Teros

The air is filled with a cacophony of shrieks and roars.  Flailing crystal hooves reach and grab at my hind legs.  As the ink-black cloud before me dissipates into nothing once again, I spare a glance at the crystal corpses of the ponies that cover the floor, moving and groaning and leaping as if they were one amorphous beast.  Their eyes drip with a thick, crimson fluid that nearly floors me with its stench.  I know it isn't blood.  It's something much worse.

A shock wave pulsates from behind me, and I stretch my wings and accelerate upwards.  Suddenly, the world is spinning, and I feel myself being pulled faster and faster upwards.  I can feel my forelimbs buckle as I smash into the ceiling unceremoniously.  Before I can move, a pile of thrashing bodies crashes down on my spine.

With a scream, I lurch and kick beneath the ponies above me—below me.  My horn alights with magic, but before I can cast a single spell, I feel myself falling again.  Scarlet eyes flicker past my view as I tumble back to the floor, and his voice echoes through the room.

"Cadenza, you could have surpassed me," he growls.  I land on top of the crystal ponies this time, but in an instant they are grabbing at me, pulling me down.

"You are everything I longed for, my princess, and yet you are weaker than I ever was, even before my...  Hmmmhmmmhmmmmmm...  Ascendance..."

Gravity inverts once more, and I feel the bones in my right wing shatter under the weight of crystalline bodies smashing into it.

"Hnnngh—Eeeyaaah!" I scream, coiling my body over my wing to try and hold any more weight off of it.  I know I heard similar cracks coming from the crystal ponies when they landed, but many of them stand in an instant on broken legs, lurching towards me to bite and thrash at my prone, whimpering form.

"To think, that I waited all this time, for you?  I am... disappointed, Cadenza."

Viscous crimson liquid oozes from the moaning things that smother me, its smell making me want to vomit.  I struggle to focus as the room flips around me and I tumble another ten meters back to the floor.  I manage to strike the landing, biting back a scream at the stabbing pain in my wing.

Without thinking, I blast the crystal ponies away in a violent explosion of blue energy.  Their battered corpses disappear into the black ether surrounding me on all sides.

"This city and its ponies are mine to protect, Sombra!" I shout into the abyss.  "Crawl b-back to whatever black pit you came from!"

"My dear princess, please..."  He steps out of the shadow, his eyes blazing with purple mana.  His armor clinks as he comes to a halt no more than a meter from where I stand, panting.  With a razor sharp grin, he leans forward, his horn crackling.  "This city... this empire... these ponies...  Their secrets are mine, and mine alone."

"You will not touch these ponies!"

"Oh, but I already have..."  He laughs a low, echoing laugh.  "Your dear sweet prince just doesn't know it yet."

In a blink, I fire a streaking bolt of mana at his chest.  His body dissolves away from it, the beam traveling straight through him.  In a puff of smoke, I feel him behind me—and I freeze at the feeling of a blade against my neck.

I feel him move, and then everything is gone.