Compatī

by Corejo

Rating: teen
Tags: Profanity, Non-consensual, Sex, Sunset Shimmer, Twilight Sparkle, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, Dark, Romance, Princess Luna, Drama, Original Character, Equestria Girls
Length: 263347

Sunset Shimmer lived a perfect life. Nightmare Moon destroyed it. When Luna seeks reconciliation years later, past demons resurface to threaten all that Sunset holds dear. Though she is willing, the question remains: is there a limit to forgiveness?

Sunset Shimmer lived a perfect life: an aspiring career as Princess Celestia’s star pupil, a budding romance, and the perfect best friend to discover the wonders of the world that made life worth living.  But under the guise of a new friend Sunset met in her dreams, Nightmare Moon sought to upend everything in the name of vengeance, and the powers that be demanded their pound of flesh.

Years later, long after the dust had settled, Sunset found her home beyond the portal. Life was good, if a little strange.  But when Princess Luna comes seeking to quell the nightmares of a past that still haunt her, those nightmares rapidly spiral out of control, and Sunset is faced with the impossible decision of allying herself with the very individual who had destroyed her life.

With little choice, they strike a tentative partnership, and as past and present converge to threaten all that Sunset holds dear, she is left standing at the precarious ledge of a question that may very well have no answer:

Is there a limit to forgiveness?

[Non-con] tag for story elements, not on-page events.
Edited by RBDash47.
Cover art by Ventious.
Chapter header art by Smeows_isgood.

Published 2018-02-17 20:40:06 UTC
Last updated 2025-01-13 22:43:34 UTC

I - A Distant Nightmare

’Twas a long while that I journeyed through the Dreamscape in search of Sunset Shimmer’s dream.

Innumerable were the spiraling galaxies and twisting nebulae that made up the collective Equestrian subconscious, but time, malleable as it was in the Dreamscape, afforded me the luxury of infinity and the mental space to understand my place among it all.

At first I feared her cluster of stars would be merely an echo, a distant memory of our world, as she had long since found her place beyond the mirror. Though as I wandered, I found that was not the case. She was forever a daughter of Equestria, and so her mind yet came to rest within my bosom when she slept. I need only close my eyes and follow my heart, for it would never steer me wrong.

Far into the distant reaches my heart led me, but it led me true all the same. Hers was a radiant star amidst the Dreamscape, a beacon to all that here slept one of Equestria’s great heroines of this age. Though, as I neared, something seemed off.

It bore a translucency I had never once encountered in my time shepherding the Dreamscape. The celestial bodies that made up the dreams of our little ponies bore a similar transparency whenever they themselves were not asleep to dream them, but where theirs arose from a disconnect of their tether to the collective subconscious, hers appeared… attenuated.

I assumed it a side effect of her place beyond the mirror, but the fears that dwelt within my heart whispered more sinister truths, those of promises I did not want to remember. Nevertheless, I touched the Veil of her subconscious, and I borrowed my share of it as I passed into her dream.

The Veil itself was more than simply a metaphor. It served as a barrier that divided the Self from the Other, the safety of the known from the terrors of the Outer Dark. More importantly, ’twas a blind spot in the subconscious. The mind only knew what should exist within one’s dream, and so I, cloaked as I was in my piece of the Veil, remained invisible to and untouchable by anything within, until I saw fit to cast it aside and intervene.

’Twas my cloak, my shield, my means of discretion. In this uncertain moment between my present self and my past evils, I was loath to admit I needed it now more than ever.

I touched down on silent hooves to find myself in a formless courtyard, enveloped by the arms of a building as devoid of detail as the world around it. The vague shapes of hedge bushes and other greenery outlined the spaces between like the rough brush strokes of a foal. All was shrouded in a dense fog.

Unlike what many assumed, individual aspects of dreams did not exist as concretely as they appeared to the dreamer, at least not natively. They were as ephemeral as a castle of sand amidst a river. Wherever the dreamer went within their dream, up went the castles of sand as if they had always been, molded by the dreamer and their subconscious. Once left behind, however, they would lapse back into blurs and suggestion, their details washed away on the currents of oblivion.

With nary a detail greeting me, I knew Sunset Shimmer had not passed this way recently. Strangely, though, all was hauntingly silent. One could hear sound from farther away than other details, as they were peripheral to what the dreamer actively focused on. But even so, I should still have heard birdsong from the trees or the babble of this world’s inhabitants, distorted as if underwater if not better.

This fog, too—mysteries working in tandem, or perhaps symptoms of her place beyond the mirror. It lent an air of trepidation, one I respected as I took my first step toward the building’s double doors.

They stood ajar, beckoning me to peer inside. When I did, however, a darkness blacker than the night sky between stars gazed back at me, as if her dream simply ended at the threshold.

’Twas not wholly unusual for dead zones to exist within a dream, but they were cause for alarm. They oft presented in recurring nightmares, where the offending nightmare-thought had begun stripping away the foundations of a dream to better entrench itself. The longer this persisted, the worse it would become, and the onset of psychosis with it.

Sunset had carried this nightmare a long while, and again I feared the part I had played.

I set forth, focused on the link Sunset and I shared as dreamer and dream steward. She was in here somewhere, beyond the darkness—or worse, below.

Below was for the helpless ones, the lost causes, those too far gone to save, and despite my hopes—or perhaps through their own spite for me—I found the path pitching downward as if following the curve of a bowl to its lowest point. There I came upon her, though she did not appear as I remembered her.

I knew the body lying before me belonged to her by the tether binding her soul to mine, but she possessed a taller, more slender form, reminiscent of a minotaur but without the musculature or bullish face. Human, Twilight had once mentioned.

She lay on her back, eyes glazed over. Naked. Defenseless. Dare I say, supplicant?

As if the act of coming abreast of her sprang a trap, a chilling presence materialized behind me. I turned to face what I knew to be the offending nightmare-thought, but rather than the usual, twisting amalgamation of abstract fears and buried prejudices that embodied recurring nightmares, I came face-to-face with the truth I did not want to believe:

Soulless eyes, cold as ice, that saw the world not in color but in miseries and the calculations of how best to extract them. A starless mane, blacker than the fur of its coat or the heart beating in its chest, curling and twisting like the nebulae of the furthest reaches of space. But worst of all, that smile—a demure widowmaker’s smile that relished the weight of my sins.

Nightmare Moon.

I could do naught but stare at my antithetical reflection standing before me, and as our manes co-mingled in the silence, I feared, briefly, that its eyes could penetrate the Veil and claw their way into my soul.

Its smile sharpened, and I stepped backward on instinct. However, its gaze continued beyond me, and it then raised its head so as to look down the bridge of its nose before stepping through me. Its body was cold like the slurry of an arctic tide.

Where its hooves touched the nothingness that held us aloft, shadows curled upward like flames from a stoked fire. It circled Sunset, tracing a wingtip up her leg, thigh, belly, as it lowered its head to come nose to nose with her.

Sunset roused from her stupor, eyes locked with Nightmare Moon’s. She did not make a sound, but the fear in her eyes transcended language, and I knew my time was now.

I must not fear it. I must not fail her. I was starlight and fire, and within the bounds of my domain I spread my wings to shed the Veil and assert my authority.

“That is enough,” I commanded. My voice echoed off the nothingness, resounded in my head and heart as grand as the day I shed the skin of the monster before me.

But neither Nightmare Moon nor Sunset acknowledged me, and the cold finger of doubt drew a long trail up my spine. I felt it still about my shoulders: the Veil, draped as it was like a silken cloak. I remained a ghost, yet I knew not why. I cursed my weakness and flared my horn. My mane and tail lifted into the air about me in the swirl of energy, yet I still could not cast aside the Veil.

Then I saw it in the light of my horn: that fog. It persisted even here in this lightless place, constricting tighter about my horn the more I tried mustering my strength.

So it must indeed be the distance between our two worlds that caged me so. I was powerless to intervene. I could only watch as that thing lorded over Sunset, a wolf and its prey.

A fanged grin tugged at the corners of its mouth. Out rolled a long slavering tongue to trail up Sunset’s chest, neck, cheek.

Sunset shied away from it, wincing as it caressed her cheekbone and continued on to trace the curve of her ear. She had not the faculties to move in earnest, as many dreams were wont to hinder their dreamer in strange and insidious ways.

I… I turned away. I shut my eyes and flattened my ears to drown out her whimpers. There was nothing I could do.

I folded my wings about my chest and lifted from the ground. As if falling upward into the soft pillows of my bed, I passed through the Veil and again drifted among the stars of the Dreamscape. I watched them twinkle their condolences as I tumbled in lazy silence.

That image of my past evils… ’Twas not a normal nightmare-thought. There was something hauntingly powerful about it. The way it felt as it moved through me, that sensation of an arctic tide. Dreams could not interact with me ere I shed the Veil, nor I them, yet I felt it plain as the moon and stars.

Whether this particular manifestation had always been or became something more in the years between, I could no longer deny the truth of the matter. The nightmares I had long ago wrought in my quest for vengeance yet plagued Sunset.

Twilight had regaled me briefly with her own exploits in the human world, and Sunset sounded well on the surface. However, what I had witnessed indicated she had merely learned to hide her pain. I feared what would become of her were I to allow this to continue.

But the scope of my transgressions… I knew it was my responsibility to see that she found peace; however, if the past had taught me anything, I needed counsel before I acted, lest I set in motion even greater catastrophes.

Sister knew Sunset better than anypony. She would understand the gravity of my query.

A final flash of light from my horn, and I awoke to my bedchambers. I gave my legs a quick stretch ere rising for the door.

Sister would know what to do.

• • •

“Luna?” Celestia said upon opening her chamber door. “Is everything okay?”

Her usual smile teetered precariously upon the concern underpinning her question, highlighted by the glow of candlelight somewhere to her left. She knew better than to assume the worst, but I was not one to come calling in the dead of night without reason.

“Sister,” I said, glancing briefly at the guard stationed beside her door. “May we speak in private?”

She held her gaze upon me a moment ere stepping back.

I followed her in, past the side table whose candelabra cast long shadows across the floor. The hardened runnels of wax trailing down its candles told the story of a late night recently put to bed. Likewise, Philomena crowed as she oft did when rudely awoken, but chirruped when she saw it was me who caused the disturbance. I afforded her a smile whilst making myself comfortable at Sister’s tea table in the middle of the room.

Sister sat opposite me. She poured a cup of tea for me before I could decline, so I took it out of courtesy. Its warmth confirmed that she had only recently bedded down. She had been up thinking about things again.

“What’s wrong, Luna?” she asked.

“I spoke with young Twilight yesterday,” I said. I took a sip. ’Twas bitter, whatever it was, meant to sharpen the mind rather than relax it. Her late-night musings were of some greater import than her usual day-to-day affairs.

“Yes, I remember you saying something about meeting her for dinner.” She did not pour a cup for herself, perhaps intent on returning to bed the moment I left.

I curled my lips at her remark. “If by dinner you mean being accosted with a score of astronomy books, then yes.”

Sister chuckled, a reminiscent look in her eye. “Twilight has always been eager to please. But I assume that’s not what this is about.”

Sister wore her signature smile. Beneath it, however, I read her true statement as one would an open book: What is wrong, Little Sister?

“She… has a book,” I said.

“She has many of those, Luna.” Her smile sharpened a hair.

I rolled my eyes. Even in the sublunary hours, she spared me none of her witticisms.

“’Tis Sunset Shimmer’s. They use it to speak with one another.”

Sister’s smirk faded, she cast her gaze down at my cup of tea, and we shared a moment of silence. “You still feel guilty,” she said.

’Twas not a question, though I frowned and let the bridging silence be an answer regardless.

Sister rose and came around the table, wings half spread to drape one over my shoulder should the need arise. Not that I would allow myself to show such vulnerability; however, the look in her eyes bespoke I had failed thusly.

“It was a long time ago, Luna,” she said.

“But it has not left her, Sister. I found her dream this eve. What I did still haunts her. What I… What I did to her.”

“She’ll work through her dreams in her own time, Luna. You’ve told me that time and again about anypony having nightmares.”

I shook my head. “That may be true for normal nightmares, Sister, but this was more than simply a nightmare. I… I felt it, that, that whatever-it-is. I do not know what to call it or what it portends, but I believe it may be a piece of Nightmare Moon still clinging to her, or something of the like.”

Sister knitted her brow. “How’s that possible? Didn’t Twilight and her friends cleanse all traces of Nightmare Moon with the Elements when you first returned?”

I slanted my mouth to deflect the sting of her words. I had to remind myself she did not mean it as such.

“They cleansed that evil from me, true. That is all I know. But what I saw within Sunset Shimmer’s dream was unmistakable. I was one to have hoped that time would heal her wounds as it is wont to do, but this one runs deeper than any I have ever seen. There was practically nothing left of her dream. ’Twas naught but…”

I took a deep breath to steady myself and spent the time distracting myself with the odds and ends of her tea table. Sister had acquired another tea bag tray since last she entertained me.

She placed a hoof on my shoulder. For as much as I should have let myself lean into her, I instead took a long drink of tea. It scalded all the way down, but I dared not let it show.

“We all have our scars, Luna. Some of them run deeper than we wish, but we all learn to heal. For some ponies, it takes longer than others.” She squeezed my shoulder a mite bit harder.

I remained silent.

Nay, Sister. This was not a scar. Scars were wounds that had since healed. This nightmare was a festering boil that needed lancing, and, perhaps, more abrasive measures. Though I was the knife that wounded her, I could also be the salve that healed her. She deserved that much.

“I must right this wrong…” I afforded Sister a pleading gaze, despite knowing I must do this alone.

“Are you asking me for guidance, Luna, or permission?” Hers was an inquisitive face, one that knew the gravitas of my worries. She was right, however.

Now that I knew the evils I committed as Nightmare Moon still plagued Sunset, to even step hoof into her dream felt criminally invasive. Trespass remained the most straightforward method, yet two wrongs did not necessarily make a right.

Part of me yearned for some outside volition to lend me direction, to pardon the wrong of this would-be offense so that I may proceed with clear conscience. Again, however, I knew that was not the way of things.

I stared into my empty tea cup, unable to bear Sister’s gaze. “All I know is that she does not deserve to suffer for my transgressions. She never once did.”

A sister’s ignorance was a sister’s forgiveness. She may have found room in her heart to extend to me an olive branch, but I knew better. To see the consequences of my actions lingering in the mind of one I had sworn to protect stirred within me that cold reminder—the Tantabus that I would forever carry with me. I could not allow it to consume me as it once nearly had, yet I refused the prospect of ignorance.

“I know what I must do.” I smiled at Sister, as briefly as it might have been. “’Twill not be easy, but I must face my fears all the same.”

“May I ask?”

I looked at the fleurs-de-lis in the carpet beneath me. “I will write to her, in Twilight’s book. I must explain myself.”

“Are you sure you want to tell her who you are? Who you were?”

A pause, and I felt my ears fall back of their own accord. If only you knew, Sister…

“I must,” I said. “’Tis better to be honest than to let that hammer forever hang over my head. I will swallow my pride. I will dig out this cancer by the root.”

I headed for the door, half expecting Sister to leave me with a few parting words. She remained silent, however. Only Philomena bid me farewell with a little chirrup ere I shut the door behind me.

The hall lay dark, lit only by the candelabras spaced at lonely intervals along its length. The night sky outside the nearby window twinkled its well wishings to me, but among the stars I saw that waning crescent, that eye slowly closing in fear of what was to come.

’Twas quiet enough to hear the blood flowing through my veins, and in the nighttime silence of the hallway, I heard Sister pour herself a cup of tea.

Author's Note

Finally back to it. I hope this story doesn't disappoint.

Onward and Upward!

This story has undergone changes. Some comments may no longer make sense or be relevant.

II - Arcanonaturamancology

(Seven years prior)

Arcanonaturamancology.

The study of magic and its magio-chemical interactions with the physical world, taught only at Celestia’s School for Gifted Unicorns.

Also known as “what?” by freshmen, and as “Bend-over-ology” by those who flunked out. Coincidentally, it inspired the name of a particularly sadistic mixed drink at a local bar.

Of course, Sunset Shimmer was a good pony and didn’t partake in underage drinking or any other activities that would detract from her studies. She, unlike many, found her high in discovering the secrets of the world, the intricacies that made up life’s doldrums.

Sunset Shimmer loved Arcanonaturamancology.

She loved the massive chalk diagrams filling the three-stack chalkboard at the front of class, she loved the vanilla-tome smell of The Nature of the Arcane open on her desk, and she loved the excited bounce of Professor Wizened Reed’s voice as he held them all spellbound in yet another lecture on the mechanics of levitation.

“And as the levitation spell is applied to the object, but before lifting it”—he wrapped a one-kilogram weight sitting on a table scale in his magic, giving it a smile as he dipped his nose low—“we can look at the scale and see that the needle actually ticks up just a bit, to 1.1 kilograms.”

The needle danced on the 1.1 marker, and all the students leaned forward for a closer look, Sunset included.

“Now, does anypony know why that is?” Professor Wizened Reed asked, and the class was silent.

A dozen thoughts whirled through Sunset’s head. Was it some sort of manipulation of gravity? A change in the density of the object that somehow messed with the scale?

“Is it something to do with gravity?” Coppertone, Sunset’s best friend, said from the row ahead of her.

Professor Wizened Reed shook his head. “No. In a particular sense, it does, but that’s not quite what’s happening.”

“Are you pushing down on the scale just to mess with us?” Page Turner, one of the few athletic types in class, asked in his usual snarky manner. The class laughed, Professor Wizened Reed right there with them.

“If only I was clever enough to pull those sorts of pranks on bright minds like yourselves. No, no… leave that to Miss Hoodwink in her Illusions courses.” He adjusted his glasses and took a moment to sigh away what might have been a fond memory.

“No, I am not pushing down on the scale. Watch closely as I lift the weight.” He raised the weight, and for a split second, the needle flicked to 1.2 before bottoming out at 0. “Did you see it?”

“It got slightly heavier?” Sunset said.

Professor Wizened Reed smiled at her. “Ah, again, not quite, but you did see what I was referring to. Don’t forget, no matter what sorts of ideas you have in your head about magic, it still obeys the laws of physics as we know them. And remember: matter cannot be created or destroyed.”

The class nodded collectively. Some scribbled in their notebooks.

Sunset leaned forward in her seat. This sort of thing was what she loved most about learning: the conceptual information, the ideas behind the inner workings of magic.

Sure, the math could be fun, and there was no shortage of calculus and linear algebra that went into the concepts they had learned and had yet to learn. But those were technical details, the nit and grit that let her experience the concepts more fully. The math would come later. Before her now was the mystery that drove her detective brain.

“What if I were to tell you,” Professor Wizened Reed said, “that when we levitate something, we are not only interacting with the object, but the space around it as well?”

A few whispers drifted over the class: “What’s he mean?” “Is he sure it’s not affecting gravity?”

Sunset curled her lip into a thoughtful frown. “Is it, like, air pressure or something?” she wondered aloud.

The class turned to her, then back to the professor.

Professor Wizened Reed’s smile practically reached from wall to wall. He gave a can-do swing of his hoof. “Now you’re thinking like an arcanonaturamancologist.”

Sunset blushed beneath the direct praise of her favorite teacher—er, second favorite teacher. Celestia might not take too kindly to holding that number-two slot.

“Yes, it is indeed air pressure that causes the needle to jiggle,” Professor Wizened Reed said.

“So then you are pushing down on it after all,” Page Turner said.

Professor Wizened Reed chuckled. “So I am, technically speaking. I guess you caught me.”

“But Professor,” said Crystal Violet, a shy, indigo mare to the far left of class, “how would the air pressure lift things when air’s so light? All those molecules needed to make that pressure would have to come from somewhere, and point-one kilograms doesn’t sound like nearly enough.”

Professor Wizened Reed snapped a hoof toward her. “Now you’re thinking like an arcanonaturamancologist!”

She eeped and flattened herself against her desk, much to the rest of the class’ amusement.

He clomped his hoof on the desk, and everypony jolted. He raised his voice to a near shout, an energy more becoming of a twenty-something stallion overtaking his old frame.

“Where does that air pressure come from? All that air pressure needed to lift something?”

He wrapped his desk—a massive, singular work of intricate carvings and enough varnish to coat the castle twice over—in a field of green and lifted it from the floor. “Where am I getting all this air pressure to lift this desk?”

The class was silent.

He smiled. “Trick question. I’m not getting it from anywhere.”

He grabbed another scale, one meant for ponies, from the far wall and set it at his hooves. He put a single hoof on it, and the needle rocketed past the farthest notch on its scale.

“Do you all remember the first thing you levitated as a foal? Do you remember the weight of that thing? The strain on your neck? It is because we take on that weight through our horn.” He tapped his horn as he said the words. “As foals, we do not know how to lift objects properly, but in time we learn without thinking to disperse the weight evenly through our bodies, and as some of you may already be aware, project some or all of that weight into the ground beneath our hooves.”

He stepped off the scale and set it aside. “Then, with the weight of the object gone, it’s a simple matter of manipulating the air pressure above and below the now-weightless object, and viola, levitation.”

“But then why does the object seem to get heavier before you lift it?” Coppertone asked.

“Aha!” Professor Wizened Reed said. “Excellent question. It’s because as we apply our magical field to the object, the magics that change and draw in the air pressure are already in motion well before the transfer of weight begins.”

“But then how do we pick things up so quick?” Page Turner asked. He had taken to hefting his copy of The Nature of the Arcane in his magic.

“You have to remember we’re talking about magio-physical reactions, Page Turner.” Professor Wizened Reed motioned at the air as if there were giant air molecules floating around that everypony could see. “Like chemical reactions, everything is happening in terms of nanoseconds, which, while that’s nothing more than the blink of an eye to you and me, the difference of even ten or so is an eternity to the molecules themselves.”

Sunset only half listened to the group conversation around her. She was still stuck on a previous question nopony asked.

“Professor?” Sunset said, crooking an ear to the side. “If the mass itself doesn’t move, then how are the forces of gravity that affect it being redirected to us? And what does that say about ponies who levitate themselves?”

Professor Wizened Reed set his desk down and fixed Sunset with an easy smile. It was a smile the class had only seen a few times, one of pride that couldn’t rightly convey the magnitude behind it.

“Arcanonaturamancology is the science of magic,” he said. “But this right here, class, is the magic of magic. Of all the spells innate to unicorns, levitation is still one of the least understood.

“Arcanonaturamancology is a relatively new field of study. We still have much to learn, and you ponies sitting before me are the next great thinkers that will discover the secrets of the world that I never will.”

The school bell rang, and everypony eagerly began packing up their things.

“Bah,” Professor Wizened Reed said, pushing his glasses up to his forehead and rubbing his nose. “I always seem to lose myself in these long-winded lectures. Read chapter eight for Thursday and answer the questions in the Read and Review section.”

Sunset noted down the assignment, clipped her binder shut, and took off to catch up with Coppertone.

The hallway bustled with students eager to stretch their legs after whatever grueling two-hour lecture they just survived. Sunset could barely hear herself think over the din.

Maybe that was a good thing, though, because all she could think about was lunch. Hitting snooze one too many times and missing breakfast will do that to a mare. To make matters worse, it was Tuesday, which meant all-you-could-eat tacos. Oh, sweet Celestia, those tacos.

“So what was the point of that lecture?” Copper shouted over the din. “All he told us was that we didn’t know what we didn’t know.”

“Not really.” Sunset smiled at her. “He told us that there’s more out there, that there’s more for us to discover, even about the everyday things we take for granted.”

Copper snorted. “Jeez, Sunny, you already sound like a stuffy university professor. Any more of those lectures and I’ll have to buy you a protractor for your birthday or something.”

Sunset rolled her eyes. Yeah, Copper wasn’t really the type for all that mysticism stuff. But honestly, that’s what made them such great friends. They both had that concrete mindset, just Sunset was more… tolerant of the whimsy of the unknown. If that made her a stuffy university professor, then that made her a stuffy university professor.

Besides, she could always use another protractor.

“I still don’t get how you even got into that course,” Copper said. “You’re a sophomore.”

True. Arcanonaturamancology was a 400-level course available only to seniors and the occasional outstanding junior, but Sunset had the golden ticket.

“I told you the last time you asked,” she said. “And the time before that. Celestia let me take it.”

Copper flicked her ears back, still not used to hearing Celestia’s name without the title. Few ponies in the world could claim themselves on a first-name basis with the princess herself.

Sunset tried her best to never let that go to her head. Didn’t stop it from happening from time to time, though. She coughed into her hoof to suppress any smug grin she might have been wearing.

“Must be nice,” Copper said. “Having the princess as your teacher.”

Sunset shrugged. “All it really means is more homework and higher expectations.”

“And getting to do pretty much whatever you want.”

“I don’t get to do whatever I want.” Sunset frowned at the notion. Did Copper really think it was all fun and games living under that sort of microscope?

Copper laughed, stepping around the far side of a freshman brewing something definitely not for homework in his alembic. “You get away with whatever you want,” she said.

“What?” Sunset blew a raspberry. “No I don’t.”

Copper raised an eyebrow. “Plague of frogs?”

“That was one time!”

It was actually two, but if Copper knew Sunset had accidentally let loose an uncontrolled frog-spawn summon again in Mrs. Doily Do’s Home Ec classroom, she’d never live it down. Thankfully, everypony assumed it was a copycat prank.

“You still got away with it.” Copper grinned like a pony waiting to lay down a royal flush.

“Whatever. Can we just go get some tacos?”

“Hmm… A fan of tacos, huh? Never would have pegged you as the type.” The suggestive lilt in her voice and the quick snicker that followed meant there was probably an innuendo or two buried in there somewhere. Because of course there would be.

Copper was, in a phrase, relentlessly inappropriate. There was no taboo too big nor dick joke too small to ride into the sunset should the opportunity present itself—Copper’s words, not her own. And no, the double entendre wasn’t lost on Sunset, either, as much as she wished otherwise. But even though Copper pushed the envelope criminally far at times, that disarming smile of hers could acquit her of murder.

“The type to like tacos?” Sunset said. “Is there a type that doesn’t?”

Copper’s snicker turned into a full-blown laugh. “Best thing on the menu, right?”

“Well yeah. Are you going to eat Sloppy Joe’s mystery veggies today?”

Copper wrinkled her nose, a sign that Sunset successfully won this little verbal sparring match. Unwittingly, she had to admit, but Copper didn’t need to know that little detail.

“I don’t think anypony in their right mind eats that compost,” Copper said.

They shared a laugh, and Sunset bumped her with her flank. “You’re the worst,” she said.

Copper flank bumped her back. “I learn from the best!”

“Watch out!” somepony shouted.

They ducked in time for a spiraling trio of magic fireworks to whistle overhead. The fireworks corkscrewed down the hall before exploding in a crackle of rainbow lights.

Ahead of them, a frazzle-maned unicorn mare stood alone in the middle of the hallway—everypony else having wisely ducked, dove, or otherwise scrambled out of the way. She lifted a hoof to her mouth in a vain attempt to hide a sheepish grin and the blush burning through her corn-yellow coat.

“Uh, sorry,” she said.

“Shower Sparks!” a voice boomed from a nearby classroom, and the hallway went silent. Nopony moved when Mrs. Phoenix Flare shouted like that.

Mrs. Phoenix Flare was something of a legend at CSGU. Head pyromancy teacher and department chair for the Evocation Arts, she held her fair share of clout among the teaching body. But along with the responsibility of organizing the largest and most diverse school of magic came the frustration of keeping in line “all you rabble-rousers’’ as she put it. And with that came her famous—or rather, infamous—temper.

She stormed out from a nearby classroom, a heavyset yellow-orange mare with a mane like fire and a scowl that could singe the eyebrows off anypony that looked at her funny. Which students usually did, because of the enormous scar that ran down the side of her face.

The seniors spread rumors that it came from a summoning spell gone haywire a few years back, and to never mention manticores in earshot of her. Nopony knew whether or not to believe them, but they weren’t about to test the theory. Everypony liked their eyebrows the way they were.

“How many times have I told you, no pyromancy outside my classroom!” She pinched Shower Sparks by the ear with a sun-yellow aura and dragged her down the hall toward probably detention. Or worse, magic kindergarten.

Shower Sparks’ “Ow ow ow I’m sorry!” trailed down the hall until everypony felt safe to go about their business.

Sunset had to hand it to this place. Celestia’s School for Gifted Unicorns boasted many gifted unicorns, even if some of them were only gifted in mischief. Either way, there was never a dull moment around here.

“So anyway,” Copper said. She brushed a curl of her mane out of her face. “Tacos do sound pretty good right about now. Let’s hit up the cafeteria.”

Sunset grinned at her. “I thought you’d never ask.”

• • •

They made it to the cafeteria entrance without any further incidents, which was something of a surprise to say the least. Being just after eleven, the lacrosse team had finished their morning practice and crowded the line ahead of them. Their light-hearted backtalk blended with the chatter coming from the cafeteria proper.

“Oh, Celestia,” Copper whispered to Sunset, fanning herself. “They’re so hot.”

Sunset snickered. “You think every stallion on campus is hot.”

“Tell me I’m wrong?”

Well, yes, she could probably find a not-so-good-looking stallion or two, but for the most part, Copper knew her stuff. Too bad for her most of them were already taken. Not that she wouldn’t try anyway.

Sunset’s hesitation probably showed on her face, because Copper frowned and elbowed her. “Oh, come on, you’re such a prude. We really gotta get you laid. It’ll do you wonders.”

“Get me what? No.” Sunset grimaced. “No. I don’t have time for that. Not with all my schoolwork I have to do.”

“‘Don’t have time’? Please, everypony has time for a good round in the sheets.”

That got Sunset good and flustered, and Copper’s widening grin signaled her readiness to capitalize on it. “Copper, why are we talking about this?”

“Because we can. You know, I bet you even Princess Celestia gets it on the regular.” She leaned in, that dang grin of hers sharpening to a knifepoint. “A nice selection of big, strong Royal Guards to pick from…”

“Sweet Celestia, please.” Sunset groaned at the ceiling, begging for this line of conversation to end.

“You think that’s what they say when she—”

“Copper, stop. She’s my teacher.”

“Hey, some ponies are into that. I don’t judge.”

“Copper!”

Copper laughed and cuffed Sunset in the shoulder. “Calm down, jeez. I’m just joking.”

Sunset raised an eyebrow at her. They both knew very well she wasn’t.

The lacrosse team noticed their little argument and shared smirks and hushed whispers among themselves. Their eyes roved over Sunset’s body—glossed over where they should have stared and lingered where they shouldn’t. Typical stallions.

Sunset rolled her eyes, but Copper threw on her trademark Coppertone grin, the one that always preceded a slew of incoming shenanigans, as she'd put it.

She leaned in conspiratorially. “Which one do you think’s the cutest?”

Sunset flustered and stepped back. “Uh, I don’t know? I don’t stop to think about these sorts of things?”

“Oh, come on.” Copper brushed up beside her. “It’s not rocket science. You already know the answer, whether you think you do or not.”

Uh, no. In truth, she really didn’t. She didn’t know which one was cutest. She didn’t know anything about any of them. She didn’t even know how this conversation started. She just wanted her tacos and to get ready for her meeting with Celestia tonight.

“You like tall and slim on the left? He’s got a pretty sexy, chiseled jaw.”

“Copper, for real, stop.”

“Or are you more of a musclehead kind of girl?”

“Copper—”

“No.” Copper said it with such conviction that Sunset found herself nodding without hearing the rest. “Tall, Tan, and Handsome, in the back middle.”

“Uh, I guess?”

“Good, ’cause I want Captain Hunk with a side of Commander Chisel Jaw.” Copper pushed Sunset toward the tan stallion, much to her surprise. “Go get ’em, tiger.”

The stallions toward the front of the line were already filing into the cafeteria, while the others closest to Sunset stuck around to enjoy this little horror show.

“Uh,” Sunset said and crooked a half-hearted smile at Tall, Tan, and Handsome. She caught his eye but looked away just as quick. The moment lasted a beat longer than it should have and it was still lasting and oh why was this happening this was so awkward.

She whinnied when a hoof pushed her a foot closer, and she glared daggers back at Copper. “Would you—”

“Hey.” His voice drifted over the cafeteria din. It had a casual, flirtatious lilt to it.

Oh, Celestia, he was talking to her.

Sunset put on her best smile, but she could feel that gosh darn blush setting up shop in her cheeks. Copper once described it as “bright enough to safely land a squadron of Wonderbolts on a foggy night,” thanks to her golden-yellow coat, and that thought really wasn’t helping right now, brain.

“H-hey,” she said.

He laughed. So casual, like this sort of thing happened to him all the time, and that bright smile and those robin’s-egg-blue eyes and that rugged frame and wavy brown mane and oh my gosh he was so gorgeous.

He tilted his head slightly and dipped the bridge of his nose to faux look up at her, and a playful cock of his ear completed the look. “You okay there?”

Sunset laughed, suddenly breathless. She raised a hoof, set it back down, looked away, looked back at those eyes oh my gosh and laughed again. “Um… I, uh, I think so? Heh…”

Commander Chisel Jaw burst out laughing. He punched Tall, Tan, and Handsome in the shoulder, jerked his head toward the cafeteria, and headed in.

Tall, Tan, and Handsome gave him a quick glance, then back to Sunset. “Name’s Doppler. Maybe I’ll see you around sometime?”

“Well, I mean we both go to school here, so I mean probably?” Wow. Smooth as silk.

His casual smile twisted into one of poorly contained amusement. His eyes flicked over her shoulder then back to her, and his smile grew wider.

“Yeah, we do, don’t we?”

“I… we… you… uh, yes. That’s… I-I’m just gonna stop talking now.” Great. Conversation ruined. Way to go, Sunset.

He turned around, but kept his gaze on her a moment longer. “Well alright, Just Gonna Stop Talking Now. I’ll see you around.”

Before she could process what he said, he had already turned the corner for the lunch line.

“I would clap,” Copper said. “But I think that would be an insult to the concept of applause.”

Sunset rounded on her. “Go eat a rainbow. I didn’t want to talk to him in the first place.”

Copper laughed and placed a hoof on Sunset’s shoulder. “From the way your face lit up like a Hearth’s Warming tree, I’m pretty sure you did.”

“Wha— I… That’s not the point!”

Copper took a step toward the cafeteria but stopped to cast a thoughtful look over her shoulder, tapping a hoof to her chin. “You know, you’re right. The point is to enjoy seeing you go brain-dead in front of a super-hot stallion.”

Sunset scowled at her. It must have been worse than she thought, because Copper laughed before she could speak.

“You’re so uptight, Sunset. You need to loosen up.”

“I’m not uptight.” Sunset looked away, ears laid back. “I’ve just had bad experiences is all.”

“Does he look like a bad experience to you?”

Sunset stared through the cafeteria doors. She could still imagine those robin’s-egg-blue eyes looking right back at her oh my gosh.

Copper tail whipped her on the flank, and Sunset yelped. “Didn’t think so,” she said, heading in.

“Hey!” Sunset rubbed her flank. Right on the cutie mark of all places. She groaned. Give your best friend one little tidbit of gossip on your sex life and suddenly she’s the ultimate relationship guru. “You’re the worst, Copper.”

“I learn from the beeest,” Copper sing-songed over her shoulder. She made it past the check-in counter and turned, sweeping a hoof toward the taco line. “Come on, Little Lovebird. Your true love is waiting for you.”

Sunset rolled her eyes and followed her in.

• • •

Lunch was tacos, tacos, and more tacos, piled high with veggies and beans and salsa and all the melty cheese Sunset could convince the lunchmare to part with. And hay fries, because why not?

They found seats at a two-pony table in the back corner, one of Copper’s favorite pony-watching spots. She wiped it clean with a napkin before they set down their trays.

Sunset dug in without a moment’s hesitation.

“I still don’t understand how you don’t get fat eating like that every day,” Copper said.

Sunset looked up with an inequine-sized bite of taco in her mouth. “Wuyyoumean?”

Copper wide-eyed her with a mixture of admiration and disgust. “I mean you’ve got how many tacos? Nine?”

Sunset shoved a hoofful of fries in her mouth and frowned as she chewed. Not enough salt. She levitated a salt shaker over from the table behind her, earning frowns from the two mares sitting there.

“Uh, yeah? I think?” She honestly hadn’t counted. It’s all that would fit on her plate.

“I wish I could eat like that.” Copper took a humble bite of her single taco and wiped her mouth with a napkin.

Sunset wiped hers with the back of her hoof. She glowered at the crumbs and nasty bits, then wiped them on the table cloth. “Then why don’t you?”

“’Cause I’d get fat?” She raised an eyebrow at Sunset.

“You get fat?” Sunset laughed and rolled her eyes before diving into another taco. “I’d like to see that happen.”

An uncharacteristic silence overtook Copper, and the sounds of the cafeteria filled in the gaps.

Sunset came up for air. “You okay? I didn’t actually mean that, you know.”

“Yeah, I know. I just…” Copper seemed lost in thought. Her eyes absently passed to Sunset’s right, and her ears perked up alongside a disarming smile. “Romeo’s lookin’ at you.”

Over Sunset’s shoulder, the lacrosse team was crammed into a single table at the cafeteria’s far end. Amidst all the motion of passing condiments, throwing of hay fries, and general collegiate team raillery, Doppler kept glancing their way.

Sunset turned back toward Copper and brushed her mane behind her ear. This really was a great pony-watching spot. Maybe too great.

“Oh, ponyfeathers,” she said, slamming her hooves on the table hard enough to jostle their trays. “I forgot to tell him my name.”

Copper ripped open a packet of hot sauce and squirted it onto the leftover half of her taco. She didn’t even bother looking up.

“Nah, you’re fine, Just Gonna Stop Talking Now. That’ll actually play in your favor, ’cause he’ll spend all day wondering what your name really is.” She let a little grin poke up the corner of her mouth. “Besides, I thought you didn’t want to talk to him?”

"I didn’t want to talk to him. But then I did, and now I—"

“And now you want him to know your name. Because now you want to talk to him.” She doubled down on her grin.

“And now I want him to know my name because it’s polite.” Seriously? Was Copper trying to relationship her with this guy they only just met? That dang grin of hers wasn’t doing her any favors in the whole rainbow-eating department, either.

“Is that what you call it?” She giggled and shook her head. “Whatever floats your boat, Sunset. But I guarantee you, he’s wondering what your name is all the same.”

Sunset tried keeping her scowl going, but she couldn’t. Not with Copper. As much as that dang grin of hers could put Sunset on edge, it just as easily put her at ease—or get her sporting her own, given the right circumstances. But now wasn’t those right circumstances, and Sunset felt her ears falling to the wayside of their own accord.

“Or he’ll just forget about me.”

That earned a raised eyebrow from Copper. “Sunset, we really need to work on your self-confidence.”

“I have plenty of confidence.” She took a big gulp of her soda. “I just…”

“You just lack any and all semblance of self-worth?” A smile worked its way onto Copper’s face.

“That’s not what I—”

“Sunset, you’re the smartest, kindest, most beautiful mare I’ve ever met. Seriously. All you have to do is not act brain-dead for two seconds and you could have anypony you want.”

Sunset blushed and set both hooves on the table. She made a nervous motion of bunching up the tablecloth and then smoothing it out.

Calling her beautiful… Projecting much? All the looks, all the stolen glances their way were at Copper, not her.

What Sunset wouldn’t have given to be as beautiful as her. That long, wavy blonde mane that always fell so perfectly past her shoulders, her naturally long eyelashes that didn’t need mascara to have all the stallions slack-jawed and drooling, those deep-green eyes that would make the most dazzling emeralds jealous. And that frame—all those perfect curves in all the right places. It wasn’t farfetched to think half the straight mares in school would go gay for a chance at her, and the other half were bad liars.

All Sunset had going for her was a half-hearted wave in her mane and a few smartass quips that enjoyed making themselves scarce when she needed them most. She did have her smarts, and she had a lot of them—more than most ponies could ever hold a candle to. But that didn’t get her very far on the social side of things.

Sunset was the bookworm. The sidekick. The afterthought.

Copper was looking at her, but Sunset instead stared into her tacos. They didn’t seem all that appetizing anymore.

“Sunset, how long have we known each other? About half a year now, right?”

“Since we got roomed together last semester, yeah.”

“Right. And what did you do all of last year?”

“I took all my first- and second-year courses so that I could take Arcanonaturamancology this semester.”

Copper blinked. “Wait, really? You took, like, sixty credit hours in one year? They let you? Actually, why does any of that surprise me? Whatever. You’re weird, you know that?”

“Maybe I am.” Sunset smirked at her. “But then we wouldn’t be taking Arcanonaturamancology together, would we?”

“Probly not.” Copper put her hoof to her forehead and shook her head. “Sorry. Got off track there. But yeah, just like six months. That’s all I’ve known you. And already I can say without a doubt you’re the most wonderful pony I’ve ever met.

“You put all your time into studying and freaking out about making sure Princess Celestia thinks you’re the best. And really, you are. Like seriously, you’re the only one in A-chem that has an A. Like, a real A. A non-curved A. You heard Professor Wizened Reed. You’re the first pony to do that in that class in ten freakin’ years.”

“Okay? Where are you going with this?” Sunset chanced a nibble at her tacos and found her appetite had come back.

“Where I’m going is that you really should give yourself more credit, and you can afford to let yourself enjoy life some.”

“But I do enjoy life.” She took a drink of her soda, but was met with the hollow sound of disappointment and frowned at her empty cup.

Copper smirked. “Says the mare who hasn’t gotten past first base.”

Sunset rolled her eyes. “I told you, I don’t need any of that to be happy. I don’t measure success in how many times I score a home run, or whatever the phrase is.”

Something about what Sunset said made Copper lean forward, and that mischievous, no-good grin of hers came around like an alley cat on the prowl. It sent shivers down Sunset’s spine.

“You have no idea how into you he was, do you?” Copper asked.

Sunset peeked over her shoulder, saw Doppler, and ducked back down again. A sudden heat rushed to Sunset’s cheeks.

“He was just being nice,” she said.

Copper stared at her a moment, then snorted and shook her head.

“What?” Sunset said.

“Nothing.” Copper threw her mint-green aura around her empty tray and stood up.

Sunset followed suit. They emptied their trays in the garbage, set them on the counter, and headed out.

It was cool outside, and already the weather team had moved the clouds to allow for a wonderful day of sunshine. Ponies that didn’t have afternoon classes made themselves comfortable on the quad, sunning themselves, playing frisbee, or testing experimental spells and concoctions without adult supervision.

They cut across the grass for the student dorms. Sunset’s hooves soaked through with the dew that hadn’t yet evaporated.

“You’re done for the day, right?” Excitement tinted Copper’s voice. Something about the fresh air after being cooped up in class all morning, probably.

The feeling was infectious, and it forced a smile to Sunset’s lips before she herself thought to smile. “Technically, no. It’s Tuesday, remember?”

“Oh yeah.” Copper put a hoof to her forehead, fake swooned, and put on her most disgustingly regal accent. “You have to go have evening tea with Princess Celestia and learn how to have proper back posture.”

“You mean I have to go back to our dorm room so I can freak out and try to remember everything I learned last week so I can tell her about it.”

“That too. But I prefer my version.” She stuck her tongue out at Sunset.

“It is a bit more theatrical, I’ll admit.” Sunset let a sigh escape her. “Though, I think she’ll really enjoy hearing about what we learned in Arcanonaturamancology.”

Copper frowned at her. “Sunset, could you at least call it A-chem like a normal pony?”

“But it’s called Arcanonaturamancology.”

That earned an eye roll for some reason. A smile overtook Copper, and she swiveled her eyes toward Sunset.

“For me?” Copper batted her eyes and put on a pout that reminded Sunset just how jealous she could be of her friend’s looks.

Sunset sighed. “Fine, A-chem. But you have to stop calling it ‘Bend-over-ology’ like all those other ponies.”

“Okay, but what if I like bending over?” Her pout turned into a sultry lip bite.

Sunset groaned her frustration to the sky. “Why do I always walk right into those?”

“Because we’re best friends and I know you better than anypony.”

Sunset smiled. She couldn’t argue that. Though, she still had yet to learn what made Copper uncomfortable so that she could poke fun back. It was like there wasn’t a single thing in the world that could get under that pony’s skin.

“So I’ll see you after tea time?” Copper was half heading toward the sports fields when Sunset blinked back to reality. There were a hoofful of stallions playing a unicorn-only version of hoofball. Of course. Where else would she go?

Sunset smirked. “Naturally. I wouldn’t want to miss out on all the hot gossip about each and every stallion out there.”

“Oh, don’t worry.” She brushed her mane out of her face and winked. “I’ll get all their ‘sizes,’ just for you.”

Sunset resisted the urge to gag. “Oh, you know how much I love measuring and math and stuff.”

That got a real laugh out of Copper. “What can I say? Sometimes math is a good thing!”

With that, she headed toward the hoofball fields, leaving Sunset to her thoughts and the smile on her lips.

Sunset sighed. Welp, time to go freak out and get ready for Celestia. She headed for the dorms.

She didn’t know what, but something told her today would be a particularly eventful evening.

• • •

They were right to fear me. They are right to fear me still.

These lunar shackles hold fast, and my flesh weeps where skin and sinew have refused their lesson in patience. But Nightmare is eternal and above all, inevitable.

Beyond the sight of Sister’s precious, little sun, the waning moon sharpens my power to a knifepoint. The dreams of our little ponies are oh so easy to bend when they slip into my nightly embrace. Hell is but a state of mind, and in the nigh thousand years I have spent in darkness I have elevated its craft to an art form.

Sister sought to replace me with these protégés of hers. Folly. One after another, they learned to rescind their titles, denounce her as their loving princess or else suffer my wrath. And her newest, this Sunset Shimmer, shall too understand the gravity of her trespass.

She will become my plaything, my instrument of Sister’s ruin. For I sense greatness in her.

Sister should never have crossed me. Her place in Tartarus was reserved the moment she refused me my birthright.

The new moon rises, and it is hungrier than ever.

Author's Note

Onward and Upward!

This story has undergone changes. Some comments may no longer make sense or be relevant.

III - Wise Words from a Wise Friend

“You need what now?” Twilight Sparkle stared at me as if I had asked her to fetch Cerberus from his post. She lay sprawled on a pillow in the main reading area of the Ponyville castle library, a large green textbook propped comfortably on a pillow beside hers. She was wrapped in a wool crocheted blanket, colored a rather fetching shade of light blue, to ward off the chill of the castle’s interior.

“The journal,” I said. “The one you use to communicate with Sunset Shimmer.”

She smiled. “Oh! Sure. Is… something wrong?”

“I must speak with her.”

She regarded me with a searching gaze, her mouth curled in a little hook-like frown. “Alright.”

She left for one of the many bookshelves lining the hall and returned with the journal. She held it aloft a moment ere handing it over. Myriad were the words on the tip of her tongue.

“If you need anything, just let me know,” was all she said, however. She afforded me one last glance before settling back in.

I tucked my nose to my chest. I had been rather abrupt in my appearance today. ’Twas rude of me to intrude on her affairs two days in a row, especially during what little free time she had to herself. I was thankful she understood, however, and so I retreated to the little corner nook where this journey began.

I laid myself down upon that same velvet pillow, crossed my forehooves, and frowned at the journal as it hovered in my magic.

It stared back, unassuming. Still it weighed heavy in my grasp, but rather than the weight of knowledge, ’twas a weight of foreboding.

I opened it to a clean page and drew up a quill and ink. Tip against paper, however, I hesitated.

What was I to say? How best to navigate these treacherous waters? Were… were such waters for me to tread at all? The thought stuck itself in my mind, and the longer I allowed it purchase, the more I feared taking that step into the unknown. I could not sit idly by whilst Sunset wasted away from within, but I could not deny the potential of that Pandora’s box were I to intervene directly.

The quill trembled in my magic, and I pulled it from the page ere I snapped it in my fit of distress. I closed the journal, rose, and returned to Twilight.

She watched me approach the entire length of the aisleway. The slant in her mouth summoned from the depths of my soul an otherworldly sense of judgement, as if I carried upon my back a great stone that grew heavier with every step. Wordlessly, I offered her the journal, which she accepted hesitantly.

“That was… fast,” she said. She wore a searching gaze, her eyes dancing back and forth between mine. Same as the evening before, I felt the tether connecting her subconscious to my soul pull taut. She considered the book, the barest hint of magic teasing the opening length of the front cover, eager to open it and sate her curiosity. Ever the patient, respectful sort, however, she set it aside and heaved a deep sigh before returning that pensive gaze to me.

“Princess Luna,” she said. “I understand you want to keep this between you and Sunset, but it’s bothering you a lot, and it hurts seeing you like this. Please let me help. Whatever it is.”

“Twilight…”

I considered her offer. Sister knew Sunset Shimmer the longest, which I had to regretfully accept was not the Sunset of today. However, Twilight knew her, the Sunset who had saved the human world from destruction on multiple occasions, the Sunset who made friends and earned her redemption.

Perhaps it was wrong of me to seek Sister’s counsel instead of hers.

“I have done things I am not proud of, Twilight Sparkle. In my exile, I used Sunset Shimmer as a means of foiling Sister’s attempts to gather the Elements against me. Among… other things.” I rubbed a hoof along my foreleg. “I am the reason she fled Sister’s tutelage. I am the reason she tried enslaving a foreign world in order to conquer Equestria.”

Twilight laid her ears back. She knit her brow and looked longingly at the book in her grasp. She then brought those innocent eyes back around, and by the stars I could not bear it. I deserved not even a shred of the empathy I saw in them.

“You should talk to her,” she said, again offering me the book. “Tell her how you feel. She’ll understand. Maybe not at first, but she will later.”

I grimaced and pushed the book back toward her. “I… I no longer believe this to be the best course of action, Twilight. I was a fool to think so in the first place.”

She wilted at my refusal of the book, but accepted it nonetheless, gingerly taking it in her hooves like a broken toy. “But talking out our problems is how we overcome them. If you don’t talk to her, you’ll never be able to do that.”

I shook my head. “You do not understand just how much I hurt her, Twilight. I did not simply haunt her dreams. I manipulated her, mentally and emotionally. I took advantage of her love for Sister and her ambitions of becoming one of Equestria’s greatest unicorns. I tore her apart from the inside whilst claiming to love her in return.

“And when she would not fully commit herself to the machinations I demanded of her, I…” I knitted my brow, clenched my teeth together. My lip trembled, and I almost couldn’t speak the words. “I, I broke her, Twilight. And she has not yet healed. Not truly.”

Twilight lowered her ears and looked away as if searching for something. The silence spanned second after terrible second, and my heart reached out that I might find something to grasp hold of or else fall into the void of my own self-loathing.

“There’s an old Zebrican craft I read about once,” she finally said. “Whenever a pot is broken, they use gold and epoxy to put the pieces back together. Zecora actually has a few. Even though it’s not the same as it was, the patterns caused by the broken pieces makes it unique and oftentimes more beautiful than it was before.”

Twilight smiled and placed a reassuring hoof on mine. “I don’t like the idea of the ends justifying the means, but she’s found happiness over there. She made that happiness, and no matter what might be between you two, that’s a good thing. She’s in a place where people care for her, and she has a whole group of friends that couldn’t be happier, too.

“And don’t forget,” she said, her smile growing just a hair, “she’s reformed, just like you. That’s common ground. You have something to relate to.”

’Twas true. Common ground oft was the foundation for many a treaty. Yet I knew not how to bridge the fact that I was the reason for her need to reform in the first place.

“It’s why you want to help her,” Twilight said. “Isn’t it?”

A tingling sensation ran up my spine. I saw in Twilight’s eyes the yearning of one who needed to understand, but could not fathom the depths of the matter. When I blinked, I saw Castle Everfree, myself, Sister—that first embrace we shared after my cleansing. I felt the Tantabus within me, dormant, yet ever present.

“Because you know what that’s like,” she said.

I looked away. I could not bear her gaze.

She was right, however. In my attempt to destroy Sister through Sunset’s manipulation, I created something new. I formed from her a kindred spirit, a victim that, like myself, fell prey to the temptations of ambition and vengeance.

’Twas my doing that broke her, yet still I knew her struggle. I felt the pain I inflicted upon her as if it were my own. Whether it was for her salvation or my own, I would know no other recourse, yet I knew it was not my decision to make.

“As beautiful as all that may be, Twilight, I do not believe it an excuse to wedge myself back into her life.”

“Would you like me to talk to her for you, then?” she said.

I reflected on that for a moment, ere hesitantly: “I would like that very much. If she is willing.”

She returned my statement with a smile I wished I could share, confident she had done her due diligence. “No problem. I’m happy to help. Let me tidy up and I can go talk to her. In the meanwhile, you’re more than welcome to spend the night here. I can have Spike get a room ready.”

“I… I would appreciate that. Genuinely.”

Twilight nodded. “In that case, give me one second.”

She marked her place in her book and closed it, ere stacking it on top of the journal, and made quick work of folding her blanket. Planning on returning to them shortly, I mused, she placed them on a little study table in the corner and led me out of the library.

“Spiiike,” Twilight called into the cavernous ceilings of the hallway, as if he were skulking about the shadows collecting there.

Within the moment, the pitter patter of claws down the conjoining hallway met our ears, and the mighty little dragon himself came scampering around the corner. He held in his arms a small pile of fresh linens, mayhaps preempting her request by way of some clairvoyance only the noblest of assistants possessed.

“Need something, Twilight?” He stopped short at the sight of me. “Oh. Hi, Princess Luna.”

“Spike,” Twilight said. “Could you prepare a room for Princess Luna? She’ll be staying with us tonight.”

“You got it.” He saluted her in a manner most amusing for its seriousness and the way he almost dropped the linens in his attempt. He turned that energy toward me and said, “Do you like cotton? Satin? Silk? What’s your preferred threadco—”

“However you would normally arrange for guests is sufficient,” I said. “I am… not one for overcomplicating matters.”

“Coming right up!” he said, hefting the linens in his arms, and gave them a smile. “Guess we’re going up to the guest wing instead, little guys.” And much the same as he entered, he scampered off to leave us on our journey to wherever it was Twilight led me.

An odd one, that dragon. Though, much like Twilight, that energetic innocence of his brought a smile to my face in this hour when I needed it most. ’Twas was something I found endearing all the same.

Quickly enough, we found ourselves in an interior room not far from the library. As one might have expected, shelves full of books lined the walls as if it were merely an extension of the library proper. In the middle, she had designed some sort of contraption of hardwood, tubes, pipes, and wires, all centered around what I realized to be the mirror itself.

Twilight placed the book upon the contraption’s pedestal, situated as if it were its keystone, and touched it with her horn. Like an engine whirring to life, the energies of the portal activated, and the mirror’s once solid surface rippled like that of a lake teased by a light wind. My reflection stared back at me, but beyond the surface lay the faint haze of another world.

“I don’t know how long I’ll be gone,” she said. “But you’re welcome to whatever you like in the castle.” She gave me an endearing smile that not even Sister could match.

“I cannot thank you enough, Twilight. I… I would ask what you would like me to do in the meanwhile. My conscience does not permit that I remain idle whilst you do this.”

She flitted her wings, and a smile entertained her for but a moment. “You don’t have to do anything in return. Helping a friend is its own reward. But if you’re insistent on doing something, you could always help Spike re-shelve the library returns. He’d really appreciate that.”

“Then that is what I shall do,” I said.

Twilight nodded and flitted her wings. “Sounds good. Hopefully, I'll see you in a bit with some good news.”

And with that, she stepped through the portal to leave me alone with my thoughts and fears.

Author's Note

Onward and Upward!

This story has undergone changes. Some comments may no longer make sense or be relevant.

IV - An Unexpected Assignment

Sunset Shimmer climbed the final staircase of Canterlot Castle’s Royal Wing toward Celestia’s room. She had gone over all her notes in her head—what to say, what to do, when to smile, when to laugh. Something about the walk kept her nerves at bay, but the long hallway leading to the door itself never failed to stir up the jitters.

She always talked big about being Princess Celestia’s star pupil, but the truth was, the very idea of being near Celestia downright terrified her. It was a good kind of terrified though—the exciting kind of terrified, the it’s-really-important-and-she-wanted-to-learn-everything-she-could-and-make-Celestia-proud kind of terrified.

If only it wasn’t so… terrifying.

Stone Wall, Celestia’s personal guard, stood tall and proud beside the double doors to Celestia’s room. Something about his stalwart posture and forward gaze always comforted Sunset. It was almost like he was her personal guard, too.

He smiled and nodded her way before returning to his thousand-yard stare at the wall opposite him.

Sunset smiled back. Action and reaction. He was a Royal Guard, not Celestia. She could make nice with him without thinking, just like anypony else.

What was it like being a Royal Guard? All that standing around. She certainly couldn’t handle that. She’d be bored to death.

Nah, she preferred being the one guarded rather than the one doing the guarding. What if she became important enough one day to have her own Royal Guard escort? That would be so cool!

“You going in?” he said, strong and bassy like how she pictured a boulder would speak.

Everything about his actions went against protocol, Sunset knew, but they sort of had a thing between them like that—an unspoken agreement that they could joke about silly things and do stuff they weren’t supposed to if the other didn’t tattle. It didn’t help stymie the blush that shot to her cheeks, though.

“Oh uh, yeah. Just, um, you know. Eh heh…”

She swallowed her grin and knocked on Celestia’s door. Immediately, the nervous jitters returned, and a weak smile danced onto her face as if strung up by an inexperienced marionettist.

“Come in,” Celestia called.

A heavenly windchime-like tinkling met Sunset’s ears as a magical golden glow seeped out from the crack between the doors, washing left and right over them like water filling a basin. The magic trickled down over the doors’ sweeping silver handles and turned them, giving the impression of wings taking flight, and the doors swung inward in welcome.

The first thing that always caught Sunset’s attention was the chandelier—the way it sparkled in the sunlight streaming in from the open balcony to spray rainbows across the ceiling. The plastered ceiling was molded into concentric rings resembling ivy that wound and wended outward to look down from every corner of the room. The vines themselves and choice outlines of its leaves were inlaid with silver to sparkle in the light and catch the eye just so.

And catch Sunset’s eye it did, every time she entered. She had the habit of picking a new vine to journey along with each teatime session, half out of curiosity as to where it would lead, half to tamp down the jitters and keep herself from bolting.

Today’s particular vine led her toward the back left corner, where her eyes made the logical leap to the cornices, etched in a way so as to continue the ivy motif, and down the corner column to the chair rail. She followed it leftward, dancing among the fine china and silverware situated like set pieces along the side table that dominated the left wall, on the hunt to pick out some little detail she hadn’t yet noticed about Celestia’s chambers. There were little hearts carved into the wood under the rim of the table, whatever that part was called.

But no matter the path Sunset's eyes took, each and every one of them eventually drew her toward the center of the room, where Princess Celestia sat at her tea table, cleared of everything but a scroll she mused over. The calm smile on her face when her eyes met Sunset’s could have stilled an army.

“Good afternoon, Sunset.” Celestia had taken off her peytral and tiara, an act she did out of familiarity and to foster a sense of casualness to their meetings. Honestly, it only made Sunset more nervous. Not that she’d ever say.

“Good afternoon, Princess Celestia. Did your meeting with the Director of Weather Coordination go well?” From her saddlebags, she unloaded her books in neat stacks, organized by subject, on the waiting tea table.

Celestia chuckled in that perfect way only she could. “It did. Mrs. April Showers can be a bit disorganized at times, but she is without equal when it comes to reconciling weather conflicts.”

“That’s great to hear.” Sunset plopped down on the pillow opposite Celestia, and her nervous smile went giddy. “I can’t wait to show you everything I’ve learned this week.”

Celestia hmmed, her visible eye sweeping across the stacks of books before she lowered her head. She magicked Sunset’s books aside and set her smile on Sunset.

“You know more than anypony that I want to hear all about how you’re doing in class, Sunset. But before that, I would like to hear how you are doing.”

And there went Sunset’s giddiness, scampering off with its tail between its legs. She shifted her weight from one forehoof to the other.

“W-what do you mean?”

“I mean how are you doing?” She drew her tea set from the table beside the balcony and set it between them. “Outside of class.”

Both hooves on the floor. Sunset’s heart racketed in her chest like one of those ball-and-string paddles. She hadn’t prepared for this sort of question.

“Oh, um, great!”

“Wonderful. And how is your friend Coppertone? You two keeping out of trouble, I hope?” She poured a cup of tea and offered it to Sunset.

Ah, pony feathers. Not the tea. Anything but the tea. That loathsome, vile, bitter excuse of a beverage better reserved for watering the plants when Celestia wasn’t looking. If Sunset had her way, they’d dump it all in the nearest volcano and wash their hooves of it.

That said, she accepted it graciously and without question.

“Of course,” she said. “Trouble couldn’t find us if it tried.”

It was a lie, of course. The polite sort of lie, though—the kind ponies told each other out of formality. The kind she was taught to say as a little filly, so as to never impose.

Celestia chuckled. She knew it was a lie, too.

“Oh, Sunset. You don’t have to be like that with me. Tell me, what sort of mischief did you two get into this week?” She poured her own cup and lifted it to her lips, but held it there expectantly, eyes on Sunset.

Sunset's mouth suddenly felt as if full of cotton. Was Celestia… gossiping?

Was she allowed to do that? Wait, no. What kind of stupid thought was that? Of course she was. She was Princess Celestia. Like, it wasn’t wrong of her, but she had never brought up this sort of small talk before.

Sunset rubbed the back of her head. “Um, I really don’t know.”

Did Mrs. Doily Do’s Home Ec class count?

“Oh, come now, Sunset. Surely there’s at least one interesting thing that’s happened to you this week that isn’t schoolwork.”

Well… there was Doppler, now that she thought about it. Those robin’s-egg-blue eyes oh my gosh.

Celestia let out a full-bodied laugh. “Now that’s the face of a pony I know is hiding something.”

Sunset blushed even harder. Curse her bright coat and how it couldn’t hide a blush to save her life. Well, she found out. Might as well get it over with.

“Well… I met this stallion.”

“Ah, yes,” Celestia said, placing her cup on its saucer. “I was wondering when you would meet a certain somepony.”

“It’s not like that,” Sunset said quickly. “When I say I met him, it was more I was shoved in his face and left for dead.”

“Coppertone, I presume?”

“Y-yeah.”

“And are you upset she put you in a situation you weren’t comfortable with?” If Celestia was anything, she was both accurate and to the point when it benefited everypony, something Sunset always admired about her.

“Well, it’s not like I’m upset. I just… wish she’d sometimes give me a little space, or…” She was about to say something along the lines of “not talk sexually about you,” but that might have raised an eyebrow or two. Celestia might have grown a third eyebrow just to raise that one, too.

Celestia idly flipped through the first few pages of Sunset’s The Nature of the Arcane. A smile played on her face, as if reliving a memory.

“Or?” she asked.

“Or, just, you know…” Sunset rubbed her foreleg and looked away, not sure how to finish that thought.

“Don’t hold how she acts against her too much, Sunset. Ponies like that, those who are comfortable enough to be their true self in front of you and want to help you be the best you can be, those are the friends you should cherish the most. And from what little you’ve told me about her, she sounds like quite the pony.” A sip of tea. “You’re lucky to have her as a friend. But do keep in mind, if what she does or says truly bothers you, be sure to bring it up. It's important that you establish boundaries.”

Boundaries. Now there was something Sunset didn't think Copper had at all, much less in spades. Not that Sunset felt Copper wouldn't respect them if she asked, but more that Copper's lack of them would make it difficult to not stumble over them—or plow right through them, more accurately—this morning's lunch line conversation a prime example. Sometimes, it felt like Copper was too carefree to be bogged down by things like setting boundaries. It's what made all of Copper's, um… shenanigans, as she'd call them, so prevalent.

But Copper was a good friend at heart, and it showed in every smile, every word of encouragement, and yes, every dick joke that came out of her mouth. Or in her m—

No, no. Dang it, brain. No Copperisms, especially in front of Celestia. Sunset swore that mare could weasel in a crass joke without even being present. Case in point.

Sunset blinked and gave Celestia a glance, hoping she hadn't noticed that little bit of mental gymnastics. Thankfully, she seemed preoccupied with the array of books Sunset had brought. Or maybe Celestia just wanted her to think that.

Where were they? Right, boundaries. Boundaries and good friends and being comfortable and truest selves around each other.

If that wasn't its own mystery and a half… It still boggled Sunset's mind that Copper even gave her the time of day, much less actively hung out with her.

That mare could crack a joke with the best and the worst of them, but it wasn’t like Sunset didn’t have her own ingloriously long list of issues. Somehow, Copper saw past all that, though.

Nopony else bothered putting up with her. That, or they only did so to try and earn some sort of favor with Celestia or the teachers, and Sunset wasn’t about to be taken advantage of like that.

“So what about this stallion?” Celestia said after a moment’s silence. “Does he have a name?”

“Um, Doppler. He’s on the lacrosse team.” She looked up at Celestia, then at her books. “Do we really have to talk about this?”

Celestia shook her head. “If you’re not comfortable talking about it, I won’t press the issue. But there is nothing to be ashamed of in liking another pony. Romantic relationships are natural, and you should take the time to explore them when you are ready.”

Sunset flattened her ears back. “I don’t think I ever want to be ready.”

“No?” Celestia had idly regarded something out her window, but swiveled an eye back at those words.

“There’s too much for me to learn still. I want to keep learning magic. Besides, I already have a friend, because you practically made me make a friend.”

“I encouraged you to make a friend, Sunset. I didn’t force you to make one.”

Sunset raised an eyebrow at her. “You strongly suggested, then. And with you, that’s practically an order.”

Celestia chuckled. She dusted off the corner of the table with her wingtip, not that any amount of dust would have the audacity to defile this immaculate place. “There’s nothing wrong with having a friend. And in my experience, it’s better to have more than just one. You’ll find that different ponies have unique interests and beliefs, and we can all learn much from each other’s perspectives.”

“Making friends is too much of a hassle.”

“Hmm… if you were to try, I’m sure you would find it worth the hassle.”

Sunset shrugged. “Not likely. I’d really rather just focus on school.”

“All work and no play makes Sunset Shimmer a dull pony.” She swirled the tea bag around in her cup.

“I’m not dull.” Sunset flicked an ear, hoping Celestia didn’t mind her tone of voice. She might have said that a little too flatly.

Celestia laughed. She set aside her tea and looked Sunset in the eye. “I should think not. You’re one of the brightest minds I’ve ever taught, Sunset. But book knowledge isn’t the only thing worth learning in Equestria.”

“Yeah, yeah, friendship is magic and all that.” Sunset put her hooves on the table and brought her eyes level with Celestia. “I like working. I have fun working. And learning.”

She threw her hooves in the air, then returned them to the cup of tea before her. It was then she remembered the tea was there at all, and she took a courtesy sip, trying not to make a face.

“Honestly,” Sunset continued. “I’m perfectly happy without any more friends. Or, uh…” She blushed, her ears falling askance. “Partners.”

“Sunset.” Celestia’s was a gentle voice, gentler than usual. It harbored no ill will or directive, but nonetheless drew Sunset’s ears forward. “Making friends and falling in love don’t ever have to get in the way of your ambitions. Just like studying to become the best you can be, friends and family—those you are born to and those you choose for yourself—are there to complement you and what’s important to you.”

“You don’t need friends to be better at magic.” A heat rose to Sunset’s cheeks. She knew her words went against Celestia’s, went against everything she was taught as a filly about manners. But she was also taught to stand up for herself, even in the face of authority if she believed herself truly right. Even Celestia had pushed her toward that.

“Is Coppertone truly your friend?”

Sunset was taken aback. “What? Of course! She’s my best friend. She’s my… my only friend. I don’t know what I’d do without her.”

“And you two go over your notes for class, don’t you?”

“Well, yeah, we’re in the same class together. But I haven’t personally needed her help.” Sunset puffed out her chest. “I’m the only student to have an A in Arcanonaturamancology in ten years. Like, a real A.”

Celestia closed her eyes and dipped her nose ever so slightly. Her smile never wavered, but the sight sent a wave of dread down Sunset’s shoulders. This was Celestia’s thinking face, the one she wore whenever they were at odds.

“I thought we’re supposed to go over my schoolwork in these meetings.” Sunset took another sip of tea to smooth over her blatant change in subject. “Not my social life.”

Celestia opened her eyes and fixed them on Sunset. What went on inside her head? What crazy labyrinth wound through that skull of hers?

“Sunset, I have a new assignment for you.”

Sunset cocked an ear aside. “What? But we haven’t even gone over my schoolwork yet.”

“I’m afraid this assignment doesn’t require any of that.”

No like, seriously, what? What did she mean by that?

Sunset’s thoughts must have shown on her face, because Celestia chuckled and lit her horn, watching as all of Sunset’s books slipped back into her saddlebags.

“I want you to ask this Doppler out.”

“Oh, okay. I mean I gue—YOU WANT ME TO WHAT?” She almost knocked her tea cup off the table, for how hard she slammed her hooves down.

Celestia, for all her social graces—and clear insanity—didn’t so much as flinch at the outburst. That tiny smile of hers crept onto her face and nothing more.

“I would like for you… oh!” Celestia put a hoof to her chest and laughed. “Oh, heavens, Sunset. Excuse me. I would like for you to talk to him. Make a friend.”

“But…” Sunset didn’t know what to say. Making a friend was certainly far less eyebrow raising than asking him out on a date holy crap why did she think that’s what Celestia meant was she crazy? But still, she splayed her hooves on the table and looked pleadingly into Celestia’s eyes. “I-I have so much work to keep up with. Not to mention I have to stay on top of my volunteer work with the soup kitchen and help the band, and clean the Home Ec classroom, and—”

“What’s wrong with the Home Ec classroom?”

Sunset blanched. “Uh, nothing! Just, um, part of the curriculum.”

A tiny grin poked up the corner of Celestia’s lips.

“What?”

Celestia bowed her head and chuckled. “Sunset,” again with the soft yet commanding voice, “you are hereby excused from all classes and their respective homework forthwith until you have completed this assignment.”

Sunset leaned over the table. “But—”

“Your assignment begins now.”

“But, but…”

Celestia looked at a clock on her mantelpiece, which read five-thirty.

“If I recall correctly, there is a lacrosse scrimmage tonight at six. If you hurry, you can get a head start on your assignment.” She winked. “Take Coppertone with you.”

“But but but…!”

Celestia neatly buckled Sunset’s saddlebags closed, tossed them over Sunset’s back, and cinched them into place. She then lifted Sunset toward the door and waved.

“Have fun!”

Before Sunset knew what had happened, she stood staring at the bas relief of a rising sun on Celestia’s door. She turned her slack jaw toward Stone Wall.

He raised an eyebrow at her. “You look like you just flunked a test.”

• • •

“And you don’t have to go to class until you do this?” Copper asked.

She practically skipped beside Sunset on their way to the lacrosse field. It had taken some convincing to get her away from the hoofball game and all those “tongue-lolling” stallions, but the use of “Tall, Tan, and Handsome” and “make a friend” in the same sentence had quite the effect on her.

“What were her words again?” she asked.

Sunset stared into the distance beyond the lacrosse field, her ears fallen slack. “‘You are hereby excused from all classes and their respective homework forthwith,’” she droned, “‘until you have completed this assignment.’”

It still felt like a dream. And by dream, she meant nightmare. No school? No learning? How was she supposed to become a better student without learning? She was going to fall so far behind in her courses! This was literally the worst thing ever.

“This is literally the best thing ever!” Copper laughed. “Do you have any idea how many ponies would give their hind leg for that sort of assignment? Just go fuckin’ hang out and shit?”

“But I really don’t want to do this.”

Copper raised an eyebrow at her. “Are you telling me you don’t wanna be his friend, Mrs. Just Gonna Stop Talking Now? Princess Celestia might not have told you to ask him out ask him out, but this is totally your golden ticket to. And even if you really don’t, there’s worse things than being told to talk to somepony. You’re literally doing it right now with me. Besides, you can always just say you did it and it was whatever if you really don’t wanna go any further with it.”

She could. But that would be disingenuous. Well, more than that. It would be a flat-out lie, and she couldn’t lie to Celestia. Like, not a real lie, anyway.

“But the best part,” Copper continued, bumping shoulders with Sunset. “She really wanted me to be the third wheel for this little friendship soirée? She asked by name? Hah! This day keeps getting better and better.”

Third wheel… Already implying it was a date. Was Copper really this insistent on matchmaking her? Was this what normal ponies did?

“Please don’t do anything embarrassing,” Sunset said.

“Sunset, I’m not going to do anything that embarrasses me. I can promise you that. But I can’t help what embarrasses you.” She turned a big grin toward Sunset, the kind that meant all sorts of unruly ideas tumbled through that head of hers. “You know, she’s probably gonna grade you on how well you ask him to join our little friend group. You think it’s all just pretense to try and get you laid?” she added with just enough honey in her voice.

Sunset rolled her eyes. “I said I’m not interested in that.”

“Uh huh.” Copper stared at her for a moment, then shrugged. “Hey, more stallion for me, then. And if you’re good, I might even let you sit in the chair.”

Sunset screwed up her face in thought. “What does that even mean?”

Copper laughed. “I’ll tell you when you’re older.”

She bumped shoulders with Sunset and held her weight there, a comfort that Sunset couldn’t help but press back into and cherish its warmth.

This. This right here. No weird assignments to make a new friend, no sidelining the things that Sunset actually wanted in life. Just this simple, quiet being with her best friend, Copper. That’s all the friendship she needed.

Their little “cuddle huddle,” as Copper called it, rounded the track for the lacrosse field, and Coppertone snagged an abandoned scarf off the track’s chain-link fence: a baby-blue-and-white-striped thing with “CSGU” emblazoned in gold down either end. It even had knotted tassels and it was just so adorable.

Copper threw it around herself in a classic pull-through style, and the smile she carelessly tossed Sunset’s way brought a jealous flush to her cheeks. It didn’t quite go with Coppertone’s tan coat and deep-green eyes, but that pony could make papier-mâché look like the hottest new fashion.

“If they forgot it, they didn’t deserve it,” was her defense, and, well, Sunset couldn’t really argue.

The stands were packed with fellow students sporting pennants and scarves and other paraphernalia “claiming their allegiance” to the Canterlot Cavaliers, as the phrase went. The school pride swelling around Sunset got a knot forming in her stomach. She felt exposed without any CSGU stuff on. Oh, why hadn’t she seen that scarf first?

Across the way, the Hoofington Horseshoes’ crowd sported their trademark black and gold. They raised banners that read crude, unimaginative phrases like “Canterlot Cava-bads” and “It’s baby blue for a reason.” The general mumble she could make out sounded more like jeering at her crowd than cheering for their own team.

Her crowd returned the favor in the form of their own banners and chants. They stamped their hooves whenever their team had the ball, and Sunset awkwardly stamped along with them, never sure when to stop or start on her own.

Copper, however, was lost in the fervor. “Soil’s the only thing you’re good at plowing!” and “You chase that ball like you chase your sisters!” were among her many colorful phrases that brought Sunset’s head low and her eyes darting around, hoping nopony heard.

The more Sunset opened her ears, though, the more she realized everypony was saying things like that, and the more she realized she was the weird one here. Ponies really got into their sports, it seemed.

As for the lacrosse game itself, Sunset couldn’t really make out the ups and downs. She knew the basics, having played soccer in her filly years, but any strategies beyond “chase the ball like a swarm of bees” were beyond her. The only thing she could really tell was that their team wasn’t doing too well.

She didn’t have to see the 1-7 on the scoreboard to know that.

The Hoofington Horseshoes were all pretty scary looking. Bigger, faster, stronger than the more academic Canterlot Cavaliers.

She recognized Page Turner by his white coat and shaggy grey mane, and she could pick out a few others by face. Doppler, though. Oh gosh.

He, like the other Cavaliers, looked ragged and weary. Sweat matted his mane and coat, and that thousand-yard stare must have settled in well before they arrived.

But still… he made it look good.

There was an effortlessness to his movement, some sort of deep inspiration or something that kept him going despite the hopelessness of it all. There was a split second when one of the Canterlot stallions had the ball that he glanced into the crowd. Their eyes met, and Sunset swore he smiled at her.

Page Turner scored a bone-rattling tackle on one of the Horseshoes, and the crowd went wild. The referee blew his whistle, calling a foul, and the crowd’s excitement turned to immediate boos and bloodlust.

Sunset flattened her ears back and leaned in toward Coppertone. “Why’s everypony being so mean?”

“It’s a rivalry game,” Copper shouted over the chaos. “There’s no reason behind it. We hate their guts just because.” She turned back to the game and put a hoof to her lips. “Yeah, let’s go! Show ’em how to really play with balls, Willow Wisp!

“It’s funny ’cause he’s gay,” she whispered to Sunset.

Sunset shied away from her. She had never heard Copper say anything remotely inappropriate like that. Well, she had, but like, not the mean-spirited sort of inappropriate.

All of this was a little too much for her. She decided to quietly watch and enjoy the game on her own terms.

For what it was worth, she did have fun. At times, she found herself cheering her heart out along with the crowd—on big saves, goals, and steals—and part of her relished watching Doppler run up and down the field.

He still looked ragged, but there was a light in his eyes that wasn’t there before, and he turned it her way with little peeks and glances whenever he had the chance. It got a smile out of her.

The referee blew the final whistle to call the match, and Sunset wilted at the final score of 6-10. That was a heck of a comeback attempt, though, and to think three of those were Doppler practically by himself. His smile seemed to say he felt good about it, too.

The Horseshoes crowd rumbled out of the stands, hooping and hollering along with their team, banners raised high.

“Yeah, go back to that shithole where you came from!” Copper shouted over the Canterlot crowd’s disappointed murmur.

“Copper,” Sunset said, ears flattened back. “The game’s over.”

Copper flipped her mane out of her eyes. “I know. I’m just callin’ it like I see it.”

“Yeah, but being a jerk isn’t like you.”

Copper raised an eyebrow at her. “You’ve never been to Hoofington, have you? Honestly, ‘shithole’ does that place too much justice.” She redid the knot of her scarf and threw the tails over her shoulder. “Either way, blind loyalty to my school is blind loyalty to my school.”

Sunset blinked. That sounded like a conversation and a half’s worth of unpacking, but she let it slide.

“I mean, okay. I get that, I guess, but it just doesn’t make sense.”

“Yeah it does. What if I called A-chem stupid?” Copper’s “gotcha” grin was contagious, and it spread to Sunset.

“Then I’d call you stupid.”

“Exactly.” She flank bumped Sunset, and they shared a laugh. “Now come on. Let’s go find your new totally-just-a-friend.”

Oh yeah. That. There was that stupid blush again that really needed to go away. She was hoping Copper had forgotten about that.

“I know that face,” Copper said. “There’s no way I’m letting you off the hook, no matter how hard you strain your wishing muscles.”

Heh. They really must have been best friends if Copper could read her like that.

“Come on,” Copper said. She pushed Sunset by the flank toward the near corner of the field. “They’ll walk by this way and we can get his attention.”

Sunset all but ground her hooves into the grass in defiance. Oh dear. Copper was really going to make her go through with this, wasn’t she?

The lacrosse team had corralled in front of their goal, going over whatever it was teams went over after a game. There was a lot of solemn nodding of heads. A quick team chant, and they hobbled toward the path leading back to main campus, where Sunset and Copper stood waiting.

Doppler caught sight of them and made an effort to find himself toward the tail end of the pack. He had his stick slung over his shoulder and his helmet dangling from its net like a bindle. A proud but weary smile graced his face, and his mane was matted over his eyes. He looked about two seconds from collapsing on top of her. Secretly though, that wouldn’t have been the worst thing in the world.

“Hey,” he said. “You showed up, huh?”

“Uh, heh.” Sunset swung her hoof in a can-do manner. “Yep. That’s what I do. Show up.”

Great, already looking like an idiot.

“Well, it’s better than not showing up.” He nodded at Copper. “And you’re Just Gonna Stop Talking Now’s friend from the cafeteria.”

Copper stuck out a hoof for shaking. “Third Wheel. Pleasure to meet you.”

He raised an eyebrow and took her hoof hesitantly. “‘Third Wheel’?”

“Don’t mind her,” Sunset said, pushing Copper aside. “She’s Coppertone, my best friend.”

“Yep!” Copper pushed back. “And just like any best friend, I’m here to say all sorts of embarrassing things about her at the worst possible moments.”

“Copper,” Sunset hissed.

“Coppertone sounds a little more like an actual name.” His eyes flicked between the two. “So why ‘Third Wheel’?”

“She’s not Third Wheel,” Sunset insisted.

Copper gave him that trademark up-to-no-good Coppertone smirk and then had the audacity to round it on her. Not even five seconds into their conversation and she was already hellbent on being unbearable. She gave an innocent shrug as the most godforsaken preamble to whatever shenanigans she had lined up.

“I don’t know. Why Third Wheel? Why not Third Wheel, Sunset?”

If looks could kill, Sunset would have happily served a lifetime sentence in the Canterlot dungeons. Part of her wished they could, just so Copper would stop being so embarrassing for once.

“What she means is,” Sunset said. “I… wanted to ask if you, uh… wanted to hang out with us? I guess?”

Please say no. Please say no. This was so embarrassing. Please say—

“What, like, right now?” He gave his lacrosse stick a glance. “Uh, that’s kind of out of nowhere, but sure, I guess. Just lemme, like, go shower and stuff. I’ll meet you in the cafeteria in half an hour?”

Wait, did he actually say yes? “Um, okay?” Sunset said.

He smiled and oh my gosh. “Alright. I’ll see you there,” he said and turned to catch up with the rest of the team.

“You see?” Copper said beside her. “When you don’t act all brain-dead for two seconds, you can have literally anypony you want.”

“Oh, can it, would you? You and your matchmaker brain.” But, like, really? That actually happened? Was that really how making friends worked?

Copper put her hoof on Sunset's shoulder. “Sunset, you might say you don’t want to do this and that you don't want this to be an actual date, but the look on your face every time you see him and all this waffling back and forth you’ve been doing… There’s attraction there, and as much as I am and will poke fun, because your reactions are priceless, that’s not something to be embarrassed about. Really. That excitement and goodness is something you should be embracing.”

“I…”

“Sunset,” Copper said. She gave Sunset a smile—simple and true, the one that always instilled an unexplainable confidence in Sunset. "Really."

Sunset laid her ears back. Maybe Copper was right, but it didn't stop all this from feeling embarrassing.

“Now that said…” Copper said, twisting that smile into a grin primed and ready to poke the fun she just espoused. “You still haven’t told him your name.”

Oh, ponyfeathers.

Copper laughed. “That look on your face. It’s the best.”

“Yeah, yeah, laugh it up. I’m sure you’re going to enjoy today.”

“Oh, I most definitely will.”

With nothing in particular to do, they headed for the cafeteria to chit chat while he got ready. Claiming she wasn’t hungry enough for dinner, Copper scored herself an ice-cream cone—a double scoop of macadamia nut and neapolitan. Because she was super weird like that.

She kept giving Sunset bedroom eyes at their two-pony table in the back corner, a supposed pre-date workout she claimed Sunset needed to practice. She was so weird sometimes. If Sunset ever started giving somepony lovey-dovey eyes like that, she prayed Celestia would come from on high and smite her.

What was the point of all this, anyway? As much as she believed Copper, she still really didn’t want to do this. Yeah, he was cute and had a pretty smile and wavy mane and all that, and part of her couldn’t help wanting to be around him and just stare into those gorgeous robin’s-egg-blue eyes.

Sure, she wanted to settle down with a stallion and have foals and all that other mushy stuff mares always dreamed of doing. But that was later—way later—after she had finished her education and established a career for herself. Doing it now would only get in the way.

None of it would help her be a better student. Her grades wouldn’t improve because of some stallion. Not that they could really get any better anyway, she had to admit with some pride. There was a reason she was Celestia’s personal student, after all.

But really, if anything, this would only detract from her perfect grades and her track toward valedictorian and all the scholastic endeavors she had planned after CSGU. Why in Equestria did Celestia want her to do this so badly?

Thirty minutes after the game, almost on the dot, Doppler strolled into the cafeteria. He waved at them from the check-in counter and made a beeline for them once the check-in mare let him through.

“Hey,” he said, stepping up to their table. He had his mane slicked back as best as a partly drying mane could be, and his coat was nappy where he had toweled off, particularly on his chest, shoulders, and the bridge of his muzzle.

Most ponies would have taken the time to smooth that out so they didn’t look ridiculous. But as ridiculous as Doppler looked, he seemed all the better for it, like he couldn’t care less and probably enjoyed the oddity of it, or at least the reactions it got from other ponies.

Oh, who was she kidding? She didn’t want to wait until she was older. This guy was too perfect.

“Sunset Shimmer,” she said.

He seemed momentarily confused, before that easy smile of his returned. He snagged a chair from a nearby table, sat down, and raised an eyebrow at her, as if waiting for an explanation.

Sunset blushed. She swore today held the record for most blushes she’d ever had in a 24-hour period, and it wasn’t even over yet.

“I, uh… That’s my name. Heh. Sunset Shimmer. I, I forgot to tell you that the last two times.”

Doppler folded back his ears, and a frown tumbled onto his face. “Oh, so your name isn’t Just Gonna Stop Talking Now?”

“I… no, sorry,” she said in what hopefully came across as sarcastic. She threw on a grin for good measure. Just act cool, the way Copper always did.

It seemed to work for how he perked one ear up and crooked the other. “Well darn. I really liked that name. Had a sort of mystery about it.”

Sunset laughed and traced little circles on the table. Don’t be brain-dead for two seconds.

“You could say that. But isn’t a sunset just as mysterious?”

“Mmm, in its own way, I guess. But I wouldn’t call it so much a mystery.”

“What would you call it then?”

“Romantic, more like.” He casually looked out the window without waiting for a reaction.

Sunset leaned back, wide-eyed. She already felt the heat rushing to her cheeks.

Did… he think this was a date? Was it? Did Sunset miss a memo somewhere or stumble over some social nuance that made it totally and unquestionably obvious?

Copper snorted and took another lick of her ice cream. “Fuckin’ hell, that’s corny.”

“Hey, there’s plenty more where that came from,” he said, smiling. “Don’t you worry.”

“I’ll be sure to pick up a barf bag on our way out.”

“Copper!” Sunset said. She was about to tell her off before Doppler laughed.

“Well then you might wanna get two,” he said.

“Oh boy. If you’re gonna start hanging out with us, I won’t have to watch my weight then, will I?” She waggled her ice-cream cone at him the way one would a rolled-up newspaper at a disobedient foal.

“Wow, and I thought I was inappropriate,” he said.

“Well, nopony ever said you weren’t.” Copper gave him those bedroom eyes she had tried getting Sunset to practice.

Sunset looked between them, and her ears fell back. For a supposed third wheel, Copper wasn’t acting very third wheel-y.

“Copper?” Sunset said.

“Yeah?”

“Can we talk?” She pulled Copper aside and whispered, “Can you lay off with the flirting some? This is supposed to be a friend thing for me, not another tally mark on your lipstick case.”

Copper quirked an eyebrow at that and underlined it with a respectful smirk. “Wow, that’s some fire coming from you.”

“Well, yeah…” She looked away. She didn’t like getting snippy with Copper. It just… it felt weird and wrong in its own ways. But still: “Celestia gave me an assignment, and even though I don’t really want to, I need to at least try, right?”

“Don’t want to? Uh-huh. Yeah, sure.” She elbowed Sunset in the shoulder. “You keep telling yourself that.”

“Copper, I’m serious. How am I supposed to do my best if you keep being—” Sunset gestured vaguely at Copper “—this?”

Copper’s grin widened a hair. “Being my stupid, piece-of-shit self? What else am I good for? Or is there really something more going on here that you still don’t want to admit?”

“That’s not what it is.”

“Yes, it totally is!” she said, a little louder than a whisper should be. “Sunset, listen to yours—”

“Shh!” Sunset looked nervously over her shoulder at Doppler, who busied himself with the table’s salt shaker, tilting it at an angle and rolling it along its hexagonal shape so that the glass made that funny warbly sound on the laminate. Oh, he could even make silly things look good.

“You’re nervous I’m going to hit it off with him better than you are,” Copper continued in a proper whisper.

Sunset flattened back her ears and looked aside. She… Well, yes. She couldn’t stop lying to herself about it—or at least waffling about it, to use Copper’s words. She did like him. Him and that wavy mane and rugged frame and those eyes oh my gosh.

And yet here she was, too scared to admit it to herself enough to act on it. Copper’s shenanigans only complicated the matter. Frankly, the thought terrified her: the one time a stallion didn’t seem like a complete weirdo and he ended up liking Copper more, all because she couldn’t get her own stupid brain to make up its mind about something supposedly so simple.

“Sunset…” Copper rubbed a hoof up and down Sunset’s foreleg. It was warm and right and everything Sunset wanted in that contact right now. The smile on Copper’s face said more than her touch, and again like so many times before it instilled in Sunset that fledgling confidence to smile back. “No shenanigans, no bullshit: Is this a date now? Do you want it to be a date?”

Sunset took a deep breath in, then out. “Yes. Yes, I do.”

“Okay.” Copper made good on her smile and gently squeezed Sunset’s shoulder. “Then I’ll lay off. Really.”

Sunset hugged her tight. “Thanks.”

Copper let the hug last a good beat before pulling away. “But you need to tell him that, because as much as he's totally already on that page, you need to make it clear you both are. And if you screw this up, I’m totally going for it.”

She cuffed Sunset on the shoulder and winked.

Oh, that mare could find a way to ruin any sentimental moment. She turned around before saying something Copper would twist sarcastically back on her.

Doppler set the salt shaker aside. He wore a smile that danced between the two of them.

“You two done with your little powwow?”

“We are,” Copper said. She winked at him and shoved Sunset in his face.

Sunset tensed up, nose to nose with him and those eyes oh my gosh. She laughed, her breath having suddenly left her, and her legs doing their best impression of cooked spaghetti.

“We’ve really gotta stop starting our conversations like this,” he said. He casually rolled his eyes. “Not that I mind, but, you know.”

Sunset brushed her mane over her ear. “Yeah. So uh…”

She tried looking him in the eyes, but a nervous case of butterflies in her stomach had her looking at anything but him. It was hard to think with those eyes looking at her.

“Hold on. Before you finish that thought, why don’t we get some food?” He got out of his chair and jerked his head toward the cafeteria proper.

“Uh, yeah.” Sunset laughed. “That sounds like a great idea.” She watched him head down the little ramp toward the food lines. Oh, she could watch him walk all day.

“You’re doing it again,” Copper whispered. She had sidled up beside her at some point. “Stop worrying and just have fun. You’ll stop acting brain-dead if you just relax.”

“But what if I—”

Copper put a hoof up to Sunset’s lips and gave her a smile. “Stop trying so hard. Just be you. The you that you are when you’re around me.”

“I’m trying not to try so hard. Can’t you tell?”

Copper leaned in, letting that little smile twist into a sardonic grin. “Then try a little harder,” she said, and followed Doppler.

Sunset stuck her tongue out at the back of Copper’s head. Just try not to try so hard, huh? Easy for her to say, with looks like that. Sunset took a deep breath.

“Okay, Sunset,” she whispered. “You can do this. Just be yourself.” She followed them down.

There wasn’t much variety for dinner that night. The entrée line that normally fulfilled everypony’s hopes and dreams was covered in the Plastic Wrap of Shame, and a skinny pegasus lunchmare scrubbed away at whatever it was they scrubbed away at behind the line.

Pizza and hay fries it was, then.

“So,” Doppler said when they got back to their table. “What exactly brought this whole thing up, anyway?” He took a bite of his mushroom-and-olive pizza and talked while chewing.

Kinda gross. Sunset could forgive him, though, as long as he kept looking at her oh my gosh.

“What thing?” she said.

“You asking me to hang out.” He swallowed his bite of pizza and put his hooves on the table. “Actually, you know what, I’m just gonna come out and ask it. Is this an actual hang-out thing or like a date sort of thing?”

Sunset stared at him, then at Copper. Copper stared back with a reserved but expectant “come on!” in the way she raised her brow and jerked her head toward Doppler.

Sunset swallowed. It suddenly felt twenty degrees warmer.

“A, uh… a date,” she said.

It was a terrifying but liberating phrase, as if the weight of the world had been lifted off her shoulders.

That little smile on his face hesitated for a moment before widening. “Alright then,” he said and took another bite of pizza.

Sunset put her hooves on the table, huddled close to her chest. “‘Alright then’ what?”

“Alright then,” he said. He swallowed his pizza and licked tomato sauce off his hoof. “We’re on a date sort of thing.”

“Oh.” She blushed. Thirty degrees warmer now. “Alright then.”

“Don’t get too excited now,” he said. He wiped his mouth with a napkin before starting his second slice.

“Oh, don’t worry,” Copper said. “She will.”

“Copper,” Sunset said.

“Just ask her about the chair.”

“Copper!”

• • •

The rest of dinner went pretty well. “Well,” as in, Doppler hadn’t yet run off screaming into the night. The three of them left the cafeteria at around eight and wandered campus with no particular destination in mind.

Sunset had gotten an ice-cream cone on the way out. Vanilla, because she was a normal pony, unlike Copper.

“Well yeah,” Doppler said on Sunset’s left. “Everypony knows about you, as in, that you exist and all. Just, you know, you kinda keep to yourself. So no, I haven’t heard much about you other than you’re Princess Celestia’s personal student.”

They rounded the meditation garden that sprawled out in front of the science building. The flowers were in bloom, and everything smelled like happiness. Or, at least that’s how Sunset learned to describe it. She was never much for flowers or all that girly stuff—daffodils being the only exception.

“Well, CSGU isn’t that big of a university,” Copper said on Sunset’s other side. “Everypony still knows everypony else to some degree. You can’t expect me to believe that.”

“Well then what do you believe?” Doppler shot back.

Copper got that mischievous grin about her. “I believe you’re the second-best stallion on the lacrosse team.”

“Oh ho, them’s fightin’ words ’round here.” He craned his neck in front of Sunset to stare sidelong at Copper.

“Are they now?” Copper said.

“I thought he did better than Page Turner,” Sunset said between licks of her ice cream. This week had been unseasonably warm, and the heat made quick work of the “ice” part. She had to keep up if she didn’t want to share it with the ants.

“Yeah, see?” Doppler said. “Somepony was actually watching the game.” He threw his hoof around Sunset and she all but squeaked in surprise.

Copper giggled. “Yeah, because I was doing my part insulting the other team’s crowd. Everypony saw you guys weren’t doing your part in shutting them up.”

“They’re all just a bunch of idiots from Hoofington. They insult themselves just by breathing.”

Sunset took a moment from her ice cream. Sheesh, was everypony so up about this rivalry thing? Why couldn’t they all just get along?

“Must be even more insulting losing to them, then,” Copper said. She turned away so she could do her over-the-shoulder “gotcha!” smile and played with the tassels of her scarf for effect.

“Is she always like this?” he asked Sunset.

“Always,” Sunset said flatly. “You give her an inch and she’ll take a mile.”

She froze. Oops. No, please don’t.

Please do, said the grin plastered across Copper’s face. “Insert dick joke here,” she said before pursing her lips and looking away innocently.

Sunset rolled her eyes. Typical Copper. Couldn’t go five minutes without saying something inappropriate. Implying a dirty joke was a step removed from making one, at least.

Doppler snickered. “‘Insert…’”

Well, she couldn’t help him cracking a joke about it. Sunset put a hoof to her mouth to stifle a laugh. She accidentally snorted, and there went any hope for composure.

All three of them belted out a round of laughter. Sunset held onto Copper for balance. When she regained control of herself, she wiped away a tear.

Copper wore what seemed like a frown trying its best not to be a smile. “You would have totally yelled at me if I said that.”

“Yeah, I would have.”

“Oh, so you’re giving your new coltfriend special privilege, huh?”

“Yeah, I—” Sunset’s voice caught in her throat. Her face went redder than a cherry, and she almost dropped her ice-cream cone.

Doppler laughed behind her.

“She didn’t deny it!” Coppertone said. She tail-flicked Sunset on the flank.

“Ow! Would you stop that?” She practically tackled Copper when bumping shoulders to get into girl-talk range. “You’re embarrassing me,” she whisper-hissed.

“Relax.” Copper pushed back. She whispered in Sunset’s ear. “I know what I’m doing.”

Sunset grumbled to herself. “Yeah, being annoying.”

She threw her scowl Doppler’s way, and it disappeared the moment she saw that smiling face of his. He seemed to be enjoying himself, staring at the sky as it washed orange with the sunset.

Copper pushed back against Sunset. She jerked her head his way and waggled her eyebrows.

“What?” Sunset asked.

Copper rolled her eyes. “Do I have to do it a third time today?” she whisper-hissed. “Talk to him. I’ve been carrying this conversation for you since we started eating.”

Before Sunset had a chance to argue, Copper shoved her at Doppler. She stumbled to a halt almost nose to nose with him for the too-many-th time today, and hand in hand with that all-too-embarrassing situation, her words made themselves scarce. She looked back to Copper for a lifeline, but stopped short.

Copper was gone. It was just her, Doppler, and the sudden return of the butterflies in her stomach, doing loop-de-loops and corkscrews and all sorts of maneuvers that got her stomach queasy and her legs noodly.

Doppler seemed just as confused. “Well, she was off in a hurry.”

“W-where’d she go?” Did she teleport? Just left her high and dry?

“Teleported. I assumed you knew where.” He smiled. “I take it that’s a no?”

“I…” Oh, she was so going to get an earful later.

“Heh. Well, anyway,” Doppler said. He took an idle swat at a tree branch encroaching over the sidewalk. “So what’s this chair that I’m supposed to ask you about?”

A nervous heat rose to her cheeks. “Honestly… I have no idea.”

Doppler watched her for a moment, then chuckled. “So it’s just one of Copper’s jokes, then. You really need to loosen up. You’re so uptight.”

“I am not uptight! I’m just… cautious. I’ve been hurt before.”

“Fair enough.” He gave her that casual smile of his that sent a flutter through her heart and looked back out at the field. “So then what are we doing, Cautious?”

Her cheeks burned at the silly nickname, and she couldn’t tamp down the stupid smile that came with it. Was he always so Coppertone-y, too?

“What do you mean?”

“Well, you asked me out on a not-date-turned-actual-date, so I assume you had something in mind for us to do.”

Sunset folded back her ears. “Oh… Right. Uh…”

“You have no idea what you wanna do, do you?” Again, he threw that casual smile her way and those blue eyes oh my gosh.

She started playing with her mane.

“Wow,” he said. “And here I thought Miss Cautious had everything planned out to the littlest detail.”

“Why would you think that?” She squared up with him. Even at her tallest, she barely came up to his chin.

“Because if there is one thing that I know about you, it’s how many notes you take. You’re the only pony in school who has an entire saddlebag’s worth of stuff for just that arcano-whatever class you take.”

She stared at him, at a loss.

“Tuesday, Thursday, 9:30,” he said. “Room 110 with Professor Wizened Reed.” He jerked his head at an imaginary schoolroom behind him. “I’ve got Incantations with Professor Vociferous across the hall, same time.”

“Oh. I’ve, uh, never noticed you there, I guess.”

Well, that was sort of a lie. She had seen him, as in, when walking to and from class she had walked past and probably said hi once or twice. But she had never actually looked at him, looked into those gorgeous eyes of his and had the courage to say anything relevant or, uh… coherent.

He shrugged. “Eh, it happens. Like I said, you’re the princess’s personal student. Not like ponies aren’t going to notice you when you’re around. That coat of yours is hard to miss, too.”

Sunset wasn’t sure how to respond to that. On one hoof, he was right. Being Celestia’s student would make her a sort-of celebrity, but on the other, she didn’t really feel herself in any sort of limelight for it. She was just another pony in the hallway.

“Plus,” he continued. “That outgoing, type-A personality of yours definitely helps.”

“I don’t have a type-A personality.”

A grin that reminded Sunset of Copper worked its way onto his face. “You have no idea what sarcasm is outside of a dictionary, do you?”

Sunset frowned. “Actually, as a matter of fact I do. And now you’re being a smartass.”

“Oh,” he said, impressed. “You can actually tell the difference. I’m surprised. Not many ponies can.”

Despite this unwelcome change in conversation, Sunset smiled. “Comes with having one as your best friend.”

“I guess it does, doesn’t it? Well, yeah, that was smartass I was speaking. I’m trilingual, by the way.” He buffed a hoof on his chest to complement this little charade of his.

Sunset raised an eyebrow and drew her head back slightly. “In what three languages, exactly?”

“Smartass, sarcasm, and Ponish. In that order.”

Sunset snorted and raised a hoof to hold in a bout of laughter. She walked into that one.

“That has to be the dumbest thing I’ve heard all week,” she said.

Doppler shrugged. “Well, if you figure out what you want to do, I’m sure I can beat that record a few times tonight.”

Sunset blushed, looking away. That was a bet she didn’t mind taking. Just, what to do?

“Tell you what…” He turned his head toward the distant track field. “There’s a trail just past the hoofball fields. Goes through the woods. We run it all the time. Really pretty this time of day. Wanna go for a little nature voyage?”

Aww, was he trying to play to her feminine nature? Long walks on the beach and talking about her feelings and all that? Still not really her thing, but for him she could make an exception.

“Okay,” she said.

They headed out past the track field and its chain-link fence where Copper found that scarf. A cardinal chirped from a nearby tree, and a light wind sent that rushing sound through the treetops. There were a few ponies making use of the track.

She still didn’t know what to say. With Copper gone, it left a hole in the conversation she didn’t know how to fill. Copper really had been carrying the conversation, hadn’t she?

Oh, the silence was stretching out and getting awkward. She needed to do something or this was all going to fall to pieces and it would be all her fault.

Come on. She could do this. She was Sunset Shimmer, personal student of Princess Celestia herself. She could handle a daa-ha-haate oh my gosh.

They were actually dating right now. Like, for real! She coughed to try and shoo away any stupid grin she might have been wearing. Just think of something, anything!

“So, um…” she said. “Doppler…”

“Yeah?”

Sunset laughed. “No, I mean doppler, as in the phenomenon. The distortion of sound due to the compression or elongation of sound waves generated by a moving object. How, um… how does one get a name and cutie mark in that?”

They headed off the sidewalk and onto a dirt path less “constructed” and more “beaten into submission” by the many sports teams at the university. It cut through the tree line and onto the trail proper. The cinder ash crunched beneath their hooves as they walked.

Doppler laughed. “Well, it may come as a surprise for an uppity Canterlotian such as yourself, but out there”—he gestured into the distant sky—“there are places where the weather isn’t controlled by pegasi.”

Sunset rolled her eyes but smiled. “So you’re not from Canterlot?”

“Nope. Ferrington, out west. Moved here when I was a colt ’cause my dad couldn’t get enough work there as a cobbler.”

“Your dad’s a cobbler?” Sunset stepped around a little pothole in the path.

“Yeah, horseshoes, boots, all that stuff. You wouldn’t think it, but there’s more boots that need fixing in an upscale place like Canterlot than there are in a down-to-Equestria place like Ferrington.”

“Huh.”

“Yeah. So anyway, there are some places in Equestria where pegasi don’t control the weather. In those backwater, dark-aged places, there are ponies that monitor it instead.”

“Monitor? You mean, just… let the weather happen?”

“Yeah.”

“Huh.”

“Weird, right?”

Sunset shrugged. “Not really. I mean, it makes sense for places where there just aren’t enough pegasi.”

“I was being facetious. It’s a thing that I do.” He elbowed her in the shoulder.

“I… Oh.”

“Heh. So what about you?”

“M-me?” She shied away at the idea. She didn’t like talking about herself. “What do you mean?”

Doppler caught a falling leaf with his magic and twirled it by the stem. “Well, you can’t have been Princess Celestia’s prized pupil your entire life. Where did you grow up? What kind of pony were you before you became Princess Celestia’s student? What was your favorite toy on your kindergarten playground?”

Sunset laughed. “What kind of question is that last one?”

“One that makes you laugh.” He tossed the leaf aside.

Sunset pursed her lips. He got her there.

“Well, umm… I grew up here in Canterlot. I was regular, old Sunset Shimmer just like I’ve always been. Aaaand my favorite playground toy was a red kickball that our teacher never reinflated for us after a colt named Howitzer sat on it.” She giggled at the memory.

“Oh, you were a kickballer back in the day, huh?”

She shot him a grin. “Best one in the schoolyard.”

His mouth took on an appraising slant, and his eyes roved over her in a way that were he any other stallion would have earned him a proper slap across the face.

He nodded. “I can see it.”

There was a toad on the path. It looked up at Sunset with its wide, beady eyes, croaked, and hopped into the grass.

“So if you’re named after the doppler effect,” Sunset said. “And you came here to CSGU. What exactly are you studying?”

“Meteorology.” He kicked a stray rock into the grass, which startled a chipmunk out of hiding. They watched it scurry across the path and into the nearby underbrush. “Which, surprisingly enough, has nothing to do with meteors.”

Sunset giggled. “Right?”

“I know! How do you think I felt after getting here and finding that out?” He grinned her way, then took a prideful stride ahead.

Sunset shook her head and trotted to catch up. He really was like a freaking stallion version of Copper. They walked in silence for a while, and Sunset took the opportunity to enjoy their little nature walk.

Sparrows and blue jays chirped overhead. Chipmunks scurried through the grass and forest floor while squirrels chased each other around and dug holes for nuts. There were a few mosquitoes out, but otherwise she loved every second of it. Hesitantly, she sidled closer to Doppler.

The butterflies in her stomach did their thing, and she slowly found the courage to look at his hooves while they walked.

A minute passed before he laughed quietly to himself.

“What?” Sunset asked. She took a step back from him, afraid it might have had to do with invading his personal space.

“Nothin’… Just haven’t done this in a while.”

“Done what in a while?” She flicked her ears forward, then back. She had a feeling she knew the answer.

“You know, just… go on a walk with a cute mare.”

Sunset snorted and rolled her eyes.

“Hey, just because it’s a corny fuckin’ thing to say don’t make it any less true.”

Sunset tched and looked away. Yeah right. Sunset turned when she noticed Doppler had stopped walking.

Doppler wore a disbelieving smile. “Okay. I mean, I’ll skip the stupid ‘have you looked in a mirror?’ joke, because it’s obvious you haven’t for how wacky your mane is today. But really, ponies don’t tell you you’re pretty very often, do they?”

Sunset blushed and looked at the ground. There was a trail of ants across the path she had almost stepped on, and she moved her hoof to avoid them. “No. They don’t. I mean, Copper does, but that’s just her being her.”

A moment passed, before Doppler snorted and shook his head. “That’s… not her ‘being her.’ You should start listening to her more.”

“I do listen to her. I can’t not when she says it all the time.”

“Then you should start believing her.” Those gorgeous eyes of his were focused on her, and they carried with them an honesty she couldn’t deny. True or not, he wholeheartedly believed it.

Sunset brushed back her mane to make it hopefully look a little more kempt.

Doppler caught her hoof before she could brush it all the way back. “Don’t. I kinda like it like that.”

The touch sent her heart aflutter. She had been nose to nose with him three times that day, thanks to Copper, but here in the forest washed red with the sunset, his hoof on hers, just the two of them, she almost forgot to breathe.

His mango-scented shampoo mingled with the smell of dirt and leaves, and she breathed it deep, her eyes never leaving his.

Part of her thought back to Copper and her spunky personality. What would she do at a moment like this? And the moment the thought crossed her mind, so did the answer. Sunset’s cheeks went hot as fire. The butterflies were back in her stomach, and they brought all their friends.

Copper would go in for a kiss.

Was it too soon, though? What would he think of her?

He tilted his head and brought it ever so slightly closer to hers.

Oh, Celestia, he was going for it. What should she do? Should she let him? Meet him in the middle? Oh no, oh no, oh no. What if she chose wrong?

No, this was too soon. Sunset broke away, laughing weakly. She took a deep breath. The butterflies didn’t seem very happy with her, but they could shove it.

“I, uh… can we head back?” she said breathlessly. “It’s getting kinda dark.”

Doppler was unreadable for a split second. He flattened back his ears before flicking them forward and giving her an easy smile.

“Yeah, sure.”

They headed back across the dirt path, past the chain-link fence, and back to campus proper. They entered the honors dorms, and Sunset led him through the winding halls to the Whinnister Wing, where the top of the top honors roomed.

“Damn,” he said, taking in the high glass ceilings and crystal décor. “You two have the nice dorms.”

“Perks of being top in my class.”

“You mean perks of being the princess’s star student.”

Sunset rolled her eyes. Whatever ponies wanted to think was the case. Those two reasons went pretty side by side anyway.

They came to her door, and she undid the lock. She was halfway inside before she realized she hadn’t even said goodbye.

She cringed and spun about with an apologetic smile. “Sorry, I… force of habit.”

He chuckled. “You’re good. I do stupid stuff like that all the time.”

They shared a moment of silence, one Sunset wished desperately to fill with something. Maybe… maybe that kiss would have been appropriate. Maybe now?

“Well, I had fun.” He took an idle peek into her living room where the lights were off, which meant Copper was probably sleeping.

“So did I.”

He smiled. “It was fun watching you get all embarrassed. You have the most adorable blush.”

Sunset giggled. “Shut up…”

She went to brush her mane back from her face but stopped herself, remembering their little moment in the woods.

“I’ll see you tomorrow?” he asked.

That got her heart racing. She smiled, if only to keep herself from squealing at the thought.

“Yeah,” she said. “I’d like that.”

“Alright.” He stepped back.

Sunset didn’t know what was going through her head. Part of her was already exhausted out of her mind, but something stirred in her chest, some desperate fear that told her no: if she didn’t do it now, he might be walking away for good, no matter what he just said.

Before he could take another step, she darted forward and kissed him. Her heart beat a racket in her chest at the leap of faith, and a sudden fear ran through her that he might not have wanted this so suddenly.

But his lips pressed back against hers, and all worry fell away to the bliss of the moment. When they separated, they pressed their foreheads together in a fit of giggles.

“Your Coppertone is showing,” he said.

Sunset couldn’t stop giggling. “So it is…”

“Lunch at 11?” he said.

“It’s a date.”

He snorted. “Now who’s breaking the record for dumbest thing you’ve ever heard.”

“I don’t know… maybe we’ll find out tomorrow.”

That got a real laugh out of him. “I think we just found our winner, actually.”

She pushed him in the chest, and oh gosh was he toned under that thick coat. Sweet Celestia, what was going on with her? She really was acting like Copper right now.

She cleared her throat and put a hoof on the door. “Goodnight.”

“You too.” He stepped back to let her shut it.

She didn’t, though. She kept leaning farther out to watch him walk, until he turned the corner. She lingered there a moment longer, dreamily imagining what tomorrow would be like. An urge to let out a delighted squeal made it to her lips, but she held it in for Copper’s sake. She shut the door and practically skipped on her tippy hooves back into her dorm.

“You were gone awhile,” came Copper’s voice from the couch. She peered overtop the back, a bleary smile on her face. She must have passed out waiting for her to come back. “You fuck him already?”

The jab didn’t even register on Sunset’s offended meter. She was so high up on cloud nine, she actually had the gusto to smirk.

“You’d like that wouldn’t you?” she said.

Coppertone’s mouth fell open. “Aww, look at you. My little Sunnybuns all grown up and giving my smartassery right back at me.”

“‘Sunnybuns’?” Sunset snorted. She climbed over the back of the couch and onto Copper. It was an awkward position—head hanging off the cushion, hind legs dangling over the couch back—but just being off her hooves felt like a dream come true after all that walking. She heaved a contented sigh.

“Oof.” Coppertone squirmed underneath her. “Yep, you’re definitely all grown up.”

Sunset giggled. “I’m tired.”

“You’re heavy.” Copper used her magic to grab Sunset by the hind legs and fwomp her down into a more comfortable position beside her. She snuggled in and wrapped a hoof around Sunset’s back while using the other to stroke Sunset’s mane.

Sunset felt her eyes flutter shut involuntarily. She had always liked having her mane played with as a filly. There was something comforting about it.

Copper’s breath smelled of milk and cookies. She’d been binge-eating again. To think she was always worried about her weight and then went and did things like that.

“You sure you didn’t fuck him?” Copper said. “Your mane says otherwise.”

“It’s been like that all day,” Sunset said, a high, defensive pitch to her voice.

“So you’ve staged an alibi from the get-go. You’re not fooling me in the slightest.” She ruffled Sunset’s mane.

Sunset snorted and shook her head. A deep sigh, and she buried herself in Copper’s mane and its coconut shampoo scent. So soft. She could cuddle with it forever.

“You’re the worst, Copper,” she whispered.

A moment of silence, and Copper giggled. She rested her muzzle on Sunset’s cheek. “I learn from the best.”

They shared a laugh, and Sunset drifted off to the gentle stroke of Copper’s hoof through her mane.

Author's Note

Onward and Upward!

This story has undergone changes. Some comments may no longer make sense or be relevant.

V - Coney Dog's

Sunset, it’s me, Twilight. I know this will sound strange, but something important came up. Can we talk? In person? I have a few questions to ask, and I don’t know if it’d be appropriate to do so here. You pick the time and place. I’ll be there.

Please.

Your friend,
Princess Twilight Sparkle

• • •

It never got less weird stepping through the portal. No matter how many times I had crossed over, the initial shock of standing on two legs and having these weird, dangly fingers never quite left. Thankfully, I had gotten used to the idea of being human, and the feeling usually passed as quickly as it took me to find my balance.

It was midmorning on this side of the portal and, being a weekend, no one was in or around the schoolyard. I headed toward the center of town, as per Sunset’s directions.

I found the place easily enough—Coney Dog’s, some retro dive bar with enough hard plastic seating, chrome trim, and lithographic posters to stir up a sense of nostalgia for a culture I never had the luxury of experiencing. Sunset was already seated at a booth, so I headed over.

She sat with her back against the wall, one leg stretched across the length of the booth seat, the other pulled close so as to casually rest it against the lip of the table in the bad-girl, screw-public-decorum sort of way I had come to admire about her. Definitely getting looks from other restaurant-goers, though, that was for sure.

She held her phone in her lap, tapping it with her thumbs to the plink-plonk rhythm of some game as I slid in across from her. The noises stopped a moment later, and she looked up at me with a casual smile.

“Hey,” Sunset said.

“Hey. Thanks for meeting with me on such short notice. I… really wasn’t expecting it to be a ‘hey, right now works’ moment, but yeah.”

Sunset shifted herself into a more proper both-feet-on-the-floor position and stuffed her phone into the pocket of her leather jacket. “Well, yeah. I know you know that school’s been pretty busy gearing up for finals these last few weeks. But you caught me literally as I was walking back from the corner store for study snacks. Figured I could use an actual study break instead of just that five-minute walk, so it’s all just great timing. It’s always great seeing you again.”

“You, too,” I said. My eyes naturally gravitated to her coffee and its little stirring spoon. “I like having the opportunity to come here. It’s… different. In a good way.”

“If by good,” she said, watching me eye her coffee cup, “you mean they have shit coffee, then yeah.” She laughed and slid it toward me. “Still the best this side of town, though. You want it?”

I joined in on that laugh, but held up a hand. “I’m good, thanks. I already had some before heading over.”

Sunset shrugged before taking a sip. “More shit coffee for me, then.”

We let the noise of the restaurant sink in for a moment. The cook called out an order of “animal fries” through the little window in the back.

“So…” I said. “I hate the idea of starting our meetup on the wrong foot, but this is… seemingly important. And I want to make sure I approach it with all due respect for you and everything between the two of you, but it’s serious to her, so it’s serious to me, and I just…”

Sunset smirked at me and leaned forward on her elbows, propping up her head in her hand. “Twilight, you’re rambling. What’s got you all nervous like this? Between me and who?”

I watched her carefully as I said, “You and... Princess Luna.”

She raised an eyebrow at me. “Princess Luna? As in Princess Celestia’s sister? Um, okay. You’ve mentioned her like once or twice. What’s… this have to do with me?”

I wasn’t sure how best to answer that. Did she really not know? Or maybe she didn’t remember what Princess Luna was referring to? Or maybe Princess Luna was mistaken, and this had nothing to do with Sunset?

While those thoughts whirled in my head, the waitress walked up. She was a heavyset mare—er, woman—with faded pink hair and an easygoing smile that reminded me of Applejack.

“Hello, dearie,” she said. “Can I get you something to drink?”

And a voice reminiscent of Granny Smith, minus a decade or two. Maybe she was a distant Apple.

“Oh,” I said. “I, uh… I’ll take a green tea if you have it, please.”

“I’m sorry, but we only serve sweet tea. Is that all right?”

“That’s fine.”

“Iced or warm?”

“Warm, please,” I said instinctively. The Applejack on this side of the mirror had once told me to never take my sweet tea cold this far north. Apparently, they never made it right otherwise.

The waitress smiled and scooted off to the next table.

With the conversation effectively broken, I hesitated on where to pick back up again. In a bid to fill the silence, I took the napkin from my placemat. The fork and knife placed on them skittered in front of me, and a twinge of nerves bid I straighten them out.

Did Sunset really not remember? Did she repress it? Should I be bringing this up?

“Princess Luna…” I said, rubbing the napkin between my thumb and forefinger. The more I felt myself trying to pick safe words, the more I felt a stranger in this domain and the message I had to deliver just as unwarranted. “She said that she hurt you?”

The ghost of a worry passed over Sunset’s face, and a guarded curiosity overtook her as she sat back in her booth seat. “What do you mean?”

Just seeing that look on Sunset’s face was enough to have me regret writing to her in the first place. “I’m sorry. I-I shouldn’t have brought this up.”

“Twilight, no,” she said. “You don’t just write to me asking for an emergency meeting, be all tip toe-y about whatever it is you came here to say and then renege on me. Seriously, what’s up? You’re starting to worry me.”

The potential of just what could be between them had me tapping my fingernail on the table, napkin still clutched between my thumb and forefinger. “You know who she is, right? Who she used to be?”

“I take it you’re going to tell me?”

I looked back and forth between her eyes and the goodness I saw in them. But it was too late now, and I only hoped it wasn’t as big as Princess Luna made it out to be.

“She used to be Nightmare Moon,” I said. “The Mare in the Moon?”

As I had feared, the moment the words left my lips, the realization hit her like a freight train. Her gaze dropped to her coffee mug, and her fingers slowly clenched into fists. It might have been my eyes playing tricks on me, but I swore she was trembling.

“What the fuck does she want?” she said sharply.

I began rubbing the napkin between my thumb and forefinger again. “She… said that you’re hurting.”

“And how would she know that?”

“I… don’t know? But she watches over everypony’s dreams. Maybe she saw one of yours?”

That prompted her to take another deep breath. Her eyes roved around the room, looking for something to latch onto. By the rhythm of her breathing, I could only guess as to how many mantras she had running through her head.

I placed my hand palm up on the table for her to take. “Sunset, whatever it is, I’m here.”

She took my hand in hers as if it were a lifeline, gripping tight enough that it hurt. I did my best not to show it.

We stayed like that for a minute as she stared at my hand, searching for the courage to handle this conversation. She closed her eyes, swallowed, nodded, then looked at me—into me, grasping for a connection I couldn’t put into words.

“Why?” she said. “Twilight, what does she want?”

“I don’t know. To fix whatever it is between you two? I don’t know the details, but she’s hurting, and you clearly are, too.”

She squeezed my hand a bit harder before letting go and dropping her gaze to her coffee mug. The briefest flash of anger showed on her face and was gone again, like the shadow of a cloud passing over a field.

“Maybe she deserves to hurt…” she said under her breath.

That got goosebumps running up and down my arms. “Sunset—”

“Twilight,” she said. Still leaning forward on her elbows, she opened her hands and held them inches apart as if trying to hold something as fragile as an idea before clenching them again. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. “You don’t know what you’re asking of me right now. You really don’t.”

I bit my lip. Sure, I had seen her worried, but never to the point of barely restrained terror. It felt like the only thing keeping her from falling apart was the fact we were in public. I clenched my hands and relaxed them, finally settling on clasping them together on the table.

“I’m… realizing that,” I said. “I’m sorry. But… I’m right here if you want to talk about it.”

Sunset sunk backward into her seat. She held her elbows tight, and I knew what I said hit a nerve.

“I’m just… I guess I'm asking for permission to help you in any way that I can. And I think that talking to her is the way to do that. Or at least to start doing that.”

That didn’t seem to help any. She tightened her grip on her elbows and took a strained breath.

I didn’t know what to think, since Luna hadn’t told me exactly what had happened between them. Whatever it was, I was sure they could come to some agreement. I just had to not screw up convincing her, which it seemed I was doing a terrible job of.

I sat back in my seat and clasped my hands together in my lap. The waiter made good timing, swinging by with my sweet tea. I thanked her for it and filled the pause in conversation with a sip. A little sweeter than I was used to, but otherwise fine.

What wasn’t fine, though, was the silence that lingered after my sip. I had hoped either Sunset would say something or I would think of a new subject to circle back with, but nothing. I picked up my glass and set it back down.

“I don’t think that will help, Twilight,” Sunset said. “I really don’t. I really don’t think there’s much you can do. I really don’t think there’s anything she can do…”

“I get that you don’t trust her. For… any and all valid reasons you have. From what little she’s told me and now from how you’re reacting, it’s… big, whatever it is, and now that I’ve just plowed headfirst into this I knew this was a mistake and now I just… I guess it’s just that I don’t understand.”

“But that’s it, though,” Sunset said. She stared at me with a haunted look in her eye. “You’re right. You don’t understand. You can’t understand. It’s not just some simple thing that magic or talking about our feelings can fix. I get that you want to help, but… I just…”

Her eyes fell to her coffee again. She took a sip, though it seemed more a compulsion to fill the heavy silence than for a desire to drink it.

This silence. Even the din of the restaurant couldn’t quite muffle it. Princess Celestia touted me as the Princess of Friendship, but more often than not, I felt like I had no clue what I was doing, like I bumbled blindly through every word out of my mouth and every step with my hooves, and the more I did so, the more I trampled whatever goodwill I tried bringing to the table.

“She put you up to this,” Sunset said. “Didn’t she?”

I frowned at the notion. “No, she didn’t. She’s a friend of mine who is hurting, so I offered to help. You’re a friend of mine who is also hurting. I want to help.”

She glanced at some couple walking past our table for the exit, then out the window beside us at the goings-on of the city. It didn’t take a mind reader to know she had already made up her mind on that idea.

“I have… nightmares,” she said.

That got goosebumps going up my arms. Nightmares, Nightmare Moon, the look in Sunset’s eye.

I let her continue.

“I have nightmares about…” Her knuckles went white around the coffee mug, and it rattled ever so slightly on its saucer. “I-I really don’t want to talk about it.”

“And you don’t have to if you really don’t want to. I just hate—”

“You hate what?” she said. “You hate seeing me like this? Seeing her like this? Maybe she deserves to be seen like this.”

I blinked, taken aback. “Sunset?”

She sighed and held her head in her hands. “I’m sorry, Twilight. I just… I know you’re just doing what you think is right. That’s… something I’ve always admired about you. But I just…”

“It’s a lot,” I said, looking down at the napkin in my hand. “I… All we can do is try.”

We lapsed into silence, and I spent that next minute struggling to keep my composure. Part of me wished I was doing it for Sunset’s sake, to give her the moment she needed to keep herself from falling apart, but I was never good at lying to myself about things like that. Composure had never been my strong suit.

“I don’t know what’s between you two,” I said. “But whatever it is, she’s changed, Sunset. I saw the Elements change her back to good.”

“Yeah… I know how that feels.” She curled in on herself.

I bit my lip. “I didn’t mean it like that.”

No answer. A long few seconds passed before I found a better way to approach the subject.

“I… I saw her fight the Tantabus,” I said.

That brought Sunset’s eyes up to mine. “The what?”

“The Tantabus. It’s… this thing. She made it or something after we changed her back. She made it to give herself nightmares so that she would never forget what she did as Nightmare Moon.”

Sunset had put her hands on the table. She stared at me with reserved conviction. Whatever this meant to her, it meant a lot.

“It slipped into our dreams by accident one night,” I continued. “And she had to chase it down. Eventually, it got into all of Ponyville’s dreams, and we had to fight it together as an entire town.

“It fed on her guilt, to the point that it almost escaped into the real world. But we showed her just how hard she was fighting to save us. And it was because of that that she realized just how much she had changed, too.”

“So what you’re saying is that she doesn’t feel bad about it anymore.”

I jerked back in my seat. “What? No, that’s not what I’m saying at all. I… I guess what I wanted to say got lost in there somewhere. But what I’m really trying to say is… what I’m saying is that she’s changed. Really and truly. She’s repented, and she felt strongly enough about everything she did as Nightmare Moon that her guilt alone could have destroyed Equestria. I…”

I reached toward her, palms outstretched as if it would somehow help impart the emotions twisting my heart into a knot. I sighed and placed my head in my hands. “I don’t mean that everything’s perfect or that what she did to you means nothing, but she’s ready and willing to help you in order to make things right. She would die for the opportunity. She’s that kind of pony. The real her is that kind of pony.”

Sunset clenched her hands into fists, but relaxed. Maybe, hopefully, she found it in herself to believe those words as well as I did.

“I just ask that you give her the chance,” I said. “I’ve read every single letter you’ve sent me. All the people you’ve helped and shown that friendship really is magic. I know that you know true repentance. There’s nopony who understands that as well as you.”

Sunset looked toward the center of the restaurant again. Her knuckles were white from clenching them so hard.

“You really trust her that much?” She said it so softly that I almost didn’t hear her, but when she brought her eyes around to me, I felt the weight behind the question like an avalanche ready to bury me. She put her hands out on the table for me to take, and I did on instinct.

“Yes,” I said. “I can tell—”

“Say it,” she said, and I gazed up the slope of that mountain.

I squeezed her hands back. “I trust her that much, Sunset. I really do. I know you don’t, and I’m not here to tell you that you shouldn’t, but if you were to give this a try, I would never let her do anything to hurt you. I promise you that.”

She stared at me a moment longer before letting go of my hands and leaning back in her chair, hugging herself about the waist. Again, she stared into her coffee mug in search of an answer. One, two, three seconds.

“I’ll think about it,” she whispered.

And that was that.

The happenings of the diner bled back into our little corner of the universe, and the next breath I took made me realize just how much I had been hanging on those words. I didn’t have the heart to break the silence this time, so I clammed up and placed my hands around my sweet tea.

“You ever taken linear algebra?” Sunset asked.

I blinked. It took me a moment to register the change in subject. “I, uh, yeah, why?”

A tiny smile perked up the corners of her lips. She ran her fingers through her hair before resting her head in her hand. A non-committal shrug punctuated whatever this was supposed to be.

“I don’t know, just got a test coming up. I could use your help with some of the problems.”

I raised a finger in question. “But… wouldn’t you have taken linear algebra back in Equestria in order to…”

She stared at me like I had completely missed the point.

Oh. It was one of those questions where she was actually asking something else. So yeah, I did miss the point.

“Of course I can help you with your algebra,” I said, blushing. I twirled a lock of hair with my finger as if that had been the intent all along. “And any other questions or concerns you might have. Math-related or otherwise. I’m always here for you.”

“Thanks, Twilight.”

• • •

We spent another half hour catching up on little things. Rainbow Dash’s upcoming soccer tournament, Pinkie Pie’s most recent party. Things like that. It kept her smiling, and I couldn’t help smiling, too.

Convincing her to talk with Luna hadn’t gone as well as I had planned, but I did my best. I had faith that my intentions—and by extent, Luna’s—got through to her. But even with that confidence, my heart wouldn’t sit still.

Sunset was one of the most fiercely loyal, forgiving ponies I knew. If this wedge between them bothered her as badly as it seemed, it worried me to think just what had happened.

Regardless, Sunset was hurting. Same with Luna. They needed to get through this.

And if they didn’t? Honestly, it terrified me to think what could happen.

Author's Note

Simple conversations like this are always fun to write. So many opportunities to flex the old environment muscle. Also, more intrigue into the rift between Sunset and Luna. You know, the driving force of the entire story. That, too.

Onward and Upward!

This story has undergone changes. Some comments may no longer make sense or be relevant.

VII - Nocturne

Nocturne

“I have been ever so eager to make your acquaintance,” said the creature of smoke and shadow.

It spoke in a soft, drawn-out voice, one of honey and all things sweet and pleasing to the ear. It coiled and billowed over itself, almost serpentine-like, with no clear beginning or end, or even what form it truly took.

“I… what?” Sunset said. “What do you mean? Where am I? This is a dream, right? I’ve never had a dream like this before. Who are you?”

This place… it had to be a dream. The last thing she remembered was lying next to Copper and closing her eyes before finding herself in this nowhere-place. And this creature, this voice. What in the world kind of dream was this? Was it a dream or something more?

From the smoke and shadows came the windchime laughter of a mare. “So… inquisitive. I mean exactly as I say. And indeed you are, as you say, in a dream. A dream you have never known because I have not yet graced yours, Little Sunset. I know you because I have seen you drift upon the currents of the Dreamscape. I have felt your presence among the stardust and limitless galaxies of the Equestrian subconscious.

“As to who I am…” The shadows converged to take the semblance of shape, and from the roiling smoke rose a pegasus—no, an alicorn, like Celestia—tall and powerfully built, but retaining the soft curvature of a mare in all the right places.

It spread its wings toward the empty sky to cast off the last vestiges of shadow, how one would unbuckle and let fall a cloak. A thousand galaxies billowed within its mane and tail, and from its bare head protruded a horn that could have run a yak clean through. Shadows swirled and wafted from its sides and underbelly, obscuring its hooves from sight, and within them, Sunset could just make out the shape of a crescent moon for a cutie mark.

It folded its wings and sat down. Every movement it made sent wisps of shadow dissipating into the nothingness around them, like mist from a waterfall.

Though its imposing presence drew a guarded step backward out of Sunset, the blank expression on its face lent it a neutral air. “Who I am I shall leave for you to decide,” it said.

“Leave for me? What’s that supposed to mean?” Sunset took a step forward, ears perked. She felt the tingle of magic about her, the invisible, snaking auras a practiced unicorn could sometimes feel in the real world if they closed their eyes and sat very still in a quiet room.

This was a being of intense magic, a… somnigeist, or something? She had read about them in a book on boogeymares and other morbid folklore.

There were different kinds. Some preyed on ponies, to steal their souls or mind-control them, like in the tale of Sundered Sorrow. Others brought happiness and well-wishing in times of trouble, like the Ghost of Hearth’s Warming Present.

This one, though… The way it sat staring at her, catlike, consumed in stardust and space stuff, felt more like a prophet, or an angel in the archaic sense.

“Like I said, Little Sunset.” It raised the bridge of its nose to look down its length at her. “I leave that to you.”

It rose from its haunches and stepped forward—only a single step, but it cleared the three lengths between them in a cloud of smoke all the same. The smoke wrapped around Sunset, and where it touched her skin, it sent icy chills crawling through her. With those catlike turquoise eyes, it towered above, and it was then that Sunset had a true sense of just how tall this creature was.

“What do you think I am?” it asked. “What am I to you?”

Sunset clenched her teeth. She wanted to say “scary,” but instinct rightfully stuffed that thought down into her stomach where it belonged. Her mouth went dry as she forced out: “A somnigeist, a dream phantom.”

“A somnigeist? Is that so?” Its voice betrayed no emotion, and those eyes remained hauntingly empty.

Again with the cryptic questions. This thing was playing a game of words. This was some sort of test, like a sphynx and its riddles.

Sunset smiled. She was good at tests.

“Depends,” she said. “I haven’t made up my mind yet. Why don’t you help me with that?”

There it was, a sliver of a smile—the tiniest flicker at the corner of its mouth and gone again. “Very well. Tell me, Little Sunset, what is it that troubles you?”

Sunset stepped forward. This creature was tall, and clearly stronger than her. But this was also a dream. Being consciously aware of that, she could wake herself up whenever she wanted, a benefit of owning a horn. Even if this was a bad somnigeist, it couldn’t hurt her.

“No, me first,” she said. “Why are you an alicorn?”

“An alicorn? I am me. No more and no less.” For the first time in what felt like an hour, it drifted away from her, and in crept a semblance of warmth Sunset had forgotten existed. “The form I take is little more than the result of my creation.”

“Then who created you?”

It turned its shining eyes toward her. Something about them drew Sunset forward, like the call of a siren. “All is fair in love and war, Little Sunset. ’Tis my turn to question, and so again I ask: what is it that troubles you so?”

“All is fair? We’re not in love and we’re not at war. Even if either were true, that’s all the more reason it’s still my turn if I say so. Who created you?” This sort of insistence was off the beaten path for her, but she wanted to get to the bottom of this creature’s intentions, and she didn’t like being jerked around, either.

This dream, this meeting, the creature’s words. It all felt almost… staged.

The somnigeist smiled fully, its first official display of emotion. Sunset preferred its passive stoicism, though. She didn’t much like the look of those fangs.

“’Tis the truth you speak,” it said. “And wisely so. ’Tis my answer all the same.

“And to your rebuttal,” it continued, “are we not engaging in a love of words? A war of words, however polite it may be?” It flitted its wings and sat down. Its studiously rigid pose reaffirmed the whole sphynx idea. “I feel the contents of your heart churning like the ocean depths. This is a game to you, a test.”

What? Sunset stepped back and held a hoof up to what felt like an icicle through her chest. She pointed her ears forward, felt the invisible, snaking auras lick at her skin.

“You have no need to fear me, Little Sunset. I bring neither harms nor fears to this that you call slumber.” It looked around in what amounted to consideration. “Such as it is.”

Sunset clenched her jaw and tucked in her chin. “Then… what do you want from me?”

The somnigeist stared long into the distance. Its eyes danced ever so slightly, the way a pony’s eyes did when they looked into another’s. Hours seemed to pass before it flitted its wings and spoke:

“A friend.”

Sunset opened her mouth to say something, but the words ran off with all pretense of her “test.”

“A… friend?”

Its eyes snapped to her. “Is that a foreign word in this day and age?”

Sunset blinked back to reality and shook her head. “No, I… just wasn’t expecting that.”

It tilted its head. “Is it so wrong that a spirit should wish for the trappings of the flesh? It has been… countless years since I have felt anything at all.”

What did a pony say to that? Was this real? So many questions whirled in Sunset’s head that she couldn’t keep up with them. She picked the loudest one out of the crowd.

“Well… why me?”

There was that tiny smile again. It seemed almost… reminiscent.

“You are not the first I have approached. You are simply the first in a long time that has not awoken in a fit of terror, and longer still that has not shunned or rebuked my presence outright.”

“Well, you don’t exactly have the whole ‘friendly’ vibe going on.” Sunset offered a wave of her hoof, but pulled it back as the cold silence in the creature’s eyes bored into her.

The somnigeist blinked, and away went the frigid stare. It laid its ears back against its skull.

“Regardless,” it said, “I thank you all the same. As I said, it has been long since I have felt anything, and longer still since I have known the kindness of another pony.”

Sunset perked up her ears. “You used to be a pony?”

It made sense. Spirits that haunted the Everfree and other places like it supposedly belonged to those wronged by somepony, or were otherwise trapped in Equestria by a spell or curse. It wasn’t hard to believe the same thing for ones that haunted dreams.

“Indeed. I hail from a darker age, one before the advent of Canterlot and this strange dialect you use.”

“Before Canterlot? Then that would put you at least…” Sunset looked up at the invisible numbers in her head. “Like, at least a thousand years old.”

“Has it been that long? It… seems like so long ago I first set after my Star Swirl…”

Sunset snapped forward and all but came nose to nose with the somnigeist. “You knew Star Swirl!?”

It perked up its ears. “You know of him?”

“Know of him? He’s practically the father of modern magic. I’ve studied every one of his theories, from memory wells to warding stones, and I’m even taking a course in Arcanonaturamancology this semester.” Her smile faltered after the outburst, and she took a step back. “Er, excuse me.”

The somnigeist chuckled. “You have no need to apologize, Little Sunset. In fact, it is much to my enjoyment to hear you speak so highly of him. To know his legacy lives on even to this day.”

“So… how did you know about Star Swirl?”

The somnigeist opened its mouth, but paused. “Star Swirl was a… a close friend of mine.”

“I…” The smile faded from Sunset’s face. “Oh…”

The emptiness of her dream crept between them, and the somnigeist’s mane twinkled in the nothingness.

“I’m sorry,” Sunset said. Her heart beat heavy in her ears, as she knew her condolences came far later than they should have.

It shook its head. “’Tis no fault of your own, Little Sunset.”

Sunset bit her lip. This was a conversation she had little experience with, and as the seconds wore on, it felt more and more awkward. She scrounged for a way to change the subject.

“You still didn’t answer my question,” Sunset said. She looked the somnigeist in the eye. “Who created you?”

That twinge of a smile returned and faded. “I did. You see… My beloved Star Swirl did not die.”

“Didn’t die? Then what happened to him? How does a pony that isn’t Celestia not die after a thousand years?”

“He… disappeared. This form you see before you”—it spread its wings and looked down at itself—“this was my attempt to discover his whereabouts.”

“How?”

It shook its head. “I am afraid I can no longer recall. The traces of magic he left behind suggested he had crossed over into the Dreamscape, and so I dedicated my life to studying what I needed, in order to shed my mortal coil and follow him. It has… it has been so long.”

A strained smile overtook the creature, but whatever emotions churned in its heart dragged its eyes to the floor, and the silence clawed its way back into their little corner of the universe. Despite the distance between them, it felt like the warmth of this dream had all but crept away.

Sunset took a slow breath. This was a lot to take in. A pony who used to know Star Swirl other than Celestia? The stories it must have, the things it must know.

Speaking of things it must know, she had forgotten one very basic, very Celestia question: “What’s your name?”

The somnigeist opened its mouth, but the hesitation on its lips and how it flattened its ears back said more than words ever could. “I… I do not remember.”

It looked into the blank white of the nonexistent floor, as if searching for a memory. The longer it stared, the external qualities that made this creature so monstrous seemed to wither—the fangs, the enshrouding smoke, the piercing turquoise eyes that seemed almost backlit by their own magic.

Sunset saw past them, saw the brief flash of a pony long separated from reality, twisted by whatever magics it had delved in the name of love. What was this creature like when it walked Equestria with its own four hooves?

She found herself a few steps closer to it before she realized. She cleared her throat and took a step back out of courtesy, though it didn’t seem to notice.

This was the sort of thing Celestia had talked about, the distinction she made between empathy and sympathy—to understand another pony versus simply feeling for them. Sunset tried putting herself in this creature’s shoes.

Sunset hadn’t ever been in love, but she knew the distinction between it and attraction. To think the somnigeist had given up everything it knew—its life, its friends and family—all in search of the pony it loved and still come up with nothing. More than nothing, even—a thousand years spent lost and alone. At what point did life become worse than death?

The very thought twisted in Sunset’s chest like a knife. She could never truly understand, but had she been in this pony’s position, a friend would be the next best thing—just somepony to talk to.

Celestia had always nagged her to make more friends. She didn’t say anything about who or… what, exactly.

Of all the places, though, that pony in need came to Sunset in a dream. But who was she to argue that? Friends were often made in the most unlikely places, according to Celestia.

And Sunset? She could be that pony. She could make Celestia proud.

Sunset smiled. “Well, I guess if you don’t have a name, we’ll have to give you one, right?”

The somnigeist tensed its brow, and it raised a hoof as if ready to back away. “Give me a name? W-what would you call me then, Little Sunset?”

“Hmm…” Sunset tapped a hoof to her chin. A coat as black as midnight; smoke trailing from it like the tail of a genie; piercing, catlike eyes. “What about ‘Nocturne’?”

“Nocturne?” That look of hope on its face twisted into a smile, to the point that its entire top row of teeth poked through. Nocturne threw its head back and let out a sharp laugh.

Sunset took a defensive step back. She flattened her ears and already had a Shield Spell focused at the base of her horn.

“Be at ease, Little Sunset,” it said after regaining itself. “I simply see within this christening the jest that fate sets before me: the play on words it deems fit for my unworthy ears. I should find that a name born of darkness is only befitting my guise.”

Nocturne spread its—her?—wings wide. The ghostly shadows dripped from each individual feather like ichor.

“The appetent darkness has gathered itself upon me in my wanderings of the Dreamscape. It clings like a parasite, desires my eventual decay, that I may fraternize in its eternal lust for dominion over all things.”

Sunset stood up straight and cursed her instinctive distrust. Friends didn’t do that to friends.

“Does it… hurt?” she asked.

Consideration traced a thin line across Nocturne’s lips. She pointed her ears forward and brought the edges of her mouth up into a smile.

“Not enough to suppress my elation at speaking with another pony.” She shook her head. “But fear not the dark, Little Sunset. For I am its keeper, and I shall keep it from you.”

Sunset curled her mouth into a frown. Nocturne was speaking in riddles again.

“What do you mean?” she said.

“I mean what I speak. The outer dark of the Dreamscape has taken to me, and in my countless wandering years I have taken to it in kind, that I may prolong the inevitable. That I may hope.

“You declare me ‘Nocturne’—darkness infinite, darkness eternal—and true, I see only darkness ahead.” Nocturne’s eyes glazed over, and she clenched her jaw. “But as true as the stars in the sky, I know it also true that salvation awaits me in that unreachable distance. If I but outstretch my hoof a little farther, press on a little further, I will be free of this curse and know my flesh as real as the day I first opened my eyes. And like my name that I have forgotten to the wearing of time, I shall too forget this one you bestow upon me.”

She blinked, and it seemed as if whatever vision played before her eyes had fallen away. She threw back her ears and lowered her muzzle. Her wings fell limp at her sides, disappearing within the twisting shadows.

“To hear such a damning name be laid upon my shoulders fills me with hope, as the emotions it stirs within me remind me that I am, and being such can yet strive for what I desire most.” She turned her eyes to Sunset. “Does… does that make sense?”

Sunset sat down and rubbed a hoof up and down her other leg. The idea of grappling with one’s own existence wasn’t really something she often thought about, nor did she want to.

“I don’t know. That sounds a bit crazy to me.”

Nocturne’s smile returned. “Tell me, Little Sunset, what is sanity without a little madness?”

Madness, indeed. She was kind of right in that, though. If a pony wasn’t willing to bend, they’d break.

