Suddenly, as the door leading out slammed closed, Sombra went weak at the knees and collapsed, like a puppet with its strings cut. His horn extinguished itself in a brief, squib-like puff of wet smoke. There was a long moment of silence, interrupted only by the occasional sob.
Sweetie stared at the shuddering, scarred lump on the floor. The brilliant, angry red of his horn had faded to the same dark shade as the rest of his body. She had to struggle to remind herself that this was King Sombra, scourge of Equestria and cruel tyrant of the Crystal Empire. His villainy knew no bounds. His name was a fearful curse, never spoken but in daylight. He was… crying?
The Doctor was equally perplexed. He’d faced an awful lot of monsters and villains over the years, and seen just about every trick in the book. But rarely had he ever seen one of his attackers suddenly break down in tears, and never when they had the upper hoof to such a degree. “Er… there, there,” he said awkwardly. He reached out a hoof halfway, but then pulled it back. Then, hesitantly, he patted the dark stallion on the head.
The snivelling tyrant pulled himself up from the floor, his face streaked with tears as snot bubbled from his nose. “Please,” he gasped. “You must help me. Please help me.”
The Doctor moved closer. “Alright,” he said quietly. “First, though, I need some questions answered.”
The king nodded, staring at the ground. “Of course.”
“All this time,” the Doctor said slowly, “You’ve been acting. Why? What’s your game, Sombra? What did you get into?”
“An actor?” Sombra snorted, still not looking up from the ground. “Were that only so. An actor may, at least, have control over his role. I am a puppet, and no more.”
“A puppet?” Sweetie repeated, frowning. “What do you mean?”
“I think I have some idea,” the Doctor replied grimly. “It was the collar, wasn’t it? Controlling your mind, all this time? It worked best when you were around the crystals, or else the plain rock helped to block it out.”
“Not too far off from that,” the dark unicorn agreed quietly. “In the beginning, it was benign, even helpful to me. I wanted the Empire to grow in power, in commerce, in importance. In the Frozen North, even the grandest of cities often goes unnoticed. My desire was to change that. It offered me help. I accepted.” He chuckled humorlessly. “I suppose, in the end, I got my wish. It twisted my mind, took my desires and my emotions, and used them. Used me. Used my— my kingdom.” His voice broke a little at that. “A city of thousands, converted into maniacs by my pride, my wrath, my greed,” he whispered dully.
The Doctor sneered at him. “And thousands more outside the gates, ripe for the conquering,” he said contemptuously. “How far were you going to go, hey? How far to make your mark? Equestria? The continent? The whole world? Would that have satisfied you, Sombra?” He drew closer to the unicorn, his expression contorted into a scowl.
“This is your fault, your doing. Every life lost, every wound inflicted, it all comes back to you and your desire—”
“Doctor!” Sweetie said, laying a hoof over his chest and pushing him away from the other stallion. “Don’t. It wasn’t his fault, was it, your highness?”
“Don’t call him that,” the Doctor said coldly.
“Please, listen to the Doctor,” Sombra begged. “I am worthy of no respect. It was my foolish contract that created this, this Tartarus on Gaea, and even here I have no more power than any other pony. I am no king, child. Merely a plaything of some far greater power, and I am that through my own actions.”
Sweetie turned to the dark stallion, who shrunk away as though expecting to be smacked. “How old were you?” she asked softly. “When it first came to you?”
Green eyes looked up at her, confused. “How... old? I fear I do not understand why --”
“What age were you when that power took you over?” she repeated.
“I… was but a youth still. Fifteen years, on the cusp of stallionhood. It came to me in a vision, more often frequented by the just Luna, and spun me tales of wonder and glory.”
“Fifteen years old,” Sweetie repeated. “I remember me and my friends did some pretty stupid stuff when we were fifteen.”
Sombra snorted. “Didst thou doom a city? Consign three thousand souls to Tartarus?”
“Well, no. But Button Mash had a big fight with his mom, and so did Scootaloo with her aunts. Apple Bloom had her rebel phase. Mostly she sat around listening to punk music and eating pears, even though she hates pears. Rumble tried to patch things up with his parents… which went badly. And Dinky Doo tried to open the Eye of Harmony, which would probably have destroyed at least all of Ponyville! And I tried to help run a diplomatic reception and nearly caused an international incident.” Her pupils dilated for a moment. “So much cake,” she muttered.
The Doctor coughed. “Sweetie Belle?”
She mare blinked. “Right! I had a point! And it is this!” She took a deep breath in and let it out slowly. “Ponies do stupid stuff when they’re teenagers. Also, when they’re kids and grown-ups, and even super-ancient alicorns or draconocci or even Time Lords that I could name, but, like, especially when they’re teenagers. And everypony can be prideful or greedy or angry sometimes. My sister is pretty much all of those things a lot of the time, and everypony in town still loves her, even if she makes mistakes. ‘Cause, when she does mess up? She feels terrible, and she does her best to make up for it.”
