The Life of Penumbra Heartbreak

by Unwhole Hole

Chapter 78: Sombra

Everything had gone wrong.

Gxurab jumped, barely avoiding a bolt of magical discharge as he ducked behind a piece of support equipment. The bolt struck the console instead and tubes exploded, casting reeking transfer fluid into the air and onto the floor. Gxurab was breathing hard through his strange lungs. He had not been so lucky before. The first blast had hit him hard, putting a hole in his chest. When he looked down, hear nearly fainted- -but focused on the spell that held his body together.

Within him, the crows writhed. They filled the hole, their bodies becoming his new flesh. It was interesting in its own right, but it was not something he could do repeatedly. He only had so many birds.

There was no pain, exactly. Only confusion. He could hear the minds of his ravens crying out in cacaphony- -but hardly noticed. The only thing his own mind could focus on was the screaming.

They were not the screams of a pony. They were not the screams of any sort of thing that was meant to be alive. Not living, not dead, not organic or machine- -something unspeakable and terrible. He should have known. He had done the scans, he had prepared the process from the start. He was not a pony. Sombra had not been a pony for a long, long time.

And yet, even as fear and horror crept through his hundreds of minds, Gxurab could not stop weeping. It had been him who had done this. It was his fault. It was he who had failed, and now the king was suffering because of him- -because he had not understood that the process could never have succeeded.

Another feedback wave detonated the system Gxurab was hiding behind, striking his body in the process. He burst into a plume of ravens, quickly spreading out and passing through the ionized air to new cover. Then, with grave difficulty, he reformed himself- -at least partially.

From his new vantage, he could see his failure. The platform had been placed in the center of the room, the epicenter of the new output transmitter’s power. Sombra now lay their, convulsing horribly and struggling against the restraints that held him in place. Above him, the elemental shadow waited- -inert and nonplussed.

Then, suddenly, the whole world seemed to stop. Sombra’s eyes opened and went wide, and then he fell back onto the metal table as his decrepit body flatlined. As Gxurab watched, he could see- -or more of feel- -as the king’s very soul left his body, torn free of his mortal coil but suspended from his machine.

The air began to hum as the machines began to shatter, unable to bear the strain. A low-frequency wave struck Gxurab, nearly disincorporating him again. It had been removed, and it was trapped, but not successfully- -the machine could not hold containment, and the soul itself was screaming in agony.

“No,” said Gxurab, rising and turning, suddenly overcome with both desperation and conviction. “NO! I won’t let you!”

His body burst into crows and he crossed the center of the room, bringing himself to the auxiliary control console just as a new and more ominous sparking began from the machine.

He checked the meters. Everything was right, or it was supposed to be: the fear-meter was in the critical zone, it had enough energy- -or should have.

“I have to reverse it!” Gxurab began to change the settings, desperately trying to recall his efforts. “I have to save him! He can’t- -he can’t leave us! I WILL NOT ALLOW IT!”

Except that it was too late. Sombra’s body had already failed. Only the soul remained, partially held in place by the power of the machine- -and as Gxurab watched, space itself began to sheer around the primary emitter. Something was dragging it outward and away. Something heavy.

Suddenly space began to distort. Gxurab cried out and held the console below him, desperately trying to retain his grasp on something material to prevent himself from being driven instantly insane.

There was no physical way to perceive the changes the world underwent, at least not in its truest form. Gxurab could have proven them mathematically, given time, but time was now something he distinctly lacked.

All that was material seemed to lose form- -and gained form in additional, indescribable dimensions. Suddenly the room was no longer the one Gxurab had begun in.

Nor was he alone. He cried out as he looked to one side and saw the spectral shadows of ponies standing at an entirely different console, one he himself had not constructed.

Then, to his horror, he realized that one of those ponies was HIM. Not a version built of cursed birds, but a morlock, as he had once been- -but contained in an entirely different suit, one that by some unknown design or construction left parts of his skin exposed, like the armor that the nobility of his race used. Beside his other self were two other ponies. One was, somehow, Twilight Luciferian- -but not. Her hair was streaked with violet, and the silvery armor she wore was strange. One of her legs was marked with delicate and beautiful luminescent lines declaring the eternal glory of Lord Dagon. The third pony was stout and extremely fluffy.

The world split again. This time, Gxurab saw a pink earth-pony linked to a complex machine using a technetium dial worn on her shoulder, the position it was placed for female morlocks. Her expression was hard and terrifying, and at her side stood a diminutive pony clad in holograms.

Then it split one more time, opening a final view to a world where no sane pony was meant to go. The room was nearly torn asunder as Gxurab looked across form him- -to where he had been standing not minutes before- -and saw a bank of machines more complex and elegant than any he had ever imagined.

