Equestria's Mark

by MasterZadok

Ch 19: It's Dark Inside

“Gizmo!” I ordered.
“Gismo!” Lilly dropped a harmometer into my waiting palm.
“Whatzit!” I called back.
“Whatzit!” My friend fetched a spectrometer.
“Whoozit!” I frowned critically at the puzzle before me.
“Whoozit!” A micro quantum abyss made its way towards me.
“Thank you, nurse.” Despite all my fancy tools, though, I still couldn’t make heads or tails of Sombra’s throne. The harmometer, basically an Equestrian ohm meter, couldn’t isolate one line of magic from another and the spectrometer’s lens, an arcane type of infrared camera, was overloaded and simply looked white. The quantum abyss, remarkably, remained dark save for two points of light representing myself and Lilly.
“Alright, how about the whatchamacallit?”
“Whatchamacallit!” There was a slight delay as Lilly threw her tiny black body against something about the size and shape of a French horn. It was a Coni Actuator, a device as heavy as one of those old cathode-ray TVs and just about as awkward. With a final grunt, the changeling managed to get it within arm’s reach and I pulled it towards myself carefully. But I couldn’t bring myself to use it.
“Now what?” I muttered to myself, looking from the antenna of the device to the crystal lattice before me. It was one thing to attempt to scan the throne, (though that had proven as fruitless as a wax banana) but it was another thing entirely to begin shooting it with lasers.
Lilly and I had spent the entire morning trying to isolate the connection between Sombra and the Crystal Empire, had poked the palace with every tool Celestia’s money could buy, but we had only found the end of our rope. The wave emitter was a weapon of last resort and even though I was certain that poking the individual crystal fibers with energy beams would give me a better understanding of where they led and what they did, there was also the very real risk that I could damage them instead. That was a risk I just wasn’t willing to take. I didn’t need to glance out of the window to remember that Princess Cadance and the magic she was pushing through the tower were the only things currently standing between us and a very angry unicorn king.
The sound of hooves just outside the throne room brought me back to myself. My knees popped as I rose from where I’d been kneeling and Lilly vanished in a burst of green light to be once again replaced by the image of Sweetie Belle. The great crystal doors swung open like stone wings and Princess Cadance trotted into the room, leaning heavily on her husband’s staunch shoulder. Despite the shadows beneath her eyes, the princess still carried a soothing glow about her.
“Oh, there you are, Mark.” She began cheerfully. “I was wondering where you’d-”
“What are you doing?” Shining Armor’s voice rang through the hall like a falling I-beam. His posture became rigid as his eyes swept over the magical tools scattered around my feet.
“Nothing!” For once my wit failed me and I practically glowed with guilt.
“Nothing!” Lilly repeated, pulling in her lips to copy my expression.
“What were you doing to the throne?” The captain of the guard demanded. His challenge filled the air with such a dangerous vibe, I found myself wondering if my changeling friend could taste it. As non-confrontationally as I could, I turned to the little filly and handed her some of the incriminating items.
“Lilly? Could you please put these back in the box along with the gizmo and the thingamabob? Thanks.” My helpful assistant immediately buried herself in her task, while I placed myself slightly between her and the excited unicorn.
“Sir Mark, I asked you-”
“And I told you, nothing. The throne is fine.”
“Is that so? Because from over here, it looks like you’re aiming a Coni Actuator at it!” Shining Armor continued to walk towards me, leaving his wife to stare after him with wide eyes. “Tools like that are used for mining crystal and breaking locks! What were you thinking?”
“Take it easy.” I said in my best horse whisperer voice. “I wasn’t going to do anything like that.”
“Mark, would you mind explaining your setup here?” Princess Cadance bravely stepped between her husband and I. Nodding, I explained,
“I’m still convinced that Sombra is harvesting magic for himself from the Crystal Empire. It would explain why bringing back the Empire also gave our enemy enough strength to escape his igloo prison. I want to know how he’s doing it.”
“But if you had damaged the throne,” Shining Armor pressed, “you would have taken away the only defense we have against King Sombra!”
“Congrats.” I muttered. “You’ve caught up to me two minutes ago.”
“That thing outside has been relentlessly testing Cadance’s defenses since yesterday.” The white unicorn glanced at his wife. “Each time he’s getting stronger and smarter and you were dangerously close to giving him the very opening he’s been looking for! Didn’t I warn you not to try and pull a stunt like this? What’s your plan?”
“Plan?” I arched my eyebrows at the captain. “You just said it. Now that Sombra’s returned, he’s getting stronger all the time. I figured I could save everypony a whole lot of trouble if I could cut Sombra off early. Without his power source, he’d be at a stalemate, maybe even forced to surrender, or at least it’d open him up to negotiations. To me, it was worth a shot.”
“And did you have any luck?” Cadance’s eyes brightened momentarily.
“Well…” I looked down at Lilly and scratched the back of my head. Unfortunately, even that roundabout gesture was enough to extinguish the princess’s hope and her shoulders deflated ever so slightly.
Sympathy glyphs, harmony circuits, even echo ports, everything I (in my limited career) knew could transfer energy or information from one place to another had eluded me during my scan of the Crystal Throne. Perhaps it was inexperience that caused me to believe I could unplug Sombra’s lifeline to the kingdom as easily as unplugging a Wi-Fi router, perhaps it was arrogance that made me think I should try, and perhaps I just didn’t want a repeat of the Queen Chrysalis dilemma. All I knew was that it would be nice to have a little more leverage over the living storm cloud currently haunting the snowy wastes.
“So,” Shining Armor spoke up, “even after assuring us that we should be safe until help arrives, you still went ahead to try and defeat King Sombra on your own.”
“No.” I said icily. “I just wanted to make things easier.” My head tilted towards Princess Cadance. “I have complete faith in her, but that little shadow out there isn’t going to be little forever. By the time the finale rolls around, ol’ Smokey is going to get bigger. A lot bigger. Think, big-enough-to-assault-the-city-from-every-direction-at-once bigger. And if he has more time to amass power for himself because we woke him up earlier than he was ‘supposed’ to be, well… that’s my fault isn’t it? I’m just trying to help.”
“Nopony blames you, Mark.” Cadance assured, although the expressions on her guard and her husband said otherwise. “The Starry Redeemer left safely. If Princess Celestia got our message, then Twilight and her friends should be here by this afternoon.”
“Aunty Twilight’s coming?” Lilly perked up like a daisy.
“And the others, too.” My hand ruffled the filly’s head playfully. “They want to see the city we found.”
“They can’t come into my room!” The changeling flushed with embarrassment. “I sneezed.” That was her not-so-subtle way of telling me that there was a fresh pile of GLASS hidden behind one of the palace’s lucky doors.
“I just don’t see how you think working behind our backs is just fine, but you won’t even listen to me and my ideas for stopping Sombra!” Shining Armor’s voice was as sharp as a sword, and he swung it at me like a challenge.
“Umm… yeah?” Instead of a tactical retreat, I matched his tone with my own. “Because your idea was” (stupid) “unsound! We can’t have you gallivanting into enemy territory when we’re spread thin enough as it is.”
“If we can find King Sombra’s old prison, we might be able to find out how the Royal Sisters were able to contain him for so long!” Shining countered. “That could be just the knowledge we need to win this fight!”
“There is no fight!” I snapped. “Don’t you get it? You can’t fight a shadow! Not with the magic we have right now, anyway! You step outside this city, you’re as good as kibble for Sombra!”
“So you want us to just sit here?” The captain locked his jaw. “I won’t do that!”
“Nor should you.” My eyes flicked between the stallion and the quiet guard at the back of the room. “Have you mapped off the castle and the city like I asked?” A cold spark flickered in Shining Armor’s eyes.
“It’s not your place to give orders, Mark!”
“I’m not giving orders!” A hand leapt up to my forehead as if to prevent my mounting frustration from exploding out of my brow. “Can’t you see I’m trying to help?”
“By having us run useless errands?” Shining Armor countered.
“Yes!” My voice popped like a firecracker, startling Lilly into dropping the harmometer. “Little things now can make a big difference for the future! You have to trust me on this.”
“Why?” The white unicorn lifted his jaw critically. “You seem to have no problem giving us information only when it suits you. Why should we trust you if you can’t trust us?” A groan large enough to be quantified on the Richter scale rose up in my chest, but I beat it back down.
“You do realize that there are bigger things at stake here if we mess this up, right?” My annunciation was crisper than a crabapple and just as tart.
“Without a doubt.” Shining Armor threw a protective foreleg over Cadance. “More so than you can possibly imagine.”
“Don’t be so sure.” I simmered, kneeling down beside Lilly. The changeling had spent the last minute and a half trying to fit the harmometer back into its velveted case, only for me to explain that she was putting it in backwards.
“Right.” The captain snorted. “I forgot you find a lot of kinship in a creature that lies for a living.”
Etiquette be damned. It was one thing for jerks to be jerky to me, I could take it, but no one, god or mortal, was going to talk about my little girl like that. With flames in my nostrils and sparks on my tongue, I whirled around to face my opponent head-on.
“Excuse me?” I shouted. “Are you trying to be a turd blossom!? Because that’s how you become a turd blossom!”
“Ah-!” Lilly Limn gasped and held a hoof up to her mouth at my sudden outburst of profanity.
“At least what I’m trying isn’t going to serve our heads to King Sombra on a silver pl-”
“Are you kidding? That’s exactly what you’re asking-”
“You’re not the captain and you should stop trying to act like it-”
“BOYS!” Princess Cadance’s call cracked like a whip and fell like a gavel, stunning the room into silence. The pink alicorn threw a disapproving glance at myself and Shining Armor as her one word continued to ring in our ears. Quickly, the princess shrugged off her husband’s leg and knelt down next to Lilly. The young filly was glancing around at the scene with tears swelling in her eyes.
“Hey…” I wanted to comfort the filly too, but Cadance threw a protective wing over her, blocking me.
“You two can take this outside.” It wasn’t a suggestion. The princess’s heavy gaze drifted from Shining to myself. “Now.”
“Cadance-” But the captain was cut off.
“If you’ll excuse us,” The alicorn escorted her fragile charge back out the throne room doors, “Lilly and I are going to find some decorations to brighten up this drafty old castle, right Lilly?”
“Snnnnf!” The changeling swallowed salty snot and nodded.
“That’s right.” Cadance soothed. To us, she added, “I don’t know what’s going on between you two, but by the time we get back, you’d better get this sorted out. Do you understand?”
“Hey, I’m not-”
“I said, do you understand, Mark?”
“Yes, ma’am.” I gulped. Shining and I watched as Cadance vanished, taking the remaining guard pony with her. In silence, I finished putting away the magical instruments and hauled them back out of the throne room. Ruefully, Shining Armor followed.
Once the two of us were back in my temporary lab and safely sealed behind closed doors, (I took a moment to scrape crystalline green ectoplasm off the door jam) I adopted what I hoped was an apologetic tone and simply asked,
“Look, man, what do you want from me?”
“Your cooperation, of course.” The stallion answered without hesitation. At that, I chuckled and nodded.
“Heh. Funny, I was about to ask the same of you.”
“I need you to tell me how we’re going to get through this!” Captain Shining Armor measured out his syllables carefully. Donning a shawl of modesty, I confessed,
“I can’t do that.”
“Of course you can’t!” The unicorn nickered. “That would be too easy.”
“You misunderstand.” I even closed my eyes to keep my sudden flare of irritation from rising anew. “I can’t tell you what else we need to do because I myself don’t know what else we can do. Everything that needs to be in place is already in place. Trying to change events too much at this point might actually do more harm than good, and rewrite the episode as I know it.”
“Then at least tell me how we finally defeat King Sombra!” Shining Armor snorted. “Help me be ready for when it’s time for us to bring him down!”
I pondered the pony’s proposal for a moment. The problem I’d always encountered when I’d contemplated telling my friends the future was the chance of them acting differently if they knew what was in store for them. Twilight Sparkle and her visit from the “Twiminator” was a perfect example of a pony trying to not do whatever it was she “did” before. The danger, of course, was that a character might miss their cue if they weren’t where they were supposed to be at the right time. For instance, if Shining Armor thought he could defeat Sombra, he might not be by Cadance’s side at the finale. If he wasn’t there, who would keep her awake long enough to catch Spike and the falling Crystal Heart? As a compromise, I simply offered,
“We don’t defeat Sombra.”
“What? But you said-”
“Hear me out.” I held up a hand. “I said ‘we’. This war will not be solved with force. Not like before, and not with our force. Really, this battle belongs to the Crystal Ponies. King Sombra will always remain in power as long as he reigns over their hearts. This ends only when they have the courage to finally stand up against him. So, I know this isn’t what you want to hear, but your role isn’t out there. You need to keep Cadance safe, all right? That’s your place.”
There was a long moment of silence between us as Shining Armor considered my answer. Even before he spoke, I knew he wasn’t happy, his glances down into the city told me he’d rather not bet Cadance’s life on the power of strangers, and when he answered, the chill in his voice made the snowy wastelands looks like a Bahamas resort,
“Right. Because that’s how you see us. Puppets on the end of our strings.” With nothing left to say, least of all to me, the captain of the guard flicked his tail and marched toward the door. The panels of crystal swung open at his approach and silently sealed a moment after he left, leaving me to massage the bridge of my nose and wonder just what I had done to deserve his ilk.
“Freaking doodlebasket…”
For the rest of the morning, I didn’t see hide or hair (or chitin) of anypony. I wandered the polished halls of the palace, checking rooms, poking my head through doors, and generally exploring Cadance’s new residence. Since Shining Armor had decided that his time was best spent sulking, arguing, and generally causing unnecessary interpersonal friction, it was left up to me to put the finishing touches on the palace before the main characters arrived. To ensure that nopony would get lost while running through the confusing tower-palace, (*cough* TwilightandSpike*cough*) I stuck waypoints at the intersection of each hallway and labeled each room by number and function. By the time lunch rolled around, most of the conventional palace, omitting the secret passageways, was clearly mapped and marked. I was even fortunate enough to uncover a number of storage rooms full of fabrics and suits of practice armor.
It was in one of the lower levels, just down the hall from a room I’d dubbed the ‘dining hall’, where I found the kitchens. Judging by the rows of low tables, the utensils hanging from the ceiling, and the wall of ovens, I probably could have deduced their function on my own, but at that moment I didn’t need anything more than my nose and a slow deep breath to tell me where I was. Even before the doors swung open for me, I knew that there was food nearby and that something amazing was in the works.
“Mark!” Lilly Limn leapt down from a stool beside one of the tables and ran towards me, leaving white flour footprints in her wake. Behind her, I could see Cadance wearing an apron and a soft smile.
“Oh, nice.” The princess greeted. “We were just about to go looking for you.”
“Mark! Mark! Come look at what I made for you!” The little changeling tugged at my pant leg and escorted me back to where the pink alicorn stood. As I got closer, I saw a pastry battleground littered with discarded dough and strewn with crumby debris. In the very middle of the mess was a collection of adorable amoebas.
“Lilly says cookies always cheer you up, so I offered to help her make some.” Cadance explained, her eyes twinkling. “Fortunately, all the ingredients are still fresh, even after a thousand years! The hardest part was figuring out how to cook with a crystal oven!”
“This one is you!” Lilly pushed a shape towards me resembling a tree trunk with a nose.
“Oh, nice.” I grinned. “Very handsome and very… tall.”
“That one is Cadance.” The little hoof gestured at a meticulously-crafted daisy. Apparently, each “petal” was one of the princess’s feathers. “I made me too!” The image representing Lilly had a hood sticking off the back of her head as big as a toucan’s beak. Lastly came poor Shining Armor. “Cadance asked me to make him too.”
“Aw, that’s thoughtful.” I tilted my head and squinted at the solitary pastry. “But why does he look so small?”
“She thought you’d get upset if his cookie was bigger than yours.” Cadance whispered, trying hard to keep a straight face.
“Ohhhh….” Now it was my turn to stifle a laugh.
“By the way…” The princess opened one of the ovens, releasing a fresh wave of olfactory bliss into the room. “Did you and Shining Armor have a productive talk?”
