The Darkened Doorstep

"Welcome to my castle, Princess Mi Amore Cadenza. Congratulations on your marriage to Prince Shining Armor."

The princess was shaking in her gold-shod boots, wondering what had possessed her to enter the same room as Sombra without Twilight Sparkle or Shining Armor. It was inevitable that her station would come with responsibilities, but she'd always assumed that those would amount to resolving disputes. This was utter madness!

King Sombra, reviled as the most powerful and terrifying pony in written history, stood at the far end of the state dining room in front of an ornate stone fireplace. The flames within were a deep red, and their dim light reached the far corners of the room. Sombra's shadow reached across the room, curling and twisting unnaturally.

The rest of the room was occupied by a long oak table, stretching from one end to the other and large enough to seat a few dozen visiting dignitaries. Set above it was a crystal chandelier, made of local gemstone but by a technique that Cadence didn't recognize. The layer of dust over everything told her that the room hadn't been used in quite some time. Over a millennia ago, now that she thought of it. Certainly before the exile of Nightmare Moon.

"Please, have a seat," Sombra rumbled, and a wave of black and violet dragged a pair of couches into the centre of the room.

"I'll stand, thanks," Cadence said faintly. One of the couches was promptly banished, but the other swept behind her and smashed into the back of her knees, forcing her to fall backwards on it. It shot forwards, until she was close enough to the fire to feel its wan warmth in the frigid room.

Up close, Sombra was even more unnerving. From afar he was a spectre, a malignant shadow that haunted the senses, but now Cadence could see the individual strands of midnight-hued fur on his hide, as well as the fine stitching of his crimson cloak. He wore a metal breastplate with heavy clasps, most of it hidden by his wild mess of a mane. Hair covered half of his face, but the one eye she could see was brilliant ruby and emerald.

His horn was long and red, jutting through his mane like a sword. It looked malevolent, as evil as its wielder and as fierce as the magic it commanded.

"If you were not aware, I am King Sombra," rasped the unicorn.

"I am perfectly aware of who the usurper of my kingdom is!" Cadence snapped, eagerly allowing her anger wash to away some of the fear.

"Canterlot has no place in my affairs," said Sombra idly. "Celestia's dominion is over the ponies of Equestria. This is my empire; claimed from the cesspit it was and shaped by my hooves."

His voice was deep and gravelly. Listening to him was like listening to the plates of the earth grind against one another; loud and distant, grating and implacable. Cadence didn't humour his attempt to justify himself with a reply.

"I suspect you are curious as to why I've brought you here," drawled the king.

"Enlighten me," Cadence said frostily. The teleportation has been sudden, just after Sombra’s clash with Shining Armor. In his retreat, the king had chosen to bring her with him.

"You are an... enigma. Alicorns come about so rarely, I couldn't resist the chance to speak to you. Perhaps, in your wisdom, you may be interested in a story."

"A story?"

"You were expecting something else," Sombra remarked. "A great battle for the fate of the Crystal Empire, or a game of wit or chance, that we might avoid bloodshed? No, this is simply a story. A story about futility."

"You can't be serious," Cadence insisted. "There are thousands of crystal ponies out there, and it is my duty to free them from your vile influence!"

She readied a spell, waiting for Sombra to attack her like he'd attacked Shining Armor, but the king merely exhaled heavily. He drew in another breath, and suddenly laughter rang through the halls of the crystal palace. Cadence paused, rattled by the display, and allowed Sombra to regain himself.

"You are strange," he said at last. "Were I you, I would have struck me down while I was distracted."

"I represent all of Equestria," Cadence said stiffly. "My actions reflect those of the diarchy, and all ponies besides. It would be remiss of me to attack you while you gloated."

Sombra smiled, showing sharp canines that no herbivore should have. "Or maybe you are truly interested?"

"If that's it— I'm listening."

"Good. That is all I ask of you. This is a story of the most perilous threat ponykind has ever faced. It begins one thousand and thirty-six years ago, eight hundred after the petrification of Discord..."

–Ω–

I cannot say with certainty why things happened the way they did. I can only relate my contributions and conjectures. You know, of course, that the prevailing attitudes of those who live here have an effect on Equestria as a whole. Magic flows in currents, like streams of thought through air, and a great many drift away from this very building to all over the country.

Princess Celestia and Princess Luna knew this, and they invested quite a bit of time and effort into ensuring that the Empire was peaceful and content. In those days, it was called the Crystal Province, and it was governed directly by the Royal Family from their city in the Everfree Forest. In those days, it was called the Crystal Province, and most of the ponies there were earth ponies who mined for gemstones. They were the salt of the earth and content to work hard for their keep, much like earth ponies have since time immemorial, but my father was a unicorn. I won't bore you with the details of my childhood, but know that my father was the caretaker of a powerful artefact.

