//------------------------------//
// Nightmare 
// Story: Mare Doloris 
// by TinCan 
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The warm evening wind sighed through the boughs of the park. Clouds of dust and pollen swirled in the shallow shafts of sunlight that slipped through the canopy above me. The moss and ferns tickled my feet as I passed. The only thing missing were the smells; dirt, flowers, fellows, and the occasional stench of an alcohol- or methane- breather who'd wandered through on shore leave.

As is the way of these things, I did not question why I found myself lost in one of the provincial capital's public parks on a breezy spring evening. No, there was a far more pressing issue on my mind.

Namely, how could I escape before the sun set?

The park was only safe in the daytime. Criminals, rowdy sailors, gangsters and worse sorts controlled it after dark, or so everyone had always warned me. I had avoided the artificial wilderness as much as possible for that reason, and couldn't have navigated the park even without the rapidly lengthening shadows. The twisty paths seemed to meander in circles or branch into ever-darker and more overgrown regions.

I was completely alone. There was no friendly face I could ask for directions or join with for safety. Then again, at least I hadn't run into any of the ne'er-do-wells yet either.

No sooner had I thought this than a twig snapped behind me. I turned to see five strangers materialize from the trees. Their scales were etched with obscene words and images, their postures were low and hostile, and each one carried a gleaming stiletto. None of the thugs spoke, but grinned evilly and flourished their weapons as they moved to surround me.

I tried to break through their ring and flee, but they kept blocking me, shoving me back into the center and swiping at me with their blades. I tried to climb the tree they had herded me toward, but the trunk felt as hard as stone and as smooth as glass. Out of options, I wedged myself in a crevice formed by a tree's roots and curled into a ball. It wouldn't do me any good. Those stilettos were designed to kill those of my species; slender enough to be thrust between scales and easily long enough to pierce vital organs.

As I sat there waiting for the stab that would end my life, quiet, pitiless laughter floated down from the tree.

"Oh, this is just adorable," the voice from above said. "They're waving those oversized needles around like it makes them scary or something. You lot are about as fearsome as kittens playing at being tigers."

I heard the criminals step back, trying to find the source of the voice. I myself unrolled just enough to peek into the branches above.

Nightmare Moon reclined on a limb with a single foreleg dangling, not merely unconcerned but outright enjoying the spectacle unfolding below.

The thugs were not impressed. One snarled and produced a sidearm from the holster at his waist. He drew a bead on the jet-black creature.

"Look, Pangolin," she called to me, "he's going to try and send me home too. What a helpful little monster!" Blue light flashed from her horn and the weapon disintegrated into black smoke, followed by its wielder's arm. With a bestial scream, he fell back to writhe in agony on the dirt before turning entirely into vapor. The other thugs melted back into the trees, no doubt in search of easier prey.

I uncurled and regained my feet, still staring at the spot where the unlucky aggressor had been. Behind me, Nightmare Moon left her perch and glided to the ground, landing on a patch of moss with an earthy thump.

An errant thought nagged me. Something wasn't right about all this. Something was out of place.

I turned to her and admitted my confusion. Did she know what was the matter?

"Oh, I'll tell you what's wrong," she said. "I'm not hearing 'thank you for saving my worthless scaly hide from those ruffians, your highness! You're the greatest princess ever, way better than what's-her-snout!' "

Of course! Where were my manners? I apologized and assured her that my family would see to it that she was richly rewarded. My brother could make sure she wouldn't get into any legal trouble from slaying that thug.

Something seemed off about that too.

She shook her head and laughed at me. "That won't be necessary. We're not really here. You're dreaming, idiot."

Dreaming?

Everything came back to me. I wasn't on this world anymore. I'd gone to a supposedly-uninhabited moon to embrace the solitary life, but instead found this mad alien and been dragooned into helping her insane plan to murder a planet. ...And now I was even dreaming about her. Dismay was apparent on my face. She appeared perturbed.

"Hey! What are you moping about? Did you want to dream about being shanked by a bunch of burly strangers? We can do anything now!" She turned in a circle, drinking in the twilit arboreal scenery. "Oh, how I've missed this," she said to herself. "I haven't been able to visualize my own world right for centuries, and of course there's been nopony else to dream-walk with." She completed her circuit and faced me again, giddy with excitement. "So, why don't you give a visiting dignitary the royal tour? How's the nightlife?"

I scowled and crossed my arms. Bad enough that I have to deal with Nightmare Moon during my every waking moment, I told her, but there was no way I'd waste my nights dreaming about her! I tried to recall what little I'd read about lucid dreaming. Maybe I could just make her disappear.

For the briefest moment, she looked hurt, then tossed her mane and affected haughty aloofness. "You're not dreaming about me, dunderhead. I'm actually here, inside your dream."

