Dark Arts and Kind Hearts

The corsairs were in full retreat, yet no one could feel so inclined as to celebrate. The pirates who had abandoned the fight would return in greater numbers than ever before, while the dead and dying citizenry scattered throughout the streets of the New Haven capital outnumbered the living; the eerie calm now creeping over the New Haven hamlet was not a signifier of victory, it was merely the eye of the storm.

It wasn't long before The Princess's cries for help caught the attention of a squad of passing militiamen, who then fanned out into the streets in search for a medic or physician. The numbers of the wounded were vast, Twilight knew, but The King was their priority. Without him his people would lose their morale. As much as it pained The Princess to admit it, Sombra had to live, if only for just a little while longer, for the death of their king would spell the death of hope itself.

Beads of sweat trickled down the back of Twilight's neck as she and her companions worked tirelessly to revive him. "Again!" she said, and Sunset and Moondancer obeyed. Their horns pulsed as a scintillating charge of rippling crackles filled the air, and they sent such a jolt of magic through the incapacitated king's body his back arched in a near ninety degree angle.

A shuddering gasp finally burst forth from between The King's lips. Weak and spastic his breaths came, but shallow breaths were better than no breaths.

"Finally," Moondancer exulted with a wipe of her brow, the lenses of her spectacles opaque from her exertions.

"Don't celebrate just yet," Sunset Shimmer advised.

A lull of rapt silence fell over them, as if at any moment they expected The King's eyes to blaze open with renewed vigor ... Alas, the hope was a vanity. His ravaged form affected lacerations and deep punctures that would have levied a mortal conclusion upon a lesser being. Beneath his dermas, they could see the bad blood spreading throughout his circulatory system like an unkempt lichen left to encroach over a rural structure neglected to ruin. By all the laws of nature and science he should have already been dead.

"Okay," said Sunset Shimmer, breaking the silence, "so, we got him breathing again. How do we get him vertical?"

Twilight studied the ruin that was The King's haggard form. He looked like a mangled ragdoll that had seen better days. His breastplate rose and fell sporadically with the arrhythmic cadence of his shallow breaths, but he wasn't opening his eyes. "I'm not so sure we can," Twilight said, then bent her hoof to his carotid artery.

Sunset moved closer. "How's his pulse?"

"Weak," Twilight replied grimly. "Almost undetectable."

"Maybe give him another jolt?" ventured Moondancer.

"We just literally jumpstarted his heart," disagreed Sunset Shimmer. "Another shock could stop it again."

"Well, what else can we do?" Moondancer said, sardonic. "Chest compressions, Mouth-to-mouth—make him turn his head and cough?"

"The King, he's just where they said he'd be. This way, doc!"

They directed their attention toward the source of the exclamation. A Pegasus clad in a tattered crimson cloak and heavy steel helm was galloping toward them from the ingress of the alleyway. A bronze-colored earth pony trailed closely behind him. A grey canvas saddlebag emblazoned with a red cross bobbed at his flank.

A medic, finally! Twilight thought, stepping back so as to give them all the room they may have required.

The bronze Earthpony slid to The King's side, where The Princess had just been standing. He placed his saddlebag on the ground, then worked to undo the leather straps securing its canvas flap.

"Princess Twilight Sparkle, I presume," the guard in the medic's company began. "I don't believe I've had the pleasure. This one has the honor of being Sgt. Biggs of his majesty's royal guard." He swept a hoof toward the medic. "This is Corporal Wedge, combat medic, former Petty Officer corpsman of the Lunar Navy, with honors."

"You can drop the chivalry," Twilight said, in a way that was more of a request than a command. "This is hardly the time for titles and formalities."

"As you say, Prince—er ... Miss Twilight," the guard amended, obediently keeping his etiquette as casual as he dared.

"Can anybody tell me how long it's been since he's lost consciousness?" The medic quarried, probing The King's sides with the diaphragm of a stethoscope. "Be accurate now, every second counts."

