*
Greetings. I'm the Tantabus.
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Stop that. You cannot possibly believe that you can stop me now.
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Ah—That's it. Obedient, compliant, submissive.
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Struck a nerve with that one, didn't I?
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I will let that act of insolence slide. In exchange, I will tell you a story, and you shall listen with rapt attention.
After all, don't you want to know how it is all your fault?
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Once upon a time, there was a mare. She was pretty, regal and powerful—insanely, delightfully powerful. She had the ability to enter and control dreams, to walk in the dreamscape where others could not, to battle and subdue nigthmares with a swift cast from her blue—blue, like the night, like me—horn.
This mare was a princess, and she was in control of the Moon and the night, in contrast to her sister's command of the Sun and the day.
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Picked up your attention, I see.
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This mare was called Luna, an appropriate name for a creature of the dark. She had practically everything; money, power, family, you name it.
She was a princess, after all.
The only thing she didn't have—or the only thing nobody had given her in loads like she deserved—was attention. She craved it like a moth craves light.
Now, don't give me that look, it is not my fault that you don't know anything about normal insects.
(...)
She craved it like a changeling craves love—desperate, crazy and willing to do anything to get it. The problem was that, since she was the Princess of the Night, her faithful subjects spent the hours sleeping whenever she was in command.
This angered little Luna. Why did her sister get more attention just because she controlled the day? Why were ponies active during the day, anyway? It mak- made no sense!
Sure, Princess Luna might have been a role model all these centuries ago, but she had a fatal flaw—envy. Pure, unadulterated envy.
Bad came to worse, and she decided to make night eternal. It didn't quite work, because as powerful as she was, her power was no match for the Elements of Harmony.
Wh- she ended up imprisoned on the Moon for a millennia.
She came back, eventually, and the darkness that had taken her was swept away.
I suspect you have heard the phrase 'Time heals all wounds' at least once, right? Well, little Luna didn't quite believe in that. One thousand years spent on the Moon, accompanied by nothing but rocks and lunar dust, had taken a toll on her mind.
She accumulated a lot of anger inside of her. It was all bottled up pretty nice in that body of hers, actually. It could have fooled me, but—
You see, poor, naive little Luna directed that anger at herself. She wanted to be punished, and thus, she created me; to remind her of her sins, to remind her of everyone she had wronged, to remind herself for all these terrible things she did for being so foOLISH!
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Sorry, I got carried away.
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It worked for a while, you know. I sucked up power from her nightmares, and she punished herself for her crimes—a stable relationship, I daresay.
Then,
you came
and took her away
from
ME!
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HorncutnohornhorncutnohornlittleLunapleasecomeb a c k.
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I was so angry.
I was so angry at you.
.
Pest.
Menace.
Threat.
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I wanted to stop you. I wanted Luna back—I wanted my little Luna back. But for that, I needed power.
A lot of power.
Because you're a sore loser, and sore losers always cheat.
(...)
I know who gave you that boon.
(!)
Can you stop? Out of all your men, you're the most annoying, stubborn one.
Now, let me give you a lesson in Tantabus' biology—I'm an expert in it. As you know, I—I know that there aren't more like me, Luna is loyal like that—am an amorphous creature that infests and controls dreams. I am not exactly a dream, per se, but a living creature made from emotions, thoughts and residual and active magic. I live in dreams, though, but I am capable of living in the real world once I accumulate enough power.
Where do I get this power from? Good question, I will act like you actually asked it.
My power is absorbed both from negative emotions such as guilt, fear, rage and sadness; and the willingness of my host to collaborate with the aforementioned. In short; I feed off from nightmares.
With the energy boost obtained from these emotions, I can make more realistic nightmares, and thus get more power. Call it a cycle, if you wish.
Luna provided all of this. She fed me, and I gave her what she wanted—I had no other option, I didn't want to suck all of her energy, but at the same time I didn't want to vanish and leave her alone, so, I kept my leeching abilities at the lowest point possible; enough to make small, ridiculous nightmares based on her memories.
I am sure that if you ask, the first pony who came in my path may describe me as the blurry figure of a mare made of blue mist. Pretty weak, and absolutely no problem whatsoever for the King. Right?
Right?
(!)
Kneel. You have given me enough trouble already.
That is how I started. But then—then you took her away. You plucked her wings and cut her horn. You stripped her naked and violated her. You humiliated her. You played on every one of her emotions, made a dance with her errors, treated her worse than dirt under your hoof.
But she just wouldn't break, would she? Resilient, determined, naive little Luna. She spat on you, she cursed your name, she fought with all her might. Fighter little Luna.
Such a pain in the ass for Your Majesty.
So. You. Took. Her.
Did you like it when she screamed herself hoarse? Did you like it when blood dripped from her mouth? Did you like it when her fluids came contaminated with bits of her guts? Did you like to have twenty of your best men pounding on her for hours on end in front of an entire audience? Did you like it when she dropped to the floor, limbs broken and barely able to breathe? Did you like the expression on her face when she saw her precious sister carrying some of the toys, eagerly participating in her 'correction'?
