//------------------------------//
// One in a Billion 
// Story: Ordinary Nightmares 
// by Mannulus 
//------------------------------//

	A short while later they arrived at Zecora's hut.  Pinkie Pie hopped right up to the door, and knocked on it vigorously, just as she had the door of Twilight's castle.
“I am coming, right away,” came a muffled voice from beyond the door, “Won't you come inside and stay?”
In a few seconds, the door opened to reveal Zecora, and Derpy groaned at the sight.  The zebra's usual outfit of gold rings had been replaced with one made up of what appeared to be actual bones, one of which was prominently pierced through her nose.
“These mares before me, pink and gray,” she said, "must have traveled quite a way."
Derpy simply stared at the bone-clad zebra, amazed and slightly disturbed.
“Come on, now, and have some tea,” said Zecora. “I'm glad to have you come see me.”
The two ponies complied, and though Pinkie's expression changed not at all as they entered what quickly revealed itself to be a chamber of horrors, Derpy was immediately certain that she regretted the decision.
There were the expected shelves of potions and such, but the whole hut was also full of rusted tools, many of which did not match the description of any implement Derpy had ever seen.  Some were fairly mundane, – knives, icepicks, various saws – and though all of those might still be used to unsavory purposes, it was the ones Derpy did not recognize that filled her with the most fear.  They hung from lengths of cord, and were stacked on shelves.  One large table in a corner was covered with dark stains that Derpy could not immediately identify, but she quickly decided not to continue trying once she noticed that it was also covered in more of the rusty, bladed instruments that seemed to fill this entire hut.
Still, however, even amidst this conglomeration of things sharp, pointy, and ominously cryptic in design, the zebra remained civil, beckoning them to sit at a dining table which appeared all at once incongruous and far too at home.
“What brings you here, my pony friends?”  Zecora's smile turned into a wicked grin that revealed teeth filed to spikes. “Seek you means to some dark ends?”
“Uh... actually,” Derpy began, returning the sharp-toothed grin with one meant to maintain civility while concealing the gut-wrenching fear she was beginning to experience.
“We're trying to figure out why everything in Ponyville's turned into an evil version of itself,” said Pinkie Pie.
“More evil than it was before?” asked Zecora. “Then even I shall bar my door.”
“See,” said Derpy, “That's what we mean; if you knew the real Ponyville, you wouldn't say that.”
“That town's real self I know too well,” said Zecora. “Less terrible than only...”
“Look,” said Pinkie Pie, cutting her off, “for the moment, let's just assume that Ponyville was a really, really nice place that all of a sudden turned into what it's like now.  What would you guess was wrong?”
“It would take magic strong and dark,” said the Zebra, “To kindle such an evil spark.”  She paused and scratched at her chin. “An alicorn I might daresay, but not the one who rules the day; neither she who sits enthroned in Ponyville or Crystal home.”
“You think Princess Luna did this?” asked Derpy.
“Who else could turn the light to dark?” asked Zecora. “Is that not how she leaves her mark?”
“Well, I suppose so,” said Derpy, “but I don't think she'd do something like that... If only there was some way I could just ask her what's going on.”
“Well, it's dark now,” said Pinkie Pie. “If we had somepony who could go to sleep with the absolute guarantee of having a nightmare, she'd probably show up, but what are the odds of that happening?”
Derpy's eyes lit up.
“Zecora,” she asked. “Do you have a sleeping potion?”
“I have on hoof a few such things," she said, and then she lifted a rusty saw, and grinned once more, exposing the evil-looking filed teeth. “But it will cost one of your wings.”
Derpy gulped, and her muscles tensed as she prepared to make whatever excuse of a run for it she still could.
“Zecora,” said Pinkie Pie, something sly behind the word.
“Please wait your turn, Miss Pinkie Pie,” said Zecora, still staring at Derpy. “Now as for you, with crooked eye...”
“Zecora,” said Pinkie again, and the zebra lowered the saw.
“What?” asked Zecora, turning to face her, and after a metrically-appropriate pause, she added, “you nut?”
“This is gonna sound off-the-cuff,” said the earth mare.
Now Derpy also turned towards Pinkie, giving her a skeptical look.
“I mean even for me,” she said, twirling her hoof in the air in an impatient little circle.
