Somnah
Legacy Name: Somnah

Does it?

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Oh, now Ambus has really gotten on my nerves. He probably thinks just because he's bigger than me, that his opinions matter more. He's been trouncing around in my own dreams, stomping his big feet and bringing terrible storms. "Where's the Queen, where's the Queen?" he asks, as if I have an answer! I haven't seen her since the last time anyone saw her!
Which was... when?
He made me sit down and really think about it. I was so busy playing with the dreams between my hooves, I barely cared, but he made me. I sat and thought and thought and dragged my mind away from my dreams to really ask myself.
Where was the Queen?
After so long of thinking, I told him, there's a big blank spot in my mind. One moment, she was here. The next? Gone. How could I explain that? Just a big empty space? I couldn't remember.
But then Selka asked the most curious thing. He sat there with his big eyes, for the first time in so long looking concerned, so much like Ambus. He sat and he looked at me, turning his head this way and that. He did that for such a long time until finally he opened his mouth and he asked me,
"Miss Somnah, was your coat always so drab?"
I wanted to take it as an insult. Drab? How dare you! But I looked down at myself. Gray - the grayest gray. Then I looked around at my world - color! Everything was filled with such vibrant blues and greens and everything else swirling between them. Every little object was lined in a brilliant white, glowing, dancing through our minds and between my hooves.
Does that make much sense, I wondered? The servant of the Queen of such a world, to look so... drab?
I didn't have an answer for Selka, so I pretended to take offense. How dare he indeed. Drab.

But I couldn't stop thinking about the gap in my mind, so I chased it once they were gone. I thought, even Ambus has brightness on his coat, and he brings rainstorms everywhere he goes!
I chased the missing part of my memory. It was dark, a growing darkness like a chasm as I got closer and closer. I ignored the dreams passing by me as I ran, my hooves carrying me faster and faster. Something really was missing, and that wasn't right at all. I kept following, following, going wherever I was being taken.
I hoped it would lead me to the Queen. Where had she been? I suddenly had the feeling that it had been a very, very long time since anyone had seen her. I had to find her. I was her assistant, after all. It was my duty to look after her, to do her bidding and watch over the world.
Right? Was that what I did?
The notion, I realized, was suddenly so vague. What was it that I really did? What was it that I had been doing, for so long, since the Queen was gone...?

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The darkness found me before I realized. Suddenly I was before it, my hooves nearly touching its inky blackness. I stepped back in fear that it would jump up at me and cover me in that colorless void. I would surely be drab then, wouldn't I, Selka?
But I stared into it. Something about it was not right. The edges were jagged, so unlike any other body of water. It couldn't have been water. I looked in and saw... What was it? Somewhere far away, something was staring back at me. Was it a face? Someone else at all?
I looked deeper, and deeper. I couldn't see any reflection of my suddenly unfamiliar drab coat. The strange pit was the same color as the widening gap in my mind, that place that separated Queen from No Queen. Where was she? In this pit?
All of a sudden, it seemed I got my answer. Whatever was looking back at me seemed to grin. Was it a face? It was holding me with its stare, a vibrantly red pair of eyes glowing with something like... pure evil.
It spoke to me, directly through my mind, as if it were one of the dreams that surrounded me. Before I could ask myself - should I run? - it spoke.
Ah, it said. You've come back. Searching for yourself?
I didn't understand.
The void reached out. Its great claws were the size of the whole world and a thousand of them surrounded me, that grin still shining somewhere deep inside.
Wondering where the rest of you went? You poor thing, it mocked, You're just a shell of your former self, aren't you? I've taken so much of it away, haven't I?
For the first time since I had last seen the Queen, I felt fear. And it was familiar. Where had I felt this fear before?
Had that void taken the Queen? Had it come for us in another time? Had it taken her?
What did it mean, when it said...
By then, the darkness was all around me. There was nothing but those great, black claws surrounding me. I wished so desperately that I had told Ambus and Selka where I was going. My friends, where were my friends? I wanted to see my friends! To hell with the Dream World!
To hell with it, indeed, sneered the void. It grinned wider and wider as suddenly, it grabbed me, and I couldn't move. We'll see what happens, it said, When a shell is filled with darkness.
As it drew me in, I saw the truth. I saw my reflection, and there was no drab gray in sight. All I could see what the bright blue, the shining white, of what I used to be. The gap in my mind, that yawning darkness, became flooded with memory, and I saw it all.
There was only a glimpse of my true self, from somewhere far in the past, my whole entire self... Before that void swallowed me whole.

Oh, Ambus, I wailed into the darkness. You were right all along to fret as you did.

As I lay unmoving in that void, filled with nothingness, I could only hope his fretting would bring him back to the Queen everyone had forgotten... Back to me.
Oh, my friends. I've gone and dreamed myself away...

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[Story, overlay, and profile by me]