//------------------------------//
// Chapter 8 
// Story: Duskmaker 
// by I-A-M 
//------------------------------//

When Luna woke next, it was with a certain reluctance and a groggy, cloying exhaustion sticking about her head which she chalked up to all of the medication and her body finally starting to heal properly from the grievous damage she’d suffered fighting the Sun Dog. 
A bowl of soup was sitting beside the bed on a small table that hadn’t been there the last time she’d awoken, and Luna eyed the meal cautiously before leaning in to sniff at it.
It smelled like vegetable soup, and there were chunks of root vegetables consistent with the limited agriculture of the Crystal Empire, as well as a few thick pieces of mushroom which were grown commonly in the cavern gardens beneath the city. 
There was only so long she could keep up the pretense of suspicion though.
As much as Luna hated to admit it, Sombra had had plenty of opportunities to poison her or weaken her. That was all ignoring the fact that if he wanted her dead all he’d had to do was leave her in the tundra and her wounds from the Sun Dog’s strikes would have done the job. Not even Threnody’s Convalescence had been strong enough to combat the virulent damage inflicted by the beast, although it had probably been the only thing that had preserved her long enough for Sombra to treat her wounds.
And she was very hungry.
Luna could go weeks without water and longer without food thanks to her nature, but that didn’t mean it was comfortable. 
Leaning forward, Luna made a tentative lick at the broth. It was tepid but not unpleasant, and she slowly began supping at the bowl. Other than being in desperate need of a little salt, the soup was perfectly normal. There was no telltale bitterness of alchemical ‘additions’ to the mix, and the root chunks, other than being a bit soggy, were perfectly edible.
Within a few moments, Luna had polished off the bowl’s contents. She’d barely taken time to breathe, but she’d been starving so she forgave herself that little indignity.
The very hungry have little use for such things, in Luna’s experience.
“Good morning.”
Luna looked up from the empty bowl to find Sombra, cowled and cloaked as ever, standing in the doorway to the study-stroke-bedroom Luna had, she surmised, been occupying for over a week.
“Aye,” Luna said cautiously as she drew back from the bowl. “Fair morn to thee, King Sombra, O’ Slaver-Tyrant of the Crystal Empire.”
Sombra’s lips quirked up at her unsubtle tone and chuckled.
“And well wishes to thee, O' Nightmare Moon, Butcher of Baltimare.”
Luna paled, and her ears folded back to pin against her skull as her pupils shrunk to pinprick, and Sombra’s smiled faded as he sighed.
“Apologies,” Sombra said quietly. “It seems my sense of humor has suffered for my isolation, assuming I had one to begin with.”
Luna lowered her head as well, then let out a soft sigh of her own.
“Nay, t’was our fault,” Luna replied, drawing a surprised look from Sombra. “We… needled thee, t’was no failing of thine that thou jested in kind.”
Frowning at the sudden lack of fight in his patient, Sombra eyed her carefully for a moment before shaking his head and turning away. As he did, something occurred to him that put the smile back on his face, if only as a shadow of it.
“You know, I’m reminded of an old and potent bit of advice regarding the Chymic arts,” Sombra said as he made his way over to his study table. “Raise up not that which ye cannot then put down.”
“We fail to see the application,” Luna responded dryly from the bed.
Sombra shrugged as he flipped open one of the large grimoires and paged back to his last section, all the while wearing a faint smile.
“From my eavesdropping in the Crystal Empire, I believe the youths of today would translate it more accurately as: don’t dish it out if you can’t take it.”
“Hilarious,” Luna grumbled before turning over and putting her back to the room in a show of grumpy petulance that Sombra found surprisingly charming.
Her wings ruffled uncomfortably as Luna shifted in the bed, doing her best to pull the blankets more firmly over herself despite her obvious weakness. She was getting stronger though, of that Sombra was certain. In just over a week, Luna had recovered enough to wake up on her own. A day later she was cogent. Now she was recovering her ability to snipe at him, which was an even better sign.
“Lie still,” Sombra said as he limped over to the bed. “You’ll only tangle yourself, and be worse off for it.”
For a moment Luna tensed, ready to argue back, but the memory of the previous night was still too fresh her memory for her injured pride to risk another such blow. With a quiet, wordless grumble, Luna relaxed and let Sombra approach.
Carefully, the large stallion began shifting the sheets out from under her pulling free covers that had gotten tangled around her hind legs.
Luna watched him over her shoulder, and as she did she couldn’t help but notice far too many things wrong with Sombra. It didn’t surprise her that he maintained a certain kind of decorum, even in the bowels of what she suspected to be some forsaken dark temple devoted to the more wicked aspects of the Dreamtime. A place to call out creatures that had no place in the Real.
The cloak though… that niggled at her.
Musing on that, she turned her thoughts sideways and found an easier topic to start on, one that would at least give her an answer.
“Our personal effects,” Luna asked as Sombra tugged a section of sheet free. “Our armor and weapons?”
“Your armor was badly damaged,” Sombra replied around a mouthful of fabric. “I had to leave it behind, besides, most of it was so dented that it was doing more harm than anything.”
