Imperfect Vision

It’s night. There’s a grassy field with brown plants and big trees reaching to the Ponyville stars five kilometres away, towering over and scattering moonlight on a decrepit caravan with its three wheels knocked off and moss where its axles once were. The oblong structure is made of darkwood once proud now stained, wet, and cracked with the interior metal spoiled by the failings of the exterior finish, the gold trim stripping away from its inset, curling and snapping off into clumps beneath the slipshod staircase constructed aftermarket beneath the overlocked door. Inside, there was a mess.

Imperfect Vision is a young Earth stallion with blue-grey fur and béchamel hair cut short on mane and tail. He sits in his single-room shelter by lamplight hunched over a slanted desk with his two hooves holding down a piece of foolscap, staring at it fuzzy with his eyes glazed over and his breathing holding the steady labour of in-and-out breaths every five seconds. In his vision lies a blank matte piece of paper covering the whole of his writing surface and oversized ballpoint pens littered on the bottom of his lectern. The flickers of wicks burning oil throw orange from outside his vision, and the writings and rolls taped up and thrown down across the walls of his home scatter around the corduroy rug that decks his floor.

His eyelids weigh heavily. His breathing shutters. His mouth curls down into a grimace as his jaw goes slack and his cheeks turn numb. The dim illumination of his off-white paper grows dimmer as greys turn to black and colours once apparent now turn to memories within the inside of his eyelids, afterimages dancing within the darkness, making no more noise than tinnitus. His internal voice and imagination were muted, his constant thoughts fading away, and he dropped his left arm to rest his cheek and nuzzle his jaw in a cool and comfortable place.

As his journey to the void started it ended with a tilt of the lectern and the wooshing of winds made within the decimetres from his head to the floor, his pens tumbling to the left with the rest of his lectern crashing down to bare metal, smashing with a dead clang as his head followed through into the papers loitering below, waking with a startled scream as his fetlocks scrambled to right himself, his hooves jamming his notes into the floor and slipping as they tore up from under him, sputtering his breath as he slammed his flank down and shot his eyes open to look at the mess he’s made.

He looked at his fallen workspace, inhaling, five seconds in, then five seconds out as he sat there with his pounding heart without a blink.

His ears thumped, his fur was crisp, and his unwashed breath turned to the fresh taste of cool mint as the colours before him turned from dim orange to a white-grey stew, the outlines of objects indistinct, and where everything was just as it needed to be, just as it needed to be, and he smiled.

He leaned over and grabbed his lectern, lifting it upright onto his desk with everything on it sliding off, carrying the motion into his body, which flopped to the right as he grabbed a rolled-wad of paper over there somewhere, orienting himself to a proper sit, and unrolled it down on the writing tablet. He glanced over his notes on stinkbugs before flipping it to the blank side with a mumble, ironing it out with his hooves and holding each end in place with the clamps on both sides of the surface. Without looking, he gripped a floorbound pen and wrung it to the paper with a scattered streak, lifting it up to the northwest corner, breathing in as his shaking hoof shook just a little less.

“SLEEPWALK,” he wrote, in deliberate caps, as large as the margins allow.

“Night Five,” he wrote, to the left under that, with a lazy and unsteady hoof.

He looked at these three words as the black ink melded into the paper and turned into the same greyish blur of canvas his writings laid on. As they disappeared, his thoughts too left him, and his breathing was all he heard.

He thought it a good time for a drink.

He shook his head and giggled, rolled his head to the opposite direction, giggled more, looked down to the rolls of his dusty old rug, and trotted towards the icebox in the corner of his abode as his giggles turned to breaths between his teeth. He cracked open the wattle-daubed chest and flung open the dripping hatch, fetching a porcelain water flask and a ten-gram glass vial with a smidgen of white powder within. He smashed the chest down and giggled some more as he took them both to his desk, wiping off the frigid droplets within the shadow he walked through, giggling as he wiped his hoof on his fur and placed them on the right of his desk ― forever cleared for water and food.