In some impossible way, he recognized the ponies on that size. They wore the same armor as Thirteen of Thirteen, although without the helmets. There were three of them, and they were all almost perfectly identical, save for the cut of their manes and the unusual size of one of them. Between them, at the controls, stood a smaller pony clad in incomplete technical armor. Her coat was orange and her mane violet. One of her hooves had been replaced with a metal claw, and she wore a mask- -a mask with a single white, luminescent eye at its center.

Then Gxurab looked up, to the center of the room- -and felt his mind fracture. He stared directly into the nexus of the collapsing realities around him, at Sombra- -and at a white unicorn mare with green eyes named Hope, at a silver earth-pony whose body was mostly machine, and at the most terrifying of them all: a gray-violet alicorn with the stumps of wings, her face contorted in agony and rage as her soul was stripped from her body.

“We’re losing integrity!” cried one of the Thirteens, surrounding herself with holograms all indicating heavy critical in languages that even Gxurab could not read. “Xyuka, if we lose containment- -”

“Then DO SOMETHING,” growled the orange Pegasus in the center. Her mask turned upward toward Gxurab, and her luminescent eye focused on him. It was linked by a cable to her equipment, and he could not even begin to imagine what she saw.

The Thirteens turned away from the scientist, their armor warping and sprouting helmets to cover their faces. As they stepped past, they distorted in a way that even Gxurab- -who had no stomach- -found desperately nauseating.

Their bodies withstood the sheer, approaching the struggling pink earth-pony and the group of three to Gxurab’s right. The largest of them seemed to be assigned to him- -but when she approached, something went terribly wrong.

All of space erupted with thunderous force and seemed to tilt, losing its binding to the reality Gxurab had created for it and sinking across countless planes. He desperately grabbed the controls, doing what he could to stabilize, but his version of the machine was too weak- -and that infuriated him.

Suddenly the whole world seemed to vibrate. Gxurab’s equipment phased into shadow, and, somehow, he saw more. It was not like the others. It was not part of another world, but a fragment of his that he was not meant to see.

Gaunt shadows moved at his sides. Gxurab was instantly terrified, but he did not know why. It was the way they moved. It was wrong. Too calm, too collected- -and too observant.

“Don’t. MOVE,” ordered the pony with the eye-mask. “You’re still out of phase, they won’t react if you don’t touch them.” She stared directly at Gxurab. “Do you have any idea what you’ve done, Al’Hrabnaz?

Gxurab gaped. “How- -how do you know my name?”

“Shut up, it’s not even your real name and I don’t have time.”

“We can’t reach him!” called the Thirteen nearest to Gxurab, desperately trying to avoid contact with the dark shadows working hard on their own devices beside him.

Space suddenly shifted. Gxurab squealed and grabbed onto a rapidly leaking tank, desperately trying to prevent himself from falling away from reality.

“Xyuka!” cried one of the Thirteens. “We have to abort! If we don’t, we’re going to tear all four universes a new one- -”

“You paid me to make a Thebe. That is what I intend to do.” She turned to Gxurab. “You,” she shouted. “You need to listen to me. We’ve become entangled. I can do what I can from my side, but your version is badly corrupted. Our universes are merging and we’re risking a pandimensional singularity.”

“But that’s not...it can’t be- -”

“It IS. His soul is too badly damaged, too much is missing.”

“But there’s nothing I can do about that, the elemental shadow- -”

“Can’t compensate if you’re already missing linkages.” The space between them began to distort in waves. “You’re going to have to rebuild the damaged parts.”

Gxurab’s eyes widened. “Creating parts of a soul- -are you insane?!”

Except that, at least in theory, it was not. Even in his distorted, semi-disembodied form, Gxurab recalled his own theories. His own life’s work. The soul was a quantifiable thing, a nexus of dimensional forces- -and yes, it could theoretically be created, or even repaired. But doing so was nearly impossible.

He looked out at the center of his machine, at the king that had given him everything. Although he felt the strain on his mind growing, he focused hard, forcing away all the other false images until he saw what he needed to see. The soul itself, a mathematical formula of unimaginable complexity, suspended before him in his machine. A shadow of Sombra, broken and in pain, unable to return to its own body or to the one Gxurab had prepared for him.

In that moment, Gxurab understood what he needed to do to succeed.

He ran to one side, circling his machinery to the central console. The words opposing him moved with him, their afterimages trailing off to new and even stranger worlds as more and more universes began to converge on the dimensional nexus. Gxurab ignored them. They did not matter. Only Sombra did.