“Hard to tell.” I admitted, cradling the cookie “me” in both hands. “I’ve told him all I can without spoiling anything, but I get the feeling he’s already made up his mind that he just doesn’t like me.”
“Ew! Mark’s eating Mark!” My little friend shrieked with glee as I popped half of “myself” into my mouth.
“And I’m very delicious.” I tried to speak around the crumbs gluing my tongue down. “Apparently, I taste like ginger snaps.”
“Eat me next!” My hands were barely clear of the first treat before Lilly forced the next one upon me. “I don’t want it.”
“Here are some fresh ones.” Cadance offered, sliding the still-molten treats off a baking pan. In the same motion, she also produced a glass bottle of a fruity drink and popped it open for Lilly.
“Thank you.” While the changeling and I settled down to enjoy our snacks, the princess lowered her voice and addressed me privately. Slowly, she began,
“You know… Shining Armor stayed awake all last night.”
“Huh?”
“He kept me company while I held the shield around the Empire.” Cadance sighed. “He gave me water to drink, walked with me, talked for hours and hours about nothing at all. Mark, I want you to understand that Shining Armor isn’t trying to be a difficult person. He just wants what’s best for us.” I popped open a bottle of juice and took a long swig before answering.
“Not to sound obstinate, princess, but he could’ve fooled me. I want to give him the benefit of the doubt, I really do, but there’s a difference between being stressed out and calling Lilly a career liar.”
“I know.” The pink pony nodded with a surprising amount of enthusiasm. “And believe me, he’s going to apologize for that before this is though. But remember, he deals with stress in his own way. Anger is how he shows his fear. Right now, Mark, I don’t think I’ve ever seen him so afraid.” The pony’s ears folded back and she bowed her head. “Please… Please don’t let fighting separate you two. You still need to watch out for each other. You still need to keep him safe. Please, for me.”
The princess’s voice had been steadily growing slower and slower until the very last words barely made it out at all. When she looked up, Cadance’s face was pulled tight and her eyes were brimming with crystalline tears. I shifted uncomfortably under her expression, not sure how our conversation had become so emotional so quickly, but then I remembered that she had foregone sleep the night before and was already reaching her mental limits. I had Lilly fetch a towel and I immediately began trying to stem the flow of tears before they threatened to erupt like a geyser.
“Cadance,” I offered, smiling awkwardly, “don’t worry about it. Hey! I said don’t worry. Look, alright, I’ll admit that from an emotional point of view, sometimes I’d like nothing better than to slap him in the face with a ripe halibut, -”
“Well, sometimes he might actually deserve it.” Cadance admitted sheepishly.
“-but believe me when I say that there’s nothing Shining Armor can say or do that would exclude him from my protection. In the end, he’s still Twilight Sparkle’s brother and he’s still your husband. That means I watch over him too, all right?” A tiny naysaying voice in the back of my head tried to argue that there were any of a number of stupid things a panicky self-righteous pony like Shining could do that would be beyond my control to protect him from, but for the sake of myself and Cadance, I shut the door in that tiny voice’s face.
“Thank you, Mark.” The princess took a deep breath to steady herself. “And, again, I’m sorry for how Shining’s been acting.”
“Now that I think of it, I can’t blame him.” My words were the “right” ones, even if I myself didn’t believe them. “So far, I think being under siege has been one of the most stressful things I’ve ever done. And this is just after one day. Makes you wonder how Troy ever managed without going insane. Oh, wait, Cassandra didn’t.”
“Well, did ‘Troy’ have cookies?” With a twinkle in her eye and a star on her horn, the princess swept the batch of fresh cookies onto a tray and began trotting toward the kitchen doors. “Let’s go find where everypony else is hiding. I’m sure they could use some snacks too.”
“Sounds like an idea.” I glanced at Lilly. “Coming, ladybug?”
“Coming!” The changeling tried to copy Cadance by brushing her own cookie creations onto a plate and running after us with it balancing in her mouth.
However, the snack run wasn’t as straight forward as our party initially thought. The throne room, and the dining hall were both empty and only two of our three guard ponies were to be found back in the main hall. I’ll admit, I wasn’t looking forward to finding Shining Armor again, but there was something about his mysterious absence that worried me far more than it should have. Eventually, we were forced to search the last location where we knew a pony would be posted.
“Good day, Thunder Clap!” Cadance greeted as we stepped onto the palace balcony. Above us, the domed sky pulsed with the princess’s shield spell while the streets of the Crystal Empire splayed out beneath us like spider webs. In front of us stood a royal guard with his eye firmly pressed to a bronze telescope. “Anything new?”
“Ma’am!” The guard pony clicked his horseshoes together and gave a brisk salute. “No, ma’am, everything is quiet.”
“Too quiet?” I clarified, studying the stallion’s face.
“I would say so.” Thunder Clap twitched a nod. “After this morning’s attack by the mysterious assailant, there’s been no sign of him.”
“Sombra’s playing the long game now.” My fingers tapped impatiently on the crystal railings. “He knows he can’t just break in. Not yet. So he’s waiting to see what we’ll do next. But make no mistake, he’s out there.”
“We brought you something.” Cadance offered the guard her tray of goodies.
“Oh! Why thank you.”
“Also, sir Thunder Clap, we were wondering if you knew where Captain Shining Armor has gotten off to.” I continued studying the horizon as I spoke.
“Well, he’s probably at the train station by now, isn’t he?” The guard frowned. My fingers froze mid-tap.
“He what?” I breathed, my voice eking out of my throat like liquid nitrogen. My basilisk stare slowly turned towards the stallion, locking him and Princess Cadance in place. “What did you just say?”
“Uh, the train station?” The guard faltered. “Captain Shining Armor was up here not an hour ago when I saw a train approaching from the south. There was no sign of danger so he said that he would rendezvous with the new arrivals.” Thunder Clap looked from myself to Cadance and back again. “He also said that he would notify you of his departure. He did, didn’t he?”
“No…” The ice in my chest caught fire with a familiar tingling sensation. “No, he did not!”
“Mark?” Lilly’s plate of cookies was trembling as she glanced up at my pale face and wild eyes.
Without hesitating, I plucked up the guard’s telescope, tripod and all, and turned its lens towards the south. In the distance, just barely viewable through the glowing shield of light, were the dotted lines of the train tracks and eight tiny flecks of dust representing the newcomers and their boneheaded escort.
“Fracking mushroom balls!” I fumed, dropping the telescope and sprinting back into the palace.
“Mark! Mark, what did you see!” There was a pair of twin clattering noises as Cadance and Lilly both dropped their trays and ran after me as quickly as they could. Instead of answering, however, I forced my lungs to focus on the more important task of shoveling atmosphere in and out of my ribcage. My body threw itself into the stairwell and dove down the flight of steps as fast as gravity would allow. Only when I reached the floor where my box of tricks was stashed, did I dare waste time talking.
“He went off on his own!” I seethed, plowing through the glassy halls. “I told him not to go out there! I told him! And he went and did it anyway! That idiot went to the train station on his own! Why, darn it, why!?”
“Mark! Talk to me!” Cadance pleaded. “What’s happening!”
“It’s a trap!” Admiral Ackbar despaired. Unfortunately, I fear my response did more harm than good as Cadance’s face immediately fell ashen white. “Sombra’s going to intercept them before they make it back to the Empire and I need to be there to stop him! I need to be there right now! I was supposed to be ready for this!” As I spoke, I ripped the lid off of my steamer trunk and began throwing endurance potions and health elixirs and cakes of lembas bread in all directions. Finally, my fingers closed around the middle of a stout rod which I tore out of storage. The wood that it was made of was nothing special, but like my old “fire rod” (may it rest in peace), I had attached something special to its crown. A cluster of polished gems, all linked together by cord glistened in the sunlight.
But my invention was no good sitting in a room in the palace. It belonged with Shining Armor, a desperate answer to my imagination’s worst-case scenario. An answer that might very well hold the fate of the stubborn stallion’s life in the balance.
“In the episode,” I explained, my fingers becoming weak and shaky as I held the rod, “Shining Armor faces Sombra’s shadow form to give the girls enough time to make it to the Crystal Empire. But he’s overwhelmed. The episode shows him emerging from the fight unharmed, save for a curse clinging to his horn, but I fear things won’t turn out so convenient in the real world. In reality, there’s no reason Sombra would give up a crippled unicorn like that. Shining is a soldier, he knows about the city’s defenses, and he’s our friend. No, if Shining is captured, it’s far more likely that he’ll be tortured or used as leverage rather than simply be caught and released.”
“Then we have to save him!” Cadance cried, her own throat strangling her voice. “We have to-”
“No! ‘We’ can’t! You’re not going anywhere!” I snapped. “No matter what happens, you’re the one protecting the entire empire! You have to keep that shield up! Every pony in this town of Bedrock is counting on you!” I would have continued arguing my point, but a soft glint of green light flickered from within my trunk, causing me to hesitate.
“But there has to be something you can do!” The princess protested. “You can’t just let him face Sombra alone! You can’t abandon him!” Her cries were rising in pitch until she was crying. “You have to have a plan! Mark! Tell me! What are you going to do?”
“I’m…” I knelt back down next to the trunk and gingerly touched the spark of green light. “… going to do something incredibly… stupid.” As I drew back my hand, my face was bathed in the vaporous green glow of the bottle of distilled wind essence. “But I made a promise, didn’t I? To protect Shining Armor.”
My muse was simultaneously brilliant and completely off her rocker. On the one hand, any alchemist knew that the best endurance and speed-enhancing potions used “wind essence” as their main ingredient. A properly crafted brew could harness the boundless energy of a whirlwind, accelerating a pony’s metabolism to Dashiell Robert Parr levels of athleticism. However, raw essence without a metabolizing agent to help it synthesize with a host was a very dangerous thing. Little better than nitroglycerin, ingesting it by itself could result in disastrous side-effects, at best, forcing a user to burp for a hours on end and, at worse, making them pop like a balloon full of Coke and Menos. I’d been planning on using Princess Celestia’s gift to craft some quality potions for Cadance to ensure that she would be awake and ready to fight when Sombra made his final push into the Empire, but desperate times called for equally desperate measures.
“Mark-?” There was an uneasy sigh, like wind through the trees, as I twisted off the lid to the vial. I could see the ghostly emerald light reflected in Cadance and Lilly’s eyes as they watched me toss back the tiny bottle and swallow the contents in a single gulp.
A “gulp”, however, turned out to be the wrong means of consumption. As the thick gas cascaded down my throat, it immediately began to expand into a full-blown tempest, rushing not into my stomach, but into the deepest corners of my lungs. For the span of a moment, all I could do was gurgle at the bizarre sensation as my chest swelled with the chaos of a rising storm. Drinking the raw element felt simultaneously like chewing on mint gum and sticking my head out of the window of a speeding car. Writhing coils of air churned like a nest of snakes within my lungs, expanding them to the bursting point. Without an outlet to direct the power of the whirlwind toward, I'm sure I would have torn apart right then and there like a fleshy truck tire. Fortunately, I had an outlet for all that energy.
“I have to go.” Tightening my grip on the makeshift rod, I once more threw myself into the palace halls.
“No! No, Mark! Wait! Mark!” Behind me, I could head Lilly’s panicked cries, but I didn’t stop, couldn’t stop, couldn’t hesitate, not even for her. The seconds were counting down to Shining’s doom as surely as Edgar Allan Poe’s pendulum and I was already breaking the laws of nature to catch up.
Though I could already imagine the looks of shock and disbelief on Twilight and Zecora’s faces when I told them I’d ingested raw potion ingredients, the sensation of sprinting through the crystal halls with an elementally-charged body was bordering on euphoric. My movements weren’t those of a cheetah or a bird or even Usain Bolt, as each of those examples needs to push through the air to move. No, I was a ripple in the atmosphere, weightless, unrestrained, free and the air passed through me as easily as I passed through it. The best way to illustrate what that moment felt like would be to envision oneself sprinting as hard and as fast as your body could possibly go, but without ever feeling the slightest hint of fatigue.
“No! Wait for me! Mark? Mark! Daddy!” As I burst out onto the crystal roads beneath the palace, the sound of Lilly’s hooffalls finally died away behind me.
“Faster. Faster! Faster!” I clenched my teeth as I reached a straightaway. “Come on!” My body instinctively abandoned the realms of ergonomics and physics, the wind element’s gift overriding such mortal constrictions, and I found myself flying over the ground with my head lowered and arms swept behind me Naruto-style. (No, not like Sonic, and no, I did not have “City Escape” playing in my head.)
Buildings whipped by in prism-casting blurs as I tore through the Empire, but my eyes remained ever locked on the grassy outskirts and the snowy wilderness beyond. Despite my prayers and silent pleas, even as I watched, the familiar cloud of Sombra erupted from his hiding place within the pure white land, staining the sky with his black and inky form. The nova of dark magic and unicorn crashed down upon the snow and began slithering after a small group of fleeing ponies. My friends ran over the icy ground as fast as their hooves could carry them, while King Sombra pursued them like a living river of malice and rage.
“No, no, no! Not yet!” I abandoned the road and threw whatever windI had left into my legs as I plunged into the emerald fields around the Crystal Empire. My feet flew above the ocean of grass, barely touching the ground as they swept me towards the rising maelstrom.
At long last, the inevitable came to pass. A form coalesced at the crown of the dark shape, a face both swollen with power and starving for more. King Sombra grinned down at his prey with a wolfish smile, revealing a row of unnaturally pointed teeth. Shining Armor took this as an opening and he immediately spun on his hoof and leveled his horn at the figure.
“No!” My magic-infused lungs warbled as I hit the barrier around the city. Its warm light pelted my face as if I were plunging through a pool of water, and I at last found myself once more greeted by the cruel blows of the icy wasteland wind.
“Mark?” By the time Rainbow Dash even opened her mouth, there was nothing left of me but a flurry of kicked-up snow. My unblinking eyes watered beneath the onslaught of snowflakes raining upon me, but their pain couldn’t compare to the gradual tightening of despair’s grip over my chest. Shining Armor’s short and ill-fated battle was already drawing to a close.
The brave unicorn fired a fierce ray of purple magic at the snarling face, momentarily stopping the advancing wall of darkness. Unfortunately, for the lone knight, Sombra’s hesitation was born more out of amusement than vulnerability. The smoky magic twisted, cleanly avoiding the unicorn’s bolt and re-coagulating in a new location. I caught a glimpse of a pair of hungry eyes in the storm, saw their glee, and watched as they pounced on the hapless captain of the guard. Shining Armor’s small form was smothered in a cascading waterfall of pitch black night.
As the last of despair’s cold fingers clinched their grip upon my heart, they might have been surprised to suddenly find they were handling a blazing orange furnace.
“Don’t you dare touch him!” I roared. My weightless body skipped off a snow bank as I leapt headlong into the inky storm. With one hand, I brandished my sturdy rod, and with the other, I pulled free its cord. As one, seven of Princess Luna’s ward artifacts flared to life with an electric blue aura, engulfing me in a ball of searing light.
The tendrils of Sombra’s evanescent body melted away as I fell into a swirling world of night and wind. All around me, at the limits of my rod’s reach, the unicorn king continued to flow and writhe like an angry blizzard while the pure snow glinted beneath my feet. My wild eyes flicked around the edges of the tiny clearing, searching for any sign of Shining Armor. At last, I caught a glimpse of an onyx-blue hoof and the tip of a matching tail, but the living cloud was already trying to drag Shining’s body deeper into itself like some greedy animal.
“Hey! Back off! Get off of him!” I brandished the rod against the swirling wall, burning it away until I had safely exposed the rest of Shining Armor’s body. He was lying on his side, unmoving, eyes shut tight as if in pain or else trapped in a nightmare. His once noble horn was already encrusted with Sombra’s special magic-resistant crystals. With only the slightest glance of helplessness at the storm around me, I stuck my rod in the snow and knelt down next to the captain, shaking him slightly.
“C’mon, man, come on!” Another glance at Sombra’s prison. “You’re not getting away from me that easily! Shining Armor. Wake up! Freaking… GET UP YOU NERD!” A swift backhand across the white unicorn’s jaw seemed to do the trick.
