The Dreamcatcher in the Wall

If there was one thing Trixie Lulamoon hated, it was looking for things to buy in the back alleys of big cities, no matter how clean and well-lit they were. It made her feel like she was doing something illegal or amoral, even though she wasn't. At least, she didn't think it was, and it was the fact that these kinds of places fed that nagging doubt that grated her nerves the most about it. However, Trixie felt like she didn't have a choice in the matter. The truth she could not escape facing no matter how hard she tried was that thanks to Twilight Sparkle, her show business was ruined. And though she had since tried to make a living doing honest work, the fact of the matter was that she didn't know what she was good at off the stage, a problem exacerbated by nearly everypony's refusal to hire her after she was exposed as a fraud. Consequently, she barely made enough to feed herself from day to day, and often lost what little work she could find to other, more qualified ponies who weren't mistrusted by default.

Over time, she had lost nearly everything she had due to having to sell her possessions to go on living. Eventually she had only her cape and her hat to her name. The former of these she would not give up because it served so many purposes beyond its decorative one. She could use it to carry things, to sleep in during those happy occasions when she could find shelter, and if necessary, to sleep under if she used her magic to stretch it out a bit for use as a tent. The latter she held onto desperately, for she felt it was the sole thing holding her mind and heart together. She put great effort into putting on airs to the contrary, but she lived each day a hair's breadth away from completely losing it.

This terrible state of living naturally led her into depression, from which she sought to escape by any means she could manage. In a stroke of irony that would likely have driven her mad had she known a little more about her archnemesis, she found that refuge from her reality in books. Thousands of pages passed under her gaze as she engrossed herself in intense study of the past and enchanted herself with the stories of fictional works. Often, she would root for the main character's rival, even though after the third book, she knew how things would turn out. This naturally made her even more depressed, so she turned instead to legends about things, rather than ponies.

Upon reading these legends, and finding the place of the Alicorn Amulet and the Elements of Harmony among them, Trixie had found herself weighing the potential consequences of pursuing them. Prior to her encounter with the former, she had thought that she had nothing left to lose and only the possibility to gain. She had learned since then that she could still lose the most important thing she's ever had: her identity. This lesson had led her to the conundrum that she faces to this day: she knows that she has one, but she has long since forgotten what it is. It was a question she had found herself asking since she first encountered the headline to the newspaper with a scathing article about her, every time she caught herself looking in a reflective surface and seeing the desperate, despairing stare of a slowly starving blue unicorn on the other side.

"Who is Trixie Lulamoon?" she would often ask her reflections and shadows out loud, not caring about who might be watching or listening as her grip on reality slowly drifted away.

However, Trixie had not lived in isolation for as long as she had by being the type of pony that let despair defeat her. There was a solution to every problem, a way out of every terrible situation. Even, she imagined, if that situation was a pony's whole life, as hers was now. In her mind, that way was one of these artifacts of legend. Even if the artifacts themselves failed to solve her problems, she reasoned, then at least revealing her capacity to find things thought lost forever might be a way to attract potential employers. It was with that thought in mind that she scoured the sorts of books that the Amulet and the Elements had appeared in. Eventually, she found an item that reminded her what hope felt like, one which should in theory both be powerful enough to set her on the path to saving herself and good enough to avoid the humiliation of having it taken away from her accompanied by a firm scolding about how she's supposed to behave by spoiled ponies with easy lives, like Twilight.

The Destiny Compass.

The basic principle behind this item was its intent to help ponies who were struggling to gain their Cutie Marks learn more about who they were so they could focus on their special talents, make a nice little living for themselves, and be on their way to happiness. There were of course, catchalls involved here. Exactly how the compass was intended to accomplish this feat was never made clear, nor was its description. Consequently, Trixie had found herself wandering from one antique shop to the next to ask about it, traveling from town to town in search of herself. She couldn't afford any improved forms of transportation, so she was relegated to hoofing it. As of yet, however, none of the dealers could help, and in fact very few had ever heard of the Compass.

However, as had been with her search for an item like the Compass in the first place, Trixie's encroaching despair was once again staved off by the ignition of another light at the end of the dark tunnel she seemed to have spent so long plodding through. One of the dealers made mention of his supplier in Canterlot, a pony rumored to be nearly as old as Luna, and who often charged in fees other than bits and gems. However, locating this pony's business was tricky: it was only open at night, and its entrance was hidden in a wall that would look fairly nondescript during the day. Luckily, the dealer told her, there seemed to be some affinity between the proprietor and the world of dreams, so if Trixie dreamed of it, she might have better luck finding it.

So it was that Trixie found herself sitting in a Canterlot alley one evening, hoping that whoever owned that lovely tulip garden would forgive her for using it to break her three-day fast, while at the same time staring intently at the most easily-overlooked place in the capital city as the sun set behind her and wondering if anypony would notice if she never returned from it. But then her growing shadow revealed a door that she was certain she would have noticed being there previously, and she shook off the dark thoughts and prepared herself for her entrance. This one deal could make or break the rest of her life, so she was going to make it her grandest yet.