//------------------------------//
// Chapter 1 - A Dream Remembered 
// Story: The Moon Has Two Faces 
// by Ether Echoes 
//------------------------------//

The wings spread across Owen's bed gleamed in the fading sunlight as he examined them with a meticulous eye. Wire, glue, and feathers had come together over weeks in his patient hands. It had taken many tries to get them just right. He'd begun with a single set of wires for each side, but it had looked weak with just one layer. It had taken three to do a proper job, with the marginal coverts and alural feathers along the top, the primary and secondary coverts in the middle, and the main secondary and primary feathers along the bottom.
The real challenge had been the feathers. No bird alive had teal feathers with white striations, and the supply stores he'd looked at online hadn't offered any, so he'd had to dye and paint them by hand. It had been a laborious task that he'd tackled with more discipline and focus than most things in his young life.
“So, this is the final result?” Tim asked from his spot by the door. Autumn sunlight slanted through the window across the orange jumpsuit of his patched-together Rebel Alliance Pilot costume. "The wings you saw in your dreams?"
"They're not quite right." Owen stopped fussing. No amount of adjustment would make it perfect. Some of them were frayed, and he wasn't sure how to fix that. He felt as though he should, but tracing that thought left him stranded in lost scraps of forgotten dreams.
Lifting it carefully, he slid his arms through the straps and settled it across his back. He didn’t have a mirror handy, but glancing to his sides as the feathers peeked out from behind gave him a faint thrill, even if it was a little off. "The colors aren’t there yet, but I guess I'm out of time."
"You're not kidding. It’s literally the day of. You've been at this for, like, forever." Tim took him in, eyes flicking up and down. "Is that really your whole costume? Your normal clothes and a pair of wings? At least get a white shirt or throw on a halo. If you're going to obsess over angel wings, maybe look the part?"
"They're not—!" Owen bit his cheek and looked away, staring out the window as a pigeon alighted on the fire escape's railing. "They're not angel wings. I'm not an angel in my dreams."
Ducking their head under a wing, the pigeon started preening their filthy feathers as best they could. It wasn't their fault, he knew. Pigeons only got that way living in places like this. The bird's gesture lit an ache inside him he couldn't quite explain.
"Maybe poke some of the spare feathers into your hoodie, then?" Tim poked through the bag of discarded feathers, mostly ones too badly off to use or with even more terrible dye jobs. "We'll say you're a tropical bird or something."
"I don't have feathers anywhere else," Owen said, feeling a little short. Tim was a friend in the sense that they hung out and shared similar interests, and that had rarely come clearer than at that moment. "This is really it. I'm not even wearing any—" He cut himself off quickly when Tim looked up, a flush rosying his cheeks.
"Not wearing any what?"
A knock came at the door. "Oi, losers, stop making out in there," his elder brother Jeremiah called and opened the door a crack, his oversized pirate hat squishing between it and the frame. "We going trick-or-treating or not?"
"Coming!" Owen called, grateful for once for his brother's lack of respect for his privacy. "Don't get your primaries in a bunch."
Both Tim and Jeremiah shot him weird looks, but he had caught his reflection in the television and his hand had gone thoughtfully to his ears, hidden behind his shaggy, dirty blonde hair. Considering that maybe Tim had been right about the incompleteness of the costume, he wondered if his friends Jaime and Aisha would have some costume ears he could borrow. They seemed to have a limitless supply of Halloween goods.
"Whatever, fairy. Let's go. If I'm going to chaperone your ugly faces around, I at least want to get it done quickly so I can go to a party."
"Yeah." Owen tore his eyes away from his wings. "Sure."
They passed through the living room, where their parents had already plowed through half a bottle together as they giggled on the couch, and they hadn't even left for their own adult party. If they said anything as they stepped out into the hall, Owen neither heard nor cared.





