“Every one of us is losing something precious to us. Lost opportunities, lost possibilities, feelings we can never get back again. That’s part of what it means to be alive.”

I’m not talking about some Tantabus style creature that someone the likes of Princess Luna would be needed to combat, I’m talking about plain ol’, vanilla, “locked in sleep in a terrible re-imagined virtual reality,” run of the mill, human-style, non-magical night terror. I’ve suffered from night terrors since my adolescence, the timing of the start of them corresponding nicely with a big, gaping hole in my memory. My sister once told me that she watched me being fairly severely beaten by our step-mother during that time. I can’t remember, honestly. What I do remember is a campaign of relentless brainwashing, mind games, manipulations, lies, and psychological abuse that lasted for the majority of my teenage years. Whatever happened during those times I can’t remember left scars on my psyche that manifest in the waking world as PTSD symptoms and in my dreams as night terrors.

At their peak during my human life, I was experiencing these about once per week. I’d wake up and realize I had two sets of memories in my head about what my current life looked like and be gripped with a frantic fear that the wonderful life wherein I escaped the grip of my stepmother, grown into my own person, met a wonderful woman, had a wonderful daughter, and making my own future were all a dream and I was actually back in my bed in my room at my step-mother’s place having to face another day of whatever mind games (and other stuff I’m glad I can’t really recall) she had for me that day.

The dreams themselves surpassed most horror films. Only a small handful of fright night movies are actually frightening to me, most just bore me, relying on jump-scares and fairly mundane imagery. Well, in fairness, I doubt even the so-called “masters of horror” of the silver screen can hold a candle to the Lovecraftian creatures my imagination conjures when I’m locked in a night terror.

That was the worst of the worst, of course. Most night terrors were just me being stuck in my stepmother’s custody as a kid again, with whatever anxiety of the day being twisted and magnified in the context of the dream and my stepmother’s abuses.

When my daughter was born, it was the PTSD that became a problem. I’d been led to believe throughout my life that PTSD from child abuse wasn’t as bad as, say, a combat theater war veteran’s, so I simply took the worst of the fallout on the chin. When you’re suffering the lack of sleep dealing with an infant brings, the accompanying stresses related to being a new parent, plus the massive strain having a child causes to the relationship between the parents, you’ve got yourself a PTSD minefield you navigate every day. I knew I needed to seek help. When I got around a competent therapist who had experience treating PTSD victims, she kindly and gently corrected my misperceptions and started me on a treatment regimen.

I came out on the other side changed. I was much easier to be around, it was easier for me to learn people skills, my performance at work skyrocketed, and I was generally able to deal with the stresses of life much easier. It also had the wonderful side effect of nearly completely eliminating the night terrors. I only had two in the four years between completing the treatment and when my human life ended.

I suppose a little thing like death would be sufficient to trigger them again.

A few of the dreams were the old familiar standbys from my youth. C’thulu-esque monsters lurking in the shadows, undead horrors, trapped with my stepmother, yadda, yadda, yadda. Since they were so familiar, they were surprisingly easy to deal with. Death makes eldritch abominations seem familiar and tame, apparently.

Most of the current dreams were new creations, however. Most often, I was the eldrich monster, what with being a huge bug-pony hybrid creature that was capable of bending reality and subjugating minds and being an emotovore, but I was always trapped in some fashion, unable to reach out to the people, the human people, around me. Sometimes I’d be hunted by humans, others I’d simply be locked in a cage or box of some sort. Most frequently I’d be in a zoo enclosure, separated from the guests by two heavy panes of some sort of unbreakable glass spaced about a yard apart, I couldn’t even taste the emotions of the people going past because of the vacuum between the panes of glass and the material the cage was constructed of. These dreams always reached a climax when my ex-wife would bring our daughter up to the glass to show this strange captive monster. My daughter loves zoo animals, but in my nightmare she would always be absolutely terrified of me.

It was during one such night terror that the first major change to the timeline occurred besides my hatching. I was sitting in my cage, gazing longingly at my ex-wife and daughter who were making motions to leave when I heard a voice behind me.

“Well, well, well...certainly not what I expected to encounter in Our realm.” As one might expect, the intrusion of a magical lucid dreamer injecting themselves into a dream caused me to come to the sudden and jarring realization that I was, in fact, not awake. If you’ve never had a lucid dream, this realization can be quite startling, enough so to jar one awake. This didn’t cause me to return to full consciousness, but I was able to dictate my own actions suddenly, a feature which night terrors tend to turn off. One can’t really be terrified if one has agency and choice, after all.

