The slam of a door. That was what made Luna flinch and jerk her tail away from the hinges suddenly behind her. She was whole again, or at least as whole as she could be while rendered inside the mind of another. Luna reasoned the pony whose headspace she’d just entered must have encountered her while she was still alive, and the intact memories present were able to fill in the blanks that even Luna herself could not.
She tilted her chin down and examined her legs, clad with platinum hoofguards. She admired her barrel adorned with a plain, yet comfortable black chest plate, and a few flicks of her reclaimed ears told her there was a tiara nestled in the folds of her ethereal mane. Luna was in fact so preoccupied with the rediscovery of her former self that the room’s other occupant had to clear its throat twice before Luna took notice.
In front of an empty desk not far from the doorway where Luna was idling, stood a juvenile, salmon-colored pegasus with curls in her mane and a bored look on her babydoll face. She took a loud sip from the mug of cocoa clasped in her hoof as she looked Luna up and down.
“Hmmm,” the little pegasus mused. “So are you real, or what?”
The voice of another pony. Luna’s imaginary legs nearly gave out from under her as she relished hearing such a beautiful sound again after so long. So very, very long.
“Take your time answering,” the pegasus continued listlessly. “Not like I’ve got anywhere to be or anything.”
“I am Princess Luna.” The words were muscle memory. Ritualistic. Wonderful and rewarding to say. “Matriarch of the Night and Shepard of Wayward Poni-“
The little pegasus interrupted Luna with an obnoxiously loud and very prolonged sip from her mug of cocoa. Luna felt the entire imaginary room rattle from the artificially amplified slurping.
When the little pegasus was done shaking the tiny universe with her noise, she wiped her mouth on the back of her fetlock and spoke again.
“I didn’t ask who you were, crater butt. I don’t ask questions I already know the answer to. I asked if you were real. Cuz if you’re not, it means I’ve gone crackers again and I gotta update the sheet.”
The pegasus gestured limply to a calendar on the wall with an uncountable number of Xs on its top leaflet. Luna could only speculate how many previous pages had already been filled, torn off, and discarded. As an imaginary calendar, the number of used sheets could have been theoretically infinite.
Apparently Luna was taking too long to answer the little pegasus’s question, because with a resigned sigh, the latter set her mug down and flittered over to the calendar on dexterous wings. Then she gripped the top page with her teeth before tore it away.
“Fifty-two moons and nine days,” the pegasus announced to nopony as she extracted the sheet from her mouth with a hoof, pulled open the largest drawer on the desk, and dropped the leaflet inside. Luna was puzzled. Fifty-two moons? The little pegasus didn’t look fifty-two moons old. She didn’t even look like she’d hit puberty yet.
“Fifty-two moons and nine days of keeping cute,” the little pegasus said, flittering back to her original standing position in front of the desk. “Not even close to my personal record, but above my average, at the very least. Alright then. Get on with it.”
Luna opened her muzzle to say something, failed to think of a productive comment, then closed it again.
“What, ya see me but ya got nothing to say to me? Some hallucination you are. In the early decades, you specters were at least decent conversation partners.”
“Do you often conjure false ponies with whom to converse?” Luna asked curiously. In all her own time spent floating in the void, it had never once occurred to her that an imaginary friend might ease the loneliness.
The little pegasus took another sip of her cocoa.
“Just swell. I’m having this talk yet again, huh? Eh, just another grain of sand added the desert. Yes Princess, I used to think up plenty of conversation partners on purpose, but not anymore. Got real old after awhile. You can only hold down so many chats with so many imaginary friends before you run out of topics for them to quiz you about. Now on the rare days another one of you does pop up, we just repeat a talk we’ve had.” Another sip. “Sorta like now.”
“May I sit?” Luna asked, eyeing the inviting empty chair behind the desk longingly.
“Sit, stand, suit yourself.” The little pegasus waved a forehoof dismissively. “You’re not real, so what do I care?”
Luna crossed the room and eased down into the chair.
“This is comfortable,” Luna said, more to herself than her depressive companion.
