When We Fall

by Princess Twilicorndog

Of Crystals and Death

Twilight grinned when she saw the Crystal Heart. She had finally found it! In her glee she didn’t bother to check for any spells around it, and as soon as she stepped towards it an alarm went off. She dove to get the Heart, knocking it out of the circle just before the dark crystals surrounded her. “The heart, where’s the heart!?” She yelled, hoping desperately that Spike had it.

“It rolled over here when you dropped it!” Twilight sighed in relief. They still had the Crystal Heart. This could be salvaged. Looking out of a gap in the crystals that imprisoned her, she saw the dragon trying to come towards her, but more dark spikes growing in his way.

“Don’t move!” Spike stood stock-still. Twilight turned around, preparing to try and teleport out. “You can move, just not towards me.” A fatal miscalculation- for her number one assistant.

There was a strangled scream, then silence, sickening silence. The unicorn screamed her little brother’s name- “Spike!” -and turned around, faster than she had ever moved before, to see the dragon impaled by two crystals, each going into one foot and sticking out of the top of his head. Meaningless thoughts rushed through her head- Who will help me clean the library now? Does Rarity know about his crush? She never will now. -as Twilight screamed and screamed.

---
The unicorn screamed her throat raw but Spike’s still echoed in her head. Twilight tried to teleport outside, and when she was just transported back inside her cage, she rushed at the evilhatredputridhorrid crystals. She bucked them and slammed her shoulder and body against them, again and again until she bled. Was she crying? That would explain the salty wetness on her face, making tracks through her fur.

Twilight would not stay in this cage for a moment longer. Her eyes blazed white with sudden fury, and the crystals shattered into a thousands pieces- each spikycrimsondeadlykiller crystal in the room- and the unicorn galloped to her Spike, her little brother. He was lying limp on the ground, puncture wounds in his feet and head, the Crystal Heart broken clean in half beside him.

She held him against her and stroked his spikes like she used to do when he had a nightmare. She whispered his name over and over again, as if it would bring her Spikey back to life. She could tell herself it only didn’t work because she didn’t say it with enough force, or maybe because the word was broken by sobs.

Then her denial was broken by the screams of Crystal Ponies- innocent ponies. Gently, ever so gently, Twilight laid Spike on the ground. She would come back for him, but right now? There were ponies- livingwhyareyoualiveandnotmyspikewhatdidhedo -who needed to be saved. Cadence’s magic failed and the Empire didn’t exactly have an army lying around.

Twilight looked out over the balcony. Sombra was in a material form, gloating before the crowd of terrified Crystal Ponies. Her friends were all lying scattered around, hopefully just unconscious. It looked like Rainbow was bleeding, but not too seriously. The unicorn was furious, enraged. How dare that monster even think of laying a hoof on her friends?
Taking a defensive stance, she teleported down, in right in front of Sombra himself. “How dare you?” She whispered.

The shadow-pony laughed. “Another goody-two shoes come to oppose me? Take your shot then, and I’ll laugh when you fa-” Sombra was cut off mid-sentence when he was forced to dodge a beam of energy.

“Now that’s just rude.” He responded in kind by attempting to block Twilight’s magic- which she was prepared for and she used dark magic to shield her horn.

“Murder is worse than rude, Sombra.” She spat his name like it was disgusting, too horrible to even speak of. Which it was.

The evil unicorn just narrowed his eyes, and crystals shot up around her in an attempt to trap her in a cage like the one she had been trapped in earlier.

“Not going to work.” The crystals shattered again and Twilight’s eyes lit up white with power just bubbling under the surface. Sombra attempted to evade whatever she was planning by turning into smoke. She just forced him to return to a physical form, easily done by a short term mind control spell cast forcefully enough. “Wha- How?” Was all he was able to sputter out before he was wrapped in stinging purple tendrils of light.

“Murdering or otherwise harming my loved ones means directly endangering one’s health.” The sentence came out monotone, without feeling. In a corner of her mind, a part of her that she pushed out of the way, was scared of herself. What was she doing?

Sombra lashed out, firing shards of dark crystal at her in something akin to panic. Twilight let them hit her, because frankly, she didn’t care. The tendrils squeezed tighter and smashed Sombra into the ground. He was screaming now, a scream of agony because he was being cut into and burned by the tentacles. The Crystal Ponies, who had at first been joyous that their lavender savior had arrived, were now cowering in fear once again. They knew Sombra probably deserved much worse, but seeing the torture happen to him, right there, along with the pure power and fury radiating off their ‘savior’…
A soft touch on Twilight’s shoulder made her turn around. It was Cadence, and she looked a mixture of concerned and afraid. “Twilight, please, stop, you need to stop.”

The white light made her deaf to her pleas, blind to her appearance. The alicorn found herself teleported across the empire without so much as a word.

Of course Sombra had taken this chance to free himself. “I don’t take kindly to pesky little unicorns attacking me.” He snarled, launching himself horn-first at Twilight.

His attack was stopped on a bit, and his bright red, precious horn was snapped off. He laughed and tried to regrow it, drawing power from the fear in the air and the dark crystals nearby.

The horn stayed a useless stump. “I- how?”

“You should know how if you call yourself a master of magic, dark or not.”

That small part of her mind screamed at her again. Stop, stop, stop! Listen to Cadence! Twilight, this isn’t you!
It was small enough to be easily ignored.

Twilight grinned a cold grin and two dark crystals shot out of the pillars around him, impaling King Sombra though the stomach. He let out a gasp, then a cough, crimson speckling the ground in front of him.

Two more crystals came out of the ceiling and the floor, and the light in Sombra’s eyes died.

That little part of her was screaming, louder and louder, but she ignored it because she had gotten revenge and saved the Crystal Ponies as well. Singlehoofedly!

Author's Note:

Mmmh...
I'm horrible at fights.
Oh well, this has been my first attempt at writing in a while. Better this than nothing, riiight?

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[chaosmaster]

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