Duskmaker

by I-A-M

Rating: teen
Tags: Princess Luna, King Sombra, Adventure, Violence, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, Dark, Romance
Length: 22399

Luna seeks her own place in the world, but stepping out of the light of the sun can lead to dark places.

Luna seeks her own place in the world. Her sister is the sun in more ways than one and she's grown tired of always being eclipsed by that light, so she makes a decision. She will go on sabbatical, see the nation she was exiled from, participate in it, and what better place to start than an empire as timelost as herself. But stepping out of the light of the sun can lead to places full of shadows, and not even the Mare of the Moon commands all darkness.

Written for Ice Star
Cover Art by the Illustrious SilverWolf

Published 2020-10-15 00:10:00 UTC
Last updated 2020-11-28 04:53:10 UTC

Prologue: The Sun's Glare

“Sister, are you certain?”

Luna looked up from her packed belongings. The pile of luggage wasn’t as voluminous as one might expect from a traveling dignitary, and certainly not as large as one would expect from a Princess, but Luna had never been particularly materialistic.

“I am,” Luna replied after a moment.

Celestia regarded Luna quietly from the threshold of her room.

The chambers were kept in endless starlit darkness by a permanent enchantment. Luna had always preferred the low-light of the evening, both for its beauty and because she claimed it was easier on her eyes despite the fact that they were both immortal nigh-deities with ageless bodies.

“Is there something I should know?” Celestia asked, and Luna had to bite back a sigh.

“I am not a bullied foal to be shielded by her sister’s wing, Celly,” Luna replied tersely, earning wince from her elder sister as Celestia averted her gaze. “I’m not fleeing the palace, I simply feel it may do both of us a measure of good for me to take a sabbatical.”

“Luna, if this is about—”

“Don’t, Celly,” Luna cut her sister off with a glare.

Celestia bristled for a moment, her hackles going up and, briefly, the temperature around her rose better than a dozen degrees.

Then it passed, and Celestia drew back looking down.

“I’m sorry,” she said quietly.

Luna let out a soft nicker and dropped the latest parcel she was packing and trotted over to her sister, leaning in to click their horns together.

“I know,” Luna replied, lighting a gentle nudge of cobalt energy under her sister’s chin to raise Celestia’s head. “But you’ve been used to ruling alone for too long, and I’m not sure I have a place here anymore.”

“Luna, please.” Celestia’s voice was a wan, shadow of her usual authoritarian strength. “I’ve only just gotten you back.”

“A few years we’ve ruled ‘together’, aye,” Luna said quietly. “We’ve looked after more than a few disasters, but let us be honest with one another…”

Turning, Luna shot a spark of power at the wall of her bedroom, turning it translucent, and from the ovoid portal she magnified the city beneath them, sweeping past boulevards and thoroughfares, street faires and marketways.

And each and every one of them bore a unified scheme of colour and shade. Golds and whites abounded. Marble polished to a gleam reflected the sunlight in scatters of rainbow light. Sun-In-Glory insignias adorned murals on walls, and mosaics across the ground, all glorifying one, and only one pony.

Aurora deia Nova Celestia

Goddess of the Sun and sole Princess of Equestria.

“I’ve tried,” Celestia said, and Luna could hear the raw strain in her voice. “I am trying… but I cannot so easily upend a thousand years of cultural tradition. If there had been another way I would have taken it, I swear it.”

“I know.”

Luna looked down over the city not with jealousy or hatred as she might have a thousand years prior. Now she looked and felt only regret.

“You did what you had to do,” Luna said, looking up and banishing the visions of the city. “You erased me, and I understand why.”

The Princess of the Sun does not cry. Or if she did, she would not do so in public. A Princess must maintain a certain decorum in front of the staff at all times, and so Celestia did not cry.

“I won’t be gone for a thousand years this time,” Luna said a bit more softly this time. “I’m simply going to visit the nation whose growth I missed. It may simply… take me a while. It’s not as though the Night Court is much oe’rcome with supplicants.”

“Petitioners, Lulu,” Celestia corrected, looking tired but at least she was smiling now. “We call them petitioners, now, remember?”

“Thy modern tongue vexes, sister mine,” Luna said with playful causticity. “But yes, I do recall.”

The conversation faltered as Luna stepped back and began packing her things again. She’d already sent for a porter to start ferrying them all down to the train station.

True, she could simply teleport them to her destination, but that was an exhaustive waste of magic considering she still had to travel beyond the Walls of Sleep each night to do her duty to the citizens of Equestria. Besides, taking the train would allow her to see a little bit more of the world, and the steam engine was an invention from well after her exile which she had only had brief moments of time to examine.

It would be… fun.

At least, Luna hoped it would be.

“Is anyone going with you?” Celestia asked, clearly trying to bridge the gap. “Or are you…?”

“I’m traveling alone for now,” Luna replied as she tucked a few more things away. “But I am not averse to the notion.”

“I see,” Celestia drew back, then sighed and lit her horn to start helping her sister pack.

She didn’t try to strike up the conversation again, for which Luna was grateful. They had repaired as much of their sisterly bond as they’d been able to in so short a time, considering their lifespans. They took broke fast and took dinner together more often than not, and in the past year their conversations had grown easier and easier.

But that one unspoken wedge still lay between them.

The yak in the room, as it were.

The truth of the matter was that, regardless of how contrite Celestia was about how the Nightmare Rebellions had begun, and how regretful Luna was about how they proceeded and ended, nothing could change the fact that Equestria was a nation that still worshipped one Princess above all.

Save for a relatively small faction of nobles and a bit of grassroots support out of Ponyville, Luna was still the black sheep of the royal family.

The porters arrived in good order, and within the hour all of Luna’s traveling luggage was on its way to the station, leaving her room almost as bare as it had been when Celestia had first had it commissioned in the hopes that her sister would one day occupy it.

“I had hoped to never see these walls so empty again,” Celestia said quietly.

“I’ll be back,” Luna promised, turning to her sister to offer an affectionate nuzzle. “Thou art still my sister, Celly, as I am thine.”

“Your diction is slipping again, Lu,” Celestia admonished with a soft, slightly teary laugh.

“Oh hush,” Luna chuckled as she wrapped a wing around her sister and wrapped her in a hug.

“I’ll miss you.”

“I’ll write,” Luna promised.

“It won’t be enough,” Celestia said, her voice cracking as she buried her face in Luna’s flowing starlight mane.

Luna sighed and rested against her sister for a long moment before finally pulling away. By the time she did, her sister’s mask was back in place. What tears may have come were banished, and the regal countenance of the Princess of the Sun was intact as if it had never known a moment of wear.

“I’ll give thy— blast it— your love to Cadence and Shining Armor,” Luna said. “And many kisses to our little niece as well.”

“Assuming she doesn’t flare and blow you through a wall,” Celestia remarked playfully as they stepped out of Luna’s room and began making their way to the closest balcony.

“Bah, I would endure,” Luna scoffed, flicking her mane over a shoulder in a huff. “Besides, I’ve always thought walls were there for putting holes in.”

“That explains much.”

“Silence, thou grubby snoutband,” Luna riposted, shooting a glare at her sister.

“I do miss the old insults,” Celestia said wistfully.

“Aye,” Luna groaned. “Calling our lagabout nephew a ninnyhammer is significantly less satisfying than it ought to be when nopony knows what it means, and explaining rather ruins it.”

“Perhaps spends some time among the youths while you’re wandering, then,” Celestia supplied. “I understand they’ve come up with some rather clever slang terms and I’ve no doubt a bevy of colorful new insults is among them.”

“Mayhap.” Luna looked thoughtful at the notion. “Although I’m still lost on the provenance of the word ‘yeet’.”

“Some things are best left unknown, dear sister,” Celestia replied with a laugh.

The cold air of Canterlot and the surrounding winds that coiled about the Canterhorn Mountain to which it clung swept across the twin goddesses as they emerged into the bright, sharp, midautumn sunlight.

They spread their broad wings with synchronised snaps, and just as they were about to take off, Luna shot her sister a playful smirk.

One that Celestia was already returning.

Parting may be sorrowful at times, but siblings tend to find their way back together. After a thousand years, Celestia knew that to be truer than most, and so she did not grieve for her sister leaving her side once more.

She did, however, indulge in one more race.

Chapter 1

The Crystal Empire, despite its immense and glorious capital city, was barely worth the name in Luna’s opinion.

She’d packed away a few texts on the place for her journey. The journey by train took three days, and she’d made certain to have plenty of reading material, and of the dozen tomes and treatises Luna had stowed regarding the Empire, she had already burned seven of them.

All of them were inaccurate to such a degree as to be considered a raw impossibility. How Celestia had allowed them to be published Luna couldn’t fathom. Even the five which had survived her scrutiny were barely passable, containing dozens of minor falsehoods but which seemed, at least to Luna’s eye, to have been published with as earnest and genuine an attempt at research as could be expected.

Admittedly, even the crystal ponies of the Empire didn’t remember much of their own history. Tens of thousands of tomes lay untouched in the vast libraries of the Imperial University, but no one could seem to parse out the organizational system that was used.

At least the tyrant Sombra hadn’t stooped as low as book burning, Luna mused as she paged through the fourth set of essays regarding the Second Shadow War.

The problem was that the period of time known as the Age of Shadows had lasted roughly two centuries. That meant that, by the time anyone got back into the libraries, the methods, secrets, and most importantly the keys to the warding spells, were lost with the near-extinction of the line of Cadenza.

One of the things Luna hoped to be able to do during her sabbatical, and one of the reasons she had selected the Crystal Empire as her first major stop, was to see if there was any knowledge she might be able to lend to the recovery of the Empire’s cultural history.

It would be nice for once, Luna thought grumpily as she shoved the book away. To not be regarded as a fuddy-duddy because of my archaic knowledge.

“Final stop! The Crystal Empire!”

The call echoed through the cabin, and Luna stood, stretched, and yawned mightily before shaking the pins and needles from her legs.

The halls of the royal cabins were larger than most, but they were still necessarily confining with respect to the size of the train itself, so rather than cram her royal bulk into said halls, Luna opted to eyeball the window, take an educated guess, and teleport herself onto the platform.

Air displaced with a dull snap, as she appeared well ahead of both her luggage and her two thestral bodyguards, Gloam and Heartfelt, who were an allowance for her sister’s peace of mind and nothing more.

They were pleasant enough, Luna supposed. Gloam was curt and professional and did his duty as a guard. Heartfelt, on the other hoof, was irrepressibly and surprisingly cheerful for someone in the Night Guard, but she’d also scored top marks in both stealth and aerial combat, just like Gloam.

“Your Highness!”

Luna scowled as Heartfelt hustled out of the train car with a grumpy Gloam on her fetlocks.

“Please! Your Highness, we’re never supposed to be more than ten paces from you!”

“Then I advise th— you grow a horn and learn to teleport,” Luna said as she picked up her pace.

The idea that she even needed guards was laughable. Perhaps Celestia had not fought a proper war in over four centuries but Luna still remembered the pitched, trench battles of the Second Shadow War and the grim, bloody, urban combat of the Nightmare Rebellions all too well.

Her arms and armor, relics of power whose art of manufacture has since been lost or forgotten, were stowed in a pocket dimension to be called in an instant to her side.

On the off-chance a foe did arise which Luna needed aid to defeat, these thestrals were going to be a burden more than a boon. She would need her sister’s aid, not the barely-enchanted blades of a pair of mortals, no matter how skilled they might be.

Gloam made a few curt orders to the surrounding porters, briefly flashing the royal coat of arms as proof of their authority, before spreading his dark, leathery wings and flapping to catch up with his companion and his liege.

Luna ignored the proffered transports that rested at the edges of the shimmering road which ran alongside the train station. Instead, she spread her wings, flapped, and carried herself over the light traffic in a hopping bound that should have seemed awkward, but carried with it the grace of a prancing doe.

Gloam and Heartfelt shared weary looks as their Princess once again cleared out of their sight. They had worked together long enough that they shared a silent rapport, and the wordless conversation they were now having was one of mild regret at having volunteered for this particular posting.

Leaving her guards behind, Luna strode into the great, gleaming city.

Nowadays everypony in Equestria called it ‘The Crystal Empire’, but that was a cold, empty name that once belonged to a vast swathe of northern reach encompassing a half dozen cities and hundreds of villages, all depressingly reduced to this.

A single city.

Empire indeed.

To Luna, this city was and would always be the Crown City of Crysopolis.

Rather than cause a fuss by waltzing into the city itself with pomp and grandeur as a Princess of Equestria, Luna discorporated, melted away, and found a comfortably dark alley to reform in.

The mare that stepped out of the alley and into the streets was one that would not warrant a second glance. Her mane was a suitably drab shade of blue somewhere between pastel and chemical runoff, a coat that was the dull, flat, color of unpolished grey quartz, and she bore a cutie mark depicting a simple silver ring topped with an amethyst.

With her horn invisible and her magical aura shrouded, Luna mixed into the populace down a broad thoroughfare that carved through the heart of the city towards the towering Imperial Palace.

A cold sliver passed through Luna for a brief moment as she looked up at it.

Every other time she had come to visit Cadance and her family, it had been in the carriage of an aerial chariot. The last time she had looked up at it from this vantage, she’d done so at the head of an army with her sister by her side and the Shadowguard of King Sombra arrayed before them. A two-thousand-strong combat force of the fiercest and most disciplined warriors and warmagi that the Shadow-Era Crystal Empire could produce.

The battle had been a bloody one.

Briefly, Luna let her mind wander to darker memories as she stepped out of the crowd and into the main plaza where the worst of the fighting had taken place.