The Doctor opened his mouth, and then closed it again. This repeated a couple of times. He looked a bit like a fish. Sweetie looked at him with large, dewy eyes, watching him expectantly.
“Er,” said the Doctor.
“Yes, well,” said the Doctor.
“Well said, Sweetie Belle,” said the Doctor, lips twitching slightly upwards.
Both time travelers turned to look at Sombra. He stared back, uncertain. And then, slowly, a slight smile graced his lips. It was a nice smile, though tired. And his teeth were hardly sharp at all.
“Alright,” said the Doctor. “We’ve all made nice, which is well and good, but where do we go from here? Right now, we’ve got a whole bloody empire that’s gone completely psycho, and somehow I don’t think they’re going to all sit down for a nice pep-talk.”
“Hey!” Sweetie objected.
“Well, do you think they’re going to let you get a word in edgewise through the screams?” the Doctor retorted.
“I liked that… Pep Talk,” Sombra rumbled quietly.
The Doctor let out a long breath through his nostrils. “Great. Sure. Good job, Sweetie Belle, thanks. But again, GREAT BIG EMPIRE full of angry ex-soldiers? How’s that gonna go over exactly?”
The two unicorns looked at each other awkwardly. “If we could just make it so that everypony could hear us at once…” Sweetie said thoughtfully.
“If I had the sonic, perhaps,” the Doctor allowed. “Crystal does have strong properties of resonance. Could turn the whole empire into… a sounding board…” he trailed off, an expression of horror etched onto his features. “Oh no. Oh no no no no no…”
Sombra looked on, bewildered, as the Doctor began to pace up and down the hall. “All this time, I never thought to ask myself, ‘why here? Why now? Why him, or them, what’s the game? ‘Cause, all along, I thought it was just you, right? But it wasn’t! You were chosen, chosen for the crystal!”
Sweetie stood up on her back legs to whisper in Sombra’s ear, “He does this a lot. Just nod along and poke me if you don’t understand what he’s saying.”
“I think,” the dark unicorn said gravely, “that we are rather beyond that, now.”
“Right. It’ll probably get a bit better soon. He’s almost done raving. In a minute, he’ll turn around, see that we don’t get it, and…”
The Doctor spun around, a massive grin on his face. “It’s brilliant. I mean, it’s horrible, obviously, end of the world, but oh, this one’s a clever bugger.” He looked first at one blank face, and then the other, his grin fading. “You don’t get it? You don’t get it. Right. Crystal, it’s got massive resonance, yeah?”
“As I believe we’ve established,” Sombra murmured.
“Oi. Who made it so that we found that out the hard way?”
Sombra lapsed into solemn silence. Sweetie frowned at the Doctor, but he’d already turned away. “Right, so, crystal preserves emotion well. But its resonance is useful for other stuff, too. Tap the right crystal at the right frequency, a whole building might start humming along. Drop a rock on the floor, it’ll echo for miles. Normally, you don’t notice, ‘cause it’s such a tiny shift when you get too far away. But if you drop a whole mess of big rocks in a bunch of different nearby spots? Cacophony. Humming mayhem. Violent vibrations. And if it’s in a properly situated spot, it’ll go for miles. Farther, maybe.”
Sombra blinked. “Heartshaven. You think they’ll strike Heartshaven?”
The Doctor bit his lower lip. “Well. They might do, of course, it’s a likely target…”
“What’s Heart Shaven?”
“The center of the Empire. The square in which the Crystal Heart usually resides,” Sombra replied. “Emotion flows in and out of there nigh constantly.”
“What, like how a real heart pumps blood?”
“If you like—”
“Not a bad analogy,” the Doctor cut in smoothly. “The emotions of the Empire flow in. They get purified a bit and sent back out as ‘good vibes.’ Heh. Jo would’ve loved this place… Sorry. Yeah, it’s like a heart. So why hasn’t it been doing its job?”
Sombra glanced away. “It was… removed,” he said softly. “Near the start of my reign. A forgery was put in its place, good enough to fool a casual observer, but with purposeful flaws. As time wore on, even that was removed.”
Sweetie caught the Doctor’s stormy eye and glared back at him. “You weren’t in your right mind,” she said softly. “It’s not all your fault.”
“I did it. It was my responsibility, and I failed in it.”
“And now, we need you to make up for it,” the mare urged. “Tell us where the original heart is. Surely that’ll help us!”
Sombra stifled a slight sob. Then, rising to his hooves, he trotted along the corridor. At a junction, he paused and glanced back. “Aren’t you coming?”
