//------------------------------//
// Invasion 
// Story: Mare Doloris 
// by TinCan 
//------------------------------//

A stroll through a winter landscape, regardless of whether it was real or not, should have been a treat; a change of scenery, a reminder of home. Not that I liked to visit to the colder regions of my native world more often than I could help it, but still, it was pleasant to be able to walk in the open air without the need for protective gear.

Even so, I probably should have donned something to insulate me before setting off. Four minutes down the path of hoof prints and I was shivering and rubbing my free arms against the inadequate hair of my belly to keep warm. I frequently had to pause to brush away the snow accumulating on my head, shoulders and back. I couldn’t recall feeling cold in a dream before. Why couldn't delusions (and surely, surely this was one, I kept telling myself) ever be unreal in my favor?

Grumbling to myself in this manner, I followed the trail of hoof prints down a hill, through a copse of outlandish-looking trees and up to a rocky clifftop overlooking a broad, dimly-lit town of single- and two-story dwellings surrounded by a crude wall of wooden stakes in the valley below. Was this ‘Celestria’? I was expecting something far grander and more menacing.

The hoof prints came to an abrupt stop at the edge of the overlook. Had Nightmare Moon taken wing? There was no trace of her to be seen in the cloud-blanketed sky. I shivered, leaned over the cliff’s edge and pondered the wisdom of descending into the town in search of shelter from the storm.

But why bother? This was all delusion of one sort or another anyway, wasn’t it? Nightmare Moon, if there really was a Nightmare Moon, could elude me just as easily here as she could back on the real surface of the planetoid. I should just retrace my steps before the falling snow erased them again, get a warm beverage, and wait in the comfort of my cell for this dream or hallucination to end. After all, she had been angered by my accidental intrusion into her dream earlier. No telling what she would do if I offended her again!

…If she was real at all, that is. Doubting my own sanity like this was beyond irritating! I decided to simply not think about the matter further. I would just go home and cherish whatever little time I had without that awful pony around.

So resolved, I nodded to myself, turned away from the escarpment, and struck my face against something cold and utterly unyielding.

I fell back onto my tail with a squeal, nearly tumbling off the cliff entirely. When I looked up to see what I had struck, my own face stared back, or rather, its reflection mirrored in the strange pale-blue metal of Nightmare Moon’s gorget and breastplate.

Looming above, she grinned down, delighted by how much of a fright she’d given me.

“Pangolin! How nice of you to join me in our little dreamland! I’m glad you finally made it here.”

By the Increate, I wished that pony would quit smiling at me like that! Still, at least I seemed to be more welcome this time. Just to be safe, I stuttered an apology for my presence. It had become rather hard to entertain the idea she wasn’t real with my nose still smarting from our collision.

Nightmare Moon dismissed my words with a smirk and a toss of her head. “No, no, this time I was expecting you to barge in,” she said, looking over my head to take in the vista beyond. “Isn’t my world beautiful?” she sighed. “Even better than yours, right?”

I hastily agreed.

“Only from a distance, though,” she added. “See, I’ve been thinking about that story you read me.”

I had gathered as much. Was that what the ‘Celestria’ sign was about, I asked. Was this like the vision shown Bay Leaf of the world in which he had never been? Had she, like him, discovered that in spite of—

She stamped to silence me, whinnying in annoyance and making a cascade of loose snow spill over the edge of the cliff. “No. Wrong. Quit talking. What would be the point of that? I already know all about that scenario. The waking world is the one where I’ve been erased and forgotten, dunderhead! If all those poor, sweet, innocent ponies you want to save from me actually cared about me, they’d… they’d have done something by now, wouldn’t they? Written a letter? Sent a care package? Anything! How can you doubt they hate me? How could it be anything else?” As she spoke, she gazed down at the town, her expression melting from a superior grin to a hungry, longing stare like a beggar peeking through a window at a banquet. When she noticed I was looking at her, she quickly masked her visage behind the usual sneer.

“No, I’m doing something a little different here. Since you so graciously butted in again, you’re going to see what they’re like, and you’re going to finally give up trying to turn me away from my destiny.”

