Nightmares Are Tragic

by Jordan179


Chapter 1: Empty and Forlorn

She watched the Earth with hunger.

She was a shadow, a ghost. To the eyes of a normal pony, had one been there, she would have seemed a nebulosity of cold plasma, a shimmering mass of dark blue iridescence with a vague resemblance to a patch of starlight in the night sky. The strange cloud oozed about the Lunar surface, hiding in craters and canyons and caves from the sunlight in the long Lunar day; moving freely across the maria or playing amongst the radiation-eroded peaks during the long Lunar night.

Sometimes she coalesced, and took the form of an alicorn mare.

The mare was dark and beautiful, with black fur, black feathered wings, and a long black spiral horn. Her eyes were a strange greenish-blue, strange because they shifted from green to blue with her moods, under her long feminine lashes. Their pupils, unlike those of a normal alicorn, were vertical slits, similar to those of a cat. They glowed, as if from light reflecting of a tapetum, save that the light came from within, not being dependent at all upon outside illumination.

On her flanks her blackness faded to a deep purple, and her Mark was that of a sharp-pointed crescent moon. Her mane was dark blue, and appeared to be made not of normal hair, but of a swirl of starlight, sometimes with individual stars clearly visible in the greater mass. It blew about her in invisible winds, despite the lack of atmosphere, and often seemed to move on its own.

Her expression was generally angry, and sometimes she snarled or shouted, generally at nothing. When she opened her mouth another strangeness was visible: her teeth, instead of being broad and flat in the normal equine maner, were sharp and jagged, those of a carnivore.

Incongruously, she wore battle armor, though there was no one here to fight. Smooth, apparently of a bluish-silvery metal that glowed like her mane, and curled elaborately about her in a helmet, breastplate, and sabatons. From materialization to materialization, the exact outline of the pieces changed, as if they were less real pieces of metal, and more emanations of her need to protect herself. The breastplate always showed her mark, the crescent moon, as would have a real breastplate in the days when she had walked the Earth.

She looked at the Earth, and she watched. Her vision was supernally excellent, though from a quarter-million miles it was still difficult for her to see much more than cities, large ships, the glow of town-lights burning on the Earth’s dark side. She could focus at will to see individual ponies, and sometimes she did, though she did not always understand what she viewed. Often, she watched one particular part of the Earth, a high mountain and the palace on top, and sometimes the great forest that streteched away to its south, in the midst of which an older castle crumbled into ruins. Sometimes, she could see one particular pony, a white alicorn mare with rainbow mane, who from time to time looked back up at her.

Her reaction to seeing this sight varied. Sometimes she screamed, and cursed, raging at the white alicorn, blaspheming and promising dire acts of vengeance upon her. Sometimes she cried, and pleaded, and broke down into incoherence, eventually huddling in a sobbing dark ball. Occasionally, she perked up her ears and listened, as if she could hear what the white mare was saying or singing to her. Sometimes, she spoke or sung back. This was possible despite the fact that there was no atmosphere: neither where the dark alicorn stood nor in the immense voids between their worlds, for alicorns can speak in hear in many vibrations, across the electromagnetic and subtler spectra.

In these latter moments, her face softened out of its customary rage, and the witchlights in her eyes died, and the pupils widened, as if they were trying to change back to those of an ordinary alicorn. The greenish-blue assumed a bluer coloration, and they seemed wide and terribly sad, with the loneliness of a young mare bereft of family, friends and home. For a short time, she did not look so terrible. Celly, she would whisper. Celly, I’m so sorry. Please, forgive me.

Then, the other shadows would inevitably come, oozing from crack and rill and crater in defiance of the harsh sunlight that beat down on the desolate world. The sunlight punished them, making them steam and lose some of their substance to the surrounding vacuum, but always their great masses were enough to last long enough to do what they must to reclaim their victim.

