Author's Notes:

This scene picks up during the chapter "Mirror Lake", telling it from Nyx's point of view. Also, I've dropped capitalizing "he" when referring to King Sombra. Someone pointed out it makes it hard to read and I agree. Thank you for the suggestion!

At the Temple, just before King Sombra’s arrival…

Nyx hated Neris. She hated her more than any other mare in her tribe. More than the entire army who was hunting them from the Crystal Empire and quite possibly more than King Sombra himself.

No, she admitted to herself as she spoke with her adopted mother and the Marazon council - she FEARED King Sombra. He had not given her a reason to hate him until he had killed her companion, and even knowing more bloodshed was to come, her fear overrode the hated by a mile.

What was the stupid old nag saying now? Oh, yeah, “Shadow ponies do not exist.”

Truly the babblings of the blind. In disgust, she replied mockingly, “So says the mare who stared into the burning gaze of one!” Opting to ignore her further, Nyx turned to her adopted mother. “Your Highness, he is attracted to fear. His projection ignored me until I felt afraid, then it homed in on me unerringly.” The warning tumbled out of her mouth in a rush, she was running out of time before he would arrive.

“Our mares are brave, Nyx,” Ainippe replied. “but this – thing he can become, it pulls at fears much deeper than those found in battle. We are not trained to withstand this!”

She knew. The odds were looking worse all the time and they had not engaged the enemy in a single battle yet. “I have to go. He's close.”

Neris stepped forward. “How will you escape him?” she asked.

Did she really have to ask this now? “I can hide a few seconds ahead of this timeline,” she said hastily. “but I will not know how long to stay there, or where to go. I can't stay there forever, even if I did have control over bouncing back here, which I don't!” She sounded a tinge panicked, lost.

The elder mare thought of something. “Not the future! We saw a future projection of you, Nyx. Your dress was not - “

“- as it is now? A cape of red? A steel crown bearing the sign of Luna's moon, but in blood red? I know. I have seen this in my visions as well. I do not know it what means, but I do not believe it is a good sign.” She looked off to her left, then back to the council mares with a look of urgency.

The skies darkened outside the open balcony to her left. She glanced nervously at it. Her senses were screaming at her to flee.

“I've got to go!” Nyx said urgently. The first seconds gave her an all too clear view of the cloud of darkness that alighted onto the Temple’s marble balcony as she did the instinctive calculations in preparation. Closing her eyes, she cast the spell to jump in time.

She sighed in relief. That was too -

- a wave of time displacement from...somewhere else...hit her through the spell. ‘Oh Goddess NO!’ she gasped, feeling her acceleration slow down and wind backwards. The spell bottomed out and slammed her back into normal time hard.

“Ugh,” she groaned, her senses reeling from the interference with her spell. She opened her eyes -

- Directly into King Sombra’s red crystal ones.

“No!” she mouthed in a gasp, freezing up in terror.

But something was wrong. He didn’t move, even though they were muzzle to muzzle. He stared straight through her.

When she could breathe again, Nyx cocked her head for a few seconds, not understanding why he was just standing there. Something felt wrong with time all around her, in fact.

She glanced out the window when she realized she could not hear the crashing of the surf against the rocks below. Running to the balcony and a look down gave her a bizarre image of waves frozen in time, water like blobs suspended in air, unmoving.

“Did I break time somehow?” she whispered, going back to King Sombra. There was no spark of recognition in his eyes, nor movement of his chest in breathing. If she had not witnessed the very ocean below had seized up, she would have sworn she had somehow killed or suspended him in time.

“What have I done?” Nyx shuddered, pacing a few steps away from him, then back. Then curiosity got the better of her and she studied his features, reasoning if she had not truly ended him, what better chance would she have to scrutinize her enemy than when he was immobile like this?

It made her giggle at first in relief, but the fit settled when she got to really look again at his features. His bearing was royal, proud, every inch a King who at first glance demanded, even deserved respect for the mere station he was born to.

Deserved it if you did not know of his reputation for brutality and bloodshed, she reminded herself firmly.

It was so true that evil came in handsome packages, she thought wistfully, admiring his well-groomed coat, so like her own shading, the flowing mane caught in time’s unforgiving, paralytic grip, yet so luxurious, so gorgeous! She dared to venture a hoof out to touch it. So soft...

