The nightmare started pretty much like they all do: opening on a view of her town. It had gotten to the point where this was starting to get old. The twist this time was that her townies were all positively thrilled to see her. Or at least, they were sporting the soul-shuddering smiles they bore under her rule. To suit, they were also adorned with equal-sign Cutie Marks, matching mane and tail styles, and faded color tones. A constant wind blew throughout the town, little more than a faint breeze, but still enough to carry a haunting sound she couldn’t quite place despite its familiarity. Like a name at the tip of her tongue.
“Starlight... Welcome!” Double Diamond greeted her, acing the disturbing image of her victims, as usual. She retched internally about how frequently she had chosen to ‘reward’ him for this performance in a very direct and physical manner.
“Welcome, Starlight!” Party Favor chimed in, and soon was joined by a chorus of identical sentiments from Sugar Belle, Night Glider, and the rest of the community.
“Welcome home, Starlight. We missed you!”
“Welcome...”
“Welcome!”
“Well....come....” it occurred to Starlight that the ponies were very careful not to be too loud, lest they risk drowning out their quieter peers. In fact, there was very little in the way of variance in their volume and inflection at all, only a certain sharpness at the end indicating exclamations.
(Gee, I sure wonder why Twilight and her little gang thought there might be something wrong here,) Starlight thought to herself sarcastically.
“Now, look, everypony... there’s no need for all this. This isn’t how things are! I’m better now!” she said to the brainwashed ponies, as if she was expecting her insistence on the state of reality to affect her dream. It didn’t.
“Of course you’re better, Princess Starlight Glimmer...” a voice from behind her declared with bone-chilling cheer. “You’re better than everypony.”
“No...” Starlight’s ears perked up, then flattened. Against her will, Starlight forced herself to turn around even though she knew she was going to regret what she saw and she was right. “No, no no no no... this is wrong! This is ALL wrong!”
“I don’t understand, Princess Starlight,” a distinctly wingless Twilight Sparkle said in an empty, airy imitation of friendly confusion as she and the rest of the Mane Six slowly took their seats in a half-circle around her escape route. “Isn’t this everything you always wanted?”
“Twilight, your wings. Where are your wings, Twilight? And stop calling me Princess!” Starlight’s demand was emphasized by the snap unfurling of what felt like wings at her back, whose weight she previously didn’t even notice. As she pushed herself to look behind her once again, it felt as though there were enough copies of the word “NO” in her mind that each individual star in the sky could have one and she’d still have more to spare.
“Don’t be silly, Princess Starlight Glimmer...” Twilight said, her voice as hollow and fake-happy as that of any of Starlight’s townies, who at this point were at least mercifully silent, affording Twilight and her friends their time on the stage of Starlight’s terror. “Only Princesses can have wings. And that’s you.”
“And they look so right on you, Darling...” Rarity chimed in, her voice somehow even emptier than Twilight’s. “I even made you a set of Royal Armor to go with them. Don’t they look just... okay?”
“Yeah.” Pinkie joined, her usual excessive exuberance now shockingly absent. Starlight wondered not for the first time how she ever thought this was right. “They’re almost as okay as your coronation party, right Princess Starlight?”
“No... no this not okay! This isn’t even real! I know it’s not! PRINCESS LUNA! LET ME OUT, PLEASE!” Starlight screamed at the full moon in her dream, sure that the Princess would hear her and come to her rescue.
But her certainty took seconds to fade. As she learned from working with the Sisters, Princess Luna was the only one out at night, keeping the nightmares at bay. She probably didn’t have time to spare with recurring ones like this, and Starlight decided that she’d been exceedingly generous as it is. Her hopes were raised by the sight of the moon’s light and the shadow it cast from Twilight morphing and splitting into two more ponies. And they were shattered by those ponies turning out to be Celestia and Luna, also crown-less and wing-less, bowing deeply as they finished manifesting. Like everypony else present who wasn’t Starlight, their colors were muted and their flanks adorned with equal signs.
“You summoned me, Princess Starlight?” Luna asked, her tone as quiet and hollow as Starlight had come to expect. “How may I serve you?”
It was about that point that Starlight recognized that the strange noise drifting around on the breeze was the sound of her own voice screaming, and she thought that she might be doing so in the waking world. With that idea in mind, she wondered why nopony was coming to wake her up, at the very least to spare their own sleep. But they didn’t, so she resolved herself to handle the matter by her own devices.
“You know what? BUCK THIS!” Starlight flared her Twilight-colored wings to their full glory as she cast a now all-too-familiar Flashbang spell to scatter the ponies around her and then quickly snapped them to her sides as she took off at a full gallop toward her old house. As she approached, she saw the door open and herself stepping out to confront her, the other’s eyes blazing with wicked mirth and face split into an unbearably smug grin. “NO! BUCK YOU TOO! I’M NOT DEALING WITH THIS!”