“Ungh! Huh?”
“Get up, soldier!” I hollered over the sound of swirling gaseous unicorn king. “We're not out of the woods yet!”
“M-Mark?”
“What? You expecting, Bugs Bunny? Let’s move!” I seized the stallion by the back of his saddle and hauled him to his hooves. He wavered for a moment, but otherwise seemed to be unharmed.
A chirrup, the sound of breaking glass, pierced the howling air and the two of us glanced up to see one of my ward devices fall dark. The entire eye of the storm shook as a rolling laugh crushed us from everywhere at once. Even the shadows seemed to sprout maliciously grinning fangs.
“This way!” I hollered, brandishing my staff and stumbling in the direction I hoped the Crystal Empire lay. Yet, even after several yards, I realized that the hoofprints Twilight and the girls had left in the snow were nowhere to be seen. Sombra’s maelstrom had obliterated any clue that we were pushing in the right direction, a subtle, but no less tortuous strategy to thwart us in our race against time. Another ward popped like an angry fuse.
“Hssss…” The air frothed with the unicorn king’s displeasure as Shining Armor and I broke into a run. The shadows continued pressing in on every side, poking at our defenses, straining the orbs I held aloft, licking at our heels. Finally, a new shape coalesced from the artificial night, a small thorn that I first took to be a rock. With a start, I realized that the black shape lying on the ground was one of Sombra’s magic crystals, a pocket of darkness so dense that it was able to stand closer to the ward than anything else before evaporating. If the mad King had thought of it sooner, he might have been able to build a better hedge with his spells, but just as two more orbs blinked dark, the wall of shadow before us could follow no longer.
There was a bright surface of light, a barrier of warm baby blue, and through it, Shining Armor and I could see the Crystal Empire and an entourage of very worried-looking ponies. (And a dragon.)
“Gyuh!” The captain and I threw ourselves down onto the grass as the living smoke licked one last time at our legs. Then, it was over. The howling was gone, replaced with a stunned silence. The claustrophobia was gone, replaced with a wide open sky. The only sounds that disturbed the peace was our own shivering breaths and the last ward orbs clicking out of life. The quiet didn’t last long.
“Shining Armor! Mark!”
“Guys!”
“They’re all right!”
“You’re safe!”
“Thank goodness!”
“Told you they’d make it!”
“No you didn’t, Pinkie!”
“Well, darn it all if you two boys ain’t nuttier than a pair of fruit cakes!” Applejack appeared above me and nuzzled me onto my knees. Then, quieter, she added, “Glad you see you’re safe.”
“Yeah…” My shoulders began to shake with a gesture reminiscent of laughter. “Ugh, you too, girls. Some welcome, huh?” Despair had finally slunk back into its lonely little den, leaving my head swimming with a feeling of inebriating relief. Behind me, Twilight was pulling her brother to his feet as well.
“Oh no! Shining Armor, your horn!” The magic student gestured helplessly at the parasitic crystals embedded in her brother’s forehead. Shining blinked a couple times, tried to rally his focus, but as he attempted to push magic through his once-mighty horn, all that the captain managed to produce was a feeble ringing noise and a few sparks of fractured black lightning.
“Save your strength.” I grunted, throwing the captain a dirty look. “You’re lucky you didn’t lose more than your horn.” Remarkably, the white unicorn didn’t argue.
“Ma-Mark! Cough! Mark! Cough, cough!” A pitiful whimper caught my attention and sunk into my heart like iron harpoons. With mingled feelings of shame, regret, and happiness filling me all at once, I glanced up to see Lilly’s tiny form stumbling through the tall grass towards us. Ignoring my protesting knees, I lurched forward and scooped up the young changeling just as she was about to collapse. Her limbs shivered, her breath came in ragged gasps, and even her Sweetie Belle disguise had burned away, but from her glassy blue eyes fell bitter tears of relief.
“Oh my gosh I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have left you like that, Lilly. You’re a real trooper, you know that? Hey, it’s gonna be all right, I’m here now. I’m not going anywhere. Shh…” I whispered into the filly’s ear as I rocked back and forth. Her black hooves tightened like a vice upon my shirt, as if afraid that I might plunge back into the heart of Sombra’s hurricane if she dared to let go. I caught Shining Armor watching the scene with a face as blank as whitewash, unreadable and detached.
“Hey, Mark.” Twilight Sparkle nudged my elbow. “Thanks.” Her lavender eyes glanced from my wilted magic rod to Shining Armor and back to the force field where Sombra continued raging against the barrier like a lion behind a pane of glass. It didn’t take a detective to piece together the signs that I had known about the nebulous king’s ambush beforehand. “Thanks for rescuing Shining from that… thing.”
“You’re… welcome.” I murmured. Refraining, for the moment, from using a few choice words I had for the girl’s brother.
“That was some fast thinking!” Rainbow Dash punched a hoof in the air. “Woo! Way to go, guys!”
“But, now what?” Fluttershy’s voice was small and fragile, as if she hadn’t fully recovered it from her mad dash a moment before. “That thing’s still out there.”
“Now,” I announced, leveling my eyes at Sombra’s slithering shadowy singularity, “We should- hngh!" My lungs seized. "We need to a- cough! Cough! Wh-aaah!?"
I fell forward, my words buried beneath a sudden assault of hacking and coughing. My stomach retched and it was all I could do to drop Lilly to the grass before I doubled over, wheezing and howling like a cat working up a hairball. Something was still at work within my lungs, I could feel it, a force boiling just behind my brestbone, a pressure threatening to split my chest wide open. A hot wave of panic flushed through me as I realized what was happening. I was still brimming with wind essence and now that I'd stopped running to burn it off, there was no place for the tempest's power to go. I was overflowing with the breath of life and it was strangling me.
"Mark? Mark! What's wrong?" Twilight Sparkle patted me on the back as a fresh fit of coughing consumed me, my hands braced on the ground at either side of me.
"Was it something you ate?" Pinkie Pie cocked her head as I heaved, spewing a pile of foamy white mucus onto the grass. "Glue and soda water will do that you you, trust me." I couldn't answer her. All I could do was turn my watery eyes on the ring of faces around me, willing them to understand that something had gone very wrong.
"It-" My lungs fluttered like a pair of meaty butterfly wings. "I-" I threw up my tongue. "Essence- Cough! Cough!" The slithering coils of air trapped within me were scraping the mucus from the walls of my aveoli like a wire brushing taking paint from a wall. The result was a constant stream of water and meringue cascading from my lips. My shoulders began to ache from the tension.
"He can't breathe!" Rarity cried, trying not to look at the spectacle.
"Are you poisoned?" Rainbow Dash demanded. "You breathe too much smoke?"
"Missy Pinkie said it!" Lilly hollered, trying to make her voice heard. "Missy Pinkie's right!"
"Glue and soda?" Twilight Sparkle asked doubtfully.
"No!" The filly stamped a hoof. "Stupid potion!"
"A potion?" That got Twilight's attention.
"No, 'stupid potion'!" Lilly corrected.
"Stupid what now?" Applejack joined Pinkie in the tilted-head-club.
"Well, Mark said it was stupid..." The tiny changeling's voice wilted.
"Mark, what did you do to yourself?" Twilight turned her ears toward me as if they were a pair of AA guns. She looked positively intimidating looming above me as I convulsed on the grass. Not that I could really appreciate the effect, however, due to the fact that my vision was simultaneously bursting with stars and being swallowed by darkness. I gestured helplessly at Lilly, my secondhand voice where mine had failed.
"Wind essence?" The changeling offered.
"Really? Where did you get-" Twilight cut herself off. "It doesn't matter! How much did you ingest, Mark?"
With streams of white foam, like toothpaste, eking out of the corners of my mouth, I tried to hold up two fingers, symbolizing a vial about the size of a shot glass.
"Oh, that's not a lot." Rainbow Dash breathed a sigh of relief. Twilight, on the other hoof, gawked at me as if she could see Hurricane Katrina itself trying to claw its way out of my chest.
"Everypony stand back!" The purple unicorn's voice sounded muffled and distant by that point. "We've only got one shot at this! Fluttershy, hold onto Lilly."
"M-Mark?" The changeling gulped. The ring of concerned faces retreated, giving a wide berth to my twitching form and Twilight's ridged posture. Without wasting a moment, the unicorn flooded the scene with her magic, burying me in a blanket of her aura.
It felt like being enveloped in plastic, as if I wasn't already fighting for breath. Twilight's magic spell searched my skin, causing the hairs on my outstretched arms to prickle, and then there was a crushing sensation. A strangulation without any pressure, a weight that didn't push me into the grass, a constriction without tightening upon me. My watery eyes bulged and I tried to gasp, but Twilight's magic might as well have been a swimming pool and I was wrapped in a tarp. Something pushed up through my neck, like a hand or an eel, and when it finally reached the back of my throat, I was reminded of what it was like to try sucking on a vacuum nozzle.
"Kaaahhh!" Like squeezing juice out of a big pink grape, Twilight Sparkle crushed the foreign magic out of my body. By that point, as I fought to stay conscious, time had little meaning, but I got the impression that I was hanging in the air for for than a couple seconds, wispy veins of ribbony green light spilling from my mouth into the blue sky. A clean exorcism even Akatsuki would be proud of.
When it was all over, Twilight released me and I collapsed like a wet rag, breathing erratically, but at lease breathing on my own once more. At once, the crowd of faces closed back in. Lilly tackled me, nearly toppling me over, and the other ponies each expressed their relief in their own ways.
"Don't go scaring us like that!"
"Did you see a long tunnel?"
"Dear me, but you look like something the cat dragged in."
"You look green. Like, literally."
"Are you going to be ok?"
Thankfully, the overlapping voices helped ease the severity of the tongue-lashing Twilight Sparkle was trying to give me. She leapt right into a discourse on exactly what the wind essence had done to me and how I was lucky to have avoided the more severe symptoms of that particular flavor of stupidity. Considering that I was still coughing like an old steam engine and a few stars still lingered in my vision, I was just happy to be alive. Behind her hard nose and stern glare, I could tell the purple unicorn was relieved too.
"We need to get you to the palace." Twilight began.
"No." I grunted, pulling myself to my feet. "I need to- cough!- talk to that Final Fantasy III boss over there for a second."
"And why might that be?" Applejack wondered.
"This is a war, isn't it?" I tried to hold back another storm of hacking. "Isn't it only fair to tell the opposing side why we're fighting them?"
"You can barely stand." Twilight objected.
"I must agree." Rarity stepped forward. "We understand how much you regret not giving Queen Chrysalis the chance to surrender, really we do. But honestly, you hardly look the part of an ambassador." Lilly and I both glanced down at my shirt, covered in grass stains and mud and at least two different types of body fluids. From the looks the girls were giving me, I could only imagine my face looked worse.
"Besides, you'd be wasting your breath." Shining Armor broke his silent spell. The stallion sidled up beside his sister and glared at the wall of darkness watching our little scene. "He already knows why we're here." Sombra growled from behind the wall like a nine-tailed fox demon.
There was a pause, an eclipse of time when neither the ponies behind me nor the shadow in front of me spoke. The monster that had once been a unicorn turned his gluttonous eyes on the city in the distance and quietly drank in their silhouettes. At last, the giant disembodied head sneered down at us and peeled his lips away from his predator’s smile. In a voice that threatened to collapse the earth from beneath my soles, the king snarled,
“MINE!...”
My response was to don an iron mask as cold and hard as Tony Stark’s faceplate. I took one last look at the smoldering green eyes before whispering,
“So be it.” Then I turned on my heel and marched back to my friends.
“Um, what?” Rainbow Dash twisted her face into a grimace. “That’s it? One word?”
“It wasn’t just a word.” I explained. “It was how he said it. Sombra just told us that, -cough!- he thinks he owns the Empire. The city, as well as the ponies. Body, mind, perhaps even their souls!” My lungs ran a quick cycle of righteous anger. “And I can’t forgive that.”
“So, big surprise, the bad guy wants to fight.” The cyan pegasus shrugged.
“Hey, I figured it was worth a knock!” I defended.
“So I still need to finish my test, then.” Twilight Sparkle thought to herself.
“What-hic! test?” My words were interrupted by an untimely lung spasm.
“The test Princess Celestia sent me to complete!” The unicorn student yapped. “It’s only the most important thing I’ve ever done in my life! What do you mean, ‘what test’!?”
“Sorry, I-hic! maybe you and I aren’t-huk! thinking of the same-kiccup! same test.” Everypony around me stared with wide eyes and varying degrees of amusement as my ability to string words together slowly broke down. I thumped my chest and tried to cough. “Sorry, don’t know what-hic! what’s gotten into me.”
“You all right there, hon?” Applejack fought to keep a straight face. “You sure you got all that hoodoo out of your system?”
“I-ikk! I think so. May-hulk!-maybe I just need a glass-hicc! a glass of water. Or maybe I’m secretly one of General Ironwood’s androids.”
"You just take it easy for a while." Twilight ordered. "Not everypony who tastes essence gets off so easy."
"Yeah..." I let a moment of sobriety pass. "But you have to admit, it was pretty cool!"
"I'll say!" Rainbow Dash punched me playfully. "I mean, back in Ponyville, you couldn’t run faster than a trot and now all of a sudden, you can move like a racehorse? Come on! For a second, I was worried you’d been holding out on us all this time!” The pegasi quickly added, “But just for a second…”
"Nanomachines, son." I continued repeating the name of a certain dragon-riding viking.
"Shoot, potions. Explains how you were bookin' it like a pig with his head caught in a hornet's nest!" Applejack laughed.
“Aw! You looked like you were having so much fun!” Pinkie chimed in. “I mean, besides the frowny eyebrows and the locked jaw and the cold sweat on your forehead, I could tell, you were having the time of your life back there, weren’t you? Hey, Mark, any chance I could try some super-speedy-potion-breezy too?”
“Sorry, Pinkie, but the-hic! in the interests of the time-space continuum, I’m going to have to say ‘no’.” I intentionally avoided Twilight’s frozen stare. “And I used the last of it.” Hopefully for a good cause. My eyes slid around to glance at the silent form of Shining Armor sitting a little ways away. “But hey! What are we what are-hic! we still standing around for!? Welcome to the capital city of Oz! Sorry, I meant,-huk! meant the Crystal Empire. Come on!” As I guided Spike and the girls toward the Empire’s mirrored road, Twilight’s brother finally stepped forward and tried to catch my attention,
“Mark?”
“Later, captain.” My shoulder was as cold as snake blood. Without pressing the matter, Shining Armor fell into step behind the rest of the group.
“Sparkleriffic!” Pinkie Pie squealed as our party found itself beneath the welcoming gate of the Empire itself. Two rosy red pillars of glass grew on either side of the polished road, framing the city beyond like a painting. Above us, a series of glistening gems hung suspended upon nothing, the smallest of them larger than a refrigerator. Once more, I was struck by how the Crystal Empire’s aesthetic was caught between hard physics, and gravity-spiting fantasy.
With each step we took, the majesty and mystery of the ancient kingdom commanded more and more of our attention until the girls could do nothing but gawk and coo at the buildings around them. Even Twilight Sparkle eventually had to stop lecturing me on the dangers of ingesting raw elements in order to give her full appreciation to the kingdom of science and magic.
“It’s gorgeous! Absolutely gorgeous!” Rarity frothed, her eyes stretched open as wide as they would go. “There are no words!”
“Focus, Rarity.” Applejack tried to bring her starstruck friend back down to earth. “We’re here to help Twilight, not admire the scenery.”
“Why not both?” I chuckled, taking a long look at a non-electric lantern. “I still can’t get over the sight of it. As far as I can tell,-hic! the Crystal Ponies developed an entire culture based around solid-state magic circuits. It’s fascinating! Without iron, wood, or-hicc! or granite, they’ve grown an entire, functional city for themselves and are completely self-sufficient. On the surface, sure, it sounds like a setting for the next World’s Fair, but the more I see of it, the more it looks like a big ‘ol magic farm and I worry about the ponies forced to live here.”
