//------------------------------// // Arc 3 Chapter 11: The Gift // Story: The Problem of Evil // by Quixotic Mage //------------------------------// Twilight swam through a murky ocean of mixed up dreams.  She had a test the next morning that she hadn’t studied for.  No, the griffon delegation was coming soon and any mistake would lead to war.  No, her husband had left her for another mare and when she woke her bed would yawn with heartbreaking emptiness.  Through the muddle a voice drifted to her. “Twilight?  Twilight, you gotta wake up.” She wanted to, she truly did.  If only she could be sure what she would find there.  An ailing bonsai tree whose illness she couldn’t seem to cure?  A futile struggle against a dark king? A lonely life waiting for foals who never wrote?  Why did she want to wake up, again? “Twilight, I swear to Princess Luna I will somehow find a water balloon and hit you in the face with it if you don’t wake up right now!” Well that was a good enough reason.  Twilight forced her hazy mind up through the layers of sleep toward wakefulness.  As she blearily opened her eyes she saw a white blur standing over her with a smaller blue blur connected to it. Twilight blinked and Pinkie swam into focus just as she was winding up for a water balloon throw at point blank range. “I’m awake, I’m awake,” Twilight said, hastily scrambling to get her hooves under her in time to dodge if need be.  She groaned as knots from sleeping in her dragon armor made themselves known. It fit her so well she’d practically forgotten she was wearing it as she’d been moving around, but sleeping in it had been a painfully bad idea. “Oh, good.”  Pinkie let the balloon fall to the side where it broke and splashed harmlessly against the floor. Yawning, Twilight studied the other pony. She was relieved to see that Pinkie looked coherent at the very least, less like the panicked pony Twilight had put into an enchanted sleep a few hours earlier.  “How are you doing Pinkie? What’s going on?” “Badly, I’m doing badly.”  Looking closer, Twilight could see that those same silver threads that had connected Pinkie to the Dreaming through the portal had reappeared and were again in the process of dissolving.  Pinkie had always been a twitchy pony, but her trembling now far surpassed what she’d ever displayed before. Where it once had made her seem lively and energetic, it now came from a place of desperate need. “I have a message for you,” Pinkie continued.  “Once I tell you, I want you to send me back to sleep and don’t wake me up until it’s all over.”  She looked away, out over their sleeping friends. “It’s better there. And don’t worry, I’ll still be helping.” “Don’t worry about helping.” Twilight blurted out.  “If being asleep is better for you, then I’m happy to send you back to sleep.  I wouldn’t force anypony to face Sombra.” A shadowed expression crossed Pinkie’s face.  “Oh I’ll be facing him. I just won’t be this hurt when I do.  Anyway, the message.” “Right, yes.”  Twilight stifled a yawn.  “Go ahead.” Pinkie leaned in and whispered, “it’s from Princess Luna.” “Luna?” Twilight whispered back, shocked fully awake by Pinkie’s words.  “How? Where is she?” “She’s in the Dreaming, silly.  Where else would she be?” “How did you get to the Dreaming?” Twilight asked. “Princess Luna said I’m something called a lucid dreamer.  Apparently I always go to the Dreaming when I sleep.” Pinkie shrugged.  “I don’t really get it, but the important thing is that I saw Princess Luna and she wanted me to tell you something.” Twilight nodded.  Her curiosity still pricked at her, but the specifics didn’t matter.  If Pinkie said she had been given a message by Luna in the Dreaming, Twilight trusted her.  “What is the message, Pinkie?” Pinkie took in a deep breath and Twilight braced for one of Pinkie’s trademark mile-a-minute rants.  Instead, Pinkie let the breath go and focused in a way Twilight wasn’t used to seeing from the other pony.  “Princess Luna said that she’s going to cut off Sombra’s connection to the other ponies to give you a chance to finish him.  She also said that just killing his body won’t be enough, but that she trusts you to find a way to end it.” “Sombra cut off from everypony else?  What would that mean?” Pinkie opened her mouth to answer but Twilight held up a hoof and cut her off.  “Just thinking aloud, unless you have an idea?” Pinkie shook her head.  “No, but Princess Luna did say she would start soon and that it should be pretty obvious once she did.  And that it probably wouldn’t last for too long.” Twilight sighted.  “That’s good to know, thank you Pinkie.  I suppose given Sombra’s threats against our friends there’s no sense waiting.  I’ll come up with some way to take advantage of what Luna plans to do. In the meantime, can you start waking up the others and tell them to be ready to fight.” “No.  Twilight, I delivered my message.  Put me to sleep. Please.” Twilight took another look at Pinkie and saw what she’d missed.  Pinkie had her back to Sombra, and at no point while she was talking had she allowed the smallest part of him to enter her vision.  Her body was rigid and she was staring not at Twilight, but straight ahead at the walls. She was blatantly doing everything she could to avoid even thinking about where she was. “I’m sorry, Pinkie,” Twilight said.  “I knew it was hard for you to be here, but I didn’t realize each moment hurt quite that badly.” “It does,” Pinkie said in a small voice. “Alright, back to sleep you go.  Tell Luna I’ll be ready to do everything I can.”  Pinkie nodded. Twilight’s magic came to her call, and it was welcomed easily into Pinkie.  The creases on the white pony’s forehead were smoothed away as her body relaxed into sleep. Would that all pains were so easy to soothe. Twilight took another look at her sleeping friends, deciding who to wake up to get everyone else moving.  They hadn’t bothered posting a guard. It wasn’t as if Sombra would be deterred by a single one of them, and they all needed their rest.  