Babies didn't sleep this well.

For the first time in a long time, Shining Armor didn't wake with a panicked start from a bad dream. He stirred slowly from his slumber. His ears were greeted to the gentle coos of his wife, Cadance. She was laying in bed beside him, with their daughter in her hooves. Little Flurry Heart was fast asleep. Cadance's soothing noises were for her husband as he awoke. He blinked and looked at her in the narrow streak of sunlight seeping through the heavy curtains of their bedroom

Cadance smiled. "Welcome back to the land of the living," she greeted. He looked over to the clock on his nightstand. It was nearly noon. "You've been asleep for nearly eleven hours. You must have really needed it after last night." She smirked.

The gentle, content smile on Shining's face spread into a full grin as the memories of the previous evening came flooding back.

As soon as they had gotten back to the Crystal Empire, Shining and Cadance received a stern scolding from Cherub Whine for not allowing her to accompany them and prevent their capture. It didn't matter that they were prince and princess. That nanny made them both feel like a inch tall.

Though it was just as well. The changeling infiltrators that tried to take their place in the Empire stood no chance against detection by Cherub and her trusted cadre of elite guard nannies. After that, they were little more than greasy stains for the janitorial staff to tend to while Cherub panicked about the wellbeing of the royal family.

"Don't ever scare me like that again you two!" she scolded.

"We're sorry, Cherry," Cadance apologized. "We should have listened to you."

Cherub's stern glare melted in a moment and she hugged Cadance and then cradled Flurry in her hooves.

"Would you mind tending to Flurry this evening?" Shining asked. "This whole ordeal has been just... so exhausting."

"Of course!" Cherub said. "Take all the rest you need. I will see to it that you are not disturbed."

"Thank you," Shining said, leading Cadance into their bedroom. As soon as they were inside, he closed and locked the door, using his magic to soundproof the room. Then he practically threw his wife onto the bed, and himself after her.

"By the stars!" Cadance purred in the bed beside her husband. "You were practically... primal last night! You haven't been that carnal since before we were married!"

Shining just smiled in pride. She was right. Shining was a father who was fast approaching middle age. And with everything that had had happened to him and his family since the wedding, he couldn't be sure if it was all the stress and anxiety, or if it was just him getting older.

Part of him wished it was the former. That it was the circumstances of his life. And that there was something he could do about it. Part of him wished that it was the latter. That is was just the course of life and there wasn't anything he could do about it.

But mostly, he feared that it was the circumstances of his life, and there was nothing he could do about it. He was powerless to do anything about it. That thought made him feel the most weak, the most helpless. The most impotent.

Until he did do something about it. He took back control of his life. He felt alive. He felt free.

The instant they hit the bed last night, they proceeded to destroy it. They didn't make love. The didn't have sex. They fucked. They fucked in every position that had a name, and even invented a few. Not once, not twice, but repeatedly. Cadance lost count of how many times she came. And Shining came as well. But he had an erection that would not quit. They fucked, and fucked, and continued to do so until it was so late in the night that it was early. The entire bed was a sticky mess and he had simply become too chaffed and dehydrated to go on.

Even laying in the bed now, his fur and mane were plastered with dried pony-knows-what. For a moment, he feared for his daughter in the bed, but found that there had been a clean duvet pulled over their shameful sheets, keeping her separated from the filth of their passion. Cadance, likewise looked immaculate.

"I took a shower earlier," Cadance said. "Goodness knows I needed one. You do too."

"I would have liked to join you," Shining said.

"I know," she said. "But you looked so peaceful, I didn't want to wake you."

Peaceful indeed.

"What in the world brought that on last night?" Cadance asked.

Shining shrugged. "Nothing like a near-death experience to help align your priorities," he said. She seemed to accept that.

But in truth, it wasn't that at all.

He was at peace.

Standing outside the forest cave, Twilight Sparkle hit her brother with a changeling-reveal spell in a bright flash of magic. It buffeted off of the stallion and did nothing but hurt his night vision.

