The Nightmare tore Celestia apart, and all Luna could do was watch. She tried to twist her head aside and avert her gaze, but cold chains held her tight against unyielding stone. Strength was no use. Her magic was beyond her.
Before her, wreaths of fire and shadow whirled around the shapes of two clashing alicorns meeting in a storm of lashing hooves and snapping teeth, the shadow gradually and irresistibly overpowering the fire, while magic erupted and thundered around them. The whole palace shook in the storm.
“Not this again,” whispered Luna. “This … this is not necessary, not useful, this … this never happened!”
A rasping scream came from Celestia as she flew helplessly into one wall on the other side of the room from Luna, shuddering as trails of black fire stitched across her wounded white hide. She trembled, tried to rise, and fell once more as dislodged rubble crashed down across her back. Celestia slumped, and the astral nothingness that was Nightmare Moon shook with wild laughter.
And then Tantibus replied directly, and its voice was Luna’s own, magnified and cold and muting all else as it rose from all around. “This could have happened. Would have happened, had you possessed the strength. You will bear this.”
“She had the Elements!”
“And you cared not. You strove for this. Watch!”
The sounds of the scene resumed, almost mercifully quiet compared to Tantibus. “- Pathetic creature,” Luna heard Nightmare Moon say, her voice high and cold. “You thought you could defeat me? Overshadow me once again? Withstand my darkness?”
Inch by agonising inch, Celestia rose, rubble and blood sloughing off her back and battered wings. Unbroken, unsurrendered. Gashes and burns covered her, and her magenta eyes were red and wet with tears, tears of pain and loss and love and despair. Her voice was a hollow whisper. “Luna - Luna, for love’s sake. Don’t make me -”
“Make you?” Nightmare Moon’s horn blazed blacker than a starless night, and fronds of dark lightning ripped into Celestia’s foreleg. Luna closed her eyes to the sight, but couldn’t close her ears to the crack of bone, her sister’s screams, to Nightmare Moon’s raving. “You merit nothing! You are nothing! Your sun will gutter and perish and you will die forgotten! That is what I’ll make you. As you would have made of me!”
“Ne … nev -”
Lightning cracked, and Celestia screamed past the point where her throat should have mercifully given out. Luna would have closed her eyes again, but the force of the dream pushed them open.
“You will bear this.” Tantibus again, deep and cold and endless as the ocean.
“No.” Luna struggled for a note of determination even as every part of her recoiled. “Nightmare Moon never -”
“Not Nightmare Moon. You. Nopony else’s Nightmare but yours.”
“I … even then, I didn’t seek to … I didn’t plan ahead to this!”
“Who exactly are you trying to fool?”
Luna hissed as her responses died in her throat. Before her, Nightmare Moon had helpfully stepped between her and Celestia’s stricken, rasping form.
Almost as soon as she realised that, however, the dream immediately shifted to give her a better view of events.
“No! I do not have to tolerate this. I do not have to suffer you!” Luna struggled within her bindings and screwed her eyes closed with all the strength she could muster. There had to be a way out of here, any way out ...
“Then unmake me and sleep peacefully forever after,” replied Tantibus. “I am of you, your making, and your magic, and will pass as unremarkably as a breath at your will. But you shall not will it. Do you enjoy what you see? Do you intend to repeat this?”
Luna opened her eyes, in time to see Nightmare Moon’s hoof descend upon Celestia’s eye. “No,” she hissed.
“Then you know I am working. And now, you will bear this.”
Princess Luna?
A new voice, a whisper that sounded directly in Luna’s ear. She glanced around for the source of it, seeing nothing but blurring stone and two alicorns turning gradually to mist.
Princess Luna?
Luna sighed with relief as reality’s cold claws got a hold in her. The dreamscape around her melted into a mess of shadows and motes of light, magic unravelling. Celestia and Nightmare Moon became vague shapes, then mere suggestions, and then nothing at all as Luna found herself falling out of sleep.
The last thing she saw was a pony carved from the night sky itself, stars suspended in the black depths of their form. Tantibus looked to her, with eyes unseen in the void that was its face, and said, “We shall resume upon your next rest, after your waking hours.”
