Dreamstrider

by OkemosBrony

Chapter 12

I look down at the puddle of mist in front of me, which has a lot of fear spilling out of it. But it also feels very similar, much like Luna’s dream did.

“Is this the dream you think I was talking about?” Luna asks from behind me, causing me to twist around and look at her walking up to me.

“I think so,” I say while standing up. “Whoever is dreaming this is scared, I can tell that.”

“And this dreamer has much reason to be frightened.” She stands next to the dream and looks at me. “Are you ready?”

“Yeah,” I nod nervously. She places a hoof in the mist and goes face-first into it, soon being swallowed up by it. When she’s gone, I stick my hoof in and follow her. It feels really weird, different than my own dream. But it still does feel pretty similar to my own, probably because the thing where other Dreamstriders feel familiar to me even if I've never met them.

Something crunches a little bit under my hooves when I land, so I look down and see that there’s icy snow covering the whole world here. A cold wind picks up and blows over us, and it’s not the good kind of cold like the dream world is.

“Can you feel the demons here?” Luna asks, seemingly unbothered by the cold.

“I just feel cold,” I say through my shivering.

Luna powers her horn up and touches it to mine, warmth quickly flooding my body before I don't even feel the cold. “Better?” she smiles.

“What did you do?” I ask, shoving my hoof into the snow. Not cold at all anymore.

“You will learn to separate your mind from theirs,” she says, looking around. “His mind has dreamed that this place is cold, and since your mind has not yet learned how to separate reality from dreams.”

“So I felt pain before we came in, does that mean there are are demons here?”

“Yes,” she nods. “Now that you are not focusing on the cold, you should be able to pick up their magic.”

I close my eyes and focus. “I can feel...something. Demons, but I can only feel their presence. Don’t know anything else.”

When Luna doesn’t respond, I open my eyes and see her standing there with her own eyes closed. “Umber demons,” she says softly. “Three, all together.”

“Do you know where they are?”

Opening her eyes, she looks towards what looks like a small town that has a few towers poking above the rest of the buildings. “Let’s go,” she says, walking past me.

“Kinda weird to finally be in somepony else’s dream,” I admit while looking around. “Feels like we’re intruding.”

“In a sense,” she says uneasily. “Luckily for us, the demons that are here cannot dig up anything in dreamers’ minds.”

“I haven’t really heard of umber demons before. What do they do?”

“‘Never heard of them’?” she repeats, shooting a sly look my way. “Last I checked, they were in the Grimoire of Demons I told you to study.”

Oops.

“Umber demons are malevolent demons,” she starts explaining since I didn’t actually do any of the reading she told me to do. “They play on primal fears, taking on twisted and grotesque shapes and frightening their dreamers.”

“Primal fears? Like what?”

“This is a dream similar to ones I have seen before,” she says half to herself and half to me. “The demons that create this dream like to corner the dreamer and instill in them the fear of death and helplessness. Basic fears, but ones that are terrifying nonetheless.”

“Maybe demons that try and kill ponies aren’t the best thing to start me off with,” I laugh kind of nervously.

“They cannot hurt you,” she reassures me. “They are frightening, yes, but umber demons cannot inflict any real harm upon you. Their only aim is to frighten.”

All of a sudden, there’s some screaming away from the path we’re walking on. “What’s that?” I ask her worriedly.

“That must be our dreamer,” she says, going towards the source of the screaming and blowing straight past me. She doesn’t seem to be showing any signs of slowing down, so I have to basically run to keep up with her.

We soon come to a hill that Luna goes down, but I stop at the top and look down; there are four ponies all huddled together, surrounded by three really tall, floating creatures wearing long robes.

“Aurora!” Luna yells when she’s about halfway down the hill, gesturing her head towards the ponies and the things that I can only assume are the demons. I start running down behind her, and she continues on to them.

“Demons!” she calls out when she gets close, causing all of them to turn and look at her.

Now that they’re turning towards us, I can see what the demons really look like: they’re really tall and thin, with a body shaped like a pony standing on its hind legs. Tattered robes of some sort of grimy, dark olive green are covering most of their bodies except for their faces and arms, which are both pretty terrifying. Their faces are sickly gray, and any features they have are flattened: bright orange eyes, two nostrils and nothing else for a nose, and a mouth of crooked teeth sharp as knives.

Their arms don’t look much more friendly. They’re really long and thin, and it looks it’s just their bones covered with skin, no muscle at all. At the end is a long hand with five even longer jagged claws coming out of it that definitely do not look very welcoming.

“Dreamstrider!” the one closest to us proclaims. I don’t understand the rest of what it says, but I can tell that it isn’t scared of us.

“Do not worry,” Luna says to me. At least, I hope that’s what she said. “Just stay back.”

I take a few steps back and just watch her as she powers up her horn.

The demon right in front of her raises its claws menacingly but doesn’t actually do anything with them, which is probably because Luna said they can’t actually hurt us. Instead of being scared, she just powers up her horn and causes chains to rise out of the ground and wrap themselves around the monster’s wrists to trap it.

