-Memories of a Girl We Have Met-

"You mustn't exert yourself so, 'Majesty!" a pony cried, but past the winds of magic they were unheard.

"Please, let us lend you our strength at least!" yelled another.

"No, assist in the evacuation! If they will not lay down their arms then I will fall and they will overrun the city," the pink alicorn yelled, her voice strained as her magic billowed in waves around her. Her dawn colored mane rippled in the magical winds, it moved like the passionate fires of her soul that held her there.

Her light blue magic refracted through the crystal walls of her palace and spread across every inch of land for miles in every direction. But it was a fruitless task, Men in adamantium armor struggled through her magic like the storm it was: slowly but surely marching on her Crystal Kingdom. Far away her magic projected feelings of love, forgiveness, understanding, and the plea for an armistice to the army. All to no avail. Her projections and apparitions were dispelled with steel, tooth, and their own magic songs. She tried projections of herself, and even took the shape of a woman to try to beg for forgiveness. She even threatened them with images of revenge and the feats of magical prowess that the unicorns of her kingdom were known for.

But these tasks were draining her and the reserves living inside the kingdom itself, within the crystal walls. For a mortal Unicorn, the task would have instantly reduced them to the stardust they had risen from if they tried to add their power to the flow: much like a string of yarn pulled away by the strong currents of a raging river. All but her Archmage, Somber Light, who had never quite been bound by the same limitations of his mortal brothers. His robes billowed around his dark fetlocks as he struggled to protect the both of them from the magical backlash and help as much as he could.

Outside a dome of pink aurora protected their citadel of glass, it swirled angrily but could do little against the hate of their enemy. While one fierce army marched in, another trembling procession trailed out. This would not be the massacre of the innocent that the fall of the Stormsinger Kingdom had been, where the ocean had turned red with blood. Amora's sisters could not be with her, occupied as they were with the skirmishes along that coast, but this city would not fall.

She would even sacrifice herself to black magic if she had to. For her ponies.

"They have reached the edges of our walls. There is nothing we can do to hold them back from here," Somber said, his horn flared with violet light as he compressed the expanse of their power into a condensed shield that finally brought the marching army to a halt and left the remaining ponies fleeing from the other side of the city trapped.

"No! They slow! I feel their uncertainty; they want, somewhere inside them, to stop the death! I know it!" Amora begged, turned to her last confidant in desperation. Her lovers had been among the first to flee the city, but Somber had stayed as his duty had demanded.

"There is nothing left!" Somber yelled, tears in his deep eyes. "Their hate spreads like wildfire in their hearts! They would much rather have us dead than struggle amongst themselves over us! You know that! This was a desperate ploy from the start," he croaked. "Please abandon this city! Live to fight again!"

"Not if it means I must condemn the souls still trapped here at their mercy," Amora yelled, her magic flared and fire raced along the domed shield. In the distance an army jumped back for fear of being burned to ash by her passion. "I know the rights as well as you! Take me and use that power to save this city!" she begged.

Amora lunged for Somber's knife, ready to use it for a black magic ritual that would surely bring them enough power to do something.

"No!" Somber pushed her away with a burst of magic. The slight struggle was enough to shake the alicorn's concentration and the wall of magic outside flickered and rippled weakly. "The shield!" Somber yelled with a gasp.

Amora grunted and with a flash the shield recorporealated and pulsed outward angrily. For a moment they both stood in shocked silence, too afraid to move in wake of their near slip.

Outside the shields, the army of tall Men had regrouped. A thick armed Blaidd led them, his angry barks pierced the air even inside the shield. Fire and huge stones hurled themselves through the air and shattered against the shield, they came in faster and faster intervals until a constant barrage assaulted the barrier. Soon it would be a constant and unstoppable force, they would fold quickly.

"Please, Somber Light," Princess Amora begged. "We have to stop them here. If we can't do that we may have no hope. If we can deny them this one victory maybe there will be a chance ... All I ask of you is this one, last betrayal; it will save them, I know it," she begged. And though it broke her heart to, she exerted her power over love on him, and Somber drew his blade.

