Journey Through Nightmares and Dreams

Earlier that day, Canterlot.

The smell struck her first: thick, hot and choking. Around her, the grasslands began to crisp and char under the unbearable heat of the sun. She felt her coat crisp and curl, and her feathers singing in the sudden blast of heat.

“Celestia!” She cried, “What are you doing, sister? Do you not remember what happened to me?”

Nightmare Celestia laughed, harsh and wild as the sun grew hotter and hotter. The forests burst into flame and the grass all around turned to ash.  Everywhere, survivors huddled under the paltry shade of unicorn magic and scurried into caves, trying to escape from the terrifying sun; not bright and beautiful anymore but menacing and deadly hot.

She found the elements all around her, looking as they had all those centuries ago.

“Celestia! Do not make me…” Banish you.

Awareness came in an instant.

Luna snapped awake.

It was a dream, a nightmare of what her sister must have gone through. Except more terrifying and deadlier by far. Her endless night would have been calm compared to Nightmare Celestia’s molten rampage.

The smell of burning grass, singing hair and feathers lingered in the air, still vivid and rasping her throat. She could almost feel the heat still upon her coat and checked, just to make sure, that she wasn't singed. It had been so real.

"A dream," she mumbled and snorted to clear the rancid smell out of her nose. Of course it did no good; the smell was a memory, not a real thing.

The past month had been day after day of interrupted sleep and worry. Had she left behind all of the envy and hatred that had attracted the nightmare to her? Was the nightmare trying to come after her again?

It certainly didn't feel like it had the first time. Then, the nightmares had been dreams, promises, whispers of promised glory and venomous whispers of adoration stolen by her sister.

Not these terrifying visions of a land where she and Celestia traded places. She wasn't sure if she could have done the necessary thing her sister had done.

The nightmares had interrupted her ever since the last Summer Sun celebration. They were getting gradually worse, always leading towards the same point in time. She was losing sleep, but tried her best not to let it show lest she worry her sister and her guards.

"What is happening to me?" She asked aloud, speaking to the only other occupant of the room, "I’ve never had such dark nightmares."

She scrubbed at her muzzle with the edge of her hoof, but couldn't get the smell out of her nose still. The smell of smoke mixed with the feelings of terror and helplessness  brought back too many dark memories; of Discord, Sombra, and the fight with her sister. Not memories that she wished to hang on to.

But they were memories she would hold onto for a lifetime. They were, each of them, a lesson that she and her sister had paid a high price to learn and she would hold tight to those memories, even if only to remind herself of the lesson she learned.

Moments later, as the adrenaline from waking to such a nightmare wore off, all thought of lessons learned and the past were swept away by a wave of nauseous exhaustion. She lay her head back down, trying to put her thoughts in order but all she could think about was the lost sleep she had suffered from in the last few weeks.

Fatigue and accumulated stress weighted down her mind and lent a sluggishness to her thoughts that she tried to throw off. Not that she tried terribly hard. There was something to be said about laying in a comfortable bed, just resting. All the lost hours of sleep agreed.

She tried to push the memory of the dream out of her mind, but could not and instead lay there in a delirium, pondering the stitching on a pillow.

She shuffled about and stretched her wings and her legs out to cover almost all of the spacious bed. A conclusion that she had been putting off began to filter back in through the sluggish thoughts until she couldn’t deny it any longer.

"Not going back to sleep today... Might as well get up." She ought to at least look after the correspondence her sister was sure to have left her.

Stay a while, the bed whispered to her. See, there's even a bit of warm sunlight to keep you company.

Her conviction wavered and sleep beckoned again, weighting her eyelids and forcing a muzzy blanket over her thoughts again.

The bed certainly was soft, and it made a convincing argument. Maybe just another hour? She let herself drift off again, the warm sliver of sunlight lulling her back to sleep.

Nightmare Celestia was there, waiting for her.

She snapped awake again, more alert this time. How long had she been asleep this time? A check of the sliver of sunlight suggested at least an hour, maybe two. At least it was something.

