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// Dreams and Translation 
// Story: Their Otherworldly Grace 
// by MonoGlyph 
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In my dreams, I found myself drifting through the cold vacuum of space. This place, without oxygen or heat, chilled me to my core. I realized I had become large, larger than any solid mass, larger than any star. The distant suns that surrounded me had become tiny pinpricks of light, flickering softly. I flew through the nebulae, marveling at the constellations and the massive galaxies that twinkled in the distance. I realized that my perception of time had been altered as well, for I bore witness to the formation of new stars and the slow burning of the old. Some of the more brilliant stars collapsed and exploded into fantastic supernovae. I felt a twinge of sadness as I understood that nothing a pony had ever built could be as vast and as dazzling as this. What purpose could we serve, insignificant as we were? It was as though life was simply an anomaly, an amusing side-effect of certain chemicals and proteins working together in a way that simply wasn’t planned.
Suddenly, everything went dark, as though every star burned out at once. I was unnerved. I flew through the featureless void for what seemed like centuries until the darkness seemed to lessen slightly. I saw that I had wandered into a plane of infinite gray. This expanse went on forever, filled with mist and… there was something else. I made out shapeless silhouettes gently drifting through the foggy space. Some seemed large while others were nearly unnoticeable. I could not give a reliable number of how many I saw, for they were always in motion, sometimes flowing into one another; sometimes splitting. Something about these figures inspired a sort of primal fear. They were ominous, overbearing. I knew I could get closer to see what they were, but I had a profound suspicion that I would regret it. An irregular jumble of musical notes sounded through this purgatorial wasteland, punctuated by bouts of alien laughter. The strange soundscape did nothing to soothe my mounting anxiety. I was desperate to leave, to get home somehow. I tried casting a navigation spell, not expecting any proper results. As the tip of my horn lit up, the musical notes and the laughter ceased. The silhouettes surrounding me shifted slightly. I had the sensation that I was being watched. It was them. The forms drifting over the non-existent horizon were watching me. Intently. 
As I looked on, frozen in terror, they began to swell. No… That’s not right. The things weren’t growing. They were drawing closer. My anxiety turned into full-fledged panic. I looked around, frantically looking for an escape, but they were approaching from all directions. As they drifted closer, they overlapped and blocked out the sky. I was in the dark once again. Then something brushed against my neck. 
I awoke on the floor beside my bed, drenched in sweat. I tried to remember where I was for some seconds. The floodgates opened, and the events of the previous day washed over me. I was grateful that the nightmare was over, but questioned why I had it in the first place. Never before did I have dreams so vivid. Could it have been the books? I quickly discarded the idea. How could a few dusty old tomes influence one’s dreams? 
It was much too early, but I certainly wasn’t going back to bed now. Spike was asleep, however, so I snuck downstairs and made some breakfast. I took the first of the Volumes with me, and scanned a few pages while I ate. The symbols that flowed from one page to the next seemed familiar, but I couldn’t place them. In the half-light of the early morning, the strange characters appeared to move. Spike had woken up by this point, so I asked him to grab several books on various dead languages. I didn’t expect to find any matches but perhaps they would provide a starting point. I pored over the texts for the next few hours, comparing them with the foreign characters in the tome. By the end of my session, I was a little closer to deciphering the language. It struck me that some of the characters were identical to those I found in my own texts. Yet these were isolated cases, and the rest of the Volume stubbornly refused to betray its secrets. I considered the possibility that the dialect was stitched together from bits and pieces of multiple tongues. The more I thought about it, the likelier it seemed, and I felt that if I was going to crack this pseudo-language, I needed more examples to draw from than I had. 
I returned to the Canterlot Archives later that day to obtain the books I needed to fill in the blanks in the Volumes. The trip itself was uneventful, and I found the treatises I needed without incident. Upon my return to Ponyville, however, I noticed that Pinkie Pie’s house was scarred and covered in ash. The damage seemed too severe for any normal firework. After a few hesitant knocks on her door, Pinkie let me in. The inside of the house looked like a warzone. Plates were broken and strewn over the kitchen floor. There were holes in the ceiling and piles of debris were burying the furniture. 
“Pinkie. I’m starting to worry about you. What kind of fireworks are you making? These look…” I searched for the word. “…Lethal.” 
She looked thoughtful for a few seconds.
“Weeeeeeeeeeeeelllllllll, I don’t really know what you mean by that, Twilight. I’m not hurting anyone. And if it’s about the house, I’m super-sure I can get this mess cleaned up before the cold months. I think you’re worrying just an itty-bitty-bit too much.”
“But—”
“Too much!”
“Do you need any help? I’m sure I could tweak the ingredients a bit and make them less harmful.”
“Oh, Twilight. It’s not as though I haven’t done this before. It actually is. Still. Don’t you have preparations of your own to get to? Of some kind?”
And there it was; a gentle reminder that I had other things to attend to.
I returned to my library and spent the rest of the day wrestling with the Volume, while Spike started plastering a few cracks in the building in preparation for the frost. The symbols, stolen from different tongues, retained their native sound. Surprisingly, the sounds fit together into near-perfect Old Equestrian. It was hard to believe that such radically different dialects could be combined so well. The Volumes of Vehement Vengeance were clearly the work of a genius. Despite what Princess Luna told me, I found it much more likely that these strange tomes were written by a single individual, rather than served as a product of some bygone civilization. What kind of a civilization would brazenly steal from so many existing cultures? 
Something else bothered me about the books. Even though I had solved the puzzle, I could not easily read them from start to finish. Oftentimes a character with a similar phonetic meaning was substituted for one that had been used previously. This prevented me from easily memorizing every used symbol as there were far too many that were interchangeable. It was as if the author was actively trying to deter any potential readers. This forced me to keep my references open and with me at all times, and I transcribed the deciphered text onto a separate sheet as I worked. 
I spent the rest of the day in this manner, skipping lunch and dinner to continue unraveling the mysteries of the Volume. I will not go into much detail about what I found in the book, as I’ve already written the translations elsewhere and, to be perfectly honest, copying the information any more than is strictly necessary makes me nervous. It will suffice to say that much of the first pages of the book were dedicated exclusively to the lore of places I have never heard of. 
The book spoke of the oppressed people of Regwelshen who made the pilgrimage to the Gwyllion Steppes and incurred the wrath of the Other Gods there. These monstrosities spared one painter of the lot, who traveled to the nearest city and spoke of how his comrades were driven mad by the visage of the Gods and slaughtered. This man began to produce paintings of the Gray Domain that supposedly surrounded the observable universe, and the scene of his people’s demise. It wasn’t long before the Gods homed in on the city; crops turned to poison and strange beasts roamed the countryside. After ten days of this heavenly siege, an unknown something stood over the city and the skies turned dark. When the messengers returned with armies from neighboring kingdoms, they found that the city had vanished, as did the thing in the sky, the strange roaming beasts and the poison crops.  
The world outside the window was growing dark. I would continue translating but the constant need to consult the reference texts and transcribe the results, not to mention the grim nature of the narrative, had drained me considerably. I told Spike that I was going to bed early on this night, and as I shut my eyes, I hoped against hope that I would not dream.