Compatī

When the Tantabus first touched its horn to me, I expected visions of fire and brimstone, of some twisted, biblical hellscape. If only I was that lucky.

I was in Canterlot Castle, and yet I wasn’t.

I stood in the throne room, facing the grand golden double doors. They had their sweeping carvings and silver filigree that I always traced with my eyes every time Celestia brought me there. The rest was fog and shadow.

I tried turning, but I couldn’t. I didn’t have a body here. I didn’t exist so much as observe, as if looking from afar through a crystal ball. It reminded me of dream diving, but far more real. And as the seconds crawled on into minutes, I felt something on the back of my neck—a pair of eyes and a distant fire that I knew all too well. I didn’t want to turn around anymore.

But I still had no control. This was the Tantabus’s dream. I was just along for the ride, a ride I wanted off of the moment those great double doors creaked open.

I would have screamed if I had a mouth.

Celestia stood at the threshold, but not the princess as I knew her. I didn’t think I could even call her a princess the way she looked.

She had no wings or horn. Not that she was simply an earth pony in this dream, but that she had been made that way. They had been forcibly wrenched from her, and the leftovers crudely sutured, like a teddy bear sewn together by a two-year-old.

Princess Celestia was strong, stronger than anypony I knew, but those eyes said it all. Those weren’t her eyes. They were the hollow, lifeless eyes of a broken pony.

She hobbled into the throne room. Railway spikes had been driven through her hooves, and shackles far too small for her had been clamped around her fetlocks, her skin raw and blistering around the edges. A tea set rattled on her back.

I traveled backward ahead of her, the dream dragging me like a child by the scruff of the neck, still not allowing me to turn. All the while, the heat on the back of my head grew hotter. Finally we came to the foot of the throne, and I stopped.

The dream allowed me to turn. But when I did, I wanted to look away again. I couldn’t bear to look at the pony in front of me, the monster upon her throne, the me I almost became.

With wings aflame and a crown of fire floating just above her head, she smiled down on Celestia as she stroked the midnight-black fur lining her throne.

Celestia bowed before climbing the steps. She squinted against the heat as she came close to the not-me and shakily offered her the tea set.

Not-me smiled wider and accepted the teacup from the tray. She brought it to her lips, but before taking a sip, she dumped it on a pile of ashes in a basin beside her, followed by the cup. With a flick of her hoof, she smacked the carafe off the tray, watching it tumble across the throne room until it crashed against the wall and came to a rest.

“Bring me another,” she said. The simplicity of her voice sent a chill down my spine. Calm, yet dangerous, and it reverberated as if two ponies spoke slightly out of sync.

Celestia bowed with apparent pain. When she spoke, her voice sounded like the parched earth of a desert.

“As you wish,” she said.

As slowly as she hobbled into the room, she turned and left. The double doors closed behind her to echo off the nonexistent ceiling, and as the echo fell to silence, I felt the unknown masses beyond the doors, the silent cries of all the ponies in this world and the people in the other, sleepless and emaciated, at the mercy of this monster sitting behind me.

I wanted to cry. I wanted to beg this other me to stop and see what she was doing, how she was hurting everyone.

I didn’t care if this was just a vision given to me by the Tantabus. I knew it too well. I had lived this fantasy in my own head far too many times to count.

Friendship saved me from this nightmare, and this wound on my heart had scarred over since. But seeing it again now that I was good, I couldn’t stand the thought of it.

I had seen enough. I begged wordlessly to the Tantabus to stop this, that I was done and wanted nothing to do with it.

The dream slowly unraveled like a thread pulled from a sweater, and I was back in the dream of Twilight’s guest bedroom, staring into the Tantabus’s starscape face.

The supernovas it had for eyes had cooled and became the lights of little stars. It stepped back and sat down on the rug.

It took me a minute to catch my breath. My heart hammered in my chest, and I could barely keep myself sitting up with how my hooves were shaking.

“You… you saw that when you fought the Nightmare inside me, didn’t you?”

It wasn’t so much a question as a statement. Now that we sat in my dream again, the connection we shared came together a little more coherently.

The Tantabus didn’t speak, but its thoughts ran faintly through my mind, like memories I struggled to remember in bits and pieces.

“I…” I looked down at my hooves, lifted them one by one. I was in control again, but it didn’t quite feel that way. “I’m sorry.”

