Patches dreamed.
In her dream she climbed a hill, threading her way through sandy mulch and around tree trunks. At the top of the hill was an open place, quite wide given the size of the hill and the trees came to the edge of this space in a tight ring but would not intrude on it.
She found Flotsam standing in the sunlight. He had a shovel with him. He was digging, but as she watched, Patches realized something was wrong. The blade struck earth again and again, jolting the unicorn each time. Where he hit there was a glassy shine that flashed, like a comet shooting past a mirror. The shovel would ricochet or just stop, but what it would not do was break ground. Grains of sand resisted like iron and the same unnatural flash flared briefly as Flotsam went on trying.
Patches wanted the shovel. Flotsam didn’t stop, or look at her, or speak. When the filly tried there was nothing, and even the memory of speech seemed distant and fuzzy. When she tried to take it, Flotsam shuffled away. When she pushed her slight weight against him he resisted with the minimum of force and all the while would not acknowledge her.
Patches got mad, but also playful. She wanted the shovel. She’d take it, Flotsam willing or no.
She circled around once. To her mind’s eye he shrunk, became less a giant and she threw herself at him. It was a grown, slim, long-limbed pony that grappled with Flotsam. As they tangled hooves the shovel fell aside.
Patches tangled, she flipped, she grabbed and spun and pushed. Flotsam was slow. Even as he turned to face her newest attack she was pressing another. Flotsam went down in silent distress. Patches was grinning as she pinned him. Easing a hoof back the nape of his neck, she forced his head forward enough to sheath the unicorn’s horn in a melon. Watery, pinkish juices spilled down his face. He struggled limply under her, but whatever little bit of fight had been in him was gone now entirely.
Patches regarded Flotsam, folded up on his limbs as he was beneath her. She was pleased. Why had she..?
Oh, yes.
She stepped off Flotsam and turning away, took up the shovel from where it had fallen, forgotten. When she turned back – filly sized once more, shovel near enough twice her height – he wasn’t there. Gone. Not escaped, not flying or running or invisible. Simply…not.
So Flotsam was gone. The freshly martyred horn-sheathing melon had stayed. That, and the signs of their struggle. The scuffed hoofprints, where Flotsam…had…fallen?
Patches realized that for all their wrestling, Flotsam had made not a single impression on the ground. A pony who could read trail-sign would have thought a lone, maddened mare had had some kind of crazed dancing fit here. Had little magic lights flared under his hooves with each step while she wrestled? Lit up under his ribs as she toppled the unicorn and held him down?
Oh, and the red X splayed across the ground was new. Stretching she could not reach from end to end of it. Gripping the handle firmly, Patches dug.
In no time at all she had a large, metal studded chest on the ground before her. Literally no time. One instant she had broken open the earth with her first swing of the shovel (no trouble there at all, thank you very much) and the next, well, this here was the next. Something had gone blip and time had reorganized.
Patches had seen chests like this before. She’d been very small. Back then she was usually looked away somewhere snug and quiet and only allowed after the all the shouting and fighting had died down and somepony, sometimes bleeding, sometimes not – usually grinning – remembered to let her out just in time to shout taunts and make baffling, arcane gestures at the bruised and battered strangers she’d never met before as they and their ship – riding considerably higher in the water – limped away into the horizon.
She glowed rosy with memory. She hadn’t really understood a lot of what it meant at the time, but it’d always felt like a great fun adventure and shared bonding experience.
The lock on the chest was old, rusted, and more than thick. It fell away, sheared open with one clean strike from the business edge of the shovel. Patches let both fall. The domed lid sprung back of its own accord and though the chest was on flat ground treasure surged out of it, perhaps for the look of the thing.
Rubies, emeralds. Jewellery, gold, money, power. It was a heady song of colour and light that sang under the sun. Patches ran her hooves through it. It was heavy.
No, it was pulling. And what it did was pull together. The mound was already tall as she was and growing. Patches leapt back and watched it grow.
Now the gems and coins were all together they started to take on shape. There was a definite suggestion of legs forming. Two pink sapphires floated up into the approximation of a face. A shiny horn of many parts rose up. Wings of gold and gem flared open, blinding Patches. She stepped backwards hurriedly, rubbing hastily at her eyes to clear them.
Curthe! Curthed Treathure!
Unsteadily the golem tested its step, entirely fixated on its own progress, its body still polishing – so to speak – and refining its shape until it was as perfect a pony as could, at least in silhouette. It walked with poise equal to its lithe, shapely beauty.
All the better to run her down with, Patches fretted.
The treasure golem turned its two lovely pink sapphires on the filly. Eventually Patches bumped her bottom into a tree.* Gold coins rattled and flowed, and to her horror Patches realized it was working its mouth. Open and close, open and close.
All the better to eat her with, Patches feared.
The filly gritted her teeth. She bared them in a grimace. She didn’t think about where the sword came from, only that she hadn’t one, and now she had one and it was a marked improvement on life. She recognized the mechanism that kept it to her hoof, the springs and pivots very much the same as what Captain Nauticaa used; allowing for earth ponies to wield not from their mouths, but from their hooves.
