The Immortal Dream

Lissa, Flarefeather and I took shelter inside a gloomy coffee shop, which offered no coffee and day-old pastries on account of the power outage. More appealingly, it had a big, glass storefront to let in light, almost no clientele and a napping bartender who looked like he was only here because he had nothing better to do.

In other words, it wasn't too dark and was about as private as we were going to get.

Lissa and Flarefeather huddled together on a chair meant for one, sitting across from me at a table against the window. A tray of glazed donuts filled the space between us. There was still some mud on Flarefeather's uniform.

None of us knew what to say. Both of my friends were finally taking this seriously; there was none of the adventurous energy that had led them to stay up last night and break into Crowscone's study. That was a silver lining, at least. But the difference in their reactions said something, too.

Flarefeather was scared. I had been flightless all my life; it was difficult to imagine losing an entire dimension from my world. The closest allegory was probably my shadow swimming, which was conveniently now broken itself. But I had taken so many knocks over the last year that it barely even ranked on the things fighting for time in my thoughts. She was new to this. There wasn't even an effort made to cover it up: prior to today, she hadn't realized she wasn't invincible.

Maybe the Aldebaran incident was a better comparison. If she felt like that... The best thing I could do was take point, and make it obvious. Back then, everyone else somehow resolved the incident without any of my efforts bearing fruit. If someone could have just convinced me they had the situation under control, it would have been invaluable.

Lissa, by comparison, looked more contemplative. She was scared too, but while Flarefeather's fear was something new and unknown, I could tell instantly that Lissa had something more definite in mind. She was trying to plan, and while she didn't voice her plans out loud, she clearly didn't like what she was thinking.

Just like me when I used to look to my bracelet as my only recourse. Her expression, I would know anywhere.

It fell to me to do something, but I knew I couldn't do what needed to be done. I, of all ponies, had no right to promise to anyone that everything would be alright. Not me, the filly who had chosen things more important than Corsica and Ansel and then ultimately left them by the wayside, completely unaware of whatever new burdens they were taking up. This was what I did. I moved on and I left half-finished commitments in my wake. And the way I did it was by never making them official.

Had I ever told Corsica what she meant to me? Had I ever revealed my nature as a changeling queen to anyone who wasn't already stronger than I was? I kept my powers a secret because I knew they had been used for great evil before, sure, but the flipside of that was that they could be used for good. By keeping them a secret, no one could ever judge me for not using them. All the promises I ever made about how my powers would be used were strictly between myself and Faye. When we broke those promises by accepting the limitations of what we could bring ourselves to do, no one else knew that things could have been different.

Who would hold me accountable if I gave these girls an empty promise that everything would be alright, and then decided to stop trying halfway through when I ran into an obstacle I was unwilling to surpass?

I hated this. I knew what to do, what powers like mine could be used for, and I knew what would happen if I tried to do it. I had known all along, really, and still chosen to coax them out onto an adventure with me. And my playbook for what to do next was well-worn and familiar: lie, abandon them, or pretend I could do nothing.

Kind of similar to my options with the ruby tower, really. I could use my bracelet and run off on my own to get there. I could try something impossible that I knew I wouldn't see through, be it attempting to cure the Consul or trying to rally the masses. Or I could sit around and wait for someone else to save the day.

With my track record, the latter would probably happen. But it wasn't guaranteed, and I hated the results every time.

The clock was ticking. The ruby tower's flame could be dead by now. Or perhaps it was still hanging on, but wouldn't last until tomorrow morning.

Keenly aware of how much time I had allowed us to waste last night, when we should have been sleeping or planning or even sprinting with the bracelet, I heaved a sigh through gritted teeth. I couldn't take this anymore. Never trying, always failing, locking myself into decisions where I wouldn't follow through even though I held phenomenal power. Setting myself up to sacrifice everything in exchange for the preservation of a status quo like this.

Something had to give. Changeling queens had change right there in the name. I still remembered the days not so long ago when the point of me, a mask, was to be plastic and moldable, something that could easily adapt to whatever I needed to be. What had gone wrong? How did I find myself locked so frequently in these rigid, brittle situations where the only choices left resulted in something terrible? Had I learned a bad lesson, taken something incorrect to heart that led me to discard the right answer before even thinking about it? It couldn't be. Everything I had learned over the last year was to prevent this kind of thing from happening.

Faye was being awfully quiet. What was she thinking about? Anything she saw that I had overlooked?

"Sorry," Faye apologized in my mind. "I gave you my craziest idea already. Maybe I should be focusing more on the end of the world, but my brain's just stuck on the concept of using our void to move around souls."

