“Sombra?” Sweetie gasped, struggling to her hooves at last. “Doctor, what happened? Is he okay?”
The tan stallion checked the unconscious unicorn’s pulse. “He’s alive,” he said slowly, hesitantly.
“But?”
The Doctor gnawed at his lower lip. “It wasn’t entirely wrong about being the Empire,” he said. “It’s like, like, a fossil. Bone slowly gets washed away and replaced by minerals and that, yeah? It’s a bit like that. Sort of. Not at all, really.”
“I don’t understand. What are you trying to say?”
The Doctor took in a deep breath. “The Empire’s been severely weakened. The psychic defenses haven’t just been compromised, they’ve been completely corrupted. The Nightmare’s gotten its nasty mental tendrils in everywhere you look. Everything’ll recover eventually, but it’s not going to be quick.” He looked down at Sombra, whose breathing had become very shallow. “And those bits that were infected the longest are going to have the harshest reaction.”
Sweetie’s eyes went wide. “He’s going to die?”
“Without medical care, specifically medical care that won’t be around for another few centuries at least… well, it doesn’t look good.”
“But… we can’t just let him die! He helped save the Empire!”
‘After nearly dooming it to begin with,’ the Doctor almost said, but he caught himself at the last moment. He took in a breath. “I’m sorry, Sweetie,” he said. “Sometimes, there’s nothing we can do.”
She didn’t look up from the unicorn on the floor. “You said it would take a long time to fix everything,” she said carefully. “How long?”
The Doctor frowned, thoughtful. “It worked its way in pretty deep. A few centuries, perhaps, maybe longer.”
The unicorn glanced away from the unconscious stallion on the floor to look up at him. “How about a thousand years?”
The Doctor opened his mouth, then closed it again. His eyes went wide. “Oh. Oh! Oh, that is good! That might, might, OH!”
“So there’s a way to save him?”
“Yes!” the Doctor said, grinning. “But we’re going to need some help…”
Celestia awoke to the unenviable situation of being buried in snow tail-first all the way up to her withers. “Hello, Celly,” a pleasant voice said. “Need a hoof?”
The alicorn turned around to see a dun earth pony smiling at her. She smiled back. “If you would be so kind, Doctor.”
He began to dig away at the snow as the solar princess concentrated. Her wings broke the fresh-fallen white surface, heat radiating off her body. “Quiet,” she noted.
“Yeah, everypony else is still out cold, even Luna,” the Doctor said. “I suppose you got the least of it?”
“Mm,” the solar princess agreed. “Is the battle won, then?”
“For the most part,” the Doctor said, stepping back as the alicorn hauled herself out of the massive snowdrift, fluffing out her feathers to shake free the last of the crystals.
If Celestia noticed the evasion, she didn’t comment on it. “And Sombra?”
The Doctor hesitated. “You’ll not have to worry about him for a long while,” he said at length.
Now Celestia did quirk a brow. “Doctor, what have you been up to?”
The Time Lord glanced skyward. “Sun’s a few hours late,” he noted.
“Oh!” Celestia’s horn glowed, and the sky grew noticeably brighter. “Don’t think that’s going to distract me,” she warned. “Time?”
“Ten past nine.”
Her horn glowed again as she maneuvered the sun carefully through the sky. The Doctor licked his chapped lips. He hated the idea of lying to his old friend, but he couldn’t alter established history, either. Celestia would understand. Eventually. “Sombra wasn’t the main problem,” he said, his tone short and clipped. “He was being manipulated, and through him, the whole Empire was being controlled. He was just a convenient conduit for the corruption of the kingdom.”
Celestia glanced at him sideways. “Doctor,” she said, “I have no patience for being guided by half-truths. I get enough of that from the gentry.”
“I’m telling you the truth,” the Doctor said steadily. “Sombra was driven to this end by a malevolent energy. But, obviously, he needs to be remembered as a bloodthirsty, insane tyrant.”
