Someone Else's Sun

by LysanderasD

Prologue

Because that is how all great stories start, really. Never mind that the beginning of a story itself has a beginning; things don't spring from the void, fully formed. No world simply exists; no circumstances simply are. It is in looking for the beginnings of the beginnings where things begin to become clear...

The Dark Lord had come from somewhere, after all. The Crystal Empire, vanished for a thousand years, its lands and inhabitants with it. It wasn't really right to call it an Empire any more, but that was what the Dark Lord had done, missives to the honorable Great Houses—demands to submit to the will of the 'resurgent Crystal Empire.' There had been war. For the first time in five hundred years the Great Houses had united against a common foe, Winter welcoming Summer onto their lands in a concerted effort to push the tide of the dark away. It was not difficult to bring light against the shambling darkness, to send the black-clad ponies scrambling back the way they'd came. There had never been any will to fight at all, really.

In the end, it all came down to the Dark Lord. The crystal spires of his castle were well within Winter's lands, the frozen north unwelcoming to the soldiers of Summer. But Winter pushed onward, into territory they had owned but never claimed, and the banners of Lord Winter were planted firmly in the permafrost as they marched. The walls of the dark continued to shatter before them. And now here they stand, the road to the plaza cleared, the castle doors trembling under the sound of their battle cries. Swiftly the war had begun, and swiftly it will end. Because, of course, there is always a happily ever after...

The door exploded.

"Get down!" Dame Chroma screamed, diving behind a pillar.

It did not shatter inward, as had been the plan, but outward, the crystal tearing through the magical battering ram. The knot of magi that had cast it into being writhed as the magic was disrupted, falling to their knees and grabbing futilely at their horns. The shrapnel from the door impaled more than one, shearing bone as easily as flesh; shards planted themselves deep in the marble of the floor and shattered against the solid crystal of the castle's hallways. Further back, there was the screech of crystal meeting a magical barrier it could not pierce.

The Valkyrie swore loudly, though it was lost under the screamed commands to pull Lord Winter back, keep him safe. Not that he needed to be kept safe, she groused. He would be fine. He always was.

The hall was filled with the thousand sparkles of enchanted crystal, falling slowly to the floor in fine grains. What damage there was going to be had already been done. But now they were down half a company of their best war magi—and they had who knew how many more doors to pierce on the way to the throne chamber, the place the despot was no doubt sequestering himself. Two dark knights with him, if intelligence was correct; the two he always kept with him. That would be a challenge.

The Valkyrie caught her breath and lowered herself to the ground again, scaleshod hooves crunching on shards of the ruined door. She felt like a fool for not expecting something like this. Now the strategists would have them sit back and devise a new strategy, and give the bastard more time to solidify his position. She grit her teeth. Damn them!

The Dark Lord isn't going anywhere, she could almost hear one of the scrawny unicorns wheedling. That may be so, Chroma conceded, but that was part of the problem. The cornered rat, as they say. Besides, who was to say any other doors were even trapped like this? Shattering a five meter crystal door was not the most of which the Dark Lord’s black magic was capable. There had once been six dark knights, after all, and there were thrice as many grieving mothers back in Weiss to prove it.

"We've got to keep moving forward!" she declared, stamping a hoof. She had to shout; the shattering of the door had deafened her, and anyway there was something about the whole place that seemed to steal sound away. Bits and pieces of the door, no bigger than sand, continued  to rain with a gentle, muffled hiss.

"Dame Chr—" somepony behind her started.

"We can't give him any more time!" she spat, turning on a hoof and glaring at what was left of the contingent in the hallway. Overwatchers had already gotten the wounded and dying unicorns on stretchers and were moving them out of the hall. The phalanx that had formed around Lord Winter parted, and the alicorn stood to his full height, giving the Valkyrie a cool look. Despite her better judgment she returned it, and, much later than she ought, she added a sullen "... my lord."

There was silence in the hall, aside from the muffled hsssss as the crystal shards continued to rain, as if in slow motion, onto the ruined floor.

"I agree," said Lord Winter. Chroma brightened. "Dame Chroma, you will push forward."

She gave him a blank look, eyes thankfully hidden behind the visor of her helmet, and managed to ask "... By myself?" without sputtering too much.

"I will join you when the wounded have been tended to," Lord Winter declared. The aegis knights around him looked startled. "But you will not go alone."

"The rest of my unit is still outside, sir," she pointed out. "And I can't imagine, with due respect, that any of your guard are willing to leave you alone after a trick like that."