But this mare had fallen out of touch with reality. She had been gone too long, probably seen too much of whatever unimaginable things lurked in this Dreamscape she kept talking about.

Sunset had seen some weird stuff in her own dreams. She shivered just thinking what sort of things other ponies dreamed about, or what could possibly exist in a dream universe.

But more importantly, Nocturne was lonely. What was it like to no longer exist in the literal sense? To be cursed to wander between dreams, feared and hated by the ponies she met?

This mare was crazy. But maybe, like Celestia always said: all it takes is a friend to show us the way.

“You shouldn’t give up,” Sunset said. “On Star Swirl.”

Nocturne looked at her for a moment, unsure. Quickly enough, though, she smiled.

“I shan’t believe I will, Little Sunset. If you but allow me safe harbor among your dreams, grant this forgotten shade a sliver of compassion, I would be forever grateful.”

“I… I, I guess I can do that.”

Nocturne smiled, but said no more.

The momentary silence had Sunset’s mind combing back through their conversation, and a thought struck her. She pawed at the ground nervously.

“Would, uh… would you tell me what he was like?” Sunset said.

Nocturne blinked, as if taken aback by such a strange request. “Of Star Swirl?”

She chuckled, which erupted into a full-bodied laugh. She spread her wings to refold them at her sides.

“I would gladly regale you in the fondest of my memories. ’Twould be invigorating to share them with another.”

Sunset beamed, and she leaned forward on her tippy hooves. “Like right now?”

Nocturne chuckled again. “Now is not the time for stories, Little Sunset. It is time for you to wake, I should think. Much time has passed in our discourse.”

“Time to wake up? Already?”

“Indeed. Time ebbs and flows differently in the Dreamscape. I dare say the sun shall be rising shortly.”

Sunset frowned. Part of her really wanted to stay and learn more about Nocturne and Star Swirl.

“Before you go, however,” Nocturne said. “I would ask of you a favor.”

“Anything for a friend.”

Nocturne’s hesitation melted into an endearing smile. Her catlike eyes twinkled like the stars in her mane.

“Smile for me,” she said.

“I…” Sunset laughed, and she could feel the biggest blush rushing to her cheeks. She brushed her mane behind her ear to try and hide her embarrassment, but even she wasn’t stupid enough to think anypony would fall for that. Courage returned in the form of a bashful smile that she turned up toward Nocturne.

“There you are, Little Sunset.” Nocturne traced a wisp of smoke across Sunset’s cheek, cold as ice but not necessarily unwelcome. “I daresay you are the most beautiful mare I have had the pleasure of meeting.”

That squirmy, embarrassed feeling wriggled around in Sunset’s chest. She looked down at her hoof where she pawed at the ground. “I’m not beautiful…”

“Do not disparage yourself, Little Sunset. There is much to you that I am sure to learn and find just as laudable.”

Sunset looked away. She felt like she could die from embarrassment, and that dang blush wouldn’t go away.

“Until next time, Little Sunset.” In a sweep of her wing, Nocturne bowed. She fixed Sunset with a final smile before the edges of dream and reality blurred together, and Sunset opened her eyes to the ceiling fan of Coppertone’s bedroom.

• • •

Oh, how innocence holds fast to its ignorance of the world. How its heart follows blindly the whims of sympathy and seeks comfort for others at the drop of a few impassioned words.

What silver tongues may tempt and sweetened words make palatable for you a drop of turpentine, Little Sunset? How does the nightingale coo from its branch and give fire to your heart, make light your hooves for the heavens behind your eyes?

I shall coo for you, Little Sunset, and lo, we shall see how you dance beneath the light of the Moon.

You have failed your first test, Little Sunset. But do not worry…

You will not fail me.

Author's Note

Onward and Upward!

This story has undergone changes. Some comments may no longer make sense or be relevant.

VIII - Cleansing the Nightmare

Cleansing the Nightmare

I knew I should have returned to Canterlot at first light of the next day. Fate, however, decided I should entertain my hopes for Sunset’s change of heart.

I remained at Twilight’s castle another day, making myself useful by assisting Spike with his chores and spending my free time among the vanilla smell of old tomes. ’Twas oddly relaxing, such a task as tedious as reordering books, but the repetition had an effect on my nerves, and it kept my mind occupied enough that it could afford no room to wander.

’Twas as I finished sorting the Mystery section that fate paid its due in the form of a knock at the library door.

I could not for the life of me name a single pony who bothered knocking on the door of a public facility before entry, but I found myself wondering such thoughts regardless, until a voice called out:

“Twilight?”

I jolted to my hooves. That was… Sunset’s voice. In all the years between and those yet to come, I could never forget that voice.

I eyed the aisleway leading toward the entrance, and my heart raced at the prospect. Had she changed her mind after Twilight’s counsel?

I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. I needed to be strong in order to weather this storm. Weakness had no place here.

Momentarily, Sunset stepped into my corner of the library. She recognized me immediately and took a defensive step back toward the main reading area. Only one, however, and there she held her ground as if facing down a dragon.

Despite the tension, I could not help but trace the outline of her face. It had been years since I laid eyes on this mare in equine form. I had forgotten just how strikingly beautiful she was, and I was loath to remember how I twisted that truth to my own ends.

“Greetings, Sunset Shimmer,” I said. I did well to watch the level of my voice. I did not want to startle her, nor overcompensate and appear condescending.

The hardness of her face did not waver in the slightest. She took a slow breath as if preparing herself for battle.

“Hey,” she said. “I… I talked to Twilight.” Her eyes danced back and forth between mine. It seemed as though she were searching for a reason not to follow through on what had brought her here.

“That is…” I cleared my throat. “That is go—”

Sunset threw up a hoof to stop me. “Shut the fuck up. I trust Twilight. Not you. Is she around?”

It pained me to hear such callous words, but I swallowed my pride. This was not a time for bickering. To do so would risk losing this one chance she was willing to give.

“I believe she had business to attend to in town,” I said. “She should be back shortly. In the meanwhile, you are welcome to assist me with reordering the library, or Starlight Glimmer is somewhere in the castle, if you wish to seek her out.”

She perked up at Starlight’s mention. “Starlight’s here?”

I flicked my ears back and forth. “She seems to hang about the upper floors of the castle whilst I am present. I believe she yet harbors reservations of the… friendship lesson she tended to between Sister and myself.”

Sunset appeared confused by my wanton statement, but no less interested in Starlight. She spun about for the exit and made it to the threshold ere I found my voice:

“Sunset,” I said.

She turned to me with all the fire of Tartarus in her eyes.

“I do not expect you to believe me, but I am sorry. For all the pain I have caused you."

She pinned her ears back a moment. The look in her eyes wavered, but a crease in her brow belied the war of thoughts within her head, and she brought her ears back around.

“Fuck off,” she said.

She left me to my thoughts and the hum of my magic about the stack of books beside me. ’Twas only then I realized I still held them in my magic, my mind absorbed so by her.

I recalled the calculated interactions whilst under the influence of Nightmare Moon. The pain I caused and the strings I pulled to see my machinations brought to life. Her words were rapier sharp, but they were the least of what I deserved.

I set back to finishing my task. Sunset needed saving, and if I were to see her to that end, I could not afford to drown in my own misery.

A quarter hour passed without incident, save a missing book from Twilight’s ledger. I double-checked the shelf to ensure I had not missed it, but it appeared the book had never been returned.

As if on cue, Twilight stepped into the library. She wore a smile that rivaled Sister’s whenever she and I shared breakfast in the morning.

“How’s the book reordering coming along?” Twilight asked.

“Flawlessly, save one missing The Curse of the Shackled Mare.”

She frowned. “I’m sure it’ll turn up. Would you like to take a break for lunch? You’ve clearly been hard at work for the past few hours.”

I let my eyes scan up the bookshelf. “I do not believe now is a good time for lunch, Twilight. Sunset Shimmer arrived not long ago seeking an audience with you. I believe she went in search of Starlight.”

Twilight snapped toward me, hope in her eyes. “You mean Sunset decided to let us help her?”

“I believe so.” All signs pointed toward such hopes, but I was not yet willing to allow my heart that jubilation. I had seen my hopes dashed before, and that was not a risk I was willing to take.

“That’s great to hear! Meet me in the portal room in ten minutes. I’ll go find them. We can get started right away.”

She trotted off ere I could voice my concerns. I knew not whether to believe in her optimism.

That cold yet familiar churning that I knew to be the Tantabus awakening from its slumber chilled the blood in my veins. It knew as well as I the narrow cliffside path that lay before me. One misplaced hoof, and all I worked for would be dashed upon the jagged rocks below.

No. The wallowing and self-flagellation ended here. I would walk through whatever fire the future held in store. I headed for the portal room and awaited their arrival.

Twilight knew her timing better than she probably assumed. ’Twas almost five minutes on the nose that she, Starlight, and Sunset stepped through the door. They wore on their faces an array of emotions, from unbridled optimism to skepticism to pronounced reservation, respectively.

Behind them towed Spike, carrying a bundle of pillows and blankets far taller than himself. Were it not for our situation, I would have smiled at the absurdity of the sight.

“Right!” Twilight said. “So, all we need to do is have you two fall asleep next to each other, do… whatever it is that you need to do, and then wake up. Uh, right?” She glanced at me.

“In a simplified manner, yes. Sunset.” I turned to her. “Are you… are you sure you are willing to do this? I know you do not trust me, and I will not be offended should you change your mind now. Verily, my thoughts on the matter should not weigh the slightest in that decision.”

Sunset threw her eyes and her melancholic ponderings to the floor. “Twilight told me about the Tantabus. Can you really make the nightmares go away?”

She raised her eyes to me, and in them, beyond the guarded fears, the faintest glimmer of hope gazed back at me.

“As sure as the stars in the sky,” I said.

My words appeared to find purchase in her heart. Her face softened all but a hair, and the deep-dwelling glimmer rose that much closer to the surface.

She turned to the pillows and blankets Spike laid out for us. A quick test of them with her hooves, and she lay down.

Twilight stepped up beside her and shared words I could not hear. No doubt reassurances, for how Sunset’s ears lay back against her head.

“We’ll be right here when you wake up,” was all I heard of Twilight before they shared a hug.

I laid myself down beside her, ensuring ample space between us, so as to act as a buffer should she feel uncomfortable yet not so much that I lose the strength of our proximity. The closer I was to the pony whose dream I entered, the stronger our connection and in turn my influence over the dream itself. A small advantage, given my unfettered purview of the collective Equestrian subconscious, but I was not one to turn down every ounce of every advantage I could afford.

Sunset closed her eyes and relaxed her head onto her pillow. With a bit of magic on my part, she drifted off as easily as a ship to sea on fairest waters.

I took a moment to watch her slumber, take in her innocent beauty. Again, it pained me to know I had once twisted that fact to play to her emotions.

No more. I was no longer that monster. I would right my wrongs and see her to the paradise she so righteously deserved. I closed my eyes and wound a thread of silver magic from my horn to hers.

When I opened my eyes, I stood in a featureless plane of dark orange. ’Twas natural for dreams to begin amorphous, colored by the waking emotions the dreamer last experienced. Dark orange was a foreboding color, one of hope yet of presaged violence. Blood would be spilt by dream’s end.

Around me, the world drew itself to life as if beneath the pen of a master artist. I stood in the foyer of a school amidst its many pennants and trophy cases. A presence materialized behind me, and I felt Sunset Shimmer’s tether pull taut ere I turned.

She stood in human form, face blank as her soul took seat within her dream body. She blinked and looked around.

“Where am I?” she said.

I wanted more than anything to emerge from beyond the Veil and assuage her coming fears. But I knew the Nightmare prowled among the shadows. If I were to best it, I would need every advantage I could muster. So I waited, invisible, for it to reveal itself.

It did not take long. The room darkened as if a blanket of clouds hid away the moon, and a guttural laugh rolled in from the hallway opposite me.

Sunset Shimmer staggered away. She raised her hands in front of herself, eyes up and into the high ceilings that towered out of sight.

“Who’s there?” she called out.

My heart hammered in my chest. Like ice water down my spine, I felt the ghostly chill of the Nightmare’s presence long before I saw it. I stared hard into that darkened hallway, and there I just made out the first tendrils of its ghastly form slithering toward us.

They lashed out like whips to snare Sunset by the ankles. She fell backward screaming and kicking at them, unable to stop them from coiling about her legs and pinning her to the floor. Try as she might, she could not pull herself free, and despite the darkness that bathed the foyer in midnight, a shadow was cast over her.

I saw in her eyes the primal fear of a cornered animal, and I felt the tingling in my skin like the charge before a lightning strike as we bore witness to the Nightmare emerging from the hallway.

It had changed since last night, had shed the image of Nightmare Moon in favor of the things that lurk in the darkest corners of one’s mind—less a creature of meat and sinew than a mass of corded shadows resembling a four-legged animal twice my size. Its shoulder blades peaked and troughed with every step, like those of a panther stalking its prey.

A pair of scythe-like malformations that I could not rightly call wings dragged at its sides. Where there should have been flesh and feathers instead stretched a pair of bony, dragon-like projections more befitting the things one would expect to find hiding under the bed. They pulled taut between them their own miasmic aura—immaterial, but tattered all the same. Where they touched the floor, they left two thin trails of lightless balefire.

Its outline perpetually shifted with every little movement, as if I were watching a series of afterimages overlaid upon one another. Its only definite feature was its eyes—white and empty as the light that welcomed the dying into the great beyond.

It set its heavy jaw square with Sunset, and a jagged gash of a mouth split open to roll out a long, ichorous tongue.

I had seen only a fraction of the horrors this beast had wrought upon Sunset’s dreams, and I refused to suffer another moment of its injustice. Before it could take another step, I lit my horn to cast aside the Veil. This time, it obeyed my command, and as the atmosphere of the dream washed over me, I raised my head high and let my voice boom off wall and ceiling.

“By the will of Sun and Moon, release her, demon! You have violated the sanctity of Sunset Shimmer’s dreams long enough. I will see you burn.”

It regarded me in passing, naught but a sidelong glance my way ere turning back to Sunset. It would learn the mistake of such disrespect.

I fired a blast of magic that tore through the tendrils holding Sunset captive, their severed ends flailing as they unraveled into smoke. I stepped forward and spread my wings wide to disperse the shadows at my hooves.

“I am Princess Luna of Equestria, Keeper of the Untamed Forest, Wielder of the Elements, Daughter of the Seven Tribes of Harmony, and Regent of the Heavens.” I narrowed my eyes. “You will not harm her.”

With the slow steadfastness of a statue, it turned its massive head to grant me the audience I sought. A moment’s consideration passed ere I swore I heard the gravelly crunching and popping of its jawbone as it forced the mockery of a smile onto its face. The flash of teeth was the only warning I had before it was upon me.

But I was no stranger to war. I have felled dragons in my days, and this beast, likewise, would fall.

I leapt aside as its jaws clamped shut where I stood but a moment ago, its massive frame overcommitting to the strike and leaving me with a clear shot of its backside. Silver magic snarled up the spiral of my horn before I let it fly, striking the Nightmare between the shoulder blades in a resounding clap of thunder.

Such a blow would have crippled most, but I would be a fool to assume it bested so easily. I craned my head backward in time to avoid a back swipe of its paw, and through the transparent afterimages of its movement I witnessed the unholy vengeance in its eyes.

It followed through with a second swipe, and that with a snap of its jaws mere inches from my throat. All the while I danced backward on light hooves, making use of my wings to stay just out of reach.

The little trails of balefire from its wingtips sketched our path about the foyer, illuminating it in a strangely hollow white that leeched the color from all it touched. The unnatural glow served to amplify its trailing afterimages.

Across its body gathered the winding, wending shadows that carpeted the floor. They curled about its frame, reaching out with every strike like ocean waves leaping to their master’s call. It made every attack hard to read and that much more dangerous.

But I was always one step ahead.

Wherever it struck, I met it in turn. Parrying and striking became one and the same. Claw was met with lightning was met with fang was met with fire in a ceaseless dance of violence. Our fatal courtship reached a crescendo in the form of a blow best described as an ultimatum.

It gathered to itself every scrap of shadow and rose formless above me like a tidal wave. I had but a moment to leap aside ere it came crashing down to rock the very foundations of the dream. The blow left my ears ringing, deaf to all but my beating heart.

I countered in kind, teleporting behind the Nightmare and summoning up a gavel of arcane energy, bright as the moon and cold as the reaches of space. I brought justice down squarely upon its back to the deafening cymbal crash of all my might, and finally the slightest buckling of its legs belied its indomitability.

A retaliatory flash of fangs drove me back a pace, but the Nightmare did not immediately pursue. Somewhere within its skull, that feral intelligence regarded me as a force to be reckoned with, and it decided it had taken enough punishment.

It slunk backward, down into the blanket of shadows like a monster into its swamp, and I was left standing amidst a profound silence.

Instinct bid that I take flight and put space between myself and the floor, where it may well rise from anywhere to strike. And so I took to the rafters, my horn alight for the faintest hint of movement.

The shadows about the floor churned like a stormy sea, and from its depths the Nightmare emerged beside Sunset to tower over her. It then bowed its head low so as to level its gaze with hers and cow her into submission with a demonic growl that vibrated in my heart.

Sunset punched it in the face.

The blow was by no means devastating. Verily, she would have fared better striking concrete, as the rapid-fire series of sickening cracks left me to wonder how many little bones she had sacrificed in the name of spite. Her defiant display did little more than anger the beast, yet it bought me the split second I needed, and from my place on high I spread my wings and dove like a smiting bolt unleashed from the heavens.

But the Nightmare was a quick learner. It melded back into the floor, ere I came crashing down to purge the nearby shadows in cleansing fire.

All fell silent again, and as the shadows rolled back in to lick at our ankles, Sunset took up a fighting stance back to back with me, holding her right arm close to her chest. For as helpless as she might have been in human form, she compensated with fearlessness and a surge of adrenaline taking charge of the situation.

The Nightmare did not give her the opportunity to make good on such heroism, however. Before I could react, it pounced upon her from the side as if from a warren at her feet and pinned her to the floor. It snarled at me in defiance, dove into her like a pony through a portal, and was gone.

Sunset flailed her arms, her face panic-stricken as she clawed at her breast, trying to tear away something that was not there. Her fingernails dug long, bloody gashes into her skin, and she let out a scream as she began writhing on the floor.

I stepped forward on instinct, but when the realization dawned on me, I staggered back in horror.

It… joined with her?

This was unheard of. I had seen dreams corrupted by nightmares, subconscious landscapes twisted into depictions of hell and the eldritch alike. But I had never seen a nightmare conjoin with the dreamer themself. If it could twist a dream so wholly, I feared to imagine what it could do to her.

I had to separate them somehow.

Sunset had rolled onto her knees, doubled over. Her breathing came in labored bursts.

Lingering traces of the Nightmare encircled her like some unholy aura. Still clutching her hands to her chest, she raised her head to look at me through the matted tangles of her hair. Eyes bloodshot, she reached out a trembling hand.

“Luna…” Her voice barely registered over my thundering heart.

I rushed to meet her. “Sunset! What has it—”

She grasped me about my foreleg, and her hands were like fire.

I cried out and pushed her away. Where she had touched me, her hand left a mark that already blistered and wept, and as if in response, the dream shifted. Canterlot High crumbled away to leave us in an empty plane of darkness.

Sunset curled in on herself and began to cry. The encircling shadows gathered strength, and this lightless place became cold as a tomb.

“Please…” she said. “It hurts.”

“Hold fast, Sunset. I will wrest this demon from thee.”

“You said you’d help me.” She raised her head just enough to stare absently through my hooves. Her eyes were disturbingly dilated, and tears ran down her cheeks. “You said you’d make me the greatest unicorn in history. You said you would love me the way She never could.”

I paused. There was a disconnect in her train of thought. She spoke of the now and yet not. The Nightmare must have been speaking through her, or she through it.

“I said many things in the past, Sunset. Many things meant to hurt you, that pressed you to make choices you wished had never come to pass. That was the evil that held me prisoner, as it now holds you.

“But that was the past,” I continued. “You have overcome your failings as I have. You are stronger than your former self.” I fanned my wings and stood tall, but the dream shifted yet again, nigh imperceptibly. The darkness around us did not change, but it felt as if we fell deeper into it all the same.

Her tears became like tar, and I realized then that the shift had far worse implications. Color had faded to black and white. The dream itself was dying, and with this Nightmare fragment still joined with her, she may well die with it. I had only so much time.

“I gave you my magic,” she said through the tears. “I gave you my heart. I gave… Y-you… took…” Her face twisted in terror, and she clutched the sides of her head as her breathing crescendoed into a scream.

“Sunset Shimmer, please! Do not let this beast consume you! I know that what I did can never be undone. The lies that I fed you, the heart that I broke. What I…” I clenched my eyes shut, but I could not stop the tears running down my cheeks nor did I want to. “What I did to you…”

I shook my head and gazed upon her with all the desperation in my heart. “But the past does not control you. What I did does not control you. You outshone the darkness that I could not. You are more than this—more than I will ever be, I have seen it! But you must fight back!”

I trembled with the fears lacing my heart, looking on with a desperation I have not felt this age. But despite any shred of hope I dared hold close, her screams shriveled into nothingness, and she went still. That same desperation bid I step forward, but I felt something I had not expected.

The Tantabus stirred within me. Like the nosing open of a door, I felt its gentle insistence within the heart of hearts we shared. It reached out to her, like the opposite pole of a magnet, and I knew what it wanted, what I had to do.

There was a saying: the eyes are the portal to the soul. What little wisdom life had deigned to offer me affirmed this truth, but there was more to it. Where the eyes were the portal to the soul, so too were the lips to the heart.

“Sunset,” I said. “I cannot take back what I did to you. But I can take that which still ails you.”

I draped my magic over her like a fleece blanket, raised her up to meet my gaze, and wrapped my hooves about her. Despite my skin cracking and blistering where hers touched mine, I pulled her close. When our bosoms touched, our hearts beat as one, and I kissed her.

I connected my heart to hers, and I subsumed that fire. I drank in the pain and the countless years spent in darkness.

Sunset placed trembling hands on my chest. Fingers curled inward, she dragged her knuckles down my chest before relaxing to release all that plagued her.

I knew the touch of doubt, the taste of hope, the hunger of ambition. My blood boiled with hatred for authority, the emptiness of love unrequited—every last ounce of misery I had inflicted upon her.

The Tantabus flared to life. It craned its stellar head toward the firmament of my being, and it rose to face the maelstrom. It clashed with the Nightmare in a fury of stardust and lightning, and every blow they dealt wracked through me as if I were betwixt them.

I squeezed my eyes shut, and the pain bid I hold Sunset with all the strength I could gather. Tears streamed down my face, and I buried myself in her chest. I knew not if she regained herself in those moments. I knew nothing of the world around me, only the pain within and the warmth that was Sunset, whom I clung to like a rock amidst a cataract. But as the seconds wore into minutes, I felt my grasp slipping.

With every clash, every roaring wind, every crack of lightning, I felt the Tantabus losing ground. The Nightmare was too much, and within my heart of hearts, the Tantabus cried out to me. Were I to abide, the Nightmare would consume it and know power unbridled.

I had no recourse. I gathered the Tantabus’s essence to the deepest reaches of my lungs, and with another kiss I breathed it into Sunset.

It felt as if a part of me died that instant, as if my soul had been torn in two, one half whisked away in the torrent while the other reached with outstretched hoof. I knew unspeakable pain, the very same I experienced when Sister bathed me in the cleansing fire of the Elements so long ago.

The last wisp gone from my lungs, I pushed away to separate myself from her, and alone with the Nightmare inside me, I drifted backward in a sudden absence of gravity.

Sunset and I shared a moment of weightlessness, our eyes wide, the only connection between us now. In her eyes shone fear—not for herself, but for me.

Before the burning within became too much to keep my senses, I wrapped my wings about my chest and fell upward through the Veil of her consciousness.

Faintly, as if from across the span of the universe:

“Luna!”

• • •

“Luna!” I cried. I lurched up to my haunches and reached out a hoof to the fading image of hers outstretched toward me, the night air like ice on my sweat-soaked coat. The image faded completely, and Twilight sat just inches from my hoof, wings fanned, startled shitless by my outburst.

“Sunset?” she said. “Sunset!” She hugged me before I could squeak in surprise, and the warmth banished the whirl of thoughts in my head.

It was all I could do to melt in her hooves and breathe a sigh of relief. But that didn’t last long, as the memories rushed back in. I gasped and pushed Twilight away.

“Luna!” I shouted.

She lay next to me on the pillows. Her face tensed, and she sucked in a breath, still dreaming.

“Sunset,” Twilight said. “What happened?”

I kept staring, and I felt my hoof reach out of its own accord. An inch from her face, I pulled it back before I touched her.

“I, I… She took the Nightmare away.”

“What? What do you mean she took it?”

I looked up at Twilight. I couldn’t tell what was running through her head, but she looked ready to throttle me for answers. It would have probably worked better than me fumbling for words. I felt numb enough as it was.

“I mean… she took it from me, she, she… sucked it right out of me and… and now…”

“Now it’s infected her,” came Starlight’s voice behind me. She stared at Luna, lost in her own torrent of thoughts. Her eyes snapped to Twilight and me, dancing between us with an unsurety that got the hairs standing up on the back of my neck.

I shook my head, but my brain told me to stop doing that with a sharp twinge somewhere behind my frontal lobe. I winced and put a hoof to my head to rub away the last of this jumbled mess of memories.

“But…” I said. “Why would she…?”

Luna was supposed to destroy this Nightmare thing, not take it from me and suffer in my place. Why did she have to do that? What right did she have to do that?

I was safe. I was strong. I could handle the Nightmare and whatever stupid dreams it threw at me. Call it suffering, it was tolerable. I was fine. Nobody else had to suffer.

But this… Now someone else was hurting because of me, because of what she did to me.

No. She was hurting because of what she did to me. And you know what? That was fine. Actually, that was better than fine. About damn time she got what was coming to her.

She deserved this.

I stood up and headed for the portal.

“Sunset?”

It was Twilight. The shock rang clear in her voice. I didn’t need to turn around to see it, but I could picture it in her eyes.

“Where are you going?” she asked.

“Home,” I said.

“Home?” Starlight said. “Just like that?”

I took a breath. The words about to come out of my mouth tasted a lot worse than they sounded in my head, but no less right.

“She took my nightmare away, just like she wanted,” I said. “It's her problem now.”

Twilight took a few steps toward me, but her hoofsteps fell short. “So, you’re just going to walk away? That’s… that’s not like you.”

I stopped just before the portal. The hurt in her voice cut through me like broken glass, but the fire in my heart, this feeling of just desserts, drew a scowl on my face.

“Then maybe you don’t know me as well as you think,” I said. Before she could reply, I stepped through the portal and into the silent courtyard of Canterlot High.

It was cloudy, and a chilly wind already tried creeping up the back of my hoodie. I zipped up and headed home.

I didn’t know what time it was, but with all the studying and that fight with the Nightmare, I was exhausted beyond anything I had felt all semester. I didn’t care if there were ten Nightmares waiting for me, I just wanted to collapse into bed and never wake up.

I stomped my way through the piles of leaves lining the devil strips leading home. The satisfying crunch was enough to keep my head empty of thoughts all the way to my doorstep.

I didn’t want to think. I didn’t want to hear that little voice in my head. It already tried pounding the words into my brain and—just, no.

I needed sleep. I needed to get my head around this whole damn thing that just turned my life upside down all over again.

The front door opened on creaky hinges, and I stepped inside. Keys in the fishbowl, jacket on the hook, I trudged upstairs.

I faceplanted into my mattress without even taking off my boots. The coolness of the comforter welcomed me like an old friend.

Yeah. This felt nice. I kicked off my boots and crawled under the covers. I liked my room pitch black, and I was happy I didn’t have the mind to open the blackout curtains earlier that morning.

I took a deep breath. I should never have agreed to this. I should have just stayed here in the human world. Nothing bad would have happened. Everyone would be happy. Everyone would be safe.

Why did everything have to go so wrong?

Thankfully, sleep hit me harder than I expected, and I was out before the intrusive thoughts could creep in.

IX - The Tantabus

The Tantabus

It was cold in my dream.

I knew I was dreaming. I had felt the sensation of sleep slip like a silken nightgown over my naked skin. It was a calming feeling, back when I practiced lucid dreaming in order to get extra study time in at school. But not since…

I snapped open my eyes. Around me stood four walls of crystal and glass, fractals of purple and blue and pink. Downy bedding pooled beneath me and cradled me in what little warmth there was to feel.

Deep shadows hid away much of the room, but I could still make out the nightstand and vanity. It seemed like I had decided to dream of Twilight’s castle. Which was weird, since I had never been in any of the bedrooms before.

It took a while to realize in that slipping, slipping neutral state that I wasn’t alone. I jolted toward the back wall at the sight of this… thing.

It was a pony, a wolf, a something—a strangely nebulous four-legged creature made of stardust and dreamstuff. The outer edges of its form undulated and curled about itself much like Luna's mane. It sat motionless on its haunches, between me and the door.

Instinct told me to stand up, to scream as loud as I could, to leap at it and claw and kick and bite like my life depended on it. Instinct assumed it to be the Nightmare, that rotted, mindless beast left over after Nocturne left me. But instinct didn’t remember earlier that morning, didn't see the indifferent, cat-like stare on its eyeless face.

I sat up and crossed my legs. It was an awkward attempt at movement that wouldn’t follow, ’cause I then realized I was a pony in this dream. I hadn’t expected that. Haunches it was.

“Hello?” I said.

It didn’t move. Starlight twinkled in its… well, its everything. Galaxies and nebulae spiraled across—within?—its body, converging and collapsing in slow motion as the silence wore on.

“What do you want?” I frowned at the thing and waggled my hoof at it. Nothing seemed to faze it. It just stared. Without eyes, the silence hit harder than it probably should have.

“Go away,” I said, waving it off. “Go on. Shoo.”

No dice. It kept staring. Talk about a stubborn dream.

That presence, though. It was the one I felt enter me when Luna… I retched as the realization finally struck me, and I doubled over, spitting out whatever would come and coughing up the rest.

She kissed me. That bitch fucking kissed me, and just… Ugh!

It took a long minute for that sense of invasion to subside, and once I felt that I had fully wiped her from my lips, I again looked up at the thing sitting on the rug. Still it stared, unmoving, unblinking.

“You’re the Tantabus, aren’t you?”

It flicked a nebula of an ear in recognition and cocked its head before shifting its weight from one hoof-paw to the other.

“Yeah, yeah, I know. She—” A tingling sensation up my spine got my nape standing on end. “She saved me. The Nightmare isn’t here anymore. Celestia knows I haven’t had a regular night’s sleep in years.” I looked up into the darkness and tapped the tip of my hoof into the bedsheets as I tallied up just how long it’d been. “Seven?”

Had it really been that long?

I looked around. It was strangely quiet. Calm. I could almost say peaceful, but that would imply I was at peace. And still this silence. I couldn’t fucking stand it.

The Tantabus still hadn’t blinked. I wasn’t sure if it could, what with the whole eyeless thing it had going on. God, this thing was creepy.

“Don’t you have somewhere else to be? Go creep on somebody else’s dream.”

It must not have been that simple, or the thing was that stupid. At least it did me the courtesy of looking around like it actually could have fucked off elsewhere. But all the same, that stare came back around, that quiet insistence that kept my heart from settling down.

It felt… different. As if it weren’t just the Tantabus staring at me, but Luna somehow sharing its body, two beings in one. Like… No. That was just me being paranoid. God, I’d been taken over by the Nightmare for so long that I didn’t even know how to dream properly anymore.

“She had it coming, you know,” I said. “She should have never gotten into my dreams. Then or now.”

Still no reaction. Two galaxies collided in its breast and flung their spiraling arms beyond—around?—its forelegs.

“Don’t you say anything? Can you speak?” I pointed my ears forward. “At least bark or something, for crying out loud.”

Nothing.

“Whatever. Maybe it’s better you don’t.” I laid down and rested my head on my forehooves. I closed my eyes for sleep, but then remembered I was already there. How does one sleep in a dream?

I clenched my eyes shut tighter all the same. This was my dream now, not my nightmare. I was going to enjoy myself, damn it.

A deep breath, in then out. Then silence.

And more silence.

And more.

I sighed. This wasn’t going to work. I opened my eyes, and the Tantabus still sat expectantly on the area rug between me and the door.

“What,” I snapped. “Do you want me to feel bad for her? Because I don’t. You know—” I shrank in on myself. “You know what she did…”

It knew what she did. I knew what she did, and everything that came of it.

The manipulation, the betrayal, the plotting, my eventual comeuppance at the hands of Twilight, and then just… burying it all. Burying it for so long, acting like it didn’t exist—knowing that it didn’t exist, as if that childish assertion were enough to will that the truth wouldn’t come back to haunt me.

And yet it did.

It did, and here it was, staring me in the face like a revenant that had clawed itself out from some shallow grave in the backwoods of my mind and still was staring at me—staring, staring, staring with that eyeless face that reminded me of her and my hooves were shaking and I needed to breathe.

Breathe.

Breathe. In through my nose, then out through my mouth. I breathed, and I kept breathing and visualizing myself breathing, here in this moment, and thinking only only only of the breathing in and out and any and all stream of conscious I could muster to force as many nonsense words through the synapses in my brain and flood out the intrusive thoughts with a tidal wave of mental noise. Mental noise, white noise, breathing, breathing—just breathe and feel my diaphragm expand and contract and imagine myself as one of those cut-away diagrams in my freshman biology textbooks.

Eventually, I relaxed enough to hold in a breath—one, two, three full seconds—letting it slowly out through my nose, and my hooves weren’t shaking anymore.

And still the Tantabus stared at me.

Now, though, that silent, judgmental stare felt less like judge, jury, and executioner and more like the loathsome remnant of the monster who deserved every last ounce of justice allotted her. The twinkle of a distant supernova in the center of its face was the closest I’d get to a blink from this stupid thing, and it told me all I needed to know. It really had no goddamn clue what I was saying.

“You’re still sitting there like you want me to do something about it. Well I’m not. I don’t feel bad, and you know it.” Even if it didn’t understand me, I felt better saying it. I laid back down and rested my head on my hooves.

This time, I closed my eyes and didn’t open them again. I refused to open them. That thing wouldn’t get to me. If Luna wanted to repent for what she did, then good fucking riddance.

I was happy she hurt now. I was glad she suffered the Nightmare like I had. I was ecstatic that she knew what it was like to relive that pain.

I was happy.

Really.

Author's Note

Sorry for the short chapter. The next few will be full sized.

X - Pancake Breakfast

Sunset lay on her back amidst the twist of Coppertone’s bedsheets. She watched the ceiling fan spin lazy circles in the early morning silence, greeting her with a brief flash of sunlight from the window whenever a blade hit just the right angle. Her eyes hadn’t yet adjusted, and as such the sun may as well have been coming after her eyeballs with a knife. She shut her eyes and rolled over.

The still-sleepy part of her brain smiled at the comfort of a newly found cool spot on the mattress, while the terrible, no-good, wants-to-be-awake part formed the coherent thought that it was morning and the lump sticking into her lower back was probably Copper’s hoof.

“Nnnnnh…”

She rolled over again. She’d had the weirdest dream.

It was all so vivid. Nocturne, a pony unstuck from the world, searching for her lost love. Star Swirl the Bearded of all ponies.

The thought got her heart beating faster. An actual link to the greatest sorcerer in Equestrian history…

Sunset shook her head. She shouldn’t get too ahead of herself. It was a dream. A weird dream. As real as it might have felt, she couldn’t believe it so completely just yet.

Still… she had toyed with lucid dreaming before, and it didn’t feel anywhere near as real as this. Whatever. She’d figure it out later.

Sunset yawned and rubbed her eyes. She cracked them open, and not an inch away were a pair of bright-green eyes staring right at her.

“Morning!” Lily said.

“Gah!” Sunset almost tumbled backward out of bed.

Lily giggled and leapt on top of Sunset with the biggest hug. “Hee! Wake up! Mom’s making breakfast!”

Sunset took another breath to rid herself of the momentary shock, then ruffled Lily’s mane. “Good morning to you, too.”

“Come on, Sissy!” Lily said, pouncing on Copper. She shook her by the shoulders. “Breakfast time!”

Copper groaned, pushed Lily away, and rolled over. “Unless you’re actively being murdered, leave me alone. Or you will be actively murdered.”

Lily blew a raspberry at her before again turning that huge smile toward Sunset. She was out the door before Sunset could even laugh.

Well, it was no use resisting that amount of cuteness. Sunset stretched out like a cat, feeling all the wonderful pops in her joints, and followed Lily.

The sizzle of a frying pan met her ears before she made it downstairs, and her mouth watered at the delightful smell of pancakes and maple syrup. Her nose was no liar, and the sight of halved strawberries and cantaloupe resting in crystal bowls on the bar window brought a smile to her face.

To her right through the kitchen door stood a unicorn mare humming away as she scrubbed a pot in a bubbly sink. Beethooven’s fourth symphony, if Sunset had her Music Appreciation memories straight.

The mare herself was impossible to mistake for anypony other than Copper’s mom. The wavy sandy-blonde mane, the sleek tan coat. And when she turned upon hearing Sunset enter… hazel eyes. Huh. Genetics was weird.

“Good morning, Sunset,” she said. She had the sweetest, motherly voice that brought Celestia to mind. “I’m sorry I didn’t get to meet you yesterday for the festival. I’m Sparknote. You can call me Spark. It’s wonderful to meet you.”

“Same,” Sunset said. She rubbed her eyes and yawned, still not fully awake. “That smells delicious.”

“Thank you,” Spark said. She flitted over to the stove with more grace than a pegasus ballerina to flip the pancakes, her spatula doing its own little pirouette in her golden magic. There was already a tall stack on a plate beside her. “I love cooking breakfast in the morning. So you’re from here in Canterlot? Copper’s told me so much about you.”

Lily came in from the back room with a hoof towel in her mouth and threw it on the counter. She tugged on Sparknote’s mane. “Mommy, can we have honeydew instead of cantaloupe?”

“Of course, sweetie, go get it out of the fridge.”

“Hee!” And off she went.

“But yeah,” Sunset said to Spark. “I grew up on Oleander, in the Free-Feather District.”

Her heart fluttered as she said those words. She disliked ponies knowing her, um… level of privilege, growing up in one of the nicest districts in Canterlot. It was no Cloudtop or Fairbrooks, but it was a few steps up from Creekside, where her mom always told her to not go wandering at night. Not that she would go wandering anywhere at night, but—

She shook her head. There went her brain on one of its pointless tangents again. This was Copper’s family. They wouldn’t mind her, uh, status.

“Oh, then you must know Top Stitch. I used to volunteer at the animal shelter with her in our teenage years.”

“I… yeah, actually. She and my mom do a book club thing every month.”

Well that took an odd turn in conversation. Sunset rarely ever brought up her parents. No emotional baggage there, just… she wasn’t as close to them as most ponies were to theirs.

Spark laughed and put a hoof to her heart. “Oh, I wish I had time to be in a book club. There’s so much I have to catch up on.”

She gave Sunset a sly grin. “You should see the stack of unedited articles on my work desk.”

“Too busy at work, huh?” Sunset stepped up beside her. Even from the respectable distance between them, she could smell Spark’s lavender-scented shampoo. Given Copper and Lily’s sharing habits, Sunset had half a mind to assume she and Whistle did the same. Would be a funny theory to test, at least.

“There’s never a dull moment around the office,” Spark said. She slapped another set of pancakes on the pile and poured more batter into the pan. The smell and sizzle got Sunset’s mouth doubling down on the whole watering thing. “Always something that needs looked over or edited or properly cited.”

“So you’re an editor?”

“In-Chief, yes. At Fernwik’s.”

“Oh. Wow.”

That was a statement. Being top dog at one of Equestria’s most illustrious magazine companies was no joke. Of course, that explained how Copper got her modeling gig way back when.

An ear-shattering skreee of wood on linoleum flattened Sunset’s ears to her skull. She turned to see Lily leaping onto a dining room chair she had pushed up against the counter. With some difficulty, she managed to roll a honeydew melon up the side of the counter and steady it with both hooves.

“Howmushyouwan?” she mumbled to Sunset around the handle of a chef’s knife, almost as big as her smile.

Spark gasped. “Lily!”

“Whyyy don’t I help you with that?” Sunset said, snatching the knife from Lily’s mouth before she had a chance to hurt herself. She grabbed the honeydew melon and a cutting board leaning against the backsplash, then gave Spark a placating smile.

Spark mouthed a relieved “thank you” before scowling at Lily. “Lily, how many times do I have to tell you? Never grab a knife without asking me first.”

Lily wilted and bunched her hooves up on the edge of the counter. “Sorry, Mommy.”

An awkward silence took hold of the moment, and Sunset bit her lip, unsure when the punishment was supposed to be over. Spark had taken to setting the cantaloupe and strawberries on the table, so that was as good a cue as any.

Sunset ruffled Lily’s mane and pulled her into a hug. That earned a giggle, and all was right with the world. She readied the knife over the honeydew.

“Say when.” Sunset cut slice after slice after slice after slice after… there was no way Lily could eat all this.

Lily watched the knife chop up and down with childlike wonder. She looked up at Sunset with a big smile.

Sunset stopped halfway through the honeydew and gave Lily a concerned look. “I-is that enough?”

“Uh-huh!” Lily nodded and scampered over to the dining room table just off the kitchen. She clambered up into a seat and wiggled her ears, eyes on the honeydew.

Oh, jeez. Sunset could never raise a filly like her. She’d be the most spoiled foal in Equestria.

Sunset plated the honeydew and set it on the table. She almost couldn’t contain her smile from watching Lily’s eyes follow the plate so intently.

Copper stomped in from the foyer hallway with Lily’s dinosaur blanket floating behind her. She let out a dramatic yawn as she wadded it up and dropped it on Lily.

“That ain’t mine,” she said. “Belongs in your room.”

The blanket ruffled and wriggled in the vague shape of hooves and the filly beneath it, and a faint but beautiful kiwi-green aura tried and failed to move it off her. Eventually, Lily found the end and poked her head out, her mane a mess of static.

“Copper,” Spark said. “Why did you bring that down here? Go put that in Lily’s room.”

“But it’s her blanket. Why should I have to take it back up?”

Spark squared up with her and gave her a Mom Stare. “Because you are the older sister and you know better than to be petty to a seven-year-old.”

Meanwhile, Lily had already wrapped herself up like a burrito. An adorable, four-legged, dinosaur-covered burrito with the biggest smile.

“Oh, so I can be petty with you?” Copper said. “Noted.” That earned her a healthy dose of the Mom Stare before the click of the front door latch and a muffled “shit” drew everypony’s attention toward the foyer hallway.

Spark went to investigate. “Whistle? I’ve been looking all over for you. Where have you been? Were you out all night with that Night Glider again?”

Whistle stomped past her into the kitchen, floating a six-pack of root beer and a bag of barbecue potato chips. “No, Mom, I didn’t sneak out to some stupid colt’s house. I ain’t Copper.”

She yanked a root beer bottle from its plastic ringlet and ripped open the chip bag. “I went out for chips and root beer ’cause fatass here ate ’em all,” she added, jerking her head at Copper.

“At six in the morning? And don’t call your sister that.”

Whistle sat down at the dinner table and gave Spark one of those rebellious “what do you want from me?” shrugs. “Pack Rat’s opens at five.”

Sunset shot a concerned glance between them. A response like that would have gotten her spanked so hard, even now. Though, Copper’s family dynamics were quite different than her own. Being an only child—and a well-behaved one at that—came with a lot of missed experiences like these.

“Don’t you worry, Whistle,” Copper said. “Fatass will take good care of your stuff.” She lit her horn to lasso Whistle’s chips and root beer her way.

Whistle yanked them back. “Hey, fuck off.”

“Whistle!” Sparknote said. “Another word like that out of you and it’s back to your room.”

“You ever think getting to go to her room is why she swears so much?” Copper said, grinning at Spark.

Spark whipped her spatula around and stopped it right in front of Copper’s nose. “No more of your smarmy comments until breakfast is over. You hear me?”

Copper nodded, leaning back, nose wrinkled and eyes locked with the floating spatula.

Sunset barely suppressed a giggle, unsure what Copper was more afraid of: getting slapped with the spatula or getting bits of pancake batter in her mane.

Spark brought the spatula back to her side and gave everypony a big smile. “Wonderful,” she said before turning back to the last of the pancakes.

“Morning, everyone,” came String’s voice from behind Sunset, loud enough that she jumped. He strode up to Spark and pecked her on the cheek. “Food smells wonderful.”

Spark giggled and levitated the pancakes to the table. “And it’s ready to eat! Everypony take a seat, please.”

Sunset sat down in the middle chair, Copper on her left, Whistle on her right.

Lily, directly across the table, stuck her tongue out in concentration, trying to levitate a hoofful of honeydew slices onto her plate. Trying being the key word. She could barely throw her aura around them, her horn fizzing and sparking the harder she tried. But what she lacked in telekinesis she made up for in adorableness.

“So you girls had fun last night?” String asked as he plated a stack of pancakes for himself. “Dang near kept me up all night.”

Whistle snorted. She took a swig of root beer to try and hide it, but it didn’t stop the looks String and Spark gave her.

Sunset shrugged and helped Lily get her slices of honeydew before helping herself to a little bit of everything. “I couldn’t tell you. I was out like a light the moment I faceplanted into my pillow.”

“Yeah, you party pooper,” Copper said. “Left me and Lily to be mischievous all by ourselves.”

Sunset wrinkled her nose. She felt the sudden urge to check a mirror for any, um, unscrupulous drawings on her face.

“Whistle, take smaller bites,” Spark said, frowning. “Celestia knows, nopony’s going to take it from you.”

Whistle stopped in the middle of shoveling half a pancake in her mouth to spare Spark a brief glance. She looked back at her pancake and horked down the rest, earning a defeated sigh from her mom.

Sunset giggled. Their family antics were hilarious. She almost wished she had grown up with siblings so she could have experienced this herself. She glanced at Lily to see how she was getting along with that honeydew and, uh…

Lily had already cleaned every last slice of honeydew off her plate. Wow. She’d grow up big and strong if she kept that up.

“Oh,” String said, his eyes on Lily’s leftover rinds of honeydew. “I almost forgot. We need to find a foalsitter for Lily next week.”

“I told you, I’ll do it,” Whistle said around another pancake sticking halfway out of her mouth.

Spark glowered at her, then at the pancake, then back at her. She didn’t bother dignifying that with a response, instead turning to Copper.

“Don’t look at me,” Copper said, putting her hooves up defensively. “I’ll be in Manehattan for that seminar thing, remember?”

“Since when did you care about keeping up on that shit?” Whistle asked.

Copper leaned around Sunset to point an accusing hoof at Whistle. “You shut your whore mouth.”

“Eat a fucking dick.”

“You whip one out and I’ll get right on that.”

“That is enough!” Spark slammed a hoof on the table. “You two say another word and you’re both going to your rooms.”

The table went silent, everypony looking more than a little unsettled at Spark. Except String. He kept at his pancakes in his slow, steady manner as if this were an everyday occurrence.

Sunset threw on a half-hearted smile. She would have volunteered to watch Lily, but she was going with Copper to her cosmetology seminar. They were staying the whole weekend to see the sights.

“Well, what about Mrs. Clear Sky and Peachy Keen next door that I met on my way here yesterday?” she offered. “They seem nice.”

Whistle elbowed Sunset in the ribs. She gave a tiny but serious shake of her head.

“We don’t speak to them,” Spark said. She set about cutting her pancake into pieces with sharp, measured strokes, without another word on the subject.

Sunset opened her mouth to say something, but came up short. She raised an eyebrow at her, then turned the wordless question to Copper.

Copper simply rolled her eyes and sighed before taking another bite of pancake. She looked like she was trying to hide behind her mane.

Whistle glanced briefly at Sunset with her head hung over her plate, mouth full of strawberry. She pursed her lips before raising and lowering her eyebrows in a “yep” sort of manner.

Lily looked as lost as Sunset felt. Their eyes eventually met, and all Sunset could do was give her a half-hearted smile. It seemed to work, as Lily slowly found her own and dove back into her whipped-cream-covered parfait.

“We’ll figure something out,” String said. He gave Spark a stern glare, one that suggested Sunset should put her nose in her breakfast and ask Copper about it later.

“I said I’d do it,” Whistle mumbled.

“Like you said you’d watch Mom’s plants last summer?” A strawberry flicked past Sunset and hit Whistle in the cheek. It left a splotch of whip cream, and Copper grinned, tapping a hoof to her own cheek. “You got a little somethin’ there.”

“Hey!” Whistle wiped the whip cream away. “Nopony asked you.”

“What did I just say?” Spark asked. Whistle raised a hoof to argue, but Spark cut her off: “To your rooms. Both of you.”

Whistle glared death at Copper, who leered back at her. It was enough to make Sunset sink into her chair and pretend she didn’t exist. Maybe sibling antics weren't all they were cracked up to be.

Copper and Whistle got up and pushed their chairs in, Whistle making sure hers scraped extra loud on the linoleum. They headed upstairs, a muffled argument floating in from the foyer.

Welp. So much for a happy family breakfast. Sunset had only eaten one of her three pancakes, but after that little scene, she didn’t feel all that hungry anymore.

“I’m terribly sorry you had to see that, Sunset,” Spark said.

“No, it’s… families are families. I get it.”

Spark fixed her with an endearing smile. “Your parents must be proud to have such a mature, young mare as their daughter.”

Maybe? Sunset had never asked. Didn’t feel like a question that needed asking. She smiled for Spark’s sake, though.

“They’re happy enough, I guess.”

That seemed to hit home. Spark went back to her breakfast with renewed gusto and a smile on her face.

“May I be excused?” Sunset asked. She still wasn’t hungry, and the questions regarding Spark’s earlier statement gnawed at her.

“But you’ve hardly eaten anything,” Spark said.

“I’m just not that hungry right now… I-I’m kind of used to skipping breakfast, honestly. Can I save it for later?”

“Oh, of course, dear. I’ll put it in the fridge for you.” She got up and was already floating it to the counter, where she got a Tupperware from the drawer.

“Thanks,” Sunset said and beelined for the stairs up to Copper’s room.

She opened the door to Copper’s room to find her curled up in bed with a green body pillow. She usually only did that when something really bothered her.

Copper shot to her haunches the moment the door opened. She mussed her mane to play it cool, but her overly casual smile wasn’t fooling anypony.

“You know it’s nice to knock, right?” Copper said. “I totally could have been diddlin’ one out.”

Sunset wrinkled her nose. Lesson learned. She shook her head and pushed that mental image down her brain’s garbage chute where it belonged.

“Is… something wrong?” she asked, stepping in.

Copper shook her head. “Trouble in this paradise? Nah, why? Come here.”

Sunset felt the warmth in that request, and she pranced more than walked up to Copper, letting herself be wrapped in Copper’s hooves. It was the most natural feeling. After a long moment, Sunset pulled back and put a delicate hoof on Copper’s chest.

“So… can I ask what that was all about down there?”

“The Mrs. Clear Sky and Peachy Keen thing?” Copper’s voice took on an odd tone, one best described as intense embarrassment. The way she threw her ears back all but confirmed that, but she idly scuffed a hoof on her bedsheets for good measure. “Yeah, that’s… that’s just Mom.”

Sunset sat down beside Copper and leaned against her. She felt Copper press back, and the warmth between them steadied the worry in Sunset’s chest. Though, it wasn’t difficult to notice Copper’s heart beating harder than it should.

“I… really don’t wanna talk about it,” Copper said. Her eyes traveled loop de loops around the floor, stopping at all the socks and loungewear scattered about—way more clothes than Sunset expected her to own. “I don’t like the constant reminder that Mom’s socially retarded.”

“Um, okay. Theeen what do you wanna talk about?”

Copper got that sly look about her. “How about you and Doppler? It’s been a while since you’ve had a chance to sit on his dick.”

Sunset rolled her eyes. Really? She didn’t want to talk about her mom’s homophobia, but it was fine needlessly oversexualizing Doppler like that?

“For the last time, we haven’t done it yet. We haven’t even, like, had a make out session.”

“Ugh. You’re such a prude, Sunset.” Copper cuffed her shoulder. “If I was you, I’d be thinkin’ about that hot stallion meat all day every day.”

Sunset glowered at her. “Something tells me you do that anyway…”

“And who’s to say I don’t?” She grinned and batted her eyelashes in a way that almost brought a flush to Sunset’s cheeks. Almost.

“Alright,” Sunset said. “You know what? Change of subject. Why’s the sky blue.”

Copper held a hoof to her mouth to hide a snort. “That hardly sounded like a question.”

“Because it wasn’t.”

“Well that’s a shame, because I had a perfectly good answer for it.”

“Which was?”

“Because I get to go have a lunch date with Princess Celestia in a few hours and air out all your dirty laundry.” Again with the eyelashes and that shit-eating grin.

Sunset withheld a sigh. Why did she still walk into those stupid comments? And that sly grin of Copper’s… She thought she was so darn witty, didn’t she?

“Do you ever stop to think of a moment when you don’t want to say something sarcastic or morally questionable?” Sunset asked.

“Where’s the fun in that?”

Sunset rolled her eyes. She hopped off the bed and headed for the door. “You know what? You’re stuck in here ’cause your mom said so. I’m going to go play with Lily.”

“What? Hey, wait. That’s not fair!” She wriggled to the foot of the bed, her hooves dangling pathetically over the edge. “You’re supposed to hang out with me!”

“Well that’s too darn bad, isn’t it?” Sunset decided to borrow a page out of Copper’s book and wiggled her flank at her, which… actually got a bit of a blush out of her?

Oh, found it. Didn’t like her inappropriateness thrown back in her face, did she?

“Maybe you’re just not cool enough to hang out with right now, since you’ve been sent to your room and all.” Sunset smirked as she stepped out of Copper’s bedroom.

“Hey Sunset?”

Sunset poked her head back in to see Copper grinning like a horny schoolmare.

“Wiggle that flank of yours again for me.” She bit her lip and winked.

“Go eat a rainbow.”

Author's Note

Lily is too much fun to write. Just sayin'.

Onward and Upward!

This story has undergone changes. Some comments may no longer make sense or be relevant.

XI - A Date With Destiny

The castle was a lot bigger than Coppertone expected. She had only seen it from the outside, and even then, “enormous” didn’t quite cut it.

Daunting. That was the word. This place was daunting.

After her fourth time getting turned around and having to ask somepony for directions, she followed a staircase up to yet another landing to find herself in a long hallway decked out in all sorts of fancy gold trimming. At the very least, it now felt like she was going the right way.

This place was a maze. If she made any more wrong turns, she’d end up wandering these halls for the next decade. The guards would find her withered corpse somewhere among the candelabras and oil paintings.

Copper smirked. Maybe that’s why they didn’t bother with all the security she had expected. Or maybe there was a minotaur on patrol. That’d be fitting enough.

About halfway down the hall, she spotted a guard standing at attention in front of a big set of golden doors. She breathed a sigh of relief now that she finally had another pony to ask for new directions to Princess Celestia’s room, but stopped when she recognized his armor from the Summer Sun Celebration.

Some sixth sense probably innate to all veteran guardsponies clicked, and he turned his head toward her. The action made her jump back instinctively, but the sudden, warm smile that swept across his face said he was a pony she could trust.

“Hey, I remember you,” he said in a deep voice. “You’re Sunset’s friend.”

Hearing Sunset’s name reaffirmed that trustworthiness and brought her own smile around. “Yeah. I-I’m here to see the princess.”

“Yeah, she said she was expecting you. Go on in.” He jerked his head at the door behind him, then returned his smile to that thousand-yard stare into the opposite wall.

Copper cocked her head. “Aren’t guards supposed to be all, like, rigid and stern and unmoving and stuff?”

He snapped a sidelong smile at Copper. “Technically, yeah, but outside the public eye, some of us like to act a little less mechanical. The princess prefers it that way, anyway.”

Huh. Okay then. Learn something new every day.

Copper cleared her throat and knocked on the large double doors. Not a moment later, a golden aura seeped through the cracks and enveloped both doors, drawing them inward to give Copper a glimpse of gold and velvet and all other manner of fineries the word “lavish” couldn’t rightly convey.

“Please, come in,” Princess Celestia said. She sat at a tea table in the middle of the room, beneath a chandelier sparkling in the noontime sun that flooded in from the open balcony.

It was hard for Copper to get moving again, not to mention pick her jaw up off the floor. “Wow. This room is beautiful.”

“I’m glad you like it,” Princess Celestia said. “Please, make yourself comfortable.” She gestured at the cushion across from her, which Copper accepted.

“Tea?” Princess Celestia raised a teapot from the table and a cup toward Copper.

“Uh, sure, thanks.” She scanned the little tray and its color-coordinated packets of tea bags. Sunset had once said she liked—or more accurately, hated least—chamomile, so she picked that one.

Princess Celestia hmmed. “That’s Sunset’s favorite as well.”

“I, I figured it’d be a safe choice.” She blushed and brushed her mane behind her ear. “I’m not really a tea drinker.”

“You don’t have to drink it if you don’t want to.” She set the teapot down.

“I’ll at least try it. I don’t want to be rude.” Copper took it in her magic and poured the cup herself. Hopefully that wasn’t overstepping any boundaries, though Mom probably would have drilled holes in the back of her head with her eyes had she been there to witness it.

Princess Celestia nodded. “In that case, if you don’t like it, you don’t have to finish it.”

She accepted the teapot back from Copper and poured her own before placing it on its saucer. “So how are you today, Coppertone? I hope everything is treating you well.”

“Very, I’d have to say. Nothing I can complain about.” Copper took a sip. Hmm, yeah, tea wasn’t her thing. At least it was pretty mild. She could be polite and get it down, at least. Probably the same reason Sunset always picked it. “What about you?”

“Me?” She put a hoof to her chest as if she actually hadn’t expected the question. Ponies must have assumed everything was perfect all the time or something. Or she was just really good at bluffing so that Copper could feel chuffed for asking. “Well, there’s this and that political argument that I have to arbitrate, or the opening of a new public building that needs my seal of approval, and the paperwork is endless, but I honestly wouldn’t have it any other way.”

“Sounds busy.”

“That’s not even the half of it, but you aren’t here to listen to me. You wished to share some of your mischief with me?”

Copper laughed. Was Princess Celestia gossiping?

“Well, I mean, not to linger on it, but I wouldn’t mind listening to you talk about your day.”

Princess Celestia blinked. A warm smile spread across her face before she closed her eyes and sipped her tea.

“Thank you, Copper, but it really would be rude of me to bore you with all the details when I was the one who invited you here.” She straightened out the doily beneath the teapot. “I would much rather hear about you. I don’t get the opportunity to get to know many of my subjects.”

Skirting the question, huh? Probably didn’t want to share, or maybe couldn’t because of, like, national security reasons or something. But she seemed personable enough to at least try.

“Well,” Copper said. “The same could be said for you. How many ponies actually know you? Like, know you, know you. What’s your favorite food? Your favorite board game? What’s the coolest place you’ve ever been? What’s it like being able to raise the sun and moon?”

That got a laugh out of her. “Thank you, Coppertone. I needed that. It’s been a long time since anypony’s actually asked me questions like these.”

“All the more reason to answer them, right?” She shot Princess Celestia a grin.

She conceded with a small sigh. “Sunset wasn’t lying when she said you’re the wittiest pony she knows. Very well, my favorite food is pancakes.”

“Pancakes? Really? You don’t seem like a pancake kind of pony.”

“You never said what kind of favorite. Pancakes have a… sentimental value.” She smiled, and her eyes got that lost-in-thought glaze about them, staring out the balcony doors. She blinked, and the princess was back in the building.

“Alright then,” Copper said, putting on her trademark smirk. She took a quick sip of tea. It really wasn’t that bad. Maybe a little honey or something. “Your actual favorite food to eat, then.”

“Hmm…” Princess Celestia tapped her hoof on the tea table. The dense crystal made for a dull thud with each tap. “I think I’ll leave that one to your imagination.”

Wow, cheater. “Well fine, but then you have to at least tell me one silly secret of yours.”

Princess Celestia looked momentarily taken aback.

Copper flattened her ears back and felt a blush rise to her cheeks. “I, err… Sorry. I got a little carried away there.”

Her royal demeanor snapped back in place as a warm smile. “It’s quite alright. Cheerful banter is something I don’t get to experience often.”

Copper cleared her throat. Princess Celestia might have said it was alright, but maybe that was enough button-pushing and line-crossing for the moment. Mom’s threats of skinning her alive if she so much as suspected Copper of being rude to the princess bullied their way to the front of her mind, and that put any lingering thoughts of mischief to bed.

“So, uh,” Copper said. “What sort of Sunset shenanigans do you wanna hear about?”

A sip of tea, and Princess Celestia hmmed. She didn’t seem to mind the abrupt change in subject. The way her ears perked up, she actually seemed happier for it.

“Whatever you’re comfortable sharing,” she said. “And whatever you know she would be comfortable sharing. Goodness knows I’ve gotten into my fair share of trouble, and not all of it necessarily something I'd prefer everypony knowing.”

Whatever Sunset was comfortable sharing. So quite literally nothing. But more importantly: “You getting into trouble? I’d be a little scared to know what you consider trouble.”

Princess Celestia waved away the notion. “Oh, ponies always seem to assume dangerous or doomsday sorts of scenarios when I use that word. Surprisingly, my troubles are much less troublesome than what most ponies go through in a day.”

“You mean like making sure I don’t forget my dorm key in the morning?”

Princess Celestia chuckled. “Like making sure your assistant made you green tea in the morning instead of chamomile. If I drink anything but green tea before morning court, I’m asleep on my hooves by noon.”

Copper blinked. “Wow, that’s… yeah, I think you win the, uh, mundane award there? You can’t even have like a pick-me-up coffee or something to keep you going?”

“One would think, but I’ve simply never been able to bounce back from a midmorning drowsy spell. Which ponies would also find odd, considering I raise the sun every day.”

“Heh. Well, you’re right about that.”

A breeze chose that brief pause in conversation to blow in from the balcony, billowing the curtains inward. The sun reflected off the railing outside, and a whim came to Copper.

“You mind if I look?” She turned to Princess Celestia.

Princess Celestia extended a wing toward the balcony. “Please. It would be a shame of me not to share.”

Copper didn’t waste any time leaping off her cushion. She stepped through the curtains and had to shield her eyes to the sunlight, but holy hell was the view worth it.

The whole of Canterlot stretched out before her, from the University stadium to the Lingerlight District. She could literally see her house from here.

Distant towers and buildings reached for the midmorning sky like hooves toward the warm sun. Ponies scurried through the crack-sized streets like ants, their chariots and carriages comically small compared to her outstretched hoof.

Far below, the castle gardens sprawled out within the walls of the castle. The flowers smiled back at her in a rainbow of colors. When Copper breathed in, she swore she could smell them on the wind.

“Wow,” she said. It was all she could say.

Was this what pegasi got to see every day on a whim? Damn, she’d trade her horn for a pair of wings in a heartbeat.

“It’s a beautiful view, isn’t it?” Princess Celestia stepped up beside her and put a hoof on the railing. “I sometimes bring my nightstand out here to drink my tea in the evenings.”

“How do you even get anything done with a view like this?”

Princess Celestia laughed, holding a hoof to her peytral. “I sometimes wonder that myself.”

Copper looked to her right, where one of the university buildings boasted a large circular window of stained glass meant to resemble a phoenix rising from its ashes. Copper always thought it looked more like a chicken running around on fire, as dark as that sounded.

“Hey,” she said. “I recognize that stained glass. That’s Wizened Reed’s classroom.”

“That is the Conjurations wing of the university, yes. That’s where you take Arcanonaturamancology with Sunset, correct?”

Copper frowned and rolled her eyes. “Yeah…”

She hadn’t exactly “passed” that class. Sunset, on the other hoof, scored the highest of any pony in that course’s history. Not just aced it, but even got all the bonus questions.

“Can’t wait to take level two next semester…”

Princess Celestia hmmed again. “I’m glad to hear it. I love seeing the excitement of my little ponies whenever they talk about their studies.”

Copper stared at Princess Celestia like she had grown a second head.

Princess Celestia gave her a sidelong smile, her brow raised above her one visible eye. After a moment, she dipped her nose low and her smile turned roguish, and it was then that Copper laughed.

“I couldn’t tell if you were being serious or not,” Copper said.

Princess Celestia looked back out onto the city. “Just because I’m a princess doesn’t mean I have no sense of humor.”

“You learn something new every day.” Copper let her smile linger on Princess Celestia.

For as much as Copper had heard of Princess Celestia, none of it really amounted to the pony standing beside her. Sure, she was as tall and beautiful and graceful as the rumor mill claimed, but they never talked about the sweet sound of her voice or how casual she could be.

Maybe that was because everypony only ever met her in super formal situations. But this wasn’t a princess standing next to her. This was a normal pony talking about normal pony things.

She was pretty freakin’ chill. If she didn’t have the whole “regal princess” thing getting in the way, she could totally kick it with anypony Copper knew.

“So how do you really feel about this course next semester?” Princess Celestia asked. She turned that sidelong eye back toward Copper.

And back to the princessy mind game questions. It wasn’t hard to tell when Princess Celestia was fishing for information. Not like she really meant to, for sure, just… it kinda happened. Came with the territory. Still, Copper herself knew that territory well, and withholding something would stick out like a sore hoof.

Copper sighed and pulled her hooves from the railing. “I don’t know. I mean, it’s cool stuff, but I don’t really think I’m cut out for it.”

“How so?”

“Well, for starters, I bombed my final.” Copper snorted and shook her head. “The only thing that kept me from failing failing was one of the bonus questions at the end, and I only got that one right because of all of Sunset’s endless studying and hammering all the information into my brain. And even then it was still off a 50/50 guess between two of the answers. Sometimes, I think she assumes everypony else is just as good at this stuff as she is.”

“She is a good pony, and I’m sure just as good a friend.”

Copper shook her head. “Oh, no, she is. I didn’t mean anything like that. Just like, I’m just not as smart as her. I don't think anypony is. Er, except you, I mean.”

Princess Celestia chuckled and closed her eyes. “There is no need to worry. I actually do believe Sunset is more intelligent than me. It is wisdom and experience that defines the difference in what makes either of us ‘smart.’”

Copper’s eyes went wide. “Wait, you actually think she’s smarter than you?”

“Are you under the impression that I’m perfect and better than everypony else at everything?” She gave Copper an appraising glance down the side of her cheek. It was enough to get her heart pounding against her ribcage and that tingly feeling on the back of her neck. One wrong answer and it could be off to the dungeons with her for all she knew. She pictured Mom already sharpening that skinning knife.

“Well, I mean, uh, isn’t that why you’re the princess?”

Princess Celestia chuckled. “Nonsense, Coppertone. I would never claim to be the best at everything. I am good at many things, true, but that is only because I’ve had far more time in which to learn them. There is still much that I am far less capable of doing than many aspiring ponies will learn of their individual professions in their time.”

Huh. It wasn’t every day you heard somepony who was supposed to be perfect say they weren’t. That was wisdom of the highest degree. Which, realistically, made them the best pony to be in charge.

“But uh, yeah,” Copper said. She rubbed the side of her leg. “Anyway, it’s more just that, like, the only reason I’m still taking the course is because of Sunset.”

“Do you mean that as in she helped you maintain a passing grade, or as in you have no other reason to stay than because she is?”

Copper opened her mouth, but clamped it shut just as quick. Wow. Celestia really was good at reading ponies.

“Would you like to sit down again?” Celestia asked.

“I, I think that would help, yeah.”

They headed back inside for the tea table, and Copper took a compulsive sip to get her thoughts in order. Still warm, still pretty mild. It definitely needed that honey now, though.

“So yeah, like you said, I don’t really have any reason to stay in this course.”

Surprisingly, Celestia said nothing. She simply waited, like she wanted to hear more before giving her two bits.

Copper fidgeted her forehooves. “I stay in it for Sunset. ’Cause, you know, she’s my friend. And we get into all sorts of trouble and have fun in that class, because Professor Wizened Reed is such a great teacher and he gets us, since like, we still pay attention and stuff, you know?”

She shrugged and looked down at her teacup. “I mean, it’s never a plague of frogs or anything, but we have our fun.”

That got Celestia’s attention. She raised an eyebrow, and a tiny smirk danced onto her face. “I’ve heard mention of a Frog Spawn Spell gone awry in the Home Economics classroom earlier this year. I assume this is the same incident?”

Copper blanked. Oh. Oh, shit. Sunset hadn’t told her about that? The growing smile on Celestia’s face was all Copper needed to know she had slipped.

“It was an accident!” Copper said. “I know she didn’t mean to do it! You know her, always trying to learn new things. She’s just being her nerdy self.”

“Indeed I do.” Celestia nodded. “And ambition always has its hiccups. So long as nopony gets hurt and she cleaned up after herself.”

Yeah, about that. Sunset didn’t have the courage to look old Squeaky Clean, the head janitor, in the eye for a week. Still probably didn’t.

“Of course she did,” Copper said quickly, though she doubted Celestia believed it. “But yeah, I guess that’s one bit of mischief for you.” Copper shrugged and shook her head. “Really though, that’s about it as far as she’s concerned. The rest of it’s more just me being my normal piece-of-shit self, and I’m sure she’s complained plenty to you about that.”

Celestia tilted her head back and forth, a movement that struck Copper as very unprincess-like. “She has brought up some concerns of hers from time to time, but nothing worrying.”

Copper rolled her eyes. “Oh, please, Princess, you don’t have to be coy about it like she always is. She thinks I fuck all the stallions, doesn’t she?”

Celestia blinked. She threw on that warm smile of hers that Copper never knew whether to be comforted by or afraid of.

“You certainly have a way with being very forward, Coppertone.”

Heat rushed to Copper’s face, and her hooves felt like noodles. That was really out of line for a chat with the princess, no matter how down-to-Equestria said princess might be. Copper shifted her weight uncomfortably.

“Don’t worry yourself, Copper.” Princess Celestia took a sip of tea. “Like I said before, I personally find it refreshing. You wouldn’t believe how stale some conversations with the nobility and other authority figures can be.”

Copper let out a breath she didn’t know she was holding. She blushed and took the opportunity to brush her mane out of her eyes.

“Do, however, take care in the presence of others,” Celestia said. “Some would take offense.”

“I’ll remember that, Your Highness.” A moment passed in silence, one Copper knew Princess Celestia would have otherwise filled with some new conversation starter—her equivalent to a slap on the wrist, if anything.

“But to your question,” Princess Celestia said finally, “she has… obliquely mentioned such things, but never outright complained. Though, she has expressed annoyance at your… we’ll use the word ‘gusto,’ when poking fun at her with it.”

Copper flattened back her ears. Those were carefully picked words if she had ever heard any. That probably meant Sunset bitched about her all the time.

“Do you mind me asking?” Celestia said.

“Asking what?”

“Why you poke such fun at her?”

Copper shrugged. “I… I don’t know. It’s just, like, sex jokes are easy to make. All the colts I knew growing up were always trying to get with me. I mean, that’s just sort of a thing you get used to and learn how to shrug off by throwing it back in their faces, and it all just kinda becomes part of your vocabulary and stuff.”

She traced her hoof along the little etchings around the rim of her teacup. They looked like vines growing on a lattice.

“You end up internalizing it,” Copper continued. “It sorta becomes you, and you don’t really know how else to act. And it’s also just… the way Sunset reacts to it. It’s funny, yeah, but…” She looked up at Celestia, to give her a chance to say something.

When nothing followed, Copper looked back down at her tea and continued. “I’ve seen how she acts around others. It’s kinda sad, how shut-in she is. I’ve never met a pony as uptight as her, either. And all this is me trying to help her. Just, make her more comfortable with that sort of thing, so that, like, other things end up not being so bad by comparison, and”—she let out a weak laugh and shook her head—“that excuse sounds even shittier out loud.”

Princess Celestia’s smile momentarily grew a hair, but she said nothing.

Copper pinned her ears back and rolled her hooves face up on the table. She stared at them, wishing for some sort of revelation to reveal itself, something to make all the wrong things in her head seem right, if only just a little.

“But I just… It’s the only way I know how to talk to other ponies. Just fake flirting and smartassery and sarcasm. Sometimes she hates it. Sometimes she groans and rolls her eyes and asks me…” She swallowed, and a shiver ran down her spine. “She asks me why we’re even friends…

“But sometimes, I actually get a smile out of her.” Copper’s heart beat faster at the thought, and a smile found its way to her lips. “And she laughs. Like really laughs. Full-on snortfest. And she'll shoulder bump me and call me something stupid back, and it just makes it all worth it.”

She let her smile linger a moment longer, but wrenched it away before it could overstay its welcome. This was wrong. Every bit of it. Mom had raised her better than this.

Celestia still said nothing. Though, her smile turned to a concerned frown.

The silence grew thick and made it all the more difficult for Copper to get her words out. “But… i-it’s more than that.”

Copper nodded slowly, her eyes trailing the etchings in her teacup around and around. “I know she complains about how I flirt with stallions and act like I get with them all the time. But the thing is… I don’t. I never have.”

Her voice fell to a near whisper. Her eyes trailed down to her hooves bunched up on the table. The tiniest of laughs escaped her, and a lump settled square in her throat. She shook her head.

Pathetic. Mom would be ashamed.

“You can already tell, can’t you…?” she asked, on the verge of tears.

Celestia never once looked away. Her eyes had a gentle insistence about them, a wordless statement that she was there to listen no matter what Copper might say.

“I have learned in my time that assumptions can be wrong,” Celestia said. “And that jumping to conclusions can come at a terrible price. I have my thoughts, Copper, but I will never assume to know what it is you are thinking, nor will I think any less of you for whatever it might be.”

Copper tried swallowing the lump in her throat, but it wouldn’t budge. Her breaths came ragged and shallow, and her heart beat louder than any bassline the Canterlot nightlife could muster.

The little voice in her head screamed at her to stop, to shut the fuck up and smile for the world like she always did, like she was supposed to. Because she was good at it, and continuing this conversation would only make things worse.

She brought her eyes up to Celestia and her gentle, patient smile, like the one Mom always wore. And that made it all the worse.

It shouldn’t be like this. She shouldn’t be like this. She was wrong—a wrong and broken pony that didn’t deserve the slivers of happiness life gave her.

She wanted to run home, to hide under her covers and bawl her eyes out until she fell asleep. It was normal. It was safe. She still had Lily and Whistle. They knew. They understood. That was enough.

But the longer she kept telling herself that, the more that lie etched itself upon her heart.

She couldn’t confide in them forever. She needed this leap of faith, to hear from somepony else the words she so desperately sought.

And so Copper took that leap of faith. She sucked in a deep, trembling breath to gather her courage, and she looked Princess Celestia in the eye.

“I’m in love with Sunset,” she choked out. “And I don’t know what to do…”

Author's Note

Onward and upward, Copper. Onward and upward.

This story has undergone changes. Some comments may no longer make sense or be relevant.

XII - The Mindtap Spell

The Mindtap Spell

I called off school the next day. I told them I wasn’t feeling well.

It wasn’t a lie, really.

I spent the day lying in bed. The blackout curtains kept the morning, noon, and evening sun to a dim halo on the ceiling above the windows, and I only knew the time by the glow of my alarm clock whenever I happened to roll over.

The darkness made it easier to see Luna in my mind’s eye: the pain in her eyes, her jaw clenched tight as she pulled away from the kiss, her struggle to hold in the Nightmare.

Why did she do it? That question had played on repeat, was written on the walls and ceiling, thumped in every heartbeat as I tried not to feel or think anything at all.

I rubbed my arms for warmth at a sudden wave of goosebumps. I could still feel the disappointment in Twilight’s voice crawling over my skin like scraggly fingers.

So, you’re just going to walk away? That’s… that’s not like you.

She was right, but I couldn’t help how I felt. I couldn’t help what Luna—what Nocturne—did to me or how this spiraled so wildly out of control. All I could help was what I did in the face of it all. And honestly, I couldn’t trust myself in this situation.

The thought of even seeing Luna terrified me. I knew what she was capable of, what she could do again if the whim struck her. All the lies, all the broken promises.

All the promises she could keep…

I shut my eyes and rolled over. I wasn’t going down that train of thought.

Instead, I focused on Twilight. I didn’t let anything else into my head but her. Her silly smile and geekish overenthusiasm. Of all the people in this world and the ponies in the other, I trusted her above everything, including myself.

She was the one who pulled me out of my rage, helped me see the light—what I was and what I was doing. All the people and ponies I had and would have gone on to hurt.

I rolled onto my back to stare at the ceiling again, raised my hand, spun it around, waggled my fingers.

People changed. I knew that. I was a prime example.

But was Luna still Nocturne? That nagging feeling never left me. She very well might have changed for the better, just like I did. Or she might not have.

I rolled onto my stomach and leaned my head over the foot of the bed. My boots lay on their sides, the way I had kicked them off the day before. They seemed to stare up at me, their shoelace holes like judgmental eyes. Maybe it was my conscience finally doing its job, but the longer I stared back the less I could deny Twilight’s words.

I still didn’t believe Luna had changed—not fully, at least—and everything about this screamed that I shouldn’t get involved. But more than I trusted my gut, I trusted Twilight.

She deserved the chance to be right about Luna. After everything we’d been through, I owed her that much.

And if I knew anything about Twilight, she’d try fixing it herself, with or without me. If something happened to her because I ran away from this, I didn’t know what I’d do. If nothing else, better me than her.

I sat up and put my boots on. This was going to be an awkward apology.

• • •

Twilight was busy chalking up a diagram on a reversible blackboard when I stepped through the portal. The sound of the portal’s magic drew her out of whatever thought spun circles in her head, and she sighed before setting down her chalk.

She turned toward me, the look on her face unsure if it should be a frown or a smile. Eventually, she settled on a smile and took a step closer.

“I’m sorry,” I said before she could say anything. “For the way I acted. I just…”

Twilight’s smile got bigger, and she flicked her ears back and forth. Without a word, she came over and wrapped me in a hug.

“It’s okay,” she said. “Everypony makes mistakes.”

“Yeah, but not quite like this.”

Twilight pulled away and gave me a smug grin. “I vaguely remember somepony trying to brainwash a bunch of teenagers in order to create an army capable of taking over Equestria. I’d say that not apologizing for being angry isn’t quite as bad.”

I sighed, but followed through with a smile. “Still, I shouldn’t have said what I did.”

“Well, consider this apology accepted.” She turned back toward the chalkboard. “Now, would you mind making good on that apology by double-checking this for me?”

I followed her over. I hadn’t seen graphs and mathematical equations like this since CSGU, but I recognized a Mindtap Spell when I saw one.

“Trying to get inside Luna’s head?” I asked.

“That’s the gist of it.” Twilight pulled out a retractable pointer and snapped it to an equation in the upper left corner. It didn’t look like anything I remembered studying, but with joules for units, it wasn’t hard to guess it had to do with magical input or channeling.

“I’m currently having some trouble with maintaining the spell,” she said.

“How so?”

“Well, the issue is mainly energy input. As I’m sure you know, a Mindtap Spell is relatively simple, but it requires both parties to be actively participating.” She snapped her pointer to a diagram that seemed to compare the differences between a willing and unwilling Mindtap. “Because Luna is unconscious, she isn’t a willing participant when it comes to establishing a connection. We’re reaching in, but she can’t reach out. And without the input from the host mind, the magic required to maintain the spell almost quadruples.”

“That’s, uh… Spellbound’s Law of Confluence, right?” I stared at the ωγ symbol longer than I should have. I always hated that equation. “Directionality of magical currents is either multiplicative or divisive, or something like that.”

“Exactly. I mean, not to say it couldn’t be done, but that would take at least four powerful unicorns all channeling the spell at once for it to work.”

“Well, you’ve got you, me, Starlight, and… And…” My throat closed up at the thought of Celestia. The last time I saw her… all I could see was that look of utter disappointment in her eye.

“I’ve already talked to Princess Celestia,” Twilight said. She lowered her head and traced circles on the floor. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to know when someone sensed bad blood. “She’s, um… she’s organizing things in Canterlot and—”

“You mean she doesn’t want to see me,” I said.

Twilight flicked an ear, and her eyes had yet to meet mine. “She’s… formulating contingency plans. In case this lasts longer than we think.”

Yeah. Contingency plans. What a load of horse shit. I didn’t doubt she had plans, but it was awfully convenient, given how widely her social nets reached, not to mention the legions of soldiers at her command and the brilliant minds at the university she could call upon at a whim to do exactly those things for her.

“Well, if Celestia isn’t coming, doesn’t Starlight have a friend in the Crystal Empire?”

Twilight let a smile shoot to her face. She wrestled with it for a moment, finally eking out a sigh and finding it again somewhere amidst the thoughts in her head.

“Sunburst is definitely talented enough,” she said. “But we can’t exactly uproot him at a moment’s notice. Not with his duties to the Empire and my brother and Cadance.” If her concerns in our previous line of conversation hadn’t already been put to bed, the way her smile got ten times bigger sure said it was now. She practically had stars in her eyes.

“But I do know of another unicorn that isn’t busy managing the Crystal Empire’s history catalogues!” she added.

I raised an eyebrow at her. “Aaand who might that be?”

Twilight danced on her tippy toes and flared her wings. “Star Swirl the Bearded!”

My mind went blank for a moment. Star Swirl the Bearded. A cold tingle ran down the back of my spine as my brain tried processing that information. I blinked back to reality and shook my head. Thankfully, Twilight seemed too excited to notice.

“Star Swirl the Bearded?” I asked. “The real Star Swirl the Bearded?”

She shot me a classic Applejack eyebrow. “No, the fake Star Swirl, Star Swirl the Clean-Shaven— Yes, the real Star Swirl!”

She was all bouncing up and down and excitedly fluttering the tips of her primaries, much the way I would have imagined Fluttershy when asked about her favorite animal.

“H-how?” I asked.

“I…” She blushed and cleared her throat in a vain attempt to hide her overenthusiasm. “Well, it’s a long story, but the short version is that we saved him and the other Pillars of Harmony from Limbo, defeated the Pony of Shadows together, and now he’s out and about exploring Equestria.”

“Limbo…?” My mind careened off track again, but I yanked it back onto the rails before it had a chance to follow that line of thought. “You’re being serious. You’re not lying to me.”

“Totally serious! I already got in touch with him, and he’s on his way from Trottingham ‘as fast as a restless falcon,’ he said.” She giggled.

“Wow,” I said, half laughing at the suddenness of it all. My legs got feather light, and I felt boxed in despite the size of the room. “That’s… that’s crazy. The real Star Swirl…”

“Right!? I still can’t believe we were able to save him and the other Pillars.” She poked me in the chest. “Which is why I need your help making sure this spell is ready. Star Swirl used to be Celestia and Luna’s mentor when they were younger, and he’s just as sharp as you’d expect. He’ll no doubt want to get started the moment he gets here.”

Celestia and Luna’s mentor. My heart squirmed in my chest hearing those words. I took a breath to wrestle it under control and keep it from showing on my face. If I gave those thoughts an inch, they’d take a mile, and I couldn’t do that to Twilight now.

I looked her in the eyes, and I latched onto the happiness I found there. Just focus on her. Give her a smile, and I was me again.

“Sounds like a good enough reason to me,” I said. “So what exactly do we need to do next?”

Twilight flipped the board over to reveal a laundry list of laundry lists: chemical catalysts, potions that could ease the process of channeling magic, spells meant to focus the spell itself, and more.

“I’ve been brainstorming ways to streamline the process,” she said.

“It wouldn’t be you if you didn’t,” I said. We shared a laugh before I continued: “So, do you need more brainstorming, or thoughts on narrowing it down?”

“Narrowing it down. But if you think of something not on the list, please feel free to share.”

I rolled my eyes. I had already skimmed everything on the board. It was like Twilight assumed she hadn’t already thought of everything.

“Well, where’s Starlight?” I asked. “I’m sure she’d be helpful with this, too.”

Not that that was a lie. Far from it. Really, though, I just wanted to see her again. Aside from the short stint in the portal room yesterday, I never actually got to see her, see her.

When I went into the library looking for Twilight, I hadn’t expected to meet Luna face-to-face so suddenly. Or… alone. I’d had enough practice throwing on a brave face to pull one off automatically, but after I left the library “looking for Starlight,” I spent the next ten minutes throwing up in the bathroom, which, embarrassingly enough, was where Twilight found me.

“I sent her out about half an hour ago to pick up a few of the less expensive things on the list,” Twilight said. “She should be back—”

The door swung open, and Starlight trotted in with a large paper bag floating beside her.

“Right about now,” Twilight finished, smiling.

“Sunset!” Starlight said. She carelessly tossed the bag onto a nearby table, much to Twilight’s annoyance, and then tackle-hugged me to the floor.

Man, I could have stayed there for hours. I didn’t even care that we were lying on the floor or that all her weight was on my gut. I hadn’t been hugged like that in a while, not even by Pinkie Pie. Sometimes I forgot how nice it was to just have that closeness with someone, even casually.

“I knew you’d come back,” she said.

I blushed. “Yeah, I… yeah.”

“So you got everything on the list I gave you?” Twilight asked, carefully emptying the bag and sorting its contents by type and size.

“Everything but the kitchen sink,” Starlight said, helping me up.

“I didn’t have a kitchen sink on the list,” Twilight said idly. She blinked, staring off into space for a moment, having just realized what she said.

I snorted before busting out laughing. I had to lean on Starlight to keep from falling over.

“Then I guess it’s a good thing she didn’t get you one,” I said.

Starlight elbowed me in the shoulder. “Yeah, could you imagine using a kitchen sink to enter a pony’s dream?”

Twilight frowned at us. “Yeah, okay. You two laugh it up. I’m going to get started.” She huffed and grabbed a little green crystal from the table before heading over to Luna.

That crystal… Oh, man, I’d seen one of those before at CSGU. What was it again?

“She’s been worried sick about her since you left,” Starlight half whispered to me. “She hasn’t slept yet. Been working on that chalkboard formula since last night.”

A pang of guilt shot through me. She had stayed up all night working on this? Because I had to go and pitch a fit?

“Is she alright?” I asked.

Starlight shrugged. “Well, you know Twilight. She’s fine until she isn’t, and you see that coming from a mile away.”

Well, yeah. That sounded like her. Still, it didn’t feel right knowing she pushed herself because of me.

“But really, we should help her.” Starlight jerked her head toward Twilight and headed over.

“Yeah.” I followed and sat down beside Twilight, who busied herself with the little green crystal between herself and Luna.

“You want a stand for that?” Starlight asked Twilight, stepping up beside me.

“Please, actually.” Twilight didn’t move, except for a slight twitch in her left wing.

Starlight trotted out the door. With her gone and Twilight focusing on her spell, I was left to the quiet windchime sound of Twilight’s magic.

“What do you need me to do?” I asked.

Twilight slid herself closer to Luna. “Right now, nothing. I just want to get a quick glimpse of what we’re up against.”

I frowned. Sitting around doing nothing while others worked was not my style. I was about to say something when Starlight returned with one of those three-legged crystal ball stands.

She set it down beside Twilight, who shifted it between herself and Luna.

“Thank you.” Twilight set the surge crystal—that’s what it was!—in the stand.

The sudden memory made me smile. I knew I knew what that little green crystal was.

Made from an emerald specially treated to withstand and slow the dispersion of magical energies, it had the distinct property of storing magic for upwards of a few seconds. When filled beyond its saturation limit, the crystal’s beryl structure would shift and release all the stored energy at once, kind of like when a pony wrung out a wet sponge. Useful for overcoming energy input thresholds for catalysts and the like. And Mindtap Spells, apparently.

Chalk that one up to A-chem all those years ago.

The windchime tinkle of Twilight’s magic grew to a dull hum, and her horn glowed brighter than a bonfire as she gritted her teeth. She fired a beam of magic into the crystal, and it turned red hot. It stored up her magic until a tiny, glassy crink signaled the structural shift, and it shot a secondary beam at Luna’s horn.

The light show died down, and as the blaring roar of magic settled back into a quiet tinkle, Twilight slumped her shoulders and her face fell slack. She lay motionless, her horn tethered to the crystal by a thin line of magic no thicker than fishing wire—the Mindtap Spell.

But like she predicted, her tether petered out after maybe five seconds, and she shook her head. She jerked away from the crystal and spread her wings as if ready to scram for the nearest open window, heaving for air like she’d sprinted a mile.

“I, I take it it worked?” Starlight said.

“I saw… darkness,” Twilight said. “And eyes. Large, pure-white eyes, like there was no soul inside them.”

“That’s the Nightmare,” I said.

Twilight stared at me like she could have crawled out of her own skin. “You had nightmares about that thing every night?”

Well, not necessarily. The Nightmare would take many different forms—be it that lion-leopard thing, Nocturne, or anything else that tickled its fancy. Whatever would best fuck with my head that night, but I didn’t really want to go down the train of thought.

“It came and went,” I lied. It wouldn’t do to freak them out before we really started. But I decided to give them a nugget of truth to swallow that pill: “It’s at its worst with the new moon.”

“Well, that would be tomorrow, I think,” Starlight said. “So what exactly did you see? Er, eheh. You already said that. I mean what did you feel, I guess?” She offered an embarrassed smile.

“I didn’t feel anything. It was more… like I was traveling down. Way down.”

“I’ve never heard of a Mindtap Spell doing that,” I said.

“Neither have I,” Starlight added. “Think it has something to do with how the Nightmare might have changed the dream? Or just because it’s Luna’s?”

Twilight put a hoof to her chin. “There’s a lot of variables we still haven’t worked out yet. I have a feeling this is going to take some time. And some expertise.”

“You mean Star Swirl?” Starlight said flatly. The deadpan look in her eye caught my attention.

The mention of his name brought a giddy smile to Twilight’s face. “Yes! Oh, just wait until you meet him, Sunset. He’s just as amazing as the stories say!”

Starlight rolled her eyes. She looked at me with a dismissive frown and shook her head.

I raised an eyebrow and looked between the two of them. The disparity was amusing, to say the least. Definitely a story there.

A story. That was… yeah. I shook off a sudden chill and hid the motion by fidgeting with the surge crystal.

“Well, we could always use more heads to think this one through,” I said. I threw on a hopeful smile. “For now, why don’t we work on creating a stable connection to Luna’s dream?”

Starlight positively beamed at the idea, probably thankful for a reason to stop talking about Star Swirl. She trotted to the table and grabbed a dozen focusing lenses, a hoofful of crystals, and an assortment of the other doo-dads she had bought.

Her reaction brought a smile to Twilight’s face. Slow to start, but sure enough, there it was, that wonderful smile that made it impossible for me to hold back my own.

They dove into a heated discussion on which hypothesis to test first, and the trinkets and baubles started floating every which way, while the retractable pointer snapped all over the chalkboard.

Their passion was all but infectious, but I sat back, watching, listening. It had been a while since the last time I could just sit and listen to my friends do what they love. It was a sight that could warm the coldest heart.

And for me, I felt the warmest I had about my nightmares in a long time.

Author's Note

Onward and Upward!

This story has undergone changes. Some comments may no longer make sense or be relevant.

XIII - Manehattan

Sunset Shimmer stared out the train car window as the grassy plains of Equestria’s countryside rolled by. It was always a sight. So much green, so much life, so much potential. There was an entire world out there for her to explore.

The door to Sunset and Copper’s little room slid open, and the chugga chugga of the train’s engine got a little louder. It snapped back into place, and the dark-wood paneling again muffled the engine.

“So why go to this thing, anyway?” Sunset asked, knowing it was Copper who had entered. “What even is a seminar for manedressing?” She turned to look at her friend, who had bought a little bag of sweets off the trolley pony.

Copper popped one of the candies in her mouth. “It’s not just manedressing, it’s also makeup and stuff. All the newest fashions and styles.”

“Why not just read a magazine for that?”

Copper raised an eyebrow at Sunset. “Because it’s all about being ahead of the curve. Everything in the magazines is at least a month old by the time you’re reading it.”

“Well, okay, but you don’t even do any of that stuff. At least, like, not professionally.”

Sunset eyed Copper’s sweetbag. She wouldn’t admit it, but she kinda wanted one, whatever they were.

“So? What’s wrong with using my license to keep ahead of the game for myself?” She flashed Sunset a sly wink. “Gotta be on top of it if I wanna be on top of it, if you know what—”

“I know what you mean,” Sunset said, rolling her eyes. Not back for even a second and already off to the races with the dick jokes.

Laughing, Copper hopped up on the bench seat and leaned against Sunset. The smell of a honeydrop candy on her breath could have attracted all the bees in a mile radius. She nuzzled Sunset on the cheek.

Sunset pulled her into a hug. “Well, we can’t have all those nameless and totally un-objectified stallions keeping my tour guide away from me while we’re here.”

Copper squeezed her back. “Don’t worry about that, Sunset. I’m sure they’d let you join in.”

Oh, that dirty mind of hers… Sunset pushed her away. Maybe a little too hard, seeing as Copper fell off the bench.

“Oh my gosh, I’m so sorry!” Sunset said. “I didn’t mean to push you that hard.”

Copper snickered and got up to her haunches. “Uh-huh. Sure you didn’t. You just wanted me on my back, get a head start on them. Can’t even wait ’til we’re at the hotel to get frisky, can you?”

Sunset slanted her mouth. Nope. Not taking that bait. She turned back to the window.

“Wow,” Copper said. “You’re bein’ a real party pooper today. Everything alright?” She retook her seat on the bench.

“Yeah, I’m fine. Just can only handle so much Copper at a time. Gotta pace myself, right?” Sunset tossed her head over her shoulder to try and catch her off guard with one of Copper’s own trademark winks. It never felt as natural as Copper made it look, but the raised eyebrow-smirk combo Copper fired back said it hit home to some extent.

Copper flipped her mane out of her eyes and countered with a carelessly seductive smile, as if to show her how it’s done. Though, Sunset swore she saw a little blush hiding under it all.

“Oh, well don’t you worry,” Copper said. “There’s plenty of me to go around, and you can tell Doppler aaall about it later.”

Sunset wrinkled her nose. Yeah, this sort of talk still bothered her, even when she used it against Copper. And especially if Copper turned it back on her. And super especially if she dragged Doppler into the picture.

Copper snorted and held a hoof up to her mouth. “That look on your face. Watching you try to be raunchy is so adorable.”

Sunset frowned into the distance behind her. “Yeah. So adorable.”

“You know,” she cooed. “I wonder how down for that he’d actually be.” She wore an expectant grin, just waiting for Sunset’s reaction. At the very least, Sunset could deny her the satisfaction of taking that bait. She’d rather gag herself with a spoon.

“Oh, come on,” Copper said after a beat of silence. “I know that face. You can’t actually be bothered by that. I’ve said way worse stuff than that before.”

“Yeah, but never about Doppler.”

“Well, I kinda have, but okay.” She wore a growing smile that ended in a giggle and a shake of her head. “Hey. What’s bothering you? Seriously.”

Sunset sighed. She closed her eyes and leaned her forehead against the window. “I don’t know. It’s just, he’s been gone almost two months now. I haven’t seen him since then, obviously, and he hardly writes.”

“Didn’t you say he writes to you like once a week?”

“Yeah, but that’s once a week.”

“Well,” Copper said around a mouthful of what was probably another one of her candies. “At least he’s writing to you. That’s a lot more than most mares can hope for from their stallions.”

Sunset rolled her head back and forth against the glass in what hopefully passed as shaking her head. “I mean, I guess? But… is it wrong to wish for more than that? How does this even work? What am I supposed to be doing right now? Am I being needy?”

Silence filled in the cracks between the engine’s muffled chugga chugga.

“Copper?”

“Hey!” Copper said more enthusiastically than she had any reason to. “You should see the dam they got here. Thing’s huge!”

Huh? Wait, that was the letter Doppler sent yesterday. Sunset whipped around to see the letter floating in Copper’s mint-green aura.

“Copper, what the hay!” She swiped at it with her hoof, but not before Copper whisked it out of reach. She threw her own magic around the letter, but couldn’t get a grip without the risk of tearing it, and so she gave up in a huff. “Seriously? Haven’t you heard of privacy?”

“Relax, Sunset. One, we’re besties, meaning no secrets. Two, it was halfway sticking out of your saddlebags. You’re crazy if you think I’m not gonna take a peek.”

Sunset glowered at her before sighing. Well, best not to start a fight before their vacation even started. Not like the letter had anything compromising in it anyway.

Copper’s smile came back slowly, punctuated by a laugh. “But the co-op, yaddah yaddah. Tracking a storm cell off the coast. Lots of rain… Wouldn’t mind getting caught in it with you? Sweet Celestia, he’s gonna give me cancer if he keeps this up.”

Sunset rolled her eyes. Copper had no tolerance for sentimentality. Probably why she never landed an actual coltfriend.

“Anyways,” Copper continued, her eyes snapping back and forth like a typewriter. “Hope you’re doing well. Blah blah blah, romantic mushy stuff. Sincerely yours, Gorgeous Eyes?” She shot Sunset a disbelieving smile. “He seriously signed it like that?”

Okay, maybe one compromising thing. Sunset snatched the letter, now that Copper wasn’t playing keep-away. She folded it neatly and slipped it into her saddlebags. That was the last time she let anything stick out the flap when Copper was around.

“Yeah. He signs them all that way, thanks to you and your big mouth.”

Copper laughed. “Oh, Celestia, that’s awesome. I really do have to keep telling him embarrassing things about you.”

“I will legitimately kill you if you do that.”

“Yeah, and how many times have you threatened me like that before?” She raised an expectant eyebrow and underlined it with a knowing smirk. A hoofful of Professor Phoenix Flare’s pyromancy spells came to mind, along with visions of what Copper might look like without eyebrows.

“That’s what I thought,” Copper said when Sunset didn’t respond. “But seriously, look at this…” She floated Doppler’s letter out of Sunset’s bag and unfolded it. His scraggly cursive stared Sunset in the face. “Like, really look at it. This is a letter. From your coltfriend. To you. He’s talking to you in the best way that he can. He wants this as much as you do.”

“I…” Sunset let out a sigh and looked at her hooves. “I just… Why does it have to be so complicated?”

The letter fell to Sunset’s hooves. Copper’s smile had all but vanished, and her voice took on a frighteningly sober tone:

“Sunset, you have no idea what the word ‘complicated’ means.”

Sunset frowned at her. “And you do?”

Copper stared back. She seemed unsure whether to frown or smile. Whatever it was, it turned into one of those eyeroll and snort combos of hers.

“Oh, you know me. Such deep, emotional connections with all my lays, right?”

Sunset shook her head weakly. Of course. Leave it to Copper to lay the smartassery on thick. Oh, Copper… Don’t ever change.

Copper leaned in closer. “But really,” she half whispered. “He’s taking this seriously, in as serious a way as he can. He wants this. He wants you, Sunset.”

Copper threw on a roguish grin and elbowed her in the ribs. “Also, you know he totally wants some of that sweet Sunset puss—”

“Copper, why!?” Sunset shouted to the ceiling.

Copper let out a laugh that ended in a snort. “You know why. Because your reactions are priceless.”

Sunset glared at Copper, who stared back with that dang smile of hers. Sunset sighed, shook her head, and turned back to the window. She could never be mad at that smile.

The engine chugged along in the wake of their silence. A warm weight pressed against Sunset’s back, and a familiar pair of hooves wrapped around her.

“You’re my best friend, Sunset,” Copper said. “I just want you to realize how special you are. To both of us.” She rested her head in the crook of Sunset’s neck. “Don’t ever forget that, okay?”

Sunset kept her gaze trained out the window. She knew Copper meant well, but it didn’t stop the aching feeling that things just weren’t how they should be. Still, Copper was there, and with her best friend by her side, Sunset knew she could get through anything.

“Okay,” she said. She couldn’t think of anything else to say, and so she found herself resting her head against Copper’s as they quietly watched the Equestrian countryside roll past their window.

• • •

Quickly enough, Manehattan rolled into view, and its towering cityscape welcomed Sunset and Copper with a flash of sunlight off its thousands of windows. A final hiss of steam signaled the train pulling into station, and the two gathered their bags from the overhead racks.

It was cool for a summer day. Manehattan’s weather team had scheduled clear skies, but must have had some sort of lake effect going on with the ocean to keep the sun from beating down as relentlessly as it should. That was a Doppler question. Sunset had never read much on weather stuff.

Against her usual habits, she hadn’t packed every last nook and cranny of her schedule with things to do around Manehattan. For once, she elected to just let the day come to her, follow a sort of Copper-like whimsy while her friend was busy with the seminar.

“So how long is this thing going to take?” Sunset asked as they stepped through the front doors of the Mareiott Hotel.

“It’s only running until noon today. They have a thing tomorrow, but I doubt it’ll be anything as useful as today’s stuff.”

The mare at the check-in counter wore a cute little gold-trimmed maroon-and-black suit jacket and bowtie, and the most genuine smile Sunset had seen all day. She got them their room key, and a bellhop escorted them up to room 834. When the door opened, Sunset and Copper gasped in unison.

Inside awaited all things crystal and gold and stained wood. A massive window dominated the far wall, inviting them to witness its commanding view of the cityscape. Even having just stepped into the room, Sunset could see the hoofball stadium from here.

“Damn, Sunset,” Copper said. “Princess Celestia knows how to treat a pony.”

Sunset blushed and shot the bellhop an embarrassed glance. She didn’t like showboating her status as Celestia’s pupil in front of strangers, or even accepting these sorts of perks that bordered on cronyism.

The bellhop didn’t seem to care, at least. He yawned like a stallion who had stayed up too late with his friends. Considering he looked about university age like them, that probably wasn’t far from the truth.

Copper tossed her saddlebags into the little space between the bed and the bathroom wall and flopped onto the bed. Well, into might have been a more accurate description. It practically swallowed her whole. She flailed her hooves around as if making a snow angel, swishing them along the fabric and rolling around to feel the silk with every inch of her body.

“Oh, Sunset,” she said. “You need to try out this bed. It’s so comfy!”

Sunset giggled and trotted over. She put a hoof on it, and yeah, it was what she assumed walking on a cloud felt like.

“Yeah, that’s comfy, alright.”

The bellhop unloaded their cart, bowed, and left before Sunset could tip him. The door shut behind him, and a happy silence overtook the room.

Copper rolled onto her stomach, wearing a conspiratorial grin. “What’d you think of the bellhop? Totally bangable, right?”

“Uh, no. Not really. Doppler’s cuter anyway.”

Copper sat up and formed a little “o” with her mouth. “Wow, Sunset. You’re using the word.”

“What, ‘cute’? What’s so weird about that?”

Copper pulled her saddlebags up onto the bed so she could rummage through them. “Nothing. It’s just that it’s a step closer to you calling him ‘hot,’ and that’s just a stone’s throw away from poppin’ a squat on his—”

“Yooou don’t need to finish that sentence.”

“That sentence? Maybe not, but finishing is definitely somewhere on that list, right?” She waggled her eyebrows at Sunset.

Sunset deadpanned at her. She didn’t even bother dignifying that quip with a response. For real, Copper’s lewd jokes were getting more and more baseless and tryhard. And more Doppler-centric, which was all the more aggravating.

Sunset had better things to do than think about Doppler’s anatomy. Unless it was his robin’s-egg-blue eyes oh my gosh. But rather than dwell on that and get a stupid, dreamy smile on her face that would only give Copper more ammunition, she trotted to the window. The view almost took her breath away.

She had stood on Celestia’s balcony a few times in her life, and the view never failed to give her goosebumps. But where Celestia’s balcony boasted a grand scene of glittering gold and whitewashed stone and all the beautiful perfection that was Canterlot’s architecture, Manehattan offered a different aesthetic.

Rigid high-rises of brick and glass stared back at her from across the street and those beyond. Trees dotted the sidewalk below to add brief splashes of green to a world ruled by concrete grey and rusty brown. In the narrow strips of sidewalk visible between the trees, ponies trotted along like ants through a maze.

The faint haze of industry loomed over the city, but rather than dulling the view, it almost seemed to constrain its aesthetic, or at least act as a happy little frame around the picture that was Manehattan. A little dirty? Yeah, but leaps and bounds more down-to-Equestria than Canterlot. Here, the film of dirt and grime symbolized hard work and progress, whereas the lack of it back home felt more a façade, a demanded perfection that detracted from its equinity.

“You done getting all philosophical over there?” Copper said.

Sunset blinked, and there went the mysticism of the moment. She turned around to see Copper lying on the bed, leafing through a tourist’s pamphlet she had snagged from the concierge’s desk downstairs. Well, not really leafing through it, since her eyes were locked on Sunset.

Copper let her casual smile inflate into a grin as she tossed the pamphlet onto the dresser. She rolled onto her flank, crossing her hooves over the edge of the bed as if posing for a pin-up photo session, and damn if those curves didn’t get a jealous flutter going in Sunset’s heart.

“What are you talking about?” Sunset asked.

“You were staring silently out the window for like three minutes,” Copper said. She tapped a hoof to her temple. “I know what goes on inside that head of yours. You were filling your head with all sorts of dramatic philosophical thoughts about this city’s potential, weren’t you?”

Sunset stepped back, blushing. “I, I, no I wasn’t. I was…”

“Getting lost in the whimsy of your Manehattan expectations?”

Sunset huffed. “Do you always have to finish my sentences with some rewording of what you just said?”

“Well, if a spoon’s made of silver, you call it a silver spoon, right?” She batted her eyes and oh, she was just the most unbearable thing sometimes.

Sunset rolled her eyes and made for their luggage by the door. She haphazardly tossed her bags against the far wall and threw Copper’s at her on the bed.

“Hey! Careful!” Copper said, shielding herself from her flying luggage. “I’ve got some good shit in there.” Her saddlebags hit the bed, and its contents spilled out like a miniature avalanche—an assortment of bottles of foundations and makeups and mascaras and other cosmetic stuff Sunset couldn’t name.

“Why?” Sunset said, raising an eyebrow at her. “It’s not like you actually use any of that stuff.”

Yet another checkbox on the “things to be jealous of Copper for” list. In all the time Sunset had known her, she couldn’t rightly remember a day where Little Miss Bottle-And-Brush-For-A-Cutie-Mark had used more than a spritz of hairspray for a bit of pizazz when she was feeling “extra spunky,” as she put it. Really putting her special talent to good use there, wasn’t she?

“Well,” Copper said, placing them one by one into her suitcase. “Mom kinda… collects them for me. It makes her happy whenever she sees them, so I just kinda got into the habit of toting them around. Besides, they’re still mine. That should be enough reason not to fuck with them.”

Fair enough. Respecting one’s property and all that. Couldn’t demand that of Copper about Doppler’s letter if she didn’t follow that rule herself. Though, she couldn’t help but notice a folded note among the contents Copper hadn’t yet put away. It was the same paper Doppler used for his letters. Curiosity got the better of her, and she unfolded it.

Hey Copper, I need your help with somethi—

The note crinkled itself up and flew away in Copper’s mint-green aura. “Hey, now. Spoilers,” she said with a wink.

“That was Doppler’s writing. What’s he writing to you for?”

“Nothing.” She fixed Sunset with a disarming smile. “Like I said. Spoilers.”

Sunset raised an eyebrow at her and frowned. “What do you mean ‘spoilers’?”

Copper tossed her suitcase back into the little space between the bed and the bathroom wall. “I mean exactly that. Spoilers. It’s kinda self-explanatory. Just you knowing that there is a thing to spoil is enough of a spoiler.”

“But what’s the thing?”

Copper frowned at her. “Were you even listening just now?”

“But you just—”

“No buts. Unless they’re firm stallion butts.” Copper gave one of her dramatically over-the-top winks before strapping her saddlebags on. “Now stop asking.”

Sunset threw on her best pouty face and set Copper dead in her crosshairs.

Copper smirked. “You really think that’s gonna work on me, Sunnybuns?”

Well, that was the hope. Sunset turned her pout into a hopeful smile. Twisted into, more like, for how strained it felt. And yeah, given Copper’s snort and shake of her head, it didn’t look like this was going anywhere.

Damn Copper and her talent for this sort of thing. Not only did she have all the looks, but she had all the charm, too.

“It’s a surprise, and that’s that,” Copper said. She cinched up her saddlebags and gave Sunset a mindful glance. Another tug on the saddle strap enunciated the point.

“Alright, so I’m off to the thing,” she added. “You go have fun doing whatever millions of things you already have planned. See ya!” And with that, she was out the door.

The door shut behind her, and Sunset stood in silence. Well, almost silence. The muffled din of carriages and city noise snuck in through the window.

Sunset frowned at the door. So what, she was supposed to simply ignore the fact they were keeping a secret from her? Wasn’t Copper the one that said no secrets between besties?

A surprise, though. Sunset smiled. Her birthday was coming up soon. Doppler would know that, and Copper was definitely the kind of mare to help him make it special. She was just that kind of friend.

Sunset rolled backward onto the bed and sighed. It was plush, and the cool silk begged her to swish her hooves all over it and feel how soft it was oh my gosh.

Her dorm back home was nice, all things considered, but with the few extra bits Celestia had given them as a congratulations on another successful semester, the upgraded suite was unparalleled. She could have lain there for hours. But that would mean missing out on all the city had to offer, and she saw at least three things on their way to the hotel that she just had to explore.

It took some extreme self-motivation, but Sunset managed to roll her lazy butt out of bed. With that initial hurdle out of the way, throwing on her saddlebags and skipping out the door came easily enough.

The street roared with the sounds of stomping hooves and rickety carts taxiing ponies to and fro. A general chatter floated above those using the sidewalks, and the air hung ripe with the smell of discovery.

She craned her neck to look up at the tippy tops of all the skyscrapers. They were so far up! The perspective made some of them look as if they were coming to a point, and she couldn't tell if the shapes flitting between them were low-flying birds or high-flying pegasi.

Back at ground level, a multitude of fancy-looking ponies went about whatever business Manehattanites went about. They all wore colorful saddles and top hats and their manes done up and other “shi shi foo foo” stuff, as her mom used to say. Nothing out of the ordinary in Canterlot, but to see it in another city took Sunset by surprise.

Apparently, stuffy ponies lived all over Equestria. Who knew?

But anyway, first things first: the ice cream parlor. Like usual, Sunset had hit the snooze button one too many times and missed out on breakfast, and she wasn’t one to spoil her appetite with candy on the train. She was, however, one to spoil her appetite with ice cream, because that wasn’t candy. Technically. That was totally a case-by-case basis, depending on the flavor.

Undoubtedly, Copper would have some snide remark about that.

Copper… That note. What surprise were they planning? What surprise could they plan? She was awfully protective of it. But that was the whole point of surprises, really.

Whatever. It was ice cream time.

Sunset trotted past the innumerable storefronts and skyscrapers. Cologne and perfume hung heavy in the air, and it brought a smirk to her lips that she couldn’t attribute to the stores themselves or all the ponies brushing past her.

The giant neon-wire ice-cream cone on the corner wasn’t lit in the daytime, but it nevertheless shone like a beacon to welcome ponies in for a tasty treat.

The inside reminded Sunset of Gumball’s back in Canterlot, complete with roller-skating waitresses, swiveling barstools, and all the flashy chrome a retro dive bar could furnish. The soda jerk behind the counter wore one of those silly paper hats and a smile as infectious as the swing music crackling overhead. His orange coat reminded her of sherbet, so she got a small to go.

A quick jaunt down the street, and same as the ice cream shop, entering the toy store was like stepping back in time.

Lacquered wood reached up up up toward the distant ceiling, where wind-up toy biplanes strung from the rafters spun excited circles. Little train sets click-clacked through mock towns of prancing ponies, marquee boards, and grassy hillsides that ringed the periphery of the store.

Foals ran every which way, looking at all the toys and gizmos. Some played with Link-’em Logs and other buildables on two large wooden tables while others rolled toy carriages around on a giant-sized version of that carpet city Sunset used to have as a foal.

An old stallion with more liver spots than hairs on his head sat behind the desk, tinkering with the wheel of a little fire truck. All the while, he wore a smile that said this place was his life’s work.

Seeing that kind of pride worked up a sense of gratification in Sunset, a sense of being proud with him. Even though he was probably old enough to be her great grandfather, he was still a kid at heart.

When Sunset asked him where to find the building blocks, he had the kindest voice she had ever heard—not that she would ever admit that to Celestia—and he happily pointed her toward the back of the store.

They had literally everything here. From paddleballs, to wind-up chariots, to those helmet clappers she always wanted as a foal but could never convince her mom to buy. They even had those whirlibird sticks that for some reason reminded Sunset of dragonflies instead of actual whirlibird seeds.

She spent what felt like hours wandering with a nostalgic smile on her face, looking at all the little things that made up her early childhood. And then she realized it actually had been hours when the cuckoo clock above the old stallion’s desk cuckooed noon.

She quickly bought a whirlibird stick for Doppler, a jewelry puzzle box for Copper, a bent-nail puzzle for Whistle Wind, and of course a bag of life-size water-and-grow bugs for Lily. Then it was back to the Mareiott where she and Copper agreed to meet. She missed out on the sunglasses shop, but maybe Copper would like to swing by after lunch.

Sunset found her in the lobby lying on a loveseat, resting her head in the crook of one hoof, the other swinging lazily off the side. She was the only pony there other than the concierge.

When she saw Sunset come in, she sat up and threw on a big smile. “Hey, you. Thought you went and got yourself lost.”

“Sorry I’m late. I got distracted.”

“Yeah, I’m not surprised. There’s lots of shiny things in Manehattan, aren’t there?”

“Oh, shut up.” Sunset turned back toward the door. “So what do you want to eat?”

As much as she meant it, she wasn’t all that hungry herself. That sherbet ice cream from earlier actually had kind of spoiled her appetite. Hopefully the walk to wherever would fix that.

“Hayburgers sound good,” Copper said.

“Okay. I think I passed a place on my way here.”

They headed south on Canterbury until they reached a park where a jazz band played for a small crowd of ponies and crossed the street for a tiny brick building sandwiched between two high-rises. Everything about it screamed hole-in-the-wall, from the large neon sign reading “Rusty’s” to the giant sticker advertisements in the windows. But if any universal truth existed of big-city restaurants, it was that those were always the best places to grab a bite.

A black-and-white checkered floor welcomed them into a dark interior, buffed with enough wax to figure skate on. Exposed brick poked out from around the hundreds of pictures, bottles, bicycle wheels, street signs, and all sorts of other random tchotchke fire hazards that were hung up, nailed to, or otherwise affixed to the walls. Some generic light rock music played in the background of the conversations drifting over from the bar.

An eggshell-white pegasus mare done up in a loose fitting t-shirt and red ascot welcomed them in and showed them to a booth. She said something else before walking away, but Sunset was too distracted by her tattoo of a dolphin swimming up her left foreleg.

“You enjoying the view?” Copper asked.

Sunset blinked and shook her head. “Huh?”

Copper wore a devious grin. “She’s got a pretty nice flank, but I do have to remind you you’re spoken for. Window shopping only for you.”

“I— What?” Sunset flushed beet red. “I was looking at her tattoo, not her. Can you imagine how much time it would take to keep that thing looking the way it does? That’s on fur, not skin. Think of how much bleaching and dying and—”

“Yeah, yeah. You don’t need to hide it, Sunnybuns. Your secret is safe with me.” She winked.

Oh, that mare could be impossible at times. Sunset had the mind to say something, but the waitress trotted back over.

“What’ll you be having today?” She gave them a cheerful smile after pulling a notepad and pencil from under her folded wing. Whenever she glanced Sunset’s way, her smile grew a little.

Sunset coughed, hoping the mare hadn’t, uh… misinterpreted anything. For what it was worth, though, she had breathtaking amber eyes.

Sunset picked up her menu. “I’ll take an, um… the number one. Small soda.”

“What,” Copper said. “You’re not gonna just cart out the whole kitchen for once?”

“I’m allowed to eat however much I want, thank you very much.” Sunset stuck her tongue out at her.

The waitress giggled and scribbled down her order. “One number one. And for you, ma’am?” she said, turning to Copper.

“I’ll take a number three,” Copper said. “With a water, please.”

“Fries or hash browns?”

Copper’s eyes lit up. “Oooh, hash browns? Yes, please.”

The waitress mhmed and nodded with a final swoosh on her notepad. “I’ll get those right in for you two.”

She snapped her pencil and notepad in the crook of her wing. Before turning for the kitchen, she gave Sunset a quick smile and wink.

“Wow, look at you,” Copper said. “If I had to guess, she liked the way you were checkin’ her out earlier.”

Sunset clomped her hooves on the table and leaned in. “I did not ‘check her out,’” she whisper-hissed.

“Uh-huh. Tell it to the judge.”

“Yeah, okay. And even if I did, who made you such an expert on…” Sunset waggled her hooves in the air. “Orientation?”

“It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know when somepony’s flirting with you. I can’t help it if you’re too dense to see all the signs.”

“What do you mean too dense? She winked at me. Doesn’t mean she’s, like, into me.”

“Sunset.” Copper shook her head and giggled. “We really need to talk about your social awareness.”

“What do you mean? Why are you so adamant about this? And why is it my problem that you apparently have Equestria’s most powerful gaydar.”

“Because it’s a useful skill to have. You’d realize that if you actually had one,” she added, more flippantly than she had any right to.

Sunset rolled her eyes. It was like Celestia had personally ordered Copper to get into all of her business. Wasn’t carting her along for her first date with Doppler enough?

“Fine, Miss Know-It-All,” Sunset said. “Then what does your gaydar say about me?”

“It says your pride and self-consciousness are too big to let you act even remotely casually in this conversation.” A slow “change my mind” smile spread across her face.

Sunset bristled at the accusation. “I don’t have pride. And I’m not self-conscious.”

“Yeah you do, and yeah you are. Just listen to how defensive you’re getting.”

“I’m not getting defensive,” Sunset said, crossing her hooves on the table. “If your gaydar’s so flawless, then what’s it say about you?”

Copper sniffed. She held her gaze for a moment before looking away and shaking her head.

“It says I’m the gayest of ’em all!”

A slow, disbelieving grimace started on Sunset’s face, but Copper snorted before she finished. The giggle fits ensued on both ends.

“You’re the worst, Copper,” Sunset said.

“I learn from the best!” She reached over the table and booped Sunset on the nose.

As if to bookend that line of conversation, the waitress again strolled over. She made a show of carrying their plates with her wings and putting on enough hip sway to turn all the stallions’ heads at the bar.

“Here’s your number three,” she said, setting Copper’s plate down. “And the number one for you.”

She slid Sunset’s plate down her wing with enough flair to rival a circus act. She even brought an extra cup of dipping sauce just for her. “Can I get you two anything else?” she asked, smiling at Sunset.

“No, I think we’re good,” Sunset replied.

“Just let me know if you need anything.” The mare nodded and trotted off.

“Whoa,” Copper said, staring at her mound of food. “That’s way more than the picture made it look like.”

Sunset stared, too, and the more she did, the more “mound of food” seemed an appropriate description. An open-faced three-patty hayburger with a hoofful of what looked like everything they could find in the kitchen that wasn’t nailed down.

“Yeah, that actually looks really good,” Sunset said.

They shared a glance and, without a word, swapped plates.

“So much for not carting off the kitchen,” Copper said. She levitated her hayburger for a quick bite and gave a satisfied nod.

“Says the mare who ordered the thing literally called The Kitchen Sink.”

“How was I supposed to know it was going to be so much?” Copper threw her hooves in the air. She clomped them down hard, and a few of the other patrons looked their way. “The phrase is ‘everything but the kitchen sink,’ so I figured the kitchen sink part would be smaller.”

Sunset snorted. She took a bite of her now-food, and yeah, it was worth the swap. Hopefully Copper wouldn’t realize Sunset had her hash browns.

“This is, like, something you would do, not me,” Copper said.

“Yeah, well look who did it.”

Copper raised an eyebrow, then threw a hay fry at Sunset, hitting her just below the base of her horn.

“Hey!” Sunset caught it before it fell. She considered throwing it back, but ate it instead. Yeah, this place’s hash browns were way better.

They both tucked into their meals and let the low thrum of the rock music on the overhead fill in the silence. Well, Sunset tucked into her meal. Copper… not so much.

The way she chewed slowly, without any of the gusto from before. Just Copper fussing over her figure like always. Never wanting to eat too much for fear of gaining a single ounce of body fat.

But as Sunset jealously had to admit, it was a body worth fussing over. And that mane she so carelessly flung over her shoulder. A pair of stallions across the way were eyeing her up.

“See something you like?” Copper asked Sunset. She threw on a salacious grin and waggled her eyebrow.

“No, but I think I found your friends for the evening.” Sunset shoveled in another mouthful of hash browns.

Copper tossed a glance over her shoulder, hmmed, and turned back with a casual smile. “Maybe you did. And maybe if you’re good, I’ll let you join in,” she added, winking.

Sunset wrinkled her nose. Yeah, that was enough smartass talk for one day. She tapped her hoof on the table, thinking of a way to change the subject.

“So what’s this surprise you and Doppler are supposedly cooking up for me?”

Copper laughed behind her burger. “I told you, I can’t tell you that. That’s kinda the whole point of a surprise.”

“Well yeah, but can’t you tell me even just a liiittle bit?” Sunset held up her hooves an inch apart from each other.

“Sunset, where’s your dictionary?”

“Uh, back at school where I left it?”

“Well, next time you go back there, be sure to look up the word ‘surprise.’”

Sunset rolled her eyes. “But really.”

“But nothing! It’s a surprise, Sunset. Jeez. This is why we can’t have nice things.”

Sunset raised an eyebrow. “And what’s that supposed to mean?”

Copper broke down into a laughing fit, almost faceplanting into her food. “Sunset, you’re adorable. You know that?”

“Uh-huh.” Sunset stared into her plate. That was the sort of thing Doppler would say. Oh, Doppler… What was in that letter?

Was it… was it even a surprise? Sunset watched Copper happily munching on her burger. What could they possibly be writing to each other about? What if…

No, she didn’t want to think about that. They wouldn’t do that to her. Still, her ears fell back, and she ate the rest of her meal in silence.

A few minutes later, the waitress swung by with their checks, sliding Sunset’s in front of her with the tips of her primaries. She caught Sunset’s eye with a friendly smile.

“No rush,” she said. Her tail accidentally brushed against Sunset’s leg when she turned back for the counter.

Copper rolled her eyes. “Big rush.”

She slapped a hoofful of bits on the counter—enough to pay for the both of them, plus a tip—and stood up, abandoning the leftover half of her burger. “Alright, let’s get going.”

“Hey, wait,” Sunset said, frowning at her check. “She didn’t charge me for my drink.”

“Of course not. Let’s get out of here before you two start making out.”

Sunset snapped her frown to Copper. “We’re not going to make out. Where did that even come from?”

Copper groaned at the ceiling. “Come on, Miss Oblivious.”

“But she didn’t charge me for my drink. I have to go tell her she made a mistake!”

“No shit you have to talk to her. That’s the point. Come on!”

With that, Copper yanked Sunset out the door and off to their next big-city adventure.

• • •

“I still don’t get why you were so rude about that waitress,” Sunset said. “She was really nice.”

She stared out the window of their hotel room. All the city lights twinkled in the dark like a reflection of the night sky on a quiet lake. Dozens of ponies still filed through the streets, little shadows trotting from lamplight to lamplight.

“Too nice,” Copper said. She lay reading the tourist pamphlet, snuggled up with one of the big, poofy decorative pillows that matched the maroon curtains.

“There’s no such thing as too nice.”

“Sunset, remember our conversation about my gaydar?”

Sunset turned to face her. “No. We’re not having this argument again. There’s no way she was hitting on me.”

Copper burst out laughing. She slapped the pillow and fixed Sunset with a sardonic grin. “Okay, fine. Then do you remember how I said you’re adorable?”

Sunset pursed her lips. She turned away before the heat rushing to her cheeks could give Copper more ammunition.

“Hey,” Copper said. Her voice carried softly in the silence and wrapped around Sunset’s shoulders like a pair of hooves. It brought Sunset’s ears flat against her head and put a little smile on her face. “Come here,” she said, and Sunset couldn’t resist.

Copper gave Sunset a warm hug that lasted longer than it probably should have, not that she was complaining. Being held by Copper was one of the most natural and wonderful things in the world. Even as she pulled away, the comforting weight of Copper’s hooves on the nape of her neck urged her to stay near.

“On the off chance that she actually was hitting on you,” Copper said, “what would you have done?”

Sunset looked up at the square of street light splashed across the ceiling. “I don’t know. Probably just have said sorry and that I was both not interested and already taken. And that I’m not into mares? At least… I don’t think I am.”

Copper smirked and leaned in. “We could always test that theory.”

Sunset reared back. “Whoa, ’kay now. Save it for the stallions there.”

Copper laughed and jabbed Sunset in the chest. “We’re still gonna have to work on that uptightness of yours.”

A skeptical frown was all Sunset could bring herself to dignify that with.

“Well anyway,” Copper said. “I’m glad to hear you’re not some closed-minded homophobe. Couldn’t have you being that socially retarded on me.”

Sunset raised an eyebrow. “And if I was?”

“I’d start calling you Mom.”

Sunset frowned. “That sounds like some sort of weird kink nickname.”

“Only if you want it to be.” Copper winked.

Sunset rolled her eyes and turned back to the window. A few of the lights in the windows across the way blinked out, other ponies with other lives heading to bed. Down below, somepony hailed a cab, but somepony else jaywalked in front of it just as it pulled up. They were getting into an argument.

“Was she really hitting on me?” Sunset asked.

“Oh, so now you believe me?”

“I didn’t say I believe you,” Sunset said. “I just asked you a question.”

Copper broke down into a fit of laughter. That dang smile of hers lit up the room more than any city street light.

“She was ready to sit on your face right there in the restaurant,” she said.

Sunset opened her mouth, then clamped it shut. She wasn’t going to set herself up for another quip. Surprisingly, Copper didn’t follow up on it with some other gross innuendo.

“So,” Sunset said, making sure to keep her voice level so that Copper couldn’t twist it as easily. “Say, hypothetically, that she was hitting on me.”

“‘Hypothetically,’” Copper chimed in.

“Hypothetically. What would you have done if you were in my place?”

“Me?” Copper said. “Probly hit on her back until she was all hot and bothered, and then popped a kiss right on your lips just to fuck with her.” She made a kissy face, complete with smoochy noises.

Sunset scowled. “If you did that, I would have slapped you into next semester.”

“Hey now, what happened to that open-mindedness of yours?”

Sunset laughed. “Says the mare who would lead somepony on only for them to find out she wasn’t actually into them.”

Copper flicked her ears back against her head, but found a reason in that dirty mind of hers to smile and blow out a quiet snort. Surprisingly, she didn’t push that envelope any further and instead let the silence filter through, her eyes wandering about the room.

Sunset was thankful for the end of that line of conversation. She turned her gaze back toward the window. The distant sounds of streetcarts and big-city noise bled through the glass.

“Hey, Sunset?”

“Yeah?”

Copper wore a smile that Sunset rarely ever saw. It was an endearing smile, like the ones Celestia usually wore, one that only scratched the surface of whatever happy thoughts might be tumbling through her head. Seeing it on Copper, though, made it… not quite weird, but different.

“I just… wanted to say something.” Copper’s eyes fell to the pillow beneath her hooves, then traveled across the way to the dresser. She bunched up her hooves in front of herself.

“Well then say it,” Sunset said. “It’s not like you to be all…” She waggled her hoof at Copper. “This.”

Copper raised an eyebrow and said, “It’s not like me to be my usual piece-of-shit self?” She giggled and shook her head. Her smile came back quickly enough, and she scooted closer.

There were words on the tip of her tongue, Sunset could tell, from how Copper folded back her ears as she leaned forward just so, and an almost pleading look filled her eyes.

“I just…” Copper rubbed a hoof up and down her foreleg. Silence. She sighed and looked up at her. “You’re my best friend, Sunset.”

Sunset smiled. “You’re my best friend, too.”

They leaned their heads together, and Copper pulled her into a hug. “I don’t know what I’d do without you,” she whispered.

Sunset giggled. “Sappy much?”

“I’m allowed to be every once in a while, aren’t I?”

Sunset couldn’t argue with that. She closed her eyes and let her head fall to Copper’s chest. She took a deep breath of Copper’s coconut shampoo and let the gesture become the wonderfully intimate if sappy moment Copper wanted.

“Alright,” Copper said. “Enough of that sappy crap. Let’s go see the nightlife, eh?”

Sunset cracked a smile. “Sounds like a plan.”

“Come on, Sunnybuns,” Copper said, hopping off the bed. “Let’s go see how many other ponies we can get to flirt with you without you noticing.” She tail-flicked Sunset on the flank.

Sunset yelped and rubbed her cutie mark. “Ow! Jeez. Could you do that any harder?”

“I don’t know,” Copper said with a sidelong grin. “But if you play your cards right, you’ll be screaming that word later.” She threw open the door and headed out, already warming up her sultry hip sway.

Sunset rolled her eyes. Yeah, like that would happen. After a quiet sigh, Sunset followed her out the door and toward whatever crazy shenanigans Copper could drag them into.

XIV - Porcelain Doll

This whole Mindtap business was an annoyance and a half.

I had dealt with finicky spells before, but they couldn’t hold a candle to the crap we were dealing with. Being in the spell was like trying to see through a dirty window and never knowing what was on the other side.

I twisted about, suspended as I was in the darkness of dream space. I squinted and leaned my head toward the ghostly shapes that drifted past me—washed out images of nameless places, faceless ponies. Still nothing. I couldn’t see through this damn vagueness that choked Luna’s dream like a dense fog.

At least I had control of my directionality this time, and a body. The feeling of drifting listlessly through a dream without any self-volition was disturbing at best.

I floated past the shadow of a yellow pegasus clinging to a storm-beaten raft. Another memory, too far out of reach.

I turned toward it, but something grabbed me by the scruff of the neck, and next thing I knew I stared bleary-eyed into my pillow.

“Easy, Sunset,” a voice said. “Easy… You’re safe. No lasers this time, okay?”

That was… that was Starlight’s voice. I was… where was I again? A sharp pain twinged right between my eyes, and I remembered all too clearly what I had been doing.

I put my hoof to my forehead to try and stall the growing throb. Getting artificially yanked out of a dream never did anyone any favors in the headache department. I blinked away the bleariness to see Starlight’s comforting smile overtop me.

“You alright there?” She brushed my mane back away from my eyes.

I jerked away and swatted at her hoof. I didn’t mean to be rude, just didn’t like people touching my hair. I must have done it harder than I meant, though, because she looked taken aback.

“Sorry,” I said. “I, uh, still waking up.” I forced myself upright and rubbed my head. “But yeah, I just…”

Just what? That was a load of bullshit if I’d ever tried shoveling any. “Well, no. Not really. I still can’t get any further than faint visions.”

Starlight’s smile didn’t waver. “Hey, Canterlot wasn’t built in a day. We’re still breaking ground here. To even get into somepony else’s dreams without Luna is something nopony’s ever done before.”

I couldn’t argue that. Still didn’t help that we’d been at this for almost twelve hours now and still basically on step one. Didn’t help the headache, either. Goddamn, it hurt.

“You got any water?” I asked.

Starlight levitated over a glass from the nearby counter. Room temp, but at this point it didn’t really matter. I chugged it in one go.

“Where’s Twilight?” I asked, wiping my mouth.

She was nowhere to be found. Which wasn’t like her, always hovering over me with a quill and paper whenever I woke up, ready to practically waterboard me for notes.

As much as we all wished Twilight or Starlight could dream dive, as we came to call it, it seemed I was the only one who could to any reasonable extent. We chalked it up to the Tantabus’s presence inside me.

“Right here!” Twilight trotted in with a stack of books trailing behind her and one shoved in her face. Magical Mixologies, read the front cover. “I think we might have been doing it the wrong way this whole time.”

“You think?” was the first thing out of my mouth before I could stop it. Starlight giggled.

“We’ve been trying to use a Mindtap Spell in order to tap into Luna’s mind,” Twilight said. “Obvious, I know”—she waved a hoof and gigglesnorted—“but I got to thinking about some of Starlight’s spells that she would mix together in our sparring lessons, and I was like, ‘hey, what if we tried that with our dream spell?’”

“Mixing a Mindtap Spell with something else?” Starlight rubbed her chin. “I don’t see how it wouldn’t work in theory. But what spells are we mixing, and what parts of them?”

“Well,” I said, standing up and taking the stack of books from Twilight. “For starters, we need the full Mindtap Spell, so we need to append the other spells, not mix them.”

“Not necessarily.” Starlight yanked Twilight’s book from under her nose, earning a frown, and skimmed it herself. “Just because you use the entirety of a spell doesn’t mean you tack another one on at the beginning or end. It depends how the spells interact.”

Well no shit. I took a quick breath to stop myself from snapping at her. God, I had to get this headache under control before it made me say something I regretted.

“Yeah, but the thing is,” I said, “if I remember my A-chem right, magical procession is always linear—it never flows backward. In other words, in order for the spell to work, we would have to arrange the spell matrix so that it never doubles back on itself. Otherwise, the spell fails and who knows what sort of backfire that could cause.”

“Or we homogenize the spell matrix to make a completely new spell.” Starlight threw on a big grin. “Believe me, I’ve run into that problem a few times myself.”

I… well shit. Should have thought of that myself. Damn this headache. I refilled my glass of water, considered it, then decided to just chug straight from the pitcher.

Twilight turned her frown to me. “You know that’s for all of us, right?”

I looked at her, then the pitcher, then her again. I offered her my water glass and a smile.

Twilight rolled her eyes and headed back to the blackboard. A short silence fell over the room as she busied herself with the equations.

The lull in conversation let my brain tumble back into its groove of overthinking things, and my eyes fell on Luna. That familiar, invasive chill clawed its way up my spine.

I remembered all the things she said, the honey-sweet words meant to turn me against Celestia and make a monster out of me. Every time I looked at her, my stomach tied itself in a knot and I wanted to stomp on her face until her teeth fell out.

No matter how hard I tried, I still saw only Nocturne in her. I would never admit it to the others, but I refused to turn my back on her, even while unconscious.

Luna shuddered like a foal having a nightmare and pulled one of the many surrounding pillows to her chest, curling into a fetal position around it. Here and there, the wing she wasn’t lying on spasmed as if she were being electrocuted, and her breathing came in quick choppy spurts. Whatever she was dreaming about, it looked horrible.

Good.

Twilight trotted over from her place by the worktable. She cooed as she pulled a blanket from the pillow pile up over Luna’s shoulders. Like a mother caring for her foal, she massaged Luna’s shoulders and brushed her mane out of her eyes. It made me sick thinking that someone could be so gentle, so nice to her.

“It’s okay,” Twilight whispered. “We’ll fix this. We’ll get you out.”

We’ll get you out.

The phrase sent a shiver down my spine, and a cold sweat started on my withers. It had me tensing up and got that weightless fight-or-flight sensation going in my legs.

No, no no, I was not thinking about that. Don’t think about it. Don’t let the bad thoughts in. Breathe. Breathe and think about the breathing like I’d gotten good at and any and all white noise to push out the memories that had no place here.

“Hey.”

Something touched me on the shoulder, and I jerked back on instinct. It was Starlight, and she stared at me with a mixture of emotions that landed her an expression somewhere between concern and fear.

But she didn’t pull her hoof away. Rather, she held it there, gave me something to focus on, lean against, add to my arsenal of white noise. In reality, it was probably the only thing that kept me from bolting.

“I think that’s our cue,” Starlight said, jerking her head toward Luna.

“I…” I cleared my throat to make sure what came next sounded convincing. “Yeah.”

She pressed her hoof into my shoulder a bit harder. “You’re sure you’re not just saying that?”

“I’m sure I’m not just saying that,” I lied. “Let’s get this over with.”

I didn’t want to do this. I really didn’t. But I had to, and now was the time to make good on the convictions I espoused yesterday, or my conscience would eat me alive.

I sat down in the glyph circle we’d chalked up around Luna, with Twilight and Starlight standing just outside with their array of surge crystals, ready to power another brief stint into the unknown. I took one, two breaths, readying myself for the influx of magic. But before the hum and raspberry glow of Twilight’s horn could fill the room, there was a knock at the door.

We all turned in unison as the left door swung open, and in stepped an impossible pony. A pony that shouldn’t exist. A pony that very much stood, living and breathing, wearing a great blue hat and cloak, with a big snowy beard that trailed all the way down to his hooves.

“S-Star Swirl?” I said. I couldn’t find any more words. He looked just like the portrait in Celestia’s room. Even the bells all around the brim of his hat and cloak looked spot on.

“So I am called, little filly,” he said in a wizened tone that fit better than any generic grandfather voice I could have imagined for him. He strode forward with all the dignity of royalty.

“Star Swirl!” Twilight all but tackled him in a hug.

The two shared a laugh, and Star Swirl straightened his hat. The bells jingled just like I always imagined they would.

“Twilight,” he said. “It is wonderful to see you again. And you, Starlight. I trust you two are doing well?”

“Well,” Starlight said. “As much as anypony can when unsuccessfully trying to exorcize a nightmare monster from Luna’s dreams, eh heh.”

Twilight threw a wing out in front of her and laughed nervously. “I, I think what she means is that yes, we’re doing great. Right, Starlight?”

Starlight rolled her eyes, but smiled.

“But how about you?” Twilight asked before the conversation could get any more awkward.

“I am doing particularly well, given the circumstances. But that aside, who do I have the pleasure of meeting here today?” Star Swirl asked, looking at me.

I blinked. Oh, he was asking me. I was kind of caught up in the whole flowing beard and the hat-bells and the trailing cloak and yes this was really him. The… The real Star Swirl. Not—

No, don’t think that. Don’t think that, don’t think that, don’t think that.

“I, er, sorry,” I said. “I’m Sunset Shimmer. I, uh. Wow. You, uh, you’re really him, huh?”

I must have looked like a complete idiot when I said that for how high he raised his eyebrow. “As we’ve established, yes. Now…”

He walked past me for the reversible blackboard, now crammed to the point of illegibility—up, down, sideways, and even a note-taking spell Twilight whipped up that shifted “layers” when tilting it up or down.

Star Swirl… Just rolling the name around in my head brought up bad memories. My eyes flashed toward Luna, though I didn’t mean to. I couldn’t help it. I wrenched my eyes away from her and took in the cloak and hat and beard again.

This was the real Star Swirl, not some fabrication, not some story meant to bleed my heart dry on my sleeve. This was the stallion who created the Amniomorphic Spell, the father of modern magic in the flesh. The real Star Swirl the Bearded. I had to hammer that into my head for like the fifth time in hopes it would actually stick.

“Interesting,” Star Swirl said, stroking his beard and having a go at tilting the board. “And you mentioned in your letter that you’ve already stabilized the connection without a grounding shard?”

Twilight grinned from ear to ear. “Well, we didn’t do it without grounding it to something. We just figured out how to use the dream-diving pony’s cutie mark as her own ground. And despite how that might sound recursive, it’s actually some pretty ingenious magic on Starlight’s part.”

Starlight smiled bashfully and rubbed the back of her neck. “I-it was nothing, really. Just a thing I learned back in my uh… yeah, I’d rather not talk about that.”

I grinned. She might not have wanted to talk about it, but that didn’t stop me from appreciating just how ingenious an idea it was. I mean, really, how in the heck did she figure out we could ground a channeling spell with the magic inside our own cutie marks? Trade off our special talent for a moment’s clearcasting. I had never heard of anything like it in A-chem. Didn’t think anyone had heard of it ever, except apparently Starlight.

Not that she didn’t have reservations, clearly. She practically begged us not to do it this way. But without feasible access to any capable grounding shards, given that this kind of magic needed ones well beyond anything even Celestia’s coffers could support, we had no other choice.

“So…” Star Swirl turned around with a swirl of his cloak and regarded Starlight with what came across as reserved interest. “How exactly does it work?”

Starlight’s smile turned strained. “I, I said I didn’t really want to talk about it…”

Star Swirl raised an eyebrow at her. “You discover a revolutionary means of magical safety for the sole purpose of this endeavor that you had personally called upon me to assist you with, and you desire not to share? My dear Starlight Glimmer, I recall our differences in our previous encounter, but surely something as paramount as this cannot go unmentioned.”

That got a wince out of Starlight. She scuffed at the floor and looked embarrassed to the point of teleporting out of the room.

“Come now, Starlight,” he continued. “Perhaps one of your colleagues would be more inclined?” He looked to Twilight, who wore a look of uncertainty.

I took a step forward and cleared my throat before throwing on my best hopeful smile. If I were meeting my childhood idol for the first time, I needed to make a good impression. Well, better than the ditzy idiot impression I already made.

“Well, as you know,” I said, “grounding shards are made of diamond or some other gem that’s placed in circuit with a channeled spell so that, you know, everything doesn’t get all explodey if the spell goes haywire.”

“Elementary information, Sunset Shimmer,” Star Swirl said. He stared at me impatiently.

My mouth hung open, and I struggled to find my words. Wow. To the point, then. No need to be a dick about it. Apparently he was only patient with those he considered on par with him.

Fine. Easy enough. I cleared my throat again.

“Well,” I said, “we couldn’t get our hands on a shard strong enough for the magic we have to put into it, so we improvised. Turns out cutie marks, because of whatever magic they have to do with our special talent, can hold a lot of magic.”

“I don’t see why they wouldn’t,” he cut in. “Continue.”

“As I was saying,” I added a tad forcefully. If he was going to demand I prove my worth, he should damn well let me speak my piece. “We use the cutie mark of whoever is dream diving as a reserve for that channeled magic, which then acts as a substitute for the grounding shard.”

“And are there any dangers of this method?” He poked at the discarded, ineffective grounding shards we had lying on the table—emerald, ruby, diamond. He slanted his mouth.

I stammered. “No. Well, yes. But technically no.”

“In my line of work, Miss Shimmer,” Star Swirl said, again studying the board, “I have found room for many technicalities with regards to spells, curses, hexes, what have you.” He turned a steely eye toward me. “But in regards to their failsafes, I have yet to find any.”

I rubbed the side of my leg. “Well, the danger is that if the spell goes haywire, Starlight removes my cutie mark and the break from the circuit causes it to shatter and harmlessly end the spell, like a grounding shard would.”