“I don’t like lying to my little ponies, either.”
“Don’t tell them anything, then. I’ve already come from the future, I know how it all turns out, up to a point. Changing that could —”
“Alter the Web of Time!” Celestia interrupted. “Cause untold devastation and unleash nightmarish amounts of paradox on the timeline! Bring Gallifrey down on your head! Spill your tea! Yes, yes, I know.”
The Doctor let out a slightly forced chuckle. “I see I’ve taught you well.”
“Extremely. Though I don’t know if all your lessons were intentional.”
The wind picked up momentarily, making the silent streets howl hollowly. Celestia fluffed her feathers again, staring into the wind, half-expecting some shambling beast to step out into the streets at any moment. “What of the Empire?”
“Freed,” the Doctor said shortly. “But deeply unwell. Think about how it was cutting off Luna’s coffee habit, then make it ten times more gouging even than that.”
Celestia’s frown deepened, creasing her brow. “I see. We’ll have a lot of work to do cleaning this up, won’t we.”
She cast an eye over the Doctor. “Luna and I will, anyway.”
“Not for a while,” the Doctor said, raising a hoof. “My companion and I, we’ve been busy while you lot were snoozing. Moving the more vulnerable inside houses, though I’m afraid we rather had to pack them in. We’ve returned the Heart to where it’ll need to be in order to be recovered. And, of course, we’ve redecorated.”
Celestia glanced at the Doctor sidelong. “And what exactly do you mean by that?”
The Time Lord smirked. “Why don’t I have her tell you? Here she comes now.”
The Princess glanced over her shoulder. Indeed, out of the doorway of one building, a long-legged unicorn mare in a mask stumbled down the steps. “Doctor, you’ve been running the poor mare ragged,” she scolded.
“That was more her than me,” the tan stallion corrected. “She’s been dashing about like mad fixing up the place.”
“Again, fixing it up how?” Celestia repeated.
The Doctor grinned as his assistant came running up, a clump of wires clutched in her teeth. “We’ve been connecting up the Empire. Come on, everyone to the TARDIS.”
“Hello, your highness. You have got the crystal, haven’t you, Doctor?” the unicorn said, pulling the wires from her mouth.
The Time Lord paused. “I thought you had it?”
The unicorn stared at the Doctor until the Time Lord coughed awkwardly and fished in his mane. “Oh,” he said sheepishly, producing a hexagonal crystal.
Both the mares chuckled. “Come on,” the new companion said brightly. “Back to the TARDIS!”
“Hold on,” Celestia said. “What is all this?”
“I’ll explain in the TARDIS,” the Doctor said. “C’mon, we’re going to need you for this one.”
The blue box was right where Celestia had last seen it, in a military encampment, now as silent as the Crystal Empire. Of course, the wiring didn’t stretch nearly that far, and all three of them had to carry it closer to the Empire’s gates. “So,” Celestia had said at one point. “Who are you then, young one?”
“Oh, my name’s—”
“Not yet,” the Doctor cut in. “You’ll meet properly in good time, and I’m trusting you to keep it under your hat when you do, Celestia. Well, under your tiara.”
“I see,” said Celestia. “Doctor, is there anything that you’re actually going to tell me at all?”
“In good time,” said the Time Lord cheerily. “I’ll explain it all to you when it’s all been sorted out.”
“And that will be?”
“Oh, hardly any time at all, just a few centuries or so,” the tan pony continued breezily.
The unicorn grunted as the box shifted onto her. “Would you both stop talking and help me lift this thing?” she wailed.
The Time Lord and the Princess quickly shouldered the burden and all continued toward the gates.
“This ought to be close enough,” the Doctor said at length, stopping a few meters outside the walls of the empire.
“Close enough for what, Doctor?” Celestia said, patience finally exhausted. “What is your plan, here? What are you going to do? What have you done already?”
