A thick fog surrounded me as I heard a maniacal laughter on all sides. I couldn't tell who or even what it was, but I knew it wanted me.
"Where are you!? Show yourself!"
I felt a presence approaching from behind. So I turned around to see a hooded figure coming forth through the slightly parting fog. The pale skin and fangs it grinned with as it looked at me unblinkingly gave away that it was a vampire, thirsty for my blood.
I threw a spell of radiant damage at it in hopes of fighting with an elemental advantage, only for it to roll aside and take on the behemoth form of a wyvern—a savage and beast like cousin to dragons.
I backed up in a panic for a moment before remembering something.
"Wyverns aren't evil! They're unaligned and primal! You can't be the champion! You'd just tear up both armies without bias and would stop spreading havoc as soon as you established your territory!"
The wyvern gave a deer in the headlights stare, then shifted into the shape of a humanoid with a tiger face and started approaching me with a smug grin.
"A rakshasa. You'd be immune to any spell I could throw at you." I smirked back. "But I have more than just spells!"
I mentally willed myself to my bear form and started to charge, to which the rakasha shifted into a tentacle faced mind flayer.
It threw psyonic waves of energy at me from its forehead, knocking me out of my bear form. I knew these guys were devastating and not to be underestimated by any means. Their culture was all about creating more thralls to serve their elder brain... I suddenly knew what logic I could throw back at it.
"There can only be one opposing champion! You're only at your most powerful when you are backed by your thralls and brethren. Without your elder brain you're not as strong a tactician as you think!"
I shrugged off the next blast in defiance, but the creature didn't back down. My logic made it to where I knew it wasn't an excessively overwhelming opponent on its own, but I also couldn't deny it was still a powerful and valid foe that I had no particular counter for.
We circled each other for a moment, sizing each other up and searching for weaknesses. As hard as I tried, I couldn't think of an opening that could easily be exploited against a mind flayer. Yet, as soon as I feared I would trip up and give him one, I found myself doing so.
He came forward and threw is head back to prepare for a particularly powerful blast as I stumbled and tried to get to my feet without success.
Suddenly, a loud voice called through the mist, "Enough!"
I saw a massive beam of raw energy smack into the mind flayer and carry him off with the sheer force of the blast just before he was about to release his own blast at me.
"Are you alright, Moss?" I heard a voice call out from the fog.
As the fog was starting to dissipate, I turned to see the silhouette of a dark colored pony with both wings and a horn.
"No! Not you! Please!"
I turned backwards and tried to crawl away, but I found my limbs harder and harder to lift as my fear overwhelmed me. Eventually, I curled up into a ball and pouted "Please, no more..."
"Hey! It's OK! It's just me." I heard Moon Beam's voice call to me as a hoof gently rested on my calf, nudging me to come out of my ball.
After a few moments of her calling to me it managed to sink in enough for me to brave lifting my head enough to take a peek.
Sure enough, I saw Moon Beam looking at me in worry. I calmed down more as I saw her face but eventually found myself looking up at her forehead. When I properly registered what I was looking at, I asked her, "Moon Beam... Why do you have a horn?"
She pulled her head back up with surprise. "Oh! Well that's as good a spot to start as any."
She closed her eyes for a brief moment and the horn disappeared from her forehead, leaving her looking like a normal thestral again. "We're in a dream. I'm a dream walker, remember? I use my horn when I need a focus to give me a boost in lucid manipulation."
As I got my bearings, I found myself on an island sitting in a sea of stars.
"A dream?" I asked.
She nodded and continued. "Pretending to be able to perform magic with a horn is a common way for dream walkers to help their willpower manifest properly here in the astral realm. I must say, you did some pretty impressive manipulation yourself there, for a non-gifted."
She then sat down right next to me as I sat myself upright again. She extended one of her bat wings around me and didn't quite fold it in around me in a hug.
"Care to talk about what that was about?"
With the wing almost surrounding me, I found myself uncomfortable and pulling out of the almost-embrace post haste.
"You're creeping me out getting so close," I said as I settled myself a good meter away from her. "What's with all the friendliness all of a sudden?"
She blushed and pulled her wing back to her side meekly. "Oh... That's right. You have only ever worked with the cold and bitter Moon Beam."
She turned her head away from me. "That's just a mask I had to wear to make sure I got honest answers from you when we met and I found it hard to take off after that with chancellor Neghsay still prying at every lead he could to try to treat you like a criminal."
She shook her head while steadily turning it back towards me. "I hate being so cold and business like. It's counterproductive to my work."
With a still glum look, she made eye contact with me again. "Dream walkers are charged with monitoring the dreams of the ponies of Equestria and intervening when the emotional states of the dreamers get to be unstable and vulnerable to the nightmare realm."
I cocked my head. "Nightmare realm?"
