"Well, good evening, sleepyhead! Doesn't seem to be much left of you, huh?" Luna asked. The random pieces of shattered crystal laying in the fast-melting snow did not reply. Luna's horn glowed, and she started to piece together the scattered fragments of what had mere hours before been a feared tyrant. "We have to admit," the night princess continued, "turning you into a living shadow was not a wise idea. That was ours, of course. Making a shadow out of you seemed clever at the time, but it looks like it was useful to you, so we suppose we must hold it against ourself."
"How... am... I..." Sombra struggled to say as his crystalline head was assembled.
"Still alive?" Luna finished. "You silly filly, you've been turned to crystal. Crystal is like any rock -you can't kill it. Besides, did you honestly expect a spell formed of pure love and joy to kill somepony? How adorable."
"Don't talk... To me like... I am... A foal," Sombra wheezed as Luna finished re-assembling him. Sombra's body glowed slightly as it assumed its original, non-crystal form.
"But you are a foal, compared to us," the princess replied, "Silly Sombra, you are merely a spoiled colt, trying to get what he wants by wailing and crying. The only difference is that instead of wailing and crying, you use thought manipulation and memory corruption. We really do not like that."
The fallen tyrant growled, glaring at his antagonist. Luna couldn't help but smile at the unicorn. At the height of his power, he hadn't been able to stand against the royal sisters, even with Luna engaged in her own inner struggle. Now, Sombra's power broken and Luna's mind clear, the ex-king stood no chance against the immortal princess. The night goddess wondered briefly if this fact occurred to Sombra, whether even the slightest possibility of it flickered through his mind. She hoped not, it would make breaking him more interesting.
"You know, we tried to convince Celestia to let us come fight you ourselves, but she insisted that Shining Armor and Twilight Sparkle, and of course dear Cadence, get a shot at you first."
"You call yourself a princess, but in the end you're just Celestia's most loyal minion," Sombra said with a sneer, "she was being a good older sister, looking out for your well-being. Very merciful of her."
Luna brought her snout mere inches away from Sombra's and replied, "your memory of our last encounter seems to be flawed, my dear young colt. We were not the one to whom Celestia was showing mercy." Sombra blinked and backed away slowly. Luna realized she had probably eliminated any chance of a real fight, but didn't let it bother her. "Speaking of Celestia, she has already heard of today's events, and plans to give most of the credit to Spike. You know, that little dragon who very nearly dropped the Crystal Heart right on your head. History will forever remember you, Sombra, as being defeated by a clumsy infant reptile." Luna gave a smile and a small sigh, then spoke words that came directly from her heart; "we do so dearly love our sister."
"She's done a better job of keeping you under her hoof than I ever did with the crystal ponies." Sombra replied, amusing Luna with his attempt to insult her, "speaking of your sister, did the two of you ever deal with the darkness in your own heart?"
Luna grinned widely, knowing that Sombra had hoped his mention of the entity that had turned her into Nightmare Moon would upset her. The princess took great joy in her reply, and the look on her enemy's face. "Oh, we called in some friends to help us sort that out. But we suppose you don't know about friendship, do you?" The unicorn gnashed his teeth as the princess continued cheerfully,
"you can't very well mind-control somepony into being your friend, even if you can make them fake it, so what say we introduce you to somepony you can't control? We have encountered someone just as evil as you, although not so foalish. Maybe she can be your friend."
Sombra's response died in his throat as a flash of blinding light consumed both ponies. The unicorn blinked several times and stared at the lifeless, crater-pocked plain he found himself upon.
"Come along, Sommy!" The princess said in a sing-song voice, the like of which a mother might use to address a tiny foal, "Hmm. Sommy? Soms? Bra? That last one seems... Off. Dear, dear, we should've thought of a nickname for you before we came, your name is much harder to work with than Crys's was."
"You. Are. Insane!" Sombra accused, filling Luna with joy.
"Oh, Som-Som, you're adorable," Luna said, batting his snout. "Som-Som! That's it! We have your nickname, so now we may continue!" The deposed crystal monarch glared at her with murder in his glowing eyes. Luna briefly considered trying to force her manic grin into a motherly smile, but abandoned the idea. She had never been the motherly sort, unlike her warm-hearted sister.
Sombra took a fighting stance. "Where in Tartarus have you taken me?!" He demanded. To the princess's own surprise, her smile widened, to the point that she thought it was past her physical limits.
"Oh, where are our manners?" The mare said with mock embarrassment, "you're an old friend, so we must have forgotten formality. Welcome, fallen tyrant Sombra, to the moon!"
The king flopped down onto the alien ground. "What," was the only word he spoke.
The princess patted his head condescendingly. "The moon, silly Som-Som, the moon. That big, beautiful sphere of glorious stone that I am responsible for moving through the night sky." Luna explained lovingly, dropping the royal plural and her formal tone. "This lovely rock predates Equestria by an absurd amount of time, and has been my responsibility for eons uncountable. No seriously, I've gone and lost count of how many centuries I've been pushing this rock through the heavens. Still, it's a good career, so long as you don't do anything stupid, like let an incorporeal entity of sentient evil play around in your head."
