“Maybe it means… no, no, that can’t be right.” Twilight tapped the end of her chin with her hoof, one eye squinted down at the paper in front of her.

She bit the inside of her lip, moving her jaw around in thought. She momentarily flashed her gaze towards a pair of candles on the table, making sure they were properly spaced and at a suitable height to provide lighting. This was at least the tenth time she had assured herself they were perfect. A tired sigh left her lips as she looked down at the small piece of parchment once more.

Her wings itched at her sides as she adjusted herself, her pillow losing its fluff under her constant pressure. The creep testing involving mechanical values flashed through Twilight’s mind, but she quickly abandoned the thought. She already understood physics and mechanical testing of materials.

Actually, she had mastered quite a lot. Not only was she one of the few ponies holding research papers in magic, equine anatomy, material engineering, and even weather mechanisms, she was also the first pony to graduate from Celestia’s personal tutelage in over a hundred years. Intelligence aside, not only was she one of only eight ponies able to use the Elements of Harmony, she was also the newly crowned Princess of Equestria. There was little she hadn’t done or couldn’t understand.

However, sitting on the thin tan parchment in front of her was a riddle that she couldn’t grasp, a clue that she couldn’t see.

It was a poem.

Twilight’s lips puckered and twisted as she attempted to read the words in a different way for the hundredth time that night. But once more no ground was gained or new knowledge presented to her. It made her teeth grit in aggravation.

“What is the difficulty with this?” She questioned herself for the thousandth time. “The secret texts of Tirek weren’t this difficult to decipher.” Her lip fed itself between her teeth. “Maybe… maybe there’s an additional text that’s needed to decipher it.” The idea was plausible, but unlikely, and Twilight knew it.

She had not found the short scroll with any other additional documents or books. It was highly unlikely that, if the document was important enough to warrant a translation key, it would be kept in anything short of a secure vault. Instead, she had found it caught between two texts, one referring to flight patterns and the other to meteorological history in relation to geography. It was neither the place for a poem nor a secure document.

For the millionth time, Twilight sighed.

“Maybe I should go to bed,” she spoke softly. “Spike does make a good point when he says a good night’s sleep helps the mind.” As if to encourage herself, her mouth opened widely to release a restrained yawn, shaking her jaw lightly as she tried to stifle it. Her wings drooped in defeat.

“Alright,” she resigned, “but tomorrow, I’m going to get to the bottom of this poem if it kills me. Metaphorically speaking, of course. The pillow beneath her lifted slightly as she rose from it, hooves trotting lightly across the floor. It took little time for her to reach the stairs, and even less to make the short ascent up them.

When she reached the top, she leaned her head over the railing, looking at the candles burning above the texts. Her horn hummed with a brief spell of magic, summoning a dark magenta aura about it. With a small flick of her head, the lights beneath were extinguished, covering the room in the familiar blanket of darkness.

Nodding in satisfaction, the alicorn walked into her room, shutting the door behind her lightly as she did to avoid waking up Spike. Her bed was stretched out along the far wall, illuminated softly under the light of Luna’s moon.

Twilight tiptoed towards the bed, careful to make little noise as she passed by her sleeping dragon. She settled into the blankets easily, savoring the softness of the mattress and the insulation of the sheets warming her body over the cool night air.

But sleep still did not come.

Her eyes remained stubbornly shut, hoping to force the comfort of sleep upon herself, yet it still did not come. The air was still, Spike’s breathing soft, and her bed more than simply comfortable, but sleep evaded her expertly nonetheless.

She grunted in annoyance as she turned over, eyes opening as she did so. She stared out the window, looking up at the few clouds that dotted the sky. They were thin and wispy, hardly enough to be considered cloud cover at all. It was either due to the laziness of the weather team or a request from a group hoping to conduct some activities at night. The moonlight wasn’t bright, but it was better than nothing.

