The Hidden Princess of Equestria

Celestia awoke, at the next day, repairing that she was alone on the bed with red silk sheets. Looking around, she saw Sombra immerging from the closet, putting his royal cloak and with his crown already put over his mane delicately combed.

Noticing Celestia awaken, Sombra said, while approaching her:

“Good morning, my love.”

“Good morning” she replied, while she received a kiss from Sombra on her forehead.

“Did you sleep well?” Sombra asked.

“The best I could” Celestia answered. “Our foal looked to be a little agitated.”

“Maybe he’s just too anxious to meet his father” Sombra joked.

“It can be a filly” Celestia remembered.

“I know that” Sombra said. “But even if it is a filly, I will make sure she’s the happiest princess of them all. Well, I have to go. Today, I have a lot of work to do.”

“In the last days, you have been working too hard, Sombra” Celestia observed. “Even more than usual.”

“You know that ruling a kingdom as vast as ours takes many of my time. But don’t worry, I promise that I’ll get some time just for the two… I mean, the three of us.”

And, having said that, gave a goodbye kiss to Celestia, passing then his hoof over her stomach with a smile, and then got out of the room. Celestia stood up from the bed and headed to her vanity table, where she sat in front of and started to comb her mane, while looking to the mirror. It was then that she remembered what the soothsayer had told her. Glimpses of the shapes that the smoke took passed through her mind.

Petal Shy got in the room, saying.

“Good morning, Your Highness.”

Celestia took a few seconds before replying:

“Good morning…”

“Do you want me to send the breakfast here or do you desire to eat it at the dinner room? Maybe you want to eat at the garden. It is such a beautiful day!”

But, noticing in Celestia’s distracted look, Petal Shy asked.

“Is there anything wrong, Your Highness?”

“It’s just… I can’t stop thinking about what that soothsayer said to me yesterday” Celestia revealed.

“I can’t blame you” Petal Shy said. “Anypony would be in the same way after hearing what she said. But I thought you didn’t believed on her.”

“One thing is not believe, another is to ignore” Celestia replied.

“Maybe you just need to occupy your mind with another thing” Petal Shy suggested. “What if, after breakfast, we made a stroll through the royal gardens? I heard that the gardeners are planting a new kind of flowers.”

Despite everything that was in her mind, Celestia ended up agreeing with a smile, happy to have a lady-in-waiting like Petal Shy.

After a breakfast served at the bedroom, the two mares went to stroll around the gardens. What, at the middle of the afternoon, Celestia was walking through the hallways of the castle, she found a guard passing by.

“Excuse me, do you know where is my husband?”

“The last time I saw him, he was getting into his office, Your Highness.”

“Thank you” Celestia answered, starting to head there.

Arriving to the office, she knocked, but she didn’t get any answer. Opening the door slowly, she called:

“Sombra? Are you here?”

But she found the office empty.

“It seems not.”

She then looked around the place and saw some book that seemed to had been tidied up in a hurry at its shelf at the cabinet. Celestia found that odd, as Sombra almost never let anything out of place. She advanced to there and proceeded to tidy the book up right, but, when she barely touched it, it moved to the front and the cabinet full of books moved to reveal a secret passage, to the queen’s great surprise.

Celestia couldn’t believe that there was a secret passage on Sombra’s office. Of course he knew the castle better than her, as he had lived all his life there, but she expected the stallion she loved and loved her back to tell her about that.

Questioning about what was down there, Celestia ended up getting in and started to walk down the stairs. She walked down and down until Celestia believed she was many floors under the castle. Finally, she arrived to a fork, where one of the ways was illuminated by torches. Knowing that could possibly be the way Sombra had gone, she started to cross it. At each step she gave, at that moment, her heart throbbed in a more accelerated way, while the fear of what she could find was raising even more.

At last, she started to see the end of the corridor. Getting there, Celestia made sure that she was well hidden and watched. Before her was an immense chamber with a strong structure. It looked like a stadium, with descending bleachers and what appeared to be a training ground at the bottom. There, Sombra was training with a hoofull of guards belonging to his personal guard. However, it was not that that shocked Celestia, but how he fought them, using violent blows that she didn’t know her husband was capable of.

