The walls had been welded shut, and with portals used to test the air flow, even that was restricted. The laboratory wing that was once meant to have researchers going in and out at all hours of the day was now uninhabitable, owing to the staleness of the air inside.
Shadow Clones did not require fresh air.
Weiss held up a Materia, and with an uttered word, cast the spell contained within it.
"Summon"
He felt his emotions shift, the pattern of his thoughts changing as he briefly experienced feelings and a mindset that were not his own. Self-Loathing, Arrogant Egotism, and a hint of Fear.
Magic warped, and with a bubbling aura of smoke, he summoned a Shadow Clone of a being other than himself in the middle of the laboratory.
Mercy's body was different from a normal Shadow Clone. Imperfect. Instead of a light olive color, her body was entirely black, and her eyes a piercing lime green. It was the same effect of color that his own shadow clone technique expressed when he took on a form other than his original one.
"So, you weren't lying. You can defy even death," she mused, looking down at her shadowy form.
"You're not quite dead yet, Councilman Oh Goodness. Of course, with you in Tartarus, the difference is academic at best. I can summon you whenever I want, and I can dismiss you just as easily." he intoned slowly.
"Even if you tried to harm me, it's only through my active magical focus that you remain tethered to this world. Erase me, kill me, give me a pillow and a mint and send me to bed. Lights out for me is lights out for you too, so don't test me, or I might decide you're not worth summoning again," he finished seriously.
Mercy nodded as if this were obvious. "Of course. What would you have me do, then."
The snake knew she had no other option. No recourse but obedience, for now.
Weiss smirked, and jabbed a thumb behind him to a large terminal, and a variety of holographic displays.
"While you can't use the Arcana Nox for a few obvious reasons, you can still access certain systems. Your task is simple, I want to know everything there is to know about dragon biology. Again. Sombra's little attack resulted in the destruction of all my research data, so you'll be building this part of the tech base back up from scratch, under my supervision."
Mercy slithered over to the terminal with a hellish new light in her eyes. "So, I'll finally learn how you were able to create all of your wonderful little creatures. You know, Sombra was desperate to suss out that particular secret. I was more than a little curious myself."
Weiss approached her from behind as she used her tail to begin flicking through the corrupted files with disturbing familiarity. Just how much did she already know about the Shadow Realm's technology?
"All that and more, if you stay in line. I'll give you a hint, to help you get started..." Weiss said, leaning in next to the snake.
"Dragon cells are biologically immortal," he whispered, laughing quietly to himself as if he had just shared a bit of juicy gossip.
The snake froze, before returning to her task with an almost frantic, desperate air, scrambling to familiarize herself with the systems.
Weiss looked pleased. Individuals were so easy to manipulate when he could get them all alone like this. He may not have known precisely how skilled Mercy was at the art of biological research, but he knew just how vulnerable her obsession with it made her.
It took so few threats to keep her in line, when what he wanted, and what she wanted, were the exact same things.
Luna knew that Weiss feared sleeping now. It didn't take long at all for her to come to this conclusion, judging from the false dreams he used as decoys to foist off her probes, and the ever shifting clock of his periods of wakefulness as he pushed slumber back further and further. It was this fact that made it all the more shocking when she caught him sleeping outside of a dream crystal. Something she only noticed due to the sheer intensity of the nightmare he was experiencing.
She could tell a lot of things from what the cloudy outside of a dream looked like, and where it was in relation to the physical world. He had fallen asleep in the Wacky Workbench Zone, he had done so from exhaustion, judging from the ragged edges of the dream. Something had made him forgo sleep in favor of work, and exposed him to natural sleep.
With a mental push, she threw herself into his dream, and calmly examined the horrors that his mind had conjured, ones that were prime vessels for any number of nightmare creatures to embody.
It was only through her magic that she was able to bring the dream into contrast, to turn the shadowy figures and swirling darkness of the mind into a vision of what he himself saw.
And it was shocking to her.
Eclipse Flash, and many other ponies were standing before Weiss, and they all hated him.
"I was right about you," she said with bitter tears dripping down her face.
"Why? Why would you do this?"
"Was it worth it?"
"Hypocrite."
This and many more statements were directed towards the figure of Weiss, cowering from them on the cold ground. He had his hands over his face and ears, as if their words were physical blows raining down on him.
