None Shall Prevail
Tirek stalked the dark streets of Canterlot, watching from the shadows for any unicorns foolish enough to wander down the alleyways alone and holding something in their aura. It was slow going, especially with all of the earth ponies and pegasi who insisted on walking around, and the few unicorns who were brave enough to venture into the shadows being aristocrats with nothing to carry, but he was making progress.
Time had very little meaning to a perpetual street predator like Tirek. He knew that it had been weeks, definitely a few months, possibly even a year or two since he had managed to escape from Tartarus. He knew that nopony was investigating the sudden loss of magic in so many unicorns, instead blaming it on various obscure venereal diseases that had been wiped out before he had even been sealed away. He knew that there was always somepony who, even if he couldn't steal their magic, he could still beat up and steal their food. He knew that it had been far too long since he had power, but he also knew that he need only be patient and ever vigilant.
And he knew exactly how he was going to use that power when he finally got it back.
Mulling over old grudges and elaborate revenge plans was one of the few remaining methods the decrepit centaur had of staying sane. The others had stopped working somewhere around the third hundredth anniversary of Nightmare Moon's banishment, or otherwise petered out over the course of his time spent huddling in dark alleyways and having to sleep through twice the amount of unicorns he did manage to rob. In a way, it made him relish his brief moments of victory over common unicorns all the more.
Thinking of that, Tirek looked up and spotted that most delicious of things, the glimmer of a unicorn's aura. He grinned so wide that you could almost see his toothy smile under the darkness of his hood, and he slunk towards his prey. This one seemed a prime catch; they were standing with their back turned to him, not making any effort to move away from the dark alley, and holding their carton of oranges almost ridiculously high above their head. It was almost too good a catch to be true.
Tirek wasn't the only one to think so.
Before the centaur could take another step, a shadowy figure leaped down from a nearby rooftop, landing on the unicorn and clubbing him around the ear before any attempt could be made to buck him off. As their mutual prey crumpled under the newcomer, Tirek had to fight down the urge to gallop over and wrestle with the shadowy figure. He barely had enough strength to carry a few buckets, much less fight off an assassin.
The shadow raised a hoof, and Tirek saw the meager light glinting off of a blade. He couldn't stop himself from crying out in shock as the blade came down, burying itself in the neck of the unicorn. He expected the victim to twitch and spasm under the blade, but the assassin was clearly an expert; the knife brought nothing but silence and stillness.
The assassin drew his knife out, and it disappeared into the shadows of his cloak with the click of a mechanism. He stepped off of the unico- the corpse with a practiced ease, and the edges of his hood glowed red with his own aura. Tirek's hind legs decided that they didn't want to deal with this particular unicorn, and began to try and drag him back into the shadows against the protest of the rest of his body.
"Tirek, I presume." The hood was flicked away, revealing a dark face with a flowing black mane that could have blended perfectly into their current environment if not for his glowing green-and-red eyes and his luminous blood-red... horn.
The horn that was still glowing with magic. The horn attached to a body that had just gone through an intense burst of activity. The horn that this stranger was practically waving in his face, his predatory grin giving away that he had no idea who he was messing with. Without any further hesitation, Tirek opened his mouth and began to drink in the magic.
The realization that his essence was being eaten did nothing to faze the stranger. Instead, he grinned all the wider. As his knees began to shake and wobble under him, he started laughing. As his face and body began to crumble into dust and disappear inside of Tirek, he just kept laughing and laughing and laughing.
By the time Tirek realized what was going on, he wasn't in control anymore. The unicorn was crumbling by himself, and rushing forward into the centaur faster than Tirek could close his mouth. Within seconds, the cloak fell empty to the ground, and Tirek's jaws were finally allowed to clamp shut.
He fell to his knees, his hands hitting the pavement, his lungs desperately trying to reject what they had been forced to swallow. There was a presence in his mind, someone trying to infiltrate his innermost thoughts and desires, and Tirek had no idea how to fight it.
"Who in the hell are y--ASSUMING DIRECT CONTROL."
Tirek's black eyes glowed green, and a self-assured grin designed for a more three-dimensional head spread across his face. "Please allow me to introduce myself," he announced to the empty alleyway. "I'm a stallion of wealth and taste."
Tirek looked around, confused. He was back in the cave, the cave where he had waited while Scorpan spied on the ponies. While Scorpan betrayed him. This was the cave where the ponies had come for him.
