Cozy Little Nightmares
“Next up is Rash Radish,” wheezed Timber, sounding bored beyond belief. “Come on in, Radish. Welcome to the Petty Problems Forum, where all your drama can be aired.”
The doors to the lounge creaked open, and Rash Radish wheeled herself in, leaning heavily on her zimmer frame.
Seated in her large, sagging and decidedly un-throne-like armchair, Luna stiffened. “Timber.”
Timber glared at her, eyes shadowed by the sagging folds of his own wrinkled flesh. “What? It’s true, isn’t it?”
“No,” Luna hissed, cursing again the luck that had landed her with this useless excuse for a seneschal. “Do it properly.”
With a sigh heavier than a neutron star, Timber straightened his hunched neck and shouted at the top of his voice. “Enter, humble petitioner, into the sacred halls of the Night Court, wherein our gracious diarch sovereign of the night, Princess Luna, will hear the pleas and sorrows of all her good subjects.”
With a satisfied smile, Luna spread her wings in welcome. “Greetings, Rash Radish. We are pleased to meet thee.”
“It’s En Pointe,” Radish said immediately, her voice querulous. “He’s been mulching my radishes to dye his damn leotards. Again!”
No title. No respect. No formality. Luna shut her eyes and counted to ten. Her return to the throne had lasted a scant three years before Celestia’s latest whim robbed her of it yet again. Silver Shoals was not like Canterlot. But she forced the smile back onto her face and nodded sympathetically. “We understand your heartache, good subject. The one known as En Pointe has been called to justice in these halls before.”
“Eh?” said Rash Radish, though Luna knew full well not even the most deaf pony in the retirement home could claim to not hear her.
“We will summon him,” she explained. “And deal with the situation. Reparations will be made unto you.”
Radish harrumphed. “I’ve heard that before. There’s nothing that can replace four month’s work growing a beautiful red radish. We only get the one window box here — I can only fit four radishes in there, and he’s stolen two.”
“An armed guard shall be mounted,” declared Luna. “Nopony shall claim the two remaining.”
Her petitioner squinted. “Where you gonna get a guard from?”
Another deep breath. Luna winced. “The crown is not without resources.”
A few days and nights without sleep while she stood guard over the window box would not be the end of the world. But still, it was at times like this she missed her batpony legions the most. Her citizens in Shady Hollow had waited a thousand years for her return, but Celestia wouldn’t let her bring even one to Silver Shoals. We’ve got to be just like them, Luna, she kept saying. Really immerse ourselves. We’re going to be just like all the other retired ponies! What fun.
Luna was learning that while she was away, Celestia had developed a really stupid notion of fun.
Rash Radish hobbled out of the garden door, and Timber coughed. “You want the next moaner?”
“Petitioner,” hissed Luna. She’d like to set her batpony legions on him.
“The next petitioner is,” Timber yanked the door open, and then blanched. “Pr-Princess Twilight Sparkle?”
Luna shot upright. Twilight Sparkle? Her sister’s protege — I trained her just for this, Lulu, so we could have some well-deserved time off — And if I don’t want time off? — Oh, Luna, don’t be so silly — What was Twilight Sparkle doing here?
Perhaps she’d come to demand Luna’s help. Ruling the entire kingdom was a heavy burden for a mortal. Perhaps she’d come to beg for a reprieve. And, gracious as ever, Luna would be more than happy to lift her mantle once again. If Twilight herself told Tia she couldn’t cope, Tia could hardly refuse.
The little alicorn came trotting through the door, the crown still sitting a touch uncomfortably on her purple head. She was taller already — pumped full of Celestia’s magic — but she looked nervous.
“Princess Luna,” she said respectfully, inclining her head.
How was it that the only pony in this godforsaken place who bothered to show proper respect to royalty was herself also royal? If Luna had her way, her sister’s little ponies would soon remember who was really in control. But…no. Modern times, modern methods. She was still adjusting.
“Greetings, Princess Twilight,” she answered graciously. “Welcome to my…temporary Night Court.”
Twilight shuffled her hooves. “Thank you.”
“Have there been any problems with moonrise? I’ve been sticking to the usual schedule.” It was Luna’s one small consolation. Even if Celestia insisted she gave away her throne, no mortal was capable of handling her moon.
Twilight glanced nervously at Timber. The official line was that she was capable of raising sun and moon alike — another of Celestia’s vagaries — and unlike Luna, she clearly took Celestia’s silly ideas seriously.