It was all I could get out. My throat closed up, and I shut my eyes to hold back tears.

“I was so angry back then. I just thought…” I shook my head and wiped my eyes. “This is what the Nightmare wants to do, isn’t it? If it gets out?”

The Tantabus didn’t move, but I felt its silent affirmation in my heart.

I stared at the bedsheets beneath me. I didn’t know how long. Didn’t think it mattered, really.

There was no way I could leave without seeing this through. Not just for Twilight. I owed it to Equestria and to my world, too.

I looked out the still-dark window. There was nothing to see, but I needed something else to look at. As calmly as it sat there, I could only imagine how strongly the Tantabus judged me.

That didn’t matter now. I had a job to do. Even if it meant saving her.

“I’m ready to wake up now,” I said. As if on command, the dream dissolved from top to bottom, and I blearily opened my eyes to a Magelight Spell far too bright for any sane pony to use.

“Sweet Celestia,” Starlight said. “You sleep like a rock.”

I rubbed my eyes. “Ughn?”

I squinted at her. Her mane was a bit messier than usual, and she had bags under her eyes, but she otherwise looked excited. Nervous, but excited.

She blushed and swished a hoof back and forth on the bedsheets. “I might have used a Clarity Spell to force you awake. I didn’t want to, because you looked so adorable snoring away like that, but we—”

“I don’t snore,” I said.

Starlight raised an eyebrow at me. “Yeah, okay. Come on. We just had a major breakthrough.”

I stretched out like a cat and plodded off the bed. My body felt like jello, and I was sure my brain still lay snoozing away on the bed behind me. Hopefully, whatever Starlight woke me up for was worth the trip.

Back in the portal room, Star Swirl stood over an array of crystals and a book almost as big as me. Electricity snarled from his horn, throwing heavy shadows into all the distant nooks and crannies. A discharge that intense would have taken a dozen regular unicorns to create. As much of a dickbag as he was, I couldn’t deny his mastery of magic.

“What’s he doing?” I whispered to Starlight.

“Combining spells,” she whispered back. “Like how we were thinking of mixing a Mindtap Spell with something else. A bit ago, we had the idea to combine it with a Stasis Spell, and now he’s trying to combine it with a Water Walking Spell.”

“Water Walking? But that’s alteration magic. How can he mix that with an illusion-class spell without it backfiring?”

Starlight shrugged. “I don’t know, he’s Star Swirl. That seems to be Twilight’s explanation for everything.”

“Is that your explanation for everything?” I gave her a grin.

A smirk spread across her lips, and I was pretty sure she snorted. Hard to tell over the hiss and crackle of Star Swirl’s magic.

Tendrils of lightning warped from his horn to the book at his hooves, and the pages flipped in a gust of wind. I shielded my face, as did Starlight, and I watched with one eye half open as he etched the final markings of his spell into the book. Everything fell silent, and my ears rang like alarm bells.

“That should do it,” he mumbled to himself and turned for the chalkboard.

Twilight, who just came in behind us with a plate full of snacks, trotted excitedly toward him. She set the plate on our note table against the right wall.

“Did it work?” she asked.

“Looks like it,” Starlight said. She snagged a sugar cookie for herself and went to town.

I stepped up to Star Swirl’s book. It looked like a collection of personal spells. And Starlight was right about the whole water walking combination thing. But the way the markings read, it seemed like he was banking on the whole cutie mark idea pretty hard.

I couldn’t help the smug grin on my face as I approached him. “Finally came around, huh?”

“Before you come gloating to me like a ruffled harpy,” he said, not bothering to look at me, “know that I exhausted every other method I could think of in order to save my dear Luna. It seems that dream diving, as you call it, has no alternative that I can find, save whatever magic Luna herself possesses.”

He stared at the chalk circles surrounding Luna, and his ears flattened back. Something about them held his attention longer than a few lines on the floor should have.

“There is no such thing as black and white, Sunset Shimmer, only shades of grey. I despise this methodology, but I do agree that something must be done, for the sake of my dear Luna and for Equestria.”

He heaved a deep sigh, and after bowing his head, he turned around. The look in his eye wiped the grin off my face faster than a fist square to the jaw would have. It was a look of defeat, of coming to terms with something he couldn’t control. And for a pony like Star Swirl, I didn’t think anyone had ever seen that look before.