Twilight had to think. She hadn't exactly been keeping a stopwatch handy from the moment Sombra became formally acquainted with the ground. "It's been about eight or so minutes," she approximated.

"Eight minutes, damn!" the medic cursed.

"Is that really so long a time?" boasted the red cloak. "I could run down to the palace kitchens for a sweet roll and be back at my post in half that."

The medic eyed him irritably. "I haven't the slightest doubt that you are quite the savant when it comes to pastry-based reconnaissance, but eight minutes might as well be an eternity to someone who is critically wounded." His expression became grim when he looked down at his king sprawled before him. "Hades take me," he despaired, "I've seen corpses in better condition."

"Gods know there's plenty of them out on the road," said the red cloak, removing his helm to wipe a thick mat of sweaty brown locks out of his face. Then he turned his head, and seemed to notice Sunset Shimmer for the first time, his weary countenance of exhausted pessimism yielding to a demeanor of utter incredulity, as if his mind took issue in validating the information his eyes were registering. "You!"

Twilight Sparkle and Moondancer looked at Sunset Shimmer, the object of the guard's befuddlement.

Sunset Shimmer fluttered her flummoxed eyelashes before she parroted the sentry's sentiment back at him. "Me?" said she, ponderously pointing to herself. "What about me?"

"You're ..." The guard's incredulous gaze then shifted to Moondancer. "Both of you. You're—"

"I need your help over here, Biggs," said the medic. "You can go tail chasing on your own time."

The sentry flushed. "That's not what I was—"

"Just get over here."

The guard gave Sunset Shimmer and Moondancer parting looks before turning to assist the medic, as if to reassure himself of their presence.

"Well, that just happened," commented Moondancer.

Twilight Sparkle noted the guard's odd behavior with an eyebrow cocked in bemusement. "What's his issue?"

"I haven't the slightest clue," Sunset insisted, looking every bit as perplexed as Twilight was.

Twilight then looked to Moondancer in the hopes that perhaps she could provide an explanation. A frown and a shrug was all she had to offer.

"That's definitely a problem," the medic could be heard saying to his companion.

"What's the problem, doctor?" inquired Twilight.

"Corpsman," the earth pony corrected her as he lowered the earbuds of his stethoscope to his neck. He then drew out a jar from his bag, which was filled with some sort of thick, tarry confection. "And the problem is with his respiratory expansions. They're being inhibited by an external force; he'll asphyxiate at this rate." A putridly cloying smell, not unlike the aroma of fermenting figs, filled the air when the corpsman wrenched the cap off the jar with an audible pop. "These shafts need to be removed. Then we need to turn him over so we can relieve him of his plate. In his state, he's too weak to bear its weight."

"Would removing a scrap of armor really make that much of a difference?" inquired Moondancer skeptically.

"When that 'scrap of armor' weighs somewhere within the ballpark of sixty stone? Yes."

"Sixty stone?" Moondancer balked. "That's impossible. Forget mere practicality issues, armor that heavy would crush its wearer."

The Corpsman didn't bother to argue with her. Time, at that point, was everyone's enemy. He along with the palace guard took to the task of breaking off the fletched ends of the shafts feathering The King's sides, then, with practiced hooves, the earthpony angled the barbed tips so that he could push them through the soft tissue, rather than crudely tear them out. The foul-smelling tar in the jar turned out to be a potent sealing salve which staunched the bleeding of the weeping apertures left from the removal of the oaken missiles.

"Okay, kid," said the corpsman, "help me turn him over." It was a great effort, like rolling a boulder uphill, but once the corpsman, with the help of his companion, had Sombra turned over on his side, they undid the fastening of his mantle and unthreaded the leather straps of his chest piece from their clasps. When the breast plate fell away to embed itself deep into the snow, like an iron coffin interred into the frozen earth, The King's chest expanded broadly as he quaffed in a deep gasp of air. Some of the color even began to return to his face.

