Princess Celestia stood at the gates of the Crystal Empire. She was alone. If this had only happened sooner, she wouldn’t have been. If she had only heeded the warning. If she had only done something…
They say not to punish the messenger who brings bad news. It mattered not what news the messenger brought, however, if he was also a power-hungry tyrant who has enslaved his entire population. It mattered not that listening to the word of such a figure could have saved her so much pain, such that she could never forgive herself for not doing so. If she kept telling herself this, she might start believing it.
A dull orange sky hung overhead as she walked into the Empire down the orange crystal street. Lining the street were houses and other buildings of jagged dark blue and purple crystal. Green flames trailing purple smoke topped pale purple crystal towers placed at intervals running down this and the other five main streets leading inward to palace. The fires weren’t roaring, merely flickering, barely providing an ambient noise amidst the otherwise silence of the landscape.
As she walked, everything around her looked empty. All of the buildings’ doors were sealed tight, and no lights shone from inside. The whole place felt unnerving, yet at the same time, all felt still…at rest…in perfect stasis. Perfect harmony. Ignore the vibes, and it almost felt welcoming. Eerily…serene. It was the type of place she would have considered visiting to relax. If she hadn’t known that it had once been much livelier.
As she reached the base of the Crystal Palace, now a towering structure of dark blue and rust red crystal, she saw something floating and slowly spinning between a pair of trident-shaped black crystal spikes at the center of the courtyard under the palace: a jagged, blood-red, upside down heart-shaped mass of crystal, the Dark Heart.
Why? Why hadn’t she acted when she’d had a chance? Hard to believe what even one moment of hesitation could allow. So imagine a month. But she hadn’t had the strength, she’d told herself, not after…
She entered through the door in one of the legs of the palace, making her way upward. She found the inside of the palace little different than outside. Dark. Empty. Still. Her falling hoofsteps were the only sound. The hallways seemed to absorb the echoes. She stopped walking, and the clacking of her hoofguards on the crystal floor immediately faded away, leaving her standing still in the silence. Alone.
She looked out of a window next to her. Behind the orange sky, you couldn’t even tell that it was nighttime. She wished that she could at least see it. She’d waited so long to act so that it would be full again, so as to offer her any sort of help it might. If only to make her feel closer. If even that.
She continued on, silent save for her steps. However eerie it felt, something just seemed…calm, peaceful about the world being in this state. After recent events, Equestria could use some peaceful calm.
She entered the throne room. Much like the rest of the palace, it was dark, silent, and empty. A large square hole in the floor in front of the throne beckoned her, a spiraling staircase leading down the sides of a cylindrical shaft deeper into darkness than could be seen.
She opened her wings and stepped off the edge of the floor, slowly drifting down the center of the shaft. Down. And down. And down. Eventually, her hooves touched the floor. Gazing back up, she saw what little light reached from the top of the shaft quickly vanish, as if the entrance had been sealed. As if she would be scared by that. She lit up her horn, casting a yellow glow around the narrow area at the base of the shaft, and saw a wooden door in a crystal archway. It opened, inviting her in. It was a trap of some kind, that was a given, but it knew she had no option but to enter, and so it taunted her.
Celestia stepped through the doorway, finding herself walking into a large and dark cavernous stone chamber. The air around her was full with wispy green mist almost seeping from the ground, and rows of round stone pillars reached from floor to ceiling. She couldn’t see to any of the chamber’s far walls, and as far as she knew, it didn’t have any. Then she heard the door close itself behind her. She spun to look back, only to discover that she was standing in the middle of the chamber with no wall nearby. Another trick.
She strode farther into the chamber, looking around. She could feel another presence nearby, floating around just beyond her sight. She stopped, and she felt the presence begin circling her.
“You can no longer hide in shadow!” she shouted into the darkness, but instead of echoing, her words seemed to be swallowed by the dark stillness. Seconds passed.
“I am shadow,” came a slow, deep voice in reply as the presence stopped moving. “The shadow that coils the Empire. Now run along… or accept your doom…”
Its words were meaningless, but despite her best effort, that voice cut straight to her heart. Celestia grit her teeth and stomped the ground. “I am done running!”
The presence again shifted position. She couldn’t tell where from or to, just that it was coming closer to her.
