was squashed under the royal body.

“Is there any problem, Your Majesty?” asked the second guard, while his companion was trying to come out from under the Princess.

“S... s... spider!” said Celestia, pointing at her room with a trembling hoof. “Big... Scary... Spider...”

The second guard took a look inside the room, but he saw nothing.

“It must be under the bed...” said Celestia, still shaking of fear.

The second guard sighed, incapable of ignoring the surrealism of the situation. After all, it was a goddess being afraid of a spider. And, although she had said it was a big one, the guard was sure that the Princess had exaggerated.

So, he looked under the bed.

“Don’t worry, Your Majesty, we’ll take care of HOLY F@&%K!”

The second guard retreated. The spider came out from under the bed, and the first guard, who had finally freed himself from the pressure of Celestia’s rear, saw it and became pale.

“What is that thing?!”

“Who cares?!” shouted the second guard. “Retreat! Retreat! Protect the Princess!”

The two guards took the Princess outside of the room and closed the door. They waited a few minutes, panting.

“Ok...” said the second guard. “It’s trapped. It can’t reach us now...”

“What do we do now?” asked Celestia.

“We... We’ll take care of this, Princess,” said the first guard. “You go raise the sun.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes. We just... we’ll just need all the weapons in the royal armory.”

On the other side of the door, the spider had decided to abandon the room through the window.

Luna lowered the moon, and the silver satellite hid behind the horizon. A few seconds later, the sun appeared. The night alicorn smiled, knowing that her big sister was now protecting Equestria, so she returned to her room in the highest tower of the castle.

She flew through the window and landed gently in the floor. She yawned. It was time to get a well-deserved nap. Luna went to the bathroom to brush her teeth. She opened the mirror door of the little cabinet above the sink to pick the toothbrush and the toothpaste, and when she closed it, she saw, attached to the reflective surface...

Sitting on her throne, Celestia took a deep breath of air. She was feeling much better, she had even erased from her memory the unpleasant sight of a spider with a 30 cm leg-span in front of her face. The Princess was sure that her loyal guards would have solved the problem already, so she could stop worrying about that and focus on attending her beloved subjects.

But then, the two guards entered in the room, each one wearing a thick iron armour and carrying several sharp weapons.

“You tell her,” whispered the first guard.

“No way! You tell her!” said the second.

“Hey, remember that you still owe me one for what happened on Las Pegasus last year!”

“Ok, ok, I’ll tell her...” the second guard approached the throne. “Your Majesty...”

“Yes?” asked Celestia.

“Well... you’ll see... We searched everywhere in your room... but we couldn’t find the spider.”

“What? Are you telling me that it went somewhere else?”

Then, Luna entered in the throne room, screaming just like her big sister that same morning, and followed by her two bat-winged pegasus guards, who were as scared as the night alicorn.

“Kill it with fire!” shouted one of them.

“We don’t know if fire will work!” replied the other. “Look at the size of that thing!”

“Sister!” Luna jumped at Celestia’s lap, like if she was a little filly again. “Spider!”

Celestia’s eyes shrank. No, it couldn’t be...

Alerted by the commotion, the other guards at the throne room formed a wall before the door which Luna had come through, prepared to fight whatever creature was pursuing the Princess of the Night.

And then, it appeared...

“@&%#!” exclaimed one of the guards.

“It moves!” screamed other. “Holy Hoof, it moves!”

“Retreat! For the love of Pete, retreat!” shouted other.

"It’s looking at me! Dear Clover the Clever, it’s looking at me!”

“I didn’t become a guard to fight a thing like that!”

“We need Shining Armor! Call him back from his honeymoon!”

“Forget the Captain, bring the tanks!”

The spider advanced one centimetre.

“%&#@€=!”

“Use magic! Blast it to oblivion!”

“I can’t concentrate! Those legs will appear in my nightmares!”

“Sergeant, kill that abomination!”

“No way, sir! I’d rather fight against the killer bunny again than getting anywhere near that thing!”

