Snow was falling, whipped about by powerful, roaring winds. Through this profound blizzard marched D27. The air was frigid, and visibility low, but neither affected him greatly. He had withstood far colder, and his eyes had adjusted to enable him to see through the thick blizzard.

The signal was growing closer, though. Energy was pouring out of some unseen force. It had become nearly oppressive, and D27 felt himself engulfed in magic. On his way, to some extent, he had hoped that the signal was false, the result of a natural phenomenon. As he approached it, though, he knew that such could not be the case. The sickening, overpowering magic surrounded him like the scent of rotting flowers in a closed room. It was incredibly strong, and incredibly threatening.

Something was strange about the magical force, though, and it became more apparent the closer D27 got to it. The transmission was separated into two parts, as if somepony were trying to conceal its basic nature. A different sort of magic had been projected on top of the transmission, one that D27 did not recognize but that surely would have been felt by organic ponies at least on some level.

Then, out of the blizzard, a light appeared. Approaching it, D27 saw that it was not actually a light, but an area where the dark clouds had separated. Below them was an area with no snow, and no cold, a region of well-lit green life.

As if that were not peculiar enough, it appeared that ponies had taken up residence in the protected zone. In the distance, D27 could see homes made from multicolored crystal, and, in the center, a grand shimmering palace. The signal, it seemed, was coming from the palace itself, making that his goal.

Still, the fact that there was a hard-border between icy, windigo-infested cold and green pasture was disconcerting. Curious, D27 attempted to pass his hand across the hard border. As soon as his mutable flesh attempted to cross the line, though, he felt a surge of magic. Sparks erupted as he was repelled by strong magic.

“They are using it a shield,” he mused to himself. “How novel.”

He looked to either side of himself, attempting to see if there was a break in the shield, but only saw that the border was round, and probably spherical, extending above and below the protected zone. That explained why it had been impossible to get a teleport lock on the source of the transmission.

What D27 did see as he looked, though, was an anomaly around himself. It seemed that he had developed a second shadow, one that closely resembled a monohorn.

As soon as D27 noticed the second shadow, the world seemed to fade. He found himself in a different location, standing on a ledge, staring out across vacuous space. Before him was an endless plane of smooth gray below an equally smooth colorless, cloudless sky; the only indication of a horizon in the infinite distance was a thin glowing line

There, before him, centered in the gray infinity, was a profoundly vast structure. In some ways, it resembled a tree, with a trunk of darkened crystal stretching toward the void above, piercing the empty heavens with billions of miles of crystal. It was not a tree, though, because it was not solid. Parts of its consisted of spheres, floating and orbited by spheres of their own, their surfaces reflective but reflecting far more than the empty grayness, all of them orbiting slowly, their paths defined by perfect mathematical coordination.

D27 could feel the magic of it permeating the atmosphere. Not only did it fill it, but constituted it; D27 was not breathing air, but rather thick, toxic magic. It felt like blades in his respiratory organs. He felt it being conscious of him, and watching, staring into him, knowing all aspects of him throughout all time. He knew the purpose of this device, this being: the death and destruction of all things.

He smiled, and shook what was analogous to his head. The illusion shattered around him. He turned to the pony-shaped shadow.

“Are you attempting to show me my greatest fear?” he asked.

“What was that?” the shadow seemed to growl back, although it might just have been the wind.

“It was the greatest fear of my people, one that was programmed into all of us at the inception of our people.”

“But the illusion…”

“I have met the Soth on several occasions. Though I fear it more than anything, it is a part of me. However, you, shadow, are not.”

Before the shadow could escape, several tendrils burst forth from D27’s lower body, piercing it and transfixing it to the ground. Though the magical aura was weak, he instantly understood, not just the nature of the shadow, but the situation before him as well.

“I am so sorry,” said D27, frowning, feeling a sudden wave of pity for the shadow remnants of a pony that surged around his feet. He turned back to the shielded city before him. “You attempted to wield its power, and it destroyed you. You had no idea what you are doing, what it truly was. It was not meant for the hooves of mortals.”

“I…need it…” said the shadow, and D27 realized that it was not actually speaking. The voice of King Sombra was within his own mind.

“Even after it destroyed you?”

