Dreamstrider

by OkemosBrony

Chapter 34

“Aurora?” Moonlight asks from the other side of my desk, causing me to turn away from the window and towards him.

“Yeah?” I ask. It’s pretty late, I wonder what he’s doing up. But on the other hoof, I guess you could say the same about me.

“What are you still doing up? I thought you weren’t doing late-night Dreamstriding tonight.”

“Could ask you the exact same question,” I laugh. “You must’ve been busy if you’re still up this late. Decided to not just go to bed after your Dreamstriding shift?”

“Came to look at the stars,” he says, coming around next to me and sitting down while facing the giant window behind my desk. “You can see a lot more of them here in Canterlot than you can in Baltimare.”

“Whereas I think you can hardly see any here. Is Baltimare really that much worse for the night sky?”

“I tried to go out and stargaze a few times when I was little.” He smiles, then leans back against my desk. “Learned pretty quickly that I wasn’t going to really get anywhere with that. Not all of us get to be from tiny towns in the middle of nowhere and see thousands of stars every night.”

I smile back, then lean on my desk next to him. “Hey, if I had to choose between being from a tiny town or a big one, I’d probably choose a big city. Coltlumbus is nice, but it can get boring pretty quickly. The library doesn’t have very many books, there’s only one playground and it’s at the elementary school so my mom would have to wait until school got out for the day to bring me, and I guess there’s a small lake we would go swimming at but that gets pretty old after a few times.”

“My mom’s from Ponyville, and she likes being from a small town,” he shrugs.

“Ponyville’s bigger than Coltlumbus is. Besides, now with Princess Twilight and the Elements of Harmony, everypony knows about it. We’re on the route between Fillydelphia and Canterlot, and still nopony has ever heard of us.”

“What’s it like there?”

“It’s a town. What do you mean, ‘what’s it like’?”

“Just like...I dunno. I know what Baltimare’s like and I know what Ponyville’s like, but what’s your hometown like?”

I think about it for a little bit, then shake my head. “Honestly, I can’t really say because I don’t know what other towns are like. I guess the only kind of thing I can say is that we all pretty much know everypony else in town, and if not, know somepony who does. Everypony knows us, though, since we’re one of like, less than ten unicorn families. Funny enough, they think we all know each other, but we’ve hardly ever met any of the other unicorns in town. I did magic kindergarten with a few of them, but they were both in a different grade than me so I never went to school with them. And there’s no pegasi at all, so us not being earth ponies really sticks out.”

“What’s that like? It’s mostly unicorns where I live, but there’s ponies of all kinds there. And when we go to Ponyville, there’s every type of pony there, too. I think it’d be really weird to be one of only a few unicorns.”

“And you’d be right,” I laugh. “A lot of them just don’t really understand anything about us, you know? They don’t understand why coming up and touching my horn without asking permission or asking if I can turn rocks into gold aren’t polite, and even when we tell them, you can’t be sure that they understand then. It’s not that anypony there is mean or rude, just that they usually have only heard of unicorns in fairy tales. And as you probably know, the stuff we do in those isn’t exactly what we can do in real life.”

“We can Dreamstride though. I’d say that’s pretty close to fairy tales. Sometimes, I love just wandering through the dream world, trying to find different places because I just can’t believe only we can go there. Have you found any great places yet?”

I honestly can’t say I have, so I just quietly shake my head. It’s always something I mean to go do, but never get around to it. With my own Dreamstriding duties, having to oversee Moonlight and Luna, needing to file official reports, and all my own studies into demons, exploring just isn’t very high on the list of things I have time for. We know where every town and city in Equestria is in the dream world, so in terms of protecting ponies at night, exploring doesn’t do anything extra for us.

“You must not be looking hard enough!” He gets to his hooves, then looks down at me. “You really haven’t found anything at all?”

“I study demons,” I remind him. “For that, I have to read a lot of books and do a lot of observations in the dream world. You experiment with tea, which can cause your dream to appear somewhere else in the dream world. You get to do a lot more exploration than I do.”

“I’ll show you somewhere. You have time, right?”