Even the dragons had needed some time to sleep. Twilight suspected it was an aftereffect of their time in the Dreaming, but she couldn’t have said for certain. Of course, there was one creature who had neither been in the Dreaming, nor undergoing ascension.  Sure enough, as Twilight’s eyes swung past Spike, his eye opened and he caught her gaze. The adolescent dragon stood quietly and made his way over to her. “Waiting’s over?” he asked quietly. “I think so,” Twilight said.  “We’re only going to get weaker if we wait any longer.  And if Luna’s able to do something from where she is, that can only help.” “I’m glad,” he rumbled.  “Waiting feels like it takes forever.” Twilight snorted, thinking of her own subjective millennia spent waiting for Celestia’s life to pass.  “You have no idea. I’ll tell you about it if we’re still alive tomorrow.” “I’d like that,” Spike said.  “I’ve missed you telling me stories.  Even boring ones about the brave little magical field and the sinister matrix tensor.”  She swatted his side and they both shared a quiet laugh. Then he sighed. “Alright, I’ll get them up.  You better come up with a good plan though.” Spike set about his task as Twilight turned away, thinking hard about what Pinkie had said.  If Sombra was cut off from his network, he wouldn’t be able to draw on the ponies he’d enslaved at will, though he’d still have whatever power he’d already drawn into his original body. It was a longshot, but Twilight thought she might be able to beat him in a straight magic duel at that point.  Even if she won though, that wouldn’t help after Luna faltered and all the copies of Sombra in everyponies’ heads reconnected with the main body.  Even if the original Sombra was completely wiped out, the network he’d created would continue without him. What Twilight needed was something that she could do to his main body that would propagate through the network and destroy it.  The only spells she could think of that might work in that regard would simply destroy any mind with which they came into contact.  So that wasn’t an option unless she wanted to basically break the mind of everypony in Equestria. She needed to fundamentally alter his original mind in a way that wouldn’t harm the ponies who weren’t evil kings. It was a thorny problem, and Twilight had come no closer to a solution by the time everypony had been shaken awake and gathered around her.  Sombra had noticed the movement and both the main body and the thralls were watching them closely. She might not have solved the problem of Sombra, but Twilight had planned out what she wanted each of her friends to do while she fought with him.  In an undertone, Twilight spoke to the gathered ponies, dragons, and one griffon. “Luna and I are going to make a move on Sombra soon. When I do, I’m going to need you all to hold back any ponies he sends at me.  Specifically, here’s what you all need to do.” As Twilight explained their roles, there were nods all around.  The parts they had to play made sense, and they were all as ready to fight as they could be.  As Twilight came to the end of her instructions she hesitated. She had a final order to give to all of them, and she knew they wouldn’t like it. Moreover, it was an order she knew she couldn’t have given before, even when she was leading the army.  In a way she worried that her capacity to conceive of the order’s necessity was a sign of just how far she’d drifted from Twilight Sparkle, and of how much Celestia had influenced her.  Still, it had to be done. With a heavy heart she said, “we only get one chance at this, if that.  So if it’s impossible to restrain somepony without injuring them, or you’re faced with a choice between one of the hostages and the fight as a whole, I am ordering you to do what has to be done.” “I’m not hurting my family.  No way no how,” Applejack said immediately. “Then you’d best hope that every creature here does their job.  If this fails, Equestria falls. I will not permit that to happen because we couldn’t sacrifice a single pony.”  Twilight’s steeled herself to the order she’d given even as she tried to force the others to do the same. “Hate me if you want to.  Blame me. I don’t care, as long as there is a future in which you have the chance to hate me.” “Twilight, dear, I think you learned the wrong lesson from Fluttershy’s death,” Rarity said, her tone deceptively mild. “This is not about Fluttershy!”  Twilight snapped. “If I can’t trust you all not to flinch when it comes down to it, then I need to take the obvious alternative.  That would be to kill everypony in this room who is not us before I attack Sombra. Would you prefer that?” She swung her gaze fiercely from one pony to the next but none of them would meet her normal eye or her eye of fire. None of them save for Spike.  “This isn’t like you, Twilight,” he said. “I’m barely me right now,” Twilight responded tightly.  “And when we have time I will explain why. But for this moment, I need everything I have become to do what has to be done for Equestria.  Now, we don’t have much time. Will you all promise that if it comes down to it, you won’t hesitate?” There were nods.  Reluctant and resentful nods, but nods nonetheless.  Twilight caught the eye of Rainbow Dash and they shared a significant glance.  The pegasus had the firepower and the will to do what she had to, even if the other ponies couldn’t. “Something you’d care to share with the class?” Sombra called out from his prison. “Just plotting your downfall,” Twilight called back.  In answer to the others’ horrified looks she just snorted derisively.  “He’s not an idiot. He knows there’s hardly anything else we’d be doing right now.  Just be ready. I suspect it’ll begin any moment.” Pinkie’s message hadn’t included details about timing, but Twilight had Celestia’s memories of the Dreaming.  