I turned to see something a bit out of left field; Nightmare Moon, standing there in full glory. It so happened that I’d visited the surface briefly a few night ago, so I knew the Mare in the Moon was still patterned on the lunar surface, so unless Luna had been cleansed by the Elements of Harmony in the last three days, she shouldn’t be in my dreams. That theory wouldn’t explain why she was here as Nightmare Moon, though.

“Imagine after centuries of isolation and binding, I find a single mote in the constellation of dreamers that isn’t barred to me and find not a pony, but a changeling!” her grin, complete with predatory teeth, showed just how amused she was at this turn of events. It told me a few things, though. First, I still had some time before there was even a chance that I’d be able to work something out with Equestria’s greatest magical genius in a millenia. Second, Nightmare Moon was, indeed, still trapped in the moon. Finally, there was something unique about me that let her travel into my dreams even from the moon.

I turned back to the window, only to see my ex-wife and daughter starting to leave. Keeping in mind that even lucid dreams are highly reliant on emotions to dictate who you are and what you’re doing, watching the two human females I’d gladly sacrifice my second life just to see one more time leaving was tearing me up inside. I explain this because it provides some context for my next actions.

Nightmare Moon wasn’t pleased I seemed to be ignoring her, “Nothing to say, changeling?! I may not be your queen now, but when I break my bonds and…”

She didn’t get any further than that, I didn’t let her. Using Dream Physics, I leapt, spun around, and grabbed her cheeks in a single move. Like I said, Dream Physics. Like the Matrix, but with fewer rules. “Ut, ut, ut,” I scolded her, “You’re interrupting family time!”

The shocked look on her face was accompanied by a surge of something, probably the magic that Nightmare was using to establish the connection between us, and the dream suddenly ended and I was vaulted into full consciousness.

I awoke laying on my back, heart rate a bit high, as usual, though not experiencing the absolute disorientation that usually accompanied waking from a night terror and mentally reviewed what had occured.

It turns out Changelings do, indeed, have breakfast. Rather, mature Changelings have breakfast. Apparently, my system hadn’t yet grown post-hatching to handle solid food, rather like human children can’t handle anything but milk right after their born. So while Chrysalis was treated to anything her drone chefs could cook up, I was stuck with only being able to smell the food while Chrysalis ate and fed me maternal emotions. Considering she rotated out her kitchen staff to keep them circulating around Equestria in disguise and all of them employable (and a few had been) by Equestria’s finest kitchens, including the Royal Palace at Canterlot, the smells ranged from merely “good” to “WHY ISN’T THAT ALREADY IN MY MOUTH?!”

At least there was no breastfeeding involved, that would have just been all forms of awkward.

We had taken the opportunity of the quiet few moments when she wasn’t dealing with Queenly matters to chat. Most often about my previous life.

Surprisingly, at least to me, she took the fact that her daughter had once been an alien with a (somewhat) full life of experiences behind them in stride. I think it was mostly down to the fact that Changelings, well, change so much, even the hive changes around them, so their minds are pretty darn flexible. That and it’s not an everyday occurrence that a newly hatched Changeling introduces a brand new, never-before-heard-on-this-planet language to the hive-mind. That kinda was enough proof of my story.

The one area she remained incredulous was that there was a fictionalized animated story series that centered around the lives of ponies, was set in Equestria, and she was one of the series’ chief villains. She didn’t have a problem with the “villain” part so much, she just had no frame of reference for animated shows. She kinda understood the concept of video, though trying to explain how television differed from the filmstrips and reel-to-reel movies that had only fairly recently become a thing for Equestria was a bit of a challenge.

She also questioned the...we’ll say “prophetic” value of the show as I remembered it and was able to relate. It wasn’t like I had much evidence beyond just my confidence that the events would (eventually) transpire.

Another thing that had come out in these conversations was the year. I had been hatched on September 11 in 976 C.E. (Celestial Era). After slapping my own head hard enough to hurt through the carapace, I’d had to explain to Chrysalis that my birthday on Earth had been September 11 in 1976 C.E. (Common Era) From that revelation I learned that Chrysalis has an appreciation of the absurd as she found the nearly identical birthdays save for one digit to be hilarious. I had to admit once I got over the feeling the universe was sticking it to me with irony, it was a bit funny and I chuckled along with her.

“Chrys...er, mom…” I began. The parentally irritated glower she was about to aim at me for not referring to her as ‘mom’ shifted to a satisfied smile, “Do you know much about Nightmare Moon?”

