//------------------------------//
// Verse 47 
// Story: The Nightmare Knights Become A Band 
// by SwordTune 
//------------------------------//

Luna slowed her descent once the current of magic had slowed enough for her to regain control. Her stomach churned from spinning through the air as she fell, but this was not the first bad dream she had to deal with. She spread her wings and glided to a gentle hover over a pool of water. 
Daybreaker, however, did not have the same luxury. Luna looked down to her sister’s alternate self and couldn’t help but laugh as the tyrant pulled herself out of the pool, her fiery mane doused and dull like a smouldering campfire.
“What are you laughing at,” Daybreaker grumbled as she swam to the edge and pulled herself out. As soon as she wrung her mane dry, the hair enveloped itself in flames once again, becoming the only light under the starry sky above them. “It’s your fault we got kicked out of her dream. We didn’t even learn anything new.” 
“Not true,” Luna said. “We learned what motivates her, and what her goals are.”
“What use is that? They all want the same thing. Power.”
Luna shook her head, landing beside Daybreaker. “Not true. I’m almost certain Scorpan is out for revenge. That nightmare of his, it’s not the kind of thing you just forget when you wake up.”
“Scorpan was always weak,” Daybreaker said as she dried the rest of the water off of her coat using the heat from her fiery mane. “That child, surprisingly, has more brains and ambition than Scorpan ever did.”
“But she didn’t do anything until you got in her way,” Luna reminded. “Now she thinks the only way she’s going to get back the life she had is if she takes everything away from you, as you did to her.”
“So this is all my fault, then?”
“Yeah, it is,” Luna answered matter-of-factly. “You done messed up, Sis.”
Daybreaker shot a look at Luna, her lips pursed so tightly they seemed as if they were ready to fold back into her face. “Don’t call me that.” 
Daybreak stood up and walked away from the pool, started to assess her surroundings. Little could be seen beyond the light of her mane. Trees of all kinds loomed around them, picking up moonlight on the leaves and shading the rose bushes below. Luna watched, slightly amused. For all her posturing and threats, Daybreaker was just as lost in the realm of dreams as Celestia. 
“Where are we?” she finally asked.
“Chrysalis’s dream,” Luna answered, looking around with her. “At least, I think it is. It’s quieter than I expected.” She looked across the pool, at the moon reflected in the gentle rippling of the water’s surface.
“Then where is that maniac?”
Luna shrugged. “She doesn’t feel as active as the others, meaning her mind is simply replaying and processing old memories into dreams. We’ll have to do some searching, or wait for the dream to bring her to us.”
“I’m done waiting,” Daybreaker said without hesitation. She picked a direction at random and started to storm off. “Let’s go.”





After about fifteen minutes of aimless wandering, the two alicorns found themselves at the entrance to a palace. Being the world that it was, there was no city of Canterlot, and no Canterlot Palace, yet Luna immediately recognized the style of royal architecture. The trees around them began to shrivel and shrink as they saw two ponies exiting the palace. What was once a dense forest was receding into a nicely trimmed and maintained garden.
Luna felt the rush of feathers fly by her head as a pair of doves flew over her head and circled around the canopy of the trees. They almost seemed to follow the pair of ponies, watching over them as they entered the garden. 
Her eyes widened once she recognized their faces. Though his armour was different, the stallion was clearly Twilight’s brother, Shining Armour. His mane, no matter how neat he tried to make it, still splayed out in the shape of his helmet. His armour was darker, pine green with accents of orchid-purple, and bore no royal insignia. And at his side, the pink alicorn princess was the spitting image of Cadence.
“You know him?” Daybreaker asked, seeing Luna’s face as the ponies walked through the garden. 
Luna nodded. “A royal guard, and Cadence’s husband. Brother to the ruler of Equestria in my world.”
Daybreaker stared at her, even more perplexed. “My counterpart has a brother in your world?” 
“What?” Luna broke her focus, taking a moment to understand what Daybreaker was implying. “Oh, ha!” she snorted a laugh. “You’re not the ruler of Equestria anymore. Or, I guess your alternate self isn’t. Celestia passed the role on to her former student.”
“She just gave up the throne?” Daybreaker gawked in disgust. “I wasn’t aware that was something some pony could do.” She quickly turned back to Shining Armour. “Anyway, what’s next? Why would he be escorting Chrysalis?”
“What are you, blind?” Luna mocked her. “That’s Cadence. That looks nothing like Chrysalis. Not her normal form, at least.”
“The pink one?” Daybreaker pointed through the trees. “No, that’s definitely her. I told you, we’ve fought before. She’s crazy.”
“So, Chrysalis in your world has been undercover in Cadence’s form this whole time?” Luna paused. “That kind of makes sense, actually.”
“I don’t know what you mean. What other form could she have?” Daybreaker said. Then, her eyes lit up like a bonfire. “Are you telling me she’s a changeling?”
“What? Yes! How could you not know?”
Daybreaker’s mane flared, threatening to catch the trees on fire as she snapped back at Luna. “Do you think I would allow changelings in my city if I knew their queen was my enemy? I’ve fought her for years, long before you showed up and broke my collar. I’ve never seen her transform. How would I know she’s a changeling?”
