Compatī

It was frighteningly familiar, feeling myself slip into a lucid dream.

That cold, tingly, self-aware sensation, like a thousand little beetles crawling up my skin before I could open my eyes. Though, I hesitated to open them. I didn’t want to know what I’d see.

The world filled in around me. I felt it in the little shifts of air. The walls fell into place, the floor slid underneath whatever cushion I sat on. A faint breeze drifted across my face, so there must have been a window nearby. I took a deep breath and let it out before summoning the courage to open my eyes.

I was in Twilight’s guest room. Again. Honestly, this was starting to get ridi—

Luna!? It took me a second to realize she sat on the area rug between me and the door like last time.

“Wait, you’re alive?” I said.

A twitch of a smile played at her lips, but she held a more somber gaze all the same. “Indeed. I am anchored to you, Sunset. If you leave the dream, so do I.”

“But, but those teeth…” I looked her up and down. Not a feather out of place.

A far-off, haunted look dwelled in her eyes. “They were a construct of the dream, as was my body. The pain will forever be real, but the me that you see before you is merely a projection of myself that my soul happens to reside within. Same as yourself. So long as we do not meet that final fate ere you leave the dream, we are ‘safe,’ as it were.”

That was something to chew on. Still didn’t make it any easier to swallow. Or gruesome to think about. I couldn’t imagine enduring that kind of torture, nor could I get that feeling of blood off my face. But with that understanding came a realization that drew a scowl across my face.

“You knew you’d be fine, though,” I said. “Didn’t you.”

She knew. She knew she’d be okay if I left the dream, just pop back in safe and sound. Just another day at the office for her.

So much for the heroic sacrifice.

“I knew I needed to protect you,” she said in a tone that implied she saw exactly where I was going with that. “And I will gladly do so a thousand times more.”

“Whatever,” I said dismissively. I didn’t even have the energy to argue in my sleep. “What are you doing here now?”

“As I said, I am anchored to you. And so I will remain until we recover my body.”

“Fun.”

“That would be one word for it. I can think of numerous, less sarcastic words as well.”

“Congratulations. So go think of them somewhere else,” I said. I laid down, crossed my hooves, and rested my head in my lap.

She took a breath, and I swore the way she squared her shoulders looked the same as how Celestia used to.

“I do not believe you understand the… magnitude I mean to convey when I use the word ‘anchored.’”

“Okay, fine, so you’re stuck in my dream. Well you’re the master of dreams, so then just make this like all of Equestria and then fuck off into the sunset.”

“While it seems my presence is enough to induce a lucid dream, I do not possess the ability to manipulate it to such an extent in my current state.” She played with a little toy guardspony she pulled off the dresser.

“Fine,” I said. “Then sit in that corner over there and shut up.”

She did so, but then she just stared at me, as if expecting me to do something. I threw a nearby comforter over her and laid back down.

A deep-blue glow surrounded the comforter, and she pulled it back over her shoulders to snipe me with a frown. “I find this solution of yours highly degrading.”

That got me to my hooves real quick. “You find that degrading? Do you even…”

I could have screamed. I could have thrown any number of things in the room at her. And it seemed I had almost done so without thinking. Half the heavy objects in the room were already floating in my aura.

I held them there, debating just how hard I should remind her that I hated her guts, but something in her eyes kept me from letting loose—a pleading look:

If it will make you feel better, etched into the lines on her face.

Fucking hell. I let everything collapse to the floor and laid back down. I couldn’t give her that satisfaction.

“You do not strike me,” she said. “And you do not uphold your command that I remain silent.”

“So?”

“As I recall, not an hour ago you wished to never speak with me, and that you wished I would ‘fuck off and die’ for all you cared.”

Was she really lecturing me? “Yeah, I did. That hasn’t changed.”

“Yet when you entered your dream, you were crying, were you not?”

“That’s none of your goddamn business.” I felt the energy at the base of my horn before I even summoned it. I really was ready to live up to the threat of beating her upside the head with the dresser if she kept this up.

