Shining Armor kept his steaming coffee mug hovering in the air with his horn. Every few minutes, he shot sparks at its base to keep it hot; the icy chill from the wind at the top of the Crystal Empire’s wall froze both pony and caffeinated beverage alike.
He took a long sip and it was good. Then he closed his eyes and took a breath.
Maybe Sombra wouldn’t come back today. Maybe after two failed attempts, he’d finally take the hint and go pillage another village, thrash the scene. At least in that case, he and Cadence could respond to the emergency, fighting Sombra head on. Because at least in that case, Sombra would once again be the tyrannical villain of the picture and Shining and his wife would be the heroes everyone admired.
So far, Sombra had only appeared at their gates to seemingly annoy anyone he could, before disappearing back into the woodworks fairly peacefully. A complete absence of magic will do that to a pony, Shining thought to himself coolly. With no magic to call his own, all Sombra has left is his lackluster mouth and his words—however disastrous they may be for him.
Shining took another sip and found it cold. Someone should really invent mugs that heat themselves, he thought stubbornly. I know I’d buy that for a bit!
“Good morning, Shining!” came the oddly jovial voice from down below. “Miss me?”
Shining glanced over the railing, hopeful his rock-hard expression would prove answer enough.
Sombra only snickered. “Oh, don’t be like that, Mr. Shiny Shield. I’ve brought you something today! Aren’t you excited? Don’t you want to see what it is?”
Shining had been so taken back by Sombra’s sudden appearance that it took him a moment to notice the large sack draped across his back. There must’ve been a large amount of whatever was inside, because it looked close to bursting.
Wordlessly, Shining signaled his guards. Thirty archers took aim.
“Leave now, Sombra,” Shining announced thickly. “This’ll be your only warning.”
Ignoring this threat, Sombra swung his heavy sack down into the snow before searching around inside. From his position on the wall, Shining had no way of telling exactly what he had.
Down on the ground, Sombra lowered his head and blew. Then he did so again. And again and again until he seemed satisfied. He whirled around, gently holding his “gift” between two hooves. A large red balloon with his likeness stretched across its middle.
He smiled up at Shining. “A balloon. Just for—”
Pop!
A stray arrow sliced through it, making him jolt.
Shining turned to his archers. “I didn’t tell anyone to fire! Who told you to fire?”
A lone archer lowered his head miserably. “Sorry, Captain. I just really hate balloons. And clowns. But mostly balloons. My mother was in a tragic balloon accident, you see. And sometimes… at night… I can still hear them rubbing together!”
His eyes got watery as another guard wrapped a comforting foreleg around him.
To save his mind as well as what remained of his dignity, Shining turned back to Sombra at the base of the wall; by then Sombra had blown up another three balloons—all completely identical with his smug expression plastered across them. For reasons so far unknown, each one was tied to a string that was tightly looped around one of Sombra’s limbs.
“So we’ve moved onto bribery, then?” Shining asked most bewildered. “I mean, sure, I guess I saw that coming, but… with balloons? Where’d you even get all those? They’re not even normal balloons! They’re like… specialty made! Is there a balloon shop in the woods that I don’t know about?”
Sombra blew up a fourth one and tied it to his tail. Once he got his breath back, he glanced upward again. “You want a balloon, Shining? I’ll be happy to give you one once I’m back inside my Empire. Which should be any minute now.”
With that stated, he returned his attention to expanding more balloons, barely stopping to breathe. Soon his face reddened and visible sweat rolled from his temples.
“I wouldn’t let you inside here if you gave me a thousand balloons, Sombra!” Shining exclaimed heroically, before quickly realizing just how juvenile and bizarre that all sounded once uttered aloud.
He turned to his left and sighed. No alicorns. That’s a relief.
Then he turned to his right.
“Oh! Hey, Cadence!” Shining blundered out in front of his glaring wife. “How you doing? Lunch time already?”
Cadence looked both majestic and motherly standing atop the wall with Flurry Heart on her back. By the mashed bits of carrot slop lining Flurry’s mouth, it appeared clear that Shining actually had missed lunch that afternoon.
Speaking evenly, Cadence said, “I thought yesterday we agreed that any Sombra business would now be our business. Shining, why didn’t you send someone to come get me?”
“Well… I mean… just look!” Shining held out a hoof in Sombra’s direction, who was now on his twelfth balloon. How he was able to knot both the balloons and all those strings with just his flat hooves would remain a mystery until the day Shining died years later in a freak blimp accident.
Cadence raised a brow. “He’s filling balloons now? But why?”
“I dunno!” Shining chirped. “And he has a whole sack of them! Possibly thousands!” He leaned over the railing to inspect. “No air pump, either! He’s just blowing up balloons for no good reason at all!”
Sombra inhaled air after his fifteen completed balloon. “Be up there… in a minute… Shining!” he wheezed out tiredly.
“He plans to float up here? Tied to balloons?” Cadence asked, the thinnest of grins on her lips. “He does realize balloons only float due to helium, right? Right?”
Shining only shrugged.
Stepping close to the edge, Cadence took a look for herself. Flurry Heart did too, remembering her clumsy, funny-looking friend from yesterday. She giggled and wildly waved two forelegs at him. Sombra, sluggishly, waved one back, before grabbing another balloon to fill.
“And where did he even get so many balloons with his image on them?” was Cadence’s next question. “Who’s even funding this?”
It felt as if Shining’s wife had seemingly just read his mind. “I know, right?”
Conversation lulled as every pony on the wall patiently watched Sombra work on the ground. 314… 315… 316. A few of the guards tried to keep count, but kept on getting their numbers mixed up. Regardless, the number of blown-up balloons currently tied to Sombra had to be somewhere in the mid-three hundreds.
