The night is dark, and full of terrors.

Twilight stood before the great main door, watching it silently with concentration etched on her face and in her eyes, her horn having a very light glow.
“It’s not a matter of strength or might to open this door, Twilight Sparkle.”
The dark voice of the large deathly stallion was heard all around her.

“I…I understand that. If it was, you would have gotten out long ago.”

“Exactly. Take your time.”

Rainbow Dash stood beside her master, watching in silence and trying to figure out what Twilight was doing exactly. What hadn’t the Unicorn just cast a Spell on the huge constructs and opened them, like she did before?

“Not trying to interrupt here or anything like that, but how did you get inside here in the first place? I mean, if this is so complicated for you right now, how was it the first time?”
Her voice sounded a little annoyed already. The Unicorn sighed softly in turn at the vampire’s words, making said being bite her lip with a minor grin.

“Please,” she said, “I need to focus right now. The weaving of the Seal is far more complex in here than it was outside. It’s like it has adapted to what I did and is now trying its darnedest to keep me from escaping. Now, let me see…”

Another few moments passed as Twilight carefully scanned and prodded the power of the Seal with her own Magic, feeling it inside and out and slowly cracking down on each weak point for better control and exploitation.
Finally, the last link was broken, and she grunted out in effort,
“OK, now just OPEN!”

There was a brief glow of light along her whole length of the doors now, and a crackling brightness of blue in-between them. Then the door creaked and complained, seemingly moving until it finally open just enough to let the moonlight in.

Twilight sighed and her frontal body sagged in relief, but then everything happened at once.

A thunderous crushing pain exploded through her body, originating from her right side, and she found herself flying through the air one moment then crashing into something else solid and unyielding the next, the sound and sensation of horribly loud cracking almost deafening her ears.

Her head wasn’t merely swimming, it was DROWNING in a twirling mess of blurry stars and colors, and it all too agonizingly slow for her to eventually realize that she was lying on the hard, cold ground, on her right side, as limp as a broken doll. Her entire body was numb, and she couldn’t move even a single hoof.

Yet somehow, her incredible mind had apparently resorted to a sort of calm, logical approach and explanation to her current shattered physical condition.

The numbness told her that her nerves were so heavily affected by the unseen attack that they had stopped working, most likely due to something in her brain, AKA head trauma.
The inability to move told her that her nervous system, again, was not working at all. Her body was disconnected from its internal control system.
The numb dizziness and inability to properly see anymore told her that she’d just sustained extreme head trauma.

The hard metallic scent and taste in her nostrils and mouth told her she was bleeding from her orifices…
The blurry heat in her eyes told her that she was crying. Crying warm salty water, mingled with something deep red.

-

Rainbow Dash watched as Twilight worked on the Seal, and the Magic was visible easily due to her enhanced vampiric eyesight.
She could feel her undead heart racing in her breast for the first time in countless years, and somehow it felt both painful and awesome! She was about to be free at last, she was going to be able to soar through the fresh clean air and kiss the sky with all the power in her wings again!

She was so excited as those accursed and massive doors began to open… that she didn’t feel her master’s power suddenly spike up rapidly until the first blow was already struck and it was too late.

She heard the sudden strike, the crunching sound of flesh and bone being well-nigh obliterated by an absurdly powerful force striking it.
She knew that sound well. She’d been the one whose body had made it repeatedly during her ‘training’ sessions with her master.

“Wha-?!”

A storm of hundreds of tendrils composed of pure blackness speeding for her were all she saw when she snapped her head to the left, eclipsing her entire field of vision.
The battle was short and one-sided. Despite her inferior strength and experience to her master, Rainbow Dash was still a prodigious athlete, and she skillfully bobbed and weaved at lightning fast speeds, leaving behind sharp whips of wind and powerful mini-explosions in midair as she tried to avoid his attacks.
But it was not enough in this limited space. She was still just a beginner compared to the much older vampire, and with a swift and unseen pillar of black crystal from beneath a wall of blackness, the mare was sent crashing through the stone wall and into one of the gate’s towers with a thunderous crash.

Even as she was swiftly up and lunging out through the hole she’d just made, Dash saw the last tail ends of the shadowy mass disappearing through the crack in the doors, just before they closed again with a resounding boom.

Her despair at losing her chance for freedom, rapidly rising into her mind, was suddenly erased as soon as it had appeared when, by chance, her gaze traveled to look in front of her… and she saw the broken body of the young Unicorn mare.

