“Date is... according to my phone, May 30th 2013; time is 1:38AM. I'm holed up in a restaurant called 'Chez Veneto', judging by the sign outside, in a language I know I've never learned to read but can anyway. Apparently this place used to be an eatery in this city called Canterlot, which is someplace that isn't Earth. There's a quarter-full moon out that's about twenty times the size of the one I expected to be up in the sky, way more stars than I've ever seen, and... fuck me, I haven't seen a single living thing since I woke up here, but I can't get past this feeling that I'm not alone in this place.

“I don't know why I'm recording this. I've gotten past the idea that I've just lost my mind or I'm in a coma, because I seriously don't think I could dream up anything this weird or this vivid. So right now I don't have a choice but to assume I really am stuck on some alien world, freezing my ass off in a broken-down city where everything's about twenty percent smaller than it should be. Which means that those voices I heard when I blacked out have to have been real, too- so they'd better be getting back to me soon and start explaining things.”

He clicked off the recording app, watching his breath fog up the screen of his phone before he shut it off. The battery meter was already down one bar, and with nothing resembling an electrical plug anywhere in sight and still no signal available, conserving power was his best bet. He did have spare batteries for the flashlight, though, so he wasn't being terribly conservative in using that.

At the moment he was curled up in the disused broom closet he'd woken up in, using a couple of spare tablecloths he'd found in a storeroom as blankets while he read one of the menus. Oddly enough, almost every meal on the menu seemed to be some Italian dish- though the prices were listed in something called “bits”, and practically everything that had something analogous to an English name seemed to involve some play on words with horse terms. I suppose that makes sense in a city called “Canterlot”, he mused, blowing on his hands to warm them. Damn it, why is it so cold here? Figures, the only tourist in town pops in when everything's closed for winter.

And there he sat for a bit more than an hour, going between staring at the walls and staring at darkness, with nothing to spend his attention on. Any hopes that he would succumb to fatigue and fall asleep ticked away with the minutes, until he found himself pacing around just for warmth and something to do. His eyes kept flicking to the door.

Finally, at around three in the morning, he let out a sigh of irritation and put his hand on the cold metal of the doorknob. “Okay, time to go be an idiot just because there's nothing else to do,” he muttered to himself before opening the door.

The air was even more frigid than before, cutting through his light jacket and jeans like they weren't even there. Jacob took a couple of minutes to carefully wrap the tablecloths around his body underneath the jacket, providing an extra layer to keep his body's heat from being stolen away, then headed back out. “Damn, must be near zero, if not below,” he muttered to himself as he once more walked through the run-down restaurant and out into the street.

Now that he was paying proper attention to his surroundings, he found himself unnerved by how quiet everything was. Aside from a very occasional gust of wind, nothing made any sort of sound- maybe understandable for the temperature and time, but still unnerving. Hearing every attempt he made at walking quietly echo down the empty streets did little for his sense of security, as well.

CLACK-clack-clack-tick-tickticktick

The same went for random pieces of debris falling down a pile of rubble. Jacob let out the breath he was holding in a cloud of white mist as he played the beam of his flashlight across a chunk of rock that had dropped off the facade of what seemed to be a clock shop. After a moment, curiosity- and a desire to get somewhere even fractionally less cold than outside- won out, and he carefully stepped into the building.

Countless glass, metal and polished wooden clock faces gleamed as his light flicked across them. The walls and ceiling of the place seemed relatively stable, with little visible damage; inside, however, hadn't fared quite so well. Many of the shelves and display tables had collapsed, spilling their contents onto whatever happened to be beneath them- mostly the floor. The clocks themselves- mostly designed with a horse motif- had weathered the time well, though, and many looked as though they were ready to run with just some oil and winding.

In fact, there was only one clock he could find that had suffered any damage not related to falling. A gleaming white porcelain clock, gilded with gold and crafted in the shape of a winged unicorn with a strange halo, had suffered some sort of impact, and a spiderweb of cracks covered the glass cover of the timepiece; a brown, flaky trail of some substance traced a zigzag line along the cracks, and a single hair- it seemed green underneath the light, but that couldn't be right- was caught in the cover's golden rim. Nothing nearby suggested what might have hit the clock hard enough to cause that sort of damage- the windows it faced were still intact, if cracked and dirty, so nothing could have come through them to hit it, and nothing on the floor in the area seemed capable of producing the necessary impact.