The Doctor and Sweetie exchanged glances. Then, together, they trotted after the erstwhile tyrant.
Outside the corridors of stone, Jade dashed through the icy streets of the empire, hooves skidding over the slippery surface. She had kicked off her armor some several blocks back, and now the eastern gate was in sight, only a few streets away. That was safety, protection from whatever calamity was about to befall the empire, assuming the Doctor wasn’t lying. And why would he be? He hadn’t even been speaking to her at the time, and his certainty had been absolute. By sunup, the Empire would be no more. Well. She wasn’t about to join it. Already she could hear the hubbub bubbling up, louder and louder as she galloped onward.
A slight shriek escaped her lips as her hoof met a particularly slick section of road and sent her caroming forward toward the massive doors.
She pulled herself bodily out of the snowbank into which she had crashed, dark blood already dripping from her nose. The noise was even louder now, jangling around in her head, already dazed though it was. She had never before heard the word ‘concussion,’ as it was currently over six centuries before the term was first used, but it didn’t prevent her from having one. She loped toward the gate with a lopsided gait, but froze up when something finally broke through. A figure, dark silhouetted against dark, stood breathless in the portal, the wind howling past him. An Equestrian soldier.
When he looked up, she could see slit-pupil eyes with irises of amber reflecting back the shine on the crystals. One of the Night Guard. She had often seen them back when diplomatic channels with Equestria had still been viable. Those deep, reflective eyes narrowed slightly. Jade quickly stumbled backwards. “I surrender!” she yelped. “Surrendering! I give in!”
The soldier relaxed slightly. Jade let out a deep breath of relief. At that moment, however, another, taller, figure emerged from the shadows. “Give no quarter,” she intoned. “They are all traitors and spies. Take no prisoners.”
For a moment, the soldier’s eyes flashed red. Jade let out a small whimper. “No, no, that’s not fair… I already escaped you once…”
Now both pairs of eyes flashed red. “You shall not escape again,” both figures replied in unison.
Jade promptly spun around and galloped as quickly as she could the other way. The soldier took off after her at a nod from the other. She watched the figures race into the distance, a distant expression on her face. “Soon,” Luna cooed in a voice not her own. “Soooon…”
The wwword ecchchhoed arououounddd thehehe crystastastal wawwaallls and streereereets, vibrrrrrrating and resesesonating wwith strangeange hararmammoninininics. From every surururffurface in the city, the walls humummummummed as though of their own volition, carrying the one word from ear to ear, mind to mind. Sparks of electricity flew from wall to wall, igniting the entire city with red fury. Soldiers both inside and outside the city looked up, smiled mindlessly, madly, in perfect synchronization. Overhead, the dark clouds began to swirl.
Deep underground, incognizant of the madness that the city was slowly sliding into, the Doctor, Sweetie Belle, and Sombra made their way through the stone catacombs. The dark unicorn, naturally, led the way through the darkness, his horn glowing just bright enough to see by. Sweetie Belle trotted along behind him, her long, thin legs easily matching the large stallion’s ponderous stride. The Doctor, on the other hoof, was lagging behind, his eyes cold and almost unblinking. He trusted Sombra not at all; he would have been a fool to do so. Yet, as he watched Sweetie Belle bounce merrily alongside the grim figure, saw her gabble on about Ponyville and the Crusaders, saw the faint uptick at the corners of the stallion’s lips, he couldn’t help but feel a little less coiled up inside.
But that didn’t mean that he trusted Sombra. He couldn’t even trust himself at present. Couldn’t trust the TARDIS either, if the Valeyard had been telling the truth. It made an awful kind of twisted sense. From the near-fatal incident with the Yeti in the Vortex to the dread spectre of the Watcher attempting some sort of paradoxical murder-suicide, it could all be explained by a malevolent force in the ship. That idea was by far more terrifying than the idea of the evil presence in his head. For a fleeting moment, he allowed himself to recall the Zagreus incident, the anti-time infection and the madness that had nearly consumed him, the TARDIS, and the whole Web of Time.
Then he shook himself from his malaise. The problem of the TARDIS and the Valeyard could wait for later, much though it pained him. Right now, he had to worry about getting out of the Crystal Empire. And in order to do that…
The Time Lord sighed. He would trust Sombra. For now.
Sweetie, on the other hoof, had no such qualms. Sombra had been manipulated and he felt horrible. Nothing more, nothing less. And given that information, there was only one course of action. She would just have to cheer the ex-tyrant up. How hard could that be?
Very hard, it turned out. In retrospect, Sweetie thought, perhaps it had been a tad optimistic to suppose that she could singlehoofedly undo the literal decade of misery that Sombra had gone through. Still, progress was occurring, she felt sure of it. At least she had gotten him talking, even if he was less chatty even than Big Macintosh. Before today, she had never thought that was even possible, but Sombra didn’t even speak in ‘Eeyup’ and ‘Nnope.’ He grumbled thoughtfully in a variety of different manners most of the time.
