Fall of Empire

by Sixes_And_Sevens

Decline & Fall

The newly-coronated king, the crown barely glinting out from beneath his tousled locks, gazed out over the throng of crystal ponies gathered in the atrium below, the pale rubies at the collar of his robes glittering in the cold sunlight. “My subjects,” he said in a measured tone that did not seem to match his still-maturing voice or gangly form. “As you all know, yesterday evening marked the demise of a great stallion; my father, the noble King Photus. He went peacefully, in the end, after many months of battle with the strange illness which gripped him. His final words to me were, ‘I shall always be a part of this noble empire.’”

Here, Sombra had to pause and collect himself. “You all know that my father’s devotion to this land was deeper and more urgent than any other love. You all know the lengths he took to improve the quality of life, the prosperity, the overall happiness of our fair empire.”

This was met with murmurs of agreement from the crowd. The new king held up a hoof for silence. “I assure you all, I am my father’s son. I will continue from where his hoofsteps left off, continually striving to make the Crystal Empire the greatest that it may possibly be. Our pride and fame will shine across all of Gaea!”

A roar of agreement rose from the crowd below, and a small smile crossed Sombra’s face at the unbridled joy that rose up from below. He nodded down at the crowd once more, then retreated back into the castle once more.

---

“That… doesn’t sound so bad,” Sweetie said doubtfully. “Doesn’t look like he kept his promises, though.”

Jade glanced around at the cloudy crystal walls and sighed. “No, it doesn’t, does it? It certainly worked for a little while. The ‘pride and fame’ part certainly did. For a good few years, the Empire’s power and influence rose dramatically through trade deals and diplomacy. You saw for yourself how charming he could be, and in that room back there, trained negotiators were putty in his hooves.”

“Not surprising,” the Doctor muttered. “So what happened?”

Jade chewed at her lower lip. “He wanted to… expand. He felt that the Crystal Empire was being stifled, isolated even, as far away from other communities as it was. He started to purchase cheap, unused land from other nations. Around that same time, he started building the army up.”

“Ahh,” said the Doctor, his brow rising. “And then he started testing it out.”

“Yes,” Jade agreed. “It started out innocuously enough…”

---

The diplomat from Reindeerdam trotted into the room, his face grave. The large, dark stallion rose from his chair to greet him, the light reflecting greasily off of the cherry-red gems that dangled from his collar. “Mr. Donner, I presume?” he asked, running a hoof absently through his frizzy mane. “A pleasure to have you here. I do hope that between the two of us, we can smooth over this little incident between our two nations.”

“Your highness,” Donner began, but the king cut him off.

“Please, his highness was my father. Call me Sombra.”

Donner blinked slowly. “Very well, Sombra it shall be. Sombra, the fact of the matter is that your army built a fort on my country’s territory. That is, I think you will agree, somewhat more than a ‘little incident.’ It is, indeed, tantamount to invasion.”

“Yes, I imagine your national pride is rather wounded,” Sombra said mildly. “Though you must admit, it can be rather difficult to tell one patch of tundra from another… I beg your pardon, I’m being a bad host. May I offer you some wine?”

---

“Somehow, the diplomat went home satisfied. The rest of the world? Not so much.”

“Let me guess. Anypony he hadn’t spoken to directly really didn’t trust him?” Sweetie asked.

“Exactly. His political ethos was such that most of the world was willing to accept it had been an honest mistake. At least, they did at first. But then, when Sombra didn’t take down the fort… when he started building more forts on land that wasn’t the empire’s…”

“Then things got a little heated?” the Doctor guessed.

“You might say that,” Jade said drily. “That was when the army started inflating disproportionately to the rest of the empire.”

---

“My ponies!” Sombra bellowed, standing at the balcony like an avenging god, robes flapping like curtains in a storm, scarlet gems encircling his neck like a choker. His mane was flat and slick and oily.“The nations of the world, our former friends and neighbors, have allied to bring about my downfall, your downfall, our downfall.”

A slow roar of jeers and boos echoed up from the crowd below. Sombra held up an authoritative hoof, clad in iron, as a call for silence. “They wish to take from us our lands and power,” he roared. “They wish to use our resources for their own selfish gain, and have resorted to trickery and warfare to obtain them. Well, if they desire war, they shall have it!”

A booming cheer rang up from the masses, and Sombra smiled, revealing sharp, carnivore incisors. “Remember, the army is open to all ponies over the age of thirteen,” he said smoothly, his earlier rage converted into calculated charm as quickly and easily as a flick of the tail. “Draft offices are to be found in every sector of the city. Sign up today!”

