Every night, the dream was different. And yet every night, the dream was still the same.
She was an earth pony this time. That was certainly new. She’d found herself in a different body every time exhaustion forced her eyes shut and her mind into this twisted world of inky darkness and ethereal silence, but each time she had known without looking that the light build and prominent wings of her natural form were still there. Now, though, her legs felt sturdier, her muscles thicker, the space behind her shoulder blades emptier. She was in a forest. The trees were short, heavy with ripe fruits that withered away as she glanced up at them.
She was running.
Her legs were pounding against the soil, branches whipped past her head and stung against her shoulders. The darkness clutched at her mane; the spindly branches of the tree seemed as fingers, their leaves as blankets of ash. Air swept in and out of her lungs, but less and less completed the journey every time she took a breath. She was fading.
It was coming.
She knew it would end like this. She had known since the moment she went to bed, the instant her eyes opened and saw the world that was seared into the imagination, the one that felt familiar and foreign all at once. The details might change from night to night, the specific method she would use to hopelessly buy some time, but in the end it was never enough. In the end it would eventually, inevitably find her.
Always different, and yet always the same.
The first night, she had been high above the ground, flying faster than she ever could have imagined a pegasus could. Clouds had burst as she blasted through them, the air had sizzled and exploded around her as she pulled into a dive and broke the speed of sound, and yet the thing behind her had never fallen behind. She had turned around, charged straight at it with her wings screaming from exhaustion and stiff with panic, and it had simply brushed her aside like an errant fly. She had lain stunned atop a fluff of cumulus as it snapped its head around to face her and lunged, and she had woken up screaming to her quiet, empty house.
The night after that, she had been smaller, more frail. She thought she might have even been a colt. In the distance, there was shouting: two ponies were arguing in the next room over. She had poked her head out to spy on them, dread mixing with irresistible curiosity; she saw a gray stallion with a black mane, a sky-blue mare with one every color of the rainbow. They had looked at her, fallen back in wide-eyed horror, screamed for her to run away. She had turned around just in time to see its head snap forward, feel the force of its impact against her. That time she had awoken on the floor, with her hooves tangled in billowing sheets and an ache in her shoulder from when she’d fallen out of bed
Then, the third night: clouds again, moving much more slowly than before. There had been something wrong with her eyes; everything was distorted, thrown out of place by some obstruction inside them that she could never quite blink away. There wasn’t even a chance to flee this time. She remembered pleading with it, apologizing for whatever she’d done to offend it. She had said anything and everything she thought might stop it from taking her again, from rearing back and slamming into her with a force that would leave her cringing for the rest of the day. And moments later, she was lying in her own bed again, soaked in sweat and tears and still shivering from the memory of its deafening screech, its spastic talons that never quite touched her. That got an inch closer each night.
And now, there was the forest: cold, abandoned, dying. Dead. She was dead. She died in every dream. There was hardly even any point in running. And yet her legs kept straining forward, as if they were moving of their accord. As if this body she was occupying no more belonged to her than the trees, or the grass, or any of the other pegasi she’d possessed in the last three nights. That was something that was always the same too.
Eventually—it could have been minutes or hours later; time was a fickle thing in this place—she tripped. On what, she couldn’t be sure. Certainly, it didn’t care. It had been gaining on her anyway. She turned under her back and heaved for breath, every nerve in her body aflame with the fear she’d come to know so well. It drew nearer in spurts, jerking and writing forward until it was nearly on top of her. And as it loomed over her, just before it spread its limbs wide and barreled down towards her, it spoke. In a whisper, too quiet to be much more than a hiss. The same thing it said last night. The same thing it said every night.
The same thing she knew meant there was no longer any reason to run.
• • •
“Are you feeling all right, Fluttershy?”
Twilight’s eyes were soft, and the corners of her mouth tight. She was worried.
“I’m okay,” she answered softly.
“Well, you look exhausted. Have you been sleeping well?”
Fluttershy watched as her friend raised her mug to her lips and took a long, slow sip. The drink was herbal tea, made from leaves grown in her own garden right on the rim of the Everfree Forest. She was so proud of those leaves. Her own mug sat untouched in front of her.
“I’ve been… having dreams.”
“Good dreams?”
A gentle breeze drifted through the open library window, the crisp scent of autumn following behind it. Fluttershy reached out and took her mug in her hooves. Too big a sip. The liquid burned in her throat.
“Bad,” she whispered once she’d forced it all down.
“I’ve got a few books on improving sleep habits in my room if you want them.” Twilight’s chuckle was a throaty one, that of somepony who either didn’t care for social graces or had never completely grasped them to begin with. “I used to be quite the insomniac when I studied with the Princess.”
Another sip. This one was smaller, and not as scalding. “I’ll be okay.”
“Do you think maybe you’re working too hard? What do you usually do before bed?”
Fluttershy shrugged. “I make dinner, check on the chickens, lock the windows. Maybe read a book, if I’m not sleepy yet…”
“Aha!” Twilight’s face lit up, her smile the same one her friends all saw wherever she felt like she had solved a problem. “I bet that’s it. You get so caught up in the story that you can’t stop thinking about it. Happens to me all the time. I really don’t know why anypony thinks reading is supposed to calm you down.”
“Hmm.”
“Just try to do relaxing things before bed. I’m sure you’ll be right as rain within a week.”
“Mm-hmm.”
The two mares sat in silence for a while, each sipping their own tea and thinking their own thoughts. Those spinning through Twilight’s head seemed to be bothering her, if the way she was chewing on her lip and looking everywhere but at her friend was anything to go by. Fluttershy saw the next question coming long before it was asked. She had hoped Twilight might have forgotten to bring it up.