But thoughts of the clouds slowly pulled Twilight’s mind away from the poem still sitting on the table far beneath. However, it didn’t ease her mind into the slumbering state she was hoping for. Instead the young alicorn found her mind thinking of a mare that frequently populated the skies, making the vacant air above more of a home than the ground below.

Twilight felt a smile pull at her lips and her covers grow twice as hot. She briefly entertained the notion they simply insulated her own growing heat. She pulled the blankets over her head, hiding her blushing features from the world. Though no ponies were currently looking upon her, it was a hard thing to say that no pony had seen her blush.

Over the past few weeks, Rainbow Dash had done a marvelous job at making Twilight’s lavender cheeks turn every shade of red on the visible color spectrum.

Whenever they were out in public together, the rainbow-maned mare made their relationship more than abundantly clear to any passing pony. Brushing her wings over the alicorn’s back, letting her cyan hooves gently graze at her undercarriage, softly licking behind her ears, kissing with near-reckless abandon…

The moan left Twilight’s lips before she knew it was coming.

She pulled the covers tighter over her head, willing for the mysteries of the poem to plague her mind more than the pegasus at the moment. She needed sleep to think clearly, but she had a greater chance of simply tiring her already taxed mind with thought than to “pleasure” herself into slumber.

It was practically molten beneath the covers.

Twilight focused hard on the poem, reciting under her breath each of the fifteen lines that made up the entire poem. There wasn’t a meter that carried it or tune it was spoken across. They were just words that paused between each line.

For once, Twilight was disappointed with her analytical mind. The idea had occurred to her far earlier in the day that finding the meaning of the poem would be far more difficult for her due to her very realistic and concrete nature, but she never imagined it would be this difficult.

She only barely suppressed a grunt as she threw the covers off of her body, letting the night air nip at her now exposed coat. She grumbled, realizing that the chill only wakened her even more than before.

What she needed was a pony that understood the arts better than she did-- not that they would be hard to find. But it had to be a pony that was used to teaching, or at least skilled in such matters. It was easy to understand something, but it was a rare trait to be able to make clear to others the thoughts of one’s own mind.

Against her better judgment, Twilight turned her head back to the window, looking out to the dark night sky. The clouds that had strewn the sky had since moved on, either by the wind or dissipation. All that was left was the pale moon left hanging against the black backdrop. It was a beautiful sight, one that a pony could enjoy without an artistic eye.

Twilight’s eyes lifted as she realized what that meant.

“Princess Luna,” she whispered to herself enthusiastically, well aware that a raise in her volume would awaken her stubborn-to-sleep dragon.

It was so obvious! Of course the princesses were great teachers. They needed to be in order to rule, and Luna had to be artistically inclined if she was to make the stars as she did. Celestia was credited with it before Luna’s return, but it took only a brief amount of time for the grace to be returned to the younger alicorn.

If there was a pony she could ask about the poem, Princess Luna was the one for the job. And, just like all things that were simple for her to understand, Twilight already had a plan to meet her.

It would take far too long to try and find her in the halls in Canterlot, as travel alone would likely exhaust the night princess’s court hours, and Twilight could not wait until the next night. However, thanks to the information Scootaloo had passed on following her outing with her friends, she knew that Princess Luna had an additional way to keep track of her ponies.

“What better way for her to show me what the poem means than in a dream?” Twilight was almost giggling with excitement. The idea seemed to implausibly simple right now; it was a wonder she had not done it before.

That was when she realized she had to fall asleep in order to dream. Dreams being formed by the usually least active and involuntary sections of the brain, they were only able to work once the motor functions of the body were temporarily halted for REM cycles.

Twilight’s mind pondered quickly any ideas that she could use. Papers, research, documentation, literature; any findings that could possibly help her fall asleep and give her the greatest chance of dreaming.

Her mind recalled one.

Her eyes lightly fluttered as she recalled the information. It was a dissertation from Starswirl, as most of the important documents always were. In it, he theorized a spell that strengthened certain sections of the brain so their impulses were more likely to induce dream states, and, as a consequence, sleep.

