Nimbus lay in his half-sister’s legs for minutes, his mouth tingling with the power of her magic while he waited for her to settle fully into sleep. Once she started breathing steadily, her heart slowing ever so slightly, he pulled out of her legs and moved to her dresser.

He pulled the top drawer open with a wing, and then locked the inside of his mouth collecting sparks of potent blue magic onto his tongue and touching it to the lock on the jewelry box inside.

The tumblers on the lock shifted and turned into place, then the box popped open, revealing Flurry's tiara, other particularly precious trinkets of hers - and his wing knives, teleported inside when he'd 'accidentally' let her find them.

Tucking the blades back into his wings, he closed the box and drawer. He turned around, smiling as he watched Flurry sleeping.

"You'd do anything to keep me safe, wouldn't you, Sis? So sweet of you. I'm going to hold you to that."

He walked past her with no worry that she'd wake up. One thing he'd learned about her since they'd started sleeping together, when she got off from hornplay she was dead to the world until morning. Like her penchant for hiding his blades in her jewelry box, he was counting on it.

It was a shame, really. With her power, if he could count on her, they'd have Equestria well in hoof. But he would have to be able to count on her.

He'd long ago learned not to do that.

He slipped out through the main door, glancing to see if any guards were outside first. Seeing the way was clear, he flew up to the ceiling, moving from tapestry to wall sconce to support beam to painting, navigating the castle he'd grown up in. He spotted the occasional patrol, but as always, they never bothered to look up unless their attention was drawn there.

Finally, he reached the door to the Royal Chambers. This was the part that would try his patience. He sat, perched above a support beam outside his mother’s chambers, waiting for a patrol to come through. Fifteen minutes… half an hour… forty five minutes… multiple patrols passed through, but none of them opened the door to the chambers.

Then, after an hour, they finally opened the huge double doors, one of the guards stepping inside for a cursory check. Nimbus walked along the ceiling, slipping into the room while using his innate pegasus magic to cling to the minute amounts of water vapor clinging to the cold surface of the castle.

“...the Prince seems to be absent from his chambers, your Highness. We’ve sent a stallion down to the servant’s quarters, and another out to the Carnal Carnelian to see if he’s there.”

“So you’ll find out in about fifteen minutes that he’s not in the servant’s quarters,” Shining Armor yawned, “and in the morning, after a very thorough ‘search,’ that he probably isn’t out paying for company either, while he turns up back in his bedroom. As usual.”

Hmm. So they weren’t entirely ignorant after all. Just incompetent. A slight improvement.

“Actually, Lieutenant Sentry was expecting this would happen, with the Duchess bringing her daughter up tomorrow, so he volunteered to take watch in the Prince’s chambers and have a talk with him when he returned.”

Nimbus smirked and nodded approvingly. On the one hoof, this meant that he would be expected, and observed, returning to his chambers. On the other, Flash Sentry was one of the guards he most suspected was aware of the… arrangement… between he and Flurry Heart. Which meant he would be expected by a sympathetic audience that wouldn’t want to ask too many questions, for fear of confirming those suspicions.

Perfect.

“Good. If he has a pony he’s actually in love with, we’ll back off of him, but we can’t do anything if he won’t talk to us.”

Oh, we’ll have a talk, Shining. Don’t worry.

“We’ll resume the patrol, your Highness, but you did say you wanted to know if we found him missing again.”

“I appreciate it, Sergeant Quartz. Have a quiet patrol.”

“Thank you, your Highness.” The sergeant saluted his prince, then turned to leave, closing the door behind him.

Leaving Nimbus and his parents all alone in the royal suite.

Nimbus dropped from the ceiling, plunging towards Shining Armor and plunging one of his wing-knives into the base of the unicorn’s neck, paralyzing him from the neck down. Shining tried to shout for help, but a hoof on his muzzle muffled the noise. Nimbus slipped his second knife into his wing-grip, raised it high above the former Captain’s head, and brought it down point first.

Cadence stirred in her bed as she heard something going on in the other room. Realizing that she was alone in bed, she yawned and rolled up to her hooves, looking around for her husband.

“Shiny? Where are you?” She waited for a response, for the noise that woke her to be repeated, anything. Instead, all she got back was silence.