Jacob groaned and rubbed his forehead when he realized what he was doing. I'm actually analyzing what happened here? he thought. Not the best time and place, maybe, Jake? I should be looking for a way home, or at least some place I can hole up safely until morning-

Something flickered in the reflection on one of the intact clocks near him. Instantly Jacob clicked off his flashlight and ducked down, scrambling towards the counter and peeking around it. There, out in the street, lit by the enormous moon that still hung in the sky- was that a cloud of dust, kicked up by something? It was gone before he could be sure he'd actually seen it. Regardless, he kept himself as still as he possibly could, scarcely daring to breathe, until he was sure that whatever had moved- if it was anything at all- wasn't going to return.

The clock shop held no answers for him, nor anything else actually useful, so he vacated it and carefully made his way down the street. It was becoming apparent that he was in some kind of commercial district, a variety of shops lining both sides of the road; some of the buildings had all but collapsed, rubble blocking their entrances and cluttering the street, while others were remarkably intact. One such store seemed to be a grocer's, and as Jacob took a quick look inside, he realized just how rustic it was- there were no refrigerators, nothing remained that looked to have been prepackaged, and even the cash register was one of those old-style mechanical ones that- once he got it open- held small golden coins, each one marked with a stylized sun on one side and a similar moon on the other.

But while the coins would've netted him a small fortune at home, here they were absolutely worthless. And the rows of shelves filled with long-since-rotted fruits and vegetables reminded him of another problem he faced- finding food. He had enough snacks and water in his travel pack to see him through a day, maybe two if he rationed tightly enough, but what then? It was glaringly obvious that this entire place had sat unattended for years, if not decades... unless he was lucky enough to find some forgotten, overgrown garden, hunger was going to be a serious concern fairly soon down the line.

Ranking above even that was shelter from the elements. The cold was seriously proving to be a problem; if the air stirred above a slight breeze somewhere he couldn't easily hide from it, he'd be in a lot of trouble. Then the idea hit him. There's a bunch of stores around here... how hard could it be to find a clothing shop? Any little bit is going to help here.

“How hard could it be” turned out to be an hour-plus of searching, having to double back a couple of times because of blocked roadways, and even climbing over a pile of rubble to get at an area that didn't seem accessible any other way. The effort paid off, though- just past the rubble was what had to have once been a very colorful store, if the remaining flakes of paint were any clue, with a partially destroyed sign reading “-dship is Fashion”. This building was fairly rare amongst all the ones Jacob had seen thus far, as it had three floors instead of the usual one or two- and the interior was remarkably intact, with only some cracking along the walls and the typical thick layer of dust.

When he got inside, though, Jacob found himself even more confused. Not just at how old-timey it seemed- all of the hanging clothing seemed to be made there in the shop; nothing had any brand labels that he recognized- but the fact that all of it hung on mannequins in the shape of horses. Small horses, too, barely past the size of a pony. And the strangeness of it all meant that it took him a full five minutes of staring around at the bizarre dress figures before all the facts clicked together in his mind.

Buildings with low ceilings and small doorways. A grocery store with only fruits and vegetables. Clocks with an equine theme. Clothing designed for small horses; accessories looking like a collaboration between a fashion show and a tack shop. Even the city name, Canterlot. What the hell, I'm in Horseyland, the place where everything's made for four-foot-tall ponies.

Made for... made by?

He decided that he needed to sit down. And so he did, in a heap in the middle of that dusty floor, not even caring about the light grey cloud that rose up around him. It was just too much for him to take in- stuck somewhere not just unknown, but alien. He could potentially, by some extreme rationalization and self-delusion, deal with somehow being on another planet, even one populated with small ponies... but a world where he was sifting through their ruins like a clueless accidental archaeologist? The number of things that could go wrong for him here- even fatally so- was more than he wanted to contemplate.

thwack

He was moving before his mind even really registered that he'd heard a sound, taking cover behind one of the dress forms and glancing out over it. The windows were filmed over with dust and grime, but he could just make out a shadow playing across the glass; something was moving across the roof of the building across the street... several somethings, in fact. And just at the edge of the window, a shape was visible- laying flat in the road, twitching madly. It sounded like a bit of a ruckus was going on, but with the thick doors and windows closed he couldn't really hear it.

Between a morbid curiosity and a desire to be above ground floor if anything came barging in, Jacob took to the stairs as quietly as he could manage, finding a fairly average-looking living area on the second floor. Both of the rooms facing out the same way as the storefront were bedrooms, so he simply picked the right-hand one and cracked its window open, thankful that it didn't make any noise audible over the snarling and growling going on outside.

At first it looked like a pack of wild dogs, or exceptionally large wolves, were clustered around one of their own lying on its side. But there was enough light to see that the resemblance was only artificial- they weren't really canines; they didn't even appear to be proper animals, their forms consisting of twisted and gnarled branches, mouths bedecked with thorns for teeth, and baleful yellow-green dots of light where eyes would be on anything normal.

