The Genuine Nature of Fear
Plenty of ponies had their ideas about what fear was, but most of them were wrong. King Sombra knew what fear was.
Fear was purely the knowledge that you are going to die, and that there is nothing that can be done to stop it. It’s a feeling most ponies never have to go through, or at least if they do they are suitably anaesthetised by denial. Sombra was one of the very few in history who knew exactly what it was like.
And though he didn’t exactly die, he certainly didn’t live.
In this realm he was thrown back into, nothing but a cloud of malformed rage and pathetic terror, he could vividly remember the fear of knowing, beyond any reasonable doubt, that he was done. When the crystal heart was finally lost to him, he had known fear more crippling than anything he had felt before or since.
And in this place he now occupied, feelings were strange. Much more tangible, visible and choking, like a cloud of acid. The colour his fear had chosen to take was something that clung onto his mind. Because there were many that seemed logical for it to take. It could have been black, the deep red of blood and war and dying. It could have been the light blue of the crystal heart that undid him, or the light pink of the usurper.
Instead, the fetid smog of fear that stalked him everywhere was always the same mix of purple and green.
Plenty of ponies had their ideas about what fear was, but most of them were wrong. King Sombra knew what fear was.
Fear was the same thing as anger.
Or, at the very least, they came from the same place. Because there was nothing more enraging than the memories that followed him. He had gotten cocky, because he hadn’t focused on the one creature that ever stood a chance. He had focused on the stronger ones. The usurper and and her consort, the lavender mage and her friends, the citizens of his empire.
How ironic it was that, through this, he had given the power over his life to some miserable dragon whelp.
Fear was steeped in the rage of each time he replayed it. Trapping and draining and killing like a cancer. He remembered when the miserable reptile got his filthy claws on the heart. He remembered every strike he tried to make to cage it. But the whelp had been slippery, evasive like the coward he simply must have been. It had to have been a coward, a fraud, duplicitous and two-faced.
How else would it have brought down a king?
By the time Sombra realised the dragon posed a threat, nothing seemed to work anymore. It was like the beast was buoyed by a force not of this world. He tried to rip out the dragon’s mind with his mirror, and he shook it off. He tried to trap him, and he slipped away each time.
A pathetic part of the king asked himself why he didn’t try to kill the dragon, but he knew it’s a lie. He did try to kill the dragon. He tried so many times and he just kept missing. He wanted to wrap its throat in rock and strangle the life out of it. He wanted to pierce those scales with crystal and rip and tear and puncture and he had tried so hard.
But he had been afraid, and angry, and he had allowed a child, some filthy half-breed bastard, to slip by him every time. And as Sombra’s bravado failed, and he remembered the clatter of claws, breath of fire and those emerald eyes, the purple and green around intensifies. All at once making him lesser.
Plenty of ponies had their ideas about what fear was, but most of them were wrong. King Sombra knew what fear was.
Fear was emasculation, it was feeling like you needed to run. And run he did, because in this world he still thought. He still felt, he still saw as he stalked around his empire, unseen and unmissed.
But, most pressingly, he still slept. He still dreamt.
The rightful king looked at the crystal heart. He hadn’t slept in days, the exhaustion was making him unable to stay awake as he kicked and screamed against it. Or, kicked and screamed as much as he could in this state.
Because all he could think of is the amplified sound of claws on his crystal heart, of the despair when his mirror didn’t break the dragon’s mind as it should have. All he could feel is the acute knowledge of how broken and beaten he was.
He couldn’t look at the heart anymore. It no longer brought him joy. Because the whole world around that heart was purple and green, stinking of fear. He moved and the world shifted around him, and it was like he was fleeing the flames of the dragon lords themselves. He supposed he was, in a sense. Because there had only been one dragon’s fire that had ever hurt him, and it was so similar in colour to fear.
And when he finally fell asleep, it was those colours that were the last thing he saw.
Plenty of ponies had their ideas about what fear was, but most of them were wrong. King Sombra knew what fear was.
Fear was being a child again. It was knowing strength and having it taken from you. Sombra knew fear better than anyone who had ever lived.
It always started off like this. He was back in the body of a child, in his throne room. His garments were oversized, they looked comical draped over his tiny frame. He called out for his soldiers, for his attendants, for his mother and father.
No one answered, until finally someone did.
Instead of a sweet voice to soothe him, what he heard was a roar that silenced the entire earth. There was no sunlight filtering through the arches. There were no stars either. Instead there was a simple pitch black, and soon this black gave way to a slitted, reptilian eye. It was huge, the beast must have been the size of his whole palace. He tried to tell it to leave, but his voice cracked, he forgot he was a child.
And that was his mistake, making the stupid gambit in the first place. Because a beast like this, proud and massive and terrifying, wouldn’t have even noticed something like Sombra. Until Sombra made the first move and called out.