"Pathetic," she said again to the only other occupant of the spacious bed, a doll. "I should not be having this much trouble with my own dreams. Am I not the Guardian of Dreams?" But who was there to guard her own dreams?

She had tried, more than once, to look in on her own dreams, only to find that she had to be asleep and dreaming to do so, when she couldn't readily enter the dream world with all of her powers.

"What use is it being the Guardian of Dreams," she complained to Celestia after on a night just a brief time after her return as Luna, "if I cannot protect my own dreams from nightmares?"

"If you watched over your own dreams, whenever would you find the time to enjoy them? Nightmares too are a part of what we must face, Luna. We learn from them just as we take comfort in our dreams," was the answer.

She supposed her sister had been right, but even so it irked her that nightmares could trouble her. Hadn’t she endured plenty of nightmares? None of them, however, had ever been so persistently disturbing before. She supposed she could learn something from them. They did bring up more insecurities about her past after all.

What could be learned from them?

What if their roles had been reversed? Could she have done what Celestia had done? Could she have ruled so well and peacefully for the last thousand years?

Could she have stayed sane?

Pondering the past and possibilities isn't going to do anything for you, she thought, get your mind off the nightmare and try to get to sleep a little later.

"Yes. That will work," she grunted. Another stretch of time passed, marked by the slow advance of the sliver of light across the bed, before she sighed and finally slipped out of bed.

In the crumpled mess of pillows, sheets and blankets lay the most prized gift her sister had ever given her. A thousand years had passed since she'd been given the doll and it still looked as new as the day it had been given. That it had been an attempt to appease and calm an increasingly volatile Luna hadn't diminished its value.

"Tia," she cooed, nudging the doll lightly. "Come on, wake up."

The white silk doll with the rainbow mane and tail so resembled her sister that sometimes she found herself talking to it as she would the real pony. Not just in appearance, but also in mannerisms and action. It wasn't just a doll with floppy cloth legs that sat around and did nothing more than look pretty.

Tia was a magical doll, granted a pseudo-life and personality that matched her sister almost exactly, or at least the sister that had been a thousand years ago. Celestia now was more demure, less prone to random acts of weirdness.

That it took after her sister was not terribly surprising. The doll had been enchanted by both Starswirl and Celestia together, a joint spell that had lasted the ages. Perhaps it had a bit of Starswirl's odd self in it as well. Sometimes she could almost hear the old mage laughing when the doll squeaked its high pitched laughter.

"Come on, sleepyhead," she cooed at it again before climbing out of bed and stretching.

It stretched with her and yawned, its cloth mouth surprisingly realistic, even down to the tiny white wooden teeth. It didn't make any move, however, to get out of bed, seeming perfectly content to lay there basking in a tiny sliver of sunshine.

“Show off,” she chided, but let it lay there anyway. At least somepony would get some sleep, even if that somepony was a doll.

She wandered through the clutter and oddly arranged furniture to another window and pulled back the curtains to let the warm, gentle sunlight wash over. Her sister sure knew how to make the sunlight warm and inviting, even in the midst of a summer swelter.

Outside, the castle grounds were bustling with activity. Merchants, nobles, commoners and guards all wandered more or less freely about the courtyard, conducting their business or waiting for an audience with her sister.

She knew all too well just how hectic today was going to be for Celestia. That many callers in the courtyard meant far too many ponies with problems for her sister to solve. Still, it was fascinating to watch them go about their business.

The bustling of the ponies down below occupied her attention for some time. The lives of her subjects were still something of a mystery to her and it was endlessly fascinating for her to imagine what kinds of things they were talking about.

Sleep called to her again as she rested her muzzle on the window sill. She shook it off and let the curtain fall closed again and stumbled backwards to her feet. Spots swam in her vision from the sudden lack light.

The room vanished into darkness and dim shapes loomed everywhere she looked. Fighting back the urge to panic, she stepped back from the window and crashed into an armoire that her panicked mind swore wasn't there a second ago.

"Keep a hold of your wits," she whispered to herself.