“So! Are we close to the Crystal Heart yet?”
“A’hm.”
“Nice. You ready to do this?”
“A’hm!”
A brief pause. “Do… you have any idea what we’re doing?”
“...N’hn.”
“Oh.” There was a longer period of silence. “Um, do you like cheese?”
“A’hm.”
“Me, too. Sometimes I eat it with chocolate. That’s pretty tasty. Have you ever tried that?”
“N’hn.”
“You should try it sometime. I bet you’d like it.”
“A’hm.”
The pause was very extended indeed this time. Sweetie Belle chewed at her lower lip. Small talk was all well and good in its place, but how could anypony be expected to carry on a conversation like this? It was like playing badminton with somepony who put the shuttlecock in their pocket every time it was served to them. It was simply impossible. Perhaps some more open ended questions? She opened her mouth to try again, but Sombra got there first.
“What is it like, where you live?” he asked. “Ponyville?”
Sweetie paused, readjusting to the sudden change in conversational gambit. “It’s… just like any other place, I guess. Um. Well, it isn’t like here. But, uh, why do you ask?”
“Earlier, I told you, I wished to travel. That was true.”
“But you said that you couldn’t. Why?”
The stallion’s green eyes never once flicked away from following the path that he had mapped out in his mind. “A king, even one as weak as I, has responsibilities to fulfill. The hoofsteps of my father were particularly large ones. I wished for nothing more than to live up to him. Always, there were meetings, parliaments to preside over, paperwork to fill out… and then, well.”
Sweetie nodded. “Let me see. Well, Ponyville is pretty close to Canterlot, but you’d have to go through the Everfree Forest if you wanted to get there directly. Um. That’s a big forest we have. Almost nopony lives there except Zecora. She’s a zebra and kind of a professional alchemist, or a witch doctor, or…”
“A sangoma,” Sombra said.
Sweetie cut off suddenly. “A what?”
“A sangoma is the term used by most zebra tribes, as well as certain groups of giraffes in southern Acacia,” Sombra replied.
“Wow. How did you just know that off the top of your head?”
Sombra’s cheeks pinked. “As I said. I always did wish to travel. Books were as close as ever I got. Perhaps I journeyed no further than the castle library, but…” he trailed off, eyes distant. “What else is in Ponyville?”
Sweetie thought. “Um, there’s Sweet Apple Acres. They make great cider, and one of my best friends lives there, Apple Bloom. She does a lot of repair work and stuff on the farm. It’s a great place. We used to have a little club there, the Cutie Mark Crusaders! Me and her and Scootaloo and Button Mash, and Dinky, and Rumble, all trying to find our destinies!” Her smile faded, and she glanced back at her flank. “It worked better for some of us than others.”
“Hrmm,” Sombra said, his eyes distant.
The duo lapsed into silence once again.
The tunnels seemed to wind in upon themselves forever. Sombra knew that even he had never explored them all, and he had spent more time in them than anypony else. They had been a sort of concession to him by his mysterious master, a temporary respite from the emotional hijacking. Undoubtedly this was in order to keep his wits from being too addled for use as a political puppet. Much of the empire could scarcely remember anything of their previous lives while wearing their guard helmets, unless a sufficiently large reminder was presented to them.
Still, regardless of ulterior motives, Sombra was grateful for the sanctuary, no matter how brief it might have been. The dark corridors were more welcoming by far than the garish crystal halls, and no matter how grim his thoughts were, they were at least his own in here. It was oddly fitting, in a way. In the last decade, he had grown to be as dark and gloomy as the chasms that he inhabited. These two ponies were the first that he had truly spoken to as himself since the puppeteer had taken his mind, and already they were succumbing to the dreadful enchantment of the empire. The stallion was, to say the least, behaving in a very sullen manner. And though Sweetie Belle was as merry and as charming as any young mare he had met, he knew that in order to get through that particular door, dark magic had to be used. The Doctor, though Sombra could sense much darkness in him, was not exactly a candidate as far as the ‘magic’ side of things went, which left only one option. He cast a brief glance at the mare trotting along to his right. She had ceased speaking some several meters back, and was now staring absently down the corridor, as lost in thought as he was.
Sombra breathed out. “Just a little further,” he said as he rounded the corner. Suddenly, he stopped.
“Ah,” he said.
The Doctor frowned. “What is it? What’s wrong?”
Sombra paused for a long moment, then stepped back. In the darkness, his face glowed ghoulishly, lit by a phantasmic yellow-green light. “It’s gotten in.”