As he uncorked the vial and flask he suppressed his giggles by biting his tongue. As his open smile faded, he eyeballed the vial and thought there no more than two grams left. He nodded and held it to the lip of the flask, tapping the powder in bit-by-bit, tilting it straight up and pouring the whole lot in. He shoved the vial’s cork back in, shoved in the flask’s cork, and shook hard with both hooves as he hummed a dumb tune. He bit his tongue with a wince as he popped the cork out, peered into its neck by the dim oil lamps, and shook his head as he giggled.

As he plugged his nose and took a swig of the chunky mix, he looked over to his page and saw the words back where they were, his pen at the lectern smearing a line from there to the shelf. He wheezed as he took away the flask and wiped his wet lips, reaching out to the pen as he cocked his head, blinking as his empty head left no room for inspiration. He reached out to the remnants of his leftward notes, and touched only bare metal as he sipped again. As he swallowed and sighed, he breathed out annoyed, and held his flask up as he leaned over further, grasping at the floor, hoof sliding over nothing, and looked over to find his notes right beside him.

He scratched his head and saw his prose-drenched scraps scattered all about. He grumbled as he grabbed a wad, and as he clenched the papers in his hoof, the rest flew out from under him with a flutter, his heart stopping as his eyes shot open and followed the trail in his vision, whipping himself backwards and slamming his back into his desk as he saw that shadow in full, that translucent black with star-studded form and presence as large as his home: the Mare in the Moon. That goddess before him. Staring.

His jaw stayed open as his chest beat badly and his breaths were cold and sharp. His pupils dilated as they stared high into hers, his fur now raised even higher. His eyes wandered right as his notes flew in his vision, flipping in the air as the Mare held them in front of her in stasis, assembling the scraps into wrinkled-up pages, organising them into a broadsheet. As the pages assembled to a sum her eyes darted between them and her face was obscured by foolscap. He gripped the scraps held in his hoof and looked at the sky-black glow surrounding it, jutting his cannon back and letting the papers fly as he shook his empty hoof, now static.

His breath got back to him as his heart beat less and less, exhaling long and strong as his eyes recognised the back of her scraps, seeing fragments of words and theories with sentences cut short as more and more of the paper-made puzzle flew into place and stayed still. His complaints in the margins spoke to him, reading in sideways writing how his eyes glaze over, how his hunger never ends, how his water is always wet, and how the tiny little constant imperfections of life makes him delusional, paranoid of things that aren’t there, will never be there, and comes to a head in sleepwalking phantoms, where the deprivation makes sights and sounds occur where they never could in existence.

With his jaw open and his eyelids halfway lazily gazing at the rest of his ideas in front of him, the rolls across the rest of his room unfurled and surrounded the Mare in a sphere of insight, and within the gaps of pages he saw her flip them around and scan them while preening her head around with low grumbles. His breathing became steady again, in and out through those same intervals, and as he crocked his head up he realised this whole time he held his flask above his head, and smiled as its white sheen flicked lamplight in his eye.

He lowered the flask slow, and as he brought it to his lips he giggled, taking a sip as some water spilled out and his giggles turned into mad laughs.

The Mare part aside her sphere as she exhaled hot and slow, staring at him, leaning closer into his snout.

He took a swig with his head to the sky, and then laughed again, wiping his chin as his posture relaxed and he looked at her with a smile.

”Ah,” he said with a lazy tongue and a cut-short chuckle. “It’s not thaaat, you know. Nothing suggestive…” He opened his mouth, then closed it, then opened it again with a grin. “It’s caffeine! From the East. It’s magic, they took the powder ― not magic like you got with the woosh and the scary reality-destroying impossibilities but with all the ― the powder they took from something, like a plant, like… chemicals and glass.” His face went numb, then he shook his head and blew a raspberry to the ground. “I don’t have the, the chemicals. I think if I keep this up I’ll become a scientist mad. Like one who gets paid to hurt himself. Any-way,” he said, turning to his desk as he spoke loud and dumb, “yeah, it does awake stuff, and I guess this is a dream or something.”

He put down his flask then picked up a pen as he shoved his hoof under the three words he wrote before, scratching a dot into the page and writing down the letter “H” before dropping the pen with his hoof in place, his mouth gaping and drooling before wiping it and searching for the pen. “I call them sleepdreams because you’re awake,” he started. “Not you pony thing, but it’s like you’re inbetween the lines of a page if you were small but you’re big and I’m there right now, like the duplication of the pony staring in mirrorland the reflection, I’m the reflection and I’m me too and my pen is crying.”