She knew that time between the Dreaming and the waking world generally flowed as the dreamer, which was to say Luna, wanted it to.  That meant that her attack would likely begin once Twilight was close to ready. Of course, she still had no idea what she was going to do, so maybe she should have tried for a little more time to think. Just as Twilight thought that perhaps a bit more time would have been useful, she saw a flicker of discomfort cross Sombra’s face.  He frowned and shook his head from side to side. Apparently the pain only grew worse for his expression contorted into an ugly grimace.  At last he threw back his head and howled. At precisely the same moment a silver flame washed over Pinkie’s sleeping body and devoured it entirely.  The gathered creatures froze, stunned into inaction by the unexpected event. Twilight’s voice snapped them out of it.  “She’s fine. This is our chance! Go, go, go!”  Everypony and everyone took off like a shot. Twilight’s first action was to fire off a supercharged version of the sleep spell she had cast on Pinkie.  It was aimed not at her friends this time, but at Sombra’s hostages. Unfortunately, in most cases Sombra’s hold on his hostages was too strong to be overpowered by a simple sleep spell.  The crusaders did slump down into slumber though, and that was better than Twilight had dared to hope for. As planned, Rarity dashed to the crusaders and scooped up their sleeping forms.  She retreated until her back was against a wall and covered them over with an illusion that matched the color and shape of the wall behind her.  Without her magic eye, even Twilight wouldn’t have been able to spot them. That was the crusaders out of the fight at least, and Twilight was grateful for that. Applejack, Iolite and Spike were fast off the draw as well.  They charged full speed at the great wooden door that stood at the entrance to the cavern.  Sombra’s honor guard outside was just starting to unbolt it so they could come pouring in when the three massive creatures crashed into it at full speed. Iolite was perhaps the largest being for miles, and Applejack and Spike were no lightweights themselves.  Between the three of them they just managed to force the door closed again and then they threw themselves into holding it that way. The door, of course, was not the only way into the room.  Unicorns teleported into the room, and the few dragons outside managed to bring some of the griffons with them when they came.  One wave of them made it in, before Sim stepped up to stop them. Twilight saw the bright blue glow of its magic expand as a net through the cavern.  Sim was no weakling when it came to magic, and the net it cast was a powerful ward against teleportation.  Twilight felt a pair of unicorns too slow off the draw crash into the net and slice themselves to pieces, never to reappear from their failed teleport. There was a price to be paid for that speed and power, of course.  The net Sim had fashioned was indiscriminate. Twilight also could not teleport, not without tearing it to pieces and leaving them vulnerable.  Sim also had to direct all its focus to maintaining the net, leaving its body open to attack from the one hundred unicorns, dragons, and griffons that had gotten in before the net went up. Fortunately, this was where Rainbow Dash came in.  For once she was the last to react. She had been collecting power for hours, and as she flew up into the cavern she finally let it free. Yet it wasn’t the uncontrolled explosion of before.  Instead, Twilight saw her rainbow tinted electricity spread throughout the cavern, waiting on a hair-trigger for the opportunity to go off. The creatures that had teleported into the cavern found Rainbow’s lightning there to greet them.  Each crack of a teleport was met now with a boom of thunder. Dash was a one mare storm, singlehoofedly pushing back Sombra’s honor guard attacking her friends.  Even more impressive than the sheer power that took was the control she displayed. Despite holding enough energy to vaporize a pony, few of her strikes did more than stun her targets.  For all her fury, she did her best to leave the ponies she fought alive. Gilda and Thraxus, loyal as always, guarded Dash where she hovered.  She couldn’t stop every one of Sombra’s troops simultaneously, and they realized quickly that they had to bring her down.  Like Sim, Dash’s focus on her storm left her body defenseless, but she trusted her two friends to keep her safe. Sombra’s troops divided, half attacked Dash and the other half went for Sim.  If either failed, then the other would fall shortly and Sombra’s reinforcements from outside would overwhelm them.  Gilda and Thraxus fought like creatures possessed. With wing and claw and talon they slashed foes, refusing to give an inch before the onslaught. The true Sombra, realizing what Dash and Sim were doing, sent pillars of shadow hurtling toward them.  Twilight flew into the path of the oncoming magic and summoned her shield. With a sound like rotting wood crunching underhoof, Twilight felt his magic impact on her shield.  It hit with all the strength of a train, but Twilight had strength of her own now, and though she flinched back she managed to hold him off. Just to the side she caught the pink flash of Captain Armor’s bubble shields.  To her relief he’d managed to wrap individual bubbles around each of Sombra’s hostages.  After Sombra’s display with Mr. Cake, she’d realized that he couldn’t simply kill them with a thought.  So long as Captain Armor held those bubbles they would be safe, from Sombra, from each other, and from themselves. But there was no time to stop and stare.  Sombra’s next attack was needle-thin lances of magic.  Invisible to the naked eye, Twilight caught them only because she could see the magic of their nature directly.  They were so thin and sharp they would have penetrated straight through Twilight’s shield. Because of that, they were also fragile.  