EV 6

Twilight woke up in stages.

The first stage was the Blind Stage, when her eyes would not cooperate. They simply refused to open, staying shut despite her frustrated commands to the contrary. The next stage was the Stupid Stage, where she finally regained her sight only to find the world swam before her and hurt her eyes. It all felt so wrong and twisted up and she felt like vomiting.

“It is disorienting. The Element of Magic is strong and will recover. How long did you say my sister has been awake for, Fluttershy?”

“Oh, well, your highness, it’s been only ten minutes or so. It took me a moment to wake you and a few more to get here and…” Twilight could almost imagine the words sinking into the ground as the Pegasus grew more timid as the sentence went on.

“It is good that you came as you did. You have done well, Element of Kindness.”

Twilight felt a muzzle against her mane. “Oh, Twilight, you look like you feel simply awful!” It was Fluttershy’s voice still, soft and in her ear. She groaned and it felt strange.

The Princess of the Night left after a kind word for Twilight and instructions for Fluttershy to bring her friend along to Celestia’s chambers when the unicorn was up to it. As her head cleared, Twilight’s question poured forth: where were the others, how long had she been out, and what had happened while she’d been absent?

“It’s been a few hours. Pinkie went to the kitchens on a suggestion from Rarity. I think Rarity was trying to distract her. Dash has been patrolling outside this room almost the whole time. I’ve never seen her this dedicated to something so boring before! Applejack and Rarity just left to get some fresh air.” She chuckled softly. “I’m surprised that they went anywhere together, just the two of them, but I think worrying about their families has pulled down some of the walls between them.”

Twilight smiled at this, glad for something good to come out of today. “I think I’m feeling well enough to walk, Fluttershy. Help keep me steady?” The Pegasus was quick to assent to this and on unsteady legs Twilight rose to her hooves. They felt a little like those jello concoctions Pinkie had on display in Sugarcube Corner, she noticed wryly.

Her progress on the still familiar way to the Princess’s chambers was slow as she slowly recovered. The strangeness of the magic involved was so beyond her experience, and she was beginning to see that Luna was wiser than Twilight had ever thought. Feeling silly for not thinking her Celestia’s equal as Princess, she realized that Luna had been trying to acclimate her strange magics on purpose…. She was beginning to suspect that the cure for Equestria’s troubles would come from within another dream, a particular dream that she’d already visited.

She was a little afraid of it, honestly.

Rainbow had been just outside the door, and had joined them wordlessly. Pinkie seemed in a good mood when she caught up to the others, but Twilight saw the sadness there buried deeply over her home and the place most sacred to her heart. Rarity and Applejack were still together when the rest of the elements found them right outside the Royal Suite, talking together quietly and civilly (much to Twilight’s surprise and secret delight.)

The Elements of Harmony stood before the great door and a shared dread fell over them all at the same time. Twilight could feel the uncertain air around herself and her friends, though she could only guess at what they were thinking. On impulse, she turned to Pinkie.

“Pinkie? I don’t know if I’m supposed to tell you this yet, but I think you need to hear it: The things carried away by the voids are all safe.”

Pinkie was stunned. “It’s all safe?” the emotion in that small statement almost broke her heart. Twilight nodded.

Before either pony could say anything else, the door opened and Luna stood in the new space. “Come, Elements,” she said shortly, and they followed without a word in response.

“She is awake and ready for what must be done. It is… strange in some ways, but she will be asleep again shortly.”

“Asleep again? So we are visiting her dreams?” Twilight said, and her friends looked to her in absolute confusion.

“Yes. Did I not say so? I meant to. Yes, I needed you—“

“Acclimated to the conditions of the magic. I figured that out,” she said, a little proud. Luna rewarded her with a smile.

“Yes, clever Twilight. Now, Elements, my sister is waiting.”

They followed the dark alicorn princess back deeper into the chambers of the elder sister…

If somepony had asked Twilight, she would’ve probably confessed that she was worried about the actual moment of seeing Celestia since Luna had suggested that not all was well with her beloved mentor. All of her fears were right here in front of her, the fears she had kept deep down in her mind.

Celestia was a wreck. Her eyes were weary and bloodshot, reminding Twilight of herself after too much time spent amongst her books. She lay on her couch before the fire looking none the better for her well-earned sleep. She greeted Twilight and her friends with a weary smile.

