Resonance

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Written by: Oneimare

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Arc 8 – Hearts Crystallised Chapter 1 – Godkillers, part I

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The echo belonging to two sets of hooves rang deafeningly through the desolated and submerged into dusk passages. When her involvement in infiltrating the Crystal Empire’s innermost halls was needed to be of airborne character no longer, the changeling queen had reverted to her regal and sinister chitinous nature. The future coated in thick living shadows—the coiling black smoke she had become very familiar with over the past few hours—strongly suggested a gryphon shape to be inadequate, though the dismayed mare much doubted she knew of any form able to match the wicked warlock’s proficiency in magic and battle.

Not for a single heartbeat the king had faltered in his advance into the core of the ancient empire, which he wished to reclaim as rightfully his. Sombra had barely acknowledged his zealously loyal soldiers falling victim to the robotic defenders barring entrance into the eerie kingdom of steel; Delight feared, were she to join the ranks of the fallen, too, the sombre unicorn wouldn’t have spared her as much as a glance. The urge to defy oblivion, to emerge witnessed by Sombra infused her with valour as much as the duty before her dying children. Even now, Sombra trod through the twilit corridors with the confidence of someone following the path of light—the radiance cast by the beacon of the throne waiting for him at its end; only the call of the crown existed for the king, for he had spared his ‘colleague’ not a single glance or even a half-turn of his head held high, casting Delight’s mind into an unhealthy illusion. If she were to assume a physique of a dragon and breathe death at the withers of the king, it would pass through him harmlessly—nothing had a chance of arresting his ascension. Such a thought bothered the changeling queen more than Sombra’s demeanour—she ought to not wish ill for the stallion on whom the survival of her species hinged so direly. Yet she couldn’t shake off the chilling sensation that had nothing to do with those empty and mute halls—she climbed the scaffold where gallows awaited her.

No relief came to her when the endless tide of the mechanical animals had ebbed for the last time, plunging the formless burrows of the Crystal Empire’s proper into silence pregnant with a question of why the battle ceased so abruptly. The foreboding intensified as the treacherous wires and pipes finally donned the shell of concrete. The dilapidated corridors—all but ruins—led ever upwards, with every side passage crumbled, and rooms, if they existed at all, deluged by machinery. Barely audibly rustling with fans, the derelict chipsets clogged every chamber, erratically twinkling like stars in a benighted sky. Cables as thick as hooves snaked by the walls, clinging to the discoloured plaster, uglily worming themselves into the cracks to betray even more ancient technology swelling beyond those remains of a building as old as the Great War. A mare brought up by Canterlot and thus not a stranger to such an industrial sight, Delight had found herself worried for another reason—aside from everything she had to be stressed out about. The cables nearly thrummed with energy and that tremendous power coursing through the metal veins of the reborn empire belonged to no ordinary source. The whole derelict pulsed with magic, something raw and vastly different from anything the changeling queen had experienced throughout her, admittedly, short life. There could be no mistake—the Crystal Heart beat, somehow serving this mechanical mockery of a kingdom; and every step brought her closer to the object so crucial for the survival of the entire realm… if the Machine Goddess could be trusted with her words.

They must have been traversing the tunnels leading straight to the only edifice that still resembled the lost glory of the Crystal Empire—the ominous gaunt spire protruding from the tumorous expanse of glistening machinery like a shard of a broken bone. It oppressed Delight with its solemn solitude and for not a moment had she allowed herself to stop scanning her surroundings—in a vain hope to catch a glimpse of some other crystalline remnant, which could be a library with the Swarm’s salvation. But only these halls of bare and barely holding together concrete bore equine touch; even here nothing suggested the vault of knowledge emerged from the merciless torrent of time. What if Sunburst’s questionable intel, indeed, was but a lure? Perhaps, she should have listened to her adviser…