Probably more productive than I was being. If we could find a way past her hangups on that, then trying to heal the Consul - assuming Flarefeather was right about his cause of 'death' - would be back on the table, and maybe we really could get everyone out of Izvaldi together. Any progress?

"Not even close," Faye sighed. "Mostly failing not to think about how it felt when I was so close to their stars. Lissa and Flarefeather's. I... thought I had mostly tamped it down, but it just keeps coming back. Maybe the damage is already done."

Tell me about it?

"It's just this desire," Faye said. "Imagine if you had a puzzle piece or a piano key or a chess pawn and didn't know what it was, and then one day learned it wasn't just a trinket and needed all the other parts to be complete. Like I thought our void was just a normal part of us before, and now see all the things that are missing. It's like that."

And it would feel complete if... what? It was filled to the brim with a hundred thousand souls torn freshly free of their bodies, like Chrysalis had done? Or were Flarefeather and Lissa special somehow?

"I don't know," Faye apologized. "All I know is that once they were close enough for me to notice it, I could tell it wasn't close enough."

I looked across the table at the two pegasi, huddled up against each other. The chair they shared wasn't quite jumbo sized. Sitting like that looked pretty uncomfortable. And yet they certainly looked like the laws of space would have to bend a little before they could be as close as they wanted to be.

Romance and attraction were mysteries to me. After working at Jamjars' wedding agency, I had seen my fair share of love at its finest, and despite recognizing its absence in Coda's diet of prayers, I really didn't understand the real thing. But looking at those two, it struck me that they didn't need metaphysical voids in their hearts to want to be closer than physically possible.

Could Faye share with me that memory of getting too close?

"Are you sure?" Faye was openly dubious. "If you don't yet have this stuck in your head, you really want to stay that way."

Positive. Gimmie. I felt an idea brewing, like a tiny glimmer on the ground that could belong to an undiscovered diamond.

"If you say so..." Faye relented. "Hope you don't have anything more important to be grappling with, like whether we can do what it takes to save the ruby flame."

We momentarily swapped as Faye tinkered with my memory, re-inserting the whole previous night I had been ghosted for. It landed like a load of bricks: her panic as our shadow sneaking failed against the window, the bizarre contents of Crowscone's study, everything about Lissa and Flarefeather. I saw Faye's star sight, felt her place a wing over Flarefeather's back... and was suddenly paralyzed as something rolled over me.

An urge to take. An urge to keep. An urge to hoard. The knowledge that she could break. The firm conviction that her purpose was to be held and admired and nothing more.

Admired by me. And no one else.

"What the...?" I breathed as the sensation oozed on past, like an ever-cresting wave of sickly sludge. The real-world Flarefeather in front of me clashed with what I remembered like a feeble flame, a faithless imitation of what I was meant to do.

"See?" Faye said unhappily. "I warned you."

No. This was bogus. This was dumb. I couldn't accept this. This was not the idea I had been fishing for.

I knew what I wanted. I wanted a world in which I had seen what Faye experienced and realized that she had mistaken something good, that it was natural to want to hold people close and our all-too-literal ability to do that drew her to the wrong conclusion. I wanted this because I wanted to be like those two, having someone to cling to when I was scared who could share that fear and know it even if they weren't strong enough to banish it at the source. I wanted this to be my oversight, the impulse I never understood, the absence of which had made it too easy to leave my previous friends behind.

What Faye had showed me instead was something different, twisted and wrong. But it had still allowed me to crystallize my thoughts. Even if this revelation didn't mean what I wanted it to mean, for an instant, I was mad enough to pretend otherwise. And I was a great pretender.

"Right," I abruptly declared, sitting up straight and willing reality to be what I wanted rather than what I had. "Listen up. I'm not gonna lie to you and tell you I have a plan, or even a grasp of the situation. Things are going wrong, and they're getting wronger by the minute. They're wrong for me, too. My shadow swimming is busted, or at least changed. But as the one who coaxed you out here, it's still my job to tell you what's what."

I glanced at the bartender to ensure he had gone fully back to sleep... though with the way Flarefeather and Lissa were now looking at me, it was too late to take it back and shut up. "First off. All this stuff is certainly happening in Wilderwind as well. If I was you, I'd be feeling like this was a pretty lousy time to pick to venture out into the world. I know I sure felt that way when my first big adventure blew up in my face. But the fact is, we've got agency here. More than you'd have in Wilderwind, I bet, because this place has a big vacuum of responsibility and is ripe for anyone to do something. You might not have asked to be heroes, but trust me: being helpless in a crisis and watching everyone else do the work is worse."