The pronouncement roused an obstinate streak in me. So she thought presenting her complaints in a different format would get me to condone mass murder, did she? If this was a ‘dreamland,’ how, I asked, were its inhabitants anything more than her own prejudices given form, just as the statues were?

‘If you’ve never seen a mortal pony before, why do you always assume I’m lying?” she snapped back. “They’re all one hundred percent bona-fide perfect memories, just like that copy of my sister was!”

A chilling thought occurred to me. Could Nightmare Moon’s tormentor manifest here as well? Did the means by which it usurped control of her magic also give it a doorway into her inner world? I dearly hoped not!

Then again, if I kept appearing here by accident, how hard could it be?

The princess mistook my look of trepidation for self-doubt. “Oh goody, I’m finally getting through to you!” she said, casting a spell on me from her horn. “I was beginning to despair of getting anything into that armored skull. Take this enchantment and run along now. Go meet those wonderful little ponies you’re going to protect. Oh, and give my counterpart a hoof down there, would you?”

Her counterpart? Did she mean Celestia? That was uncharacteristically charitable! I reminded her that I wished to help both her and the other ponies reach a compromise, not one’s dominion over the other. …But what did this spell do?

“An ‘equitable outcome beneficial to all parties’? Listen to yourself!” she mocked. “Quit flapping your jaws and look for once!”

On later reflection, I am still uncertain whether the edge of the cliff crumbled away at that moment from my weight alone or if she had a more direct role in it. I would not put it past her to play such a cruel prank, and it may well have been her laughter that I could barely hear over the sound of the small avalanche that descended the slope with me.

Dropping my light, I instinctively balled up and rolled as I tumbled. This kept me well-protected from the trees and jutting stones I caromed off in my career down the cliff, but also resulted in my gaining a rather fearsome momentum. Worse, I couldn’t see a thing in this state. I didn’t dare uncurl at such speeds.

Just as the ground seemed to level a bit, I bounced off something, sailed into the air, and crashed straight through something else. The next thing I knew, I was rolling across uneven cobblestones, striking several other hard objects, before I came to a violent stop against a wood surface. I was only dizzy, rather than smashed. Having never been launched like a carom ball before, I wasn’t sure if it would have hurt this little in real life.

“W-what was that racket? What happened?” said an unfamiliar voice nearby, faint above the ringing in my ears.

“Celestia preserve us, it shot right through the wall!” wailed another. “We’re under attack!”

“Guard! Where’s the guard? Help!”

Other voices were raised around me, so many that I couldn’t make out the rest over the general commotion. In the midst of the furor, I felt something tap lightly against my scales.

I uncurled just enough to see around me and found myself staring into the large eyes of a tiny pony leaning from a bright window about an ell above me. I knew they couldn’t really all be the color of moon dust, but I wasn’t expecting the eye-searing combination of cinnabar and teal in its body and mane.

The pony gasped and flinched away as I opened my scales. After a moment, it leaned forward again, stretching its neck to peer at me.

“You’re not a rock,” it whispered.

Unsure how to respond to this, I simply nodded.

“Are you a monster?” it asked, eyes widening still further.

I shook my head.

The young pony turned to look in the direction from whence I’d come. “Then why’d you do all that? You almost knocked down my house.”

I uncurled and stood to get a better view of my path, and a scene of linear destruction met my eye. In the meager light of watchtowers and windows I saw a trail of damaged trees and disturbed snow reaching down the cliff to a sizable hole in the town’s outer wall, and a few dents and cracks in the houses and street leading up to my current position.

This didn’t make sense. How could I have been going that fast? How could I have caused all that damage? I should have been stopped cold by the outer wall at best. The trip down the cliffside had hurt less than smashing my nose against her armor.

“Are you with that big evil pony? Is she coming to get us again?”

I began to ask who ‘she’ was (as if I couldn’t guess) and to reassure the small pony of my benign intentions when a voice from within the building interrupted me. “Snap Pea, you get away from that window right now!” called an adult pony. “They could have shot in a bomb or a trap or somesuch.”

