To Dream in Red

As time passed, Luna found herself becoming disconcertingly comfortable with the stench of putrid blood and rotting flesh. Desensitization was an inevitable side effect of her frequent visits with Poppy Blanch, but instead of making her feel better about the whole situation, it only made her feel worse.

On the nights that she came to visit, she would always stumble upon the young colt doing something beyond reprehensible in his nightmarish refuge. Some nights he would be mashing flesh and bone underhoof in acts of mindless violence. Others he would be mangling the corpses like twisted art displays. One night, she even found him gnawing on the remains of a pony, to her utter revulsion.

Always though, Poppy Blanch would stop what he was doing and greet her with complete polite lucidity, as if he had not just been committing acts that otherwise would have branded him as a raving lunatic. Luna would always do her best to hide her disgust, but even as weeks turned to months, he always managed to surprise her with new depths of depravity that she wouldn’t have considered even as Nightmare Moon. If it wasn’t for how calm and collected he seemed during her visits, she might have feared him.

If anything, she was frightened by the fact that she still could not understand what drove him to such acts. During their time together, Luna would do her best to learn more about him, and as time went on, he became more receptive to questions prodding his mind. All but questions relating to his waking hours, which he always politely refused with a smile. The more she learned, however, the less she understood.

She learned that for whatever reason, Poppy Blanch always had a fascination with the macabre, and for as long as he could remember, his dreams were violent and gruesome. He always made sure to emphasize that they were dreams, and that he never did any of it while awake. More curiously, he never had any nightmares. He would joke that the nightmares were too scared of his dreams to come for him, and yet Luna found herself agreeing. There was nothing that the nightmares could do to him that he hadn’t already gleefully done to one of the countless bodies littering his dreamscape.

That being said, he seemed shockingly normal at times as well. Although he never gave details about his family or home, he would sometimes divulge her in his interests and hobbies. He had a keen mind for herbalism, and although he had not yet earned his cutie mark, he hoped it had something to do with that. Sometimes the two of them would play chess together, and although he never won, he was certainly improving. He was quite intelligent for his age, and almost reminded Luna of Celestia’s pupil, in a way.

These seemingly conflicting aspects only compounded Luna’s curiosity and confusion in equal measure, however. When she was awake, Luna would spend many hours a day pouring over ancient scrolls and tomes in the Canterlot Library. She had hoped that in the past thousand years, some doctor or magician would have encountered some similar case and recorded it for study. Unfortunately, she found no such circumstance, regardless of how hard she looked. Even studies from foreign lands around the world failed to illuminate the mystery of Poppy Blanch’s disturbing impulses.

When traditional medical and magical wisdom failed her, she turned to the restricted section of the library. Because it required both sisters to open, Celesita was of course curious as to what Luna was researching, but the Princess of the Night didn’t dare discuss the situation with her sister. Celesita had enough on her plate, and didn’t need the extra concern of Poppy Blanch on her mind. When Luna assured her that the situation was under control, Celestia begrudgingly agreed to trust her; a show of faith that did not go unappreciated by the younger sister, especially after the past thousand years of heartache.

Unfortunately for Luna, even the most secretive knowledge of the forbidden wing bore no fruit. No matter what dark secrets she unveiled in a search for answers, she found none that resembled the plight of the young colt. She had uncovered deep evils and horrors from ages long past, but nothing quite like the curious case of Poppy Blanch. It seemed that against all reason, there was nothing particularly unusual about the colt, beside his uniquely disturbing fixation with murder.

Whatever made him so special was beyond Luna’s reckoning, and although that in of itself terrified her, it did not frighten her as much as the fact that the young colt seemed perfectly content with his condition, as if it was the most typical thing in the world.