“Now comes the hardest part.” said Starkin in a family home she shared with two ‘absent’ parents. “Finding a new host suitable for Sombra.”
“Already done.” Smiled Somnambula.
“Really?”
“His name is Terra Clave and-”
“No!” Daring screamed, “How could you even think that!?”
“A half-kirin archmage with mastery over earth,” said Somnambula simply.
“That could describe a lot of stallions!”
“Seriously?” asked Starkin, “Cause in our age that was stupidly rare. Let me ask Starlight.” she wrinkled her nose. “No that’s still a one in several generations.”
“Let alone the most pressing evidence.” cawed Somnambula, “The sphinx answers to no one but it’s creator and those he tells it to serve. So either Sombra saw hundreds of years into the future entered him by name into the Sphinx’s list of masters, or else the Sphinx has spent these last centuries seeking out the soul of it’s creator and identified it within Terra who, like Sombra, gifted it to his first love.”
“...The sphinx is Altozutl!?”
“Terra gave it a facelift to be sure to make it look like a… dog instead of a lioness, but the core programming is the same and unmistakable.”
“But-but Terra always said he’d made Altozutl!?”
“Built it new shell to be sure, but even if Terra was the prodigy to end all prodigies and learned his craft a decade ahead of Sombra himself, without stewardship over the earth and an empire’s wealth of rare materials to construct the core processor he could have never matched Sombra’s sphinx.”
“What clan is he from?” asked Starkin.
“I don’t even know. His mother was exiled when she was pregnant with him and I never found out why. She moved to my hometown and worked as an enchantress of jewelry… I think. She never got married.”
“You grew up together?”
“No, I barely ever met him until he was about nine and I was fourteen. He was getting followed by a gang of twelve-year-old bullies and I told them to buck off. He followed me home and almost never left me alone after that.”
“And showered you with gifts like Altozutl and a scourge of zombies for your birthday.” Somnambula added.
“She got zombies for her birthday?” laughed Starkin, “That’s awesome!”
“No! It wasn’t awesome!”
“So why don’t you have a bunch of foals with him by now?”
“Because I ran away!”
“Did he like… skin you and another mare alive and then sew you back together in each other’s skins because he didn’t like your color?”
“...What?”
“Did he break your knees and elbows, cut out your eyes and tell you he’d only heal you if you managed to climb to the top of a massive, slippery, irregular, staircase with no guardrails where each step slanted different directions and had jagged edges.”
“No! No one would ever do that! That’s not even possible.”
“Well, actu-” Welkin was cut off by Somnambula’s wing knocking the air out of her ribs who settled down next to Daring and draped a wing over her,
“Did he ever deliberately hurt you?”
“He threw a firebolt at me once.”
“Why?”
“Does it matter?”
“Yes.”
Daring sighed, “He… can count cards. There was a new game that got popular when we were kids and Los Pegasus held this big tournament with a ten thousand bit buy-in and a million-bit price. Terra was certain that he had cracked a code and made a system that was absolutely unbeatable but he needed a partner for it to work. He got the money from… somewhere, I think he stole it, he cast disguises over us to make us look older and gave me very definite instructions of what I needed to do but when we were at the semi finals I panicked. I played the queen of hearts with the king of diamonds instead of the king of hearts and he threw a fit and attacked me right there at the table. He got arrested, I went home, he showed up a few weeks later and tried to apologize.
“So you’ve hated someone for over a decade, because they gave you a minor injury once, when you cost them a million bits.”
“No.”
“Then what did he do that was so terrible.”
“He m-murdered my dog.” she whispered quietly.
“I thought he liked your dog.” reminded Somnambula, “and renamed the sphinx in honor of his memory.
“No!” shrieked Daring, “He came to me when Ahuizotl, my Ahuizotl was just fine, and said he’d seen how much I loved playing with my dog and offered to make me a better dog who could talk and do all kinds of crazy tricks. I told him Ahuizotl was all the dog I needed. He walked away and two weeks later Ahuizotl dies to make room for his clay golem or sphinx or whatever that th-thing is which constantly keeps kidnapping me and locking me in deathtraps!”
“It seems that” Somnambula started but Daring talked over her.
“So, I adopt his little monstrosity and my parents.” she swallowed hard, “My parents had always had trouble having another kid after me. My mother had a couple of miscarriages early in the pregnancy but her last one was coming along good; seven months in and no problems. Then she made the mistake of saying in front of Terra that if they lost this baby then they would apply to adopt a colt. A month later she miscarried and his mother died in the same freaking week! My… parents adopted him of course.”
“So he kills my dog to make room for his monster and he kills my real little brother to make room for himself. You’d think he was done but NOOOOPE! The school, in its infinite wisdom, decides to give the little imp sex education. The teacher decides to mention that fillies who don’t have fathers living in their home are significantly more likely to start shagging at an earlier age because they’re more needy for male affirmation. Whoops! Bye, dad!