“What are they about?”
Fluttershy went still, her lips still pursed at the edge of her cup. Slowly, gently, she set it back down on the table. Her eyes never left its rim.
“Your dreams, I mean? What do you dream about?”
Always different. Always the same.
“I don’t know,” Fluttershy told her. “Different things. Scary things.”
“What’s scary about them?”
Can’t get away.
“I’m alone, usually. It’s dark. I can’t see very far. I feel… afraid.”
“Of what?”
Can’t hide.
“Of it. That it will get me.”
“Fluttershy, what is it?”
It knows me. It knows where I am.
Fluttershy shut her eyes, folded her hooves over themselves and squeezed them tightly together in her lap. When she spoke again, it was barely above a whimper.
“I don’t know what it is," she said. "I don’t know what it wants, or why it won’t leave me alone. I tried talking to it, running from it, b-b… begging.”
She swallowed hard and shuddered. Twilight’s hoof hovered in the space between their noses, unsure whether to finish the journey to her friend’s shoulder. Before she could decide, Fluttershy had forced herself to go on.
“Every time, it finds me. It doesn’t matter where I am, whose body I’m in… it always finds me. It hunts me down and it… it says…”
Twilight had pulled her hoof back to rest over her mouth, and now she uncovered it just long enough to let a single sentence escape. “What does it say?”
Her spine felt like it was made of glass: brittle, tingling with cold, ready to snap at the slightest movement. This was the worst part. The creature didn’t just live in her dreams anymore. It was all around her, in every shadow, behind every corner, in a black place right in the center of her heart that grew larger every day. That hurt more and more every night.
“Fluttershy, I just want to help…”
She could hear it now.
“Fluttershy, please. Tell me what it says to you.”
She could hear it every time she closed her eyes.
• • •
“Nigeb. Go back. Go back. Nigeb.”
She could hear it outside. It was calling for her. Making her a promise. This dream would be over hardly before it began.
She was an earth pony again, and for the first time she was inside a building on the ground. It wasn’t her own house, though like the forest before it still seemed familiar. White counters, colorful wallpaper grayed out by the night… and the stinging, cloyingly sweet scent of smoke. Something was burning nearby. Burning inside the building.
She backed away from the front door it was still trapped behind, the very ground seeming to shake from the force of its pounding and slamming against the obstacle blocking its way. The lock screeched in complaint and still held, but only just. It wouldn’t be long now. She had maybe seconds to hide.
A sharp, stabbing pain bit into her flank, in time with the biggest impact the door had withstood yet. She yelped—thought she never heard the sound leave her throat—and looked back to find a lengthy paring knife lying blade out on the tabletop behind her. The vibrations shaking the building had knocked it from its sheath; in her panic, she had backed right into it, opening a yawning slash right over her now obliterated cutie mark. The pain was exquisite, far worse than any she’d felt even in her normal life. She should’ve woken up by now. Dreams shouldn’t be able to hurt this much. Dreams shouldn’t feel this real.
An unearthly, rattling roar blasted through the windows and walls, and when it rammed into the door this time, she heard some part of its construction snap. There was no time left. She had to move. As fast as her wounded leg would allow, she bolted down the hallway behind her, directing herself by inexplicable instinct towards the basement door. The chamber inside was pitch-black, the air wafting up the stairs damp and freezing cold. But she had no choice. There was nowhere else to go. She threw herself inside and slammed the door behind it. In the same instant, she heard what sounded like the entire front wall of the building be blasted to pieces.
She waited there, huddled in the corner beneath the stairs with her flank burning and her heart pounding loud enough to wake the dead. She dared not make a sound, even as the thing upstairs ripped through cabinets and tore apart closets and crawlspaces looking for her. She had played her hand, laid her cards out and bet her life on the outcome. If it called her bluff, she might live. If it didn’t think to look down here, she might finally be safe.
The noises outside the basement went on for ages. She tried counting in seconds, then minutes, then in a strange combination of shaky breaths and throbs of pain in her leg. Eventually, she just withdrew from the world, curled up into as tight a ball as she could and told herself that she had to wake up soon, that this couldn’t go on forever. And it didn’t. When it stopped, it did so as suddenly and immediately as it had started.
Hardly daring to believe she had actually escaped, she waited for over ten agonizing minutes before she was convinced that it was truly gone. Even still, she kept her sigh of relief short and quiet, and most of her ecstatic tears silent as well. Maybe it would finally leave her alone now. Maybe her nightmare was finally over. She stumbled across the room on stiff, aching legs and made it to the foot of the stairs, where she remembered the switch for the basement light. After one last happy giggle of satisfaction, she reached forward and turned it on.
She only had time to blink once, to see something blurry in the corner of her eye, to begin turning towards the rippling black mass standing just inches away from where she had been hiding. It twisted its neck around, stared at her, whispered its name. By the time her scream reached her throat, it was already upon her, and the world was black, endless night.
• • •
“Okay, Fluttershy. Let’s start from the beginning.”
Twilight sat at the ready nearby, a freshly inked quill poised over the clean first page of an empty notebook. She’d asked Fluttershy over again today for this specific purpose. The study of dreams had always fascinated the young mare, and with her friend’s night terrors having such a dramatic and visible effect, she couldn’t resist the urge to put her mind to work on them. She fancied herself a psychologist now, it seemed.
“You’ve had four of these dreams so far, right?”
