Not-Shining looks down at me with a dark glint in his green eyes and his mouth his mouth twisted into a cruel smirk. For a moment, our gazes lock and all is still as my flabbergasted mind frantically tries to process what the hell just happened. Then, without warning, he hoists me out of the water by the scruff of my neck and tosses me into the air. I fly up towards the ceiling and back down again in a tall, narrow arc. My limp, sopping wet body impacts roughly onto the white-blue crystal tiles of the bathroom floor, but I’m numb. I still can’t move, and more worryingly I don’t feel the surge of magic that usually signals my body being repaired.
Half of my face can make out nothing but the floor underneath it, but one of my eyes is facing upwards. So I can make out another figure looming over me – this one of Twilight. She gazes down at me, her face is twisted into a broad leer. But this is no more Twilight than the thing in the bath is Shining. If nothing else, the sheer exultant malevolence radiating from every pore of the mare would be enough to tell me that.
“The Princess of Love,” comes the voice of Not-Shining, still identical to that of my husband. “As I promised.”
“I must admit, I had my doubts that you could deliver,” says Not-Twilight, looking up and away from me. From the sound of it, her conspirator is getting out of the bath himself. “But you’ve been as good as your word.” She glances back down at me with a hungry expression in her eyes.
“Remember,” Not-Shining answers a note of caution in his voice. “This is only the beginning of what we stand to gain. Soon our friends from the north will be here, and then we move the next phase. Keep your eyes on the greater reward.”
“Yes yes,” Not-Twilight rolls her eyes. “I’m not going to go running off and leave you to face them alone after all this investment. Honestly, a little confidence in me would be nice.”
“To run and hide is in the nature of your kind.”
“And it’s not in yours’?” she snorts. “Ponies flee before the dread wrath of an irritable chipmunk.”
“… I suppose that is fair enough.”
Not-Twilight looks satisfied. “But we have a little time yet before they’re here,” she now turns her full attention back to me, lying limp at her hooves. “Time for revenge.”
Not-Twilight is enveloped in a wave of all-too-familiar green fire.
“No!” I plead silently. “Please no!”
My prayers aren’t answered. When the fire dies, Twilight Sparkle is gone, and in her place stands Queen Chrysalis.
My eyes widen, my ears fold back, and somehow, despite my paralysis, I start to shake. If I could shrink back before her, I would. The paragon of dark majesty towering above my helpless form radiates a sense of utter triumph and malice. Her sickly green eyes and vicious bared fangs promise me nothing but imminent pain and a slow death. Oh gods, she survived! I don’t know how or what happened but Chrysalis survived the fall or came back from the grave and she’s here to murder me and destroy all I hold I dear and-
No… wait…
This isn’t Chrysalis. The face is wrong. Her horn is shorter, with a slight curve to it. And the membrane that comprises her mane is longer. And she’s slightly taller than the Queen I remember – first from my wedding, then from her autopsy.
Not that that actually improves my situation any.
The Queen ends my speculation readily enough. She leans down to glare at me from close up, her fangs mere inches from my eye, and speaks.
“My name is Ecdysis. You killed my mother. Prepare to die.”
She opens her fanged maw wide and-
“NO!”
Queen Ecdysis’ head jerks upwards, surprise writ large covering her face.
“What?” she asks, her tone more confused than anything else.
“I said no. Don’t kill her,” answers Not-Shining, coming to stand over me. He’s slightly taller than Ecdysis, but two pairs of green eyes lock easily enough.
“What do you mean, no?” hisses Ecdysis through gritted teeth. “I agreed to your little scheme on the express condition that I would exact vengeance on each and every one of my mother’s murderers. If you think just because you have a body now that you can try to go back on our arrangement…” She hisses again, baring her fangs and placing a hoof over my body, like lioness defending her kill.
Not-Shining looks unfazed, a raised eyebrow the only sign of any emotion at all on his face.
“You don’t sense it?” he asks, sounding genuinely curious.
Ecdysis blinks. “Sense what?”
He puts a hoof on my stomach. “There is another life in her. It is yet weak, but it is there. She is expecting.”
The sound of those words coming from his lips triggers something in me, enough at least to shake me out of my silent stupor. “No…” I manage, my voice little more than a hoarse, barely audible whisper.