“It’s fine,” Luna reassured her. “He’s deeply uninterested in Night Court.”
“No,” Twilight said. “It’s something else. I don’t know if you’ve heard all the way up here, but things have not been going…well…with my efforts to rehabilitate Cozy Glow.”
Luna cocked her ears. “Ah, yes. I’ve seen the stories in the newspapers. There’s been quite a few breakouts, hasn’t there?”
Eyes cast down, Twilight nodded. “Yes — I keep unfreezing her, because she’s a filly and I can’t just leave her as stone, but…”
“She’s proven difficult?”
“Yes. She’s impossible, Princess Luna. I can’t seem to get through to her about friendship at all, and at this stage another breakout would be disastrous. Ponies in Canterlot are already on edge about Chrysalis’ probation.”
“How can I help?” Luna asked, still feeling a deep satisfaction that Twilight had turned to her for help. Celestia had dragged her kicking and screaming into retirement, but the nation would not let her retire. The kingdom needed its Princess of the Night.
“Honestly, I need to find some way to rehabilitate her without taking her out of stone.” Twilight swished her tail, which still hung limp without magic of its own. “And I thought that maybe…dreams would be the way.”
Her eyes widening, Luna tilted her head. Of all the directions this conversation could have taken, this was not the one she had expected. “You want me to give Cozy Glow…dream therapy?”
Another nod. “She says she’s conscious while she’s frozen. She says, actually, that it’s an inequine form of imprisonment that would drive anypony insane, and she’s going to tell the police and destroy me in court next time she gets out, but…that’s beside the point.”
For a moment, Luna was silent, her mind racing as she thought through the possibilities. It was not quite the triumphant reclamation of her throne she yearned for, but it was…it was something. A mission for the good of the nation. Something that only she could do.
And anything was better than another Night Court at Silver Shoals.
“I think I can help,” she said at last. “I’ll need to be close to the statue, of course. If she’s conscious by default it will take work to lull her into a dream state.”
“Of course,” Twilight said eagerly. “I can open up your old wing of the palace again.”
The Lunar Tower. Home. Ponies who weren’t most of the way dead already. And no more Timber.
“That sounds delightful,” beamed Luna. “I’ll bring a contingent of batponies with me as staff.”
“Oh.” Twilight looked nonplussed. “Whatever makes you most comfortable, of course.”
Luna was already composing the missive to Shady Hollows in her head. Dear Dusk Fall, come at once and bring twenty of your most loyal. I’m going to be making a trip to Canterlot, and I want my own batponies with me. We’re going to be doing things in style.
If Celestia’s own personal student was the one ordering it, she could hardly be angry with Luna, could she?
Luna sucked in a deep breath and stared with satisfaction at the diamond-inlaid constellations on the ceiling, the plush blue carpets, the velvet wall hangings draping down across the windows. No aged ponies, no radishes, and not a single unfortunate stain of dubious origin. Now this was more like it.
Twilight smiled, the consummate hostess. “I had the staff leave everything the way it was. I hope you’ll be comfortable.”
“Thank you, Twilight. We are always comfortable at home. It’s pleasant to be back, even if only for a few days.”
“When you’re ready, ask Dusk Fall to show you to the dungeons; I gave him a key to the statue room yesterday.”
Ah yes. That. Luna had almost forgotten. The delight of being home, of having her own guards around her again, being able to wear her own moonsilver regalia without Celestia whinging about how they were retired now — it had driven everything else from her head.
“Of course,” she said easily, not letting Twilight see her hesitation. After all, how hard could it be to handle the dreams of one little filly?
The statue repository was dark and shadowed. A single beam of light filtered dimly from a crack in the ceiling, illuminating the ridges in the snarling muzzle of the child at Luna’s feet. Her eyes were narrowed to slits, and she stared upwards with an almost feral rage. Luna did not have Cadence’s gift for empathy, but even so she could almost feel the waves of hatred rolling off the filly.
If this had been a genuine statue, Luna would have ordered it shattered and the unfortunate sculptor banished. It was unsettling to look at. Unpleasant. An expression like that did not belong on the face of a child.
But this was no true statue, and Twilight said she claimed to be conscious. Luna exhaled, and then smiled in as friendly a manner as she could manage.
“Greetings, Cozy Glow,” she said. “We’re going to work on a project together.”
The granite statue glowered silently up at her.
