They had tried everything.
Spike had tried his claws.
Sombra had tried his magic.
Cadence had tried pooling her magic with Sombra’s.
Nothing had worked. The three of them stood in the kitchen, glaring at their stubborn and seemingly unassailable adversary.
“You think you’ve won, don’t you? Well, you’re dead wrong!” Sombra exclaimed.
“Erm, daddy?” Cadence replied. “You’re talking to a jar of pickles.”
“He knows what he did!” Sombra fired back, briefly turning his attention to Cadence before turning it back to the offending container on the counter in front of them. “And I will not stand for it! No jar of anything will stop my granddragon from getting his snack on! This calls for… The Big Guns™.”
A chill wind suddenly swept through the kitchen, Cadence and Spike both shivering as Sombra began working fell magic far, far older and more powerful than any cast since the end of the last age, waving his hooves over the jar. “By the torturous imaginarium of Gary Gygax, I command you!”
The stallion reared up and threw his hooves over his head —
“OPEEEE —”
Cadence’s wings sprung opened.
“— EEEE —”
Every cabinet in the kitchen opened.
“— EEEE —”
All the windows in the Crystal Empire opened.
“— EEEE —”
The ovens in far-away Sugar Cube Corner opened.
“— EEEE —”
Millions of miles distant, the plan of the Bydo Empire to exterminate all life on and colonize the planet dubbed Equus was halted when the entire crew of the megabattleship Megabattleship was suddenly vented into space.
“— EEEEN!”
Sombra dropped back to all four hooves, glaring at the jar of pickles as the kitchen returned to as normal as a kitchen that was recently filled with eldritch power can be. After a moment, Spike picked up the jar and tried to unscrew the lid again.
“Did it work?” Cadence asked, wings still spread widely.
This did not escape Spike’s notice. “Uh, well, it opened something,” he said with a nervous smile. Sombra looked at Cadence the moment she looked behind herself, and then both gave inarticulate shouts of surprise and alarm that rapidly gave way to articulate demands.
“Don’t look! Don’t look!”
“Put those away, young lady!”
It was at about the time that Cadence got her wings under control again and Spike finished snickering that they felt it; an inaudible, low rumbling that felt like the world would shake apart at any moment.
“Uh oh,” said Sombra.
“‘Uh oh?’ Twilight’s destroying the world and that’s all you have to say?!” Spike demanded.
Sombra just glared at him. “The world isn’t ending, Spike. That’s not what it feels like when the world ends.”
“How do you even know that?!”
“No, what we’re feeling is the side effect of a nearby and massive subspatial teleportation, coming from — ” His horn flashed red for a moment — “The throne room! Quickly!” Without wasting another moment, he tore out of the kitchen, Cadence following after a moment after Spike leapt onto her back.
They galloped down the corridor.
Past the dining room.
Past the ballroom.
Down the stairs.
Down another corridor.
Past the second ballroom.
“Sure could use an editing mistake right about now!” Sombra shouted. Then, they came to a door. “Thank you!” Without wasting another moment, he bucked the door open, and the three of them hurried inside of the washroom they’d found. They stopped and stared to make sure they hadn’t imagined it.
“Wait,” said Cadence. “The only way to get into this throne room is from….”
They turned around; sure enough, on the other side of the door was the actual throne room, not the corridor they were in just moments before.
“Well, there’s that editing mistake you wanted,” Spike remarked, but Sombra shook his head, horn aglow again. The rumbling of the castle intensified, or at least it seemed to.
“This is no editing mistake. Subspace is extremely unstable right now. There!” Sombra suddenly looked at the balcony that overlooked the Crystal Square. “Right there! It’ll appear any moment now!”
The rumbling intensified even further, until it felt as though the whole universe would shake to pieces! And then, it stopped abruptly with a little ‘pop!’ and everything was calm, as if nothing had happened at all. Except that the balcony was now occupied by a manic Twilight Sparkle, a queasy Shining Armor, and a large something-or-other about the size of a carriage, covered by a giant, white sheet.
Before anyone could say anything, Shining went galloping across the throne room and into the washroom, slammed the door, and proceed to make a very loud and unpleasant-sounding deposit in the Porcelain Bank (Crystal Empire branch, so really, more of a Crystal Bank). When he’d finished, Twilight opened her mouth to speak, only to be stopped cold by Shining making a second deposit. A moment later, the toilet flushed, and Shining came stumbling out, still not looking too hot.
Sombra opted to focus on Twilight instead. “So, you’re here,” he said calmly.
