From the Shadows

"How long has he been awake?" Sombra asked a second time, raising his voice, and Twilight mistook his tone for concern.

Sombra took a menacing step towards Twilight, made confident by his recently acquired strength. Small grey crystals sprouted at his feet, adding to the amount of limpid stones already bountiful in the room.

"How long..."

"I don't know!" she erupted, a rare statement for the alicorn, and she rushed past Sombra to her brother, weakly trembling on the floor.

Twilight cradled his head, and as she looked into his glossy, blank eyes, she felt the foreign feeling of fear rising within her heart; Sombra felt it as well. The dark lord, from behind Twilight's back, blinked away the green that had begun invading his eyes as more power graced his being, and gulped it down, suppressing the feral aggression tempting him to do something brash. Situations like these had to be handled delicately, and the elements of harmony were still a valid threat.

"What's wrong with him?" asked Twilight aloud, more to herself than to the room's only other responsive occupant.

"He has sleep deprivation," growled the king, knowing full well that there was no way for the truth to be proven.

Twilight inspected Shining; he appeared to indeed be deprived of rest. All the symptoms were there, from the bloodshot eyes to the unresponsive nature. But most of all, Shining's slow pulse and shuddering body were most alarming, and Twilight knew he needed help urgently.

Sombra spoke from behind Twilight, his voice deep and ominous in the otherwise silent library.

"There is nothing that can be done for him. He is too far gone. Make your peace while you..."

Sombra's words fell on deaf ears, and he abandoned them as Twilight interrupted him with a healing spell, giving a few more minutes of precious life to her dying brother.

"We need to get him to the hospital," said Twilight frantically as a lavender aura came to be around the barely conscious stallion.

"He will not survive without immediate attention," said Sombra again, trying to discourage her, but the alicorn remained devout.

"I have to try. He's my brother, and I love him," she said as she cantered out the door, her brother, clinging to life, floating behind her in a telekinetic grip.

Sombra winced as she spoke, the words grinding together in his ears most unpleasantly. Their lingering ring was routed by the library's door slamming shut, splitting silence taking its place a moment later.

Suddenly, Sombra had the house to himself.

Perfect.

****************

Sombra relaxed, allowing the crimson glow of his horn to die away, and looked proudly at the winding staircase he had erected from crystalline columns around the library, starting at his room's window, and rising to the oak's summit.

He stalked outside onto the first of the steps, and ascended them methodically. Once at the peak of his climb, he fashioned a precipice from opaque stone, a platform extending out beyond the radius of the tree's branches, and stepped onto it. Reaching its edge, he sat on his haunches; it was still dark, but he looked out over the land before him with radiant eyes, violet tails emitting from their corners.

It was a perfect time for thinking.

He was alone, and all was still in the early morning's tranquility; he looked up to the moon, a moon long concealed from him behind the perpetual clouds of the north.

Gazing up at its pale white face, his hardened gaze softened, and a wave of nostalgia came over him. He had greatly missed its glow, which had been hidden behind the perpetual clouds, along with many other things absent in the loneliness of the frozen north; he would not be going back, ever.

There, beneath the night sky, Sombra vowed to the moon, and the stars at her side; never again would he leave the lands he had earned for the desolate tundra that had been his most unpleasant home for eons, no matter the cost.

But, the right to stay would not be given; it either had to be either earned, or taken, and he had become especially good at taking all those years ago.

Regardless, it would not be easy to earn residence south of the icy wastelands of solitude. Many factors would come into play, almost all of them against him; the elements of harmony were a constant threat, as well as his greatest one, along with the alicorn sisters, and, perhaps least threatening of all, the royal guards.

He had already surmounted the greatest of them with the defeat of Shining Armor; the rest would be no challenge. And the princesses...

They had already cast him out of one kingdom, and likely, would have no problem doing it again. But, their influence was lacking, as was their presence. The two were off, searching for the 'source of the darkness' in Equestria they had become infatuated with. In all, the dark presence was the reason for him being brought into Equestria, as well as the cause for the princess's power to be amiss in the town, and hence, it was a blessing that it had taken root.

But the elements; their power was unrivaled, and were wielded from those he was to be reformed by.

Sombra chuckled at the thought; the Equestrians actually thought they could reform him by teaching him the power of love.

He knew the immense power of love already, as it had bested him in the Crystal Empire once before. Once; It would not do so a second time. There was no Crystal Heart around to expel him now. The only thing that could do such a thing was the princesses and the elements, one of which were ever-present in the miniscule town.

Something would have to be done about them.

But even for all the power of love, it was nothing compared to the power of hate. Hate decays, love grows; one destroys, the other builds. It can take seconds to destroy, to break, to kill; but it can take years to build, be it a structure or a life. The more powerful of the two was the one Sombra knew best.

And that knowledge was his asset, his core, his ally; he planned to use it.

He vowed again to never go back to the north, and planned on how to achieve that promise.

The elements would have to be made void somehow; but how to do it?

He could not stand hoof to hoof with the wielders in battle; together, their power would surpass his.

But, one on one, he had a chance.

