Prologue
The chain gang – a torture unlike most of the Equestrians ever knew. The horrible slavery endured was painful enough, but when that pink-haired, heartless veteran Celestia was watching over you, the chain gang became positively fatal.
All creatures of different races were shackled together, those of flight had their wings tightly bond while those who used magic had enchanted shacks or horn rings in the unicorns case.
That day, in 1815, two of Celestia's associates in the police force watched and beat upon several convicts working very hard, so hard that they began to bleed.
"Look down, look down, don't look them in the eye," Celestia's associates chanted. "Look down, look down, you're here until you die."
"The sun is strong, it's hot as Tartarus below!" one convict cried, his face contorted in pain. An officer kicked him to the groud.
"Look down, look down, there's twenty years to go," the officer sneered.
"I've done no wrong! Sweet Faust hear my prayer!" a griffin cried, his coat ragged, his feathers badly ruffeled and his talons clasped together in prayer.
"Look down, look down, Sweet Faust doesn't care."
"I know she'll wait, I know that she'll be true!" the third convict yelled with his hoof on his chest.
"Look down, look down, they've all forgotten you."
"When I get free, you won't see me here for dust!" the fourth convict threatened and spat. The officers continued to just beat and kick the convicts.
"Look down, look down, don't look them in the eye…"
The fifth convict looked as though he had been on the gang for a very long time, and he was very weathered and dirty. "How long, oh Herd, until you let me die?"
"Look down, look down, you'll always be a slave… look down, look down, you're standing in your grave," the officers echoed.
The various threats and screams stopped. The officers and the convicts looked up to see the hardened face, pearl mane, and spectacular magenta eyes of Celestia.
All work stopped. Celestia's white coat and pearl pink mane/tail billowed in the brief wind. Celestia looked to the officers.
"Now bring me prisoner 24601," she asked in an oddly delicate voice. The officers quickly brought him the convict, a black alicorn mare with the mane of a starry night sky and a crescent moon mark on her flank. The convict moved some starry mane out of her intense eyes.
"Your time is up and your parole's begun," Celestia explained. "You know what that means?"
"Yes it means I'm free," the convict sighed, a small smile on her face.
"No! It means you get your yellow of ticket of leave. You are a thief!" Celestia accused.
"I stole a loaf of bread," the prisoner countered.
"You robbed a house!"
"…I broke a windowpane." The prisoner looked at Celestia. "My sister's child was close to death. We were starving –"
"You'll starve again!" Celestia interrupted forcefully. "Unless you learn the meaning of the law!"
"I know the meaning of those nineteen years a slave…" the mare glared at Celestia. "Of the law."
Celestia turned his back to the prisoner. "Five years for what you did, the rest because you tried to run! Yes, 24601 –"
"My name is Nightmare Moon!" the prisoner intruded angrily.
Celestia snickered malevolently and turned back to Nightmare Moon. "And I am Celestia. Do not forget my name – do not forget me, 24601!"
As Celestia beckoned for the officers and the chain gang to follow him, they chanted, "Look down, look down, you'll always be a slave. Look down, look down, you're standing in your grave…"
Nightmare smirked somewhat, and then looked at a puddle of water below her.
"Freedom is mine. The earth is still," Nightmare breathed. "I feel the wind… I breathe again. And the sky clears… the world is waking."
Nightmare bent her head gently, and then drank the fresh clear fallen water. "Drink from the pool – how clean the taste! Never forget the years, the waste… nor forgive them for what they've done."
"They are the guilty, everyone," Nightmare sighed, as doors began to open on the houses, and the square filled with creatures as the sun gently rose.
"The day begins… and now let's see what this new world will do for me!"
Nightmare found work with a farmer. There, she toiled diligently with the farmer's other workers, doing much better work than them and doing it faster. However, at the end of the day, the farmer only gave her half salary, as opposed to what the other men received.
"You'll have to go, I'll pay you off for the day. Collect your bits and pieces there and be on your way," the farmer told Nightmare as he handed Nightmare the coins.
Nightmare frowned. "You have given me half what the other ponies get! This handful of tin wouldn't buy my sweat!"
One of the other workers scowled, looking at the yellow ticket-of-leave and the ring round her horn. "You broke the law, it's there for people to see. Why should you get the same as honest ponies like me?"
Nightmare saw the sun was beginning to set, and saw an inn, full to the brim with Equestrian creatures. She knew she couldn't go there. And there was no way that anyone would let her into their houses.