Twilight dropped her shield and turned to her side, covering Dash with her body and letting the magic break on her dragon-forged armor. Even as she did so, she felt Sim’s net wobble in its protection.  Another wave of Sombra’s troops spotted the weakness and teleported into the cavern.  Dash’s lightning immediately decimated their ranks, but there were still plenty of survivors to join the crush trying to break through to her and Sim. Spinning around, Twilight saw that the net had wobbled because Sim himself was under attack.  It was crouched on the ground and its right foreleg was missing from the joint down. With a snarl, the blue glow of its magic flared and the attacking dragons were pushed back.  The net reformed, but it needed help. “Go!” Gilda shouted to Twilight.  “We’ve got Dash.” Without even bothering to respond, Twilight snapped her wings down and took off like a shot.  She relaxed the seal on her mage’s blade. With a howl, the hilt-less blade of crackling blood-red energy reformed in her lavender magic’s grasp.  She was in control now though, she remembered feeling worse rages than this. Her armor reinforced hoof took one dragon in the jaw and sent it spinning, even as the mage’s blade cleaved clean through a second dragon’s throat.  The third glowed a sickly green and tried to cast some poisonous cloud her way. With scarcely a thought, her magic tore his attack to pieces and her blade found his heart. “Can you hold the ward?” she asked Sim in the brief lull that followed. It coughed, and blood splattered the floor.  “Can I afford not to?” it asked. Not even trying to put wait on its missing limb, Sim climbed back up to stand on its three good claws.  “I’ll hold. Keep them off me if you can, and take a crack a Sombra when you get the chance.” In all the confusion, Twilight had almost forgotten the true objective of their struggle.  She cast a glance at Sombra and saw a glow of moonlight starting to surround him, distracting him from further shots at her friends.  The light wavered though, and through gaps the flow of his dark magic could still be seen. Twilight took that to be Luna’s attack, and she knew her own attempts would come to nothing until the moonlight was unbroken around him. “Could use some help over here!” Applejack called frantically over the din. Before Twilight could rush over, the sound of splintering wood echoed through the cavern.  With a cry, Applejack fell back from the broken door. Spike and Iolite were not far behind. “Sim, drop the net.  Give us cover,” Twilight ordered.  Sim nodded and Twilight saw the blue net reform into a sold wall just on the other side of the retreating forms of Iolite, Spike, and Applejack. “Form up on me!” Twilight shouted.  Half her mind was still directing her mage’s blade as it sang its way through foe after foe.  “Form up!” Shining Armor was next to her almost instantly.  His horn still glowed with the magic powering the bubble shields over the hostages, and that left him without any to spare for fighting magically. Rarity wisely stayed hidden with the crusaders.  Applejack and the two dragons joined Twilight a moment later, but Dash and her friends kept fighting were they were, halfway between Twilight and the door. “She can’t move,” Gilda shouted back to her. It was true, Twilight realized.  Dash was so deeply wound into her magic, that she hadn’t even heard the call to retreat.  All of her focus was on sending the storm flashing again and again into the attacking troops.  It was helping too. She kept disrupting them before they could form up for a good charge on Sim’s wall, and that was the only thing keeping their defenses intact. At least from the front.  Twilight spared a second she didn’t have to glance back at Sombra’s true body.  It was still insensate with the pain of Luna’s attack, but the walls of moonlight weren’t complete yet.  They still needed more time. “I’ll get Dash.  Get ready to run!” She shouted to Gilda and Thraxus. Shouting wouldn’t get Dash’s attention, she was too focused on manipulating the electric fields in the cavern and Twilight was too far away in any case.  Instead, Twilight used her magic like a battery to set up a potential difference, with one end at Dash and the other next to her. Dash’s control over the storm in the cavern meant that that change was like a glowing neon sign.  Her head whipped around and she stared right at Twilight with eyes of blazing pools of white. They looked much like Twilight’s own when she’d lost control of her magic and Twilight now understood just how disconcerting it was to be on the other side of that impersonal glare. Still, Dash needed to move, not just look.  Twilight gave a little tug on the magnetic field, just enough to nudge Dash toward her.  The other pony got the hint. “Run! Now!”  Twilight snapped.  Gilda and Thraxus moved at once, disengaging with their current opponents and flying straight toward Twilight.  As a bolt of lightning, Dash followed them. Twilight felt her fur prickle beneath her armor as the electrified pony appeared at her side faster than the eye could track. They were gathered in one place.  They had Sim’s wall, Dash’s lightning, and all the magic Twilight could conjure.  It still wouldn’t be enough. Sombra could keep bringing more and more ponies, and when the armies arrived, if not before, they would fall.  Already his honor guard hammered at Sim’s blue wall, unmindful of the lightning that brought so many of them low in the process. Twilight needed to take out Sombra.  His defeat was still the only way to ensure their own survival.  Glancing back once again, she looked for any sign that Luna had succeeded in her attack. Her eyes provided her with a curious double vision.  To her mortal eye Sombra had disappeared behind a thick spherical shield of pure darkness.  It was broken only by the spears of light that transfixed Sombra, and it was wrapped so closely around those that it was constantly being disrupted and reinforced. To the ember of the sun that graced Twilight’s immortal eye, the shadowy sphere was still present, but the contrast made it a small and frail thing.  