//------------------------------//
// Chapter The Only 
// Story: Checking it Twice 
// by TheJackOfTales 
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Twas mere hours before Hearth’s Warming, and Flurry Heart couldn’t sleep. Each time she even dared to blink, that wretched scene would play over and over again in her mind. Her father, dumbfounded as his prized possession, a signed first edition Ogres and Oubliettes Collector’s Box, was vaporized before his very eyes. That thing was older than she was, but with one fateful magical mishap, it was gone, nothing more than dust on the wind. Her father said that everything was alright, that he knew it was an accident, but Flurry Heart was already familiar with the lies of adults. Only a foal would be convinced by such obvious lies. A teenage filly like Flurry Heart? Never.

“Alright? You’ve gotta be kidding.” Flurry Heart softly argued with her bedroom mirror. She saw nothing in its reflection, which made perfect sense for a lightless room. To go through with her mission there needed to be absolute darkness.  The guards couldn’t think for a moment that she was still awake. Right now, she was pulling double self-motivation duty, giving herself a pep talk by arguing with a mental representation of her dad.

“Nothing can just be ‘alright’, not on Hearth’s Warming Week,” she muttered to herself. Hearth’s Warming Week was torture for foals, especially foals like Flurry who truly believed in the Hearth’s Warming spirit, but also knew the rules of The Game. Generally throughout the year, you would be afforded a myriad of mess ups and face no punishment beyond groundings and lectures. Of course, a teenager as sweet as Flurry (A description contested by various scholars, including her previous Crystaller) never faced those. However, she was familiar with hubris, the sick to the stomach feeling of eating all her Nightmare Night candy in one go because surely alicorns had stronger stomachs. To fly too close to the sun, making a mistake during Hearth’s Warming week because the rest of the year was so easy was a rookie error guaranteed to leave somepony with no presents in their stockings. 

Noticing her eyelids begin to droop, she took the risk of showing brief horn light as she levitated a mug of black coffee to her lips. It tasted horrendous, but this bitterness was one she would have to get used to if things didn’t go according to plan.

“I know what you’re hiding from me,” she spat coldly to the mirror. She was on the Naughty List now. Despite all her knowledge of The Game, her spotless, awe-inspiring Nice List record, it seemed even the greatest had to fall eventually. 

Plus, at this level of sleep deprivation, coffee was unable to convince her primed for bedtime three hours ago brain that she actually wasn’t tired. She was loopy enough that the voice in her head she called Shining Armor she was arguing against was actually starting to make some good points, something about the rampant materialism ruining the holiday spirit and that encouraging children only to be good for a reward was only good in the short term. 

This called for another sip of coffee. Another levitation and sip later, and there was just enough caffeine in her system to remind her that brain Shining Armor was not to be trusted, a foul being of deceit that wanted her to lose The Game and any hope at receiving presents this year. Winners like Flurry Heart, however, were known as such because they knew how to bounce back, to spit defeat in the face and wrench victory from its jaws. 

“What you think isn’t even important anyway, old man. I know who really runs things around here,” with hoof and mouth she dramatically tossed her bedsheet over the mirror, vanquishing the Shining specter. The argument was over. Her statement was true. While dear old dad was co-ruler of the Crystal Empire, he had no jurisdiction when it came to Hearth’s Warming gifts. After all, on every present Flurry had ever received, it said they were from Kris Kringle. Thus, all mom and dad could be were snitches, messengers and informants for the big man of the frozen north. As long as she caught him in the act of stocking the rest of the family’s stockings, she could convince him otherwise. Hopefully, Kringle wouldn’t make her resort to force. 

Flurry Heart already had the joint cased. The ‘joint’ in question was her own home, and while the winding halls of the Crystal Castle were confusing to many, with fifteen years of experience she practically knew it like the back of her hoof. The fact that every hallway was also a hall of mirrors did catch her off guard on occasion, but everypony made the occasional mistake. Thus, the darkness of nightfall was a bonus. The plan was foolproof.


First step: Take plenty of naps. By setting off her body’s rhythm, she ensured an active nightly state on par with thestrals. The effectiveness of this was questionable considering that reality was currently constantly in and out of focus. 

