//------------------------------//
// Ch 2 - The Stars in Low Fields 
// Story: Making Wishes on the Furthest Stars 
// by Henbane Skies 
//------------------------------//

Chapter Two
The Stars in Low Fields

There was nothing sinister about the day. But then, there was nothing sinister about that day, was there?

Fluttershy followed close behind Twilight, feeling the gentle pull of her cottage behind her. Angel Bunny was with her, curled up into a little ball on her back, sleeping soundly in the sunlight. His presence was a comfort, as comforting as comfort came to her, but the closer she got to the little house on the hill, little boxspring home hardly big enough to be called a shack, with its walls painted a blue as dark as the deepest part of a lake, its roof shingles as purple as old bruises, the more she wanted to turn around and run back home, where things were familiar.

She’d told herself that she’d grown over the years, that she’d become braver and stronger since that little pegasus filly first fell from the clouds into her new life. She told herself that she’d been through so much with her friends, so much adventure and heartache that surely she ought to be numbed by it now, or at least willing to accept it. But there was a word for telling oneself something that isn’t true, and that word was delusion.

The silvery fairy mist that lay about the low fields and hills surrounding Ponyville was already being burned away by the sun, still hanging about in shallow patches. The air smelled of dew and the shadowed woods. Sparrows alighted on a rocky outcropping, calling to her or to each other. The shrill chicka-dee-dee-dee-dee of the smaller yellow birds came to her ears from the distant edge of the woods and the tall bushes that dotted the field. There was nothing sinister about any of this.

The sky was blue then, too, she thought to herself, staring at the ground passing between her hooves. The sky was blue and empty, everypony was happy, every animal was happy, We were so excited about the celebration. And then she came…

She knew exactly what would happen once she had that thought, thinking it anyway because she needed a reason to think it this time. Thinking about it in the daytime seemed nominally better than at night, when the shadows tried to weave her fantasies into truth. Memories of black ships lurching through black clouds, monsters in masks, running, running, trying to make sure the animals and her friends were safe, the princesses turned to crystal, a unicorn that held back no ounce of her hate. And more running.

“Do you really think that she might be hurt, Twilight?” she asked, and the delusion she told herself to believe was that she wanted to know that answer.

Twilight glanced at her over her shoulder. There was an odd expression on her face, one that Fluttershy couldn’t immediately place, but she knew she had seen before. “I don’t know. I hope not. She was acting a little odd that night…”

“How odd?”

The wind blew in Fluttershy’s ear and filled in the silence as Twilight thought about the question. Fluttershy was about to assume Twilight had ignored it when she suddenly said “Like frenzied odd. The-end-is-nigh odd, I guess.”

Fluttershy waited for her friend to say more, but when it was clear that she wasn’t going to, she turned her eyes up to the little house on the hill instead, the little blood blister that brooded and stared out from the field toward the town. The road that led out of Ponyville bled into a smaller path on the right that curved around a shallow recess in the ground, then righted itself, going some distance in a straight line, up to the base of the hill. No mailbox, just as Twilight had said. There was a porch hanging out over the eastern side of the hill, the support beams looking like they were made by ponies who had no intention of doing an adequate job. Windows like blind eyes stared at them, dark curtains betraying no secret. A garden had been set up at the base of the hill, hemmed in by crooked picket-fence walls.

Fluttershy followed Twilight, keeping close, feeling as though danger would burst out of the door or the windows, or fall from the empty sapphire-skinned sky. They followed the path up to the garden, smelling vegetative decay.

“Wow,” Twilight said. “Those flowers didn’t even try to put up a fight.”

Fluttershy nudged at a bushel with her wingtip. By now Angel had woken up and was diligently inspecting the garden for any free treats, though the faces he was making was evidence that there was no hope for these plants. “The raspberries seem to be doing okay,” Fluttershy mumbled halfheartedly. The raspberries were not at all okay, but they were the only fruit in the garden that didn’t seem to be as spoiled as the rest.

Twilight was already stepping up to the porch, the sound of her hooves giving a hollow echo across the low fields, the kind you’d hear when you tap on a watermelon to know if it’s ripe or not. Fluttershy trotted up behind her, Angel seated comfortably on her back between her wings. It wasn’t as terrible as the visions her daydreams had painted, but there was some unseen quality that made her skin crawl. The world had become a Dada-esque painting and Fluttershy was trying to find that secondary image.

Twilight raised her hoof to knock on the front door but then paused, her head tilted to the side. Her ears swiveled around for a moment. “Do you hear that?”

It’s quiet, Fluttershy thought just then, knowing that that wasn’t true. At the top of the hill, the wind was blowing. Up here, the wind seemed like it was screaming.

Twilight’s horn glowed, and the doorknob rattled; the door wouldn’t open. She turned in place, her back to the door, then bucked it as hard as she could. The frame splintered, spraying them both with wood and plaster, but the lock held. She hit it again, and this time the door flew open, rocking on its one good hinge before the screw fell out and the whole piece clattered at an angle into the thin entryway.

“Twilight…” Fluttershy began then stopped, her eyes wide.

“Ow.” The alicorn limped into the hall, keeping off her rear right leg. She levitated the door out of their way, shoving it against the wall. The wind was louder in here than outside, a rhythmic undulating noise that rasped in her ears. Her chest tightened, and she realized that the wind she was hearing was her own frantic breath.

Twilight shouted as they stepped through the entryway and into the kitchen. “Fizzlepop!? It’s me and Fluttershy! Where are you!?”

Twilight had dodged through a hallway, leading presumably to the bathroom on the left and the bedroom on the right, so she wasn’t the first to see it. Fluttershy felt the rough tapping of Angel’s paw on the back of her neck, on the left side. She instinctively turned her eyes into what she would later understand to be the living room. A living room was not what she saw when she looked there.

Light, the same bloody color of tomato-skin, filled the entire room, making her think for the barest of moments that the house was burning down, even though there was no smoke and no smell of charring wood. The screaming was coming from here, and now she was certain that it was screaming, centered on a group of shadows, arranged in a semicircle around a crouched figure near the left wall, huddled beneath a thick blanket. 

