A King's Return

by Maulkin

17 - Of Preperations and Proclamations

I watched with detached ambivalence as my past self crept ever closer to his goal. I knew he would eventually be thwarted, but it was a small comfort. The next week had been a flurry of activity, his renewed vigor only tempered by his need to stay hidden – his altered form was sure to attract attention, and he wasn't quite ready to face that just yet. He sent word around the castle that he was 'indisposed', claiming that the dragon attack had taken its toll and that he needed time to recover. As a result, he spent most of his time in his lab and personal quarters with only his mind-slaves for company. Limited as he was in public functions, he finally had time to really pour through Starswirl's old journals in earnest, as well as give greater attention to certain projects he had been neglecting in his advancing age.

Having witnessed the destructive power of the Construct powered by the City's fear, his first priority was to harness that power for himself. He remembered well how the first test runs had nearly ruined everything when he was caught in the field, and how it did little to stop the impending dragon horde when used at full power; further use in its original function would be suicide. The initial results of Fear power were encouraging, but unfortunately he'd have to institute some major changes to take advantage of that potent power – both in the system's hardware, and in the political climate. The entire social dynamic he'd been carefully crafting for years, his very persona as a kind and fair advisor to the Duchess, would have to be scrapped. In its place he would institute something more... efficient. Something that would reveal the Construct's full potential to the world. Something that would, in short, inspire the fear he needed to fully realize his ambitions.

His demeanor was the first and easiest things to change – gone was his kindly and affable attitude, his genial airs, and no more did he hold comfortable dinners with the rich and powerful (they were, after all, already his pawns; he no longer needed the pretense of a private get-together to take control of them). He quickly adopted a militaristic, merciless, and even cruel manner, slipping into it as comfortably as a satin slipper; the ease with which he assumed the new role surprised even him. Still, he could not appear in public as he was – there could be spies about, and the last thing he needed was a pre-emptive strike from the Princesses. He considered his options – he certainly couldn't go about unmasked and exposed – but soon recalled paintings and diagrams of the unicorn generals of old, and smirked as he devised a new plan. He would not be an advisor, after all; he would be a king. He could at least dress the part.

The unicorns of old wore armor into battle, oftentimes for with full horn-sheaths to protect the relatively delicate protrusion of bone; one good swipe could shatter it, rendering their magic useless until it grew back – if it grew back at all. He had no such fear, however; his new horn was more akin to a dragon's crest, and was as sturdy as the rest of him. Even so, it did afford him a unique opportunity; so long as he wore a carefully crafted helmet, his horn could masquerade as its owns protective sheath, and none would be the wiser. He looked at himself in the mirror, nodding as he inked in plates and ridges to conceal and protect; the guards on his legs would hide the scales that showed through his coat; the size and angles of the barrel would conceal his increased musculature; the heavy boots would mask his greater density. He would be terrible and fierce, but he would still be an ordinary unicorn in the eyes of Equestria. There would be no hint of dark magic, not until it was too late.

He immediately put a stop to any and all dissenting speech – in the name of the Duchess, of course, though he made sure to be the one who made the pronouncements – and let the populace know that complainers and rabble-rousers would not be tolerated. Mandatory curfews, censorship of all media, and a few ponies being 'disappeared' in the dead of night... It was all a carefully crafted recipe to play on his subjects' fears and paranoias. His own soldiers were increasing in number and diminishing in mercy every day, and even began to march through the streets as though they were an occupying force. He laughed mirthlessly at the thought – perhaps 'occupying force' wasn't far off the mark, he thought. With that, he had a feasible plan of action for the necessary to achieve the social climate he desired; he then turned his attention to the Construct itself.

The necessary hardware modifications for the Construct were many, but the largest was the installation of a city-wide network of modified Empathic Resonators. Relatively simple in form and function, they normally did little more than gently alter the moods of ponies nearby. Hospitals often used them to bolster the spirits of those recuperating, encouraging their healing naturally through good spirits. They required little magical energy to operate, and their effects were often so subtle that most unicorns couldn't tell they were nearby, unless they paid close attention. But what if they were attuned to fear instead of joy?

He smirked, watching as a modified Resonator powered up, and a small group of test subjects looked about nervously at one another. If a smile was infectious, he reasoned, fear was even more so. A single happy pony might make a few others smile; a pony that jumped at shadows, however, could spread the same fear to others, undiminished. His grin broadened as the test subjects began to visibly shudder, looking about nervously for what was spooking the ponies around them, and in turn growing more fearful and restless as they could see no cause. The beauty of it, he thought with cold satisfaction as the first scream broke out, is that their own instincts did most of the work. The group lost all semblance of calm as they ran about in a panic, hooves pounding on cold stone tiles as their herd instincts took over. For all their advances in mathematics, for all their knowledge of the magical and the mundane, a pony was still an animal – and still prone to fall back on its basic instincts in times of fear and crisis. He calmly compared the thaumic input for the device and the output from the stampeding herd, and found that it was a net gain by several orders of magnitude – that is, he essentially had free energy, limited only by the number of ponies under his sway. True, he would need to fine-tune the settings as a constant state of panic was undesirable, but that was easily achieved. Within a month, he had hundreds of such Resonators installed throughout the city, ready to activate at his command.

