//------------------------------//
// Chapter 7 
// Story: Duskmaker 
// by I-A-M 
//------------------------------//

It was dark when Luna awoke the next time, although being underground all that really meant in the practical was that Sombra had doused the magelights which had provided the dim illumination that had been present the last time she had stirred.
The darkness was not complete, though.
At the far end of the room, a candle flame danced at a stone table. The table was piled high with thick tomes, all of which Luna was certain were rooted in questionable arts. It was unlikely that a being like Sombra kept anything else in this place, wherever it was. Sombra sat at the table with his back to her, his cowl lowered a little for the first time since she’d seen him although his head was bowed in such a way that she couldn’t see any details. She could see his ears flick left and right at even intervals, though.
It was odd, she thought… how utterly equine he looked at that moment. He could have been any Crystal Scholar were he a normal-sized stallion. Certainly he couldn’t have been the bloodthirsty tyrant that had ruled for two long centuries over one of the most brutal regimes known to the world.
He seemed so much different now. Lessened, Luna thought, although she wasn’t sure why that thought rankled her. It should please her that such a terrible figure was laid low but instead it set a pit in her stomach that she misliked greatly, both for the feeling and for the fact that it existed at all.
Not that there was anything she could do about it for the time being, but something had woken her up and it wasn’t Sombra. 
At first, Luna couldn’t put a hoof on what had caused her to stir from sleep. She was still too weak to move, her horn was still dead to her, and her wings were useless feathered appendages that could no more lift her than they could the whole of the Canterhorn.
A moment later, an uncomfortable pressure made itself known, though, and Luna felt another flush of shame creep up her neck to settle stonily in her cheeks.
Sombra looked up, one ear twitching suddenly as if he had heard a voice or disturbance, and pulled the cowl up and over his head again before turning to the bed and limping towards her, his tail swishing softly behind him.
Odd that so large a stallion should be so quiet.
“Away, cur!” Luna snapped, gratified that speaking no longer labored her as she set a hoof beneath her on the mattress to push herself up. “We are not so desperate as that.”
Sombra paused, and a quiet chuckle rumbled out from under the cowl.
“You say that, Princess, as if I had not cleaned up after you prior to this,” Sombra countered.
Luna’s eyes flew wide and a dull, cold pit opened up in her gut as her leg went out from under her, dropping her back to the mattress. With a grunt of effort she raised her head to stare up at him, her eyes and cheeks blazing.
“Thou art—”
“—not a liar,” Sombra cut her off. “I have told you this and am not fond of repeating myself.”
He gestured broadly with one enormous hoof to the bed she was occupying.
“Why else do you imagine that you do not lay soiled in a pile of your own filth after a bedridden week?” Sombra asked. “Or has your crown and divine status gone so deeply to your head that you imagine you no longer shit? If so I pity your maids.”
Luna was shaking, but whether it was from mortifying shame or all-consuming fury she wasn’t sure. Probably both.
“Th-Thou hast…” Luna stammered, her throat seizing up as if her whole body refused the concept of what Sombra was suggesting.
“Don’t flatter yourself, Princess,” Sombra said tersely. “I am a doctor, so I guarantee that you possess nothing I have not seen before, and in greater detail.”
“Doctor?!” Luna spat. “Thou art a tyrant and a war criminal!”
“Glass houses, dear Princess, I know what you did during the Rebellion,” Sombra replied with that sharp-toothed grin. 
Luna stiffened but didn’t reply. That was an argument she knew she would lose so it suited her not to step into it. As Luna had told her sister before she left, she understood the reasons for which Celestia had ensured that Luna was forgotten.
Some things were better left unremembered.
“And as of currently,” Sombra continued. “I am neither king nor criminal as I lack a crown, a throne, a kingdom, and a conviction status other than ‘Deceased’. However, I do still possess my four principals from the Imperial University, somewhere over there, I think,” he gestured towards a pile of books, “and therefore I am still a doctor.”
Sombra thumped one great hoof against the stone floor, and shadows bled up from around it, slithering out from beneath the immense stallion to form a pool beside him. Spindly, arachnoid legs peeled up out of the pool, followed by a bulbous and oddly lop-sided body.
The creature skittered under the bed, rustled around, then emerged slowly, dragging the chamberpot with it as Sombra moved up beside Luna to start pulling her free of the blankets.
“Off me, cretin!” Luna snarled, although her attempts at resistance were feeble. “We can manage ourself!”
Sombra huffed in annoyance and stepped back. “Then by all means, extract yourself from the bed!”
