A Forum For Change

Do you want to know what was in his head as he woke? That little voice, the faintly kingly voice, the one that accompanies you in your loneliest times. That voice, it said "Come home through the gryphon lands, win for us."

The Invader, business in Canterlot now finished, walked away and down towards the gryphon lands. However, not knowing where that is, he went to the nearest village and asked the first pony he saw if that mare could lead him to the gryphon lands.

She agreed and walked away, with him following close behind. When they got close to the gryphon territory the invader pushed the mare off a cliff to her death. And with that he walks to the fairly distant settlement and enters it. The gryphons inside watch him semi-suspiciously but are not completely hostile to the pony look alike.

It takes him several hours of wandering before he happens upon a portal that he is attracted to. It ended up being in a small stone house which could comfortably hold about ten ponies.

Naturally, he steps into this portal and winds up in his home world, albeit face-to-floor in King Sombra's throne room. He has been transformed back into his natural, three-legged, chittined body. He also has his hands and arms back, using them to stand upright from the fall through the portal. Though, halfway through this he notices the king and immediately hurries up to him extremely close and brings his head up to look from nearly under the sitting creature of similar shape, but with a black and dark blue body rather than a red one like Zagoroth's.

"You were given a set of numbers four months ago. What were they?" King Sombra asks, staring nearly straight down himself at Zagoroth

"40 dash 9 dash 8... 0072 o-" His voice is quiet and he cuts off with a heavy coughing, his buggy eyes going wide with fear

The king frowns at him "Where have you been citizen?"

His reply is only more coughing, so he goes to the nearest window to open it but the air outside was worse for him than what was in the building. He falls to the floor, more and more weakly coughing until he just chokes up and can't breathe. Soon after he goes faint and dies of the terrible smog, his body going limp and cold quickly. Colder than in life, that is.

In Equestria, the remains of princess Luna are discovered while the invader is stepping into the portal. When the moon was supposed to go up and Luna wasn't doing anything they went looking for her and they found her, every single part. Celestia was enraged, the creature had clearly murdered her sister and she wanted to get revenge on him. However, he was gone by the time she got to the part about wanting to kill him. The portal remained open but the king didn't dare send anyone through, and Celestia wasn't going to send any of her ponies through based on what those lungs had been adapted to.

No good came of this, and the resulting grieving and turmoil in Equestria stopped them from coming to the aid of the gryphon empires in what they really seemed to think was an important war but it always sounded like something easy enough to fight to Celestia, and her ponies didn't need any more death.

A bloody sun rose that dawn in The Gealach, as if to signal a day of mourning and repentance. Not for the king, of course, but for the populace. The king, for his part, will sit in a lounge chair on the roof of his tower and watch the blood sun float across the sky, taking the time to wonder on god and the universe.

And the gryphons?