//------------------------------//
// Chapter 20: Tale of Two Sisters Part 1 
// Story: Marshmallow Dreams 
// by Halira 
//------------------------------//

I remember the first time I dreamed after I'd been told that my pegasus magic didn't work right because I'd started dreamwalking at too young an age. Even though I had been putting on a brave face about it, it was impossible to keep my hurt and disappointment from impacting my dreams. I could lie to myself while awake but I couldn't lie to myself while asleep. 

Dreams can reflect all the scrambled thoughts that go on in the back of our heads. A lot of it doesn't make sense because they aren't fully formed thoughts, they are feelings that our minds are trying to make sense of and give images to. I had it explained to me once that our minds are like computers, but sometimes all these bits and pieces of hanging information gets our minds fragmented, so dreams are there to defragment them. Magic gets fragmented too, and the dream realm aided in fixing that, like an extra layer of protection. The entire dream realm was essentially a big virus control and tune-up system. If you go without sleep for extended periods these fragments pile on top of one another and your mind stops working the way it should. Some people needed a lot of sleep, some less, but they all needed time to defragment. 

I don't get nightmares often. Dreamwalkers are different from others since they tend to have that defragmenting process going on in the background when they are asleep, since they have stronger ties to the dream realm. It is one 'perks' of being a dreamwalker. They also tend to be vivid dreamers as a result as well, and more in control and aware they are dreaming. This doesn't mean they don't ever have nightmares, or are never at the mercy of their own dream (unaware they are in a dream). High amounts of stress (good or bad stress) can make a dreamwalker involuntarily retreat back into a regular dream, if it gets to be too much for the passive effects of the dream realm to cope with.

My fragments weren't too bad, at least in types. I say this because my mind seemed to know exactly how to visualize my feelings. That's something you can say that is healthy about nightmares that you can understand completely, your brain can't be too scrambled if that happens. So, hooray for having a healthy brain! I take those silver linings where I can find them! However, I still had enough of them to put me in a nightmare outside my control. 

I was flying along, quite peaceful and gracefully. That should have immediately alerted me to the fact that I was in a dream, since graceful was one of the last things I was in the air, but that part of my mind was off at the time. I was high in the air, so high that I could only see clouds beneath me. That should have been the next warning, since I never ever flew that high. The air got thinner that high up, the wind currents got rougher, and I just didn't like those things. Plus, even a pegasus who could fly really well could be hurt by a crash from that height. I wasn't nearly as cushy back then, and even with my adult cushiness my bones would go splat. 

My flight suddenly came to an abrupt halt. A giant catfish flew through the air towards me, it stopped right in front of me and said something profound.

"Squirrels only fly to Atari!"

Well, I'm sure whatever that meant was extremely profound, even if I didn't understand what it meant. The way the fish said it sounded like it was the answer to everything. Wisdom from flying fish is no less profound if no one can understand it. That a flying catfish decided to share its wisdom should be profound enough. Perhaps some future generation will understand those words and it will bring world peace.

Or perhaps it is just a dumb fish saying nonsense. I guess I'll never know. 

All the feathers on my wings just fell off. One moment they were there, the next moment my wings looked more like fatty versions of night pony wings. I beat my wings as hard as I could, but they didn't do anything, and I fell, just like a cartoon character who'd walked off a cliff and needed to realize they had before gravity took hold. 

My fall wasn't too far, as I hit the clouds. This was a short lived reprieve though. My fat on my body started expanding, till I couldn't even move my head or legs because they were invaded by the fat of my body. I became so heavy that the cloud could not support my weight, and so I began to fall again. My face turned downward, and I could now see the hard bedrock below me, rapidly approaching. I screamed. 

"I think this has gone on long enough to satisfy Miss Nightmares."

I stopped, right in the middle of the air. My body resumed its regular figure, and my feathers returned. A massive cloud cover set in, bathing everything around me in white and grey. Finally, Miss Seapony appeared before me. 

I tried to put together what had just happened. "Did you do that?"

Miss Seapony swam up next to me. "I put an end to the nightmare, but was not responsible for it. You were the source of all that."

"Why didn't you stop it sooner?" I asked, crying now. "I was scared. I thought I was going to die!"

She wrapped her tail around me and sighed. "Phobia doesn't like us to stop nightmares too early. She says they serve a purpose, and we're negating that purpose if we end them too soon. Technically, she can't do more than complain if I stop a nightmare right away, but she'd be mad at me for it, and I don't like my sister being mad at me. She's not wrong either, about them serving a purpose. They reflect our feelings and anxieties, and it is important to recognize those things."

I hung my head. "It's about me not being able to fly right."

"And you are angry at me, aren't you?" She asked softly. 

"I'm- I don't know."

She wrapped a fin around me and hugged me. "I'm sorry. I didn't know it would happen, and I don't know a way of fixing it. I wouldn't have done this to you if I had. It's alright to be angry. Mister Potty-Mouth yelled at all of us already, but you can yell some more, if you like. It can be very stress relieving."

I shrugged. "What's yelling about it going to fix?"

"It isn't about fixing it. It is about venting your frustrations. You have a right to do that, and don't ever let anyone tell you that you don't. It's just a matter of how you vent them that can be right or wrong."

I buried my head against her side. "I don't want to yell at you. I don't want to yell at anyone. It just hurts your feelings."

"Yelling isn't always the best choice, true, but you need some sort of release. Holding all that stuff inside… it isn't good, Rebecca. Believe me, I learned it the hard way. Little frustrations happen, and they are just little things, so you dismiss them. Then more and more of them happen, and you keep ignoring them. Then the next thing you know your beating someone you care about with a blunt object over something stupid, all because you couldn't ever voice your feelings for years… I'm getting off track."

