AUTHOR'S NOTE: The following chapter includes some pretty gory stuff, please read at your own discretion.

As she had done every night since the invasion of Canterlot, Luna lit her horn, lightning bolts searing off its tip and crackling all around her, dissipating throughout the stream. This time, however, a single word crackled through the air around them: Monster.

There. If that didn’t catch the bug-bitch, she didn’t know what would. All that was left now was to wait for something to return, an echo bouncing off that word humming through somepony’s – or, someling’s – subconscious. In the meantime, all she had left to do was to sit and wait, thinking about escape plans, about fortifying herself against anything Chrysalis might try to steal some information right out of her skull, and most decidedly not about the idiot that had wooed her sister and was now free to turn her moon into cotton candy on a whim and toy with her subjects’ hearts and…and make her sister so totally and completely happy, so much happier than she’d ever seen her, even in the days before his arrival when it was just them in…

She opened her eyes, watching a few tear droplets hang in front of her face, suspended in the stream. Cursing to herself, she shook her head and stamped her forehooves together. She was strong. She was the Princess of the Night! She was the warrior-ruler, capable of beating down just about anything the night had ever thrown at her, be it a rabid manticore in the Everfree or a group of thugs who thought she would make an easy ransom (they thought wrong, of course. Very wrong).

Finally, a few sparks leapt from her horn. All angst and anxiety disappeared from Luna’s mind, buried under a squee of triumph. “Finally found you!” She sang, sailing off into the stream, pursuing the sparks’ origin like a bloodhound caught on a criminal’s scent.

“Found you! I found youuu!” She continued like a child winning a round of hide and seek, skipping happily towards a little current. As she approached, she groaned audibly, squinting at the little thread of glowing, black light that occasionally shimmered green. It was just so obvious! Why did it take so long to find the cursed thing?

“Okay, calm down Lulu, you’ve found it, and that’s what matters,” she whispered, the little current wafting past. It was odd: she had expected the Queen’s dream current to slither or hiss by, but it just sort of drifted lightly, a bit like her own, or Tia’s. The Princess frowned. For a creature of such obvious evil, her dream current looked rather normal. Kind of pretty, in its own, dark way.

Shrugging, Luna took a deep breath and plunged into the current, readying herself for anything. Just what would occupy the Changeling Queen’s mind? War? Torture? Conquest? Canterlot in flames? Ponies being enslaved?

She opened her eyes again. Darkness greeted her. She sighed in a strange combination of relief and disappointment. The Queen must have been between dreams, her mind suspended in that strange twilight between REM fits. Not that she’d been hoping to find war and torture and an image of the Queen dancing over a bound image of her sister, but as it stood, she’d now have to dive into the changeling’s subconscious on her own.

“Wonderful,” she sighed. As if this day couldn’t get any worse. Most normal ponies’ subconscious minds were a total hodgepodge of repressed memories and barely-formed emotions, a dumping ground for whatever the conscious mind couldn’t deal with, or just didn’t want to deal with. Now, if that pony was immortal, things could get a whole lot nastier. A normal pony’s subconscious was icky enough, but give someone a few centuries to screw their own psyches up, and they could come up with a whole lot of wretched things to dump down there. She remembered the one time she attempted to dive into her sister’s subconscious, back when she was barely a few centuries old and still exploring her powers as the Princess of the Night. That excursion had ended with her running through a city filled with buildings that looked like her mother’s teats, dodging a pink-maned version of Celestia wielding a six-foot long purple dildo. And her sister was one of the good guys, she didn’t even want to think about what might be in some villain’s head!

Luna took a few deep, quivering breaths, keeping her attention on a group of blotches and swirling colors gathering in the distance, dancing in the darkness like a bunch of marionettes under the control of someone in the middle of a seizure. It hurt to watch, seeing all those colors still a few minutes away from being fully-formed thoughts and notions, but she forced her gaze on them, squinting to keep the worst of the effects away.

The colors reared up and gathered together, the gray, half-formed fluid molding itself into a gaping maw that stretched over her, towering and foreboding. The colors and shapes formed into a cloud, with immediately formed into a cave covered in rock, black as the deepest night, yet glowing with that same strange, fluorescent green that apparently accompanied everything the changelings created. A few more wisps twisted around themselves to form stalactites and little random pebbles on the floor. Lifting her nose to the air, Luna sniffed, inhaling that dank mustiness that hung in the air of every cave.

