Chapter 25
Flaming Ivory grunted and struggled against Rosseth, but the zebra was able to succeed at his task of disabling the unicorn. A magical ring made of platinum and engraved with various cursed symbols had been clamped around the base of his horn, one of the most powerful and expensive inhibitors available on only the most illegal of markets. The poor musician couldn’t even get a single spark to fly from himself whenever he tried to cast a spell. Midnight looked at his three friends from Sombra’s side, all of them stripped of their gear. Shadow’s amulet had been confiscated, and Techorse’s battle saddle had been gutted, the laser cannons, helicopter blades, and empty missile racks left on the floor along with the nuts and bolts that held them in place normally in the machine. Rosseth seemed to have enjoyed every moment of taking away their weapons and equipment, humming a song he didn’t recognize as he disarmed them.
“And now with their weapons and magic gone, Midnight, they belong to you my son,” Sombra said, a pleased expression on his face.
“How come you see me as your son?” asked the unicorn, still unsure why the thousand year old King of Shadows was claiming him as his own, “I… I don’t think we’re really related, Sombra. We don’t even look much alike.”
“Oh but we very much are,” chuckled the ruler, his green eyes flashing red momentarily, “long ago, I fell in love with a beautiful crystal mare named Autumn Wheat. Before the Crystal Empire was concealed by my final act against Equestria, I suppose she managed to escape… with my son or daughter firmly in her tummy.”
Shadow Breeze wretched as if about to vomit, making the zebra hybrid near him hiss, “Show a little respect, Shadow Breeze! King Sombra holds your fate in his hooves.”
“Rosseth, please,” Sombra answered softly, throwing his flowing red cape over his other shoulder, “Shadow Breeze may not be aware of it, but Autumn was very much willing to choose me… and although I never met our foal, they were quite successful carrying on my line! The line of the Shadow Ponies.”
“And you’re saying I’m somehow… one of your descendants from that line?!” gasped Midnight.
“Never,” growled Techorse, “Midnight’s nothing like you Sombra. He’s self-controlled, nonviolent, and wouldn’t take advantage of others!”
The king seemed to enjoy Techorse’s bold rebuking, “Ahhh, but Techorse, don’t you remember just who is related to your loyal friend Midnight?”
He walked closer, his black mane following him, and his armor gently rattling,
“A certain detective with a penchant for brutality?”
“A one-eyed swordspony with a taste for young mares?”
The larger pony put his face right in front of the inventor’s, mocking him openly, “I know you remember both of them. You’ve had your conflicts with each of them, because they exhibit the traits of true Shadow Ponies. Strength! Power! The ability to take what you want merely because you desire it.”
“What is it you want with me, Sombra?” Midnight asked, scraping his hoof angrily on the ground, “To pretend you’re my parent?”
Great patience seemed to come from the ancient dictator, as Sombra turned around. Yet Techorse could feel the air around him get mysteriously colder, as if the anger was being forced to go someplace else.
“Honestly my child, I am not looking to satisfy a hole in my life, I’ve done more than most ponies get to do across their lifetime already,” answered the king with a pretentious shake of his head, “I just know that eventually, this will all come to an end… and I need a successor to carry on my legacy. At the very least, being a specter shattered by the Crystal Heart has taught me that perhaps I am not as permanent as I thought I was.”
“Why not pick my uncle or dad then?” complained Midnight, raising a hoof in defiance, “They’re both way better at… taking control.”
“Ah, but Arbiter Axechop was redeemed by your best buddy Techorse,” explained Sombra, continuing with his intelligent, mocking tone, “and your father has already chosen a nice wife and had you, and your brother! I was looking for the freshest blood in the family line… and a stallion whose personality and capabilities most closely matched my own. Now is the time to take back what belongs to our clan.”
Midnight snapped back, “I am NOTHING like you, and I will never help you conquer the Crystal Empire!”
The ruler’s cape stopped flowing, and sank to the floor magically, Sombra’s smile disappearing.
“You… won’t join me?”
Rosseth turned to the other three ponies in the back of the room watching on, and drew a striped hoof across his neck while making a harsh, grisly noise with his tongue and saliva. Now the king was going to become furious, and turn them all into magically-irradiated piles of ash!
“That’s right, your Majesty!” shouted Rosseth, laughing “you four morons can’t just...”
King Sombra’s horn flashed red, and Rosseth vanished in a puff of smoke, Flaming Ivory and Shadow Breeze gasping loudly in horror.
