//------------------------------//
// Dreams 
// Story: Discord's Pet Human 
// by Thorizard 
//------------------------------//


Chapter 3 Dreams


My sleep comes in spurts. I turn throughout the night. The bed's possibly the best I've ever had, but I can't turn my thoughts off. Everything I saw today constantly flashes in front of my eyes, no matter how tight I shut them. When I do fall asleep, I only know because an hour passes on the big clock above the door. The clock ticks like a time bomb. Once morning comes, I'll be back in that hell outside. There's nothing I can do about it. I'll have to answer questions again, and I'll be treated like a kid.
I wake up fully, but it's still late at night. I feel better, rested, but it's still dark out. I decide to walk to my door. I don't hear Discord or Fluttershy, so they must have gone to bed. I crack the door open, but what's outside isn't the living room. It's the neighborhood I grew up in.
I nod at the ground and let out a sigh of relief. “I guess Discord realized I wasn't going to work out in Equestria, so he sent me back. That was smart of him. I'm glad I got to see some place new, but this is where I belong.”
"Why do you say that?" someone says. 
A tall, dark blue pony walks toward me from a foggy corner of the neighborhood. Her mane and tail flow beautifully, shining with unbelievable grace in the moonlight. As I look around, it's just us in the empty street. All that's around us are the same brick buildings and broken concrete that I grew up with. We're right in front of the orphanage where I'm due to graduate in two months.
"Who are you?" I ask as she walks out of the fog, becoming slowly clearer. Her eyes are a shining dark-green, like an emerald-shaded obsidian. I can't look away from them.
"Call me Luna," she says.
I stare, almost in a trance. "Luna,” I repeat. I feel speechless, but the brilliant light of her smile breaks me out of it. I stutter out, “W-why did you follow me here?"
"I am the Princess of the Moon, child. The night is my home, and your dreams are where I set up my shield from evil. If you live in Equestria, I will be your dream catcher to defend you from suffering while you sleep."
"Oh. Then I'm asleep? I'm still in Fluttershy's house?"
She nods. I look down and sigh.
"What's wrong, Caleb?" she asks me. "Why don't you feel that you belong with us?"
I keep my eyes down. She's only a few feet from me, so I see my feet and her hooves at the same time. "Just look. I have feet. You have hooves. We're different." I look up to see her smiling. "How could I belong in a world of ponies? It doesn't make sense."
"Caleb, many different creatures are friends despite their appearances," she says. She nods along the road, so we start to walk together in the middle of the street. There's not a car in sight; just fog. "Do birds and wolves not share the same water?"
"As long as the birds keep their distance," I say back. She laughs, but I'm serious.
"You're right about that," she says. "If the wolves were hungry, and the birds weren't careful, there would be less birds in the world very suddenly. But neither of us are predators, Caleb. We are not hunting for you. Quite the opposite, we desire the best for you."
The fog thickens even further, slowly crowding around us so that I can't see the neighborhood. I can barely see to either sidewalk.
"Why am I here, Luna?" I ask her. I don't know why I feel like I can trust her. Maybe it's a spell. Maybe it's because she's different.
"No one knows why fate changes our course. We can only walk the path before us. If we may choose to walk a different path, we do so with our best judgement and with a full heart, not an empty one. Whatever path we take, we must never turn back or stay motionless."
I don't think I know what she means, but I don't really wanna ask. She's the only one I've liked yet except for Twilight sort of.
The fog surrounds us completely so that we’re walking on nothing but dream clouds. It feels freeing to be so conscious of what’s going on, yet surrounded by such a surreal fantasy. I've never had a dream like it in my life. I feel like I'm flying, and for once it doesn't feel like I'm going to fall. It feels like Luna is holding me up, keeping me in the air with her so that we can fly together.
"If my path is split, then what way should I go?" I ask. I can't say the words I need to say. I know what they are. I know that I need to say them as much as I need to breathe. But every time I feel about to say them, I freeze.
"It's hard to know, my child," she says. Every word she says is like cool water, flowing gently over me. "I only know so much about you. I know that our home is not where you were raised, but I know that this chance was given to you for a higher reason. Truth about your life is something you may only find within yourself."
"I know, but," I try to say. I feel like I'm about to cry. Something here is flooding me with emotion, and I can't handle much more. The fog is darkening. I feel panicky. The dream can't be ending. I need her to stay. "I don't think I can do it."
