Within

She wasn’t sure she was awake.

She could feel her eyelids parting, but the world was so fuzzy and dark in front of her that she could hardly tell a difference. Her sense of balance was muddled, and her body refused to move when commanded to. Her hearing was muffled, almost silent, and the only constant sound was that of her own soft breathing as air whistled through her nostrils.

In such a state, she normally just closed her eyes and allowed her tired brain to shut down again so she could continue sleeping. But this time her brain fought back, refusing to be coaxed back into unconsciousness. A tangible lick of fear kept it going despite all her mental efforts to go back to sleep, and then she began to realize that she was not where she thought she was.

The surface she lay upon was not the soft, warm bed she called home, but a cold, hard slab of rough stone and dust that clung to her coat as she rolled off of her side. Pebbles fell free from her body as she shook off her lingering slumber, and a low, gurgling growl from her belly pierced through her half-dead ears with its complaints for a fresh meal and her customary morning pot of hazelnut coffee.

The longing desire of breakfast was the spark that set her senses alight, suddenly recalling with exquisite agony how she had come to be imprisoned inside the abandoned gem mines beneath the foundation of Canterlot.

And the nightmarish creature that had put her there.

Princess Cadance struggled to upright herself on four weakened legs, but her persistent hunger and thirst were overpowered by the more singular and powerful desire to get out. To warn Canterlot and the rest of Equestria of the threat looming from within its own borders. To make sure her beloved was alive and well.

Her love of her adoptive aunt’s subjects gave her all the strength she needed. As her eyes cleared and began to turn her blurry world into a visage of a dark, stalagmite-studded cave, she willed her horn to life with the familiar tingle of magic, recalling countless months spent foalsitting her beloved’s little sister and the impromptu magic lessons that both of them learned from. The tip of her horn quickly grew warm with a brilliant white light, casting away the darkness and showing her the way out.

The walls that had imprisoned her, strangely, were no longer there. Before her lay a wide-open cavern, with four tunnels snaking off into various paths. Each tunnel beckoned her towards it with promises of freedom and threats of further imprisonment within the mines, her fate decided simply by chance. There were no clues or signs at any tunnel entrance to help her choose wisely between them.

But as she swept her gaze across their gaping maws, she felt an odd compulsion towards the second tunnel on her left. After a few moments of study this compulsion grew stronger, to the point where she began to feel her hooves softly clopping forward to take her within its shadowy depths. It felt….right, for lack of a better word. It felt right to take this path.

The light from her horn guided her forward through a seemingly endless loop of tunneled rock and crystal, her head ducking under the occasional low-hanging stalagmite or a portion of the tunnel roof that had not been excavated for hoof travel with alicorns in mind. At times she had to force herself into an awkward crouch walk to continue, but within a few minutes of entering the tunnel it began to curve upward and curl off to the left, and hope re-energized her aching muscles into a quicker and stronger pace. If this tunnel was heading upward, it might eventually lead to a way out.

And yet the relief she expected from the promise of freedom did not come. Her fear of the unknown, the fear that had resisted her earlier attempts to go back to sleep, remained firm and resolute, taunting her with the implications that she would come to regret escaping at all.

Eventually she was driven forward as much by panic as she was by her need for fresh air and food. Was her subconscious silently suspecting that her warnings would come far too late? That above her was a land infested with horror and despair, and that she had only spared herself the kinder fate of starving to death?

No. I refuse to believe that. I will NOT believe it! Everypony’s going to be fine, Aunt Celly and Luna would never let that….that thing win. They will not let these monsters consume all the good in our world, our family, our friends…

Believe. Believe. Believe, she kept telling herself as she clambered up the tunnel, hoping that with each prayer she would begin to believe it in earnest.

She never did.

Her fear had become her drive. Rather than seeking to warn everypony, and maybe get a bite and that sweet scent of liquated hazelnut, she now sought to reassure herself that she was panicking over nothing. That she would reach the end of the tunnel, to the way out and into Canterlot’s streets, and find nothing wrong with the world at all. That she had been worried for nothing.

