This story will, at certain points, contain links towards videos comprised of a combination of the text and thematic music. When you come across said link, right-click it and then watch the video in a new tab. Alternatively, the section of text included in the video will have the last sentence marked in purple, for those of you who would prefer to read this story sans pretention.

And yes, this is relevant to the plot.

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The first thing Luna noticed was the map, coupled to the table by twin daggers thrust onto either side. The pattern on it looked vaguely familiar, like a bloated, fading version of the continent she had spent years gazing at from space. It looked almost like Equestria.

It was a fairly clean and well organised map. The light-brown colour it had been painted in wasn't too garish to look at, and the size of it meant that no fine detail had been lost. Somepony had, with what looked like painstaking care, traced a row of black lines across it, cutting the map into several well-defined squares. Luna's hoof rested in the middle of one of them, the weight of the cast-silver horseshoe she was wearing pulling the map taut around it. A few blue and red flags stood at attention across its surface, the red ones usually at the tip of some long, similarly coloured arrow that stretched eagerly across the painted landscape.

It occurred to Luna—dreamily; she was not alarmed—that she had never seen any of it before in her life.

Her ears twitched as she became aware of a faint buzzing on her right. The sound resolved itself into that of a raspy male voice, fainter sounds of moving objects and clanking metal providing a background to whatever he was saying. Slowly, and only with her eyes—as if afraid that movement might scare it all away—Luna looked up and over to where the voice was coming from.

There was a dragon standing next to her, the pulled-out seat behind him filled up with his lavender tail. An arm covered in scales flashed violet in the candlelight; the dragon’s passion for what he was saying was clear, even if his words weren’t. His arm then slapped down, impacting with the burgundy tablecloth that sloped out from under the map. Small fragments of the fabric caught onto his claws as he drew them back up, the holes left in the cloth revealing the dark, varnished wood beneath.

He caught her staring at him, and turned to her, emerald eyes glaring in a mixture of anger and respect. “Isn't that so, Lady Luna?” She had no idea how she could understand him.

She didn't answer. Instead, she raised her head, moving for the first time, and took in the rest of the room.

A glistening chandelier dangled a few metres above her head, the dozens of candles stacked along it feeding light into the room. Ivy clung onto every surface, the leaves grey and withered, as if the plant was in the final stages of a long, futile struggle. A wall composed in its entirety of windows curved elegantly about the sides; dark-granite columns separated the panes before stretching up to support the ceiling. Heavy, velvet curtains draped down over the windows from their golden-pole strongholds, covering off half of a night-time's view. Small motes of light glimmered out at her from what seemed like a great distance. They looked like fallen stars.

And with the room thoroughly investigated, her attention turned to the people in it. Aside from the dragon, three others were seated at the round-table: a unicorn, a pegasus and an earth pony. Her eyes flickered between them, uncertain of whom to look at.

The unicorn caught her gaze first, mouth half-open and expression incredulous. A gold earring glinted from the tip of a vivid-blue ear and a mane of a lighter tone flowed like water across her neck. The mare frowned at her, eyebrows cutting a scowl across her pleasant face.

The pegasus was next; a black cap rose out of her blue mane where a pony’s ear would normally be, and a fine network of scars were spread like white roots across her pale-yellow body. None were deep, but all showed some past wound immortalised in her flesh. Her silver horseshoes tapped lightly on the table as Luna watched her, expression torn between concern and nervousness.

And that left the earth pony; his skewbald, mud-patchy body was covered by a thick, silver armour that stretched up to the nape of his neck. A red bandana tied back most of his hair, with only a light framing of brown showing the colour hidden beneath. His gaze never left hers as she watched him, only shifting slightly as he switched focus from one of her eyes to the other.

“I have,” Luna said, tone detached and almost casual, “no idea who any of you are.” She blinked once and then continued looking round the room. “I feel like I should,” she added, “but I'm afraid I don't.”

She was aware of their eyes burning away at her, but she didn't look down to meet them. It had been a long while since she'd last had a dream—and she was quite convinced this was one. Nightmare Moon had never dreamt, which made her all the more determined to make the most of this one; although, truth be told, this wasn't that much of a dream. She couldn't remember a lot about them, but she was certain that her older ones had been a brighter thing than this; she was certain that they had been fun.

The dragon was talking at her again. Luna glanced back over at him, lifted her hoof up and, after having eased her hoofwear off with a telekinetic tug, prodded him gently in the cheek.

“You feel exactly like I'd expect a dragon to feel,” she murmured, hoof scraping against his skin and catching on the ridges between scales. “But then again, you would, wouldn't you?” Without waiting for an answer, she turned and said to the pegasus on her left, “That is the way of dreams, after all. What I think is.” Luna's head listed to one side, hoof leaving the dragon alone and falling back to her side. “I wonder what you're meant to be...”

“You cannot be serious! You just can't!” another voice cried out, deeper, richer and more feminine than the dragon's. Luna turned her head; the unicorn was speaking, her body nearly out of her chair and onto the table as she leant forwards. “Trixie refuses to play these games, especially when she's in the middle of a war. And she demands to know what’s going on.”

“You demand of Lady Luna?” The dragon was talking again. “There is insolence, Trixie, and then there is you! You would be advised to remember your place before recalling your tongue from the last mess it got tangled in.”

The dragon's tirade continued, though Luna had long since stopped paying attention. Her investigations had revealed a scroll-filled tub by her side, and she had already unfolded the first and started reading it. The words seemed to shimmer slightly as she looked at them, before resolving themselves into normal Equestrian. She broke off from it mid-sentence—something about aid for changelings—then rolled it back up and shoved it in with the rest.

“Hey”—the pegasus was speaking—“let's not get too emotional about this, okay? It's... it's been a pretty tense meeting. Maybe messing about a bit's in order, you know? Right? I mean, come on. It's only a joke.” She grinned hopefully, eyes flicking from pony to dragon and then back again. Luna wondered how the smile hadn't cracked her face open, given all the scars.