“This must be the changeling homeland,” she whispered under her breath, peering into the darkness. That explained the level of detail: of course Chrysalis would know every rock in this place, every stone pillar. The smell would always be there as well. Scent was the closest sense tied to memory, after all, she remembered Twilight rattling that little statistic off at some point.

“Twilight…” she whispered, taking a few tentative steps into the yawning maw. Remembering why she was doing this pushed her onward, though she resisted the urge to take off at a dead gallop. The dream was still forming, after all. It wouldn’t do to blunder right out of it and back into Chrysalis’s subconscious, sent spinning and turning back into the darkness to wait for another dream to come by.

“So, this is it?” She muttered, looking around. Her voice echoed off the stone walls perfectly (and why shouldn’t it when the dreamer had spent a lifetime listening to that echo?), reassuring her, helping bury that urge to go flying off into the darkness as fast as she could in a wild search for whatever it was she could be looking for. “I must say, this is mildly disappointing. One would think such a massive civilization would be able to create something like…”

Her voice trailed off as she rounded a corner and nearly stepped into thin air. She paused and gasped, triggering another echo as a pebble, dislodged by her trot, flecked off the ledge and sailed into the darkness. She watched as it bounced off something, a tiny clack echoing around her. Hunching her eyebrows, she gazed off into the dark, letting loose another gasp to bounce off the cavernous walls as a thousand dark tendrils materialized, tracing out a cavern big enough to hold Canterlot castle itself, all lit up with green lanterns to put her own stars to shame. A castle materialized before her eyes, dark minarets and towers rising into existence, all aglow like Canterlot at night, but again with green fluorescence rather than a candle’s warm glow. The scraggly towers sat atop fortress walls to put the ancient garrisons she knew and loved to shame, accessible only by a wrought-iron portcullis, with a drawbridge spanning a canyon so deep she didn’t even want to think about how far down it might go.

“…ahem…yes, something like that,” she added, trying very hard to sound nonplussed. Noting the black staircase appearing before her, she slowly trotted down into the cavern, reaching the great bridge and traveling over its wooden surface. She took note of the heavy way her hooves sounded on the ancient, creaking wood, the way the massive chains suspending it clanked as she trotted along. Obviously, Chrysalis was not the kind of ruler to just sit in her room all day while lazily passing decrees and making the occasional appearance at state functions. Only someone who trotted over this bridge a thousand times would remember this distinct sort of creak.

She paused just before the portcullis, the wrought-iron prongs decorating its underside looking very suddenly like teeth. It was an apt metaphor: she had no idea what she might encounter in there, but if she wasn’t careful, it could gobble her down as easily as any monster, leaving her a vegetable floating in her own juices in the Crystal Dungeons. Most ponies’ nightmares might never have accomplished that, she was an all-powerful night goddess after all. But this was Chrysalis, Queen of the Changelings! Who’s to say she had never encountered something worse? Something not even the Princess of Night could handle?

Needless to say, Luna wasn’t seriously considering just turning around and leaving. Her duties to her country and her need to help her friends would never have allowed that, not in a million years. But then there was that subconscious fear anyone would feel when standing over some deep ledge, looking down, and seeing an unknowable darkness. She wasn’t considering backing out, but some of that bravado she’d had when she first walked into this place had taken quite the hit.

Then a scream echoed through the cavern. Something high-pitched, and filled with fear. This wasn’t the scream a filly emitted when she opened up her presents on Hearthswarming and found that new toy she’d been gazing at through a store window for a month and a half, and it wasn’t that little yip that same filly might let out when she turned on the lights and discovered a centipede skittering along the wall. This was the sort of drawn-out cry one might hear from a housewife’s lungs when the stallions in full armor showed up at the door, removed their helmets, and informed her that papa wasn’t coming home. This was the scream of someone in the middle of a visit to some beloved family member’s hospital bed when the EKG printout suddenly flatlined and they realized nana’s little nap was going to be much, much longer than expected. This was a cry of pure, emotional agony, only ever emitted when somepony realized all hope was lost, and that their world had forever changed into something terrible and unrecognizable.