Luna swallowed, and seated herself beside Cozy Glow. She shut her eyes and reached out, feeling for that familiar spark of life. It was always easier when a pony was close to sleep — then their minds unfolded, spilling out in dozens of colourful directions — but Luna could usually sense waking ponies too, when she tried.
Unfortunately, when she brushed her magic against the statue, even when she made physical contact, all she felt was…statue. Lifeless stone.
“Can you hear me, Cozy Glow?” she asked, beginning to feel ridiculous.
It was entirely possible that when the stone spell took effect, the mind was put into stasis just as the body was. Cozy Glow was a consummate liar, and she had no motivation to tell Twilight the truth. And though Luna had never gone out of her way to spend time with Discord, surely somepony would have mentioned it if he had claimed to be conscious for his two-thousand-year imprisonment. Or possibly the stone spell removed the animus from the body and stored it…where? A pocket dimension? How was she supposed to reach a dreamer in a pocket dimension?
With a small grunt of frustration, Luna shut her eyes and refocused herself. She turned her gaze inward, into the dreamscape, and reached again. If there was anything left of this filly, she would find it.
Forming her magic into a cone, stretched out, deep into the snarling statue, and felt around. And — wait! There it was. The tiniest glimmer, not even enough to call a spark. But it was there, guttering in the darkness, frail and red. A mind.
Luna smiled. “Got you.” And then she lit her horn and began to cast sleep spells, one after another.
Most of them she had created with living ponies in mind — spells for slowing blood flow, calming heart rate, releasing serotonin. She had no idea what would work on a statue with no discernible brain chemistry, but it was worth trying the lesser ones before bringing out the big guns.
Finally, Luna decided on a spell she had designed as a teenager for use on windigos, when she and Celestia had still been hunting them down. As non-corporeal creatures, windigos had no bodies to be lulled, and she had resorted to simply sledgehammering them in the mind with a huge blast of magic wrapped thinly in a psychic command to sleep. Unable to process a blow that powerful, most non-alicorn minds defaulted to obeying the command. It had worked on windigos — which in their natural state did not even need sleep — so there was no reason it wouldn’t work on a statue with a soul.
S l e e p , said Luna, and instantly, Cozy Glow did.
And like a flower, her mind blossomed, flooding out in a way Luna could understand. There was the usual yellow childlike content — happiness, delight — but they were only isolated islands in a sea of green bitterness. Threads of anger and cold resolve pulsed through everything, hard and black.
Images flickered in the flames of her mind. Chrysalis, Tirek. A giant twisted version of Cozy Glow, wings spread and horn lit. A knife. Twilight Sparkle’s face, sympathetic and gentle, clouded by a miasma of hatred from the dreamer.
Luna straightened her spine. It wasn’t like she had expected this to be easy. She had her dreamer, and now it was time to make contact. With the shivering motion of a foal shaking off a blanket, Luna cast her spell and slipped out of her body, and the dream opened up to embrace her.
When Luna stepped out from the glowing blue portal, the world was a dark, ominous red. Umber lights flickered in the distance, fissures glowing red against the strange, humped ground. Luna took a cautious step forward, and then another. The sky was a dull coppery colour, like dried blood. The landscape was featureless, other than the cracks in the earth, and their pulsing light provided the only illumination.
“I want them to hurt,” a child’s voice whispered, seeming to come from everywhere and nowhere at once. Luna froze. And then, as the fissures began to bubble again, lava climbing higher, “I want to hurt them.”
Cozy Glow’s dreamscape looked like a classic nightmare. The voice was…disturbing, but Luna had seen worse. She pulled in a breath and cast a spell of soothing, designed to turn the nightmare into a pleasant dream.
The power washed out from her, and soft blue grass sprouted at her hooves, moonlilies and night orchids spreading their petals as they opened up to the sky. Luna began to walk, searching for the dreamer, and the oasis of plant life and soft music spread in her wake. She glanced back over her shoulder at her portal where it waited, soft and reassuring, visible only to her.
The desolate landscape seemed to stretch forever. The disembodied voice spoke again, the lava in the cracks hissing and popping with every word.
“I’ll end it. I’ll take it all away, and nopony else will have it either.”
The nightmare-ending spell was spreading slower than Luna would have liked, its growth stalling just a few paces ahead of her. When she turned back, the edges of her night garden were already blackened and withering away. Strange. Usually Luna’s control over a dreamer’s inner world was complete, and she only refrained from altering it out of a sense of politeness. But this one was sluggish, somehow. Slow to respond.