Hate, they whispered in her mind, hate. She is your enemy, all ponies are your enemies, all who will not worship the Great Dark as we do, as you do, all are your enemies. Hate, and you shall have power; hate, and you shall have revenge; hate, for one day you shall be free to reclaim your world, to bring about your heart’s desire, the Night That Shall Never End. And open the gate, to us, that we might have revenge too, upon all life …

Sometimes she would try to escape, to gallop across the surface of the dust deserts, bounding immense distances, hooves puffing up moon dust. Sometimes she would become glowing vapor, to fly into the sky, where she would inevitably be repelled by paramagnetic fields of immense power, set there to confine her. Sometimes she would ooze into the regolith, haunt the lava tubes and ice caves that lay beneath the visible surface. There were strange things in some of these caves, for Ponies were not the first nor even the greatest of the civilizations that had seen the Moon, and left their marks upon her. Sometimes she would gaze in fascination at artifacts left behind by those others, mysteries as yet undreamt of by Ponykind.

There was one plain in particular to which she often returned during those times of freedom, for it was wide and sun-swept, difficult for the shadows to cross. On that plain there was something small, seemingly insignificant, a boxy thing of spidery legs with a bell-mouthed descent engine nozzle between them, a scatter of abandoned equipment of oddly-familiar make, a flag of red and white and blue stripes and stars.;

She would sit and gaze upon this litter sometimes, and gaze and grow sad, for the failed dreams of a forgotten world, and for the failed dreams of her own empty heart. They would never have given in to the Shadows, she would think. He never would have let them. I knew no shadows when he was with me …Dusk! Oh, Dusk! The silent cry would come from the core of her soul. Then the tears would flow, drops of evanescent cold plasma, witch-fire mimicking the water that would have come from her in her Earthly life.

But in the end, whether on bright plain or black sky or hidden cave or amongst the memories of her former life, the Shadows would again come. From the old landing site, they would often hold back for a time, repelled by some holiness that they could not face, until her sadness would turn to rage, and the desire for revenge on the fools who had failed to listen to her, and then the Shadows would flow forth eagerly, embracing her, entering her, becoming her, and she would be the Nightmare again.

So her unlife continued, as the Moon slowly orbited and rotated. Ten thousand, three hundred and seven Lunar days, which were also Lunar months, passed, the Moon’s phases shifting each time from the viewpoint of the primary planet. On the Moon, the madmare’s own phases shifted, from sadness to hate to rage to a sanity that never lasted very long. On the Earth below, the position of the day-night terminator slowly shifted as the tilted planet’s orientation changed with relation to the Sun. In the Northern Hemisphere, the snows crept south, receded back north, a thousand times.

Each time the light was greatest in the North, each time the Northern day was longest, the dark mare could feel a shiver go through the paramagnetic field all around her. She knew that something was happening within the four silver objects that shared the Moon’s orbit, from which the field was being generated. During her moments of sanity, she sometimes thought: The counter’s been decremented one step. Another year past. Another year closer to freedom.

And in those sane moments, she would sometimes imagine coming back to the white mare, her sister, being forgiven. Once again being with her, being loved, having friends.

When that happened the Shadows would surge forth with especial vehemence and lash her cruelly, tormenting her with her own memories of loss, loneliness, betrayal. She hates you, they would hiss into her heart. You must hate her, her most especially, or you will be defeated and banished again! You have no love, no friends, no purpose save hatred and revenge! Hatred is your power – would you once again be weak, a failure, derided by all the ponies who play in your sister’s sunlight, who despise you?

And then the hatred, the rage would return, and the Shadows would once again be content.

Beneath her the Earth slowly changed. She saw the old castle swallowed by the primal dark forest. One by one, the ancient fortresses of the noble families crumbled into ruins: new mansions sprawled, their designs dictated now by display and luxury, rather than the iron demands of feudal war. She saw the new city, by the palace on the mountain, grow. Forests fell, farms spread across the land, roads snaked between the cities. Traffic moved by wagons on the roads, by canal barges and river boats and sea shipping on the water. There was a new town south and then another one north of the old castle, and the forest fell back on its heart. Here and there, outside the new towns, smokestacks began to climb into the air. Palls of dirty black smoke coughed forth, like a foal’s lusty birth-cry.