“Princess of Day,” taunted the voice of King Sombra, “now so bold, but at heart… can you really follow through this time?” In front of her, a silhouette emerged, a mass of darker darkness amidst the surrounding darkness. “You failed to save your sister… you didn’t even warn her. Now, for your final failure, a simple test of magic. Win, and you may try to restore the Empire. When you lose, I’ll have that crown.”
Celestia steeled herself for the fight of her life. “I will. Not. Lose!”
A blast of shadow shot from the darkness, and Celestia fired a blast of light at it. The two magic attacks hit each other in midair and vanished, canceling without sound or shockwave. The mass of darker darkness slid back and again melted into the surrounding darkness. It had just begun.
Celestia felt the ground under her hooves tremor slightly. She threw a yellow spherical energy shell up around her a second before a ring of jagged black crystals erupted from the ground beneath her. They stabbed into the shell, pushing it several feet into the air. Celestia was standing on its inner surface, but it started cracking along the bottom as the crystal tips began piercing through. She jumped up as the shell shattered around her, taking flight and rising halfway to the seemingly 100-foot high ceiling.
A thick shadow beam shot at her from near the ceiling a distance away, and she countered with a thick light beam of her own. The two beams intercepted, each canceling the other halfway between their sources. Suddenly, the shadow beam condensed down to a razor thin streak, slicing Celestia’s light beam right in half down the middle and shooting at her. Celestia gasped and dropped down to avoid it but was just a fraction slow. Her hooves slammed onto the ground below, sending a wave of wind outward on impact. She cringed at the smoking black streak along her face and wing.
She looked up to see a giant hand of red and black cloudy shadow reaching out of the darkness at her. She shot a light beam that cut a hole through the palm, but the hand wasn’t slowed. She quickly wrapped the beam around her to form another shield shell, which the hand grabbed and tried to pull back into the darkness. Celestia saw the shield begin to dissolve away at contact with the shadow hand and teleported out, the flash popping the shield like a bubble, sending out a shockwave of light, the arm collapsing into red smoke as it passed. Celestia teleported back in in midair.
“No matter how many shadow plays you try to make,” she announced to her adversary, “the light will always vanquish the darkness!”
She was surprised as Sombra’s chuckling echoed throughout the chamber. “Ahh,” he said, “so is that what happened… to the night.”
Celestia’s eyes shot wide open. Words can be the deadliest of weapons.
“…SILEEEEEEENCE!”
Celestia charged up and fired a massive beam of light magic up to the chamber ceiling in front of her, where the end of the beam stopped before erupting into a miniature sun. A burst of yellow light blazed throughout the chamber, disintegrating the shadows in an instant and replacing them with a blinding glow. Celestia hovered, breathing heavily with every wingbeat, attempting to let the rage flowing through her dissipate.
“You forget,” came Sombra’s voice still, “that even on the brightest of days, when you face the sun, there is still always a shadow… right… behind you.”
Celestia gave a slight gasp and spun around, ready to face off a sneak attack. She saw nothing but her own light. What was he up t—
The miniature sun extinguished, total darkness returning to the chamber in the blink of an eye.
She spun back around to see a giant pair of glowing red eyes rush up and stop just in front of her, green and purple smoke trailing from them. “The sun has no reach underground,” echoed Sombra’s voice. Celestia shot a beam of light between the eyes, but there was no indication that it hit anything. “Down here,” Sombra continued, unfazed, “your power is limited…weakened. There is but one power that can rival me, that can compete in my domain. You know what it is, yet you do not use it.”
“It is not a power I would use,” Celestia announced. “Such power can only be one’s undoing.”
“It seems to me,” Sombra taunted, “… that not using it can lead to a far more unpleasant undoing.”
Another shadow arm shot out from between the floating eyes, Celestia quickly putting up another shield shell. It grabbed the shell and pushed it down, slamming it into the ground, knocking Celestia around inside it.
“Why do you fight me?” came Sombra’s voice again. “I tried to help you. I tried to warn you of your sister. It was your fault for ignoring me.”