With what seemed to be the passing of an eternity, she began to notice a change in her environment. Each breath she took brought in more oxygen than stagnant air, revitalizing her waning strength and giving her hope that she was panicking over nothing. How could fresh air be getting into this portion of the tunnel if Canterlot had been infested—

Yes! She cried happily to herself upon spotting a faint glimmer of a flame’s light in the distance. A cliché ending she’d read in countless epic fantasy thriller novels, but she understood why now. After spending so long in the darkness of uncertainty, the protagonist character would inevitably feel the suffering of their continent-spanning quest to be vindicated and well worth it at the sight of that proverbial light at the end of the tunnel.

With renewed vigor, she hurried towards the light, her careful walk turning into a full fledge gallop as the tunnel walls began to expand and swell outwards away from her. She cared not that her hooves could have been heard clopping for half a mile, only that her endless imprisonment and torturous separation from her beloved would soon come to an end.

The light at the end of the tunnel turned out to be coming from a set of torches, set alight via magic-enchanted means to keep them burning for weeks on end if necessary. The tunnel was revealed to be the mine entrance itself, its entrance enshrined in wooden supports and a pair of hard hat helmets dangling off of a peg hook embedded in the rocky wall beside the tunnel entrance itself. As she’d expected, not a soul was in sight. In fact, the dust accumulated on the hard hats and the rocky floor suggested this mine entrance had not been seen by pony eyes in weeks, if not longer. The mine itself, she’d been told, had been long forgotten by Canterlot entirely, though a few souls still seemed aware of it to have had the forethought to put hard hats down here.

No matter. The doorway outside was still there, and it didn’t look broken. She swiftly killed the light from her horn, trotting towards the door and practically willing it to open before her with a second burst of magic.

Finally! Everything’s gonna be okay, I’m freaking out over nothing! Everypony will be fine, and I can have a laugh at my own expense at Donut Joe’s shop and have all the hazelnut coffee I can stand an—

Her legs stopped working as she oozed out of the doorway and found herself entering a street in the downtown district of Canterlot. Her magic’s hold on the door faltered, and then fizzled into nothingness and allowed it to creak and sway as her horrified eyes tried to blink away the sight before her.

The buildings alongside the street were devoid of interior lighting in general, and of life in particular, for one very good reason—their exteriors were covered in some sort of hideous, hardened substance of a sickly green color, creeping upward along the walls from a large collection of the stuff at the sidewalk. It almost seemed as though it had begun life as a goop or secreted resin, and molded to the buildings in a manner much like mortar, sometimes forming thick columns large enough to hold entire groups of ponies. The surface pattern of the strange substance reminded her of leg muscles, and within the columns of resin were several oval shaped holes, formed from the outside, further cementing the purpose of the substance.

She saw this crafted resin decorating every building she could see, and the near-black storm clouds above obscured Celestia’s sun so much she doubted it was even there. The lack of light allowed darkness and shadow to accent much of the alien substance in sight, evoking chills that ran the length of her spine and deep into her ribs whenever her eyes fell upon it.

She stood there for a full minute, unwilling to believe that she was in Canterlot, and repeatedly wished for her eyes to fix themselves in quick, quietly uttered bursts of pleading prayer. But her words and hopes went unanswered. After a fifth attempt failed she began to doubt that she was even sane. This could not be Canterlot, this had to be a mistake, a cruel prank by misguided pon—

Y-yes, that’s it! It’s a joke, or a…a test run for Nightmare Night decorations!

With her latest explanation in mind (or denial), she found the strength to begin walking again, and turned left to begin her ascent towards the royal castle further inside the city. And the more she thought about it, the more it seemed to make sense…

…except that she couldn’t remember hearing about it at all. Decorations of this scale, with the intent of scaring those who saw it, wouldn’t have been done at all without permission from the Royal Guard, and thus far neither Celestia nor Luna had ever been the recipient of a request for such a trial run.

Out of morbid curiosity, she stopped just long enough to peck at a column of the substance when she passed by it, intending and hoping to discover that it was merely colored molding clay or plaster.

Instead she felt a chunk of chitinous resin give way when assaulted by her forehoof, snapping off and falling to the sidewalk beneath her hooves. A lingering mental image of insects invaded her mind’s eye at the touch of the hardened material, and she felt herself compelled to enter the building it ensnared. She supposed that she’d hoped to find somepony inside waiting to poke through so that they could jump out from the darkness and yell, “Surprise!”.