Aisha and Jaime Gaines, in fact, did have a selection of costume ears, and they came out with a bunch to try on while they waited in front of their house. It wasn't much of a place, just a tiny house with one story and a basement in a neighborhood with cracked roads and the Philadelphia skyline hidden by apartments across the street, but Owen loved it all the same. The little yard was packed with Halloween decorations, and even with the sky still bright kids walked past them to the doors where their father waited with a dinosaur costume to leap out and scare them before handing out candy.
To the sound of screams, Owen looked at the different headbands, passing floppy dog ears and elf ears and devil's horns without pause. In truth, none of them seemed right, but the cat ears felt closest, so he picked the tabby ones over the black and looked up at his friends.
"I have to say," Jaime said, a year older than his sister and just starting to sprout into the awkward stages, "the effect is remarkably cute, but I'm still not sure what you're supposed to be. Hey, though, I am all for it." Dressed as a vampire count in a handmade costume and cape, his smile contained a hint of fangs, and it was far more genuine than Tim's mocking half-smile.
"This is so goofy." Tim shook his head. "I'm embarrassed to even be near you freaks."
"Maybe some kind of flying cat?" Aisha, her dark face painted with whiskers, took the black ears back and settled them in her hair. "You gotta tell me more about these dreams. The same one every night for how long now?"
"Not a cat." Owen shook his head. "And like… I dunno, a while, and they're, uh, they're not the same. It's the same place, but I'm always doing something different, and there are people, some more, uhm, more recurring than others? Like real life, you see your family and friends a lot, but you're doing other stuff, too." He pulled at the base of his shirt awkwardly. "It's just in the last few months it's been easier to remember them, I think. Normally it just slips away like, like morning dew or something."
"Morning dew," Aisha and Jaime echoed together and laughed. "Jinx," she said.
Jaime rolled his eyes at her and laid a hand on his shoulder, grinning. "You're adorable, Owen, did I ever tell you that?"
Gazing up at his deep brown eyes and smiling face, Owen felt a snarky reply dry up in his throat, and he had to look away as his face burned right to his ears. "J-just about ten times. Knock it off." He gave him a push back. Not a hard one, not that he could have. His arms always felt weak after the dreams, but it seemed to linger more and more of late.
"Maybe you should keep a dream diary?" Aisha fixed her tail and adjusted her skirt. "I heard that's supposed to help."
"Owen!" Jeremiah called, heading over. A car had driven up to the curb with a bunch of teens while they stood around talking. "I'm heading out. Don't tell Mom and Dad."
"Hey!" Owen spun. He felt like his wings should have flared out dramatically, but they just swung awkwardly on his back. "Jerm, you're supposed to chaperone us! We can't be out at night on our own!"
"Don't be such a pussy. You’re like, twelve, you can handle yourself. Just because Mom is a control freak doesn't mean you need to let her turn you into a wuss." Jeremiah ruffled his hair so hard he knocked the ears away and vaulted into the back of the car. He pointed at him as they drove off. "Don't tell Mom and Dad!"
The teens laughed as they roared off, dodging a group of kids further down the street. Owen stared after him, coughing on the exhaust, and didn't notice Jaime until he felt the ears settle back on his head. He jumped a little and gaped up at him.
"Like I said: adorable."
Aisha glanced at the kids walking by and took Owen's hand. "Why don't we just pass? I mean, we can totally go on our own, but you don’t honestly seem like you’re all that into it right now. Our dad will call yours, say you're staying over for the night. We can stay up way too late watching dumb horror movies and eat leftover chili. You can take the couch."
"Well." Jaime laughed. "We can. I know you've gone vegetarian on us, but I think we got stuff for that, too."
"Hard pass." Tim threw his pillow sack over his shoulder and made his way down the overgrown sidewalk. "I'm going anyway. You dorks have fun at your lame ass party."