Fluttershy let her cheek rest on the reclining couch Twilight had brought from their friend Rarity. It was so soft; the velvet-lined stuffing felt so much more comfortable than her bed at home. If she fell asleep here, would she still have the dream? Would it follow her away from her house, through the blinding light of morning?
“Fluttershy?”
She blinked hard and sat up a bit, pulling her hind legs up against her haunches. “Five,” she said without looking up.
“So you had another one last night?” Once she saw Fluttershy nod, Twilight pressed further. “Do you want to talk about it?”
She stared at Twilight’s hooves, and gradually her head descended back down onto the couch again. Twilight wrote something down in her notebook, then stuck the end of the quill between her teeth.
“You said something about ‘it’ finding you. What exactly is ‘it’?”
Go back, it told her. Go back. But back to where? Back to what?
“Nigeb,” she told Twilight.
“That’s what it’s called?”
Fluttershy shrugged. When the velvet rolled over her back from the motion, she almost wanted to do it again. “It keeps saying that. I don’t know what it means.”
“It doesn’t sound familiar,” Twilight muttered half to herself, her horn glowing even brighter as she drew a big circle around the last thing she’d written on the page. “What else does he do?”
Fluttershy shrugged again. The pressure digging into her spine almost made her sprint out of the room.
“Let’s try something a little more general,” Twilight said. “When did you first start having these dreams?”
It was a mistake. “Five days ago.”
“And every day since, you’ve had another dream like this?”
I just needed some herbs. “Yes.”
“Was there anything strange that happened to you that first day?”
I didn’t mean for any of this to happen. “I…”
“Do you remember what you did that day?”
Fluttershy took a deep breath, ordered herself to calm down. It was the middle of the day. She was awake. Nigeb was just a dream. It was all just a dream. “I got up at sunrise,” she said, her voice still weak but a good deal steadier than before. “I watered my plants, made breakfast for me and Angel, and then I found out I was out of pepperdew nectar. I went into town to the apothecary, but they didn’t have any either, so I… I didn’t have any other choice.”
Even given their mutual experience with all manner of dangerous and deadly creatures, Twilight’s eyebrows still went up. “You went into the Everfree Forest? Alone?”
“I-it wasn’t very far,” Fluttershy assured her. “I just… there was a terrible cold going around some of the field mice, and I’ve really been trying to not be so scared of the place. I remembered seeing some the last time we went in, so I thought I could find it again really quickly and run back out before anything…”
“Okay, okay, I get the picture,” Twilight chuckled. “So you went into the forest. Then what?”
Then what? What had happened after that? Something had, she was sure of it. She remembered her unease at how the thick canopy of leaves had turned sunny afternoon into foggy night, the speed at which she had trotted down the single overgrown path leading in. But after that…
“It took me a while to find the flowers, but eventually I did,” she recalled haltingly. “I picked as many as I could carry and put them into my saddlebag, and I was about to go back home when…”
Her eyes went wide. Of course she remembered what had stopped her. How could she forget it? It was back at her house right now, sitting forgotten in the saddlebag she hadn’t touched since that day.
“There was a watch on the ground. An old one.”
“Like, a pocket watch?”
Fluttershy nodded. “It was scratched up, made of gold. It looked valuable. I went to pick it up because I thought somepony had lost it and they might want it back, but then I saw that it was broken. It had stopped at exactly midnight.”
“And then what did you do?”
Fluttershy had to think hard. This part of her trip was the haziest of all. “I decided to keep it, maybe get it fixed and try to find its owner. I opened my bag back up, put it in with the flowers, and…”
The memory hit her like a speeding freight train. Now she knew why she couldn’t remember, why it had taken her an hour to get into the forest and only minutes to get out. Now she remembered looking up from her bag, squinting into the mist, being struck dumb as electric terror coursed through her body. As she saw a figure watching her. A dark, shadowy, indistinct figure.
The same figure she had seen every night since.
“Fluttershy? Fluttershy, are you all ri… Fluttershy!”
She was on her hooves before the pain even registered in her mind. She had fallen off the couch. The velvet had burned against her skin like fire. “I…I-I-I have to go,” she stammered. “I can’t… I-I need to… I have to go. I have to go home.”
“Fluttershy, wait a second, just…” Twilight began to protest before trailing off, her eyes going wide as they drifted towards her friend’s flank. “Oh. Oh my gosh, Fluttershy, what happened to your leg?”
Dimly, beyond the sheet of ice-cold water that seemed to be filling out every hollow space in her body, Fluttershy saw Twilight waiting anxiously for an answer. “I…”
“Just look at it!”
Fluttershy turned, faced a mirror Twilight had just conjured out of thin air. She saw the library, the title of each book on the shelf behind her reversed. She saw herself, pale as a ghost and shaking where she stood.
And on her back left leg, cutting straight through the three butterflies stamped on her flank, she saw a long, jagged red welt, in the exact same spot the knife had cut into it in her dream.
• • •
When would it end?
She had asked herself that every time this happened. Every night she spent sitting up in bed clutching desperately to her pillow, terrified that every blink and twitch of her eye might be the one she didn’t look up from, the one that would leave her trapped in this nightmare again.
There was another new twist to the dream tonight: for the first time, she was a unicorn. And for the first time, there was no sign of its eternal antagonist anywhere. It wasn’t lurking in a corner, bashing against the walls, hissing and spitting as it threw itself towards her. But just like she knew winter would follow autumn and death would follow life, she knew it was here. She knew it was coming.
She walked forward, using the feeble light from her horn to pick her way through discarded strips of fabric and broken hunks of what looked like white plastic. It looked like somepony had gone through the place with a sledgehammer, indiscriminately smashing anything it saw in its path. She felt horror, but at the same time it was a variety displaced from what she normally felt in these dreams. Almost as if the destruction around her were of greater concern than the creature she knew was surely biding its time nearby.