He looked at the page, looked down to the rest of the pens on his lectern, then picked one up. “Hallucination,” he said as he nodded his head, then brought the pen to the page, staring at the space beyond the “H”. “Self-induced dementia,” he muttered, the rest of his words nonsense as they grew quiet and dull. He wrote some letters after “H”, sloppy and like a sine wave as they left his sights and went into the great beyond within the page.

A speck of drool wet the paper, and he moaned.

The Mare moved past the back of his head and peered into the mess as written, leaning in with bile curiosity, her head beside his while her eyes scanned this production of deranged thought and hoof. She craned her neck to the notes she flipped beside her, and her face went soft with pity, before growling with a scowl as she brought her lips beside his ear and whispered with an exhale.

“I assure you, my dear Imperfect… I am no mere vision.”

She flung her wings beyond her and with a neighing, two-hoofed stomp threw her papers to each end of the caravan, startling Imperfect as he snapped to consciousness with a shake, looking back at the swirl of notes being brought forth from each corner and wall, unrolling and twirling into a cyclone as she stepped back and gazed all around her its contents. With a glow from her horn, oil siphoned out of the wall-hung lamps, and with it the fire that danced on each fluid rope, flaming wisps thrown inbetween each page without catching alight, the fires moving faster and faster in front of her eyes, into a single wheel burning at speeds unreasonably fast yet paradoxically steady and still.

Imperfect stared dumbfounded with his mouth open and his breathing stopped, looking at his life’s work toyed with, flung about careless, still undamaged. She sorted each paper into squares based on topic and flipped each page around, magic horn-beams slicing pages down the middle as needed, directions opposite where her eyes were focused, splitting at hairs-length the scrawlings of disparate research and setting them aside into relevant groups. As each page found its home and each category was put in its place, the cyclone lessened in mass, with only a few pages fluttering as they, too, fell into order, with only the fire leftover.

As she checked her scheme and paginated each group in single stacks, the corner of her eye saw Imperfect reach for his flask, and with a flick of her head popped the cork like a missile as it ricocheted against the walls, the water trailing the cork’s trajectory just as fast, with the caffeine powder separated and erupting from the spout as he surrendered his hoof to his head. When the cork aimed for the Mare’s skull, she stopped it dead and dropped it, the water trail brought above her and into a spiral tall yet thin rotating to a point right above the fire, a drop let onto it with a sizzle, then steam.

The spiral rotated downwards as each floating folio went between the fire and water, the steam licking the top end of each stack as the water sputtered into flame and turned to boiling clouds. With each stack seared, their tops bound the pages together into an ashen glue, then pulled back behind her and dried with a flap of her wings and a riffle of the pages. With this each leaflet became a single codex, the sum of knowledge for each subject held together in flipbook volumes, stacked together in a mountain of chapters as the last bit of water funneled into the final fires and disappeared into smokey embers and remnants of oily resin.

In the new darkness, she made a nightlight with her horn, then put the resin in each lamp and lit them with a nod. The warm glow was back, the papers floated onto the lectern, and furled through them one last time as her magic scrounged up a pen from under the desk, cracked it in two, then siphoned the ink to trace it around her held-up hoof. With a wet underhoof she slammed it into the cover page center, obscuring a canvas scrawled with “Imperfect Vision” by the dozens, then shook her leg as she traced the rest of her ink onto the page’s border, drawing a simple line over and over, bold until the last ink left.

Imperfect was covered in caffeine.

She looked to him with her hoof down and smiled with a cheeky exhale. “Your pen will no longer cry,” she said. “It spent its life in service to a better mare.”

Imperfect blinked. “Huh?”

She leaned down and aimed her horn at him, and with a blue blast of bright water parted the powders on him to the back of his wall, pasting a confused silhouette before a white blast of wind slammed into him and dried off his fur in an instant, shaking his head and sputtering as she parted the wet remnants into irrelevant droplets, turned to air.

She threw the pen pieces behind her and it landed in a corner somewhere. She huffed and looked down at the stallion. “Are you quite awake, yet?”

