Along The Dreamscape
Dreams were weird.
That was presumably the first thing Luna had learnt when she originally started to venture into the realm where the fantasy of ponies knew no limitations. At times it could be very frightening, sometimes heartwarming and other times it was just plain undescribable. Truth be told, she had no idea whether she was lucky to walk the forsaken and twisted roads leading through the dreamscape.
A part of her always looked forward to any new venture, another part just wanted herself to never sleep again, for fear of getting involved in some uncomfortable dream. But Luna did her duty, she walked the starry road across the empty tapestry of the space inbetween.
This was her own dream, a road of milky white dots, glowing in an eternal dark. She had never dared to venture off this road, never dared to look behind her, scared of the horrors she herself might dream of. Walking forward was a reward in and of itself, however, and Luna prepared herself for leaving the road and walking through the darkness with the doors.
The quiet was her only companion right now, only broken by the voice that usually resided within her head. Here it became an entity in its own right. No, that was wrong, here, every opinion was an entity, a companion for her lonesome journey.
“Oooh,” said the excited opinion, “I can't wait to see what we'll see next.”
“Ugh,” said the bored voice, “can't I just enjoy the silence for once? It's not like they can't figure their own dreams out?”
“Now, now,” answered her dutiful voice, “It's my job to keep watch over their sleep, so they might enjoy another happy day.”
“Truly,” said the other voice, “but for whose sake? So Celestia may have an easier job? I'm not a foalsitter, I rule over the country just as she does, and the night is far more beautiful than the–“
The excited voice interrupted the opinion Luna liked to shun. “It's there! It's coming! The dreams, the voices, the song in the depths! I can hear it, just like the first time. Yay!”
It was no lie, in the distance, a bright light shone and a song grew louder in the distance. It was the song of an unbroken fantasy, the hymn hummed by a million sleeping souls. It was a song nopony but Luna knew, a gorgeous light at the very end of the tunnel, her sanctuary in the dark.
She smiled and took the steps through the light and into the long, deep dark on the other side. The humming had grown into a song sung by a choral, the tongue nothing Luna could understand. Not that this was bad, for the hopeful sound of it was all Luna needed to feel more comfortable with her role again.
And then she looked at the doors to the little ponies' dreams. As she walked through the darkness she spotted a cyan door with brass metal parts, the sound of a harp playing beyond it. Luna stopped to take a look at the door gap. It was clear that a fire was burning on the other side, and she could hear a voice whisper praise to the one who played.
“Looks like Lyra would prefer her privacy,” her cautious voice said, elliciting a giggle from her curiostiy.
“Oh come on, one small peek can't hurt. She plays so beautiful.”
Luna rolled her eyes, as if she was listening to two kids fighting over nothing. No, this place wasn't for her. Another dream would find itself, and if not, then this would indeed be a quiet night.
Another step, another door. The white wood framed by pink, along with the gorgeous flower motifs spreading across it told of its owner's style and elegance. Luna stepped closer to listen in, hearing loud cheers on the other side and a thousand ponies shouting one name.
“Fleur! Fleur! Fleur!”
“Somepony decided to get some ego stroking,” her funny voice joked.
So there was no reason to step in, this pony did not need the aid of another, all she needed was what her mind gave her. Luna stepped away from the door.
The hymn grew louder. It was a song of happiness, a song of strength. It helped her with her steps, it helped her with her eyes. When she had come here the first time, the darkness was overwhelming. It'd been ten years until she found herself able to block her own fears out and concentrate on her job, but that hadn't been easy back then.
Now, ever since her return, somepony was singing in the distance. She did not know who it was exactly, but she liked to think it was everypony's voice, reaching out to her. That might have been selfish, yes, but she deserved it.
“Here I go again,” her criticism spoke up.
Luna reigned herself in, walked past the peaceful doors and the dark doors, where the ponies either didn't sleep, or didn't dream. Her walk through the blackness went on until she reached another door, dyed a pale blue with white clouds and rainbows spread across it. Luna often ventured in there to spend comfort where only nervosity existed, to bring faith where doubt reigned and to listen when nopony else should. But tonight the voices of family where heard from behind the door. A father and a mother laughing at something their daughter had done, and a young filly laughed with them.