So at this stage, you’d think the little imp had run out of people to murder. It’s just him and myself and my mom left right? So I graduate and he knows I’m wanting to leave and go as far away as I can so mom gets sick, really sick with some tropical parasite cancer thing that no one’s ever heard of before. She needed twenty/four-hour care by someone who can monitor temperature which happens to be the one and only sense he never ‘managed’ to install in Ahuizotl who can do just about everything else that Terra ever wanted, and something in his internal core makes mercury explode if he gets too close for who knows what reason, so he couldn't do it.”
“Sometimes what’s easy by by natural means is almost impossible with magic.”
“He poisoned my mother for years so he could completely control me!I knew if I stayed there I’d be trapped forever and sooner or later Terra would get tired of waiting for me to fall in love with him and force himself on me. When I ran away he sent Ahuizotl to drag me back and told me that if I left again then my mother would die! He sent Ahuizotl after me again, but I guessed a password deleted Terra’s location. Ahuizotl still wants to bring me back but so long as he doesn't know where it becomes a low priority task and if have him repeatedly build more and more dungeons then he won’t look for Terra. A month after I left Terra realized mom wasn’t useful to him in getting me so he killed her and he’s been looking for me ever since. I never stay in any one place for long, I never visit the same place twice and I write under a persuader so he can’t track me through that.”
Technically, it was entirely possible that none of what Daring had just said was true. She never had any proof that Terra had ever killed anyone but he was smart enough to get away without any evidence. If Daring had started snooping and by some miracle had found evidence, he would have caught her! Terra would never kill her, but he’d have a hundred ways of making sure she never told anyone and none of them were better than death.
The alternative possibility was to believe the story that the kirin clan matriarch had put a curse on the bloodline of Terra’s pregnant mother when she was exiled; a curse which destroyed anyone who loved him. That would explain Altozutil, his mother, and her parents but if there was a curse then Daring did not want to be next on the list.
Maybe the curse was real but self-inflicted. Terra had always… dabbled in things that best left alone. After he was adopted Daring had seen him sneak out right after bedtime and didn’t come back until after lunch the next day. She’d covered for him figuring he just needed some time alone but when asked he said that he’d bribed ‘The Jailer’ to let him speak with his mom after she’d died and boasted about how he had smuggled her a blade to ‘end her pain’. It had sounded like the delusions of a twelve-year-old struggling to deal with the grief of loss while trying to impress his crush with made-up superpowers, neither of which she wanted to encourage.
Terra annoyed almost everything and everyone he came across and the possibility he’d irritated something stronger than him and brought the curse on himself. Or he could just be really, really, really unlucky.
She figured it was maybe a 50/50 chance he was a serial killer but one option made her the only thing close to a friend he’d ever had and she’d abandoned him because she was a paranoid wreck who had chosen to blame him for every single thing that ever went wrong in her life because she was a bad daughter too afraid to watch her mother die. The other option meant she was standing up for herself by avoiding an abusive psychopath who was after her because she was super-hot. She knew which answer she wanted to be true so that’s the version she told herself.
She realized she’d been crying. She didn’t know how much time had passed, but Jeopardy was screaming profanities at her, kicking her in the ribs and yelling that they would never regain the status they’d just lost in Somnambula’s eyes after this pathetic display of weakness. She was aware of a cup of honey tea being pressed into her lips by Welkin and Somnambula’s wing covering her like a blanket and she snuggled into it. Jeopardy yelled at her not to trust the bitch but no one had held her like this since her other died and she just needed a moment to pretend that it was real. She loved Sombra because he made her feel safe. He was the only other person she’d met who could have protected her from Terra once and for all, she didn’t fall in love with him so he could become Terra.
“And now, it’s time for you to face him,” Somnambula ordered.
“I c-can’t. I wish I could but-”
“Isn’t your name Daring Do?” asked Welkin.
“It's who I want to be, not who I am. I’m not a hero. I’m just an archaeologist who writes novels that are loosely based on playing games with my dog.” She steeled herself. “Promise me that Sombra is different. That he’d never do the things Terra did."
Starkin blinked, “You mean the part about the dog?”
“No! My Parents! My Brother! Holding me hostage and raping me!”
“Don’t you remember Jeopardy?”
“What? Remember what!?”
“Being the warden of all Sombra’s concubines you kept locked in the basement; punishing the ones who tried to escape, cleaning out the corpses of the ones Sombra got too excited with, and setting up gladiator death matches between the fillies he got bored with. You made a killing off the betting rackets and” Starkin couldn’t keep a straight face anymore and burst out laughing as Daring felt her guts sink and Somnambula threw a threatening glare at her, “I’m just kidding.”
“No.” Somnambula soothed calmingly, “Sombra would never do anything like that and once he’s returned, Terra won’t be able to do it to anyone.”