//------------------------------//
// Blissful 
// Story: Knowing 
// by Skylarking the Stargazer 
//------------------------------//

The mint coated mare shut her eyes as the fallen leaves brushed past the tip of her nose. Lifting her head up into the deep eminence, or so she tried, resulted in only a blank state of oblivion.

Starlight Glimmer watched from behind carefully observing her silent phenomena. Her horn flickered and danced in the darkness casted between the sleeping forest and the deep black sound. She released a stressful sigh as she listened to the silent waves rolling over the compressed sand beneath their hooves. Only time would tell when her dreaming counterpart will ever speak.

Biting on her lips, Starlight was reluctant to open her mouth for the first word between them. Her heart was racing on the possible collapse of architecture if the conversation was to fail. She clumsily twisted her tongue when trying to pronounce the letter "L" many times in the past, and it sounded more like a self-entangled lie without "ra". But now was a perfect opportunity to follow her gut instinct and let it out.

Yet a sudden breeze stopped her cold. She turned towards the direction where the wind originated. Across the great sound, a lively metropolis illumined her eyes. While the flashy rays of its golden light failed to reach the unicorn's naked heliotrope body, the burning city streamed the upper air, irradiating and ringing the heavens above where the unknown presence of a certain being awaits for the selected few.

'At least those architectures won't fall anytime...' Starlight thought to herself.

"Lyra—" She immediately hoofed over her mouth. She didn't know why the name came out now, but she didn't have to know why either. A dream for a dream couldn't proceed any more abstract than this.

Standing on the tip of her hoof above a large stone, liquid droplets gracefully soared onto and over the mint unicorn's entire body. Each time the waves battered against the stone, Starlight had to remind herself that she was hearing them before she could see the same mare with a lyre cutie mark sprayed with pure saltwater. 

It didn't make sense to her, for she was supposed to see the waves first. But since it's only a temporary dream, nothing was supposed to make sense.

"Ahh... The sound of the galloping Apple families stampeding Sweet Apple Acres. I remember it like it was yesterday."

She finally spoke! Starlight couldn't help but release a tiny grin. Immediately she joined in the conversation.

"It was yesterday. An Apple tradition where they gather a reunion and race across the Ponyville grasslands from the very tips of east to west, just being an outside spectator was more than emotional."

Hopping off the boulder, Lyra Heartstrings was now face to face with her dream sharer, frowning. "Yeah, and now you ruined it. Because that was supposed to be my dream."

Too ashamed to even meet her gaze, she sighed. "I know, I know. I'm sorry for forcing you to merge our dreams, but I had no better choice than to do this."

Lyra was unimpressed. "Because...?"

“It's a very personal question."

The musician raised a brow.

Starlight inhaled, and the cold air soon rushed out. "Why are you so obsessed to see the other world?"

"Huh?"

"These anthropological creatures called homo sapiens, and their behaviors. What does that have to do with our equinity?"

"Oh, humans?" Remaining unamused by the mare's words, Lyra rolled her eyes and stared down at the wavy shoreline. "Lemme guess, Bon-Bon told you to ask this."

Starlight Glimmer was silent.

She smiled as a hermit crab poked its head out of a shell, perhaps dumbstruck by the mare's lustrous appearance. "Of course. My obsession with that species annoyed her everyday, yet we're still two peas in a pod. Anypony else would've shut me up by now and accused me of being psychopathic."

"But that doesn't stop a foolish mare like myself from chasing her dreams and what she's fated to believe. A pony doesn't have to see with her bare eye, but rather to make something out of nothing."

Starlight remained still, but this time for a different reason: every sound that was supposed to be its own onomatopoeia were now string plucking and bow dragging. Everything around them were entwined in a golden aura that paralleled the sleepless metropolis across the sound. Gathering her self-esteem, she turned to face Lyra once more.

"This song was a personal collaboration with my neighbor, Octavia Melody. A truly talented musician who could play any string instrument. With a wooden bow and you'll see her light up further than the brightest morning star. Even Vinyl Scratch was eager to make a remix in tribute so she can play it in front of her audience of thousands."

"W-why are you telling me all this?"

"Why not?" She giggled. "It's always a good feeling to share your thoughts to other ponies. What's the point if you keep them to yourself?"

"Even if you can't prove their existence?"

"Oh please!" The air hummed with a rhythmic note pulling through the deep forest thickets as it breathed the ocean wind. "Don't tell me you're one of those stuck-up Canterlot guys who read the papers every Sunday morning."

"I'll take that as a no then."

"Do you ever fantasize?"

Starlight did a double take. "Me? I mean, of course I do, but I try not to because it means I'm daydreaming and not focusing on the task at hoof—"

"Would you ever want to at all?"

"I would naturally when I'm not feeling like myself." She forced an awkward smile.

"So you're not there yet..." Lyra Heartstrings stroked her chest, feeling the autumn vibe pulsing through her veins. For a minute, Starlight thought she had seen the mare's veins emanating through her body like an x-ray crystallography. Pressing against the side of her head, she tried to envision a sense of sharp pain tearing through her adrenaline. It resulted in only awkward posing and a facial scrunch.

"Are you okay?"

"N-no." Starlight faked a laugh. "I was just trying to picture myself in mental torture. Kept forgetting that we're in a dream."

"Why did you agree to help Bon-Bon with all this?"

She stopped cold. "Why, you ask?"

Lyra firmly nodded. "This is the time to tell me everything. I don't like keeping personal secrets. Bon-Bon should've known that by now."

Starlight Glimmer chewed on her lips. The golden hue of both the musical island and the great metropolis fell upon her, as if she was the central spotlight on the stage. She wanted to sing a song and get away with it all, but reality told her otherwise. And in this dream, she was no different than being wide awake on her bed, while surrealism gently fell asleep.

"I-I used to be like you."

Lyra rolled her eyes again. 'And away goes the organic empathy out the window, Miss Cliché.'

"Not in the sense that I had a similar goal. But I had my own social utopia that others couldn't have seen possible. It would've been ideal, it would've been perfect. I had it planned out in every way to work."

The musician's curiosity grew on her. "And what made you stop chasing?"

"Turns out, dishonesty was the biggest price I had to pay. One can't be empty hoofed like the others to make a difference." A lavender comet streaked across the night sky within a second of her last word. She gradually smiled as she wrestled against her own tears. "She who saw my ideology at work fixed me onto the right path, and here I am."

"Are you wishing to ever go back on your old path and seeing what comes out of it?"

Pausing in thought, Starlight simply smirked. "I'm afraid not."

"I see..." She hoofed a pile of sand before facing away from the sound. Away she goes into the tropical lushes, brushing away the dry hardened humidity that once had the the mare stale.

"Where are you going?"

The free spirited unicorn heeded no attention to the insipid question. And doing what she does best, Lyra Heartstrings followed the gentle rhythm committed by her magical island and vanished from Starlight's luminescent sight.