Unfortunately, Nurse Redheart had to return to her work shortly after Sombra had woken up, and Sombra was still far too weak to move on his own. The dinner date would have to be delayed. He closed his eyes and sighed heavily, trying to clear his mind and get some sleep, hoping to pass the time until he had the strength to stand. At some point he drifted into a shallow sleep, but he was brought back to the land of the waking by a commotion in the hall. Twilight Sparkle was still in the room, albeit leaned back in a chair with a blanket over her instead of hunched over Cadance’s bed. Cadance herself seemed to be asleep as well, her breathing deep and rhythmic. The sounds in the hall grew closer, and soon Sombra could make out muffled words.
“Sir, I told you, you can’t go in there, visitation hours ar-”
“But she’s my wife! And besides, you said Twiley was still in there!”
“Sir, I’m sorry, but that is a special case. You’ll disturb the other patient-”
“She doesn’t even have a room to herself?”
“That’s not what I meant but no, she does not. Sir, if you would ple-”
The door to the recovery room burst open. Twilight snorted herself awake and her wings flared briefly, throwing the blanket from her body. Sombra felt his muscles try to contract in shock, but nothing much came of it except a dull, throbbing pain in his torso. Cadance’s breathing was interrupted for just a moment with a sniff, then returned to normal.
“Cady!” Sombra recognized the large white unicorn. The muscular stallion was almost as tall as Sombra himself, with a two-tone blue mane reminiscent of the DJ from the party. His face was a mixture of anger and fear, and in that moment Sombra discovered the intended purpose of a bedpan. To the black pony’s surprise, though, the other unicorn rushed right past him to Cadance’s bed, his original expression fading and changing to one of concern. With a great deal of effort, he rolled his head to the right to face the trio.
“Shining Armor!” Twilight proclaimed, somewhere between surprise, relief, and frustration. Ah yes, him, Sombra thought, practically watching the gears turning in the purple pony’s head as she tried to decide which emotion to settle on for her next sentence. “What are you can’t just be alright,” came out of her mouth, which promptly closed again as she tried to figure out how she’d mangled the sentence so badly.
“What happened? Is she going to be okay?” Shining Armor’s concern had melted into fear again. His eyes were wide and his breathing rapid and shallow, his head moved in a twitchy, erratic manner as he kept shifting his gaze from Twilight to Cadance.
“I’m sorry miss,” a chubby pink nursemare muttered apologetically from the door, “I couldn’t stop him from coming in.”
“It’s ok,” Twilight assured her, “I’m not sure if I could stop him from getting to Cadance.” Twilight exhaled fully, turned to Shining Armor, then inhaled again before continuing. “Yes,” she began, “Cadance will be fine. She’s just resting, she had a lot of blood drawn. She wasn’t hurt or in an accident or anything, she just needs some sleep. How did you know something was wrong, though? Did the hospital contact you?”
“Shiny Sense,” he answered as though that explained everything, then continued his questioning. “Why did she need to donate so much blood though? I know she has a rare blood type but… it’s not that uncommon, is it? Cady’s a hemophiliac too, doesn’t that interfere with donating blood?”
“Actually, by the hospital’s records, there are only two ponies in Ponyville with compatible blood types, one is out of town and the other has more alcohol than hemoglobin in her body,” Twilight told him, “Or so the nurse told me. Also, it would seem the problem with hemophilic blood can be filtered out once out of the body.”
“Well, if one is out of town and the other is a mare,” Shining Armor puzzled aloud, “Then who is this?” He gestured to Sombra without really looking, “I’m assuming this is the pony that needed the blood?”
“Shiny, come over here for a second.”
Shining Armor complied, and walked over to the far side of Cadance’s bed, next to Twilight. “What’s wrong?”
“You might want to be sitting down for this next bit.”
The white unicorn plopped his rump in a chair obediently.
Sombra gulped.
“That,” Twilight gestured to the big black pony, “Is the former King, Sombra, of the Crystal Empire.”
Here we go, Sombra thought.
Shining Armor worked his jaw, as though trying to stretch out a sore spot. He frowned slightly, his brow furrowed, and he turned to look over at Sombra. One arched eyebrow expressed the confusion running through his mind, and Shining Armor turned back to Twilight.
“But he died?” Shining Armor’s voice pitched up questioningly for emphasis.
“I thought that too.”
Shining Armor paused, working with the information. This was a surprise, that’s for sure, but he didn’t feel the anger he thought he would. Sombra, the monster that tortured the Crystal Empire, and made his best attempt at both his own and Cadance’s lives, was sitting in a hospital bed with several pints of his wife’s blood in him. This meant he’d been seriously injured, and liable to bleed out. Two questions came from this – well, three – well, a lot more than that, but three important ones.
