//------------------------------//
// Verse 26 
// Story: The Nightmare Knights Become A Band 
// by SwordTune 
//------------------------------//

“Everyone, make space for other creatures and head for the palace.”
Cadence glided low, watching for any yaks or ponies who fell over. The whole city was up in a panic over the shadows. One fall and someone could be trampled without another creature to notice. Meanwhile, the Dragonlord gathered her subjects, many of whom were still outside the market.
“I thought you said the pony market would be peaceful,” said an older dragon. Not ancient, but he was a tad larger than Ember and seemed to have a few dragons following his lead.
Ember flared her nostrils. “Back off, Broil. If any of us want to get out of this, we have to head for the Crystal Heart where the magic is strongest.”
Cadence broke up the dragons and pointed to a young limping yak on the street. “If you don’t mind, I could use some help here.”
Ember nodded and folded her wings, dropping down into the middle of the stampede. “Watch it, hairball!” Ember shoved away a distracted yak who was about to trample over his fellow yak-kin. “Hey! You too, half-wits, move it!”
Ember barked at a bundle of stallions clumping together, bumbling and stumping over everything in their path.
“Yona lost friends!” the limping yak tugged at Ember’s arm.
“Yeah, well,” Ember looked around, “that’s rough, buddy. But you’ll just have to find them later.” She hoisted the yak up and flew her over to Broil.
“W-what are you doing?” the dragon stammered as she handed the yak over to him.
“As Dragonlord, I am commanding you to fly this yak to the palace. Fail and I will have you dragged by to the Dragon Lands in a cage.”
“Ugh, you’re such an annoying Dragonlord,” he scoffed. But no dragon, no matter how reluctant, could refuse an order from their lord. The dragon and the friends backing him took their leave, taking the young yak with them.
“Got a few more!” Cadence called out, raising a small barrier around a group of ponies trying to get their friend up off the ground. “Come on, Luna,” she murmured to herself, “we’re barely keeping up.”





“Keep it up!” Tempest blasted a street clear of shadows for a ponies trapped in their shops to escape. But in seconds the creatures returned, reformed from their scattered pieces. Starlight erected barriers behind them, sealing the monsters into buildings or cutting off empty streets in an attempt to slow them down.
What felt like a battle of attrition had only been a few minutes, and already both unicorns had spent most of their magic. The shadows did not stop coming. One shadow shaped something like a stretched lobster scampered along the roof of a shop and jumped over Starlight’s barrier, tearing down a row of street food stalls.
Hot cooking oil and fried pastries sizzled the cold dew on the pavement. The shadow’s pincers dug up the ground, sending stones flying towards Tempest and Starlight.
“They don’t stop,” Starlight ducked out of the way. She swung her horn in an arc that cast an animating aura over the rubble. Piece by piece the scattered bits of stone and wood assembled themselves in a cage around the lobster shadow.
Tempest blasted apart the pavement, pushing the stones into a stack to block off the shadows. The misshapen ones, shadows with tiny legs or floppy bodies, clamoured uselessly against the wall, but the other half of the horde were coordinated like the lobster beast, effortlessly taking to the roofs.
A shadow in the shape of a mosquito led the charge, it wings replaced with drooping-jawed snakes, large enough to swallow a pony whole. “We don’t have a choice! We have to keep them off the main roads.” Tempest shot bolts of raw power into the shadow.
“Then we need to keep moving,” Starlight pushed herself up close to Tempest and teleported them further down the street. “There are shadows everywhere, we have to stick to the crowd.”
“Yeah, but-- look out!” Tempest shoved Starlight aside when a shadow rolled towards them. It was like a ball, three times their height, with dozens of legs poking out, desperately writhing to find some ground to stand on.
“Why do they have to look like that,” Starlight winced in disgust. She cast a circle of symbols around it as Tempest pinned the monster in place with a stream of her magic. The two unicorns backed off, leaving the shadow to trigger Starlight’s trap. Magic ropes sprouted from the symbols, forming a net around the shadow without it being destroyed and reformed.