“She said”—a hoof was jabbed accusingly at Luna—“that she doesn't know who we are! That she doesn't know who Trixie is! What kind of a joke is that?”

“Do not,” the dragon roared, “point your hoof at the Lady!”

“Well, of course I don't know who you are,” Luna interrupted, smothering another heated argument before it could erupt. “This is a dream, and you are all just dream-ghasts based off of real ponies. And dragons,” she amended, with a nod at the wide-eyed and now seated lizard. There was a pause in which the backdrop of distant goings on re-emerged. Luna tapped her hooves together, metal clinking as it struck nail.

“I don't suppose there's any cake?” she asked wistfully, her words almost sighs. “I have missed cake.”

There was a thunder of thuds as something heavy moved towards her. Luna looked up in time to see a flash of red before her world filled with brown. The earth pony had moved to an uncomfortable distance, his gaze focused on her right eye. There was a barely noticeable flick as the black nuclei snapped onto her other. Luna felt something shift lower down, and she moved her head back, trying to increase the gap between them.

“She's not lying.” His voice was surprisingly calm, as well as tinted with the faint trace of an unplaceable accent. He backed off a bit and frowned heavily at her, his expression almost concerned.

“What do you mean she’s not lying?” hissed the unicorn, and at the exact same time the pegasus cried “It’s not a joke?” And with that prelude over, pandemonium once again broke free.

Luna looked hopefully around the room once more, but it hadn't changed at all. The walls were still dark; the table was still round; it was still night outside. She was beginning to feel bored.

Well. That settled it, then. As Celestia had always said, beginning is close to being in more than just letters, and right now, Luna was inclined to agree. With a quick flex of her wings, she leapt over the table and landed neatly on the other side. She was out of the circular room before any of them could finish speaking. A few hoofsteps later, and she could hear them scrambling to catch up. Her lips cracked open to reveal a vein of white in the darkness. A chase it was.

Luna rushed down a succession of dimly lit corridors, and the sound of her pursuers followed after. A selection of torches—unevenly spaced—spat out spheres of orange light into the hallway, breaking the darkness aperiodically as she ran. They hindered her more than they helped, ruining her night vision each and every time she passed through their flickering domain.

She slipped mid-stride and skidded freely for a metre or so: her unbooted hoof had landed on a patch of black-ice, indistinguishable from the stone floor in the darkness. Her wings stretched as far as they could in the confined space, and then flapped repeatedly, hooves clicking together as they left the ground behind.

The dream has become cold, Luna thought. I wonder why?

She noticed, in passing, an array of icicles dangling like forgotten daggers from the tip of a stone arch. She ducked beneath them, and her wingbeats disturbed them enough to loosen the icy stalactites into falling. They shattered behind her with the sound of bells.

The corridor ended, and the building followed after, depositing Luna into the confines of night-covered courtyard. Towers rose in crooked lines out of the enclosure's ground, and a zig-zagging wall cut the square into a rectangle over on Luna's left. There was snow everywhere, piled up against the walls and other edifices as if tired and needing to rest. It flooded out over the floor and painted it into a brilliant white; the landscape beyond the wall was the clear darkness of absent ground. Faint trails of hoofprints and wagon-lines had compressed parts of the snow into a tangle of thick, creamy ice, forming lines which splayed like fractures across the ground. The wind whipped up a scattering of crystals; they brushed against her face like sand: sharp and granular. Luna wondered why she wasn’t cold.

Two bronze-armoured ponies were trotting cautiously towards her, their hoofsteps muffled by the snow. Luna saluted as they approached and, as they mimicked her in confusion, she slipped past, laughing. Two more to add to the chase.

Not that they’d have much further to chase her. With a final burst of her wings, she angled herself towards the flattish edge of a tower's conical roof, horn glowing as she brushed the top layer of snow from it. Her hooves clattered dissonantly as she landed, the difference between hoof and metal more than noticeable in the clash against stone. Turning as her wings folded in, Luna looked out.

There were grey clouds up above, altering in tone from a wispy paleness through to a secretive murk as they spread across the sky. The moon winked out at her from between breaks in the clouds’ hold over the heavens; a welcome companion in an unfamiliar land. Off in the distance, she thought she could make out the sight of snow cascading down. It looked almost as if the clouds had a bad case of dandruff. She giggled at the thought.

Looking down, Luna was surprised to find that there was a city spread out beneath her. She wasn’t sure what she had been expecting, but a city was more complex than she was used to. Most dreams contented themselves with a producing a smudge of buildings or forests, being more concerned with creating mass than individuality. And yet here, she could almost tell the difference in each building's character; almost. They all still looked alike to her, and they were far from the most interesting things to look at.

For she could spot movement—sluggish, perhaps, and indistinct, but movement nonetheless. Faint trails of light, most likely lanterns signalling a group in transit, wove like crawling fireflies along the unfocused outlines of streets. Smoke huffed out of chimneys at her, and she could smell the tint of ash in amongst the cleanness of the cold air. A cluster of catapults near the wall swarmed with activity: the tarpaulins covering them were tugged off like a blanket from a sleeping child; ponies rushed frantically between them, their cries indistinguishable; and great, glowing balls were tossed from unicorn to unicorn like a group of children playing catch. It was a curious thing to watch, and Luna wondered if they'd stop should she try to get closer.

The sound of her pursuers—long noticed, but ignored—grew louder. The main bulk of them had, it seemed, caught up, and the two guards who had wasted time calling up at her were engulfed into their group. Their voices buzzed like flies against Luna’s ears: angry and eager for attention. Her head snapped round.

“Yes! I am here. What is it? What exactly do you dream-ghasts want of—” She’d noticed something. “Is that mine?”