The next room was worse off than the first, but in here at least there seemed to be something that had escaped too much harm: somewhere in the distance, a clock was still ticking away. She tried to concentrate and channel more energy into her horn, and a moment later met with success: the room brightened, thought not as much. She could at least see a few other items that didn’t seem to be broken, and once she saw the satin-cloaked figures propped up against the wall, she pieced together what the broken plastic behind her had once formed. They were mannequins. The dresses on the ones in here still looked pristine.
She moved on, intrinsically drawn toward finding the source of the ticking even as her mind assured her that nothing good could come of it. It seemed to be in the back of the room past a row of six more mannequins facing every which way, the middle two of which had had their heads torn from their shoulders. She pushed in between them, and the fabric draped across their backs rustled across her shoulders. Once she got past them, the rustling didn’t stop.
She stopped in place a few feet away from the spot on the wall where the ticking clock hung, just as a gust of wind whistled through her mane. A sudden sensation of warmth reached her brain, and the hair on the back of her neck stood up. All the windows in this room were closed. And evening breezes were never that hot.
Her hooves begin to step slowly forward, even as the rustling began again. That wasn’t the sound of quivering fabric she heard; it was too deep, too regular, too close behind her. And now she heard something else behind it, something that sounded like language. Like words.
“… ige…”
She had reached the clock now. She could see all its hands clearly in the light.
“… o… ack…”
The second hand was going the wrong way.
“Go baaaack…”
She whipped her head and looked towards the door. The mannequins were inches away, all faced towards her. A third one’s head was gone. The ticking of the clock was almost deafening.
“… Nigeb.”
The mannequins rose into the air, huddled together in one mass. For a split second, she could see it standing behind them. Then the mannequins were launched aside, broken shards of plastic pelted her face, and she knew no more.
• • •
It was a long time before Twilight said anything. Strangely, the forced silence didn’t bother Fluttershy nearly as much as her friend seemed to be expecting. Hidden behind her sopping wet mane, all she did was nose at her soaked saddlebag and avoided even the slightest glance in Twilight’s direction.
“Do you want to explain what happened?” she finally said. Her question was tinged with equal parts frustration and exhaustion. Fluttershy’s response stayed locked inside her mind.
“Fluttershy, we found you two miles inside the Everfree Forest, cowering under a tree root and muttering that you had to ‘go back’. You can’t just pretend this isn’t real!”
“It is real,” Fluttershy whispered. “I know it’s real.”
“Well, good, because it’s also real that those stupid harpies followed us all the way back to Sugarcube Corner. I can’t even believe you went out there alone again. This isn’t like you, Fluttershy. What’s going on? Are you still having those dreams?”
“Do they know?”
For the first time of what was sure to be many that evening, Twilight found her tongue tied into a knot. “Does who know?” she eventually managed to ask.
“The others.”
That was all she got from the eerily aloof pegasus, so Twilight did her best to just guess what she was referring to. “I told the other girls you were having nightmares, and that you’d been acting really weird the last couple of days. I don’t know. Was I supposed to keep it a secret? They’re your friends too.”
Fluttershy’s gaze scanned around the room at an agonizingly slow pace. For almost half a minute, it lingered on a small wall clock Twilight had hung behind her book-laden desk.
“Can you at least tell me why you were out there?”
Now Fluttershy was staring out the window, as intently as if there were another pony writing a message with their hoof in the raindrops beading on the glass. “I had to go back.”
It took Twilight a long, teeth-grinding moment to bite back the urge to scream. “I know, Fluttershy,” she replied as calmly as she could. “You already said that. Why did you have to go back?”
Fluttershy’s answer took another twenty seconds to come out, and when it did it was so quiet that Twilight almost missed it entirely. “Nigeb…”
“What?”
“Go back…”
“Fluttershy, what are you talking abo…”
“It wanted me to go back, Twilight!”
That made twice now that Twilight had been struck speechless. Was it really this bad already? “It wouldn’t stop,” Fluttershy said, her voice trembling with either fear or fury. “It wouldn’t leave me alone. It wanted me to go back. To where I found the watch. That’s why it kept following me. I took its watch. It wanted the watch back.”
“Stars above…”
“So I listened.” No, that was definitely fury. “I took the watch and I went back to that stupid pepperdew plant and I left the stupid watch there, and now this whole stupid thing is OVER!”
Fluttershy was heaving for breath, her eyes shining and wild with the panic she still seemed to be claiming she released herself from. Twilight shut her eyes, and spent a few moments delicately choosing her words.
“Fluttershy…”
“It’s real, Twilight.”
“Fluttershy, I think you might be just a little bi…”
“It’s real.”
Twilight’s hoof rose instinctively towards the bridge of her nose. She caught up with it in midair and forced it back down. “Dreams can seem very real when we’re having them,” she explained slowly, “but in the end they’re just that: dreams. They can’t hurt you.”
“You don’t know that.”
Twilight looked forcefully at the mountainous pile of psychology, physiology, and oneirology texts behind her. She’d been woken up to go find Fluttershy with her nose still pressed into one. “Yes, actually, I do.”
“What if these aren’t just dreams?” Fluttershy hissed. “What if they’re visions, Twilight? How can I see Nigeb everywhere I go if he’s just in my head? Why did I only start having these dreams after I picked up that watch?”
“Just listen to m…”
“How could I have a cut exactly where I got one in my dream if nothing I dreamed about was real?”