Something brushed against her hair, making her heart leap up into her throat. The thing buzzed noisily past her face, some twisted combination of crustacean and grasshopper, making a sound like rifling through a stack of paper. More buzzed and hummed through the room, lighting on the walls and the one curtained window. She was scared, horribly scared, and as much as she wanted to run, for all the desire she had to get out of this terrible place, her hooves couldn’t leave the ground.

“Fluttershy, what’s that…that noise…” From some distant realm Fluttershy could feel Twilight rub against her side, heard her voice, but both sensations were awfully muffled, drowned out, as though Fluttershy were experiencing it all from the black and scummy bottom of a lake.

One of the tall shadows stepped forward, away from the light, and when a pair of great blue wings shot up, the darkness cleared away, and Fluttershy saw that it was Rainbow Dash. She had to assume it was Rainbow Dash; it had the same body type, the same color mane and coat, the same voice, but there was no face.

“Look at you,” the voice screamed, laughed cockishly, coming from somewhere around that featureless blue bulb. “What are you dedicated to? What are you loyal to? A monster or a filly’s aspirations—they’re both dead! Deader than dead! What good are you, if you’d sell yourself out to the highest bidder, if you’re blind enough to take in any offer at the drop of a hat? Stupid mare, doing everything that she’s told just to fuel her own delusions! What do you think you’re dedicated to!?”

The faceless pegasus laughed as she stepped away, back into the orange-red light, laughter still coming from the shapeless blue thing that was its face. Then the body rippled as it deteriorated, dissolved into a swarm of those crustacean-like insects. They hung about the air for a while before alighting on the wall, their wings like laughter. Another spectre took the cue to step forward, one that looked far too much like Pinkie Pie. This Pinkie Pie didn’t speak very much, she only screamed. There were words fragmented into those screams, sentences cobbled loosely together by the intake of each strained breath, but Fluttershy couldn’t comprehend them.

When Pinkie Pie’s voice faltered and faded into coarse weeping she stepped back—Fluttershy saw that her hooves left red marks that gleamed in the light—and Applejack stepped forward. Something dark and blue fell out, spilling out over her lips. Her eyes had been sewn shut with thick catgut. “You’re a monster,” she—it—said, its voice like hooves dragging along corrugated steel. “You scared of me? You’re scared of what I got—honesty. You’re scared of taking a good looooong look inside yourself and seein’ what you already see. Huh…You give and you take and you try to make the world better, and that’s balance, girl, that’s harmony, but you been taking way too much. That ain’t balance. There’s got to be compensation, got to be a reckonin’. You got to pay for what you done, but you know that already, don’t you? You ain’t going to find anypony to help you, but you know that, too, don’t you?”

Every word that the nightmarish Applejack said made the dark bluish liquid spew onto the floor, where it spat and sizzled and smoked into the wood. It ate away at the mare’s flesh, liquefying it into an orange stew. By the time she had finished speaking, she was little more than a knobby substance seeping through the cracks in the floorboards. A unicorn then stepped out of the light, her coat dazzlingly white with a majestic purple mane. Fluttershy saw nothing wrong with her, nothing at all. It didn’t make her any less horrifying.

This new awful Rarity walked slowly to the huddled figure beneath the blanket, a skeleton’s grin on her face. Her eyes were normal, but then they went wrong, dilating into black pits and she laughed. “I don’t need to tell you about generosity, do I? Oh, yes, you know ALL about that! You know all about the charity of contempt, you little abomination. I hope you rot!”

Rarity’s horn fell out and thudded to the floor, as though it weren’t attached to her skull at all. A dozen segmented legs broke out of either side of the horn and the thing skittered away, into and out of the light. Lines appeared on Rarity’s face, and when it blossomed open like a malignant rose Fluttershy had shut her eyes tight, as greased as they were with her tears. She shook her head of the bad thoughts and the bad images but they still came at her, appearing behind the backs of her eyelids. The sounds of other things thumping down onto the ground made her crouch down and throw her hooves up over her ears.

Twilight’s voice sounded throughout the room. Not the Twilight beside her, as she’d hoped. “What friends do you have? Every creature you’ve met, you’ve used for your own profit. Your only friends are the crows and the worms that clean up your messes. You’re not my friend, you’re a problem. You need to be corrected. We need to fix you.”

Fluttershy opened her eyes against her better judgment, against everything that screamed at her to keep her eyes closed. Whatever Twilight might have been there, it was gone. There was a new scorch mark on the floor.

A twisting of shadow in the corner of the room, and the light of perpetual dusk washed over the phantom that had been sitting there, weeping. Fluttershy blanched, almost vomited, when she saw herself. The other Fluttershy sat up as she turned and walked slowly, almost drunkenly, toward the blanketed figure. Her eyes were bloodshot and her cheeks and chin were wet.

“How could you!? How could you!? How could you!?” The words echoed like knives scraped across a chalkboard, and Fluttershy, the one that was certain she was too scared to scream, began to breathe in ragged choking gasps.

The crouched figure was saying something, shook its head and mumbled something too quiet to be heard over the laughing and the weeping. The yellow mare, tears still spilling from her eyes like beads of glass in the light, spread her wings, and dust blew off of them in a sulfurous mist. The real Fluttershy brushed at her eyes, her voice coming from far away. “Twilight…”

The pegasus disappeared, blown away on some invisible wind. Another spectre materialized from the light, and from another world Fluttershy heard Twilight gasp. She wiped her eyes again and saw Princess Celestia standing there. Tall, beautiful, and regal, as she should be…but there was something wrong. Chains were dangling from the folds of her wings, beginning nowhere, twisted ends dragging on the floor. Things were writhing in her mane and tail.

The huddled figure shrank away from the princess, the blanket shifting enough that Fluttershy could see a muzzle, so dark it was almost black in the light. The not-Celestia walked like a knife dragging across warm bread, her head drawn downward in a threatening manner, the long helical horn glimmering like a silver-white spearhead. Her mouth moved, whispers too soft and too lethal to be carelessly thrown around, while grey-black smoke leaked from her blazing hateful eyes.

“I’m sorry,” came a noise below the blanket, trembling voice hardly more than a rasping in the wind. “I’m sorry…just stop it, please…”

“Twilight,” Fluttershy moaned.

