When Twilight awoke, all she saw was glass.

Different fragments of colour shone brightly into her eyes. She squinted, attempting to lift a hoof to shield herself, but her forelegs didn’t cooperate.

None of her cooperated. She couldn’t move.

Where am I? What’s going on? Why can’t I move?

Twilight’s eyes moved in a panic. Everywhere she looked, all she found was more bright lights, more colours. A mixture of purple and pink, but hard to look at for longer than a few seconds at a time. Her breath caught in her chest.

How do I get out?

Her horn flared hot with magic. With fear as her motivator, Twilight focused on her power, scrounging up just enough to send a beam of tangible light from her horn.

Seconds later, she heard a crack.

The immaculate façade of colourful glass shattered around her, the sound like a thousand bells ringing in her ears. Twilight screamed as the object holding her still suddenly crumbled around her, leaving her tumbling onto the hard ground beneath. Jagged pieces of her prison grazed her legs as she tried to scramble upwards, gasping out in pain with every new incision.

As soon as she was standing – on albeit unsteady legs – she looked down at the remains of her prison.

It wasn’t glass, she realised. It was pieces of multi-coloured crystal. The same crystal that grew in stacks inside of her palace.

She blinked, ruffling her wings as jagged pieces of crystal fell from her feathers and scattered onto the ground. What was going on? Where was she?

She was indoors. She must be; the ground was cool beneath her hooves. Not quite stone, not quite earth. More crystal?

She looked up and her mouth fell open.

Hanging above her was the rotted remains of her library home. Golden Oak’s roots, once decorated so beautifully to remind her of home… now limp, black, and decidedly dead. Twilight looked about herself more closely. This was the throne room of her palace.

Now she understood what was beneath her hooves. Not the ground at all, but the table.

The table had somehow encased her in a ginormous piece of crystal.

Oh, she was going to have a field day with this one.

“Spike!” she called out, suddenly excited with her discovery. Mentally, Twilight was already mapping out what supplies she’d need for a full scale essay. No doubt Celestia would be thrilled with the new developments happening from within the Palace of Friendship. “Spike, you’ll never believe what happened!”

Twilight’s voice echoed eerily through the room. Odd, she’d never seen the palace as eerie before. Maybe it was from where the roots had rotted away the lights, leaving nothing but the crystals to cast a subdued glow into the room. She would really have to get that replaced. Maybe she could put a spell on it to get the roots to regrow; it really would be shame to part with the last reminder of her first home in Ponyville after all.

“Spike?” Twilight called again, a little worried this time. Maybe he was napping somewhere.

She trotted to the edge of the table, jumping off and landing with a flurry of her wings. She could still feel pieces of crystal in her coat; she’d have to clean herself up before she started on her essay.

Walking towards the hallway, Twilight opened the door with her magic. She frowned. The hallway was dark too, the crystals still the only source of light.

“Spike? I think there’s something wrong with the electrics…” Twilight said loudly, glancing about herself. Nopony answered her.

As she walked down the hallway, Twilight began to open doors at random with her magic. The kitchen, the dining hall, the library… but she found no one. Nothing.

Come to think of it, everything seemed a little dusty. Which was strange, especially in the library; she was nearly always in there. It didn’t have a chance to get dusty.

“Spike? Come on, this isn’t funny anymore,” Twilight said nervously, stopping dead at the front doors.

Nopony was in the palace. Maybe Spike had gone out to the spa? Maybe he’d found Twilight encased in that crystal and gone out to find somepony to help? Come to think of it, what had she been doing just before the table had decided to… well… eat her?

“Spike?”

Twilight opened the doors.

And she nearly screamed.

There was… nothing.

Simply, nothing.

Where lush grass and exotic flowers had once grown… now there was just a barren wasteland. Greyish black dirt, rubble and little else was scattered as far as the eye could see.

“No,” Twilight said quietly, shaking her head.

There was no way…

“No.”

She slammed the door shut, closing her eyes.

“NO!”

She turned on her hooves, racing down the hallway.

“SPIKE? SPIKE, WHERE ARE YOU?”

She ran through every room, galloping to every nook and cranny, the whole time she didn’t stop screaming for Spike.

Then she changed tactics.

“STARLIGHT GLIMMER?”

Her friendship student, surely she was in the palace somewhere.

But there was no reply.

“RARITY? APPLEJACK? PINKIE PIE? RAINBOW DASH? FLUTTERSHY?”

“ANYPONY!”

Twilight found herself gasping for breath exactly where she had started, hoof-deep in sharp crystal shards. She shook herself, mentally and physically. This was wrong. This was… impossible. How was she alone? How was the outside… nothing?

She trotted back to the front doors, ears splayed against her head. With a burst of magic, she opened the doors again and a hot, dry, ashy breeze hit her in the face, ruffling her mane.

She coughed, eyes watering, as she looked out at the world before her. At what remained of Ponyville.

She could see the town from here… or rather, what was left of it. She could see collapsed structures, pieces of rubble and burnt wood. Dusty broken carts and rotten food. And nothing else. Not a single sound carried on the air. It was entirely silent.

She was alone.

