I was dreaming again, though this time it was different. It was not completely dark like before, where I would typically wander in a wilderness of black feeling my way along. This time there was a dull light that emanated all around with no source. I looked up half expecting the moon, and instead saw a blue, green, and brown orb covered with white swirling clouds. I looked back at the place I was in and saw the ground itself seemed to glow softly, just bright enough to see shadowy objects, rocks and natural formations. This was the light we played under when we first woke in the evening, and the light we said goodbye to before going to bed in the morning...could this place really be the moon? Deep down I felt I had been navigating to this destination ever since I first heard the whispers, guiding me through the black that separated home from the heavens, all those dreams that muttered things just out of earshot. I had found the thing I was looking for. It was all around me.

"You have found me, little Jen." The voice was strong, authoritative and almost threatening. A portion of the very air in front of me darkened into a void. The voice projected from that abyss, "We can finally speak face to face."

"Who are you? What do you want from me?!" I demanded. If a horrible creature was going to devour me, I wanted it over with as quick as possible. I couldn't have been the only one who hated long waits.

She suddenly appeared up close to my face in all her wicked glory, obscured by shadows as she was. Her eyes large orbs like twin moons, pupils like beams penetrating my soul. The aura surounding her was a miasmic mass of swirling blues, purples and blacks, at once silhouetting a magnificent alicorn, and then hiding it in chaotic maelstrom.

I furrowed my brow and asked "what is that? Is that a thing or something?"

She pulled back a bit, the aura losing some of its energy. "What do you mean...what thing?!?"

I tilted my head to look around her sides at the aura. "That whole 'get in your face when you are not expecting it' thing. Why would you do that? You could get smacked or spit on when you are that close."

The dark mysterious entity turned away slightly and murmured, "I never thought of that. Normally the other goody two-shoe-day ponies cower in their nightmares when I do that." She looks back to me and demands, "Why are you not affected so?"

I straighten up and put one hoof forward, "I have been bullied my entire life, picked on and pestered for what I am. You can haunt my dreams and do your misty mist trick, but you will be just like the rest, whatever you are."

The entity seemed taken aback by my vehemence and watched me for countless seconds. Or hours perhaps, for there was no concept of time here. When she finally spoke, it was a softer tone, yet still imperialistic. "Strong, impetuous, and naive. I can work with that. You are a child of the night, as are the rest of your kind. Of all those that walk the land, your kith and kin appreciate me most, or did a long time ago. The other ponies shall soon learn what it means to worship the night and bend knee to me, for I am the Mare in the Moon!" Her chest thrust out and she held her head high as though crowds were before her.

The Mare in the Moon! I knew this story, as did all young thestrals. Almost 1000 years ago the princess of the night nearly succeeded in a coup to supplant her sister for dominance in the heavens. The stories passed down from parent to foal told of the anguish the younger princess endured as the realm shunned the night, and by extension, her. Countless attempts she made to fix this transgression. There was even a tale about a separate colony she tried to establish. They were called the original Children of the Night, though nopony knew if our race of thestrals were descended from that colony or if it was another set of ponies, if it ever existed at all. And here this legendary force of nature stood before me.

I had started to nurture a certain disdain for leaders and figureheads at my very young age, mostly from dealing with adults that thought they knew best. From my limited experience, all I ever witnessed was whoever was the biggest or the strongest made the rules, benefiting from them. Even the bullies followed the same pattern, so this would have normally been great opportunity to mock yet another high and mighty pony. I...couldn't. In this Mare in the Moon, I saw the potential for wrongs to be righted. There was a rumor spoken of how her return would make all equal under her power, and I believed every bit of it. With reverence I seldom showed for anypony, I bowed my head and extolled, "I am sorry, your Majesty. I did not know who you were. I...I am sorry." I felt so very small. Granted I was still in my filly years, but how often do you meet royalty? Historically, the relations between day and night species had never been great these last several centuries, and it had to be a long time since any thestral dared to approach the great day princess, Celestia. Now I was in the presence of our future queen!

If she won the war.

I kept my head down as I continued, "Your Majesty, if I may ask...does this mean you are returning soon, and you are going to make all ponies equal...all of us?"

I could see her mist enshrouded hooves step closer to me with my head still down and she spoke quietly next to my ear, "I know what you want of me child, yet that is a miracle I cannot perform. Rest assured you are more useful to me than any of the others because of the hardships you suffer, so similar are they to my own."