---

The Doctor looked like he had aged fifty years. “And sign up they did…” he murmured.

“Indeed,” Jade sighed. “That was the beginning of the end for my role in court, not to mention the golden age of the Empire…”

“Hm,” said the Doctor quietly. “Interesting. And all this,” he waved around at the cloudy walls, “just turned up overnight?”

Jade glanced around. “Well, no. As I say, it was only the beginning of the end.”

“But was it?” the Doctor pressed. “Was it really where it all began?”

Jafe flushed. “I don’t know what you’re trying to imply.”

The Doctor gazed at her for a long moment. “Huh. You really don’t, do you?”

Jade’s face suddenly went flinty and cold. “So explain it to me,” she growled. “You think you’re so clever, mucking around with your traveling hermitage and you wanna come here and insult me? Is that it? Is that—”

The Doctor cut her off, eyes flashing with fury. “Insulting you? I needn’t even bother when you’ve done such a good job of insulting yourself. How blind do you have to be, not to see your own city decaying around you? How—”

“Hey!” Sweetie Belle shouted, cutting both of them off. “Both of you, calm down. Doctor, this isn’t like you. Jade, I don’t think this is like you, either. Calm down.”

Jade’s face slackened and she took a deep breath. “You’re right,” she said. “Excuse me. I keep having these mood swings, and they keep getting worse.”

The Doctor had also calmed down. Now, he looked more worried than angry. “How long have they been happening?” he asked, his forehead drawn.

“The mood swings? Um, a few years, I suppose. Why?”

The Doctor shook his head. “Just curious. So, our rooms?”

“Yes, of course,” said Jade, her expression still slightly troubled. “Follow me.”

She led them up a tight spiral staircase that seemed more like a tunnel, given the claustrophobic walls and low ceiling overhead. Sweetie shuddered as an undefined shape scuttled across her path. “Has this castle got a rat problem?”

“Oh, no,” Jade replied. “No rats. They were all eaten by the roaches.”

The unicorn paused, then shuddered again. “Are we almost there?”

Jade swung a door open. “Yes,” she said, stepping out into the marginally brighter lighting of the hall.

The Doctor and Sweetie glanced out. This corridor was a gloomy, ugly shade of sludgy orange. “I’m glad it didn’t look like this when Rarity visited,” Sweetie muttered. “She would have had a coronary.”

“It’s not exactly setting me at ease, either,” the Doctor replied, stepping out into the hall. “Which rooms are ours, then?”

“First and second doors on the left,” Jade replied, gesturing. “Or will you be sharing?”

The Doctor blinked. “Two rooms will be great.”

“Ah. Do you want somepony else to snuggle up with?” Jade winked lecherously. “I can help with that…”

“Really, really, no,” the Doctor said, shaking his head.

Sweetie crinkled up her snout. “He’s kind of married.”

Jade blinked. She glanced at the younger mare, then reddened. “Oh. I see,” she said flushing. “Is there anything else you’ll need?”

“No,” the other two said in tandem, shaking their heads fervently. “No, no, we’ll be fine, just…”

Pink-faced, Jade galloped back to the stairwell, slamming the door behind her. Sweetie Belle, just as pink, turned to the Doctor. “Wait. Did she think we were married? I mean, even if you weren’t, like, a thousand years older than me, I'm still twenty and you look about thirty-five. That's pretty gross. Also, did she just proposition you?”

The Doctor shrugged. “Ponies, especially mares, married younger during this time period,” he replied. “I mean, not as young as you might think, but usually by age eighteen.”

“Still.”

“Well, you're right, still a bit..." he pulled a face. "Eugh. Perhaps the hallway had something to do with it.” The Doctor glanced around. “Color does tend to have some emotional symbolism. The blue areas made us sad, the white room made us feel empty…”

“So what’s orange?”

The Doctor shrugged. “Dunno. What d’you feel like doing?”

Sweetie considered. “Kinda like chasing down Jade and yelling about how she shouldn’t assume stuff like that. And also some stuff about Button Mash...” she trailed off, blushing fiercely. “Not important, never mind. You?”

“I’m getting... the overwhelming urge to find the Crystal Heart and use it to destroy Sombra once and for all,” the Doctor replied. “Also, the urge to eat a whole bunch of bananas. Of course! Orange must symbolize some kind of loss of inhibition, some sort of… impulsiveness. Desire, be it sexual or intellectual or anything else”

“Do you think the rooms are the same?” Sweetie asked.

“I almost hope so,” the Doctor returned. “It’s hard to really ‘want’ much of anything while you’re asleep.”

