//------------------------------//
// (Past Chapter 7): Wrath of the Gods: Part 2 
// Story: The Unique Properties of Dark Magic 
// by Shadestyle 
//------------------------------//

Less than one hundred meters from the Crystal Empire's borders, a patch of snow hisses loudly, opening to reveal a hidden tunnel, containing rails and a Minecart filled with bright cyan cubes made of some sort of crystal, and filled with a glowing, purple fluid.  The amount of them is staggering, though their size is as small as a single hoof.  Behind that Minecart, there are twelve others.  These minecarts all contain either bottles of scorpion blood, or fake corpses.

"Alright everypony in Team Alpha, you know your jobs.  Scatter the corpses and blood around the city, then find the houses or streets you were assigned and inform the inhabitants of what is to come.  Any who are unwilling to leave their homes at the assigned time, you may attempt to convince them, but you must leave when the operation timer goes off.  Keep radio silence where possible, and be prepared for this plan to go to pot," I say, tension flooding my body as I hand out orders, which the military captains all give and repeat as well, ensuring that all my troops understand.

As they all begin their part of my plan, I turn to the second group.

"Team Beta, your job is clear.  Distribute the Cubes to every street where evacuations are planned, even distribution, then join Team Alpha in preparing houses for the escape."

The final Minecart contains my backup plan.  If, somehow, everything else fails, a gigantic robot crab is a good second option.

Iron Diamond approaches me as I watch everyone get into position and wait for my signal.  "Sir, I strongly suggest you return to the Shadow Realm to command those things.  It won't be safe to do it here."

I shake my head.  "I'm hidden enough here.  I'm going to see how this plays out.  I refuse to be somewhere where I can't help if things go wrong."

Iron Diamond almost looks, dare I say it, possessed with an iota of respect, before he himself silently joins Team Alpha in distributing the fake bodies around the streets, and propping them up against walls and structures.

Occasionally, a pony will throw a bottle of the scorpion blood at one of the bodies or simply on the ground and buildings, making it look as though something quite horrific had occurred.

By the end of it, A good chunk of the Crystal Empire looks exactly as I envisioned it.  A God Damn Warzone.

My radio crackles.  "Shadow approaching Sector Forty-Five, no unusual activity detected."

"Alright, let's ride or die,"  I say to myself.





Iron Diamond knocks on a door, and a kindly old mare opens it, looking at him with a weary expression.

"Yes Mr. Soldier?  How may I help you?" She says with resignation.

"My name is Iron Diamond, I'm here to prepare you for evacuation from the Crystal Empire.  This is your chance to escape, if you would follow me inside so I may explain,"  He recites.

She spots the havoc outside, and her eyes widen.  "Oh my word, what is all of that?"

Iron responds accordingly.  "Fakes, M'am.  When Sombra comes looking, he'll think that all the escapees died."

His words give the old mare pause, as she visibly rolls the idea around in her head.  "He won't hunt us down?"

Iron nods.  "He won't even know you're gone until it's too late."

She smiles fondly, turning around as she shakes slightly from age.  "Boys! Come down to the livingroom, there's a nice stallion here to help us!"

Several small colts stumble down the stairs, bleary eyed and tired from being awoken.  Between them, an even smaller filly rubs her face to get the sleep out of it.

When Iron repeats his explanation, any thoughts of sleep are instantly banished from the children's minds, and they all smile brighter than the sun.

'This has to work.' Iron thinks to himself at the sight of that, not properly putting a thought to the reasons why that is as he maintains a stoic demeanor in front of the adorable children.

"Alright, everypony.  Here is how this has to work.  Right now, I'm waiting on a message from my superior, we all need to stay inside until I get that message, and when I get it, you'll all follow me to the evacuation point, ignore anything you see on the way there, because we need to move quickly when that happens.  Can you all do that for me?"

The children nod dutifully.

'It just has to.'





"Sombra has reached Sector Fifty," My radio sputters simply.

With that said, and our tests of his maximum speed confirmed through past instances of provoking and observing him, the window is now open.

"All Teams, maintain radio silence.  Begin the evacuation.  We have one hour,"  I state into my radio crystal.

After that, I cast a spell which turns my radio purple in color, and attunes it to my golems.

I begin speaking the activation phrase into the crystal, communicating it to all of the cubes.  