Luna closed her eyes against it, and found herself in a cold sweat, a tangle of sheets, and the reality of her own bedroom. The shapes of it rose indistinct all around her; the curtains conspired with any sunlight to turn the whole place into a mire of shadows.
A Nightguard hovered nearby, his expression the very picture of wary confusion. His face was unknown to her. A newly anointed member, most like. “Princess Luna? Are you awake?”
“Awa … yes. We are awake.” Luna let reality slide back into focus, let each of her senses blearily register their loathing for the early day. On one wall, a clock’s hands hovered just before the eleventh hour.
“Are you well, princess? You were turning and mumbling, as if you were having a nightma … a night ...” The Nightguard’s face contorted in interesting ways before he lamely settled upon, “... a bad dream.”
“We are quite well, Sir … beg your pardon, I know not your name. And why have you woken us? It is not even noon.”
“Sir Stardust, Your Majesty. And it was your royal sister who sent me. She said a situation had arisen that needed your unique talents.”
“A situation? My talents?” Frowning, Luna extracted herself from her bed and set her hooves down. Long-studied propriety meant that she only wobbled a little, and she was able to suppress a yawn. “Did Celestia describe what said situation was?”
“A pony’s been hurt, Your Majesty.” Stardust kept pace alongside Luna at a steady trot as she ventured out into the day, and then sped to a full-blown canter as her pace quickened towards the throne room.
A half-hour later, Luna rapped her hoof twice upon a hospital room door. Scant seconds passed before it opened, revealing a unicorn stallion. Tall and gaunt and grey-coated, with dark circles under red-webbed eyes, he swept immediately and silently into a deep bow.
Luna had seen his type before. Too often before.
“Rise … Standing Stone, I presume?” she said, forcing gentleness of tone past the inner stormclouds. The stallion mutely nodded, and Luna turned to the two Nightguard in attendance. “Wait here.” They took up guarding positions on either side of the door, gazes sweeping down the long and sterile stretch of corridor, and bowed only briefly as Luna swept past them and into the room.
She nudged the door shut with her magic, and took stock of what awaited her in the room. It was a small, quiet place, chairs and quietly ticking hospital equipment jostling for floor space around the occupied bed. A younger, female version of Standing Stone lay there as if in sleep, lit by wan sunlight spilling in through a small window.
But it wasn’t any good sort of sleep that entailed twitching and constant little rolls from side to side in the bed. And when she leaned closer to the prone mare, she saw that her eyes were half-open, red and blistered around the edges, with sickly green motes crawling in the depths of her pupils.
A few moments passed, silent but for the ticking of the instruments, before Standing Stone spoke, his voice an emotional croak heavy with fatigue.
“My daughter.” He didn’t look at Luna. All his attention was for the mare on the bed. “Rosetta, Your Majesty. Should have been back at her studies in Baltimare by now. Been like this for a week instead. Farriers don’t know what’s wrong with her. Farriers never know what’s wrong.”
“Did they advise you to plea for aid from the court?” said Luna. No natural malady within a farrier’s ken afflicted Rosetta, that was certain. Then again, Celestia would have hardly pointed her in this case’s direction had that been the case.
“No, Your Majesty. I’ve been a viewer at the court before. During a Day Session. Made my … made my case there yesterday. In case Celestia might know something.”
And what was your first thought when you saw me now? growled some dark and beguiling voice in the back of Luna’s head. ‘Why wasn’t it Celestia, why not the good one?’ Whining chattel.
Pain almost instinctively rose in Luna at the voice, long-learned and self-induced, Tantibus’s cold rebuke all but following it like an echo. She quashed it with barely a tremble. “It was wise of you to do so. There are resources open to the princesses which other ponies lack.”
The magic of her position, the tantalising energies that would let her slip out of the waking world, beckoned. Magic began almost absently to wreath around her horn. “Some princesses more than others. Stand back. I shall see what can be done for Rosetta.”
Standing Stone obediently backed off, his eyes widening as Luna brought more of her power to bear. She would have normally taken flight for this sort of casting by force of habit. But this plain, white-washed little place was too small to accommodate her spreading her wings, and so Luna simply drew out the white thread of the dreamwalking magic from her horn, drawing it out until it passed smoothly through Rosetta's brow.