Crystal does not heal quite like stone. Marble slabs can be replaced and concrete torn up and reset, but crystal?

No, crystal is sturdier by far but by that same token, the scars tend to last a bit longer than that.

Luna paused at a bench that was set around the edge of the plaza. The corner was shorn off. The shattered corner had been ragged when the juggernaut she’d been fighting had pitched her against it. She’d struck it hard and rebounded off the corner with a brutal snap that left a jagged break, but either time or a careful crystal artisan had smoothed it over.

Following her memories of the battle, Luna walked over to the wall of a bistro where a mural had been painted. The crystal ponies were such clever people. They’d created a special pigment that bonded with crystal surfaces and altered the reflection of light that reflected, creating vibrant colors seen nowhere else in Equestria.

The paint job wasn’t quite enough to mask the crack if one knew what one was looking for, however.

Luna had broken the juggernauts back against the wall, and she recalled how disgusted she’d been to see the pitiful, mind-broken creature still trying to kill her even after the mortal blow.

She’d put it out of its misery then right where she was standing now.

“Move, vagrant!”

Luna turned at the sharp tone to see a pair of Imperial Guards jostling a lumpen figure in a ragged cloak. She narrowed her eyes as she started towards them. The guards were knocking the butts of their spears into the poor stallion’s side, who was stumbling away with an obvious limp towards the gate quarter.

“Excuse me!” Luna snapped. “What’s going on? Has this stallion committed some crime?”

The Guards turned from their work to glare through the narrow slits of their helms at Luna’s disguised form.

“None of your business, ma’am,” the Guard said politely. “We’re simply clearing undesirables from the—”

“Undesirables?!” Luna snarled, stepping between the guards and the stallion and knocking one of their spears away. “This is a living being! Not an ‘undesirable’! If you want him gone then feed him! Clothe him! Give him a warm bed and meaningful labor!”

“Ugh, another activist,” the left guard grumbled, “look, lady—”

“ACTIVIST?!” Luna snarled, her temper roaring to the fore. “I am no activist!”

There is no power quite like the unveiled magical might of a fully mature alicorn, especially not one bonded to a planetary satellite. Luna’s disguise didn’t so much vanish as it did explode off of her with a noise like splintering glass. Crystal ponies in the plaza screamed and cried out as they ducked for cover.

In a lonely quarter of her mind, Luna actually admired the guards for their gumption. They didn’t run, they thrust their spears forward in reflexive, disciplined, killing strikes that must have been the result of intense and rigorous training.

A flare of magic turned the speartips to brittle glass and the hafts to ash as Luna towered over her would-be assailants.

Both guards stared up at her, then hit the ground prostrate. They didn’t beg or babble, they simply bowed.

“We are no activist,” Luna repeated in a grim tone like a blade slipping from an oiled sheathe. “We art a Princess and were this kingdom mine the brace of thou wouldst be stripped of rank, flogged in this very square, and then cast out in sackcloth to endure this ‘vagrancy’ thou dost deride.”

It took Luna a moment to realise that the plaza had gone utterly silent, and she let out a slow, irritated breath as she looked up to regard the doubtless terrified ponies of the Empire.

To her surprise, there was no terror in them. Not amongst the populace anyway, although she felt the fear radiating up at her from the two guards she was in the middle of admonishing. The rest of the populace had dropped everything to kneel.

Not grovel.

Not cower.

Kneel.

It was a gratifyingly refreshing change of pace.

“Aunt Luna!”

From high above, the graceful figure of Princess Mi Amore Cadenza, Cadance to her friends and family, and Empress de Cadenza to the ponies of the Empire, descended on crystal wings into the midst of the plaza.

At no point did a single pony raise their heads.

“Cadance,” Luna said tersely. “Thy explanation for the actions of thy guards ought best be on par with the Neighttysburg Address, or we will be having far harsher words in private.”

“What do you mean?” Cadence asked, her eyes flicking between Luna and her prostrate guards. “What were they doing?!”

“They were—” Luna began, turn to the cloaked stallion behind her, only to find the figure had taken the opportunity to flee at some point. “—oh… well, we can’t say we art surprised,” Luna grumbled before turning back to the guards and continuing. “They were harassing a poor, vagrant stallion with a limp, and We must say, Cadence, if thy definition of keeping order in thy city involves browbeating and ousting the poor rather than helping them then We must wonder if mayhaps We wasted our time o’erthrowing the Tyrant King Sombra.”

With each word, Cadence grew paler, and by the end, her head was lowered and her ears sagging.

The expression lasted only a moment before her eyes blazed and she fixed her furious gaze on the two guards. Although their heads were still pressed to the ground, they both shivered. They could feel the anger directed at them. The rage of an alicorn, even a fledgling one like Cadence, is no small thing.

“I am so sorry, Aunt Luna,” Cadence said quietly as she turned her gaze back to the Princess of the Moon. “This wasn’t how I wanted your arrival to go, and believe me I will be looking into our guards'… indiscretions… thoroughly.”

“Thou owe’st us no apology, Cadence,” Luna said stonily. “Thou art a Princess, and thy mistakes are inflicted upon thy people, not thy peers. Remember that.”

Luna stepped past Cadence as she spoke, but paused as she finished, then sighed and layered a wing over Cadence’s back.

“Thou art young,” Luna said quietly. “Thy greatest mistakes are nothing to the mistakes of Our— of my sister and I… we will speak of this later, and as for the guards? I will leave them to you. They are your people, not mine.”

Cadence nodded, and Luna could feel the misery in her, but to the young alicorn’s credit, it didn’t show on her face. There was just hard and imperious authority there as she moved out from under Luna’s wing to face down the two guards.

Spreading her wings, Luna rose from the plaza and angled herself towards the Crystal Palace. As she did she scanned the plaza one last time, looking over the ponies and over Cadence as she spoke sternly to her guards.

At that same moment, she saw something else: a figure wearing a dirty, ragged brown robe in one of the alleys that lead into the plaza, and who was not looking at Cadence, and nor was he kneeling.

The vagrant was looking directly up at Luna, and she got only a brief glimpse of eyes like dark rubies set into a shadowed face before he vanished into the alley.

“Curious,” Luna mumbled.

Curious, but meaningless. If he wanted help he’d had only to ask, but he fled instead. Perhaps the poor stallion would find more generous souls elsewhere, and she at least hoped he found a warm place to sleep for the night.

Spreading her wings, Luna caught a thermal and turned, soaring towards the Imperial Palace. She would begin her work tomorrow and perhaps offer a few remedial lessons on rulership to Cadence in the meantime.

Celestia had clearly neglected something.

Chapter 2

The nights in the Crystal Empire were not as cold as Luna had expected, but they were certainly far clearer.

Canterlot, for all its height being mounted along the side of the mighty Canterhorn, was forever illuminated by magelights. Even that faint light pollution dulled the luster of Luna’s night sky, and it was one of the many small and secret resentments she held against the city.

For all of its grandeur, Luna had despised the city of Canterlot from the moment she first set hoof upon it.

Luna had never, and likely would never, voice such things to her sister. Celestia loved her ponies and her city with all her heart. It was a cold, divine love, but it was love all the same. Luna could never hurt her sister in that manner, and so she kept that small resentment to herself.

Truthfully, though, she greatly preferred Crysopolis, or whatever it was the locals now called it.

The dim but gentle illumination of the city was sunken deep into the ancient crystal foundations, and the crystal ponies were perfectly comfortable with the low-light conditions. That gentle luminance combined with the clear, bright star-and-moonlight made everything clear enough that it was easy on the eyes and aesthetically pleasing to the senses.

At least, Luna thought so.

A gentle knock at the door disturbed Luna’s thoughts, drawing her attention away from the night sky and back down to Equus, and the palatial room she’d been given.

“Aunt Luna? May I come in?”

Cadence’s voice was muffled beyond the doors, and Luna sighed quietly as she lit her horn and opened the door.

“This castle is thi— is yours, Cadence, you needn’t ask permission,” Luna said with a wry chuckle as Cadence entered the sitting room of Luna’s suite.

Behind her trailed three figures. The first she recognised; Shining Armor was Celestia’s Captain of the Guard prior to his nuptials, now he was Lord Governor of the Crystal Empire. He wore the crystalline-heart coat of arms of House Cadenza, and a suit of lightweight armor, but no weapon. Beside him was a slightly larger stallion, broad as a bear and twice as stoic, who wore the armor and insignia of a Colonel.

The third stood out only by her dichotomy to the others. She was small, slight, and willowy, with a chartreuse coat, and wearing voluminous and hooded purple robes that sat poorly on her as if they were made for another, larger pony, and a stallion at that.

“Princess,” Shining knelt briefly, per his station, before raising his head and giving her a more familiar and wearier smile. “It’s good to see you again, Luna.”

“Governership suits you, Lord Armor,” Luna said with a chuckle.

“I disagree,” Armor replied with a sigh. “And I’m not even the official ruler.”

“Heavy is the head that bears the crown,” Cadence quoted in a tired voice. “I never really appreciated what it must have been like for Celestia to rule, and I can’t even imagine what you and her had to deal with back when Equestria was still new.”

“It was a different time,” Luna said, waving a hoof dismissively. “Do not compare trials, that is an ill path to trot, and besides, we are neglecting these newcomers.”

“Oh, yes, sorry,” Cadence stepped to the side and gestured to the large stallion. “This is Colonel Sunder, he commands the main body of the Imperial Guard.”

“My deepest apologies, your Highness, for the actions of my men.” Sunder’s voice was a deep, stentorian rumble that Luna found quite pleasant. “My thanks for your intervention. Be assured they will be suitably reprimanded.”

“I should hope so,” Luna said dryly, before turning to the young mare. “And you?”

The mare in the robes almost jumped at being addressed, then scrambled into something approximating a bow which resulted in her knocking her head painfully against the floor.

“Ow— Uhm, s-s-sorry,” she said, and Luna raised an eyebrow. “My n-name is Jadeite S-Spur, Grand Crystal S-Sage, p-pardon my s-stutter, your Highness.”

Luna glanced at Cadence who gave her a weak smile.

“She’s really good at her job, Aunt Luna,” Cadence promised. “The sages have been instrumental in repairing the city and raising the pylons that hedge out the storms.”

“I had thought the Order of the Crystal Sages dissolved,” Luna said, eyeing Jadeite. “My understanding was that King Sombra destroyed your Chanceries and eliminated the practice save for himself and a few choice disciples.”

“He was not as th-thorough as he th-thought,” Jadeite said with a shaky laugh. “Our p-p-practices endured in s-secret, and when we were f-finally f-freed, we re-establish the old w-ways.”

“I was hoping you could work with the sages to recover some of the old texts and secrets of the order,” Cadence said brightly. “The Imperial University’s libraries are barely functional right now, and sages have been doing their best, but most of them are better than twenty generations removed from the original order prior to its dissolution.”

“Even I cannot fathom how much must have been lost in that time,” Luna lamented, shaking her head, and her mane of stars shifted around her like a mantle. “I shall happily extend my hoof to the sages and their good works.”

“You have our d-deepest gratitude, your Highness,” Jadeite said, bowing low once more, and more carefully this time.

“And if you have time,” Shining interjected, “I hoped to ask you a few things about what Sombra may have… left behind.”

Luna raised an eyebrow at that.

“Clarify,” she spoke with quiet authority, and Shining immediately straightened to attention by force of long habit.

“We’ve had reports from Imperial Rangers of shadows and enormous… things… moving about in some of the distant areas of the Empire’s old territories,” Shining said in the short, clipped manner of a guard giving a report. “We’ve kept our distance, and it’s possible they’re just large, local fauna, but…”

“Doubtful,” Luna said darkly. “Sombra reaved this land of most of its natural fauna over the course of two centuries of experimentation with dark magic. Few living creatures were left unsullied by his wicked arts.”

The four ponies shared nervous glances as Luna turned to glare out the window, this time fixing her eyes on the distant horizon that led out to the desolate, blizzard-rocked tundra.

“You really think some of Sombra’s creations could have lasted this long?” Cadence asked quietly.

For a long moment, Luna was quiet, lost in her memories of wars long past. She thought, at times, that she remembered far too much for her liking. The Shadow Wars were by far some of the worst of those memories, even counting the crimes she had committed during the Nightmare Rebellions.

“My sister and I,” Luna began, just as Cadence was about to speak, “have had a very long time to practice our magic and build our repertoire of spells, you know.”

Cadence stared at her Aunt, then coughed quietly, and nodded.

“I know,” She said softly. “Celestia taught me everything I know about magic.”

“And yet, she is not half the magus that I am,” Luna said, and before anypony could argue she continued with: “and she will admit as much herself if you ask.”

That set Cadence back a step. Celestia was considered the premier magical genius in the whole of Equestria. Hearing that she was, by Luna’s description, so far behind the lunar alicorn, was shocking to say the least.

“Celestia’s power comes from a combination of brute force tempered by centuries of diligent practice,” Luna continued. “But she has no talent for the subtle arts. She’s far more comfortable with her arsenal at hoof than a spell.”

“Why are you saying this?” Cadence asked quietly.

“Context, dear niece,” Luna said, finally turning from the window to face her guests. “I am telling you this for context because I need you to understand that while I can make my sister look like a novice with my mastery of magic, King Sombra’s skill and genius makes us both look like buffoons.”

Even with context, they could not possibly know what it was like to go up against him.

