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As you touch the sun emblem, waves of heat crash around you and light eddies around you in
bursts of fierce whiteness, too bright to look at. When you open your eyes, a tiny sunbeam
peers at you from an impossibly distant horizon framed with great pillars of red stone."Oh!" someone behind you says. "Hello!" Turning, you find yourself face to face with a little yellow pony. "I'm Sunblaze," she introduces herself. "But who are you? You weren't here a minute ago!" "Well, there were these little stone symbols, and I touched one . . . and I ended up here." "Oh, do those still work? Why, we haven't used them in centuries!" The earthling opens her eyes wide in astonishment. "Well, you are welcome to stay in the Sun Palace as long as you wish!" Sunblaze says, waving a hoof. "The Sun Palace?" As you pivot to see what Sunblaze is pointing at, you catch sight of a monolithic golden dome fingered by the first creeping rays of sunlight. A few bolder beams play over the smooth sheen of gold, blazing along the barely visible furrows which quarter it. "You live in that?" you boggle. Your amazement increases as the quartered sections of the dome smoothly pull apart like some bizarre flower unhurriedly spreading gigantic petals. Perhaps the strangest aspect of the operation is the complete silence. Something so large and complex ought to grind or hum or clank . . . but the rustling of the straggling and sunburnt desert plants has no competition from the dome. To your surprise, the four quarters of the dome do not open all the way, but merely unfold until they stand more or less vertical. "It gets so cold at night that we close up the dome," explains Sunblaze, noticing your jaw attempting to reach the ground. "Come along and I can show you around." You obediently follow her, still staring. As she leads you around one side of the structure, you are unable to draw your eyes from the gleam of an elegant castle standing in lofty isolation between the four "petals" of the dome. Like the protective covering, the castle is all agleam with beaten gold; statues of ponies, absurdly large and impossibly muscular, decorate many of the balconies where the early-rising inhabitants of the palace lounge against golden filaments which delicately arch and intertwine into protective railings. "It's so beautiful!" you breathe. Sunblaze tosses her red mane proudly. "It is rather impressive, isn't it? Of course, seeing it every day we get used to it--" "What are those?" you interrupt, peering into the shadowy concavities of a curving slice of dome. You can barely discern shadowy terraces in the early morning light. "Oh, you know. Parks, gardens, farms . . . there are even a few shops in there, I think." "But . . . wouldn't they fall apart when the dome closes??" "Well, everything in the shops is either nailed down or hooked down," Sunblaze explains. "And the unicorns use their magic to help with the plants. They're very rugged plants," she adds as an afterthought. "Well, here's the palace! What do you want to see first?"
My Little Pony is copyrighted to Hasbro.
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