Compatī

The first thing I noticed when entering Luna’s dream was the creak of old wood beneath my hooves and the chill of an otherworldly draft up my backside.

I opened my eyes to find myself in that same auditorium I left after my spat with Luna. The yawning abyss beyond the blown-out back wall greeted me in that same unnerving manner I’d left it. The broken floorboards looked like jagged teeth, giving it the look of a nefarious Dealmaker awaiting my handshake. I made good on the instinct to take a healthy step away from it.

“You’re back,” came Luna’s voice. She sat exactly where I had left her, in exactly the same position, with exactly the same hopeful-yet-distant look on her face.

Being near her again still got that instinctive tingle running down my spine, but I threw on a neutral frown. “No shit. Something’s happening outside, and we’re running out of time. Did it work?”

“Making your amends? Indeed. Suffice to say, it appears to have worked, but not how I had expected.”

She charged up her horn and fired a Magelight into the distant darkness like a miniature shooting star. It spanned the void for one, two, three seconds of nothing, until the darkness gave way to a curious sight.

Where there should have been open sky, it whizzed past a mountain free-floating in space, orbited by chunks of rock and the remains of buildings uprooted from the city around us. It was as if gravity had tried and failed one too many times to keep them where they belonged before throwing up its hands and storming off.

“So instead of shrinking it, it just got all messed up,” I said.

“In a manner of speaking, yes. It seems the dream itself is too fractured to fall apart correctly, and therefore shrink in a predictable manner as I had hoped. As to how it will progress, I do not know that either.”

“Well, we’ve still got a job to do.”

“Indeed. Let us be off.”

A stairwell stage left of the auditorium followed the outer perimeter of the building. Most of it had fallen away with the wearing of time, probably lost somewhere in that distant mess of an asteroid field. Every step felt a little more treacherous than the last, but we made good time getting back to street level.

The eerie moonless glow cast the world into a sharp, contrasted duality of light and dark, where storefronts became the entrances of caves and the cracks spidering along the asphalt little windows into a void churning just beneath our hooves. For all I knew of this falling-apart dream, that second thought might very well have been true.

We walked in silence while Luna did whatever it was she did when not bothering me. She scanned the cracks between the brick and mortar, skimmed the smallest details between details, as if they were a thin veneer plastered over multitudes of secrets. Whatever invisible, unnameable things she found within them drew her gaze to the far horizon, and she stayed like that for an unnervingly long second.

The longer she stared, the more I got that uncomfortable sensation that I was missing something important, and so I followed her lead, putting out those feelers with my magic, reaching out for whatever arcane undercurrents there might be.

Beyond street after street of dilapidated, crumbling high-rises that leaned at dangerous angles; beyond the distant gloom that shrouded the lazily free-floating, twisting mountains; beyond the edges of this non-reality that the Nightmare had strung together, I felt it reach back: a strange heartbeat-like sensation that with every pulse tugged at me ever so slightly, as if a magnet were trying to draw the iron out of my blood.

“Can you sense it?” Luna whispered, breathless. There was a mixture of what looked like wonder and fear in her eyes, though I didn’t buy my own assessment of that. Luna wasn’t the fearful type. At least, not outwardly. “That distant, thrumming otherness beyond the dark?”

I wouldn’t have called it a thrumming exactly, but I knew what she meant. “Is that the Tantabus?”

“’Tis indeed. It calls to us. Keep this feeling close at heart. You will need it when we draw near. Now let us be off. I wish to be rid of this once and for all.”

One of the rare occasions we shared the same sentiment. We continued on.

An hour’s walk saw the road turn into the broken mockery of a path. Asphalt became rubble became dirt, until we were left with only our wits and the vague notion of forward.

To our left, an artificial cliff face rose above our heads, the result of the crazy terraforming going on in this dream. It was like a tectonic plate tired of being walked on and wanted to live out its dream of being a cloud, but with the slow, centurious patience only the earth could know.

Chunks of rock the size of my head gravitated around the cliff face, like yellow jackets hunting for a new nesting spot. I put my hoof to one within reach and pushed it away to watch it go. Somehow, it was still as heavy as I expected it to be, and it took a bit of effort to send it on its way.

“Trippy,” I said.

“Watch your step, Sunset.” Luna stole past me. She extended her wing to let the rock I had just pushed graze her wingtip and spin lazy circles on its journey into the unknown. “Though it is solid ground we walk upon, a careless hoofstep may find you staring into the oblivion below us.”

I took that moment to squint at the corner where the cliff and ground met in the same manner she had scanned the walls of the city. A hairline fracture ran along the seam, just enough to give me a glimpse of what looked like a black, purplish oil churning below.