"All warfare is based on deception."

Across the Crystal Empire, the glowing blue cubes tilt up onto one corner, pulsing with light.

"Hence, when we are able to attack, we must seem unable."

At the second activation phrase, the cubes begin lazily spinning in place, pulsing faster than they did before.

"When using our forces, we must appear inactive."

The cubes begin to spin faster, picking up in velocity, until they're humming slightly, and look more like cones.  An enchantment activating inside them projects an illusion, shaped like a wriggling white grub, covered in small crystal barbs.  Insubstantial, but visually beyond the range of ordinary illusion magic.

"When we are near, we must make the enemy believe we are far away."

Inside the cubes, pressure builds up as a small amount of additional fluid is grown inside of their internal chambers, bubbles begin to form as the liquid attempts to turn into steam from the added pressure.

By this point, everyone but Weiss himself has made their way into the secret tunnel just outside of the Empire, where the masses of ponies are all shuffled onto the underground train parked there.  An ominous feeling approaches rapidly, as Weiss shuffles into the tunnel's entrance and waves the train away, leaving nothing but him and his machinery in the secret hideaway.

"When far away, we must make him believe we are near.  Activate Project Crystal Shrimp."

With the final phrase said, one of the cubes hops in place, before a pulse of force throws the cube towards an empty building, and, using Crystal Growth Magic bound in its enchanted fields, it grows crystals inside the walls of the building to make it crack and crash apart, as though a meteor had smashed into it.

The cube bounces to the ground, unharmed, and it, alongside its other brethren, begin fulfilling their own role in utterly obliterating the empty buildings that were left behind by the evacuees.  The swath of raw destruction complimenting the fake bodies and blood left on the streets.

In every sense of the word, the illusion is one of a swarm of horrific, crystalline monsters, attacking the Crystal Empire.





Sombra unleashes wave after wave of magical slashes into the landscape below him, his teeth grit so hard that it drives him into his incorporeal form once or twice at his failure to worm out anything.  Thus far, he has been in the dark almost entirely, regarding who, or what is responsible for the Empire's population rapidly decreasing over the past months.

Heaving his breaths out in a cloud of black smoke and white haze in the cold as he floats in the air, Sombra decides to try casting his suite of detection spells, his horn flaring with dark magic as he goes through every single one of them.

"Where... Where!" He howls, as the last spell returns one simple fact to him, just like all the rest.

"Nothing Unusual Nearby", the spell informs him uselessly, in its own, nonverbal manner.

"I will find you, you foolish little ponies, do you hear me?  You cannot hide from the inevitable forever!" The dark pony roars, shaking the land with the power of his magically enhanced voice.

Taking several deep breaths, Sombra slowly regains his composure, and chuckles.

"There's really no need for me to get all worked up like this.  If I must scour every inch of this blasted wasteland, I'll dig up where my little ponies are hiding."

"And then, I will break them.  Defiance like this should have already been stomped out of them.  Their little vacation will be quite the setback for the breaking of their spirits."

"I'll have to come up with something very special, to make up for lost time on that front,"  He mutters to himself, scanning over the endless expanse of white snow, as though he'll find anything more this time than he has the last ten times he's scoured the land around the Empire.

It's been extraordinarily difficult, hiding his energy from the Royal Sisters during his outings, without the spells he has uniquely developed to thwart their own sensory magic, they could probably sniff him out in moments.

It will all be worth it, though, when he can quietly shuffle his escaped slaves right back into their prison.

Sombra's imaginings are interrupted, when he suddenly feels countless alarms going off in his mind, as though, all at once, wide swathes of the ponies still trapped in the Crystal Empire had all disappeared from their homes in rapid succession.

Sombra turns in the air and blasts towards the empire at his fullest speed.  'Oh, that's pleasant.  A nice diversion to take my mind off this nasty business.  I'll pop over, quell whatever insurrection this is, and then personally interrogate the fools who thought that I wouldn't notice them scurrying underhoof.'

As he arrives though, his suspicions change, as he spies fires, explosions, and the utter chaos that has splattered over the city, blood and bodies littering the streets, many of which have been pulped or crushed by the falling debris of houses.

Scattered among this destruction, Sombra spots the cause.  Strange, glittering objects that leap about like gnats, smashing into things with what seems to be a speed so potent that it breaks through even the reinforced crystal walls of the buildings they crash into.