Tempest gasped and caught her breath, clutching her scrapes. “We need to do that one more often.”
“As long we don’t get surrounded,” Starlight said, pointing behind them. Already the shadows they escaped from were closing in, tearing up the streets as they went. Exhausted, they still readied their spells. 
“We fight until Luna is done,” Tempest said. Without a word, Starlight nodded and started casting circles of magic symbols on the ground.





The line of creatures trying to get into the barrier was moving fast enough. Every street was closed off, save for the city’s main road. Twenty yaks could stand shoulder to shoulder on the road, but it was not enough to bring in the entire city. 
“Keep it civil, everyone,” Shining Armour told them. He had his sight in the sky, watching the flying shadows circling around them. Dozens of dragons had already been hit and taken down, left to recover their broken wings in the palace infirmary. But, if it wasn’t for Lightning Dust’s warning, they never would have reacted in time.
In the middle of the line, a commotion stirred up.
“Out of the way! I got a kid here.” Shining recognized the rasping voice as a dragon’s. To his surprise, the yaks ahead of him parted, and when they entered his barrier, he saw why. The steel-scaled dragon and a young yak limped toward the palace, using their weight to support each other.
“Monster attacked from the sky,” the young yak said, “Yona sprained ankle from falling, but dragon got hit worse.”
I’m fine!” The dragon grumbled. “And I have a name! It’s Broil. Those little shadows can’t hurt a dragon.”
Shining bunched up his brows, looking intensely at the dragon with doubt. “You don’t look fine, dude.” He reached out to inspect the dragon’s wings.
“Ghrahh!” he whimpered. “Why does that hurt so much?”
“We’ve been able to get dragons treatment pretty fast,” Shining said, “this is the longest we’ve seen an injury progress without treatment. Your wing, the skin looks like it’s dying.”
Broil shoved Shining’s hoof away. “What would you know, huh? You don’t look like a doctor.”
“Okay,” Shining stood back, “since you’re fine, head inside and up the stairs on the left, keep going until you see the infirmary. The nurse will give you painkillers and treat your wings if they can.”
Broil huffed, but he made no complaints and followed Shining’s advice.
Yona watched him leave, still standing by Shining’s side. “Have you seen griffon or hippogriff passing through here?” 
“Sorry, kid,” Shining knelt down to look her in the eyes, “I don’t know if I did. I’m too busy trying to keep up this shield. But hey, if you want, you can wait out here and look for your friends.”
Scores of yaks and ponies continued to flood into the castle. The flash of magic outside told Shining Armour that his guards were still fighting to keep the shadows away from the main street. It was risky, keeping every creature in one spot, but it meant they had fewer places to defend.
Behind him, the Crystal Heart hummed as if nothing had changed. Watching it helped him focus, strengthening his barrier, but he knew that extra strength wasn’t coming for the Heart’s magic. The Crystal Heart didn’t simply create a bubble around the Crystal Empire, it expelled wild and dark magics out from the land, wherever they were. Shining didn’t understand how the shadows could even be standing in his city. 
“All because of dragons…” he heard two ponies murmuring.
The line was tense, but not all problems had been forgotten. There were ponies and yaks and dragons in the same line to get to safety, but they each moved in their own crowds. Shoulder to shoulder, other tensions were tentatively pushed aside, not magically evaporated.
A wave of voices washed over the crowd after a row of houses was broken through. Five royal guards wrangled a six-headed shadow with enchanted chains. It seemed like they were outnumbered, though. Shining’s heart ached to see his ponies facing the danger without him, but he was the only one who could create a barrier strong enough to defend the entire palace.
But there were more shadows. So many more. Some had indescribable shapes, others more like animals. Those which could fly snatched and grabbed up ponies, pulling them back towards the horde of monsters further away.
“Let us in!” the ponies started shouting. “Prince Shining, open the barrier!”
He knew could not. The shadows came closer to the palace now, directly attacking the ponies outside and scattering them into smaller groups. Opening more space would leave more openings for the shadows to come in. 
