She's pale, Starlight thought, stroking the unresponsive Twilight Sparkle's cheek gently with the back of her hoof. She was cold, too. Cold as a corpse. But she had a heart beat, faint as it was. And she was breathing, though just barely. The Princess was not truly alive, nor was she truly dead. She and the others were just husks, robbed of their sentients. "Do they dream?" she wondered out loud.
Sombra watched her from the alchemy table, his eyes glowing vividly in the dimness of the chamber, making him seem like something born from a nightmare. Starlight imagined the affectionate way Fluttershy must have looked into those eyes of his on the night they conceived that child of theirs, ill as the thought made her. How could she willingly spread her legs for such a repugnant creature? He looked like a demon. He was a demon for what he had done to her friends. "Did you dream?" he asked her.
Starlight lowered her head. The melancholy she felt upon seeing her friends in the pitiful state they were in was almost overwhelming. "No. Last thing I remember was you looking down at me in the garden. I remember closing my eyes. Then I remember opening them down here. That's pretty much it."
"Then I doubt they are," Sombra put forth. "They most likely are as you were, sleeping peacefully. You should rejoice in that. Dreams can be such unpleasant things. Believe me, I know this all too well."
What do monsters dream of? What could possibly disturb, disquiet or frighten one such as you? Starlight wiped her eyes. "You didn't have to go this far... You didn't have to hurt them this badly."
Sombra's voice was cold in a logical sort of way. "You tried to kill me. I could have killed you. I could have killed all of you, but I didn't. The only crime I am guilty of is showing you the mercy you would not have granted me."
Starlight thought of the blood stained keep filled with slaughtered rogues. Rogues that didn't need to be slaughtered. Rogues that could have been imprisoned instead of killed, and perhaps even rehabilitated. With the proper care and counseling anything was possible. But Sombra had robbed them of that opportunity. To hear him go on about mercy was nothing less than nauseating. "You only spared us because you saw more value in us as hostages than corpses; you're not merciful, you're just opportunistic and self-serving," she accused.
"That is a half truth," Sombra admitted, in his insufferably patronizing matter-of-fact tone he liked to use. "The Princess of friendship is indeed a valuable hostage. You are more of a value to me as an asset than an enemy. Your other friends, however, they're useless to me. In fact, they're less than useless. They're nothing but a drain on my resources. I look forward to the day I can finally rid myself of them."
"Then, do it!" Starlight demanded. "Just let them go. They've been punished enough, what with being trounced within an inch of their lives, and then being induced into a coma to grow more feeble by the day in the bowels of your palace. These are not the hardened barbarians you're used to throwing down with, Sombra. They're just teenage girls."
"Yet, they're far more of a threat to me than any savage I've ever killed, with you being the biggest threat of them all. You claim that I had 'trounced' you, but do not forget the wounds you've dealt me: You caught me by surprise, you disoriented me, you burned me, you even battered me around for a time. It was ultimately your ignorance and your recklessness that did you in; you willingly hanged yourself in that fight, all I did was provide the rope."
Yes, and you're quite fond of hanging, aren't you? The swaying bodies from the keep managed to once again force their way into Starlight's memories. Why couldn't she get those images out of her head? The wide eyes, some of them popped out of their sockets from the pressure the ropes around their necks had created, the blue faces, the blackened, swollen tongues, it all tormented her so. Her anxiety flared whenever the images intruded upon her thoughts.
"If you so desperately wish for them to be free," Sombra tempted her, "you know what you must do."
Starlight sighed. "You want me to bend the knee to you?"
"Yes, and the sooner you do, the sooner I'll rouse your friends. I would have them bathed and pampered as you were, and I would have them sup with us on the eve. My cooks would prepare a grand feast for all of us. And on the morrow after, I would send them on their merry way. We can then begin to work to put all this ugly business behind us, you making an attempt on my life and trying to steal my wife away from me."
"She was our friend before she was ever your wife. And you were the one who stole her away from us."
Sombra's voice dripped with sarcasm as he said, "And I'm sure she would have gone with you just as willingly as she did with me, if you had only asked her nicely."
"You. Kidnapped. Her. There was nothing 'willing' about it. I Don't know if you've realized this, but kidnapping a young mare, It's kind of a dick thing to do!"
