Music is playing through the house; a soft, classical piece I can’t quite place, but that’s not surprising. Music is a funny thing in the Dreamtime, especially in a person’s own private dreams. Often songs or tunes are made up of hodge-podges of half-remembered melodies and nonsense lyrics from a dozen different songs.

Straightening out, I take stock of my surroundings.

I’m still in Rarity’s workroom, but it’s a lot more like I remember it being before the Trials and the Nightmare. There are scatterings of fabric, bits and pieces of cloth, partially finished dresses on manne…quins…

“Wait,” I narrow my eyes at them, then recoil.

Not mannequins.

Corpses.

There are no discernable features, but the stitch-covered horror adorned with a partially completed dress is clearly a dead body. The dress itself is dirty and stained at the edges, and as I step back and look around I realise that what I had initially took for fabric isn’t fabric at all.

“Bandages?” I kneel down and scoop up a handful of bloody bandages, and as I pick them up a few bloody-tipped needles fall from the mess.

Looking up, I glance across the room and find more used bandages and needles, more signs of blood and quiet violence.

“Rarity…” I say softly as I stand, “what happened to make your dreams this dark?”

Trauma.

This is deep and abiding trauma. Something terrible happened to her in this past year and change, and it left more scars than I’m comfortable counting.

“Where are you?” I mutter, discarding the handful of bloody bandages.

I make my way out of the workroom. It’s almost obscene how well-lit everything is. The light suffusing Rarity’s dream is a soft, fuzzy shade that makes it hard to focus on any one thing, which may be on purpose. It’s probably her mind trying to block out parts of the damage.

Repress the trauma.

Except Rarity is too sharp for that. She knows what’s in her own head and now she’s scratching at it like a scab, refusing to let it go, or let it heal or scar over.

Something is keeping her from the closure she needs to do that, and I’m willing to bet it’s her missing sister.

The den is superficially fine, but I don’t take that for granted. Instead, I focus, trying to push past the static light and get a read on the room.

The television is playing something… it reminds me of CCTV footage from an old security camera, and in the video is Sweetie Belle. She’s in the kitchen with her back to the ‘camera’, and she’s at the counter in front of a cutting board chopping vegetables.

Chop, chop, chop, chop.

The sound is like a metronome and it’s eerily unsettling. I turn away from the screen to look over the rest of the living room.

Another bundle of leftover stained bandages are hanging from the arm of the couch, and there are needles pinning it in place. I brush my fingerblades across the fabric, touching the metal needles briefly, and as I do a sharp, metallic noise pierces my ears like tinnitus turned up to eleven.

“Ah! Shit!” I press my palm to my forehead as I stagger back from the needles before mumbling, “okay… bad memories, got it, no touchy the needles.”

I step away from the den towards the kitchen, and as I do I pass the steps going upstairs. The moment I do, I stagger as a sudden weight settles on me, and I turn my head to stare up the steps. Unlike everywhere else, up there is dark. It’s pitch black, actually, which is weird for me. I haven’t really perceived darkness the same way since I was taken to the Trials for the first time and remade to survive there.

This isn’t real darkness though. It’s a darkness of the mind. A dark spot in Rarity’s memories. A dream of a dream of a nightmare.

Something she doesn’t want to see.

Behind me I can hear the television still playing.

Chop, chop, chop, chop.

Before I can pursue that line of thought further, the door at the far end of the kitchen which leads to Rarity’s back yard clatters open, and Rarity bustles in looking prim and proper, but clean. She’s carrying a vase with wilted flowers in one hand, a fresh bouquet in another, and she practically power walks to the sink, dumps out the water from the vase into the sink, then dumps the flowers into the trash before placing the new bouquet.

“They always go so fast,” Rarity mutters. “Why can’t keep them fresh enough?”

“Rarity?” I say cautiously.

She doesn’t react. She just tips the vase gently beneath the kitchen faucet and begins filling it with…

“What the f—” I trail off as I step so close to Rarity that I’m craning over her shoulder to see what’s coming out of the faucet.

Sure enough, it’s what I thought I saw from the corner of my eye. Coming out of the spout in a thick, viscous pour, is blood. It’s like Rarity just plugged a spigot into someone’s artery and turned it on.

Slowly, I turn to stare at Rarity in confusion.

“Seriously, Rares,” I say quietly. “What the fuck happened to you?”

This was some grim shit for a Survivor to be dreaming of. I might expect something like this if I poked into Rainbow Dash’s head—not that I’d ever try it since I’d probably go ballistic and sleep-murder her—but from Rarity? Proper and prissy Rarity? Dreaming of blood and gore is incredibly out of character.

