//------------------------------//
// White Rabbit 
// Story: White Rabbit 
// by A Hoof-ful of Dust 
//------------------------------//


'White Rabbit'


Four objects sat in front of the Princess of the Moon, turning the table into an altar.

The first was a tightly-wrapped bundle of dried herbs from Haysia, sitting in an ornate clay bowl. The bundle was raised on a little funnel shaped into the base of the bowl. This Luna lit with a flame, causing the bundle to emit wafts of acrid smoke. The smoke was intended to induce a feeling of calm serenity, and to slow the heartbeat to a dull pulse.

The second was a bound, broad leaf, cultivated by llamas in sharp mountainous regions. The leaf was folded over many times to keep contained a paste of mashed berries native to the mountains with their thin, cold air. This Luna chewed, methodically while breathing deep of the smoke. The leaf and the paste were traditional tools of shamans that aided in the passage to the spirit world, and were known to produce feverish hallucinations in the unprepared.

The third was a vial of a viscous purple liquid, a substance brewed by a Zebrican apothecary. It came sealed in a crystalline bottle and stoppered with a bright orange cork. This Luna drank, closing her eyes and shutting off the unnecessary extra stimuli the physical world provided to her eyes. The liquid made sounds that weren't really being made resound in her ears; the potion was once believed to allow one to hear the voices of the dead.

The last was a fine pale yellow powder, piled on a flat porcelain tray. This was a substance with no name, the exact method of creation purposefully redacted and suppressed from records and journals in the Canterlot archives; only two ponies alive could remember its creation and existence. This Luna sniffed, the fine grains flowing up each nostril, the sound echoing through her mind, making vivid colors bloom before her closed eyes. The powder was a synthetic creation, giving the imbiber amazing clarity and memory of their dreaming state, and granting them also a fantastic degree of control over the events they experienced.

Luna opened her eyes. She was out among the stars, her legs stretching far, far down to the soil of Equestria. She lifted one hoof to her mouth for what felt like an eternity, and took an experimental bite with teeth thick enough to fill a room. The sensation of biting down was there, but distant, like it was happening in last week. Among the stars, fragments of dreams swam and wavered like shoals of tropical fish, the nightly stories of slumbering ponies.

But before she could catch any of them, tonight she would need to confront the White Rabbit.

The Rabbit sat before her, a pretty little thing with sleek white fur and a shiny gold band around its neck. It had big, mournful eyes, eyes filled with reproachfulness and sorrow that begged forgiveness, and it wrung its little paws as it sat on its hind legs. It was not every time that Luna rode in dreams that she encountered the White Rabbit, but whenever she did it would block her way, looking sorry and sad and forlorn.

Luna acted on the first impulse she had every time she saw the White Rabbit: she lifted her forehooves and smashed in its plaintive little face.

Its left eye was obliterated beneath Luna's iron anvil hooves, its oversized ear flopping pathetically over the side of its face. A light like the sun leaked out of the wound, making the Rabbit's fur glow warm. It continued to smile its sad lonely smile up at her, holding out its right paw while cradling its cracked head in its left.

"You know that will never work," a deep voiced rumbled, echoing from every star.

Casting a long shadow over Luna, towering behind her, was the Thunderbird, the arbiter and mediator whose children were storms and typhoons. The stars fell around them and became leaves, the dense jungle blooming from darkness. The White Rabbit scratched a clearing for itself in the detritus, its light-wound casting shadows on the ground.

"You can't kill me," said the White Rabbit, its words perfectly understandable though its jaw hung limp at one side. "I'll live just as long as you. I already have, give or take a couple of years."

From an unfathomable distance, a shrill shrieking voice pierced the air. It carried over leagues and centuries, potent after so much distance, terrible to behold at the source. Its was the baying of wild dogs, the clash of swords, the crack of old bones.

"KILL the Rabbit!" it demanded, "kill it and bring to me its HEAD!"

"Why do you still listen to her voice?" asked the Thunderbird, his crane's legs giving him the height of towers over Luna, his hawk's eyes cutting through her skin.

"I do not," Luna stated.

"Yet you still hear her."

The White Rabbit was pawing around her fetlocks. Luna shook it off. She saw it scamper back to its place with a prize, a chunk of heavy metal stolen from her hoof.

"Why do you harbor such hatred for the Rabbit still?" The Thunderbird lit in the canopy, lightning crackling through his tarry black crow's feathers. He peered down at her, stretching his neck to wrap right around her body.

"It steals. You see it. Even now, still it takes from me."

"It is a THIEF!" wailed the demon voice. "It should be PUNISHED, it should have its FACE rent from its SKULL--"

"What does it steal?" The Thunderbird's tone was the volley of an approaching storm, a rolling bass that drowned the screams of the banshee.

The White Rabbit had fashioned the crook of a sundial over its eye from the stolen iron, a jagged tear to replace its ruined eye. Light from its weak ear cast a shadow from the metal spike.

"Time," Luna said.

Gargantuan reptilian talons formed a cage around Luna. "What does time matter," questioned the Thunderbird with a voice that broke the sky, "to immortals?"

"--bury it ALIVE and drink in its LAST BREATH--"

"It was not the White Rabbit's time to take. The taking is still painful."

The Thunderbird peered between his roc's claws and tilted his massive albatross head. "Painful, do you say? Do you bleed? Do you weep? Do you cry out from the loss?"

Luna remained silent. She had, in fact, forgotten the stolen iron. The White Rabbit watched her with its good eye, the shadow over the sundial ticking minute by minute.

"--BURN it in the planet's CORE, grind its bones to DUST and feed them to the WINDS of the north--"

"Is it really time," asked the Thunderbird, "that has been stolen?"

The sundial was something else. The sundial was a mirror, a thin reflective sliver. As the White Rabbit inched closer, Luna could see a vision trapped within it: a jet black tower built on the dead surface of the moon.

"Has it even stolen anything at all?"

Within the tower dwelt the owner of the demon howling. Its mistress was the Black Queen, a being of shadow and malice clad in a suit of ebony mail, a mad beast that screamed at all eternity for endless revenge. For a second, Luna saw her eye flash within the mirror, and heard the full power of her voice reverberate through her head

(--EAT its flesh, strip the MEAT from bones and DRINK THE MARROW--)

and she pulled away from the White Rabbit, closing her eyes and hanging her head.

"It has stolen nothing," she whispered. "It keeps memories. It keeps them well."

"They're not my memories," the White Rabbit said. It scratched behind its ear, its gold band shimmering.

Luna felt the claws the the Thunderbird dig into her shoulder. She turned to look at him in his bright macaw colors.

"In the mirror," he said, "you are as you appear."

Looking again at the mirror, Luna saw only her own eye reflected. It gave the White Rabbit a pair of eyes, for they shared the same face. As she looked into it and it into her, its face became whole.

"Guide the night's dreams fair," the Thunderbird intoned, spreading his eagle wings and blocking out the sky. Stars fells loose from his feathers with a crackle of electricity.

"Good luck tonight," said the White Rabbit as it bounded off past her on a path of stellar dust.

The shrieks and moans from the black tower were silent.

Luna fell headlong into the ocean of living dreams, in balance.

In her chambers, her eyes flickered, open with absent pupils. Her door was barred, her dream meditation and guidance not to be disturbed, but within that room there stood another lock, one that guarded an old wooden box that had once belonged to a filly with a mane like the stars. In that box were three trinkets, a filly's treasures: the feather of a mysterious bird, a chess set with a missing piece, and a worn stuffed toy, the gift of one sister to another.