“Shatter a cutie mark?” The look of disbelief on his face would have made top bidding for a candid camera, had that been a thing here in Equestria.

“Well,” Starlight offered hesitantly. “It’s either that or… boom.”

“Besides,” I added. “They’ll grow back.” That got a look of surprise from him. “The cutie marks. This version of Starlight’s spell won’t remove them forever.”

Maybe. Hopefully. Starlight said they would, so it was all I could go by.

“This is dark magic you speak of, Miss Shimmer,” Star Swirl said. “And you, Starlight.” He glared at her contemptuously. “Had I known you were privy to such knowledge, our first meeting would have gone much differently.”

Twilight stepped between them and put a hoof on his chest. If not for that strained but reassuring smile of hers, I doubted he’d have even given her the chance to say anything.

“Star Swirl,” she said. “This is new magic, yes. But desperate times call for ingenuity and a bit of luck. We’re working as hard as we can to save Luna, and we’re all aware of the risks we take to do that. We ask that you help us make it better, make it safer. Because I know you want to help. It’s why you came.”

She turned her gaze to Luna still curled up with that pillow between her legs. It almost made me feel sorry for her. Almost.

He studied Twilight for a moment. A million thoughts flickered behind his eyes, all of them bickering over whether or not he should trust her.

“Very well,” he said. He turned to Starlight. “For my dear Luna’s sake. Show me.”

Starlight cringed.

It had to be hard showing off a talent for something as taboo as cutie mark removal, especially in front of somepony like Star Swirl. But this was important. We needed him to—

The world went fuzzy and wibbly wobbly as my brain suddenly felt three sizes too large for my skull. I put a hoof up to my head, and I had no feeling in my face except for the distinct sensation that I was drooling all over myself, like I had just been doped up on novocaine at the dentist’s. The only thing I could feel was the ground trying to do somersaults with me still on it. Something hard hit me in the back of the head, and I could have sworn someone took my stomach and wrung it out like a wet towel.

As soon as the spinning, spinning, can’t-let-go-or-I’d-fall-into-space feeling reached its peak and my lunch was ready to make a Trixie-level grand entrance, the sickness eased away, and I sucked in a breath of fresh air. Oh, fucking hell… what in the world?

“Tadaaa…?”

Oh… That was… Was that Starlight? Yeah, that was Starli… Starlight’s voice.

I lifted my head. It wobbled back and forth a bit, and I had to blink away the last traces of what was definitely magic. And wouldn’t it just be the case that whatever it was left me lying on my back with my legs spread like a French whore.

Oh, goddamn. Yeah, she did the thing.

“Ungh, Starlight…” I squirmed onto my side and stretched a kink out of my neck. Now that my brain was done being scrambled eggs, I felt like I had been beaten half to death with a sock full of bar soap. I put a hoof up to my temple where it hurt most. “Could you at least warn me before you do that?”

I shook my head, and that gave the dream-dive headache from before enough reason to come rushing back like some ill-advised knight in shining armor. Truth be told, though, I’d take what amounted to a hangover instead of whatever the hell Starlight’s spell did to me any day.

I gave my flank a quick check to see what all this spell ended up doing. Sure enough, my cutie mark was missing, like she had taken a whole bottle of industrial-strength hair bleach to it, leaving only the faintest pencil-like outline. Looking really closely at the individual hairs, I could see the color inking back in from the outside in, like some invisible tattoo artist was airbrushing it back on in slow motion. Maybe a day or two and it’d be good as new.

“Barbaric…” Star Swirl stared at me with a haunted look in his eyes. He turned his gaze to Twilight, more in disbelief than fear. “And this mare is your pupil? You allow this?”

Twilight flinched as if he had struck her. She lifted a hoof to her chest, like she meant to say something but didn’t know what.

“I… I know it’s a lot to take in,” she said. “But Starlight is a good pony, and I trust her and her abilities.” She took a hopeful step toward him.

It was hard to miss the little smile that threaded across Starlight’s face, and I couldn’t help one myself.

Star Swirl measured Twilight up with tight lips. It seemed like he had at least a half-dozen arguments on the ethics of all this. He wouldn’t have been wrong, either, but we didn’t have time for that sort of thing.

Surprisingly, he didn’t say a word and instead scanned the blackboard in silence, tilting it up and down as needed. After a solid minute of awkward silence, he humphed and turned back to us.

“A cutie mark is the very representation of what a pony is. It is their namesake and their livelihood. You would risk that in this… this farce? This abomination of magic?”

Starlight turned away in shame, and that stoked an indignant fire in me.

“It’s not an abomination,” I said. “We’ve all made mistakes we aren’t proud of. She’s using what she knows for something good.”

“Good or not,” Star Swirl said, “an abomination is exactly what this is, Miss Shimmer, and I will have no part in it.” In a swirl of his cloak, he turned for the door.

“So what,” I said. “You’re just gonna bitch out on us? On Luna?”

He wheeled around faster than a stallion his age should have been able to. Magic billowed around him like a second cloak, little invisible traces of a dozen silent incantations reaching out to touch me. They waited on bated breath for his go-ahead to tear me to pieces.

“I do not ‘bitch out,’ whatever that phrase implies, you disrespectful”—he struggled for a word—“child.”

“Hey,” Starlight said, stepping up beside me. “Sunset isn’t—”

I put a hoof on her chest without breaking eye contact with the dickbag in front of me. “I don’t know how things worked back in the day, or what sort of sticky situations you’ve had to get yourself out of, but this is my friend you’re shit-talking. She’s done a hell of a lot to get us this far, a hell of a lot more than you.”

I furrowed my brow and took a step forward to match his. I could smell the cinders of some fire spell on his breath.

“And if you think I’m gonna to just stand there and let you bash her,” I said, “then you’re either that arrogant or you’re going senile.”

“Sunset, Star Swirl,” Twilight said, stepping between us. She put a hoof up to my chest, wisely assuming I would make the first move if there was one. “That’s enough. Fighting isn’t going to accomplish anything.”

“Indeed,” Star Swirl said, his eyes never leaving mine.

I didn’t back down from his little staring contest. “Fine. Walk away. Walk out on your ‘Dear Luna.’”

Twilight glared at me. “Sunse—”

“Why are you here, Sunset Shimmer?” he asked. I could almost taste the venom dripping from his words.

“Because I have bigger balls than you, clearly.”

He opened his mouth to say something, but thought better of it. “What is Luna to you?” he asked instead.

His eyes studied me, into me. There was some kind of magic I couldn’t figure out in his eyes. They seemed brighter than earlier.

I scowled at him, then Luna. “She’s nothing to me. But she’s something to Twilight. And if she means that much to her, then I’m doing my part. With or without your help.”

He took another step toward me. I could feel the chill of his gaze rip right through me. There was definitely magic in that stare, some Insight Spell or other that tried its hardest to reach down inside me like some grasping hand for an answer I didn’t want to give.

“What exactly is it between you two?” he asked.

I looked away. “The same thing between you and me.”

“The same thing between us?” A slow, sardonic smile overtook him, and he chuckled. He took yet another step forward, close enough I could have slapped that look right off his face.

“Then I must ask what I am to you, Sunset Shimmer.” He narrowed his eyes. “I have spent the last few months learning the lay of the land and the ponies in it, and I must say, you’re the only one to receive me with disdain and mistrust.”

“Let’s just say that you remind me of bad memories,” I said flatly.

He raised an eyebrow and tilted his head just enough that I had to look up the length of his muzzle to look him in the eyes and god, was he just being an absolute shitbag. “What is it? Little Sunset can’t reconcile the legends with the stallion before her?”

I got up in his face with a glare that could have melted steel. “Don’t you ever call me that.”

“Oh, a touchy subject, I see,” he said. He raised his head all holier than thou, and I swore I could have blasted him back into Limbo right then and there.

“Don’t you even fucking start with me,” I said.

I felt the invisible magics he wove together around us and matched them with my own. If he wanted a tussle, he’d get one. I didn’t care if he was the real Star Swirl. I didn’t care if he was Celestia and her entire goddamn army with their spears at my throat. Nobody fucking talked to me like that.

“Heyheyhey.” Starlight trotted over. She put a hoof on my chest. “Easy.”

I resisted her hoof in a bid to keep squared up with that fucker, but I knew nothing good would come from a fight, as much as I wanted one. I huffed and shoved past him for the hallway.

The silence here was overwhelming, and the cavernous ceiling echoed with a nothingness I knew far too well. Past visions of Nocturne floated to the surface. Those cold eyes, that crescent-moon smile.

Little Sunset. Like a porcelain doll. A weak, delicate thing, ready to break beneath the slightest touch.

God, what the fuck was wrong with me? What was I doing here? I squeezed my eyes shut until I saw spots. This whole situation was an absolute mess.

“Sunset?”

It was Twilight. Her hoofsteps came up gently beside me. A wingtip brushed against my side, but she pulled it back.

I did my best to wipe away the tears before she could see them. “I can’t work with this asshole.”

I didn’t bother whispering, even knowing how shaky my voice would come out. I wanted that bastard to hear me.

Twilight gave me a pained look before starting in a hushed whisper. “Sunset, I know he’s a little… set in his ways, but please. Remember we’re here to help Luna.”

I looked away. I really wasn’t. I knew the little voice in my head wanted me to believe that—that all the feelings in my heart were me trying to be a good person and do the right thing. But honestly, the only reason I stood here at all was because of Twilight.

I… I trusted her. I trusted that she was right about Luna, and I couldn’t bear the thought of anything happening to her because of me. And like I told myself earlier today, I owed her. At least enough to try.

“I know we are,” I said. “But Star Swirl’s…”

“He’s not the pony he’s cracked up to be, I know. At least not on a personal level.” Twilight put a hoof on my shoulder and drew a smile across her face. “But he’s doing his best, just like we are. And we need all the help we can get.”

I stared at her like she grew another head. “Doing his best? All he’s done since he walked in was ‘hmm’ at your notes and shit-talk Starlight.”

“He just wants to make sure what we’re doing is safe, both now and for the future of magic. What we’re doing does break some… ethical boundaries. And given he’s from more than a thousand years ago, there’s no telling just how much that shakes the foundation of his beliefs in magic and how we use it.”

“I just…” I sighed. She had me there. “I don’t know, Twilight. I just… I need sleep.”

Twilight gave me a smile that could have stopped a raging bull in its tracks. “I’ll talk to him, okay? You go rest. I had Spike prepare you a room earlier.”

I tried and failed to hold in a chuckle. And fuck it, I wiped away a tear right in front of her.

“You knew before I did that I’d come back, huh?” I said.

Just when I thought her smile couldn’t get any more reassuring, she went and outdid herself. “I know you’re a good pony, Sunset. Sometimes we just forget it ourselves.”

Twilight leaned her head against mine, and I closed my eyes to better feel that connection. She was warm, warmer than any blanket or heating spell I could have asked for. She gave me a gentle squeeze, and with a final smile, we went our separate ways.

I knew her castle well enough to find the general area of her spare bedrooms, and from there I figured it out. Helps when it’s the only spare with sheets on the bed.

But anyway, I shut the door behind me, and when I turned toward the bed, my exhaustion warped into a creepy sense of déjà vu. It was the same damn room I dreamed about yesterday, right down to the area rug.

Whatever. I crawled into bed and let the downy comforter do its job.

The cool spots of the mattress sunk into my skin, and I found myself swishing my hooves around to soak up every last bit before lying uncomfortably twisted and tangled up in the sheets.

This day. This whole goddamn day. It was all so… so wrong.

I lay there like a log, waiting for sleep to do its thing. But even with nothing to do and all these thoughts hounding me, I didn’t want to fall asleep, either. I didn’t have the Nightmare in me anymore, but that thing—the Tantabus—would be there, silently judging me.

I sighed and rolled over.

I was doing this for Twilight. Whatever happened, I trusted her. I owed her that.

Sleep happened eventually, and as sure as I guessed, I sat in the dream version of Twilight’s room, and there was the Tantabus in its place between me and the door. A galaxy spiraled across its chest as I waited for something to happen.

But something was different. This dream, the Tantabus. Everything was… darker, and it was as that realization dawned on me that everything started changing.

Shadows bled down the walls to hide away the corners of the room. The moon, visible last time through a window to my right, had been plucked from the sky and not a single star took its place.

What little light filled the room came from the Tantabus, now sitting in a pool of its own golden-white glow. Where stardust and the twinkle of distant galaxies once drifted across its face in lazy spirals, two fierce supernovas burned in place of eyes. It stood and came forward with slow but determined steps.

I tried backing away, but my hooves had melted into the bedsheets and held tight. My heart thundered in my chest. Standing still meant death, but my hooves were useless and I couldn’t feel my horn.

As it got closer, the cold chill of space pricked against my coat, and my ragged breaths fogged in the inches between our faces. My neck grew stiff. I could only stare as it reached forward with its horn extended.

And when its horn touched my forehead, the distant screams of nameless ponies filled my ears. I wanted to scream too, but my mouth went numb and my legs turned to jello.

My eyes rolled into the back of my head, and everything went white.

Author's Note

I, uh... may have forgotten to post this yesterday. Whoops.

Onward and Upward!

XV - One for One

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!?”

XVI - Mirror, Mirror

“Nocturne?” Sunset said. Her voice echoed off the nothingness as if she were in the bottom of a vast canyon. “This is your dream again, right?”

It had to be. This would make it the fourth time Nocturne had visited her, and every Nocturne dream started with this very same white nothingness as far as the eye could see.

“Hello, Little Sunset,” came Nocturne’s voice from behind her. The dream suddenly felt twenty degrees colder, but the warm smile on her face staved off the shivers. “I have been waiting for you.”

Sunset smiled back and crooked a hoof. “I was actually kind of hoping to see you again, too.”

Nocturne’s smile grew twice as large. Was that excitement? Embarrassment? Either way, seeing that Nocturne looked forward to these little meetups got Sunset’s heart going like a filly skipping down the sidewalk.

Nocturne bent low to bring herself face-to-face with Sunset. The dry-ice-like shadows curling from her underside swaddled them both. It sent a shiver down Sunset’s spine, but only a little one.

To be honest, it still kind of creeped her out. Not Nocturne—Sunset genuinely enjoyed being around her—but rather that the Dreamscape could cling to a pony like that, that it could twist and malform the very air surrounding them. But like any repetitive motion, Sunset found herself flinching less and smiling quicker every time Nocturne got close.

“It has been centuries since I have heard words from a voice as lovely as yours, Little Sunset. Verily, ’tis one of the many things I look forward to most in our meetings.”

That brought a blush to Sunset’s cheeks. She could say the same about Nocturne. What a beautiful voice she had, and her diction was as strange as it was unique. But Sunset was getting ahead of herself. She brushed Nocturne’s foreleg with a hoof and offered a smile.

“How’s your search for Star Swirl going?”

Nocturne snapped her ears backward, but still found reason to let her smile dangle. “It goes, as it has.”

Sunset leaned forward, hoping for more. When nothing followed, her smile grew strained, and she threw her ears askance.

“Well, um…” She bit her lip while thinking of something to fill the silence. “I hope you find him soon.”

“I shan’t fear your hopes are spoken in vain. But I am weary from this night’s search, and I wish for respite.” She brushed Sunset’s mane from her eyes and wrapped her hoof under Sunset’s chin. “Might I trouble you for a glimpse of your day?”

Her hoof felt as cold as ice, and the suddenness of the gesture sent a nervous tingle up Sunset’s spine. But the innocence in Nocturne’s eyes kept her still. Nocturne hadn’t spoken to another pony in almost a thousand years. She didn’t realize how forward she was being. No friend would freak out about something little like this, as far as Sunset knew.

Still, Sunset wasn’t without a hesitant smile. She took Nocturne’s hoof in hers and sat down.

“Well, I didn’t really do much today, but I’ve been hanging out with Copper a lot. Which, I guess, shouldn’t really be a surprise.”

“And you enjoyed yourself, I presume?”

“Always.” Sunset tried her best to hold in a giggle. “A few days ago, we went to Manehattan and saw the sights. I wasn’t all that excited about the crowds, but being there with Copper made it all worth it.”

Nocturne cloaked herself with her wings as Sunset spoke, some of her smoke caught up in the draft and curling off into nothingness. The gesture felt regal in a sense, almost like something Celestia would do.

“I mean, it’s not hard to do when she’s my best friend. She’s my only friend. Er, well, in the real world.” She gave Nocturne an embarrassed smile.

“Do not fear, Little Sunset. I do not fret over semantics. You are, after all, my best friend. And as such, I have something for you.”

She raised a hoof to her chest, and out from where her heart would be expanded a smoking orb. It floated an inch above her hoof, black as her coat, but with a metallic sheen that warped Sunset’s curious reflection across its surface.

“I wish to impart upon you a gift. A symbol of my thanks. A symbol of my admiration.”

“A-admiration?” Sunset crooked a hoof in front of herself.

“Indeed.” Nocturne nodded. “I do not mean to intrude upon your privacy, but when I enter your dreams, I catch glimpses of your mind, fragments of your thoughts, experiences from the waking world. It is no small feat to be Her Majesty’s prized student.”

Sunset flicked her eyes back and forth between the orb and Nocturne, unsure which she should be more concerned with—Nocturne’s clairvoyance, or this oddity in front of her. A strange aura wafted from it like condensed vapors from an open freezer.

Nocturne offered the orb to Sunset. “’Tis a part of my soul. I wish for you to have it, that it may see you safe and sound on the nights I cannot attend thee.”

That got the hair standing up on Sunset’s withers. She backed away instinctively, shaking her head. “Part of your soul? I, I can’t take that. That’s… I couldn’t do that to you.”

There was dark magic in the world that dabbled in the realm of souls—necromancy, vampirism, and the like—all of it very much forbidden and locked away in the restricted section of the Canterlot Archives. Sunset didn’t have access to that sort of blasphemy, nor did she want it.

It brought questions to mind, inexplicable horrors. Just what sort of devilry had Nocturne committed in her search for Star Swirl?

“I see the reservation carved upon your face, Little Sunset.” She herself wore a reserved frown. There was no small amount of pain behind her eyes as she stared into the nothingness beneath them. “I pray you do not linger on whatever fears trouble you. I have paid with my own flesh and blood for the crimes I committed against nature, and the time of my unholy pursuits I have long since put to rest.”

“But… soul magic is forbidden.” Sunset had settled down well enough that she stared at the orb with nervous curiosity rather than fear. Her large teal eyes stared back at her from its convex surface.

“I am not proud of what I have done for the sake of my dearest Star Swirl,” she said. She extended her wing toward Sunset and touched her under the chin, using that gentle touch to draw Sunset’s gaze up to hers. “But as I said, my sins are my own, and I accept them and who I am today because of them. To have learned from my mistakes is the only saving grace I can claim, and so I have.”

She held out the orb. “And, perchance, if I can lighten another’s journey, then wisdom is not the only good to come of it.”

Sunset took in Nocturne’s thoughtful gaze—the wisdom, hurt, and hope swimming behind her eyes. She could only imagine what sort of sacrifices it took to learn this kind of magic. If it made Nocturne feel better, there was no harm in at least humoring her.

Sunset hesitantly reached out to take the orb. It floated just above her hoof, and its fog fell in smoky tendrils along her fetlock, cold as a blizzard. Somehow, it felt both as heavy as granite yet light as a feather.

“What do I do with it?” Sunset asked.

“Whatever it is your heart desires, Little Sunset. This particular sliver is my happiness.”

“Your happiness? You mean like a… like a physical manifestation of happiness?”

Nocturne chuckled. “As physical as any one thing can be in a dream, yes.”

Within the orb, there was a mixture of obscured reflections—memories, experiences, life lessons—that played out as if on the other side of a dirty window. None of them looked happy.

“It is a happiness I hope you will come to care for and foster in my stead,” Nocturne said. “And, perhaps, add your own happiness to as well.”

Nocturne smiled at her, but turned away. A broken smile from a broken pony. Oh, what sort of life had she lived if she considered the misery in this orb happiness?

“Tis not much, I know,” Nocturne said. “But I hope you appreciate it nonetheless.” She flitted her wings and settled them back at her sides. There was a twinkle in her eye that belied her tiny smile, like she was afraid it wasn’t good enough. “’Tis all I have to give.”

“I… I do appreciate it. Really. I just… I still don’t feel comfortable accepting this. It’s your soul.”

“Fear not such trivialities, Little Sunset. My soul has long since fragmented, and the pieces will never be whole again. I have… I have long since accepted this fact. I merely wish for some good to come of it.”

Sunset stared into the orb and all the not-happy memories skimming along the surface. Nocturne wanted to make her happy. Being happy would make Nocturne happy in return. In a way, it was a lot like how Sunset and Copper’s friendship worked. Their happiness came from each other’s.

But… if these really were the happiest memories she had, Sunset had no right taking them, even if freely given.

“I… really,” Sunset said. “It just wouldn’t feel right.” She handed it back to Nocturne, who in turn took it hesitantly, ears flat back.

“I-if you insist, Little Sunset.” Her voice sounded fragile, on the verge of shattering like a pane of glass. “I shan’t solicit further.”

“How about instead of giving me your happiest memories,” Sunset said with a smile. “We help you make new ones. Ones even better than those.”

Nocturne looked at her, her ears slowly perking up. A light caught in her eyes, like a match to tinder, and her teeth poked through her lips in the tiniest of smiles.

“I would like that very much.”

Sunset laughed. “Then what are we waiting for? Does this dream count as lucid dreaming? Can I control it? I’d love to show you Manehattan, especially the toy shop.”

“I do possess modest control of dreams,” Nocturne said. “I have learned such in my time aloof. Come here, close your eyes.”

Sunset did as she was told and felt a soft brush of winter air against her face, likely Nocturne’s wafting shadows. It teased at her mane and brought a silly smile to her lips. Nocturne ran a hoof through her mane, and Sunset found herself leaning into it with every stroke.

“Now,” Nocturne said. “Think of this place, this Manehattan. Every detail, every sight and sound. All the smells and colors and emotions you felt walking its streets.”

Sunset squeezed her eyes shut tighter. She saw the neon light of the ice cream shop overhead, brushed past all the stylish ponies, heard the clip-clop of hooves on the pavement. The smell of hayburgers tickled her nose, and the whir of toy biplanes spun circles from the ceiling above. And when she opened her eyes, they stood among the throngs of ponies walking the streets of Manehattan.

Sunset laughed. “Nocturne, it worked!”

“Indeed…” Nocturne’s voice came out breathlessly. She eyed the many ponies around them with a mixture of astonishment and surprise. When one came close, she stepped aside, as if afraid they would bite. Had she really been gone so long that other ponies freaked her out so much?

No time to waste on that. If Sunset was going to be the friend Nocturne deserved, she’d have to put in every ounce of effort. She took Nocturne by the hoof.

“Come on!” Sunset said.

And with that, she pulled Nocturne inside the toy shop.

• • •

Intriguing…

How the nightingale’s coo finds empty ears where once they listened so sweetly. Intrepid may the innocent heart be, but the forest is dark, and many are the songs the nightingale may yet sing for you, Little Sunset.

Patience… Patience.

You have passed this, your second test, Little Sunset. But I must thank you. It has been ages since I’ve the honor of such labyrinthian methodology.

Perhaps more acerbic measures should suit a pony of your…

…naïveté.

• • •

“She listens to me,” Sunset said.

Celestia sat as she always did on the other side of her tea table. Meaning regally, whether she meant to or not.

“Does Copper not listen to you?” Celestia asked.

It was a quiet Thursday in Canterlot. Sunset hadn’t had the chance to talk with Princess Celestia earlier that week, and Celestia wanted to hear all about her Manehattan trip. And as all of their talks eventually did, this one devolved into boring conversations about friendship and stuff.

Sunset shifted in her seat. “Well, yeah, but not like this. Nocturne… she actually gets what I’m talking about. She wants to hear what I have to say, no matter what it’s about. Unlike Copper, who always has some snide remark to try and get under my skin just because she thinks it’s funny.”

Celestia chuckled. She flipped through Sunset’s The Nature of the Arcane to the first page on magio-thermodynamics.

“I can understand the frustration of a friend keen on mischief.” Her smile wandered toward Philomena napping in her cage. “But never marginalize a friend simply because she pokes fun. It means she’s comfortable around you. And again, never hesitate to set boundaries if you feel the need.”

Celestia flipped another page. “Still, it’s wonderful to have many friends of different kinds, and I’m glad to see you finally spreading your wings, as it were.”

Sunset dipped her nose toward her own teacup and smiled. She had finally come around to telling Celestia about Nocturne, but she still worried that Celestia might misunderstand just what—and who—Nocturne was. Convincing her that Nocturne was a pony from far in the past and not just some evil spirit would be a hard sell. Mentioning Star Swirl would only complicate that. So for now, Nocturne was simply a friend that Sunset met during the Summer Sun Celebration. Which, technically, was true.

“I would love to meet this Nocturne someday.”

Sunset threw her ears back and frowned. Nocturne wasn’t exactly a type-A personality, either. She had her bold moments, but they came across as more of a façade, like when a pony was afraid of being made fun of. When Nocturne let her walls down, she made Sunset look like a bona fide Copper by comparison.

“Maybe someday. When she’s ready to meet you.”

Celestia nodded. “I understand. But enough of that for now. I have something I want to show you.”

Sunset perked her ears up. Oh?

Celestia stood up and came around the table. She extended a wing toward the door. “Would you follow me, please?”

“Of course!”

Something new? Something exciting? Anything Celestia felt better showing than telling was definitely worthwhile. Sunset leapt to her side.

Out the door, they turned right instead of left and followed the hallway to its end. On the left stood a large wooden door that led to Stone Wall’s quarters, but Celestia instead concerned herself with the opposing wall. She lit her horn, and a large rectangle of wall lit up before recessing to slide out of the way.

“A servant’s entrance?” Sunset asked.

“It’s a shortcut through the heart of the castle, yes,” Celestia said.

Sunset had never seen a servant’s hallway before. And even though she didn’t exactly have a clear picture in her head of just what she hoped to see, it still didn’t quite match her expectations.

It was a simple two-pony-wide hallway that retained some of the aesthetics of the one behind them, mostly in the color and wall moldings. The occasional skylight kept the place feeling homely, and wall sconces filled with little glowing sunstones sat at attention, adding their own yellow-orange aura to an already surreal atmosphere.

Very clean, as she would have hoped for a passageway used by the cleaning staff. Thick carpeting, too—probably so that visiting nobility wouldn’t hear the servants stomping around behind the walls and think the place was haunted.

She had honestly expected it to be a bit flashier. This was Canterlot Castle, after all. But it got the job done, and Sunset couldn’t argue with that. Though, it was kinda musty. Probably from the linen carts stationed here and there in various states of use.

A hoofful of servants made use of the hallway as they passed. They bowed before scurrying out of the way through various doorways and branching corridors. Sunset took that as a sign that they weren’t used to Celestia strolling through their little corner of the universe.

They turned at an intersection, and the hallway gently sloped downward before ending in a staircase and a wooden door fashioned with a sliding mechanism like the other one. It didn’t otherwise look anything special, but a thin ribbon of blue-green light spilled through the crack beneath the door.

When Celestia slid the door open, Sunset shielded her eyes to a flash of light. She squinted as she stepped through, and her jaw almost hit the floor.

They stood in a massive hallway of blue crystal, segmented by diamond pillars that flanked the hall at lengthy intervals. They reached up toward an arched roof that entertained row upon row of stalactites, each its own array of facets and prisms refracting the light as clusters of rainbows. Glow-quartz crystals lined the walls like flameless torches. A pair of ponies in lab coats trotted from one large room full of whirring machines into another across the hall.

“Are these the research labs?” Sunset asked. She’d never been allowed down here before.

“Hmm,” Celestia said. “What do you think, Sunset?”

“Well, fancy glowing crystal lights, ponies running around in lab coats, and doors leading into big rooms full of fancy-looking equipment. I’d say yeah.”

“Then your skills of perception would be unparalleled.”

“I… Was that sarcasm? Since when were you ever sarcastic?”

“Ever since a very cupric pony stopped by for tea and told me just how much you enjoy quips like that.”

“Cupric…?” Sunset looked down, her eyes flicking back and forth along the polished floor. “Wait, Copper? Seriously? Now she’s got you being all smart around me too?”

Celestia laughed and cast Sunset a sidelong smile over her shoulder. “I don’t mean to cause you any annoyance. I simply wanted to see it for myself.”

“See what for yourself?”

“How flustered you get around sarcasm.” Celestia led on without a moment’s hesitation. “I won’t bother you with it anymore if you dislike it.”

Sunset frowned the moment Celestia stopped looking. “Yeah, let’s go with that.”

Like the servant’s passage, the ponies here noted Celestia’s presence with surprise and hurried bows. Scurrying out of the way like bugs from an upturned rock seemed to be the MO of the castle today.

The hallway followed a semi-circular pattern, likely keeping with the curve of the mountain beneath the castle, and seemed to go on forever. Sunset swore she hadn’t walked this much since her first date with Doppler.

Doppler… He hadn’t written to her yet this week, despite the two letters she’d sent him. She flattened her ears back at the thought.

He must have been off having a wonderful time up there in Vanhoover. Forget about boring, old Sunset stuck here in boring, old Canterlot.

She sighed. She just wanted to feel his hooves around her, bury her muzzle in his mane. It’d been so long since the last time she’d seen him—

Sunset bumped into Celestia’s flank. She shook her head, realizing they had stopped.

Ahead stood an archway of jagged purple crystal, whose facets cast a dozen reflections of herself back at her. It reminded Sunset of the geodes Professor Prismweave often cracked open for their crystallomancy classes. The archway led to a small room lined with metal panels and buttons and dials with needles bouncing back and forth on their meters—all pretty high-tech stuff.

A large observation window separated the room from a larger laboratory, where a half-dozen unicorns in lab coats ran around doing Celestia knew what.

A blonde-maned stallion to their left turned when they stepped through. He jolted in recognition, but was quick to recover.

“Your Majesty,” he said, bowing. “String said you’d be swinging by.”

Sunset quirked an eyebrow. String? As in, Copper’s dad?

“Yes,” Celestia said, returning his bow with a formal nod. “I’d like to speak with him, if he’s available.”

“Of course.” He trotted to the window, knocked on it, and jerked his head over his shoulder at them.

Beyond the glass, a burly stallion levitating a jar with some large purple rock inside looked their way. Sure enough, it was Copper’s dad, though it was a little hard to tell at first glance because of the lab coat and goggles.

A huge smile leapt from one side of his face to the other. He passed the rock to another stallion and made for a little door beside the window.

“Your Majesty! Sunset!” he bellowed, not even halfway across the threshold. He bowed to Celestia before levitating his goggles onto a control panel beside the door, then threw a hoof over Sunset’s shoulder to pull her into a hug. It was like being strangled by a bear.

Sunset wriggled out of his grip and heaved for air. She threw on a strained smile so he wouldn’t notice.

“You said you needed me for research help?” he asked, looking at Celestia.

“I did, yes,” Celestia said. “I would like you to lend Sunset here a hoof whenever she needs it. Can I ask that of you?”

“For my Little Cupcake’s best friend? You don’t even need to ask.”

Sunset snorted and hid a smile behind her hoof. Little Cupcake? Oh, that was too precious.

But more importantly, lend a hoof with what? What research? A hopeful smile plastered itself across Sunset’s face. Was Celestia assigning her a research project?

“Wonderful,” Celestia said. “In that case, we will be in—”

Something began popping and snarling like somepony had set off a dozen firecrackers. The large purple rock glowed orange at its core, and the lab ponies around it backed away slowly.

“Put that back in the coolant!” String yelled, dashing back into the lab. “It needs to stay at negative twenty degrees!”

Celestia chuckled. She turned back for the archway. “Perhaps we’ll let him keep to what he’s doing for now.”

That sounded like a good idea. Sunset followed Celestia down the hall.

“So why did we go say hi to String?” Sunset asked. “Not that I don’t mind seeing him. He said something about research?” That hopeful smile came back twice as big.

Celestia nodded. “You heard right. There is a special project I would like for you to work on. It’s an artifact that came into my possession a long time ago.”

She led Sunset into a small research lab, lit by a large skylight. Counters and shelves lined the walls, crammed with pedestals of crystals and glassware filled with colored mixtures.

Sunset noticed a shoddy piece of glass leaning against the wall, the only non-sciency looking thing in this hodge-podge excuse of a storage room. It was roughly the size of Celestia, were she to rear up on her hind legs.

“A mirror?” she asked.

“It’s much more than a mirror,” Celestia said. “It’s a portal to another world. It might not look like much now, but it holds immense magical power. When it’s actually working, that is.”

A portal? Cool.

“So what happened to it?”

Celestia frowned. Probably more than one bad memory in there somewhere.

“Millennia of disuse. When I first discovered it, I was not in a position to make proper use of it, nor was the world across the way ready to make contact. But now that Equestria is the shining jewel that it is today, I believe now would be an excellent time to give this other world another try.

“There is magic there,” she continued, “and I believe that a lasting friendship between our two worlds would be for the benefit of all.”

Sunset did her best not to roll her eyes. There went Celestia with more of her friendship junk.

Still, the thought of researching a new world sounded way cooler than anything else Sunset had ever done. Oh, this would probably put so much of her Arcanonaturamancology studies to use! The thought dragged a smile from ear to ear.

“So where exactly do I come in?” Sunset asked. She rocked back and forth on her tippy hooves.

“I would like you to get it working again.”

Yes! Sunset could have done a backflip, but that would have probably ended in a first-class ticket to Canterlot General. She settled for an even bigger smile than the one already on her face.

“Can I entrust you with this task?” Celestia wore a smile, but not her usual one. This was a serious smile—one that implied all sorts of responsibility, and probably a government secret or twenty.

But that came with the territory, didn’t it? Being Celestia’s personal student? If this was her first real test as such, how could Celestia possibly think her ready for anything else if she said no?

Sunset nodded. “Of course, Princess. You can count on me.”

If Celestia didn’t look happy before, she certainly did now. “That is wonderful to hear. But I should warn you that projects like this require a certain level of discretion. I ask that you keep this to yourself for now. So don’t share this with your friends or anypony else.”

So basically don’t tell Copper. Easy.

Sunset wouldn’t dream of doing that, not with something so monumental. This was the stuff of Sunset’s greatest fantasies. Research. Like, real research. In a lab, with magic and potions and who knew what else. She couldn’t even conceive of jeopardizing that.

Sunset shook her head. Getting off track there.

“You had asked String to help me out whenever I needed it,” Sunset said. “I take it he’s allowed to know?”

“I have spoken with him at length and I believe he is both a trustworthy pony and an asset to your studies you shouldn’t overlook.” A chiding smile overtook her, and she chuckled. “Goodness knows I would hope he was, if he’s been promoted to his position.”

Yeah. Whatever that meant. Sunset redoubled her smile for Celestia’s sake.

Celestia sighed and stared at the mirror. “But I digress. I would love to hear back from you on anything you discover regarding the mirror, or any issues you have or things you might need that String Theory cannot assist you with.”

“You can count on me, Princess,” Sunset said, turning for the door. “I’ll just need to go grab some things from my dorm and I can get started right away.”

“That’s wonderful to hear. I’ll be in my room for another hour if you need me.”

“Of course, Princess. Just one thing before I head out, though,” Sunset said.

“Of course, Sunset. What is it?”

Sunset tried her best to not look too foalish standing there in the doorway. She could still feel the coal-fire blush on her cheeks, though.

“Which way’s the exit?”

XVII - Playground Blues

The week after Sunset and Coppertone’s Manehattan visit passed in a blur of sleepovers, one not-too-many trips to the ice cream parlor, and generally having fun the way fun was meant to be had: together. Today was no exception.

Thankfully, the weather pegasi had some sense to keep today as beautiful as Mondays—or any day, really—should be, and with hardly a cloud in the sky, Coppertone lay on a playground bench beside Sunset, watching Lily do her thing.

“Sunset!” Lily shouted from the top of the playground set. “Watch this!”

Copper watched Lily go down the Big Slide—Big with a capital B; it was a rite of passage for foals Lily’s age—and end with a graceful tumble through the mulch. She smirked, wondering just how much mulch Lily’d get in her mane by the time they left. Maybe those sensible pegasi could be convinced to start up a rainstorm on their way home to save her the trouble of giving Lily a bath.

“Yeah, Lily!” Sunset had looked up from a research article about wind or something. She wore the prettiest smile that got Copper all squirmy on the inside.

Lily beamed before hopping to all fours and brushing herself off. She made for the stairs leading back up for another go.

Copper watched Sunset cheer Lily on. She had “forgotten” her manedresser’s magazine on the counter, and so had nothing to pass the time other than enjoying the scenery—of which Sunset counted for most, through little peeks and glances.

“She really likes you,” Copper said.

It was an idle statement, something even Sunset couldn’t be oblivious to. But Copper wanted Sunset to look at her. She wanted to look back into those eyes and maybe get a peek at what went on inside that beautiful head of hers.

“No kidding.” Sunset brushed her mane out of her face so she could watch Lily scramble back up the stairs, bowl through a group of foals, and dive back down the slide for another tumble through the mulch. “Glad she’s having fun.”

“Yeah,” Copper said. “Are you?”

“Hmm?” Sunset brought those eyes of hers around and oh, Copper could have stared into them forever. “Having fun? Of course. Why wouldn’t I be enjoying myself? I’ve got my best friend, her little sister, a research article on geostrophic winds, and the perfect day to enjoy it all.”

“Is ‘geostrophic’ another word for ‘huge nerd stuff’?”

“Yes,” Sunset said. She shot her a smirk that would have brought the biggest blush to Copper’s face had she not expected it. “Enormous nerd stuff.”

Sunset had been practicing her whole “keep up with Copper” thing. The way she tried being raunchy was beyond adorable—and if Copper were honest, pretty damn sexy.

Not that Sunset’s usual self wasn’t pretty damn sexy. Those teal eyes and gorgeous smile, that fierce yet humble intelligence. It was enough to drive a girl wild. Add in a healthy dose of raunchiness, and Sunset had the perfect recipe to get Copper feeling things too PG-13 for a public playground.

Not to be outdone by such a grade-school-level dick joke, however, Copper sidled closer. “Oh yeah? Like other enormous things you like, huh?”

“Totally.” Somehow, Sunset managed to keep a straight face, and the glint in her eye hinted that she just might keep up for once.

“Wow,” Copper said. She elbowed Sunset in the ribs. “You didn’t even blush that time. Before you know it, you’ll be flirting with strangers and you might actually know you’re doing it.”

Sunset pushed Copper’s elbow away. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

“I think it’d be fun to watch.” She raised her hooves in front of her and spread them wide. “Sunset, walking off into the distance, a trail of broken hearts in her wake.”

“Oh, yeah, because that’s totally me.”

“Haha, okay, maybe not that extreme, but it’s nice seeing you actually, like, not freak out from the most basic small talk like when we met. And you can finally talk about dicks now without gagging like you’re smokin’ one.” That got a face out of Sunset, and Copper laughed. “Okay, maybe not quite.”

Foalish laughter rang out over the playground. It seemed the foals had taken to playing tag, and Copper took the break in conversation to sigh.

“So I’m not complaining,” Sunset said, her eyes back to the article in her lap. “But I thought Mondays were Whistle’s day to watch Lily over the summer.”

And there went the happy mood like a deflated balloon.

Copper bunched up her hooves. “Y-yeah…”

“‘Yeah’?” Sunset stared at Copper with a curiosity that bordered on worry. “That doesn’t sound good.”

Oh, Sunset… How was she so good at reading everything but the obvious?

“Yeah… So Lily got sent home for fighting on the playground the Monday after we got back from Manehattan.”

“Lily got in a fight?” Sunset said. She wore a little smile that seemed unsure of itself. “That sounds like something you’d be proud of.”

Copper laughed. It felt good to laugh. It made the coming conversation that much more bearable. Not that it would be easy.

“Well, yeah, I am. And I always will be, because she stood up for herself. But it’s not about the fight. It’s…”

What was she supposed to say? How could she put this into words that Sunset would understand?

“It’s because she kissed another filly,” Copper said. She nodded at the foals gathered beneath the rope bridge. “The redhead with the pigtails, actually. That’s how the fight started.”

Sunset raised an eyebrow. “She kissed another filly? Okay? I don’t get where this is going. Everypony has schoolyard crushes when they’re little.”

“Even you?” Copper asked with a smirk. This might not have been the time for it, but she couldn’t pass up the opportunity to poke fun.

“I feel like we’ve been over that before.”

“Knowing you? Probably.” Copper waggled her eyebrows when Sunset stuck her tongue out at her. She sighed again and stared at the mulch beneath their bench. “But yeah. Some colt who also apparently has a crush on that filly picked a fight with her because of it, and Whistle cheered her on instead of breaking it up. The colt’s parents brought them home. Mom was pissed.”

“Oh,” Sunset said. Then her ears fell back and she stared off into the distance as the meaning finally dawned on her. There was no way even Little Miss Oblivious could forget that… discussion Mom and Dad had over pancakes the other week. “Oh…”

“Yeah…” They watched the foals go ’round and around the playground.

“Well,” Sunset said. “I still don’t get why it’s a bad thing. What’s it matter who you like?”

“It doesn’t…”

“Youuu don’t sound convinced.”

Copper opened her mouth, but the words didn’t immediately come. She shook her head while trying to corral them into proper order.

“It’s just… pretty young fillies aren’t supposed to grow up liking other fillies. They’re supposed to grow up into beautiful mares and find loving stallions and ‘have lots of grandfoals for Mommy.’”

Copper couldn’t look Sunset in the eye, as much as she so truly wanted to. All of this was just so wrong and so… so… just, not how it should be.

An awkward silence filled in between them, broken here and there by laughter from the playground and birdsong from the trees. Sunset did that fidgeting thing she always did with her hooves whenever she didn’t know what to say.

“Mom…” Copper said. “Mom didn’t grow up in a big city like Canterlot where everypony’s all happy and accepting and progressive and stuff. She’s from the outskirts of Hoofington. They don’t have openly gay ponies, or wheelchair ramps… some of the places there don’t even have indoor toilets. And the few pegasi that are stupid enough to live in that shithole make sure to keep their homes at least above the cumulus level.

“I know she’s not entirely like them, and she’s definitely not the shitbag my grandpa was, but that stuff still sticks with you. Pair that with how much she won’t shut up about the grandfoal thing, and now you know how much it fucks her up in the head to even imagine her little bundle of joy kissing another filly.”

The silence filled in again. Which was good. Copper needed to focus on keeping the tears in.

“Well,” Sunset said. “Then it’s a good thing she has you.” She wore a little smile that got Copper’s heart racing. “That way she can have those grandfoals and still love Lily just the way she is. Everypony wins.”

Copper couldn’t help the painful laugh she let out, but an instinctive smile leapt to the rescue. Yeah. Everypony wins.

“Hey, now,” she said to keep the hurt from digging too deep. “I can’t just go poppin’ out foals like a potato cannon. Gotta keep things down there in one piece for the stallions, right?”

That got a picture-perfect face out of Sunset. If only Copper had a camera on her.

“I… really didn’t need that mental image,” Sunset said.

“Too bad.” Copper shrugged, and she passed off her sigh of heartache as one of relaxation. “That’s what you get when you hang out with me, right? You know how much of a hopeless romantic I am.”

If only she did. If only she really, truly did…

“Yeah, okay,” Sunset said. “But for real, with how much you’re all”—she waggled a hoof at Copper’s flank—“that, I’m actually surprised it hasn’t happened yet.”

Copper kept herself from biting her lip, but her smile turned strained, and that nervous feeling came back enough to have her bunching her hooves in front of herself.

Just tell her. Just grow the fuck up and say it: yeah, about that… There was nothing wrong with it. There was nothing wrong with her. The princess herself said so.

But what would Mom think?

And just like that, the words never came. So she strangled the thought with a giggle and jabbed Sunset in the ribs.

“Hey, you never know. There’s a lot of back alleys and coat hangers in Canterlot.”

A look of horror overcame Sunset. “Copper, what the crap?”

Copper snorted. “What, too much?”

“Do I even need to say yes?”

Copper sputtered and waved a dismissive hoof at Sunset for effect. “Fine, fine. I’m sorry. Abortion jokes are bad, I know.”

She threw a sidelong grin Sunset’s way after a beat. Sunset could never stay mad at her when she did that, she’d learned.

Like clockwork, Sunset’s frown turned into an eye roll and a shake of her head, and a tiny smile poked through like the sun through the clouds. “But anyway,” Sunset said. “Your mom shouldn’t be mad that Lily likes other fillies. And if Whistle happens to, too, then whatever, right?”

Copper raised an eyebrow at her. “I know for a fact that Whistle’s the straightest of all three of us.”

“Straighter than you? I find that hard to believe.”

Copper let out a real laugh for the first time in way too long. She savored the feeling of simply lying there beside Sunset and looking into her eyes. Oh, those eyes…

But the wonder of the moment drained away too quickly, and it left her alone with a crumbling smile. So close, yet so far away.

Oh, Sunset… If only she could just see…

“Believe what you want,” Copper said, shrugging. “She gobbles cock like it’s her job.”

An uncharacteristically wry smile ran across Sunset’s face, and she let out the tiniest snort. “She learns from the best.”

With that, they both sputtered into a giggle fit that lasted a solid minute. Copper had tears in her eyes by the time they got ahold of themselves. She had lost her balance somewhere in the middle of doubling over and had rolled against Sunset’s side. With the rush of sudden closeness and her now-racing heart, she cuddled in closer, resting her head on Sunset’s shoulder.

Sunset in turn lay her head on Copper’s, and they shared a happy moment of silence.

This was it, right here. This feeling. Pressing herself into Sunset’s side, feeling her warmth against her own. This was where Copper wanted to be, always and forever.

“By the way,” Copper said, somberly. “Don’t tell Mom we took Lily to the park. She’s been low-key grounded all week.”

Sunset said nothing as she gazed out at the foals on the playground and the redheaded filly in particular. A little smile grew on her lips, and she pressed her weight into Copper.

“You’re a good big sister, you know that?”

Copper was. She knew she was. Every day, she tried her hardest to be the big sister Whistle and Lily deserved. She wasn’t always. Nopony was perfect like that.

But here, on an easy-going summer Monday, when Mom and Dad were at work and the rules didn’t apply, nothing could be easier. She just wanted Lily to know there was nothing wrong with being herself.

There was nothing wrong with being herself.

Copper leaned in closer to Sunset, listened to the thu-thump of her heart, and dared to rest her hoof on Sunset’s foreleg. She tilted her head to get a better glimpse of Sunset’s cheek and a sliver of her left eye, preoccupied as she was with the research article between her hooves.

A thought crossed Copper’s mind: she could reach up and pull Sunset into a kiss, right on the lips. Easy. She wouldn’t even have to fumble for words.

To hell with what Mom thought, to hell with all her ignorant bullshit. There was nothing wrong with being herself.

But the very thought of how Mom would look at her…

Who was she kidding? It wouldn’t accomplish anything: Sunset had a coltfriend, and it would only make things worse with Mom. So she traced little circles in the fur of Sunset’s foreleg and smiled away the nonsense.

For now, this, right here. She could still be herself. Just a little. Everypony would be happy.

And there was nothing wrong with that.

Author's Note

This chapter always hurt to reread while proofing. Onward and Upward, Copper. Onward and Upward....

XVIII - Confidence

“Oh, thank Celestia, you’re awake,” someone said.

I squinted and shielded my eyes from a bright light. That was… was that Twilight?

I dared to peek around my hoof, and sure enough, Twilight stood overtop of me. She looked like she’d had a panic attack or five.

Starlight stood beside her with a glass of water, which she gave to me the moment I looked her way. That cool water going down my throat tasted like heaven.

“You alright there?” she asked.

“I—”

“I’m so sorry,” Twilight butted in. “We tried to keep the connection stable, but the energy efflux kept increasing faster than we could account for, so we weaned off the input until the spell naturally dissipated.”

I blinked, the words slowly sinking into my head. Wait, they killed the spell? I checked my flank and sighed with relief. Cutie mark still where it belonged.

“You’re good, Sunset,” Starlight said. She gave me a nudge on the shoulder. “No cutie mark yanking just yet.”

“I know, I… I just had to check,” I said, getting a laugh from Starlight.

Another hoof rested on my other shoulder. It was Star Swirl, and he wore a real if reserved smile.

“Indeed. It is good to see you back in one piece. But my dear Luna still slumbers. What did you manage to accomplish on our first true dream dive?”

“I…” Well this was going to be awkward. I rubbed my hoof up and down my foreleg. “So, uh, good news. Luna is safe and sound.”

“Saying there’s good news like that means there’s bad news,” Starlight said.

I gave them a hesitant smile. “Y-yeah… The bad news is, I had to trade the Tantabus for her, and she’s not happy about it.”

“You traded the Tantabus?” Twilight shook her head. “That doesn’t sound good.”

“You mean like it wanted the Tantabus,” Starlight said, wearing a concerned frown, “or you convinced it to take the Tantabus?”

She seemed more in tune with whatever implications the situation had. Not that I couldn’t figure out that something bad was going on, but the unnatural tension in her voice sent goosebumps up my legs that wouldn’t have been there otherwise.

“It wanted the Tantabus,” I said. “I just don’t know what for.”

“If I know anything about masterminding villainous, long-term plans,” Starlight said, “that sounds really bad. Like, take-over-the-world kind of bad.”

I flattened back my ears. “You’re making it sound like what I did was wrong. The dream was falling apart around me. I didn’t know how long it would be before the next time we had the chance to save Luna. I had a split second to decide.”

Starlight winced and shot a brief glance around the room, doing her best to avoid eye contact. “I’m not saying that you made a bad choice, I-I’m just saying that the choice you made might have been, um… bad.”

She offered me a nervous smile when I frowned at her. It didn’t help any. “What I mean to say is—”

“What she means to say,” Star Swirl butted in, “is you couldn’t have known the outcome of your actions, nor do we know what exactly it plans to do with the Tantabus. You did what you felt was right, and that is all we have to go by.”

Starlight nodded, relieved. Twilight nodded, too, but the silence that followed stifled any sense of ease they might have hoped for.

“You…” Star Swirl began, stroking his beard. “You said you traded the Tantabus for Luna. Does that mean she is with you, this very moment? The way the Tantabus was?”

“I… I think so? I mean, she’s not like a voice in my head that can hear every word you’re saying right now if that’s what you’re hoping. But I did dream of the Tantabus while it was in me.” I shuddered at the thought of being stuck with Luna in my dreams.

“So we can hope for her input on the matter the next time you sleep,” Star Swirl said. He looked out the window, where a new moon hung low in the sky. It seemed like Celestia really did have the whole contingency plan thing covered.

“Hopefully,” Twilight said. “We should all get some sleep. If this has taken a turn for the worse, we need to be ready to face it. Sunset?”

“Yeah?”

Twilight smiled at me. The way her ears perked up and her wings poked just over the arch of her back was all I needed to know she had way more hope in this plan than I did.

She had hope. She wanted this. She wanted to save Luna. And I… I threw on a smile.

“I’ll talk to her,” I said. “If she’s there.”

That seemed like exactly what she wanted to hear. Her smile got bigger, and she fluffed her wings before tossing a hoof over my shoulder. She nuzzled me on the cheek, and that closeness alone made my promise worth it.

“Then it is settled,” Star Swirl said. “Speak with her tonight and see what insight she can provide us. We will convene in the morning.” With that, he turned for the door.

The others followed suit, all of them in higher spirits than I had felt in weeks. Part of me wanted to stop them from leaving, but luckily enough, I didn’t have to.

Twilight looked back from the doorway. The smile on her lips turned melancholic, and it took her a moment to find the strength to meet my eyes.

“You sure you’re okay with this?” she asked.

I did my best to shrug indifferently. “Well, we’re already kind of neck deep in this mess now. Can’t turn back even if I wanted to.”

That got a frown out of her. She cocked an ear to the side and seemed like she had something she wanted to say. Eventually, she looked me in the eye, and I felt the words on the tip of her tongue: You don’t have to do this if you don’t want to.

That same argument sprang up the way it always did. I countered with a frown: I won’t let you do this for me.

Whether or not that sentiment got across to her, she smiled anyway and put a hoof on my shoulder.

“We’re always here if you need us, Sunset. Never forget that.”

Smiling, I took her hoof in mine and squeezed it. “I know.”

She turned back for the door, but she seemed to think of something. “Do you… do you want to sleep with me tonight?”

Her face went red as a Hearth's Warming bulb the instant the words left her lips. “Er, I, I mean in the same room. Not, like—”

I put a hoof to her mouth and laughed. It was good to feel normal for a moment. I needed that more than I cared to admit.

“I know what you mean,” I said. “I’ll be okay. Thanks though. And yeah, if I change my mind, I’ll bring an extra blanket.”

That was a lie I’d gotten good at… If I need help, I’ll ask.

I had the personal experience to know better than to ignore conventional wisdom, but there were some things people needed to do themselves. I had to prove to her—to the world—that I was strong enough.

Either way, the lie did its job, and she gave me a big smile and a sigh of relief. We shared a hug and headed to bed. At the junction between my turnoff and her hallway, I stopped to watch her go. Her tail disappeared around the slight curve of the castle, and a few seconds later, I heard the click of a door latch.

“You know,” came a voice, “you don’t have to act strong for her.”

I yelped in surprise and spun around, only to see Starlight standing there, wearing a star-spangled nightcap that looked like it belonged to Trixie. A toothbrush dangled from her mouth.

“Oh,” I said. “Hey, Starlight. Why are… Why are you walking around brushing your teeth in the hallway?”

She pulled her toothbrush out to talk better. “I always go for walks when I brush my teeth. I don’t like standing in front of the bathroom mirror. Staring at myself makes me uncomfortable.”

She went back to brushing, but something in her eyes hinted that she had more to say. “But I’m not wandering today. I wanted to talk to you, just the two of us.”

I sucked in a breath through my teeth. Just what I needed, more emotionally heavy conversations when I was least prepared for them. Which was to say always.

I tapped the tip of my hoof against the crystal floor and looked aside. “Then talk away,” I said.

I saw her frown out the corner of my eye. Her magic let go of her toothbrush to let it dangle in her mouth again.

I knew I was coming across as standoffish, but I couldn’t help how these sorts of conversations made me feel. I was tired of feeling helpless and talked down to. It wasn’t Starlight’s fault, though. I had to remind myself that.

“You’re allowed to ask us for help once in a while,” she said around her brush.

There it was. That single most irritating sentiment they’d been grinding into my head since I got here.

I knew I could ask them for help. That’s what friends were for. But I needed to do this myself, for all sorts of reasons I already told Twilight. Why couldn’t they get that?

“I…” I sighed. “I know. I already talked to Twilight about it. I just… She’s already stressed out enough as it is over this. And if I can just not be one more thing on the pile, then that’s the least I can do.”

She glanced down the hallway behind me, then back to me. “Between you and me, that doesn’t stop her from worrying.”

“What do you mean?”

She pulled the toothbrush from her mouth, and bits of toothpaste flung across the hall. She didn’t seem to notice.

“I mean she worries about you all the time. Not that she doesn’t think you’re capable of handling whatever goes on in that other world, or that you don’t have the best set of friends you could ask for.” She shrugged. “But, you know… she’s Twilight. Worrying and overthinking things is basically her special talent. Honestly, if you really want her to worry less, talk to her. Tell her all the worrying things she should worry about. That way she can at least make checklists and stuff to better cope with the worrying she’ll do anyway.”

“But I talk to her all the time. I’ve already filled up half of the new notebook she gave me.”

Starlight raised an eyebrow at me.

Okay, what in the crap was that look for? I wasn’t lying.

“You might talk to her,” she said, “but you don’t talk to her. You don’t confide in her. At least, not with whatever this is. You’ve been showing us how you feel, but you’ve been guarding what you feel, or what it has to do with Luna. I get that it’s something big—I think we all got that—but whatever’s bothering you, you gotta actually tell her.”

I bit my lip and ground my hooftip into the floor. “I, I don’t know if I’m comfortable doing that. Not yet.”

“And that's fair, but the longer you wait, the more it’ll eat you up inside. Believe me. I know a thing or two about bottling up your emotions.” Her lips warped into a frown as she stared past me at some undesirable memory. She shook her head and gave me a placating smile. “There’s strength in accepting our weaknesses. And understanding what we’re bad at is what lets us grow.”

I smirked, something I didn’t expect myself to have in me at that moment. “You know, I’m really not used to you being so insightful. Whenever we hang out, we usually just, you know, hang out.”

Starlight shrugged. “Twilight’s taught me a lot about myself. Just comes with hanging around her so much, I guess.

“Also Trixie,” she added. Her smile became a thousand-yard stare on the verge of a PTSD flashback. “Nothing teaches you how to be the responsible one better than keeping her out of trouble.”

That got me laughing. If this world’s Trixie was anything like the one back home, I could write a book on responsibility. Still, as easily as Starlight could force a smile out of me, that good feeling just wouldn’t last.

“I get that you think I should talk to Twilight. Like, really talk to her. But it’s not that simple. You see, the thing is, Twilight has… Twilight has a very specific image of Luna in her head. And I have a very different image in mine.”

I took a deep breath and shook my head. Even just talking about having to talk about it was tough.

“I don’t doubt that Twilight’s image is genuine,” I continued. “But that doesn’t change how mine looks, or how genuine mine is, too. And the difference between them is… staggering. I don’t know if she could see my image even if I told her everything.”

I rubbed a hoof up and down my foreleg. “Besides, I don’t want sharing mine to ruin hers. I… I couldn’t do that to her.”

Starlight pulled her toothbrush out and held it aloft. She gave me a frighteningly sober look.

“Are you afraid of her image of Luna changing, or yours?”

Her words ran down my back like a bucket of ice water, and my mouth went dry. An instinctive scowl shot to my face.

“I’m not afraid.”

She held that sober stare on me way longer than I was comfortable with. “Look, you don’t have to tell me what happened between you two, but you should still tell Twilight. Even if you’re worried she won’t get it or that it’ll hurt her. She’s hurting as it is, and so are you, and neither of you will get better until you suck it up and rip that bandaid off.”

She twirled her toothbrush in idle circles like a drum major who’d lost her train of thought. “And like I said, I’m always here if you need somepony else to talk to. We all are. Okay?”

And there we were, back to the original, condescending sentiment. I pursed my lips and looked aside. I knew they meant well, but it didn’t change jack shit for how it made me feel.

“Okay,” I finally said. A momentary silence followed on its coattails, and I felt exposed, like I was disrobing for an operation, laid out on a table for a bunch of indifferent medical students to ogle at.

Starlight looked around like she was searching for another conversation piece. When she didn’t find anything, she gave me one of her awkward smiles that she always wore whenever she had to backtrack over something socially inappropriate. The toothpaste foam coating her lips added another layer of awkwardness to the moment.

“Sooo yeah. I’m gonna… Yeah. Goodnight, Sunset.” She hurried down the hallway for the bathroom, her toothbrush trailing beside her.

She was so strangely awkward, I cracked a half smile as I watched her disappear beyond the curve of the castle hallway. My smile didn’t last long, only until the fading echo of hoof steps left me in silence.

After a hard moment to myself, I whispered, “Goodnight, Starlight.”

• • •

Sleep happened quickly enough. I must have been more tired than I thought. Which wasn’t surprising, given how much dream diving took out of me.

Also unsurprisingly, I opened my eyes to the same goddamn dream of Twilight’s guest bedroom where I slept in the real world.

I was starting to get used to the idea of this little room as a dreamplace, or whatever I should call it. Almost like a home away from home.

That was, until I saw Luna standing between me and the door. I bristled at the sight of her, but I did my best to throw on an indifferent stare.

“What are you doing here?” I asked. I tried standing, but my hooves felt velcroed to the bedsheets.

“I could ask the same of you, Sunset Shimmer,” she said.

I scowled at her. “It’s my dream. I’m kinda supposed to be here.”

“In a dream, yes. But in this dream? What makes you dream of such a place? Why Twilight’s castle?”

Oh, wasn’t that just the most bullshit answer? Answering a question with another question.

I bit my tongue to keep from jumping the gun. If I was going to chew her out for daring to show her face here, I wanted to wait for something big to hit her with.

And besides… I owed it to Twilight. I promised I’d talk to her.

“I don’t know, but you stay over there,” I commanded.

“I have not moved,” she said.

“Exactly.”

She blinked, and I swore I saw a hint of annoyance, but she seemed to think better of whatever thoughts ran through her head and sat down. God, she even sat like she used to, with her wings half spread and everything.

“Why did you come for me?” she asked.

“You were in a coma or whatever. Twilight and Starlight were working on getting you out. But they couldn’t get into your dreams like I could. We think it’s the Tantabus that lets me cross through dreams better.”

She watched me with razor-sharp eyes. Did she think I was lying? What reason would I have to do that? She already knew I hated her guts. I didn’t have anything to hide.

“I gave you the Tantabus for safekeeping,” she said. “Not so that you could stumble blindly back in and deliver it to our enemy.”

“Well it’s not like you gave me an instruction manual or anything. How the hell was I supposed to know? And what did you expect me to do? The dream was falling apart and I had to make a choice. Was I supposed to just let you lay there in that coma forever?”

“Yes!” She leaned into the statement, and out went those wings, just a tad more.

That sent me back on my heels. I locked eyes with her, and I saw something other than that stone mask of hers. Something in her eyes pleaded with me.

Was that guilt?

I snorted. “If it makes you feel better, I wanted to.”

That earned me a healthy dose of silence. Judging by how she scanned the floor, it was hard to tell if she found my words hurtful, justified, or both.

“I subsumed the Nightmare to keep it from plaguing you,” she said. The judgmental sharpness to her voice had left. She sounded tired.

“Yeah? And look where I ended up. In a dream with my real Nightmare.”

She said nothing to that and looked away. The silence that crept in was more than welcome.

I still had a job to do, though, so I reluctantly asked, “So what’s with the Nightmare wanting the Tantabus?”

“Power. I feel it even now, sucking away the Tantabus’s life force. If the Nightmare devours it wholly, I fear what power it will gain. I dare not refute the prospect that it may even find the strength to break free of its own shackles and gain control of my body.”

“You really think that’ll happen?” I didn’t have any explicit reason to believe her, but something in how plainly she said it triggered a primal fear in me. No one would be that serious about something without believing it themselves.

My thoughts flashed back to the dream the Tantabus showed me last night. The evil things I had once wanted to make real. That really was the Nightmare’s plan, wasn’t it? Just like I guessed.

“If the Tantabus could tear open a dream and escape into the real world,” Luna said, “there is no reason to assume this Nightmare could not do the same, if not more, after consuming it.”

I couldn’t argue with that logic. I scuffed my hoof on the bedsheets without taking my eyes off her.

“So then what do we do?”

Luna sat quiet for a while, deep in thought. I had never seen someone more focused.

“We destroy it,” she said.

“Destroy it? You mean the Nightmare or the Tantabus? I thought you were trying to save it. Isn’t that the whole reason you gave it to me in the first place?”

I caught her eye for a split second before she looked away. Her ears fell flat back.

“The Tantabus is a part of me, true, and I cannot imagine life without it. But I will sacrifice what I must to protect my subjects.”

There were a million things I could have said, a million more I wanted to. But all I could manage was a half-hearted whisper:

“Yeah…”

The silence came back after that. Neither of us could look the other in the eye.

“I’m done here,” I said. I couldn’t stand being in the same room as her.

Luna didn’t say anything, but she granted me my wish with a flash of her horn and a suffusive, white light.

• • •

It was still dark when I opened my eyes.

I took a deep breath, and the nightly autumn chill from the window said without words that I was truly awake. I considered lying there until sunrise, but my eyelids weren’t heavy enough and my legs itched for a walk.

My hoofsteps echoed off the hallway’s high ceiling, which loomed just out of reach of the crystal torchlights. It was hard to keep myself from staring up into that darkness. Something about it felt necessary, like it was part of something missing from me. I couldn’t wrap my head around it.

I just… I needed to think. About what I was doing. About what I was doing here. What did I gain from all this and was it all really worth it?

So many questions I had to ask myself. So many answers I needed to find.

I wandered past a staircase, and a whim struck me. The spiral stairs drew my eyes up up up the inner core of the tree, and after a moment’s consideration, I followed them.

I went to the highest tower in Twilight’s castle. It opened onto a balcony that overlooked all of Ponyville and the valley beyond. Canterlot sparkled like a tiny jewel latched to the distant shadow that was Canterlot Mountain.

A slow but steady wind blew across my face. I was too high up to hear any of the bugs, and it was too early for the birds to be out. Just me and the deep, deep shadow of a new moon, with no Mare to speak of.

Starlight was right. I needed to talk to Twilight. Like, really talk to her. I just… I didn’t know how. What if I did hurt how she felt about Luna?

But that’s what this was all about, wasn’t it? Twilight wanting to help me get through this? She had said exactly that so many times, and I knew she meant it. But all the same, I didn’t want to hurt her. I didn’t want her to hurt for me. That just wasn’t right.

But how much of this could I handle on my own? I was strong. I was. I was. I had to be.

But there was strength in accepting our weaknesses.

I… Starlight was right. I headed back downstairs.

The hallways seemed quieter than before, as if watching, waiting for me to wuss out and head back to bed. I stopped in front of Twilight’s door and put my hoof on the handle.

Here I was, moments away from my greatest fears.

I heard the brass handle jiggling in my grasp, and I remembered to breathe. I had to do this. I had to talk to her. I swallowed the lump in my throat and turned the knob.

The faint rectangle of light swept across the floor and over Twilight’s bed. She rolled over beneath the sheets, and after rubbing her eyes, she squinted at me.

“Sunset?”

I lifted a hoof, about to step inside, but stopped myself. “Hey, Twilight. Can we talk?”

XX - Trust Fall

July 27th.

A Thursday and nothing more, in the grand scheme of things. Sunset had spent the day finishing up that research article on geostrophic winds, as insignificant of a timestamp as that may be. But in hindsight, the day itself was pivotal enough to back-mark on her calendar.

It began a series of X’s marching their way toward a large red circle around August 26th: the next full moon.

She often stared at that date long after having turned off the lights for bed. It was a countdown, a timer getting the better of her. Without knowing when the last 30th full moon came and went, Sunset had to operate under the assumption that it would be the one coming up, and she had much to prepare.

She had spent a good four days crafting a proper mount for the mirror: a dais of crystal the color of port wine, about a meter in diameter, buffed and rebuffed and smoothed out and polished to a shine, and all of it done by hoof. Even the faintest traces of residual magics could contaminate the base and ruin everything, were she to use her horn.

She hated the soreness in her legs that the endless motion brought, but the base had to be as perfect as a quiet pond—the more imperfections, the more discordant energy, and that, more than residual magics, could spell disaster.

“As shiny as a sorcerer’s silver,” as Professor Wizened Reed often joked when rambling on the subject of arcane conductors, and damn did it look fit for a king. Or a princess, actually. The thing could have passed for its own mirror.

Speaking of, the mirror itself needed its own laborious care and attention. She’d invested nearly a week of steady, careful polish, making sure it was even more perfect than the base—so much that it seemed to have its own auric glow when she turned off the lights.

She often stared at it for hours, long after String had gone home. The sun could have set and the birds already been up at their chirpiest, and Sunset would still be there, staring.

Something about the mirror’s magic changed her reflection. Her eyes shimmered brighter than in her bedroom vanity or the odd window-shop display. Her mane seemed to have a bit more wave to it, the way she wished it would stay while out and about. And if the guilty pleasure of admiring this better version of herself wasn’t enough, her reflection didn’t appear alone.

Nocturne stood beside her every time she stared long enough into the mirror. She pitched her nose downward and her ears forward in greeting, and Sunset could feel the happiness radiating from Nocturne’s smile, her silent cheers and, and… admiration for what Sunset accomplished here and now.

Sunset wasn’t just doing research. She was doing a good deed. She was saving somepony’s life. She was the hero of this story and in the heart and mind of the one staring back at her from the other side of the glass.

She brought a hoof up and gently brushed her lips to remember that sensation, that cold wintergreen chill, light as the season’s first snowfall. It gave her the confidence to smile, to see herself as more than a nopony, as more than Copper’s shadow, as more than a passing thought.

It made her feel… worthwhile.

Sometimes, she’d reach out and touch the glass, press against it with the faint hope that she could break through and pull her friend—her maybe-more—out of her nightmares and into the real world.

But against her deepest wishes, the glass was merely glass, and Sunset’s hoof stayed on this side.

For now, that is.

And so her daydreaming would continue, until the sound of a broken beaker or the whir of some magical spell in a nearby lab pulled her from her thoughts. She’d remember to blink and realize she sat alone with her reflection and nothing more.

“I’ll get you out” were her parting words to the room; “I’ll get you out” her mantra that followed her home, each and every night; “I’ll get you out” her dying thought as sleep took her, the sensation of wintergreen lingering upon her lips.

• • •

Damn it! Damn this whole thing to Tartarus.

Sunset stared at the remains of yet another mirror frame. She kicked a piece and watched it skid into the far corner of the room.

Like the mirror’s base, the frame had to be designed just so in order to contain the mirror’s latent magic when it activated. A well-made base ensured proper magic flow through the system, but a proper frame kept things from getting explodey. And that’s where things weren’t going as planned.

She had built a simple magic inducer to simulate how the mirror would react upon activation. If the fragments embedded in her blast shield were any indication, she had some modifications to make.

Why didn’t the frame hold up to the power surge? She made it from the same crystal as the base. Hell, it was the same crystal the other research ponies used in their containment fields for whatever the hay those glowing rocks were. “Industrial grade” was supposed to mean something, but apparently all it really meant was “big freaking disappointment.” Unnecessary setback after unnecessary setback. She was running out of time for no good reason.

It didn’t help that Copper had moved back into their dorm. Not that she wasn’t a welcome sight at the end of a long day, but the questions… so many questions about “all that sciency shit” Sunset was working on, and not being able to tell her made everything that much more stressful.

Sunset had promised Celestia. Confidentiality was absolute. Not even her best friend could know. But Copper being Copper, that didn’t stop her from prying.

“Hey, you,” Copper said the moment Sunset walked through the door that night. She sat looking over the back of the couch, wearing a roguish smile that banished any notion of innocence that little red hairclip of hers could front. “How’s the sciency shit goin’?”

Sunset resisted the urge to roll her eyes and tossed her saddlebags on the table. She did smile a little, though. No matter how exhausted she felt, just seeing Copper could get that much out of her. But tired is as tired does, and she flopped onto the couch next to Copper with all the gusto of a beached whale.

“It’s alright,” Sunset said.

“You sound like you got hit by a stagecoach. If that’s your definition of ‘alright,’ then I don’t wanna know what you consider ‘bad.’”

Well, truth be told, Sunset did consider this bad. She just didn’t want to admit it. Admitting this was bad meant admitting to this power containment issue and her constant failure to surmount it.

And Sunset Shimmer didn’t fail at anything.

In her slump, she noticed a vase of daffodils on the coffee table.

“You’ve been having a rough week,” Copper said, watching Sunset eye the vase. She dug the point of her hoof into the cushion, looked down at it, and shrugged. “I know they’re your favorite, so I figured I’d, y’know…”

That got Sunset smiling in earnest. She picked them up and brought them to her nose. They smelled like happiness.

“You’re the best, Copper,” Sunset said.

“I learn from the worst!” Copper said from somewhere off in the kitchen area. When did she even move? She was like a freakin’ ninja. “And I know what else will make you feel better.”

Not that she intended to look, but Sunset didn’t need to, as Copper floated a letter in front of her nose, dangling it by the corner like a carrot on a string. “What’s that?” Sunset said, not bothering to swat it away.

“You know what it is…” Copper put on the sultriest voice she could muster, which was saying something. Sunset could see the horny schoolmare look on Copper’s face without looking. “Or more importantly, who it is.”

The envelope did a little jig on Sunset’s nose. It was sealed with a little sticker in the shape of an acorn, and she caught the familiar scraggly cursive addressed to her.

Oh. Doppler. Sunset sighed and laid her head down on her forehoof.

“I know you’ve been thinking about him non-stop,” Copper said. She made the envelope do a little pirouette in front of Sunset.

Sunset slanted her mouth. She… really hadn’t thought about him in a while. Honestly, when her thoughts weren’t on the mirror or planting her face firmly into her pillow, they were on Nocturne.

Nocturne… alone in the dreamscape. No Star Swirl, no family or friends. Only Sunset to keep her company.

“Well guess what?” Copper said. “I’ve been thinking about him, too.”

Sunset picked her head up off her forehoof. “What?”

“Hah! I knew that’d get you out of your head for two seconds. But you know what will really get your attention?” She seductively bit her lip and waggled her eyebrow. “I read your letter, too.”

Yeah. That got Sunset’s attention alright. Even if she had fallen out with Doppler, invasions of privacy were just that. She snatched the envelope out of Copper’s magic and sat up.

“You read my mail? What the crap, Copper.”

Copper took a step back and put a hoof up defensively. “Hey now, with how much of a bum you’ve been these last few weeks, I knew you wouldn’t read it. But it’s from Doppler, and you know what month it is.”

“August…?”

Copper threw on the biggest grin Sunset had seen all week and said in a sing-song voice, “He’s on his way baaaack.”

For all that statement should have excited her, Sunset couldn’t find the will for it. She knew she should feel something, but didn’t. She was too tired to feel anything, too tired to care. For all that she had wanted to hold Doppler in her hooves before, the mirror had taken over every facet of her life.

Nocturne needed her. And if Sunset were honest with herself, she needed Nocturne. She brushed her lips with a hoof. Was it wrong to have a crush on a 1000-year-old ghost pony? The thought of leaving her stranded in the Dreamscape for even one more minute got her heart doing that squirmy, anxious, impossible-to-sit-still feeling.

Copper’s grin drooped into a frown. “Hey. You okay? You’ve been spacing out a lot lately. And you’ve been doing that lip-brushing thing a lot, too. You know nervous tics like that are a sign you’re going bonkers, right?”

Sunset stared at the envelope. That acorn sticker was probably Copper’s. Doppler would have sealed it with something silly, like a pencil or a paper with an A+ on it. She sighed and set it on the coffee table next to a messy stack of cosmetology magazines.

“It’s this research thing you’ve thrown yourself headlong at, isn’t it?” Copper said. “Why are you so dead set on this deadline, anyway? I thought Princess Celestia told you this was supposed to be a year-long thing or whatever.”

Sunset glared at Copper and had half a mind to tell her off, but she sighed and laid her head on the table. “She did, but there’s more to it than just what Celestia said.”

Copper perked up at that. “Something more important than what the princess told you? Oh, man. This I have to know. What is it?”

“I didn’t say it was more important.” That phrase left a sour taste in Sunset’s mouth. Wasn’t it, though?

“But there is something else that’s important about it.” Copper bit the tip of her tongue and leaned in farther and sweet Celestia, she could be the most adorable and simultaneously aggravating pony in the world.

“I can’t tell you,” Sunset said, rolling her eyes. “The whole thing’s confidential. I can’t say a word.”

Copper smirked. “You sound like me when I had to keep Doppler’s secret from you in Manehattan.”

Oh yeah. That thing. Sunset let out a sigh. Yeah, she didn’t really care about that anymore, either. Kinda went with the whole falling out with Doppler thing. Man, that was going to be an awkward conversation when he finally got back. She… still hadn’t told him she’d lost interest.

“Wow, not even that’s getting a rise out of you? You really are in the dumps about whatever this is.”

That was putting it lightly. August 26th was less than a week away, and she still hadn’t figured out why the frame kept failing. At this rate, Nocturne might be stuck in the Dreamscape for another two and a half years. That got her heart all can’t-sit-still squirmy-like all over again.

“You know you can always talk to me about it, right?” Copper brushed Sunset’s shoulder, gently smoothing down the little hairs that never liked to lie flat. A sober yet hopeful smile threaded across her face, the kind that always sort of unsettled Sunset, given the perfect, happy pony Copper was. “And I know it’s confidential. I get that. But I just… You look so unhappy, and I know talking about it’ll help.”

Copper flattened her ears back, and the way she clenched her jaw made her look beyond worried. She held up her right hoof in oath. “You can… you can sew my mouth shut with literal string if I blab. I swear.”

“I…”

Sunset looked away. She didn’t like this line of thinking. True, talking about problems was a surefire way of coping with them, and talking to String about it didn’t help. All he ever said was “just gotta keep at it” or other annoyingly motivational phrases.

But she knew Copper. And that meant entrusting what amounted to a state secret to the blabbiest pony in Equestria.

But she knew Copper, and Copper knew her. They were best friends. And that look on Copper’s face… If there was ever a time Copper was being serious and willing to keep her mouth shut, this was it.

Even if Copper couldn’t help her with the research itself, talking about it might help. Just having that shoulder to lean on would make things easier.

Celestia didn’t have to know.

“Okay, fine. But I will sew your mouth shut if you blab.”

The unsettlingly sober frown on Copper’s face got swept away in the torrent of a massive, infectious smile. “I swear on life and lips!”

She leaned in uncomfortably close to add: “And you know which lips I mean.”

“Of course I do.” Sunset rolled her eyes.

“I was talking about my—”

“Copper!”

She laughed. “Okay, okay. I’m just kidding. Talk to me. Really. I’m here for you.”

Sunset hooked her lip into a frown. Talking would help, but Copper wouldn’t understand anything she would say. She’d smile and “mhm” in all the right places, maybe put a hoof on Sunset’s shoulder when needed, but she wouldn’t get it. And, really, Sunset needed her to understand, not just listen.

It’d be better to just show her.

She threw her saddlebags back on. “Come on.”

“What?” Copper gasped. “You’re gonna show me!? Ohh, this is even better!”

“Hey,” Sunset snapped. “This is serious. I mean it. I’m trusting you big time with this.”

Copper’s excitement simmered down to a frighteningly serious smile. “I know. Really.”

Sunset held her gaze for a moment longer before setting out. “Okay.”

With some effort, Sunset managed to get her lazy butt off the couch and back out the door, Copper right beside her, more bubbly than the first time they met. They made good time back down through the quiet CSGU campus and into the castle. Past a few curious but well-wishing guardsponies, and down they went into the depths of the research facilities.

“This is so cool,” Copper whispered. Her eyes roved the high ceiling, the glow quartz sconces, and the many branching laboratories. She turned to Sunset after seeing one of the night crews at work. “Are we gonna get in trouble with me being here?”

Sunset shook her head. “They’re all busy with their own stuff. They won’t bother us.”

Copper ribbed her. “Look at you, all professional and big and stuff. ‘They won’t bother us.’ Hah!”

Yeah. This was already starting to feel like a bad idea. She had learned a thing or two about gut feelings, and that not acting on them usually ended up making things worse.

But this was how Copper always acted around new things. She… No. This was a bad idea. Things like this always ended badly. Sunset would get in so much trouble. She could lose everything.

“Copper,” Sunset said. “I think we should turn around. I don’t think this is a good idea anymore.”

Copper’s jaw dropped. “What? But we just got here. You can’t renege on me now.”

“I just… wait, what’s that? Shit, someone’s coming. In here!”

Sunset grabbed Copper in her magic and all but launched her through the nearest door. To say that Sunset was surprised Copper didn’t yelp would have been the understatement of the century.

Thankfully, the room lay dark as the hallway, and when Sunset shut the door behind her, everything fell silent. She cast a Hush Spell just to be safe. Unfortunately, she didn’t know any listening spells off the top of her head, so all she could do was strain her ear against the door for their hoofsteps.

“I thought nopony would bother us walking around down here?” Copper whispered.

Sunset barely heard her, thanks to the Hush Spell, but glared daggers at her all the same. It earned a skeptical but acquiescent frown from Copper, and she said nothing more.

Sunset pressed her ear back to the door. Two ponies walked by, talking about something or other to do with thermodynamics and coefficients of friction, until they faded away. She heaved a sigh of relief.

“For real, though,” Copper said quietly, muffled as she was by the spell. “What’s with the sneaking? You’re Princess Celestia’s personal student. I thought you were allowed down here.”

“Yeah, I am,” Sunset said. Her voice came out as a whisper, too. She didn’t feel comfortable lifting the Hush Spell quite yet. “But you’re not. And I really can’t risk losing my privileges.”

“Not even to show me this awesome amazing thing you’re sworn to secrecy about?” Copper batted her eyes, and for once, that definitely wasn’t going to fly.

“No!” Even under the effects of a Hush Spell, that came out loud enough to echo in this unfurnished room. Sunset flinched and grabbed Copper by the scruff of her neck with a pinch of magic before hightailing it out of there.

“Fuck, ow! Sunset, let go!” She struggled in Sunset’s magic until Sunset released her halfway down the hall. She rolled her shoulders to work out the kinks and fixed Sunset with a disbelieving stare. “Chill the fuck out, holy shit.”

“No, I’m not going to chill out. I could have gotten in trouble for that.” Sunset turned and looked up at the ceiling. “Why did I think this was a good idea?”

“Sunset, you have no idea who those ponies were. They could have been just some dorky research students for all we know. And if they even remotely knew who you were, they wouldn’t have fucked with you. But I would have definitely fucked with them.” She waggled her eyebrows. “Maybe even left out the ‘with.’”

“Copper, seriously. This is why I can’t show you stuff like this. All you do is joke around.”

“Well… yeah.” She broke eye contact for a second. “I always joke around. When am I not joking around?”

“Exactly!”

“It’s not like I can’t be serious and joke around at the same time. Come on, Sunset. Let’s go back down there. I want to know what it is.”

“Why?” It came out harsher than Sunset meant, but maybe that was a good thing.

Copper blinked. Her ears stood straight up, as if this were the first time she had actually taken a good look at Sunset.

“W-what?” she said.

“Why? Why are you so insistent on this? I changed my mind. Why can’t you respect that? This is why showing you is a bad idea. I could lose everything I have with Celestia and Noc—” She cleared her throat. “Why do you want to know so badly?”

Copper wilted beneath Sunset’s glare. Her ears fell back, and from the way her mouth hung slightly open Sunset realized she had stumbled upon a moment where, for once in her life, Copper didn’t know what to say.

“Because this is tearing you apart from the inside, Sunset.”

“I’m fine.”

“No. No you’re not. You’re tired all the time. You snap at me and everypony else—”

“Well maybe you deserve to be snapped at once in a while, especially when you pry like this. Not everything is meant for you to stick your nose in like it’s your business.”

Copper’s jaw dropped, and she reared back. She pointed a hoof at Sunset.

“That. That right there. What the hell is getting to you? Why is this getting to you? You’ve never acted like this before.”

“Yeah. That’s because…”

Because what? Because Nocturne, that’s what. Nocturne needed her, and Sunset was the only pony who could save her.

But Copper wouldn’t get that. If Sunset told her about Nocturne, she’d think Sunset was crazy, and there went best-friend confidentiality. She’d tell String, who’d take it right to Celestia. And when that happened, goodbye mirror, goodbye star pupil status, goodbye Nocturne.

“Because I’m under a lot of pressure,” Sunset said. “And I can’t tell you about it.”

“Yes,” Copper said, taking a step forward. “Yes you can. You don’t have to tell me anything about the project, but you can at least tell me how you feel. And I want to know, because…”

Copper lowered her gaze to the floor, and her eyes danced back and forth as if searching for the right words. She looked back up with folded ears and misty eyes.

“You know how much I care about you…”

Maybe it was the shameless prying. Maybe it was the earlier smartass comments. Maybe it was the lack of sleep. It didn’t matter. Something about the tone of Copper’s voice set off a fuse in Sunset’s head. All the flip-flopping emotions she played at had tested Sunset’s patience enough for one day.

“Yeah,” Sunset said flatly. “Thanks for your concern. I appreciate it.”

“S-Sunset?” Copper stared at her, alarmed. She had raised her front hoof as if ready to step back.

“You heard me.”

“Wha— I don’t—”

“Copper, what is… you know what? Never mind. I’m going to bed. I’ll see you back at the dorm.” And with that, Sunset slunk out of the lab.

Copper called out to her, but she didn’t bother looking back.

Sunset took the long way home, through the nice part of the trade district that butted up against the white walls of Canterlot Castle. Sadly, there wasn’t much out this late at night to keep her mind off their little argument, and she wound up face-first in her pillow with nothing to show for her aching hooves but a head full of Coppertone.

Well, fuck if that didn’t go as horribly as it possibly could. What was she thinking, bringing Copper to see the mirror? She knew Copper wouldn’t get it. And now all it did was piss her off. Piss herself off. Just… ugh!

The birds weren’t going at it outside just yet, but Sunset surely had less than a few hours before they would, and it was too hot to shut the window. She rolled over and covered her head with her other pillow, for whenever they inevitably started.

Screw this night. Screw showing Copper the mirror. Screw Copper’s prying.

What the hell did she know? She hadn’t met Nocturne. She didn’t know how important this was, how narrow a window Sunset had.

Right now, all that mattered was figuring out this mirror. Nocturne counted on her.

Sunset idly ran her hoof along her lips. She had to get Nocturne out.

She had to…

• • •

Princess Celestia stood on her balcony overlooking Canterlot and the whole of Equestria beyond. The evening sun was an avid painter of golds and oranges and pinks, and it made a canvas of city and scattered cloud and distant snow-capped mountain alike. She allowed herself an extra moment to bask in it. But only a moment.

Ephemeral beauty begets ephemeral beauty, as was its nature; the day giveth unto the night, and so goes life as it was, is, and will be. In with a breath, out with a sigh.

Moments like this she cherished most. Moments like this she regretted most.

Celestia closed her eyes and threw her magic around the still slumbering moon. Like a lasso tossed beyond the horizon, she felt it grip and pull taut. Though it had come to heed her command over the centuries, the moon never quite obeyed her the way the sun did—ever mistrusting, ever resentful—and it took more than her fair share of effort to coax it above the horizon.

With the moon high above, Celestia watched as, ah yes, there the stars were, slowly creeping out to dapple the sky like children coming out to play. She took a moment to smile and breathed in the first quiet breath of night.

Her job done, she turned in to ready herself for bed. Peytral on its hook, tiara on the nightstand, she settled into her bedsheets with a contented sigh and closed her eyes.

There was a knock at her bedroom door. Celestia sat up and rubbed her eyes. Did she fall asleep?

The moon cast a dim light through the balcony doors. Judging by the angle of the moonlight, it was somewhere around two o’clock. Philomena snoozed in her cage with her head under her wing.

The knock came again.

“What is it, Stone Wall?” Celestia said.

“Your Highness,” came Stone Wall’s bassy voice through the door. “Copper is here. She wants to speak with you. It sounds important.”

Copper…? Copper who? She rubbed her face, trying to wake up.

Ah, yes. Coppertone. Sunset’s friend.

Celestia got out of bed and cleared her throat. “Yes, Stone Wall. Send her in.”

A pause, and the door latch clicked to herald a hesitant set of hoofsteps. “Princess Celestia?”

She sounded… worried.

Celestia smiled, despite knowing Copper couldn’t see her in the darkness. To remedy that, she lit the candelabra on the reading desk by the door. The candlelight illuminated Copper’s left half, but that perhaps made the look on her face all the more concerning.

“Yes, Coppertone? What do you need?”

Copper stepped inside the doorway, her hooves clip-clopping on the marble floor. She stopped just short of the carpet.

“I know it’s late. And, by late I mean early. But…”

The sign of a thousand thoughts and fears warred on her face. And Celestia watched her heart break with every word she spoke.

“It’s about Sunset…”

XXI - The Morning After

I spent the night in Twilight’s room. We talked about a lot of things. Life, love, and, eventually, Luna.

I drew the conversation out beforehand. Even with Starlight’s suggestion and the fact I knew it had to happen, I struggled to work up the courage. But even though I finally ponied up and told her a few things, I still chickened out on others.

I did tell her the big thing, though, and really, the hardest part was seeing Twilight the morning after—the way she looked at Luna with hesitation instead of pity. I didn’t know how to feel about it.

On one end, good. Someone else saw her for the monster she was. On the other, though, I took something from Twilight. I stole an innocence, an unbiased trust she could never get back. The thought made me sick to my stomach.

But it couldn’t be helped. At least now somebody knew what I was dealing with.

“So,” Starlight said as we prepared for another dream dive. “We ready?” She directed a smile at me, the kind where she made sure she listened specifically to me. Something about it said she might have guessed what happened last night.

“Yeah,” I said.

Twilight was already marking up a new chalk circle. With how much energy coursed through the spell, the circle needed redoing each time we dream dived or else it could fall apart pretty violently.

“Ready over here,” she said.

Star Swirl stepped in from the hallway. “I’m here. I’m here. I—” He let out a big yawn. “—I will prepare the…”

He stared at the circle Twilight just finished drawing. “I must have slept in later than I thought.”

“Don’t worry,” Twilight said. “We got this. Everything’s good to go.” She turned to me. “Whenever you’re ready.”

I took a deep breath. I wasn’t ready—I probably never would be—but that was par for the course. I noticed Twilight’s smile looked kind of like Starlight’s, that empathetic “you really don’t have to do this” look. But I had to, especially now after the whole Tantabus thing.

If I wasn’t pussing out on fixing one mistake, I was busy causing another. I sat down on my end of the circle, opposite Luna.

Her face had a strangely vacant expression. Usually, she had some sort of look about her, be it a smile or a twinge of worry. But now that she lived inside me, her empty body looked just that… empty.

I remembered what she said last night, that the Nightmare intended to overtake her body and come into the real world.

I couldn’t run away now. I had to fix what I broke.

I closed my eyes and lowered my nose to my chest. A slow breath in through my nose, let it fill my lungs to the bottom, and hold.

The windchime sound of magic tickled my ear, and I felt it ripple down my body like rainfall. My mane floated upward as if I were suddenly deep underwater, and when I opened my eyes, I was back in the dream world.

I wasn’t quite sure what to expect when I entered. Maybe something violent and scary, or the same surreal blurriness I saw the first time I entered. But there was quite literally nothing to see in this void of a dream. Just me and the darkness.

“Greetings, Sunset Shimmer,” came a voice.

The hairs shot up on the back of my neck, and I spun around, horn flared with the first spell I could think of: Fireball, a classic off Professor Phoenix Flare’s “do not use” list.

Luna stood about three lengths away. Unlike her empty face in the real world, she wore a searching look here, as if trying to see what was going on in my head.

I let my spell fizzle, but kept it at a low simmer at the base of my horn, just in case. “What are you doing here?”

“You are in my dream, and I, as I currently exist, am bound to you.”

“Do you want to be here?” It was a strange question, I had to admit, but the way she spoke so distantly got me curious.

“Of course,” she said without missing a beat. “As I said before, the safety of my subjects is paramount.”

Yeah. Just like mine was. I left her with a glare instead of saying that.

“I know you do not wish for me to be here, but our goal is one and the same.”

“To never have to see your face again? Yeah, I’m all for that.”

She stared at me in what looked like an attempt at stoicism, but a vague tightness to her features spelled out that lie for what it was. “We will proceed when you are ready,” she said finally.

“Then proceed.”

She started as if she meant to follow, but I made sure to keep her in sight. I still hadn’t let go of that spell, not for a good while longer.

We walked through the emptiness in silence for what felt like an hour. Little motes of firelight floated past us in the dark—the first sign that we were anywhere at all other than some gaping nothingness. They bobbed and flickered on a listless wind only they could feel.

It was like walking through a swamp at night and seeing all the will-o’-wisps come out, like in the stories I read as a foal. Something about how they led hapless ponies into inescapable mires or other boggy spots inhabited by cragodiles or arbormaws. Plus, it felt like we were heading down a slope, which, if I knew anything about dreams and symbolism, was a big red flag.

It went on for a while, and the continued silence both irritated and comforted me. I half wanted to argue with Luna, make sure she knew exactly how I felt about our arrangement, and the other half didn’t want anything to do with her.

“Fate is a fickle mistress,” Luna said as if reading the first half of that thought.

“Don’t start that shit with me,” I spat. “Fate didn’t ruin my life.”

Luna seemed to contemplate my words. “I do not deny my overbearing role in what transpired, Sunset. What I speak of is the opportunity fate has set before us. It is strange indeed that she would conspire to bring us together.”

“What are you talking about? Again, that was you. I don't care if Twilight’s the one who talked me into this. You’re the one who brought it up with her. I know her, and I know you. Don’t fucking act like you didn't take advantage of her kindness.”

“That is decidedly not the case, Sun—”

“Bullshit.”

“Please. Allow me to speak.”

“After all the lies you shoved in my face back then? I don’t see why I should believe a word you say. Stop talking to me.”

That sat sour between us for a long time. It was probably only a few seconds, but the way she stared at me could have been its own eternity.

“I have been nothing but—”

“I said stop talking to me.”

“Sunset, I am trying—”

I rounded on her. “No. I don’t care what you’re trying to do. I don’t care what you want or what you think. The only reason I’m here right now is because if I wasn’t, Twilight would be, and I couldn’t live with myself if she got hurt doing this. But you can fuck off and die for all I care.”

I turned back ahead. It was a long while before the sound of hooves started up behind me. I had told myself I wouldn’t let her out of my sight, but goddamnit, I couldn’t stand to look at her.

We went on in silence for about another hour. The downward slope never changed, though the atmosphere seemed to get darker, like a shadow had fallen over the darkness itself. It wasn’t until the air felt clammy that Luna’s hoofsteps stopped beside me.

“Wait,” she said.

I did. I didn’t give a damn about her or what she thought, but her tone of voice said I should pay attention anyway.

“’Tis a threshold,” she said. She looked around, her eyes searching for something beyond the darkness.

“What do you mean a threshold?”

“I sense it. Here.” She pointed a wing at the ground beneath her hooves. “I do not know what lies beyond. But we should take care before we continue.”

I didn’t know what to say. Part of me felt this was just one of her mind games, a reason to start up the conversation again. Caution played in her favor, though. I remembered how the Nightmare could fuck with my dreams, and that hesitation pulled back on the reins.

“So then what?” I asked.

“We steel ourselves. For battle, illusion, something.” She raised a hoof and set it down across her imaginary line. We flicked our ears back and forth, straining for a sound. I could hear the blood running through my veins.

And nothing.

“So much for that,” I said.

“Patience. The darkness knows not the passage of time. Mortality is its own arrogance.”

“The hell’s that supposed to mean?”

But then I felt it. That pinprick on the back of my neck. A sense of impending doom, eyes watching from all around yet nowhere.

Something rose from the darkness ahead. I couldn’t tell what shape it took, but I recognized those glowing white eyes.

Luna leapt in front of me, wings fanned, her horn already glowing. “Stand fast. We slay this beast here and now.”

I readied my own Flamethrower Spell at the base of my horn. From the few times I tried fighting off the Nightmare in my own dreams, it hated fire more than anything.

The Nightmare came forward, its steps shapeless and silent, and it whispered incoherent, overlapping words in the back of my head that made my skin crawl.

Luna guided me back onto our side of the threshold, either thinking it wouldn’t cross or to use as a line in the sand.

When it reached the threshold, it flashed forward as if fired from a railgun. I dove sideways, feeling it shave off the tip of my tail.

Luna had leapt the opposite way, and when I was done tumbling into an ungraceful heap she had already pivoted and fired off a bolt of lightning. It snarled along the ground, sending up a line of smoke and the stink of ozone.

The Nightmare split in two to let it pass between. Like some unholy miasma, it hovered in the air for a moment before congealing into a lightless mass on the ground.

As if emerging from a swamp, its leopard-like head rose to greet us with soulless white eyes. Ears as sharp as horns took shape atop its skull, pointed forward, toward me. Out reached one, then another shadowy protrusion that twisted into the grotesque suggestion of muscle and paw to pull the rest of its lithe, muscular form from the nothingness. It curled back its lips to show off footlong fangs that glistened with malice, and a low growl rolled out from its throat.

My legs went weak, but I gritted my teeth and mustered my Flamethrower Spell to blast a gout of fire in its face. I must have been more off my game than I thought, though. It didn’t even flinch as the flames rolled across its body.

“Submit, demon!” Luna shouted from above, and a streak of blue magic came screaming down from on high before either me or the Nightmare could look up.

The Nightmare leapt backward just before the blast landed, and I had to brace myself against the shockwave that nearly sat me back on my ass, even from this distance. The heat from the explosion brought a flash sweat to my face, followed by a sudden chill in its absence.

Luna landed beside me, her horn preparing another spell. “I will not command thee again. Submit!”

Well behind its side of the threshold, the Nightmare lowered its head. Its body wavered like a heat mirage on the distant horizon, and when it crouched low, it seemed to lose its shape.

It came at us in that indistinct, four-legged shape, but before coming within range of our spells, it swan-dived into the earth to become like a black puddle crawling along the ground.

I didn’t know what to do. What did I hit something like that with? My Flamethrower hadn’t even fazed it. What did—

The earth heaved as if a bomb had detonated just below the surface.

A massive, rhinoceros-like thing surged out from the flying debris and shook the earth with its landing. With legs like tree trunks, it stampeded toward us, and its mouth split impossibly from one side of its body to the other to reveal row upon row of teeth the size of my head. Every raging step it took was an earthquake that tried shaking me from my hooves as it barreled closer.

I liked to think I was a brave pony. I had faced off against Sirens, stopped rampaging magic from tearing apart the universe. But as this behemoth came within spitting distance, its mouth twisting and opening up wide enough to swallow me whole, all I could do was tremble.

My hooves went limp, I collapsed to the ground, and I all too suddenly felt the world lurch underneath me as a heavy force smashed into my side.

I tumbled maybe a dozen feet before coming to a stop, and when I gathered my bearings, I saw Luna’s body bent and mangled between its jaws. Feathers fell in tufts from a wing twitching helplessly between its teeth. Blood ran in little rivulets down its jaw to pitter patter on the ground. Her eyes were on me.

“Leave,” Luna said. Her voice came out raspy and strained, like every muscle in her body tried and failed to hold together. There was fear in her eyes. “Leave.”

“I…” was all I could get out.

“Now!”

The Nightmare’s jaws clamped down another inch, and Luna’s screams couldn’t drown out the symphony of splintering bone.

The blood. So much blood. I felt the warm spray on my face.

A surge of bile rose up in my mouth, and I choked on the acidic taste. I couldn’t see anything anymore, couldn’t catch my balance, couldn’t hear anything but her screaming.

I managed to light my horn, and I felt myself falling upward as everything around me faded away. I passed through a film of some sort, like really thin curtains, and the weight of the world disappeared.

I drifted through nothingness for what could have either been a second or an eternity. My brain was in standby.

A sense of some unknowable existence threaded in around me like a sweater being knit while I wore it, and all too suddenly I realized who I was and what just happened.

“Luna!” I screamed. I opened my eyes, but the world swam in colors like unstirred paint. I reached out, and something hard touched me on the shoulder.

Teeth.

I screamed and backhanded it as hard as I could. A sharp pain shot up the little bones of my pastern, but I didn’t care. I shifted my hips to square up a kick that would send that shapeless monster back to whatever hell it came from.

A strange sound thwumped in my ears—it was the only way I could describe it—and some small fraction of my brain recognized it as magic, an illusion-class spell. The rest of me felt some common sense leak back into my head, along with the reasoning to slow down and take stock of my surroundings. I could practically feel my eyes dilate, and my lungs finally decided to open up, letting me breathe in the deep, sucking gasp I needed so badly.

“Sunset!” A pair of hooves grabbed my cheeks, and Twilight’s face was inches from me.

Oh, I was so happy to see her I could have kissed her. I hugged her tight and never wanted to let go.

“Sunset, it’s okay,” she said. She smoothed out the fur of my cheeks and down to my shoulders. “Whatever it was, it’s gone now. You’re safe.”

“What happened?” Starlight asked. She had a cup of water in her magic waiting for me. She rubbed a red mark swelling up on her cheek, and a pang of guilt shot through me.

“What happened to Luna?” Star Swirl asked from the opposite side of the chalk circle. He struggled to his hooves, the strain of maintaining the spell probably harder on him than he let on.

I took a deep breath. As much as I wanted to keep holding Twilight, I knew they all had plenty of questions, all of which I felt obligated to answer.

“Luna’s…” I swallowed the lump in my throat and sucked in another breath. I hated her guts, but the shock of actually seeing it happen punched a hole through my psyche like a fist through drywall. “Luna’s dead.”

Silence fell on the room.

“What do you mean she’s dead!?” Star Swirl roared. He stormed up to me, eyes and horn ablaze. “Look me in the eye when you speak such blasphemy!”

“Star Swirl, Star Swirl!” Twilight grabbed him by the cloak, but it didn’t do shit for slowing him down.

I backed up onto my haunches and almost fell over backwards for how he got nose to nose with me. “I—”

“Luna is a master of the Dreamscape,” he shouted. “The dream realm bends to her will. There is no way in Tartarus she would—”

“Star Swirl!” Twilight yanked on his cloak hard enough to spin him around. She set him with a stern glare. “Let her explain.”

Star Swirl raised his chin, and I could tell a silent war of words crossed between them. When he turned around, I saw more worry in his eyes than anger.

I took a deep breath and hugged myself. I had chills running all up and down my spine that I couldn’t shake.

“We traveled. Down. Down this invisible slope. It was dark, and it felt like the air itself was pressing in like we were underwater.”

I put a hoof to my head to steady myself. I couldn’t get the image out of my mind. The screams, the sounds. So much blood.

“We… We got to what felt like a gateway or like a line in the sand. I don’t know. There was nothing there, but Luna told me to stop. And I felt this… this feeling, like this sense of impending doom. Like when the hair stands up on the back of your neck and the darkness has eyes you can’t see.”

Starlight, Twilight, and Star Swirl gathered in front of me. Twilight put a hoof on mine, and the touch broke me down enough that I couldn’t keep the tears from coming out.

“And the Nightmare. It… came at us, and we fought it some. But then it changed. It changed into this giant rhino, hippo, bull thing I’ve never seen before, and… and…

“Luna pushed me out of the way. I think that’s what happened. But her magic wasn’t strong enough to stop it, and it grabbed her.” I tried wiping the imaginary blood off my face, but it wouldn’t come.

Why was I crying? Why in the actual fuck was I crying? She stepped in front. She chose to die like that. Just like I told her. She wanted to repay me for what she did, and good riddance.

So why couldn’t I stop crying?

And as if the universe wasn't finished bending me over the metaphorical table, the latch clicked on the hallway door behind me.

I wasn’t sure who I expected to walk through that door when I turned to look, but I knew who I didn’t expect. The longer I stared, the harder my brain ground its heels into the dirt and refused to believe.

I refused to believe the pristine white coat. I refused to believe the unforgettable, regal smile that carried with it a ray of sunshine even into this darkened corner of existence. I refused to believe the flowing mane and all its pretty, perfect pastels. But most of all, I refused to believe the happiness I saw in those eyes, the very same eyes that last looked down upon me with scorn and condemned me to the hell of the last seven years, and her name crystallized on the tip of my tongue: Princess Celestia.

Upon seeing all of us, her smile warped into a concerned frown. “What happened? Is everypony oka—

“Where the fuck have you been?” I yelled.

I didn’t pick those words. They just sort of tumbled out.

I had planned for years what I would say to Celestia when we eventually met—no small amount of apologies, the things I’d learned in my absence, heartfelt stuff like that. Every time I thought of seeing her again, my heart pounded in my chest and my throat closed up. I never figured out the exact words, only the feelings.

But there in the silence of the portal room with the imaginary blood of the pony I hated most on my face, all I felt was rage. The silence that had fallen over us cinched up like a noose, even the perfect decorum I remembered so distinctly about Celestia buckling within its stranglehold.

It was too much.

I stormed past her and shouldered open the door. Nobody tried stopping me. I assumed they were a little too shell-shocked themselves. I got halfway down the hall before a little voice popped into my head.

Stop running away, you little bitch.

I ground to a halt. The hallway lay silent, and I couldn’t block out the voice of reason that decided now of all times to fuck me over.

This was my fault. I messed up, and now Luna was dead. Someone died because I was too much of a chicken shit.

My breathing sped up, and I felt the muscles in my legs tense as if ready for someone to punch me. Sunset Shimmer didn’t fail, but what the hell was I supposed to call what just happened?

I knew the answer before the voice even spoke up. Falling down wasn’t failing; refusing to get back up was. I had to get back in there. The day still needed saving.

It’s just… what was I supposed to do? This wasn’t a simple “keep calm and carry on” situation. This was life or death, with all of Equestria and possibly the human world on the line. I couldn’t do this. Not with that… that thing waiting for me, that whatever-the-fuck the Nightmare was capable of becoming now that it was sucking the life out of the Tantabus. It was getting hard to breathe.

At least Luna tried.

The tightness in my chest reached a breaking point. I screamed at the top of my lungs; mustered every last drop of magic I could to my horn; and unloaded all my frustration, all my anger, all my sense of abandonment into the crystal wall beside me. I screamed as loud as my lungs would let me as I carved a fierce gouge from floor to ceiling. It oozed downward in glowing molten chunks hot enough to get a sweat going on my brow, and the effort of it all had me shaking.

The swath of molten crystal cooled to a blackened, charcoal-like luster, like someone had melted a box of crayons together. I took a deep, shaking breath to compose myself. When I let it out, I was calm, tranquil, at peace. Breathe in, breathe out. I headed back.

I thought that calm would last, but I hadn’t planned on Celestia coming out to check on me. Not alone, anyway.

Before I let any more memorable quotes tumble out of me, I took a moment to size her up. Her beauty always stopped me short—that tall slenderness that never failed to draw all the attention in a room—but the way her eyes danced back and forth looking into mine said way more about how worried she was than the thin line her lips made.

“What?” I said.

Her eyes went past me to the wall over my shoulder. “Are you feeling better?”

A pause. “What do you care?”

I didn’t know what else to say. I looked down and scuffed at the floor. The silence between us said she probably wanted to do the same, but I knew her well enough that she wouldn’t show that kind of weakness. Hesitation wasn’t her strong suit.

“I’m glad to see you again,” she said.

It was genuine. I could tell that much. The barest hint of worry hung in the way she said it, though. Even after all these years, I could still pick up on that. She was nervous about how I felt. And why shouldn’t she be? I hadn’t exactly left on the best of terms.

“Twilight has told me a lot about you,” she said. “What you’ve been up to.”

“You mean fucking everything up? Yeah, I’ve been pretty good at that lately.”

“I meant making the friends I had hoped you would.” Something in her eyes tried its hardest not to show my language bothered her. Not that I hadn’t already set that precedent back in the portal room.

“Yeah. That didn’t turn out how either of us hoped, did it?”

“Sometimes things don’t turn out how we want them to, but like a sapling from a forest fire, there is still beauty to be found in the end, and bigger and better things wait for us on the horizon.”

That was a carefully measured speech, even for her. Sounded like she’d been waiting to use that one for a while. Still, she wasn’t wrong.

“I’m sorry,” I finally said. “I didn’t deserve to be your student. I was the furthest thing from it.”

“There is nothing for you to be sorry for, Sunset. I made you my student because you were deserving of it. I wouldn’t have taken you on if you hadn’t been. I, on the other hoof, should have been more attentive to what you were going through.”

“Except you were. You tried to warn me, you tried to stop me. And…” I looked down, ashamed. “And I didn’t listen.”

I gave a tiny laugh and shook my head, then said weakly, “You warned me exactly what would happen. And then it did.”

“That doesn't put you at fault, Sunset. Falling for whatever lies she fed you and what you did as a direct result of them is not your fault.”

The lies she fed me. If that wasn't the understatement of the century, I didn’t know what was. This wasn't just some insignificant “oh, woe is me” bullshit.

Luna didn't simply feed me lies, she shoveled them down my throat. And by god, I consumed them—so completely, so wholeheartedly—until they consumed me. No matter the circumstances, I chose to follow through on them, and just… Celestia didn't get that. Nobody got that.

I didn’t have the energy to fight her on it, though, but thankfully the look on her face said she had no intention of pushing that line any further.

She followed through on that sentiment with another moment’s silence, punctuated by an errant flit of her wings. Seemed she wanted me to pick the conversation up again, but I honestly had nothing to say. I had already worked through how I felt about us and what I had done, how I had failed her. Seven years could do that to even the densest pony like me.

Seven years… How in the fuck did this conversation feel so… normal?

Sure, what we were talking about was anything but, but the tone of our conversation hardly felt… I didn’t know. It didn’t feel right. It felt, what was the word… incongruent?

Fuck, I couldn’t think straight. I wiped away tears I just now realized ran down my face. The motion brought back the feeling of blood and with it the crunch and screams. I broke down crying all over again.

A gentle hoof brushed back my mane. I jerked away on instinct and shot Celestia a glare.

She pulled back, her ears falling to the wayside. “I’m sorry. I remember that being something you loved.”

“Yeah, well, someone else happily ruined that for you.” I couldn’t stand this conversation anymore. It felt too awkwardly normal and… just, not the way it was supposed to feel. I headed for the portal room. “And now she’s dead. So who’s laughing now.”

She let me get all the way to the door before driving one last knife through my heart: “He’s doing better, by the way.”

I shut my eyes and forced myself to not fall apart again. I knew exactly who she was talking about, and I didn’t need to think about that right now. Three breakdowns was enough for one day.

Celestia waited a good two seconds for me to answer, but I was too busy keeping it in. “He’s walking again,” she added.

I swallowed. Somehow, I managed to keep the tremors out of my voice when I said, “That’s good.”

Just as I put my hoof on the doorknob: “He forgives you, Sunset. He wanted you to know that.”

That did it. I squeezed my eyes shut and willed myself to breathe. I was not crying. I was not crying. A quick sniffle, and I pushed through the door.

The others looked on in a mixture of sympathy and curiosity, and it was the worst goddamn thing. I hated it when people looked at me like that. Even Twilight’s little smile got me sick to my stomach. I just… I couldn’t.

She put a hoof on my shoulder, but as much as I couldn’t stand it, I was also afraid to pull away. She was reaching out to me on an emotional level that I didn’t deserve, but I also didn’t have the right to refuse. All I could do was stare back into her eyes and let her believe she was helping.

“I’m glad you’re safe,” she said.

I had already primed a “yeah, I’m fine” on the tip of my tongue, but I hadn’t expected something so radically different, something so… fundamental.

Words failed me. I fell into her hooves and hugged her as tight as I could.

She held me like a mother would, her hoof rubbing up and down my back. We stayed like that for a long time, only letting go when I was ready. When our eyes met, she gave me that same little smile of hers from a moment ago, and it suddenly felt like… like everything really was going to be okay.

“You should go get some rest,” Twilight finally said. “You’ve been through a lot.”

I stopped to consider that, but I also knew myself. If I took a break now, I wouldn’t have the willpower to go back. Objects in motion and all that. I pushed past her.

Luna or not, I needed to get back in there and do my job. I couldn’t let Twilight take my place, not with that thing waiting for her.

It wasn’t until Star Swirl of all ponies stepped up to me. He wore a look that danced between anxiety and concern. I couldn’t tell if it was for my sake or Luna’s.

“Go get rest,” he said. “You are in no state to continue.”

“And what state do I have to be in to continue?” I wanted that to come out more forcefully, but the truth was I didn’t even have the energy.

I sighed. They were right. I was being stupid and stubborn. This would only end up with me fucking something else up.

“Sorry,” I said. “You’re right. I’ll just… Yeah.”

I slumped out of the room, numb to all the eyes trained on me. I didn’t know what I should have felt.

Part of me was happy that thing got Luna. Part of me retched at the thought I could believe something like that. And another felt so overwhelmed to the point of apathy. What was the point of it all?

If I were to go back in there, it’d mean needing the right state of mind, which meant…

Which meant running away like a little bitch. The same way I solved all my problems lately.

I couldn’t even get mad at that. My earlier temper tantrum sucked all the energy out of me. I was too tired to be angry.

Whatever. I trudged through the castle. I didn’t bother looking at that scar I left in the wall outside the portal room. It would only rekindle everything I just got over freaking out about.

I collapsed into bed without bothering to shut the door. With nothing to block out the thoughts in my head, I went back to that moment—that disgusting, unthinkable moment—and the sounds and screams and…

That should have been me.

I didn’t want it to be. God, it terrified me enough just seeing it happen. But it would have gotten me, if not for Luna.

Why the hell would she do something like that? Did she really think that it counted for or amounted to anything? Was that enough to make up for what she did? I didn’t even know anymore. What sort of standard existed for something like this?

I thought of the classical Lady Justice, blindfolded with her scales held out for the world to see. I scoffed at myself. Justice was why I ran away in the first place.

It just… it didn’t feel right. The scales were imbalanced. Something was missing from the equation, and the more I thought about it, the more I hated everything about the situation.

I was done with it all and just wanted to sleep without dreaming for once in my life. I wanted to forget about Luna and enjoy the fact she was dead and would never bother me again.

So why was I still crying?

XXII - Unholy Reunion

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.

XXV - When Stars Misalign

Sunset figured it out: change the color. It was so simple!

Magic resonated at fixed frequencies when applied to uniform matrices like ice or certain precious minerals. Strangely enough, those frequencies could be attenuated or amplified based on color variation independent of base material, and the change plotted linearly.

It was something yet to be explained by Arcanonaturamancology. Current theory leaned toward the similarities in wave-particle function that magic and light shared. Regardless, predictable trends were predictable trends, and Sunset wasn’t one to pass up an opportunity.

Now, all that wasn’t to say she could slap a can of paint on the thing and call it a day. She needed to find a stone or crystal type that had naturally occurring color variants, and at a price the royal treasury could stand to lose without gaining any unwanted attention.

She settled on a soft amethyst quartz as a middle ground between magical decay and energy dissipation, and even before running her stress tests, it already performed leaps and bounds over the deeper auburn of the last model. Rather fitting. Its gentle purple sheen complemented Nocturne’s mane whenever she saw her reflection in the mirror.

With the experience from her previous attempts under her belt, it only took a few days to get the base and frame to her standards. Not that those days weren’t without their moments.

Sunset wasn’t technically barred—or even unwelcome—from the research labs, but everypony knew she had no reason to be there anymore, especially String. If anypony saw her skulking around, it’d get back to Celestia, and that could not happen.

Celestia seemed to think scruples alone would keep her away. But this was bigger than morals or ethics or anything like that. Celestia was wrong about Nocturne. When she met her in person, she’d see.

Sunset refocused her dispersion crystal and triple-checked that the layer of microcrystalline gel on the mirror was as smooth as butter before taking her place behind the blast shield. She powered up an Attunement Spell and fired it through the dispersion crystal suspended in the shield’s center.

The spell refracted as a perfect white light across the mirror’s entire surface, and the bleed-off fed into the frame. Sunset cut off her spell at the moment indicated by the scribbled calculations at her hooves, and she gave the mirror an intense stare.

The mirror glowed for a brief moment, then went still. No explosions, no latent feedback. She gave it an extra minute just to be safe, and when all seemed good, she stepped out from behind the blast shield.

On closer inspection, the mirror frame looked no worse for wear, a far cry from previous attempts, if the scars and indents in the blast shield’s plexiglass were any indication. She ran a hoof along the frame. No markings or cracks, nor was it warm to the touch—an important indicator in magical buildup. Good. Didn’t want it exploding later on after multiple activations.

She turned back for her schematics lying on the safe side of the blast shield and—

Celestia stood in the doorway, flanked by Stone Wall and some other guard. The hair went up on Sunset’s neck.

“I went to your dorm to speak with you,” Celestia said. Her voice drifted across the distance between them, distressingly calm. “You weren’t there, or the library. And String hasn’t seen you since last week.”

“I… I-I haven’t been back since last week,” Sunset said, looking away. The lie came out clumsily, and she knew before even finishing the sentence that Celestia saw right through it.

Celestia’s eyes flicked to the mirror, then back to her. Though short, the silence spanned a moment Celestia would have certainly made use of. Little silences like that she reserved for grave offenses. It was enough to make Sunset sick to her stomach.

“You promised me you would stop this.”

“You forced me to make that promise,” Sunset said. A lump welled up in her throat. She already knew where this was going.

“I did not force you to do anything.”

“That’s a lie and you know it.” She could barely get the words out.

A few lab ponies poked their heads around the corner. With a brief flash of her horn, Celestia slammed the door shut in their faces.

“I wouldn’t say it if it weren’t true.” Celestia’s words came out short and precise. She took a step forward, chin raised.

“Then what about everything you’ve said about Nocturne? I know for a fact that she’s nothing like what you say.”

That got Celestia to narrow her eyes. “I told you who she is, Sunset.”

“No! Shut up. Just shut up!” Sunset stamped her hooves. “You’re wrong about her. Maybe she was evil. Maybe she deserved to be locked away for a thousand years. But whatever she might have done, she’s changed. You haven’t seen her now. You haven’t looked into her eyes and felt what I do.”

Tears rolled down Sunset’s cheeks. Her mane fell in front of her face, and she brushed it back with a shaky hoof.

“She’s kind and compassionate and beautiful.” She sniffled and wiped the tears from her eyes, but they kept coming. “And she visits me when I’m sad or lonely.”

“She does those things because she has underlying motives. She—”

“She does them because she loves me. And I love her, too.” It hurt letting the words fall out. It felt like an admission of guilt, but at the same time it was the most liberating feeling. Celestia needed to know. Nocturne’s life was on the line.

Sunset shook her head to reaffirm herself. “You keep acting like she’s a monster, but she isn’t. Why can’t you just see that?”

“Because what I see is my most faithful student blinded by false pretense and lies.”

“It’s not false pretense. It’s real!” Sunset put a hoof to her heart. “You can’t tell me what I feel in here isn’t real.”

“What you feel is your emotions being manipulated by a monster—”

“She’s not a monster! Stop calling her that!”

“By a monster,” Celestia repeated, “intent on upending everything you know and love.”

“I love her! She isn’t manipulating me, you are!” She jabbed a hoof at Celestia. “You’re the one upending everything. You’re the one who’s trying to control who I love.”

“Because you can’t see that she will break your heart the moment she has what she wants, Sunset. And not because it is necessary, but because she can. I guarantee you nothing will come of what you seek except heartbreak and misery. And if this is the path you choose, then you give me no choice. If you cannot see reason, then I will have to enforce it for your own safety.”

Sunset’s legs shook, barely able to hold her up. Shameful tears streamed down her cheeks. She didn’t care anymore. Nocturne was worth more than her pride. She was worth more than anything in the world.

“How dare you,” Sunset choked out. She sucked up a dribble of snot, and her breath hitched. “How dare you talk about her like that.”

“Sunset—”

“No! That’s not fair. You can’t tell me who I can and can’t love. You can’t tell me not to do what I think is right. I’m going to save her. I… I have to…”

Celestia drew a strained breath in through her nostrils. She closed her eyes, and a pained look settled on her brow, like she had the audacity to think whatever ran through her head was right and just.

“So be it,” Celestia said. When she opened her eyes, every last ounce of patience had left her, and she spread her wings with an authority that sucked the warmth from the room.

“Sunset Shimmer, I hereby strip you of your status as my pupil. You will forfeit any and all privileges related to your standing, and you are officially barred from castle grounds until you have come to your senses.”

A cold ice-water sensation rippled down Sunset’s back. “I, I… what?”

“I am not finished. You will relinquish any and all progress you have made on the mirror, and you are forbidden from discussing it with anypony until I deem otherwise. It is going somewhere safe, where you can’t hurt yourself any more than you already have.”

“No… No.” Sunset shook her head. This wasn’t happening. This wasn’t happening. “No, no, no you can’t do this! Princess—”

“I can and I will.” Wearing a determined scowl, Celestia strode toward the mirror.

Sunset was a full three heads shorter than Celestia, but that didn’t stop her from standing in her way. She squared her shoulders and did her best to put on a brave face despite the tears.

Celestia towered over Sunset, her wings silhouetted by the skylight. The air became charged with magical energies that felt like the tingling sensation before lightning struck. Even the guards fidgeted behind her.

“Move,” Celestia growled.

Sunset trembled beneath the sight, but glared back defiantly all the same. Once upon a time, she saw in Celestia’s eyes the world and everything beautiful waiting to be discovered. But now all she saw was a tyrant trying to tear apart the one thing that ever truly mattered.

“N-no…”

“I will not tell you again, Sunset. Move.”

“I said no!”

Celestia took a step forward to shoulder her aside, eyes locked on the mirror. The determination in her eyes fell short of only murder.

Sunset didn’t have the will to fight—all the happy memories of the last ten years of her tutelage welling up inside her—but an overwhelming fear of what was to come brought a desperate spell to her horn, and she let it fly.

Celestia’s eyes tracked down toward her as the red flare lit up the room, and with the reaction of a trained soldier she deflected it into the floor. It left a blackened crater the size of her hoof.

“Sunset Shimmer!” she boomed loud enough to shake the walls, and slammed a hoof down, cracking the tile.

It was the first time Sunset ever felt afraid for her life. She crumpled backward onto the dais, her hoof stretched out behind her in a last-ditch effort to protect the mirror.

Celestia stared at her, breathless, with a mixture of anger and realization. She collected herself with a deep breath through her nose, eyes closed, prim and proper like a Princess of Equestria.

“Sunset,” she said weakly. “Please. Do not force me to move you.”

“You can’t do this…”

“Sunset.”

“You can’t!” She wrapped her hooves tight around Celestia’s legs and sobbed into her fetlocks. “You can’t…”

Celestia’s hooves quivered ever so slightly, like maybe, just maybe, she would reconsider. Like she actually understood how much this hurt.

“Sunset…” She sounded tired, sad. “Please stand up.”

Sunset shook her head. It felt as if she were holding onto Nocturne. Letting go meant casting her back to her own personal hell and herself adrift in a universe devoid of meaning.

A gentle hoof rested itself on her shoulder. It was Stone Wall, lying on his belly beside her. There was no anger or motive on his face, just a sympathetic frown that said he was there for her. He gently pulled her into a hug.

“It’s okay,” he whispered, his muzzle buried in her mane, just behind the ear. “You’re okay.”

At his touch, something inside her broke, and she leaned into him in a sobbing heap. The individual rivets of his armor dug into her skin, but she couldn’t find the strength to let go.

He held her like that for who knew how long. Time didn’t mean anything anymore.

“Come on,” he said after a while. “Let’s get you home.” He coaxed her to her hooves and led her out the door—the mirror abandoned, and her hopes and dreams of true love with it.

Stone Wall led her back to her dorm and left her with a solemn farewell. In the silence of the living room, red-washed as it was in the waning light of dusk, Sunset couldn’t bear the loneliness.

She imagined the look of disappointment on Nocturne’s face, the slump in her shoulders, the defeated splay of her wings about her on the floor. What would Nocturne say? How would she react to having her hopes dashed to pieces?

Sunset felt powerless, weak, useless. Her life had fallen apart before her very eyes, and all she had the courage to do was watch.

Celestia might as well have shattered the mirror, just to make it official. Sunset sniffled. What did she care? Nothing mattered anymore.

She was a reject, a useless nopony that now didn’t even have that one bit of status that made her worth the time of day. She had nothing left.

Nothing except Nocturne. Maybe not in real life, but they could still be together in her dreams. There was still hope. Somewhere, somehow. That’s what ponies in love did in hard times, wasn’t it? Never gave up hope? Leaned on each other?

They’d… They’d get through this, she and Nocturne.

Sunset sniffled and dared to smile. Nocturne was as wise as she was beautiful, and just as kind. She would understand.

Sunset got in bed and closed her eyes. She held her hooves to her heart, thought of Nocturne, and cast the spell. When she opened her eyes, Nocturne was already standing in front of her.

Sunset threw her hooves around her and buried her face in Nocturne’s chest. The tears she cried were as happy as they were sad.

“I missed you,” Sunset said.

“And I you.” Nocturne wrapped a hoof around Sunset, and it was the best feeling in the world. Sunset could have stayed there forever. “But I am here now, Little Sunset. Let me be the salve to the wounds upon your heart.”

Sunset let the gentleness of Nocturne's voice seep into her bones. It made everything she had to say bearable, if only just.

“They all hate me. I don’t ever want to see them again.”

“Who could possibly hate you, my love?”

Sunset sniffled and wiped the tears from her eyes. Hearing that phrase, “my love,” made her heart do a somersault, and the pain hurt that much less.

“Everypony,” Sunset said. “Copper, Celestia, and everypony else will too once they find out what I did.”

“Come now, Little Sunset. Celestia surely could not hate you. You are her everything, are you not?”

“You weren’t there. You didn’t see how… how furious she was. I thought she was going to hurt me.” She nuzzled into Nocturne’s chest, and everything felt just a little better. “You’re the only thing I have left.”

“Such things should not be said. One cannot find solace in one being and one being alone.” She ran an idle hoof along Sunset’s shoulder, and the contact helped reassure Sunset that yes, things would be okay.

“You don’t understand. I don’t have anywhere else to go… There’s no way Celestia could forgive me for what I just did, and my parents would disown me faster than anything if they even thought I tried to attack the princess.”

“Attack Celestia? What could bring you to do such a thing?”

A wave of shame rolled through Sunset. It made her shiver just thinking about it.

“Sh-she… she caught me working on the mirror again, and she tried to take it away from me. I, I did get it working, though, but I don’t think she knows that.”

Nocturne perked up. “You got it working?”

“I mean, it’s not the 30th full moon right now, so it’s not active. But… but it passed all my stress tests, and it took the Attunement Spell just fine. At the very least, it won’t explode when it does activate.”

Nocturne was silent for a moment, her eyes glazed over in thought. Presently, she shifted her eyes toward Sunset, and she flicked an ear askance.

“This means… This truly means what my heart tells me must be true. There is yet hope.”

Sunset pulled away, ears flat back. Another wave of shame came over her. How could Nocturne be so hopeful when everything was lost? “Yeah, but she took the mirror. I don’t know where. Probably the Royal Treasury, or her bedroom. She’s afraid I’ll get it working.”

“Then that is to your advantage, is it not?”

“It is, but… I mean, I could probably figure out where she’s keeping it. Maybe sneak through if there’s nopony guarding it. I just…” Sunset shook her head. “I, I don’t want to leave you.”

Nocturne took Sunset’s hooves in hers. “My dearest, you are not leaving me. The span that will soon divide us is little more than a setback, a necessary evil we must endure for the sake of greater truths. We knew this from the beginning.”

Still holding Sunset’s hooves, she placed one against Sunset’s chest and the other against her own. They beat in time, two hearts in harmony.

“Feel this, my love,” Nocturne said. “Feel the warmth that beats in time with mine own. Take heart that never a day will go by that I do not eagerly await your return, and all the sweeter that glorious moment shall be for it. I believe in you.”

“I just… I don’t know.” She pressed herself into Nocturne’s chest. Oh, it felt so right like this, just she and Nocturne. “Why can’t I just sleep forever and be with you like this instead?”

“Because life does not work in such ways, Little Sunset. You must trust me, as I trust you.”

Sunset pressed herself deeper into Nocturne’s chest. Why did it have to be this way? Why did she have to leave?

Thirty full moons was roughly thirty months. She didn’t know if she could last a week without Nocturne, let alone over two and a half years.

Working on the mirror, building toward a goal she could see and feel was anything but difficult. But faced now with the very real prospect of leaving Nocturne for years, she had doubts. The what-ifs crawled out of the dark corners of her mind.

What if she didn’t find the magic on the other side in time for the next 30th full moon? What if she wasn’t strong enough to bring it home? What if something happened and she never made it home?

She’d never see Nocturne again. She’d never get to hold this forlorn, time-lost mare in her real-life hooves and tell her everything was okay.

“I just…” Sunset clenched her teeth. “I can’t. I’m scared. I want to stay here with you. Don’t make me go. Let’s just stay like this. Please. I’ll miss you too much.”

“Do not say such things, Little Sunset,” Nocturne said. “Do not let your fears sway you. You are strong as the northern wind and beautiful as the auroras. Trepidation can never drive a wedge between us lest you give it quarter. Please, my Little Sunset, I beg of you to find your courage. You must do this for me.”

There was a twinge of impatience in her voice. Or maybe it was desperation. They were both desperate.

“I know, I just…” Tears beaded in Sunset’s eyes. “I can’t. Please. I’m sorry.”

An almost mournful hardness settled on Nocturne’s face, as if she were… was that disappointment? She closed her eyes and took a deep breath, all emotion drained from her face.

“Very well,” she said. When she opened her eyes, a tiny smile formed on her lips. “It pains me that you would come to this decision, Little Sunset. But if this is the path you choose, then I shan’t deny you.”

The dream darkened as if a cloud had passed over a nonexistent sun, and the nothingness blurred into vague shapes and shadows suggestive of furniture.

Her bedroom took form around them, down to the littlest detail—her bed to the left, her recessed bookshelf lording over the back wall, her dresser beside the closet door. It was comforting, being surrounded by the familiar things she had known practically all her life, and having a chance here to share them with Nocturne made the moment all the more sentimental.

After all the dream’s shifting and morphing, Nocturne stood by her bed. She lowered the tip of her muzzle just a hair and gave a little chuckle.

“Come to me, Little Sunset.”

Her laugh leaned a little toward the creepy side, but the smile on her face, that glint in her eye… It got Sunset’s heart running wild in her chest. It told her to leap forward and kiss Nocturne and never let go.

This was where she belonged, not in a castle or studying under a princess that didn’t care about her. She belonged with Nocturne, whether that be in the Dreamscape or the real world. As long as Nocturne was there, everything would be okay.

She met Nocturne halfway with a kiss, and she melted like chocolate left in the sun. She pressed forward, kissing deeper, giving herself to the sensation that felt so natural and true—but pleasure turned to pain when she felt a sharp sting in her lower lip.

“Ow!” Sunset jerked back, putting a hoof to her lips. She tasted blood.

Nocturne craned her head low and ran her tongue along her upper lip. With wings half spread, she took a step forward, grinning. A devious hunger danced in her eyes, like a candle flame trying to leap from its wick.

“N-Nocturne…? Did you just bite me?”

Nocturne said nothing. The shadows wafting from her legs sprawled out to carpet the floor. Her horn glowed a pale blue, like moonlight on a tombstone, and thin, thread-like shadows snaked around Sunset’s horn.

“Nocturne, w-what are you doing?” Sunset backed into the dresser. The little knickknacks on top jostled and fell over. Something shattered on the floor, but still she pressed harder, enough that the dresser leaned on its back legs. No matter how hard she tried, her horn wouldn’t light, tied up as it was by the moonlit threads.

Nocturne came nose to nose with her before tracing a line with her tongue across Sunset’s cheek and up to the tip of her ear.

Sunset seized up as Nocturne’s breath raked along her neck and collarbone like a winter wind. It was getting hard to breathe.

The shadows wrapped themselves around Sunset’s hooves. They didn’t care for how she pulled away, ever persistent and invasive. One slithered up her back leg and licked at her inner thigh.

Sunset yelped and jerked away. She scrambled to the far corner, where she put her back against the wall. Tears ran down her face. She tried again and again to light her horn and pull herself from the dream, but the harder she tried, the tighter the snaking threads wound themselves.

“Please,” she whimpered. “Nocturne, stop. I don’t like this.”

Short, curt laughter froze the blood in her veins. The room dimmed as a wicked smile on Nocturne’s lips split the darkness like a crescent moon.

“Ohhh…” Nocturne drew out the word with sickening enjoyment. She strode forward again, her hooves distinct and heavy on the hardwood. “But is this not what you wanted, Little Sunset? To sleep and be with me in this dream, forever?”

Sunset shook her head. She pressed herself into the wall in desperate hope that it would disappear, that she would fall away and start awake in a damp sweat. That’s how nightmares were supposed to end.

But Nocturne came closer, her hooves louder, her smile sharper. The room rimmed her wings and shoulders silver in its dying light.

Sunset’s legs refused to hold her up, and she collapsed in a shivering heap, unable to look away from the glowing slits that were Nocturne’s eyes. The shadows licked at her hooves, teased at her skin.

She kicked at them, tears in her eyes and pleas for mercy caught in her throat. But the more she swatted them away, the angrier they wound and pulled and grasped at her.

She could scream. She wanted to. She wanted to scream and cry until the world made sense again. But what would it do? That’s what… that’s what Nocturne wanted.

Nopony could hear her. Nopony could save her. She felt herself shutting down, and as the seconds wore on, she closed her eyes and curled in on herself.

An ice-cold hoof touched her beneath the chin, drawing her eyes up. In the blackness towering over her, Nocturne stared back with that wicked smile.

That same hoof holding her so delicately by the chin suddenly shoved her against the wall, pinning her there. One of the many shadows traced down Sunset’s cheek and neck like an icicle, then down her chest—lower, lower, lower.

Sunset whimpered and squirmed away, but Nocturne’s grip grew tighter around her throat. No matter how hard she pushed with both hooves, she didn’t have half of Nocturne’s strength. Her neck felt ready to snap, and she couldn’t breathe.

Her eyes bulged as she managed to suck in the tiniest, gasping breath, and Nocturne leaned in close enough for her to smell the wintergreen on her breath. She squeezed her eyes shut and cried.

“Yes,” Nocturne cooed. She ran a cold tongue up Sunset’s cheek to lick away the tears. “Good girl. You know that I love you. Now, Little Sunset, let me grant you the courage to cross that divide…”

• • •

Sunset Shimmer didn’t sleep that night.

She had awoken not long after that fateful, terrifying moment, once the innocence and wealth of the world had been stripped away. She stared absently into the bookshelf on the far wall as the thin lines of sunlight through the blinds crawled their last few inches up the wall, her tail tucked firmly between her legs.

Her tears had long since run out, and the unending silence lent no comfort. She felt hollow, as if her soul had been dug out of her with a scalpel.

The bedsheets were still damp from where she lay after her shower. It didn’t help. No matter how much she lathered or how hard she scrubbed, she still felt everything.

“I’ll be back, Little Sunset,” Nocturne had whispered moments before she woke up.

And Sunset believed her. Every word of it. The relish in Nocturne’s voice was unmistakable. She would do it again, and Sunset couldn’t do a damn thing about it.

Except… she could still go through the portal. The thought sent a shiver down her spine, and she pulled her comforter tighter around herself.

Nocturne couldn’t reach her there, that much she believed as well. But Nocturne wanted that. It was part of some plan of hers, some sick and twisted game that Sunset was merely a pawn in. Used and tossed aside. Forgettable, unimportant, like she always knew herself to be.

Celestia was right. Nocturne had played her for a fool, and she was too stupid to listen.

She imagined Celestia now, what she would say if Sunset went groveling back to her. Celestia would welcome her with open hooves and accept her apology, surely, but… but what would that accomplish?

Celestia couldn’t bring Nocturne to justice. Nocturne would come back like she promised. She’d do it again. And again, and again, and again, until Sunset threw herself through the portal or she chose a more… permanent alternative.

But even if Celestia somehow managed to stop Nocturne, what would she do, throw her in a prison cell? Iron bars in exchange for Sunset’s innocence wasn’t justice. Justice was taking back the words Nocturne made her say, unthinking the thoughts that demon had drilled into her brain, unbreaking her heart, and making whole her peace of mind.

No. Celestia was useless. All she had done was set Sunset on this path to pain and misery.

Make some friends…

Where did that get her? Sunset tucked her tail tighter between her legs.

This was all Celestia’s fault.

She had failed Sunset, just like however many others Nocturne had broken before her. There was no justice in crawling back to her, only more lies about the wonders of friendship.

If Sunset were to have justice, she’d have to find it herself. She was a go-getter. She was Sunset Shimmer. Nopony could stop her when she put her mind to something.

And if this was how the world worked, then fine. She could play along.

She’d cross through that portal and find whatever magic there was. She’d become the most powerful unicorn that ever lived. When she returned, she would show Celestia what real power was.

And when she finished that? She would come for Nocturne. She would drag that bitch kicking and screaming from the Dreamscape and teach her the real meaning of nightmare.

And nopony—nopony—would use her ever again.

• • •

And so the nightingale has spent its last coo. Oh, Little Sunset, how it sang its song to give fire to your heart, make light your hooves for the heavens behind your eyes. And how you listened.

Dethroned, deflowered, deserted.

Naught a petal remains of the single red rose, and ample is the crimson that drips from its thorns. Such is the coward’s due—undesired, yet no less satisfying.

However, Little Sunset, do not mourn yourself. No… Not yet.

This darkness befallen you is but the first of many hells you shall endure, for you do not know the fortune of death your predecessors do. In time, you shall see.

I relish the thought of your return. I await the coming of the full moon that sees your pretty face on this side of the glass. And once I reclaim my rightful place with Sister’s head upon my throne, I will welcome you home with fire and ash.

But for now, Little Sunset, goodbye.

Goodbye, and good riddance.

Act II - XXVI - She Ran Her Fingers Through My Hair

I couldn’t say how long I’d lain in bed. I’d left the curtains drawn when I first ran off for Twilight’s castle, and I didn’t have the presence of mind to open them when I made it home. I wanted it dark, anyway. I wanted everything to go away where I couldn’t see or think or feel.

I wiped my eyes. I didn’t need a mirror to know how red and puffy they were. Today wasn’t a day for mirrors. Today was a day for bed, for burying myself in the comfort of my blankets and pillows and trying to forget.

The world would go on, but I wanted to stay right here where nothing happened but the sound of my breathing, and no living soul—pony or otherwise—could ever hurt me.

There was a knock at the door.

I flinched and snapped my eyes toward the front of my apartment. The loft where I kept my bed gave me a commanding view of the front door, and when I looked, I saw what was unmistakably part of Human Twilight’s hair through the door’s little windows. What was she doing here?

I thought about rolling back over and pulling the comforter over my head. I didn’t even care that my hair was still damp from my shower.

I didn’t want to talk to anyone. I felt so ashamed and disgusting. I wanted to be alone, and yet I felt anxious and completely overwhelmed. Just thinking about it almost had me breaking down again.

Twilight knocked again, harder this time.

Fuck. I couldn’t leave her standing out there. It was raining—I could hear it on the roof. My front stoop didn’t have an awning, and the fall weather had been getting chilly this last week.

I rolled out of bed with my down comforter over my shoulders and shuffled to the door. When I opened it, I was surprised to find not just Human Twilight, but also Princess Twilight.

They both regarded me with a short pause and apparent concern, and the cold air made the tiniest puffs out of their breaths. Princess Twilight wore the dark-purple coat with the faux sheep’s wool trim that I got Human Twilight for Hearth’s Warming, while Human Twilight wore her raggedy old teal one that I’d told her at least a dozen times to get rid of.

Human Twilight had a nervous look about her. Princess Twilight probably hadn’t shared any specifics, and seeing me like this didn’t do her worries any good.

Princess Twilight, though… If I had seen her concerned before, right now it looked like her heart was ready to break. She opened her mouth, shut it, extended a hand, pulled it back, and finally settled on coming in for a hug.

I flinched at first, but her warmth quickly chased away my worries. I wrapped the comforter around her and we stood there for a while. The slow exhalation of her breath on my shoulder was warm, and it reminded me that yes she really was here for me.

“She showed up on my doorstep asking me to take her to you,” Human Twilight said. “Said it’s important?” The upward inflection in her voice spoke volumes of how little Twilight must have told her, and the nervous look on her face begged me to tell her anything she could do to help.

Princess Twilight and I pulled away from our hug. Or, more like she let me pull away when I was ready.

“It’s…” I started. Honestly, I didn’t know how to continue that. “Thanks, Twilight,” I said to Human Twilight. “It is.” To Princess Twilight, genuinely curious: “How did you know where to find her? Canterlot City is like a hundred square miles.”

Princess Twilight rubbed the back of her neck and gave me a sheepish smile. “So, funny story. I knew that I needed to come find you after you rushed out like that, so I followed you over. But you were long gone by that point and school was closed, so I couldn’t go ask Principal Celestia. But I did know you were friends with my human counterpart and that she’d know how to get in touch with you.

“So I found the local library and did a little research on demographics, zoning laws, and transit times to and from Canterlot High to gauge possible places that I would live in a metropolitan area like Canterlot City. Then I did a quick home search in those areas and categorized my possibilities by city tax brackets and the most efficient square footage based on a single-residency with part-time income. Hers was my third guess.” She poked the tips of her index fingers together.

I attempted a smile, as—

“But… telling you about that isn’t why I’m here.” Princess Twilight took another step toward me, her hands clasped at her breast. “May I… may I come in?”

I rubbed the sleeve of my arm and looked away. As much as I wanted to be alone, I couldn’t stand the loneliness. After a moment’s hesitation, I stepped back to throw a half-hearted arm toward my apartment.

Princess Twilight stepped inside. “Thank you.”

She waited just inside the doorway, her hands now clasped at her waist like she was waiting for me to direct her somewhere. I didn’t have the energy for that, so I simply shuffled past her.

“Are you going to be okay?”

Hearing Human Twilight behind me brought me up short. It was odd enough knowing two of the same person, but having them both in the same conversation added an extra level of weirdness I wasn’t used to. I looked over my shoulder and took another shot at that smile from a moment ago. I liked to think this time I actually succeeded.

“I’ll be fine,” I said.

Human Twilight didn’t seem convinced. Her eyes danced between me and Princess Twilight, but she eventually gave a small nod. She adjusted her glasses before saying, “If you need me, you have my number.”

“Thanks.” I wasn’t sure what else to add to that, and it didn’t seem she did either, so I shuffled back inside, closing the door on the way.

My apartment had an open floor plan—it was all essentially one room, with the small loft where I kept my bed lording over everything. It was dark with all the curtains drawn, just bright enough to see the stairs and avoid geolocating any furniture with my shins along the way. I went up to the loft and sat down among my nest of blankets.

Twilight took off her coat before following. At the final stair, she did that sort of lean-to-the-side thing as if peeking in an open doorway. When I didn’t say or do anything, she crept up to the bed and sat on the corner. She looked afraid—of what to say, of a lot of things.

“Do you mind if I turn on a light?” she asked in a noncommittal, walking-on-eggshells tone of voice.

I rolled over to the far side of my bed and snapped on the nightstand lamp. It was one of those vase-like cone tops that pointed upward to light up a room off the ceiling rather than a standard lampshade. It was nice for not blinding myself in the middle of the night whenever I had to get up to pee.

“So…” Twilight said, one hand on her lap, the other clenched at her chest. She rubbed the opening of her blouse between her thumb and forefinger. “You had a nightmare back there. Didn’t you?”

She knew exactly what had happened in that dream. I made that much obvious with the way I bolted out of there.

