The twins stood in front of the castle barbican and stared at the keep nervously. The guards kept close watch but were otherwise unsure of what to do.
"We're not paid enough for this," Candy whined.
"I wish that alicorns weren't actually a thing," Candied echoed. She sat and held her head between her hooves. "Everything was going relatively easy. We got that fantastic job, we got to do whatever we wanted..." The mare slumped. "And now we're talking and conspiring with a literal god born of the moon who can make us disappear just by being too close to her."
Candy babbled. "W-wh...She can do that?" His question was met with a shrug.
"What do you need, assistant mayors? You've been standing there, bickering for several minutes," a guard asked.
"We came to see the alicorn," Candied Cane replied. "I'm hoping there's nothing wrong with that?"
The guard became visibly nervous. "Well, she hasn't come out of the keep since she came back. You'll have to fly up to her yourselves."
"You're not helping?!" Candy shouted in disbelief.
The guard shook her head. "No way! I don't know what she'll do if we distract her!"
The stallion thought deeply then turned to his sister with a wide smile on his face. "She might be dead! This whole thing could be over!" he whispered enthusiastically.
Candied looked at him with revulsion. "Brother, that's a terrible thing to say!" She paused. "But yes. That would be best for the situation, I suppose," she noted dismissively.
The guard directed them to the keep where they stopped and hesitantly peered in through the doors into an empty, freezing cold chamber with nothing in it. They could only catch a glimpse of light coming from above. Limbs became heavy and the air stagnant. It stung their airways with every inhale, but the twins went in reluctantly while the guard stayed behind.
"W-wait, you're not coming with us?" Candy asked.
The guard laughed heartily. "Oh Hades, no. I'm not getting near her. You don't mess with her. Salute!" the guard said with a salute and disappeared into the courtyard.
There was a short pause while the dumbfounded twins tried to recollect themselves.
"That was cringe-inducing," Candied wheezed.
Candy rubbed his throat and tried to clear it several times. "I think phlegm just tried to block my throat," he croaked.
They both looked back up at the light and gulped in unison.
"Well, let's just get this over with. If it doesn't work then we can just get the mayor, wherever he is."
Reluctantly, the two flew up to the platform out of reach of most ponies and gradually rounded the corner. There might have been windows, but they weren't visible. All the twins could see was the alicorn on the floor, surrounded by a vortex of black smoke producing intermittent flashes of pale pink and purple. Nightmare Moon herself would occasionally flash a bright blue that seemed to linger in the air around her.
"Uhh...Is that normal?" Candied asked. Candy shrugged. "Oh. Right," she groaned.
Candy cleared his throat and slowly approached the alicorn. "Uhhh...Miss Alicorn?"
He was shoved by Candied. "You're supposed to say 'Your Highness'!" she berated him behind clenched teeth.
"But I don't know how to say that in Old Canterlotese or whatever the language was!"
The two started to panic, pacing about the room, unaware that Nightmare Moon wasn't reacting to their existence.
"What do we do?! How do we talk to her? I thought that stallion with the weird mane was taking care of it?!" Candy shouted.
"I don't know! W-w-we should shake her, you know?!" Candied blurted. "Shake her awake or something!" The two looked at her and gulped audibly. "You first, big brother."
He raised a brow at her. "You're the one who is a few minutes older. You go, dearest older sibling."
"That's just a technicality! Now you're arguing semantics" Candy shrugged in response, annoying his sister. She threw her wings forward. "Look, how about we both touch her and, if she doesn't move, we leave?"
The stallion thought deeply then acquiesced with a sigh. "Fine. Together then."
The two approached Nightmare Moon and slowly inched their hooves beneath the strange magical objects floating around her. If they didn't touch those, it would be alright, right?
Candied stumbled and fell forward. In the second that it occurred, she turned around and reflexively grabbed her brother's foreleg, pulling him into her fall towards the inanimate alicorn. Yet still, she spotted something lurking in the corner of her eyes scampering away before she could get a good look at it. The next thing the mare knew, they were floating in some horrifying void of purples, reds, and blues. A chaotic amalgamation of colors. All in an instant. She couldn't process everything.