I lifted my head and stared into those proud eyes to ask, "How is my deformity a boon to you? I cannot fly and nopony will take me seriously."

The regal shadowy form began a slow saunter around me. It felt like she was assessing my value, inspecting a potential tool. "Your pain pierced the veil between this realm and the waking world. Normally I am afforded brief windows into the minds of those with troubled dreams, to remind them I still exist. Your dreams been open to me for a long time...." She paused when she got to my cutie mark. Then she continued her walk. "Prophecies...they can be so tedious. You are meant for so much more, but not as you are, now." The shadowed entity completed her circle in front of me.

I was confused. She needed me or not? Afraid I might lose this being's interest in me, I asked, "Please Great One, what am I meant for, what do I have to change? What am I?"

Her form started to become harder to see, shifting to translucency. "You are untrained. My time to return is years away and approaching. I can sense your impending awakening from this dream. Hear me! When you rise, find the colt that chased you into the jungle. He needs your help or he will die. He and his friends may have taunted you, but they did me a service in sending you to me. I need all my children ready for my return and to lose one diminishes us all." She was pulling away into that void.

I started to follow, attempting to keep up, "How can I find him, where do I begin?"

The Mare of the Moon's voice grew faint as she responded, "You can track him now. Retrace your hoofsteps to where you entered the jungle, then pretend you are flying." The shape was gone, the glow surrounding this place was diminishing into darkness. I could still feel her, all around me and yet distant. The murky feeling of wakefulness was pulling me from her, it seemed.

I still galloped in vain. I needed to know how to accomplish her task and the pain in my head was making it harder to move in this place, "Great Mare! Do not leave me now! I have no idea how to find him for you!" I stopped after a time in the fear my hoofsteps might have covered her response.

Nothing. A dim light was starting to chase the darkness away, pulsing in time to the throbbing in my head. I could hear birds twittering nearby. Were they in the dream or were they real? I could sense I was not standing anymore. I was lying down, with hard lumpy things underneath me. I despaired, thinking I had lost her. And one last whisper drifted back to me.

"I am still here, young one. I have always been here. Ever since you cried yourself to sleep you have heard my call and have sought me, and in that search I taught your subconscious what to look for, how to seek your quarry. Pretend to dream, and you will remember my lessons...pretend...."

The darkness faded as I lifted my head, groggy from the experience of the dream and the tree I had knocked myself out on. I looked around to get my bearings and regretted it as my headache increased. I nearly passed out. In that moment I caught a vestige of the lingering dream, a wisp on the edge of my mind that said, "...to fly."

I gingerly rubbed a hoof on the top of my head and felt a nice sizable lump there. I recalled how I got it and sighed. Never celebrate until you are standing in the winner's circle. Looking around at the jungle I noticed the sun was beginning to rise. That meant the daytime denizens would be up and about. I was nowhere near that circle.

I stood up slowly and checked my limbs. Everything was in working order. I looked around again, slowly, and observed a peculiar mark in the dirt. Something small had scampered up to me, inquisitively got closer, had jumped back from some unexpected event (possibly me mumbling in my sleep), waited for several minutes and then scampered up the tree next to me. I looked up and saw the squirrel on the upper limbs looking down at me before it chittered and ducked inside a hole in the trunk.

That was odd. How did I look at scratches in the dirt and come up with that chain of events? When I looked back, the marks hadn't changed, but it wasn't as straight forward as before. My head was getting clearer as the morning light brightened. The jungle canopy wasn't too thick this far north, which made seeing in the daytime marginal. I was still a thestral and that sun could be bad at the wrong moment. I attempted to find my hoofsteps leading to my spot and came up empty. Great.

What was it she said, pretend to dream? I half-closed my eyes, calmed myself and tried to remember that soft feeling back when I was wandering in my dreams. I remembered the soothing sounds, now that I concentrated. The sounds...whispers maybe? They were saying things. I began to walk, looking at the ground. There, a small clump dug out of the dirt. Definitely my shape, at a heavy gallop. I continued on. I recalled the whispers had spoken of an awareness of things around oneself, how animate and inanimate objects interacted. A lot of it I felt was way over my head where even adults would be lost, but much of it referred to how the environment was disturbed when one moved through it. I took a very long time winding around trees, catching broken twigs with my eyes, finding moss scraped away here and there. I had made a real mess coming through here earlier. I knew I could do a cleaner run next time I was trying to outdistance a flying moron.