The moonlight danced merrily off the silver horseshoe floating by the unicorn's side, encased in a shimmering wash of pink. The garment looked, as far as her passing acquaintances with inanimate objects went, familiar. It certainly matched the one she was wearing well enough. Luna felt more than entitled to claim ownership.

“It is mine, isn’t it? I’ll be having that back.” She held out her hoof, an attempt at a stern expression on her face. She was rather surprised when the demand worked, and the horseshoe was back on her hoof within moments. Dream-ghasts were usually more playful when provoked.

“Lady Luna, if we could talk inside for just a moment.” The dragon’s arms beckoned her down. Luna snorted.

“I’m not coming down. It’s far too much fun up here on the roof!” She pranced happily back and forth, her clumsy and uneven hooffalls loosening the slate tiles enough for them to slip off. They cracked open like eggs against the ground, spreading black shards everywhere. “Whoops! Sorry about that!” She brought a hoof forcibly down and caused another tile to abandon the roost. Her horn glowed, and the tile bobbed back up. “Hey! I caught it this time!” There was no response.

Looking down, Luna spotted the six of them clumped together in a circle down below. She frowned: they were supposed to be paying attention to her. This was a very funny dream.

After having waited a few moments—most of it spent debating the benefits of trying to land a tile on one of them—the pegasus left the group and flapped on up to her. Almost simultaneously, the two guard ponies raced off and vanished like rabbits into the black holes that were the castle’s portals.

Is it a castle? Luna thought. She gave the buildings around her a quick glance before remembering whose dream this was. Yes. Yes, it is a castle. My castle. She frowned down her nose at the approaching pegasus.

“What business do you have in my castle, stranger?” she barked. The pegasus paused, wings flapping languidly as she hovered in place.

“I... erm,” she mumbled, hoof ruffling through her mane. “I'm one of your generals? I mean, I am one of your generals. Yes. That's my business. Being here.”

Luna blinked. A general. That was much more like it. They were playing along at last.

“Of course you are!” Luna cried, wings spreading out as she strutted off the tower and out into mid-air. The winds gently buffeted her with snow and teased her mane out into a long, flowing aurora. “I do apologise, General. I'm afraid I didn't recognise you in the dark!”

The pegasus slumped slightly, as if some invisible puppeteer had just abandoned his post, and then she grinned. “I'm glad to hear that, Luna. You had us all worried for a moment there.” Luna nodded; they'd had her all worried too.

“Yes. Quite right, Madame General. Now then. Our first order of business is the war.” Her general nodded. “We shall attack... them!” Luna flung a hoof downwards pointedly, the tip of her silver horseshoe directed at the small group gawking up at them.

“Wait, what? We... We're...” She tugged at her eyepatch. “But I thought you were okay!”

“Of course I'm okay,” Luna replied, before pressing a snowball into her companion's hooves. “Prepare to fire on my mark, General!” She flicked back to the roof, landed on it and then scooped up another ball from the untouched piles of snow.

“Err...”

“Mark!”

The snowball whizzed through the air like a miniature comet before becoming impaled like a back-to-front snow-cone on the unicorn's horn. Luna huzzahed in triumph; the unicorn howled in disbelief. A gust blurred the ground below under a sudden rush of white. And then, from out of the distance, something answered their echoing cries: a roar which sounded like a thinly mixed blend of wind and thunder.

Luna’s eyes widened as she turned towards the sound. The light around her horn extinguished, and the slate tile fell, forgotten. “What is that?!”

“Oh no,” the pegasus whispered, her eyes just as wide but lacking Luna’s joyful sparkle. “Oh very no.”

Ignoring her, Luna leapt like a cat off the roof, arch tight and pointed like a needle towards the ground. One powerful wingbeat changed that, forcing her trajectory out of a downwards plummet and into a horizontal blur of blue. Snowflakes spun into a hazy outline around her, buffeted into chaos by the air-front pressed ahead. Within a few moments, her castle was far, far behind her—not that Luna cared to look back.

There was another roar, although unlike before this one was orphaned from a source. Luna skidded in mid-air, hooves pressing small clouds out of the atmosphere as she shuddered to a halt. Her wings flapped steadily, keeping her in a hanging hover as her eyes darted quickly about. There was nothing to see but a blue, pale mist; whatever had made the noise wasn't nearby. There was only the blackness of the night around her—broken only by two twinkling stars—the now distant lights of her castle and the smudge of grey clouds swirling in hazy circles overhead. She had missed whatever it was. It wasn't here.

Or, Luna reflected, it's here and it's invisible. She drew air into her lungs, chest rising as they quickly became full. And then she shouted:

“Hello out there! Show yourself!”

The answering roar was much, much closer and much, much louder, and yet still Luna could not see it. Her head darted around, but she could still only see mist, blackness and the stars—stars which were shining against a cloudy backdrop; not piercing it, but on top of it. On the wrong side.

Luna hovered back, her gaze fixated upwards. A dark curve in the cloud layer translated into the outline of a cheek; two hazy brushstrokes of mist stiffened into ears; the stars pulsed blue, and Luna realised—still with the faint, unworried tones of a dream—that they were eyes, and that they were locked on to her as much as hers were on it.

And then something collided with her from behind, wrapping up her wings and pushing the two of them into a falling, twisting bundle of thrashing limbs. They plummeted downwards, the misty figure above them fading back into the atmosphere. The last Luna saw of it, the vague sketch of its pony-like head was twisting away from her and back towards the castle. The stars briefly vanished as it blinked.

The constriction suddenly vanished, and Luna's wings shot out, sending her into a muddled but slowing spin. Her eyes whirled madly round until she at last located the sky, and then with a rush of wingbeats she was decelerating whilst level. A blue and yellow blur shot down towards her, and then suddenly halted. It was the pegasus.

