“Tell me, my Rarity. Would you still be alive were it not for my training? Have you not used your blade to protect your friends and bring ruin to your enemies? I gave you knowledge. I gave you power. And with it you have performed magnificently.”

He turned and flung a shard of Carsomyr into a unicorn below them. Rarity knew she should have looked away, but her better judgement failed her. She watched the unicorn explode from the inside out. Her father continued.

“You may despise me, my daughter, but I never sought your love. I had to give you the tools you would need in Titan’s new world. Not just to survive, but to excel. I made you… superior.”

Rarity took a step back from her father as she fully realized the weight of his words. “No…” she said. “You couldn’t have known.”

Esteem forcefully took a step towards her. “Little girl,” he said. “Of course I knew. My talent, my purpose, is war. War.”

His mouth twisted into a snarl, and he shattered his blade and sent the enchanted shards tearing through the air around them. They bit into the street, the buildings, and even some of the ponies below.

“No!”

The shards exploded, and the street below them was obliterated. Puppets and ponies on both sides were crushed and torn to shreds by flying stone and splinters. Despite the noise, Rarity could still clearly hear her father shouting.

“War, Rarity! It is a part of the natural order, a part of our very species! It comes as easily to us as love and loathing, as virtue and vice! It separates the weak and the worthless from the powerful and the privileged! War ruins the individual, but it tempers the race!”

He snapped the pieces of his blade together so quickly that several of them blew through the edges of the bridge-way to reach their proper position. Then, he thrust the blade into the stone before him.

“Celestia sat on her throne,” he spat, “playing god, and she lobotomized our race, Rarity. She expunged from history our greatest conflicts and burnt the books that we had written. In the name of her greater good, she presumed to take from us our natural right, and for a thousand years our race stagnated. What right did she have to decide what we could and could not do? I was born to kill. A warrior pony in a world without war. How dare she deny me a life of purpose.”

“No…” Rarity took another step away from her father.

“It was I who brought Titan back into this world!” he declared triumphantly. “I who redeemed our species!”

Rarity looked at her father. At the intensity of his eyes, the hard set of his mouth. She realized that he wasn’t lying, not to her or to himself. Esteem was perfectly sane.