"Finding truth is a mere matter of admitting your fears, Caleb. There comes a time when we must begin to trust the truth rather than our past. Trust the future." She starts to slip away as the fog begins to fade into shadows.
"Princess, wait!" I cry out to her. "I–" I try to say. I have to say it. The world stops for a moment. She doesn't move. She stands in the fog, neither slipping farther nor coming nearer; neither becoming clearer nor harder to see. Her mane and tail flow as the only movement besides my breathing. It's so quiet, I feel as if I've gone deaf. "I–"
I have to say it. She waits for me. She is patient. I almost see her crack a smile in the fog. Does she know what I mean to say? I can't disappoint her.
"Luna," I whisper with a cracking voice. "I– I need your help." I said it. My eyes fall to the floor of clouds as they start to swirl once more, turning into that peaceful fog once more. "I need help."
I feel her hoof on my cheek. It doesn't feel hard or sharp like it looks. It feels soft, warm, gentle. My legs collapse and I fall into her, but she holds me up with her leg and her soft wing. I've never felt so comforted. I know this can't be just a dream if I can feel so vividly.
"Caleb," she whispers, holding me tight. I grab her fur between my fingers and hold tight, sobbing into her neck. "Child, I'm here for you. I know that your life has been tough, but I can help you if you only open your heart to me. I need you to trust me."
"I trust you, Luna," I mumble into her soft mane. "Please. Please help me."
The fog is swept away all at once like dust blown off an old book, and I find myself high above Ponyville, still clutching her tightly. I hold on even tighter but now out of fear of falling.
"Trust me, Caleb," she says, letting go with her leg. I look in her eyes. My legs are dangling beneath me. I feel as if I'll fall. "Trust me, and let go of fear."
I swallow and close my eyes, letting go. I don't fall. I open my eyes and find myself standing right in front of her in the sky. I can taste my tears, realizing how much I’ve been crying. I wipe my face with my sleeve and smile at her as she beams back with an angelic laugh. Her eyes shine just as brightly as the clearest stars.
“How do I start?” I ask. “I’ve never told anyone too much before. Opening as much as I did to Twilight was hard for me.”
“I know, Caleb,” she says, still standing right in front of me. She gazes at the moon. “Maybe you’ll do better if I show you. I’ll take you into my memories, child; then, I want you to take me into yours.”
I nod. The stars begin to dance, racing around each other for a reason I can’t understand. The fog swirls around and envelops us both. When it disappears, the moon looks much different.
“There’s a face in the moon,” I say.
She nods. “That was me. I was cursed with 1,000 years to be trapped on that moon.”
“1,000,” I repeat. “1,000 years?”
“I was alone,” she says. The fog starts to swirl around us again as she continues, “I was remorseful, but I had been taken over by dark magic. I knew what was happening, but I had reached a point in my sorrow that the dark magic I had studied for centuries began to take over my mind and my body. Before I could hold onto who I was, I became Nightmare Moon.”
Luna is suddenly enveloped in the fog as well, and I reach out to her. The fog is consumed with a midnight blue and suddenly dissipates to reveal a much darker, crueler-looking pony. I step back, but she reaches out to me. “It’s still me, Caleb. I just wanted to show you how I had been changed.”
Her fur is black and her mane has been swept down. Her wings are larger and sharper, and her eyes are narrow. Most importantly, I can no longer see the beauty and hope that was so clear in her eyes before. All I see now is regret and anger.
“This is Nightmare Moon, my child,” she says, and I can tell that this memory is hard for her. “My sister and I had long served alongside one another; she raising the sun and I the moon. However, one day I began to consider that our subjects worshipped her who rose them for the day and lit their way. They saw the day as good, but they saw the night as evil. I grew jealous of her, but she ignored my sorrow. When I raised the moon, she was too tired like the rest of the world and retreated into sleep. When she raised the sun, she was too busy to listen to me. When even my sister, who I would have given my life for, I had left me in the dark; that was when I truly became consumed with shadow. I declared my hatred for the world, for life itself, and the dark magic possessed me, transforming me into the feared, loathsome creature before you.”
“Could you still feel what was going on while you were trapped inside?”
She nods. “I knew everything that was happening, but I was not nearly powerful enough to overturn it. Even as my body was filled with vengeance, my soul inside felt regret for every action I made. Even when I was trapped on that moon, I could feel the rage building inside my possessed body as guilt pooled in my heart. I've never known helplessness like that."