'Not a mass-escape, then, but an infestation!' Sombra thinks in shock, flying down to destroy these monsters before they can kill any more of his slaves.

He crashes into a wide clearing in the town, where a fountain used to pour out glittering water everywhere, now a crater filled with some ice and slush.

Sombra prepares his own crystal infestation spell, but before he can, one of the gnats leaps into his face, and with a vicious spinning impact to his face, forces him into his incorporeal form.

With a growl, Sombra reforms elsewhere, only for two more of the beasts to again leap towards him, this time crashing into his body with the force of arrows, and throwing him back into his cloudy form again.

Snarling with frustration, Sombra flies high into the air, and reforms once more, creating a gigantic slab of black rock beneath his hooves that he crashes into the ground with, crushing several of the beasts and causing the slab to crack as they explode underneath it with a series of deafening pops.

This time, when a swarm of them attack him from all angles, he is ready, and unleashes a wave of dark magic, which causes the diamond gnats to suddenly be overwhelmed with black crystals, growing forth from their bodies and encasing them entirely.

Sombra's smug expression shatters as quickly as the crystals do, when he detects a sour blend of hatred and greed from the little gnats, and his crystals suddenly rupture as internal forces break them apart.

Confused, and angrier than before, Sombra takes to the skies before the newly freed creatures can assault him again and drain more of his magic by forcing him to revert to smoke.

Cautious and mindful of their maximum jumping distance, Sombra snatches one in his levitation, bringing it up to his face in a firm grip.  Now that he's seeing it up close, this is no flesh and blood creature, but some sort of gem beast, surrounded in a wriggling grub made of light magic.  He forces his mind into the cube that makes up the beast's core, but finds himself unable to alter its mind, as it is too overwhelmed with hatred.

Confused at why the hate in a mere insect would be sufficient to keep him out, Sombra is unprepared when, with a crickle of glass, the cube suddenly hisses at him, before exploding in a haze of purple mist and glittering cyan shrapnel.





As I watch Sombra battle my little tricky golems through my binoculars, It feels like I'm looking into a mirror, or at least, like I'm looking back from one.  Sombra's magical skills immediately stand out as everything I was afraid of, deadly, fast, skilled, and, unsurprisingly, packed with raw power that I just can't match.

When I spot him actually grab one of the golems to examine it, I immediately bark into my control crystal.  "One-Closest-to-target, Vile Hatred, Detonate."

With that said, the golem mass communicates between themselves rapidly, deciding that the one Sombra is holding is the one that I had commanded to do that, and thus, making it immediately channel all of its remaining magical power into growing royal ice inside of itself, building the internal pressure up so vastly that it detonates in an explosion of steam, and leaving no trace that Sombra could use to reverse engineer the spellwork.

It also riddles him with a literal pressure-cooker-esque bomb's worth of diamond fragments and blistering steam.

Seeing that Sombra has started acclimating to the golem's default tactics, and is hanging around higher than their ordinary jump-ceiling, I speak into the control crystal again.  "Fifty-Percent-Random, Allyoop-One-Target."

With this, roughly half of the golems, chosen randomly among the remaining active golems, pair together and launch into the air, using one another as footstools to leap twice as high as they would normally be able to, and reaching Sombra yet again.

Oh yeah, that's pissing him off alright.

I spot him charging up something big and powered by some sort of fear energy, which actually manages to push back the golems just from the raw force he's putting out.

Time to switch tactics, if he's just going to stall like that.  "Eighty-Percent, Beta-Tactics.  Excluded-Percent, Gamma-Distraction."

With that, eighty percent of the golems turn red, and begin using sustained Prestidigitation charms to power through his kiai wave, while the remainder begin to beeline it to the fake corpses, crashing into them before visibly decreasing the amount of magical energy they're holding back.





Sombra roars with anger as he uses the energy taken from his ritual to boost his magic to staggering heights, enough to easily push away these cretins.  Breathing room obtained, Sombra has just enough time to realize with some small panic that the creatures are now moving towards the corpses, and, embedding themselves in the dead ponies, he can sense their power increasing the moment they touch the lifeless cadavers.

'They're draining energy from the bodies.'  Sombra concludes from the sight.

