In the Pale Moonlight
Princess Luna strode up the hallway of Canterlot Castle, her hoof-steps echoing throughout the empty hall as they collided against the checkered marble tiles of the floor. She glanced down at the tiles - an alternating pattern of bright white and pitch black - before raising her head and looking through the stained glass windows, their shapes now painted in muted colors without the sunlight to illuminate them.
This new palace was wonderful, though she still sometimes longed for her old home at the Castle of the Two Princesses. From her perspective, it had barely been a few months since she’d walked its halls, galloping from the throne room and out to the garden and hedge maze, taking the secret passages and pranking the guards…
But that place was in shambles now. She’d laid it to waste herself, torn it apart in her fury as she gave in to the Nightmare, and the next time she’d glimpsed it was when she’d been purged of her dark powers and stood in its skeletal ruins.
“Luna!”
She was pulled from her reverie at the sound of her sister’s voice, and she smiled as she saw Celestia coming toward her down the hall. She also noticed Celestia’s pace quickened as she approached, unable to hide her eagerness, and she quickened her own as well.
“Sister! I thought you would be in bed by now!” she exclaimed as she met her in the middle.
Celestia chuckled. “Tired as I am, I couldn’t help but stop by to see you before you begin your vigil,” she said and bent her neck to nuzzle her. “I admit that I was worried about you resuming your dreamwalking so soon after your return, but it seems I was worrying over nothing.”
Luna’s smile broadened and she raised her head. “Though it was a thousand years ago, for me it was barely any time at all. Indeed, I was glad to get back to it: it’s something that feels familiar in this new age when so much else feels new and unprecedented.”
Celestia’s smile faltered, so Luna raised a hoof and placed it on her shoulder.
“My dreamwalking is not the only familiar thing I’ve returned to, Sister.”
Celestia relaxed and let out a chuckle.
“I’m glad to hear that, Luna,” she said. “Well, I see you’re ready to get to your duty. The sun is down, and the realm is in your hooves.”
Luna nodded. “Good night, Celestia.”
“Good night, Luna.”
With that, Luna continued on her way to the balcony looking out over Canterlot and the darkened land beyond. Her horn lit up, aglow in her magic as the silvery orb of the moon rose, casting its glow upon the world.
This is the world my sister has built, the told herself. The world she wanted for me. The world I nearly destroyed. But I will resume my duty and ease our subjects' woes by fighting off their nightmares. And in this way, I will atone for my mistakes...
She drew in a deep breath, closed her eyes, and let herself sink into the murky world of dreams. When she opened her eyes, her vision was filled with stars, and the sounds of the world’s dreamers filled her ears.
She smiled and stepped forward into the Dream Realm, the dreams of a thousand ponies rising up around her like a field of flowers.
“Now then,” she said to herself, “let’s get to work.”
The funny thing about nightmares, Luna often mused, is that they were nowhere near as scary as ponies often thought they were. In their sleep state, their half-focused imaginations often created monsters that, when seen from an objective standpoint, were no more frightening than a child’s puppet: mad dogs with outlandish teeth and skewed eyes, teachers with lengthy jowls that made them look less like demons and more like basset hounds, and boogeymen so unintimidating that they could be frightened off with a stern word and a spray bottle.
But sometimes a nightmare was a bit worse than the usual distorted funhouse scenery and masquerade ball monsters. And it was late into her vigil that Luna followed the sound of screaming and entered into a nightmare that immediately stood out from the childhood anxieties and exaggerated daily stressors…
She found herself in a house, walking up a hallway. The shadows were deep and exaggerated, but the proportions were right. Portraits hung on the wall, but their images were obscure and darkened. It was just a normal hallway in the middle of the night.
What struck her was not the sights; it was the sound.
A clock on the wall ticked evenly, the sharp sound echoing throughout the house as the pendulum swung back and forth. Outside, she heard crickets and the distant sound of a dog barking. From somewhere else came the tolling of a heavy iron bell, twice. But otherwise, there was a barren, moribund silence, stale as attic air and lifeless and dry as old paper.
There was a door at the end of the hallway. It was half open, and pale light spilled out of it onto the floor in a straight and narrow column, like a dagger embedded into the darkness.
