//------------------------------//
// Chapter 69: Letters and Dreamscapes 
// Story: Pandemic: Starting Over 
// by Halira 
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The evening progressed calmly, with no other drama. The night ponies were going to be awake all night, obviously, but Alice would be spending part of the night sleepless as well after obtaining her parents' permission to help watch Méng. To my surprise, Devon, Paul, Dusk, and Jess all stayed overnight instead of leaving and coming back despite the possible danger. I didn't ask why; I just accepted it. , 

I tucked the colts in and checked on everyone else before heading to my room. Starlight wasn't back, so that left Trixie and me getting escorted to our rooms by Robby and Tempest so we weren't walking the halls by ourselves—although we would end up breaking the rule for being in our rooms. 

There was one last task for me to complete before bed. I pulled out a pen, paper, and envelope and sat down to write a letter.

Dear Princess Luna, 

Today has been an eventful day at the end of an eventful week. There are so many things I could discuss in regards to this week, the experiences I have had, and the lessons learned. It is hard to pick just one thing to write to you about. Many of these things I expect will be things I have to learn over and over again because old habits die hard, and behavior patterns are rarely changed in a single day. 

I finally decided on what to write to you about for my first lesson. Today, I had to make a hard choice. I had to choose to set aside my anger at what part of me perceived as a betrayal of my daughter by my daughter-in-law. I won't go into details about it because that involves their private business, but it was a hard thing for me to do. I am sorry I couldn't share better information, but even if I could trust you to keep them secret, the government reviews all my correspondence (hello to whoever is reviewing this. I hope your day is pleasant). 

The heart of the problem is I am fighting against my understanding of how relationships work and not fully accepting that there are other ways they can work. I understand it on a mental level, but on an emotional level, it is a struggle for me. Even knowing the right thing to do, I still felt angry for an utterly unfair reason. I hid my anger, but I'm ashamed that I couldn't make it go away. However, I feel like the choice I made, the option to be understanding and try to show compassion, was the better one to make. 

My wife asked me yesterday about my friendship language. You might not be aware of what I am discussing. It is this Harmonist thing where they break the ways we express friendship into five elements. We all have every one of these elements in us, making up the magic of friendship, but we favor different ones. The question posed to me was what was mine and how mine lined up.  I was unsure at the time, but after today I think I can name my top two for sure, and my bottom one seems clear as well.

My top two are kindness and loyalty. These were the things at war with one another when I was dealing with my daughter-in-law. Today, kindness won out, and I think it might be what I want to win out most often. I would rather be kind than loyal; I believe my understanding of loyalty is too dogmatic and too easily perverted. 

My bottom element I think I can say with certainty, is honesty. Where generosity and laughter fall, I do not know, but I'm not an honest mare. I deliberately withhold the truth to protect others' feelings. That same episode with Rosetta meant I had to lie to her to tell her I was okay with everything. It was the kind thing to do, but it was not the honest one. Am I leading myself into disaster? Should I speak with her and tell her the truth? She is hurting, and I know my daughter is hurting. I don't want to hurt them any more than they are.

I have read the Friendship Journal and am not sure how this will stand against its entries. I don't know if you are supposed to write me back, or discuss this in a dream with me, or you just file it away and wait for the next. I will be sending another letter next week, although I am not sure how long each will take to reach you, given the government must review them.

Until next time. 
With God's Faith,
Your Student,
Sunset Blessing

I sealed the letter in an envelope and was uncertain exactly how to address it. I wrote out my return address, but for a mailing address, I simply put Princess Luna of Equestria and left the rest blank for the moment. Starlight could help me address it and get it sent. 

Setting the letter aside, I climbed into bed. I still had other matters to attend to tonight. It was time to talk to Tonya.

It didn't take long to fall asleep, and I found myself in Tonya's, or should I say Arbiter's, temple throne room. She was in her angelic form, sitting on her throne, holding her accursed staff of bonking in her hand. She didn't look angry, but she wasn't in pony form, so I was unsure how to approach this conversation.

"You have my permission to act on my thoughts," I said as I approached her. 

She smiled at last. "You are wondering why I am in this form? Don't worry, I'm not angry, but you're coming to me looking for a Dreamwarden, and that is what you are getting. You have questions."

Straight to business then. "Okay… I promised to ask this right away. Is there any such thing as a ghost, not counting Dreamwardens?"

She sat still. "I cannot answer that definitively in good faith. The best answer I can give is I have seen no evidence of ghosts on Earth, and the only place there is evidence is across the universe from us."

I pursed my lips. "That was not the answer I was expecting."

"But that is the answer I am giving," Arbiter replied. She frowned. "Now you have a new question."

"Yes, I do," I confirmed. "What does evidence of a ghost look like?"

Her frown didn't go away, but our surroundings shifted. 

We were no longer in her ordinary Dreamwarden room. Above me was a starlit sky so dense with stars it was hard to tell where one began or ended, and they glowed with an intensity that not even the North Star possessed. The ground we stood on was chalky white, but perfectly flat and free of dust. All around us were tall, unadorned buildings made of the same whatever the ground was. There were no windows, and they were all of rectangular design of various shapes, some seeming just only a story tall, others towering what must have been hundreds of stories tall, with no seeming pattern in their placement. There was a street, of sorts, that we were standing in, but it didn't follow anything resembling a straight line, nor was there anything on the road aside from the buildings that surrounded it. Some of the taller buildings had openings with unrailed bridges with no seeming support between them. The entrances to buildings, whether they be up above or down below, were egg-shaped and lacking anything that indicated a door once adorned them. There were no lights of any kind within the buildings, no decorations, not so much as a stray weed to show signs of life. Everything seemed to be one piece, a massive city carved from a single stone.

