Dreaming Black
or
Lost in the Lunar Sea: Tales from a Twisted Mind

Prologue
Sea of Madness

Let me tell you about my favourite dream.

When you're magically imprisoned, in both mind and body, for a whole millennium, you have a lot of time to dream. Time stops being linear: It doesn't just stretch out in front of you, but all around, in every direction, over the horizon and beyond. Up and out to the furthest reaches of space, so far away that no civilisation could ever hope to reach its end, no matter how long they had, how evolved they were, or what fantastic advancements they may have invented for themselves. This unfathomable constant, enough to break the mind of any mortal at the mere thought, was my reality.

Some may say it was a blessing that I knew that I would escape one day, but I disagree. If I didn't know, I could have drifted carelessly for eternity, treading the waters of half-consciousness and half-sanity, and sinking at will, taking in the madness, letting my mind break under the pressure of time like a drowning figure allowing themselves to submit to the tides, to sink ever quicker in order to end their suffering all the sooner. With the deadline, the knowledge that one day I would be free, that one single day one thousand years into the future was like a distant planet in the eye of a cave-dweller; bright in the sky, but absolutely unattainable. It made seconds stretch into years and years pass like centuries.

Though I didn't sleep for one moment of those thousand years, I still dreamed, and dreamed often. My mind became the theatre for countless plays, and so great a number of players that such a number has never been named. Often they were sketchy, half-visualised. Other times they felt as real and seemed as detailed as the world around you – not that that was always a good thing. For every beautiful moonrise, there were a thousand twisted settings, evil faces, grave misdeeds. The mind has a tendency to focus on the bad, on the primal, of the unique glee that only evil can provide.

Especially when that mind is trapped in limbo for millennia. Jealous. Vengeful.

I am not just a creature of darkness; I am the darkness. It is my shroud of velvet ultramarine that embraces the land and sky when the night falls, my moon that provides a watchful eye when all others are blissfully relieved of the burden of sunlight… and my night that was shunned and reviled by all for so long. All I wanted was to show that I cared, and maybe just a little gratitude in return. It may seem trivial a cause to any who were to listen, but it is the cause for my imprisonment, the genesis of my awakening and my magically-induced coma. Curtains and eyes were not the only things that closed when night fell: so did their minds. A wilful ignorance to my benevolence, to my worries, and worst of all, to my suffering within my lunar isolation. They finally had the reason they needed to sleep through the night: if they didn’t see the moon, they didn’t need to feel that pang of guilt that surely, surely they had tugging at them deep down.

That is why, for what felt like endless eons in the throes of my mind, my favourite dreams were the ones not where I was redeemed, or even where I triumphed, and snuffed out the sun like the flame of a candle. No.

My favourite dreams were the ones where I murdered my own flesh and blood.

It might strike you as more than a little disproportionate, and maybe to mortal minds, it is. But I’ve had centuries alone in my head to mull it over, and my judgment is always the same: Luna, Princess of the Night, died that day at the whim of her sister Celestia. A battle for the sun and moon – so infinitesimal they seem now – resulted in one sibling condemning the other to a slow, agonising death in the infinite void of her own mind. And I? I am the result. Amid the deafening silence and maddening nothingness, I have attained clarity. I am more than any mortal mind, any simple civilisation with its hopes, dreams, and pitiful attempts at giving meaning to their lives. They are but ants upon the earth, and I… heh. I am the moon, falling from the sky toward them, blinking out their entire world in an instant.

Clarity. The comfort and torture of silent lucidity. The millionth rendition of my favourite dream. But as I stepped away from the twisted remains of what had been my sister – had been Luna’s sister – something happened. Something new. The visions didn’t fade back into inky blackness, my mind didn’t sink back into the sea of madness to re-emerge ages later. I stood. I remained, and so too did the city that had sprung from the darkness to provide the stage for my umpteenth strike of vengeance.