There was a face above her, slowly twisting itself into being from wisps of cloud and darkness. “You will learn,” it said, in a stallion’s voice, and then it warped again, the cropped hair falling forward in the familiar blunt fringe of Celestia’s protege.
Luna stared up at the giant face in horror. This was not the pleasant dream she had willed into being. But this must be the first sleep Cozy Glow’s mind had experienced in months. Luna had worked with insomniacs before, but never one as sleep-deprived as this.
“You’ll see that friendship is the right path to choose,” said not-Twilight, her lips curling in an ugly sneer. An expression the real Twilight would never wear. “Friendship is magic.”
“Magic,” whispered the fragmented earth between Luna’s hooves, lingering over the word and transforming it into something horrible.
“Enough, now,” Luna said with a touch of impatience, and cerulean magic flooded out across the wasteland. Trees and flowers and fluffy little fruit-bats burst into being — the simplest dream-world in Luna’s repertoire, and her favourite.
For a second everything was as it should be, but then the sky flickered again, merlot and mahogany.
“You will learn.”
“Please,” said the child, and Luna’s fruit-bats and their orchard crumbled into dust.
“Stop this,” snapped Luna, wrenching at the dream, unravelling the core of it. The splintered red land fell away, fractured islands floating in a sea of darkness, and Luna could suddenly feel the route to the centre.
“You will learn.”
Luna began to gallop.
“Mommy, please don’t,” the voice sobbed, and Luna flung aside cast her soothing spell over and over again. Somewhere in the distance, a child was weeping hysterically. A thin voice raised in a howl of despair so acute that it tore at Luna’s soul.
“It’s alright, little one!” she cried, finally giving up on subtlety and flapping up into the air. “Where are you?”
There was no response, and Luna cast aside all respect for the integrity of the dream and took complete control. She let out one final tidal wave of power, intending to banish any semblance of darkness and turn the dream into a sunny afternoon in the Everfree. But instead of changing the blasted red earth to green grass, the spell stuttered and popped before it was halfway to the ground.
Luna stared in disbelief. This had never happened before. She repeated the spell, and to her relief, this time it took. Vegetation shot up from the soil, stone and earth appeared from nothing to fill the void, streams burbled and deer sprang lightly through the long grass. Letting out a long exhalation, Luna lowered herself back to the ground, shut her eyes briefly as she located the dream’s epicentre, and teleported herself directly to it.
“Golly,” said a small voice, and Luna looked down into dull red eyes the exact colour of the lava-filled crevices. The colour of blood. A filly smiled up at her, no more than ten years old. “Who are you?”
Luna smiled automatically, wanting to reassure the child after the nightmare she had witnessed, but she took a brief look around. They were standing in the ruins of a circular structure dug down into the ground. Daisies and dandelions now adorned the rings of tiered seats, and the columns and other more disturbingly shaped lumps in the pit — was that a hoof? — were smothered by the rich green grass.
Hastily returning her gaze to Cozy Glow, Luna’s smile wavered. “Hello,” she said softly. No Royal Canterlot Voice here after her experience with the colt in Ponyville. “I’m Princess Luna.”
Cozy Glow sniffed. “Another one?”
Luna raised an eyebrow. “I’m the only Princess Luna, as far as I’m aware.”
The child shrugged. “Not the only princess.”
Thinking of the monstrous Twilight in the sky, Luna forbore with the child’s rudeness. It wasn’t like all the children in this strange new era were polite as she was used to it. And besides, this avatar was only an expression of Cozy’s subconscious. She couldn’t help it if her thoughts were a little…unfiltered.
“I’m here to help you,” she said, abstaining from mentioning Twilight at all.
Sitting back on her haunches, Cozy Glow folded her forehooves, and Luna did her best not to look at the brownish stains spattering her fur. “Have you come to let me out, then?”
A pity that she remembered her imprisonment even in sleep. Dreams were supposed to free a pony, to let them do the things they couldn’t achieve in the waking world. But Luna was no stranger to long imprisonment, and the bars of her own jail had never left her, even in sleep. Especially in sleep, given that Celestia’s binding of the Nightmare had limited her to her own dreamscape, cut off from her ponies even in the astral world. I want to hurt them was a terrible thing for a child to dream, but Luna…she found that she was not without sympathy. She could empathise with this angry, trapped little girl.
“Not let you out,” she admitted. “Not yet, at least.”
The red eyes gleamed, and Cozy leaned a little closer. “When, then?”
