My eyes opened to the sound of screams.

"Help me, Shining!"

My blood froze in an instant. I rolled over, stretching out my foreleg to feel for Cadance but she wasn't there. My hoof instead slapped against empty sheets that were wet and sticky. I shot up panting in terror. In the dim lamplight I could see my limb smattered in crimson. Blood was all over me and the bed.

My panicked whimper was drowned out by a baby cry echoing from afar. I whirled around. I was in my old bedroom in the tower but it was huge. My eyes locked on Flurry Heart's crib some distance away across an ocean of a floor rug. I stumbled out of bed and galloped to my daughter's bed as she continued to wail. "Flurry Heart!" I cried. The crib was empty too, adorned with the same bloodstains. My heart was beating out of my chest. Where were they?

"Shining, please, where are you?" Cadance screamed.

I bolted for the door. It was so far away and the ceiling was so high that I couldn't even see it. The walls simply extended upward, receding into what looked like a black starless sky.

"Cadance," I shouted, bursting through the door without breaking stride. The hallway was even more distorted than the bedroom, twisting in a barrel roll upside down as I ran past a million doors. The corpses of Crystal Empire guards littered my path, sprawled out on the polished stone floor and slumped over against the wall and ceiling. It got darker and darker as I approached the end and the double doors nearly broke from their hinges as I leapt into the throne room.

There was Cadance, crawling desperately toward me, leaving a smear of red across the once pristine floor. The dark horse, Sombra stood behind her laughing, relishing in the sight and stoking the embers of my rage.

"I'm here, Cadance," I bellowed, skidding to a stop on the crystalline floor.

She reached a shaky hoof up to me, her horn broken, her eyes huge with fear. "Where's Flurry Heart?" she begged.

I took her quivering shattered body in my forelegs and glared up at Sombra. I focused a spell but my horn sputtered impotantly.

He sneered back at me. His horn glowed purple as he charged up for the blast that would end the both of us and give him the Crystal Empire. Unable to muster even a modicum of magical power, I threw myself over Cadance and clutched her to me in some involuntary attempt to rectify my actions from before. No killing blow came. Cadance's body evaporated in my grasp.

I opened my eyes to see that I was no longer in the tower but huddled over a canvas of luminous gray silt. I looked up slowly and instead of Sombra, I saw Princess Luna standing majestically before me. Her flowing mane waved without wind before a starry black void. Though infinitely graceful, her neck was burdened with an ethereal collar which bound her to this sphere just as it had for so many years before.

A knotted pang of conflicting emotions hit me hard. So many nights of dark visions like these. So many days of stumbling around lost. Breathless, I shook my head, unable to curate my words before they spilled out of my mouth. "Where the hell have you been?"

"You know exactly where I've been, Shining Armor," she began in a contrastingly genial tone as she plodded slowly toward me.

"Why didn't you come to me sooner?" I bristled. "I needed you."

Her face softened in sincere empathy. "I'm sorry. Things don't work the way they used to. While I do have more insight and influence than my sister, I still don't have much. But your brush with death seems to have made things easier."

She placed a comforting hoof on my cheek and my anger was smothered beneath an avalanche of sadness. I drew her close in an embrace, still high on the emotions of my nightmare and reliving the worst moment anyone can experience.

"I ran away, Luna," I sobbed into her shadowy mane. "I couldn't save them and then I just disappeared." Tears streamed down my face.

"You would have died too, Shining."

"Maybe that would have been best," I argued.

She released me and wiped my tears away in a motherly fashion. "I know it hurts but your heart still beats for a reason. You must find your sister, Twilight Sparkle."

It felt validating to hear those words from an ancient goddess, the part about Twili. I'm still on the fence about having a real purpose.

She mournfully scanned my eyes. "I see so much sadness in you," she added. "But I also see so much hatred. What are your true intentions, Shining?"

"I'm going to kill Sombra or die trying," I replied resolutely.

"I had definitely gathered as much. But what about the old Crystal Kingdom and the rest of Equestria?"

"What about them?" I shrugged.

"Suppose you succeed. They will need benevolent rulers to heal them and keep them safe."

The sad truth was that I hadn't really thought about it. I'd lived under the new regime just like everyone else. Struggled and suffered in it, wanted to burn the hideous mockery of my old empire to the ground like anyone with half a scruple left but I'd somehow never entertained the thought of actually sitting back on the throne and fixing it again by myself.

"Um… hopefully we could figure out how to free you and Celestia and you could go back to Canterlot," I offered tepidly.

"And the empire?" she asked, cocking her head expectantly to one side.

I looked away, shamefully allowing the moment to die.

"Shining?" she prodded, as if pressing a foal to tell the truth about who broke the vase.

"That was always Cadance's thing," I groaned. "I was mostly just along for the ride."

"If not you, then whom?" she posed, aghast.

"I don't know," I growled in annoyance. "The one thing that I want right now is Sombra's head on a pike."

Luna closed her eyes and sighed. "If anyone deserves death, it is he," she agreed. "But my fear is that you are becoming apathetic, even cruel as your lust for vengeance outweighs all else."

"What does that matter?" I shrugged dismissively.

She blinked in apparent shock. "What has happened to your sense of duty? You don't sound like yourself. Remember who you were and what you had. Remember the things that used to bring you meaning and peace and never stop seeking those things. Don't lose yourself to your hate. Hatred destroys all it touches, Shining Armor. You and your loved ones as much as your enemies."

"Don't tell me you just popped in to lecture me on my mission etiquette," I fumed. "Everything I've done has been calculated and necessary." I didn't even make it through the sentence without my belief in my own words faltering. The fact that I was no longer living in the city testified that I was wrong.