“But my weapons,” Luna pressed. “My blades.”
“In the forgeworks, one sublevel beneath us,” Sombra replied. “Beautiful craftsmareship, by the way. Pre-Unity Unicornian, I think… early reformation, probably.”
Luna let out a relieved sigh.
“First Age, in fact,” Luna admitted with a small laugh. “The very first.”
Sombra looked up at that, true curiosity lighting in his eyes, and in that moment Luna saw something she hadn’t expected in the former dark king. There was a sort of scholarly eagerness to him that was oddly endearing, especially given his monumental frame.
“Indeed?” Sombra asked, genuine interest softening his tone. “Tell me, were they crafted in the Solar Forges?”
The expression on Luna’s face quickened to a wry grin as she turned her nose up slightly. It earned a frown from Sombra. Never was there a more mercurial mare than the lunar alicorn, he reflected sourly as he turned back to the covers.
“We propose a trade,” Luna said after a moment of silence, drawing Sombra’s attention back to her with a raised eyebrow. “Give us the answers we seek, and we shall give to thee in kind.”
“A game of questions?” Sombra asked with a chuckle. “Very well, I have nothing to hide anymore, and as I’ve asked you a few already, I’ll permit you the honor of the first turn.”
“How gracious,” Luna replied dryly as she sat up properly.
Sombra laughed again more quietly as he moved a fair distance away, then turned and sat. His cloak settled around him like a mourning shroud, cloaking almost all of his features in shadow.
“Ask, then, Princess.”
Luna eyed her savior—and possible captor—cautiously for a long moment before realising her first question was sitting in front of her nose.
“Verily, am I free to go once I am mended?” Luna asked.
“Aye,” Sombra replied. “I have no intentions to keep you captive, nor did I ever. Once you have healed you free to go.”
“Why?”
“Ah, ah,” Sombra tutted, his wolfish maw flashing beneath his cloak. “My turn.”
Luna scowled but nodded before settling in and crossing her forelegs over one another as Sombra hemmed and hawed thoughtfully for several moments. Finally, he seemed to settle on something and leveled his gaze back on the Lunar Princess.
“Did you truly hate your sister?”
Whatever she imagined Sombra might ask first, that was far from what Luna had imagined, and her jaw dropped as she worked it a few times.
“We—?! Did We what?!” Luna squawked, and her voice came out strangled with indignation. 
“You went to war with her,” Sombra said, gesturing broadly with his hoof. “You burned her cities, killed her soldiers, and hung her spies from the treetops of the Everfree. So, it’s a fair question, I think.”
“We…” Luna started, then trailed off as she deflated. “Yes, We did, and for a very long time before We dared to rebel. We hated Our sister for her bellicose approach to governance—nay, to everything.” Luna bristled at the memories, and despite herself, the old anger she once knew began to flood back. “We hated how she would always mock Us for our insistence on diplomacy and subterfuge, and how she would openly disregard Our opinions in matters of court in front of all of our subjects as if We were the lesser among supposed equals!”
Luna slammed her hoof into the bedframe, cracking it briefly before the self-repairing enchantment sealed up the damage.
“We hated her bigotry and the way she drove the old faiths into the shadows!” Luna snarled. “We told her it would give rise to darkness and she laughed! She laughed at Us! And not a decade past her first Solar Inquisition did the first great Warlocks begin to rise! We—!” 
With an effort of will, Luna sealed her lips and settled herself back on the bed, snorting and huffing as she shook her mane back into a presentable flow of cosmic light.
“Our… apologies,” Luna muttered. “Tis a sore subject.”
“I can see that,” Sombra replied in an arid, neutral tone.
“Tis a small, if spiteful, victory,” Luna said quietly, “that we see how our sister hath implemented so many of our ideas and plans after Our banishment, despite disregarding them for centuries. The Royal Intelligence Service was Our idea, as was the diplomatic corps, and the cross-tribal training which is taken as commonplace now.”
Sombra nodded thoughtfully, then let out a quiet grunt as she shifted his hind legs.
“Given the… personal nature of your sharing,” he started, “I shall give you your previous question for free, and tell you that I will release you because holding you serves me no purpose. I am not intending to return, nor will I ever.”
“Forgive me if We are skeptical,” Luna replied. “On a more current note, We shall ask of thee this: what in Tartarus' name is wrong with your leg?”
Sombra glanced down at himself, then chuckled wanly before shuffling in his cloak and lifting it away from the floor to show the leg he had been favouring, and Luna had to blink several times to be certain that what she was seeing was truly there.
The former tyrant’s rear-left leg was bent at an odd angle, and the way the flesh was distorted around his leg suggested it had always been so. Something about the turn of the bone turned Luna’s stomach, at the way the skin clung to the limb was noisome all on its own.
“Such are the wages of the dark arts, We suppose,” Luna said grimly.
“Amusing,” Sombra rumbled, “but incorrect… t’was no working of chymic sorcery that did this. I left the womb with this leg.”
“Oh!” Luna flushed for a moment, then narrowed her eyes as she examined Sombra carefully. “Verily?”
“Aye,” Sombra grunted. “I was born a cripple and I shall die a cripple, for fate has a wicked sense of humor, in my experience.”