Step two: Construct a convenient lie to stay in her room all day. Using the guise of a ‘goth phase’, she made sure that she remained in the dark, keeping her eyes adjusted properly to notice figures in the darkness dashing away. The fact they never questioned the falsehood’s validity was something that caused her to chuckle. Her parents were lovable, but man were they easily fooled.

With the briefest, dimmest glow of her horn, she activated step three: one of her aunt Twilight’s soundproofing spells, granted to her after a very uncomfortable talk about the birds, the bees, and housing that naturally resonated as opposed to dampening sound. Lucky she had that conversation, as Flurry’s first instinct when she realized night fell was to rush out of her bed and sprint for the hall, an instinct countered by the unfamiliarity of a room typically surrounded in garish pink lighting being shrouded in darkness. The soundproofing spell thoroughly masked the cartoonish thump of Flurry’s forehead colliding with a door she could’ve sworn was still five steps away.


She had no time to dwell on her failure. Kringle was known to appear for mere moments before vanishing in puffs of smoke, and Flurry Heart had little time to plead her case. Of course, to make her mad dash through the Crystal Castle she had all the guard schedules memorized, even if the majority of them spent their Hearth’s Warming patrols maintaining the security of their own homes.

It was in remembering the guard schedules, however, that she made her fatal mistake. Many ponies before Flurry had refused their bodies sleep, certain that the couple of extra hours granted to them by working further into the night than evolution wanted them to was ultimately worth it. These ponies were Luna’s favorites, but those who could actually manage to do so were few and far between, lost souls whose sleep schedules were so out of whack that night was day and day was night. Flurry Heart was not one of those ponies.

As a result, her body was looking for any opportunity to sneak her into sleep’s comforting embrace. It had tried earlier with the blinks. It was thwarted then by caffeination, but as the hours grew longer, coffee not only grew weaker, but sip by sip disappeared entirely. Perhaps Flurry Heart could’ve withstood her body’s suggestion had she not closed her eyes to visualize the guard shifts. Considering that that was exactly what she did, it was no surprise that she ended up falling fast asleep, face planted on the door. 

Hearth’s Warming was a season of cheer, but for those on the Naughty List, it was also a season of fear. There are some ponies who know how to manipulate that fear, and they find the fear of an alicorn the tastiest. Maybe if it wasn’t Hearth’s Warming, where the whole castle’s guard was down. Maybe if Flurry Heart wasn’t a magically gifted teenage alicorn who found the idea of Princess Luna invading her dreams super creepy (she preferred that if aunt Luna was going to conduct therapy sessions, they would be while she was awake) and had set up a series of wards around her bedroom to block her from doing so. Maybe if magic wasn’t so darn specific, maybe if anti-dreamwalking wards were also anti-dream infection wards..maybe, maybe, maybe…somepony would’ve noticed the brief flash of red and green magic as Sombra found the perfect source of fear to begin reforming from.

As far as Flurry knew, however, she was galloping through the crystal halls without a care in the world, unable to notice the trail of shadows far ahead. Brief sparks of light from her horn ignited the otherwise dim hallway as she magically spirited away the few remaining sugar cookie and eggnog stuffed guards back to their own homes to make her way toward the main hall. In said hall, there would doubtless be a garish spread of Hearth's Warming decorations and most importantly, the cookies and milk she had jinxed earlier as step four of the plan. The goal wasn’t to kill Kris Kringle. Hopefully things wouldn’t have to come to that. Hopefully, there was just enough magic mixed in that they’d be a bit more willing to let slide some of Flurry’s minor infractions. 

“I wasn’t aware part of the Hearth’s Warming spirit was vile parasitism!” Halfway down the hall, Flurry heard a thud not too unlike that of a dropped sack of potatoes. The worst case scenario flashed in her mind:Kris Kringle collapsed on the floor, tainted milk forming a mustache on his holly jolly corpse. Blood the consistency of cranberry sauce pooling around his forehead. Their last action? Likely to place Flurry forever on the Naughty, no, the naughtiest list of all, never to see the light of Hearth’s Warming presents again. 