It was then that, at the climax, Sombra charged his horn with magic, whose aura was dark and heavy, and, with a magic pulse, he made dark crystals appear on the ground and knocking off all the soldiers. Celestia hold off her breath when she saw that. Sombra had just used dark magic. If she hadn’t seen it with her own eyes, Celestia wouldn’t believe it. The warning words the soothsayer said to her started to echo in her mind. No… Celestia thought. It can’t be…

“I’m having a better control now” Sombra said. “It won’t last for me to have complete control…”

He turned to a guard and ordered:

“Bring him here!”

“Yes, sir” the guard replied.

And he got out for a while and, when he returned, he brought with him an earth stallion full of cuts and bruises, like if he had been tortured intensively for days. He was thrown before Sombra’s hoof, falling on his knees. The stallion looked to Sombra who looked back with such savagery that made the stallion to startle. Even Celestia did the same.

“Well, well, let’s get to know…” Sombra said, while rising the stallion’s chin to force him to look at him. “What have you been telling to your little friends about Equestria?”

“I… don’t know what you’re talking about” the stallion replied.

“I see…” Sombra said, while rising up. “It looks like we have a brave one, guys! Or should I say a fool? Because if you think that keeping the mouth shut before me is an act of bravery and intelligence, then I have to tell you that it’s just stupidity. I know that you are a spy working for Saddle Arabia. Those ruffians continue wanting to stand against Equestria, even knowing that they don’t have any chances. So, this is my proposition to you: tell me at this moment what I want to know and, in return, I’ll turn your death quick and painless. But, if you prefer to continue to be stubborn, then I will have to pass to less pleasant methods that will make you wish having loose the tongue when it were my guards torturing you.”

Celestia could feel her heart racing in such accelerated way and her legs were shaking, hearing Sombra saying something as wicked as that.

The stallion, in response, just spit blood over Sombra’s face and replied with a disdainful smile:

“I will never tell anything about my country to a stallion as despicable as you, who prefer to use disgusting dark magic than fighting like a real stallion!”

That left Sombra really angry, while he cleaned the blood on his face. Greenish dark smoke started to get out of his eyes and then, suddenly, he grabbed the stallion’s neck with the hoof and told him:

“The hard way it is…”

And, dropping the stallion, Sombra trespassed magically his chest and, when he took off the hoof, he took, to Celestia’s great terror, the heart, that had been enchanted and was still pumping.

“Now that I have your heart, you belong to me” Sombra said to the stallion. “I was hoping that you wouldn’t force me to this so I could spend some quality time with my family, but it looks like there’s things that a king has to do by his own hoof. Now, tell me, what did you tell to your superiors about Equestria?”

The guard tried to resist, but the enchantment on his heart forced him to tell:

“I just told them that the great and fearful King Sombra is about to be a dad… That our greatest enemy… now has a weakness.”

That made Celestia to hold her stomach, in a protective gesture towards her foal.

“While I continue to live, you can be sure that I will not let any harm come to my family. Your country will never inflict to me the same pain twice! And you’ll be the example to all the others…”

And he started to magically applying a force on the heart and the stallion felt an immense pain at the chest, something that he never felt before. It was then that the magical force reduced the heart to dust and the stallion simply fell on the ground… dead.

That caused Celestia to let a small scream get out, what echoed through the chamber. Hearing that, Sombra turned around and his look crossed with Celestia’s. She didn’t know how long they stayed like that, looking at each other, but when she started to feel her legs again, Celestia got out of there running. The instinct guided her through the secret passage until she arrived to the office and then through the hallways of the castle until she arrived to her room, where she turned to the mirror to look at her reflection.

Her face was even paler than the usual, while drops of sweat covered her forehead. She could feel herself with a fever, but that could be because of the effort she just did, having in count that she had a foal in her womb. The horror was marked on her traits, with her realizing that what the soothsayer was true. And if the part about Sombra succumbing to the darkness was real, then the one about the upcoming war was true as well.