He whimpered and rubbed his hoof to his snout. “Yeah, sure,” he said.

She smiled. “You’re not.”

“Okay…” he said, struggling to raise himself to his fours. “Thanks for asking a useless question…” He fumbled, then jerked himself to his hooves and gripped himself up to his desk.

Her eyes followed his body raising him to his lectern, and scoffed with glee. “Now that I’ve done this favour for you ― ”

He interrupted without thought. “What do you mean, unawake? That would mean accepting your being here as reasonable. Which it isn’t.” As he got himself in place, he grabbed a pen and shuffled through the pages of his new opus, then went back to the cover and traced her hoof-stamp with the pen’s butt. “Look at this ― look at this! This is incredible! All of ― ” He turned around and looked at her chest, waving all around to nothing as his wide-open eyes darted within his caravan and his pen pointed to places where there was once filth, but now nothing. “There’s order! I’m not in order! You made all this in order. And this binding… it’s…” He moved to face his desk, but then stopped, and stared at her chest again. His mouth was open, but then it closed, and his eyes moved down to the floor, as he sat there and thought.

“You’re the goddess,” he said, then paused. He shook his head. “No wonder I’m so refreshed.”

She nodded her head. “Inbetween the lines of a page. Awake, and yet asleep. The domain through which I travel.”

“So, what?” he asked in a half-hearted laugh. “Not my domain. I’m just visiting ― oh, FORGET IT!” He slammed his hoof into the desk, and his porcelain flask toppled. “What am I doing? I should be writing this down!” He took his pen and flipped through his research, looking for a section filled with his first four nights. “The dreams, the delusion, the madness! The magic, the visions, the hallucinations! Your existence! What else is there to do but record this epiphany and ruminate on its creation? What deigns the dreams of colt and mare and what binds their thoughts together? The collective consciousness ― of course! The magical means of bringing all folk together! The universal equation of everything!”

As the Mare listened her visage scowled and growled low into a scream. “Vision!” She whisked the folio away with her magic and slammed her hoof onto the lectern’s slant, bouncing the flask off the desk and onto the floor with a metallic twang, the glass vial following and dropping on top of it. She jammed her snout into his and breathed hot air into his nose, baring her teeth and screaming into his face. “Enough with the theory, and enough with my courtesy! I am here, I am present, and you are ruining my ability to do my job, and help out ponies with actual problems instead of this philosophical pseudoscientific whinging!”

He looked straight into her eyes as they shot wide open. He quickly looked away, then slowly lowered his pen and put his hooves into his lap. He whimpered. “Sorry.”

“You better be.” She retreated her face from his and brought back the codex, removing her hoof and exhaling as she re-corked the flask, grabbing the vial with her magic and levitating them both to the desk. “I now know why you’re doing this, but I will tell you why you must cease.”

“J-job,” he stammered out, rubbing his arm as his pen slips out his hoof. “Goddess? A-are you a goddess?”

The Mare rubbed her hoof into her face, and exhaled yet again. “The ponyfolk are truly lost this generation… as is my reputation.” She removed it and shook her head, brushing the floor with her hind legs before sitting on the bare metal. “Look. Imperfect. That is your name, correct?”

“Uh, yeah.” His body shook, then he snapped his back straight. “I mean yes! Yes.”

“Now…” She spread her left wing out, and fluttered it soft. “I have wings, correct?”

“Yeah.”

She pointed her head down. “And I have a horn, correct?”

“Yeah…”

“Good…” She retracted her wing and put her head up. “Now, what does that make me?”

“A mutant,” he said.

“Uh-huh.” She said, shaking her head. “And what, Imperfect, is a mutant?”

“Well,” he said with a smile. “It’s when an organism suddenly develops a new trait that leads to the creation of a new subspecies outside of natural selection.”

“And that is what they’re teaching you down in Canterlot these days?”

“What?” He looked up to the ceiling. “No, no, you’ve got it wrong. I’m from Ponyville ― ”

“No,” she said. “You’re not.”

“Prove it,” he said, pointing at her, then retracting his cannon. “You ― you can’t prove it. I’m right.”