“What the hay are you thinking, Luna?” she snapped. Snow began falling around them, gently at first but becoming thicker and thicker as time went on. “What's the matter with you, huh? One moment you're fine, the next you're loopier than I've ever seen you! What's wrong?”

Luna grinned. “Did you see that... that thing? It was just...” Her head twisted skywards, dredging the air above her for any sign of its previous spectre. “I mean, that's new! I've never seen anything like that before: ever! That's just... so... amazing.” Her wings flapped harder, driving her upwards.

“Amazing? That's dangerous,” the pegasus replied, wings flapping as she joined in with Luna's ascent. “And what do you mean new? I know you've seen windigos before, Luna, and—“

“Windigo? Is that what that is? But I haven't read anything on windigos in ages, so why am I dreaming about them? That's... I've always wondered what they’d look like. Its cries really do sound like the wind, don't they?” Luna smirked upwards. “Wanna get a closer look, General?”

“A closer... You really are mad, aren't—”

She saw the interruption before she heard it—and, for that matter, before it had truly begun to interrupt. A corner of the sky was lit up, as if the sun was dawning on the wrong side of the world, and far, far too quickly. Ignoring the pegasus's faltering words, she turned her head towards the growing, orange light. And there it was: a burning rock trailing through the air like a falling-star thrown back.

If her snowball had been a comet, then this surely must have been a meteor. Bright, and with an ethereal artery of sparks lingering after it in the sky, the stone seemed more to push the world out of the way than travel through it. The paltry moonlight retreated, temporarily giving way to the fiery outpouring of red. A scarlet, pony-like silhouette was traced vibrantly across the sky, the figure utterly unable to hide itself under the advancing blaze. Its eyes sparkled, and the now sharp outline of its mouth opened wide.

And it howled. Gusts formed of snow and eerily white clouds billowed out from its mouth in a tidal wave of directed force. The encroaching boulder weathered it, the coronal mane of flames surrounding it merely dimming into a still-burning ember of impossibly flying rock. Undaunted, it drew closer and closer before colliding with the ghostly afterimage of the thing's foreleg. It snapped clean off, bursting into a flurry of translucent sky-skelfs and a few residual wisps of mist. Mere moments later, the leg had rewoven itself from nothing, and the boulder had vanished off into the night.

A displaced bulge of air—refuge from the collision—surged downwards towards the two bobbing fliers; the curvature of its presence was marked by a rapidly filling in expanse of white, like an explosion outlined in snow or a ripple magnified indefinitely into an expanding, three dimensional wave of rushing, thunderous air.

“Oh crap,” the pegasus muttered, and then the onslaught caught them, bundled them up and carried them along in a twisting, tumbling package groundwards.

Snowflakes scraped like glass against Luna's skin, the impact hard enough to force them into ice. Her eyelids clamped shut in an effort to protect her eyes, and in doing so, cut off her vision. Luna realised she had no idea how far away the ground was. Some weight, barely noticed up until now, loosened on her head. A few seconds later and there was a tug on her mane, followed by a few pinpricks of pain as the hairs were torn out by their roots. And then a rush of cold engulfed her into its oceanic depths in a shivering crunch of power.

Down she fell, the snow flowing over her like brittle water: hard and frosty and unforgiving. Pain lanced along her outstretched limbs, firing their way along each wing-tip until the cold numbed them into a dull throb. Eventually, as if grieving that she had to stop, Luna's passage slowed. Blue eyes opened out onto a world of white.

About a metre above her was a gap in the snowy cylinder that enclosed her, out of which she could see the last fiery after-trails of the retreating rock. What had seem like a titanic plunge was revealed before her quivering eyes as a minor stumble; she was taller standing than the hole was deep. Slowly, brushing snow off of herself and shivering in her sudden perception of the cold, Luna sat up.

The moon must have passed behind a cloud, because it was far darker than it had been before; she could see perhaps less than a metre ahead. The ground around her was snow, great billowing hills of it that shuffled uneasily at the wind’s slightest touch. Luna was buried in one of them, the small crater caused by her landing already disintegrating under a soft, persistent breeze.

The pegasus hovered down next to her, having somehow—miraculously—remained airborne. The wind from her wings whipped up a small flurry of white flakes from the snowy ground beneath her. The pegasus's lips moved; Luna heard nothing.

She shook her head, dislodging a small slab of snow from out her ears, and then spat another chunk out of her mouth. The pegasus's head returned from a quick glance behind her, and mouthed, “We need to get out of here, Luna. There's a war going on, and we can't risk you being in the middle of it!”

Luna starting nodded in confusion and then stopped. Her head felt too light, and a memory from a moment ago whispered of a weight flying off in the fall. She raised up a hoof and felt around her horn. The crown, a barely noticeable part of her current garb, was missing.

“I need to find the... the...” She struggled for the word. “The thingy!” She gesticulated wildly about her head and pulled herself out of the hole. “It should be easy to spot: it's black and everything around here's white.” The wind tugged angrily at her mane.

“What?” The pegasus's eye alighted on her horn. “Your crown?”

“There! That's the word: my crown. It's gone and we have to find it.”

“You want to stay here and look for your... Oh, for the love of Pete.” Her hoof scraped down the side of her face. “Look, Luna, I don't know what you're thinking right now or what this all looks like to you. Maybe you've gone mad or maybe you're just having a breakdown, but staying here and looking for your crown is... is...” She sighed. “Just come back with me to the castle, okay?”

“Crown first, castle later,” Luna replied, and then trotted past her, legs disappearing up to their knees in the snow. The tip of her horn lit up, bathing the surrounding ground in a bright-blue light. She waved her head from side to side, revealing more and more glittering snowdrifts. Falling snowflakes stuck to her mane and coat. “It's black, after all. Just give me a moment and—” Her horn-light glinted off something. Two somethings. “I think I've found it!” She waded forwards in short, bouncy jumps, legs piling up clumps of snow onto either side.