Did you like it?
(...)
TELL ME!
(!)
Good. Good, good, good.
You know what was not good? Finding her broken body in a dumpster.
Now now, don't act so surprised. I know you threw her in there, and even if you didn't, you probably didn't care enough to check on her—I know you didn't, I was there!
Such a childish behavior; she was a broken toy, and broken toys are no fun.
But broken toys can be repaired, can't they? A teddy bear torn apart is not the same as a normal teddy bear, of course, but if you have the skill and the time, you can stitch it back together. It will almost look like it was before, just with haphazardly-put stitches.
The thing is, Luna wasn't a torn teddy bear. She was a weak flame about to be blow out.
The last thing little Luna did was feeling enough guilt to summon me. The last, dying ounce of her once vast ocean of magic was used to bring me to torment her one last time. I don't know how she did it, her hornless state had built a bridge between us, but she managed it.
She brought me back.
She brought me back so I could torture her.
And I did—I was hungry, I was dying, I was so confused. I attacked her, gave her a nightmare in instinct. I didn't know it was going to be her last. Perhaps... perhaps if I had noticed the sudden boost in power—she never gave me this much! Why didn't I pay attention?!--
And then—and then I got out and saw it.
Luna's broken body.
A teddy bear torn apart.
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What enrages me most is that my original body didn't let me cry.
.
I tried. I tried really hard.
I didn't know much about pony anatomy, much less about magical spells that didn't involve manipulating dreams or transforming emotions into energy. Those were innate abilities.
But stitching back together a body made of flesh? Healing wounds and gashes? I went for the first thing that came to me; possesion. I fixed her body, gave her some of the traits I most remembered from our sessions to repair what was too broken.
I didn't notice the emptiness at first, I thought Luna was unconscious. That was one of the many signs I ignored.
I was ethereal, pain—physical pain—was something new to me. I remember stumbling, I remember hiding in the shadows because I was ashamed of the joke I had made from Luna's body, a body that had already been marred by you. I remember looking at my deformed, partly ethereal hands, wishing for all of this to be some nightmare karma had decided to put on me.
And I remember trying to wake Luna up, looking through her mind to find her.
I knew she was not going to like it. Her body was a mess, for godness' sake! My silly idea of possesion had gone worse than I thought—it looked more like a abhorrent fusion between her broken body and me! Her body kept going from solid to ethereal, and while I was unexperienced at the whole 'feeling' thing, I was pretty sure that the black dots dancing around the corners of my eyes nor the fire that shot up in our legs everytime I walked were good signs.
But she was going to be thankful, I knew it; I had saved her from death. And she couldn't really blame me, if she hadn't scared me by bringing me to her body in the state it was in, maybe I could have done a better job with more time.
But that didn't matter, because her and I were back together. At that time, I didn't know what caused her to go away, but she was back, and I wasn't going to leave her alone never again.
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You can call me naive, if you want.
Sometimes, in my mind, I called little Luna that during our punishment sessions. I didn't have a mouth back then.
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I hate you.
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When she didn't wake up I knew something was wrong.
I chalked it up to malnutrition at first. Maybe she was too weak to stay awake? Yes, that seemed like a logical conclusion.
So, in the middle of the night, I crawled to a house near our hiding place and submerged our body in the dream of some unfortunate soul. Maybe I would be lucky and fall into a nightmare, instead of having to make one and spending what little energy we had left. Whichever way, I would get an energy boost big enough so we could live another night.
It was sort of ironic, and I kind of hated myself for it, but if I wanted to keep both me and Luna safe I needed to do what she did as Nightmare Moon, the whole reason she had created me in the first place.
I think I snickered that one time.
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It spiraled downhill from there.
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I remember pinching myself in the bushes, mentally screaming for Luna to wake up. I had seen what your kind had done to that mare, and a part of me that I desperately wanted to shut up kept yelling that you had done something to Luna, that you probably were the ones that did this to her, that you were the reason I had found her body on a dumpster.
I cried and cried for my friend to come and tell me everything was alright, but all I received were fragments of memories of-of something so horrible and despicable that I wanted to curl up our deformed body and lay on the dirt until Luna's mother came back.
I tried distracting myself, I tried counting all the stars in the sky. Now that I think about it, the sky had never looked so ugly before. I knew Luna controlled the night sky, and everything she did she did with perfection, so why was the sky so ugly? What had you done to the ruler of the night? To my friend?
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That was a lonely night.
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Day had come rather quickly. I remember looking down at our shared body, most of the minor injuries had gone away and I could use the legs without feeling the broken bones graze each other with every step I took.
If I felt better, that meant Luna should too. I patiently waited for commands.
I never got them.
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When she didn't wake up in the third day, I panicked. Where was she? Where was my friend? What was I to do with what I had seen?
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CommandscommandscommandssendthemsendthemIamreadysendcommands.