“Okay. Alright. Sure. This is happening. Three questions, Twiley. How,” Shining wagged his forelegs in Sombra’s direction, “What,” one foreleg changed back to Cadance, two ponies now the target of Shining’s wiggly appendages, “And why?” His waggling shifted towards Cadance.
“As for the how, Sombra is, apparently, immortal in some capacity. I’ll let him explain it to you later, I… don’t really fully understand it, and I don’t really want to talk about it. It’s complicated, and not pretty,” Twilight stopped for a moment and looked away from her brother, eyes staring blankly at the floor tiles. She shook her head, and magicked away a bit of mane that fell over her eyes. “Sorry. What? Well, I brought Cadance here because both Sombra and I thought it would be a good idea for them to meet, both given their history together in the Crystal Empire and the similarity of their cutie marks. I neglected to tell her why I wanted her to come to Ponyville, and who she would be meeting. She reacted… understandably poorly, and almost killed Sombra. By mistake! Don’t worry, it was an accident. Why… well, that’s the interesting bit.”
Twilight levitated a sheet of paper from the table next to Cadance’s bed, floating it over to her brother. Her purple aura was gently washed away by Shining’s own blue magic as the white unicorn brought the paper closer to his face to read. Twilight watched his eyes scan down the page, stopping at a certain part and sliding back and forth over it a couple times, before he brought the paper only inches from his snout and squinted. It wasn’t really a necessary action, but Twilight forgave her brother, as the information was a bit hard to swallow and seemed unbelievable.
“Is this accurate?”
“Not completely, but with that high of a percent, it seems pretty likely.”
“Wow.”
“Yeah. Bit of a revelation, isn’t it?”
“Yep.”
“I guess it explains a lot, though.”
“Yep.”
“Shining…”
“Sorry, Twiley. It’s just a lot to take in, you know? Finding out your wife is a distant descendant of…” Shining Armor searched for a word, and Sombra cringed in anticipation of the incoming insult. Instead, either due to inability to come up with the word he was looking for or actually not wanting to be that cruel, the Captain of the Guard just said, “him.”
“I am… awake you know…” Sombra tried his best to sound annoyed, but he was a little too grateful to be alive and a little too sore to manage it properly.
“Oh, uh…” Shining Armor tried to make some form of recovery for his first impression with the other unicorn, but found himself lacking the words.
“It is fine,” Sombra grunted again. “I have no right to ask you to like me. Just… please do not kill me.”
Shining Armor chuckled without humor. “I don’t really think I could, honestly.”
“Are you not the Captain of the Princess’ Royal Guard?”
“Well, yeah, but…”
“Ah, I suppose Celestia does not really do… executions, does she?”
“What? No! Of course not,” Shining Armor’s indignant voice filled the room before he realized Sombra’s tone was less confusion and more regretful. “Hey, I’m sorry, I just… I dunno. My heart is telling me to hate you for what you did to the Empire and what you tried to do to my family. At the same time, Twilight is telling me I can trust you, and Cadance willingly saved your life. You must be different. You are different. I can tell.”
“I would have expected a little more anger towards a would-be assassin from my knight in Shining Armor,” Cadance mumbled tiredly from her bed, causing two ponies to turn to her in happiness and one to look away in shame.
“Cady! You’re awake!” Shining Armor stopped himself just short from throwing his wife into a full-bodied hug and instead opted to gently caress her, as though afraid she might break.
“You don’t have to be so gentle,” she said softly, “It isn’t like I’m some recovering from surgery. I’ll just be pretty tired-” a yawn punctuated her statement, “- for a few days.”
“I know, I know, but I’m glad you’re not hurt. You aren’t hurt, right?”
“Nothing more than my pride, sweetie,” Cadance replied as she pulled away from the hug, and shifted herself in the bed so she was sitting up. She shared a brief smile with Twilight, and then turned her attention to Sombra. “I think it’s time we talk about the red heart on your flank,” the pink Alicorn said flatly, merely attempting to gain the attention of the big black unicorn. It did a bit more than that, though.
“I beg your pardon?” Sombra whirled around in the bed, medical equipment clattering together and sheets sliding over one another as his large body rotated. “Miss Redheart and I are most certainly not in a relationship of that sort!”
The other ponies in the room stared at him blankly, before Twilight Sparkle’s mouth opened in a small “oh” of realization. Sombra in turn realized he had misconstrued the statement, and looked at his hooves as he contemplated putting them in his mouth.
“You meant my cutie mark.”
“Well yes, but I don’t have to be the Princess of Love to see there’s something there,” Cadance teased, “I mean, that whole episode when you woke up…”
“You were awake?” Sombra asked, blushing deeply and avoiding Cadance’s glittering eyes.
“Yes, though I figured it was best not to interrupt you two. Who would I be to stand in the way of romance?”
