SBMS020

There was a cacophony of bellows and screams behind me, but it was muted, dulled, as if I was hearing it from below the surface of a pool of water. The starry black cloud surrounded me, and I saw nothing but it itself, and it was looking at me, and I felt like I understood its thoughts. When you look into the abyss, and see yourself looking back at you – there’s nothing so disorienting. For a second, I could not tell if I was in my own skin, or outside of it looking down into a shop-worn zebra just barely this side of middle age. I blinked, and the disassociation dissipated, and I was myself.

And there was a mare of darkest night standing front of me, and stars like suns shone in her flowing mane, and I could see the pikestaff through her translucent body.

The Spirit. With great thestrian bat-wings, and a long, cruel unicorn’s-horn, and a coat as black as coal. She looked almost confused for a second, and then the glint entered her spectral eyes, and a terrible grin split her lips and showed the assembly her sharp and serrated teeth, teeth that no herbivore born ever kept in its mouth. She looked hungry. And she was looking down, at the foals.

I stomped, once, loudly, and bellowed my greetings to our Mistress.

"Milady! Hail to you, who we have not seen in many an age! How fares you! How shall we address our Mistress?"

"Oh, my beloved warriors, it has been so long since we’ve talked, face to face. The moment of Our release must be drawing close, that such an offering brings Us thus, immenentized, here outside of our imprisonment, if only for a moment. What did you say you had for Us?"

"Thy name, fair Mistress, that we might address thine personage appropriate to the occasion?"

"Really, Sawbones, we are not so ignorant of the world outside our celestial prison walls, that we must be addressed in Ye Olde Equuish. What *you* know, and remember, *We* know, and remember. And more besides. You may address your exiled queen by her heart-chosen name, for we are Nightmare Moon, true queen of Equestria, and the Three Tribes wherever they lay their hooves!" She looked around, as if she had expected some sort of fanfare or spectacle to accompany this dramatic announcement, but there was nothing, and she looked piqued. "Again, have you offered Us these… succulent morsels? It has been too long, not that it was ever really all that often even in the old days. But We remember… the taste…"

"Mistress Moon! We did not bring you foals to be devoured! These are your own Children, apprenticed in full propriety to we your Knights, as squires in vassalage. They are each and each the future of this your Company!"

"Our Company, indeed. One of many, it ought to be. The old Third, the bloody-bannered Third, that held the fortress of Emerald Gorge against the Arimaspi for two terrible years, that held against the traitor legions when all others fled in the rout in the Whitetail Wood, who held the peak of the Canterhorn while all others fled in the face of the Solar traitors. But you left me alone like all the rest in the end, and slipped away across the portals while your Mistress was stripped of her crown by those fickle damnable harmony-baubles. But I strain and I strain my thoughts and I cannot feel any of the others. Have they scattered so far, fled to worlds so far down the Chain of Creation that even I can not hear their deeds?" She looked sad, and a little lost, or at least, as sad and lost as a vast, great spirit in the shape of a corrupted alicorn queen could be sad, and lost.

She turned again to the foals, and narrowed her eyes at them. "Once, before I was this, long before I was this, I was the guiding spirit of Taw Nun, a great and wise polis, and they called me Moloch, and they took their foals, the first-born and first-fruit, the children of their best and brightest, and they boiled them in great braziers before my altar!" She reared up, her green-blue cat-slit eyes wide and mad, her great jagged fangs gaping wide with each articulation over the cringing foals and their crouching sponsors.

"And now, my ponies, my only remaining ponies, they dangle a hoof-full of foals before me, and ask for blessings, and offer not a single blood sacrifice. This is the fruit of my failures, not yours. I feel my hold on this place loosening, and I am tired. The stars whisper to me that their plans are in motion, and I only need be patient. But I have been patient for more than nine hundred years, and I am feeling stretched, and wan, and I, I need something more…" She strode insubstantially forward, passing through a chair as if it was not there, and perhaps it was not there for her. She held a wing out to the pikestaff, but did not touch it, and even then, a black bolt of lightning jumped from the lance to her wing-claw, making her jump as if she had been shocked.

"Oh! Indeed! You all have forgotten more than you’ve remembered! Here is something indeed! But too strong, too strong, I would lose my mind if I took all that in a sitting! I would be as empty as a foal if I drank all that down! Indeed, indeed, in fact, I almost feel something coming on…" She spun on her heels, turning to face the assembly.

"I will return, this is worth the investment indeed! Your service has been well worth the wait! You have my blessings for these paltry foals!" She was waving her forehoof dismissively when the light went out of her great eyes, and she blinked, emptied, then she looked confused.

"What devilry is this, that mine rest is disturbed so? Why have ye brought us thus unprepared before an assembly? I, I do not recall having slept. Where is this? Where am I?" She looked around, distraught, her body-language no longer the brutal domineering pony-eater who lived to terrorize subjects, but rather a lost child waking in an unfamiliar body.

"Pr-Princess?" Gibblets stood and walked forward in his odd bipedal crouch, worried and tender in a way I had never seen him display to anyone, ever.

"Gibblets? Why art thou dressed thus, and here in this rough assemblage? Where is the castle, and our attendants? Where is my si-si-sister?" At this last word, her composure broke, and he reached out with his glamours, and formed a sort of spectral hug for the lost phantasm to collapse into.

"Easy, easy Your Highness, you are merely having a bad dream, a Nightmare. It shall pass, as all such do." His spectral arms mimicked his monkey-paws, stroking her across her crest.

"Do not talk nonsense, Gibblets, thou art no longer our peirrot, thee hath had thine promotion, as thou begged our sister. And thou dost know, that our dominion is over dark dreams; we cannot have a nightmare, ever." She looked both fond and disturbed at the same time. Her eyes scanned the confused ponies of the Company, and settled on the curled foals, hiding from the confused geist-mare.

"Oh, foals! How wonderful to see you in this our presence! How is it your parents hath permitted you here? They are so often protective of children, and our august presence is considered harmful to foals. It has been so very long…" she reached out and tried to stroke the mane of Bad Apple, and then Foufollet, and frowned as her spectral hooves passed right through the fillies as if they were not there, which they were not, for her. "Oh! Oh! Are these ghost-children, that I cannot touch them? Oh, what terrible tragedy hath befallen them, that I cannot hold them in my arms. Oh, o-o-oh Gibblets…" and she started to weep dark starry tears over the heads of the confused apprentices. The little warlock used his phatasmic arms to lead her away from the foals, and calmed down her upset, getting her to rest on her haunches in the middle of the hall.

"Hush, hush. Sleep. You will have great things to do in the evening, you cannot waste your days half-awake and sleep-walking among the day-courtiers." She settled upon the floor of the dining hall, and curled up under the strokes of his glamoured arms, and rested her head upon her forearms.

And then the Spirit was gone.

"Well," said Octavius, "that was certainly something."

Author's Notes:

And there's a promise redeemed. I promised Nightmare Moon in the first submission of the first chapter of this story, and here we are, twenty chapters in, and she's finally made her mad appearance, half Ophelia, half Maleficent.