Sweetie gnawed on her lower lip, but pushed open the first door. A lurid shade of bright, painful chartreuse shone out. The Doctor pushed open the second door, revealing a deep, gloomy shade of grey. “Hm,” he said. “Not promising.”

“I’ll take yellow-green,” Sweetie said.

“Right,” the Doctor replied, not taking his eyes off the grey room. “How tired are you, exactly?”

Sweetie shrugged. “Not very, I guess.”

“Right, in that case, let’s go exploring,” the Doctor said firmly. “Better, I think, to keep moving through different rooms than to spend too much time soaking in any one of them.”

Sweetie stared longingly at the nice, fluffy-looking bed. She hadn’t really realized just how tired she was until the Doctor had mentioned it. “Just a little nap? We can take it in shifts.”

The Doctor glanced down the hallway. “But Sweetie! Exploring!”

“Sleep!”

The Doctor glanced over his shoulder once more, then sighed. “Alright. You have a go first. I don’t need much sleep anyway.”

Sweetie let out a sigh of relief. “Thanks. Wake me in an hour or so, alright?”

The Time Lord chewed on his lower lip. “Take this,” he said, hoofing his recorder to the mare. “If anything happens, blow into it as hard as you can.”

Sweetie took the instrument with a grin. “Thanks,” she said. “Night, Doctor.”

The Doctor nodded. “Pleasant dreams,” he said with a faint smile as the mare trotted into the yellow room, shutting the door behind her. With a somewhat less-than-satisfied grumble, he sat down on the cold, hard crystal floor to begin his vigil.

After a little while, he got up and began pacing.

After a little while, he sat down again and started reciting his multiplication tables through 700.

After a little while, he tried to do a headstand.

Then he turned out his pockets and built a camcorder, which he then turned into a voice recorder, which he then turned into a wind-up penguin.

“Ugh! This has been the worst seven minutes ever,” he groaned, sitting back against the wall. He glanced toward the door of the yellow-green room. “Mm… maybe I could just sneak off and do a little exploring while she sleeps… I’d be back before the end of the hour… Just down to the end of the hallway. She’ll never even need to know!”

Grinning broadly, the Time Lord set out to find the other end of the orange hallway and satisfy his suddenly ravenous curiosity, trotting farther and farther from the dangers that awaited Sweetie Belle…

---

Jade galloped down the stairs, catching a few unlucky super-roaches under her hooves. She didn’t slow until she had come back into the relative light of a gangrene-green hall, and she didn’t stop until she had rounded a corner into a little niche carved into the rock. She let out a shuddering sigh and all but collapsed on the wall. Her face was burning with boiling blood, though she couldn’t say how much of that was due to her run and how much could be attributed to sheer embarrassment. Why in the world had she propositioned a complete stranger?

“Because he looked like me…”

Jade stopped. Shook her head. “No. No, you aren’t here, Corundum.”

The walls distorted more than reflected, these days. Try to study yourself in a shining surface, and you’d look like a completely different pony. That, at least, was what Jade had to tell herself; what they’d all had to tell themselves, back when there was anypony else around. There were only a few left, now, who hadn’t vanished into thin air. Corundum had gone only a few months ago, looking for his cousin, Sparkle Shine.

“He did, though. It’s the eyes.”

Real or not, Corundum had a point. The Doctor had a peculiar sparkle to him, something Jade had never dreamed possible for an outsider. They had all had that sparkle, once, back in the bad old days when Sombra had really started getting tyrannical. The bad old days. Hah. Better than the nightmarish new ones. Better by far to betray a memory than to betray the crown, but she couldn’t countenance the consequences for either. “He’s not you, though.”

She couldn’t stop herself. She looked up to see her reflection, and there he was. Just for a moment, she saw his smile again, and then he was gone. “Miss you…”

“Miss you too,” she murmured. She took a moment, no more, to choke back a sob. Then she rose shakily to her hooves and trotted out of the alcove. She still had a report to make, after all.

---

The king of the Crystal Empire stormed down the hallway, almost radiating energy as he trotted along. Guards stood more stiffly as he passed by. The crystal beneath his hooves turned faintly redder for a few seconds after he had trodden past, like a streak of blood-dyed carpet. “Excuse me, your majesty?”

“What?” Sombra snapped. “Oh. It’s you. Report.”

Jade nodded sharply. “Succinctly put, they appear to know absolutely nothing about the current socioeconomic climate, nor even about the war. Either they’re the best liars I’ve ever seen, or they’ve been living under a rock for the last decade. Or, well, two rocks.”

Sombra stared off into the middle distance. “And?”