“I…need it…”

Arguing with it was of no use. The former king was too far gone. His remains only barely clung to life, powered by the residual Order magic within his body. The same force that had once given him power had ravaged his physical form, leaving him nothing more than a fragment of a soul clinging to a the tatters of a mind and a body of black smoke.

“Perhaps I shall avenge you,” said D27, pressing his hand against the shield of the city before him. This time, he did not recoil, but allowed the energy to surround his hand, arcing and interacting with his own Order magic.

“You cannot break the barrier…it is powered by love…”

“Love is no different from fear,” said D27. “It is nothing more than an illusion.”

His body shifted. He drew on his reserves of mass, expanding himself physically, converting his normally semi-liquid surface into hard, resistant plates of blue armor. At the same time, he adjusted his own frequency of magic to more closely approximate the magic of the shield. His body and magic sparked, and his now hulking form stepped forward.

His magic surrounded him, protecting and defending him from the powerful offensive magic, but the shield bent as he stepped into it, deforming at the presence of another source of Order. The fundamental spell lacked volition, and began to crack; then, with a burst of rainbow mist, shattered, allowing D27 and a flurry of frozen air to enter the Crystal Empire.

Shining Armor laid on the bed, his wife sprawled out beside him. Cadence’s wings were extended, and Shining Armor slowly ran her feathers through his mouth, gently preening them. They tasted dusty, and slightly like something reminiscent of coconut, which was what Cadence tended to taste like in general. As he moved from feather to feather, Cadence would occasionally coo with pleasure, and her wings would further stiffen, as if instinctively awaiting further preening.

Being married to the Princess of Love indeed had its advantages. Cadence was a beautiful pony, both in body and in spirit, and Shining Armor loved her more than anything in all of Equestria, and he knew that she loved him equally in return, with a beautiful mix of passion and intimacy.

Suddenly, Cadence’s eyes widened, and she doubled over into a fetal position, crying out in pain. Shining Armor jumped back, his mouth filled with grape-colored feathers that he promptly spat out.

“Cadence, I’m sorry!” he cried, using his magic to draw a first-aid kit from under the nightstand, thinking that he had broken a feather. Surprisingly, their bedroom first-aid kit had seen quite a bit of use since they had arrived in the Crystal Empire.

“The barrier,” gasped Cadence, clearly in pain but attempting to right herself. “The barrier has been breached!”

D27 marched through the streets of the city. He had accumulated a significant amount of mass, both from his storage supplies in the Gloame and from Equestria, and now stood higher than most of the crystal buildings around him.

The force of the magic emanating from the central palace was intense, and occasionally it would burst across his armored shell in unpredictable surges of force; as such, he was only able to move slowly. The repelling force was minor compared to the barrier surrounding the protected zone, and he had already burst through that with relative ease.

Below him, ponies scampered away from his massive feet. Many of them were screaming and trying to pull their young to safety, even though D27 was taking care not to crush any of them. Much to his dismay, a large number of the ponies appeared to be heavily afflicted with the effects of the Order that permitted the kingdom. Their bodies had been rendered translucent and faceted, almost like organic crystal. Their plight was unfortunate, but D27 knew that he was able to rescue them.

Above him, several winged ponies appeared, travelling toward him at high speed. D27’s triangular organs refocused, magnifying them, and he saw that they were a team of mostly Pegasi, with two chimeric creatures that he understood were called “griffons”.

D27 reinforced his armor, and waited for the sting of energy weapons and particle beams against his shell. The blows never came, though, and D27 looked again. The flying ponies did not seem to be armed, which made them completely pointless in combat. The worst they could possibly do was to ram themselves against D27, which would probably do more damage to themselves than him.

Still, the city was large. The fact that there was an air force meant that there might a greater military presence, perhaps with artillery or armored units. D27 could see the magic emanating from his target; he would need to accelerate his approach if he were to reach it before more substantial defenses could be placed in his way.

“By Celestia,” gasped Shining Armor. Even without the spyglass, he was able to see the creature approaching the palace. Even in his in-depth studies of every creature or magical construct that could conceivably be a threat to Equestria, he had never heard a description of anything remotely similar to the long-armed, thick-bodied blue juggernaut that was approaching them.

“Prepare archers!” he ordered.