"Just so, Dame Valkyrie, just so," he murmured, and then stamped a hoof.

The sound went out like a whip crack, cutting through the muffling, thick air of the castle. Despite herself, Chroma had to actively will herself not to flinch from the sudden clarity of the sound. The air seemed to clear and Chroma took a deep breath, closing her eyes. When she opened them, two ponies had moved around the lord's phalanx. One was the kirin blademaster she'd met earlier. The other...

Dark armor from hoof to horn, front to back, a wall of ominous blue-black that caught the light strangely, seeming to hold onto more than its share. Baleful yellow light shone from the eye sockets, obscuring the actual eyes beneath. A massive sword was sheathed at the pony's side, the handle and sheath constructed of the same unnatural light-eating material. Chroma bristled.

The dark knight shifted his head. He might have been looking at her. "Dame Chroma."

"You!" she snapped, feeling her wings snap open.

"Ser Future Sight has already proven his loyalty to me," said Lord Winter calmly. The cool look  from before was back. Chroma rallied against it.

"My lord, three of my ponies are dead because of him!"

This seemed to bother the dark knight. Seemed. The word bothered her; seeming. It was always about seeming. You could never see their faces. You had to guess. You couldn't know. Who's to say all of this wasn't just another seeming? Here was a fellow who willingly walked away from his comrades. Second chances didn't exist in Chroma's strategy book.

"At the time," said Future Sight quietly, "I could have done nothing else. If I had not killed, I would have been killed."

"Better you than Fleetfoot and Snowflake and Rumble, you blackg—"

"Enough," rumbled Lord Winter, and the magic behind the command snapped around her muzzle, silencing her. She seethed openly. "Becalm yourself, valiant knight; it is in your nature to be faithful and to mistrust disloyalty, but in this you must trust me."

The kirin cleared her throat.

"With respect," she said in a clear voice, "I would not turn down his help in your position. He was close to the Dark Lord. He has information that will end this war. And frankly, I would rather fight with a dark knight than against one."

The Valkyrie's wings had already snapped open, a reflexive threat display. "I don't trust him!"

"Nevertheless," the dark knight replied smoothly. "Here I am."

Chroma gave Lord Winter a pleading look. "My lord—"

"You three are my champions," the alicorn said, voice overpowering her protests. "The three most powerful ponies under my command. If there were any ponies I trusted to pave the way to the Dark Lord, it would be the three of you. Dame Chroma, you have proven your loyalty to me time and time again; I know you would lay down your life in my service. Lady Kaze, the Emperor in the West could not have chosen a better representative. And you..."

Chroma was mollified somewhat to see that the look the alicorn gave to Future Sight was hard and cold, like steel spikes.

"You have many sins to pay for. Removing your master from power would be the first of many recompenses."

"He is not my master," said Future Sight, head facing down the empty hall.

"He taught you how to use that thing," Chroma spat, indicating the dark sword.

"An instrument of his power," the dark knight acknowledged with a shrug. "But now I am discordant to his tune. He is a conductor I will not follow. Whether you trust me or not is irrelevant, Dame Valkyrie. I will capture him with or without your help. Afterward, I will submit to your judgment. You have my word."

Your word is worth less than dirt to me, the pegasus thought, glaring at him.

"You are my vanguard," Lord Winter resumed, indicating the three ponies. "I and my guard will follow behind you. It is right to me that you do this. I trust in your power. You must trust in each other."

Kaze bowed deeply. Without taking her eyes off of the dark knight, Chroma knelt, inclining her head toward the alicorn. "Yes, my lord."

The dark knight continued staring into the distance. When they had stood again, he began walking, hoofsteps loud against the floor. Kaze furrowed her brow and worked to catch up. Chroma felt Lord Winter's eyes on her back as she spread her wings and followed.

What alarmed Chroma more than anything was how quiet it had gotten.

The Valkyries did not do 'quiet.' They lived for the thrill; racing through the clouds, half a ponylength ahead of the lightning. They were the first things enemies of House Winter heard, and the last thing they saw, if they could see after the blinding flash of a Valkyrie bending the storm to her will. And there had been plenty of that for months, now, slowly but most certainly pushing the despot’s forces back north, to the wretched wastes. For day upon day upon day upon day, Chroma and her brothers and sisters had lived and breathed battle, racing to bring the storm to the black-clad ponies under the Dark Lord's control. She had fallen in love with it, in a way, had looked forward to spreading her wings and leaping into the sky, spear trailing ozone behind her. It had always been noisy. But this?