“That’s ridiculous!” Rarity guffawed. “Who in their right mind would think that such an intricate piece of art like this could be so sinister?” I pointed at Lilly who pointed at me.
“Eh, I don’t see what the big deal is.” Rainbow Dash shrugged as we wandered beneath the shadow of the palace proper. “Just looks like another old castle to me.”
“Ah! Puh-! Gyuh!” The fabulous unicorn’s tongue short-circuited in shock. “Another old-! Have you lost your mind!? Look at the magni-” The sound of everypony else sharing a laugh told Rarity that she had been the victim of a rather well-placed tease. She blushed and admitted defeat, “Very funny.”
“So, Mark?” Rainbow Dash hovered backwards as the rest of us ascended the stairs into the palace. “What’s the plan? What other tricks do you got up your sleeves? Now that Team Hero’s here, when are we gonna show that snarling jerk outside who’s boss?”
“Tricks?” I asked innocently, glancing down at my useless magic staff.
“You know, because you can tell the future, remember?” The pegasus waved her hooves in exasperation. Before I could answer, however, the conversation was bisected by a frantic voice rolling over us like a speeding train,
“No spoilers!” Twilight shrieked. Spike, who was riding on the unicorn’s back, had to regain his balance.
“I-”
“No!”
“Was-”
“Spoilers!”
“Just-”
“Mark!” The look Twilight threw at me couldn’t have been harder even if her face was made of diamond. “Princess Celestia personally gave me a very special test. She asked me to help find a way to save the Crystal Empire and so if you do or say anything to help me, then that means I didn’t solve it on my own! And if I didn’t solve it on my own, then that’s cheating! I won’t be graded accurately! Do you know what happens to cheaters?”
“Ooh! Ooh!” Pinkie Pie hopped forward. “They get to sit on a special chair in a special corner and wear a special white party hat until recess, right? Ah, good memories.”
“Do schools even use the ‘dunce’ hat anymore?” I pondered.
“Regardless,” Twilight continued, “this has to be my test and my test alone, got it?”
“Say no more, say no more.” I adjusted Lilly on my shoulder. “You’ve got the right idea.” Then, as the magic student turned away, I whispered to Rainbow Dash, “She’s totally got the wrong idea.”
We found Cadance waiting for us in the throne room, a ragged husk of her usual self. Between her lack of sleep and her fretting over the fate of her husband, the princess looked more thrashed than a flag in a tornado and more frayed than an iPhone charging cord. Even still, her smile somehow managed to brighten up the entire room when she saw us walk through her door.
Twilight and Cadance immediately ran towards each other and exchanged their endearing nursery rhyme. It was almost enough to make one forget the predicament we were all in, until Cadance suddenly winced and the skies outside the windows flickered dark and cold. Donning a brave smile, the princess laughed,
“One of these days, we need to get together when the fate of Equestria isn’t hanging in the balance.” Apparently, she was the only one in the room who thought it was funny. Looking past the rest of us, the alicorn’s violet eyes alighted on Shining Armor standing quietly by. I watched as relief and joy rose up in her cheeks, only to be poisoned by the sight of his horn and the bruises he carried. Her dry eyes strained fruitlessly to produce more tears. A little sheepishly, Shining finally stepped forward and nuzzled his wife.
“We made it back safe.” He offered. “That’s what matters. I’m sorry for worrying you.”
“Sorry?” Cadance grinned, but her eyes remained shut tight. “When we get through this, you’ll owe me a whole lot more than a ‘sorry’.” She forced herself to scan him hoof-to-horn once more and her emotions redoubled in their efforts to make her cry. “Oh, Shining, what happened to you out there?”
“I get the feeling I’m not the first unicorn King Sombra has ever fought.” The stallion chortled mirthlessly. “He knew just how to stop my magic.”
“And this?” The princess looked critically at a large bruise swelling just beneath Shining Armor’s left eye.
“I can’t remember much.” He admitted.
“A real mystery…” I folded my hands, surreptitiously covering a matching welt on the back of my knuckles.
“And you, Mark.” Cadance beamed through the bags weighing down he eyes. “Thank you. So much.”
“I’m just glad I could help.” An order of polite with a side of snide. If Shining Armor hadn’t told the guard where he was going, that “could help” would have become a disastrous “couldn’t help”. Apparently, even a stubborn dolt gets lucky every once in a while.
“It appears I owe you an apology as well.” The captain of the guard turned towards me and inclined his head in a gesture of humility. “What you did out there was nothing short of noble, Mark, and you have my deepest thanks.”
Suffice to say, I wasn’t expecting such a turnaround from Shining Armor. At least not in that moment, anyways. I’d started to resign myself to the possibility that he and I would always rub each other the wrong way and that there was nothing I could do to change that. At most, I’d hoped to get a grudging “good job” or some other half-hearted accolade at the end of a grand finale or perhaps after I’d saved the world a couple more times. Having him just up and admit that running off on his own was foolish had me momentarily wondering if hell was starting to feel chilly.
“Well, remember, you mean a lot to Cadance and Twilight and I’d hate for them to-” But it was too good to last.
“-Is what I would like to say.” The stallion’s voice had regained its frosty edge. “But I can’t help but shake the feeling that this was just another scene in your play.”
“… What?” I blinked.
“That device.” Shining’s rock-hard brow dipped towards the ward rod in my hand. “Why did you bring it with you?”
“Is this a trick question?” Confused, I looked at the ponies around me. “I brought it to roast marshmallows on. Obviously, it was to save you from Sombra, wasn’t it?”
“Let me rephrase.” The captain pulled himself to his full stature. “If you knew King Sombra was going to attack us out there, why did I need saving at all? Why couldn’t you just warn me ahead of time and avoid it entirely?” All eyes flicked between Shining and I as if we were a pair of ping-pong players. “Was it so that you could play the hero again?”
Up until that point, I thought the concept of making one’s “blood boil” was just a figure of speech. Apparently, risking your life to (literally) snatch someone from the jaws of death wasn’t enough to convince them that your motives really were benign. Before this adventure, I thought my self-control was as strong as iron, but it turns out frustration makes for one heckova rust.
“No, let me rephrase!” My lips were twitching. “I brought that bunch of bad guy-B-gone so that, on the off chance some idiot got themselves in trouble after all my efforts to direct them otherwise, I could do something about it!”
All the mares in the room flinched, but none more so than Lilly. Cadance, on her part, gave a soft groan and suddenly looked twenty years older.
“Stop posturing!” Shining Armor leaned forward threateningly. “You set me up so that you would look better!”
“You set yourself up!” I bellowed. “What in Tartarus did you think you were doing gallivanting out on your own? Who’s the one playing hero here?”
“At least I was doing something helpful instead of cowering behind Cadance’s magic!”
“No, you were doing something stupid!” I shouted, as if my voice needed the extra force to push through the stallion’s thick skull.
“QUIET!” The call eventually rang out, the scolding that I knew was coming. Shining and I had once again descended into our unresolved squabble and once again it was up to a mediator to referee us. However, the voice that interrupted us wasn’t Cadance’s. Instead, I turned a surprised look to where Twilight Sparkle was bristling behind me.
“Twi-”
“No!” The purple unicorn held her ground. “You might have saved him back there, Mark, but there’s no reason why you can call my brother stupid!”
“Look,” I grimaced, “I know you just got here, and you don’t really know what’s going on, but Shining and I-”
“Actually, hon, it isn’t too hard to figure out.” Applejack scratched her mane absently. “You’re both up-an’-at-‘em kind of guys who wanted the other to stay out of your way. Both noble, but you two were bound to butt heads sooner or later.” A murmur of assent circled the room.
“And if he’s 'stupid', then what does that make you?” Twilight Sparkle demanded. “Shining Armor met us at the train station, alone, the only pony there when we arrived, and he fought Sombra alone too. But you’re no better! You jumped headlong into that magic storm with nothing but a cluster of dusty artifacts to protect you! How crazy are you, anyways? Do I have to remind you who just saved you from eating distilled wind essence?"
“Considering that I coughed up a lung a couple blocks back, I'd say no, we're good.” I mimed the action of flicking water out of my ear. “But for the record, even if I didn’t tell Shining about an ambush, I made it very clear that he wasn’t to go outside the city without me. You still don’t think he was trying to put on some heroics?”
“No more than what you would have done.” Twilight tossed her head as if finishing her sentence with a visible period mark.
“Maybe I was…” Shining admitted. Warily, I glanced over at the white stallion. About half of the strength had left his voice and his eyes were now leering at the floor instead of me. “Maybe I was trying too hard… Trying too hard to be the hero.” With what looked like a great effort, he lifted his head. “Trying to prove to myself that I’m not as helpless as Mark says I am.”
“Pardon me?” I looked at Twilight and Applejack for help, but they had no input. Desperately, I tried to clarify, “When did I ever say you’re helpless? You’re Shining freaking Armor for crying out loud. The white knight incarnate! The Captain of the Guard. Correction, the ROYAL Guard! The one who, I don’t know, staved off a changeling invasion for, what, a week?”
What I was saying may have sounded like a compliment in any other setting, but in that moment, my own words only fueled the burning in my bones. Everything he was, everything he had achieved, was everything I wanted to be. I thought I admired him, but seeing Shining Armor up close only served as a scalding reminder that,
“If anything, you’re the guy with actual power and I’m the helpless one!”
“Helpless?” Shining guffawed. “You hold the future of the world in your… hands! You can change destiny on a whim!”
“Ha! Now there’s a laugh! I’m about as qualified to guide ‘destiny’ as Phaethon is qualified to drive the sun! You don’t think I’ve tried taking the reins before only to be bucked off and reminded just how insignificant I am compared to the whole bleeding universe!?”
“I’d still trade my power for yours if it meant protecting my family!” Shining asserted.
“You can have it! I’d gladly trade mine for a taste of real magic!” I huffed.
Long seconds passed as the stallion and I both stared down the same crackling line of atmosphere. I can’t speak for Shining, but I know that I only held the visage because I didn’t know how else to react. My frustration and exasperation toward him had finally boiled away, and I was surprised to find that what remained was borderline admiration. He actually envied me and, if I were honest, I might even go so far as to admit that I envied him too. Were I even more honest, one might say that I saw an annoying amount of myself in the stubborn unicorn. It would explain how he was able to get under my skin so easily.
“Did we just…?” I faltered.
“I don’t know…” He muttered helplessly.
“But it might be…”
“Looks that way…”
“What? What did you do?” Lilly looked from my face to Shining’s and back.
“If we just apologized, then that’s the weirdest amends I’ve ever made.” Finally, I broke eye contact.
“Same.”
“Unless…” I jabbed a finger past Shining Armor towards Cadance’s swaying figure, “Did you do this!?”
“Do what?” The princess blinked for a few seconds before realizing what I was asking. “Oh, no, you two are safe from me. My special talent doesn’t work like that.”
Behind me, the girls were whispering to each other.
“Boys.” Rarity tittered. “Such intricate creatures.”
“I hear ya, hon.” Applejack snickered back.
“No more yelling?” Lilly asked hopefully.
“Yeah.” I shifted on my feet. “I think we’re done yelling.”
“Agreed.” Shining Armor said quietly. “We still need everyone’s help to save the Crystal Empire.”
“That’s why we’re here.” Twilight Sparkle perked up.
“Why we’re all here.” Applejack joined in. Behind her, the rest of the girls nodded.
“Then let’s get this show on the road.” I grinned encouragingly. A soft voice spoke up from behind Pinkie Pie.
“But, what are we supposed to do?” Fluttershy asked timidly. “Nopony said anything about fighting angry unicorn kings.”
“So, Mark,” Rainbow Dash sang innocently, “are you sure you can’t give us just tiny little hint?”
“Spoilers!” I beat Twilight to the draw. With a wink at the purple unicorn, I explained, “But to be honest, there’s not much more I could tell you. I’ve already used up everything in my bag of tricks. You won’t see any more interference from me because you all made it to this moment.”
“What moment?” The rainbow pegasus tilted her head.
“This moment.” I gestured at the room. “When you all made it safely to the Empire. From here on out, it’s all you girls. Of course I’m going to still help, but only as your friend. Not as some kibitzer. Remember, guys, I’m not the writer, editor, or even a proof-reader. I’m just a fan.”
“What about the gems you set up around the city?” Lilly Limn thought out loud. Immediately, I put a nervous finger over her lips and chuckled,
“That’s only for polish, dear. No major plot holes there.”
“So we’re just supposed to make things up as we go?” Rainbow Dash complained.
“Oh, I don’t know about that.” I threw a glance over to where Shining Armor stood uncertainly. “Twilight’s brother may have an idea or two...”
“Me?”
“The floor is yours, captain.” Anxiously, the room fell quiet as the stallion pondered the predicament we were all in. After studying the floor like a grandmaster examining a chess board, he began,
“Well, with Cadance putting all her strength into keeping her spell going, and me trying to keep an eye on signs of trouble in the arctic, we haven't been able to gather much information from the Crystal Ponies.” Shining Armor thought aloud. “But we have to believe one of them knows how we can protect the Empire without having to use Cadance’s magic.”
“A research paper!” Twilight squealed, drawing a lot of confused looks from the ponies around her.
“Huh?” Even for Shining, the magic student’ train of thought seemed to come out of left field.
“That must be part of my test!” Twilight explained hastily. “To gather information from the Crystal Ponies and deliver it to you! This is gonna be great! I love research papers!”
“Yeah, who doesn’t?” Rainbow Dash elbowed Pinkie playfully.
“Oh-oh-oh! Lemme guess!” And once more, the sarcasm was lost on the pink pony. “Is it Spike? No no, Fluttershy! Rarity?”
“Plot twist!” I giggled, “It’s you, Pinkie!”
“Whaaaaa?” The energetic mare gasped so hard she almost swallowed her tongue. Twilight, however, wasn’t paying attention.
“Don’t worry, big brother.” She assured. “I am really good at this sort of thing.”
“If you say so…” Without any obvious objections, all Shining Armor could do was watch as Twilight rallied her friends and led them galloping out into the city.
“Take care.” I tossed back to the princess and her husband. Before I could join the girls, however, the captain detained me.
“And Mark?” Shining glanced at Cadance and looked at me with quiet gratitude. “When this is all over, I owe you a proper apology.”
“And I you.” I muttered so that the other ponies couldn’t hear. “If you really are as crazy as me, perhaps I shouldn’t have tried to hold you back the way I did.”
For a second, I met Cadance’s eyes, an unfaltering ray of sunlight in a sky full of clouds. I admired her strength, but in that moment I also knew how much of it was a reflection of Shining Armor’s own courage. As an apology for my own behavior and as a token of peace, I felt a sudden urge to grant the knight’s wish before leaving him behind.
“So, Shining,” At least he didn’t order me to call him “captain” anymore, “you say you want to know the future?”
“It was foolish of me, I know, but-”
“Stay close to Cadance.” I whispered, a glimmer in my eye. “The future of the Empire depends on it.”
“How?”
“Well,” A mischievous grin curled across my face, “if all goes well, a certain baby dragon’s going to fall off the top of this tower before the day is done.”
“If all goes well!?” The pony blinked incredulously. Undeterred, I continued,
“Also, let’s just assume every other winged pony is going to be down in the city at that time. Just make sure your wife is awake when it counts.” And with that, I swept out of the room, leaving the captain staring after me, unsure whether to look grateful or worried.
“What did he say?” I heard Cadance ask behind me.
“Nothing!” Shining Armor started. Then, apologetically, he added, “You should just relax for now. Don’t worry about a thing. Would you like me to find you some tea?”
Once back out in the city, Twilight gave a few hasty directions to us and our group split up to find the enigmatic Crystal Ponies. The streets were almost completely abandoned and the few souls who meandered out and about did so with averted gazes, actively avoiding conversation like a redhead avoiding sunlight. My own efforts to waylay a few of the ponies were met with blank stares, hollow faces, and mumbled speech devoid of passion or vitality. Their personalities had been wiped away, leaving nothing but working drones the likes of which I hadn’t seen since the cybermen came to town. Unless, that is, one managed to slip a few “keywords” into conversation. (I. E. King, Sombra, black crystals, chains, and/or slaves.) In which case, the results were instant, dramatic, pitiful, and afterwards made me feel like a terrible person.
