Stumbling from her bed, Twilight Sparkle crumpled to the floor in a purple heap; her groans of exhaustion reflected off of the uncaring walls and ceiling, echoing into the uncaring hallway where they faded into nothingness, as if they had never existed at all.
She promptly turned and walked down the stairs and out the door, nearly tripping over her own hooves in her half-conscious state. As she pushed open the door, an inferno of sunlight immediately flooded into her vision and cascaded over the shelves of books, consuming everything in sight. The shadows crouched in their hiding places among the nooks and crannies of the library, braced against the light, sheltered as always in their sanctuaries of darkness.
As the spots of white settled into their usual distinct shapes in Twilight's field of vision, the first thing she noticed was the snowflakes fluttering down from the grand ceiling of the sky, undisturbed by the breezeless air. Something about them bothered her; they looked almost as if they were watching her. Warning her. Trying to tell her something. One snowflake brushed past her ear, sending a shiver down her spine; it whispered a thousand cautions into her mind, yet its voice was too quiet to hear. Deciphering these warnings amid the dull background noises of life was an unsolvable riddle, an impossible puzzle, a never-ending game...a game of silence.
The crunching of fallen snowflakes beneath her hooves disguised the sound of Twilight’s approaching friend, who in a blur of motion stood by her side.
"Hey Twi!" exploded the voice of Pinkie Pie, saturated with ecstacy. "Whatcha doin' today?"
A ruffled pattern of creases seized Twilight's forehead; her eyebrows furrowed and her mouth compressed into a frown. "I...don't know. I feel like I did have some plans for the day, but..." Trailing off, she scoured her mind for any remnants of memory of the internal schedule that normally gave strict guidance to every waking second of her life. In its place she found only emptiness, a hole that had been torn straight through her mind.
Suddenly a spark burst into life in her brain. A hole, torn straight through...? In a chain reaction of firing neurons, tiny fragments of memory began to re-assemble in her mind, forming an incomplete sort of jigsaw puzzle whose image was faded and decayed. A hole torn straight through the center of the sky...
"Twilight? You okay?" A passionate thread of sympathy was woven into Pinkie's normally carefree voice. Shaking her head to clear her vision, Twilight found herself staring into the eyes of her friend. Snowflakes broke Pinkie's piercing gaze, passing between the two and distracting Twilight for only a moment—yet they seemed to demand her full attention.
"Yeah, Pinkie, I'm fine. I just...." Uncertainty spread like a disease through Twilight's voice, contaminating its usually orderly demeanor. Her eyes closed again, trying their hardest to lull her back into the dark abyss of sleep—she immediately snapped them open, her willpower lashing out like the crack of a whip. "Actually…no, I’m not fine. Last night I had a bunch of weird dreams, and now I keep seeing these images…"
“Dreams?” interrupted Pinkie, her head cocking to the side, intrigued. “Well, I know one pony that could pull you out of the little pickle you’re in without even using pliers. You might have to wait a little while, though—she’s a bit of a night owl.”
Twilight thought for a fraction of a moment, allowing Time to translate Pinkie’s cryptic and nonsensically worded statements into a comprehensible line of thought. “You mean Princess Luna?” she responded, one eyebrow raised.
“Yup!” said Pinkie, her voice bouncing in sync with her happy-go-lucky gait. “She knows a lot about dreams and nightmares.”
“You don’t say…” said Twilight, stopping to rub her temples. A pounding headache had emerged from the depths of her mind, reaching out with black tendrils and clutching her skull with the dark, shadowy claws of pain. The wide expanse of her vision began to disintegrate at the edges, leaving a void of darkness that surrounded the colorful, vibrant world, so full of life and of pure white snow.
Twilight squeezed her eyes shut and a thousand images forced themselves into her mind all at once, the very same things she had seen the night before—The moon. The sun. A starless midnight sky. A never-ending field of grass, rolled out like an emerald carpet over a flat expanse of empty land. A road of cobbled stones, colored the shade of gray that all things become after their life force has been drained by the merciless disregard of Time. A stallion as lifelessly gray as the road he walked, his hollow voice bearing one message:
“Knowest thou thyself?”
Twilight’s lips parted without her permission; her voice spoke with a life—if it may be called that—of its own. Yet the voice that emerged from her paralyzed mouth was not hers; though it carried all of the same tones and was spoken in the same volume as it always did, its energy was all but nonexistent.
Pinkie stared at her friend, who stood inert and still in the middle of the road. Twilight’s eyes were frozen wide open, staring ahead, at something that only she could see, a sight so mesmerizing—or possibly horrifying—as to keep her in a trance, lost within her own mind…only within the recalling abilities of one learned in the deepest magics of the mind and of dreams.
The last sensation to enter Twilight’s realm of perception of the physical world before she was fully absorbed into the metaphysical was that of a slight tickling on her nose, where Pinkie’s mane had lightly brushed it—from this Twilight gathered that she was now positioned on her friend’s back—before all of her senses and all of her feelings were cut off from her conscious mind, intentionally barred by the powers of the mastermind who had manipulated her every move and thought since the night prior. It is of no surprise that such a being, with considerable power and with an innocent citizen in his grasp, should attract the concerned attention of one of the High Rulers of the Kingdom of Equestria:
Her Royal Highness Princess Luna, the Bringer of Night and the Guardian of Dreams.