She can’t even watch horror movies.

Or at least, she didn’t used to be able to.

“There, that should be enough,” Rarity says briskly as she turns the faucet off and tips the vase back. “Really now, this shouldn't be so difficult.”

Turning on her heel, Rarity walks back through the kitchen toward the door, and I follow her, leaving behind the house and the chop, chop, chop, chop of the television set.

She nudges the porch door open with her hip as she cradles the full vase with care and steps outside. I make it to the porch just behind and have to stop again to stare.

“Wow.”

I can’t really think of anything else to say. Just ‘Wow’.

In the middle of Rarity’s backyard, rather than a neatly kept lawn, is an enormous, knotted, diseased-looking tree. Its branches are twisted and gnarled, and there isn’t a single leaf on it. I’m not sure it’s dead though. In fact, my gut instinct is saying it’s not. I have no idea what it means, although I can venture a guess as to what the things hanging from it mean.

From the highest branches, better than half a dozen familiar corpses hang suspended, each from their own noose.

Applejack, Rainbow Dash, Pinkie, and Fluttershy hang nearest the ground, their bodies unblemished but clearly dead. Above their heads dangle the feet of Apple Bloom, Sweetie Belle, and Scootaloo, and while the youngest Apple daughter looks like the others, Sweetie and Scootaloo are both different types of mangled.

Rarity’s little sister is missing her arms, and the gory stumps look like they were chewed and worried at by wild dogs. Scootaloo is a mess of broken bones and bruised flesh, and hangs limp with disconnected joints.

And lynched from the highest branch, wavering in the breeze, is my own body, split and broken by a long, terrible fall.

“Why can’t anyone just move the fuck on?” I mutter. “They hated me. They never trusted me… not really.”

Rarity stops at the base of the tree and kneels to set down the vase, pressing into the mud and dirt to drive the base of it into the soil.

“Rarity,” I call out from the deck of the porch. “Hey! Rares!”

Nothing. She’s too deep in her own dream.

I guess I’ll have to reach her from that side rather than bringing her over here. On the upside, she won’t remember shit about this dream. It’s a lot easier to erase memories from that end even if it’s probably going to be a pain in the ass.

“Abracadabra,” I mutter as I reach out with my fingers and slice through the thin membrane that separates the larger Dreamtime with Rarity’s own personal nightmare, then tip forward and—

CRACK

Bones snap as the air rattles through my shattered body. I spasm and jerk in place, dancing like a marionette on a single, rope string as my vision pivots and swings vertiginously from where I had been a heartbeat ago on the back porch to where I am now, high up in the boughs of a not-dead tree with a noose around my broken neck.

“F-Fuck,” I snarl as blood bubbles from between my lips.

Everything hurts. My back is broken, my ribs are too, all of them. My arms are snapped and my legs are cracked and fractured. I can feel bone grinding on bone and something wet squelches inside of me every time I move and thrash.

Even if this is just a dream… it hurts like a bitch.

I focus and breathe, drawing Fog from beyond the skin of Rarity’s dream to take control, at least a little bit. Enough to pull myself together.

Bones snap back into alignment, ruptured flesh knits turning catastrophic damage into merely grievous wounds. The worst of the internal damage rights itself as I take a breath, then another, and another, each one clearer than the last, and once I get some feeling back into my extremities I force my broken jaw to move around words that are wet with blood.

“Still grieving me, Rarity?”

She freezes far below me with her hands still on the vase. The flowers are already starting to rot and die.

Slowly, Rarity raises her head to look up the tree to the suspended dream-facsimile of my corpse that I’m now occupying. It was the closest thing to myself that I could jump into in her Dream. Doing anything else would have been orders of magnitude more uncomfortable for me, and possibly harmful to her.

“Sunset?” Rarity murmurs. “I… You…”

“You seemed pleased enough to be rid of me before,” I croak. “Why guilt yourself over it now?”

“It was a mistake,” she sobs. “We made a mistake.”

“Mistakes have consequences.”

I twist my head down to see her more clearly. You’d be surprised how hard it is to maneuver your head when you’ve got a broken neck.

“I know,” Rarity sobs. “I know… I’m so sorry, I should have known, darling, but it’s all gone so wrong.”

“Are you so surprised she ran?” I ask, looking down between my feet at Sweetie Belle’s body that’s creaking back and forth in the faint breeze. “She must have been miserable.”

“No,” Rarity says wetly. “After Scootalo—after all of that, she vanished… just like you. Maybe she was taken, or maybe she’s just dead in a ditch somewhere.”