Suddenly, Delight’s hooves froze to the floor; heavy as stone, they refused to help the changeling unfalteringly shadow the king of shadows. She avoided her loyal Praetorians, didn’t even acknowledge their arrival. The changeling queen turned her back on her subjects—her dear children—for she couldn’t bear to face them, to look at the changelings fighting to reach her; all she could see were green flames devouring their black forms till they underwent their final metamorphosis—into fine ash. It might be true that a king and a queen followed those withered veins of the Crystal Empire, but did a changeling and a pony walk these halls, and not a pegasus and a royalty? Outside of donning glamour after glamour, Delight remained a pony in her heart, yet to act like a true master of deception; the Swarm needed a mother as cunning as caring, a mare disingenuous and ruthless when it came to achieving her goals—not a docile pegasus struggling to pretend to be a queen in the presence of a true monarch. But watching the pale light of the Crystal Empire’s core as if hurrying to abandon the king’s inexorable and ominous silhouette, she wondered how she was supposed to act like a changeling when a single misstep would plunge her into a sea of coiling black smoke, from which only blackened crystals emerged. Clenching her teeth, Delight made a decision—she would ask Sombra to let her search that place, now when the siege seemed to come to an end. He didn’t need her to put a crown on his head; her children needed her to prove worthy of hers. And whatever the king’s first decree would be, the queen would rather abdicate her privilege to witness the dawn of a new era; she merely wished to see the next sunrise.

Even as the walls blended into one big smudge of dirty grey, Delight still couldn’t help but notice the plaster ceding back to glistening cables—or she thought it to be metal shining through the gaps betwixt the girthy cords. When she finally caught up with Sombra, the understanding struck her like lightning—it was crystal; at the same moment, she emerged into a chamber paned with dully glinting gemstone or, perhaps, she entered an unbelievably tremendous crystal geode.

Although Delight’s eyes swiftly adapted to the dancing reflections, the cavernous space still had enough to dazzle the changeling. Titanic arches supported the vaulted ceiling, their spacing and size suggesting those being a foundation to an even bigger construct—the spire; steep stairs offering ascent through the monumental crystal pillars betrayed as much. The vast gaps betwixt the supports offered no view—immured with stone and metal in a fashion clashing almost physically jarringly with the sublime cuts of crystal. However awesome the architecture of the Crystal Ponies was, the queen’s eyes couldn’t find purchase at it for long—her gaze drifted towards the centre of the chamber by itself, where from the ceiling an elegantly chiselled stalactite reached through the entire height of the room to pierce the top of the pile of machinery. Chaotic at first glance, the mass of cables, consoles and cooling systems slowly gained a disturbing outline—that of an equine, but horribly distorted and overgrown with technology; a mechanical monument on the verge of dissolution, held together by an abundance of as if metal moss. And whereas the rest of the Crystal Empire shivered with artificial life, that machine lay utterly dead, though Delight sensed the arcane heartbeat keener than ever.

Its murderer stood right by, her equine features recognisable with far more ease. When Delight, following Sombra, reached halfway across the spacious chamber, the frigid air echoed with the Machine Goddess’ voice, soft with dismay.

“My invitation into the Unity couldn’t find a single equinoid in the Crystal Empire, not a single consciousness answered me,” the arcanium alicorn uttered. “There was one, once; now, not even the name remains—only a machine who can’t remember why it exists.”

Her words, laden with emotion, continued to rebound off the crystal walls till the sound regained sharpness; the echoes no longer belonged to the sovereign of machines—those were of a multitude of hooves approaching.

Each step bringing Red Wire closer to the Crystal Empire’s heart—proverbial and literal—contributed to the build-up of dread inside her; it churned in her bones till they could contain the poison no more and the heavy premonition started to infuse her limbs with unbearable weight. What started as insubstantial worries had gradually festered into pounding pressure inside her head; common sense demanded her to stop and think and primal instincts awoke to implore her to run, but she pressed on.

Yet to recover from her magic burnout, the unicorn without a working horn had very little to offer to the changeling squad; cheering for the successes of the Praetorians—the extent of her usefulness—felt acutely out of place and not just because of the inherent ridiculousness of that notion. Something lurked in the semi-dark warrens of metal; the darkness that had come here at the same time as the assorted equines and the dragon. Nor had the situation improved when the steel champions retreated—for the first time since the arduous battle had begun. The following silence, pregnant with suspension, rendered even ever stoic Rainbow Dash tense.