The darkness did not bother her most any night or day, but suddenly it felt like the nooks and crannies created by the various and sundry of gifts hid menaces and dangers of an entirely un-imaginary sort. She forced back the fears and steadied her breathing.

Several deep breaths later, she called up a bright azure light to scatter the shadows and splintered the spell, sending its magic into the lanterns scattered about the chamber. The shadows obediently retreated, leaving her room bathed in a soothing blue.

"Am I going crazy?" she asked of Tia and the room's shadows few remaining shadows.

When Tia only looked at her, tilting its head as though it hadn't understood the question, she sighed. "What a question... I talk to you, don't I?" She wasn't sure if that meant she was crazy or not.

Tia only looked at her. A smile creased the doll's mouth and it chirped once, then stood up and pranced around in a circle before sitting back down, still looking at her.

"Very reassuring."

For some reason, the scent of burning fur and feathers wouldn't leave her, even though she was certain that she had left the dream. Maybe she was going crazy... Just to be sure, though, she checked a mirror and looked all around, but found no trace of singed fur or even so much as a feather out of place or even any candles that might have burned down to the last bit of wick.

"Maybe I am," she commented finally. "Is this how you go crazy? Bit by bit like this? It didn't feel that way before. Back when-" she cut herself off and sighed. Back before Nightmare Moon.

"I might as well get to it," she continued. "The business of the night won’t take care of itself.”

She sat at her desk and began to read through the scrolls, signing or re-addressing them as appropriate and trying to keep the smell of burning fur out of her mind as much as possible.

On the bed, Tia began to bounce around, squeaking and chattering her teeth at her. It wasn’t until the doll made a stand atop a small mound of pillows, pointed a padded hoof her way and went off on a long, squeaky tirade that Luna finally put down the scroll she had been staring at and glared at the doll.

“Tia! Stop that, I’m trying to work.”

Try being the operative word, she thought.

The scroll she put down was a long, well organized letter from Twilight Sparkle on the nature of comets. It was well documented, cited several well-known sources and probably would have been accepted by any astronomer as a wonderful treatise on the nature of the celestial bodies. It was very informative. And utterly dry.

The doll didn’t seem to care and only chattered more forcefully.

“Fine, be that way.”

She pulled the doll off the bed with a spell. It squeaked and grabbed at a pillow, then another, flailing about and trying to hang onto the bed.

"Oh hush," she chided. She lifted it over and set it down next to the velvet covered crystal globe that she used by night to wander the dreams of others. "Just sit there and keep me company, please Tia?"

She rubbed at her nose with a hoof and sneezed.

That smell was really starting to bother her, and it seemed to get only stronger, not weaker, the longer she was awake. She supposed she could ask the guard outside if he smelled it too, but she knew it would be reported eventually to the real Celestia and she didn't want her sister to worry about her.

After having spent a day handling all of Celestia's affairs, she had firsthand knowledge that her sister didn't need any more headaches.

Just like the headache that the miniature version of her sister was being. It had gotten a hold of a tassel on the cloth covering the crystal globe she used to view dreams and enter the dream world and was worrying it back and forth like a dog.

"'Seriously? You-" what she would have said next died on her tongue as the doll tore off the velvet cover.

The crystal of the sphere, normally clouded with white and grey smoke obscuring barely seen images from other ponies dreams, was now a deep red, nearly black and seemed to ooze and pulse with vile intent. The red glow intensified a hundredfold for less than a heartbeat before vanishing, leaving behind only a faint afterimage in her eye as a reminder that it had ever been there.

"Tia, did you see that? Tell me I'm not going crazy!"

The doll was cowering under the cloth that had fallen atop it, tented about its wings and horn. Only Tia's muzzle showed under the edge. She could almost feel the doll's fear, if dolls could be said to have fear.

"It was there, I know it was. I'm not going crazy," she declared, then covered her face with her foreleg, feeling absurd for having said that to a doll. "Shut up," she told it.

The crystal's surface clouded again suddenly and pulsed red, for just a moment so brief that Luna almost missed it and would have if she hadn't been staring intently into its surface.