There was too much awareness in those bright beady eyes, and Luna’s fur prickled. Almost instinctively, she cast a spell for deeper sleep, to send the dreamer further back into the recesses of their own mind.
For a long moment, she watched Cozy, and the silence stretched. Then the filly’s expression slackened and she looked up at Luna with a vacant expression.
“Come,” Luna smiled as she relaxed again, releasing the dream. “Why don’t you show me the place you feel calmest in all the world.”
“Okay,” said Cozy, and the grasslands melted away again to reveal the same barren rocks as before. There was nothing and nopony here, just raw stone and slumbering fire, and a smiling filly in the centre.
Luna gulped.
“I’m bored,” said Cozy Glow, kicking savagely at the white roses that Luna had asked her to gather.
Luna dropped her own mouthful of roses and sighed. The rose garden at her old castle in the Everfree was as beautiful as it had been a millennium ago, but tending the flowers was not soothing Cozy Glow in the way she had hoped. In fact, the sight of the shears had brought an unsavoury gleam into Cozy’s eye, and Luna had hastily vanished them and suggested they pick by hoof instead.
“Alright,” she said. “How about we try something a little different tonight?”
Cozy Glow grimaced. “I don’t see why I should try at all.”
Luna pressed her lips together to avoid a sharp response. Just cast the deep sleep spell again. Cozy Glow was entirely too sharp for a dreamer. She kept resurfacing and asking pointed questions, when what Luna needed — what Equestria needed — was for her to relax a little and absorb some harmony into her subconscious so that it could gradually filter up.
As her horn flashed, Cozy’s glare relaxed back into her usual sullen expression, and her eyes drifted away from Luna.
“What if we try going out in Canterlot?” Luna suggested. If Cozy was going to function in society again someday, she needed a little practice. “Would you like to see some real ponies?”
“Yes,” said Cozy Glow, a small smile curling at the edges of her lips. “I love real ponies.”
“Good,” said Luna, and resculpted the dream.
They emerged in a bustling street on market day, ponies rushing back and forth between stalls, some dressed in the fashions of Luna’s youth, others in the modern clothes that would make Cozy feel more at home.
“Now,” Luna smiled, “If you could do anything in the whole city, what would you do?”
“I love sushi,” said Cozy Glow, and Luna nodded. Expressing preferences for restaurant choice was progress, surely. A child asking for their favourite meal was not a child on the verge of violence and draining magic from the world.
So she crafted them a Neighponese tea house, tucked incongruously into a Canterlot alley, the sliding walls and delicate paper screens exactly as they had been when she saw them in Yokopona fifteen hundred years earlier. The only difference was that her chefs did not wield the same beautiful folded steel knives they had done in reality. Mixing Cozy Glow with bladed weapons was not a route Luna felt ready to take just yet.
The filly’s eyes shone when she saw the geishas in their elaborate oni and butterfly-sleeved robes, and she giggled like a real child when one of them poured her a cup of tea. She is a real child, Luna reminded herself fiercely, as they seated themselves on cushions at the low table. It was easy to forget, when she looked up at you with that calculating expression, but she was a child. She was still capable of joy, like any other filly.
When one of the mares walked past Cozy on the way out and the filly reached up to scratch herself behind the ear, Luna did not think much of it. But when the pointed golden hairpin appeared in her hoof and in the next motion slid smoothly into the mare’s jugular, Luna realised she should not have been surprised.
Cozy Glow’s giggles climbed higher and higher, laughter verging on shrieking, and Luna scrambled to her hooves and shredded the dream into nothingness. The two of them stood in the eggshell-blue void of raw dream, and stared at one another. The blood was gone. The hairpin was gone. Even the laughter had ended.
Luna looked behind her, at the welcoming blue glow of her portal, and decided she’d had enough for one night. “Sleep,” she commanded Cozy, and though the filly’s eyes seemed to flicker for a second, then they slid shut and she curled obediently on the floor.
With a small sigh, Luna walked slowly back towards her portal. The second time she’d tried Cozy around a new pony, and the second murder. She’d leave that avenue of their work alone for a while. Maybe some calm sailing would soothe Cozy’s disordered nerves. The tides were a remarkably therapeutic thing.
She emerged from the dream with the pleasant feeling of shaking off a tunic too tight for her. Since that first night she had made sure there had been no nightmares, but being with Cozy verged on the nightmarish. There was not much progress to report to Twilight, and while the time not spent in the dungeons was delightful — all her guard around her again, her own familiar observatory and rooms — the ugly snarl on the statue’s face always seemed to linger in the back of her mind.