“Yeah.”

I pulled my knees into my chest and hugged them, stared at the wrinkles my feet left in the bedsheets. They looked like a miniature mountain range stretching from one edge of the world to the other.

A car went by outside blaring rap music with the bass up way too high. Neither of us said anything until it faded away.

“Do you… do you want to talk about it?”

I could feel Twilight’s gaze, that forever reaching, yearning look on her face. I buried my chin into my knees and held tighter. Of course I didn’t want to talk about it. I didn’t want to think about it. I didn’t want to relive what I just relived.

I saw her eyes follow the still-damp tangles of my hair, and she returned her gaze back to her lap.

“Did the shower help?” she asked.

“No.” I sniffed halfheartedly in a pathetic attempt to hide it. “It never does.”

More silence. She put her hand out toward me on the bed, but the inches stretched between us, and I felt afraid to reach out myself, like letting go of my knees would make me fall upward into some infinite abyss. When I didn’t react, she pulled back and considered her lap again, while I retreated to my thoughts.

Hello, Little Sunset…

Her voice still bounced around in my brain as fresh as the day she said those words. I’d had nightmares about that… that moment, every so often. But nothing like today, nothing as real.

The bedroom, the bookshelf, the darkness closing in. I could feel the shadows winding up my legs—feeling, touching, probing—and no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t shake the disgusting thought that somewhere along the line, I made it happen. After all the shit I did, after all the lies I swallowed and feelings I let control me, I deserved it.

I heard a familiar fwwwishz of air. Twilight had snagged a deck of cards from my bookshelf and was shuffling it. It was the one I bought at a thrift store the first time I felt homesick. A red-and-white pony with a swirling mane and tail reared up on the back of them.

She divvied out five cards to each of us and set the deck aside. A hopeful smile spread across her face as she fanned hers out in front of herself.

I knew by the five-count what game she wanted to play. Canter’s Court, as I had grown up knowing it, a two-to-four person game oddly similar to Hearts here in this world. I considered the cards lying in a small pile at my feet.

Playing a card game sat squarely at the bottom of my list of stuff I wanted to do right then. More than anything, I wanted to curl up in my nest of blankets and wish the world away. But that wouldn’t have been fair to Twilight, especially after just letting her in.

She was trying. And by the grace of whatever gods were out there, so was I.

I picked up my cards: an even spread of a five of clovers, king of horns, two and seven of wings, and a jack of horseshoes. She dealt, meaning my lead, so I threw down the two of wings.

I wasn’t in the right headspace to bother with what the best opening card would have actually been. Never really was one for card games in the first place.

Twilight threw down a ten of wings and swept up the hand. She still wore that hopeful smile. Somewhere in that head of hers she believed she could get through to me, that she could help just by being here.

Which she was. Really. But also not. I knew her smile was real. I knew she was right—she was the goddamn Princess of Friendship, after all—but in the moment, believing fell outside the realm of possibility. I appreciated it, but I could hardly work up a smile of my own.

As the game wore on, her smile receded to a simple line, then into a reserved frown. Words lay on the tip of her tongue, but she was either too afraid to say them or couldn’t figure out their proper order.

Not that I fared any better. Staring at the cards, at the numbers and little symbols, trying to eeney-meeney-miney-mo what I should play next in order to keep up with appearances.

The whole situation was too much. Not that I didn’t appreciate Twilight being here—I doubted I could ever put into words how much that meant to me—I just couldn’t think straight enough to play a game at the moment. I just…

I sighed and folded my hand of cards in my lap. This wasn’t working.

I snatched up the deck and put my hand out for hers. The frown on her face turned to distress, and she seemed all the more desperate for the words still eluding her. But she handed me her cards, and I went to shuffling. That done, I dealt them.

One for me, one for her. One for me, one for her. One for me, one for her.

It was all I could do to keep myself thinking, and yet to keep myself from thinking. Mindless motion. One for me, one for her, until I’d dealt the deck. I flipped my top card over and placed it between us. Seven. I pointed noncommittally at her deck.

Twilight wore a mix of emotions, and it was easy enough to see her struggle to follow through. She had picked the song we danced to—this little game of cards—and it was all I could do to keep myself from screaming until my lungs shriveled up.

She flipped her card, a four, and I swept the pair into my off pile. Her mouth formed a hook that would have gotten a smile out of me any other time, just imagining the gears whirring in her head. She didn’t need an explanation, though. War was simple enough to pick up after a few hands.

I threw down a nine, and she a jack. I pushed the pair toward her and pointed at her deck. Her lead.

We played a few hands in silence, me focusing on the sounds and feel of each card flip, her with a distressed frown as her eyes stared past the game itself, until she found whatever thought she was looking for.

“How’d you get through it before?”

I had just pulled a card from my deck when she said that, and the words brought me up short. I thought back to the days immediately after it all happened. All the planning—the lies, deceit, and bullying I did when I first crossed over. It was hard to believe I let my feelings drag me down that dark of a road.

“I didn’t,” I said. I laid down a king to take her queen.

“What happened, then?”

“I just kinda… pushed it all down.” Three versus nine, she took the hand. “Sometimes you forget about it, and the feelings leave you alone.

“You sometimes feel like you’re better,” I continued, “that you’re healed.” Six and five, my hand. “And then some little thing comes along that reminds you of it, and the hole tears open again like it’s always been there.”

“And the nightmare back there was one of those?”

I shook my head. “No. A little thing would be seeing Vice Principal Luna in the hallway and finally realizing why you’ve always had a bad feeling about her. Or hearing one of the guys at school playfully calling his girlfriend his ‘little so-and-so.’”

I turned away from the card game and stared through my bookshelf. The nightmare crept in from the corners of my mind, that feeling of powerlessness and being distinctly and utterly alone. I sucked in a breath before realizing I had dug my nails into my arms hard enough to leave marks.

“That nightmare was more than just a little thing, Twilight,” I said. “That was more than just a nightmare.”

“I, I didn’t mean it like that, Sunset.” She wore a look of almost fear. It was hard to believe, but it seemed like she really had no idea what she wanted to say or how to say it. If the Princess of Friendship herself was speechless, then what kind of lost cause was I?

I clammed up and held my knees again, to show her I didn’t feel like talking for a bit. Not that I didn’t want to hear her voice.

I just… I didn’t want to talk right now. I would have given anything just to listen to her talk, though—to hear her read a book or something. It could have been the dictionary for all I cared. Anything to keep my mind away from what we were talking about and to know I wasn’t alone.

The halt in conversation hurt her, I could tell. She seemed even more distressed than before, and all her motions came in quick, nervous bursts.

She put down a seven, and I matched her with my own. One, two, three cards face down, and I flipped over a… damn, a four.

I caught her staring, and so I waggled my finger at my cards, then pointed to hers.

Twilight placed three cards and flipped an ace. Shit. No beating that. Well, at least my four was crap, but the other cards were… a queen, a six, and a jack. Son of a bitch. I pushed everything her way.

Twilight raised an eyebrow at me. “Isn’t the ace a one?” she asked.

“Mm-mmm,” I said, shaking my head. “Ace is always a trump card in this world, except for a few games where it can be a one if you want it to be.”

A difference I had forgotten about in Equestrian card games. All the same, it was nice hearing her ask that—something normal, even if only for a moment.

“Huh.” She shuffled her winnings into her neat little off pile. We played another two hands before, “I’m sorry.”

“Hmm?”

She couldn’t meet my gaze. She clutched her half of the deck in her hands tight enough to bend them. “When you came into my room the other night and wanted to talk, I thought it was just going to be something little.

“I mean, I knew you were taking whatever it was pretty hard. It was serious to you, so it was serious to me. But deep down, I wanted to believe it was just some silly misunderstanding between you two that we could easily work out together.

“And I want to believe we can still do that,” she was quick to add. “To some extent, at least. But… I, I had no idea just what it was. A-and when you finally told me, I…”

“I know,” I said. “I saw the way you looked at her the morning after. Sorry, for… ruining how perfect she seemed to you.”

Twilight shrunk in on herself at that and again took to bending and unbending her cards. We passed the moments in silence, neither of us able to find the will for another hand of War. A car passed by outside, playing something country-ish.

“I just… It’s a lot, Twilight. It’s a lot to take in. To process, to… to just deal with.”

I tried to keep my voice level. Not sure if it worked. I found enough strength to look her in the eye, at least, but she was still staring worriedly at her cards.

“And I’m trying to,” I said. “To deal with it. It’s just… you can’t understand how hard this is for me.”

Luna came to mind. That stoic, self-martyr-like grandstanding she kept trying to pull ever since she wedged herself back into my life. It was bullshit. She didn’t have the right—not to save me, and sure as shit not to destroy me.

“I know you’ve been trying to be strong,” Twilight said. “And you have been. But you don’t have to go through this alone.”

And there it was. That ever-persistent notion that she and the others kept throwing on me like a safety blanket, that I was a thing to be preserved and protected. Caution: fragile, handle with care.

A fucking porcelain doll. That’s what I was to them.

And they were right. That’s what I was. Damn it all to hell, that’s exactly what I was.

I was tired of it. I was so goddamn tired of it. The tears built up in my eyes, and it got hard to breathe, but I didn’t care anymore.

“Except I do,” I said. I looked her in the eye, and a kernel of desperation welled up inside me. “I’m the one that has to go into these dreams. I’m the one that has to relive this bullshit and save that bitch from all this.”

I jabbed a finger toward the front door. My hands shook, and it took all my effort to keep the anger inside me from dragging me down into a sobbing mess.

“I’m the one that has to see her face and hear her voice and play nice while remembering exactly what she did to me.”

Twilight bowed her head, and her eyes crawled up the bedsheets toward my feet. She had let her cards spill out in front of her.

“You know she hates what she did just as much as—”

“I don’t care!”

And just like that, the dam broke. My throat closed up, and I couldn’t hold back the tears. All I could do was clutch my knees and wish none of this was happening.

“I don’t care…” I whispered through the sobs.

Somewhere in the middle of it all, I felt Twilight’s hand on my shoulder. I knew she was going to say something about Luna, some bullshit about her that I didn’t want to hear.

“I have to go back, though,” I said. “I have to. Because nobody else can. And they shouldn’t have to, because this is all my fault. Because I’m the one who let Nocturne manipulate me. I’m the one who was too stupid to realize she wanted to destroy my life. I’m… I-I’m the one who thought she loved me…”

Twilight pulled me into a hug. I laid my head on her chest, gripping her by the blouse and holding her as close as I could. We stayed like that for a while—her rubbing my back, me sobbing like a child. When I calmed down enough to speak, I pulled away and wiped my eyes.

“When Nocturne…” I swallowed. It was hard saying the word. “When Nocturne raped me, she threatened that she’d come back. I ran away through the portal because I had to get away from her. Because I knew that no matter what I said or did, I couldn’t stop her from coming back whenever she wanted. Not me or Celestia or the entire goddamn Equestrian army.

“I came here to take the magic on this side of the portal and use it to make her pay for what she did. But instead, I became a terrible person, until you and the girls fixed that. And then I just kind of… pushed it down, made myself forget about it.”

I brushed my hair out of my face and took a deep breath. I felt so empty all of a sudden, like all the warmth in my body had bled out of me. I shook my head.

I remembered the vision the Tantabus showed me: that other me with her wings and crown of fire, the broken and brutalized Celestia, the worlds beyond sight that I wanted to subjugate for their indifference, the hatred that I had turned into a mantra. That unholy reminder of what I hoped to become, what I almost truly became.

I looked down at my hands resting in my lap, at all the lines in my palms, curled and uncurled my fingers. “Revenge wasn’t me anymore, and the Nightmare was just this… this thing that I’d gotten used to. It was a part of me, and I was okay with that. It reminded me of where I came from and why I was working so hard to be a better person.

“But then… Luna just waltzes back into my life, proclaiming that everything’s going to be better, when all she’s done is make things worse. And now I have to fix everything before the Nightmare destroys both worlds.” I clenched the loose fabric of my pajamas. “Because I was a stupid, naïve piece of shit with stars in her eyes, who gave up everything she had for a ghost pony who hated her guts from the word ‘hello.’”

I tried laughing but didn’t have the energy. Instead, I rolled onto my side and pulled the blanket over my shoulders.

After a long moment, I felt Twilight’s hand rubbing up and down my arm. I pulled my shoulders in tighter, but I wouldn’t have given up that contact for the world.

“You don’t have to do this, Sunset. If you really don’t want to, we’ll find a way.”

She’d find a way… Honestly, I believed that. Twilight had that kind of resourcefulness. She and her friends could move mountains. But if I were to step aside for her, that left a bigger question that I’d never live down:

“Even if you did, what would that say about me?” I rolled over to look her in the eye. “If I back down and let you save the world like you always do, what would that say about me?”

Twilight didn’t have anything for that. She looked at me like a lost puppy.

“I couldn’t live with myself if I ran away from my problems again,” I said. “I couldn’t live with you fixing my failure because I was too weak to. Or worse, if I let you get hurt instead of me, I… what does that say about me?”

Twilight stopped rubbing my shoulder. Her eyes glazed over, but her face was still wrought with worry.

“It says you’re a strong pony,” she said.

She wrapped her arms around me and rested her head on my shoulder. “Stronger than Celestia. Stronger than Luna. Stronger than anypony I know.”

“Don’t lie to me, Twilight,” I half whispered. I didn’t even have the energy to be mad anymore. I just felt empty.

Twilight kissed me on the temple, and she brushed my hair away from my ear. As much as I hated people playing with my hair, it was Twilight, and I was tired, so I resisted the urge to jerk away.

“I’ve never once lied to you, Sunset. I know you’re strong. Because a weaker pony would run and never look back. You came back once. And I know you’re strong enough to do it again, if you choose to. But if you don’t, nopony would fault you for it.”

A lock of my hair lay next to my hand. I rubbed it back and forth between my forefinger and thumb.

“I would,” I whispered.

More silence. The rain had stopped sometime during our conversation, and all I could hear was the sound of Twilight’s breath.

“Do you remember what you said to me?” she asked. “That night you came to my room?”

I had taken to twirling the lock of hair around my finger, but as she said those words, I stopped. I hadn’t told her much, only the one big thing, really.

“You made me promise,” she said. “You made me promise that no matter what, I’d help you see this through to the end.” Tears ran down her cheeks, and her hand trembled on my shoulder. “That I’d help you see this through to the end.

“And I hate it. I hate seeing you hurt like this. I hate knowing that there’s more and worse things ahead. I hate thinking ‘what if?’ What if you don’t wake up this time? What if you do but you’re not the same? Or it’s not you waking up in your body?”

I reached up and took her hand. She gripped mine tight enough that it almost hurt.

“But a promise made is a promise kept,” she said. “I can’t break that. It’s the only reason I haven’t insisted on doing this myself. I know you need this.”

I really didn’t know what to say. I’d never been in this situation, nor had I ever helped anyone else through it. But I knew well enough that she needed to ensure this got fixed as much as I needed to fix it.

I gave her hand a gentle squeeze, and she took that as a cue to let go.

“Thanks,” I said.

I wasn’t used to this kind of vulnerability from Twilight. She was always perfect, always sure of herself, dorky nerd moments notwithstanding. She projected confidence like it was nobody’s business, like a goddamn Princess of Friendship should, but the tears running down her face painted a different picture.

She wasn’t a god, she wasn’t perfect. She had struggles just like everyone else. Bigger struggles than others, to be fair, but struggles all the same. And right now, I was one of them. She’d hurt enough today, so I offered her a smile.

It got through to her, and she smiled back. She took to stroking my hair again.

I resisted the urge to pull away, and the more she did, the less it felt wrong—the less it reminded me of Nocturne.

She ran her fingers through my hair, until I closed my eyes and breathed a deep sigh. Somewhere as I drifted off to sleep, I heard her whisper:

“I’ll be here. As long as you need me.”

XXVII - New Directions

It took a lot of self-convincing to step back through the portal.

God only knew the storm of questions everyone would have, all the stares and pity they’d throw at me like rice in a wedding procession. It helped that they cared, but the last thing I wanted was them knowing what happened. One Princess of Friendship was enough ponies in that circle.

But thankfully that wasn’t the case. I needed space, and they gave it to me. No questions, no awkward glances.

In fact, the first thing I saw when I stepped through was a big smile on Star Swirl’s face. It briefly reminded me of my grandpa on my dad’s side, all of two times I met him.

“Are you ready?” Starlight asked me. She had just finished redoing the chalk circles around Luna’s body. Her lips were slanted in what seemed like a frown trying its best to be a smile.

“Of course,” I said. I doubted I sounded very convincing. Conviction wasn’t really a thing I had in spades at the moment.

“You can always pull yourself out,” Twilight said. She was in the middle of fluffing up the pillow under Luna’s elbow. She wore that “you know you don’t have to do this” look from last night.

“I know,” I said. I wasn’t sure which statement I meant that for, but it didn’t matter. I had to do this. I had to do this.

I took my place beside Luna, on my half of the chalk circle, pillows pushed aside. I preferred lying on the floor. It made for a few sore muscles when waking up, but it lessened the drowning feeling on the way in.

I closed my eyes, and everyone’s hooves shuffled into place around me. Twilight’s magic tinkled somewhere to my left, the magic hit me, and all sound fell away to the rush of nonexistent water.

When my hooves touched pavement, I took that first relieving breath of air. Almost without thinking, I called out, “Luna?”

No answer. Hearing my voice carry her name into the distance sent creepy crawlies up my legs.

This didn’t feel right. Every time I dream dived, Luna was right there beside me. As much as I couldn’t stand being near her, her absence unsettled me.

Come to think of it, I didn’t dream last night when Twilight came over. Luna was inside me, so I had no reason to think she wouldn’t be there when I slept. What happened to her?

The world around me was lit by the glow of what would have been a full moon, if one hung overhead. But the sky was unnervingly empty—not even the passing suggestion of stars up there. Still, the strange, omnipresent light was better than no light at all, so I got going through the dilapidated city streets.

This dream seemed way more filled in than the ones before. Maybe the Nightmare was getting stronger, or I was getting better at dream diving.

I wandered for what felt like hours through the Manehattan-like city. Not a sight or sound of Luna or the Nightmare. It was like this entire dream was wholly and truly empty.

I felt directionless to the point of wondering why I even bothered. That old, gnawing doubt did its thing, whispering to me from the dark corners of my head: this was a lost cause. My time would be better spent enjoying my freedom from the Nightmare. A shake of my head shut it up pretty quick.

Thankfully, I didn’t have to worry about those thoughts coming back anytime soon, as my wanderings paid off in the form of a familiar yet strange sight: the street we ran down while running from the Nightmare. The ground even had scorch marks where we’d deflected its magic. And farther down the street, the same doorway we crashed through. And the shattered atrium window above it.

Had we been in the same dream every time? I had nothing else to go by, so I retraced our steps.

Everything lay eerily quiet, like an unmarked grave. I didn’t notice it before, but the building sat in a terrible state of decay. Combined with the silence, the crumbling ceiling and mildewed carpets gave this place a being-watched aesthetic. I half expected the Nightmare to come bleeding out of the walls.

I… really needed to stop playing horror video games back home.

A few minutes’ trudging found me through the maze of hallways we took last dream dive and through a final doorway, where I came to a sudden stop.

I stood in the back of an auditorium. Row upon row of smashed and overturned stadium chairs sloped toward a shattered stage, whose floorboards reached into the open air of the outside darkness like the jagged teeth of a manticore.

Luna sat center stage, gazing into the distant dark. Her wing twitched, and she looked over her shoulder at me.

Yesterday came back to me all too suddenly—that smile and those turquoise eyes, that unclean, self-loathing feeling. But I was good at masks. Stuff like that made you good at masks.

“What the hell are you doing?” I asked.

“It is not here,” she said after a pause.

“Well, no shit. I’ve been wandering around for like three hours. This place is a ghost town. Where’d it go?” I stepped up onto the stage, but kept my distance—both from her and the ledge. That said, in all honesty, I’d take my chances with the ledge.

She blinked contemplatively. “I do not know for certain. The Nightmare is expanding the dream, as fractured as this one seems. It seeks to evade us within a labyrinth of its own design. It is stronger than us, true, but it still knows its mortality.”

“So then what do we do?”

“We shrink the dream.” She said it so simply, like it was the most obvious thing in the world.

“Okay. Well are you going to tell me how, or are you going to keep sitting there like some sanctimonious know-it-all?”

And it seemed like the first time she actually let my words get to her. About time the bitch owned up to it.

She flicked her ears back against her head, and her eyes settled somewhere on the floorboards between us. “Your words cut deep, Sunset. I ask that you please refrain from such insults.”

“You don’t get that privilege,” I snapped at her. “Where are we going and what are we doing?”

She brought her eyes up to me, and I saw in them a far-off, contemplative look, her body present but her mind elsewhere. I wasn’t sure what she was thinking about, but she needed to stop. The longer she sat like that, the more uncomfortable it made me feel about all sorts of things.

She blinked, and it was like she remembered she existed at all. Another flit of her left wing, and looked aside.

“Firstly,” she said, “it is important to remember that this is my dream. ’Twas constructed by my subconscious whilst I dreamt, and it is maintained due to the fact that I have not awoken, thanks to the magics you used to supplant me with the Tantabus.”

“Hey, I told you, I only had so much time to make a choice.”

“I am not passing judgement, Sunset, merely reiterating so that I may better explain what lies ahead.”

Hmph. Not passing judgement my ass. Her brand of passive aggression really was a league of its own, and by god I couldn’t stand how it got to me.

“But now that I have been torn from my own body and the dream contained within,” Luna said, “the Nightmare now holds dominion, and it seems to have come to possess rudimentary control of it. However, it has fed off you for so long, yours are the ideas and machinations awaiting us in this fractured plane. There are many things I remember from… those days.”

Her gaze sloughed off me and found itself somewhere in the dust and scattered concrete between us. She blinked, and just as quickly shied away. She didn’t say anything else, so I circled back on something she said.

“What do you mean by ‘fractured’?”

“Fractured. I mean it in a literal sense.” She extended a wing into the distance. “You cannot see it, but beyond the darkness, this dream is not whole. The ground rises, shifts, and separates like tectonic plates unbound from the earth.

“Dreams are not meant to be experienced more than once, nor by multiple ponies. Recurring dreams exist, but they are not explicitly the same dream every time. The insertion and removal of any one subconsciousness exerts heavy stress upon a pre-existing dream, and as such can violently change the landscape. ’Tis why I often choose to end dreams after intervening in them. Not even I may pass through the Veil without leaving a mark.

“Coincidentally,” she continued, “after trading the Tantabus, this is why you entered the dream in full each time thereafter. There was no Veil for you to peel back, because you had already done so. I apologize that I could not properly explain that earlier when you asked.”

Fair enough. I had actually forgotten I asked that question myself. But more importantly: “So then the more I dream dive, the harder it’ll be to find the Tantabus.”

“Quite so. To the point that this dream may collapse on itself, and the Tantabus and Nightmare be flung into the Dreamscape.” Her face darkened. “And if that happens, I fear I do not know what untold catastrophes would follow.”

Twilight had told me about their first go with the Tantabus. I didn’t need convincing that this would be way worse.

“Okay, so not only do we have a time limit on stopping this thing, but we also only have so many reset buttons. Great. So back to the whole shrinking-the-dream thing…”

“Yes. From what I can make of it, the Nightmare has been reconstructing segments of your past as a means of deterrence, much like yesterday’s…”

“Yesterday’s what?” I spat.

She was trying to find the right word for it, but I knew exactly what ran through her head. Yesterday’s incident. Yesterday’s oopsy daisy. Just say it, you stupid bitch.

“Trial,” she finished. Again, she let her gaze fall to the floor, and her wings slacked beneath the curve of her back. “Symbolism and syllogism withstanding, I believe that were you to confront these past demons, it would weaken the foundations upon which the Nightmare builds this dream, and those aspects would slough into the Eversleep below.”

“The Eversleep?” I asked.

“For one as to-the-point as yourself, you certainly enjoy your tangents.”

“Hey, you’re the one being all cryptic about it,” I said. Was she really getting snippy with me over this? “So what the hell is this ‘Eversleep’?”

“It is… I am not quite sure what it is. It is the remains of dreams as they fall apart and become one with the universe’s collective subconscious.”

“So it’s like flushing a dream down the toilet.”

She blinked. It looked like she had to physically will herself not to snap at me for that. The muscles in her legs tensed and relaxed.

“I suppose one could draw similarities,” she said coldly. “At the very least, if I am wrong, it will help us navigate those elements of the dream with more certainty.”

“Whatever,” I said.

She furrowed her brow. “This callous indifference of yours is not helping, Sunset, and it does little to mask your fears.”

“I’m not afraid of anything,” I spat.

She didn’t even crack a smile. “The deeper down you push your fears, the blacker they become.”

“I told you, I’m not afraid!”

I took a deep breath and settled myself. She wouldn’t get to me. Whatever the hell game she was trying to play, I wouldn’t let her win.

“I don’t know what you think I’m afraid of,” I said, “but you’re wrong. Let’s just get this over with. What do you need me to do?”

She stared at me for way longer than I was comfortable with. It was an almost pitying look. I had half a mind to knock it loose from her face, along with maybe a tooth or five.

“You must confront the regrets you hold closest to your heart,” she said.

“And those are?”

“That is for you to say, Sunset. There—”

“That isn’t an answer,” I spat. I was tired of this game. I didn’t need her dancing around the subject like some kind of holier-than-thou matador.

“I was not finished,” she said with a pointed stare before lapsing back into that look of… dejection? Seriously, fuck her. “There are many things that I convinced you to do. Terrible things. And their weight shall forever rest upon my shoulders, not yours. But I cannot tell you what they are, only that they exist. That knowledge lies with you. Follow your heart, Sunset. It will never steer you wrong.”

I felt the muscles in my legs tighten. My heart told me to punch her in the face. Would she have found that wrong?

“Great. So then are we doing anything else in this dream right now, or am I waking up and doing that?”

“I am here for you should you desire additional counsel, but in the essence of time, I believe you should set off.”

Fucking hell, she knew how to get under my skin. Waste my time and belittle me all in one go. She wasn’t doing herself any favors. Or maybe she just liked pissing me off.

Whatever. We were done talking. I had to count my blessings where they mattered most.

“Fine,” I said and cast the Wake-Up Spell.

The all-too-familiar magic lifted me off the ground by my shoulders, like I had grown a pair of invisible wings, and I tilted backward. A cold sensation, like passing through a paper-thin wall of water, washed over me, back to front, and gravity shifted somewhere in the meanwhile. It got really bright all of a sudden, and I had to squint to keep it from hurting.

“You’re awake already?”

That sounded like Starlight. Yeah, that was Starlight, overtop of me with a glass of water like always.

“Is everything okay?” Twilight asked.

“Well, she didn’t wake up screaming and shooting up the place,” Starlight said, “so I’d like to think she’s okay.”

After a long pull from the glass of water, I shook my head and rubbed away a migraine. “Yeah, I’m fine.”

Twilight stepped up beside me and put a hoof on my shoulder. “What’s going on, then? Did we forget something?”

I sat in silence for a moment, simply appreciating the weight of her hoof on my shoulder, the realness of reality asserting itself around me. I was still coming to, but even in that groggy state, I couldn’t help needing that closeness. It spoke multitudes to me, that sensation.

But with more of me coming to, so did everything Luna said. She knew a hell of a lot more about dreams than I did. No matter how much I hated her guts, I couldn’t ignore that.

“She and I talked. I have some stuff I gotta take care of.”

Twilight looked at me funny, but that was neither here nor there. If I was going to get my part of this job done, I couldn’t let my bullshit emotions get in the way.

I got up and got going.

• • •

Luna might have been coy about saying it, but I had no reason to be. She wanted me to talk to all the ponies whose lives I’d destroyed.

Might as well start from the top. Get the worst one over with first.

Some Royal Guard I didn’t know was stationed outside Celestia’s door. He gave me a wary glance when I approached, the wing holding his spear tightening around the shaft as if ready for me to start something.

I offered him a smile, if only so he wouldn’t stab me when I got close.

“I’m here to see Princess Celestia,” I said.

“Any and all appointments with the princess are to be processed through—”

“Yeah, yeah, through the Advisory Board, I know. It’s tea time right now, though. She has 30 minutes to spare. Tell her it’s Sunset Shimmer. Please,” I added, when all he did was glare.

Without taking his eyes off me, he leaned toward the door and knocked with a vicious-looking metal barb attached to his wingtip, specifically so that I knew it was there. The guy really didn’t trust me.

“Your Highness,” he said in a gruff, soldier-like fashion.

“Yes, Razorwing?” came Celestia’s voice through the door.

“A mare named Sunset Shimmer is here to see you.”

A pause. “Send her in, please.”

He looked surprised. At least, as much surprise as could peek through that trained indifference of his. Nonetheless, he opened the door at her command and gestured me in.

Up went my eyes to the chandelier and the spray of rainbows along the ceiling and its winding ivy-like plastering. It was a strangely uncomfortable nostalgia, following it with my eyes.

Celestia sat at her tea table in the middle of the room, books and tasseled bookmarks and little notes plastered all over. She had a little section quartered off for her tea, but at least a half-dozen legal documents heedlessly encroached on that holy ground.

She was really in the thick of it. Maybe this specific tea time wasn’t the best one to interrupt. Celestia made no show of such an intrusion, though, greeting me with a sweeping smile.

“Good afternoon, Sunset,” she said in that all-too-memorable voice. Just listening to it wash over me sent goosebumps up my legs.

I sat down like I had so many times as her student. God, this was weird.

“Hey,” I said, as formal as ever.

She set aside the book she’d been poring over and pulled her teapot and an extra cup from the secretary against the left wall.

“Tea?” she asked. She made a placemat’s worth of space for me on my end, the documents and manila folders shuffled and stacked aside.

“Sure.” Might as well. Everything else already felt eerily déjà vu-y enough. Hot water, chamomile, some honey, and a little stirring spoon. Back to silence.

“So,” she said. “You wish to speak to me?”

She maintained an air of friendliness to her voice, but not the same kind I used to know. The distant kind of friendliness, a guarded politeness normally reserved for someone she’d only met once or twice. Definitely not the kind I would have expected from the mare I once looked up to as more of a mom than my own mother.

“Luna says hi,” I said.

She hadn’t, but I was at a loss for conversation starters. Best let decorum lead the charge, and the smile on Celestia’s face said that hit home better than any other dogshit icebreaker I could have come up with.

“I’m glad to hear it. And how is your progress with the Tantabus?”

“We’re working on it,” I said. “Bit of a bumpy road, but we’re getting through.”

Celestia took the momentary silence to refill her teacup. The sound of it pouring into her cup was one I never thought I’d miss.

I scratched my head. “That’s… actually why I’m here.”

The pouring stopped, and Celestia looked at me—like, actually looked at me. It was as if, maybe, she forgot all the crap that happened between us, just for a moment. She set everything aside.

“I am more than happy to help in any way that I can,” she said. The old warmth in her voice was back. Same with her smile.

“Yeah, I… that’s the hard part. You see, Luna thinks that the Nightmare is feeding off my regrets, specifically the things she made me do uh… back then.” I tapped the tips of my hooves together. “And that includes everything I did to you.”

“You never wronged me, Sunset. Not once.”

Except I did. I bit my tongue, though. I wanted to keep this as civil as possible.

“You say that,” I said. “But you’re not the one who fell for an evil ghost pony that turned you against everyone you loved.”

Celestia let that sit between us for a bit. She of all ponies could tell a sore subject when she saw one. Not that I hadn’t tried murdering her over it or anything.

I sampled the tea to fill in the time. Seven years had done nothing to change the taste, but drinking it used to make her happy. Now that I was older, I wondered if she’d always seen right through that little nicety.

“You said that Luna sent you? Or I should say, you came to see me because of a suggestion she made?”

I flicked my ears back. “Y-yeah, but that doesn't make what I have to say any less sincere. I'm sorry for what I did. I really, truly am. I'm sorry for not following through on the friendship lessons you taught me, for not listening when you clearly knew better than I did. I'm sorry for not being worth your time as a student.”

She flicked an ear at that. The years I'd spent under her tutelage gave me the wherewithal to recognize that little twitch of frustration when I saw it. Did she seriously think I wasn't being sincere? Or was this one of those multi-layered implications that I hadn't picked up on yet?

“You should listen to her,” Celestia said, keeping to herself whatever little speedbump I had plowed through. “Luna, that is. I understand you have… misgivings about my sister, and for your own justified and rightful reasons. But Luna is wiser than even she gives herself credit for, and she is no less experienced in dreams.”

That last bit got a twitch out of me. “Yeah…” I said curtly.

I’d gotten the impression Luna had more than a few brain cells to rub together from my time dream diving, and I’d be an idiot to think she wasn’t smart, the way she played me like a fiddle back then. I just… I just couldn’t shake the sense of dread in listening to her. It felt wrong on so many levels to trust her, even with the most innocuous stuff.

“But as much as I trust her wisdom on… a way forward, as it were,” Celestia said, “I disagree with the notion of you asking me for forgiveness. Rather, I should be the one asking you, Sunset. I wasn’t the mentor you deserved, and I was too quick to punish you on her account. I was afraid if I didn’t act immediately, things would have gotten far worse.”

And there she went trying to turn everything around on me. Again with the porcelain doll mentality everyone obsessed over: I did nothing wrong; how could somebody so fucking fragile ever do anything wrong?

“Please don’t apologize,” I said. “You’re not the one who’s supposed to be apologizing.”

“Except I am. Luna only became Nightmare Moon because I failed to be the sister she needed. Had I been that sister, there would be no Nightmare Moon, and she would never have hurt you. Nevertheless, instead of keeping you safe from her, I dismissed you, and I…” She looked askance, and her ears followed suit. It got a strangely uncomfortable sensation squirming in my chest.

Not once in my life had I ever seen Celestia trail off. Every word, every sentence, she spoke with an almost deific conviction. In light of that, what I would consider here a minor moment of guilt for anyone else was for her a moment of complete and utter shattering. But just as quick, a thousand years of practice did its job. Up went the mask, and the princess was again whole and perfect as she should be.

“Water flows downhill, Sunset, and it carries with it whatever sand or silt it picks up along the way.”

I let the totality of her sentiment roll around in my head for a good minute, but every little thread my brain could follow brought me to the same conclusion. “You can’t hold yourself accountable for what she did to me because of what you did a thousand years ago. That’s stupid and insane.”

“By that same logic, neither should you, Sunset. I could not control Luna’s actions, but I had every opportunity to control how I reacted to them, and I failed to do so in a way that mattered.” She leaned forward the slightest bit in her chair, and in her eyes I saw genuine sorrow. “And for that, Sunset, I am sorry.”

That got me flattening back my ears and setting my jaw. I listened to her words bounce around in my skull like a bullet ricocheting infinitely, unable to find a way out.

She was sorry. She was sorry. She was sorry. Celestia was sorry. But she had no reason to be sorry, because being sorry implied she had done something wrong or that I had done something wrong worth forgiving, something capable of being forgiven and what the fuck was wrong with me and every little notion of innocence that had built this mountain between us and she was sorr—

Breathe.

Breathe. Breathe despite the trembles. Breathe through the tightness.

In through the nose, out through the mouth. Look at the tea set. The little tea packets in the silver plate container and the little fleurs-de-lis along the rim. Its tiny claw-feet, like those on a fancy bathtub. The manila folders, the spotlessness of Celestia’s table, the fine china and the slight discoloration of the liquid in the cup before me. The tea. Think of the tea and how it always tasted like ass and how the honey never did anything for it and she was sorr—

No. Don't think that. Don't fucking think that. Stop your stupid fucking brain right there and just don't. Watch the balcony curtains blow in with the wind. Watch them breathe. Breathe like they do. In and out. Keep the rhythm. It was nice out. It was nice out. Breathe, and let reality be.

I let out that final breath, and I liked to think that I had it under control again. Hopefully.

Maybe.

“Sunset,” Celestia said.

I flinched, but managed to point my ears forward and look her in the eye. Again, that same genuine sorrow gazed back at me, and it was the worst goddamn thing.

“I know you feel responsible for what you did,” she said. “But it's important to understand that what she manipulated you into doing isn’t your fault,” she said.

Maybe not.

“Don’t say that.” I pulled my hooves off the table. “Please.”

“Sunset, what she did to you is not—”

I slammed my hooves on the table and leaned forward. I felt like I was drowning and didn’t know which way was up. The only thing that kept me from keeling over was my balance on the table, and even that was slipping.

“It’s not my fault,” I said. “You keep saying that. Everyone keeps saying that. But you know what? You’re all wrong. Every last one of you.

“I didn’t ask her to do what she did to me, but it is my fault. I’m the one who let her in and let myself become the satanic bitch that I did. I’m the one who let her twist the lessons you taught me and the friendships you encouraged me to make.

“I’m the one who spit in your face when you tried to talk some sense into me,” I said, placing my hoof over my heart. “And didn’t believe a goddamn word you said. I still did every last bit of it of my own volition, and I… I already had this conversation with Twilight…” I sighed and cradled my head in my hooves. “I really don’t want to have it again.”

She wanted to say it again—that godforsaken phrase: it’s not your fault. But she spared me another go of that broken record everyone loved playing so damn much.

“I just…” I took a deep breath. “I want to get this over with, so I never have to think about it again.”

Celestia wore a slew of emotions, like she couldn’t pick which one fit best. “I understand wanting to put this all behind you, Sunset, but regrets aren’t something you simply ‘get over.’ That’s why they’re regrets. You don’t leave them behind. You come to terms with them.”

“Well then that’s what I need to do, so just…” I folded back my ears and looked away. “Please.”

I let my eyes wander back to the balcony and its fluttering curtains. I’d always had it in my head that the sun’s brightness directly correlated with Celestia’s mood. Following that logic, gloomy days never sat well with me, more so during moments like this when a cloudless sky seemed just a tad darker.

“Coming to terms with your regrets takes time, Sunset. You can’t force it. Different things take longer than others, and it’s different for every pony going through them.”

“It’s been seven years.”

She had raised her teacup to her lips but stopped short as I said those words. It held her attention for an uncomfortably long second.

“It’s been a thousand,” she said.

That got a scowl out of me. If she was trying to make me feel bad for her, or say that my problems were insignificant by comparison, then that was a low blow. I didn’t care how long she’d dealt with her problems compared to mine, they were apples and oranges.

She must have read that sentiment all over my face, though, as she set her teacup down without taking that sip. “I don't mean that as a comparison, Sunset. Merely that regrets take time. Sometimes a very long time.”

I glared at her a second longer before letting the anger of the moment slough from me like mud in a hot shower. My hooves followed suit, back to the pillow beneath me, and I punctuated the sentiment with a sigh that I really wished did more to tamp down the frustration roiling in my chest.

“Luna has a lot of regrets, too,” Celestia said, after I didn’t respond.

“She fucking better,” I spat. That earned me a good five seconds of silence.

“Do you know how she came to terms with them?”

I rolled my eyes. “The Tantabus. I know. Twilight told me the story. Luna created the Tantabus and bottled up her regrets until it almost caused it to escape into the real world and turn it into a living nightmare.”

“That is all true, but it doesn’t answer my question.” She used that forever patient tone of voice I remembered from her many court holdings. “Do you know how she came to terms with them?”

Silence. I had no answer for her. Younger me would have trembled at the very thought of not knowing. Younger me had to be perfect for her, lived and breathed by her every word. Present me just wanted to go home. This whole “fix my regrets” thing was a joke. I’d rather just dive back in and fight this thing to the death than deal with another minute of this wayward therapy session.

“She forgave herself,” Celestia said simply.

I blinked and cocked my head. Maybe I didn’t hear her right.

“What?” I asked.

“She forgave herself.”

No, I did hear her right. But she couldn’t have possibly said that. Nobody in this world or the other would let that kind of shit slide.

“That’s it?” I stood up and practically leaned over the table. “That’s fucking it? She forgave herself? Whoop-de-fucking-do!”

“Sunset—”

“No. Don’t you fucking shield her like this isn’t all because of her.” My legs trembled. I leaned into the table hard enough that it slid toward her with a very unruly scrape on the marble floor.

Celestia lowered her nose, but didn’t take her eyes from me. She was done making excuses, and about goddamn time. I wasn’t going to listen to her spew any more shit about Luna. She sat there and took it like she damn well deserved.

“I haven’t slept right in seven years,” I said. “And don’t give me anything about your thousand. Do you have any idea what she did to me? What she actually… You know what? No. I already know the answer to that, because if you did, you wouldn't be spewing this bullshit.”

I ground the edge of my hooves into the glass of her coffee table, and the lack of hands I could ball into fists left me desperately flailing for a means of channeling all this pent up whatever-the-fuck I was feeling. I gritted my teeth and shook my head.

I wasn't gonna cry. Not now. Not now not now not now.

“I’m not doing this,” I shakily forced out. “If this is how you’re gonna be, then I don’t want to fix what’s between us. I’ll take care of this mess without your help. Fuck this, and fuck you.”

I got up and stormed for the door, but just as I threw my magic around it:

“Sunset…”

Celestia’s voice carried so softly. No matter how much I hated her guts, that ancient need to appease her crawled out from whatever hole in my heart it’d been hiding in and rooted me in place.

I shut my eyes. Not now. Please… Anytime but now.

“Would you please go see him?” she said. “Not for my sake. He misses you.”

I squeezed my eyes shut tighter. Why now?

I used the momentary silence to steady my breathing. “Fine.”

I pushed the door open and headed out.

XXVIII - Greener Pastures

In all honesty, I didn’t mind visiting him.

Well, that was a lie. I did mind, but… it was complicated.

I knew I had to, whether by Celestia’s or Luna’s command or not. He was one of many names on my mental checklist. I needed this just as much as he did.

After what I did to him… God have mercy on me.

I couldn’t go groveling back to Celestia for his whereabouts after that little display I left her with, but it didn’t take long to corner a guard on my way out of the castle.

Greener Pastures Retirement Center. The name alone made me sick.

Thankfully, the place itself seemed nicer than I first expected. Maybe it was just a human world stereotype.

Whenever I thought of retirement homes, I thought of droning old-timey music and quiet hallways, the lifeless shuffling of rickety bones collectively awaiting their turn on the slab. That thin veneer of liveliness and newfound energy that twisted the phrase “golden years” into “golden” years.

This place fit the bill at first glance, but it had more color to it than the few others I’d seen, and no shortage of pictures and whatnot to fill in wall space, like the ponies running it actually tried to put some “home” into this retirement home. There was even a bonsai tree and a little water feature in the lobby. Veneer or not, one could hope.

Still, that didn’t change the reason for my visit, and as luck would have it, my reputation preceded me.

The cream-colored earth pony nurse at the counter recognized me like a preacher man meeting the devil. She shot to her hooves, her wide amber eyes watching my every step up to the counter.

“Ma’am,” she said. “D-do you have an appointment?”

I watched her hoof hover under the desk. Probably a panic alarm, like at banks.

“No,” I said. “Do I really need one?”

“You’re not allowed to visit patients without an appointment.” She affected a prim and proper little scowl to compliment the tight auburn bun that was her mane. What she didn’t know was that I could be way more assertive than whatever mirror she practiced in front of every morning.

“Would it help if I said Celestia sent me?”

She pursed her lips instinctively at the name drop, but she squared her shoulders and doubled down on that brave face of hers. “No visitors without an appointment.”

Oh, was she being cute. I didn’t have time for this. I picked up the clipboard behind the receptionist desk, penciled myself into one of the boxes—I didn’t bother reading it—and slapped it back down on the desk.

“That was a medication chart!” She reached for it to see what damage I had done.

“Yeah, well now it’s a visitation schedule.” I started down the hallway, checking the patient doors as I passed—all of which stood open for the charge nurse to better keep an eye on them.

I didn’t know if she pressed that button or not, but at this point I didn’t care. They’d have to drag me out of this place in manacles if they wanted me gone before I saw him.

“Ma’am!” The nurse badgered me all the way down the hall. Her clip-clop on the linoleum echoed after me. “Ma’am, you’re not allow—”

I stuffed a hoof in her mouth as I came to a standstill outside room 183. It was a small room, one fitted to look and feel like a miniature house, with a corner kitchenette and a sitting area. A radio on the nightstand played some upbeat, old-timey swing number that sounded like a gramophone recording.

He sat staring out the tall solarium windows spanning the far wall, soaking up the rays of a midafternoon sun. I couldn’t see his face, but I’d recognize that cropped mane and statue-like posture if I was deaf, dumb, and blind.

I swallowed. It took me a moment, but I found the strength to knock on the door frame.

His ears perked up, and he turned with that little smile I all too often saw whenever I visited Celestia.

“Hey, Stone Wall,” I said meekly. A lump settled in my throat just getting that out.

My god, just look at him. I wanted to think he looked strange because he wasn’t wearing his usual get-up, but I knew better.

He looked like a ghost of his old self. A stiff wind could have carried him off to Cloudsdale. There were lines in his face that weren’t there before. Half of them looked more like scars than wrinkles.

“I was hoping I’d see you again,” he said. He hobbled over and hugged me. Like, actually hugged me.

I stiffened at his touch. I didn’t know what to do. This intimacy felt so wrong, yet his precedent was the only one I had to follow, so I hesitantly put a hoof around his back. I could feel the individual vertebrae along his spine and the patches where his fur didn’t grow properly.

“You look great,” he said when we pulled apart.

“I…” what was I supposed to say to that? You too? His cheeks had hollowed out some. Was he eating enough? Could he eat enough? “Thanks.”

He brushed my mane out of my face. It took all my strength to not jerk away. He of all ponies didn’t deserve that from me.

My eyes drifted to his left hind leg—or, what was left of it. A thick bandage wrapped the stub from haunch to hock.

“It’s not so bad,” he said. He followed my gaze to his back leg. “You get used to it after a while. Besides, I lost the weight my dietitian was always yelling at me about.”

I laughed half-heartedly and looked away. Hiding pain with jokes like that never sat well with me. I tried that route for a while. It didn’t end well.

The song on the radio faded out, and in its place came the slow introduction of a piano-sax jazz number that reminded me of the Fall Formal back at Canterlot High. Stone Wall hobbled toward it.

”Don’t need this on while you’re here,” he said.

“N-no, it’s… I like it.”

He looked at me funny. “Since when were you into old-timer music?”

“Since when were you? You aren’t even fifty if I remember right.” Not even fifty and already put out to pasture, my mind drilled into the backend of my skull.

That got a chuckle out of him. “I’m allowed to like what I want.”

“And I’m not?”

He gave me that smile of his I remembered frighteningly well from our little moments in Celestia’s hallway. “Of course you are. And don’t you ever let anypony tell you otherwise.”

He grunted and strained as he sat down beside the bed. I made to help him, but he waved me off.

“I’m good,” he said. “Don’t worry about me.” He straightened himself out and tried giving me a placating smile.

The nurse huffed at him from over my shoulder, and I almost jumped out of my skin. I had forgotten about her.

“You should be sitting on your pillow, Mr. Stone Wall,” she said. She grabbed a pink lace pillow very unbecoming of the stallion I remembered from a little wire seat in the solarium.

“Oh, I’m fine,” he said and shooed her away. “Get outta here, y’old bat.”

She frowned at him before turning up her nose, settling on leaving the pillow beside him should he change his mind. “Fine. But don’t come crying to me when your back is out of shape.”

She gave me a final “I’ve got my eye on you” scowl as she trotted out of the room.

Wonderful mare, that one. Stiffer than the broom handle she surely had up her ass.

“Don’t mind her,” Stone said, nodding at the door. “Acuity, by the way. She’s nice once you get to know her. Sometimes she can be too blunt, though. Comes from when she worked in the ER, I think. You wouldn’t believe the stories she has.”

He gave the doorway a quick glance before sliding the pillow under the bed. “Can’t stand that thing. My ass slip-slides all over the place if I use it on anything but carpet.”

I smirked, because that was the reaction he wanted from me. Part of me did enjoy his antics, but the rest drowned in the guilt of watching him struggle with basic, everyday things.

I noticed the muscles on his right side were more tense than his left. Even without his left hind leg, he refused to compensate his balance by widening his stance or shifting his weight. Not a hoof out of place. A soldier’s poise, always and forever.

“I’m sorry,” I said. I’d waited long enough to say that. “I’m sorry for what I did to you, and everything that’s caused.”

He waved his hoof at me again. “Don’t worry about it. Besides, I’d run my course.”

“Don’t say that.” My throat threatened to cinch up at the thought, and my eyes primed themselves for tears I didn’t have the courage to shed. “Don’t ever say that.”

“You’ve never been in the service. Once a soldier, always a soldier, they say. It’s true, but there’s always that nagging voice in your head. There are younger ponies ready to fill your boots. I mean hell, have you met Razorwing? It’s not his real name, but I don’t think anypony’s got the balls to ask what it is. Kid’s a walking goddamn nightmare.”

I couldn’t disagree. He was rather intimidating. Not sure if Celestia really wanted a soldier like that as her personal guard, but, knowing her, she intended to slowly work it out of him one way or the other. Make a model citizen of him by the time he sported his first grey hair.

“But seriously,” he said. “Don’t apologize. The princess visits every weekend, so it’s not like everything’s all bad. Makes it feel like a vacation rather than a retirement.”

He always addressed her like that: “the princess.” I’d never once heard him say her name, not even back then. I found it curiously reverent.

“But while we’re on that topic,” he said. “What exactly happened, if you don’t mind me asking?”

And there it was. The big question. The whole reason I’d dragged myself here. I knew in my heart that this needed to happen, but now, in the moment, I wanted to run.

I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. I was strong. I had to be.

“I fucked up,” I said.

“We all fuck up,” he said way more matter-of-factly than I expected. Which shouldn’t have surprised me. He’d been way more casual about everything than he had any right to be from the moment I got here. Always was, honestly. “What counts most is what you do to fix your fuckups, and you’re here now.”

“Way after the fact…”

He put a hoof on my shoulder. His side muscles quivered just holding himself like that.

“You’re here now,” he repeated. “Care to explain?”

“I’ve…” I’d already explained this so many times I wanted to puke. Just thinking about saying it all over again made me nauseous.

A wave of guilt snapped my eyes to his back leg for the tiniest fraction of a second. He of all ponies had a right to know.

I sighed and shook my head. I ran my hoof through my mane, but all it did was fall right back in place.

“I was… I was stupid and blindly in love, and then that got turned on its head. I became… angry. So, so angry and resentful of everyone and everything, and you just happened to be…” I almost said “in the way,” but the phrasing disgusted me—it made him sound so disposable—and I lost the strength to find the right words.

He nodded with a far-off look on his face. He knew exactly what I was going to say.

“Love can make a pony do crazy things,” he said. “So can anger. Any emotion, really, but those two are the ones ponies usually blame.”

Yeah. I didn’t need reminding of that. I spent practically every hour of every day for a solid year thinking about that after Twilight saved me from myself.

“Do you know why I joined the Royal Guard?” he asked.

I blinked, his question pulling me out of that dark corner of my mind. I actually remembered the conversation he was talking about. We were in the hedge gardens, because Celestia was in the mood for a night walk. It had rained that evening, and all the chrysanthemums smelled like heaven.

“You told me it was because you wanted to protect the ponies you love,” I said.

A little smile played on his lips. “That sounds like a white lie I’d tell. Well, white lies being what they are, that’s not the real reason I joined.”

I slanted my mouth. I didn’t know why the thought crossed my mind, but I went with it anyway: “Thi-is isn’t one of those weird-ass revelation things where you tell me that you’re my real dad or something, is it?”

That got a real laugh out of him. He doubled over—half laughing, half flinching from whatever pain it elicited. When he came back up, there were tears beading in the corners of his eyes.

“Oh, damn,” he said. “I haven’t laughed like that in a long time. No, this ain’t some crappy radio soap opera. I joined because I didn’t have anything else.

“I was a Canterlot street urchin. Grew up on stale bread from the trash can behind Leaven’s Breads up there on Oatley, and whatever spare change I could sneak off the stuffy nobles walking around like they owned the place. When I was old enough, I saw an opportunity to get out of the hole I was in, and I took it. Best damn choice I ever made.” A far-off look built up in his eye, kind of like the thousand-yard stare I was so used to seeing back when.

“It made me… patient. I learned how to deal with my problems, from boredom, to the anger issues I had as a colt. Maybe that’s just part of growing up, but I like to think the Guard at least beat some sense into me.” He shrugged. “I never expected to become the princess’s personal guard, but that’s a different story.

“The big thing about it, mmm maybe three or four years into it,” he said, rocking his head side to side. “I learned that I like pony watching. I like seeing everypony go about their lives, running back and forth, wondering just what’s going through their heads and how their lives all fit together.” A smile tugged up one side of his lips. “Bet you never thought I was so philosophical, eh?”

I smiled back half-heartedly. I wouldn’t have considered that philosophical, per se, but I appreciated the sentiment.

“Being a guard let me do just that,” he continued. “And I’ll have you know, there’s a lot to see in this world if you pay attention, and a lot more nuance in each and every pony you’ll ever meet.” He nodded. “And the more I came to appreciate that, the more I understood what was actually important in this world.”

He glanced at the radio, which had since moved on to some baritone stallion leading a stage band in a slow lullaby.

“I always liked watching you come and go. Wondered what all you were learning, what the princess taught anypony one on one, what was important enough to teach ’em that way and all. Never really asked you, though. Wasn’t my place, and you never said much. But you always did give me that smile of yours.” He sighed.

“I always wanted kids, but no time for it. The Guard does that to you.” He ran his tongue across the inside of his upper lip, his eyes still lost in some distant thought beyond the kitchen table. “But, you know, I always felt kinda lucky with that… With how you were always coming and going, those little bits of conversation we shared, I kinda felt like I was getting the best of both worlds.”

I felt a lump form in my throat, and my eyes misted over. Goddamn it. He can’t just sucker punch me like that.

“And of course…” He laughed and gave a little shrug. “Now I have all the time in the world, so heaven doesn’t have to wait anymore, eh? Guess I have you to thank for that.”

And the beating continued. Trying to twist the consequences of my short-sightedness into a silver lining, and a bold one at that. I couldn’t stomach that kind of forgiveness. I flattened my ears back and shrank in on myself. Even if he meant it, no sort of end could justify those means.

“You’re supposed to hate me,” I said. I barely got it out. It almost sounded like a croak for how big that lump in my throat got. I couldn’t keep this mask on anymore. The tears brimmed in my eyes, and the levee man had long since punched out.

“And who says that?” His eyes were trained on me, half serious, half disbelieving. “The only pony I report to is the princess herself, and I don’t remember her giving me an order to hate you.”

I had no answer. I didn’t deserve to answer. An eye for an eye was all I deserved.

“Hey,” he said. He lifted my chin to meet his gaze. The smile he gave me was one of genuine unbridled happiness, but all I could see was him standing outside the Royal Treasury and the reflection of fire in his eyes—how he saw it coming but didn’t so much as lift a hoof to stop me.

“You couldn’t do anything to me that I couldn’t forgive in a heartbeat,” he said.

I shut my eyes and pulled away. Goddamn it. I couldn’t cry now. I didn’t deserve this kind of sympathy from him.

When I first got here, I had expected him to freak out and throw things at me. I expected nothing but hate and a thousand lifetimes worth of curses. I destroyed his life, yet he welcomed me back with open arms. I didn’t deserve this kindness.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

“This.” I gestured around me at nothing in particular. “You being here in this place. You having to go through that”—I pointed at his missing leg, then the patchy fur and his ribs I could count from here—“this, all of this pointless suffering because of me. You shouldn’t be forgiving me. I haven’t earned it.”

“Maybe not, but you’re actively working at it, right? Look at you now. You’re back in Equestria, and you’re talking to me. That means you saw the princess. And if you’re on good enough terms to talk to her, then that’s enough in my book to know you’re on the right track.”

“I…” I shook my head.

“You might not think you’ve earned the right to be forgiven, but in all honesty, that doesn’t matter.”

He struggled to his hooves and worked a kink out of his back. He still held an imposing stature despite his gauntness, but nothing about it gave me any reason to fear for my safety. Rather, there was a softness to his stance, the sort of gentle giant-ness I’d always seen in him.

“I choose to forgive you,” he said. “So it’s up to you whether or not you accept it, and more importantly, if you choose to forgive yourself.”

I dropped my gaze to my hooves. I was not going to cry. I was not going to cry. Goddamn it, why was I like this?

The tremors started, but I held the tears back like the adult I had to be. I was Sunset goddamn Shimmer. I was strong.

He was right, though. He had every right to forgive me no matter how stupid or arrogant I was or how little I deserved it. Saying otherwise would just be spitting in his face.

But while he might have freely chosen to forgive me, I couldn’t, not ’til I’d earned it. However long that’d take, I didn’t know, but if he really believed in me the way it seemed, I could at least try.

“Thanks,” I said. “This wasn’t exactly how I pictured this going. I-I’m sorry.”

“I’m not,” he said. “I got to see you again. That’s all that matters to me.”

And that got the waterworks going. Fuck. I couldn’t do this. I broke down sobbing into his chest, and he rubbed my back with a slow, steady hoof. It took a good minute for the tears and hiccups to subside, and I pulled away once I had a semblance of control, wiping away the tears.

God, I felt like a mess. I didn’t want to think about what I looked like. This was all backwards. I should have been the one comforting him over what’d happened, not the other way around.

But like the trained soldier he was, he made no show of whatever feelings he felt inside. He made sure I only got a good view of his smile, full of reassurance and good will.

I truly hoped heaven didn’t wait for him. With a genuine smile like that, he’d make the best damn father both this side of the portal and the other.

“Thanks,” I said again. It was the only appropriate response.

“Of course.”

I took a deep breath to finalize my little outburst there, and I was good now. I was okay. No more crying. I smiled to punctuate that fact.

“Whatever happened to your friend, by the way?” he asked. “That blonde mare you always hung out with.”

I broke eye contact and settled on staring at the radio, now dolling out a soft jazz instrumental. “I… I don’t know. I haven’t seen Copper since I left.”

“Oh,” he said, deflated. “That’s a shame. She was a nice mare. The princess really liked her.”

The silence let a whole slew of bad memories fill in the gaps. I rubbed the side of my foreleg.

Thankfully, the nurse made good time swinging back through. The overtly loud clip-clop of her hooves on the hallway linoleum was by no means a subtle preamble to whatever variation on the phrase “piss off” she had primed at the tip of her tongue. She made a show of clearing her throat once she stepped inside and glared daggers at me with the milquetoast assertiveness she aspired to.

God, what was wrong with me? She may have been a snippy little priss, but she was just doing her job. Where the hell was all this vitriol coming from on my end?

“Well,” Stone Wall said, dragging me back down to reality. “Looks like the drill sergeant needs me up and at ’em.” He gave the nurse a friendly smile, which didn’t amuse her one bit. Back to me: “Hallway ain’t gonna patrol itself, right? I hope you’ll swing by again sometime soon?”

That upward inflection cut through me like glass. The mere thought of coming back terrified me beyond reason—he was a constant reminder of my endless trail of fuckups. But I wouldn’t dare hurt him again. He didn’t deserve that.

“Of course,” I said.

He hugged me, and this time I actually felt comfortable enough to press into it. His hoof found the back of my head to hold me the way that always made me feel so safe.

“It’s okay,” he said. “Really.”

I nodded into his chest. The walls came down, and I let a fresh wave of tears out.

“Okay,” I said.

“You’ll make somepony real happy one day. But you gotta make yourself happy first. Just remember that.” A little squeeze, and he let me go. “Now go save the world. That’s what the princess’s star pupils do best, right?”

I laughed despite the tears. I didn’t even know what emotions I was feeling anymore. I wanted to go home, bury my face in my pillow, and scream, yet somehow he still got me to smile.

“Yeah…” I gave him a final hug, and I left that godforsaken place.

The train ride back to Ponyville didn’t even register. It felt like I teleported from one end of Equestria to the other. But no matter what black magic had my brain feeling unstuck from time, the sun hung low in the sky as proof that I had missed a good four hours somewhere, lost in my head.

I stumbled through the front doors of Twilight’s castle, and when all eyes locked onto me as I entered the portal room, I felt less myself and more like a ghost trespassing on holy ground.

“Put me back in,” I said to Twilight.

She looked at me surprised. “Uh, are you sure? You don’t look quite ready—”

“Twilight. Put me back in. Please.”

Her eyes danced back and forth between mine. I could feel her heart reaching out to me, but I couldn’t deal with that right now. If I let even the slightest bit of her get to me, I wouldn’t have the strength to sit myself in the chalk circle, let alone gather myself for the coming conversation.

Quickly enough, the dream dive magics washed over me, and I found myself in the auditorium, staring out at the infinite darkness.

“What is wrong?” Luna asked, her brows knitted in concern. “Why do you return so soon?”

“I can’t do this,” I said. “It’s, I just… this isn’t working.”

“If it is not working, then it is because you did not let it work. You did not truly open up to these ponies.”

“Yeah? And how would you know if I opened up or not?” I squared up with her. “I didn’t see you out there talking to them. You’re just this high-and-mighty piece of shit who thinks she knows how to fix me, but you don’t. Why do you even assume I need fixing? You’re clueless and arrogant, and I just… I can’t. I just can’t.”

Luna came up to me. “I know it is difficult, Sunset, but—”

I backed away to keep my distance. “What do you know about difficult? Why does everyone think they know so much about what it’s like?”

I clenched my jaw and squeezed my eyes shut. My life was turning into a broken record. They all thought they knew so much, and every time I had to explain it over and over and over and over again.

“I did not—”

“Don’t even. Just… don’t even bother.” I sat down and turned away. Fuck me. Why did I even think coming back here was a good idea?

“To overcome one's problems means to face them, Sunset, but in doing so make oneself vulnerable to them.” Her voice carried disgustingly gently in the silence between us. I could picture the feigned worry on her face without even looking. “It means not looking away even when we want nothing more than to do just that. Because that is how one overcomes them, not by hiding away from them.”

That got me onto my hooves and right up in her face. “Don't even fucking talk to me about vulnerability. You have no idea how vulnerable I've been with my friends about this. I told Twilight everything. Everything,” I added, and I watched as her ears fell back in shame.

“Can you even possibly comprehend how hard it was putting that into words? How… how disgusting it made me feel admitting to that? Because that's what it felt like: an admission. Like I had done something fundamentally wrong by simply being a decent human being and letting you into my life, only for you to…”

I squeezed my eyes shut and took a deep breath to steady myself. This, too, felt like just as much of an admission, but I'd rather throw myself into a fire than let these feelings lie.

“Have you ever watched the light die from someone's eyes, Luna?” I said. My legs started shaking, and it took everything I had just to keep myself standing. “Because that's what happened when I told her. And I had to see it again the morning after when she saw you lying there, and every dream dive since. Do you think I enjoyed that? Do you think I liked ruining the happiness she felt about you? That… that inherent admiration she held because of who you were to her? It made me feel like I stole something from her. Like you once again made me do something against my will, that you took that agency away from me, just like you did when you took everything else from me.”

We stared at each other for a long time. She looked almost afraid, and I sure as shit wasn’t going to be the first one to look away.

I shrugged my shoulders at her. “Well? Is there a single goddamn brain cell in there that has anything to say to that?” Still nothing followed, so I scoffed, “Of course not. It doesn't matter to someone like you. It's just one more reason on the pile of why she should smother you with a fucking pillow.”

She let her eyes fall to the ground, and her wingtips slackened below the arch of her back. “Regardless of what you may think, Sunset, I do care. And I hate what I did with as much passion as you, if not more.”

What? No. There was no fucking way she just said that. No one in their right mind could ever be that dense.

“Say that again,” I said.

She eyed me warily, and I noticed the tiniest spreading of her wings—instinct doing its fair share of heavy lifting in the piss-me-off department.

“You hate what you did…” I shook my head, and I couldn’t help the tiny laugh that escaped me. “And what did you do, Luna? What could you have possibly done that you hate so much, huh?”

No answer, so I slapped her across the face. For what it was worth, she took it, and the alarm on her face when she brought her gaze back around gave me something to latch onto and drive that anger home.

“That right there,” I said. “That bullshit right there. Stop talking around it. Stop fucking acting like it’s this thing you get to ignore or go quiet about when it’s convenient for you. All you’ve done since we started was dance around the subject with your pretty words and your woe-is-fucking-me attitude. You don’t get to hide from this.”

I thumped myself in the chest. “You don’t get to, because I don’t get to. So if there’s even a single repentant bone in your body, then shut the fuck up with all your holier-than-thou bullshit and do me the one goddamn courtesy even you can’t be too stupid to realize.”

The trembling came back. All the anger, all the misery, all the everything that was my life up to this moment rushed through me like toxic sludge. It was all I could do to grit my teeth and level every last ounce of it into my voice.

“Say it,” I spat. “Say exactly what you did to me.”

“Sunset, I—”

I slapped her again and seethed: “Use the word, you fucking coward.”

She looked me in the eye. By god, she looked into the very depths of my soul, and maybe—just maybe—she finally saw the depths of her evils.

Shakily, she said, “I… raped you, Sunset Shimmer.”

I took a step forward, grabbed her by the cheeks, and brought her nose to nose with me.

“Again,” I said.

She stared at me, longer this time. Maybe a second, maybe ten. I didn’t fucking know nor did I care. I could hardly breathe for all the emotions choking the life out of me, but I would have rather died on the spot than let her go another moment without feeling at least a drop of the tidal wave that had drowned me every day for the last seven years. And as I held her there, I saw whatever shred of dignity, whatever sliver of humanity she still might cling to, squirm the way I did beneath her seven years ago.

A single tear ran down her cheek, and she sucked in a shaky breath. “I, Princess Luna of Equestria, raped you, Sunset Shimmer. And I am forever sorry.”

I pulled her forehead against mine to the clack of our horns and held her there. “Take your own fucking advice and look me in the eye. You can hate what you did all you want. And maybe you actually do hate it more than me. But I don’t care, and I never will. Not in a million fucking years.

“Because your sorry doesn’t pull your weight off of me as I couldn’t breathe. Your sorry doesn’t untie me from your magic as I begged you to stop. Your sorry doesn’t put back the tears that you licked from my cheeks as you… you… entered me.” I pressed my forehead harder against hers, and although she had easily twice my strength, she practically collapsed beneath my weight.

“Your sorry means nothing.”

I pushed myself away from her. Turning my back on that worthless piece of shit was probably the worst thing I could have done, but goddamnit, I couldn’t stand to look at her. All it did was make me think of then—all the probing and the touching and the violation and wanting to just die so I didn’t have to feel it anymore.

I took a deep breath, and I focused on the sound of that breath entering my lungs. Listen to the breathing. Become the breathing, and let it become me.

“Not once have I thought myself above what I have done, Sunset,” Luna whispered. Her breaths came in shaky spurts. “Not a moment has passed that I haven't regretted the evils I committed, the equinity that I shed the moment I stripped yours from you. I am not ignoring it, Sunset. I never once have.

“I cannot change what I have done. That is forever a scar upon my heart. But there remains what I can change, and that is and forever will be the Nightmare, until it is naught but a memory. I pledge my life to that end, now and as I had when we began.”

And there she went again with her pretty words and the woe-is-me. She just had to inject herself into my headspace at every given opportunity. Force and pry, wedge and weasel, crawl and slither into the one remaining place that should have been sacred from her corrupting touch.

“That’s what you don’t seem to understand,” I said, wheeling about to stare her down. “I don’t care if you want to help. I don’t care if what you’re doing is the right thing or that you have my best intentions at heart. Because you still gain something from this. Because you get to feel some sort of peace of mind, some… some self-appointed justice about it all. But what do I get from it? Huh? Square one? I don’t even get square one or whatever shitty metaphor will finally drill that hole through your fucking skull. Your opinion, your hopes and best intentions mean nothing.

“You don’t get a say in any of this.” I was shaking now. Goddamnit, I couldn’t help it, but the truth hurt too much to keep in. “You’ve said that time and again like it’s this thing you can just deal with. Like it’s some wall you can bash your head against until it falls down. Because you’re the lucky one who has a wall you can do that to. Because for you, it’s just a wall.”

I shook my head, and I loathed the tears running down my face. “But not for me. For me, it’s a mountain. It’s the biggest fucking mountain with all the gnarled tree roots and twisting paths and little bits of stone that you think will hold your weight. But the moment you put your foot on them, you slip and fall. All the way to the bottom.

“And it doesn’t matter how many times I try.” I put my hoof to my heart, and my throat tried cinching up on me. No matter how hard I swallowed, that bitter pill wouldn’t go down. “It doesn’t fucking matter. Because there’s no top to that mountain. There’s no summit that I get to reach and look out on all the beautiful things in this world and the other.

“Because you took that away. Because you dragged me down from it. Because you decided I was less than.” I stepped up to her, wearing the shame of my tears for the world to see.

“And that is why you and everything you stand for can burn in hell.”

I lit my horn and ripped myself from the dream. I was already on my hooves and heading for the portal before anyone noticed I’d woken up.

And no matter how many times they cried my name, I didn’t bother looking back.

XXIX - Avenging Twilight

I fucking knew it.

Not even a day after leaving through the portal, there was another knock on my door. This time it was Starlight.

That thought alone had the dark fears poking their ugly heads out from the back alleys of my brain, but it wasn’t until she said three unholy words that I let them properly rampage through my mind:

“Sunset… i-it’s Twilight…”

I all but dragged her back through the portal, and we spilled out onto the castle floor. “Twilight!” I shouted before I was even on my hooves.

She lay in the middle of the chalk circle, her head resting on a pillow beside Luna’s. Her eyes were half open and her jaw slack as if she were in a trance.

I shook her by the shoulders. “Twilight, it’s me, Sunset. I’m here. Wake up.”

No response. I shook her harder.

“Sunset,” Starlight said. She put a hoof on my shoulder, but I pushed her away.

“Twilight!”

“Sunset!” Starlight whipped me around in her magic, and we had a moment. The pain in her eyes cut right through me. “She can’t hear you. She’s… she’s not in there.”

“What do you mean she’s not in there?” I half shouted. “She can’t have just up and dream dived. She couldn’t do that alone.”

I then noticed the little green surge crystal propped up in its wrought-iron tripod beside Twilight. Goddamn it. She just had to go and try and put everything on her shoulders. However the hell she managed it, I’d figure out later.

“She… told me she was just going to go over the spell real quick before bed,” Starlight said. Her thousand-yard stare passed through Twilight and beyond whatever dark thoughts held her brain hostage.

“She was afraid of anypony else getting hurt,” Star Swirl said. He stood just inside the double doors, a mournful look on his face. God only knew how long he’d been watching. “Goodness knows we all feel the same way. But here we are…”

I got to my hooves and stormed up to him. “Did you know she was gonna try this?”

“Sunset Shimmer,” he said in a grave voice, his eyes like thin slits. “Had I known her intentions, we would not be in this predicament. I would have volunteered myself before letting her even think of something so foolish.”

My heart tied itself in a knot, and I shook my head. She couldn’t have done something this stupid. Not without a good reason. And while saving others from hurt was a good reason, Twilight had more common sense than that. If only I could…

Actually, hold that thought.

“I’ll be right back,” I said. I dove through the portal and hit the ground running. People jumped out of the way as I bolted down the street. I earned my fair share of car horns and angry shouts, but I didn’t care. I needed my necklace.

I shouldered open the front door of my apartment—I had luckily forgotten to lock it on the way out—snatched the necklace off my nightstand, and made it back through the portal before my mind could fully process that I’d made the trip. It wasn’t until I kneeled beside Twilight again that my shoulder started complaining about the whole doorbusting thing.

Necklace on, I pressed the Empathy gem to my heart, and I took Twilight’s hoof in mine. The gem’s magic yanked me through a series of visions: a green flash, darkness, a looming black face with piercing white eyes. For the briefest moment, I was Twilight, and every sensation and emotion coursed through me as if they were my own.

I felt the trail of a cold wind over my back, heard the sound of hoofsteps and pebbles scattering beyond sight. My skin crawled with the sensation of a thousand spider legs, and the air reeked of old meat.

I saw Nocturne. Like the flash of a phosphorus bulb, that crescent-moon smile and swirling void-mane burned into my vision and winked out with the knowledge that I stood alone with my back against a wall. And in that moment, I knew fear like I’d never known it before—the true realization that death came for me and I was powerless to stop it.

A pair of fangs sunk into the back of my neck. I couldn’t breathe, I couldn’t scream, as my tongue slackened and my legs went numb as if filling with ice water. I heard the dying scream of a mare—in the distance, in my head, I couldn’t tell which.

It was Twilight, twisted and gurgling. A death rattle I knew all too well from my dreams. Somewhere in the back of my mind, she whimpered.

I want to go home…

Something tugged me upward, like the strings of a marionette. It pulled my soul from the body I occupied, and I became weightless, formless. Any semblance of awareness left me, and my brain ground to a halt. Was I dreaming? I couldn’t tell anymore.

A pair of hooves grabbed me around the waist and yanked as if heaving my drowned body from a river. The next thing I knew, Starlight stared me in the face.

“Sunset!” she said. “Oh, thank Celestia you’re okay.”

I reached out to touch her, and yes she was real. I touched my face to check if I was real, and my cheeks were wet with tears.

The memories came rushing back, and an impressive migraine set up shop dead center behind my horn. I put my hoof to my forehead. Goddamn, the Empathy gem never did that.

“What… what happened?” I groaned.

“That’s what I was going to ask you,” Starlight said. “You had a seizure the moment you touched her. Your eyes rolled back and everything. We didn’t know what to do.”

I squeezed my eyes shut and tried thinking back despite the pain. All my thoughts seemed far away, hidden behind a thick curtain that I couldn’t toss open. Twilight’s scream was the only thing that cut through.

“It… it got her,” I said. There couldn’t be any other explanation. Twilight tried something stupid without telling the others, put everything on herself the way I knew she would.

“Sunset?” Starlight had poured me a glass of water and offered it to me. She said something else, but everything grew far away, and a bout of tinnitus settled in.

I vaguely felt myself accept the glass. My body was on autopilot and my brain in standby. I felt like I was sitting inside a pressure cooker set to high. My heart pounded faster and faster as the ringing morphed into Twilight’s scream clawing at the inside of my skull. I flattened my ears back and squeezed my eyes shut, but it couldn’t keep out the screams.

I was seconds from clawing it out of my ears when something sharp cut me on the cheek. I winced, and that’s when I felt a warm wetness running down the side of my face.

“Sunset!”

I remembered to breathe, and reality snapped back into place. A handful of glass shards floated in my magic, the sad remains of the water glass.

“Are you okay?” Starlight used a napkin from the table to wipe a line of blood from my cheek.

I kept staring at the glass shards in my aura. Breathe. In through the nose, out through the mouth. It didn’t help.

A rage unlike any I’d known before boiled up inside me. It had me shaking, and I could only manage my breaths in little spurts.

I crushed the glass into sand and glared at Starlight. “Put me in.”

“What?”

“I said put me in. Put me in Luna’s goddamn dream.”

Starlight held up a hoof. “Sunset, I get that you’re angry, but it’s not smart to just dive back in and take a whack at the Nightmare out—”

“I’m not going to fight the Nightmare.”

Starlight stalled out midthought, her words piling up on the back of her tongue. There was a look in her eye that teetered between concern and confusion.

“What does this have to do with Luna?”

“Everything.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“Yes it is, now put me in—”

“She didn’t have anything to do with this, Sunset.” She jabbed her hoof at Twilight. “Twilight did this to herself.”

“Look, just put me in the damn dream.”

“I… Not without Twilight,” she said.

“If Twilight did it by herself,” I snapped, “then so can you.”

“That, that has nothing to do with it.”

“Then what does it have to do with?”

“Sunset—” She caught herself before saying something she’d probably regret. She took a deep breath. “Sunset, Twilight knew what she was doing with whatever alterations to the spell she made, but I don’t. I have no idea what she’s changed or what using it without figuring that out will do—”

“Then use the old one.”

“Without figuring out what it’ll do to both you and to everything we’ve been working for.” An intensity flared up in her eyes as she talked over my cut-in, and winked out just as quickly. “And if the Nightmare really did get her, I’m afraid of what you’ll be walking into.”

She rubbed a hoof up and down her foreleg. “I… I don’t feel safe doing this without her. I really don’t.”

My chest tightened up, and I looked at everything but Starlight. I swallowed and shot my gaze to my hooves before finding the strength for another breath through my nose.

Fuck me. Everything just had to get worse. Why couldn’t luck just work in our favor for once?

“Sunset, I know you’re hurting and I know you’re upset, but—”

“I know, I…” I shrank in on myself. “I-I’m sorry. I shouldn’t be taking it out on you.”

Starlight threw on a tiny smile for me, and she put a hoof on my shoulder. “No, I get it. You’re worried. So am I. I have been for a long time.”

I could barely hold myself together. A flurry of emotions ran through me, from anger for what happened, to fear it might be too late, to shame for lashing out at Starlight. She may have shrugged it off, but her readiness to forgive didn’t confer permission to trample her emotions.

I got up and headed for the door.

“Where are you going?” Starlight asked.

“Bed,” I said. “I’m tired.”

“You’re still going to talk to her,” Starlight said. It wasn’t a question. “In your own dream.”

I didn’t say anything, not to her, or to Star Swirl as I brushed past him. I didn’t meet his gaze. I couldn’t. They didn’t deserve any more of my bullshit.

But they had nothing to do with this, nor did they have a say in it. This was between me and Luna. They might not agree, but they couldn’t stop me, either.

It didn’t matter how directly a role Luna played in Twilight hurting herself. This was still because of her. It all lead back to her and her master fucking plan to make everything sunshine and rainbows.

I shouldered open the door to Twilight’s guest bedroom. The curtains were drawn, keeping out most of the afternoon sun. I tossed a Dampening Spell over it to fade out what little sunlight bled through and throw myself into complete darkness. A flick of my horn, and the door shut and locked behind me.

I slipped under the covers, but instead of lying on my back to stare at the ceiling, I bunched up the sheets and pillows around me in a sort of makeshift bunker. It might have been stupid, but I didn’t feel comfortable otherwise at the moment. The last time I’d cast the spell I had floating around in my head, things… didn’t go as planned.

I remembered the spell easily enough, the one Nocturne taught me so long ago. Just think of her, she’d said, and how she made me feel, let it reach down into me and draw out the magic.

I thought of happiness and the warmth of a bright future filled with love and endless possibility. But no, that wasn’t right. Those were the feelings I felt then, not now.

Now, I felt anger. I felt helplessness and the desperate need for agency in a situation that afforded none. I felt resentment for the hundreds of lies she told me, and the thousands more I told myself because of her.

I let the last seven years flow through me, one hateful, burning memory at a time. It felt as natural as putting on a sweater, the raw emotions trim and form fitting. And when I opened my eyes to see Luna sitting before me, they roiled in my lungs, ready to billow out like dragonfire.

We were back in Twilight’s guest bedroom dream again—me on the bed, Luna between me and the door. It was dark, save for an invisible light above that cast the room in shades of blue.

Luna stared at me, alarmed. “Sunset, what—”

“I told you this would happen,” I said.

She fanned her wings. “You told me what?”

“I told you that if I left, Twilight would try getting in. Now she did, and she won’t wake up.”

“Twilight would not do something so foolish,” Luna said. She scowled at me, as if I were a monster for even considering that Twilight hadn’t just gone and basically offed herself.

“Yeah? Well guess what, she did. And now she’s a goddamn vegetable like you.”

A tear ran down my cheek, but I wiped it away. After all I had done, after everything I had promised myself, I still went and got Twilight hurt. I knew she’d try. I goddamn knew it, and there I went fucking everything up even more despite it all, thanks to this bitch.

“So rather than set straight to rescuing Twilight, your first thought is to accost me further?”

“Don’t you fucking lecture me,” I said.

She glared daggers at me. “I will lecture you, Sunset Shimmer. Whenever and wherever such lectures are necessary. And that includes this foolish stunt of yours. If Twilight needs saving, then Twilight needs saving. Bickering is not our best course of action, no matter how much you may feel otherwise.”

“Oh, no you don’t. That’s one thing we’re getting straight right the fuck now.”

I stepped off the bed toward her, holding my head high to be as close to her face as possible. I didn’t care that I didn’t even come up to her shoulders. I was ready to spit back whatever bullshit she spewed at me.

“You mean ‘my.’” I thumped myself in the chest. “My course of action. Only bad things have happened since you tried prying back into my life. I put up with it when I was the only one getting hurt, but now Twilight’s hurt or worse because of you, and it stops there. I’m done letting you break everything you touch.”

I jabbed her in the chest. “So listen good, because I’m not repeating myself. Don’t you ever show your face around me again. I’m doing this alone, the way I should have from the start. Whatever it takes, I’ll figure it out. And then when you wake up in the real world, you can crawl back into whatever hole you came from and rot.”

Luna fanned her wings. “Sunset, cease this foolishness. Nothing good will come of rushing headlong at the enemy. You cannot hope to defeat the Nightmare alone. You cannot so brazenly throw your life away.”

“I don’t care what you think I should or shouldn’t do.” I lit my horn with the first spell that came to mind, and I lashed out with a magic whip made of corded fire—a personal favorite of Professor Phoenix Flare, back in the day. It cracked in the gloom brighter than a phosphorus bulb. “You’re done running my life. You’re done making bullshit suggestions like you think you know better. And if you even think of showing up in my dreams again, I’ll show you exactly what I plan on doing to the Nightmare when I find it.”

She scowled at the whip, then me. “Threats of violence do not sit well with me, Sunset. I understand your frustrations, but this display of yours benefits nopony. The valuable time you spend here berating me would be better spent—”

I cracked my whip at her, slashing her across the chest. The open wound cauterized before the steam had a chance to dissipate.

“My time would be better spent if you were fucking dead!”

I heaved for breath, and it was then that I realized she hadn’t so much as lifted a hoof to stop me. Even a shitbag like her had ample opportunity to flinch. The whip’s firelight danced in her eyes, and my mind flashed back to Stone Wall and his charred body on the Royal Treasury floor.

I…

I screamed. I leapt on her in a blind rage, and I let loose everything I’d bottled up for the last seven years.

I beat her. In the face, the neck, the chest—any part of that useless bitch I could reach. I poured every ounce of anger into my hooves until the blood gushed from her nose and her teeth littered the floor.

And she took it. She crumpled beneath me, blow after blow, never once flinching or raising a hoof, and never once taking her eyes from mine.

She wanted this, just like last time. The difference now was that it didn’t matter what she wanted.

I didn’t care if this was some secret fetish or part of her martyr complex, I couldn’t hold it in anymore. I wanted—I needed—her blood on my hooves and the meaty thump of her body beneath me and the liberation of letting it all go.

And then it was done. I came down from my high, and the exhaustion hit me all at once. Heaving for air, I stumbled backward from my work of art with sticky hooves.

Luna struggled to a sitting position. Her left wing was bent out of shape, and broken feathers littered the pool of blood dribbling from her mouth. Her face looked like hamburger meat.

“Are you finished, Sunset?”

She said it so simply, so… dismissively, with just enough of an edge to that chiding belittlement that I hated so goddamn much.

You know what? No. No I wasn’t. Not in the fucking slightest.

I cracked the whip. “Get up.”

She let that statement hang between us. If it weren’t for all the stupid shit she’s spewed these last few arguments, I would have found the look of confusion on her face unusual.

“Sunset, you cannot—”

“Shut the fuck up. You wanna be a fucking smartass and ask a stupid question like that? Then you get exactly what you ask for.”

I squared my shoulders and cracked the whip again. I was top of my class back in Mrs. Phoenix Flare’s Pyromancy classes, and the disbelief on Luna’s face had me itching to stretch my legs, as it were.

“I said get up.”

Still nothing. It was as if whatever ancient, decrepit hamster had the misfortune of spinning her wheel finally kicked the bucket. Fucking bitch.

I took a step forward, and for the first time since she wedged her sorry ass back into my life she paid me due respect in the form of an alarmed step backward. Her one good eye tracked from me, to the whip, and back to me. Was this really what it took to finally make her listen? Was she really that much of a fucking animal?

Magic loud, fire bad? Fucking pathetic. I took another step forward, and she another back.

Without a word, she lit her horn, and thin slits ran across her swollen brow. They bled freely, and the swelling subsided to the point I could make out the color of her right eye again.

With another flick of her horn, she gathered her teeth. One by one, she reseated them in her mouth with a quiet schlick. She ran her tongue across them behind pursed lips, and with a deep breath, she stood. She was not smiling.

“Sunset, this is not a game.”

“Who said we were playing?” A third step, but this time she didn’t match mine. “You never gave me a choice. Don’t act like you get one now.”

Her face hardened a hair. “I will not say it again, Sunset. This is—”

“Then don’t.” And I leapt.

I lashed out with my whip and comboed it by throwing a gout of fire around like a left hook.

She danced backward just as my fireball swung beneath her jaw and my whip cracked inches from her left ear. She used her wings to skirt around me before I cornered her between the dresser and vanity.

“Fucking fight me,” I yelled, cutting the line between her and the bed. But every time I got near, she flitted this way or that, ducking and dodging whatever I threw at her. Avoid and evade, just like the Nightmare. Just like the word. Just like every little responsibility she claimed to be so profoundly in charge of.

“Sunset, cease this pointless charade.” She leapt over the bed now, and I chased her around the foot of it.

“Nothing about beating some fucking sense into you is pointless.”

“You cannot allow your anger to let you lose sight of—”

Her shitty little pontification cost her the split second she needed, and a quick flick of my whip caught her just above the brow.

This time, something in her eyes changed, a sense of focus or revelation or whatever the fuck existed inside that skull of hers finally triggered some primal instinct other than run like a coward.

Was that what it took? A knick of the brow? A little blood to know I actually meant business? I ribbon-twirled my whip back to let it coil beside me. The area rug began to smolder outward from where it lay.

“I think I’ve got my sights set pretty straight, actually.” I lowered my chin to my chest. “How about you? You still feel high and mighty enough to keep talking down to me?”

I went in for another crack with the whip, but a flicker of blue magic caught it like wire wrapped around a pole, the firelight highlighting the blues of Luna's mane and casting a shadow up across her face. The crease in her brow said more than words ever could.

Finally. Let’s go, bitch.

Not waiting for an invitation, I yanked my whip free of her magic and redoubled the fire at my horn. I brought it to bear in an executioner's downstroke that I was rather proud of, but she once again backstepped to leave me just shy. The flames splashed across the carpet to set the room aflame.

One, two quick steps, and out went those damned wings of hers in a flurry of feathers. She clapped them together to blast me in the face with a gale-force wind. I could barely keep my footing let alone keep my eyes open.

I knew something was coming. It didn’t take a genius to know a distraction like that. I threw up a shield to block whatever she might have the balls to throw at me, but something caught me in the small of the back, flattening me to the ground.

I twisted over and threw my hooves up to shield myself while I focused on a Fireball Spell. Whatever she had planned for me, she was too slow. I caught her square in the chest, grinning ear to ear.

Easy fucking peasy. Stupid bitch needed to learn some respe—

I stopped smiling when I realized what actually happened.

The fireball never actually hit Luna. The instant it detonated, a tiny glimmer of blue seemed to swallow it whole and absorb it into her horn. When she leapt backward, she spread her wings wide, and every individual feather became wreathed in flame.

Oh, fuck.

She clapped her wings together and blasted my own inferno back at me on the coattails of another gale-force wind, but without my footing, I crashed backward through the bedroom door and smack into the far wall. For a moment, I saw stars.

Luna stepped through the burning doorway. She shouldered aside what splinters remained of the door, which fell from its hinges to join the smoldering debris.

I shook my head. Got lucky at the last second with a quick Shield Spell. That would have probably killed me otherwise—in real life, at least.

I spit the blood out of my mouth and grinned. If she wanted to be like that, good. I could play dirty, too.

I stumbled to my hooves, resummoned my fire whip, and charged. I wound it back, but before she could yank it from my grasp, I let it fade and teleported behind her.

The moment I flickered back onto this plane, she was already facing me, a pony-sized gavel of pure white energy summoned over her head. She knew I’d try and one-up her, and it made the next fraction of a second all the sweeter.

Just as the gavel came crashing down, I teleported again, right beside her and caught her square in the gut with a fireball the size of my head. I felt it sink in, and the grunt that eked out of her was the most gratifying sound I’d ever heard in my life. I savored it a bit too much for my own good, though.

Luna swept her wings upward to keep her hooves planted, and with a quick pivot of her hind legs, she caught my horn with hers and threw me off balance. Like a rhythm stick sliding down another’s length, the spirals of our horns krit-tit-it-it’d until she caught me between the eyes with her skull and my sight went blotchy. Something hit me in the side, and the next thing I knew, I was on the ground.

A shadow crawled across my body. Luna towered over me, her silhouette ablaze from the fires consuming the pennants lining the hallway. Her eyes flashed blue in the light of another spell at her horntip, and I had only a second to throw up a shield.

Our magics collided, red against blue, but where I had expected that all-too-familiar resistance, her magic instead enveloped mine. The sound of crackling ice surrounded me as jagged crystals spidered down around my shield, until I lay in a darkness staved off only by the dim red glow of my horn.

A thousand little reflections of myself stared back from the facets in whatever this was, each with a frazzled mane and a wild look in her eye. That bitch encased me in a little crystal dome.

A second passed in silence. Then two. Then three.

I jumped to my hooves, looking left, then right. Behind? Underneath? What was she doing? Where the hell was she going to attack from?

The hair stood up on the nape of my neck, and a tingling sensation ran down my spine—a chill that drew all the moisture out of the air. It condensed against the crystal dome and ran down the walls in little trickles.

I couldn’t control my breathing. I hadn’t seen magic like this before, and I didn’t like enclosed spaces—even sleeping with my bedsheets over my head made me uncomfortable. But I knew what she wanted.

She wanted me to teleport out, blindly throw myself into whatever trap she had waiting for me. She thought she could outsmart me with some shitty parlor trick like this?

Yeah, no. That wasn’t happening.

I dropped my shield so that I could focus another spell to my horntip. I blasted the wall with a gout of fire, sending a trail of molten crystal oozing to the floor. No dice. I spun around.

I gritted my teeth and blasted it again and again. Globs of white-orange crystal pooled around my hooves, but I’d still hardly made a dent. I fell back on my haunches, panting for air.

I shook my head. She wouldn’t get to me. Whatever the hell mind game this was supposed to be, she would not get to me.

Before I had a chance to bust my way out, a wave of blue light rippled down the length of the dome, and it shattered into a thousand little shards. They fell less than an inch before that same blue light suspended them in midair, snapping their pointed ends inward. Shit.

I teleported out just as the shards made a pincushion of the floor, and before I even got my bearings, something cracked me upside the head. I crumpled to my stomach.

No time for pain! Get up!

Maybe something a little more certain than just getting up. I teleported across the room where I knew I’d have space between us.

Luna stood about twenty feet away, beside a broken hutch and scattered silverware. Where she stepped, she left hoofprints of blue fire that ringed outward, consuming the velvet runway.

If she was all about her trickery and mind games, maybe turning things on its head would trip her up. She was expecting me to pull another ace out of my sleeve. Maybe a good old-fashioned beatdown was just was the doctor ordered, and I was more than happy to obli—

Something hard and heavy caught me in the ribs, and the momentum sent me sliding sideways a good five feet. It took all my focus just to stay on my hooves.

Fuck. When did she teleport beside me?

I squared up with her and deflected a bolt of magic. Out came that magic gavel again, and I leapt backward just before it turned the floor into a pony-sized crater, kicking up a cloud of powdered crystal and dust thick enough to obscure sight.

The moment my hooves hit the ground, I charged up the biggest fireball I could and waited. There was no doubt in my mind that she’d come at me—she surely thought I’d be off balance after that, and I was ready to give her the beating of a lifetime for being that stupid.

Sure enough, she charged through the cloud of dust, and I was ready. I let it fly, and the light burned intensely enough to whitewash the entire hallway.

I had another fireball at my horntip for a follow-up, but it wasn’t necessary. What little gap she had to dodge closed shut, but she seemed unfazed. Instead of fear or surprise, she simply lowered her shoulder and… let it hit?

I stopped short, and the momentary lapse in thought was a mistake. I saw the backhand swing through the curling flames, and she caught me just below the chin. My teeth clacked together, the impact jolting through me like lightning.

I was off my hooves. I didn’t know which way was up. Panic mode kicked in, and I threw fireball after fireball into a sudden, unnatural darkness. I couldn’t see a foot in front of me.

What felt like a sledgehammer caught me from underneath, lifting me off my hooves. My stomach caved in, and breathing became a distant memory. I reeled backward. My magic wouldn’t work right. Everything hurt.

I wheezed for air and swung a hoof to my left. She clocked me in the face from the right. I spit out a tooth.

I stumbled backward and wiped a streak of blood from my lip. Fuck this.

I charged up a Flamethrower Spell and swept it in a wide arc across the room. I couldn’t miss if I hit everything.

The room went up like a grease fire, and the deep red of the dancing flames pierced even this magical darkness.

I caught a glimpse of blue light parting the flames to my left. Gotcha, bitch. I banished the darkness with a Clarity Spell and charged. This ended here.

I went high, she went low. We met in the middle in a clash of fireworks. The explosion launched me backwards, and I rolled into a fighting stance.

She was already on me, blow after reeling blow, cycling through more spells than I could count—fire, ice, crystal, lightning. I could barely keep up, let alone stay on my hooves.

She magicked a glowing speartip just under my chin, but I somehow caught it before she had a chance to run me through.

I couldn’t breathe. I could barely see. The dust had gotten in my eyes, and my heart was ready to rocket out of my chest, but I was not going down.

Every day for the last seven years, I promised myself I’d never let someone put me in a corner again. I’d be damned if I let her do it a second time.

I wrenched the spear from her grasp and turned it on her, but she cut off the spell before I could drive it home. It dispersed into a thousand little motes of silver light that filtered through my magic like wet sand through my fingers. A few melted against my coat, cold as snow.

I went for another flamethrower to catch her off guard, but I was too slow. She met me halfway with what looked like condensed moonlight, and we stood there, gridlocked.

I pushed with all my might, the flare at my horntip bright as the sun. The rubble at our hooves jittered in the latent energy, and I gritted my teeth to double down on my spell.

She pushed me backward without even breaking a sweat.

I felt the center mass of her magic shift low and force upward on mine, deflecting our magics into the far wall to blast a hole into it the size of Canterlot’s front gate.

Before I could catch my balance, she twisted her hip and kicked out with her hind leg, catching me in the shin. I felt the snap of bone, and I caught the scream in my throat before it could escape.

She beat her wings to blind me with a kick-up of dust, and when I shielded my eyes, something heavy crushed my nose in like a pop can.

I had never felt pain like that before—that blinding, tear-wrenching fire and the gripping fear that came with it. I stumbled backward into the corner, shielding my face from a second blow. I heard the wet schlick of meat as a searing pain tore across the length of my shoulder, and I crumpled to my haunches.

Luna towered over me, head held high, blood swirling through the air from the tip of her horn like a dancer’s ribbon. The intensity in her eyes was something I’d never forget.

But just before she dealt the final blow, that baleful intensity sparked with… recognition?

She caught a gasp in her throat, and that split second was all I needed to grab a rock from the nearby rubble and club her across the face. The weight of the blow staggered her sideways, and I followed through with another square to the jaw that sent her tumbling backward into an ungraceful heap.

I let the rock fall from my magic and collapsed forward onto my face, coughing and hacking up a disgusting mixture of dust and phlegm and blood. My eyes burned from the dust and the heat of the flames around us, but I could just make out the blurry image of Luna maybe five feet ahead of me. She wasn’t moving, save the barest rise and fall of her chest.

I struggled to my hooves. My shoulder burned like a motherfucker, along a deep gash that bled freely—and my broken foreleg wouldn't accept any weight—but nothing in this world or the next could stop me from hobbling over to see that self-righteous bitch where she belonged.

Even as the hallways still burned down around us, I paused to lord over her, the way she had done to me so many times before. The flames threw frantic shadows across her body, gleamed in the blood dribbling from her muzzle, dampened the lazy twinkle of her mane.

Still heaving for air, I summoned up my own magic gavel. That’d be fitting enough. Put her down with the very symbol of justice she wielded so willy-nilly, so… flagrantly. I drew it back for an executioner’s stroke.

Bring it down. Just pancake her fucking skull into the floor. Paint the room with the justice she wanted so badly and make it all go away. I raised the gavel higher, but my shoulders started shaking, and I felt the tears well up in my eyes.

“Fuck,” I said and dismissed the gavel. Gritting my teeth, I snagged her by the neck with my magic, and held her up to me.

Her head lolled to the side. Every shred of anger I carried with me for the last seven years burned hotter at the sight of the peaceful emptiness on her face.

Just wring her fucking neck. A simple twist and all was right with the world. Like a baby bird in the palm of my hand, all I had to do was squeeze. So I did.

I wound my magic tighter and watched as her skin indented and cartilage bent. Soft, vulnerable. Just like I was.

And I… I squeezed my eyes shut.

“Fuck!”

Shameful tears rolled down my cheeks, but I dragged her away from the flames, grabbed the splintered remains of a nearby hutch, and got a fire going.

Author's Note

That's gonna leave a mark. Onward and Upward, Sunset. You'll get there eventually.

XXX - Fireside Chat

I remembered getting a fire going and laying my head down for the briefest moment. Next thing I knew, the crackle of the fire pulled me out of whatever mental standby had me unstuck from time and rudely reminded me how much everything hurt.

Fuck, did I fall asleep?

I winced, pulling my hooves up to my nose. Bent out of shape and crusted with blood, it felt like I’d gone and run full sprint into a brick wall.

The simple motion brought with it a slew of other aches and pains. With no adrenaline to dull the pain, coming back to it all at once really fucking sucked. I wanted to curl into a ball and die. There weren’t any real spells for that, though, and the sensible part of me knew better than to trust my overdramatics. I latched onto that thought to get a hold of myself and take stock of my surroundings.

The campfire was still going beside me. It had died down some. Maybe an hour or two, then? Little sparks spurted off and rose toward the soot-covered ceiling of the hallway. Darkness encircled my little encampment, and the charred and splintered remains of furniture and other castle fineries made dancing shadows of the nearby walls.

Luna lay sleeping where I left her on the other side of the fire. Even asleep, the sight of her had me scuttling to my haunches, only to be rudely reminded of the leg she had snapped clean in half. I collapsed sideways and grasped at the bend in my shin that shouldn’t have been there.

“Fffucking shit.”

I sucked wind while trying to ride out the pain. Breathe. Just breathe like you’re good at. It’ll go away. God fucking damnit, it’ll go away.

“Sunset?”

Luna’s voice got the hair standing up on the back of my neck. She had sat up sometime during my little episode. The firelight danced in her eyes as if to compete with the stars twinkling in her mane. Quickly enough, she gazed into the flames and laid back her ears.

“It is good to see you awake,” she said.

I rolled onto my stomach and forced myself to a sitting position with my one good foreleg. “Is that supposed to be a joke?”

I was honestly curious. If she was here, then logic dictated I was still dreaming.

A tiny smile tugged at the corners of her lips. “I see your wits are as sharp as ever, Sunset. But I mean it within the confines of your dream, not true wakefulness.”

She let her smile fall back to that observant stoicism of hers, and her eyes came around to mine. There was a… a sort of yearning in them that pronounced when she roved over my injuries. Her ears perked forward, and I felt that sixth-sense-y animal magnetism—well, empathy, I guess—reach out to me.

“May I? she said. That… hopeful gaze lingered on me, but she didn’t approach.

May she? I remembered the whole fixing-her-face thing she did before our fight. I could still hear the way her teeth slid back into their sockets and just eugh.

But the look on her face didn’t spell out “eugh.” It… I didn’t know. As much as instinct screamed that I should back away and tell her to fuck off, I didn’t have much left in that department. All the aches and pains contributed their share of debilitation, and I laid down. Being angry was too hard right now.

“Sure. Whatever.”

She got to her hooves and rounded the fire for a better look at me. Rather than loom overtop of me, she laid down next to me, made herself as small as possible. Even her wingtips didn’t poke above the arch of her back like they usually did.

Gently, as if trying not to spook me, she lit her horn and brought it to my muzzle. A radiant warmth bloomed all the way into the back of my skull. The sensation of feeling my muzzle uncrunch and pop back into place got the squirmies going in me, and my sinuses went into overdrive to have me tearing and snotting up like I had just snorted a line of hot sauce. I could breathe through my nose again, though—something my brain hadn’t even considered until suddenly regaining that blessing.

One by one, she touched her horn to my other injuries—my shoulder, my shin, and the heaps of bruises all over my body—and that warmth rushed in to ease away the pain. Everything still hurt, but in a feverish ache sort of way rather than a run-over-by-a-stagecoach way.

When she pulled back, that warmth left me surprisingly cold, like someone opened a window in the dead of winter. She was sweating, but she wore a hesitant smile all the same.

“Better?”

I took a deep breath to steady myself, but it came back out shaky. Only now did I realize how tense I was. I couldn’t help the sense of invasion the whole deal stoked in me, even though I consented. Still, she deserved at least complacency for the gesture, and I did my best to relax.

“Yeah.”

She retreated to her side of the fire and sat down. Again, her eyes gravitated to the little flames dancing as if for her amusement. A moment’s silence before: ““How are you feeling?”

Now that had to be a joke. I let that thought show plainly on my face.

“I do not mean physically,” she said. “How do you feel?”

Tired? Stupid? Ashamed? Dozens of other, more self-deprecating words sprang to mind, all centered around how much of a fuck-up I was. How she beat the ever-loving shit out of me up until the last second, how much I had proven myself all bark and no bite. I settled on the most all-encompassing word among the flock:

“Like shit.”

She contemplated that awhile, her eyes lost in the dancing flames. Something about her had me following suit, and we stayed that way for a good minute.

“Why’d you stop?” I eventually asked. I looked her in the eye for any wordless answer she might give. “You had me dead to rights. Why’d you stop?”

She repaid my question with silence, or so I thought until she finally spoke up.

“You wished to fight me, Sunset. I did not wish to, as I felt it contrarian to our best interests. But to have denied you that fight would have been to supersede your desires, as would have ‘pulling my punches,’ as the phrase is said.

“However… in that moment ere besting you, backed into a corner as you were, the fear in your eye… I do not know if your mind went back to that moment, but mine did. I saw you as you were then. I saw you beneath me, and I… I could not do that a second time.”

That got me laying my ears back and my heart going. That unforgettable sensation of everything closing in, the inevitability, the hopelessness. It was all I could do to stare into the fire, but among the flames I saw her beneath me, the firelight glinting off the blood dribbling from her muzzle.

The same, and yet different.

“There is much anger in your heart, Sunset, and I am its rightful recipient. Hate me as you must, but you must also learn to control that anger, or it will consume you.”

It will consume you… Yeah. I felt that consumption well enough. I could still feel her blood on my hooves, the meaty thump of her body beneath me, how joyous it felt. Now that the heat of the moment had passed and the very real proposition of snuffing the life out of her crystalized in the forefront of my brain, the thought sickened me. And yet that felt almost self contradictory, like I shouldn’t be allowed to feel sickened, because I shouldn’t need to.

What she did was unforgivable, yet I couldn’t bring myself to enact the justice I had been denied for so long, as if part of me wished for some higher power to come dole out that justice on my behalf, just so I wouldn’t have to actually cross that threshold. And yet I knew there was no higher power. My situation was proof of that. No god worth praying to would have let this happen.

Fuck, what was wrong with me? I blinked away the afterimages of the fire and looked to Luna, if only to drag my brain out of that shitshow of a mental spiral. Just… something to focus on other than my own self-loathing.

I noticed the patch of raw and weeping skin stretching from her right breast to her wing joint, where she had shouldered my Fireball Spell as part of my beatdown. Same with her face. The rock I got her with left a trophy of a gash running from the bottom of her earlobe to her jaw. The blood matted her fur all the way down to her collarbone.

No healing magic for herself? Was that suddenly against the rules, or did she mean it to garner some twisted sense of sympathy? Whatever. I was too tired to care.

I looked away. No hope of finding a reprieve from the bad thoughts in her, and if she was going where I thought she was with this conversation, I didn’t want to tempt fate. Now didn’t feel like the best time for a lecture, even if it was part of some unofficial terms of surrender or whatever the fuck this little situation was turning into. I just wanted to sleep. Like, really sleep, and not think about anything for a solid week.

“Did Sister ever tell you why I became Nightmare Moon?” she asked.

I sighed. This lecture thing was gonna happen whether I liked it or not. Might as well get it over with.

“Not really,” I said. “All I remember is from that old pony tale. Everyone liked the way she ruled things more or something, and you were jealous.”

Luna contemplated that. “There were many reasons, more than simply that our subjects favored the day over the night.”

“And those were?”

“Love, for one,” she said.

“Love?” I looked up at her. There was a far-off pain in her eyes.

“It is… difficult to speak of, but yes. He… he chose Sister, and… I, I could not cope.”

Ouch.

Anything to do with unrequited love got me right in that sensitive, heart-shaped spot better left untouched. It didn’t matter if the only reason I could relate was because of her—that shit got me. I found it hard to hate, despite the principle that I should.

She’d lied to me from the moment she said hello back then, but I didn’t have any reason to think she was lying now. I’d gotten good at knowing when people were lying. Took one to know one, and this wasn’t it.

“What happened to him?” I asked.

She said nothing for the longest time, maintaining that distant gaze through the fire. Part of me wondered how normal it was for her to space out like this. A thousand years on the moon couldn’t do good things for a mare’s sense of time.

“I destroyed him,” she said finally. She let the sentence hang between us. The simplicity in her voice sent a shiver up my spine, and was lost in the firelight again.

“Does Celestia know?” It didn’t really matter much, but I was curious.

“Yes. ’Twas a… difficult dinner conversation.”

“Sounds like it.”

Luna sniffed at that. When I chanced a peek out the corner of my eye, there was a little smile on her lips. Or maybe it was a grimace.

“’Twas not the tipping point, but it was certainly the first spark to illuminate that dark path.”

“What finally did it?”

“The winter solstice,” she said. “Am I right in assuming there was no such festival related to it during your foalhood?”

I shrugged and quickly regretted the motion when my shoulder flared up. I rubbed it gingerly.

“The winter solstice was just the longest night of the year,” I said.

She nodded. There was a stiffness to her movement, as if she were trying to hold something back or keep herself together. Honestly, it was kind of frightening seeing her like that.

As archaic and high-minded as she could act at times, that almost unnoticeable tremor in her legs, the way her eyes stared a bit too intently past whatever it was she looked at, it all brought her back down from whatever pedestal she kept trying to set herself on. It… it reminded me of myself, how I tried to never be a burden on my friends.

“The Winter Moon Festival,” she said. “’Twas an idea that came to me one night whilst pondering the stars. Our subjects by that point had mostly forgotten me, or seen me as largely antiquated, as we had a few generations prior secured the southern border of Equestria along the Badlands, and the griffon raids in the north we had, at least, contained for the time being.

“Equestria did not have need of her Warrior Princess as she had before, when the dragons raided as they pleased and the Kirin marauders kept many a night watcher vigilant at their post.”

I looked Luna up and down. A Warrior Princess, huh? Explained the beating she gave me earlier. It also explained Celestia’s big schtick on diplomacy. A princess for war, and a princess for peace. No wonder Celestia needed the Elements to beat her.

“Sister had the Summer Sun Celebration, so why was I not allowed to have a festival of my own? Some might call such notions vain, but I did not mean it as an adoration of me and my rule. Rather, I wanted to show our beloved subjects that the night need not be feared, but exalted as Sister and her daytime were.

“I set to making it the greatest act of revelry Everfree had seen in a millennium. I poured my heart into its preparation, from turning back the cycle of the moon, to clearing the clouds with my own four hooves.”

Her ears fell back, and she looked at the ashes and bits of splintered wood in the fire. “However, not a soul attended. Not even Sister.

“The ponies complained that the moon was too bright and they could not sleep. Some even went so far as to demand I abdicate my throne, that I was both a burden and a liability for acting upon such foolish whims. To see Sister even consider their words…” She looked me in the eyes, and it was like she cast a spell to send goosebumps up my legs. “That, Sunset Shimmer, was the first time I felt true hatred in my heart.”

The look in her eyes reminded me of Celestia. It’d been seven years, but I never forgot that vindictive glare she gave me in the portal room after I attacked her. It sent an uncomfortable chill down my spine.

But Celestia had my best interests at heart. That much I could see now. It made me wonder if she had the same mindset for Luna back then.

“Did she really have no idea?” I asked.

Luna shook her head. “No. But she will be the first to admit fault. Do not disparage her. That said, jealousy and anger paved the path I walked, not her carelessness or that of others.

“Nightmare Moon was not a result, ’twas a decision. I chose to submit to my inner demons, to destroy Sister, and claim the throne for myself, that all would know not just the wonders of the night sky, but of the blood, sweat, and tears I poured into my role as Regent of the Night.”

She looked away. “And we all know the end of that story…”

I followed her gaze into the fire. It was a lot to take in, a lot to piece together how I fit into it all.

Banishment, relegation to a bedtime ghost story, being forgotten. One could argue that was a sentence worse than death, and wanting revenge equally justified.

It wasn’t an excuse for what she did to me, but it was a reason. The more I thought about it, the more I didn’t want to. I mean hell, playing second banana to someone better at hogging the spotlight, stabbing them in the back out of some perverted sense of justice, and then getting shafted for it by the world at large? That… that hit a little too close to home.

“Regardless of your feelings,” Luna said, “we are similar, you and I. The roads we walk bear an uncanny resemblance. I am merely farther down my own.

“I told you to meet with those you had wronged, because there were many that I had wronged as well, and I only found the strength to face myself once I had found the strength to face them.” She flitted her wings and refolded them at her sides—her version of an idle tick, if I could call it that. “Many I will never have the opportunity, so works the fickle hoof of mortality. I have only the ability to right my wrongs for those who yet live.”

She turned to me with that seeking look again. “We find the strength as we go. More often than not, life finds us before we are ready, and we must rise to meet it lest we are crushed underhoof.”

She looked away again. It might have just been the flicker of the campfire, but it looked like she was trying to hold back tears. The firelight was good at that, the way it danced just a bit more in her eyes.

“I myself was crushed.” Her voice came out as a pained whisper. “I believed myself strong when I turned from the light and became Nightmare Moon. However, that strength was little more than a weakness, a wolf in sheep’s clothing. I gave in to the anger, and in doing so, I gave in to my weakness. I do not wish to see it happen to you, any more than it already has.”

I stared into the firelight, letting her words sink in. Find the strength to face myself, huh? I remembered Twilight telling me about the Tantabus. Did Luna think we were really that alike? Were we that alike? I mulled over her reasoning, the series of choices leading to this very moment, and it eventually brought me to an uncomfortable fork in the road.

I scratched a little groove into the dirt. “So why’d you do it?” I asked.

“Do what?”

“You know what I’m talking about… I figured you needed me out of the way for your return from the moon, but what I don’t understand is… why go through the effort of all that? Of making me fall in love with you? What did fucking with my head accomplish? Why not just—” I shuddered at the thought of speaking so plainly about it. “—just do it and be done with it?”

A long silence punctuated my question. I could see the gears turning in her head. Not the kind meant to churn out a mollifying string of words, but the honest reflection kind.

“’Twas not my intention at first,” she said, gazing into the fire. “You were a powerful unicorn whose capabilities were nigh limitless. To have you at my disposal after my return was a boon I could not overlook.” As she spoke, her wings slowly fell to the ashes gathered around her, the shame evident on her face.

“But ultimately, you were Sister’s protégée. No matter how completely you had fallen for my lies, you were a variable that I could not account for once my motives came to light—whether you would fight for or against me when that inevitable battle came to pass.

“You were a danger to my plan, and therefore nothing less than your guaranteed absence would suffice. The atrocity I committed against you I did out of necessity, once you made it clear you would not step through that portal willingly. Such logic is ruthless and unforgivable, I know, but that is the way of it.”

With my eyes, I followed the little groove I had dug out, all the little etches and individual granules of dirt. Luna, likewise, took to staring at the ground. She seemed almost shrunk in on herself, her wings held tight against her sides and her head low to her chest.

“I know it is the last thing you want to hear,” she said, “but the old me enjoyed hurting you. Watching you dance beneath the light of the moon, helping you grasp gently that single red rose…”

She took a strained breath through her nose, overcome with whatever thoughts wound through her head. When she opened her mouth, it came out as a shaky whisper:

“I am… glad. That, that Twilight and her friends defeated me. I am ashamed to know what horrors I would have wrought were I victorious.”

I nodded absently, letting her words roll around in my head. Yeah. If what she did to me was just the tip of the iceberg, I couldn’t imagine what she’d do, either. And if history had been rewritten so that my power fantasy came true… I didn’t need to think about that.

I should have felt disgusted. This whole conversation should have had me retching and clawing at my skull to make the thoughts go away. But I just couldn’t bring myself to care.

The exhaustion and soreness overwhelmed me to the point of apathy. I didn’t even care that I didn’t care, and I didn’t know if I should take that as a good thing or bad. Maybe a silver lining, at least. Whatever.

“In my many discourses with Sister since my return,” Luna said, still gazing into the fire, “she seems to believe that I have forgiven myself of the evils I committed. She knows of the Tantabus, as does Twilight, and they both have conflated my victory over it with victory over my past sins. But they would be wrong. One does not claim victory over such things, only mollification.

“In the years betwixt my imprisonment and my purification within the cleansing fire of the Elements, I… I can say that I have never done anything as heinous as what I did to you. ’Twas unforgivable, what I did. Likewise, I am not here for forgiveness, nor do I ask it of you. I am here because of the goodness that I can effect. I am here because you allowed me to be. I am here because it is the right thing to do.

“Some may see this call to action as little more than a selfish need to silence my own guilts, as you yourself have mentioned. I will not deny that I benefit from this journey, that I desire to see my own demons laid to rest. But those needs are forever secondary, and I will not allow them nor the fears of such accusations—true or not—to sway me from doing what I believe is right and just, so long as you would have me.”

Like a statue, she gazed long into that fire. Had it not been for the slow rise and fall of her chest, I might have thought she turned to stone.

“Do I forgive myself for what I did? No, nor will I ever. For I fear that in forgiving myself, time may work its sinister motives and see me to some semblance of complacency. Years. Centuries. I do not know how long such machinations would take to bear fruit, but I refuse them from now until the end of time.

“There is much that I do not believe myself forgivable for,” she continued. “But I take heart in the truth that I have, am, and will forevermore strive against. I must find that strength as I go, to right what I am able and to do good in the absence of that which I stole. That much I believe.”

With her little monologue finished, the silence on its coattails treated us to the steady crackle of the fire, and my eyes were naturally drawn toward the little embers that trailed up into the dark above.

She really didn’t forgive herself, huh? As she shouldn’t. At least she got that right.

Granted, she had said things to that effect a few times before. And, well… I guess the whole beat-to-shit thing finally had me in a low enough gear for that to actually stick. Just me being too dense to realize something, as always. Good or bad, sufficient or not, it was something, at least.

I timidly scratched at the little groove in the floor again, watched the dirt collect along the rim of my hoof. “So you still really think this whole talking-to-everyone thing is a good idea?”

After a long, strained moment: “I do,” and nothing else.

I gave another nod. It was all I could manage, other than laying my head down. I was just so tired. I closed my eyes, but sleep wouldn’t come.

For what it was worth, the crackle of the fire and the warmth on my face made up for the abhorrent silence. The need for something to take my mind off things came back—to not think and just be until I got past whatever hurdle stood in my way.

I kept my eyes closed and thought back to yesterday. The way I drifted off in Twilight’s arms, how she ran her fingers through my hair. It was the most wonderful thing I’d felt in years.

Twilight…

I jerked up. “Twilight!”

I winced at the sudden pains that movement rekindled. Crap, how did I forget about Twilight? She was the whole reason I came back here.

“I feel her,” Luna said. She held a hoof to her heart. “Within my breast. A nightmare wracks her slumber.”

I grunted as I got to my hooves. The fire in my gut reignited, that burning repulsion for every little thing Luna did and stood for. My overwhelming exhaustion and soreness might have made for the perfect mix of inward-facing apathy, but nothing in the whole goddamn world or the next could chain me down when Twilight’s safety was at stake.

“Then why the hell didn’t you tell me that sooner?” I yelled.

“We had much to speak of, and she has time enough to persevere.”

Much to speak of, my ass. Twilight was more important than “us.” I tried casting the Wake-Up Spell, but all I got for that was a nasty migraine at the base of my horn. Our fight must have taken more out of me than I first realized.

“Before you go…” Luna said.

I rolled my eyes and shot her a pointed “What?”

“Cherish your friends. Remember what is most dear to you, what it is you truly fight for. And most importantly, never forget you are strong, and that letting others in is not weakness. There is a summit to that mountain, Sunset. I assure you.”

A few snide comments sprang to mind, and I almost threw them her way. But I remembered our little… argument and everything she’d said between then and now. I pushed them down. I nodded and finished casting the spell.

Thankfully, none of the aches and pains transferred into the real world, and I woke up feeling surprisingly refreshed. I stretched out like a cat to get the last bits of sleep out of my bones, and I was off to the portal room. No time to waste.

Twilight still lay inside the chalk circle beside Luna, and I set my sights on her with a determination I hadn’t felt since the Battle of the Bands.

Something touched my shoulder. It startled me out of my trance.

Starlight pulled back and held her hoof crooked against her chest. She looked alarmed, but more so concerned.

“I… did you say something?” I said.

“Yeah. I was saying that we figured out what Twilight did.”

“Oh,” I said. Didn’t think I was focusing hard enough to block her out, but whatever. “Well, yeah. She dream dived to fight the Nightmare and got hurt.”

It came out curtly, and I instantly regretted it when I saw the look on Starlight’s face. “Sorry, I—”

“No, I… I get it,” Starlight said. “We’re all worried. This is bad.”

Star Swirl stepped up beside her, even put a comforting hoof on her shoulder. “Indeed. Things are not going our way, but there’s still a chance this hasn’t gone as poorly as we assume. Twilight made numerous modifications to the spell, including a short-term Stasis Spell that appears to have shunted her into her own dream instead of Luna’s. I believe she meant it to act as a ripcord of sorts, in case the Nightmare went after her. Though, I fear learning how well it actually worked.”

“Do we know if she even made it into Luna’s dream in the first place?”

“Not without asking her ourselves,” Starlight said.

Not the most helpful information, but if I were to get her out, I had to assume the worst. It wasn’t farfetched to think the Nightmare would swap bodies, given the opportunity.

“So are you going to tell us what you were planning?” Starlight said. Her eyes flicked between me and my horn.

I looked back and forth between her eyes. Worry welled in them like tears. All we’d done this entire week was worry. They needed someone to show a little confidence, and not the bull-headed kind I’d been waving around.

“I gotta save Twilight.” I turned back to Twilight and did up a chalk circle just like we did with Luna.

“I don’t know if that’s going to work,” Starlight said. Her hooves clip-clopped up next to me.

“She’s locked up inside her own head,” I said. “Getting in hers can’t be any different than getting in Luna’s. You guys just need to power up the spell like normal. I’ll do the rest.”

I sat down in my part of the circle, eyes on Twilight. She looked so helpless, so… vulnerable. Was this what I looked like to her just yesterday?

“I have to fix my mistake…” I said.

Neither Starlight nor Star Swirl had anything to say to that. A quiet resolution settled over the room as they set about preparing a new Dream Dive Spell.

“Hang on,” I said, as they added the finishing touches. I grabbed a few of the pillows from underneath Luna and propped Twilight up so she looked comfortable. She grabbed one in her slumber and held it tight.

“I’ll get you out,” I whispered, brushing her mane out of her face. I took my place on my side of the circle and centered myself. “Okay. Ready.”

“You’ll only have so much time,” she said, readjusting Twilight’s surge crystal for her own use. “I can’t tell you how long.”

“I’ll make it quick, don’t worry.” I closed my eyes and waited for the magic to envelop me.

The familiar wash of not-water rained down my head, shoulders, hooves, until it soaked through my skin and held me aloft like a buoy on a choppy sea. I breathed it in, my sense of weight filling in from my lungs outward. My hooves touched stone, and I opened my eyes to darkness.

It was a cave of sorts, the kind I’d expect to see deep below Canterlot Mountain, with row after row of stalagmites and stalactites reaching out like shark teeth. Puddles stretched along a narrow path, carving little grooves and divots through decades of erosion. The slow and rhythmic drip of water echoed throughout the cavern.

“Twilight?” My voice carried far beyond sight and called back to me. Another thought came to me. “Luna?”

Still no answer but my own echo. Strange. I half expected her to come galloping in like a white knight ready to save the damsel in distress in a dream like this. Maybe the magics that connected us relegated her to only my dreams and her own.

I shook my head. Couldn’t get hung up on useless tangents. Clock was ticking.

I lit a Magelight Spell at my horntip to light my way and set off down the path. The dripping water had run dozens of grooves into the stone, making every step an ankle-rolling hazard. Strangely enough, the water didn’t cling to my hooves, and I left no ripples in the many puddles.

It was weird. Luna’s dreams seemed piecemeal, their construction so after-the-fact and fractured the way real dreams felt. Hers never once felt as concrete or seamless as Twilight’s. It was as if—

My Magelight Spell cast a faint silver outline over an organic shape out of place in this world of rock and stone.

“Twilight!”

She lay in a pool of water, wings splayed. Her mane and tail blossomed around her in the water.

“Twilight!” I ran to her side. “Twilight, it’s me, Sunset.”

She didn’t acknowledge me, her eyes half-lidded and staring into the water an inch from her nose.

“Twilight?” I reached for her shoulder but phased right through her. This was… something like this happened before.

I tried remembering back to the last time I entered someone’s dream. That would have been Luna’s, way back when I traded the Tantabus for her soul. I was… observing, if I recalled correctly. I remembered the spell the Tantabus gave me, the one that let me pull away that silken curtain—the Veil, as Luna called it. I cast the spell and felt that same peeling sensation draw across my skin, and the atmosphere in this dream seemed to double.

“Twilight!” I said. She felt cold to the touch, like a slab of meat taken out of the freezer moments ago. I brushed her mane out of her eyes.

A drop of water fell an inch from her face, and that slow-motion sound reverberated off the cavern walls. Twilight focused on the spot.

There was something in her eyes, a sort of twisting darkness inside her pupils. It didn’t take Luna herself to know that wasn’t a good sign.

“Twilight, snap out of it!” I stomped my hoof in the water in front of her face, but it didn’t splash. It hardly even felt like I’d displaced it.

It did get her attention, though. Her eyes made a slow trail up my hoof to my face, and a faint glimmer of recognition kept my hopes alive.

“Sunset?” she whispered. It came out slurred and groggy, like she’d been drugged or something.

“Yeah, it’s me. I’m gonna get you out of here.” I looked around for anything that might attack us. I didn’t know if the Nightmare had jumped bodies—or if she had even successfully made that connection in the first place—but I wasn’t about to find out the hard way.

I could pull myself from a dream quick as a whip. Pulling someone else with me… I still didn’t know if it was possible, and I had no idea how hard it’d be or how long it’d take to focus that amount of magic, but I gathered it at the base of my horn all the same.

The Wake-Up Spell was an illusion-class spell, so it followed the same principles as dream diving, but I had to feel out the magical procession and figure out how to redirect it—leash it around Twilight without losing control.

A little blue light pulsed to life over my left shoulder. When I turned with a fireball ready at my horntip, I was instead greeted by the sight of Twilight’s library, suspended like a little facet within the cavern itself no more out of place than the stalagmites and pools of water. Specifically, it was the little nook in the back of her library.

She’d mentioned it a few times. It was her favorite spot, because of how the afternoon sun came in through the windows.

A dream version of Twilight sat propped up on a mess of pillows with a book in her lap. She spoke with Luna, who stood opposite her. Dream Twilight shook her head with a resolute frown, and Luna walked away, heartbroken.

“Twilight?” I took a step forward.

A hoof touched my foreleg, the real Twilight’s. She looked up at me with a groggy frown.

“Don’t… You’re safer this way.”

“Huh?”

“If I tell Luna not to talk to you, I can’t convince you to come back to Equestria. I can’t make you relive your nightmares. If I don’t help, you’re safe.”

I… didn’t know what to say to that. There was a disconnect in logic there, some past-present dream convolution going on, if I had to guess. Part of me wondered if it had to do with that darkness in her eyes.

“But… that’s not what happened, is it?” I asked, probing for more information.

“It’s what should have happened.” She stared wistfully at the not-memory.

“You’re being silly, Twilight. You’re…”

It was about then that a cold shiver set my nape on end as I realized the Nightmare hadn’t jumped ship to ravage Twilight’s dreams. These were her nightmares.

I remembered back to what Star Swirl said, about the reworked spell. He’d compared it to a ripcord, to protect her from the Nightmare. But however it worked must have dumped her into her own nightmares, possibly with her own personal Nightmare—that darkness in her eyes.

I turned back to the memories drifting past us—or rather, the ones we drifted past, the cave having morphed into a river with us along for the ride. We stood on the water itself, the river meandering like a conveyor belt, pulling us along.

The snippets we drifted past were all moments that had to do with me: there was our conversation at Coney Dog’s, over there were the two of us in my apartment, and more I didn’t recognize but could assume had to do with me in some way. But they all seemed different—artificial, even. The Twilights in them all acted cold and distant.

The Twilight beside me sat up, her eyes focused on the scenes passing us by. The drugged, saggy look on her face had faded, but a reserved, almost nervous look settled in, and I didn’t know which I hated more. She seemed to both realize yet not realize who I was. Maybe she was finally coming to.

“If I had simply done nothing,” she said, “none of this would have happened.”

We drifted past a vision of the portal room. My dream body lay on the floor beside Luna’s. All of a sudden, Dream Me screamed and flailed about before getting up and bolting for the portal. That… that had to be the day before last, when the Nightmare turned into Nocturne.

The looks of horror and confusion on everyone’s faces made me sick. How much had I made them all suffer for my actions?

We circled back on the first altered memory, that of her and Luna in the library nook. The real Twilight pitched her ears toward the scene as we drifted past, her eyes locked wistfully with her dream form.

“Twilight,” I said. “Go talk to her.”

She stared at me as if I asked her to commit murder. “What? No! I… I can’t. If… I-if I do, all it will do is cause you—”

“It’ll hurt me. Yeah. Believe me, I know. But this isn’t about me. This is about you. This is your dream, these are your fears.”

“But I can’t. Everything would have been better if I’d just let it be. I wanted to help you, but all I did was make things worse.” She flattened her ears back and stared at her reflection in the puddle.

The shadow in her eyes intensified briefly. It spread across her body, and the image of a pony plumed upward from her backside, like a ghost leaving its corpse. It looked like the depictions I’d seen of windigos in my history books, but took on a purple sheen a few shades darker than Twilight’s coat.

It landed beside her, its head craned over her—eyeless, yet staring. Twilight didn’t seem to be aware of it, but she shied away all the same, like she felt its presence rather than knew of it.

The temperature dropped enough to see my breath, and a sensation of being watched from the shadows bore down on me. That skin-pricking, hair-raising feeling of impending doom.

Was this… was this Twilight’s Tantabus? Was that a thing? Was there more than one?

I could barely keep it together as I watched this otherworldly being lean on her, pressing her down into the stone. The inch-deep puddle came up to her knees. I didn’t know much about dream symbolism and whatnot, but I’d spent enough time around Luna to know this wouldn’t end well if I didn’t intervene.

“Twilight, listen to me,” I said. “You can’t do this. This whatever-it-is you think you’re doing. You have to do what you believe is right.”

“It doesn’t matter, Sunset. I’ve hurt you enough. I’m not going to hurt you or anypony else any more than I already have. I’ve made up my mind.”

I didn’t like the sound of that. “And how are you going to do that?”

“By choosing to do nothing.”

“But choosing not to choose is still a choice,” I said.

“I know, but if my choice not to choose is the only way to keep me from hurting you, then it’s worth it.”

What in the world had gotten into her? Was this… was this thing making her think this nonsense, or was it simply feeding off that negative energy? She was submerged up to her chest now, and I couldn’t let her drown.

I reached my hooves into the puddle to pull her out before she went under, but where she sunk through, I hit stone.

Goddamn it. Only one way to get her out.

“Twilight, listen to me. You have to do what you think is right. I’d be hurting for the rest of my life if you hadn’t done what you did. Sure, it’s worse now, but… it’ll get better.”

Would it, though? I couldn’t say I believed my own words, but… no, I had to believe them. I had to know things would get better, because if not, all this pain and misery—my own and that of my friends—would have been for nothing.

“You don’t know that,” Twilight said. Up to her neck now. “Nopony does. What’s the point?”

Yeah, this was definitely not the Twilight I knew, but she was in there somewhere. I just had to find her.

“The point is because this isn’t you. Yeah, you don’t want to hurt other ponies, but not doing something tears you apart. I know it does.”

“If it makes others’ lives better, then I’m okay with that.”

I huffed at that. God, I could have slapped her for being this thick if time weren’t too precious.

“Twilight, you aren’t some bump on a log. You’re a part of this world, and you make things happen. Good things. You’re the goddamn Princess of Friendship for a reason. You wouldn’t have gotten there without having done at least one right thing along the way.

“You get things done. Because you care. I know you do, Twilight. And I know you’re afraid of causing more problems, but doing nothing isn’t the right way to go about it. You know as much as I do that success doesn’t…” I had to take a deep breath. The words I was about to say didn’t mesh with the kind of person I’d been these last few days. “Success isn’t about not failing. It’s about getting back up when you fall down.”

I thought about Stone Wall and what he said to me. The smile on his face spurred me onward and assured me that what I felt in my heart was the simple truth.

“Look how far we’ve gotten. Look what we’re doing to fix what’s happened. Even if where we are right now isn’t where we want to be, we’re on the right track. Something good will come from all this. I know it will, because you’re the one doing it. But you need to trust me.”

I offered her my hoof. She was up to her jaw in the puddle, and my brain screamed at me to reach down and yank her out. But my heart knew she had to pull herself out of this.

She stared at the Twilight sitting in the nook, then at my hoof, then at me. A light flickered in her eyes, and it was like a veil had been lifted back. She saw me. She saw into me. Her eyes danced back and forth between mine.

She took my hoof, and she stepped out from the puddle as her Tantabus watched in silence.

I gave her a smile and jerked my head toward the Dream Luna across the way. “Go talk to her.”

Twilight’s eyes followed mine out, then back. She seemed unsure.

“I’ll be right here. I promise.” I took her hoof in mine and held it to my heart. “You made me who I am today, and I wouldn’t change it for the world. I believe in you.”

Slowly, her ears perked up, and she returned my smile. She left me with a little squeeze of my hoof before walking toward the library nook.

Her Tantabus followed behind and to the right of her, coming abreast when she stopped.

Words were exchanged. I couldn’t hear them, but as the conversation went on, her Tantabus got smaller. It shrank to her size, eventually turning and joining itself with her.

The Dream Luna smiled at Twilight—the real Twilight—and they shared a hug.

A gentle darkness crept in around us. Not a foreboding kind, but like someone had turned down the dial on the overhead lights. I felt lighter than a feather, like I could have jumped and spread my hooves to take flight.

My vision unraveled at the corners of sight, and I felt myself lifted off the ground without magic. That strange Veil brushed along my skin like a silk robe falling about my shoulders to the floor. My brain seemed to stop working for a second, and when I refocused, I saw Twilight lying next to me.

“Twilight?” I said.

She winced and let out a groan. “Sunset?”

“Sunset!” came a desperate voice.

Something tackled me hard in the ribs and stole what little breath I had. We went rolling for a good five feet before coming to a stop with the weight of the world on my stomach.

“Sunset!” that same voice said. “You guys are okay!”

Yeah, that was Starlight. Nopony else could weigh that much for her size.

“Oof, get off me.” I pushed her off so I could take a precious breath of air, then pulled her back in for a hug we could both agree on.

“Oh, what a dream…” Twilight rubbed her head. She opened her eyes, and when she realized where she was, she jerked back in surprise. She stared at the chalk circle around her, then at Starlight, then at me.

“Or… it wasn’t a dream?” She pointed a confused hoof at me. “Orrr it was, but you were still there? Or you being there made it a fake dream? But it was so real, there’s no way it could have been fake. Does that mean all real dreams are fake dreams?”

“Well, at least we know Twilight’s okay,” Starlight said. She gave Twilight a hug and helped her to her hooves.

“I’m so confused right now,” Twilight said. She stared at the floor for a while with that little hook of a frown on her face. She turned her eyes up to me, and I felt the connection between us.

A warmth like no other ran through me, and I couldn’t help but give her a smile. We shared a hug, and everything that had felt wrong about the last few days fell away. It was just me and Twilight in that moment, and nothing could have been more perfect.

“Thanks for that,” Twilight said. “What you said back there. I, uh… I needed to hear that.”

I gave her another squeeze before letting go. “I’m just glad you’re safe.”

“So, uh,” Starlight said. “Not to kill the mood or anything, but what do we do now?”

Good question. What did we do now? It felt like there was so much to do that I didn’t know where to start.

I wanted to ask Twilight about her Tantabus. How long had she felt that way? How could she think the world would ever be a better place without her?

I wanted to bombard her with so many questions in a way that would have made her proud, but I decided against it. My curiosity could wait. Right now, I just wanted to hold her.

She was the only reason I was here in the first place. I’d failed to keep her safe, because I was too afraid to keep my head on straight when I needed to most.

Never again. I saw with my own eyes what would happen if I gave up now. I couldn’t run away from this anymore, not even a little. Twilight needed me. Everyone needed me.

More than anything, I needed myself. I needed to know I could do this. I needed the courage and confidence to believe in me as much as they did. I couldn’t take no for an answer, no matter what questions I had to ask myself or what problems I needed to face. And with that epiphany, I knew where I had to start.

“I don’t know about you guys,” I said, “but… I’ve got someone else I need to talk to.” With that, I got up and headed for the door.

As much as I hated admitting it, Luna was right. The answer to all my problems sat square in my heart, in a Coppertone-shaped hole that needed filling.

Author's Note

Speaking as the author, up next is probably my favorite chapter of this story. Onward and Upward.

XXXI - A Long Time Coming

If I were honest with myself, the moment I left the portal room, I almost booked it for the guest bedroom and threw myself under the covers.

I knew I needed to see this through. I knew I needed to be the brave mare everyone thought I was. Shit needed doing, and I was the only one who could do it. But that didn’t stop me from being downright terrified.

I wasn’t brave. I wasn’t a Warrior Princess or a Princess of Friendship. I was Sunset Shimmer, an average, run-of-the-mill nobody. Last night’s beatdown brought that reminder home all too sharply.

None of that changed the fact that the world still needed saving, though. Life finds us before we’re ready, as Luna put it.

So yeah. I’d put it off long enough. I had to own up to my actions. All of them.

It was time to pay Copper a visit.

I made a quick trip down to City Hall to skim through the national census records and figure out where in the wide world of Equestria I’d have to hunt her down. And wouldn’t it be my luck that she lived right here in Ponyville of all places. Because of course she would.

But this little sliver of coincidence felt less like serendipity and more like the universe itself breathing down my neck, demanding this conversation happen or else. Well, best not disappoint.

401 Poinsettia Drive. Easy enough.

Getting there proved more difficult, since I didn’t know Ponyville and its sprawling, non-grid layout. But I put my Filly Scouts training to use and… oh, man, this was really happening wasn’t it?

Her address matched up with a small cottage a little ways north of the marketplace. A thatched roof and burgundy shutters framed what most would probably call quaint, but I knew immediately as “not Coppertone.” She never bought into all that frilly girly crap, no matter how much she worried about her looks.

I hesitated at the door, but I had to do this. If not for me, then at least for her. I knocked.

Several terrible seconds passed as I listened to the sound of approaching hoofsteps. I had time. I could teleport away and hide and never think of this again. But I couldn’t. I stood there, and I… I took a deep breath and let it out.

The door opened, and the mare on the other side of the threshold looked so strikingly familiar: wavy blonde mane, light-tan coat, deep green eyes. She was even more beautiful than I remembered.

She recognized me instantly, and from the fright in her eyes, I thought she’d faint like a goat, right there on the doorstep. Her breathing quickened for a moment, but she regained a distanced composure, a guardedness in how she held herself just a bit taller. It felt as if she were trying to use the height difference to look down the bridge of her nose at me, but there was a glint in her eye that I couldn’t place.

“Can I help you?” she said. Her eyes focused on me, tracking every little move I made. It felt like my CSGU entrance exam all over again.

“I… Hey,” was all I could muster.

That guardedness faltered, and the faint trace of a smile found her lips. “You never were one for words, were you?”

“I, uh… no, not really. Do you have a minute?”

And back came the distanced composure. “I have lots of minutes. The question is, do I want to spend them on you?”

Ouch. Still had that sharp tongue. I swallowed.

“I… I know I don’t deserve it, but I’m asking all the same.”

Another mare poked her head around the door frame. She had massive hazel eyes that regarded me the way a child regards a stranger, and her mane tumbled down her left shoulder in streaks of gold and light orange. She wore a necklace with a pendant that looked like a flower, but the sun glared off it too bright for me to tell what kind.

Copper looked at her, then back at me. She stepped back and left the door open.

“Thank you,” I said and entered.

The inside struck me as more reminiscent of the Coppertone I remembered, but also not so much. A mess of fashion magazines littered the coffee table, and a healthy dose of pictures decorated the yellow walls—all stuff that screamed Coppertone—but an array of things like doilies and a bookshelf full of ceramic animals, kind of like her mom’s elephants, shot that assertion out of the sky. These two must have been rooming for a while if Copper allowed that kind of stuff in her living space.

She turned about in the living room, inadvertently giving me a proper view of her figure. Still as model-worthy as our days at CSGU, if not more so. I couldn’t help the flash of jealousy that hit me.

Copper extended a halfhearted hoof toward the room and the floral-print couch beside me in particular. She avoided eye contact, taking only little peeks and glances at my hooves.

“Welcome,” she said noncommittally.

The other mare scurried up beside her. Like a dog with its tail between its legs, she looked up at me with a drooped head and frightened eyes.

Who in the hell was this chick? I hadn’t seen anyone act this sheepish since Fluttershy when I punted her rabbit across the lawn my first day at Canterlot High.

Getting a better look at her, I put my bets on a modeling or manedressing friend, assuming Copper had jumped back on either career path. Trim, long in the legs, and an innocent face that I found myself losing valuable seconds admiring.

Modeling, definitely. Her mane had streaks of faded orange to it—washed-out dye from a recent photo shoot, if my memories of some of Copper’s gigs still held water.

Her necklace was a daffodil of all things, midbloom and vibrant as the ones that Mom used to grow in the backyard. I wasn’t one for jewelry, but the younger mare in me would have killed for a piece like that.

And still no one said anything. With the seconds still wearing on, I figured an icebreaker was in order.

“Is that a daffodil?” I asked, staring at her pendant. “It’s gorgeous.” I reached out to cup it in my hoof, but the mare backed away.

She clutched it to her breast, her eyes locked on me for a split second before she looked down at her hooves. “I, I… thank you.”

She shrank in on herself and shifted those large eyes toward Copper, ears pinned back. It might have been the lighting or my own hypervigilance, but I swore she was trembling.

Copper pressed her shoulder into the mare’s. The scant size of Copper’s personal bubble was something I wouldn’t have questioned knowing how close she and I were back in the day, but the look they shared had me questioning a few things in the present. And if that wasn’t enough, Copper hooked a hoof under her friend’s chin and drew her into a kiss that would have made a versed poet blush. It sure as shit made me.

So Copper was into mares. That was a thing now.

“Give us a minute, please?” Copper cooed as she pulled away from the kiss. She traced her hoof up the mare’s jaw to the tip of her chin.

With eyes still closed, Copper’s “friend” leaned wistfully into the remnants of the kiss like a pony toward a siren’s call. The spell broke, and she took a hesitant step back, suddenly aware of our presence, before scurrying out of the room.

Copper sighed, brushed her mane out of her face, and smiled at me. It was a weak smile, the world-weary kind that old, well-traveled stallions wore when they decided to settle down for their golden years. Not the sort of thing I wanted to see or should have seen in my oldest friend in her mid-twenties.

I wanted to ask about her change in, um, orientation, but that could wait. She gave me the floor, and the last thing I wanted was another shouting match to mirror the previous chapter of our relationship. I sat down on the floral-print couch and stared into a tea set on the coffee table.

Copper was never a tea kind of mare. It must have belonged to her, uh… friend. But I couldn’t help noticing they only had chamomile. She sat down across from me on a matching loveseat and dug the point of her hoof into the cushion.

“You want a beer or something?” she asked.

I shook my head, following the curls of her mane down her shoulder. Still the same to-die-for mane I could only dream of having. I wondered if she used the same coconut shampoo.

“I’m good, thanks,” I said.

She nodded, her eyes trailing the length of the coffee table. “Full disclosure,” she said. “Even if it has to do with how many pubic hairs Celestia has down there, I want to hear it.”

“432,” I said without thinking. I blinked, and our eyes met. There was a moment of shared disbelief, until the dam broke and we both snickered.

“You’re just making that up,” Copper said. “Please tell me you’re making that up.”

“Maybe, but you’ll never know for sure, will you?”

We laughed. It was a strained laugh, a reserved laugh. Still, it was a laugh we shared, the first one since CSGU.

We lapsed into silence, and the smile on my face waned until I let it slip away like a tree’s final leaf on an autumn breeze. A clock ticked on the far wall.

“So you’ve loosened up some, huh?” She wore a whimsical smile. “No more blushing at the tiniest dick joke?”

I shrugged. “You could say that. Or I just grew up, I guess. I—oh wait, I see what you did there.”

We laughed again, but that awkward silence came back quicker this time. With nothing else springing to mind, I figured now was the best time to say what I came here for.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m wholly and truly sorry for any and every hurt that I’ve caused you. I know what I did was wrong and that nothing I say or do can fix what’s happened. I don’t expect you to forgive me, nor do I feel like I deserve it or that you should feel compelled to, but I… yeah. I’m sorry.”

Copper nodded slowly, tracing little circles into the loveseat’s floral print. She kept her eyes firmly on her hooves.