Luna glowered at him for a moment before shuffling awkwardly beneath the covers. The sheets were tangled around her hind legs which were frustratingly ignoring her commands. Even the blanket felt as though it weighed a quarter ton when she went to lift it. Every movement stole more and more energy from her until she was sweaty, panting, and barely able to shift her own legs.
“Are you finished?” Sombra asked tersely. “Or will you piss yourself out of pique?”
Luna lowered her head, still feebly struggling, but there was nothing left in her. No strength, no magic, no might was left to the once-goddess. She had bested a creature of myth, fought armies to a standstill alone, commanded the moon and the stars and walked the dreams of a million souls. 
Now, if only her demons and the ghosts of her past could see her reduced to this. Perhaps then they would finally take pity on her.
Shuddering, Luna pressed her face into the mattress as she fought off the cloying shame, hatred, and gut-wrenching humiliation. It was in vain, though. If nothing else, she at least had her tears left, and they rolled hot down her cheeks as her shoulders quaked and shuddered. She bit her tongue trying not to let the sobs escape, but there was no stopping those either.
In moments, the goddess of the moon was weeping.
Sombra said nothing, he did nothing but limp closer, move the blankets off of her with a kind of gentle care that would have shocked Luna to stillness if she had anything left in her but sorrow, before wrapping his forelegs around her to pull her free of the sheets, and steady her on the floor over the pot.
“Keep it stable,” Sombra addressed the little shadow-thing, averting his eyes from Luna before speaking to her. “I will return momentarily.”
He left the ‘when you’re finished’ unsaid, for which Luna was shamefully grateful.
Leaving her be, Sombra limped out of the study he had been sharing with Luna for the past week, silently cursing himself. What had possessed him to needle and mock such a proud creature as her like that? He hated that he didn’t quite have the answer to that question beyond the notion that he hated seeing her so despondent.
At least when she was angry she became more animated.
But he had pushed her too far and too hard. She was brittle, her body was betraying her, and now…
“Fool,” Sombra grumbled to himself as he sat outside staring up at the ceiling in the room beyond the study. “You’re just an old fool.”
The ceiling was a field of stars that bore constellations no being of Equus would recognise. Even Sombra wasn’t sure it was real, but it was a place within the Dreamtime from which dark things came, a few of whom he was on a first-name basis even if he had not contacted them since the end of the Second Shadow War.
Sombra had always loved looking up at the stars, whether they were ones he recognised or not. There was something infinitely peaceful about that star-pierced blackness of the void above him.
A chittering click drew Sombra’s attention back to the study, and he turned to regard the small familiar he’d drawn out of the Dream to help Luna. It was trying to get his attention, which meant Luna was finished. The familiar will have helped clean her up, no doubt she would feel better with that situation that Sombra himself trying to help.
That would likely be too much for the proud mare.
“Aye, I’m coming,” Sombra said as he stood up, winced, then hobbled back to the study where a sullen Luna lay on the ground beside the bed.
Sighing quietly, Sombra paused to nod down to the familiar, mentally ordering it to take of the chamberpot’s contents. It bobbed in a weird, asymmetrical bow, before scuttling off to collect the pot. It perched it on its back before making its way to the waste-room.
“Come then,” Sombra said quietly as he moved to Luna and knelt to begin gathering her up. “Up you get.”
Luna didn’t fight him this time, she just shivered, sniffled, and let him pull her up to brace her against his shoulder before moving her onto his back briefly so he could lever her over onto the bed.
“I apologise,” Sombra said quietly as he moved her gently onto the mattress, and Luna stirred enough to fix one tired eye on him. “For mocking you, I mean. It was unnecessary and unworthy.”
She stared at him as if he’d grown a second head while he carefully laid the sheets over her, then the blankets, and settled them around her until her shivering began to subside.
Once that was done, he straightened and fixed her with a narrow look of his own.
“What?” Sombra asked.
“An apology?” Luna’s voice had the shadow of a sneer, but there were too many tears in it for it to be real. “Thou hast taken our dignity, must thou now try to rob us of our rage as well?”
Sombra lowered his head and sighed. She was as stubborn and proud as she was beautiful, just like always. Even with the passage of a millennium, Luna had not changed.
“What would you have of me?” Sombra asked quietly as he sat back and stared at her from beneath his ratty cowl.
No answer came immediately. For a long while Luna simply lay there, eyes dull and half-open as she stared into the distance at nothing in particular while Sombra sat beside her, quiet and waiting and he took the moment to watch her, to take her in. 
For the time she’d spent asleep in the throes of the Sun Dog’s toxins, he’d avoided spending unnecessary amounts of time near her. It rankled him his sense of honor to linger beside her, and truthfully he would have given her a private room if he hadn’t been concerned that she might quietly expire in the time between him checking on her and not.
