Memories of the Stone

by WanderingPony

Chapter 12: Condemnation.

The Sun struck, for the thousandth time and more at the Shadow.

Teeth curled into a mirthless grin, Sombra tore the flaming gout of energy from the sky and loosed a hail of darts from his own horn, only to have them spatter harmlessly off the radiant aura surrounding the Solar Princess. Perhaps it diminished ever so slightly. Mayhap Sombra's own energies declined an iota.

"We could be here for another week", Celestia thought to herself, not without a hint of bitterness. Without her sister's aid, fighting the mad unicorn was more of an even match than she had expected- for a mortal, he seemed to be drawing off a pool of energy far deeper than anything of simple flesh should manage. Capturing him? Vexing, verily.

The image Luna broadcast to her sister's mind as she cleared the heights of the ruined stadium washed away mere frustrations...

Grey and dark forms, familiar from long distant memory. An obsidian scythe disembowling a helpless mare, using the only thing she had to shield her filly of a daughter- her body. The filly, blinded by tears as the Kindred warrior began to devour the bisected remains...only to be frozen into an icy mass as a berserk Luna summoned the cold touch of the far reaches of space to smite the fiend. A cobalt wing smote the frozen husk, shattering it into ashen pebbles of un-natural flesh.

Touching her horn to the nearly comatose child, Luna focused and wove there to here, stitching a path between the patch of ground she stood upon and the waiting room of Canterlot Mercy. The filly materialized in the arms of a surprised nurse, bawling.

In better times, Luna read to sick children there. Now, it was the safest place she could grasp in her head, rage mixing with mare-instinct to shield foal from predator, herd from hungering beasts. The wave of primal feelings raced back into the link as the two sisters came to a mutual conclusion.

The temperature in the rubbled stadium rose a full twenty degrees as Princess Celestia's wings and horn began to burn with the light of a roiling sun. Long sparks of heat wavered the air as she pawed at empty space, striking nothing yet causing gouts of blinding light to sear the surrounding space.

"Sister, Sombra's allies are...are....we had banished these fiends to Tartarus before the first pony learned to speak more than whinnies and neighs!", passed the thought between Sun and Moon. Luna's response was to drop a chunk of orbiting stone at terminal velocity on the behemoth as it frolicked obscenely across the ruins of another building, crushing it's hind legs beneath a fallen comet the mistress of the stars had dragged from the firmament. It's spine shattered, the behemoth writhed and howled helplessly before a second falling star nailed it's skull to the earth, slaying it utterly.

The torn lines of guardponies put up a cheer as Luna's wrath made itself manifest on the demonic attackers, finally distracting them from the massacre as they swarmed towards the goddess incarnate...and Celestia felt the sting of an inky probe of dark magic as it stabbed at her hoof and tried to crawl it's way up to her cutie mark.

Looking down, the Sun finally noticed the dozen or so beasts that had chased Starlight and Wedge from the field in the first place, now attempting to defile a new target. A moment's effort purged the plague from her hindquarters, and a toss of her horn impaled the entire group on a beam of sunlight. Resistance was...not even remotely possible as the demons found their essence banished to the four winds, dissolving them into motes of black energy that were quickly swallowed in the unrelenting radiance.

The *CRACK* of Sombra's magic finding it's mark made the price worth it for the enemy- dark crystals forming at the point of impact, sapping away Celestia's mystical energies as it replenished Sombra's. A quick counterspell washed the crystalline assault away, but the strengthening strikes on her protections showed that the warlock had stolen a fair piece of power in the brief distraction.

Chastened, Celestia put all four alicorns on the same message of mental speech.

"Sister, niece, faithful student- the things Sombra has allied with are called "Kindred"- a race of dark servants to powers fell and ancient beyond count. Strike harshly, for they are truly not alive as you know it, and will kill anything and everything without hesitation. Destroy them without mercy, for they are here only to slay our subjects until the Empire would become an open grave.. Magical light burns them best, but enough of anything will do- and whatever you think is enough, use it thrice over instead. How Sombra has dragged so many out of the depths of Tartarus I know not, but they must be stopped, here and now".

"Sombra by his deeds has condemned himself not to a thousand years of penance, but a swift death. Show no mercy, for to call such fiends, Sombra surely has sold his cutie mark to things that make Tirek the Ancient seem like a mere drop of ink."

Celestia opened her mouth. The sound that came forth was like that of a crematorium fire, eager to consume the body being fed into it's furnaces.