Rainbow Dash's mind found great peace in her childhood, as it should be. Her parents had always supported her, had been there in her time of need, and so, at least in her dreams, she ran with them. Were it not for her own pride and stubbornness, she would keep the contact up even in real life.
Yet she didn't need aid tonight and Luna didn't want to play with her tonight. Bringing herself too much into the dreamscape of others could only end in disaster. That, too, was something she'd experienced before the moon had risen and not gone down again.
Her steps carried her to yet another door, styled with copper bars and behind them wood in cerulean colors. A filly by the name of Pearly Whites, Luna knew, a good child with a big heart and a brave mindset, albeit a little dense. From beyond the door the sound of a drill was coming, and the filly was screaming.
“A first,” her decisive voice spoke, almost sounding like it was ordering her to go.
Luna nodded to herself and stepped closer to the door, opening it with one swift motion.
A deeper darkness engulfed the alicorn, an impenetrable blackness that hid the gateway she had walked through away. There was no going back until she brought a little light into this place. She sighed, her duty could get annoying in parts.
She had the might of a god within this realm, could access a pony's memories and that of others too. The only reason she had not abused her abilities until this point was because of her very first walk along the dreamscape and how it had ended.
Good thing I'm no first timer anymore, she thought, the inside voice being inside her again.
There was a light somewhere away from her, and a table stood beneath it. Twitching and twisting, a pony seemed tied to it.
“Let me go,” the voice of a teenage filly begged, cracking as she did so.
Luna took a step, and it echoed across the hall like the roar of a dragon. The filly reacted shocked and tried to get a look at her, but was unable to turn her head properly.
“Is somepony there?” she asked.
Luna took yet another step, and then started her careful walk towards the room's center. With every step sounding like a cannon was fired, the filly shook and tears started to roll down her cheeks. Subtle nightmares like this were the worst to fight, Luna mused.
“Please,” she heard the filly beg once more, “M-my teeth are okay. There's no need for the drill. Please, please.”
Somewhere in the distance, something began spinning, the rotation of a dentist's drill. The familiar noise pierced right into Luna's skull, an unending cacaphony that was unwilling to be stopped. The filly's begging came closer to sobs, and she wasn't even aware that this was a dream.
“Pearly,” Luna spoke up, but the drill drained her voice out, she took another step, and then the filly was farther away from her.
Oh, nice, Luna thought with all the sarcasm she could conjure up and tried to figure out why she couldn't approach her. Breaking through without any sort of disguise was probably a bad idea anyway, now that she thought about it.
Luna lit her horn up, weaved the unreality into a disguise fitting for a nightmarish setting like this, and after a few seconds, she stepped forward and into the light.
The sound of the drill receded immediately, and the filly looked at her, scared.
“P-please, m-my teeth are fine,” Pearly said, dreaming her teeth brown and black and rotten to the core.
“Now, now, Pearly,” Luna said, the moustache of her disguise tickling her upper lip.
She looked now like some elderly doctor with a grey mane and a receding hairline, the thick moustache the most clear thing Pearly could imagine, but Luna figured that she didn't have a real face. Few ponies could imagine proper faces in their dreams.
She turned her face to a chart she held in her hoof, telling her why exactly Pearly was here.
“It's just a routine check up, no need to be scared.”
“Please, my teeth are okay.”
Luna sighed and took another look at her chart, once more taking her magic to weave something from the imagination of the growing pony. This time, she imagined what Pearly had seen to scare herself so much.
One tooth! Sixth, Upper left! Please don't notice! Please don't notice! PLEASEDON'TNOTICEPLEASEDON'TNOTICEPLEASE
The writ became a never ending pleading for the doctor to declare her perfectly safe. Wow, you sound like somepony with a phobia, Luna thought and shook her head.
“We need to check first. If everything's fine, you can go.”
“And if not?” The filly asked.
Luna produced the most non-creepy smile she could think of and answered truthfully, “then we'll take care of it quickly and painlessly. You're a brave filly, so it won't be a big deal.”
“My mother will be mad if you drill.”