She sturdied herself as she made her way to the door. Despite herself, her pulse had quickened as a thick, cloying dread fell upon her.
This is wrong, she told herself. Something very wrong has happened here. This nightmare… it is still a dream, but this feeling is too real. This is something that actually happened.
She pushed open the door, and it opened silently on its hinges. She found herself in a bedroom, and a pony, a unicorn stallion, was standing in the middle of it. His horn was faintly glowing, and he held something before him in the grip of his magic just out of sight. He was looking down as he stood over something, his breath coming in tense, uneven gasps. This pony, she knew, was her dreamer.
She swallowed as she approached, taking note of her surroundings, and trying to understand the situation before speaking to the stallion.
There was an unmade bed in one corner, a half-filled suitcase laid upon it, and a strewn pile of clothes on the floor. A dresser was at the back of the room with a jewelry box, a mirror, and a few picture frames on it, though the mirror and pictures had all fallen, as though something had slammed into the dresser heavily enough to knock them over. Though most of the pictures were dark, one of them contained a clear picture of a stallion - the same one standing in the room now - and a mare, both with smiles on their faces. He wore a tuxedo, and she a white wedding dress.
Above the dresser was a square window. It was dark outside, but she saw the pallid glow of the moon, its rays streaming in through the window and bathing the scene in its glow. It rose over a tower with a tapered roof and some sort of steeple with a wire-framed decoration of some sort on top of it, though the structure was merely a dark silhouette against the starry night sky.
She silently glided up behind the stallion and looked over his shoulder to see what he was standing over, and a scream nearly escaped her.
A mare was on the floor. The same mare as the one in the picture, she realized. But she was bleeding from a wound on the side of her head, the dark blood congealing into her fur and mane as a syrupy puddle of it pooled on the floor around her head. She stared vacantly at nothing, her eyes dark, the whites slowly graying, her mouth open and unbreathing.
In the aura of the stallion’s magic, he held a ball-peen hammer, the head of it stained with blood. It wavered unsteadily as he breathed in sharply before it fell to the wooden floor with a loud clatter. Luna gasped in surprise and the stallion swiftly looked over his shoulder.
“She… I…” he stammered, his eyes locking onto her. “It wasn’t my fault, you see? You understand, don’t you? I didn’t mean to, really! It’s not my fault! It’s… she was the one!”
Luna stepped back, raising her head, her teeth clenched. “What… what have you done?”
His fearful expression worsened, his face contorted with a mixture of terror and rage.
“No… no, no!” he shouted. “I didn’t mean it! It wasn’t me! Get out of here! Get out! Get out!!”
Before she could react, he rushed forward, shoving her back.
She fell back through the bedroom door and out into cavernous darkness, falling away into nothingness as she stared up at the stallion through the doorway, his terrified features rapidly receding as she fell, their mutual screams blending together until the dream at last fell away and Luna’s eyes popped open. She gasped for air, the horrid images of the mare's corpse and the stallion’s desperate eyes still stuck in her imagination as she leaned against the railing of the balcony, her heart still thudding in her chest.
“Murder… a murder!”
She wanted to scream the words, a sick pit of bile building in her stomach. She wanted to wretch, wanted to run or fly anywhere else, and then her thoughts immediately turned to the one whom she should run to.
“Celes—”
She froze. It was nearly dawn. The moon was still in the sky, but she knew instinctively that night had reached its end.
Steadying her nerves, she turned her gaze skyward, took a breath, and let her magic bring the silvery orb down beneath the horizon.
Celestia would rise soon, and the sun with her.
Then she would tell her what she’d witnessed.
Celestia had barely touched her breakfast as Luna told her the tale. She’d rushed to her in such a state that at first Celestia thought she’d taken ill or been injured, but nothing could have prepared her for the words that left her lips: “Murder! Sister, I witnessed a murder!”
“In the castle?!” Celestia had exclaimed.
“No… in the dream realm!”
And at first, Celestia had simply tried to comfort her, reassure her that it was just a nightmare, but Luna had insisted that it was real with such venom, such vitriol, that Celestia had to relent. And so Luna related the whole story to her at breakfast.