The brief blink, for Luna could think of no other word to describe it, felt like it was the act of some other force watching her.

"Watch over things here," she told Tia, feeling absurd once again talking to a doll, but she didn't have any time to waste.

She called up her magic and wove together the spell that would send her mind into the dream world through the sphere.

On the other side of the veil of dreams, Luna found herself adrift in a star field awash in blood and speckled with black spots. The dreamscape pulsed and throbbed around her, pressing in against her mind with all the intensity of her nightmare. Images of Nightmare Celestia percolated through her waking mind.

“Begone!”

She pushed back at the images, aware now that they were not her own nightmares but those imposed upon her by a dangerously sneaky foe. She let her rage banish the fatigue, embracing the red hot core of determination and fury borne of the knowledge that her realm had been so cruelly and systematically violated.

Focusing her magic, she formed and cast a spell to impose seldom seen order upon the dreams of those few ponies who slept during the day. Her azure power scoured away the clinging inky red filth that clung to the pathways she carved into the dream.

The red hue wavered as her power flooded the dream-world and each dream floated in to settle at the end of a spiral pathway, orderly and easy to follow. The red glow faded across the entirety of the void, diminishing until it stood out as only a single mote settled squarely in the middle of the pathways through the garden of dreams she created.

She let the rage seethe and boil, calming herself as she walked the pathways towards the dream that even now quivered and struggled to break free of the bonds that held it.

Each dream she passed offered up a little bit of information about itself and its owner as she came near, and each calmed as her power steadied. The pleasant dreams she passed helped to calm her further. She would need a clear head to face a foe that had hid its face successfully from her for a month. She kept the worry at bay, held back by the bits of her fury that had solidified into cold, hard knots.

The dream shrouded by the nightmare told her its owner was a mother without a child and a sister without a sibling. That would have intrigued Luna and enticed her to ponder the meaning of the identity any other time, but there was little enough of that and she couldn’t spend it mulling over the sometimes strange ways that her subjects saw themselves.

Who are you, Luna thought, pondering the dark dream and the message of fear that underlay its owners identity, and why is this nightmare so interested in you?

This close to the nightmare, she could feel the influence it still had on the mare it held in its thrall. Grief and fear and an unreasoning terror gripped her. Luna could only imagine what the nightmare was doing to her.

She was about to dive into the nightmare and free the mare of it when it reacted to her presence.

Luna felt a phantom pain hit her in the chest and the dream in front of her wavered, dimming. Realization and horror struck her. The nightmare was trying to kill her subject. There was no time for subtlety.

"Enough!"

Luna dove into the dream in a blaze of azure power, sundering the darkness and scattering the nightmare into shreds as she tore apart the vile shroud and found herself standing in Ponyville. All around her, the nightmare fled rather than face her. Little pieces of it flared and died as she turned her rage upon them, unleashing bolt after bolt of dark blue lightning upon them.

In the fading moments of the dream, as its owner woke, she caught a glimpse of what must have been the dreamer, a unicorn with a light green coat and blue mane, staring at her with her hooves as she stood above the lifeless body of another unicorn mare that Luna could have sworn she had seen somewhere before.

Then the dream burst like a bubble as the unknown dreamer, the mother without a foal, woke.

Miles away, Celerity Bellweather opened her eyes to the concerned faces of Gizmo and Nurse Redheart, a throbbing pain fading away in her chest. The nightmare was gone, banished between one heartbeat and the next by the Princess of the Night in a terrifying, and welcome, display of power.

The nightmare still burned in her mind, haunting her. She had been forced to kill her own daughter, and she hadn't been able to tell it wasn’t real. Worse, everypony cheered her onward as she did it.

She focused on the fact that it was a dream as Redheart shouted for a cart, burying the image of her daughter, still and lifeless and hers the hooves that stood upon her neck.

It was just a nightmare, she told herself. In the middle of the day while standing around wide awake and waiting for my luggage. Tales of darkness creeping from a well of eternal shadow didn’t sound quite so far-fetched anymore. She needed to look into her sister's diary more closely. Maybe Lyra could help.