//------------------------------//
// Chapter 3 
// Story: Stories of a Shade 
// by ConfettiColored 
//------------------------------//

Dreams. Oh, how I love them. Those little slices of your subconscious where you can do whatever you want, provided you have practiced lucid dreaming like me. But last night was different. My dream started how I would begin any other, me being surrounded by ponies, but not trying to attack me, taking joy in my presence. Like I was just another one of them, with my own friends, but after a while I started to notice something was wrong. There was one pony not having fun with the others, he was just standing there, looking away from us all. I went to talk to him, but when he turned around to look at me, all the ponies disappeared, the landscape changed to a burning wasteland, the sky turned black and orange, and then he spoke to me.
"You will help me in making this a reality."
That's when I woke up, sweating like mad and panting heavily. I was no stranger to this, I did have slip-ups when practicing lucid dreaming the first time, but I hadn't messed up like that in a while. I looked at the L.E.D clock and groaned, it was six in the morning. Whenever I wake up in the middle of the night, I don't even bother trying to go back to sleep, because once I'm up, I'm up for good. Still unnerved by the nightmare I experienced, I went to get some orange juice and a bowl of cereal at the portable mini-fridge(that we certainly didn't steal) over by the extinguished campfire, only to find my brother already there, getting a glass of water.
"Hey. What are you doing up so early?" He asked me.
"I could ask you the same thing, but for the record I had a bad dream," I replied.
"I got up to think about what we do if someone finds out that we're not ponies. So you're not up early because this new job has made you more responsible." He joked. "So, what was your nightmare about? You can normally control that stuff,"
So I told him everything that happened in the dream, to which he assumed I was just so stressed out about this new job I lost my dream control, brushing aside the idea that a demon had contacted me. He claimed that the idea that the I was contacted was to far-fetched, as if anyone wanted to conquer Equestria they'd probably wait a while due to the recent defeat of Tirek. I gotta admit that's very true, but I was still wary about the whole thing.
Eventually, the alarm clock in Artimesis's tent went off, with her waking up, eating a quick breakfast, and heading off to work, with us guys following suite soon after."