This place made a graveyard seem full of life. 

"Not your most charming fantasy location," I muttered with a shiver. 

She shook her head. "This place is no fantasy. This is Jeg'galla'gamp'i, the First and Last Place. This is a memory, but aside from how the stars look in the sky, I am sure that it looks no different today than it did so long ago. Jeg'galla'gamp'i never changes. It was like this when the universe was born, it will be the same when the universe ends, and it will remain the same at the birth of a new universe. You can bury it, cast it into a star, do whatever you can to make it inaccessible, but you cannot destroy or even chip away the smallest fraction of it."

I looked around. "Is this Heaven?" I asked fearfully. 

"If it is, I'd rather go to Hell," Tonya muttered. I was astonished to see she looked almost frightened by our surroundings, even though this was a dream. "This is where you find evidence of ghosts. You could say this place itself is a ghost, all that survived the end of a universe. It has survived everything, and although you don't see any residents, this place is not empty. There's a presence about this place, an intelligence alien to my understanding or anyone else's. It can give gifts, physical ones, and take them away. It watches you, and if you aren't careful, it never lets you leave. It is always here, it never sleeps, and can never be found. Triss spent ages here trying to make sense of it, but she came out no wiser than she began."

Nothing had changed, but now the shadows felt more menacing, the streets more cramped, and openings to the buildings seemed gateways to oblivion. I shivered. 

"I don't think I like this place," I whispered as I inched closer to her for protection. 

She laid a trembling hand on me. "I don't either; in fact, I loathe this place on a level you cannot possibly understand. Be glad you have no reason or capability of ever setting hoof here."

She gestured with her staff, and we returned to her regular temple. She briefly squeezed her hand on my back and then returned to her throne, looking strangely tired for a being that lived in a dream. 

"Who built that place?" I asked. 

"I don't know," she said, staring down at the ground. 

"Is it evil?"

"I don't know," she repeated in a dejected tone. "I'm not all-knowing, Sunset, despite what anyone might believe. I already told you it stumped Triss and stumps us as well. It predates literally everything."

I looked at her, seeing her look weak for the first time since she had become a Dreamwarden. "Why are you afraid of it?" 

She looked me in the eyes. "Once upon a time, it gave a gift, and that gift eventually ruined a friendship and led to jealousy, resentment, and misery. That misery led to the making of the Devourers, and that led to more death than you can contemplate. If there were one thing I wish the Devourers could destroy, it would be that place, but there is no justice. It is incapable of being destroyed, even by them… believe me, they tried. They destroyed the planet it sat upon and the star it circled, did everything you could imagine and more to destroy it; their efforts were for not, and eventually, they just gave up—perhaps because they detected no life. Jeg'galla'gamp'i endures without so much as a scratch. So much for there is a silver lining to everything."

This wasn't Tonya speaking and explaining things; this was Arbiter and everything that entailed. Not for the first time, I wondered how my wife had become so alien to me.

She still had permission to act on my thoughts and knew what I was thinking. In a flash, it was no longer the angelic form of Arbiter sitting on a throne before me but the regular pegasus form of Tonya seated on the floor within hoof's reach. 

Tonya reached out and touched me with a wing. "I'm sorry, but there is no going back to who I was when I was alive. I know you have been increasingly fretting about how much of me I am and how much I am of others. There is no easy answer for that. I'm an amalgamation. What made me Tonya makes up a significant part of that and defines me from my brothers and sisters. My hopes, desires, worries, drives, and loves are all primarily mine.  However, I do have many traits that I inherited, and it can sometimes be a struggle to remind myself that previous Dreamwarden memories are not my own. What we just saw… Tonya would never have seen or had strong feelings about it, but Joss, a distant predecessor of mine, had very intense feelings about it, and they are part of me too."

"And Sha'am?" I asked. I detested Sha'am. I didn't know anyone who didn't. 

Tonya touched a hoof to herself near her heart. "She's in here too. I have never made a big announcement about it, but I carry on her duties. I give final dreams to the dying—something she cared deeply about and I inherited. I cannot defend most of Sha'am's actions as being right or just or even an acceptable means to an end, but I can say she was a very troubled soul, and she honestly believed she was protecting people through her actions, even if she failed to see the error in her thinking to the bitter end. There was good in her, and I hope that I can embody those parts of her rather than the darker aspects. I don't hate her; I mourn her and the fact her worldview became so perverted by the injustices she endured in life that she could never overcome her darkness. There is no joy in the death of an evil person, only sorrow because they never found redemption."

"You are too good," I said. It wasn't an insult. I was always in awe of how compassionate my wife could be.

She kissed me, then pulled back and smiled. "I fell in love with a pony that some might call evil; even she might call herself that in retrospect. I saw the good in her, and I am so proud to see that good continue to grow and blossom. I love you, Sunset. You've made mistakes, but you can yet be one of the world's brightest lights."

She gave me a final kiss before I could say anything, and I found myself swept up in a regular dream about fighting alongside turtles using mudballs against dogs.