“Well,” said the Doctor, setting down his corner of the TARDIS, the other two following suit, “We’ve run these wires all through the empire, connecting up all the buildings, all the ponies, all the streets and tunnels and what-all-have-you.”
Sweetie pulled open the TARDIS door. “And now, we’re gonna hook it up to the TARDIS, put it into a time-shift, and set the Empire out of step with reality for about a thousand years, or until it fixes itself, whichever comes last.”
Celestia blinked. “Okay. I have one question.”
“Alright, go for it.”
“What in the world would make you think that’s a good idea?” The force of the Royal Canterlot Voice made both of the others wince. “And don’t tell me it’s because it’s what happened in the future. You’ll need a better reason than that to convince me to let you do this.”
“If we don’t do it, the Empire will be easy pickings for any vengeful nation who wants their land back with interest,” the Doctor said shortly. “It’s literally decayed from the inside out.”
“Or,” said the unicorn, “We can make the whole city disappear. Nothing left. Not even ruins, just snow.”
“And if somepony starts to spread a rumour about, say, a dying tyrant’s curse, well, that would just be the icing on the cake,” the Doctor said, grinning broadly.
Celestia hesitated, her forehead still creased. “What of the citizens?”
“Trapped in a moment, locked outside of time while the remnants of the invasion are washed away.” The Doctor waved a piece of iron in the air. “All the stored evil disperses into the environment, and with the level of hoof traffic this spot gets, it’ll just fizzle out.”
“They won’t be harmed, then.”
“They’ll be asleep! They’ve just been on the worst emotional bender of their lives. Let ‘em sleep it off.”
“What of my sister and the soldiery?”
“They haven’t been connected. If you’d like to make absolutely sure they’re not caught up in it, we can move them all out first.”
Celestia considered. “We will be doing that, make no mistake. After that… I think what you say has merit. I will… think on it as we work.”
By the time the soldiers had all been moved out of the city, a task made rather easier once Luna was properly awake, the sun had long since passed its zenith. Unicorns, earth ponies, pegasi, and all their nocturnal counterparts had been taken back to the encampment, either staggering along with pounding headaches or still stone-cold unconscious. As afternoon slipped into evening, two princesses stood outside the city gates with the Doctor and Sweetie Belle. “Well?” the Doctor asked. “Made your decision?”
Luna spoke first, having been filled in by her sister some hours ago. “We find this proposal… acceptable,” she said. “We do not like the notion of erasing an entire city, nor pinning the blame for our actions on another, no matter how disgusting that one’s actions may already be. Can you assure us that these problems will be corrected in time?”
The Doctor smiled. It was much thinner than either sister felt comfortable with, thinner than they had ever seen before, and they had traveled with the dour Scottish incarnation with the cultivated air of mystery. “Even I can’t tell the future,” he said.
Luna snorted. Celestia gave the Doctor a look. Even Sweetie raised an eyebrow. “I can’t!” he protested. “I can manipulate it, yeah, with a lot of prepwork, but even that was iffy. I stopped playing games with timelines a good while back. I just do what I can, nowadays. But I can tell you this much, there’s no better option to be had. One way or another, the Crystal Empire is going to disappear. Isn’t it better that we know why?”
There was a long pause. Luna looked to Celestia. Celestia closed her eyes and nodded. “Brilliant,” the Doctor said with a smile. “Just let me… connect you up…” with fairly impressive speed, he wrapped copper wires around the bases of each sister’s horn, Luna’s connected to the TARDIS and Celestia’s to the Empire. “Couldn’t do this with the TARDIS alone,” he explained.
“We needed a way to transmute the artron energy into magical power for best results,” Sweetie said, dutifully parroting the Doctor’s earlier explanation as she trotted into the TARDIS. On the console, the old, burnt-out crystal had been set out, replaced by the Crystal Empire’s present to them. The new addition had been itself wrapped in copper coils like an electromagnet and plugged into its spot in the array of machinery around it. It was vibrating slightly, almost as if, Sweetie thought, it was anxious to get on with the plan. Well. So was she.