Sombra had been terrifying in a way that even Discord hadn’t been because at least Discord had been clearly insane. Discord was the spirit of Disharmony itself, he was the next best thing to a God. Sombra had been born mortal, achieved his masteries as a mortal, and then ascended beyond that limited spectrum on the wings of his genius.

In all of her immortal life, there was no being that Luna could recollect which frightened her more than the mortal stallion called Sombra, and at the same time, no foe for whom she bore greater respect.

“We will aid the sages for the time being,” Luna said, finally breaking her silence as she turned to Shining Armor. “But the moment thy— damnation— your rangers report a sighting of one of these things, I will fly out to meet them.”

“Aunt Luna, are you sure?” Cadence asked worriedly.

“I am,” Luna replied firmly. “If this is merely the mutant offspring of one of Sombra’s horrors, then so much the better. We will organise a hunt and put it out its misery. If it’s one of his original creations, however, then I am the only one save for my sister who might recognise it on sight and be able to identify its abilities and weaknesses.”

Too many memories were lost in the fog when Sombra banished the Crystal Empire beyond the Wall of Sleep, and since it was unlikely that the average Imperial citizens had any knowledge of the abominations that Sombra fielded on his front lines, and a sage was far too valuable a resource to risk on an excursion like this, that left only herself.

Luna knew all too well what she would be looking for and though she did not relish reliving her nightmares of war, a small part of her looked forward to taking the field again.

It would be nice to feel useful again.

A week passed before any news reached the University, and when it did it found Luna in the main library hall of the Imperial University looking over schemata of one of the warded wings.

“These are obnoxious in the extreme,” Luna grumbled as she compared her notes on one of the main sigilic circuits to her latest tests. “I can see why your sages have had no fortune in bypassing them.”

“There m-must be a k-key,” Jadeite said, glowering at the schemata. “We s-simply haven’t found it yet!”

“I doubt it, actually,” Luna remarked as she looked up and rubbed a hoof between her eyes, trying to push away the growing headache. “As unpleasant as this is to suggest, I suspect these wards were intended to be lowered manually.”

Jadeite paled, then groaned and thumped her head against the table they were working at.

“You’re j-joking.”

Luna chuckled. She had to admit, she liked Jadeite. Her stutter was charming in its own way once you got used to the fact that any conversation with the sage took a bit longer than normal. With her hood down, she also had to admit the young sage was quite pretty. Her dark olive mane complimented her chartreuse coat nicely, and she possessed a brilliantly analytical mind that made her a pleasure to work with.

“Sadly not,” Luna admitted. “In a way, it’s quite clever, and it’s probably the reason Sombra never bothered breaching or destroying the libraries, it would be too much work.”

“But s-s-surely that would be far too complicated f-for day-to-day use!” Jadeite protested.

Luna shook her head and pushed the schemata of the wards to Jadeite.

“Not necessarily,” Luna said. “Imagine practicing with a puzzle box over and over and over again until you could solve it by muscle memory alone. Likely they had a wardmaster for each wing for whom that was their entire duty, simply opening and closing the doors.”

“That’s m-mad,” Jadeite said weakly. “Are you s-sure?”

“Obviously not,” Luna said, waving a hoof. “But it’s the most likely answer to the current situation. None of these sigils suggest that they’re connected to a total bypass, which would be required if a keystone existed.”

Jadeite let out a defeated groan and slumped against the table.

“It will take m-months just to f-figure out the combination to a s-s-single door!” She grumbled, face-down on the crystal table’s surface.

“And even longer to master the method of opening it!” Luna said with a bright chuckle. “Ah, yes, I’ve missed the old ways.”

“I regret m-my life ch-choices,” Jadeite lamented, then let out a bitter laugh as she sat up. Luna’s bright, bell-tone laughter joined hers a moment later.

This felt good.

Luna felt better than she had in weeks, actually.

Working on magical theorems and puzzles, ancient spellwork, and talking over strategies late into the night with like-minded individuals was something she had missed.

True, there were only a dozen sages currently, and twice that in training. The order’s esoteric arts surrounding the shaping and maintenance of the crystals that made up the Empire wasn’t something that could be learned in a day, or even a decade.

Jadeite was the next best thing to a prodigy and understood the arts of Crystal-shaping better than most. She earned her role as Grand Sage rightfully, and Luna had taken a fond liking to the quirky mare.

“Well, good news though,” Luna said with a grin as she pushed a pile of notes across the table. “I think I’ve managed the calculations for this door, at least.”

“Oh?” Jadeite gathered up the notes and dragged them closer, looking over them with care, and her smile grew larger with each passing moment.

“It will take some time to master the sequence for opening it,” Luna said. “But…”

“No, this is b-brilliant!” Jadeite looked up at Luna with a broad grin. “We’ve got s-something at least!”

Before Luna could reply, a heavy knock rattled the heavy crystal doors to the library which swung open to admit a pair of guards followed by the ursine frame of Colonel Sunder.

“Princess Luna,” he rumbled, kneeling briefly, before straightening as Luna stood from the table.

“Report, Colonel.” Luna gave the order by reflex. A millennium may have passed since her last battle, but for her, it didn’t feel nearly so long ago.

If Sunder minded receiving an order from someone who wasn’t his direct superior, he didn’t show it. Instead, he simply snapped to attention and nodded before starting.

“Imperial Ranger unit twelve sent back a missive reporting one of the entities, along with a brief description, although it’s sparse. We’re putting together a response team—”

“Give me the description first,” Luna cut in. “A response team may be meaningless depending on its contents.”

Sunder bristled for a moment, then calmed and nodded.

“Aye, your Highness,” he said with a low nod. “The entity is roughly twenty klicks beyond the city borders, north by northeast. There’s no actual description of the entity itself, only a mention of an impenetrable shroud of darkness approximately a hundred meters across.”

“Not approximately,” Luna replied grimly. “It will be exactly one hundred meters across, and in all directions.”

“Your Highness?” Sunder raised an eyebrow.

“It’s called an umbral shroud,” Luna said quietly. “And it narrows down the possible nature of the entity far more than you might think. Sombra created dozens of living, or half-living, dreadnoughts meant for various purposes, from breaking formations to breaching walls, but many of them could project a shroud like the one you described in order to prevent my sister and I from accurately destroying them at range.”

“I see,” Sunder said grimly. “So it is one of his, then?”

“Almost certainly,” Luna replied, before turning to Jadeite. “Grand Sage, I’m afraid I must away for the time being, I bid thee good fortune in parsing this puzzle, and look forward to sharing tea again soon.”

“Of c-course,” Jadeite said softly. “Be c-careful, Princess.”

Luna smirked as she stood to her full height and rolled her neck.

“Now where’s the fun in that?”

Chapter 3

No guards. No reinforcements.

Just the way she liked it.

Luna stretched her wings wide as she soared through the frigid air of the frozen north towards the site Colonel Sunder had reported. Under royal orders, she’d forced her own bodyguards to remain in the Crystal Palace. They'd bristled and protested of course, but in the end they'd had no choice but to obey their sovereign.

It was a mercy, as Luna saw it.

The Night Guard of this lesser era was nothing compared to the hale masters of war she had marched into battle with against Sombra and, later on, her own sister. The organization was a brittle shadow of its old glory, a relic kept around by Celestia out of sentiment, rather than any true need or purpose.

Heartfelt and Gloam, for all of their high marks and good training, were born in an era of peace.

This shrouded thing in the north was a product of a different age. It, like herself, was an entity forged for the purpose of war and war alone.

Ah, so that’s it.

Luna smiled wanly against the whipping winds as the realisation touched her mind.

That was why she was so eager to face this thing down alone. Not because calling reinforcements would endanger other ponies who were unsuited to battle something like this, even though that was true. And it wasn’t even to protect the Crystal Empire, although it was true she was doing that as well.

No, Luna wanted to fight it because she was tired.

She was tired of pretending to be the demure Princess of the Moon. Tired of pretending to be content with this soft, spineless age.

Luna was tired of peace.

One more thing she could never confide to her sister.

Her wan smile stretched into a grin as she put another surge of strength behind her wings and soared forward. She was not necessarily eager to reach the shadow but took comfort in that when she did it would be glorious.

Luna saw it from almost a full kilometer away.

The entity was little more than an amorphous roil of shadows that meandered aimlessly across the tundra.

Her eyes narrowed as she measured its pace and direction before she glanced down and lit her horn to scan for the mental flickers of equine minds. She found them easily enough.

No matter how well camouflaged they made themselves, it took a true master to hide the presence of a mind. None in this era that Luna had encountered knew the trick, which was unsurprising. Few in her own time could have managed it. Celestia herself was hilariously bad at hiding her presence unless she was using powerful masking magic which was a dead giveaway by itself.

Luna turned a graceful corkscrew in the air, angled down, and dove, slicing through the cold winds to land amidst the hidden rangers in their mottled gray-and-white cloaks.

“Report,” Luna said tersely. “And don’t bother hiding. If that beast hasn’t noticed you then I assure you it’s not because of your stealth, it is for the same reason you might not notice an insect.”

Four rangers rose sheepishly from the snow, and Luna favored them with a wry grin.

“Your discipline speaks well of your training, though,” Luna amended. “Could any distinguishing traits of the beast be discerned?”

The four ponies shared glances before one, an earth pony mare, gave a short nod and stood straighter than the rest.

“Lieutenant Deadeye, ma’am,” she said as she saluted. Luna couldn’t tell her true colors under the oil paints that distorted her coat. “I got the closest to its path and…”

She shuffled around in her baggy cloak for a moment before drawing out a small notebook with a black bookmark tucked into it, and hoofing it over.

Luna raised an eyebrow as she lit her horn and took it, flipping it open to the marked page. On the rough paper, sketched in charcoal, was a simple drawing. It was something like a pawprint, the like of which might have belonged to an enormous canine if one had both an extremely loose idea of what a wolf’s paw was supposed to look like and a willingness to drastically improvise.

The sight of it put a cold stone in Luna’s gut as she slowly closed the notebook and passed it back to Deadeye.

“How long has this thing been wandering out here?” Luna asked quietly, and the sudden shift in her tone and expression sluiced ice down the spines of all four rangers.

After a moment, Deadeye turned to the larger stallion among them.

“Captain Gander, ma’am,” he introduced himself as he stood. “It’s been sighted three times, counting this one, over the past five months. We think it emerged somewhere east of the city and it’s been moving anticlockwise around city borders ever since.”

“But you can’t be certain?” Luna asked.

“No, ma’am,” Gander replied. “We’re not sure how, but we always lose it shortly after each appearance, it’s like it just… ceases existing.”

“I see.”

Luna turned away from the rangers to face the silent tempest that was slowly plodding away from them and narrowed her eyes. This was what she'd wanted, Luna reminded herself. She had wanted a fight like the old days, when life and death were on the line and nothing else mattered but the next moment, the next second, the next breath.

“We shall be teleporting thee and thine back to the Crystal Palace,” Luna started as she began stretching, rolling her neck and withers to the tune of a few satisfying pops and cracks. “With all haste, you must alert Princess Cadence and the Lord Governor Armor to raise all defenses, then send missive begging support from my sister in Canterlot.”

“Princess?” Gander spoke with quiet dread, and whatever other words remained in him died in his throat as Luna fixed with a one-eyed glare over her shoulder.

“Tell Our sister we battle the Sun Dog, she will know the name,” Luna said grimly. “And to satisfy thy curiosity, the daemon shaketh thy pursuit by using the portentous moment between day and night to burrow twixt this realm and the Dreamtime only to emerge at some later dawn, but which dawn We cannot say, so We must challenge it here. The longer We permit it to wander and glut itself on solar magic, the more impossible it will be to slay.”

“Can’t we simply leave it alone?” One of the other rangers offered meekly. “It doesn’t seem aggressive.”

Luna turned her glare on him and he wilted back.

“Nay,” Luna replied quietly. “It circles thy city because it has chosen Crysopolis as its next feasting ground, but likely it has been starving for centuries, so it feeds first on the light of the sun. Had We but known when the Sun Dog first emerged We could have slain it with ease, but now… now We are not so sanguine of that outcome.”

“Ma’am… your Highness, please,” Gander said grimly. “We can’t allow you to engage that thing if it’s as dangerous as you say! We can muster forces and—”

“By the time any significant force is raised it shall be well past sunset, and the beast will have gone and be stronger for it!” Luna cut through his protest with another glare. “Thou shalt do as We have bidden, Captain, and We shall endure long enough in battle to keep it from retreating to digest its latest meal.”

“Forgive me, your Highness, but… how long?” Gander asked. “How long can you last?”

Luna did not look him in the eye. She did not turn nor did she spare a glance over her shoulder. Her dark eyes were fixed on the moving titan of shadow as she answered the ranger Captain.

“Long enough.”

Her words struck a chord in the rangers. Slowly, but as one, each of the four raised and beat their hooves across their chests in salute. It was an old style of salute, to clash one's hoof to one's breast, and one that had been forgotten in this new and peaceful age.

Luna turned at the sound and favored the four with a weary smile.

“Be swift, my little ponies,” Luna said softly. “May the north wind be mild, and the sun mellow.”

“And may thy loved ones meet thee at thy summer’s end.” Gander spoke the old words, and they stirred a spark in Luna’s chest.

A warrior’s farewell.

It was, she thought, a good thing that not all the luster of the old days had faded, and hearing those words here and now.

Yes… it was good.

“Fare thee well, wherever you fare, Rangers,” Luna said with a small nod.

Then she lit her horn, ignited her magic, and with a callous snap of displaced air the rangers were gone, back to the Crystal Palace to raise the alarm.

“Enough dilly-dally, old mare,” Luna muttered as she turned to the shadow. “Thou still hast monsters to slay.”