“Fire the Orbital Friendship Cannon! Initiate Canterlot’s Self-Destruction Sequence! Do something!”

“Run away!” screamed Celestia.

Twilight Sparkle was trotting happily under the sun, right towards the castle. After all the excitement of the wedding and the party afterwards, she wanted to spend some time with her teacher. Just the two of them alone, in front of some cups of tea, in a relaxing and quiet environment, like the royal library, for example.

However, before she could enter in the castle, the magnificent doors opened, and the purple unicorn was overwhelmed by a wave of screaming ponies, who were desperately running away from something.

“What’s going on?” she asked. Then, she realized that Celestia and Luna were at her back, trembling.

“Oh, Twilight!” said the white alicorn. “Thank goodness you’re here! You have to help us!”

“Call for the others, Twilight Sparkle!” said Luna. “Go get the Elements of Harmony! They’re our only hope!”

“What’s happening? Was Discord released from his prison again?”

Then, she felt something tickling her hoof. She looked down, and...

We don’t need to tell you what happened next, do we?

Ah, there’s nothing like enjoying a sunny, calm morning in the beautiful streets of Canterlot, specially after an event such as big as the wedding of a princess and the captain of the royal guard.

Pinkie Pie, Applejack, Rainbow Dash, Rarity and Spike were relaxing in a park, sat around a beautiful fountain. Pinkie Pie and Spike had somehow managed to steal the figurines of Cadance and Shining Armor (again) and were playing with them.

Then, Twilight and the two Princesses materialized before them, in a flash of purple light. They looked as if they had seen a ghost.

No, let us elaborate: they looked as if they had seen a ghost chanting a passage of the Necronomicon while being eaten by the werewolf zombie of its former body in the middle of the reenactment of a Stephen King novel. Directed by Clive Barker. And Junji Ito. And Francisco de Goya in his latter years.

The four mares (and the baby dragon) looked at each other, and then Rarity asked:

“Is there any pro-”

“Run!” shouted Twilight. She looked just like that day when she had gotten obsessed with being tardy with her friendship reports. The scary thing was, Celestia and Luna looked just like her. “We have to run away from Canterlot! We need to go back to Ponyville and send letters to all the cities in Equestria! We have to warn everypony about-”, she got pale. Her lower lip was trembling.

“Are you okay, sugarcube?” asked Applejack. Then, she felt a ticklish sensation on one of her hooves, so, of course, she looked down...

A chorus of screams rose from the park. Five ponies, a baby dragon and two goddesses were cornered against the wall of a nearby house by a spider the size of a dinner plate. Spike threw the figurines at the arachnid, but it basically ignored them. Mostly because the dragon had the aiming skills of a stone.

Then, a new pony appeared in scene. A yellow pegasus of pink mane.

“Hi girls,” she said, with a voice which rounded the seven decibels or so.

“Run away, Fluttershy!” shouted Rainbow Dash. “Save yourself!”

“Save myself?” the yellow pegasus looked around, worried. “From what?”

“From that thing!” and Dash pointed at the spider.

Fluttershy looked at the arthropod. Then at her friends. Then at the arachnid again. Then at her friends.

“Um... girls, this is a giant huntsman spider. It’s mostly harmless to ponies.”

The sound of trembling stopped suddenly.

“What?” asked Luna.

“Yes,” said Fluttershy. “Look...”

She approached the spider and bowed her head next to it.

“Hello, little friend,” she said, with the sweetest voice you could imagine. “Are you lost? Poor little thing... You must be scared!”

She gently rubbed the abdomen of the spider with a hoof, and the arachnid seemed to like it. Then, it crawled up Fluttershy’s leg and took refuge inside of her mane.

“There, there...” whispered the pegasus. “No more running through this big, dangerous place. Let’s search a good home for you. There must be a nice warm cave near Canterlot...”

And she trotted away, singing a lullaby to the spider.

Celestia and the others were left in a very uncomfortable silence. The Princess of the Sun blushed.

“Let us never speak of this again,” she said.

And everypony quickly answered:

“Agreed.”

THE END.