Judging by its position and the amount of debris around it that Jacob knew hadn't been there before, it seemed that the fallen creature had taken a tumble off of one of the rooftops and landed very badly on the street. It was struggling to get up, but its rear legs were only twitching, and something was leaking... sap?... onto the cobblestone, while the rest of its pack sort of milled around looking confused and upset.

Then one of them- slightly larger than the others, and poised in a way that suggested “pack leader”- turned its head. For one blood-chilling moment, Jacob thought he'd done something to be noticed- but the creature was looking up the street. With a short snarl, it jerked its head back, then turned and tore up the street like its brambled tail was on fire; the rest of its pack followed suit just as quickly, minus their downed member, who feebly tried to drag itself after them, whimpering all the while.

After the last creature- wood-dog? No, wait, timberwolf? came the ludicrous thought- cleared the tall pile of debris up the road, Jacob made ready to close the window... but he found himself watching the injured wolf still struggle its way across the cobblestones, leaving a trail of sap behind it; a warm, steadily-increasing wind made it impossible to hear the timberwolf's pathetic whimpers. Only now did it dawn on him that the creature wasn't trying to follow its pack, but instead seemed to be desperately trying to reach a closer mound of rubble at the end of the block.

He'd just realized that the stars had faded away and the skies had brightened when something half-blinded him. He closed his eyes for a moment and raised his hand to block out the bright light; once his vision cleared again, he realized that he'd been blinded by sunlight reflected off of the very pile of crumbled stone the wolf had been trying to reach... though as bright as it was, it seemed more like someone was turning an enormous, sunlight-colored spotlight down the street. Shimmering heat was already rising from the top of the rubble even as the sunlight seemed to crawl down it.

The timberwolf was not taking this development well. It had already reversed course, practically pressing itself against the ground while dragging itself forward with a fervor that, had the wolf still owned four working limbs, probably would have set a new land-speed record. Even above the now-howling wind, he could hear it yelp in terror as it scrambled to get away from the advancing line of illumination.

It wasn't nearly quick enough. The moment the sunlight hit its tail, the wooden limb burst into flames like kindling; the timberwolf practically screamed, not giving up in its futile efforts in the least. But the unforgiving sun kept moving, and that bright light made its way up the creature's back, fire springing up in its wake like napalm.

The entirety of its lower body was aflame and the top of its head had just caught fire when Jacob slammed the window shut and scrambled away from it like it was about to attack him. A simple, entirely innocuous-sounding warning from a disembodied voice echoed through his mind.

Avoid the sun.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck.” He threw the curtains closed- as if the gauzy linen would do squat versus a solar laser- and made his way back down to the bottom floor, finding a windowless storage room still filled with various fabrics and slamming the door shut. He could only pray that he wouldn't bake inside the house, that the incredibly intense sunlight wouldn't superheat the entire building and broil him. He flicked his flashlight on and took a look around at the various rolls and folds of fabric around him. “Well, at least I picked a fashionable place to die,” he muttered to himself, leaning against the wall.

With the adrenaline fading from his system, he felt fatigue hit him like a train; somehow he managed to muster the energy to gather some of the swaths into a makeshift bed and pillow, and undressed partway, stashing his gear and supplies on a shelf next to him before getting as comfortable as he could in a strange room that he fully expected to become an oven, and his tomb, all in one go.

Despite the feeling of foreboding, he was asleep almost as soon as his head touched fabric.

(-)

Sister! It... no, he... returns!

So I see. Good that he survived his first night. This bodes well.

Indeed. Friend... as much as we regret your appearance here, it is imperative that you work with us and listen carefully to what we tell you. We-

Sister, can you not sense? He is frightened. Obviously the impact of what is happening has fully struck. Friend... please. We both understand your feelings. We would not ask this of you were it not utterly necessary. But without your help, all of us are doomed!

Sister, I fear that there can be no preparing him for what comes next. As different as he is from us... can he adapt?

We can only hope. Friend, as difficult as what is to come will be, it is necessary. My sister and I have found a way with which all that has happened can be undone- but we are powerless to travel this path. You, however, are not. You will be given a form and knowledge to help you blend in, but to help us, you will need to learn more. Sister, are you ready?

I am. We may begin at any time.

Good. Friend... what you will find, what you will become, will seem strange to you. Perhaps even beyond your ability to adapt. But you have come this far... please, we beg you, use this opportunity. Only you may learn what destroyed us- what destroyed everything we knew.

There was a bright flash.