Consciousness is a fickle thing, especially when one is on the verge of death.
Luna’s waking mind flickered in and out, and for once there was no grip of lucidity. So it was that for the first time in a very long time, the mistress of dreams had nightmares all her own.
They were dark things, amorphous and hungry, and they gnawed at her.
Some were memories of war. Memories of the trenches that spanned the vast tundra where so many nameless battles took place across frozen hellscapes where the ground was as frozen in places with as much blood as water during the wars against King Sombra's legions. Memories of the war-torn cities where she fought against her Sister’s forces, scorching whole districts of life in their desperate battles and steering through corpse-choked streets with battered killsquads of her beloved Night Guard.
It was said, during the Rebellion, that no army lost a battle where their patron goddess took the field. Those rumors usually failed to mention the absolute devastation that occurred when both Sisters were present, however.
Others were memories of isolation. Luna’s long, maddening imprisonment in the cage of the moon, bound in its lightless depths by chains forged from magic that was older than Discord were buried deep in her mind, locked away but always whispering.
A voice penetrated the darkness of memory, at times. It was a grim, leonine voice that told her to rest, and at times to drink something.
Luna was far too weak to resist, and she was so very thirsty.
‘Drink’ said the voice.
Luna swallowed weakly in her fever throes, coughing and sputtering around the bitter, herbal taste. It burned going down, but less than the searing in her veins.
With every passing of the voice, Luna’s dreams grew quieter. There were fewer screams, fewer trenches, fewer blood-soaked city alleys.
‘Drink’
Luna swallowed again, although how much time had passed between the first time, this time, and all the intervening times, she couldn’t say. Time had lost all meaning, as it tended to when she dreamed, but Luna had forgotten how jarring it could be.
To dream as a mortal dreamed.
“Do you muse this thoroughly while awake?” That familiar bass voice broke through the malaise of incognition, sharpening Luna’s mind with an almost-audible ratcheting sensation.
Darkness became dimness while up, down, left, and right were defined without warning, and with an abrasive shudder of space and time. Luna staggered as her bodiless mind suddenly became solid and heavy, and a gasp escaped her lungs as the alien sensation of breathing struck her in the chest.
“If so, I may consider investing in a muzzle,” the voice continued.
“Show thyself!” Luna snarled and her voice echoed strangely in the null void of space she was standing in. “We know thy name, Sombra, and we ought to have known thou wouldst persist past death again, thou roach.”
“Your dreaming arts are rusty, Princess,” Sombra replied with a chuckle, ignoring the insults. “Had you spent the past few years of your return honing them, rather than the barbs on your tongue, you could simply force me to appear. After all, this is your mind we’re in.”
Luna bristled at Sombra’s condescending tone. The worst of it was that he was right. Since she had returned from her lunar prison and been freed from the madness of Nightmare Moon, Luna had struggled to find the motivation to pursue her arts as she used to. Perfecting her dreaming arts had once been a necessity, especially back when she and her sister had been contending with forces like Discord and, indeed, Sombra.
The dark king was a monster, true, but he was also one of the most accomplished dreamers in the span of creation.
Forcing her temper back, Luna grimaced and looked down, concentrating on the vast nothingness around her. She focused on the glimmers of consciousness, they were so far away from her now, too far for even her divine senses to reach, but they were there.
She was weak. She knew this in the same way a once-hale farmer knows he’s gotten old when he wakes up one morning, goes to move, and every joint in his body protests. Luna knew the way a plague victim knows the moment she’s taken ill, with a sick turn of her stomach and a flush of fever up the neck and around the brow.
“Damnation!” Luna gasped as she released her hold on her magic. Even here in the Dreamtime she felt faint. “What ails us such that We cannot even—?”
“Not bad,” Sombra rumbled, and this time the voice came from directly behind her.
Luna whirled in place and planted all four hooves solidly on the ground, baring her teeth and lowering her horn. Magic or no, power or no, divinity or no, she would best the brute if it meant goring his sorry heart with her horn!
He was as terrible and imposing as she remembered. Huge on a scale not seen even among the stoutest earth ponies, taller than her by half a head at least where she towered over the average pony by a full head. His fur was the color of fresh, black ash, while his mane was a rakish tumble of obsidian curls, and his horn… Luna always thought Sombra’s horn looked too much like a curved blade freshly pulled from a gory wound.