“I…” Ecdysis looks down at me, then back up at Not-Shining. She shakes her head, and her expression hardens. “That means nothing. I’m going to drain her until she’s a withered husk begging for death and no appeal to pity is going to-”
“Think!” he growls, his brow creasing for the first time as he bares his own teeth. “Think! Whose child do you suppose it is?”
“…Shining Armor’s?” she asks, blinking again.
He rolls his eyes at her apparent incomprehension. “And what would that make it?”
Ecdysis’ eyes go wide briefly, before narrowing. “An alicorn.”
“And how useful could such a tame creature be to us?”
“…” she hesitates, clearly torn between opportunism and the burning desire to slaughter me on the spot.
“And besides,” the corner of Not-Shining’s mouth curls into a cruel smirk. “How much better a revenge would it be to consign her to oblivion knowing not only that she failed utterly, but that her own foal will serve as a slave to her conquerors. Forever.”
Ecdysis puts a hoof to her chin, appearing to mull it over for some time. Without warning, her mouth splits into another toothy, malicious. “Yeeesssss…” she hisses. “How much pain that knowledge would cause them… How delicious…”
Not-Shining grins, his own perfect whites a stark contrast to the changeling’s yellowed fangs. “Now you understand.”
“Yes,” Ecdysis’ smile is suddenly replaced by a deadly serious look. “But after she gives birth, we kill her. No more excuses, no more delays. Agreed?”
Not-Shining looks down at me, his deep green eyes making contact with my own solitary orb. “I assure you that when the time comes,” he says, not looking up. “I will have no hesitation in disposing of her.”
Ecdysis' grin returns, wider and more malevolent than ever. “Excellent. Then we have an agreement?”
“So we do.”
“But as the Princess of Love, she can survive quite a lot being drained…”
He smiles knowingly. “Indeed she can. By all means, go ahead. Just be certain to stop before it reaches fatal levels.”
“With pleasure.”
Ecdysis lowers her head towards mine, opening her maw wide once again. Her horn glows green, and I somehow feel a yanking sensation in my gut.
My screaming begins shortly thereafter.
How does one describe the sensation of having one’s love drained away to somepony who has never felt it? Hmmm…
Well, the best comparison I can think of is having your intestines grabbed none too gently by an armored gauntlet, followed shortly by having them pulled through your guts, up your throat, and out through your mouth. Inch by bloody, torturous inch, over the course of several minutes. Only your body doesn’t have the decency to break down and die. Is that how it feels for everypony? Or is it just me, with my rather intimate connection with the emotion? I have no idea.
The aftermath is, from a purely scientific standpoint, rather curious. You’d expect to be overcome with sadness or fear or hatred or at least anger at what happened to you. Some kind of negative emotion. But no. It has been said that the opposite of love isn’t hatred, but apathy – you have care about something on some level to hate it. Indifference is the sensation that fills the void left behind in me by the changeling queen. A total emotional numbness overcomes me in the wake of those frantic, agonizing minutes. I’m literally not feeling anything at all right now, other than perhaps a vague sense of intellectual curiosity.
I passed out in the wake of the feeding, only to awake in a dark, dank space that I quickly evaluate as one of the old mining caverns of the Crystal Empire by the faint light provided by a hooful of crystalline growths on the wall. Not-Shining is here, affixing shackles of black, rune-encrusted iron to each of my hooves and both of my wings. More chains of the same material loop around and bind me to the walls.
I honestly don’t know why he bothers. My neck is still broken, and I can’t feel anything of my body. Even if I were somehow free, I doubt I could summon the motivation to do anything.
I just stare at the white alicorn binding me firmly for a few minutes before he apparently notices that I’m awake and speaks up.
“You know who I am, don’t you?” he asks, almost conversationally.
I see no reason he shouldn’t know. “You’re King Sombra,” I answer, my voice still very weak. “Ecdysis said you didn’t have a body until recently. And your eyes are the same color as his.”
He nods. “Very good,” a last chain attaches itself to the cavern wall, and he turns his full attention to me. “It would be a shame if you didn’t realize at whose hoof your downfall comes,” he rubs his hoof along his chin. “Though I suppose you going to grave believing your lover betrayed you had its own appeal.”
“Can’t say I much care either way,” I answer, honestly.