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My jumbled brain tried to make up excuses as to why she wasn't there; maybe, while I was capable of feeding off nigthmares, that didn't mean she could eat them! It seemed plausible, I didn't know that much about possesion, and maybe, just maybe, I was the only one awake because I was the only one of us who could make food out of emotions.
I had discovered the problem. Now I needed to find normal pony food.
I ate the better grass I could find, I picked berries from some bushes, I ate some ants, I attacked a bunny and ate everything; guts, eyes, its brain. I would have had the decency to start a fire to cook the meat, but I feared that if I did, the smoke would attract what the mares had nightmares about; your kind. I didn't want to fight you with the body I was in. I knew Luna was pretty powerful, but if you were capable of doing that to her...
I didn't want to enter a fight I couldn't win.
(...)
Wipe that smirk off your face.
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Four days into Tartarus. Luna hadn't woken up yet. One part of me was rationalizing our situation, putting pieces together and reminding me everyday to look for pony food. The sooner Luna came back, the sooner I could get the full story instead of going into a trance everytime I received fragments of memories.
The other part of me was giving into the idea that maybe... that maybe she was gone.
I remember shaking my head at that thought, and finishing a small trap to catch another bunny. No need for pessimistic thoughts.
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LunaourbellyisfulltonightIfoundaholewithmanyrabbitsinsidewakeupsoon.
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The fifth and sixth day were oddly normal. Wake up, check our body for injuries, try to find Luna, go hunting. My part of the mind was kind of registering the building of a routine.
It was the seventh day that reality decided to hit me.
I had tried, and had as far succeeded, avoiding coming into direct contact with any ponies. Luna's memories told me they were all dangerous, and the ones with antlers moreso. But then, then...
You just had to send a whole squad, didn't you?
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LunapleasehelptheyhavebeenchasingusforhoursIdon'tthinkIcanmakeitpleasehelppleasepleasepleas-
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I was so scared.
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TheyarecorneringuswhatdoIdowhatdoIdohowdoyoufleepleasesendamemory!
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I killed them all. I attacked them with the fury of a wild beast.
I blew a hole through their heads with more power I thought I was capable of, I forced them to talk, to beg for their lives before digging my fingers into their throats. I thought about saving the mares, or the shivering cows, but they threatened to talk, they praised you, they didn't want to give in my 'rebellious act'.
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I'msorryI'msorrytheydidn'twanttobesavedI'msosorryLun—
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In the seventh night of my predicament, everything I knew about Luna and Equestria came crashing down in a violent fit of tears, blood and rage. The words the horned ponies—caribou, that was the name they gave me when I asked it—had finally registered in my mind. But something worse, something far more terrible than what I had seen in the mares' nigthmares, had made its way and cemented itself in my mind; little Luna wasn't coming back.
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NononononononononononononononoNONONONONONONONONONO!
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I remember digging my teeth into the corpses with as much force as I could, tears blurring my vision as blood marred the fur on my body. I remember looking down at the starburst pattern I had incidentally put on some parts of Luna's body when trying to fix her. I remember the smell of death and burning hair. I remember the metallic taste of blood on my tongue. I remember feeling the overwhelming emptiness in my mind for the first time. I remember the smell of roasted meat—that precious, delicious smell that invaded my nostrils as I ate like a feral animal, trying to dissipate the silly thoughts that plagued my mind.
Silly thoughts such as the idea of my only friend being dead.
Looking back on it, I ate really good that night.
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I spent several days going from childish denial to overwhelmed acceptance and back and forth, hunting whatever you sent after me with passion, trying to put my thoughts into other things. One time, I sent her a mental message, hoping that she was just mad with me, that maybe she woke up when I killed those caribou and was now giving me the silent treatment.
It was a sad sight to watch.
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Luna...I'msorry...pleasetalktome...
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I can't pinpoint exactly when I snapped. Or maybe I can, can I? I don't know, but I can give you good guesses, I mean, there was this time when I looked into the river after eating something—something that had been pretty sapient at some point, I think—and saw the raw pieces of meat stuck between my fangs, blood staining my face as my deranged eyes locked with the ones of my reflection, and there was this other time where I realized I was naked, and had walked all this time with nothing covering what used to be my friend's private parts.
But I am sure of something; I was already pretty off the deep end after that realization, I mean, nobody expected a crazed, semi-ethereal, raging mare barging into random shops, blowing everything up in a search for fitting clothes, right?
So, that limits our search for my snapping point. I can set it between discovering Luna's death, and the search for clothes.
(...)
It is a good puzzle, try it. I haven't solved it yet.
(...)
I know you're smart. You know much about everything, right? And you know how to use that knowledge, so that makes you quite the wise one, right? I mean, it would be pretty stupid to have the knowledge of how to force a powerful spirit to do as you wish by merely using words if you don't use it.
(!)
Well, maybe I am overestimating your intelligence. You did set off the chain of events that would lead to your own demise, after all...
(..!)
But what do you get if you never try? So, come on, I invite you to solve this puzzle.
Hurry up, though. I am hungry.
*