Towering unbroken walls of moonlight wrapped around Sombra’s body, enclosing him entirely in a cylinder of light. Luna had done it. Sombra was cut off from his network.  In response, he had protected himself with the strongest shield he could cast.  Now was the time to strike, but to do that Twilight needed to break through that shield. “He is cut off!” Twilight cried.  “Now’s our chance. Sim, Dash, hold the wall!  Armor, keep hold of the hostages. Everypony else, hit that shield with everything you’ve got!” Applejack charged the shield, her heavy armor clattering as she thundered forward.  She smashed into it with all the force she could muster. Unfortunately, she’d finally found something harder than her own head.  She bounced off and crashed to the ground, the impact having hurt her as nothing else had since she’d put on the armor. Iolite and Spike both opened their mouths wide and blew emerald streams of dragon fire against the shield.  Thraxus tried to add to their inferno, but he couldn’t muster the same firepower. He joined Gilda instead in making passes swiping at it with talon and wingblade. Twilight herself brought her mage’s blade around and sent it rocketing toward the sphere.  That blade, which had cut through armor, skin, and bone with equal ease, clanged off without leaving a dent.  Twilight followed up with a penetrating beam of pure magical force, but it disappeared into the sphere with scarcely a ripple.  The dragon fire died away, revealing that it too had been ineffective. “If you’re doing something, do it soon!” Sim called out, strain clear in its voice.  “We can’t hold much longer.” Through the sphere Twilight heard Sombra cackling through his evident pain.  “Hahaha. Not enough, my dear. Take my subjects from me, chain me with this cruel sunlight.  Even with the power of dragons and alicorns it’s still not enough. I am King Sombra and the world is mine!”  At his words a wave of darkness billowed out of the sphere and roiled toward Twilight. Twilight brought her mage’s blade around and it cut the attack in two, sending it rushing to either side of her small band.  She gritted her teeth and hung on as the force Sombra’s attack kept bearing down on her. This wasn’t working, Twilight realized as the attack ended and she could return her blade to its grizzly work on the other side of the wall.  They were getting pushed further and further back, and the shield still was unblemished. Only one pony left had a chance of being strong enough to break through. “DASH!” Twilight screamed in desperation, magic coloring her shout and rubbing her throat raw.  It was enough to get Rainbow’s attention. She turned her head and saw at once what Twilight needed. The smell of ozone intensified as Dash threw everything she had into a single shot.  She was deeply in tune with the electricity covering the cavern, sensitive to the smallest variations in the electric field.  Perhaps that was why she knew what to do. A great rainbow beam shot through with electricity fired out from Rainbow Dash.  The air crackled as it passed and it blinded all mortal eyes looking at it. Even Sombra’s attacking troops had to pause in their assault and turn away to shield their eyes. Twilight, though, possessed more than mortal sight.  Her pony eye was forced to close, but her magical eye remained open, made as it was from the full light of the sun.  That was why she saw that rainbow beam split into five separate threads and smash into the shield right where the spears of light broke through it. The shield did not break, not completely.  Jagged cracks of light crisscrossed the previously unblemished shadow-stuff, but even as Twilight looked they began to repair themselves.  She knew the weakness now though, and the spears of light even gave her an inkling of what to do when the shield broke. It had to be broken first, though, and that was still no easy task. “The spears!” she shouted.  “Attack the sphere where the spears cut through it.” The others understood and the moved quickly to comply.  Spike and Iolite flew up and breathed fire down along the spears through Sombra’s raised forelegs.  Gilda and Thraxus worked together on the spear through one of his legs, trading off slash for slash so that the shield didn’t have a second to recover.  Twilight brought her mage’s blade around and wedged it deep into the crack near Sombra’s other leg. She gave a savage wrench of the blade and was gratified to see the crack widen. They needed one more pony to strike.  Dash was spent, and even as they fought she sank to the ground.  If Sim’s concentration dropped for even an instant, its wall would break and the honor guard would be on them.  Twilight was on the verge of ordering Rarity to drop her disguise, abandon the crusaders, and strike the needed blow. Instead, Applejack came rocketing back around.  There was blood flowing freely from the inside of the helmet, and Twilight would have been shocked if she didn’t have a terrible concussion.  But the earth pony was nothing if not stubborn, and she ran with all the force her weight could muster. Applejack crashed head first into the sphere right next to the spear into Sombra’s side.  It was too much, even for a shield conjured with all of Sombra’s strength. As Applejack sank to the ground, her body spent, the sphere crumbled into dust. At last, Sombra was revealed and the walls of moonlight still held. A fierce grin spread across Twilight’s face.  “Sombra’s mine now. You hold. For as long as you can, you hold!” Not waiting to hear their response she dove forwards, wings pumping as fast as they could.  He fired blast after blast at her, but she brought her mage’s blade around each time and cut them away. His face contorted in a hideous snarl as she reached him.  On the wings that drove his jealousy she floated there, face to face and eye to eye.  