Upon realizing the relation the Crystal Province had to the rest of their territories, many years after annexing it, the Princesses took it upon themselves to create a repository of harmony and goodwill, such that we would remain free from strife, and filled it with their love for all things under the moon and sun. They called this the Great Heart, and it was my father's job to ensure that it was properly aligned with all the necessary ley lines and magic channels for that love to be felt throughout Equestria. He was very proud of his duty, my father, and it was expected that I would follow in his hoofsteps.

When I was of age to leave that mouldy building they called a schoolhouse, I became a librarian. No, my cutie mark is not a book, an inkwell, or anything like that. It was a job, nothing more. I'm sure the names of the southern cities have changed in the past thousand years, but in my youth the north was not much different. The library was a dim place nestled between much larger edifices, and it was so bare that many mistook it for a part of another building. There would be one or two visitors a day, if that, and so I had a great deal of time to myself. My father worked for the state, and naturally I couldn't afford any further education, but the library in the only city of the Crystal Province contained old books. Older than Celestia, certainly; rumours held that the collection was assembled by Clover the Clever in the twilight of his life, though there is no veracity to that claim. I learned much from those books, magic and lore from ancient days when the world was new and the wisdom of sages long dead.

There was a mare, an earth pony, who came to that library often. Why, I cannot say. I will be blunt and note that I suspect her father of drunkenly abusing her, but at the time I was unaware of the depths of casual cruelty to which ponies could sink. She was not the brightest pony, nor was she especially sociable, but she clever, and I found myself beginning to enjoy her company.

No, I won't tell you her name. I have precious few things to myself, and telling the Princess of Love too much about a long-dead friend of mine would be the height of foolishness. Nevertheless, she and I were friends. She plied me with small favours, candies, and the hours spent together. Eventually, I showed her my work. Magic, you see, is my passion, and although I spurned the chance to work with my father, I did wish to understand what the Princesses had wrought.

If you ask me what my cutie mark is one more time, I will chain you to a mountain and leave you for the Windigos!

Where was I? Ah, yes. One night, this mare stormed into my library covered in blood. Her father, you see, was drunk that night, and she'd made a mistake with the cooking. I remember the cuts across her face, one nearly crossing her eye, and I remember the blood running down her hind legs. She was angry, so angry that she sat in my kitchen and did nothing for eight hours. I had to leave then, had to sleep, and when I woke up at noon the next day she was gone.

She was... different, after that. She spoke very little, and I confess that I was so absorbed by my studies in magic that when she came around less and less, I scarcely noticed. I had found, in my inherited collection of antiquated writings, a number of journals written by unicorns who'd lived under Discord and survived long enough to transcribe their experiences. The language was different enough from ours that translation was necessary, but what I learned was worth the effort.

Months later, her father died. He was a miner, so when he was found with his head crushed by a rockfall it was a tragedy, but not unprecedented. I will relate that, as one of the few ponies who knew his daughter, I was chosen to be a pallbearer. His corpse was much lighter than it should have been. There was no investigation done, because those were simpler times. Had I done so, would I have learned something that might have changed history? That question haunts me still.

–Ω–

My friend died as well, not much later. It was not unusual for mares to die upon foaling in those days, but our grief was eclipsed by curiosity. The foal, the filly, was made almost entirely of clear white crystal. Her mane was amber-coloured, possibly even made of amber itself, and her eyes were opal. I am not sure what Celestia has told you of the creation of the race of crystal ponies, but I recall with certainty that it began on the floor of my library. She had stumbled in during a rainstorm, while I was away, gave birth and died.

Yes, I suppose I might have misinterpreted the chain of events, but when I came home that evening a good friend lay dead on my floor, and there was a strange creature attempting to nurse from her barren body. I was especially surprised; she had not seemed pregnant, although I have read that some mares only show in the final weeks.

That particular funeral had few ponies attending, but when I announced that I would go, my father came with me. It was he who offered to raise the foal as his own, and I gladly agreed. It would have taken up too much of my valuable time, and I was obsessed with my studies. Magical discovery is a science that consumes the soul and lights the mind aflame, and I had no time for other things.

The Princesses did not learn of these events until years later, when Asteria was seven or eight years old. Luna had experimented with imbuing the fabric of the night sky with uncommon magic and released a species of beasts upon the forest surrounding their castle. The mightiest among them slew hundreds of ponies before escaping into the uncharted portions of the Everfree. It was a time of mourning and sorrow for the nation, and Asteria went largely unnoticed. Understand that Equestria was an unexplored nation, and many oddities lay in corners untouched by the light of the sun. A thinking, feeling rock formation was not so strange, and warranted nothing more than passing curiosity.

