As a Young Mare Dreams
Luna had always had duties differing from that of her sister. She was the more combative one, and so when matters of the guard needed to be tended to, she was usually the one tasked to do so. She was the more creative one, and helped fund and kickstart many aspiring artists, writers, and playwrights. Some playwrights were commisioned specifically for her sister, as she knew she enjoyed them. She held court in the later hours of the day, when the light of the sun grew dimmer with each passing hour, and ended when she rose the moon.
Attending to the dreams of her subjects was simply one of these duties. She would passively scan with her magic to find what troubling dreams and nightmares plagued the populace, and did her level best to soothe them when and where she could. However, as with being a diarch of her country, the lesson that you cannot save everypony is a hard one to swallow, yet one that she begrudgingly accepts.
It had led her to pass by a specific door, a particular bubble, which was painted over a mix of dark navy blue and bright pastel pink. The mark adorning each door was usually one of their cutie mark, or the marks of their parents, guardians, or caretakers if the colt or filly had not found theirs yet. This one was completely unmarked.
And yet it was not the lack of a mark that drew her to this door, but the aura it was exuding. It was a terrifying thing that had been nagging at her since the moon first rose, and it had lingered in lesser forms for nights before this one. She had merely cast a spell as she always did with those, one that let the dreamer fall into a deeper, dreamless sleep.
It was a bandage for a wound, but not anything that would help it heal. Sometimes the wounds closed on their own with no need for further examination or treatment. Other times, like these, it was best to take a more direct approach.
And so the alicorn opened the door with a gentle pull of magic. A tug was all it took for the door to swing open with a yawning darkness awaiting her on the other side.
Stepping in with caution, and quickly closing the door behind her, Luna found herself in darkness so thick she could not see her own front hooves. Using a horn-light to see as she went, she took careful note of everything that could be observed. There was a ground even at the edges of this twisted dream, and there were whispers on all sides of her. Things tugged at her mane and tail like curious foals, yet she dared not stop or look around to see what they were.
She fears for a moment, as the nightmare resolves itself into a more visible form, that maybe she had been too late.
What awaited her was chaos and madness. Large tents and odd contraptions created a backdrop with buildings somewhat more familiar to her. The plaza she stood in had hard, tough, unforgiving ground that was not the cobblestone streets of unicorn make that she had grown used to. In front of her was yet another oddity and yet, this one nearly broke her concentration.
There were a raised platform and a roof overhead similar in designs to the tents. There were no walls and thick metal poles connected the top to the bottom, with a cylinder at the center of this contraption which rotated. The rest of it rotated along with it, revealing what was so shocking to her.
Mounted on one of these poles, held maybe half a foot off the ground, was a pony. The dreamer, if the emotion radiating from her was anything to go by. Yet she was unlike any pony she'd seen. It was a mad alchemist's dream, to think up a pegasus pony mixed with a bat. Or a dragon, as the case may be, yet she saw no scales and it did not seem as if the dreamer was capable of breathing fire.
Nevertheless, the pole, bright red and glowing unlike the others of brass and gold, was going cleanly through this young mare's midsection. Her hooves were suspended as if in mid-run, supported by nothing. And it was not just this wheel that was the dream. Oh no, it couldn't be that simple. Even if Luna could safely cast the spell to release this young mare from the dream she was trapped in now, doing so without rooting out the cause would risk this nightmare occurring again.
And so she waited.
The world was a dark purple-grey compared to the decorative, colorful contraption and the dreaming pony within it. It was not long for the monochrome landscape to be broken by a light shining in the distance. One that steadily grew as it drew closer. The light twisted in shape, forming an alicorn, though this was not the light of the Eternal Sun that Celestia was. This felt different, and the alicorn's colors, while similar to her sister's was different as well.
A pale gold-white coat with darker hooves and a mane and tail that was shorter than what Luna was familiar with. They too, though, shone like golden fire. She was clothed in a beautiful ruffled dress, while her cutie mark showed an open eye above a closed book.
Though the most peculiar thing about the alicorn was that she stopped and stared with bright purple eyes right at Luna for a long moment, before turning to the distressed bat-mare fusion.
"Mom!"
Luna double checked, and yes she should in fact still be hidden. She shook off the vulnerable sensation she had felt and refocused. The mare called this unknown alicorn her mother. Perhaps the status is simply because she put her mother upon some high pedestal?
The alicorn spoke something that Luna couldn't understand, before stepping back and bowing her head. The mare, likewise, had fallen silent and bowed her own as much as she could before the bottom of that sideways wheel caught fire.
None of this is real. You will not be harmed. You will find the source of this madness and put a stop to it.
Yet so far nothing showed that aura of being the root of the dread and fear that had called Luna here in the first place. The fire engulfed the entire contraption, and yet from it the mare, now freed, leaped and stood in front of the dream realm alicorn. Only now she was sporting a horn and was also completely healed.
"Why do you dream of this? It is a twisted mockery of what we've gone through." The mother asked, wings and ears drooping. It was as if she already knew the answer.
"Because I haven't seen any of the others, or you, in a long time and-" A trident sailed through the air and plunged straight through the mare's mother.