Sliding to a stop in front of the main controls, he disconnected his technetium dial and slammed it into the center of the computer, integrating it to the mechanical controls of the entire system. He turned it, opening the tertiary nanocogs and began performing the necessary calculations.

“You have to understand, filthy Pegasus,” he said. “I would do anything for my king. Anything at all, no matter the risk. I refuse to fail.”

“Then don’t.”

Gxurab looked up at her and gave a toothy smile. “I won’t.”

He pressed the crystalline center of his dial. The crystal in the center screamed and detonated- -and as it did, the screams of ponies filled the air.

The pink earth-mare’s dial exploded against her shoulder, throwing her away from her machine as her machine failed and her subject failed to ascend. His alternate self also cried out, his own system overloading as the alternate Luciferian cast a shield spell and vanished from Gxurab’s sight. Only the Thirteens managed to remain, and even then only barely.

“WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?!”

“I redirected their power!” Gxurab laughed uncontrollably. “What they were doing doesn’t MATTER! Only MINE! Only my machine, only the ONE TRUE KING!”

Space began to collapse, filling in where the extra dimensions had once been connected.

“You can’t!” cried one of the Thirteens. “You idiot, you’ll destroy EVERYTHING!”

“No.” Gxurab grasped the edge of his dial. “I think not.”

“NO, YOU FOOL, YOU CAN’T- -”

Gxurab twisted the device, channeling the adsorbed energy into his present reality- -a reality already disconnected from the one to which he was born.

The shadowy intangible figures surrounding him suddenly burst through into solidity as his dimension merged with theirs. Their equipment appeared, already merged with his own, and the room around him changed. A new one was drawn from elsewhere across reality, from the dim half-world of the unspeakable horrors that now stood alongside Gxurab Al’Hrabnaz. A structure built by some ancient and forgotten race eons before the eldest of forgotten eras- -a castle of power, suspended in the half-void.

The horrors smiled, because things were going exactly according to plan. They oversaw the process and set to work, stabilizing the processes that had allowed for their convergence. Gxurab saw them, but was forced to stare at the ground. He comprehended them better than any others could, and could not bear to look at them. Perhaps, in time, his sanity would return to him- -but in order to save the king he loved, he had been forced to sacrifice it.

“Do you have any idea what you’ve done?” asked Xyuka. Her voice was calm and even, as if this were mildly amusing to her.

“A soul cannot be both complete and bound to a body. I created that theory.” Gxurab glared at her. “And you thought you could use it against me. To purge my reaction in favor of your own. I won’t allow it. I simply cannot.”

Xyka reached for her mask and removed it. To Gxurab’s surprise, she had a face beneath it, and not an unattractive one for a surface-dweller. Her eyes, though, were quite clearly synthetic and bore both a distinctive fire and a terrible coldness.

She was smiling.

“There are more worlds than these,” she said, smiling. “And I can always build more gods.”

Then she was gone.

The elemental shadow reached almost immediately, suddenly cleared from the foul entanglement that had held it at bay. It reached forward, suddenly grasping and gaping as it developed eyes and limbs. It was attempting to take the shape of a pony, to create a form that could devour the soul before it.

But the soul was already failing. The machine had sliced it free of most of its connections, but it was still bound- -and the machine was failing.

“I’m losing him,” said Gxurab, desperately looking down at his machines. “There’s enough fear!” He slammed his hooves against the cold metal of his device. “There should be enough! There has to be! THERE HAS TO!”

Something was not right. There was something missing.

“Just a little more,” he said, tears flowing form his eyes. “I just need a little more...”

He looked down at his console. He saw the fear-meter, but also saw the energy spikes coming from the Heart of Darkness. Through the castle’s sensors, he understood completely what was happening outside it. He could perceive the shield, and the princess, and the power she was generating at the expense of her own life. The sacrifice she was making to keep the kingdom of alive.

And Gxurab made his decision.

He lifted a shaking hoof to the controls. “It does not matter if the kingdom dies, so long as the king survives. If he survives, we can rebuild. Hail Sombra. Hail the WITCHKING!”

And with a single stroke of his hoof, he engaged the final switch.

Comments

[ponepony]

The third pony was stout and extremely fluffy.

derpicdn.net/img/view/2019/7/7/2085307.png

“There are more worlds than these,” she said, smiling. “And I can always build more gods.”

Hey, that's my reaction every time I lose in a game with savestates support.

I also love your descriptions of space distortion; I always found it fascinating.

[alamais]

Gxurab makin' enemies across the multiverse. I'm sure that could never come back to bite him.

[Sypher]

Ah, so Xyuka makes her proper entrance--and exit.

One day I really want to see where this journey throughout the multiverse leads.