The wind screamed with the voice of every ghost and demon conjured for Nightmare Night, rippling in their ears, but by some terrible stroke of ill fortune, an alignment of the wrong chances, Fluttershy had still managed to hear the last few words the not-princess had said.

“That’s enough!” Twilight shouted. There was the brief, deep sound of a massive pool of magical energy being ripped into reality, a brilliant flash of violet-white light, and the smoldering Celestia was gone. The red-orange light was gone. There was only the small living room, with barely any furniture to prove that there had been life here. There was only the dream catcher, hanging suspended in the air for a few moments before clattering to the floor.

The figure in the blanket jerked up into a standing position. Fizzlepop’s eyes were red and bulging, black circles sinking into her upper cheeks, as though she hadn’t slept for a long time. Something clattered to the middle of the floor, but Fluttershy didn’t see what it was. She could only look at the unicorn’s left front leg, at the latticework of weeping red marks from hoof to shoulder. “Get away from me!” she shrieked, and in a hobbling sottish manner she turned and ran through a backdoor.

“Fizzlepop, wait!” Twilight screamed, limping to catch up with her. She flapped her wings as well as she could in the small space to gain ground over her quarry.

Fluttershy listened to herself catching her breath back. She licked at her dry lips, feeling them become dry a second later, as dry as the rest of her mouth. She pushed herself up on wobbly legs, afraid to move more than an inch in case she, by some magical fault, had caused that horrible light to reappear and the screaming to return.

Something was shaking against the tip of her pink mane. Terrified that it was one of those repulsive insects, she turned her head, as slow as slow could be defined without meaning “to not move.” Angel Bunny was quivering in a tight ball in the small of her back, making little frightened noises. She nudged him with her nose until his eyes opened. “It’s okay, Angel,” she said, wondering if that was true or not. “I think it’s over now.”

She looked back into the living room, finally seeing what had clattered into the center of the floor. “I think…it’s over now,” she said again, trying to figure out a way to stand as tremors ran up her legs, trying to figure out a way she could ever get to sleep without hearing what she had heard here today. Wondering how she could ever close her eyes without seeing the ruby gleam of a little fruit knife, salivating on the cracked floorboards.


Fizzlepop tripped over the back porch when she dragged her hoof over the top step at an awkward angle. Twilight was steps behind her, and one poorly-timed flap from her wings sent her into the other mare. The two tumbled over the porch, down the hill, and into the tall grass in an agonized tangle of limbs. Twilight felt her elbow hit a rock on the way down, her entire leg filling with tingling fire.

Twilight didn’t know which way was which when their fall ended, whether the sky was up or down. She twisted about to untangle herself, even when equilibrium had already righted itself, trying to move her head slowly so her horn wouldn’t find a stomach or a flailing limb. Fizzlepop was thrashing her hooves and head like a madmare as she struggled to break out from under Twilight. The alicorn tried to force the mare down and into the grass. “Fizzlepop, stop it! Calm down!”

A lucky kick took the wind out of Twilight’s lungs. Surprised, her wings instinctively fanned out. She grabbed at Fizzlepop’s head, trying to force her to look up and see. “Snap out of it!” she managed to rasp.

Fizzlepop’s eyes rolled, saliva frothing at her mouth. She was crying. “Get away from me, Twilight! Get away from me, please!”

“No! Not until you…just calm down! Why are you acting like this!?” Twilight tried to focus, tried to think of a spell that would calm the unicorn down, but her mind was coming up blank. Her friend’s safety was above the name of any spell.

Fizzlepop snatched the opportunity and bit down on Twilight’s leg, an explosion of pain bursting into brilliant white and red flowers in her eyes. Twilight grimaced as she pulled back her hoof, the one that was still tingling, and struck Fizzlepop just above her eye. The mare’s head rocked against the ground and Twilight felt her body slacken beneath her, no more fight in her than the wheatgrass and foxtails that obliviously rippled under the breeze.

Twilight froze, stunned. She hadn’t just done that, had she? The pins and needles were fading from her leg, but the small jolt it took when she struck Fizzlepop still resonated through her body. Words formed and died in her mouth. The sound of hooves drew her eyes back, seeing Fluttershy trotting to the porch, her eyes wide and moist.

Fizzlepop wept tears and words, and all of it garbled in her despair. Twilight asked her what, what was she saying, receiving no answer other than those choked and choking sounds. Twilight bent down, brushing back Fizzlepop’s dirty hair, hair the color of raspberries or carved bloodstone. Tears were beginning to well in her own eyes now as she bent closer, straining to hear.

“What? What are you trying to say?”

The unicorn coughed, swallowed, gasped. Twilight could just barely make out the words “I infect everything…Everything near me…ruined.”

An idea came into Twilight’s head. She focused her magic, threads of silvery-yellow light weaving through the air between the two ponies. Twilight shushed her, continuing to brush her hair back. “It’s alright, everything’s alright. This will help you sleep, Fizzlepop.”

Her eyes immediately went wide and she began to twist beneath Twilight again. “No! No! No!”

“Twilight!”

The mare’s eyes fluttered for a second before closing, her body going slack again and her ragged breathing flattening out. She fell asleep with a deep grimace, as though pained. Fluttershy ran up beside them, sweat beading and running through the fur of her cheeks. “Twilight, what did you…”

“It was only an anesthetic spell, Fluttershy. She’ll be asleep for a while.”

“It sounded like she didn’t want it.”

Twilight rounded on the pegasus, trying to put all of her emotion into her eyes while being calm, wondering just how she could be calm at all. “I know that! I heard what she said! But there was no other way I could be certain that she wouldn’t get loose again and do more damage.”

The two mares stared at the sleeping unicorn, expecting something to happen, another scoop on the bizarre sundae this weekend had become, but the day spurned them. There was only the whispering wheatgrass, the wind blowing in their ears. Twilight let out a breath she hadn’t been aware she was holding. Forgetting, she pushed down on her sprained hoof and hissed through her teeth, jerking that leg back into the air.

“We have to get her to the hospital,” Twilight said.

“Do you think they’ll accept her, Twilight? I mean, considering who she is?”