“The beginnings of dreams are awash with colors that symbolize the dreamer’s final waking emotions. Yours was naught but dark blue, which can be representative of both depression and acute sadness.”

Depression, huh? Like she knew what that was like.

“Sunset Shimmer, what is it that truly bothers you?”

I glared at her. She already knew the answer to that.

Luna laid her ears back and looked away. It seemed even she wasn’t dense enough to keep pushing that envelope.

“So then,” she said. “If you do not wish to speak of such things, we should at least discuss our plans for recovering the Tantabus.”

“We go back in there, beat the shit out of the Nightmare, and then come back out.”

She scowled at me. “You cannot think such a rudimentary plan will work. You saw what it was capable of.”

“Well what the hell else are we supposed to do? It’s not like we can just magic the Tantabus back to us. We have to fight that thing.”

“Do not tell me you did not see how much stronger it has already become. I stood my ground thinking the same as you, but it is clear that we face an enemy beyond our capabilities.” Luna sighed and threw her gaze to the floor. “I do not know what it is we should do, but rushing headlong into the fray will see us to no amiable outcome.”

I huffed. I knew she’d counter with something like that. Honestly, I knew it myself. There was no way I’d be able to stand up to that thing, not with how I practically pissed myself earlier.

I acted tough. That I could do at the drop of a hat. Came with the whole “bad girl taking over the human world” territory. But this—being tough—was a whole different ball game that I only recently started after Twilight and her friends saved me from myself.

I couldn’t stand relying on her for advice like this. But she was right. This had to be done.

“So then what do we do?” I asked.

“When you wake, speak with the others. I trust Twilight’s wisdom specifically. Together, I trust you will come up with a plan.”

“Not Celestia?”

Her expression took a turn for the crestfallen. “I should think Sister would not have come. There is much for her to prepare should things take a turn for the worse. Our subjects are more important than myself.”

Did she really think Celestia wouldn’t show up? That was… That was harsh.

I didn’t have anyone to come for me when I needed it, but having someone that could—someone who did—but wholeheartedly believing they wouldn’t was on a totally different level.

I thought about telling her, but I decided against it. What reason did I have to make her feel better?

She twitched the tip of her left wing while deep in thought, much the way Nocturne used to. That brought back a multitude of bad memories, and yeah, there went any shred of mentioning Celestia.

I shied away and mumbled, “You can wake me up now, then.”

Luna blinked. She gave me that longing look, like she was pleading with me to stay. It only made me want to leave more.

Closing her eyes, she lowered her nose to her chest. Her horn glowed silver as the full moon, and I felt the dream give way. The darkness disappeared like holes burned through paper until I saw the shadowed outlines of the guest room furniture.

I sat up to check the area rug. No Luna. I laid back down.

The earliest morning light outside the window turned the sky the faintest traces of pink. Twilight would probably be up trying some new theory on the Dream Dive Spell, same with Star Swirl, and Starlight would be out getting donuts or something.

I could have gone out to the portal room, sated that primal urge to be around others that I often got after a bad nightmare. But the sheets were warm, and the memories crept back in—that giant mouth splitting from one side of the Nightmare’s face to the other. So much blood.

Going back in that room meant going back into the Nightmare’s dream, and that was the last thing I wanted. I fought magic, not monsters. This was out of my league.

I wanted to cry. I hated that I wanted to cry. I hated everything about this and myself and what in the actual fuck was I doing here?

I hugged my pillow and refused to let that tightness take over my chest. Deep breath in, slow breath out. I did that a few times, let my heart rate come back down. Relax. Just listen to the sound of my own breathing and think only of the breathing.

Twilight crossed my mind. I saw her in the Nightmare’s dream, staring up at that monster and its rows of teeth. It opened its jaws and clamped down on her, and I shot up.

“Twilight!” I screamed, my hoof reaching out toward the door. I felt myself shaking uncontrollably.