“It’s getting late. Do you really want to be going around the dream world at this time of night?”

“Why not? Not like we have anything we have to be up early for tomorrow. Besides, we’re Dreamstriders. We’re going to need to get used to staying up super late anyways, so why not at least have fun doing it? There’s this one place that’s great for stargazing, way better than anything you can see in Canterlot. What do you say, wanna go?”

I stand up, then grab an empty mug out of my desk. “Why not? Sounds like fun.”

He runs into his room, then I can hear sounds of him moving all sorts of stuff around. “Give me a minute!” he yells. “Just have to find where I put my notes, then make the tea itself. Hold tight!”

As he’s looking for whatever it is he needs, I just sit down at my desk and look out over the Dreamstrider office. This’ll be nice, I don’t think I’ve ever really spent much time with him on a personal level before. I won’t have much time in the future, especially since Luna’s told me that she’s going to be going to Manehattan and getting Adhara, the next Dreamstrider, soon and that I’ll be doing even more to help train her. Hard to believe that in the three years it’s just been Moonlight and me, we’ve never really done anything like this. Also hard to believe that it’s been five whole years since I first came here. I can still remember the night I had that dream with Princess Luna, where she took me out of my dream, put me in hers, then wiped my memory of it so she could meet me in this very room. I mean, not this exact room, but she dreamed of it. I know she did that with Moonlight, too, but that was before I moved in this wing. I wonder what she’ll do now that there are two Dreamstriders living here, because I think it might look kind of weird to have a princess sleeping in the middle of the room where two of her subordinates live and work.

After a few minutes, he comes out of his room with two mugs of tea and levitates one over to me. Without saying anything, we both blow on them a little bit to cool them down, then start drinking. It tastes just like all sorts of plants, and the color is a dull green, which reflects that fact.

Once I finish about half of my tea and can start feeling my magic start to change, I levitate the mug onto my desk and stand up. “See you in the dream world, alright?”

“See you there,” he responds, getting up as well and placing his mug next to mine. We both quickly nod at each other, then go into our own rooms and close the doors.

When I push through to my dream, Moonlight is already sitting in the grass at the top of a hill our dreams are near the bottom of. I can’t see much else from here, so I just walk up to him and look over his shoulder.

“What is this place?” I whisper I look over his shoulder and down at the crumbling stone building that you can hardly see through all the plants and vines growing over it.

“Just some building,” he shrugs as he stands up. “Nothing really inside of it. Looks neat though, doesn’t it?”

“Well, let’s go.” I start walking towards it, and he just trots up next to me and looks confused.

“You want to go inside? I thought you said you don’t really explore much in the dream world.”

“Because of time reasons,” I correct. “Besides, demons aren’t really known to build things. So why are there ruins here?”

Instead of responding, he just looks forward and stares off into space. “Huh. Never thought of that.”

The closer we get to the ruins, the warmer it gets. Weird, I don’t think I’ve ever known a single place in the dream world to be warm. Everywhere else has been either cool or not really had any temperature, so this place must be really different. The ruins themselves are on a small island in the center of a little lake, and as we walk on the mossy bridge towards them, it almost starts feeling humid. I’ll have to see if I have any books about this place, or if Luna knows anything.

Upon entering, Moonlight just goes straight in to the back, where it looks like there’s another room that I can’t see what’s inside. I’m moving slowly in part because I want to notice everything around me, and in part because it feels like I’m in a sauna right now. It’s way hotter and way more humid in here than outside, and I swear I can already start feeling all the hair on my body start to frizz up.

Whatever this place is, it’s very old. Not only is the magic here very powerful, but it just feels ancient, like it’s been here a long time. Longer than most magic, and it’s just hanging in the air like an undisturbed swamp. Usually magic likes to be moving and flowing, but everything here is just completely stagnant.

“How did you find this place?” I ask Moonlight as I try and look in the main room for any clues as to what this place might be.

“Just experimented with tea and stumbled upon it,” he yells back. “Once you dig into it a little bit more, you find out how to design tea blends to do what it is you want. Most of the stuff I knew would bring my dream somewhere different than the Canterlot Cave, but where exactly I would end up I didn’t know.”