“No!” shouted Flurry Heart, horn sparking bright as in a yellow flash she teleported onto the scene of what she assumed to be her own crime. The first thing she noticed was her former crystaller, Sunburst, draped within a costume befitting the season on the ground inches away from an intricate furniture set designed for the big jolly stallion himself. It wasn’t the first time she had seen him like this, in a dreadfully tasteless masquerade of the real thing. She always knew that one day, Sunburst’s actions would come back to bite him. The second thing she noticed was Sunburst’s general state. Drenched in milk, cookie crumbs all over his red and white sweater, bright green ey-Wait, what?

“Your castle’s security is lacking, Princess,” spoke King Sombra. “It seems your guards have grown fat and lazy in the brief decade or so I’ve been gone. There’s no other way to explain this second-rate Santa Claus.” Sombra hadn’t known what to expect when infecting Flurry Heart’s dream. All he expected was to get a free source of fear with which to reform. Instead, something about that girl’s mind had forced him into some ridiculous red and white getup that looked only vaguely familiar to something he remembered donning back in the good old days. A getup copied by that pathetic worm who seemed to insult him by wearing it worse. 

There’s nothing that kick starts a fight or flight response quite like seeing the stallion who brought nightmares to your child self in the flesh again, so Flurry Heart can be excused for instinctively blasting the bastard in question with a beam of raw magic. To Sombra’s credit, the shield he put up in response made it so that he wasn’t immediately slain by a teenage girl. No, by the time Flurry Heart’s brain caught up with her magic enough that she was too busy questioning why Sombra was there in the first place to keep pouring magic into killing him, Sombra was just barely clinging onto life. Auntie Twilight’s magic lessons were a force to be reckoned with. 

After taking a moment to catch her breath, Flurry began charging another magical barrage before stopping abruptly. Something was off. The Sombra she knew, the Sombra that managed to take over the Crystal Empire in an hour and a half shouldn’t have been nearly defeated by a crude beam of magic. Now that she was giving him a good look, he was a lot less corporeal than she remembered, practically seeping into the floor.

“Everything hurts…but this pain is nothing compared to the agony of watching that buffoon gallivant around in my role,” groaned the former tyrant. 

Before she could get into that, she was quickly reminded of her original objective. Once again, she lit up the horn, placing it at the fallen Sombra’s throat. “Where’s Kris Kringle? What did you do to him?” She questioned.

A look of indignation flashed across Sombra’s face. “Just who do you think you’re pointing that horn at, brat?” His eyes flashed green, an unnatural purple magic bursting forward from his horn as his gaze pierced her. She knew what would come next, she had heard the stories from mom and dad, the two ponies who she definitely should’ve called for the moment she saw him. In moments, she would be living her greatest nightmare. After all, Sombra was already infecting this dream, the very fact that she was able to talk was an anomaly in of itself, one that he could easily remedy. At least, that’s what he thought.

She braced herself, shutting her eyes and steeling her resolve. Each second felt as eternity as…nothing. Nothing happened. Slowly, she reopened her eyes, only to find Sombra still laying on the floor, gasping for air.

She began to put two and two together, not only was Sombra almost decimated by one blast of magic, but his trademark “Let’s see your greatest fear” shtick had amounted to nothing. Multiply that by the fact that it’d only been fifteen years since his last spotting when Twilight figured that the next time he’d manage to reform would be in a millennia could only mean one thing.

“You…you can’t hurt me, can you?” Stated Flurry Heart, almost unable to believe her own words.

“Would you like to test that again, child?” Once more, Sombra’s eyes flashed green. This time, Flurry Heart keeps her own eyes open as a phantom image of Sombra’s eyes radiated from his own and towards her, only to dissipate moments before touching her, much to the stallion’s surprise.

“It’s only been fifteen years.” Flurry put a hoof to her chin, examining the evidence. ”Auntie Twilight said that now that your immortality isn’t sustained by the constant fear of your subjects, you’re running on whatever scraps of fear you can find. With that in mind it should’ve taken you almost a thousand more years to come back at full strength. Right now, you’re not a threat to anypony, are you? Well, anypony except Sunburst, apparently.”