His blush not departing, Owen scratched at his arm and stared at the ground. "I'd really like that." He met their eyes. "I mean, really, really like that. Maybe, uhm, don't call my folks, though? If you do, you'll just get voicemail, and it's not like they aren't going to be passed out until noon tomorrow. They do every year. And occasionally on other holidays." He cleared his throat. "Also, uh, th-they wouldn't like me staying with you guys be-because…"
He couldn't bring himself to finish. It made him sick even to think about what his parents would say. It made him feel like scum for being related to him, as though he'd inherited a bitter bile that oozed through his veins.
"Because they’re racist?" Aisha asked pointedly, and he nodded, mute.
"Forget them, Owen." Jaime kept his hand on his shoulder and urged him to the door. "What they don't know won't hurt them. Or, more importantly, hurt you."
"I'm sorry," he whispered, letting Jaime tug him along without resistance.
"Like I said, forget them. They want to be stuck in the past, let them." He poked Owen in the chest after they reached the porch, with its hanging ghosts with eerie lights behind their eyes. "You just care about who you really are, got it? You're our friend, so you can stay here whenever you like."
"Whenever they aren't paying attention, anyway, which I wish they did more of the rest of the year," Owen murmured and touched his chest, as though he could still feel the touch. "They don't like me going out after dark, or anytime, really."
"Yeah, you gotta learn to buck back. Though, if you're gonna come around, just be careful." Aisha grinned wide, her slit-eyed contacts gleaming in the growing night. "People who stay at our house have a bad habit of getting… devoured!"
They leapt out of their way as a giant dinosaur sprang from the shadows, and Owen shrieked like a little girl.





Curled up hours later on a big, often-patched couch in the Gaines’ basement, eating the little candy their father couldn't give away and watching old movies, Owen felt like he was in heaven. A musty-smelling, basement version of heaven, but heaven all the same. It even had a big window set into the ground above that let the full moon's light cut a square over their instruments in the back, a drum set and bass guitar that had been rescued from some failed band their uncle had done sound work for, with curtains installed around their beds.
Despite—or, perhaps, because of—the vastly reduced quality of the fat CRT monitor perched on the dresser in the corner, something about the flickering haze of dying VHS tapes made the movies even more terrifying, and he found the siblings pressed tight on either side whenever a jump scare or piercing note cut through the night. It made him feel strangely at peace in a way he hadn't felt for a while in his parents’ apartment.
Jaime and Aisha had a habit of yelling at the characters on the screen, something else his family never would have tolerated. The urge bubbled up in him to ask them to let him listen at first, particularly since it was clear they’d seen all of these movies multiple times and so obviously knew what was going to happen. After a while, though, he found he no longer cared. Movies like Nightmare on Elm Street and Halloween III weren’t actually all that good, and when they played an actually scary movie on their laptop—Oculus—their hushed commentary was the line between him being scared-but-kinda-excited about it and scared-and-won’t-ever-sleep-again.
“Okay, my little creatures of the night,” their mother called down, back from her evening shift, “Time for ghoulies and goblins to get to bed.” She came and shut down the laptop, turned off the TV, and made sure the three of them brushed their teeth before laying out some pillows and a quilt on the couch for Owen. They didn’t even need to explain that he was staying the night, and he watched her work with a strange longing in his heart.
He couldn’t sleep as he lay there, watching the moon’s light slowly glide across the wings resting against the wall before closing his eyes. He wanted to dream, but no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t find sleep. Restless, he shifted and turned, opening his eyes when the siblings knocked on the frame of the couch.
“Hey, Owen,” Jaime asked, sitting on the arm rest. “What’s eating you? It’s the witching hour, you know. Three o’clock. Dangerous time for winged cats or whatever you might be.”
“Worried about bad dreams?” Aisha crouched by the cushions. “I suppose it was probably a mistake to throw all those horror movies at you without proper conditioning. A few nightmares will do you good, though.”
“I don’t really have nightmares.” Owen pulled a pillow to his chest. “Never have.”
“Well, like my brother said, it’s the witching hour. It’s a magical time, the best time for talking about dreams. Maybe if you try, you can remember? I forget my dreams when I wake up, but, sometimes, especially when I’m drowsy and can’t sleep, I can pull them up again.”