The golem came on, gnashing its mouth still. Patches caught a glimpse inside it, a press of gems and gold pieces all sliding over one another.
She raised her guard, shifting slightly on her hooves.
The resplendent spectre had the body, the poise, even the expression of a very pretty and now confused pony. It stalled at the sight of the sword. Patches did not.
She rushed the treasure golem and whacked at it gracelessly. The jolt of impact shot through the blade and up into Patches. The mechanism rattled and pinched her hoof. She hit it a few more times to little effect. The golem was metal and stone from end to end.
The shining armoured thing looked hurt and shied away. Not hurt hurt, but…upset. Distressed.
Patches was feeling pretty distressed too. She glanced about. How did a pony fight something like this? She needed Flotsam’s magic, or the Captain’s impeccable bladework, hit some kind of vital point maybe, but if there were any Patches’ saw no hint of them on the golem. It had simply spilled out of the treasure chest and assembled itself from every last gem, jewel, ornament and bit.
Patches glanced about hurriedly, trying to back away while still holding some semblance of a guarded position. Wait, the shine there…it hadn’t used every piece?
There, sitting in the lee of the chest, a mirror-smooth, silver chalice. Every other piece was golem, but not this one? And it was glowing, a glow obscured by the sunshine, but glowing nonetheless with a light that could only be called could silvery, snowy purity.
The golem’s wings flared open. It raised its hooves in a threatening manner.
Dropping the damaged, pinchy, otherwise-very-nice-but-quite-useless-in-this-context sword Patches made ready to dash for it.
Running fast as she could and then some because of fear she planted her front hooves on the last step, swung her back legs with all the momentum she could carry and booted the silvery chalice so hard it flew up, and up, and still up, ricocheting off a tree** and disappearing into the undergrowth.
The golem, which had been nearly atop Patches, shook apart violently. Gems and gold poured down and buried the filly.
Patches awoke with muffled screaming jolt – her hollowed out place had proven too much and the sand castle had collapsed on her. It wasn’t hard to pull herself from the heap, and she simply nestled herself in on top collapse-soft sand to drift away again.
She didn’t notice (but we can, by the power of narrative) that the lovely red cockle near to her had crumbled into many little pieces. In the morning she would assume she had stepped on it, and feel bad for a moment without really knowing why before forgetting all about it.
Far away, two alicorns got their bearings and pulled themselves to shaky hooves.
“Your dream just tried to chop my head off,” Mi Amore Cadenza observed calmly. Her brief stint asleep had only awakened her body to how utterly, totally, haven’t-stopped-to-rest-for-days-on-end exhausted she was. Much too tired for shock or outrage. “Does that happen a lot?”
Luna had the scowl of an authority figure very recently kicked up the bottom. She walked stiffly. “Not it does not. And that was not my dream. Ponies rejoice to receive my visitations.”
She propped up the smaller alicorn on her shoulder and gently urged her towards bed.
“I couldn’t speak,” pondered Cadence. “There was no sound at all.”
“Some ponies do not dream with sound. This filly is apparently one of them. For others it is colour. Normally these things are no impedance to me, but, this is hardly my normal method.”
Cadence murmured agreement. “It’s new magic. We have to…” she yawned, “figure it out as we go.”
There was a couch just across the room. She’d get Cadence there, push her up onto it if needs be and let the poor, desperate pony sleep – properly sleep. Luna hoped to get her there before she realized what the plan was.
Cadence’s hooves scraped and slid across the crystalline floors. “I owe you so much thanks,” she murmured. “You helped me devise magic. New magic. And we found him with it. We found Shining Armor.”
“Indeed we have done.” Luna didn’t point out that what they’d actually found was a lot less than that. But it was a start. And while she doubted she was as entirely drained as Cadence, carrying an alicorn’s presence around the world and squeezing them both safely into a filly’s mind had been no mean feat. “Now put your head down.”
The good news – slight as it was – seemed to placate Cadence and she did. “I hope he’s having a good night,” she whispered sleepily.
“I am sure that he is. Now sleep,” Luna insisted, putting magic into the command.
Luna walked away, quickly losing herself to thought. Carrying a pony into another’s dream wasn’t not something Luna enjoyed doing. She alone was the warder of dreams, another pony would not know the risks and the nuances.
It worried her that neither of them had manifested fully in the dream. They’d become props as it were to the filly’s narrative, as her mind took the foreign bodies and squished them into roles that, for her, made sense. Other limitations had applied. The lack of sound, for instance, made it that much harder to communicate. Cadence need not know how fortunate she had been to manifest as something so indestructible as metal and mineral.
Luna, instead being the cup that held Cadence had had no such defences. She walked stiffly to her own chambers, granted to her indefinitely in the Crystal Empire’s palace.
There were no guards about. Luna took the opportunity to rub her tender behind in privacy. “Whoever she is, that filly can kick.”