“Yes, I am! And now, we’ll see who the real slacker is, Sombra! Behold! My greatest and most sinister invention yet!” Twilight said before whipping the sheet off with flair, revealing the large machine underneath. Box-like with the top half sharply sloping inward with hard, angular surfaces to meet what looked like a chimney with a large, glass disc suspended above it, all the non-glass surfaces painted stark white and the side facing into the throne room covered with switches, dials, and red and green lights.
“The Karmageddon Lens!”
“Is she going to monologue?” Sombra asked no one in particular.
“For too long, ponies have refused to listen seriously when I tell them about the magic of friendship, but no more!” Twilight exclaimed.
“Oh my god, she’s monologuing! This is beautiful!”
“I’ll bring them around to the idea of friendship, by showing them what happens when they neglect it and all other emotionally positive things with the Karmageddon Lens! And SCIENCE!” Twilight paused to laugh maniacally, having final obtained enough practice to avoid a coughing fit. “By focusing bad vibes into a Juju Matrix, the Karmageddon Lens will create a singularity of pure negative energy that will draw the entire world into oblivion! Ponies will rue the day they ignored friendship, and rue it hard, and they’ll repent and beg forgiveness! Except they won’t, ‘cuz they’ll have been drawn into oblivion!”
As Twilight laughed a second time, Shining Armor was reconsidering his earlier stance. “Guys, I’m getting concerned,” he said. “Twilight’s been battier than usual, and maniacal or not, that was not a natural laugh. I think she might actually destroy the world!”
“Oh, don’t be a wet blanket, Armor, this is going to be adorable!” Sombra remarked, walking towards the balcony to better see the event unfold. “I remember when I built my first doomsday device and it fizzled. I’m told the pout I put on afterwards was cavity-inducing!”
“Well, keep your voice down or you’ll discourage her,” Cadence said lowly, walking alongside Sombra, Shining and Spike not far behind her. “It’s hard enough getting her just to go outside. I’ve only seen her this passionate something once before, and it’s endearing to see it again.”
“Yeah, because if there’s one thing she should be excited about, it’s destroying the world,” Spike remarked. As per usual, no one paid him any attention, and in short order, Twilight had finished laughing and turned to her device, switching the switches, dialing the dials and working happily, if a bit jitterly as the lights switched between red and green and back again.
After thirty seconds of this — plus the occasional maniacal giggle from Twilight — the ponies (and dragon) who weren’t Twilight Sparkle began to fidget uncomfortably. After another fifteen seconds, Spike could stand it no longer.
“So, when the Empire disappeared, was that you, or….”
“All me,” Sombra replied. “Well, me and the Chro-Noes-Chro-My-God, but I built that, so still basically all me.”
“And that was, what? Doomsday device that fizzled out?” Spike asked.
Sombra opened his mouth to answer, but hesitated a moment. “Actually, I’m not entirely sure,” he decided. “I mean, I built it with the intention of erasing all time from space, but I was under a lot of stress at the time and mainly I just wanted ponies to leave me alone until I could sort things out. For all I know, separating the Empire from normal space-time for a thousand years was exactly what I intended it to do. It’s kind of fuzzy, actually.”
“Huh. Well, that —”
“Ready!”
All attention jumped back to Twilight at her sudden exclamation. Sure enough, all the lights on the side of the Karmageddon Lens were green and they could all plainly hear a low but gradually rising electric whine. Above the device’s focusing array — otherwise known as a ‘lens’ — a ball of energy darker than night began to form. Five pairs of eyes watched it power up, but did not watch it equally, for while four of those pairs were eyes trained in the arts of magic and ending all life as it was known, the fifth was trained in the art of seeing when things were about to go horrifically wrong so that the minimum safe distance could be reached in time, and those eyes were not thrilled.
“It’s not going to fizzle,” Spike said suddenly, horror dawning on his face.
“Don’t be ridiculous!” Sombra threw an arm around Spike’s shoulders. “Look hard at that, Spike. Does that honestly look like it’s going to maintain a stable, whatever it’s supposed to produce?” he asked.
“Yes!” Spike replied immediately.
“Wait, what?!”
At that instant, the Karmageddon Lens fired, hurling a pitch black orb up and up and up into the sky where it exploded — or maybe imploded; it was really hard to tell — and left a sphere of pure negative energy hanging over the Crystal Empire. Winds began to build on the ground below and motes of dust that were gradually growing larger were being pulled up and away.
“Success!” shouted Twilight.
The other three ponies, with their jaws hanging opened and using the most eloquent of words, expressed their feelings of the situation thus:
“WAIT, WHAT?!”