Jade furrowed her brow. “Not much. The Doctor seemed to know more than he let on.”

“Obviously,” Sombra growled. “No pony could know so little and still live.”

“As you say,” Jade nodded. “However, I do not believe that they would mean the Empire harm, nor yourself.”

The dark unicorn paused in midstride and stared at the green mare. “Do you stand by that?”

Jade cantered backwards, but her expression did not shift. “I do. They were kind, not as you warned Equestrian spies would be. They were open, honest.”

Sombra glanced at the subtle deepening blush of pinkish-orange beneath the mare’s hooves. He nodded. “On your head be it,” he said, and walked away without another word.

He could feel Jade’s eyes on him as he opened the door to his quarters just far enough to accommodate his frame, and then slipped inside, slamming the door closed behind him.

As soon as the door closed, his shoulders sagged, legs buckling as he unceremoniously collapsed to the floor. Sombra lay there, heaving with misery and pain for several long minutes before he hauled himself back to his hooves, his green eyes red and wet with anger. This would have surprised most anypony in the castle for two reasons; firstly, that the charismatic and vicious tyrant of the Crystal Empire, the greatest and purest of all the crystal in the kingdom, was crying, and secondly, they all would have sworn that his eyes had been violet mere moments before.

He whipped off the cloak with a hoof, not magic (it had corrupted his aura, corrupted his soul), and a scream of wordless rage (not that any could hear him in this soundproof prison) and flung it against the flat grey rock of the wall opposite him (one of the few rooms in this nightmarish palace that he could be himself).

He glared at the gems that collared his robe, collared him. Colorless. Their power had been sapped the moment the door had shut behind him, and it would return as the door cracked open. Once, he hadn’t put them on when he left. That was a mistake he never made again. He shuddered and ran a hoof over the scarred burns on his back where the monster had struck him over and over again for days on end.

Sombra glanced at his bed, then away. Sleep never came easily to him these days, and the torment of dreams was far from worth it. At any rate, he had work to do. This was the one concession that he had been granted, the one respite from its control. The travelers might or might not be enemies of the empire, but they were the only ones whom he could even think to trust. With a grunt, he turned to his bureau, picked up a quill, and began to compose a message.

---

Luna glared at the spires and geometry of the city on the horizon. Somewhere in there, she knew Sombra waited, like a spider in the center of his web. She didn’t know how he was able to blot out her influence over dreams within the walls of his kingdom; only the most powerful of mental magics could keep out a dreamwalker as skilled as she was, and Sombra certainly did not have the necessary skill or training to perform such a web of cantrips.

Someday soon, she would have the answers she sought, and the justice clamored for by so many nations of the world. Sombra would be—

“Your majesty? Are you listening?”

Luna didn’t even blink. “Of course, Captain Aegis. Pray, do continue with your account of today’s no-score battle.”

The thestral frowned. “Highness, our troops have discovered a strange artifact in Nopony’s Land and recovered it at extreme risk to their own safety.”

“Oh?” Luna asked. “And what, pray tell, is this artifact?”

“A box, highness, made of blue-painted wood. A distinct rarity in this part of the world, I think you will agree?”

There was now no question that the princess was paying attention. “Captain. Pray tell me, did this box have lettering upon it? Was it accompanied by a peculiar pony? Was it taller than I stand?”

Captain Aegis stepped back, unnerved. “Er, yes, highness. It bore the legend ‘Police Public Call Box’, and it was indeed greater in stature than are you. But there was no pony accompanying it.”

Luna groaned and sat back. “Then we are too late to stop them,” she murmured. “Captain, send a missive to mine sister at once.”

“To be sure, highness,” the thestral said. “But what shall it say?”

Luna cogitated. “Say only that, ‘they have returned',” she declared. “She will understand the rest.”

“It shall be done,” the captain said with a nod, flying out of the command tent.

Luna turned to the Crystal Empire’s skyline once more, this time with a far greater intensity. “Doctor, what are you doing this time?” she asked quietly.

Comments

[FanOfMostEverything]

He went peacefully, in the end, after many months of battle with the strange illness which gripped him.

"An illness that had absolutely nothing to do with poison in any way, shape, or form."

Interesting touch with the reddening rubies...

“Oh, no,” Jade replied. “No rats. They were all eaten by the roaches.”

That's... deeply concerning.

Ugh! This has been the worst seven minutes ever,

Heh. Very little whiles, those.

Oh. Well. This is certainly an unexpected turn. I have a hunch about the history here, but I'll wait to get more information.

Say only that, ‘they have returned',

A common message when discussing the Empire.

Very interesting development here. Definitely looking forward to more.