This happened once before, she realized in her saner moments. In the forgotten world, the one that sent the lander. They’re remembering! The ignorance is lifting! Sister, we’ve done it! And her joy when she realized this, the love that sprang into her heart for her sister, and for all the little ponies, drove the Shadows from her for Earth-days at a time, though their fury when they finally caught her again, and the lessons they needed to teach her, kept her happiness in check for many Moon-days to come.

This happened more and more frequently, as she saw new things in which to delight. Ships sprouted smokestacks, sailed against the wind with spouting steam. Traceries of metal wound between the cities, and steam trains puffed along these new rail roads. Balloons rose, grew smokestacks and propellers, became great airships to ply the routes of the air. Some of it was strange, but all was wonderful to the dark mare’s delighted gaze. What a new Age of Wonders it must be!

Once, she felt a somehow special regard coming from the Earth below, and she gazed down with her sight-beyond-sight. A lavender unicorn filly, just on the cusp of adolescence, mane indigo with a streak of lavender like her coat, her Mark a spray of stars, was gazing back up at her, through a telescope on her balcony. She was watching the Moon in general, but at this distance it was as if she were looking directly at the dark mare.

The purple filly stepped aside from the telescope and looked up with her unfiltered eyes. They were big and purple, intelligent and innocent, wide with appreciation of the beauty of the night, rich with all the possibilities unfolding in her young world.

The dark mare felt a strange, warm rush of sisterhood toward the purple unicorn.

She loves my night sky, the dark mare thought. I wish I could meet her. We could be friends. And, though that was clearly impossible, given her own imprisonment, the mere knowledge that there were ponies that special on Earth filled her with something she had not felt in centuries.

Hope.

Then, on the ten thousand, three hundred and seventh Lunar day, the field shivered yet again, slackened, died. The silver not-stars, sucked in by its collapse, crashed into the Moon, raising fireballs, gouging out new craters.

There was nothing between her and the rest of the Universe.

For a moment, the dark mare stared up at the black sky, almost unbelieving at what she was sensing, though she had expected it for a millennium. Sister – for real? It’s over? I can come back? Join you, in the bright new world you’ve made? Her heart leapt in happy anticipation, her beautiful blue eyes wide open with her love for all life. Her wings rose, her legs tensed to make the leap …

… and the Shadows struck, with greater force than she had ever known, encoiling her in ebon tentacles. She cried out in pain as the cold burned its way down her neural pathways, entering her brain, seeping into her soul. She struggled, desperately, to hold on to the memory of joy. Hatred and rage filled every corner of her mind, and the essence of Luna was shoved far, far back.

That essence could hear the Shadows speaking, their whispers for the moment loud enough for her – for the first time ever -- to really understand their words. They were hard to make out – much of it coming to her as a kind of static. Their minds were very alien.

Almost lost …, one voice hissed. How … possible … she should have weakened … a thousand years!

Link … sister … ponies. Still … knows love. That last word, “love,” was thought with the intonation Luna would have used for the droppings of a particularly-ill animal.

Will change. No …when all … ponies dead. At that, Luna redoubled her struggle against the fog that was keeping her from the controls of her self. It was as useless as a foal trying to break free of inch-thick steel manacles.

It attracted the attention of the entities.

No time … subtle …Celestia knows. Must … Elements. Regain control …NOW!

A wave of sheer hatred, of a literally inequine lust for domination, degradation, and destruction, hit Luna’s soul. It was like a tsunami. She rolled over and over, helpless in the flood.

Luna succumbed. She went unconscious. Luna closed her big blue eyes, for the last time in this form.

Nightmare Moon opened them. Green witchlights oozed from her slitted orbs, the energy of her sheer fury crackling out to lash the moonscape, causing flashes from the vaporized regolith. Gas and dust puffed up into the void.

She gathered her limbs, spread her wings, became pure energy.

She jumped.

One and a quarter seconds later, she was on the Earth.

Once again, the Nightmare had begun.