“Noted,” I said. We continued on. “So how come we aren’t all floaty like these rocks and stuff?”

“You are a visitor within this dream, Sunset, and I am its dreamer. Neither of us are explicitly part of the dream, merely individuals within it. It and its consistencies are what fall apart, not we. Beyond that, I cannot say more.” She hopped up a collapsed skew of boulders that formed the vaguest suggestion of a staircase, to the top of the leftward cliff. “Even as versed as I am in the realm of dreams, there is little I know of that in particular. As I said earlier, a singular dream experienced multiple times is not something I have had much practice with.”

That almost sounded like A-chem, strangely enough. As far as I knew, there weren’t any major breakthroughs since I left. Briefly, I wondered how old Wizened Reed was doing.

“Do you know any of the professors at Celestia’s school?” I asked. Might as well dispel my curiosity while we walked.

“I do not. I… I am not one for academics, nor are many of them interested in me or my pursuits. I keep to the Dreamscape, and that is enough for me.”

Didn’t get out much, huh? That felt like CSGU, too. That felt like all my schooling under Celestia. Books, books, and more books.

That, uh, that really killed the mood I had going. Suddenly, all the curiosities of this dream didn’t feel quite so curious anymore. I let her silence become mine, and we moved on.

After another hour’s walk, I could tell we were getting close. The beating in my heart that wasn’t my own steadily grew stronger, pulled harder at my veins. Our path had taken us beneath and alongside mountain after floating mountain. Here and there they’d grind against the earth like planes crash-landing in slow motion, and the immensity of the resulting earthquakes would send us to our stomachs. Others collided midair to rain down rocks and pebbles that our magic could barely shield us from. It made our journey dangerous to say the least—deadly, more often than not.

Regardless, we kept our heads and a healthy distance from any errant floating mountains, and curiously enough, that heartbeat sensation redoubled as we came before the mouth of a cave. A cold chill ebbed out and across my coat, like a swarm of little scraggly fingers climbing over me in their outward march. It smelled of damp earth and the tang of ozone.

“I suppose it would not be a dream were it not to employ rudimentary symbolism,” Luna said. “Are you ready?”

“I told you, I’m here to get this over with.”

She took that with a nod and started ahead, and I kept abreast of her. No way I’d let her play the hero here. She didn't deserve that title.

It was a small cave, or a tunnel, actually—the light at the end almost as bright as the one over our shoulders—just wide enough to fit us side by side, and tall enough that Luna didn’t have to stoop. Less than a minute’s walk brought us to the other end, and we were inexplicably on top of the mountain, even though we made no upward climb. The arena we stepped into was shaped like a bear trap meant for a titan, at least forty feet around, its long, jagged teeth pointing up toward the empty sky, ready to snap shut and enclose us in an impenetrable darkness.

I took a step toward the middle, but Luna stopped me with a wing. Her eyes were fixed hard on something directly ahead of us.

“It is here,” she said.

As if a mirage melted away before my eyes, I saw the Tantabus take shape on the far end of the arena.

It lay like a mare posing for a photoshoot, its back legs stretched out and forelegs crossed. All the stars in its body seemed to gravitate slowly toward its right shoulder, where its undulating form trailed away in smoky wisps that drifted up toward one of the rocky tooth-like protrusions.

Instinct took hold before I even registered what I saw. I flopped to my belly, and a rush of wind raked over my withers.

Something heavy thumped to my right, and I turned to see the Nightmare’s large, lithe figure pounced where Luna had been a fraction of a second ago. It wheeled around with fangs bared and would have swallowed me whole if not for an ear-splitting crackle of magic above.

Like a star being born, a pale-blue light flared to life in the empty sky, and I felt all the little hairs on the nape of my neck rise toward it. I could just barely make out Luna’s silhouette and the glint of fury in her eyes. She let fly, and I capitalized on the opportunity to scramble away from the Nightmare.

I heard the spell scream all the way down, the magic letting loose a banshee’s wail that stirred in me the fleeting hope of a killing blow. I let it draw my eyes up in witness, but the Nightmare melded with the ground not a moment before impact, and when the dust settled, it rose from the earth about twenty feet ahead, between us and the Tantabus.

Luna swooped down into a wide arc and circled the arena. She swung in just close enough for the Nightmare to strike, but flitted back out of reach the moment it did, while it kept between her and the Tantabus like a lion guarding its kill. Around and around she went in this precarious dance with death, never quite committing herself more than it would let her.

Then I realized. She wasn’t trying to fight it. She was trying to bait it.

I caught her eye, and her stern glare confirmed the assumption already half-formed in my brain. She would deal with the Nightmare; I had to get the Tantabus.

While she spun her loop-de-loops and zigzags to keep the Nightmare preoccupied, I scrambled toward the Tantabus as quietly as I could, my heart hammering in my chest. If the Nightmare saw me, I didn’t think even a hundred Lunas could get that thing away from me with how jealously it kept guard. A little too jealously, ironically enough, as it hadn’t so much as flicked an ear my way the entire terrifying approach.

I had maybe ten seconds if I was lucky.

The Tantabus was smaller than I remembered, hardly coming up to the bottom of my barrel in its lying position. The Nightmare must have sucked out so much of its power. Even now, that wispy trail extended from its back toward the Nightmare like some vampiric aura.

“Come on,” I whispered. “We don’t have much time. Let’s go.”

The nebulae drifting lazily across its face regarded me with what felt like idle curiosity. It twitched an ear, and nothing. Oh no, not this shit again. Being stupid in my dreams was one thing, but we didn’t have time for it here.

“Get up,” I hissed. Still nothing.

What the hell was I supposed to do? Should I just grab it and cast the Wake-Up Spell? Would that even work? If it didn’t, we’d be back at square one—if there was even a square left for us to stand on in this crumbling ruin of a dream. Five seconds.

Fuck it.

I threw my hooves around it, expecting to feel the cold stardust-y reaches of space I remembered about Nocturne, but my hooves passed through as if trying to touch a ghost.

My momentum carried me stumbling through it, and the sensation of ice water washed straight through me oh god. I scrambled out of it, and the mere sensation had me shivering like my soul got sucked out of my body and then plopped back in with an ice-cream scooper. Goddamn, I never wanted to feel that again.

I shook out the last of the shivers and sucked in a deep breath. Focus.

I gathered the magic at my horn and thought of the Dreamscape, thought of the Veil separating us from it. But rather than lasso my magic around the Tantabus, I held it aloft for it to take hold of.

“Please,” I said. “We need to leave.”

The Tantabus regarded the magic for a distressingly long moment, then me, before rising to its haunches. With glacial patience, it put a hoof to my heart, and again I felt that blood-tugging sensation in my veins, like a fisherman reeling in his catch. Except… it didn’t pull toward the Tantabus. It pulled the other way, behind me.

Over my shoulder, the Nightmare raged and thrashed after Luna, but all the same I felt the tug follow its movements, as if I were the stake it was lashed to that kept it from running Luna down.

I looked back to the Tantabus, afraid of the answer to the question I didn’t want to ask.

The Tantabus belonged to Luna. Did that mean—

A shadow crawled over me.

I spun around to see the Nightmare towering above, and the growl that rolled out of its throat all but had me pissing myself. My legs turned to jello.

I saw the flash of fangs and the darkness within its throat, and then I saw Luna, landing on its skull like a meteor to drive it into the dirt.

“Focus, Sunset!” Luna barked. “Breathe.”

I did just that, and the hamster between my ears jumped on its wheel double time. I was suddenly hyper-aware of where I was and everything around me. Or, at least it felt that way. My heart pounded a million times a minute, and I felt light as a feather.

“Luna!” I yelled.

It was all I got out before the Nightmare sunk into the ground, split outward, and curled up at the edges to envelop us like a venus flytrap. Row after row of monstrous, jagged teeth formed beneath the crest as it came crashing down.

Just as I should have felt those teeth sink into my flesh, reality blended together like stirred paint. I felt myself being yanked off my hooves, sucked through an impossibly small straw, and then spat out the other end. The tip of my mane smoked like a snuffed candle.

I sat up and shook off the wobbly-hooved aftereffects of being teleported by someone else. Fuck, chalk that up next to phasing through the Tantabus on things I never wanted to feel again.

“Focus, Sunset,” Luna said beside me. Blood trailed down her face and chest like war paint, and her wings looked like the flags of a storm-beaten ship, but I knew by the strength in her voice she’d stand firm. “Keep your head. You must be strong if we are to defeat this monster. We fight this together. Are you with me?”

I shook my head to clear my thoughts.

Where was all that bravado I threw around not even a day ago? I could talk big, but god knew how much of a bitch I really was. I wasn’t a Warrior Princess or a Royal Guard. I wasn’t strong.

But strength didn’t always mean physical. Sometimes it meant saying something with uncertainty, because it needed saying. It meant questioning your betters in order to understand, or to help them to understand in kind.

“But Luna, I don’t think this is just a Nightmare fragment from Nocturne. I think it’s a Tantabus. My Tantabus.”

“Your what?” She looked at me as if I had run a spear through her chest. She turned a frightful glance at it, then me, then back to it, and she took a step backward.

“L-Luna?” My words fell on deaf ears.

Luna’s eyes were trained on her Tantabus, and whatever emotions her gaze carried was enough to convince it to rise, turn, and meld with the Nightmare.

My blood went cold as we watched the Nightmare grow to twice its size and let out what I could only describe as a dragon’s roar. What was once a black void within its mouth radiated with a dark anti-light, like inverse sunshafts that sucked away what little I could see around its head.

When it took its first step toward us, the weight of its paw fractured the stone beneath it, sending massive cracks outward and up the walls of the arena. The earth detonated beneath my hooves, and I went airborne.

The ground became the sky and then the ground again. In that eternity of a second, I heard only my breathing and my heart, pounding like a wild animal against the bars of a cage, before my entire left side jolted with pain, and I tumbled to a halt.

I got to my hooves as fast as I could only to see the world swimming around me. The earth shuddered, and my innards rose up as if I were falling even though I stood still.

“Luna!?” I cried. Where was she? The Nightmare?

A shadow towered over me and sapped what little light there was to see by as I tried making sense of my situation. I saw the mountain itself rising like a curtain pulled upward into the sky, jagged and misshapen.

I stared slack-jawed as the realization finally hit me: the entire mountain had split in two, and my half was a landslide in the making.

Gravity had seemingly decided to exact its long-awaited revenge at that moment, and all the loose pebbles and boulders rained down around me, trying to break my footing and see me tumble to my death.

I scrambled left right and center, dodging what I could and blasting to dust what I couldn’t as the mountainside keeled over backwards. My footing slipped as I struggled against the steepening earth, desperate for the ledge rising higher above me. My breathing became frantic, and I knew only one reality: if I didn’t reach the ledge before it toppled over, I’d be crushed beneath the mountain.

“Luna!” I cried.

At that moment, I didn’t care about who she was or what she had done. I didn’t want to die—not here, not like this.

I only just managed to scramble over the ledge in time to take a hoof-sized rock to the face. Pain exploded in my left cheek, and I went blind in my left eye. I felt the blood gushing down my face before I even put a hoof to it.

Panic mode kicked in, and I threw up a full bubble shield. “Luna!” I cried again.

Along the ledge of the mountain’s other half, a good fifty—now sixty—feet up, I saw Luna fighting the Nightmare. A black scar stretched across her side, and one wing hung limp and charred. In the briefest moment, she shot a wild look down at me, and the words read plain as day across her face:

Wake up!

I couldn’t breathe. The whole world was crashing down around me. Boulders falling, gravity turning sideways as my half of the mountain keeled over.

In the direction of what had become the vague notion of “down,” an oil-slicked whirlpool yawned wide to swallow everything up like a black hole devouring the universe.

It didn’t take a dreamwalker like Luna to know what was happening. The magic exerted by the Tantabus and Nightmare’s joining was enough to fracture what few threads still held the dream together. The dream was collapsing, and it was trying to take us all with it.

I screamed instinctively, but there was no more sound, and my sense of touch had all but vanished to leave me like a ghost separated from reality as it watched the world disappear.

There was no saving this dream, no defeating the Nightmare here. Luna was right. Now was the time for running.

I dug deep for the strength to light my horn and felt that familiar sensation of rising upward. The Veil’s silken touch draped over my shoulders and made me weightless within and without. Some semblance of consciousness came to me, as if staring upward through the ice of a frozen pond.

Twilight stood over me, and I knew safety. Her mane and tail whipped about in a torrent of wind, her wings spread wide against it. She wore a look of pained resignation as she knelt down beside me.

I reached out to her. My hoof was heavy, despite my weightlessness, and I touched her hoof. I couldn’t feel her, though. I felt… restrained, as if I hadn’t fully crossed through the Veil.

I couldn’t move, couldn’t speak. I couldn’t cry out to her and tell her how much I needed to see and hear and feel her hold me and tell me that I was okay, that this nightmare was just a dream and I was safe.

She held my hoof against her cheek, and a tiny fear pricked at the back of my mind. There were tears in her eyes. She touched her horn ever so gently against mine and cinched off what little warmth there was to feel.

The vision faded to empty sky, and I fell.

Tears formed in my eyes. I watched them rise up into the inky blackness like stars.

Like an afterimage behind cracked glass, I saw Luna diving after me, before a cold wetness soaked into my bones and everything went black.