“I will believe when this I see,” said Zecora. “Go ahead; surprise me.”
“Well,” said Pinkie, “I might... maybe... just possibly know where you can get a good half dozen severed pegasus wings... and a pretty good stock of other... uh... pony... parts.”  She paused.
“If this is true,” said Zecora, and then she turned back towards Derpy, “It's good for you.”
Derpy did not reply, but simply held her breath, wings still tensed, and ready for a quick, airborne sprint at the nearest window.
“You might walk out with all your legs,” Zecora continued, “rather than on wooden pegs.”


The potion Zecora gave Derpy went to work fast, knocking her out cold.  Predictably, she had another nightmare.
This one, however, was different than the others; a replay of a memory.  Perhaps it was the nature of the zebra's potion, or perhaps it had only been a matter of time, but this dream took her back to the first of many days in her life she would rather not think about – perhaps the day upon which she'd first begun to teach herself how not to think about such days:  the day of her Mother's funeral. 
Her father stood beside her as she looked down into the coffin to say her goodbyes, a foreleg around her shoulders.  Her eyes, straight and true, just as they had been in her fillyhood, welled up, and she burst into tears.  She wept then as only a child can, overcome with a sense of fear and loneliness that defies the understanding of those grown accustomed to loss with the many abandonments and partings endemic to adulthood.  No, an adult could not cry like this; it was an art lost to most and relearned by few – and never willingly.
These were bitter sobs, like broken glass rubbed across concrete underneath a plate of rusted iron.  There was nothing graceful or elegant in them; there were hyperventilations, brief moments of the filly coughing as she choked on her own saliva and mucus, and the slow encroaching of a rasp that would never fully depart her voice.  Only a life's first visitation of bereavement can elicit such poignant woe.
In this dream, to Ditzy Doo – for she had not yet, in this age of her life, ever been called  “Derpy” – this was, as it had been that day, her first real goodbye.  The ponies in the Cloudsdale chapel all turned their heads away from the sight and sound, their own hearts riven at it like stone before a jagged chisel, but this itself was strange because none of them had faces or even eyes.
So it had been on that day for little Ditzy, for in that tiny chapel of cloud, there had been no faces to her but the sad, broken, and unresponsive one of of her father, and the dead, unmoving one of her mother.  She remembered that face now for the first time years.  It had been covered in ugly makeup that the mortician had applied, trying so hard to make her look alive in death that he had succeeded only in making her look nothing like herself.  Cruelly, this had become the face she saw whenever her mother entered into her memories – or her dreams.
She continued to wail and all but shriek, and as she retched and gagged with the exertion of her own grief and the interruption of anything vaguely resembling normal respiration, Ditzy saw a thing of pure horror:  the dead mare in the coffin's eyes twitched, and then slitted themselves open.  It happened slowly, beginning at their inner corners, then moving outward as the eyelids peeled apart the thin line of glue the mortician had applied to keep them shut.  Out spilled the pair of plastic caps inserted behind them to make them appear round and healthy, revealing a pair of glassy, yellow irises that shown as little more than thin rings around dilated pupils gone cloudy and gray.  Her lips likewise peeled open against their own barrier of glue to reveal the cotton that had been stuffed inside them to keep the mare's cheeks from slackening and appearing sickly and dead.
But they were dead, and as her mother sat up, extending dead hooves at the end of dead legs to take her, her father did not react.  He stood stone still, as if nothing was happening, his own foreleg like a vise that would not let Ditzy escape its iron grasp, even as she pushed against it, trying to back away from those slow, reaching hooves.  The open mouth spilled out the cotton, blackened with the chemicals it had absorbed, and the face around it morphed into something like that of a wicked, dead clown with running makeup that seemed to pour away, revealing a gray face gone grayer with death.
Then, the dead hooves took her, and the thing she had wanted so much moments before -- to feel once more her mother's arms around her -- became in that instant the greatest terror she could imagine, as the corpse leaned back into the coffin, and her father reached out to shut the coffin on the both of them.
“Come along, Ditzy,” said her mother's voice in the now-perfect blackness, but it was cold and ominous in its tone. “Come lie here with me.  It's best for you like this; best you don't embarrass yourself.”
“I don't wanna lay here, Momma!” she screamed, surprised that it the words came out in the voice of a grown mare. “I've tried so hard... I don't want to be a failure!  I don't want to disappoint you! I didn't mean for everything to turn out like this; you have to believe me!”