No, this would not do. A bright, bustling city, the sun high above? A perfect setting for the slaying of the sun’s very champion, but for a single second longer the rays began to burn like acid. Any attempt at lucidity, at shaping what my mind’s eye saw, ended in failure. Any direction I ran only led to more streets, more prying eyes, more damn sunshine. But I had one last trick, one that I had stumbled upon at my lowest ebb, so long ago: a flash of blue, magical light, and I fell to the ground, pierced by my own power, my blood pooling, just as that of the fallen, dream-conjured facsimile of Celestia had.

When they said suicide is painless, they lied. Well, how would they know? I, however, was a little more familiar by this point, long past my initial attempts to free myself from my prison in the only way that seemed possible, long past the screams of dismay when I found myself still trapped in the endless prison of my forcibly dormant mind. Of course I couldn’t die; my body and mind were one with the moon, and I had no corporeal form to stab, or suffocate, or crush, or drown, or burn. For escaping such terrors as a summer sun out of my control, however, it was an ideal tactic. Now to fade into the blissful sleep of what felt like death, and I would “wake” once more, decades later, far from this awful place.

Except I didn’t. Not the first time I tried, nor the second, nor the hundredth. This city, this one damn city street in particular. Each time I opened my eyes it was there, unchanged, unperturbed by the screaming figure that had once been the Princess of the Night. Out of my control, and I at its very centre, for the first time lost not in the comforting, tormenting embrace of maddening nothingness, but in a setting that, at the very least, felt almost like reality. I struggled upright, the scorching of the sun settling to an almost-satisfying constant agony.

Pain is like water; if you’ve no appreciation for it, you’re likely to balk at the mere thought, before passing it up for a cordial, or a peppermint tea. However, if you were to find yourself surrounded on all sides by desert while the heat beats mercilessly down from above, then the thought of a single sip of water will make every fibre of your being ache with longing and regret the ungratefulness you showed in times gone by.

So it is with the pain that engulfs my very being right now. Any mortal being, be they pony, griffon, even dragon would beg for clemency from such complete and consuming torture, shortly before passing out... only to come to and have the horror begin all over again. I am long, long starved of physical sensation, my mind so accustomed to my feeble attempts to fool myself into thinking I can feel anything bar the numb, perpetual isolation that even the most violent attempts on my own wellbeing are like the kiss of a feather to the mightiest mountain, barely registering in my psyche. Thus, when my body is assailed by the light of this sun, and it actually burns, I accept the excruciating agony with relish. Torment? Hardly. My ears flattened against my skull as a piercing, disjointed cacophony rent the air asunder, and my realisation that it was my own scream of pain caused my mouth to curl into a twisted mockery of a smile, deforming the tail-end of the scream into a malformed laugh even as tears flowed freely from my eyes, exploding upon the ground beneath me.

Pain! Delicious, excruciating sensation! I gleefully allowed my legs to buckle and send me crashing first to my side, then over to my back, eyes wide with defiance as I dared to stare at the sun until I felt my very corneas scorch, my vision reduced to a murky, swirling mess of black and purple shapes and smudges. For the first time in centuries, I was feeling, and not just feeling any simple twinge: this was a universal blanket of physical trauma, every atom of my body screaming in anguish. Put simply, I was in heaven… until my near-nonexistent vision vaguely made out the shape of a formidable bank of cloud, one that deigned it necessary to separate me from my tormentor. It moved swiftly, blotting out the burning sun and rendering the entire cityscape a drab and indecisive grey, neither the offensive brightness of day nor the beautiful indigo of night.