"Huh," thought Moondancer, giving the breastplate embedded in the snow a dumbfounded look. "His armor really was hindering his breathing?" She was unable to lift it. Even when clamping the leather straps between her teeth and heaving backward with all her weight, the laden object remained absolutely recalcitrant in giving up so much as an inch of yield. She spat out the leather strap with an oath of exasperation. "Sixty stone," she reflected, this time a little less skeptically. "Gods be good, Sombra, what are you that you can just go frolicking about in this thing like it's nothing more than a tweed waistcoat?"

The corpsman was now tugging at the straps securing The King's gauntlet to his foreleg. "Help me get these off too," he said to the guard. "The positioning of his body will be easier once we've removed all this heavy armor. Then I'll want to take a look at that flank. I don't know what he did to it, but that exposed sinew needs to be covered. It would be better to plaster it, but bandages and hemostatic ointment will have to do for now."

"Right, doc."

"Corpsman," corrected the corpsman.

The gauntlets slid away from The King's arms when the guard and the corpsman had their straps unthreaded, and that was when Twilight Sparkle beheld The King's body bared for the first time. He was more mammoth than stallion, she realized, beholding him in all his naked glory. Even as he lay sick and dying he was an imposing specimen to behold, with iron thews rippling along the length of his mighty arms. His exposed chest was larger than a keg, and from shoulder to shoulder he measured roughly the width of a stagecoach. There had been a time when Twilight had assumed The King's armor was beaten and shaped in a way so as to give the illusion that he was larger and more imposing than he actually was. She could not have been more wrong.

Sunset Shimmer was considering Sombra's monstrous chest piece, that ungodly sixty stone hunk of iron embossed within the concavity its great weight had impressed into the earth. "Girls?" she said, "either one of you getting the feeling that Sombra went easy on us when we fought him?"

"We underestimated him was all," Twilight said matter-of-factly.

Moondancer appraised Sombra's now-exposed physique. Somehow he seemed larger without his armor than he did when he was wearing it. An illusory notion, mayhap, a deception of depth suggested by his dark fur contrasting with the stark whiteness of the snow. Though the way his biceps bulged like protruding knobs from the gnarled routes of a giant oak seemed to curtail the notion somewhat. "I was but a stock of straw in this monster's grasp," she shuddered. "He could have snapped me in two if he wanted to."

"He was trying to use you as a bargaining chip," Twilight replied. "Given the situation he was in, to just kill you would have been akin to a soldier casting aside his shield amidst a volley of arrows."

"Sunset Shimmer may be onto something with the whole Sombra going easy on us thing," Moondancer was forced to admit. "I don't remember much of what happened after he got a hold of me. All I know is that he gave us beds instead of coffins."

Twilight rolled her eyes at that. "You might as well throw out any prospect of Sombra even comprehending the definition of the word mercy, if that's what you're getting at. What's kept us alive all this time was his fear of Celestia's retribution, and nothing more."

"I wouldn't be so sure of that," interjected the guard in the red cloak.

Twilight noticed him casting a contemptuous gaze in her direction from over his shoulder. "You wouldn't be so sure of what?" she prompted.

The guard turned to face her and said, "I was down in the catacombs this morning. I was one of the guards Sombra set at the door of the apothecary's lab, to watch over you three whilst you slept."

"Your point?" replied Twilight, not sure where he was going with this.

The red cloak pointed at Sunset Shimmer. "You," he said, "Sombra ordered me to snuff you this very morning."

Sunset Shimmer's irises shrunk to pinpricks. "He what?"

The guard's tone was somber as he recollected the encounter. "I was standing over you as you slept, poised, dagger in hoof, its tip resting between your ribs. You were one thrust away from naught." He grimaced. "But I just couldn't do it. 'I'd kill for you, sire. I'd even die for you,' I said to Sombra. 'But to butcher a defenseless girl in her sleep. There's no honor in it.' Well, The King wasn't at all happy about that. At that point, I thought he was going to burnish the apothecary's walls with my brains for defying him, but neigh, he ordered me away instead, deciding upon carrying out the deed himself."

Twilight upturned her muzzle at him in a rather skeptical manner. "Then why are we all still alive?"