It wasn't hard to look at both of them in turn when they were so close together. "Second," I continued. "I'm going to need your help to fix this. I know you're shaken by this no-flight thing, and I'd love to be a big hero who tells you everything's gonna be okay because I'm on the case. But the truth is, I'm the wrong pony for the job. Not even because of how hard or easy this will be. It's because..." I took a big breath. "I'm a chronic, incurable coward. And if I'm left to my own devices, I'm gonna get halfway through this and then run away."

I forced my ears to stand up straight. "I've never not fled from responsibility. I'm horrible with it. I pretend to take on big jobs by getting close to the action and then I wimp out when I reach the edge of my comfort zone. Every time I hit my limit, it's because I flake out, not because I'm outmatched. I fixate on the consequences of messing up during the moment of truth and then make snap decisions about things with far bigger consequences I then have to run from. And I don't trust anyone as a result, because I know that I'm not trustworthy myself. It's stupid. It's stupid and it prevents me from making lasting friendships with anyone... which could soon include you two if nothing changes."

Both of them looked a little stunned.

"It's a lame weakness," I said. "Pep talks are supposed to be how it's okay to have fears and weaknesses and how you can overcome them, and the truth is I've been bested by my insecurities every single time I've tried to see something through. I've never stayed committed. I'm a self-proclaimed adventurer with nothing but forfeits under my belt. So let me make something perfectly clear: this is not a pep talk. Like I said, I'm telling you what's what."

I took a deep breath. This wasn't even the hard part, but I wasn't out of steam yet. "Despite all that, you threw me off a skyscraper and saw me walk away like it was nothing." I pointed a hoof at Flarefeather. "And believe it or not, that's the least of what I can do. This is all the more stupid because if I could get a grip and learn to stop bailing at the drop of a hat, I'd be unstoppable. Instead, I always under-promise and then pretend to be a bystander, and no one can call me out on it because I never tell them I can make a difference in the first place."

Finally, I folded my forehooves on the table. "So. I'm sorry for airing out my dirty laundry in your faces at a really awkward time. But I can get us out of this if I apply myself and get my act together, and the stakes are too high to magically assume this time will be the charm. I need your help, and what I need you to do is hold me accountable if I say something's impossible or 'this is the only way' without a really good reason."

Flarefeather looked suspicious. Lissa, oddly, looked guilty and a little annoyed, but my heart was pounding and I couldn't even try to parse her feelings over the rush of my own nerves. Even in my head, Faye was quiet, waiting to see how my speech would play out.

"You know, you made it pretty clear when we met that you had issues," Flarefeather ventured. "You thought your luck was so terrible that you'd get sucked into a conspiracy just by breathing. But then you talk big about Yakyakistan's windigoes, or going south so you can fix the weather, and now all the stuff you just said. Am I hearing that right? That you like to hang out around stuff like this and then only get spooked once you're far in?"

"...Yeah." I let my ears fall. "I'm a whole lot better at starting stuff than seeing it through. I just usually don't get much farther than being in the right place at the right time."

Flarefeather nodded. "See, someone who's truly paranoid about everything would have fled the continent by now. So what are you actually afraid of?"

There it was. Here came the hard part.

"I'm..." I swallowed, my throat suddenly bone dry. "Some of the things I can do are kind of... distinctive. And I'm afraid that if I make a big splash, or even just use all the tools in my kit, someone's gonna recognize them and realize who I am."

That got Lissa's attention. "Realize who you are? What?"

Flarefeather tilted her head. "What do you mean, realize who you are? Are you secretly someone famous operating under a pseudonym?" She squinted at me. "You're like... our age. How long have you even had to become famous?"

I shuddered, and checked to make sure the barkeep was still sleeping. "I'm not, but I easily could be. It's... I'm..."

Both of them watched as I struggled. I had been able to just spit it out for Puddles, hadn't I? Come on, come on...

Flarefeather looked awkwardly restrained, as if she was uncertain whether to press me. But Lissa spoke up. "Is this a test to see if we'll let you weasel out of something when you just asked us not to, or are you actually tongue-tied?"

I sighed, something loosening in the back of my mind just a little. "I'm not a batpony. I'm a creature called a changeling queen. Which, if you didn't know, is the same kind of super-rare monster that destroyed the Empire two decades ago."

Both of them stared at me, incredulous yet slowly starting to pale.

"There aren't many of us," I said. "But everyone who was alive back then must have been affected by that. If I stay in one place for too long, show off too many different things I can do, they stop being anomalies and start becoming patterns. Someone's going to figure it out, especially here in the Empire. Some people already have, so it might be only a matter of time no matter what I do. And it's not guaranteed that what I'll do is good, either. There's only so many ways to use a power that lets you rip out the minds of real batponies and turn them into soulless drones. But that's what I've got to work with. I'm trying to be a good guy, but living with it has done some interesting things to my sanity."