I met with her on many occasions over the years. When she was five, my father asked that I look after both her and the Great Heart for a week while he went off on business. Asteria matured slightly faster than the average pony; by then she could speak in full sentences and articulate herself as well as any adult. The Great Heart interested her, because foals are contrary creatures who want what is forbidden to them, and my father forbade her from going into the room in which it was kept. You have experience with younglings, and no doubt know that they will exploit adults who are not familiar with them. My father may have mentioned in passing that I was to keep her away from it, but I disregarded him for one reason or another when Asteria raised the topic after dinner.

The Great Heart was suspended in the air by a sustained magical current in the attic of my foalhood home. When Asteria and I went up to see it, I spent my time trying to deduce how it had been created. To this day I do not know, but I suspect it was based in part on the mechanism of the Elements of Harmony. I filled whole notebooks with what I observed that evening, but all Asteria did was look at it. The Great Heart was the size of a watermelon, bright red and orange in colour and pulsing with warmth. I was more interested in its interactions with the environment, but to the untrained eye it was a large heart, of the sort that ponies exchange on Hearts and Hooves Day, which emitted light. Strange, sure, but the effects of it couldn't be felt through proximity. At the time, I did not know why it fascinated her so.

Some years later, an incident with the tax bureau forced me to take up a job as an educator on a temporary basis. It was irritating and detracted from my autodidactic tendencies, but hardly more than a nuisance. A classroom full of earth pony foals is remarkably easy to manage with telekinesis. At any rate, there were three dozen of the insufferable pests, and one of them was my little sister. It was here that I realized what I was truly dealing with. Asteria was a remorseless, charming scoundrel. She had her way with remarkable ease, surpassing the normal barrier that a lack of a cutie mark represents. I must confess that, were I not endowed with magic and the supreme arrogance that entails, I would have been intimidated by her myself.

You don't think so? I can see why; the impressions of youth to us more experienced ponies are never the best indicators of what will happen in the future. Who would have thought a librarian in the Crystal Province could one day become a king? But I digress: Asteria carried herself with poise and tact above her years. Whenever there were other stallions or mares with myself, she took the opportunity to prove herself immature and short-sighted, but when confronted with me she let herself slip. Not much, but it was there.

Have you ever looked a crystal pony in the eyes? I have, and I can tell you the date that I first saw Asteria for what she truly was. It was eight hundred and thirty-six years into the reign of the Sisters, on the second Tuesday of May. I looked into Asteria's eyes, and I realized that she had no conscience. She was so guilelessly free-spirited, so utterly unchained by convention, that she was equally capable of acts of great charity and despicable sadism. There were days where she would give half of her lunch to a classmate, then hunt down one of grazing sheep in the fields outside the city and snap its neck only hours later.

Don't look so surprised! At first I suspected that she was simply a sociopath, but as I was forced to spend more and more time with that little horror, I came to suspect something far more sinister. The remainder of my indentured term as a schoolteacher was nerve-wracking after watching her kill that first ewe, watching her try to bite through its neck with teeth unsuited to the task and scrabble at its hide with rock-solid hooves while I cowered behind the windows. I was hypnotized, forced to look on against my will as the terrified sheep cried with pain and begged for mercy.

Then she turned and looked directly at me. And waved.

That was the first time I ever dared to teleport myself. There are a thousand and one warnings for the unwary and inexperienced unicorn against teleporting, and in that instant I disregarded all of them just to get away from her. She was a little filly, barely up to my shoulder, and yet in that moment I was more afraid than I can articulate. How had she known I was watching her? Why had she killed that sheep? And how could she have known that I would tell nopony?

I didn't, out of that same fear that compelled me to flee like a rabbit before a manticore. That creature was something so alien to what we understand, and yet there was a pony beneath. She was my sister Asteria, who liked making daisy chains and drinking tea on rainy afternoons with my father, but she was also strange. Her body was crystal, her mind untethered by any ideal or taboo. Do you see now, what had happened? I doubt you do; even I have only half-formed suspicions as to what my friend invited into this world, or how.

–Ω–

It was the most astounding magic trick to ever be performed: a self-assured stallion became a withdrawn, nervous wreck. I do not know how I survived the remaining two months of that school year, but eventually I was able to end my contract with the board of education and return to minding the library full-time. I had a full week to myself, completely free from Asteria and her madness, but then the nightmare truly began.

The first victim was a mare named Vale. She was the teacher hired as my replacement, fresh out of her own education and with a enthusiasm for the job that would have comforted me had I actually cared about those students. Her coat was purple, and her mane was a garish combination of blue and white. We met one morning in the park, in which I gave her the keys to the building and turned over the foals' reports.

