//------------------------------//
// Lord Sombra's Rise: Carbon, Part One 
// Story: Her Dark Inheritance 
// by GoesKaboom 
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Important: Sensitive readers should take care while reading this chapter. Considering the nature of King Sombra's rise to power and Luna's fall from sanity, there are some disturbing events depicted in this story. While I do not think it is graphic enough to need a rating change, please note that there will be discussion of disturbing topics such as wartime violence(including implied sexual assault), regular garden-variety violence, and descent into madness. 


Lord Sombra's Rise: Carbon, Part One


Sometimes, in order to achieve a final objective, one has to work with other individuals that one finds distateful. 

That didn't mean that Lord Sombra of the Crystal Empire had to like it, though. 

There had never been any being, pony or otherwise, that he had wanted to blast to smithereens more than the smarmy Diamond Dog Alpha currently grinning at him. Yes, if he was going to dethrone that blasted King Staccato, he was going to need outside help. And trying to get the Crystal Ponies on his side was, he already knew, a lost cause if there ever was one. Equestria clearly wouldn't help him, so obviously if he wanted allies, he would have to go outside of his own species. Of course, he would have preferred it wasn't Diamond Dogs. Lord Sombra had entered negotiations with both Commander Gaston Grayskies of Griffindell and Empress Mofubuki of the Penguin Nation, but both had fallen through. Commander Grayskies' wife had laid an egg, and in griffon society it was considered taboo for the father to leave a nesting mother and unhatched chick to fight. It was considered so disgraceful that if the griffon died, leaving nesting wife and unhatched chick behind, he would not be given a proper burial, and worse still, he would be denied entrance to the Holy Aerie, the griffon afterlife. 

Personally, Sombra found the whole idea foolish- a Holy Aerie? As if the cosmos cared whether or not a griffon, a pony, or a dragon, or any other being was a virtuous or corrupt individual... but then again, ponies had some equally odd beliefs, so Sombra really had no room to talk. Besides, the Commander had agreed to send a contingent of troops if necessary- he just wouldn't be leading them. 

As for Empress Mofubuki, the penguin monarch had in fact been very interested in forming an alliance wit the unicorn stallion. The Empress had lamented the fact that her nation of Pengin was little more than a barren, frozen wasteland, and her subjects were an uneducated, destitute people. Pengin had few natural resources other than an abundance of ice and fish, but ice was worthless for trading and most species (with the exceptions of griffons, dragons, and the few remaining tribes of sapient bears) did not eat fish. As the griffons already had plenty of their own fish, the fact that fish was considered “poverty food” by the dragons, and that the bear tribes were even more destitute than the penguins... well, they didn't have much of a chance to better their lots in life through trade. 

Sombra had promised the penguin Empress that her people would be allowed free and open immigration to the Crystal Empire and the frozen lands that surrounded it, as long as the Empress provided troops to help his uprising. He also conveniently forgto to mention that under his rule, the Crystal Empire probably wouldn't be the sort of place anypony (or anyguin, as the case may be) would go to have a decent life. If the penguins managed to survive the coming war, likely they would just end up poor and cold in a whole new location. 

But the Empress had apparently believed the pretty lies, and had been more than happy to acquiesce to Sombra's requests.... at least until she'd met an untimely death. The official story from her successor, her son Pirtuk, was that Empress Mofubuki had been out on a tour of one of the coastal villages, when the part of the ice shelf she'd been standing on gave way, sending her plummeting a thousand feet to her doom in the icy water below. But it wasn't exactly a secret that Pirtuk had hated his mother, and hated even more the idea of opening Pengin up to the outside world, and had likely orchestrated his mother's “accident.” Unfortunately for Sombra's plans, the new Emperor was as paranoid as the late Empress had been trusting, and had immediately scrapped the plans for the alliance, going so far as to state that if Sombra ever stepped foot in Pengin again, his life was forfeit. 

This had lead Sombra to begin negotiations with a pack of Diamond Dogs that lived about fifty miles outside of the Crystal Empire. They wouldn't have been the unicorn stallion's first choice of allies- they were unstable, excessively violent, and even by Sombra's admittedly lax standards, lacked any sort of moral compass whatsoever. Sombra wasn't a good pony by any stretch of the imagination, but there was something about Brassite, the Alpha of this pack, that made his mane stand on end. 

“So I understand that your people are quite fond of gems? If you join with me, I cam make sure that your pack is supplied with plenty for at least a hundred years,” Sombra said, attempting to get the Alpha's attention. “If you have any espeically intelligent dogs in your ranks, perhaps I could even teach a simple lapidomancy spell, so that you can find your own gems without too much terrible trouble.” 

“Yes, gems good,” Brassite salivated, “but mares even better! Can Lord Sombra promise mares?” 

Sombra's eyes nearly popped out of his head. “Excuse me?” 