"And now I know how freedom feels," Nightmare shook her head. "The jailer always at your heels – it is the law! This piece of paper in my hoof, that makes me cursed throughout the land – it is the law! Like a cur, I walk the street, the dirt beneath their feet."
Nightmare sat down on a stoop, in front of a darkened house when a white unicorn mare with a curly purple mane, the Lady Rarity of Digne, emerges from the doorway. Rarity pushed a violet strand of mane out of her eyes to see the weary Nightmare.
"Come in miss, for you are weary," the lady invited Nightmare. "And the night is cold out there. Though our lives are very humble, what we have, we have to share…"
Rarity led Nightmare into her house, and sat him down at the table.
"There is wine here to revive you, there is bread to make you strong. There's a bed to rest till morning – rest from pain and rest from wrong." At first, Nightmare was very conscious of how much she ate, but Lady Rarity insisted that she eat her fill – so Nightmare did.
Nightmare watched Lady Rarity take to her room, and Nightmare looked at the table.
"She let me eat my fill… I had the mantacore’ share," Nightmare realized. "The silver in my hoof cost twice what I had earned in all those nineteen years – that lifetime of despair, yet she trusted me."
Nightmare snickered. "The fool trusted me – she'd done her bit of good. I played the grateful serf, and thanked her as I should… but when the house was still, I got up in the night."
Nightmare took a fine silver goblet off the table and stuck it in her satchel. "Took the silver – and took my flight!"
Nightmare ran out of the house, towards nowhere in particular, when two constables grabbed Nightmare and led her back to Lady Rarity’s house. They knocked on the door, and the good lady answered.
"Tell the reverence your story," the first constable instructed.
"Let us see if he's impressed," the second continued.
"You were lodging here last night…"
"You were Lady Rarity’s guest."
"And then out of Christian goodness," the first constable pointed out, "when he learned about your plight…"
The second officer turned toward Lady Rarity. "You maintain she made a present of this silver?"
"That is right," Lady Rarity nodded. She turned to Nightmare Moon. "But my friend, you left so early… surely something slipped your mind."
Lady Rarity gave Nightmare two silver candlesticks, exquisitely designed and worth more than Nightmare had ever made in her life. "You forgot I gave these also. Would you leave the best behind?"
"So, Messieurs, you may release her," Lady Rarity told the constables. "For this man has spoken true. I commend you for your duty, and the Herd’s blessing be with you."
Now the lady turned to Nightmare Moon, her eyes colder than before. "But remember this my sister, see in this some higher plan – you must use this precious silver to become an honest mare. By the witness of the martyrs, by the Passion and the Blood, the Herd has raised you out of darkness – I have bought your soul for the Herd!"
The Lady of Digne retreated to inside her house, and Nightmare became frantic.
"What have I done, Sweet Faust, what have I done? Become a thief in the night, become a dog on the run…" Nightmare looked at the brick ground. "And I have fallen so far! And is the hour so late that nothing remains but the cry of my hate – the cries in the dark that nobody hears – here where I stand at the turning of the years? If there's another way to go, I missed it twenty long years ago! My life was a war that could never be won; they gave me a number and murdered Nightmare Moon, when they chained me and left me for dead… just for stealing a mouthful of bread!"
Remembering was painful for Nightmare Moon, so she sat back down on the street. "Yet why did I allow that mare to touch my soul and teach me love? She treated me like any other, she gave me her trust… she called me sister. My life he claims for the Herd above – can such things be? For I had come to hate the world – the world that always hated me."
Nightmare felt a tear drip down her face. "Take an eye for an eye! Turn your heart into stone! This is all I have lived for; this is all I have known! One word from her and I'd be back, beneath the leash, upon the rack. Instead she offers me my freedom. I feel my shame inside me like a knife – she told me that I have a soul, how does she know? What spirit comes to move my life? Is there another way to go?"
"I am reaching, but I fall," Nightmare continued, standing up, clutching her yellow ticket-of-leave furiously. "And the night is closing in… and I stare into the void, to the whirlpool of my sin. I'll escape now from the world – from the world of Nightmare Moon –"
Nightmare tore her yellow ticket-of-leave in half and with a powerful magical burst destroyed the ring round her horn. "Nightmare Moon is nothing now! Another story must begin!"
Nightmare tore up her yellow ticket-of-leave into many pieces and left them in her magical grasp, scattering them as she walked.