I was in the bedroom. Twilight was safe. It was just my head fucking with me.

I buried my head in my hooves. This was too much. This was all too much.

But sitting around letting my imagination run wild wouldn’t dig me or anyone else out of this hole. I got out of bed and made for the portal room. There was no bitching out on this. Twilight needed me.

• • •

Before I had even gotten all four hooves through the door, Starlight was already badgering me with questions about yesterday.

The news that Luna was alive and well gave them something to smile about, at least.

“It’s…” I hesitated on how to put it. “It’s getting stronger.” I kept my eyes moving around the room, taking in all the things they’d been working on. I had to keep my mind from wandering down dark alleyways so that I didn’t renege on my conviction.

Thinking about it like that didn’t make it much of a conviction, though, did it? That, too, I had to stuff down inside with the whole looking around the room deal.

“It’s consuming the Tantabus, like you said,” Star Swirl said. He had his face buried in some old scroll of his. His beard, half poking out beneath the scroll, bobbed up and down with his words. “We expected it to be stronger, did we not?”

“Yeah, but not like this.” I stared at him, a desperate yearning practically tugging my heart out through my chest. “That, that thing wasn’t the Nightmare I know. That was a monster. Er, like, more of a monster than it already was.”

“So then either it’s been sucking up the Tantabus faster than we expected or it’s stronger than you thought in the first place.” Starlight sputtered. “Either way, that’s bad.”

I gave her a “no shit” look.

“Hey, stating the obvious helps me work through my problems. I’m taking this just as seriously as you are.”

I sighed. “I know. I just… How are we supposed to do this? If we can’t fight it and we can’t exactly run since we don’t know where we’re going or anything, then what should we do? I mean, it just kinda feels like we’re out of options. Like we have to throw ourselves to the wolves and just hope for the best.”

Twilight pored over a small set of flashcards, probably to do with the Dream Dive Spell. “You’re after the Tantabus. I remember Luna talking about it before, that it’s like physically a part of her, or that it’s tethered to her. I forget exactly what she said, but I’m sure she could lead you to it.”

“Well, okay, but that doesn’t change the whole ‘the Nightmare is going to chase us to the ends of the Dreamscape and all we can do is let it’ thing.”

That got a concerned frown from Twilight. She set the flashcards down—well-loved school notes on extramatrical attunement, I now noticed—and stepped up to me. Her mane stuck out at odd ends and sleep bagged heavy beneath her eyes, but there was a special reassurance in that smile of hers.

“She’ll keep you safe,” was all Twilight said, and she hugged me.

I melted into her. I had told her enough times to stop worrying about me and that no I wouldn’t let her go in my place so stop asking. This little gesture meant more to me than she probably realized. She trusted me to deal with this and for once to not put everything on her own shoulders.

“Yeah,” I said. It was a half-hearted “yeah.” Not that I didn’t believe her, but just…

She’ll keep me safe.

I couldn’t swallow that thought. After everything that happened between us—after what she did to me—I couldn’t see Luna truly protecting me like that, yesterday be damned. That was a fluke, a publicity stunt.

“You know it’s going to be waiting for you, right?” Starlight said. She was staring at Luna lying in the circle. “At least, if I were still a bad guy and I knew I was stronger than you and you were coming to my territory, I’d definitely be waiting to blast you the moment you showed up.”

Yeah, because I really needed to hear that right now. At least I had that whole thing going for me where I wasn’t part of the dream until I cast the Tantabus’s spell. If it worked the same as last time, I’d at least have the chance to get my hooves on the ground before everything invariably went to shit.

“We’ll just have to deal with that when we get in there,” I said.

I didn’t want to think about it, but if I could magic myself out of the dream at any given moment like I had yesterday, we technically weren’t in any danger. I just had to keep telling myself that.

Well, time to get to it. I sat down in my spot and closed my eyes. I listened to the hoofsteps of everyone else getting into position, and a fuller sense of dread washed over me.