As if on cue from his memory, Tirek spotted a lone pony in a cloak wandering up the dirt path to his cave. Acting purely on instinct, he let the crackling power of magic build up between his horns, then he fired a vicious blast that should have torn flesh from bone and left the pony as nothing but a speck of ash on the wind.
All it did was tear the pony's cloak away.
It was a small relief to Tirek that the pony waiting underneath that cloak was not Starswirl the Bearded, or else one of the alicorns. But the pony underneath was far worse than them. It was the pony from the alleyway, except this time he was garbed in far more than a simple assassin's cloak. He wore a long, flowing cape of crimson silk trimmed with ermine, and bore a metal crown atop his flowing mane. There were bits and pieces of spotless armor all over his frame, and Tirek half-expected a sword.
"My name is King Sombra," the pony announced, suddenly standing on the threshold of the cave even though Tirek could have sworn he had been several feet away. "I am the sovereign of the Crystal Empire, the King of All Monsters, the nightmare from which there may be no waking. And you are?"
"I am Lord Tirek," Tirek proclaimed, the deep and booming nature of his voice surprising him. He had expected to still be speaking in the same reedy voice that he had been whispering to his victims in the alleyway. "Once and future conqueror of this pathetic sphere of existence."
"Wrong. You've never conquered anything." Despite being forced to measure up to a centaur stuffed with the memories of stolen magic, Sombra wasn't betraying so much as a hint of terror. "And you don't want to conquer Equestria. You want to destroy it."
"What's the difference?"
Sombra glared at Tirek. His horn glowed, and the stones of the cave broke apart and fused together to form a blade. Without even blinking, he cut off one of Tirek's arms.
"A conqueror leaves something standing. Ponies, buildings, some vestige of what a place used to be before he swung through. Take me, for example. The only part of the Crystal Empire I ever destroyed was their free will." Sombra's stone sword slashed again, this time merely tearing a huge gash across Tirek's chest. "A destroyer leaves naught but ash in his wake, if he's generous."
"So, you're tearing me apart because of semantics?" Tirek tried to prepare another spell, but Sombra simply leaped up into the air and cut off the centaur's head with a single fluid motion.
The fact that Tirek kept being able to think and speak diminished the gesture a little, but it was still quite a shock.
"No, the tearing you apart is for much better reasons. Celestia's reasons."
Tirek's head laughed, even as the motion sent it spinning through the air. "Oh yes, because I'll believe that! You just told me that you conquered an entire empire and took away their free will, and you expect me to believe you're working with Celestia?"
"I don't expect you to believe anything, Tirek. But it's the truth. While you were in Tartarus, the world changed. Old enemies resurfaced, and were defeated. And Celestia realized something, with my help."
"And what did she realize?", Tirek sneered.
"That there will always be evil, but there won't always be villains. A villain is someone with an ethos that is in opposition of good, an opposite number that seeks to overwhelm and change the world as it is. A villain can be fought, can take part in wars, can take centuries to defeat. A villain has a place in the world, and can eventually find balance with a hero. But there are some creatures of evil, monsters, that seek to destroy everything."
Sombra's blade slashed through the rest of Tirek's body. "A monster cannot be reasoned with, will not listen to negotiation. A monster has no halfway point, no system of restraint, no ethos, no beliefs. All a monster has is the desire to make the entire world as empty as he is. Tirek, you are a monster."
"So you just decided to kill me? All of your own accord?"
"Oh, no." Something approaching a genuine smile flitted across Sombra's face. "If I had my way, I would have hunted you down and publicly gutted you the moment we found out you were loose. It was Celestia's idea to let you have hope that you might win."
"Why in the blazes would she allow that?" Tirek demanded, his body fighting to re-assert its natural shape.
"So that you would know what I bring to the table." Sombra brandished his sword, more to look fancy than anything else. "Because my subjects have hope. They live under a tyrant, but they have hope. Because they know that if they were in danger, they would already be dead. They hear rumors of a rebellion. And they know that if they could just run far enough, and fast enough, they might reach Celestia."
The sword flicked through the air and cut Tirek's head in half. His mouth stopped working, but his brain kept going so that he could still listen.
"But there is no hope of an escape from Tirek, because everypony who doesn't run from Tirek only makes him stronger, lets him chase faster and harder. And there's no safe place to run to, no place that will stay safe, because eventually he'll eat the alicorns when they fight him and we'll all burn and die." Sombra's blade crumbled, as did the world.