“I am one to let my pride get the better of me,” he continued. “Your friends here were the ones who helped me see that not long ago. Yet as with all vices, we do not let go of them as easily as we would like.”

“I’ll take that as an apology,” I said, scratching my head. “And… I owe you one, too. I can get a little hot-headed when it comes to defending my friends.”

“I wasn’t finished,” he said. “My reckless abandon nearly cost our efforts your expertise, not to mention no small part of your happiness, and for that I am sorry. A pony’s worth is measured by her actions, not her words. And you certainly have plenty of both to spare.”

He let out another sigh and looked away. A weariness settled on his shoulders, as if his age had suddenly caught up with him.

“The world has changed much in my time away, and so have the ponies in it. You, Sunset Shimmer, are a different breed altogether.”

I blushed and rubbed my hoof up and down my foreleg. “I… thanks. I guess I’ve just had some different life experiences than most.”

“Hmm. And I have no doubt most are centered around my dear Luna, given earlier.”

I cringed and looked down at my hooves. “Yeah, I…”

He put a hoof on my shoulder. “I know you are here for Twilight’s sake and not your own. Whatever is between you and Luna, I commend you on seeing past it. It says much of your character. You are a pony I am more than honored to have met.”

I couldn’t help but smile. “Now that’s more the Star Swirl I remember reading about.”

We shared a laugh and a quick glance around the room before he cleared his throat. “Alright, to business.”

We gathered around the chalk circle we had spent the better half of yesterday perfecting. It looked like they had made a few additions while I slept. Runes and glyphs marked the spots where the others were supposed to sit, with spots for Luna and myself in the middle.

I sat down in my little subcircle next to Luna and glanced at Twilight. I knew she wouldn’t let anything happen to me, but I couldn’t keep my heart from going wild in my chest.

It was still a little nerve-wracking, this dream diving thing. Not that the act of being in another pony’s dreams wasn’t cool. Just the whole getting there part—the actual dive. It was like holding my breath before jumping into a pool, but there was no coming back up for air.

As I had the ten or so times before, I closed my eyes and took a deep breath to prepare myself, and before I knew it, the ice-water plunge of magic enveloped me. Everything went weightless—hooves, body, mane. Sound twisted and distorted like I was underwater, and the hum of magic took on a low throb that vibrated in my heart.

I stuck out my hooves—I still hadn’t opened my eyes—searching for a floor that no longer was. I knew I could breathe if I just let myself, but the instinct to thrash about and struggle for a nonexistent surface held fast. It was stupid, yeah, but in the thick of things, it was hard to get the notion of drowning out of my head.

That momentary struggle ended when I couldn’t hold out any longer, and the instant I took that breath, I knew this was it. This was the spell we were looking for.

I felt it before my sense of sight kicked in, like I had grown an entirely new sense after breathing in this dream air. Maybe it was the dream itself, or the magic that got me into it screwing with my perception.

I touched down onto soft, springy grass. The sensation of touch caught me off guard, and I almost stumbled. I didn’t have any of my senses in previous dream dives except sight.

But yeah, as I swooshed my hooves through… whoa. I stepped backward away from the blurry, muted green beneath my hooves. Though, that didn’t really help, because I kept stepping back into more of it.

I swooshed my hooves through the not-grass, and yeah, it still felt like grass. Around me were other blurry visions of what I was pretty sure were houses and ponies trotting through a village park.

Weirder still were the sounds—the conversations and laughter of a town full of friendly ponies, all distorted and warped as if heard echoing down an impossibly long hallway. And despite the sensation of touch and the weird sounds, I couldn’t smell a thing, even though I was sure the square of blurry pinks and blues next to me was a garden. A smear of a pony floated through me at one point, like I didn’t even exist.

The breeze picked up, tugged at my mane. Forward, along a winding cobblestone path up a hill. A faint light silhouetted the top like the earliest rays of dawn. Behind me, the dream petered out into a vague darkness and the sense that nothing lay beyond it.

Well, no one ever said dreams weren’t symbolic. I followed the path up.

As I got near the top, a little doubt nipped at the back of my mind. Everything around me was still blurry, but other little details filled in the cracks. The outlines of the houses grew sharper. Voices spoke actual words instead of garbled echoes. I was getting closer to something, likely the center of the dream.