Running off pure instinct, the Princess took off across the castle’s courtyard at a dead gallop, all worries for her own safety forgotten like so much luggage at the castle entrance. Judging from the direction of the scream, it sounded a bit like it came from somewhere deep within the castle’s keep: a heavily fortified tower standing at the center of the courtyard. The tower stretched up into the sky, a few scraggly spires with a large, center structure, all pointed and black, of course. The occasional, asymmetrical window lit up the tower here and there, yet that wasn’t what gave Luna pause at the heavily-fortified, stone entrance.

The moment she set hoof inside, the air grew stuffier, like trying to breathe through a mass of cotton balls. That oppressive heat growing in her chest was followed with a stench like rotting meat and infected wounds, a sour sort of smell that invited every thought and memory of death. And then there was the atmosphere of the place, a feeling that clung to the air itself and seemed to fill the body more with each breath. Fear and terror bombarded her senses with all the same realness as that rotten smell, with just a hint of some sadistic enjoyment of it all. Something was very wrong here. Something horrible was waiting for her in this place, something which made its home amongst death and showered in the blood of everyone and everything around it. Something evil the likes of which Equestria had rarely seen in its entire history, and which could make Chrysalis appear like a little filly playing in the garden by comparison.

“Not real,” she repeated to herself, plunging inside like someone taking a step off a diving board. Just had to do it fast, before her mind caught up with what her body was doing. She continued the chant in between short gasps of breath to keep as much of that fetid air out of her lungs as possible. “Not real. None of it. Not real. Not real. Not real.”

She took her first, shaking steps under the arch of the stone doorway, the door squeaking open on hinges in desperate need of an oiling. The shriek they unleashed as the door swung open was not too unlike the scream that had lured her inside. Of course, the moment she stepped a few feet away from the door, it slammed shut with a rumbling thud, casting the already-darkened hallway into pitch blackness. She’d been expecting this, however, and so the illumination spell she’d had prepared from the moment she stepped under the stone archway was all set and ready to go within a blink of the eye.

She squinted through the eerie, deep-blue light. Unsurprisingly, it lit up a circle barely five feet around her, not even enough to touch both walls at the same time, or to make out a ceiling. The darkness itself seemed to suck the light right out of the air, swallowing it like some deep, foreboding monster hiding in the shadows. Just what you’d expect in a nightmare.

A few steps in, and a changeling reared up at her, its fangs bared, its head appearing out of the darkness. Luna took a few quick steps back, the circle of light immediately transforming into a shield bubble to buy her a few extra seconds, a hoof rising reflexively to fend off any attack. Yet the changeling remained where it was, locked in place, fangs still bared. Curious, the Princess set her hoof down and took a few steps forward. “Hello?” She asked, the light slowly working its way along the changeling’s body, revealing more of its figure.

As light spilled over the creature’s hind quarters, she gasped and darted back again, resisting the urge to gag. She turned away, her eyes wide, a hoof jammed into her mouth to suppress the gag still threatening to rise from her stomach. Once the feeling subsided and the urge to upchuck passed, Luna shook herself and took those next few steps forward.

Beneath the waist, the changeling was gone. Just gone. Green, fluorescent blood soaked the rock beneath what remained, with a trail leading off into the darkness behind it. “It…dragged itself here,” she said, her voice sounding unsteady in the darkness. “It was sliced in half…and it just dragged itself along until it…bled out.”

Now it was obvious. The changeling’s fangs weren’t bared in fury, but in shock and terror. It had been in the last moments of life, dragging itself along by its forehooves, the pain unimaginable, and as the lights dimmed it had let out a silent prayer: no, please! Please! Not now! Not like this, alone, in the dark! Please! Don’t let me die…don’t let me...

She turned away again, dry heaving. She wished there was an echo when she’d gasped earlier. That would’ve been something. As it was, the darkness swallowed up every sound, just like it did her light. For the first time that night, she seriously debated turning back. It was obvious there was nothing useful in this wretched place. Journeying further would just reveal more terrors; more things to make both her and the black Queen turn over in their sleep. Thing was…

…there’s still that scream. Someone else was in this hell, right in the midst of the same tortures that had ended the life of the poor soul before her. Imagined or real, changeling or pony, she could never in good conscience leave anyone in such a terrible state. It wasn’t just a matter of being a princess, but a matter of being a fellow sapient being! What sort of kind, loving soul would leave someone suffering here just out of fear?