The days seemed to bleed into each other. With each one, Twilight hoped she would wake from this nightmare. She was never successful.

It had taken her three days to realise that there was no more weather, and the reason for that seemed to have something to do with the fact that there weren’t any clouds. There was a layer of something in the atmosphere. She’d flown upwards, hooves reaching towards the sky, only to fall short of victory when her muzzle had hit an invisible barrier.

The collision sent a shockwave through whatever she’d hit, giving it a visible shape for a brief time. What Twilight saw made her heart sink into her stomach.

It was a dome.

Equestria seemed to be encased in a giant dome.

Although she’d wanted to put all of her energy into studying the dome, something else took priority. Namely, food and water.

A few old spells used before unicorns had learned farming from the earth ponies allowed Twilight to magic up the resources she would need for fresh soil. Fortunately the palace had been stocked with seeds of all kinds, and a few ‘accelerated growth’ spells gave her the food she needed in a matter of hours. It was nothing fancy, but it would keep her alive.

So would the ‘weather in a bottle’ spell she’d devised. There’d been a time when Rainbow Dash had scoffed at Twilight’s efforts to make a small, hoof-sized raincloud. Now, it was the only thing keeping Twilight from dying of thirst. She couldn’t restore weather to Equestria, but she could sustain herself, hopefully long enough to figure out what had happened.

Because something had definitely happened.

This wasteland was unsettlingly similar to what Twilight had discovered when Starlight had first tried to destroy her friends’ cutie mark connection. By stopping Twilight and her friends from discovering their cutie marks simultaneously, it had kept them from ever meeting. Without meeting, they had never become the Elements of Harmony, and without the Elements of Harmony, Twilight and Spike had been thrown into several alternate dimensions where different villains of their past had never been defeated and subsequently taken over Equestria. The final reality Twilight had seen – the one she’d dragged Starlight into against her will – had been much like this one. Barren, silent, dead.

Could the table have malfunctioned somehow? Maybe there had been elements of the time spell still connected to it? That would have explained the environment, but it didn’t explain the crystal.

The days after Twilight had solved her food and water problem were dedicated solely on studying the crystal and its properties. Days and nights – which were hard to distinguish as the dome gave the sky a permanent reddish-tinge – were spent in her lab, mixing together different concoctions to test the crystal’s many components.

But there was nothing special about the crystal. Testing it with the others that decorated Twilight’s palace gave the same results. The crystal could have spontaneously grown from the table for a multitude of reasons, but Twilight’s experiments were unable to tell her why.

“Whatever the reason,” Twilight mused after nearly a week of constant testing, “it protected me.” She probed one of the remaining shards with her hoof. “This palace saved me.” She thought of the other thrones that adjourned the throne room. The five others with her friends’ cutie marks and the sixth that sat next to her own.

Twilight sighed, closing her eyes. “So why didn’t it save them?”

It was easy to lose track of time in a world without it.

Twilight realised very quickly that the sun and moon appeared to be gone. There was one entity that gave light and whatever it was it was far beyond her reach, lying somewhere past the dome that covered Equestria.

There weren’t any stars either.

No stars, no light, no life, no colour.

What kind of reality had she fallen into? How could she get back to hers?

Those were the thoughts that swallowed her mind every time she tried to sleep. But they weren’t the only ones. Sometimes her mind wandered to other places, darker places.

What if she hadn’t slipped into another reality? What if something truly terrible had happened to her Equestria and she really was the sole survivor?

Twilight remembered the conversation she’d had with Celestia after her royal crowning as the newest Princess of Equestria. She’d been told what becoming an had Alicorn meant. She was far from indestructible… but she had great power, great abilities, and one of those meant that as of her transformation, she would never age. She couldn’t die of old age.

She could quite literally spend an eternity here.

Twilight tried to still her mind after that.

“I can’t stay here.”

Twilight wasn’t sure how long it had been when she finally cracked. Which was part of the problem.

“This is silly,” she muttered to herself, pacing from one side of the throne room to the other. “If I stay inside this palace forever, I’m going to start seeing my friends on those chairs.” She pointed to Applejack’s throne with her hoof. “What d’you think AJ? Am I going crazy? Be honest.” She snorted, rolling her eyes.

“What about you Pinkie, think I’ll have fun staying cooped up like this?” She shook her head in frustration. “I could survive indefinitely inside here… but eventually I’ll run out of reading material.” She barked out a laugh. “Oh, if Rainbow Dash heard that she’d have a field day.” Twilight’s smile was strained. “Of course that’s all you care about,” she mimicked Rainbow’s voice poorly, “Twilight Sparkle, biggest egghead around trapped in a literal nightmare and all she cares about is how many books there are to read.”

“Well it was a joke, Rainbow!” Twilight said, whirling towards Loyalty’s empty throne. “Of course I know that books are the least of my problems! But if I stay here, I’ll never figure any of this out! I can’t just hope the answers come to me! I can only learn how this happened through exploration!” Twilight’s last words echoed, hanging heavily in the air. She blinked, trying to stem the tears just about ready to flow. “Plus, if I stay here…” She looked bleakly at each empty throne, her eyes finally falling towards Spike’s smaller chair at Magic’s side. This time, she couldn’t keep her tears from spilling. “I’ll just be reminded of the ponies I miss the most.”