I wailed with dismay as the excruciation faded to a mere torture. With all the desperate vigour of a starving child falling upon a banquet, I turned to the ground, wanting more, my hooves pounding at the unforgiving rock beneath until they gave way, becoming split and ruined. Blood sprayed from my nose with each ragged breath as I smashed my face into that selfsame pavement over and over and over and over and over. Finally, a deep crunch reverberated through my cranium as the root of my horn splintered and snapped free from its mooring upon my skull. All four legs fell limp, and I giggled with all the mirthful joy of a carefree filly as darkness embraced my consciousness.

~~~

I was not sure how much time, be it real or imaginary, had passed before I opened my eyes to find my vision rested, recovered and pin-sharp once more, my horn and hooves not just unbroken, but pristine. This I was accustomed to; much like how sensation was an incredibly rare phenomena in the seas of my waking coma, so to was lasting injury. After all, you cannot damage what exists only in your imagination, no matter how damaged that imagination itself may be. However, as I rose in an undignified and unsteady fashion, I felt my attention drawn to something unusual: yes, I felt numb to pain once more, and yes, my horn was firmly rooted to my skull again, but as I craned my neck to look over my form I found not an unblemished coat of royal blue, but a singed, melted, soot-black mess. My self-inflicted wounds had gone away as expected, but the horrific burns adorned by the sun’s rays remained, the loathsome ball of fire having boiled my skin and melted my coat to a brittle shell, for lack of a better description. Tumours, blisters, burns; my body bore the brunt of the sun’s despicable fury. Any other creature might be shocked or terrified, but I felt a smirk lance its way across my features. Why? One simple word:

Consequence.

Oh how I longed for consequence, be it positive or negative. No longer did my existence rely on how frequently I blinked, but instead on how time itself decided to march on. The only question I had was why this had suddenly happened, but I had no interest in the answer; I simply revelled in the excitement this happenstance afforded me. I moved to turn and examine myself more closely, but found my hooves welded to the ground by the melted remains of my coat. I felt myself smile and roll my eyes, as though I’d stumbled upon a trivial inconvenience and not a side-effect of my sun-induced deformity, before I pulled myself free with a crack that signified the fracturing of melted keratin and inspected myself once more. Though this deformity was a sign of welcome consequence, it simply would not do as the visage of the Princess of the Night. No matter: my being so accustomed to waking lucidity, this was an easy fix that simply required me to will my healed body into being. In the blink of an eye, my scars were spirited away and replaced by a coat of… black.

Hmm. This was most unusual.

I tried again, and again I found the same soot-shaded horsehair. With a sudden pang of suspicion, I tilted my head and regarded the dark clouds that floated between myself and the sun. Yes, between its ability to hurt me and my inability to affect my setting like I could every other aspect of my consciousness so far, it made sense that this was somehow connected to my burning. One last, indelible scar of sorts… but, in all honestly, I liked the idea of this black branding. A physical sign of my unjust treatment at the wishes of my sister, and a poetic juxtaposition to her white coat. Not just a princess of the night, I was now a princess of darkness, truly. The Night Mare, if you will. My mind relished the wordplay as much as my prior agony. I felt a new sense of purpose and a drive that reinvigorated my form – after all, my day of release will arrive sooner or later. Maybe it is almost here, or maybe it has arrived and I simply retained some latent lucid magic that had been learned throughout my banishment? Or maybe I was finally dead and found myself with the ability to haunt my sister once I find my way back to her? I laughed under my breath; no, I’d been in far too much pain to be anything but alive.

Still, the subject of ‘making my way back’ brought an important issue to the fore, that of where exactly it was I found myself. Real or not, my surroundings needed to be familiarised with, the seemingly infinite, dusty sandstone streets winding sinuously in every direction. But where to start? That was an easy choice. With a derisory and dismissive flick of my mane, I turned my back to the western sky and the sun that hung low there, and walked determinedly toward the welcoming embrace of the approaching dusk.

I had hoped to introduce you to the dream in which I died, truly and finally. But this is not that dream.

This is the dream in which I lived.

Author's Note

Hello!

The series finale inspired me. Like, a lot. I've not done any writing in years, due to not having the attention span or drive for the longest while, but darnit, I have to! As such I'm dreadfully out of practice, so please be gentle and/or constructive. Thanks!

Also I can't take credit for the excellent Lunar Sea/lunacy pun.