Humming under her breath, BonBon trotted down the dusty road through the center of Ponyville, eager to get home and rest her sore hooves after a long day pulling taffy and wrapping lolly pops at her confectionary. It was already evening, and activity in Ponyville was winding to a close as the sun sank low over Everfree forest. A few ponies still milled around, calling cheerful greetings to the candy-loving Earth Pony, or gossiping in clusters of three or four. They were enjoying the cool evening weather and chatting happily over the din of singing crickets, while in the sky a few Pegasi were lining up small clouds for the night’s scheduled light rain. But the lights were out in the businesses, aside from a few restaurants, and the small town’s populace was getting ready to curl up for the night. This was no Manehatten, BonBon mused, or Canterlot, where ponies stayed out late and slept till afternoon. No, not in little Ponyville.
As the sun sank lower, the library near the town’s center glowed like a lantern in the dusk. Every candle in the place had to be lit for that much saffron light to pour from every window in the hollowed-out old oak tree, BonBon thought, tossing curls of pink and blue mane out of her eyes. What on earth was Twilight Sparkle doing, the Earth Pony wondered, that she needed-
That thought was cut off by a loud crash and clatter, the unmistakable percussion of a hundred books falling onto a wooden floor, and then the librarian-pony’s frustrated cry of, “Oh, Spike!”
BonBon and another earth pony with a straight, pale-purple mane jumped at the sudden noise, exchanged wide-eyed looks, and rushed off before the chaos that followed Celestia’s student sucked them in. It seemed, after all, that everything chaotic that happened in Ponyville followed that purple unicorn around, and everything disharmonious that had happened in the past few years had come crashing down around the hooves of the Elements of Harmony. BonBon raced down the dusty road towards the cozy cottage she and Lyra shared, perfectly content to spend the evening curled up with the cup of hot tea and a good book, avoiding the troubles that hounded more prolific ponies.
While meanwhile, back inside the oak tree, the library was a madcap mess of books, parchment, quills, ink bottles, apples, empty bags, hastily-scrawled maps, scarves, quartz points, pieces of the newly-broken wooden ladder and crushed cardboard boxes. Spike perched on a fallen bookshelf, claws clasped over his head as the last of the books with titles ranging from A – C rained down in a rainbow torrent around him. “Sorry, Twilight!” the baby dragon cried, rushing to try and pick up the tomes.
Twilight groaned theatrically, lifting the lot with magic and shoving them haphazardly back onto the shelves with no respect to alphabetical order. She would regret that, later, when the madcap arrangement would compel her to pull every book off the shelf and insure that they were neatly lined up in the correct order, their bindings flush to one another and square to the shape of the bookshelf. For now, though, she simply didn’t have time to worry about things like that. Her hooves blurred as she rushed from one room to the next, sifting through piles of junk and stacks of books. Spike browsed through the few titles he hadn’t managed to knock to the floor when he’d accidentally tipped over one of the ceiling-high book shelves, biting his lower lip with his sharp teeth and trying not to get in the unicorn’s way. “But I don’t think it’s here.”
“I was just reading it!” Twilight screamed in frustration, stamping one hoof. “I had it just last night, and was doing research on the Dreamwalker’s spell just before I went to- oh, my bed!” Her anger evaporated with that revelation, and she vanished into midair without another word. Her voice came from upstairs: “Found it!”
Spike sighed and hurried over to grab Twilight’s saddle bag, unbuttoning the flap and holding it open. Twilight came trotting down the stairs, an old, weighty, white-and-gray book in her mouth; with a flick of her head she sent it flying in Spike’s direction, and “The Worlds We Dream” fell neatly into the saddlebag. “Good!” Twilight announced with a tired sigh. “Good. I think that’s everything. Do you have the food? And the water? And my scrolls and quill? We don’t know what we’re going to find in there, Spike. We have to be prepared.”
Spike frowned. “Twilight,” he said, hesitantly, pulling on his short, ridged tail, “are you sure this is a good idea?”
Twilight’s expression turned puzzled. “Of course it’s a good idea,” she said, skeptically. “It’s a great idea. How else are we going to help Apple Bloom to get over her nightmares? She’s tried all of Granny Smith’s old mare’s cures and every herb Zecora can think of. We need to figure out what’s causing these dreams, and to do that, I need to see them for myself.” She grinned at the succinct truth of her own explanation, and began re-shelving more books with her magic, blindly shoving them wherever there was room.
“But isn’t it… dangerous?”
Twilight rolled her eyes. “Everything’s dangerous, Spike,” she said patiently, grabbing the saddlebags from him with magic and levitating them over to her. “We could be… I don’t know, run down by a blind carriage-team crossing the street tomorrow, for all we know. Grab the checklist, will you?”
The baby dragon’s eyes widened. “Does that happen?”
“You can’t live your life in fear. Checklist, Spike! What’s the first item?”
Spike held the neatly-printed scroll up above his head, grabbing one of the dropped quills from the floor. “Rations. But, Twilight, there has to be a reason no one ever does the Dreamwalker-”
“Check!” Twilight exclaimed.
Spike checked it off on the list, then read, “Water? Anyway, no one’s tried-”
“Check!”
“Parchment and quill? Most unicorns-”
“Check!”