"I'm not sure if I can do this," she confided in me, jittery with nerves.

I didn't particularly care, but I assured her that it was the easiest job in the world. Did I forget to tell her that Asteria was a menace beyond all equine reckoning? You could forgive me if it slipped my mind, although I certainly don't forgive myself.

Somepony, probably my father, must have mentioned to Asteria that Vale was to be the new schoolteacher, because one day there was a commotion in the streets.

"It's spreading!" shouted some panicking imbecile, and as one of the province's expert on magical phenomenon, I was dragged out to examine what had happened. Imagine my surprise when I saw Vale, completely formed from translucent crystal. I knew it to be her only by her cutie mark, which had not changed from the last time I saw her. However, her body was now a dark shade of yellow, and her mane an unimproved palette of orange and black. For her part, Vale did not appear fazed by having become a species of sentient stone seemingly overnight, but the rest of the town reacted with screaming panic.

For my part, I think I walked home and did nothing. I say I think that, because the remainder of that summer is a blur in my memories. There were dozens of professionals from the Royal University, all unicorns wearing white lab coats and rubber shoes. They came in droves, examining both Asteria and Vale for the taint of Discord or anything that could threaten the golden age of Equestria, but nothing came from those tests.

Oh, there were results that said they were sapient quartz deposits in the shape of ponies, results that said they were ponies who'd had their flesh replaced by impure minerals enchanted with life, but those are contradictory and immaterial. Only the magic mattered, and none could say whether it was a natural process or something guided by intelligence. Even I do not know the answer to that, nor do I care to guess. Neither possibility gave me any hope.

–Ω–

I last saw my father as the weather turned chilly. He came to my house unannounced, wrapped in thick scarves and stuffed garments meant to keep out the frosty bite of winter, despite it being only the beginning of autumn. I welcomed him in, though not without ensuring that he had not brought Asteria with him.

"What brings you here?" I asked him.

"The Heart," he murmured, "is behaving oddly. I noticed last night that it was off-centre, as if the love of the Princesses had come into conflict with something."

My heart skipped a beat. "Are we under attack? What could cause such a disturbance?"

He explained that the Great Heart had never had cause to be used actively, and in fact such a mode of use had only ever been hypothesized. It was meant only to distribute positive emotions throughout Equestria, flowing from north to south like some vast current from the unmapped arctic wastelands to the sun-baked deserts. The use of the thing could only be as a weapon, meant specifically to pacify a bellicose force.

During our discussion of the magic involved, my father mentioned an old theory regarding the Elements of Harmony. Namely, that any pony or group of ponies could successfully use them, provided that together they adequately exemplified those traits that support our society. In the past thousand years, I can only assume that this has been proven or disproven, but working with that assumption we hashed out an explanation for what had happened.

You see, the Great Heart is like a vessel or repository for the love of the Princesses. Such is their compassion that this alone nourishes the continent. I suspect that you might have done a better job of filling it up, Princess Cadence, but that is idle speculation. It was the idea that it could be filled with anypony's love that lead to the idea that it could be filled with any kind of love, though perhaps that tends towards the meaninglessly philosophical.

My father and I realized that any invading force, whether it be an unstoppable engine of destruction like Discord or a marching army, would be incapable of harbouring warlike intent on Equestrian soil. The Great Heart therefore represented a weak point in Equestria's defences, and something had attempted to destroy it. Of course, destruction of so pure a thing is impossible, even for an entity of gargantuan power. One does not lightly underestimate Celestia and Luna of Equestria.

My father assured me that he would inform Her Majesty at once, and returned home to pen a letter to that effect. I remained in my library, studying a new shipment of textbooks and attempting to drown my misgivings with the disgusting tea he brewed.

The next afternoon, a concerned neighbour found my father dead in his living room. His left foreleg and some of his neck and torso had been turned to crystal, but not before the self-inflicted wound to the blood vessels of his neck resulted in his death. My father's telekinesis was never the most precise, and in the moments before his death, shaky from loss of blood, it had hardly improved. Nevertheless, he had taken a great quantity of his own blood and smeared a message on the walls.

'CELESTIA FORGIVE ME'

Why had he chosen the coward's end? It was because my father was a greater stallion that I could ever hope to be, brave enough to chose the fate of death when offered with an unknowable alternative. Only I mourned, for it was discovered earlier that day that twenty-seven other earth ponies had turned to crystal. Much like Asteria and Vale, they retained their earlier personalities, but something had changed. The crystal ponies, as they were now known, were as capricious as the churning sea, and just as dangerous.