“Now, I’m just going to need to get you to touch horns,” the Doctor said. The two princesses gave him sidelong looks, but both bent their heads until tip met tip. “Right. Okay.” The Time Lord stepped back into the TARDIS. “Now!”
Sweetie Belle pulled down on a lever. The TARDIS doors swung shut, and the blue box began to dematerialize. Luna almost pulled away, but Celestia’s sudden gasp gave her pause. The elder princess watched in astonishment as the entire city began to slowly fade in and out of existence, like a mirage. The sound hit a moment later, like the slow rise and fall of the TARDIS except amplified a hundredfold. In the base camp, all the soldiers froze, staring as the Crystal Empire simply— vanished. In the mountains behind it, several small avalanches were set off.
And then silence. The Empire was gone. So was the blue box. “Is it over?” Luna whispered.
Celestia raised her head again. The plane where the Empire had stood was almost clear, but not completely. Rocks scattered the ground in spots. Some few stone tunnels which the Doctor and his companion had apparently missed stuck out of the ground like great curling coral tubes. And there, in the center of it all, an iron rod, stabbed into the ground, easily missed from this distance if one didn’t think to look for it. The Empire’s last point of return to this plane. “For now,” Celestia said. “Yes. For now.”
Far beneath the surface, however, where Celestia could not see, the iron rod extended much further. It had taken more than a little effort but when you have a time machine that actually works, it really isn’t that difficult to travel back and commission a crystal casket, drill a borehole through the earth, stick an iron rod straight down through that borehole, and then put a gaudy statue over the top to keep the rod from being noticed, then be back before your unicorn companion has even finished running fake wires all up and down Heartshaven. Because of course the wire didn’t criss-cross the entire empire. It didn’t have to. Crystal conducted artron energy, alicorn magic, and electricity as easily as any other sort of energy. The real difficulty had been in getting Sombra to travel along with the rest off the Empire, given that he wasn’t a crystal pony.
Well. The REAL difficulty had been traveling back through time and getting a crystal casket in the first place. Ponies tend to look oddly at a stranger who orders that sort of thing without also buying a funeral, and it wasn’t fun getting it through the TARDIS doors, either.
“...And that's the story,” the Doctor concluded with a bob of his head. “Course, we also had to sneak into the tunnels and leave the note and the carving— and that’s my recorder, thanks much— but that brings us pretty much up to speed.”
Silence reigned. Shining’s face was twitching slightly, while his wife’s was perfectly still. Then, a slow clap echoed through the halls. “Wow,” Discord drawled. “I’m actually surprised. I shouldn't be, but bringing that one back to the Empire?” they shook their head. “Certainly something.”
Twilight, meanwhile, was working herself into a tizzy. “But I, Sombra, not evil? Then what? Crystal Empire, Heart, big black clouds. But not evil, I? But we?” She struggled to collect herself.
Sweetie Belle put a hoof on the older mare’s shoulder. “That was the remains of the Nightmare,” she explained, rubbing tiny, calming circles in Twilight’s back.
The purple mare paused. “...Oh. The big cloud thing. Right.”
“The one which we bucked to Kingdom Come and back, let us not forget!” Luna said proudly. “We doubt that even thy Rainbow Dash could perform such a feat!”
Sunset leaned over to Celestia. “I don’t understand. Even in the story, she could speak modern Equish, so why isn’t she now?”
Celestia raised a brow at her former student. “Really? That’s the part you don’t get?”
Sunset shrugged. Celestia leaned in. “She likes to talk like that,” she muttered. “Makes her feel more self-important.”
“...Huh. But she already rules, like, the entire night. All of it. How much more important does she need to be?”
Celestia shrugged. “If it keeps her sane and happy, I see no problems with it.”
“So…” Shining said slowly, peering around the corner. “Do we get to meet the guy? I mean, I believe you guys. You… trust him. But I wouldn’t mind forming my own opinion of how much a threat to the empire Sombra is actually going to be.”