“Cadance! Stop teasing the poor stallion,” Twilight exclaimed, her sister-in-law abiding by her request with a soft giggle.
“Anyways,” Shining Armor cut in, “I’m more than a little curious why your cutie marks are nearly identical. I mean, that doesn’t happen that often between even parents and their children, much less the incredibly distant relationship between Cadance and Sombra. How are they even related, anyways? I mean, the Crystal Empire and all the ponies in it were sealed away with Sombra all that time ago. How could Cadance be one of his descendants?”
“Actually, I might know that,” Cadance offered. “There was a story passed down through my family for many, many generations that once upon a time, way, way back when, the matriarch of the Cadenza bloodline was a Crystal Pony who escaped the rule of an evil tyrant after being forced to bear one of his children. I don’t remember many details beyond that. There have been several crystalline cutie marks in my family’s ancestry, but we all assumed it was just a story because it had been so long since anyone had seen a living Crystal Pony. Even with the reemergence of the Crystal Empire it was so ingrained in my memory as a fairy tale I never made the connection that Sombra might have been that evil tyrant from so long ago.”
Sombra thought for a moment. The name Cadenza sounded familiar to him, but at the same time he had never let a concubine go and had no memory of ever siring a child. It was not out of the question, however, it seemed extremely unlikely. No more unlikely than our nearly identical cutie marks, however.
“Okay, so, assuming they are related, and that your story is in fact true, why are their cutie marks the same? I mean how could Cady have the same destiny as that ssssss…” Shining Armor trailed off, changing his mind on what he was about to say, his hissing continuing as he searched for a recovery option.
“Sack of horseapples?” Sombra offered.
“…sssstallion. As that stallion. I was going to say stallion.”
“Sure you were, honey,” Cadance snickered, and Twilight rolled her eyes.
“I was! Honest! Okay, not really, I’m sorry. Anyways, do either of you have an explanation for that?”
“I might,” Sombra said, “I got my mark many, many years before my fall. Several decades, even, I was quite young when it happened. At the time, my destiny was to rule the Crystal Empire with a warm heart and love for my citizens and friends, and to power the Crystal Heart. Everything changed, though, and when I covered my flank with robes and metal, my true calling had been long forgotten, and soon enough so had I. While my personal experience with Princess Cadance might suggest otherwise,” Sombra paused for a moment and considered apologizing for the unintentional slight, but when Cadance saw it was her turn to avoid eye contact, he decided better of it, and continued, “it is not beyond the realm of possibility that she has a similar destiny. I already know she can power the Crystal Heart, and one can only assume she is doing a better job of ruling the Empire than I ever did. When you go back, Cadance, Shining Armor, do not tell the Crystal Ponies I am alive. Their king is dead, he died a very long time ago, and that is all they need to know.”
The room sat in silence for a moment, a pony occasionally opening their mouth to speak, then changing their mind and closing it again. A soft knock on the door came at one point, followed by Nurse Kindheart informing them that the paperwork checked out and that Princess Cadance was free to leave the hospital as soon as she wanted to. The nurse exited as quietly as she had entered, and the room fell silent once again. Eventually, Shining Armor began to help Cadance from her bed, and Twilight left to go check on Spike.
“I would like a word in private with the Princess,” Sombra said as Cadance and Shining Armor were about to leave, “If that is alright with you.”
Shining Armor gave his wife a questioning glance, but she nodded reassuringly, and the white unicorn trotted slowly from the room, leaving the two Crystal Rulers together. With a great deal of effort, Sombra forced himself into a sitting position, staring blankly at the wall before him rather than at Cadance.
“Look, I-” Cadance began after several seconds of awkward silence.
“I am living proof that the most terrible of things can be results of the best intentions,” Sombra interrupted, without turning his gaze from the wall. “I know this is going to sound hypocritical and be a little hard to believe, but please, hear me out. There is great light in you, Princess Cadance, just as there was in me thousands of years ago. The light will eventually flicker and fade, however. That is not a bad thing, in fact it is entirely natural. Just as the sun rises and sets, so do our lives, and going against the natural order of things leads only to pain and suffering. I know you are capable of restoring my nation to its former glory, and probably far beyond. But when it is your time to step down and leave, you must do so. Do not fight it. Do not follow in my hoofsteps. Please, Princess, promise me this. You will not do what I did. Promise me.”
“I promise,” Cadance said solemnly, “I promise.”
“Thank you, Princess. Thank you for everything. Now go, go back to your Empire, and rule it with love and light in your heart.”
Cadance smiled, turned, and left the room.
Sombra sighed and leaned back into his pillow, and began to cry. Not for sorrow, no, but for joy that the Crystal Ponies had such a wonderful mare as their leader now. Crying was how he lay down, and smiling is how he fell asleep.