“Oh relax, I’ve magically sent him to his quarters, where he’ll be kept quiet,” muttered the king, turning around “he’s an idiot… but he’s useful. As for the three of you, I already have what I want from you, and Midnight has no intention of cooperating right now.... so you will no longer be necessary.”
The curved, lava-colored horn started to glow bright red, charging up a spell that was perhaps best left unspoken of in nature. Maybe Rosseth was going to get his wish after all...
Shadow Breeze’s eyes started to water, “P… Please have mercy on us!”
Midnight Blaze could only watch as his friends were about to be put down, conflict tore at his heart.
He finally burst out in defeat, “Wait! Sombra, please… I’ll be your son, if you don’t hurt my friends.”
“That’s all I wanted to hear,” he answered, chuckling as the magic dissipated, “we’ll find good places for them, I promise.”
Midnight knew he was going to say that, having had a long history of owning other ponies for labor. But clearly, the king required him for some kind of a plan for retaking the Crystal Empire, and he therefore had a good bargaining chip to prevent abuse of his friends or the destruction of the city.
“Hang on, Sombra, that doesn’t mean there won’t be any conditions to this,” growled Midnight, stepping forward, “I’ll be your adopted son and I’ll help you with whatever it is you’re up to… but my friends can’t be slaves, and you’re not allowed to attack the Crystal Empire yourself!”
He felt his heart sink in fear when he saw Sombra nod in agreement, as if the conditions were nothing but minor annoyances, “Well of course. There’s room for willing servants in this world too, Midnight, and conditioning you to be the ruler of the Crystal Empire is exactly why I want to be your father.”
Midnight’s friends seemed relieved they weren’t being disposed of, but still felt a bit of terror when Sombra turned around and made eye contact with them.
“Therefore, Techorse will be your head scientist, Shadow Breeze your diplomat, and Flaming Ivory your court composer,” he said, giving them each a role, “and I have assignments for each of you to make sure Prince Midnight’s needs are seen to. Now then, we will need some help, since this massive palace is quite hard to run on just three servants.”
“No slaves, Sombra!” warned Midnight.
“You know me too well,” he laughed, “Midnight, I have other means of creating help, follow me once I have dismissed your friends, and I will explain there. Shadow and Flaming Ivory should go their quarters immediately.”
“Where are they?” asked Shadow Breeze, hoping to get out of the room as soon as possible.
He felt a sharp, burning feeling in his mind as Sombra implanted the knowledge in his head forcibly, almost making Shadow cry out in pain. Now there was a map of a castle where his memory of his last weekend should have been…
“Ouch...” said Flaming Ivory, rubbing his forehead with his hoof, “Could have just told us, you know...”
“Get going.”
“Yes sir!” cried Shadow Breeze, grabbing Flaming Ivory by the barrel with his wing and hauling them both out of there as fast as he could.
“Techorse, I want to speak with you in private,” said Sombra, “there’s a laboratory at the back of the main castle floor, should be quite easy to find… unless you’d also like a map?”
“No thanks,” laughed Techorse nervously, “I can find it myself. Do you want me to start setting up the lab equipment?”
“Whatever you feel is best, you’re the mechanically inclined one here,” Sombra answered in a bored tone.
Techorse walked up to Midnight, trading him a casual glance that indicated he had done the right thing. They were stuck for a while, but all four of them were alive and not slaves under mind control by the king. Midnight just hoped that he had truly done the right thing by agreeing to work with Sombra. He still wasn’t sure why he was wanted as a son and successor, but he knew he’d have to play along. Princess Cadance had tried so hard to help him with his family problem, that he felt obligated to help her in return… by stalling King Sombra.
“Midnight, please, follow me,” said his new father, smiling, “I really want to show you this, my son.”
Still feeling a twinge of regret for choosing him, Midnight sighed, and followed the king into the lit depths of the castle.
It was dark, gloomy, and damp inside the bowels of the castle, cobwebs flung in every corner from age and water running down a portion of the basement stairs.
“You’ll have to excuse the… untidiness of my home,” Sombra joked, his horn glowing to provide some light during their decent, “a castle unused for a thousand years often needs a few renovations to feel like home again.”
When they reached the bottom of the stone staircase, they were cloaked in complete darkness, but Midnight could sense the room they were occupying had to be large and crowded. There was an eerie silence and a feeling of a high ceiling that gave away the massiveness of the area underneath the castle.
“Welcome to the forge, Midnight!”
A ball of light shot from Sombra’s horn, and bounced from location to location on the walls, lighting torches and activating aging arcane light fixtures that illuminated the area. It was a titanic square room with a high-vaulted ceiling, made of the same tan bricks clad with banners of Sombra’s logo tattered from age, Midnight and Sombra stood on a balcony over the area and looked down into the depths of the workshop.
