Time was frozen. Snowflakes hanging in the air like droplets of paint across the cloudy night sky.
Which is not how it usually works. I remember exactly how it happened, in great detail, and what I was seeing wasn’t the cracking prestressed concrete, nor the tallest structure in the entire country tipping over and falling down, but a photograph of same. A stereoscopic picture of destruction that is just about to occur, and somehow isn’t happening.
Wait. Stereoscopic. I can’t see stereoscopic. By all rights I should be unable to even imagine anything stereoscopic. The golden eye shows me whatever it pleases ever since it “woke up,” but it’s never, ever a stereo pair to my normal eye. It’s been doodling something like a cross between H.R. Giger and Hieronymus Bosch back then. In Equestria, it’s pretending to be Van Gogh, sometimes slipping into subtle fits of Edvard Munch. Which actually turned out to be much more difficult to ignore than the usual imagery of sexualized disgust and horror, but I’ve been managing so far. And right now it’s showing me a proper stereo pair, which can’t be happening. Not even in a dream. I have never had two good eyes, and my MRI shows, that what I have that passes for optic nerve on this eye could never sustain vision. I’m not even supposed to be getting the hallucinations I am getting, but there you have it.
Ah. Right. This is not the usual madness, this is just Equestria.
“Your highness?” I called out, looking around. That’s where Rika appeared before she sliced the tower apart, and in the ankle-deep snow covering the roof, instead of her bootprints, what I saw were the unmistakable traces of four hooves.
Princess Luna faded into view, blinking her big eyes at me. Pretty. Say whatever you want about ponies, they can be pretty as all get out, especially in contrast to here. And her dark navy blue is a perfect contrast to the snow.
I curtsied. Which looks silly when I do it, since I haven’t done it for decades. Not that I ever had much of an opportunity to practice it. “Pardon me if this is not appropriate protocol, but King Edward was never known for visiting the dreams of his subjects,” I said.
“How didst thou know?” Luna said, studying me with apparent interest, but no signs of surprise.
“This thing,” I said, tapping the cheekbone next to the golden eye. “It’s normally nowhere as cooperative, which can only mean I’m dreaming, or that it finally drove me insane. I don’t feel any more insane than usual, which implies I am dreaming. Since being aware that I’m dreaming is pretty much unheard of for me, supposing a visit from the Mistress of the Night becomes an educated guess.”
“There are at least three of you here,” Luna chuckled. “Thou still thinkest thyself sane?”
“Time travel,” I said, shrugging. “This was a very important event. I really did watch it four times. There should be three more of me elsewhere in the city, but I guess they aren’t visible from here…”
“Tis not just a nightmare of frozen time, then?” Luna asked, gracefully walking over to stand next to me by the balustrade.
“More of a memory,” I replied. I neglected to mention what sort of things the golden eye saw, because they were both different for every time I went through this set of events, and qualified as nightmares. “The pivotal moment of my story, the eucatastophe. In a decade, this will be the place I call home.”
“We find that thine companion is not asleep. Why is that?” Luna inquired.
“Rika can’t sleep,” I explained. “At all. Something about how if she’s ever actually asleep, she will never wake up. Anyway…” I added, smiling. “I’m afraid that quietly observing my dream is not really an option now.”
Or ever, if the eye is always going to freeze-frame the proceedings every time Luna comes in to watch, which seems likely. She frowned a bit, as if I accused her of saying something mildly rude, and she didn’t have a good rebuttal. “But I will be happy to tell you anything you wish to know,” I continued. “Judging by Twilight Sparkle, visitors from another world force you to reevaluate many things you thought you knew about yours.”
“Thou’rt not as much of a surprise as thou…” Luna said, shook her head, as if to clear it, and corrected herself, “…you. Not as much of a surprise as you think. We know of many worlds beside our own. Including one where humans live. We have also heard reports of your tales. Succinct as they had to be, they were most descriptive.”
“Oh, thank heavens,” I grinned. And thank heavens she stopped speaking in their mutated Middle English, I don’t know if I would be able to stand it for long. “I almost turned the welcome party into a press conference. Repeating everything yet another time would be kind of difficult.”