Finally, the sprawling facility came to an end, offering a path paved with worn-out and shattered ceramic tiles; the deserted and ancient corridors belonging to the architecture of ponies brought with them questions nobody wanted to have answered—neither Sunset, nor Rainbow recognised those passages. Nevertheless, both agreed to explore the ruins embedded into the labyrinth of steel, plastic and rubber. The disintegrating concrete tunnels offered no room for discovery; the debris and intertwined cables gave no choice in choosing a direction to follow—the winding path persistently led skyward; the mottled group barely had the time to regain their breaths with the stairs ready to meet them at every turn.

Wire’s horn throbbed in unison with the cables; her head throbbed with a nagging sensation of them being corralled somewhere. She was willing to bet her healthy eye—wherever they headed, Sombra would meet them there; Heterocera would be with him. The same intuition that had been screaming inside the unicorn’s head for hours also suggested the Machine Goddess and Nightmare be present at the meeting that would be deciding for the entire world.

And her magic ability could produce but a fizzle, too weak to scare even a rat. Wallowing in her impotence rendered Wire blind to her surroundings, but even in her debilitated state, she didn’t fail to notice entering a vast space. Her breath caught in her throat and not only because of how cold it was compared to the stuffy tunnels. The scale of the chamber momentarily stunned her, and then the other visitors of the overwhelming place picked up the torch of leaving the unicorn breathless. The unmistakable tinny sounds told her the changelings took notice of King Sombra and the Machine Goddess, but sparing a glance behind her, she saw the gun barrels pointing at the floor—the children couldn’t bring themselves to aim at their mother. Night, who stood by them, followed their example, albeit frowning deeply—trying to hide how hard she was shaking. Rainbow narrowed her eyes and clenched her jaw, glaring at the warlock, but remained as still as a statue; the dragon towered above them all and partially spread her wings before mimicking the pegasus.

Though the tension hung thickly in the air, Wire perceived something else permeating the vast chamber like a heady scent—magic. She would have traced its source if she were blind; the only object in the room—the pile of metal under a crystal stalactite—pumped out raw arcane power, making her horn tingle. There could be no mistake about what steadily beat beneath that mound of machinery. Wire stared at it for but a heartbeat before a realisation—a resolution—came to her, crystallising in her mind clearer than anything ever before. She adamantly refused to gamble on what would happen when either the warlock or the goddess reached the Crystal Heart. If she was a mare consumed by paranoia… so would it be; she would rather suffer the consequences of committing a terrible mistake rather than stand idly whilst a tragedy unfolded.

Rainbow grunted with indignation as Wire’s magic yanked the Valour from under her wing; the sword bounced off the floor when the unicorn’s telekinesis nearly failed. The strain of keeping the heavy, even if designed for a unicorn, blade afloat and galloping invited shadows to the edges of Wire’s vision, but she kept her gaze fixed on Sombra’s smug smirk. Yet darkness did abruptly blot out the rage-inducing sight and Wire barely managed to stop the swing of the sword before it sliced through… chitin. Her slightly mismatched golden eyes, wide with disbelief, met the deep green of the changeling queen. The unicorn stared into those pools of deception—the betrayal she had never known herself. As the seconds had stretched into an eternity a horrible thought visited Wire’s mind: perhaps, she should have let the blade save Delight from a lie too sweet for even a mother of changelings to resist its fatal allure.

A small smile tugged on the corners of Delight’s lips and she winked.