I laughed. That was nonsense. I explained it to her slowly, enjoying the chance to talk down to the creature that so terrified me in the waking world. The natural philosophers all agreed that dreams were jumbles of disconnected thoughts that only seemed to have coherent progression in retrospect. To share the dream of another is impossible, I asserted. Why, she might as well claim to have drunk from the oasis in a mirage or visited the backward room seen through a looking-glass.

"For your information, I've done the latter," she retorted. "Honestly, mirror-worlds aren't all they're cracked up to be. The speculars are even ruder and more thoughtless than the ponies they have to mimic."

What obvious fabrication! I was about to give a scornful rejoinder when she continued:

"These 'natural philosophers' of yours, how do they go about 'discovering' that the dreamlands don't exist?"

By experimentation, I replied, caught off-guard by the question.

Nightmare Moon smiled in a way that reminded me of the thugs from before. "Well, you're about to be a natural philosopher too! If this is a dream, you can do whatever you want here." She raised an eyebrow. "And don't even pretend you aren't itching to get back at me. You've just been bottling it up because you're a coward. Now, if I'm merely your own mind's phantasm of Nightmare Moon, then nothing will come of it and you can say and do anything your evil little heart desires. But!" She raised a single toe to wiggle in my face. "If I'm the princess herself, visiting your dreams, then I'll remember every bit, and I will not let you get away with it!"

If she was the real Nightmare Moon, I reminded her, she'd given her word not to harm me.

"Pangolin, Pangolin, Pangolin," she chided, running an armored toe down my back with a noise like a xylophone's scale, "I always remember my promises. I only swore to spare your life, not that I wouldn't harm you. Try me and you'll find that even mortals can live through quite a bit! ...But I digress. You were saying something about how foolish it was for me to be telling you that I'm actually here telling you things?"

I clamped my jaws shut.

She patted me patronizingly on the head with her wing. "Well, you may not be a philosopher, but at least you're smart. Now, shall we be off?"

Nightmare Moon caught me up in the blue light from her horn, opened her wings and flapped them three times. The ground seemed to fall away below us as if it had been dropped. As we passed above the treetops, the lights of the provincial capital's skyscrapers and spaceport glowed on the horizon around us. The flying pony oohed appreciatively, seeming to forget me.

"Towers of light everywhere! How beautiful!" she exclaimed. "You know, when I'm done dealing with my rebellious subjects, I'll have a bit of free time on my hooves. Maybe..."

I barely heard her. I am afraid of heights. This may seem odd coming from a creature descended from tree-climbers and limb-perchers, but being suspended over five hundred ells from the ground by nothing more than the power of this hateful dream-invading beast scared me out of my wits. Part of me knew this was all in my imagination, but that part was drowned out by sheer instinctual terror. I flailed and screamed in the air.

As I panicked, the landscape began to wobble and fade. I must have been waking up.

"Hey, no! Stop that at once!" Nightmare Moon commanded. "Quit acting like you're falling or I'll drop you for real!"

The next thing I knew I was in freefall, the dark ground rushing forward to meet me. I threw my claws before my eyes just before the impact.





I awoke in a heap on the floor beneath my perch, head aching. I'd never fallen from the perch before. It shouldn't be possible for me to inadvertently lose my grip, especially in low gravity.

Nightmare Moon, awake but still resting in her makeshift bed, regarded me from across the room. She smirked but said nothing.

My rattled brain struggled to make sense of what I'd just experienced. It had been unlike any other dream I could recall. Was it true? Did she move among my thoughts even now? No! Of course she couldn't see into my mind. Hadn't I deceived her before? Why would it matter whether I was awake or asleep?

Perhaps hypnosis then? No, it couldn't be that either. She'd been laid low by the plants she'd stolen from my garden at the time. The dream must have simply been nonsense conjured up by my subconscious mind.

"Did you have pleasant dreams, Pangolin?" she asked innocently.

Not wanting to admit how much the thought of her had disturbed my rest, I simply expressed incomprehension as to how I'd fallen to the ground.

Nightmare Moon nonchalantly removed one of her greaves and polished the shiny black toe it had covered against her coat. "No mystery there. I meant it when I said I'd drop you for real."

Though she wasn't looking at me, she appeared to enjoy my astounded reaction.

Going into dreams as if they were real places of their own was impossible. But she'd done it. She knew what had happened. What kind of power, what kind of understanding, how precise a control over her environment was necessary to perform such a feat?

Her dream of killing a planet was sounding more feasible all the time. And she'd found the brief glimpse of my own homeworld alluring...

My duty to convince her to spare her own had just taken on an extra degree of urgency.