Breathing deep, Luna lit her horn once more and brushed the edges of the Wall of Sleep. There were pockets and alcoves dug into that grand old barrier, and in one such sidelong dimension Luna had tucked away her most precious possessions.

With a cobalt flare, she drew out her barding, piece by piece, cladding her in the colors of a moonless night. She had shed this armor in her days as Nightmare Moon. At the time she had told herself it was because the armor represented an era that no longer existed and because she refused to wear the old colors.

Only later did Luna admit to herself that she refused to wear the armor out of shame.

Not now, though.

Now, she could wear her old armor again with pride, even if it might very well be for the final time.

The wind howled around her as peytral, pauldrons, and gorget locked into place, settling heavily over Luna’s body. It was good to be clad for war again, even if she was alone this time.

Once, in past times, she would have been surrounded by her armies, and in the times before that, before the Unification and before the Elements, she would have been surrounded by her sisters.

They, like all the others of that age, were gone now.

Not even dust.

“Time is cruel, sisters,” Luna muttered as she raised her chamfron and stared through the helm’s slit. “Cruel enough that We should be the only one left of us. Cruel enough that even the face of Equus has forgotten thy names.”

Turning the helm over, she raised it, then lowered it, slotting her horn through the brace, and letting her starlit mane flow through the comb to billow out behind her like a pennant.

“We do not forget, though,” Luna said softly as she raised her head to face the slowly drifting shadow.

“For We are the last.”

Luna spread her wings, the delicate bones of which were braced in rare armor shaped in the stormforges of old Pegasopolis.

“And We are the brightest.”

Baring her teeth in a snarl, Luna tore into the sky, lighting her horn once more to draw her weapons from the space beyond the Wall of Sleep. Six dark blades, guardless and double-edged, each one bearing a mare’s name in ancient Unicornian etched along the flat of the half-meter blade.

Luna spoke each of the names in turn as she wheeled in the sky, turning in flight to bear down on the ponderous shadow.

“Penumbra. Orpheia. Mallea.” Each name brought memories. Memories, and tears. “ Tenebra. Lumina…”

She trailed off at the final blade. Her blade. She did not speak that name with the others. No one ever would. Her name would join the names of her sisters only in death.

Such was the burden of the final sister.

Igniting her horn, Luna pulled lambent moonlight from the sun-dark sky and spit it down in a ravening hammer of ghostly light. For all its ephemeral glow, the beam struck the umbral shroud like a spear, splitting through the barrier with a clap of thunder.

The instant the shroud fell, a dim and noisome light spilled out. Light like cancer. Light like mold. The illumination crawled through the air like a dead thing desperate for the warmth of life as the enormous canid shape deep within that all-devouring light turned from its mindless plodding advance to look up into the sky at the alicorn who had challenged it.

The Sun Dog, for its innocuous name, was a threat that Luna knew all too well. It was a thing to whom death was a stranger. More shadow and dark magic than flesh and whatever else the mad tyrant had cobbled together to shape its body than anything real. It was stood better than 8 meters high at the best approximation of its shoulder, its teeth were dripping beads of headache-colored light, and to this day Luna still wasn’t certain there was even enough real life left in the thing to properly die.

Thrice, Luna and Celestia had slain it, and each time it had returned as deadly and terrible as ever.

She had dared to hope that, without the ancient sorcery of King Sombra fueling it, the damned thing might finally waste away.

“Ought to have known better,” Luna muttered grimly as her six blades circled her.

Spells spilled from Luna’s horn, layering one over the other, sinking into bone, muscle, skin, and steel.

Bones that were already stronger than any living pony became as strong as concrete as the Fortitude of Adamance sunk into them. Bellwether’s Bracing Strength made corded steel out of Luna’s muscles. Flesh that healed in hours what took other ponies days to mend became like self-knitting cloth with the infusion of Threnody’s Convalescence.

Baring her blades like the fangs of a hunting cat, Luna beat her wings and hammered through the air at the thing.

Far in the distance, beyond the sight range of the rangers and the moon goddess alike, a stranger watched. He watched from a risen crest of snow and ice as the moon descended to the earth to beat back a shadow made of poisoned sunlight, and despite the ache in his leg and bitterness in his heart… something stirred.

“Foolish,” the stranger muttered, his voice a grating, leonine rumble as he began limping forward. “But who is the greater fool, I wonder?”

Chapter 4

On a quiet street on the outskirt wards of the city called the Crystal Empire by those ponies who had forgotten that the so-called Empire once spanned significantly more than a single frigid metropolis, a vagrant sat silently in the shadows of an empty alleyway.

He wore a ragged brown cloak that was torn and shredded by time, wind, and poor care. He was not the only one on the street, but he was certainly the most notable, were there anyone capable of noticing him.

Hundreds of crystal ponies walked up and down the street going to and fro to gods only knew where.

None of them paid any mind to the vagrant stallion they passed, despite his size. By any standard, he was enormous. He towered two heads taller than the largest pony walking the streets, and despite that, not a single one of the citizens of the Imperial Capital paid him the slightest mind. That was as the vagrant desired. He did not want to be seen, and so he was not.

Once upon a time, he had been stronger.

In those days he could have reached into their minds, snapped them like brittle ice, and reshaped those minds to his will.

Now… well, he might be able to manage it still, but it would tax him dearly and garner him nothing. No, the vagrant was satisfied with putting the slightest pressure on every mind that perceived him and whispering to those minds that they saw nothing. Just a frail old transient resting his bones in an alley shielded from the flurries of the cold north.

Curiously, none of them stopped.

The vagrant chuckled quietly to himself as he watched them walk by the beggar they thought they saw without a moment’s hesitation, and with their thoughts secretly bared to him.

‘Poor sod, someone should help him’

‘Not my problem’

‘Wonder what he did to deserve that’

The vagrant’s lips twisted up derisively as he waited for the crowd to thin, then stood and began walking between the ponies of the Crystal Empire. He dragged his rear-left leg. It ached in the cold and moved stiffly, but it supported him fine enough so long as he didn’t lean so heavily on it.

Every mare and stallion moved around him, affording him the space that their minds were convinced he didn’t need, yet doing it all the same for some reason they couldn’t, and wouldn’t bother, to fathom.

The vagrant passed by a pretty young mare with a teal coat and sapphire eyes as he stepped inside of an apothecary. The moment he was inside, he let the world adjust to him.

The vagrant was gone and in his place was a stallion of modest means in the hood and robes of an academy professor who moved with an odd shuffle that suggested a bum leg.

If later asked, the patrons and proprietor might say the stallion had a dun coat, or maybe it was matte grey. But they would be quite sure that he was tall, or… no, wasn’t he a bit short, actually? He had brown eyes, though, certainly… or were they gold?

They might recall the limp.

None of them would remember a coat the shade of dark ash, or an obsidian mane, though. They would not recall a pair of eyes the color of blood-drenched rubies.

The professor— once a vagrant— paid for a small bundle of purchases, then tucked them beneath his cloak before bidding the proprietor farewell and turning to leave. He plodded between the shelves, past a pair of chatting ponies, and stepped past the threshold and out into the street, and he left the professor behind in the shop as he became a poor, overlooked vagrant once more.

One more stop and he could be quit of this miserable city for another moon, perhaps more.

His head ached along with his leg as he traversed the city. There were few places in the world he hated more than this one, but there was nowhere else to go where his existence would notably change, and at least he knew this city well enough to blend into it.

“The devil you know,” the vagrant mumbled.

A chuckle rumbled out of him as he made his way towards his next stop. The bookstore on the corner of the street he was on had a knack for picking up old finds. The owner of the shop had an eye for grimoires of good provenance, and the vagrant had taken up the hobby of learning the latest advances in the thaumic sciences.

Little of it was new to him, he’d realised. So much was lost in the Age of Chaos, then rediscovered, then lost again in the prevailing and so-called Age of Shadows.

The Nightmare Rebellions had, apparently, been the final nail in the scholarly coffin of magical research. The elder Alicorn had spent the coin of her grief on rage after banishing her sister, enacting Inquisition after Inquisition, uprooting every cult and two-bit warlock that had the misfortune to lay claw, paw, or hoof on a record of true power, whether that was a grimoire of proscribed arts, or something as simple as the first few syllables of some daemon’s name.

What passed for magical research and experimentation in this pale, lusterless age was a wretched thing. They studied simple, sterile topics, and the vagrant doubted there a single true artist of the subtle ways left among those supposed magi.

The vagrant ascended the two short steps off the street and into the bookstore on the corner of the street as the modest professor.

He spent an hour perusing the shelves, finding only a single volume worth purchasing in that time, and he took it, leaving the requisite bits on the counter with the owner along with another muttered greeting, and earning the usual ‘thank ye for your patronage’ as he left and became a vagrant once more.

Food, materials, ingredients, and a new book.

The vagrant had made his purchases and acquired his necessities, and while there was a bit more he could do in the city he had exhausted his reserves for dealing with the citizens of this colorless city.

Turning down the road, the vagrant walked along the shadows of one of the lesser roads to the main plaza and thoroughfare that led out into the frozen wastes where he was headed. Every step increased the throb of pain in his leg and skull, the latter was the worst, being a dull, heavy pressure that was settling ever deeper between his eyes.

Perhaps when he arrived ‘home’ he would brew himself a decoction that would knock him out rather than simply relying on his mental discipline and the arts of the mind.

As he made his way into the plaza, the vagrant stretched his mind across it, blanking his presence from each pony as they perceived him, the same as he had always done, except…

“What—?!” The vagrant stumbled, his bad leg going out from under for a moment as his mental sweep struck something utterly alien.

Something powerful.

Something… familiar.

The mind of the average pony was like candy floss against his will, easily distorting around the faintest breath of his power. This was like trying to bend cold iron with his teeth.

“You!”

The vagrant looked up, frustration and annoyance boiling up from his gut and through his throat as a pair of guards advanced on him. They hadn’t seen through the bulk of his veil, but his stumble had let their more vigilant minds perceive at least the shadow of the old stallion he had disguised himself as.

Layers upon layers upon layers.

They saw through the filter, and there was no putting that spilt wine back in the decanter, but the vagrant reached out and reinforced the image of the old stallion in their minds. A wretched old thing, penniless and homeless, perhaps they had some pity in them and would—

“Move, vagrant!”

The butts of their spears jabbed painfully into his side and he stifled a grunt of pain as one of them jabbed at his back leg.

Then again, perhaps not.

On the other hoof, though, they were forcing him towards the outer wards and therefore the gate quarter. All he had to do was let them bully and hector him a little more and they would escort him, if a bit roughly, to the outskirts of the city.

“Get on you wretched—”

“Excuse me!” A mare with a coat like dull quartz and a mane like poorly mixed paints snapped as she stepped between the vagrant and the guards. “What’s going on? Has this stallion committed some crime?”

It took the vagrant only a heartbeat to realise who had come to his defense. He nudged her mind as gently as possible and there wasn’t even the slightest give. There would be no mind-twisting here, not with this one, this mind was older and just as strong as he recalled.

But there was a trick to her, he remembered.

It was like fitting a pick and torsion rod to the most complex lock imaginable, but the vagrant still recalled the pattern.

A twist of envy.

A turn of disregard.

The slightest pressure of melancholic nostalgia and—

“ACTIVIST?! I am no activist!”

The image of a bitter old vagrant stallion settled over the ancient mind hiding beneath the visage of an unassuming mare just in time for that mare’s form to shatter like broken glass in a flash of power and rage.

“We are no activist,” the mare repeated, and a hush of awe fell over the plaza.

For a moment, the vagrant felt his own breath catch as the Alicorn of the Moon, Princess Luna of Equestria, the Mistress of the Night stood to her full height and unshadowed in her glory to tower over the two shaking guards.

“We art a Princess and were this kingdom mine the brace of you wouldst be stripped of rank, flogged in this very square, and then cast out in sackcloth to endure this ‘vagrancy’ you dost deride.”

A part of the vagrant wanted to remain.

Here there was still a flicker of that old, better light. Here there was still a thing of beauty, like pure silver yet untarnished by the passage of time and poor care.

She was, he thought, just as beautiful as she had been the day she had killed him.

Stepping back, the vagrant let himself fade from the minds of the crowd as their full focus fell on the Princess and away from the pointless old transient who had angered the guard for existing in a place of refinement while lacking any of his own. He stepped away, just as heads turned skyward in time to see the last of the vapid and vacuous line of Cadenza descend on pretender’s wings.

The vagrant turned his back on the plaza and retreated into a nearby alley, waiting out the argument and admonishments. His arts were subtle ones and would work best once everyone had calmed and returned to their business.

So he waited, and watched, and while he did he watched her.

What a creature she was.

Luna.

The Goddess of the Moon.

The vagrant had always liked the moon better than the sun. It was less harsh on the eyes, and more beautiful to the soul. The moon was a subtle thing and its mistress no less so.

He was glad, in a way, that she was free of her dark prison. Glad at least that some glimmer of the past still shone through to this vain and barren age.

So he watched as she spoke to the guards, and spoke to the pretender, and then spread her beautiful wings before rising on conjured thermals. He watched as she wheeled about the plaza, looking over, and the vagrant’s ancient heart leapt in his chest as their eyes met once and briefly.

Just for a moment, and then she was gone, having seen only a broken old stallion.

As the vagrant turned and made his way out of the city, he let his mind wander to that age of war and blood. Everything was so much more hateful, so much more visceral, back then.

Was it better?

Likely not. Certainly not for the average pony. But things had a certain beauty back then that this world lacked.

