In the moment I was defeated, the universe ground to a halt. I froze, as did all else about me, and time ceased to have any meaning. My mind, eternally clouded with rage and ambition, was suddenly clear, and for the first time in many centuries, I truly thought. I tried to move from a world held in pause, and felt my consciousness slip free of my body. I moved around to the front of myself, and stopped.
I looked up to see my own form, twisted, a far cry from what I remembered from my youth. The mouth was caught in a snarl, and the horn glowed with the sickly blue-purple aura I had grown so accustomed to. He wore dull, leaden armor, and his coat was a dark, unnatural gray. His teeth were fanged, and were bared like knives to flash in the light and threaten all who looked upon him.
I looked up at myself, and I did not recognize the figure I looked at.
I looked down at myself, to see a comforting blue-gray coat, a lustrous black tail, and a small, simple mantle of royalty. I felt a thin, light circlet upon my brow, the crown I had once worn, representing power granted, not taken. I appeared as I had in my youth. As a pony in his prime, as a colt not yet grown. Before my rise, before my fall. When I was benevolent, when I was foolish. From the age when I knew love, from the age when I could not inspire fear.
As I turned once again to the black, nebulous thing above me, I looked to its wild, soulless eyes. It was a monster, a tyrant bent on expanding its rule; it was sad, a young colt crying out for never having known the closeness it yearned for. I stared into those empty eyes forever, for an instant. The words of Nietzsche came to me. If you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes into you. I wondered if that had been my mistake, my glory. Had I, perhaps, stared too long so long ago? That abyss of my own self-loathing and grief had consumed me, had created me.
Whether or not, the thing which wore the crown and mantle of Sombra had now come full circle, and was itself the abyss. I saw the hate in it, in me, in him, and I knew it was my downfall, my triumph. The slayer of monsters had not been careful, and had himself become a monster. The child king had become the ageless tyrant, and he had only his own faults and himself to blame. The love within him had given way to hate, and the kindness had given way to cruelty and evil.
I turned away from the detestable thing I knew as myself to see the Crystal Empire I had once called my home, and once called my dominion. I saw the six brave and strong ponies whom the world called heroes. I saw the princess who had vanquished me, who had cheated me. I saw the ponies I had once been proud to call my friends and subjects, had once been proud to call my slaves. I looked at the whole of the Empire, and I looked at the icy wastes it had nearly been reduced to by his actions, my actions.
I looked to the beautiful, elegant architecture of the city, to the wondrous, terrible, Crystal Heart. I felt its brilliant light cutting through Sombra, through me, scything apart his form, my form; it was glorious, it was agonizing. I felt torture, I felt rapture. I was being killed, I was being revived. The light of love was coaxing me forth from him, that I might be spared when he was destroyed.
Through the pain, through the comfort, I felt myself finally removed from Sombra, not merely in form but in thought. I no longer had a name, for I was the past, but I did not need one. Sombra, the vicious and terrible tyrant, was finally separated from Me, the loving and generous king. It felt strange, being separate from something which was not separate from oneself. I had never been possessed, nor twisted, nor turned; I had simply changed, yet I was once again my purest self, my self when I had held the throne for but five years, and was but eighteen years of age.
The king who was no longer more than darkness was rent to shards of his coveted crystal, and flung forth on the light of joy, harmony and love to parts unknown. Sombra was destroyed; I was restored. I was once again the young king of the Crystal Empire, benevolent and kind. I looked down at the Empire, sparkling as it had in my childhood. I knew that this alicorn and her husband would govern far better than I had, and never fall to tyranny, as I had.
The Empire was in safe hooves. The world would benefit from it, and its effects would be felt across the planet in every nation, and even beyond, into the realms of the spirits and of magic. Harmony, love, and mirth would be carried along the leylines of magic to every corner of existence, and the world would prosper. Perhaps, finally, I did not need to remain among the ponies I cared for, and could go to the ones I yearned for.
I did not need to linger upon this world. I had been on it far longer than I should have been. In an act many centuries overdue, I turned my back on the mortal realm for the last time, and ran to embrace my mother and father, who had left me their crowns at far too young an age. As I clung to them, I felt one last thing for the ponies back on Equestria. An emotion I had not felt in more than a thousand years.
I was happy for them.
Author's Note
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