Strangely, though, in this vision of him, he wore neither his armor nor his crown as he always had when they’d met in the Dream before.
“Don’t bother,” Sombra said with a smirk.
Before she could give a reply, Luna’s legs went out from under her. Her chest started to burn abominably, her head pounded, and her very veins ached.
“W-What… c-curse hast thou le-levied on us?” Luna gasped the words out around a throat that seemed deadset on strangling its owner.
“None,” Sombra replied with a shrug. “I simply stopped shielding you from your body’s input. This is how you would be feeling were you awake right now, so perhaps you ought to be thankful—” Sombra nodded, and his scarlet horn glinted faintly, and instantly the pressure and pain subsided— “that I am allowing you to remain asleep.”
“Why?” Luna hissed as she struggled to her hooves. “Ransom? We wouldst bite our own tongue off before suffering such indignity!”
Sombra crooked an eyebrow, then chuckled, and Luna shivered despite herself. The mouth of a pony should not contain teeth so sharp.
“Leaving aside that you could bite off your tongue all you wished in this place and t’would gain you nothing but a grotesque carpeting of tongues to tread upon,” Sombra said before his quiet, heavy laugh tapered off to stillness. “To answer your question, no… you are neither prisoner nor hostage, at worst you are a patient, and eventually a free mare.”
“Liar,” Luna said flatly.
Sombra bared his teeth in a humorless grin that showcased a maw which belonged more to the muzzle of a wolf than a pony.
“I am many things, dear Princess,” Sombra growled. “A bastard, a tyrant, and a murderer… but I am not a liar.”
The ground vanished from beneath Luna’s hooves before she could make her reply. Her wings flapped uselessly, her pegasus magic gone from her, and her horn would not light no matter how she focused as she fell.
“It’s a dream,” Luna spat, clenching her eyes shut and willing herself not to feel the stomach-clenching, primal panic of freefall. “It’s just a dream, it’s just a dream, it’s just a dream!”
The darkness around her howled and wind beat at her like she was flying through a tempest. There was no sanity, no reason, just the endless downward scream of falling and falling and falling.
Luna spasmed as she jerked awake, and instantly the taste of bitter herbs and bile flooded her mouth. She shivered violently as she tried to move, but failed, for a moment she was certain she was restrained; pinned to the ground by chains or magical force, but the more she tried to move the more she realised that the truth was far more terrible.
She was simply that weak.
“Lie still,” Sombra’s voice called from the side of the room.
Forcing her head up, Luna squinted at the massive pony in the sackcloth and wind-torn robe of a vagrant as he mixed something at a stone table at the far end of the room.
His voice was rough with what Luna thought was disuse. It was a familiar enough affliction to her. During her imprisonment, she’d occasionally gone years at a time without speaking before descending into screaming fits that lasted months.
“The va-vagrant,” Luna rasped, then coughed several times before working her tongue around her mouth to try and move around some moisture.
“You were… in Crysopolis… the day I arrived.”
Every other word was a labor to get out, and Luna found herself breathing hard after just a few words.
“The fickle bitch of fate and nothing more, I assure you,” Sombra replied irritably. “Now lay back, you should have remained in the Dream.”
“Then why… why not keep me there?” Luna asked as she tried to rise, but faltered and collapsed back down.
As she did, she realised whatever she was laying on was actually quite comfortable. A quick glance told her it wasn’t some straw mat in a cell, but in fact a lushly appointed bed with old and worn blankets and thick pillows. The bedclothes had a faint musk to them, too. It wasn't quite sweat so much as the smell of fabric that was used and often, and by the same pony such that a certain scent of them never quite faded despite the laundering.
“It was taking too much power,” Sombra replied as he took up the mortar in one hoof and the pestle deftly in crook of his other to start grinding. “If you wish to suffer the wage of your affliction so dearly that you’ll spit on the small mercies I offer, then so be it… wake and be miserable.”
Slowly, Luna lowered her head back to the pillow she’d been laying on before. It was matted with hairs from her mane and sweat from her brow. She didn’t have the strength to protest, or she would have.
