Preview: The Heart of Winter

I apologize for not releasing a chapter this week. Inspiration has been hard to come by recently, and I've been doing my best to fit all of the pieces of the story together. In the meantime, I have continued working on Inheritors: The Heart of Winter, so here's a preview excerpt below for Chapter 1: The Ivory Tower.

It might have seemed to an observer that he was mindlessly wandering, but he knew better. The maze constantly changed and shifted around him, but there was always a constant in his nighttime travels: sooner or later, his hooves would take him to a dead end, and at the end of that hallway would be a pony who needed his help more than any other - the last mirror was inevitably a dream so bad that it required Midnight to intervene in person. That was the hard part of his job, and he was dreading what might me at the end of tonight's first dead end. Dealing with strange or terrifying imagery was never the problem... what really scared Midnight was the way ponies looked up to him. The way they bowed and thanked him like he was some great hero, and worst of all the way they always asked for advice that he didn't have the experience to give. How long did it take Luna to attain her fabled wisdom? How many times would he have to disappoint a pony by telling them that he didn't have the answer?

Eventually, he did come to that dead end, and this one... this one would be something strange. In the mirror he could see a garden teeming with life, and in the distance he saw a pony and a creature he didn't recognize sitting together at a gazebo overlooking a beautiful, still pond. It was tranquil and serene, and that was what worried Midnight the most- there had to be something there just beneath the surface. This dream in particular had to have called to him for a reason.

Midnight took a deep breath to steel himself and stepped through, and immediately he was assaulted by sweltering heat. The world he knew was cold and snowy, and most ponies' dreams reflected that, but the air here was hot and humid. The second thing he noticed was the sound of birds singing - birds were rare, and most of the ones he knew were scavengers who roosted in the high stories of Manehattan's ruined towers, or the hawks and falcons who preyed on them. But the hedges and trees around him were filled with beautiful songbirds of every color, the kinds that he'd only ever seen in old books about the forests of Old Equestria. What kind of pony dreamed about a place like this? Midnight wanted to just enjoy himself- just relax for a night and enjoy the singing of long-extinct birds and the smells of wildflowers that hadn't grown in hundreds of years... but he had a job to do, and so he started trudging towards the gazebo with a resigned sigh.

What he saw when he got closer made him gasp in shock and dive into a bush to hide himself, forgetting for the moment that Luna had taught him to conceal his presence much more effectively in the dream realm. Conversing with a pretty yellow pegasus mare was a creature he'd only seen before in ominous visions of the future brought on by Luna's meddling with his magic. It had a patchwork body of a pony, a dragon, a gryphon, and even a goat, mismatched horns, and a single wicked fang amongst its teeth; he had previously seen it sneering with cruel, hateful laughter, but when it laughed now it seemed merry and sincere. The creature looked at its companion not with the roiling hate Midnight had seen, but with affection, perhaps even love, as they sat at a glass table sipping tea.

"It's so good to see you again, Discord," the pegasus said...