As I reached the crest of the hill, it sloped downward on the other side to give me a view of… nothing.

“What the hell?” I said, but no sound came out. There was no sound anywhere. The garbled conversations around me fell silent, and when I turned to look I realized everything had been swallowed up by the darkness, save the few cobblestones beneath me.

Somepony cried in the distance. It echoed all around me—a low, pained weeping.

“Who’s there?” I shouted. I brought a few defensive spells to life at the base of my horn, and I let the cherry red of my magic glow bright as a warning that whatever lay ahead shouldn’t fuck with me.

I was here to find Luna. I had to remind myself of that. Find, not sit around waiting to be found by her. Or worse, by something else.

My heart got going, and I took a daring step into the dark. Thankfully, I didn’t go plummeting into some endless abyss, but it gave the slightest bit under my weight, like gymnastic foam.

With every step, the little ring of cobblestones shrank into the distance behind me, an island of safety pleading that I return. But as much as I wanted to stay there, where I felt at least a sliver of familiarity, another circle of light appeared ahead and compelled me to come closer.

Luna sat inside it, wings limp at her sides, feathers strewn about. She stared unmoving into the darkness ahead of us.

“Luna?” I said. My voice didn’t carry, as if I were in a vacuum, but she snapped to attention at something else. The fur on the back of her neck stood up.

She spun around, and I swear the blood in my veins turned to ice when I saw the look of terror on her face. Her eyes had shrunk to pinpricks, and the temperature in this dark place dropped enough that the tears running from her eyes frosted over.

I felt it along my spine before I even had a chance to gasp.

A sensation like a cold, spindly finger traced up from the small of my back to the top of my withers, and alongside me strode a monster of muscle and sinew—that black leopard-lion form the Nightmare loved to embody in my dreams whenever it had more… violent intentions. I barely came up to its shoulders.

Its eyes glowed white as death and trailed away in wisps of smoke, and its paws padded like massive slabs of meat on what had become a stone floor sprawling outward around us.

A heavy lump fell into the pit of my stomach. I’d felt its jaws around my throat more times than I could count, and even though it didn’t even look at me, I felt those pitch-white eyes bore into me all the same.

It stepped behind and around Luna, its gangly, freakish excuses for wings tracing the ground to leave little trails of white-rimmed voidfire in its wake. Footlong fangs poked out from the vicious snarl on its lips, and its prehensile tail whipped back and forth, impatiently awaiting the coming bloodbath.

Luna stared at her hooves, the muscles in her legs tensed and trembling. An overpowering sensation commanded her to look up—even I felt that fatal attraction and the nightmarish whispers creeping in from the dark.

The longer I stared, the more I realized neither Luna nor the Nightmare had so much as acknowledged my presence, and I slowly came to understand that I wasn’t actually part of the dream. I was watching, yeah, but unlike I had first thought, I was observing from some sort of limbo or other effect.

The Tantabus stirred in my chest. It reached up into my head toward the base of my horn and whispered wordlessly to me with piecemeal thoughts and suggestions. Somewhere among them, I felt the faintest traces of a spell that would peel back whatever separated me from them. It wanted me to fully enter the dream and intervene.

My heart beat faster. We had worked our asses off to get into Luna’s dream and confront the Nightmare, but now that I stood here, watching as Luna stared helplessly into its eyes, a crippling fear grabbed hold of me.

If I cast this spell, it would know I was here. If I cast this spell, it could touch me.

I was finally free, and I never wanted to see or even think about it again. But I couldn’t just do nothing. Twilight was relying on me. She trusted me.

Before I could convince myself otherwise, I cast the spell, and a film peeled away from my eyes. The heaviness of the dream’s atmosphere pressed in, and I felt suddenly powerless and small.

Some preternatural sense told the Nightmare to stop and raise its head. It perked up its ears before whipping around to pierce me with those soulless eyes. A moment’s recognition brought a scowl to its face, and out rolled the guttural, bassy growl that preceded every nightmare in recent memory.

My heart racketed in my chest, but I threw on the bravest face I could manage and squared my shoulders. “I’m not afraid of you. I’m taking her with me, and you’re not stopping me.”

Maybe I was an idiot for staring certain death in the face. It sure felt like it. I knew damn well what it was capable of. The pain was always real enough to matter until I woke up.