"You were trying to do exactly what you're accusing me of, the only difference being that you were going to commit an act of murder in the process."
"Oh, so we're the bad guys? What about you, Mister Death-and-Destruction? You destroyed half of the Chrystal Empire when you went on that rampage of yours."
"But did I kill anyone? And please, think before you respond. I'd hate for you to look the fool."
"You..." Starlight froze. She had witnessed the damage that had been done to the city firsthoof, but she couldn't recall hearing about any deaths. It was an anomaly that seemed rather miraculous at the time, all that destruction and not a single fatality. "You threatened to," she attempted, "and you destroyed a lot of property."
"Yes, t'was a demonstration of my raw power, so that my threats would be potent enough to coerce Celestia into granting my demands. She would not have agreed to quarter with me otherwise. Were I to simply canter up to her gate and start barking demands, she, her sister, and her guards might not have taken to me too kindly... Then there would have been death. Mine, definitely, and probably many others, but I went through drastic measures to avoid that scenario."
The King's explanation awakened a morbid curiosity in Starlight. Vexed and utterly befuddled, she gave him a look, as if she was trying to figure him out. Sombra was a mystery wrapped inside of an enigma, festooned with riddles and encased in a puzzle box. He had flaunted his power, cowed Celestia with threats of mass murder, specifically chose one of her own Elements of Harmony to bride, escaped to the North, then began a blood-soaked campaign of carnage. There was a method behind all this madness, she could feel it. "But why?" she heard herself say. "Why any of this? Everything you've done, it's obviously been coordinated, planned. What's the end game in all of this?"
"Look around you," came The King's cryptic reply.
"Okay..." And so Starlight Glimmer did. She saw her friends laying comatose in their beds. She saw stone walls, and candles, and alchemy equipment, and she saw The King. "What exactly am I looking for?" she said, confused.
"What do you see?"
"Walls?"
Sombra nodded. "Yes, and what's beyond that?"
"Your gates?"
"And beyond that?"
"The village?"
"And what is in that village?"
"Cottages, roads... That tavern you took me to last night?"
"You're not wrong, but think harder."
Starlight Glimmer was quickly reaching the end of her patience. "I don't know, Ponies? Zebras, Griffons, Hippogriffs, Yaks?"
"My subjects," Sombra corrected her, as she had apparently arrived at the crux of his inquiry. "Their race is of absolutely no consequence to me. Many of them have known pain and suffering a southron such as yourself could never imagine, and now they are living under my rule. What I did at the Chrystal Empire, and what I do here now in New Haven, I do for them." He then removed his crown, his raven mane tumbling about his shoulders like loose ringlets of darkened silk, and he looked at it thoughtfully. The polished dragon bone reflected the light from his eyes. "I did what I did to be a king once again," he explained. "To be king during a time of war, I would not wish it upon my most loathed enemy; it is the greatest burden anyone could possibly know. I sometimes feel as if the weight from this blasted ornament could break my neck."
"What's with you? You just said you went through great lengths to be a king once again, but then you immediately talk about how horrible the burden is?"
Starlight Glimmer gave The King a ponderous look as he pulled a stool out from under the alchemy bench. He offered it to her with a gesture of his hoof. "Sit. If you would, please."
Suspicious, yet intrigued, Starlight did as she was asked. There was only one seat in the entire room, and that was the Apothecary's stool, so Sombra sat on his haunches, at the end of the table. Starlight adjusted herself until she felt comfortable and said, "Okay, so we're sitting. What's this about?"
"I'm afraid I was not as honest with you as I could have been," Sombra sighed, looking deep in thought. "Do you recall the question you put to me when I supped you last night? You should know the one I'm talking about."
Starlight thought, and she managed to recall an inquiry that was not received with a satisfactory answer. "It was the question I asked you just now, only worded differently. I asked you why you were doing all this. You simply said that you were doing it because you could. I wasn't sure what to make of that, but I decided not to press the issue."
Sombra placed his crown on the table. "You are astute," he commented. "A vaguely articulated truth holds no more value than that of a lie by omission. They can both be used for deceptive purposes."