But I couldn’t let that get to me. I stuffed it down with all the other thoughts and feelings vying for headspace and took a deep breath.

A moment passed, the windchime tinkle of magic gathered to my left, right and center, and I gritted my teeth. The familiar sensation of water closed in around me, and just as my hooves touched the ground, a blast of magic rattled my brain inside my skull.

A pounding migraine lodged itself at the base of my horn before I even opened my eyes, and a strange concussive sensation made my insides feel like they’d become my outsides. I blinked away tears and gathered enough of my senses to realize I lay on my back.

What the fuck? What happened to the whole not being part of the dream thing?

Luna stood over me, her horn lit and wings spread. A bead of sweat ran down her face, shimmering in the faint blue light of a bubble shield surrounding us. Sulfur stunk up the air. Whatever the hell hit us, it was meant to kill.

“Rise, Sunset,” Luna said. She stared into the darkness behind me. “I do not believe I can stop another.”

I rolled onto my stomach and tried finding my hooves. Luckily, my hearing worked better than my balance. I heard the next one coming—a massive, toxic-green fireball sizzling like hot grease.

Too easy. I grinned and lit my horn and teleported us about ten feet to the left—and straight into the open jaws of that rhino-behemoth thing from yesterday. My heart skipped a beat, and I seized up.

Luckily, Luna threw up another magic shield just before it could clamp down on us. Cracks spidered along the shield’s surface like glass. Quick thinking on Luna’s part, but nothing was going to stop those teeth for long. She grabbed me by the scruff of the neck, and in a surge of wings yanked us backward just before the shield shattered, its shards screaming past us like shrapnel. We tumbled across hard asphalt, little bits of gravel and rock digging into my skin.

The Nightmare let loose a deafening roar and charged. The earth rumbled beneath its stampede.

The adrenaline finally kicked in, and I was already on my hooves. I knew where I was and what was happening with vivid clarity. It was like seeing everything happen in slow motion—Luna getting to her hooves, the Nightmare stampeding toward us, the fragments of Luna’s shield embedded in the asphalt around us dissolving away like swarms of fireflies taking flight. It was so surreal, yet so terrifying.

Maybe it was the adrenaline talking, or maybe it was knowing I could teleport out of the dream whenever I wanted. Either way, some notion of courage wormed its way into my brain. I squared up with the Nightmare and summoned the biggest fireball I could.

The heat building at my horn sent beads of sweat down my face, and when the Nightmare opened its jaws, I let it fly.

I had to admit, no small amount of pride went into that spell, and as it caught the Nightmare full in the back of the throat, I let out a laugh. “Fucking eat it, you piece of shit!”

“Sunset! Watch out!” I heard Luna call.

As the smoke cleared, I saw the rhino thing tipping backwards as if it was going to land on its back, but before it hit the ground, it dissolved into a black fog and knifed toward me.

Luna leapt between us, already firing off a spear of white magic that flash froze into a gleaming blue streak of crystal the moment it struck the fog, crackling and spidering outward to encase the errant plumes that tried escaping. If it weren’t for our situation, I’d have considered it a strangely beautiful modern art piece.

She turned to me. “We have little time. We must move.”

Behind her, cracks were already forming along the length of the crystal, and a demonic hiss poured out from within.

“What is—”

The crystal shattered in a hail of shrapnel. One caught me just below the eye. I reached up and felt blood, but before I could fully comprehend that, Luna yanked me by the foreleg and we were off at a dead sprint.

“Where are we going?” I yelled.

“The Tantabus lies farther within the dream. I can feel it calling out to me.”

I took a second to contemplate that, but before I could dwell on it, the Nightmare let out a lion’s roar that rumbled in my heart.

It soared overhead, taking the shape of a windigo, but black as midnight, with ragged wings that sounded like flags in a heavy wind. Its mane and tail billowed behind it in a spiral of stars that consumed the empty sky in a hypnotic, lulling pattern, but it was hard to miss the toxic-green light growing at its horntip.