“Bully for you,” the pegasus replied. “I wouldn’t know.”
“You’ve never reclined in it yourself?”
The little pegasus rolled her eyes. “Not the real one, no. So I got no texture to give to the fake one you’re in. Why do you think I spend all my time standing?” She glanced contemptuously at a nearby stool. “No matter how many times I visited the real version of this office while I was alive, I never once sat down.”
Sip.
“Certainly you’re alive, child,” Luna insisted. “If you were I would not have been able to enter here. Of this I’m sure.”
For the first time since Luna arrived, the pegasus exhibited an emotion other than morose detachment. For a split second, Luna saw a spark of something briefly give life to those tired eyes.
Hope.
The pegasus hid it immediately by hardening her expression and obscuring the lower half of her muzzle with another long sip of her seemingly bottomless mug of hot cocoa.
“I can’t believe I forgot Princess Luna can dreamwalk. I really… I really am getting old.”
The pegasus’s tone was trying way too hard to sound casual. Luna guessed the foal had been a very convincing actress at some point. Not so much now, being severely out of practice.
“I s’pose,” the pegasus continued, “since I have nothing to lose except an unbroken streak of Xs on the sanity calendar, I’ll take the plunge here. I’ll act like you’re really Princess Luna, come to give little old me a dreamscape therapy session after all this time. What took so long? Kept forgetting to pencil me into your schedule?”
Luna hung her head sadly.
“I’m afraid I don’t know you nor do I know the context of this lounge. I myself have been dead and lingering for so long, most of the past is lost to me. I only entered your mind because my wandering, incomplete form passed you by. I detected your unhappiness and felt compelled to investigate and help.”
The pegasus tightened her grip on her mug and her eyes went impossibly wide. She wasn’t blinking. She seemed downright afraid to blink, as if she believed that the moment she did, this miracle guest would vanish and leave her alone again for another incalculable number of eons.
“You’re real… but don’t… know who... I am?”
Luna shook her head. “Apologies, but should I? Were we friends? I have reason to believe we encountered each other when I was living, given how easily your mind reconstructed me when I arrived. It is a known fact that dreams cannot invent faces from whole cloth and must rely on ones the dreamer saw while they were awak-“
“You said you don’t recognize this room either?” the pegasus interrupted.
Luna pursed her lips and looked around.
The dreamscape was ostensibly an office of some sort, though the pegasus had already referred to it as such. Bookshelves, knickknacks, and motivational posters obscured most of the walls and the color scheme of everything was ten different flavors of cheerful and bright. Or maybe Luna just thought anything was cheery and bright after being adrift in the dark for so long.
“This is…” Luna strained the few memories she had, wanting nothing more than to please the stiff-postured foal standing in front of the desk she’d commandeered. “This is... a workstation belonging to one older sister of yours,” she finally guessed. “You respect her very much and are currently dreaming about one day filling her horseshoes.”
The little pegasus frowned, which was a wordless message to Luna that her guess had been incorrect.
“You shouldn’t go around projecting your own doubts onto other ponies,” The little pegasus chuckled darkly. “That goes double when you’re talking to an egomaniac like me.”
Luna felt a subtle warmth spreading through her, though it took a moment to realize why.
Humor.
Humor was something friends shared with each other.
“You’re weirding me out with that manure-eating grin, Princess. Quit it.”
The former Queen of the Night recomposed herself as best she could.
“Very well then,” Luna acquiesced. “I admit this simulacrum is unknown to me. But for a lucid dream reconstruction, it is quite impressively detailed."
“Hold up. You think I’m asleep right now?”
Luna blinked uncomprehendingly. The pegasus was certainly not conscious, so what alternative was there other than asleep?
“Seriously, you old bat? The calendar wasn’t a big enough hint for you?”
“I…” Luna was fumbling. “I… am missing a piece to this puzzle.”
“Pff. I’ll say. You know, I might have been fine you coming back after all this time to ask me if I’d learned my lesson. Hit me with some sort've lecture like ‘Ooh, you naive and faithless filly. I endured my own solitary prison sentence that was just as awful and lengthy as yours has been, so forsooth and anon! Grovel before me and I might deign to give you a reprieve.’ Something flowery like that. But nope, look at what I get instead!”