Twilight stared at Fluttershy, not comprehending. Surely a health care facility wouldn’t have any predilections or biases against a pony, or any creature, in need of care. If any structure could be counted on to have a view that was unbiased if anything, it was a hospital. It was even in the name: from the word hospitium, meaning “guesthouse.” Her mind turned to images of ponies being turned down, ponies dying, and being turned down not because of some rubbish legal formality but because the staff just didn’t want to see them.

Twilight scowled. “They better. If they know what’s good for them, they just better.”


By noon, they managed to establish Fizzlepop a room up on the third floor of the hospital. A nurse stood by and monitored the unicorn’s heart rate at regular intervals, a dour expression on her face, as though she were checking the oven again to see how the bread was doing. Fizzlepop’s leg had been cleaned and bandaged all the way up to the shoulder, red staining through in some spots like malign calligraphy. Fluttershy had stayed with her while Twilight teleported away, to “see to things,” as she put it.

The yellow pegasus looked at the unicorn with the broken horn. The pony who had done so much damage and whom Twilight had expected everyone to befriend. She didn’t look as dangerous as she did then, not as she did in Fluttershy’s daydreams. She looked like something coughed up by an owl. Fluttershy stared, not feeling fear, not feeling sympathy. She only watched the rise and fall of the dark mare’s chest beneath the blanket, the subtle movements of her eyes beneath closed lids, wondering just what she should be feeling.

“Twilight said she’d be here soon,” Fluttershy said, not really caring if Fizzlepop could hear here or not. Her own voice was more comforting than the sterile white ceiling tiles, the grey-green wallpaper with the fake pink butterflies that looked too much like bats, the beeping and whirring of machinery, and the back-and-forth calls between doctors and nurses and patients in the halls outside. “She went to take care of a few things, I think. They shouldn’t take long, not really. I hope she gets here soon. I hope you…”

Fluttershy sighed, not knowing what else to say and letting the sentence falter. This place was making her thoughts come up like the featureless tiles above her, as scentless as the air or as dull as the fluorescent lights. She stepped closer to Fizzlepop, or Tempest, whatever name she was going by now. Fluttershy frowned at that, wondering why she hadn’t even bothered to ask about it. A name was just as important to a pony as a cutie mark, if not more so.

She glanced at Angel Bunny, snoozing on his side in the low cushioned chair. The chair stood next to the window, and the warm sunshine had lulled the rabbit into a peaceful sleep.

After they had come back from Canterlot, after the dust of the Storm King’s siege had settled back down and ponies began to return to their homes, Fluttershy had discovered that Angel Bunny was missing from her cottage. He never left the cottage if he didn’t know she would be back there soon enough. It had been ten days, ten long and excruciating days Fluttershy had spent flying around town or running through the Everfree forest, looking in the shadowed corners of the Whitetail Woods and the nearby fields, searching for her little friend. She had supposed, one day, that he had been alarmed by the black ships in the sky, the smoke coming from where she said she would be, and he had gone out to look for her.

She asked anyone who would listen, and some ponies had helped her, when they had the time to spare. Her mind ran through all the possible scenarios a young rabbit like Angel might have met his end, as much as she tried to force her mind to focus on other things it would always circle around to those awful thoughts. She would become so anxious that she would be sick, couldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep. She could only wonder what had happened, and a minute of wondering was worse than a whole day spent searching and not finding him.

On the tenth day, there was a storm. In response to the attack on Canterlot and the ultimate victory over the Storm King’s forces, Cloudsdale had allowed several weeks without rain, the longest it had gone without precipitation for that season in a long time. In the middle of the night, Fluttershy, unable to sleep with her stomach heaving up into her throat, heard the frantic scratching of a little claw on her door. She opened it as a blue claw of electricity cut through the sky and illuminated a little bunny on her doorstep. He hardly looked alive, this little rabbit that more closely resembled a foal’s toy that had been left out in the backyard for a year, half drowned with rain and mud. The moment his eyes met hers, a big smile broke out on his face and he leapt up into her hooves. She screamed his name, weeping and laughing, words like relief and happiness not strong enough to define the sensations that poured from her heart.

Fizzlepop reminded her of how her Angel Bunny looked then, coming in from the storm. Bedraggled and unkempt, and so very tired. Her eyes fell to the mare’s bandaged arm, drawn up in a sling, white and red and white.

“I don’t know how I should feel about you. When I think about you, you scare me, but sometimes you make me angry, too. What you did to my friends and my neighbors, what you managed to do in just a few days, it makes the idea of forgiving you almost laughable. But…I guess I pity you more than anything. Yes, I feel bad for you. Rarity says that’s a weakness of mine, but I’ve never seen it like that. I’ve never seen it as a weakness at all.” Fluttershy saw that there were blades of wheatgrass and dirt in Fizzlepop’s hair; she reached up and did her best to brush them away, instead getting them onto the pillow, where they slid down and below the blanket. Fluttershy stood back and sighed.

There was a brief flash of light and Twilight stood at the doorway. Fluttershy saw that her face was pale and her mouth was as thin a line as it could possibly be. Something was dangling from her hoof, a dream catcher. There was a beautiful phoenix feather hanging from a quartz-bead string. Near the central strands were three gleaming beads, all yellow-red.

“Twilight? What’s wrong?”

The alicorn limped into the room. Both of her injured legs had already been bandaged, even though the back one was only a mild sprain. She looked like she had no inclination to turn her eyes anywhere near Fizzlepop. “I made a mistake,” she said, horror filtering her voice into a whisper. “She…she wanted me to show her a way to record her dreams, so she could see them again. I initiated it before she left, but I…I must have mistaken the proper way to initiate it, or something. It was supposed to store the dreams she had wanted to see in these beads, and it did that just fine. She was supposed to be able to trigger them whenever she wanted, bringing her consciousness into the dream, but that’s where the magic must have gotten tangled. Instead, the dreams had become inverted, playing out in the real world instead of her mind. When they started doing that, there was no way for her to focus so she could stop it. They must have been going and bleeding into each other when she first triggered it, like separate veins of paint running together.”

“They were real?” Fluttershy said, her eyebrows shooting up into her scalp.

“No…technically no. Not any more than any dream can be. Of course, if the brain perceives the sensations to be real, and since the body is regulated by the brain, then, naturally, problems can arise…”

Fluttershy looked back at Fizzlepop, her mouth slack, a wet stain spreading along her pillow. “What was it she wanted to see again, Twilight? Didn’t she tell you what her dream was about?”