“There are all kinds of explanations…”
“What if it’s not a dream, Twilight?” Fluttershy shouted. “What if it’s a spirit, or a wraith, or a demon-“
“It’s not a demon, Fluttershy!” Twilight screamed right back. Fluttershy fell silent, the crease in her brow deepening with each word than then came spewing out of her friend’s mouth.
“It’s not a demon, because demons. Don’t. Exist. They’re myths, legends, ancient fairy tales meant to scare little foals and give grownups an excuse to dress up in silly costumes on Nightmare Night. All the old books are full of them because they made for good stories. That’s it. Everything that’s happened to you has a rational explanation. Maybe you saw an animal in the Forest and couldn’t tell what it was. Maybe you got hurt weeks ago and slept on the scar too long. Maybe you read too many scary stories, you’ve convinced yourself that you’ve been possessed by a pocket watch, and it’s making you run off into the Everfree Forest and put the lives of you and all the ponies who care about you at risk!”
Twilight paused to grab for breath, but never caught it. Fluttershy’s stare was nearly at full power. “You think I’m crazy,” she growled.
A sudden burst of sympathy flooded Twilight’s heart, along with a similarly large amount of guilt. “I don’t think you’re crazy, Fluttershy. I don’t. I just…” This time, her hoof did make it all the way up to her eyes, and when she lifted it away and let it drop the floor again, it came away just the slightest bit wet. “I’m scared. All right? I’m scared of what almost happened to you tonight, I’m scared of what might happen to you in the future, I’m scared of what all of this is doing to your health, and I don’t know what I can do to help you. You’re not sleeping, you’re not eating… I mean, look at you! You’re skin and bones! And that scares me, Fluttershy. I-I panicked, I… I don’t want to see you get hurt. Not over something as simple as a few bad…”
Fluttershy nodded slowly, started turning away.
“Wait, where are you…”
Started walking towards the door.
“Fluttershy, wait!”
“No, I’m tired of waiting!” Fluttershy said. Her eyes were shining, doing their best to mirror Twilight’s. “I’m tired of coming here and trying to explain what it’s like, trying to pretend I think you believe me! I’m not making this up! I know I'm seeing it, I know this isn’t normal! You can talk about your books and your stories all you want. I don’t care! The watch is gone. I went back. It’s over!”
She whipped around towards the door, her saddlebags slapping against her sides. Something shiny slipped out of it and hit the ground with a heavy thump.
“Fluttershy, wait, you dropped someth…”
Twilight’s words faded away as her gaze dropped to the floor, and what she saw there sent a chill down her spine that made it all the way to the tip of her tail. Lying on the rug between them was a tremendously old and weather-worn gold watch, its chain slung haphazardly in front of it and its hands reading a minute past three o’clock. It was several moments before she looked up to Fluttershy again. Her face was clear, serene, as if she’d finally come to realize something that had eluded her for days. She shook her head, her mouth twitching into something that almost resembled a smile, and leisurely bent down to pick it up.
Just before the watch disappeared into her saddlebag, Twilight could’ve sworn she saw the minute hand tick back up to three o’clock exactly. Before she could think to ask for a chance to examine it, Fluttershy was already gone.
• • •
It would not end. It was as simple as that.
The knowledge was oddly liberating. It would never be over. It would never go away. This was her life now, or whatever she had left of it. Surely, she couldn’t survive much longer like this: fading in and out like a ghost in the daytime, sinking into this torture every night. Twilight couldn’t stop it, and certainly she couldn’t herself. One way or another, the end was near. The only thing left to do now was wait and see what form it inevitably took.
She was a unicorn again—not that it mattered. She’d been a different pony every single time. And that was the one of many things she still didn’t understand about these dreams: she’d been having them for over a week now, and yet not once had she simply been herself. She was always looking at this world through another’s eyes, merely observing their actions as if their body was at once both theirs and her own. As if their actions were inevitable, their eternal ends already mandated by a power beyond her comprehension.
She crept down the stairs, ears perked and primed to listen for the slightest movement. The room below her was messy, cluttered with thick, blocky shapes and furniture that bore the slightly askew appearance of having been shoved swiftly out of place. Familiar. Why was it always familiar? Why did she feel as if she’d been here before, walked through this room with her own body, in her own past life?
She reached forward, prodded the base of an unlit candle nearby. Confusion. She felt confusion, above all else. This was its trick, wasn’t it? Unnerve the victim, make them confused and unable to defend themselves. She’d seen it all before. She knew what would happen next.
Sure enough, a cold breeze blasted through the open window, just before each and every one around her slammed shut. Why was she confused, though? In the early dreams, she had felt only terror, only dread about an ending that she knew without knowing. With each one that followed, though, that sensation has lessened. Now it was barely there at all, present only as a budding, paranoid sense of fear. If these were all visions, why weren’t they building up to anything? Why did it feel like instead of approaching a conclusion, she was receding farther and farther away?
This time, the wind hissed in through a crack in the door, like a breath exhaled from the very night itself. She froze in mid-step for a moment, then continued towards a crowded desk in the back of the room. Something was ticking there. Something too small to be a regular clock.
The more she thought about it, the more questions she had. Why was she always alone in the dreams? Why was she still having them? What did the backwards clocks mean? The darkness? Nigeb?
“Go back…”
She reached the desk. Atop a pile of books stacked up to her chest, a grimy gold pocket watch lay gleaming in the fading light from the window. The hands showed thirty seconds after twelve. With every heartbeat, the second hand jerked closer and closer to midnight. Twenty-nine, twenty-eight, twenty-seven…
“Go baaaaack…”
She had gone back! She had done what it asked! Why was it still here? What did it still want with her?