"The only one who can draw power from my slaves is me!" He roars with madness in his eyes as he flies down towards them like a meteor, ignoring the gnats that, having changed color, are now flying towards him like cannonballs, exploding on him and turning parts of his body to smoke.

As filled with rage as he is now, however, he couldn't care less, and, smashing into the ground while maintaining his force emission spell, begins weaving a second spell on top of it.

"Submit!"  The mad king screams to the heavens, his body exploding with dark energy that turns the surrounding area into a forest of black crystals, stronger and thicker than the crystals he attempted to encase the shrimp in previously.

One thing he fails to notice in his demonic fury, is that each of the diamond grubs explodes moments before his mind controlling crystals can touch them.

Panting from the exertion, he looks around at the remaining intact houses, and chuckles to himself, brushing his chest off with a hoof dismissively.

"I suppose I should deign to dig the slaves out before they suffocate.  Perhaps the sight of what happens without my gracious protection will cow these disgusting slaves into proper subservience."

Spotting one of the larger chunks of diamond left over from the strange beasts, still possessing its wriggling, malformed light-body, Sombra walks over to it, and, with a cold sneer, crushes it beneath his hoof like a plastic cup.

He had won.





I have won.

With a sigh of relief, I clamp down on my hammering heart and watch Sombra stalk over to one of the buildings to pry it open, beginning the slow methodical work of cleaning up his own mess.

At this point, even if Sombra instantly realized the deception, it's too late for him to do anything about it.  By now, the train carrying the escaped citizens has already reached the newly built Angel Island Zone.

Grinning to myself, I can't help but feel proud of what I've done today as I get into the Minecart with my unused Heavy Lobster Mecha, and set it to travel back to the Shadow Realm, a switch flipped beforehand making the tunnel collapse behind me as though it had never existed.

I wonder if this makes me some kind of hero?





"He's a monster!"  Celestia shouts, pounding at the dark barrier that prevents them from simply savaging Sombra in an instant, a barrier they had been trying on-and-off to shatter for over a week.

As soon as Celestia and Luna had sensed the powerful dark magic boiling inside the Kingdom's borders, they had rushed over as soon as they could to investigate, only to see and sense a true nightmare.

As they stared in naked horror at the city, they saw that whoever had been responsible for this had slaughtered countless crystal ponies with their twisted monsters, leaving bodies scattered in the streets, and ruin in their wake.  And, without a shadow of a doubt, Celestia and Luna knew that someone was responsible for this.

Where Sombra had grown nose-blind to dark magic in his years of practicing it, the Royal Sisters had instead honed their ability to sense evil magic to the finest point possible, and its very own perpetrator had been so close they could taste it, their only salvation in that exact instant being their proximity to the Crystal Empire's foul aura muddying their location.  The unique sensation of a pony giving in to the undilute powers of darkness practically basted their twisted creations as the Sisters had been forced to watch Sombra save the Empire from them for his own twisted ends, helpless to do anything themselves from the border of the dark barrier.

Luna, ever the voice of reason for her hot-blooded sister, puts a hoof on her shoulder, attempting to calm her elder sibling.

"We will not allow this to go unavenged," She says, her own fury a vast ocean beneath the depths of her calm exterior.

Celestia snarls, her face wrinkling with the promise of violence unlike any that Equestria had witnessed before.  "We should not have allowed it to go unhalted!"  She growls.

Luna's eyes meet her sisters, and they both gaze to the side, where the energies of this new Dark Mage had flown away at incredible speed.

"But we will not let it go unavenged," Luna states with a resolve more rigid than lunar stone.





"Woo!" I shout, giggling as they haul in a throne.  I swear I told them not to make a damn throne, it's super egotistical, but the mood is way too nice for me to tell those little pouting faces "no" when they were so insistent on it.

Food, drink, and laughter flow around the room like water, as ponies desperately cheer and embrace one another across the entire Shadow Realm.

Turns out, when you free a large enough portion of the population, it results in a lot of heartfelt reunions.  Who knew?

Oh, Goodie!  My little student is here too.

I trot over to her, intent on getting her take from all of this.

"I greet you Eclipse Flash.  Have you opened your Heart to the Darkness yet?" I say, laughing maniacally.