Twilight bared her teeth. “No, she didn’t. And I was stupid enough that I didn’t bother asking! She didn’t seem interested in staying, and I didn’t press her…I probably should have. Celestia…I didn’t think things would turn out like this. She must not have slept since I gave this stupid thing to her.”

Twilight let the dream catcher drop to the floor. She crushed it under her hoof, silvery threads and the power that ran through them snapping with the crackly sound of broken spider webs. The beads cracked and flared as they popped, little stars dying out. Fluttershy looked down sadly at the phoenix feather, not quite as big as the one she kept, the one given to her by Princess Celestia’s own pet. The memory made her heart ache for yesterdays she wanted to experience again. When things weren’t as they were now.

“When do you think she’ll wake up?” Fluttershy wiped at her eyes. She waited for Twilight to answer; feeling like the pause was reflective on what the alicorn was going to say.

“I really don’t know, Fluttershy. I could wake her up with a spell, that shouldn’t be more than a few—.”

“No.”

Twilight flinched. Fluttershy had slammed her hoof down hard on the ceramic tile, thunderously loud. The pegasus stood glaring at her with so much contained rage and desperation that she had to take a wobbly step backward. “No more magic, Twilight. It seems to me that magic is the problem behind this, don’t you?”

The purple mare stood with her mouth hanging open, snapping it shut only when Fluttershy looked away. The pegasus turned and looked out of the window, staring down the three floors into the town below, a cold universe between her and Twilight.

Some time had passed—the doctor came in to see how Fizzlepop was doing, knowing full well that she was still asleep. Probably going through the movements in front of the princess to show that he could pretend to care about the patient, Fluttershy mused, frowning up into the big empty sky. The doctor left after some trivial chitchat with the princess of friendship.

Twilight was about to say something but Fluttershy cut her off. “Does Princess Luna know anything about this, Twilight? Can she do something for her?” Or did she do something to her, she wanted to ask, but didn’t. Another thought best kept hidden away.

There was a pause as Twilight thought out her response. A familiar mailmare flew by the window and waved at Fluttershy, but she flew off before the yellow pegasus could return it.

“I spoke to Luna the night after Fizzlepop came to me about the spell. I asked her if she knew anything about the dreams she wanted to see again, trying to be clever and sneaky about it, but I think I just made Luna angry. And we know she doesn’t know anything about this since Fizzlepop wasn’t awake. She doesn’t seem to care much for Fizzlepop…”

Fluttershy sniffed, looking over her shoulder at her friend. “Princess Luna was imprisoned for a thousand years, Twilight. I don’t think she much cared for being imprisoned again.”

“But we fixed it, Fluttershy! She helped fix it. Shouldn’t that count for something?”

There was yet another uncomfortable silence, broken by the constant hospital hum around them. Fluttershy opened her mouth, looked at the unicorn’s bandaged leg, roses on white lace, then shut her mouth again. She shook her head and turned back to the window, pleasant spring afternoon with the big sky and all its emptiness. It was then that Fluttershy had a terrible thought, one to push away all the rest with its bleating growls. That the sky is never blue, not really. The blue is just a kind of blindness caused by the sun, a veil to hide the earth from the nothingness and the stars inside of it, and it wasn’t really real. But the stars were always watching, veil or no veil, they were always there, unseen and silent.

Fluttershy sighed, and watched, and waited.


Eternity was condensed into a few precious moments, the entirety of the cosmos packed nice and tight into a little moonlit field.

She recognized this field with its rolling hills, and the little town nestled on the edge of the deep woodlands surrounding all of it. It was all so close to her, sights and smells buried so deep in her mind and so close to her chest that it began to hurt. Something deeper than cartilage or muscle or sinew snapping. She walked into the empty and silent town, her hooves brushing through the low fog that clung to the ground like the steam that hovered over a swamp. Lights were on in the windows, staring at her like the watchful golden eyes of owls.

Fizzlepop Berrytwist looked up into the night sky, expecting to see something up there—not really knowing what, just expecting something. Suddenly, laughter, small and pleasant laughter from a group of foals filled the night. It bounced off the walls of the houses and escaped down the deserted streets. Fizzlepop wanted to run and hide. Not being seen right now seemed like the most brilliant plan she’d ever had.

Two unicorn foals, not yet old enough to have their cutie marks, trotted up to the rear window of one of the houses, one that didn’t have a light on. They were trying not to laugh, trying to be serious and shushing each other. Fizzlepop watched them, her mouth hanging open, knowing exactly who those foals were. It’s not possible, she thought, her eyes refuting that possibility.

One knelt down so the other could hop up on their shoulders. The lower foal pushed himself up off the ground, the filly putting her hooves up on the windowsill. She squinted into the dark, cupping her hooves around her face.

“Berry!” she whispered as loud as she dared. She tapped on the windowsill; a rock would have made less noise. “Berry, are you asleep?”

“She wouldn’t answer you if she was asleep, dummy!”

“Don’t call me a dummy, dummy!”

Suddenly the window flew up and another small unicorn, a filly with a fan-shaped mane and a coat the color of raspberries leapt out of the dark. “Gotcha!” she whispered, sending all threw foals into a rollicking heap. They twisted through the low wet grass, laughing and shushing each other. Fizzlepop felt her heart jerk up, her throat closing shut and her mouth turning dry as a brick when she saw the filly.

The three managed to disentangle themselves, walking out into the street, keeping close to each other. “I thought you two would be here sooner. Didja get lost or something?”

Was that my voice? Did I used to sound like that?

“Sorry, Berry. My mom kept checking up on me.  I’m not really good at faking being asleep.”

“That’s easy!” one of the colts said. “You just have to breathe normally with your eyes shut. Your parents have to see the blanket going up and down.”

“Oh. Hey! Who’s got the lamps?”

The filly gasped and ran back to her home, to the bushes under her window. She came back, levitating three big lamps with removable glass cases. She floated two toward the others. “Where should we go? I saw a bunch out in the field.”

“Nah, the biggest ones are down by the creek, behind the Bonnet’s place.”