“So am I,” she said.

“You have nothing to be sorry about.”

She didn’t reply to that, so I let it drop. Like a rock down a well, I waited for the splash of conversation to reach us, but she seemed hard-pressed for words, still following the leaf-print with the tip of her hoof. It tore me up inside seeing her act like a goddamn wallflower. She practically never shut up back in school.

How much had I broken her?

I jerked my chin toward the hallway. “So who’s your friend?” I asked, if only to break this awkward silence.

Copper met my eyes for a moment before looking away again, ears back. “Star Chaser. We’re, uh… we’re dating.”

“I, I think that part was well established. Sooo, when did you two meet?”

“About two years ago,” Copper said. “I met her at the marketplace downtown. We bumped into each other in Jasmine’s tea shop.”

I glanced at the tea set between us. If that was a fact, then I couldn’t argue, but I still couldn’t wrap my head around Copper willingly visiting a tea shop. Just wasn’t like her.

“What were you doing in a tea shop of all places?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know. I was bored, I guess.”

That was strikingly noncommittal, but wasn’t something I felt comfortable pressing. I brushed my mane back behind my ear to pause for time.

“So when did all, um… you know. When did you, uh, switch gears?”

A smile flickered at the corners of her lips, there and gone. She nodded at me.

“A little after our, uh… breakup.”

Breakup. Yeah, that was a phrase for it. A very understated phrase for it.

“Yeah,” I said. “So about that. To say that I didn’t mean what I said back then would be a lie. I did mean everything I said when I said it.”

“If this is another apology, it’s a pretty crappy one.”

“I’m getting there.” I gave her a pointed glare, but she wasn’t looking, her eyes still following her hooftip along the floral print. “But yeah. I meant them, but… I was wrong. Like, both in that I shouldn’t have said them, and also, uh, that I was incorrect.

“I called you a rat for telling Celestia, but that’s what I actually needed then. I needed someone to stop me, because I didn’t realize I was hurting myself and those around me. I let myself become a horrible pony, and I paid for it. If it makes you feel better, my life was pretty much hell for a long time after that. Still is.”

Copper looked at me, horrified. “Why would that make me feel better? How could you even think that?”

I… had no answer. I’d expected some level of satisfaction—a quiet smile or a small nod. Honestly, I wanted her to feel vindicated in the fact I’d shoveled my fair share of shit since we last spoke. But the disgust leveled across her face painted a far different picture.

She still cared. After all this time, she still felt for me.

What the hell had I done to deserve someone like her back then? Now? Was I allowed to call her a friend even now, after what I did?

“So what are you really here for?” she asked. There was a guarded intensity in her eyes.

Yeah… that. I wondered when this would crop up. Preparing for it didn’t make it any easier than the apology.

Toxic people didn’t just show back up in your life to say sorry and nothing else. There was always a catch, and… I was no different.

I found it hard to look her in the eyes, so I instead trained my gaze on the tea set. “There’s, um… something going on between Princess Luna and me,” I said.

That got Copper to snap her ears forward. “Wait wait wait. The fuck? You and Princess Luna? You’re dating a princess?”

I reeled at the implication. “Whoa whoa whoa. No-ho-ho. I didn’t say anything like that. I said there’s…”

I put my head in my hoof and sighed. Full disclosure, like she asked. This wouldn’t make sense otherwise.

“Let me back up some. So… I don’t know how much you know about Princess Luna, but she used to be bad.”

“Nightmare Moon, yeah.”

I winced. Yeah, she had an actual name, not just “Nocturne.” She was infamous, and I was an imbecile.

“Yeah, so anyway, Celestia locked her away in the moon for a thousand years, and she came back, blah blah blah. But… the thing is, she was never actually locked away. At least not fully. She could still enter the Dreamscape, get into ponies’ dreams, and I think she had been for a long time. One way or another, she targeted me to get to Celestia.”

I kept an eye on Copper’s hooves while talking. She was doing that pawing thing cats did when prepping a spot to nap. One of her many idle ticks. Thinking back on it now, though… were they idle, or nervous?

“I knew her as Nocturne,” I continued. “We met that first night of the Summer Sun Celebration we went to with your family.”

Copper leaned forward, alarmed. “That long ago? You were talking to her the whole time and you didn’t tell me?”

“You were the blabbiest pony I knew. I didn’t want you to…” I sighed. “I know now that it was stupid of me to keep that from you, but back then, she was a friend I had made in confidence, and because of where and how we met, I was afraid Celestia would hurt her if she found out.”

“And when she did find out, you were already too far gone.”

“Yeah…” My heart squirmed in my chest. I didn’t like this conversation. I felt so vulnerable opening up like this. Copper may have been my best friend, but after everything that happened, this was more than just an admission of guilt. It felt like I was letting her stare into my soul and see all the foul things hiding there.

“So how’d it happen?” she asked after a moment. “Getting to that too-far-gone point?”

I shook my head, staring into the tea set. I followed the little painted vines along its edges with my eyes as if they held some revelation, some epiphany for why I couldn’t see this before.

I remembered it all so vividly. The dreams of Manehattan, the wintergreen kiss, even that orb thing she tried giving me. God only knew what kind of shit-fuckery that was supposed to be.

“I met her a bunch of times in my dreams. We became friends. I trusted her, because she was patient and kind—”

“And I wasn’t?”

“It’s… it’s different.”

“How’s it different?”

“Let me finish.” I stared pointedly at her until she settled down. I recollected myself with a deep breath. “You remember when I took you to the research labs?”

A ghost of a memory haunted Copper’s eyes, and she shuffled uncomfortably in her seat. “Yeah…”

“I was working on a portal for Celestia,” I said, “for that research project she gave me. It led to a different dimension. Leads, actually. It’s in Twilight’s castle now. But anyway, Nocturne got it in my head that there was powerful magic on the other side and that getting it working was the only way to save her from the Dreamscape.”

“And that’s why you hated me for talking to Celestia…”

I nodded. “’Cause then she started asking questions, yeah. And she found out about Nocturne and pulled me from the project. And then, well… you know the rest.”

We shared an awkward silence again, one I didn’t have the heart to break this time around.

“So basically,” she said, “I got ousted as your best friend by an evil super-bitch—”

“You didn’t get ousted as my best friend. We were— She…” I sighed. “She led me on to think we were more than friends, and I fell for it. Hard.”

Copper’s eyes found their way up my legs, chest, face, to land squarely eye to eye with me. She wore a look that bordered on horror.

“Y-you were in love with her?”

I struggled to find the right words for an answer. Every affirmation that came to mind tasted like bile.

“Yeah…” was all I could muster.

Her eyes unfocused as she took that in. Slowly, her gaze drifted back down to her hooves.

“Oh…”

That was all: Oh… It was a pained oh, a regretful oh, one that belied any carefully constructed demeanor with a long and winding trail of could-have-beens.

A cold shudder ran down my spine, and I looked back toward the hallway, where that mare had gone. I remembered that unsure, almost fearful look in those hazel eyes. The orange streaks in her mane, the daffodil pendant. The daffodil pendant…

Was… was I reading into it too hard? Was this me going off on one of those pointless mental tangents I was famous for?

Before I could follow that train of thought any further, Copper got up for the kitchen. “I need a beer,” she said weakly.

I watched her go. Her movements were stiff, stilted, as if she were already a half dozen in.

After a long minute, she came back with two Pacer’s Porters, a staple of the underage CSGU crowd. Even being one of the good students, I recognized that brown-and-orange label immediately. She plopped back in her seat, floating one to me.

Alcohol wasn’t my go-to, but after my years in the human world I could at least get it down. I accepted it hesitantly.

“So what’s with Princess Luna?” she asked after a long swig.

I blinked away my thoughts to catch her staring through me. “Yeah, so there was this fragment of Nightmare Moon inside me that’s been haunting my dreams ever since I left. Luna tried getting rid of it a few days ago, but things didn’t go how she planned. Now she’s in a sort of coma-slash-stuck-in-my-dreams thing that I don’t know how to explain, while the Nightmare is trying to possess her body, and we’re trying to stop that before all hell breaks loose. And according to Luna, me coming to terms with my past regrets will help us with that, which… which is why I came here.

“But it’s not the only reason I’m here.” I caught myself leaning forward and sat back to keep my composure. “I, I didn’t come here just for the sake of marking off some mental checkbox. I did want to see you, because I do genuinely feel horrible for what I did. You didn’t deserve that. You didn’t deserve any of what I did. And again, I’m sorry.”

Copper nodded slowly. “You said that already.”

“It’s worth repeating.” My heart gave a little flutter as I said that. I wanted to say so much more, to reach out with whatever might span the gap between us. But I was no architect of words, so all I could do was sit on my side of the gulf and wish.

“So what did she do to you?” Copper asked in a frighteningly level tone.

“I, uh…” The hairs on the back of my neck pricked up. “W-what?”

“What did she do to you?” Her eyes had filled up with tears somewhere along the line. It took all her might to keep them from trailing down her face. “What could possibly make you fuck off to Celestia knows where for the last seven years after you were willing to say and do what you did?”

The thought flashed in my mind: the crescent-moon smile and silver-trimmed wings. My heart started beating against the inside of my ribs, and I felt a sweat start along my withers. Instinct told me to look for the nearest exit, and it suddenly felt like the walls were closing in.

“Uh, yeah, that’s…” It was one thing bringing it up with Twilight in confidence. It was a whole different beast talking about it with anyone else.

God, I hated talking about it. I hated thinking about it. It made me feel so disgusting and vulnerable and expendable. I wanted to curl up in a ball and die just thinking about it.

“Sunset?”

Copper was staring at me. She had put her beer down and leaned forward. “Sunset, what’s wrong?”

It must have been written all over my face. I couldn’t even keep this shit to myself. I didn’t want to say, but she deserved to know. Full disclosure.

I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. I felt myself trembling, and the memory pressed in around me like a blanket trying to smother the life from me.

“She… she did things to me.”

“She what?” she said. “What do you mean by ‘did things’?” Her concern grew pronounced, and I caught the momentary glance toward my crotch. “You mean…”

“Copper, can we please not?” I shrank in on myself. That grasping, clawing, invasive sensation never went away, and the more she pressed, the more I felt it crawling across my shoulders, around my neck, along the back of my ear.

“But like, wha—”

“Copper!”

I tried to not let it show on my face. I tried to be strong. I tried to keep it in. But in the end, I could only do so much.

I was tired of being that porcelain doll everyone saw and perpetuating my own victimhood. Fuck that. Fuck every last bit of it. I just wanted to be normal again. I honestly couldn’t remember what that was like.

“S-sorry,” she said.

We let the silence fester, her staring into her beer, and me into the tea set, tail tucked between my legs. I didn’t think she was expecting that kind of a bombshell, nor did I blame her.

“Why did she?” she asked after a time. She’d set her bottle down, well away from her side of the table.

I ground the sides of my hooves together on the cushion. “She wanted me to go through the portal so I’d be out of her way when she came back from the moon. I said no, so she… yeah.”

I looked down at my hooves and curled my tail around myself for good measure. I couldn't stand her eyes on me, couldn't stand her taking in the less-than I had become as I lay bare admission after disgusting admission, the scum I was reduced to when Luna…

Rape.

Use the word, you fucking coward. Luna raped me.

I had to say it—if not aloud, then at least in my head. I couldn't run from it. I couldn't hide from it. But fuck me, did I loathe every last goddamn shred of the shame that threatened to bury me here in this very moment for even thinking that word in front of Copper and how dare I bring this affront to her wellbeing to her doorstep.

Yet I did. Despite any notion of bravery or mending fences, here I was: Sunset Shimmer, the porcelain doll.

“Oh.” Copper flicked her ears back and forth, desperately trying to hide the fact that she was avoiding my gaze. “And now you’re helping her.”

And now you’re helping her. Apparently it was Copper’s turn to drop a bombshell. Amazingly, though, it didn’t blow me off my hooves.

I watched it fall, heard it whistle all the way down. But when the trigger fired and the untold megatons detonated over the unsuspecting population of my psyche, I hardly felt the shockwave.

And now you’re helping her…

The very thought curdled the blood in my veins hardly a week ago, had me foaming at the mouth at the very sight of Luna and ready to throw Equestria to the fire just to see her burn.

But now it was a thing to consider, like a display in an art museum. Something to circle around with one hand cradling my elbow and the other at my chin.

Helping Luna. Simply entertaining that thought still felt wrong, like I was slapping some law of ethics in the face by not grabbing the nearest stanchion and smashing the display to pieces.

But… Luna was good now, wasn’t she? That’s what I went on—banked on, even. Twilight believed it wholeheartedly, and I believed her.

Despite the evil of what Luna did, despite the hell I had lived every day since, despite the void I had just spiraled down not even five seconds ago, I couldn't deny the truth of that, however small a kernel it may be.

Luna was… she was like me. Or rather, I was like her. I didn't buy into the idea that we walked the same path the way she seemed to believe, but even the densest person like me could point out the similarities.

Honestly, that was probably the only reason I had the balls to come here in the first place.

“She’s trying to make up for what she did,” I said, rubbing a hoof up and down my foreleg. “We both are.”

The words rolled off my tongue like a bowling ball, with myself at the end of the alley. I waited for the inevitable crash that would send me tumbling down into the depths of my mind where I often went when thinking about all that had happened.

“What made you decide to help her?” Copper asked.

It was an innocent enough question in an innocent enough tone. But I picked up on that same withered resignation easily enough, that “oh…” in question form. I absently read the fine print at the bottom of my beer label.

“We beat the shit out of each other,” I said. It was the simple answer to a question far more complicated than Copper probably assumed. I was also emotionally burnt out and well past any effort of cherry-picking my words.

Copper wrinkled her nose. “That sounds like either there’s more to it or you’ve discovered a few strange kinks while you were away.”

I snorted. Only Copper could squeeze an inappropriate joke into a heavy conversation like this.

“I… I really don’t know,” I said. “When I left, I was a horrible pony. I buried myself beneath the anger I felt toward her and almost let it consume me to the point of no return. Then Princess Twilight came and showed me how wrong I was. She taught me how to be good again. And I tried my hardest. I like to think I succeeded.

“But I was still living with those problems buried deep inside me, and I never let them out or let anyone see. That’s when Luna came back into my life and dragged it all out into the open.”

I shook my head, absently watching her trace the floral print with her hoof. “I was so angry with her, for what she did back then, and now for bringing it all back to the forefront. Because I thought I was over it. I thought I had it all under control, and that the hurts I lived with were just part of me.

“But I was wrong. Part of me knew that, but I still fought it. I let that dredged-up anger control me. We had a fight, and… it made me realize how tired I was. Of being angry. It gave me a reason to stop and actually listen to her and understand her reasoning. I still don’t like her or what she had to say, but that doesn’t make her any less right in her own way.”

Copper nodded, her eyes back to her bottle. She copied me in that she picked it up to twirl it around and regard the back label.

We were good at letting the silence fester. Like one of those orange- or rose-colored slime molds that grew in the darker parts of the Everfree, its pseudopods sprawling out from the table, swallowing us up—eyes, ears, everything.

I took a swig. It went down hard with a bitter, coffee-like tang that got a grimace out of me. Porters, of all the beers, I liked least, and it didn’t help that Equestrian beers had a headier, more earthy bent to them.

Copper didn’t seem to mind. She downed hers like a barmaid on a bet.

I didn’t mean for it, but that nagging question came back to me during this lull in conversation. Now still didn’t feel like the right time, but I desperately needed to get my mind off our last subject.

“Copper… have you always been gay?”

No small amount of courage went into the mask she threw on, but it wasn’t enough to hide her wince. She sat up straight, eyes closed. A deep breath, in through her nose and out through her mouth. Once. Twice.

“Yes,” she said. “I’m gay, Sunset, and I always have been.” She let out a shuddering breath that ended with a tiny smile. Her ears fell back, and a wave of relief washed over her, like that was the biggest, most liberating admission she had ever made in her life.

I didn’t know what to say. Didn’t her mom hate gay ponies? What did she think of this? Of Star Chaser? Admitting that had to be hard enough. It didn’t feel right pressing her for more.

“Huh,” I said.

“‘Huh’?” She looked at me in disbelief. “You’re… not angry?”

I looked at her funny. If her face hadn’t been telling, I’d have assumed that was sarcasm.

“Why would I be angry? It doesn’t change who you are.”

Her ears, at first pointed and alert, eased back, then fell to the wayside. Her gaze dropped to my hooves, then to the table and the loveseat in turn. She went back to tracing the floral print with her hooftip.

“I mean,” I continued for the sake of sparing us yet another bout of silence, “it kinda explains a few of our adventures back in school, but… I don’t know.”

I shrugged. I had nothing to say on the matter. Some ponies were gay, others felt they were the wrong gender. That was just life.

Turning the focus of the conversation inward, it had me wondering where exactly I fell on that spectrum. What sort of social constructs did I live oblivious to or at the mercy of, and how did it make me any different from her, if at all? How much of our lives was just a product of circumstance, and where did our own choices influence them?

Maybe I was just being stupid and thinking too hard again. I did that a lot.

An unusually familiar smirk overcame Copper—that trademark, up-to-no-good Coppertone smirk I could never forget if I tried. It got my heart going.

“And by adventures,” she said, “you mean misadventures.”

I couldn’t help the smile that dragged out of me. Something in the tone of her voice sparked a long-lost emotion I couldn’t place, and I yearned to hold that feeling in my breast and cherish its warmth.

“Something like that,” I said.

She giggled. “Like when you let that Frog Spawn Spell loose in Home Ec and got away with it?”

I snorted. “Oh man, that’s a memory and a half. Did you know the second time was also me?”

Copper perked up. “Bullshit. You’re bullshitting me.”

I shook my head. My smile had already spread to Copper, and the two of us snickered.

“Cross my heart and hope to fly. I honestly thought I’d get it right the second time.”

“Says the princess’s star pupil.”

“Hey, you weren’t Little Miss Perfect yourself. What about the time in Mrs. Phoenix Flare’s class when you blew up her prized globe of Equestria?”

Copper sputtered and waved a hoof at me. “Please. If you’re gonna laud my accomplishments, at least mention the good ones. Like when we locked Loosey Goosey in the broom closet.”

“‘We’?” I said, holding up a hoof. “That was all you. I had nothing to do with it.”

“She called me a whore. Was I supposed to take that lying down?”

“Well, wasn’t that how you always took it?”

The massive grin on her face screamed that I’d hit the sweet spot, pun intended. She threw a pillow at me, and I caught it with my face like the graceful pony I was. We broke down in a fit of laughter.

“You know,” Copper said. “I wouldn’t have gotten in trouble for that if you hadn’t let her out.”

“Yeah, but everyone knew that storage closet smelled like hooves because the janitor never wrung out his mops. She probably would have died in there if I didn’t.”

“Woulda served her right for all the times she held up our incantations classes at the end with pointless questions. Oh, speaking of…” She leaned forward, excited. “What about when we snuck out of that snoozefest of a lecture that one Friday to see that fire twirler in the quad.”

“Yeah, that was the other big one. Don’t say that like it was my idea. You’re the one who convinced me, and you only succeeded because I already had a 110% in the class.”

“Yeah, like 110% of something else you needed a lot more of at the time.”

I raised an eyebrow at her. “And what exactly is that?”

She shrugged and tossed a careless grin my way. “I’ll tell you when you’re older.”

Wait… Wait.

Like a lightning bolt from on high, an epiphany struck me to link that phrase with the last time I heard it tumble out of her face.

“Oh my god!” I started belly laughing. “It was a cuck joke. You fucking cuck joked me.”

“W-what?” Copper wore a confused but expectant smile.

“That freakin’... Shit, where were we?” I tapped the tip of my hoof against the cushion. “It was the... yeah, the lacrosse scrimmage. We were talking about the whole make-a-friend thing and you told me you’d let me sit in the chair, and I didn't know what you meant, so you said you’d—”

“Tell you when you’re older,” Copper said in unison with me, already wheezing from the laughter that had possessed her, body and soul. She had fallen back in her seat, nodding in remembrance, the laughter in her belly demanding more air than her lungs could give. Tears rolled down her face as she tried and failed to get a hold of herself enough to form a coherent sentence.

I gathered myself enough to snipe her with a sharpened grin and ask, “You were gonna say ‘110% dick I needed,’ weren’t you?” which got her redoubling her laughter until she had nothing left to squeak out but another nod and a laughter-tear rolling down her cheek. All I could do was shake my head at what was probably the dumbest jab she’d ever taken, but I wouldn’t have traded this moment for the world.

After that little bout, she wore the most genuine smile I had ever seen, and I took a second to appreciate it, remember all the little details—which had changed and which stayed the same.

God, she was beautiful. All the little things I used to jealously nitpick. Seven years only refined her perfection. Maybe it was just the way the sunlight filtered in through the windows, but I swore she radiated with her own inner light when she smiled. But like all good things, her smile waned to a reserved sliver, and she again went misty-eyed, staring into her bottle.

“Remember when we went to Manehattan, and you got hit on by that waitress?” she said, wiping the tears from her face. She giggled. “And all the clubs we hopped that night? I’d never seen anypony dance as terribly as you. But I’ve never seen anypony have that much fun, either.”

I leaned back in my seat, and my eyes unfocused as I listened to the rhythm of her voice. I’d always loved listening to her talk, back when she would idly gossip about this or that. Just let her words wrap around and through me. Now was no different, and my heart reached out to her.

As silly as it sounded, I wanted to hold her hoof. I wanted to feel her warmth that I had all but forgotten and experience that closeness again. But given the circumstances and the mare probably waiting in the other room with one ear to the wall, I didn’t feel I had the right.

“Or the time we went to the park and just watched Lily play?” she said. “You were so happy with that article thing on wind. And all the times you fell asleep while I brushed your mane…” She giggled and her eyes fell back to the floral print at her hooves. “You always did this little snoring thing in your sleep.”

I tried laughing with her, because I desperately needed to clear the air of a sudden wave of melancholy. I couldn’t help but notice the trend in her memories. So many details—not about me or her, but about us.

I knew what it meant. It took me seven years to realize, seven long years to open my eyes and understand the pain I had caused and the heart I had broken.

I could have listened to her talk until the sun came up, but it would only make everything hurt worse. The more we remembered those days, the more I could see just how steep the slope was that I’d fallen down, and the same for her, all because of me.

All the happiness of the last few minutes felt like it’d been sucked away to leave me frighteningly alone. The only thing that could make the feeling worse would be to give it a chance to rub off on Copper, and she didn’t deserve that.

“I should go,” I said. I got up to leave, but she caught me by the hoof.

“Sunset…” She put a hoof on my shoulder and used the gesture to inch closer. It had a reassuring weight to it that begged me to lean into it and remember that closeness I used to cherish. But I didn’t deserve that, and neither did Star Chaser.

“Please stay,” she said.

I put my hoof on her chest to keep my distance. “Copper… it wouldn’t be right.”

Copper snapped her ears back, her eyes dancing between mine. She furrowed her eyebrows, breathless, pleading.

“Sunset. Just… You can stay in the guest bedroom. For me?”

She came in for a hug before I knew what was happening, and I let my hoof fall to the floor. She was so warm. It reminded me of the many nights we fell asleep together, and the many more between that we never got to share.

Though, knowing now that Copper had feelings for me, it felt… different. Not wrong, or that I had been lied to or taken advantage of, but just… I didn’t know how to describe it or really know what I should be feeling. But it felt right, like this was the one missing piece to the puzzle that was my soul.

She was Coppertone. She was my best friend.

“You still smell the same,” she whispered into the crook of my neck and hugged me tighter.

And I… I hugged her back. It hurt seeing her like this. I wanted to see that smile I remembered so fondly—that can-do, happy-go-lucky smile that never failed to inspire me. I wanted to be the reason I saw it. I hadn’t shared this kind of intimacy with anyone since… since her, actually, and I shamefully couldn’t deny I wanted this, too.

We stood there longer than I deserved, just holding each other. Far too soon, we parted and sat side by side on the couch. We spent the next few hours talking about this and that as the sunlight trekked up the wall and faded to orange.

I felt… normal. Like we were back at school. Just two kids enjoying another weekend away from the worries of the world.

I forgot about Luna. I forgot about the Nightmare and the Tantabus. All my concerns fell away like old bandages that I didn’t know I was wearing. Before I knew it, nighttime had come, and after a long, hug-filled goodnight, I found myself lying in the darkness of Copper’s guest bedroom amidst the girly odds and ends that doubtlessly belonged to Star Chaser.

A pair of stuffed dolls, a mare and stallion, stared down at me from a high shelf that ran along the crown molding. I could just barely make out the red tint of the mare’s frilly dress in the moonlight.

I briefly wondered what they’d think of my situation if they could talk. I snorted at the notion of a Come-to-Life Spell, my brain leading off on one of its tangents. I didn’t have the headspace to entertain something like that, not to mention that wasn’t how the spell worked.

But if it did, what would they say? No doubt they’d scold me for butting back into Copper’s life and making problems for their owner who was no doubt having a mental breakdown because of what I represented.

If Copper really did love me—if she still loved me—then I was setting up a bomb nobody could defuse.

I rolled onto my side to stare at the opposite wall. I didn’t need any more condescending talk, whether from a pair of dolls or my own stupid brain. The cool spot on my pillow gave me something to focus on, but it faded all too quickly, and I was left with the thoughts shambling down the back alleys of my mind.

The door opened on near-silent hinges behind me. No other noise found its way into the room, and after a long minute, I turned my head. Even in the darkness, I could see the moonlight twinkling wistfully in Copper’s eyes as she leaned against the doorframe.

“Copper?” I said. I knew what she was thinking, what she must have thought every night at CSGU and every night since.

“Can I come in?” she whispered. Hopeful. Pleading.

“Copper, you shouldn’t be doing this.”

She shut the door behind her and tiptoed in. The bed creaked ever so slightly under the weight of her hoof, and the pre-magics of her unlit horn already tugged at the corner of the bedsheet.

Hesitantly, I let her climb in. She was warm, a rather welcome feeling on this chilly autumn night. I instinctively huddled closer to relish that precious body heat, but my thoughts drifted to Star Chaser, now cold and alone in their bed.

Copper whisked that thought away by placing her hoof on my shoulder. Its gentle weight begged me to cuddle into it.

I rolled over to press against her and intertwined my hooves with hers, our noses almost touching. Her heart raced in her chest, apparent from the wild thu-thump I felt against the back of my hoof. A moment passed, and I gathered the sense she spent it mustering her courage, evident in how her eyes danced back and forth between mine.

I didn’t know what to say, much less do, but again I thought of Star Chaser, and so I shied away when Copper came in for a kiss.

Her breath hitched, and she squeezed her eyes shut. Her whole body trembled trying to keep it together.

I wanted to help, I wanted to be the one who could hold her close and make her happy, but doing so wouldn’t have been true to myself. I didn’t know what I wanted well enough to know what I should do, so I pressed the side of my muzzle against hers and let the gentle insistence be my reply.

“I love you more than I could ever put into words, Copper,” I whispered. “But I can’t love you the way you want me to.”

I reached for a tear rolling down her cheek, but before I wiped it away, she took hold of my hoof and held it there. The moonlight glistened in her eyes, and a just-barely-holding-it-together feeling stretched thin across her face. Her voice trembled when she spoke.

“Sunset… Please. Just let me have this one night.”

I felt her words more than I heard them, felt the beat of her heart against mine. Our hearts beat in time, just as our breath shared what little space there was between us.

“Just let me pretend…”

“Copper…” I gazed into her eyes, and I saw the world as she would have had it: she and I, and nothing more.

I remembered all those mornings spent in A-chem, throwing paper airplane notes and peanuts at each other; the walks down the hallway, avoiding whatever insane concoction some student thought was a good idea; the long nights we lay holding each other, her hoof stroking my mane as I fell asleep.

I again felt in my heart that aching, yearning sensation from earlier that evening, the one that so desperately sought whatever words could span the distance between us. But here in the moonlit bedroom, with the breath-sweetened air and the comforting warmth of her heart so close to mine, it became more, grew beyond sensation to a compulsion that would rather reach out over that chasm and chance falling into oblivion than recoil and know Copper forever remained on the other side.

I knew it was wrong, but I placed a chaste kiss on her nose, and the levee broke.

Copper buried herself in my chest. Her tears stained through my fur, hot and wet, and she held me tight about the shoulders.

I cradled her head against me and kissed her forehead. We lay like that for a long while, and I took to stroking her mane. It was as soft as I remembered, like the fetlocks of a newborn foal.

I buried my nose in her mane and breathed in her coconut shampoo. I imagined each and every time we lay like this, wondered how different life would have been had I simply known.

All those jokes about how we were meant for each other… Between the sarcasm and snark, she never once lied about it. I was just too thick to notice. The tears threatened at the corners of my eyes, and a lump formed in my throat.

Maybe. Maybe if I had known, we could have worked.

It would have been a good life. Yeah. I was sure of it. Nocturne would have never gotten through to me if we were that much closer back then. Copper’s mom would have been a different issue, but we would have gotten through.

Together, we would have been invincible.

But that wasn’t real life. That was a fairy tale in my head, a whimsical make-believe that I didn’t deserve. The real me had burned her bridges and torn Copper’s heart from her chest. I had thrown her away, yet despite it all, she still loved me. But even if I was the one she wanted, I didn’t deserve a pony like her.

In time, maybe I’d earn that love. Maybe I’d finally earn the privilege to look her in the eye as an equal and say “I love you,” and feel the words as truly in my heart.

But that wasn’t now. The me lying here had a demon to destroy, a princess to rescue, an Equestria to save.

I relaxed my hold of her and took the opportunity to kiss her on the forehead again. I held it there longer than I felt I should have, but who was I to decide that?

Copper hiccuped and pulled away so she could look me in the eyes. Hers were filled with tears that caught the moonlight, made them look as if full of stars. She gently caressed my cheek, and I felt her hoof reach behind my head to draw me into a kiss.

I knew it was wrong—all of this was—but I closed my eyes and let it happen.

I was glad I did. After all the pain I had caused her, I was glad I could give her at least something to make amends.

I also couldn’t lie: the way she used her tongue was pretty damn hot.

When I didn’t resist, she dove deeper into the kiss, mixed her hot breath with mine. Her hooves started roving toward places they shouldn’t, and I drew the line there with a firm grip on her hooves.

I couldn’t deny her a passionate, long-desired kiss, but I wasn’t ready to retread that unwanted territory.

The tremble in her breath voiced her disappointment, but she didn’t press the issue and instead nuzzled into my chest again. She took to drawing idle circles in the fur of my shoulder, the way she used to when we were young.

“You have no idea how long I’ve wanted to do that,” she whispered.

The smile on her face was one of immeasurable happiness, but nothing gold can stay. As the seconds wore on, her smile threaded out, and the circles she traced slowed. She knew this wouldn’t last, that it didn’t ultimately mean anything.

Except it did. It meant the world to her—I meant the world to her. And that… that meant the world to me.

But no matter how much we wished the night could last forever, eventually the sun would rise and this moment here would become nothing more than a memory.

I kissed her on the forehead, and as the moment marched ever onward, my emotions got the better of me, and out came the tears.

“I’m sorry,” I said, wiping my eyes. “You should go back to Star Chaser.”

Copper wiped a tear from my cheek. That smile was back, a pure, unrivaled happiness I would never forget.

“Sunset, nothing in the world could ever take me away from you.”

“Copper…” I sighed, half-laughing. “You’re the worst.” I knew it was wrong, but I leaned in and kissed her, right on the lips.

A moment of silence passed before Copper snickered and held me tighter. “I learn from the best.”

We shared a quiet laugh, and she nestled into my chest. I kissed her on the forehead and stroked her mane. Her warm breath and warmer tears seeped through my coat, but I knew she was smiling.

I knew it was wrong, but I snuggled in closer, and so did she. Now that the heat of the moment had passed, a quiet chill crept in to sneak up my flank. I magicked the bedsheets over our shoulders, and when Copper let out a contented sigh, I buried my face in her mane.

I knew it was wrong. All of it was—from the moment she first stepped through the bedroom door—but for the first time in seven years, I felt utterly, truly, convincingly happy.

Author's Note

Them... :heart:

Onward and Upward.

XXXII - Cupcakes with Pinkie Pie

It was still early morning when I left Copper’s house. It took all the strength in the world to pull myself from her hooves, as entwined as we were. But the world marched on, and I had obligations.

We shared a few quick words over coffee—where we were and where we were going. Copper wore a morose but stalwart smile. She knew what we did was wrong, but I knew in my heart she couldn’t keep turning a blind eye to her problems. It wasn’t fair to herself, least of all Star Chaser.

Speaking of, Star Chaser wasn’t there when we woke up. Probably left sometime during the night. I couldn’t blame her, and I felt no shortage of guilt for my part in it. I kept telling myself it was for the best, that a relationship built on imitation and chasing past regrets would only end up worse in the long run.

We’d move forward, one way or another. I had a job to do, and Copper had an apology to make. And it was on that melancholic note that I headed back to Twilight’s castle.

I thanked the weather pegasi for the cool, dreary overcast and the rain we got sometime last night. It made for streets slick with sodden leaves and hardly another soul to speak of, affording me time to think.

I’d been doing that a lot lately. Thinking. About myself, about Luna. About how this all fit together to form the tangled mess that was my life right now.

Copper got me on that topic yesterday, and I couldn’t unstick it from my mind: And now you’re helping her.

Wildly enough, I was. But now that I had time to let that thought settle in, it took me by the hand and led me down the back alleys of my mind that I hesitated treading.

Luna was smarter than even she gave herself credit for, like Celestia said. Wise. I shuddered. Powerful. I was lucky that dream injuries didn’t carry over to the real world, unless I were to count my pride.

But I needed that fight. The same way I needed a lot of things that I didn’t realize at the time. My life was a ball of twine that needed unraveling so that I could properly respool it. I had at least that much to thank Luna for.

I didn’t dream last night, either, and I woke up more refreshed than I had in years. I wanted to think she finally gave me the space I needed, or was at least finally able to.

Regardless, I made it to Twilight’s castle without incident, and my head was already back in the trenches by the time I clicked the portal room door shut behind me.

It was… strangely quiet. Usually, someone was up doing something by now, whether that be drawing up a new chalk circle or loudly reiterating one of the theories behind dream diving to make sure she wasn’t crazy. I wasn’t going to say I was referring to Twilight, but I was totally referring to Twilight.

But no, the portal room was indeed empty after a quick sweep. I did, however, find a little note waiting for me on the table.

Sunset, if you make it back in the morning, meet me in the kitchen.
—Twilight

Okay.

I briefly imagined making waffles with Twilight, and if that wasn’t the strangest yet most normal thought I’d had in the last week, I didn’t know what was.

What did that word even mean? Normal. My life had never been what most considered normal. But if abnormality was what I’d lived all my life, then wasn’t that technically my normal?

I let my brain do its thing as I found my way to the kitchen. It didn’t take long with the scent of vanilla and sugar practically grabbing me by the nostrils and floating me there.

A dull hum met me just outside the door, and when I stepped inside, the hum grew into the loud whir of an automatic mixing bowl. Someone was making cupcakes.

And one hell of a mess: cake batter mounding from a cupcake tray by the sink, flour avalanching across the island counter from an overturned mixing bowl, a streak of canola oil along the floor like an oil slick left by a secret agent on the run from the feds. A catastrophe of this magnitude could only be the work of one pers—

Before I could finish that thought, something picked me up from behind and squeezed me tight around the barrel. I felt like a balloon ready to pop at both ends.

“Sunset!” a very Pinkie Pie voice said, explaining just about everything in the inexplicable way Pinkie’s mere presence did.

“Hey, Pinkie,” I said as soon as she let me out of her bear hug. I tried rubbing the soreness from my ribs. “It’s nice to see you.”

A less mentally preoccupied me would have been content with that, but an idle curiosity got to me: “A-are you my Pinkie Pie or Twilight’s Pinkie Pie?”

Pinkie snorted. “Oh, silly Sunset. I don’t belong to anypony.”

Err. I should have seen that interpretation before I said it.

“I mean, are you this world’s Pinkie Pie, or my world’s Pinkie Pie?”

She zipped over to the counter and poured flour into a bowl for another batch. “Well, you came from this world, so this is technically your world, too. So answering that wouldn’t answer the question, silly.”

I put my hoof to my forehead. Mentally preoccupied or not, I didn’t need this kind of brain bending this early in the morning.

“You know what? It’s not important. Hi, Pinkie, it’s nice to see you.”

She took that as a good enough reason to give me another rib-crushing hug. Before I could process a life of breathing like this, she was at the counter cracking an egg into the bowl. And then she was at the island mixing something in another bowl.

I smiled. It really didn’t matter which world I was in. My friends were my friends, no matter the form they took.

“Hey, Sunset,” came Twilight’s voice from behind me. She stepped up beside me and nuzzled me on the cheek. She then threw a hoof over my shoulder and dropped her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “You know, between you and me, Pinkie once told me she traded places with her human counterpart for a day, and since then, I honestly couldn’t tell you which one’s which.”

“They make the best bear claws over there!” Pinkie shouted from across the room.

Twilight went pale, and I laughed. One way or another, any Pinkie was the real Pinkie. Not thinking too hard about it tended to be the best choice, but it didn’t seem Twilight was always capable of that.

“So what are you guys making?” I asked, if only to get Twilight’s brain hamster back on its wheel.

She shook her head. “We’re maki—”

“We’re making cupcakes!” Pinkie Pie said, popping up from behind and yanking us into a hug. She whisper-hissed in my ear: “The secret ingredient is extra cake.”

And she was off to the races again, ingredients flying and whisks a-whisking at a million miles an hour.

I smirked, my brain finally attuning itself to Pinkie’s wavelength. Was that to mean she added already-baked cake to her cupcakes? I thought about egging her on with questions, but it might be too early in the morning for Twilight to handle.

She was still waking up. Had the last remnants of that bleary-eyed look about her, like this baking session was more Pinkie’s idea. The time, at least, if not the baking itself—a large mug of coffee sat on the nearby counter, with a little pink bubble shield overtop it to ward off any errant globs of cupcake batter.

Even without her cutie mark painted on the side, I knew it belonged to Twilight. Pinkie didn’t drink coffee. God help us all if she did.

Twilight took the moment to levitate it over and savor a sip. I could tell by its light-brown color there was probably more creamer than coffee in there. How it had any effect on her was beyond me. Might as well just drink ice water at that point.

“So,” I said. “It’s weird seeing you without your face buried in some book in the portal room. What gives?”

Twilight sighed. There was a certain weight to her breath, as if preparing herself for something.

“Before I say anything else, I want to make sure you know that everything we’ve talked about has stayed between us, and it’ll stay that way unless you decide otherwise. But I’ve had my own conversations with my friends last night while you were away, and they think I need to relax.” She nodded toward Pinkie doing her thing all over the kitchen. “This is me relaxing.”

“Or the closest thing you’ll get to it,” I said. I knew her well enough to know the inner Twilight was pulling her mane out wanting to get back to work. Maybe adding my two cents to the ring would get her to actually settle down. Again, the last thing I wanted was for her to come out of this worse for wear on my account. That included mentally as well as physically. “But it’s a nice change of pace.”

“It is, honestly. Rainbow Dash was here earlier,” she added. “But she left to get started on the warm front that’s supposed to be moving through this afternoon.”

“Nope!” came Rainbow Dash’s voice from a chandelier above us. “Still here!”

“Rainbow Dash,” Twilight said impatiently. “Why are you napping on my kitchen chandelier?”

Rainbow got up and stretched her wings. “Uh, duh. Because you and Pinkie were baking cupcakes. And there’s no way I was going to miss out on free cupcakes.”

“Why is there a chandelier in your kitchen?” I asked, my brain finally wrapping itself around the oddity.

“Ask the Tree of Harmony,” Twilight said flatly. Given what little I’d heard about the castle and how it got here, I let that curiosity lie.

Exactly as I would have expected Rainbow Dash from my world had she a pair of wings, this one made a show of somersaulting off the chandelier and landing dramatically not a foot from me. Were it any other pony, I would have flinched, but that would imply Rainbow wasn’t one of the few who could put her money where her mouth was. Most of the time, anyway.

“Damn, Twilight,” Rainbow said, looking me up and down. “No wonder you keep sneaking off to that human world.”

As offended as any woman in my shoes had the right to be, I could only smirk at that. Some of Copper must have rubbed off on me last night.

“I-I’m pretty sure it’s not like that,” I said.

Twilight gawked at me like I had kicked her dog. “‘Pretty sure’!? It’s not like that.”

Rainbow Dash blew a raspberry at her. “Yeah, whatever.” To me: “And you definitely got yourself a catch here,” she added, jabbing a hoof Twilight’s way. If the whole “steam spewing out someone’s ears” gag were a real thing like in cartoons, it’d definitely be happening to Twilight right now.

It wasn’t much of a secret within our friend group in the human world that Princess Twilight was a closet lesbian, whether she herself knew it or not. Didn’t stop it from being obvious, the way she acted around us. The subtle physical contact, the rapt attention, the need to please. Those weren’t “Princess of Friendship” traits so much as “I like you but I don’t know how to say it” traits. Funny how well they overlapped.

Sometimes she was so casually platonic, I often forgot until something like this happened, specifically Rainbow Dash trying to bait it out of her. She had a few bets going with Applejack on the matter, last I heard from Starlight.

“Do I now?” I said to Rainbow Dash, deciding to play along. “And what makes you say that?”

“Have you looked at her lately?” She waggled her eyebrows at me.

I have, and I did again just now for effect. Twilight looked ready to blast Rainbow Dash to the moon.

I threw her a bone: “Is this one of those ‘takes one to know one’ kind of moments?”

“Oh, wouldn’t you like to know?” She ribbed me and winked. “Buuut I can see where this is going, and even Pinkie’s cupcakes aren’t worth Twilight going all Twilight on me. Later!”

And with that, she was out the window quick as a flash. Not sure if it was my ears playing tricks on me, but I swore I heard her laughing hysterically in the distance.

“Rainbow! You get back here!” Twilight looked ready to take off after her, but if one universal law held true between worlds, it was that no one beat Rainbow Dash in a race.

“So that was something,” I said.

“She thinks it’s so funny,” Twilight said. “Oh, I could just. Ugh!” She turned her pouty lip toward me and oh god it was just too precious seeing her like that. “You’re pretty laid back about her looking you over like that.”

I shrugged. “I’ve had my fair share of objectification.”

As soon as those words left my lips, I wanted to reach out and snatch them up. It killed what little playful mood we had going on, and I felt the sudden urge to run back to the guest bedroom and hide forever.

Twilight coughed into her hoof. “So, uh…”

“Y-Yeah…” I didn’t know how to smooth that one over, either.

For what it was worth, Twilight found a smile somewhere in that head of hers and took a seat, careful to avoid any errant splotches of cupcake batter.

“So how’d meeting your, uh… was it a friend you went to see?” she asked. The words came out stiffly, and the embarrassed look on her face had me wondering exactly what theories ran through her head. Whatever her assumptions were, they probably weren’t far off.

Yeah, so I got to see my best friend for the first time in forever that I apparently mentally scarred because she was super in love with me the whole time, and then I found out that I was effectively destroying what little of a life she had scraped together by storming back into it. Oh yeah, and then we almost fucked.

“Yeah,” I said. “A friend. It went about as well as I could have hoped.” I left it at that, and she knew not to press.

She took another sip of coffee. The smell had me wanting some for myself, except maybe not with as much creamer.

“Sometimes that’s the best we can hope for,” she said after a while.

With the conversation effectively stalled, I racked my brain for a way to get it rolling again. I didn’t want to lose this bit we had going. To that end, I pressed my side against Twilight, and she leaned into it. I just… I needed that contact right now.

I wanted to ask her about the Tantabus thing in her dream. What was it? Where did it come from? How long had she had it? It was all so strange and confusing and just… not the sort of complication we needed at the moment.

Pinkie Pie appeared out of nowhere and gave me another bear hug. “I know a hug when it’s needed. Now, how about those cupcakes?”

I smiled. Cupcakes sounded good.

We spent the next hour or so baking cupcakes. So many cupcakes. Chocolate chip, vanilla swirl, cotton candy, banana split, and a million other flavors I both never knew existed nor really believed should exist in cupcake form. By the time we were done, I didn’t want to see another cupcake ever again.

But I had fun. A small but ever-present smile lingered on my face that I couldn’t get rid of if I tried. Twilight had one, too, and Pinkie Pie’s was a given. Even Spike and Starlight poked their heads in to say hi and to steal a tray or three. Also, Spike had wings now. Who knew?

Cupcakes turned into library time. Starlight joined us with the last of her cupcake contraband while Pinkie Pie busied herself with a pop-up book about a prince saving his kingdom from an evil dragon. She giggled and made growling noises whenever the dragon reared up from the pages.

Starlight read aloud alongside her, because it seemed Pinkie’s lack of actual reading and focus on the pictures had her ready to pull her mane out. I liked to think she was trying to give Twilight and me some time away from Pinkie’s overenthusiasm, but that was a tall order on the best of days.

Twilight had her muzzle buried in a textbook about astrophysics. Something about how Luna once told her how certain stars move differently based on where they were in the sky got her interested. Such a curiosity would have gotten me reading over her shoulder were it not for her mention of Luna.

Instead, I picked a romance novel at random, earning a raised eyebrow from Twilight. I needed “some light reading to get my mind off things,” which only made her eyebrow go higher. Apparently, The Rose Parade was a romanti-tragedy that was “literally the furthest thing from ‘light reading’” that I’d find in her library. I settled in with it anyway.

It started simple. Good guy stallion, beautiful redheaded mare—it was always beautiful redheads in these types of stories, for some reason. Foreboding undercurrents and suspense abounded. For all I knew, it might have been the best story I would ever read. To be honest, though, I just couldn’t get into it.

Too many questions whirled in my brain, and none of them about whether or not The Cobalt Cavalier would get the mare or not, or if they’d escape the castle before the evil baron let the monster loose. I found myself glancing Twilight’s way more often than at the pages between my hooves, but what I had to ask felt too sensitive for other ears, especially a pony like Pinkie.

It took time, but eventually Pinkie got bored and told us goodnight and to not let the bedbugs bite and a whole slew of other silly ditties I’d have in my head for god knew how long. Starlight helped speed up the leaving process, and finally the door shut with a long echo to leave Twilight and I, for the first time today, alone.

“So what did you want to talk about?” Twilight asked not even a second after the echo died away. She closed her book and stared at me. The look on her face screamed apprehensive, but no less determined to help.

“What?”

“You get this really distant look about you when you’re thinking. This isn’t the first time you’ve worn it, and you’ve been wearing it all day.”

“I…” Did I have “a look” when I was thinking? Copper once said something like that years ago. Something about being all philosophical. Was I really that easy to read?

“Do you want to talk about it?” A smile took the place of her previous apprehension. She wanted to listen, she wanted to be that shoulder for me to lean on.

Opening up to friends is not weakness, rang Luna’s voice clear in my head.

“Yeah,” I said. “I, I wanted to talk. About your dream yesterday.”

Her smile faltered but redoubled just as quick. She flicked her ears before pointing them toward me, ready for anything. Or, at least, she wanted me to think that.

“You were under this… this, like, spell,” I said. “There was a creature there, what I’d guess was a Tantabus, or like your equivalent of one. It lorded over you like this massive shadow trying to suck all the happiness out of you.”

As I spoke, Twilight’s face grew paler. Her eyes fell to the floor, and she shrank in on herself.

“I have a Tantabus?” Her voice trembled.

“You didn’t know about it?”

She shook her head. “I’ve only ever heard of Princess Luna’s.”

“It was, like, pushing you down into the stone,” I said. I didn’t know what else to tell her. “I don’t know what sort of symbolism that entails, but I figured it was bad while it was happening.”

Twilight chewed on the inside of her cheek. “I didn’t feel anything like that happening.”

“You also didn’t know it was there lording over you.”

She winced when I said that, and I instantly regretted it. “That’s something Princess Luna would know, but I don’t. I don’t have any experience with dreams. I didn’t even know this was possible. I figured the Tantabus was unique to Luna, but if you’re certain what you saw was one, then maybe I do have my own Tantabus.”

“Maybe we all do,” I said.

Or maybe just princesses had them. God knew if that was the trend, I couldn’t imagine what Celestia’s looked like or what it was capable of. It was something to think about.

We didn’t get much time to think about it, though, as Starlight stormed through the front door of the library, out of breath. “Oh, thank Celestia, you’re both still here.”

“What’s wrong?” Twilight asked, shooting to her hooves.

Starlight’s concern morphed into a lopsided nervousness. “Yeah, so I know everypony said to take the day off because you guys had been going at it for a while, but, um… something happened. Youuu’ll want to come see this for yourself.”

That couldn’t be good. We ran to the portal room, hot on Starlight’s heels.

Star Swirl sat hunched over Luna’s body in the middle. He turned to us as we entered with a grave face.

“What’s going on?” Twilight said. “What’s—”

That’s when we both saw it. Luna’s eyes had rolled into the back of her head, and she twitched as if having a seizure.

Yeah. Pretty sure that wasn’t supposed to happen.

“Could this be the dream falling apart?” I asked. “Luna mentioned that to me before. Something about entering the same dream multiple times tears them apart.”

“I don’t know,” Star Swirl said. “But I can only assume this is a sign that we’re running out of time.”

The others exchanged worried glances, before they all eventually settled on me.

A deep breath in, then out, before I said, “I’m ready.”

XXXIII - Finding the Nightmare

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.

XXXIV - The Dream Dive Unraveled

“You keep looking that over,” I said to Starlight, who was staring at the chalkboard equations for the millionth time today. “Why do you keep looking that over?”

Starlight frowned. “I don’t know. Something just feels off.”

“Starlight, we checked and double-checked our math, and then we double-checked our double check. Even Star Swirl double-checked my double check of our double check!”

She didn’t seem convinced, but math never lied.

“Starlight, you can stop worrying.”

My eyes gravitated to Sunset and Luna in the middle of the room. Around them wound a series of chalk lines, scrawled outside the original Dream Dive glyph. They glowed a full spectrum of colors, and their magic tingled like windchimes in my ears. Even at this distance the arcane charge tugged at the individual hairs of my coat like static electricity.

A battery glyph, as we’d so aptly dubbed it. That was to say, rather than the more academically correct “séance circle” I had initially christened it. I wasn’t fond of such a straightforward name, but I was outvoted two to one. Apparently, being a princess still only counted as one vote. Not that I was disappointed or anything. Because I wasn’t.

Regardless, the, ahem, battery glyph acted just as its name implied, like a battery meant to power a spell. Thanks to some ingenious surge crystal work and a little more cleverness besides, we figured out a way to make use of the Dream Dive Spell’s latent feedback, allowing the circular nature of magic to replenish itself. To a degree, anyway—Conservation of Energy still withstanding.

Effectively, it let us take turns powering the Dream Dive Spell, freeing us up for some important continuing R&D. Or some much-needed R&R, as Starlight all too readily put it, like the chocolate chip cookie I nibbled on from the steaming plate Spike brought in a minute ago. It was as soft and gooey and delicious as the way Mom made them.

Starlight shot me a look. “Me stop worrying? Twilight, you’re the princess of worrying. We named a verb after you. The fact you’re not worried has me worried.”

I rolled my eyes at that. “Twilighting,” as they so wonderfully called it, still didn’t sit well with me. It felt… presumptuous? I didn’t know what to call it. Still, my friends were my friends, and they wouldn’t be themselves without acting true to who they were. Sometimes, that meant getting a verb named after you.

But that was whatever. It was hard to feel concerned for the world while munching on a little bit of heaven. Maybe that’s why Mom made me cookies all the time when I was growing up. I shook my head. Getting off track.

All the same: “Starlight, we did the math. I did the math.”

“I know, it’s just… I have a bad feeling about it, Twilight. Like, I don’t doubt you did the math right, but… what if we were fundamentally wrong about it? Or there’s things going on in the dream that we can’t account for? Sure, your logic is sound leading from one thing to the next, I mean both me and Star Swirl believe that on a personal level. But what if the whole basis of your equations is off?”

“I get that you’re worried, Starlight, but Sunset and Luna are counting on us. We’ve made it this far with our hypothesis and theories holding up. We can’t go back to the drawing board now. I mean, we could, but everything’s working exactly how we predicted. And honestly, if what Sunset said is true, we don’t have time to start over.”

My words didn’t seem to comfort her much. She wore that slant of a frown that meant her gut didn’t agree. The cookie in my mouth suddenly wasn’t as appetizing as usual. Not only did I hate seeing my friends in a mood, but Starlight had a pretty good track record when it came to gut feelings.

I put a comforting hoof on her shoulder. “Let me grab our notes and we’ll go over our dream dive theory from the ground up. How’s that sound?”

And there was the smile I hoped for. She squeezed my hoof and gave me a playful bump with her shoulder. Her smile went rogue, and in a flick of her horn she absconded with the unbitten half of my cookie.

“Hey!” I said. “The plate’s literally right over there!” I jabbed a hoof at it halfway across the room.

“Yours was closer.” She gobbled it in a single bite and with her mouth full continued, “And the little pouty face you make is priceless.”

“I do not make a pouty face.” I made due effort to keep my lower lip exactly where it was supposed to be.

“Uh-huh,” Starlight said, pulling my notes from the far table and arranging them into neat little stacks for me to take. “Sure you don’t.”

The grin she shot me I had once heard Applejack call “slappable,” and although I abhorred the idea of hurting my friends, I couldn’t disagree on a metaphorical level. Channeling that bit of Applejack, I gave her an eyebrow as I snatched my notes from her, reordered them to my liking, and led her out.

We took our session to the library. I appreciated the freedom the battery glyph gave us, but that constant magical hum bored into my thinking space and I had to get away from it if we were to really dig into this the way Starlight wanted.

“It’s crazy that just a bit of chalk can do so much,” Starlight said on our way there.

I tried my best not to wince. Yeah, about that…

I hated this glyph. I hated it. The magic was fantastic, no doubt, but… I couldn’t get past the fundamental truth of its creation. Just thinking about it made me queasy.

This wasn’t regular sidewalk chalk that foals played with. When it came to magic, that kind of chalk did quite literally nothing. The only “chalk” that had magic-conducting and magic-insulating properties was actually ground unicorn horn—donated by willing ponies, of course, after they passed. Like donating a heart or a kidney. Still, it didn’t make drawing out those lines any easier.

Starlight and Sunset had no idea, thankfully, but it didn’t get past Star Swirl. He recognized it the moment he first stepped through the door. That was… a long conversation he and I had later that night. After dealing with Starlight’s cutie mark magic, though, I believed he came to terms with this much easier. He’d… sobered up to our situation, and seeing the next shipment come from Celestia herself probably held a lot of water.

This was ethical gerrymandering at its finest. To call it anything else would be an insult to those generous enough to donate their bodies to science. But where this sort of magic was normally associated with the insane and occult, here, we used it for the safety of Equestria and the wider world beyond. I had to keep telling myself that.

“We’ll take whatever advantages we can get,” I said.

Spike had finished reshelving the returns sometime that morning, which gave me one less thing to worry about. I really had to give him a big Best Assistant Hug later. He’d always been instrumental to daily maintenance around the castle, but keeping up with it through this ordeal helped me stay focused and stop sweating the small stuff, as Applejack put it. Even with the fate of Equestria hanging in the balance, life still went on. And that meant ponies visiting the library to check out a book or two from time to time.

We set up camp in the back nook, where Luna had first found me and set this whole chain of events in motion. Call me a dreamer, but I liked to think that sort of full-circle poeticism applied to real life.

Or that was just confirmation bias working its evil machinations. Sometimes, it sucked being both a literary connoisseur and a science nut. Empirical evidence and literary synchronicity weren’t the best of friends.

I cuddled up beside Starlight to make use of her body heat. It was rather temperate outside for a fall morning, but the crystal castle tended toward the colder side, even in the summer months. Besides, I liked being near her. She had a certain gusto about her that I’ve tried absorbing via proximity over the years. Learning went both ways, and as a teacher I’d be a fool not to take advantage of that.

“Okay,” Starlight said, levitating a dozen books into an orbit around us. “So starting from the top, we’ve got a Mindtap Spell as the foundation for our spell. And we amplify the mental presence of the diver with a Clarity incantation.”

“Right,” I said. “Which is possible because we let the Mindtap bear the initial load of the cast before Clarity comes into the picture.”

I loved seeing her get like this. This deep thinking she did when we went over magical theory and spellcrafting. There wasn’t really another pony out there that was into this stuff like I was, minus Star Swirl of course. We were kindred souls on the quest for knowledge.

“And Waterwalking as a means of physically injecting the diver into the dream,” Starlight continued, “with the capacity to interact with it, but we maintain delineation by channeling the spells from different sources—Waterwalking from Star Swirl, Clarity from me—so that the magics only interact at discrete intervals, which you maintain by enforcing a steady state via the original Mindtap.”

“At a one-to-three ratio, yes. Still all correct.” I nodded my head along with her breakdown of our spell. By this point, every aspect of it seemed rote and ordinary. Foal’s play. I couldn’t see where she was having issues with the spell’s logic.

She tracked a particular sheet of looseleaf as it passed in front of us. “The spell itself is grounded in the diver’s cutie mark, which also acts as the anchor and where the spell actually takes place, because it’s the only part of a pony that can handle that kind of magical throughput without things getting all explodey.”

“Laymare’s terminology,” I said, “but yes.”

“Hey.” Starlight shot me a grin. “That’s how Sunset phrased it, and now I refuse to call it anything else.”

“Laymare’s terminology,” I reaffirmed with my own grin. “But yes.” We shared a laugh.

She leaned into me, and the weight as I pressed back was both reassuring and fulfilling. I could have stayed like that all day.

“And that’s… that’s the spell.” She tapped her hoof on the cover of a book in front of her while staring at the flurry of notes encircling us. “I just… I don’t know. It just feels off.”

“Care to explain?”

“That’s what I’ve been trying to find the words for… questioning everything we’ve done and have yet to do is… I, I just don’t want to sound stupid.”

“Starlight, there’s no such thing as a stupid question. And asking them doesn’t make you stupid. Asking questions is how we learn what we want to know and how we affirm what we do know.”

I caught myself frowning before she saw it, but I couldn’t shake the mood it put me in. How could she think that about herself? About asking questions?

Starlight scratched the back of her hoof, and she wore that slanted mouth that always worried me. “Like, are we sure it’s actually using the cutie mark, for instance?”

“It’s what all our research has so far pointed to. And you said it yourself when we were developing the concept. I don’t mean to dredge up the past, but you’re the cutie mark expert.”

No matter how gently I brought it up, Starlight winced as I said it, and I felt terrible. “I mean, I get that,” she said. “And I do think we exhausted every angle we could. But… what if that’s not how it works? Or if that’s not how it works anymore? What if there’s more to it than we thought or could possibly expect? How do we know for certain the spell’s contained solely within her cutie mark? How do we know it’s not flowing through all of Sunset’s body instead?”

I was silent for a moment.

We designed it to work within the confines of her cutie mark, but the truth was, we had no way of verifying that outside of things not “getting explodey” yet, as Starlight put it. The conclusion of our experiments determined that it did indeed originate there, but like she seemed to worry, it didn’t rule out the possibility of a metastasis of sorts.

But it worked, and as much as it went against all I knew as a scientist, working with multiple unknown variables was all we had. And if I were to allow myself that one kernel of hope, we didn’t have any evidence that disproved our theory.

“What about the Tantabus?” Starlight asked.

I blinked back to reality and focused on her words. “What about it?”

“Well, we thought it was the reason why she was so much better at dream diving than us, because it gave her some unknown connection to Luna. And maybe that was true initially, but she gave the Tantabus to the Nightmare a while ago, and her dreams have only been getting better and stronger and more vivid, if what she’s said tells us anything.”

“She’s in Luna’s dream with Luna. I admit I don’t understand it, but that’s all we have to go on.”

“Or maybe she’s getting better because she’s expanding her ability to utilize more than just her cutie mark?”

I got that uncomfortable, squirmy feeling in my gut like Starlight might be on to something. “She’d tell us, I’m sure.”

“It’s dream magic, Twilight. She might not even be aware of it, if that’s the case.”

I… that I couldn’t argue. The nuance of certain types of magic could be complicated enough before factoring in something as variable as consciousness. Dream magic still very much belonged to Luna and Luna alone. We knew very little about it.

Cutie marks, the Tantabus… so many variables we simply didn’t have the tools or understanding to figure out. Educated guesses were all we had to go by, and thank Celestia we’d been right enough so far.

It got me thinking about my own Tantabus that I apparently had inside me. I still didn’t know what to make of what Sunset said. I believed her, though. I couldn’t ignore my own fears, especially not while urging others to face theirs.

I had to face mine, too. I had to keep going, even with the looming, ever-present fear of making things worse.

“It’s gotten us this far,” I said. I swallowed and put my hoof on Starlight’s. “It’s the best we’ve got right now.”

“I’m just afraid that everything’s going to blow up in our faces sooner or later.”

And there I definitely had something reassuring to say. I smiled and squeezed her hoof. “Which is where your magic comes in. Just like we practiced.”

“But if it really is using more than just her cutie mark, I don’t know if my magic will end the spell.”

And there went the wind from my sails.

“I’m just…” Starlight sighed. “There’s just too many variables that we’re trying to tackle with hard science. Like you said, it’s gotten us this far, but I’m afraid we’re moments away from all Tartarus breaking loose.”

And as if her words were the law of some divine being, a deafening boom ripped through the castle and drove my ears flat against my skull. The windows shattered inward and rained down on us. I felt the tiny pricks against my skin before I found the presence of mind to throw up a bubble shield.

Starlight and I shared a horrified glance, and we booked it back to the portal room. The stink of burning rubber and ozone hit me like a brick wall as we burst through the double doors. My eyes watered from the intensity.

Star Swirl lay unmoving a good twenty feet from the glyph, and a glaring light whitewashed the room. What looked like a tree—pure white with the faintest hint of blue around the edges—had sprung forth from the glyph encircling Sunset and Luna. Except to my horror it wasn’t a tree. It was pure, unfiltered magic screaming, arcing, clawing out of whatever confines previously contained it.

“What’s going on!?” Starlight yelled. She ran to Star Swirl’s side to check him over.

Starlight had Star Swirl covered. I had to figure out what was going on with Sunset and Luna, but I had a horrible gut feeling I already knew.

The very Something we feared had happened—the Something we hadn’t planned for, the Something we knew nothing about.

We’d been spared an immediate backfire thanks only to the battery glyph, which seemed to be damming up the flow of magic. It wouldn’t hold long, though, judging by the glowing cracks spidering outward along the floor.

My mane flapped wildly around me in the hurricane winds as I struggled to get near. Errant bolts of magic tore scars along the crystal floor that I had to dodge or risk becoming a pylon and conducting all this rampant magic through me. I didn’t want to think about what that might do to myself or the castle.

Instead, I focused on Sunset and Luna. I had to get to them. I had to stop this.

I had to charge up a bubble shield to step over the glyph. The rampant magics warping around the shield turned bright green like copper ablating in a fire. Within the perimeter of the glyph, all was stunningly quiet.

“Twilight!” Starlight yelled as she slipped in behind me with her own shield. She seemed momentarily surprised by the silence, but regained herself.

We joined our shields into one, and she came in for a hug. Her coat was scorched down the side, the hairs around the edges still curling. The skin beneath looked ready to blister.

“Oh my gosh, are you alright?” I asked.

“I’m fine.”

“And Star Swirl?”

“Unconscious, but breathing. He’ll be fine, but we need to get a lid on this now.”

“Right,” I said. “Just… just stick to the plan.”

Just stick to the plan. Starlight was scared. It was written all over her face. But that was okay. I had faith where she didn’t. Everything would work out the way we planned. I believed in her, in us.

She closed her eyes and hefted her half of the bubble shield onto my shoulders, focusing all her attention on her cutie mark spell. Her mane went weightless in the latent magic, and for a moment, I held my breath. Sunset’s cutie mark took on Starlight’s spearmint-green hue and peeled away from her flank like a sticker. It floated aloft between us before popping out of existence, and…

And the storm continued.

“But…” I said. “But the spell—”

“Twilight,” Starlight said. There was fear in her eyes. “Forget the spell. Forget our plan. It’s just like I was saying. Somewhere, somehow, we were wrong! We were wrong the whole time. Our research, our hypothesis, all of it. The spell’s been using her as its anchor, not her cutie mark. I… I can’t stop this.”

No. No no no… This was all wrong. It shouldn’t be happening. It couldn’t be happening! We did the math. I did the math! I could hardly breathe.

“Twilight!”

“I know! I know!” How did we stop this? What kind of magic was this? Did I plop a Containment Spell down around them and hope for the best? But that would kill them…

And as if that wasn’t the worst thought to run through my mind in my lifetime, another reared its ugly head. Which was worse: them, or all of Ponyville?

I… I… No, I couldn’t let them down. They were counting on me.

I cast a quick Scrounging Spell to tap into the energies forking around us. If I were to undo this, I’d have to know what kind of magic it was first.

As I focused on the ebb and flow, I started picking up the loose threads. There was a pattern to it, as jumbled as it was, and—

Something touched my hoof. I gasped and jerked backward.

It was Sunset. She reached out again and rested her hoof against mine. Her eyes were cracked open, and she slowly raised her gaze toward me.

The spell wasn’t just falling apart. Sunset was waking up.

That was it. This rampant magic wasn’t just breaking the dream dive, it was piggybacking on Sunset’s Wake-Up Spell.

But that would mean…

The magic within the chalk circle crackled with lightning and bled outward like lava, forcing Starlight and I to huddle farther inward. It radiated an angelic white light, laced with threads that spanned the full spectrum of the rainbow. Outside the glyph, cracks spidered along the floor and snaked up the wall to catch a tapestry on fire.

I was petrified. Here on the precipice of a cataclysm, I didn’t know what to do.

I was terrified of making things worse, but doing nothing would be just as catastrophic. I remembered back to what Sunset told me. I had to be true to myself. I had to keep doing what I thought was right. Educated guesses were what got us this far, so I put my faith in Sunset’s wisdom and made another.

I knelt down beside her and lit my horn.

She put her hoof on my cheek, and I held it there, feeling the tears well up in my eyes.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered, and just as Sunset seemed to wake fully, I pressed my horn against hers and let the spell go.

Her eyes unfocused, and her face sagged as if all her energy melted away. She closed her eyes, and her hoof fell to the floor. The magic storming around us died away to leave me in a profound silence that seemed so distant yet so smothering.

Another hoof touched my shoulder—Starlight this time. She threw a hug around me and said words drowned out by an intense ringing in my ears. I felt what might have been her tears seeping into my coat.

Like the silence, she seemed so distant. Everything but Sunset seemed so distant.

Sunset. I couldn’t get it out of my head. I knew that look in her eye. It was the look of a mare begging for help, a mare that needed the comfort of somepony they trusted beyond any shadow of a doubt, a safety only I could give.

And I had cast her to the wolves.

XXXV - Stones and Shadows

That was the last time I let Twilight convince me to take a break.

What started as a mental relaxation exercise became “just a few minutes’ rest,” which became rolling out of bed to a dark room feeling like death warmed over. Oh well. All that meant was I’d get the portal room to myself for a healthy dose of graveyard shift, which I didn’t mind. Coffee was definitely on the menu at some point, though.

I strolled into the portal room to the immediate sound of shifting papers. Twilight sat hunched over the table in that way I had told her a million times was bad for her back. She’d have the posture of an old spinster by the age of thirty.

“Twilight? You’re still up?”

“Uh-huh.” She leafed to a new page of notes, not bothering to look up at me.

“Why? It’s…” I rubbed my eyes. It was almost midnight, wasn’t it? I didn’t fever-dream what my alarm clock said, did I? I trotted up beside her. “It’s late.”

“I know,” she said, and turned the page over.

I listened to the flutter of the page, oddly loud now that the persistent hum of the portal was elsewhere. After the whole almost-exploded-all-of-Ponyville incident, we figured moving it to the basement to avoid mixing magic was the least we could do. The room felt strangely empty without it lording over everything.

“My math was right,” she said after a moment’s silence.

“I believe you,” I said. “Really, I do. It’s just… We don’t know what happened.”

“Sunset woke up. She tried pulling herself from the dream, and something happened that changed the way her spell works, something that wasn’t her.”

The Nightmare. I didn’t need to say it aloud. The answer was written all over Twilight’s face.

“Sunset’s Wake-Up Spell works by attenuating the Waterwalking portion of the Dream Dive Spell until it can’t maintain its cyclical nature,” she said. “Like a satellite falling out of orbit. Whatever magic was piggybacking on her spell caused it to amplify instead.”

I glanced at the notes spread across the table, all the equations and graphs and even the little stick-figure caricatures Pinkie Pie had snuck in and drawn before Twilight chased her out.

Had we been manually powering the spell, would this have still happened? Worse yet, would compensating for the disruption have allowed Sunset to properly wake up? Would it have come out with her?

I stared at Sunset and Luna huddled together. Luna had draped a wing over Sunset sometime overnight. The sight would have brought a smile to my face if Sunset hadn’t twitched. I took a slow breath to keep a frown from showing on my face.

“What do you think they’re dreaming about?” Twilight asked in a hushed whisper. Her wings were plastered tight against her sides.

She’s fine until she isn’t, and you see that coming from a mile away.

I had so many words on the tip of my tongue, but I bit them back. They were the very same words spinning endless circles in Twilight’s head, but if I said them, she might actually try putting them into action, and we didn’t need a repeat of the other day.

“I don’t know,” I said.

We had spent the entire day redrawing and redoubling the battery glyph, or “séance circle,” as Twilight originally named it. I took to calling it that for her sake. It got a little smile out of her, and Celestia knew she needed that right now.

“They’ll be okay,” I said. “We just have to do our part, so they… so they can do theirs.”

I felt Twilight’s pained look as I stared into that circle, and a knot formed in my throat. It took all my willpower to not cry.

Twilight knew as well as I did what it really was. She wasn’t stupid.

After the spell fell apart, Sunset and Luna remained in Luna’s dream, just like we expected. But Twilight’s Sleep Spell had long since worn off. We didn’t actually need the glyph to power anything anymore.

The thickened chalk lines, the extra curves and interwoven segments… It wasn’t a battery anymore. It was a prison cell.

“We can’t just sit out here and do nothing, though,” she said.

“We aren’t doing nothing. We… we have to keep the circle working properly.”

Was that it? Was that why we stayed behind while they risked their lives? Was I really that afraid to admit what this was—a doomsday contingency, in case the impossible happened again?

That lightning storm that nearly took out Ponyville… The magic needed to pump out that kind of energy was beyond anything any of us had seen, Star Swirl included. If the Nightmare escaped wielding that kind of power, let’s just say there’d be a few sizable craters on the map before all was said and done.

But that was why we were doing what we were doing. So nothing else bad could happen—would happen—if there was a silver lining to all this. Which was good. I didn’t think Twilight could take any more bad things happening.

I saw the magic, I saw Twilight’s face after she cast the spell. After she… after she saved us. It was the face of a mare who had just driven a knife through her best friend’s heart.

The question she asked me a minute ago was the first thing out of her mouth since the incident. Honestly, I was just glad she showed up this morning. I’d welcomed many desperate ponies back in Our Town. Those that didn’t mesh found… alternative solutions to their problems that even Past Me couldn’t stomach stumbling upon the morning after.

I shook my head. Twilight didn’t deserve me thinking those thoughts right now.

“They’ve got this,” I said. “They’re both strong ponies. Stronger than we or they think.”

Those were Twilight’s words. She’d said them countless times during dream dives. Said them for our sakes, me and Star Swirl. If anypony needed to hear them now, though, she did.

“And if they don’t?” Twilight shook like a leaf in the wind. “If they aren’t?”

I put a hoof around her, and she leaned into me like a filly to her mother’s breast. “They’ll make it out.”

“They have to…” she said into my chest. Her tears stained through my coat as I brushed her mane.

I stared at the two of them lying huddled together. I put every ounce of courage I could gather into my voice.

“They will.”

We stayed like that for a good minute. I let Twilight hold me ’til she was ready, and she repaid me with a smile as she wiped away the tears.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I, I shouldn’t doubt them. Or us.”

“It’s okay. You’ve been working hard enough. You should get some rest.”

It took a moment, but Twilight nodded. She gave me a forlorn look, like she was about to say something to the contrary, but I cut her off.

“It’ll be okay. They’ll be fine, but you need sleep. I’ll finish up the last of today’s work, and we’ll get back to it in the morning.”

I held her gaze with what I hoped was an encouraging smile, and I eventually got another nod out of her.

“Okay,” she whispered. “You sure you’ll—”

I put a hoof up. “Twilight…”

That got a giggle out of her. “Okay. For real.”

We shared a hug, and Twilight headed out for an early night’s rest. Well okay, maybe not early, but rest all the same. It was a long minute I spent staring at the double doors before I found my train of thought.

Right. Now to re-up the outer lines of the battery glyph, tidy up all these notes Twilight had been poring over, and then go faceplant back into my pillow. With Star Swirl out of commission, organizing and making good on our work took a bit longer than she and I were used to.

That blast did a number on him. Thankfully, he was still in one piece, but a few days’ bedrest was what the doctor ordered, and I’d be damned if he didn’t keep his ass firmly planted in that bed until hale and hearty. Unfortunately, that meant more work for Twilight and me, but I’d gladly shoulder that burden over the alternative. I set to work in the quiet of the empty room.

To be honest, though, I preferred working alone. As much as I enjoyed the company of others, the years after Sunburst got his cutie mark taught me to cherish solitude. There was something about being alone with my thoughts that let me experience a level of freedom I couldn’t find anywhere else or with anypony else.

My friends were just that, friends, and I couldn’t live without them. But ponies were ponies. Judgement happened, whether we meant it to or not. I felt like I had to constantly keep my thoughts in check around others. But when I was alone, I could do and think what I wanted without feeling that pressure.

That wasn’t to say I thought or wanted to do horrible things. Just… the past never leaves us. Ponies change, yeah, but what we’ve done is etched in stone, and the shadows those stones cast stretch farther than most ever realize.

When I was alone, I could pretend my shadows didn’t exist. Sometimes, I’d even forget. But in a friendly place like Ponyville, solitude was short-lived, and there again that forever-lingering judgement reared its ugly head.

“Hey, Twilight?” Spike called from the hallway. The pitter patter of flat, scaly feet heralded his entrance through the double doors.

I took a slow breath through my nose. Speak of the devil, and he shall appear. I turned to greet Spike with a smile.

He steepled his claws in that cute way he did when unsure of himself. In line with that, he had his wings clamped against his sides.

“Oh, hey Starlight. Is, uh, Twilight here?” He glanced around for her.

“No, sorry. She went to bed a few minutes ago. Is it something I can help with?”

“I… yeah,” he said. “I mean, maybe. We have a visitor. She wants to speak with Twilight.”

I hadn’t heard it initially, because of Spike’s footsteps, but when he stepped aside, the sound of hooves echoed in behind him.

A cream-colored unicorn mare stepped through the door. She looked like a pin-up model I’d have expected in one of Rarity’s magazines, one of those leggy blondes that gave all the stallions rubberneck syndrome. But even though she had the looks and the posture, she had a strange aura about her, like a perpetual raincloud hung over her head.

Her eyes briefly landed on Sunset and Luna, and I swore she broke a little inside. She cleared her throat behind a hoof, and up went a smile that could have fooled Celestia herself.

“Um, hi,” I said. I stepped forward to shake her hoof. “I’m Starlight Glimmer. Twilight went to bed not too long ago, but I can still help. It’s nice to meet you. Uh, what’s your name?”

“Hi,” the mare said. She brushed a lock of her mane out of her eyes. “I-I’m Coppertone, Sunset’s friend. She told me about what’s going on. I want to help.”

XXXVII - A Strange but Welcome Lunch Date

I stayed at the castle that night. Starlight was kind enough to put me up in a spare bedroom. Crystal walls, silken sheets, the comfiest mattress that my younger self could have only dreamed of sleeping on. It was nice, I guess.

But that thought didn’t stick with me very long. Not many did these days.

When I woke the morning after, I lay there for who knew how long, idly swishing my hoof through the sheets, watching the creases and folds bunch and smooth out. The most luxurious bed in the most luxurious castle. And yet…

I reached over and pulled the other pillow close, breathed it in its scent. I could smell Sunset in the fabric. This was probably her bed. I wondered if Starlight meant for us to share a room, or if she had made a mistake—just another passing luxury.

Sunset…

She let me pretend. For just one night, it was real; she and I simply were.

I swished my hoof across the sheets again, smoothed out the creases, and stared at the other half of the bed for the make-believe that it was.

Like the pillows, like the sheets, just another passing luxury.

That thought dragged behind me like a ball and chain when I rolled out of bed to find Starlight. She’d said they always ate breakfast in the “map room,” wherever that was. Which actually wasn’t that hard to find, given the castle’s concentricity.

Concentricity. I sighed. That was a Sunset word. Leave it to the world-class fuck-up that I was to ruin my own day before it even started.

I nosed open the door to see a large round table in the middle of the room, surrounded by seven tall crystal chairs, each emblazoned with what looked like the cutie marks of Princess Twilight and her friends. Starlight sat at the one with a trio of apples set into the top, and she waved me over like a long-lost friend.

“Morning!” she said. She motioned at a stack of waffles on the table in front of her. “Help yourself. We’ve got plenty, and Spike’s making more as we speak.”

“Morning,” I said. “I appreciate it, but I-I’m not quite hungry. Is… Is Twilight around?”

“Uh, yeah? I mean, she should be. She’s normally awake by—” She started in realization, glared at the far left door, and stormed off. “Oh, she better not be…”

I didn’t know what to do other than follow, but I kept my distance. The words she muttered curled from her lips like dragon’s breath, and I didn’t want to be caught in the crossfire.

Starlight burst through the double doors Spike had led me to last night, and before even stepping inside, there she was: Sunset. She lay inside that strange chalk ring, intertwined as if in the throes of passion with… her.

Princess Luna. Nocturne. Whatever the fuck she wanted to call herself. She had draped a wing over Sunset sometime last night. I wanted to rip it off and beat her with it.

Sunset wasn't mine to love. She never was. But I couldn't help the indignant fire the sight stoked in my belly. After how that bitch tore our friendship apart—after what Sunset said she had done to her—how fucking dare she touch her.

“Twilight?” Starlight yelled at the mare slouched over a large table commanding the right half of the room. “What did we talk about last night?”

The figure sat up and turned, and it was indeed the Princess of Friendship herself, from what little I’d seen of her. She wore a tired, miserable expression, like she hadn’t slept in days. She turned back to the papers and charts and stuff scattered all over the table.

“I have to get her out,” she mumbled.

Get her out? My eyes snapped to Sunset, and I felt the panic rising up to grasp my heart like a gangly claw. Did something happen to Sunset? Did she do something?

I walked up to the chalk circle that enclosed Sunset and Princess Luna like some strange foal’s game of hopscotch. I did recognize some of the inscriptions as stuff from our old A-chem textbooks, but I couldn’t for the life of me guess what they meant anymore or how they were being put to use.

“Don’t step on that,” came Starlight’s voice from behind me. She had a hoof pointed at me. “That’ll seriously mess up your day. And you—” She turned back to Princess Twilight. “Did you sneak back down here after I went to bed this morning? You can’t keep working like this. You’re gonna fall apart, and then who’s going to save them? We’re already down Star Swirl for a few days. I’ll be damned if we’re down you, too, for even half that.”

“I’m not going to fall apart,” Princess Twilight snapped. “They need me. And I need to figure out what happened so we can keep it from happening again.”

Starlight put a hoof on Princess Twilight’s shoulder. “Twilight, I get that. I really do. But we need to keep ourselves healthy. I know you remember how Fluttershy almost killed herself helping Zecora.”

Princess Twilight said nothing.

“Twilight,” Starlight said. She put extra weight into her hoof. “You need to get out of this room.”

“Not until I—”

“Twilight,” Starlight said forcefully enough that even I jumped to attention. Softer: “Please. You’ve been working yourself to the bone. You can’t help them if you don’t help yourself. Just go get some breakfast at least. Spike made some amazing waffles.”

“I’m not hungry.”

That got a frown on Starlight’s face. “Well, if you won’t sleep and won’t eat, then would you at least go get some fresh air? Take a walk, go say hi to Applejack or somepony. Just…”

She turned to me with a smile far removed from her earlier, uh, rancor. “Would you mind taking her out for a walk or something? I know you want to help, and getting Twilight back in the right headspace would do us loads of good. Making a new friend will be better than me badgering her all day,” she added with a bit of emphasis and a pointed glare at Princess Twilight, “and I’ll still be here working on things.”

Princess Twilight answered her with an eye roll, but nevertheless got up and trundled for the door.

Starlight watched her go before leaning in to whisper: “She’s… under a lot of stress right now. We all are.”

I stared at Princess Twilight as she made it to the door, stopped, and turned to look at me. A war of emotions raged across her face, making it impossible to tell anything beyond the “this is a waste of time” she had already made clear. Part of me wanted to run back to bed and cower under the sheets, but another drew my eyes back to Sunset in the middle of the room, trapped inside that labyrinth of chalk.

It didn’t look like sleep. If anything, it looked like a magically induced coma.

I wanted to save Sunset from whatever was going on. I wanted to dive headlong into whatever fray there was to dive into, throw her over my shoulder, and claw our way back out. I would do whatever it took if it meant holding her in my hooves again.

But I had to stop being an emotional bitch. I had to be realistic, and that meant swallowing the lump in my throat, taking a deep breath, and smiling for the world. So I did just that.

“If it helps Princess Twilight help Sunset,” I said, “of course.”

Starlight smiled at me. “Thanks. You really don’t know how much it helps. Spike and I will be here when you two get back.”

Princess Twilight and I headed out amidst the bustle of the breakfast rush. It was overcast today, but that didn’t stop ponies from hitting the town. A dreary autumn morning might have made for a quiet wake-up, but Ponyville knew how to make the best of the crummy weather the local weather team loved drumming up.

The weather also did little to dampen their curiosity, I had to admit. As we passed through the town square, we got quite a few looks from passersby. I was used to frequent stares from practically every stallion and the occasional mare, but Princess Twilight really took the cake. She must not get out much, which tracked with my own rare sightings of her. Not that I myself got out enough to say for certain.

“So what did you want to do?” Twilight said. She had a stiff lilt to her voice—rote, mechanical words from a mind definitely still stuck in that room.

“How about waffles?” I said as we passed Flap Jack’s. I couldn’t blame her for thinking about Sunset, but Starlight entrusted me with cheering her up. Besides, my nose couldn’t say no to the sugary sweetness rolling out from the joint. “I, I kinda missed out on them back at the castle.”

She gave me a noncommittal shrug and turned in at the patio entrance.

It was one of those outside-only grill cafés that sported a large patio all done up with flower baskets along the perimeter fence, with red-and-white striped umbrellas shading half a dozen picnic benches. The perfect sort of breakfast spot for a sunny summer day. Of course, it was neither sunny nor summer, but a dreary autumn day was probably ideal. Cheery weather would have made me feel cheery, which in turn would circle back on the day before last and all its fuckups and now I was thinking about it. Fucking brain.

Smile for the world. A deep breath—in, then out—and I followed her in, sunshine and rainbows.

A mare greeted us at the gate with a smile and a sweep of her hoof toward the tables. “Welcome to Flap Jack’s! Have a seat. Your waiter will be with you shortly.”

We thanked her and picked an empty table toward the back left of the patio, nearest the grill. The glorious smell of pancakes and syrup rolled over us like ocean waves, and the sizzle-sear of freshly poured batter had my mouth watering like a Manehattan whore in a “toy” shop.

The waiter swung by and got our drink orders—a root beer for me, a coffee for Princess Twilight—and even still Princess Twilight had that absent dullness to her voice.

“So how do you know Sunset?” I asked. Bringing her up wasn’t the best way to get Princess Twilight’s mind off her, but I had to start somewhere.

“It… i-it’s a long story. One I’m honestly not sure if she’d want me to share.” She tapped her hoof on the table, her eyes wandering the tablemat’s criss-cross red-and-white stripes. “Uh, you two are friends, right?”

“Yeah. We both went to CSGU. We took A-chem together.”

That got her to perk her ears up. Of course it’d be some goofy science thing that got her attention. Beggars couldn’t be choosers, though.

I was about to segue into the many shenanigans we got up to in that class, but the waiter ground that train of thought to a halt by swinging around again for our breakfast orders. I could forgive that bright smile of hers, though. I’d always had a weak spot for purple eyes.

“I’ll take a Flap Jack’s Favorite,” I said.

“I’ll get the same,” Princess Twilight said without so much as glancing at the menu.

With a quick scribble on a little notepad, the waiter nodded and trotted off.

She was a pretty one. Had a youthful, energetic jaunt that flaunted her petiteness, and that messy bun of hers was definitely doing her plenty of favors. I caught myself watching her go longer than I should have and blinked back to reality, only to see Princess Twilight sporting her own thousand-yard stare somewhere in the marketplace behind me.

“Hey,” I said. I reached across the table and put my hoof on hers, gave it a gentle squeeze.

She looked at my hoof, then me with that stare. There was a sense of longing in her eyes, of searching for an answer to a question that possibly had none.

“You’re worried about her,” I said. “I am, too. And… I get that our worries will never be exactly the same, because we’re different ponies. But like Starlight said, you gotta keep your chin up. You can’t help her when you’re sulking like this. Nopony thinks straight when they’re that deep in their own head.”

I was one to talk, but I tried my best to put that aside so I could smile for the world and the mare who needed it most here and now. It took a moment, but I finally got that gentle return squeeze I was hoping for.

“It’s not just that she’s in there fighting while I’m stuck out here, it’s…” Princess Twilight’s eyes trailed off into the salt and pepper shakers huddled up against the table’s umbrella’s shaft. She sighed, and she brought a tiny smile up to meet me. “I’m sorry. You’re right. Starlight’s right. I needed to get out. Just like I needed that little break with Pinkie Pie that never actually became a real break. So thanks. I really would like to get to know you better.”

She pointed her ears toward me, and I took that as a sign that, at the very least, she was trying.

“My name is Twilight Sparkle,” she said, doubling down on that smile. “It’s nice to meet you.”

“I’m Coppertone,” I said. “Same.”

She pulled her hoof out from underneath mine, and I likewise retreated to my end of the table. “So how long have you lived in Ponyville?” she asked.

“About three years.”

“Really? I’m surprised I haven’t bumped into you, then. I honestly thought I’ve met everypony in town at least once by now.”

I shrugged. “I don’t get out much. Just kinda eat, sleep, work.”

I didn’t feel the need to mention Star Chaser in that formula.

And with that thought, it was my turn to take a tumble back down into the dumps. After the day before yesterday, that little voice in my head had gotten louder about how I’d fucked her over, and thinking about her now didn’t help me stay on track with Starlight’s request.

Twilight hadn’t seemed to notice yet, at least. She seemed too busy taking stock of me the longer we sat there. Studying, admiring. The little smile of hers got warmer with every passing second.

I knew what it meant, but I’d been used to it all my life. I was just a pretty face. That’s all I ever was. Only one pony saw me differently, and she was lying in a coma on the castle floor. I smiled back, if only to shove that thought down where it belonged, for Princess Twilight’s sake.

Smile for the world, and here we go.

“So what about you?” I asked. “I’ve only ever seen you a few times out and about. Always with your friends, traipsing off to prevent one cataclysm or another.”

That got a giggle out of her. “I wouldn’t exactly call it traipsing, but I wouldn’t be anything without my friends.”

So you could say being the Princess of Friendship comes with a few “benefits?” I almost said. Had it been Sunset in front of me, I wouldn’t have thought twice, but it wasn’t the sort of leap of faith I was comfortable making with a mare who seemed, for all intents and purposes, relatively uptight. Probably would have gotten me thrown in a dungeon or something, even.

But Sunset… She would have snorted in that adorable way of hers and probably thrown the paper from her straw at me. Her smile, though… I could imagine her smiling like there was no tomorrow.

“Coppertone?”

I blinked, and it was Princess Twilight sitting in front of me again. She had her mouth hooked in a little frown.

“Is everything okay?” she asked.

“Yeah, I, you know…” I sighed. Maybe giving her another problem to focus on would take her mind off things better. “I’ve just got a lot on my mind right now. Like, not this whole whatever-it-is you guys are doing. Just… relationship stuff.”

“Oh.” Twilight folded her ears back.

“I mean, we kinda broke up. In a bad way. I talked to her yesterday, and it… I don’t know. I never wanted to hurt her, but clearly that didn’t pan out. So we’ve, uh, broken it off officially. It’s better that way.”

Princess Twilight’s expression ran the gamut from defeat to concern to surprise to hopeful reservation hinted with a grain of shame. It was kinda funny, honestly, but I kept that to myself. It made me wonder if she even realized how transparent she was. She was an odd duck, at the very least. Most un-princessy princess I’d ever met, if I were to use Princess Celestia as the gold standard.

“I’m sorry.” Twilight began combing the back of her mane forward over her shoulder, taking a sudden, intense interest in her coffee mug. “What was her name?”

“Star Chaser,” I said, and I left it at that. Didn’t have the strength to say much else.

“She’s from Vanhoover,” Princess Twilight said, still staring into her coffee. “Used to work for—”

“Vanity Mare,” I said. “Yeah. Before moving here to get away from it.”

Most ponies got caught up in the glamor of modeling and the supposed highlife that came with it. What they didn’t realize was how skewed toward the top that lifestyle was, while the “mid-range” and “bottom-barrel” models got the leftover scraps. To make it big the way most fantasized, you had to sacrifice your dignity, among other things. The top-end models traded their innocence for a moment in the spotlight, only to find themselves tossed out the back door with the rest of the trash at their first grey hair.

It was such a disgustingly nepotistic industry devoid of morals and ethics. It sucked you dry and spit out your shriveled corpse. I was lucky to learn that before diving irreversibly into it. Star Chaser, not so much. And now, thanks to the living arrangements we decided for ourselves, she’d probably have to go back to that shithole of an industry. All thanks to me.

“I hope she’s feeling okay,” Princess Twilight said.

Yeah. I did, too.

“Are you sad you two broke up?” she continued after a moment.

Other than the whole bit where I emotionally and financially fucked her over? I shook my head.

“No, I’m… I’m glad. I mean, yes, I’m sad we broke up, but she deserves better than me. I was pretty horrible to her.”

“You? Horrible to somepony?” She wore a disbelieving frown. “You don’t seem like a horrible pony.”

“You’ve also never met me before,” I mumbled.

That seemed to cut deep. Princess Twilight laid her ears back and looked away.

“Everypony has their problems,” she said. “We’re not flawless.”

That got a weak but wry smile on my face. “We’re a work in progress.”

Princess Twilight snickered, and we both broke down into laughter. When I got control of myself, I leaned forward on the table and pointed a hoof at her.

“Now that little stunt I do remember,” I said. “You guys had the whole town bitching and moaning about something or other.”

Princess Twilight rolled her eyes. “Believe me, I remember it, too.”

We shared another laugh that ended in a contented sigh from both of us, and we let the conversations from the other tables take the reins.

The waiter came around with our plates, and I tucked in, if only to keep a sense of normality afloat to ride out the happy silence. Not to say I wasn’t hungry as hell, but I still had to keep my obligations front and center.

Twilight took to her meal with the same gusto, but I could tell by the way she folded her ears back that her mind was still stuck on something. Sunset did that a lot, and I’d be damned if I didn’t notice when somepony else did it, too.

I let it go, though. She kept a smile, her eyes bouncing from pony to pony around the café. Observing the friendships going on around us to distract herself, I bet. Those who were more than friends, too. Her smile turned wistful, and I couldn’t help feeling the same dregs collecting in the bottom of my heart.

“So what’re you into?” she asked, her eyes suddenly on me. Her ears stood at attention.

I considered the bite of waffle in my mouth and I figured that now, if ever, was the best time to poke some fun. I swallowed and gave her the slightest grin.

“What, you mean like kinks ’n shit?”

Oh, man, and I thought Sunset could look flustered, but this chick took home the gold. If the word “nope!” had a face, I’d be hers at this very moment.

Except maybe that was going a bit too far, if the way she wilted was any indication. Touchy subject? My brain wandered down the old dusty road of pointless musings, but stopped at the fork signposted “Foalhood trauma, left. Sexually frustrated, right.”

Now wasn’t the time for therapy, and Celestia knew I wasn’t qualified to dispense it. Still, I threw the elephant into the room. I had to at least try and drag it back out.

“Not your cup of tea, huh?” I smiled, hoping that would smooth over whatever speed bump I’d plowed through.

She started as if I had shouted, and she did that flitty thing with her wings a lot of pegasi did when flustered. A smile, a quick refolding of her wings, and the princess was back in the building.

“N-not really, no,” she said. “I’m… that’s more of a conversation for indoors than here.” She regarded the remainder of her waffles, but said nothing else.

A measured statement. Something I should have expected from a princess, no matter how un-princessy she was at heart. She had to maintain a certain level of formality, or else the public would eat her alive.

Behind that crown, though, there was a certain endearing quality to her. She reminded me of Sunset, back in our university days. It was… refreshing, in its own way. It felt normal, as abnormal as comparing them was. But none of that line of thinking.

I did my best to simply enjoy her company. I liked to think that I succeeded, and she looked much the same. The liveliness Starlight wanted me to draw out of her seemed very much at the forefront.

The smile on her face was genuine, at the very least. After a lifetime of getting hit on by thirsty colts and being the butt of many a mare’s jealous ideations, I knew fake smiles from real ones.

We went on about this and that—this one time something silly happened, schooltime shenanigans and whatnot. I was surprised to learn just how much of a nerd she was. After my experiences with Princess Celestia, “nerdy” was the last label I’d have expected to slap on a princess, despite how many preconceived notions she had broken.

I forgot about the worries of actually helping Princess Twilight. We were like two long-time pals shootin’ the shit. It was well past noon by the time we gave up our seats to the tail-end lunch rushers and moseyed back to the castle, taking the long way through town.

The weather team had cleared away most of the overcast to give Ponyville at least a little sunshine before the depressingly early autumn sunset. Still, as much as I hated the dreary weather, I enjoyed myself. It wasn’t until we got back into view of the castle that the melancholy settled back in the way I imagined knee pains did for old ponies when the weather changed.

We entered the portal room, and there she was lying on the floor. Oh, Sunset… I couldn’t take it. I couldn’t stand seeing her like this. It didn’t matter what Starlight said, I wanted to run over and hug her, hold her tight and never let go. I wanted to shake her awake and tell her everything was going to be okay.

This was wrong. The coma, the nightmare, all of it.

If only I had kissed her that day in the park, or told her how I felt back on our Manehattan vacation, all those years ago. None of this would have happened.

I would have given anything to see her smile right now, to just know she was alright.

But I couldn’t do that. That was just me being the stupid, emotional fuckup I’d always been. I’d only make things worse.

Twilight stared at the two of them much the same. She had her ears back, and her wingtips had slackened below the curve of her back.

I came up beside her and put a reassuring hoof on her shoulder. Smile for the world, and I said, “So how else can I help?”

Twilight looked at me, at them, then at her hooves. “It’d be best if I got you up to speed before anything else.”

She pulled her notes from the table, and she led me to the library.

XXXVIII - Heart to Heart

I was still rubbing the sleep from my eyes as I shuffled down the hallway the following morning. I felt like I rolled in one side of bed and right out the other. All-nighters I could handle—the staying up part, that was. In fact, I thrived on them. But the moment I laid down for some shut eye, I was one with my mattress, and Celestia help me if I didn’t get a full eight hours. Which was to say I needed all the help she could give and then some.

Nothing a hot cup of coffee couldn’t fix, thankfully.

I was pouring a greedy portion into my Best Princess mug, a gift from Starlight last Hearth’s Warming, when she trundled into the kitchen with her own fair share of sleep still bagged under her eyes.

She gave the mug a glance, then me a smile. “Morning.”

“Ughnn,” I said.

I took that first sip, and there it was… revitalization.

“Is it really that good?” Starlight said. She wore a mischievous grin as she opened the cupboard and pulled out a box of graham crackers. “I swear, that smile on your face almost looks like afterglow.”

And there it wasn’t. I was in the middle of my next sip when she decided to ruin the rest of my day. And by that, I meant she made me spew that second sip all over the counter.

To add insult to injury, she snickered at me the way I knew Trixie loved to behind my back. At least she had the decency to magic a napkin my way so I could wipe the dribble from my chin.

“Did you really have to go there?” I said, getting to the rest of the counter.

Starlight shrugged. “I don’t know. Our new friend’s been rubbing off on me a bit, I guess.”

“Coppertone? But she’s so… demure.”

“You’d think that from how she acted yesterday, but once you get to know her, she’s quite the firecracker.” She seemed to consider what she just said. “She and I hung out for a bit after you went to bed. Just, you know, chatting about stuff. She’s really snarky when she isn’t all… preoccupied.”

Preoccupied… That was a word for it. She practically wouldn’t take her eyes off Sunset while we were in the portal room. Celestia only knew what ran through her mind with a look like that on her face.

“She’s a friendship problem and a half, by the way,” Starlight said. She went rummaging through the cabinets and came out with a box of cereal, because the graham crackers weren’t enough, apparently. “She’s got enough baggage to fill a train car. You’ll wanna work your Princess of Friendship magic on her soon.”

I rolled my eyes at her phrasing. I knew she meant well, but the way she said it came across as dismissive. Still, Starlight wasn’t wrong. Coppertone certainly had her own assortment of issues she needed to address. Between her talks of Star Chaser, the way she watched Sunset last night, and Sunset not coming back the night before last, I had a few guesses as to what went wrong. And, uh, the sleeping arrangements we made for her probably didn’t help.

She stayed in the guest bedroom again. We didn’t tell her it was the same one Sunset used. Starlight hadn’t realized that little slip-up in logistics when she first let her stay the night before, and by now it would be, one, weird to tell her to move rooms, and two, awkward if she knew why. Besides… i-it was one less bed Spike had to make, and he was already busy enough dealing with both his own workload and the one I shirked for the sake of the whole Nightmare deal. It was more efficient that way, right?

There was an idiom about devils and appearing that my brain was still too sleepy to remember verbatim, but Coppertone stepped in, quiet as a mouse all the same. She had a wistful, contemplative look in her eyes.

“How’d you sleep?” I asked with a smile. It didn’t have a perfect track record, but a happy good morning usually did well in setting my friends on the right track to an actual good morning, no matter the circumstances. Giving my friends a smile was like finding north on a compass.

“It’s Sunset’s bed, isn’t it?” she asked at length, and my blood ran cold. “It smells like her.”

I… I didn’t know what to say. That was the last thing I expected her to lead with, and just as much a damning statement for our oversight. I clicked my mouth shut to keep from looking like an idiot and scrambled for words, not that any would suffice.

“Thanks,” she said before I could process a reply, and a little smile crooked the corner of her mouth.

And I still didn’t know what to say. Starlight sure as heck didn’t either, the way she was staring like a rabbit before a wolf. But if it made her feel better, then no harm no foul? Words still didn’t find me, and so I went in for a hug in hopes of sending a message words never could.

She accepted it, but in that stiff sort of way one does when they’re unsure what they should be feeling. Her smile persisted, at least, and the look in her eyes finally got the jumbled words at the back of my throat in order.

“We’re happy to have you,” I said. “No matter the circumstances, and I’m glad you’re happy, too.”

She looked away. I could tell I made her uncomfortable, but I knew in her situation that was a necessary first step in moving forward. Step two was the more genuine smile she brought back around to me, and step three was the words she said next:

“Let’s get to it, then?”

• • •

We spent the next thirty minutes reorganizing our notes and setting up a fresh study space. With our, um… mishap with the cutie mark grounding theory, we cottoned onto the idea of using grounding crystals the way we… the way we should have from the get-go. Given how much of the spell relied on Starlight’s modifications based on cutie marks, that meant we had to effectively scrap the entirety of the spell. Not that we hadn’t learned anything from our first go—we learned quite a lot, actually—but we confirmed we were playing with a fire we didn’t know how to contain.

To say Starlight was morose about it would be putting it lightly. Truth be told, she bore the turn of events heavily on her shoulders, almost as much as I did, which honestly wasn’t fair to her. We all knew what we were getting into, and I… she wasn’t the one who locked Sunset in there.

I shut down that train of thought before it left the station. I didn’t need that right now, and the others didn’t deserve that from me. Sunset didn’t deserve that from me.

We had a new direction now: reconfigure the Dream Dive Spell in order to integrate it into the battery glyph, which quickly became a tangled mess of equations and double- and triple-checking those equations, while I let Coppertone redo the chalk lines.

I didn’t tell her or Starlight, but I had Spike do some digging yesterday before bed. He was kind enough to send Princess Celestia a letter and get me Coppertone’s school transcripts. It wasn’t that I didn’t trust her to be an asset to the team—anypony can be an asset to any team if they put their heart into a project—but I wanted to know her strengths and weaknesses and where she’d fit best.

She did well in her first two academic years. I expected nothing less from somepony who attended CSGU, but I was interested specifically in her Arcanonaturamancology grades. She had barely scraped through her first semester with a 42%, but then suddenly dropped out of not only Arcanonaturamancology II, but CSGU entirely.

To say I wasn’t concerned with the implications there would be a lie. Still, she passed the first semester, and with an 85% failure rate, that was an achievement all its own. I’d just have to ask her what happened between then and now, when the time was right.

For the moment, she seemed to be throwing herself headlong into redrawing the glyph. Her lines were clean and professional, and she made good on consistently referencing the notes splayed out beside her.

She had a scholarly look about her that I couldn’t help admiring. That intense focus, the crease in her brow. And if I had to admit it, she was… aesthetically pleasing to look at.

She even smelled pretty. Coconut, I was pretty sure. She had enough mane to empty a bottle in a week, no doubt, but I wasn’t complaining. The way it fell in effortless curls around her shoulders would have even Rarity grumbling behind her back.

Starlight caught me staring and gave me one of those raised eyebrow looks of hers. A little smirk formed on her lips.

“What?” I said.

“Nothing.” She left it at that, busying herself with her half of the notes we’d worked up.

That little smirk of hers lingered as if I weren’t in on the joke. Probably something inappropriate, like the ones Rainbow Dash and Applejack loved throwing back and forth. The thought of bringing it up in front of Coppertone didn't sit well with me, so I let it lie for when we had a moment alone.

Starlight and I were about halfway through reordering the energy ratios of the Waterwalking and Clarity Spells when somepony cleared their throat behind me.

Coppertone stood about two feet away, levitating my notebook beside her. “Princess Twilight? I have a question.”

“Sure, what do you need?” I turned around fully to see which page she might be referring to.

“I just wanted to make sure I have this right. Drawing’s easy enough, but Abjuration magic isn’t my best subject.”

“You know,” Starlight said, “speaking of best subjects and all… I, I think I forgot something, over in, um… somewhere. I’ll, uh, be back in a bit.” She zipped out the door, making a show of closing it behind herself.

Well what the hay was that about? If she needed to duck out for a minute all she had to do was say so. She didn’t need to make up an excuse.

Whatever. I needed a break from that smirk of hers, anyway.

I turned back to Coppertone. “So, you were saying…”

She was staring at Sunset. She maintained a level of stoicism, but it didn’t take much to see her writhing on the inside, like a worm trying to escape the rotten core of an apple.

Why was everypony always wearing masks around here? This was a time of struggle, sure, and we all needed to be brave for one another. But hiding our fears and our hurts only let them fester.

I wanted to reach out to her, hold her, just let her know she wasn’t alone. But I didn’t know how much would be too much, or what might come across as affection, which added its own set of issues to a mare staring longingly at somepony else.

“I’m sorry,” she said when she noticed me staring. “I’m just… having a hard time. She’s right there…”

“And yet she isn’t,” I finished. “I know.”

We sat in silence for a moment. I didn’t have the heart or the headspace to keep at the formula like this.

“She’ll be okay, though,” I said at length. “She’s with Princess Luna. She’ll keep Sunset safe.”

The pain warring across Coppertone’s face twisted into a mixture of disgust and disbelief, and she aimed it at me. “How the fuck can you say that? ‘She’ll keep her safe?’ Are you for real?”

She pointed a hoof at Princess Luna. “You know who that is, right? Princess Luna. Nightmare Moon, Nocturne, whatever the fuck name you want to use. It’s still her. She’s the one who caused all this. All of it. How can you be so hopeful and up-beat that she’s locked in there alone with Sunset? Like she didn’t fucking rape her?”

She laughed in that weak, breathless way one did when unable to emotionally comprehend something.

“You know that’s what she did to her, right?” She jabbed her hoof at Princess Luna. “That’s what that fucking cunt right there did to her. W-with her hooves, or-or or her fucking mane or whatever the fuck, I don’t know. It makes me sick just thinking about it. But now they're in there together doing Celestia knows what, and we’re supposed to just pretend like that didn’t happen? Are you fucking kidding me?

“The only reason I haven't said anything until now is because I trust Sunset.” She placed her hoof against her heart. “I trust that she knows what she’s doing. But I just… This is so absolutely fucked and I can’t stand it. I can’t stand seeing them like this. Seeing Sunset like this, with… her.”

I lowered my gaze to the floor, and a strange mixture of emotion I could only rightly call shame welled up inside me. Shame for facilitating this, shame for not knowing how to feel, shame for a lot of things.

“I get it. It’s… just about as un-ideal a situation as anypony could ask for. Sunset… Sunset told me, too. What Princess Luna did. And I hate it. I hate that it wasn't just some silly misunderstanding, some… little argument or disagreement that they couldn't just talk out. Really, it’s out of my league to arbitrate.

“And same as you, I also trust Sunset. That she knows what she’s doing. But… I trust Princess Luna, too, as wrong as that might sound. I…” I felt my mouth hang open as I grasped for words, but I knew the feeling in my heart and the utter insufficiency of language to impart it.

“I’ve seen the goodness in her,” I continued. “All the good that Luna has done since coming back from the moon. I saw the Elements. I-I was the Elements. I saw and felt the anger and resentment and, a-and… vengeance stripped away from her, to leave her how she was before. In that moment, I saw true clarity return to her. She…”

I shook my head, and an uncomfortable weight seemed to press down on my shoulders. The weight of contradicting ideals and the shame of not knowing how to process them.

“I saw the Tantabus and the crushing guilt she has for every single evil she did in the past. And… I get that guilt is no equivalent to justice, but it’s the first of many steps to atonement. And she’s trying. She really is. She’s striven every day since the moment I’ve met her for exactly that.

“I’m not stupid enough to believe that there’s any way for her to fully make up for what she did to Sunset. Not on a personal level. What she did to Sunset was beyond evil. But all the good she’s done since still counts for something. It… it has to.” A cold tingle worked its way down my spine, and I wanted more than anything to not stare down this dragon of a moral dilemma. “How much, though… I feel like that’s only for Sunset to say. I’m… I really don’t know what to do in this situation, other than just… move forward. I really don’t.”

“I’ll tell you what you do,” Coppertone said. She trembled as the emotions warred across her face—anger mixed with pain mixed with sadness. Tears beaded in the corners of her eyes, and still that trembling threatened to have her collapse into a sobbing mess. “You give me a fucking baseball bat. That thing can't come out if she's dead, right? If she wants to be a hero, then I'll make her a fucking hero.”

Her voice sounded like a pane of glass ready to shatter if I touched it. “After everything she did to Sunset…”

The longer I watched her, the more I couldn't deny the emotions shoring up on the other side of the mask she tried to sell. I knew that look on her face. It didn’t take a social genius like Rarity to understand.

“You love her,” I said. “Don’t you?”

She held her gaze on Sunset for the longest second before slowly, resignedly, shaking her head, as if any faster might slip loose the mask from her face. Her voice came out as a broken whisper.

“That doesn’t matter…”

I laid my ears back, and all I could do was drown in the heartbreak seeping out from behind that mask.

I had never fallen in love before, not the kind romanticized by the back half of the library’s fiction section, anyway. Mild attractions and platonic gravitations came and went, but never anything to the extent playing out before my very eyes. My heart reached out to her, but at the same time, an unfamiliar nervousness pulled back on the reins.

“What matters is that this shouldn’t have happened,” she said. Her breath hitched, and she shakily sucked in another. “None of this should have…”

Another moment of silence followed on the coattails of that sentiment. It felt… suffocating, just watching her gaze into whatever memory captivated her so. The look on her face was almost haunting. For all I knew, it haunted her.

“When she and I…” Copper swallowed, but it didn’t seem the lump went down. “When we had our fight, she said that I was always putting her down and taking up the spotlight. But I wasn’t, or at least… I wasn't trying to. But… It doesn’t fucking matter what I think.

“I just… part of me always wonders. I-I have this sick feeling in the pit of my stomach every time I think about it. That, like, by being my stupid bullshit self, I somehow caused this. That everything Sunset hated about me gave her just enough reason to open up to that bitch. That I pushed Sunset into trusting her by not being good enough of a friend.”

Copper laughed weakly and shook her head. Her eyes misted over, and I knew in that moment that I watched a mare’s heart break before my eyes.

“‘She was patient and kind,’ she said. And I…” The crease in her brow told its own story of self-loathing, but whatever words it heralded died in her throat. She squeezed her eyes shut and collapsed in on herself.

She stayed like that for a little while, and so did I. I didn’t have the heart to trespass on those emotions. I really didn’t know what to do.

Hesitantly, I put a hoof on her shoulder. I felt comfortable enough doing that much.

“It’s not your fault, Copper. What happened to Sunset is not your fault.”

Copper let out a little chuckle. She closed her eyes and reclined her head. Again with the mask, by way of a sour smile on her lips, she whispered: “It’s not my fault… I wish that was the truth. I want to believe that was the truth. Because I’m not the one who manipulated her and then used her like a two-bit whore.”

She brought her gaze down to me, and in her eyes I saw the tears of countless regrets. “But I am the one who didn’t stop it in time when I had the chance. I didn’t see what was happening until it was too late. It all happened because I let it, because I was too fucking stupid to take her little gripes seriously, because I didn’t just fucking grow a pair and tell her those three godforsaken words, and you can’t tell me I’m wrong.”

I… I kept my mouth shut. It wasn’t my place to affirm or deny that, no matter how much I wanted to question the veracity of it. Some regrets we couldn’t help others through. They had to come to terms with them on their own, so I let her continue:

“I don’t know what would have happened between us if I was any less of a piece of shit, but I know it wouldn’t be”—she gestured helplessly at the entirety of Sunset, Luna, and the glyph—“this.”

She let out a breathless laugh and wiped her eyes. “But I finally did. And now look at her.”

It’s not your fault jumped back to the forefront of my mind. I beat that toxic phrase down before it could escape again. It was a sentiment I’d tried expressing, but I clearly fumbled it. I should have known better than to downplay how she felt. We all experienced our own feelings in our own ways. I’d be wrong to tell her otherwise, and so I came at it from a different angle:

“We’ll get her ou—”

“I almost killed myself.” She said it so simply, so matter-of-factly that it didn’t register at first. But the far-off look in her eye and the pain knitting her brow told a different story. “Back when she first ran off. I almost did the other day, too, after she left.”

The hairs on my nape bristled instinctively. “Nopony should ever feel like they have to do that. Everypony is special and unique. Equestria wouldn’t be the same without each and every one of us.”

“Including her?” Copper said, eyes on Princess Luna, and I… I didn't know how to respond to that, so she let out a weak laugh and continued: “Of course you’d think so… You’re a princess. Everything’s sunshine and rainbows for you.”

That got a scowl going on my face real quick. “Excuse you, but that is, first off, extremely rude, second, awfully presumptuous regarding me, and three, insinuating that of Princess Luna is a dangerously loaded statement.”

She didn’t back down when I raised my voice. Rather, she pointed her ears forward, and the look in her eyes poised a question like a sword held up to my throat:

Yes, and?

I again felt the hairs on the nape of my neck stand on end. There was power in that stare, power in the anger and frustration and misery finally spilled forth for the world to lay bare that simple yet defiant question. More accurately, it prompted a very uncomfortable truth in my own mental wanderings since this whole situation spiraled so wildly out of control.

Yes, and? Yes, and hadn’t you, Twilight Sparkle, Princess of Friendship, pondered this very same question? Yes, and hadn’t you followed that hypothetical to its logical conclusion? Yes, and hadn’t that little thought wriggled the tiniest bit in the back of your head every time you looked at her? Every time you had to move her wing to draw a line? To fix a pillow under her chin? To sit and work quietly in that room knowing exactly what she did and whom she did it to?

Yes, and so the question remained. Copper’s eyes were still on me, and as one second became two became three, I felt myself withering beneath her stare.

I sighed. “You’re right. I’m the Princess of Friendship. I… I can’t ignore a certain degree of separation from some of the harsher realities other ponies face. I deal with friendship problems, not—” I gestured vaguely at Sunset and Luna. “This is… this is a whole lot more than a friendship problem.

“But I am the Princess of Friendship, and…” And I heard Sunset’s wisdom once again ring true in my ears, just strong enough to bring my ears around and to look Copper in the eye. “And that means I am for a reason. Because for better or worse, I’m trying. Because I’m trying to understand in the face of something that terrifies me. Because I’m here trying to be the friend Sunset deserves. Because… I’m trying to be worthy of her friendship.”

At that, all the vitriol Copper had leveled my way sloughed from her face. Her ears, at first pointed at me like daggers, swiveled back, and she broke off her gaze to search for some semblance of composure in the cracks along the floor. The sight got my heart squirming in my chest.

I could tell commiseration when I saw it.

No matter the direction of the conversation, no matter the sharpness of her tongue or opinions, right now, Copper needed somepony to talk to. She needed to let the hurt out. She needed to let the healing in. Simply, she needed a friend. So I latched onto that sentiment, let it guide me, and threaded a hopeful smile across my face.

“And I’m trying to be worthy of yours,” I continued, putting a hoof on her shoulder. “Because no, you should never have to feel like you need to do that to yourself. You are special and unique. Nothing can take that away from you.”

I caught her staring at Princess Luna, but she didn’t say anything. Instead, she shrunk in on herself, ground the sides of her hooves together. The words on the tip of her tongue had her pinning her ears flat against her skull.

“You don’t know what I’ve done,” she whispered. “To Star Chaser.”

“Copper, there’s…” I glanced at Princess Luna, then back to her. “There’s nothing you’ve done that can’t be forgiven. Nothing.”

Her lip quivered, and her eyes roved around the room before settling on my hooves. She took a deep, shuddering breath.

“I didn’t tell you what happened between me and Star Chaser.”

“You said it was a bad breakup.”

She laughed, but the smile that came with it petered out until only the scars of a painful memory remained. “Yeah, but it’s not about the breakup. It’s about everything else.

“I know I already said it, but… I’m in love with Sunset. I always have been from the moment I first met her. And that… that never changed, even while I was dating Star Chaser.” She stared through me, as if trying to process the words coming out of her mouth, like she couldn’t believe them herself.

“It started out innocent. One day she dyed her mane red for a photoshoot. Another day, she styled it short and wavy on a whim. That fucking daffodil pendant I just happened to find at the craft fair and had to get for her. And so many other little things. Little by little, I… I twisted her. With every little thing that remotely reminded me of Sunset. I destroyed who she was and stuffed her into a box she could never fit into for my own selfish lovesick bullshit.

“And I knew.” She swallowed, and her breath hitched. “I knew what I was doing, but I did it anyway. I let it consume me like this… this… thing, where if I could just make her… close enough…

“And do you know what happened then? When Sunset waltzed back into my life two days ago, and I finally had the real thing right in front of me again? The real Sunset that I’ve been yearning for all my life?” She let out a broken laugh, and the tears started down her cheeks. “I fucking threw her away. I threw Star Chaser out with the garbage, so that for a single goddamn night, I could pretend. I could pretend that I was happy.”

She laughed again, because that was all she could do. “And I even said that: just let me pretend, even after Sunset rejected me.

“I said it knowing exactly what it really meant. I knew what I was doing, what it would do to Star Chaser.” She looked like she was going to throw up. “And I did it anyway.”

She stared at me with teary eyes, and I was again faced with the terrifying truth that I was way out of my depth.

“You know the worst part about it? I talked to her the day after—to Star Chaser. And you know what she did?” She shook her head and threw her hooves up in defeat. “She forgave me. Just like that. She wanted to act like nothing happened, like I didn’t just try to fuck Sunset in the other room while she was lying awake in bed listening. She begged me to let us go back to how we were, because living that lie was somehow better than admitting it was one in the first place.

“And I actually thought about it, and it makes my skin crawl that I could even remotely consider that.” She hugged herself tight until her hooves dug into her coat. I was worried I would have to stop her before she started bleeding. “I don’t deserve that. I don’t deserve her forgiveness. I didn’t even deserve her in the first place, because she wasn’t the one I was trying to love.

“What I deserve is to die, for someone to just… off me, or, or turn me to stone and make a statue out of me so that I can at least effect some positive change in the world. Don’t be like this fucking piece of shit or you’ll hate yourself ’til the day you die. But I don’t deserve to make that choice myself. I don’t deserve the easy way out of this fucking mess of a life I’ve lived.”

The tears kept coming, and she kept laughing in that breathless defeated manner that had me terrified she might do something drastic. “And really, that’s the only thing that kept me from doing it. I can’t even justify that I just… stop existing, so that I can stop fucking up everything I touch.

“So please. Please, Princess. Tell me how. How did I let myself become so fucked in the head that just being gay isn’t enough? How could I do something like that to somepony who loved me? Who thought the absolute world of me? How could I twist them into a mockery of another pony just so I could pretend my life wasn’t falling apart?”

She shook her head and glanced at Princess Luna. “That’s not love. That’s a monster. I’m a monster. Just like her.”

I didn’t know much about love, but I did know about ponies, and I liked to think I had catalogued enough lessons on forgiveness to have a say in the matter. It and communication were the foundations of friendship.

“No,” I said. “First off, you don’t deserve to die. Nopony…”

As the words tried rolling off my tongue, that little thought wriggled the tiniest bit in the back of my head: Yes, and?

The neurotic side of my brain wanted to follow that tangent off into infinity, but Copper didn’t deserve that from me. I took a deep breath to tamp down the tightness in my chest and focused on her.

“There are some wayward souls out there, but I can say without a shadow of a doubt that you’re not one of them.”

“You might think that, but it doesn’t change how I feel…” She gave a defeated laugh. “I know how it works. You say the things that you think I want to hear. ‘You matter.’ ‘You’re special.’”

She shook her head wistfully. “I hate myself. I have for as long as I can remember. I don’t want to, but I can’t help the way I am.”

“Well, the way you are seems pretty normal to me. We all have our issues we work through every day. Some are different than others.”

She shook her head and looked down. “There’s no such thing as normal.”

“Even if there isn’t, that doesn’t make any non-normal pony wrong or abnormal. It just makes us, us.”

She let the silence fill in a gap in conversation, her eyes trained on her hooftip as she traced idle circles along the floor. Her lip twitched upward for the briefest smile.

“Do you hate yourself, too, Princess?”

“I…” How was I supposed to respond to that? I’d felt embarrassed and ashamed many times for the many stupid and shortsighted things I’ve done and the mistakes I’ve made. Outright hate myself, though? That was a little extreme.

“I don’t think comparing you and me is the right way to go about it,” I said. “You’re you and I’m me, and like I said, we each have completely different lives and problems that go in them. But… I am who I am, and I don’t see anything wrong with that.”

That exasperated laugh of hers broke through again. She sniffled and wiped her nose with the back of her hoof. This time, though, the broken smile on her face seemed at least a little genuine, if not fully.

“I wish I could be like you. I wish I could just… be happy with myself. But I’m not. I’m a useless, fucked-up waste of space whose last reason to live is lying right there on the goddamn floor.” She pointed at Sunset before letting out another breathless laugh. “And now I don’t even have that.

“What am I supposed to do with myself now?” she said. “Where am I supposed to go from here?”

I tried my hardest not to shrug. I really didn’t have a good answer for her.

“Sometimes, life simply happens in a way we don’t want or can’t account for,” I said. “All we can do is try our best to make the right choices along the way.”

She brushed her mane behind her ear and sniffled. “Then what am I supposed to do when my heart tells me the only right choice is the one that I know is wrong?”

“That, I… I don’t know.”

“But you’re the Princess of Friendship,” she said. She was choking up. She tried her hardest to keep it in, but every dam could only hold back so much. “If anypony in the world can figure out what the fuck is wrong with me, it’s you.”

Actually, that was more a Cadance question, but that was beside the point. The course of this conversation had merely proven an earlier truth I had pieced together. Copper didn’t need love advice. She needed validation. She needed to understand she was worth more than what she saw in herself and the level of dignity and life issues she attributed to her sexual orientation. Because she was worth more than that. Anypony with two eyes and a heart would say the same. How to word it eluded me, but that didn’t excuse me from trying.

“I, I don’t know what to say, Copper. I really don’t… I haven’t been in your shoes, I haven’t lived your life. But I hate seeing ponies hurt the way you do, and while I want to help, I can’t. That has to come from inside.

“So no. I don’t know what you should do. But if I were you, I’d start by telling myself that I’m not a monster.”

I pressed my hoof against her chest and looked her dead in the eye. I tried so desperately to impart the feelings in my heart with that one look and said, “Because you are not a monster.”

With that, her trembling became too much, and she broke down sobbing into my chest. Her warm tears stained through my coat.

“I don’t want to hurt anymore,” she said.

I didn’t know what to say, so I simply held her. A lump formed in my throat, but I did my best to be the rock she needed. I gently swayed back and forth, rubbing her back the same way Mom used to do for me as a foal.

We stayed like that for more than a few minutes. I didn’t bother counting. I would have stayed like that for weeks if she needed me to.

Eventually, she got it all out and pulled away. She wiped her eyes and sucked in a long breath through her nose.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “You don’t deserve this from me. I just want everypony to be happy, but I’ve only ever broken everypony I touch.”

I offered her a smile. “Well, you’ve been hugging me for at least five minutes, and I’m still in one piece.”

She didn’t have the emotional faculties to laugh the way I had hoped, but she did smile, however tiny it was, and I took the opportunity to follow through on my earlier sentiment.

“It’s not a matter of whether or not I deserve to deal with your struggles,” I said. “It’s a matter of whether or not I want to help, which I do. Because believe it or not, you are special, and you do matter to ponies out there.” I nodded at Sunset, then flitted my wings to indicate myself. “To ponies right here.”

I took her hooves in mine and looked her in the eye. “You matter to me. Whether you think you deserve it or not. And no matter what you might be going through, you’re not alone.”

She laughed breathlessly again and wiped her eyes. They were puffy from crying, but that didn’t stop her little smile from being the most beautiful thing I’d seen all week.

“Goddamn it,” she whispered. “I’m such a fucking mess.”

“We all have bad days,” I said.

She let out another laugh and wiped her nose with the back of her hoof. “Some of us more than others, clearly.”

I laughed with her. It felt appropriate to let her have at least that little self-jab, but I circled us back emotionally with a squeeze of her hooves.

“Thank you for sharing that with me,” I said. “I don’t know what it feels like to go through what you are, but it takes a lot of courage to open up about those kinds of feelings. And I hope that me listening helped.”

“Yeah…” She brushed her mane out of her face, sniffled, looked everywhere in the room but me, and then nodded. “Yeah.”

She shuffled past me for the door. “I, I should go clean myself up.”

“I’ll be right here when you come back,” I said.

The door closed, and an unsettling dread crept in with the newfound silence.

So much hardship, so many ponies hurt by this singular event—one great splash in the ocean of life. How far did the waves spread? How many more ponies would they send under the surface?

The question brought my eyes around to Sunset, then, eventually, Princess Luna. I lingered there, and the longer I stared, the more I couldn’t stand it anymore. As Princess of Friendship, I did my due diligence focusing on Copper first and foremost. But now that I stood alone in the portal room with the dregs of our conversation collecting in the bottom of my heart, I couldn’t refrain any longer.

“Why…?”

I searched Luna’s face for an answer, as childish a hope as that was. And like a child, I nevertheless waited. Silence begot silence, and the little threads that made up the tapestry of Luna in my mind led me back to the beginning, to that fateful moment in Castle Everfree. Feeling the Spark. Becoming the Elements—washing over her, stripping away the evil until only the good and pure remained.

I knew what I saw. I knew what I felt. My friends and I turned her back to good. But…

Yes, and?

“I looked up to you…”

And on the wings of that broken statement, silence. So I put my childish hopes to bed with a sigh. Best get back to work.

I had the room to myself for about another quarter hour. Just me, my notes, and the ever-present glyph dominating the center of this room.

It was… therapeutic. I didn’t get moments like this to myself much anymore. It was always arbitrate this or delegate that. Princess things.

I didn’t mind them, but “me time” had become a scarce commodity I made sure to cherish, and what better way than to look over Copper’s notes?

They were, truthfully, my notes, but she had taken to scribbling in the margins—facts worth double-checking later and the like. Her horn script was impeccable. I stopped short simply admiring it.

I had never seen cursive that perfect before, not even in the Canterlot Library’s pre-classical texts that were the literal lifeblood of many a sorcerer’s career. I didn’t have to squint or look at it sideways or anything like when reading Starlight’s notes.

It was beautiful. As beautiful as… as she was, to be honest.

There was nothing wrong with thinking that. Ponies needed to be reminded they were pretty every once in a while, and I was allowed to think that of them. Empirical evidence is as empirical evidence does. In that regard, all my friends were beautiful in their own way, physically or otherwise.

It’s just, none of them had an affinity for magic the way she did, other than Starlight or Sunset. It was rare for a scholar to be both, well, scholarly, and artistic. They were simply two skill sets on entirely different ends of the professional spectrum.

It was impressive to say the least. And, well… she needed a friend. A friend that wasn’t lying—

No, don’t finish that thought. I couldn’t finish that thought. Just thinking about not thinking about it tugged my eyes toward Sunset, and my brain started flashing back to those final, lightning-filled moments—

“Stop,” I said out loud. “Stop thinking that.”

I just had to think about something else. Something, anything. Copper’s smile. It was the last positive visual I had, and a point of pride on my part, if I were to allow myself that. I needed to let myself have that. I helped somepony today, as simple as it may sound. I got her to smile, and I just had to keep thinking about that and not the other thing.

“Am I good to come back in, or do you need a moment?”

I almost jumped out of my skin at Starlight’s voice. I whirled around, and there she was with a bottle of something or other in her magic and a confused frown on her face.

“You okay?” she said. “You looked like you were trying to hold in a fart.”

“I was not—” I took a deep breath and let it out. “Did you get what you needed?”

“Yeah.” She twirled the bottle of what I now realized was chocolate milk, scanning the room. “Where’d Copper go?”

“She went to the restroom.” I could feel my heart rate coming down, and sweet Celestia, what was it with ponies and sneaking up on me all the time?

“Oh.” Silence. She scuffed her hoof on the floor as if trying to dispel the awkwardness she brought in on her own coattails. “So…”

She dragged the word out in a knowing fashion. There was a glint in her eye and a mischievous grin on her face. She propped herself up on the table by her elbows.

“So what?”

“How’d it go?”

“Uh, we talked? And then I started working on the glyph while she went to the restroom.”

Starlight’s smile flatlined, and she did that adorable scrunchy face she often did when perplexed.

“Okay, um, never mind then.” She perked back up as if her line of questioning never happened. “So what’s next?”

I pivoted on my heels and snatched up my notes so I could tamp them down into a neat stack. “With the glyph redrawn and a quick recharge, it should be a day or two before it needs redoing.”

“Yeah, but… that’s just our holding pattern. What about after that?” She took a swig of her chocolate milk.

“I… I don’t know. I was really hoping we’d have this taken care of by now.”

Copper chose that moment to wander back in. She seemed composed, and the effects of a tiny smile shone through despite the storm clouds still brewing over her head.

I came level with her gaze, and the light behind her eyes gave me the strength to say what I needed to. “We do our best. Like we always do.”

“While true,” Starlight said, “that doesn’t answer my question.”

“Then we keep going over and refining our notes until we think of something.”

“Well, just remember to take breaks this time, would you?” She cuffed me on the shoulder. “I swear, if you keep at it, you’ll be seeing those notes of yours in your dreams.”

I laughed alongside her, but the longer we stood there, the more it tumbled around in my head.

It was an innocuous enough joke at an innocuous enough moment, but after our previous setback and the valuable time spent playing catch-up, I couldn’t get that thought unstuck from my mind.

When the end of the day rolled around, I excused myself for bed, but made a pit stop at the library to secret away a book from the divination section. I couldn’t have Starlight acting like a monkey on my back over this. I didn’t need a part two of yesterday’s lecture.

What we needed was time—time to think and time to prepare. And what better way than to utilize all the time we had?

I settled into bed and cracked open Septal Slumber’s Magical Mundanities, a Guide to Lucid Dreaming.

XXXIX - The Transient Valley

The Eversleep was an ever-fickle enemy.

It existed in a state of duality, as one might compare the ethereal plane to the material. It appeared that Sunset and I, though present in the physical aspects of this Eversleep, were not as bound to them as I had initially assumed. And as I hoped once discovering this, I could project my subconscious into this place much the same as when shepherding the Dreamscape, so long as my “conscious” self remained asleep. In doing so, I became a part of the ethereal half of this duality, physically disconnected from it as I was in any dream within my purview.

The recursive nature of this was not lost on me, and its implications vastly contradicted what I knew of the Dreamscape and what suppositions I had of the Eversleep at large. It stirred within me a sense of curiosity and desire to safeguard our subjects from any possible threat this may pose, but I dared not plumb it in our current circumstance. I chose to focus on its applications in the here and now, specifically in escaping this strange non-existence.

“Up” had forever symbolized and thereby manifested as a removal of one’s self, a return from the depths of the individual to the collective, and so I took to the sky in my dream form, to allow myself an outsider’s glimpse and to better make sense of this alien plane. However, try as I might, I could not pierce this place’s outer limits.

’Twas not a silken veil in the same sense that separated the Dreamscape from its dreams. Rather, ’twas like a curtain made of burlap, and just as unsightly. It surrounded us much the same as an oort cloud surrounds our solar system, but where one would find a sparse collection of space debris, here there was naught but the hungry chill of the void and violent, celestial tempests.

I daren’t chance venturing into that unknown, lest I be swept away on its currents to Orion knows where, and so I acquiesced for the time being, turning back to the ever-shifting landscape below.

I found our bodies amidst the grove of strange cherry trees. Sunset yet stood watch, her eyes blind to all but her ears at fox-like attention.

Like a ghost passing through the mortal plane, I alighted without disturbing even the softest patches of moss beneath our hooves. There, I looked upon our haggard forms, and I pondered our situation.

’Twas true that in this manner I could watch over both of us as I slept, but that would not be right. To do so would undermine Sunset’s sense of agency. She needed to be strong, and I had to allow her that opportunity.

I took flight again. On the chance the Nightmare had befallen this place same as us, I wanted to know for certain.

Beneath the shadow of the lone mountain at the center of this world, I hunted for a sign of our quarry. The eldritch and aberrant wandered and hunted of their own devices whilst I flitted past them in my ethereal state, unseen and unheard. My search took me through valley and grotto, over hills and around sheer cliffs overlooking oblivion, but no sight, nor scent, nor whisper of the Nightmare’s blight encroached upon this domain.

We were alone, it seemed. The Nightmare’s mark would be irreversible and unmistakable, even in as transient a place as this, and I cursed the universe for depriving us of the one blessing we could have hoped for. However, my illicit flight did not prove fruitless.

In my search for the Nightmare, I discovered an inkling of magic that corroborated my initial assumptions of the mountain itself.

The barrier between the Eversleep and the Dreamscape seemed to dip toward the mountaintop, as one would imagine the magnetic poles of Equestria. Just as the poles allowed solar winds to become trapped within their curvatures and give us the auroras our subjects so adored, so too I suspected this place to harbor a similar phenomenon, and with it, perhaps a way out.

My heart leapt at the prospect, and I did little to quell my hopes of stopping what may have transpired since this… misstep. However, I could not allow such feelings to stymie due caution.

I returned from my search, and there I found Sunset still keeping watch.

Though her eyes saw only darkness, she radiated with a resolve I had not seen this age. Come what hurricane dare challenge her, she would endure. And I, for what little it amounted to, would remain by her side to see her through the storm.

I merged with my still-sleeping self and opened my eyes on the material plane of this dreamspace.

Sunset twitched her ears, and a moment later her sightless eyes came around to mine. Even with the deadened gaze such sightlessness instilled, there remained an attentiveness about her, and if I were to allow myself the notion, a certain poetic beauty to be found there.

“You good?” she said.

“Indeed. Rest, Sunset. I shall keep watch for the remainder of the night.”

Her ears flattened back and her nose dipped ever so slightly as if she internally condemned the idea, but she slowly swiveled them toward me. “You sure?”

She needed to be strong, yes—for herself, for Twilight, for the world. But finding that strength also meant finding strength in others.

I nodded. “Yes. Conserve your strength. I do not doubt we will need it come morning.”

She pondered my statement. “To fight the Nightmare?”

“For whatever it is that lies ahead.”

“To fight the Nightmare,” she repeated. She looked away, but nonetheless laid her head on her lap without further argument and sighed. Soon enough, I felt her presence within my bosom, her soul coming to rest with that of the collective Equestrian subconscious. When I blinked, I caught snippets of a forest and sunshine, and I found myself enjoying the subtle motions of her slumber—the rise and fall of her chest, the little smile on her lips.

This, right here, was what we fought for: the gentle repose of a soul long denied that liberty.

I knew not how long I watched her sleep. Admittedly, I found myself honored by the gesture, that she trusted me enough to sleep in my presence. However, with that honor came the inexorable truth of my evils.

I did not deserve her trust, and yet, however tentatively so, she gave it.

She was beautiful, as beautiful as any mortal mare could be and more. A heroine of this age, who bore the scars of a life she did not deserve, yet she was all the more beautiful for it.

Yes, she was beautiful.

So very beautiful indeed.

• • •

My eyes still weren’t working when I woke up.

The wind had picked up sometime overnight—or whatever “time” it was in this weird-ass place—and the trees rustled overhead. A pungent forest-y smell hit me as if to say good morning in as unique a way as this place could manage.

Luna was up and staring at me. I couldn’t see her, obviously, but I had one of those unnameable animal magnetism sixth sense sort of moments where you just know something.

“Are you ready to be off?” she said, confirming my assumption.

The thought of her watching me sleep was creepy at best, but I stamped that ice-water feeling down before it got shivers out of me. It’s… it’s what I agreed to. Sleeping in shifts, that is. And she didn’t do anything, like she promised.

“Yeah,” I said. “Let’s get out of here.”

We got up, and I shook off the last bits of sleep. I actually felt pretty good, as far as sleeping in a freaky, inhospitable dream world could get. My hind leg throbbed like a motherfucker, but that was peanuts to what it could have or honestly should have been.

That healing spell of hers did wonders. She really did care. That cold, clammy thought sent a wave of shame down my neck and shoulders. I still didn’t like it, but I couldn’t lie to myself. I sighed to give myself a moment to whisk those thoughts away, stretched out like a cat to crack my back in a way I oh so needed, and fell in line.

I followed Luna’s hoofsteps out of the grove, and the soft moss gave way to crunchy leaves, then hard stone. An angry wind howled down what sounded like a narrow canyon we were suddenly following. Talk about weird-ass biome transitions. Did I miss another dream coming down and twisting up the landscape? Of course we’d have that kind of luck.

And as if to spite me, the wind I heard howling moments before smacked me in the face, blowing my mane every which way.

“Careful,” Luna said. “There is a sheer drop to our right, and I do not yet believe I have to strength to fly.”

Noted. Not that I wasn’t going to follow exactly on her hoofsteps like a damn puppy. After last night’s little… adventure, and with this whole blind-as-shit thing going on, I wasn’t about to go wandering off on my lonesome.

It was… slow going. Luna wasn’t kidding about the sheer drop. If only she had mentioned how narrow our path got. A few careless hoofsteps on my part sent pebbles tumbling down into whatever hungry void waited far, far below. At some parts, I practically hugged the wall and still only had room for my hooves single file.

I could hear the distant rumbling of earth and the hiss of whatever the crap it was that made the landscape change on a dime. It got my heart going a million miles a minute hoping it wouldn’t change underneath our hooves to leave me falling to my death. The more optimistic half of my brain hoped that it would change under us, but to something less treacherous—strawberry fields forever or some other cliché deal. But I knew how latching onto that mode of thinking ended up.

We were heading down, at least. The way she described it, we were more or less on a hill about a mile out from this mountain she kept talking about. Make it down through the valley and back up to the mountaintop and off we’d go on some rainbow carpet ride back to sanity.

I mentally kicked myself for that and all the pessimistic bullshit that had been running through my head. She really was trying, and this place was still her area of expertise, no matter how out of sorts she was.

And as much as I hated all of this, I… I had to trust her. For Twilight, if nothing else.

I could feel the mountain ahead of us. It had that same static-y sensation like just before lightning struck—that ever-so-subtle tug at the individual hairs of my coat. Whatever it was, there was definitely something special about it.

Speaking of strange static-y sensations, I couldn’t feel that heart-tugging magnetizing-the-blood-in-my-veins one I got from the Nightmare. I initially chalked it up to how fucky this place was, but now that I had as much of my bearings as I could, I expected it to crop up again at some point along the way.

“It’s not in here with us, is it?” I asked, for lack of a better conversation starter. No immediate answer—just as much of a resounding “no” as anything else.

“We must hurry,” was all she said.

Well that wasn’t exactly the answer I was hoping for. Could have at least dignified my question with an actual “no.” I clenched my teeth before a “stupid bitch” or the like could tumble out and sighed away my annoyance.

This was all so… well, there was no right word for it other than fucked up. This whole situation was fucked up. And worse yet, the Nightmare was out there doing god knew what to the Dreamscape or Equestria at large.

She led me down a slope that thankfully wasn’t as treacherous as the cliffside we skirted earlier. It got warmer, and a forest-y scent caught my attention.

It was indeed a forest she led me through. The soft fronds of ferns and underbrush tickled my chest as we went, and I had to bend low beneath the windchime tinkle of Luna’s magic whenever she lifted a branch for me to pass under. It made for slow but steady going, and part of me rather enjoyed our little nature walk—just the sound of crunching leaves and twigs beneath my hooves and the smell of pine trees on the wind.

A twig snapped to my left, and before I even flinched and thought to throw up a shield, Luna fired a bolt of magic that screamed over my shoulder. The meaty impact reverberated up through the trees, and I felt a warm spray of blood on my face.

Up went the baying of those hyena-dog things, but their stampede through the underbrush went the other direction, away from us. And just as their footpads died away, I remembered to breathe.

“Let us continue,” Luna said, and off went her hoofsteps as if nothing had happened.

I tried wiping the blood from my face, but succeeded more in napping the fur around my muzzle. Getting splattered with blood was becoming a more common occurrence than I cared for.

So her magic was back for the most part. Good to know. That could have been useful last night—just pop one of those bastards like a zit and watch the rest scatter. Regardless, that was one less worry on our plate. I took another deep breath and fell in line.

About an hour’s journey went uneventfully. We were heading up now, though. I noticed the incline maybe a quarter of an hour ago, but it wasn’t until now that the mountain itself seemed to acknowledge our approach.

I couldn’t see it, but I could feel and hear a massive emptiness yawning far above, and my sense of “down” shifted ever so insidiously toward it. It pulled at me like a gravity well, my mane and the individual hairs of my coat tugging toward what I could only imagine as some infinite darkness.

It was gentle in its onset, just a little bit more with every step up the mountain. I felt the dust and little pebbles lift from the ground beneath my hooves, brush past my coat, and briefly tousle my mane. The longer we walked, the stronger that attraction became, and eventually, the more violent.

Here and there, I heard the sound of tearing roots and hefty rocks ripped from the earth and sucked into the void. I found it weird that we seemed only minutely affected, as if by nothing more than a light wind. Maybe because we weren’t meant to be here. Who knew. I certainly didn’t, and if Luna did, she kept it to herself.

Luna stopped just ahead of me, and I knew to point my ears forward. I imagined her gazing pensively up into that yawning abyss.

“This is it,” she said.

“The top?”

“Indeed. The top of the mountain, the threshold back to sanity. The end of the line all the same.” She paused, and the absence of noise stirred in me the sensation of an ever-growing gap between us, as if we were on opposite sides of a tectonic fault splitting apart.

“Luna? What are we waiting for?”

The ground around us erupted, and the whoosh of boulders the size of mountains hurtled past us toward the sky. The ground at my hooves crumbled away to spray my face with dirt.

I staggered away from the ledge and spit out what got in my mouth. “The hell’s going on? Luna?”

“I do not know, but it is more violent than before. I fear what it portends, and just as much how capable we are in the face of it.”

“No shit. I think I got that part, but what the hell are we supposed to do?”

More of that damnable silence. I could picture her staring pensively at me, but as the moment wore on, I imagined a crease forming in her brow and the grim determination of a mare thinking in ultimatums. The words she spoke next got my hackles standing on end:

“Sunset, do you trust me?”

I swallowed the lump in my throat. A shaky breath kept me from firing off a multitude of sharp comments, but I couldn’t stave off the shiver that ran through me all the same.

“No,” I said. “I don’t. I really don’t. Not without knowing what the hell’s going on. But… but that doesn’t change our situation, does it?”

She left me to the darkness of my sightless existence for one, two, three terrible seconds before, “No, it does not.”

I let the silence bridge my answer in kind. “Then just fucking do whatever stupid idea it is you’re thinking. Stop wasting time.”

Another bout of this unbearable silence kept my muscles tense and ready to run. Soon enough, Luna wrapped her magic around me, and I felt myself lifted upward.

As her aura receded, that strange sensation of silk brushed over my shoulders. Vertigo settled in, and my head spun until I thought I was going to throw up. The next thing I realized, I could see. It was as if the universe decided I’d suffered enough, and with the snap of its fingers, my eyes opened.

I was… I was in outer space. The void of the cosmos stared back at me from all directions, broken by the distant specks of stardust and spiraling galaxies and the spray paint of red, blue, and purple nebulae.

