Nightmares are matters of perspective. What may constitute a nightmare for one could be completely harmless to somepony else. It is this above all that makes mastering the ability to inflict them so difficult, but then again, the same could be said for my life here. Not many ponies would understand why I left the safe land of Equestria to become a nightmare thestral, to live alongside the new queen whom Celestia and Luna still consider to be a threat. Many would say that I had everything to live for, that I chose the path of futile rebellion, but I beg to differ.
For one, there are particular standards I set for myself in my new home. My fellow nightmare forces have respected my decision not to fight in any potential wars and understand that, as a former Equestrian citizen, I will always have some divided loyalties. This standard comes above all else for me because I have nothing against our neighboring land itself. I still respect Celestia and Luna as rulers, though I’d never say that within earshot of some of our more radical thinkers. Being a rebel was never really in me, and to this day, I prefer to sit on the sidelines and watch. Then again, seeing as that was what led me to this place and to the love of my life, I don’t regret that too much. The only thing I really do regret is that I put up with the way I was treated in Equestria for so long. While there are still some nightmare forces who are skeptical of my true ties, I can honestly say that this place is a ray of light compared to what I lived through before.
There are ponies here, many of them, who feel the same way. After trying to conquer Equestria and failing, the nightmare forces began to fall back, wise enough to know that a few moments of peace and a small amount of land would be far better for them in the long run than lengthening the war and heightening casualty. The truce that was made between them and the Equestrians was never a particularly strong one, and thoughts of breaking it whisper through our country to this day, but for the time being, it was their best option. The option that would allow them to stay alive. Back when it was made, it meant nothing to me other than more news fodder for the flourishing Manehattan newspapers. It was a matter of time before they’d come back, but I was so naïve back then. I should’ve known better.
But, like them, I needed to stay alive, and the only way I could do that at the time was to blind myself to the long-term, to live in fear of the short-term. Peace, even to the point of ignorance, was the only way either of us could live. I wish now I would’ve sympathized with them sooner, as I certainly fit in with them more than I did with those figures of my past.
Even then, I knew that to call them friends was not only inaccurate, but a blasphemy to the term. To this day, I’ve always been one to serve others rather than to take leadership myself, and any change in my life before was merely a difference of names and faces I allowed to control me even since fillyhood. Some of them weren’t bad, still allowed me a good amount of freedom, but not the one I was employed for right when the nightmares came to Manehattan. We’d failed to strike a rapport with one another even since our first days as coworkers, yet we still lived together. She said it was to streamline the delivery process, so she could receive the items she required of me sooner, but it was all lies. I know now, and knew even then that it was so I could never escape her. So I’d end up relying on her so much that I’d never even think of quitting, no matter how much she put me through.
And they call us the nightmares.
One thing I need to get out of the way very quickly before I go any further with all this is that at least we nightmare forces try not to hurt ponies who don’t deserve it. Having gone through some of the worst things regular pony life could offer, I could honestly say that, if that really was what we were put here for, then I wouldn’t have stayed here as long as I have. No amount of recognition or fame could make me hurt somepony else the way I was, even in their dreams. However, as part of the truce, one of the agreements was that, seeing as our species actually needs fear as a nourishing source just as much as changelings require love for theirs, nightmare forces are allowed to invade the dreams of those who truly deserve it. In a way, it serves as a sort of catharsis for some of us former Equestrians to take out all the pain we suffered in silence on others, to show the worst kinds of ponies what it is really like to live in fear.
Though I don’t believe that Suri, the boss that so tortured me back then, has ever really felt anything like that in anything other than a dream, I still cannot bring myself to enter hers. In a way, I feel somewhat pathetic for still not being able to fight her and can’t help but wonder if I’ve really changed in this past few years. But in a sense, I guess it’s understandable. Maybe the only reason I crossed over into the country of nightmares was because I was too afraid to face her, because I’d go to any lengths to avoid her.