No such event occurred. In fact, when she dared to stick her head through the door, she simply saw more of the foreign growth seemingly cocooning the entirety of what looked like a resident’s living room. The coffee table in the middle of the room had been knocked over and broken in two, shoved against a couch along the right side of the room, and broken glass surrounded a shattered chandelier that had dropped from the ceiling.

And dry splotches of dark crimson coated the carpet all across the room.

She pulled herself away from the room with a startled gasp, fighting to keep her breathing from spiraling out of her control. Such violence within a pony’s home....she couldn’t deny it any more, no matter how much she wished to.

She was too late. They had already struck.

Her hunger and thirst were forgotten entirely, replaced by the numbing horror of what lay around her. Her royal adornments fell away, clanging off the asphalt in dumbstruck disbelief as she cast them aside to free herself of their weight. Her stomach began to quiver as she staggered into the middle of the street, but having nothing inside it to expel, all she wound up doing was dry heaving herself into a fit of exhaustion as her mind tried to process the reality around her. Everypony in this city was gone.

Gone. By what means or ends, she didn’t know. And didn’t wish to, if the lingering evidence in that house could be believed. She could only shiver as she tried not to imagine their last thoughts as their nightmares descended upon them and their children. So many happy souls and memories…

Her body stopped rejecting non-existent meals, and with a stumbled start, she began her journey once more. But she walked now with the gait of the condemned, seemingly aiming for no particular destination but finding herself moving towards the castle by instinct. She could see its spinneret towers even from where she was, partially obscured by the resin coating their surfaces. She often found the sight of the towers comforting.

She dreaded to think of what she would find inside when she got there.

An empty, hollow wind began to sweep through the lifeless streets, haunting her steps and teasing her mind with the terrible tales that had occurred within each cocooned building. Tales that would never be told or heard of, and perhaps for the best. But it wasn’t until she had emerged from the downtown district and into the more populated (and popular) market district that she finally had something more firm than mere imagination to work with in discerning the fates of the residents.

It seemed that the closer she got to the castle, the more heavily “infested” the city became. Many buildings were now almost entirely covered by this resin material, with barely any hint of the dwelling they covered showing beneath them. Curved, ominous-looking pods similar in appearance to the resin were clustered together in several different sized groups along the sidewalks and in lonely patches throughout the streets—some groups had only four pods, and other groups were composed of over a dozen . Several other buildings in the immediate vicinity were not nearly as covered, but still bore more resin structures than much of the downtown district behind her. Still, she was able to identify at least three of them from memory. She did, after all, spend a good deal of time here.

….in fact, she thought she could see the front door of Donut Joe’s shop from h—

Her blood turned cold when one of the pods outside Donut Joe’s quivered briefly, startling her with its sudden movement, and its wet, slurping sound. She thought it to be merely her imagination and her tired, weakened state to be playing tricks on her until it happened again a few seconds later.

There was something inside these pods. Perhaps these pods were the source of the hardened resin overtaking the city? Or perhaps they contained monsters?

…..o-or ponies?

Ponies that might have been enjoying a snack in Donut Joe’s, when the end of the world came down upon them?

She galloped to the front doors in a rush, fearing what she would find, but not willing to go any further without knowing for sure if there were ponies trapped here that she could still save. She couldn’t help but think back to the long, cold winter nights she’d spent here with her beloved, with steaming cups of hot chocolate and sprinkled glazed donuts to nibble and feast upon. To the complete sanctity and security she felt when she was in his company, and to the soul-enriching, intense attachment she felt towards him.

She felt none of that now—they seemed like alien concepts in such a hostile environment. She couldn’t bear to think that those days might never return.

The pod quivered and bobbed again as she passed by it, and as she gingerly stepped over a tube-shaped coil of resin trailing through the donut shop’s doorway, she began to feel herself growing cold and still at the sight within the shop’s walls.

All of the dining tables were smashed, or turned over and broken, and chairs scattered about like a bag of spilled marbles. Donut Joe’s counter, towards the back of the dining space, was smashed and no sugary treats remained within the glass display cases. The shelves behind the counter were bare and showed varying degrees of damage—broken in half, or hanging by only set of mounting screws. Only the top shelf seemed mostly intact, missing only a chunk of its right corner. Like the house she’d spied into earlier, the shop’s interior was also entombed with resin structures and coverings….

….almost like an insect hive….

But that wasn’t what had her so terrified.

It was the piles of bodies.

Pony bodies.