Movement caught Wire’s attention—a faintly shimmering air behind the king’s back solidifying into an outline and then a tall black equine. As its copy, still grinning at the unicorn, began to smoulder with green embers, a blast of magic hit Sombra from behind, point blank. The king flew through the air, limp like a doll, only to dissolve into smoke mid-flight; Wire barely had a chance to take notice of that—the crystal panes underneath Delight’s mimic ear-splittingly shattered, erupting with jagged shards. The double, with ash flaking off it already at a rapid pace, exploded into Wire’s face when gemstone pikes with edges sharp as razors eagerly impaled the disintegrating body from beneath; the malevolent crystals, guided by the king’s bloodlust, continued their preternatural growth, aiming for Wire’s neck. The unicorn flung herself away, avoiding decapitation at the last moment; she rolled across the floor—her body shuddered by a coughing fit on top of her balance sacrificed for that life-preserving manoeuvre. Spitting out ashes, Wire dearly hoped Delight had created the decoy from magic and not by shedding her skin akin to a snake.

Springing back on her hooves, Wire frantically assessed the chamber that had turned into a battlefield in the blink of an eye. The moment the changeling queen backstabbed Sombra, the standstill broke—everyone rushed to finish the warlock off… except for the Machine Goddess. As she struggled with the momentum of her fall, Wire noticed the arcanium mare peer at one of the walls as if she could see through it; presently, the equinoid disappeared in a hurry, but not fast enough as to not flash her mask, which had become a grimace of deep concern.

The crystal beneath Wire’s hooves vibrated, barely perceptible; her horn itched from the build-up of magic somewhere very close and her mind connected the two right in time for her to jump away from the explosion of crystal shrapnel that would have maimed her, if not outright killed. Now on the move, she once more tried to take in the chaos that had broken out around the Crystal Heart. Sombra was yet to touch the floor he rendered deadly—the warlock disappeared and reappeared in trademark bursts of black smoke, popping in and out of existence around the chamber so rapidly, his hooves never touched the ground. The changelings, the dragoness, the Kirin—everyone—had given up on trying to intercept him, focused on surviving the semi-opaque spears of blackened crystal intent on gutting them. Only Rainbow, dexterous enough to dodge those with ease, chased the king, but even the fastest pegasus had trouble catching the unicorn teleporting faster than one could think.

Galloping, Wire veered away from a javelin shot at her from the crack in the floor, but it still nicked her neck. Stifling a cry to save her already ragged breath, she deeply regretted the decision to start a fight in a room where almost everything was made of crystal.

“Fall back!” Delight’s shrill voice sounded above the cacophony of gemstones shattering and reforming. “Retreat!” she repeated her order, shrieking in pain when a crystal shard grazed her flank, leaving a line dripping ichor on the floor.

The unceasing onslaught of crystalline blades gave the changelings no opening to assume any new shape. Neither their training, nor wings could save them from the wounds, even if not lethal; the injuries mounted, whilst Sombra denied them even the slightest opportunity to retaliate. Their shoulder-mounted cannons had yet to fire a shot; their target moved too fast and a suppressive fire could easily become friendly fire with everyone running around. At first, the Praetorians refused to abide by their mother’s will—they dutifully continued to keep a circular formation around her, with the rest spread out in an attempt to end up close enough to the king, when he rematerialised the next time. In mere seconds, two of the changelings cried out as a barrage of spikes tore apart their protective circle and one of the soldiers skidded across the cracked tiles, alive but crippled. Before Sombra could finish the job, a group led by Teleta hastily propped up their wounded comrade and guided him away to one of the staircases leading back into the ruins; the rest followed, but not without giving their queen and mother a worried look.

Although Wire hated to see any changeling hurt, their departure meant the king had fewer targets to spread his attention to and her already overwhelming task of surviving suddenly became more difficult. Her doubts took the worst moment to return, assaulting her as viciously as Sombra’s vile crystal-bending; perhaps, it wasn’t her fight either and she should retreat. Unwilling to make it even easier for Sombra, she sped up, thankful for adrenaline numbing her pain and letting her forget how exhausted she was. However, the unicorn mare didn’t just flee for her dear life—both of her eyes tried to fix themselves on the warlock to glimpse an understanding of his eldritch and tremendous power; she had not even a vaguest comprehension of what the stallion had become.