The dream was nearly over. She would turn around, catch only the slightest glimpse of it, shut her eyes and never see her bedroom snap into existence around her. Always different. Always the same. No answers. No escape.
She shut her eyes tight, tried to make sense of the details jumbled together in her head. Shadows. Bodies. Ticking. The watch. It all came back to the watch. To time. Out of time. She was out of time.
She opened her eyes.
She turned around.
The ticking stopped.
“NIGEB!”
• • •
Twilight opened the door an inch at a time, expecting at any moment to be shouted away and told never to come back again. No one spoke even once it was fully open, though, so she went ahead and stepped inside.
The house bore a heady scent of neglect and decay. Withered and dried plants filled every windowsill. Scruffy-looking squirrels and mice peered out from dust-coated houses built into the walls and ceiling. A filthy white rabbit glared out at her from under the sink, its paws wrapped around a knobby carrot that was pressed against his visible ribs. And in the back, a yellow pegasus sat on a green upholstered couch with her hooves neatly folded before her. Plump black bags hung heavy under her vacant eyes, and her lengthy pink mane hung limp around her shoulders. A thin blanket lay crumpled on the floor beneath her.
“Fluttershy?”
She turned her head slightly and slid her eyes over to acknowledge Twilight’s presence, but said nothing. Twilight stood by the door chewing on her lip for a moment, then gradually made her way into the house and over to the couch, where she soon forced herself to delicately sit down.
“I wanted to apologize,” she said after staring at her hooves for a few moments. “For how I acted yesterday. I was upset and… and afraid, but that was no reason to treat you the way I did. I’m sorry.”
It was as if Fluttershy had been turned to stone. Twilight followed her gaze out the window across the room. It looked straight out into the Everfree Forest.
“I, uh… dug through the mythology section a bit last night.” She reached into her bag and pulled out a thin purple tome bound in coarse, faded velvet. “I found this.”
She pulled a table over with her magic and propped the book up on top of it. Another glance from Fluttershy let her know that she had the mare’s attention. “It’s a Necroponicon. I didn’t even know the library had one. They haven’t printed them since medieval times. It contains a description of every malevolent ghost, ghoul, and purported pagan deity ever spoken of by ponykind. And I read through every entry, A to Z.”
She took a deep breath and slid her forehoof off the book. “Nothing. Not one single mention of anything like what you’re describing. Granted, it’s been a long time since any of the entries were edited, but since I didn’t find anything in any other books either, I… I don’t know what to tell you.”
Fluttershy blinked, the first time Twilight could recall seeing her do so since she came inside.
“If it makes any difference, I believe you. I believe that you’re… seeing what you say you’re seeing. I just… I don’t know what to do about it. I don’t know how to help you.”
Twilight slipped her hoof under Fluttershy’s foreleg and pulled it against her haunch. Her skin was clammy, and freezing cold to the touch. “I wrote a letter to the Princess before I left to come here. About… about Nigeb. She might know more about this than I do. I know there are a lot of very talented doctors and dream experts in Canterlot. They might be able to make the dreams stop. If you want, I could take you up there once she responds.”
Finally, some movement: Fluttershy’s chin dipped down towards her chest, then lifted back up to face the window. At the corners of her mouth, a faint smile curled onto her face. “Thank you,” she whispered. Twilight smiled back, and squeezed her hoof tighter.
“No problem,” she replied. “I gotta get back home now. Spike’s probably starving by now. It’s way past dinnertime. I’ll come check on you tomorrow morning and tell you what the Princess said. In the meantime… well, just try to get some sleep, okay? I know it’s hard, but it’s only one more night. Then we can end this once and for all.”
Fluttershy’s head bobbed again. There was no glance in Twilight’s direction now, even once the unicorn got up and started to leave. It was only once she was almost to the door that Fluttershy spoke up.
“I was you.”
Twilight turned around. Fluttershy’s gaze was hypnotizing, filled with hopelessness surrounded by what almost appeared to be pity. “What?” she asked.
“Last night. In my dream. I was you,” Fluttershy said. “I was in your body.” She trailed off. Her head turned back to face the window. “I was in everyone’s body.”
Twilight swallowed hard. Through the sudden chill that had swept into the room, she managed to ask the first and only question that came to mind. “What happened to me?”
Twilight waited for ten seconds. Twenty. A minute. Finally, Fluttershy turned to her again. “I’ll see you later, Twilight,” she said, her good cheer as false as the call of a mockingbird. As false as the smile she’d shown before.
“See you later,” Twilight replied. Her discomforted expression stayed with her all the way out the door.
Outside the house, the sun continued its descent below the horizon. It had been halfway obscured when Twilight had come to visit, and now by the time she left, only a single blazing sliver remained in view. Fluttershy’s gaze remained locked on the Forest; she watched as the shadows of the trees grew longer, as they stretched their elongated silhoettes over the fence, across the yard, through the window and over her chest. When the house was dark, she shifted. When the sun disappeared behind her, she began to cry.
The noise was muffled, but even still it attracted the attention of her largest houseguest. The rabbit under the sink lodged the stem of his carrot behind a nearby pipe and hopped across the floor to stand by the couch. He reached up and placed one of his paws gently on his owner’s hoof. For the second time that evening, Fluttershy smiled.
“Oh, Angel…”
She scooped him up into her forehooves. For once, he didn’t resist the gesture.
“Stay with me. Please.”