She smiled, raised her eyebrows, then looked down at him with triumph. “The games ponies play for no more reward than pride… Alright, then, dear Prefect. What information will best remove this façade from our conversation?”

“Uh ― ”

“Oh,” she interrupted. “We can start with the objective, like your out-of-place possessions ― ” she said, while magically sliding his flask across the desk and onto his lap, “in this otherwise humble caravan. Or the means which you’ve come to acquire them, including the caravan itself. And the pens, the papers, the lamp oil, and this obvious ― ” She smashed her foot into the metal flooring and it thumped without an echo “stash of coin within the ground. You do realise, dear Prefect, that the undercarriage is meant to be hollow?”

He closed his mouth and looked at her, putting his flask aside with eyes sharp, a face shown with neither shame nor fear.

“I’m sure if we dug up the bits we’d find them minted with indicators of their origin ― whatever means they make them these days. But that would be boring. Let’s talk about the subjective, like your advanced education, which they don’t,” she spoke with a presumptuous laugh while motioning towards his desk, “teach you in Ponyville. Some of your ideas are humble enough to pass the rigours of the unchallenging demands of unimportant villages, but others…” She paused and rolled her eyes up, swishing ideas in her head, “…well, an Earth pony isn’t apt to rederive the Theory of Elemental Arcanery without immersion in the proper channels.”

“I think,” said Imperfect slowly, “your point has been proven.”

The Mare paused, then closed her eyes and sighed happily. “Good, good… And to think I took you for the stubborn sort.”

“Too well.”

“Yes, yes,” she said while waving her hoof, “I know. Now we may discuss the reason for my being here, as fortunate as you are to ― ”

“Because I know what we’re here about.”

She blinked, started to put her hoof down, then laughed. “Oh, really now? Then why don’t you enlighten me as to ― ”

His heart beat, he put his hoof to his face and spoke on with an exhale, disregarding her. “Look, your circumstantial evidence and silly non-sequester rhetorical tricks will impress the slack-jawed bumbling yokel hicks you seem to think me and my Earth Pony ilk are, which is fine, because they are hicks, but I’m less interested in confirming the fact of other ponies’ existential mediocrity than in confirming that a goddess with demonstrably incredible power and methods of rationality has bizarrely decided to visit a social outcast misanthrope -” he said quieter. Colder. Bitter. “- whose unclaimed ambitions have left him wailing in his own sphere of uninfluential pseudoscientific philosophical whinging, because nobody will read his works or accept him into journals and I can’t even live anywhere important anymore because the cost is too much and the ponies are too there and there’s too much going on at any given point in time that it’s like rejecting the scum that wanders this grassy earth and retreating into nature kilometres away from society where they wouldn’t care if I choked on my own bog rot is both the problem and the cure to everything I’ve ever hated about the world but is still there as the only constant I can appreciate as an eternal source of complex simplicity, and I can’t decide which is which and there’s obviously no reason to care about anything I’ve ever said or done so evidently you’re here because I’m ruining your, uh, ‘dream duty’.”

He looked at her and breathed with a shiver between breaths and his eyes now heavy. “If you wanna call it that.”

The Mare stopped as she kept staring at Imperfect, breathing, with that same steady labour of in-and-out breaths every few seconds, repeating.

She rubbed her brow and breathed out as she picked up her haunches, brushed them off, then walked to the desk. Imperfect’s breathing stuttered as her magic riffled through the flipbook she created, stopping at the few or so pages he wrote on his sleep deprivation experiment, and read them over slowly as she muttered the words to herself.

He reached out and yelled at her. “There’s nothing in there a-about you! I didn’t even know you ex ― ”

“Silence!” she snapped with a growl, piercing her eyes into his. “Do you believe me to be so vain? And surely, my dear, my noble Prefect, you’re grateful your writings are finally being appreciated, instead of collecting dust in this deprecate and antiquated carriage you desperately call your home?” She looked back and kept murmuring.