“Might help to talk about it.” Jaime nodded.
A lump formed in his throat, and it had to be swallowed back down before any response was possible. “I can try, I guess. You guys are so nice. How’d you get this way?”
Jaime laughed, slapping his foot. “Come on, Owen. What do you mean by that?”
“It’s just…” He squirmed at the touch. “Whenever I’m dreaming, I feel… happy, and free, and clear. Whenever I’m awake, the world… it just wears me down. My parents, my brothers, school, all the things I see around town…” He flinched. “I feel shitty for saying that. I know you guys probably have to put up with a lot worse than I do.”
“Sure, but we’ve got two parents who love us and show it,” Aisha said. “That’s more than a lot of folks can say.”
“Our dad says, ‘You gotta carry your heart high when you’re wading through the worst parts of life. Don’t let it get weighed down, not when you’re in the thick. Hold tight to the things that matter, recharge and renew yourself when you’re somewhere safe, and it’ll carry you through.’” Jaime mimicked the deeper baritone of his father, ruined only slightly by a squeak in the middle. Owen pretended not to hear, though Aisha giggled.
“I dunno if I can do that. I… I guess… I don’t really have a safe place. This is the closest I’ve been in a long time, and I know that if my parents found out, they’d take me away.” Owen hugged the pillow more tightly. “That and my dreams, but I can’t remember much of them.”
“Well, maybe try what I said.” Aisha nudged his shoulder. “Go on. We wanna hear, right?”
Jaime nodded. “We’d be happy to hear if it’ll help.”
Surrendering to their relentless tag-teaming, Owen sighed and nodded, closing his eyes. “Okay. I’ll try.”
Taking deep, slow breaths, he focused on the feelings that were most relevant to him. The sense of air flowing over his wings, the warmth, the safety. “I’m… in the clouds,” he mumbled, his voice exhausted from the long day. “I’m flying, I think. No… no that’s not right.” His back twitched, and he shifted in place, losing it for a bit before finding the blue skies again with the clouds gleaming beneath the sun. “My wings are spread, the same wings as the ones I made but better, but I’m not the one flying. There’s someone beneath me. I’m standing on them, and they’re flying beneath me with wings that are a lot like mine, but a little different. Her striations have the same pattern, but the hue is a few shades darker. Teaching me, I think?”
A memory of a woman’s voice echoed through him. “She said, ‘That’s right! Just keep them up, like that. Feel the wind moving beneath them, pressing up gently? Just hold on tight and keep that pose.’”
“That’s sweet.” Aisha was a soft presence to the side of his head, a distraction, but not an unpleasant one. “Who was she? Do you know?”
Trying to cling to the thread, Owen relaxed his hands, ducking them under the sheets as they became numb. Aisha started to speak, but Jaime hushed her, watching. “I had my arms and legs wrapped around her back. I…” He swallowed, momentarily overwhelmed.
“It wasn’t hands and legs. It was legs and legs. Legs in front, legs in back.” He couldn’t speak for a moment, his heart slowing as his breathing evened. For a second, he could see the woman’s short, crimson hair in the wind. She banked, and he banked with her as best he could, clouds shifting to the left as they went right. “She didn’t have clothes on, neither of us did, but it didn’t matter, because we both had coats of… coats of fine hair. I could feel her muscles turning under her as she broke the air with her wings, and I knew I wanted nothing more than to be just like her. More than anything.”
“Your mother?” Aisha asked softly.
Like a key turning in a lock, something came undone in Owen. He mumbled incoherently, his grasp on the world around him fading fast. It was as though a pit had opened beneath him, a great, vast abyss of sleep that drew him down, down into some unknowable vastness.