The three foals laughed and shushed each other, practically twitching with the excitement of the night. Fizzlepop watched them walk past her, expecting them to stop, to look up at her and run away scared. The three foals didn’t seem to acknowledge her presence, even though they had been bare feet away. I was never that small, was I? she thought.

“There’s one!” one of the foals cried out, ignoring the others’ attempts to quiet him, and they all took off down a split in the path. Fizzlepop followed them, seeing them climb up and over a fence and run through somepony’s backyard. The large yard sloped down for a ways before coming to a small but noisy creek at the foot of the woods, silver blue in the moonlight. That’s right, Fizzlepop remembered, her breathing as shallow as a pond in summer. We were going to catch fireflies that night because…

“They’re supposed to be magic,” Fizzlepop murmured into the night. She watched the foals running along the bank of the creek where the water was constantly eating away at the land, jumping into the air and swiping at the flickering insects. Tears filled her eyes as an unbearable sadness filled her heart.

Something hit her nose, a water droplet. She looked up, and there was no sky.

Stalactites like the teeth of a colossal beast hung down from the location where, moments ago, she had seen a familiar constellation. Every sound took on a resonant quality, and the air felt like it was clutching her in a bitter embrace. There were no more stars, no moon, only the flickering lights in the windows, and those began to flicker. The plink-plink-plink sound of water tapping against limestone formations seemed to echo into forever.

She couldn’t see the foals anymore but she could still hear them, their laughter as sharp as nails scratching in her ears, the walls doing funny things to the sound as they traveled through the shapeless black cavern. Fizzlepop began to shake her head, small noises leaking over her lips; she knew exactly where this dream had taken her.

The foals’ laughter abruptly cut out, as though a cord had been unplugged. There was only the small mutterings of the unseen creek and the bubble-pop sounds of falling water. She wanted to run, not caring that she didn’t know where she was, or that a place that was effectively nowhere had no entrance and no exit. She was back in a part of the dream 

Please, not again. Not this place again. If there is any power watching over me please please please get me out of here don’t let me see this again…

The lights faded out. Fizzlepop had the sense of being nowhere and being nothing, that she wasn’t even real. The world around her felt more real than her. She moved her head to look for a possibility out of this, her muscles feeling light years away from where they ought to be.

There were stars in the cave.

Fizzlepop froze as constellations wove and danced themselves into existence, astral parthenogenesis. Threads of a faint blue aura twirled between and around them, encircling them even as a galaxy, consolidated into the rough shape of something immense, pushed itself up into view. Two stars shined larger and brighter than the rest, two gardens of foxgloves or poisonous mushrooms gleaming with cold wetness, infinitely more beautiful and deadly beyond those feeble comparisons. Her eyes and her head began to hurt as her mind tried to translate the object into something mercilessly coherent.

The final few stars resolved into the muzzle of a huge mammal, a bear. She felt all the air ripped out of her lungs when its eyes glared down at her. Something rumbled deep inside the cavern, the sound of thunder churning, worlds cracking asunder. She tried to breathe normally, breathing too much as she tried to grab enough air, her vision blurring at the edges. Run run get out of here get away get away! She tried to move, but her hooves felt like they were made out of cement; strange shapes were forming in the steam made by her breath.

The ursa minor opened its jaws to roar, nose scraping the roof, mandible furrowing the cave floor, the doorway into oblivion staring right at her. Something loosened inside of her, and she finally found her voice. Her scream was a firecracker against a typhoon.

One of the stars between the creature’s eyes flared with a brilliant silvery light. It ripped itself out of the bear’s head and floated down, down, down to the cold cave floor. Fizzlepop watched as it hovered toward her, feeling something not as cold as the frigid womb of a cave, but more akin to a slow calm night. Waves of comfort fell over her, soothing the terror in her chest and her aching head.

Suddenly the light flared again, and Princess Luna stood tall and exalted between her and the star bear. Her wings stretched out and gave one great flap, kicking up a wave of dust and detritus.

“You have no power here,” the princess said. “Leave.” Her wings gave another monstrous flap and Fizzlepop watched the ursa minor vanish, the stars blown apart and the creature’s aura dissipating like so much smoke in a breeze. There was one fading rumble like distant thunder, becoming hardly more than the memory of an echo.

Luna’s horn glowed and flared, the cave around them disappearing in a flash of light. Around them, the field was awash in the glow of a full moon, low fog weaving through the muttering grass and the creek burbling incessantly in the distance. It was warm, like being in a blanket woven from shadow and starlight. Small fireflies flickered yellow-green in their little dances, and one landed on the tip of her nose. She brushed it away and watched it fly off towards the little hamlet, still sitting there in the hollow of the field. Somewhere, foals were laughing.

The flicker of violet-blue drew her eyes up and Princess Luna was standing at the top of the hill, watching her with an unreadable expression. In truth, it wasn’t half as unreadable as Fizzlepop pretended it was. She recognized that frown, the accusatory look in her eyes, the same look that made the expulsion of mirrors and the installment of curtains over the windows in her house a vital prerequisite. Thunder rumbled somewhere; she walked up to the princess, keeping her eyes down to the grass.

“Princess Luna?” she asked. The dream was taking a different turn now. She remembered hearing from Twilight that Luna visited ponies in their dreams for the purpose of driving away their nightmares; she herself had never had such a visitation, and considered the tales as hearsay.

“Walk with me.”

The alicorn turned and began walking down the hill, fireflies trailing in her wake like the tiny galaxies in her tail. Fizzlepop scowled, uncertain, then trotted to catch up to Luna.

They walked in silence for a while, listening to the quiet. An owl hooted somewhere, just once before quieting down. The three foals came running up from the creek dripping wet, their lamps held up high and glowing with fireflies. They were all smiling and laughing, forgetting they ought to be quiet tonight. The unicorn watched her past run away from her, carousing with her friends. Her heart ached.

“Who are you?”

Fizzlepop frowned, not sure she had heard that, even less sure that she wanted to answer that. “What?”

“You heard me correctly. Who are you?”

The unicorn bit the inside of her cheek, amused that even in this dream she could feel the sharp sting of a nerve being crushed between her molars. “I’m Fizzlepop Berrytwist.” 

“Are you sure?”