Luna raised her eyebrow at that. “Minuette? Why would she be mad?”
“She told me to always brush my teeth, she'll find out I didn't properly do it.”
Do I want to know why you're so scared of your mother? Luna asked, and found the answer on the writ she held in her hooves.
Apparently Minuette took toothbrushing really seriously and seemed to prefer to scare her child into obeying her hygiene decrees. Luna shook her head.
“It's nothing to worry about. If everything was always perfect with ponies' teeth, there would be no need for dentists now would there? This sort of thing happens to everypony, even your mother. And if there is really a hole, we just fill it up and you can forget you ever had one in the first place.”
“B-but the drill?”
“Isn't going to hurt, there's,” she was no doctor, so the name escaped her, “stuff to make it not hurt. Trust me, I'm a doctor.”
That was about as convincing as Celestia's poker face, Luna grumbled in the depths of her own mind, but the pinkish gray filly with the cerulean mane nodded understandingly.
“So I don't got to worry about anything?”
Luna turned towards where the sound of the drill had come from. “Nope, you're in safe hooves and your mother will be more worried than mad. But that's just how parents are.”
She felt the light of the door, the hymn calling to her again, and the filly brightened up again.
“Okay!” she said and Luna turned away.
The moment she closed the door, she felt a chill run down her spine and quickly went forward again. Time's flow was distorted on the road of dreams. Once a pony woke, their night was whisked away, but not so for Luna. She walked the road and worked herself through the dreams of everypony until the chill became a flame so cold it turned this realm to ice and all the voices went quiet.
Luna never stayed that long, she went long before that, always as soon as the choir in the background started dwindle. To stay too long could mean anything. She might never be able to wake again, might lose herself to whatever the oncoming cold was, or something even worse, something she couldn't even begin to imagine.
“Or it's just your own nightmares taking over everypony's dreams,” her creativity said with a hint of smugness.
It wasn't something she hoped for, in fact, it was probably the worst option. Her nightmares belonged into a little chest in the back of her head, a vault that would remain unopened until she started her final journey down the road of dreams.
But for now, she needed to follow the doors.
Twilight Sparkle's door was a simple wooden thing with the mulberry paint falling off and the smell of old books lingering on it. When Luna had returned, Twilight's door had always been quiet. Back then Luna had thought naught of it, until curiosity had bidden her to take a peek. Apparently Twilight's nightmares were not loud and rampaging, but quiet and slick. It had taken her weeks and weeks of work until she'd figured out what plagued the depths of Twilight's mind, the many irrational fears that consumed her from within.
Now, Twilight dreamt of a picnic, with everypony acknowledging her before Celestia herself and the alicorn herself praising Twilight for a test well done. For all her complexities, Twilight was a pony that, at heart, aimed to please others, especially those she considered her superiors. It was a trait both admirable and abysmal, Luna figured, and she hoped that Twilight would never use it as a means to bring herself down.
It might happen, and Luna needed to be there when it happened. Some avalanches were best not set off.
She stepped further into the dark, following the dark and empty trail of black through the room of nothingness, closer to another door and then past it, and again, and again.
Once more did she stop, this time before a door of pale yellow, the light smell of flowers in the air. The sounds from beyond the door were the typical ones and Luna waited a second, looking at the nod.
“Hey, it's the worst part of the job anyway, how about you just take a time-out? Get some rest somewhere else? She can fend for herself.”
“Hey, how about you step away, you don't need to do this.”
Luna sighed. “One screw-up, that's all there's gonna be.”
She opened the door.
The grass swept in the wind and the distant trees seemed to howl and grown with every motion, while their branches beat against each other. The field was the maw of a great unknown beast and in the darkness between the woods, an uncountable number of red eyes were staring at them.
Luna put on a smile nonetheless, looking at the little yellow ball before her.
“Hello, Fluttershy,” she said.
The weeping and shaking little thing looked up, her tiny green eyes looking straight into Luna's own.
“Princess?”
She nodded.
“What are you doing here,” she whispered, “They'll notice you if you stand there.”