Fog consumes her and dissipates just as quickly, revealing her original beauty. I'm glad to see her back to normal, but now I know what she can be capable of. I know that she has suffered as well. 1,000 years of loneliness, being hated and then forgotten; feeling both hatred and regret; consumed by an evil parasite of magic; to have everyone else's life move on without knowing the suffering she endures; I can't imagine a life like that.
"I don't know what to say," is all I can mumble.
"I've opened to you, Caleb," she says, and the fog begins to take us both. "Tell me about your past. Why do you find trust and love so difficult?"
My throat feels so dry. I look around at the fog, watching it grow darker. I know I have to tell her. I promised. I just– I don't– I–
"It's alright, Caleb," she says. "Take your time. Once you start, it won't be so hard anymore. I’ll help you along the way."
I swallow and nod. My head is hot and my palms are slippery. "Okay. I was born and raised in a very poor neighborhood. I never really knew my dad or my older brother. They both died in a car accident when I was just two years old. My mom talked about them a lot, and I could tell she missed them both so much. Still, she told me every day how grateful she was to still have me. She was the person that I always trusted.”
"What happened to her?" Luna asks in her silken voice.
I sigh. I can't stop now. "I don't know why, but one day she gave into the thing she desperately told me to stay away from. She started using drugs when I was young, and her life fell apart so quickly. The whole time she was using, she still told me to never use, and one day she told me that she didn't want me to end up like her. A few weeks later, I came home from school and found her dead."
"The drugs killed her?"
I nod. "I don't know if it was intentional or what. She was using some bad stuff."
"I’m sorry, Caleb,” she says. “What did you do then?”
“I stayed with her,” I say and pause for a little. I remember how I felt, looking at my mom’s eyes rolled over; feeling her cold hands; barely able to see through my teary, swollen eyes. I can feel my mouth swell and my eyes getting watery, but I can avoid crying if I just talk my way through it. I just have to tell the story. I don’t have to get my head involved in it. Luna just wants to know what happened because she already knows how I feel.
I look into her eyes and see her feeling for me. I swallow and hold back my thoughts back to keep going. “I don’t remember much of that day except for however long I was with her. Everything else blurred into memories of looking at her when she was happy or when she was suffering or when she was gone. I know that the police questioned me, but I don’t remember anything they said or anything I told them. I was only 12, so I got placed into an orphanage. I’ve been there for about five years. I was only two months away from being forced out when Discord came to me.”
“So he saved you in a way then?”
I grimace and sigh. “I guess. I mean, yeah, if he hadn’t come then, I would’ve been on the streets. I had a minimum wage job with no way of improving, which just couldn’t be enough to pay rent anywhere, and I had no hope of doing anything with my education. I’m just not that smart.”
“You were smart enough to take your chance to get out,” Luna interrupts.
I stop and look at her. I want to say something to refute it because I hate to admit that Discord could have helped me or that this whole thing is really good instead of just a desperate chance at something different, but she might be right. She cocks her head and smiles.
“So what did you do in your five years at the orphanage?” she asks.
“Right.” I guess I need to move on from Discord. We can talk about him later. “I never talked with anyone in the orphanage. When my mom died, everything just happened so fast. I stayed quiet most of the time, and I just didn’t want to make friends. I wanted to be alone. Plus, when I saw some of the other kids start using drugs, I couldn’t help but stay away from them. Honestly, I got scared. Every time I saw someone using drugs, I couldn’t stop thinking of my mom. I thought of her telling me to never use, of her starting to suffer and give in to it, and then when she was lying dead in front of me. Every time I saw someone else use drugs, I just turned away. When people called after me, I didn’t turn back. Sometimes people would tell them about my mom, and I knew because they didn’t stop me from walking away again.”
“So you never talked to people about drugs?”
“I wish. It was completely impossible to avoid talking to the dealers. Sometimes, they had me cornered, and I was too scared to run. If that happened, I used to just try to explain to them that I didn’t wanna use because my mom OD’d.”
“That didn’t work?”
“Not at all. The always said things like they would help me to avoid overdose, like they would be there for me.”
“You didn’t trust them?”
“No. Hell no! I could see through what they were saying. They were trying to get me hooked, and I think they maybe even pressed harder because they heard about my mom’s problems; like, as if her problems would make me weaker to the drugs.”
“Do you think they’re right about that?”