But I tell myself yet again that I won’t let that horrible boss of mine take credit for my transformation. That would be giving her power she frankly didn’t deserve. The one who really does, on the other hand, is my queen, the one I am happy to not only serve, but to love with all my being as royal consort. She is the reason why I am so ambiguous about attacking the ponies: on one hoof, I don’t want to see an increase in the amounts of death and destruction that accompanied our last war with them. On the other, she refuses to marry me until she trusts that we will be treated as nonthreatening equals by the Equestrian monarchy. While I believe starting a war is the absolute wrong way to go about it, that it will only emphasize the stereotypes propagated about us, I know by now to stay out of the conversation and leave the job to the warriors and political minds. Despite being the queen’s intended fiancée, I do not hold the power that she does and, aside from having an additional post as the royal fashion designer here, I really have no more power than an ordinary citizen.
Power, though, has never really been something I particularly sought. I didn’t fall for Queen Nightmarity for any political motives. There are still whispers of that rumor about, but for the most part, they’ve died down, more out of the fear of enraging her than anyone else. After all, Nightmarity can be the most vindictive pony around if you’re not on her good side, and when you see her fight, you can see why other call her a nightmare. But for me on that day, she was the sweetest dream imaginable.
A dream that made me never want to see the underlying truth, never want to wake up.
****
Nightmares can reflect your deepest desires, even if they do that by making you realize how miserable you’d be without them. Before Nightmarity came into my life, I felt I didn’t have a purpose other than to be punched around and yelled at, to be a scapegoat without a will. To them, it was always “Coco’s fault” and never their own. And I bought into all that, thinking that such behavior was just an ordinary aspect of serving somepony else. I’d given up on having others show me compassion and on them seeing me as even an animate object, but that day on my way to work, my entire world burst into flames. Right there, in the building where I worked sewing all Suri’s knockoffs, where I worked in the background as she took credit for them, was the tallest unicorn I’d ever seen and Suri curled up in a corner, cowering at her sheer power. Before then, I didn’t even know unicorns like that existed; with wings, she could’ve easily have passed for royalty. Her stance surged with combined dignity and rage, her horn glowing intensely as it aimed at my boss’s head. I stood there for a few seconds, my mouth dropping at the absurdity of the situation, before I did the only thing I could.
I was a complete coward and escaped the building as fast as I could. For all I knew, she could’ve been a terrorist. She could’ve blown up that entire place. I cursed to myself at the time for not calling the authorities or something and basically just stood weeping in a crowded street corner, the picture of pathetic. For Celestia’s sake, I didn’t even really know why. I couldn’t stand Suri and, sad as this may sound, would actually be relieved if she were to suddenly disappear from this world. At least, then I could just move on to presumably being bullied by somepony else and continue this vicious cycle.
As I pondered all this, however, the black unicorn returned from the building and noticed me crouched onto the sidewalk. It was then that she did the one thing I never expected.
She extended her hoof to me.
I can’t recall exactly the conversation we had that day, the exact words we said to one another, but I remember that the first thing I asked her was why she had come. What she had done with Suri. She grinned as she answered that she was fine and gave me an even more important question to consider: why I particularly cared about what happened to her after the way she’d treated me. Turns out that even then, she’d been looking on other ponies’ dreams, and somehow she just knew. In any other situation, I would’ve been suspicious of how this knowledge came to her, but my mind was too shaken to do anything but blindly trust her. I was given even more reason to do so when she assured me that she didn’t kill Suri, that she didn’t have anything against me, that she only injured my boss to drive a message into her thick head.
In later days, when I asked her why she left Suri alive in the first place, she told me it was because of me. She didn’t want to scare me too much. She wanted to hurt as few ponies as possible to make her point. She wanted to be the one pony willing to listen to what I really needed to get out of my head.
We talked for a long while that day, or at least as long as we could have until it was realized that a potentially hostile foreign queen was within the area. The rest passed by like lightning. As she was being carried away by the Manehattan police who were requesting for her to leave the area, I couldn’t help but follow her, for even then, I felt she had some sort of hypnotic quality around her. At the time, I didn’t realize that it could be love; I was just desperate for more days like this where I could feel that somepony had really opened their heart out to me.
I would like to be able to tell you that I followed her all the way to the Equestrian borderline, but I’m afraid I can’t. I only got so far as the Manehattan city limits before she decided to quit walking and power up her horn for a teleportation spell. Before she could do it, I let out a strange scream, practically begging her not to leave. I stepped into the tiny portal she’d created and never thought she’d let me stay by her side. I knew she’d throw me out like everypony else, but I didn’t care then.