A massive furnace made of rusted steel was pressed up against the back of the room, its chimney extending to the ceiling, and the giant gear that crossed the entire length of the castle intersected the back of it. Mazes of heavy tubes and pipes ran across the walls and through the ceiling tiles, color-coded though the paint had chipped. Swinging his magical energy around the room, Sombra’s banners started to repair themselves, the stitches rapidly changing color from black tot blue as his logo was quickly replaced by one of Midnight’s cutie mark.
The furnace was quickly cleansed of rust with what Midnight figured was an easy spell for Sombra, and red aura covered almost every object in the room as the king cleaned it up, just as he had done for the hallways upstairs. Every spiderweb and speck of dust was removed, every rust stain had been scoured off of the steel. Midnight saw below him series of tables littered with hundreds of magical components and parts needed to make tools, from energy crystals to conduits!
“What is this?!” he marveled, a bright, happy look coming over his face.
“I knew you’d like it,” Sombra said, his green eyes lighting up, “this was my workshop, Midnight… I want you to have it.”
“Why would you have this workshop in the first place?” he asked curiously, “I thought you were a king too busy ruling over the Crystal Empire.”
“Well where did you think you got your talent for making magical tools from?” the large graphite stallion said, winking casually, “You don’t think you got it from your biological father, did you?”
Sombra brought Midnight down a nearby staircase onto the factory floor, guiding him to one of the tables. It was covered in spent energy crystals, likely looted from the empire centuries ago. Midnight casually picked up one of the stones with his aura, and inspected the gem closely.
“Think about it, Midnight. Once you are my Prince, you’ll have all the time in the world to invent things,” Sombra proposed, throwing his hoof around his side, “there’ll be no more hostile questions about your choice of career, no more struggling to pay bills or debts, and no pony to tell you your inventions aren’t worthwhile. I look forward to seeing the completion of your Mindstones project.”
Midnight imagined himself buried in his work, among the parts and dust of the workbenches, enchanting items, placing runes on everything. The bliss of doing his favorite thing without pressure from his dad! Of course, if this came at the price of enslaving the Crystal Empire again, it wouldn’t be worth it. But the thought of getting away from his father and finally living out his dream made Midnight feel good about himself, and there was something perversely satisfying about King Sombra, one of Equestria’s greatest monsters, having an interest in his work.
Midnight turned to look at Sombra, “You want me to finish the Mindstones project? But I’d think you wouldn’t care since they’re for earth and pegasus ponies.”
“Productivity is good, Midnight,” he answered, understanding Midnight’s doubts about him, “the Mindstones project is revolutionary, as much so as that curious device your friend has.”
“Tech’s probably the better inventor,” Midnight humbly admitted, hoping to draw attention away from himself.
“Well, a better engineer perhaps, but that’s why I believe he’ll be of use to us,” agreed Sombra, “but I see more potential in you by far. You’re welcome to spend as much time as you want in the forge area, my son, but we need to begin production of our new ‘staff’ immediately.”
He raised an eyebrow at the statement, “What do you mean by that?”
Sombra ushered Midnight over to the massive blast furnace, and approached an ornate control console of sorts made from stone, and covered in carved runes over the surface. He placed his curved horn gently on the controls, activating the runes which shone with blue energy that raced down the sides of the platform and into the ground. From there, the blue lines of energy ran through the conduits on the floor, making Midnight jump out of the way as the magical force traveled to the various components of the factory. Pipes started to rumble to life, bellows pumped with gusts of air, and a heavy, thumping sound like a rocket igniting sputtered within the furnace, before dying out.
The shadow king rolled his eyes and tapped another rune, “Oh, come on...”
This time, the furnace successfully ignited, a bright flame roaring within a glass window on the front. The giant gear behind it made a loud, horrid groaning sound as the rusted axis started to turn again for the first time in a millennium. Magma began to be pumped up from deep within the crust of the Plain of Shadows, and it filled the central area of the machine, providing hot material with which to smelt metal and begin the manufacturing process. Outside, the gear rotated slowly, and the smokestacks in the center of the castle fired up, dark smoke rising into the already pitch-black sky.
“Good girl,” Sombra smirked.
Hitting several runes with his hooves like keys on a keyboard, a nearby stone wall lit up in several places, which Midnight supposed was a menu of sorts that let the king pick what he wanted his arcanic forge to produce. Materials came flowing in through the pipes and pneumatic tubes, tumbling into the melting pot inside the furnace.