“Luna?” I called out, but nothing followed. Like the vacuum of space, my voice didn’t carry in this starlit abyss, and Luna was nowhere to be seen.

Okay. Okay okay okay. Stop freaking out. Luna slingshotted me out of the Eversleep and into the literal reaches of dreamspace or something. This was… yeah, this had to be the Dreamscape. What else could it be? This was where she got into everyone’s dreams.

I didn’t have a clue where I was or what I should be doing or even what I was capable of doing. But this was my chance.

If this was the Dreamscape, then I… I had to find someone else’s dream. If I entered it, and they woke up, maybe that was the key to getting out of here. It made sense in its own chain of logic, and I had nothing else to go by. At the very least, I could hop in and talk to whoever I barged in on. I could at least get a message out.

Better yet, I could find Twilight’s dream and talk to her directly.

On the coattails of that desperate hope, I took off for the nearest galaxy.

XL - A Glimpse of Infinity

The Dreamscape was far more enormous than I first thought.

It was like taking flight into the night sky, on and on, forever into the unknown. I could control my volition, as if I had wings and knew how to use them since birth. After the initial panic of being flung to the farthest reaches of space whittled away, I was left with a sense of awe and, naturally, curiosity.

I drifted past neutron stars, soared through nebulae, danced among the luminous galaxies that made up this strange and beautiful infinity.

What seemed almost like a river of starlight wound through a nearby stretch of space. As I passed over it, I let my hoof skim its surface, and as the twinkling starlight curled away in a glittering spiral, the strangest sensation shot through my mind.

It was the color red mixed with the feeling of happiness and a radiant warmth, all in one. A vision—or maybe a memory?—passed through my head, one of the careless whimsy of a lazy afternoon spent sunbathing on the beaches of Fillydelphia.

I pulled away from the starlit river, and my mind was my own again. The significance of the phenomenon teased me from the edges of understanding until it finally hit me.

This was someone’s dream.

These constellations and galaxies and other space things were the dreams of everypony in Equestria. I just touched someone’s dream. I felt someone’s dream.

I laughed in the silence of the starlit vacuum, and although I had learned earlier that my voice wouldn’t project, the reminder brought my excitement to a screeching halt.

I had always been a relatively solitary person, even in my CSGU days. As nigh inseparable as Copper and I were, I craved the moments between hanging out with her just as much as those spent feeling her beside me. Even when she was around, I still felt a level of disconnect from anything not related to schoolwork. Ironically, it’s what let me accomplish what I did with the mirror and get myself neck deep into this mess.

But solitude wasn’t isolation. And isolation was the first step to madness.

The high of exploration that initially filled me with wanderlust now gripped me with an unshakable bout of agoraphobia that had me hyperventilating. Tinnitus set in, and I spent what felt like the next hour just freaking out.

Everywhere around me, the distant stars stared back, indifferent and unmoving. My breathing grew louder in my head like I had cupped my hooves over my ears, and no matter how I clawed at them it wouldn’t go away.

I had to get out.

I took off in a random direction as fast as I could. There didn’t seem to be any limit to how fast this place would let me go. Stars turned from pinpricks to lines that stretched behind me. Galaxies and nebulae became smears of color forgotten just as quickly as they passed.

I had to get to the end. There had to be an end—a ledge, a threshold, a something that I could cross where gravity would take me back like a prodigal daughter, back to where everything made sense and I wasn’t locked away with my own dark thoughts.

But it was like some goddamn nightmare. This place just went on and on and on and on and on. I was lost.

I let myself slow into an aimless tumble. The stars twinkled back in their still-silent indifference, and I was, like so many times before, alone.

I cried. I didn’t care. My tears drifted weightlessly away like miniature stars, until I couldn’t tell them apart from the real ones.

How did Luna do it? How did she stand this place? What in her lack of sanity made her capable of, of… presiding over a place like this?

Worse yet, did she even want to? Was this something she chose, or was she forced to as some kind of punishment?

I pulled my hooves in on myself, and an even darker thought slithered out from the back alleys of my mind:

Was she always this alone?

I continued tumbling through the Dreamscape, my vision cycling upward like a photo reel of the spray-paint nebulae behind me, then back to the spiral galaxy ahead—nebulae, galaxy, nebulae, galaxy.

The more I lingered on that question, the more my heart got that squirmy feeling that made me want to get to my hooves and run, run away as fast as I could to anywhere but here—to hide from the hurts and the terrible truths and the everything that made my life the way it was.

But I had done my running. I flew countless light-years through this hell to find myself lost in the nothingness around me and in my own fucked-up head.

I knew the answer to my question. I knew it before I even asked myself.

And I liked to think I now understood, even just a little. A sliver of empathy for a mare who arguably deserved none, but it gave me something to focus on, gave me something more substantial than the ceaseless mania in my head. Better yet, it gave me a new question to ask myself:

What would Luna do if she were stuck here?

I didn’t picture her so much as I let myself picture her—that sort of non-committal hoof on the metaphorical thin ice one can’t help after so many years of pain. But I caught an inkling of her—if only just a distant memory from the cobwebs of my mind—and as if she were whispering in my ear, I heard her voice.

Follow your heart, Sunset. It will never steer you wrong.

I didn’t know if that was my imagination turned up to eleven, or if she really was communicating with me, but either way I let myself be wrapped in her words.

She really did care, and I had to trust.

I closed my eyes, focused, and thought of Twilight. I thought of her smile and the way she never seemed to be fully used to those wings of hers. Her awkward, silly ramblings and how she often trailed off into an embarrassed smile once she realized.

I felt a tug at my heart, like someone pulling at the loose string of a sweater. But instead of unraveling, it pulled taut, and my heart whispered a single word:

Forward.

I followed. As I had with the Nightmare in Luna’s dream, I let the faint, indistinct sensation lead me onward into the unknown.

Time flowed. Minutes to hours, hours to days. I lost count after what felt like a week. The unending ringing in my ears was maddening, but I focused on Twilight.

I thought of all her quirks that made me smile—her positive, nerdy attitude, the way she flitted her wings whenever she got excited, or how she tapped the tips of her hooves together when nervous. I let them surround me like new threads winding out from whatever this magic was that pulled me onward. It led me past supernovae and gas giants. The ice glittering amidst the rings of a frozen planet scattered as I passed through them, crystallizing on my coat and the rest catching the solar winds to begin their own journey into a greater beyond. I existed like that for god only knew how long, until I came to a little cluster of stars among a gathering of other celestial bodies.

The philosophical part of me wondered if they were Twilight’s other friends, the Elements inseparable even in this weird, metaphysical place. I touched the cluster and felt myself drawn through what felt like a sheer curtain of silk. A presence surrounded me—atmosphere, I suddenly realized—and the perfume of old books welcomed me into a darkly lit alcove of brick and mortar.

If the library smell wasn’t enough to know with certainty that this was Twilight’s dream, she herself sat at a desk stacked high with books that needed reshelving. Her face was scrunched in concentration as she scribbled something on a piece of paper.

“Twilight, is that really you?” I ran forward and hugged—

Actually, I passed right through her like a ghost. Goddamn it. I cast that stupid Veil Spell, and the rush of atmosphere hit me all at once.

Twilight either had masterfully keen awareness in her dreams, or my spell made quite the entrance. She spun around with a preternatural sense, and if the way her face went from confusion to excitement couldn’t spell relief, I didn’t know what could.

“Sunset?” she said.

Before she could say anything else, I threw my hooves around her—actually threw my hooves around her this time—and yes it really was her, from the gentle bob of her mane to the nappy bit of fur on her chest she could never quite flatten out. I held her tight and never wanted to let go.

“It’s you…” I said.

“Uh, yeah, it is.” She returned my hug instinctively, but then held me at arm’s length to study me carefully. “W-what are you doing in my dream?”

“I was… Wait, how do you know this is a dream?” I said.

“Oh! Starlight mentioned offhand that I’d start dreaming about our work if I didn’t stop working so hard. So, uh, naturally, I figured that was actually a great idea, so I’m trying out a spell to help me lucid dream. Which, I mean, maybe I’m taking her too literally, but I figured it couldn’t hurt to try?” She tapped the tips of her hooves together nervously in that very same manner that helped me find my way here.

Oh, I’d done that before! Suddenly a million questions came to mind, but one in particular crowded the forefront of my brain.

“What are you dreaming about this for?” I gestured at the books and immense library shelves towering over us.

“I… think I botched the spell a little bit. Or I let my mind wander before it was complete, which is the more likely answer. So yes, botched it.” She shook her head. “But that’s not important. Is this you? As in, the real you? Are you dream diving right now? Is this Dream Dive Sunset, or are you a product of my imagination?”

She proceeded to grab me by the cheeks and turned my face every which way. It wasn’t until I yanked her hooves off me that she smiled sheepishly and backed off.

“First off,” I said. “I’m glad to see you too. Second, yes, Twilight, it’s the real me. It’s a long story.”

That didn’t seem to satisfy her. “How do I know you’re not just a product of my imagination telling me you’re not a product of my imagination?”

I rolled my eyes. “Copper and I didn’t fuck like you think we did. Does that work for you?”

That got her face redder than a tomato—way more than it had any right to. Which meant… Had she met Copper? And she maybe had a thing for her? I stared at her for a moment before shaking my head. Focus, you idiot.

“I, uh, I don’t think that’s how it works,” she said. “That would still count as—”

I grabbed her by the face and scrunched her cheeks. Dreams weren’t my forte, but I assumed I only had so long to say what I needed before it fell apart like Luna’s way back when.

“Twilight. It’s me. Really. If you really want external proof, ask Copper about the ball gag.”

“The… what?”

“Twilight, focus. It’s me. It’s really me, shit’s gotten complicated, and I have no idea how much time I have to explain it.”

“I…” She closed her eyes and took in a deep breath before regarding me with all the seriousness she could muster. “What do you mean ‘complicated’?”

I sighed. I wanted to avoid the whole “explain the long story I was trying to not explain,” but I guess I shot myself in the foot with my own lead-in.

“So,” I said. “Luna and I were hunting down the Nightmare in Luna’s dream. We eventually found it sucking the life out of the Tantabus, but then the two of them merged into one being or something, and Luna was fighting it while the whole dream was collapsing around us.

“We… fell into what she called the Eversleep, this place she basically said was like a dream graveyard. Lots of things happened there, but ultimately she got me out of it by throwing me into the Dreamscape while she stayed behind. I’ve been wandering through metaphorical deep space for what’s felt like at least a week.”

“A week?” Twilight said. “But it’s only been two days since… since I…”

I knew what she was talking about: that moment I tried escaping the broken dream and reached out for her like a lifeline, only to watch her cut the rope at the last second. The sensation of falling, the waking up to blindness and abandonment in an alien world with nothing but the mare I hated most. It got my brain panicking and my legs sweating and my heart racing. But I had to put on a brave face for Twilight’s sake.

I put a hoof on her shoulder and smiled. “Look, I get it. Something happened, and you had to put me back under. I don’t know what’s going on out there in the real world, but we lost track of the Nightmare. Is it out? Did it escape?”

Twilight was silent for an uncomfortable length of time. Her eyes wandered the floorboards, and I noticed the dream morph around us as if alive and breathing.

The wall to my left slid open like a secret door, and fragments of light filtered into existence as if watching it through a camera lens coming into focus. It was a stained glass of Nightmare Moon, wings spread wide. The phases of the moon surrounded her head like a halo, with the full moon looming above her like the keystone to the entire piece.

I recognized it as the one in Canterlot Castle’s Aspirant’s Quarter, an enormous hallway of stained glass windows that timelined all of Celestia’s personal students through the centuries. I had no idea why Twilight would dream of here of all places, but standing directly beneath the image of Nightmare Moon gave me a few inklings to start with. More importantly, I was having an impression on her subconscious. At the very least, I’d bet money this meant she’d remember our conversation when she woke up.

“Hey,” I said. I put on my best disarming smile to catch her eye. When she looked, I jerked my head toward the stained glass. “This isn’t going to happen again. I won’t let it.”

That little show of confidence won me a smile, however brief. I couldn’t honestly believe my own words, but right now, that bit of hope on her end was all that mattered.

“But we need to save Luna if we’re going to stop this,” I continued. “She’s stuck in the Eversleep, and I have no idea how to get her out.” And just as quickly as I had coaxed out that smile, I chased it back into its hole.

“I… we’re stuck, too,” she said. “When you were, I assume it was when you were fighting the Nightmare, there was an eruption of magic from the two of you. Our spell backfired, and… something happened to the spell itself. We’re not entirely sure what, but removing your cutie mark didn’t cut off the spell like we thought it would. That’s why I had to put you under, because it seemed like it was tied to you waking up.

“We reworked the glyph as a”—her face contorted as if the words tasted vile coming out—“containment protocol, so that it wouldn’t happen again. But we’re not sure how to move forward without chancing another magical storm surge that could take out half of Ponyville.”

That… yeah, that sounded like a problem. Damned if we do, damned if we don’t. If only…

A thought occurred to me.

“Twilight, you know Copper, right?”

“I… yes?”

“Her dad works in research down beneath the castle.”

“Wait, what?” Twilight threw her serious face back on. “Her dad works for the Canterlot Research Department?”

“Well, I mean, he used to. Dunno if he still does. But he was a lead something-or-other. Research and safety containment was, like, his thing. He’s the one who helped me work on the mirror. I’d bet my left cutie mark he could help. You should talk to him.”

It was getting dark. My vision started going grainy, like I was watching one of those old movie reels. The atmosphere loosened its grasp on me, and I got that weird tugging sensation at my shoulders telling me time’s up.

“Twilight. I think I can feel the dream falling apart. I gotta go. I’ll try and find you tomorrow, or however the hell this works.”

Twilight’s mouth moved, but her words never reached me. A strange force wrapped itself around my shoulders, and gravity signed my contract off to some higher power. My sense of “up” became as useless as a compass on the north pole, and I felt my brain doing just as many somersaults as my body. Next thing I knew, I was back in the Dreamscape.

I shook my head, and the stars and galaxies welcomed me back with their unique indifference. Okay, that was trippy as fuck. Note to self: leave dreams before they make me leave. Good god, my brain felt the same as when Starlight yoinked my cutie mark. For good measure, I checked to see if my nose was bleeding.

I blinked back to reality to find myself tumbling listlessly through dream space. A part of me just wanted to float like that forever. To drift aimlessly in this time-dilated place. It was like the world didn’t exist while I was here.

Was that why Luna presided over the Dreamscape the way she did? To get away from everything and everyone and just think herself into infinity?

Maybe she liked being alone—alone but not lonely. Some people were like that. Those people had a certain confidence of self I could never hope to emulate.

I could see the appeal in it, though, if solitude were their driving force. God knew I liked it here until I realized I couldn’t just bamf myself out whenever I wanted.

It gave me a sense of perspective, though. I just lived well over a week in the span of two days, and I remembered Luna saying something about how even that wasn’t necessarily a constant. It made her detachment that much more understandable.

She’d been doing this every day for as long as anyone could remember, and she was thousands of years old. I could only imagine how ancient her mind was. What would this place do to the mind of a mortal pony? What if I really did get lost in here, forced to live forever in this nowhere-place?

Would I… would I become like Nocturne?

I shook my head. Enough of that line of thinking. I was getting philosophical, as Copper would have put it, and I could daydream my life away later. Equestria needed me. Luna needed me.

I headed back the way I came, and I prayed from the depths of my soul that my heart wouldn’t lead me astray.

XLI - A Friendly Request

I didn’t want to get out of bed the next morning. My conversation yesterday with Princess Twilight had me drained like a razor-blade suicide.

I rolled back over and pulled the blanket up over my shoulders. It was warm under the sheets, and the castle had a basement-like chill to it thanks to all the crystal. Made sleeping easy and comfortable, but getting up that much harder.

I stared at the vanity across the room and the odd knickknacks that cluttered the counter. A hairbrush, bobby pins, a messy array of makeups and mane care products. None of them mine, and definitely not Sunset’s. Spare odds and ends for a spare odd and end.

Oh, Sunset…

I hugged my pillow to my chest. It was big enough to curl my hind hooves around, and when I closed my eyes, I was back in the spare bedroom. It was dark, but I knew by the smell and her warmth that she lay beside me.

Just let me pretend…

I took a deep whiff of the pillow and held it in. I couldn’t smell her anymore.

I opened my eyes, and there went the illusion, there went that passing luxury. The curtains framing the window glowed around the edges from the morning light trying to peek in. I rolled over the other way.

What was the point? What was I even doing here? How in the everloving hell did I expect to help Princess Twilight figure this crap out?

And so I laid there. That was something I could do well, at least. Just lay there. Do nothing. Hate myself. Be the piece of shit I always knew myself to be.

I sighed. This wasn’t right. I was wallowing.

I just… I didn’t have the energy for anything but wallowing. All day, every day. It was all I ever really did.

Even Star Chaser hated how much I wallowed. She knew why I wallowed, though. She knew from the very beginning. She was a good mare that I didn’t deserve, like so many other things I didn’t deserve.

And there I went wallowing again.

Just fucking… Ugh!

I forced myself up to my haunches and gave the room another once-over while grappling for something to focus on. Just… took in the silence of this liminal space and all the little nothings that made it feel so otherworldly. Eventually, my eyes landed on the vanity, and the mare I saw in it stared back with tired eyes—eyes tired of being tired. I rolled out of bed and went to give that mare a closer look.

Her mane was a fucking mess. It looked like two raccoons had gotten freaky in it and then died. I didn’t have the energy to brush it. It… it’d just get messy again anyway.

Do it for Sunset, my brain echoed, and the pitter-patter that got going in my chest was enough to make me pick up the brush and get to work.

I settled on doing my mane up in a loose french braid and letting it drape over my shoulder. I gave myself a smile in the vanity. It wasn’t much, but it always got Sunset to smile back. And if I were to be real with myself, I’d had enough days of feeling like shit recently. I wanted to feel pretty today.

Twilight was already up and at it by the time I got to the portal room.

“Mm-mm!” she said with an up-down inflection around a mouthful of toast. She waved me over to the far-right table where we organized our notes, and her wings did that adorable flitter thing pegasi did when excited.

It was… nice, seeing that reaction. She knew how much of a fuck-up I was, and yet she was still happy to see me.

I strolled up to her, and she gave me a hug. She was warm, despite how damn chilly it was in here, and she smelled like pancakes and buttered toast. Must have helped Spike make breakfast this morning.

Her eyes trailed my mane down my shoulder, then back up to me. “You look nice,” she said.

Your mane’s a fucking mess, my brain translated, but up went my smile for the world.

“Thanks,” I said, instinctively reaching up to touch it and pray that it wasn’t the rat’s nest it probably was. “I, uh… yeah.” I trailed off, looking past her at the notes strewn across the table, and then past those, too.

“How are you feeling?” she asked.

Her question brought me back to reality, and I smoothed over whatever lingering silence there might have been by clearing my throat. “Okay, I guess. As good as I can after, uh… yesterday.”

A hairline fracture cracked across Twilight’s smile, and her eyes flashed with momentary if subdued panic. Was she afraid I was going to do something drastic?

“We all… we all have our struggles. I’m here if you need me.” She seemed like she wanted to say something else, but wasn’t sure how.

The fun part of me thought back to the looks she gave me on our little breakfast outing. Was she finally growing a pair and coming out?

“So, I hate jumping straight into this,” she said, “but something came up. This is going to sound weird, but I, uh… I talked to Sunset last night. In… in my dream.”

My mind stalled out mid thought. “W-what?”

“She’s okay,” she added before that worry could spin out of control. “She’s just, uh… stuck.”

“S-stuck?”

“Yeah. In the Dreamscape.”

Twilight had mentioned that place when she first caught me up on all they were doing, but I couldn’t really envision what exactly they meant by it.

“You mean like, she’s floating around between dreams or something?”

“Uh, maybe? I’m not really sure what it’s like in there.”

“Are you sure you didn’t bump your head and imagine it?”

A nervous blush overtook her, and the playful side of me wanted to dig into it. It was actually pretty adorable seeing her like that.

“That was my worry, too, in a sense. But for proof she, uh…” She nervously tapped the tips of her hooves together. “She said to ask you about ‘the ball gag’?”

“Wait, the what?” I snorted. I couldn’t help it. Holy fuck, she wasn’t lying. That was a throwback and a half if I ever heard one, and definitely not something she’d have up and casually told the princess about. I broke down laughing. When your best friend gets hit on by some stallion in full BDSM leathers at a rave club, how could you not?

But that meant… she really was stuck in the Dreamscape.

“So what’s so funny about it and do I want to know?” Her voice took on a flat, borderline already offended tone, like she was setting herself up to not be surprised.

“Oh, I, um… it’s just… we visited Manehattan one time way back when and went out to see the nightlife. It, uh… she tells it better than I can.”

She stared at me as if I were demonstrating the use of the offending object.

“It’s not what you think, but it’s…” I couldn’t help the nostalgic smile spreading across my face. “It’s pretty great.”

That hardly reassured her, as she cocked an ear to the side. She gave a slow nod as if reminding herself to put a pin in that conversation and move on.

“Aaanyways,” she said. “They’re safe, but they can’t get out. Meanwhile, the Nightmare apparently isn’t stuck, and we have to figure out how to get them out without letting it loose, and we’re pretty much out of ideas, as you know.”

“You’re going somewhere with this,” I said. I let a grin take over, and the playful part of me I’d let out of its cage wanted to stretch its flirting muscles for the fun of it. Not gonna lie, she was kinda cute when she put on her serious face.

“Sunset said your father works in the Canterlot Research Department?” The upward inflection glinted hopefully, like gold in a coal mine, but my brain was the canary that just keeled over.

There went the happy mood. The playful part of me scampered back to its cage with its tail between its legs, and my heart did that thing where it feels like it just wrung itself out like a sponge.

I… I hadn’t thought about Dad in years.

“Yeah…” I said.

Twilight’s hopefulness turned to worry. “Oh, I-I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to—”

“It’s fine, I… it’s, what do you…” I sucked in a slow breath to steady myself. I wasn’t smiling away the world—I couldn’t now—but I was composed. “What do you need?”

She hesitated, flicking her ears back and forth as if unsure whether or not she should ask, now that I’d gone and fucked over her clear conscience. “Could you… could you talk to him for me? Maybe? Or at least get me in contact with him?”

Oh. She wanted his help.

“It’s… not that simple,” I said.

Again with the ears. “May I ask why?”

Because I lied about who I was my entire life and destroyed my family in the process.

“I haven’t talked to him in a while.”

“Oh. Well, there’s no time like the present to fix that! Parents love hearing from their kids.”

No. That was a lie. Maybe her parents loved hearing from her, but that made sense. Parents liked being reminded of their successes, not their failures.

“Hey,” Twilight said, putting a hoof on my shoulder. “Whatever it is you’re thinking, I’m sure it’s nothing a long talk can’t smooth over, or at least get you two back on track toward, um, amiable conversation?” She found the smile she was looking for earlier, and it radiated as much hope as it did ignorance.

If only I could be stupid enough to believe her. What I wouldn’t give to just… I could feel myself trembling, and I took a shaky breath to calm myself. It didn’t help much.

“Like Starlight said yesterday,” she continued. “We’re stuck. We’re in a holding pattern while we wait for Sunset and Luna to work things out in the Dreamscape. But now we also know that they aren’t making any headway. And like I’ve been saying from the beginning, we need all the help we can get.”

I breathed in through my nose, let it out, and smiled for the world. “If it helps. I can do that.”

“Also,” she said. “About yesterday…” She seemed to hem-haw about whatever it was. “Regarding Sunset.”

I was enough of a wreck inside that her name alone had me on the ropes. My throat cinched up, and I had to concentrate on standing upright.

“Yeah?” I said.

“You said the other day that you were dating Star Chaser.”

Oh… I knew where this was going. I didn’t need anypony telling me off for the shit I’d done, least of all the Princess of Friendship herself.

“Princess, please don’t. I don’t need to be reminded of how—”

“This isn’t me saying you’re a horrible pony. I’m not, nor will I ever say that. I’m not judging or condemning you in any way.” She put a hoof to her heart. Her eyes were filled with a pain I hadn’t seen in another pony.

Was that… empathy? Did she honestly think I deserved even the time of day from somepony like her?

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I shouldn’t have brought it up now. I just… I want to understand. So that I can help.”

What did I say to that? Thanks? It seemed like the right answer, but I couldn’t find the strength to say it.

“Okay,” was all I got out. That familiar tightness in my chest returned like an animal back to its den. It got hard to breathe, but I kept my smile going.

She threw her hooves around me in a hug. That was the last thing I expected, but it was the most welcome feeling. Truthfully, I had never felt quite as safe as I did right there.

I hugged her back to let the moment be, and damn it, if her little smile wasn’t contagious. This whole Princess of Friendship thing fit her really good.

She let me go when I was ready—which I was, really—but there was only so much I could prepare myself for what she asked of me.

“I’m here to listen,” she said. “Whenever you’re ready to talk, that is. I don’t want to push.”

“I know,” I said. I sniffled and wiped my nose. “I should get going.”

To her credit, she didn’t stop me. I knew she wanted to. That look on her face said it all.

But I couldn’t stand that much empathy from somepony who arguably had no incentive to give it, so I headed out.

I took the next train to Canterlot. It was a nice ride. Twilight paid for a first-class seat. Not a luxury I was used to, but it meant I had the car to myself, just me and my thoughts. I didn’t know if that was good or bad. At the very least, nopony could see me being a hot mess.

I stared out the window most of the trip, listening to and feeling the cla-clack of the train tracks. The way the countryside rolled by reminded me of the train ride Sunset and I took to Manehattan.

Manehattan.

I smiled at the thought. I remembered the sunglasses shop, the rave club I dragged her to. That fucking ball gag. I laughed quietly to myself.

But my smile turned sour at another, darker thought. At that point, Sunset was already falling for Nocturne, as she called her.

Was she already too far gone then? How different would things have turned out had I just said what I wanted to that night in the hotel room? Or the park the week after?

My brain ran the gamut of possibilities, but no matter how much I wished, I was as much a coward then as I was now. This all happened because of me, and here I was doing something about it only after Princess Twilight did her damnedest to convince me. And even then, my help was marginal at best.

Did she even need my help, or did she simply pity me?

Honestly, I was just getting in their way. What did menial labor like drawing circles mean if not to keep me from fucking up something important? Sending me on a fetch quest for my dad was just another way to get me out of the castle and away from their project.

I was trying my hardest, but even my greatest triumphs were peanuts compared to their day-to-day life.

The train pulled into the station, and I followed the crowd out the doors. The station thrummed with the bustling of business ponies and loved ones returning to open hooves from vacation trips and a small group of school foals on a field trip.

I shuffled through until I got to the main street I knew too eerily well and headed north, toward the castle. It was midday. Dad would be down in the research labs if he still worked there.

If he still worked there.

A wave of cold dread ran down my back. I honestly didn’t know, it had been so long. I hadn’t so much as written a single letter to tell them I was okay.

I just… it was all too much, and I was so ashamed. I couldn’t. I couldn’t do that to them.

Hey, yeah, so I fucked off because Mom threw me out like the trash that I am. But hey look! Here’s a letter. Because the last fucking thing you all need is a reminder that my gay ass exists. Sorry I haven’t blown my brains out yet. I’m not a good enough daughter to even do you that courtesy, apparently.

“Copper?”

I gasped as that single word brought my train of thought to a grinding halt. A wave of goosebumps ran up my legs, and my heart hammered in my chest as I grappled with the disparity between hope and reality.

I knew that voice. Never in a million years would I forget it.

Trembling, I turned, and there among the ponies shuffling through the street stood a grey unicorn mare with a long snowy mane and piercing blue eyes.

“Whistle?” I said.

Author's Note

Somehow, I skipped over this chapter when posting chapters. Sorry for that! Hope this doesn't ruin your reading progress or whatever.

XLII - Family Reunion

To say that I expected to eventually meet Whistle after all these years wasn’t a lie.

Eventually being the key word there. I just never expected eventually to happen so suddenly. Life had a knack for fucking me sideways, though.

“So where’ve you been?” Whistle asked me from across the booth table. She sat hunched forward, hooves folded beneath her. Her eyes followed the seam of the wood paneling beside us.

We had ducked into a nearby corner café after the shock of our… reunion had passed. And by ducked, I meant Whistle dragged me in tooth and nail and sat me down like a prisoner ready for waterboarding.

It was an order-up-front style place, so nopony would bother us, I hoped. The redhead at the cash register busied herself with rolling up plastic utensils in napkins and stacking them in a wicker basket beside the register, and an older stallion was bussing tables across the way.

I idly ran my hoof along a nasty gouge some kid had carved into the table with a knife, feeling the compressed sawdust beneath the cheap laminate. “I’ve been a few places. Just… kinda coasting.”

Whistle huffed. She watched me trace the groove, shifting to prop her head up with a hoof. Her eyes came around to mine, and I could tell there was a certain level of discontent somewhere behind that indifferent stare.

She’d grown up quite a bit since I last saw her—pretty in a rough-around-the-edges, bad-girl sort of way, and that snowy white mane of hers would be to die for if she bothered taking a brush to those errant curls and split ends even just once. Her eyes had more of a ghostly blue intensity to them than I remembered, much like Dad’s in all his old research publication pictures. She still had that raggedy-ass purple slouchie of hers, though. It looked lived in, which was par for the course.

“That’s it? Just… around?” She made vague circular motions with her hooves. “That’s a load of bullshit if I’ve ever heard one.”

To be fair, that summed up my post-Canterlot existence pretty succinctly.

Bullshit this, bullshit that. Nothing but fucking bullshit. And my current deflections were just one more load on the steaming pile that was my life.

“How’s Lily?” I asked before the tears could start.

“She’s doing great, actually.” A smile slipped across Whistle’s face for a brief moment. “Wants to go for an art degree when she’s older. She actually made that painting over there.”

She nodded at the far wall over my left shoulder. A large painting a good three feet tall by five feet wide lorded over the booths situated there. It was an abstract piece of reds and dark purples done in large, blocky brush strokes overlapping one another, with a single vertical line of gold no wider than a pencil about one-third of the way from the left border.

I had no idea what it was supposed to mean, but it made me think of the times we spent coloring together on the living room floor. Of all the smiles I’d seen on Lily’s face, those were always the biggest.

“It’s pretty,” I said.

“Yeah.”

The café went about its happenings. Some loud pair of stallions stumbled in laughing about something or other. They looked drunk.

“Is she here?” I asked, letting at least that hope get the best of me.

“Here as in, in Canterlot? Yeah. We live up on Chambers, by the old marketplace.”

That sent a cold shiver through me. They weren’t living with Mom and Dad anymore?

“Oh…” I said. “You… you moved out?”

“After what Mom did to you?” she said, way more matter-of-factly than she had any right to. “Did you think we wouldn’t? We fucked off the moment I had enough money to rent a place for us.”

“Oh…” I said. I bunched up my hooves on the edge of the table.

Chambers. That was a relatively nice part of town. It was no Oleander or Fairbrooks, but it was a safe distance from Creekside or the bottoms. I couldn’t imagine where she found a job that let her scrounge up that kind of cash.

Actually, I could imagine, but I didn’t like the path my brain took or the stops along the way. There was no shortage of sick fuckheads out there, and Whistle was always a blunt, results-oriented pony. There wasn’t a damn thing in the world she wouldn’t do for Lily’s sake. The way she hunched over the table didn’t help my assumptions, either. She looked… tired.

“But what about Mom and Dad?” I asked. It took all my willpower to keep my voice steady.

“What about ’em?” she shot back with that indifferent tone of hers, but with just enough of a sharp edge to give away her true feelings. After all these years, she’d barely changed.

“I don’t know.” I left it at that. I didn’t know what else to say. She was set in her ways, and I didn’t have the heart to break down that wall. We’d only just reunited. I couldn’t stand the thought of losing her again by challenging that mindset.

I worried about Lily. She loved Mom. It was next to impossible to think she’d move out willingly, even with how Mom was about gays.

Were they… were they thrown out, too? She said they left when she could afford it, but part of me doubted it hadn’t been the other way around. Whistle was prideful like that.

“I missed you so much,” I said, reaching my hoof across the table.

Surprisingly, she put her hoof on mine. Whether she genuinely wanted that contact or some deep-down instinct compelled her to appease me, I appreciated the simple gesture. That unsureness lingered about her when I pulled away, but she relaxed into the Whistle Wind I remembered: hard on the outside, soft on the inside.

Up at the cash register, the two drunks made a show of ordering the “Sundae Surprise,” laden with as much innuendo and leering as possible.

The mare behind the counter soldiered through it with trained retail employee restraint. Her clean-cut french braid screamed “innocent teenager,” but the look on her face had “fuck around and find out” written all over it. Those two dickwads must have been frequent fliers.

“I have to go talk to Dad,” I said.

“Why? So he can let Mom walk all over you again?”

I winced. “We need his help.”

She didn’t immediately reply. Something seemed to be turning over in her head, giving her brain the run-around.

“‘We’?” she said.

“It’s… complicated.”

“When isn’t it with you?”

I let out a breathless laugh. I had no real answer. Truer words and all that. I let myself cherish that little bit of sunshine in an otherwise cloudy conversation while she mulled over whatever had her chewing on the inside of her cheek.

There was a crash and clattering of lunch trays toward the back of the restaurant, and I looked up to see the two drunks dashing for the exit, laughing as if they had just pulled off the prank of the century. The cashier chick leaned halfway over the counter, shouting enough creative obscenities that I felt honored just witnessing them.

As the stallions ran past us, I flicked a bit of magic to trip one of them up and allow his momentum to acquaint his face with the doorframe. Whatever they did, he deserved it. Fuckin’ chodes.

He let out a muffled “fuck” and shot me a glare before ducking out the door. Just as quickly, all was quiet on the western front. The cashier shot me an appreciative smile before going back to her business. For all I could tell, the busser didn’t even notice, or at least didn’t care, still going at his job with the same glacial persistence.

“Friends of yours?” I asked Whistle, if only to relieve the tension for a moment.

She snorted. “They wouldn’t have dicks anymore if they pulled that kind of shit on me. And then why would I bother being friends with them?”

That got me laughing. Something about her casual audacity stoked an old fire in me. I used to ooze that kind of dry irreverence—and I wasn’t without my fair share of it when Sunset came by a few days ago—but hearing it from somepony else caught me off guard in a refreshing, almost nostalgic sense.

“So,” she said, followed by a thoughtful pause. “Did you finally get under her tail or what?”

That got my heart doing the squirmy, sponge-wringy thing. It wasn’t that her lack of tact or the sudden change in subject surprised me. She said those sorts of things all the time. I just… after that night with Sunset, it hit closer to home than either of us expected.

“Sorry,” she said, laying her ears back and staring at the table. “I know that was a tough thing for you, and… I’m sorry for what I said about you and her back then. And I’m especially sorry about what I said to you in front of Mom.”

“I know,” I said.

There were a lot of “sorrys” going around recently, most of them mine, but the ones sent my way were undeserved. Rather than wear that feeling on my sleeve, I figured it was better to move forward.

“I’m at Princess Twilight’s castle,” I said. “Down in Ponyville. You two should come by.”

She raised an eyebrow at me and let that damn grin of hers imply all sorts of things. “Princess Twilight? Damn, it really must be complicated, then.”

I laughed. What a notion, being in some sort of love triangle with a princess. I mean, Princess Twilight was cute in her own way. Really reminded me of Sunset back in school. Honestly, she was more like Sunset than Sunset was. But the princess title put her way out of any league Whistle or I could fancy myself blundering my way into.

“Don’t tell me you’re actually slapping curtains with the princess,” she said.

That got me grinning. A statement like that was too easy to follow up on, even in my current mood.

“Would you be jealous if I said yes?”

“Why would I be jealous you’re getting all that empty space between her legs?”

I snorted. “You’re such a cocksleeve.”

“Says the box licker.” Whistle laughed. “At this point, I wouldn’t believe you could take a dick if you tried.”

“‘Box licker’? That’s a new one. And what is there to taking dick? You just sit and spin.” I gyrated my hips to hammer the image home.

That got her practically howling. She doubled over the table, slapping it hard enough to jostle the silverware.

“And that’s how I know you’re still gay,” she said, wiping away a tear.

“I’m glad you’re enjoying the facets of my orientation,” I said. Part of me wanted to be offended, but I knew better than to let something so basic get under my skin, especially after all the shit I’d given her in the past.

As if to outdo itself, my brain did an about-face on her sentiment and dragged the nastier, more shameful thoughts out from the dusty corners of my head.

“And what about Lily?” I asked. That nervous feeling crept back in and had me bunching up the tips of my hooves on the table. “Is she still…”

The smile on Whistle’s face bled away to alarm. The moment I recognized the look in her eye, I regretted where I steered the conversation. That was the same look she used to give Mom behind her back.

“Is she still what?” It came out as more of a statement than a question.

“Nothing,” I said quickly.

“No. You were about to ask if she was still gay, weren’t you? Like it’s a bad thing.”

“I wasn’t going to say it was bad.”

“Yeah, but you still wanted to know if she was gay, and all this bullshit tiptoeing you’re doing right now implies you think it’s bad, no matter how much you don’t want to. Lily is what Lily wants to be. That’s all that matters. Holy hell, Copper, Mom still has you fucking brainwashed. Get that bitch out of your head. There’s nothing wrong with you, or Lily.”

She cut her tirade short, and the silence of the restaurant settled back in. Which was good. I couldn’t focus on her and keeping the tears in at the same time.

The cashier chick made a show of cleaning the counter, trying her hardest to look like she couldn’t hear every word of our conversation.

“I can’t help the way I am,” I said. A lump set up shop in my throat. I tried swallowing, but it only made it worse. “I’m just… I’m me.”

“Yeah, which has nothing to do with the problem. You weren’t the problem.”

Except I was. She just… she didn’t get it.

“No, I… I shouldn’t have run away.” I shook my head. “You shouldn’t have needed to deal with the mess I made. Or anything else that came afterward.”

There was a long pause. “You’re happier because of it, though,” she said quietly. “Right?”

She wore a strikingly sober look, one I couldn’t ever recall her wearing. The hunched-over look from earlier, the tip-toe deflections and marginalizations of where she got her rent. How much had I put her through because of my stupidity? How much shit had she shoveled that she needed my happiness to justify it?

I smiled for the world, I smiled for her.

“Yeah. I’m happy.”

She stared at me with those icy-blue eyes that could pierce through Canterlot Mountain and keep on going. One, two, three painful seconds passed before she hunched over the table again, looking down at the knife marks, then over at the busser, who’d made his way to the corner booth.

“Good,” she said quietly. And that was that. So simply, blatantly, disgustingly that.

The seconds rolled by like hell on square wheels while I tried scrounging up a different topic. I may as well have tried being straight.

“So you’re really gonna go see him?” she said. There was a weariness to her voice—a sense of defeat, even—like a pony who carried the weight of the world on her shoulders who was asked to carry even more. “After all he didn’t do?”

I took a breath to steady myself. I had already gone off the deep end, but there was no reason to make it worse. Besides, I had to do this. Princess Twilight needed me.

“We need his help,” I said.

“Yeah, because he’s so good at that,” she said. She took to scratching at the knife grooves with the tip of her hoof. “Helping when you need him to.”

“Then let him actually try this time!” I hissed. “I know you hate what he did or didn’t do, but he can still help us. He’s still Dad. And Mom’s still—”

“Mom?” she said. “Yeah. I bet she fuckin’ is.”

I clenched my jaw. A whole slew of toxic phrases leapt to the tip of my tongue, but I swallowed them before I said something I’d regret. Or did something like last time.

In keeping those thoughts to myself, I didn’t have any others left worth saying, and it seemed neither did Whistle. She slapped a few bits on the table and got up. As much as I so desperately wanted her to look at me, she couldn’t find the courage.

“We’ll come by sometime,” she said. And she left.

The little bell over the door signaled the all-too-soon end of a reunion I never thought I’d live to see, and again, I was left with that bitter loneliness I’d gotten to know like an old friend.

My vision got blurry with the tears I couldn’t hold back anymore. I reached for the napkin dispenser, but it was empty, so I made do with the back of my hoof.

The cashier chick swung by, catching me in what I wouldn’t exactly consider my proudest moment. She slid a dessert glass onto the table. It was a strawberry milkshake, a pretty little thing all done up in sprinkles and chocolate syrup and the good will of a stranger. She put a gentle hoof on my shoulder.

“You look like you need it,” she said, ending on a tiny smile before going back to her napkins and utensils.

I stared into the frothy whipped cream topping, but no matter how much the cashier chick wanted to help, all it did was remind me of Whistle and Lily and everything I’d thrown away.

Hiding my face behind it so that I didn’t bother her further, I broke down and cried quietly into my hooves.

• • •

Fifteen minutes later, I was heading toward the castle like a giddy school filly enjoying the sunny weather. A quick apology to the cashier chick, a deep breath, and a smile for the world was all I needed to feel right as rain, or at least look the part.

Good thing I never wore makeup.

It was kind of surprising what a smile and a casual name-drop would get me. The guards practically lit up at Dad’s name and talked about him like they were best pals. One was even polite enough to escort me down to the research labs, which I was pretty sure went way against protocol.

I declined, though—for my own sake, and probably his too. It felt weird enough just coming here, let alone doing all the mental gymnastics I needed to prepare myself. I could only imagine the range of facial expressions I’d have going on and what he’d think of me.

I figured out the way there through the gardens, the same way Sunset took me back then. This place hadn’t changed in the slightest, and the déjà vu grabbed me by the withers and wouldn’t let go.

I tried focusing on Dad and what to say. I knew it’d follow the same script I did with Whistle: an awkward hello, a hug or two, words we couldn’t say before but have longed to say ever since. Life was repetitive that way.

But it didn’t change how I felt, how lost and afraid I was of the what-ifs. What if he got angry? What if he didn’t want to see me after the stunt I pulled? What if he and Mom realized life was so much better without their gay-ass daughter fucking everything up?

The rational half of my brain throttled me by the neck, exclaiming that was impossible, because that would mean their lives were better off without Whistle or Lily.

But… what if they were? What if what if what if?

I spun myself into a tizzy trying to keep my brain from going overboard. I almost bolted with my tail between my legs. Better to run now than be run out later.

But I… no, I couldn’t. He wouldn’t. It was Dad. I was his little filly. Daddy’s little girl.

Was, my brain insisted.

I couldn’t. I couldn’t do this, no matter how much Princess Twilight was relying on me, no matter how badly I wanted to see him again. I couldn’t, I just—

“Can I help you?” somepony said. I almost didn’t hear them.

A stallion stood beside a door just behind me. He had probably just come out while I was all up in my head. He was surprisingly young compared to the image I had in my head of lab ponies, probably a year or two older than me, with a mane longer than I was used to seeing on a stallion. He wore a pleasant enough smile, but he had an air of “you’re not allowed to be here” to him.

“Oh hi,” I said, and up went my smile. I cleared my throat. “I’m looking for my dad, String Theory. Is he around?”

That seemed to catch him by surprise. “Oh, String? Yeah, he’s… what’s up?”

“I just need to talk to him, if you don’t mind.” I hooked my mane behind my ear and tried looking bashful and embarrassingly lost—less for playing the damsel in distress card than for hoping he hadn’t seen me freaking out a second ago.

“Uh, sure, I guess. I think he’s doin’ thermics today. Come on over here.” He led me down the hallway to what looked like a small control room filled with masks, lab coats, and all the other “PPE” stuff I remembered Dad talking about as a filly.

“Wait right here.” He stepped through a door at the back of the room. A large window looked into the laboratory proper, and there I watched the long-maned stallion trot up to a large figure at a workbench surrounded by a bunch of other lab ponies.

The hairs stood up on my withers the moment I recognized him. The bushy beard. The cropped mane.

Dad…

The long-maned stallion jerked his head over his shoulder toward me.

Dad followed with his eyes, and when he saw me, I swore he thought he was staring at a ghost. He almost dropped the vial he was holding. He stormed toward the door, tearing off his mask and lab coat, and when the door opened, he stopped right there on the threshold.

We shared a moment of silence, just staring at each other in disbelief. After being gone seven years, it felt like a dream seeing him standing there.

“Dad, I—”

He already had me wrapped up in his massive hooves, and I didn’t have any more words. I guess I didn’t need them. I hugged him back, and that intense warmth I remembered so fondly came rushing back from the distant corners of my mind.

“You’ve grown,” he said, holding me at arm’s length. He had that far-off Dad Smile about him he used to get whenever I did those stupid modeling gigs Mom put me through as a filly.

“I, uh…” I didn’t know what to say. You too would have probably gotten a laugh way back when, but I wasn’t sure how he’d take it now. It’d been so long. “Yeah, I… I-I guess.”

I wanted to bury myself in his chest and feel his hooves around me for hours and hours, feel his warmth reach down and warm the part of me that had been so cold for so long. But I laid my ears back and retreated to the safety of my hooves bunched up in front of me as the urgency of Princess Twilight’s request hounded me from the back of my mind.

“Dad,” I said. “I need your help with something.”

“Name it.”

“I—” Wait. Did he say yes? Just like that?

He looked serious, like whatever I said next would be the most important thing in the world.

Parents love hearing from their kids, Twilight’s voice sounded in my head.

Some parents, that other voice clarified. And sure as shit not yours.

But that look in Dad’s eye couldn’t be lying. Was it really that simple? Was I overinflating the issue? Did they—or at least he—actually miss me?

“Copper?” he said. “What’s wrong?”

“I, I… Has… Has Princess Celestia told you anything about Princess Luna?” I asked.

He sat back and scratched his beard. “No, she hasn’t. Not really my business down here in the lab.”

“Well, we’re… I, uh. I really don’t know how to explain it. But it involves all this sciency stuff.” I waggled my hoof at the window where the other lab rats fussed over some blue liquid in the glass vial Dad had been holding. “And Princess Twilight asked for you by name.”

His eyes lit up at the name drop. “Princess Twilight? Now where in the wide world of Equestria have you been to be rubbing elbows with princesses?”

“I-it’s a long story.”

“Well, then give me one second,” he said. He headed back into the lab and chatted up the long-maned stallion, who seemed to be in the middle of corralling the others into some semblance of order. I couldn’t tell what they were saying, but he nodded at Dad and turned back to whatever was in that vial.

A moment later, Dad was back on this side of the door, all smiles and hopeful energy. “Alright, let’s go.”

“Let’s go? Just like that?”

“Just like that. It helps being the big stallion around these parts.” He threw on a casual smile before leaning in for a conspiratorial whisper. “And between you and me, I really needed to get out of there. These new kids are driving me up the wall. Bunsen can handle ’em for a day or two.”

That got a laugh out of me. It felt good to laugh. I hadn’t done nearly enough of it in so long. A hopeful sensation welled up inside me, and I felt good, like the universe smiled down on me for the first time in my life.

“Alright,” I said. “Let’s get going.”

XLIII - And Will that Hell Shall Meet Us

I spent what felt like another week wandering the Dreamscape.

It still got goosebumps running up and down my legs from how big this place was. Infinity had always been an idea I could wrap my head around, but the moment it became more than a concept…

Mortal minds weren’t meant for this.

To spare myself another existential nightmare, I elected to switching off my brain in favor of coasting in neutral. Hours of that supposed week went by like the blink of an eye. In the short moments I came out of standby, I focused on what Luna told me: Follow your heart, Sunset. It will never steer you wrong.

I did just that. I listened to the rhythm of my heart when different memories rolled through the movie reel that was my brain—some good, some bad, and some… I wasn’t sure.

The last time I let my heart draw me toward Luna, I felt hatred, rage, contempt—all the things that made me want to stomp on her face until her teeth fell out. But where that rage once burned like the fires of hell, I… I didn’t know what I felt anymore, but it wasn’t anger. At least, not strictly.

Honestly, I felt lost in a way no compass or map could fix. And the only pony who had an inkling of what was going on was the very one at the end of this nigh limitless journey.

Luna. Her name alone should have had my stomach upending itself. My brain lashed out instinctively: never forget what she did to you. And I didn’t. I couldn’t. The scars were there, in my head and in my heart. She broke me, yet she was also the one working hardest to fix me.

It still felt wrong admitting it, but she looked out for me. She protected me. And when I let the rage of what she had done get the better of me, she beat me into the dirt in order to peel away the mask hiding all the nastiness and uncertainty underneath. I still couldn’t justify that as the best way to help, but it proved one undeniable fact: she didn’t see me as the porcelain doll everyone else did.

I was a living breathing human with all the dignity and fallibility that entailed. She didn’t coddle me, nor did she try fixing me so much as enable me to fix myself.

Part of me still didn’t want to admit it, but she understood. And the way she laid bare her soul to me at the fireside had me feeling a little more… I didn’t know. Patient? Willing to listen? That much was true, if nothing else.

Maybe it was the whole concept of acclimatization that desensitized me to who she was and what she represented. God only knew the fuckery I had come to call “normal.” But it was mine to fight and mine to fix. She was merely there to see me through it in the way she thought best.

And it worked for the most part—scrub away the infection so the body could heal. The mind worked the same way, I had to assume. At least, that’s what mine told me, and no matter the circular nature of that logic, I was content.

I followed that contentment through the inky infinity, time a distant memory as I made myself one with the stars, and when I came to a gaping blackness I could only see by the absence of stars beyond it, I knew I had found the place.

The Eversleep took the form of a black hole. Little flecks of spacedust drifted into its gravity well and winked out, figments of someone’s last dream-thought gone, never to be dreamt again. It sent an icy chill up my spine.

I approached the event horizon, and I felt gravity shift insidiously, by way of the hairs tugging at my fetlocks. Another inch, and there was no going back.

I thought about it for the briefest moment: just turn around and walk away, leave her to the consequences of her martyr complex. But Twilight counted on me. Equestria and the human world counted on me. And I needed to do this for myself just as much. I sucked in a deep breath, and I took that fateful step over the threshold.

The change was immediate and intense. What was once an event horizon became the highest reaches of some planetary atmosphere. Icy winds howled and battered at me like feral windigos, tossing me every which way, but I gritted my teeth.

I kept my mind focused on Luna: her regal posture, the way her wingtips poked up above her back and the way she held her head upright and rigid yet with a smoothness of motion even Celestia couldn’t match. The Warrior Princess.

She wanted to help just as much as she needed to make amends, and I liked to think I had cooled off enough to let her. Tough love as the saying went. But that was a type of love, or at least the extent she was capable of, a sense of justice she felt I was due.

It was… calming? Relieving? Alleviating? I couldn’t pick the right word for it, but the sensation persisted even as I touched down amidst the maelstrom. The winds ripped apart the very ground beneath my hooves, and yet I felt… safe. Maybe not happy, but safe had never been more of a certainty, and no less so as she turned to greet me. Except maybe I was jumping the gun on that assumption, judging by the crease in her brow.

“You should not be here,” Luna said curtly. She sat up from where she lay overlooking a darkness my eyes couldn’t penetrate. She wore a scowl that could have peeled paint off a wall, and goddamn it no matter how hard I tried to see her in a different light, she just knew how to get under my skin.

“And why not?” I shot back.

“Because when I raised you from this place, I did so so that you might stop the Nightmare and end this plague.”

“No, you didn’t do so so that I might anything,” I said. “You did so so that I could do what I thought was best. I chose to go. Besides, it’s not like you even tried to come with.”

“Because it was safer that way. I could better focus on manipulating the fabrics that separate us from the Dreamscape. I could guarantee your escape, or I could chance ours. I see little reason to consider the notion.”

If I’d had fists, I would have been clenching them. “The whole fucking point is that we work together. You’re the one who wanted to fix this so damn badly.”

“And I do. I have said it time and again that I would bleed for the chance, so do not deflect when I ask why in Orion’s name you have returned.”

“Because someone has to save you, you dumbass!”

The look in her eyes faltered, and where there was once confusion and frustration, there was now… pain?

“Sunset, I had once before made the choice to save you at my own expense. Do not tell me you have forgotten what happened because you came to—”

“No, stop talking. I don't care what sort of sob story you think you're the star of here. I don't care if you think leaving yourself for dead is the right play. Now is my turn to talk, so just listen to me.”

“I have listened, Sunset. Tell me—” She spread her winds to gesture at the surrounding maelstrom. “—is this not what you wanted to become of me?”

I… and there she went, turning my words against me. Like some kind of goddamn stenographer itching to see me off to the chopping block.

But was she wrong? Wasn’t this what I wanted?

I’d told Luna she could burn in hell, and I meant every word when I said it. The animalistic part of my brain still did. This here was the closest she’d get while still technically alive.

But…

But what?

Things had changed. I had changed. My time drifting alone in the Dreamscape gave me perspective. It gave me ample space to think, to see, to feel what made me who I was, who I was becoming, and Luna’s place in it all.

She could get under my skin like nobody’s business, but annoyance wasn’t rage. Oil and water didn’t combust like alkali metals. They just… didn’t mix.

The rage that once consumed me had burnt out—been stamped out, really, but gone all the same. To some tentative degree, I was content with who she was and the dynamic we shared. But did that lack of hatred acquit her of what she did to me? Did she really deserve to burn in hell? The whole ethics thing wasn’t my strongest suit.

I could science anything I put my mind to, but there was no chemical formula for right and wrong, no scale that could measure earnestness, no chromatogram for stratifying morals. Truth didn’t come in a reagent bottle, nor was intent measured in molarity.

I had no numbers to correlate or graphs to infer from. All I had were my eyes to see, my ears to hear, and my heart to feel. I felt intellectually naked, and the very idea of that unknown terrified me the way disappointing Celestia used to years ago.

But I had my eyes, and I could hear and feel all that Luna had done—not Nocturne, Luna. Despite the wrongs she committed before, she strove to make up for them. The proof was written in her own blood. Not once or twice, but three times she had sacrificed herself to save my life, and despite the thankless hell I’d put her through, she stayed true to her word.

She really did care.

Maybe she deserved to burn in hell despite it all. Maybe she didn’t. I couldn’t say for certain anymore. But right now, that didn’t matter.

“You’re right,” I said. “This is what I wanted. Wanted, not want. And you’re right that I probably shouldn’t have come back. It was dangerous and stupid of me. But I did it anyway. Because…” My mind wandered back to my last conversation with Celestia, and a strange squirmy feeling wrapped its grubby fingers around my heart. “Because I need to come to terms with this. I need to grow the fuck up, and that means coming back for you, the way you did for me, and not just because Twilight asked me to.”

I sucked in a deep breath through my nose. It took all my willpower to form the words in the forefront of my brain:

“I can’t do this alone.”

I let the rest of that breath out as an exasperated sigh. “There, I said it. I need your help. I want your help. Because you’re smart, and brave, and you kick ass like it’s nobody’s business. You know a hell of a lot more about this than I do, and if there’s one thing I do know, it’s that you didn’t have to leave yourself behind. You said it yourself. Maybe it really was safer, but you didn’t have to.”

I looked back and forth between her eyes in the hopes I’d see something in there worth all these mixed-up thoughts in my head.

“I can’t do this without you,” I said again. “I really can’t. But right now, you need to stop getting your rocks off to this bullshit martyr complex of yours and fucking help me.” I took a step forward and looked her dead in the eye. “Please.”

She stared at me, so taken aback that I was pretty sure her brain had to do a hard shutdown to reboot. A solid two seconds went by before she blinked, snapped her wings flush against her sides, and turned the lights back on between her ears.

In that annoyingly pensive way only she could manage, she gave me another moment’s regard before closing her eyes. The way her ears flicked about told me there was no shortage of cognitive dissonance and self-deprecation going on in her head, but she eventually craned her neck toward the maelstrom above and let out a sigh.

“You have come far in this short time we have known each other, Sunset. I am proud to bear witness to it. I would be a fool to think myself infallible, and indeed, mayhaps I was wrong in discarding myself so hastily.” She went quiet again, and slowly her gaze came around to settle upon me—fragile, yet hard as diamond.

“You truly believe what you say?” she asked. “That you need my help? That you want my help?” There was a certain hollow measure to her voice, as if whatever I said next would be the most important words to ever come out of my mouth.

After a long moment, I said, “I do.”

The wind howled, the ledge crumbled to sail off into the sky, and still she stared at me with the weight of her soul borne upon the hope I found in that gaze, until eventually a smile came to her.

“Very well.” She got to her hooves and gave the ever-circling maelstrom a determined glare. There was an electricity to her, a spark flickering to life in challenge of the storm. “Then we shall rise against the maelstrom together, and will that Hell shall meet us should it be our fate. ’Twill not be easy, and I know not what will happen should we fail.”

“I sense a ‘but’ in there,” I said.

She tracked a sidelong eye down toward me. The way her lip curled into a grin had me second-guessing our tentative arrangement.

“But,” she said, “you will have to trust me.”

She flapped her wings, and just as my brain processed the implication, she lowered her right wing toward me like a ramp.

“Oh no,” I said. “No, no no no no no. We are not flying. I told you—”

“Sunset,” she said, the calmest I’d ever heard her speak.

I almost didn’t hear her over the wind. I waited for her to say more, but she merely stared at me expectantly.

Oh god. Oh jeez. We really had to do this, didn’t we? I was going to do this. This was insane. I took back everything I said a moment ago. I didn’t want to grow up. Coming to terms was for chumps. I hated flying.

“Sunset,” she said again in that same patient voice.

I winced and snapped my ears flat back. A deep breath, in then out, and I opened my eyes. We were doing this. We were really doing this. I had to do this. For… for Twilight. For Copper. Everyone was counting on me not being a little bitch.

My heart racketed like I’d run a marathon as I hopped up on her back. She was warm, but she could have been made of magma and it still wouldn’t have done jack for the ice water running through my veins.

She gave her wings a few test flaps. There were gaps in them where she still hadn’t regrown all her feathers, and I felt a lump in the joint where her wing met her shoulder that probably healed incorrectly. But she had full range of motion, and I had to pray that was enough.

“Are you ready?” she asked.

“Fuck no.” I wrapped my hooves tighter around her neck.

I could practically hear her smile in the laugh she gave. She found a sick, twisted sort of satisfaction in my misery, I just knew it.

She gave a few more test flaps before running toward the far end of the mountaintop. Oh god oh god oh—FUCK ME!

And we were off into the sky. My mane whipped in my face, and the wind felt like ice against my coat.

Luna pumped her wings to take us higher up and away from sweet, solid ground, and I felt the subtle arching of her back with every wingbeat. A perpetual grunt settled into the cracks between her breaths.

“Hold fast, Sunset,” she shouted over the now roaring wind as we approached the darkened clouds above. They loomed like an iron fortress awaiting whatever hapless travelers may dare enter.

She lit her horn, and everything was lost to a flash of light and the howling wind.

[End of Act II]

Act III - XLIV - The Warrior Princess

One moment I was freaking out riding on Luna’s back, the next I was tumbling through the weightless void of dream space.

I twisted around to get a sense of where and why and how.

Okay, so we weren’t dead. That was a start. The stars, in all their indifference, looked patterned the same as I remembered, which put Twilight’s dream… I turned to aim myself in the right direction, and there I saw Luna drifting toward me.

“Fear not, Sunset,” she said, putting a hoof on my shoulder. She spoke telepathically, her words passing through my brain like a thought I didn’t think myself. “We are free of that abyss, and I am with you.”

She gave me a smile, but the more I looked at her the less I could call it one. She looked… weakened. I didn’t know how to properly put it, but she was like a gem that someone had taken steel wool to. Whatever she did to get us both out must have taken a hell of a toll on her.

But she wouldn’t want me dithering over that, nor would it help any. We had to figure a way out of here.

“Come on,” I said wordlessly to the void. I assumed she could at least read my lips, if the telepathy didn’t work both ways. “Can you get us out of here?”

I tapped the tip of my horn to indicate magic, but the moment I did so, I saw hers.

Thick, ugly cracks spidered up her horn, indistinguishable from its natural spiral. Tiny flakes broke off to drift aimlessly in the zero gravity whenever she moved her head too quick.

Copper’s dad had that sort of thing going on with his horn, but not nearly to the same degree. His was like a wood grain striations type deal that gave it a sense of character, like a greying beard. Luna’s was blasted-earth levels of fucked.

Horn disfiguration ranked highest on my body-horror list. Just thinking about it got me queasy.

On second thought, we should look for an exit the old-fashioned way. At least until… that healed. If it ever did, I tried to not think.

In true bull-headed, martyr-like fashion, Luna tried lighting her horn to do any number of stupid irreversible fuckery to herself. The pain on her face had me cringing, and when the attempt left her spent and panting, she had the gall to look at me apologetically.

“I am sorry,” I heard between my ears. “I cannot draw us from the Dreamscape as I hoped.”

As if I would have wanted her to fuck herself up more trying to magic us out of here. I almost slapped her for being that stupid.

“You’re gonna kill yourself, you idiot,” I said. “Who the hell’s going to stop the Nightmare if you go and do that?”

I had half a mind to flick her horn like I used to do to Copper whenever she used magic to prank me, but the body-horror crawlies came back at the thought of it snapping off. I let my stomach make a monkey’s chain of itself while I grabbed her by the hoof and pulled her in Twilight’s direction, but I didn’t get very far before she yanked me back.

“Come on,” I said. “We need to find…”

She had craned her neck toward a nearby star, and the sight of it had me stopping short, too.

It looked… sickly? Malnourished? How did one describe the physical “health” of a star?

“This is… touched,” echoed her voice between my ears. She circled around, studying it from every angle. As stoic as she could be, there was no hiding the urgency in her eyes. “The Nightmare has been here.”

She could tell that just by looking at the thing? I mean, I had no reason to distrust her, and honestly, I—

“H-hey, wait!” I shouted wordlessly, as she pressed herself nose first into the star and faded from existence.

Goddamn it. If it wasn’t one thing she was off trying to kill herself with, it was another. She was in no shape to deal with whatever the hell might be in there, let alone the Nightmare. Did I have to put her on a goddamn leash? I dove in behind her.

That silky sensation of the Veil brushed over my coat, and the moment its final threads gave way, I got a hefty whiff of old meat.

We stood in a cellar. Water dripped from an unseen leak somewhere to my left, beyond the shadows that clung tightly to everything and everywhere. A dim spotlight gave us just enough visibility to squint by.

A colt no older than five sat huddled in the center of the dreamspace, crying his eyes out.

Luna was at his side in an instant. Her back right leg trembled, struggling to hold her weight, and her left wing hung folded just a bit lower than her other, but she brushed away the magic separating us all the same.

Bitch was fucking crazy. If the Nightmare was in here, we were beyond boned.

I breathed in the dank, rotten stench of this place for one, two, three breaths—and nothing. I spun around. Still nothing.

Luna had already approached the colt. “Do not worry, little one,” she said, extending a wing to cup the colt’s chin and bring his eyes up. “I am here.”

“Princess Luna!” the kid said. He threw his hooves around her forelegs and bawled his eyes out, and if that wasn’t the most pathetic, heart-wrenching thing I’d seen all week, I’d eat a rainbow.

“You are safe now,” Luna said, pulling him close.

She took to brushing back the colt’s mane, like this was her natural habitat. No matter how beat to shit she was, she somehow found the strength to be his rock. But as all well and good as that was, I needed in the loop.

“So what’s going on here?” I said.

“’Tis an echo of sorts,” she said. “The Nightmare has been here, but it has since passed on, leaving its scars upon this dream.”

“If you say so. Does that mean we’re done here?”

She nodded to me before turning to the kid. “Be strong, little one. Stand tall and face the dark.”

She brushed his mane out of his face, and to the kid’s credit, he put on a brave smile for us.

“Go beat up that monster,” he said.

Even in my current mood, I couldn’t help laughing at that. “I’ll make sure to stick his nose in the mud for you.”

Luna tossed a playful smile my way, then the colt. She gave him a little nuzzle on the cheek, earning a giggle and another hug, and she again turned to me.

“Sunset,” Luna said. “If you would.”

What, the Wake-Up Spell? The expectation in her eyes bid I jump on that assumption, and so with a flick of my horn I wrapped us both in that weightless, falling-up sensation that pulled us back into the Dreamscape.

Huh, interesting. So the spell didn’t so much wake me up as it removed me from whatever dream I currently occupied? Or was it based on intent? I’d heard of emotional spell components that could alter things like that. I’d have to tinker with it later.

While I was busy all up in my head, Luna flitted over to the dream. She closed her eyes, touched her hoof to the star much the way I’d imagine her touching a crystal ball, and its inner light seemed to fade until it took on this strange transparency.

“Does that mean you woke him up?” I said without words.

“Yes,” came her voice between my ears. God, I was never going to get used to that. “’Tis safer that he remain awake for the time being. The corruption that has taken his dream is not so easily removed, and I am happy to offer him succor whilst we give chase to the Nightmare.”

“Uh, yeah, no. We aren’t chasing the Nightmare.” I poked her in the chest. “Not with you like this. We need to find Twilight and figure out a plan.”

“Sunset. You asked for my assistance, and that is exactly what I am doing.” A hint of annoyance sharpened her words to a knifepoint. “I shan’t hesitate if the opportunity presents itself to be rid of this once and for all.”

“No,” I said. “You shan’t shit. I asked for your assistance. Not to take the reins and re-up on your martyr bullshit. You’re in no shape to fight that thing, and I know you know that. It kicked both our asses, and that was when you were up to snuff. You don’t go walking into the boss room on one health. That’s suicide.”

She frowned at me. “I am unfamiliar with this metaphor of yours, but my duty to my subjects supersedes my own safety. It pains me enough to consider passing by these corrupted dreams and doing nothing.”

“You can’t do much if you’re dead, either,” I fired back.

“Be that as it may, we will accomplish far less if we remain here discussing our course of action.”

You’re the one with the stupid ideas that need discussing, I wanted to say.

The scowl on her face hinted that I had “said” it anyway. Yeah, well, if she could read my thoughts because I couldn’t control how this whole talking thing worked, then this would be the least of our conversations. That said, I could at least try and meet her in the middle. That little speech I just gave wouldn’t amount to much if I didn’t put in that ounce of effort.

“Look,” I said. “It’s a stupid idea to go rushing headlong into danger the way you always do. But if you’re absolutely dead set on it, would you at least let me try and patch you up first so it doesn’t off you the moment we catch up to it?”

She tried mustering whatever will held that damnable stoicism of hers together like duct tape, but she eventually thought better of it. “If that is what you wish.”

I closed my eyes and focused the magic at my horntip the way she taught me, felt it reach out and touch her. I felt the bruises under her skin and the patchwork of scars she earned from those hyena-dog things. Like molding clay, I smoothed them down one by one, eased them into the canvas that was her skin. Deeper still, tissue torn from bone I pulled closed, set straight the little bones of her pastern, sealed shut a hairline fracture in one of her ribs.

But the more I reached in, the harder it got to maintain the spell and the more it seemed I stretched myself thin. Try as I might, I couldn’t get further than that. It seemed there was an upper limit to what I could actually accomplish. Rather than give myself an aneurysm trying to bash my head against that wall any harder, I cinched off the magic and gasped for breath.

Goddamn, that took a lot out of me. I wiped the sweat from my brow and gave her a once-over. Like before, I was no surgeon, but at the very least she didn’t look ready to fall to pieces. The smile on her face said she appreciated the effort, however much it actually helped.

I cuffed her on the chest and offered her a matching smile before I set off into the Dreamscape.

We followed the dreams into the distant dark. It was like following in the wake of a tornado, each dream worse than the one before. Some looked outright mangled, as if the thing had torn its way in like a goddamn shark through the bars of a diver’s tank.

Part of me thanked the powers that be they headed the same direction as Twilight—two birds with one stone and all—but that left a nagging pit in my stomach. If we didn’t stop it in time, Twilight’s dream was on the chopping block. Walking into that boss room on one health looked all the more necessary, and so we pressed on.

An hour turned into a day, turned into three. Time became irrelevant—a comment she made somewhere along our silent hunt. That was a phrase for it. Ageless wisdom from the ageless one herself.

I kept an eye on her throughout. She seemed charged with some supernatural energy. I couldn’t tell if it came from an inner fire or was tied to the Dreamscape. No matter how beat to shit she looked, she just kept going.

I couldn’t deny a certain respect for it. Stubbornness was a trait I had in spades, not that I was proud of it. It’s what made us oil and water at the best of times. But seeing it from an outsider’s perspective—not being the focus of it for once in my life—it was something to behold. That simple, unfaltering persistence. It felt like staring into a mirror at times.

How much did she really enjoy this life? Did the silence get to her, or had she overcome that mental obstacle? Was she really that much of a glutton for punishment that she didn’t mind? Or worse, had it already broken her to the point of apathy?

I thought about striking up a conversation.

I just… wanted someone to talk to, if only to keep myself from going insane. One “week” cooped up in my head was enough for a while. Any more and I might start hearing voices.

But part of me didn’t want to break her concentration. She looked like she’d fall to pieces like one of those old-timey cartoon jalopies if I did. So I kept to myself, and she to herself. Until finally she didn’t.

“There,” she said after a time, breaking a week’s silence with a single word. She pointed at a dream up ahead.

It took the form of a red dwarf, if I had my astronomy right, but the corruption gave it a greenish hue around the outer edges rather than the rusty reddish tinge it should’ve had.

“‘There’ what?” I asked. The hackles went up on the back of my neck before she even answered.

“With me,” she said, and in she went.

“No, wait—” I started, but she had already committed.

That was one way to get my heart rate through the damn roof. Shan’t hesitate god-fucking-damn it. I swore to god, if we survived this I’d kill her myself. I gritted my teeth and dove in after her.

I touched down on rough beige carpet in a nondescript maze of cubicles. “Luna? Where are you?”

Nothing. I strained my ears for an answer—far off, buried, what have you. Still only silence.

Dipshit must have touched down in a different spot. I had to find her and pull us out before she got herself killed.

“Lu—”

A clay pot shattered behind me. I spun around to see the Nightmare about ten feet down the cubicle aisleway with its back to me, covered in clay fragments and dirt. It prowled farther down the aisle, toward the far T-junction where an auburn-maned pegasus mare was trying to overturn a filing cabinet between them.

Shit. This wasn’t an echo like that last dream—not a shadow, not anything else Luna could make up names for. This was the real deal. And of course this happened when neither of us were ready to fight the damn thing.

The Nightmare growled, and the mare managed to overturn the cabinet just in time to bear the weight of its leap.

I heard the sickening crunch of metal as it caught the filing cabinet in its jaws and shredded it like a popcan in a blender. Papers scattered in the breeze, and in the half second I would have spent pissing myself were I in her shoes, she was off like a jackrabbit through the underbrush, the Nightmare hot on her heels.

“Hey!” I yelled, scrambling after them.

I knew it’d be suicide to intervene, but I had to keep close. If I stayed near, Luna would show up eventually and I could drag her out before she did something stupid.

The mare led the Nightmare on one hell of a chase. Upstairs, down the hall, through another half-dozen cubicle-filled offices, upturning everything she could manage without slowing herself down.

The Nightmare made splinters and twisted metal of her little obstacle course. The only one she really slowed down was me. Even in the in-between state the Veil put us in, I was still bound to the dream’s physical state, and that included my own lack of athleticism. My lungs felt like I was making balloon animals out of them by the third office space.

Where the fuck was Luna? The last thing I needed was for her to burst onto the scene after I’d already passed out and throw back the Veil all high and mighty, just to get her shit stuffed.

A cubicle panel collapsed behind me, and there I saw Luna struggling to keep up.

Thank god. I thought I was going to die of a heart attack before she bothered showing up.

I turned around to grab her and cast the Wake-Up Spell, but it turned out that even in her half-dead state, she still had one hell of a shoulder check. She acquainted my face with the nearby water cooler and kept on trucking.

It took me a second to find my hooves. Fucking hell, my jaw. I could already feel it swelling up. Shan’t fucking hesitate, huh? With that kind of energy, maybe we stood a chance after all. I got up and took off after them.

She was like a goddamn revenant.

Over the twisted heap of metal that was once a cubicle, through a hallway door, across a skybridge, and there I caught up with Luna, where she had stopped at the threshold of what looked like the entrance into a hospital waiting area. A sign above the entrance read Surgery – Orange Tower. She heaved for air, her legs sprawled like those of a baby deer just learning to walk. Her wings hung at her sides, no small amount of feathers missing in disturbing tufts.

She was trying to light her horn, no doubt to join the fray. The fact she couldn’t even do that should have been warning enough for her not to try, but it seemed bullshit martyr complexes didn’t leave the heart as readily as I’d hoped.

I reached out to put a hoof on her shoulder. “Come on, we gotta—”

Out of the corner of my eye, I caught sight of the mare, boxed in by the Nightmare not even five feet away. She had scrambled backward into the corner, wings snapped helplessly against her sides. Her eyes were locked with its massive jaws, and the deep growl that rolled out of its throat shook dust from the ceiling tiles.

The mare pressed her back into the wall, that look in her eyes… I almost lost my balance as the déjà vu settled in like vertigo. Something inside me snapped, and a primal urgency fired into the forefront of my brain like gasoline into an engine.

“No!” I shouted and ripped the Veil away myself.

The Nightmare’s attention was immediate and intense. It spun around with a slavering snarl on its lips and its hackles wafting into the looming dark in smoky tendrils. The muscles beneath its black, skinless form tensed and coiled.

“You get the fuck away from her,” I said.

Luna appeared beside me. Even after the Healing Spell I did earlier, her mane and wings still looked like she’d jumped through an industrial fan, but her eyes carried the rallied spirit of an army’s war cry.

“I call first dibs on this punching bag,” I said, then nodded at the mare. “Get her out of here.”

Bold words coming from a chicken shit like me, but I needed the little internal pep talk. No matter how gutsy I felt, I couldn’t shake the fact this thing had already handed our asses to us not once but twice.

Third time’s the ch—

It swiped a claw at me, far short of any mark it could have been aiming for. I didn’t even bother dodging, but that became a fatal mistake I realized too late when the shadows trailing in the wake of its swipe condensed and swelled to twice its original reach.

All I could do was flinch before it sent me sailing through the glass and into the main waiting room. I crashed into something hard, and my ears rang like someone had pulled the fire alarm. I got my bearings in time to see Luna duck underneath another shadow swipe and carve a nasty gouge in its belly.

Thick black smoke spewed from the wound like steam from a burst valve, and the Nightmare roared in pain. It dispersed into shadow as she brought her head back around for another spell. The empty air crystallized in jagged spikes of ice the size of my legs, and the drop in temperature happened fast enough that I felt a draft along my withers. My breath came out in thick puffs of vapor.

“Where’d it go?” the mare shouted, manic. She was still pressed into the corner like a frightened animal, her eyes trying to watch every shadow lurking in every corner at once.

“Don’t move,” I yelled at her. And as if the universe loved challenging any semblance of luck I might have, the Nightmare seeped out of the cracks in the drop ceiling above us and materialized beside her, its claws raised above its head.

Shit.

I lassoed her with a flick of magic and yanked her out just as its claws came down to the ear-splitting crash of wood and drywall.

The mare landed on top of me, surprisingly heavy for a pegasus. She gawked at me like someone had thrown a wrench into the cogwheels of her brain.

“You said don’t move!” she yelled.

“Yeah, that was before the giant claws of death, you idiot! Now get off me!” I shoved her aside.

“Focus!” came Luna’s voice.

I rolled onto my belly in time to see her throw up a bubble shield between us and the Nightmare. Its blue glow threw the Nightmare’s musculature into deep contrast to make it look more terrifying than I needed right now.

It threw its weight against Luna’s shield, visibly buckling the floor where she had anchored it.

Again and again, with shoulder and tooth and claw in a cacophony of metal grinding on concrete. Its drool oozed down the side of her shield like blood from a wound.

“Luna, we have to get out of here,” I said. I knew I was the idiot to pull back the Veil this time around, but it didn’t take much to realize we were in over our heads again. “We can’t deal with this right now.”

“Sunset, trust me.”

“You know what happened last time!”

“Sunset!” She caught my eye for the briefest moment, and there was no room for argument.

“Goddamn it!” I yelled, and I readied a spell.

Luna flinched with every blow against her shield, as if bearing the brunt with her own shoulders. The laminate tile beneath us caved in, and splinters of floorboard shored up against the inside of her shield. Any more of this and we’d probably fall through to the floor below.

“Now!” I yelled.

She released her shield as it reared back, and I fired off the biggest fireball I could manage. But my spell went screaming into the far wall, the Nightmare having vanished just before it connected.

The hell? “Where’d it go?”

What felt like a bear trap clamped down on my left hind leg and ripped me from my hooves. I screamed as it smashed me sideways into the registration desk, flung me up through the cork and metal framework of the drop ceiling, and slammed me into the floor. The impact knocked my sense of hearing offline, and I was left in a little bubble of ringing silence while a lancing pain in my leg ripped a muffled scream from me.

I reached for my hind leg to find that it simply wasn’t there. My hoof trembled as I brought it back covered in blood, and the slow realization brought the pain into searing focus. I squeezed my eyes shut, curled in on myself, and let out another scream lost to the void.

An explosion behind me rocked the building, raining dust and debris down on us. Metal yawned deep within its bowels, and down crashed an office desk from the floor above. The screeching, tearing metal broke through even my deafness and drove my ears against my skull.

A flash of blue light illuminated the dust from within like lightning in a storm cloud to silhouette Luna and the Nightmare midbattle. She shot out the top end of the cloud with a burst of her wings just as a massive paw reached out after her, followed by flashing fangs and the Nightmare’s relentless hollow eyes.

I almost couldn’t believe it. She was still going. Somehow, someway that crazy motherfucker trucked on. Her coat was more red than blue from a dozen open wounds, and she was missing half of her left wing. Every wingbeat painted the room with a spray of blood.

I had to get up. Get up get up get the fuck up and help.

I tried dragging myself to my hooves, but the moment I got to all fours, my back leg slipped out from under me in the pool of my own blood. Out of instinct, I tried catching myself with my other back leg and fell on the exposed bone with my full weight.

I liked to think I knew what pain felt like until that moment, but as I had so many times before, I learned the hard way how naïve I truly was.

The sensation of lightning shot through me, and I seized up before collapsing sideways, clutching at the stump. I couldn’t even muster the will to scream.

My brain went back to the first time we fought the Nightmare head-on and how I was the same joke of a fighter now as I was then. Except this time we were really gonna die.

There was no running from this. It could dream hop just like us. I had no lifeline to yank me back into the waking world, no Twilight to hold me and tell me everything was okay. And the fact that these thoughts ran through my head proved I was nothing more than a coward, a child crying for her binkie.

A scream cut through me like glass, and I snapped my attention toward the Nightmare.

It had Luna about the chest, her wings splayed at impossible angles between its teeth. Blood ran in ample streams down its jaws.

She flailed her back legs, kicking at its face, clawing at its eyes. The Spirit of War enraptured her even in the face of death, but fanaticism could only account for so much.

Undeterred, the Nightmare put a paw on her hips to pin them to the floor, arched its neck, and heaved.

She screamed. She screamed like I had never heard anyone before.

I shut my eyes to block it out, put my hooves over my ears and tried to drown out the popping, twisting, snapping and the sound I could only liken to a wet towel being wrung out on the floor, and my brain conjured the image of Luna simply being… separated. I whimpered to myself as the tears ran down my face.

I was next. I was next, and there was nothing I could do to stop it.

Her screaming relented, and I found the tiniest sliver of courage to open my eyes. I didn’t know what shred of mercy the universe spared us from my imagination becoming reality, but I thanked whatever gods existed all the same.

Upside down, she hung limp in its jaws, like a fish freshly caught from a river, rent to ribbons but still whole. Blood ran up her neck, cheeks, filled in the spiral of her horn, dribbled into the tatters of her mane. She didn’t have the strength to move, but I saw the fire in her eyes still burning—flickering, smoldering, but there all the same. Still alive, still fighting. Fearless to the end.

She lit her horn, and I saw the Nightmare’s muscles seize up as a faint blue light rippled across its body. With the last shred of her strength, she looked me in the eye, and I read the words on her face as clearly as if she had screamed them.

Do it.

So I did. I gritted my teeth and thought of every single nightmare I’d had in the past seven years. All the pain and suffering and fear and anxiety—every negative emotion it had used to put my face to the grindstone. I pictured Nocturne, the swirling mane and those silver-trimmed wings, the lies and deceit, that crescent-moon smile, and I had all the ammunition I needed.

I opened my eyes with singular focus, my horntip burning bright like magnesium. When I let it fly, I felt the oxygen in the room go with it.

The Nightmare tried to move, tried to disperse into shadow, but the blue glow surrounding it held it both in place and form.

My spell struck home, punching a hole clean through its chest cavity and out the other side. I could see the burning hole in the far wall through the wound—and the wall behind that, and the wall behind that.

The spell’s release sapped all the adrenaline from me, and gravity reached out to remind me who the master was here. My head felt heavy. Everything spun. Next thing I knew, the world lay sideways.

I shifted my head to look at the Nightmare, watch it struggle for footing. That’s right, fucking suffer, you piece of shit. I picked my head up and gritted my teeth. Just one more spell. Just put this thing in the dirt where it belonged.

And I… I felt the magic fizzle and go static-y, and my legs turned to jelly. I was on my face again.

I was losing seconds to the lightheadedness. I lay on my stomach. Now my hooves were in front of my face. Get up get up get the fuck up you goddamn coward!

The Nightmare lay on its side… now raising its head. Somewhere in the paint swirl that was my vision, I saw it looking at me, looking into me. Its body took on that indistinct wispy form, seeped up through the ceiling tiles, and was gone.

I reached out toward it, gritted my teeth, tried again to magic a spell to my horn, but the pain was too much. I collapsed in the pool of my own blood and curled in on myself. Angry tears beaded at the corners of my eyes.

“Goddamn it!”

After everything we fought for, after everything we put on the line, it still got away.

The world was sideways again. Luna lay a few feet away, still breathing, if only barely. Every breath sounded like the last dregs of pop being sucked through a straw.

Her eyes tracked to me and for the briefest moment shared with me a spark of pride—and then nothing. Her pupils unfocused, and that long final death rattle raked the depths of my soul.

“No,” I said, the tears running freely down my cheeks. “No you fucking don’t.” I gritted my teeth to spite the pain and dragged myself across the blood-slicked floor until I was close enough to throw my hooves around her.

Fuck her martyr bullshit. She didn’t get the hero’s way out. I jammed my horn into her chest to dump everything I had left into her.

“Live, you son of a bitch,” I said, and I…

I…

XLV - A Familiar Face

The universe had an uncanny habit these last few days of making sure everything hurt like hell.

It started with my hind leg, an aching, throbbing pain that lanced when I tried moving it. My ribs felt like the punching bag of a heavyweight champion after a good workout, my jaw was as swollen as a bad bee sting, and god, fuck my leg.

I put a hoof up to my forehead to stave off a pounding headache that gave Starlight’s cutie mark removal spell a run for its money. Some monotonous beeping nearby wasn’t doing me any favors.

“Holy shit,” someone said. “You’re awake already?”

I opened my eyes to see the auburn-maned pegasus chick sitting on a chair against the nearby wall. A plastic smock-looking thing lay discarded beside her chair, covered in enough blood to make a haunted house worker proud. It took a moment for the only two active brain cells between my ears to rub themselves together:

“I’m not dead?” My voice came out hoarse, like I’d spent the entire day singing my heart out at a rock concert, and my throat hurt when I swallowed.

“Not quite,” the mare said. She threw on a prideful grin. “You almost were for a few hours, but I like to think I’m pretty good at what I do.”

“…What?”

That’s when I noticed the heart rate monitor—the source of that beeping—on a table beside me and all its little wires and strips of tape keeping it on my hooftip, along with an IV sticking out of my foreleg. It led up to a red plastic bag she had hanging from a bent clothes hanger jammed into the ceiling. There was a giant “O-” on the label.

I lay on the center table of what looked like an operating room. A row of cabinetry dominated the length of the far wall, littered with boxes of hoof gloves and face masks. Long sheets of what looked like corrugated steel lined the nearby wall, decked out with long plastic bins filled to the brim with little plastic-wrapped medical doo-dads.

The floor was a mess of torn-open plastic wraps and scattered medical paraphernalia—needles, blood tubes, IVs, and a bunch of other stuff from those bins that I couldn’t name—and a healthy pool of blood trailed in from the double doors and onto the table where I lay, as if someone tried mopping up with my insides instead of water.

It looked like a murder scene. And yet here I was, alive and un-murdered.

“I’ve never had a dream before that was this one-for-one with the real world,” the mare said, looking around at all the surgical odds and ends. “But I’m not gonna question it. You’re really heavy, though, you know that?”

I decided to take that as a compliment and ignore the rest of its implications. “Yeah, that’s kinda Luna’s MO… whenever she’s involved, expect hyper-realistic dreams.”

Goddamn, my head hurt. At this rate, it would for sure win out against Starlight’s cutie mark spell.

“But for real,” I asked. “What the hell’s going on? And how the hell am I still alive?”

“Well, like I said,” the mare said. “You were teetering on death’s door there for a few hours until I got you stable, aaand I used to work here.” She buffed a hoof on her chest. “Lead trauma nurse for three years.”

“Well that’s awfully fuckin’ convenient,” I said. “Who the hell are you?”

The mare grinned. “Well, I could keep being a smartass and say ‘a lead trauma nurse for three years’ again, but I think the real answer would get your goat better. You don’t recognize me, do you? It’s the wings, I bet.”

She pulled her mane back into a messy bun and struck an informal pose, much the way I imagined Copper would.

I squinted at her. Cream-colored coat, auburn mane, those amber eyes… Wait, was she…? No, it couldn’t be.

“You’re that nurse bitch from the retirement home,” I blurted out. I vaguely remembered Stone Wall mentioning the whole ER thing.

She scowled at me and let her mane fall back into place. “I have a name, you know. And you’re welcome for saving your life. No big deal or anything.”

I… Well, she got me there. “Sorry, I… thanks. I-I’m Sunset Shimmer. You were… Acuity, right?”

She smiled like sunshine. “Yeah. I’m surprised you remember it. Nice to formally meet you. I… do have to say sorry for how I was last time we met. I, I was having a bad day.”

I tried my best to return her smile. “I was gonna say, you’re a lot more laid back than the stick-up-your-butt you were then.”

“Says the mare who thought the best way to say hi to her old friend was to scribble all over my med schedule. And stick up my butt or not, I had every right to be concerned when the mare who put a fucking Royal Guard into retirement strolls through the door with a frown on her face.”

I winced at the accusation. Though, it was hard to deny. That’s exactly what I did.

She wore a searching look when I found the courage to meet her gaze. I didn’t think she realized how deep that would cut, or maybe she wanted me to hurt. I gave her the benefit of the doubt and set the thought aside, instead focusing on the part of her dream that kinda tripped me up.

“So you’re a pegasus in your dreams,” I said. “What’s up with that?”

Her smile took on an amused twist at the ends, and she leaned against her chair’s armrest. “You literally just fought some hulking shadow beast thing, and you’re more fixated on the fact that I have wings in my dream?”

“Well, touché, but still. How come? I get that dreams are dreams, but that seems like an odd, uh… discrepancy?”

She shrugged. “I grew up always wishing I could be a pegasus. My mom was a pegasus, and she used to always tell me stories about Cloudsdale.”

“‘Was’?”

“Was.” She looked around the room at nothing in particular—or maybe everything in particular. “It’s why I ended up busting my ass in school to get here.”

Was… shit. I didn’t mean to drag out that old baggage on her. Not really the time or place even if I did.

Was this the kind of counseling crap Luna dealt with every night? Door-to-door heart-to-hearts after fighting off bad dreams? No wonder she was so somber all the time, dealing with everyone else’s problems.

“What made you change jobs?” I asked. Not that I felt compelled to take up Luna’s mantle, but… well, I felt like I owed her at least that much after stomping through the vulnerable side of her memory.

Acuity’s smile flatlined. “This place was going to kill me. The pay was nice, but too many overtime and on-call shifts. I already have a few grey hairs coming in thanks to this place. Greener Pastures is… easier, and I still get to help ponies who really need it. Especially your friend Stone Wall.”

Hearing his name out loud got goosebumps crawling up my legs, and my heart wrung itself out like a sponge. Considering who I was talking to, I knew the conversation would end up here, no matter how much I wanted to avoid it. My mind flashed back to that moment in the Royal Treasury. I could still feel the heat at my horn tip, hear the roar of—

“He talks about you all the time, by the way.” She stared at me with a cross between nostalgia and pity. “You were his favorite thing about his job. ‘I always wished I had a daughter like her,’ he’d say.”

Her eyes traced a slow path toward the bandages around my stump of a leg. “He never told me exactly what happened, but something tells me karma has a sense of poetic justice. Or at least a twisted sense of humor…”

I followed her gaze to my leg. Karma… That was a word for it. It was even the same damn leg as his.

I didn’t really believe in karma, but the way the universe had been fucking me over recently had me reconsidering. Either way, I couldn’t argue against deserving all the shit life had thrown at me.

“Where’s Luna?” I said, again in desperate need to change the subject.

“Over there,” she said, nodding toward a gurney in the back corner that I hadn’t noticed. Luna was tucked in beneath a blanket, and she had her own clear IV bag of what was probably saline. “She’s fine. Whatever spell that was you did before passing out did a hell of a job. All she really needed from me was a few bandages and the drip.”

Finally some good news. Those last moments were a little fuzzy, but I could still see her lying motionless in a pool of blood, how the light all but went out in her eyes.

“So you’re really real, huh?” she said, eyes still on Luna. “Not some figment of my imagination?”

“The way you say that tells me you already know the answer.”

She shrugged. “I know, but I guess I just want to hear it from you.”

“That’s a logical fallacy and a half,” I said, grinning. Had she really just walked into the same stumbling block Twilight had when I visited her?

That seemed to push a button. She puffed up in the cheeks, and her wings did that half-mast thing pegasi did when flustered.

“Yeah, well, you’re a logical fallacy and a half.”

I laughed, and—ow, my ribs.

That got her sputtering and putting a hoof up to try and hide that grin of hers. Sputtering became a snort became full-blown laughter, and I fell back into a laughing fit alongside her and ow fuck, goddamn it.

Still, it felt good to laugh, felt good to share a laugh. I really needed that right now.

“But really,” Acuity said after our laughter subsided. “She couldn’t just stamp her hoof and wake me up?”

“I-it’s more complicated than that right now. Clearly. If it wasn’t, I wouldn’t be here. Well, I should say she wouldn’t need to drag me along for the ride. It’s just… It’s weird, when I think about it.”

“Like thinking me being a pegasus in my dreams is weird? Seriously, if that’s weird to you, then what the heck do you normally dream about?”

“For the last seven years?” I nodded at my leg. “The thing that did this.”

Her ears fell back. Judging by the look on her face, I worried I might have to throw her on the table and start chest compressions.

“Oh… well, I guess, um…” Her face turned up in a wry smile. “From how you blasted it to kingdom come, it should be having nightmares about you instead now, eh?”

I knew she was just trying to smooth over that little conversational speed bump, but it got a smile out of me. If only…

“If everything goes according to plan,” I said, “it won’t, ’cause it’ll be dead.”

“Plans don’t always work out the way you hope, though.” She was staring at my stump again.

“Not really,” I said. “It’s dream hopping. We’ve gotta stop it before it figures out how to get into the real world and all hell breaks loose.”

“Looks like you’ve got your work cut out for you, then.”

“Yeah. Speaking of, we should get going.” I tried standing up, but the world chose that as the best moment to practice its cartwheels.

“Hey hey hey,” Acuity said, leaping to my side to steady me. “You lost a lot of blood and you’re still dehydrated. Don’t be stupid and leave AMA on me already.”

Against medical advice? my brain weaseled out. I had all those cheesy hospital dramas I used to binge in the human world to thank for that nugget of wisdom. But something else she said had me grinning like a drunk sorority mare.

“‘Don’t be stupid’?” I said. “That’s not very professional of you.”

“Yeah, well, you’re not a real-life patient, so I can say what I actually feel.” She punched me playfully in the shoulder, but last night’s beating made sure she found a sore spot that still really hurt.

“Lots of work baggage there?” I asked, gritting my teeth so she hopefully didn’t notice.

“You don’t know how many times I’ve wanted to say that and more to some of my patients. You see a lot of dumbasses come through the trauma bay in three years.” She settled me back down to a sitting position, where I was steady enough to hold myself up.

“But for real,” she said. “You shouldn’t be jumping back into action just yet.”

“I’ll be fine. We’re not going to fight that thing again anytime soon if I can help it. The plan is to get out of the Dreamscape first. If we do that, I should come back in like this never even happened. At least, that’s how it worked last time.”

“What about the princess?”

“Same thing when she was linked to me. Now, though… I have no idea. But it’s all I have to go by, and I need to get back to Twilight and the others.”

She perked up at that. “Princess Twilight? Damn, this must be big. Is Princess Celestia involved, too?”

I frowned. “I wish she wasn’t.”

“Oh…” She coughed in an attempt to avoid an awkward silence, but that only served to highlight it.

“Anyway,” she added. “Before you go…” She rubbed her foreleg, looking aside. “I know it’s not what you want to hear right now, but it’s something you need to hear. Stone Wall won’t say it, but he’s horribly depressed. The only time he ever smiles is when he’s talking about you or Princess Celestia.

“I know you said you’d come back, but in my line of work I’ve heard enough empty promises from patients’ friends and family. You will actually come back and see him again, won’t you?”

Goddamn it. I didn’t need my heart twisted into a knot right now. I took a slow breath in through my nose to keep my voice steady.

“If I get out of this alive, it’ll be the first thing on my list.”

She didn’t seem one-hundred-percent convinced, but she eventually smiled. “I look forward to seeing you, then.”

“Same.” I focused my magic at the tip of my horn and pulled Luna to my side. Another ounce of magic, and the Wake-Up Spell wrapped around us like morning mist. Its chill got goosebumps crawling up my legs, but the sensation was both familiar and welcome after all the shit we just shoveled. Still, I looked back before completing the spell, one final thing on my mind.

“By the way,” I said to Acuity. “You should wear your mane down more. It’s really pretty like that.”

And up Luna and I went through the Veil. Gravity waved us farewell, and the spray paint of stars welcomed us back to that silent emptiness I would never get used to.

Coming out of the dream didn’t fix my leg, nor any of my other aches and pains, so there was something about either Luna flinging me from the Eversleep that differed from leaving a dream by my own magic, or the Eversleep itself. But that was neither here nor there. It couldn’t transfer to the real world, and I still had a job to do.

Luna tumbled listlessly beside me—still asleep, but alive. I put her on my back, and off we went.

A few days went by, just me and the stars. Luna never woke up, but I could feel her heartbeat against my back, slow and steady. Its rhythm was a constant reminder of the unknowns lying ahead: how were we going to wake up? Did we have to re-enter Luna’s dream? Was there even a dream for us to return to? Did I have my own dream out there somewhere that I could enter and then wake up from?

The questions pestered me like mosquitoes buzzing around my ear.

We came to Twilight’s dream, that little cluster of stars too eerily similar to her cutie mark. Thankfully, the Nightmare hadn’t weaseled its way in, but farther on in the distance I saw other dreams twisted and discolored from its touch.

So she was awake when it passed by, judging by her dream’s transparency. Whether due to a late night working or a sleepless night spent tossing and turning, we finally caught a break. But where the Nightmare couldn’t enter, neither could we.

I curled my hooves in and sighed, resigning myself to follow its slow orbit through the Dreamscape.

All I could do was wait.

XLVI - Reassessing the Situation

Dad and I took the evening train back to Ponyville.

It was all so surreal. I hadn’t seen hide nor hair of him in seven years, and now all of a sudden we were on a train ride together, like we were taking a day trip out to see the countryside. Just me and Dad.

Not a moment passed where I wasn’t leaning into his side. It’s how I spent my time getting him up to speed on the dream spell, how I fell asleep watching the hills roll by, how I woke up as the train pulled into the station. The only thing that could have made it any more like the Good Old Days was if he had picked me up—still sleeping—put me on his back, and carried me home to bed.

Now was anything but the Good Old Days, but I could dream.

Spike welcomed us into the castle with the biggest of smiles. He was a nice little dragon. Not that I really had anything to compare him to except the summer migrations, and those didn’t paint all that nice a picture. But I knew where we were going, so I thanked him, and he left to do whatever it was dragons did around castles.

Dad marveled at the castle’s interior as we headed to the portal room. It was weird seeing him get so giddy over it, since he basically lived in the Canterlot Research Labs. The only real difference was the crystal shelving in the portal room versus the sleek chrome they used down in the labs.

Twilight was quick to bound over when we stepped in. She threw the biggest hug around me before I knew what was happening.

My first instinct was to stiffen up. I had, for the most part, accepted who I was, but being hugged by another mare in front of Dad, I… I was being paranoid. I was being paranoid. I was being paranoid.

And I knew I was being paranoid the moment Twilight wilted at my reaction. Her eyes flicked to Dad, then back to me. She cleared her throat into her fetlock and turned fully toward Dad, all smiles.

“Hello!” she said in that chipper voice of hers and extended her hoof. “I’m Twilight Sparkle. And you are?”

“String Theory,” Dad said, taking her hoof. “Call me String. Pleasure to meet you, Princess. Copper says you need my help with something?”

Princess Twilight fluffed up her wings, and that smile of hers grew ear to ear. Sweet Celestia, she was so unbearably dorky sometimes. In a good way, that is.

“Yes!” she said. “We’re currently working on some groundbreaking new magic. Dream Diving, as we like to call it.”

His eyes landed on Sunset and Princess Luna in the middle of the room, and his casual smile flattened into an appraising frown, like his brain had switched gears into Professional Mode. Dad then gave the room a quick once-over.

“This your setup?” he said. His voice had a critical weight to it, like all his years in the lab told him he should hate everything about it.

“I… yes?” Twilight lifted a hoof, as if ready to take a defensive step back.

“There’s no outer shielding. There’s no inner shielding. Your glyph doesn’t count. I’d wager my career that your grounding shards aren’t big enough for what you’re trying to do, and they should be routing this energy somewhere. You have to have somewhere for all this shit to go if it overloads. You know how much energy gets released when one of these fails?” His eyes followed a giant crack that ran across the room and practically turned the wall into a mosaic. I was honestly surprised he hadn’t been staring at it since we walked in. “When it actually fails?” he added.

In what little time I’d known her, Princess Twilight had ever been the optimist, but that “ever” flagged with each and every little thing that Dad pointed out. She may as well have been a puddle on the floor by the time he finished.

“I… we’re aware of that now,” she said. “It’s just… i-it started out simple, just a few lines on the floor to help channel a spell. And then we just kind of kept adding on as necessary until it became this, and I really didn’t think about it but it’s clearly too late to change now, so um…”

He gave the chalk glyph a closer inspection. “Well, you’re right about it being too late now, and it’s a good thing you’re using the right kind of chalk. But there’s a reason we do our lab work beneath a hundred feet of bedrock. There’s a few things we can retrofit, but if the glyph fails completely, this’ll all still become a whole lot of somepony else’s problem.”

Twilight’s frown became a wince. I had half a mind to guess she wanted to become a puddle on the floor at that point.

I knew Dad was just offering the expertise she explicitly asked for, but it hurt to hear. It hurt seeing her hear it. She was doing her best with what she had. I believed that with all my heart. I wanted to give her a hug, even with Dad watching, but as I stepped forward, I heard voices from the hallway behind us.

“Believe me, my dear Starlight,” came a grandfatherly voice. “Were that an option, I would have already…”

Starlight strolled in beside some old stallion with a long, flowing beard and a hat with a bunch of bells on it. They both paused at the sight of us, especially Dad.

“Ah, we have guests,” Grandpa said. Eyes on Dad, he added: “And who might we have the pleasure of meeting?”

Dad stuck out a hoof. “String Theory, Co-Head of Research and Development at Canterlot Castle. Call me String. And you must be Star Swirl. I heard you came back, but I’ve been too up to my eyes in work to have had the honor.”

Star Swirl? So this was the dude Sunset used to gush about back at CSGU? Other than the getup, it was hard seeing him as a living legend. He looked like a batty old coot in a big jingly hat. But if Dad gave him this much respect, then he had to be the real deal.

“Ah, a fellow pioneer of the sciences,” Star Swirl said. “I am pleased to make your acquaintance.” He shook Dad’s hoof before turning to me. “And you, my dear, wouldn’t happen to be Coppertone, would you? Starlight here has made mention of your assistance while I was”—he cleared his throat—“recovering.”

I… really? She actually thought I was helping? I had to look to Dad to make sure I heard him right, and the spark of pride in his eyes was all the confirmation I needed.

“Uh, yeah,” I said. “That’s me, but I wouldn’t say I’ve been that big of a help.”

“Nonsense!” Star Swirl said. “You have drawn up the glyph better than any of us have yet. I daresay you’re the only reason this place isn’t a giant crater after last time. Not to mention you brought aboard another professional. Nopony else here could have done so well or as timely.”

Normally, I would have brushed off what he said. Compliments were a dime a dozen, as I’d learned most ponies liked throwing them my way for ulterior motives. But the look in his eyes… He meant it. He really did.

Damn it, I blushed, and I couldn’t stop myself. I didn’t deserve it, but I… maybe I could make an exception, just this once.

“Thanks,” I said and shied away.

Dad patted me on the back and pulled me into a gentle squeeze. When he let go, he took a step toward Starlight.

“And you must be Starlight, then, yes?” Dad said.

She met him halfway with a smile and an extended hoof. “Student of Friendship and resident spell botcher. Nice to meet you.”

Dad chuckled and shook her hoof. “A sense of humor, I like that. These your guys’ notes?” he added, turning to the chalkboard wheeled up against the nearby bookshelf.

That got Princess Twilight’s attention. She zipped over to the board, and I was pretty sure there were equal parts pride and nervousness in that smile of hers. It reminded me of Sunset whenever she talked about presenting something to Princess Celestia.

She launched into her spiel on all the sciencey stuff I could never hope to understand other than a few cherry-picked words like “water walking” and “discrete intervals.”

I let my mind wander while listening to the rhythm of her voice. She had such a melodic cadence despite the excitement giving it an up-beat edge. Meanwhile, I couldn’t help overhearing Starlight and Star Swirl still going at each other with their own fair share of shit talk.

“I like him better than you already,” Starlight said under her breath to Star Swirl, the friendly intonation in her voice impossible to miss.

Star Swirl laughed and whispered back, “One could say the same of you.”

“You’re right,” Starlight said. “One. And only one.” She ribbed him, earning a playful laugh I wouldn’t have expected from old Grandpa. Batty old coot or not, I could respect his sense of humor.

Eventually, Princess Twilight finished her long-winded explanation and trotted up to me. “Thanks again for your help. You really don’t know how much it means to us.”

I looked away and rubbed a hoof up and down my foreleg. “I mean, I just did what you asked.”

She put a hoof on mine to stop my nervous tick. “Which means a lot to us.”

I looked back and forth between her eyes and the genuine appreciation I found there. That smile of hers never wavered.

She really meant it, didn’t she?

“I… Okay.” It was all I could get out, and I hoped it rang as true for her as it did me.

“I know you just arrived,” she said. ”But we were going to take a quick break for dinner. You’re welcome to join us, unless you’d rather show your dad where he’ll be sleeping? That is, only if he’s planning on staying, of course. He can have the spare room next to yours if so.”

“Oh. Um, sure, I guess… A-and by that I mean yeah, I’ll show him his room. I’m… not really hungry right now.”

She smiled. “Great. Meet back here in twenty minutes?”

I nodded, and that was that. I took Dad upstairs and the hallway greeted us with a healthy dose of silence.

“Quite the gaggle you’ve fallen into,” Dad said after a long minute.

“They’re, uh… Yeah, I guess.”

We made it to the room beside mine, and I swung open the door to show him in. “Here’s your room,” I said, then nodded to the next door over. “That’s mine if you need anything.”

He gave the room a quick once-over before tossing his saddlebags on the bed and turning to me in a hushed whisper:

“Copper, listen. About this whole Dream Diving Spell they’re working on. I don’t want to get your hopes up. They’re dealing with magic I’ve never worked with before, let alone thought about in my wildest daydreams. I research and design magical objects: substances, artifacts, you name it. But spells? That’s not my department. Her asking for my help is like asking an ophthalmologist for help with a splenectomy. I’ll do my best, but I really don’t know how much help I’ll really be.”

That got a twisty nervousness going in my stomach. “She’s grasping at straws, Dad… We all are.”

“I know. I can tell she’s scared and that this is spiraling out of her control. I just don’t want to see you get hurt.”

“I don’t want you to get hurt, either.”

He pulled me into a hug, and I let myself be surrounded by that warm, happy feeling I’d been so starved of. The silence made for an impressive and necessary period to our little sentiment, and we started back toward the portal room.

“She’s cute, by the way,” Dad said, switching gears like a runway model switches outfits. “You talk to her?”

The “She” and “cute” side by side got all sorts of alarm bells going in my head. “Who?”

“The princess.”

My heart shot up to my throat like one of those carnival hammer-bell games, and I skidded to a halt. “W-wait what? Are you seriously trying to hook me up with Princess Twilight?”

He shrugged. “You were smiling at her quite a bit. I didn’t know if there was something between you two or not.”

“No, I… well, I don’t think so. Maybe, I don’t know.” I brushed my mane out of my eyes, wishing I could brush the heat from my cheeks, too.

“You ‘don’t know’? The way you’re blushing tells me a thing or two. That, and she seemed awfully friendly toward you.”

I laughed. “She’s the Princess of Friendship, Dad. Of course she’s friendly. And really, why are you pushing it so hard?”

“Is an old stallion not allowed to wish the best for his daughter? Or to wish for the next step toward grandfoals?” He raised an eyebrow at me.

“You’re not even back in my life for a day and you’re already getting on me about grandfoals? And you know that’s not how biology works.”

“Of course I know that. Doesn’t mean there aren’t options, and I have to make up for lost time pestering you about it. It’s an important Dad Job that I take very seriously.” He wore the most shit-eating grin I’d ever seen on him. It got me sporting my own.

“Since when were you such a shit-talker?” I had to ask. “You were always so… straight-laced.”

He shrugged. “I was a bit of an instigator like you when I was your age, but I had to do some growing up when you and your sisters came into the picture.”

“And deprive me of somepony who might actually keep up with my bullshit? How could you ever consider that good parenting?” I ribbed him for good measure.

He ribbed me back. “Maybe I just wanted you to turn out better than I did.”

“I never would have thought you the type.”

“Did you think you got it from your mother?”

Touché. With how uptight Mom was, I was surprised she didn’t pop me out in a full habit. But… but Mom…

I felt Dad’s eyes searching me. He knew where my brain went with that, and his voice took a turn for the somber.

“You liked her, didn’t you?” Dad said. “Your friend Sunset.”

I sighed. “That’s not really a question at this point, is it?”

“Not anymore, I guess. I kinda figured you did after all was said and done. I just wanted to hear it from you.”

That was… fair. After seven years of silence, he deserved that much. But that silence wasn’t to be outdone so easily, and it crept back in as quickly as we had broken it.

“You could have told us,” he said. “You could have told me, at least.”

“And have Mom know?”

“I can keep a secret,” he said. “Celestia knows how many I kept from you all about work.”

I stared at my hooves. No matter what he said, or how much he believed, Mom would have gotten it out of him. Celestia knew there were enough times she should have figured it out from me.

It’s just… Mom…

The thought of her got my heart twisting itself into a knot. For the longest time, I didn’t think about it. I couldn’t think about it. I kept myself busy with work or Star Chaser or any of my useless hobbies. But I always ended up circling back on that one memory, that one image I could never get out of my head—that frown of… indifference. I could have slit my own throat right there on the kitchen floor, and all she would have done was complain about the blood.

“So what happened after I left?” I asked. I had to get my mind out of that spiral, even if it meant chancing another deeper, darker spiral. “Whistle said she and Lily moved out.”

He perked up when I said their names. “You saw them?”

So that was a yes. There went my heart knotting up tighter and tighter.

“Yeah. I bumped into Whistle on my way to see you. They’re… doing good.” I didn’t know what else to say, so I added, “Lily wants to go for an art degree when she’s older.”

That got a smile on Dad’s face. “You two always loved coloring together.”

My throat cinched up, and my eyes misted over. I could still see Lily lying on the living room floor, idly kicking her hind legs up and down, crayon in her mouth.

“Well, anyways,” Dad said, “you asked what happened…” He stared into the distance for a while. “Truthfully, not much. Not to say what did happen wasn’t monumental, but the way you read about it in the papers makes it sound so much more… Sensational? I don’t know. Monumental sums it up better, I guess.

“One day I come home, and you’re not there. Whistle’s locked herself in her room, your mother has a black eye, and she’s holding Lily so tight I thought she’d pop. Whistle left a few days later. Took Lily with her, and I haven’t heard from them since.” He let that hang for an unbearable moment, just staring into the distance. “Your mother, she… She didn’t handle any of it very well. And I couldn’t handle how she… Well, that’s all to say I left, too, about a year later.”

My heart writhed in my chest as he spoke. I remembered the full-bodied happiness his voice always carried, but the softness of his voice, the hollowness of his voice… It was like his soul had died years ago but left his wasting body to carry on, and I barely had the strength to find my words.

“Whistle didn’t even say goodbye?” I asked.

He shook his head. “Didn’t even leave a note. Not that I would have stopped her either way. Didn’t feel like I had the right to. Which might have just been another wrong choice. I still don’t know.

“Life doesn’t prepare you for that. You just have to go and hope you make the right choices. My brain says I did, but my heart says I’d already done all of you enough wrongs by not getting on your Mother’s case that it wasn’t my place to choose anymore, and that you’d come find me when you needed me. All I could do was be ready when you did.”

I was trembling just trying to keep it together, but by the end, I couldn’t hold in the tears anymore. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry for everything I’ve put you guys through.”

“You have nothing to be sorry for.”

“But it’s all my fault. This wouldn’t have happened if I—”

Dad put a hoof to my lips to silence me, then took me by the shoulders with that strong grip of a father—equal parts firm and gentle. He looked me in the eyes, and I could hear the truth in his voice before he even spoke.

“You have nothing to be sorry for,” he said. “You’re you, and there’s nothing wrong with that.”

There’s nothing wrong with being yourself.

A lump formed in my throat as those words rang in my head as clear as the day Princess Celestia said them to me. The words I needed to hear, the words I wished I believed, both then and now.

“There hasn’t been a single day since that I haven’t thought about you three,” he said.

Tighter and tighter wrung my heart. “Dad, I—”

“I’m not done,” he said. “I’ve been meaning to give you something.” He reached into his chest pocket and pulled something out. “I’ve been holding on to this.”

My heart skipped a beat when I recognized the bit of plastic in his hoof. It was my little red hairclip. The one Sunset liked.

“You forgot this,” he said. “You always said it made you feel pretty.”

The lump in my throat doubled down on me, and the tears in my eyes followed suit. It was stupid. It was just a damn hairclip. I had no reason to get emotional over something so stupid.

But… he held onto it. He kept it for me, just in case.

I gingerly took it from him and put my bangs up the way he always liked.

His eyes were misty, and he put a hoof up to my cheek. “That’s my girl.”

Hearing him say that snapped something inside me like a fine wire. The stupidest smile overtook me, and damn it if I didn’t feel like daddy’s little girl for the first time in nearly a decade.

I giggled. The giggles became laughter, the laughter became tears, and I collapsed into his chest to let the last seven years of my life pour out.

He rubbed a hoof up and down my back. It was warm and heavy and everything I wanted it to be.

“We’ll all be a family again,” he whispered in my ear. “I promise.”

I hugged him tighter, and it was like I was five again, hiding from the monster under the bed or the bullies on the playground. I was safe here, and no matter how terrible the world seemed, every word he spoke was gospel truth. We stayed like that for I didn’t know how long. Honestly, it didn’t matter.

But no matter how happy I was to see him and just be with him again, I couldn’t help taking in everything about him that had changed. His beard had a lot more grey to it, and his horn looked like petrified wood. He was… old.

It was weird. Dads were supposed to be on in years. That was just life. But there was a certain permanence specific to Dad, because he was my dad. He was always there, and so time or age were never part of the equation. But the lines in his face and the weariness behind the indomitable smile exposed that lie for what it was and struck me in a way I couldn’t properly put into words.

How much time we’d lost, how many memories I’d missed out on that I would never get back and all I had once taken for granted.

Never again.

Fuck royal business. I needed him, and I wanted to think he actually needed me. Past, present, or future, I caused him enough heartache. He didn’t deserve any more bullshit from me.

I had no more words, and like before, I still didn’t think I needed them. He accepted me for who I was with open hooves, and for the first time in a long while, I didn’t smile for the world.

I smiled for myself.

When I was good and ready, he said, “Come on, let’s head back.”

I nodded, wiped my eyes, and followed after him. Neither of us were hungry, so we headed for the portal room to wait for the others. All the while, I wore a little smile on my face, cherishing the thought that there just might be some happiness reserved for me in this world after all.

We made it back to the portal room, but before I could turn for my notes on the table, Dad threw a hoof up in front of me.

My heart leapt into my throat as the worst possible scenario sprang to mind, and my eyes snapped toward the glyph. I pushed his hoof out of my way and stepped forward, but my heart stopped at the sight of Sunset sitting up from her heap of pillows, rubbing the sleep from her eyes.

• • •

“Sunset!” Copper yelled.

She came bounding toward me but stopped short of the glyph surrounding me. Her eyes were misty, but she wore the biggest damn smile I’d ever seen.

“Hey,” I said. I rubbed my forehead right where a pounding headache had set up shop, but I worked up a smile for her sake. So not only had she met Twilight, she was apparently part of the gang now. “I’m glad to see you, too.”

Pink magic materialized around her hoof when she reached out toward me, like the static electricity of a plasma globe. She held her hoof there above the chalk threshold as if pressing against a pane of glass.

I pressed mine against the opposite side of what I now realized was a barrier, and it felt like nothing stood between us, if only for the briefest moment.

The spell of our silent exchange broke, and she pulled away like the magic had shocked her. Her gaze fell to the floor. Likewise, I receded into myself.

“So I was initially going to just talk to Twilight in her dream like I did earlier,” I said. “But I was waiting for ages. When the hell does she sleep?”

“She… really hasn’t much.” Copper wore a look of concern, like that fact had plagued her recently.

I caught myself staring and shook my head. “Yeah, so anyway, I don’t know how long I was waiting for in real life, but eventually I went and found my own dream thing to see if I could wake up from it, or whatever you wanna call it. Luna would know. But yeah, I’m here, and I’ve got some news if you can round everyone up.”

She gave a slow nod and made to stand, but String put a hoof on her shoulder.

“Don’t worry. I’ll take care of it,” he said. He offered her a quick smile, then me, before heading out. The door shut behind him, and we were alone.

I waited for Copper to say something, but after a good ten seconds of silence, I figured it was my ice to break.

“Talk about a fancy warding spell,” I said, eyeing the chalk lines weaving around me like a Celtic cross. “Twilight really outdid herself on this one.”

“Actually, I drew it up,” Copper said. She tossed an embarrassed smile across the room and idly ran her hoof along the braid she’d draped over her shoulder. “I mean, they’re from Twilight’s notes, but I did the actual drawing.”

I let my eyes continue along the curves and whorls that chained together at least a dozen incantations and enchantments I’d never seen before, along with an arrangement of surge crystals and grounding shards I couldn’t make heads or tails of. I got the gist, though. I was under lock and key until we got this wrapped up.

“Really?” I said. “You did an amazing job.”

“Thanks…”

Her voice rang hollow, and the beginnings of a wince played around the edges of her face. She may have appreciated the compliment, but the implications behind the glyph itself spoiled any notion of pride she should feel entitled to.

You did a great job locking me up in here, I may as well have said. I’m proud of how well you fucked me over.

“So, uh… how’re you feeling?” I said, wanting to distract her from those thoughts.

She took a deep breath and let it out. “I’m here,” she said noncommittally.

Another hollow statement that had me questioning an ulterior meaning. I wouldn’t have thought anything of it were it not for our conversation the other day: I’m physically here. I haven’t offed myself yet.

Honestly, it probably wouldn’t have been an issue if I hadn’t shouldered my way back into her life. As unhealthy as it was, she’d at least still be happy in her own way.

That struck a chord in my head, and I thought of Luna. It was… frighteningly similar, and I didn’t want my brain going any farther down that road.

“You?” Copper asked.

“Same, I guess.” I didn’t know what else to say. My predicament kind of explained itself, just looking around the room. Hell, if Copper were here helping, she already knew the shit I was neck deep in. But social platitudes begot social platitudes, and it looked like I had to be the one to break the cycle.

I sighed. “Well, no. That’s actually a lie. Look, there’s no point in me acting like I’m fine. It’s obvious enough that I’m not, and me acting like you don’t realize that would be an insult to your intelligence.”

A tiny smile traced her lips. “Not like that would be much of an insult. I was never the smart one of the two of us.”

“Yeah, well, neither was I,” I said weakly. When that didn’t get a response, I took a deep breath and decided now was the time to address the elephant in the room.

“So yeah,” I said. “I know you’re here because of me. And I appreciate that. I really do. But as much as I appreciate it, I hate seeing yet another person I care for suffering because of my bullshit. You’re still my best friend, Copper, and that’ll never change. As…”

I realized then what I said, and I swore her heart broke all over again. “I, I didn’t mean—”

“I know what you meant,” she said. “You never loved me that way. And that’s fine.” She took a deep, shaking breath. “I’m moving past it. Really.”

Fuck me. Why the hell was I so garbage at talking to her? I just couldn’t stop being a bull in a china shop with her emotions for one goddamn second.

“I just don’t want to see you get hurt,” I said. “I don’t want to hurt you any more than I already have.”

“Sunset, stop.” There was a weariness in her voice, like she was trying to hold back tears. “Please.”

“Stop wha—”

“Just stop. Don’t make it about you.” There was a sense of pained conviction in her eyes, highlighted by the tears beading in the corners. She still loved me. We both knew that. But I could see plain as day she was trying her hardest to not let it tear her apart. “I’m trying my hardest to not make it about you.

“I’m here because I want to be,” she added with finality, despite the cracks around the edges of her façade. “I’m here because I want to help. No more, no less.”

I stared at her, my mouth hanging open. I wanted to say something. I wanted her to know just how much I cared, how much she really did mean to me, and how much it hurt seeing her like this. But anything I could possibly scrounge up would just be me swan-diving through the china shop display window all over again.

“Good,” I half whispered. It was the most neutral response I could think of. “That’s… that’s good.”

We let the gentle hum of the glyph fill in the ever-growing silence. I idly lifted my hooftip to the barrier to watch the energy gather around it, my thoughts soured by the reality that we could never go back—we could never just be us again.

But the “us” I thought we used to be wasn’t real, either. It was an illusion that masked—no, that smothered—the “us” she yearned for.

Did I love her back? I let that question plummet down into the distant depths of my mind like a coin dropped into a well and its answer the distant splash echoing back up.

I thought of those nights we used to fall asleep together. The way she played with my mane, the glint of starlight in her eyes, the immeasurably happy smile that she reserved for me and me alone.

Did I love her back?

Yes. Yes I did. So very, indescribably much. But again the bitter realities that strung my life together reared their ugly heads—all that I had lost, all that I had ruined, all that I had let drift away. They would eternally stain the us she forever wanted, the us she forever deserved, the us I would forever strive for yet find myself wanting.

Even at my most selfish, I couldn’t do that to her. I couldn’t chain her down like that, siphon the good will and happiness from someone as pure and wonderful as her.

“So what really is this thing you’re fighting?” Copper asked. “Everypony keeps calling it ‘The Nightmare,’ but nopony’s been saying, like, what it is.”

I blinked away the reveries and should-have-beens lost among the glow of magic surrounding my hoof. “It’s… I mean, physically when you look at it, it shapeshifts. Sometimes it’s a giant leopard thing, sometimes it’s Nocturne or a rhino or whatever. Mostly the leopard. But what it is is… I’m pretty sure it’s my Tantabus, or, like, my version of one.”

“A Tantabus? Isn’t that the thing Luna had a few years back? I heard some ponies talking about it once. That all happened before I moved here.”

“Yeah, she had one. Er, has one. They, uh… mine and hers, like, merged or something. And now mine’s feeding off hers, and that’s what’s making it so bad.”

“Hers was going to destroy Ponyville, right?”

“Something like that. I don’t know much about it, either.”

Silence. I watched the magic’s faint pink glow highlight the gentle curves of her face while she dug for another question.

“How’d they stop it?” she asked.

Celestia’s voice rang in my head: she forgave herself, which by Luna’s assertion was incorrect. But it made me think of something else Celestia touched on, and I gave that little kernel of wisdom a voice.

“She… she came to terms with it,” I said. “At least, that’s what it seems like.”

“How the fuck could anypony come to terms with doing what she did…?”

My mind flashed back to her lying beside the fire, the light dancing in her eyes as she gazed into whatever abyss captivated her so. It got the hairs on the back of my neck standing on end thinking about it. That look of utter haunted regret, and… yeah. Maybe immortal minds weren’t meant for this sort of thing, either.

“I don’t know.” I let my gaze unfocus somewhere in the depths of the magic surrounding my hooftip. “But I believe it. If it makes you feel better, she… she doesn’t forgive herself.”

Copper stared at Luna for a long bout of silence. The look in her eye had me questioning whether or not I should ask Twilight to hide away all the sharp and-or heavy objects they had lying about.

“Good,” she said. “She better fucking not.”

Yeah… good. No, what was I saying? Good. That… that was good. Wholly and truly. The fact she held herself accountable to the fullest extent meant something. Maybe not much in the grand scheme of things—maybe not at all—but even the possibility of that “not much” was enough to have me sitting here mulling it over, same as the last time Copper and I talked about it. I again pictured myself pacing around that metaphorical art display, hand to my chin, elbow cradled in my other.

And now you’re helping her… Except that wasn’t true. She was helping me. That much I also believed.

“Yeah,” I said. “I guess so.”

Copper wondered on that longer than I felt comfortable watching. When she spoke, I decided I preferred the silence.

“You think that’s what you have to do, then?”

“What, come to terms with it? I… I mean, I assume that’s how this works. But…” I shrugged. “How the fuck does that even work? What does it even mean to come to terms with it? To something like this?”

“I don’t know.” Copper mirrored my shrug. “Usually, bad things happening just boils down to friendship and forgiveness and stuff, but…”

The thought got the hair on the back of my neck standing up. “What, like I’m supposed to just up and forgive her and it all magically goes away?”

It sounded so impossibly simple. Like, it’s just this one little thing, yet that one little thing was simultaneously so unfathomably monumental. How could I forgive her for what she did? Setting aside our differences for the greater good I could do. But telling her “all’s well that ends well” and truly mean it? Fuck every last bit of that.

At the same time, was that all this was? Could it really be that simple? Was I allowed to even consider that?

“No.” The look on Copper’s face twisted in disgust, and I got the feeling she didn’t mean to imply that. That request of Twilight felt all the more necessary, though. “Hell no. Never in a million fucking years.”

After a beat, a semblance of conflict warred across her face and had her flicking her ears back and forth in some sort of internal mental exchange I could only guess at. It got her bunching her hooves up underneath her, and her gaze fell to the chalk lines between us.

“If… If you think that’s what’s really necessary,” she said, “then… I’ll support you, no matter what. But…” She shook her head, and around came that earlier look of disgust to have her pinning her ears back. “I just… I can’t. Because you just… you don’t forgive something like that. I don’t know how you could, even if you wanted to.”

She shrugged. “I mean, I forgave you. Because we were both young and stupid. Because you did something that’s actually forgivable, something that’s actually, like, understandable, because…”

A healthy silence crept in as the ghost of some memory strangled the courage from her. I knew exactly what ran through her head, though. Like the many little silences we shared the other day. All the words we couldn’t say, all the feelings we let wither and die…

She blamed herself for this, didn’t she? Somehow, someway, she found a way to twist the simple truth of my failings into her own and bear them on her shoulders, just like Twilight. And the more I watched it writhe inside her, the more I hated myself for not being able to see from day one.

“Copper, it’s…” I sighed. I almost said it wasn’t her fault, but that would be parroting so much of the shit I’d already slogged through myself. How could I loathe the porcelain doll everyone made me out to be only to then turn around and cast her as one?

“I know you want to blame yourself for everything because you’re… because you liked me,” I said. “But no matter how much of it’s true, the fact is that that’s the way you are. You’re you, and you have to ask yourself: who really hates you for that? Who’s actually telling you not to be or stopping you from being your realest self?”

She winced but said nothing, and she still couldn’t meet my eyes. With little to go on, I took that thought one step further:

“Is… is it worth letting that control you?”

In the following silence, I let that sink into my own head. Is it worth letting that control you?

For the longest time, I’d raged against the very thought of Luna and what she represented. Even when she came back offering peace and had proven herself changed, I didn’t let up. She needed to know how much I hated her. I needed her to know how much I hated her. And in a way, no matter how in control of myself I was, that hatred was still me giving up my own power to what she represented.

I wasn’t stupid enough to believe I could have simply snapped my fingers and been done with it, but I needed more than wishful thinking to see me through this mess. And in the face of that truth rose another, more precarious truth that threatened to drag me down the face of the mountain the more I let myself wonder on it: I needed Luna’s help to finish this.

Because I did. I did need her help. I swallowed no small amount of pride admitting that to her face, and even now, separated from the moment when I first made that claim, it felt no less true.

There was no doing this alone, no tagging out for Twilight, and the certainty of those truths felt like some unholy amalgamation of self-perpetuated victim blaming only my stupid fucking brain could warp into existence, as if to punish me for that hatred.

I wasn’t wrong for hating her, though. How could I be?

But was she wrong? Still, that is. The past was immutable, and the jury had long since rendered its verdict.

But was there some distinction, some line in the sand that dictated a separation between her then and her now? Did time’s passage and her attempts at redemption create some moral inflection point, and if so, was I wrong to not forgive her—her, as opposed to her actions?

What did it even mean to forgive someone for something like this, and where did I fit into the greater realm of forgiveness and morals surrounding such a concept? What sort of precedent was there for me to follow, if one even existed? Was I even allowed to follow a precedent?

The very notion struck me as... I didn’t know what word to use. Impersonal? Like I was denying myself some aspect of humanity by grasping for a script or user manual to give me direction, and by extent, Luna as well. But by virtue of that extension, the grasping felt counterintuitive by way of predestination, and I just... I felt lost. I felt so unimaginably lost in the everything that formed this mess.

Again, that sense of spitting in the face of some cosmic truth reared up at the thought. Ethics and Justice folded their arms, and I could feel their disdainful scowls on the back of my head the longer I let the thought meander the broken cobblestone of my morality.

“It’s not that easy.” Copper’s voice broke the silence—quiet as a mouse, yet so loud I flattened back my ears. “Is it?”

Her eyes searched me, reached into me. She could see plain as day that I thought the very same things in her head, questioning myself and my own shortcomings. Bigger and bigger grew the mountain.

“No,” I said. It was all I could say. Even if the right words came to me, they wouldn’t suffice.

Instead, a realization struck me, and the absurdity of my brain’s one-eighty got me giggling.

“What’s so funny?” Copper asked.

I waved her away. “Nothing, really. It’s just, I’ve been having a lot of these heart-to-hearts recently. They’ve… it’s been a lot.”

The strangeness of my non-sequitur got a snicker out of her. “You, too?”

I shrugged. “I’m nothing if not a basket case.”

“Well, welcome aboard then, captain,” Copper said with a can-do swing of her hoof. “I’ll be your admiral for the rest of this venture.”

I laughed, and she soon followed. A good twenty seconds passed of us letting off all the steam built up between us, and boy was there more than I realized. It may not truly be the best medicine, but laughter helped in ways no other medicine could.

“Life’s been throwing a lot at me lately,” I said. “These sorts of talks have really been helping me sift through it all.”

“No kidding.” A pause. She had a far-off look in her eye. Not happy, not sad. Simply content.

“I really am glad you joined them,” I said. “Twilight and the others.”

“Well, I have to put all that A-chem bullshit to use somehow, right?”

I giggled. “I mean, you’re not wrong. But even if you didn’t, that’d still be alright. Just… be the realest you you can. That’s the you I like the most.”

That got the tiniest smile out of her. “I’ll try.”

I decided to push that envelope a bit, to both ride out the good vibes and change the subject in one go. I leaned toward her conspiratorially, with a little grin on my face.

“You know, if my hunch from earlier is right, Twilight kinda has a thing for you.”

Her smile got a bit bigger, and she traced a crack in the floor with her hoof.

I waited for her to say something, but when nothing followed I tugged that conversational thread a smidge harder. “Youuu like her back?”

And there was the smile I wanted to see. A real smile, the kind I only ever saw in our most intimate moments: the times we fell asleep side by side, the train rides to and from wherever, all the quiet times when there was nothing to say worth more than simply being near each other.

How many times she had looked my way with that smile… Another bout of shame got my heart knotting itself up. Fuck me and my younger stupidity. She didn’t deserve the heartache I put her through, and I didn’t deserve her patience.

“She’s nice,” Copper said. “She’s… complicated.”

“Complicated? Of all the words I’d use to describe her, complicated is, like, at least third on my list.”

She raised an eyebrow at me. “What are your first two?”

“Quirky. Neurotic.” I snorted. “Neophilic. Make it the fourth word.”

We shared another laugh that left the room feeling a little less lonely. But as the following silence trailed on, I found myself thanking the universe for the barrier between us. Whether or not we both desperately wanted that closeness, I couldn’t afford to let her fall back into that self-destructive habit, nor did I deserve the comfort it brought me at her expense.

In her own words, she needed to get past me, and as much as I hated the thought of losing her in any capacity, I had to let her do just that. I had to let her keep me at arm’s length, I had to let her smile at the thought of Twilight, and I myself had to smile—here, in this moment—to tell her everything was okay in the only way that I could.

The others made good time walking in. I didn’t think I could take another minute of that conversation.

As they entered one by one, their eyes gravitated toward me, which I was thankful for. It gave Copper the moment she needed to compose herself. They each wore a smile that did wonders in pulling me out of my slump.

Twilight’s was the most relieved of the group, and she made good on that sentiment by coming abreast of Copper to put a hoof on the barrier.

“I’m glad to see you’re safe,” she said to me.

I gave a non-committal shrug. “For now, anyway.”

Twilight’s smile faltered for a fraction of a second. I didn’t think I would have noticed had I not already attuned myself to that emotional wavelength thanks to Copper.

“So what all happened since you… since the last time we talked?” she asked.

“Well, I went back and got Luna. We figured out how to escape the Eversleep, but that whole deal messed her up pretty good. We were heading back for your dream to touch base when we realized the Nightmare was dream hopping in the same direction. I was actually worried it was coming after you for some reason. But either way, Dipshit got the brilliant idea to go fisticuffs with it when we caught up.

“It was… a bit of a scrap,” I continued. “But we got our fair share of shots in. I think we bought ourselves some time.”

“A bit of a scrap?” Starlight asked. “I know you well enough to know you’re downplaying that. What exactly does that mean?”

“Well, it ripped my leg off and turned Luna into hamburger meat. But she made confetti out of its stomach, and I punched a hole clean through its chest before it fucked off into the Dreamscape.” I shrugged again. “So, you know, gotta crack a few eggs to make an omelette, right?”

Everyone’s face ran the gamut from dismay to horror. Copper in particular looked mortified.

“We’ve got this, though,” I added. “For real.”

“You say that,” Starlight said, taking a step forward. “But you also say that you pretty much almost died. That doesn’t sound like you’ve got this. What exactly is the plan?”

The plan was there wasn’t one. I had no fucking idea what I was or should be doing, and Luna’s earlier bullheadedness practically screamed that she had nothing left in the ideas department, either. Honestly, I was hoping they’d have more of a plan than just keep doing what we’re doing and hope for the best. I couldn’t put this on them, but goddamn it, I needed at least a nudge.

Letting others in is not weakness, sounded Luna’s voice in the back of my head, and I really didn’t need that right now. The way Starlight echoed that sentiment the other day didn’t help, either.

They were right, though. Letting everyone in wasn’t weakness, but right now, I needed them to let me keep my end of the bargain. I refused to let Twilight almost kill herself again for my sake.

“For now, we’ll try and track it,” I said, if only to fill the silence. “See where it’s going and what it does. I still need to make sure Luna’s back in one piece before I make any promises.”

“You mean like saying you’ve got this?” Starlight wore a less-than-convinced frown, one that quickly spread to Star Swirl and String. Twilight and Copper shared a look of concern more than anything.

Let them in, that little goddamn voice said. I sighed.

“Look,” I said. “I get it. You guys were hoping I’d have this all wrapped up after fucking off to La La Land for however long I’ve been gone. But the truth is, I don’t, and I really don’t know how to. Luna and I have been running in what feels like circles trying to catch this thing, and all we have to show for it is all the bumps and bruises we got along the way.

“But we’ve got this,” I said, giving Starlight an adamant glare. “I won’t let this thing win. We… she and I have put too much into this to give up.”

That didn’t seem to convince Starlight, but Twilight found a smile worth sharing. “From the sound of it,” Twilight said, “you’ve done a lot more than run in circles. We’ll keep working on a solution out here. I know you can do it.”

My eyes wandered the chalk lines, then the tectonic upheaval all around me.

Right. A solution.

“Yeah,” I said, putting enough pep behind it that I hoped it passed for agreement. “Let’s stop wasting time, then.”

I found a comfy spot among the pillows and laid myself down.

I noticed Copper staring at me. I didn’t need to ask what was on her mind. The look in her eyes said it all.

She would have given anything in the world to hug me for what could very well be a final farewell, and once again I was thankful for the barrier between us. Once again, she needed to get past me. Once again, I myself had to smile.

I closed my eyes to let the familiar sensation of magic take me, but a realization struck me: Luna’s dream had fallen apart. She had no dream for me to return to via the Dream Dive Spell.

Or worse. The last thing I wanted was to get dumped back into that black hole of a non-dream that was the Eversleep.

Instead, before the others could set up, I turned my focus inward, toward Luna and the many thoughts and feelings her name evoked—that strange mixture of uncertainty yet safety, frustration yet contentment. I felt… confident, strangely enough. Confident in her, in us. No matter what lay ahead, we really did have this.

I cast Nocturne’s Sleep Spell, let the sensation cradle me in its arms like a mother holding her child, and soon enough I felt myself touch down on soft fabric.

I opened my eyes and… Goddamn it, I was in that same damn dream of Twilight’s guest bedroom. It still bore the marks of our duel. And by marks I meant carnage. At least all the fires had burnt out.

“Greetings, Sunset Shimmer,” came Luna’s voice behind me. Her mouth formed a stoic line across her face, and she held her wings at half-mast. She was in one piece, though, which was a good sign. “Shall we be off?”

“Ready when you are,” I said.

Luna gave me a nod and spread her wings. A silver thread spiraled up her horn to glow bright like the northern star, and gravity heeded her command.

She lifted us into the Dreamscape, and we were on the hunt.

XLVII - Later that Night

I knew it was a bad idea heading back to the portal room alone. The moment I stepped inside, my eyes locked onto Sunset, and the hurt started all over again.

She lay on a heap of pillows, her head cradled in the crook of her elbow. She looked so peaceful, but I knew the hell she waded through every moment she spent in there.

I sat down at the edge of the chalk circle, my tail curled around my hooves. A few errant hairs spread out from the bunch, and where they touched the chalk lines a faint glow of magic caused them to burn and shrivel. If I remembered right, that meant the chalk’s insulating properties were wearing out. We’d have to redo them soon, before it started acting less like a containment field and more like a tesla coil. With how much magic we had behind this thing, I didn't want to think about just how nasty that could get.

The doors opened behind me, and Twilight stepped in. She seemed surprised to find me here, almost backing out of the room like she’d walked in on something private. But somewhere in that silly head of hers she found a smile worth sharing.

“Can’t sleep?” she asked, stepping into the room proper.

“Not really, no.”

She sat down beside me. Her wing brushed against my side, just lightly enough to be accidental.

“I can’t either,” she said after a pregnant pause. Her eyes trailed the weave of chalk lines and cracks in the floor—everywhere but me. Eventually, our eyes both gravitated toward Sunset, just beyond the faint pink glow radiating from the glyph.

“She’ll be okay,” she said. Her voice rang with conviction, but it didn’t take a mind reader to know she said it more for herself than me. The melancholy clung to her like perfume. “They both will.”

“I know,” I said with the same conviction. We were both drenched in it. “We’re all doing our best, her and… well….”

When she didn’t say anything, I absently brushed a few more hairs onto the chalk to watch them sizzle, and a wisp of smoke trailed its way toward the ceiling.

Twilight followed the trail with her eyes, lost in whatever doomsday scenarios ran circles in her head. With a brain like hers, I could only imagine how many.

“We’re doing our best,” she echoed. She kept it in for my sake. Tried to, I should say. She was a leader, a princess. She wasn’t allowed to show weakness, but for all that she tried, she looked more like a pane of glass that would shatter if I touched her.

I hated seeing her like this. I hated looking at her knowing there was nothing I could do to make it easier for her and that I in fact was just another bullet point on her laundry list of stress factors. Me wallowing in my own mental bullshit was one thing, but I couldn’t stand knowing she felt the same way.

I had seen her smile before—like, really smile, not just the placating ones she tossed out when conversationally appropriate. On that first “date” Starlight threw us on, when I finally got her off the topic of Sunset, it was a magical thing all its own. Honestly, just getting her to smile again would drown out all the worries bogging me down. It’d make my presence worthwhile.

“Sometimes it can feel like our best isn’t enough,” she said.

And now, apparently, was my time to shine. Smile for the world, smile for her.

“Sometimes it’s not,” I said. “At least for regular ponies. But when it comes to you, I don’t think there’s a best that isn’t not enough.”

That got a tiny, incredulous smile out of her. Not the kind I was looking for, but it was a start.

“‘A best that isn’t not enough’? What exactly do you mean by that?”

“I mean exactly that. A best that isn’t not enough of a best to be best enough.” I flashed her a “Trademark Coppertone Grin,” as Sunset always called them. If you can’t blind them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit, right?

And there peeked out the smile I wanted to see, the confused but amused smile that said I wasn’t a complete waste of oxygen. She laughed as she said, “W-what even are the words coming out of your mouth right now?”

I shrugged flippantly. “Ones that make you laugh.”

Like the flip of a switch, she flushed a deep red, and a breathless laugh got the better of her. She made a nervous show of looking at anything but me, and I figured now was time to press the advantage.

“Ones that make you realize that other ponies realize just how ‘best enough’ you really are,” I continued. “You know, if there’s one thing I’ve known about you from before we met, it’s that you’re the princess of pulling a victory out of your ass at the last second.”

She scrunched up her nose. “I’m the Princess of Friendship, not… pulling a victory—”

“King Sombra, Discord, Chrysalis, that blizzard up in the Crystal Empire we all heard about.”

“I… well, um…”

“Am I wrong?”

She hooked her mouth in a little frown, and I struggled to not flash a smile before it was due. “Okay fine, so we win by the skin of our teeth sometimes. What’s your point?”

There was no point, really. Small talk never had a point other than filling the silence or helping somepony get over their uncertainties.

Or, like Sunset said, getting to know a pony you kinda liked.

I shrugged and tossed out my tried and true ace in the hole: “If a spoon’s made of silver, you call it a silver spoon, right?”

That got another scrunchy face out of her and holy crap, this time I couldn’t help the stupid laugh it got out of me. But the glyph’s magical hum seeped through the cracks of our little back-and-forth to remind me where we were, and the mood soured as quickly as it came on.

I sighed. “I just… Everything will turn out okay, one way or another. I know it will.”

“You don’t sound convinced,” Twilight said. It was her turn to smile for the world, and she brought that smile around to me. The tiniest upturn in her eyebrows begged me to elaborate on the things dragging me down. She was a shoulder to lean on, a friend to confide in, and I couldn’t deny her.

“I just… I know everything will turn out okay,” I said. “I believe that. I really do. But like, it’s been so much, you know? Just, all of this. How much of a toll it’s clearly taken on everypony, and… I don’t like knowing how much everypony’s suffered because of it. Part of me just wishes this all never happened.”

Twilight let that hang for a moment before saying, “I don’t.” She had a little smile on her face as she stared past Sunset. “For one, Sunset’s been hurting for a long time. What we’re doing has made it hurt worse in the short term, but I believe it’ll be better in the long run. And two—” She turned her smile toward me. “—I got to meet you.”

I knew she meant it earnestly, but in light of all our interactions—and that five-star performance of a blush she put on barely a minute ago—I couldn’t help hearing it way differently in my head. I had to look away to keep from snickering, and I pursed my lips to keep a smirk from giving me away.

She fluffed up. “W-what? I’m being serious.”

So much for hiding it. Now that she prodded for info, I couldn’t keep it in, and trying only turned what should have been a simple laugh into a full-blown snort fest better saved for when Sunset was being a complete doofus. I put my hoof up to my mouth to try and hold in what little I could.

“I know, I know, I’m sorry,” I said between laughs. “But that was the cheesiest pick-up line I’ve ever heard.”

Her cheeks went the most perfect shade of red, and she scrunched up her nose and oh sweet Celestia, if only I could have taken a picture. “That, that wasn’t supposed to be a pick-up line!”

“‘Wasn’t supposed to be’? So it was, huh?”

“Wha— I. No, I…” She shifted her weight from her left hoof to her right. “What makes you think I’m… that I’m into you?”

I eyed her just to be sure I heard her correctly. She had to be denying it out of embarrassment. There’s no way she was that in the closet, not after that little spat.

Though, it’d be easy enough to find out, and the playful side of me yearned to stretch its legs. I got up and stood in front of her.

I was maybe two inches taller than her, and I made sure to use every bit of it to keep that fluster of hers going.

Her eyes locked with mine, and the nervous uncertainty in them as they danced back and forth told me all I needed.

Careful not to step on her tail, I walked around behind her, putting on a bit of hip sway to get her attention. I could feel her eyes on me, tracing up and down my body, taking in what she couldn’t touch. I gave her a sidelong glance, just enough to show my own sliver of interest and stir up in her that subconscious need for more.

“Copper, what are you—”

I brushed up beside her, making sure to nuzzle up under her chin.

Her breath hitched, and out went those wings of hers that she never seemed to know what to do with. She went rigid, like her brain had jumped the rails at 6000 rpm and blasted clean out the side of her head, and so I went in for the kill.

