Equestria Divided: The Crystal Dominion

It began, like all stories are wont to do, with darkness. Lack. The total and absolute lack of everything. It was dark, it was cold, it was empty, and it was silent.

And then there was light.

With the light there contrast to the darkness and with the contrast came the possibility for distinction.

From that distinction came observation and in the mind that observed were born thoughts. Thoughts gave way immediately to memories, memories of a time long ago, a time where there also was light and darkness, where there was warmth and cold, where sounds rang through the distance and echoed back and where there were 'things'.

Things to touch, things to hold, things to cast aside… and things to conquer.

Conquer; at that word a complex web of memories came back, some simple and some jumbled and he – he remembered he was a ‘he’ now – he realized that his current condition was a consequence, a result of his actions. It didn't matter if he was the one who’d caused this non-life to begin or if his fate had been imposed on him like a punishment from on high, from somepony more powerful.

Somepony? Yes. He realized he was a pony. He was a ‘he’ and he was a ‘pony’ but he was something more, so much more than either of those things.

King. He was a King. This was his kingdom, he had been ‘deposed’, dealt with by a pair of shining stars. Celestial bodies had fallen from on high to remind him that he was merely mortal and that he had a place within the natural order of things, their divinity was something he could never aspire to match.

Or so they would have him believe.

He was a ruler, thousands of ponies who were in theory his ‘equal’ surrounded him and in the name of becoming that 'ruler' he had ground those thousands beneath his hoof. His first decree, the first lesson he had imparted to the vanquished, was a proclamation that nopony could ever rise from their dregs and become a match for him.

In the absolute that was not true, but the truth did not matter. The only thing that mattered was that that ‘truth’ had successfully dissuaded many who might one day try to usurp his power the same way he had stolen it from the hooves of everypony. How many of those who had believed him might have been strong enough to prevail? He'd never know.

He wouldn't be the stallion to surrender what he'd stolen so easily, however. So he looked to these two Celestial bodies, these shining stars, and in the end he dared to raise his voice with the challenge: “Prove it!”

They were, of course, proven right. He was defeated, banished… but not deposed. He took back his original assessment because a King once is a King forever, everywhere. And while he could not prevent them from removing him from their skies, they had no power to remove him from his earth. As he sunk beneath the ice he unleashed his curse upon the Empire and brought it down with him. It was meant to last until the end of time…

Instead, he realized his curse had only suspended time.

The Crystal Empire was restored and he and his subjects awoke as if from a long slumber but nothing had changed. A dozen, a hundred, a thousand years could have past and while he and his peasants’ life forces were bound intact it was ludicrous to expect the same of the kingdom. He expected to find marble crumbled, crystals growing, crops and livestock decaying but everything had been preserved.

Only the 'incorrect' placement of the stars convinced him that his curse had worked and that he woke from a temporal rift and not just another long night. He roamed his palace, taking ancient textbooks from his libraries. Once the star charts been consulted and calculations made he deduced a thousand years had passed.

As with chronology few answers to his many questions were readily available to him. His curse's end confused him: did he really only have enough power to remove the Empire from time and space for a mere thousand years, or had somepony else broken his spell? The facts eluded him but King Sombra was not one to look a messenger bearing good news in the mouth to assure himself his tongue spoke the truth. He wasn't going to deny the truth, he was going to explore it.

He'd been freed so he left the Empire in its own hooves to tend to its own devices, much as he’d always done during his rule, while he explored the confines and limits of his own kingdom. This wasn't merely stretched his legs, the heavenly bodies had beaten him before and while his body was strong his magic was weak from the centuries. He had to scout for their presence and infuriating as it was, if necessary, hide.

For three days he watched the earth, trying to regain a sense for the lay of the land in the frozen tundra. He found many things, including the railway system. The station was gone. The rail line itself was frozen, pock-marked and brittle.

Nopony had used the train in months at the least. This fresh mystery confused him now that he remembered the wisdom of the first Celestial Body. Celestia. That was her name. Whatever else his ancient, timeless nemesis had been Celestia had always been thorough: a garrison, a watchtower, a sentry post, something should have been in place there to announce the presence of the Kingdom that had conquered his lands and lay watching for his return.

Surely Celestia hadn't thought his curse to be a doomsday spell that atomized it all, had she?

No, that wasn't her. Something was clearly wrong.

He followed the tracks south and what he found was surprising: a vehicles graveyard. Trains, all of them destroyed, left like waystone markers where they fell. He searched for further signs of life and in time he found one further north, a campfire left burning, mares and children left to huddle in their tents.