“Are they zombies?” Lilly Limn asked tentatively, watching a cobalt stallion shuffle down an alleyway.
“Close, but they’re not dead inside,” I explained, “just asleep.”
“Should we sing Evanescence songs?” She queried.
“You know, we may have to. A little Evanescence, a little Skillet, a little Letter Black, and we can have a right goth little party.”
The other girls’ efforts weren’t any more fruitful. Rainbow Dash’s pushy personality caused most ponies to clam up or shut down completely, Fluttershy couldn’t bring herself to break through the initial conversation barrier, and Pinkie Pie was off doing something that involved a mask, some rope and a pair of night-vision goggles. Rarity, apparently, didn’t realize that “Crystal Ponies” isn’t just a reference to their nationality, and spent all of her time gawking and swooning over the mysterious glassy sheen upon all the city’s citizens.
All too soon, (and not soon enough by my count) the girls returned to the preordained rendezvous point to discuss their findings.
“I got nothing so far.” Rainbow Dash sighed in defeat.
“Hm? Oh, me neither.” Rarity was staring at her mane with a dreamy look.
“Fluttershy?” Lilly asked as the yellow pegasus approached us. The mare’s posture was uncharacteristically stiff and her eyes darted about warily. Suddenly, she brought a hoof to her forehead and doffed her disguise, revealing Pinkie Pie standing among us instead.
“Gah!” Lilly and I nearly jumped out of our own skins after seeing that.
“My cover has been blown.” Pinkie hissed. “I repeat, my cover has been blown!” Without further explanation, the pink mare dashed for the nearest shadow and vanished.
“Oookay?” Twilight stared after the retreating pony uncertainly.
“What is this even made out of?” I poked the discarded Fluttershy suit cautiously. A second later, the real Fluttershy wandered up and glanced warily at the costume on the ground. The only answer I had for her was a confounded shrug.
“Sorry, Twilight.” Applejack, at least, offered some helpful analysis. “These Crystal Ponies seem to have some kind of collective amnesia or somethin’. Only thing I was able to get out of ‘em was something about a library.”
“A library?” Sparkle’s eyes sparkled. “Well, why didn’t you say so!?”
“Uh,” The orange mare grimaced, “thought I just did.”
“Take Amethyst down a block, turn left just before Garnet and then you’ll find the library on the corner of Pearl and Steven.” My fingers quickly pecked the directions into the air like an invisible puppet show. The ponies looked up in surprise.
“Mark, I thought you weren’t going to give anything away!” Twilight scowled.
“Not giving away!” I explained hastily. “Earlier, I realized Sombra had removed all the old street names. Some sort of cultural purge, if I had to guess. I didn’t want anypony to get lost, so I made my own. Even named them after gemstones to fit the city’s theme.”
“Oh, so that’s what little Lilly was referring to earlier.” Rarity pouted, apparently disappointed that my secret project had nothing to do with real rocks.
“But hang on.” Spike fiddled with his claws. “What kind of gem is a ‘Steven’?”
“I don’t know. A special kind?” I offered. “Never did get into that show.” Before the nitters could pick, however, there was a tremor in the ground and the blue sky momentarily flickered grey.
“We’re wasting time.” Twilight thought aloud. “We should hurry.” She dashed off down “Amethyst” and the rest of us quickly followed.
The library, like the rest of the city, had walls of raw crystal, but stood apart from its mundane neighbors via its vaulted windows and imposing double doors, flanked on either side by a pair of petrified opal griffons. Without hesitation, Twilight Sparkle threw open the entrance and flooded the shadowy building with sunlight. At once, rows upon rows of glass shelves, stuffed with countless tomes shimmered like waterfalls of light. To those of us who couldn’t fully appreciate the cache of ancient knowledge we’d opened, the sight was as dazzling as watching a rainbow on a sunny day, but to Princess Celestia’s prized student, the spectacle was nigh overwhelming.
“I just… I don’t even know what to…” Twilight began to hyperventilate. “There are no words.”
“Ahem.” A smoky blue mare with large spectacles emerged from one of the less radiant corners of the room. “May I help you?”
“Yes.” The purple unicorn beamed. “We’re looking for a book.”
“We have plenty of those.” The ancient mare gestured listlessly at the endless halls running off into the distance.
“You do.” Twilight whispered. “You really do.”
“We’re lookin’ for a history book.” Applejack stepped up. “Something that might tell us how the Empire might’ve protected itself from danger back in the day.”
“Yes. Of course.” The old mare stated, rubbing her chin. “History, history… Ah, yes.”
The girls leaned forward expectantly, daring for a breakthrough in their investigation. The old mare looked at them, they looked back at her, and she stared back. Shifting on her hooves, Twilight finally pressed,
“… Which is where, exactly?”
“I… I can’t seem to remember.” The old pony looked around in visible confusion. “I’m not sure I actually work here.”
“Ugh!” Rainbow Dash drew a long hoof over her muzzle in exasperation.
“We’ll just take a look around.” Twilight Sparkle excused herself. “I’m sure we can find it on our own.”
“Let me know if you find anything.” With that, the old mare returned to shuffling aimlessly through the endless aisles of books.
“Sure. If we ever need somepony to vacantly stare at us, you’ll be the first to know.” I huffed, turning to follow the girls. Pinkie Pie hesitated a second longer to stare after the meandering crystal pony.
“I like her!” She squealed, joining us as we plunged into the labyrinth of knowledge.
Our party tore into the shelves like termites at a lumber yard, hunting for any record of the city’s legendary defense device. Between Rainbow Dash and Applejack, entire rows could be reduced to debris in a moment, with books strewn across the floor like fallen leaves. Even I, despite my natural reverence for literature, eventually succumbed to the fact that we were in a race against time and began walking down the aisles with one arm dragging books onto the floor like a reverse snow blower.
“Nope… Nope… Nope…” My other hand caught the titles as they fell before letting them continue the rest of the way to the floor.
“Nope… Nope… Nope…” Lilly helped too. (By checking the books I’d already discarded.)
After a fruitless half-hour where we were caught between sheer boredom and utter panic, only Fluttershy and Pinkie continued to treat the books with any kind of respect and not like hay to be sifted through in our quest for the elusive needle. For a panged moment, I even feared that the history we were looking for might have been removed from the library altogether. Already, every title falling through my hands showed signs of heavy editing, blots of ink and ripped pages, the scars left from where the knowledge of the old world did not mesh with the culture that Sombra had cultivated. Even with its chapter about the Crystal Heart cut out, who was to say that a book about traditions and customs would have a place in Sombra’s city at all? (I really hated George Orwell’s “1984”.)
“Uh, anyone else stating to think this is a lost cause?” Applejack looked up from a pile of titles she had been nuzzling through.
“No, no, no, no…” Twilight was her own machine, harvesting, scanning, and depositing books into a monstrous pile as her magic indiscriminately gathered the entire building’s worth of text in her aura. At long last, her piercing eyes caught a keyword, “No, no… Yes!”
All fatigue forgotten, every eye rounded upon Twilight and the Mt. Everest of books behind her. She was clutching a hardbound tome with worn edges and golden letters on its cover.
“History of the Crystal Empire.” She read the formal Equestrian characters. “I just hope it has the answers we need.”
Fortunately, it did. As we gathered around, Twilight Sparkle began rapidly flipping through the pages, her wide eyes drinking in all the facts she could find with the practiced air of a professional student. In a way, it was strangely satisfying to learn that my theories about the nature of the Crystal Empire were more or less accurate. The city itself was designed to channel the magic of the ponies that lived in it and use that power to generate the local climate, shield the city from harsh weather, and turn greedy kings into the smoke monster from Lost. (Ok, it still didn’t expressly say that last one.) Getting numerous auras to work together, however, required a sense of unity between the citizens. To do this, the builders harnessed the ponies’ spirit of hope, patriotism, and benevolence with,
“A ‘Crystal Faire’.” Twilight explained.
And there it was. Saving the Empire meant that we first and foremost had to save the Crystal Ponies. When viewed in that light, it actually made a lot of sense. Many a war was won or prevented altogether through virtues as simple as goodwill. As for me, it helped to keep things in that perspective instead of focusing on the fact that we were going to break a siege, commit regicide, and save the world by hosting a carnival.
Yet, that’s exactly what we ended up doing.
It was already a mature afternoon by the time Twilight Sparkle got the go-ahead from Cadance to host the Crystal Faire. No pun intended, but Lilly and I were horses in the gate, raring to go and ready to direct the girls to everything they’d need to throw together the best faire in a thousand years. (Technically, the only faire in a thousand years.) If there’s one thing my friends are good at, though, it’s putting together parties, and between all our efforts, we had a working line of booths and events set up within the hour.
Using Sombra’s stockpile of textiles, Rarity produced a plethora of colorful booths. Applejack wasted no time firing up the king’s kitchens and I hauled out the sparing suits I’d found for Rainbow Dash’s jousting tournament. The work kept my mind focused, and the catchy tune we were all singing did wonders for the nerves, but when Fluttershy ran in from the sheep fields with reports that Cadance had shrunk the size of her force field, I couldn’t help but feel anxious about our dwindling hours of daylight.
“It looks amazing!” Twilight exclaimed, trotting through the rows of tents on either side of the street. “I don’t know how I could’ve done this without you!”
As one, our group blushed modestly. In all honesty, though, the pony who had done the most running around was Twilight Sparkle herself. Armed with nothing but a heavily-censored history book, she had overseen the entire production, running up and down the street to make sure everything we did was as “authentic” as possible.
“One last check to make sure everything is in place, and then the festivities can begin!” She declared.
“What’s this thing for?” Applejack poked curiously at what looked like a prehistoric table lamp. Twilight Sparkle was many things, but an artist was not one of them. The faux Crystal Heart, though mostly the right size and shape, was asymmetrical, flawed, and rough.
“The last page of the book mentioned a Crystal Heart as the Faire’s centerpiece, so I used my magic to cut one out of a crystal block.”
“Looks like my boogers.” Lilly observed. I gave the changeling a quick, “shush”, but to be fair, I was thinking along the same lines. Still, because I valued my friendships (and my head) I didn’t say anything to Twilight or the rest of the girls regarding the real artifact.
To kick off the Faire, Shining Armor, Princess Cadance and Twilight Sparkle mounted the lowest and largest of the palace’s balconies and presented themselves to the city while Pinkie Pie heralded their announcement with a sounding of the traditional flugelhorn. At least, I hoped it was Pinkie on the horn, though it admittedly sounded more like a narwhal getting frisky with a hippo. Borrowing a page out of Dumbledore’s book, Twilight Sparkle magically magnified her voice and declared,
“Hear ye, hear ye! Princess Cadance and Prince Shining Armor do cordially invite you to attend the Crystal Faire!” Fortunately, for all their advanced technology, the Crystal Ponies hadn’t invented double-paned glass, meaning that Twilight’s call and Pinkie’s… horn… caught the attention of a sizable number of the reclusive ponies. Cautious faces peeked out of their windows or poked out from the shelter of their doors, visibly confused by the commotion and curious about the appearance of this so-called ‘Princess Cadance’. For whatever reason, the summons seemed to work, and a few figures began traipsing toward the colorful tents in front of the palace.
“Welcome!” I said in my best greeter’s voice as the first couple ponies entered the line of stalls.
“Hoi!” Lilly chimed in. From behind the pie stand where she and I were volunteering, the changeling and I watched as Applejack gently greeted the first Crystal ponies to the faire.
“Oh, I do hope this helps them.” Rarity whispered beside me. Her sapphire eyes were filled with pity for the grey ponies now carefully approaching the vibrant faire tents.
“They might look broken, but I’m sure all the pieces are still there.” I assured the white unicorn. “We just need to trigger a memory and they should fill in the gaps on their own.”
“I suppose, but how do you propose we do that?” Despite her doubt, Rarity put on a bright smile for a passerby.
“Iduno, I’m making this up as I go.”
“It’s dangerous to go alone! Take this!” Lilly announced the approach of an agate-purple mare with a golden laurel for a cutiemark.
“She means ‘hello’.” I coughed. “Would you like to try some of the crystal berry pie?”
“Crystal berry pie?” The pony rolled the words around in her mouth like a jellybean whose flavor she had not yet been able to identify. “It sure smells familiar, but I just can’t remember…”
“The taste?” In a flash of crystal cutlery, I produced a hearty slice of the pastry upon a napkin. “Go ahead and tell me what you think.”
The purple pony looked doubtfully at the juices bleeding out of the pie and then up at me. Obviously, being served unfamiliar food by a bipedal stranger wasn’t very comforting for the young mare, but the tantalizing scent of baked goods was too mesmerizing to pass up. Slowly, she took a bite and chewed thoughtfully.
“Hmm… This is…” The crystal pony wiped a crumb away from the corner of her mouth. “The crust is excellent, but…”
“I’ll be sure to tell Applejack.” I grinned. “But what?”
“But…” Our guest searched the air above her head as distant memories buzzed around, fighting to be heard. “But it’s much too sweet. Did you use red berries for the filling?”
“We didn’t know what to use, so we mixed red and white.” I admitted. “I mean, they grow on the same bush, right?” Rarity and Lilly glanced up at me, visibly deflated at the fact that our first customer wasn’t happy with our product.
“Oh no, only the white berries are used for pies. They’re the tart ones and they taste so much better when you bake them into jelly. Oh!” The pony gasped suddenly, almost dropping her snack. “That’s right! I remember now! Flower Terrace’s mom used to bake the best berry pies in the Empire!”
To our astonishment, and Rarity’s glee, the purple pony in front of us flashed with a mysterious light and her coat was transformed. No longer dull and grey, the mare stood as clean and radiant as the heart of a geode. Oblivious to her own metamorphosis, the Crystal Pony sputtered,
“Oh my! I- I need to find Terrace! She needs to see this!” The mare reared and dashed back down the street.
“Fill your cravings at the circus of values!” Lilly called after her.
“Well, one down…” My eyes swept over the rest of the city. “A couple more to go.”
“That was amazing!” Rarity squealed. “Did you just see the way her face lit up? Ah! It worked!” Unable to contain her sudden burst of inspiration, the unicorn shot off towards the arts and crafts booths across the street. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, we simply must keep this up!”
Like kernels of corn in a hot pan, I watched as one pony, then another and another burst into radiance as they wandered through the Faire. Some individuals required very subtle and specific stimuli in order to trigger their memories, like the gentle tug of a balloon on the end of its string, or the way music echoed off the underside of the palace. For others, the light of remembrance readily sparked to life for things as simple as throwing a ring around a target, the smell of a petting zoo, or (for a lot of the stallions) the taste of traditional faire fare.
Actually, atomic fission might be a more apt metaphor. Unlike corn, these ponies were not isolated incidents. Having one trigger its memory meant that it wanted to share the experience with its friends, who in turn triggered more memories and connected with more ponies. Furthermore, some of the more stubborn ponies’ memories were only triggered by the sound of a laughing crowd, and as the number of “rescued” Crystal Ponies doubled and quadrupled, that’s exactly what they heard.
Though the girl’s efforts were valiant, I knew from the get-go that we wouldn’t be able to host the entire Empire on our own. Still, despite the fact that Economy-based games of real-time strategy games often kicked my butt, the importance of recruiting these newly awakened ponies into our staff was not lost on me. Run into a pony who has tips on how to boil corn on the cob? They’re our new corncob chef. Someone’s dad can craft funny faces out of funnel cake? Hand him a vat of batter and let him have at it! Find a pony who can actually play a coherent tune on the flugelhorn? We’ll have to get back to you on that one… But the point remained, having ponies who actually knew what the Faire was like back in the day gave us that extra level of “authenticity” we needed to draw in the rest of the crowds.