Back in the real world, Tirek gave a final, violent cough. Sombra came leaping out, assembling from dust and springing into glorious full regalia. He turned and sneered at the centaur, who had only a few seconds left before his lungs collapsed and he got dragged down to Tartarus through the one-way passage.
"I am stronger than you because I can be beaten. Because there will always be someone who can. I can survive in a sane world, but you? You cannot be left to sit and grow stronger in distant lands. You and your kind demand a hunt, a quest with a timer. And that is why you will always lose."
Tirek died. Sombra walked away. And Discord got up and had a horrible coughing fit.
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An intriguing concept and excellent execution.
Please sir, can I have some more?
Hmm. Not sure I entirely buy Sombra's reasoning, but I won't argue with the results. Plus, this is one of the more impressive presentations of him I've ever seen. Nice work.
What the people below me said!
Hmm...
Interesting.
I always pictured Sombra as half of a protagonist, and half of an antagonist. Yes, he took over the Crystal Empire, but for a reason. He gave the Crystal Ponies a reason to have hope, hope to get to Celestia and escape his rule. He was a tyrant, but he was a villain that conquers, but he didn't destroy, unlike Tirek...
I hope they bring him back.
I love the concept of villains keeping monsters in check. I kind of want to see more on the concept in general. But what is Discord? A monster or a villain?
7650447 "Killing is so... boring. There's so little you can do with a corpse. I keep ponies alive. These days, at least."
I think he sees himself as a villain, but Sombra is very iffy on the idea of not cutting off Discord's head.
7650460 Another question is whether or not he could cut off Discord's head. Discord seems rather more powerful than Sombra.
7650478 That's a large part of the reason why the matter isn't settled.
So the pony Sombra killed was Discord... Well it would be something to see, I would expect something like that in Transformers not MLP... Just does not fit in the cheerful world of magical talking pastial colored ponies, but right in place in Transfomers Gen 1, Beast Wars and Prime.
But yes Sombra is still the best MLP villain!
Been around for a long long year, stole many a stallion's soul to waste?
Well, that was metal as fuck. I like your incarnation of Sombra—a villain who knows he's a villain, but he's not a completely illogical or mindlessly evil one at that. Hell, he almost seems to have a bizarre, unspoken code of ethics. It's not even completely unbelievable that he and Celestia would see mutual benefit in each other despite their (rather glaring) opposite personalities.
I'd personally like to see how this Sombra handles other villains from the show, but I guess we don't have any that would be 'monsters' to the magnitude of Tirek. Still, the idea of a vigilante Sombra is really rad, and it's sad to see it done so well in so short a story.
7650595
Well, folks said the same thing about Synthetic Bottled Sunlight back in the day.
7650595
7650613
Norry just got rekt.
7651712
7650613
Stupid fake sunlight.
I approve of this and the hunt idea thing.
This, is good. Really good. As a one off this was amazing, but it could also be the first chapter of something even more amazing if you decide to go that way.
Agreed
I guess every society needs an enforcer of justice.
That was my favorite Sombra so far. I like his explanation and the way he carries himself.
I felt like that last line kind of threw the tone off. Like going from hardcore to epic to punchline.
I want more Sombra now...but an awesome Sombra like this.
By the way, that cover art is FANTASTIC!
Best final line to a fic ever.
Well this turned out better then i thought, Great Sombra.
7720207 Punisher :)
This is some dang good philosophy! Really, that's something I love to read in a story, since I've found them to be some of the best mediums for the teaching of philosophy, psychology, ethics and morals, and all sorts of other metaphysical ideas.
And this one is a personal favourite, the idea of villains having a purpose and use, of being actual people with goals and ethics and standards.
As for the story itself, I found it well written, and the the little bits of humour were fitted in very appropriately
One thing that particularly got my interest was the system by which Sombra survived and reformed after the absorption process, and how he could kill Tirek from the inside
Then again, super powerful master of shadows and mind magic, so
Another excellent fic!
Before I read this, what is th Dark tag for ?
And how bad does it get ?
8128530 Either read it, or don't.
So, if Tirek would not steal all the magic in a pony, but 90%, then waited for it to regenerate and then repeated - he would be "a villain"? I'm afraid I don't quite understand the idea.
I liked and favorited this story just for the last sentence. I am not a discord fan.
It's been a while since I originally read this story. Wish I could tell you when but sadly I can't remember. I decided to re-read it again as it was in my 'thinking fics' library on the site, since I needed some inspiration for a villain doctor in a My Hero Aca RP I'm in. Since I've read a fair amount of your stories and I've never left a comment (despite your attempts to get me to do so), so I believe it's time that I do.