Nyx backed up, shook her head to clear the admiration out of her senses, but soon fell again to looking over his large, sturdy build. She briefly wondered what his cutie mark was and trotted around to sneak a peek from under the royal robe across his broad back. None of the intelligence on him had said what it was, so how could she resist look -

- there was no cutie mark!

Stunned, her eyes flew to her own flank, to the oriborous there.

No cutie mark. It couldn’t be!

Heart pounding and head reeling, she backed up, crossing back over to his front. Why had she not seen that before in her visions?

She knew why. All the other visions had been hazy, blurred, filtered through unstable time windows, impressions of fear and a dark fury and deep internal pain overwhelming, all-consuming. It was there, in his glittering red eyes, despite the freezing of the very life force that was there, waiting to be released back into time’s natural path…

But then she realized something she had not considered before...if he were truly frozen, why could she still sense those emotions radiating from him?

“No,” Nyx moaned, backing up. “I don’t want any part of this!” She turned and ran to another room, desperate to be away from him before she did something she sorely regretted!

The room she ran into felt like a sanctuary from the unforgiving march of time against her. It held a life-size statue of Princess Luna, her forelegs pawing the air, wing span fully spread, taking up the entire back wall of the small altar room. Her presence brought up mixed emotions in the frightened mare. “This is all your fault, you know!” she spat, bringing her hyperventilating lungs back under control. Feeling safer after a few minutes, she concentrated once more, tweaked the spell midstream to push her further along its time’s track. Long ago she had discovered it often reacted to her feelings and when she was calmer, it would abruptly “shut off”, dropping her out of time unexpectedly. Relief at having escaped him had dumped her back to where she had come muzzle to muzzle with him, but something had gone wrong this time and she had not come completely back into normal time. Pacing she tried to work it out in her head. “Am I back? Then when is he? Not where, just when?” She glanced back through the door. “Frozen too soon? Is he a frozen shadow too soon and I screwed up his destiny? Argh!” she yelled, her head a frantic mix of images of sometime in the future, cold and pressure under a hundred tons of ice, a throne room...she wasn’t there, then she was and he was staring through her.

She was staring at a mare and a stallion, looking back over her shoulder at them from where she knelt before the King in his stasis sleep. “...if that is the case, then I want the last vision on my cortex to be of him.” She turned back to the frozen Shadow King upon his garnet crystal throne. “He saved me,” her voice grew soft, affectionate. “and I cannot save him. And this is the price I must pay - “

Nyx screeched, trying to stop her hand from pressing some button on the other wrist, somehow knowing it would be her last act when another wave of time displacement hit her through the vision and the time spell. It shattered the vision’s tight grip on her and she looked up.
Another figure appeared. A dark mare wearing red and silver, waves of fog-like mane framing her face, flowing across her back. An identical pair of all-black eyes met hers. She backed up, stunned.

It was her.

“Oh, this HAS to be bad!” she muttered.

The other version of herself smiled at her.

“You can’t be me!” she said aloud to the new Nyx.

The new arrival nodded, pointed to herself, then to Nyx.

The mare’s mind reeled. “From the future?”

Her future self nodded.

“I - you - you look like...HIM!” Nyx stammered, motioning to the other room. "Like my visions!"

The apparition grew more solid and the Seeress felt herself losing her grip on the current timeline her aborted spell had dumped her into. Of course. Two of them couldn’t exist in the same space, could they? It was just a theory, she admitted sheepishly. How could it be otherwise?
This had never - well it HAD happened, but not since she had been an infant...

The future Nyx looked to the other room where King Sombra was. She moved towards it.

“Wait!” her fading self yelped. “Are you CRAZY?”

The future Nyx laughed.

“Of course you are, if you’re me,” the current version shook her head. She thought frantically for a moment. The time spell would yank them apart any second. “Wait! Please. I - I don’t want to do this! Just tell me...if we - I - am, are...whatever." This was making her head spin! She started again. "If I’m captured.” She glanced back at the handsome invader still frozen in the other room, then back to herself. “Is he worth it?”

Her counterpart looked at her sympathetically. She must have known - remembered how torn and conflicted she was at that point in her life. All she did was smile and nod “yes”.

The current Nyx bit her lip, tears in her eyes. It wasn’t the answer she had wanted, but the eyes reflected back to her - her eyes, seemed so certain of her answer. She closed her own eyes, feeling herself fade as the two parted ways - one to her past and one to an uncertain future.

Or was it?