"Who knows?" answered the guard. "Perhaps my words reached him. Perhaps he could not go against his queen's pleas to spare you."

Twilight rolled her eyes. "More like Celestia wouldn't allow—"

"Oh, have done with that already!" The guard bulled over her. "You really are insufferable, you know that? The order to kill your friends might as well have been handed down to me from Princess Celestia herself."

Twilight, Sunset Shimmer, and Moondancer looked at him, not understanding, not comprehending. A frigid breeze whispered through the eaves of the surrounding structures. All over the town, amidst all the carnage the pirates had left behind, mares and children could be heard rending the skies asunder with their lamentations. A crier could be heard shouting for citizens to unbarricade their doors and get to the palace. Noncommissioned officers were giving orders to fortify defenses and get the wounded to sanctuary.

"Celestia," the guard elucidated, "sold your friends' lives to Sombra in order to guarantee the safety of yours, her precious protégé. He wanted to dispose himself of them, because he saw your combined powers as a threat." He looked back at The King, who lay unresponsive whilst the corpsman wrapped his wounded leg with an ointment-soaked bandage. "He's actually chosen to walk the path of mercy. Sombra can be quite the wildcard at times. Just when you got him figured out, he'll do things that would surprise even—"

"Liar!" Twilight exploded.

The Princess's paroxysm seemed to catch the stallion off guard. "I'm not lying!" he insisted. "I'm telling you, I was there. He was going to revive you after doing away with your friends, then after you've been awakened, Sombra was going to escort you to The Crystal Empire himself, to relinquish his custody over you to Celestia. I heard them working out the conditions for your safe return with my own two ears. 'Do with them as you must' I believe were her exact words during the negotiations."

"And to what end would she allow Sombra such a liberty?" Twilight demanded.

"As I've said, for your safe return. She was eager to have you back; she had grown weary of worrying about you."

Twilight's expression wasn't far removed from one who was chewing something they just couldn't bring themselves to swallow.

Moondancer's voice quivered as she spoke. "Could ... Could this really be true?"

"Of course it's not!" Twilight's voice was a whip, shrill, chiding, as if to admonish her for even considering the notion.

The red cloak did not falter. "You can ask Queen Fluttershy if you don't believe me. In fact, she fought for your friends harder than Celestia ever did. She mugged a guard and cut him with his own dagger before threatening Sombra with it, her own king and husband. She even vowed to kill herself should he dare hurt either of you."

Sunset Shimmer, the maverick who had been cast aside by Celestia once before for her iconoclastic ways, looked as if she was a little more willing to believe the information than the other two were. "Twilight," she said negotiably, "whatever Celestia may or may not have done is irrelevant to—"

"No!" Twilight cut her off, refusing to tolerate any dissent on the matter. "Now we know for a fact he's lying. First, Sombra plays the pacifist with us, then Celestia tries to have you two killed? And now—and now—Fluttershy ... Fluttershy ... is assaulting guards, brandishing blades and spewing threats?" Then she slashed the air with her hoof as she vehemently declared, "Either the world has gone completely and utterly mad or these are the most blatant lies anybody has ever tried to sell me!"

"Call me a liar all you want, I know what I—" The guard yelped when a shaft of searing light grazed his cheek, leaving in it's wake a singed furrow of smoldering whiskers.

Twilight stood with her hooves spread apart in the snow, her head down, a wisp of smoke coiling lazily from the tip of her horn. "Not. Another. Word," she growled through a row of clinched teeth.

Sunset Shimmer and Moondancer traded irresolute expressions with each other, and that was when a sound poisoned the air. It was a grotesque snarling, guttural, growling, gasping choke of a sound—thick and horrible and contemptuous. Sombra's maw was open and spurting dark fluid. His eyes were weakly narrowed, yet they positively brimmed with dark amusement.

Twilight then realized what that horrible sound was. The King was laughing at her. "Just die already!"

"In time," The King rasped in morbid amusement.

"I'd spit on you if you were even worth the saliva," Twilight sneered.