“Worry not,” the princess smiled back at me in a polite, official manner. “A visit of explorers to our world may be unexpected, but is not something we could not conceive of. All who come in peace are welcome in Equestria, how they arrive matters not. My sister has explored many of these worlds with Star Swirl the Bearded, our magical counsel of many years ago. They did this for years, in secret. Equestria has gained much from that exploration. None of our subjects have ever known where coffee beans originated, but many cannot imagine life without them.”
“Really?…” I wonder, if that’s a part of mainline that I simply missed, or something local. A pony Stargate program could explain a lot about this story.
“Indeed so, human. It must be thrilling…” Luna said, sending a wistful glance along the horizon. Your typical cityscape on the New Year’s Night – a seemingly endless sea of lights under an overcast sky. At least, that year it was a snowy one. Just ten years back, it was a drizzle.
Wait. That needs to be much, much more specific before I confirm or deny anything of the sort. “…What?”
“To boldly go where none have gone before,” Luna explained, glancing back at me curiously.
“Pardon me for being literal…” I said. “The Library doesn’t really permit access to places where none have gone before. Everything suggests it’s not even possible. Wherever one might get by going through it has been imagined by someone. At least technically, they were there first.”
Luna’s expression shifted from merely curious to slightly surprised. “Truly it cannot be that you don’t find any adventure in this.”
I shook my head. I need to settle this, this is important. “Just seeing another world a wondrous experience, but it is no different from reading a book, really. Just going there is not yet an adventure. Adventure is something that might happen if you do.”
“What sort of adventure would you seek, then?” Luna inquired, leaning closer to me. She’s the first pony so far I’m exactly eye to eye with, so it’s the first time a motion like that actually feels natural.
“Well…” I muttered, looking around. Yeah, why not. Really, why the hell not. Let’s see how she reacts. “Let’s take this tower, for example,” I said, pointing at the offending structure, still frozen in time, exactly five degrees off vertical. “The fall of this tower kills twenty three people. It seriously injures a further hundred and ten. Some of them… I would hesitate to call them friends, but I liked them.”
“Suspiciously precise,” Luna said, trying to keep her expression neutral, even though her twitching ears betrayed that she was not as impassive as she would have me think.
“I make a point of keeping track of everything I break,” I replied calmly. “That’s as low as I could get the count to go.”
This gave Luna the expected pause. “I have seen ponies who thought they were their own nightmare, but you appear to take this to the next level, human,” she said, glancing along the mostly empty street.
“I tried and tried, and destroying the tower was the final missing piece. It’s quite difficult to arrange a revolution in an entrenched police state,” I said, passing my hand along the balustrade and rolling up a snowball. Funny, I haven’t noticed I’m actually wearing the same coat I wore that night before I did this. “Took me three hundred and eighty one individual jumps. I actually lost count of the times I met myself.”
I also lost count of the times I ended up crying in my own arms, but I’m not going to tell her that. Crying in your own arms is far less comforting than it sounds, because you get to experience it twice.
“To what end?” Luna pressed, ignoring the snowball. Well, it’s not like I would toss it at her anyway. I’m not sure that would even work.
“To destroy lies and make way for the truth,” I said, stretching my hand across the balustrade and releasing the snowball. It remained motionless in the air. I poked it, and it moved again, but froze the moment I pulled my finger away. “It makes more sense in context, I suppose… But that’s not the point,” I added, looking back at the pretty pony princess. “The point is, if there is an adventure anywhere… It’s in making the universe better. Where it happens isn’t quite as important. The ultimate futility of the effort on the scale of the universe matters even less.”
“Did this actually make the universe better?” Luna almost whispered back. “Destroying… a marvel of architecture? Getting ponies …humans killed? This was an adventure to you?!”