The second something surged downwards in a sudden jerk of motion as Luna approached, revealing itself as a thick, smoky block of ice. It kicked the first glimmering object towards her. Luna's crown bounced across the snow, parts of it becoming coated in a speckled white. She snatched it up, pulled it onto her head and then stared at the block. Rather than sinking into the snow, it almost seemed to float on top of it, like a boat out at sea or a pegasus walking on clouds. It was the most impossible thing she had seen yet.

Luna paused and raised her head, casting her horn-light higher into the air. A figure made out of ice appeared, carved into the shape of a pony and cast in a deep, glacial blue. Her light penetrated less than a centimetre into its surface, the core beneath hidden by opaque layers signifying an unrealistic depth. The head turned towards her, and Luna imagined that she could hear it creak.

She took a step back; three more figures emerged from the darkness, their progress surprisingly quick until they came into the circle of light. Broken reflections glinted out at her from their flat and angular crystalline skin. Luna turned round and beheld ten more. The pegasus was gone.

“What are you?” Luna asked them, entirely unconcerned. She paced up and down a bit and shivered in the cold. Her head cocked to one side as she looked one over. She grinned. “I wonder if you break?” A sapphire spark formed at the tip of her horn, light overriding the conical glow of her previous spell.

“Luna!” She whipped her head up; the pegasus was flying in a tight figure of eight up above.

A windigo roared off in the distance, distracting her. The pegasus was gone by the time she looked back, and Luna noted that the duo of stars above her had been replaced by a constellation. More flaming rocks were hurtling through the sky, their arching parabola preserved in a blotted line of dwindling flames. A few inched closer to the glimmering dots that were their likely targets; most veered wildly off course.

One didn't appear to be moving at all. Luna blinked, blinked again and then realised that, far from not moving, it was heading directly towards her. It would probably land nearby. She wondered if it would chase the cold away.

She looked back down. The things—snow ponies, she suddenly decided—were closer, the radius of their surrounding circle decreasing with all the slowness and certainty of a glacier. She took a step forwards, and then another, till she was standing within hoofsreach of one of them. She held out a foreleg and prodded the thing gingerly; it did not move. She pressed harder against it, silver horseshoe digging slightly into the snow pony's chest. A scattering of blue dust tumbled out as her hoof carved into the ice. The figure didn’t move. Red light flickered off its icy skin as the flaming rock continued to descend. Luna’s hoof pulled back.

As if that was all the signal they were waiting for, the figures lurched forwards. Luna backed off quickly, wings flaring upwards as the ring surrounding her contracted once, and then once again. The snow ponies' movements weren't as jerky as she'd expected them to be, but smooth and coordinated to an unnatural degree.

“Step back!” she warned. They pressed inwards; her horn flared into a red that matched the growing light bouncing off their bodies. “Don't make me—” An icy figure pushed her backwards, and an arctic weight thudded against her side.

Blue wings blurred into a retaliatory motion, pushing air downwards as the alicorn rose. Her horn flashed continuously as magic flowed from out her forehead and rose upwards in a dizzying surge of power. The ruddy illumination cast by the falling boulder increased into a heady scarlet, and—seeing further under the added height of being airborne—Luna realised it was not a small band that surrounded her, but hundreds of figures clomping through the snowy dark; not towards her, but around her, as if the bare twenty gathered in an imperfect circle down below would be enough to subdue her. Her eyes flashed white, the charge in her horn released and a bolt of blue zapped towards one of those arrogant enough to think they could hold her.

It hit the glimmering surface of the chosen snow pony and bounced straight back. Blank irises widened further, the pureness of the white already fading into a clear blue. The beam struck her wing in an explosion of red; feathers twirled amongst the falling snow.

Luna landed heavily, snow billowing around her in a rising shower of white as she coughed pitifully. Seconds later, an icy hoof thrust into her chest and once more recreated the crash, driving her down, down, down into the snowdrift's icy confines. Her silver horseshoes slipped along the pillar's polished surface, unable to force it off or even catch a grip against it. Snow clutched angrily at the semicircle carved into her wing, tugging and tearing at it with every desperate motion. Three more columns joined the first, driving her further down into the shifting weight of the snow. Luna tried to breathe and found she couldn't: her chest was like a frozen void, dark and spreading. Her horn sparked feebly. Cold poured into her lungs.

Heat followed after it in great, billowing waves, driving intolerable amounts of boiling energy into her. The weights holding her down lifted, and Luna started to claw her way upwards, only to give a muffled cry as the snow surrounding her injured wing tugged her back. She pushed upwards again, teeth gritting together as her wing felt like it was being pulled apart.

The snow above her became softer and almost watery as she dug herself through it. Eventually, one of her hooves broke through the crusted surface and out into a world of blistering heat. It briefly retreated, before reaching back up, hooking onto the side and pulling. Luna’s head rose like a sunken iceberg out of the snow, coughing and spluttering desperately for even a thimbleful of air. A second hoof burst out of the snow and echoed the first in trying to catch onto the side. It sank into a thick slush of melting ice and water.

Her eyes creaked open, only to wince back into a thin crack of colour as the world burned around her. The rock had landed, inverting a world of frost into one of flame and driving the figures from it, though all she could see of this was a thin, watery blur of red. Her hooves fumbled in ever slowing motions against the melting snow, repeatedly failing to find either grip or strength enough to pull herself out. Finally, she slumped down into the half-watery slush that pressed against her, world dwindling into black as the edges of her vision collapsed.

Something pushed its way under her forelegs, lifting her up and out of her melting cocoon. Her dangling wing broke through the surface, and she was too apathetic to even flinch at the pain. A stray thought crossed her mind that she should struggle, try and get away, but she quickly quashed it. The dream was drawing to a close, and who was she to try and stop it? She might as well let the dream-ghasts do whatever it was they were doing with her.