With that, she stopped pointing her horn toward Sombra, and instead levitated him onto the same chair Sunburst had fallen off of. She wasn’t used to magically manipulating fluids, so it took a couple of tries to get his shadowy body standing upright. The speechless Sombra just accepted being manhandled for a moment, shell shocked that he had not failed once, but twice, to manipulate somepony, let alone one he last remembered seeing in diapers.

“Well, there’s nothing to do now but to wait for Kris Kringle to arrive,” Lighting her horn again, she teleported Sunburst away much like she did the guards. The only distraction now to her original goal was Sombra himself.

“Yes! He’s gone. I didn’t have the power left in me to do away with him myself. At least you’ve done me the courtesy of a small favor before slaying me,” spoke Sombra, reinvigorated. This was not a high moment for the former king. This could actually be considered the lowest he’s ever gone, but at least he wouldn't have to see anypony else wearing that stupid suit.

“At this point I just have to ask. What did Sunburst even do to you? Wouldn’t it make more sense for you to use that power against me and my family?” Said Flurry Heart. “Not that I want you to,” she clarified. “But as long as I’m sitting here waiting, might as well ask.”

“It seems the only respectable thing about you is your respect for the Hearth’s Warming season,” began Sombra. He was nearly defeated, but there was still an angle which he could play, a way to draw out enough fear to place himself as the master of this dreamscape. The moment he entered, his spell gave him enough information to know what the child alicorn’s greatest fear was. It had been a thousand years since he had to stoop so low, forced to use words instead of magic to incite terror. Umbrum, luckily, were a predator species, and there was no use in being able to speak if not to trick prey. “But you’re wasting your time, you know. You’ve already found Kris Kringle, and you and I both know it certainly wasn’t that sham.” Best of all, Sombra knew that the best tricks were ones that required no lies at all.

“I’m not going to fall for your tricks at this point, Sombra. Without the magic, you’re just a really bad liar,” was Flurry Heart’s disinterested reply. She wasn’t about to entertain the last ravings of a tyrant, not on Hearth’s Warming Eve.

Sombra chuckled, puffs of smoke billowing outward that were swiftly blown away by a flap of Flurry’s wings. “They haven’t told you, have they? Despite years of using him as an anchor over you, restraining you from wreaking havoc all throughout the year as is any child’s greatest wish, they never told you the origins of Kris Kringle, did they?” 

“I know what everypony knows,” said Flurry Heart. “Kris Kringle is an alicorn with a talent that allows them to detect who’s naughty or nice and figure out the best presents for the nice ponies”. She crossed her hooves and looked away at Sombra. What kind of sad pony didn’t know who Kris Kringle was? 

Sombra sported a wicked smile. “So, why is it then that the only nation with any history of their existence is the Crystal Empire?” The line was cast, all Flurry needed to do was take the bait.

Take the bait she did, pausing for a moment to digest Sombra’s accusation. Flurry had a talent for sensing the emotions of other ponies, passed down to her by her mother, but in a way far broader than emotions of love and affection. Unluckily for her, Sombra was a sorcerer beyond his years who only had endless time to improve. It was in moments like these where he was backed into a corner that all that knowledge was put to its best. Fear magic, too, was emotional magic, and although it almost brought him to oblivion, he stretched the last scraps of magic he had into tricking Flurry’s sensors. If she detected even a hint of deceitfulness, it all could’ve been over, he already felt he was pushing his luck, only succeeding so far because his lived experience matched so perfectly with her greatest fears.

If she had spent more time on it, really dissected Sombra’s emotional state instead of glancing over, the jig would’ve been up. Flurry Heart, though, was not immune to confirmation bias, and there was a part of her that really didn’t believe the Kris Kringle story. A part of her that wanted to believe Sombra.