When the gruesome tale was finished, Celestia looked down at her stack of pancakes and pushed them away. She’d lost her appetite with all the talk of blood and death, and the pancakes had grown cold and soggy anyway.
“And you’re… absolutely certain that this was a real memory, Luna?” she asked carefully, raising her gaze to meet her sister’s.
“For the thousandth time, yes!” Luna shouted, pounding the table with her hooves.
Celestia shut her eyes and took a deep, calming breath. “How are you so sure? I’ve never heard you say this about any dreams you’ve entered before…”
“Celestia, wilt thou…” Luna shook her head. “Will you listen to me? The dream was too real to be pure imagination. Nightmares have some aspect to them, some exaggerated feature that I can mark as a sign of a troubled mind. But in this, almost everything was as vivid as the waking world. I have seen some truly, truly disturbing things in my battles against nightmares, but this was stark and far too clear to rise out of somepony’s imagination. This was a pony reliving his own traumatic memory!”
“Could it not be that stallion’s twisted fantasy about murdering his wife?” Celestia asked.
Luna shook her head. “Impossible. He wouldn’t have thought about the suitcase, the things knocked over on the dresser, the… the wound…” She swallowed. “I know what death looks like, and what I saw could not be fabricated by a twisted imagination. The two of us, in our reign, have seen much violence. We have seen death. We have seen the cruelty that ponies can inflict on one another. Haven’t we, Sister?”
Celestia narrowed her eyes. “We have.”
“And I’m glad, Celestia,” she sighed, giving a small smile, “that the realm is at peace, and that war and sickness and murder are rare. You’ve… you’ve done well to protect it these thousand years in my absence…”
“If the realm is at peace,” Celestia said, “then you should take some credit for it too, Luna. After all, it was our strength together that helped Equestria to stand on its own in its infancy. And it was only my love for you and the hope of your return that kept me going these centuries to help steer the nation onto its current path. If Equestria is nearly a paradise, it's because I thought my sister deserved to return to naught less.”
Luna stared back at her for a moment. Then she looked down, chuckling as she blinked back tears.
“It’s not fair to say those things to me, Celestia,” Luna whispered. “I have no answer for them. I am unworthy to hear them.”
Celestia came over to her, wrapping her wings around her. “Don’t say that, Luna. Don’t you dare.”
Luna sighed again and let herself enjoy the hug for a moment before gently pushing Celestia away.
“As much as I appreciate it, Celestia, we still have a murderer to deal with,” she said.
Celestia nodded. “Then let’s find him,” she replied.
“Then… then you believe me?” she asked.
“If you are this certain, then how could I not?” Celestia tapped her chin, considering what Luna had told her. “If the memory was real, then we will need to rely on the details to determine where this was and who was responsible.”
“And then we can arrest the fiend!” Luna exclaimed.
Celestia made a face. “Luna, we cannot arrest a pony based on a dream,” she said.
“But he is a—”
“A murderer, yes,” she said. “But Equestria is now a nation of laws. Unless we witnessed the murder - the actual murder - then we cannot simply imprison a pony without a trial. We’ll have to uncover some sort of physical evidence. Or else we'll have no choice but to…”
Luna narrowed her eyes. “No. I will not permit his crime to go unpunished. No evil should ever go unpunished.”
“Then, as I said, we’ll have to find him and see what can be proven. Now then,” Celestia said, “let’s see what we know and what we don’t.”
Luna nodded.
“So, you don’t know this pony or his wife?”
Luna shook her head.
“Nothing about the room was familiar?”
“I have never been there, no,” she said.
Celestia shut her eyes. “Hmm… you mentioned a window…”
Luna gasped. “Of course! I saw a tower through the window! There was some sort of symbol on it… I think it was a bird!”
“Could you draw it?”
“I…” Luna rubbed the back of her neck.
Celestia rolled her eyes. “Or we could have you describe it to one of the servants or a commissioned artist.”
“Yes, that would be better. And also,” Luna said, suddenly remembering another detail, “I heard a bell of some sort. That tower might have been a bell or clock tower!” Then she frowned. “Ah… but there must be thousands of such towers across Equestria. It may not be of much assistance.”