That was how he could win, the only way he could win; working from the shadows, promoting the decay of fear and hatred. All he needed to do was plant a seed, a seed which would grow, so long as love did not cut it down as a sapling. But that was easy enough to prevent.

Sombra had already seen the impurities in the bearers' souls; he knew nothing of them, other than their appearances and their flaws, but both were invaluable in fostering fear. The white one's contempt, the blue one's arrogance, the yellow one's fear, she reeked of it, the pink one's nonchalance, the orange one's pride, and Princess Twilight's lust for perfection; they had all shown him in the few seconds of contact when they first met only a few hours earlier, but that was all the time he needed to realize their flaws. Flaws to be used to tear them down; flaws to be used to build himself up.

They planned to reform him; he could use the time spent with them to learn much more. All the much more to use against them. Knowledge would be the deciding factor; not power, not numbers. It would all come down to who knew his enemy better, and Sombra was the only one in town that knew dark magic; it was the purpose for which he was immigrated.

Sombra's brow hardened once again as a determined grin spread across his chin.

He would not be going back to the north. Never again.

****************

Just as the first rays of light, the first Sombra had seen in ages, came through the windows of the library, Twilight came home. She looked tired, and as Sombra saw that her drooping eyes were devoid of tears, he concluded Shining had, somehow, survived.

"Still awake?" mumbled Twilight as she trudged inside, seeing Sombra seated on her couch.

The king gave no reply.

Twilight ignored his silence, putting it off as an aspect of his nature, and tramped up the stairs to her own chambers. Sombra was left alone for a few moments before she returned, the sand gone from the corners of her eyes and her mane at least somewhat combed, a small dragon at her heels.

This was new to the dark stallion; he didn't know of a reptilian inhabitant of the house prior. Yet, for some reason, the drake seemed familiar.

Twilight began speaking to him as she came down the stairs, something about Shining Armor's condition, but Sombra heard nothing; he was too focused on remembering the dragon.

Purple scales, emerald spines, green eyes, slit pupils opened wide and filled with anxiety as they met his own, small, plump body; then, suddenly, it hit him with all the weight of memory.

The drake was the one from the Crystal Empire, the one that had robbed him of the Crystal Heart, practically taking it from his hooves amidst his attempt to retake his throne during the Empire's rare moment of weakness.

More of Twilight's words were ignored as Sombra glared at the dragon, searing hate and wrath parting his lips to reveal dagger like fangs and prompting very uncomfortable, nervous looks from the dragon.

Sombra rose from the couch, standing imposingly as he stared the dragon down. The reptile's quivering jaw was mute, and his were feet glued to the hardwood among small crystals, which had been continuously sprouting since Sombra's arrival.

But, as he went to move on the drake, Twilight reached to grab him by the forelimb, her hoof passing through his body with a sound like a ghost's whisper, as if nothing was there.

Sombra looked at her disapprovingly, drawing his forelimb away from her embrace, and Twilight suspiciously eyed him as well.

A moment passed in silence, giving Spike time to hide in the kitchen, before Twilight motioned to the door, and asked, "Aren't you coming?"

He gave her a confused, disgruntled look, drawing away a few inches farther.

Twilight rolled her eyes, trying to feign a smile, and retold everything she had said a few moments prior.

"Shining will be okay; the doctor said he'll need a few days' rest before he's back to his normal self, and the hospital said that the rest of the guards apparently took a stallion named Jax to Canterlot. I guess he was sleep deprived too."

Sombra nodded consent, praying she would not catch on; luckily, she was eager to believe he was innocent, likely due to its implication that he was already accepting being reformed.

"By the way, I'm sorry about how they treated you. That was no way to host a guest."

Sombra couldn't believe what he was hearing. She was actually being friendly to him.

He was unsure of how he felt about it either. One thing was for certain; it was...odd.

"So, with them out and about, its just us," she paused, correcting herself a bit, "you, me, and the other bearers. So, I figured we'd get started on your, umm..."

"Reformation?" grumbled Sombra, looking suspiciously at the alicorn.

"Yeah," Twilight answered, and Sombra looked away, annoyed and uncaring.

"Well, I didn't really mean 'reform'. I guess what I had in mind was more of a tour," she said, raising her voice at the end of her sentence as if it was a question, "I figured you could just get to know us a bit first, so we're not total strangers anymore."

Sombra felt something rising within him, something completely opposite from the sensation fear and hate prompted. This felt sluggish, light and lukewarm, completely unlike the heavy, revigorating cold that the fears of others spawned. Is this what kindness felt like?

Sombra dismissed the notion eagerly; it was preposterous. He would not allow anything other than hate and fear into his being. Such things as love and kindness were at the core of what he defined as weakness; such things were at the core of everything he hated.

Remembering this hatred bolstered the king's power a bit, and the flamboyant emotion he experienced earlier was expelled.

"So are you coming?" asked Twilight as she stepped toward the king.

Sombra grudgingly followed her, knowing that his opportunity to stay in Equestria for his plans to blossom depended solely on his cooperation.

As he followed her out the door, the brittle, grinding sound of crystals germinating in his footsteps rivaling Twilight's hoof falls, the thought came back to him.

Kindness?