[i]“Your Highness, where do our dreams go when we wake up?”[/i]

I remembered being asked that most intriguing question by a young filly when I accompanied my sister on her visit to an academy not long after my return to Equestria. It was not the first time I have heard of that question; I have asked the question myself several times when I was at a similarly tender age. Such was the curiosity of a child: a ponderous and perilous beast, well-intentioned as it may be.

My mentor at that time, the esteemed Lady Canary, persistently stated that such questions are best answered at the appropriate time and place. She was a stern yet benevolent teacher, strict with her discipline yet cordial outside her regimen. Beneath her eternally-youthful appearance hid wisdom that the kings of old have waged wars over, for she was a master in oneiromancy, and was the only one of her kind back in the day. She had wished to impart her knowledge onto me once she learned of me being newly crowned as the Princess of the Night, and though I had been apprehensive of her punctilious methods as much as I was of the responsibility of possessing the knowledge itself, I soon became fond of her, and she of me.

Knowing the burgeoning wealth of her wisdom, it only beseeched me to ask that question, and every time I did, I would either be gently disappointed or severely admonished. Either way, by the end, she would make the same promise: that she will not only tell me where our dreams go but show me as well.

Suffice to say, she kept it.

The earliest memory I had of the place was a garden of marble columns and overgrowing hydrangeas. I found my mentor seated by a glass table in a cerulean dress, beckoning me over to indulge in an enlightening conversation over eucalyptus tea.

The Lady Canary had called this place the Penumbra. The road to her discovery of this place was familiar, for she too had asked her mentor this very question and was guided down to this very same realm. The Penumbra existed at a niche in the periphery between the dreams and nothingness. It was a place where all the dreams of the world constantly converge to bleed into the nothingness; a place so terrifyingly treacherous and dissonant that even creatures like the Tantabus refuse to tread upon.

At the surface, The Penumbra was a stitched quilt of all the world’s relinquished dreams. The aforementioned garden, Lady Canary confided to me, was dreamt up by one of the castle’s gardeners, but the hydrangeas specifically were from a young filly living somewhere southwest of Applelachia. The table and dress she wore were leftovers from the nightmares of a Saddle Arabian princess in an arranged marriage, the eucalyptus tea said aristocrat’s hoofmaiden.

Altogether, I was viewing what I believed was a most pleasant vignette, of which I had made it known to her after the fact. Nonetheless, the Lady Canary was adamant that the Penumbra, though harmless at first glance, was extremely dangerous, and made it exceptionally clear to me that I must not enter it without her supervision. Being the curious filly I was, I often wondered why that was the case, especially as our visits to the Penumbra became increasingly common as the months went by.

In time, I began to learn why.

Lady Canary decided to bring me deeper into the Penumbra a few nights after I turned thirteen. The precautions she took before leading me in were ridiculously inordinate, even for her. However, I quickly understood the need for that the moment we delved inside.

Everything in there was misshapen, some grossly conspicuous, others deceptively subtle. Wherever I looked, I was met with sight after uncanny sight—serrated trees, slithering flowers, pulsating rocks—yet what caught my eye were these translucent silhouettes roaming all around, squirming and crawling about the devolving world like spiders with twisted legs.

Lady Canary had called them the Mýrarhryssur. They were haemorrhaging vestiges of ‘living’ creatures that were borne of those who dreamt them, be it a forest animal, a monster from a nightmare, or even another pony. Much like with everything else, their convulsing forms were amalgamations, a blackened shadow of all the world’s dreams. They have no sense of self, their only prerogative being to wander about until their eventual fate of being swallowed slowly and painfully by the abyss.

I had to watch it happen alongside her once, as part of my lessons. Let it be known that there can only be so many hours of shrieking and screeching and squelching a young teenage mare should tolerate before breaking down into an inconsolable mess.

Thinking back, I should have wondered at the time about why the Lady Canary thought it imperative that I witness their dissolution, about how it was relevant to my lessons in dream-walking. My qualms then were brief, for I firmly believed she had only the best interests at my heart.

It was on the night of my fifteenth birthday when Lady Canary decided that I was ‘at that age’ to visit the deepest vestibules of the Penumbra, the final place where everything ends up. After all her extensive precautions, she was leading me across the plateau of disfigurations once more.

Our destination proved to be a small rotunda in the middle of a gaping emptiness. Stone steps lead down to the middle the inkiest, murkiest pool of bubbling black, the stench wafting from it akin to a mix of boiled flesh and rotting eggs. Surrounding the water’s edge was more of the Mýrarhryssur, yet these were frozen in genuflection; statues in prayer around a pool in a macabre rangoli.

[i]“This is it,”[/i] my mentor spoke. [i]“This is where all our dreams go to rest.”[/i]

She then stepped forward and, before I could stop her, dipped a hoof into the water. A sizzle, before the blackness began surging up her veins. Almost immediately, her flesh began to melt away, her bones beneath flaking into dust. Her pores spurted black, her decaying form looking like a ruptured beehive.

[i]“The power I taught you, the power you have now, is a borrowed one. There will come a time that it has to be returned. Here, at the end.”[/i]

She smiled back at me. It was eyeless. The ink spewed from her sockets.

[i]“My teacher did the same when she passed all the knowledge she had, as did her teacher before her. Tonight comes mine. One day, your time will come too.”[/i]

Nevertheless, she looked at peace, as if it was meant to be.

[i]“And when that time comes, when you’ve passed on all your knowledge of this realm to your successor, you know what to do.”[/i]

Lady Canary passed later that night. I was not present, but the records state that the guards found her in her quarters being seized and held up by an invisible force, her voice drawn out into a long and low croak as her form was plucked away, piece by piece, into nothing. Her demise lasted three hours.

I rarely returned to the Penumbra ever since. I still see the Lady Canary sometimes, beckoning me to join her, to relinquish my royal duties and take a dip. I am still asked that question time after time, of where our dreams go when we wake up, and my answer was always the same.

[i]“They go to sleep. They rest.”[/i]