"Your friends' worth to Celestia remains even less," Sombra quipped.

Twilight began to charge a second shot, her horn flickering. "It's about time I finished what you started six moons past, deceiver."

The red cloak who came in the company of the corpsman fumbled with his helm before throwing himself in the projectile's path. "You caught me by surprise with the first one," he challenged her. "Loose another and I won't pretend it was an accident."

"The only one who's been deceived is you," Sombra taunted, laughing that horrible, wet, sputtering laugh of his again. "The deification of your princess will be your downfall. However, if you need something to worship, it might as well be me. At least I'm not a hypocrite."

The light at the tip of Twilight's horn intensified as she dressed the guard down with an unblinking glare. "You do realize I could just shoot through you?"

The guard narrowed his eyes, utterly bereft of fear or hesitation. "You better hope it kills me."

"Stand down, sergeant," came Sombra's command.

Biggs turned his helmed head to look back at him. "Sire?"

"Your wife has a little one on the way, does she not? Don't throw your life away pointlessly; I'm already dead, you fool. At this point she'd be doing me a favor."

A little one? Suddenly Twilight felt foolish. She withdrew the spell.

"I can't just shirk my duties, sire," The guard insisted. "I'm sworn to protect you!"

"That's twice you've defied me today, damn you," Sombra snarled. "Stand down, or I'll have the order handed down to The Queen to have you flogged and demoted after all of this."

The guard turned to face Twilight, looking like a whipped dog. "Yes, sire," he sullenly obeyed, then stepped off to the side with his gaze downturned.

"That's twice you've defied him?" Twilight mused.

The guard did not bother to make eye contact as he spoke. "The apothecary's lab," he elaborated, just vague enough in order to spare himself the redundancy of repeating the story. "I'm not going to try to convince you of anything. Just believe what you want."

"The lab," Twilight echoed. Could it really be true?

Suddenly, a blast could be heard. It echoed through the sky, reverberated through the town, long and low and sonorous.

Twilight, startled from her thoughts, looked toward the debouchment where the alley opened into the streets. Soldiers, guards, militia, and even ordinary citizens with rusted pot helms and crude makeshift clubs were running hither and tither with shouts of "Formations!" and "To arms!"

Twilight felt a knot forming in her stomach. "What's happening?"

"A warhorn," Sombra announced, struggling to get up. "They're here."

"You're going to open your wounds!" the corpsman exclaimed as he put up a feeble effort to restrain him. "My king, stay down. I'll get you a litter so we can wheel you back to the palace."

"Bugger that." Sombra struck him with the back of his hoof, sending him reeling back into a bank of snow that had broken off from the thatched roof above them.

The redcloak rushed to help his king to his hooves while the medic was pulling his battered face from the snow. He spat out a gob of blood before he spoke. "Sire," he spluttered, "you'll exacerbate your injuries."

"You're going to keep fighting," Twilight Sparkle said. It wasn't a question.

"Aye," was Sombra's monosyllabic response. Blood was beginning to bead around the wounds the medic had just salved. Even with the bandages binding his rent flank, the hot air wafted off the hideous wound in blistering tendrils of vapor that distorted the air around it.

"You can't fight like that," Sunset Shimmer observed.

Sombra ignored her as he pushed passed them, his haunting visage morose with agony as he shambled at an uneven gate.

"You're going to die, you know that?" Twilight shouted after him. Even as she was saying it she couldn't have said what possessed her to do so.

"I'm dead no matter what I do," Sombra said, pressing on. "At least if I die this way, it will make for a better song."

"Damnit!" Twilight, irritated by the mere flippancy of his response, chased after him. "Come on, girls. I have an idea."

When the redcloak turned to notice them approaching he threw himself in their way to impede their path to him. "Hold," he challenged them. "What do you think you're doing?"

"Sombra!" Twilight shouted.

The King stopped, looked back at her, his expression grim with the finality of his decision to fight and die alongside his people.

"You can't fight like this," she said.

Sombra turned to continue along his way.