Anytime she ever talked about Kris Kringle outside of the Crystal Empire, she would be met with awkward expressions, adults scanning around the room to check if her parents were there before reassuring her that yes, Kris Kringle was real. The foals were just plain confused. She thought it was because they had simply become nonbelievers, no longer able to see Kris Kringle like she could. That’s how her parents explained it to her, and why would they lie? Then again, Flurry never did use her magic to check…

“Clover the Clever, Smart Cookie, Private Pansy. All of them are mentioned over and over in the Hearth’s Warming legend. Don’t you think, child, that an alicorn of all things would be referenced somewhere?” Continued Sombra. “Yet the Crystal Empire remembers. It’s almost like they’ve been forgotten for a thousand years.” 

Realization and anger flashed across Flurry’s face, her horn sparked again. “You! It was you! You made Kris Kringle disappear with your stupid curse!” It was in this moment, the exact second Flurry began to give into fear, when she ceded control of her mental state and thus her dream to the infection that was Sombra, that he won. He could feel himself winning, even, the delectable taste of alicorn fear fueling his strength and his ability to wage even more control over the mindscape. 

He knew he had to be careful with his growing strength though, tip off any alarm bells and Luna would come knocking, brute forcing through the wards Flurry Heart had oh so generously set up for him. Careful fear-based dream manipulation meant setting up dreams within dreams. Even if Luna brute forced through it, with the proper maze set throughout the dreamscape, Sombra could harvest enough fear from Flurry to manifest in the real world. To get enough power to do that would require one last push.

Once again, Sombra laughed his smoky laugh. This time, however, the billowing smoke rolled gently, the wheeze of his laugh rounding out into a deep, bellowing guffaw. “Ho, ho, ho, Princess. You’re so close to the truth. Now try again. Here, let me help you out.” The smoke around Sombra shifted, rolling slowly toward his chin as it pooled into a magnificent black beard.

Flurry looked at one of the leftover sugar cookies, stared at the visage of Kris Kringle upon it, and, hooves shaking, picked it up and compared it with the figure in front of her. The colors were off, a magnificent white beard to Sombra’s black, but the look was exactly right. The pieces were clicking into place. There was never a sleigh. There was just Sombra’s smoky body rippling out throughout the sky, the figure reflected on the moon as one stallion being pulled by a chariot of deer. The milk and cookies weren’t for Kris Kringle, but for those working in the mines and the fields, a reward on the only day their tyrant deemed they deserved one. Appearing in everypony’s house and knowing what they desired and feared didn’t require an alicorn. Flurry had heard of unicorns powerful enough to manipulate the flow of time to their whim, so there was  no reason a stallion powerful enough to curse an entire empire for a thousand years couldn’t manage a sequence of teleportation spells.

As each puzzle piece found their place, Flurry’s jaw dropped further. Sombra and Kris Kringle were one in the same. No, there never was a Kris Kringle. Flurry had ignored it earlier, but that’s not the name Sombra said when she first encountered him. He said ‘Santa Claus’.  

“Yes! Now you understand! I was the greatest Santa Claus the Crystal Empire ever knew! I was the only Santa Claus they ever knew, that the world knew! I knew their greatest fears, and reversed them to find their greatest dreams! To those adults who were good, who worked well in the mines and treated their fellow workers with respect, I gave them a day off. The good children got the finest candy in the Empire from my own personal stores!” Shouted Sombra. The shadows began to grow, spreading throughout the entire room and shrouding the hall in darkness. Sombra’s body was no longer visible, just his piercing red eyes, and nothing in the room was illuminated besides Sombra and herself. Checkmate.

Her heart was pounding,  sweat beginning to mat her fur, yet  Flurry Heart questioned into the darkness, voice quivering “And what about the bad ones? The ones on the Naughty List?” 

“Well, they already knew what their greatest punishment was, now didn’t they? All I had to do was show it to them.” Spoke Sombra matter-of-factly as the green hue of his dark magic reflected once more in his eyes.  
 
The world Flurry saw in Sombra’s eyes was nearly identical to her current one. The Crystal Empire was still abundant in Hearth’s Warming cheer, making up for the lost thousand years of holiday spirit by blinding all of Equestria with Hearth’s Warming lights combined with naturally refractive buildings.The only different was that in the center of the Empire, hanging underneath the window Flurry and her parents used to address the people for the newspapers, was a gilded cage and its cerise prisoner, the Naughtiest foal that ever lived. She was doomed to watch the Hearth’s Warming cheer of others but never to participate herself, allowed only to cry out in despair!

