The child was one of nearly thirty others scattered about. Like her, they were oblivious to the odd symphony of fear and anticipation that never failed to creep its way up the back of those confronting the unknown.
Few dream walkers still believed there were “lines” between planes of existence. Fewer ever mustered the courage to seek them out, or even peer into them. Fewer still, dared to make an attempt at traversing them.
And no one to date, had survived such an endeavor.
Planer travel, an idea supported by the Nexus during the early ages of its re-founding and supposedly backed by sources recovered from those who first abandoned America's largest dream scape sometime in the eighteenth century, colloquially called the progenitors.
Once separated from the Earthly plane, it is said that a dream walker will have access to enough raw aether to re-create the world ten-times over and, due to the immeasurable distance between soul and body, when their corporal form perished, their astral one would not follow.
Countless hours and an untold mass of resources were poured into the first "transcendence" project; dream walkers cut swaths across the Nexus, exploiting every mote of progenitor knowledge they could obtain. When the time came for the first attempt, disaster struck.
Golem-like mounds of flesh, called the "pale ones" by their victims, erupted from the first test gates, slaughtering everything in their path indiscriminately. They encircled the fledgling masters of the dream scape, almost rendering it inhospitable to all life.
With their borders shrinking by the day, the many organizations that ruled the Nexus ceded their authority to a "council of eight" in a final act of desperation. With a combined effort ,they were able to beat the pale ones back long enough to erect walls around their remaining territory. The survivors of "The Great Halt" were allowed time to lick their wounds and rebuild.
Under a new central government, the Nexus' dream walkers were able to return to relative normalcy; though travel outside of the wall became severely limited and all attempts at another transcendence project were punished under pain of banishment.
Even still, the allure of immortality simply proves too great for some ignore.
They appeared in Appaloosa without warning.
Pale, bloodless creatures without heads or fur came from a rift in the air at about ground level during a magic show near an orphanage. Twelve foals and three adults were snatched up faster than any orderly retaliation effort could be formed and brought into the rift which closed almost immediately.
Court mages dispatched to the scene of the foal-napping were able to identify trace amounts of magical residue, yet no sign of any known race, unicorn, shamanistic or runic could be detected in it.
Days after the event, a Manehatten cemetery was violated, corpses removed from their graves with the unicorns among them missing horns. Thought to be the work of simple grave-robbers at first, when word got to Canterlot that traces of the same enigmatic spell used in Appleloosa were present, the royal sisters were quick to put a cap on the story to avoid inciting mass hysteria, releasing information on a need-to-know basis.
Yet there was nothing keeping their minds at ease.
Somewhere, there was an unknown enemy capable of slipping in and out of their lands to do harm to
their ponies without a semblance of forewarning.