We took turns tossing up shields to deflect the Nightmare’s magic—red, blue, red, swatted the missiles off into the darkness. Like errant flares, they illuminated shapes beyond sight. Buildings, window shops. We were in a city.

Luna deflected a bolt that would have otherwise caught me in the back of the head, and a pane of glass shattered to my left. The shards rained down on us, and I felt a sting along my shoulder blades.

I couldn’t think about that though. We didn’t have time for pain.

But I wasn’t the hero that sort of statement made me out to be. I was never good at running, being the bookworm that I was. My legs felt like fire, and I swore I had knives in my lungs after not even a minute.

I deflected another bolt of magic, and I saw the light reflect the worry in Luna’s eyes. She knew I couldn’t go much farther.

With a flick of her horn, she blew a hole into the side of a building and cut a right angle for it. “In here!” she shouted.

I squinted to keep the dust out of my eyes, but I hacked and sputtered, unable to keep myself from sucking in lungfuls of it as I followed her in. The shockwave from a final blast behind me sent my tail between my legs, and I heard the brick and mortar cave in behind us.

We were in an atrium of some sort, with one wall leading farther into the building and the other three a series of two-story windows. A catwalk ringed the upper story and led inside on both ends.

With how dead I felt at that moment, I had hope enough to look over my shoulder and ask, “Did we lose it?”

In the momentary silence, I could only hear my heartbeat thumping in my ears, but as I swiveled my ears around, I caught the faintest whisper of sound. An unnatural, skin-raking shriek grew steadily around us like the whistle of a teapot, and above us, a shadow grew on the far atrium window like a shark rushing up from the depths of the ocean.

The Nightmare crashed through the glass and unfurled its wings. The spell at the tip of its horn glinted green off the scattered shards like nighttime rain around a street lamp.

I shielded my eyes and threw up a little shield to keep the shattered glass off us while Luna dealt with the blast of toxic magic. I was getting tired of all this damn glass raining on me.

“I do not know why you would think it that simple,” Luna said. She turned for a nearby interior door, hooking her right wing over my barrel to pull me as she went. “We move.”

Not a moment too soon. I took a single step forward, heard the brief thwump of magic hit the floor behind me, and the blast sent me ass over teakettle through the door ahead of us and skidding to an ungraceful halt on my chest, back hooves dangling overtop. A sharp pain lanced up my left forehoof when I tried moving it, but Luna lassoed me in her magic and threw me back to my hooves before I could take stock.

I only caught it for a second, but the look in her eye said more than she ever needed to put into words: Run or die. I took off after her.

Fuuuck. The blast had knocked the wind out of me, and I heaved for air as we barreled down the hall.

Luna shouldered her way through a leftward door, and we trampled into a small corporate lobby. I didn’t know why we stopped, but above the sound of our haggard breath I heard… nothing.

I swiveled my ears for that shrieking sound, the shifting of winds, the hiss of another caustic fireball. Blood pounded in my ears, and my legs trembled. Half of me felt like I should just cast the Wake-Up Spell and get out of here before I passed out.

“I sense…” Luna trailed off. Ears at attention, she looked up at the corkboard ceiling, then at the door ahead. “It has left. For now.”

“It gave up?” I collapsed against a receptionist desk and heaved for air.

“No. It is toying with us. If I know my old self as well as I should, it has had its fill of fighting. Be careful of this dream. I should think it will not stay the same for long.”

I shot her a glare that could have drilled right through the back of her skull. “You mean like how you were a sadistic, manipulative bitch?”

Maybe that was uncalled for. Luna had borne the brunt of the fighting so far, while I barely even kept up. But if my words got to her, it didn’t show on her face.

“Now is not the time, Sunset,” she said.

I… I flicked my ears. Yeah, she was right. I needed to lay off, at least for now, so I circled back to another thought burning in the forefront of my brain.

“So what the hell was that?” I said.

“What was what?”