Unconventional as it looked, however, that day was still a battlefield, and the merciless sand continued to fall through the hour glass as the sun slipped lower and lower in the sky. I could almost feel Sombra’s malice like a sunburn on the back of my neck as he sat at the gate, stewing just beyond the blue barrier, just waiting for Cadance’s magic to slip. Fortunately, the Faire hadn’t been open for more than a quarter hour before I noticed Rainbow Dash streaking across the sky with one of Rarity’s banners clutched firmly in her muzzle. Somepony had let slip that THE Crystal Heart wasn’t just ANY Crystal Heart and Twilight Sparkle’s final quest had been set in motion.
And none too soon. Within moments of Twilight realizing her mistake, Cadance had her first real black-out. Crystal Ponies across the city glanced up in terror as her shield spell collapsed, the serene sky rotting and falling away to reveal a howling grey tempest beyond. All hooves froze in their tracks as a new bugling washed over the city, the chilling cacophony of the monster king’s advance. As soon as it happened, however, the threat subsided. Slowly, and with visible effort, the blue bubble of the princess’ magic rose up once more, cutting off the irate roars of the shadows. Literally, if the episode was any indication.
“Why hello there! Are you the pie chef today?” An elderly blue stallion with crow’s feet the size of ostrich toes smiled down at Lilly.
“No.” The changeling looked uncertainly from the pony to the sky and back. “I’m the official taste tester.”
“An important job, indeed.” The stallion chuckled.
“Mark says it’s the important-est.” Lilly waited patiently for me to serve our guest, but I was too busy staring at the blue dome above us. If any of the Crystal Ponies were worried about the fact that the sky was literally threatening to fall on them, they didn’t show it. Once again, the ponies’ resilience frightened me.
“Thank you, enjoy your time at the Faire.” My animatronic muscles served the stallion and sent him on his way without a second glance. Were it not for Lilly’s interference, I might have even forgotten to provide the pony with a napkin.
“Hey, huggabutt, can we take a quick break?” It wasn’t a suggestion, seeing as I was already wiping my hands and tugging off my apron.
“You can rest when you’re dead!” Though she sounded like my old swimming coach, Lilly obediently hopped down from her stool and followed after me, a sticky pie tin still clutched in her mouth.
My friend and I ducked down a nearby alleyway and within a few seconds, I found what I was looking for. A steep flight of crystal stairs took us to the top of one of the nearby buildings and from atop its veranda, one could see all the way to the edge of the city and the magic wall beyond.
“Schnitzel.” I spat under my breath. At the extent of my perception, by the towering rose pillars marking the edge to the Crystal Empire, a small black shape had begun to fester right in the middle of the road. Sombra’s own horn, severed by the cycling of the force field, was now within the city limits, a foothold for the unicorn’s vile magic, a crack in the dam through which the ocean began to force itself through. Even as I watched, shadows began to ooze across the road, sprouting crystals like weeds.
“Schnitzel!” Lilly mimicked.
“Ooh, sorry, did I say that out loud?” As if by instinct, I lifted my young friend and held her protectively. For a moment, I considered charging back to the edge of the city. We did, after all, still have Lilly’s ward and if I acted quickly, then even its limited strength might be enough to push back the advancing darkness, but I decided to bide my time instead. Though Sombra’s foothold would allow him to begin corrupting the magic circuits in the roads and buildings, thereby putting more strain on Cadance, it gained him very little tactical advantage in the long run. At the rate his shadows were growing, he would overwhelm the city by midnight. We only needed to hold out until sunset. If one little ward could do anything against the swollen smoke sorcerer, it was wisest to save it for the grand finale.
“Hey, Mark!” A familiar voice soared overhead, preceding a certain blue pegasus.
“Rainbow Dash!” I greeted.
“Miss super-ultra-extreme-awesomazing!” Lilly hailed.
“Now where’d you get that from?” I leaned over the filly.
“Doesn’t matter!” Rainbow Dash waved her hoof. (Was that a blush I saw?) “We’re in deep trouble! Like, for real now!”
“The Great Blackout of ’65 just now wasn’t a clue?”
“I’m serious! Okay, so Twilight’s book had some stuff torn out of it. The Crystal Heart! It’s a real thing! I mean, not like a real real thing like the one she made herself, but an actual real Crystal Heart! And it’s-”
“Dash!” Like a traffic cop, I held up a hand to stop the rush of words. “Deep breaths. Stay calm.”
“I am calm!” The pony screeched.
“So the Crystal Heart is an actual artifact, I get it. That’s good, that’s very good. And now Twilight’s going to go look for it, right?”
“Right! But she doesn’t want anypony else to help her!” Rainbow Dash exclaimed. “Even me!”
“Also good.” I nodded. “I mean, not the part where she doesn’t want any help, but she gave you an important mission too, right?”
“Yeah! The rest of us need to keep the Crystal Faire going! No matter what, we need to keep spreading that love and unity, got it?” The pegasus jabbed me in the stomach so hard I almost fell off the roof.
“Aye, aye, cap’n…” I wheezed.
“I can’t hear you!” Lilly looked up at me expectantly. “Now you say ‘aye, aye, cap’n’ again…”
“Great! Now get back down there and let’s see some unity!” With a gale of wind and noise, Rainbow Dash leapt back into the air. “And don’t let anypony know about Twilight’s un-real Crystal Heart, ok?”
“Stop shouting about it and it just might remain a secret…” I waved a thumbs-up at the pegasus before leading the way back down into the city with Lilly hot on my heels. The changeling barked in her best Johnson voice,
“Hit it, marines! Go! Go! Go! The Cor ain’t paying us by the hour!” Pretty accurate, if the tough-as-nails sergeant was sucking on a helium balloon instead of a cigar.
“It’s almost time. Getting so close now. Just a little longer…” I whispered, the familiar butterflies beginning their cursed dance in my stomach once again. As I burst out onto the main street, I caught a glimpse Spike and Twilight Sparkle running back toward the palace. I wanted to flash one of my self-satisfied smiles, but a flicker of grey in the sky and the sound of distant thunder stopped me. The final showdown was coming to a head.
After that came the hardest game I had ever played. The waiting game. The game where there was no winning, only staving off the inevitable. The game where progress was measured by the territory we lost to Sombra’s infringing blight. The game where time was no longer measured by minutes, but by the frequency of the thunderclaps rolling over the city. I spent days waiting for the last couple hours to crawl by.
“Hue hue hue ha ha ha haaaa…” A whisper on the wind filled the snowglobe of the Crystal Empire, a gleeful tone of mockery and confidence, like a vocal snake crushing the life out of its prey.
“For not being very loquacious, Señor Sombrero sure knows how to use his resonance.” I mused thoughtfully. “Definitely a solid ‘8’. Maybe more…”
“Two words my friend, no refunds!” Lilly waved cheerfully as a final Crystal Pony walked away with our last slice of pie. Looking around, I saw that most of the other stalls were in a similar state. The balloon stand had run out of gas, the popcorn stand was down to its final kernels, all the apples had been fished out of the apple bobbing buckets, and Rarity had just finished weaving a party hat out of three pieces of straw and an actual drinking straw. (She made it work, but still!)
Instead, most of the ponies had migrated further up the street to where the “placeholder” Crystal Heart sat beneath the palace. Applejack stood in the midst of them, trying to placate the mounting buzz of unrest welling up within the crowd, but the darkening sky could only be ignored for so long, and more and more ponies were demanding to see the princess and the artifact that would supposedly save them from their old tyrant king. The earth pony was a savant when it came to showing hospitality and confidence, but in that moment, she looked more like a leg of ham in a kennel of junkyard dogs.
“Good job today, Lilly. I think we’re done here.” I tossed my apron back over a pile of discarded tins (most of which had been licked clean by my friend) and strode out from behind the pie booth. “Let’s go find the others.”
“Where is Carmen Sandiego?” The changeling sang, prancing along behind me.
“Probably in her safe house with Waldo.” I muttered. “You know, I can’t tell if your cultural references are getting more applicable or more random.”
“No! I’m not random. Missy Pinkie is random.”
“Granted.” My eyes threw a glance back towards the palace where the pink pony was sporting a vibrant jester costume and attempting to distract the Crystal Ponies by dancing atop a rubber ball whilst juggling an ensemble of flugelhorns. It didn’t end well.
“Come on.” My stride broke into a trot. “I just remembered something I forgot!”
“Remembered something I forgot…?” Lilly turned that logic over in her mouth a couple times.
“Yeah, I just realized that I didn’t prevent Fluttershy from getting conscripted into Rainbow Dash’s jousting tournament.” I feeling like writhing worms rose in my throat. “Yeesh, I hope RD wasn’t too harsh with her.”
With such thoughts rolling around in my head, it was nothing short of confusion, astonishment, and a brief moment of wondering if I had slipped into an alternate dimension, then, when I found Fluttershy perfectly whole and composed and Rainbow Dash was the one covered in bruises and battered armor. The two pegasi were kneeling (actually, Dash was sprawled) behind the stands surrounding the jousting field, the yellow one holding a bottle of water from which the blue one drank thankfully between her grunts and moans. Lilly and I approached the scene carefully.
“Excuse me, I seem to have taken a wrong turn at the signpost to the Twilight Zone.” I explained. “Can you please show me the quickest route back to Equestria?”
“Oh, har har.” Rainbow Dash quickly pulled herself to her hooves as if to stop the dignity from oozing out of her. “You probably think you’re real funny, don’t you? You think Fluttershy made me look like this?”
“You look like Mufasa after a run-in with the wildebeest stampede.” Fluttershy, Rainbow Dash and I all turned wide eyes onto the little speaker. Lilly flinched beneath the sudden attention. “Did I say a bad thing?”
“I didn’t teach her that.” I explained, dumbfounded. Then, upon further reflection, I assented, “She’s right, though.”
“Well, it’s true that Rainbow Dash and I jousted.” Fluttershy explained softly, indicating the battle saddle still strapped across her back. “But after two rounds, other ponies wanted to joust too. I guess they used to be really good at it, huh?”
“Hmph!” The blue pegasus snorted a cloud of steam. “Turns out, three of the ponies in the stands used to be part of a Crystal Empire jousting club. I took ‘em all on by myself! One two three!” Dash tried to buck the air for emphasis, but winced. I noted that she was favoring her left side.
“She did really well.” Fluttershy said encouragingly.
“Did well? Did well!? I did awesome!” Another grunt. “The first guy got a lucky hit in, but I was just surprised is all. Beat him. Beat the next guy. Almost beat the third guy!”
“He was twice your size…” Fluttershy whispered as if not entirely sure she wanted to relive that memory.
“He cheated is what he did!” From within her dented and squeaking armor, Rainbow Dash fought her way into a standing position. Once an image of chivalry and arena glory, the sparring suit she wore now looked more like a tin can that some 30s kids had gotten a hold of. “He tried to jab me under the wing to get more leverage! You saw him, Fluttershy!”
The yellow pony, wisely, said nothing.
“I’m going to find him and challenge him to a rematch!” Rainbow Dash made a motion to march right through me, but Fluttershy stopped her with a subtly strong hoof.
“I think you’ve done more than enough to cheer up the Crystal Ponies, Rainbow Dash.” She said. “They’ll be fine on their own.”
“Not to mention, we’re still at war.” I scratched an earlobe absently.
“Phooey! I can still joust!”
“Can I joust?” Lilly asked. There was a burst of green fire around her and suddenly I found myself standing next to a second Rainbow Dash. It even wore dented armor and might have been a passable imitation if it wasn’t about half the size of the real Rainbow Dash. My stunned moment of silence was actually a cleverly-veiled attempt at not laughing.
“Nicely done, but no.” I shook my head with a twitch.
“But-”
“Whoa there, little missy. Since when did ‘no’ mean ‘let’s have a discussion’?” I put on my stern eyes just in case the message wasn’t clear. “No jousting today.”
“Lookin’ good there, kid.” Rainbow Dash smirked at her Mini-Me.
“More importantly,” I rounded on the cyan pony, “things are getting pretty tense back at the palace and now I find that half of our air force is grounded on account of taking a lance up her wing pit.” A bad pun, and a bit of a stretch, but it got me thinking, “Actually, now I’m wondering if angels need twice as much deodorant since they have their wings to think of…”
“What do you mean ‘tense’?” Fluttershy looked up in alarm.
“Like feast of fear with a dollop of despair and a panic pudding for desert. If Twilight Sparkle can’t retrieve the Crystal Heart in a few minutes, not only are we going to have no way to fight Sombra, but all the hope we’ve been giving the Crystal Ponies is going to disappear faster than the fritters at an Apple family reunion!”
“Then let’s get over there!” Rainbow Dash lurched forward. I rolled my eyes,
“That’s my line!”
After a couple steps, however, it became clear that something was very wrong. Fluttershy gave a small gasp as Rainbow Dash stumbled, marching along the flat road as if she were wading through a marsh of pain. The blue pegasus’ forelegs were stiff and her left wing still clamped tightly to her side as she shuffled down the crystal street. At long last, the full impact of what I was seeing came home to roost and one more fear was laid among my growing collection.
If something went wrong with Cadance, I’d been relying on Rainbow Dash to take care of Spike in her place. Without our champion flyer, though, who else was capable of snatching victory out of the jaws of defeat? My eyes glanced to the gentle yellow pegasus dutifully supporting her athletic friend, but the thought was killed in an instant. True, Fluttershy had the gift of flight, but she didn’t have the speed or agility to beat Sombra. Not to mention, she didn’t even have the constitution to get close to the shadow king. I snapped my fingers, freezing Rainbow Dash on the spot.
“Let me take a look.” My words were icier than a soda commercial.
“Hey! You can’t-ow! That’s right where it hurts!” The pegasus squawked like a big hooved bird as I knelt beside her.
“I haven’t even touched you yet.” I snapped. But I soon changed that. Despite the pony’s renewed yelps, I pried her wing away from her body and surveyed the damage. Whatever jerk she had been sparring with clearly had no concept of pulling punches. Through her hide, I could already see the flesh discoloring into a spectacular bruise. At best, it would heal in a few days, running its course through purple to blue to green. At worst, tendon damage.
“Beaver damn.” I breathed.
“Beaver damn!” Lilly echoed.
“… I’m such a bad influence on her.” A low groan eked out of me. “I really am.”
“Badder than ‘ol King Kong! Meaner than a junkyard dog!” The changeling chimed in. Ignoring her chorus, I pointed back down at Rainbow Dash.
“Whoever you jousted, Rainbow, he wasn't just trying to win. He was trying to turn you into a kebab! But not to fear, I have an app for that!” I announced, dropping the pegasus’s wing like a mechanic shutting the hood of a car. “And by ‘app’, of course, I mean healing potion.” Fortunately, an enchanted version of the standard first-aid kit was sitting up among the supplies we brought into the Crystal Palace. Something about being a Boy Scout a couple lifetimes ago and all that “be prepared” song and dance.
With a reassuring wave at Fluttershy and a worried glance at Rainbow Dash, I shot off towards the Crystal Palace like Sher Khan with a torch tied to his tail. Behind me, the loyal pitter-patter of Lilly Limn’s hooves shadowed me. The crowds beneath the palace had swollen to an unhealthy size, a veritable cauldron of frightened and confused ponies, ready to boil over at any moment. They still clung to their hope, hiding in the relative safety of the castle’s shadow, but to me they looked like ants scampering to escape the rising waters of a flood. One good wave would drown them along with any love and unity they had managed to salvage from their broken memories.
At last, I was able to push my way into one of the Palace’s doors and leapt up the spiraling staircases. (The palace had a lot of stairs. Made you wonder if Sombra had a slinky collection hidden somewhere.) Lilly and I found the first-aid kit without any trouble. The exciting stuff happened when we tried to leave again. We were just racing past an open balcony when I caught a glimpse of some very familiar ponies. Applejack and Rarity were hanging over the railing, smiling nervously down at the city while Pinkie Pie, Shining Armor, and Princess Cadance knelt silently nearby. The princess’s breathing was shallow and her head wobbled in the air like a blade of grass.
“Now, don’t y’all worry your pretty little Crystal heads!” Applejack sounded less than confident. “The real Crystal Heart will be here any second!”
“I don’t know if they believe you…” Rarity hardly sounded any better.
“Don’t know if I believe me…” The earth pony grimaced beneath her Stetson.
“What’s wrong?” I paused just long enough to hail them. “Why aren’t you down there with the rest of the city?”