“It’ll just be a few moments, and the material will be melted and ready.”
Sure enough, another set of pumps on the side of the furnace activated, and a bright hot slag of molten rock flowed out of the belly of the machine and into a set of molds, another magical pipe feeding purple colored energy crystals into the top. Steam and smoke poured forth from the heavy stone casting equipment, and runes on the molds danced with purple and yellow energy, which Midnight knew to mean that magical instructions were being encoded onto whatever the molds were making.
After ten minutes or so, a nearby spire of green crystal lit up suddenly, “Our first batch is done.”
The hot rock stopped flowing from the furnace, and the molds hissed as a massive burst of skin-peeling steam shot from the sides in a violent cooling process. Then, the halves of the production chambers started to grate open, Midnight’s mouth fell open as soon as he saw what Sombra’s machine had produced.
They were six and a half feet tall, four feet across, and had legs with a reverse joint with heavy, thick foot pads. Two jointed arms as thick as those of the strongest minotaur warrior were attached to a heavy, flat and bulky torso coated in thick armor plating that better suited a knight. Its head was an ornate cylindrical shape with the appearance of a dragoon helmet. But within the headpiece, only a single glowing purple eye made from a re-purposed sentry rune could be seen. Golems, made of stone and steel stepped forth from the molds that cast them, their eyes tracking Midnight, who backed up slowly. He could clearly see the menacing red crystals jutting out of their right-side wrists, an obvious beam weapon of some kind.
The golems meant no harm to him, as they instantly knew who their master was, and the machines bowed on one knee in front of the two ponies, pledging their loyalty as magical automatons of the Shadow Pony nation.
“These are your stone golems, clad in the thickest Shadowsteel, a very durable material we can mine only on this side of the mountains,” Sombra explained, “these warriors will serve you on every field of combat and obey without a second thought. They aided me in my first takeover of the Crystal Empire, and they will do it again.”
“Shadowsteel...” Midnight thought, figuring the corporeal Sombra could no longer enter his mind, “I wonder if that’s what Sombra’s armor is made out of. That stuff must be extremely hard to destroy if the Crystal Ponies couldn’t stop him or his army!”
“Speechless?” the king asked jokingly, stepping in front of him, “I can’t blame you, they’re rather impressive for thousand year old designs. I made them very easy to produce, to replace our inevitable losses and to serve our cause.”
Midnight watched the four golems stand back up and salute with their left arms, their hands and fingers thick with Shadowsteel, giving the impression of thick gauntlets. They marched out of the factory, and Sombra set the furnace to produce another set of eight.
“I’ll make a few more, but then I need to address your friends,” he said, “in the meantime, please, enjoy the workshop and forge. Tomorrow morning begins your training on the path to becoming royalty!”
“Thank you… dad,” Midnight said in an effort to appease him.
The bigger stallion left him alone in front of the furnace, Midnight watching as the golems rolled out of the molds. After a few moments of staring, and dreading what those machines were likely going to be used for, he turned his attention to the benches, and decided to spend some time working on his hobby. There was nothing he could do tonight to free his friends or stop Sombra… he would just have to keep pretending he was interested in being his son until he could get help.
Outside the castle, in the dark of night, the twelve golems marched into the fresh grass surrounding the palace, pressing it down underneath their heavy feet. Sombra assembled his troops, wishing his forges were capable of making them faster, and stood firm on all hooves.
“GOLEMS OF THE SHADOW PONY CLAN! ATTENTION!”
They stopped, every purple eye on their king.
With his magic, Sombra brought out a large scroll sealed with his own insignia on blue wax, and stepped forward in a dignified manner for the golem closest to him. The king cast a long, snaking beam of energy from his horn into the construct’s head, and when the spell dissipated, the golem’s eye had turned green.
“You are now the captain,” he said to it, “I have a list of ponies I need your detachment to bring me from the Crystal Empire by morning. You do not need to bring them all, but… make sure the types of mares I put on the list are what you prioritize. Midnight will… need them.”
The captain unrolled the scroll, his eleven buddies huddling around him and peering over his shoulder. A dozen glowing eyes moved back and forth as they read the information quickly, seemingly gaining a personality and sense of teamwork. Then, the captain gave a metal thumbs up to Sombra, and the machines formed a perfect square formation, marching along with no objective in mind other than to serve their leader.
Sombra’s horn flashed red, teleporting himself to the top of his castle, where he observed his machines walk for the pass back to the Crystal Empire. The glow of the moon at his back, and the wind swishing his cape and long black mane, the self-declared member of royalty felt a sense of pride and success.
“It’s good to be back!”