"Or to avoid a topic one would rather not discuss?" Starlight guessed.
"Once again, you are astute. It is not fair for me to expect you to join me in my conquest, if I should refuse to explain to you the reason for why I have embarked on it."
"And what if I decide to not join you on this 'conquest' of yours?" Starlight glimmer looked at him uneasily. "Would you still tell me?"
Sombra considered her before responding. "If it should so please my lady, this boon I shall grant you."
Starlight had to restrain a snort. Oh, so now I'm his lady? The King was once again trying to play the charmer. If only he realized how ridiculous it sounded when he used that ye oldy dialect of his in such a non-ironic way. "Sure," she replied, "I'll lendeth you mine ears, my, uh, gentlesir."
Sombra frowned. "I suppose you think that's terribly funny, that jape of yours?"
Starlight lowered her head, abashed. "It wasn't, was it? Yeah, that was in poor taste, sorry."
Sombra silently looked at her until she felt more uncomfortable than she already was. He was acting noticeably more serious than usual. He could usually put up with an impertinent remark, so long as it wasn't too personal. It made her wonder deeper still about what it was he intended to tell her. "I apologize, okay?" she finally said. "You're gonna burn a hole through me if you keep glaring at me like that."
And there was a partial truth in that. His eyes glowed so brightly in the dim laboratory that it stung to look directly into them. His irritation only seemed to intensify their vividity.
"I'm not glaring," insisted Sombra. "Merely thinking. I'm not sure where to begin. I guess I should start at the collapse of my first reign... Yes, that is a good starting point, I believe."
"The collapse of your first reign?" replied Starlight, placing her hoof thoughtfully under her chin. "You mean when Celestia and Luna defeated you?"
"Yes." Sombra's voice went soft, yet it was still deep, like a dull hum. "I remember pain."
"What did you say?" Starlight leaned over the table to better hear him.
"Everything hurt, not just on the outside, but on the inside as well. I was bereft of my sanity, and in one fell swoop Celestia and her sister smote me and appropriated my throne. I had nothing left after that. I begged them for mercy, but they granted me none."
Starlight Glimmer's ears perked up. "You begged them for mercy?" she said disbelievingly. "How can you say they denied you their mercy? Princess Celestia offered you a chance to yield, and you spat in her face."
Sombra rolled his eyes and began to quote the final chapter of The Darkness Rising verbatim, as if he himself had read it a thousand times. "He needed only repent for all the suffering he had wrought, and all would be forgiven. Remorse, however, was an emotion that was lost on the beast. So consumed with seething black hatred was his heart, that there was simply no room for anything else. Sombra spat Celestia's offer back in her face and cursed her for a whore, and by doing so, he sealed his fate." The King's head fell forward as he punctuated the closing sentence with a humorless chuckle, his thick black mane closing around his visage like a dark curtain.
"You begged them for mercy?" Starlight said again, her face the portrait of scepticism. Sombra seemed too proud for such a thing.
Sombra lifted his head and swept his dark mane back with his hoof. "Celestia had no mercy to offer me, nor did I curse her for a whore. I begged her to kill me. I wanted to be nothing more than naught. But in her unfathomable cruelty she decided that she would instead seal my still-living body away in a tomb of ice. And it was in that tomb where I would grow no older than I was. I would simply exist for all eternity."
"You actually wanted to die?"
"Yes, I had grown quite weary of this wretched thing called existence. The cards life had dealt me up until then had left my soul in shambles. I wanted an end to it. Celestia and Luna had defeated me. My life was theirs for the taking, and I eagerly welcomed them to it."
"But you were born a prince. You lived a life of wealth and privilege. What was so horrible about your life that it left you wanting to die?"
Sombra cast a seething gaze upon her and snapped in a sharp tone, "That is not a story for you. And I would thank you for not asking me that again."
Starlight Glimmer tensed up in her seat. "Okay, okay... Gosh..."
"I had thought that I knew what true suffering was, but Celestia had proven me wrong," Sombra continued. "Decades passed, and all I could do was project my astral form to wander about aimlessly. Madness took hold, and my senses abandoned me. I wanted so badly to die, I threw myself from the highest peaks. I tried to drown myself in the deepest oceans. I was well aware that my astral form couldn't be killed, for it was merely a magical projection of my consciousness, but I was utterly and hopelessly mad with desperation."