After a few seconds of charging, Starlight blasted her old home and her old self out of existence. She skidded to a halt as her brain tried to process what was left in their wake. To call it a “hole” would not even begin to do it justice, although the second term that came to mind, “rift”, sounded much more appropriate. The rift rapidly tore itself wider, ripping her personal pocket dream world in half so fast that Starlight barely had time to scream before she started falling. She stopped shortly after she started though, her breath caught short by the momentous view reaching for what seemed like eternity all around her.
Still rapidly descending through a world of darkness, Starlight found herself illuminated by the light of countless stars. At least, that’s what she thought they were until she drifted close to one of them (or did it drift to her?) and saw inside the gentle light a brief glimpse of a tiny Applejack held close by what Starlight could only assume was Applejack’s father. Remembering what the blunt country pony begrudgingly informed her brought both forehooves to Starlight’s mouth in an instant as she stifled a sob. But the stifling was not enough, it seemed, since the dream bubble appeared to decide to take the strangled sound as a cue to rob Applejack of her sweet memory and return her to her desolation.
Suddenly wanting to die, Starlight plummeted faster, leaving the soured dream in her tearful wake. Now she deliberately avoided the stars, or at least tried to as best she could with somepony else’s wings and a mockery of Royal Armor made from rusted iron. She didn’t see most of them, but she could feel them bouncing off her body and imparting their warmth into her. Warmth that was immediately followed by chills when she realized that now they probably no longer had it. Where was Princess Luna? Surely she’d at least want to stop Starlight from ruining other ponies dreams!
But as she continued to fall, Starlight’s fears bled out of her as something truly dark reached out to grip her heart. From beneath them all, the sea of dreams truly did look like stars in the night sky. Once again, she was reminded of Luna’s utter loneliness here and imagined the Princess frantically flitting from dream to dream, trying to stave off the terrors that plagued their owners, all without a word of gratitude from the vast majority of them. And worse, this was ponies today, as opposed to those from a thousand years ago who might have decided she was performing dark magic and tried to assassinate her. Down Starlight fell, deciding that Luna transforming into Nightmare Moon was better than Equestria deserved.
“Gee, Starlight... Why don’t you just ask the Princess of Night to drop everything and come deal with the problems you’re causing for her?” the plummeting mare asked herself, realizing that she had spoken them aloud just moments before she plummeted into a murky pool of... silk?
The impossibly soft fabric tensed a scant few seconds after she impacted against it, gently breaking her fall before propelling her back up a short distance to fall against it again.
It’s her...
Starlight’s ears perked up and she looked around with enough tension to suspend Twilight’s entire castle coursing through her nerves.
The Falling Star! We caught The Falling Star!
Again the words without voices. Just as Starlight was starting to miss the hollow, empty voices of the brainwashed ponies from before, the weird cloth she’d landed on suddenly capsized, causing her to roll sideways down it. Her left wing immediately caught under her body, and just as she was wondering why she didn’t feel the tension in its bones, it snapped off and vanished in a puff of... something. Half a rotation later, the right wing followed suit, and Starlight finished her tumble without further incident, even landing on her hooves. She guessed there was one thing she could be grateful about the iron horseshoes for.
She’s safe. The Falling Star is safe!
I thought you were The Falling Star.
Shut up.
She didn’t know how she was doing it, but she was starting to sort out the not-voices and kind of give them identities. As she oriented herself, Starlight saw that she was standing in the immediate company of two out of what appeared to be about thirty foals, evenly distributed of sex and breed, all slightly smaller than the CMC and in place of each one’s Cutie Mark was a huge black X that indicated the grisly predecessor to her Cutie Mark-removal spell, inspiring Starlight to need to suppress a powerful urge to vomit. The dim light of the vicinity was provided by the ten unicorns, whose horns glowed from their efforts to hold what appeared to be a giant parachute with no ropes in a very specific area. The other twenty foals also held the parachute with their teeth or appendages of choice. Deciding that she wasn’t going to let a nightmare dictate the setting for her, Starlight ignited her own horn, causing all of the foals to flinch from the light.
The flinch was short-lived though, because the light was too. The shock of the sight of the foals caused Starlight to lose her focus on her magic, which immediately flickered out. Trying and failing to hold back a torrent of sobs, she swiftly snatched the filly to her left and pulled her into a fierce hug. The filly struggled, but weakly and briefly, before submitting. Somehow that only empowered the cries wracking Starlight’s body.