Like a drowning person heaving for their first breaths, Owen came suddenly and sharply awake with a violent gasp. He stared around at his surroundings, unseeing for a few moments as though none of it made any sense. In a way, it didn’t—the high window had gone and been replaced by two covered in curtains, with only a faint peek of a full moon glowing through. Pictures, their figures indistinct in the poor lighting, clustered on a dresser, and others hung over the wallpaper. The room didn’t smell musty, it smelled of others, and her back lay not on a couch, but a bed that creaked with springs at her motion.
“Sweetheart?” a man’s voice groggily asked, and he froze in place. “Are you all right?”
A head moved above his, and he trembled in place at the strangeness of its shape, narrow and lean with a jutting darkness at the brow.
From his other side, great limbs rose and stretched, spreading impossibly large before shrinking back down to the sides of another figure. “What’s wrong? Arc Light burning the house down by accident again?” Her head craned in opposite the first. “Honey? What’s wrong? Bad dream?”
Owen couldn’t speak. He could only wheeze faintly.
Then light stung his eyes as something on the man lit up, and he was blinded further as lights clicked on. Limbs folded around him, and he found himself pressed close to a fluffy chest, one sea blue with white speckles. “Oh, stars, she’s trembling. Should we send for a doctor?” The woman’s voice ached with worry.
“Just give her a moment to calm down.”
Before Owen could gasp out a question, the woman folded one of her extra set of limbs around him, and he found himself cocooned in a soft wing with dark striations. It was in this instant that memory sparked. “Mom?” he croaked in a high, desperate tone.
“That’s right.” She opened the wing enough for him to see. “Right here, as always.”
They weren’t human. The man—the stallion, his father—floated a pair of glasses over with the horn jutting from his head glowing pale blue, and blinked away the light. Slender and slight, he cut a graceful figure with his single-toned, light magenta coat, a constellation picked out on his thighs. “Just take deep breaths, Light Breeze. You’re okay. You were having a bad dream is all.”
The name struck a chord so deep he—she—gasped. Like another key, it fit a lock she’d never known she’d had, and to her own sides she found a set of immature wings pulled in tight. Opening them was like unclenching a fist that had long been gripped shut, but she did, unfolding them to reveal the glorious patterns of teal and pale striations. Her coat was the same, speckled like her mother’s.
Stronger, with a short crimson mane and a long tail of equally vibrant red, her mother smiled and nipped at her ears. A school of leaping fish adorned her sides. “You heard your dad. Deep breaths, like we’re practicing to go up high.”
Light Breeze did, inhaling her parents’ scent and exhaling malaise and confusion. Each breath reminded her that she was herself, that the hooves pressing into the sheets belonged to her, and that she wasn’t far away on a couch in a basement with a pair of very nice, if peculiar, children.
That thought stuck with her too, though, as she pressed in against her mother. “I’m all right, I… I did just have a bad dream, but it wasn’t as bad as most. I was with some people I knew, and we’d been having a private Nightmare Night celebration. It was wonderful, one of the best days I could remember having. In the dreams, that is.”
Normally, by then, the details of her memories would run like water through her feathers, but not this time. “Their names were… Aisha and Jaime.”
Her name had been Owen, and the memory of the aching in his heart dwelled in hers, soothed only by her parents continuing to nuzzle and press at her. Minutes passed, and still the dream hadn’t faded.
“Those are peculiar names,” her mother said, clicking her tongue. “Foreign? Did you meet anyone from Saddle Arabia or Griffonstone lately?”
“No, they’re no one I’ve ever met. They’re only friends with me in the dream. I…” She frowned, concentrating. “I’ve dreamed of them before, quite a few times, I think. I’ve only just remembered clearly.”
“That’s probably because you were trying to.” Her father stroked her back with a hoof. “When you wake up, the short-term memories of your dreams won’t stick around unless you take effort to commit them to long-term memory. Sometimes, you can remember bits and pieces, but that’s usually it.”
“Still a nerd.” Her mother giggled and pushed him with a hoof, grinning. “All right, though, Light Breeze?”