"Oh, I knew this was a bad idea!" Candy cried. "I just wanted to go back to our office and do some standard, normal work! Now we're stuck in this...catastrophic cacophony of colors!" Candied stared at him. "What?"
"Came up with that on your own on the spot?" she asked.
The stallion tilted left and right. "Kinda." The two kept quiet, looking around their new location, unable to register what was happening. "So...which way is up?" Candy asked.
The two ponies had been gradually floating around but were still in standing position. They hadn't paid attention to it when they had just briefly entered this world, but now that they were able to observe everything quietly, they finally noticed their involuntary movement.
Candied looked around and frowned. "I...don't know," she worried.
Candy started panicking. "How do we even move? Are we supposed to move?" he shouted.
"I don't know!" the mare responded in kind.
The chaotic mess of colors turned black, and the two ponies felt like they were being pulled by something. They were going faster and faster until they slammed on a tiled floor and slid along. They couldn't make much out, but it looked like a stone building with tan-colored walls and giant, pony-sized tiles on the floor. The walls were thick and the sun shone brightly through empty windows above. Only a few wooden panels hung on creaky hinges, and most of the wooden panels had fallen off. Upon closer inspecting, the walls and floor were cracked, and there was wooden debris everywhere. In fact, it wasn't sunny outside. It looked like there was a conflict of interest between who could stay within the sky above, creating a corona of light around an eclipsed sun and filling the sky with purples, reds, oranges, blues, and flickers of green passing between a few stars bleeding through the sunlight. There was an acrid stench of iron and ash. The mixture was uncanny and made the ponies' eyes water in response to inhaling it.
"What is this?" Candy wondered in shock. The two looked around, baffled. "First, the alicorn is surrounded by some swirling clouds, then we end up in a void with no up and down, and now we're in some kind of unfinished building?" He kicked a pile of wooden debris on the floor and coughed when he breathed in some of the disturbed dust. "Abandoned unfinished building," he stated with boredom.
Candied rubbed her forehead and shook her head afterwards. "Well, the only thing we can do now is look around and try to make sense of...whatever any of this is. We entered the magic field of a literal goddess, so this must be the work of extremely powerful magic. Hopefully we can get back if we find a source, or the alicorn or whatever."
"Guess we're going that way then," Candy said as he pointed down the hallway.
This was beyond their paygrade, but now they were trapped and were forced to find an escape. The building they were in was quite immense, judging by the area they entered. It looked like an old throne room with the walls stretching higher and higher into an arched ceiling, but there wasn't much in terms of decoration. Most of the room was barren save for pillars built into the walls. Walls that had holes in them or were damaged. The same could be said of the floor tiling which displayed gaps exposing the naked ground beneath them.
"Over there!" Candied cried out.
She rushed towards a pony splayed on the ground. He was wearing a singed helmet that didn't cover much of his head. It covered a bit of the back of the neck and the top of the head, but there was no protection for the ears or the rest of their face. Their sky-blue coat only peered through in small portions through the charred blackness of the rest of their body. There were other ponies laying on the ground as well, unmoving and silent. Some wore blue helmets, others white or yellow. Some had wood-leather armor, others were bare. Regardless, the whole chamber was littered with them, and some were hanging off the base of the empty windows or stuck against the walls.
A laugh broke the two out of their stupor.
"What was that?" Candied wondered aloud.
"It sounded a bit like that alicorn, no?" Candy breathed heavily and his wings twitched. "I don't want to, but we should check the source and confirm if it's her. She might be able to get us out of this place."
The two followed the laughter as best as they could, going down the path of ponies to a torn down wall leading to an open balcony protected by a stone roof and many small columns on the edges of the platform meant to hold it up. Beneath the roof itself was a throne whose back had been broken off, leaving only a sliver of chiseled stone sticking upright. A familiar figure stood behind it in front of a hole between the small columns, holding up what appeared to be a pony, but one the twins did not recognize. They could only make out a white coat and a massive mane of pastel colors floating and waving on its own.