Angel regarded her carefully, his beady black eyes displaying no trace of sympathy. But when he usually would’ve bounded away or smacked her on the nose, he instead slipped out of his grasp and into her lap, where he tucked his ears beneath his chin and curled up into a ball. Fluttershy sighed and dried her eyes, brushing the same hoof gently over his back once it came down from her face.
They sat there together for several minutes, neither thinking of anything but the warmth of the other’s body. Fluttershy could feel her eyelids drooping, her mind succumbing to the inescapable desire for sleep. Could she bear to do this again? Could she allow herself to let the world go dark, to lock herself inside the one and only place where her tormentor would always reside?
She looked down towards her chest, shifted her hair away from the golden pocket watch it had been obscuring. Yes. She could. One more time. One last time.
She leaned her head back and gave in to the fatigue that had been tailing her for the entire week. Her eyes fell closed, and didn’t reopen.
• • •
For a moment, she wondered whether she was dreaming at all. When she opened her eyes, the room around her was unchanged. The couch beneath her was still green, the hair crowded around her shoulders was still pink. The house around her was still her own. And yet the darkness was too thick, almost physical in its weight against her stomach and chest. And yet her animals had vanished, the pressure of Angel’s body gone from her legs. They would still be here if she was awake. She would know if she were awake.
So this was it, then. The final twist. The last thing different in the dreams that were always the same.
She straightened up and looked towards the door. Closed tight. Locked. On their way across the room, her eyes caught a glimpse of a shadow darker than the rest, a portion of the room that seemed to be filled not by darkness, but by pure, unending nothingness. She leaned forward onto her hooves, took a deep breath, and faced it.
There were no games this time, no pounding on the walls or playing tricks with the lights. It just stood there, bobbing its head from side to side and twitching what she could only assume functioned as its hooves. Its skin was hairless and white as bone, and jagged slits ran down its nose and cheeks, covering where its mouth should’ve gone. Its eyes, though, were the worst part: cavernous empty sockets that paralyzed her, encompassed her in a terror that was beyond words or reason. She’d thought she might have gotten used to it now, might no longer find its appearances so foreboding. But this was different. It was different. It wasn’t moving. It wasn’t attacking her.
It was speaking.
Yes, it was speaking. Saying the same thing it always said. Except… no, that wasn’t possible. It wasn’t saying the same thing. It always said the same thing. These words were backwards, twisted around from what they should’ve been. A whole host of details suddenly flooded her consciousness: the scuffs in the dust on the table, the errant violet hair on the couch arm, the fading spot of warmth right at the base of her belly. This was her house. This was her body. It wasn’t different. It wasn’t the same.
She wasn’t dreaming at all.
It spoke the final word, lowered its head, began to float towards her. But slowly, sedately, with none of the mad rush it normally embodied. The final puzzle piece fell into place in her mind, and her eyes widened. The dreams. The visions. Her friends. She had to warn them. She had to escape. But it had already reached the couch, already wrapped its limbs around her torso and pressed its face up against hers. Its eyes bore into her, tearing at her face and pulling her deeper and deeper inside. There would be no warning. There would be no escape.
She had never escaped Nigeb. Not in her dreams, and not now.
She felt a tiny prick, like a needle being slid between her ribs, and then the room fell away as it enveloped her, its essence pouring into her body and hollowing it out, purging all traces of the shy, carefree mare that had once inhabited it. Hair fell in clumps to the floor, joining the desiccated husks of the helpless animals her predator had already consumed. Her bones cracked and disintegrated, her mouth sealing over before her final scream had a chance to leave it. Her heart sputtered and choked under suffocating blackness; the light faded from her eyes just before they imploded and dissolved into dust. In a matter of moments, the pony who had wandered all the way into the Everfree Forest just to get some pepperdew buds was gone, replaced by something less than equine and far, far more than mortal.
For several minutes, it was motionless, its vacant eye sockets pointed towards the cursed forest it had infected for centuries. Finally, it stood, its gaze jumping all over the room before settling on the bolted front door. With unsteady, convulsive steps, it approached the exit, the lock sliding back the second it drew near. The pattern had been decided. The clock had been set. Nothing could be spared. Nothing could escape its grasp.
The door swung open, and the unlit sky beckoned it forward. It paused for a moment to consider its objective, then stepped forward and vanished under the veil of night. The moment it did, the watch hanging from around its neck began to tick.
• • •
The sun had set on Ponyville by the time Twilight made it back within its borders. It had only barely begun to graze the horizon when she left the library that afternoon. She must’ve stayed at Fluttershy’s longer than she thought. Of course, it was also possible that she’d just be too distracted by her own thoughts to notice anything going on around her. Fluttershy’s nightmares were the first problem that had well and truly stumped her in months, and that just made the prospect of puzzling them out all the more alluring. She supposed that someday that attitude might get her into trouble, but in this case at least, she was doing it for a good cause.
What in Equestria could be the matter with the girl? She couldn’t just be making this up. Fluttershy would never do such a thing in the first place, let alone be able to pretend she was this tortured by it. So what was it? Perhaps she was schizophrenic, or repressing a painful memory that was violently forcing its way back to the forefront of her mind. Surely, it had to be something of the sort; Twilight had pulled out that book on ancient devils and evil spirits mostly just to make Fluttershy feel better. If there was any chance that some kind of otherworldly being was involved here, it certainly would’ve been mentioned in a macabre collection like that.
Unless, of course, it just devoured everypony who had ever even heard of it, she mused as her hooves carried her down the sidewalk leading up to her home. Her wry twist of black humor only convinced her more that she had done the right thing in contacting the Princess. It wasn’t her place to make any kind of diagnosis like this. She’d done all she could do to set this thing right already.