Starlight Glimmer shifted uneasily in her seat. "Could anyone see you in this astral form of yours?"
"Neigh. I was but a ghost, formless and intangible, and no matter how fiercely I howled in my fits of hopeless misery, not a soul would pay me any mind."
Starlight could feel a chill come over her.
"After countless failed attempts to end mine own existence, I had eventually accepted my fate, that I was doomed to walk the earth for eternity, forlorn as the prospect had made me. With nothing to do for my situation, I decided to roam beyond the northern boarders of the Chrystal Empire. Whether it was a desire to change the scenery or a since of nostalgia that was beckoning to me, I can't quite remember."
"Nostalgia?" Starlight interrupted. "I'm guessing by 'beyond the norther border' you mean the peninsula - where we are right now. Why would you have a since of nostalgia for this place?"
"This place was my home for a time. I was the crowned prince of The Chrystal Empire, but I spent half my youth here. I'd rather not get into depth. My childhood is irrelevant."
"This horrible place was your childhood home? Sheesh, no wonder you're so--" And then Starlight stopped herself.
Sombra gave her a mildly irritated look, but it passed quickly enough as he continued. "I had found that the peninsula had gotten worse since I had left it. Much worse. Warlords were beginning to stake their claims in the few pieces of fertile land that existed in this barren place, and skirmishes were breaking out everywhere over contested territory. This was never an easy place to live, but when the brigands started forming factions and instigating rivalries, it became Tartarus on Equestrian soil.
"I was merely a specter wandering the battlefields, going unseen and unheard as I watched plunderers lute bodies before giving them to the carrion birds. I saw tyrants rise, and I saw them fall to other tyrants, only to be replaced with another within a moon's turn. I saw warlords clash, and I bore witness to hundreds of would be emperors and kings meet their fates. It was never ending. The crows were the only creatures around here that were consistently fat and happy. I had eventually arrived at a point where it was becoming too much for even me to watch. My capacity for carnage was reaching its threshold."
"So, you do have a limit?" Starlight said.
"I do," Sombra admitted. "I had been teetering upon the edge for a while, but I eventually witnessed an event that brought me to a point where I finally decided that enough was enough."
"What was this event?" Starlight asked with genuine interest.
"You'll not enjoy this part," Sombra cautioned her.
"We've gone this far," Starlight said, steeling herself for whatever it was she was about to hear. "We might as well go the rest of the way."
"What I am about to describe to you is a prime example of bandits doing what bandits do best."
Starlight was almost ashamed at how eager she was becoming. She hadn't even realized until she looked down that she was literally sitting at the edge of her seat.
Sombra made a face, as if he had a bad taste in his mouth. "One day," he began, "I happened upon a traveling merchant, her wares and belongings gathered in a wagon. She was woefully oblivious of the danger she was walking into. To any brigand, she was an irresistible target: a mare, young and pretty, seemingly all alone and unarmed, with a wagon full of plunder ripe for the taking. She was either stupid, or she wasn't from around the area. I assumed she was traveling in from the southern border. It was oft that merchants from The Chrystal Empire would travel in search of new patronage, as the competition amongst the traitors in the city was fierce at the time. But this girl... This girl..." Sombra looked down at the table, and in an ominous tone he said, "She was a long way from home."
Starlight Glimmer chewed at her lip. She could already see where this was going. "That poor girl," she said sadly. "I can only imagine what must have happened to her."
"I'm sure you can, and you wouldn't be wrong," Sombra replied. "A group of marauders eventually discovered her, as you have probably surmised. Using tactics they had no doubt employed a hundred times before, they fell upon the mare as sudden and violent as a storm. She tried to resist them as they were pulling her from the yoke of her wagon, but all the fight was immediately taken out of her when one of them savagely struck her in the face with a war club. The girl went down after the blow had been administered, and those dregs, in their eagerness, wasted no time unhitching her from her cart so they could take turns having their way with her. The girl tried to cry out, but the only sound she could make from her smashed in muzzle was an incoherent gurgling moan. It was a ghastly, piteous sound that I would never care to hear again in my life."
