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// And Perhaps, Buried in the Shore, a Mirror of Lapis... 
// Story: Nightmares: They Don't Make 'em Like They Used To 
// by darf 
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Scene: Celestia and Luna are asleep in their four-poster beds in their bedroom at Seaward Shoals1. It's early in the morning, around 6:00AM, and both ponies are snoring softly.

Luna's snoring stops rather suddenly. She's awake, in her bed, kicking away the blankets like they're smothering her. Her eyes are still shut—no, now they're open, and she's stopped thrashing, just pulled the covers off, staring into the darkness towards her sister's bed. Panting, run somewhere in the aether that's left her out of breath.

"Celly," Luna whispers. "Wake up."

Celestia shifts a little in her bed, but continues snoring.

Luna sighs. "Celestia," she says, this time louder. "Please wake up."

"Hmm?" Celestia's voice is motherly and official-sounding even trudging through the swamp of early-morning slumber. She raises her head from her stack of frillowy, decorated pillows and looks towards her sister's bed. "Luna? What is it?"

"Celly... I feel like I just had a really bad dream."

"Oh dear." Celestia sits up in her bed a bit, and adjusts her mane, tucking a few stray strands behind her ear. How alicorn manes manage to stay so billowy and ethereal is a matter for scientific documentation elsewhere, preferably at high pay. "Was it the same as last time?"

Luna nodded.

"I dreamed that... we were really little. And you were playing with the castle set, and I wanted to play with it too, but you wouldn't share. So you... you..."

Celestia tilted her head with a concerned expression.

"...you banished me to the moon."

"Oh dear," Celestia said again. She finally got up from her bed, made her way to Luna's side, and sat down gently on the night-black quilt dotted with stars that covered most of her sister's bed. "You really can't get that one out of your head, can you?"

Luna shook her head back and forth furiously, as though attempting to dislodge the nightmare through her ears. She succeeded only in ruffling her mane more than it already had been after her night-vision runaway. "Unh-uh."

Celestia put a hoof around her sister's shoulder and brought her close. Outside the bedroom window, the window howled silently, carrying the sea-breeze and a handful of leaves off into the unfamiliar distance.

"I feel like... I feel like it really happened. Like I was there. Like you... you were yelling at me, and everything was big and dark, and I..."

"There there," Celestia said, pulling her sister even closer, squeezing her in tight. Celestia's mane hovered down over her sister's face like a cloak or mask, and as the two of them hugged, it became more and more difficult to tell where the outline of one pony started and the other began. Swirling green and pink rainbows merging with the blue-black starry night, mixing the stars and sunshine into a blur of shimmering mane and alicorn coat.

"Do you promise you'd never do that to me, Celly?" Luna asked, her voice shaking slightly. She rocked back and forth as she held on to Celestia, bobbing slightly, like a plastic bird drinking water.

"Of course. Of course I promise. You're my sister," Celestia said,  patting Luna's back, staring pointedly out the window at absolutely nothing.

"You'd never send me to the moon, right?"

"Never."

"You wouldn't banish me for a thousand years, would you?"

"...Are we really going over this again?"

"I don't remember. That's all I wanted to say."

"Luna, how could anypony hope to remember what had happened every day for a thousand years? Even I forgot most of it... after a while."

"That must be nice for you."

"I had no choice, Luna. The power of hatred in you was overwhelming. There was nothing I could do to return you to your former state, to take away the strength of Nightmare Moon that had stolen you away."

"Not so strong that you couldn't banish me, but strong enough that you couldn't save me. Do I have that right?"

"You're getting all upset over semantics. We've settled this long ago, and now you're just facilitating bad feelings about a grudge for what I've already apologized for unendingly. You made the choice to accept banishment the moment you decided to lash out against me, as though you were no longer my sister."

The room was dead still, air lingeringly uneasily like the crackle after stepped on skeletons. Luna's breath shook as she inhaled it into her chest, and her chest shook too, but then only slightly, her eyes closed, searching for the hold that would allow her to steady and continue.

It was like that, then. It had always been like that.

It was her fault then. It had always been her fault.

It was a one-way tunnel, with the light always on her sister's side.

It was a comedy of self-indulgence, Luna praying at every moment that her suffering was more intense or valuable than anypony else's.

But that was the tail-end of the nightmare. Where had it all began?

"I want to know what you did when I was gone," Luna asked, tucking her head tightly to her chest. She pulled back on the bed, away from Celestia's sisterly embrace, and Celestia pulled her hoof back, letting it rest lax against her side.

"I ruled Equestria missing you every day," Celestia said somberly, staring down at the bedsheets. The kaleidoscope of stars and moons and all-encompassing darkness.

"I lived on a diet of pebbles and dust. I fought voices in my head that told me to cut myself. I prayed every night for an entity more powerful than my own sister to kill me instead of leaving me to mark days in the dirt that were left until I could breathe real air and speak to something other than the dead silence of an eternally empty rock. I dreamed a million times of death."

"Better to let you banish me instead, to submit to the darkness that had overwhelmed you, then?"

"Then what is a choice, sister, when you had all the faculties of your own senses, and any hope of mine were gone and buried by nightmare magic?"

"Your choices lead you to the darkness!" Celestia shouted back. "And at every moment you imply, 'I had more power than you'. The Elements of Harmony chose to assist me, my sister. They aided me in doing what was right."

Luna collapsed into her blankets and huddled into herself, shivering desperately.

"They... they chose a thousand years?" Luna's eyes had begun to stain with tears. The flashbacks were coming again. The empty craters and forever expanses of white dust. The glow of the sun each day, blinding her from below, the moon's surface playing her punishment in the part of a mirror. Spinning every day, alone, to wait to learn she had suffered enough. Sobs, and wracking breaths.

"Luna... you're making all of this up. It wasn't like that. You were happily suspended in time and stasis entirely. No eating rocks. No time to think. No need to contemplate or dwell or regret your mistakes endlessly."

"Then what could I have learned, frozen for so long? What could be the point of a prophecy to rip us apart, to endure only in a way those on the border of immortality might even be capable of enduring?"

"Well... one thousand is a nice, round number," Celestia said thoughtfully.

Luna wept noisily into her pillow.

Celestia took in a deep breath and let it out slowly. She stared out the window of the bedroom, looking for a hint of the sun over the ocean horizon. There was a shimmer there, maybe... but mostly, the weather just looked like clouds.