I trailed the tip of my nose up her jawline to moan an “mhm” into her ear, and the shivers on her breath had me biting back a grin.

Circling fully around her, I kept my eyes locked with hers as I let my shoulders, then my hips, then my tail brush along her chest. The rosy shade of pink dominating her cheeks would have had me laughing were I enjoying this solely at her expense. Truth be told, I was having far more fun than I deserved.

I let that excitement sharpen my lips into a grin as I turned back toward her, inches from her face.

Her eyes danced back and forth between mine, every breath she took hot and heavy, no matter how hard she tried hiding it.

Oh, she wanted it.

I came an inch closer, and she matched me. Back went her ears, and I was certain every creature in a mile radius could hear her heart hammering in her chest. It ignited a fire in my blood that had me biting my lip, which only drove her more wild.

I could feel her breath on my muzzle. It took every ounce of willpower to keep from following through on every instinct screaming in my ears. I cupped her chin in my hoof, drew her forward ever so slightly. She was like putty in my hooves. And just before leaning in to commit to that passionate release, I stepped back, letting my hoof trail away from her and watched her lean wistfully after me.

“You were saying?” I said as coyly as possible.

She blinked for the first time since I brushed against her and took a heavy breath as if regaining herself from a spell. She took a step back and cleared her throat into her hoof.

“I, uh… that was… unexpected.”

I snorted. “But not unwanted, hmm?”

I carefully brushed my mane out of my face on the sly. Couldn’t have her thinking I enjoyed that as much as she did, could we? Well, maybe just a little…

That was, until I caught Sunset out of the corner of my eye, and my playful side went yipping back to its cage, tail between its legs.

But I couldn’t let that show—not after the performance I just put on for her—and so up went the mask of satisfaction as I flaunted each and every curve, the way my old modeling gigs taught me, and sat beside her, close enough to brush against her wing in a way that certainly wasn’t accidental.

After that little performance, she kept her eyes strictly forward. Though, she pressed a very measured amount of weight against me, and I couldn’t help but notice she placed her hoof daringly close to mine.

“Okay, yeah,” she said. “So I like you. Like, that kind of like. You’re beautiful, attentive, academic, artistic and all sorts of things that don’t normally go together that make you this… unique individual that I can’t help but admire.”

She finally found the courage to look at me, and I in turn met her gaze. She could have kissed me right there had she chosen to, and it seemed she realized it herself, given how quickly she retreated to looking at her hooves.

“A-and it’s not just you,” she said, laying her ears back. “Er, I mean, it is you, but like—”

“I know what you mean,” I said before she could ramble herself into a tizzy. I bit back a stupid smile of my own.

“R-right. So yes, I’ve always kind of… gravitated toward mares. I just… I’ve been worried. About my friends knowing. I’m the Princess of Friendship, not the Princess of…” She waggled her hoof in an attempt to dredge up the right word, but I couldn’t help myself:

“The Princess of Friendship with Benefits?” I said.

She fluffed up at that. “Th-that’s not what I was going to say. But… that sentiment, more or less, yes. Rainbow Dash pokes enough fun at me as it is.”

“Because she’s your friend? And that’s a thing friends do?”

“I get that she’s poking fun for fun’s sake, because she would never mean to hurt her friends. I know that. But… it still hurts.” She wilted, looking down at her hooves.

“Then you should tell her that. Just be serious about it. Or, be direct about it, I should say. Just tell her that in no uncertain terms. It’s always the rise they get out of you that eggs them on.” I laughed. “I should know. That was very much me with, uh… with Sunset.”

It was ironic, me counseling the Princess of Friendship on a friendship problem. I almost laughed again, but luckily I kept that in. Probably wouldn’t have flown well.

“And really,” I continued, “I don’t think they’ll think any differently of you in the slightest. For one thing, they’re your friends, and two, they already know. I guarantee it. It’s why Rainbow Dash is poking fun in the first place.”

“You really think so?”

And out came that laugh from a moment ago. “If my dad’s already picked up on it, then they sure as shit have.”

She clicked her teeth shut and stared at the floor beneath her hooves as if some grave understanding suddenly dawned on her.

“But for real,” I continued, to shut down whatever doomsday movie reel she had playing in her head. “They’re your friends. All this worrying you’re doing, it’s a non-issue.

“Just…” I paused to think what would be best to say, and I remembered what Sunset told me not even a few hours ago. “Just be your realest self. That’s the you everypony likes the most.”

The sentiment hung between us, like a balloon whose string she wasn’t quite ready to grasp.

“Be my realest self?” Her eyes met mine, then retreated to the floor. A second passed, and she hesitantly reconsidered. She searched me, like she wanted to say something her brain couldn’t put into words.

She didn’t have to say anything, though… I knew that look better than I had any right to. I had lived the feelings etched across her face for as long as I could remember. And it was because of that commiseration that I didn’t flinch when she leaned in and kissed me, right on the lips.

It was a weak little thing, like she’d never done it before, or was too afraid to commit. I almost felt bad, as if I were somehow taking advantage of her, but my heart somersaulted nevertheless, and in that moment the world was nothing more than the two of us.

It felt right. It felt natural. Wanting and being wanted. I wanted to kiss her back, to hold her against me, to submerge myself in these feelings that for the first time in my life made sense, that for the first time in my life weren’t a lie.

But just… not in front of her.

I put a hoof on Twilight’s shoulder to ease her back to arm’s length, and the hurt in her eyes had me regretting wandering down here tonight.

“You’re still in love with her.” Her eyes gravitated toward Sunset, wings slack at her sides. “Aren’t you?”

“What? N-no, that’s—”

“No, it’s okay.” She let out a little laugh that ended with a frown. “I, I get it. She’s…” A sigh. “Well, she’s Sunset.”

She’s Sunset… Like that was self-explanatory. Like she was this immaculate ideal us mere mortals were all cursed to compare ourselves to and be deemed unworthy—this untouchable goddess that I would never hold as my one and only, the one that got away.

And damn it, she was. She really, truly was—and yet she wasn’t, and both were right answers but I was still somehow wrong and I couldn’t keep lying to myself.

“Don’t say that,” I said. It came out shaky no matter how hard I tried. “Please don’t say that. Don’t make me think about it, don’t make me think about her.”

I shook my head and squeezed my eyes shut to keep the tears in. “I’m trying to move past her. Damn it, I told her I was moving past her. But the harder I try to move the more I feel like I’m standing still.”

The tears pushed through, and I figured I might as well give up that charade now, like I had everything else worthwhile in my life. I sobbed into the back of my hoof, and there went whatever shred of dignity I had going for me.

Twilight put a hoof on my shoulder. I flinched at first, but I quickly leaned into it as if it were the only thing keeping me from falling into space.

“That’s… not how hearts work,” Twilight said. Her voice was oddly distant, but there was a certainty to it, some princessy wisdom I clung to if only to keep from bolting. “You don’t just… flip a switch and turn off your feelings. Some hurts take time. Some never go away, and we have to learn how to manage them.”

Some hurts never go away. Wasn’t that the truth. Wasn’t that my life, from the moment I first felt that tug for another mare and every day since. Knowing I was a disappointment, a burden, an abnormality. I was a problem I couldn’t fix. No matter who I loved or who I hid it from, I was a fucking wreck that did nothing but drag others down with me. I…

Star Chaser’s face sprang to mind, that warm smile full of life and love whenever she looked at me, and that was the final straw.

“I can’t do this,” I whispered. I tried taking a breath, but my lungs chose now of all moments to stop working. “I can’t…”

“Copper, what’s—”

I teleported back to my room upstairs. It was the first place I could think of that wasn’t next to Twilight.

I couldn’t be there. I couldn’t stand seeing her look at me with that kind of sympathy, that kind of… desire to be remotely close to me. I couldn’t do that to her. I couldn’t drag her down, too. The world was spinning and my heart beat faster and faster as I scrambled for a way out that didn’t exist and why the fuck did I teleport here of all places? I stumbled into the dresser, put my hooves to my head, and gritted my teeth. I couldn’t breathe.

There was a crack and flash of magic to my left, and there suddenly Twilight lorded over me. The stern look on her face had me cowering against the dresser like a cornered animal.

“How did you…” I barely got out. “How did you know where I went?”

“If you honestly think I can’t trace magic in my own castle,” Twilight said, “then you don’t know me.”

The tone of her voice had me shaking. “I-I’m sorry, I—”

She put a hoof to my lips, and I shut up.

The hairs stood up on the back of my neck. My heart pounded a mile a minute. The power in her stature, the intensity in her eyes, and all the insanities spinning in my head circled back on a simple terrifying truth: with the simplest flick of her horn, she could kill me on the spot.

I wanted to run. I wanted to cry. But even the tears were too afraid to show themselves, and I wanted to die rather than keep staring into those eyes. But as the seconds wore on, I was able to weasel out a more reasonable understanding of what I saw in them.

It wasn’t anger. There was a sternness, for sure, but there was also patience. She had this certainty about her that I had never seen in another pony, a confidence of motion as she cupped my hooves in hers, gently but firmly, and stared me dead in the eye.

“Breathe,” she said. She took a slow, deep breath, in through her nose, then out through her mouth, and I followed her lead.

In through my nose, out through my mouth. In, then out. Slow and steady.

She never took her eyes off me, and I couldn’t look away even if I wanted to. For as much command as there was in her gaze, there was also safety. I saw it more clearly with every breath. So long as I kept staring, so long as I kept breathing in time with her, nothing could ever hurt me—she wouldn’t let it.

She wanted to help. She was the Princess of Friendship. There was no dragging her down. Rather… she wanted to lift me up, to help me realize some potential only she could see, and damn it if I let myself believe.

With every breath, the panic ebbed until I was left safe and sound in her gaze, and within the blissful silence of that moment, she was the most beautiful thing.

She sensed that I had composed myself, and a smile crept onto her face to light up the room. Her eyes danced back and forth between mine, searching for words she wanted to say but couldn’t find. Ears pinned back, she came a little closer and cocked her head ever so slightly, and the hopeless romantic in me recognized that cue better than anything.

This time, we both went for it. It started out small, chaste, but she pressed into it just the tiniest bit, and that sparked the match.

I let out a little moan, and she replied with a shuddering breath. She pressed further, the taste of her breath driving me wild, prompting me to let one of my hooves travel up her foreleg to her shoulder blade and pull her chest against mine while the other trailed up the back of her neck to tangle itself in her mane.

She followed my lead, pressing her weight against me, wrapping her hooves around me—touching, feeling, roving down the length of my sides, to my hips and back again. It sent shivers up my spine. Gently, she put her hooves on my chest, and I let her push me backward for the bed and all the wonderful places my mind started roaming.

But leave it to my dumbass self to be a smidge farther from the bed than I realized.

Rather than falling dramatically into the sheets and my laundry list of romantic ideations, my butt caught the edge of the mattress and slipped forward when it sagged under my weight, which caused me to panic and flail for anything I could grab ahold of. Of course, that meant Twilight, who came tumbling sideways with me, and in all that grace of motion I conked the back of my head on the bed frame.

It was a mystery how I managed it, but fuck it hurt. I clutched the back of my head with both hooves as the pain sharpened to a fine point, just below the crown. It was already starting to swell up. Naturally, my brain thought it fitting to add an extra “fuck you” to the mix by reminding me that I had explicitly told myself I wouldn’t drag her down with me, and there kinda went the mood.

“Oh my gosh, I’m so sorry!” Twilight said, already helping me up. “I was following your lead, and you were really into it, and it just felt right and—”

It was my turn to put a hoof to her lips and have the satisfaction of shutting up the princess herself. At the flip of a switch, her cheeks flared up like Hearth’s Warming lights, and her wings made another show of not knowing what to do—less a Princess of Anything and more the quirky, neurotic, complicated neophile I had gotten to know.

Her eyes were a mess of emotions. I could practically hear her freaking out inside her head, in the same vein as our little “experiment” not ten minutes earlier. To top it all off, she wore the picture-perfect look of a mare who thought she was reaching so far out of her own league and had been rightfully put back in her place.

Not that that was true. The princess title alone handily outweighed whatever shortcomings she saw in herself, not to mention she was quite the looker if we were talking leagues and all that fake social hierarchy bullshit. But fake or not, her confidence to try despite them was enough to put a wry smile on my face.

I wrapped her in my magic and threw her on the bed.

XLVIII - On the Hunt

“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.

L - Once More Unto the Breach

“We are here,” Luna said.

We’re… here? They were the first words she had spoken since we took flight from her dream. I almost thought I imagined them.

How long had it been?

“Sunset!” A hoof caught me by the shoulder, and the sense of touch startled me out of my head.

I blinked away the cotton stuffed between my ears and actually saw what I was staring at, what I had almost blindly auto-piloted into—the Eversleep, that black hole I could only see by the absence of stars beyond it. It tugged at the individual hairs of my coat, begged that I come closer.

“We’re here,” I echoed. “We’re… we’re actually here.”

Back to where I made my triumphant stand in the face of my own insecurities, where I buried the hatchet and my hubris along with it. And as the reality of what was to come beyond that event horizon grappled me in its stranglehold, I threw another shovelful on that shallow grave:

“I’m scared,” I said.

“As you should be,” she said after a moment. “Fear is natural. ’Twould be concerning were you not afraid. However, it is not the absence of fear but rather what we do in the face of it that matters, and you have proven yourself admirably thus far.”

I’d heard a quote along those lines before. Courage isn’t the absence of fear, but the mastery of it. As poetic as it was, it didn’t make me feel very courageous. Still, we needed to do this. I needed to do this. And that had to be good enough.

“You are not alone in your fears,” Luna said, and that snapped me out of my head.

“You’re afraid, too?”

She blinked, and the silence cast her gaze down into the distant cosmos. “Indeed. I fear many things. I fear that my efforts are in vain. I fear what will come should we fail, the ponies who will suffer for my weakness.”

“Sounds about right. I don’t want to lose, but not because it means I’ll die.”

In crept the silence. I almost didn’t notice, for how I had grown used to it.

“Many ponies rely on us,” she said. “I refuse to be unworthy of that trust. We will succeed.”

If only I had that kind of confidence.

“So then… do we go in?”

“That is for you to decide, Sunset,” she said. “But know well whatever it is you say next, for what you say will no longer be mere words. Words can be spoken, but actions must be done, and I am no stranger to witnessing others kneel before the storm.

“Here, the Nightmare has chosen to make its stand. It will not run, save however it must in order to claim my dream for whatever purposes it may require it. I will say again that I will not fault you should you decide now to turn tail, but I must be sure that when you cross that threshold you are acutely aware: we will not return unless victorious.”

With your shield or on it, rang an old saying from the dusty upper shelves of my mind. And this time she really meant it. We didn’t have a reset button I could press at the flick of my horn, or anyone waiting in the wings to bandage us back together again. In there, whatever happened would be final.

But she was right in confronting me here. I was a lot of talk. I wasn’t stupid enough to act like the last fight we had with the Nightmare never happened. I could still feel the pain in my leg. It got me sick to my stomach just thinking about it. But I remembered the words I convinced myself of at the start of all this, the words I only shared with Twilight.

If I ran from this now, what would that make me? Even if it turned out the Nightmare couldn’t escape the Eversleep or wasn’t able to take whatever it needed from Luna’s dream and our choice here meant jack shit.

If I decided to bow out and leave this to Luna? Without a shadow of a doubt, she’d figure it out. She’d bash her head against that wall until it came crashing down, brick by brick. The Luna beside me was that kind of psychotic masochist, if even a shred of all we went through was any indication.

But what would that make me?

Maybe I was being selfish—as selfless as it was, but for my own selfish reasons—but I knew deep down this question had only one answer.

Selfish or not, I had to be like Twilight. I had to be strong, I had to believe, and so I said:

“We go in.”

She let the silence fester, her eyes never wavering from mine. She was testing me, here and now, in my thoughts and my conviction, scrying into the very depths of my soul.

“Then we are settled,” she said, and nodded. “When you are ready.”

I held her gaze a moment longer, stared into the emptiness of the Eversleep, and in we went.

• • •

The Eversleep tried ripping us from the skies the moment we entered.

Just like the last time I crossed that threshold, the winds battered me every which way like feral windigos. But I had Luna beside me, and she shielded me with her wings as we touched down on that mountain top.

“I feel it this time,” Luna said. “It is out there.”

Thankfully, I could feel it, too, that same magnetic tugging at the blood in my veins. The Nightmare was in here. Our gamble paid off. Now to make good on it. We set out.

If there was one thing about this place that Luna got right, it was how strange the landscape was. This place was a surrealist artist’s wet dream.

At the bottom of the mountain, we came across a little copse of a garden, with a marble water fountain whose basin overflowed into the open expanse of some purplish-blue prairie. Overhead, the sky swam freely between reds, greens, and blues, as if I were staring into a choppy lake. The far horizon caged us in with an imposing mountain range that gave the phrase “purple mountain majesty” a new gold standard in my mind.

The borders between dream real estates shifted constantly, some creeping outward with amoebic-like militaristic expansion while others were swallowed up, never to exist again.

I heard the fizzle of a dream coming down to join the rest. What looked like an aurora trailing down from the heavens seeped into the cracks between the prairie and the fountain copse, trying to wedge itself in. The ground buckled and shifted to make room, resulting in a sort-of tectonic upheaval where either dream refused to budge.

I had to hand it to this place. It certainly hit that uncanny valley between beautiful and terrifying.

We followed the tug of the Nightmare past the marble water fountain, into the flower fields. They felt cold as I brushed past them, until I realized the petals were made of snow. I cupped one in my hoof, pulling it from the stem, and watched it melt into a mixture of green and periwinkle that ran down my hoof like food coloring.

“Who the hell dreams of stuff like this?” I asked. No answer. “Luna?”

I caught her staring to our right, up the slope of the valley toward the tree line hugging the mountainside. The hairs on the back of my neck stood on end at the sight of those hyena things, maybe a hundred yards out. I knew it before even the first howl sounded across the valley.

Not that shit again.

I launched a fireball their way and watched it sear across the distance between us. It let out a deafening explosion that had them scattering to the four winds, yipping and hollering.

“You guys can fuck right on out of here!” I shouted. “I don’t have time for you.” As their cries died away, I let myself bask in the momentary pride.

Luna wore a pensive smile. “I am glad to see your magic is not dampened in this place. ’Twill be indispensable once we find our quarry.”

That got a nervous smile threading across my lips. Yeah. I didn’t want to think about that just yet. Our last fight with the Nightmare came to mind, and I shuddered at the thought of all the blood.

“Just a little warm-up, right?” I said, shooting her a smile, but it didn’t take a social genius like Rarity to know that little display of bravado glanced right off her.

We continued on.

“Up there,” Luna said after an hour’s trot. She pointed her nose toward one of the distant mountains, and I felt it too as I focused on the peak.

Cloven in half, just like we left it, the mountaintop from Luna’s dream awaited us.

“Crazy how it’s just… there,” I said.

“True, but I am glad for it. It means we know our quarry has not already absconded.”

I would have argued the opposite in that were her dream to have already been devoured the way we’d seen a dozen others, the Nightmare’s gambit would have already been foiled. But I wasn’t really in a position to argue. I kept my little wishes to myself, and we pressed on.

A short climb up the sloping valley led us to that same eerie tunnel from last time. That dark portal welcomed us into the heart of the mountain like the gateway to hell. We were in a dream world, but goddamn if it didn’t get the goosebumps going up and down my legs all the same.

I gave Luna a nervous glance, but the stoic mask she wore radiated the conviction she demanded of me at the threshold of this unholy place, and so I fell in line, one echoing step at a time into the dark.

When we broke free of the other side, the Nightmare was waiting for us.

It lay upon a raised section of rock as if upon a throne. It regarded us with a bassy snarl, but for the first of many times we had come upon it, it didn’t attack the instant it laid eyes on us.

“It’s waiting us out,” I said.

“Then we shan’t let it.” And in a blast of her wings, she launched herself forward, the force almost blowing me back on my ass.

It met her with a flash of fangs, and their magics lit up the arena like fireworks. Like last time, Luna skirted around it, using her wings to flit away whenever it struck, keeping it at arm’s length.

It didn’t seem as ferocious as before. Whether by consequence of our previous fight or the trail of miniature nightmares it had left to slow us down I could only guess, but Luna took full advantage of it. For once, it seemed like she actually had the upper hand.

I honestly found it difficult to find my own opening. Anywhere I tried, she was already there, lashing out with fire and ice and lightning like the revenant I had chalked her up to be. It was… humbling, and friendly fire wasn’t something we needed right now, so I waited in the wings, ready to throw a helpful spell into the melee.

As their battle wore on, the mountaintop itself seemed to shrivel around us ever so slightly. The stone beneath my hooves took on the slightest spongy texture. The hell? I knelt down and pawed at it. The stone seemed to come up with my hoof as an almost powder-like substance—no, ash.

Luna and the Nightmare began kicking up a violent storm in their own right. With every leap, pivot, and wing beat, up billowed a choking cloud that blocked out the sight of them.

Something wasn’t right. The dreams we saw earlier didn’t fall apart like this. The Nightmare had to be doing something to the mountain somehow.

Luna had the Nightmare occupied, so I sat down in the ash and closed my eyes.

Magic existed everywhere. From the highest mountain to the lowest ocean trench, there was magic to be found in nature and in every atom of every molecule that made up the universe. It was the foundation behind A-chem and divination magic—a coming together of sorts. All it took was a little patience and know-how.

Like I had with Star Swirl in our first meeting, like I had with Nocturne when she first slithered into my dreams, I let my magic reach out and feel the invisible, snaking auras around me. Breathe. Block out the noise. Reach, and let it find you—and there it was, an almost necromantic energy leaching from the mountain beneath us. I took a breath and visualized it, reached further in to grasp, feel, examine its subtle yet overpowering makeup. But as I reached further in, I felt it reach into me.

A cold, clammy sensation tingled up my spine like the fingers of a corpse. I sucked in a breath as cold as an arctic wind, and it took every effort to hold onto that sensation and keep myself grounded in that zen state. The fuck kind of magic was this?

It was almost as if…

The essence of the dream, the lifeblood of a dying thought made manifest. I pulled on that thread, and it went taut. Harder, but it resisted. I couldn’t wrench it free, but I had what I needed. Like a divining rod, I knew what I was looking for, and with myself attuned to the magic, I opened my eyes.

Like morning mist on a pond, a faint crimson haze emanated from the mountain all around me. It rose up in wispy tendrils, up and around my body, danced with the air currents when I staggered to my hooves. From every corner of our little arena, it trailed into the ash cloud, and a pit opened up in my heart.

The hesitation when we entered, Luna matching it one-for-one. The Nightmare wasn’t weakened. It was busy casting a spe—

A deafening boom blasted me off my hooves. My head hit the packed ash, and I stared upward into what looked like the eye of a hurricane. Far above, I made out the shape of the Nightmare against a strange auric backdrop of reds and purples making up the sky.

A flash of blue signaled Luna dive-bombing toward me, landing with a heavy kick-up of ash. The look of fear in her eyes said it all.

It had what it wanted. This was our last chance. If it got away, Equestria and the world beyond was lost.

I swallowed my pride and a healthy dose of fear, leapt onto her back, and we were off in a torrent of ash and wind.

I focused on the Nightmare rising higher above us, drawn upward almost angelically as if being assumed by some higher power. Its eyes were glued to the aurascape above. In any other situation, I would have been, too, witnessing an event that went against the very nature of this place.

Higher and higher we climbed. I could feel the strain in Luna’s muscles, the spirit that had already given its all but still needed more.

“Luna, hurry! We’re not going to make it.”

She shot me the briefest glare before something drew her eyes downward. Her eyes widened, and I dared to follow her gaze.

Below, the ash storm rose after us, winding upward like a giant worm with its mouth open wide. Before we knew it, we were engulfed in shadow.

Around us, the eye of the storm closed in like a hangman’s noose cinching up about our necks. Violent winds battered us from every direction. I blasted apart what I could and threw up Shield Spells for the rest, but I could only do so much.

I shut my eyes to keep the ash from blinding me, but that proved fatal when a gust blasted me in the ribs and tried tearing me from her back.

Luna twisted in midair to compensate, but I heard the pop of a wing joint, and was immediately hit with a face full of feathers bending in ways they shouldn’t. She screamed, and I felt my bowels rise up in my stomach.

We were in freefall.

We spiraled I couldn’t count how many times. The winds kept battering us, and I couldn’t tell which way was up. I imagined the ground rising up to meet us and the unfortunate smear I’d make on the Eversleep below—until a gentle hum of magic bid I stop thrashing. A pair of hooves took me by the shoulders, and I felt strangely calm.

I peeked open my eyes to see Luna gazing back at me. We shared a moment where words had no meaning, but I read plain as day the silent determination etched across her face.

“Go,” she said, and lit her horn. A filament of silver magic traced its spiral, reached out to touch me, and I became weightless. “I believe.”

The noise of the storm ebbed away, and I watched her fall into the yawning oblivion.

“Luna!” I yelled, but my voice didn’t carry. I reached out to her as she disappeared into the maw of that ashen void. Some higher power shunted me sideways, and before I could process the concept of “up,” the diamond starscape of infinity greeted me in silent indifference.

My legs still shook from the adrenaline pumping through my veins, and there wasn’t enough air in the world to get my lungs in working order. I felt the tears drift away from my face to join the stars.

I squeezed my eyes shut and gritted my teeth to bury the panic deep down. As I wiped away the tears, I sucked in a deep breath to center myself before taking off as fast as the Dreamscape would allow, praying that I wasn’t too late.

LI - A Product of Fate

I felt myself come to naturally enough. That slow, gentle onset of wakefulness I used to cherish in the warm, happy summer days of my fillyhood when punctuality wasn’t mandatory. My brain continued booting up, and the hazy, love-drunk memories percolated in my mind.

I curled in on myself, let my hooves trace up and down my sides the way hers had last night. I wanted to feel her again, huddle close, soak up that precious body heat, touch and be touched in a way that my most intimate fantasies couldn’t put into words until her.

I reached over and found her half of the bed empty. Still warm, but empty all the same.

She probably got up to get an early start on the day.

The responsible half of my brain knew I should, too, but maybe, just today, I could lie here a few more minutes and savor her smell on the pillow. I pulled it to my chest, took a deep breath, and committed her scent to memory. My heart started pounding as if I was holding her against me. I could have lain there forever.

Truth be told, I wanted to. I wanted to lay there and imagine last night and how right it felt. Just she and I. But my imagination was merely that, so I gave the pillow one last squeeze before sitting up and rubbing the sleep from my eyes.

A yawn got the better of me, and I took the opportunity to stretch out my back and feel the oh so wonderful popping sensation, then took a deep breath. I felt refreshed, like I’d actually gotten some sleep for the first time in a month.

Speaking of time, what time was it? Did I sleep in? Well, no. That was a silly question. Of course I did. What I should be asking was how much did I sleep in.

I got up to peek out the curtains and oh crap it was like noon. The sun was almost too high up to see from this angle.

Crap crap crap crap crap. I dashed out the door but skidded to a halt upon realizing I had dashed out of Copper’s door. Luckily, nopony was around to witness this awkward moment, but more importantly, had they gone looking for me? When they found out I wasn’t in my room, where might they have looked instead?

Did they ask Copper? Would she tell them?

I hadn’t even been up for five minutes and already I had more questions whirling in my head than I could deal with. I sighed before scurrying downstairs, hoping nopony thought about it too hard. I wouldn’t be much help to the others without that first coffee, though, so I stopped in the kitchen for a quick mug.

Starlight sat at the little table we had set up to turn the kitchen into a little break room of sorts. She welcomed me with an amused smile over the newspaper she was reading.

“Good afternoon,” she said.

“Is it?” I said as if I hadn’t noticed. I pulled a mug from the cabinet.

She laughed. “It’s almost one, Twilight. You’ve been sawing logs while the rest of us were up and at it. To be fair, though, if any of us needed the extra sleep, it was you.”

“Well, I have to admit,” I said, pouring myself some coffee from the burner, “that was probably the best sleep I’ve had in weeks.”

Starlight’s smile went rogue, and she leaned forward just enough that I noticed. “I bet it was.”

Oh no. She knew. She knew she knew she knew oh crap she knew she totally knew.

“I mean, that’s what I said.” I angled myself away from her and stared into my mug as casually as I could manage. If I looked anywhere else, she might see right through me. I blew on my coffee to maintain that air of causality before taking a sip. “And like you said, I really needed it.”

I could see her still grinning out of the corner of my eye—up went the eyebrow, impatient for whatever reaction she wanted out of me.

“I saw Copper earlier,” Starlight said, and dang it I froze up.

That was all the response she needed. She casually leaned forward on her elbows, resting her chin in the crook of her hooves in a very conniving, Old-Starlight manner.

“She was in a good mood, too. She also looked like she got the best sleep in weeks.” Her grin sharpened just a hair. “Wouldn’t happen to know anything about that, would you?”

“I, uh… maybe?” I could feel myself sweating. I took another sip of coffee to hide my face, even though it burned going down.

“‘Maybe,’ huh? So you maybe saw her this morning?”

“No, I haven’t seen her since last night.” Which wasn’t a lie. The whole, uh… she-and-I thing did happen at like two in the morning, but I could still technically count it as “yesterday” since I hadn’t fallen asleep yet.

“Okay, so you saw her last night. And youuu—”

“We talked,” I said quickly, catching her before she could line up any loaded questions.

“You talked?”

“We talked,” I said. “A lot.”

She lowered the bridge of her nose a smidge to show off that damned grin of hers. “And then had sex.”

I let that silence linger for an uncomfortable span, but I eventually sighed. Some things were simply easier to own up to than let her drag out of me one painfully awkward implication at a time.

“…Yes.”

Starlight gave a satisfied nod, leaned back in her chair, and went back to her newspaper. “Nice.”

I scowled at her. “What do you mean ‘nice’? Is… that all you care about?”

She raised an eyebrow at me over her newspaper. “Twilight, I don’t care that you got laid. I mean, I do, don’t get me wrong. Celestia knows, you of all ponies needed it.”

I scowled harder. “What the hay’s that suppos—”

“Buuut, I care more about what it means.” She flopped the newspaper down and came around the table toward me.

And harder. I leaned away from her as she came close.

“Oookay…? And what does that mean, exactly?”

She laughed, throwing a hoof over my shoulder. “Twilight, everypony already knew you were gay. We were waiting for you to figure it out yourself. Or at least admit it to yourself, whichever it was. And you did. So I’m proud of you. For real.”

And there went all the anger like bathwater down a drain. Into its place crept that sucking, uncomfortable embarrassment that only reared its ugly head when I was being too thick or stubborn about something.

So Copper wasn’t wrong. Oh dear, was I really that transparent?

Starlight let out a bout of laughter and punctuated it with a sigh. “Oh, I wish I had a camera for that face you just made. But on a serious note, just… be careful.”

That was a strange thing to say. “Of?”

Starlight grimaced at nothing in particular. “Just… Relationships are difficult at the best of times, and she just got out of one. Rebounding’s a thing, and it doesn’t usually end well.”

“I… okay, but why is that?”

Starlight hem-hawed back and forth. “Because rebound relationships tend to be about chasing the high of being in a relationship and all the immediate benefits that come with it rather than about the ponies themselves.”

Okay. I couldn’t argue from an experience standpoint, but hearing it from the mare who couldn’t even work up the guts to ask out Sunburst had me sporting a frown.

“And when did you become such a relationship guru?”

She put her hooves up defensively. “Whoa now, I’m the furthest thing from a relationship guru. It’s just I’ve seen others go through something similar back in Our Town. Like, ninety percent of all my social know-how comes from all the bad stuff to come out of that place. You know, before you all came and made it a good place.”

I gave her the Applejack eyebrow.

“What? I’m serious. Besides, you’re the one that always goes on about ‘making the best of bad situations’ and ‘mistakes are only mistakes if you don’t learn from them.’ So by your own words, I’ve made plenty of great not-mistakes in my life.”

In any other conversation, that last line would have had me doubling down on the Applejack eyebrow, but I let it drop. This wasn’t what I would have considered a normal conversation, and what she said earlier got an uncomfortable thought-worm wriggling in my head:

“Do you think she and I won’t work?” I asked.

“Whoa whoa whoa, no.” Starlight held up her hooves again. “That’s not what I’m saying. I mean heck, you’re the Princess of Friendship. I’d bet a stack of bits as high as the castle that if anypony can make it work, it’d be you. I… I just don’t want to see either of you get hurt. Just… just know what you’re getting into and try to remember where she’s coming from is all. Communication and all that.”

Fair advice, and just as comforting given the fact it was in no uncertain terms about Copper and I both being mares and that Starlight was cool with that and I was totally overthinking this and I should just smile and accept her acceptance because this was totally a normal thing. Right?

“But anyway,” Starlight said, that roguish smile of hers making a grand re-entry, “while you two were busy booty boppin’, String, Star Swirl, and I were planning out some retrofitting for the portal room.”

I wrinkled my nose. “Booty… boppin’?”

“Yeah, now come on.” While I was still trying to parse that strangest of phrases, Starlight magicked a tug at my wing, bidding I follow her to the portal room. “By the way, Copper had quite the goose egg on the back of her head. I don’t judge, but you might wanna scale it back some.”

I bristled at the implication. “That was from—” I clamped my mouth shut before I dug that hole any deeper. Instead, I cleared my throat. “I’ll keep that in mind,” I said calmly, and left it at that.

We didn’t share another word the rest of the way, and while I welcomed the quiet after that little… misinterpretation, the idyllic morning silence of the castle quickly became anything but. As we approached the portal room, it felt as if I had stepped out of my castle and into one prepping for war.

Along the outer wall, a large stack of scaffolding planks and metalwork sat unpackaged and ready for setup, the plastic casing on some of the newer-looking sets torn open for inventory purposes. A rhythmic hammering welcomed us into the portal room proper, where a set of scaffolding ran along the left wall. Thankfully, Starlight and the others had the presence of mind to empty the bookshelves before setting up shop.

String Theory was up in the scaffolding, about two stories high, hammering what looked like a piton into the wall. Beside him sat a large metal box of a dozen or so more, and what looked like a series of those already driven into the walls had been strung with some sort of thick cabling. It reminded me of those precipitous mountain paths that had nothing but a board for walking on and a chain to hold onto.

“That should catch any wild magic that happens to leak through the glyph,” Starlight said, nodding at the cabling that circled the room. “The plan is to have it go around and around the room like Hearth’s Warming lights. According to String, it’ll at least keep the castle standing if everything that can possibly go wrong does. Of course, anything with that kind of power will still release an initial shockwave that’ll turn anypony in the castle to jelly, but at least Ponyville won’t become a crater the moment it happens.”

As if that wasn’t the most comforting thought I’d have all day. Either let the masses keep their blissful ignorance and die an instantaneous death, or leave them with a few seconds of unimaginable terror but also the tiniest sliver of a fighting chance? Those weren’t the kinds of moral extremes I liked thinking about, let alone making an actual decision on. I still hadn’t even had my coffee, which I was dumb enough to forget back in the kitchen thanks to Starlight and her “talk.”

“I figured you’d want to take a look at all this,” Starlight said, “but String said most of what he’s doing he won’t need our help with, and Star Swirl took the midnight train out to Canterlot to fill in Celestia face-to-face. I figured you could help me with some of the reorganization, instead?”

The upward inflection in her voice implied less of a question and more of a suggestion. I got the feeling she could read at least some of the thoughts whirling through my brain, but I didn’t really have the heart to follow through on her good will. A sense of melancholic helplessness had my stomach in knots and my heart fluttering like a pegasus ready to leap into the sky at the first sign of danger.

It had settled in when we made it to the portal room, but I knew myself well enough to know it started sometime between waking up and making it to the kitchen. The quiet thoughts we don’t quite think, the subtle feelings we don’t quite feel—the stuff of the subconscious we don’t like admitting exists.

“Just stack everything in the sitting area of the library,” I said. “Organizing that right now would just be a waste of time.”

That sounded uncharacteristically un-Twilight, even to myself. But as much as I loved and respected all things literature, books were just books when compared to living, breathing ponies. And I had not only two lying comatose in the middle of the room but an entire nation to worry about before any words on any page.

“Oookay then,” Starlight said. “I’ll go get on that, then.” She snagged a stack of books from the nearby table and headed out the way we came, leaving me with my thoughts and the incessant hammering of steel on crystal.

“Thought I heard somepony talking,” came String Theory’s voice after a moment. It wasn’t until I shook my head that I realized the hammering had stopped. He sat looking down at me with his weight leaning against the scaffolding’s railing, his foreleg hooked over it the way one did the back of a chair. A quick flick of magic lifted a pair of safety glasses up over his horn, and he wiped the sweat from his brow. “You good down there?”

“Yes,” I said. “Just… thinking.”

“There’ll be plenty of time for that later. You wanna help me with this, or do you have something else you were gonna do?” He slanted his mouth. “Orrr do you have something you need to get off your chest? You’ve got that look about you.”

I laid my ears back and scrounged for the words among the cracks along the floor. Eventually, my eyes gravitated toward Sunset and Luna.

“I just… I know I was all smiles last night about keeping things going out here, but they’re the ones actually fighting. Honestly, I don’t really know what else there is to do at this point. I feel like all we have left is to pray, and it makes me feel so helpless.”

It hurt letting those words fall out. It felt like a confession, but I figured he of all ponies was level-headed enough that I could speak my mind. Communication and all that, like Starlight said.

He watched me for a moment, scanned me much the same as any research paper or magical artifact back in the Canterlot labs. He got up and trundled down the scaffolding stairs. There was a careful rumination in his eyes when he came up to me, like he wasn’t sure how best to phrase what he needed to say.

“Well,” he said. “That’s the sobering truth of where we’re at. Sunset and Princess Luna are in there doing whatever it is they’re doing to stop this. Not much we can do other than prepare for the worst, short of jumping in there ourselves, which I don’t think we can do, can we?”

No, we couldn’t. Sunset and Luna were in the Dreamscape, not any individual dream. Sunset never taught me her spell, and frankly we didn’t have time to design one, if that were even possible. We could set up a new Dream Dive circle and possibly alter the spell in order to dive into one another’s dreams, but that wouldn’t help unless Sunset and Luna came looking for that specific pony to bring them along. Besides, that could potentially open up another route for the Nightmare to escape.

No. We made our choices. I chose to safeguard Equestria, and they chose to fight.

I had to trust. I had to trust. I had to trust.

I felt the weight of a hoof on my shoulder. It was String’s, and it carried the surety of both a father and a friend.

“Maybe a few swings of the mallet will take your mind off it?” he asked.

I looked at the rubber mallet in his magic, then at him, then at the pitons along the wall and the cabling dangling between them.

“You’re just building a bigger faraday cage,” I said. “Like the séance circle.”

He chuckled much like my dad did whenever I asked him about one of his household projects. “Well, yes and no. Mostly no. These cables are a lot like the chalk you used to make that glyph, yeah. But where you were using the chalk formed from the horn’s outer shell, this is inlaid with ground horn from the inner core.

“Rather than insulating against the magic,” he said, “it conducts it away from your main shielding, which in our case is the castle itself. And, if you build it right, it gives it a direction to flow, the way copper wiring would electricity.” He pointed at a pair of pitons already driven into the floor, nearest the centermost wall that butted up against what I knew to be the map room on the other side. “Which can be the difference between this castle staying a castle or becoming a thousand two-ton meteors raining down all over Equestria.”

He stared at the mallet held aloft in his magic—crestfallen, if nothing else. “That said, we call it ‘shoestring’ for a reason, because it’s a shoestring safety measure on a shoestring budget. It isn’t meant for something this big, but it’s cheap, easy, and anything else would take too long to set up before we need it.”

And that got the same uncomfortable, squirmy sensation wriggling in the pit of my stomach. This was just one more contingency plan for the pile, another nail in the coffin of our assumption that Sunset and Luna would fail. Because what else was planning for the worst if not the assumption the best wouldn’t happen?

I trusted them. With life, limb, and everything in between, I trusted they’d pull through. But this… all of this. I couldn’t shake the sense of innate distrust that came with it. It made me feel dirty, like I was failing them somehow or lying to them behind their backs.

I took a deep breath and let it out. I was being negative, and the worst part was, I knew exactly why: I had no agency in the matter. It all circled back to that simple fact.

I couldn’t dive in and help; I couldn’t grit my teeth and dig and dig and dig until I came out the other side. They were stuck, I was stuck, and like I already told myself too many times today, all I could do was trust.

String hefted the mallet toward me. “Going once, going twice,” he said with a smile that again reminded me of my dad. When I didn’t take it in my magic, he added, “No? Well then if nothing else, take the day off. Like you said, there really isn’t anything else to be done except wait, and Celestia knows you’ve been the one working hardest on this. You need to give your brain a chance to rest.”

I laughed and rubbed the back of my neck. “You say that like, even if I did take a break, that I wouldn’t spend the entire time worrying about it.”

“Maybe.” He shrugged, and his smile got a bit bigger. “But I do know that Copper was taking a stack of books to the library. Maybe she could help you take your mind off things?”

There was a hopeful glint in his eye, and I felt the heat rise to my cheeks as the implication dawned on me. Oh, Celestia, he really had picked up on it, hadn’t he? I must have been easy to read, because not even a moment later he laughed and put a hoof on my shoulder, gently pushing me toward the door.

“Go on,” he said. “If I need anything I’ll come get you.”

“Oh, uh… okay. I guess I’ll just, uh, go look for Copper! Uh, eh heh… Yes, that.” I couldn’t trot out of there fast enough.

The silence of the hallway welcomed me with a pat on the back for a job well done making things super awkward. I could only imagine what sort of thoughts were running through his head after that. I’d had my fair share of “settling down” conversations with my parents to last a dozen lifetimes, but being actively matched up? That was an exceedingly new level of embarrassment I hadn’t felt before.

And to add a cherry to the top of the awkward cake, of course Copper had gone to the library, after I had just dismissed the idea of heading there to Starlight. I could already see the sly grin she’d throw my way as I walked in.

Whatever. That was just friendly prodding, and she did have my best interests at heart. If I really had nothing meaningful left to contribute, then I could at least get some answers to the questions whirling around in my head.

Of course, life was a series of awkward moments and tests of character, and what kind of day would it be if it didn’t try throwing me another curve ball? I made it halfway to the library before I heard the pitter patter of dragon claws down the intersecting hallway that led to the main entrance.

“Hey, Twilight?” came Spike’s voice from around the bend. Out poked his little head, and he perked up at the sight of me. “Oh, good. I was hoping that was you. You have a visitor. Or, visitors.”

Visitors? Now?

“Uh, could you tell them to come back later? I’m… now’s not really the best time for visitors.”

He tapped the tips of his index claws together in that adorably nervous way he all too often did, and his eyes flicked over his shoulder before returning to me. “Youuu might want to actually take this one. One of them is Coppertone. Or isn’t? I, I can’t tell. And the grumpy one is, uh… intimidating.”

Wait. Wasn’t Copper down in the library? Curiosity got the better of me, so I headed for the foyer.

Just inside the main doorway stood two unicorn mares. The first one had a grey coat and wore a purple slouchie over her snow-white mess of a mane, and the other… was the spitting image of Copper. Except she looked different—younger somehow, and she had her mane pulled back in a braid. No, it most certainly wasn’t Copper. Did she have a sister?

“Good afternoon,” I said. “Can I help you?”

The moment I stepped up, the grey unicorn fixed me with an intense stare. Spike wasn’t kidding about the intimidating bit. It felt like I was being interviewed for my CSGU entrance exam all over again.

“Where’s Copper?” she asked. “She said she was staying here.”

“I…” I started, but wasn’t sure how to finish that sentence. My few years as a princess got me used to a certain level of formality from strangers, and her intense straightforwardness was… disarming to say the least.

The mare who looked like Copper stepped between us, offering me a smile. “Princess Twilight? I-I’m sorry. She, uh… She means ‘hi.’ I’m Lily Rose, and this is Whistle Wind.” She gestured to herself, then the other mare. “We’re looking for Coppertone. She’s our sister, and we were told she was staying here in Ponyville?”

A look of intense hopefulness shone in her eyes. Anything other than a “yes” would absolutely crush her. Luckily, that was exactly the word I had in mind, if only I could get my brain to form the right words.

“Um, yeah. I think she’s in the librar—”

And Whistle was already halfway down the hall. “Sorry,” Lily added before skating off after her.

“—ry?” Did she really just—I shook my head and followed. “It’s on your left!”

Not that they couldn’t follow the signs, nor had we even barred access to the public areas of the castle throughout this ordeal—minus the portal room, naturally—but I wanted some say in this strange encounter.

Whistle led the charge, shouldering open the door hard enough that the handle slammed against the inside wall. Thankfully, nopony was directly on the other side. Normally I would have scolded somepony for being so careless, but the moment I filed in to see Copper in the library foyer, I had no room to speak.

She stared at them as if they were ghosts. For all I knew about her family life, they might have been to her. The books in her magic fell to the floor, and for a long, silent moment, nopony moved.

“Sissy!” Lily said, rushing forward.

Copper snapped out of her trance and met her halfway. She pulled Lily to her breast like a mother holding her foal.

“I missed you,” Lily whispered into Copper’s chest.

“I missed you, too,” Copper whispered back. She wore the most radiant smile that shone through the tears streaming down her face.

Whistle stepped up a moment later to join the hug, and I looked on, an observer of this hallowed moment I didn’t understand.

“Well that was quite the hello,” Starlight said. “What’s the occasion, if I’m not prying?”

Except she most definitely was, and she should know better. They’d tell us in their own time, if they wanted to at all. I tried saying that with a frown, but it glanced right off her.

“What?” she said to me, obtuse as ever.

Copper laughed, still wearing that radiant smile. She wiped her face, but the happy tears just kept coming.

“Starlight, Twilight. This is Whistle and Lily, my little sisters. It’s… it’s been a while,” she added, resting her head on Lily’s.

“Too many whiles,” Whistle added before her expression went sour. “Is Dad still here?”

Lily scrambled out of Copper’s hooves and fixed Whistle, then Copper with that same hopeful gaze she gave me back in the foyer. “Is he really?”

Copper’s face ran the gamut from startled, to concerned, and ultimately back to that gentle radiance. “Yeah.”

She got up and led them to the portal room with me in tow, Starlight deciding to continue her work in the library. The rhythmic hammering welcomed our little troupe in, and the moment Whistle and Lily stepped inside, they came to a standstill, eyes on Sunset and Luna.

“The fuck?” Whistle said.

Copper sighed and turned to give them a sobering look. “Yeah, this is the complicated bit I told you about. So basically, some evil monster-thing called the Nightmare is trying to escape the dream world so that it can enslave Equestria or something and we’re trying to stop it.

“Here in Ponyville, that’s just Tuesday.” She tried smiling, but anypony worth their salt could see right through it.

“Are… are they okay?” Lily asked.

“As okay as anypony can be while stuck in the Dreamscape,” Copper said uneasily. “But that can wait for a moment. Right now, the reason you’re here…”

Copper threw on the smile of a showmare ready to present her latest magical feat before turning toward the scaffolding. “Hey, Dad. You’ve got visitors.”

The creak of wood signaled String sitting back from his work, and I could just see the tip of his horn from our angle. The mallet thudded on the wood beside him, and he came to our end of the scaffolding, pulling his safety glasses over his horn and wiping his forehead with the back of his hoof. The casual smile on his face disappeared the moment he laid eyes on us, and I half expected him to keel over from shock.

“Whistle? Lily?” He rushed down the scaffolding stairs but in his haste tripped and tumbled into a heap at the bottom.

“Dad!” Copper and Lily both shouted, running to his side.

Whistle didn’t follow, I noticed. She had taken that instinctive first step, but she caught herself and scowled at some memory hiding in the cracks along the floor.

“Ah, fuck,” String grumbled under his breath and let out a very dad-like groan as they helped him to his haunches. But any trace of pain or anger was gone by the time he looked Lily in the eye.

“It’s really you,” he said. He looked at Whistle, then back to Lily. He threw his hooves around Lily and Copper and pulled them in tight, tears running down his face. “I missed you so much.”

I had to admit, seeing a normally stalwart pony like him get emotional had me tearing up, too. I turned to check on Whistle only to see that she still hadn’t budged, so I stepped up beside her discreetly.

“Is everything okay?” I whispered.

That startled her out of whatever mired her thoughts. She shot me a look of surprise before gathering herself as if I didn’t just witness her having a moment.

“Yeah, I’m fine,” she said curtly before joining the group.

String pulled her in without a moment’s hesitation, but she didn’t hug him back—at least, not at first. It took a glance Lily’s way before she begrudgingly returned the gesture.

And I looked on with a weight in my heart no scale could rightly measure. What happened to this family? So estranged, yet so full of love.

When they all finally unwound in a fit of teary smiles and sniffles, Whistle was the first to speak.

“So that’s it? Seven years, and that’s it. Just kiss and make up?” She glared at Lily, and some unspoken communication crossed between them. She didn’t seem to find the answer she wanted and so turned to Copper. The bridging silence failed her again, and she resigned with a sigh and a shake of her head.

“Fine. Whatever. Just give me the fucking hammer and tell me what to do.” She stormed past String and up the scaffolding.

Strung stared at Whistle, the gears in his head struggling to process what just happened, before leaping into Dad Mode as I called it and following her up.

I couldn’t make out what he was saying, but it made me think of the many times when I was little that my dad used to teach me some household skill, like fixing a cabinet door or a leaky faucet.

“Wow,” Copper said. “That’s not something I expected to see.”

Lily raised an eyebrow at her. “What is?”

“Whistle listening to Dad.”

Lily laughed. “And why’s that? Getting to see you and Dad again is why we came. You know she’s too straightforward to do anything else.”

A pause. The crack of metal on crystal resounded off the walls and ceiling. String gestured at the piton held against the wall by Whistle’s ice-blue magic, not quite having sunk in. His mouth moved to form words I couldn’t hear over Copper and Lily.

“She knows how to hate,” Copper said. Her eyes had a distant look about them—perhaps a painful memory, or a regret. Maybe both. “Because of me.”

“Hold a grudge,” Lily corrected. “And… she doesn’t hate Dad, and it’s not because of you, either. She just… She cares about both of us. Sometimes, I think she cares too much. She’s put up with a lot because of it, because of me. And… life hasn’t really paid her back for it.”

She turned to Copper, and seeing them look each other in the eye highlighted how uncannily similar they looked. The same in all but age and a smattering of life experiences.

How many words passed between them in that silent exchange I would never know, but the simple surety of that connection was unparalleled. It made me long for Shining Armor.

Whistle took another swing at the piton, and the crisp ching drew our attention back to the tippy top of the scaffolding. Whistle sat along the nearby edge with the mallet held aloft in her icy-blue aura. Over her shoulder, String smiled like a parent watching his foal take her first step—which she was, in a way. The first step toward healing, the first step toward letting him back into their lives.

“No good deed goes unpunished, does it?” Copper said. She watched Whistle take a few more swings before she pivoted for the door. “Let’s let them have their quality time.”

Lily and I followed her out, but not before I stole one last glance over my shoulder. Maybe it was the optimistic part of my brain finally putting in some work, but I swore I saw the tiniest smile on Whistle’s face on that very next hammer strike.

Time. That’s what they needed. Time and willingness.

We made it about halfway back to the library in silence before Copper decided I wasn’t allowed to stay locked up in my head where I felt most comfortable right now.

“You know, Twilight,” she said. She shot me a casual over-the-shoulder glance that hopelessly outmatched any platonic assumptions. “You’re allowed to talk.”

I fidgeted with my wings while I tried wrestling the sudden heat at my withers under control. “I, I know, I just, uh… this is a special moment for you and your family, and I don’t want to get in the way of that.”

None of which was a lie, but the way she maintained that look said more than words could. She knew I had questions, and although I had scolded Starlight for prodding earlier, now that I had been given the spotlight, it might be better to have an understanding of her family situation rather than stumble blindly through that minefield.

Maybe Copper wanted me to ask so she had an excuse to get it off her chest. Or she wanted to sate whatever hesitant curiosities I might be entertain—

“You’re overthinking it,” she said, laughing. “Whatever’s going on in that head of yours. You haven’t said anything in a while, and I know that brain doesn’t go any slower than a hundred miles an hour.”

I cleared my throat, and my nerves with it hopefully. “Well, if it isn’t too much to ask, what exactly happened? With you and your family.”

“The short version?” Copper said. “Mom kicked me out when she found out I was gay, Whistle hates her guts for it and blames Dad for not doing enough to work that mindset out of her, and Lily…” She looked at Lily, whose smile had deflated to that same melancholy when I first met her. “Lily got caught in the middle of all our family bullshit.”

“Oh.” I… I really didn’t know how to feel about that. That was… a lot, not to mention it mirrored many of my own fears. “I-I’m—”

“Sorry?” Copper fired a grin my way. “Please, Twilight. You weren’t a princess when that all happened. Not much you could have done, and you weren’t even a part of it. You don’t have anything to be sorry about for the shit my stupid ass has dealt with.”

Which was true, but it didn’t lessen my need to express my condolences. Trauma in any form required facing, and a shoulder to lean on if available. I wanted to be that shoulder. And if I were honest with myself, it hurt to hear her be so callous. Casual self-deprecation was an all-too-common coping mechanism, and I hated seeing it in action. So did Lily, it seemed, judging by the distant look on her face.

“Princess Twilight?” Lily said. She came to a stop, her ears back and head lowered. “Can I ask you something?”

“Sure, what is it?”

Her eyes briefly passed to Copper before returning to me. “Um. Alone… Please.”

Copper looked between us with a confused but amused smile. “Alright? I’ll see you back at the library.”

Copper continued down the hallway until the last of her slipped around the bend. It took a moment for her hoofsteps to fade, and it seemed that was the cue Lily wanted.

She swallowed a lump in her throat, and her eyes roved every nook and cranny of the hallway, her nerves getting the best of her.

I offered her a comforting smile. “What is it you needed?”

She kept her eyes on the ground, embarrassed, maybe even ashamed. “First off, thank you. For helping Copper. I was too young to understand what Mom was doing to her back then, but I do now. Looking back on it, I never realized how badly she was hurting. It was just some big-sister drama thing.”

She laughed to herself, and a smile poked through like a ray of sunshine. “And the way she always gushed about Sunset just… made all the bad parts she worried about seem so, I don’t know, silly? But then Mom found out, and Copper ran away without even saying goodbye.”

The tears started at the corners of her eyes, and she wiped them away. “And Mom didn’t even care. She just went about life like nothing happened. I remember her telling me that Copper had done something bad and was going away for a while. And she kept telling me how pretty I was and how precious I was to her, and she would preen my mane whenever she could. And I remember it just feeling so wrong, because that’s what she used to do to Copper.

“That’s when Whistle took me away. I just, I remember not understanding why everypony was so angry and how come they couldn’t just talk it out like Mom always said, and Whistle insisting we couldn’t be with her and Dad anymore.” She took a deep, shaky breath and let it out. “But I’m old enough now to realize they already did the talking. Mom had been doing the talking for the last twenty years at that point. I was just lucky enough to only be around for a few of them.

“So thank you,” she said, looking me in the eye. A tear ran down her cheek, but the tiniest smile shone through the heartache. “I don’t know how you two met, but she seems… comfortable here, and not just because we showed up. Thank you for looking after her. Thank you for giving us a chance to find her.” She pressed herself into me.

I hugged her on instinct, and her head fit perfectly into the crook of my neck, like the little sister I never got to have.

“Thank you so much,” she whispered.

I held her there and let a gentle squeeze be my reply.

“That’s not all, though,” she said, pulling back. Tears brimmed in her eyes, and she struggled to look at me. “I have a question that’s been bothering me for a long time, and I don’t know who else to ask. So… I’m gay, too, same as Copper. At least, I think I am. I’m still figuring that out, honestly. But like, Mom was Mom, and if she never found out about Copper, then Copper wouldn’t have run away, and none of this would have happened.

“Mom would have kept being Mom, and I would have had to grow up with that, too.” She searched the floor in a last-ditch effort to avoid asking whatever had her tongue tied. “I, I hate admitting it, but… Part of me is relieved that… that Copper went through that before Mom could poison me, too. I-is that wrong? It makes me feel disgusting just thinking about it.”

Luckily, this question was actually within my area of expertise, unlike today’s previous curve balls. I wiped the tear from her cheek, and I felt her lean into it, so I held my hoof there.

“Life is complicated, even at the best of times. It’s a series of both good things and bad things, sometimes at the same time or one after the other. Sometimes one thing can be varying degrees of both good and bad, but it’s important to remember that bad things will always happen at one point or another. Being able to see any good there might be in a bad situation is part of that, as is understanding when a good thing has bad side effects. What happened to Copper… it certainly was bad. I can’t even begin to imagine how bad. That kind of hardship is something I would never feel comfortable quantifying.

“I understand disliking how it happened,” I continued, “but it’s natural to feel relieved that you didn’t have to go through it yourself. And it’s good that you didn’t have to go through it yourself. Being able to learn and grow from others’ hardships isn’t selfishness… It’s wisdom. And being given that opportunity is something you should never look down on. Like I said, bad things will happen, but it’s up to us to make sense of it and find some good among the bad, even if it’s simply learning a hard lesson. The more good that can come from any bad situation, the better. And being able to share that goodness with others is paramount to being a good pony.” I brushed her bangs out of her eyes, hoping to coax her gaze back up to mine.

She searched my eyes for proof that yes everything I said was the honest, indisputable truth, so I gave her another:

“And I can tell just by looking at you that you’re a good pony. You and Copper both. Always remember that. Okay?”

She drew in a slow breath before nodding, and the tiniest smile made it all worth it. “Okay.”

I pulled her into another hug, cherished the way she fit so perfectly.

She let me have that moment, and I liked to think she found some comfort in it as well. Eventually, she pulled away, but any number of worries had her searching the floor again for the courage to say her piece.

“Princess Twilight,” she said. “One more thing, i-if you don’t mind.”

“If it’s something I can help with, of course.”

She found what she needed to muster that courage and brought her eyes up to mine. “Can we stay here tonight? Please? Just for tonight.”

“Here? In the—”

“Please,” she added before I could say yes. There was desperation in her eyes. “And it’s not just because I want to see Copper. I…”

“What’s wrong?”

She threw her ears back. “Whistle won’t say it, but… Just, please. I, I don’t want to go back there.”

The way she wilted while saying “back there” set off all sorts of alarm bells in my head. Ponies shouldn’t be afraid of where they live, especially one as young as her.

“Of course you two can stay. We’d love to have you.”

The look of relief on her face was worth that promise a thousand times over, and she threw her hooves around me. “Thank you so much.”

“Of course. We have plenty of rooms. Copper can show you where she sleeps.”

She nodded into my chest. “Just… Please don’t tell Whistle I asked.”

My smile that followed came naturally. “It was my idea, and I wouldn’t take no for an answer.”

That got a genuine if reserved giggle out of her. She gave me another hug before heading off to join the others.

I made a mental note to follow up on what exactly that was all about and headed after her. Paired with her earlier statement about Whistle, I feared the possibilities my mind normally wouldn’t wander.

Copper was waiting outside the library when we arrived. The grin she carelessly tossed my way had me subtly unfurling my wings so that I wouldn’t start sweating.

“All good?” She swung around to fall in line as I cast open the door.

Inside, Starlight was taking a feather duster to an empty bookshelf awaiting a nearby stack of books. She regarded us casually, but the tiny upturn at the corner of her mouth said otherwise.

“You two lovebirds done giving the family tour?” she said. “I could use some help.”

“I’ll have you know,” Copper countered, “she’s the only bird in this gaggle of ours.” She unfolded one of my wings with a flick of magic, but I snapped it back in place before she could do anything weird.

“Lovebirds?” Lily said. She glanced between Copper and me with disbelief, but a glowing smile crept onto her face.

“You do that to the wrong pegasus and they’ll teach you to fly with their hind legs,” Starlight said.

Copper sauntered up to her, cheeky grin at the ready. “I don’t have a thing for hooves, but thanks for the personal wisdom.”

Starlight shot a frown back at her. “Remind me why we brought you on board again?”

“Because this stuffy crowd Twilight keeps around here desperately needed some comic relief.”

Beside me, Lily giggled and checked that I was enjoying this charade as much as her. She missed this sort of banter. That smile said it all.

“Comic relief?” Starlight said. “So you like being the butt of a good joke, huh?”

“Never said I wasn’t an ass girl.” She fired a sly wink my way, and I, uh…

Uh…

I coughed into my hoof and tried flitting my wings on the sly to deal with a sudden flash sweat that really needed to go away.

Starlight stared at Copper a moment longer, then at me, snorted, and shook her head. “Aaanyway, before Twilight catches fire, I’m almost finished dusting and was about to figure out how to arrange all the books we just brought in. There was enough space on the shelves for most of it, but all those over there, I was thinking of just kind of shoving into the back nook if that’s okay with you, Twilight.”

“Or,” Copper stepped up to the stack of books. She took one idly in her magic and twirled it around, studying it. “Better idea. Why not stack ‘em all on the table out here so they aren’t in our way. Then we could have a little reading pow-wow in the back?”

Lily lit up like a Hearth’s Warming tree. “You mean like a sleepover?”

The excitement between them was immediate and intense, and they both turned that energy my way. “What do you think, Twilight?” Copper said.

That was a good question. What did I think?

In truth, I thought a lot of things. Star Swirl was in Canterlot organizing things with Celestia, String and Whistle were finishing the “shoestring,” and String had insisted there wasn’t anything else we could do in a timely fashion. We were ready to jump into action at a moment’s notice, and thinking myself into a tizzy would only make things worse.

Plus, this gave me a legitimate excuse to insist Whistle and Lily stay the night without needing to weasel out a white lie and have that on my conscience.

More importantly, though, this hit home a realization I hadn’t quite let myself accept. I told myself there was nothing left to do but wait. Except there was.

These ponies here were my friends, sure—they saw me at my highs, my lows, and everything in between—but I was still their princess, and they needed me to be their princess, to be their leader and a source of comfort in their time of need.

I still had to be myself. I still had to be a friend.

Before my brain could leave Twilighting Station, I threw on a smile. “I think that’s a great idea.”

We finished dusting off the newly moved books and stacked them on the foyer table, making room in the back nook to accommodate half a dozen ponies and whatever sleeping arrangements they might come up with. From there, I took the opportunity to do one last run down my mental checklist of responsibilities.

I checked in on String and Whistle to see that they had made quite a bit of progress on the shoestring. Whistle even smiled at one point! I left them to their work and went to fetch Spike for a letter to Celestia. Not that I didn’t trust Star Swirl to be exhaustive with his in-person report, but a letter signed by yours truly would surely add that extra layer of comfort to what I could only imagine was an already stressful time for her.

I kept it informal.

I told her about Copper and the help she provided, both in maintaining and reconfiguring the séance circle and bringing String on board. I told her about Copper’s family reunion, and how adorable Lily was. I told her String was hard at work certifying all of our precautions and adding a few more. And I may or may not have circled back and harped on how invaluable Copper had been, because how could I not?

I signed my name, and with the final stroke, I resigned myself to the fact that yes, the rest was wholly and truly out of my hooves.

It was terrifying, yet relieving. The sensation of having nothing left to do but wait.

I had to trust.

And so, stepping back into the library, I did just that.

Copper was in the middle of arranging some blankets and pillows in a semicircle fashion about the back nook with Lily’s help. They probably anticipated story time or the like. It’d be just like Copper to put me on the spot. She gave me a smile, and after it lingered a moment longer than one normally would, I figured now was as great a time as any to get the morning’s concerns off my chest.

“Hey, Copper?” I said. “Can I… talk to you for a moment?”

She sauntered up to me with a disarming grin. “You can talk to me for a whole bunch of moments.”

“Just uh… out here.” I led her just outside the library and closed the door behind us.

“Hey, you,” she said. “So what’d you wanna talk about?”

She was all giddy smiles as she stepped up to me, close enough that the fur on her chest brushed against mine and her muzzle that much closer. She was warm, and the smell of her coat filled my nostrils, subtly sweet like the faintest perfume.

I knew the science. I could picture my olfactory gland drowning in pheromones as I breathed in her scent, firing off the signal to my pituitary to dump every last hormone into my bloodstream. My head swam with a wildly stupid, giddy sensation that had my heart doing backflips and my legs quivering like jello. I giggled as the heat rushed to my cheeks, and I got all tingly just thinking about her, feeling her press against me, breathing in her warm breath, and somewhere in the back of my mind remember every last intoxicating moment.

The same tingles were getting to her, too, and the seductive look in her eyes said she was ready and willing to do all sorts of things too inappropriate for a library. Or maybe exactly appropriate, if I were to let some of my more intimate fantasies take center stage. She giggled, and I could have melted into a puddle on the floor right then and there.

But as much as I let those thoughts run rampant through my head, the no-good, no-fun-allowed, logical part of my brain finally tapped my love-drunk heart on the shoulder and asserted the question I meant to ask:

“What even was last night?”

I mean, I knew what it was. It was wild and amazing and refreshingly exhausting in all the right ways, and my heart screamed that I should take the hint her eyes were giving me and blink us both back up there right now, what are you waiting for, stupid? But I also had that inkling of doubt, the dark and ominous stepping stones that paved the way to unwanted conclusions.

The grin on her face sharpened a hair, and she tilted her head slightly, ready to make good on all the promises dancing in her eyes. “Fun?”

I snorted, and my heart wanted to lean into that snark with my own quip, but I had to force that giddiness back down where it needed to stay. This wasn’t the time for that.

She quickly picked up on my seriousness, and away went that smile the longer we stood there. I hated seeing it go, but I needed answers.

“It was fun,” I said. “I can’t lie and say it wasn’t. It was fun and wild and everything I wanted my first time to be. We, uh… we got there faster than I expected. And there has to be more nuance that led to last night and within last night itself that more than justifies it, because clearly if there wasn’t it wouldn’t have happened and I’m overthinking that part and I need to stop rambling, but…” I laughed at how stupid I sounded and could only hope she saw some humor in it, too.

She humored me with a laugh, but it was a hollow laugh, the kind meant to stifle the silence between the bitter realities I strung together.

“I know what it was for me,” I said, “but I’m not one-hundred-percent certain it was the same for you. And I hate confronting the unknown, but not knowing isn’t something I can live with, even if it means the chance of losing out on… on us.” I shook my head, at a loss for how best to say what came next. “I just want to make sure that this feels right because it is right, not because I’m filling a gap or that we got caught up in the moment.”

I studied her face as my words sank in, watched the pain seep out between the cracks of the mask she tried to sell, and I could only assume her mind went back to Sunset and, by extent, Star Chaser. I didn’t mean to salt that wound, but it was too late for me to change what I said and too important of a truth to let her ignore.

She dropped her gaze to her hooves. Up went the mask of a pony calm and collected, but try as she might, she couldn’t hide the trembling.

“Is it possible,” she said, quiet, fragile, “to fall in love for all the right reasons, but watch it fall apart for all the wrong ones?”

“I… I-I’m not the best one to answer that,” I said. “That’s more of a Cadance question. I don’t know much about love, and it wouldn’t feel right to act like I do. But I do know that it’s possible for any relationship to fall apart without open, honest communication.

“So I have to ask again,” I said, staring her dead in the eyes. “What was last night? What was it for you?”

She couldn’t pretend to hide the trembling anymore. Still, she kept it together for my sake, or maybe she thought that breaking down would prove some point she couldn’t afford.

“No matter how I phrase it,” she said, eyes misted over, “it’ll still come out wrong.”

Any reasonable pony had every right to draw a dangerous conclusion from that statement.

For once in my life, I wished I wasn’t a reasonable pony. But I was a princess, and I had the experience to know that what somepony said wasn’t always what they meant and that they should be given the chance to properly explain.

“The first step to doing anything right is trying,” I said. “You need to at least try and tell me. You can’t keep whatever it is you feel bottled up inside, good or bad. Even if you’re terrified of what I might think or say. Like I said, communication is key in any relationship.” I cupped her hooves in mine and took a deep breath in through my nose, same as last time.

She followed suit, her eyes locked with mine. A deep breath in, then out. Just the two of us. In, then out. In, out, and the weight of the world seemed to leave her shoulders—or, more accurately, she gained the strength to bear it.

“I’ve done a lot of running from my problems,” she said. “And I need to stop. I want to stop.” She laughed, but the smile that came with it faded just as quick. She took to tracing nervous circles in the cups of my hooves.

“Do I still love Sunset?” she continued. “Yeah, of course I do. That won’t change, because like you said, we don’t just turn off our feelings. And maybe I’ll never get over her, but one way or another I need to get past her. And you’ve helped with that. You’ve been helping with that. And it has nothing to do with the sex. I mean, it was the best I’ve ever had by a long shot”—she let out an exasperated laugh, and the tips of my ears started burning—“but, but that’s not the point. I…”

She sighed and aimed a tiny embarrassed smile at my hooves. Her eyes danced back and forth, and I liked to think there was a shred of happiness in there, pushing through the heartache.

“Yesterday was… a lot,” she said. “Not gonna lie, in that wigged-out state I was in after I teleported back to my room, and you popped in after me. That look in your eyes… I, I thought you were going to kill me. But then you took my hooves in yours, just like this, and you told me to breathe. Just… breathe.” She had a far-off look in her eye, and that tiny smile gathered strength. “You had this… this presence. It was powerful and beautiful and… In that moment, you were the entire world.

“And that’s when I knew. That… that even though I love Sunset, I can love somepony else more. Somepony who can and will and wants to… to…” She waved her hooves in tiny frantic circles, trying to dredge up a word. “Reciprocate. That I can be in love with somepony, not just at them. I might not be there just yet, but… I’m capable of it. You’re the reason I can say that, and I want you to stay the reason I can say that. The way you make me feel…”

She shrugged and shook her head, searching for the right words. “You’re the only pony I’ve opened up to about Star Chaser and… a-and Sunset. You’re the only pony who’s made me feel comfortable enough to, and the only one who’s made me feel comfortable being myself.

“Like, actually being myself, even around others—especially around others. And I get that there hasn’t been some dramatic or climactic moment where I’ve needed to prove that loud and proud to the world, but just… being around you, it makes me feel like I have. I know it sounds stupid, but that’s something I’ve never had before, and now that I do, I’m suddenly terrified of losing it. Of losing you.

“And yeah, I know that’s clingy as fuck,” she added, taking my hooves in hers. “Because I’ve only known you for like a week. But I can’t help that it just feels right. This potential to just… be happy, I, I…” She let out a breathless laugh and shook her head. “I honestly don’t remember how that feels.

“You have your head on straight,” she continued, eyes on me. “And I know I need to find my own happiness in order to get mine on straight, too. I get that that’s how that works, but having some help along the way never hurts. And like I said, you have helped, more than anypony ever has in my life, and that’s why it feels right, even if it’s sudden, and…” She laughed again and wiped at the tears forming in her eyes. “And now I’m the one rambling like an idiot.”

I shared that laugh with her, as short-lived as it was. Her words didn’t come across as wrong as she seemed to expect, but I could understand her hesitation. It was… a lot, and she had the history to prove it.

“I think,” I said. “I think your heart is in the right place, and I understand the whats and whys that you think make it right.” And as I said that last word, I saw the wince, the ready-to-shatter look in her eye waiting for the other shoe to drop.

So I let it.

“But as right as it feels, suddenness is still sudden, and intense emotions like these are hard to process, even when we have all the time in the world to sift through them. I think it’s right, too. It’s something worth fighting for—this, us. I really do. I wouldn’t even consider saying so if I didn’t believe it from the bottom of my heart. I just… I know I’m technically the one who initiated last night, but I think we should figure us out after.” I gestured behind me, toward the portal room. “After all of this, when there isn’t any sort of desperation or urgency warping our emotions.

“You and me?” I took her hooves in mine. “We’re important, which means it’s important enough to take the time making sure us is right.”

I gave her hooves a gentle squeeze, prompting her to look me in the eye, but she retreated to her thoughts and any number of internal mantras to hold back the floodgates. I threw on a hopeful smile and lowered my head to catch her gaze. This time, I managed to coax out the first hesitant glance back up at me.

A slew of emotions churned in her eyes as they danced back and forth between mine. Her ears fell back, and before I knew it, she leaned in and kissed me.

It was as wonderful this time as every time before, but after what we just talked about, it also felt invasive and advantageous. I pushed her away and stepped backward.

“Copp—”

She put a hoof to my lips, and a sudden flutter in my heart silenced me, had me on pins and needles for what she might say. That same desperate slew of emotions still churned in her eyes, but out from that mire rose a sense of understanding and, ultimately, conviction.

“After,” she said.

I pulled her hoof down to my heart and held it there. My mind was just as much a mess as hers, staring into those eyes. But my brain, ever the frustratingly logical organ, knew patience and reason were the better voices to heed here and now.

I smiled. “After.”

We shared a hug, one my heart wished would never end. But it did, as all good things do, and so I took one final breath of her coat before pulling away.

“Gaaaay,” came a voice behind me, and I swore my ghost left my body for a second. Copper similarly jumped out of her skin, and we both turned to see Whistle standing there with a grin on her face.

“Fuckin’ hell, Whistle,” Copper said.

“Yeah,” Whistle said, “I don’t mean to get between you two slappin’ curtains and all, but, uh… Dad wants you.” As she spoke, the casual indifference that normally laced her voice threaded away. Her eyes were on me, and I didn’t like the disquietude I saw in them. “It’s… I-it’s urgent.”

That got the hairs standing up on the back of my neck and my brain barreling full steam toward the worst possible conclusion. I dashed for the portal room, Whistle and Copper hot on my heels.

It couldn’t be. She couldn’t mean that. Please don’t let it be that.

I shouldered open the doors, and not even two steps inside I ground to a halt. The others came up short behind me, and we all stood huddled together, gazing upon the one thing in the entire world I wished I would never see.

Princess Luna lay retching in the middle of the glyph, eyes as black as death.

LII - And the Rest Will Follow

“It’s…” I said.

“Yeah,” String said. “It’s awake.”

We all stared in varying degrees of disbelief at the… the creature lying in the glyph before us. Copper pressed against my side, trembling.

I threw a comforting wing over her, but I didn’t think I could do anything to ease the sight of… of…

Luna, my brain kept telling me. That’s Luna lying there.

It indeed was Luna lying there, pressing her slack-jawed muzzle into the floor, every breath raspy and guttural as if her lungs were filled with mucus. That was Luna lying there, wings twitching and unkempt, with forehooves clawing at the crystal floor and hind legs bent at uncomfortable, inequine angles. That was Luna lying there, in the limp tatters of her mane pooling about her, her one visible eye darting about the room as if searching for predators. That was Luna lying there.

Was.

“No. No no no no. This can’t be happening. Sunset! Luna!” I shook my head and raced for the glyph, but String put a hoof on my shoulder.

“Princess.” Though he spoke at a near whisper, his voice cut through me like glass. He pointed at Sunset. “Look.”

Softly but surely, her chest rose and fell in rhythm. So at least she was okay. Sunset was still in there somewhere, and it stood to reason Luna might be as well, to some capacity. I could still hope.

“So what do we do?” I asked.

The Nightmare started hacking, and a dark fluid dribbled from its mouth. It retched and convulsed, every muscle in its body innervated in no clear pattern, as if all the neurons in its brain had been rewired. Feathers flitted and fluttered loose from erratic wingbeats, and I thought I heard the wet pop of a joint somewhere in there. It relaxed in a slump, tongue lolled out on the floor in a pool of that dark fluid.

A tiny, high-pitched intake of breath instilled in it the briefest moment of clarity, and for one long, chilling second, that singular, trembling eye snapped to me. Its pupil struggled to bring me into focus, dilating and contracting with an almost heart-like rhythm. All the while, that dark fluid ran down the whites of its eye like rainfall down a windowpane, down the walls around us and the chalkboard in the far corner and String beside me, down the spiral of my horn, the crown of my head, the back of my neck to puddle between my shoulder blades, down the bones of my wings to the tips of my primaries, down each and every feather pressed against my side, down my hooves and the tip of my tail with the cold grasp of death.

The second passed, the moment lost in another coughing fit of dark fluid and that feral, darting paranoia, and I remembered to breathe. Around me, the world was again as it should be, yet I couldn’t shake the feeling of being drenched, like I’d just come in from the pouring rain.

“We keep working,” String said. He headed for the cables and piton box and got back to it. “If I were you, I’d let Princess Celestia know, so she can prepare whatever she needs to. It looks like it’s trying to get its legs under it. I don’t know how long that’ll take, but I’m getting the feeling we’ll definitely need every last measure we’ve put in place here if we give it enough time.”

“I-I’ll go get Spike,” Copper said, hurrying back out the door.

“I’ll, uh,” Whistle said. “Yeah.” She turned tail after Copper.

With String back to work on the shoestring cords and Copper and Whistle off getting Spike, I was left well enough alone with the rasping, gurgling, creature lying before me. I approached cautiously, like a nature documentarist studying a sleeping lion. Again, that eye swiveled my way, but whatever power had ensorcelled me either failed to do so again or didn’t try, so I lay down inches from the glyph, as close as I could get to Luna’s body.

It… it felt wrong to call her it, but what else could I say?

This was not Luna in any sense of the name. I knew the gentleness of her touch and the kindness of her heart, the fierce intelligence behind those eyes tempered by experience immemorial. How this… possession warped the things about her I found most beautiful—the soft features of her face now hard and wild, the grace of motion now erratic and clumsy. This unholy creature, this… primal regression before me was her opposite in every possible way.

It seemed to sweat the same dark fluid dribbling from its mouth. Its coat shimmered like an oil slick when it caught the light.

I could only imagine what it meant. Was this the Nightmare slowly exuding from her? If so, would it take up a form separate from Luna or grow to overtake her physically?

I squeezed my eyes shut. Stop thinking like that. Stop it stop it stop it.

Luna was still in there. It was still her body to return to, hers and hers alone. They’d come back. They’d figure this out.

But what if they didn’t?

How could I forget the look on Sunset’s face as I cast the spell amidst the magical lightning storm? I remembered watching the light go out in her eyes, remembered them unfocus like those of the dead and dying, remembered her body falling slack as her soul slipped into the depths of whatever hell she tried clawing herself from tooth and nail. No matter how hard I shut my eyes and pressed my hooves into them so that the splotches bled into the back of my vision, my brain played and played and played the unholy movie reel of what I had done and what I would have to do should they fail: I envisioned myself touching my horn to theirs and watching them dissolve away like dust in the wind.

No no no.

I slammed my muzzle into the floor, and the pain blossomed all the way up into my sinuses. My eyes teared up, and I gritted my teeth, forcing myself to focus on the pain, focus on the searing throb and visualize myself in this moment and just stop thinking for once in your goddamn life.

The Nightmare snarled, and I opened my eyes. Through the tears, I saw it clawing at the floor with its forehooves, unable to find footing. The scrape of its horseshoes echoed stridently off the cavernous room, devoid of books and other homely décor that would have otherwise dampened the sound.

I took a moment to compose myself. My hoof came back dabbed with blood when I checked my nose, but it was a small price to pay for tearing myself out of that spiral. I took a deep breath, and when I exhaled, out went all the pent-up fears and my reservations with it.

Focus. Make a checklist. Do what you do best.

First, like String said, the others needed to know, beginning with Celestia. She needed as much notice as possible, to enact whatever plans she may already have in place on a national level. It would also lend some authority to waylaying whatever concerns the others would bring up when I broke the news.

Second, we needed to figure out what exactly happened to Luna. How to get her out or get her back.

Third, what was the Nightmare capable of? That meant careful study. Any little shred of information we could leverage could mean the difference between Equestria as it stands and…

Don’t think that.

Don’t think. Breathe in. Trust, and the rest will follow.

And follow it did, through the double doors behind me in the form of my number-one assistant, with Copper just behind him. Spike scampered up to me, quill and parchment at the ready.

“Twilight! What happened? They said some—what happened to you?” He dropped everything and grabbed me by the cheeks to inspect my muzzle. “Are you okay?”

I waved him off. “I-it’s nothing. I’m fine. I need you to send a letter to Princess Celestia.”

The Nightmare chose that moment to descend into another coughing fit. It retched and sputtered, doubling over into an almost fetal position.

Spike’s eyes went wide as he stared past me at the Nightmare. His wings snapped to his sides, and he took a step backward.

I hesitated. Part of me wanted to shield him from the bitter reality we faced. He was still like a little brother to me, and he always would be. But I couldn’t deny he had grown so much since that fateful day we came to Ponyville, and he possessed a level of insight I needed now more than ever.

“It’s important, Spike.” I couldn’t hide the defeat in my voice, but I liked to think it lent weight to our situation. Please don’t ask questions. Please don’t make me say it out loud.

His eyes danced between me and the Nightmare before ultimately settling on me. He picked up his quill and parchment, a look of grim understanding in his eye.

“It’s awake,” I dictated, skipping any formalities I would normally feel compelled to include. “We’re finishing the last of our containment measures, but I believe we’ll need you and Star Swirl here should things get worse. Your faithful student, Twilight Sparkle.”

Diligent as always, Spike penned my letter to the tee before rolling it up and sending it up in flames. We watched the wisp of smoke snake a trail for the nearest window, and out with it went the faint tinkling whoosh that buffered us from an uncomfortable silence. Now without that buffer, the silence tingled down the back of my neck with that same unnatural sensation of rain.

Spike spent those uncomfortable moments staring past me, at the Nightmare. “I-is Princess Luna okay?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “But our job is to make sure nothing worse happens. So that’s what I’m going to do. We have a few other things that need taking care of.”

He clenched the remaining ream of parchment in his claws, nervously rolling and unrolling it, his eyes searching for something among the cracks in the floor. Eventually his eyes met mine, and a sense of responsibility swam among the myriad emotions I saw in them.

“What’s first on the list?” he asked.

My eyes gravitated back to the nearby window my dragonfire message had egressed through. “That was. Second would be assessing the Nightmare itself. Which, well… I already kind of did that, too. Sort of.”

I looked over my shoulder. In its current state, it seemed relatively harmless, but like a baby doe learning to stand, I expected that to be short lived. And when it did “get its legs underneath it,” as String had put it, I had no reason to think it wouldn’t be able to bring Luna’s full power to bear just as quickly. The glyph may as well be papier-mâché at that point.

The issue wasn’t if, but when.

Copper chose that moment to remind me she existed by stepping up beside me. She nuzzled me just behind the jawline, and it sent the warmest fuzzies through me from hoof to horntip.

“Just tell us what you need us to do,” she said.

“You guys are so fucking gay,” Whistle said, joining us. She wore a playful smirk that filed down the sharp words I had primed at the tip of my tongue. Her level of snark was going to take some getting used to.

She jerked her head over her shoulder, at a procession of Royal Guards, followed by Princess Celestia and Star Swirl. “Guess who I found walking through the front door on my way back from the library?”

“Princess!” I said. I rushed over and threw my hooves around her.

“Twilight,” she said. She hugged me back, and that timeless safety of her presence filled me from head to hoof. “It’s good to see you.”

The tinkling of magic followed on the coattails of our embrace, and I looked up to see my dragonfire message coalesce and unfurl for her. It seemed, thankfully, she was a few steps ahead of me.

“What in the name of…” Star Swirl said. When he saw the Nightmare, it looked as though all the joy in the world had left him. “Oh… my dearest Luna. What happened to you?”

And there went that timeless safety, pulled back like a funeral veil. I sighed and untangled myself from the hug and the safety it imparted. I took a step back, and as if on cue the Nightmare let out a low, guttural growl to remind me that our situation was anything but safe.

The Nightmare had dragged itself toward us, a streak of that blackened oil-like substance spanning the distance from where it lay a minute ago. It pressed the side of its face against the barrier. The fluorescent pink glow of magic holding it at bay added a sheen to the streaks of its fluid-slicked fur and was in its own way a strange contrast to the murderous fixation in its eyes.

It had grown incisors like those of a wolf, and it bared them in what passed as an attempt at snarling. From them, that black substance dribbled down the barrier to sizzle and snap like hot grease when it reached the glyph’s inner markings, and up trailed little wisps of black smoke.

“We should get you out of this room,” I said, taking Princess Celestia by the shoulder. “I don’t like how it’s reacting to you.”

There was a haunted expression on Princess Celestia’s face. It was the look of a mare brought face-to-face with her most closely held fear. It nipped at her heels all the way out into the hallway, where she stopped and took a moment to collect herself. A deep breath in, then out, and she took the lead.

The guards that had preceded her into the portal room followed us out and took position flanking us. It was weird being escorted to and from wherever. I didn’t think I’d ever get used to it, not to mention the circumstances made it feel less like a princess’s escort and more like that of a prisoner’s.

A prisoner of my own title. Was this how Princess Celestia felt anytime the world was in peril?

She led me to the library, where a pair of Royal Guards attended the doors. They saluted before opening them to reveal a commotion going on inside.

Nearly a dozen more guards ran to and fro, rearranging stacks of books and making a mess of our earlier setup. The foyer table had been swept clean of the knickknacks that gave it the homey feel I loved in order to make way for a map of Equestria. They positioned little wooden markers here and there along the roads connecting Ponyville to other towns and cities.

Lily sat in the corner, on the verge of tears, Starlight beside her, doing what she could to console Lily. When Starlight saw me enter, she came trotting up.

“What the hell’s going on?” Starlight asked. “First Copper comes in and drags Spike out by the scruff of the neck, and then the next thing we know, half the Equestrian army barges in, saying they need the space to set up and then start making a mess of all our stuff.”

She looked up at Princess Celestia, and it seemed like she just now noticed her presence. “Oh, uh… hi, by the way.”

Meanwhile, Lily trotted up and buried herself in my chest without a word. Her tears stained through my coat, and she hugged me tight.

I didn’t know what I had done to engender such a reaction, but wrapping my hooves around her came naturally. The sentiment brought my eyes up to the guards around us. The more I watched them reconfigure my library into a war room, the more that loathsome helplessness from earlier today coiled around my heart and squeezed.

I wanted to yell. I wanted to grab the books from their hooves and stuff them back on the shelves. I wanted to tear the map from the table and snatch up all these heartless brutes in my magic and toss them out the door for desecrating my library and how dare they doubt that Luna and Sunset would succeed.

I wanted to believe that all this was unnecessary. I wanted to believe that I’d see them again.

And I would. I would I would I would.

A hoof rested itself on my shoulder. It belonged to Princess Celestia, and the look in her eyes said she understood more than I could ever imagine. She knew it hurt, but right now I had to be a leader like her. Her wordless obligations reminded me of my purpose, and I in turn looked at Lily in my hooves.

I did my best to channel that obligation, and I gave Lily a gentle squeeze before holding her at arm’s length. I held her there until she looked up at me.

“We have work to do,” I said gently but firmly. “We have to do our part.”

She sniffled and wiped her eyes, but I caught the barest hint of a smile in there somewhere. She gave me a reassuring nod, and I took that as cue to let go.

I turned toward Princess Celestia and resettled my wings. “You brought soldiers?”

I tried sounding curious rather than resigned, though I knew Princess Celestia saw right through it.

“As a leader, Twilight, it is important to establish a presence. And while I might be a princess capable of great things, I’m still only one pony and can only be in one place at a time. Should things grow worse, they will be here to help in many ways that I might be too preoccupied to do myself.”

“Aren’t you worried about scaring the population with an, uh… a sudden, increased military presence?” I instinctively flicked my eyes back at Lily, who busied herself helping the guards.

Celestia smiled at me. “Oh, Twilight. A contingent of soldiers occupying Ponyville in case a monster threatening to destroy Equestria gets loose? That’s just Tuesday.”

She held that smile a moment longer before letting it sour. Normally, I’d laugh at such a joke if it weren’t for this particular “monster.” It wasn’t just a monster. It was Luna.

“You’re thinking about it as a leader should,” Princess Celestia said. “And I can tell by the tone of your voice you’re worried for more than just those close to you. I’m proud to see that, Twilight.” She threw a wing over my shoulder and pulled me close. “But to your question, an increased military presence is a sign that something is wrong, yes, but it is also a sign that we are aware and are working on the problem. What’s most important is that they feel safe.

“Discretion is a powerful tool in the right hooves, but being a leader also means knowing when to set it aside in favor of assurance. I believe we have reached the point where they should have the opportunity to know something is amiss, and to be ready should something happen. There is a fine line between safety and complacency that I refuse to cross.”

A minute but severely uncharacteristic pause filled the space after her last word, one that wasn’t meant to add weight to her words but rather was dragged down by them.

Again, my brain finished for her.

“Equestria’s finest are here to make sure everypony is safe,” she continued. “And I’m here to make sure they are safe, as well as you and your friends.”

Make sure everypony is safe. And there the uncomfortable thoughts crept out to make themselves known to me. I pinned my ears back. There was only one way to truly guarantee what she just said.

Yes, and…?

She read clear as day the question I didn’t have the courage to put into words. “No,” she said definitively, and I withered beneath the guilt of imposing such a thought on her of all ponies. “If I must fight Luna again, then I will do so. But I refuse to execute my sister on the presumption she and Sunset won’t succeed from the inside.”

Her features softened. “I know you didn’t mean it as a suggestion, Twilight. The temptation to seek the easiest answer will always present itself, but that doesn’t always make it the right answer.”

“I’ve gotten the feeling there really is no right answer here.”

The barest suggestion of a smile came and went on her face. “As any wise ruler would understand. That’s simply part of being a leader. But we must still choose, or fate will choose for us, and I’ve learned in my time that fate is often far worse at picking the best answer than we are.”

Choosing not to choose is still a choice and all that. Well, I could think of at least one choice we needed to make.

“Then we should also warn the Crystal Empire, in case things…” I was about to say “get out of hoof,” but I caught myself. We were long past that point, and it didn’t feel right beating that sentiment to death.

“I’ve already sent word,” Celestia said. “Cadance and your brother already know, as do Dragonlord Ember, Pharynx, and the leaders of Griffonstone. I have ponies who will notify us of their response.”

Their response. Their response to what? To the coming calamity? The doomsday unfolding before my very eyes? Each and every what-if that had played on repeat in my brain since the lightning storm?

I looked at her, then the soldiers carrying out whatever orders had them scurrying to and fro, then the map of Ponyville and the lines some captain-looking guard drew along the road leading to Canterlot. Evacuation routes. Rallying points. Lines in the sand.

I couldn’t help but look each and every one of them in the eye as they passed me by, my brain painting the broken and twisted images of what would become of them should we fail.

“So what do I do now?” I asked.

Celestia turned back to me with that motherly smile that never failed to calm my nerves. “Do what you do best, like you already planned. Study it. Figure out anything you can learn that could help us on this side.”

But I already did that.

What else was there to know? To see? I shuddered as my brain continued down the list of senses.

“I’ll do my best, Princess.”

I left the library with what felt like a heavy stone where my heart should be. I crossed paths with Lily and Starlight in the hallway, still helping the guards organize the books and other library effects they had relocated. I caught Starlight’s eye, and I saw in her the worry of a mare who had no ideas left to share. But there was, at the tail end of it, a glint of reassurance. She believed in me more than I did.

Without a word, she carried on with her organization, but I latched onto the sentiment and took with me what few shreds I could manage to the portal room.

A pall hung in the air, as if the castle itself commiserated in this unshakable lack of agency. String was still busy hammering away—almost done from the looks of it. Star Swirl, meanwhile, sat beside the barrier, studying the Nightmare.

“Have you learned anything about it yet?” I asked, stepping up beside him. I tried to not look at it, but I couldn’t avoid seeing it in my peripheral.

It lay panting with its shoulder against the barrier. Its eyes were on me, and I felt that cold, penetrating stare clawing its way into the recesses of my soul.

“There isn’t much to learn, I’m afraid,” he said. “It is gaining its bearings, slowly but surely, but beyond that there isn’t much to glean.”

I eyed the black goop trailing back to the center of the glyph. “Do you know what that… stuff is?”

“I do not, nor do I really care to. I can only imagine it is some sort of byproduct of the magic allowing the Nightmare to take possession of her body.”

“A byproduct implies a reaction of some kind.”

“It would indeed, but calling it a byproduct is merely a temporary label on something we don’t yet know enough about to properly define. Likewise, assuming there’s a reaction of some kind is dangerous at best.” He gave me a world-weary smile. How long had it been since he last slept? “I know you mean well, but assumptions—”

“Assumptions are what got us in this mess in the first place, I know. I just…” I just what? I was grasping at straws, that’s what. I had been from the get-go. All my academic discipline, all my scientific expertise down the drain because I couldn’t separate my foalish hopes from reality.

There was a thudding sound, quiet enough at first that I thought maybe String or Whistle had dropped the mallet up in the scaffolding. But then I saw them looking down our way, hooves hooked over the railing. Their eyes were locked somewhere to my right, and I felt mine drawn like magnets toward the one thing in the universe I didn’t want to look at.

Shoulder still pressed against the barrier, the Nightmare braced its elbow against the base of the glyph so that it could lift its head and hit its temple against the barrier. Again. Again. Rhythmic, unblinking, staring into and through me as if it were reading the pages of my soul. And with every unholy thud against the barrier, I felt the drizzle of rain on my withers, felt the echo of magic against bone recede downward into the cavernous depths of whatever space existed inside me.

The longest second of my life passed, and I took a breath to shrug off whatever it was about this creature that kept ensnaring me in its vile magic. I realized I was shaking.

I wiped the back of my neck to rid myself of that accursed wetness, but my hoof came back dry.

“Princess,” Star Swirl said. He looked at me as if staring at a ghost. “Are you—”

“Hey,” String cut him off, striding toward me from the scaffolding. How’d he get down here so quick? He jerked his head toward the door, bidding that I follow him out, and I couldn’t get out of there fast enough.

The moment we stepped out, he shut the door behind us and turned to me. “We should be careful what we say in front of that thing. We don’t know if it can understand us.”

“True, but does it matter? It wants out, and at this rate, it’s going to get out.”

“No sense in taking chances or adding to our problems. And who knows if what you say might jeopardize Sunset. It’s in there with her, and if it can go back into the Dreamscape, it could go after her there, too. Or worse, it could just as easily turn around and maul her right there in the glyph.”

That realization was like ice water running down my back.

“I think for now you need to not be in there,” he continued. “I saw the way you were looking at it. There’s something going on, and I don’t like it.”

“What, you think it’s, like, mind-controlling me or something?” That was an absurd leap in logic, but I felt the wetness running down the back of my shoulder blades. Hypnosis, at the very least, wasn’t exactly a wrong guess.

“I have no idea what it is, and I’m not going to jump to conclusions. But it’s getting to you one way or another. I think what you need most is to get some rest. Go to bed. It’s late anyway. We’re almost done with the shoestring, and as soon as we are”—he jerked his head toward the portal room—“we’ll be getting the hell out of here, too.”

“But—”

“Princess.”

I winced, but nonetheless sighed. I couldn’t help right now. I had been wrestling with that notion all day. I knew it. He knew it. Hell, the Nightmare probably even knew it. I had no productive options left since yesterday, but hearing it from somepony else cut as deep as ever.

“Alright,” I said. “I’ll… go try and sleep… or something.”

I trundled off to my room. I didn’t even bother brushing my teeth. Just face down in my pillow, letting the darkness try its best to pull me down into something I could hopefully call sleep.

And I lay there.

I tossed and turned for I didn’t know how long. A few minutes? A few hours? Time had a habit of slipping past me whenever my brain went into overdrive trying to wind down for sleep. A dark room could do that to me. It made it too easy to think, and I had too many things to think about right now.

I could still hear it—that thudding thudding thudding of its head against the barrier. I could see those eyes staring into me, splaying me out like a cadaver on a mortician’s bench.

I tried shutting it out, holding my pillow over my ears, pulling the comforter over my head, but I could still hear the thud thud thud of its temple against the barrier as if it were against the inside of my own skull.

I couldn’t tell if I lay in a pool of my own sweat or if the pouring rainfall sensation could reach me even here where the fleeting certainties of foalhood claimed that I should be untouchable. But all the same, I turned over, and the chill of a draft on seemingly wet fur clawed up my back.

Sleep wasn’t going to happen. I got up, went to the kitchen, grabbed the biggest mug I could find, and filled it with the stale coffee left over from the day before. Still warm and a little burnt from being forgotten on the burner, but it would do. I closed my eyes and reclined my head to let the first sip’s warmth wash through me.

The clip-clop of hooves signaled a visitor to this liminal space of mine. It was String. He looked a bit confused to see me, and if my tired brain were allowed one biased assumption, just a little bit annoyed.

“Thought I sent you to bed,” he said.

“You’re not my dad,” I grumbled. I felt the silence build between us well before realizing what had actually come out of my mouth. “Oh my gosh. I-I’m so sorry. I’m—”

“No, that was… I, I phrased that poorly.”

Another beat of silence passed before we laughed away the misunderstanding.

“I just can’t sleep,” I said, rubbing the back of my neck. “I’m just tossing and turning. There’s no point in trying.”

“I get it. Honestly, it’s why I haven’t bothered myself.” He made for the cabinet and got his own mug.

I offered him the pot. “Then why’d you send me off?”

He shrugged while pouring a healthy portion for himself. “Maybe I was just being too cautious. Part of me also just wants to do everything I can to make it easier for the rest of you.”

I nodded. Couldn’t argue that. Parents were like that, always wanting what’s best for their children.

“It’s standing now,” he said after his first sip. He stared into his mug, and I swore he looked ten years older as he said it.

I got that sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. I mirrored him by staring into my own mug. We were on track for everything I had hoped wouldn’t happen.

“Can it use her magic yet?” I asked.

Yet, my brain needled.

“I don’t know. It hasn’t tried, at least. Star Swirl’s been lookin’ the thing over. He’d have more to say.”

“Then let’s go hear what he has to say, I guess,” and I trundled for the portal room, String following close behind.

As promised, it was standing now, albeit unsteadily. It swayed like a drunkard well past their cut-off point, but its eyes were those of a predator, keen as a knifepoint and just as focused on me as ever. It tracked my movement as I followed String over to Star Swirl at the table.

“This is done, at least,” he said as we went, nodding at the cabling that wound around and around the portal room in a neat, professional spiral.

I followed it with my eyes, each and every lap around the room, slowly but surely sloping downward for the pitons driven into the floor, leading down into the roots of the castle. Along that route, I caught sight of Copper helping tear down the scaffolding along the back wall.

She, Whistle, and Starlight stacked the planks and metalwork on a cart, along with the boxes of leftover pitons. A haunted look filled her eyes, one she shared with me as she wheeled the cart past me out the door.

Star Swirl sat at the table, cleared of everything but a few scraps of paper he scribbled on. The worry on his face had me second-guessing if I should interrupt. He looked at wit’s end for an answer lost among the scribbles.

Still, I had to try. I had to be their princess.

“Any luck?” I asked.

He didn’t lift his gaze from his notes—equations, snippets of archaic knowledge, many slashed through and re-annotated and slashed through again. The desperate calculations of a pony at their final few inches of rope. The weight of the world lay upon his shoulders, and it carried in his voice.

“No,” he said. “I really do not know what to do or how to stop it. I’m afraid we’re at the end of the line, Twilight.”

His words got that sucking, hollow feeling in my chest. I didn’t know if I had the heart to stomach any more bad news, let alone the pall that hung over this place like a funeral.

Still, I had to be their princess, and so I turned for the Nightmare.

It watched me approach with subdued hunger. A low growl rolled out of its throat, and it reminded me just how sharp its incisors were with a snarl. A primal instinct welled up inside me, made my hooves light as feathers and my hackles stand on end, but I kept my scowl locked with it.

Again its gaze pierced me, into me, and the wet trickle of magic started down my horn. This time, I pressed back against it, and as our magics co-mingled at the base of my horn, I realized. That reaching, searching, scrying in its eyes…

It wasn’t staring at me.

I doubled down on my defiant scowl. “You can’t have it.”

It snarled in reply, and in a flash threw itself against the barrier. The barrier’s pink magics undulated outward along its surface, like the ripples caused by a rock thrown into a lake.

I staggered back, a Shield Spell already at the base of my horn. I centered my breathing and resettled my wings.

“You can’t have my Tantabus. And you’re not getting out of there. We won’t let you.”

It snarled again, crescendoing with every breath it took until in a fit of rage it reared back and slammed its head into the barrier. Its eyes were on me as it pressed the side of its face against it, and that’s when I saw to my horror the silver threads of magic wind up its horn to bleed into the barrier like water washing down a windowpane.

Everyone in the room stopped and stared, and I heard the collective holding of breath, the single moment of silence when everypony’s heart skipped the same beat.

The Nightmare let out a gurgling roar, reared back its head, and slammed against the barrier again. The chaotic energies at its horn crackled and snapped like lightning seeking a ground. They forked every which way along the inside of the barrier, skittering up its pink sheen, chaining into one another and down into the glyph, now glowing white hot.

The Nightmare spread its broken, tattered wings wide in a spray of dark fluid, and it let fly a bolt of magic directly into the barrier.

The resounding thunderclap shook the castle, and within seconds, Princess Celestia stormed through the doors, flanked by her guards. The fear in her eyes was momentary, before she furrowed her brow and strode forward.

“Get everypony out of the castle,” she said to Star Swirl. “I will deal with this.”

He hurriedly ushered the others back. “You heard her. Move, move!”

Celestia turned that blood-chilling gaze my way, but I stood my ground.

“I’m not leaving,” I said.

“Twilight, this is no time to argue.”

“I know. I’m not leaving. I saw it with my own eyes: you had to do this alone once. But you’re not alone this time. I won’t let you be. Not again.”

“Twilight, that is noble of you, but you are a leader. Equestria needs a leader in case—”

“Then that’s what my brother and Candace are for,” I said, matching her glare. “I’m. Not. Leaving.”

She held her gaze on me a moment longer. The words she wished to say and the feelings she and I could only wish to share in that moment passed across her face like a cloud across a field, but the moment passed, and she turned to the guards.

“Go. Evacuate the castle. Ready the others.”

They saluted and were off, shepherding everypony toward the door.

Copper pushed back when they tried to move her. “W-wait, Twilight!”

“Copper,” String said, throwing a hoof over her shoulder as she tried slipping past them. “We don’t have time. We have to move.”

“We can’t just leave them!”

He wrapped her in his magic and wrenched her from the floor. “This isn’t your fight anymore,” he said. To Celestia: “Princess, that glyph is holding back a lot of energy. When it goes, this entire room—”

“I’m aware. We will be fine.” She put a wing over me, and for the briefest moment I knew that maternal safety it always instilled in me.

He stared incredulously at her but turned to leave, taking Copper with him.

Copper tumbled and twisted in his magic, reached out for anything to grab hold of and claw her way back to me. The fear in her eyes said it all, and I wished from the bottom of my heart that I could have said goodbye with more than simply a look.

It was for the best.

Star Swirl was the last one out the door, making sure the others got out safe, and with a grim look of farewell, shut the door behind him.

Beside me, Princess Celestia stared long at the Nightmare. A hollow sadness dwelled in her eyes, a certain remembrance at war with her sworn duty. Her chest expanded with a deep breath, relaxed as she released it, and she closed her eyes. A thin line of magic followed the spiral of her horn, and as she spread her wings, up went a transparent shield laced with strands of iridescent light.

I lit my horn to add my power to the spell, and as our magics intermingled in the space before us, I resigned myself to the consequences of my failures.

The Nightmare took our stance as a challenge. Snarling, it craned its neck back and drove its horn into the barrier as if it were a lance.

The barrier flared to life, concentrating all its blinding energy on that single point. For the briefest moment, it held fast, and I let myself hope it would hold firm, but the first signs of failure started to show in the form of a tiny hole at its center.

A bolt of blue lightning clawed its way out from that point, arcing outward like a chain ripped from the crystal beneath our hooves. It snarled toward us to crash white-hot against our shield and skitter across it in dozens of little filaments searching for cracks to seep through, provoking a glassy radiance along the shield like the ripples of a fishing line drawn every which way across the surface of a pond.

Others fired off in other directions to leave glowing red scars along the floor before latching onto the shoestring cables and following them down into the heart of the castle. The corded steel glowed cherry red with the raw energy and began sagging and unraveling in places. What few sections of shelving that were made of wood went up in flames.

So much raw energy. The sight of it sent a cold chill rippling down my back. Even if our shield held, what kind of catastrophe would surround us when the dust settled? We couldn’t just stand here and wait. We had to do something before that happened. But what?

And as if the universe saw fit to challenge my greatest fears, I saw something that got the hairs standing up on the back of my neck.

Amidst the thunderstorm, a shape rose up behind the Nightmare, silhouetted by the brilliant, crackling light. I had to squint to recognize the stature of the figure, the mane and tail that in any other moment would have set my heart at ease, but seeing it now froze the blood in my veins. I stood in wide-eyed terror as Sunset got to her hooves.

She rubbed her head and looked up at the thunderstorm, then the Nightmare between us. She scrambled backward to avoid a lightning bolt that snarled past her to become one with the glyph. Confusion turned to surprise turned to panic. Her eyes met mine, and it felt as if time stood still as the fear in our hearts attuned to one another’s.

Then, of all the things she could have done, she did the one and only thing that could ratchet my fear up one final notch:

She smirked.

“Sunset,” I yelled. “No, wait!”

Either she didn’t hear me, or she didn’t care. The tip of her horn glowed cherry red, and I felt my heart stop as she lunged at the Nightmare. Like a fencer deflecting another’s blade, she caught the Nightmare’s horn with hers, and the thunderstorm of magic crackled red and silver, exploding upward like the innumerable branches of a tree.

I shielded my eyes as the energy grew too bright to look at, and the lightning storm sputtered and died as quickly as it had erupted. When I dared peek, Sunset lay on top of the Nightmare. Neither of them were moving. Neither of them were breathing.

“Sunset!” I couldn’t even hear myself over the ringing in my ears. I ran as fast as I could to her side, but I was met with the painful reminder that the glyph was still active. It was like running headfirst into a brick wall.

Get up get up get up! I scrambled to my hooves and threw myself against the barrier, pushing with all my might as if it were a door I could simply open.

Celestia stormed up from behind and tried grabbing me. “Twilight—”

I swatted her away. Contingency be damned. I refused to let Sunset die before my very eyes.

I charged up the first spell I could think of and blasted it at the chalk to vaporize it and undo the glyph. But the chalk lines soaked up my magic and flashed briefly like lightning deep within the belly of a cloud, just like we designed it.

Shit! What do I do what do I do? “Sunset!”

She still wasn’t breathing, and for the life of me I could barely breathe myself. My head was spinning, my hooves felt like jelly. I didn’t know if the wetness running down my face was blood or tears. I clawed at the chalk, ignoring the white-hot sear in my hooves from the rampant magic it had soaked up.

“Twilight!” Celestia shouted. She wrapped me in her magic, and my body seized up.

I struggled against it, reaching out a hoof toward Sunset, watching her go, watching her die. I gritted my teeth as every fear, every uncertainty surged to the tip of my horn, and I turned it on Celestia.

“No!”

The shockwave blew apart her spell, cracked the walls and ceiling, blasted the loose rubble away from us like shrapnel to embed in the far walls. She took a frightful step backward, and I bolted past her.

I threw my magic around a nearby piton and ripped it from the wall, taking a healthy chunk of the castle with it. I slammed it into the floor to shatter it free and dove at the chalk line in a murderous frenzy.

I jammed and jammed and jammed it into the glyph, inch by inch tearing away the crystal beneath it. Magic arced from it in all the colors of the rainbow with every strike until there simply wasn’t any floor left to connect the circuit. The final filaments of magic skittered and curled between the interwoven lines like electricity down a tesla coil until it went silent. Heaving for air, I let the piton tumble to the floor and dashed inside.

“Sunset!” I grabbed her by the shoulders and laid her on her back. There was blood everywhere.

I staggered away, looking for the injury, only to see a piece of crystal about an inch long stuck out from the inside of my foreleg, likely from the piton. I ripped it out, threw it across the room, and pulled Sunset close.

“Sunset!” She wasn’t moving, wasn’t breathing. I couldn’t feel a pulse. “Wake up!”

What did she cast? What kind of spell would do this? If only I knew, I might be able to reverse it.

I gritted my teeth and cast the Wake-Up Spell. Nothing. A Clarity Spell. No movement. I focused my magic and reached in with a Healing Spell, but there was no injury to heal.

“No no no no, Sunset, no…” I started chest compressions. Something. Anything. Keep the blood flowing. Preserve the brain. She’ll wake up. I had to trust, I had to trust, I had to trust.

The blood from my leg matted her fur, and my hooves kept slipping. Keep the rhythm, don’t let her die. And I kept it and kept it and kept it and kept it until I went blind from the tears and collapsed on top of her with the weight of every broken promise.

I pulled the body of my best friend to my chest and cried like a foal as I cradled her in my hooves.

LIII - Reflections of the Self

Call me crazy, but I honestly didn’t think that would work.

Taking the Sleep Spell Nocturne taught me all those years ago and projecting it onto another person wasn’t that big of a leap in logic. Putting all my eggs in one basket and attacking the Nightmare with it? In the middle of a magical lightning storm that could have altered the spell in any innumerable ways?

Forget calling me crazy. Stupid was more like it.

But if a stupid plan works, it isn’t stupid—or so they say—and despite all the bad luck the universe loved shoveling in my face, I found myself touching down on soft grass with a warm sun on my back.

It seemed I hadn’t projected the spell as directly as I hoped and dragged myself in with it. Or it in with me, whichever way the spell decided to work. At the very least, we were dreaming, and I had spared the world a few more minutes. That’s all that mattered for now.

I was in a town of sorts. The splotchy shapes of ponies milled about the vaguest suggestion of a marketplace. It reminded me of the first time we got the Dream Dive Spell fully working. I had to find the center of this dream, or at least the focal point or whatever Luna would call it. I spun about in place, and with little detail to lead me, I picked a direction and started walking.

Dreams had a strange way of distorting time. Anypony could say that and believe it as cold hard truth, but being fully cognizant really let me experience the magnitude of it in sobering detail.

I wandered and wandered. It felt for a brief moment like the infinity of the Dreamscape had snuck in and worked its magic when I wasn’t looking.

But time, infinite as it may be, still bent the knee to eventuality, and I found what I believed I was after in the form of an incongruence in the dream itself—like two separate dreams had been stitched together, Eversleep style.

I stood in the space between my former classroom and Celestia’s greeting room. That comforting space I had gotten to know in my many teatime sessions with Celestia overlooked the auditorium where I took my entrance exam.

I was no purveyor of dreams, but I could tell the Nightmare in disguise when I saw it.

My younger self stood at the fore, staring at an array of items atop a little table, and my eyes instinctively snapped to the candelabra that I would accidentally Come-to-Life were this to play out as I remembered.

But just before that fateful moment, I caught my younger self’s eye, the Nightmare in disguise, and it looked at me as if staring down a lion. It took off for the side entrance that led toward CSGU proper.

“H-hey! Wait!” I took off after it.

It led me on a chase through the hallways of CSGU. I barreled past Professor Wizened Reed’s A-chem room, phasing like a ghost through the unknowing ponies of this dream. The hallway became a courtyard—no, the quad, where ponies sunned themselves and played games and cooked up any number of crazy experiments—then out past the track field and beyond.

A healthy dose of clairvoyance struck me, and some preternatural instinct told me this was the evening of the lacrosse match where I met… What was his name?

I could see his short-cut wavy mane and the frame of his shoulders, but I couldn’t remember what his face looked like—just that he had pretty eyes. It had been so long, and he likewise was little more than a passing fancy.

I came to a stop at the chain-link fence where Copper had snatched that scarf. Lo and behold, it sat there on the fence pole waiting for me. It heeded my magic when I went to lift it—so I was in this dream proper, strangely enough—and I twisted it about.

What a pretty little thing. The younger mare in me still adored its tassels, but… I set it back. Copper would come along for it in some form or another, so I let it be.

I wandered back to the path where me and that stallion had had that wonderful first date so long ago.

I cut through the hoof-beaten path between the little copse of trees and felt the familiar crunch of cinder ash. There after the bend in the path, I saw my younger self sharing a moment with what’s-his-face.

For the life of me I still couldn’t remember his name, but I remembered the butterflies he made me feel, the stupid, love-drunk smiles he got out of me. No matter what fanciful daydreams my mind wanted to dredge up, memories were memories, and that’s where he was meant to stay. I momentarily wondered how he was doing, wherever he was. Did life treat him well? Better than me at least, I hoped. He didn’t deserve that kind of suffering. That much I knew.

Ahead, What’s-his-name pinned his ears back before leaning in to give my younger self a kiss. But before she could deny him as I had that day, she saw me over his shoulder, and the scene ground to a halt.

There was a look of fear in her eyes as they danced back and forth between mine. Fear twisted into anger, and she screamed at me before running off again. Unlike earlier, though, I didn’t feel a sense of urgency.

These visions—was this truly even a dream?—they were a highlight reel of what sent me spiraling. On their way to it, at least. Symbolism and syllogism withstanding, I remembered Luna once saying, and I followed along the path as it circled me back, memory after memory.

Poignant moments from a poignant past. Semester finals, the Summer Sun Celebration with Copper’s family. Fast forward to our Manehattan trip and everything in between.

Each and every prominent memory of my youth rolled past me like some sort of conveyor-belt museum tour. I felt like I already knew what was going on, where it was leading me.

It wasn’t long before I found myself in the mirror room. I stopped with no one direction to follow, and around me the month’s dedication I had poured into this little space occurred at hyper speed, like a VCR set to fast forward. I watched my younger self build and polish the mirror base, the many failed attempts to contain its magic. The times I spent standing before it, unnervingly still, staring into its polished surface long into the night—long enough that I could make out the features of my own face despite the timelapse.

Soon enough, Celestia entered. I remembered that conversation, then the one after. I again saw the pleading in her eyes to see reason, the disappointment I could only now feel in the years gone by. I made myself watch, I made myself remember, I made myself suffer that memory and the deluge of emotions that drowned out all reason in favor of what amounted to a fairy tale. I watched as my younger self let fly that desperate spell, as she groveled at Celestia’s hooves, as Stone Wall led her home.

When that final burning image undid its grip about my heart, I found the strength to turn, and that’s when I knew this was the end:

I stood in a hallway—the hallway, and I knew what awaited me beyond the door at the other end. Hesitantly, I took that first step, felt the soft carpet beneath my hooves, smelled the stale chemical smell of new paint. Then another step, and another as ancient, unwanted emotions quietly bubbled to the surface. They made my hooves as light as feathers, yet my heart as heavy as stone. They made me want to turn and run, and yet I felt myself drawn forward.

I came to a stop before the door. It stared back at me, silent and unassuming, but I knew better than I wished. I reached up and put my hoof on the handle to feel the weight of the memory awaiting me.

Something shattered inside.

I froze up, straining my ears for any little noise on the other side. Only my own frantic breathing and my heart hammering in my chest punctuated the silence to follow, longer and longer into the infinity of that instant.

And then came the screaming.

I flattened my ears back and shut my eyes while the tears rolled silently down my face, the sounds bringing back the deluge of every terrifying second. I could see her in my mind’s eye as vividly as the day it happened—the crescent-moon smile, her wings rimmed in silver moonlight, the reaching, touching, probing tendrils of shadow—and much the same as then, I waited for the inevitable, accepting silence that followed.

I didn’t know how long I stood there. The sounds had long since died away, and still I waited, hoof on the doorknob. It trembled in my grasp.

Still I waited, listening to the damnable, smothering silence like a pillow held over my face, until eventually a quiet sobbing bled through the door.

I focused on that sound. I focused on the hollowness, the complete and utter destruction of self, like a child scraping up the shattered pieces of her soul to clutch them against her chest, but I knew well enough those pieces would never fit back together. Hesitantly, I opened the door.

The room looked exactly as I remembered.

The remains of a ceramic something-or-other lay scattered across the floor by the chest-of-drawers, and my younger self sat huddled on the far side of the bed. The room lay red-washed in the waning light of dusk.

At the creak of the door, she turned and looked at me with wide, frightened eyes. Her breath hitched—once, twice, three times before she laid down and squeezed her eyes shut—but there she stayed.

There was no more running. There was no more reason to.

I took that first careful step into the room, then another. My hoofsteps echoed off the hardwood, and I came to a stop at the foot of the bed. There I stood for the longest time, listening to her heartbreak. Eventually, I found the strength to voice the words in the back of my throat.

“May I sit with you?” I said quietly.

She looked at me with massive, tear-stained eyes. She was hyperventilating, and she curled in on herself as if I were here to do the very same thing I didn’t want to remember.

The instinct to reach out and hold her had my heart beating faster, but I knew better—better than I ever wished I could. I instead sat down on the opposite end of the bed, the gentle creak of the mattress beneath my weight the only reminder that I indeed existed in this space.

We sat in silence, only broken by the quiet sobs she couldn’t keep in.

I stared into the stripes of my old comforter, idly ran my hoof back and forth to feel the synthetic silk that never quite kept in the heat even on the warmest nights, watched the downy plush stuffed inside it give beneath my hoof. After a time, I noticed the sobbing had stopped.

Little Me still lay curled in on herself, but she took to stealing glances my way before retreating to the comforter. She kept her ears pinned back, but those little moments she spent looking at some part of me—whether it be my hooves, my flank, anything but my eyes—got longer and, if I allowed myself to believe, just a hair bolder.

I let her take all the time she needed, until she felt comfortable enough looking directly at me. It’s the least I would have wanted back then.

“How are you feeling?” I eventually said. It was such a grotesquely obvious question that I knew the answer to, but she needed to acknowledge it directly.

She stared at me for a long moment before pressing her face into her pillow, and we again lapsed into silence.

So I waited.

I gave her the space she needed, spending the time taking in the liminalities of yesteryear: my The Nature of the Arcane and many other textbooks lining the shelves, the calendar on my nightstand, the phoenix plushie abandoned in the far corner—all the little things that made up who I was, who I used to be, what I had lost, and what I had become in the face of it.

“You’re my Tantabus,” I said. “Aren’t you?”

It was less a question than a statement. Copper got me thinking about it the other day, and the more I let the idea take root, the more I couldn’t deny it. I guess I just wanted to hear it for myself. Or, at the very least, I needed to hear myself say it out loud.

Little Me peeked an eye out from the pillow and stared mistily at the plushie in the far corner, then down to the folds in the bedding. The crease in her brow was a delicate thing, as was the shaky breath she sucked in before squeezing her eyes shut. She said nothing, but it was an answer all the same.

“I guess that makes sense,” I said, envisioning the conveyor belt of memories that led me here.

If this was indeed my Tantabus lying next to me, then it felt the very same feelings that tore me apart in those moments immediately afterward. Well, felt didn’t properly convey that. It was those very feelings—it was the literal manifestation of the rage and helplessness I felt in that moment and my desire for control in a world that no longer made sense. It was the culmination of the mindset I thought I needed, that I clung to like a life preserver, because in reality, that’s what it was.

But it was also the stone tied to my ankle, dragging me down into the depths of my own misery. That much I could see now, and that much I needed to see.

So I started small.

“I remember,” I said.

She sniffled and wiped her eyes before looking at me.

“I remember how it feels,” I continued. “It… it doesn’t go away. It will never go away.” I shrugged and shook my head, looking down at my hooves. “That’s the hardest thing about it. It happened, and now it’s part of you, whether you want it to be or not. It’ll always be there, waiting to remind you.”

I pressed my hoof into the comforter to watch it sink into the padding, stare at all the individual creases in the silk and the little shadows within them.

“Some days are worse than others… but you get through them. Sometimes one day at a time, sometimes one minute at a time.

“And every waking moment, you ask yourself… Why? How did it get like this? How was this supposed to help? How was this supposed to benefit anyone? How… How was this justified? To think it was a reasonable course of action? Was there any thinking involved at all, or… was it all just to watch me suffer?”

I shook my head and stared at my hooves. Saying these things out loud made me feel small, and yet this desperate need to let it out clawed away inside me, yearning to see the light of day, feel the warm sun on its face.

I had the opportunity to ask the questions. I had the fortune of getting the answers. I was one of the lucky ones. And in a way, not so lucky.

“But even when you finally get the answers, they aren’t enough. Because that’s all they are. Answers. Answers to questions that shouldn’t exist. Reasons without excuses. And that hollow emptiness of finally realizing there’s… nothing. It…”

As I let that statement circle the drain of my psyche, a sense of understanding about those answers bubbled to the surface. They had made themselves known in the quiet moments after my rage subsided and my tears were spent. They came in the form of the little whispers in the back of my mind I didn’t want to believe were true. Things about myself. Things about Luna.

Because it was fun. Because I was in the way. Because I was less than, not good enough, too stupid to realize, too fucking pathetic to assert myself when and where it mattered. Because she decided how things should play out.

Because I hated her.

Which I had every right to. Anyone in their right mind would agree with me. And I needed to know how much I hated her. I needed her to know how much I hated her. Honestly, though, that was probably why this stuck with me for so long.

I felt justified. I was justified, every single loathsome second. And it was that sense of justice, that I had to bring some sort of holy retribution down upon her or see her to that end in some capacity, that kept me so… focused.

There was no alternative. Because anything less than that would mean admitting I was wrong—that I had wasted my youth, my privilege, and all the perfect things I had for going for me in an otherwise perfect life, and that my innocence had been stolen from me for nothing.

They would all pay, I remembered thinking over and over and over and over like a curse seared into my flesh. I had turned it into a mantra, a promise that I would see through, come hell or high water, when in reality, the one who paid the most was me.

Why, then? Why really?

Maybe I’d never know. Maybe the answers didn’t actually exist. Except that wasn’t quite right.

They did exist, because I found them. Found in the loosest sense of the word—less a location to arrive at or a thing to place my finger on and more of a direction to head, a sensation to follow. In order to get past the negative emotions, I had to understand. I had to derive understanding from them. And it all circled back on one very important question at the beginning of this long and winding journey: had Luna changed? Was she good now?

Well, yes.

Twilight was right about one thing from the start. Luna really had changed. She was good now. She had proven that time and again through this whole ordeal. I wouldn't be where I was this very moment without the blood, sweat, and tears she poured into these last few days—these last few maybe-months, if I were to try and gauge our time in the Dreamscape.

Not everyone gets a chance at redemption. Fewer bother taking it. But for better or worse, Luna did get that chance, and she grasped it with every fiber of her being.

But no matter how hard she strove and the rivers of blood she shed in the name of atonement, did that absolve her of what she did to me? Was there such a thing as enough to absolve her? And as that question shambled down the back alleys of my mind, I once again felt the cold stares of Ethics and Justice on the back of my head.

Never forget what she did to you. And I didn’t. Same as before, the scars were there, in my head and in my heart. But that's what they were, scars—wounds that had since healed, salved by those rivers of blood she shed in penance for her evils. Freely, willfully, wholeheartedly. That truth wasn’t lost on me.

But penance and punishment weren’t the same as atonement and forgiveness, and reaching this point in the journey left me standing at the ledge of a far more impossible question I had only begun scratching the surface of.

Did I forgive her? At least… did I forgive her in a capacity that truly mattered?

I could forgive the lies. I could forgive the manipulation. I could forgive turning me against Celestia and making me hate everything I once cherished in the name of a love that never was.

And I did. Wholly and truly, I did.

She really did care, and after all she had done to right her wrongs—after all the pain she had endured on my behalf—I felt comfortable giving her that much.

But I had to ask myself in no uncertain terms or flowery language: did I forgive her for raping me? Did I forgive her for stripping from me my peace of mind and shattering what I had once thought good and pure about the world?

I wasn't one to believe that innocence could be taken from someone, not in the way the storybooks made it sound. But Luna took something from me. That much I knew. She stole an integral part of what made me me, something I would never get back—those little shards clutched against my chest—and for the sake of the filly lying beside me, I had to give an answer to the question: was that wholly, truly, forever a bridge too far?

If I were to forgive her, would the hurts and pains go away? Would the demons that hounded me go quiet? Would Ethics and Justice sit by, content with my decision?

If I didn’t, and I held onto that hatred until my dying breath, would I stay bitter and resentful? Would every little association my brain was so good at piecing together send me spiraling? Would I remain forever steeped in the misery that had gnawed at me ever since that fateful moment?

I honestly didn’t know. Even after everything Luna and I strove for, I really, truly, fucking didn’t. Arms folded, Ethics and Justice continued staring into the back of my head, and I felt their silent demand that I fall in line.

Part of me wanted to believe that somewhere, somehow, I could find it in myself to forgive—that I should forgive, as was instilled in me at an early age. Maybe that was simply the final sliver of glass still clinging to the window frame of the Something that Luna took from me.

But part of me also felt the need for certainty before taking that leap, a true and utter clarity that I didn’t feel I possessed, one I wasn’t sure even existed. Life was a journey, and I didn’t have the fortune of knowing just how long a road lay before me.

But I was on a road—that much was true. One she forced me down, sure, one all too similar to her own, yet still one that she tried correcting in the way she thought best.

I glanced at the filly beside me, still crying into her hooves. The instinct to protect and console her and to destroy whatever could have inflicted such pain in her welled up inside me, but I had seen what became of the mare who did exactly that: Luna, Nocturne. They were one and the same, yet different. Separated by time and ideology.

Just like me, Luna really had changed. The fact that I even paused to consider was evidence enough, and I felt the need to turn, look Ethics and Justice in the eyes, and glare my defiance back at them and the simplicity of their demand.

Part of me felt like I was failing somehow, failing some aspect of the growth I had found these last few days, like I’d run a marathon but stopped just short of the finish line. But at the same time, I felt confident in the truth that I wasn’t failing, that I had found something worthwhile among the chaos of my heart, and was finally able to take stock of what had once been too much to wrap my head around.

I couldn’t deny the beacon of justice and unflagging loyalty Luna had become since her return from the moon. I couldn’t think of a word to properly describe the heroism of everything she did for my sake, as even that word felt wanting.

But did I forgive her? Really and truly? Did I, could I, should I?

Again, that nagging uncertainty crept back in from wherever it had been hiding, and the fact that I still asked the question was answer enough. Without that complete and utter certainty, it felt wrong to take that leap.

Did I forgive Luna for raping me?

No. No, I didn’t.

And honestly… I felt okay saying that.

It didn’t come from an instinctive lashing out, a foaming of the mouth, or some mindless pounding at the walls like a ferocious, starving animal. It came from a place inside that, for once in my life, didn’t feel too jumbled to trust, too mixed up with emotion to clearly see and take stock of what I felt and how it fit into the puzzle that was my soul.

I had to draw a line. There had to be a line, otherwise, the moral greys could never be distinguished from the black and white, and the simplicity of that truth instilled within me a gentle but unshakable faith.

These thoughts, these pains… They were just memories now, things to pull down from the cobwebbed shelves of my psyche and remember the emotions instilled in them. But emotions needed direction, and it was for me to decide what they meant and what to do with them.

Hesitantly, I reached a hoof out across the mattress for my younger self to take and offered her the broken pieces of a smile.

“It’s okay to be scared,” I said. “It’s okay to be angry. It’s okay to want what you think is right. To want justice, to want… closure.”

Her eyes danced back and forth between mine, fell briefly to my hoof, then back up to me. She lifted a hoof, and after a long moment’s hesitation, placed it in mine. The trembles were there, but she held all the tighter for them.

“It’s okay that it might feel overwhelming and that everything you thought or were told to think might seem jumbled together to make even the simplest decisions seem impossible, and the impossible ones that much more." I squeezed her hoof a tiny bit harder. "It’s okay that the right answer might feel wrong, or that following through on it feels like you’ve failed somehow, that you lost a part of yourself somewhere in the process.

“But it’s important to know that you were right all along in a sense,” I continued. “All the feelings you felt were worth every ounce of weight you placed in them. And no matter what the world says, no one can take that away from you.

“But more than anything else, more than right or wrong, more than Twilight or Luna or Copper or anything in this world or the other…”

I felt in my heart the words I needed to hear—the words I needed to believe—then and in the years after Twilight saved me. They burned like fire in the back of my throat, but I gathered them all the same, and out came the words I never thought I’d have the strength to speak:

“What she did to you isn’t your fault.”

And as I looked into my younger self’s eyes, I saw myself. I saw the pain and confusion, the yearning for answers that would never suffice. But I also saw the resilience hiding just below the surface, the hope for a better tomorrow. And as the tears welled up in her eyes, I saw, for the first time in seven years, the truth. The tears started down her face, so I pulled her close and let her cry that truth into my chest.

There was no grand sense of Ethics presiding over right and wrong, no great Justice that doled out due consequence. There was only me, the feelings I felt, and the choices I made. I and I alone held the power to decide what that meant, and with that revelation, another fell from my lips as a whisper:

“It’s okay to not forgive. You are not a bad person for asserting that truth.”

I could accept that Luna had changed. I could accept that she had grown and become a better person—that she, to use her own words, strove to do good in the absence of that which she stole. And there was value to that.

But there was also value in that very thing she stole from me, a value that she could never balance against on the scales of justice. What she did came from a place of malice, and understanding the intent behind it solidified that reality.

Ethics and Justice may deem my choice insufficient—the fact that I chose at all rather than give myself over to some preordained truth—but I felt assured in my own reasons.

Because I had found my own value. I had found my own happiness—here, now, and in all the goodness I had pieced together in the last seven years—to balance that scale in my own way on my own terms.

Forgiveness was for the self, not the other, just as penitence was for the other and not the self. Choosing not to forgive was not failure, nor was forgiveness an ultimatum in the grand scheme of my own happiness. So long as it came from a healthy place, so long as I didn’t let it consume me.

A warmth radiated into me as my younger self’s form melded with mine, and I felt a deep-seated certainty settle in my chest, right beside my heart. I cradled that sensation in my breast and smiled through the happy tears rolling down my cheeks.

A pure and utter sense of liberation washed through me, and I was, for the first time that I could remember, at peace.

Something nuzzled me on the cheek.

I scrambled backward off the bed, falling flat on my ass before whipping around to see the Tantabus lying there—Luna’s Tantabus.

“Fuckin’— goddamn. Don’t scare me like that.” I took a deep breath to get my heart rate back in order and wiped the tears from my eyes. “How long have you been sitting there?”

It cocked an ear at me as a galaxy rolled through a starry nebula across its chest. It stepped off the bed and came up to me, nuzzling under my chin, then curled its head over my shoulder in a hug.

I hugged it back and let out a little laugh, the beginnings of a smile along for the ride. Softly, I whispered, “This is what you were hoping for all along, wasn’t it?”

It dug its chin into my shoulder a bit harder before backing away to regard me. It cocked its head as a supernova went off way in the depths of its face, where its eye should have been—what I wanted to equate to a wink, if anything. Eventually, it craned its neck to look into the empty sky. I had no means of knowing just what it was hoping to see, but my heart whispered her name.

“She’s still out there, I know.” I stared into that darkness for a long minute. She was still out there, lost in the Eversleep, prisoner to her own hubris. It was fitting.

The deed was done, the monster thwarted. I had found my peace as she wanted, and she was left to the consequences of her actions. But as much as Ethics and Justice might have already dusted their hands of her, I couldn’t say the same. Like before, when she lay bloodied beneath me, I didn’t feel I had the right to choose—even by omission.

“I better go get her, eh?”

What amounted to a smile lit up the Tantabus’s face by way of a solar flare erupting from one ear to the other, and I took that as cue to make good on that statement.

What happened next was my choice to make and mine alone, and so I chose to light my horn and pull myself up into the Dreamscape.

I drifted for a moment while my mind caught up with the transition, and somewhere in the scrambled eggs I had for a brain, I started piecing together the far-flung indifference of the universe gazing back.

I set off, resigning myself to the journey. Though, after the spans of existence I’d endured this week—I couldn’t rightly call it anything else—another trip through the Dreamscape would be less a thing to dread and more a trip down memory lane.

And so it went, just me and the stars and other space stuff that made up the this little non-universe. Soon enough, I found the Eversleep, and in I went.

I touched down amidst the ash-laden graveyard of our little arena. What little light there was to see by limned the edges of this space, maybe the size of a bedroom now, blanketed as if by the snowfall of a cold winter’s night. A little island of ash amidst the other dreams slowly encroaching to swallow it up. The ashes of a dream long since put to rest.

There were no hyena-things to be found or found by, and so I wandered the patchwork of Equestria’s subconscious detritus until I found her sitting on a cliff overlooking an ocean. A cool wind swept up from the rocky shore below and teased at my mane while a flock of seagulls cawed in the distant skies, circling about, coasting in place on the updraft.

I sat down next to her and admired the scenery.

She stared at me, alarmed and unsure what to make of my unusually casual entrance.

“You ready to get out of here?” I said, looking out over the ocean. Strange shapes swam just below the surface, far larger than what such shallow waters could support. “I get it if you say no. This little slice of heaven seems like a good place to while away the time.”

I shot her a grin, and by whatever gods existed in this universe or the next I hit the jackpot in the form of her jaw falling open.

She gawked. She actually gawked at me.

“And what of the Nightmare?” she asked.

I tapped my chest and let my grin relax to an easy-going smile I cast back over the water like a fishing line. “Taken care of. And you have a friend waiting for you.”

My smile seemed infectious, if delayed in onset. “Indeed I do,” she said. “Shall we be off, then?”

She unfurled her wings, making sure to lower one toward me like a ramp.

“Oh goddamn it, we’re not doing that crap again.”

“I do not mean to impress it upon you,” she said. “But it is the simplest means at our disposal.”

I slanted my mouth. “Only if you’re certain you can make the flight this time.”

“There is only one way for us to find out, Sunset.” She rolled her shoulders as if warming up for a morning’s stroll, her wings doing that half-unfurled thing pegasi liked to do when testing the winds. “But I do believe I am ready for another try.”

“You say that like you’ve just been sitting here with your hoof up your ass instead of trying to put yourself back together for another go.” I tapped my horn with my hoof.

“Healing takes time,” she said. “And no less so for the way this place smothers my magics, as you no doubt remember.”

I sighed but nevertheless clambered onto her back. “Just shut up and start flying.”

On fair winds, we climbed into the sky, heading for the mountain at the center of this strange existence. The magics that dipped low toward its peak seemed to almost welcome us up through the Veil and into that of the Dreamscape’s indifferent starscape. From there, we made the long trek back to my dream.

We traveled in silence, but unlike the oppressive nothingness of our previous flight through this liminal infinity, a sense of accomplishment and contentment kept me in good spirits. “Merriment,” Luna would have probably called it. “Joviality,” even. Hell if I knew, but we rode that high all the same.

We eventually arrived at my dream, and as we approached, I decided to take a back seat to whatever came next. It’s what I would have wanted were I in her shoes.

The Tantabus was waiting for us in my bedroom, the only source of movement in this otherwise timeless space. She and it stared at one another like long-lost friends, until eventually Luna closed her eyes, chin toward her chest, as if in repose. She stayed like that awhile, sharing with it whatever sentiment there was to share.

It melded with her, and the beginnings of a smile crept onto her face. Small, but no less radiant. And I smiled, too. Hate her or not, I understood.

“Everyone’s waiting for us,” I said, when I figured she was ready. “We shouldn’t keep ’em waiting.”

“Indeed. Though…” She looked at me, then about the room, settling on the sunlight coming through the window, where little dust motes danced listlessly among the blinds. “It is rather peaceful here.”

“Well, that was the whole damn point, wasn’t it?” I said, and…

She blushed? She actually fucking blushed. I never thought I’d live to see the day.

“So it was.” A small but morose smile threaded across her lips. “However…”

I raised an eyebrow at her. “‘However’?”

“I am sorry,” she said. “It is not for me to say.”

“Well, now I kinda wanna know what it is.”

A pause. “I hope that you believe this was worth it in the end, Sunset, and now that all is said and done that you find your happiness.”

I let that roll around in my head a bit. “You’re right. That isn’t for you to say. Because it isn’t your place to tell me to have a great life. It’s mine.

“And I will,” I continued matter-of-factly. “Not because you hoped for it or asked or commanded it of me or anything like that. But because I can, and I’ll put everything into doing just that.” And as I gave that statement life, I felt a simple surety soak into my bones, give lightness to my heart, and put a little smile on my face worth sharing, even with her.

I guess there was a summit after all.

“So yeah,” I said. “I’m gonna go have a great life. And you…” There were many things I could have said. Many things I probably should have. But as right as they felt, now didn’t feel like the time for vitriol. We just won, and I didn’t want to spoil that. I looked down at my hooves. “Well… the others are waiting.”

Spoken or not, the words left unsaid reached her ears to have the smile on her face take a turn for the somber. She pinned her ears back, but nonetheless took the whole of that statement as cue to rise, spread her wings, and light her horn.

The light at her horntip suffused the dream, prompting gravity to forget which way was down, and as my perception of reality corkscrewed into place, I realized someone was crying into my shoulder.

“Twilight?” I said.

“Sunset!” She jerked back to look me in the eye before throwing her hooves around me. Warm tears soaked into the crook of my neck. She shook like a leaf. “I thought you were dead…”

I laughed. For all I knew, that may have been true.

“How long was I out?”

She stifled a bout of tearful laughter and wiped her eyes. “I don’t know… Maybe, a minute? Don’t ever scare me like that again.”

It was my turn to share a bout of tearful laughter. “I’ll try not to. I… W-wait. Twilight, you’re bleeding.”

“I know,” she said, laughing, holding me tighter all the same.

“No, like a lot. And all over me, god—gross! What the hell’s going on?” I scrambled out of her hug and spied the open wound on her inner foreleg. I grasped her firmly by the pastern to hold her still, and with a bit of magic I pressed the tip of my horn against it to suture it closed.

Behind her, the double doors opened, and in poked the heads of not only Star Swirl and Starlight, but also Copper, Whistle—did she seriously still wear that slouchie?—Lily, String, and Celestia.

“Twilight!” Copper said, and she dashed in to tackle-hug Twilight in a fit of laughter. And… It was a strange sight.

Copper, the mare I loved so completely in every way, sharing that love with Twilight—the very intimacy she had unflaggingly reserved for me and me alone. And as the moment wore on, watching her kiss kiss kiss Twilight and hug her tighter while the happy tears streamed down her face, I…

All I could do was smile.

“Get a room, you two,” Whistle said, strolling in.

“I mean, if you insist,” Copper said, shit-eating grin loaded for bear. In a flash of mint-green magic, she and Twilight were gone.

“Wait,” I said. “Did she really just—”

Another flash of magic—pink this time—and before I could blink away the afterimage, Copper’s laughter filled the room. She lay on her back, pointing a hoof at Twilight, who clearly wasn’t smiling.

“Oh, come on,” Copper said to Twilight. “You know that was funny.”

“So,” I said. “You two are actually a thing now?”

Copper’s laughter died away frighteningly quickly, and a nervous silence overtook her. All eyes were on she and Twilight.

“We’re working on that,” Twilight said, coming to her rescue. She shared a smile with Copper, and slowly it became mutual.

“Gaaaay,” Whistle said.

“You know,” Twilight said, sporting an uncharacteristically smarmy grin, Whistle dead in her crosshairs. “Copper’s mentioned something about a Daisy Chain. She lives down on Amaryllis Avenue. I could put in a good word for you if you want.”

That got Whistle good and flustered. “W-what?”

Copper snorted. “Holy shit, she fucking got you.”

Forever in service of her subjects, Luna groaned and rolled onto her stomach to divert the conversation away from that imminent roasting. She rubbed her head before looking around at the rest of us.

“Luna!” Celestia said. She threw her hooves around Luna, and Luna all but melted into the embrace.

“Sister…” Luna half-whispered. “It is done.”

It’s done. It really was. Part of me could hardly believe, yet here we stood. And it seemed I wasn’t alone in that struggle, judging by the faces around me—all the smiles slowly gaining ground. Everyone heaved a collective sigh of relief as that sentiment well and truly soaked in. That is, until Luna got to her hooves and turned toward me.

I noticed Copper bristle out the corner of my eye, and she stepped up defensively beside me. She raised her chin to level a defiant scowl at Luna as she approached. The height difference brought her ears back for a moment, but she found the will to bring them around again and double down.

Conversely, Luna pinned her ears back at the sight of her—a language all its own—and the look in her eye had me wondering if she’d turn tail and bolt. But whatever archaic dogma saw her standing before us likewise gave her the strength to turn toward me and bow, muzzle to the floor.

“As sure as the stars in the sky,” she said. With that, she paid me one last solemn glance before turning and heading out the door.

Twilight moved to stop her, but I put a hoof on her shoulder. Only Celestia followed through on whatever concerns hung about the group. She headed out after Luna to leave the rest of us in a strange but not unwelcome silence.

“Well,” String said after a moment. “I don’t know about you guys, but this is the sort of thing we’d throw a party for down in the labs.”

That seemed to snap Twilight out of her thoughts. She flitted and resettled her wings in that way I always adored about her.

“Uh, yeah. I’m sure we could get Pinkie to put something together. I mean, that is, if you want, Sunset.” She stared at me with her ears at half-mast and a smile waiting in the wings. “This is your moment.”

All eyes were on me. It was the good kind of expectation, though—the kind that would happily accept whatever answer I gave. They were my friends, the ones who put everything on the line to see me to where I was today.

But right now, I had one more friend out there who needed me.

“Actually,” I said. “I have to go.”

Twilight looked taken aback. “Go? Where?”

I let a little smile shine through. “I, uh… Well, in your own words, a promise made is a promise kept, and, uh… yeah.”

With that, I made for the door. Surprisingly, no one tried stopping me.

It was still the ass crack of dawn, but although I had technically pulled an all-nighter, I felt right as rain. And as I made my way to the train station, I mused with the thought of just how many bits I should wager on Acuity shitting her pants at the sight of me.

Prologue - The Journal

Compatī (Cohm - pah - tee)

cum + pati, latin.

“To suffer with.” It is the origin of the word “compassion.” Beyond sympathy—beyond empathy—it isn’t to simply walk a mile in another’s shoes, but to walk that mile side by side with them, to feel alongside another person both the good and the bad, the joys and hurts of life and what comes with it. And I think that’s beautiful.

~Corejo

’Twas a fine Sunday evening that I found myself resting upon a velvet cushion in the back nook of Ponyville Library.

