Princesses of Equestria

Chapter 16: Nightmares

Applejack had a hard enough time getting shuteye without Twilight's psychic dreams playing up.

"Princess ... Equus Nox ..."

Applejack buried herself in her sleeping bag, and tried ignoring the mumbles.

"Storm ... Orphanage ... Intellectus!"

"Sentence fragments!" Discord wisecracked. "Forced pauses! Just phrases!"

"Oh shush you," Fluttershy said softly, but too late.

"Consarnit ..." Applejack grumbled, and peeked out her sleeping bag to see what the all fuss was about. Twilight, turned ghostly green under the embers of Spike's latest campfire, writhed to and fro.

Discord had paused from some late night reading to watch the show. Applejack squinted at what he'd been browsing (a plastic bag, maybe?) but the odd fellow swallowed it the moment he caught her looking. Had the gall to wave his finger at her too! Chaos gods.

Applejack pondered the cheddar cavern he'd made. Purportedly made, anyhow, around a thousand years ago. Discord had stopped denying that the swiss cheese caves they trekked through weren't his handiwork. Who else would transmogrify an entire gosh-durned geological formation based solely on a bad pun?

Thing was, Discord couldn't recall transmogrifying it, or any other formation in Equinox Greens. Not when Celestia and Luna had showed them the Pandemonium in that scrying scope, and not now. Or so he said, usually while nursing a headache.

Applejack didn't buy it. Yet, the Element of Honesty didn't play up when Discord told his story, so Applejack still reckoned he was telling the truth. As far as he knew, anyway.

Applejack yawned. Laws, all this thinking was tiring her out.

Hm. Twilight had gone quiet. Perhaps she could still get to sleep—

"Elements! Crown of Harmony! Twelfth birthday!"

"Aw hush your mouth, Twi!" Applejack burst out, louder than she'd intended.

Suffice to say, it didn't work. Instead of hushing, Twilight yelped, jerked awake, and rolled over Spike's tail. His yelp sprayed dragonfire at Pinkie, her evasive twitch rattled Applejack's zap cider bottle, the bottle's spark's lit Rarity's mane, Rarity's panicked spray of extinguishing water sprayed Rainbow Dash too, and sent the startled gal zooming round the cavern. By the time she'd calmed down and dried off, everypony else was wet, peeved, and definitively awake.

"Uh. Apologies, y'all," Applejack said placatingly. "Twi's sleep-talking got to me." Twilight squirmed under their tired looks.

"Another dream, huh?" Spike asked, more curious than annoyed. "What was it this time?" He shivered as he talked, and re-lit his fire with a puff.

"Well ..." Twilight began uncertainly, while Applejack and everypony else gathered to hear her story. "See for yourselves," she said, and opted to show the story instead.

Twilight's horn flickered like a theatre projector, and she used the opposite wall as a makeshift screen. Images appeared there in a feverish blur, much as Twilight's earlier mutters had described.

A storm. An orphanage. A big winged lion; Intellectus, Applejack guessed. Twilight's movie was silent, but the pictures spoke for themselves. Applejack was looking at memories. Memories that weren't Twilight's. Memories of a unicorn who single-hoofedly stopped a storm thrice the size of the one that had threatened Ponyville on festival day.

A unicorn who, come the dream's end, had been given the Elements of Harmony, their Crown and a pair of alicorn's wings by the Princesses she'd eventually cast into oblivion.