That’s enough! “Why should I have heeded word of a tyrant such as you?” she called out, attempting to stand up inside the shell. “You are the opposite of all that both Equestria and the Crystal Empire stand for, a corruption in every sense. The land needs peace, now more than ever. And for that…,” she trailed off. This fight had taken more out of her than she’d expected. “For that, you…” She’d been able to ignore the stinging from the graze until now. “You…”
“You oppose my rule,” Sombra said, “yet I bring what you strive for. Where there is light, there must be activity, else there would be no light. Where there is activity, it can always be constructive, but it can also always be destructive. Only in the cold of total dark stillness can true peace be attained. And, most importantly…maintained.”
The shadow hand’s contact had almost eaten through the shield. Celestia called upon her remaining strength and teleported out, but was zapped back inside the shield an instant later. Sombra chuckled at her futile attempt.
“By the very nature of your power, you cannot defeat me,” he said, “as you cannot take that action which must be taken. You are a hero, and heroes cannot fight like I am free to.”
The shadow hand squeezed, and the spherical shield around Celestia shattered, the hand contracting and grabbing her. She tried to hold back a cry, the smoky hand’s grip feeling like sizzling lava on her body. The arm began to retract, slowly dragging her across the ground and back towards its source.
She looked into the darkness, and as she was pulled closer, saw first a silhouette, then a figure. King Sombra, a dark gray unicorn with a pitch black mane, glowing green eyes with red irises and trailing purple smoke, and a curved red horn. He stood clad with a tarnished silver chestplate and hoofguards and a red cape, the shadow arm stretching from the surface of the chestplate. The fool. He’d revealed his true self while thinking she was defeated. Celestia fired a light beam at him.
Without so much as a flinch, the left and right halves of Sombra’s chestplate split open, revealing a swirling vortex of red and black shadow clouds, a pair of red lightning arcs reaching to a red-glowing blackened mass floating in the middle of the clouds, the object which was the actual source of the shadow arm: his true ‘dark heart’. The beam of light shot directly into the gaping chasm inside him, curving and spiraling around the black heart as if caught in its gravity, the surrounding shadow clouds quickly eroding it away into nothing. Sombra cackled. His voice, now coming directly from him, no longer echoed.
“Against the true darkness,” Sombra said, “light gives no contest.” Celestia let her head drop, the last of her power and hope giving out. “And true darkness…cannot be destroyed…”
Celestia stopped struggling. She had lost. She had failed. As the shadow hand, whose painful touch she was now numb to, dragged her slowly closer to the deepest of shadows, she sighed, and looked back upon her recent life. All light faded as the scene fell into total blackness…
“One,” Celestia’s voice said from the darkness. “I allowed someone like you to take power without acting, and many have suffered. Two. I saw my sister’s distress slowly rising and again did nothing, and she suffered. Three. Upon finally acting, I was forced to defeat and imprison the very sister I should have been protecting, and I suffered.”
“What are you doing?” growled Sombra.
“Counting up my sins,” she responded. “And by my count…I am no hero.”
The scene unfaded from blackness, Celestia twisting back onto her hooves as she attempted to stand up against the shadow hand’s pull.
“You rule through fear,” she continued. “All remain still around you, not because they believe it is good, but because they do not wish to incur worse.” She turned her head to face the King, a fire glowing in her eyes. Or something else… “This misuse is the mistake that you make with your power, Sombra.”
In a blur faster than sight, Celestia slipped straight through the shadow arm’s grip as if it had been nothing more than fog. Sombra had the time to look down. He saw Celestia standing in front of him, head down and out forward, her horn stabbed into his heart. He-heh. My, how the mighty have fallen. Like a liquid, a purple glow began running down the spiral of her horn.
“I won’t,” she said.
Sunrise in the Crystal Empire. The orange sky was dissipating before the sun’s yellow glow, revealing the blue sky underneath. Crystal ponies had begun to walk outside to explore, having felt Sombra’s disappearance.
Princess Celestia stood in the courtyard under the Crystal Palace by the former pedestal of Dark Heart, now gone. She stood with her eyes closed, letting the light bathe her as she lifted the Sun higher into the sky. There would be a lot of work that needed to be done, but it was possible. Finally…true peace. Perfect Harmony.
A crystal pony hesitantly walked up behind Celestia. She didn’t turn around.
“I-is it true?” the crystal pony asked. “Is the Crystal Empire safe now?”
“And true darkness…,” her memory replayed, “cannot be destroyed…”
“Yes,” Celestia answered. “The Empire is free…”
“… only moved…”
Celestia opened her eyes. They were glowing green. “…from Sombra.”