“Last time I entered your dream, I was invisible or some shit, but this time I literally hadn’t even opened my eyes and it already almost killed us. I know for a fact I didn’t cast that spell the Tantabus gave me. What gives?”

Her face hardened, not at me, but at the walls and debris scattered throughout the office space. “The last time you entered my dream, you did not cast it either. I have my suspicions as to why the Veil did not protect you, but I do not rightly know. That is a question for later, Sunset, when I have had time to ponder.”

Right. Deflect and evade like always. She could never be wrong if she simply never answered. Why should I have expected any less?

She was right, though. I actually didn’t cast it last time—only the first, when I traded the Tantabus. What the heck kind of magic were we dealing with that even she had no idea? I sighed and turned my attention back to the—

Where was the office? I spun around, staring into what was now the vast hallways of CSGU. The din of schoolwork and excited ponies filled the air, but there wasn’t a soul in sight.

It was all around us—the stampede of hooves heading to the next class, the slamming of locker doors and the laughter of friends. The school bell rang, and everything went unearthly silent.

I glanced at Luna, unsure what to make of this, but she was a mask of stoicism.

“I think you will find this place to your liking,” came a voice.

The hair stood up on the back of my neck. That was Celestia. That was the first thing she said to me on my first tour of school.

I turned around, and there I was, walking beside Celestia. She had her wing draped over my younger self’s shoulder.

I looked like a complete dork with those wide eyes and slack jaw. Little Me even had those stupid pigtails I took way too long to grow out of. I remembered being so overwhelmed and amazed and afraid of the place. All I had done was some little magic trick with a candelabra, and that was enough to make Celestia sweep me up and make me the star of some grand show I never knew existed.

They walked through us, down the hall, and I caught Luna out of the corner of my eye. She wore a strange look that I couldn’t quite place. Something between wonder and regret.

That didn’t last long. Her face hardened, and she turned to me.

“Be on your guard,” she said. “It is peering into your memories. Hold close your thoughts lest it uses them against you.”

The moment those words left her lips, the dream shuddered as if in a rage that she dared suggest we held any power here. I was almost thrown from my hooves as the concrete collapsed beneath my left hind leg, splitting the hallway behind us into a yawning chasm of crumbling mortar and twisted rebar that threatened to take us with it.

“Move!” Luna yelled.

We took off after the memory, the hallway ahead bleeding away to darkness as the cracks split the floor beneath my hooves. I stumbled, and when the floor gave out, I screamed and shut my eyes. I plunged into ice water, and the chill sucked the air from my lungs. I thrashed for my life, gritted my teeth until they felt like they’d crack.

A pair of hooves gripped me around my shoulders. “Breathe, Sunset. ’Tis only an illusion.”

I sucked in a deep breath, and the sensation of drowning disappeared. My hooves found solid ground, and when I opened my eyes, we stood in Celestia’s room.

Little Me sat on a red pillow across from Celestia, two cups of tea between them.

What was this? What was the Nightmare doing? I’d had crazy dreams before, but nothing like this—nothing this real, this lucid.

“Why is it doing this?” I asked. It wasn’t until then that I realized Luna was still holding me by the shoulders. I jerked away and put a good two feet between us. It didn’t seem like she noticed.

“I do not know for certain,” she said. She stared at the scene before us with a distant look in her eye. “However, it is building toward something, in order to scare us off. Of that I am certain. The magic it used to fight us must have taken a larger toll on it than we first believed.”

Well, good to know we weren’t the only tired ones after that. Didn’t make it any less comforting, though, now that we had no idea what to expect.

“Well aren’t you just the smartest shit in the room?” someone said behind me.

Wait. I knew that voice.

Goosebumps ran up my legs, and I almost fell back on my ass from the shock. I turned to see the dream had shifted again. We stood in the second-floor hallway of the school’s evocation wing—I knew it by the orange-and-red pennants hanging above the lockers—and I felt a supernatural pull toward the intersecting hallway just ahead. When we turned the corner, I stumbled to a halt and stared wide-eyed at the scene bleeding into view.