The dark knight, Future Sight, walked ahead of her. This was not something that she had had to bother to declare, though she would have made it an order if push came to shove; the unicorn had simply decided to go first, and neither she nor the kirin had seen fit to correct this. He was making no attempt to be quiet, for good or ill; his hooves slammed against the floors of the crystal palace with a sort of chilling finality, as if he planned never to walk those steps again. Perhaps he didn't, really.

But what bothered her, what really bothered her, was that there was nopony around. Just to get to the doors they had had to fight through at least three score of enemy soldiers, crystal ponies and mind-controlled to the last—but they had, at least, been some form of resistance, even if a token sort. This, now, here, in the bowels of the crystal castle? The only sounds came from their hooves, bouncing off of the walls and back with, it seemed to her, a sort of funerary solemnity. There was no opposition. The emptiness of the place was frightening—it had the beauty of a tomb. It struck her as odd, suddenly, how somepony calling himself a Dark Lord could stand to live in a place so... well, she couldn't avoid using the word beautiful. It was all gems, all the time, looking as though they were all carved of a piece. Sapphire and emerald on the floor, ruby and jade and topaz and carnelian in the walls...

Finally, she couldn't stand it anymore. "Where the hay is everypony?"

Future Sight's head shifted slightly. Her eyes snapped to him; it seemed as though he were looking back at her out of the corner of her eye. But there went that word again—seeming, seeming seeming. She hated how he seemed.

"For a revered knight of the realm, your tongue is... common."

She glared at him. "So what? Dress me up and throw a ceremony. I'll throw all the right words at you at the right time. The rest of the time, I'll talk how I damn well please. You gonna answer my question?"

"The Dark Lord will have sent everyone else away, I suspect," Future Sight replied softly, looking to the fore again.

"Away?" asked Kaze. "Why?"

"When I left him last, weeks before, the war was already beginning to weigh on him. It was as though he... could not bear the weight of it. He would often sequester himself in his quarters and deny any audiences, even among us, we who might be called his most faithful servants. He had begun with such fervor, but it had begun to fade. When he sent me to attack Hoss Hill, he could barely look me in the eye. It was unlike him. And yet..."

Silence descended, but only for a moment.

"I believe he did not begin this war with any real desire to win it."

Chroma sputtered. "What?" When this failed to produce more than a shrug from the dark knight, she pushed forward, hovering next to him and punching him in his black-clad shoulder.

"Then he just wanted to send those crystal ponies to their meaningless deaths?" Kaze asked.

"It may be said, I think," said he, not acknowledging the touch, "that the Dark Lord does not know what he wants. That what he did and said was done out of anger. But wars cannot be apologized for. Lives cannot be brought back. I believe the Dark Lord has sent everyone else away to avoid more such meaningless deaths."

"I mean, I was expecting... something," Chroma said. "This just seems like a... a waste. Such a waste." And a letdown, she added to herself. Don't stories like this always have exciting conclusions? Grand clashes with the evil overlord? Weird, world-destroying magics averted at the last minute?

Was this how everything would end?

Not that she spent that much time reading, she told herself, face flushing behind her visor. Reading was for... for... eg... other ponies.

Future Sight held out a hoof. The trio stopped.

The hall before them opened up and split to either side, continuing around the circumference of the tower. Before them stood a door, at least as high or higher than the one that had shattered. Text ran across it in huge characters cut from the jade and topaz that composed it, though Chroma could not read it. In the center, divided cleanly where the doors might open outward, was the carving of a crystal heart.

"In darker times," said Future Sight softly, "before the empire re-emerged into the white of winter here, the inscription was unreadable. Now, the Dark Lord can read it from his throne; it is carved into both sides of the door. I think it has something to do with his descent into silence."

He trotted forward and laid a hoof on one of the great doors. "Better a bloodless ending. I do not think capturing him alive will be difficult, in any case. Yet this does not seem to be the victory he, or I, had once hoped for."

"What does it say?" Kaze asked. "Can you read it, Dame Chroma?"

"I doubt she can," said Future Sight. Chroma, mouth open to answer, shut it again and scowled darkly at him. "It was an old language when it was carved, when the crystals still pulsed with the lifeblood of the young world. The inscription reads 'The heart is the seat of all life. Let not its pull be forgotten; let not the radiance of love, the cadence of passion, fall into darkness.'"

"Will you just open the door, already?" Chroma asked, clamping her spear under her wing as it unfolded and extended with a series of snaps and bursts of magic. "I think I've decided I want to end this bloody war."

Celestia opened her eyes.

The sun had risen.

She screamed.