It was in a dream that Christopher first saw the city. Warm currents carried his body through the air, as if he could fly. A rosy expanse of clouds, painted over with beams of sunset, drifted around him, clouds so close he could have reached out to gather them up and feel the water condense on his hands. Beneath him were hills of rolling green, a landscape dotted by verdant trees and quaint houses. Figures moved across stone pathways, and farther along his line of sight were roads that trailed across the earth to far away places. These momentary, though peaceful, sights of an idyllic realm were peripheral to the towers of a grand city in the greater distance. Towers of ivory, accented with golden brass bands and topped by violet spires, which stood sentinel before a sea of dusk, all resting on the western face of a slumbering cone of snow-capped rock. At such a distance the earth itself seemed to dissolve at the horizon into the bed of starlight, giving the fanciful illusion that the city floated along the wind, just as he did.

The dream seemed to beckon him, and the howling of the high-altitude breeze swirled in strange ways and whispered indistinctly in his ears. All of the details and peripheral phenomena of the world around him fell out of focus. Only the distant glitter of that weightless city was worth his attention.

As soon as those towers finally revealed their peaks through the cloud cover, Christopher awoke with a start, finding himself not in the land of wondrous castles, forests and fields, but within a clearing in the woods behind his home, the same he has known for the first eight years of his life, by the moonlit pond.

***

Far beneath where he had soared, the town of Ponyville had averted a crisis. Nightmare Moon had returned to bring forth eternal night, but six ponies, the Elements of Harmony, restored the balance of the heavens and reunited the once-banished Princess Luna with her sister. The return of the alicorn coregency had brought about a change in places very far from Equestria, so far indeed that only one, seemingly beyond the realms of magic, ever knew of it.

He had been wandering the woods behind his childhood home. There was a small pond of cattails and lilies, mossy spheres of stone, and a trickle of water from the deeper woods which steadily filled the pond as another stream on its far side carried away the overflow. One night he’d been listening to the song of cicadas and crickets and the sway of leaves. The watchful moon, reflected and distorted by the traces of ripples on the water, kept his attention for some time.

He almost missed it; there was a change in its face, subtle enough that he could have passed it off as imagination or some consequence of the dancing water. It filled Christopher's mind with wonder and curiosity, and the hairs on his neck and forearms stood. The wind held its breath and the singing of the night life was halted. The surface of the pond was motionless. Nothing happened for nearly a minute, and he dared not breathe, not even blink, lest his interruption somehow cause the moment to evaporate.

After a moment, the woods slowly reconstituted themselves, and the familiar sounds and sensations played again as if they hadn’t left. Christopher was spellbound. For the rest of the evening this experience occupied his thoughts until sleep took hold and he was transported to the beautiful and strange land of Equestria for the first time.

***

The nightly escapes from reality would continue over that summer, each dream as vivid and captivating as the first. The more time he spent sailing on the aromatic winds above Ponyville, the more he would fall in love with the lively colors of the orchards, and the distant chatter of birds and ponies that went about their business. One night he found himself to have control over where he flew, and finally settled on a grassy hill. To his surprise, four indigo hooves extended from his body, and two feathery wings graced his frame. He was a pegasus, not unlike the ponies he'd seen walking about and cutting across the skies not far from him.

As the summer carried on, he became more familiar with the town itself, and the ponies who lived there. There were other pegasus ponies who welcomed him as if he'd been born and raised under their own roof. There were also unicorns, who performed magic as part of their daily life. Everything was so fantastic as to be overwhelming to someone from such a comparatively mundane world. There were ponies without a horn or wings, but their strength and cultivation was evident wherever he turned. Flowers of all kinds that enchanted the senses and orchards of brilliant apples that became the horizon.

He'd learned the names of some ponies, and they'd told him everything he wanted to know. The role and structure of unicorn magic, the ageless agricultural experience of the earth ponies, as he'd learn to call them, and the fundamentals of pegasus flight. Inevitably, his attention would be drawn toward the irresistible opal gleam on that distant mountain. When he could finally speak the name of that divine abode, having asked several ponies on the street, his quest would supersede even the greatest wishes of any boy his age, whether awake or dreaming. He must feel those smooth stone streets beneath his hooves, the chilled breath down the face of the imposing rock, the radiance of the morning rays as it played against the minarets. All was nothing if not that city.

Canterlot.

Without exception, each dream was a winding road which inexorably led him there. Even the wayward breeze carried him toward the mountain. But it was always out of reach. He would fly for hours, always waking up before he could make out any more details. It was as if it sought to escape him, not ready or willing to reveal to him some secret truth of his desire. Once he flew along the train from Ponyville and slipped into one of the open windows of a train car, only to find the tracks extend themselves eternally forward, leading nowhere. Another night led him to the Ponyville library, where he was allowed to peer through the telescope. The brilliance of the masonry and the gigantic, imposing gateway were all he could make out before the sun of his own world would tear him away yet again. His final dreamtime trip to Equestria would allow him closer than ever before.

It was nearing dusk. There was a pony named Cherry Berry tending to a large air balloon, untying the ropes securing it to stakes in the ground. He’d asked if she was headed to Canterlot, and to his fortune, she was indeed going to sail through the heavens to the alluring city. Though he had no money, she’d heard his pleas to see the city for himself, and her heart went out to this poor fellow who seemingly wanted nothing more than to be blessed with a chance to finally step through the impervious gates that have taunted him for weeks. And so they lifted off, rising above the scattered evening billows. Moonbeams washed over the basket of the two ponies, gently illuminating the sleeping plains and woodlands below.

Higher they ascended, drifting lazily with the mild northward breeze. In the distance, shimmering and twinkling like the vault of stars above, stood the unsurpassed beauty of Canterlot. The constellations and asterisms themselves bow to the true majesty of the firmament, the house of power which commands the spheres and their destinies. Christopher had almost forgotten in his reverence that he was nearing the city, and yet the occult forces of his dreams had not snatched him away. Cherry Berry had told him their journey was coming to an end; soon they would be landing and she would not leave until tomorrow. As the final stray cerulean clouds dissolved against the drifting balloon, and the flickering sconces on the ramparts could be spied through the mist, there came a sudden and violent burst of sound. Cherry Berry gasped in surprise. Christopher’s field of vision dissolved into blackness, and he awoke in his room.

***

That summer came to an end. Christopher's family moved across town, and the halcyon dreams, just as suddenly as they had come to dwell in his mind, left him entirely. All of his subsequent nocturnal endeavors were as dull and prosaic as the experiences which bookended them. The memories of his pegasus body and experiences faded with time, preserved only in drawings and short stories he'd written for school or for himself. He would not see the Equestrian paradise, and therefore Canterlot, for many years. Life had moved on, and him along with it. But not unlike the waves and currents of his own world, those of the mind would, unbeknownst to him, lead him closer still toward his dormant, elusive ambition.

Haven't written any fan fiction in a long time, pardon the rust. The brevity of the prologue is intentional; the meat of the story is in the upcoming chapters. Going to try and flesh it out properly Hopefully the implied dialogue isn't too strange, but I thought it fit the fleeting and transient nature of a childhood dream.