“It’s alright mama,” Snap Pea yelled back, “They just threw a funny-lookin’ animal at us.”

The mother pony started. “An… an animal? Oh!” Her eyes met mine, then she screamed and charged toward the window, in a rage the likes of which I’d never seen from Nightmare Moon. I briefly considered explaining myself, but instead opted to roll tightly back into a ball.

It was the right choice. “You filthy monster!” she shrieked. “Get away from my baby!” She snatched up her child, then pointed her stubby yellow horn at me, which emitted a ray of pale green light. The spell struck with a force that sent me rolling to the other side of the street. As with the trip down the cliff, I barely felt it.

I couldn’t quite place the reason for my unusual resilience. Perhaps it was some sort of safeguard to prevent me from awakening before Nightmare Moon wished? Inside my armor, I pinched the skin on the unprotected side of an arm but felt nothing. I did notice the faintest blue glow playing across my arms, however. Maybe the spell she cast on me was protective in nature? The cold still seemed real enough.

“Guards! Guards! That thing is an invader!” the mother screamed as she slammed the window shut. “It tried to eat my baby!”

I unrolled, shook the dizziness from my head and got back onto my feet. Like my first contact with Nightmare Moon, this one was swiftly turning into a disaster of hostility and misunderstanding. As I shook the chunks of bark and earth from between my scales, I resolved to do a better job of representing myself to the inhabitants of this strange dream world. Its creator might well be aware of everything I did here, after all. Perhaps I could give her hope that the real ponies would receive a dangerous-seeming stranger hospitably. The child had seemed amiable enough.

My thoughts were interrupted by a host of winged ponies, the ones called pegasi, descending from the direction of the wall to hover over me. The steel of their armor and weapons, though dull, glittered in the light of the watch-fires and windows.

“Now whadda we got here?” one calmly drawled.

“This must be the thing that shot through the wall, cap’n,” another volunteered.

Ah, the constabulary, excellent! While the civilian citizenry could be panicky and fearful, especially considering the circumstances, these good ponies ought to be more professional and diplomatic. Certainly, they’d see they had nothing to fear from the likes of me!

I held my belly up with empty claws open and announced that I came in peace and that the damage to their town was entirely accidental. They only looked at me strangely, then the one who had spoken first made a slight gesture to a pony behind me.

The butt of a spear slammed into the back of my head and sent me sprawling face-first onto the snowy street. Again, there was no pain.

“You made a big mistake coming here all alone without your buddies and your mistress, monster,” the ostensible leader said.

I spat some dirty slush from my mouth and informed the pony I had no idea who he was talking about.

“I never seen one like this before, cap’n. Never heard of one just being alone and talking, either,” one of the other armed ponies said. “How come none of the other monsters ever acted like this?”

“Bet it’s a diversion and the rest are making trouble somewhere else,” said a pony directly behind me, likely the one who had knocked me to the ground. “It’s wearing one of her spells, so of course it’s her minion. Don’t trust anything it says.”

The captain frowned and made an experimental thrust at my belly with his spear. I flinched and yelped, but the point bounced off with a flash of blue light.

“Must be this magic shield that let it smash through the wall like it did,” he said. “Nuts. That means we’ll have to get her highness to break the spell before we can slay it.”

A collective groan went up from the warriors.

I made an attempt to insist that slaying was entirely unnecessary and I would be willing to go along with whatever they wished. The ponies ignored my words and remained hovering with their weapons pointed at me.

Then again, what was the worst that could happen? I’d just wake up, wouldn’t I?

The captain gave one of the others a prod to the ribs. “Well? G’wan, call ye olde high-and-mightyness! The sooner we get this over with, the sooner we can get back our bunks.”

The guard nodded and withdrew a tube from beneath his armor. He pointed one end at the sky, folded back his ears, and tugged a string dangling from the other end with his teeth. A firework leapt into the air and exploded above the town with a noisy pop and a shower of blue sparks.

“D’ya think she’ll try and get all chummy with us again?”