"You mean to trap me here!" Sombra declared, jumping to his feet. His eyes glowed with rage and malevolent power, "left alone, so far from my empire-"
"You won't be alone at all," Luna said sweetly, "didn't I tell you? I have a friend for you. Now come along." Princess Luna turned away and began walking. Sombra the fallen king followed, his head low and his eyes wary.
After walking for what seemed like an age, the two ponies crested the raised edge of a particularly large crater, and found at its bottom a large pile of stones and an unusually tall changeling. The changeling was staring at the moon rocks as if intent on learning every single detail of their surfaces.
"There she is!" Luna said gleefully. She waved a hoof in the air, calling, "Chrys! Oh Crys! We have somepony for you to meet!" The princess switched on the nerve-grating formality. The changeling whirled around, her wings buzzing as she stared in confusion and shock at the two ponies. She flew at Luna, her face distorted in rage.
"You madmare!" The changeling cried, "how dare you-" Chrysalis stopped short as Luna ran a small amount of magic through her horn. Just enough to make it glow and remind the changeling who held all the proverbial cards on the moon.
"Dear, dear Chrysalis," Luna let her voice assume a gleeful tone, "we thought you might be lonely, so we brought a friend for you! He's just as bad a troublemaker as you are, so we thought we might as well have him share your sentence." The princess plopped a hoof down on Sombra's shoulder and continued, "Chrysalis, former Queen of Changelings, meet Sombra, deposed king of the Crystal Empire! Sombra, this is Queen Chrysalis! She's a naughty, naughty retired monarch, just like you!" The ex-rulers stared mutely at each other as their still-crowned counterpart assessed Chrysalis's rock pile with a professional eye.
"Chrys, oh Chrys, you'd better pick up the pace! Our moon-rock castle was much further along by now! Or maybe it wasn't, we did lose track of time up here." With that, the night-sky princess vanished.
The changeling and the remaining pony stared at each other for several more minutes.
"So, by 'sharing your sentence', I suppose she means I'm here for as long as you are." Sombra said slowly.
"It seems that way," Chrysalis said bluntly, "well, we're stuck with each other for the next thousand years, so we might as well get along."
"One. Thousand. Years?" The unicorn asked, stunned. The changeling queen nodded grimly and turned to hover back to her rocks.
King Sombra wept. Queen Chrysalis, however, ambled away. She kept ambling, in fact, until the crater was several miles from her, and she was standing next to her jailer.
"Decided to stick around a bit longer, Lulu?" The changeling asked, gazing at the distant planet below.
"'Lulu'? I don't think anypony has called me that before. It's quite novel" The princess replied, her tone melancholic.
"Hm, what happened to the false sweetness and the half-crazed grinning?"
Luna thought carefully before replying, "I always scare myself when I get like that, I think I enjoy it too much. Reminds me of how I used to be. Should I be telling you this? I'm not sure. Too late now, though. That aside, I do enjoy it up here, even though this place once served as my prison. It's so quiet. But it's a quiet that can drive a pony to madness."
"And that's why you brought the weeping unicorn here? To give me someone to talk to?"
"When I found him, Sombra had been turned into crystal, and then shattered." Luna turned to look Chrysalis in the eyes, "but he was still alive. And he was aware. Can you imagine that? Being separated into hundreds of fragments and scattered across the land, yet remaining fully conscious? Unable to move, unable to call for help, unable to even scream at the horror of it all?" Chrysalis's face went pale as she considered the idea, "and worse, living with the knowledge that no help will come, because everypony thinks you're dead, and they're all too busy telling each other how evil you were to care for your well-being anyway." The princess sighed and continued, "he enslaved an entire nation, corrupted the memories of countless ponies, and caused his entire empire to vanish from the world when Celestia and I came to do something about it, but for all of that, I wouldn't wish that fate on him. Bad enough that we have to keep Discord in stone."
"Discord?" The changeling's ears pricked up, "not a name I am familiar with."
"I'm surprised, he has the power to warp reality, and enjoys using it to make ponies suffer. For a time, all of Equestria was under his control. He's a statue now, the only way to stop him from abusing his powers in his madness. But you, Chrysalis, you and Sombra, are not quite like him."
"So you send us to the moon instead." Chrysalis said flatly.
"I don't want Equestria or the Crystal Empire invaded again," Luna replied, just as flatly, "admittedly, with Sombra, I didn't calculate or plan, as I did with you. Once I'd re-assembled him, it occurred to me that I had better imprison him or he'd just have another shot at the Empire, and this is the only place that can hold him. You two can't hurt anypony here. Thanks to my power, not even each other. Consider this an opportunity to re-evaluate your life, Chrysalis. One thousand years on this moon did me a world of good, in a surprisingly literal sense. And you, and perhaps Sombra, are very much like I was in those days."
"Re-evaluate my life?" Chrysalis sneered, "don't talk nonsense!"
"Well then, consider this riddle. From what I have observed, Queen Chrysalis, you are powered by love, but motivated by hate. I don't know if that's true, but that is, when all your illusions are stripped away, how you appear. How, then, did this come to be?" Without waiting for an answer, the princess vanished once more.