“Diamond Dog bitches no good for anything except puppies. Queen Dolomite was the last good bitch, but she been dead for four hundred years! Maybe mares be more fun!” 

Sombra hesitated. What Brassite was proposing... yes, he was not an upstanding citizen himself, and he had already commited many crimes, but he could safely say that he had never raped anypony. The idea was actually quite revolting to him on a base level. There was something so... dishonorable about the whole idea, and if anypony had ever tried to attack his late mother in that way he would have immediately blasted them into gory chunks. However, he did need these soldiers, and it wasn't like he intended to actually leave his new allies alive anyway. Would it really hurt anything if he agreed to let Brassite and his minions have their way with the mares of the Crystal Empire if he killed them all before they had the chance? And did he even really care what they did anyway, or was he just imagining his mother in the place of those mares and reacting poorly because of it? 

Deciding that he would deal with those moral questions later, Sombra gave his lukewarm agreement, if only to get to the next, more important part of the negotiation. “Fine. Now how many soliders can you send?” 

Brassite thought for a moment. “My pack is 10,000 dogs strong, but about 2,000 are puppies and another 3,000 are bitches. You don't want bitches, they not worth much. Of the 5,000, I need 750 here to keep order and another 200 of those are too old. You can have the rest though.” 

Sombra quickly did the calculations in his head. 4,050 troops. He could definitely work with that. “So we're agreed, then?” 

Brassite grinned, a feral expression that made Sombra's latent evolutionary instinct to flee kick in. The stallion muscled his way past it, however, and stood his ground. The Diamond Dog nodded. “Agreed. Now allow me to give you my pack's hospitality, Lord Sombra!” 

The pack's hospitality turned out to be a lineup of different meat-based dishes, each served by a wary-looking puppy. Sombra, out of politeness to his hosts, forced himself to take a bite of every dish, even as his stomach screamed at him in rebellion. It did not help that Brassite personally insisted on graphically describing how he killed each and every one of the creatures in each dish. 

Sombra was busy trying to suppress his gag reflex at Brassite's story about how the calf in the veal dish had watched in horror as the dog had forcibly milked its mother, murdered her right in front of it, then stabbed the calf in the head, when a sudden commotion broke out not too far from where the disgusting meal was taking place. As Brassite had already told him that scuffles among Diamond Dogs were commonplace, Sombra had already turned his attention back to forcing down more of his revolting dinner when someone shouted over the din- “Touch me again and I'll bite my tongue off and choke on my own blood!” 

The voice sounded more educated and genteel than any other Diamond Dog that Sombra had come across so far. The urgency, seriousness, and despair in that single statement caught the stallion's attention, and he jumped up from his seat, turning an accusing glare on the Alpha. “What's going on over there?” 

Brassite looked supremely unconcerned. “Nothing to worry about, Lord Sombra. Just one of the prostitutes causing trouble.” 

“That didn't sound like she was the one causing the trouble-” 

“No, it is just daughter of the old Alpha. I did not kill her when I killed her father. I should have, though. Enjoy your dinner, do not worry about it- she'll be dead in a few minutes anyway, hopefully.” 

It was at that moment that Sombra decided that alliance or no alliance, Brassite could get bucked. Teleporting away from the table, Sombra immediately materialized in the cluster of Diamond Dogs that surrounded the fight. 

In the middle of the cheering crowd, an absolute behemoth of a Diamond Dog was ruthlessly beating a smaller one. Diamond Dogs were a bit difficult to tell apart in terms of gender, but the sleek, if somewhat shaggier than normal black coat and more delicate features of the smaller one made Sombra think that it must have been the old Alpha's daughter. Any doubt that the stallion might have had was removed when the enormous dog spoke. 

“What a worthless little slut, parading around like you're still Alpha's daughter! Your place is here as a whore, but you don't get that, do you? I ought to kill you where you stand.” 

“Go ahead,” the female snarled defiantly. “Unlike you-” here she uttered something that Sombra couldn't make out, but it did not sound complimentary- “I have not betrayed my Alpha, I have not violated Pack Law, I will be welcomed into the Crystal Caves by Volkan and Queen Dolomite! I will get to see my parents and brothers again! You omega backstabbers will rot in Tartarus! I will die with my honor intact!” 

“What honor?” the huge dog sneered. “Whores don't have honor! Good for nothing but mating, if even that!” 

“Yeah, Pyrite, show her whose the Alpha here!” someone called from within the crowd. “Show that thing its place!” 

Pyrite roared in agreement, the dog's stance changing so that it was obvious to any being what his intentions were. The female got back on her feet and assumed a defensive position, but the wounds she had already sustained in the altercation affected her, causing her to stagger unsteadily. Realizing that she had no realistic way of fighting off her oversized attacker, the Diamond Dog closed her eyes and braced herself, expecting death, or something worse, to come. 

Sombra had seen enough, and powered up his horn. 

To Be Continued