"Are you being serious?" Flarefeather asked, quiet.

"You want to know why I'm so paranoid about the people around me?" I asked her. "It's because I've had way too many experiences where people who do know something about me try to use me as a tool. This isn't a random bracelet. It's part of me, and the focal point for my power. Listen, I..."

I swallowed. "I get it if this is a deal breaker for you. I swear I'm doing my best to stay on the right side of history, but the only safe way to do that is to not be a part of it. See, I also don't know much about my powers, because I've never had a teacher. Even with good intentions, I could accidentally-"

"Do you need a hug?" Flarefeather asked, interrupting.

I blinked. "What?"

"I dunno much about changeling queens, or whatever you called yourself," Flarefeather said. "But if you've got something everyone else wants and they've never left you alone about it or treated you like anything else, that actually explains so much. So? Going once..."

"...Yeah," I answered, still processing what she had said just as much as she was processing mine. "Go for it."

Flarefeather hopped down from the chair she shared with Lissa, still crusted in dried mud, and glommed onto my side. And as she did so, I felt something different.

My old aversion to being touched was just as present as always, yet it felt more transparent now, more mechanical and artificial. It made my skin prickle, my fur bristle and my gut squirm, but I could feel something else underneath it. Several things.

One was that... this was nice. Welcome, even. Although she had yet to grasp or process the situation, her first desire was to help, and I felt some real measure of comfort and relief from it that I didn't think I would have felt before.

The other was a strange, coiling knowledge that I didn't have to let this end. She was about to stop any second now, but I could keep her here by force, couldn't I? I could keep this, and so, so much more.

My void was for holding things, wasn't it? This was such a perfect match, my desires and her soul at this precise moment in time. I might not know how, but my instincts could fill in the blanks. Capture her, trap her, freeze her, endlessly repeating the precise note that I desired to hear.

I could do it. And there was no good reason not to.

Flarefeather relaxed her grip, patted me on the head, and tousled my leafy ears. She said something, too, but I missed it over the strength of my internal monologue, that creeping sensation retreating into the recesses of my mind with a feeling of patient victory.

See? I was right. She wasn't here anymore. Now I'd have to live without this for a while.

This loss could have been avoided, if I had been a little faster at quashing my inhibitions.

Oh well. It would be a learning experience. Next time, I would remember how temporary this pleasure had been. And the next time. And however many times it would take for me to realize that this time need never end.

Starlight Glimmer was getting hungry.

Maintaining her crystal raft took every bit of her waning focus. They had been going for hours, if not days. Her eyelids were heavy, the world still seemed to resist her magic, and it was only a matter of time before her spell would fail, dumping all her friends and Misophaes into the strange, dark water and leaving them without even the illusion of progress.

And she was pretty sure they were going nowhere, because this sea beneath the Aldenfold felt endless.

"Guys?" Rainbow said, hauling on her oar as the dark rain zipped past, blocked by a crystalline roof and windshield that Starlight hoped were worth the effort to maintain. "I'm starving."

"Don't say it," Twilight grunted, pulling the other oar - Starlight got a reprieve from rowing, since she was keeping the spell alive. "Thinking about it will make it worse."

"Fine," Rainbow sighed. "But I'm also getting tired. Do you think we should, like, find a place to sleep? 'Cuz we didn't sleep at the snail shell platform since we wanted to get out quickly, and that's starting to feel like a mistake."

Twilight shook her head. "If we slept first, we'd be even more hungry now, and that's assuming we could get to sleep in this rain."

"Oops, did I say starting?" Rainbow continued, teeth clenched. "I mean this whole thing felt like a mistake twenty hours ago! Hey, creepy!" She shot a glare back at Misophaes, who was sitting calmly at the back of the raft, some distance between her and the Flame of Love. "Feel like taking a shift rowing, for a change? We're here because of you, you know."

"I know," Misophaes softly said, looking oddly satisfied.

Rainbow just growled. To her credit, she didn't try to litigate Misophaes' demeanor yet again: they had been over it countless times since they set off. Misophaes simply enjoyed this place.

Starlight fixed her eyes on the sky ahead, steering the crystal raft as it shot forward at breakneck speed. The water offered no friction or resistance, and if they stopped rowing, it would take almost a minute to come to a halt. But aside from the occasional ice structure poking above the surface, and correcting for differences in Rainbow and Twilight's strokes, there wasn't much steering to do: they were trying to go as straight as possible, using the chain from the nautilus Twilight had discovered as a guide.