Twilight sank to her haunches and wept.

After a day’s rest, it only took Twilight a few hours to gather the essentials. She prepared enough food through her farming spells, and magicked up a few hoof-sized rain clouds into sealable glass jars. On her command, they would expel the rain inside and create perfectly safe drinking water. If she had been in any other situation, she would have been pretty proud of herself. As it was, her preparations to leave barely brought a smile to her lips.

After packing some quills and ink, she added some vials and other scientific equipment she might need for experimentations along the way. If she could find anything that might bring her closer to a solution to all of this, she didn’t want to waste any time finding the proper necessities.

Which left just one more item to pack.

Twilight trotted into the palace library, eyes scanning over every spine.

After waking encased inside that crystal, one of the first things Twilight had done was come here to think. To find a way out of this mess. Being as pragmatic as she was, the first thing she’d hoped to find was her journal – anything that might have cleared up the buzz in her head where her memories of this whole incident should have been. Unfortunately, she’d come up empty hooved. She’d checked every inch of the library and every other room in the whole palace, but she never found it. Whether or not somepony had taken it purposely was beyond her, all she knew was that right now, she needed something to keep her thoughts in check.

She might be the only pony left alive in all of Equestria, but Twilight still didn’t feel comfortable talking out everything she found out loud, it felt too much like madness. At least with a journal she wouldn’t feel self-conscious about it. Besides, she had more control that way.

Finding a spare journal on one of the shelves, Twilight levitated it towards her. Blowing off the dust that had manifested on it, she slid the book into her growing saddle bags. That was the last thing on her check list that she would need to carry.

Despite only taking very short ventures out of the palace since she had arrived, Twilight knew that the new ‘climate’ of Equestria was hot and dusty. There was a burn to the air, an uncomfortable sizzle that went right to the skin that reminded Twilight rather unsettlingly of radiation. Still, with a few rudimentary protection spells, she reasoned that whatever damaging particles in the air wouldn’t be able to do much harm to her. Of course, even with her skin protected, that still left the dry winds spitting dust and granules into her eyes.

Rainbow Dash had gifted Twilight with a pair of brass flying goggles shortly after she’d been given her wings. They were useful, though because Twilight had always preferred teleportation to flying, she’d used them rarely. Now, she could finally find a proper use for them.
They still existed in the same spot where Twilight had left them in her bedroom, which did give praise to the pre-existing theory that this dimension was somehow her own, but Twilight refused to pay it mind. Instead she slipped the goggles over her eyes, put on some green boots to protect her hooves from the hot rubble, and finally headed outside.

This is Twilight Sparkle, as, uh, you might have already been made aware. In this journal, my aim is simple: to remain sane. Also, to document what I see here in this strange new otherworld.

I’ve already lost track of how long I’ve been here, but a little while ago I awoke inside a crystal easily the size of five ponies with no memory of how I got there. Even more distressingly, once I escaped, I found that the world I had awoken to was nothing like the one I had left.

There is nothing here. It’s a wasteland of a world, much like the one I saw in one of Starlight’s many alternate realities. If this is somehow a world where I never made friends with the Elements of Harmony… then I’m not sure how I can get back.

And although I hate to admit it, a part of me wonders if that is even the case. My palace remains exactly like the one I left. The goggles Rainbow Dash left me were still in my bedroom, the dresses Rarity made for me still in my closet (albeit a little dusty). Spike’s bed is still in the palace, which must mean that I hatched him as a filly. If all these things remain true… then can I be in an alternate reality at all?

There is a dome around this world – whatever world it is – and I aim to find where the dome ends. Whatever happened to this world, my journals have gone missing, which means somepony didn’t want me to know the truth. Perhaps it was the same pony responsible for trapping me inside the crystal. My first theory was that the castle had saved my life under the stress of a catastrophic event… but now I’m beginning to wonder.

Because if the palace could have saved my life, then why not Spike’s? Why not my friends’? Because if the palace had my best interests at heart, it wouldn’t have left me alone. I was… I am the Princess of Friendship, but now it seems I no longer have any friends to guide me. I need to find the truth. I need to know what happened and if there is any way to reverse it.

My first stop is the Everfree Forest. It’s dangerous, I know, but if anything could have survived an event like this, it would be the wildlife that resides there. As well as that, in one of Starlight’s corrupted realities, I found Zecora hiding there with a group of my friends. If anypony has survived, then I want to find them. I have to hold on to that chance, no matter how slim. I refuse to believe I’m the only pony left in Equestria.
Furthermore, somepony made that dome. Somepony is responsible for this. I simply can’t be the only pony alive. And a spell that large… that consuming… it could have only been created by another Alicorn.

Which means somewhere out there, the princesses must still be alive. Celestia, Luna, Cadence, even little Flurry Heart… I will find you all.

I’m confident of that.

Author's Notes:

Hi guys, I've been away a while and I thought I'd try out some ideas in an all-new story. Tell me if you like it!