...Have you ever woken up to a dream?
That's a really strange question, isn't it? Normally you wake up from a dream, not the other way around. But, for the longest time, I did have it the other way around. It was only when I slept that I returned to reality; or in my case just my hopes. It's almost tragic... You try and try to grab out for your dreams, but you can never get it. It's like that with reality and me. I close my eyes and just try to grab it... But I never get close enough.
You never really know what you had until it's too far away for you to touch. When that happens... God... You'd do anything to get that back. Just... Anything...
...I'm sorry. I lost myself in thought again. Let me explain what I meant when I said "woken up to a dream". See, my reality is that I'm -well- a normal girl. I had a normal family; normal brother, normal sister, normal mom and dad. I worked part time on my family farm so I wouldn't need to ask for any money from mom and dad. It wasn't like I could just go and get a job at fourteen, so working on the farm seemed as good a place as any to start... Man, what I wouldn't give to go back to pitching hay...
The short story of what happened is... I don't know. The long story is... I really have no idea what happened. I just... woke up here. I woke up in this dream. Animals talking, horses flying, ponies doing magic; it had to be a dream. But... It wasn't a dream, was it? No. No, you can have your brother and sister laugh at you after you have it if it were a dream... I never once got to tell my brother or sister about this dream... I never got to tell anyone.
Instead, the moment I woke to this dream, I felt very different. Different was maybe the best way to even say that... I was certainly different than everything else in this world. For one thing, I could walk on two legs... For another, I had only two legs. Everything else with any sort of brains about them walked on four legs and was covered in fur. A girl's fantasy land, really. Only, fantasies I now know lose their majesty after awhile. These ponies... They hated each other.
They didn't show any sort of mercy... Any kind of love... All they felt was anger when they looked at one that was different than them. The world a woke to smelled like copper and tasted like it too. The grass was grey-dead and the dirt was spongy with the soak of blood. Maybe that was all my imagination... Maybe everything here was... I could have died for all I knew and came here as some sort of twisted afterlife. I still don't know... But I knew it had to stop.
"Stop!" I yelled, "You've gotta stop!" But they didn't... They didn't hear me or just didn't want to. Talons ripped at soft tissue and eyes were gouged by dull yet effective horns. Caws, whinnies, curdling screams... How many different kinds did I hear in just one second that day? I recall them all so vividly... Just like how I recall the anger I felt when I looked at them fighting.
It was... Pointless! I didn't even know whatever these creatures were... But they were fighting over nothing! Not one of them worked together. I saw ones with horns slay a winged one before turning right onto another with a horn. This was crazy! It was bloodshed for the sake of shedding blood. No reason! Pointless! Barbaric! It... It had to stop. And I was the only one trying to stop it...
"This isn't for anything! Stop fighting!" I screamed my lungs out from the hill of dead grass... But they still kept fighting each other like... Like... animals.
I didn't know these creatures... I didn't know what they stood for... I didn't even know where the hell I was or what the hell I was supposed to do! I was just a child! What the hell was I supposed to do! It was frustrating! It made me so sick! I was so...! Mad! I kept screaming at them to stop. But... I slammed my fist against the ground, falling to my knees and pleading with clenched teeth for this 'dream' to end. I beat the land... I beat it like I would beat my pillow in a fit of anger... But unlike my pillow, it hurt...
My knuckles bruised... They bled... They felt so, so fuzzy with dull pain... My hand was real at that moment. The world before me was real at that moment. The creatures dying down there were real at that moment. The screams of pain were very real at that moment. And at that moment... My words were real.
"Stop it..." was all I whispered... And they listened. The fighting... The screaming... The hurting. It all stopped and the center of the world fell onto me at that moment. Blooded eyes of barbaric savages looked at me... And I felt... Very different. I felt this... This light inside my chest. This light telling me I was alive. That I was safe. And that I could stop this all.
Terror cut through my body as my feet squelched along across the war field, passing a different creature one after the other. The eyes followed me and so did the growls when I went past one. My heart beat against my ribs, making my blood churn like the field filled with it I was standing on. Around me were these... Things. But to them, I was a thing to.
"My name is Megan... And..." The light felt so warm... "...I will never let this sort of fighting happen AGAIN!"