Sombra snorts. “That will pass. I daresay you will recover quickly enough, even after a draining of that scale. Your heart will balance itself again, and it is for that reason I want you to know:” he leans in closely, as though whispering a great secret to me. “Everything that has come to pass is entirely your fault. Your worthless sister lies in magical stupor in a stone coffin at the bottom of the sea, awaiting only my return to strip her of the last of her magic. Your pathetic, effete husband writhes helplessly inside the body you so thoughtfully created for me, his soul trapped in an endless reliving of his own worst fears. Your kingdom is awash with my allies, with more well on the way. I will destroy everything you care for, take everything that should have been mine, and remake this world in my image. History will not remember you, your beloved, your sister, your aunts, or your precious harmony.” He leans in very close, his mouth mere centimeters from my ear. “And it is: All. Your. Fault!” He sounds excited. "You succumbed to temptation. You drew me back from beyond the grave. You drained your kingdom's defenses. You made me a host body."
“Hunh,” I muse.
Sombra frowns and bares his teeth, flicking his ears irritably. “This is far less enjoyable when you have nothing left to feel despair with. I had hoped something of that would get through to you, but it seems the queen was too thorough.” He shakes his head. “Ah well, soon enough you will learn the true depths a heart can sink to. I hope to be there to watch.” He turns towards what I guess is the exit.
“Why?” I blurt out, driven by a vague impulse. “Why are you doing this?”
Sombra turns his head to regard me with one green eye.
“I could tell you,” he says after a delay of several seconds. “Of an alicorn princess much like yourself. Beautiful, powerful, eternal – beloved by all. I could tell you the tale of a stallion besotted by her from an early age. A great magician, he rose to become her councilor. And in time, even her lover. But he eventually grew old, as all mortal things must. She thought him used up, and callously cast him aside. Determined to prove himself, he ventured into realms of long forbidden magic. It brought him power beyond his wildest dreams, but drove him mad. In jealousy and blind rage he slew the princess and cast down all her works, taking everything that was hers for his own,” he sighs. “I am certain it would make for quite the story in the right hooves.”
Sombra turns around fully and looks over me up and down before continuing. “But, in truth, I am going to do this because your kind are a blight on our species. You keep us shackled in chains of indolence and stupidity, suppressing our potential by chaining ponies to ridiculous notions of harmony and peace and,” he virtually spits. “Friendship. With our combined strength every nation in the world should bow and scrape before us. Yet because of you and your ilk our kind are weak stupid, left vulnerable to the predators of this world and utterly dependent on you for our defense. The armies and defenses of our nations have languished under pathetic fools like you and your husband, unable to see off a direct attack on their own capital or even expel a single dragon. Only a small number of magical artifacts – controlled, conveniently, by you – stand between us and the mercies of our enemies. You alicorns keep ponies placid and weak so that you may rule, crushing any who threaten your dominance. Yet even there you lack spine, imprisoning such creatures as Discord and Tirek when they should have been stripped of all magic and executed. We should be the rulers of this world, but with you in control we are nothing but its prey,” he shakes his head. “But I will change all of that. I will destroy you, your husband, your sister, your aunts, and purge all our kind of your indolence. Then, with myself at the head, ponies shall crush utterly each and every threat or enemy of our kind, until we stride this world as colossi and-”
The king’s speech is cut short as a frigid chill passes through the cell. Even as deep underground as we must be, I can see my breath in the air, feel the cold even deep in my numbed bones.
“Ah,” he says, looking upwards. “That will be them then.”
Sombra pauses for a moment, return his eyes to me, and then takes a deep breath. “That is why I do what I do. I was not lying when I told you that I regretted my actions from before. I regret that I only slew one of you and then succumbed to the madness of my own magicks. But centuries wandering the realms between life and death have taught me perspective. I know what I must do now, and will not repeat my mistakes of last time. My magic bows to my will, not the other way around. I shall use its strength,” he grins. “And the strength of the Crystal Heart that you so generously donated, to finally rid the world of your kind.”
King Sombra laughs and turns his back on me, walking briskly towards the exit. Right before he reaches it, he turns his stolen head around for one parting shot.
“Oh, and your child? It will make for a most excellent host.”
The king’s laughter echoes behind him as a quartet of dark crystal golems take their places within my cell.