“The sort unworthy of the title ‘Princess’,” she muttered to herself, a hoof tapping the tiara in her mane. Focusing a bit more magic in her horn, she stepped deeper into the darkness, her magic straining to fight back the darkness with every step. As she walked into the endless void, the strain grew visibly more, the darkness clawing at her light. “Not real, not real, not real…” she repeated.

The hallway remained, for the most part, featureless. Every now and again, an old, crusted green bloodstain would greet her, or a disembodied leg would appear. She passed a room filled with webby fluid she recognized as the remnants of changeling egg sacs, but with charred remnants and scorch marks where the eggs were meant to be. She tried very, very hard not to imagine what had happened there, not to imagine the tiny bodies all curled up in their gestation chambers, unaware as some horrifying wretch danced among them, a flame in one hand and some sort of accelerant in the other…the tiny bodies resting blissfully until the beginnings of flames began curling against the exterior of their sacs…the little ones turning over uncomfortably as the fluid inside slowly rose to a boil…

“Not real…” she whimpered pathetically. “Not real…not real…

The next horror came once she reached the bottom of a staircase, looked up, and let out a high-pitched cry. The torch sconces lining the stairs each had a changeling head substituting for a flame, each jaw agape in horror, each set of cold, pupil-less eyes wide-open, all spiraling with the stairs up into the darkness. The sheer absurdity of it, the twisted, demented genius behind it, was too much for her. The Princess’s knees finally buckled and she fell with a deep thud, her stomach meeting cold concrete. Her body collapsed against the stairs, the edge of the first step digging into her shoulder. Even when Nightmare Moon’s evil had infected her mind, nothing this wretched had ever occurred to her.

“What is this?” She gasped, fighting back tears but unable to keep her voice from cracking frantically. “Just what kind of horror could this nightmare be reenacting!? What could possibly justify this much fear!?” She should run. Whatever was up there, it held nothing but terror for her, and she should just run and run and run until she was as far away from this place as she could get, with as many cities, countries, and preferably continents as possible between her and this damned, cursed tower.

Then the crying started.

At first, she thought it might be coming from her own throat, as if she’d lost all connections with her own body and had started crying without realizing it, like some horror story cliché. But after sealing her own mouth and forcing her throat to lock up, she realized just how wrong she was. The crying rolled towards her from somewhere high up in the darkness, past the gaping jaws and terrified gazes of the changeling heads. It was the sort of cry you’d expect from a small, terrified child, lost in the woods, wondering where mommy and daddy were. The sort of cry you might hear from a lost teenager cowering in some hiding spot in an old, dark house, trying to tell themselves that the heavy footfalls outside were just the wind. Slowly, her hooves shaking, the Princess pushed herself up, her body rising from the glossy, black floor. “Not real…not real…none of it’s real…”

The hallway at the top of those long, endless stairs had been transformed into a slaughterhouse. Changelings hung from the ceiling, bits and pieces missing from their bodies, hooks piercing through the holes in each of their hooves. The chitin around each of the hooks was cracked and bleeding without exception, allowing blood to dribble down each body in irregular drizzles and streams. And then, to her horror, she realized there were pony bodies dangling amongst the changelings. Two of them: a mare with a hot pink coat and a stallion with a strawberry blonde, short-cropped mane, both with their mouths hanging open, frozen in a silent scream of horror, their eyes rolled back until only the whites were visible. Green goop from changeling containment pods mixed with blood in a thick fluid matted to their coats. Luna’s eyes wondered unbidden from those horrified expressions, where she discovered the hooks pierced through their fetlocks like so much meat in a freezer.

