The room was dark, lit only by the candles on the tables and the fire in the fireplace. It was big enough to enclose several long tables and have its windowless walls shrouded in shadow, but small enough for one to be aware of the enclosure of its boundaries. The floor was carpeted, thickly enough to have once been fluffy, but long since worn down. Only one wall was even partially visible, the wall with the fireplace.
There were five tables in the room, of various lengths and shapes- four of them were rectangular and one was small and round. They had different heights and styles, as though they’d been gathered together from wherever they could be found. They were in rows, sort of, lined up so as to be easily walked between and around, but also just a little askew and out of place.
The tables were laden with various equipment, though for what would have been unclear to most anypony who saw them. Some of it resembled chemistry, beakers and burners and other such scientific knickknacks. But there were also clumps of wool, lengths of ribbon and string, pieces of unidentifiable wood, leaves and flowers, precious gems, glass containers swirling with colorful energy. Across two of the tables, a sort of chain was set up, like a science experiment mixed with a Rube Goldberg machine. The round table served as a supply station, where materials were kept. The other two held smaller, individual “experiment” stations, and had little organization to speak of- if, indeed, there was anyone to speak at all.
In fact, there was someone. A young unicorn, fairly pretty, but with worry lines etched across her forehead. The colors of her coat and hair were muted and distorted in the orange glow of firelight, but in the sun they would have shone distinctly: a pale blue coat, accented by a soft purple mane streaked with reddish gold. Here, in this dream, her cutie mark was distorted and shadowed, so it could not be made out.
For it was a dream. The unicorn had asked Princess Luna to put her into an enchanted state of lucid dreaming, so that she could construct this place and conduct her experiments undisturbed. She would sleep until she had found what she was searching for, experimenting with wild guess after hypothesis after theory, until she found the answer. She had arrived in the dream plane and constructed the room exactly as she had imagined in her original idea, and willed into being all of the ingredients she could possibly need. The one thing the unicorn could not dream up in its pure form was the solution, because she didn't know it yet. That was why she was here; to find out.
The unicorn walked over to one of the tables, continuing her work. She tilted a beaker of clear liquid into a pan of sizzling powder, and then used her magic to grab a few flower petals and place them in precise locations on top of the bubbling mixture. Hurrying around to another part of the setup, she carefully levitated a small, polished, perfectly round, blue stone with a hole through the center into a pot of still, cool water.
She went on for some time in this way, time that could have been hours, days, or merely seconds. Always working, in complete silence, mind busily at work within the dream. Very little that she did seemed to be connected in any way; each little combination or reaction stayed contained in itself. Finally, she began to combine the various mixtures. A powder was poured into a carefully enchanted goblet, which sent out a spark of energy to a twisted coil above it. The energy traveled down the coil, igniting a pile of delicately balanced moonflower petals and bits of bark. The smoke from that drifted into a funnel, leading into a magically suspended bubble of lavender water, stirred with a rowan wand. A few drops of the now-smoky water trickled down a half-pipe made of pure copper, into a sapphire vial filled with a strange mixture of swirling energies. And on it went, down the long trail of strange substances, until finally it reached the end.
The last drops of the copper-colored liquid ran into a pan of rosy powder. There was a flash, and the pan was now an emerald-colored glass beaker filled with an icy substance that looked like water-- except that water didn't usually give off smoke. The unicorn, who had been watching the whole thing intently, drew in a breath. She was so close to her goal! If this worked...
She didn't dare finish the thought. If she got her hopes up for nothing, this could crush her. Of course, she had done this so many times now, it might not affect her anymore... She couldn't count how long she'd been here, how many years or days or weeks it had been since she'd entered the dream. There was no way of telling time, with no sun or moon or stars to gauge the days in this small, enclosed world. She could easily dream herself a bigger place with a sky, but she didn't want to. It felt safe here in her small, firelit room where she could feel the borders of existence. Nothing needed to be beyond these shadowed walls that she had built up around herself.
The unicorn shook herself out of her thoughts. It was time to see if her labor had paid off. Carefully, she levitated the emerald beaker. She walked over to the wall beside the fireplace, where a mirror stood. It was a simple full-length mirror, oval in shape, framed in gold. The frame had runes etched in it, runes that she had painstakingly carved into the soft metal herself. The unicorn reached out her magic to a feather on the supply table, gently controlling its path on its way over to her so that nothing would brush against it and set a single barb out of place. It had to be perfect, or the spell might not work.
She took a deep, steadying breath. The unicorn focused even harder on the feather, ever-so-carefully levitating the tip of its quill into the beaker that she also levitated. She dabbed it into the liquid as she would load a quill pen up with ink to write, as that was essentially what she was doing. Once it seemed to be appropriately soaked, she drew it out.
Gently, she made the quill drift over to the very first rune in the mirror's frame. Then, painstakingly, she followed the path she had already carved in the frame, rewriting each rune in this substance. The words were of no language known to ponykind; they were written in the language of dreams and spirits. As each symbol was retraced, it glowed golden with a light of its own, increasing the light level of the room imperceptibly.
Finally, she finished. Each symbol was aglow, perfectly traced. The unicorn put down the feather on the table behind her, and refocused on the beaker that she still held in her magical grip. This she moved with slightly less care, tilting it to let a steady stream of the liquid pour out as she traced it in a circle around the base of the mirror. When it was empty, the unicorn put it, too, on the table behind her.
She took another deep breath, steeling herself. Here came the important part. She stared at the floor for a few... minutes? seconds? hours? It was impossible to tell. After an eternity, she decided that she'd have to do it eventually, or risk waiting here forever. Without looking up, she said the magic words, the words that would activate the spell.
The words that were her question, her reason for being here.
"Who am I?"
She looked into the mirror, and saw only herself.
The unicorn sighed, and turned back to her experiment. The dream would go on until she found a solution.
Author's Note
"It does not do to dwell on dreams and forget to live."
-- Harry Potter and the Philosopher's's Stone