Then that eye flicked to Sombra and he got a good look at it. There was something in the back of his mind that told him he shouldn’t be afraid. That he should have been able to kill this beast easily. But all he can think of is how he couldn’t, how he didn’t, and how he was now here. Because the eye was a deep green, surrounded by a sneering brow of royal purple scales and it made Sombra blanch. Never before had he seen a creature that was so perfectly coloured to inspire fear.
The dragon roared in fury and hatred, smashing open the walls of the palace with barely a flick of its wrist. Sombra got up to run. He only just managed to avoid the rubble. He heard a whistle like a steam engine as the drake breathed in. The boy king turned at the door to his throne room. With the walls down he could see it fully now.
The dragon was enormous, so much bigger and better and stronger than him and it was going to kill him and he knew he couldn’t stop it he knew he was going to die. It was all purple and green, a mass of razor sharp spines and scales stronger than mail. He lit his horn and tried to break the beast’s mind, but it shook him off.
Sombra summoned his mirror, his capturer of souls and spreader of terror and hoisted it up to the dragon’s face. And though for a second he saw it recognise something horrifying in the glass it doesn’t last long. It smashed his mirror like a child’s toy and a distant part of Sombra thought that was funny. It did just turn out to be a child’s toy in the end, didn’t it?
Here they were reversed yet true, and Sombra knew he should be looking down on this dragon, sneering at its weakness. Though he hated it, the last remaining good part of him knew this is how it was really. How he was eclipsed by a being much bigger than he would ever be.
The king tried his final gambit, he summoned his crystals to grab and trap and tear and snare. But every time he made a move for the beast it was already somewhere else. His attacks bounced from it. He could swear he heard the rattle of distant laughter as the world looked on, amused by his pathetic attempts to defend against this primordial force of nature.
The dragon released the breath it took nearly an eternity ago. Sombra ducked into the corridor but was thrown by the force. He looked as everything spun and lurched in slow motion.
The fire was green, one of the true colours of fear.
When it was all said and done, Sombra lay broken and smashed. His limbs were shattered and his mouth tasted of blood and everything hurt. But there was no mercy. He heared every step of the beast as it stalked up the halls to him. Every crash of its enormous feet against marble sent shockwaves that agonised his ruined form.
It stood over him, and Sombra would’ve cowered if he could. Those eyes scorched themselves into his mind forever. Devoid of equinity, love or mercy. The slits only saw prey, and Sombra was always prey for a beast like this.
It dragged its claw down his body, bisecting him as he stared in horror. In the middle of all the parts of him he hoped never to see was a shining blue heart, and the dragon plucked it from him. If it weren’t for the blood in his mouth and throat Sombra would have screamed. It didn’t matter, he had no time to before the beast opened its maw and incinerated him in flames that burned so much more than his body.
Plenty of ponies had their ideas about what fear was, but most of them were wrong. King Sombra knew what fear was.
Fear was trauma.
They were the same thing. Fear in the moment was trivial. His fear when the dragon had gotten loose with his heart, when it gave it to the usurper, was nothing compared to this. Fear was the way his amorphous form shuddered awake and lurched with sickness and terror.
Fear was having to live on under the shadow of a reptile half his size, but so much bigger than him. Fear was those reptilian eyes, fear was purple and green. And all of it was death, and anger, and emasculation, and power loss.
More than any of that though was it trauma.
More still, to Sombra, fear was a tiny dragon that haunted him. He wondered whether he would ever get peace from it.
He drifted into town to watch his citizens live their lives under the usurper and it was there he saw it. They were working diligently on a statue, and of course it was of the dragon. He moved as close as he dared, the weight of his trauma still stopping him from getting close. The inscription read ‘Spike - Vanquisher of the Tyrant King’.
He thought that was fitting in a way. Spike, like the spike through his heart, like the spike of fear he felt every time he went to sleep and remembered those terrible eyes, that scorching fire. The spike of a claw ripping him open.
The king of the crystal empire, cowed and broken stared at those eyes. The calmness and command in them. He tried to reconcile it with the memories of a sweating, nervous child he recalled when he had tried to kill this Spike, but it was getting increasingly hard to do so.
Instead, he found more and more he could only remember the feelings of terror. He could only visualise his killer as an enormous beast, slathering and monstrous. He no longer seemed to think of Spike barely getting through his mirror and crystals, now the memories were of him smashing them all.
Because fear was trauma, and trauma was a tiny dragon that got bigger in Sombra’s broken mind day after day.
Plenty of ponies had their ideas about what fear was, but most of them were wrong. King Sombra knew what fear was.
Fear was a dragon called Spike.
So he continued to back away from the statue, his reduced, gaseous form still managing to shiver under the weight of every single thing that fear was. And eventually the statue of the dragon faded from view as it was eclipsed entirely by an intangible field of purple and green.