“Sir, we can’t,” said the crystalline soldier beside him. “There is too high of a risk of civilian casualties.”

“It’s being attracted to the Crystal Heart,” said Cadence, suddenly appearing beside Shining Armor.

“Princess,” said Shining Armor, “you need to get to safety immediately!”

“Don’t you ‘Princess’ me, Shining,” snapped Cadence. She turned back to the creature in the distance. “The Pegasi can’t do anything against it. Can’t you see it?”

Shining Armor could, or rather, feel it. It was like an unpleasant vibration in his horn, or a sense of foreboding. He had felt it before. It was the same black aura that King Sombra had released before the Crystal Heart had terminated his pitiful half-alive state.

Cadence spread her beautiful, bicolor wings and, before Shining Armor could stop her, she took flight.

“Cadence!” he cried as she swooped downward toward the creature, her flight unsteady from lack of practice.

As he called out, the space in the distance distorted, and two triangular portals opened up: one across the city, near the creature, and the other closer, near the palace. Without hesitation, the creature passed through and crossed the entire city in a single step, leaving the portals to close behind it.

“No,” said Shining Armor. “Mobilize the unicorns! Bring me my armor! I need to get down there!”

The soldier hesitated for a moment, a look of terror on his face, but then did as he was told.

D27 passed through the portal, feeling his magic distort as he did. Opening a space-to-space portal was dangerous and power-intensive; the device he had built was meant to move from the Gloame to Panbios, not between two places in Panbios. Unfortunately, he had not brought any monohorn skulls to perform a teleportation spell; he doubted it would be useful anyway, considering the size he needed to maintain to resist the magical field that permeated the kingdom.

His magical reserves had been damaged, and his body had taken some internal radiation burning, but the effect had been worth it to accelerate his passage to the source of Order. Time was of the essence.

Before him, a small contingent of armored monohorns had gathered. Their horns glowed with energy, and a large curved barrier formed between them and D27. At the same time, ice arrows rained down from above.

D27 paused, but only because of his confusion. He did not understand why they were using such inferior weapons and primitive magic against him. He understood that, with only single horns, monohorns were inherently handicapped in terms of magical stability, but he was sure that these were the same creatures who had brought heavy weapons into the Gloame. For a moment, he wondered if they were planning something, or attempting to trick him.

Not that it mattered either way, of course. The arrows rained down uselessly over his armor, and he raised one of his massive stone-like fists and, summoning a field of Order around it, pounded it into the translucent shield that the monohorns had projected.

The shield shattered instantly, D27’s magic backfeeding into the monohorn’s own organic magic. Their horns sparked, and they were instantly rendered unconscious. The field had actually been far stronger than D27 had expected, and was confident that the feedback had not killed any of them. Monohorns were far more powerful than he remembered; if they had been better trained in that spell, he would almost surely have been unable to break it.

D27 turned his attention to the center of the palace, and his triangular eyes adjusted to see through the magic better. When he saw it, he paused for a second time, taken aback by the abomination before him. He had understood that the magic was probably being projected by a fragment of Order, but before him, spinning frantically, spewing out toxic magic, was a Heart of Order.

Around it was a crystalline structure, and D27 realized that what he had taken for a palace was actually a synthetic crystalline transmitter, a perverse machine designed to harness the power of a god.

“What have you done?” whispered D27, as if to King Sombra. This was a device that no sane being would ever use, let alone create, if they fully understood the horror that was a Lord of Order, a child of the Soth.

As D27 stared into the Heart, he remembered something about himself. He recalled how he had died.

“This time I will not fail,” he boomed as he moved forward with speed that surprised even him. He stepped directly into the primary corona of the Heart, and it resisted, heaving out prodigious quantities of magic with no conscious volition. It was resisting purely on instinct.

D27 anchored himself into the ground and stretched out his arm toward the Heart. He concentrated, engaging the required spell, and his surface changed; the normally blue hard surface became more metallic, separating into plates and intricate arcane designs, forming a gauntlet that would allow him to handle the Heart without being obliterated.

He extended his hand deeper into the core, and the heart sun faster. Prominences of rainbow energy refracted from within its crystal structure, scattering across D27’s body. The force of the magic was actually painful, and D27 could feel his body tearing apart, both from the force of the Heart and from the energy of his own magic, which was being rapidly depleted. If it ran out, he knew that he would be killed.