The rest of the Construct was modified to run on Fear power with relatively little modification, though with a critical drawback; Fear didn't 'play nice' with most other forms of magical energy. Several capacitors had suffered catastrophic failure, and had to be replaced. The solution was simple, if crude; Thaumic Shunts re-routed the other forms of energy out of the network before they accumulated in any significant quantities, allowing relatively pure Fear energy to enter the Heart. The only issue he foresaw with with that approach was how easily the shunts could be burnt out by sudden a sudden upsurge of contrary emotions – love, hope, charity, etc – but he quickly dismissed this notion; the ponies in the city were miserable, and nothing, he thought, was liable to change that. Changing out the occasional shunt or capacitor was easily managed. Besides, he ran the numbers and found that it would take nearly the entire city to be in good spirits for a complete Shunt overload, and at that point he would only need to replace said shunts – a simple task for a pair of mind-slaves. If he didn't have a legion of those at his disposal, however... Well, odds are they were either somehow freed or dead, and he would be facing the Sisters or Discord on his lonesome – in which case, he was royally bucked anyway.

On the matter of contingencies, Starswirl's notebook contained several interesting entries of a defensive and proactive nature. His mind and soul would be preserved in the Heart upon the destruction of his physical body, it was true, but without a means to regain a corporeal body, that was of little use. He was certain he could improve upon this arrangement. Yet again, old Starswirl came through with a solution – he had apparently devoted a great deal of research in the area of immortality and resurrection, so much so that Sombra wondered why the old unicorn wasn't alive still. With so many ways to cheat death, why had he succumbed? Did he not have the resolve to go through with them? Perhaps, like so many other great unicorns of his, he had fallen prey to Discord, and hadn't put any of his theories into practice – an ignoble death for such a great researcher, to be sure.

No matter, he thought – another immortal being might only get in the way, and he had enough on his plate with Celestia, Luna, and that infernal avatar of Chaos. The relevant entry – the aspect that would turn his preservation into resurrection – involved a theoretical treatise on the manipulation of natural Order magic to cause one's “physical essence to propagate and multiply according to its kind, flesh for flesh, sinew for sinew, blood for blood, and coalesce into the perfected form”. The data was incomplete, as Starswirl appeared to have lost interest and moved on to other avenues of study, but that did not prove a problem for Sombra; his own knowledge of Order filled in the gaps. A few hours of experimenting on his own had revealed a most promising effect; he could, through careful application of Order magic and a ready supply of raw materials, cause living flesh and bone to grow. It was truly astounding how the flesh behaved so much like a crystal, precipitating out of the slurry, growing as if it contained the very instructions to build more of itself. He nodded with satisfaction as he drew the beginnings of a skeletal system out of the slurry, with traces of muscle and sinew attached – a skeleton that appeared to be unicorn at a glance, but with several distinctly draconic features upon closer examination. He pulverized it telekinetically, as fire magic would do little to the bones of a dragon-infused unicorn – he didn't want the risk of competition, even from himself, no matter how remote. He sealed the slurry vat with a small phial contained within, the latter holding traces of his physical and magical essence, and cast a preservation enchantment on the whole ensemble. When the link between the Heart and the vat was established, his regeneration was all but assured; upon the destruction of his physical body, the phial would break, the spell would activate, and a new body would immediately start forming. It was almost worth defeat to see the looks on Celestia's and Luna's faces after their foe, thought dead and gone, apparently rose from the grave. Almost.

Still, even for all the careful planning, for all the power afforded by the Heart, for all the steps he'd taken to stave off death, he had a few lingering doubts. The Elements of Harmony were an unknown factor; all he knew was that they were powerful magical artifacts that could bind a draconequus in stone. What could they do to him? Would they destroy him utterly, or trap him in a living death like they had Discord? Would they destroy his mind? Would they do something completely unexpected? He didn't know, and he had no intention of finding out. So, the final failsafe, the most difficult and potent of them all, was devised.