She scowled, heat flooding her face. She didn’t like this. The nightmares she could accept because they were familiar, they were what she deserved. The route of questioning Luna was taking was unfamiliar and discomforting. “Yes.”

The alicorn let out a sigh that sounded pained in Fizzlepop’s ears, making wish she’d just kept her mouth shut. Instead, she pricked her ears up when Luna cleared her throat. “Long ago, in a distant place, there was a temple built for meditation and for discovery. A place of knowledge. Some ponies lived in that temple, forsaking everything they owned and everyone they knew because they could hear things others could not. They could feel things that others could not. Those ponies were called Oracles. Some of the knowledge they coveted and held in secret, but some secrets they carved all across the walls of their temple.”

Fizzlepop looked behind her. The town was fading away now, the woodlands rearing up before them like huge patches of black fur. She felt like a flea walking along the skin of a dog. Fizzlepop took in a deep breath as Luna continued.

“One night, something bad happened to that little temple and all the ponies inside. There are no records of what happened, none left alive to remember.” Here Luna paused, staring up at the sky. Something small and pretty blazed across the surface of that blue velvet sea. “There are ruins, shattered pieces of something that had once been grand. In the forecourt leading into nothing, there are words carved into the stone. Gnothi seauton. Do you know what these words mean?”

“No.”

“They mean ‘know thyself.’ You do not know yourself.”

Her face and ears burned. She didn’t like this, not at all. Worry and fear began eat at her. Suddenly Luna stopped, looking hard at a tree near the path. “How interesting,” she muttered. Fizzlepop looked around the alicorn and saw a galley wheel mounted into the trunk of the tree, one made of thick black iron. The kind used on the Storm King’s ships. Suddenly aware that the world around her had changed again, she gave a weak gasp as her throat closed up.

Rigging hung from the thin canopy in the trees, dangling like unused marionette strings; scraps of tattered black flags with a familiar light blue insignia blew in the breeze; the forest stopped smelling like the forest and more like winter, like ice and sea. It smelled of airship fuel and gear lubricant. As they continued to stroll through the forest, the forest began to eat itself up, replacing itself with pieces of elsewhere. On her right, the colossal blue-white wall of a glacier, grumbling as cracks formed from within. The burning bow of a fallen airship hung over the path, suspended in midair by the trees. It began to snow.

“What’s happening?” Fizzlepop gasped. She had to step over some indescribable dark thing in the path, daring herself to keep her eyes up, feeling them pull back anyway.

“Your dream is reacting to your emotional state. These images are the walls your dream is putting up.”

“W-Walls?”

“The walls that you wish to keep hiding behind so that you don’t have to see yourself as you are.”

The glacier split apart with a calamitous bang. One half fell over, the other slid down at an angle, tearing through the forest like a monstrous elephant toward them. Fizzlepop shrank away as the hunk of ice and snow consumed everything in front of it, sliding into a grinding halt over the path in front of them. Luna rolled her eyes, her horn glowing; white light arced through the air and bored a wide tunnel through the ice, large enough for several alicorns to pass through. Luna walked right on through undeterred. Fizzlepop followed in her wake, telling herself that because it was a dream she really shouldn’t be worried about the faces she was seeing in the ice.

Luna’s horn flared and light filled the tunnel, magnified and fractured into a million points of flame around them. “Everything that’s happening is in response to your fears, your worries. You have to calm down.”

“How?”

Here Luna laughed. It was a small chuckle that Fizzlepop might have thought of as cute if the circumstances were different.

“Who are you?”

“My name’s Fizzlepop Berrytwist.”

Luna glanced at her out of the corner of one eye. When Fizzlepop looked up at her she had turned away. “What if I told you that I didn’t believe you? What would you say if I told you that your name is Tempest Shadow?”

“That’s not true.”

“Isn’t it? You seemed so confident, so in control of yourself, when you were Tempest. Why is it so different with Fizzlepop?”

“Because Tempest did things that Fizz…that I want to forget.”

“No, you don’t.”

Fizzlepop sneered, bit her lip, tried to find the right words so it wouldn’t make her anger seem so apparent. “What? How could you possibly presume to know what I want?”

Luna swept a foreleg along the walls of ice. “Because your dreams reflect who you are. You’ve been burying yourself in your past so deeply that you cannot think about your present or your future. You don’t want to forget because the idea of letting it all go would give you a reason to be happy, and that’s something, I think, you don’t want.”

Fizzlepop was silent. She kept her eyes on the ground. There were no faces there. “You’re telling me that in order for me to be okay with myself, I keep myself from being happy. You’re saying that I’m content when I’m miserable.”

“Is that not exactly what you’re doing?” Luna and Fizzlepop made it to the other side of the tunnel, where they were greeted by snow-sprinkled trees. They were silent again, and silence was the worst thing; it made the knot in Fizzlepop’s stomach turn in tighter coils. Finally, she blinked and allowed the first tear to fall, feeling the small course it ran down her cheek make her feel worse.

“It hurts, princess. Whenever I think about that town or the friends I used to have, it hurts. When I think about why I joined up with the Storm King, it hurts. When I remember the things I had to do under his command, it hurts. It’s all a confusing jumble full of hurt, and I want to stop hurting.”

“And how do you plan to do this?”

Like the other one, the question seemed to slap Fizzlepop across the brain. She hadn’t really thought of how to stop it, or that it even should be stopped. She didn’t speak, but Luna was waiting, expecting an answer, so she tried to think of one that would satisfy the princess. Before she could say it aloud, Luna interjected.

“Whose forgiveness is it that you’re seeking? Is it your foalhood friends’, all of Equestria, or your own?”

She read my mind, Fizzlepop thought with a tremor, and for a second that thought pushed aside all the others. Something darted across the path, something hugging the ground and keeping to the trees. Luna’s horn glowed, a beam of light scorching through the forest. Something gave a brief scream, and the forest was silent again.

“Unless you believe that you can’t be forgiven. Which would then mean that you’re setting yourself on a path without an end. No matter what you will try to do, you will always be two steps behind. You will always fail in your endeavors. You will always see yourself as somepony who doesn’t deserve anything she gets. But that’s not what others see.”