She picked her way to the library door more through muscle memory than anything else. Spike must’ve forgotten to light the lamps out front again. Once she was inside, she allowed herself a grin and a small chuckle. For a number-one assistant, he sure could be scatterbrained sometimes.
“Spike, I’m home! You hungry?”
No answer. He’d probably fallen asleep waiting for her. She lit a few candles with a magically produced flame and took one with her as she trotted up the stairs to find him, her mind already busy preparing a couple playful jabs about his sleeping habits. But when she reached the bedroom they shared and lifted her candle up to illuminate the upper loft, she saw no trace of the baby dragon anywhere. In fact, there was no sign that anyone had been inside this room for hours.
She floated her light source over to a nearby table and almost left it there so she could go and investigate further. Just as it came to rest, though, she saw something white flash in the candle’s flickering gleam, a sight so odd that she couldn’t help but take a closer look. Next to Spike’s empty and overturned basket, at least a dozen tightly sealed scrolls lay piled haphazardly on top of each other. The ones poking out from the bottom looked as neat and orderly as one would expect a letter from royalty to appear, but the ones at the top of the stack were crumpled and torn, as if whoever had written them had been in a tremendous hurry to get them finished. Twilight dropped her saddlebag on the floor behind her, and the Necroponicon slid out onto the carpet, its back cover flopping open from the force of the fall. Another flash of white caught Twilight’s eye, and she turned back towards the book. There was a tiny scrap of paper poking out from inside its binding.
Her curiosity overwhelmed her, and her heart soared. A secret message inside a mystical book of monsters and mayhem. She hadn’t felt this adventurous in years.
She left the letters behind for the time being—reading those could wait for at least a minute or two—and snatched up the paper, flattening it out on the side table next to her candle. Actually, as it turned out, there were two scraps of paper there. The first seemed harmless at first: it was a map of Equestria dated about thirty years before she was born. The Everfree Forest and the town of Ponyville were circled in thick black ink, and in the middle of the forest, one spot in particular was marked by a large ‘X’. In the bottom margin, somepony had scribbled what looked like a riddle:
Don’t go into the forest.
Don’t pick up the watch.
Tell no one what you saw.
It always knows who knows.
Twilight read and reread the lines while the feeling that she was missing something prickled on the back of her neck. When she figured out what it was, her blood ran cold. The watch. Fluttershy had found a watch inside the forest. She had told her what she saw in her dreams.
She turned the page over and looked at the one behind it, and had to force herself to stay put as a shudder squirmed through her shoulders. The paper was filthy, smeared with ink and darkened spots where liquid had splashed onto it. In a center, somebody had scratched out a terrifying depiction of some kind of creature Twilight had never seen before, its features vaguely pony-like save for the gashes over its mouth and the wide black circles where its eyes should’ve been. All around the drawing were disconnected phrases written in shaky block letters:
CAN’T SLEEP
NO EYES
THE END AT THE START
THE LAST GOES FIRST
But it was only the last line, the one right before the creature’s chin, that made her heart skip a beat. That made her realize that she hadn’t known nearly as much as she thought.
NIGEB. GO BACK. GO BACK. NIGEB.
Nigeb. That was the thing Fluttershy had told her about. Somepony else had seen it. It wasn’t just her.
She backed away from the table. The papers fluttered to the floor. She had to get to Fluttershy’s house. She had to tell her about this, get her away from the Forest. She had to figure this out.
When she was halfway across the room again, the candle on the table went out. She had just enough time to stop and look back at it before the entire library went dark. She stood stock still until her eyes adjusted, listening all the while for the noise of an intruder that never came. Swallowing back the lump that had leapt up into her throat, she moved forward and crept downstairs. Her eyes were opened wide. Her ears were perked.
“Spike?” she called out. “Hello?”
From the foot of the staircase, the library looked perfectly normal: the stacks of misplaced books were all where she’d left them, the door wasn’t hanging off its hinges. The only thing different was the air: it had been pleasant when she first came in, but it was bitingly cold now. But that couldn’t have been enough to put out all of the candles, could it? She leaned forward and prodded at one. The wax dripping down its sides was hard. It was like it had never even been lit.
A stiff breeze suddenly whistled through the room, turning pages of open books and ruffling her mane and tail. The thought of closing the windows had just coagulated inside her mind when they all slammed shut of their own accord. Her flesh crawled with equal parts alarm and shock. Could the wind have really done that on its own? Was there a rational explanation for this too?
She moved without thinking to the center of the room, her eyes fixed on the door as it shifted in the wind buffeting it outside. What was that noise behind her? Her clock wasn’t that loud. No clock she’d ever heard was that loud. She spun to look for it, and found herself staring at her writing desk. Every book on it had been collected into one stack. They were ticking. The book at the very top of the stack was ticking.
She took a step forward, and the wind swirled around her ankles. It had slipped in beneath the door, sounding almost like a whisper spoken from too far away to be fully heard. Another step. The ticking was growing louder. She reached the desk, looked up to the top of the stack.
She saw something made of golden metal.
She couldn’t jump, couldn’t run, couldn’t look anywhere but at the golden metal. At the watch. At Fluttershy’s pocket watch that could not possibly be in her home right now. Tell no one what you saw, the paper had said.
Behind her, the front door creaked open.
“Kab og…”
It always knows who knows.
“Kaaaaab og…”
She closed her eyes. Her mind was blank, her body rigid. Fluttershy was right. Fluttershy had known. Fluttershy couldn’t save herself.
Twilight opened her eyes.
She turned around.
And it spoke.
"BEGIN."