That chain was still going. It didn't sag, it didn't bend and it didn't flex, tethered perfectly to the horizon as if gravity was just a dream. Did it even have an end? It had a beginning. And this was the most productive idea anyone had come up with about which way to go.

"Man, what a ship of fools," Rainbow groaned, looking back at Misophaes again. "Hey, aren't you hungry? You had a spell that made that weird evil food back in your village, right? How come I haven't seen you use that?"

Starlight knew someone was going to bring that up eventually. At some point, a starving pony would eat anything, and Abaddon's 'food' had at least kept Keeper alive.

She was almost surprised it hadn't come up earlier. For her part, she was willing to go a lot longer before she tried eating modified ether flakes to survive. But Rainbow and Twilight hadn't seen batponies turn into those when hit with her sword. Maybe she was underestimating how they felt about that food's creator.

"I don't want to," Misophaes explained, speaking in her characteristic haunted singsong whisper. "When I use magic, I ask the accusations to keep me alive. Now that they're gone, I don't want to call to them. I don't want them to come back."

"Even if you shrivel up and starve?" Rainbow raised an aggressive eyebrow.

"That's okay," Misophaes said. "My punishment is over. I'm already dead. And if I'm still alive like you say, I no longer have a reason not to die."

Rainbow shook her head and went back to rowing.

They rowed, and they rowed, and somehow, every time Starlight thought she was about to give out, she found the strength to keep going for just a minute longer. Her horn throbbed, almost like the headaches she used to get as a filly, and the spikes of discomfort from maintaining her spell were enough to keep her awake in turn as she held her spell together through sheer determination.

What would happen if she fell asleep? When she woke up, would she be rested and ready to continue, or would her hunger erase any gains she could make? What was their plan, beyond rowing and seeing what happened?

She was the Flame of Hope. The world would rearrange itself so that her goals could never become impossible, so long as she fervently wanted them. But did that apply here, in a place the Flame of Love said their jurisdiction did not extend?

By using her horn, by casting her magic, she was forcing her jurisdiction to exist here. So if she could force there to be a way out, the only way it would happen was by being stubborn and staying determined.

And, finally, her determination paid off. Something appeared on the horizon dead ahead, small and pyramid-shaped, growing rapidly closer in the dim, omnipresent light. The chain they were following led right to its summit.

It was the same type of island as last time.

The crystal raft bumped against its shore, and everyone disembarked in a hurry before Starlight finally let her horn go out. Instantly, the rain hit her fur, long dry in the safety of her boat and now exposed once again.

Everyone would just have to deal with it. There was no way she could maintain a roof while they slept. Overwhelmed by exhaustion, Starlight curled up against the nautilus island's lowest wall and instantly gave in to sleep.

Mist curled around Starlight's world. She felt her spirit hovering above the dark water, vaguely aware that this was a dream.

There was no rain in her dream, and her world was bounded not by darkness but by white fog. But she was flying somewhere, moving at great speed, ice ruins passing rapidly below.

Then something grew out of the fog ahead of her, looming and twisted. It was a great tower cut from raw, black stone, hovering above the water, its shape too alien to identify in the mist. Starlight's spirit rose, drifting towards the peak of the floating tower, where a broad swath of flat land was overshadowed by great stone protrusions that looked like grasping claw tips, silhouetted in the fog.

She saw structures on the land, roads and ruined buildings that had long been left to the ravages of time. Some were more intact, especially where the tower's claws protected them, yet others were nothing but foundations. But her path took her over the buildings, towards what might have been a town square, a circular plaza near the very center of the summit. At the center of the plaza was a well, and there, Starlight descended.

The well shaft was too dark to permit light, and yet the mist around her was white, forming a two-tone backdrop as Starlight emerged into a cistern, a forest of pillars obscuring the horizon with their shadows.

Someone was here with her. She wasn't alone.

"Creature of Harmony," a voice said, ancient and echoing and powerful. "Your world has abandoned you, as it has abandoned many things before. You cannot return along the path you came. But this purgatory need not be your grave. Find me, and I will show you other paths, paths to places your creators could not begin to imagine. You have stepped beyond the bounds of their rules, and little remains to constrain your potential."

Then, like a spell being extinguished, the dream ended, and Starlight was awake.

"What...?" She groaned, putting a hoof to her forehead and getting another beneath her. The first thing she noticed, looking around, was that everyone else seemed to have woken at exactly the same time.

"Nngh..." Twilight blinked in confusion, climbing to her hooves on the shore of the nautilus island. "Girls? I just had the weirdest dream..."