He shook his head and sighed with wet breath, grimacing. “Forget it. If you don’t want me to tell you ― ”

“Oh!” she snapped again. “And I suppose you don’t think me capable of reconstructing how you’ve accurately described my purpose here in so few words that my presence here is not even needed.” She shook her head violently with teeth clenched. “If only I were a more vicious goddess as you so describe me that I might reclaim what I’ve just done for you, and let you live the rest of your happy, oh, miserable life having known even the modest amount of time you’ve spent your life devoted to this, this craft if you so want to describe such, will all be for nothing, and you won’t even know what’s gone wrong?” She shot her gaze back and forth down to him and back to the pages. “Why, my beloved Prefect, why not just bid me farewell, so that you may never see ― ”

“You’re calling me Prefect when that’s impossible.”

She stopped, turned her head, and stared at him with eyes wide open.

He clambered to four legs, snorted mucus down his throat, shook out his face and torso, and breathed out long as he rubbed his eyes, then sat down next to the Mare as he reached out to his pages. She stepped to her side and kept staring at him as she levitated the pages behind her. His hoof followed the flipbook’s path, but when it came too close to her snout, he retracted it as her head moved back and he looked down to the ground.

He coughed into his elbow then looked to nothing in particular. “I can show you if… if you want.”

She turned towards him, blinked, then her eyes went soft as she slightly shook her head and brought the book into his chest, him fumbling with it then orienting it to the front. He looked at the cover with a hum, then rubbed his hoof across the binding.

“Wow,” he said soft. He smiled as he held his hoof in front of the Mare’s stamp, bringing it closer and further away from it, and quietly laughed as he saw they were much the same size.

She craned her neck around the book and looked at what he’s doing from the side with her jaw open. “What?” she asked curious. “What’s so funny?”

“Uh,” he said, while doing the thing with his hoof, “it’s just incredible to hold. I haven’t been able to go through it, because, um.” He paused. “It’s amazing to see everything I’ve done all in one volume,” he said while feeling the cover’s coarse texture, “because it’s like I’ve been an idiot for not doing anything like this before even though I probably could have.”

“Oh.” Her eyes narrowed and she frowned.

“And the cover is really pretty, too.”

“Oh?” Her eyes widened and her frown left.

“I mean,” he looked to her and back to the page quick. “I don’t know anything about æsthetics or any form of beauty artificially induced by living beings but it looks really personal and I like how you took a page I made out of boredom and recycled it into this formal thing with a stamp and everything, the same as I like the existence of what I’m holding in the first place. It’s amazing.”

“Ha, ha!” she laughed with triumph, jolting her head up to the ceiling and her hoof on her chest. “Of course it is, my dignified pony-friend! Who else but yours truly could have both the means and ability to create such tomes of salient thought? Truly, I must be a goddess, for who else can have such power, and yet wield it in such a judicious manner as to cause benefit to her newfound subjects ― and not the harms that so destroy the threads of our society, and the relationships which bind us together as ― ”

He scratched his head. “I, uh. Wrote the thing.”

She stopped her speech, then looked down on him. “Yes, indeed. And you can be proud of your reasoned ideations.” She shuffled over beside him and sat down, preening into his book. “Now tell me about your deduction!” she said with wide eyes and interest.

“Oh, um.” he laughed out his nerves and idly flipped through the pages, straightening his posture and smacking his lips. “There’s really nothing to it. You see, throughout the ― ” he did a quick count in his head ― “two hundred or so pages in this thing, I don’t ever call myself Prefect, right? That’s just a nickname, something I used to have back in…” He trailed off the thought.

“Canterlot!” she decisively said.

“Okay.” He continued. “Well, anyway, I always had the nickname ‘Perfect’ hanging around me, because some foals think they’re too clever to call me by my name, but the innovation from that came from a teacher or something misspelling my name as ‘Prefect’, which is silly because it’s not spelled right. It’s not ‘Perfect’. And I guess the idea came to some of my classmates that we should keep up this silliness, so that’s how I ended up as Prefect for some years of my life. I don’t even think anypony remembered my real name. So that’s the story.”

“There’s more,” she said.

“Well ― ”

She huffed. “What logic prevents me from re-inventing this name manipulation in my head and mistakenly calling you by something incorrect? What mechanism stops this from being nothing more than a mere coincidence, a faulty ‘non-sequitur rhetorical trick’ which I independently discovered as a means to dominate you in discussion?”