She had been about to take a sip from a beverage that brewed like tea but was thick like coffee and smelled like chocolate, but she paused and set the teacup down. “I know nearly a millennium ago Celestia and her sister got into a tiff that left the world in darkness for half a day. Soon after my drones around Everfree reported that Luna had taken the name Nightmare Moon and tried to kill her sister. That was around the time the moon got that face on it.”

She grimaced, “Once, before her little rebellion. She tried to enter my dreams. I used the hive mind to put a stop to that.”

Ah, so that’s why she normally can’t enter a changeling’s dream but could get into mine. My little faraday caged room meant that whatever protections were on the hive weren’t extended to me. “So you didn’t know she’d been sealed in the moon?”

She finished a sip she’d started as I was pondering my exclusive status and gave me the look she saved for when I said things that made sense but betrayed far more knowledge than an infant changeling should have. Accepting or not, her mind still skipped grooves every so often when she dealt with me. Hell, she was dealing with it better than I would have. When I put Finding Dory on for Freya, she was explaining events in the movie that hadn’t happened yet because she was smart enough to guess where the plot was going to go. I knew she hadn’t seen it before, and confirmed that with her mother later, and so it was a massive mindf*ck when it was just intuitive guessing. If my daughter had started using perfect and fluent English at the age of one month and discussing politics, aetherodynaimcs, and was able to plot out a rough sketch of future events I’d have probably had an existential crisis or five.

“...I didn’t, though that makes some sense. It would certainly explain why there was never any public trial or execution announcement.”

Oh, hey, my turn to be thrown for a loop, “...wait, Celestia would kill her own sister?!”

Chrysalis pondered for a moment before replying, “I think, in that moment in time, she might have. She was still fairly new to the throne, Discord had only been handled a few years prior, and she was very much Sol Invictus, the Day Star and Conqueror of Tyrants. Her court was still new and questioning her every step of the way, and some of the old unicorn nobles were seeking any excuse to supplant the new princesses and restore the House Blueblood to the throne. Had Celestia not banished her sister, I can easily imagine a scenario where a public execution for treason would have been the least bad option.”

I shuddered. As much as I loved America, it had been baptized in the blood of soldiers and slaves, and I would have hated to imagine an Equestria that had lost its innocence that way.

The conversation drifted at that point, discussing politics. It felt good, actually. My mom in my human life had loved talking politics with me, and doing the same with Chrysalis felt like home.

That night, Nightmare Moon returned. This time it was a fairly random dream, one of those that’s not quite an episode of a few different shows you’ve watched and isn’t quite related to anything you’ve ever experienced. I was at a table with Richard Castle in a cafe in San Diego discussing the latest presidential run and it’s impact on the price of Apple family produce and whether it would strain relations with the Griffon Empire. Were it not a dream (and I weren’t casually chatting with a fictional character about politics and trade for two worlds that had no connection), it might have seemed odd that I was a changeling. A fully grown changeling, at that.

Abruptly, we were joined by a woman who had the features of Vice-principal Luna with Principal Celestia’s body and onyx-stone black skin. That was where the similarities to the Equestria Girls franchise ended, however. She was wearing a flowing gown that flickered in the breeze like the alicorn manes on the show with slits up to her thighs showing that this human form was adorned with a crescent moon cutie-mark and boots that did things to her legs that would have made standing up in my old human male body an embarassing experience. She was examining the fingers on one hand, “Ah, yes. The mirror universe portal. I wonder when you gained access to it, Changeling?”

“My goodness, Chrys,” said Castle, rising from his chair, “Introduce me to your stunning friend!”

Curse my sexually active subconscious and it’s attraction to statuesque bad girls. I sighed, “Richard Castle, meet the embodiment of foal-hood terror and the night eternal, Nightmare Moon. Moon, mystery author and crime solver Richard Castle, who somehow manages to write a series of excellent suspense thrillers in spite of being a fictional character himself.”

I believe I detected a hint of a blush on Nightmare’s face when Castle pulled her hand into a French-style greeting and kissed the back of it, “Enchante,” he charmed winningly. “Your beauty is that of the night sky itself.”

Nightmare huffed indignantly, glaring at me. She knew how these things worked as well as I did...better, even. “Such affrontery!” she spluttered, “Thy familiarity is undignified! Were’t this a dream and thou a petitioner in Our court We wouldst have thee cast into the dungeons!”

I rolled my eyes, the scene shifting around us. “Your ‘ye old-ee Ancient Equestrian’ is slipping, your royal tyrant-ness.” I said, intentionally butchering the old English-style pronunciation Luna (and by extension Nightmare Moon, apparently) used when flustered.