“Was thy horn another such mutation?” Luna asked wryly.
Sombra scowled rather than answering, and his silence darkened the room with an unpleasant tension that settled in Luna’s chest like a cold weight as her hackles went up again. Whatever their mutual understanding, a part of her was reminded in that moment that this creature had committed atrocities rivaled only by her own. 
After a moment, though, he let out a quiet breath, then snorted out a brittle laugh.
“My turn first,” he growled. “Your blades… where were they crafted and honed?”
Shifting in the bedsheets, Luna grimaced, then sighed and nodded.
“Fair is fair, We suppose,” she replied. “They were crafted in the Solar Forges of Unicornia by the First Smiths, and honed on the edges of moonbeams by the Dreamers of Hollow Hill.”
“That benighted place?” Sombra rumbled. “I thought it was a myth.”
“So do many, and tis… most of the time,” Luna said with a wan grin.
Sombra raised an eyebrow.
“There are nights,” she continued softly, “when the stars are right, and the moon is too, that if thou knowest the old songs and true rhymes, that thou cans’t still find the Hollow Hill, and hear the crones and maidens dreaming all that may not be.”
For a very long moment, Sombra could only watch the light sparkle in Luna’s eyes; they were so beautiful, and the way she spoke pulled at his heart in ways he had thought impossible now. The mystery of her smile was like a crow's call at midnight, or a dirge sung unseen on the moor. It was old, and young, and impossibly fair… ancient and new and sublime.
“You truly are the moon,” Sombra whispered softly.
“Flatterer,” Luna said playfully. “Now, tis my turn. Thy horn… We always wondered and would have Our wonder satisfied. Ne’er before thou has there been a Crystal Unicorn, so tell Us, how didst thou come to be so?”
Sombra drew back into his cowl as he thought on her question. It was a dire one, but not one that came unexpectedly. In truth, it was the answer he had expected to trade to her at some point in this conversation, and in that manner there was no reason for him to continue hiding it.
No, no reason other than old habits which die so hard.
“My leg was no work of sorcery,” Sombra began as he lifted his foreleg and hooked it under his cowl. “But my horn, unfortunately, was…”
Pushing the hood back, Sombra shook out his ashen mane, and Luna’s jaw dropped quietly open.
Beneath the cowl at the point of his skull where his bloody-bladed horn once curled out was a blackened and brittle stump that looked like nothing so much as a ruined tree struck by lightning too many times over. The bone was blackened and chalky, and only the faintest hint of red rested in the center of the exposed fragment of horn.
“Oh,” Luna mumbled, “That… how?”
“Another question,” Sombra said testily, “but I shall permit it… the how is complicated, but boils down to utilising the mysteries of the Crystal Arts in ways the original Master Sages never envisioned to grant myself power that I…” Sombra trailed off before sighed and shaking his head, “that I turned to selfish ends.”
“The Crystal Arts?” Luna narrowed her eyes at Sombra. “But such knowledge was jealously kept! The Sages were miserly with their secrets and taught only their… own…”
Luna’s jaw clicked open as the dots connected.
“Thou art a sage,” she mumbled. “An original sage…” She lifted a hoof and pointed at him, not caring if it made her look like a foal. “Tis how thou didst break the order! Thou knewest the manner to destroy the Chanceries and unmake their works not because thou wast some mere thief of the arts but because thou never had a need to steal at all! Because thou art one of them!”
Sombra let out a slow breath and nodded.
“Aye, I was,” Sombra replied. “No family would raise a crippled foal in the frozen north, so I was given over to a Chancery to be raised as a lay-stallion of the Order. My fate would have been to live and die scrubbing floors, emptying chamberpots, and refilling ink wells save that I demonstrated a talent for the Crystal Arts, and was inducted under… sufferance.”
“Sufferance?” Luna scowled at the venom with which he spoke the word. “What do you mean?”
Rather than answer, Sombra's expression darkened again.
“Enough of this game,” Sombra growled as he stood and began limping towards the door. “I tire of it, and you ought to be resting. Now, I have work that I must see to, Princess, so sleep, and I will return ere long.”
For a moment, Luna was tempted to argue, but the bitterness in the old, former King’s posture took her off-guard and stilled her tongue. There was too much familiarity in it for her to rally any true anger. Not anymore.
“Very well,” Luna said gently as she settled back into her bed. “Thank you for indulging Us.”
Sombra paused at the threshold and sighed.
“Aye,” he grumbled. “Thank you for… your company, Princess… sleep well.”
Luna watched the old stallion leave, and some part of her heart ached at the way he dragged himself out of the study. As much as she had hated and feared the ancient sorcerer that the world knew as King Sombra, she had also always admired and respected him. 
Not easily did a mortal rise to challenge the realms of the Gods, but Sombra had done so and more, and on his own merit.
To see him reduced to such an ember felt… wrong, somehow.
Obscene, even.
It was like seeing some of the grandeur of the old world dying out, and Luna found she had no taste for it.
“Goodnight, old King,” Luna muttered quietly as she settled her head onto the pillows. “We shall see thee on the morrow.”