Moon Beam closed her eyes for a brief moment and nodded before looking back at me. "A natural aspect of the astral realm that embodies negative emotional magic. It's not evil. It actually can be beneficial to many ponies in helping them have healthy amounts of fear of different things. But like field mice or locusts or other beasts that eat voraciously, it has to be kept in check or it can become like an infection of the mind, growing too strong and harming ponies instead."
I pondered on this. "Like how princess Luna became jealous of her sister and transformed into a monster a thousand years ago?"
Moon beam's eyes went wide at that statement as she said nothing for several seconds. "Y-yes. That was the incident that brought about the proper establishment of the Dream Walkers' Guild to make sure that the burden was never carried solely by any one pony, including a guild rule that members had to monitor each other's dreams too, in order to avoid another incident like that from ever happening again."
I nodded my head and put my eyes out to the sea of stars again. "Kinda reminds me of the old phrase 'who guards the guardians?'" I rhetorically added.
After a pause, I could see her nod in agreement in the corner of my vision. "Occasionally dream walkers have to help other creatures too, though it is pretty uncommon for the nightmare realm to outright attack non-ponies. Still, I'm here to help you through whatever it was causing that bad dream."
After hearing her offer, I tilted my head back and forth in consideration. "Nopony else is listening in?"
She gave a small nasal giggle and shook her head. "Active dream walkers can always sense each other. We are so sensitive to each other that extra caution has to be taken to not disturb other dream walkers that we check in on when they are just sleeping. We are alone."
I relaxed for a moment but then tensed up again and looked at her with a deadpan face. "What did you do when I refused to give up my faith?"
She cocked her head. "What?"
"What did you do when I refused to give up my faith? I have to know this is really you I'm talking to. You were able to fake a horn, you could be somepony else faking Moon Beam's entire appearance."
Her jaw went slightly slack and her eyes widened again as she realized what I was getting at. "A... A wise caution. Very well. To answer your question, I cried. I cried tears of respect for your choice."
With this I managed to properly relax and gave her a smile of relief. "Now that I know for sure it's you that I'm talking to, get comfortable. This will take a little explaining."
* * *
Moon Beam listened intently, though didn't seem too surprised at any of what I told her.
"Archimedes has managed to share that with you, then? We knew it was inevitable. He is bound to you."
When she saw the confusion on my face, she sighed. "I'm the one that entered his dreams so he could warn us of what's to come, remember? He's been with us in Canterlot, aiding our intelligence for some time now. So he has had the chance to share a lot with us. More than I could explain here and now. We invited you to visit him regularly but you declined every time. He's not hiding anything from you. You've just not been receptive to what he has to say."
She took a deep breath and looked out to the sea of stars I had been staring at while I explained my worries.
"As for the fear you have of the opposing champion, it's understandable. Even we do not know what threat they will present, but know this."
She turned to me. Her face was littered with concern, her eyes wide and ears limp. Her voice was akin to the voice of a worried aunt.
"We have every intention of facing this threat and protecting the citizens of Equestria and our allies. That includes you. Even if you do wind up having to face the other champion, we are going to do our best to make sure you do not have to face them alone."
She extended her bat wing out to me again to offer a comforting hug. I pulled back just an inch or two, showing my reluctance to hug, but reached my hand out. I gripped the joint of the wing and let her curl the thumb like bones of her wing around my hand. With an uneasy smile, I said, "Thank you."
After letting go, we sat there for a few moments, letting the calm of the resolution to my concerns wash over me. As she got up to presumably leave, I reached out and asked. "How have you been? I missed you yesterday. Tempest standing in as Starlight's teaching chaperone was dull at times and, to be honest, a little scary."
She gave me a bittersweet smile and turned back around. "I was catching up on sleep. I am nocturnal after all."
She stood there, waiting to see if I had another question with a mild eagerness.
Without much else to say personally, I asked a more professional question. "So, has my time learning magic helped you guys much?"
She gave an uneasy smile and sat back down. "Yes and no. The cantrips were a moderately useful surprise, discovering spells that existed outside the spellbook. As for watching you learn the spells in the spellbook, it hasn't really turned up much new data, but it has been giving us a good baseline."
I looked at her perplexed. "A baseline, for what?"
She pulled back and looked downward with a sad expression. "I wanted to tell you the fuller extent of what we were needing from you from the start, but they wanted to ease you into it."
She looked back up to me with a somber expression. "Don't you think it's odd how we are just now asking you to learn magic? We could have started this almost immediately after Archimedes came to us."
I raised both eyebrows at this. I hadn't thought of that before.
"It's because of what happened when you healed Fluttershy. More specifically, because of how the Speaker described your use of quintessence."
She willed different colored orbs of light into existence in front of her. One a purplish red, one a vivid green, and another one pale blue.
"Æther, the Animus Mundi and quintessence are the three known energies capable of tapping into magic in our world, though quintessence is faint and classified. I won't go into detail on the Animus Mundi or Æther, as those are fairly well studied and not very relevant to our concerns."