In her headlong rush, she nearly collided with Sunset—the dragon, too, failed to confront Sombra, forced to defend herself. She did swipe her claws at the black mist and breathed plumes of cyan fire, but they always missed the king by a fraction of a second; her scales glistened with crimson, showing the price paid for those transgressions. A living torch—the Nirik—demanded Wire to be careful where she headed; betwixt them two, Night would suffer far less from bumping into the unicorn.

Shadows were all that Wire could see—flickering, they followed every Sombra’s attack, dancing along with the crystals, which answered his murderous caprices. Sometimes, it seemed as if the darkness itself methodically hunted the warlock’s victims, whilst the stallion’s body was merely tossed around to taunt them.

As the anaesthetic and invigorating bliss began to fade, despair took its place. Seeing Rainbow’s armour dented, Delight’s chitin marred with ichor, Sunset’s bloodstains and Night’s limp—knowing she, herself, looked no better—Wire started to truly despair, for she knew: it was her, who started this doomed fight. Though, the king’s lips stretched in joy and his eyes sparkling with the thrill, told her—she was right about him all along… not that it mattered anymore.

Wire’s muscles burnt like coals under her lathery coat, foretelling the choking mare—her hooves would give out any moment now, but she clung to hope. Whilst her movement grew increasingly erratic and sluggish, the frequency of Sombra’s jumps, too, slowed down; not enough to let anyone catch him, but promising less menace and, perhaps, cessation of his murderous spellcasting without him left in the chamber with only warm corpses.

Rainbow rocketed past the king, who didn’t even bother to teleport—he merely dodged the no longer lightning-fast pegasus. He hovered in the air, descending with all the haste of a feather, mockingly leering at the changeling queen scrambling to avoid a series of spikes threatening to rip apart her hind hooves; he grinned in triumph when a glimmering spear parted the dragoness’ scales to leave a nasty gash in its wake. His incarnadine eyes then found Wire and the mare stumbled, fell, thrown off balance by the sheer bloodlust in the warlock’s gaze. Resigned to her fate, she clenched her jaws and would have squeezed her eyes shut, if not for one of Sombra’s shadows doing something utterly strange—it plunged at the warlock from the ceiling. Before Wire recognised it as a small grease-blighted mare, a metal hoof shot out, smashing Sombra’s horn; his bellow of pure inequine rage drowned out the clatter of metal grate fallen beside him.

The king grabbed Tin Flower by her mane, tearing her away from his withers like a burr; hissing in pain, she refused to surrender—her jaws bit into the stallion’s limb. And though her savagery hardly impressed Sombra, freeing himself from the vice of the mechanic’s jaws demanded his attention. His hoof, clad in iron matched the young mare’s punch from the moments ago—landing square at her muzzle, it sent her tumbling and bedewing the pock-marked crystal floor with her blood; despite likely a broken nose and a concussion, she didn’t slump, dazedly scrambling up.

Whilst Delight and Night stared at Flower’s sudden—and very welcomed—involvement in the fight in a stupor, no different from Wire’s bewilderment, one mare chose to not indulge in watching an earth pony beat one of the most powerful unicorns ever live with her bare hooves. And now Rainbow glided over the floor, the sword, which had once decapitated the warlock, back in her grasp.

A deep and reverberating hoarse cry belonging to a Sunset sprawled in the pool of her blood echoed pleadingly with a dire warning, “He is going to escape again!”

Wire’s head snapped back to Sombra and she finally bore witness to his true nature.

Whilst the king’s body remained still, lifeless, something stirred in her vision, barely perceptible—for who ever paid close attention to the shadow one cast? The dark silhouette on the crystal slithered, the intangible essence of the warlock fearing neither blade, nor magic. He needed no horn, no hooves to evade justice—as long as light existed, so would he, thrive as its inevitable consequence; Wire couldn’t promise even that little solace, for she knew so little about the magic Sombra authored and mastered, nor did the idea of the world without light seemed worth letting Nightmare reign. No, the solution lay in the darkness which gave birth to his power, close to Luna’s tenebrous affliction, but not quite the same. The unicorn, who had hunted every rare scroll and book for years in the hope to crack the riddle of loveless lovechildren, learnt but a single spell that might be that answer—an arcane formula she shouldn’t have ever laid an eye upon, hidden amidst the lamentations of a mare with a questionable story; she had never dared to try something so twisted and it was unfinished anyways. She had an idea now; it might not work, but it wasn’t the time for doubt.