Her eyes were locked upon a mare sprawled over an overturned table, her frazzled mane and tail looking far worse than her own disheveled state, but the lack of color to her pale blue coat was….unnatural. It was as though the very life had been sucked away from every fiber of her being.

And not just her. Her foal, too….

…and the stallion at the table next to her….

….everypony in the room….they were all dead….

All of them.

Such was her shock that she didn’t even notice the dangling, drop-shaped pods attached to the ceiling until her trembling body inadvertently backed up into one trying to find the exit. The cold, slimy touch frightened her and caused her to jump away from it, spinning around and trying not to land on any of the husks littering the floor—

—she fell to the floor screaming at the sight unfolding within the pod. A part of one side of the pod was an opaque covering, allowing her to see the gross assault of nature unfolding within it—a pony’s body, shriveled and with his/her mane hairs falling out, as the pod slowly pulsed, almost as if it were breathing. She could hear soft, wet crunches emanating from within the pod, though she couldn’t see what was happening inside of it.

And there were ten other such pods arrayed around the room, all hanging from the ceiling, and the four pods she could see into also contained ponies…or what was left of them.

Her legs found a way to move without conscious thought, and she screamed her shock out to the world as she burst back outside into the streets. She now saw the ground-based pods in a far more sinister light, and couldn’t bear to be near even one of the blasted things. She ran as hard as she could manage, forcing herself to stop screaming at the top of her lungs to conserve her limited energy for her aimless running. She settled for short, gasping howls of terror and wails, her vision starting to blur as she tried to fathom what she had just seen.

All those poor souls….their children….their lives, stolen from them….and they were not even being allowed the decency to rest in peace afterwards. She couldn’t begin to imagine what all these pods were for, what they were doing to the bodies….

…to the….

….o-o-oh dear starlight, Shiny!! No no no no—

She screamed again, her galloping now fueled by dread and adrenaline as she concentrated on making her way to the royal castle. It pained her to see another’s loved ones lying dead on the floor like a used, discarded rag. But to know that the same fate might have been shared by Shiny…that she might have been cheated out of a future with him…

Her screams turned into staggered sobs. It got worse when she finally spotted the royal castle’s front gates, smashed and broken in the street as though some giant had reached down and crumpled them up like paper. In the castle courtyard beyond were the scars of a protracted and vicious battle—chunks of ground pockmarked with craters, lengths of ground-up soil, smashed statues, broken spears and blood-splattered armor pieces….

….but no bodies, pony or otherwise. The victor had cleaned the scene of corpses.

The massive, bulbous overgrowth of resin overtaking much of the castle exterior frightened her to the point of tears. The castle entrance lay open, and her mind’s eye tried to deter her from entering with imagined scenes of ponies enshrined into the resin walls like a spider’s latest catch, of their captors waiting and hiding inside the walls for more unsuspecting victims to claim for their nefarious purposes.

Shining Armor would have been at the center of all of this bloodshed.

A frantic search of the discarded, bloody armor turned up no sign of his presence—his armor bore his sister’s cutie mark, and displayed his rank along the collar. But the lack of his armor did not assuage her worries and fears, and with a mournful gasp she bolted away from the carnage and barreled into the castle’s interiors. If he had not fallen here, he would have made his last stand with Aunt Celly and Luna.

The courtyard did not give her any confidence that they had succeeded.

She was mortified to learn that her imagination was not far off in its predictions of what she would find. It was much like walking into an oven—already her coat was beginning to bead with sweat as the oppressive dry heat pressed against her and made her frightful, labored breathing a chore on her lungs. The walls had been intricately molded over with more of the invader’s resin, inflicting an aura of terror upon any living thing foolish enough to even think of entering. Now and then, she would come across a writhing, pulsating pod, or the deceased, shriveled body of a pony entombed within the hideous, organic-looking walls. The pinkish-red glow of a combat spell at the tip of her horn didn’t make the sights any easier to stomach.

Nor did her failing ears, as they tried to assign horrified screams to the overwhelming ambient silence whenever she came across an encased pony within the walls. Or her increasingly unhinged imagination, which tried to terrorize her into fleeing for her own life with images of these victims in their last moments, twisting and screaming in a fruitless attempt to escape their impending deaths.