Throughout the journals, and especially the latter, Starswirl made regular references to “Travelers from afar” and “Visitors from another world”. He thought back to what the Draconequus said about some creature named “Tirek”, a name he dismissed as the mad creature's senseless babblings at the time, but perhaps Starswirl and the draconequus were referring to the same beings. One “Scorpan”, apparently “Tirek's” brother, had shared with Starswirl many magical secrets of his own world. Starswirl wrote of the creature's unwillingness to share too much, lest 'our world became like his', but even so the clever old unicorn had clearly gleaned a great deal from what Scorpan let slip. The one thing the otherworldly visitor had been open with, however, was the mechanics of 'stepping outside the world', apparently the very technique they had used to cross from their world and into Equestria. With a start, Sombra realized what the creature had been referring to – it wasn't just mundane teleportation, but travel outside of time and space itself and into other dimensions. And what was the reason for such openness? 'Spreading the harmony of Equestria to other worlds', Scorpan was recorded as saying. 'Well,' my past self mused, 'Order is harmonious, is it not?' He chuckled to himself and read on, amused at the thought of showing this Scorpan exactly how he put that knowledge to use.

It took him some time, but eventually Sombra worked it out. 'Stepping Out', as it was called in the journal, involved the direct physical transfer into the timeless, spaceless void that exists (if such a non-entity can be said to exist) between the different dimensions; from there, one must either re-enter their own dimension, or enter another. Well, he had no plans on entering others – not yet, anyway, he could scarcely travel through dimensions as a mere mortal – but, there were several other applications. He started small, of course – he didn't 'Step Out' himself, but rather sent a book on a brief sojourn into the timeless void and pull it back out only a few feet away from its starting point. Still, it was proof of concept. Useful too, he thought – wards and spells could block an area from basic teleportation, but he could bypass them entirely with the new technique.

He soon became quite good at it – better than he'd expected. Indeed, any spell that involved translocation of any sort seemed to come easier to him than it did before – another happy benefit of the transformation, he soon realized, as the warp-dragon had given him a more innate understanding of space and the magics affecting it. Even so, the more he practiced the more he felt he was missing something. He was sure he wasn't utilizing the spell to its full potential. The thought nagged at him for several days, until finally, while engrossed in one of Starswirl's treatise on the mechanics of time travel, he had an epiphany. The very same principles that would allow him to travel from one dimension to another could likewise allow him to pass from the present and into the future. The 'Outside', the void, was without time and space; it did not, in the strictest sense, exist. The same principles that allowed him to travel from one place to another – even across dimensions – would allow him to transfer from one time to another. Rather than bridge a gap of space, he would bridge a gap of time. It wasn't true time-travel, of course – he could only go forward – but it would serve his purposes. A plan began to form in his mind.

If things went hooves-up, and he needed to make an escape, he didn't intend to do it without his city. With the power of the Construct, he could set off a city-wide 'Step Out' as a final defensive measure, until the storm had passed. All he needed was a set of triggers to determine when to re-enter the universe. He considered... His only real enemies were Celestia and Luna, and Discord, and with the City under control he believed he could take the Sisters – provided they did not have their Elements. As for Discord, he was less certain; even so, he suspected that there must come a time when either Equestria overthrows the tyrant, or something else renders him a shadow of his former self. In any case, the best triggers he could come up with were for the Sisters to both lose their connections to the Elemenents, and for Discord to be rendered powerless. There was, of course, the risk that the triggers would never be fulfilled... He shook his head. If he was going to use it, then, he would use it only if he was likely to die anyway.

Of course, he had to test his theory first. So, he had prepared.

I watched my past-self go about his business, Luna beside me, and found him setting up in the early morning sunlight, putting everything to order in his quarters. She was the first to break the silence.

“We had wondered how you made your entire city disappear,” she said curiously, frowning over his shoulder. “Even with the power of the Heart, we knew you couldn't cast a time-travel spell that large, with such a great displacement.”

“Well, now you know,” I said glumly. Despite the wonders of magic I'd seen, all the fantastic things I'd learned again... it was hard to get excited about the new knowledge when it would inevitably turned to such a foul purpose.

“Are you just going to mope?” she asked, frowning. “You could help many people – our kind and humankind – with some of these forgotten spells. Don't you think you should focus on what you can do to help, rather than dwelling on the evil of your past?”

“Don't you think you should mind your own business, you interfering nag?” I retorted almost automatically, then bit my tongue. My temper got the better of me yet again.

She fell silent at that. As the silence extended uncomfortably long, I mulled over what I'd said. 'She didn't deserve that,' I thought, lowering my ears. She was just trying to be nice, to put my mind on happier things, and I snapped at her. Offended her pretty badly, too. 'Great job', I thought bitterly to myself. It was a wonder she remained after that, but remain she did.

My past-self seemed determined to make me feel worse; every step he took towards his goal was performed with a barely suppressed, savage glee. It didn't matter who got hurt or what it cost other ponies; if it furthered his goals, he would make it happen. I looked on, disgusted with myself as I watched the old me prepare for his sojourn into the Outside.