Celestia smiled knowingly. “Unless, of course, you knew somepony who’s toured the nation enough times to be familiar with almost every landmark in every village, town, and city. Granted, such a pony would have needed decades to see them all. Perhaps centuries. Do you know anypony like that?”
Luna smiled back. “I think I do, as a matter of fact.”
Withers Stowey was a town not far from Trottingham. It was a cozy place surrounded by farmland and mostly contained a few shops and had a population of ponies who commuted by train to other, larger towns. It had a few landmarks as well, including, it just so happened, a clock tower with a weather vane atop its steeple in the shape of a chicken.
It was a tower that perfectly matched the tower she'd described to Celestia's artist. The tower she'd seen in that nightmare.
Luna hovered in the air next to a few pegasi members of the Royal Guard.
“Is this the place, Your Highness?” one of them asked.
“I believe so,” she said, looking down at the town. “We’ll need to get closer. I’ll cast an invisibility spell while you find us a place to touch down without being heard.”
She cast her spell as the two guards located an alleyway. They landed and Luna looked up, seeing the tower rise above the city.
“Yes… yes, I’m sure of it now,” she whispered. After all, they couldn’t be seen, but they could still be heard, and there were still ponies out and about on the streets passing by the alleyway. “But the angle is wrong. What I saw happened elsewhere. Follow me…”
She swiftly made her way unseen up the streets, breezing past the town’s citizens as the guards tried to keep track of her despite not being able to see her.
She finally stopped and grunted as the two guards collided with her rear end.
“Silence!” she hissed, looking up. “There!” she exclaimed, pointing with a hoof.
“We… we can’t see where you’re pointing, Your Highness.”
“The tower!” Luna hissed. “I recognize this angle… and look, that house across the street! I recognize that tree in its backyard!”
The two guards could say nothing, but saw that they stood across the street from a humble house with a small garden in the front and a scrawny tree with skeletal branches visible from the back. And beyond that was the clock tower.
“The fiend must live there!”
“Should we detain him, then, Princess?”
Luna was about to say yes, but then she paused remembering Celestia’s words.
“No… remove your armor and then knock at his door. See if you can draw him out long enough for me to confirm his identity.”
“Yes, Your Highness!” The guard murmured, “Um… how should I do that?”
“How should I know that?! Pose as a traveling peddler or some such thing. Or ask about his fence or his shrubbery or… or something!”
“Yes, Princess!” the guard replied.
Luna removed the invisibility spell from the guard and watched him trot up to the front door. He knocked once. When that got no response, he knocked again, this time with more force. A dog next door began to bark, and Luna felt a shiver down her spine when she recognized the sound of it.
A unicorn stallion answered the door, and Luna’s breath caught in her throat.
His expression was different, calmer now, more tired than anything else, but the minuscule amount of doubt she had vanished in an instant, replaced by cold certainty and seething rage that he could stand there so calmly, knowing what he’d done.
She grit her teeth, forcing herself to remain calm as she reminded herself of the reason she was there.
“Yes?” the stallion asked wearily.
“Ah, good afternoon, sir!” the guard asked, giving a broad smile. “I’d like to ask you about your garden.”
“My garden?” he asked. “What about it?”
“Well, I was wondering about… those flowers growing on that bush there!”
“Those? Oh, they were planted by... by my wife. She, um... she liked the smell.”
Luna peered through the door from her hiding place and put herself just out of sight as she teleported in a brief flash inside the house. The stallion had not seen the flash and gave no indication that he heard the sudden pop of her teleporting.
“Well, is your wife home, sir? I’d like to ask her about them!”
The stallion drew himself up. “No, she’s… she's out of town today.”
“Oh, well, perhaps you could—”
“I’m sorry, I have work to do. Excuse me.”
The guard shoved his hoof in the door, preventing it from closing. “Wait, sir! This… this bush could be entered into a contest!”
“What the… contest?! I don’t care about that! Get off my porch!”
As the stallion and the guard continued to argue, Luna made her way further into the house. She rounded the corner of the living room in the front and found herself in a hallway. And at the end of it was a door that she had only seen once in the depths of that nightmare.