Starlight resisted the urge to cover her ears. "I don't know if I want to hear anymore of this."
"It gets worse," Sombra said.
"How could it possibly get any worse? Im guessing they killed her in some horrible way afterwards, right? If that's the abridged version of what you saw, then you can just leave me with that."
Sombra furrowed his brow. "No, that's not what happened. Though that may have been preferable to what actually ended up happening to her. What I saw them doing to that mare disgusted me, but I wasn't truly horrified until I realized there was a child hiding in the wagon. The bandits, there were eight of them, if memory serves correctly, they discovered her when one of them ripped the tarp away to have a look at the plunder. She couldn't have been older than ten years of age."
Starlight felt a knot forming in her stomach. "No..."
"Yes." Sombra looked at her. "The most depraved bandit in their group gave that filly a hungry look upon discovering her. He must have decided his grotesque appetite wasn't quite sated. The son of a whore dragged the filly screaming from the cart, all the while making some disgusting jest about how he didn't mind his fruit a little underripe."
Aghast, Starlight shot up from her seat so fast she knocked her stool over. "But You... You just said she couldn't have been older than ten. She was a baby!"
Sombra's eyes darted away from hers. It appeared as if he was looking off in the distance, but there was only a wall in front of him. He nodded once and gave a curt, "Aye."
The pitch in Starlight's voice became high with distress. "But that's sick! What about his friends? I mean, I get that they were all bandits, but they must have had some standards! One of them had to have at least said something."
Sombra sneered. "Oh, they said some things. They stood by and laughed and spat obscene jests as they watched that poor little girl squirm and sob. After that, they bound both the girl and the mare with ropes as they both wept inconsolably.The bandits then dragged them away along with their cart. Two new slaves and a wagon full of valuables... Those brigands were well rewarded for the horrific crimes they committed that day.
Starlight felt sick. "How could you have just watched something like that? Was there nothing you could have done to help them?"
"Fool!" Sombra suddenly slammed his hoof on the wooden table. The beakers and flasks rattled. Starlight was so startled she backed away, but her hoof had become entangled in the legs of the stool she had knocked over, and she fell backwards. "Do you think I enjoyed merely being a spectator to what I had witnessed? If it was in my power to do so, I would have ripped that bastard's head clean from his shoulders before he could have so much as laid a hoof on that child. I would have desexed the lot of them with a hooked blade and let them bleed out for what they did to that merchant."
"I-I I'm sorry. I didn't mean to imply that you didn't care," Starlight stammered.
Sombra removed his hoof from the table, to inspect the damage he had made. The area of impact was now dented inward and bristling with splinters. "Winter Lilac is not going to thank me for that," he mused regretfully. Starlight could only blink stupidly at him as he looked down at her apologetically and offered her his hoof. Cautiously, she accepted it, and the powerful stallion effortlessly pulled her to her hooves, the muscles in his arm rippling under his course grey fur. The King then wordlessly reached down to pick up the stool.
"I'm sorry," Starlight said again, as she reclaimed her seat.
Sombra sighed. "You've done nothing to apologize for..." He then lifted his hooves and looked at them, as if to scorn them for the useless things they were. A few locks of his hair managed to tumble down in front of his face during his outburst. It obscured one of his eyes, giving him somewhat of a disheveled appearance. "These hooves," he said. "They were made for killing. Just look at them, they're bludgeons. Yet, I could do nothing to help them. I could do nothing to help anyone in the state I was in."
Starlight could finally see where this story was heading. She had to be careful; she couldn't allow herself to let her guard down. This may have been the same tactic he used to garner Fluttershy's affection, this tragic villain card he was playing. She always was a sucker for stuff like that.
Sombra looked down at his crown and lifted it off the table. He inspected it, rotating it slowly in his hooves. The light from the candles shined off the polished dragon bone, its reflective surface aglow with a soft fiery aura. "The more of these atrocities I witnessed, the more I forgot about my misery. The outrage I just described to you began to open my eyes to the suffering the innocent inhabitants of this land were forced to endure. I saw many and more horrible things befall them day after day, and soon, my desire to die was replaced with an ambition. This land needed order. It was riddled with disease, and I eventually decided that I would be its cure. For the first time in nearly a thousand years, I felt a sense of purpose. I vowed I would reclaim my body, somehow, someway, no matter what I had to do, I would figure out a way to free myself from my frozen prison. I would then return to this foul quagmire of sin and suffering, and I would purge this land."
