//------------------------------//
// Act 1 | The Silk Road 
// Story: Daughter of the First Reign 
// by LegionPothIX 
//------------------------------//

The filly rose from her slumber in on the cobblestone streets. The sky was filled with a shimmering light, and a thick field of magical energy that coursed all around the city. Sombra stood in awe at how differently the city he spent the last five years in looked to this little filly. Not only could she see the barrier but also the magics that made it. Magics that were supposed to be invisible to everypony. Even Discord could not find them again after he left.

Each type of magic had its own tint, its own odor, and could be tasted in the air. It was as perceptible as anything else in the world; as though magic itself was simply another every-day object like a fence or a stone. Being so near the barrier caused the air itself to have weight. It was filled with ambient energy which made his body feel sluggish as though he were underwater. 

Sombra found the whole experience disorienting. He turned his gaze to the ground and gasped for air while trying to clear his senses of the world around him. After he regained his grip he saw a large chalk arrow draw itself beneath his hooves and, with it, his attention to the filly waking on the street.

His senses were inundated with the memory of her own. He could feel what she felt. Hear what she heard, as she heard it, but also as it really was. He could even fill the tilt of the earth, the murmur of creatures around her, and her savage fur stand on end as she assumed a defensive posture in the street. He couldn't help but wonder if Nurse Clarity had a similar experience that drove her to her maddened outburst, and what might become of him for this one. 

“What’s wrong with her?”
“What a strange cutiemark.”
“Is that a tree? I wonder what it means.”

The voices from the gathered crowd didn't seem hostile but there were more creatures her size than she had ever seen before. They swarmed around like the black army of her home. They seemed to use these noises to communicate though she couldn't understand any of them. She hissed and growled at the onlookers and snapped with her jagged teeth at any that got too close. Sombra was beginning to see how the pony thought before she came into the charge of Nurse Clarity. Before her... domestication.

“Whoa! Look at her go! Like a wild animal that one!” a plump one exclaimed.
“Vile. Simply disgusting. Call someone to take her away,” a frail voice resonated from thin form.
“Easy! No one’s going to try to hurt you!” one particularly soothing voice explained. It didn't carry the ramshackle sounds of mother’s lullaby, but it had a deep peaceful ring in its own right.

Though not a single word could be understood by the filly; Sombra was able to make sense of it on the first try. The several attempts of the soft spoken creature allowed her to calm enough for it, and only it, to approach her. The colt could tell from her scared and nervous posture, in conjunction with the confusion written all over her face, that she had no idea what he was saying.

A patrol approached the group and began to disperse the unlawful gathering. As they did the filly was able to relax a little until they approached her directly with their strange noises. As she tensed up Sombra tensed up. Each one of them were twice her size and the child watched as they babbled back and forth. Her apprehension was visible through the hair standing on edge all over her weathered coat. 

“More street urchins causing trouble?” a surly pegusus voiced to the earth pony colt who had talked her down. “Don’t think you can just get away with this shit just because we’re on the outskirts of the city,” he said while he dropped his fore hoof down on the colt's skull so hard it drew blood.

The foal started to cry and try to explain at the same time. “No sir, nothing like that! She just wandered into the city and collapsed!” The colt began to glow as he lifted off the ground and drew in close to the second guard whose horn radiated the same color. 

“That is the worst lie I've ever heard,” the magical guard yelled in the colt's face, “No pony can just wander into Crystal Empire.” 

Though it was true that they were near the barrier that kept the wild chaos of Discord’s domain at bay, even Sombra wouldn't have believed it possible if he wasn't about to see it with his own eyes, and so there was no surprise that the guards didn't buy it either. Their suspicion was writ upon every inch of their body. That this mess of a filly could best the magics of their ruling council was unthinkable. To even crack the shield would require power impossible for an individual to posses and would have alerted every guard in the city as well as the council. Yet, no flags were raised and the shield remained intact, despite this a strange and unknown filly stood in the streets.