“I’m not claiming omniscient morality license. I’m not claiming any morality at all, actually,” I replied. I’m not exactly proud of it. But I won’t be ashamed of it, and you can’t make me. “I wanted to create a world for myself to live in, one with dignity and justice in it. One where miracles would be possible. So I found hundreds of people who also wanted this and used them,” I said, pointing my finger down at the street. Primarily, at the small group of superheroes assaulting the police on the snow-covered lawn next to the tower. “Manipulated them to find each other. That was my adventure. The adventure of my life,” I exclaimed. Calm down, dammit. Shouting at a princess is not something you do even if she deserves it. “I don’t think I could handle another one anytime soon, to be honest… Think whatever you will, your highness, I refuse to justify myself to you. It is my home world, my dream, my memory and my nightmare. They don’t judge the victors around here.”
“So…” Luna said, after spending a tense minute staring down at the heroes. It’s pretty far, you need binoculars to see much of anything interesting. I wonder just how much she actually sees. Might be a lot, since this has to be a reflection of my memory… “…how did it end?”
“There was singing in the streets. The kind they call ‘the sound of empires toppling,’” I said. I was the one who brought the amplifiers, retroactively, but I certainly did not tell anyone to sing. It just happened. “And a long, slow process of rebuilding, that was a few hundred years overdue.”
“Why are you telling me all this?” Luna stared at me, an obvious expression of compassion on her face. The last thing I expected. “Even in court, none may be compelled to incriminate themselves. Surely you understand how …questionable this appears.”
All I have for you is a perfectly honest answer. “Because that was what you wanted to know.” It might be an incomplete answer, but it’s certainly not a lie.
Luna pulled back, opening her eyes wide. “But… I would not demand of anypony to bare their soul.”
“I’m actually surprised that you are so defensive about it,” I ribbed. “Everything I knew about ponies seems to suggest you do not value the sanctity of mind quite as high as most human cultures do. So ready to trust…” Sometimes, I’m actually glad to have an eye that always has a second opinion. It has consistently been a hindrance, but it also appears to render me partially resistant to psychoactive effects of just about anything. Like news. And certain superpowers. And including every antidepressant known to man and general anesthetics, which occasionally makes life extremely unpleasant. Looks like the power of dream walking also counts, who knew.
“Well, you’re wrong if you believe this,” Luna flared her wings and stomped her hoof, sending up a cloud of snow, which remained hanging in the air. “I am the protector of dreams, not an… omnipresent voyeur you imagine!”
“I don’t have to imagine anything, your highness,” I said, shrugging. “You could have summoned me. You could have sent an agent to talk to me. You could have waited for Twilight’s detailed report. Instead, you came to observe my dream. You have not demanded it, but that is clearly what you wanted to know. And I see no reason not to oblige you.”
“I wish you would rather not,” Luna huffed, turning away from me. “I… am sorry if you took it that way, but this was not my intention.”
“Look at it this way,” I said, slowly kicking apart the snow so that I could walk around to face her. “When you break the constraints of time, ethics gets so convoluted, that it’s beyond my ability to determine whether my actions were ethical. So I choose not to. In my eyes, this is just fact. I am curious what color will you paint it, once you give it some thought.” There. Look into my eye, princess. No, the working one. “And when you do, I will know something just as important about you.”
“If you think so, human,” Luna slumped, finally giving up.
I sighed. This is getting annoying. “I do have a name, your highness.”
Luna blushed slightly. A blush on a pony’s coat looks exceedingly weird up close, the actual hairs appear to change color. “It sounds… so confusing, when you clearly are… not a pony. I am still not entirely used to the modern accents.”
“You can use my middle name, then,” I said, raising a finger. “Clarissa. I haven’t mentioned it to anypony. And I won’t… so it can be our secret.”
“Clarissa…” Luna spoke, as if trying to taste an unfamiliar word. “Middle name? So there’s a third part to it?”
“I’ll leave it for some other night,” I grinned. “What would I be if there were no silly little mysteries left to me?” Just another useless footnote nobody ever reads, probably.
Luna looked straight at me with a serious face. “Somepony whose waking worries are not entirely unlike the ones that trouble the dreams of my sister,” she told me.
Wow. “Thank you for the vote of confidence, your highness.”
“Luna. Call me Luna.”