For all his evil, he was thorough. First he made sure that his mind-slaves were under his control, and would remain so even if the link was broken. It was a sort of residual effect, I surmised, and so long as he returned in due time they would remain enslaved – his will would remain for a long while, even after the connection was severed. Once he was sure he wouldn't come back to a full-blown riot, he focused on the spell itself and its requirements. He cast every ward, wove every protective enchantment, donned every magical bulwark he could for the 'extended stay' in that unknown and unknowable place; he would effectively have to exist without time and space, and that was a difficult thing to manage even on the conceptual level. He took a deep breath – he wasn't sure what would happen if something went wrong, but he knew it wouldn't be good – and with the greatest trepidation...

He Stepped.

He was in a place that was no place, for an eternity that lasted no time at all, his mind silent as it screamed, thrashing in complete stillness, and...

And there was something there.

Before he knew what was happening, though, he was back. He gasped and shuddered, nearly landing in a heap, but already the memory was fading from his mind. Even my memory of the memory was warping like a fevered dream, dissolving to meaningless nonsense. My past-self soon dismissed the notion that he'd experienced anything at all in the Outside, ruling that out as impossible – time didn't exist in that place, he reasoned, and one could only experience anything within time. I began to wonder if I'd misremembered as well, or if the spell had just messed with my mind. Indeed, my past-self had already recovered, and was looking about his quarters with a devilish grin. For him, it had been early morning but a moment before; yet ruddy glow of sunset told him that several hours had passed. He had 'stepped out', and had 'stepped in' at a completely different time. All of his planning, all of his plotting, it was coming to fruition. All he needed...

His stomach rumbled with hunger. 'All I need is some breakfast,' he thought, amused. 'Or is it dinner? Ah, the trials and tribulations of time travelers. The sacrifices I make for my kingdom,' he thought with a smirk, deciding to take a brief respite and bask in his own success. He strutted out of his quarters as if he had already defeated the Princesses, so supremely confident he was in his immanent success. I'm not sorry to say that I took some satisfaction in knowing how very wrong he was.

His guards did a double-take when they saw him. “Sir?” one asked nervously as he casually walked past.

My past-self frowned and turned to the guard. “What is it?” he growled.

The guard lowered his ears, but plowed on – his will to serve was stronger than his self-preservation instincts, thanks to Sombra. “I... We couldn't find you anywhere. We haven't seen you all day, and when your servants cleaned your room they-” he quailed under Sombra's impatient glower, and hastily cut to the chase. “W-with all due respect, sir, we were just wondering where you'd been...”

Sombra continued to glower at them for a moment. Then, to the guards' consternation, the frown slowly turned to a grin and their master chuckled. “Don't worry, gentlecolts,” he said arily. “I only, ah, 'Stepped Out' for a moment.” He only laughed at their growing unease and confusion, and trotted on.

“...That was a terrible pun,” Luna groaned. I couldn't disagree.

The guards continued to eye him warily, confused, and Sombra decided it was time to take back the reins. He checked on his network of slaves, and nodded in satisfaction – all under control, everything proceeding as normal. Perfect.

“Good. Now get back to work.”

***

Within the month, his preparations were finished. The armor he had commissioned was finished and polished to a shine, suitable for a general or a king. It fitted him perfectly – indeed, he barely noticed it was on. He took to wearing it openly – let the world see who he was. The 'resurrection vat', as he called it, was operational and stabilized, and tucked away in a safe place, and his link to the Heart was strong and stable. His magic, bolstered by the heart, was many times stronger than any unicorn's magic had a right to be, and he was confident he could hold his own against the Sisters. His troops were sharpened to a razor's edge, ready to attack at a moment's notice, and even extend his influence beyond the borders of the City. The Resonators were installed throughout, ready to ramp up the Fear in the City in preparation for any major power demand, and had been fine tuned expertly by his engineers. Every failsafe was ready, every weapon was honed, and everything was in place... He went over the checklist one last time, each tic a gem in his eyes, before setting the scroll aside. It was time.

He strode onto the balcony over his City, and grinned down at his hoard, his slaves. A spark of magic floated from his horn to his throat, amplifying his voice so every Crystal Pony could hear.

“My crystal slaves,” he spoke, his voice booming out over the ramparts and across the land, rumbling like an earthquake, “the time has come to expand my dominion. My soldiers – we start our march to Canterlot this very day, and you will spread my blessing upon all who oppose us. My subjects – you shall remain here, and defend my city with your very lives if called to do so. The era of the Sun and the Moon has come to an end; the rein of the Crystal Empire begins!”

Author's Note:

Hey guys, let me know if you find any spelling and/or grammar mistakes - I read it before hand, but a few things probably slipped by. Constructive comments are always appreciated.

Comments

[sjo3989]

thanks for the update!

[yrfoxtaur]

Damnit!

He should have apologized, rather than marveling that she didn't leave.