Two more limbs wormed their way around her waist, securing her bottom half, and two more followed that. A faint, almost watery drumming sound filled the air, and Luna felt the farewell tug of the ground as she left it beneath her. The world fell into darkness as they carried her away.

I shall miss this dream, Luna thought, feeling rather than seeing the dream drifting into fractured thoughts. Though it was very, very strange.

---

Luna’s snore died violently as she turned over, its life ending in a fit of explosive snorts into her pillow. Her thoughts rolled sluggishly about her brain as she began to wake up. The memory of a cramp twinged at her left leg and pulled it out into an easing straightness. Luna mumbled scattered nothings into the doughy confines of her cushion, and then lifted her face out, eyes remaining shut. She turned and rested her head down on one side, sacrificing the other to a fate of sinking slowly into a world of all-surrounding softness.

There had been a... a... a something. Of that she was certain. One of her forelegs slid under the pillow and rummaged about for a patch of coldness to slump into. The something had been a vague sort of thing, as far as she could recall. It had been... well, weird. She wasn’t sure if she had or hadn’t liked this particular type of something. It was hard to tell without knowing exactly what the something was. A slow grin spread across Luna’s face as her foreleg settled in, the bulge of its entry pushing her sinking head back up above the pillow-layer. Oh yes, that was it. The something had been a dream.

Luna mumbled out a few nothings again, before squirming slightly about on her tummy. The blankets covering her began to slide off, until a cloud of blue tugged them back into place. She let out a half-stifled yawn.

Her last dream had been... oh, centuries ago now. Luna could barely remember it when she was awake, never mind attempting to try her luck whilst on the verges of sleep. She could remember that it hadn’t been that exciting, though—not that that last dream had been any better. She’d had to make that one interesting instead of just letting it play out, which was rather presumptuous for a dream. They were meant to entertain her, not the other way round.

A clock’s chime reached her from far away, and Luna began to wonder how many hours were left till dusk. She slowly opened her one free eye, and—

It was dark, and not the growing darkness of twilight or the before-its-time blackness of a thunderstorm, but the full, covering darkness of midnight. Flecks of snow fluttered like butterflies inside the gloom, their presence illuminated by a row of merrily dancing candle-flames. Luna blinked her one uncovered eye a few times, her muddled thoughts catching up with the idea that, rather than looking out into a void, she was staring out towards a window. She wouldn’t normally have considered it anything out of the ordinary, if it wasn’t for the fact that she’d had nothing to do with it. Clearly, Celestia had let her sleep in and switched the sun and moon over alone, because this was a night that was not hers.

Luna huffed once, breath disturbing the sheets, but didn't rise out of bed. Her one visible eyebrow scowled, and the pale-blue eye beneath it rolled restlessly about the half of the room visible to her, taking in the sparse decoration and shadowy reflections splayed across the window. It occurred to her, after a few moments, that it wasn't her bedroom. Her eyes flicked over to the window. Snow. They resumed their investigation of the unfamiliar room. Not yours.

There was a pattern hanging in the air, but Luna'd be damned if she could see it. She yawned again, pulled all four of her legs back under her and lifted herself up. The covers flowed down her back and gathered into a half-assembled gown as she stretched, the bones along her spine popping and cracking into place. Her mane fluffed up into a bunched, transparent cloud around her neck. Some of the sheets must have wrapped around her during the night, because her wings were stubbornly refusing to unfold from her chest. Her horn glowed as she tugged at the cloth wrapped round them; it disdained movement. She turned her head round and blinked at it. A word filtered into her mind: bandage.

The pattern’s solution suddenly arrived: she was still in the dream and it was still being strange. Waking up within a dream was... well, it was strange. No real way around that. Not unheard of, but never experienced by her. Luna sat down with plop on the bed, noticing for the first time that it was a far bigger bed than she was used to. She mulled the problem over as the sheets slid off her and into a messy pile on the now bare mattress.

This isn't very much like a dream, Luna thought. She blinked a few times and tried to remember what little she could of the dreamscapes she'd visited in the past.

This isn't like a dream at all.

Luna looked around slowly and steadily, as if she had all the time in the world. The room was a bedroom for somepony important who, as far as she could tell, didn’t seem to spend that much time in it. Other than the bed and the window, there was nothing else there. Putting aside that she'd never seen it before, it wasn't that remarkable. Exactly what she'd expect from a dream. Luna frowned and leaned forwards, a nagging suspicion at the edge of her thoughts.

It was the wall which broke it for her and revealed what had, up till then, been hidden just out of sight. It was the same dark-granite as all the other walls before it had been, but this time Luna really looked at it, taking it in as an object rather than just a background.

The stone was crumbling in places, usually around the corners, and small trails of dust hung like dangling fish inside of cobweb nets. A few more had dark splotches slapped onto them: discolourations in the rock which looked ugly against the usually uniform granite. Small sparks of sand or possibly quartz twinkled out at her from gashes cut deep into the stone. No stone looked the same. She trembled slightly as the idea hit her, eyes widening and then clamping shut.

A few minutes later, Luna gulped, her first movement for a while. Her eyelids opened in a gradual but certain lift, revealing eyes that remained focused on nothing. She stood up, and with slow, careful hoofsteps that sank slightly into the mattress, got off the bed. The sheets followed after her, having gotten tangled round one of her legs in passing; one of the bed’s two pillows rode along the fabric like a ship across a duvet sea. She stopped and, with one hoof holding the cloth firmly down, yanked her leg forwards. The blanket tore with a sound like miniaturised thunder; feathers filled the air like storm-clouds.