After Scootaloo… what? I narrow my eyes at her, then look back down at Scootaloo’s body, then back up to Rarity.

Something happened to her, maybe to all of them but definitely those two. I would have to look into it, but with that said I can’t deny the possibility that Sweetie Belle was taken back to the Trials by the Entity. The Old Stain is still alive, I know that much. It’s wounded, maybe mortally, but it won’t die for a good long time, and until it does it will do what every dying thing in the history of ever has tried to do.

Survive.

It’s going to try to recoup its losses, reap new sources of hope, and a teen in despair is a prime target. I should know.

That said, it would be kind of a slap in the face if Sweetie was taken considering the amount of trouble the others went to to try and rescue those three brats during my little jailbreak two years ago.

Rarity is still on her knees, shaking.

“I can still see you falling,” she says in a strained voice. “That day in school, I remember looking out the window, and thinking about… about a dress or something… a coat maybe… and then I saw you, just a flash of gold and red and black, and then nothing.”

I never knew she’d seen me, although, in fairness, I haven’t really been in a position to ask around since I took my long walk off a short rooftop.

“You abandoned me when I needed you,” I say through the rattle of a brittle and shattered chest. “And then you abandoned her.”

“I… I suppose I never learn, do I?”Rarity says, and her voice comes out dark and hollow.

“Some people never do.”

She doesn’t reply, she just nods, then stands up in a mechanical manner that suggests rote motion before turning on her heel again to walk towards the house.

With an effort of will, I release my hold on her dream and let it catapult me out of it. The sheer relief of not being in a body broken by a four-story drop is ecstasy all by itself, and I stumble in euphoric bliss for a moment as my own powerful senses reassert themselves when I manifest at the base of the tree. I flick my fingers, rasping the blades against one another and taking comfort in the familiar sound of metal-on-metal before steadying myself and looking around.

Rarity is going back inside, and I move to follow her. I’m out of her little dream-bubble so she can’t see me anymore, and I get the feeling I just made her nightmare worse which isn’t surprising.

I couldn’t help picking at the festering wound though. Petty and spiteful it might have been but I just couldn’t help it.

“What happened here?” I mutter as I step through the door and into the kitchen.

Rarity’s long, lovely legs are ascending the staircase into the darkness, and I frown as my stomach twists. I don’t want to go up there. She doesn’t want me to go up there. I don’t think she even wants to be up there herself but something is compelling her.

Guilt. Self-hatred. Despair.

It’s all the same shit.

“Rarity!” I snarl her name as I slam the door shut and make it into the den.

Chop, chop, chop, chop.

“Rari—!”

The sound of a dull blade splitting flesh is a curious noise. When it’s deep and intentional, it sounds like leather being ripped and then the hiss and splash of arterial spray as the heart pumps splatters of blood as heavy thud rattles the whole house, and gore dribbles down the steps in miniature waterfalls just as the house shatters with an almighty crack! And I’m flung out of the dreaming mind of Rarity Belle.

The dim workroom comes back into focus along with the mother of all headaches as my senses reorder themselves back into something cogent.

Rarity jerks awake at her desk, her eyes wide and frantic as she puts a hand to her neck. She’s hyperventilating and crying, making tiny, wheezing sobs that I realise is the only sound she’s capable of making at all right now.

As I steady myself, Rarity dives under her desk and flails around for something before sitting back up gripping a black aluminum can. She cracks the tab and immediately puts it to her lips and starts chugging.

I raise an eyebrow as I lean in to examine it.

Hellion

I know a few EMT’s back at Canterlot General that swear by that particular energy drink but even they say you shouldn’t drink more than one a night. A quick glance under the table shows an entire case of the damn things pushed a little further back, but still within easy reach.

“That cannot be healthy,” I say dryly as Rarity lowers the now-empty can and takes a deep, ragged breath.

“Oh my, that was… much worse than usual,” Rarity mutters as she rubs at her face. “Now uhm, ahem, where was I—Oh, right.”

The missing person posters she’d printed off lay scattered around her feet where they fell when I pushed her off the precipice into the Dreamtime, and Rarity heaves a quiet if dramatic sigh as she crouches to start gathering them up.

Everyone’s having nightmares apparently, and despite them being about me I, the dream demon, ironically have nothing to do with it. They’re just flaying themselves over their own guilt.

“Not my problem,” I say bitterly. “You all made this bed, not me.”

Turning my back on Rarity with a deep scowl, I leave the little home that once might have had good memories for me. Pinkie and Rarity were okay, for certain definitions. Nothing a fuckton of therapy won’t help with at least, but I’d be surprised if even one of them was bothering with it.

