Palace of Frost
Twilight was confused. She'd gone to sleep the previous night, and had awoken to find her castle completely covered in ice.
"Spike," she called to her young dragon assistant.
There was no response. She called to him again.
"Spike!"
Nothing. She attempted to enter his room, but it too was sealed off by the frozen water.
"What's going on here?"
Twilight tried to use a heat spell to melt the ice, but it had no effect.
"This is impossible! Even magical ice can be melted by a simple heat spell!"
She left the area where Spike's room was. She attempted to melt the ice that sealed off the entrances and exits to the castle. Even the balcony was blocked off by a window of frost. After her attempts to melt the ice failed, she tried brute force.
"Darn it. Why won't this ice shatter?"
After she'd exhausted all possibilities, Twilight returned to her room. What she saw destroyed her very will to exist.
"That's…Me?"
Her body lay on the bed, lifeless and still. No motion was detectable at all.
"This must mean…I've passed away…"
Twilight was now aware of what was going on, but she wasn't sure why she was here in her castle. She'd thought her soul was supposed to transcend the mortal realm when she died, but it clearly had not.
That's when it hit her.
"This is…My own spiritual world. I'm completely alone here."
She had read many books on spirituality before. Ironically, this scenario was one of the least accepted theories. The most popular beliefs were that a pony's consciousness would either disappear entirely or it would move on to someplace else. Twilight subscribed to the latter because she believed the princesses were actually goddesses. Now though, what was happening around her seemed to prove her notion entirely wrong. She left the room and sat upon her now frozen throne.
When she did, these words escaped her lips.
"I dwell in grief after I die; the landscapes, so below.
I harken up. The sunset choir sings from the palace of frost; the place where I shall dwell now, the palace for the lost…"
…The End…