I was approaching the edge of the jungle as it transitioned to the swamp's southern border. The bully was flying around here. Since he hadn't been running on the ground, I glanced up into the tree branches and picked my way into the jungle. There, torn leaves on that low hanging branch...and over there, those trees were too dense to fly through so he would have had to go around to the left. Ouch. I stepped up to where the chasing thestral would have likely flown to see a set of broken tree branches, thick ones, and a five foot long furrow in the soft dirt. He had hit his wing on them. At the impact site, there were several confusing hoofprints that eventually continued deeper in the jungle, nowhere near the direction I had fled. From this point on it was easy to follow where he went.

I followed the tracks well past noon, stepping quietly as I heard animals moving around. Getting in bullies' faces was one thing. Getting in predators' stomachs, um, no. I didn't remember any dream instructions on this part, but good old instinct for survival could do wonders. After what seemed like ages creeping along down into small bowls and over vine-covered logs, the canopy opened up and for a brief moment I was blinded. I stopped dead still and squinted until I got used to the glare. Bits of dirt fell away from my hoof out into a deep ravine. An unsteady male voice cried out, "Hey, who is up there!?" I crept back and waited. After a while, I didn't hear anything. Okay. I quietly gathered several small stones, none TOO large, slowly approached the edge again and tossed them down. A loud yelp of pain followed by several swear words came back up, so I poked my head over the edge to take a look.

The bully that had been chasing me was at least fifteen feet down on a small ledge. His right wing was hanging limp with a few tears in the membranes, though no broken bones, it appeared. His fearful expression was replaced with the more usual annoyed one I was used to as he said, "Oh, it's You. Hah hah, you got me." His rebuke just didn't have the ring to it like it once did.

"It's Me. And I wonder if Me is going to help You." I lied down and put my chin on my hooves as I watched him. If I got ate by a dragon right now, still worth it.

My revelry was short lived when he dropped his eyes and his body literally deflated a bit, "I wouldn't blame you if you walked away." I didn't say a word, merely watched him. In all fairness, I wasn't very mean about this sort of thing. I just wanted to see what he would do. After a time he looked up with an unsure look on his face, saw me there...then he started to walk over to the edge and look down.

"Woh, woh! What are you doing? Come on, I was going to help you up." I started pulling down some nearby vines and putting them in a pile. Occasionally I would look over to see what he was doing. He stayed near the edge but didn't appear to be going anywhere. Once I had braided enough vines to make a decent rope, I threw part of the coils down, leaving my end wrapped around my barrel and looped behind my neck. After a minute, he backed away from the edge, grabbed the vines with his forelegs and proceeded to walk slowly up the rocky side. I made more progress with my better trained running legs, so we made quick time of hauling him up.

He collapsed in a heap, breathing, "Thankyou....thankyou..." I waited for him to catch his breath. I know he hadn't had the benefit of sleeping off his pain the way I had. Head still hurt. He eventually said, "You know, we never really meant to hurt you. At least I didn't. Was it Gem...jim..Jum?"

I sighed in disgust, "Jen, you idiot. How is it you control the largest gang of spoiled brats and you can't even remember a three letter name?"

He got up on shaky legs, wincing when he inadvertently used his wing for balance. "I will be honest, calling you other names was more fun."

I glared and turned away, "I should kick you back over that cliff, but I'm not that kind of thestral. We need to get back home. As much as we may not like each other, this jungle hates us both." I began picking up the tracks back toward the cave community. I could hear him following. We moved in quiet solitude, me in my ponderings over the past dreams that now had new meaning for me, and his...whatever stuckup bullies thought about. A good half hour went by before I heard him inhale and I whipped around to beat him to the punch.

"I don't care what you have to say. I did it because somepony told me to, and if I had to do it again....I don't know. I definitely don't need your thanks!" He stopped and blinked at me several times.

"I was going to tell you my name.."

Fine, make me feel like garbage. I turned around and continued walking. He started following me again. After a time I sighed, "I'm sorry...anyway I already know your name. Dork Lance." I heard him stumble and I grinned.

"DARK Lance. And my friends call me Lance. Um, you can, ya know, call me Lance too." He had gotten very down to earth since he was laid low. I could have been gentle. I could have washed my hooves before dinner time too, but as a kid who had time for that?

"I'll call you Dork. Not out of revenge. Just because."