"Luna, please don't do this!" the pony begged. It was a mare.
The dark figure laughed. "But it was all for me, sister. You did this all for me," 'Luna' growled.
The white pony was dropped and fell down whatever chasm this place stood over. The figure turned around, laughing fervently at her victory. The two noticed this pony seemed familiar but...not known. The sun outside vanished, leaving the moon to take its place in the sky. It was a nauseating sight for reasons that escaped the twins.
Candied squinted and tried to make out all the details. "She looks...kinda like..."
She became quiet once the alicorn opened her eyes to glare at her. The alicorn's eyes reminded the pegasus of a dragon of ancient folklore.
The alicorn clicked her tongue. "They're bleeding into my dreamscape..." she growled. "To another," she croaked.
The twins found themselves in the void again. This time, however, there was no calmness to it. It was more akin to being swept up into a tornado and thrown about violently between more of them traveling together. Their screams couldn't be heard over that of the storm of chaos they had been thrown in. Senses were jumbled and thrown upside-down. They had no way of righting themselves up or even getting out of it. Then, as suddenly as it began, they were free. Standing on solid ground. Another location. This time more...insalubrious to a pony's well being.
A field of batttle in a rocky, squarish field of black obsidian. Tattered flags and ruined ponies strewn about the battlefield. Destroyed wagons and siege weaponry holding onto tattered cloth that flapped in the wind. In a ditch further down the black alicorn was present once more, this time badly wounded. Her wing hung to her side and her face and parts of her body had been scorched. She had to hold up her right hindleg as she looked down upon the white pony again, multiple spears and swords raised and pointed at her with magic.
"You...you put up a good fight, sister," the black alicorn complimented through her wheezing. "But the night has won in the end."
The weapon went down, and the pastel mane and tail lost their color and movement. The alicorn chuckled to herself as she struggled to turn around while the night asserted itself. Her smile was quick to disappear when she noticed the twins staring at her.
"What? Again?! Leave me be!"
Another shift, another trip in the storm, another environment. Pipes and cogs everywhere. Ponies engulfed in gigantic, metal bodies. The same white alicorn whose face the two couldn't see. Another conquest. Another night. Another discovery of the twins. No matter how many times the scene was changed, the twins would always reappear somewhere around the black alicorn. Again and again they would reappear, and again and again they would vanish. At some point the twins no longer cared about the storm they were cast into constantly. After over a dozen times of being pulled in and out of the vortex, the two were kept within the chaos and confronted with the alicorn whose body had morphed yet again.
No longer did it have a black coat with a tall, thin body. No longer were its wings shaped like crescent moons. No longer did blue armor adorn its head, chest, and hooves. The only thing that remained consistent was her ethereal mane and tail vaguely resembling the night sky waving on their own. Her coat was a dark shade of blue, she was much shorter, and she was more akin in appearance to a normal pony. However, surrounding her body was a ghostly shape of Nightmare Moon made of a black smog. It possessed a face that floated just above the alicorn's, although its eyes were hollow. It seemed to be imitating the smaller alicorn's facial expressions. Here it was baring its teeth and frowning at the twins.
"Who are you and what are you doing here? How did you even get in here?" the alicorn asked.
Candy stepped forth, his body shaking from nervousness. "We uh...we were just trying to talk with Nightmare Moon. She was surrounded by some weird cloud spell thing. We touched it, then we found ourselves here."
"We have been trying to find her to get out of this place and then get back to the office and never speak of this again," Candied added. She leaned forward. "Do you know how to escape this place? I'm pretty sure Nightmare Moon would know."
The blue alicorn's expression lightened, followed by the cloud of Nightmare Moon. She leaned back and straightened her neck, and her voice was firm but tired. "I am Nightmare Moon." The twins froze, as though the concept was not comprehensible in any state. "This is my dreamscape, so leave me be. I'm living through what should have been mine. What IS mine by right! Denied to me by who knows what!"