But I was done. I was done being its bitch. I’d lived its hell long enough, and if there was one thing Luna did right, it was proving that this thing could be stood up to.

What started as a renewed growl turned into some strange punctuated sound midway between a growl and what I imagined this thing would sound like if it could purr. It took me a moment to realize…

It laughed. It laughed at me, and sure enough, the traces of a smile warped its face to give it a disturbing level of personality.

In a fraction of a second, its jaws opened wide enough to crush me between its fangs. I didn’t even have time to react, but instead of tearing me to ribbons, it reared back its head to regard me, ears at attention. Though it had no pupils, I could tell its focus was on my chest—more specifically, the thing residing within it.

The Tantabus came to the forefront of my chest, just behind my sternum, as if looking out a window to meet its gaze. They shared a connection, like two poles of a magnet. One reached out with a sense of communion, of extending an olive branch across the divide. The other, a ravenous hunger and nothing more.

It wasn’t hard to tell which belonged to which.

The Nightmare began pacing between Luna and me like a tiger in a cage, eyes locked with the Tantabus inside me. Between paces, I caught sight of Luna, still sitting amidst the feathers beaten loose in her struggle to break free.

She looked shaken, her eyes screaming all sorts of fears I couldn’t parse. But where the Nightmare focused on the Tantabus in my chest, she stared directly into my eyes. I could only imagine what thoughts ran through her head, the things she wanted to say but couldn’t.

“I’m not going to say it again,” I said, scowling at the Nightmare. “I’m taking Luna with me. I’m not asking, and you’re not stopping me.”

Its eyes briefly came up to meet mine, and I could feel as much as see its patience wearing thin.

Around us, the darkness pressed in against the spotlight illuminating our little corner of oblivion. Chilling, indecipherable whispers tickled my ear, twisting and overlapping one another. They were the Nightmare and yet weren’t, a voice that spoke on its behalf—to me, of me, through me—a jumbled mess of nonsense and raw emotion that I couldn’t listen to or else chance going mad.

But I could feel them, those voices, and all the hunger and rage dripping from every wordless thought hammering against my brain. The only constant among the impossibilities was a sensation of intense desire, and with it a proposition: give, take, trade.

My legs trembled beneath me, and I didn’t know if I had the strength left to stand let alone make such a choice. I was weak. I was a coward.

It wanted the Tantabus, and every fiber of my being screamed that was the worst choice I could make. But I had no other options.

I could feel the hollow chill that accompanied the ending of a dream dive. The darkness ringing this circle of hell threaded away to reveal a deeper darkness, a nothing beyond the nothingness. I was running out of time and Twilight was counting on me what the hell was I waiting for Luna was right fucking there. It was all too much too fast, and the mounting desperation in Luna’s eyes had me crying and I didn’t know what to do.

But somewhere amidst the hurricane of thoughts, I felt the Tantabus stir deep down in my chest.

At first, I expected it to throw itself against my ribcage as if trying to break out through sheer force, the way a caged dog would while trying to protect its master. I expected it to howl and rage and gnash its teeth. But rather than match the Nightmare’s bloodlust, it made its quiet decision known to me with a gentle nudge against my heart.

It offered me another spell, a simple incantation that would draw itself out of me, and along with this newfound knowledge came a gentle assurance that everything would be okay. It wanted to trade—one for one, its life for its master’s.

A powerful wind ripped through the dream, whipping my mane in my face and pulling heavy streams of shadow from the Nightmare’s back like smoke from a bonfire. It tore the ground away, stone by stone, into the cavernous dark above us. I had only a few precious moments before there’d be nothing left to stand on and I’d plummet into whatever purgatory awaited us.

So I made a choice.

I glared the Nightmare in the eye, in defiance of everything it had done to me, and I cast the spell.

It was like having my ribcage split open like a pair of grasping hands and my soul dug out with a scalpel. I couldn’t even scream. My eyes rolled into the back of my head, and my jaw fell slack.

The Tantabus left me. In its place, a colder, frightened presence took root.

It felt fear as I did, from the tips of my hooves to the spiral of my horn. Its ghostly presence grabbed me by the shoulders and shook until I could barely make out Luna’s silhouette as the cackle of demonic laughter echoed in the distance.

Her eyes met mine, and just as reality threaded away, I heard between my ears:

“What have you done!?”