Rainbow didn’t begrudge the unicorn kid… the young mare—the changeling queen, actually—whatever… for initiating a fight with such a dangerous enemy in such a reckless way; she, herself, wouldn’t have been able to watch him claim that, for which so many of her friends had sacrificed their lives. A strange serenity permeated her whole being instead; it didn’t dull her reflexes, nor did the tragic truth sapped them of any determination. She was dead—all of them were already—that the pegasus understood crystal clear.

Her rune-engraved suit of armour easily fell under a category of marvels—she would be gone without it, so long ago. The old, if frozen in her prime, mare considered it a miracle how she had survived encountering Sombra on the battlefield, back when the Crystal Empire had more than just a single spire looming over these plains. Having lost many valiant ponies to the warlock’s witchcraft, she couldn’t help doubting her streak of luck being endless. Sombra wasn’t throwing crystals at her, but insults; with malign glee, he observed her desperately squirm and cowardly run; he appeared for mere eyeblinks, smug as ever, to taunt the frantic pegasus, letting her know—he bore witness to her prolonged humiliation; he revelled in the display of his infinite superiority, postponing the defeat of his enemies in favour of petty amusement.

Letting her honed by centuries training take the reins of her body, Rainbow focused her mind on a single thing—to see an opening in the stallion’s perfect dance of shadows; she harboured a hope that deep inside Sombra remained mortal and thus susceptible to committing a mistake. All the whilst the pegasus had to silence reality insistently reminding her—she wasn’t flawless herself.

Even in the darkest hours of her life, Rainbow didn’t pray—neither to Celestia, whose death gnawed on her heart even after all those years, nor to Luna… the sombre alicorn had never seemed like some who would listen to prayers anyway. She refused to indulge in such a habit now as well, despite the Pale Horse sharpening the scythe for a soul long due for the harvest. The pegasus had no idea to whom should she pray, anyway; definitely not to the Machine Goddess, who fled from the battle, in spite of being, perhaps, one of the few who could accept the king’s challenge not as a convoluted way of committing suicide. Yet, an intervention did take place; not exactly divine, for a dirty mare diving at Sombra’s head barely passed for anything heavenly.

Nevertheless, Rainbow had no intention to refuse an unexpected blessing and an ally; instead of watching what would become of the audacious pony who slighted the king, the pegasus bolted for the blade—there would be no other chance. Sharply pivoting, she held fast to the sword never designed to be wielded by the ponies without a well-functioning horn. It rested in her grasp so awkwardly, regret flooded her mind—she might be wasting time as her bare hooves would likely be of more use. As the pegasus half-galloped, half-flew, heading for the stallion brawling with Tin Flower, Sunset added to her doubt of the weapon’s usefulness, reminding her—it didn’t work last time.

Shining Armour’s blade finally slipped from Rainbow’s grasp as she stopped, no longer sure who was her target—the warlock lifelessly sagging onto the crystal tiles or the young unicorn mare some lengths away, whose horn bubbled with a mix of green, red and black. Confused and terrified, Rainbow tried to make sense of the ghastly scene and noticed something else—Sombra’s silhouette on the floor, betwixt his body and Wire, writhing as some insuperable force dragged his shadow towards her. The unicorn, in turn, grimaced and shrieked—vile magic coursed through her body. Seeing it as another of the warlock’s tricks, if not quite prepared to deal with it, the pegasus stepped closer to Wire, picking up the sword as vain reassurance. Her conviction in Sombra initiating the eldritch display vaned the closer she got to the agonised unicorn mare—no longer bound to the flat surface as a two-dimensional projection, the stallion’s shadow became reminiscent of Trixie’s true form. And whilst tears streamed down Wire’s cheek, her eye harboured no fear; Sombra’s misty outline, however… Along with the young unicorn’s magic, indomitable panic firmly gripped every wisp of black smoke and, though his eerie eyes glowing with muted white had little in common with the cunning crimson gaze of the king, horror flooded them, perhaps, for the very first time.