We were now in something resembling a board room, though the meeting table stretching off into the distance and terminating in a beach complete with an ocean lapping gentle waves onto it was a dead giveaway we were still firmly in the land of dreams. Nightmare Moon was back to being a pony; she slammed her hooves on the tabletop, “You shall not disrespect me in this manner!”

At this point she was just winding herself up, I recognized the behavior from my ex-wife and her family, pretty much nothing I was going to say at this point would diffuse the situation. I decided to go full-on Deadpool on her, “Hashtag, Not-My-Princess.” I retorted with a grin.

With a roar, she launched herself across the table at me, a magical blast hitting me in the chest and launching me through the wall. I re-emerged not as a Changeling princess, but as my OC on FimFiction.net and other pony-related Internet communities. I stood as a full sized alicorn, snowy white coat, alternating red and white mane flowing in non-existent wind, and a similarly flowing star cloud tail, “Bitch, I am the horse Captain America rode in on!”

As I charged up my own blast, she stood, momentarily stunned, “Ce...Celestia?!”

My own magical blast launched her back toward the beach, tossing her ass-over-teakettle in a rolling tumble. “Not quite, your Dark-and-Stormy-Night-ness!” I decided a little Doctor Strange would be appropriate and summoned a few shields in the form of Spiritual Geometry. “It’s pronounced, ‘Columbia,’ and y’all best speak softly while I get all Manifest Destiny on your ass with my big stick!”

Have you figured out that I’m a massive geek yet? ‘Cause I figure you should know that about me.

Growling, Nightmare leapt off the sands of the beach and hovered a couple dozen feet above the sand. Her influence on the dream was manifesting in the starry night bleeding across the sky, resulting in half being bright and sunny like I remember from my years in San Diego and the other half being constellation speckled night. Where the two halves met was a swirling, turbulent mess that would never exist in the waking world. There was no sign of the previous board room, though down the beach I could see a beached ship reminiscent of one showcased on an episode of Grand Tour. If we were tapping that episode for the setting, then that meant that...yup, the tide was coming in and there were cliffs that would prevent us from simply going up the beach to avoid the water.

Taking to the air myself, I faced off against Nightmare Moon as the ocean consumed the beach, the cliffs, and soon from horizon to horizon there was nothing but ocean underneath an impossible sky. “So,” I smirked at the Queen of the Night, “We gonna dance?”

Snarling in anger, she charged me again, her horn lighting up with a renewed assault.

Chrysalis’ brows furrowed as she watched me yawn over the breakfast table again. As much as I was trying to be discreet, my series of yawns were akin to a cat’s yawn; big, wide, expressive, and showing every single tooth. “Are you sleeping well, daughter?”

I lifted my forehoof and waggled it a bit, “Eh, just some intense dreams. It’ll probably pass. I’ll be needing some naps, though.”

Several nights later, Nightmare Moon and I were laid out amongst the ruins of either the Castle of the Two Sisters or the Silver Millenium’s Palace on the Moon, depending on which feature you focussed on. Isolated pockets of fires crackled around us as we panted for breath, nearly mirror images of each other. I was in my dream-adult-Changeling-Princess body, as she was in her normal dark mirror image of Celestia form. Magic fitfully spurted from her horn, I limply reached out and swatted the tip to force whatever spell she was about to attempt to fizzle.

Every night, she showed up again, and every night she worked herself into a frenzy of perceived slights until we’d be in full on combat with each other. Human, changeling, alicorn, or whatever form we took, it was always a pitched battle.

Her eyes didn’t quite focus on me as she glared in my direction, “Whelp...I shall,” more panting, “Teach you...to respect…”

“Yadda, yadda, yadda,” I interrupted, “You’re lonely and I’m pretty much it.” I managed to swallow to ease the parched dryness of my throat. “I really doubt you’d be throwing so much time and attention at me if you had any other choice.”

Something that resembled a shuddering sigh escaped her lips as she closed her eyes in frustration.

One of the things I noticed about my ex-wife was until you pushed her against the metaphorical wall (...and again, a metaphorical wall. No actual pushing and or pinning was involved) and held her there in any given argument where she was very clearly in the wrong, she’d never, ever admit she was wrong. It seemed the same was true of Nightmare Moon. “Prithee, do not flatter thyself.”

She glared in my direction again, “Had I the energy to do so, I would bite my fetlock at thee.”

I snorted, amused at the twisting of the Elizabethan-era version of “flipping the bird” being appropriately ponified.

