//------------------------------//
// Miseries 
// Story: Mare Doloris 
// by TinCan 
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On my homeworld, there is a shrub called the fleeceflower. It blooms in the spring with very un-fleecelike little blue blossoms. Its namesake appears when these are pollinated, producing a fertilized seed encased in a thick pale-blue puff of fuzz. This covering allows it to be picked up and carried far afield by the wind. Great masses of these seeds drift over the plains in late spring, clinging together until they appear as fleecy, low-flying clouds.

I mention this only that the analogy will be clear when I say that listening to Nightmare Moon's endless litany of wrongs and sufferings felt like being stoned to death by fleeceflower seeds.

The pony royal seemed to be blessed with a perfect memory for every time she'd been slighted. A visiting dignitary had broken some protocol concerning her. A courtier spread sordid palace gossip about her. A servant had been slow to obey her commands, clearly out of spite. On and on it went.

And her sister, always her sister! None of this mysterious creature's actions had any purpose but to harm her sibling. Every word was some veiled insult. Every deed either a prank at Nightmare Moon's expense or showing off to make her look inferior. Every seeming kindness was only condescension to humiliate her.

The spiel had gone on for hours and hours. insult after insult, woe after woe. She wasn't even looking looking at me anymore, just staring off into a corner and occasionally punctuating an especially horrible trespass with a stamp or a flick of her tail. I had the horrible feeling that I was eavesdropping on an inner monologue; the mental soundtrack that had accompanied all those years out there on the barren hills.

She hadn't been lying about not having to breathe either. She went for hours, then days without so much as pausing. 

The content was, for the most part, as bad as the quantity. Maybe one in every couple dozen complaints could have been grudge-worthy, so far as I could tell through the haze of her paranoid editorializing, but the rest seemed to me to be pure fluff and uncharitable assumption. Whenever I thought her complaints couldn't get more petty or specious, another came along to prove me wrong. After detailing the things she'd suffered at the claws of the third generation of palace staff, the topic veered from her grievous woes back to her co-ruler and what the two of them actually did.

"She ruled the day and I ruled the night. That was supposed to be fair. Half for each of us, yes?" she asked me.

I supposed that explained why she had felt personally insulted when her subjects failed to be nocturnal. A moment of blessed silence alerted me that she expected a response. I nodded noncommittally from my seat on the floor.

Her lip curled into a sneer. "Idiot! Imbecile! You're as foalish as I was back then. It was a joke, just another subtle barb digging under my skin. Oh, she told me how very important it was. How many threats menaced our ponies from the dark, what a heroine I'd be to face them! She even implied that she couldn't overshadow me then. I would stand alone between the dangers of the night and our beloved subjects, and they would finally give me the praise I deserved."

It didn't work out that way, I inferred.

"No! No it did not!" she snapped back. "And don't you dare say I failed either! If anything, I was a victim of my own success. I protected them so well at night they soon forgot there was anything to fear. Instead of huddling in their little houses or keeping the watches with me through my night, they all just... they went to sleep. That was my reward, to spend all my waking moments alone, guarding those careless, thoughtless ponies."

Would that be a problem for her? I pointed out that she could follow them into their dreams.

"Ha! Who told you that?" she asked, grinning triumphantly that I'd finally admitted it. "It's true. I had to; not all the threats and monsters live in the waking world, after all. It was going to be perfect; I'd meet my subjects face to face, so to speak, delve into their hearts and rescue them from their greatest fears!" The grin dropped from her face, her head lowered and she barked a short, scornful laugh.

I asked her what had happened.

"How many dreams do you remember, Pangolin? Across your entire life, how many can you still recall?"

It was difficult to say with any certainty. No more than a dozen, perhaps.

"Yet you dream every night. It was the same with my ponies. I'd meet them there and we'd get along splendidly. They were always so amazed, so delighted that one of their rulers cared enough to go to such lengths for their well-being." Her eyes hardened. "And then her accursed morning would come, and they'd awaken and forget it all before they were done with breakfast! When I returned again the next night, it was as if they'd never met me. You see how she's got it rigged? That nag had it all worked out so that everything important, all the honor, all the adoration flowed to her and her alone! Everything she let me have was trash, scraps and thankless labor. She didn't let them remember me!"

The brain's tendency to prioritize waking memories over dreams for long-term storage was a common trait of nearly all beings that experienced consciousness, I said. How could it be a matter of Celestia allowing or forbidding anything?