“It was getting dreadfully crowded, if you haven’t noticed.” Rarity flashed an apologetic look.
“We reached the end of our rope about a mile ago, partner.” Applejack agreed. “These ponies want answers that we just don’t have. It’s all we can do to keep ‘em from bolting like a cow in a rattler’s nest!” A thick peal of thunder rolled across the city. Once more, I heard the distinct notes of a dark smoky laugh carried within it.
“Just keep it up! You’re doing great!” Beneath the wavering blue light of the princess’s shield, however, my voice sounded hollow and flat. A silence had begun to take the world, a muteness found at the edge of the point of no return. My words were nothing compared to the void, but they were all I had. From his position beside the young princess, Shining Armor looked up at me.
“You’re doing great.” He nodded. “Just keep it up.” Despite the fear eclipsing his face as surely as the horizon eclipsing the sinking sun, his eyes still burned with hope. In that moment, our hope was all we had, but through some miracle, or madness, or both, it was enough.
I swallowed hard, turned swiftly, and continued running through the palace. Behind me, Cadance’s magic flickered low and fragile, a candle on a rainy night.
“Alright!” I hollered, wading my way back through the crowd of Crystal Ponies. “Alright, I got the kit!” In front of me, at the edge of the commotion, Rainbow Dash and Fluttershy had hunkered down in front of one of the empty music stalls. Close enough to hear ponies from the castle balcony, but out of the way of the city’s nervous herd.
“Oh, that’s excellent! Thank you, Mark.” Fluttershy cheered in her meek way.
But I was too late. Even as I knelt down beside the cyan pegasus and began rifling through the rolls of gauze and antihistamines in the first-aid kit, the finale broke over us. The sky flickered blue one last time, as fragile as a robin’s egg, and then went dark for good. The unmasked heavens burned copper-gold, lit by the fires of a distant sunset. I might have described the evening sky as breathtaking, had it not been for the artificial halo of shadow that encompassed the Crystal Empire. The air immediately grew cold and blustery and the restless Crystal Ponies behind me fell strangely silent.
“It’s him! He’s back!” A solitary whimper broke the hush. One pony, her coat clouded grey once more, backed out of the congregation, screaming. “I can’t take it!”
She and a couple other ponies turned to flee, their instincts commanding them to return to the false safety of their homes, but their legs died beneath them as their eyes beheld what remained of their city. For as long as they had put their trust in Cadance, the whole time they were pressed under the castle like chicks beneath their mother hen, Sombra’s shadow magic had been bleeding into their sanctuary, ravishing their buildings, corrupting their streets, and tainting their magic. Half of the city had already been transformed, buried beneath the king’s poisonous thorny crystals in a display of corruption I hadn’t seen since Metroid Prime 3.
“King Sombra…!” The mare faltered, her head and ears sinking into her shoulders as if she wanted to melt into the ground. A voice answered from the darkness, a reply to every question, a boldness that buried any doubt,
“My crystal slaves…” The king had returned. As before, his words dripped with the same malice as when I first spoke with him. He owned the Empire, he owned its power, he owned its people. A tongue of fire coiled around my lungs at his arrogance.
But he hadn’t won yet. Even as he had the princess lying helpless upon the balcony, even as he had an entire city frozen in fear, even as his nebulous body slithered over the buildings, the deposed king still did not have the Crystal Heart. A panicked cry from atop the world told us so. Every eye turned up to the very tip of the Crystal Palace to see a tiny purple dragon frantically clutching the hope of an entire Empire. Spike danced precariously along the roof of the palace, hollering down to us, his little claws tightly wrapped around a piece of heart-shaped crystal the size of a beach ball. In the light of the setting sun, it radiated like an icy nova against the storm clouds.
“That is MINE!” I felt the entire city tremble as Sombra dove headlong into the crystal streets. His magic ran along the veins of glass like oil down a pipe, tainting every mirrored surface he passed and sowing jagged spars of solid crystal magic like briars. Swollen with almost two days’ worth of the city’s magic, the dark king charged for the palace and the helpless rebels within, rising like an avalanche, bellowing like a train.
“Hold your ground!” My futile attempt to shout above the rising panic went unanswered. “Hold your ground, Ponies! You’re stronger than him! Stand together, you don’t have to fear Sombra any more!”
“He’s coming!”
“We’ll be punished!”
“I’m sorry, your highness!”
“Forgive us!”
“Please have mercy!”
The rising tide of noise threatened to explode into a stampede and I had already mapped a safe route back towards Fluttershy and Rainbow Dash when a new call rang out,
“Hey! What does that filly think she’s doing?”
I turned as fast as I could, but ice had already begun to fester in my veins. When my mind finally caught up to my eyes, I saw Lilly Limn, still disguised as Sweetie Belle, running headlong toward the oncoming cloud of darkness. Either my ears were filled with static, or the rest of the Crystal Ponies were just as shocked as I, it didn’t matter. My world had suddenly become a very focused tunnel.
“Lilly? Lilly! Stop! What are you-? Lilly, get back here!” I shrieked. “Lilly! Don’t!” My feet felt like they had bricks tied to them, but I forced them to move anyway, pounding along the streets of crystal, willing my cries to be heard. Without a potion flowing through me, however, it was my turn to be outrun. “Please, stop!”
But she didn’t stop. Deaf to my cries or to the roar of King Sombra, the little changeling charged into the heart of darkness, a lonely George Kirk flying into the depths of the Narada. For a moment, I thought she stumbled, but in the next instant, a pale light enveloped her little body, a protective glow that burned with ancient power.
“The last ward?...” I mouthed the words, too stunned to give them sound. As I watched, the little filly careened toward a blossoming spire of black crystal, spun around on her hoof and kicked it with a defiant scream. I knew from personal experience that Lilly’s buck couldn’t knock the ears off a piñata, but as the light from her protective ward came into contact with the solid shadows, a bright silver crack appeared on their surface.
“What… is she doing?” The random Crystal Pony repeated. Now the crowd was all but silent, mesmerized by the scene playing out in front of them. A tempest of emotions erupted from within me, a discord of joy, rage, relief, and anger, but none of them shone as brightly as the one called “pride”. Whirling around to face the crowd, I jabbed a finger at Lilly and told them exactly what she was doing,
“She’s proving that there’s still one heart in this city that doesn’t belong to King Sombra! One knee that refuses to bow! One spirit that refuses to be broken!” I bellowed, eyes flashing like the sunset. “Open your eyes, ponies! You’ve been imprisoned in your own city for too long! This will be the day that you’ve waited for! This will be the day we open up that door!”
“But-” A particularly bold pony tried to interrupt my soliloquy, but I bowled him over like a monster truck.
“But nothing! This is your choice and my friends have given you everything just so that you can take it!” Again, my throat was tearing under the strain of shouting, but it was a worthy sacrifice for all the souls in front of me. “I don’t know what path you’re going to take, the choice is yours, but as for me and my friends, we dare to dream of a future! A future of peace! A future of freedom! A future without Sombra! Now stand up and fight! Ponies! Of the Crystal Empire!”
A couple of the faces flickered. A few eyes lit up just the way I had seen them do a hundred times that day, the way they glowed right at the moment when they remembered who they used to be and not who Sombra told them to be. But their coats remained dark, their faces still filled with fear. The unicorn king was now a mountain, rising upon his own crystals like a tsunami, his teeth bared as he climbed closer and closer to the Crystal Heart atop the palace.
There was a rush of wind, the sound of splitting air, and the ringing of magic. King Sombra hesitated, Spike and the Crystal Heart having vanished from between his very jaws.
“Huh?” He grunted.
A pink alicorn streaked through the tumultuous sky with the young dragon on her back and the Empire’s treasure held firmly in her magic. In a single arc, she swooped into the vaulted hall beneath the palace, above the astonished heads of the Crystal Ponies.
“What?”
“Is she-?”
“Behold! The Crystal Princess!”
Cadance dropped to the ground with a stomp of her golden horseshoe, wings held aloft and the Crystal Heart levitating above her. Even beneath a mountain of Sombra’s night she stood, the last light of the day.
“The Crystal Heart has returned.” She declared, her even voice cutting through the stunned silence. “Use the light and love within you to ensure that King Sombra does not.”
If Lilly’s selfless actions had set the tinder, Cadance’s words brought the spark. First one, then another and another of the Crystal Ponies blossomed with their mysterious light. In a matter of moments, the hall beneath the palace was glowing like a nest of Christmas decorations. As if by instinct, the ponies touched their muzzles to the crystal floor, and the city caught their fire.
“What?” Sombra growled from atop his false mountain. Beneath him, a white magic was flowing through the streets like water, all rushing towards the very apex of the Empire itself. I could feel the air grow thick with static as the Crystal heart levitated into its place, nested directly beneath the palace, at the annex of every magic circuit in the city. With a musical hum, the artifact began to spin.
“No… No!” Sombra bared his fangs. “Stop!”
“Splendid last words.” I growled, throwing myself over Lilly just as the Crystal Heart went critical.
The rush of magic was entirely different from Shining and Cadance’s spell. The power that gushed through the Crystal Empire poured through the streets, shone from the buildings, and flowed up the palace tower until it bloomed within the stratosphere itself. The burst of energy I felt sweeping over my skin was charged like electricity and tingled like sunlight. The power was purging the darkness from the crystals themselves, and Sombra was right in the line of fire.
The king’s cries were buried beneath the tempest flowing from the Heart. I watched as the black unicorn writhed in agony, his veins blazing white under his hide. The last I saw of him, his mouth and eyes were wide open, showing a core of pure white energy immolating him from the inside out. Then he was no more. The unicorn’s form shattered, his remains nothing more than dust and shards of armor. Expelled from his own kingdom.

That evening found me standing once more before the Crystal Throne. My scientific instruments had long since been packed away and the palace was empty save for the princess and her husband, who were enjoying some well-earned sleep. Outside the glassy walls, the rest of the city was celebrating its newfound independence with a second Crystal Faire and all the lights and music that entailed. Myself, I had simply excused myself to collect souvenirs of ancient crystal technology and was at last winding down with a glass of Crystal Nectar in my hand and Volaire’s “Riding A Black Unicorn” on my lips. (The acoustics in the throne room were amazing.)
“This place is just so fascinating!” A voice as sweet as a can of Febreze wafted into the room. I paused and turned to see Twilight Sparkle trot up behind me, her purple coat still glistening like a dusk diamond from her exposure to the Crystal Heart’s light.
“That’s a good look for you.” I giggled. “Just make sure Spike doesn’t try nibbling on your tail.”
“It’s not real crystal.” The student explained hastily. “It just looks like crystal because the visual spectrum is still being altered by the magic from the Crystal Heart. The whole Empire is practically glowing with an ‘order’ algorithm!” Twilight squealed and danced on the tips of her hooves. Though not as prance-y, I too shared her excitement. It wasn’t every day one could witness a long lost form of spell craft and the Crystal Empire had a mathematical beauty to theirs.
“I don’t think I could get used to it.” I coughed, looking back down at my glittering palm. I looked like a sissy vampire that got on the wrong end of a lacquer gun. “The light just clings to you like nuclear radiation. No wonder the Crystal Ponies look different after living here their whole lives.”
“Oh, but there’s so much we could learn from the Empire!” Twilight Sparkle floated in circles around me. “Like, what the world was like a thousand years ago! Like what’s changed since they’ve been gone! And maybe they’ll be less reclusive now. If they accept Princess Cadance, they could share all kinds of amazing things with Equestria!”
“Like how to turn raw magic into semi-physical crystals.” I said dreamily. “Just think of what it would be like to have a stable lattice magic template!” The power to conjure faux crystals had a certain appeal. It wasn’t worth brining up that my steamer trunk was already full of crystal samples and books that I was borrowing from the library for an undefined amount of time.
“According to my brother, you already got a head start on studying this place.” The purple unicorn jabbed her horn at the throne. “He said you were about to shoot the throne with a Coni Actuator!”
“Clumsy, I know.” I brushed my hair back with a sigh. “I saw the palace like a nerve system, so I thought that if I could poke the individual circuits, I could find the ones Sombra was feeding on and cut him off.” A wince. “I was approaching the problem with a doctor’s reflex mallet, but that throne is as intricate as a brain. There was just no picking it apart.”
“So in the end, the only way to actually defeat him…” Twilight looked at the throne in awe.
“Was to poison his source of power.” I nodded. “Only the Crystal Ponies could do that.”
“I’m just glad things worked out.” The unicorn’s ears folded back. “Even without me.”
“Excuse you?” I arched an eyebrow like St. Louis’s Gateway.
“I failed my test.” She whispered. “How am I ever going to tell Celestia?”
“Yeah, um, so, about this test-”
“No spoilers!”
“Would you give it a break?” I snorted. Then, softer, I explained. “The episode is over. I’m just ‘me’ again. Ok? This is just friend-to-friend.” It was a stretch of the truth, but it calmed the student down.
“Ok…”
“All I wanted to say was, not all tests are ink-and-paper, Twi. In the grand scheme of things, you performed amiably. Magnificently, actually. How could anypony look at today without being proud of you?”
Twilight Sparkle still didn’t buy it, but she was grateful all the same. She smiled bravely and nodded her head in thanks.
“Actually, there was something I was hoping a ‘brony’ could tell me.” Her ears perked back up.
“Shoot.”
“Was Cadance’s cutiemark foreshadowing that she would find the Crystal Empire?” The purple eyes widened with wonder. My own gaze mirrored the expression.
“Ooh! That’s a good one! You know, I’m not really sure. Now that you mention it…” A grin twinkled over my cheeks. “Probably.”
“And… another question for a ‘brony’.” The ears went down again. “Well, maybe I shouldn’t.”
“What?” I frowned at her sudden hesitation.
“Is… Is Sombra really gone? Just like that?”
“Interesting. You never asked about any of the other villains returning.” My face remained stoic as memories of Trixie and Discord’s return episodes flashed through my mind. “Sombra got pretty obliterated today. Like really obliterated. Like Sweetie Belle’s cooking obliterated.”
“Sombra didn’t really have much of a body to begin with. And you still haven’t said ‘yes’.” Twilight pointed out. She had me there. I sighed and admitted,
“Well, I suppose it’s not technically a spoiler.” I watched in amusement as the pony leaned forward eagerly. “The last I saw of the show was the finale of Season 4. Up to that point, no, there’s no hide or hair of Sombra and the majority of the fan community rates him as the least likely of any character to make a reappearance just because his end was just so final.” (I mean, now that I think of it, he may very well be the only character who dies in the whole show.)
“However, and that’s a very big ‘however’, the show was rumored to have a fifth season in the works when I left Earth. Ergo, I don’t know what happens after Season 4.” And I was praying to the good Lord above that I wouldn’t have to live through the Equestria Girls movies. “Also, Sombra’s… disassembly… didn’t stop me from spending an hour out in the wasteland just now looking for any trace of him.”
A long second passed between the two of us.
“And…?”
“Nothing.” I admitted. Which was the truth. If any piece of the black pony had fallen onto the white snow, it should have been as easy to see as the spots on a dalmation. Yet, writers had a knack for bringing characters back from utter oblivion, (just ask the creators of Doctor Who) so my working attitude was that no character was ever truly “dead”.
“So that’s where you went.” Twilight grinned.
“Yes.” Among other places.
“I saw Lilly earlier and was wondering where you’d got off to.” The pony continued. “I thought you were taking a nap.”
“Yeah, I pawned her off on Rainbow Dash and Pinkie Pie for the evening.” I shrugged. Twilight Sparkle looked at me as if spiders were waltzing out of my nose.
“Lilly, Dash, Pinkie. What in Equestria made you think that was a good idea?” She demanded.
“Don’t worry about it.” I waved a hand. “Dash is cool with Lilly and Pinkie can be really responsible when she wants to be.” My chuckle faded into a strained giggle as memories of the changeling rushing towards Sombra haunted my vision. Twilight noticed this and put a hoof on my arm.
“She was really brave today.” The pony encouraged.
“Yeah!” My voice came out strangled. “Monkey see, monkey do is what it was. Honestly, I’m a terrible influence on her.”