Twilight had yet to try the spell herself, but if there was a good time for everything, then this would be it. Best case scenario, she would fall asleep, find Luna, discover the purpose of the infuriating poem, and then wake up to a bright new morning. Worst case scenario… well, at least she was already in her bed.

Summoning her magic into her horn, Twilight focused her mind on creating the silent incantation of the spell. The familiar vibrations of her horn were enough her magic was working.

The sudden loss of feeling also helped.

Twilight gasped as she awoke. Well, awoke wasn’t quite the right word.

Her lavender eyes quickly looked around to see where she was. It took only a blink of her eyes to realize she was no longer in her room, laying over her comfortable bed. The longer her eyes lingered over the area surrounding her, the more obvious it became where she was.

The landscape was vast and unmarked. There were no rivers, roads, or even stars above to show her where she was. The air was still, with not even a single wisp of wind pushing against her coat.

But the dead giveaway was mountains of books surrounding her, stretching for miles into the air above her.

“It worked!” she cheered happily, prancing lightly in place as she marveled at the volumes of texts around her. “Yes! It’s so good to know that something productive was finally done today!” Her prancing devolved back into trotting, letting her move at a joyful pace forwards.

Her eager lavender eyes scoured the cover of each text she could see, reading the spines as they climbed higher and higher into the sky. Her wings flapped excitedly, giving her greater and greater altitude to read the titles of each of these novels with.

But with each one she read, her excitement was dampened.

“History of Early Equestria,” she noted the spine of one book before turning to another. “Lessons for Early Foalhood, Notes Regarding Dual Female Reproduction, Naked Singularity, Spellbound Fireflies, Growing Pains...” a slow sigh left her lips.

“These are books that I’ve already read.” Twilight was disappointed. Not surprised, just disappointed.

It made perfect sense that all of the texts were things she had either previously read, wrote, or experienced. This was her mind, after all. She laughed a little now at the idea of finding a book she didn’t recognize, seeing some words she hadn’t experienced before.

She thought the poem was driving her crazy. Twilight knew she was liable to lose her mind trying to figure out how her mind had conjured a book she had never read or experienced before.

“Hello!”

That wasn’t her voice.

The alicorn’s movements stiffened as her coat bristled, ears perking to their tallest. Her wide lavender eyes stared forwards, stiff as a statue in the Canterlot Gardens. Slowly, eerily so, the alicorn began to hear the soft clopping of hooves. They weren’t disguised or in a rush. They moved at an even pace. Practiced, one might say.

That made Twilight smile.

“Is anypony here?”

It was Luna; it had to be. There were no other ponies that could so freely enter her dreams, let alone the dreams of any pony. It was an art lost when Princess Luna was banished, and it only made sense that she was the only one now who could cast it.

The mare began to lightly trot towards the sounding of the approaching hooves, hoping to limit the time spent searching for the princess. The sounds of clopping hooves grew in volume the closer the two became, and Twilight unintentionally found her pace increasing.

Striding past another column of books, the lavender mare turned to see what she thought would be The Princess of the Night, Guardian of Dreams.

The pony she saw was not the pony she was expecting.

“Rainbow?” Twilight spoke the mare’s name curiously, as if unsure that the pony with a muscular feminine figure, rainbow mane and tail, and pink eyes was the pony she was thinking of.

Said mare raised her own brows in surprise.

“Twi?” She asked in mild shock. “What are you doin’ here?”

Author's Notes:

Let me make it clear that this is an experiment, of course. It doesn’t flow like my usual stories because I’m attempting a different method of narration and dialogue while trying to mix two genres together. What they are will become quickly obvious next chapter. That said, please be honest with any reviews or comments, as I value knowing my strengths and weakness. I do tally them.

Also, again, in case it isn’t quite obvious, Twilight and Dash are in a relationship, it is physical and that WILL come into play, hence the rating and warning.