“Sombra!” Cadence called out to him. “Please, stop! This is pointless! Really, it is!”
Sombra sat slouched in the snow, another empty balloon in his grasp. His breath sounded raspy and thin, like in the middle of an asthma attack. His whole body was drenched in sweat, his face the color of a beet slice.
“I’m coming… up!” he spoke, each word seemingly on the verge of choking him. “Any… second… now…”
Before finishing that last thought of his, Sombra’s eyes closed and he passed out. He fell backward onto a trio of filled balloons that loudly burst underneath him. Somehow even that couldn’t wake him up from his comatose-like slumber.
Cadence and Shining regarded their fallen nemesis for a moment before facing each other. (Flurry Heart keeping her sight squarely on Sombra over her mother’s shoulder.) Cadence chewed on a lip before admitting quietly, “This is stupid, Shining.”
Shining rolled his eyes. “Tell me about it. Sombra would’ve had a better chance getting inside here dressed up as a mare searching for a quick date.” He flinched as a mental image swam into his head. He shook himself to get it out.
“No,” Cadence replied. “I mean this is really stupid. Like too stupid.” She took a furtive glance back at Sombra, still in mid-snore. “We have to remember that at one point, Sombra was a King—a King in charge of a whole empire! Clearly, he has revenge on the mind at the moment, but is this honestly how any of us pictured him going about it? With weak apologies, babysitting applications, and balloons?”
“He did mention some brain trauma earlier,” Shining tried to add helpfully.
Cadence only shook her head. “I feel like we’re being tricked into a false sense of stupidity—that Sombra wants us to think he’s an idiot.” She paused, took a breath. “All I know, is that at this very moment, Sombra is either our most brilliant adversary… or the most brain-dead pony alive.”
Why not both? Shining was about to blurt, a moment before Flurry Heart started energetically bouncing around on her mother’s back. She hurriedly scrambled up her neck and sat on her head, holding onto Cadence’s horn for support.
Soon both parents discovered the source of her excitement. They both grimaced.
“It can’t be,” Shining whispered, as he caught sight of the three hundred or so balloons tied to Sombra effortlessly begin to lift him into the air. Still unconscious, Sombra’s limp torso rose higher and higher, story by story, until he was nearly at the very top of the wall.
The Frozen North’s icy wind batted Sombra’s mane and tail around, first one way and then the other. He didn’t seem to notice, though; he only kept on snoring.
“But I thought you said he didn’t have any magic left!” Cadence exclaimed, with the same wide-eyed wonder as the rest of the ponies on the wall. Before Sombra even floated a single foot into the air, the archers had already directed their arrows toward him.
Moments later, Sombra rose until they were all equal height… although it would be doubtful he’d ever recall doing so, out-cold and drooling from the mouth.
“Som-som!” Flurry Heart cried joyously, reaching out to her friend. “Som-som!”
Cadence wrapped a hoof around her, holding her back. Then an idea struck her, and she pulled a single balloon out from the mass to give over to Flurry. Instantly, Flurry Heart squeaked and chortled, rubbing the latex rubber material against her chubby cheeks until it popped.
“Som-som?” she whimpered out sadly, clutching to what remained of her blood red Sombra balloon.
Shining was quick to react, nabbing another balloon without pause; he reinforced it with a mid-level shield spell before hoofing it over. As he did, some small print near the bottom of the balloon gave him pause.
“Mystery solved,” he told Cadence dryly. “Still wondering where Sombra’s been getting all his stuff? Surviving out in the wilderness for so long on his own?”
He held up the bottom of the balloon so she could read. “Discord Incorporated?” She looked up with a frown. “Making your nightmares a reality? So Sombra has a sponsor now?”
“Looks like it,” Shining said. “Would explain why those balloons tied to Sombra are somehow floating in midair right now. And don’t appear to be stopping anytime soon.”
As Flurry Heart rubbed her face against her new balloon (slobbering all over it as she did), her parents and all those stationed on the wall could only watch in bewildered awe as Sombra continued upward and away, carried by both balloon and wind and whatever twisted magic Discord had infused upon them.
Sombra soared until the wind high above changed directions, pushing him back toward the snowy forest several dozen meters away. Sombra awoke a solid minute later, peering at the solid ground now far, far below. “Oh, Tartarus, this actually worked?”
A single arrow left the Empire’s wall—loosed by the lone archer with the fear of both clowns and balloons.
It must’ve been quiet the miracle shot, because half of Sombra’s balloons suddenly burst into bits and he was left hurtling toward the ground, screaming as he descended. “Oh, shhhhii—”
Cadence covered Flurry Heart’s ears. “He’s saying sprinkles, sweetie. Just sprinkles.”
Sombra landed with a thud somewhere in the thick of the forest. For a long time, not a single noise could be heard.
“Som-som?” Flurry asked, clearly on the verge of tears.
“I’m sure he’s fine,” Cadence tried telling her with a tight smile.
From some unseen location in the woods, Sombra screamed, “My spine! Oh, stupid Celestia, my poor spine! I landed directly on a rock! There were six whole bushes in this field and I got the rock? It’s pointy, too! And there’s someone’s blood all over it! Gross!”
“Well,” Cadence soldiered on, her tight smile weakening, “I’m sure after some much needed rehabilitation, Sombra will be right as rain.”
“My spine! I can actually see my spine! Now I know that can’t be good!”
Again, Shining and Cadence turned to one another.
“Somehow, he’ll still be back tomorrow,” Shining admitted sadly. “Somehow.”
Cadence found she really couldn’t argue on that.