“I believe you, Ditzy Doo,” said a voice she recognized, and the darkness began to fade.
She found herself, of all places, in the bed of Princess Luna, clutched tight against the alicorn's warm body as she had been moments ago the cold one of her mother.
Oddly, the Princess' size made her roughly similar in proportion to adult Derpy as her mother had been to little Ditzy.  Perhaps this was why Princess Luna always seemed to rescue Derpy from her nightmares in this way – that it simply reminded her of the safety that death's cruel indifference had stolen from her.
“I was just awakening,” said the Princess.
“Is this a dream still?” asked Derpy Hooves.
“Something like that,” said the Princess, rolling away from the pegasus, and standing up.
Derpy rolled over, and saw the Princess as she had left her; her mane and tail braided tightly, though now slightly disheveled and with a few stray hairs from her day's sleep.
"A terrible nightmare, that," said Princess Luna. "Terrible and surprisingly unique; a perversion of a memory, I should imagine."
"Uh-huh," said Derpy, not moving from where she lay.
"And thy father; that was he who shut thee into the coffin with thy mother?" asked the Princess, pulling her mane and tail loose from their braid. "Why?"
"Yeah," said Derpy, weakly. "I guess because he's a mortician."
"A common profession for a bat pony these days, I should imagine," said Princess Luna, stepping to her mirror. "They have tended the dead for thousands of years, you know."
"I know," said Derpy, sadly. "He did what he thought was a good job by Momma's body, I guess."
"But to thee," asked the Princess, now levitating a brush to her mane, "she did not look as she should have?"
"How could she?" asked Derpy.
"Only in thy memory," said Princess Luna, still grooming herself, "or perhaps in thy dreams."
"Not likely," said Derpy, holding back tears with gritted teeth.
"Perhaps more so than thou wouldst believe," said Luna.
“It doesn't matter,” said Derpy, crawling for the edge of the bed.
She dropped herself to the floor, finding the distance thereunto just a little further than would have been comfortable even for a tall pony.
“Something really awful is going on,” said Derpy, stepping towards the Princess. "Ponyville has changed into some kind of evil version of itself.   Everypony's either gone insane or turned into a monster, and terrible things keep happening.  It's like... like...”
“A nightmare,” said Princess Luna, and in those two words there was no question – only certainty.
“Well, yeah,” said Derpy.  “It's like a bad nightmare that nopony can wake up from.”
“That is because nopony is asleep,” said Princess Luna.  “The version of Ponyville that thou hast seen since thy return is, at this moment, the real Ponyville of the waking world, and all of reality hath altered concurrently.  Everypony everywhere, my sister included, believeth – knoweth – that Ponyville is and hath always been this way.  Only you and I are aware that anything hath been changed.”
“What about Pinkie Pie?” asked Derpy.
“Ignore the pink one,” said Luna. “She is mad.”
“Fine," said Derpy, "but I don't understand how this is possible.  Even Zecora – like, crazy Zecora, but still Zecora – said that this would take a lot of really, really powerful black magic.”
“It did indeed,” said Princess Luna, “It took the shared nightmare of two souls utterly dissimilar in every respect but that both so desire to be like someone dear unto them, and yet, in their own estimation, have failed in every way to become anything like unto that individual.  It took one of those souls being in form and spirit the Queen of Nightmares, herself – and that form having been born of her own sense of inadequacy.  It took, finally, the other deeply and perfectly understanding that singular sense of agony and failure.”
Luna gave a bitter “Hmph.”
“All it took was for me to admit such a thing to thee,” she said, “and to do it in the form of Nightmare Moon; 'twas a one-in-a-billion chance.”
“Can you stop it?” asked Derpy. “Can you make the nightmare go away like you always do?”
“No,” said Princess Luna. “This is no longer a simple nightmare.  This is reality now, Ditzy Doo.”
“Then what do we do!?” asked Derpy urgently, trying to run towards the princess, but quickly finding that in whatever reality they inhabited, her leg was still sprained.
“At least one of us must face her fear,” said Princess Luna, quietly, and she swallowed so loudly that Derpy heard it from many paces away.  “She must find what stalks her in her dreams, and confront it,” she said. “We must cease to share our nightmare.”
