//------------------------------//
// Prologue 
// Story: Nightmares Never Cease 
// by TooShyShy 
//------------------------------//

	I cannot properly describe how my transformation felt.
Fire was raging inside my chest.  The agony was cutting off my air supply, choking the very feeling from my limbs.  I was not in the room anymore.  I was outside of the room, outside of my own body, outside of the world.  Through the smog that was my home, I could only see Tia's face.  I could not speak or move within my haze and my pain.  How can one move their lips when they are nothing?  And for  those many seconds, I felt as if I did not exist.  
Eventually, I returned.
But everything had burned away by then.  The happy memories, the admiration for my talented older sister, the smiles I saved for her alone.  I was not an alicorn anymore.  I was not a mare.  I was not a pony.  I was nothing except my rage, my animosity, my immature desire for vengeance against a foe who had meant me no harm.
I was Nightmare Moon.
I was a puppet of my own loathing.

My return to myself was even more indescribable.  
My memories, my affection, my very soul was rushing back into me.  It was excruciating, yet I relished it as one relishes sunlight after a storm.  The wall that had formed between myself and my most barbaric thoughts shattered, leaving me a weakened shell of a pony that was once bitter loathing.  The realization of what I had done, the malevolence of my intentions, nearly destroyed me. 
But what thrust me even closer to my destruction was the anguish of rebuilding the Princess of the Night.
The agony of it nearly tore me apart in those horrible moments.  I thought I would tear, break, fold, or simply vanish into the void.  With effort I did not know I possessed, I forced the curse from my body and set about, in the space of mere seconds, putting myself back together.  I had never felt as close to death as I did then.  
I was no longer Nightmare Moon. 
Yet I was no longer Princess Luna.
I had rebuilt myself as something more than either of them.