Twilight Sparkle had invited me over to discuss stellar radiation, and of course I could not say no to one so enthusiastic about her most recent academic fixation. Rare were the moments I had time to chat with Sister’s star pupil when Equestria was not in peril, and rarer still did I have the opportunity to, as they say these days, “talk shop” with somepony other than Sister.

I found her innocence and perspective on the world a welcome break from the norm, even if it meant entertaining her… eccentricities. Which, naturally, meant watching her sidetrack herself with her overbearing need for cordiality.

Regardless, with a little smile on my face, I folded my hooves, took a sip of coffee, and continued watching Twilight fret over her assortment of astronomy literature.

“Or maybe you’d rather read Grazewing’s Guide to Gargantuan Galaxies.” Twilight hefted a book levitating beside her. She gasped. “Oh, where did I put Star Gazer’s Anthology of Astral Anomalies?”

She raced for the next aisle from my little corner nook, where an avalanche of books sounded from around the bend. “Ow…” came Twilight’s voice.

She returned with the aforementioned book, plus one open-faced atop her head. ’Twas unapparent if she knew it was there; however, she wore a winning smile as she placed Astral Anomalies on my lap.

I closed my eyes and smiled. “Thank you, Twilight Sparkle, but I believe this is sufficient reading material to choose from.”

We both looked at the stacks of books surrounding me. It could well have passed for a fortress had she kept at it. Was this how Sister felt all these years teaching this mare?

Twilight flitted her wings and lowered her head. “Eh, heh… Right.”

“Truth be told, Twilight, my reading interests are not solely focused on the night sky. I entertain myself with a myriad of studies.”

I pulled the least astronomical-looking book from the pile. Modern Linguistics for the Absolute Beginner. I shifted my head back to double-check the title before raising a brow at Twilight.

She stepped back and gave me that sheepish chuckle of hers. “I-I’m just gonna go, uh, sort some of these books.” She lifted half the surrounding stacks and took off down the nearest aisle.

I chuckled. ’Twill be a sad day indeed when young Twilight loses that innocent charm of hers. I set Linguistics aside and glanced over the remaining pile, where a brown-and-gold spine stood out from the brighter blues and greens. Curiosity bid that I take it, and I was greeted by a strangely familiar red-and-yellow sun emblazoned on the cover. ’Twas heavy. I could already feel the weight of knowledge it carried within. I opened it, and to my surprise it was not a textbook.

Dear Princess Twilight,—

I shut it. ’Twas a letter book—a diary of sorts. I glanced back the way Twilight had fled. No. I would not invade her privacy. Setting it aside, I perused my remaining options. Not a moment later, however, it glowed and began vibrating. I started to my haunches and fanned out my wings, ere leaning in for a closer look.

“What a strange enchantment,” I said, hefting it in my magic.

“Oh, hey,” Twilight said, returning from the nearby aisle, eyes on the book. “Sunset Shimmer’s writing to me.”

Sunset Shimmer? I almost dropped the book. A shudder ran down my spine as a deluge of memories best left forgotten spilled out from the darker crevices of my mind.

That sun on the cover. ’Twas her cutie mark. I… I felt myself shaking, and it was all I could do gently lay the book down before Twilight noticed.

She snatched it up and leafed to the middle, where she diligently scanned line after line. The silence of the library crept back in, to the point that I pitched my ears forward.

“Is something the matter?” I asked.

“Huh? Oh, no. There’s just this thing called a ‘movie’ she saw, which is sort of like a pre-recorded play, and she needs to gush about it.” She smiled, and a little blush rose to her cheeks. “Apparently, one of the lead roles is really cute.”

“I… is that all?”

“Mmm, looks like it. But she did also say to tell all my friends ‘hi’ and that she hopes they’re doing well. So, you know, Sunset Shimmer says ‘hi.’” She giggled.

I laid myself down and refolded my forehooves. Sunset Shimmer says “hi.” I did not know how to take such news, but I knew in my heart that she would not address me in such a manner. She may well not address me at all. Or rather, I feared in what ways she would address me.

“That is… wonderful to hear,” I said.

“Princess Luna?” Twilight stared at me with that same concern Sister oft did when she caught me ruminating. “Is everything okay?”

I felt the pout form on my lips before I could stop myself, and the shame that came with it bid that I look away. “No, but it is my concern, and I wish for it to remain as such.”

“Are you sure?” She creased her brow.

I felt her heart reach out to mine. As Steward of the Dreamscape, I could see and feel the dreams of our little ponies whenever their souls melded with mine in sweetest slumber. Though Twilight was not asleep, her daydreams and their accompanying emotions fell within that domain, albeit faintly. When I blinked, I saw darkness—myself lying alone in a derelict Castle Everfree.

“There are many duties I must see to myself.” I considered her unfaltering gaze. The tether that bound her subconscious to my soul pulled taut. “If I require your assistance, I will be sure to ask.”

That seemed to mollify her. She looked aside, then smiled tentatively at me. “I’m here to help, Princess. Whatever it is. We all are.”

“Thank you, Twilight.” I stood and strapped on my saddlebags. “For now, it is getting late, and I must see to the dreams of our little ponies.”

She raised a hoof, hesitant on letting me leave so suddenly. However, she lowered it and nodded.

“Goodnight, Princess.”

“Goodnight, Twilight.” I felt her gaze on the back of my head as I reached the library door, and a dozen scenarios thrummed on her tether in a symphony of nightmares. Thankfully, I left that suffocating room unmolested.

An evening sun kissed the far horizon in a watercolor spray of yellows, pinks, and oranges. ’Twas early autumn, and a light breeze sent the fallen leaves skittering along the ground like foals scampering home after an evening’s play. The Nightmare Night season lay just around the corner, and its festive spirit inveigled me to smile, as fleeting a gesture as it may be.

Though I always tried separating the symbolism and metaphor of the Dreamscape from my interpretations of the waking world, the coincidence of finding that book on the eve of a new moon brought a chill to my withers.

Forever had the moon followed its cycle through the night sky, and with my return the new moon became my symbol to the ponies of Equestria that I was reborn, that I was no longer that being of nightmares. To continue that cycle was to relinquish my rightful place in the sky for a night. ’Twas my humility, my promise, my repentance.

But with that reminder came the subtle nature of the dark, the dangers the ponies of this age did not know thanks to Sister’s wise rule: where the full moon was synonymous with insanity and revelry, a new moon heralded chaos, the occult, and worse.

The Dreamscape called to me, and so did my past demons. Fate deemed it necessary I pay Sunset Shimmer a visit. I knew not what the future held in store, but I knew a long and winding road lay ahead.

For myself, and for her.

Author's Note

Onward and Upward!

VI - Meeting the Family

The rest of the spring semester flew by much the same as any other good thing in life. Sunset Shimmer bid farewell to her sophomore year at CSGU and welcomed the coming summer: three whole months of reviewing her notes, lounging in the sun, and hanging out with Coppertone.

Doppler picked up a co-op position in Vanhoover and wasn’t going to be back until late August. Which was unfortunate, since Sunset had been looking forward to sharing with him all the heaps of fun summer had in store.

They went steady maybe a month after that first wonderful friendship-assignment-turned-date? She wasn’t sure how it worked. The whole dating thing was still a little foreign to her. And no, she hadn’t “fucked his brains out” yet, as Copper so delicately put it. She did, however, consent to nose nuzzles when nopony was looking.

But today was no day for nuzzles. Today was the first official day of summer, and as everypony knew, the first day of the Summer Sun Celebration: a week-long festival of carnival rides, cotton candy, and everything else Sunset loved about the summer months.

The only thing that could make it more special was spending it with Copper and her family. The way Copper described them, her little sisters sounded absolutely adorable!

Sunset rocked back and forth on her hooves, staring at the front door of Copper’s house. It was still dark outside, since Celestia hadn’t yet raised the sun to begin the festivities, but the pre-dawn pinks and oranges spray-painted across the sky already set the mood for the day, the sun just as anxious as her to begin the fun.

Copper’s house was a pretty little thing, all well-trimmed flower pots and clean woodwork. They even had a white picket fence around the front lawn.

The door opened, and out poked a burly but smiling stallion that could only be Copper’s dad. He had a cropped mane like a military pony, greying on the sides, and an impressive but well-groomed beard. His icy blue eyes scanned her face much the way he probably scanned all those research reports Copper always talked about.

His horn showed signs of overuse, like how wood grain sometimes cracked when it dried out. Apparently that’s what happened when you were the Lead Catalytic Engineer in the castle’s research department.

“If you’re not Sunset Shimmer,” he said, “I’ll eat an arcanite crystal.” He let out a laugh deeper than a frat house booze trough that rumbled through Sunset’s bones, and he stuck out his hoof. “String Theory. Call me String.”

Sunset smiled and took his hoof. Hopefully he was just kidding about the arcanite crystal… Arcanite was a magic inhibitor known for its use as a “unicorn poison” in olden pony times, nowadays used in experimental containment protocol. Not the kind of thing ponies should be popping like candy.

“Hi,” she said. “It’s nice to meet you.”

“Same.” He jerked his head over his shoulder and stepped back. “Come on in.”

Sunset followed him through the foyer. It was one of those grandma sorts of houses, decorated to the gills in pictures, doilies, dark wood paneling, and fancy brass fixtures. Sunset smirked, wondering if their couch was covered in plastic.

Portraits of Copper and her sisters hung along the foyer hallway, at various grade-school milestones. Even some from Copper’s modeling days through high school.

“Copper,” String shouted up the foyer staircase. “Your friend’s here.”

“Coming!” Copper called back, muffled. Probably in the bathroom fussing over her mane.

String led Sunset to the living room, where thankfully the couch wasn’t covered in plastic. That same cozy atmosphere of doilies and nice upholstery greeted her as warmly as a campfire on a cool summer night. It could have used some more lighting, but that was to be expected with homes in Canterlot’s Lingerlight District. Older houses had that darker aesthetic.

Copper’s mom had an obsession with collecting ceramic elephants, it seemed. They cluttered every horizontal surface as if on parade.

“Go ahead and make yourself comfortable,” String said. “I’m sure she’ll be down in a few hours.” He laughed to himself and headed for the kitchen, where a homely sort of chaos stared back at Sunset through a bar window. Homely, meaning cluttered but still much cleaner than her kitchenette back at the university.

Sunset took a seat on the couch and propped herself up on a blue crocheted pillow. It had a snowflake-like pattern to it, and although a bit of the stuffing poked out of the middle, it was darn comfy.

A grey filly probably around fourteen wandered into the room. She had a snowy mane that fell about her shoulders in loose curls, and her eyes had that cold steel to them like String’s. She wore a purple slouchie despite the warm weather scheduled, and had a good four piercings in her left ear.

She had a silver flute for a cutie mark. That made her Whistle Wind, then. An up-and-coming “bad girl,” as Copper put it. “Did her proud,” even. Whistle sat down next to Sunset without so much as a hello, absorbed in a puzzle cube she twisted and snapped about in her magic, a cold blue that reminded Sunset of a frozen lake.

Sunset half raised a hoof, switched them, then looked around. She took a breath to break the ice.

“Whistle,” String called from the kitchen. The fridge opened, and the sound of clinking glass drifted into the living room. “Say hello to our guest.”

Whistle blinked and set down her puzzle cube between her hooves. She looked at Sunset with wide eyes, and she flicked an ear, just now noticing her.

“Hi,” she said.

“Hi,” Sunset said. “I’m Sunset—”

“Shimmer, yeah. Copper’s friend.” She looked Sunset up and down, then went back to her puzzle cube. “She talks about you a lot.”

“Copper talks about everypony a lot.”

Whistle snorted. “Uh-huh.”

Sunset raised an eyebrow at her. What was that supposed to mean?

“You like beer?” String said, standing in the doorway between the living room and kitchen. He frowned at the bottles in his magic—frozen-lake blue, same as Whistle’s—then at her. “You old enough for beer?”

Sunset grimaced. “I, uh, no… But even if I was, I don’t drink. Thanks, though.”

“I’ll take a beer,” Whistle said, eyes still locked on the puzzle cube.

“Like hell you will,” String replied, earning a smirk from Whistle. That smirk must run in the family. He popped the cap off a bottle and took a swig.

“Hey!” came Copper’s voice from the foyer hallway. She strode in and plopped down beside Sunset, opposite Whistle. She wore the prettiest little red hair clip to keep her bangs out of her eyes, and her mane in a French braid that draped over her shoulder. Her confident smile brought some much-needed sunshine into the room. “How’s it goin’?”

String frowned at Copper, then at the bottle he just opened. “Well, I’m not letting you go to waste…” he mumbled and took a deep swig.

“I’ll take that other one,” Copper said to String before Sunset could reply, pulling the second bottle out of his aura.

He yanked it back. “No you won’t. We were waiting on you.”

She stuck her tongue out at him. Back to Sunset: “So yeah, how’s it goin’?”

Sunset smiled. “Pretty good. Just kinda been hyping myself up for this for a while now, so I’m excited for it to finally be here.”

“Oh, we’ll make sure we get our fun in, don’t you worry.” She elbowed Sunset in the shoulder and winked.

Whistle snorted again.

A tan-colored filly who couldn’t have been older than seven poked her head out from the hallway door. That had to be Lily Rose. Oh, she was just the cutest thing. She wore her blonde mane flat on either side of her face, trimmed in neat, straight lines. She gasped when her eyes landed on Sunset, and she dashed over.

“You’re pretty!” Lily said, looking up at her with the brightest green eyes Sunset had ever seen—brighter than Copper’s even, and that was saying something.

Sunset laughed, blushing. “Well, hello to you, too. Are you Lily?”

“Uh-huh.” Her eyes shone like she was staring at her most favorite thing in the world. She glanced at Copper and giggled before looking back at Sunset.

“Lily,” String said. “Leave her alone.”

“But I wanna talk to Sissy’s friend.” She snapped back to Sunset. “Do you like bugs?”

Bugs? Um… That was a resounding no. They weren’t bad, nor did she have a gut fainting reaction to them the way some ponies did—she glanced at Copper—but she once had a bad run-in with a giant star spider as a filly and hadn’t been partial to creepy crawlies since.

“Of course!” Sunset said. “They’re all sorts of fun.” She put on the best fake smile she could, which was actually pretty easy with all of Lily’s contagious excitement.

Copper shot Sunset a barely restrained grin. She could smell a lie from a mile away, Sunset knew, but just seeing Lily beam like that was worth any Copper-centric consequence.

“What?” Sunset said. She ribbed Copper.

Copper ribbed her back. “You’re such a little shit, you know that?”

“Copper,” String said around the mouth of his beer bottle. “No swearing in front of your sisters.”

Whistle laughed without looking away from her puzzle cube. “Yeah, Copper, stop fuckin’ swearing.”

“Whistle!” String shouted.

Copper slapped Whistle’s puzzle cube out of her magic with a rolled-up magazine from the coffee table. “You’re not allowed to swear either, you little cocksleeve.”

“Cop—”

“What’s a cocksleeve?” Lily asked.

String put his face in his hoof and sighed.

Sunset laughed. Yep. This was definitely Copper’s family.

String gave Copper one last warning glance before sighing again. He levitated his empty beer bottle into the kitchen. “Well anyway, the gang’s all here. Mom’s busy at the office, so it’s just the five of us today.”

“Mom’s always busy at the office,” Whistle said. She got her puzzle cube to have one side all green and let out a groan.

Copper idly swatted at her puzzle cube with the magazine. “Yeah, ’cause somepony couldn’t make honors and get that scholarship she was supposed to.”

“Fuck off,” Whistle said, moving her cube away from the offending magazine. She swung at it with her hoof. “You’re the one doing fuck-all with your mane bullshit.”

“Will you two stop fighting for one second?” String said. “And if you swear one more time, I’m gonna zip-tie your mouth shut for the day.”

“She started it!” Whistle pointed at Copper.

String stepped forward with the classic Dad Stare that Sunset had learned to shrink away from as a filly. He spoke quietly but intensely: “We have a guest.”

Coppertone blew a raspberry and waved him off before tossing a hoof over Sunset’s shoulder and yanking her into a hug. “Please, Dad. Sunset’s family. If she can handle me, she can handle anything you guys throw at her.”

Sunset gave them an embarrassed smile. It was true though. Copper definitely was the instigator of the family.

“He’s all bark and no bite,” Copper whispered. “If you couldn’t tell.”

“Maybe,” Sunset whispered back. “But I’m not one for poking the bear.”

String grabbed his keys off a hook by the hallway door. “At any rate, we should get going. Come on. Don’t want to miss out on a decent spot this year.”

“We’re probly too late for that after how long Copper took,” Whistle said, setting her puzzle cube on the table and following him out. She threw a smirk at Copper over her shoulder. “You’d think she was getting ready for a date or something.”

“Oh, shut up, you,” Copper said. She waggled the magazine at Whistle before tossing it back on the coffee table. She smiled at Sunset. “One big, happy family, right?”

“One big, happy family,” Sunset said.

They headed out the door, Copper on Sunset’s left, Lily on her right.

“I found a beetle the size of my hoof yesterday,” Lily said. She stuck her hoof in Sunset’s face as if trying to show just how big it was. “You should have seen it!”

Sunset scrunched her nose, but forced out a smile. “That’s… cool.”

“Hey, can I ride on your back?”

“Lily,” String said. “Leave Sunset alone.”

“But Daaaddy…”

• • •

“There it is!” Lily said, gleefully hopping up and down on Sunset’s back. She pointed at the large Summer Sun Celebration banner up ahead.

Streamers and balloons strung together lamppost after lamppost, and the sound of laughter already reached across the final street separating them from Sunrise Field, the main greenspace for the festival.

Lily all but bounded off Sunset’s back and took off. “Come on!” she called over her shoulder.

“Lily, slow down!” String called. He started after her, but Copper put a hoof on his chest.

“We’ll get her,” she said, then turned to Sunset, grinning. “Come on, before he spoils the fun.”

She took off, and Sunset had no other choice. They passed beneath the welcome banner, and though there was no true boundary, it felt like they had crossed a threshold into a new world of laughter, the smell of fresh-cut grass, and all the carnival fare a pony could ask for.

Lily was already past the cotton candy stand a dozen meters ahead, and Copper made little effort to actually catch up. Knowing her, she wanted the extra distance between them and String to “get lost” and enjoy the pre-festival on her own terms. Not really Sunset’s style, but there was time for hanging out with Copper’s family later. Besides, this meant more time specifically with Lily.

They caught up with her at a seashell booth, whose glass display case boasted an array of necklaces and bracelets made of shells and bits of whittled driftwood. Lily leaned against it with her forehooves, face pressed against the glass.

Everything was technically closed until Celestia raised the sun to begin the festivities, but that didn’t stop her from scoring a free seashell necklace from the mare at the stand. One smile, and she melted the hearts of everypony around her.

At this rate, she’d be worse than Copper when she grew up.

They let her run adorably rampant about the main thoroughfare for a while. Lily made friends with no less than four foals, a dozen grown-ups, and an old stallion that Sunset was pretty sure used to be the superintendent for CSGU’s elementary grades.

Copper eventually decided that was enough limelight for one little filly, and they headed for the Dais of the Summer Sun.

“There you three are.” String pushed through the crowd, Whistle in tow, chewing what looked like bubblegum. “You need to stop running off on your own, Lily.”

“Sorry, Daddy.”

“How long ’til sunrise?” Whistle asked. She blew a bubble, and the snap! turned a number of heads around them.

“Where’d you get the bubblegum?” Copper asked. “Everything’s closed ’til the sun comes up.”

“Up your butt and around the corner. When’s sunrise? I want caramel corn.”

“Why, you gonna get that from up my butt, too?” Copper wiggled her flank at Whistle.

“Whistle, stop egging your sister on,” String said. “Copper, stop acting like a foal.”

Copper raised an eyebrow at him. “But I like acting like a foal. Life’s more fun that way.”

String grumbled, looking away and shaking his head.

Sunset giggled. She had a feeling his greying mane wasn’t from his years in the lab.

“Psst.” Lily tugged on Sunset’s mane.

Sunset leaned down so Lily could whisper in her ear.

“So what is a cocksleeve?”

Sunset went red in the cheeks. “Uh…”

String sighed. “Damn it, Copper, if she says that word one more time, I’m going to hang you by your tail from the weather vane.”

“Hey, don’t threaten me with a good time.”

He scowled at her. “I’m serious. You’ve been way out of line these last few weeks.”

“Tell that to Whistle! She’s the one who won’t stop getting on my nerves.”

Snap! went Whistle’s bubblegum. She sidled up beside Copper and chewed it loudly in her ear.

“Getting on what now?” Whistle asked.

“I’m gonna stick that in your mane if you don’t get it out of my face.”

“What’s the matter?” Whistle said, smirking. “I thought you liked sticky stuff in your face.”

Much to Whistle’s surprise, a frosty-blue aura wrapped around her from head to hoof, and String dragged her aside. He looked ready to live up to that threat about the weather vane.

Copper stuck her tongue out at Whistle and turned back toward the dais.

“But seriously,” Lily whispered to Sunset. “What is a cocksleeve?”

Sunset grimaced. “Uhh, why don’t you tell me about your favorite bugs instead?”

The smile on Lily’s face had Sunset practically expecting a dissertation, but a series of shadows flickered overhead to draw everypony’s attention toward the pre-dawn sky.

A column of pegasus Royal Guards circled above like vultures, and one by one they landed according to some grand design Sunset could only guess at. They formed a line separating the masses from a velvet runway leading from the nearby castle courtyard.

The crowd began cheering before anypony could see Celestia, but the moment she appeared, the cheer boiled into an excited roar.

And damn, was she a sight.

The sun waiting just below the horizon partially silhouetted her in a way that darkened the white of her coat but amplified the blues, pinks, and greens of her mane like light shining through a waterfall. She had her wings out, and like her mane the sun rimmed her feather tips in gold to evoke an otherworldly sense of awe. She surveyed the crowd, and the tiny smile on her lips sent shivers down Sunset’s spine.

Despite how relatively casual their relationship was, moments like this reminded Sunset that this mare walking toward the dais—this graceful, beautiful, powerful pony she knew as a mentor and role model—was Princess Celestia.

Lily tugged at Sunset’s mane again. “You’re the princess’s special student, right? Can we go see her?”

Go see Celestia? Right now? “Um, I’m not so sure that’s a good idea.”

Lily’s face drooped like a puppy told to go lie down. Oh, that face. How could she say no to that face?

“Okay, fine. But after the ceremony.”

If Lily’s face was impossible to say no to before, no word existed to describe it now. She practically vibrated with excitement.

Celestia took the final steps up to the dais, surrounded on three sides by the awaiting crowd. She swept her smile left to right, followed by her hoof.

Everypony went silent, save the murmurs of those too anxious for the coming festivities. Lily grabbed hold of Sunset’s leg and shook it. She had to stop being so adorable, or Sunset might just fall to pieces.

“Welcome, everypony, to this year’s Summer Sun Celebration.” Celestia’s voice boomed as if shouting into a megaphone, but somehow sounded just as natural and gentle as if speaking face-to-face. “I am delighted to be here with you all. I see many familiar faces, and many new ones as well.

“It is my duty and honor to remind everypony on this wonderful celebration, the first day of summer and the longest day of the year, that we all share in the bounty of our nation. Let us all take a moment to look to one another beside us and thank them for all they have done in making Equestria the prosperous land that it is.” She paused to allow everypony that opportunity.

Lily shook Sunset’s leg again. She wore the biggest smile and oh gosh was she too cute.

Copper, likewise, cuffed Sunset in the shoulder. She wore her trademark smile, the one that made Sunset feel all warm and happy inside.

“Now,” Celestia said. “Without further ado, let us welcome the sun and give thanks through song and celebration to the years behind us and the years ahead.”

And with that final announcement, she beat her wings to take flight. On cue, the sun leapt into the sky behind her to envelop her in its blinding light and bathe the crowd in her radiance.

The display was met with a thunderous stamping of hooves.

“Can we go now?” Lily said, hopping up and down.

Well, the official ceremony had ended, and Celestia was heading for the castle. Now probably was the best time. Just a quick “hi” and then back to the fun.

“Yeah, let’s go.”

She escorted Lily through the crowd, keeping one eye on her and the other on Celestia. Given Lily’s track record, she half expected her to take off and tackle Celestia’s legs in a hug.

The guards spotted them coming well before she got close, and they already formed up to stop them.

Luckily, Stone Wall was among Celestia’s escort detail and intervened before they caused a scene. He let them through with a smile.

“Sunset,” came Celestia’s voice. “It’s wonderful to see you. Niece of yours?” She nodded at Lily.

Sunset smiled. “Actually, this is Copper’s little sister, Lily Rose.”

Lily stopped moving the moment Sunset said her name. The way her eyes got all big and her jaw practically fell to the ground almost made Sunset laugh.

“Hello there, little one,” Celestia said, stooping down to meet Lily’s gaze. “Are you enjoying your Summer Sun Celebration?”

Lily was too awestruck to say anything. It was like looking back in time to when Sunset first met Celestia.

“You’re allowed to talk to her, Lily,” Sunset said and nudged her forward.

Lily hardly seemed to notice. She still hadn’t blinked since first laying eyes on Celestia. The light shimmered in her eyes as if she were seeing for the first time.

“Lily, what are you doing?” String pushed his way through the crowd, bowed to Celestia, and scooped up Lily in his magic. “I am so sorry, Your Highness. Sometimes I think her special talent is sneaking off when I’m not looking.”

Celestia laughed. “It’s quite alright… String Theory, was it? You work in research, correct?”

String flustered. “I, uh… yes! Yes, I do, Your Highness. Lead Catalytic Engineer, going on thirty years.”

“I remember when Blue Shift first hired you,” Celestia said. “You should have heard how proud he was to have another Manehattanite working with him.”

String blinked, and his voice went soft. “Wow, Blue Shift… That’s a name I haven’t heard in… ten? Twelve years?”

“He was a dear friend of mine,” Celestia said, “and I’m glad to see you carry on his legacy. I know he would be proud of you.”

“Thank you, Your Highness.”

Sunset stepped forward, eager to get her own few words in with Celestia. “That was a great speech, Princess.”

“Thank you, Sunset. I’m glad to see you here enjoying it with friends.”

Sunset shrugged. “They seem to know how to have fun. I’ll keep them around, I guess.”

Celestia chuckled. “They seem to be rubbing off on you as well. How is your coltfriend Doppler doing?”

“Coltfriend?” Lily snapped out of her Celestia-induced trance and looked up at Sunset.

Sunset smiled back. She brushed Lily’s mane and pulled her head into her chest. “Yeah.” To Celestia: “Pretty good, actually. He’s in Vanhoover on a co-op, though, so he won’t be back until August.”

“Three months is some time for a new couple to spend apart,” Celestia said. “I hope you won’t let the distance get between you.”

Sunset shrugged. “Eh, we write to each other at least once a week, so it’s not the worst thing in the world. It kind of sucks, but we’ll be fine.”

Lilly tugged on Sunset’s mane, a little harder than she needed to. “Well… well that’s okay, because you can play with Sissy instead!”

As if on cue, there was an argument over by the guards. They were hassling Copper, who it seemed had come up to join the group.

“It’s alright, Stone,” Sunset said. “She’s with us.”

He did a double take between them. “Oh, is this your Copper friend? Well heck, just say so.”

One of the other guards rolled his eyes. “Oh, sure, let’s just let ’em all through. Why are we even here?”

An excited-looking mare stepped up from the crowd. The guard’s scowl put her back a few paces.

Sunset gestured at Copper. “Princess, this is my best friend, Coppertone.”

Celestia gave her that trademark smile. “Ah, so you’re the mare I’ve heard so much about. It’s a pleasure to meet you.”

Copper didn’t reply immediately. She had that momentary lapse in thought everypony did when first meeting Celestia. Though, her ears fell back briefly, meaning she had passed that point and was now somewhere in the middle of figuring out what to say.

Was she nervous? Oh, she was so never going to hear the end of this.

“I hear you’re quite the mischief-maker,” Celestia said, not missing a beat.

It was fun watching her fill in the gaps of conversation other ponies left in her wake, now that Sunset knew where to look. It said a lot about just how accustomed to it Celestia was.

Copper blinked, and it looked like the hamster in her head had gotten back on its wheel. She smiled that easy smile of hers.

“I roll with the best of ’em, Your Highness.”

“I’m sure you have many stories to tell.”

“Oh, I could fill an entire afternoon with all the hijinks we’ve gotten into.” She threw a hoof over Sunset’s shoulder and yanked her in.

“Copper,” Sunset said.

“I would love to hear them someday,” Celestia said. “I do enjoy spending time with my subjects when I have the time.”

Wait, what?

“I’d be down for that,” Copper said.

Whoa, slow down a minute. Were they making lunch plans? After like, two seconds of conversation?

“Spontaneity is the mother of frivolity.” Celestia laughed and spread her wings. “I could shift a few things around. Would tomorrow at noon work for you?”

“Am I even allowed to say no?”

Celestia chuckled. “Of course you are, my little pony. I would never force somepony to do something they were uncomfortable with.”

Sunset gawked at them. “Well what if I’m uncom—”

“Then yeah, definitely.”

Celestia hmmed. “I look forward to seeing you then.” To String: “Next time you see him, say hello to Spark Plug for me, would you?”

“Of course.” String bowed.

Sunset watched Celestia leave in disbelief. “Did… you just make lunch plans with Celestia… to tell her embarrassing stories about me?”

Copper leaned against Sunset, faux-swooning. “It’s a date with destiny.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“What don’t you believe?” She ribbed Sunset. “That I just scored a lunch date with the princess, or that I just scored a lunch date with the princess and get to tell her all sorts of embarrassing things about you?”

“Yes, that! All of it!”

“Don’t you worry.” She waggled her eyebrows at Sunset. “I’ll make sure to tell her how loud you scream when you’re on Doppler’s—”

Sunset zipped Copper’s mouth shut with a Silencing Spell and turned away, grumbling. “Why did I even agree to come here with you?”

Copper lit her horn and undid the spell to blow a raspberry at Sunset. “Because we’re literally two halves of the same pony and you still don’t realize it.” Sunset rolled her eyes. She didn’t need to look to see that remarkably unflattering smirk plastered on Copper’s face.

“Yeah, you’re the messed-up half,” Sunset grumbled.

Whistle shoved her way through the gathering of ponies and cuffed String on the shoulder. “Great. Princess meeting over. Can we go get caramel corn now?”

“I want another seashell necklace,” Lily said.

“Another one?” Copper hefted the centerpiece shell hanging around Lily’s neck. “But this one’s so pretty.”

“I wanna give it to Mommy since she couldn’t come today.”

Yeah, Sunset was going to fall to pieces if this kid kept being too cute. “I think we can manage that.”

“Come on,” Whistle said, cycling her hoof in the universal “hurry up” motion. “They’re gonna run out of caramel corn like they did last year if you guys don’t stop talking and start moving.”

“Yeah, yeah, we’ll get you your stupid caramel corn,” Copper said. “Just can’t get enough of that salty sweetness in your mouth, can you?”

String glared at Copper. “One more thing like that out of you and you’re going home. You hear me? You too, Whistle.”

“What’s wrong with caramel corn?” Lily asked.

“Nothing,” Whistle said before String could turn a scowl to either her or Copper. “Dad just can’t hang. I learn from the best, by the way,” she added, side-eyeing Copper as if their conversation had never been interrupted. She tail-flicked her on the flank to punctuate that sentiment.

“Hey,” Copper said. “You’re not allowed to do that. That’s mine and Sunset’s thing. Isn’t that right, Sunset?” She tail-flicked Sunset on the flank.

Sunset yelped, to Whistle and Copper’s amusement. She rubbed her flank. “You two laugh it up. I’ll get you back.”

Copper made that sarcastic “o” face that used to boil Sunset’s blood when they first met. “Oh, listen to you. Still rubbing off on you, am I?”

“More than you think.” Sunset flicked her tail at Copper. If it could really be called a flick. More like a sad wave, a respectful brush with the tip of her tail.

Copper snorted. “You will learn in due time, young grasshopper.”

“Oh, shut up.”

• • •

The rest of the festival went about how Sunset expected. Lily got a dozen seashell necklaces, Whistle didn’t get her caramel corn, and Sunset and Copper practically collapsed through the front door after all that running around keeping up with Lily. String thankfully didn’t have to live up to any of his threats, and Copper and Whistle didn’t make her the butt of any more jokes.

Sunset never did get them back for the tail flick, though.

That evening, she and Copper lay in Copper’s bed, staring at the ceiling. The fan contributed its fair share to the lazy silence as the final rays of sunlight filtered through the blinds.

“Hey, Copper?” Sunset said.

“Yeah?”

“Why do we always end up lying next to each other at the end of the day like this?”

“Because I learn from the best.”

Sunset snorted. “I’m supposed to say you’re the worst before you can say that.”

“Okay, well now I learn from the best.” She elbowed Sunset in the shoulder.

Sunset laughed. “You’re such a dork, Copper.”

“I’m the dork?” She put a hoof to her heart in feigned insult. “You’re calling me the dork? You’re the dork here, Sunnybuns. Also, it’s ’cause I know you totally wanna have a slumber party with Lily, but she’d never go to sleep if we did that.”

“As true as that might be, that has nothing to do with it. Besides, you say that like we ever go to sleep when we have a sleepover.”

Copper blew a raspberry. “Sunset, please. The second I start stroking your mane, you’re out like a sorority mare after a keg stand.”

“What’s wrong with that?” Sunset ran her hooftip along an errant curl of her mane splayed out in front of her. “I like having my mane stroked. It’s comforting.”

Copper’s smirk relaxed into a gentle smile. “I’ve noticed. And I can’t say that I—”

The door cracked open, and in poked a pair of bright-green eyes.

“Lily,” Copper whispered, “go back to bed.”

Like any adorable little sister, Lily did the exact opposite. She scampered into Copper’s room, dragging in by her mouth a purple-and-orange dinosaur blanket made of tasseled felt. She hopped onto the bed and curled up between them.

“But I wanna have a sleepover with you guys too,” she said.

“Lily…” Copper huffed. “Alright, fine. But if Mom gets mad, it’s your fault.”

“Hee!” Lily snuggled into Sunset’s hooves and smiled up at her.

It was a good thing the day was over, because now Sunset was officially falling to pieces over this filly. She brushed Lily’s mane out of her eyes and wrapped herself around her new snuggle buddy.

Lily used the same coconut shampoo as Copper, Sunset noticed. Was there anything these two didn’t share?

“Hey now,” Copper said. She rolled onto her belly and pointed an accusing hoof at Sunset and Lily. “No matter how much you might like her, she’s mine.”

Sunset grinned. “Who are you talking to?”

“Both of you.” She jabbed Sunset in the shoulder.

Sunset jabbed her back in the chest, laughing. “You’re the worst.”

“Ha! I learn from the best.”

And there it was. Sunset giggled. Oh, Copper… don’t ever change.

“Goodnight, you two,” Sunset said, rolling onto her back and closing her eyes.

“You’re passing out already?” Copper asked. “You, the one who literally just said that we never go to bed when we have sleepovers.”

“We did a lot of running around today,” Sunset said. “I’m beat.”

A momentary silence passed where Sunset knew Copper was making—as Copper herself called it—her “bitch, please” face.

“You’re not allowed to fall asleep yet,” she said. “Don’t make me get a marker and draw dicks on your face.”

“You do that and I will legitimately kill you.”

“Love you too, Sunnybuns.”

Sunset snorted. She nuzzled into Lily’s mane and smiled as her unofficial teddy bear giggled and squirmed in her hooves. She closed her eyes and sighed.

Copper and her family really were the best thing in the world. The thought carried her aloft on the blurry, indistinct middle ground between wakefulness and sleep.

Sunset remembered twisting and tumbling through that hazy thoughtless space for an impossible-to-determine span of seconds to hours before the trappings of consciousness gently tugged her down toward an invisible floor and the vague understanding of this liminal space.

It had been a long while since she last had a lucid dream.

But this was different. Usually, lucid dreams were just as incongruent and nonsensical as regular dreams in every way but her level of awareness, but this was just… nothing—white emptiness as far as the eye could see.

She stood up to wander the void when that sixth sense got the hairs on the back of her neck standing on end. She turned, but there was nothing behind her.

There it was again, to her right. Something, some… presence tickled her ear and had her twisting about to see what it was that sent pins and needles up and down her spine.

The animalistic part of her brain told her to run in whatever direction “away” might be, but the logical part reminded her this was just a dream, and that the mosquito-kiss tickling her ear was little more than her imagination.

But that imagination gained direction, and this time when she turned her head, she saw a trail of smoke snaking along the ground. As it drew near, that ever-persistent mosquito-kiss changed tune, and Sunset could hear the beginnings of a voice amidst the hum. Gentle, sweet, feminine.

“Greetings, Sunset Shimmer. It is so wonderful to finally meet you.”

Author's Note

Onward and Upward!

This story has undergone changes. Some comments may no longer make sense or be relevant.

XIX - What Lies Beyond

“One last try,” Sunset said.

She fiddled with the little yellow dispersion crystal resting in a three-point wire stand. It sat slightly askew, but a nudge settled it snugly in place, pointed at the center of the mirror about five paces ahead of her. She then triple-checked that the focusing crystal just behind it aimed directly into the dispersion crystal, and with a slight twist, all was properly aligned.

There. Power, focus, disperse. If this went according to plan, it should draw out some small fraction of the mirror’s magic so they could study and, hopefully, reverse engineer it.

She took her spot behind the focusing crystal and gathered her magic. It trailed up the spiral of her horn, and with a careful flick, she fired it into the focusing crystal, which narrowed her beam to a hair’s thickness. It shot into the dispersion crystal, whose oval shape perfectly matched that of the mirror.

With her horn pointed at the crystal, Sunset couldn’t see the mirror or how the dispersion crystal evenly spread the spell over the mirror’s surface. Rather, she knew it was happening. One didn’t simply dive right into a set-up this precise without testing it a dozen times on the wall first. The deep amber glow pooling around her hooves was merely a formality at this point—her spell telling her that all proceeded as intended. Not that “as intended” was easy.

The strain of her Attunement Spell quickly got the better of her, and it petered out to leave her panting like a dog. She wiped the sweat off her brow, knowing without even looking that it damn well didn’t work.

“Maybe it needs a more concentrated microcrystalline gel,” String said over her shoulder. “Or you might have to cool down the mirror in order to better facilitate the transfer of magic.”

Sunset slanted her mouth. She already had the most concentrated catalytic gel she was comfortable dealing with, but there was truth to that second suggestion. Although chemical reactions increased at higher temperatures due to the random vibration of molecules and magic worked by initiating those reactions, magic transfer worked conversely, as too much of that same random vibration disrupted the flow of magic. It was about finding the sweet spot, which unfortunately varied depending on the spell make-up and the material under study.

Sunset leaned around the iron tripod holding up the focusing crystal to stare at the mirror. It didn’t so much as shimmer, twinkle, or sparkle after all their attempts to coax out its magic.

There was magic, though. There was so much of it. She could feel the energy radiating from the mirror whenever she sat still beside it and closed her eyes, and it tingled against the tip of her horn whenever she stared at her reflection.

“What’re you thinkin’?” String asked.

Sunset slanted her mouth to one side. “I don’t know. We’ve tried an Empowerment Spell, reversing the aetheric resonance, and now an Attunement Spell, and nothing’s worked.”

She couldn’t bring herself to say it out loud, but she was stumped. Not that she didn’t appreciate a good challenge, but she couldn’t be stumped. She wasn’t allowed to be stumped. She was Celestia’s star pupil.

They could try a stronger catalyst in the microcrystalline gel or lowering the temperature, but honestly, she doubted that would change anything. It was almost as if it were a regular old mirror. That thought would have plagued her time and again if she hadn’t felt the thrum of magic herself.

Who knew, maybe it was sentient and just playing a prank on her. Wouldn’t that be something?

“Well,” String said, scratching his head. “Whatever the case, we’ve been at this for a good six hours. We should leave it for tomorrow.”

“But why? We haven’t figured anything out yet, and it’s been two weeks since I started.” Sunset threw on a pout for good measure, wilted ears and all.

String threw his head back and laughed. “Sunset, I have too many daughters for an amateur pout like that to work on me.”

“Wha— I, uh…” Sunset pinned her ears back and blushed furiously.

“Besides, sometimes your best inspiration hits you when you’re doing the dishes.”

Sunset opened her mouth to say something, but fell short. She crooked her ears and tilted her head.

“Come on.” String cuffed her on the shoulder. “Let’s take a break for today.”

Sunset stared at the mirror a moment longer before giving a defeated sigh. Shoulders slumped, she fell in line.

He gave her a reassuring pat on the back. “Don’t worry about it, Sunset. This is how most research goes. You’ll figure it out. One way or another, you learn something new.”

Sunset couldn’t bring herself to nod, but she slanted her mouth in semi-agreement. He wasn’t wrong, but it didn’t help much.

They left the research labs through the front entrance, following on the coattails of the last stragglers keen on getting their own final tests in for the day. String got a few nods and farewells in the halls, but for the most part, Sunset kept her eyes on the floor.

It just wasn’t like her to not succeed. She hadn’t failed—that didn’t happen until she truly threw in the towel—but to lack the barest hint of progress was so unlike her.

She hadn’t given up, no, but with every passing day, that terrible thought rose up in her throat like last night’s meal. Was this something she couldn’t do? Had she finally lost? Was the great Sunset Shimmer finally and truly stumped?

“You want me to walk you up, or are you good here?” String said. “These old knees can’t do stairs as well as they used to.”

Sunset looked up at him, startled. A quick glance around, and Sunset realized they were already in front of her dormitory. Back to him, she threw on a casual smile.

“Oh, no. I’m okay, thanks.”

He wore an easy smile, the same one he wore when they first met. He had said a few times that he thought of her as his fourth daughter. The one that “turned out alright,” he would jokingly say with a far-off smile, one she knew fondly saw Copper somewhere in the distance.

He felt that way about Sunset even before they met. Said the way Copper talked about her, she felt like part of the family from day one of their first semester. And if she were honest with herself, the way she had gotten to know him these last few weeks, he felt like more of a father than her own dad.

He nodded, his gaze drifting off toward the setting sun behind her. “It’s getting late. You get some sleep, okay? Don’t beat yourself up about this.”

Sunset giggled. She wasn’t exactly happy, but she’d picked up a thing or two about platitudes from Copper.

“I’ll try not to,” she said. “Not too much, anyway.”

He raised an eyebrow at that. Something jumped to the tip of his tongue, but Sunset beat him to the punch with a quick laugh.

“I’m just kidding,” Sunset said. “I’m fine. Really.” She gave him a hug for good measure.

String seemed happier when she pulled away. “Well, alright. You take care.”

She watched him go until he made it around the bend. The summer heat had died away sometime that evening, and as the dormitory shadows crept across the sidewalk, a cool breeze swept through her mane. She sighed, entered the dorms, and trudged up the stairs.

She unlocked and threw open her door. Copper was still at home for the summer, so she had the place to herself. No matter how often she wished for a break from Copper’s shenanigans, at times like this, all she wanted was her best friend to hold her and stroke her mane.

She trudged into her room and flopped onto the mattress, heaving a deep sigh. Even after all these weeks, the mattress still smelled like Copper’s coconut shampoo—a consequence of her hanging out with Sunset during study sessions. She turned over and stared at the popcorn ceiling.

What even was all this? This research… What Celestia would use the mirror for other than “friendship” was anypony’s guess.

Sunset shook her head. That didn’t matter. Celestia counted on her. She had entrusted her with this research—no, this mission. There was a reason she asked Sunset and nopony else.

Sunset curled up beneath her bedsheets and pulled a phoenix plushie close—a gift from Doppler last week, from some gift shop up in Vanhoover. She stroked its crest feathers. When she squeezed it against her chest, she imagined it chirruping like Philomena.

This mirror… it was unlike anything she had worked on before. Hopefully String was right. Hopefully inspiration would strike eventually.

Eventually.

• • •

Sunset was in Nocturne’s dream again. She could tell before even opening her eyes. They had a special feeling to them, as if an energy leapt in from the Dreamscape itself to lend a sort of static to the air.

Though, there was something different about it today. A sort of… apprehension. It clung to Sunset like water after a bath.

Nocturne sat in the middle of the white emptiness as always, but this time, her wings lay splayed out on either side, and her head hung to the floor, hidden amidst the clinging shadows. She trembled like a leaf in the wind.

Sunset took a hesitant step forward. “Nocturne?” Sunset said.

Nocturne flinched, snapping her wings up in front of her as if expecting Sunset to strike her, but relaxed back to that pitiful posture.

“Nocturne, what’s wrong?” Sunset asked, coming around in front of her.

Nocturne raised her head, tears streaming down her face. “He is gone.”

“What?” The hairs on Sunset’s nape stood on end. “What do you mean? Who’s gone?”

Nocturne shut her eyes and looked away. “My beloved Star Swirl.”

Sunset’s mouth fell open as she tried to find the words her mind struggled to keep up with, and a tingling chill traveled down her spine. “What happened to him? Is he hurt? Is he…?”

Sunset put a hoof on Nocturne’s shoulder. She felt the tension in the muscles beneath her skin.

“Nay,” Nocturne said. “He lives. He is, however, gone from my world. From my life. I, I knew not his motives for entering the Dreamscape, but… I had never once entertained the audacity of elopement.”

“Elopement? You mean…”

“Indeed.” Nocturne’s eyes found Sunset’s hoof on her shoulder, then fell to the ground. Her wings trembled at her sides. “My Star Swirl loves another.”

Sunset felt her grasp on Nocturne’s shoulder slipping. She blinked away the shock and looked around for something, anything, but they were alone in an empty dream, like always. Just the two of them. If it wasn’t for Sunset, Nocturne would be truly alone.

“I found them together, he and that… that whore.” She shook with rage, and the shadows wafting from her hooves snaked up in front of her and wound together as if strangling an invisible pony. Sunset pretended to ignore that.

Nocturne breathed herself calm and hung her head. “It felt different. ’Twas an artificial dream, one he must have constructed ere his escape from the mortal realm and why it was so difficult for me to find. A mare on her deathbed, saved from eternal slumber through artificial consciousness. He… he had planned it from the beginning. It is the only way…”

“It’s…” Sunset started. “I-it’s going to…”

What, be okay? Who was she to say that? Nocturne had spent the past thousand years looking for the pony she loved only to find out he ran off with another mare.

“I’m here for you,” she said. It was all she could say. She had no idea what a friend should do in this situation. At the very least, though, saying that felt right.

It brought a smile to Nocturne’s face, however briefly. “Thank you, Little Sunset. That is… more than I deserve.”

“More than you deserve? How can you say that?”

Nocturne’s gaze fell to the wayside. “Because I was foolish enough to believe. I was stupid enough to toss aside everything in the name of a love that no longer was.”

“Being in love doesn’t make you stupid. And being in love isn't inherently wrong, either.”

Silence fell between them for a beat, and it wasn’t until Nocturne’s eyes swung around that a smile just barely pricked up the corners of her lips. “I know that what you say comes from the heart, and I thank you with all of my own. But all the same, I do not know if I can bear this hardship. Not as I am.”

Nocturne wiped away her tears, and the way she trembled had Sunset worried she might fall to pieces at any moment. “I do not wish to burden you with such knowledge, Little Sunset, but you are all that I have now…”

Sunset threw her hooves around Nocturne to give her the biggest hug she could. Nocturne’s fur was colder than ice, but that was a small price to pay for the slow, steady brush of Nocturne’s wings along her shoulder blades and gentle hooves returning the gesture.

“I’m here for you,” Sunset said. “Until I wake up. Any night that you need me.”

A moment of silence, then Nocturne’s hooves held her tighter. They stayed like that for a good minute. Sunset was unsure when she should let go, but figured it was better to let Nocturne decide that.

When Nocturne finally pulled away, she cleared her throat. A hint of embarrassment ran across her face, and her ears fell back.

“I am sorry for that moment of weakness. I am not normally one for emotion.”

Sunset’s heart twisted in her chest. It hurt to think Nocturne felt that way. Even after so long away from other ponies, she couldn’t quite open up. But this was a step in the right direction. She would help her new friend yet.

“You can always talk to me about things.” She pressed herself into Nocturne’s chest again. “You don’t have to deal with whatever worries you by yourself. Not anymore.”

A hoof brushed a strand of mane behind Sunset’s ear. “I thank you, Little Sunset. A-and, if I may, I would ask of you one small favor in that regard.”

“Name it.”

“I wish to teach you a spell, one that you may use to find me, wherever I may be.”

A new spell? Sunset loved learning new spells.

“Okay,” she said. “How do I do it?”

Nocturne wrapped a wing around Sunset and held her close. The intimacy was chilling, yet oddly exhilarating.

“Whensoever you are wont to see me, all you must do is close your eyes, and then—” She touched her horn to Sunset’s, and a cold sensation like a drafty window wrapped down her horn and into her forehead. “—simply think of me, and I shall find you.”

Sunset let the spell reach into her, all the way to the tips of her hooves. She memorized the sensation, from the drafty chill to the quickened pitter-patter of her heart, and pressed her head into Nocturne’s chest. She smelled of ozone and what Sunset imagined stardust would smell like.

Nocturne brushed her mane, and with her wings wrapped around Sunset, it was the most natural feeling in the world, even more so than when Celestia did it.

“I will always be here for you, Little Sunset.”

Sunset nodded into her chest. “Me, too.”

Nocturne gave her a final squeeze, and they parted. “Now, let us speak of lighter topics. How are you faring in the real world?”

Sunset’s ears fell to the wayside. She pulled away from Nocturne and frowned at her hooves. She loved this dream place she spent with Nocturne because it was an escape from the real world and its problems. But she supposed she couldn’t keep away forever, and Nocturne loved hearing about what she was up to. Still, it didn’t make it any more fun to think about right now.

“Okay, I guess,” Sunset said.

“Your countenance says otherwise.” Nocturne regarded her with a searching gaze. It was impossible to tell what she was thinking, but the tone of her voice leaned toward concern.

“Well, it’s just…”

Was it okay to tell Nocturne about the mirror? Celestia asked her to keep it confidential, but did that count when it came to dream-walking ghost ponies? Telling her about it couldn’t get back to the real world, so real-world confidentiality couldn’t be broken.

Besides, they were having trouble with it. Maybe Nocturne had some advice, given her experience. Who knew what she might know?

“There’s this mirror. It’s this thing Celestia wants me to fix for her from…” She perked up a bit. “From about when you were around, actually.”

“A mirror?”

“Yeah, it’s like a portal or something. To another world.”

Nocturne stared into the distance. Her eyes danced back and forth between visions only she could see.

“I believe… Yes, Star—” She swallowed a lump in her throat and heaved a deep breath. “Star Swirl spoke of such a thing. A portal, activated by the full moon every thirty cycles.”

Sunset perked forward. “Really? It’s that simple?”

“As far as I recollect. However, what lies beyond is what concerns me.”

“What do you mean?” Sunset’s ears fell back, and she took a hesitant step forward. “Celestia said there was a world that wasn’t ready for friendship back then or something.”

Nocturne shook her head. “I do not know of such things, only that there is magic to be found there.”

Sunset turned her head slightly and furrowed her brow, eyes locked with Nocturne. “How much magic?”

“Unfathomable magnitudes, from what I gathered through Star Swirl’s words, and what little of it I have come across in the Dreamscape. However, he spoke of it darkly.”

“You’ve found it yourself in the Dreamscape?”

Nocturne shifted on her haunches. She seemed almost embarrassed to talk about it.

“There is… anomalous magic dispersed throughout the Dreamscape, some of which matched his descriptions of this mirror. I once tried sussing them out; however, I could not reach beyond whatever span they bridge. Their magics resisted my efforts, and, embarrassingly enough, frustration got the better of me and I lost interest.”

Sunset stared at the ground. An unfathomable magnitude of magic. What did Celestia want it for?

“Do you…” she said. “Do you think there’s enough to…”

“To what, Little Sunset?”

Sunset scuffed at the ground. She raised her eyes up to Nocturne. “To bring you out of the Dreamscape?”

Nocturne’s mouth opened just a hair, and she brought a hoof up. “Bring me out? Do you mean, return me to the waking world? As a living, breathing pony? I… I do not know. H-he spoke of power unrivaled, of life and leverage over its machinations, but…”

She cast her gaze into the distance and her wings to the floor. The shadows wafting from her underbelly whooshed outward in the draft and dissipated as they brushed past Sunset.

“Could it be possible…?” Nocturne whispered. She looked Sunset in the eye. A glimmer of hope—no, more than a glimmer, a spark—flashed in the depths of her eyes. “If such magic could be harnessed, I could…”

That wordless hope sent a rush of emotions through Sunset’s heart and a smile from ear to ear. This broken, time-lost pony, this friend of coincidence that she could save. Not even for Celestia’s friendship crap, but actually truly save, because Sunset wanted to.

Because that’s what friends did.

Was this, maybe, the stuff Celestia was trying to get her to learn? Maybe friendship wasn’t so hard after all.

“You can count on me,” Sunset said.

For the first time, Nocturne smiled wholly and truly. Not just out of regular, old happiness, but from genuine… what would the word be? Excitement? No, elation.

She swept Sunset off her hooves and spun her around, laughing all the while. The way Nocturne held her felt more real than anything Sunset had felt before.

Nocturne’s happiness was infectious, and Sunset found herself laughing, too. She put her hooves against Nocturne’s chest and let the moment carry her aloft.

After the moment passed, Nocturne set her down. There was an excited, anxious look in her eyes, one Sunset couldn’t quite place. Her ears went back, and she leaned in to kiss Sunset on the lips.

Blood rushed to Sunset’s cheeks, and the tips of her ears went hot as fire. She almost didn’t realize what was going on until she pushed herself away. The first breath she let out frosted in the space between them, and the next breath she drew left a cold tingle of wintergreen on her lips.

“I-I’m sorry,” Nocturne said. She shrunk in on herself, wings clutched tight at her sides. “I do not know what came over me.”

“No, it’s…” Sunset brushed her mane behind her ear and she let out an embarrassed laugh.

“Truly, I am sorry. You did not deserve such trespass.”

Sunset flicked her ears back, forward, and then shook her head. Part of her couldn’t stop smiling, and the blush on her cheeks refused to go away. All the while, the sharp taste of wintergreen scented every breath she took.

“No, really,” Sunset said. “It’s fine. I… Y-you’ve been—”

“’Tis no excuse.” Nocturne looked disappointed in herself and wiped a fresh bout of tears from her eyes. “Please, let us forget it happened.”

Nocturne closed her eyes and sent a pale-blue streak of magic spiraling up her horn. The blank world around them shifted like one of those topsy-turvy corridors in a carnival house, until the blurry images of buildings and streets came into focus. Laughter and shouting grew like somepony spinning up a gramophone, and as Sunset turned about to see everything taking shape, the sights and sounds of Manehattan filled in around her.

“Please…” Nocturne wore a pleading, hopeful smile. “Show me again?”

Sunset looked back and forth between Nocturne’s eyes. The emotion within them tugged at her the same way Copper’s often did whenever they went adventuring through Canterlot’s shopping district.

Sunset threw her hooves around Nocturne. “Anything for a friend.”

They shared that hug for a healthy minute before heading into the toy store. They saw the sights and laughed their share of laughs, watching the Manehattanites go about their busy, bustling lives. They watched the ships at port dock and set sail, and had ice cream before dinner. The stars shone bright enough that even the nightlife couldn’t chase them away, and they spent hours atop the tallest skyscraper counting those very same stars and pointing out silly shapes in the sky.

The dream was as fantastic this time as it was the last, yet Sunset’s mind lingered elsewhere through it all. When the stars blurred together with her slow slip into consciousness, just before Sunset opened her eyes, a soft touch like the lightest winter snow pressed against her cheek.

“Until next time, Little Sunset,” Nocturne whispered.

The room lay quiet, and Sunset stared at the ceiling. The sound of her heartbeat overtook the silence of the room, and with unfocused eyes, she brought up a hoof to trace her lips and the subtle but still-present taste of wintergreen.

• • •

What a curious coincidence, this mirror; what long-forgotten memories this junction brings.

Do you remember, Sister? I do.

I remember the hope in your eyes of a new world to befriend, the prosperity such kinship would bring, the fire and fury they met us with. By whose counsel do you again seek this fool’s errand? Or is this of your own design—yet more proof that you are unfit for the mantle you wear?

No matter. I daren’t squander this that Divine Providence has laid before me. Dearest Sister, I shall humor you.

As for you, Little Sunset, you have failed this your third test and thus you shall learn:

Ever alluring is the single red rose. So beautiful, so perfect. ’Tis coveted above all of life’s gifts, yet woe to the pony who dares grasp it by the stem.

Let me help you grasp it, Little Sunset. Let us show the world the color you bleed.

XXIII - Misguided Conviction

Almost.

Sunset scribbled down a few notes before sweeping up the mess of crystal shards. She had gotten her frame to last almost twenty seconds, thanks to testing different frame variants. It still needed an oval shape so as to fit the mirror itself, but like a temperamental fashion diva trying on different outfits, it seemed almost to prefer particular variations in design. The wavy style seemed the most promising so far. She chalked it up to resonance frequency, but that was testing for a later date.

She set her clipboard aside, eyes focused on the mirror. The longing tugged at her more with each passing day. I’ll get you out.

And she would. She could feel the magic now, the subtle upwelling of energy spilling out from the mirror, like the rising of the ocean tide. It brushed against her coat whenever she stood very quietly next to it, closed her eyes, and thought of Nocturne.

This was it—the coming full moon. It was now or never. I’ll get you out.

There was a knock at the door. Who the hay could that be? String was off for the weekend, and nopony ever interrupted her, as per Celestia’s orders.

Sunset opened the door, and there stood Celestia in all her splendor and then some, thanks to the skylight.

Sunset practically jumped out of her skin. “Princess!” she said, bowing.

“Sunset. My most faithful student.” Celestia strode gracefully into the room. She smiled at Sunset, at the mirror, then back at Sunset. “I trust things are going well with your project?”

Sunset offered her a sheepish smile. “M-mostly. I’ve gotten pretty much everything worked out except the frame.”

“Hmm,” Celestia said. She stepped up to the mirror for a closer inspection. “You’ve been working hard on this, I see.”

Sunset scuffed the floor. “Well, when the princess herself gives you an assignment, you kind of have to give it your best shot, right?”

“Indeed. And how is your assignment with Doppler going?” She turned an errant eye Sunset’s way.

Oof.

“I, uh…” Sunset said. “Yeah, I don’t know about, uh… us.”

“May I ask why?” She sat down beside the blast shield, her eyes wandering its scuffs and dents.

“I just… I don’t know.”

“Does he know?”

Sunset winced. He might have suspected it by now. She hadn’t replied to his letters in the last two weeks, and his had gotten less detailed and heartfelt, accordingly.

“Not… really? I mean, he might, but…” Sunset bit her lip. She’d been so focused on the mirror that she hadn’t put any effort into keeping things going with Doppler.

Not that dating him was part of Celestia’s assignment or anything. The phrase “extra credit” came to mind in the way Copper had brain-wormed her so many times and she really didn't need that sort of quipping right now, brain.

But if Sunset were honest with herself, she had no desire to keep things going with him, friendship or otherwise. Every time she licked her lips, she could still taste that wintergreen chill.

“There is nothing wrong with falling out of love or growing apart from friends,” Celestia said, “and I am happy you gave both a try. But I’m worried it might be a symptom of you taking this research project a little too seriously.”

“What do you mean ‘too seriously’? You told me to do this. When you tell somepony to do something, they have to take it too seriously.”

“I did ask you, and that may be true. But there is such a thing as overcommitting oneself. I’ve been keeping a close eye on you these last few weeks, Sunset.” She raised Sunset’s chin with a wingtip and looked her in the eyes. “You’ve hardly slept. I’d hoped it was only temporary, but this has gone on for too long.”

It felt like a stone had fallen in the pit of Sunset’s stomach. She could tell where this conversation was heading, and her mouth felt dry.

“What’s wrong with wanting something?” Sunset asked.

“Nothing. It’s when want becomes need and obsession takes hold that I fear for your well-being.”

“My… My well-being?” She could hardly parrot Celestia’s words. This couldn’t be happening. It couldn’t.

Celestia raised her chin slightly in that way she did when making an executive order. But there was an empathy in her eyes, that motherly sort of “this hurts me more than it does you.”

“Sunset,” she said. “I would like for you to postpone your research on the mirror, effective immediately.”

A cold chill rippled down Sunset’s back, and she shook her head in disbelief. “I… I, I. No…”

“No?” Celestia raised an eyebrow at Sunset.

Sunset shifted uncomfortably on her hooves. Her mouth fell open but she couldn’t find her voice. Was this a joke? This couldn’t be happening. This couldn’t be happening!

She felt dizzy. The world spun around her and her hooves refused to keep her steady. She needed air. Like a drowning pony reaching for a faraway surface, she saw her chance to save Nocturne slipping away. Her throat cinched up, and she could feel the tears beading at the corners of her eyes.

“You can’t,” she choked out.

“Sunset…” Celestia stepped forward, hoof outstretched to brush Sunset’s mane behind her ear, but Sunset jerked away before she could touch her. Celestia shied away, the concern on her face growing more pronounced. “Sunset, please tell me what is going on. This is unlike you.”

Sunset stared teary-eyed at the floor. Should she tell Celestia about Nocturne? She had mentioned her before, and Celestia seemed warm to the idea of who Nocturne was. But what if Celestia didn’t like what Nocturne was?

What did it matter? If she didn’t give Celestia a reason, she’d pull her from the project. It was now or never.

“I can’t.” Sunset felt her hooves trembling. “I can’t quit. Somepony… somepony is depending on me.”

“What do you mean? Who is?”

Sunset swallowed the lump in her throat. “M-my friend. Nocturne.”

“Your friend from the Summer Sun Celebration?” Celestia asked, to which Sunset nodded. Her tone changed from concern to guarded curiosity. “What does she have to do with the mirror?”

“It’s… it’s the only way I can save her.”

A momentary silence fell between them as Celestia stared daggers into her. She kept her chin raised.

“Sunset. Explain.”

Sunset rubbed a hoof up and down her foreleg. “Sh-she’s the one who came up with the idea of using the mirror. There’s magic on the other side, like you said. And-a-and if I can get it and bring it back, I can rescue her from the Dreamscape.”

Realization dawned on Celestia, how her eyes went just a bit wider as she stared into some unknowable distance. Was… was that fear? But Celestia wasn’t afraid of anything.

“Sunset.” Her voice rang with an almost desperate tone. “Where exactly did you meet Nocturne?”

Sunset cowered like a dog beneath its master. Celestia never talked to her like this. Did she do something wrong?

“I was… in a dream. She came to me in a dream, that night at Copper’s house.”

Celestia closed her eyes and took a pained breath. Her wings twitched at her sides.

“Does Coppertone know about Nocturne?” Her voice was level—unnervingly so, like she struggled to keep any emotion out if it. Celestia only got like this when something bad happened.

Sunset laid her ears back and lowered her head. “No…?”

When Celestia opened her eyes, there was a hardness to them. “Sunset. You must listen to me. Do not speak to Nocturne again.”

A hollow sinking feeling overtook Sunset. “W-wha… no. No, I—”

“Do not question me. If she tries to talk to you again, come to me immediately.”

Sunset fidgeted. “What do you mean?”

“Sunset, if what you say is true, she is not who she says she is.”

What? Nocturne wouldn’t lie. She was Sunset’s friend. She was… she wanted to be more than friends.

“Sunset.” Celestia stood over her, wings fanned. The sunlight streaming through the skylight cast her in a dangerous glow. She was not smiling.

Sunset shrank beneath her shadow. “I don’t… I, I don’t understand.”

“Sunset, I need you to promise me.”

It felt like her world was falling apart around her. “But, how can I promise you something without understanding what I’m promising? What’s wrong with Nocturne? She’s my friend…”

“She is not a friend, Sunset. Lu—” Celestia paused to gather herself. She folded her wings and closed her eyes. A deep breath—in, then out. “She does not have your best interests at heart. Sunset, please promise me you will not speak to her again. You must trust me that this is a dangerous pony.”

This wasn’t fair. This… this wasn’t right. Nocturne hadn’t done anything wrong. Celestia had no right or reason to do this. Just thinking about it doubled up the knot in Sunset’s throat.

“I, I can’t. Not if you don’t tell me what’s going on.”

Celestia stared at her for a long time. Her brows were creased, but not in anger. It was as if she herself were pleading with Sunset: please don’t make me say it, please don’t make me remember. She took a deep breath and looked away.

“A long time ago, Nocturne, as you know her, ruled side by side with me. I loved her as… as a sister, and she loved me in return. But the ponies we ruled over didn’t appreciate her hard work like they did mine, and chose to enjoy my rule more than hers. She grew to resent them, and me as well.

“I ignored the signs, and… when I finally confronted her, things escalated, and I was left with no choice but to banish her to the moon.” She stared into the far wall like she did the stained glass in the astronomy wing whenever they toured the castle.

“I believed that doing so would keep her from harming anypony else. But if she is speaking to you in your dreams, then I worry what she may be planning and just what kind of influence she still holds in the dream realm.”

Sunset’s jaw dropped. “You banished her to the moon? You mean she’s the Mare in the Moon? But that’s just a story meant to scare foals.”

“All legends come from some shred of truth, Sunset. It happened almost a thousand years ago, but she was very much a real pony like you and me.”

That squirming, aching feeling gripped her heart again. It couldn’t be true. Nocturne couldn’t be evil. The pony in her dreams was nothing like those stories.

Nocturne was kind, compassionate—shy, even. She had her outbursts, but they came from excitement and hope, and anything outside of that was because she’d been alone for so long. Anypony would lose their grasp of social norms like that.

“But what about Star Swirl?” Sunset asked. “She was in love with Star Swirl.”

A scowl overtook Celestia, and it felt as if the room itself darkened beneath the shadow of an eclipse. “She was not in love with Star Swirl. Star Swirl was our mentor and teacher. Anything she might say to the contrary is a lie!”

The hardness of her eyes relaxed, and she sighed again, looking away. “I’m sorry, Sunset. I didn’t mean to yell. But I need you to understand. I need you to promise me you will avoid Nocturne in the future.”

Sunset couldn’t look her in the eye. Everything about this felt so wrong. This wasn’t the princess she knew, nor did anything she say make sense. It couldn’t be true. She felt the tear running down her cheek before realizing it was hers.

“Sunset…”

Before Celestia could reach out to her, Sunset shook her head, swallowed, then nodded. “I’m okay, Princess… Whatever you say.”

Sunset stumbled past Celestia and out the door. She walked in a daze through the research hall, only vaguely hearing the voices of passing ponies. They might have been talking to her, but all she could think about was Nocturne.

Nocturne. The wonderful, amazing, powerful, beautiful pony in her dreams. She couldn’t be evil. A pony as wonderful and kind as her simply couldn’t be.

But the look in Celestia’s eye told a different story. It was almost… vengeful.

How could Celestia feel that way about somepony like Nocturne? Had she really been evil once?

She had dabbled in soul magic by her own admission, but she did that for Star Swirl’s sake. That didn’t make her evil. Misguided, surely, but not evil. But… was she truly in love with Star Swirl, or was that all make-believe? Or worse, was Celestia the one lying?

That got her heart squirming and wishing for the answers to make sense of it all. Whatever the truth, it couldn’t be as bad as Celestia made it out to be. It was just a misunderstanding. Nothing more. They needed to meet in person, talk it out. Celestia always went on about sharing her feelings and being personable. That’s all they needed, and then she would see how wonderful Nocturne really was.

Sunset stumbled home with the ceaseless whirlwind of thoughts in her head. Somewhere in the middle of it, she stood in her living room before realizing she never pulled her keys out of her saddlebags, which meant she hadn’t even locked the door on the way out that morning.

Maybe Celestia was right. Maybe she was getting too absorbed in this project.

Sunset gritted her teeth before screaming at the top of her lungs. She grabbed a glass of water off the countertop and threw it as hard as she could at the far wall. It shattered into a thousand pieces, and the water left a violent, dark splatter down the wall.

She panted, her legs trembling as if she had sprinted a mile. The vase of daffodils on the coffee table caught her eye. Oh, Copper, that piece of…

Ugh!

Copper ratted on her. There was no other explanation. The timing was too perfect. Not even a day after their little argument in the research lab and here Celestia was, pulling the rug out from beneath her.

She picked up the vase and spun it around in her magic. She thought about smashing it. Just smash the whole damn room apart. What’d it matter anymore? After all she went through, all the hard work she put into the mirror, all of it down the drain. All thanks to Copper.

She slammed it back down on the coffee table. As much as she wanted to, she didn’t have the energy.

Tears in her eyes, Sunset stormed off to her room and flopped onto the bed. The sheets were cool and soft, and they reminded her of Nocturne. She sniffled.

Oh, Nocturne… what were they going to do? How could she complete the mirror in time for the next full moon if Celestia forbid her fro—

“Sunset?”

Sunset caught a gasp in her throat. Behind her, in the living room, she heard a pair of familiar, delicate hoofsteps.

Copper came around the corner, her brow furrowed in concern. She glanced over her shoulder at the shattered glass by the far wall, then back at Sunset.

“Are you crying? What’s wrong?”

What’s wrong? Oh, she had the gall to say that.

“How dare you!” Sunset shouted. She rolled out of bed and stomped toward Copper. “How dare you rat on me!”

Copper retreated backward into the living room. “Sunset? Wh-what are you talking about?”

“You told Celestia that I brought you to the lab.”

“I didn’t tell her anything!” She bumped into the couch, her tail bunching up over her flanks.

“Don’t you lie to me. You told her I wasn’t okay—”

“You aren’t!” Tears welled up in Copper’s eyes. “I don’t know what’s so important about this research, but it’s destroying you. Just look at yourself!”

“No, you’re the one who destroyed me. You’re the one who always has to be perfect and beautiful and take up the spotlight.”

Copper’s breathing turned frantic, and she didn’t seem to know what to do with her hooves. She shook her head the tiniest bit.

“What does that have to—”

“You shut up! You were always making fun of me. You were always putting me down and making me feel small with your snide jokes.” Sunset’s throat cinched up. Tears threatened to roll down her cheeks, but the words burned too hot in her heart to let lie. “And I put up with it. I put up with it for so long, because I somehow fooled myself into thinking you actually cared, in your own annoyingly weird way.”

Sunset trembled. She could barely hold herself up. “But the moment I had something that, that meant something to me, that made me happy, you… you…”

Eyes squeezed shut, Sunset clenched her teeth and collapsed to her haunches. The rest hurt too much to get out.

“I don’t make you happy?” Copper’s voice trembled.

“It’s not the same,” Sunset said. She hung her head, and the tears rolled down her snout. “You, it’s…”

“Sunset, I’m sorry. Please stop crying.”

“No! She took it away from me, Copper. She took my research away because of you. And now I… I can’t…”

“Sunset, it’s okay.” Copper put a hoof to Sunset’s cheek and reached up to run it through her mane.

Sunset jerked away. An unquenchable fire ignited behind her eyes. “Don’t touch me! It’s all your fault, Copper. This was all I ever wanted, and you screwed it up.”

Copper startled backward, but then found the audacity to scowl at her. She actually dared to think she was in the right.

“Sunset, it was just some stupid research project. Snap out of it. Please. Do you think I want to see you hurt like this? Do you think I enjoy seeing you suffer? It hurts me, too. It hurts right here.” She put her hoof to her chest. “And I have to watch you do this to yourself every day. What was I supposed to do? Just watch the mare that I—”

She stalled out, her eyes going wide like a ghost had stolen the words right out of her throat. A wince crawled across her face, and she shrank in on herself.

“So you did go see Celestia.”

Copper jerked back as if Sunset had slapped her. Her mouth dangled open, like a foal caught with her hoof in the cookie jar.

It was almost funny… When it mattered most, she had nothing to say. Where were all her witty comebacks now?

“Sunset—”

“You shut up. Just shut up!” Sunset screeched, her voice cracking hard enough that it hurt her throat. She wilted and fell to her haunches, tears still running down her face. She didn’t bother hiding them—what did it matter anymore?

“Get out of my life, Copper,” she whispered. She sniffled and wiped her nose. “I never want to see you again.”

Copper’s lip trembled. When she spoke, Sunset could barely hear her.

“Y-you don’t mean that…”

Sunset saw red. She picked up the vase of daffodils, smashed it at Copper’s hooves, and stomped forward.

“Get! Out!”

Sunset took another step, but Copper was already out the door. Her sobs faded down the hallway until everything fell silent.

The daffodils lay in a heap at Sunset’s hooves, their petals scattered. Sunset gritted her teeth and screamed. She stomped and stomped and stomped the flowers into the floor until she was out of breath.

Chest heaving, Sunset looked at her hooves. Some of the shards from the vase had cut her fetlocks, and blood dribbled down her hooves. A motherly voice in her head told her to get them bandaged up, but it sounded too much like Celestia. She stumbled into her room and collapsed into bed.

This wasn’t fair. Here she was doing exactly what Celestia told her to: work on the mirror. Make some friends… And suddenly, that was against the rules?

But what could she do? Celestia gave her an order. She couldn’t go against her. She couldn’t go against the princess herself.

She sobbed into her pillow, holding it tight, wishing it was Nocturne. The phoenix plushie Doppler got her lay cocked on her other pillow, staring at her. She swatted it off the bed and rolled over.

“I wish you were here,” she whispered into the pillow. “I would do anything. Anything…”

She imagined Nocturne’s soft fur and the brush of her wings, the cold mist of her mane along her back. The memory of that night not long ago drifted to the surface, and with it the spell Nocturne taught her.

She heaved a final sigh and closed her eyes. A brief squeeze of the pillow to help clear her mind, and she thought of Nocturne.

It brought a smile to her face, and she let the feeling envelop her, let it sink into her bones. She lit her horn, and her sense of presence seemed to shift, like gravity decided it didn’t like going down anymore.

Her mind phased out for a second, and when it refocused, she felt altogether different—refreshed, even.

Sunset opened her eyes, the aches from just moments ago miraculously gone. Her fetlocks didn’t even sting. She gasped.

The spell worked.

“Nocturne!” she shouted.

Her voice echoed back, desperate. This place normally had a comforting, homely feel to it, but without Nocturne beside her, it had a strange claustrophobic emptiness to it, as if the nothingness pressed in around her.

“Nocturne?” Her voice sounded scared. She felt scared. “Nocturne? Are you here? Please come out.”

A presence materialized behind her with a cold ripple down her back, and a delicate hoof touched her on the shoulder. “What is the matter, Little Sunset?”

When Sunset looked, Nocturne wore a concerned frown. “Your emotions weigh upon my heart like great stones. Why do you hurt so?”

Sunset buried her face in Nocturne’s chest. Her fur was cold as a blanket pulled from a cupboard on a winter night, but it soon warmed and the softness was unlike anything Sunset had felt in real life.

“Easy, Little Sunset. Fear not what troubles you. I am here, as I will always be.”

Sunset took a deep breath of stardust and shadow before pulling away. She bit back a sob. No matter how hard she wanted to, she couldn’t look Nocturne in the eye. She instead watched the shadows curl away from Nocturne’s hooves.

“Celestia pulled me from the mirror project,” Sunset said. The words tasted like vomit. “And she doesn’t want me to talk to you anymore.”

Nocturne seized up, and Sunset felt the hitch in her breath.

“She said…” Sunset continued, “she said you were a bad pony. That you tried to take over Equestria. You’re the… the Mare in the Moon. Is it true?”

Nocturne wilted. It was strangely terrifying to see such a large, powerful pony collapse under her own weight.

Now that Sunset finally got the question off her chest, it was Nocturne’s turn to be unable to look Sunset in the eye. “I… I am not proud of what I did in ages past.”

“So you are,” Sunset said, defeated.

“I said I am not proud!” Nocturne shouted. Sunset shrank back, but not as quickly as Nocturne, who curtained herself behind her wings. The plumes of her mane and tail wilted as if commiserating in her shame.

“I, I feared that knowing such things might scare you away,” she continued. “That I might lose my one chance for friendship, for redemption, in this hell I have lived for almost a thousand years. I thought that if I were to meet you as simply a pony”—a short chuckle escaped her—“as close to a normal pony as I can be, that you might see me—the real me—as I am today.”

Sunset sniffled and wiped away a dribble of snot from her nose. She found a tiny smile somewhere in the rubble of her emotions.

Nocturne smiled back, tracing a hoof down Sunset’s cheek, and Sunset leaned into it. “The fire that stirred my heart to fury a millennium ago has long since been snuffed,” Nocturne said. “I am nothing more than the pony standing before you. I have nothing left of the power or hatred or greed that consumed me then. I have had nothing for centuries but the dark and my own loneliness. That is, until I met you, Little Sunset.”

Sunset held Nocturne’s hoof against her cheek. The emotions carried by the gesture sent her heart racing, and she couldn’t pull away from the mournful look in Nocturne’s eyes.

“I fear the dark that lies ahead should we part ways,” Nocturne continued. “But… if Celestia forbids us, then I shan’t jeopardize your standing.” She pulled away, and the sudden distance shot through Sunset’s heart like an icicle.

“She doesn’t have to know!” Sunset blurted out. She caught herself short, her mouth hanging open before she found more words. “We can—we can still be together. Here, in my dreams.”

A tear rolled down Nocturne’s cheek, and up went a happy but mournful smile. “I will forever cherish your innocent optimism, Little Sunset. But reality is fickle. I cannot allow you to risk all that you have for my sake. I… I should not have let myself believe.”

Nocturne turned and walked away, head hung low. Even the shadows that swaddled her lower half drifted off her in languid curls as if they too accepted their fate.

Sunset shook her head. Celestia was wrong. Even if Nocturne was evil before, she was good now. And Sunset, as dense as she could be at times, knew when somepony needed her.

“Nocturne,” Sunset said. Just as Nocturne turned to look at her, Sunset rushed forward and kissed her.

In that instant, all her fears and worries melted away. It was like the world was right again and everything made sense. When she pulled away, that wintergreen taste lingered on her lips, and every breath came in chilled by its intoxicating scent.

This felt different than Doppler, more real than Doppler or anypony else. She didn’t feel this way because Nocturne had gorgeous eyes and a pretty smile, but because Nocturne was beautiful, both inside and out.

She was a pony to admire and cherish—that hopeful, unbreakable, ever-searching spirit. How much she had suffered because of her banishment, how much she had clearly changed, how much she was willing to continue changing for the better.

“I’ll find a way,” Sunset said.

“No, Little Sunset. You have already sacrificed too much in my name. I cannot bear the thought of what you would lose were she to catch you. ’Twould be a shame I would carry with me all of my days, knowing my freedom came at the expense of all you hold dear.”

“I’ll find a way,” Sunset insisted. She took Nocturne’s hooves in hers and stared her dead in the eye. “It’s what friends do. It’s what…”

Sunset’s heart fluttered. A breath caught in her throat, and she almost lost the courage to say what came next.

“It’s what more-than-friends do.”

Nocturne’s eyes danced back and forth, gazing into hers, and for a brief moment, it seemed like that unshakable hope had resurfaced. Her ears fell back, and she leaned in for another kiss.

Sunset was all too happy to meet her halfway. The wintergreen, mind-addling sensation was unlike any other.

She couldn’t explain it. She couldn’t understand it. She could only follow the feelings in her heart, and those feelings told her to embrace Nocturne and not only see but feel the beautiful mare lost to time and the physical world.

Whatever the future held in store, Nocturne had a place in it. Sunset had given up too much to know any different.

Sunset broke off from the kiss and pressed her head into Nocturne’s chest. It was colder than the deepest reaches of space, but she breathed in that stardust-y smell and melted into her despite the shivers.

Nocturne wrapped her wings around Sunset, and the chill of her feathers gently touching the small of Sunset’s back sent goosebumps up her spine.

It was an odd feeling—the sensation so naturally uncomfortable, yet so welcome. And when Nocturne placed a kiss on her forehead, Sunset couldn’t help but giggle like a foal.

A smile took its place on her lips and she kissed the fur of Nocturne’s chest before nuzzling deeper into it.

“If it is what you wish, Little Sunset,” Nocturne said. “Then I am eternally grateful. I shall stand by your side the rest of my days should you succeed.”

Sunset brushed the tip of her hoof down Nocturne’s chest, watching the individual hairs flatten and stand back up, the way Copper often did to her at their sleepovers.

“You’re the only thing that matters to me,” Sunset whispered. “If you left me, I don’t know what I’d do.”

“Never in my life would I do such a thing.” Nocturne said it with such conviction that Sunset’s heart fluttered. “But what of your friend Coppertone?”

Sunset stayed quiet. She looked down, but didn’t pull away from Nocturne.

“She’s not my friend. Friends don’t rat you out for doing the right thing.”

“The right thing? Do you mean this? Us?”

“Not us, but… I took her down to the research lab, but changed my mind before we got to the mirror. She said I should stop working on my research, and we got into a fight over it.”

Nocturne stroked Sunset’s mane. “You are wise, Little Sunset. A friend who spurns another’s ambitions is not truly a friend. I know it is hard, but you will heal and become stronger for it.”

Sunset squeezed her eyes shut and nodded into Nocturne’s chest. It did hurt. It hurt more than anypony could imagine.

“And what of Celestia?” Nocturne asked.

“I don’t know…” Her throat cinched up, and tears welled up in her eyes. “She doesn’t like you, and I don’t think she ever will. But she’s the one who told me to make friends. She’s the one who wanted me to get to know you. Well, before she knew who you were.”

Nocturne gave her a little squeeze. “I cannot help what she feels, only what I am. I have served my penance. It is all I can do to earn her forgiveness.”

Sunset absently rubbed circles into Nocturne’s chest fur. Watching it nap and smooth out was its own strangely natural comfort.

“I don’t think that’ll happen from the way she talks about you. I don’t know what to do…”

Nocturne brushed Sunset’s mane behind her ear. “Nor I, Little Sunset. It pains me to see you torn so.”

Sunset sniffled. This wasn’t fair. Nocturne didn’t deserve this. Whether she was bad before or not, she was a good pony now. She wasn’t a monster.

Celestia was afraid and closed-minded. She didn’t see. She refused to see.

And since she refused, Sunset would just have to make her see. She would make them all see.

“I’m not torn,” Sunset said. She sniffled and dried her eyes. “I’m more certain than ever. I’ll get you out. No matter what it takes.”

• • •

Oh, Little Sunset. What a foolish creature you are, so taken by the nightingale’s coo.

’Tis almost a shame. Were this another time, another life, perhaps I may have deigned to humor you further. But alas, the time has come for your… reward.

You have burned your bridges as I deemed necessary, and the world beyond the portal will be your paradise, where you shall wallow in your own naïveté. But do not worry… I shall have use for you in years to come.

So smile for me a while longer, Little Sunset, grasp gently the rose and be the good girl I know you are. For should you cross me at this, the crux of my triumph, I will tear that rose from you, and the shriveled husk of your heart shall stand testament to all who dare oppose me.

XXIV - What a Mother Does Best

It was a beautifully sunny day outside: the birds chirping merrily in the trees, the pleasant breeze carrying on its winds the smell of flowers and happiness, and all the other bullshit ponies loved about the midsummer months.

Coppertone wanted nothing to do with it.

She wished it was raining. Hailing, storming, thunder and lightning, meteors and armageddon, something—anything but the disgustingly beautiful day that tried prying through the blinds and into her little corner of oblivion, as if her own personal armageddon hadn’t just happened.

She had been holed up there for a few hours now, huddled up with her body pillow. It may as well have been years. Just forget the world—or more accurately, let the world forget her.

Every time she shut her eyes, all she could see was Sunset. The tears, the anger, the way she smashed the vase at her hooves without a second thought. Her hooves still stung where the glass cut her.

What the hell was she thinking, going to the princess? Copper had thought maybe the princess could talk some sense into Sunset, but she never expected this to happen.

She clenched her body pillow harder. That stupid research project. What the hell was so important about it?

Her bedroom door creaked open, and a pair of hooves stepped inside.

“Get out of my room, Whistle,” Copper said without looking. She was the only pony who would barge in unannounced. No answer, but the box of tissues from downstairs thudded onto her bed a moment later.

“I figured you could use another one,” Whistle said. She took the wad of tissues huddled up at the bedside and shoved them into Copper’s empty tissue box, then set that on her back.

“I… Thanks,” Copper said.

“Feeling any better yet?”

Copper rolled onto her stomach and tucked her hooves under her chest to hide the scabs. She didn’t need any more drama today. It was embarrassing enough as is.

“Kinda.” A moment of silence passed, both of them unsure what to say. “Whistle?”

“Yeah?”

“Why am I like this?”

“Because you’re you.” No hesitation. It was impossible to tell if she was being a smartass.

“Why can’t I just be normal?” With her eyes, Copper traced the seam of her body pillow along its rumples and folds. Anything to keep from looking at Whistle. Her eyes wandered to the clutter of eyeliners and mascaras on her vanity. Little presents from Mom over the years, all of them opened to appease a passing glance but never once used.

Whistle kicked a pair of socks lying in the middle of the floor toward the closet hamper. They made it about halfway, landing on an open Mustang Monthly, where a muscled stallion struck a pose that would arouse any right-minded mare.

“Because then you’d be boring like the cunts who actually fawn over that shit right there.” She pointed at the magazine. “And everypony knows boring sucks.”

Smartass, but genuine. That gave Copper the strength to giggle.

“So what you’re saying is that you suck.”

“Yeah, fuck you too.”

“That’s still an implied yes.” They shared a laugh, and Whistle even gave her a hug, forehead pressed against forehead.

It was moments like these that Copper loved more than anything. She and Whistle got into it real good all the time. That’s just what sisters did. But deep down, Whistle cared, more than anypony in the world, and she wasn’t afraid to show it when it mattered most.

Whistle pulled away and gave the tissue box a gentle nudge toward Copper. “I’m gonna go downstairs before you make me not boring, too.”

“You mean you wouldn’t be down for a little sisterly bonding?” Copper asked and wriggled her eyebrows.

Whistle snorted. “Please. You know a classy lady like me would never stoop to something like that.”

“‘Classy lady’? Don’t insult yourself now.”

“Hey, you know nothing’s more insulting than being your little sister,” Whistle said with a smirk. She cuffed Copper on the shoulder before turning for the door.

That got a laugh out of Copper, but as well-meaning as Whistle’s jab was, she just couldn’t roll with it right now. She’d had plenty of practice smiling for the world when everything hurt inside, though, and here was no different.

“You will have to come down sometime soon, though,” Whistle said. “You know that Mom knows something’s up if the dinner table isn’t set, and I never do it right, apparently.”

Copper slanted her mouth. Right. Mom. That’ll be a fun conversation…

Oh, where’s Sunset? I thought you said she’d be joining us today.

Nah, Mom, she won’t be, on account of your gay-ass daughter being too much of a bitch and letting her feelings fuck everything up. Oh, and did I mention I’m gay? Because let’s not forget how much you hate faggots. What a great role model I’ve been for Lily, right? Don’t worry, though, I’ll go kill myself now so I don’t fuck up anything else.

Whistle’s hoofsteps creaked out the door and down the stairs until they faded away at the landing. A sudden loneliness piggybacked on the newfound silence, and Copper clutched her pillow to her chest.

Who cared about dinner? What did any of it matter? It was all Sunset’s stupid project’s fault.

But what if she had just talked to her? Yeah, about that…

The thought played over and over in her head. All the opportunities presented, all the chances wasted. She could have kissed her right there in the park last week. The hotel room in Manehattan. She could have kissed her anywhere, at any time. If only Sunset knew, how much would have turned out different?

Even if it didn’t, at least she’d know. At least they’d be on the same page. If nothing else, Copper could have walked away with her head held high.

She rubbed her fetlocks, ran the tips of her hooves over the hairline scabs. Tears beaded in the corners of her eyes.

Something shattered downstairs, and a muffled “Fuck!” trailed in from the hallway.

Copper snorted, then sighed. Come on, lazyass. Enough moping for today.

Smile for the world, and off she went.

Downstairs, Whistle was cleaning up the remains of a glass cup off the dining room floor, and Copper couldn’t help the smirk on her face as she strolled in.

“I guess you weren’t lying about never doing it right after all,” Copper said.

“Yeah, well, me doing it wrong is still a shitload better than you not doing it at all, lazyass.”

Good old Whistle. Bringing things back to normal. Honestly, it was probably just that she couldn’t stand being sappy for long periods of time. But there was a certain honesty to it, even if her normal self could be rather abrasive.

Copper watched Whistle set the table, but noticed she put the spoon and fork on the left side of each plate. “Fork, knife, spoon,” Copper said.

“Huh?”

“Fork, knife, spoon. It’s alphabetical. The fork goes by itself on the left side, and the knife blade faces inward toward the plate.” She grabbed the utensils from Whistle’s aura and set them according to the format she’d learned in Home Ec her freshman year.

Whistle shot her a frown. She mockingly pantomimed Copper and waggled a hoof up and down.

“Great,” Whistle said. “Now that’s gonna be stuck in my head forever.”

“It’s just that much less dick you have to think about now, right?”

“Big talk from a pony who’s never taken one.”

“Bigger talk from a pony who’s also never taken one but actually wants to.” Copper threw Whistle that carefree smile that always got under her skin.

Whistle blushed. She actually blushed. Check fucking mate. Nothing shut Whistle up faster than reminding the Queen of Cock herself that she was still a virgin.

Not that a mare her age should be worrying about that sort of thing, despite what all the hormones might be telling her. But if she was going to have all that dick on the brain, might as well put it to use.

“Yeah, well, you just… whatever.”

“Yeah, whatever’s right.” Copper continued swapping the utensils around to their correct spots. “And no matter how many daily bukakke fantasies you might have, you’re still gonna have to learn this eventually. Who’s gonna set your dinner table when you’ve got your own family?”

Whistle rolled her eyes. “Uh, he will. Duh.”

“Oh, right. I forgot you wanted a ‘Daisy Chain’ for a husband when you grow up.” Copper curled her lips into a sardonic grin.

Other mares had a Prince Charming waiting to sweep them off their hooves. Whistle had a “Daisy Chain” waiting for her to sweep him off his. And boy, of all the buttons Copper could press, that was the biggest, reddest, and shiniest of them all.

Whistle gave Copper the biggest scowl she’d seen in a good week or so. “Oh yeah? Well it’s better than clit-worshipping my straight best friend behind her back because I don’t have the balls to actually talk to her.”

Oh, that was so off limits. Copper was about to bonk Whistle on the head with one of the many spoons in her aura, but the front door latch clicked, and in sounded a one-filly stampede—Mom and Lily back from the market.

“Hey, Mom,” Copper shouted. She quickly set the rest of the table and returned Whistle’s shit-eating grin with a scowl. The little fucker knew damn well what would have been coming if not for Mom’s timely entrance.

“Hi, hun,” Mom called from the foyer.

“Sissy!” Lily yelled as she flew around the corner. The blur of hyper energy threw a hug around Copper before she had a chance to flinch. A quick hug for Whistle, too, and Lily dashed back into the front hallway to help Mom with whatever they bought.

“Look look look!” Lily bounded back into the dining room with some toy in her mouth. “Look what I got!”

“Oh! It’s a… uh…” Copper slanted her mouth at the ball-and-stick toy thing Lily had. “What is it?”

“I have no idea!” Lily said. She made off with it into the living room to play with it. Whatever it was, she seemed pretty bad at it.

“You bought Lily a toy?” Whistle asked. “Sooo you’re not mad about last week anymore?”

Copper shot her a glare but kept her mouth shut. She knew it was all part of keeping things normal, if a little obtusely.

Normal… since when was anything ever normal? At the same time, though, nothing would ever be normal again.

“Oh, no,” Mom said as she stepped into the room proper. She had a good half-dozen bags of groceries on her back. “I did some thinking, and I gave your sister the talk.”

“You gave Lily the… what?” A wave of goosebumps ran up Copper’s legs.

Mom sputtered and waved a hoof as she went about sorting the groceries along the countertop—carrots, potatoes, celery, and a few different bags of beans. It was soup day.

“Well, I don’t know if it should be called ‘the talk,’ since that’s something a little different, but I did explain to her that what she did was wrong. It’s unnatural.” She drew the word out so flippantly, as if complaining about the weather. “I love my girls, and I know each and every one of them will be just the perfect wives with the perfect grandfoals,” she added, pinching Whistle on the cheek.

“Like you say every day, Mom,” Whistle grumbled, rolling her eyes.

“And I mean it every day, sweetie. Even when you act up.” She added a little “mind yourself” look at Whistle before pulling them both into a hug and flitting off for the stovetop. “Love is what a mother does best,” she sing-songed.

“Now,” she continued. “I have to get dinner ready before your father gets home. Goodness knows, I don’t beat him home very often. Won’t this be a surprise!”

Copper stared at Mom, then Lily rolling around on the living room floor with her stuffed rabbit—the stick-toy thing already forgotten beside the couch—then back to Mom. The tightness in her chest hit her before she could steady herself, and the tingles started along the nape of her neck.

Breathe. Breathe. Smile for the goddamn world and don’t you dare make it look obvious. She can’t know. Don’t let her know don’t let her know don’t let her know.

Copper reached for the countertop to balance herself, but a hoof steadied her by the shoulder.

“Relax,” Whistle whispered. “You know she’s full of shit.”

Copper closed her eyes and focused on Whistle’s touch, made it her anchor that kept her from falling into space. “It doesn’t change how it makes me feel…”

“Then just tell her. Sweet Celestia. She’s Mom. She’ll deal with it.”

“Yeah, she’s Mom…”

Whistle rolled her eyes and dragged Copper toward the living room so she could hiss in her ear. “For fuck’s sake. She’ll find out eventually no matter how hard you try to hide it.”

Copper stared at the floor. “I’d rather she be happy. I’d rather everypony be happy.”

“Well, you’re clearly not.”

“That’s not important…”

Whistle scowled at her. “You’re fucking retarded, you know that?”

She bumped shoulders with Copper to really get her attention. “Look at it this way, Mom’s gonna stay like this unless you do something about it, because I can’t. Do you want Lily to grow up as fucked in the head as you are?”

Copper opened her mouth to say something, but nothing came out.

“Exactly,” Whistle said. “I sure as shit don’t, either. Mom likes you better. She’ll listen to you. Seriously. But if you don’t grow some balls and deal with it, then it’s never gonna change.”

Whistle stomped off to the living room. Like the flip of a switch, she was all smiles and romping with Lily.

She really did care. In bouts and spurts and when nopony was looking. She was a better big sister than Copper could ever hope to be.

“Copper,” Mom asked. It startled Copper enough that she almost jumped. “Could you hand me that spoon, please?”

Mom was looking over her shoulder at the stirring spoon on the counter beside Copper. She could have easily magicked it over herself, but Mom was always the type to make chit chat however possible.

“So where do you think Lily got the idea?” Mom asked when Copper trotted over with the spoon.

“The… idea?”

“Yeah, to kiss that… oh, what was her name? Sundae Sprinkles? I mean, she had to get it from somewhere.”

“Oh.” Copper looked back at Whistle and Lily in the living room. “I, I don’t know.”

Copper lowered her gaze to the floor, listening to the sound of Mom’s spoon scraping the bottom of the pan. The stirring stopped.

“You seem… absent, Copper,” Mom said. She wore a little frown, the stirring spoon hovering just over the saucepan. “What’s wrong?”

“Hmm? Nothing, just…”

Mom’s frown got bigger. “Now I know that face, what’s the matter?”

“Nothing, Mom. Just…”

Mom looked between Copper and Whistle. “Does it have to do with Sunset? Is that why she’s not here? Is she okay?”

“She’s fine, Mom. It’s…” The lie hurt coming out far worse than she expected. Copper had to bite her lip to keep from tearing up.

“Oh, honey, did you two get in a fight?” Mom pulled her into her chest. “I’m so sorry. Are you okay?”

Copper sniffled. “Yeah, Mom. I’m fine.”

“Everything will turn out alright,” Mom said, letting her go so she could stir the saucepan. “It’ll be okay. Everything happens for a reason.”

The tears started back up again, and Copper could barely keep herself standing. Everything hurt. She just wanted to curl up on her bed and pretend the world didn’t exist.

Mom set a pot of water on the other burner and set it to high. “Honestly, maybe it was a good thing you two got in a fight. It makes me wonder if maybe Lily got it from Sunset. I mean she had to get it from somewhere, and she’s always been fawning over that mare.”

She salted the water and threw a lid over it to bring it to boil. “And Sunset always seemed so, I don’t know, keen on hanging out with you.”

Every word out of Mom’s mouth sent another squirming sensation through Copper’s heart. Her chest tightened up, and she could have sworn she stopped breathing for a moment.

“Mom, about that…” Copper straightened her shoulders and willed herself to look Mom in the eye.

“Hmm?” Mom turned back toward her, and she looked so… happy.

Copper sucked in a deep breath. “I… I, I… Never mind.”

She looked away and rubbed her leg. She couldn’t do this. She couldn’t take that happiness away from Mom. Telling her would only make things worse.

“You fucking pussy.” Whistle stood in the living room doorway. She stomped up and got in Copper’s face.

“You watch your language, young lady,” Mom said.

“Shut the hell up, Mom,” Whistle said without looking away from Copper. “And you, fucking grow a pair already.”

“Whistle, please…” Copper said. The spinning, slipping, barely-keeping-it-together feeling came back, and she didn’t know if she could hold it in this time.

“No,” Whistle said. “I’m tired of this bullshit. I’m tired of the way it hurts you, and there’s no way in hell I’m going to let this happen to Lily, too. Just fucking tell her.”

Lily poked her head out from behind Whistle’s legs, ears flat back. She looked scared and confused.

“Let what happen to Lily?” Mom took an instinctive step toward Lily, but Whistle beat her to the punch, stepping between them.

“You,” Whistle snapped at her. “You and everything about this stupid charade everypony’s been playing. It was bad enough when it was just Copper.”

“Excuse you.” Mom had the sauce spoon out and pointed at Whistle. “I will not be spoken to like this, Whistle Wind. Now you are going to tell me what in Equestria is going on.”

To Whistle’s credit, she didn’t so much as flinch. In fact, she leaned forward, as if daring Mom to hit her.

“Whistle,” Copper whispered. “Don’t do this.”

“No. You need to grow up, and she needs to get over herself.”

The tears pushed through. “If Dad were here he—”

“Dad’s a spineless coward!” Whistle stomped hard enough to jiggle the china plates displayed along the top cupboards. “You know he won’t do jack shit. He never has, and he never will.”

“That is enough!” Mom shouted.

“I’m not talking to you!” Whistle yelled.

“Stop yelling!” Copper screamed over them both. She broke down crying. There was no point in hiding it anymore.

Lily cowered in the far corner, tears in her eyes.

“Please,” Copper choked out. “Just stop. I don’t want any of this. I just want everypony to be happy…”

“Yeah?” Whistle spat. “Well, ‘everypony’ includes you, so how fucking happy are you?”

Copper shook her head and gave a defeated laugh. “You shut up,” she whispered.

Whistle got in Copper’s face. “No, I’m not going to shut up. For fuck’s sake, I’m done defending you from yourself. If you want me to shut up, you’ll have to sit on my face, you fucking homo.”

Copper reacted without thinking. It was the same reaction that came to mind anytime somepony mumbled a homophobic slur in earshot, anytime she saw somepony side-eye their neighbors at the market. It wasn’t until she felt the sting in her pastern that her brain caught up with the moment.

“Whistle!” Mom shouted, moving to Whistle’s side like lightning.

Whistle lay sideways on the floor. She had propped herself up with one hoof and the other at her cheek, where blood beaded along a curved, inch-long cut. Her slouchie lay on the floor beside her, and her mane was a mess of hat hair and static.

She looked up at Copper, not in anger but surprise, and if the way she pinned her ears back was any indication, in shame. “Copper, I, I didn’t mean…” was all she could get out.

Copper stared back at her, struggling for air, trying to make sense of what just happened. Her eyes tracked to the cut on Whistle’s cheek, then to the surprise on Whistle’s face, then to her own hoof, unmistakably hers yet so alien. There was a chip in her hoof that wasn’t there earlier. She stumbled backward into a cabinet.

She hit Whistle. She hit Whistle. That… that really happened. She had gathered all her self-loathing and frustration for what should never have been and took it out on the one pony who understood, the only pony in the world who truly knew and cared despite it all.

She felt sick. She couldn’t breathe and the walls were closing in and everypony was staring at her and—

Everypony but Mom.

She tended to Whistle’s cheek with a washcloth from the sink and nothing more. Not a twitch, not a flutter, not a word.

“Yeah, Mom,” Copper said before the shame tore her to pieces. “I’m gay, alright?” Her words came out trembling, like a newborn foal taking its first steps. Her throat closed up on her, and the tears started fresh. “I have been for as long as I can remember. And I’m the one in love with Sunset, not the other way around. You wanted to know where Lily got it from? Well now you do…”

She fell to her haunches and let the tears pitter-patter on the floor. Nothing mattered anymore.

“I wish I was normal,” Copper said. “I wish I could be the little filly you always thought I was, and make you so unbelievably happy, and have all the little grandfoals you could fit in your hooves.”

Copper shook her head and sniffled. “But that’s not me. I can’t help the lovesick mess that I am, or who I’m in love with. But I’ll always be me. I’ll always be your Coppertone.”

She sucked in another trembling breath and tried biting back the tears, ready for whatever tirade Mom might hurl at her. But for an unbearable span, nopony said anything, least of all Mom. It was quiet enough to hear Lily whimpering in the corner.

“Mom…?” Copper said.

Nothing. Mom still silently tended to Whistle’s cheek and nothing more.

“Mom, don’t be like this. Just say something. Please…”

She couldn’t stand the quiet. She would rather have Mom clawing at her throat, foaming at the mouth, kicking and screaming at the top of her lungs in a blind rage that how dare she hit Whistle or be a bad influence on Lily or anything—anything—but this calm indifference.

But when Mom finally spoke, Copper realized she preferred the silence.

“You’re not lying to me.” Her voice was terrifyingly level. She refused to look Copper in the eye as she sent the cloth back to the sink for another rinse. “Are you?”

“N-no… I-I’m not.”

Mom rinsed and wrung out the towel again before bringing it back. She continued dabbing away the blood still beading along Whistle’s cut.

“Then get out of my house,” she said quietly. “You’re not welcome here.”

Copper’s breath caught in her throat, and a numbness trickled like rainwater from her withers to the tips of her hooves. Mom didn’t just say that. She… she couldn’t have said that.

But Copper knew that face, that unmistakable apathy in Mom’s eyes. It was the same look Mom wore whenever she saw their neighbors next door or the many gay couples in the marketplace. It was… She…

Copper ran.

“Copper!” Whistle cried out, but Copper didn’t look back.

She shouldered open the screen door, practically ripping it off its hinges, and leapt off the porch. A searing pain shot up her ankle when she landed funny, but she didn’t let it slow her down, not for a second.

Tears streaked her face, and the image of Mom’s disappointment followed hot on her heels. She could hardly see through the tears, but she knew the city well enough to find the train station.

She booked a ride on the next train out, to anywhere but home.

XXXVI - The Graveyard of Dreams

She called it her Tantabus.

I had no reason to doubt her. Verily, the pieces that have fallen into place leave little room to believe otherwise. I loathe the thought of destroying something so innate to her being, but Tantabus or no, it is a danger to her and Equestria at large and must be stopped by whatever means we have at our disposal. Be it magic or muscle, I will put forth all of myself to see Equestria safe from its corrupting touch.

However, I fear a… complication.

If she speaks the truth, that this is a Tantabus rooted in the deepest dark of her heart, then our objective may be as equally simple as it is impossible.

As it was with myself, the mere act of accepting my failures and acknowledging my growth therefrom brought my greatest adversary to its knees. But I know how perilous that mountain is and just how different her Tantabus may be from my own. I can only help her climb so far.

If this must be the way of things, however, then so be it.

I shall climb this mountain by her side. I shall see her to that summit, where the winds blow cool and the sun shines warm upon her face. And when we reach that fateful moment where I must stand aside and watch, I shall do exactly that. I can only proceed as I have and hope she will find her way.

• • •

Twilight betrayed me.

It was the first thought that came to me: that tear-filled resignation in her eyes as I reached out for the one lifeline I knew would never fail me, the one person in this world or the other I could wholly trust. And then falling.

I remembered the whirlpool, that oily churning blackness that clung to my coat. I remembered holding my breath as the currents blasted me every which way like a riptide pulling me under.

I remembered to breathe, and the panic hit me all at once.

I pushed myself up from a stone floor. It was cold, and my eyes didn’t work. I wiped at them with my hooves, felt that oily, tar-like substance pull away in sticky, goopy strands. I scrubbed and I scrubbed, but it wouldn’t go away.

Where the fuck was I? Where the fuck was I?

“Luna?” I called out, but it sounded wrong, like hearing someone yell from far away with my hooves held over my ears. I stumbled backward, only to have my tail press against something cold. I freaked out, but the realization hit me quick enough.

It was a wall, you fucking idiot. Get it together!

I could only imagine how loudly I screamed, thanks to whatever hellish curse had my head all plugged up. What might have heard me? Where the fuck was I?

All I could see was this godforsaken darkness, the darkness and Twilight. My lack of sight made it that much easier to envision her overtop me and that mournful look in her eye, the light at her horntip, the falling.

She trapped me in here.

Something cold as ice pressed against my chest, sucking the air from my lungs. I screamed and flailed my hooves to keep away whatever the fuck touched me. I had to get out, I had to get away. I turned and ran.

Pain exploded in my muzzle, and I crumpled into a heap against what I remembered to be a wall. I pressed my back against it and tried lighting my horn, but even that wouldn’t work. An unnatural heaviness dragged it downward. I could only assume it was the same oily bullshit in my eyes and ears.

Was this how I died? Alone and flailing against the unknown in the dark?

My heart pounded in my ears, and sweat stung my eyes where my mane was matted against my face. I felt a sensation, an understanding of another creature reaching out toward me—to touch me, grab me, devour me.

I leapt to my hooves and swung at the nothingness like a feral animal. But just as quickly, my body seized up under some outside influence, and a small part of my brain knew the sensation of magic. Try as I might, I couldn’t break free.

Something out there in the dark stared at me, watched me, held me in its grasp. My throat cinched up.

“I’ll be back, Little Sunset,” whispered a little voice in my head, and that crescent-moon smile leered at me from the dark corners of my imagination. My knees gave out, and I stumbled backward onto my haunches.

“G-go away,” I cried out, but I had no way of knowing if the words even left my throat. A black pit opened up in the depths of my heart, and the tears started down my face.

The magic tightened its grip on me, and I screamed. The tears flowed freely. I couldn’t stop them. Without sight, strength, or magic, all I could do was cry and beg. If only I had my magic. If only I could see, or even simply run—anything but blindly await the inevitable.

I had once thought that nothing could be worse than the first time, but I was wrong. I knew what it was like, the prospect of that axe dangling over my head all too real, and when the Nightmare’s magic clamped my mouth shut, I felt the hot shame of my own fear soak into my tail and down my thigh.

I could feel its serrated, crescent-moon smile leveled against my neck, ready to saw into my flesh, and a single, loathsome thought ran through my mind.

Just get it over with…

It touched my chest again in a bid to make good on that request, and the blood froze in my veins. But where I expected that hoof to slide up and grab me by the throat, it instead came to rest on my shoulder.

A gentle nose found mine, and the scent of rainfall hit me on its warm exhale. Its forehead pressed against mine, and our horns clacked together. A pair of wings draped around me as another hoof rested itself on my other shoulder, and I understood the gesture for what it was, who it was.

A hug. Not from Nocturne, but from Luna.

I let out a shuddering breath, and the tears started anew. My pride had left me, and self-respect followed it out the door. I threw my hooves around her and never wanted to let go. In that moment, I didn’t care who she used to be, only what she wasn’t anymore.

“Luna, what’s going on? I can’t see or hear anything.” It all came out between hiccups and sobs and an unending stream of tears. I wanted to be held close and be told that everything would be okay.

Except nothing was okay. I was blind and deaf, in an unknown world with the mare I hated most. But all I could do was hold her tighter or else be cast adrift in this dreadscape.

She gave me a gentle squeeze before pulling away. The firm weight of a hoof on my shoulder directed me forward, toward a flickering warmth I just now noticed—a campfire.

I all but collapsed beside it, as close as I could get without burning myself, and buried my face in my hooves. Blind as I may be, I couldn’t stand the thought of her seeing me like this.

I hated myself. I hated that I let myself fall to pieces in front of her—again. I had shown enough weakness in front of her for a thousand lifetimes over.

I wanted to go home. I hated this place, and so I let her hold me like the child I was.

Pathetic. Useless. Porcelain doll. That’s what I was—that’s all I was—and the shame stirred up by my deepest fears had me silently wishing it had happened. At least then my feelings would be justified.

The thought sickened me, and I doubled over, retching. Nothing came up except that acidic tang I knew all too well.

I wished I was dead.

I might as well have been. For all I had done and the hurt I’d caused, for letting Twilight nearly destroy herself. I was a drowning pony reaching for a line, but all I could do was drag others down with me. Twilight was right to hold my head under.

What the fuck was wrong with me? Was this really how I dealt with my problems now? Did I really just roll over and accept it as if fate were some inexorable truth?

The old Sunset Shimmer would have laughed in the Nightmare’s face. She would have sold her soul to tear down the fabric of reality before giving in.

What would Twilight think?

I squeezed my eyes shut. Stop being a stupid, emotional bitch. I was strong. I was Sunset Shimmer.

I was ready to throw down with Luna not even a few days ago. I did throw down with her. It didn’t matter that I only won on a technicality. I fought her—Luna, the mare who destroyed my life and upended everything I knew and loved. I stood up to her and showed her I wasn’t someone who would simply roll over and die.

So where did that strength go? Where along this journey did I lose that part of me? When did I become so… inconsistent in my own values and the will to stand up for myself?

Luna brushed her hoof along my shoulder. She seemed to take extra care in not startling me. Had she brushed me any lighter, I might not have noticed.

I suppressed a flinch at her touch. I was strong. I was strong.

I looked up in her direction. I couldn’t see, but I could still guess where she was.

“What’s going on?” I said. My words drifted into the black hole of my new existence.

She tapped my hoof with hers twice, probably to indicate she heard. Wishful thinking, maybe, but even if I only had straws left to grasp, then grasp I must.

She traced that hoof up my foreleg and shoulder, up my neck to my ear. There, a warm sensation worked its way into my inner ear—Luna’s magic doing whatever it was she thought might help, I assumed.

The hair stood up on the back of my neck. I couldn’t help it. But I held still—that much I could be proud of.

Slowly, that weird windy sound your ears make when you dig pool water out of them built to a steady howl. My eardrum popped, and as if waiting for its cue, the crackle of a fire welcomed me back to the land of the hearing. She did the same to my other ear, cleaned off my horn, and the tinkle of her magic dropped its harmony to let the fire alone remind me how much I took my senses for granted.

“Is that better?” Luna asked, and oh, how happy I was to hear her voice. But just as quickly as that elation overtook me, a sudden wave of shame washed away whatever bits of happiness I felt.

Why was I clinging to her so definitively? I knew how I felt at this moment, how alone I was in this little sightless bubble of mine, but I shouldn’t feel this way about her.

Never forget what she did to you.

“Better,” I said.

“Good,” she said. I could practically hear the smile in her voice. “Now, please hold still for me.”

My left eye twitched as she magicked the lids open. The only thing stopping me from jerking away was the thought of ripping my eyelids off, and I had already dealt with enough body horror in my life.

“It is in your eyes as well,” she said.

“What’s in my eyes?” My breathing got faster. I hated how she said it so simply, like a doctor diagnosing a patient with the common cold.

“I do not know what it is, but I am one to liken it to tar. That swirling darkness we fell through to find ourselves here in the Eversleep.”

Right. That. I’d always been afraid of heights. I wouldn’t be forgetting that fall anytime soon.

“So then take care of it,” I said.

She let go of my eyelid, and I blinked away the intrusion. “I… I do not believe I can. Not without causing harm.”

“Just do what you did for my ears.” God, was it really that difficult? Was she trying to make my life miserable now by dangling a basic necessity in front of me?

“Do you mean for me to scoop it out?” she asked with the tiniest edge of impatience.

I had to admit, the immediate thought of taking an ice-cream scooper to my eyeballs came to mind, and my gut went all squirmy. I kept my scowl going, though. I wasn’t about to let her win the argument.

She took a sharp inhale through her nostrils and let it out slowly. “I would be remiss to so boldly throw caution to the wind. We do not know if this is permanent or if it will fade with time, and I… I do not wish to hurt you.”

I glared in her direction. Bold fucking words coming from her. Where was that sentiment seven years ago?

“So that’s it? Just fuck me, right? You’d rather I just be dumb and blind while you tote me around like a dog on a leash?”

“That is not—”

“Luna, are you even listening? I can’t see.” I started shaking, and my heart bounced around my chest like a pinball. “I can’t see a goddamn thing.”

“I know,” she said. There she went again with that edge of impatience. At least, it sounded like impatience. “I know…”

“How can you think that’s okay?” I tried my best to push down the shakes and keep my tone level.

There was a tension to the silence, like maybe it hurt her to imagine what I was going through. A dark part of me wished for that. If I had to hurt, then so did she.

“I do not think that it is, Sunset. But without knowing more about it, I believe that it is the lesser of two evils. I ask you to be strong.”

“Whoa, like hell you will,” I snapped. “Don’t you ask me to be strong. You don’t get to ask me that. I’ll be strong. Because I choose to.”

She went silent. Then, softly: “Very well. Do as you please.”

Damn right I would. I didn’t need her telling me what to do when I already had my hands full coping with my new… situation.

That’s what this was. A situation. I’d dealt with many situations before, and this would be no different. I could do this. It meant I’d have to rely on Luna for pretty much everything, but… But I could do this.

I… I was strong. For Twilight.

“So what’s the plan?” I asked.

“I do not know for certain just yet.” She paused, maybe staring out at something in the distance. She did that too often for me to not imagine her doing it right now. A tuft of wind stirred up from her wings—the way she always flexed and resettled them at her sides in what had to be a nervous tick. “We must learn what happened both to us and the Nightmare.”

“Did it fall in here with us?”

“One can hope. But I would not be so quick to assume. As I see it, three possibilities exist. It has fallen into the Eversleep with us, it has been expelled from my dream and flung into the expanse of the Dreamscape, or in joining with the Tantabus it has gained the power to possess my body and now stalks the waking world.”

“Which one’s worse?” My own assumptions screamed the third one, but my time spent with Luna had me thinking a little more three dimensionally. I could practically hear the gears turning in her head.

“Genuinely, I cannot say for certain. The latter two are equally harrowing thoughts. If it has fallen with us, there is yet a chance to stop this catastrophe before it begins. However, were it loose in the Dreamscape, there is little we could do to stop it from rampaging through all the dreams of Equestria. And if it has gained control of my body, I do not know how well the others will or are already faring against it as we speak.”

“But dreams are just dreams, right?”

“You of all ponies should know not to dismiss dreams so simply, Sunset. If the Nightmare has indeed escaped into the Dreamscape, it would have unfettered access to the dreams of our subjects and subjugate them as it sees fit. Such a thing would have a profound effect on everypony’s psyche. The body may heal with time, but the mind is a fragile thing…” A silence overtook her, and I could hear the sharpness of the breath she took through her nose.

I found myself holding my own share of distress, a tightness in my chest I couldn’t shake loose. Twilight appeared in my thoughts, that happy, insightful smile turned black and wailing.

“We can’t let that happen,” I said.

“Indeed. We should be off. To where, however, I am unsure. This place… it is unlike anything I have ever seen.”

“Well, sitting around here isn’t going to help.” I got up and stared forward.

“Dismissing idleness is key to our cause, Sunset, but do take heed that aimlessness is its own stagnation.”

I caught myself before saying anything rash. I didn’t have the energy for another argument. Also, I wanted to think I was better than that, as poorly as I’d held myself to that standard recently. I hated her guts, but like I told Copper, I was past anger. And more importantly, I had to figure out what the hell was going on in my head right now, all these conflicting thoughts on who she was and how I should act.

To that end, how I’d accomplish anything useful while blind as a bat was beyond me. But we had to do something. Twilight was counting on us. On me.

“Well then let’s at least start moving and see if something pops up,” I said with a little more confidence than I expected. Even I almost believed myself there.

“Very well.” Her hooves ground on the grit and stone as she rose, and her hoofsteps echoed off cavernous walls.

I followed her in the direction of what I assumed was out, and soon enough a low howl met my ears before I felt a soft but steady wind brush across my face. It was cool out here, wherever “here” was.

“What’s out there?” I asked.

“In a word, much.”

“That’s descriptive,” I said.

That earned me the silent treatment for a good two seconds. I knew it wasn't exactly within her wheelhouse of expressions, but I imagined her giving me the Applejack eyebrow.

“’Tis a strange and alien landscape,” she said. “It shifts as errantly as one’s own thoughts.”

“You say that like you’ve been here a dozen times before.” I drizzled some sarcasm into my tone. Not really the time or place, all things considered, but I needed something at least gallows-humor-adjacent to keep my head in the game.

“We did not find ourselves in that cave upon falling into the Eversleep, Sunset,” she said, keenly ignoring my snark. “After our battle with the Nightmare and your fateful fall into that churning abyss, we plummeted from this place’s sky and into an ocean. I dragged to shore what I feared to be your lifeless corpse, and there we were beset by creatures hoping to make a meal of you.”

That got goosebumps running laps up and down my legs. “So we aren’t the only things wandering around here.”

“We are indeed not, and I would much rather not face them again, have we the choice.”

I shook that worry away and tried grappling with a different question to keep my mind off it. “Well alright. The other problem, then. If everything’s all topsy-turvy changey, then where exactly are we going?”

The fluttering of feathers met my ears—Luna extending a wing, I assumed. “In the distance, there stands a mountain in what I believe to be the center of this place. It is the only thing that has held fast in the hours since our arrival. That, I believe, is our destination.”

Sounded like a plan to me. But the straightforwardness got my withers standing on end.

“We… aren’t gonna fly, are we?”

Please say no, please say no, please say no.

I hated flying. Hated it. So much so that whenever me and the gang back home went somewhere, we drove. Didn’t matter how far. I was not getting in one of those flying metal death traps. Never in my life had I been more than a few feet off the ground—barring a rollercoaster or two—and I'd be damned if I broke that streak now, doubly so on her back without so much as a seat belt to strap me in. Never goddamn ever.

“My left wing was injured in our fight against the Nightmare. I could not fly even if I wanted to.”

I breathed a sigh of relief. Flying would have simplified things, but I for the life of me couldn’t imagine being yanked off my feet and flown across god knew whatever hellscape surrounded us, not without even the grace of seeing what untimely demise might await me.

Flight or no flight, I knew she was giving me the chance to be strong. She wasn’t the type to ignore another’s shortcomings. Part of me respected that allowance, that she didn’t belittle me. At least not consciously.

Still, part of me wanted my hand held through this darkness. Deafness I felt comfortable imagining, but blindness? This was a whole different level of terrifying I didn’t think I could ever prepare for.

But shit needed doing, and so off we went.

To be honest, every step terrified me. Her mention of an ever-shifting landscape had me imagining a field of soft wheat beneath my hooves one second, and the edge of a cliff the next. I felt like I was putting my life in the hands of a joker god playing roulette with my surroundings.

But on we walked, and outside the occasional hoof to my chest indicating I stop or the wingtip brushing against my side to direct me leftward or rightward, we just kind of… continued. Up hills, down slopes. Here and there, rocks made for a stumbling path, but there weren’t any cliffs that tried swallowing me up.

After a while, the loneliness got to me. “Hey Luna?”

“Hmm?”

“What’s it like here?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, what do you see? What’s around us? This place is where all the leftovers of dreams go, right? What sort of dreams are we walking through?”

A pause, then, “There is a field of blood-red grass to our left within a sloping valley. We ourselves walk along a ridgeline separating that from a barren wasteland of rock and cracked earth to our right. A greenish haze hangs over it, one I would prefer we not learn what it may be. We are still on course for the mountain ahead.”

I imagined the scene: an ocean of bloodgrass lapping up against a shore of dunes and craggy desert canyons, an unrelenting sun somewhere overhead in a cloudless sky. Maybe the sky was purple. Anything was possible here.

A hissing sound met my ears, and Luna snapped a hoof to my chest. “The world has changed.”

That got my hackles up. “What do you mean?”

“I believe somepony has awoken. Our ridgeline is gone. There is a cliff before us now, and an ocean laps against the rocks below.” A pause, before, “I do not like this place. The landscape shifts and reforms as if at the whim of Discord himself. Follow me.”

While I was still trying to picture what she meant, I heard her hoofsteps swish through tall grass to my left. “Hey, wait up!”

I took off after her and bristled at the touch of these long fronds brushing against my hooves. They came up to my chest and were soft as could be. Something reminiscent of wheat fields, but the scent of honeysuckle tickling my nose threw off any notion of familiarity.

“Wait,” Luna said. An uncomfortable intensity sharpened the word to a knifepoint.

The hair on the nape of my neck pricked up. “Wait for what?”

Something brushed through the grass to my left.

“What the fuck was that?” I said, stumbling away from the sound. Visions of shambling horrors came to mind—piercing eyes and slavering jowls.

Luna said nothing.

“Luna, don’t do this to me. What was that?”

A snarl and the frantic swish of grass in front of me gave way to a dog-like bark before a just-as-sudden snarl of magic. The dog-thing yelped, and I heard the rough thump of a body hitting the ground. It flailed amidst the grass, and the low howl of nearly a dozen others rose up in a frightful chorus all around us.

“Sunset,” Luna barked, just over my right shoulder. “Run past me, and do not stop. Now.”

My heart shot to my throat. “Run? Where!?”

I heard the swish of grass behind me, and I didn’t need another invitation. Like a gazelle at the first sign of a cheetah, I bolted toward Luna’s voice and beyond, sprinting blindly through the reeds beating at my hooves and chest. Normally I wouldn’t fall in with such insanity, but the footpads and baying of some unearthly creature not even five feet behind me could stir me to any number of crazy ideas—crazier for the cliff face somewhere nearby. I didn’t even know if it was to my left or right anymore. All I knew was run or die.

So I kept running. I ran and I ran and I prayed that whatever unholy creature behind me either gave up or Luna came to the rescue. I had to trust, I had to trust, I had—

Suddenly, where there should have been solid ground, I instead found air. I went tumbling forward for a fearful eternity before crashing chest first into packed dirt.

The footpads pitter-pattered to my right, down what sounded like a slope before veering back toward me. Pain exploded in my right rib cage as it barreled into me full speed, and we went rolling through the reeds. Before I could even figure out which way was up, it clamped its jaws down on my shoulder. It was like putting my arm to a circular saw.

I screamed and jabbed my horn at it as hard as I could. It sank into something soft—hopefully the fucker’s eye socket—and I let fly the biggest Flamethrower Spell I could muster.

Its squeal of pain was immediately lost to the roaring flames, and the stench of burnt fur and flesh flooded my nostrils. The flames took to the grass like dry brush, and the heat hit me as if I were storming a burning building.

I got to my hooves, but rather than take off again, the adrenaline pumping through my veins instilled in me some vague notion of bravery. There was no running with my shoulder like this, and I’d rather die grinding against the inevitable than be run down like prey. I set fire to the rest of the grass around me, and I got ready.

The footpads of the smarter bastards encircled me, the reed grass marking their path with the faint swish and hiss of leaf against fur. There were maybe four of them, all looking for an opening through the flames.

I imagined myself as one of those blind monks from those old karate movies, effortlessly fending off a pack of thugs who didn’t know how out of their league they were. Not that this was effortless—far from it—but I had to channel something to keep my head.

A sharp pain stabbed into my hind leg and thrashed as if trying to tear it off. I bit back a scream and turned to blast the dog-thing to smithereens. That’s when another let out a hyena laugh right in front of me, and the fear took hold.

I put up a shield to protect my throat just in time to hear its teeth clack against the magic. It clawed at my chest with its huge paws, and the hot breath from its nostrils hit me in the face like steam. It stank of tooth rot. The sound of cracking glass just beneath my chin sent a shiver down my spine.

“Get the fuck off me!” I yelled. I let loose another Flamethrower Spell in its face, hot enough for the latent heat to sear through my coat and burn my eyelashes off. I turned the spell on the one crushing my hind leg, but it let go to leap away before I could give it a faceful of “fuck you.”

My leg throbbed where it had gotten me, and I struggled to put weight on it. But I knew I had to bite the bullet and gut this out. If I showed weakness, they’d all jump me and that’d be it.

I re-upped the brushfire around me, but I’d be stupid to think that would do much. The one that got my leg had already braved the fire once.

It earned me a moment’s reprieve, at least. Time enough to catch my breath and signal where I was to Luna. If she’d get here in time, that was. And as the seconds wore on, I swiveled my ears about to locate the remaining three, only to realize that the growing crackle of burning reedgrass drowned out the sound of their footpads. I’d signed my own death warrant with that lack of foresight.

My breathing got the best of me, and I quickly found myself cowering backward into the smoldering ashes as the fires crawled outward. The heat scalded through my hooves, but I’d take that over another set of jaws clamping down on me.

“Luna, where are you?” I whispered.

As if that were an invitation, my ears caught the snap of reed grass to my right, and I heard the shifting of a body midleap with a snarl in its throat. I threw up a shield and braced for impact. Its weight was enough to push me back a pace, but my shield held firm for the moment.

My abjuration spells weren’t as good as my evocations, but even those didn’t seem to scare these bastards off the way I hoped. Like a flash in the pan, an idea struck me, and one of Luna’s spells came to mind. I split my focus on the shield while conjuring up the image of a spear made of pure moonlight and the first snows of winter. Luna had almost killed me with it in our duel—now, she’d save me with it.

The crack of glass signaled the final moments of my shield, and I took a step back. I imagined the thing gnawing on the rim of my Shield Spell like a bone, and I utilized what would possibly be the single most important second of my life.

Focus. Line up my aim with the sound. I only had one shot.

The shield shattered, I heard it leap, and I put all my weight behind the thrust.

There was a schlick of magic through meat, and I was met with a warm spray on my face. The creature let out a pathetic whimper and frantically clacked its jaws an inch from my muzzle before going limp.

I stumbled back, letting go of the spell to the weighty thump of the now-lifeless creature, and the realization of the moment caught up with me. Holy shit, that actually worked. It really shouldn’t have. It really shouldn’t have. What the hell was I thinking? That wasn’t just lucky, that was downright stupid.

That same strange hiss that I heard when the ridge turned into an oceanside cliff yanked me out of my head, and the temperature dropped like a storm cell barreling through the countryside.

“Sunset!” came Luna’s voice. A distorted reverberation of energy rang low and bassy as it whizzed overhead to impact a dog-thing behind me. “This place is changing again. Hurry, with me!”

A whirlwind swept through the reedgrass and blew my mane back. I shielded my face from the dust, and the air went cold where I’d been sweating. A current of magic pushed against my chest to turn me around, and I heard Luna’s hoofsteps trample up beside me. Without a second invitation, we were off with those dog-things hot on our heels.

They followed us over rolling hills of reed grass and around cliff sides—I could hear our hoofsteps echo off their towering heights—through stony hollows and across paved stone, ever at the mercy of Luna’s “left right forward” call-outs and the uneven ground beneath me.

I couldn’t count how many times I rolled my ankles, but at every stumble or stutter, Luna was there to pick me up with a wing and an encouraging word. I could hear by the cadence of her hooves that she sported a serious limp. Her breathing didn’t do her any favors in hiding what might have been many more injuries besides, but that didn’t stop her from raining hell on the dog-things still hounding us.

She tossed lightning and ice magic over her shoulder at every opportunity. The respective crackles of her magic as they soared through the air were both distinct and humbling, ending in a crack or a fizzle that scored any number of howls or yips of pain.

I did what I could to help keep them off our heels, slinging fireballs and gouts of flame over my shoulder, but I had no idea how much I was actually helping. The exertion caught up with me faster than I’d hoped, so I turned my focus back to running. Running and surviving.

My hooves hit smooth wood that took a slight, rounded incline, like we were crossing one of those fancy oriental bridges.

“Sunset, with me,” Luna said as we made it to the other side, and I felt the magics building at her horn before I heard them. With that kind of firepower, I guessed she meant to take out the maybe-bridge. Her hooves stopped, and so I skidded to a halt, spun about, and let fly what little I could contribute. Together, we let loose a veritable atom bomb of an explosion, and the blowback of the metaphorical megatons was just as satisfying as it was draining.

The sound of splintering wood and stone smashing into stone rang like music to my ears, down down down into whatever chasm yawned below. The dog-things let out a chorus of howls from across the gap, and my little corner of the world receded to the wind in my ears and the struggle for breath.

I collapsed where I stood, and I couldn’t help but laugh. “We did it, Luna. Fuckin’ showed them what’s up.”

“Indeed,” she said after a time. Her voice was strained, and I could tell by its directionality that she had also lain down. “You fought admirably.”

She tried to keep her breathing level, but I still picked up on the strain. Actually, she sounded labored—a little gurgly, even.

“Luna?”

The moment she realized I saw through whatever mask she wore, she let it drop. Her breathing became hard and heavy, and that gurgling sound took center stage. That wasn’t good.

“We must seek shelter,” she said. As much an admission of distress as I’d ever get from her. She must’ve been far worse off than I thought. “Before this place changes again and we are no longer beyond their reach.”

That was… Yeah, we needed to do that, like right the fuck now.

I struggled to my hooves, still heaving for breath, and was about to stumble away from the bridge when I noticed Luna hadn’t gotten up. That got my hackles shooting skyward.

“Luna?”

Her hooves scraped on the stone as she tried picking herself up, and I felt my body lock up in fear. If she was this beat up, what the hell were we supposed to do? Thankfully, the sensible part of my brain took charge, and I found myself at her side before I realized.

“I am fine,” she said in a tone that very much meant she wasn’t—that mask of hers dangling from her muzzle. Too proud to let it slip away, and that stoked an indignant fire in me.

“Oh, no you don’t,” I said, wedging my shoulder under hers. “The last thing you’re doing is being all high and mighty on me on your fucking deathbed.”

“I am not on my deathbed,” she said through gritted teeth as I helped her up. “I refuse such a notion.” Nonetheless, she put her weight on my shoulder, and off we went.

We eventually got away from the howling winds, wherever forward was actually taking us. We were going up, though. That was easy enough to tell by the incline beneath me and how she leaned against me that much more because of it.

As much as I knew I had to support her, I was hesitant to let her put too much weight on me, or even just potato-sack her like I probably could have in a pinch. If she was wounded, the last thing I wanted was to make her wounds worse by touching them or holding her wrong. Besides, that was just gross. Blood was a No with a capital N, and all other bodily fluids just… oh god, now I was thinking about it.

For the sake of getting my mind off those heebie jeebies, I instead channeled that thought of blood and guts and what have you into something productive by way of casting my magic over her. I had learned a thing or two about magical probing in my school days, thanks to the mirror, and so I poked and prodded in hopes of seeing through feeling, the way a blind person touched another’s face to “see” them.

It took a moment before I got the hang of it, but I gathered she had a large gash running the length of her barrel, a number of deep bites all up and down her left foreleg, and her left wing had been torn to ribbons. She could hardly even fold it back into its resting position.

I had watched her re-set her teeth and bleed out a swollen temple in seconds that one time. She’d even fixed my broken muzzle and closed my shoulder up. It was hard to imagine she couldn’t do that here and now unless something kept her from it.

“You gonna… fix yourself up there or what?” No reason to beat around the bush. “I mean, not that carrying your ass hasn’t been the highlight of my day or anything.”

She humored my smartassery with a tiny snort, and I pictured a tiny smile on her face. “I daren’t think otherwise, Sunset Shimmer. Indeed, ’twas my plan all along.”

Her hoof caught a rock, and she collapsed to her knees. The grunt of pain she let out sent a wave of goosebumps up my legs.

A breath in, then out, before she said, “Humor aside, this place dampens my magic. It is as if the very air fights to chain me down.”

I got on her other side and threw her good wing over my shoulder to help her up. “It doesn’t dampen your ability to kick ass with your own four hooves, does it?”

She might not have meant for me to hear it, but I was close enough to catch her sniff at that. I imagined her smiling again, even if only a little.

“Thankfully, no. And I am not one to fear these beasts. But fighting without magic is itself more of a handicap than I would like. You seem to have fared little better than myself. I am sorry I could not protect you, but I am proud of what you have accomplished, blind or no.”

I bit back the urge to snap at her for that kind of comment. Porcelain doll or not, it didn’t feel right to snap back, not after she took this kind of beating.

“Where are we going?” I asked, if only to get my mind off that volatile topic.

“There is a path ahead leading up a hill. We should survey our surroundings, now that we are not hounded like rabbits from their holes.”

“That’s all well and good,” I said. “But we need a place to rest.”

Luna grunted in opposition, but I knew damn well she couldn’t argue. “There is a grove ahead, to our left. Take us there.”

That’d work. It took some doing, but we managed a trundling pace up the hillside with a few stumbles here and there on my account. I followed her directions toward said grove, and I felt the cool transition of stepping out of direct sunlight and into some semblance of shade.

We collapsed more than settled down, and to my surprise a thick blanket of moss welcomed us off our hooves, soft as my bed back home. It smelled like clover and the cool, dewy freshness of spring.

The thrum of magic sounded to my left, Luna putting her horn to my hind leg.

I jerked away on instinct, but I relaxed as the warm sensation that was a lack of pain settled in. It struck me as strange, thinking of it in those terms, but I didn’t have better words for it. I felt the skin pulling taut along the wound, her magic a suture and her horn the needle drawing it closed.

She did the same for my shoulder, before soon enough, the thrum of magic subsided, and a shiver ran through me as I was left distinctly cold, like I had been all bundled up in my favorite blanket and someone rudely snatched it away.

Despite her attempts to downplay it, I noted the tremors in her breath, the strain that spell took on her. I imagined her sweating, same as last time but without the luxury of a smile, given the circumstances.

“We are still a ways from the mountain,” Luna said in that tone I associated with that distant, pensive stare of hers. “I would guess two miles by flight.”

“That’s not happening,” I snapped.

That got a laugh out of her, but it quickly devolved into a painful coughing fit that had me cringing. “Nor would I impress it upon you,” she said. “We will make it, and there we shall see the threads that hold this place together.”

That line got a ripple of goosebumps up and down my legs. I knew from the get-go that we were operating on a hunch, but after everything between falling into this place and now, the realization hit me harder.

What if we really were stuck down here in this dream graveyard? And with no sign of the Nightmare, there was a good chance it hadn’t been sucked in with us, leaving it to do whatever the hell it wanted in the Dreamscape, or worse.

“Sunset,” Luna said. “I… I wish to ask of you a favor.”

“And that is?”

“These wounds, loath as I am to admit, are worse than I first believed. And with my magic diminished as it is, I do not believe I am capable of tending to them as I was yours.” A pause, then hesitantly: “Perchance, if it is not too much to ask, would you see to them for me?”

That got another round of goosebumps up and down my legs. Working with her was one thing, as was fighting alongside her. That was cooperation for the sake of a greater good. That was for Twilight.

But healing her? That got my skin crawling in that same cosmic ethics sense from before, in my heart-to-heart with Copper. But again, this was for Twilight. This was for Equestria and my home beyond the mirror.

“Fine,” I said. “Show me.”

I shut my eyes. Not sure why, since I couldn’t see jack, but it felt necessary all the same. I knew she was coming in to touch her horn to mine, and that invasion of space warranted far more than a wince on my part, if I had a say on the matter.

And there it was—a strange, twisting, curling warmth, like a smoking coal right at the tip of my horn. It traced down the spiral of my horn and into my skull, and the warmth spread through me as if I became the coal itself. Warmth turned to feeling, and feeling into knowledge.

Being able to learn a spell by feel was a rare gift, but one I’d found out I had a knack for in my filly days. Was why I picked up my courses so easily, and probably the only reason I ever made it as Celestia’s prized student. It made me wonder how much of this I’d never have gone through if I never discovered that about myself.

But Luna pulled her horntip away from mine, and I was left with a sense of cold that flowed down my horn like a winter wind, strong enough to make me shiver, but not enough to snuff the coal inside.

A deep breath in, then out. For Twilight, and I cast the spell.

It felt awkward, poking and prodding about like an intern told to glove up and have at it on day one of clinicals. I got the hang of the spell, though, and once I worked up the courage, I reached into her with my magic, like dipping my hands into a vat of warm jello. Muscle and viscera parted in inconsistent, slimy spurts, and bone and cartilage pushed back with twig-like springiness.

The strangely tactile feedback got the squirmies going in my chest, as I was never one for bodily fluids or other medical crap like that, but it helped me map out her skeleton in my head and give me a sense of what I had missed when I went poking around her wounds earlier.

I wasn’t a surgeon. The extent of my medical knowledge ended at Anatomy & Physiology II, with a smattering of hospital drama TV show lingo. But luckily, magic was a little more forgiving, and one by one I found the injuries and sutured her up best I could. Doubt it looked anything professional, but at least she wouldn’t keel over while we slept. The sigh of relief she gave was enough to know I’d done my part, at least.

“Thank you, Sunset,” she said.

“Yeah,” was all I could say. A moment passed where nothing but a listless wind rustled the trees above us. I took the opportunity to roll onto my back and feel the cool springy moss beneath me like the cool spot on a mattress.

“Did you know,” Luna said. “’Twas Twilight who taught me that spell.”

“Really?” In a strange irony, that both surprised and didn’t surprise me at all. Twilight was the type of pony who would know and teach others that sort of thing, but given Luna’s age, I’d have expected her to know a similar spell already.

“Indeed. She… she once healed somepony very dear to me. I made sure to learn it myself, should he and I ever meet again.”

I mulled that over in my head: somepony she held dear to her enough to memorize a healing spell for. There were only a handful of instances where “dear to me” fit that sort of bill.

“The guy that loved Celestia over you?” I guessed.

“Would it surprise you were I to say no?” she asked. Her words stuck out as accusatory, but her tone sounded more curious—why did I think that, rather than how dare I.

I shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s… I guess it’s just hard to imagine you in love, after…”

She left that alone for a bit, and I could imagine her staring into the distance.

“I am equine, just as you are,” she said. “What I was… well, I am again equine, thanks to Twilight and her friends.” She shifted beside me, probably from one haunch to the other. “I have feelings, same as you. Love, hate, jealousy, fear. ’Tis why I fight for what I do and why I have sacrificed much to see us to where we are.”

“That still doesn’t answer my question,” I said.

A pause. “No.”

“No, as in you refuse to answer my question, or no, as in not him?”

“No, as in not he.”

I snorted. “How many times have you been in love, then?”

A longer pause this time. “Thrice, and perchance a fourth.”

“‘Perchance a fourth’? That sounds like a story and a half.”

“’Twould not be a lie to frame it as such.” She ruffled her wings and resettled them. Their breeze caught me gently in the face. For better or worse, she left it at that, and it made me wonder just what could be a “possible fourth” for someone who had lived thousands of years. And for that matter, four seemed like an awfully low number, unless the whole immortality deal made pursuing romance time and again more of an issue than I was capable of understanding.

I could have let my mind continue wandering that road, but another curiosity shouldered that line of thinking off the path.

“Hey, Luna?” I asked, staring up into the darkness that was my world.

“Hmm?”

“What’s it look like? This grove we’re in.”

Silence took hold of the moment before she shifted to what was probably a more comfortable position. I assumed she was looking up and piecing together what to say.

“There are trees of the strangest purples and reds. There is a luminosity around the edges of their leaves I would liken to that of one’s horn. The one above us bears fruit I hesitate to call cherries for the nature of the little spines that grow upon them, but I cannot think of a better comparison.”

I pieced together this little puzzle of a narrative in my head. Not gonna lie, it was kind of relaxing, listening to her describe this place. Maybe it was just a nice change of pace from being blind and hunted down, but I could have listened to her all day.

I rolled onto my stomach and made myself comfortable. It wasn’t hard, given the thick layer of moss, but I took the time to keep my hind leg out from under myself. Luna might have healed it shut, but the throbbing soreness would be killer tomorrow if I slept on it funny, if my injuries from our duel were any indication.

“We should rest, Sunset,” she said at length. “’Twould not do us well to squander this relative safety.”

Fair enough. “I can take first watch,” I said, as ironic as that sounded.

She stirred up a little current of air with her wings. They made a soft brushing sound as she traced them along the moss.

“If you so wish.” She laid her head down and then let out a deep breath through her nose. “Goodnight, Sunset.”

I said nothing in return, merely staring sightlessly in her general direction. A certain unnameable sensation chose that moment to creep in and trash my relative peace of mind. It drew my ears back against my skull and tugged on my heart as if by the shirt collar.

She and I had been having ourselves a lot of these—quiet moments, that was. It was strange. Before, I couldn’t stand the sight of her, but now, well… I couldn’t see her to make the same assessment, technically speaking, but thinking of her while knowing she lay beside me, it was… what was the word I wanted? Not “fine.” Fine was too positive. Tolerable?

Her little shifts and rustles in her sleep didn’t get my hackles on end, nor did the body heat she left in the moss, where I found myself reaching out to soak up some of that latent warmth. I felt like I should be disgusted by this… complacency? There was some law of the universe I defied by not spitting in her face and knocking her teeth in again.

Maybe this was all part of some plan of hers. What if she did this to me? To force me to rely on her and come to my own conclusion that she was a noble and righteous pony.

I snorted at that. This was a product of our situation, and I really needed to stop being such a bitch. I had put enough blame on Luna already. If she wanted to have her way with me again, this was the time and place—when I was blind, broken, and scared shitless.

I kept my eyes trained in her general direction, imagined how she lay right now, the gentle rise and fall of her chest. It made me sick to my stomach admitting it, but I couldn’t keep lying to myself.

She really did care, didn’t she?

XLIX - . . .

Mortal minds weren’t meant for this.

Into the silent infinity—past the spraypaint of stars, around nebulae, skirting the edges of galaxies and alongside the ghostly tails of comets until their courses veered off to whatever may await them—we continued on…

And on.

And on.

And on...

How long has it been?

I want to go home…

Mortal minds weren’t meant for this. I didn’t think they ever could be.