“Because you’re so obviously too proud to stoop to the level of children that this defense is coming after the fact as a means to make me finish the train of thought.” He looked into her watchful eyes for a second, then went back to idly flipping the pages. “Which I was going to.”

“And are you?” she asked.

“What ― yes!” he cried out. “Yes, of course I am! Why are you like this? Why are you constantly trying to intimidate me when I already said I’m interested in talking to you?” His breathing got heavier, and his voice got louder. “I don’t understand it! And I just told you I’m grateful for sorting all this ― ” he tapped the book “ ― out for me! Okay, yeah, it’s obvious you did it to awe me into getting me to stop this stupid sleep deprivation experiment, and I’m sorry for being such a neurotic idiot that I didn’t shut up and just let you do your speech! But come on! Aren’t we better than this? What do you stand to gain from this other than an inflated sense of self-worth when your actions are already enough to confirm it?”

“Imperfect,” she said loud, then looked at him. His eyes were narrow, he bit a frown, and his breaths stuttered as he held his tome in one hoof and rubbed both eyes with the other. Liquid rolled down his cheek, and he softly sobbed.

“Imperfect…” she said soft. She brought her hoof to her mouth, looked down to the ground, thought for a moment, then sighed. Her eyes shot open, and she looked at her hoof.

It flickered.

The Mare stood up, patted her chest, walked to the center of the caravan, turned around, and brushed her hooves on the corduroy rug as she whinnied then blew air through her lips. Imperfect put down his book and rubbed both his eyes, then exhaled and looked at her with open-mouthed anguish.

“What ― ” he asked “ ― what are you doing?”

“Vision,” she said, looking to the roof. “How long do you think a dream lasts?”

He blinked.

“Wait,” he said. “Wait. Wait, this isn’t right! It’s only been ten minutes ― there’s so much to talk about, so much to ask, so much to ― ”

“Vision.” She said, firm and loud. “You are correct about my duties. I solve problems. I solve pony problems, problems that can be resolved with no more effort than a soothing voice and truisms about our meagre state of existence. The problems I solve are simple ones, for simple ponies who don’t live for any higher purpose than waiting for the grave.” She looked at him. “You’re right about my duties. I am a dreamwalker. I deign to tread where ponies can never be, so I can interrupt their peaceful sleep with the arrogant idea that I may solve their omnipresent problems with a few minutes of mutual therapy.”

He shuddered, looked to his chest, then looked to hers. “You didn’t even hear my full derivation ― ”

“Forget!” she yelled, “About your derivations! Yes, my ‘dear Prefect’, I cheated. I know who you are. I know who you knew. I stole the slumber of the ponies of your past so I may learn your history and persuade you against disrupting my concentration with your hypnagogic experiments, so that I can ‘help out ponies with actual problems’ instead of you.”

His legs tensed, and he slowly stood up to his fours. “You played games with me. You manipulated me!”

She exhaled hot and hard, shaking her head to the floor. “Yes, Imperfect. That was my plan. A plan which… immediately…” She looked to him, and her eyes became soft. “…became irrelevant.”

She took a step forward as he stepped back on instinct, then stopped his hooves from moving further, steeling his eyes, then stared directly into her face.

Her expression did not change as she held her eyes on him. “You’re not an idiot; you’re just lonely. You’re waiting for a deity to untangle the knots of hatred and malaise that you’ve tied yourself within your psyche. Some vision to tell you that everything will be okay if only you had someone to recognize your greatness, to accept the flaws you refuse to work on, to give you some magic that will fix all your problems, and to get past your hatred of every living pony so they can recognise that you are a good person inside, that you do care about other ponies, but only those that fit your criteria of what a good pony is.” Her eyes went hard, and blew hot air with a snort. “You’re waiting for me to be your friend.”

Imperfect’s heart pounded, and his breathing stopped between heartbeats to catch up with a fury. “That’s not true!” he yelled. “That’s just ― it’s not logical! It’s not right!” He pounded his hoof into the floor with a impotent thud. “You don’t know me!”