Scared of the dark.

He grinned and decided to attack this first new ponies from this new era. All light and heat was extinguished in the presence of his darkness form.

The mares grabbed their foals, “Forao’!!” on their lips.

And then somepony came up, a whitemane of strong flesh with long braids in his beard and not a single tooth in his head. Sombra arched his brow in amusement.

“VER VERA NHORSE!”

Against all odds the pony surprised him. The whitemane charged at him wielding a massive axe in his gums. At the last moment the Whitemane spat the weapon from his mouth, took it in both hooves and swung it about.

Sombra didn’t bother with him. With but a though, crystals burst from the ground smashing the whitemane back and knocking the iron weapon out of his hooves.

Sombra appeared satisfied but then a youngster approached the whitemane and took up the old stallion's axe.

‘A stubborn folk,’ Sombra thought to himself ‘they will make hardy workers in the mines.”

But instead of attacking him the young stallion raised the whitemane’s axe on high and chopped the whitemane’s head from his neck with one swing.

For the second time that night Sombra was surprised.

“VER. VERA. NHORSE!!”

Lightning fell from the sky and struck the great axe. A dozen other colts and young stallions, too young to be out in the tundra alone, pushed away from their mothers’ sides to take a sword or spear or axe from their family’s tent and went to the whitemane’s corpse to further desecrate the body until it was hacked to bits.

All the while chanting “Ver vera Nhorse!”

“Ver vera Nhorse!” “We are Nhorse!” Sombra began to understand.

With each hack new strikes of lightning fell from clear skies, no clouds hung overhead, only the faint glow of the Crystal Borealis marred the otherwise perfect starry darkness. Each time new lightning struck and a youngster found himself with glowing eyes and lightning-touched iron.

A runt, impatient, charged at Sombra with a dagger and the same fate occurred. Only instead of knocking him aside Sombra punched the jagged crystals through him.

Another child, a foal not much older or larger than the one impaled, turned tail dropping his dagger and running back to the safety of his mother. Sombra grinned.

The colt stopped, squealed and gasped and sputtered before dropping to the ground. His mother held up a dagger of her own, an ordinary dagger, stained crimson with his blood. She screamed “We are Nhorse!”

The group chanted again and Sombra realized his translation wasn’t so accurate. It didn’t just mean ‘we are the Nhorse people’, it was a warcry, a challenge, a warning.

A threat.

‘We are Nhorse: Nopony fucks with us. We are Nhorse: you’re dead. We are Nhorse: Run!”

Sombra wasn’t going to run, even as he realized something astonishing was happening in his absence as the colts turned upon the coward and stamped his corpse with their hooves until a fine red mist hovered about the ground before them.

The children roared. The sacrifice of the elder in combat had given them lightning. The destruction and punishment of the coward had given them rage. Rage and power. The blood mist rose around them and as it did the colts became larger, stronger, their muscles bulked with pronounced veins. They stood between him and their mares: their mothers, sisters and now, it was obvious, their one-day future brides. Like wolves the swarmed, surrounding him, and he stamped them out two at a time until one pony he misjudged dodged his attacks and got close. The lightning from his knife tore at his shadow and Sombra bled darkness as if from a wound.

For the third time Sombra felt surprise but this time there was something more: a taste of his own mortality, a taste of his old fears. All amusement vanished, and with it the King was done playing games.

When his anger left him Sombra emerged from the bloodrage to find himself surrounded by a crystal forest, the dead buried under a fine layer of rock and snow, encased within crystal pylons or strung up on said like so many trophies. None had been spared.

At the edge of the forest, where the mares had held their ground and forced their colts that none may retreat, an old crone still breathed. Breathed and more; the old hag cackled and Sombra was angered to his core. He was wounded but that didn’t matter: he was ignorant, a stranger in a land with ponies that acted nothing like the ponies he remembered but this hag's reaction was beyond even that.

He approached the old hag, ready to silence her personally but as he did he realized neither her head nor her eyes followed him. She kept looking on, looking beyond him.

He caused a sudden growth and she bothered him no more. He'd decided she was just a foolish, blind mare laughing at the meaningless death of herself and her tribe.

And yet she troubled him. The mares were of all sorts from newborn foals to young and middle-aged and old. But the stallions, only the whitemane and colts were there.

With grim realization Sombra rose as mist to the height of the crystal-encased corpse and looked out in the direction the old hag had been staring at. He saw nothing but a hill so he rose further.

In the distance, shining under the borealis like a glowing beacon, stood the Crystal Empire. And Sombra knew where the stallions had gone.