The little pegasus was in the air, hovering above the desk and bearing down furiously on her confused and frightened guest.
“Instead you stumble in like an airheaded lobotomy patient, claiming you found me by pure luck. Luck?! What about my luck?? What about me being forced to play host to a senile shard of the pony who sealed me in stone forever?”
Luna didn’t even have the strength to gasp. She barely registered the clatter of her chair as she collapsed onto the floor on her haunches, forelimbs tucked defensively and her head downcast.
Sealed in stone forever.
The phrase had hit her like a hoof to the gut. Luna was seeing a brief flash, like an afterimage that was burned into her retinas: she saw herself bound to an expanse of cratered rock, looking longingly back at the planet where she belonged.
Sealed in stone forever.
Luna had once been threatened with a similar fate, hadn’t she? She had no recollection of the specifics, but that didn’t matter. What mattered was after staring down and escaping the threat of eternal loneliness, she had (if the still fuming pegasus’s insults were true) turned right around and condemned another to that exact same torment. What kind of pony would bring herself to do that?
A villain. A villain would.
Luna untucked her forelegs slightly. Without compromising her upright fetal hunch, Luna brought those alien limbs into her field of vision so they could be examined. Were these the hooves of a villain? Again, she had no actual memory to call on, but her phantom heart told her yes, she had definitely been a villain when she was alive. A villain who escaped her cage.
Had she, upon breakout, victimized this young pegasus? Regret for actions unremembered threatened to drown Luna as she rocked slowly back and forth on the illusory rug. She had entered this head searching for someone to befriend. She had instead done the opposite, strutting like a jailer who came to unwittingly gloat.
Unintended cruelty was still cruelty. And it was utterly shameful to the poor portion of a soul who played the role of Heel.
“Oh pick your head up, Princess. Your crown is falling.”
Prepubescent hooves adjusted Luna’s tiara for her, and she looked up just in time to see the pegasus flit uncaringly past on her way to the far wall with the discarded calendar page once more in her teeth. The pegasus reaffixed the page on top of the others and hovered back a few feet to judge her repair job.
“Fifty-two moons and ten days is still in the cards,” she announced. The little pegasus seemed to have forgotten the outburst from moments ago, but Luna decidedly hadn’t.
“I wronged you,” Luna mumbled.
“Pff. So?”
“So… I’m regretful.”
The pegasus rubbed her eyes wearily. “You’re a saint, Princess. Ya know that? Only a saint feels sorry seeing a bad pony get what she deserves.”
The revelations just kept coming. It was the farthest thought from Luna’s mind that this foal could possibly be a villain like her, especially a self-admitted one.
“Lock up Princess Luna, and she grows a conscience,” the pegasus continued, returning to the desk. “Lock up Cozy Glow, and all she does is loaf around feeling sorry for herself.” The pegasus who called herself Cozy Glow retrieved her mug of hot chocolate from the top of the desk. She took another sip. “Why are you still here, anyway? Figured you’d skedaddle after I started yelling.”
Luna looked around the imaginary office. She didn’t want to leave the only tangible space she’d found in Faust knew how long. Nor did she want to leave the company of the only pony who had so far accepted her. Cozy Glow had major depressive issues, that was abundantly clear, but she was a far more preferable companion than the void.
“P-please do not dismiss me,” Luna begged. “I have nowhere else to go. Yours is the only hospitable mind I have come across.”
“The only one, huh?” Cozy Glow looked wistful. “Guess that means Chrysi and Tirek escaped some time back. Good on them. Hurts a little bit they didn’t take me with, but it’s not surprising. If the roles were reversed, I probably would've ditched them too.”
Sip.
“I..believe your two companions are still nearby,” Luna said slowly. “I reason they were the characters whom I decided against engaging before I entered you.”
Cozy Glow wrinkled her button nose. “Okay, two things, Princess. One: Never say the phrase ‘I entered you’ ever again.”