“My Little Ponies! Welcome,” she said, raising her head and trying to straighten her posture, but Twilight and she both knew that the damage had been done.

“Princess, what in tarnation is goin’ on?” Applejack asked first, bluntly. “We’ve been gettin’ the run-around and ah just want some answers here.”

“And you will have them, Element of Honesty. Luna, I… I need your help.”

Luna was at her side instantly, nuzzling her older sister. “Start at the nightmares and the Net.”

Celestia sighed and began. “Nightmares. All ponies have nightmares. Unicorns are no exceptions, but for the longest time we wished that they would never dream. Their magic does strange things sometimes, things they can’t always explain. Their nightmares manifested sometimes, and many ponies were hurt over the years.”

“So that story I read that scared me as a filly…” Twilight murmured softly.

“Is probably based off of a true story, yes. They never attacked in such large numbers as they have now, because they would come and burn themselves out in a night or so. Ponies burned lanterns and held watch for them. There was a lot of strain between the Earth Ponies and the Unicorns over it, a lot of bad blood.

“When my sister and I defeated Discord, one of our first actions was to try and fix this problem which had only gotten worse under his rule. So my sister and I created the Net, a magical matrix which caught the nightmares as they were spawned and deposited them into the realm of dreams— the Lunar Aether. It took years of experimentation, but we were able to finish it. But in making it, I fear we were not careful enough. Discord’s magic is a part of Equestria in a way I can’t explain right now—“

“The Exodus,” Twilight said reflexively.

This took Celestia by surprise, but to her credit, she recovered fairly quickly. “Yes, Twilight, the Exodus and the Bridge, the first rainbow. When we made the Net, we didn’t truly understand the nature of that primeval magical influence. Only later did we understand that Discord’s useless passive magic had bonded with our own.

“Then Luna… I lost her,” Celestia said, her voice going soft and her eyes looking down at the floor. The Elements of Harmony stood still as statues out in the gardens.

“I lost her,” she continued as Luna looked away, troubled. “I had to do it all alone, and it was hard beyond what I think even she could understand. It took decades to learn how the moon worked in every detail, and even then it wasn’t the same. The night sky wouldn’t answer to me in the same way it had for her. But I tried, for her, to make it beautiful… The Elements left Luna and came to me in our last confrontation, but as soon as it was all over they left me and would have nothing to do with me. I hadn’t controlled them at all in those last moments. I may have decided to sentence my sister, but they set the terms of her imprisonment. At first, I thought my loneliness was my punishment.

“But that wasn’t my only suffering. The true price extracted by Order was this: that I wane and diminish as my power drained. As time went on, things began to slip away from me. I could hardly tell how strong some of the old bonds were anymore, and to be honest I had forgotten about some of them. Even after Luna returned to me, the damage had been done. I had lost much of my sensitivity. I suppose it is similar to magical burn out, Twilight.”

Rarity and Twilight both shivered at the same time, prompting confused glances from the others. Twilight explained shortly. “Magical burnout is an unpleasant condition. It’s not just that you lose your magic, which in of itself is like losing a hoof, but it leaves you feeling weak and sort of sick.”

“I couldn’t feel the cracks in the magical bonds of Discord’s prison, and he escaped. I couldn’t feel the cracks that had been forming in the most important bonds besides his I had ever created and finally, two nights ago, my carefully constructed spell shattered. I dreamed.”

“Do you not normally, Princess? I mean, everypony dreams!” Pinkie Pie exclaimed. “Surely not…”

The Princess was shaking her head. “Not since before Discord. I am an Alicorn, Pinkie Pie. If a regular nightmare by a regular unicorn produces something capable of the things a Nightmare is capable of, imagine what one produced by a nightmare of mine would create.”

“Golly,” Applejack breathed, imaging it.

“Exactly. And, predictably, the first time I dream in over a millennia, and it was a terrible, terrible nightmare. I knew it would come if I dreamed again— I think I’ve been waiting for that nightmare a thousand years.”

“What happened Princess? What would you remember that long? Is it Discord?” Fluttershy managed, her quiet voice sounding a little frightened, as it should be, Twilight reflected. Things that haunted the nightmares of essentially eternal beings were things one feared.

“Oh, my little ponies,” the princess said in a heartbroken voice that left them all bewildered and a little frightened. “The day we defeated Discord is one of the worst I have ever seen. The only other thing that compares to it was my confrontation with Luna when she was Nightmare Moon. I… a terrible thing happened that day.”