Maybe Pinkie, if only because the Cakes would be pushing for it. She definitely seemed like the most well-adjusted of my former friends and saying that about Pinkie Pie of all people just goes to show how bad things have really gotten.

So, Apple Bloom is being ostracised by her family, Sweetie is missing in action, and something happened to Scootaloo which definitely doesn’t sound ominous or anything. Hopefully there’s something online I can look up, maybe it will give me a lead or at least eliminate a few possibilities.

I step outside and pause on the sidewalk in front of Rarity’s home.

None of this should be going so badly, but it is and it’s becoming more and more difficult not to feel responsible for it all.

I hate this. I shouldn’t have to feel bad that the girls who helped push me to suicide, even if only by accident, are spiraling downwards. All that should mean is that they feel guilty for something that they definitely deserve to feel guilty about.

“Damn it.” I turn and start walking.

It’s getting late and there are enough sleepers to ping-pong myself off of that I could go almost anywhere in the city except…

Except I don’t even know where I want to go.

Home?

I don’t have a home. I have an apartment I share with three people who can barely look at me and a bed that I share with a woman I just flung across a room, and the sick part is that I know if I were to go back it would be Tempest apologising to me.

Assuming she’s even still there.

Lacking any other direction, I make my way towards the border between Whitetail and the Ponyville Commons. I pass by the occasional person or couple walking the same sidewalk, their features shrouded by the Fog. I’m invisible to them, and to everyone else, and I’m happy to keep it that way.

Sometimes, it’s better to be unseen.

It’s certainly easier.

Canterlot is a funny place. Unlike a lot of cities its divisions aren’t just lines on a map, they’re scars in the land. Where Whitetail stops and the Canterlot Heights begins is where the steep gradient of the mountains begins to arch upward; it’s where the flat, even spaces of the suburbs turn into the picturesque switchbacks that crawl past stretches of exorbitantly expensive plots of land occupied by fat, architectural McMansions belonging to people just rich enough to claw their way out of the middle class.

But that’s to the north. I’m going east towards downtown.

Between Whitetail and Canterlot City itself is the place where I went to school and later pitched myself off the roof of. Canterlot High is settled right near the border between Whitetail and the more urban stretch of the city, but it’s technically still a part of Whitetail itself because that little cookie-cutter suburban hellscape ends, and the dirt-poor part of town begins, along the shores of the River Canter.

Ponyville Commons isn’t what you’d call a nice place, but I guess it’s better than the East End. People who live in the Commons do so because it’s cheaper than anywhere else in the Canterlot Metro area, and it shows in their walk and their look and in the clothes they wear.

They’re the poor kids, attached to the moderately tidier neighborhood of Whitetail by a single, expansive bridge that crosses the Canter’s icy floes, and that’s where I eventually find myself.

I stop in the middle of the bridge and turn to lean against the rail and look down at the rushing water of the river.

For the first time in a long time, I realise I don’t want to be in the Dreamtime. I want to be in the Real, breathing the cold air and listening to the water rush beneath me. I don’t want to hear it through the Fog-crushed filter of static. I don’t want the muted smells and distant sensations, so on a lark I focus, cut the skein, and force myself through the veil, and as I do I put away the skin of Nightmare Sunset.

I shiver as the cold air bites and the world of sound rushes against my ears, and for the first time in a very long time, ‘Sunset Shimmer’ steps back into the real world, with Whitetail on my right, the Commons on my left, and me standing in between.

Always in between.

“How poetic.” I tug my jacket closer around myself as I lean against the rail again, relishing the cold burn of the icy metal.

“Uhm, w-where did you just come from?”

I blink several times at the soft voice that just piped up, then slowly turn my head.

Standing not ten feet away from me is a young woman who couldn’t be any older than me or Aria, staring at me.

Her hair is a long, bushy tangle the color of morning glory vines that stretches down her back all the way to her waist that frames a face dotted with freckles and a pair of soft brown eyes. Her skin is a fair complexion of pale green, and she’s wearing a dark coat that stretches to her knees, winter gloves, and a pair of black boots.

And she’s practically right next to me and clearly had been for some time.

“Uh…” I look around nervously, then chuckle and start to hold out a hand. “I uh, kinda sneak up on people sometimes, sorry, I’m—”

“Sunset Shimmer.”

The bottom falls out of my stomach at the sound of my name—my real name—coming from this unknown girl’s lips.

“We went to Canterlot High together but…” the girl shakes her head in disbelief. “You… you died.”

Well… shit.

Author's Note

Compassion is a rarity in the fevered pitch...

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