Luna nodded sheepishly.
“And two..” Cozy licked her lips. “Why.. um…why did...” Was Luna projecting again, or did Cozy Glow actually appear flattered? “If you didn’t know who I was and you also had the two greatest criminal masterminds in Equestria’s history as other choices…. Why’d you pick me over them?”
Luna told the truth. “The others were angry. You were sad.”
Cozy Glow swallowed. “You noticed from that far away, huh? Golly. Even I don't notice how I’m feeling most days anymore, and I’m around myself twenty-four seven. Sad, huh? Yeah, sad sounds about right.”
Neither pony noticed a solitary bubble rise from the depths of Cozy’s hot chocolate, then dissipate when it reached the surface.
“This room is a very pleasant setting,” Luna observed, trying to steer the conversation away from heavier topics. “Did you have happy times here?”
Cozy Glow didn’t answer immediately.
“I had times here. That’s enough.”
Luna kept quiet, hoping Cozy would continue. Her patience was rewarded.
“This is Starlight Glimmer’s guidance office. That’s her chair you’re sitting in. I’ve been using this place as a backdrop for a long time now.” Sip. “A very long time.”
“May I ask why?”
Cozy sighed sadly.
“Because after about a century of mulling it over, I figured out this was the room I damned myself.”
Luna winced at hearing the foal’s cherubic voice curse so casually, even though it was an indirect sign that Cozy Glow was getting looser and more relaxed. Or maybe the little pegasus just didn’t care anymore.
“You really don’t remember what my crimes were, huh Princess?” When Luna shook her head, Cozy Glow’s eyes went to the floor. “Well, to tell you the truth… I don’t really remember either. I remember being able to remember though, if that makes any sense.”
“Your voice is trembling.”
“So what if it is?” Cozy Glow snapped defiantly. “Gods above and below Princess, do you have any idea how hard this is for me to talk about? Of course you don’t. You’re too good of a person. I’d say the first few years of being a statue were total Tartarus, but I’ve actually been there already so I know this was way worse. At least in Tartarus I could move and see. In here I just ended up pulling out my thoughts, bouncing them off the inside of my head, catching them, putting them back, and eventually losing track of the ones I didn’t pull out to play with often enough. I almost forgot my name once. Made sure not to let that happen again. Golly, I’ve lost so many memories over the centuries. I don’t know how many I have left, but it can’t be more than a hooffull. This office, Starlight Glimmer offering me that mug of Empathy Cocoa, me not even touching the thing, those are super clear ones because those are the ones I come back to the most often. The rest are echoes. Didn’t even remember how I got petrified til you showed up again. And yep, it was definitely you who did it. And even though I don’t remember why you did it, I’m pretty sure it was justified. At least, I hope it was. Otherwise that’d make you the bad guy. And who in Equestria would want that?”
Sip.
“Stop me if I am incorrect,” Luna answered slowly, “but you claimed you never even touched the drink you were offered?” Cozy Glow rolled her eyes so hard it was a wonder they didn’t pop out of her head.
“If that was the one thing you got from me pouring my heart out just now, sure. GlimGlam sat where you are now and tossed down a mug that I ignored. Was too busy lying to her face to be thirsty.”
"How can you drink now, then? I recall an earlier remark about being unable to sit for similar reasons."
Cozy Glow wasn’t inclined towards shows of vulnerability (earnest ones, anyway), but dignity meant nothing anymore. It hadn’t meant anything in countless ages. So she sighed sadly and flopped down onto the stool next to her, too deflated to even be amused by Luna’s frowning confusion.
“I never said I couldn’t sit down, old mare. I just said it wouldn't feel like anything. You know none of this is real, right?”
In less than the time it took to blink, the reconstruction of Starlight’s office collapsed into a smothering darkness so complete that it made the void from which Luna had escaped seem populated and lively. Instead of endless space, there was no space at all. The countless calcified grains of Cozy Glow’s former body were packed so tightly together that Luna's dimensionless, amputated soul thrashed in reflexive claustrophobic panic. Or it tried to. There wasn't an angstrom of give. Inside this weathered, eroded lump of stone only vaguely still shaped like horrified grimacing filly, was sealed an inescapable dark, wider than infinity and more dense than a neutron star.