He missed that.

The winds of the tundra howled as the vagrant reached the edge of the city, passed beyond the final pylons protecting the capital from the ravening fangs of endless winter, and stepped into the snowdrifts.

Words that were not quite words fell from his lips. They were the sounds of the mountains shifting in their sleep, and the groans of the bones of Equus as they settled with the passage of ages. With every word, the ground shifted beneath the vagrant, and every step took him a passage of kilometers away from the city.

Old magic, old words.

The vagrant knew many of them. Certainly he knew enough of them to make his life out in the tundra bearable if not comfortable.

Days passed, then a week, but the mare of the moon was still on the vagrant’s mind as he walked the ancient stone halls of his chosen home. It was a dark place that had played host to things best left out of mind if one valued their sanity.

Now it was a cold place whose cyclopean halls echoed only with the footsteps a timelost phantom that was content to rot away his remaining years in seclusion while the miserable world trudged onward into mediocrity.

He had found a new hobby at least.

The vagrant had taken to shaping the dark crystal of one of the large ritual halls. It had long since lost its mystic purpose now that the vast cults that once populated it were gone, but the crystal walls… those could still serve a purpose.

“More cerulean than teal, I think,” the vagrant said quietly to himself as he entered the ritual hall and paused before his latest work. “Yes… teal has too much green in it…”

The vagrant spoke a syllabic, shivering harmonic tone, and the vast swathe of crystal, almost six meters across, wavered as portions of the colors shifted and darkened. Yesterday he had risen certain deposits of brighter crystal to the surface on part of the mural to make the stars in her mane, but the colors had seemed off to him at the time.

After sleeping on it, he’d realised he’d been mimicking more oceanic colors, and while beautiful, they didn’t quite fit.

“Now… regalia…” the vagrant muttered as he let his eyes fall over her brow. “Silver, I think, silver always suited her best.”

Less was more with the Lunar Alicorn. Where her elder sister would be adorned with ostentatious gold and shimmering opals, the younger carried her beauty with her in the galaxies that swam in her mane, and the void between the stars that rested deep within her coat.

The rippling syllable that shifted and changed the crystal painted a simple circlet on the mare’s brow, just enough to tame her wild astral mane.

He was in the moment of considering whether or not he should add a small amethyst to the center of the circle at her crown when the ground shuddered beneath him. There was only the briefest moment of confusion before he felt a swell of ancient power flex within the air, and the taste of poison sunlight settled on his tongue.

“No, that’s impossible…” The vagrant turned and scowled towards the entrance to the sunken temple he had made his home.

He moved as fast as his limping leg allowed him to, which was little more than a hobbled sprint whose questionable speed was only made up for by his immense stride. His mane of coal fell around him from beneath the dirty brown robe he was clad in that kept the worst of the cold out as he emerged from the temple, clambered up the steps, and alighted on a high drift.

In the distance, he saw it, and his stomach plummeted.

One of his greatest creations.

And his mightiest sins.

It spilled poison light from its flesh, boiling the snow away from it as it turned to look up at the moon-made-manifest that shone above its head like a star of ill omen.

She was alone.

Beautiful, but alone.

Mighty… but alone.

“Foolish,” the stranger muttered, his voice a grating, leonine rumble as he began limping forward. “But who is the greater fool, I wonder?”

Chapter 5

Luna struck the permafrost like a thunderbolt as whiplash arcs of poison light spat and slashed around her. Wherever they struck, the earth boiled and blackened, wherever they passed, the air turned rancid and noxious.

After less than four minutes of combat, a cloud of otherworldly toxins had already thickened in the air.

Assuming they weren’t rendered to paste by a passing impact from one of the immortals hammering each other, or reduced to their constituent molecules by a pulse of reality-cracking magic, any mortal pony, no matter how hardy, would suffer catastrophic lung failure within seconds of stepping close.

Luna was merely starting to breathe hard.

“Bastard!” Luna swore, turning a tight spiral in the air as a lash of bloody gold sliced beneath her, trying to take her out at the knees.

All six of her blades rocketed forward from their orbit around Luna, shot from the arbalest of her thaumic aura on tight-strung cords of telekinetic will. Four of them struck off-center of the Sun Dog, and its aura flared as it sent them spinning away only for the narrow lines of power linking them to their mistress to snap taught and reel them back in.

One blade struck center mass only to be deflected with a deafening clap of light and sound, and be sent spiraling away.

The sixth and final blade, the one whose name was left unspoken, and which had followed in the shadow of its scattered sister, punched through the weakened barrier and instantly superheated to an angry red as it sliced through wards and defensive sorcery to bury itself with a dull, almost wooden thunk in the Sun Dog’s left eye.

Its agonised howl was unearthly, and Luna’s vision swam and bucked with vertigo as the Sun Dogs unwholesome psychic presence hammered the bulwark of her mind, slowing her for an instant.

It was an instant too long.

A lash of light-eating radiance struck a hammer’s blow across her shoulder and chest, buckling her pauldron and scarring her peytral as it sent her spinning backward, flank over withers, to land in an undignified, smoking heap almost fifty meters away at the end of a blackened scar of split earth.

Luna groaned as she turned over with a graceless flop while the Sun Dog thrashed and howled nearby, its massive body cracking the earth with its agony. Her ears were ringing and she could taste blood. Every inch of her body ached with the force of the blow dealt to her and even her near-divine biology was laboring to keep the toxins of the Sun Dog’s radiance at bay.

But she could not yield.

If she fell back, if she faltered, then the Sun Dog would retreat to the Dreamtime, lick its wounds, and return even more dangerous, and with a grudge. For all she knew, it would return and attack Crysopolis itself. But if she could keep it here until sundown passed then it would be trapped for another day at least.

Long enough for Celestia to arrive with reinforcements.

So Luna stood.

“Pray,” Luna spat as she staggered drunkenly to her hooves, flared her wings, and grinned through bloody teeth, “is that all thou dost possess?”

Luna wasn’t sure if the Sun Dog understood her, but its enraged howl cheered her as ichor leaked from its punctured eye.

At least, Luna was passingly certain it was the Sun Dog’s eye. One of them at least. The creature had no discernable biology. Luna couldn’t even make out any true details. It was surrounded by a permanent corona of moldy light that devoured everything healthy around it. It was only called a Sun 'Dog' because the dark, amorphous shape inside the well of shadowlights was vaguely canid.

Tendrils of noxious light spilled from its healing defensive aura, but the wound struck by her weapon refused to close fully. The blade was made for that after all, piercing even the most thorough and powerful of defensive spells and the hardiest of hides and armor.

No other weapon would be suitable for an assassin.

The Sun Dog howled again, rattling brain as it thundered across the tundra towards Luna. Every beat of its alien paws left dead earth seared beneath it, and every breath from its panting maw thickened the poison in the air.

“Craven beast!” Luna snarled, lighting her horn and flourishing her head.

Two dozen glimmering motes leapt into existence around her that flickered for a heartbeat before lancing out like needles of cold light. Each one pierced into the Sun Dog, bending and twisting at hard, unnatural angles as the Sun Dog jinked and bobbed around to avoid them, looking oddly graceful despite its bulk.

But not even the Sun Dog could move faster than starlight.

Bright needles dove through the broken shell of its aura, puncturing into the thing's facsimile of skin, only to vanish for a moment.

And only a moment.

With a sound like steel splitting through rotten leather, two dozen spears of cold light erupted from the Sun Dog’s flesh like grotesque, petalless blooms. The Sun Dog thrashed for a moment as Luna spread her wings and bolted into the sky.

Ravenous light followed her, spilling from the flesh of the Sun Dog to chase her, nipping at her tail and the fetlocks of her rear hooves. Luna gritted her teeth as the nearness of the poison light blackened her fur and stung the skin around it as the tendrils closed with her. The clouds roiled above her, twisted by the unnatural air and toxic fumes, the smell was a charnel house stink underpinned by the cloy of gangrene, and Luna could feel it spreading through her lungs and thickening her blood.

Her divine biology wouldn't last all that much longer at this rate.

“I’m sorry sister,” Luna snarled as she twisted, turned, and dove between the spirals of light, wincing as she felt feathers and the surface of her coat cook at the deadly proximity.

Then she was through, bolting past the fusillade of lashing, hungry light as she poured every ounce of power into her horn only to cast it skyward.

The heavens rocked and quaked, and the pestilent clouds buckled with a silent scream as pure starlight lanced through them. The sun, already lowering, shuddered in the sky as Luna’s strength, ever the equal to her sister, attuned to the silver disk of the moon and pulled it into the firmament by main magical force, buckling Celestia’s solar sorcery.

Luna could feel her sister’s shock echo across the heavenly spheres like a dissonant note in an otherwise perfect harmony, and a pang of guilt lanced through her heart.

“Forgive me, Celly.”

This was a death sentence and Luna knew that even as the Sun Dog rocked and staggered, its alien mind suddenly cognizant that it had been robbed of its window of escape. With its shock, the tendrils of virulent power it had been striking with flickered and vanished, but Luna could see them reforming around it.

It had her dead to rights.

By forcing the moon into the sky against both the natural order and the will of her sister, Luna had hemorrhaged the native power of her wellspring. Once she relinquished her grip on the moon, the source of her divinity, for the night, it would take everything she had left with it.

And it would be so easy to let it.

Luna was tired. She was more tired than she could remember being in a very long time. Millennia at least. Her body ached, her head pounded, her lungs burned, and every inch of her was begging to just sleep.

But she couldn’t.

If she closed her eyes now, then that would be the end. If Luna let this thing go on to rampage, even in its injured state, it could still reach Crysopolis in an hour… maybe less. It would wreak untold devastation and end countless lives before Celestia could teleport to the Crystal Empire and put it down for good.

‘Breathe,’ Luna commanded herself as she tightened her grip on the moon.

It was starting to burn, but she needed its strength for now.

Just a little while longer.

Forcing herself to stay conscious, Luna bared her teeth as the Sun Dog rallied, steadied, and bloomed with power around the silver-blade wounds that still jutted from its skin and which were keeping its false flesh from closing and healing.

It was reaching for her with coils of light, trying to find purchase on her, to drag her down to its level where it could end her once and for all. But not even Celestia had been able to drag the moon from the sky. No, even the Alicorn of the Sun had been forced to settle with caging Luna among the stars, and Luna would be damned if this patchwork jumble of hate, shadows, and ill will would outdo her own sister!

With a single breath and an almighty scream of ‘HEEL!’, Luna split the sky and poured the sea of stars itself down onto the Sun Dog’s head, and at the clarion crash of Luna’s command, a pillar of light fell like the death of night in a blinding, concussive peal of purifying starlight.

“Bow!” Luna snarled as she struck the ground, her horn searing white-hot as she channeled the power of a celestial body untethered through her body and soul. “Kneel! Scrape and grovel thou mange-ridden mongrel!”

A strange, almost puppyish yip of agony was ripped from the Sun Dog as it struggled to escape the hammer of light that Luna was pouring down over it. It was like watching a jackal trying to escape the battering force of a waterfall while simultaneously drowning in it, gasping and convulsing as it desperately tried to flee.

“Thou art nothing!” Luna bellowed. “Thou art filth!”

The light grew brighter, hotter, and deep inside the aura of the Sun Dog a single point of light glimmered, and a name unspoken, writ in runes only a handful of ponies left on the face of Equus could read, burned and writhed on the surface of an ancient blade.

“Thou thinkest us brittle?!” Another pulse of light struck the struggling Sun Dog to the earth. “Thou thinkest us weak?!”

Another hammer beat the hoary beast into the permafrost.

“We are Luna!”

Bones manufactured of hate and shadow snapped and cooked under the brutal light.

“Daughter of Adamance!”

The Sun Dog was thrashing now, it’s flesh burning away faster than its unholy regeneration could keep up with.

“Last of the Duskmakers!”

A maddening howl rived the sky.

“WE ARE THE MOON INCARNATE!” Luna roared. “AND WE ARE NOT THE LESSER LIGHT!”

In the sky above, for the briefest moment, the Moon shone like a silver sun, blotting out the stars with her radiance before fading and returning to her soft, gentle illumination of the night sky.

Meanwhile, far in the north, in a crater that was two dozen meters across and blackened to carbon, rested a set of mutant bones that could never have belonged to a creature made from nature and the good earth of Equus. At the edge of the crater, a lone alicorn stood. Her mane flickered and shone with dying stars as she wavered in the faint breeze of the tundra, and in a moment known only to herself, she smiled.

“See sister?” Luna whispered softly to nopony. “We— I can be brighter than you.”

Darkness closed around Luna’s vision as she toppled over, falling to the ground in a clangor of beaten flesh and shattered armor. Every breath was a labor, and every beat of her heart was a struggle, and in that moment she thought she saw something.

“I know you,” Luna muttered thickly.

A hooded figure, massive, and wearing a ragged cloak browned with age and shredded by the fierce winds of the north, stood over her. Eyes like garnets set into a hidden face stared down at her and for a moment something tickled the edge of her memory.

“You’re a fool,” the vagrant rumbled. “A fool of a mare.”

Luna’s eyes widened, but there was almost nothing left to her. Certainly no magic, and not even the strength to stand. But there was strength enough to speak, if only barely.

“The vagrant,” Luna said through numbing lips. “The… the plaza—”

“Color me impressed, though, Princess,” the vagrant said as he tipped his hood back to let his leonine mane of obsidian flow free. “To best the Sun Dog alone, even starved, is a thing of myth…”

Before Luna passed out, she forced one final word past her lips in a hiss of hate and rage that took the last of her strength from her on its way out.