“And there’s really nothing in here suggesting what it might have been?”

“Well, there’s this.”

“‘This?’” I repeat, snapping my head in his direction. “What’s ‘this’?”

“Flower and a something written in Demon, but I can’t read it. I’ve been meaning to bring you here actually, since you’re way better at it than I am.”

“And this is why you need to focus more on your Demon lessons,” I remind him as I walk into the small back room he’s in. There’s a single, soft blue hydrangea in the center of the room on top of a little pedestal with something carved into it.

“It’s in Old Demon,” he points out. “I can hardly read regular demon, so demon that was written a long time ago is way too hard for me.”

“‘Let this single flower serve as a memory to V, the first elder demon to fall in the war against The Nightmare,’” I read aloud.

“‘The Nightmare?’ ‘Elder demon?’”

“I’ve heard of elder demons before,” I think aloud. “Most Dreamstriders have thought that they were a legend or a myth. All the stories say that they’re extremely powerful demons, ones that hold very deep knowledge about the dream world and our world but live far away from any other demons.”

“And The Nightmare?”

I put a hoof on my chin, then stare at the inscription and try to see if there’s any other hints. “Must have been a very powerful elder demon. If thousands of years of Dreamstriders thought that they were myths, then it would make sense that only another elder demon could find and kill one, right?”

Now my mind is going on a thousand different directions at once. Does this mean that elder demons are real, or is it maybe just the demon equivalent to a folk tale? Why a hydrangea? Why here? On that, why is this place the only warm and humid area I’ve ever been in the dream world? And why would elder demons fight amongst themselves, let alone wage all-out war?

“Hey Aurora, you coming?”

Snapping back into reality, I notice that he’s no longer here with me. Where did he go? “Moonlight?”

“Up here!” he calls from above me. It takes me a while to find him, but I can see his face poking through a small hole in the ceiling in the corner of the room. “You gonna come or what?”

“How did you even get up there? There’s no ladder or stairs or anything.”

“Climbed that bit of rubble,” he says, pointing his hoof to a very unsteady-looking pile of rocks right by the hole. I’m not sure I’ll support me, to be honest. I’m thirteen, not exactly a little filly anymore.

A quick sigh, then I move over to the pile. Here goes nothing, I guess. I put all four of my hooves on the rubble and feel it shift a little, which isn’t a good sign. With more care in every hoofstep than I’ve ever had to put, I start making my way up the pile of rock. Right before I’m about to get up to the top, I can just feel my back left slip a little too much. Probably not the best idea on top of a collapsing pile of stone, but I instinctively jump and grab the ledge right before the entire thing topples, leaving most of my body just dangling above it.

“Little help?” I grunt after trying to hoist myself up onto the roof where Moonlight’s just watching me struggle. Maybe I should’ve listened to dad when he said I should try and get a little stronger.

Moonlight grabs one of my hooves and starts pulling, grunting while doing so. “You’re so heavy!” he cries out.

“Because that’s what a mare wants to hear,” I grunt back as I manage to pull myself up onto the roof. “That she’s heavy.”

“Well, it’s true,” he says as he lays down on his back. “By the way, see? Told you the view here is pretty incredible.”

I get down next to him, and he’s right. It’s just like the one plain Luna showed me years ago, but here the light from the moon and stars seems closer and brighter. Add that into all the magic, and I feel very in touch with my Dreamstriding capabilities. I’m going to have to come back here sometime and do some tests, because I feel like I’d be able to do so much that I’ve never done before.

“What do you think this place is?” he asks after a few minutes of us just sitting in silence.

“Probably a memorial,” I shrug. “I don’t think demons create anything, so it was probably made by ponies. And there was a plaque in there, so somepony must have created that and added it.”

“No, not this specific place.” He stretches his forelegs wide. “The dream world. What do you think it is?”

“It’s just the dream world to me. It might not be the best answer, but that’s just it. The best we can do is just learn how to live with it and interact with it.”