Purge... Nice replacement for the word genocide. You might as well use the term 'cleanse' or 'purify.' It would almost make what you're doing sound noble. And that was the problem. From hearing Sombra's story, it seemed that he truly believed what he was doing was righteous. He had even gone so far as to delude Fluttershy into thinking the same way as him. It was terrifying how alike the two were starting to sound. The uncomfortable thought brought her to her next question. "Why Fluttershy? Of all ponies, of any mare you could have taken, why did you choose her?"
Sombra scratched the stubble of his chin. "I had many reasons for choosing her."
The vague and almost carefree way in which Sombra replied irritated Starlight. "Yes?" she said impatiently, prompting him to continue.
"Her face was such a fair thing to look upon, with eyes so blue, I nearly drowned in them."
Starlight Glimmer screwed up her face. "You're... You're kidding, right?"
"Her voice, tremulous as it was when she first met me, was like an angels choir," Sombra continued. "Her delicate wings. The exquisite curves of her flanks, and let us not forget that shapely little rump they're attached to. There was simply nothing about her that was not pleasing."
"You had the hots for her? That's the reason why you selected her?"
"Yes, I found her appealing. Is that an odd quality to seek out in a mate?"
"No... I just figured you would have other reasons for picking her. I had assumed it had something to do with the power of her element."
"Oh, but it did. I demanded to have my pick of Celestia's own Elements of Harmony to bride. I killed two birds with one stone that day. In choosing my bride, not only would I have my queen to rule along side me, but I would also succeed in separating the elements, so that they could be one less weapon for Celestia to form against me. Once they were paraded in front of me, it all came down to whichever one I fancied. The white one with the azure eyes was a close contender, but Fluttershy was the one who ultimately caught my eye... The pink one, what was her name? She would have been the runner up. I have a weakness for blue eyes, I must admit."
"Fluttershy," Starlight mused. "The element of kindness. Opposites attract, after all." It's a shame her best quality is being eroded by your influence. Damn you, Sombra.
The pieces to Sombra's plan were falling into place. Everything The King had done up to this point was starting to make sense. There was one more thing that bothered her, though. "You obviously managed to escape from that frozen tomb of yours," Starlight said. "How exactly did you pull that off?"
Sombra steepled his hooves like a villain in a play monologuing his scheme to the audience. "Through discipline and sheer power of will, my dear... Unimaginable discipline, and power of will."
Starlight sighed. She was getting sick of that pose. He did it. Fluttershy did it. No doubt their child would grow fond of doing that as well. Could you be anymore of an archetype? she scoffed internally.
"After decades of trial and error I learned to gather energy from within my tomb by means of meditation," The King went on to explain. "The process would not work in my astral form, so I was forced to return to my body. It was slow going, and unbelievably painstaking. It was by far the most arduous trial I had ever been through. An entire century had gone by before I had enough energy to break free from my frozen prison. One hundred years trapped in my own body, unable to move, with nothing but the cold as my company. But low and behold, upon the thousandth anniversary of the fall of my first reign, I had finally returned. I stood from the ridge of the mountain in which I had been sealed, and I looked upon the empire that was once my kingdom. I wasted no time in putting my plans into motion."
"You could gather arcane energy through meditation?" Starlight said, astonished. "I've never heard of a technique like that. How - how did you do it?"
Sombra offered her a seductive smile and an inviting hoof. "I would love to teach you. I have much knowledge to bestow, so many secrets. Secrets you would not find in any book. It could all be yours, my dear."
Starlight, suddenly repelled, scooted her stool back to put more distance between them. "On second thought, I think I'm good."
"You make me sad." Sombra's countenance soured. He then looked to her friends laying in their beds, as if to wordlessly remind her of the ultimatum he had put to her. "What do you think they would say if they knew how selfish you were being?"
Starlight was baffled by the accusation. "Selfish?"
"You refuse to free them. They, who are your dearest friends. How is that not selfish?"