She wrapped one hoof around his head and wrenched it forward until they were almost muzzle to muzzle.  Their horns crossed and Twilight’s magic flared. Sombra and Twilight were pulled together into a shared mindscape, one oh so similar in type to the space Twilight had recently shared with Celestia. *** The clash of steel on steel, the cries of pain, the smell of spilled blood, all faded away.  A profound silence fell as the place in which Twilight and Sombra stood became wholly other. Around them stretched a vast plain.  In place of swaying grass, waves of darkness flowed beneath them off to the horizon. There were no other features of the space, nothing for the eye to fix upon nor any obvious light source.  Just the unending waves of darkness and the minds of two ponies determined to destroy one another. Twilight’s armor was gone, and even her mage’s blade felt distant.  It was a mental space, not a physical one, and that meant there were no tools to use or friends to rely on.  By the desolate look of the place, Sombra had long since taken the measure of his own mind and come to terms with his own darkness.  That was useful to know, but it made the prospect of fighting him here all the more frightening. Sombra’s snarl had faded and he was laughing again.  “And I thought you had some clever plan. You think you have a chance here?  In a shared mindscape? It seems I overestimated you, Twilight. You claimed to know the spell I first used for enslavement.  You should have guessed that for every pony I enslaved I had to subdue their mind in a place much like this. I am the greatest mental mage the world has ever known.  And you chose to challenge me here? Ha!” Twilight listened with only half an ear.  His strength and familiarity with this place was an unpleasant surprise, to be sure, but it shouldn’t truly matter.  She had a plan, and for that plan to work she needed his magical signature. The memories of his foalhood which she had gained in Hvergelmir formed the basis of it, but it would have changed in the years since.  She could not afford to make Celestia’s mistake and tie her spells to an obsolete signature. “It seems fitting that it would come down to the two of us,” Twilight said, playing for the time she needed to investigate the mindscape.  Already she was comparing it with the memories she had, triangulated how it must have changed over the centuries of rule and imprisonment. “It is indeed,” Sombra said ponderously.  He continued speaking, something about destiny she thought, but Twilight didn’t bother paying any heed to the monologue.  Pieces were falling into place, like tumblers in a lock, but not fast enough. Nor was she subtle enough.  Twilight had thought she’d pasted on her face an appropriate expression of trepidation and attention, but Sombra must have seen through it.  With no transition from speech to action, he launched his first attack. The shadowy plain doubled up on itself in a wave of gigantic proportions.  It was would have dwarfed even the crystal spire at its peak. As it crested high above Twilight she was forced to spend some precious attention avoiding it.  Twilight flapped desperately, flying upwards and backwards to avoid the wave as it came crashing down. It was a close thing, and flecks of the darkness peppered her coat as the waved frothed and crashed just below her hooves. From the fallen wave tendrils of darkness rose, seeking to drag her under.  Twilight reached for her magic even as she fled. She meant to make a barrage of light to counter the seeking darkness, but her magic wouldn’t come to her. “No magic here, Twilight,” Sombra called with amusement as he watched her flee.  “My ocean of darkness devours the energy before you can even begin to shape it. You can find no victory here.” It was true.  Twilight found even the simplest of spells beyond her reach.  She could feel her mage’s blade at least, it was too closely tied to her mental and emotional state to be completely suppressed.  But she lacked any ability to summon the energy needed to make it manifest. Even her heart’s fury couldn’t empower her against that endless expanse. Bereft of magic and earth to stand upon, Twilight was left only with the skills of a pegasus.  She spun and dodged among Sombra’s grasping tendrils, relying on Celestia’s instincts honed by centuries of flight.  She spiraled downward, avoiding a seeking thread and swooped to the left just as a wave sought to hem her in. All the while her mind worked feverishly at analyzing the surrounding mindscape. Had she been an ordinary pony there would have been no hope of succeeding.  There were too many ways in which a pony could fall, and without magic she would never have been able to guess at the precise consequences of each type.  Twilight, however, was a gestalt of all the memories of the crystal ponies and she knew the intimate details of their lives and their magical signatures. She could compare the grey of the sky above to the way the sky had looked to a hundred depressed ponies.  The shadows that sought her reminded so many of the shadows they’d found in depths of a mug or the empty alleyways of an uncaring city. Twilight mined the misery of her memories and put it to use.  She could feel as she got closer. Each added bit of precision to the signature she held in her mind resonated with the world around her and even Sombra himself, though he did not seem to feel it.  If she could just flee from his grasp for long enough to find that one perfect resonance that would cut through his defenses. And then, quite suddenly, there was no more time.  She had made a misstep in the delicate dance between contemplation and frantic flight.  A lucky tendril grabbed her hind hoof and that was that. She flapped desperately, but hopelessly.  Without magic there was no way to cut through the darkness. Thin though it was, that tendril was a death sentence.  It instantly crept upward, engulfing her entire leg. She writhed in its grasp and even tried to stab through it with her horn.  