The philosophy on monsters vs villains was something I quite liked, especially seeing it on a rational Sombra, one that fit the 'Lawful Evil' alignment that i expected him to be in the show way back when he appeared. Why Sombra killed the unicorn we may never know, though I'll assume he was a monster as well. Having him be working with Celestia bothered me a little, but once again 'Lawful Evil' has the word lawful in it, so it makes sense in my eyes. I was a bit disappointed that the story didn't go deeper into it's philosophy, but most stories that leave me wanting more of it's ideas probably shouldn't or else sequilitus may ruin it.
Overall coming back to this story I find this story as enjoyable as I did the first time I read it.
8756180
The final line of the story is meant to explain the unicorn. This story begins as a copy of the original Tirek vs. Discord scene, but then Sombra steps in and decides to use his tactics instead.
8223150
No, it wouldn't matter, sombra was getting at the fact that tirak wanted nothing but to kill and destroy, leave the world a burning wreck, unlike sombra that simply wanted conquest.
8857949
That's exactly what I mean. What if Tirek's goal was not to burn everything to the ground and kill everyone, but to farm pony magic by leaving them 10% of what they had, wait until they recover, repeat?
8857998
The farming of magic had nothing to do with what sombra was getting at, farming magic is not a goal, it was a means to an end.
If all he wanted was to steal magic, he would be nothing, literally nothing, since he could live literally anywhere and steal magic, but he didnt and it cant be a goal, lastly, him stealing the magic had nothing to do with what makes a villain and a monster that is worst.
8858179
Repeat: what if Tirek's goal would be to farm magic, not "kill everyone?"
8858211
Then he'd be one step above a plague. He'd be a seasonal epidemic that you can see coming and can theoretically reason with, who has decided that he isn't going to kill you.
And in that scenario, Celestia would still send someone to neutralize him, because eating people's ability to function does not suddenly stop being evil just because you let them keep their legs attached.
8858211
Your missing the point, 'stealing magic' isnt an end goal, Tireks end goal was to leave the world empty.
Plus, if hes 'just stealing magic' there are still medical and mechanical needs, with out magic, those cannot be met, and many would die.
8858871
Nor is desire to remake everyone into a mindwashed slave, which also does almost no physical harm.
8859069
According to canon, Tirek wants to A) get all magic in Equestria, and B) rule over it. Total destruction, like with Nightmare Moon, was a possible outcome yet definitely not a consciously desired one.
I know of at least one race which lives without magic (humans)) ). So it is bad but not possible.
Also, there is always hope of freeing Princesses from Tartarus, finding Elements of Harmony or whatever.
8859078
Yeah, Tirek didn't want to be in charge. He wanted all the magic, and the second he had it, literally all he did was start destroying everything he tangibly could. He showed up in an area, ate all the magic, and then just walked away.
"Once I've stripped these ponies of their magic, nothing would give me greater pleasure than to see their world turned upside down."
Tirek doesn't want to rule. That is the entire point of the story in which you are having this inane argument. He literally just wanted power. That's it. That's all. He hated the ponies and wanted to burn their civilization to the ground. Had Twilight not lured him to the Everfree, he would've been going on a rampage with a much higher death count.
And if you're going to claim ponies can function without magic, congrats on the headcanon that they don't biologically need magic on some level. If magic weren't a necessity and were just a luxury, nobody would have cared to stop Tirek.
Finally, Nightmare Moon didn't want total destruction. She came about because Luna wanted equal power to Celestia, which presumably includes having a country to rule over, and in the timeline where Nightmare Moon won we see that the world isn't dead because of eternal night and that she has a government.
If you're going to have a lore argument, at least know the lore.
Now, buzz off.
8859078
HUMANS WERE NOT BORN WITH MAGIC GENIUS, HENCE OUR CIVILIZATION ISNT DEPENDANT ON IT.
secondly, in the timeline in which tirek rose to power, after he got all the magic in the world, HE LITERALLY STARTED DESTROYING EVERYTHING.
Thirdly, when tirek stole magic from eveypony, IT DISABLED THE PEGASUS' FLIGHT, AND EARTH PONIES UNABLE TO WALK OR EVEN FUNCTION.
Fourthly, THE ELEMENTS WOULD BE WORTHLESS IF TIREK KILLED ANYONE OF THEM OR HAD ALL THE ALICORN MAGIC.
8860144
Why are you still here?
8860548
Just wanted my last piece said before i gave up on this.