“Nuh…no…” she gasped, stumbling over the ground until she collided with the far wall. Her eyes pinched themselves shut, trying to shut out the horrors swinging in the darkness behind her, but she couldn’t keep those dead, rolled-back eyes from rising in her mind’s eye. Insane… she realized. This must be what going insane feels like. I shouldn’t have come here…this isn’t real…shouldn’t have come here…not real not real NOT REAL OH MY MAKER ABOVE…

Another sob brought her back down to reality. “Not real,” she whispered, her voice solid and confident again. “The product of a tortured mind, yes, but not real, not real, not real…”

A breeze drifted through the hall, and voices followed it. She heard mostly the characteristic hiss of changelings in natural form, but there were one or two ponies in there too. They whispered through Luna’s ears: You were supposed to protect us…Why? Why did you fail us…I died screaming…

She clenched her teeth in a desperate bid to fight back the voices, her hooves locking over her ears. “Not real! Not real! Not real!”

She trailed off, finding the strength to stand again as the wind and the voices faded. Her hooves quaked unsteadily amongst the blood coating the floor, both the red and the green mixing together into an eerie purple. It would have been poetic if it hadn’t been so unbelievably wrong. She turned to the massive door she had come here for: a large, wooden thing this time, set in a stone arch, as was apparently tradition amongst changelings. A humongous knocker hung on its surface, but she didn’t even bother with it. She took a few deep breaths, muttered a few more “not real’s” to herself, and pushed through with a shoulder that shook violently as she forced her way past.

Chrysalis’s throne sat at the other end of a black cavern, against the far wall. It dominated the room, reaching up almost to the green, glowing stalactites that decorated it and provided illumination. Its back was divided into spires, much like the structure it inhabited, and seated in the glossy, black structure was a certain someling Luna knew only too well. The changeling sat with her head slumped, mossy green hair cascading over her eyes, forehooves splayed out over the armrests of the throne.

“Chrysalis?” Luna asked, taking a few, tentative steps towards her.

The changeling bolted upright, fear-filled eyes locking with Luna’s own. The Alicorn paused mid-step. The Queen’s eyes were puffy and swollen, and not just from tears. The trace of blood polluting some of the green of her irises told of endless beatings, probably a few nights spent with wounds that should have been tended to by doctors. Her chitin was cracked in places, and her fangs had been chipped by something slamming into her mouth repeatedly. Worse yet, a chain was locked around her neck, held in place with a heavy padlock. Luna could see scuffs and scratches on the chitin around her throat where the chain had been used like a leash. Something told her that if Chrysalis were to turn around, she might find even more along the back of her neck, where the chain would have been used to tow her around like an irate dog.

And then there were the eyes. Massive bags hung under the changeling’s eyes, but despite this they were as wide as dinner plates. Tired and fearful. It was a look she’d seen on too many mares with husbands who liked to blow all their bits at the local tavern, mares who’s manes fell out at an early age from the fear of that one night he would come home with just that right number of beers sloshing around in his belly to take the nightly beating a few hits too far.

“Chrysalis,” Luna gasped, taking a few more steps towards her supposed nemesis, sympathy oozing from her heart. “What’s happened…”

“Don’t come!” Chrysalis barked, shrinking back against the throne. “Don’t! Don’t come any closer!”

“Chrysalis, why?” Luna asked, still shocked at the wretched sight before her. “What’s happened to you? What could be so traumatic that…”

“I said don’t come, you idiot!” She screamed. “He’ll know! He always knows!”

“He?” A few steps closer, and Luna stretched out a hoof, offering it to the changeling. “Who’s he?”

The expression on the fallen queen’s face locked into absolute terror. She shrank even deeper into her throne, whimpering, tears welling in her eyes. It only took a moment for Luna to recognize the old cliché. Behind me…

“That would be me, stupid little pony,” a snide, deep voice cackled behind her. Luna’s wings seized up, straightening out in the air reflexively. She turned her wide, haunted gaze around, and faced down pure evil itself.

A massive, powerfully built changeling stallion reared up behind him and grinned at her, saliva dripping off rows of razor-sharp fangs. The stallion stood at least a head taller than Luna, his crew-cut, teal mane disheveled and tinged with crusty remnants of blood and viscera, his eyes looking at her with the sort of hungry look she might have seen through the bars of a maximum-security dungeon or an asylum for sex offenders, a look that froze her heart just looking at it.

“Wh-what…” she swallowed, shivered. “What are you!?”