Many messages were sent south that day, but it is a long run from the northern reaches to central Equestria. To this day, I doubt that any of them reached the Princesses in time, and more than a few must have been sabotaged. Crystal ponies have no lungs to grow ragged, no muscles to tire, and no morality to stand in their way when they choose an end. No help was forthcoming from the south, and I am ashamed to say that I did nothing to stop it from happening. With my knowledge of eldritch secrets, I warded the library building from intrusions and settled down to wait for aid. Sadly, I was more a coward than my father ever was.

While I waited there, sealed away from the tumultuous events unfolding in the city, I examined the threads of magic that wound their way through the library. The love from the Great Heart was still there, flowing as strong as the pulse in the aorta, but it had been sequestered. Something oppressive in the very air held it at bay, something stronger than the unadulterated love of the celestial bodies. It was as if the night had fallen, and all we had for light were the stars. I was afraid, afraid enough to put my might behind those wards.

–Ω–

The following day, I discovered two things. One, that I had enough food to last me until the morrow, and two, that everypony in the Crystal Province had suddenly descended on my library.

I had but one small window through which to watch as the crowd outside swelled, but swell it did. There were a hundred or so crystal ponies outside, while the rest milled about the streets like animals. There could not have been many like myself, with the foresight to barricade our dwellings but lacking the wisdom to flee entirely. As the day passed, they amassed without like a tide of insects, until they stretched from my view of one horizon to my view of the other.

Why were they so calm? The ones uninterested in myself were content to bicker and cavort in groups, destroying whatever they encountered and building crude structures out of the rubble. Others fought, like wrestling colts with the ferocity and strength of minotaurs. At one point, a crystal stallion was thrown against the wall of my library. The wards I was using held against the impact, but the force of the hit managed to rattle the building and drop books from the shelves. I jerked away from the window and darted around the library, ensuring that nopony had broken in. The stallion, whoever it was, had brushed off a collision that could have felled a bear and gone back to fighting, completely uninjured.

I know more now than I did then. I know that crystal ponies are harder than the stones they once mined, that liquid sapphires flow through their veins and that shards of beryl churn in their bellies. I know that their manes, like lignite, were once organic. I know that their strength comes not from them but through them, like light refracted through the water's surface until it reaches the ocean's bottom and illuminates the poor, stupid creatures that skulk in the deeps. Then, though, I was more concerned by what they wanted.

By day's end, I knew the Crystal Province had fallen. The terror that had gripped me was dulled, leaving me only on edge and not as jumpy as a lone parasprite in the presence of a hungry chimera. The shouts had grown louder as the crystal ponies frolicked, their horrid voices raised with parodies of laughter and camaraderie as they gambolled like unthinking beasts. I did not weep; they meant nothing to me, not anymore. I continued to look out my little window at the crystal ponies watching me, but they were implacably patient. At times, crystal ponies wandering the streets join them, and sometimes one would grow bored and leave. It was like watching the slowest of creatures, glacial in their moods but mercurial in action.

As night fell, I knew I would have to sleep. I vowed to observe the ponies for as long as I could, but as the sun set I found that the darkness was absolute in the ruins of the city. Even my attempts to shine light through the window through means mundane and magical failed, as if the night had become a solid barrier to the radiance. I slept troubled, comforted only by my confidence in my wards and the hope that I would be rescued.

The next morning, however, my hopes were dashed. The entirety of what I could see in the feeble dawn sunlight was crystalline. The horrid substance had spread everywhere, as though it were ice that had formed in the bleakest winter of that night. For minutes, I thought that the Fires of Friendship had finally been extinguished, that those abominations from the mountains had stampeded through Equestria and reduced us to rime-encrusted misery. Would that we were so lucky.

The crystal ponies had dispersed while I slept, and I reconsidered my options. I could starve in the absence of food. I could escape, running for all I was worth until my legs gave way. Or I could regroup, search for food, and find Asteria.

Death did not appeal to me, nor did escape. I was hardly weak, but no creature of flesh and blood can hope to outlast unyielding mineral in a long-distance race. I quickly discovered that food was easier to come by, as some had been left in a food stall near the library. The taint of crystal had not reached everything within its circumference, merely structures and earth. I ate undisturbed by crystal ponies, but when I left that stall two of them saw me.

One was Vale, the other a mare I could not identify. They were speaking to one another, discussing a novel that had been published the month before. Their voices... how do I describe this? They had no... no cadence. When ponies speak, they have natural changes in pitch that convey emotion, yes? Vale and her friend sounded cold and dead. Their voices were loud and broken, swaying in timbre but horribly shattered and difficult to listen to. It made me cringe, almost to the point of crying, but I rallied my courage before I faced them.

"How do you do?" asked Vale, and I was again thrown. Her voice was completely normal, as though her previous conversation was only a dream.

"Do you know him?" asked her companion, who was equally composed.

"We met in the summer."