“Oh no! Please, NO!! Twilight! Please don’t die!”
She rushed to the limp form, and did not know what to do. She tried to pick up the poor Unicorn, but one touch and she realized just how BROKEN she actually was.

“Please, Twilight… I just met you a few days ago and all that…(sniffle) but I just, I don’t know… I just CANT lose you!”

Rainbow Dash leaned over the bloody broken body of the gentle, kind-hearted… beautiful, young Unicorn, and began to sob.

-

Outside, barely complete, the vast cloud of nightmarish darkness circled around the large castle like a living sandstorm, traversing all over it, even shooting up high into the sky as a black mass of malevolent shade.
It swirled around in the air above the castle like a gargantuan whirlpool, and somehow began sucking in all the real clouds around it like a black hole with a howling, moaning noise like the winds that are heard in the heights of winter in the mountain.
Great storm clouds that had covered mountains and forests and had been ready to unleash their vast holdings of rainwater upon the earth were suddenly being reeled in like a fish on a hook and swallowed down into the dark mass, the same way that apple cider would be drunken down from a mug by another version of Rainbow Dash in another, better world.

The dark unnatural cloud swarmed over the cliffs and the woods and the mountain highway that had brought Twilight here in the first place, but soon it returned to the deathly castle that had been his prison for just over a millennia.

The inky smoky blackness, with ghastly images of numerous creatures crying out with mournfully contorted faces and reaching out in vain trying to escape the swirling void before disappearing back into it, circled over the great castle again before finally descending.
It fell down in long streams, like blood pouring down from a freshly killed carcass that was hung up and gutted, and condensing around itself until the large dark-colored stallion materialized, the tattered remnants of his warriors cloak blowing in the now very real wind along with his midnight black mane and tail.
Behind him, the shadows were fully visible, looking like smoke from a great fire while also being the fire itself.

Casting his vision upwards toward the heavens, Sombra grinned fierce and terrible, his nostrils filling with one thousand different scents and sorting through each of them in the time it takes a pony to take a breath.
The weather had suddenly grown both colder and dryer by now, and already numerous dead leaves were being caught up in the wind and gathered together in little tornadoes that were forming nearby.

The dark Unicorn creature closed his eyes and turned his head in the direction of the moon, now revealed as the clouds had all moved away from hiding it or been absorbed by the terrible shadows, and it shone down upon him with what could only be described as cold disdain.

He opened his eyes now and saw the bright light, and even if it was bothering to look at directly, he grinned even more menacingly.
It was the first time in centuries he could see it directly with his own two eyes, not in a vision or with a barrier in between.
He then looked beyond and saw the stars….the worlds, even the vast gatherings of worlds and stars uncounted that were referred to as ‘galaxies’ beyond with his vastly advanced eyesight.
The mighty vampire looked around and found that almost everything still looked exactly the same as he had remembered it before his corruption of Rainbow Dash and their shared imprisonment.
Now, there was something right in front of him.

Another door.

Sombra chuckled darkly and narrowed his eyes. That was the last thing standing in his way to walking back into the outside world.
He raised a single hoof, slamming it down to the ground hard and saw a current of dark purple crystal travel swiftly to the door, springing up like blood from a sliced artery and covered it completely with hundreds of little spiky vine-like pieces of itself. The vampire felt his horrid power invading every single fiber of the metal and wood.
And it was so very wonderful.

He calmly blinked once and watched as the altered door collapsed on itself and was dust before it even hit the ground, showing a long stone bridge beyond it.
He chuckled and smirked triumphantly.

Somewhere nearby, he heard and felt the sensation of mortal grief. It was… a pony crying.

“Hmm?”
He turned and focused more for one seconds on the sound he had just heard by now. He knew that voice, there was only one pony who had a voice of that exact frequency and had a heart that devoted.

He laughed, and the air shivered from the sound that he made.

Well, I suppose that it has been long enough. It is now time to fulfill my end of this deal.

He tapped his hoof to the ground now, more calmly this time, and saw the crystal take over the huge doors now. But this time, they could only force it open somehow.
The Magic Seal was still upon them, refusing to be fully purged from their place of enchantment.
But just then, he felt something in himself. It was like… a minor warning, a tingling sensation growth that was somewhere else. He forced the doors back open and entered them physically with his own body.

Inside, Dash was kneeling over the body of the unmoving Unicorn, and her jaws were upon that poor throat.
The blood of Twilight was nowhere to be seen, either.

“I see that you have turned to the only solution you could think of to save your dear little friend.”
He hissed out, walking up to the Pegasus mare whom he could also now sense was overflowing with hate and fear that she didn’t even bother trying to hide anymore.

“But you won’t be enough on your own.”

As soon as Dash gently pulled her fangs away from the body, he brought one of his own hooves up to his jaws and bit into it violently. His own black blood, if it even could be called that anymore, oozed and spilled down his foreleg.
He moved closer while Rainbow Dash moved back reluctantly, and he telekinetically raised his blood and circled it into the air above Twilight’s broken head, then let it fall down and form a perfect black circle around her crumpled form which immediately burnt the stone floor, raising a thin stream of amber-colored smoke.

“She’s as good as dead, Dash,”
He growled, already knowing what his Fledgling was thinking,
“Being gentle will just waste more time. Besides…”
And now he turned to grin at her, “Don’t forget who she is and what she is capable of. She will be fine.”

-

Twilight was in darkness. Pure, utter darkness. She could feel her own body, and it was one word: helpless.
She could feel fear, and wondered if she was still crying out there in the physical world.

The despair was also crushing down on her, and the sheer pointlessness of it all was at the forefront of her thoughts.
All she’d wanted was to free her new friend from an eternity of imprisonment in darkness, and now here she was, dying helpless and alone, her last action having been to instead free an ancient horror upon the world.
A monster that had manipulated and tricked her into letting him out and had now killed her.

But just recently, she’d felt something odd, like it was biting into her. And she could feel something going down into her… body, maybe? Either way, it was something, and it made her feel. Feel like some of the energy that she had completely lost was being slowly returned to her, but in a different sense.

She suddenly became more acutely aware of her own physical presence now, and she didn’t know how or why.
And she felt… an odd feeling. Like there were strange strings, and they were wrapped around her limbs. Wait, did she have limbs? If she did, then she supposed that THIS was how it felt to have them tied with something thin and strong.

The strange sensation pulled lightly, or something like that, and so she pulled back… and was met with utter weariness again.

How am I tired? I don’t even have a body right now, it feels like Limbo! Wait, I am in Limbo? If so, how do I feel..?
Get it together, Twilight. Just… focus on what you can feel for real, and panic later. That’s it, panic later.

But it mattered not! She forced herself to pull on it again, and again. Each time it became easier, and she felt her energy returning in waves.

Sombra and Rainbow watched as the broken, heavily bloodied body of the young Unicorn began to shift as the bloody black circle somehow glowed, and her horribly mangled, practically CAVED-IN ribcage began to fill out again, the cracking sounds of bones being reattached and forcing themselves back into place.
Her gashed skin began to pull itself back together along with her muscle, and they could both see and HEAR her partially-crushed skull *POP* itself back into its proper shape and size.
Her broken legs snapped back into place, and countless little twitches along her whole body were going off, indicating her nervous system was being reconnected and realigned with itself across all corners of her form.

This…did not make sense. Why was her body not being encased in any sort of light or shadow, but instead was healing physically?

But Sombra forced any doubts from his own mind and waited for a few seconds longer, then he pulled away, the bite wound on his hoof healing up in seconds as shadowy energy emanated from the stump and grew fully into another complete hoof.
His sword-like horn flashed once and his circle was completely undone before he stepped forward and towered over the newly revived mare as she slowly began to stand, and Rainbow silently came up and stood beside him.

Twilight felt herself, along with the sky above her head and the world beneath her hooves.
Her body… it was healed, it was rejuvenated. But how?
She felt strange, but quickly chalked it up to still being in a state of shock and not fully grasping just WHAT had happened to her just yet.
She had died, and now had been revived in some way.

Slowly breathing in and out as she felt the last of her grievous wounds fading away, she opened her eyes and looked up, right into the eyes of the monster that had killed her and was apparently responsible for her resurrection.
He grinned down at her something dark and foreboding, and the stars behind his head only added to the deathly aura that rolled off him as naturally as reverence and respect emanated from the Princesses.

“Hello again, Twilight.”
The vampire greeted.