The door's hinges creaked loudly as the whole of it became gripped in a thick, blue aura. The centre handle—a silver loop—clattered uselessly as the door was tugged outwards into a vicious, swinging arc. It reached the end of its path, the wall, and did not slam against it, but instead shuddered helplessly into a dying oscillation. Luna passed it calmly by as dust, disturbed from its hiding places by the violent motion, flowed down it like a waterfall.

She entered into a corridor, the dark walls and high ceiling lit by a row of torches—these spaced regularly. A glint near the end of it, to the side of a thick, wooden door, caught Luna's attention. Soft murmurs of hushed conversation grew as she padded towards the end, competing insistently with the glint for her attention.

Luna reached the door; the conversation behind it was now almost coherent, though her eyes remained fixed on the glint's source. Slowly, oh so slowly, a dark-blue alicorn crept into view alongside her, naked except for a tight, white bandage wrapped around her midriff. Luna's eyes flicked up and across to the alicorn's mane. She hoofed her own steadily, foreleg running through the twinkling, flowing curls and out into an unfamiliar length. Her eyes drifted upwards to the horn; she prodded the tip of her own, as if uncertain that it was there. It twanged audibly in response.

Her eyes lowered again, and she stared into the alicorn’s blue eyes. They glinted back in response, looking lost and frightened. It was like looking at a sister she had never known.

Luna breathed out in one long, continuous sigh. Her breath fogged up the mirror, hiding the reflection from view. She shivered once—from the cold, she assured herself—and then turned, extended hoof eking the door open. The whispered conversation that had, up till now, been muffled by the door flared into audibility.

There was a gathering hall beyond the door, cut into three roughly similar sections by two granite columns. Ponies filled up most of it, the columns separating them out into their individual tribes: unicorns on the left, earths in the middle and pegasi on the right. A sea of shining eyes flicked over to her from the purple dragon standing in the room’s centre. The dragon’s head turned with them, blinking once as his gaze met hers. She blinked back.

The dragon coughed once, and turned back to his audience. “I think that calls an end to this. You can all go now.” A quiet murmur, drawn from a crowd rather than a group of individuals, replied. “I said that’s an end. The Lady is not well and you have no business in bothering her.”

The crowd turned and, with surprising quickness, left. Soon, only the sound of their retreating hoofsteps remained. Eventually, those too vanished.

“This isn’t a dream, is it?” Luna said, still perched by the door. She didn’t look at the dragon. “I... How did I get here? I’ve never seen this land before in my life. ”

“You’ve always been here,” the dragon replied. His claws clinked off the stone floor as he walked towards her. Luna shut her eyes. “This is your home, my lady. Not a dream or a fantasy or make-believe, but your home.”

“No! No, it... it can’t be.” Luna’s eyes flung open and she stepped back. A reflection that was not her flashed out from the side: dark, tall and far more imposing than she was used to. The dragon smiled a sad little smile at her. “You’re lying.”

“I’m afraid I’m not and that this place is your home, though I understand why you may not think so. There is a... hereditary condition amongst your lineage, though calling it ‘hereditary’ is, perhaps, a little strong. As far as I can recall, only your great aunt, Queen Celestia, ever—”

“Celestia is my sister. And she’s a princess, not a queen.”

The dragon paused and huffed quietly to himself, cheeks puffing up as he did so. “Perhaps,” he said, “I am approaching this the wrong way.” Reptilian eyes gently locked on to hers. “My name is Spike. What do you call yourself?”

“My name’s Luna—exactly what you’ve been calling me this entire time. And it’s Princess Luna, not ‘Lady Luna’.”

“Princess?” Luna nodded once, still eyeing him carefully. One of her back legs tensed slightly as he walked towards her. “That is... curious.”

“It’s not wrong.” She almost took the step back, but managed to quell the urge. “I am Princess Luna.”

He paused, and then blinked lazily at her in an almost cat like fashion. “I said it was curious,” he replied. “You are, of course, whoever you say you are. No one is questioning that. I am, however, interested about your views on one thing in particular: Where do you remember being last?”

“I was in a town. Ponyville. There was a celebration. A great... evil had been lifted from the land, and they... put a garland of flowers around my neck.” Her hoof rose up and began to rub the fur under her neck. “I hadn’t done anything to stop it, and they still put it round my neck. And then I... I...”

“You don’t remember what happened next, do you?” The dragon huffed, once. “My la... Princess Luna, I—”

“No!” Luna interrupted, her unbound wing flaring up and scraping against the corridor’s sides. “No, I must have gone back to Canterlot with my sister. Maybe I fell asleep along the way, and stumbled out of a dream to end up here. Or maybe my presence here is magical in origin, and—” Her eyes pulsed. “Big Sister wouldn’t have.” She swallowed. “She wouldn’t...”

“I must admit, I am rather curious as to what it is you think she’s done,” the dragon interrupted. He shifted his weight around, leaning back from her. “Aside from leaving you unable to speak of it.”

Luna’s mouth closed-over tightly, and she spoke her next words through gritted teeth.

“I think she may have sent me here. Wait. Where am I, exactly?” Her head tilted back and her eyes began to dance over the ceiling. She snorted once and then returned to glaring at the dragon. “Where have you brought me? What... What is this place?”

The dragon’s arms folded over, claws tucking under his elbows. “This is the fortress of Tacktagel, defender of an entranceway into the Vernian reserves. We have not brought you anywhere; in fact, it was you who brought us here to prepare for an assault against the windigoes.”

Luna’s head turned to one side and nodded fiercely up and down, her tongue dabbing out and wetting her lips. “Oh, yes. Oh yes, of course. I brought you here. I’m the one who—wait. Why would you let me bring you anywhere?”

“As sole ruler of Equestria and the orphan nations, what you order is—”

“Hah.” Luna snorted, eyebrows burrowing into her forelock. “You call this land Equestria? You can’t just—Queen Celestia? And you call me Luna, and... and...” Her eyebrows dropped down and her lips smacked shut, only to surge back open as she shouted:

"You can’t just change everything about something whilst giving it the same name!”