Somber Light was no ordinary archmage, his Princess knew that. His talent had always been in dark magic, and black magic had a distinctive lack of effect over him. No one had accepted his talent before the Princess had found him, she had loved him and he had loved her in return. But now she was asking him to perform the most forbidden of black magics: a sacrifice. The ending of a life could magnify a caster's magic to godlike levels, the more powerful the creature sacrificed the more power that the caster would gain. So to somehow take a god's life ... the power would be unmatchable.

The blade slowly slid from Somber's belt, not with the soft hiss of metal from the scabbard, but rather the dull dry sound of bone against leather. His greatest accomplishment had been the death of a Blaidd-Ddyn, and in turn had granted him the one and only weapon capable of taking a god's life: the greatest sin of any pony. Instead of shattering, the bone would cut through alicorn flesh as if it were wet papyrus. His hoof shook with the horrible, short, sickle blade made of the demon claw. He could not even hold it in his magic, the bone dispelled all of it.

With Amora's compulsion upon him, he moved almost without thought. His lips recited black words that left his lips feeling oily, he tasted blood on his tongue even as his hoof wrapped around Amora's graceful neck. Her regalia was gently pulled aside and the tip of the blade met her flesh. An alien bead of red blood ran down her throat, and with a simple flick it was joined by a waterfall of ichor.

Amora's life force fled fiercely fast, safe, but in its wake it left a vacuum. The shield imploded as the ambient magic of the world rushed to fill the gap. Before her body had even begun to fall to the floor the magic had rushed into the nearest vessel to the vacuum: the unicorn Somber Light. The crystal around the castle warped as magic was pulled through it and drained, it blackened as if burned and cracked with hard edges. Even Somber began to be burned as the magic realized its dark origin and twisted: his coat became truly black; the edges of his mane and tail began to smolder in a fire that would not be extinguished and his eyes burned in the same flame; with a screech of protest his horn grew from a once modest size to a curved and sickly shape and his teeth twisted into a terrible fanged grin; he could even feel his soul smoldering in the magical fire.

But he did not burn, he was born anew. His will splashed out in waves of black smoke as half of the palace crumbled under its own weight, and he found that the power continued to flow into him from the infinity that had been Amora. The smoke rushed over pony and Man alike, and where it struck metal black crystal grew like wild vines; in but a moment the front lines had become nothing more than a wall of bristling, black crystal.

A hissing voice, like the corners of wooden splinters against the screech of a blackboard, rose above all else even as the army smashed through their crystallized comrades: "C҉́̕R̷Y̡ŞT̢͢AL̵̕S," the abomination that had been Somber hissed. By the time the army had broken through, the cities of crystal was gone; it had simply disappeared into the nothing and the ice began to move in on the army and the fleeing refugees. “̶̛҉TH̶̷E̛͢ ͏̵͟K̶̕ING͠D̡̨͢O̷M̶ ͝W̶̛ÍLĻ̡ ͏R̡͠E͡T͢Ú̧͞R͡N.”

Few from the army would return, and those ponies that had witnessed Somber’s betrayal did not survive for long. However, their frostbitten throats were able to tell of his black magic and croak out his name, mangled by exhaustion: "Somb ... er ... Sombr ..." And those that heard them told the Princesses of King Sombra, of Black Magic, and the fate of the Crystal Kingdom.

Author's Notes:

Another reminder that if you want to see the numbers and the little symbols made from text better to format the text to have 1 line spacing instead of the default 1.8.

Anyway, here's another short interlude chapter that I threw together (The great part is that I don't have to do a lot of work to figure out how to make the wolf and the unicorn shape now that I've already done it once, copy+paste ftw!) This one depicts the events of the Crystal Kingdoms disappearance, which I tried to keep as canon as I could with the result (to the best of my memory anyway) and have decided that because of the separated nature of the kingdom that the story was warped and told differently by the time it got to Celestia and the other sisters. Sombra is still an evil bastard, but its less his fault in this: Rather, now he's more of a lich that has been given the task of "protecting" the Crystal Kingdom, which he does by disappearing it for a thousand years (You gotta be specific about these things). Black magic became saturated in everything and is what led even the people who were trapped there to believe that Sombra was actually a cruel dictator in their dreams that lasted a thousand years. I'll explain how Amora Eternae Cadenza became Mi Amora Cadenza at some point I'm sure, just not now.

Until I've finished the next chapter, here's a gif of the most awesome fight in animated history: