Compatī

“How many does this one make?” I asked.

Luna and I stood over the body of a nightmare fragment, where its shadowy leopard-like body lay bisected by one of the many spells in her arsenal. It snarled at us as it writhed on the floor, trying to stand on all fours as if it didn’t know its other half lay ten feet away. If only it were the real Nightmare.

“Too many,” she said.

Silver threads of magic unwound from her horn and coalesced into a shining winged spear overtop the beast, point down. An unsettling determination glinted in her eye as she drove it to the hilt, and the nightmare let out a pained whine before falling limp. The silence that followed got goosebumps up and down my legs.

Her movements were ceremonious, and bearing witness made me feel like a trespasser in the midst of some religious rite. She let the magic disperse into a thousand little wisps. On their coattails, thin filaments of light and shadow escaped from its body like souls freed from a cage, winding and wending upward into the dreamsky. When that hallowed moment ended in a bout of silence, there was nothing left but her, me, and the stallion who this dream belonged to, hiding in the corner.

“Let us be off,” she said.

Without waiting for my reply, she drew us into the Dreamscape on the coattails of those soul-like filaments, and we continued into the expanse.

I gave the dream one last glance over my shoulder, translucent as it was after Luna closed off his dream and forced him awake.

I kinda wished I had the opportunity to tell him everything was alright. But I missed my chance, like the dozens before him, and I could only extend that sentiment through well-wishing and a silent farewell.

We continued on much the same. We skipped from dream to dream like rocks tossed into a lake. The ones not so corrupted by the Nightmare, Luna could dispel with the touch of her horn. Those not so fortunate we entered to play a more active clean-up role.

After a few run-ins with these more twisted dreams, we figured out they weren’t so much afterimages of the Nightmare as they were independent fragments, bits and pieces of the Nightmare itself shed like dead weight from a space shuttle. Smaller, weaker, but real all the same.

It meant our initial assumptions that we should leave these dreams alone were wrong. Every fragment we destroyed meant one that couldn’t take root in the dreamer’s mind and whatever exponential propagation that might come from it. On the side, it kept others from living through the hell I used to, and that made every pit stop worth it in my eyes, no matter how much it slowed us down.

But it also highlighted another truth that kept us focused and on the chase:

It was afraid.

Whether that shot I put through its heart did more damage than I realized or our sheer persistence finally got into its head, I had no way of knowing, but it was on the run and trying everything it could to evade and hinder us. It gave me the confidence to fight just a little harder, endure just a little longer. And not gonna lie, I think we both had a taste for the blood in the water.

But the Dreamscape was enormous, and the Nightmare-touched dreams were just as far between as they were numerous. So we drifted. And drifted. And by the grace or curse of whatever gods may exist, we drifted. I couldn’t count the number of days, weeks, possibly months that stretched on in this place. I knew time was meaningless and that only a day or two could have passed in the real world, but that didn’t stop the passage of non-time in here from feeling as real as anywhere else.

I’d always been an overthinker. Time to think without wasting time was a luxury my younger self would have killed for: time to read and learn and wonder at the mysteries of the world without a moment’s aging to show for it.

But this place was timeless, and like my first journey alone through this starlit void, I clung desperately to the thoughts that kept me sane. Or maybe they drove me insane, and my frame of reference was gnarled like an old tree. No matter the answer, they cycled in my head one after another, over and over and over in the infinite silence until they became me. Or I became them. I couldn’t tell anymore.

Mortal minds weren’t meant for this.

My only salvation from the monotony came with the Nightmare, when we dragged ourselves back to some semblance of reality to fight yet another fragment. They were the smallest reprieves from the maddening, self-inflicted ramblings of my brain, but still only a reprieve. And “reprieve” was a bit generous even then, for all that I actually helped.

Luna hardly needed me at this point. Whatever ghost of her former Warrior Princess self once existed now possessed her body and soul. She cut the fragments down with deadly efficiency, like a farmer taking her scythe to a wheat field, and we were off again to the Dreamscape, hungry for the journey’s end. It was honestly terrifying.

Did she think? Was the princess still inside that head of hers, or did her body simply move at the will of some cryptic instinct, like a machine still at work long after its creators had passed? If I spoke up, would that cold, calculating indifference piloting her turn on me?

Maybe even immortal minds weren’t meant for this. Maybe I was thinking too much again.

But thinking was all I had. Thinking was all that kept me me and reminded myself that yes I still existed. In whatever semblance of existence this forward progress could be called, I was. Yet that fact grew more indistinct with every passing non-moment and withered away like everything else.

Honestly, I just… I needed someone to talk to…

• • •

The time I had spent in the Dreamscape the greatest mathematicians could not tabulate in mortal numbers. The concept of infinity did not encompass the reality of this place, not in span nor duration. Eons were nothing more than grains of sand in the desert of its timelessness, and yet the Dreamscape itself was but a microcosm of the greater expanse beyond.

The immensity of everything and nothing that pressed in drew us outward toward infinity.

And yet she persisted, tireless as the arctic winds. Her mind was a beautiful thing, and just as resilient. Yet she was not without her share of scars. I could see the wear and worry in her eyes.

Moreover, she still feared me. I felt it in the silence between us.

When I blinked, I caught snippets of her deeper thoughts—daydreams, as they were. Shifting shadows and billowing white eyes; Twilight standing alone in the distance, a chiaroscuro yet a silhouette; a blonde mare, transparent like frosted glass; and strangely enough, myself, wings splayed in bloody tatters—a strikingly vulnerable image from a strikingly vulnerable moment.

Symbolism interlaced itself in every facet of every dream, and while I felt myself a trespasser in her thoughts, I could not pry myself from that particular image of myself and the strange cacophony of emotions paired with it. Hatred, safety, trust, and a touch of shame—shades of red and blue all mixed to form the vignette of my portrait in her mind’s eye.

A rainbow of turmoil I found… enthralling.

I can’t do this alone, she had said, and I found it humorous that those words would have been truer were it I who spake them.

’Twas ironic.

In my shameful, dark-touched years, I set in motion many events that would come to pass. They did as I saw fit, and those that resisted I bent to my will with but the gentlest touch.

However, my time had passed, and with it my part to play. For all that I did now, for all the Nightmares I have slain and the wrongs I have set right, I have become little more than a pawn in the greater scope of things, much the same as the Dreamscape to the expanse beyond its borders. I move forward, and I can only hope that she will persevere when the time comes.

And truly the universe, as indifferent as any may claim it be, belied an amusement only it could gain from the timeliness of another dream, the one I feared most, and yet the one we sought all the same.

A star cluster naught but the size of my beating heart came before us. It shed a pale chilling light as we neared. I felt a certain indescribable magnetism to it, as if my subconscious yearned for the familiarities of oblivion. However, I approached with caution.

The dream before us had a sickly hue to it—pallid, unkempt. Its depths offered little to the eye, unlike the potential that dreams could offer. ’Twas a husk—transparent with my absence, yet mangled as if by the Nightmare all the same. Which, admittedly, was true.

“This is your dream,” Sunset said. “Isn’t it?”

“It is.”

She floated closer for a better look, and I was loath to admit an upwelling of shame at what imperfections she may glean from it. Gently, as if holding a baby bird, she cupped it in her hooves.

“It’s not here, though, is it? It looks… empty? I don’t know what to call it.”

“It does not appear to be,” I said. “Neither my dream nor the Nightmare. My dream fell apart with our plunge into the Eversleep. I could not imagine much remains.”

“You think that’s where it’s headed, then?”

I leveled my gaze with the distant celestial horizon, and could already feel the strings tugging at my heart. The Nightmare left for us a trail of breadcrumbs—yet more dreams twisted and perverted by its touch—and I feared what awaited us at the end. ’Twas indeed leading us back to the Eversleep, that unnatural, unholy amalgamation of dreams and should-never-bes, but to what purpose I did not know. I knew only that whatever it wanted, we could not allow, and to that end, my fate was sealed.

I fought because I must, I fought because Sunset needed me, I fought because the Nightmares I faced were not those before her.

Hers was not a battle with any demon made of sharpened fang or slavering teeth. Hers was an enemy of a different sort, and when she goes to where she will face it, I cannot follow.

Sunset remained as steadfast as ever, though she, like myself, did not know what lay ahead. Had she, would she remain at the helm? Would she press on like the heroes of legend as she did now?

I feared the answer on the tip of my tongue. I feared what she may do, what she may say if only she knew.

I feared many things, but most of all, I feared that I led her to her doom.

“Is that what you believe, Sunset?” I asked.

A far-off look in her eye followed the same course through the distant cosmos, and she no doubt felt the pull.

“Yeah,” she said.

I paused. “I believe so, too.”

Eyes still tracking the infinite distance, she said, “Then off we go.”

So off we went.