She almost listened. Almost turned around and beat hoof out of Canterlot with her tail tucked between her legs…but to what end? If Canterlot had fallen, nowhere in Equestria was safe. She would simply be trading one death trap for another. And she couldn’t leave without Shiny…or knowing what had happened to him.

So she trotted onward on shaking legs, with lungs that didn’t know how to work correctly anymore, a heart that saw her ribcage as an apple tree to be kicked, and a darkening subconscious that saw monsters in every shadow and crevice. And she wasn’t sure that she was wrong—a couple of times, she thought she could see a slight shimmer of movement within the walls.

With the hallways now resembling an insect hive of sorts, she had a much harder time finding her way around the castle. She eventually had to resort to trying to identify the poor ponies around her to come to some general conclusion about her location. In her time in the castle, she had come to learn many of the staff members that Celestia and Luna retained for assistance in their duties and downtime. Guards, aides, chefs, messengers, she knew many of them by name…and their daily routines. At any given time in a day, if she needed to find somepony in the castle, she knew where to start looking.

And by knowing their professions, she knew where to expect them to spend the majority of their time. This knowledge came to be sickeningly helpful as she’d quickly begun to recognize several of the bodies on her trek—Brush Stroke, a mare that served as an organizational aide of sorts and kept track of royal appointments, meetings, and city events, had been found within three minutes of her deciding to start trying to recognize the departed souls around. She spent the majority of her shift in her own office, and would sometimes take a short break in a nearby lounge room down the hall.

Staring at her discolored, lifeless husk, cocooned into the wall ten feet down the hall from her office door, she could only think of the fact that she had never thought to ask Brushy if she had a family outside these walls. She could only offer the pointless gesture of closing her dead, frightened eyes, as much out of grief as for the desire to not have that empty, accusing glare staring at her any longer.

She thought she found what was left of Daylight two halls down after taking a right turn, but it was hard to tell because the body was trapped within a hanging pod, and she couldn’t stand to be near it long enough to be certain. He served as a messenger between Brush Stroke and the Princess Sisters. That would put her within five hundred yards of the throne room, if she was right.

Three halls later, she stumbled into a guard’s corpse that had been left on the floor—the invaders had simply incorporated him into the floor of their hive tunnel. All that was left to identify him by was a small scar along the left side of his face, below his—

….below his empty eye socket….

Star Streak. Patrolled the southwest quarter of the castle, with the western kitchen as his meal break stop. Which, conveniently enough, was not far from where she found him.

Three hundred yards away now.

Another three halls and one left turn after that, she discovered one last familiar face, and stopped in her tracks.

A little filly, maybe ten years old, who bore a collar with her name on it because she found it easier to get access to the castle, and to her mother who worked directly inside the throne room as one of Celestia’s personal assistants, if the guards didn’t have to ask who she was and why she was trying to run past them. Cadance found the collar on the floor, covered in drying goop and resin, and had to pull it free with a crunch of her forehoof without disturbing the filly-sized form embedded in the floor of the tunnel.

“Newt”, the collar’s tag read.

With a silent prayer of apology to the innocent filly’s departed soul, she forced herself to tremble down the last hundred yards to the throne room of her adoptive aunts.

It was the last place she would ever see.

There was no hint at all that the walls had ever been built by ponykind, as they had been completely overtaken by the invaders’ hive. What little she could see of the red carpet beneath her hooves was tainted by a dark green substance, and pods of the ground and hanging type were dotted across the expansive room.

Splayed across the slope of a two-tiered platform that served as Celestia’s seat of power, was….

“….no….”

This isn’t happening.

“….not you, no—“

This isn’t happening!

Her aches, her overheated body, became nothing as she stumbled across the room, struggling to make this mirage vanish and give her what she wanted—

This is not happening, he can’t be gone, not like this—

“Shiny, wake up…”

Her beloved failed to rouse from the steps. A stretch of tube-shaped resin beneath him was coated in red. And his coat was far paler than she remembered. There was no luster to it, or to him in general.

“Please wake up….please….”

She finally reached the steps, tripping over herself in the process, and had to pull herself up to him in order to shake him to his sens—

The ice-cold feel of his body against her forelegs turned her rapidly beating heart towards a dull, emotionless thump. His eyes lacked any sign of a loving sparkle to them. Not a single beat of his heart could be found in his chest or his neck. The skin beneath his coat had seemingly dried and wrinkled, as if something had sucked him dry of all that he was.