“AAAAH!” shouted Flurry Heart, suddenly back in her own bed, trapped under an endless layer of blankets and pillows. Like she remembered, it was pitch-black. Unlike what she remembered, there was a knock at her door.

“Honey, it’s Hearth’s Warming. I know you’re going through some self-discovery right now, but won’t you please enjoy the holidays with your dad and I?” asked Mom gently. The constant napping and staying in a pitch-black room like steps one and two required caused Flurry to sleep through the entirety of Hearth’s Warming Eve. She breathed a sigh of relief. All of it was just an awful nightmare. Kris Kringle was real and Sombra wasn’t this weird monster named Santa Claus.

Taking a moment to turn her hornlight on so she wouldn’t bonk her head on the door like she did in the dream, Flurry opened the door and immediately hugged her mom. That dream only lasted a couple of hours, but she had missed her family so much, and even though she was in her ‘too cool for Mom’ phase of teenagehood, she couldn’t help herself this time. That’s when she felt the scratchy yet pillowy feeling of a grand, luxurious beard. 

Her heart nearly leapt from her chest as she craned her neck upward. Once more, she was face to face with the pulsing green eyes of Santa Sombra.

“Ho ho ho!” Bellowed Santa Sombra. “I have a special place to put Naughty little fillies like you”. His jaw unhinged to floor level, revealing an open gilded cage at the back of his throat. Flurry scrambled away in an attempt to escape, but found herself being sucked into Sombra’s mouth as if it was a black hole. She flapped her wings, straining her muscles as far as they could go, but to no avail. She tried to teleport, but only felt the sharp pain of the black crystals that lined her horn while she wasn’t looking, stopping her magic.

“AAAAAH!” She screamed once more, and awoke again in her room. The knock came. She ignored it. She turned her hornlight once more. This time, there was a big red present at the foot of her bed. Levitating it, she noticed that despite its ostentatious design, the lovingly textured wrapping paper that, considering the crinkles, had to have been made by hoof and mouth, there was no resistance when moving it. The box was empty. The knocking at the door still continued.

Flurry Heart paused for a moment. Staring at the door made her want to panic, so she focused on other things. “So, I know I”m in a dream,” Flurry figured that if she started thinking about the problem, she wouldn’t have enough time to focus on her emotions to the point of fear. This time, she was using Auntie Celestia’s advice. From what she recalled from the same lessons that gave her the ability to combat Luna’s dream walking in the first place, she was in textbook dream demon territory. Some shade had to be using Sombra’s visage to harvest her fear, so all she had to do was get over it. 

The more she thought about what it was she was so scared of, the visions that the demon had been haunting her with, the Santa Sombra, the knocked out Sunburst, the Naughty List(that totally had to be a fear it was making up) the more stupid all of it clearly was. 

Flurry Heart screamed for a third time, but not out of fear, but sheer anger at the ridiculousness of her situation. Here she was, fifteen years old, worrying about whether she was on the Naughty list! The Naughty list wasn’t even important, it’s not like that’s why she had felt so terrible for the entire day, why she felt the need to barricade herself inside of her room without any light. She accidentally destroyed something her father felt terrible about, and the guilt over that somehow spiraled into this ridiculous sequence. That kind of realization demanded a nice long scream, but it also demanded a solution, and it wasn’t too hard at this point to figure one out. To stop a dream demon, you needed to get over your own fear. You needed to find closure. The only difficulty was doing that through all the demon’s tricks. As an alicorn and part-time dreamwalker, though, Flurry could influence her situation far more than most. She didn’t know what the demon’s plan with that present box was, maybe he’d pop out of it or something, but she knew that she could use it as a weapon. The demon would assume anything within the present to be of its dominion, and wouldn’t think twice if she placed something of her own design.