Sometimes she almost missed guarding the radishes.
“The root of a dream is the branching point,” Luna said, gently running a brush through Cozy Glow’s mane as the filly lay somnolent on the grass. “Where it all begins.”
“Mmmm,” hummed Cozy sleepily. Almost happily. She was comfortable with Luna now. Almost willing to trust her.
Satisfied now that Cozy was fully relaxed, Luna let the brush and the meadow melt away and lit her horn. Time to put some of the psychology books from Twilight’s library to the test. “I have a plan for tonight. Let us dig a little deeper into the why of your nature, Cozy Glow.”
She reached into Cozy Glow’s mind, more open and receptive than it had ever been, and reached for the steadily beating little seed of black-veined red at the centre. Time for some answers.
The dream warped and thudded. When it reformed, they were in a tunnel. It stretched long and winding to the limits of Luna’s perception — to the edges of the dream itself — with countless others branching off and away from it. Black liquid oozed from the walls, dripping down to pool in flat black puddles at their hooves. And Luna knew, she could instantly feel, that somewhere out there something was stalking them. Something with…fangs, and cloven hooves that could crush a skull in a single blow. She could change the dream, banish the monster and end the nightmare — but what would they learn then? No. Better to stay.
She turned to the filly at her side. “Which way should we go?”
Cozy Glow blinked up at her, looking bewildered. “I don’t know.”
“Try to…feel it,” Luna suggested. “Follow the path that seems right.”
“Alright,” said Cozy, and Luna cast the spell that would send her a little deeper into unconsciousness, just to be sure.
They began to walk, following one sharp bend after the next. Cozy Glow chose the tunnels seemingly at random, but the light grew dimmer with every step they took.
“You will learn,” whispered those two distant voices, a stallion and a mare, and the child’s voice answered them.
“I want to hurt them…I want to hurt…”
Luna shuddered, but Cozy Glow was trotting now, surging ahead, and Luna forced herself to keep up. She was going to get to the root of it all. She just had to keep on going.
The tunnel jackknifed again, and suddenly Cozy was gone. Luna turned, staring into the shadows, but the darkness was pressing in and the filly was nowhere to be seen.
“Cozy?” she called. “Cozy, are you there?”
Jagged hooves scraped on stone. The monster was close.
“Try harder,” a voice snarled. “Any daughter of mine should be able to manage a simple light spell.”
“I’m trying, Mommy,” a child’s voice whimpered. “I’m trying.”
“She doesn’t have a horn, darling,” a second adult interjected. The walls pulsed with every syllable. “I keep telling you it’s useless trying to work with her.”
Heavy breathing, rasping in a throat far too large to be equine. The sound of drool dripping onto the ground.
“Stay back,” Luna warned it, but it crept closer.
Purple eyes gleamed at the very limits of her horn-light, and a long curved horn jutted out from a lilac forehead. Wings arched overhead, blocking out everything. “Magic,” the monster crooned, in a voice entirely too familiar. “Friendship…is…”
Sharp fangs shone and it reached for her.
“Get away!” Luna recoiled, lashing out simultaneously with a burst of offensive spells and an end to the dream. Her portal was visible in the distance, and though Cozy Glow was nowhere in sight, Luna was past caring. Twilight Sparkle, her friend, distorted and malformed — turned into something out of a ghost story. It was too much.
What was wrong with Cozy, that she could see someone so gentle and so caring as that? Her mind was…twisted; her dreamscape was so distorted it was unnatural. It wasn’t poor Twilight who was the monster. It was Cozy Glow herself.
Luna fixed her sights on the reassuring blue circle in the distance and fled.
It was three days before Luna could bring herself to brave the mind of the monster again. Twilight asked over breakfast how things were going, and Luna swallowed the first mouthful of her supper and immediately felt so close to vomiting she wished she hadn’t. It was a casual question, simple, but she found that had no idea how to answer it.
“Very well,” she croaked at last. “I think we might be close to a breakthrough.”
But it wasn’t until the post was delivered and she opened her daily letter from Celestia that she finally reached a resolution.