At breakfast I was a bit punchy, giggling at random bits. I did discover, almost by accident, that if I took it slow I could ingest liquids. A few days into the nightly spats with Nightmare Moon, I’d absently reached out and taken a sip of fruit juice (pomegranate, as it turned out) and only after swallowing remembering I wasn’t supposed to take in actual foods yet. After watching me carefully for a bit for signs of possible choking, Chrysalis smiled at me and offered me more.

This particular morning, though, I kept giggling while I was attempting to drink. After one of these spurts of giggles and subsequently snorting juice out my nose, “mom” sighed in exasperation, “What is so funny?”

I wasn’t sure how to explain it, I stared at her for a few minutes, just trying to come up with some sort of summary. Finally, I just said, “I am the horse Captain America rode in on!” before collapsing in my seat into a pile of cackling changeling.

It was another night terror, but rather than being trapped in a cage or hunted by humans or an eldrich horror, I was losing my wife and daughter all over again.

The dream blended aspects of my human life and changeling life. In the days leading up to my wife leaving me, I knew that something was wrong, but couldn’t pin it down until her family pulled an entrapment and JoLene used it as a convenient excuse to leave and take our daughter with her.

Being a changeling and driving a human van was...weird, but a dream covers up the strangeness with “of course it works, because dream.” The scene was from the Thursday before JoLene’s family would manipulate me into a final emotional confrontation, I was driving her home from a medical procedure which had, for whatever strange reason, had to happen at four in the morning. Some part of me recognized that I knew I was dreaming and that the results of the next few days were inevitable and unchangeable, but the version of me in the van driving back to our apartment stayed on script.

I was making some observation about one of the other people in the waiting room we had just left, when I turned to find Nightmare Moon in the passenger seat instead of my wife. “Jesus fu…” I bit off the string of swear words and straightened the van on the road, recovering from the dangerous swerve that my jumping reaction had caused. A moment later, whatever magic Nightmare Moon used to kick me into lucidity during my dreams fully caught up to me. “Well, at least you stopped the night terror.” I muttered, turning my eyes to the road, “Thanks for that.”

She didn’t respond right away, simply watching the scenery for a bit before saying, “You are also banished, are you not?”

I also held back on an immediate response. “I dunno,” I finally said. “In that I am cut off from my home and the people I love, yes, I suppose I am. But I don’t know what caused me to be here and now. Maybe it was God, maybe the Fausticorn decided to play a cosmic joke...” I shrugged as I trailed off.

She turned to me, “The places your mind takes us during our battles, are these all places you’ve been?”

I snorted, “Nah. Well, some, but most of them come from either shows I’ve watched or popular fiction.”

She reached a hoof over to the center console of the van and tapped at some of the buttons. I used my magic to turn on the radio, which fortunately was playing some of my favorite music. Hey, my dream, my playlist. Nightmare raised an eyebrow, “And this conveyance, is it also from your fiction?”

I chuckled, “Nope. I drove this for the better part of five years until it got blowed up in what I think was a freak accident.”

She seemed surprised at that, but said nothing as we drove for a bit more. The dreamscape whizzed by, a blur of city blocks that were an amalgam of Denver, San Diego, and Phoenix.

“I…” she began, finally interrupting the silence, “You are right. I am lonely.”

“After I was locked in the moon, I had...some access to the dreams of my subjects, for a time. News of Celestia’s betrayal spread, of course, but for a while some of my subjects allowed me into their mindscapes.”

Her eyes were looking out the front windshield, but her gaze was nearly a millennia in the past, “Celestia...some stories began to spread. I became the boogie-mare, the scary monster that would attack naughty foals in their sleep. I’m sure my sister was behind it, probably to prevent my subjects from finding a way to release me from my prison. Within two generations my little ponies had forgotten I was even Celestia’s sister, let alone a rightful ruler of Equestria, and their minds began to be blocked to me. Within two more generations, I was completely barred from the dreams of my subjects.”

A scripture I had read came to mind, “‘And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, between thy seed and her seed; and he shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.’” I recited. At her quizzical look, I replied, “It’s from the scriptures of the church I’m part of. It explains how God kept...let’s just say it’s directly analogous and answers a few questions about your situation. Enmity being an actual spiritual force would do a darn good job of keeping you out of people’s...er, pony’s heads.” ...and would explain how the “old mare’s tales” about Nightmare Moon got started, I thought but didn’t say, A campaign to suppress the origin of Nightmare Moon and her life as Luna, hero of the realm, would ensure the Nightmare couldn’t spread.

For a bit, she was quiet, before she said, “We would be done with our combat. It profiteth Us not.”

Lost Little Wolf

by PrincessColumbia

Chapter 5 - Bargaining