Too much of it.

The door to their bathroom was open, and the lights off, so Shining Armor wasn’t in there. She couldn’t hear him moving around in the other room, or talking to one of the guards. Her horn glowed as she stepped off the bed carefully, illuminating the ground ahead of her as she started to step out into the main room.

Her breath hitched as her purple aura caught the edge of a spreading pool of blood. She cast a spell to illuminate the entire room, gasping as she saw Shining Armor laying on the floor, his body twitching uselessly with a knife buried into the base of his horn, his eyes looking up at Cadance pleadingly as he tried to say something.

She was just starting to realize he was saying ‘watch out’ when a powerful pair of forelegs wrapped around her from behind, a knife pressed to her throat as she felt a pony’s weight landing on her back.

“He’s trying to say ‘watch out, he’s behind you,’” Nimbus rumbled as he pressed the sharp blade against his mother’s neck, drawing a thin line of blood. Her pulse was racing, throbbing beneath the edge, her entire body tensed as adrenaline flooded her system.

“Sorry to wake you up so rudely, mother, but I needed to talk to you about something,” Nimbus explained. “Specifically, the little issue of the Crystal Heart. End your connection to it, or you get to watch me take Shining Armor apart before you die.”

“Nimbus, you-” Cadence stopped talking as her son moved the blade up to her eyes, holding the point against one of her eyelids.

“Now, Mother.”

Her horn glowed as Cadance cast the spell, relinquishing control of the Heart to her heirs.

One of whom was asleep… and one of whom was ready to torture her husband to death and murder her in order to get that control.

“Good girl,” Nimbus crooned. “Now, go ahead and lay down next to Shining.” The blade was still just above her eye, ready to plunge into her brain in an instant if she tried anything.

“Why are you doing this, Nimbus?” Cadence whispered, doing as her bastard son ordered her. “Do you really want the Empire so badly?”

“Partly,” he admitted. “But it’s more than just that. Flurry would be happy to have me rule alongside her. More than happy,” he chuckled deep in his chest. “I keep my promises though.”

“What prom- NO!” Cadance screamed as Nimbus moved one of the hooves around her neck, stomping it down on the pommel of the blade trapped at the base of Shining’s horn. The unicorn twitched as the blade slipped through the soft base of his horn into his brain, his eyes rolling back in his head as a light wiggle of the hoof on the knife sent the blade slashing through soft grey matter, destroying everything that had made Cadance’s husband the pony she’d fallen in love with. He started gurgling helplessly as he lost control over all his body’s functions, lungs and heart spasming helplessly as blood leaked from his nostrils.

“I promised that I’d make you regret betraying me,” Nimbus pointed out with a smile, starting to slide the tip of his blade into Cadance’s eye along the bridge of her muzzle, scraping the tip along the orbital bone as the pressure in her head became unbearable.

Just before he sank the slender blade into her brain, as hooves beat towards the heavy double doors outside, he whispered up into her ear.

“Just know that your Daddy is so, so proud of what a bitch you grew up to be.”

With that, Nimbus sank the blade into her skull, twisting it to destroy her eye and the frontal lobes of her brain. He leaped off of them, running out onto the balcony and taking off, soaring around the castle as he left the Prince and Princess of the Crystal Empire dying on the floor of their own chambers, with their son’s knives buried in their skulls. He hadn’t even gotten his hooves bloody in the process.

Which was going to make it so, so much harder for Flurry to explain why his knives were the ones that had killed them, when she had locked them up in her jewelry box herself not even hours before. With her inevitable exile, he would be King of the Crystal Empire again, and this time with control of the Heart all to himself.

Nimbus smiled to himself, an expression that would horrify any crystal pony who saw it, and would recognize it from centuries before, in another body. He slipped back into Flurry’s chambers through the balcony, climbing into bed with her to be found when the guards arrived to announce the tragedy.

Flurry wrapped her hooves around him, snuggling up close in her sleep, mumbling something sleepily into his neck.

“Won’t let ‘em send you away.”

Nimbus fought not to start laughing as he closed his eyes.

He loved it when everything went according to plan.

Author's Note