“Never knew her to be good at what she does,” Luna answered, “didn’t think she could go so deep undercover. Are you sure it’s her?”
“Yes, now shut up. I think I recognize this memory. It didn’t look exactly like this, but it’s close.”
A ball of flaring light, not from Daybreaker’s mane, lit up in the night sky. The two alicorns shielded their eyes as a familiar figure stepped out of the light, the spurs of her talons barely touching the grass as if she couldn’t bring herself to step on the dirt beneath her.
Eris, Luna recognized the bird-headed draconequus even before the light faded, stepped and approached Cadence and Shining Armour. 
“Ah, just the two ponies I was hoping to find. Wasn’t sure if I’d land in the right spot. Teleportation is more of an art than an exact science, you know.”
Immediately, a bubble of magic projected out from Shining, pushing back Eris into the branches of a tree. “What are you doing here?” he snarled at her.
“My dear boy,” Eris laughed, then tapped her claws against his barrier. Her claws drew a crack across Shining’s magic and shattered the shield like paper-thin glass. “The fact that you are still here is proof that I have no intention to kill you and your lovely wife.”
The horizon of the dream flashed with an orange glow as if the sun were rising. But the smoke and fire and distant screams told Luna another story. Squinting, she could just about make out a ball of fire hurling itself through the sky before crashing back down and destroying something else in the distance.
“You sure do know how to make an entrance?” Luna told Daybreaker. The fiery alicorn said nothing, continuing to watch Eris speak to Shining. 
“Oh, speaking of your wife, a little birdy told me the most curious thing.” Eris waved her claw and created a portal between them. Shining Armour stared wide-eyed, mouth ajar, as a ragged copy of Cadence rose up, bound in chains around her hooves and neck.
Luna could feel the air getting hotter, and turned to find Daybreaker clenching her jaw. Just seeing the same kind of chains which enslaved her for a thousand years seemed to well up a torrent of anger. 
But she was undercut by a sharp laugh from Eris. “My pet was raiding a changeling hive when she found this little thing wrapped up in one of their prisons. Looks like your wife isn’t who she says she is.”
“That’s ridiculous!” Cadence, or rather Queen Chrysalis, shouted. “Your tricks won’t work here, Eris.”
“Tell that to her.” The lord of chaos smirked and snapped her claws, releasing Cadence’s chains. The pink alicorn’s eyes opened, slowly at first, and then fixated on the copy before her. 
Luna covered her ears as the whole dream shuddered from Cadence’s scream. She wailed and raged, shambling across the garden’s grass in a wild crawl and tackling Chrysalis. They tumbled against the ground, beating each other with hooves and biting each other’s ears and manes. 
“Give me back my body you bitch!” Cadence, the original one, Luna believed, screamed. “You stole my life! I’ll kill you!”
“You’re crazy!” Chrysalis answered, not dropping her form. Magic blasted from both horns, splitting the trees apart. 
Shining stood, stunned, trying to put up a barrier between the two of them. Telling them apart was surprisingly simple. The Cadence who Eris had discovered was frail and thin. Even from behind the trees where Luna and Daybreaker watched, they could still see how paper-thin her skin was, with her ribs and spine pushing out as if they would fall out of her if she was hit too hard. Still, the original put up a relentless fight, not letting go of Chrysalis for a second. 
Amidst the chaos, Eris laughed. “Aw, maybe they should get married instead. Look at them, they’re inseparable!” And then she fell silent. “Hey, you know what…”
As the two Cadences fought, the flames in the distance still burned. In fact, they grew closer. The rippling sound of fire flying through the air came to a halt when the Daybreaker entered the scene, crashing through the castle behind Shining Armour.
“Shining!” Chrysalis cried out, but the stallion was too shaken to react. By the time he turned to raise a barrier, a wall of burning bricks crashed down on top of him. Chrysalis kicked Cadence away, rushing to clear the rubble away. The dream’s Daybreaker broke out from the pile, her mane ablaze and her horn charged with magic. 
But her power immediately shut off as her collar strangled her magic and shocked her. Daybreaker writhed until she collapsed, and then looked up at Eris with confusion across her face.
“Master, I was just— argh!” Eris clenched her claws and activated Daybreaker’s collar again, the shock growing in intensity.
“You stupid animal!” Eris hissed. “I told you to keep the destruction to the city. I wasn’t done with these ponies and now you ruined my fun!” She opened a portal beneath Daybreaker and pushed her though, leaving the collar to continue shocking wherever she went.
“And you two.” Eris teleported both Cadences into her claws, gripping them by the necks. “I was going to drive your beloved Shining Armour mad, but I guess this will have to do. I don’t have time to deal with you both, so I hope you enjoy each other’s company.”
As if they were both made of clay, Eris twisted the two Cadences together, pulling and pushing their flesh into a single body. Her chaos magic, even in the memory, seemed to bend and distort everything around her.
Luna clutched her stomach, feeling sick as if the dream itself struggled to make sense of the magic. Even Daybreaker shrunk away, retreating slightly behind the tree.