Her knight, her Shining Armor…was gone.

Her tears began to flow freely in warm, salted rivers, her forelegs unwilling to part from her beloved as she began to howl and cry. In a fit of maddened grief she tried to pull him up to the top of the steps, to at least give him a more comfortable resting place—

—her left foreleg bumped into cold metal, and she forced herself to tear her eyes away from her departed better half—

—Celestia’s bloodied crown lay in front of her favored seat cushion, its tipped crest broken off down to the cracked jewel inset in the center—

—she dared to look up, and found Aunt Celly encased in an unusual cocoon, rather than the pods she’d come across so far….but she was as lifeless and empty as all the other victims of these invaders. What looked like dried blood streaked down her snout and stained the bottom of the opaque, green-tinted cocoon.

Her tear-blurred vision barely had time to take in the sight of her dead aunt being hung about like a trophy when she heard a heavy weight thump onto the ground behind her—

A sinister, female voice, with a slight echo, re-entered her life for the last time. “We’ve won, Cadenza.”

Cadance’s heart began to twist about in her chest as she turned around on unsteady legs, her mind still reeling from all the nightmarish scenes she’d come across.

Queen Chrysalis stalked towards her from the center of the room, her cat-like irises sizing her up as prey rather than a threat. “I’d planned on coming for you once we’d finished consuming Equestria, but if you’re that desperate to join your beloved in the afterlife, then we’ll oblige you.”

All around her, she began to hear haunch-quivering crunches emanating from the shadowed corners of the room, accompanied by a chorus of hisses and the flitter of insect-like wings that drew closer with every moment.

“….y-you….you killed them,” Cadance sobbed, too drained and stricken with a combination of terror and grief to move away from any of the changelings. “….all of them …”

“Welcome to the bottom of the food chain,” Chrysalis hissed gleefully as she drew close enough for the princess to make out a sharp set of fangs baring themselves at her. “And guess what? You’re tonight’s main course. Your love alone will feed a thousand of my subjects. And they’re all very hungry.”

The flittering wings began to batter her face with displaced air, and in a panic she began to pull herself away from the approaching queen, to buy herself a few seconds of life, to thi—

—the cocoon above her split open, spilling a sticky, green liquid out upon the floor beneath and splattering Cadance’s face—

—she glanced up, hoping against all the bad luck she’d had today that Aunt Celly would stop this insanity and save everypony, but felt her heart shoot up into her throat when Celestia’s forelegs shot out of the cocoon, her face now contorted and elongated into a nightmarish form as her jaw revealed rows of razor-sharp teeth and a fresh set of dripping fangs—

—Cadance screamed as five sets of teeth found purchase in her flesh, and she thrashed about in a final burst of defiance against her killers—

—a crash of thunder shook the room as her body leapt out from beneath sheets of cloth and their enveloping, warm touch, and slammed into the cold, dry floor as her screams rebounded off the walls and flooded her ears. The changelings, their murderous queen, her mutated aunt….all of them vanished from her sight, her eyes now seeing the crystal-sparkling walls of her bedroom as a white light flooded the room from a stand just above her head.

And still, she screamed. She screamed and yelled all the way to the bathroom, practically rammed the door open with a single, broadside tackle, and felt her dinner begin a return trip from her stomach—

She snapped her eyes shut and allowed her body to hurl its disgust at the horrors it had just witnessed, barely making it to the commode before she lost it—

—a heavy set of hooves stormed in behind her, a flair of magic grabbing at the sink faucet—

“—oly cow, Cadie!!” Shining Armor’s voice cried in terror, unknowingly filling the alicorn princess with much-needed relief with his mere presence. “What happened—“

Her answer was cut short by a second gag, and then a third, before he turned the sink on and began splashing her face with cold water from the sink faucet to wash her mouth out, using his magic to funnel the water straight to her. Her mind began to flash with images of the world she’d just left—

“O-o-oh go-gods—“

—a changeling hive corridor decorated with the bodies of their victims—

“—y take it easy, Cadie, it’s okay—“

—Celestia’s fangs zipping out towards her face in eager anticipation—

“Oh m-my s-stars I—“

—the cold water stopped soaking her face, and the faucet was roughly switched back off as more important matters lay before her stallion—