She glares back defiantly, but even I can tell it's a bit halfhearted, as she had been talking to her cousin, who was one of the ponies in this batch of newcomers.  "I'll never let your foul evil turn me from my just cause, Weiss," She says melodramatically.

I definitely do not giggle at that as I leave her be, and prepare to walk off.

"Wait, wait,"  She says, making me pause.

"I'm still going to reveal your evil plans to everypony as soon as I figure them out... But."

She looks a bit overwhelmed at all the new ponies, at least a few of which are among friends and family of hers.

"Thank you for including us in them."

Did my heart just skip a beat?  Whatever, I'm not some edgy tsundere.  I can take a bit of praise without shelling up and acting aloof.

"Sounds like someone just learned a Foeship Lesson.  I'll expect your report within the week, my most traitorous student,"  I smile, walking over to the snack table.

As I grab for some crystal cheese sticks, I find myself lifted up by a mob and dragged over to my hastily assembled throne against my will.  I feel there's a metaphor to be made here, but for the life of me, I can't find it.

Priss pops out of the crowd, and I can instantly sense from the expression on her face that she's about to say something hilarious or infuriating.  There is no in-between with that filly.

"All hail Weiss Noir, the Darkest Lord!  His Only-Vaguely-Sinisterness! The Least-Evil!  Hail!" She shouts sarcastically, prompting the crowd to start shouting it unironically.

I laugh with an embarrassed flush overtaking my face, but slowly, something tickles at the edge of my mind, like some detail I'm not noticing, but that I really should be.

And then the ceiling explodes up and outwards in a haze of gold, sending ponies screaming everywhere, and running for safety in the tunnels.

Despite the danger, I can't leave now.  Not because of bravery, or some sort of sense of duty.  

It's fear.

I know it before I see it, in the middle of the dust that's being rapidly cleared away with magic, the two Royal Diarchs of Equestria.

"Dost thine eyes see, Celestia?  We had told thou that it was beneath the earth," I hear.

"So thou didst Luna,"  She says, eyes scanning around the mostly empty, once-jovial room until they land on me.

Even though my every instinct from my mind down to my soul is screaming at me to run, to hide!  I can't even breathe, her presence is too much.  It's like looking directly into the sun.

No, that's not correct.  It's like being inside of the sun, with the star's full weight crushing me where I sit.  Her fire is too much.

"O-oh Christ," I force out, as she takes a step forward.

She pauses at my words, but shrugs off my exclamation, taking another step forward.  "We hope thou hast obtained all thou dost desire from this life, for thou willst lead it freely no longer," She says grimly, lifting me up and tossing me almost playfully into a wall, cracking the wall, and turning my side into a mess of bruises and my face into a mess of broken teeth.

"We will find the deepest, darkest pit that exists within Equestria, and we will throw thou in it.  But first..."  She trails off, as her glowing, aurorial mane briefly dims before it explodes into a maelstrom of ungodly light.

"We will deepen it!"  She bellows, shaking the foundations of the Shadow Realm as her mane catches ablaze.

And thou wouldst be lucky to experience such, if thou dost not force us to end thy life here and now.

I struggle against my bone-deep pain and that mind-consuming fear that won't leave my heart, I have to do something, anything at all to stop her, or stall her somehow.

It feels like she'll kill me in an instant if I so much as twitch, in spite of that, I force myself to speak.  "Why?"

Her sister winces at this, as if knowing what's about to come next.

Her lips turn up in a bestial snarl.

"Why?  What a foalish question.  Thou darest ask us why, when we bore witness to thine carnage this day?  When we smell the blood on thy hooves as surely as we smell the hatred in thy heart?"

As she grabs my neck and drags me up onto the wall with her hoof, I blankly note that apparently, that does happen outside of movies.

I choke my words out as quickly as I can.  "Fakes!  The bodies... fakes!  Scorpion meat, fake fur."

"I swear to God they're not dead!" My voice trembles as the pressure increases on my throat.

She swings around, throwing me into a table in the middle of the room with disgust, as though the act of continuing to touch me, even to crush my windpipe, was something she could no longer condone.

"What boldfaced lies the monsters of this era weave.  We believe this pitiable attempt at deception pushes thy crimes beyond what can be tolerated, even among the imprisoned."

Luna watches blankly with an indecipherable expression as Celestia's horn alights in life-ending solar armageddon.