As he burned, the black smoke from the white flames of self-hatred seemed to grow, and take the form of something else above the sage, something with a fanged grin, and glowing green eyes that chuckled at the amassed crowd with utter apathy.
Luna stepped forwards, using her magic to sweep away the angry figures.
"Weiss!" she shouted, making her way towards him. As she did, he looked at Luna with naked fear.
"No, not you too, please not you,"
She shook her head. "This is a dream, Weiss, none of this is real, please, calm yourself!" Luna insisted, approaching the sage and igniting her horn.
With a blast of magic, she intended to eradicate the last vestige of the nightmare before it could be possessed by anything, firing her horn at the mass of grinning, malicious smoke above Weiss.
As she did, however, she realized her mistake too late as the dream began to collapse. The cowering white unicorn she had thought to be the dreamer, was instead merely another facet of the dream, and what she had thought to be part of the nightmare was in truth a representation of himself. Weiss had already seen himself as not the pony, but the black entity feeding off of his guilt and shame.
With that misplaced attack, Weiss woke up with another scream, magic surging through his body as he narrowly avoided destroying the precious research he and Mercy had obtained.
He slowly got control of himself, and realized what had happened.
"I fell asleep as a Shadow Clone," he realized.
Looking around, it was obvious what had happened. He had worked for too long, had become too invested in the research to realize the time, and eventually, he lost consciousness here, in a room lacking any and all Dream Crystals. An intentional measure to further control Mercy.
"How much did she see?" he growled to himself, rubbing his face to stave off the headache that came with being forced out of your own dream.
"I saw enough," Luna said, approaching him with the fading flash of a teleport behind her.
Weiss stood stiffly as the princess approached him and offered her wing to the sage. "Is that truly how you see yourself? How you see them?"
Weiss felt relief. She obviously didn't see enough, if that was her reaction.
"Of course it is," he responded bitterly. "You should know that more than anyone."
She shook her head. "Weiss... You did everything for them. You were prepared to sacrifice even your own life if it meant their happiness. Come with me," she said firmly, teleporting the pair away.
Weiss blinked, looking around. They were in the crowded streets of Equestria.
"What? Why are we here, Princess?" he asked as she ferried him towards a theater.
"You spend too much of your time alone in these tunnels, Weiss. Forgive me for the suddenness of this excursion, but it cannot wait another moment," she said insistently, pushing him along when he moved too slowly for her liking.
"You are losing touch with the truth in your singleminded isolation. When was the last time you truly spoke to another pony besides me or my sister?" she asked, as Weiss tried to get a grasp of the situation. He watched as ponies seemed to not notice him or the Lunar Princess, when they saw the pair, they were ignored, and those who stared too much found their eyes sliding off the duo as they made their way into the theater's uppermost balcony.
Before he could properly conclude Luna's intentions, they are seated, and Luna's horn ceases its glow.
"An illusion works best when combined with yet-subtler magics, I find," the princess explained in response to his curious glance that expressed his wonder of how they managed to get inside without triggering a calvalcade of questions and bowing.
"Not that I'm complaining, Luna, but I'm pretty bewildered here, why did you yank me out of my lab this early in the morning for a play?" he responded slowly.
Luna frowned. "Firstly, it is noon. Secondly, you need better means of having fun. I may not mind your less reputable methods of amusing yourself, but when your night terrors feature the slow decline of your own morality as their overarching plot, then I must insist upon whisking you away to silly things like this."
She gave him a piercing look that demanded honesty. "Have you been having dreams like that every night?"
The sage grimaced. "I have. They keep me focused on what's important. You should stay out of my head from now on, Luna."
She didn't respond as the play began, but he got the distinct feeling that, in this particular matter, she absolutely would not obey his request.
The play had begun nearly thirty minutes after their arrival. The schedules of actors, it seems, did not bow to those of royal blood or deific power. It was a fairly intricate showing, a story that followed the whirlwind romance and betrayal of two enemy commanders and a humble second-in-command.
Weiss was mostly disinterested in the intrigue and drama of the play, and at times, he seemed slow to figure out what exactly was happening in the interplay between characters.