“Stop, Cadie, it’s over—“

—Newt’s collar in her hooves, coated in slime—

Shining Armor’s forelegs enveloped her body and brought her into his, squeezing gently as his warmth began to overtake her shock. “Cadie, stop, calm down, it’s over! It’s over, you’re okay—“

Her breath began to come in stronger, longer gasps, the touch of her beloved embedding a strong sense of security into her wild mind. His voice, urging her to a calmer state of mind, began to beat back the horrific sights of her nightmare and replace them with the forceful boom of his presence. She dared her eyes to open, to stop seeing all the horrible, gut-churning sights of her dreams, and allowed herself to be entranced by the droplets of cold water sliding off the front of her mane and onto the floor.

“You’re okay now,” he continued, maintaining his tight hold on her and keeping her still in the off-chance that motion would induce another round of gagging. “It’s over, you’re safe, you’re okay, you’re back home. Calm down…”

When her forelegs found a way out from his grasp, she returned his hug with as much strength as she could muster. More than anything else right then, it was his touch, his voice, his frazzled coat, that anchored her back into reality. To feel his warmth instead of a cold, lifeless shell, to hear his soothing voice instead of dead, eternal silence….

To feel his life….it was all she needed to know right then. So she held onto him, and allowed her screams to soften into shocked gasps as she began to come down from her hyperventilating panic—

“It’s all over,” he assured her with a nuzzle across her left ear. “You’re home, with me, nothing’s going to hurt you here. Just calm down.”

It took a minute of just being there, in his hug, hearing his voice soothe her fractured psyche, before her breathing resembled a more normal and sedate pace and she could talk in more than just bubbling fragments of terror-filled speech. “….oh gods…”

“It was just a nightmare,” Shiny soothed softly with a pat against her back. “A really bad nightmare, it’s over. Just sit tight with me here, okay?”

Her wet, cold face buried itself into his neck, reveling in the steady, lively pulse she felt beneath his flesh. She allowed him to steadily move them back into the bedroom, and eventually back onto their bed where she had both his loving embrace and the warm, soft touch of a mattress and comforters to serenade her senses and chase away the last vestiges of her nightmare. It was the most relieving, affectionate gift he could have given her for a Hearth’s Warming Eve present, and yet she could receive it whenever she needed it.

This time, her tears were of joy….tears of joy that he nearly jinxed by daring to ask her to relive the insanity she’d just escaped from.

“What was it?” he whispered into her left ear with a reassuring nudge of his snout. “I’ve never seen you like this before. Talk to me.”

“Absolutely not,” she croaked back, her voice slightly hoarse from her screaming fit. “Just…just stay with me.”

He usually knew better than to press her when she was out of sorts like this, but this time he wasn’t taking no for an answer. “Cadie, you just threw up your dinner back there. What? Happened? What did you dream about? Talk to me, please, I’m scared.”

Her face lit up with invisible fire, a rush of blood to her cheeks shaming her for failing to even consider what that must have been like for him to witness just then. “….the changelings.”

She felt his body tense up momentarily. “….we beat those monsters back. Sent them flying for hundreds of miles, if I recall.”

“But what if we hadn’t?” she forced herself to say aloud in a cracking, fearful tone. “Shiny, I was trapped underneath Canterlot for what felt like weeks. I was afraid that I would come out, and find that I was too late to save anypony….and that was what I just saw. Only…it was worse. They killed everypony in the city, covered it in….in something, I don’t know what. Put others in these pods, and…I don’t know what they were doing it for, I don’t wanna guess at it…”

Shiny’s hug grew tighter, his snout brushing against her neck in a comforting touch.

“….I found the castle, being turned into their….their central hive, I guess. I saw the bodies of ponies I knew….a little filly…even Aunt Celly. And I saw you, broken and…and taken away from me, you were so cold….”

Now he seemed even more determined to re-assure her that he was alive, and that he would remain that way. His hug tightened until it felt as though they were joined together at the hip. And she couldn’t say she minded right then.

“….the queen, she dropped out of nowhere. Said something about us being at the bottom of the food chain, and then the changelings started piling on me like hungry wolves, sucking my love and life out of me….”

“And I know the rest,” he moaned in sympathy. “….Cadie, that was months ago. And this is the first time I can recall you having this bad a nightmare over it. Do….do you want to see Doc Light in the morning?”