“Y-yeah. I think I am.” She sniffed and nuzzled into them each in turn. “I feel like I’ve been missing you two for a long time, is all. That dream felt like it took all day.”
No matter what her father had said, not a little bit of it had faded as she woke. She tried not to dwell on it, but it didn’t help. Owen’s entire Nightmare Night—his Halloween—sprawled behind her in its intricate and sometimes awful details, from the bean burrito he’d contented himself with in the morning to the lovingly prepared salad that night, to the way he’d felt when his parents didn’t so much as comment on his wings, and to the circle of affection the strange siblings cast over him. It took no effort at all to imagine herself as Owen, to feel what he felt, and that terrified her more than anything.
“Do you think you’ll be able to go back to sleep?” her dad asked, cutting through her rambling thoughts.
Her legs seized at the thought of going back to sleep and facing those sensations again. Maybe he’d just stir in his sleep for a bit before going back to bed, but she didn’t want to risk it. “Uhm, uh, what time is it?”
Her father glanced over at a brass alarm clock on his side of the dresser, the two faces painted in a gentle shade of white and an especially dark shade of blue. “Six-ten. Well, I guess it is a little late to try and sleep in.”
“Speak for yourself.” Her mother yawned and fluffed a pillow. “I don’t gotta be up until eight. The river’ll keep until then.”
“Uh huh.” Her father’s horn lit up, and he scooped the pillow up just as she started to lay her chin down. “But it’s Tuesday, which means it’s your turn to make breakfast for the kids.”
“Oh, shoot.” She flushed, her wings puffing a little. “I’m sorry, love. I lost track of the days. I’ll get right on it.”
“I can do it!” Light Breeze sprang to her hooves and leapt off the bed. “I’m not such a little pony anymore! I’ll make breakfast, and Mom can stay in bed!”
Her parents exchanged glances before giving her looks equally charmed and alarmed. “That’s really nice of you to offer, Light Breeze, but it’s okay.” Her mother stretched her majestic wings and slid onto her hooves. “See? I’m up, and I’m a responsible mom and everything. Why don’t you go shower real quick, and breakfast will be ready for us like always?”
Light Breeze huffed, smiling, and fixed her mane after her mother ruffled it in passing. “Okay. I’ll go do that. See you both downstairs!”
She took off, heading into the bathroom she shared with her brother and propping herself up onto the low sink. Looking back at her was a filly, with the same two-toned red and blue mane, cropped at her chin that she’d always had, her eyes the same turquoise blue they had always been.
There was no sign of the miserable boy with his mop of yellowish hair, but Owen didn’t disappear from her memory, not even after her mother made breakfast and served it with her wings, not after Arc Light made fun of her awkward attempts to straighten her messy mane at the kitchen table, and not all the way through class and swimming in the crystal clear waters of the river afterwards to strengthen her wings further. Fillydelphia rambled along the hills, tree-lined, clean and beautiful, but around every corner she still expected to see a homeless person—an oxymoron if she’d ever heard one—or rubbish and disordered graffiti on the walls. She eyed a public safety officer like he might threaten her, and sat as far as possible on the tram home from him.
Like one of those horror films he’d watched, she seemed to carry a piece of him with her no matter where she went.





Light Breeze elected not to sleep with her parents that night, exhibiting an unusual streak of anxiety over a filly her age nesting with her folks, and closed the door to her room. Her bed, its frame ovoid, rested near her lone window, the moon’s silver light still full for the time being, but, for some reason, the thought of laying her head down there worried her. Still, she pushed aside her fear and curled up against the mists of her cloud mattress, hoping to dream for once of her upcoming flight practice in a week or so. It seemed a futile fear, as though she’d had these dreams many times before, and would be many times hence. She tried to be a good skeptic like her father and question whether or not her certainty was true.
Laying her head against her pillow, Light Breeze watched the moon’s progress across her floor until she could hold her eyes open no longer, her heart thundering. Its beats faded as her breathing evened out, wondering if the drop would come.
It did.