“I can't do that,” said Derpy, her eyes glazing over and her head shaking slightly, “it has to be you.”
“Impossible, I am afraid,” said Princess Luna. “It must be you.”
“What?” asked Derpy. “Why?  Aren't you... I dunno; in charge of all this sort of thing?  Why does it have to be me?”
“Because thou art... older than me, Ditzy Doo Hooves,” said the alicorn. “By the measure of time, not at all, but by the measure of the time thou hast remaining unto thee, very much so.  The questions of who thou art, who thou hast been, and who thou art meant and meanest to be are of more urgency for thee.  They trouble thy heart more deeply than mine own, for thou hast less time in which to answer them.”
Princess Luna stared at the floor.
“I confess that when I pull thee from thy nightmares, I am always terrified.  I see how deeply thy fears cut at thy heart, and I know that mine will one day cut as deep.”  She gave a deep “Hmm,” and then looked at Derpy. “For now, however, I cannot envision my fears the way thou can thy own, and thus I cannot confront them.”  She shook her head. “I am not ready.”
Derpy's mouth, having hung open with incredulity for the duration of the Princess' explanation, now found command of itself, and formed words.
“What makes you think I am!?” she almost shouted. “You're THE Princess of THE Night.  If you can't deal with this, how can I!?”
“A spectacular question,” said Luna, looking towards her, eyes now welling, “and one day, long after thou art naught more than dust blown amidst the four winds, I shalt likely find myself asking in my own hour of struggle: “If a little, gray pegasus could overcome this burden, why is it that I, the Princess of the Night... cannot?”
She smiled, and a single tear, jostled from her eye by that simple upturning of the corner of her mouth, spilled its way down, and found the floor.
“Or so I hope,” said the Princess, "if thou take my intent."
Hearing this, Derpy came to a realization.
“You can't help me, can you?” she asked, but she already knew the answer.
“Not more than I have,” said Princess Luna.
Derpy groaned.
“I just... I don't think I can do this, Luna.  It's just too much.  Not even for all my friends in Ponyville.  This scares me more than anything else I've ever even thought about.  That face that I always see, like some kind of dead, evil circus clown, but it's my Momma...  And all the things she says to me, Princess; it's worse than death.  It's worse than being buried alive or drowning or even public speaking!”
“I know.” said Luna. “Remember that if nothing else, I at least know how frightening this will be for thee, Ditzy.”
“Then you know I can't do it,” said Derpy.
“Will you not even try?” asked Princess Luna. “Not even if it means that somewhere, right now,    your daughter remembers growing up in this version of Ponyville?”
This, Derpy had not considered.  Somewhere, at Celestia's school, Dinky was in her dormitory, studying, sleeping, or perhaps even playing with a friend, but if she had grown up in the Ponyville Derpy had seen today, was she even still Dinky?  Was she the daughter Derpy remembered?  Could she be, after having lived in a place like that?
“Or what about that stallion you love?  What dost thou think that living in a place like that after the losses he suffered did to his heart?  Art thou even certain that he will remain there when thou returnest, or does he now rest beside she whom he lost... and his hope that she bore within her?”
“I... hadn't considered...” said Derpy.
“What about thy friends?” asked Derpy. “I know what thou hast seen, for it was in my dreams.  Thou hast seen the withered roses at the flower stand, Pinkie Pie's attempts to hide things that in her bizarre way she somehow knoweth are not her own doing, Twilight's fractured mind, Fluttershy's... eh... behavior.”
“Princess,” said Derpy, “I want to help them, but I don't know what to do or say to that gray creature in the mist.  I know what it's going to look like.  I know the things it's going to say to me, even.  I just don't know what to say back.”
Princess Luna shrugged and shook her head, pursing her lips slightly.
“Nor do I.”
“Then just wake me up,” said Derpy, quietly, her voice and face resigned. “I'll make it up as I go.”
“Very well,” said Princess Luna, “but hear this one thing before thou go.”
“What?” asked Derpy.
“Rarely,” said Princess Luna, and she paused to clear her throat and wipe her eyes. “So very rarely is the thing we fear the thing we think it is.”
She walked to where Derpy, stood, and her horn glowed.  Without a word, she tilted it down, and touched it to Derpy's forehead.
The pegasus awoke on the zebra's bed.