In the spreading chaos, Shining witnessed an orange glow against the backdrop of the attacking monsters. Dragonfire lit up the night, driving back one shadow for brief moments.
“Stay away from my friend!” A young orange-scaled dragon flew above the heads of the yaks and ponies. Beside Shining, Yona bounced up in hope.
“Smolder?” she cried out, though she didn’t seem to hear.
Crashing from above came as more shadows threw themselves forward, finally attacking the barrier directly. Shining Armour winced and buckled, but held the shield up.
“Everyone, get in now!” he shouted. In his focus, he hardly noticed the growing fires. But slowly they added onto each other, becoming a light he could not ignore. Shining saw a wall of dragons forming around the scattered ponies. Each dragon added to the other’s fire, creating a torch so bright even the shadows could not abide by the light. 
They hardly covered a tenth of the street, but they gave the scattered time to regroup. And more and more again and again. With shadows bearing down from every corner, the dragons did not back down from the fight.





Luna’s presence reduced the smaller shadows to smoke and ash. 
Dark magic responded to power, and in the night, none was more powerful than her. Still, the largest of the monsters had enough strength to resist her commands. She beat them down, forcing them into corners of the market before they relented. But in the time it took to overpower one strong shadow, another one pulled itself from the weaker masses to challenge her.
“Sombra is gone!” she reminded the shadow, wrapping it in a web of her own magic. “And now instead of a dark lord, you shall have a queen! As terrible as the night and just as beautiful. Obey me and despair!” 
The lightless deformity deflated and caved in, becoming overwhelmed by Luna’s own aura. Every shadow was not purely destroyed. The ashes left behind were their physical manifestations, but the dark magic needed to go somewhere.
In its weakened state, the destroyed energies could not remain near the Crystal Heart. Even now, with hordes of shadows consuming the city, the Heart’s power was still working. Luna could feel it herself. Commanding the shadows to disperse themselves required her to tap into magic she would have preferred to forget.
It wasn’t a pushing force, like a magical barrier. Luna could feel the Crystal Heart’s power breaking down her own inner magic. Like layers of leaves being eaten away on the Everfree’s forest floor, dark magic decayed and disintegrated under the influence of the Heart. Luna stumbled. Her own body was instinctively trying to hide the darkness to save itself.
But the Crystal Heart’s magic was dangerously weak. Luna knew deep down what the Heart could do to Nightmare Moon. The fact that she only felt slight dizziness was a bad sign.
“Hungry.”
She turned her head to the voice. The shadow in front of her lengthened, stretching the length of a market street and becoming just as wide. Its body rose up from the blackened ground, forming a coherent shape, the form of an earth pony.
“We have risen. You have fallen. We are doom, the true children of the dark.”
“Are you guiding them?” Luna looked around. Shadows surrounded the market centre, linked in a circle and swaying with disturbing unity. They moved like a single wriggling wall. She didn’t need to wait for an answer. This shadow was the source, a piece of Sombra’s dark magic which managed to grow until it gained some semblance of a will.
“There is no destination. Only hunger. Order is a lie. Only power.”
“I will assume your answer is a ‘yes.’” Luna traced a square of magic and shot it below the shadow’s hooves.
The pavement turned wet, then watery, transforming into a pit of mud. The shadow collapsed halfway, but its last two hooves seemed to learn before it was fully submerged. A barrier of dark magic formed at its hooves, hovering just above the mud.
It shot out of the pit without effort, whipping its tail around to strike Luna from the side. She rolled away, pouring more magic into the ground, raising spikes to pierce the shadow’s legs. Despite its wispy appearance, it had to act solid in order to destroy physical material.
“You only slow us. The castle falls even without us.”
“Castle?” The palace, and the Crystal Heart. Luna flew up and looked to the centre of the city. A swirl of black smoke surrounded the palace, almost completely obscuring the light of Shining’s barrier. 
The talking shadow pulled its leg, but the stone spikes trapped it tight.
“This city is stronger than you think,” Luna told it. “I will save them, and they will empower the Heart to banish you for good.”