She pulled the redish and green orbs aside, bringing the pale blue one front and center.
"You know that quintessence is the power wielded by the followers of the exalted being we are at war with, but you may not know that it has existed on Equis for possibly even longer back than the first rift war and has been harnessed by natives in the past."
She pulled the red orb forward again and pulled wisps of energy from both it and the pale blue orb, then re merged the wisps with the opposite orbs. Pushing the mostly red orb forward, she continued. "This is an approximate mixture of what our Alicorn Princesses use naturally. Their æther is laced with a trace of quintessence. It is why their magic tends to be so powerful. The lord of chaos, Discord, has power over æther and quintessence even beyond their level, but we can't study it due to his chaotic nature."
She brought the mostly red orb back and the mostly pale blue orb forward. "This is the level of purity we've seen in rare individuals who believed with their whole being in a cause, such as the Pillars of Light or the modern element bearers. Don't worry if you don't know of them. What you need to know is that it can only be done at this level with the use of powerful artifacts or with extreme strain on the user, but even then it isn't quite pure."
She put the orbs down and looked at me. "But the Speaker of the Fey described yours as having a complete absence of Æther. In other words, it was pure quintessence that healed Fluttershy, the same as the priests of the first rift war had. It is a power we thought was lost to us. A power that we need to learn to harness, fast."
Thoughts I had been suppressing were coming to the surface. The character my form was based on was one level of cleric, a class that drew its powers directly from the gods they worshiped.
"That's why you guys have been asking me if I'd figured out the source of that presence I felt. So we could investigate it."
Moon Beam nodded. "Close, but we already investigated it. We knew what it was before we asked you. But due to the kind of personal attachment proper, high purity, quintessence use requires, we wanted to try to get you to approach it yourself and form a personal attachment with it in your own way."
"So Oghma has a connection with me?"
Moon Beam cocked her head at me in surprise. "What!? Goodness no. That would make you his follower by technicality and disqualify you as his champion. No. The information I gathered from Archimedes's dreams showed that they infused you with the essence of another being less powerful than a god but still naturally able to use quintessence. Doing so allows a creature to become what we understand to be an artificial priest. More accurately, it provides a substitute for them to connect to instead of an exalted being, while allowing the creature to have the quintessence abilities of a priest. It was not an easy feat and it causes permanent damage to the being bound to the subject, but we have record of it happening once before."
She stood up and dismissed the orbs back to the nothing that they came from. Approaching me, she asked, "So, have you figured out what the presence was that you felt?"
I sat there for a moment then shook my head. "I've been trying to not think about it, really. About the only clue that I had was it was suffocating me with..." My eyes widened in realization. "...Disdain for me."
I looked over at Moon Beam and muttered "I got to go!" before mentally forcing myself to wake up with sheer willpower.
Waking up in my cell, my body was stiff as it was every morning, curled up on my undersized bed, but I forced it to move. I stumbled out of bed with my stiff joints and found the door to my cell open with my tray of breakfast sitting just inside, ready for me when I woke up. Archimedes was sitting across from it, just outside the doorway.
"Are you OK, master? You awoke early."
My side was wanting to cramp up as I crawled towards him. "It was you! It's your quintessence inside me, isn't it!?"
The owl stepped back a few paces at my approach, but otherwise made no attempt to flee.
"What is left of it, yes," he spoke plainly but remorsefully, as if openly admitting to something terrible, "The rest of it was used to seal up the sky rift we were sent through and the forest rift that was about to burst open."
His straight forward answer left me at odds. I stared at him for a moment and processed what he said, alongside what Moon Beam said.
"...How badly were you hurt? When you were bound to me?"
He nodded and faced me straight on.
"To insure you do not get the wrong idea, the process is not normally as devastating on the donor as it was on me. They would simply become weakened or wounded in a way that can never be healed akin to a solder that must use a cane to walk after an injury. The more powerful the bond, the greater the injury, but our bond in this regard is at the most basic of levels."
He came forward again as he saw me dedicate my full attention to him.
"However, in order to ensure the forest rift would hold tight once we restored its strength, every last spare bit of my essence beyond what was bound to you was put to the sealing power of the meteorite. Save for the form your magics grant me, I have no more physical form. I was once what some may have incorrectly labeled as a demi-god, but I am effectively only a spirit now. When our bond is severed upon your eventual death as a mortal, I myself will be rendered mortal in whatever form I am in at the time of the severance. If I do not have a form at that time, I too will die."
The paranoid side of me used my good luck charm to help ensure if I could tell whether he was being truthful. When the hairs on the back of my neck told me he was, I backed down.
Going into a sitting position, I reached for my breakfast tray. I held the tray there but didn't eat, just staring at it in thought. I sighed and looked back at him.
"I still have a bazillion and one bones to pick with you, but..." I struggled to get the last words out.
With a huff, I looked down and closed my eyes.
"But thank you. Thank you for helping me heal Fluttershy."