A single name.

“Sombra.”

Chapter 6

Consciousness is a fickle thing, especially when one is on the verge of death.

Luna’s waking mind flickered in and out, and for once there was no grip of lucidity. So it was that for the first time in a very long time, the mistress of dreams had nightmares all her own.

They were dark things, amorphous and hungry, and they gnawed at her.

Some were memories of war. Memories of the trenches that spanned the vast tundra where so many nameless battles took place across frozen hellscapes where the ground was as frozen in places with as much blood as water during the wars against King Sombra's legions. Memories of the war-torn cities where she fought against her Sister’s forces, scorching whole districts of life in their desperate battles and steering through corpse-choked streets with battered killsquads of her beloved Night Guard.

It was said, during the Rebellion, that no army lost a battle where their patron goddess took the field. Those rumors usually failed to mention the absolute devastation that occurred when both Sisters were present, however.

Others were memories of isolation. Luna’s long, maddening imprisonment in the cage of the moon, bound in its lightless depths by chains forged from magic that was older than Discord were buried deep in her mind, locked away but always whispering.

A voice penetrated the darkness of memory, at times. It was a grim, leonine voice that told her to rest, and at times to drink something.

Luna was far too weak to resist, and she was so very thirsty.

‘Drink’ said the voice.

Luna swallowed weakly in her fever throes, coughing and sputtering around the bitter, herbal taste. It burned going down, but less than the searing in her veins.

With every passing of the voice, Luna’s dreams grew quieter. There were fewer screams, fewer trenches, fewer blood-soaked city alleys.

‘Drink’

Luna swallowed again, although how much time had passed between the first time, this time, and all the intervening times, she couldn’t say. Time had lost all meaning, as it tended to when she dreamed, but Luna had forgotten how jarring it could be.

To dream as a mortal dreamed.

“Do you muse this thoroughly while awake?” That familiar bass voice broke through the malaise of incognition, sharpening Luna’s mind with an almost-audible ratcheting sensation.

Darkness became dimness while up, down, left, and right were defined without warning, and with an abrasive shudder of space and time. Luna staggered as her bodiless mind suddenly became solid and heavy, and a gasp escaped her lungs as the alien sensation of breathing struck her in the chest.

“If so, I may consider investing in a muzzle,” the voice continued.

“Show thyself!” Luna snarled and her voice echoed strangely in the null void of space she was standing in. “We know thy name, Sombra, and we ought to have known thou wouldst persist past death again, thou roach.”

“Your dreaming arts are rusty, Princess,” Sombra replied with a chuckle, ignoring the insults. “Had you spent the past few years of your return honing them, rather than the barbs on your tongue, you could simply force me to appear. After all, this is your mind we’re in.”

Luna bristled at Sombra’s condescending tone. The worst of it was that he was right. Since she had returned from her lunar prison and been freed from the madness of Nightmare Moon, Luna had struggled to find the motivation to pursue her arts as she used to. Perfecting her dreaming arts had once been a necessity, especially back when she and her sister had been contending with forces like Discord and, indeed, Sombra.

The dark king was a monster, true, but he was also one of the most accomplished dreamers in the span of creation.

Forcing her temper back, Luna grimaced and looked down, concentrating on the vast nothingness around her. She focused on the glimmers of consciousness, they were so far away from her now, too far for even her divine senses to reach, but they were there.

She was weak. She knew this in the same way a once-hale farmer knows he’s gotten old when he wakes up one morning, goes to move, and every joint in his body protests. Luna knew the way a plague victim knows the moment she’s taken ill, with a sick turn of her stomach and a flush of fever up the neck and around the brow.

“Damnation!” Luna gasped as she released her hold on her magic. Even here in the Dreamtime she felt faint. “What ails us such that We cannot even—?”

“Not bad,” Sombra rumbled, and this time the voice came from directly behind her.

Luna whirled in place and planted all four hooves solidly on the ground, baring her teeth and lowering her horn. Magic or no, power or no, divinity or no, she would best the brute if it meant goring his sorry heart with her horn!

He was as terrible and imposing as she remembered. Huge on a scale not seen even among the stoutest earth ponies, taller than her by half a head at least where she towered over the average pony by a full head. His fur was the color of fresh, black ash, while his mane was a rakish tumble of obsidian curls, and his horn… Luna always thought Sombra’s horn looked too much like a curved blade freshly pulled from a gory wound.

Strangely, though, in this vision of him, he wore neither his armor nor his crown as he always had when they’d met in the Dream before.

“Don’t bother,” Sombra said with a smirk.

Before she could give a reply, Luna’s legs went out from under her. Her chest started to burn abominably, her head pounded, and her very veins ached.

“W-What… c-curse hast thou le-levied on us?” Luna gasped the words out around a throat that seemed deadset on strangling its owner.

“None,” Sombra replied with a shrug. “I simply stopped shielding you from your body’s input. This is how you would be feeling were you awake right now, so perhaps you ought to be thankful—” Sombra nodded, and his scarlet horn glinted faintly, and instantly the pressure and pain subsided— “that I am allowing you to remain asleep.”

“Why?” Luna hissed as she struggled to her hooves. “Ransom? We wouldst bite our own tongue off before suffering such indignity!”

Sombra crooked an eyebrow, then chuckled, and Luna shivered despite herself. The mouth of a pony should not contain teeth so sharp.

“Leaving aside that you could bite off your tongue all you wished in this place and t’would gain you nothing but a grotesque carpeting of tongues to tread upon,” Sombra said before his quiet, heavy laugh tapered off to stillness. “To answer your question, no… you are neither prisoner nor hostage, at worst you are a patient, and eventually a free mare.”

“Liar,” Luna said flatly.

Sombra bared his teeth in a humorless grin that showcased a maw which belonged more to the muzzle of a wolf than a pony.

“I am many things, dear Princess,” Sombra growled. “A bastard, a tyrant, and a murderer… but I am not a liar.”

The ground vanished from beneath Luna’s hooves before she could make her reply. Her wings flapped uselessly, her pegasus magic gone from her, and her horn would not light no matter how she focused as she fell.

“It’s a dream,” Luna spat, clenching her eyes shut and willing herself not to feel the stomach-clenching, primal panic of freefall. “It’s just a dream, it’s just a dream, it’s just a dream!”

The darkness around her howled and wind beat at her like she was flying through a tempest. There was no sanity, no reason, just the endless downward scream of falling and falling and falling.

Luna spasmed as she jerked awake, and instantly the taste of bitter herbs and bile flooded her mouth. She shivered violently as she tried to move, but failed, for a moment she was certain she was restrained; pinned to the ground by chains or magical force, but the more she tried to move the more she realised that the truth was far more terrible.

She was simply that weak.

“Lie still,” Sombra’s voice called from the side of the room.

Forcing her head up, Luna squinted at the massive pony in the sackcloth and wind-torn robe of a vagrant as he mixed something at a stone table at the far end of the room.

His voice was rough with what Luna thought was disuse. It was a familiar enough affliction to her. During her imprisonment, she’d occasionally gone years at a time without speaking before descending into screaming fits that lasted months.

“The va-vagrant,” Luna rasped, then coughed several times before working her tongue around her mouth to try and move around some moisture.

“You were… in Crysopolis… the day I arrived.”

Every other word was a labor to get out, and Luna found herself breathing hard after just a few words.

“The fickle bitch of fate and nothing more, I assure you,” Sombra replied irritably. “Now lay back, you should have remained in the Dream.”

“Then why… why not keep me there?” Luna asked as she tried to rise, but faltered and collapsed back down.

As she did, she realised whatever she was laying on was actually quite comfortable. A quick glance told her it wasn’t some straw mat in a cell, but in fact a lushly appointed bed with old and worn blankets and thick pillows. The bedclothes had a faint musk to them, too. It wasn't quite sweat so much as the smell of fabric that was used and often, and by the same pony such that a certain scent of them never quite faded despite the laundering.

“It was taking too much power,” Sombra replied as he took up the mortar in one hoof and the pestle deftly in crook of his other to start grinding. “If you wish to suffer the wage of your affliction so dearly that you’ll spit on the small mercies I offer, then so be it… wake and be miserable.”

Slowly, Luna lowered her head back to the pillow she’d been laying on before. It was matted with hairs from her mane and sweat from her brow. She didn’t have the strength to protest, or she would have.

What worried her more wasn’t that, though.

What concerned her most gravely was that she was very clearly in Sombra’s own bed.

Sombra was many things, as he himself said. A bastard? Perhaps in the pejorative sense, but Luna knew nothing of his parentage. A tyrant? Certainly, history and her own memory alike proved that well enough. A murderer? Undoubtedly. How many had died during his regime? How many executions of political dissidents or rebel forces had he seen to by his own horn?

Yes, he was all of those things, but situated where she was, weaker than she could ever remember being, so weak that she could barely lift a hoof, much less fend off an attacker, Luna’s more pressing and gut-wrenching concern was whether or not he was—

“Haul your mind out of the gutter if you please, Princess!” Sombra snapped, a spark of true anger flaring in his voice for the first time since she’d awoken as he turned slightly to eye her with a bitterly furious glare. “I am not a liar, and I am certainly not that, so I would thank you to keep your thoughts to yourself if you’re going to be indulging in such fantasies.”

“Fantasies?!” Surprise struck Luna cleanly across the jaw, so much so that she briefly forgot how weak she was as she jerked up to stare scornfully at him.

Something her body was keen to remind her of a moment later as she collapsed back to the mattress.

“Thou canst hardly… blame us…” Luna huffed, already red in the face from her exertion. “Thou hast me… at thy will, and… in thy bed, so…” Luna trail off and she paused as she rewound the prior few moments in her mind, then narrowed her eyes at Sombra. “Art thou rooting around in our mind?!”

“You’re not guarding yourself,” Sombra replied, the heat gone from his voice as he put his broad back to her once more. “Cerebramancy is not an art one can just turn off, either. Thoughts are like whispers… or bellows, in your case.”

A light blush of shame colored Luna’s cheeks.

“Our magic… is failing us,” Luna grumbled, settling back down on the bed. “We… We can’t.”

Sombra huffed quietly, then turned to hobble over to Luna with a steaming mug of something that looked like tea but smelled like a latrine. Sombra closed the distance quickly, but not without difficulty, and Luna couldn’t helped but stare at his cloak-covered hind leg as he reached the edge of the bed.

“Can you hold it?” Sombra asked, holding up the cup.

Luna scowled, tried to light her horn, but only got a twinge and a brief icepick headache for her trouble before shaking her head.

“Very well,” Sombra replied, moving the cup, and himself forward until the cup was pressed against Luna’s indignant muzzle. “Drink, unless you wish to worsen.”

Pulling her mouth away from the rim of the cup, Luna scowled up at Sombra, what little she could see of him under the cowl of his ratty cloak anyway, and snorted.

“How… How are… we to know, thou art… not poisoning us… further,” Luna pushed the words out with difficulty, and Sombra chuckled before moving the cup back to her lips.

“If I wished you poisoned,” Sombra replied, “I would have been better off leaving you to die of the Sun Dog’s touch.”

He nudged her lips with the cup as he spoke, which Luna frowned against. Sombra rolled his eyes and drew back.

“Princess, introducing any more poison to your system would have been like administering a bee sting to a pony with four gangrenous legs and a case of the galloping scumpox. Now drink.”

Sombra pressed the cup to her mouth again. Luna, against both her instinct and, more importantly, her pride, opened her mouth for Sombra to pour his foul concoction in. She nearly gagged, swallowing it down, before smacking her lips as she tried to get the taste off of her tongue while Sombra chuckled and set the cup down.

“We take it back,” Luna grumbled as she laid back down. “Poison would certainly taste better.”

“Poison is always sweeter than the cure, Princess,” Sombra said quietly. “Now sleep… you will likely not dream, but in case you do I will keep watch.”

Already Luna’s eyes were growing heavy. There must have been some kind of soporific in the brew he’d given her because all of her weariness was catching up to her at once.

“W-why?” Luna mumbled through a yawn.

Sombra turned, and for a moment Luna thought she saw something odd beneath the hood. Like a glint of something pale, but then the cowl shifted and it was gone.

“Because you’re a goddess,” Sombra replied so softly that Luna nearly didn’t hear him, and she was fast asleep by the time he spoke again. “And this world ought to have something beautiful left in it.”

Chapter 7

It was dark when Luna awoke the next time, although being underground all that really meant in the practical was that Sombra had doused the magelights which had provided the dim illumination that had been present the last time she had stirred.

The darkness was not complete, though.

At the far end of the room, a candle flame danced at a stone table. The table was piled high with thick tomes, all of which Luna was certain were rooted in questionable arts. It was unlikely that a being like Sombra kept anything else in this place, wherever it was. Sombra sat at the table with his back to her, his cowl lowered a little for the first time since she’d seen him although his head was bowed in such a way that she couldn’t see any details. She could see his ears flick left and right at even intervals, though.

It was odd, she thought… how utterly equine he looked at that moment. He could have been any Crystal Scholar were he a normal-sized stallion. Certainly he couldn’t have been the bloodthirsty tyrant that had ruled for two long centuries over one of the most brutal regimes known to the world.

He seemed so much different now. Lessened, Luna thought, although she wasn’t sure why that thought rankled her. It should please her that such a terrible figure was laid low but instead it set a pit in her stomach that she misliked greatly, both for the feeling and for the fact that it existed at all.

Not that there was anything she could do about it for the time being, but something had woken her up and it wasn’t Sombra.