“Why would I lie about that!?” the foal whimpered back at the stallion. The question indicated that it was self-evident such a story would draw a beating. “The barrier just moved around her like they were made out of the same thing!” he protested. 

Sombra paused and repeated the foal to himself. However the deplorable nature of what came next from the guards caused him to grimace, and he lost his train of thought.

“Bullshit! War orphans don’t just stroll into this city.” The words came with a magical maneuvering that slammed the foal into a nearby wall. Dazed and still magically enshrouded the filly-sized earth pony was slowly pushed toward the barrier. “You want to see what happens when ponies try and get through the barrier? It isn't pretty.”

The image of the yellow army filled her mind as she watched the guards bully the nice one, and Sombra could feel the crawling of termites under his skin– eating away at his nerve. "Stop!" Sombra shouted to to Treeling, and the memory froze. "I didn't ask to see this!" 

The memory faded from its vibrant true life color to muted greys as the visage of Sombra appeared in front of the real one, pulled from elsewhere in her mind, and the deal played out once more on mute. The reminder had been enough. After a moment the real Sombra nodded and his visage faded before the initial memory resumed.

The filly couldn't understand a word of the guard but could hear the hostility the last statement came with. In a surprise assault Treeling lunged at the unicorn guard and latched her teeth deep into one of his blood pipes. Though she would have no words to describe the feeling of a Brachial Artery bursting in her mouth she could feel and taste the red liquid running across her tongue. She reveled in it. Sombra, however, reviled it and spat the taste from of his mouth the best he could. 

The bite she delivered was to the underside of the guard's left fore-leg. With the twisting of her neck and the gnashing of her teeth she drug his leg close to his chest to deliver her horn through his ribs. Sombra stood in awe having never seen a unicorn favor close-quarters combat without using any magic.

Once it began her primal rage could scarcely be sated. The guards lost their cool as a thorn was sticking in one’s side. Her horn wasn't long enough to puncture his lung, and her jaw wasn't strong enough to hold his leg in that position for long so she was forced to choose. Sombra knew that, had she been his size, she would have easily taken the guard to the ground. However, being the size she was, she lost her grip on the leg. It slid out of her mouth and left only chunks of the skin and fur in the gnarly gaps of her teeth. 

After a few attempts at firing magical lasers, and having found that the ribs below the armpit are a terribly difficult place to strike on one’s own body with vector magic, the unicorn learned that any energy beam would be out of the question. Instead he reached out with a telekinetic field to pry the piranha off while her fore-hooves delivered tiny hammering blows. The pegasus guard couldn't help but laugh as the filly played his partner like a xylophone; not yet realizing the true extent of the danger he was in.

The unicorn reached out with his magic but she caught it with her golden gilt. With a deep breath she took it in and held its power inside of her for a moment before she breathed it back out. After channeling it into his body the telekinetic pressure of the blast was enough to collapse his left lung, and a river of red streamed out between the ribs that were wedged open by her horn. The grooves in her horn, from a lifetime of foraging in the discordant plains, proved an efficient network of irrigation canals that swiftly delivered the elixir of life onto her face and into her mane.

It wasn't funny anymore.

In a split second the pegasus dropped low and prepared for launch. However, instead of leading into a flight stance, he tucked his wings in before exploding into a full charge. The shoulder tackle to the filly was enough force to knock her off her hooves and, with a twist of her jagged horn in the side of his companion, she was wrenched free. Knocked off her balance she tried to stabilize but a hoof slipped in the viscous puddle. With a rising uppercut the spring-loaded wing of the pegusus sent her flying. The wing-buffet was enough to launch her straight into the barrier, and the foal watched in horror at his new friend's impending demise. 