I looked up at her, and she had her face turned away from me. "Did you- did you hurt someone?"

She sighed. "Rebecca, no matter how I try not to, I always end up hurting someone. I did once hurt someone a lot more though."

"Do you want to talk about it?"

"It's an old hurt, Rebecca. It's best to let it be."

"You just said don't hold it all in."

She turned and looked at me, then smiled. "Nothing like having my words turned on me right away." Her smile went away. "If I tell you this you might not look at me the same. Only my brother and sister Dreamwardens know about this. It's something I'm deeply ashamed of, something more than anything I wish I could take back."

I rubbed against her. "I trust you. If you say you're sorry for it, I believe you."

She didn't reply right away. I thought she was going to just ignore me with howls long she was silent, but then she started talking. "A long time ago, when I was a young human girl, I lived with my parents and my older sister. People from elsewhere sometimes think there aren't different economic classes in China; I'm not sure where they get that idea. My family is what you Americans would consider upper class. We had a nice house, we got nice things, I went to a nice school, everything was… nice.

"I was what you might consider lazy, or at least my parents thought so. I didn't do well in most of my classes, I tended to never be where I was supposed to be, and I was generally rude. My sister was just the opposite. She was seemingly perfect about everything. She wasn't arrogant about it either. She never spent time reminding me how she did better at everything than me. She didn't really have to, it was obvious, but she did worse. She still treated me with love and respect."

I frowned. "I don't understand. Why is that last part bad?"

"Because it made me feel guilty about thinking anything bad about her. I wanted so much to be mad at her, but she never gave me a reason I could justify. If she had just held one thing over my head, just once, and been a brat about it, then I could have expressed all my built up resentment about her. There was nothing. She was perfect, I was not, and I was so angry about it.

"My parents always heaped praise on her, and told me I should do better, like my sister. I just dug in and refused to apply myself, convinced that I couldn't compete with her. That changed though, when I finally found something I was passionate for. Something I wanted to be great at, the violin."

A violin appeared, and Miss Seapony took it into her fins and gazed at it. "I practiced my heart out, day after day. It took a long time, but I became very good at it. Enough that my parents seemed like they were proud. My sister played the violin too. Listening to her had been what had inspired me, but I never thought about comparing myself to her when it came to that. I loved to play my music. It was mine. The one thing I could say I was good at. The one thing I cared to be good at. It was my passion… and my undoing."

She sniffled, and raised the edge of her long tail up to wipe her nose. "There was a recital. My sister and I were going to perform together. We were the two Huáng sisters, and I actually had some pride that I was being listed right along my sister like an equal partner. Fate was against me though. That day I had a cold. I didn't tell anyone, because I didn't want to lose my chance to perform. I just took some medicine. We took to the stage, and began to play."

I listened as Miss Seapony's breath became labored. I never understood why that kind of thing happened, since it was a dream, and by that point Miss Seapony didn't even have a real body anymore, yet she still physically reacted to things. 

"Things seemed to be going great. We had three pieces to play, and the first was done with no problems. However, halfway through the second piece I had to stifle a sneeze. You can't be doing that when trying to play an involved piece on the violin. Any little sudden jerk of the body causes the note to come out wrong, sometimes very noticeably wrong. That is what happened to me. I messed up, right there in front of an audience. My sister kept playing as if it hadn't happened, and I tried to resume, but after that I just kept making mistakes one after another. I wanted to cry, and that just made the notes come out worse."

She turned away again. "The third piece went better, but the damage had been done. When it was all over I had to listen to how my sister had continued on perfectly when I had done an inadequate job. It wasn't fair. I was just as talented as her at the violin. I cared more about it than she did, and she had so many other things she could be better at. This was my thing, and here I was being put down as not good enough again."

"So, what did you do?" I asked. 

"That night my sister came to me. She wanted to tell me that she was sorry about what happened. That I would do better next time. That it was just bad luck. With each attempt to soothe me I became more and more angry at the reminder of my failure." Miss Seapony's breath caught, and the next part came out in an anguished sob. "I don't know why I did it, but I grabbed my sister's violin from the wall, and I just started beating her with it, screaming like an animal. She begged for mercy, but I wouldn't stop."

I flinched away from my friend, and she looked down at me with such a sad look in her eyes. "She survived my assault. I'm glad I didn't kill her. But my attack had disfigured her face. My parents didn't press charges against me, didn't have the authorities come get me, they just kicked me out of the house. I was dead to them. I think it might have been more of a mercy if they had me taken away, perhaps that's why they didn't."

I was speechless. I never in my life thought Miss Seapony would do such a thing. 

"And that is how my passion and built up frustrations led me to hurting the person who loved me most, and led to me finding myself trying to figure out how to survive on the street. I have never forgiven myself for what I did." She looked forward at nothing. "I did face my sister one more time though. It was about a year later. I was doing petty theft at the time, but decided to rob my parents house. I broke into my old room, and to my shock my things were still where I left them. I walked over and found my violin, sitting right where I left it on the bed. I picked it up and heard movement. There was my sister, her face looked better, you couldn't even see the stitches if you weren't looking for them. She and I stood staring at each other silently for what seemed an eternity, just frozen where we were. She then reached a hand out to me and said my name. Then I took my violin and ran. That was the last time I ever hurt my sister."

I only felt sorry for Miss Seapony, and hugged her while telling her I forgave her for what she did. There's a caveat to this story though. Sometimes history repeats itself, and resentment between siblings is one of the longest repeating stories. I had a sibling, an angry one, I just didn't know it at the time.