“I gotta say,” the gruff, gravel-filled voice of the stallion filled the halls with all the warmth of a serial killer talking to the bailiffs marching him to the hangman’s noose. “I didn’t know my little Chryssy wanted to bring her friends around to play. If I’d known, I would’ve saved some of myself for you, sweet thing.”

A whimper behind her caught Luna’s attention, and she whirled around to find that the adult Chrysalis had been replaced with a sniffling filly, looking back at her with massive, teal eyes, rubbing a tiny hoof at her tear-soaked cheeks. The filly looked beyond Luna with a thousand-yard stare, the sort of look that belonged on the faces of soldiers returning to war and stallions that had lost their families to house fires, but never on little filly’s faces, never so terribly blank a look on a filly’s face. It wasn’t right. It simply shouldn’t have been allowed to be. Yet here it was, and when Luna turned back to face the nightmarish stallion, the latest offense to seize her senses took hold as a massive, black growth sprouted out between his legs, growing in size and strength as he leered at her.

Luna’s muzzle twisted in utter revulsion as her eyes flitted from the stallion’s growing erection to his smug grin, her gaze flitting from one to the other as if she were watching a sideways tennis match. She had to swallow back vomit at the mere implication of what this disfigured thing in front of her was implying, but she did so with the help of a good, dear friend: Burning Homicidal Rage.

“You. Dare!?” She spat, taking a step forward, her wings flaring. “You, a mere pony’s daydream, dare imply that to the Princess of the Night!?”

All at once, the thing before her shuffled back. Its fetid, black growth wilted beneath it as it backed off. “I am…”

“Who fucking cares!?” She bellowed as her hoof smashed across the thing’s face in a powerful roundhouse. Several blood-covered fangs flew free, clattering to the floor as the things chin hit the tiled ground. “I am thy Princess, thy ruler, thy goddess. Ye are nothing but the quivering, gelatinous mass caught beneath mine hoof, waiting to be scrap'd off at the nearest curbside! A wretched, lowly cur, a shadow of what yearns to be reality, an impertinent, fool-born blind-worm! For this, thou shalt stand in fire up to the navel and in ice up to th'heart, and there th'offending part burns and the deceiving part freezes f’r this insult, this laughable attempt on our hon’r!”

Still, the nightmarish thing stood before her. Its hoof reached up to its cheek, massaging at the wounded part of its face, the chitin now turning dark brown with an ugly bruise. Between its hind legs, the growth which had been so imposing before now shrank until it practically sucked up into its body.

“Hast thou nothing to say f'r this embarassment!?” Luna growled.

The creature, stunned beyond words, merely rubbed at its cheek and shook its head.

“Then begone from our sight,” Luna said, turning away with a huff. “We have wasted enough of our precious sleeping time on thee; thou mangled knotty-pated maggot-pie.”

A few moments later, the rushing sound of a nightmarish construct vanishing behind her filled her ears. Luna didn’t even bother turning around, instead opening her eyes. Before her, Chrysalis sat up in her throne, eyes wide, hooves splayed out comically, gone were the chain and the collar and scuffed and dented chitin and, most importantly, the fear. Instead, she looked at Luna as if the Princess had just materialized from the air itself.

“Luna?” She asked, looking around the throne room as if she were expecting answers to what was going on to leap out at her from the darkened corners. “Wh-what are you…”

And then she was gone, the little threads of thought and emotion holding the dream together scattering like so much dust in the wind, leaving nothing but the empty blackness of Chrysalis’s subconscious. Gasping heavily, Luna closed her eyes and counted backwards from five. When they opened again, she was back in her cocoon, sealed up in a sub-basement deep beneath the Crystal Palace. She heaved a heavy sigh, breathing in the changeling fluid and wincing with the still-fresh injuries coating her physical body.

“That was…intense…” she mumbled to herself, shaking the sleep from her eyes and pressing a hoof to her forehead. Indeed, that had been one of the most intense nightmares she’d ever needed to rescue anyone from, pony or changeling. That sort of nightmare could only be born of the purest, most total fear, the kind of fear only some horrific trauma could summon. When Luna’s eyes opened again, that old steely determination had returned in them. She needed to have a little chat with the Queen.