She breathed outwards, and white-hot plasma roared from between her lips, drawing a line that devoured Sombra's shield and forced him to gallop out of the path of the solar flare gouting from Celestia's muzzle. A line of glassy score marked it's progress from one end of the stadium to the other, but it's power seemed only matched by it's difficulty to control.

A second searing blast left a U-shaped curve glowing in the earth as Sombra leaped back from the heat, hopping over the first line as residual energies scorched his fetlocks. Then a third, closing the circle and making the unicorn mage cross the first line once again to escape. A fourth as Celestia's neck strained to control the angry fires within her blazed an angry diagonal that flattened Sombra to his belly, then a fifth the opposite way made him roll away with his tail a lit torch. A sixth matched the first, though shortened in it's path by Sombra's proximity. A seventh drew a line further away to chase the dark unicorn once again into the center....and the flames finally cut off as Celestia visibly dimmed, then settled to the ground. Her head hung low, and the gasps of breath could be heard across the ruins as the Bearers looked on in mute astonishment at the wrath of the Sun. Twilight's shielding faded to a nearly invisible gleam as it no longer had to turn a forest fire's worth of heat away from cooking the seven ponies into charcoal.

Four pairs of eyes stared half-blinded at the solar display. Pinkie Pie merely pushed a double-sized pair of sunglasses over her ears and started waving a placard saying "GO CELESTIA!", cheering and dancing on her hindlegs. Fluttershy slowly pushed her nose clear of where she'd buried it under Orange Wedge's flank, shivering despite the summerlike warmth. Realizing WHERE she'd been hiding her face, her face got even warmer...and suddenly making sure that the wounded pegasus had ALL his injuries taken care of was very important. Yes, oh very much so.

Nobody else noticed.

A double layer of protective and warding magic cooled as Cadence and Shining Armor rose from behind a scorched stone barrier, the balcony walls smoking here and there from stray reflections of heat from the inferno twelve stories below them.
Glowing telekinetic force pulled the canvas covering a stony shape away, leaving the Crystal Heart open to the air. A rainbow of colors sparkled inside the relic, generated by the power of the Heart itself.

"I can light the Heart on my own, but I don't know for how long...", echoed Cadence's mental voice from the Celestial link. "Normally, this takes the love and cheer of hundreds of ponies!".

Celestia's mental growl was more wolf than horse. "Sombra is a fool, and he stands in his own noose, ready to hang.". It was ragged, haggard, and edged with a rage that Twilight had never heard come from her teacher. "Witness a traitor to ponykind suffer his just desserts."

A hoof glowing white with the Sun's power struck the outer curve of the circle Celestia had engraved in the stadium floor with her seemingly wild attacks, the lines lighting from one end to the other as Sombra rose to his hind legs in a panic, a whinny of fear escaping as he realized exactly WHAT the Solar Princess had accomplished in her feigned fury.

The fully empowered sigil wrapped it's power around it's horned victim and slammed him helpless to the earth, his four legs spread out as if held down by stakes of iron. Glaring with white-glowing eyes, Princess Celestia began to speak in a voice that echoed as if she was in a vast cavern rather than the open skies.

"IT BEGINS."

Savage darkness, foul device. You resurrect an evil best left buried, a time forgotten. The past rejects you.

Inside the circle, Sombra brayed like a donkey as the spell began to take hold.

Subterfuge and cruelty, the perversion of a good and worthy gift to the intentions of hatred and darkness. Existence denies you.

The ground ceased to be underneath the supine unicorn, yawning into a black hole above which Sombra's body was suspended by unseen power.

Deviltry and hatred, the use of a great soul bartered to the petty acts of cruelty. Foresight ignores you.

A wind sucked eagerly at the fur of Sombra's coat, pushing downwards into an abyss that held no lights for as deep as Cadence and Shining Armor could see, watching from their perch.

By the name of Echwaz, Eldest, The Nightmare-

...as the circle thrummed and the air itself shook...

We reject thee,
We deny thee,
We abhor thee.

In the Name of the Past,
In the Eyes of the Present,
By the Light of the Sun,

WE COMMAND YOU....

BEGONE.

Blinding light rose in a pillar from the edges of the circle as a clap of thunder marked the displacement of a huge amount of air from within. Briefly, the terrified scream of Sombra could be faintly heard from within the circle as a river of air tumbled ponies like tenpins and forced Cadence to hold Shining Armor's leg in her teeth, lest he be flung blocks away by the sheer force of the banishing spell's side effects. Only Celestia was unmoved, and even eyes that could withstand the Sun at it's height for a century straight closed at the force of the released energies pushing against them.

In the center of a circle where nothing should remain, something began to laugh.