“Map of Sweet Apple-”
“Check!”
“And copy of Northern Light’s ‘The Worlds We-‘”
“And check,” Twilight finished with a grin. She tossed the saddlebags over her back with a toss of her head and tied them securely with her magic, head held high, grinning with self-satisfaction. “We’re ready to go, then! Do you need to take care of anything before we continue on?”
“Twilight, nopony’s tried the Dreamwalker spell since Northern Lights disappeared!” Spike burst out, crossing his short arms in front of his chest. “And no one knows where she went to. Didn’t you say she vanished in the middle of travelling through someone’s dream? What if that happens to us?”
Twilight sighed, regretting reading out loud that particular part of the Afterward of “The Worlds We Dream,” which had been Northern Lights’ magnum opus and the brilliant unicorn magician’s in-depth report on the magic of pony dreams. Her research hadn’t always gone smoothly, it was true, but that was the way of it, sometimes. Twilight sat down and spoke with exaggerated patience to her young assistant. “Spike, listen. Northern Lights disappeared because her subject woke up while she was still in the dream. Nopony knows what happens to your dreams when you wake up, only that you create a new dreamworld every time you sleep, and since Northern Lights was actually in the dreamworld when it vanished, and not just projected into it like the dreamer was, she vanished with it when it went. But her scrolls survived, thank Celestia. Just about everything we know about dreams comes from Northern Lights’ research!” She sighed. “Imagine that. An entire field of research, abandoned because of one incident. Imagine what’s still there to learn! Imagine what I- what we- could be the first to know! I could learn something that no pony has ever known before!” On the last word, she couldn’t contain an excited squeak and joyful bounce.
Spike frowned. “But aren’t we doing this to help Apple Bloom, Twilight?”
“Of course,” the unicorn answered flippantly, pulling “The Worlds We Dream” from her saddlebag and flipping it open to the section that described the spell. “Poor Apple Bloom hasn’t had a restful night’s sleep in weeks, and she’ll be falling over at the Apple Harvest Festival next week if we don’t figure out what’s going on in her dreams and do something to make them a little happier. That part will be easy. We’ll drop in, see whatever monster is freaking her out, patch things up, have a quick look around, and get out again.”
“A quick look around?”
“It’ll only take a second,” was the distracted answer as Twilight recommitted the important parts of the spell to memory. The book would make a good reference, true, but she decided it would be best if she could replicate, or manipulate, the spell in a pinch if needed.
“Twilight, what if she wakes up?”
The unicorn rolled her purple eyes skyward, then folded the book closed and tucked it back into her saddlebag. “She won’t wake up, Spike. I had her take sleep-inducing herbs from Zecora earlier tonight- she should be in the dream until midmorning at the earliest. Applejack is under strict orders not to wake her. As long as we don’t let her know that she’s dreaming, everything should be alright.”
“Because the shock of the realization might wake her,” Spike recited, with a sigh. “Or she might begin lucid dreaming and muck everything up without thinking.” He’d gone over all the warnings with Twilight the night before- not to let the dreamer see him and any dreamed-up projections of him simultaneously, and to act along with the dream as best he could, so the world’s creator didn’t realize that it was all imaginary, and do something reckless or simply pull themselves back into consciousness. That was all well and fine when the only subjects in the dream are mental projections of themselves, but Twilight and Spike would be their own real, flesh-and-blood selves. “I trust you, Twilight.” He hopped up onto the unicorn’s back, careful not to crush the apples or scrolls tucked away in the saddlebags.
“Excellent,” Twilight replied, closing her eyes and summoning all of her energy into her horn. It glowed reddish violet and glittered in the gathering evening gloom. One by one, candles flickered out in the library, until that red light was the only illumination in the room. “Now, when we walk through the dream, two doors will appear. One will take us into the dream, and the other will take us out and back into the real world. They should appear at opposite ends of the dream-world, so we’ll need to find the second door as soon as we’re through. Priority one.” In the air in front of them, a white arch appeared, glimmering; swimming through the light were vague figures like ponies and lions and birds that appeared in the corners of their vision and vanished as soon as they tried to focus on them. Soon, though, the patterns of wooden planks etched themselves across the space under the arch. A brass doorknob appeared, and the gateway solidified into a literal door, shut tight, standing alone in the center of the room. Twilight focused on Apple Bloom- her cheer and stubbornness and thick southern drawl- and the signal of a tiny apple appeared in the center of the door.
Twilight’s magic surrounded and turned the doorknob. “Are you ready?”
“Uh, no,” Spike said, honestly, his claws nervously gripping at Twilight’s multicolored mane.
“Well,” the unicorn answered, pulling the door open, “here we go.”
Beyond the door was the spread of stars, the scent of pine needles, the very faint echo of Apple Bloom’s laugh.
Then the unicorn and the dragon tumbled through into the world beyond.
***
Author's Note: So, ah... my first pony fanfic ever yaaay! My first fanfic in general in a long time, actually. I've been working on it for a while, wanting to make sure that the basic plot is gonna work out and I'm not gonna write myself into a corner two months in and not have anywhere else to go- it's flowing smoothly so far, though, so I guess I'll publish the prologue and just keep havin' fun with it.