"What do you know about me anyway?" I scoffed, unable to amend a better argument.

Her eyes narrowed and she hunched forward to lambast me. "Your mouth may lie but your dreams cannot!" she bellowed in my face in her royal Canterlot voice. "The shiny brass ring of vengeance has kept you marching when all you want to do is flop over and curl into a ball! It keeps you sober where you otherwise would have been lost to drink or drugs but this motivation comes with a price! You are rotting inside!"

I rubbed my ringing ears, still reeling from the blast. She'd never yelled at me like that before, well, once but not at such close range.

"Who's to say I won't find peace again once I put him in the ground?" I argued weakly.

"Sit," she commanded sternly, slamming her rump into the moon dust.

I indulged her and she sidled up to me, beholding the Earth in the blackness above us and for a moment I was unsure if we were still in a dream or really on the moon.

"Destruction may be an inevitable solution for some things but it will not heal you," she managed in an even tone. "It's not killing Sombra, it's the careless wake of destruction left in your path to get to him. Ponies who were once your subjects and may have even served under you. Equestria will need your leadership. We can not replace a cruel tyrant with a shattered callus shell of a stallion to rule over the same ponies he cut down without mercy. Hold fast to the ones you love."

I gritted my teeth in frustration. "That's what I did before, Luna. Now look at me."

"So what then?" she mocked dismissively. "Live as a malignant vindictive husk the rest of your days, shunning love and abdicating duty? Leaving your country and ponies to twist in the wind. You have suffered a heinous transgression and an incalculable loss but you don't have to be broken forever, provided you don't rashly throw all your pieces away. Have you not once considered what life is like for an eternal alicorn? How many friends and lovers come and go in your life? You find one, you are happy, you lose them, you cry, then another comes." She bowed her head in a somber pause as if she were thinking of someone in particular.

"When I returned from banishment the first time, everypony I knew was dead. Not only that, their children and grandchildren were dead. If things had gone as they were supposed to, you would die one day of old age while your wife and child lived on. You would be a stepping stone in their journey. Life could not stop for them. Cadance might find happiness once more with a new husband or eventually a dozen new husbands… or wives. That would never detract from the memories she had with you. Flurry Heart would outlive her own progeny and her progeny's progeny and so on but that would not stop her from loving all of them. That is life.

"That is depressing," I added, feeling my face tightening up in anticipation for more tears.

"Perhaps devastatingly so," she continued. "Until you realize it is not the end of a book; it is the end of a chapter. The next chapter is yet unwritten and the quill is in your hooves. Kill Sombra if you must but along your journey ask yourself is this honoring your family's memory or is it simply gorging your own bloodlust?"

I wish I could say that that was the moment that pulled me back together and made me a hero but instead it revealed just how much of me had already slipped away without my concern. The disconnect between Luna's expectations of me and my own self-gratifying desires and the fact that the full gamut of this glaring mutation had escaped my notice until now was nothing less than shocking. And yet I could not step back from the edge of monsterdom. It was like watching a precious photograph burn away because I was so entranced by the flame.

It's not like I'm a complete sociopath now, I thought to myself. I still cared about… Pinkie and Twilight anyway. Spike…

"Okay," I sighed in a placative conciliatory tone. "But all this leadership business I think is putting the cart before the pony at this point."

"We will speak of this again," she cooed darkly in my ear.

I shivered at the full body deepness in her voice and her unexpected intrusion into my personal space. "Fine," I breathed

She laid out on the silver dune and twirled a hoof absently through the silt as she thought. "Then on to the matter at hoof. Before you attempt your assault, were you aware that King Sombra possesses the Alicorn Amulet?"

I raised my eyebrows. "He possesses the what now?"

"So you didn't know. That is how he banished my sister and I and why he seemed more potent than the last time you sparred. With it, I fear he is still too much for you. That is why you must conspire with your sister, the last alicorn in Equestria."

I sighed in frustration at the high probability that I was still inadequate but I was also somewhat intrigued by the silver lining of Sombra's power being more finite than expected, even reversible. "Well, I'm already on my way to Twilight," I boasted. "Do you know exactly where she is?"

Luna shook her head slowly. "She no longer appears to dream anything discernable, so I know no more than you do. She, like you, was consumed with Sombra and I am worried about her."

"Do you know where Pinkie Pie's family is?

Luna smiled weakly but kept looking straight ahead across the moonscape. "No but I do know that they are all alive."

"That's reassuring anyway," I muttered.

"You sleep in her bed, do you not?" She asked abruptly, peering back at me from the corner of her eyes.

"Pinkie Pie's?" I replied, taken aback by the somewhat personal question. "Whenever I can." My eyes darted away, landing on my own hoofprint in the lunar soil.

"That is part of the reason I've had such difficulty making contact with you. As the former Element of Laughter, she still possesses intrinsic powers that soothe your nightmares. You are so lucky to have her."

The few loose chain links on Luna's ghostly collar rattled as she melted fully into the silt on her side in a tired, almost listless flop. It was so subtle but I'd never seen her do such a thing before, seemingly shed the invisible burden of royal decorum right in front of me. Her sudden candidness put me on edge as though something were wrong. She looked as if she were ready to fall asleep right there on the ground but she kept her eyes on me.

"It's difficult to enter dreams at all anymore, Shining and I am in no way eager to return to complete solitude. Please do not mistake my intentions but would you do me the kindness of laying next to me until dream's end?"

Author's Note

Night in Crystal City Playlist