So he had simply commanded his familiars to drag the bed from his private room, the only bed in the temple that survived thanks to the preservative, and self-laundering, enchantments layered on it.
He had found himself to be doubly thankful of that last enchantment during this time. Although it didn’t clean up the beds occupant, unfortunately. He’d had to do that himself, as he’d admitted.
“An answer.” Luna’s reply broke the unsteady silence, drawing Sombra’s attention, as she finally moved, turning her graceful muzzle up to look at him wearily. “A true one, and not some wan excuse.”
Sombra sighed quietly, then started to chuckle.
“An answer?” Sombra repeated, then nodded mostly to himself. “Tell me, Princess, do you remember when we fought at Rowanholdts Ridge?”
Luna frowned, but humored the diversion.
“The first time or the second?” Luna asked. “We recall both.”
“Mm, right, we did catch up to your Guard at the Ridge a second time,” Sombra allowed. “T’was happenstance, though… no, I refer to the first, the one with the dragon.”
“Aye, Olstavrion’s brood was a thorn in our side for the war entire, as I recall,” Luna grumbled. “That was… Uvamorn, wasn’t it? The second eldest of the brood?”
“Third, actually,” Sombra admitted. “I killed the Olstavrion’s eldest when I dominated the brood.”
“Well, regardless we do recall,” Luna said acidly. “T’would be damnably hard to forget the time we were eaten.”
Sombra laughed quietly, nodding at it, and to Luna’s surprise a quiet snort of real humor escaped her as well.
“T’was a notable thing to be sure,” Sombra replied with that canid grin of his. 
“I remember most how you cut your way out of its gut, your blades spinning around you like a razorfield of light, gore and bile painting your armor, rent flesh hanging from your horn as you emerged from it hissing and cussing before firing a dozen bolts of light into the hole you left behind and blowing the damn thing up.”
Luna flushed as she recalled the particulars, then frowned and looked away.
“It was already quite dead, you know,” Sombra pointed out. “It just hadn’t realised it.”
“We are aware,” Luna replied tersely. “We simply thought to teach it a lesson about proper dining etiquette before ushering it out of this mortal coil. What has that to do with your saving our life?”
“When I saw that, I distinctly recall thinking something that I’d never thought before,” Sombra replied quietly. “Not even of your sister, vaunted though she may be.”
Luna watched him cautiously for a moment, her interest undeniably piqued. She hated to admit it but there was a very small ember of pride being stoked. There was a certain something that comes out of acknowledgement not from one's allies, family, or friends, but from one's enemies.
“What was it?” Luna asked softly.
Sombra closed his eyes and recalled the grim memory with a smile.
“I thought to myself, ‘now that is a goddess’.”
When he opened his eyes again, he found Luna staring at him with her mouth softly open in a small ‘o’, and a faint shade of red across her cheeks, and Sombra smiled at that. It was a surprisingly mortal expression.
“But… our sister…” Luna lowered her head as her lips flattened to a thin line. “She has ever been the greater warrior, she could have slain Uvamorn with half as much effort.”
“Perhaps,” Sombra said. “But she would not have been nearly as beautiful doing it. So there is my answer, Princess,” he looked down at Luna as she lay on the bed with an expression of raw shock on her face. “I saved you because the war is over and I am done taking beauty from this world… and because at our age a nemesis may be the one who knows us best, and so may be the closest thing in the world we have to a friend.”
Sombra trailed off, then shook his head and started to laugh as he stood up, turned, and began to limp away towards his work table.
“Or perhaps that’s just me,” Sombra added quietly. “I’m sure you have friends aplenty.”
Luna watched the stallion she had once known as King Sombra clump back to his book and to the lone candle which had nearly melted down to nothing, and to her surprise found something other than hate beating in her heart. It wasn’t pity, nor anger, and it certainly wasn’t disgust or contempt as she had expected.
No, if she had to put a word to it she might have called it something like a rapport or affinity.
Kinship, almost.
Something she had not felt in a very, very long time.
“Sombra, pray… wait,” Luna spoke up softly, prompting Sombra to glance over his shoulder back at her as she lifted her head wearily from the pillow and offered a small smile. “Thank you.”
Sombra raised an eyebrow, then nodded as he turned away.
“You are quite welcome, Princess,” Sombra rumbled. “Now get some sleep.”
For the first time in ages, Luna settled into a bed, closed her eyes, and let herself fall asleep without the shadows of the ages pressing in on her. For some reason, in this temple that seemed so divorced from time, those memories didn’t feel quite so close.