“So when such a terrible, vivid dream caught her, her raw pain and grief sent tidal waves in the aether. Celestia and I prepared for such a possibility and the Net was designed to destroy itself to destroy any Alicorn-Nightmare. The plan was that the Nightmare would be caught “in-between” , never managing to manifest as it burned along with the now spent Net in thaumaturgic fire. But Discord, whose mind wanders mostly unaware of himself in the Aether, felt that tidal wave and he acted on it. Maybe he thought it would bring him back, and perhaps he only wanted to see Celestia in pain. Regardless, he tried to call on the anchors which bound him to our world…”

“Which were tied to the Net,” Twilight finished. She was beginning to see what had happened.

The others weren’t so lucky. “So how does that translate intah holes in the ground, Princesses?”

“Discord… broke it,” Celestia said with a weak chuckle. “Twilight will understand this: The Magical Conflagration became something entirely different.”

“It blew up,” Twilight said breathlessly, and suddenly she was animated and trying to form words properly. It all made sense, all of it! For the first time since she’d woken up two mornings ago, she knew exactly what was going on.

“It blew up, the magic and the Nightmare,” she explained to her confused friends. “But Discord’s magic sort of ‘caught fire’ as it were. The ‘fire’ spread back along the trail of his magic, which is sort of everywhere in Equestria. It didn’t get all of his passive magic, but it did get a lot of it. Where it burned, it created Void, and the buildings and ponies fell through the ‘gaps’ into the Aether!”

“Where they sleep.”

“Sugarcube Corner is inside the moon?” Pinkie said weakly, somewhere between supremely happy and relieved and totally, absolutely… something. The look on her face was too hard for Twilight to read well when distracted.

“Yes, essentially. It’s… strange, I know, but the Aether has been strange since the Beginning. A lot of things about it honestly don’t make sense, my ponies. It’s chaotic, unknowable, perhaps the perfect home for Discord.”

“So the Voids are tears, in the ‘fabric’ of the world, then?” Rarity spoke up suddenly. “Where it’s been ripped open by some power. How do we sew the two sides back together again and close these holes?”

“… And get back what was taken from us!” said a still not completely appeased Applejack.

“I have to go in to her dreams,” Twilight answered them both, eyes locked on Celestia’s.

Her heart was a storm. Part of her was terrified of knowing the singular horror in Celestia’s past. She felt hot and cold all at once as her ever-present desire for knowledge began to howl for this deepest of secrets, this most hidden of lore. She didn’t want to do this.

“Yes, Twilight, I think now that you must. Luna and I… talked. Things we planned— things I planned, must be put into motion sooner than I had anticipated. They must start in the way I intended, but not under the circumstances I intended.

“We need the Elements. Twilight must enter, but you must all be here by her side to aid her when she calls on you, her friends. Will you accompany her, Luna?”

There was no answer, only a silent nod. Celestia sighed.

“Waiting will only make you more frightened of what you’ll see, Twilight.” Her voice was kind, and it burned in Twilight’s heart and she felt shame for that fear. She stepped forward.

“How long will it take, Princess?” Dash asked from behind her. Probably not wanting to be stuck pacing in front of my door for hours again, Twilight thought to herself, a little wryly. A little humor to make the bitter pill go down… she took the last step to be behind her mentor. That she had to try to be closer to Celestia was more shocking to her than the fear she had felt. Her whole time as Celestia’s student, she had always wanted Celestia all to herself. What way was there to be more closer than to share her mentor’s mind?

But she hadn’t wanted closeness like this.

Luna’s and Celestia’s horns both glowed with magic energy and the aura surrounded both them and Twilight. It was a tingling feeling, spreading from her hooves to her horn. She couldn’t decide if it was unpleasant or not, honestly, but it was definitely not something she was used to. Unicorns didn’t normally use magic directly on another pony’s whole body like this, for a lot of reasons.

A deep breath, and all three closed their eyes as the Elements came close.

“What do we do?” Applejack sounded so lost in all this talk of magic, and Twilight felt a pang of sympathy.

“Just be here, wait. When I call, you’ll know, and the Elements will…respond… just…st—“ Talking became strange and her mouth heavy and she was sleepy and then suddenly—

It was awful, entering her mind.

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