A bolt of energy struck him from the side, and he cried out in pain as a beam of magic bored through his body. He turned shifted his triangular eyes, and below him saw a small pink winged creature. She was essentially a pony, but her figure was gaunt and distorted. She had wings and a horn, which D27 understood meant that she was called an “alicorn”. The magic she exuded was exponentially higher than any normal monohorn. She stared at him with righteous anger, her horn glowing with energy that was curiously reminiscent of Order magic.

When D27’s eyes wandered to the insignia on her flank, he instantly understood, perhaps more so than the thin alicorn did herself. She bore the mark of the Heart of Order. She was its creation, a being created probably over the course of decades to serve the Heart and its motivations, a replacement for her failed predecessor King Sambra.

“You fool,” boomed D27. “You do not understand what this is, what you are. I could cure you.”

“You will never take the Crystal Heart!” she shouted.

“I do not intend to take it,” said D27, “I intend to destroy it.”

He gripped the Heart tighter, and his claws reached its horrid surface. It stopped spinning, and he began to pull it free of the false body that maintained its fragmentary life.

The response was tremendous; the entire transmitting tower backfed into the Heart, producing an explosion of magical prominences and fields that knocked the alicorn back, breaking one of her wings in the process. D27 held his ground, even as twenty percent of his body was rendered biologically inert. He had come too far to fail now; this heart was an abomination, a relic of a dead age, a part of a hideous creature that had no business existing in Panbios.

As he drew out the Heart, he suddenly heard a cry from beside him. There, not forty feet away, were a pair of afflicted ponies, one of them an adult female and the other a filly. They were not armored, so they were not soldiers; they must have been fleeing from D27’s advance. They now stood transfixed by the glow of the heart, trapped in place by arcs of magic that landed around them at seemingly random intervals.

D27 expanded his internal mind, and ran a calculation for the prominence storms of the Heart, and determined that the two were standing in exactly the wrong spot.

There was no time to warn them, or to stop the Heart; a curving jet of superheated magic poured out with a deafening sound. D27 had no choice. The left side of his body morphed, and a narrow arm extended rapidly, interposing itself between the arc and the two ponies.

He screamed as the extension of his body absorbed the magical force, vaporizing instantly and transmitting the remainder of the energy into his own body, tearing him apart internally and fragmenting his magic. As he had anticipated, with most of his magic focused on the Heart, there was nothing left to protect him; just preserving his life used most of the remainder of his energy. He absorbed a significant amount of it into himself, and discharged a substantial portion of it into the ground behind him, but even doing that was nearly fatal.

The magic discharge from the heart suddenly blew him back, and the Heart rebounded to its position between the two points of its normal residence.

D27 had failed, but that was the least of his concern. His body was losing integrity, and he was reverting to a liquid state, his mass decreasing a profoundly.

“Cadence!” cried a voice. D27 saw a heavily armored monohorn stallion standing over the unconscious body of the alicorn nearby. He looked at the writhing mass that was D27, and glared. As he did, a contingent of monohorns surrounded them, their horns glowing with energy.

“My advice,” hissed D27. “Destroy it…it does not deserve life.”

With his final words, he reverted to a fully liquid state and squirmed away rapidly.

“After it!” cried Shining Armor. He moved to engage himself, but then stopped when he realized that although the monster was gone, its shadow had remained.

The shadow sparked with blue energy, and then seemed to writhe itself. It became solid, and darker, turning into a tar-like substance. Then, suddenly, it rose up, gaining form. A head emerged, and then a torso, pulling itself from the muck, the black substance converging into a pair of red and green eyes, and a red, pointed horn.

“I must…have it,” cried King Sombra, pulling a solidified version of himself from the shadow, reaching out for the slowly revolving Crystal Heart.

D27 reached the edge of the kingdom as quickly as he could, and reformed the several pieces of his liquid body into a single form. Several Pegasi were pursuing him, and he needed to escape.

Drawing the pieces of himself together, D27 formed a hard spherical shape and, with the remainder of his magic, levitated himself and burst forward with a tremendous burst of speed into the blizzard. The Pegasi followed for a moment, but D27 accelerated a second time, moving too far for them to see. In seconds, he had lost them.