“Mom, can you get Dad to open the door this time?” Flurry Heart carefully walked to the door. To flurry, this was bait a dream demon couldn’t pass up. A victim trying to influence the dream, only to reveal more vulnerabilities? Textbook dream demon maneuver here was to masquerade as whatever the victim thought would bring them safety and harvest more fear that way. The moment they did that, however, was the exact moment they were most vulnerable, showing their true bodies to their targets for efficient emotion harvesting. 

Sombra was a careful sorcerer, sure, and he knew about Luna’s domain. What he didn’t know was that others knew, assuming himself to be the first, even above Starswirl himself, to amass enough power to influence the dreams of and cause nightmares within the pony populace like Luna could. What he felt in this moment was exactly what a dream demon would: a fly waltzing into the web. Too bad it was he who was trapped. 

“In my hooves is a newly signed first edition Ogres and Oubliettes Collector’s Box. In my hooves is a newly signed first edition Ogres and Oubliettes Collector’s Box.” The dreamscape shifted for a moment,  her lucidity allowing her magic to pop the wished for items into existence within the present. When the door opened, she wasn’t surprised to see Santa Sombra again. But that was fine, he wouldn’t be staying for long. The very present in her hooves would be what destroyed him.

“I think I get it now.” Flurry began as Santa Sombra once more opened his gaping maw. “I don’t actually care about being Naughty or Nice. It was always about being the kind of pony to spread love and joy everywhere I went, and when I did something so horrible to somepony I loved, even if by accident, I didn’t know how to handle what that might say about me”. This time, she walked in of her own volition, present still gripped tightly in her hooves. 

Even if the situation was fabricated, the words she spoke were true, and with a charge of her horn, the present box glowed with a light brighter than the sun as she tossed it down Sombra’s throat. This was her anchor, a physical manifestation of the fear that brought her here, and simultaneously the proof of what it was her brain was getting over. Most of the work of a dreamwalker was parsing emotions in a way the brain could easily understand, away from the chaos that was its natural state, and with tools like these, Flurry’s mind was grounded on the real problem at hoof. The dream demon’s tricks were an easily ignored distraction.

Try as he might to regain control over the dreamscape, Sombra’s might as nothing to Flurry Heart’s now that fear had given way to resolve. The alicorn of Empathy would not be fooled again. As her horn glowed brighter than ever before, the dreamscape began to shatter and crack as Sombra felt the pain of being disassembled. This spell would erase everything in Flurry’s mind so that whatever had infected her couldn’t escape to any others. Of course, she had her own escape plan in mind, as with a leap she glided down Santa Sombra’s throat and jumped after the present.

There was no cage this time, just the door to her room. It wasn’t shrouded in darkness either. It was her usual room, bright hot-pink lighting and all. With a quick glance at the calendar, Flurry Heart knew it was the night before Hearth’s Warming. It always was. 

The present from her dream was still in her hooves. Unexpected, but not impossible from what Luna had taught her. She knew exactly what to do with it. Instead of marching down the hall, sneaking around and darting past guards, she’d just go to her parents’ room and give her Dad a present a day early.

Though Shining Armor was understandably grouchy at being woken up late into the evening, he accepted the gift with care, encouraged by a glare from his loving wife. Their child had been through a lot in the past couple of days, going through a phase they never would’ve imagined, and yet came bearing a present for them. How sweet of her. This was why she deserved all the presents she was getting tomorrow. The family slept together, visions of gumdrops in their minds as they waited for Hearth’s Warming Day. 

It was then, as Hearth’s Warming Eve moved into Hearth’s Warming Day that a shadowy figure paused atop the crystal tower, dressed in blood-red robes and adorned with a horned helmet. The Crystal Princess was not one to be toyed with, it would seem. She had almost slain him for good. If he had sent his true body instead of a fear harvesting simulacrum, it would’ve all been over. Good thing that after countless years of sorcery he remembered to always be wary.

It was that near paranoia that granted him the drive to construct his immortality spell, and what also served him well when jumping into and out of chimneys unscathed and evading inquisitive young foals trying to catch him in the act. It had been over a thousand years since he had last had to be Santa Claus, but he still pulled it off.

“Even after countless years, I remain the greatest Santa Claus!” He shouted to no one in particular. He seeped back into the shadows, preparing his next plan to overthrow the Empire.