What worried her more wasn’t that, though.
What concerned her most gravely was that she was very clearly in Sombra’s own bed.
Sombra was many things, as he himself said. A bastard? Perhaps in the pejorative sense, but Luna knew nothing of his parentage. A tyrant? Certainly, history and her own memory alike proved that well enough. A murderer? Undoubtedly. How many had died during his regime? How many executions of political dissidents or rebel forces had he seen to by his own horn?
Yes, he was all of those things, but situated where she was, weaker than she could ever remember being, so weak that she could barely lift a hoof, much less fend off an attacker, Luna’s more pressing and gut-wrenching concern was whether or not he was—
“Haul your mind out of the gutter if you please, Princess!” Sombra snapped, a spark of true anger flaring in his voice for the first time since she’d awoken as he turned slightly to eye her with a bitterly furious glare. “I am not a liar, and I am certainly not that, so I would thank you to keep your thoughts to yourself if you’re going to be indulging in such fantasies.”
“Fantasies?!” Surprise struck Luna cleanly across the jaw, so much so that she briefly forgot how weak she was as she jerked up to stare scornfully at him.
Something her body was keen to remind her of a moment later as she collapsed back to the mattress.
“Thou canst hardly… blame us…” Luna huffed, already red in the face from her exertion. “Thou hast me… at thy will, and… in thy bed, so…” Luna trail off and she paused as she rewound the prior few moments in her mind, then narrowed her eyes at Sombra. “Art thou rooting around in our mind?!”
“You’re not guarding yourself,” Sombra replied, the heat gone from his voice as he put his broad back to her once more. “Cerebramancy is not an art one can just turn off, either. Thoughts are like whispers… or bellows, in your case.”
A light blush of shame colored Luna’s cheeks.
“Our magic… is failing us,” Luna grumbled, settling back down on the bed. “We… We can’t.”
Sombra huffed quietly, then turned to hobble over to Luna with a steaming mug of something that looked like tea but smelled like a latrine. Sombra closed the distance quickly, but not without difficulty, and Luna couldn’t helped but stare at his cloak-covered hind leg as he reached the edge of the bed.
“Can you hold it?” Sombra asked, holding up the cup.
Luna scowled, tried to light her horn, but only got a twinge and a brief icepick headache for her trouble before shaking her head.
“Very well,” Sombra replied, moving the cup, and himself forward until the cup was pressed against Luna’s indignant muzzle. “Drink, unless you wish to worsen.”
Pulling her mouth away from the rim of the cup, Luna scowled up at Sombra, what little she could see of him under the cowl of his ratty cloak anyway, and snorted.
“How… How are… we to know, thou art… not poisoning us… further,” Luna pushed the words out with difficulty, and Sombra chuckled before moving the cup back to her lips.
“If I wished you poisoned,” Sombra replied, “I would have been better off leaving you to die of the Sun Dog’s touch.”
He nudged her lips with the cup as he spoke, which Luna frowned against. Sombra rolled his eyes and drew back.
“Princess, introducing any more poison to your system would have been like administering a bee sting to a pony with four gangrenous legs and a case of the galloping scumpox. Now drink.”
Sombra pressed the cup to her mouth again. Luna, against both her instinct and, more importantly, her pride, opened her mouth for Sombra to pour his foul concoction in. She nearly gagged, swallowing it down, before smacking her lips as she tried to get the taste off of her tongue while Sombra chuckled and set the cup down.
“We take it back,” Luna grumbled as she laid back down. “Poison would certainly taste better.”
“Poison is always sweeter than the cure, Princess,” Sombra said quietly. “Now sleep… you will likely not dream, but in case you do I will keep watch.”
Already Luna’s eyes were growing heavy. There must have been some kind of soporific in the brew he’d given her because all of her weariness was catching up to her at once.
“W-why?” Luna mumbled through a yawn.
Sombra turned, and for a moment Luna thought she saw something odd beneath the hood. Like a glint of something pale, but then the cowl shifted and it was gone.
“Because you’re a goddess,” Sombra replied so softly that Luna nearly didn’t hear him, and she was fast asleep by the time he spoke again. “And this world ought to have something beautiful left in it.”