Turned out that even Princess Luna was not able to protect her.
When Lyra opened her eyes again, she was already floating in space, staring into the blackness, but she knew something was different this time, for her mind was fully conscious. No strange thoughts were invading it, and she was perfectly sure that she was dreaming from the very beginning.
She tried her hooves and found them locked into places again. An uneasiness shot all over her, her furs alarmingly zipping straight. Having the same dream for two consecutive nights is strange enough, and now even a lucid one?
This can’t be a coincidence…No…panicked thoughts flooded into her. She saw the green stars again. Their motion was too well-synchronized with the ones she saw yesterday, painting a green semi-circle before rushing towards her. Once more Lyra felt the heat as they flew past, and her body was jerked around, facing backward. Her eyes widened.
The planet was still there, but Lyra could barely recognize it. The beautiful green and blue parts of it were gone, consumed by packets and packets of black rocks and grey goo. The entire planet was like a rotten egg covered up by grey moss. The color was too familiar to Lyra, and it turned her uneasiness straight into terror—they were the color of xeomorphs.
Her belly suddenly trembled. A strong force pulled on her hooves, thrusting her towards the planet. The grey globe rapidly enlarged until the abhorrent color filled up every corner of her vision, and she felt the resistance of air as she pushed through the atmosphere. Reflectively she closed her eyes, and she could feel a moist on her fur as she penetrated the clouds, her hoofs landing on solid ground. Tentatively she opened her left eye, then gasped.
She was standing on the top of a small, black rock-covered hill overlooking a vast plain. The land beneath her was pure grey, barren without a single sprout of life. She could see jagged protrusions jabbing out from the grey goo, and she nearly screamed out upon a closer look—they were the branches of dead trees. Everything was covered by a thick layer of grey xeomorph dust, and in a distance, she could see many much taller protrusions leaning against other in a maze of spires—the remnants of a great city.
The planet was consumed by xeomorphs.
Is this a warning? Her mane couldn’t stop trembling, is this what Equestria would become if we hadn’t stopped those xeomorphs in the forest? But why would there be so many—
Bear witness, organic creature. This is what we can achieve together.
A voice arose in Lyra’s head. Her hooves wobbled and she nearly fell to the ground. Hums were going off all around her. Flickers of green light were appearing in the carpet of grey in front of her, rising and falling.
Abandon your physical form. Join us. As family.
“No! No!” Lyra screamed. The hum was getting louder. More and more green lights were joining their brothers, twinkling like the stars of a miniature galaxy.
You will be taunted by no one. Your strength will be unmatchable. Your loneliness will be history.
Together, we will devour the very gods…
The xeomorphs were starting to flow. The silent grey goos were starting to drift, forming a massive wave towering above her. Before she could turn around and flee, three black tendrils lashed out from the wall of grey, grabbing her limbs and suspending her into the air. The grey goo locked her joints, stripping her movements. A fourth one was lifted right in front of her eyes, its tip sharp like the stinger of a hornet.
Accept it. Be one with the Tempest…
“No!” Lyra squawked, closing her eyes and forcefully shaking her head, “you are not real! You are just a dream! A nightmare! None of this—everything is just my imagination!"
The tendril wrapped itself around her throat, silencing her.
I assure you, organic creature, we are very real. I could send an electric shock to your central nervous system, frying every single neuron in your brain right now…You will wake up…and become the Tempest...It will be painful…
Lyra’s eyes widened in horror. The black spike had raised above her head, aiming towards her eye.
You do not have a choice, but we will make it comfortable for you. Three solar circles, that’s how long we will wait…
Now…wake up…
The spike stabbed down, and everything went black.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
“Ah!” Lyra sprang up from the bed, her eyes snapped open to the wooden ceiling of the guest room of the Cosmetic Balcony. In less than a second she figured out one thing: she could still see. Her eyes were well-functioning. They didn’t even hurt. Panting hard, her sight wandered to the window, where she saw Celestia’s sun hanging above the line of buildings on the street’s other side. It was daybreak.
It was…just a dream…
But it was too much even for a nightmare…Tears were welling up in her eyes, and she quickly shook her head and ordered herself to think straight.
Breathe, Lyra…think about how Twilight will handle this…look for a logical explanation...
She took a few hard breaths to slow down her heart rate. As her brain cooled down to normal temperature, though uncomfortable it felt, she still tried her best in recalling all the stuff she’d seen in the dream.
It couldn’t be real, she realized, I went through an ENTIRE ATMOSPHERE. I would have been burnt to ashes long before I reached the ground.