To no avail. Implacably, it reeled her in, pulling her near to the ground and to Sombra. “Really,” he called, coming closer to see his vanquished foe, “what were you thinking?” Twilight had no choice but to use what she had.  It wasn’t perfect, but it was closer than she had any right to be.  She took her best guest at Sombra’s magical signature and threw it into the spell she’d prepared, the only one she could imagine that had a chance of working in the mindscape.  But it needed one more thing, eye contact, and she was currently held upside down and backwards. That could not be permitted to stop her.  Twilight wrenched herself sideways and gained just enough range of motion that she could look straight at Sombra.  Her right eye, the eye she had lost and that had been replaced by a piece of the sun, met his green and red glare. Buried deep within her socket was an ember of the mantle of the sun.  It was a part of her, and it had come with her when all other magic was blocked. Knowing it was her last hope, she had kept it hidden, encouraged Sombra to forget what he had seen when they fought in the real world.  Now it was unveiled. For the first time in millennia there was sunlight in Sombra’s mind. The mere sight of it transfixed him.  A moment later, the spell tied to that eye and targeted with Twilight’s best guess at his magical signature fired.  A visible beam of sunlight shot forward and grasped him with its light. It was a stark thing, the single ray of sunlight in that place of endless shadow.  It was not beautiful, or peaceful, and it did not have the strength to bring the cleansing fire.  The shadows loomed all the larger around that thin beam of light connecting Sombra and Twilight. Almost, they managed to extinguish it entirely. Almost. Twilight’s guess had been close enough.  Though Sombra would have dearly liked to have broken the beam or turned it aside, it was tied too precisely to his signature for him to break or for the darkness of that place to snuff it out.  It could not destroy him, or even hurt him, but it asserted its defiance nonetheless, and for the moment he was held back. So long as the light held him, Sombra could not control the darkness with the same precision he had previously displayed.  The shadow wrapped around Twilight’s leg wavered and she slipped free, never dropping her gaze. “I did not come to challenge you here,” she said, drawing slowly nearer to him.  “I came to give you a gift.” “What are you thinking?” he asked again, but now there was fear in his voice.  His muscles tensed and flexed beneath his coat, but this was a place of the mind and his mind was pinned.  “No, stay back. No!” His flailing caused waves of darkness to crest and crashed around them, but so long as Twilight’s ember of the sun held his eye, there was a space of calmness which his darkness could not touch. “Luna wrapped you in sunlight and it made you strong even as it tortured you.”  Twilight floated before him again, in a mirror of their positions in the real world.  “She didn’t dig deep enough to rout out your darkness and so she ended up strengthening your shadow.”  A fell light burned even in her mortal eye, and in the other the sun blazed. “I won’t make that mistake.” Sombra tried for his trademark equanimity.  “You have indeed caught me, for now, but look around you.”  He gestured broadly at the dark ocean that surrounded them. “Do you really think your little ray of light can purge all of this?  Or that you can hold me once my connection to my subjects is restored? No, I can afford to be patient. My darkness will triumph in the end.  You simply don’t have enough light.” Twilight did not waiver in the face of his derision.  “Don’t I? I told you I came to give you a gift. I bequeath to you now the mantle of the sun!” Spreading her limbs wide, Twilight let the amber chains of dusk shoot forth from her legs and wings, stabbing deep into Sombra just as the spears of light had done.  He screamed. Long and loud and the mindscape trembled with it. Twilight reveled in the sound and, though she might have wished to think that that revelry in another’s suffering came from her borrowed memories, she knew it was purely hers, bought and paid for. Slowly, the golden orb emerged from Twilight’s chest.  Though she remembered knowing it well, the mantle of the sun had been hers for such a short time that it did not hurt her to let it go.  Somewhere deep inside, though, Celestia was screaming. That scream was matched by the sheer hatred of the mantle for the being Twilight sought to make its new host.  And the new host himself certainly did not want to accept it either. But Twilight’s will was the only one that mattered now.  Celestia was no more than the ghost of a memory. The mantle of the sun was powerful, yes, but it was meant to yield to ponies and yield it did.  Sombra, for his part, fought the gift with everything he had, but so long as the ray of light from Twilight’s eye transfixed him, his will could not overpower hers. And so progress was slow, but progress was made.  The orb inched forward moment by moment until it left Twilight’s body entirely and began its steady way toward Sombra.  He redoubled his efforts, wrenching painfully at the chains and the eye that bound him. He turned his fearsome will against the orb, trying to force it back.  The darkness outside frothed like a tempest and wave after wave crashed against their little space of calm, trying to tarnish the light. It failed. Whenever he came close, Twilight’s will was there to push him down once again.  She could not have done it alone, that much was sure. There was no pony that could have fairly stood against him, will against will or magic against magic, neither in the real world nor in the mindscape.  But the sun cared little for his will or his supposed might. An eternity later, or so it seemed, the thinnest edge of the orb brushed against Sombra’s grey coat, just above his heart.  