He quickened his pace just enough to get alongside me. "That's called revenge." He was about to say something else, then he let it lie and continued walking as I resumed my path-finding. We made better time heading out of the jungle than I did looking for him, my familiarity with the area increasing. He eventually spoke up again, "How did you find me." I was wondering when he would get around to that.

"I found your crash site, and your sloppy hoofprints all over the topsoil. I simply followed them to the cliff." We began transitioning to the Hayseed Swamp, and soon we would be home. Hopefully he had no more questions.

"Who told you to find me?" Nix that.

I kept silent. After the way this day had turned out following a night of typical juvenile crap, he was dangerously close to finding more reason to treat me like an outcast. "I misspoke. I meant somepony would have wanted me to find you. I'm not heartless, I know your parents would be sad if something had happened to you."

Lance wouldn't back down. "No, don't do that. I know you said 'somepony told me to'. That means you spoke to....who? Did you really leave me out there and go back home, or did you run into somepony in the jungle?" I was getting uncomfortable about all this. I wasn't into lying....and yet, would not being a weirdo be worth it? Well, less weirdo? I gritted my teeth and plodded on, the warm sun having made the swamp very mushy. Lance seemed even more bothered by the mush; he must normally fly over this. Enjoy it, fellow wing-less.

He tried one more time. "Look, I won't tell anypony how far we went into the jungle. The fault is all mine anyway, I chased you, I messed up my wing. You have a big knot on your head so they are going to think I clobbered you. I will get in trouble for something I didn't do, and you will be the hero. I can live with that." Crap, does it look that bad? I reached up and felt it. It was not going down anytime soon. "Anyway, if you are afraid of me thinking you are some kind of freak, I won't. You saved me and got us both out of there, and that's a fact I can never forget." He did have a way of talking thestrals his way. Maybe he was a good leader. Just not a worthy one.

"Alright, if it means that much to you. I knocked myself out once I lost you. Yes, have a laugh." He chuckled a little but waved me to go on. "While I was out, I had a dream. I was on the moon, and something very powerful told me to find you." I didn't look at him. To be honest I was afraid of what I might see. For an instant I was vulnerable, starting off with bravado to prove how I had found him, and ended up bearing a truth even I didn't understand yet. I peeked at him. He was walking along with a somber expression. That got me very curious, "What? You know something." He glanced at me and said nothing. "Dork, speak."

His face wrinkled, "That name is really terrible." I continued staring at him until he relented, "You were on the moon, talking to a powerful thing. You know who that was, don't you?" I nodded, glad he wasn't outright dismissing it. He shook his head, "No, you don't get it. The Mare in the Moon. THE Mare. Nightmare Moon!"

I shrugged, because I never heard of that. "Mother and Father only ever told stories of the Mare in the Moon. You asked who told me to find you. She did." We walked further for a time until we could see the slopes of our home through the trees. Finally we would be back indoors. Most of the thestrals were still asleep since it was still sunup so nopony was around to see us reach the cave mouth.

Before we entered, Lance turned around. "Jen, most of the stories favor thestrals and her inevitable return. A few were told to me from my distant cousins that live north, near Canterlot. They call her Nightmare Moon, if you can find a book that talks about her. And those books say she wishes to harm her sister when she returns. And she might not stop there."

I looked at Lance, at his wing, and thought about how things changed for the better when certain events took place. "Lance, if it made us all equal, would breaking a wing be all that bad?" I had seen his mean face, his haughty face. Today I had seen him angry, weakened, and contrite. I had never seen him horrified. I had never seen anypony horrified at me. I turned and sought the way to my family abode, quickening my pace with every second. Was that the face bullies received during their terrorizing of others? I tried to rid that look from my memory. I couldn't.

I weathered the berating from my parents, the consoling for the lump on my head. I accepted the grounding and the extra chores. I saw them as punishment for leaving Lance at the entrance the way I did. Father thought it very grownup of me to accept the new conditions, temporary as groundings usually were. Mother was concerned. How is it mothers always know something? I avoided her gaze at lunch, and at dinner. I cleaned the dishes and went to bed early. She lingered near my doorway and eventually went to bed too. She saw a difference in me. Not the wing-less difference everypony was used to. Now I really moved differently, spoke differently.

Now I had a mission.

Author's Notes:

Some of this story can be tedious, forgive me. It's more of a psychological journey than an action-packed spaghetti western.