Also, those words the… she winced. That stab definitely felt real, …xeomorphs spoke to me…there was no logic in it…it’s just a random stack of words and sentences that terrified me…
Ultimately she came to a fitting conclusion—the stress, mysteries and near-death experiences she’d encountered in the past few days had finally weighed down her sanity enough to allow a few nightmares to slip inside. All her worries and fears were materializing into exaggerated versions of the dangers she’d faced and ramming her head-on in her dreamscape.
I’m not fit for this…she sighed. Slaying monsters and saving the world should be the jobs of Twilight, Bon-Bon, and the princesses, not her. She was just trying to find her mother, for Celestia’s sake! It was not supposed to be THIS difficult!
“Lyra!” Nightjar’s worried exclaim pulled her out of her sulk. The guest room’s door slammed open as Nightjar pounced up to her bed.
“What happened?” she shrieked, “you were screaming!”
“Nothing,” Lyra replied, “just a bad dream.”
“I told you already, you are too stressed out! You should really just relax and ease down a bit…” Nightjar breathed in relief, brushed her mane, then smiled confidently, “but don’t you worry! I found a new lead that will definitely make you happy!”
“What is it?”
“Oh, not so fast!” Nightjar smiled mischievously, “breakfast is ready. You go downstairs, fill up that belly of yours and make sure that you have got enough rest, then I’ll tell you!”
“Has anypony told you that you are probably the kindest griffon on all of Equestria?” Lyra chuckled pleasantly as they went downstairs together. She was acting as composed as she could. Nightjar didn’t deserve to suffer the pain of feeling bad for her, “I did bring my own sandwiches, you know?”
“Eating those bland hay sandwiches of you ponies in the household of a griffon?” Nightjar playfully slapped her flank, Lyra noticed that she was intentionally avoiding her bandaged belly, “in that horrible dream of yours!”
Minutes later they were sitting at the long table in the center of the circles of books on the library’s first floor, Lyra munching a pile of delicious honey pancakes, and Nightjar reading a book quietly across from her.
“How to Fix Your Feathers…?” Lyra read when Nightjar showed her the title, “I thought this book was written for pegasuses.”
“There’s no other way for me. It’s not like anypony has written a book about handling griffon feathers,” Nightjar stuck out her tongue, “I tell you, it is trouble! You ponies only have feathers on your wings, but we griffons—” she reared up, exaggerating her white chest feathers, “—see? When they get too wet or too dry they’ll just go ‘poof’! All fluffy and chaotic!”
Lyra tried imagining it and laughed.
“Don’t you do that! I’m serious!” Nightjar struck her horn, beaming herself, “it’s not like any griffon can teach me, so…”
No griffon is there to teach her something this basic? Lyra acutely caught this detail, what about her parents?
She wanted to ask Nightjar, but she had already got back to reading. A dreadful guess popped up in her mind when she went to wash the dishes, but she shook it away as well as she could. Now was not the time to mention it. When she got back, Nightjar had put the book away, eyeing her with excitement.
“Alright, detective Nightjar,” she said as she sat down beside her, “show me what you got.”
“It’s actually about Grey Wind,” Nightjar stood up and went over to a bookshelf. Her brows knitted, “I know she is a good pony, but I’ve always thought that something was weird about her,” she turned around to look at Lyra, cocking her head, “I’ve said that her way of speaking is a bit cold, but when I thought more about it, it was almost…” she shuddered, “…emotionless. How would anypony sound like that?”
“Glad to see I’m not the only pony thinking that way,” Lyra answered, “so what?”
“Right? Then I couldn’t help but think over everything we’ve been through in the last few days, then…things just got more and more wrong!” Nightjar squeaked, “remember last night, at the forest? There are many luminous plants in Midnight Forest, but that place was still dark! We could only see the xeomorphs because we had your magic!”
“But she has been fighting them long before we arrived,” Lyra instantly understood.
“How did she manage to see?” Nightjar exclaimed, “also, you heard what Doctor Warmhoof said. She had a wound on her head and a snapped wing,” she gave her an indisputable look, “you and I both saw it! She crashed head-first! Her wings were not hurt by that touchdown! Which means--”
“She hurt them either because of that bash when we arrived, or even before that,” Lyra said. Her heart was starting to feel sick, “and she flew those last five minutes on a broken wing.”
“There’s clearly something wrong with that pony!” Nightjar took out a thick book from the case and hopped back to the table, “so I got suspicious and did some research last night—here’s what I found!”