“I don’t know, but I never wanted to find out. I had to find a way out just in case it was true, so I decided the best way to beat their lies was with my lies. So I would tell them that I couldn’t use cause of sports, and some of them surprised me and respected that, but said they would try to catch me later. Sometimes, I would say that my father was a policeman, so they should avoid talking to me, and that bluff worked sometimes. Sometimes, it dug me a deep hole of threats though, and I had to dig it out by promising that I would never tell anyone about them. If they knew I was at the orphanage though, they would get really aggressive. Sometimes, all I could do was keep going until they beat me up, and just hope that I could survive.”
“Those are all very dangerous ideas.”
“I know, but I felt like I didn’t have anything to lose. I felt like if I got caught up in drugs at only 12 or 13, and if my mom died within just a few years after starting, I would basically be dying anyways by using drugs. Plus, I felt like I had to get back at them for taking my mom away from me.”
“Hold on. Now, being afraid of drugs I can understand, but avoiding something wrong to do something wrong is an impossible way to live.”
“What?”
“You can’t declare yourself against drugs because you’re committed to revenge. Once you’re in that life cycle, you can only go down. And how did you even know that these people were the ones who had killed your mother?”
“I didn’t know. But they represented the same thing. They sold drugs, and they didn’t care who they hurt as long as they made money, so I had to fight back.”
“But that attitude can only lead to you getting–”
“And besides, I was too young and too weak to actually get revenge. I just wanted to fight back by resisting. They were bigger, there were more of them; all I had was my will and memories of my mom, and I wanted to prove that was enough.”
She sighs. It’s the first break we’ve had in the story for a while. I can feel my breathing start to slow down, and I realize how heated I was getting while trying to defend myself.
“Very well, Caleb,” she says. She sounds like she was getting upset too. I never meant to make her mad, and I kind of feel bad about it. “I may not agree with that motive completely because I still think it ultimately harmful, but I realize that this is your story and your life, and these are your decisions. I should not demand you to make perfect ones, and I should not pretend that I could have made perfect decisions given my history and my current ability to look clairvoyantly on your situation.”
There isn't much more of the story that I can tell. I almost change the subject, but I get curious. “What would you have done?”
“I would have resisted just as you did. I may have told lies to get out of the situation as I have experience telling lies when I need to. I’m different from my sister in that way. But I know the danger of harboring feelings of hatred, and I would have maintained a deep desire to avoid that feeling, that vengeance.”
I nod. I guess I shouldn’t disagree. If anyone else had said that, I would have just said they didn’t know what they were talking about, but I know that Luna has experienced feelings like that, and she paid for keeping them until the feelings literally acted for her. “I know that magic can’t take over me like it did for you, but I guess feelings like that could lead me to doing something I would regret. I still felt like I had nothing to lose though.”
“When I was in my most dire moments of pain and loneliness, I also felt as if I had nothing to lose. I know that these feelings seem empowering, but they are deadly. You cannot forget that you always have something to lose.”
“What do you mean?”
“I thought I had lost my sister, but she still loved me. You may have thought that losing your mother made you alone, but how can you say that when your memories of your mother became your ultimate courage and strength? She was with you in your darkest moments, even more so than I felt my sister with me.”
I look down. The fog swirling around us constantly changes, shifting between the asphalt of my old neighborhood and the dirt roads of Ponyville. “I never thought about that.”
“Just because she isn’t physically there for you doesn’t mean she isn’t still worth fighting for.”
“So shouldn’t I have been fighting just like I was?”
“Well, you did make it out, but you certainly didn’t make it unscathed.”
“What do you mean?”
The fog and Luna both start to darken and haze. “Your heart is broken, Caleb; by memories and mentality. You know what can mend that, but you have to be open to it.”
“Where are you going?”
“Morning is here, Caleb. I will return to your dreams any time that you need me, and I thank you for letting me into your heart. I hope that we may become friends.”
“Thank you, Luna!” I shout with my last moments to her as the dream starts to fade. I feel like I could cry again, but I don’t. I hope that we can be friends too.
Just as I start to see her smile fill my mind with joy, I open my eyes and shriek, thrashing about at the disgusting monster right in front of my face.
Discord laughs and falls back on the ground, holding his belly to contain himself. I sit up in my bed and stare at him. “I didn’t even have to use magic for that one!” he squeals between gulps of air. I bury myself under the covers and pray to fall back asleep.