Oh colt, here we go.
Shut. Up.
Just as the filly’s submission intensified her grief for the little thing, the nearby colt’s display of dominance cut it short, despite the fact that he was merely a colt and also that his command was neither audible nor directed at her. Her aching heart suspended by her mind’s sudden attention to the surreality of her situation, Starlight sat on her haunches and, refusing to release the filly, re-ignited her horn. Slowly, this time, and to a much softer ambient light than she had produced before. The image was no less agonizing to look at the second time, but at least the shock was no longer amplifying the horror.
As her eyes had previously told her, the foals present were all the victims of rather brutal assaults. The filly in her arms, most of the others present, and at least half the colts had all been violated. Those that hadn’t appear to have been subjected to sufficient conventional beating to compensate. Starlight’s anguish was quickly replaced with dizziness and nausea. She was held together, strangely enough, by their determination to pay as little attention to her as possible. Even the filly ensnared in her forehooves seemed more concerned with reaching for her corner of the parachute than with actually escaping Starlight’s grasp. The grown mare accommodated her by holding her out far enough to get the grip she wanted, and the filly relaxed.
She turned her attention to the colt, a grim-looking little guy with a gray coat and blue-and-gray mane. His eyes and much of his body had hoof-prints dented into it. He offered her a faint smile that showed cracked teeth that made her cringe, but said nothing and made no effort to get up from his position lying at the edge of... whatever was under the parachute. Like a couple of the other foals, he looked emaciated to the point where Starlight wondered how he moved at all, let alone managed magic, let alone supported a joint effort to catch a fully grown mare falling at what must have been terminal velocity.
“Hello... I’m Starlight Glimmer.” she introduced herself, awkwardly.
We know. We’ve been waiting for you.
Even though there was clearly an attempt at friendliness somewhere in those words, the fact that they appeared directly in her mind instead of being spoken to her only caused a chill to run through her. To her chagrin, it was so intense that she dropped the filly, who immediately bolted out of Starlight’s reach.
“You... you have? But why? How did-?”
You’ve been here before.
You’re here a lot, actually.
We almost know about time again, because of you.
“Almost know about... how long have you all been- wait, stupid question.” Starlight berated herself, but the foals had gotten excited and completely ignored her gaff.
But you’re usually in your bubble!
In your safe place.
And you can’t see us!
And the Princess-
LUNAAAAaaa!
The interruption was carried out by about twenty of the mute ponies, almost singing the Princess’s name despite the lack of sound. They must have really liked her. Then again, considering where Starlight just remembered she was, she realized that Luna must have been their only company besides each other until her own arrival. The thought made her want to hug another foal, but the filly was wise to her this time and evaded her grasps. So instead she picked up the reclining colt and crushed him into her chest instead. He didn’t resist at all, but he likewise made no effort to return the gesture.
Landing in the spot Starlight had just pulled the colt out of was the mare of the hour, Princess Luna herself. She had the look of a shell-shocked veteran visiting a familiar battlefield. As though they practiced it, the 29 foals not held by Starlight released the parachute and folded it neatly, then assembled themselves into neat little rows to either side of her, gazing up at the alicorn with expressions of utter worship.
“Starlight, you’re here again...” Luna spoke sotto voce, her gentle, soothing voice an almost deafening bellow compared to the utter silence Starlight had been sitting in whenever she wasn’t speaking or sobbing. “Why do you keep coming back here? What’s it going to take to keep you away?”
“Again? They said that too, but I think I’d remember a place this dreadful.”
“You’re... you’re outside this time. You were always inside before, where you belong. Everypony’s supposed to stay inside...” Luna said, trying not to cry and failing. “Why didn’t you stay inside?”
“I was having a nightmare, Luna.” Starlight responded bluntly, then inwardly kicked herself as hard as she could when she saw the way the Princess flinched.
“Forgive me, Starlight... Please, I just needed a little more time! Please go back inside and give me some more time next time! Please?” Luna’s voice bulldozed Starlight’s heart, but the purple unicorn held her ground. She was not about to abandon all of these foals. Or their spirits. Or their memories. Or whatever they were. She couldn’t, not now.
“Luna, I can’t...” Starlight forced out, refusing to drop the colt as she had the filly before, although he was still not struggling as she had. “I can’t just leave them like this! Who... who are they? What are they doing down here? What is this place? What happened to all of these foals?”
As Starlight’s barrage of questions drove Luna to hide progressively further beneath her wings, the small army of foals all glared at her, minus the one she held, of course, since he was faced away from her. They were about as intimidating as an angry family of hamsters. Suddenly, they all flinched in unison and did not attempt to resume their heated looks, instead turning to comfort the Princess. For her part, Luna broke out in sobs too but at least lowered her wings.