She crept down the hallway and gently pushed the door aside, and there it was: the bedroom.
Though it was lit by the sun now rather than the moon, she saw the same bed, the same dresser, and the same window with the clock tower standing in the distance. She looked down and saw the dresser was virtually untouched, but now the portrait of the stallion and his wife had been placed facing down.
She gently raised it with her magic and saw the two of them. Two ponies, both proud and joyous on their wedding day, as though that bliss would last forever.
She looked down at the floor and saw that it was spotless now, but as she knelt down, between the cracks of the wooden floorboards was a tiny spec of brownish red. She nearly pressed her muzzle against it and inhaled through her nostrils, and recognized the coppery scent in an instant.
“...For the last time, I don’t care! Leave now before I call the police!”
She heard the guard’s protests as he was roughly shoved away and the door slammed. As she heard hoofsteps approaching, she teleported herself back outside, appearing in a flash next to the guard.
“Princess! I’m sorry, I—”
“Shh,” she hushed, her hoof placed to her lips. “I’ve found what I needed. Now, both of you will go to City Hall with me to look for the public records. We'll reference this address and find this pony’s name.”
“Then, you don’t wish to alert the authorities?” the guard asked.
Luna shook her head. “We have no evidence,” she said, heaving a sigh. “Nothing but what I saw in the dream realm. Just his nightmare… his… nightmare!”
She suddenly took to the sky and the other guards followed her hurriedly.
“Your Highness, what is it?” the other guard asked as he swooped in next to her.
“Nightmares are the result of our fears and anxieties,” she said, chuckling. “Were his blood totally cold, he would sleep more soundly. No, I think I know what to do now…”
She found herself in that same hallway again. The same elongated shadows, the same muted portraits, and the same sliver of moonlight bleeding through the half-opened door at the end.
She moved in silence, hearing that same barking dog, the sharp sound of the clock on the wall, and the long tolling of the clock tower’s bell.
The door again parted for her, silent on its hinges as she entered the room.
The stallion again stood there, his breath in halting, ragged gasps as he held the hammer in his magic and stood over the corpse of his wife, the both of them bathed in the pale moonlight.
She looked down at the mare, her dead eyes staring but seeing nothing as her head rested in a pool of her blood.
Luna gently took a breath. “Rubber Stamp,” she said quietly, and the stallion whirled around at the sound of his name.
“N-no!” he gasped. “This… it wasn’t—”
“You’re going to say, ‘It wasn’t my fault.’ Aren’t you?”
Rubber Stamp swallowed, backing up and colliding with his dresser, rattling the contents upon it once more. “It… it’s not!”
“Then what did happen?” she asked, keeping her voice calm. She met his eyes and kept her expression plain, free of judgment. She would not smile, but her placid tone of voice seemed to soothe his anger for a moment. “Please, tell me. I am only here to listen. Tell me why you're reliving this same nightmare again and again.”
“I… she…”
He slumped to the floor and looked over at the mare's corpse. A mirthless chuckle escaped him.
“She was cheating on me,” he said. “I worked day in and day out in Trottingham for her. I tried all year for a bonus or a promotion or something, and… and it went nowhere. Just the same thing every day, working in that office, filing paperwork, approving requests, sucking up to the bosses, trying to make their lives easier while I did all the dirty work and kept things moving. Check this, check that, re-check it, stamp it, file it, shred the old one and type up a new one. It’s dull, monotonous work with a long commute and I spent over 12 hours a day on it all to make her happy.”
Luna glanced down at the mare’s body. “And your wife didn’t appreciate it?”
“At first, sure! But after a whole year of trying to do better, trying to get us out from under our debts and everything else, coming home dead tired, I just… I saw her drifting away from me. And I started to notice some things: shed be gone when she should be home, somepony else’s cologne on her dresses, and the hickeys on her neck that I knew I never gave her. I’d come home and she’d treat me like a burden. And when I finally found that note she'd been writing, I… I finally had to accept the truth.”
Luna swallowed. She wanted to say more but knew to let him continue.