“He’s a good guy! I’m telling you!” Sweetie insisted.
“That’s as may be,” Cadence agreed. “But to ponies around here, his very existence, it could cause chaos in the streets. We need to take steps to disguise his return.”
“You need not fear, highness,” a mellow baritone rumbled. A portion of the wall suddenly came into sharper focus, and a dark-grey pony stepped from the place he had been standing the entire time. Several of the assembled jumped, and Discord screamed like a goat.
Sombra shied back. Sweetie cleared her throat. “Uh, yeah. We kinda let him out before we came to see you guys. Um, Surprise?”
Cadence was among the first to recover. “Please, excuse me, sir,” she said, stepping forwards.
“Cady,” Shining muttered, pulling on her tail slightly with his aura.
His wife shot him an evil look that spoke volumes, specifically the Unabridged Encyclopedia of Digging Yourself in Deeper and its companion reference, the Complete Atlas of the Sofa you will be Sleeping on Tonight, Buster. Shining let go of his wife’s tail.
Cadence turned back to the stallion currently standing awkwardly in the doorway, the smile back on her face as though it had never left. “My name is Cadence. Princess of the Crystal Empire.”
“Yes, I know who you are,” Sombra did not smile, exactly, but his posture grew slightly more relaxed. “It is an honor to meet the pony who accomplished what I could not.”
“A good deal more than that,” Shining Armor muttered.
Sombra bowed his head in assent. “As you say, Commander Armor.”
Shining went nearly as pink as his wife as every pair of eyes in the room fixed stares of varying degrees of judgement on him, including those of his sister. “So, er, you were saying that we didn’t need to worry about the Empire finding out about… you.”
“Well,” Sombra said. “I scarcely intend to stay here for the remainder of my life. I would be unwelcome. I will live in obscurity in some backwater town, or perhaps take up the life of a nomad, travelling the world after all…”
“You could come stay at Twilight’s,” Sunset said.
“What? Sunset!”
“Well, you already have me and Trixie, and you used to have Starlight Glimmer. I mean, you might as well call it the Former Antagonist’s Halfway House or something.”
“You can’t just volunteer my castle!”
“Oh, so you’re just going to refuse the poor stallion? Leave him out in the cold?”
“I— what— I— no!”
“Then it’s settled,” Sunset said smoothly.
“Do I get a say in this?” Sombra asked.
The Doctor patted him on the withers. “No, not really.”
“Ah. Very well.”
“We’ll just need to get a good disguise on him for the trip,” Sunset said, rubbing her chin. “Or you could take the TARDIS.”
The Doctor’s smile faded. “I… no. No, just, just put the TARDIS in a boxcar. We’ll take the train back with you.”
Twilight blinked. “Really?”
“Yeah, sure!” the Doctor said, his smile slapped on as if it had never come off. “I love trains, me. Brilliant things always happen on ‘em. Trains, spending time with my friends, what could be better?”
Sunset studied the Doctor for a long moment. “Aaaalright,” she said slowly. “Come on, Twilight. If we’re going to get Sombra out of the city, we’re going to need one hell of an illusion… Wish we’d thought to bring Trixie.”
The Doctor looked at the scene. Sweetie was chattering excitedly at Sombra about how much fun he would have in Ponyville, while Celestia and Luna watched closely, though from a respectful distance. Shining was glowering at the former king, but Cadence mostly looked thoughtful. Twilight and Sunset were discussing the relative merits of various disguise spells, and Discord was helping by turning random objects into even more random objects. He let the smile slip from his face. There was something very wrong in his life right now. Something dangerous, influencing his actions at every turn. He would do whatever he needed to do in order to protect his family and friends.
In the TARDIS, the recently-replaced crystal hummed with energy, electricity almost visible beneath its bright, clear blue facets. And then, with a brief, angry crackle of sparks, it turned red.