The Mare whinnied a shriek, stood on two legs, then slammed both her hooves into the metal flooring with a vehement crash, her hooves glowing black with magic as they pulled themselves up from the dented, damaged panels. Imperfect shielded his face, her body flickered for a second, then she whipped her glowing horn up as she yanked out the panel with a jutting crash, then whipping it back as she brought forth fountains of glittering golden coins and spread them across the room, him barely peering through his elbow as he saw the glistening bits shine reflect the meagre lamplight and bring forth light to all corners of the caravan. As the fountain sputtered and he looked at the piles of wealth surrounding him, he saw her suspicion stamped on each face in illegible type: “Canterlot Mint”.

He peered at the Mare, and in the yellow light he saw her starry body transparent, fading and flickering as she struggles to maintain form with her arched back and head pointed squarely at him with a growl.

“I have lived for a thousand years, Imperfect! A thousand years! Alone! On the Moon!”

His jaw dropped and his face went numb. “On… the…” He tilted his body and peered over to her shining flank. A cutie mark. A waxing crescent in front of space.

She screamed. “I am no goddess, Imperfect! I have seen things in the minds of ponies that would ruin you, that would destroy your perception of the world if you thought about them for more than a second! I have seen death, destruction, suffering, sadism, and pure, undeniable evil done for no more purpose than pleasure in the deranged minds of the demons that walk our earth! Ponies are scum, Imperfect! They are selfish, backstabbing, duplicitous mongrels that look out for no greater purpose than the incomprehensible ideologies they invented to justify the malevolent actions they commit so they can go to sleep at night and declare themselves the hero of their own life’s story!”

Her form flickered more, and her exhausted breathing gave wet to wet breaths and a heart jamming white within her chest. “I go to sleep in a desolate crater and I wake up with sweat on my brow and visions of madness that dance on the canvas of space. Every. Night. And as I look out towards the planet whose miraculous existence you naïvely take for granted, I wonder how long it will be until all the countries, all the creatures, all society and all the beings within will cry out with a primal screech, all life will be erased, and then the pain of living will suddenly cease to be.”

Imperfect stood stunned. His legs shook, his heart stopped, his eyes went numb, and he only breathed by instinct.

He shook his head, exhaled, trudged through the golden wastes, over the torn tile, put one hoof in front of the other, and walked over to the Mare as he snorted back his mucus, held back his tears, and slowly clambered over as he closed his eyes and leaned his head into her chest.

There was nothing there.

“Imperfect…” softly said the Mare.

He opened his eyes, his heart beat, and he saw his head was inside her chest, her body a mirage, and her breathing stuttered. He listened, and as his breathing went soft, he heard that it wasn’t his heart that pounded so. It was hers. And as he snorted harsher, his mouth contorted into a frown, and his lips trembled. He closed his eyes. And listened.

It thumped.

The Mare breathed in, and out, soft. She put her head down and above Imperfect’s back. Her warm breaths parted his fur in rhythm, and he felt it through each time.

“Impy…” she said.

Imperfect’s frown turned to sobs, wet, uncontrolled sobs, as his teared dripped down his hard, red cheeks, and splattered on the carpet within her hooves.

She exhaled once more, as her body became clearer, and her avatar shuttered in and out of existence as her voice became quiet and her breaths became nascent.

“Look out to the stars,” she whispered. “They move in impossible ways, as if…” She breathed out. “…as if somepony wants me back.” She closed her eyes and nodded her head. “If the stars can forgive me after a thousand years, then somepony will love who you are today.”

He nodded, clenched his teeth, and held back his sobs as her heartbeat faded and his knees trembled and he brought his hoof to his eye with the other forced open.

The Mare stepped back, looked at him with a smile, and spoke one last wavering line as her body turned to air. “Goodbye, Imperfect.” And she was gone.

Imperfect went cold, his limbs stopped shaking, and he put his hoof down as he stopped thinking. He took two steps forward, his limbs gave under him, and the nerves returned to his body as he felt everything, all of it, all at once. His body shook, his bawling turned to screams, visions of madness took hold in his head, and the pain of living took root within his soul. He gripped the folds of his scratchy corduroy rug as he trembled, his muscles fired as he pulled them over his body, and he rolled over as his fur jammed knives within his skin. As he clinged to dear warmth, holding onto the rug as his course, discomforting blanket… pain.

For all the pain he felt before it faded, the worst was a simple thought. He would wake up, and he would never remember this.