"Was that really necessary?" Shining Armor asked in mild irritation, blinking away the spots in front of his eyes.

"I should ask you the same thing!" Twilight asked indignantly, levitating the severed horn of the late Queen Chrysalis in front of him. "I needed to be sure it was you, and I still don't believe it!" He turned and started walking back to the changeling hive. "Shining!" She said trotting after him. Her brother ignored her as he kept marching briskly forward. "Shining! Are we really not going to talk about this?"

"I really don't see what the point would be," he said.

"This isn't you! This isn't the brother I know!" she said.

"You haven't known me for a long time, Twilight. Times change. Ponies change." He looked at her wings. "Yourself included."

"What are we going to do about this?" she asked.

He took it from her with his magic and put it back into his bag. "I imagine Cadance will want to destroy it, herself. Just knowing that the queen is dead will bring her peace just as much as it will for me."

"I think you're confusing peace with quiet," Twilight said.

"You're arguing semantics," he said.

"No. I'm not! Shining, you murdered her!" Twilight shouted. Shining turned on his hoof and faced her.

"She raped me, Twilight," he said. "And she raped Cadance, too. She raped her wearing my face! I've had nightmares about her ever since then."

"She raped me, too!" Twilight said.

There was a twinge in the corner of Shining's eyes. At first, a pang of sorrow and anger that it ever happened in the first place. Balanced with a glint of righteous vindication. The two canceled each other out, leaving his face a strained neutral. "You of all ponies should be sympathetic, then."

"Shining, I understand why you did it, but that doesn't mean I agree with it! Yes, we have terrible enemies who do terrible things. But if we fight evil with evil, how are we not just as bad?" she asked.

Shining let out a cynical snort and kept walking "You sound like Cadance," he grumbled. "Two days ago I might have agreed with you. After the wedding, I was ready to scour the world to find Chrysalis and..." his eye twitched. "...mete out some justice. But Cadance helped me get over that. It took a long time for me to get over what happened. Her too. But as long as Chrysalis was gone, I was willing to just forget and move on. At least, I hoped I could, eventually."

They stopped at a small stream so he could wash the changeling blood from his hooves.

"But she crossed the fucking line when she came after my daughter," he said. "I wouldn't let that stand. I couldn't. You saw her back at the hive. Starlight gave her every opportunity. But she was unrepentant. As far as I was concerned, in that moment, she signed her own death warrant."

"We have a place for creatures like that," Twilight said.

Shining rolled his eyes. "Yes. Cadance told me about Tartarus. If you think that's any more merciful, I have a bridge to sell you. And that's all well and good until they swear revenge and escape again like Tirek did. Even the stone statue spell on Discord broke after enough time."

"But Discord has changed!" Twilight said.

"Has he?" Shining asked with a dubious eyebrow.

"Yes, I think so! And in time, Chrysalis could have changed as well."

"Hmph... Maybe." Shining looked at his washed hooves. His fur was pristine white again. "But it hardly matters now. Hate me if you must. But I will not apologize for protecting my family." He dried his washed hooves on the grass. They exited the forest and trekked back across the barren wastelands back to the hive.

"I don't hate you, Shining," Twilight said. "I love you. I care about you. I just don't want you going down a dark path out of some kind of righteous justification."

"I appreciate that. But someday you'll understand when you have a foal of your own," he said.

Her ears perked up. "Is that a promise?" she asked.

Her meaning didn't land right away. He looked over at her and she had that hopeful look on her face. He just snorted and looked up at the top of the hive before looking back at her again. "Mind giving me a lift?" he asked.

"I don't think that'll be necessary," Twilight said, watching three figures descending towards them. Princess Celestia and Luna landed in front of them, followed shortly by Cadance with Flurry in her hooves. Cadance looked at them nervously.

Shining looked back at them. "I'm not going to have to do the ladybug dance am I?" he asked.

"No," Luna said. "We know you're not Chrysalis."