The other two demons behind it spring into action and start floating towards her, but she does the same thing to them, binding them all.

“Aurora,” Luna calls. “Do you wish to help me banish these demons?”

“Sure,” I say, but I’m not really sure. “What do I have to do?”

“You at least read the spell for banishing malevolent demons in your grimoire, correct?”

“Yeah,” I nod. It’s not like I didn’t do any reading.

She closes her eyes and bows her head, and a blue beam of magic comes out of her horn and touches mine. “There is, of course, the part of the spell that is unique for each demon. I have just given you the knowledge of the part for umber demons.”

I walk next to Princess Luna and power up my horn, aiming it at the demon right in front of us. It’s saying some more stuff I don’t fully understand, distracting me because my mind is trying to make sense of what it’s saying and cast this spell at the same time. But I have to focus; this is what Luna had me do all those focus exercises for.

The spell eventually manages to come to life in my horn, and when I cast the final few parts of it, a burst of magic shoots out from my horn and hits the demon square in the chest. It starts screaming and disintegrating into a shadow, which starts flying up and out of the dream.

Luna casts another spell on the other two demons, which react similarly. When the last little bit of the demons is finally gone, the ponies huddled together all look at us.

“Princess Luna!” a colt with a dark blue coat and soft purple mane yells, running out of the pile and hugging her tight. “Thank you for getting rid of the scary monsters!”

“It is no problem, Moonlight,” she smiles, returning the hug. “You should be thanking Aurora here too, because she helped a lot.”

He smiles as he turns his head to me. “Thanks!”

“You’re welcome,” I reply, trying to figure out how old he is. He seems to be a couple years younger than me, so it’s going to be a while before he joins the Dreamstriders. That is, if he even is the Dreamstrider she was talking about. I guess it could be the other colt with the adult ponies still sitting where they had previously been huddling, but he just seems to be kind of sitting there. If he’s just a part of the other colt’s dream, it would make sense he’s not really doing a whole lot.

“We must go now,” Luna says, exiting the hug. She looks around, and a look of dissatisfaction grows on her face. “Quite depressing here, don’t you think?”

For the first time since we entered the dream, I can get a good look at where we are. And she’s right; it’s depressing. It’s dark and cloudy, the wind is still howling, and all the trees around us are dead and rotting.

“Let’s fix that, shall we?” Luna asks, winking at me. She then powers up her horn and quickly shoots a burst of magic into the sky, making the area brighter, stopping the wind, and turning all the dead trees into pine trees with snow on their branches.

“Make it snow, too,” I smile.

She smiles back, then shoots another beam into the sky and causes the soft gray clouds to start dropping tiny flurries onto us.

“Have fun,” she says to Moonlight.

The colt runs back to his family, and Luna walks up to me. “Are you ready to go?”

“Yeah,” I nod. “Do we just jump out like how I have to jump out of my own dream?”

“Yes,” she confirms. “Meet you outside?”

“Meet you outside,” I agree. She jumps up and out of the dream, and I follow her after getting my mind and magic in the right state to do so.

“Come help me with something,” she says, beckoning me over back to the puddle of mist once we’re outside.

I walk up next to her, and she powers up her horn. “What do you need my help with?”

“I suppose we should wipe some of the memories of his dream, don’t you think?” She looks down at the mist. “He does not need to remember the umber demons or us.”

“Why would you want to make us forget him, though? Wouldn’t you want him to remember that we helped?”

“No,” she shakes her head. “Unless the dreamer learns some sort of lesson that could have kept the demons out, I wipe their memories afterwards. I was never one for drawing attention to myself, so I am content with simply being a benevolent, unseen force. And ponies value their privacy; if they learned the true extent of our involvement, they may feel like we are intruding.”

I look back at Moonlight’s dream real quick, then back to Luna. “So Moonlight was young, but not like baby young. Besides us, how many Dreamstriders are there right now?”

“He wasn’t that young,” she smiles while shaking her head. “Just two years younger than you, as a matter of fact. And as for Dreamstriders, there is him, a filly named Adhara who is three years younger than Moonlight, and another colt named Palus who was just born recently.”

“You said we can feel it when another Dreamstrider is born, right?” I look up at her. “I think I remember that youngest one being born.”

She nods. “He was born last fall, yes.”

“It felt like...I don’t know, really. Weird. Magical. Felt like dream magic now that I know what that feels like. You know what I’m talking about, right?”

She laughs. “Yes, and I couldn’t have described it better myself. There is some sort of magic tying us all together, binding us. It is our destiny.”

“You believe in destiny?” I ask.

She nods. “Yes, yes I do. I used to not to, I have only started believing recently.” Going silent, she looks up and stares at the moon. “The legends of Nightmare Moon claimed I was to escape and make my way back down to Equestria one day, and I held onto those as hope that I could escape my prison and become who I once was. To regain control, to get rid of Nightmare Moon. And the tales came true, against everything I expected. I figured it must have been my destiny to return.”