She shook her head furiously. "You know nothing. I had found a way! I had worked something out and she wouldn't let me have it! It wasn't fair; I was in the right! They'd all be dead without me anyway!"

When she noticed that I had no idea what she meant, Nightmare Moon collected herself and explained. "Shortly before I was betrayed and sent here, there was a sickness among our subjects. Most adult ponies had the strength to endure it and recover, but many of the children did not. The victims would lose consciousness near the end and, after several days of feverish slumber, they perished in their sleep.

"Naturally, my dear sister couldn't bear having her whole civilization of sycophants thus reduced, so she and her unicorn toadies put all their knowledge to work trying to concoct a spell or medicine to cure the plague.

"I, of course, am no slouch at magic either, as you've seen. Instead of 'collaborating' and letting her steal all the credit yet again, I put my unique skills to a far better use. I went among the nobles, then the servants, and even among the commoners. I told them I could save their children who had fallen into the deathly sleep."

I nodded, trying not to imagine where this anecdote was going.

"There were so, so many! We filled an entire hall of the palace with their little pallets and beds. Fillies, colts, even tiny foals. My power was enough, though. The sickness still festered in them, but I soothed their pain. I nourished them from my own magic, and I forbade the plague from taking their lives.

"And then we dreamed, all together. A mere four weeks, but it was the most wonderful month I'd ever had! A few cried for their mothers at first, as might be expected, but, ha-ha, it works both ways."

'It?' What did she mean?

"It wasn't long before the youngest dreamers began to forget. They forgot about the sunlit world and my sister and even their own parents. There was only our starry dreamlands, all their little friends, and myself. I was their closest friend, their only princess... their mother." She closed her eyes, took a slow, deep breath and smiled dreamily, treasuring the memory. 

I encouraged her to continue. How did it all end?

She snorted in annoyance at having her reverie interrupted and crossed her front legs. "How do you think? That nag saw that I was happy and dropped everything just to ruin it all! The children were fine, they were having the times of their lives, but she pretended she had to 'save' them with the miracle cure she and her hooflickers concocted. Save them from what? From me? Why did she have to horn in?"

I took a moment to try and understand what she was complaining about. Celestia administered the cure to the children Nightmare Moon had been protecting, allowing them to awaken and return to their families in health, and this was a bad thing?

The princess-in-exile stomped across the habitat toward me in a fury. "She stole them away. I had saved them! They loved me! They. Were. MINE!" The last word flew from her mouth with such volume and force I was literally blasted off my feet.

"Oh, but that isn't all." she continued at a normal volume, as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened. "She wasn't the least bit sorry. She acted like she was doing me a favor by not mentioning 'your little indiscretion' when she took them from me and sent them back to their families. The children all forgot, too, and they soon made me regret I'd bothered at all. One of them had just become the next Lord Kittiwake and behaved about as horribly as his father had. Why, at the Grand Galloping Gala that year..."

And so the tirade continued, and then continued some more. My life consisted of listening to this interminable retelling all day, every day. For lengthy periods, she didn't even seem to notice whether I was paying attention, so lost was she in her recollections. She kept at it while I ate, while I maintained the habitat, while I mended the damage to my suits, and especially whenever I attempted to perform any of my hermitly duties. She probably blathered on even in my dreams, though, as she had complained, I could barely recall these within an hour of waking save for a vague feeling of disdain and unease. The horizon finally fell below the sun and still she wasn't finished.

This is not to say I tuned her out. To the contrary, I bore as much as my mind could take and noticed a pattern begin to emerge. Though it had began chronologically, she shifted into a stream-of-consciousness retelling, as one incident reminded her of another. She would recount in minute detail all the things that her subjects and others had done, but would inevitably return to 'that nag, Celestia,' the mastermind behind it all. She had utmost faith in her sister's malfeasance and masterful powers of manipulation, certain that everything she'd suffered ultimately happened by Celestia's will.

It seemed like a promising angle to argue. After waiting a couple more days more for her to pause so I could get a word in edgewise, I made a suggestion. Shouldn't she reserve her ire for the usurper and leave the others alone? Couldn't she at least wait and see if removing this one factor from the equation would make things better before turning on the rest of the planet?

She frowned sourly and shook her head. "It's easy to be soft-hearted and magnanimous when you've never been around them, Pangolin. That nag's so clever, but she's wrong about them. Completely wrong."

I asked what she meant. Wrong about what?