Rainbow watched, at a loss for words and thought, how Sombra’s shadow merged with Wire’s body. She slumped on the floor, seemingly lifeless and, at the same time, the stallion’s frame swayed and toppled, shattering into myriad black crystals on the impact.

In the grave silence that followed, Rainbow carefully, almost reluctantly approached the sprawled unicorn. Night reached her first, trying to prop the unconscious mare up. Flower, dripping crimson from her muzzle, shuffled to Wire’s other side, unsure if she should join helping her once closest friend, but, in the end, found it unable to abandon her. Those ministrations produced a groan from Wire, but before her head rose from its hanging state, the tip of a blade pressed itself against her chest, right under her nose, held by Rainbow’s unsteady hooves.

Night and Flower froze, tense and not because of the weapon one movement away from killing the unicorn—they abruptly came to share Rainbow’s fear. Ever so slowly, Wire raised her eyes to meet Rainbow’s stare—with clear gold of her own, as bright as it always was. Accusation and admiration mixed in the pegasus’ tone in equal proportion, she demanded in a voice barely above a whisper, “What have you done?”

Guilt flashed in Wire’s gaze before she cast her eyes downwards. Before she could explain herself a scraping noise came from behind Rainbow—Sunset struggling to get up. Despite her numerous bleeding cuts, the dragoness managed to stand tall and proud. She eyed the unicorn for a few long moments, her expression unreadable; nonetheless, her cold eyes and predatory features rendered her comment reproachful.

“I thought that spell was unfinished.”

Wire smirked, her grin making everyone’s heart skip a beat—for a fraction of a second, it carried an all too familiar quality. Yet, her response had none of the malignity. “It was,” she admitted. “But Trixie has left enough hoofnotes in her diary for me to figure out how it’s supposed to work… kind of.”

“I’m not sure which impresses me more,” Sunset uttered, slightly bowing her head. “Your ingenuity or your courage.” Amusement then sparkled in her eyes. “You will need both of those, when Trixie learns you copied her homework from her personal diary.”

“She shouldn’t have left it lying around like an ordinary book.”

“No ordinary books are bound in leather…”

Rainbow let their bickering fade into the background or, rather, the immense relief deafened her as the centuries-long enmity abruptly imploded and left behind a vast hollowness. She didn’t mind it—the tumour of hatred, which had mutated from duty, never deserved that space in her heart. A smile crept on her face as realisation sunk in—it was never her place to end Sombra’s dark reign either. The overconfidence of the warlock, who must have thought nobody would be able to figure his spell out, definitely not his worst pupil or some unicorn accidentally stumbling upon it, killed the bastard king. She deeply inhaled, preparing to let out a sigh she had been holding back for five long centuries.

It caught in her throat.

Enchanted with more than time-bending runes, her armour also protected her from such grievances as the chill of winter and, yet, coldness rushed to embrace her body with the touch Rainbow instantly recognised—the otherworldly breath that couldn’t be stopped by any cloth or magic. Her head whipped to the remains of Sombra’s body and she stared, moon-eyed, at the pool of ink spreading on the floor, bubbling around the crystalline shards. The obsidian gems sunk into that void and from the puddle of tar a long bony horn emerged first, followed by a monstrous equine—almost a bare skeleton—with its featherless and fleshless wings spread in the silent announcement of Nightmare’s arrival.

Author's Note

English isn't my native language; though I try my best and use various tools to aid myself, I'm aware that a result is far from perfect. That said, if you notice anything that you think should be fixed—please let me know.

I hope you've enjoyed reading this story so far.
Stay awesome.