“I confronted her. I told her that I knew the truth. Told her I’d forgive her if she’d come clean, that I still loved her, and that we could go back to how things were when we first married. And she did come clean… and then she laughed, told me she didn’t need my forgiveness, didn't care about any good old days, and said she was leaving me for a pony who made twice what I was worth but that she’d still take half of everything in the divorce. That she knew she’d get it all because I’d never fight because I was just a spineless, simpering nopony who—”
She again placed a hoof on his shoulder.
He bowed his head and emitted a shuddering sob. “She was packing,” he whispered, pointing listlessly at the half-filled suitcase on the bed, “when I came in. I don’t remember when I picked up the hammer. I barely remember anything other than the pure rage I felt that everything I’d done for her meant nothing, that she was going to laugh at me, cheat on me, and then rob me blind just for the hell of it! For the contempt of it!”
Luna bowed her head. “So you killed her,” she said.
“I… came into the room, she backed up into the dresser, and she started to scream, and when she wouldn’t be quiet I panicked and… and…”
Luna sat down in front of him. “I see now,” she whispered. “She wronged you. But even so…”
“I’m sorry… I’m so sorry… forgive me, Princess, forgive me…”
As he sobbed into his hooves, Luna heaved a sigh. “I cannot forgive you, Mr. Stamp,” she said, “for I am not the one you wronged. And as unfair as she treated you, you still know in your heart that it was wrong to kill her. If you did not, then you would not be haunted by this memory. This recurring nightmare, this guilt will eat away at you, and you will never know peace.”
Rubber Stamp raised his head, tears streaming down his face. “Please… please, Princess, I can’t take it… what do I have to do?”
Luna got to her hooves. The room around them dissolved, leaving only Rubber Stamp, the body of his wife, and a solitary beam of pure white moonlight.
“You know the answer to that question,” Luna said.
And Rubber Stamp raised his head, staring into the moonlight until it became blinding, searing away the guilt and pain and lies, leaving only the Truth, naked and unobscured by any hint of shadow in his heart…
The next evening, Luna was on her way to her vigil when once again, Celestia met her halfway in the tiled marble hallway.
“I thought you might want to see this, Luna,” Celestia said, unfurling a newspaper and passing it to her.
Luna saw that the paper was turned to one article in particular. It was the Trottingham Times evening edition and reported a murder in the nearby village of Withers Stowey. The suspect, Mr. Rubber Stamp, confessed to murdering his wife after she was caught cheating on him. He’d buried her in the garden behind their house, placing her underneath some of the bushes she’d personally planted.
“It seems you were successful,” Celestia said with a grin. But then her smile faded as she saw Luna bow her head. “Luna? What’s wrong?”
“For this crime, he’ll no doubt suffer some sort of punishment,” Luna said. “Lesser, since he confessed, but there is no doubt that he will go to prison to answer for what he’s done. And some may never forgive him for it. What sort of contrition could one take to repent for taking a pony’s life? What…” she swallowed, raising her head to meet Celestia’s eyes. “What sort of contrition could atone for an even greater misdeed? One that placed the world in danger?!”
Celestia breathed in slowly, letting it out with a sigh. She offered her sister a gentle smile. “That would not be necessary for a pony who has already been forgiven. For one who has already shown her contrition and devotion to Equestria.”
She wrapped her sister in a hug, but Luna did not return it. Instead, she pushed her sister away and continued on toward the balcony to begin her vigil.
Celestia reluctantly let her go and watched her continue on her way. “Luna… let it go, my sister,” Celestia called after her. “There’s nothing more to atone for!”
Luna paused and nodded as she made her way to the balcony. She heard Celestia’s relieved sigh and did not look back. Instead, she looked over the night-shrouded world with a new weariness.
Nightmares… that stallion has justice to face, and need not torture himself with nightmares. But for one who has committed far greater evils, one for whom no justice is given but a proffered hoof of friendship she does not deserve…
She shook her head and closed her eyes. No… for that pony, there is no escaping the guilt, and nightmares are the only true justice…
In the dream world that rose up around her, a purple, swirling mass of smoke appeared next to her.
She looked at it with a rueful grin. "Isn’t that right, my Tantabus?"