The imaginary office returned as quickly as it had vanished, letting Luna to gulp in the nonexistent air greedily. Cozy Glow was back too, looking more sorrowful than ever.
“That’s the only thing that’s real anymore, Princess. The only thing that’s ever gonna be real again. I’m not sitting down right now. I wasn’t standing up earlier either. And when I do this...“ Sip. “I’m not drinking empathy cocoa. I wish I was though. I wish I did, back then. Cuz maybe if I had it would've made me feel want to come clean to Starlight and not do whatever it was that I did."
Cozy Glow tilted her mug upside down and nothing came out. It was empty so she wearily set it down on the desk between herself and her old enemy.
"There ya have it, Princess. After all this time, that's my Friendship Report. Push it through to Twilight after you leave, m'kay? If she's still alive, I mean."
Luna shifted in the counselor's chair, taking in not just Cozy's words, but the surroundings Cozy'd chosen to be her mental home. There were board games and books on the shelves, but without looking Luna knew the boxes were empty and the pages were blank. Nothing existed here that Cozy's fading mind couldn't dredge up from its depths.
Except Luna herself. In fact, now that the former alicorn thought about it, hadn't Cozy said something about Luna having an affinity for dream magic? Unlike Cozy, Luna could feel the soft chair beneath her own rump, hear the inhales and exhales of her conversation partner (currently Cozy's were soft and quick, like someone trying to keep composure) and could smell the faint scent of cocoa powder wafting from a cup whose contents had supposedly been ethereal and flavorless. Or... wait. No.
The aroma wasn't coming from the cup, but it was definitely nearby.
Cozy visibly flinched to see Luna throw open a drawer behind the desk and stare fisheyed into it.
"What the hoof are you gawking at, old mare?"
"St... Starlight's dispenser."
"Huh?"
Luna swiped Cozy's mug from the desk top and Cozy's ears swiveled involuntarily as the sound of a beverage tap filled the room.
"I nev- ahem! How'd you get that drawer open, Princess? I never touched any of those back in Equestria except for the one where the calendar pages go. The others shouldn't...be able... to..."
Cozy's words died in her mouth as Luna produced the refilled mug of Empathy Cocoa. Its brew looked exactly the same as the astral imagined mix Cozy had dreamed up and maintained, but Luna's eyes were shining bright as if she was looking at a draught steeped for a Queen.
"For you," Luna whispered as she laid the drink down like a treasure. Cozy meanwhile was unimpressed.
"Are we even seeing the same cup, Princess?"
"I don't believe so, no."
Luna had officially stopped making sense, and her nose was twitching like a yearling on the scent of an alfalfa patch. Why? The brew was scentless as Cozy sniffed it, and tepid to her touch.
"It's hot," Luna warned.
"No it isn't," Cozy grunted as she took a swig. "And I would know, because it's dreamed up by my own useless mind-"
The taste of chocolate.
Real, tangible chocolate and marshmallows. After centuries of nothingness, the intensity on Cozy Glow’s tongue hit so hard that her recreation of Starlight's office actively lurched and blurred. All of Cozy's psyche cloyed and clasped at the sensation like a foal in the embrace of its sire. Her mug was empty again, and Cozy was only dimly aware that the fiery ache in her barrel meant she'd greedily swallowed everything in one gulp.
She too was consumed: by a delirium more dominating than the worst she’d endured in the earliest months of her petrification. And yet this, now, was a different flavor of madness. Unlike those terrible traumatic times where insanity was a last resort defense against endless, tortured numbness, Cozy was here roiling between thrums of bliss, each so bright and sonorous that she felt her fossilized heart almost make another defiant beat in an effort pulse life through her physical self.
Almost.
