Chapter four: Dream of the dead

I am alone in the morgue. White floor tiles and cold steel walls.

There is an examination table. A shape under the sheet. The tail draped over the edge has all the colors of any given rainbow. I know who’s under there.

I still feel compelled to look under the sheet, as if doing so would reveal she was still alive. As if the sheet was part of a magician’s show.

The sheet is pulled to the floor. The head’s skin is still missing, the white lateral surface almost looks like cotton fabric. Only the closed eye-lids are still blue.

Blue like the sky of the most beautiful day.

Magenta iris. Black pupil.

She’s staring at me with the largest eyes in the world.

“Hey.” A scratchy voice. I am silent.

Rainbow Dash rises up on her front legs.

“What’s up?”

I step back, my legs rubbery.

“Hey, come on,” she chides. “I thought I was your hero. You could at least say hello.”

Something gets tangled in my hooves. The sheet. I lose my balance and land on my rump.

Rainbow Dash smiles at my pratfall.

“Maybe you should say hello to my friends, too.” She waves a hoof behind me.

I turn to see six examination tables. Six shapes under six sheets.

One sits up. The sheet slides off. It’s the stallion that was forced to drink battery acid until his innards dissolved. He smiles at me. Foam slips out the side of his mouth.

He says, “I was killed because I was hated.”

The pony in the nearest table gets up, pulls off his sheet. An ice pick is stuck in his left eye.

“I was killed because I was loved.”

More ponies revealed themselves. Dried blood. Missing limbs. I remember them all.

“I was murdered for being rich.”

“For being poor.”

“I ate myself to death in my kitchen.”

“I starved to death in a well.”

A blue hoof tapped my shoulder. I turned away from the cavalcade of the departed. Rainbow Dash stood next to me. Her gut-slit had split apart. The shredded lips dangled, dripped dark, oily blood.

“We all have to die, Mortis,” she said. “Why not join us? Your father did. He’s happier now at the right hoof of Nightmare Moon than you ever could be in the living world.”

She walked past me. Hoof-bumped the ice pick pony. “Noone loves you, Equus. Not any more. In the eyes of Nightmare Moon, all the dead are equal. Death only means misery under Princess Celestia’s rule.”

Rainbow Dash giggled. “When she takes her rightful place on the throne, we’re all going to come back. Pinkie Pie will be so happy to see me, she’ll scream for joy.”

I blinked. Pinkie Pie. The name snapped me out of my dream-trance. I stood up and kicked the sheet away.

“I know it’s you, Nightmare Moon.”

The pegasus smiled paternally. “Such a clever boy. Your family would be proud of you. After a thousand years of building up my strength, I’m ready to return your family to it’s former glory.
No more hiding our history from prying eyes. No more shame of our glorious heritage.”

“There’s nothing glorious in me losing my father.”

She frowned. “We all have to make sacrifices for the greater good. Ivory did consider sacri-ficing you to me, you know. He even picked out the knifes to cut your tendons and cutie marks with. But I convinced him to wait.”

I swallowed, trying to hide my shock. “Why? Not that I’m glad to have been spared.”

“Because any father can sacrifice his son. But true commitment to a cause requires paying the ultimate price. When your father bled out and his heart began to stop, he begged me to end him.”

Her eyes drifted up towards the ceiling as she savored the memory. “But I wasn’t strong enough to do that. Not that I would have. It had been so long since I had seen so much blood, I only wanted to watch.”

Thanks for bringing that up, I thought. I really needed another flashback to the worst day of my life. One of the worst, anyway.

“His pain ended, as all pain does. As your pain will. It is blood, given in my name, that gives me strength. It’s not just friendship that’s magic, it’s many things. Blood. Agony. Fear. They all have power. You’ll understand once you’re reunited with your family.”

“You think I’ll join you after all the damage you’ve caused? One of my heroes is dead and the other wishes she died under that bridge.”

Nightmare Moon rubbed Dash’s chin, pondering what I said. “It’s funny you should say that. I wanted her to kill so many more ponies, but she resisted me enough to jump off the bridge. She thought that stunt could end my possession of her, but she gave herself a much worse fate. I let her remember the last thing her former lover said before Pinkie took Dash’s face.”

“Lover?” I was stunned, as if smacked with a stick.

“When Dash got her wings sawn off, she asked Pinkie if she was getting killed out of jealous rage. Seems Pinkie and Dashie blended petals for a small while. Rainbow Dash is...oops, so sorry...was quite the filly-fooler. I wonder if Pinkie Pie tasted like cotton candy?"

She snickered. “I also wonder if Dash’s new bed-squeaker Applejack tasted like apples, but I get bored easily. Living on the moon for a thousand years can do odd things to your head. I just wanted Pinkie to do something funny to Rainbow Dash’s head, as well as her own, to keep me amused.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

“Because you’re doomed to fail if you resist me. The Mane Six needs all six members to make their Elements of Harmony work together in order to stop me. Even if you try to take up the slack, they’ll never trust you. Not with your history.”

She stepped towards me. I couldn’t move. I could almost feel her hooves digging into my mind. “You belong to me, little death-pony. You were mine the minute you were born. The harder you try to fight me, the sweeter the victory over you will be.”

My vision began to blur. The corpses behind her began to sway like trees in the wind. “Be my enemy if you choose. Maybe you’ll take longer to bleed to death than your father.”

I could hear other sounds swirling around me as she said, in a distant whisper, “But I doubt it.”

“Hey, buddy!” barked someone.

My eyes flashed open. I saw several ponies staring at me. None were happy with what they saw. The one that woke me was the the train conductor. He was frowning at me as if I had burped in his face.

“You okay, mister?” asked the conductor.

Shaking the dust from my mind, I nodded.

I said, “Why’s everyone staring at me?”

“We thought we heard you talking to, well...” his eyes drifted away from me.

“Nightmare Moon?” I guessed.

“Well, yeah. You were pretty loud. Some colts got scared and the parents got me to wake you.”

I looked over the conductor’s shoulder and gave my audience a weak-tea smile. “It’s all right, folks. I ate a lot of spicy food before nodding off. I just had a weird dream, that’s all.”

The critical stares drifted away and so did the conductor. I looked out the railcar window and recognized a few houses in the hills. It would be about a half-hour until I reached Ponyville. Plenty of time to organize a report of my findings for the Princess.

My mother died birthing me.

My father killed himself, after considering sacrificing me.

If this is what being a Mortis amounted to, then my family can go live on the moon forever.

I wondered what the real Rainbow Dash was making of all this, wherever she was. I wasn’t anxious to ask her anytime soon.

I was, however, very anxious to avenge her.

Author's Note

Here 'tis, just as promised.
The soundtrack for this chapter is Accurst Fragments of a nightmare 1,3 and 9.
(As heard on the Sinister movie soundtrack.)