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Chapter 1: Empty and Forlorn2,512 words
Chapter 2: First Impressions Count!2,129 words
Chapter 3: Ranking the Pieces2,713 words
Chapter 4: Falling for the Foe1,671 words
Chapter 5: Soothing the Savage Beast2,713 words
Chapter 6: Giggling at the Ghosties2,935 words
Chapter 7: The World That Was Not2,619 words
Chapter 8: Bridging the Gaps1,848 words
Chapter 9: The Age of Wonders1,342 words
Chapter 10: Reuniting With an Old Friend1,786 words
Chapter 11: Mare and Rider1,251 words
Chapter 12: Twilight Sparkle1,011 words
Chapter 13: Recognition1,423 words
Chapter 14: Taste the Rainbow!2,707 words
Chapter 15: Reconciliations3,087 words
Chapter 16: An End to Nightmares?1,063 words

Chapter 16: An End to Nightmares?

Luna dreamed ...

It was a strange dream by her standards, for as soon as it began she realized that she could not control it.

She was drifting through space, floating toward the Moon. There was a strange dread in her, which had nothing to do with fear of her former imprisonment. She knew she was dreaming, she knew that when she woke up she would be back in her room in the Palace at Canterlot.

She saw the Moon’s familiar features grow in her vision. She saw that she was falling toward Tranquility, the great lava plain growing in her vision. In fact, she was falling towards the old landing site, the one she had so often haunted in her time alone.

But her emotion was one neither of sadness, nor of happiness because she now knew that Dusk Skyshine was once again in the world. It was of fear – but what could she fear, on the dream-Moon?

As she dropped she saw the old metal of the Descent Stage glinting in the last rays of the Sun. The long Lunar day was ending, the Lunar night beginning. Something she had seen over ten thousand times before …

The shadows were crawling.

Because they were the Nightshadows. But never had she seen them in such numbers.

She knew these dream-shadows could not hurt her, yet still she cringed from their unwholesomeness. Now that she was free of the Shadows within, she could for the first time fully grasp their loathsomeness, the sick abnormality that they represented in any environment of a sane world. She feared that if she fully opened her psychic senses, she would hear their foul whispers in her mind, insinuations of stark, alien cosmic evil.

She feared that if this happened, something still buried deep in her own soul might answer them.

She was coasting over the Lunar surface now, over the swarming Shadows. Had there truly been so many of them? Had she just never noticed? Or was something, some event, stirring them to far greater than normal activity.

Anger filled her at the sight of them defiling her Moon. For a thousand years she had been unable to prevent this desecration. For a thousand years she had been at their mercy, their helpless tool. She was still weak, but someday – someday soon – she would return in truth to this orb and cleanse it of their contamination, restore it for the Ponies that they might return to what they had won by their mettle.

But even with the anger there was still the fear.

She was gliding quite rapidly over the Lunar surface, not galloping or flying or even hurtling on some ballistic arc, but sliding smoothly along as if being pulled across an invisible surface. Below boiled the Shadows. She realized that they all seemed to be going in the opposite direction from her. Was she approaching some sort of origin point of these tenebrous horrors?

There was a hill ahead, the remnant of some ancient volcanic convulsion, perhaps in response to the colossal impact that had created the lava sea. She had seen this hill many times before, but never thought much of it. Now she saw that it seemed to be her destination.

The hill filled her field of view, until it seemed as though she might crash into it. With dream-logic she instead swooped into a crevice which must in reality have been far too small to contain her tangible form. There was a rushing sensation, as she hurtled down a series of cracks in the hill which must have been the result of aeons of thermal stress weathering, prying the rocks apart along the faults between the remnants of different volcanic eruptions.

Suddenly she emerged into a great cave, perhaps the remnant of some long-exhausted magma chamber. She must have been miles beneath the regolith now, in formations caused by the Moon’s responses to its titanic violation during the Late Heavy Bombardment Era. No Earthly vacuity would have remained open for so long at such depths, but conditions were less unforgiving under the Moon’s milder gravity.

It was of course utterly dark in there, but she could see with a gentle pulse of gravitons, something she could have done in the waking world as well.

She shuddered at what she saw.

The cave was full of Shadows. Writhing, squirming, oozing over one another with their eagerness to climb toward the surface. They were impelled both by their own unguessable lusts, and by the pressures of the ones coming from behind.

Coming from a sort of crack in the rock near the back of the cave.

She drifted toward that crack. She probed it with gravitons – and was shaken by what she sensed.

The gravitons, curled, twisted, transformed into other particles as they approached that void. Those which went within did not return.

This was not merely a crack in the rock.

It was a crack in the continuum.

And the Shadows were streaming out from it.

Into our Universe.

As she drifted toward the crack she felt a pressure, the force of the Shadows emerging from that flaw in spacetime. She felt them ooze around and through her, a horrid sensation like being bathed in earthworms without and within. She tried to fly, walk, or otherwise move away from them.

She could not stop her motion.

Then her terror became personal when saw that she was still drifting toward the crack in the continuum.

This is only a dream! she thought. Not even fully lucid. If it was then I could control it – couldn’t I?

The flaw in her assumptions suddenly exploded in her mind.

I’m assuming that someone – or something else – isn’t overriding my control.

With that she began to frantically struggle, to exert every intangible ability she had in a desperate attempt to wake up, or at least to pull away from that dreadful abyss in Creation toward which she was now ever faster and faster drifting.

To no avail. She was a chip in the foam of some awful compulsion. No, she thought, not again …

She screamed ...

And the dream ended.

She sat up, gasping in terror.

The dream was fading from her mind. Still exhausted, she lay her head down again, and went back to sleep.

***

When she woke twelve hours later, she did not even remember she had dreamed.

END

Author's Note:

My original concept for this dream was even nastier, but then I realized I was giving away too much. Heh-heh-heh.

To be continued, eventually, in my planned sequel All the Way Back, which will detail Luna's re-adaptation to a very different Equestria than the one she left a thousand years ago. This will fill in the (long) gap between "Nightmares Are Tragic" and "A Meeting By Moonlight."

I'm really grateful to everyone for all the encouragement I've received in writing this. You know who you are.

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