Row upon row of desks and eager students sat staring at us from the front of a classroom. Little Me sat in the third row, smack in the middle. I was in my late teens this time. Judging by the little details around the room, this was A-chem, and there beside my younger self sat a blonde-maned, green-eyed mare wearing a hauntingly familiar smirk.

C-Copper?

“Better be careful with answers like that,” Copper said. “Ponies might think you’re actually trying to pass this class.”

“Well, one of us has to,” Little Me said, leveling a grin at Copper.

Copper laughed. I remembered that laugh. So light, so full of happiness. It had… it had been so long since I thought about her. My heart weighed heavily with the memories.

But as quickly as the memory took shape, it bled to darkness, and I stood watching my breath form puffs of fog in a sudden chill. The moisture in the air crystallized on my coat, and I could hear its tiny crinkles when I swiveled my ears for anything in this unearthly vacuum.

“I don’t understand,” I said. “Luna, what’s going on? Why is it using these memories? You said it’s building toward something, but what? Luna?”

I turned to where she stood moments ago, but saw only darkness. A bone-chilling sensation crawled up my legs, and I staggered backward with a tiny shake of my head.

“Luna!” I called out to her. Nothing. The emptiness pressed in as if a thousand unseen eyes were all trained on me, and I suddenly felt very much alone. Every breath I took came without air. “Luna!”

This was wrong. I wanted to wake up, I wanted to kick and scream and be done with this hell. I didn’t even care how much I hated Luna. In that singular moment, I just wanted someone beside me.

A speck of blue caught my eye, far off in the distance. My heart pulled toward it. It was Luna. I could feel it.

I ran as hard as I could. I ran until my legs burned and the fire reignited in my lungs. I ran and I ran and I ran until I collapsed in a heap, heaving for air that seemed to withhold itself from my lungs, and I came to realize I hadn’t even moved.

“Luna…” My voice came out pathetically weak. I sounded like a blubbering filly on the verge of tears. If I were brutally honest with myself, that wasn’t far from the truth.

“Hello, Little Sunset.”

Those honeyed words crawled up the back of my neck like the scraggly fingers of a corpse. I jumped to my hooves and spun around. I had a fireball primed at the base of my horn, and I knew the scowl on my face would have sent a manticore running for the hills. But the moment I saw the mare standing before me, I froze.

I saw the turquoise eyes and the fanged smile, but I didn’t believe them. I saw her nebulous mane and tail and her half-spread wings, but my mind refused to accept. All I could feel was the sucking emptiness in my chest and the tingle in my legs as they went numb.

“Nn-nnnoc…”

I couldn’t say her name, I couldn’t think her name. My throat cinched up, and somewhere in the middle of it, I felt tears running down my face.

The corners of her lips poked upward into a bigger smile. She took a step forward, head low and body rimmed silver by an invisible spotlight.

I matched her steps backward one for one, step after trembling step. I stumbled into something wooden, and I shot a glance over my shoulder. It was a dresser of polished cherry. To my left, a bed rose up from the floor, and a large bookshelf recessed itself into the far wall.

I gasped, recognizing the knickknacks scattered around the room in a fit of terror. This was my old room back at school. This was…

She let out a chuckle that rolled into a blood-chilling laugh and took another step toward me.

I slumped to my haunches, trying to push myself backward through the dresser. I couldn’t breathe. My horn refused to work, and I felt the world closing in.

With wings half spread, her mane swirled into the air, and the shadows gathered around us like seeking tendrils. One touched my flank from behind.

I screamed. With all the power I had, I tore through the magics suppressing my horn and ripped myself from the dream. I woke up with my hooves flailing and tears in my eyes.

Twilight shouted at me, but I had no idea what she said.

I ran. I ran for the portal as fast as my legs would carry me. I had to get out. I had to get away.

She wouldn’t hurt me, not again.