The fight scenes were of marginal interest, but they seemed too saturated with long monologues, and unrealistic feats that strained his suspension of disbelief.
As the play ended, Weiss and Luna left as quietly as they came.
As Weiss made his way to the Arcana Janus portal connecting Equestria and The Shadow Realm, Luna stopped him, a bubble of silence surrounding them and isolating them from the crowd of those coming and going.
"Lord Weiss, I want you to know that you are not responsible for what happened to them. You did all you could, and I know they would forgive you, no matter the circumstances. Your dreams are just that. Dreams, and nothing more."
Weiss seemed to hang on to this statement, processing it slowly as his mane flickered in a ponderous way.
He walked off without another word, but his posture seemed more sure, his actions less hesitant. She could only hope that her words had eased some of the guilt he had been feeling.
Luna attempted many more times to pull Weiss away from his court, to make him partake in various frivolities. Parties, plays, and more were the weapons of her conquest, and yet, they only seemed to highlight the disinterest Weiss had slowly gained towards others.
Those she would introduce him to, he was coldly polite towards, and what few friends he had once made, he seemed uninterested in meeting any further. Isolation, even in a crowd. The only things that seemed to catch his interest and bring him out of his shell were those who seemed determined to be belligerent with him. Haughty nobles, wandering heroes who heard of his "cruel and unusual punishments" (typically manipulated to confront him by haughty nobles), and of course, Celestia herself.
His bickering with her sister seemed to fill him with vitality, no matter how crude or heated their constant arguing became.
Where the idea of friends seemed to push Weiss away, and her own attempts at giving him a sense of normalicy felt like sand slipping through her hooves, it was enemies that saw some semblance of the old Weiss returning.
The Shadow Realm was little better, as a site for her goal. Games played on dream crystals were entertaining, and he seemed invested in teaching her everything he knew about the systems, games included, but he avoided the actual inhabitants as if they were sick with plague.
When she asked how long it had been since he spoke to another, she hadn't realized then just how little contact he had with his ponies and the others who came to live in the Shadow Realm. It was none at all, or as close as could be had.
His guards, what few he had? All of them received orders digitally. His court? He only spoke to criminals during it, save to give commands or ask questions from witnesses.
He was isolating himself from the Shadow Realm, using nothing but his automatic systems to govern them. To let them govern themselves without his oversight.
He seemed at his happiest on one day in particular, when her attempts to bring Weiss to a meal at the castle were interrupted by the arrival of a dragon.
It was another day like any other, when one of Weiss's golems informed him of a breach.
"Oh, goodie, this should be a treat," he said, waving for her to follow.
As she did, she watched as various screens displayed the new difference in how the Shadow Realm's defenses operated.
All of the homes in the Shadow Realm now relied on the Arcana Janus, each housing district not only containing escape portals, but being kept inside them as well. With a gesture, ponies, griffons, and other assorted denizens were whisked away in moments as a swarm of golems swept through the zone.
He refused to let anyone know where any of these portals actually led to, geographically, and there were steep fines for anything that threatened to reveal any of the spatially disjointed homes.
The princess watched with an impressed stare as the entire Shadow Realm was on high alert in seconds, doors were locked with molten iron, massive mechanized golems were distributed, and the smaller population only made it simpler to ensure all of this. So much equipment was left behind that there was a surplus of defenses, and a distinct lack of individuals for them to actually protect.
As they walked up and out of one of the exits, they found the dragon that had arrived out of nowhere, calmly sitting cross-legged on the ground and watching them approach.
"Greetings, Lord Weiss Noir," The white dragon Parboil of the Dragonlands had said, surrounded by golems and other automatons at the entrance of one of the zones, bowing lightly to the sage.
The dragon dismissed Luna out of hand, though she couldn't tell if it was out of blatant disrespect, or merely the tension of the situation at hand. It wasn't every day when a single individual was surrounded by an entire army of souless enchanted soldiers.
At the sight of the dragon, Weiss seemed to come alive in a way none of their outings, none of her visits, nor any of her attempts to assist him in his work had seemed to.
"Dragonlord Torch demands your presence. He would speak to you of what you have been doing to the dragons who enter your realm," the elder dragon said simply.
She saw Weiss Noir's smile at this proclamation grow, until he was vibrant with excitement.
"I would love to."