Except this was no normal shout; this one had volume to it. Flags hung several metres away snapped to attention as the barrage of air unleashed from her mouth forced its way past them. The dragon winced as echo after echo bounced around the hall, eyes tightly closed and claws covering the sides of his head. Eventually, after the noise had stopped, they opened out to the sight of Luna’s hoof clasped over her face.

It slid down by a centimetre. “I am so, so sorry. I... I didn’t know it would—I didn’t think it’d—I don’t, I... I...” She sniffed, and her head swung round to peek at the mirror by her side.

“I don’t know who she is.” A great heaving breath as her regular, controlled rhythm finally broke down. “I-I’m not this colour. M-my hair never used to glow or be this long, and... and this isn’t my body, or my horn or... or my height, and... and...” She swallowed once, her hoof lowering down to reveal white teeth digging into her lip. “I don’t know who she is!”

That was a tapping sound as the dragon moved forwards; Luna leapt away from him, horn aglow as the door between them slammed shut in his face. She skittered stiffly back, legs whirling in painful motions as she raced along the hall. The door into the bedroom—which had been left open—slammed shut behind her as she passed it, a blue glow fixing it firmly in place.

Luna’s gasps echoed softly inside the small room, broken only occasionally by a muffled sob. They stopped, suddenly, and the echoes quickly died. And then sound re-filled the room, a sound similar to the shout from before, except, somehow, louder. Cracks raced like frost lines across the room’s windows before they shattered outwards, the myriad shards glinting in the moonlight as they twisted through the air. Smoke rose steadily from the torches' smouldering remains.

The moon’s light lit the room up slowly, pouring in through the jagged remains of the windows and gradually re-illuminating the scene. It gently washed over Luna, who was hunched up in the middle of the room, breathing in and out steadily. Her eyelids opened to reveal dry eyes that blinked once or twice as they adjusted to the darkness.

Her head lifted up and turned towards the shattered window; snowflakes fluttered in and out of the room. There was solid ground outside it: a balcony of some sorts. Without much of a clue as to why she was doing so, Luna rose to her hooves and walked towards it.

She stepped out onto the balcony, hooves clicking loudly off of the stone floor. The ground outside was covered with piles of snow and the glassy sheen of rock under ice. A flag placed less than a metre away from her flickered and cracked as the wind coaxed it into an erratic dance.

Luna sighed once, softly. The wind snatched the sound from her, and carried it far across a landscape that was bleak and white and desolate.  

She was an oddity, an alien. A creature utterly out of place in this world of ice and conflict. And yet, they expected her to lead them. To guide them. To rule them.

And she did not know how. All she wanted was to go home. To a world where she was welcomed, loved and wanted.

And wanted...

The wind spat snowflakes against her face, hard and cold. Luna swallowed once as it tugged insistently at her mane, pulling her focus up towards the blotted underbelly of the sky. Small streaks of moonlight tumbled down through cracks in the frothing cloud layer; the moon stained them into a pale, unhealthy yellow in its struggle to shine through.

Luna blinked up at it, her lips parting slightly to release a single, warm breath. The corners of her lips eked up into a smile.

They expected her to lead them. No, they wanted her to lead them.

Even when Luna had ruled with her sister, her subjects had never wanted her, never seen her as anything other than the lesser princess. Here, her subjects loved her and wanted her. Here, her rule was welcomed and expected.

She'd blotted out the sun for less.

Why should she try and return? What could there offer her that she could not get here? Why did she want to escape from a land that wanted her to one that didn’t? And even should she try to return, why not stay a while? This land needed her, and perhaps she needed it.

Power flowed along Luna's horn in rippling, shimmering waves. Above her head, the cloud layer tore itself up into thin fragments of mist as the full moon beamed through.

She'd been in the dark for so long, waiting for them to notice her, waiting for them to care.

She’d waited long enough.

A loud rapping at the door broke Luna out of her trance. She shook her head once, and then turned back with a shiver. The frozen hairs of her mane crunched as she walked.

She padded her way across the room and opened the door. The dragon was behind it, a torch clasped firmly in his left claw, flame flickering on the brink of going out. He coughed on it, and it flared back into life.

“My Lady Luna... I mean, Princess Luna, the clouds are—”

“Do you want me?” Luna interrupted. He frowned.

“What? My Lady, I do not under—”

“Do you want me? As a leader, that is. Does this land want me to lead it?” His frown turned quizzical, one eyebrow breaking it to rise up into his forehead.

“Of course we want you as a leader.” He turned and fixed the torch into a nearby bracket; it shone down on the two as they stood next to it. “You have led this nation through thick and thin, through the best of times and the worst. You have never abandoned it, and so neither will it abandon you.”

“Your name was Spike, correct? What is it you do around here?”

The dragon blinked. “I am indeed called Spike, Princess Luna. I serve as an... advisor to your court and the consul of the dragon nations.”

“Then you would know a lot about Equestria, wouldn’t you, Spike?” Luna rolled the unfamiliar word round on her tongue. Spike. It was an oddly apt name for a dragon.

Spike huffed. “You could say that, Princess Luna. I am not your advisor for nothing; most of what happens in the Equestrian Republic passes through my ears at some point.

Luna smiled. “Then, Spike, you have much to tell me about. When shall our lessons begin?”

---

Thanks for reading; I commend you on having made it this far without getting too bored. If you're interested, this'll probably get updated on a "when my editors stopping hitting me with sticks" basis

I pre-apologise for the aperiodicity in updates

Thanks go to

Firebirdbtops, Frederick the Saiyan, cheezesauce, N64Fan and SALT

Additional thanks goes to Stupidyou3 for permission to sully her work by association with this fic.

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