"Wait," Twilight pleaded. "Just listen to me!"

Sombra stopped, but this time he did not look back at her.

Satisfied that she still had his attention, she turned to the others. "Girls," she began, "I'll require your magic. All of it. Every single ounce you can muster."

Moondancer looked anxious. "We're going to have to fight, aren't we?"

"No," replied Twilight. "Not us. Not directly, anyway."

"We're going to fill a support roll?" surmised Sunset Shimmer, anticipating the essence of Twilight's plan.

"Percisely," Twilight said. "We need to form a daisy chain with me as the central catalyst. From there I'll funnel my arcana into Sombra and keep him hale to the best of my abilities. Don't give all your magic to me at once, mind you. We don't know how long this battle is going to last. Just keep feeding it to me in a steady stream."

"That won't be necessary," Sombra declined. "I'd much rather your return to the palace so you can protect Fluttershy."

"The enemy's chances of making it to your wife so she'd even need our protection will slim down exponentially if we can keep you and your soldiers in the fight," Twilight objected. "But, you have my word, if you should fall, we'll fall back to the palace and mount up a defense."

Sombra made no bother to reply, though he must have seen the logic in her reasoning. He finally turned around and he regarded the three of them with a suspicious frown on his paling face. "Why would you do this for me?"

"Oh, trust me," Twilight said with a sardonic smile, "you're the last one I'm doing this for."

The Princess of friendship's cruel, brusque, brash honesty made Sombra smile. It was an impish, devilish, diabolical smirk of a smile. Like something even the foulest of dastardly evil doers would have to practice in the mirror to get just right. "Well, ladies," he rasped, "I'm ready to dance when you are."

"Sunset?" said Twilight, "how much do you have?"

"Enough," she replied. "I used some magic when I was helping out around town, but I still have plenty to spare."

"Moondancer?"

"Fully stocked."

"Good," concluded The Princess. "I'm ready when you two are. Remember: slow, steady streams."

Sombra watched them through cold, tired eyes as the three created a chain of cascading phantom ribbons, each corresponding to the colors of their magical signatures. Moondancer's was a glistening red. Sunset Shimmer's was an affair of molten orange and yellow. And finally the link Twilight created between her and Sombra was a star-speckled midnight blue.

Sombra's response to the quickening was a positive one, as if a massive weight had been lifted from his shoulders. An aura began to shimmer around him as he thrust out his bosom. He whipped his tail and knickered, spry as a yearling, paying no attention to the hurts that had been hindering him only moments ago.

"Magnificent, sire!" exclaimed the redcloak. "Let's get your armor—"

"No time," Sombra said, and within an iota of an instant he was out of the alley, a black phantom in motion.

"Wait, you moron!" Twilight shouted after him. "You'll sever the tether if you move too far from us!"

"How can anything so big move so damn fast!" huffed Sunset, falling in beside her.

"Fast?" Twilight said as they rounded the corner at the alleyway's exit. "He was 'fast' when he was wearing his armor. Gods know how—" And just then they came to an abrupt halt. They could see Sombra where he stood, poised, his tail whipping around eagerly in his blood lust as his steely gaze zeroed hotly into the distance.

They strained their senses toward the direction in which he was looking, and could see that the horizon was bristling with avian figures. The griffons were nearly a mile out and fast approaching, scores of them, hundreds of them, thousands of them.

"I didn't think there'd be that many," Moondancer said under her breath.

Twilight looked feverishly at the paltry numbers martialed about her. There wouldn't be enough of them to muster a successful defense. Not nearly enough. Not even by half. "How can there be so many of them?" she thought out loud, but nobody seemed too keen to give answer.

"There can't be that many pirates ... In the world," Sunset Shimmer despaired.

"There can and there are," Sombra replied.

"So it would seem," Twilight said. "And how do you suppose we stop them with only a hoof full of infantry?"

Sombra whipped his tail once more, exuberant with the suffusion of Twilight and her friends' magic coursing through his veins. "By killing them," he stated matter-of-factly, "how else?"