“Probably. S’not like we can tell a princess to take a hike; night guard, and all.”

It began to dawn on me that every one of these guards had identical voices and mannerisms. The oversight seemed strange. Was this some pony form of esprit de corps, or were they all drawn from Nightmare Moon’s memory of one particular individual?

As I wondered, a dark figure flitted across the sky, barely glimpsed in the fading blue glow of the firework.

“Hoo-boy,” the captain grumbled, “here she comes. Backs straight, faces on, and we’ll try and get this done quick.” His soldiers unhappily complied.

The pony that landed before us was strikingly familiar-looking. It was larger than my captors, but smaller than Nightmare Moon. It possessed the combination of horn and wings, and also the great floating mane and tail, but its hair was more sparkling and solidly blue than the princess I’d come to know. Most notably, its hindquarters had a black splotch of the same shape as Nightmare Moon’s purple one, with the same crescent marks in the midst of it. It wasn’t just Nightmare Moon it resembled, though I couldn’t quite recall who else. It wasn’t as if I’d actually seen any other real ponies, after all.

The guards not watching me bowed low to her, but their expressions were mostly poorly-disguised impatience and annoyance.

For her own part, this new pony seemed oblivious to the chilliness of her reception, though she did appear generally tired and defeated-looking. She tried to smile grandly, then opened her mouth to speak.

Several of the guards bowing around me raised their front hooves to cover their ears.

“GREETINGS, GOOD PONIES OF OUR NIGHT GUARD,” the princess said in a voice impossibly loud even for her relatively large frame, “WE WERE HUNTING OUR NEMESIS WHEN WE ESPIED THY BEACON AND CAME WITH ALL HASTE. WHAT—”

Lights were springing up in windows all over town now, even more now than when I’d crashed through the wall. Accompanying this was an audible rising groan of hundreds of irate sleepy voices. The princess glanced about and grimaced, embarrassed.

“Er, —WHAT TROUBLES OUR BELOVED SUBJECTS THIS NIGHT?” she continued in a voice only slightly quieter than before.

“I got a noise complaint!” a pony heckled from a distant window. The princess reddened but refused to otherwise acknowledge the remark.

“Nothin’ much, your worshipfulness,” said the captain, wincing at the volume of the princess’s voice. “This thing got shot through the wall somehow, and we can’t hurt it with this fancy shield spell on it. Real sorry to keep you from your important duties. Just take that spell away and you can get right back to chasing your villain, okay?”

The princess looked disappointed. “YES, OF COURSE. WE ARE ALWAYS EAGER TO AID OUR PONIES—”

“Except letting them sleep,” a bleary-eyed pony in a night cap grumbled from a nearby doorway.

“—BECAUSE WE LOVE THEM,” the princess added, sparing an apologetic and pleading look for the critic. The tired pony harrumphed, withdrew inside and slammed the door behind him.

A couple of the guards prodded me forward at spear-point until I was standing directly before her highness. She looked me up and down.

“CURIOUS, I HAVE NEVER SET EYES ON THE LIKES OF THIS MONSTER,” she boomed. “HOW DID SO SMALL A BEAST CAUSE SUCH RUIN?”

The captain shrugged. “Came rollin’ down into the valley like an avalanche and busted through the gate like a catapult stone. When we got here it was tryin’ to eat a colt, but we saved ‘im, your grace.” The other guards nodded and made noises of assent.

Those lying, corrupt blackguards! I tried to get a word in edgewise but the princess’s booming voice drowned me out.

“WELL DONE, DOUGHTY WARRIORS OF CELESTRIA!” she said, clapping the captain on the shoulder with enough force to stagger him. “SUCH DEEDS BRING HONOR TO THY NAMES.” The large pony paused for a second and looked askance, as if trying to decide on a risky course of action, then forged ahead. “AS THOU AND WE ARE FELLOW DEFENDERS OF PONIES, LET US NOT STAND UPON PROTOCOL. THOU… thou may refer to us as… just ‘Luna’.”

My ringing ears pricked up at the name. Could it be? …But she looked (and sounded) so different.