At first, Luna couldn’t put a hoof on what had caused her to stir from sleep. She was still too weak to move, her horn was still dead to her, and her wings were useless feathered appendages that could no more lift her than they could the whole of the Canterhorn.

A moment later, an uncomfortable pressure made itself known, though, and Luna felt another flush of shame creep up her neck to settle stonily in her cheeks.

Sombra looked up, one ear twitching suddenly as if he had heard a voice or disturbance, and pulled the cowl up and over his head again before turning to the bed and limping towards her, his tail swishing softly behind him.

Odd that so large a stallion should be so quiet.

“Away, cur!” Luna snapped, gratified that speaking no longer labored her as she set a hoof beneath her on the mattress to push herself up. “We are not so desperate as that.”

Sombra paused, and a quiet chuckle rumbled out from under the cowl.

“You say that, Princess, as if I had not cleaned up after you prior to this,” Sombra countered.

Luna’s eyes flew wide and a dull, cold pit opened up in her gut as her leg went out from under her, dropping her back to the mattress. With a grunt of effort she raised her head to stare up at him, her eyes and cheeks blazing.

“Thou art—”

“—not a liar,” Sombra cut her off. “I have told you this and am not fond of repeating myself.”

He gestured broadly with one enormous hoof to the bed she was occupying.

“Why else do you imagine that you do not lay soiled in a pile of your own filth after a bedridden week?” Sombra asked. “Or has your crown and divine status gone so deeply to your head that you imagine you no longer shit? If so I pity your maids.”

Luna was shaking, but whether it was from mortifying shame or all-consuming fury she wasn’t sure. Probably both.

“Th-Thou hast…” Luna stammered, her throat seizing up as if her whole body refused the concept of what Sombra was suggesting.

“Don’t flatter yourself, Princess,” Sombra said tersely. “I am a doctor, so I guarantee that you possess nothing I have not seen before, and in greater detail.”

“Doctor?!” Luna spat. “Thou art a tyrant and a war criminal!”

“Glass houses, dear Princess, I know what you did during the Rebellion,” Sombra replied with that sharp-toothed grin.

Luna stiffened but didn’t reply. That was an argument she knew she would lose so it suited her not to step into it. As Luna had told her sister before she left, she understood the reasons for which Celestia had ensured that Luna was forgotten.

Some things were better left unremembered.

“And as of currently,” Sombra continued. “I am neither king nor criminal as I lack a crown, a throne, a kingdom, and a conviction status other than ‘Deceased’. However, I do still possess my four principals from the Imperial University, somewhere over there, I think,” he gestured towards a pile of books, “and therefore I am still a doctor.”

Sombra thumped one great hoof against the stone floor, and shadows bled up from around it, slithering out from beneath the immense stallion to form a pool beside him. Spindly, arachnoid legs peeled up out of the pool, followed by a bulbous and oddly lop-sided body.

The creature skittered under the bed, rustled around, then emerged slowly, dragging the chamberpot with it as Sombra moved up beside Luna to start pulling her free of the blankets.

“Off me, cretin!” Luna snarled, although her attempts at resistance were feeble. “We can manage ourself!”

Sombra huffed in annoyance and stepped back. “Then by all means, extract yourself from the bed!”

Luna glowered at him for a moment before shuffling awkwardly beneath the covers. The sheets were tangled around her hind legs which were frustratingly ignoring her commands. Even the blanket felt as though it weighed a quarter ton when she went to lift it. Every movement stole more and more energy from her until she was sweaty, panting, and barely able to shift her own legs.

“Are you finished?” Sombra asked tersely. “Or will you piss yourself out of pique?”

Luna lowered her head, still feebly struggling, but there was nothing left in her. No strength, no magic, no might was left to the once-goddess. She had bested a creature of myth, fought armies to a standstill alone, commanded the moon and the stars and walked the dreams of a million souls.

Now, if only her demons and the ghosts of her past could see her reduced to this. Perhaps then they would finally take pity on her.

Shuddering, Luna pressed her face into the mattress as she fought off the cloying shame, hatred, and gut-wrenching humiliation. It was in vain, though. If nothing else, she at least had her tears left, and they rolled hot down her cheeks as her shoulders quaked and shuddered. She bit her tongue trying not to let the sobs escape, but there was no stopping those either.

In moments, the goddess of the moon was weeping.

Sombra said nothing, he did nothing but limp closer, move the blankets off of her with a kind of gentle care that would have shocked Luna to stillness if she had anything left in her but sorrow, before wrapping his forelegs around her to pull her free of the sheets, and steady her on the floor over the pot.

“Keep it stable,” Sombra addressed the little shadow-thing, averting his eyes from Luna before speaking to her. “I will return momentarily.”

He left the ‘when you’re finished’ unsaid, for which Luna was shamefully grateful.

Leaving her be, Sombra limped out of the study he had been sharing with Luna for the past week, silently cursing himself. What had possessed him to needle and mock such a proud creature as her like that? He hated that he didn’t quite have the answer to that question beyond the notion that he hated seeing her so despondent.

At least when she was angry she became more animated.

But he had pushed her too far and too hard. She was brittle, her body was betraying her, and now…

“Fool,” Sombra grumbled to himself as he sat outside staring up at the ceiling in the room beyond the study. “You’re just an old fool.”

The ceiling was a field of stars that bore constellations no being of Equus would recognise. Even Sombra wasn’t sure it was real, but it was a place within the Dreamtime from which dark things came, a few of whom he was on a first-name basis even if he had not contacted them since the end of the Second Shadow War.

Sombra had always loved looking up at the stars, whether they were ones he recognised or not. There was something infinitely peaceful about that star-pierced blackness of the void above him.

A chittering click drew Sombra’s attention back to the study, and he turned to regard the small familiar he’d drawn out of the Dream to help Luna. It was trying to get his attention, which meant Luna was finished. The familiar will have helped clean her up, no doubt she would feel better with that situation that Sombra himself trying to help.

That would likely be too much for the proud mare.

“Aye, I’m coming,” Sombra said as he stood up, winced, then hobbled back to the study where a sullen Luna lay on the ground beside the bed.

Sighing quietly, Sombra paused to nod down to the familiar, mentally ordering it to take of the chamberpot’s contents. It bobbed in a weird, asymmetrical bow, before scuttling off to collect the pot. It perched it on its back before making its way to the waste-room.

“Come then,” Sombra said quietly as he moved to Luna and knelt to begin gathering her up. “Up you get.”

Luna didn’t fight him this time, she just shivered, sniffled, and let him pull her up to brace her against his shoulder before moving her onto his back briefly so he could lever her over onto the bed.

“I apologise,” Sombra said quietly as he moved her gently onto the mattress, and Luna stirred enough to fix one tired eye on him. “For mocking you, I mean. It was unnecessary and unworthy.”

She stared at him as if he’d grown a second head while he carefully laid the sheets over her, then the blankets, and settled them around her until her shivering began to subside.

Once that was done, he straightened and fixed her with a narrow look of his own.

“What?” Sombra asked.

“An apology?” Luna’s voice had the shadow of a sneer, but there were too many tears in it for it to be real. “Thou hast taken our dignity, must thou now try to rob us of our rage as well?”

Sombra lowered his head and sighed. She was as stubborn and proud as she was beautiful, just like always. Even with the passage of a millennium, Luna had not changed.

“What would you have of me?” Sombra asked quietly as he sat back and stared at her from beneath his ratty cowl.

No answer came immediately. For a long while Luna simply lay there, eyes dull and half-open as she stared into the distance at nothing in particular while Sombra sat beside her, quiet and waiting and he took the moment to watch her, to take her in.

For the time she’d spent asleep in the throes of the Sun Dog’s toxins, he’d avoided spending unnecessary amounts of time near her. It rankled him his sense of honor to linger beside her, and truthfully he would have given her a private room if he hadn’t been concerned that she might quietly expire in the time between him checking on her and not.

So he had simply commanded his familiars to drag the bed from his private room, the only bed in the temple that survived thanks to the preservative, and self-laundering, enchantments layered on it.

He had found himself to be doubly thankful of that last enchantment during this time. Although it didn’t clean up the beds occupant, unfortunately. He’d had to do that himself, as he’d admitted.

“An answer.” Luna’s reply broke the unsteady silence, drawing Sombra’s attention, as she finally moved, turning her graceful muzzle up to look at him wearily. “A true one, and not some wan excuse.”

Sombra sighed quietly, then started to chuckle.

“An answer?” Sombra repeated, then nodded mostly to himself. “Tell me, Princess, do you remember when we fought at Rowanholdts Ridge?”

Luna frowned, but humored the diversion.

“The first time or the second?” Luna asked. “We recall both.”

“Mm, right, we did catch up to your Guard at the Ridge a second time,” Sombra allowed. “T’was happenstance, though… no, I refer to the first, the one with the dragon.”

“Aye, Olstavrion’s brood was a thorn in our side for the war entire, as I recall,” Luna grumbled. “That was… Uvamorn, wasn’t it? The second eldest of the brood?”

“Third, actually,” Sombra admitted. “I killed the Olstavrion’s eldest when I dominated the brood.”

“Well, regardless we do recall,” Luna said acidly. “T’would be damnably hard to forget the time we were eaten.”

Sombra laughed quietly, nodding at it, and to Luna’s surprise a quiet snort of real humor escaped her as well.

“T’was a notable thing to be sure,” Sombra replied with that canid grin of his.

“I remember most how you cut your way out of its gut, your blades spinning around you like a razorfield of light, gore and bile painting your armor, rent flesh hanging from your horn as you emerged from it hissing and cussing before firing a dozen bolts of light into the hole you left behind and blowing the damn thing up.”

Luna flushed as she recalled the particulars, then frowned and looked away.

“It was already quite dead, you know,” Sombra pointed out. “It just hadn’t realised it.”

“We are aware,” Luna replied tersely. “We simply thought to teach it a lesson about proper dining etiquette before ushering it out of this mortal coil. What has that to do with your saving our life?”

“When I saw that, I distinctly recall thinking something that I’d never thought before,” Sombra replied quietly. “Not even of your sister, vaunted though she may be.”

Luna watched him cautiously for a moment, her interest undeniably piqued. She hated to admit it but there was a very small ember of pride being stoked. There was a certain something that comes out of acknowledgement not from one's allies, family, or friends, but from one's enemies.

“What was it?” Luna asked softly.

Sombra closed his eyes and recalled the grim memory with a smile.

“I thought to myself, ‘now that is a goddess’.”

When he opened his eyes again, he found Luna staring at him with her mouth softly open in a small ‘o’, and a faint shade of red across her cheeks, and Sombra smiled at that. It was a surprisingly mortal expression.

“But… our sister…” Luna lowered her head as her lips flattened to a thin line. “She has ever been the greater warrior, she could have slain Uvamorn with half as much effort.”

“Perhaps,” Sombra said. “But she would not have been nearly as beautiful doing it. So there is my answer, Princess,” he looked down at Luna as she lay on the bed with an expression of raw shock on her face. “I saved you because the war is over and I am done taking beauty from this world… and because at our age a nemesis may be the one who knows us best, and so may be the closest thing in the world we have to a friend.”

Sombra trailed off, then shook his head and started to laugh as he stood up, turned, and began to limp away towards his work table.

“Or perhaps that’s just me,” Sombra added quietly. “I’m sure you have friends aplenty.”

Luna watched the stallion she had once known as King Sombra clump back to his book and to the lone candle which had nearly melted down to nothing, and to her surprise found something other than hate beating in her heart. It wasn’t pity, nor anger, and it certainly wasn’t disgust or contempt as she had expected.

No, if she had to put a word to it she might have called it something like a rapport or affinity.

Kinship, almost.

Something she had not felt in a very, very long time.

“Sombra, pray… wait,” Luna spoke up softly, prompting Sombra to glance over his shoulder back at her as she lifted her head wearily from the pillow and offered a small smile. “Thank you.”

Sombra raised an eyebrow, then nodded as he turned away.

“You are quite welcome, Princess,” Sombra rumbled. “Now get some sleep.”

For the first time in ages, Luna settled into a bed, closed her eyes, and let herself fall asleep without the shadows of the ages pressing in on her. For some reason, in this temple that seemed so divorced from time, those memories didn’t feel quite so close.

Chapter 8

When Luna woke next, it was with a certain reluctance and a groggy, cloying exhaustion sticking about her head which she chalked up to all of the medication and her body finally starting to heal properly from the grievous damage she’d suffered fighting the Sun Dog.

A bowl of soup was sitting beside the bed on a small table that hadn’t been there the last time she’d awoken, and Luna eyed the meal cautiously before leaning in to sniff at it.

It smelled like vegetable soup, and there were chunks of root vegetables consistent with the limited agriculture of the Crystal Empire, as well as a few thick pieces of mushroom which were grown commonly in the cavern gardens beneath the city.

There was only so long she could keep up the pretense of suspicion though.

As much as Luna hated to admit it, Sombra had had plenty of opportunities to poison her or weaken her. That was all ignoring the fact that if he wanted her dead all he’d had to do was leave her in the tundra and her wounds from the Sun Dog’s strikes would have done the job. Not even Threnody’s Convalescence had been strong enough to combat the virulent damage inflicted by the beast, although it had probably been the only thing that had preserved her long enough for Sombra to treat her wounds.

And she was very hungry.

Luna could go weeks without water and longer without food thanks to her nature, but that didn’t mean it was comfortable.

Leaning forward, Luna made a tentative lick at the broth. It was tepid but not unpleasant, and she slowly began supping at the bowl. Other than being in desperate need of a little salt, the soup was perfectly normal. There was no telltale bitterness of alchemical ‘additions’ to the mix, and the root chunks, other than being a bit soggy, were perfectly edible.