“But that’s a bad answer!” he exclaims. “There has to be some answer, right? It can’t just be the dream world, can it? Everything has to be something, and the dream world has to be something or somewhere. Like, the moon and stars. Do you think they’re the same moon and stars we see back in the awakened world, or are they different ones?”

“I think…” I pause, then just stare at the moon. “I don’t know, honestly. I don’t think I’ve ever really thought of it. It’s probably a different moon though, because if it was the same moon, then wouldn’t this planet have to be right next to ours or something? We only have one planet and one moon, so there’s not something close enough to be able to see the moon in the sky. Especially like this; I feel like if I put my hooves out, I’d get moon dust on them.”

“So then where are we?” Not taking his eyes off the sky, he sits up. “This isn’t our imagination, because we’re definitely here. And I don’t think these are our bodies, because we don’t disappear from the awakened world when we Dreamstride. So if it’s not imaginary but not real, then what is it?”

“It’s real, but…” As I take a few moments to just try and think about what to say next, so many questions are going around in my head that I can’t just focus on one of them. “Just lost my train of thought. All I know is it’s the dream world, and that’s good enough for me.”

“I’m sure I’ll figure it out someday,” he says confidently. “It’s got to be right in front of us, right? It’ll be one of those things where somepony figures it out, then we all sit around and wonder how we didn’t notice that before.”

“If it were that easy,” I laugh, “don’t you think somepony would have it all solved by now? We wouldn’t be sitting here having this conversation.”

“They’re just not looking in the right place,” he proclaims, laying back down on his back. “I’ll find out where they looked, then look in different places because the answer obviously isn’t there.”

“Maybe that’s what everypony who came before you said, too. I don’t think it’s a bad goal, but I don’t think it’s an easy one. Dreamstriders are pretty rare, so it’s not like there have been a ton of ponies who were able to study that a ton. My guess is just a hoofful or so.”

“Always got to be somepony who makes the breakthrough,” he points out. “Why not me?”

With a smile, I just go back to looking at the moon and stars. He’s determined, I’ll give him that. And it’s not a bad or unrealistic goal, either.

“So what do you want to figure out about demons?” he asks after a few seconds of silence. “Why did you decide to start studying them?”

“They’re just...I dunno, interesting.” I shrug, not knowing what else to say. “They’re just like, here. And we know almost nothing about them outside the fact that they’re here. Even they don’t know anything about where they came from or what they are or even what the dream world is, and none of them really seem to be interested in finding out. So much powerful magic is in here, and I think if we learn how the demons use it and were created from it, ponies could benefit so much.”

“How would we use that? What would learning about where demons come from do for us?”

“That’s what we need to figure out,” I say as I turn my head and wink at him. “Who knows, maybe there’s a ton of magic going on that we don’t know about. Demons can have some pretty powerful effects on us while we’re dreaming, so maybe there’s something about their magic that we could learn to use for ourselves?”

“Well, I’ll tell you if I find anything.” He points his hoof up towards the moon, and I swear it’s so close that he’s going to touch it. “My goal is to get up there, though. Find out if this moon is our moon. And even if it’s not, it’d be cool to walk on it, wouldn’t it?”

“Just walk on it?” I ask. “That’s all you’d want to do up there?”

“Well, what else would I do? There isn’t really anything up there.”

“So your whole goal is to get somewhere, just to say you’ve walked on it?”

“Hey,” he defends, “why do ponies climb mountains and do all that stuff? To say they were there. And who’s to say there’s not something on the moon that will help us, or something that I’ll find on the way? If finding out that I’m a Dreamstrider and doing all this crazy stuff has taught me anything, it’s that I have no idea what’s going to happen to me in the future. All I can do is just take it as it comes.”

“Fair enough,” I reply as I put my hooves behind my head. It’s weird to think about, but he’s got a point: I wouldn’t have expected any of this either a few years ago. I thought I’d just be in middle school and be home alone with mom and dad at this point in my life, but that’s just so far from what I’ve been doing the past five years. But it’s weird, because now if I try to imagine myself in a normal life, it doesn’t seem normal. This is what my life is: sitting in the dream world, looking at the stars of some unknown area and wondering if I’ll ever figure out where I am.

I guess there’s worse lives to have.