Book 1 - The Behemoth came to Canterlot

by Equimorto

Kingdom

A dream is partway the result of memory, and memory of a dream itself can persist. Beyond that, something else might continue to exist. Something deep within the mind of the dreamer, some subconscious knowledge they are not quite aware of that may, on occasions rare, guarantee consistency between dreams, and in fact make it possible to return to and continue one.

What she was doing was in a lot of ways related to all those things, and in others yet far removed from them and far weirded. For once, her dreamer, if it could be called that, was not a pony, nor a creature at all. At least, she hoped it was not a creature. It was rather a place. A space within the dream world, a manifestation of a physical location reflected in the realm dreams existed in. It itself within the dream was dreaming at that moment, made to by her own efforts, and remembering what it had seen just a few days before.

Indeed it was not something she would have ever allowed Rainbow Dash to enter, something the pegasus would have had no hopes of navigating. The Everfree Forest's dream self, at its most frenzied state, in its most twisted regions, warped yet again by the nature of the dream within a dream containing its memory made manifest.

If physics had been unnaturally contorted by the place as it had existed in the dream world prior, they downright broke down there. Luna's own form in it existed fragmented and separated, parts of her moving in different spaces and directions when she went one way, her consciousness itself placed in multiple places at once. It was not something she could not stand up to though.

The creatures there, to which she chose to remain invisible, were at their most deformed. The deepest, blackest nightmares she'd ever seen, things that might have driven ponies insane if they'd escaped. But they'd never left the innermost reaches of the forest, she knew that much, as only its warped and twisted conditions had been able to sustain their existence without a host to drain like a parasite.

Even past the added layer of distortion the additional dream created, Luna could clearly see the impressive degree to which reality had been twisted as she neared the centre of the Everfree. Where before its shape had been merely convoluted, everything there was starting to twist in on itself and converge towards one single point. Like a black hole warping space around its mass, the fabric of the dream itself curved to trap those who moved closer, pushing them deeper and deeper towards the core of it all until every direction one chose to move was always forward, no matter what.

What had seemed like merely another stretch of trees from the edge of the forest, and merely another curve in the convoluted mess of twisting space from further within, revealed itself as a whole space hidden from the outside, a fold in the universe where everything collapsed around a single point, a single core high in the sky and yet surrounded by land on all side, far and yet closer with every step taken to get further away, an inescapable trap of crumbling reality all gravitating around a singular entity or thing at its centre.

Luna felt the outer dream's emotion at the memory, tinting the dream within a dream within which she walked, and that emotion was fear. And she stood and looked onto the swirling mass of blackness and red that had warped the Everfree Forest so, greater than it whole as she stood in front of it above the shrunken world below and yet invisible from within it, and she understood how truly and completely it had twisted its space in ways even she hadn't understood.

And the dream awoke and screamed, and she awoke within it.

Comments

[Venerable Ro]

The Hiss? Sounds like the Hiss...