"When did you first realize that it was going to be different from all of the other times, that you were in trouble you might not get out of?"

"How did I know we were in trouble? Discord wasn't laughing anymore."

Lightning and thunder flashed and crackled through the sky, arcing between unnatural black clouds and the Giant of Light. The Giant of Light, Adam: an otherworldly being, taller than a full grown dragon, bipedal but with proportions unknown to ponykind. The beast, if it could be called such, as it showed intelligence, was enraged, casting beams of energy from its form, cross shaped explosions burst forth from the ground wherever they struck.

Six ponies stood at the behemoth's feet, looking up at it in awe and fear, their bodies adorned with jeweled necklaces, with the exception of the one, a purple unicorn who wore a jeweled tiara. Beneath the fear and the shock was a grim determination; they would not leave without victory. There was too much at stake to fail, the entire world could end if this creature was allowed to run unchecked.

The noise, the...scream. Haunting, alien, it seemed to permeate the very souls of those who witnessed it, penetrate into the deepest layers of the mind, it felt wrong, angry. Agony. The giant's arm flew up and to the side, a blast issued forth from the palm of its appendage; the beam of coherent energy lanced into a distortion in the air and dissipated in another cross shaped explosion.

"Can they really do it?" the draconequus asked, standing back from the brewing calamity, he was pouring everything he had into holding back the tide of destruction, keeping whatever was building from spreading to the rest of Equestria, the irony not lost on him.

"We must have hope, Discord. If you had told me a month ago that I would be standing beside you as an ally, I would have thought you mad. If anypony can do this, they can." The white alicorn replied, her own face hopeful as she watched the rainbow-hued energy beam of the Elements of Harmony streak towards the barely contained giant.

"I wouldn't need hope if I'd recognized this for what it was, anything that would have woken me up..." Discord tailed off, the rest not needing said, she would know what he meant. He watched with rising panic as the rainbow-energy enveloped the giant, it was... wrong. "It's not working..."

Discord watched in morbid fascination as the energy cone broke up, rebounded back into the six ponies that had created it. The impact knocked them apart like bowling pins: purple, cyan, white, orange, pink, yellow, all scattered by the blast.

Celestia took a few steps towards her ponies, her face twisting from her hopeful smile into rage, "If that doesn't work... I'll have to resort to-"

"No." Discord said, as he grabbed onto her with his right hand, "You can't. I'm changing the laws of physics around him to interfere with what he's doing and it's not even slowing him down. You don't stand a chance against that kind of power... You have to trust the ponies to figure it out... and it looks like they are."

Twilight was on her hooves again, the other five close behind, she was advancing, casting a spell into the element of magic, adding her own energy to this next attack, this last chance to stop the rampaging giant.

Celestia gasped as she read the runes hovering around her star pupil. "Discord, we have to stop her, she's putting too much of herself into that spell, it will kill her if she casts it."

It wasn't a complex spell, with that much power behind it there couldn't be much control. Twilight poured her essence into a wall of force that would blast its way through anything that tried to stop it, unmake it from existence. As she worked she was dimly aware of Celestia mouthing something, but it was far away, unimportant in the face of the task before her. Gathering the last fragments of her power, every last scrap of energy she could summon forth, she formed it into a torrent of raw magic and loosed it into the framework of the spell. There was a blinding light--

Celestia gritted her teeth as she frantically worked a counterspell, drawing on millenia of knowledge to safely disassemble the complex layers of runes constructed before her. Every second she could feel the surge of power building, could see Twilight weakening as she poured her very life into the spell. In a tremendous surge of will, she sent forth a dozen streams of magic, searching for Twilight's essence amongst the roiling waves of raw magical energy. There was a blinding light--

Discord watched the neat, precise march of runes, painful in their orderliness, studying the chaos that invaded them, the tiny infinitesimal flaws which would cause them to catastrophically crack and fail under the raw power of the spell within them. And then he reached out and did something so foreign, so utterly alien to his nature that he barely comprehended the concept of it. Smoothing the fabric of reality, he pulled the chaos away from the most dangerous failures, channeled it away harmlessly. Beneath his feet, tiles cracked and ruptured under the onslaught of raw chaos. There was a blinding light--

Twenty years later...

"All lines are currently busy, please hang up and try again later. All lines are curre-"

The orange pegasus pressed her hoof onto the phone switch and disconnected the call. She'd been sent to New Canterlot by her mother and yet hadn't been told why. 'It's important... That's what matters.' she thought to herself as she stood at the edge of the empty city.

Shops and vending stalls littered the roadsides, and not a pony in sight. It was as if everypony had simply walked away from what they were doing, meals were still on tables, coins still on counter-tops. Her only companion was the cadence in the distance. Tump-Tump. Tump-Thump.

'Wait, what?' she thought in confusion, 'That wasn't there bef-' "Oh my." she finished aloud. Standing over a hill just outside of town, just at the end of the road she was standing on, was a monster the likes of which she had never imagined.

Four hundred hooves tall, if not more, almost avian, almost draconic. It stood tall on two legs, with two spindly arms covered in boney plates coming from shoulders set far too broadly. The entire creature looked wrong, disproportionate and yet... terrifying. It's eyeless face covered in a mask of bone, a sharp beak adorned it, less the beak of a bird and more like a needle...

And it was staring directly at her.