Twilight did not move or reply, but what happened next she did not expect, and blinks rapidly as if she woke up from a dream. The reason? Rainbow had dashed forwards and was now hugging her!
“Twilight! Oh Twilight, you’re okay…”

After recovering from the surprise, the Unicorn slowly hugged back. She couldn’t believe she was actually hugging a vampire, but she did.
Her mind was still just a bit confused by the last few minutes of pain and death and now resurrection, but she felt that this hug was welcome and enjoyable.

For a few special minutes they just stood there in their hug, and Sombra actually did not disturb them.
Eventually though, they both gently pulled away from the other’s embrace, surprised at how legitimately comfortable it had felt. But they quickly snapped to attention as the unmistakable sound of the elder vampire approaching them made itself clear.
For Twilight especially, the fear was slowly starting to return in force. He had just KILLED her, but then brought her back. Why?

She began to shudder again as the shock was starting to wear off far too soon and now the phantom pain was starting to appear, the agony of her body being shattered by his unseen blow and her last moments of life being spent realizing that she’d made a horrid mistake and couldn’t fix it flooding her awareness.
Yet before everything could strike fully, her face was suddenly being held in a pair of light blue hooves and she opened her purple eyes(when did she shut them?) and find herself staring into dark pinkish ones.

-I legit don’t know the exact color of Rainbow’s eyes, sorry-

“Shhh, it’s OK now, Twily. Please believe me, OK? I’m here now.”
Rainbow said desperately, trying to calm down the poor mare before she could freak out and possibly invite the wrath of the nightmarish beast nearby who was watching them and clearly running out of patience.
She leaned forward and pressed her forehead against Twilight’s and closed her eyes, just doing whatever she could think of to try and induce some sense of peace and calm in the near-outright panicking Unicorn.

Dash rubbed the other pony’s cheeks gently with her hooves, she nuzzled her softly, and she even resorted to using a hoof to brush the purple bangs from the front of the other’s face.
She didn’t know how, but a multitude of memories had come by now into her mind’s eye. Memories of seeing other ponies doing these things to each other when one was fearful and needed to be comforted.
Memories of seeing her father doing this to comfort her mother all those years ago…

Rainbow Dash did not know when she herself had started to cry.

Slowly, second by second, breath by breath, Twilight could feel her heart rate steadily dropping. Eventually, her mind slowly stopped racing with images of terror and pain, she was soon able to overcome her hyperventilation, and her eyes stopped streaming so that she could finally see clearly again.
Clearly enough to see the Pegasus in front of her, eyes shut and tears streaming down her own cheeks as she pressed her forehead against Twilight’s and was cupping the latter’s face in her hooves.

What? Why is she… wait, is she crying out of concern for me?
The young Unicorn thought to herself.
Rainbow Dash, the 1,000+ year old vampire Pegasus, upon seeing her starting to panic and hyperventilating, could have done anything. She could have let the panic attack run its course, or she could have just spoken loudly and forced the traumatized Unicorn to focus or else.
But what had she done? She had held Twilight close and began crying…because she cared about her that much? So soon, too?

Alas, just as the Unicorn opened her mouth to speak and was slowly raising a hoof of her own, their tender moment was finally interrupted.

“Follow me, both of you.”

Came the black commanding voice, and then to Twilight’s even greater confusion and uncertainty, the creature of the night walked past them and began to move deeper into the castle itself rather than leave through the now-open gate.

Back into the castle? But didn’t he just-?

Twilight didn’t move for a moment, but when she heard a sharp SHING and then looked down to see a razor-sharp spike of black crystal just next to her ribs and under her barrel, she jumped up and away it with a strangled gasp and began to follow the terrifying stallion.

“C-coming sir!”
She stuttered out fearfully, but still keeping a reasonable distance from him. She knew now at this point it was useless, since if he wanted to hurt/KILL her again, then she would not have a chance of stopping him. But it felt just a teensy weensy bit better to be further away from him than closer.

She knew that she had to hold her panic down, lest she annoy him. She could restrain it properly and then let it all out later when she was alone.
What had she done to warrant him even striking her so violently, anyway? But now she heard the Pegasus come up next to her, and she felt the smallest bit more calm.
And when she felt the other pony nuzzle her cheek softly and then put a wing on her back in a comforting gesture, she couldn’t help herself and turned to look at Dash with a grateful smile on her face.

“Thanks, Rainbow.”
She whispered as she leaned forward to briefly nuzzle the other pony, and they both walked closely side by side to follow the dark master back into the shadowy depths of his dreadful castle.