The rest of the guards fidgeted uncomfortably.

Luna lowered her head and gave the captain a shaky, ingratiating grin. “It… it would greatly please us to know thy names as well.”

The captain looked as if he wanted to be anywhere but where he was. “Oh, ah, yeah. That’s real nice of you, your serene majesty. Treatin’ us grunts like regular folks. Real… nice. But Glorious Celestia, May She Reign Forever, wouldn’t like it if she heard we talked to her sister like she was just a dirty commoner, so we can’t. Real sorry, your highness; you understand how it is.” He yanked me between himself and Luna. “So, can you crack the spell on this thing?”

The princess looked shocked at the guards’ rudeness, then deflated and stared at the ground.

Taking advantage of the moment of silence, I protested that the charges of sophontophagy were complete slander, and furthermore—

“BY OUR STARS! THE CREATURE SPEAKETH?” exclaimed the princess, looking back up at me with renewed interest.

The guards gulped in unison. “Uh, don’t put any stock in what it says, your magnificence. We know it’s part of her army, so it’s going to be up to no good, right?” said one.

The other soldier ponies pretended to consider this point, then nodded in agreement.

Luna sighed, accepted the argument, and began preparing a spell on her horn.

How disgraceful! These guards were trying to get their superior to simply render me vulnerable and then leave, so as to kill me quickly before I could contest their self-aggrandizing lies.

I wasn’t too keen on being skewered, even if it was merely in a dream, especially considering how realistic things had been feeling before Nightmare Moon had cast her spell. Based on my hypothesis of what was going on in this dream world, and in whose presence I stood, I decided to take a gamble.

I called out to the princess, addressing her by name. This in itself caused her to extinguish her horn and listen, much to the soldiers’ dismay. I questioned her: was this nemesis she sought a creature similar to herself, but larger, jet black, clad in pale blue armor and going by the name ‘Nightmare Moon’?

“Nightmare… Moon?” she said wonderingly. “The one we seek doth look as thou hast said, but never hath she revealed her name to us. Art thou truly her minion, then?”

Not her ally, no, but her prisoner! I had just escaped from that pony’s clutches and had come here seeking asylum, I told her. All that I knew I would gladly share with her.

The princess’s face lit up with happiness. Unless I missed my guess, the cause of her joy was not the promise of an intelligence coup against her enemy so much as merely having someone who was pleased to speak with her.

“Oh, of course! Come, let us bring thee out of the cold that we may converse at leisure.” She put a wing around my back, sweeping aside the spears of the soldiers, and began walking down the street, lightly pushing me along with her.

“But, but, it was trying to eat a pony!” the captain protested. “We need to slay it!”

Luna tossed her mane in a familiar way. “THANK YOU, GOOD GUARDSPONY. WE SHALL TAKE CHARGE OF… er, who art thou?”

Instead of my real name, I identified myself by the name Nightmare Moon had given me. Sadly, given how much that pony talked, I was beginning to respond to it more readily than to my birth name.

“…OF PANGOLIN. YOU MAY RETURN TO YOUR POSTS.”

The guards regretfully gave in and flew away, and I was glad to see them go.

Nightmare Moon had spoken the truth; unlike the vision in the story of Bay Leaf, this dream wasn’t about a world where the protagonist had never been born.

No, rather it was one where she had never left; one where she had endured another thousand years of the sort of neglect and abuse that she’d spent the entire previous month complaining to me about. In spite of the difference in size, color, and behavior, this Luna was meant to be her, bearing the name she had rejected, still trying fruitlessly to win the approval and affection of the other ponies. This was more terrible to Nightmare Moon than never having been.

As I got my legs into gear and began walking instead of being pushed along by her wing, the feel of it, warm against my back, sparked a mental connection. More than she resembled Nightmare Moon, this pony looked much like an older, larger version of the little statue.

So this must be the ‘counterpart’ Nightmare Moon had wanted me to aid, then. Yet this Luna had called Nightmare Moon her nemesis, just as the little statue worked against her wishes. What was the cause of this division against herself?