"Where is Asteria?" I demanded, projecting more confidence than I felt.

Vale giggled. It sounded like both a reaction to a humorous statement and the spread of spiderweb cracks in fine glass. "Who are you to make demands of me?"

"Test me not!" I warned her, though they seemed intent on just that. Without indication of her intent, Vale's companion lunged forwards. It was far too short to actually hit me, but I reacted anyways. Willing the magic to rise, I let loose a blast of pure energy powerful enough to turn a dragon into a dog, chanelled into heat great enough melt bedrock into magma. She landed entirely unharmed, grinning as though the boiling heat of the air surrounding her was nothing more than an annoyance.

"Delicious," she growled.

I must have screamed, must have overreacted, because what next I recall was the area devastated. I felt the drain only slightly, my vast reserve of arcane power already replenishing, but I had reduced the interiors of several houses to powdery sawdust. To my dismay, the crystal remained unaffected by my magical tantrum. The two crystal ponies I had accosted were nowhere to be seen, and at the time I reassured myself that they had either been vanquished or driven away. They were not; they had simply been satiated.

It occurred to me that an investigation of my father's home would be prudent. I ran there, unheeding of the crystal ponies around me. No doubt many noticed me, and just as many chose to follow as to continue with whatever inscrutable task they pursued. I felt only the pounding of my hooves on the crystal roadways, looked up only to swerve through the wreckage littering my path, and filled my thoughts with enforced silence. It took me mere seconds to make the journey, but it felt like days.

I burst through the doors of my childhood home, headed by some instinct to the attic. That instinct must have been faulty to instruct me to go there; I personally would have preferred to go in the opposite direction. There, I found Asteria. Although I had predicted that she would be intent on the Great Heart, she instead faced me.

"Hello, Sombra," she said, amused. "I was wondering how long it would take you to find me."

"You are not like them," I stated. It was true. She had been the first, the origin of the sickness. Whatever she was, she had become my responsibility. The daughter of my friend, my adopted sister, neither of those things mattered. She was my responsibility because nopony else remained to claim that burden.

"How astute of you. I am... does this language have a word for it? No. I am not their mother, nor their creator, but those descriptions come the closest. I remember my mother, my creator. I remember her last words. I remember you."

"You prattle on," I said shortly. Half-formed riddles did not capture my attention, nor did the ravings of the clearly mad.

Asteria laughed harshly. It was a natural sound for her, the sound of a tiger who has cornered its prey and is momentarily entertained by its antics. She then jabbed a forehoof at the Great Heart.

"There is no love in this," she muttered. "It feeds not from them. How, then, does it function? Why does it...?"

"Why should such a thing as love concern a monster like yourself?" I demanded sharply. I noticed, maybe for the first time, that she had never developed a cutie mark. Isn’t that a strange thing? As if I needed more indication that fate was no longer at play, or that the revolting thing that faced me down was no true pony.

Asteria grinned, and in the light from the Great Heart she looked truly hideous. I brayed loudly and produced another bolt of magic. I will admit, it was meant to kill. The black spell struck Asteria in the chest and launched her into the far reach of the attic. She landed in a crumpled heap, limbs impaled through the wooden floorboards.

"Your magic is... formidable," came a voice from behind me. I spun about so fast I was left dizzy, and to my surprise a crystal pony stood in the doorway. Behind him, and as far down the stairwell from the upper floor as I could see, were more of the weird creatures. Without thinking, I set ablaze the floor beneath them and teleported to the street below. From without the house, and with no pomp or circumstances, I engulfed my former home in fire. The sudden rise in air pressure blew the roof into the air, individual pieces evaporating into smoke as I poured energy into the fireball.

Crystal ponies around me began to take notice. A few left whatever games they played and approached me with unheeding caution, and I responded with telekinesis. No, not on them, but on the rubble around me. A fallen lamppost was my weapon, and with one swipe I launched two of the encroaching beings into the distance. It was satisfying, but it was not enough. I looked on the ruins of my community, at the wanton destruction and the weird plague and the foul gemstone encrusted on like the residue of some disgusting murder, and I felt something besides fear. I felt rage.

The nearest crystal ponies were cast into the inferno of my house, whooping cries of joy and despair as I encircled them with conjured chains susceptible to my levitation. Others were similarly bound and lifted to great heights, from with I released them. I did not stay to see whether they survived those falls or not; I swept onwards like an avenging ghost. As I ran, I struck out at former neighbours and townsfolk alike, using curses so foul that their incantations were liable to seep through pages of books and into the foundations of the library, using hexes so vile that the agony they inflicted grew with the ability to withstand it, using jinxes so potent they fractured the crystalline ground like lightning bolts from an invisible storm. The crystal ponies were not so easy to destroy, but I had been devoured by my hatred and pressed forwards.