Desperation has always been my most prominent quality, after all.
****
Nightmares can bring relief when they end, but also pain. Their effects can haunt you for a day or even a week, but will eventually be forgotten. I hope more than anything that my nightmarish dreams will not become this way, but I fear that the end is approaching. In the end, it really was my desperation that caused me to start arising from this slumber.
I am no longer within the nightmare territory, but back in Equestria. To be more specific, I am in a small, strangely constraining town called Ponyville. The only two nightmare thestrals here are me and a young Manehattanite filly I found on the streets during another voyage Nightmarity and I made together to Equestria to increase our ranks. We had chosen to take this young homeless filly in as the closest thing to a daughter we could have together, and while I love her dearly, staring at her right now is nothing but a reminder of what I have done to shatter the dream world I inhabited. Now she will only have one mother to care for her, and I was the one who sealed this fate. The only way I could repay Nightmarity for all she’d done was to let her die.
I learned only a few weeks ago that Nightmarity, like me, was not naturally born a nightmare. The news shocked me at the time, but nowhere near as much as what was really going on behind the scenes in my kingdom. It toppled under the height of its growing factions, who were beginning to doubt its own queen. Whispers reigned of how my fiancée was becoming less and less ruthless in battle and how she’d started to show more mercy towards others after the truce. I had always admired this about her so much that I never once thought that others could disagree, but it seemed that merely feeding on the guilty parties did not provide the nourishment others had hoped. At first, it was just minor dissatisfaction expected from any leadership situation, but it snowballed hard.
As soon as the soldiers and other parties learned that there was a part of Nightmarity’s original pony form fighting from the inside and gaining control, they began to realize that they’d chosen the wrong host for their queen. Her other form, Rarity, was becoming stronger than expected, and increasingly resistant to magical efforts to keep her from coming out. The only way to stop it, they predicted, was to commit outright regicide, allowing the spirit that had inhabited Nightmarity and Nightmare Moon to come out and into another.
In any ordinary situation, I would’ve kept my loyalty, would have done nothing if it meant not endangering myself. I never wanted to become a traitor to them or to anypony. But Nightmarity wasn’t ordinary. She was worth fighting for. Becoming a traitor by protecting her was the greatest honor I could’ve received in this world.
So I thought nothing of it when I turned myself in to the princesses and begged for freedom in return for being an informant. It took a day or so to convince them that I wasn’t a threat, but it was good enough for me if it meant saving my queen from a court that could no longer tolerate her. Within a week, an army of Celestial forces stormed into the place I considered to be my homeland, escorting the former Element Bearers with them. While they no longer carried their physical Elements, the power of harmony somehow managed to flow through their souls as they rushed towards the friend they’d thought corrupted. The battle raged on and no matter how hard the nightmare forces tried to fight, they found themselves outnumbered. The war they’d sought so hard had been lost in a way they never would’ve thought imaginable.
Now, both the country of the nightmares and Nightmarity herself have vanished. The being of shadows that once inhabited her body is now kept in a glass case in a maximum security area to ensure that the reign of nightmares can never be repeated. The only thing left for me is to somehow continue with my life and wait as the white unicorn laid out in front of me continues to be in her coma.
The Element Bearers have warned me that there will be a chance that Rarity will not remember the events she lived as Nightmarity, and yet I have nothing but hope as she slowly awakens because I know the memories we shared can be repeated somehow. Deep inside, I believe that the two are not so different, that Rarity was the one I truly ended up falling for in the first place.
My prayers will end up coming true someday, as I am slowly accustomed to the pony life. My wings will stay with me, despite the fact that magic exists to remove them, as a reminder of the best moments of my life, as a reminder that I can still stay in the dream as long as I remember it. After several months of bonding to compensate for her dark magic-induced amnesia, Rarity will take me on as her apprentice, and I will gladly accept. I may not know if she truly loves me for some time or if her feelings have changed after having the nightmare removed from her. But I’d like to believe that she will. I’d like to believe that nothing’s really changed. Because, after all, nightmares never truly die. The fear, and sometimes the revelations, that they bring can stay with a pony for a lifetime.
Nightmares, as long as they change who you are as a pony, never truly end.