She quickly flipped it open to a page in the middle. Lyra went forward and read:
The Heartless Puppet
Once upon a time, in the magical land of Equestria, there were two regal sisters who ruled together and created harmony for all the land. To do this, the eldest used her unicorn power to raise the sun at dawn, the younger brought out the moon to begin the night. Thus, the two sisters maintained the balance of their Kingdom and their subjects, the different kinds of ponies. But as time went on, the younger sister, Princess Luna of the night and the stars, became resentful. The ponies relished and played in the day her elder sister brought forth, but shunned and slept through her beautiful nights.
“Isn’t this…the Tale of the Two Sisters?”
“Keep reading. Here’s where things get interesting.”
The princess of the moon, however, possessed a final comfort: a loyal pegasus that had followed her throughout her entire life. The pegasus was the only pony that never slept at night. She always appreciated the majesty the Princess conjures and would always be there to listen to the Princess’ fears and worries. She was the only pony the younger Princess would trust with all her heart. She was the younger sister’s confidence, that some pony would still enjoy her night.
But fate had its own plans. Soon the Princesses launched a quest, a journey to challenge the beasts and monsters roaming our land to free the ponies they enslave. The loyal pegasus fought along the younger sister’s side. She was her brightest sword during the day, and her best friend during the night., But all legends are bound to fall: in the final battle against a monster known as the Shapeshifter, the pegasus blocked a lethal attack on the younger sister with her body and sacrificed her life.
The battle was won, but the princess’ heart was forever broken. In her desperation, she devised a plan: with the remnants of the Shapeshifter, the younger sister built a puppet, one that had the exact appearance of her lost friend. The pegasus will always be there to look after her night until the end of eternity.
But the puppet was cursed: no matter how hard the princess of the night tried, she would never get the puppet to smile, nor could she make her cry. The puppet could not feel emotions, her memory of the past locked behind her ever-still face. She would always follow the Princess, but no longer as a friend. She would not speak and would only silently listen. She was but a husk of her former self, a meaningless machine.
No ponies would appreciate the younger sister’s night anymore. All that the puppet had brought her was more pain and bitterness. On one fateful day, the younger princess refused to make way for the sun…
The rest was all too familiar to Lyra. It was an exact copy of the last few paragraphs of the Tale of the Two Sisters. Below the last line, the one that tells how Princess Celestia had banished Nightmare Moon with the elements of harmony, however, there was another line that hadn’t appeared in the story she had read:
It was said that to this day, the puppet still roams Equestria like a baleful shadow, exercising her duty of hunting monsters for the Princess of the Night. She had forgotten everything but the name and the purpose she was given. There was only one cure for the princess’ desperation: only when the puppet could feel true emotions can her memories be returned, and so will the secrets she’s kept.
“Take a look at this,” Nightjar pointed to the other side of the page. There was an illustration drawn below the words, depicting a female pegasus, wings wide-spread in battle stance, eyes full of determination. She was facing many clusters of grey clouds hanging in the background.
“Xeomorphs?” Lyra raised an eyebrow.
“Look at her cutie mark.”
Lyra traced her sights to the pegasus flank. Her cutie mark was a single round grey sphere with six grey columns radiating evenly from its center, each connected to a similar grey sphere on its end. She gasped. This pattern was awfully familiar.
She floated her saddlebag onto the table, taking out the small stone box. A faint glow was still coming out of the green pattern around the keyhole. A sphere in the center, six spheres circling it at the end of six poles. Her eyes fell onto the pattern, then onto the pegasus’ cutie mark.
They were exactly the same.
“What…?”
“Grey Wind WAS the puppet! That’s why she was hunting the xeomorphs! She was an artificial pony, and that’s the source of all the weird things she’d done!” Nightjar slammed a front paw triumphantly onto the table, “this story was the original version of The Tale of the Two Sisters. If Nightmare Moon was real, then the puppet must be real as well!” she pointed to the box, “and this box your mom had left you…Grey Wind…the xeomorphs…all of them are connected! The key to opening it must lie in her forgotten memory when she was made into a puppet! Otherwise it wouldn’t bear her cutie mark!” she met Lyra’s eyes with a look of ambition, “all we need to do…is to break the curse that sealed her memories!”
This was not far-fetched, Lyra noticed, if Grey Wind was truly a pony-made puppet, then her source of power must be magic. The night vision was probably the result of a built-in magical tracking system, and she did not need wings to fly.
“No wonder she sounded so emotionless…” Lyra nodded. As a citizen of Ponyville, she knew best that the bedtime stories of Equestria have this nasty tendency of being true. She picked up the book with her magic, “only when the puppet could feel true emotions…”
But why in any sense would mom get her hooves on a box that shares a connection with an artificial pony who was more than a thousand years old? Lyra pressed a hoof onto her forehead. There was only one way to find out.
“I have a plan for that,” Nightjar grinned, “remember that monster I told you about? Time to pull out the show!”