As I stare down the barrel, the soft pitter-patter of hooves halts everyone involved.

'What are you doing, Eclipse?  You need to get out of here.' I think slowly.  A bit slower than I normally think.

She speaks up, looking at her with nothing short of youthful will.  "Stop!  You can't prove he did anything wrong!"  She shouts.

Something bubbles up inside me.

Celestia glares down at the filly standing between me and her.

"Child, thou willst not intervene in the matters of royalty,"  Celestia says, her horn still glowing.

She shakes her head.  "You don't have the right!  Until you can prove that he did something wrong, prove it to the ponies, you can't hurt Lord Weiss!"

"Anything less would make you a monster," She says, as I somehow stumble to my hooves, looking down at my apparently Loyal Opposition in shock.

Celestia's face holds the barest trace of mercy and hesitation, but both me and Eclipse notice it pop in the exact same instant, like a soap bubble in the noon-day sun.

My perception leads me to believe that in that moment, time had almost slowed down.  

I can't help but wonder incredulously if Celestia knows that she can snipe me without hurting Eclipse, or if she simply deemed it a worthwhile risk to attempt it anyway.  As I stare at the beam of evil erasure trailing its way through the divide between us, its trajectory aimed to slip over Eclipse Flash's head, and plow directly into mine, I realize that such pondering isn't helpful right now, and summon up what bare scraps of strength remain in me, to shield Eclipse from the worst of the fallout.

Time resumes in a split second, as Eclipse's entire body ignites even faster than my horn can begin to spark, and a magical surge overtakes her.  Before my eyes, I see it, not the pillar of black fire, frozen inside the invincible pillars of crystal that stand as a bulwark between us and Celestia, and had absorbed her magic attack completely, but on Eclipse's flank, where in a shower of sparks, a Cutie Mark had appeared.

A large, red and yellow diamond, partially eclipsing a black, flaming sun, with rays of rainbow colored light spraying outward from the glittering circular gemstone.

Celestia looks to be completely without words, and, to be honest, so am I.

Eclipse looks tired, but her will hasn't changed.

"You need to leave this place," Eclipse says to the royal diarchs, as Luna looks me directly in the eyes and approaches Celestia's side.

"Sister, we believe he may be telling the truth.  There exists no shadow within which he could hide his true nature from our power.  His soul remains unstained with death, however blackened it may be with dark magic."

Celestia gives her sister a hard glance in response, before a snort escapes her nostrils.

"Very well," she says, turning her glare to me.  By this point, for reasons I don't understand, her previously overwhelming presence is now unable to affect me, and I meet her gaze evenly as she speaks.

"We will return, when we have pondered longer what fate will become thine."

And with that, the duo flap their wings, and shoot off into the night sky.

I'll have to reward my ponies for getting the hell out like the procedures clearly stated.  If anyone managed to suddenly turn a room into a warzone, the plan had always been for everyone to run like hell.

Although I suppose, if Eclipse hadn't disobeyed that order, I'd be dead right now.

Speaking of which, she seems to be pretty unsteady on her feet.  I walk over to her, ignoring the dull ache that covers my entire left side to help her stay upright with a bit of levitation.

"Come on kid, let's get you to a bed.  We're burning perfectly good moonlight here," I say softly, and guide the drowsy, magically exhausted pony to the evacuation minecarts, where ponies are already guiding the uninitiated newcomers through the re-homing procedures, since Celestia and Luna basically announced the location of the Hidden Palace Zone to the entire world.

She falls asleep mid-trip.

A few days later, the new and improved Hidden Palace Zone is rebuilt in a new, hidden location, as it should be, and the Hatesink is moved there accordingly.

Priss told them to make the throne and throne room bigger without my say in the matter, and they actually did it, the mad-ponies.  It might have pissed me off, but it's certainly a good prank.

She better not do it again.





"Lord Weiss Noir,

Today I learned that no matter how much you disagree with somepony, no matter how much you hate them, or stand against what they stand for, there are two simple facts that you can't ever forget.  Injustice is still injustice, and hope is still hope.  And it doesn't matter if they come from a Princess or a Scoundrel, a pony must always fight injustice, and, of course, a pony must always have Hope.  Anything less will make you worse than all of your foes, whoever they may be.

Your Traitorous Student, Eclipse Flash."