A shrink, she shuddered sadly, trying to bury herself further into the bed’s comforters. He already thinks I’m losing it…

….then again, this was the first time she’d ever had a nightmare this intense…

“….m….maybe…maybe just a day off. Let the castle staff take care of things.”

A soft sigh blew across her neck, and he let go of her and parted from her company. “….sure. I’ll keep Doc Light as a backup plan, just in case. You think you can eat anything before we get back to bed?”

Her sudden, sharp rebuke of further sleep startled both of them. “No! No….just…could I kinda…have a….mug of hazelnut coffee?”

“Cadie, it’s not even midnight, you’d be up until morning with all that caffeine running through you.”

“….that was kinda the idea, love.”

“No, what you need is rest,” he insisted strongly, the weight of his body leaping from the bed and thumping into the floor. “A good night’s rest, and good dreams. I’ll just get you some hot tea. Unsweet, decaf. Back in a bit.”

Her tongue began to salivate at the thought of the heated drink warming her from the inside out, and she rolled over onto her other side to watch him leave—

—his blue tail was already swishing through the door before she could get her hooves back under her and chase after him—

“—w-wait, don’t forget, no—“

The door clicked shut as she spoke, and her words might as well have been uttered into a raging storm for all the good they would do.

“….no lemon,” she huffed in disappointment, settling her head back onto the bed. Truth be told, with the nightmare behind her, and her husband no longer within hugging distance, she didn’t dare tread far from this room now.

She was afraid to.

Even so, she quickly grew restless awaiting his return, and in a slight fit of anxiety she finally pulled herself away from the bed and walked towards the window on the other end of the room. Most of the rooms of the Crystal Empire’s castle were built without one, but she had begun to grow in love with the sight of the empire from on high, and had little trouble convincing the castle staff to have a window carved out in the royal bedroom. It was true that the view from the lower balcony allowed the crystal ponies to see their relatively new princess better, but there were times when she sought out the sights for the simple, therapeutic relief it brought her to sit at a window and stare at the endless, bountiful lands that stretched out all the way to the horizon.

And she sorely needed it today.

Her face pressed against the window, she ignored the winter chill seeping through the glass and watched as the scheduled overnight snowfall peppered the city. Many of the home lights had dimmed and shut off as their residents tucked themselves into bed, but the street lights remained alight for those few souls who chose to make their living under the blanket of Luna’s night. The clouds did not block her aunt’s moon from view, but formed a jagged perimeter around it so that the moonlight would illuminate the snowflakes in pale white light, and she began to wish she could see how it looked from the street rather than her bedroom window.

But the sights before her were enough, for tonight. She allowed herself to lose all sense of place and being, and just stared at the snow as it fell down past the window, and out into the city streets. And for the hundredth time since she’d arrived here, she counted herself forever lucky to be alive to see such a city in its resplendent beauty. She’d never imagined that the Crystal Empire would ever have been so astoundingly gorgeous, and with every day spent here, she began to believe that she would never want to leave here.

In a matter of weeks, she’d begun to think of the empire as home. She could no longer imagine even living anywhere else.

Which made her nightmare all that more terrifying. If those changelings had succeeded, if Twilight had not found her when she did….

—a tower of pristine crystal, covered in writhing, muscle-like resin as a herd of crystal ponies tried to flee from the blanket of shadow emerging from the castle’s towers—

She shook the mental images before they could bring about a relapse of her fitful slumber. No! Not now! Not ever! Those things will never even look upon this land as long I’m alive! This place will never know horrors like that!

Never.

Her self-therapy now more or less ruined, she sighed in defeat and pulled away from the window after one last, longing glare at the beautiful, moonlit snowfall—

—a pair of cat-like, green-tinted eyes furrowed at her from the other side of the window, accompanied by a pair of crimson-tainted fangs—

“—EVERYTHING YOU LOVE IS MINE TO CONSUME—“

—the window shattered into a thousand shards as Chrysalis’s holed forelegs latched around her neck and pulled her out into the cold winter night—

She fell back onto her rump with a scream as she pushed herself away from the intact window and her brief daydream horrors, scooting herself up against the bed as she fought to keep her heart from ripping itself out of her chest.

There was nothing outside the window. No bloody fangs, no predatory eyes. But then, they never were. They were already in the one place where she couldn’t escape them.

Within herself.