I cut. I smashed. I burnt. I scoured. I battered and bashed and crushed and destroyed, all the while bellowing and screeching incoherently. I found that they resisted physical destruction, so I found more creative solutions. My most noxious attempts to fell the accursed things were nothing short of mental assault upon the crystal ponies that dared to stand against my wrath. I knew invocations to summon dreams, and in those terrible hours I bent them to nightmares and sent them forth upon the living nightmares that inhabited my province. I brought down fire and shadow and ice and ghastly visitations.

I see you are familiar with this portion of the story. Surprising, isn't it? Nothing ever happens without reason, though at times the reasons we see are merely inventions of the mind. Grand designs exist upon the world, which even the most learned of sages must ruminate for aeons to understand. Do your count yourself among their number, Princess? Do you comprehend even a sliver of what history and prescience scream and beg of you to see?

I do not. I do not know what ancient intellect or sudden impulse guided me to fashion this plate armour with my magic, nor did I thank it when it saved my life that night. I simply reacted, throwing my attacker from some great height while black lenses concealed the world from his eyes.

Did I know that I was capable of such a rampage? It astonishes me even now.

I stood before the burning carcass of my home, allowing the flickering light to hypnotize me into a more comfortable state. Such a feat was impossible. The stain I felt on my soul could not be washed away, not without atonement. In the centre of the city, out of the corner of my eye, I could see the foundations of this very palace begin to rise from the debris. Four pillars, unconnected at the time, growing from living crystal before my eyes. I did not think much on it; I was too concerned by the nightmare I was trapped in. The nightmare of my own devising.

"I knew you could do it," said my sister condescendingly. She stood to my side, also watching the embers the die down.

"It wasn't easy," she went on, "having to choose you. I canvassed the entire city. There was nopony more suitable to the task than you, but I spent far too much time engineering the right circumstances. Why couldn't you be a patriot, like everypony else? All the effort distracted me from my fun. I suppose we are alike in that way."

I didn't respond. She still struck fear into my heart, but Asteria seemed content to wait. I turned back to see what I had wrought, and was dismayed to find that not only had I succumbed to my baser instincts, the crystal ponies remained intact and unharmed.

"No matter," I said to myself, though loud enough for my erstwhile sister to hear. "The Princesses will do what I cannot."

"And here they come!" exclaimed Asteria, pointing towards the horizon. I watched, numb with shock, as the dark outlines of the approaching alicorns appeared in the distance.

It is impossible to understand the terror that accompanies the knowledge that Celestia and Luna are coming for you, but not only did I know that to be true, I felt fearless in spite of it. The greatest danger stood by my side, mocking me. The Princesses were only a minor irritation compared to her.

"Oh no, Celestia!" Asteria cried out sarcastically, "the evil Sombra is attacking us poor crystal ponies! Quickly, stop him before he destroys the Great Heart and plunges Equestria into chaos!"

She marched into the bonfire behind us, heedless of the heat and smoke, and soon returned with the Great Heart tucked beneath her foreleg. The vitality it once held was gone, replaced by a grey pall. The magnificent magic still flowed from within, but the love it carried was gone.

Had it been replaced with evil? You're thinking far too simplistically, Princess Cadence. No enemy of Equestria declares war because they are evil, merely because it is their nature that brings them into conflict with ponies. Good and evil describe things that occur naturally in any sentient being, endowed as we are with the ability to choose between right and wrong, knowing the difference.

Was it apathy? I thought so too, at first. Without any sort of intent, the Great Heart would be perfectly useless. All magic is equal parts emotion and energy, as any student of the the art would know. That explained some, but not all of the conundrum.

The truth is something a great deal more horrific. It was a rejection, a violation of what we hold sacred. It was akin to turning away from destiny. It was indescribably awful, something most ponies never even contemplate.

In my last moments, I watched the beginnings of a crystal shell form over the Great Heart. I saw the placid triumph in Asteria's eyes. I had called her a monster, but that was inaccurate: she was a predator. A hunter of intelligent prey, and sheep had lost their appeal. The crystal ponies had set their sights on a loftier goal.

The magic of the Princesses dissolved my physical form in an instant, reducing me to animate shadow. I grounded myself with magic, but my proximity to Asteria weakened its effectiveness, and I found myself losing ground at a terrific rate.

The spell they used was meant to imprison me within the mountains of the north, not kill me. It is a tactic that Celestia has used time and time again, showing mercy to the fallen when none is deserved out of the fear that she has misjudged a situation. I suspect that it has cost her dearly in the past, though it was surely a boon to her sister when she was bound within the core of the moon. In my case, they were hastily attacking the perpetrator of a heinous crime, without due investigation, and obviously thought that summary execution was unwarranted. I deduced these things at once, for their power had turned me to smoke and not disintegrated me into oblivion.