There was a susurration against her senses as the thread found Rosetta’s mind; whatever part of it had a hold in the dream-realm opened at her practised touch. Luna breathed out with satisfaction, and then let herself simply fall forwards along the thread.
A silent thunderclap muffled out all her senses, and as she fell into the white, her world turned to blackness and fleeting points of light, a confusion of colour and forms and impressions wheeling endlessly in the void around. A second of that whirling descent, maybe two, and then she felt solid ground greet her hooves.
Rosetta’s dream-realm greeted her on all sides, a circle of great stone pillars extending upwards from a stone platform to a shadowed and unseeable ceiling, lit vaguely from below by an ambient, sourceless blue light. Past the circle of pillars, the stone platform broke away into rubble protruding over endless, yawning, blackness. Wind howled distantly in the dark.
Sharp and irregular lines had been scored along the pillars, and Luna frowned as she flew closer to investigate them. Deep gouges had been scored into them, as if with some huge blade or a beast’s claws, and in the recesses of the marks, a cold green surface glistened. She prodded at one such surface with her hoof, and withdrew it with a startled hiss. The green surface was sharp and crystalline, leaving deep scratches in her hoof where she had made contact.
Sour wrongness emanated from the little crystals, an off-kilter note even in the realm of dreams. The cold of winter, the smell and taste of rot, and a sound like a persistent, all-surrounding, terrified whispering all hit Luna in that instant, and she reeled back where she stood.
“Dark magic?” whispered Luna.
Of a potent kind, purred the voice at the back of her mind. Worthy of investigation. Of pursuit.
Luna shook off the voice, blocking out its words. “Rosetta?” she called, glancing around the pillared platform for any sign of the pony mind inhabiting this dream-realm. “Rosetta, where are you? There’s nothing to fear now. Rosetta?”
And in the silence all around, a single hoarse whimper came from behind one of the pillars.
Luna teleported there in an instant, disappearing and reappearing with her back to the void and a pillar at her front. A heap lay crumpled at the pillar’s base, half-hidden in shadow, so withered and battered that Luna took a moment to recognise it as a pony at all. Her breath caught in her throat, and escaped slowly as a low and furious growl as she saw the damage that had been done.
Rosetta’s dream-self lay curled-up and foetal, her limbs trussed at the hooves in tight coils of green-glistening barbed wire. Bloodless rents ran along her grey hide there and further up in her torso, lengths of the same wire spooling out from her inside. The same little cold, uncanny, green-hued crystals shone at the tip of each barb, emanating palpable waves of dark magic. Luna swallowed her disgust and apprehension and leaned closer, to the terrified, pain-filled eyes looking up into her own, and saw a knot of the crystal-edged steel poking out against one eye’s membrane.
“Kch … kccht ...” Rosetta writhed within the wire binding, her mouth feebly opening and shutting, her tone the quietest of whimpers. “Hu … hurts. Hurts. It hurts.”
“Hold still. Be brave. I’ll see you free of this,” murmured Luna, dropping down beside Rosetta while her magic probed around the edges of the wire, searching for knots, weak points, places where it could be unravelled. A gentle start. Peeling it free, on the other hoof … scarcely deserved contemplation.
But for all that it wasn’t her area, that salvaging and healing was Celestia’s domain rather than Luna’s, it had to be done. There was only one dreamwalker left, and here she was.
Here, somepony else had been.
Of course it falls to us to pick up the pieces absent thanks, muttered a piece of Luna’s mind, as she worked and Rosetta rasped out scream after scream. Of course it falls to us to venture into the darkness with nopony else at our side and do a job that should have never fallen to us. Why should it be otherwise?
It took a moment for Luna to remember the source of that voice, and to quash it once again. No more distractions. Not now.
“Dark magic? You’re certain?”
An hour past noon found both sisters in Celestia’s high and lonely office at the top of the Lance, the palace’s tallest tower. Wan daylight poured in from an open terrace at one side, grey clouds shrouding the sun. Celestia herself stood behind her desk, an assembly of quills and papers that she’d held when Luna had entered now lying scattered. Her gold regalia hung on a nearby stand, and she seemed oddly naked without it.