The alicorn's form shrunk to the same size as the mare, her mark changing so that there was a bright stylized sun surrounding the eye, now printed on a page of an open book.
"-Rose!"
The next morning, just as the day court was coming to a close, Luna told her sister of what she saw, and more importantly, how she could not stop it before it so abruptly ended. Celestia, her princess mask slowly sliding off, suggested that she seek out this pony if this dream is not resolved in the next few nights, or to have her invited to the castle if it proved important enough.
It was nights before she found the nicknamed "Bat mare's" dream again. That night there was the Bat mare’s mother, Rose, facing off against a giantess of an alicorn alongside a stallion. Both were of alicorn status. Another figure that this dreamer holds of high esteem? The being they faced carried the traits of an insect as well as a fish and had a carapace that was dark as ink.
This dream, a blur of motion that it was, was one that ended with Rose and that alicorn stallion slain by a trident.
A third unresolved dream passed that was tamer, calmer, and yet somehow no less distressing. The two mares had switched roles, and so now Rose was the daughter, yet there were continuous slips that the bat hybrid made, calling her mom instead of Rose or daughter. It seemed to be that way on both sides. They wanted to call each other by their names, and yet mother was uttered in its stead. It caused frustration for the both of them or in just the Bat mare, leaving Rose, the dream construct, confused.
Luna had spent hours pouring over notes she’d taken and laboring over what possible meaning to this there could be. Alicorns everywhere. The dreamer being some mix of a pegasus and a Bat in her dream before becoming an alicorn herself. That odd multicolored fire and a whole list of other things.
Not to mention what that alternate Rose, with the cutie mark that contained only the eye and open book, had said to her.
A twisted mockery.
The last dream that she encountered, before her descent into becoming Nightmare Moon, was a battle with the great bug-fish alicorn mare that the dreamer was apart of. The same one that the older Rose and that stallion from the previous dream fought against. The younger version of Rose was there fighting at her side, along with two others she could not identify. A male alicorn that was different from the one she’d previously seen, a colt this time, and an insect-like pony not too unlike the being they were fighting.
She heard snatches of conversation in the previous dreams, but this one merely contained overwhelmingly loud music. No. A cacophony of sound. They had fought and to Luna’s eyes they had lost before she and the dreamer were violently thrown out.
~*~<>~*~
1000 years later...
4 RoL, 13th Of Harmonia
“You wanted to see me, sister?”
Luna stepped into Celestia’s personal chambers with a slowness that was afforded only to those weary insomniacs who’d forgone nights without sleep several times before. Ones whom then found it hard to wake themselves without the aid of some flavor and strength of coffee that they could not drink for several minutes without scorching their own tongue.
The mug was held aloft in silvery blue magic still steaming as Luna yawned and glanced around. Her sister mustn’t have heard her it seemed. How was it again that she always found it easy to wake with the sun’s rising? Not even Luna could accomplish such a feat.
“Morning Tia.” She calls again after the door behind her had closed, “I see you’re hard at work already. What’s gotten you in such a rush?”
“Hm?” Celestia’s head snapped up from the scroll she was reading over, blinking her eyes as if she was riding from the depths of sleep herself.
“You asked for me...” Luna didn’t bother to finish the sentence, sipping at her coffee and raising an eyebrow instead.
“Ah! Yes. Yes I did, though I did not expect you to visit so early.” Luna snorted at that.
“You said it was urgent and so I came post-haste.”
Celestia grinned knowingly, “But first, coffee.”
“Oh but of course sister dearest. Whoever would I be without it. It is like you and that tea you’re so fond of. Now, could we get to the point? As much as I’d love to spend time with you we both have duties and if this is big enough to cause you to take more than a day off-“
“Enough for the both of us to take a week off, you mean.”
Luna nearly dropped her coffee right then and there.
“What?! Who would be in charge then? Cadence?”
Celestia rolled her eyes, “It’s not as if she isn’t capable. She will however have the council to help her, plus her fiancé, and let us not forget Twilight has sat in on most of my court sessions since she was a filly. She’ll be fine.”
“You say that and yet somehow I am finding it hard to believe you. Also, you’re stalling.”
“The Crystal Empire has returned.”
Oh no.
“Oh. And some unknown pony has shown up in griffin lands and has been...ah, let me see here. Conjuring bits out from nogriffin knew where, conjuring food in the same manner, and as this pony is quoted in saying, “just helping you out and oh wait I know that look what did I do now?”
Luna leveled a glare, “That sounds like Pinkie Pie are you certain it isn’t her? And how does that add up to equal importance to Sombra being back?”
“Well. He isn’t.”
“You jest.”
“I do not. He isn’t back. A crystal pony arrived last night, forgive me I didn’t want to wake you. But he delivered a message that a their new emperor was the one to defeat Sombra.”
“And what does this “new emperor” have to do with the pony in griffin lands that may or may not just be Pinkie Pie?”
Luna took another sip of her coffee. A long one. One that lasted until the mug was drained because sometimes you just have to love the perks of being an alicorn.
“Well I thought you’d like to know about it seeing as the description this letter gives is: a young unicorn mare with the wings of a bat.”
The coffee winds up all over Celestia’s coat.