She didn’t know for how long she stood there looking to herself, but that moment was interrupted when she heard the room’s door opening and steps getting in. Sombra’s image appeared at a corner of the mirror, but Celestia just gave him a simple and brief resentful look.

“Celestia…” he said. “We need to talk.”

“We don’t have anything to tell to each other” she replied. “I know what I saw.”

“Let me explain” Sombra asked. “That was not what seemed to be.”

The alicorn queen dropped a sarcastic laugh and comented:

“It seems stallions like to use the same excuse for everything.”

Turning to Sombra, she continued:

“Are you going to tell me that I didn’t saw my husband, a pony that I always considered to be good and generous, using dark magic and crushing the heart of a helpless pony at cold blood?!”

“What do you want me to do?!” Sombra asked. “He was a spy from Saddle Arabia. You know what I feel about them!”

“He was just a pony doing his duty to his country!” Celestia exclaimed back, taking a deep breath so she could continue in a calmer way. “I know that what they did to you was… unforgivable.”

“They killed my parents, Celestia!” Sombra shouted. “I was just a teenager… a kid, when I was forced to hold on the weight of the crown and an all land, while I was still grieving the only family I had. They were the ones that started this war, not me! But I will be the one to finish it… in any way possible.”

“Then do it without have to use this dirty and wicked methods” Celestia appealed. “Why don’t you try to make a deal with them? Why don’t you try to offer peace and show them that you are superior?”

This time, it was Sombra’s turn to drop a sarcastic laugh. He said:

“Please, Celestia… Peace is the last thing those ponies want, mainly now that they know about our foal. They will want to hurt me through you and our child.”

“But dark magic is not the solution, Sombra” Celestia said. “With it you may have power, but that comes with a price… a very high price. I know what I’m talking about, because my family has been studying dark magic to fight it.”

“I can control it” Sombra replied.

“No, you can’t, Sombra” Celestia contradicted. “You think you can, but the truth is completely different. Dark magic has a will of its own. It can take advantage of your deepest and darkest desires, fears and insecurities to manipulate you. Please, Sombra, for everything that is most sacred… for our love… and, most of all, for our child… give up using dark magic. Together, we can find a much better solution.”

Sombra turned his back to Celestia, while reflecting about the answer he would give her. A part of him wanted to accept Celestia’s words. But a voice in his mind shouted at him, reminding him of everything his enemies did to him, all the pain and suffering they caused to him and his subjects and the desire he had to make them feel the same agony he felt. It was that what made him turned to Celestia and reply:

“No, I won’t do that.”

“No?” Celestia repeated.

“You heard me” Sombra said. “I won’t give up on dark magic. I don’t care about the price I have to pay, if that can ensure the security of both my family kingdom and take revenge on my parents’ deaths.”

Celestia stayed without reaction hearing Sombra saying something like that. But she keep her posture and simply said:

“Then, you don’t give me any other option.”

And she started to charge her horn with magic.

“What are you doing?” Sombra asked.

“Ensuring that you won’t drag us all with you… for more it pains me doing it” Celestia replied.

Sombra recognized the spell Celestia was about to cast and told her:

“You wouldn’t dare… Please, Celestia, you know I would never hurt you or our child.”

“I know that and I would be willing to believe… but I can’t trust on dark magic” Celestia replied.

“No, Celestia… Don’t do this!” Sombra exclaimed.

“I’m sorry…” she said, with her eyes full of tears, getting ready to enact the spell.

“NO!” Sombra roared, while advancing towards Celestia.

But she casted the spell, what caused an explosion that hit Sombra and made him disappear. Celestia’s spell spread through all Equestria until arriving to the outside of the borders, where Sombra reappeared, falling on the ground. Getting up and getting to know where he was, the king said:

“No…”

He advanced to the border and tried to cross it, but he hit a barrier that repelled him. Sombra tried to pass through it some more times before shouting:

“CELESTIA!”

At her room, Celestia was sitting on the floor, crying for what had just happened. She just banished her own husband from his own kingdom and, despite all the pain, she had done what was best for everypony in the kingdom… and for her foal yet to born.