"I'm not going to be your trained killer, Sombra."
"I never asked you to kill anyone."
"But you will, won't you?"
"In my service, you will do as you are told."
"Which includes killing?"
Sombra didn't so much as bother to sidestep the question. "For those who need to be killed, yes. And believe you me, there are many."
"Those who need to be killed?" Starlight scoffed. "Who are you to make such a decision?"
"The King," Sombra replied bluntly.
"Anyone can wear a crown and call themselves a king. That doesn't give them the right to play grim reaper."
Sombra's posture stiffened. "I do not do what I do for pleasure, I do what I do because it must be done. I have the might to punish the evil plaguing this land, therefor, it is my duty to do so, for he who does not punish evil commands it to be done."
"Might doesn't make right," contended Starlight. "Being stronger than those you are killing doesn't make killing them any less morally bankrupt."
The King was becoming visibly exasperated. "You're attacking a straw pony. You're refuting arguments I have not made. You're either taking my words out of context, or you're not paying attention."
"Then put it into context for me," Starlight challenged him.
Sombra looked at her for a long time before he sighed and said, "I already have, several times, and you just seem to refuse to understand... Very well. Hold to your ideals, just as I shall hold to mine. We're just throwing the same argument back and forth. We'll be here forever if we keep this up." His eyes narrowed slyly. "I would just like to ask you one question, if I may."
The King's sudden capitulation made Starlight suspicious. "Sure," she said carefully, in the way a defendant in court might to a shifty prosecutor.
Sombra gave her a serious look. "You are a mare of peace, yes? I wouldn't go so far as to call you a pacifist, as you seem more than ready to fight for your friends. But killing is where you absolutely draw the line. Am I correct?"
Starlight met his question with a curious nod. What is he getting at?
"I shall submit this to you, then: If the taking of life is such a reprehensible taboo in your eyes, no matter what the reason - why then did you try to kill me?"
"That was..." Starlight Glimmer stole a quick glance at The Princess. The attempt on Sombra's life was Twilight's idea, yet Starlight did not object to it. "You had Fluttershy. We were fighting for our friend," was all she could think of to say.
"Ah, cognitive dissonance." Sombra smiled. "Or do you believe that killing is justifiable when you and only you deem it so? You either suffer from a God complex, or you're a hypocrite. Which is it?"
Starlight Glimmer looked away from him. "I was fighting for Fluttershy," she insisted, though her words came out weak and tremulous. The assassination wasn't her idea, she only went along with it. That was the truth of it, but that excuse seemed even more pathetic than the one she had put forth.
The King placed his hoof under her chin, and he forced her gaze to meet with his. "How fragile, this illusion you cling to called morality."
Aggravated, Starlight Glimmer wordlessly shoved his hoof away.
Sombra frowned. "Now, you're just acting like a spoiled brat."
Starlight had nothing to say to that.
"No one likes being called out on their hypocrisy," The King continued. "No one likes having their views or beliefs challenged. No one likes admitting when their wrong, but every once in a while..." The King fell silent when he heard a rapping at the door. "Come."
The laboratory door opened, and in walked a sentry adorned in the red cloak and black armor of Sombra's Royal Guard. He removed his helm and bowed before he spoke. "My King, the citizens volunteering to be your court witnesses are filling the court yard. Prince Blue Blood and your advisor await you in the throne room."
"And my queen?"
"She's with the volunteers in the courtyard." He bowed again. "She's keeping them entertained until your arrival, your grace. All her idea."
"Entertaining them?" Sombra said with mild amusement.
The sentry smiled. "It seems she's taught those birds of hers some new tricks. The throng seemed quite amused as I was leaving to fetch you. The common folk love her so, your grace."
"Aye, as do we all," The King replied. "Have my advisor lead them all to the throne room. I shall be there shortly."
"Yes, your grace." The sentry bowed, donned his helm, and he was gone.
Sombra gave Starlight one last look of admonishment before he beckoned her to follow."And wipe that glower off your face. You look like a petulant filly that just had her wrist slapped."
Irritated, Starlight acquiesced and followed Sombra to the throne room, sparing her friends one last longing look before she closed the laboratory door behind her."