I was aware that I could not match the Princesses working in concert, so instead I turned my magic to a different task. With the last dregs of my willpower, I threw my full power into a spell upon the Great Heart. It slipped away from the parts covered in crystal, the energy devoured by an otherworldly maw, but the Heart remained inextricably connected to the Crystal Province.

With this spell, even as I was thrown into the chains of an icy prison, the entirety of the Crystal Province was dragged with me. Although I no longer had a corporeal form, I was aware of everything within the city. Crystal ponies howled with rage, leaping and bounding towards the hazy perimeter of the city-state in a bid for freedom, and Asteria had frozen with a look of rage on her face.

I meant to keep these monstrosities away from the rest of the country, even if I consigned myself to an eternal imprisonment in the process.

–Ω–

"It’s cold out there," Sombra said morosely. "The ice spreads like the crystal did, over a thousand years ago. It chokes out life, and even I cannot stop its progress. The winter is strong now; the Fire is weak."

Princess Cadence tried to maintain composure, but she was sure that she was staring at him anyways. King Sombra, the tyrant-ruler of the Crystal Empire, thought that the crystal ponies were unstoppable, soulless abominations? The Crystal Heart was a corruption of some antediluvian knockoff of the Elements of Harmony? Only an idiot would take him at his word, and Cadence was no idiot.

Still, his story contained elements of truth. Cadence wished she had the means to separate fact from fiction, but the cracked mind of Sombra spewed both in such mixed quantities that it was unlikely that an accurate story would ever come out. Maybe, if they managed to contain him, the psychologists in Canterlot could search through his psyche for more accurate memories.

"What happened?" she asked, forgetting the cardinal rule of not antagonizing dangerous sociopaths. The unhinged king, despite his inability to see the forest for the trees, was still the most powerful unicorn of his era and very, very unstable. Fortunately, Sombra answered her without incident.

"Much of what the history books contain true," King Sombra said. "The Princesses renamed this place the Crystal Empire and bequeathed it to a minor noble line, in case it ever returned. A member of that line gave birth to the first alicorn in centuries, and she was ordained the Princess of the Crystal Empire in absentia, possibly the first use of that term to describe the absence of the territory rather than the ruler. The Great Heart became the Crystal Heart over time, more to do with the name of the country than what had happened to it. And, of course, I joined Discord and Tirek in the pantheon of defeated foes of Equestria."

Cadence frowned. "What I meant was, there's a lot of speculating you just threw at me. What do you mean by, 'turning away from destiny'? What is your destiny, anyhow? And why did you return, if you intended to keep the Crystal Empire in limbo forever?"

"I was unable," whispered Sombra. "I worked tirelessly for decades, holding the Crystal Empire in stasis, but my curiosity got the better of me. The windigos swarmed the city, but none entered it. No predator ever enters another's domain. They kept warm, those crystal ponies, and the chill seeped into my bones. I gave in to temptation, entered their shelter. I studied them."

"Is that where you learned the spell you used on Shiny's horn?" asked Cadence, her voice low and cautious.

"Dark magic," the King hissed angrily, and Cadence let out an involuntary shriek as a drop of blood fell from his mane. The colour hid it well, but much of his mane gleamed wetly with the stain of blood. He paced towards her, reared up and slammed a hoof down on the armrest of the couch.

“I have laboured for far too long!” he roared. “I channeled those spells until I could feel my mind distort with the strain! I have served as the barrier between this madness and Equestria since your ancestors were young! There is no reason, none whatsoever, that I should stand in their way any longer!”

Princess Cadence swallowed. “That may be, but Twilight Sparkle and my husband will be here soon. They will find the Crystal Heart, and the goodwill of the crystal ponies will enable them to defend their homeland! It matters not what magic you use, your end is assured!”

Slowly, Sombra raised a hoof to his mane and brushed it out of the way. Beneath, white crystal covered most of his face. It was spreading rapidly, extending down his muzzle and up into his hair, turning both the colour of freshly fallen snow. At the divide between flesh and crystal, blood welled up and spilled into the air, falling like steaming drops of rain down his face. Cadence could see it move, travelling inexorably across his face at the pace of a snail. His crystal half looked almost peaceful, compared to the rest of him.

She still could not see his cutie mark, hidden as it was by his red satin cloak. A small part of Cadence’s mind, the part that had not been consumed by raw, animal fear, wondered what it was.

Whether he had one.

"They will find it?" growled Sombra, leaning forwards until their noses were almost touching. His eyes practically glowed, madness and power shining through them like lanterns.

"I... look... forward... to... it."