“No mistaking it,” Luna replied grimly, wearied after the task. Her hoof was unmarred, but she still felt a cold tingle where she’d touched the crystalline residue, and she ground it against the carpeted floor. Dreams had no right to that sort of hold. “I recognise its nature, its scent, the marks it left. Wounds left within the fabric of the dream realm, and dark chains upon the mare, crafted and calculated.”
“What of the mare herself? Rosetta?”
“Safe. Alive. Recovering in hospital with her father by her side. But … there shall be scars. And they will persist.” As she spoke, Luna ground her hoof ever harder into the floor, felt the heat of pain rise from it, fed it to fury’s engine. Let it work for her. “And merely dark magic could not have done the deed.”
“I’d guessed such.” It usually took a practised eye to see when Celestia was agitated, but when she paced from behind her desk to her terrace, jaw grimly set and cold gaze set somewhere past the clouds, Luna guessed a blind idiot could have picked up on it. “We are dealing with a dreamwalker, then. Another dreamwalker. But we sealed away that particular branch of knowledge, did we not? We took especial pains there.”
“Not sealed as firmly as we’d hoped, it appears,” Luna replied. Inside, her thoughts were in turmoil. How? was the question, and it begged an answer. “The most powerful practitioners and sages on the matter passed a long time ago - or somewhat recently, but they have passed, all the same. The teachings have been sealed away by you, under every lock and seal known to Equestria. And the few ponies that are born with an aptitude for it in these times certainly never move beyond their own dreams, let alone wreak such havoc. There are no natural predators of the dreaming realms that could prey in such a manner - at least, not with dark magic.”
“We deal with something new then,” murmured Celestia.
“Or something old,” Luna replied. “Which bodes poorer than the other, I couldn’t say.”
Celestia looked out from her office’s terrace towards the gray sky over Canterlot, shrouded under clouds pockmarked with working pegasi teams and small airships. A cleansing rain in production, if Luna was any judge. Below them, the usual bustle and clatter of ponies in the city conjuring equal amounts of order and chaos. Roads and railway tracks spiralled out from the city’s base and down the mountainside, webbing out over green and rolling fields all the way to the horizon. Celestia looked to that horizon, her gaze fathomless, and even Luna couldn’t guess at what she truly saw.
But she could at least venture a guess as to her sister’s thoughts and sooth them accordingly. Luna kept speaking. “Whatever it is, I intend to pursue it and vanquish it if I may. This is a dreamwalker’s hunt. I’d like to see any that could outmatch me in that arena.”
Relief briefly found a home in Celestia’s expression. “I’m glad of it. I wouldn’t have wished to add to your existing burdens and duties -”
“Add? Guarding our ponies from terrors is among my duties already, sister dearest. And who else can pursue this, besides? Dreamwalking’s never been an area in which you’ve excelled.”
“To put it mildly. It’s an unreasonably complicated discipline.” Celestia grimaced. “Shall Night Court be suspended then, so you may devote your energies to this?”
“No. Not yet. I know not how cunning this predator is, but whatever the case, let’s not give them any sign that we’re on their tails. I’ll work through the day, starting now, and hold Court as usual during the night. No duty need be neglected. And … well, I imagine missing one session of beauty sleep shan’t dent me much.”
“Scarcely little to lose there, I quite agree,” said Celestia with a wry grin. The grin turned to concern as Luna turned to depart. “This is a strange foe you’re fighting alone, and going unrested seems far from ideal. Be cautious. And please don’t get yourself hurt.”
Luna injected cheer into her tone as she made for the door. “Hurt? Don’t be silly, Tia. We’re invincible.”
The last she heard from Celestia before leaving her office was a murmured, “We, yes,” before the door closed at her back. It would be a long trot back down the stairs, Lune thought, as lockstep Nightguard shadowed her. Long enough to give her time to think. To plan.
She could surely find a lead out there.
“Let us find a peaceful alcove that nopony else presently needs,” she said to the Nightguard. “I have some roaming to do. I imagine some ponies will still be dreaming at this hour.”