Dear sister, the letter read, I hope things are progressing with your little side project. From everything Twilight has told me, Cozy Glow is a very difficult patient. If you find that your efforts to rehabilitate her aren’t any more successful than Twilight’s, don’t despair! Your room in Silver Shoals is exactly as you left it, and Nurse Big Pill has been teaching me how to knit. It’s so exciting! Just like a real old pony. Not a courtier in sight. I’m getting pretty good, and I’m sure I can help you catch up if you’re not gone too much longer. I’m knitting you a scarf, blue and grey, and I wouldn’t mind a yellow and white one myself, if you were so inclined. Lots of love, (not a Princess!) Celestia. Ps. Rash Radish says to tell you ‘there’s only one left'. She was very upset, but she wouldn’t explain. She said you’d know what she meant. So you might find you have another little friendship problem on your hooves when you get home.
With a shudder, Luna let the missive fall. Home — as if the repulsive little nursing home could compare to her beautiful Lunar Tower. As if Rash Radish and Timber could substitute for her beloved batponies. The only thing Silver Shoals had that interested her was Celestia herself, but as long as this interest in knitting and whist drives persisted, perhaps a little distance would be healthy for them.
She had a mission here. A mission that let her avoid saying those fatal words — I hate it there — to Celestia. She wasn’t ready to drive another wedge in between them, but she didn’t want to go back to Silver Shoals either.
The only way to reconcile those two goals was, alas, Cozy Glow and her dream therapy. So with reluctant steps, Luna descended the winding spiral staircase to Cozy’s dungeon, and presented herself once more before the snarling face of the statue.
“Hello again,” she said, and she could hear the weariness in her own voice. “I hope you’ve had some time to…recover. I want to take a gentler approach today. Let’s make a pleasant dream. Something for you to relax in.”
She cast the sleep spell, and down she went.
It was the meadow again. Meadows were relaxing. Pastoral, idyllic. Luna had found nature to be an excellent relaxation aide for most ponies. — though Cozy Glow was not most ponies. When she was weaving, she’d planned a small-scale dream. A quiet little place where they could sit and talk about the horrors they had witnessed three nights ago. Where Luna could finally ask about the things the voices in the earth whispered. What Cozy was supposed to learn.
But what she found was not a pretty little clearing with tasty wildflowers scattered across it, and Cozy Glow’s avatar waiting in the centre. Instead she was facing the entrance to a shady avenue flanked by huge hedges. It stretched away into the distance, never curving, never ending.
Luna looked down that endless pathway and sighed. She had no idea what had gone wrong. If only Cozy Glow would dream like normal ponies. She shut her eyes and felt the limits of the dream. It was vast, but she could feel Cozy’s presence, somewhere along the avenue.
She sighed. Clearly Cozy’s subconscious had influenced the outcome of her weaving somehow. She could talk to her in the emptiness of the dreamscape, or she could accept Cozy’s unintentional edits and meet her on her own turf. Maybe familiar surroundings would relax her a bit. Make her less defensive.
With a dubious look at the towering yew hedges, Luna began to walk.
She was barely five steps in when the first shift came. The hedges trembled, and then they were different. The entrance was gone, and the path ahead of her divided into three. A hedge maze. Luna still didn’t feel like she knew Cozy Glow well, but a shifting hedge maze felt about right. She shut her eyes and felt for the centre again, where Cozy waited. Relying on that pull more than her more mundane senses, she pressed on.
There were whispers in the maze, of course. The usual refrain, in Twilight’s voice or the two ponies Luna could only assume were Cozy Glow’s parents. You will learn. She really ought to ask Twilight for some details on who they had been, or for an investigation to be opened. Their daughter was no paragon of harmony, but it didn’t seem like they had been good parents.
Luna walked for what felt like an hour before she began teleporting. Each skip brought her out somewhere different — still frustratingly distant from the centre. Just hedge after hedge, yew yew yew all the same. And the ceaseless whispers. I want them to hurt. I want…I want…I want…
“I don’t care what you want,” Luna snapped, after her sixth jump, and then was suddenly glad that Cozy Glow had not been with her to hear it. She was just a child, a suffering child, and Luna was a Princess. She wasn’t who she had once been, and she ought to extend the same sympathy to others that they had once offered her.
If anyone could understand change, she could.
She teleported again — and this time it was different. The yew trees suddenly gave way to oak and hemlock, and through their tangled branches Luna could see the edges of a city.
It was impossible, of course: nopony but her could craft a dream of enough complexity to contain an entire city, and she could feel the amount of dream-ponies in this one. But it was achingly familiar, too, and she couldn’t help herself as she stepped towards it. The trees made way for her, and Luna stepped into another world.
This was Canterlot as she had known it, before the forest raged out of control in her absence and claimed the whole city. The original Canterlot, where she and Celestia had built their empire.