A ripple shimmered across the barrier on impact as the filly tumbled out the other side and rolled to a stop before rapidly rising again into her feral stance. She was breathing swift, shallow, breaths and her eyelids were heavy. The energy from the Crystal Queen's barrier still clung to her coat with a tether that siphoned off even more energy with each breath. It made a hissing sound as the blood of the unicorn was pulled apart by its magic. It also rustled her coat causing the gilt of her roots to simulate a shimmer across her body. This was the moment that Sombra had been waiting to see but it was a guard who echoed his sentiment.

“I… Impossible!” The staggered word came with the sound of equally staggered hoof-beats on the cobblestone road. The unicorn lost the strength to stand, and fell in a slump clutching his wounds. The pegasus had backed himself against the wall in fear and the earth pony colt had made a mad dash away from what was to come.

Treeling attempted to replicate his maneuver using her horn to spear rather than any wing to bash. Sombra recognized this maneuver as the one that was imprinted onto Crystal Clarity though, the way the filly was now, he doubted that even his crystals could block it. 

In a leaping charge the warchild burst through the barrier bringing with her four more tethers, one for each hoof, which melded into the first as she slid to a stop. Terrified, the pegasus took to the air narrowly avoiding the collision that would have certainly destroyed him. He soared up into the sky to where no unicorn filly could reasonably reach him.  

The silver and black tabard of the Crystal Empire, as worn by the pegasus, and the blood soaked one worn by the unicorn set off her rage. They were like ants to her, biting at her while she slept, and she would punish them. She pulled in more and more of the barrier’s destructive magic to strengthen her hold on the one part that actually mattered. The link between her and the massive magic bubble was a flexible one. Pulling with her whole body she build up the momentum required to bring the throng the magical whip down onto the air-born pegasus.

A visceral scream ripped the sky open and caused the filly let go of the magic that she had stolen. His exposure was a short one that burned across his entire body. This magic was decidedly different from the magic she previously harnessed. It did not transform the pegasus as it did the tuber. She curiously watched the pegasus, who was suspended in a rack of pain, be drawn into the barrier with the tether she left to flail wildly about. 

It reminded her of the times with her mother when the sky would cry and the tears would fall on the little black soldiers. They always took a round shape which pulled whoever they touched back into them and held them there until they stopped moving. Like the blood from earlier: his feathers and hair slowly turned to a vapor that the pegasus could not help but breathe in whilst howling in pain.

Sombra grimaced at the image but couldn't block the memory from being placed in his mind. For the duration he was the filly.

Tired from the ordeal the filly plopped her plot onto the patchwork stones and turned her drooping eyes to the source of the nearest noise. “You… You’re a fucking monster!” The variable audio tones of the quaking voice were soothing to her, but the words themselves were still unintelligible.

Tired and hungry she crawled closer to the speaker who was still profusely bleeding onto the street. Weakly he tried to scramble away from her slow approach. Disgust filled her face as she licked the fur out of her teeth and spit it onto the street. Though the blood felt natural—familiar even—it tasted strange. She had never bled enough to fill her own mouth but other creatures had. She could feel the magic in them, but could not feel any magic in this one’s blood. There was a small hint of it, of course, because it was capable of using magic... but nothing like the levels outside the water drop she found herself drawn into.

The overhead screams had faded. The crack and sizzles of the energy field drown out the rasping for breath of the distant pegasus, and not-so-distant unicorn. The filly’s jack-knife grin grew a little wider with her carnal glee. Her snout reached mere inches from the broken body of the unicorn. His flesh was still tense when she issued a deep and long sniff before clamping onto his flank for a taste.

In a surge of adrenalin the guard managed to buck the filly into the wall cracking stone and ribs. Sharp pains shot through her whole body; pain that brought her eyes to once again to rest. As she drifted off the frantic sounds of an exchange could be heard in the distant waking world.

“What the hell happened here!?” 
Several rasping coughs broke up the explanation. 
“She… Came through the barrier... Turned it on us.”

Her eyes fluttered open only briefly to see two new guards staring up to the bloody smear in the sky that was still dropping bits and pieces, and splattering them on the road below. 

In the distance Sombra could see himself losing his lunch from her perspective.


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