“What is she doing to them?”
They merged. Chrysalis, no longer in control of her own body, melted away her outer guise. Beneath the fur and hair of a pony, her skin turned to a shiny black chitin and her eyelids peeled back to expose the unblinking bug-eyes of a changeling.
“What is this?” Chrysalis screamed. “What did you do to me?” 
There was little time for an answer. Her legs and Cadence’s interlocked, and the true alicorn’s skin folded itself around the two of them, gift wrapping them together. When Eris was done, there was only one body. One Cadence.





“Get out of me!” 
Luna and Daybreaker backed away from the memory and Cadence’s anguished crying. The dream was beginning to fall apart now that it arrived at the core reason for the nightmare. But Daybreaker was not willing to simply leave the dream altogether. She had learned something about Chrysalis, but not where to find her.
“If we stay here too long, the dream will consume us,” Luna told Daybreaker. “It’ll be easier to leave now while it still doesn’t have a grip.” She decided not to mention that it was just a complete guess. In one thousand years, Luna had never been in a dream controlled by two minds. 
Connecting dreams between two ponies was one thing. It was a simple task of being a mediator for both of their thoughts. But Cadence, or Chrysalis, whoever she was now, was not as simple as bridging two minds. They were two minds fused to the same body, different and yet the same straight down the subconscious. There was no predicting what would happen. 
“I am not leaving until I know where to find them!” Daybreaker roared and kicked a tree in frustration. “This would all have been for nothing.” 
“Well, we would’ve learned that you’re good at destroying lives,” Luna replied. “And that they’re in the forest. You said it yourself, the memory was a little bit different from what really happened.” She waved her hoof to the tree around them. “Just a guess, but this entire forest probably wasn’t part of their castle gardens, right?”
“I was ordered to attack the city to add some chaos. And the castle gardens weren’t this big, we should be running through streets right now,noy throug a forest.” She huffed and slowed down, finally stopping to talk. “But I already knew they were in the forest. I just don’t know where.”
“Well, let’s think about the dreams we were in,” Luna said. “Scorpan’s dream was in a forest too, at an old castle ruin. This dream combined a castle from Chrysalis’s memories and a forest. Perhaps there’s a connection there.”
“What about the kid’s dream?”
Luna shook her head. “Cosy had a good grip on lucid dreaming. We can’t know what was intentional and what wasn’t. However, Scorpan and Chrysalis, they are not as stable as her, mentally speaking.”
“Well, castles were the first thing I looked for,” Daybreaker said. “There are a few ruins in the forest, but they were untouched when my soldiers found them. I posted guards to watch them, but turned up nothing.”
“I still think that’s the best clue we have. The forest is huge, there has to be places you haven’t explored yet.”
“It’s hard to miss a whole castle, even the ruined ones. I’ve flown over the forest a dozen times, I know I would have seen a—” Daybreaker paused. “Wait, the pool of water we landed in. There was no pool of water in the gardens when I attacked. There couldn’t have been, it was too small. But the forest has a few ponds and small lakes.”
Luna smiled. “See? We learned something after all.” 
“It’s still not a guarantee.”
“Only clue we have, though.”
Daybreaker grunted. “I’m not going to that concert if it doesn’t work out.”
“Oh? So if we do find them, that means you’re coming, right?”
“No,” she snapped back. “I’m just saying it for emphasis. I’m not going to your concert at all.”
“Well, maybe I should just pull us out of the dream then,” Luna shrugged.
Before Daybreaker could remind Luna that she could still hold her prisoner if she didn’t help, the dream lurched around them. It felt like being on a ship on the open sea, in the middle of a storm. The whole world churned and twisted around them, and Luna could see the sky itself stretching closer and farther from the ground. 
Behind them, Cadence’s cries began to become louder once again. The pink alicorn and changeling fusion shot up into the sky.
“Daybreaker!” she screamed. “I’ll kill you for Shining!”
“Ah,” Luna laughed nervously, “so that’s why she hates you.”
“Well? Do something about her. Change the dream or something.”
“Yeah, no.” Luna instead tugged at the dream until a portal split open in front of them. “This is the dream of two insane alicorns. Well, an alicorn and a changeling queen. Kill me if you want when we wake up, but I’m not going to risk losing my mind in this place.”
“Hey, I didn’t say we were done,” Daybreaker barked, but already Luna was already stepping out of the dream. “Luna! Get your butt back in here. Don’t—” The cracking of trees came closer as she protested. Through the branches, she could barely see Cadence’s eyes reflecting the light from her fiery mane.
“I’m coming for you!” she shrieked, and for once in the entire dream, it sounded as if she was talking directly to Daybreaker.
“Luna! Luna!” she shouted through the portal. “Luna, get back here, don’t just leave me!”
“I’m going to wear your flesh!” Cadence yelled, her voice inching closer. For a moment, Daybreaker wondered if creatures were stronger in their own dreams. In the waking world, she had no doubt she could defeat Chrysalis. But the dream was not the real world, and she quickly abandoned the thought.
Without waiting to test the answer to her question, Daybreaker jumped after Luna through the portal.