“I don’t know. She did what you did and you did what Shining Armor did.” Twilight Sparkle gave a warm grin. “And I couldn’t be more proud of my brother, so…”
“Still…” A shadow passed over my brow. There was one last thing I had to get off my chest, but I was sure that as soon as I voiced it, Twilight would shoot me down like a fowl from Duck Hunter. Still, I had to try and that moment was the best chance I could have asked for. My shoulders tensed as I would up for the pitch and I said,
“Actually, I’m glad you’re here. There’s something I wanted to ask you about. Privately.”
“Of course! What is it?” So far, so good. The pony hadn’t detected the conversation’s change in octave.
“A favor, if you will.”
“Anything.” It was an encouraging word, but the unicorn said it slowly, studying my face cautiously.
“I want to see Sombra’s door.” My request hung in the air like a demetor, wilting the light on Twilight’s face.
“Mark-” She started to object.
“Yes, I know about the door.” I continued hastily. “I know that it shows a pony their worst fears. I also know how unpleasant it must have been for you and Spike.” The mare said nothing, but averted her eyes. I pressed, “Of course, what I’m saying would sound crazy at first, but hear me out. A lot of stories have their heroes face such a door. In Doctor Who, it was a hotel room, in Harry Potter, it comes in the form of a boggart, Batman has the Scarecrow, and heck, even Saint’s Row IV locked prisoners in their worst nightmares! But they always come out stronger for it.”
“Mark…” Twilight began again, clearly shaken. “You don’t have to prove anything. Not to yourself and not to anypony else.”
“It’s not just some glorified workout.” My voice was low and patient, trying not to plead too much. “I’ve got a bipolar magic aura, remember? Sometimes humans can see good things in a bad light and evil things from a sympathetic point of view. Just once, I’d like to strip away all the pretense and see exactly what scares me. Make it so that I can’t hide and I’m forced to admit what truly motivates me.” I flapped my hands against my sides. “Think of it as a journey of personal discovery!”
“In theory…” Twilight mumbled. “But that’s not really how it works. You see things differently after coming out of the door. I never thought Celestia would ever shun me, but now that I’ve gone through the door, I just know that when I see her again, that’s all I’m going to be thinking about. And Spike, oh… poor Spike. He held onto me tighter than ever after coming back from his nightmare.”
“Are you sure it wasn’t just because you were using a gravity spell at that time?” I muttered out of the corner of my mouth.
“You should have seen the look on his face when I told him to take the Crystal Heart and go. I yelled at him to leave, just like in his dream.” The purple pony faltered. “He didn’t need that kind of memory. And neither do you.”
“What about Luke Skywalker?” I challenged. “He walked through a cave of nightmares and he defeated his worst fear! Then he went off to save his friends from Vader himself, remember?”
“As I remember it,” Twilight’s tongue was hard as steel, “Luke Skywalker gave in to his fears and ran right into a trap because of it!”
Things were going downhill. Fast. I needed to salvage my argument, but the purple pony had parried me every step of the way. Suddenly, a trump card revealed itself to me out of thin air like a Dark Chip from Megaman Battle Network 4. Without thinking, without considering how it might affect Twilight, I seized it.
“We almost lost your brother today because he gave into his fear.” My words were low and venomous. “He even told you that he ran out there because he had to prove something to himself.”
Twilight fell silent.
“I don’t want that to happen to me.” I drilled my point home like a rusty screw. “I don’t want you or Cadance to go through that again.”
Unfair? Probably. But it got the message through and Twilight Sparkle finally assented. With a shallow nod, she took a deep breath and leveled her horn at the crystal circuits above the throne. A drop of shadow magic, a stream of boiling darkness sank into the depths of the prism and the light it reflected was heavy and black. Beneath our feet, the yawning spiral staircase from the episode reappeared.
“Thank you, Twilight.” I began to walk forward.
“Don’t thank me yet.” She warned.
Our pilgrimage into Sombra’s basement was silent save for the echoing clip of my feet and the tinkling of Twilight’s horseshoes. Everything at the bottom of the crystal missile silo was just as I had pictured it. Dark, dusty, and with a single door waiting for us like a sleeping spider.
“It probably doesn’t even work anymore.” Twilight said half-hopefully. “Sombra’s been purged from the Empire and-”
“Your magic opened the secret path, didn’t it?” I jabbed a finger up at the mote of light that represented the throne room above us. “Same difference.”
Defeated, Twilight Sparkle summoned her anti-patronus once more and took aim at the solitary door in front of me. Her magic sunk into its surface and a sickly green light eked out from behind the wooden edges. With one final glance at my friend, I stepped forward.
“Just a warning,” Twilight swallowed, “it’s not… pleasant.”
“How bad can it be?” Quite possibly the most foolish line of my life. “I’ll keep in touch.” I took a broad step forward, seized the handle, and yanked the door open. Without another word, I stepped inside.
It was dark. I wasn’t tumbling through a void and I wasn’t surrounded by night, but instead felt as if I were wandering through a warehouse that had been painted entirely black. I could see my hand in front of my face, though there was no apparent light source, and my feet tapped rhythmically upon a hard flat surface. Unless I suffered from an unknown case of agoraphobia, the door was taking its sweet time assembling my nightmare. Possibly a result of my unique aura.
“Testing, testing, one two three!” I called out, noting the slight echo to my voice. “Hey, Twilight, can you hear me? Don’t bother answering that, I can’t hear you anyway, but if I’m not wrong, my body should be standing immobile in front of the door by now. Please don’t draw on my face while I’m gone. I’ll keep you posted if things get too hairy, but for now just stand by. Oh?” a glint of light caught the corner of my eye. “Looks like the show’s starting. Be right back. This should only take a minute.”
A pale white smudge had appeared in the shadow world and I began jogging toward it briskly. All I needed was a glimpse at my worst fear and then I could have Twilight yank me whenever I wanted. Perhaps it was that confidence that made me drop my guard. Perhaps it was the immunity complex that comes from mentally separating a dream from reality. Perhaps this was just a bad idea after all.
As I approached, the pale smudge turned out to be a white circle, a spot of light on the ground. Playing along with the simulation, I stepped squarely into the glowing ring and waited good-naturedly for a piano to fall on my head. Nothing of the sort happened, and I was just about to leave when a mote of color caught my attention. There was a pony just outside the ring of light. A mare, almost completely obscured by shadow.
“Aw, hey, Twilight! Fancy meeting you here!” I tried to approach the mare, if only to get a better view of her face, but my foot took me nowhere. My position remained directly in the middle of the spotlight. Another pony appeared.
Applejack, Fluttershy, Rarity, Rainbow Dash and Pinkie Pie all approached from different directions. Squinting through the darkness, I could just barely make out their faces, but something was wrong about them. Different. Twisted in a way I had never seen before.
“So, now what? Are you going to eat me or something?” My laughter died in my throat as Applejack stepped forward. The alien expression became clear. She was crying, and at the same time, not. Her leaf-green eyes were welling up with tears, overflowing onto her freckled cheeks, but her mouth was lifted in an encouraging smile.
Somehow, that scared me more than any of those stereotypical “eyeless” creepypasta pictures.
“We’re so proud of you…” The earth pony choked.
“… Huh?” I blinked.
“You did great, champ…” Rainbow Dash hiccupped.
“It’s okay.” Pinkie Pie warbled. “You… You can smile. I want you to keep smiling, ok?” Mentally, I checked to make sure that the pink pony’s mane was fluffy and not laid flat. It was.
“Don’t worry about a thing, darling.” Rarity’s voice cracked.
“Your job is done. You can go home without any regrets.” Twilight whispered. With a shock, I realized that the purple unicorn had a pair of wings tucked along either side of her body.
“What’s… going on?” I demanded, turning to Fluttershy.
“Oh!” The yellow pegasus simply wilted beneath my gaze like a daisy beneath the sun. And then she was gone. The shape of Fluttershy melted back into the darkness like a drop of ink in water.
“Don’t be afraid.” Applejack’s voice filled me with dread. “We want you to be happy.”
“We couldn’t ask for a better friend.” Rainbow Dash sniffed.
“And we were blessed to meet you.” Rarity added.
“We had so much fun together.” Pinkie Pie spoke one last time. “Remember us like that, ok? Pinkie promise?” She vanished.
“What did I do?” I spun around on Rarity. Was that panic in my voice?
“Your best, dear.” The white unicorn was swallowed by the darkness.
“That’s all anyone could ask.” Snot dripped from Rainbow Dash’s muzzle. “And you were awesome.” The shadows claimed her.
As the last of her prisim-colored mane faded into oblivion, I suddenly realized what emotion they were trying to convey. They were being brave. Brave in the face of utter tragedy. They wanted me to remember them smiling, even if that one gesture cost them everything.
“Wait.” I breathed to the final two ponies. “Don’t go.”
“Aw, hon, don’t be like that.” Applejack lowered her hat to cover her eyes, but it wasn’t enough to hide her tears. “We have to go.” And her body dissolved into the dark.
“But why?” In spite of myself, my shoulders began to shiver.
“Isn’t it obvious?” Twilight’s facade finally broke and all I saw was pitless terror and despair. “You couldn’t save us.”
“Wait!” I fought against the laws of the dream, trying to catch Twilight before she vanished, but her purple form fell through my outspread fingers like campfire smoke. “Save you from what?”
But I already had my answer.
I had always had my answer.
A blood-orange light broke through the world. I flinched beneath the sudden onslaught of radiance, hands held in front of my eyes like claws. It was the sun, but not like anything Celestia had tamed. This orb of fire hung low over a rocky landscape, baptizing the world in a cruel smoldering glow. As my eyes adjusted, I could discern a black shape against the disk of light, but I couldn’t quite identify it.
Not that I had to.
Silently, and without any guidance from my brain, my feet carried me towards the sun and the mysterious silhouette therein. I passed over scorched dirt, shattered stones, and the smoldering remains of trees. My path carried me steadily higher, ascending a low hill of ash and debris. On every side of me, the remains of houses and buildings were cast aside like the bones of an elephant graveyard.
I recognized the buildings.
At last, I crested my hill and looked down into a burning crater. A crater that used to be the valley of Ponyville. In silent shock, my eyes took in the scene, the river that had been boiled away, the scorched fields, the writhing sky. Whatever wasn’t burning was still dyed orange by the falling sun. The world was aflame.
Above it all, standing above his prey like a skyscraper, stood the one I knew I’d find. Lord Tirek smiled down upon his conquest with glee stretching his baboon mouth from ear-to-ear. His horns goaded the heavens and his hooves were steel mountains, his silver mane was a wild crown and his broad hands were the jaws of hungry dragons. He was the silhouette I had seen from so far away. He was the blot on the sun.
As I tried to hold down my rising panic, I couldn’t help but glance towards Twilight’s home. Sure enough, the Golden Oak Library was a hollow piece of charcoal, the pages of a thousand books strewn about like confetti. But it was there that I saw them. In the center of town, sprawled in the dust and barely breathing, lay my friends.
“No…”
They were defeated. Their power gone. Their lives spent. All of them wore scratches. A couple bore more serious injuries. I tore my eyes off them to glance up at Lord Tirek. The centaur was watching my expression in apparent glee, his hollow eyes burning like twin coals. Slowly, he began to move forward.
I knew what was coming.
“Please…” I faltered. “Stop…”
Tirek lifted a hoof.
“Don’t-!”
The titanic guillotine fell upon Ponyville, but I didn’t hear it. A shockwave like an explosion washed over the scene, but I didn’t see it. The earth moaned beneath the force of the blow, but I didn’t feel it. They were gone. My friends, my family, blotted out of existence in a moment. And all I could do was watch.
My eyes remained fixed on the unmoving hoof. Even without seeing their pain, without hearing their cries, without watching their death, I knew. I felt their bones shatter within my own limbs. I felt their screams rising up in my own chest. My own blood was pouring out into the dust. They were gone.
“Y-you… b-… bastard…” Something warm and hot began to trickle down my lip.
“You bastard.
“You bastard!
“You BASTARD!
“YOU BASTARD!”
A red mist swallowed my vision and I lost control of my own body. I plunged into the city, screaming, crying, swearing, I’m not sure. All that mattered was the hoof in front of me and the bodies of my friends beneath. A rage had consumed me, enveloped me, intoxicated me. My hands curled into claws and my nostrils flared as I broke myself against the steel hoof of my enemy.
“YOU BASTARD! I’M GOING TO KILL YOU! BASTARD! YOU BASTARD! I’M! GOING! TO! KILL!” My fingernails shattered against the rough black wall, my bones screamed as I threatened to twist my own joints out of place, but I felt nothing. If my arms failed, I’d probably have started breaking my teeth as well, if they weren’t busy throwing out a constant stream of curses and oaths.
Suddenly, a band of stone chains erupted out of the ground, catching my claws and holding them back from Tirek’s massive foot. I shrieked, I cussed, I spat and I howled, but the chains refused to let go. Only after taking my eyes off the centaur to focus on the bonds did I hear a distant voice calling my name.
“Mark! Mark! Calm down!” Twilight’s voice slowly became louder and clearer. Either that, or the red mist choking my brain began to melt away. “It’s just a dream! It’s just a dream! Wake up, Mark! Mark!”
I blinked. I was standing in a deep shaft made of crystal. Instead of chains, I found my arms caught in a purple telekinetic aura and instead of Tirek’s hoof, I found myself facing a rough wooden door. Beside me, a purple unicorn was looking up at me with wide frightened eyes.
“Um…” I looked down at myself. A B-movie werewolf that had just been run through a meat grinder would have looked more presentable than I. Almost all my nails were cracked and bloodied and I had splinters of wood the size of toothpicks sticking out of my palms. Meekly, I nodded to my friend. “Thanks.”
“Are you ok now?” She lowered the telekinetic spell warily, too frightened to be angry.
“I- I think so.” Though my ears still blazed red from my pounding heart.
“I told you.” Her voice was as soft as a scarf. “I told you it wasn’t pleasant. When am I wrong?”
I refused to answer on account that it would ruin the mood.
“Do… Do you want to talk about it?” She looked up pleadingly, but I avoided her gaze.
“… No.”
I should have. I should have told her everything. I should have dropped onto her shoulder right then and there, arms around her neck, and held her tightly, reminding myself that she was still alive, still there with me. I should have fought the nightmare, should have opposed the darkness, but I didn’t. I let it in, and in that moment I couldn’t bear to stand the sight of my best friend. As I looked at her, all I saw was how miserably I had failed her. How I had let her die.
“Mark-”
“Thank you, Twilight Sparkle.” I cleared my throat and straightened my back. “That was a very educational experience.”
“But-”
“If you don’t mind,” As brave as I tried to be, I couldn’t keep an imploring note from entering my voice, “I just need to be alone for a few minutes. Think about what I found. Please.” She didn’t like that. She didn’t like that at all. But she also knew just how terrifying the power of Sombra’s door was. She knew how scared I was and perhaps she wanted to believe that I knew how to deal with it on my own. Either way, she softly nodded, her head bobbing long before her voice came.
“… Okay.” She let me go. As I swept past her to begin climbing back up to the throne room, she spoke up in a gentle whisper. “Mark, you’re bleeding.” The mare quietly offered me a handkerchief.
“Thanks.” I swallowed hard.
Without the whiskey of adrenaline numbing my body, I could feel countless small injuries covering me. Most of my fingers refused to move and at least one of them was properly broken. My throat was a thrashed piece of beef jerky and even my jaw was sore from opening it too wide. I wiped streams of mucus from the corners of my mouth and a bright red foam was seeping from my nose.
But in that moment, nothing else mattered. As the red glow washed away from my vision, I felt as if I were seeing the world clearly for the first time. Everything was crisp and focused. I saw the world and my place in it. Powerlessness. I was afraid of losing the lives that mattered the most to me. I was afraid not for my own death, but for the death of those I promised to protect. I was afraid of failing my family. In that moment, as I sucked the splinters out of my hands, as I wiped snot and tears out of my eyes, as I climbed ever higher on those cold stone steps, I had my answer.
I knew why I had come to Equestria.