At once, Sombra’s screaming cut off and he fixed such a lucid gaze on Twilight that she feared she’d been tricked. “No, no, Twilight,” he said, “it still hurts.  But I have borne great pain for longer than I can say and I can bear it a little longer to offer up my last words.” Twilight grit her teeth and redoubled her effort, drawing a gasp from Sombra as the orb thrust a little deeper.  “No. No last words. No dramatic farewell. You have nothing to offer the world and when you are nothing but a burnt cinder everything be the better for it.” “Come now, Twilight.  Surely you acknowledge my skill with magic and my– “ “No!” Twilight cried and with a last furious effort she thrust the golden orb that was the mantle of the sun deep into the essence of Sombra’s being.  Like a lit match to gasoline his whole being blazed out light and his mind was shattered in the midst of it. As the sunlight bridged the gap to the ocean of darkness below, that too went up in flames. The sun burned its way through the ocean of darkness.  A white light, so bright and pure that even Twilight could not look at it covered the plain entirely, and Twilight felt herself engulfed in the unleashed power of the sun. *** Luna and her moon-blessed soldiers sang.  She could not have said for how long. After the manner of dreams it could have been mere moments or a lifetime.  All she knew, all that they all knew, was that they had to endure until something changed. Luna was the first to have some inkling that something had in fact changed.  Gazing into the heart of the shadow the soldiers surrounded, she saw the faintest glimmer of light.  A brief sparkle, so fast she might have blinked it away like the first shimmer of the evening star. And like that evening star, when she looked again it shone all the brighter.  Clear enough now that the other soldiers could see it. They were disciplined and they did not lose focus, though a hopeful melody was now threaded throughout the music.  In a sudden blossoming that hope was rewarded. Light. A light inimical to the very fabric of the Dreaming, burning it away as morning’s first light burns away the night’s dreams.  It pained Luna to see the Dreaming treated so, but if the Dreaming could not bear the light, then neither could the darkness. The light fountained out and filled the space the moon-blessed contained in an instant, burning until the darkness was no more.  Then it turned its rage against their barrier itself, furious at anything that dared contain it. As hard as Luna looked, she could no longer see the faintest trace of the darkness they had contained, so she gave the order. “Enough!  Enough my brave soldiers!  We have done what needed doing.  Now rest your weary voices and minds.”  With a great sigh of relief, the soldiers stopped their singing and dropped the barrier dividing what had once been Sombra from his network.  Many dropped to the floor from sheer exhaustion, but Luna found herself buoyed up by a need to see this ending. Once the barrier dropped the darkness of Sombra’s network rushed in.  It sought to reconnect with Sombra and it recoiled at finding only light in his place.  For a moment, Luna feared that the oncoming darkness would douse this sudden and unexpected light.  But no, no she knew that light and she knew it would not, could not fall to something as fragile as that. The filaments of shadow were made incandescent by the energy of that light, searing along the paths of those connections through the Dreaming.  The darkness had carved the channels, but now the light poured through them like molten metal and the Dreaming would never be the same. Dimly, Luna could feel that the part of her still connected to the Dreaming was screaming as its flesh was branded by the light flowing through the network. Had she still been master of the Dreaming, Luna was not certain she’d still be conscious.  Indeed, many of her soldiers had given way after being asked for far too much. It was worth it though.  For all the pain it was causing and damage it was doing to the Dreaming, this light was not an enemy and it was driving out Sombra’s taint. Driven by a need to see the process through to the end, Luna took to the air, racing the sun to the outside.  The sunlight picked up speed as it went, burning though the shadow threads faster and faster, and leaving a glittering web of light in its place.  Luna hardly dared think what the lingering light might mean, especially if, as she suspected, that light was a permanent addition to the Dreaming. Darting around corners and using her legs to push off of walls, Luna came out of the narrow corridor into a rotunda from which two other corridors opened.  There was a long staircase spiraling up the edges and hoofprints she recognized as her own pressed into the cracked rock at the center. Once again she had no time to climb the interminable stairs.  Fitting her hooves to her hoofprints from the night when it had all begun, she pushed off and shot upward.  The long ascent passed in a blur and before Luna realized it she was through the wooden door and out into the open air of the Dreaming. The light had spread even further.  From her spot at the base of the crystal spire she could see little flare ups from when the sunlight encountered clusters of Sombra’s slaves.  Driving her wings on, Luna ascended past the top of the spire, desperate to see everything the light would do. In the real world her vision would be limited by the horizon, but this was the Dreaming and what could be imagined became what was.  Thus, Luna ascended high enough that she could look out across the whole of Equestria and see that the light had not halted in its spread.  Every trace of Sombra’s darkness was rooted out and in its place there came these gleaming connections of sunlight. Darkness lifted at last and the sun rose over Equestria.  No, not over. The sun rose in the very heart of every Equestrian citizen.