Celestia shifted her hooves. "Thorax and the other changelings said that they- felt it, when the queen..." she trailed off.

Cadance cut in. "Is it true?" she asked insistently, giving Flurry to Celestia to hold. "Is the queen truly dead?"

"Yes," Twilight answered simply.

"Are you sure?" Cadance asked with an edge of desperation as she took a step closer and looked Shining in the eyes. "Are you sure!?"

Shining opened his bag and tossed the severed horn of the queen at the ground in front of her hooves. For a silent moment they all just looked at it. There was an alien stillness in the barren wasteland air around the changeling hive. Devoid of all life, there was not even the sound of evening crickets. It was perfectly silent.

The silence was shattered by the deafening report of thunder from the gout of magic erupting from Cadance's horn. The fiery blast narrowed into a focused beam at the severed horn on the ground, engulfing in in an arcane conflagration. She incinerated it instantly and yet kept it held together with her magic, not even letting the ash escape her wrath.

Her lips peeled back in a viscous snarl as she poured more and more magic into it, making it glow white hot. The others there had to back up and look away, shielding their bodies with their magic, and their eyes with their hooves. But Cadance never took her eyes off it. She stared directly into the brilliant white light of the tiny sun she had created on the surface of the world and she didn't stop. The ground beneath it turned to molten slag, and then into boiling lava. The once-solid stone began to evaporate as a volatile gas around the atomized changeling horn.

The magic shields of the others shimmered and sparked as waves of thermal energy buffeted of them. The gold of Cadance's shoes and crown began to soften and deform. Her mouth went dry. She was screaming. She realized she had been for a while. Even over the thunderous roar of her spell fire. She poured a final wave of a world-ending amount of magical energy into the queens horn. She ripped apart the very atoms of it, dissociating them into their elementary particles, unable to prevent them from escaping at last as photons. The entire region was bathed in the light of a second sunrise.

When the fires of Ragnarök had at last died down, Shining hazarded to look at his wife. She looked back at him from under her half-melted crown. Tears streamed down her cheeks, fell to the glowing ground, and flash-boiled into steam. She growled through her clenched teeth. "Never again!" She stepped out of her shoes, fused to the stone, and ran around the glowing crater to hug Shining.

"Never again," he whispered as he hugged her back. She bawled into the fur of his chest while he held her. Shining sighed.

Ah, dames. Sometimes they just need to let it all out. And a few buckets later they're right as rain.

Cadance looked up at him with puffy red eyes. "Can we please go home now?"

"Yes. Let's," he replied. Cadance took Flurry back from Celestia and headed back towards the outskirts of the wasteland, where Celestia's summoned chariots would be arriving soon to bring them back to Equestria.

"And the others?" Twilight asked Celestia and Luna.

Luna answered, "Discord offered to bring Starlight Glimmer and everypony else to her Sunset Festival in her old town. Celestia and I waited behind to begin diplomatic relations with the new changeling king."

Celestia added, "And to wait for the return of you and Shining, of course."

Twilight raised an eyebrow. "Why didn't you come after us?" she asked.

"We were looking after Cadance and Flurry," Celestia said. "We couldn't just abandon them, here, in this strange place. And besides..." Celestia trailed off again, looking at the smoldering crater in the ground. "Even we were not foolhardy enough to come between Shining and the queen."

Twilight frowned. "Don't tell me you condone this."

Celestia pursed her lips. "In an ideal world, no. No creature should have to die. But some times, some creatures are unable or unwilling to listen to reason." She looked at the departing couple. "Had things gone differently, I myself would have struck down the queen on the day of their wedding. We ponies have the luxury of living in a society of laws and rules. But there are some laws that are older than even my rule. Unbreakable laws as old as the sky and stone, birds and beasts. The law of the jungle. Shining Armor claimed the ancient right of a husband and a father to protect his family from a monster. It could be argued that as a mother, Chrysalis was doing the same. But the jungle cares not for the righteous. In the jungle, might makes right. And make no mistake, Twilight..."