“The Silent Children serve as watchers of The Abyss.” Luna said, pointing a hoof past Starlight and toward the massive hole that had previously been covered by the parachute held by the foals. “That they exist in this state at all is my gravest failure as Princess, but they refuse to abandon this duty, and I cannot make them because so many ponies like you need them here.”
“Silent Children? Abyss? Your failure? Ponies like me? Princess Luna, please slow down, this is a lot to take in!” Starlight stood as she turned to follow Luna’s hoof with her gaze, her mind conjuring memories of the Hearth’s Warming story Twilight read to her recently, perhaps to help her cope with the utter insanity she had plunged into.
All she saw was a black spot on gray ground, like a crater in the moon. So she charged her horn and sent a brilliant beam of light into the spot, which revealed itself to be a hole deeper than her light could reach. Giving up on finding the bottom, she chose instead to scan the sides, -and instantly regretted the decision. The walls of “The Abyss” were dotted with a large number of the broken shells of what Starlight had come to recognize as the dreams of ponies, now utterly destroyed and oozing a mysterious viscous fluid down onto either lower shells and eventually into The Abyss itself. Starlight recoiled in horror and tore her eyes away from the sight.
“What... what is that? That’s horrible!” She said, but she was certain the world failed to do the sight justice.
It’s Despair. The one thing that can kill a pony with more certainty than anything. Now please stop letting yourself fall into it.
After a moment, Starlight identified the not-voice as belonging to the colt in her grip. She had been squeezing him tightly this whole time, but noticed with a start that she felt neither a breath nor a heartbeat from him, and his body was the same temperature as their surroundings. Even having been pressed against hers for all this time hadn’t seemed to affect that. Suddenly alarmed that she might be clinging to a zombie, she cried out and threw the colt to the ground. All of her maternal instincts reminded her of their presence by screaming at her for it.
“All right, Citizen Starlight. It is now time to depart whence you belong. You had best forget what you’ve seen here, and try to stop letting your regrets consume you.” Luna commanded, and before Starlight could protest, she was violently launched back into consciousness.
* * *
“AAAAHHH-hck!” Starlight’s scream of terror was abruptly cut short by the impact of her head against what had to be the hardest substance ever to exist in Equestrian history.
She almost slipped into a coma, but was actually too scared to sleep to let that happen. A few desperate gasps later, her vision cleared, and she identified what she had hit her head on. Maud stared at her with her usual impassive expression, only right now it seemed even more impassive than usual. Starlight had never thought she could possibly be so happy to see literally anypony in her entire life, but here she was. She hugged Maud as hard as she could until Maud decided she’d had enough hug and removed Starlight like a piece of lint.
“Starlight Glimmer, you have been asleep for five minutes and twelve seconds.”
“I-what?”
“Of that time, you have been screaming for a solid two minutes, uninterrupted. Were it not for the indignity to my eardrums, I would be impressed.”
“What. What?”
“You are forbidden from reading the works of H. Pone Lovecraft at sleepovers again. Ever.”
“Ohh....”
“I don’t care what manner of dreams you choose to entertain yourself with at night, but my baby sister is NOT a fan of nightmares, regardless of what she might assert to the contrary.” Maud plodded on, unstoppable, almost theatrically gesturing to where Pinkie Pie was lying on the ground in a sleeping bag next to the bed the two elder mares shared. Her eyes were wider than a pony would have thought anatomically possible, and about as bloodshot as her heart should be.
“I’m sorry! I didn’t-” Starlight was again interrupted by the impact of Maud’s forehead against her own, and was again spared unconsciousness only by sheer terror of what she might see.
“And I am not a fan of my baby sisters being upset. Am I clear, Starlight?” was that an edge in Maud’s tone?
“C-crystal...” Starlight responded, but Maud looked unimpressed. “Did I say crystal? I meant lens! Lens clear! You have magnified my awareness!”
“Good. I don’t like leaving room for doubt when it comes to my family.” Maud said, easing away from Starlight to lean over Pinkie, violating several laws of physics in the process as she reached down and booped Pinkie on the nose, sending her instantly to sleep.
“Good night, Pinkie.” Maud said, then turned back to Starlight and reached for her face.
“N-now Maud, I don’t think I ne-” Maud interrupted Starlight for the third time in as many minutes, this time by touching her horn and sending pure existential bliss directly into her brain through it.
“Good night, Starlight.” The unicorn was out like a light. Maud heaved a sigh, pulled up her covers, rolled over and muttered to herself, “This is why I only read the things I write. You can’t get nightmares from stories about rocks.”