Within a few moments, Luna had polished off the bowl’s contents. She’d barely taken time to breathe, but she’d been starving so she forgave herself that little indignity.

The very hungry have little use for such things, in Luna’s experience.

“Good morning.”

Luna looked up from the empty bowl to find Sombra, cowled and cloaked as ever, standing in the doorway to the study-stroke-bedroom Luna had, she surmised, been occupying for over a week.

“Aye,” Luna said cautiously as she drew back from the bowl. “Fair morn to thee, King Sombra, O’ Slaver-Tyrant of the Crystal Empire.”

Sombra’s lips quirked up at her unsubtle tone and chuckled.

“And well wishes to thee, O' Nightmare Moon, Butcher of Baltimare.”

Luna paled, and her ears folded back to pin against her skull as her pupils shrunk to pinprick, and Sombra’s smiled faded as he sighed.

“Apologies,” Sombra said quietly. “It seems my sense of humor has suffered for my isolation, assuming I had one to begin with.”

Luna lowered her head as well, then let out a soft sigh of her own.

“Nay, t’was our fault,” Luna replied, drawing a surprised look from Sombra. “We… needled thee, t’was no failing of thine that thou jested in kind.”

Frowning at the sudden lack of fight in his patient, Sombra eyed her carefully for a moment before shaking his head and turning away. As he did, something occurred to him that put the smile back on his face, if only as a shadow of it.

“You know, I’m reminded of an old and potent bit of advice regarding the Chymic arts,” Sombra said as he made his way over to his study table. “Raise up not that which ye cannot then put down.”

“We fail to see the application,” Luna responded dryly from the bed.

Sombra shrugged as he flipped open one of the large grimoires and paged back to his last section, all the while wearing a faint smile.

“From my eavesdropping in the Crystal Empire, I believe the youths of today would translate it more accurately as: don’t dish it out if you can’t take it.”

“Hilarious,” Luna grumbled before turning over and putting her back to the room in a show of grumpy petulance that Sombra found surprisingly charming.

Her wings ruffled uncomfortably as Luna shifted in the bed, doing her best to pull the blankets more firmly over herself despite her obvious weakness. She was getting stronger though, of that Sombra was certain. In just over a week, Luna had recovered enough to wake up on her own. A day later she was cogent. Now she was recovering her ability to snipe at him, which was an even better sign.

“Lie still,” Sombra said as he limped over to the bed. “You’ll only tangle yourself, and be worse off for it.”

For a moment Luna tensed, ready to argue back, but the memory of the previous night was still too fresh her memory for her injured pride to risk another such blow. With a quiet, wordless grumble, Luna relaxed and let Sombra approach.

Carefully, the large stallion began shifting the sheets out from under her pulling free covers that had gotten tangled around her hind legs.

Luna watched him over her shoulder, and as she did she couldn’t help but notice far too many things wrong with Sombra. It didn’t surprise her that he maintained a certain kind of decorum, even in the bowels of what she suspected to be some forsaken dark temple devoted to the more wicked aspects of the Dreamtime. A place to call out creatures that had no place in the Real.

The cloak though… that niggled at her.

Musing on that, she turned her thoughts sideways and found an easier topic to start on, one that would at least give her an answer.

“Our personal effects,” Luna asked as Sombra tugged a section of sheet free. “Our armor and weapons?”

“Your armor was badly damaged,” Sombra replied around a mouthful of fabric. “I had to leave it behind, besides, most of it was so dented that it was doing more harm than anything.”

“But my weapons,” Luna pressed. “My blades.”

“In the forgeworks, one sublevel beneath us,” Sombra replied. “Beautiful craftsmareship, by the way. Pre-Unity Unicornian, I think… early reformation, probably.”

Luna let out a relieved sigh.

“First Age, in fact,” Luna admitted with a small laugh. “The very first.”

Sombra looked up at that, true curiosity lighting in his eyes, and in that moment Luna saw something she hadn’t expected in the former dark king. There was a sort of scholarly eagerness to him that was oddly endearing, especially given his monumental frame.

“Indeed?” Sombra asked, genuine interest softening his tone. “Tell me, were they crafted in the Solar Forges?”

The expression on Luna’s face quickened to a wry grin as she turned her nose up slightly. It earned a frown from Sombra. Never was there a more mercurial mare than the lunar alicorn, he reflected sourly as he turned back to the covers.

“We propose a trade,” Luna said after a moment of silence, drawing Sombra’s attention back to her with a raised eyebrow. “Give us the answers we seek, and we shall give to thee in kind.”

“A game of questions?” Sombra asked with a chuckle. “Very well, I have nothing to hide anymore, and as I’ve asked you a few already, I’ll permit you the honor of the first turn.”

“How gracious,” Luna replied dryly as she sat up properly.

Sombra laughed again more quietly as he moved a fair distance away, then turned and sat. His cloak settled around him like a mourning shroud, cloaking almost all of his features in shadow.

“Ask, then, Princess.”

Luna eyed her savior—and possible captor—cautiously for a long moment before realising her first question was sitting in front of her nose.

“Verily, am I free to go once I am mended?” Luna asked.

“Aye,” Sombra replied. “I have no intentions to keep you captive, nor did I ever. Once you have healed you free to go.”

“Why?”

“Ah, ah,” Sombra tutted, his wolfish maw flashing beneath his cloak. “My turn.”

Luna scowled but nodded before settling in and crossing her forelegs over one another as Sombra hemmed and hawed thoughtfully for several moments. Finally, he seemed to settle on something and leveled his gaze back on the Lunar Princess.

“Did you truly hate your sister?”

Whatever she imagined Sombra might ask first, that was far from what Luna had imagined, and her jaw dropped as she worked it a few times.

“We—?! Did We what?!” Luna squawked, and her voice came out strangled with indignation.

“You went to war with her,” Sombra said, gesturing broadly with his hoof. “You burned her cities, killed her soldiers, and hung her spies from the treetops of the Everfree. So, it’s a fair question, I think.”

“We…” Luna started, then trailed off as she deflated. “Yes, We did, and for a very long time before We dared to rebel. We hated Our sister for her bellicose approach to governance—nay, to everything.” Luna bristled at the memories, and despite herself, the old anger she once knew began to flood back. “We hated how she would always mock Us for our insistence on diplomacy and subterfuge, and how she would openly disregard Our opinions in matters of court in front of all of our subjects as if We were the lesser among supposed equals!”

Luna slammed her hoof into the bedframe, cracking it briefly before the self-repairing enchantment sealed up the damage.

“We hated her bigotry and the way she drove the old faiths into the shadows!” Luna snarled. “We told her it would give rise to darkness and she laughed! She laughed at Us! And not a decade past her first Solar Inquisition did the first great Warlocks begin to rise! We—!”

With an effort of will, Luna sealed her lips and settled herself back on the bed, snorting and huffing as she shook her mane back into a presentable flow of cosmic light.

“Our… apologies,” Luna muttered. “Tis a sore subject.”

“I can see that,” Sombra replied in an arid, neutral tone.

“Tis a small, if spiteful, victory,” Luna said quietly, “that we see how our sister hath implemented so many of our ideas and plans after Our banishment, despite disregarding them for centuries. The Royal Intelligence Service was Our idea, as was the diplomatic corps, and the cross-tribal training which is taken as commonplace now.”

Sombra nodded thoughtfully, then let out a quiet grunt as she shifted his hind legs.

“Given the… personal nature of your sharing,” he started, “I shall give you your previous question for free, and tell you that I will release you because holding you serves me no purpose. I am not intending to return, nor will I ever.”

“Forgive me if We are skeptical,” Luna replied. “On a more current note, We shall ask of thee this: what in Tartarus' name is wrong with your leg?”

Sombra glanced down at himself, then chuckled wanly before shuffling in his cloak and lifting it away from the floor to show the leg he had been favouring, and Luna had to blink several times to be certain that what she was seeing was truly there.

The former tyrant’s rear-left leg was bent at an odd angle, and the way the flesh was distorted around his leg suggested it had always been so. Something about the turn of the bone turned Luna’s stomach, at the way the skin clung to the limb was noisome all on its own.

“Such are the wages of the dark arts, We suppose,” Luna said grimly.

“Amusing,” Sombra rumbled, “but incorrect… t’was no working of chymic sorcery that did this. I left the womb with this leg.”

“Oh!” Luna flushed for a moment, then narrowed her eyes as she examined Sombra carefully. “Verily?”

“Aye,” Sombra grunted. “I was born a cripple and I shall die a cripple, for fate has a wicked sense of humor, in my experience.”

“Was thy horn another such mutation?” Luna asked wryly.

Sombra scowled rather than answering, and his silence darkened the room with an unpleasant tension that settled in Luna’s chest like a cold weight as her hackles went up again. Whatever their mutual understanding, a part of her was reminded in that moment that this creature had committed atrocities rivaled only by her own.

After a moment, though, he let out a quiet breath, then snorted out a brittle laugh.

“My turn first,” he growled. “Your blades… where were they crafted and honed?”

Shifting in the bedsheets, Luna grimaced, then sighed and nodded.

“Fair is fair, We suppose,” she replied. “They were crafted in the Solar Forges of Unicornia by the First Smiths, and honed on the edges of moonbeams by the Dreamers of Hollow Hill.”

“That benighted place?” Sombra rumbled. “I thought it was a myth.”

“So do many, and tis… most of the time,” Luna said with a wan grin.

Sombra raised an eyebrow.

“There are nights,” she continued softly, “when the stars are right, and the moon is too, that if thou knowest the old songs and true rhymes, that thou cans’t still find the Hollow Hill, and hear the crones and maidens dreaming all that may not be.”

For a very long moment, Sombra could only watch the light sparkle in Luna’s eyes; they were so beautiful, and the way she spoke pulled at his heart in ways he had thought impossible now. The mystery of her smile was like a crow's call at midnight, or a dirge sung unseen on the moor. It was old, and young, and impossibly fair… ancient and new and sublime.

“You truly are the moon,” Sombra whispered softly.

“Flatterer,” Luna said playfully. “Now, tis my turn. Thy horn… We always wondered and would have Our wonder satisfied. Ne’er before thou has there been a Crystal Unicorn, so tell Us, how didst thou come to be so?”

Sombra drew back into his cowl as he thought on her question. It was a dire one, but not one that came unexpectedly. In truth, it was the answer he had expected to trade to her at some point in this conversation, and in that manner there was no reason for him to continue hiding it.

No, no reason other than old habits which die so hard.

“My leg was no work of sorcery,” Sombra began as he lifted his foreleg and hooked it under his cowl. “But my horn, unfortunately, was…”

Pushing the hood back, Sombra shook out his ashen mane, and Luna’s jaw dropped quietly open.

Beneath the cowl at the point of his skull where his bloody-bladed horn once curled out was a blackened and brittle stump that looked like nothing so much as a ruined tree struck by lightning too many times over. The bone was blackened and chalky, and only the faintest hint of red rested in the center of the exposed fragment of horn.

“Oh,” Luna mumbled, “That… how?”

“Another question,” Sombra said testily, “but I shall permit it… the how is complicated, but boils down to utilising the mysteries of the Crystal Arts in ways the original Master Sages never envisioned to grant myself power that I…” Sombra trailed off before sighed and shaking his head, “that I turned to selfish ends.”

“The Crystal Arts?” Luna narrowed her eyes at Sombra. “But such knowledge was jealously kept! The Sages were miserly with their secrets and taught only their… own…”

Luna’s jaw clicked open as the dots connected.

“Thou art a sage,” she mumbled. “An original sage…” She lifted a hoof and pointed at him, not caring if it made her look like a foal. “Tis how thou didst break the order! Thou knewest the manner to destroy the Chanceries and unmake their works not because thou wast some mere thief of the arts but because thou never had a need to steal at all! Because thou art one of them!”

Sombra let out a slow breath and nodded.

“Aye, I was,” Sombra replied. “No family would raise a crippled foal in the frozen north, so I was given over to a Chancery to be raised as a lay-stallion of the Order. My fate would have been to live and die scrubbing floors, emptying chamberpots, and refilling ink wells save that I demonstrated a talent for the Crystal Arts, and was inducted under… sufferance.”

“Sufferance?” Luna scowled at the venom with which he spoke the word. “What do you mean?”

Rather than answer, Sombra's expression darkened again.

“Enough of this game,” Sombra growled as he stood and began limping towards the door. “I tire of it, and you ought to be resting. Now, I have work that I must see to, Princess, so sleep, and I will return ere long.”

For a moment, Luna was tempted to argue, but the bitterness in the old, former King’s posture took her off-guard and stilled her tongue. There was too much familiarity in it for her to rally any true anger. Not anymore.

“Very well,” Luna said gently as she settled back into her bed. “Thank you for indulging Us.”

Sombra paused at the threshold and sighed.

“Aye,” he grumbled. “Thank you for… your company, Princess… sleep well.”

Luna watched the old stallion leave, and some part of her heart ached at the way he dragged himself out of the study. As much as she had hated and feared the ancient sorcerer that the world knew as King Sombra, she had also always admired and respected him.

Not easily did a mortal rise to challenge the realms of the Gods, but Sombra had done so and more, and on his own merit.

To see him reduced to such an ember felt… wrong, somehow.

Obscene, even.

It was like seeing some of the grandeur of the old world dying out, and Luna found she had no taste for it.

“Goodnight, old King,” Luna muttered quietly as she settled her head onto the pillows. “We shall see thee on the morrow.”