They were the beasts in the shadows of the trees, monstrosities in the forms of ponies Fluttershy had known in her life. She often dreamt of other ponies, of their laughter directed at her, of how they would never leave her alone. Fluttershy had also long since accepted those dreams as her everyday reality and didn't wake up sweating and panting whenever they appeared.
No, it was dreams like this that made her weep and unable to enjoy another beautiful day.
“Don't you want them to notice us?”
Fluttershy whimpered, as she always did. “They'll notice you and then you'll leave, because they're calling. Everypony has dreams, and they're important. Thinking about it, you should probably go, they're all more important than me.”
She heard the call of the door, the distant hymn and the growing chill.
Luna seated herself beside Fluttershy, noting how she towered over the small pegasus. Fluttershy tried to think of others, but she didn't really want the alicorn to leave, she wanted somepony to stay with her in this strange and unknown land.
“The sky shows a pretty blue,” Luna commented.
But Fluttershy did not answer, was to busy cowering on the ground and whimpering. On one side, she wanted to be noticed by somepony, on the other hoof, she also didn't want to be noticed, because they'd only make fun of her again. It was the same thing every time the dream came back, and Luna never knew how to deal with it.
Logic was not the stuff dreams were made off, but there was always a thread moving through the scenes. All the emotions always came to a head and there was always a specific path one needed to take.
Fluttershy didn't want to walk away from the middle of the circle, but she also didn't want the things to leave her. The sky above her was blue and empty, save for a few clouds.
“I hardly ever see a sky like this,” the princess of the night continued. “I guess there's a certain beauty to an empty sky, shining in the brightest of blues. It's no wonder the pegasi are so often amidst the clouds.”
“You have wings too, do you fly often, princess?”
“The nightsky is no place for a pony, truth be told. Even I cannot navigate through the darkness outside. I mostly spread my wings when a pony dreams of a race with me, just as I sometimes dance across the stars with young children or old ponies.”
“Such heights aren't for me. I can't even leave this spot.”
Luna didn't answer. They had had this conversation often enough. When she asked why, the laughter would grow and Fluttershy would weep and wake up. When she told her that she could just stand up, a hole would open up and swallow the pegasus.
She tied herself to one place, and this was not a riddle easily solved.
“It's a nice spot though,” Luna decided to say tonight.
“Is it?”
“I mean,” what do I mean?
She felt almost out of option, but then thought of something else and looked up to the clouds. “I mean, everypony's here, aren't they?”
“Nopony's here. My parents never bothered to check up on me, nopony likes me and–“
“Fluttershy,” Luna interrupted, “you shouldn't forget that you are an Element of Harmony, and it was your bond with your friends that brought me back from an unimaginable darkness, both cold and hot, burning through me like a spear of ice. You're always there for them, and they're always there for you. Lift your head, Fluttershy.”
Luna smiled once more. “Your friends are here.”
She feared that this wouldn't work, that the yellow pegasus' mind would conjure up some sort of excuse to drown herself in self-pity and loathing. But Fluttershy did indeed look up, a soft breeze blowing through her mane, and Luna spotted Applejack lending her a hoof.
“Get up,” she laughed, “It's cider day today.”
As Fluttershy grabbed her hoof, Applejack easily lifted her from the ground.
“Come on,” Rainbow Dash spoke in the distance, “I'm thirsty already.”
“Oh shush, don't rush her, there's still plenty of time,” Rarity said.
“Yup, quite a few months even after she wakes up, actually,” Pinkie threw in.
Twilight Sparkle stood beside the pink pony and groaned. “Exactly, and cider is bad for you anyway.”
Luna felt an eyebrow lifting as what was supposed to be an emotional ending to the dream turned into an anti-alcohol PSA. Not that she was actually bothered by it, because sometimes, dreams were weird like that.
She decided to stand up again, and Fluttershy looked right back at her. “Thank you, princess.”
“Wake up well, Fluttershy,” the princess said with a courteous nod. “And have a nice day.”
The door was calling her again, and so was the web of doors. The alicorn heard the distant choral picking up and then she left the dream once more. A thousand more awaited her, and she would continue on despite the cold. This time, she would fight it, for her little ponies, and for herself. Because after all this time, her dream was one of peaceful nights and happy days.