"Way back at the beginning, when we first set eyes on the mortal ponies, we didn't know what to make of each other. They were so puny and slow-witted and scared of everything. Even the strongest ones were like foals next to us. I didn't think they were even worth our time. She took me aside and admitted I was right. They were like foals, but that was why we had to care for them. She said that someday they'd grow up to be our peers instead of just our wards."

And it had taken longer than she liked?

"Please, I'm nothing if not patient. It wasn't slow; it simply didn't happen at all.

"Now where was I? Ah, yes. Anemone. Assistant to the Lady Chamberlain during the thirty-third year of our reign. So kind. So sympathetic. She reached out, wanted to be my friend. I thought she was sincere, but no sooner had we grown close than she started wheedling and whispering. Could I do her the tiniest favor? Could I suggest such-and-such to my sister? For her? Surely I wouldn't refuse the request of such a good friend, would I?"

I remarked that she was repeating herself; I was sure I'd heard this account a couple days ago.

She looked me in the eye and slowly shook her head. "You're thinking of Amphora, the fifth steward, and you're almost right. It follows a pattern. They do the same nasty things, over and over again, generation after generation. One batch goes back into the dirt and the next one is just as stupid and evil, if not worse. Do you know how many times some enterprising courtier has tried to butter me up as a stepping stone to my sister's ear? Guess."

Inwardly bemused by the bizarre mixed metaphor, I gave little thought to the question and put it an even twenty, certain it couldn't be that many.

"Thirty-seven, actually, and evenly spaced over the span of my reign. Whenever those mayflies forget what happened last time, another amoral fool steps up to try her luck." She stared out the window at the stars. "And they are lucky, really. They can go through their lives fooling themselves that things are getting better or worse. They don't live long enough to see that it's just a cycle. They don't improve; they don't grow up. It's always the same and I'm always at the bottom of the heap." Her eyes fixed on me again. "That's why I'm going to break it. It's all pointless and ugly and deserves to be ended."

As much as I hated to admit it, these last words struck a chord in me. They sounded far too much like the drunken ranting I'd spouted beside my brother's pyre not long before I booked my voyage here.

Apparently she noticed the faraway look in my eyes.

"You begin to understand. Do your kind live long enough to see it, Pangolin?"

Not wishing to give her more ammunition, particularly against other species, I simply noted that I had studied history, and learned of the rise and fall of the great stellar empires.

She nodded in understanding. "So it even stretches to the stars. Of course it does; why not? The emperors are the worst, too. Whenever a unicorn was foaled with so much as an extra spark of magical power beyond its peers, it would go and try to carve out a little empire for itself, enslaving everypony it could and attacking the ones it couldn't. Petty tyrants were the bane of our first couple centuries of rule."

I inferred that they eventually stopped, then. Wasn't that a sign of moral progress?

"No!" she snapped. "The only progress was that she was getting better at controlling them. We each had vastly greater magical powers than the common ponies, and plenty of time to learn to use them to their fullest. If a unicorn wanted to reach the apex of its power, it needed Celestia's support. She even started a little school to groom the most promising ones and ensure their loyalty. In time, she'd cornered the market on magic. Other than the occasional upstart with a relic, no pony would dare challenge us anymore. It was pointless, though."

Against my better judgment, I groused that I wouldn't think it pointless if someone would drive away all the crowned thugs who wanted to make my own world just another gem in their scepters. At least the stability would actually let people mind their own business and live in peace!

Nightmare Moon gave me a reevaluating glance. Her voice when she continued was the quiet, deadly-cold tone she used to express the utmost extent of her anger. "You think you've suffered more, is that right? You think I'm whining. You don't even believe me, do you?"

Her tendency to accurately figure out what I was thinking given time enough was rather troubling.

For the sake of tact, I loudly denied the charges, but she wasn't having any of it.

"Well, let's hear it! What are your petty problems? What tiny ills trouble a mortal mayfly so free of responsibility he can just take off on a jaunt between the stars when he's feeling sad? Did you lose your favorite dolly? Did you fall and scrape your knee? Go on, give me a laugh!"

That... that ignorant, arrogant, self-obsessed, vicious, hypocritical villain! How dare she, the same type as the grasping despots who had ruined my homeworld, make light of the way her ilk had treated me and mine! I drew myself up to my (admittedly small) full stature, took a deep breath and prepared to give her a piece of my mind.

"Oh, and don't take more than ten minutes." she said, interrupting just as I was about to begin. "My time is too valuable to be wasted by the likes of you."

In spite of her claim, I think she was pleased that my first half-minute was lost to speechless apoplexy.