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// Prompt #314: Mitternacht 
// Story: Ponywatching 
// by ThunderTempest 
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Do you know what it was that finally pushed the Nightmare from me? No, ‘twas not the Elements. They were merely the catalyst, the final push I needed to cast the creature from myself.

While I was on the moon, the Nightmare still had full control of my faculties. Or almost. Whether through some sick, twisted game of its own making, or simply because it could, it left a small portion of me cognizant inside while it puppeteered my body. Enough of me to see, to hear, to taste and feel and smell. Enough to drive me mad, one would suppose.

But while I was on the moon, after Celestia, my own sister, hit me with the elements, it was in this small piece of myself that I could think clearly. And I saw what Eternal Night would look like. I experienced it. The moon is vast, and empty. It is a wasteland. At times, a beautiful and stunning one, but still a wasteland. The presence of the beautiful does not mean that such places are desirable. The moon is shrouded in darkness-perpetual, endless night. A night that does not end is no more wondrous than a day that does not cease. It is a terrible thing. The only other thing I had to look at, aside from Equestria itself, was out into the void. The emptiness of space is not a comforting thing. It is cold, harsh, and deals only in absolutes, and I find it terrifying beyond all things. Perhaps, if I had been skillful, I could have preserved some of Equestria, but before my banishment, the Nightmare and I were almost completely aligned in our goals. We cared not for other ponies lives. We only wished to see Celestia fall before us.

That was what the first hit with the Elements did to me. It preserved me. Kept me from going mad, from succumbing to the Nightmare’s influence again in that small portion of my being. It subjected me to one thousand years of what I had wanted to bring to Equestria, forced me to come to the conclusion that it was not suitable. The beauty of the night is not that it is permanent, as the sun’s is, but that its beauty comes from its transience. It reminded me of the things which the Nightmare had made me forget.

So, when Twilight Sparkle and her compatriots attacked the Nightmare with the Elements, that was all the gap I needed. As the Nightmare inhabiting my body recoiled from the physical strike, within my mind, I struck at the core of the Nightmare’s essence, the Elements invigorating me, enabling me to fight off and eventually destroy the foul creature.

But it was not because of the Elements that I was cleansed.

It was because I was forced to spend a thousand years on the moon, witnessing the results of my own, or the Nightmares’, twisted plan. It was because I was subjected to eternal night, and I found it terrifying. That was what spurred me to rid the Nightmare from myself, the knowledge of what it intended to cause.