Even though she'd been allowed a split second of psychic relief, the former foal named Cozy Glow was still just a soul in a statue now. Not even the most powerful dream trumped reality, and reality was where Cozy was sadly, steadily returning to. The dark was back, so with deeply ingrained practice she filled it with Starlight's office once again. The warmth of the cocoa was also fading, so she replaced it with the plain carpet of the floor beneath her. Or at least she tried to. The imagined recreations of her hooves materialized not beneath her, but instead tucked loosely to her sides because her belly was facing up. Cozy Glow blinked blearily up at Luna, reclined in the counselors chair and rocking the little filly like a newborn.
"L-Let go of me, old mare!"
"Would it make you happy if I did?"
Cozy looked away, but didn't squirm. "I... I guess not."
The admission of defeat didn't make Luna smile. She'd followed her instincts and given Cozy what she'd hoped was a strong dose of ‘dreamscape therapy,’ but aside from making the office flicker as Cozy coughed and collapsed, there was no external effect. Maybe Luna just didn't have enough of herself left to be the one who gave Cozy-
"Did you reopen that, Princess?"
Luna followed Cozy's line of sight the office door. The same door that had slammed and nearly taken off her tail when she first arrived. Right now it was wide open, and on the other side of the frame was a dark more dark than any other.
The void.
The real world.
"It's closing again!" Cozy squealed as the hinges indeed creaked feebly and the wood moved to swing shut.
Luna dropped Cozy roughly and rushed for the door. Cozy beat her wings furiously, righting herself and following close behind.
"It won't stop!" Luna helplessly exclaimed as she threw her withers against the door, failing to slow the steady swing. Cozy however moved like a pink bullet and her forehoof stopped its advance on contact.
"My mind," she huffed authoritatively "...my rules."
Luna blew out and slumped down. Cozy meanwhile landed and peered into the endless gloom.
"That's the outside, is it? Looks a whole lot like the inside. Unless this is the cocoa thing all over again and you're seeing something I can't."
Luna shook her head. "No more tricks from me. I believe this is my method. A visit, a lesson, and a departure. That's the nature as a dream mage."
Cozy Glow’s legs shook. "You're leaving me? Now?"
"I see no other choice. The exit opened but is clearly aiming to close."
Cozy sniffled. More genuinely than she ever had.
"I don't want to be all alone again, Luna."
"Then you would have me stay?"
Cozy Glow would. More than anything, she would have had Luna to stay with her. But still she shook her head.
"I know what its like in here, Princess. Maybe this is just the drink talking, but I wouldn't wish this place on anyone. Especially you."
“And you’re truly so confident that out there is better than in here?"
"Believe me Princess, anywhere is better than in here."
Luna looked back at the desk. At the bright office walls and the overturned mug on carpet where Cozy had dropped it. And finally she looked down at Cozy Glow herself.
"You have a very eye-catching Cutie Mark, my little pony."
"What, a Rook? Yeah. The castle chess piece. Since castles are made of stone, being a statue was my destiny from the very start, wasn't it?"
"Stone though they may be, Rooks can still move. Straightforward and without tiring."
Cozy Glow looked at Luna, then out of the door, then back at Luna. She seemed rightfully afraid of the offer she was being given.
"You said yourself child, that anywhere is better than here."
Cozy Glow pawed the ground. The ground that didn't exist and would vanish forever if she accepted Luna's invitation to follow. To leave. To die.
"Will... will it hurt?"
"It will not."
"Is it safe?"
"Depends on whom we encounter and what dreams they might have."
Cozy Glow nodded knowingly, then nibbled a stray primary on her left wing.
There was an old superstition among pegasi: By preening before takeoff, by leaving a feather at the point of departure, the sojourner would have good fortune on their journey. And if they didn't, well, at the very least leaving a feather behind was a statement of purpose. A wordless declaration saying ‘I was here. I mattered.’
Her chosen feather placed, Cozy Glow drew up her short frame. She stood tall and brave, shoulder to knee with Luna.
“Okay, Princess. I’m ready.”
Bolstered by each other and a shared sense of cautious hope, both former souls let their pasts and fears dissolve. The cosmos beckoned them home, with sapient stars warming the softness of space. Luna and Cozy were gone, and two new points of light moved amid the numberless multitudes.