“You make it sound like you were aware during all that time, but all the legends say Nightmare Moon totally took control of you.”

“I was aware, but not in control.” A very sad sigh escapes from her. “At least, not fully. Which made being controlled so much more painful, because I saw myself doing terrible and awful things yet was not able to stop myself. Every day I fought against Nightmare Moon to try and take myself back, but she was strong. Only once was I able to take any action, and it was during my fight with Celestia. I was not able to stop fighting like I wanted or end my life like I continually threatened Nightmare Moon I would do so I could stop her, but I was able to reign in my strength enough so Celestia was able to defeat me.”

“You threatened Nightmare Moon you’d kill yourself? If you took control and had the ability to do so, would you have gone through with it?”

“In hindsight, no,” she admits. “I do not believe I would have the willpower to do so. It would have benefitted the ponies of Equestria greatly, but I could not have forced my hoof if it came to it.”

“Nightmare Moon was stopped, and you didn’t need to do it. So it all worked out in the end, right?”

“Some days, I wonder how many lives would have been spared from her cruelty should I have been able to take control and do so. And I ponder too if my actions have allowed myself to sufficiently repent for the lives that were ended through letting my jealousy and anger burn so brightly to allow such a vile creature take over.”

“You know nopony really blames you,” I tell her. “At least, most ponies don’t.”

“Guilt is just a feeling I have become used to.” She hangs her head. “I made a pact with a guilt demon upon coming back, though you may know it better as the Tantabus. It sensed my intense guilt and tirelessly attempted to enter my dreams, though I was always able to keep it out. But as I started going through all the notes on demons I have accrued, I noticed many of them mentioned the strength of guilt demons and how territorial they are. I let that one in to feed in exchange for keeping away rare and powerful demons I may not even know exist, though the demon grew too ambitious and began trying to take over other dreams as well.”

“I heard about that,” I speak up, cutting her off mid-speech. “Didn’t I hear that you said it was because you wanted to punish yourself for doing what you did?”

As she ruffles her brow, she thinks it over a minute. “While that is not exactly true, it is also not exactly false. I did tell the ponies of Ponyville that, but that is because I did not wish to bore them with the specifics of demons or frighten them about the creatures that are frequently shaping their dreams. And I will admit, I am still afraid that the ponies of Equestria deep down blame me for what happened long before they were born, and I wished to make myself seem repentant. And of course, letting in a guilt demon did plague me with nightmares about my transformation.”

“But then why would the demon connect you to Ponyville, which isn’t even the closest place in the dream world to Canterlot? I know you said the dream world and the awakened world don’t exactly have the exact same layout, which is how we just came from the dreams in Baltimare even though we’re just a few minutes from Canterlot!”

“There is a lot of magic I do not quite understand going on, though I suspect that it must have seen the Elements of Harmony in my dreams and decided to target them." She giggles a little and looks down at me. "You are asking many questions tonight."

That causes me to pout a little, because it sounds like when ponies look down on me just because I’m a foal. And I’m almost nine, so it’s not even like I’m really young.

Her giggling grows into a soft chuckle. “Do not get upset, little one. It is getting late, and you should rest. Entering another’s dream is tiring the first few times, and you will notice it when you prepare to go to sleep tonight.”

My face scrunches up a little. Why do adults always like to tell me it’s time for bed? “Fine, but tomorrow you’re explaining what you know to me. I’m young, not dumb. And if you don’t think I’ll understand something, you won’t know until you start telling it to me.”

“I never implied you were dumb,” she shakes her head. “But it takes time, and it is growing late.” When the edge of the small grove of trees in front of Canterlot Cave, as Luna calls it, comes into view, she stops and looks at me with a smile. “You did well tonight.”

“Thanks,” I smile back.

“You would do well to leave the dream world and go to sleep,” she says as she gestures her head towards the trees. “Tonight is a night that I look for demons giving dreamers nightmares, so I am not able to accompany you back. You are capable of leaving your dream once inside, correct?”

“Yeah,” I nod. “See you tomorrow?”

“See you tomorrow,” she confirms.

Comments

[IAmApe]

So not only have you externalized Nightmare Moon, you've also retconned the Tantibus to be meaningless to Luna.

I did tell the ponies of Ponyville that, but that is because I did not wish to bore them with the specifics of demons or frighten them about the creatures that are frequently shaping their dreams. And I will admit, I am still afraid that the ponies of Equestria deep down blame me for what happened long before they were born, and I wished to make myself seem repentant.

Oh sure, Luna simply lied to Twilight and friends (the ponies who saved her) and put on a big show to make it seem like she was beating herself up over what she'd done, when she's actually completely unrepentant. It's not like she did anything wrong. It was all Nightmare Moon, who certainly wasn't Luna at all.
What a shallow interpretation of her character.