The two walked in silence together, and Fizzlepop walked alone. It had made her aching worse when she told Luna how she felt, unbolting that door for the words-- which weren’t even correct, but were close enough—to come out. What Luna had said, to have her emotions laid out so smoothly, felt sharper than any knife. She wiped at her eyes, ashamed and ashamed of being ashamed.

But that last sentence was the worst. ‘That’s not what others see.’ that didn’t feel right. It felt like a lie; it felt like a poor joke.

“And what do you see?”

Luna gave the mare a sad smile as she thought. Her wings rustled softly, the sound of velvet against silk. “When I look at you, I see a sad and lonely mare. I see a pony with perhaps too much in her heart. I see a unicorn who cannot seem to—.”

“No, I’m not!”

The world tore apart when she stomped her hoof, trees and ice melding and becoming black, like the walls of a sunless cave. The moon and stars vanished and became the toothy cavernous ceiling stretching up into and becoming nothingness. Luna recoiled, shocked at the other mare’s outburst and the sudden and rapid change in their environment. Fizzlepop wanted to feel bad and she did, but seeing that worried look on Luna’s face felt so good.

“I’m not a unicorn anymore! I don’t know what I am, I don’t know who I am! And none of this matters because it’s just a dream and it’s not going to change a thing!”

Sparks flew off the cracked base of her horn, scattering turquoise light across the floor. Chipped rock fell from the ceiling, and Luna had to leap out of the way to avoid a stalactite that had detached above her and landed with a resounded crash that the walls of the cavern transformed into a scream. She stared down at Fizzlepop, about to say something when something, some deep blue sheen captured in the mare’s tears, had forced her to turn around. The ursa minor had returned, its body as big as the cave, its mouth open and filled with destruction.

“I want to be the me I used to be, but I don’t know who that is anymore! I want to be Tempest because I had purpose and meaning in my life! I want ponies to stop seeing me like a monster. I want to stop being a monster but I can’t. You can’t forgive the things I had to do.”

The entire cave shook with the ursa minor’s movements, amplifying the noises that drove out of its throat. Fizzlepop sat down on the floor, wanting to see what was happening but she didn’t much care about the tears blurring her vision and homogenizing everything. She didn’t want to see Luna giving her that look, that look, the one that everypony gives her when she tries to talk to them. She would rather die than see Luna’s face at that moment. 

“I spent years hating those ponies who I thought abandoned me, but it wasn’t their fault, it was mine. I’m responsible for being so weak and stupid. Every moment of every day.”

She would also have seen that Luna wasn’t looking at her at all. She was staring up at the ursa minor, at its mouth and the scraps of clothing hanging from its teeth. Light flashed from her horn again, and for one unsettling second, Luna noticed that the bear did not immediately vanish as it should have. She focused her magic and released it, the cave around them vanishing into a black fog. Threads of the nothingness swirled around them, black clouds whirling through an intangible wind. Only one object filled the space above them to give any perspective, a shattered, lightless, suppurating moon.

“You truly wished you’d never left that cave,” Luna said quietly.

Fizzlepop wept noisily, wiping at her eyes as though they had betrayed her. She felt feathers brush her cheek and she froze. Even as the alicorn’s wing gently pushed her head up, she wouldn’t dare take the chance to look into that face.

“Look at me.”

“No…”

A forehoof brushed her cheek, diverting her tears. She disobeyed the not-so-little voice in her head and opened her eyes. Luna looked down at her; Fizzlepop was transfixed by the little gleam of a tear running down Luna’s cheek. “I know how deeply guilt and regret can cut. I know what it’s like to question how you can live with yourself when the memories are always with you. I hurt for you.

“You’ve woven yourself into a puzzle, and no one can solve you except yourself. You may not think you have the power to do this, but you do. I know you do. You have friends—.”

“I don’t…”

“Yes, you do. You have friends who can help you, but you have to be the one to make the first step. I…I see so much of myself in you. I recognize that same sadness, the same contempt and the same aching longing—perhaps that’s why I loathed you. I’ve been afraid, so afraid, that you’d become that thing that I used to be, so I kept my distance and watched. I watched you to see if you’d do something terrible. I even wanted you to do something just to prove that I was correct. Perhaps, if I’d acted sooner…”

Fizzlepop hiccoughed. A humorless smile cracked open. “Do I really frighten you, princess? Can you really see that thing inside of me?”

Luna closed her eyes, and she kept them closed for a long time. She opened her mouth to speak when Fizzlepop cut her off. “Because you’d be right.”

The alicorn shook her head, starlight flickering in her mane. Fizzlepop thought of the ursa minor. “Do you truly believe that I’d still be here trying to help you, if I thought you were beyond help? Even if I thought you were, I would still try.”

The mare scowled. She sniffled and used her hoof to wipe away what ran down her nose. Luna brushed her tears away. A jolt ran up Fizzlepop’s back when she realized that this was the longest she’d ever looked at a pony in the eyes in a long time.

“Your dreams are about punishment. But you do not even know the pony you’re trying to punish. You have to discover who you are, and make peace with that pony, if you can.”

Fizzlepop shook her head. “But I don’t know how to do that. Where do I start?”

Luna shook her head, and that small sad smile had returned. Fizzlepop didn’t find it so awful now. “Regret is a terrible pain to bear, but we harm ourselves even more when we refuse to take that first step toward overcoming it. You know your destination; it’s up to you to find the path.”

“But…”

Luna’s wings enfolded Fizzlepop. It was a softness and a darkness she had never felt in a very long time, longer than her memory could reach before it entered vague and foggy regions. It was impossibly comforting, and simultaneously cool and warm. She felt embarrassed; if there was any sense in the universe, a pony like her didn’t deserve to be embraced like this, not by a pony like Princess Luna.

“I wish you well,” Luna whispered, cool breath running over her ears and making them burn. “You have to wake up now.”

Denials and repudiations filled Fizzlepop’s mind and she knew they were all equally foalish, thinking them anyway. She didn’t want to leave this, and the idea that she would have to was nonsense, ridiculous. When she felt Luna’s wings leave her as the alicorn took off into the air, she felt a biting emptiness inside, of having lost something vital. Luna’s voice filled the sky and echoes rippled across the clouds.

Wake up.

The nothingness unraveled.