Ponies were milling around every side, and the language they were using was achingly familiar. Old Ponish. They were wearing tunics and hoods, and with a sudden wrenching certainty, Luna knew that she was back where it all began. Before her banishment. Before it all went wrong.
Had…had Cozy’s dreamscape somehow brushed up against her own?
Dazed, she drifted towards the castle, eyes wide as she took in the details of the world she had lost. Batponies saluted her everywhere she went, almost as numerous as her sister’s ponies — back before the war, before they dwindled and faded away. Purple-armoured guards pulled back the doors of the castle to admit her, and then there she was. In the beautiful presence chamber of the diarchs, where everything was sculpted and painted in exact equality. Dawn and dusk, night and day. The throne room of two equals, not a chamber of worship to the sun with a moon wall hanging shoved in one corner.
She was home.
The court was thronging all around her, smiling as they had never smiled at her, calling out her name with love in their voices.
And Celestia was there, in full regalia, as Luna had not seen her in years. Her eyes were soft and pink and soulful, and they were filled with the deepest disappointment Luna had ever seen.
“Sister?” asked Luna, utterly bewildered.
Celestia shook her head. “All I wanted was a peaceful retirement, Luna. Just for a few decades. Why couldn’t you play along?”
And then things shifted, and Luna was a filly again, pale and small, the stars gone from her mane.
Celestia’s eyes widened with horror, and then narrowed. Furious. “What have you done, Luna?”
And Luna looked down at her own hooves, saw the black creeping up over the midnight blue, felt the Nightmare clawing in her mind, and she screamed in terror.
“No, no!”
She lashed out with her magic, trying to drive it away — and she found nothing. There was no darkness, no spirit come back to claim her. Only the dream, completely within her control as it always was.
With a hiss of anger, she lit her horn and dismissed it. Tried not to meet Celestia’s accusing gaze as she dissolved along with all the rest of it.
Luna was left standing in a vast empty place, coloured the pale blue of the raw dreamscape. There was nothing but the distant glow of her own portal — and the small pink blob standing beside it.
“Oh, boy,” Cozy Glow called, her voice raised to be heard across the vast distance between them. It echoed eerily in the cavernous space. “I can’t believe that worked.”
“Cozy?” said Luna, completely bewildered. “What was that?”
“A little distraction,” the child answered cheerily. “All it took was a moment, and here I am. At the root of the dream, just like you said.”
She glanced towards the portal, and Luna realised belatedly that Cozy Glow knew where it was. Could she see it? Nopony was supposed to be able to see that portal.
“Cozy Glow!” Luna thundered, her limbs already moving into a gallop, her wings spreading wide. “Stop right there!”
“Had they invented lucid dreaming back in the stone ages?” the child chirped. “I don’t think I remembered to tell you how good I am at it. Golly, I’m such a forgetful little filly sometimes!”
With a crack of raw power, Luna teleported, but she was too late. When she popped into existence by the portal, still galloping, she saw only the final blue curl of the filly’s tail vanishing through the portal as it closed behind her.
One pony in, one pony out. The bounds of her own spell used against her. Trapped by her own magic, in the statue Twilight had sworn never to unfreeze again until she declared it safe.
“Cozy Glow!” bellowed Luna in her loudest Royal Canterlot Voice. “Cozy Glow, return to me at once!”
Silence was her only answer. The destroyed dreamscape stretched empty and blue before her. Luna shut her eyes and flexed her magic once more. Crafting a door back to reality, back to herself. One wavered, almost materialised — but there was nothing left. Nothing for a door to lead to. Her body was…it was no longer there, waiting for her.
“No. No.” Shaking her head furiously, Luna’s horn flared brighter.
She hurled herself against the bars of her cage again, grunting with the effort of it. The constraints of the dream tightened once more, pressing down on her, and Luna began to scream.
Far above her in the Lunar Tower, Princess Luna opened her shining blue eyes and smiled widely. Her horn sparked to life as she stretched and ruffled her feathers luxuriantly.
"Golly," she said. "This is nice."
And then with her untapped wells of magical power, she reached for the darkness that was only ever a whisper away. The midnight black of the Nightmare washed over her deep indigo fur and her pupils narrowed to slits. Inky bat wings arched overhead and as she smiled her teeth sharpened into fangs.
"Princess Twilight's going to be so surprised," Nightmare Moon said brightly, and then gave a most un-Nightmare-like giggle. "I can hardly wait!"