Dark World Building 101: Tirek · 10:32pm Jul 1st, 2016
Despite the best efforts of Nightmare Eclipse, she could never seem to prevent the one mortal in all creation she had ever feared from returning to the world. And neither could Discord, even once he realized attempting to team with him to stop his tormentor was a fools game. And trying to keep HIM out was the one thing they EVER agreed on.
But no matter what way they attempted to prevent his rise, somehow or another Lord Tirek would ALWAYS return from the darkest depths of Tartarus to ravage the world at some point during the cycle. The only thing the two of them could manage was to contain his return to the earlier years of his reign to ensure the best chance of defeating him before a world ending clash with Eclipse could happen.
One wonders if either realized that between the leaking Alicorn Amulet and the corrupted Elements of Chaos the Chaos Six had been forced to hold, Tirek had quite the rope to pull himself up with.
In the final loop, it happened as follows:
Tirek began stealing magic the moment he emerged, Discord's chaos magic spread over the world from his various games being a virtual buffet for the Dark Lord of All. He regained his power as a rapid rate, growing stronger and stronger with each passing moment.
The Chaos Six could not oppose him, for while the purified variant could well be his undoing, he had known the corrupted Rainbow of Darkness like the back of his hand long before Discord had even physically entered the world. In fact Spike was just barely able to save Rarigreed from having her Element stolen,Tirek's bottomless greed eclipsing hers as an ocean does a river.
Fluttercruel felt fear of someone else's cruelty for the first time in her entire life before the demon centaur, who threatened to devour the very chaos magic that had given her life. Discord suffered deep wounds from Tirek's horns when he came to save her, a powerful dark magic freezing spell slowing his ability to heal with the one thing a draconequus could not directly effect.
"This spell is powered by the one thing greater than my might: my desire for all I servery. It consumes heat as I do power!" Tirek mocked with a smirk.
Making matters worse...Tirek began a trek towards Discord's fortress after this confrontation, following the retreating enforcers like moths to a flame, draining all in his path from the ponies and other beings to the chaos magic saturating the world itself, hoping to ensure he'd have enough magic to claim Discord's power for himself when he arrived.
The Rainbow of Darkness in the hooves of 'beasts of burden'? Unthinkable. He would reclaim what was rightfully his.
While ponies were shocked to see green grass drained of chaos magic, none dared think Tirek was 'the lesser of two evils' in comparison to their current tyrant. At least Discord would let them live.
However...before Tirek could reach the Chaos Capital, he sensed an enemy he had sought to kill for untold millennia, even before his mutation into a living cataclysm.
Spike had pleaded with his mother and father gods (surprising them with his humility at contacting them in the 'disgraceful' state Discord had him in, something many a dragon's pride would not allow) to do something, pointing out rightly that Tirek would not suffer dragons to live, and if he succeeded in his ambitions there'd be no stopping him.
Let it never be said that Tiamat and Bahamut ignore their children.
Luring Tirek to a remote mountain range, a battle that shook Equestria happened. Tirek matched their gigantic size, but the Ryujin were husband and wife, and knew one another like two sides of a coin and fought as a team.
"It's been a long time, your 'majesty'," Tirek told Tiamat, mocking a bow.
Tiamat's nose smoked and fire licked her five mouths. "We should have eaten you thousands of years ago, abomination."
"I was about to say the same about mounting your heads on my wall."
Bahamut was the fastest Dragon to ever live, and put it to good use assaultingTirek while his mate, the most powerful of Dragons, took advantage of his lightning fast distractions to strike with her immense strength. Each covering the other to prevent Tirek from getting either in a position to steal their magic.
But Tirek had absorbed a great deal of magic and had millions of years of combat experience. The Ryujin were capable of dealing damage to him, but ultimately began to lose ground and take heavy blows. At this rate, they would soon fall...until a beam of Harmonic energy slammed into Tirek's back.
"I hope you don't mind assistance, your majesty," Queen Cadence the First, ruler and hero of Avalon, said, arriving, the Changeling Rangers forming their mighty robot and joining the fray as they followed their queen. Dracozilla emerged from the sea, giving a massive roar that shook the ground as he came to aid his Mother Goddess after being awakened from his slumber near Neighpon by the Changeling Rangers' mentor Katydid.
"Dragons are proud, but we are not stupid. We need all the aid we can get," the Mother of All Dragons replied.
The battle was long, and bloody. By it's end, the three gods and one dragon super mutated in the disaster that ended the Golden Age (or his descendant, the knowledge of which is true is lost to history) would be recovering for months, and the Changeling Rangers' super robot would require even greater amounts of repairs.
The surrounding area used to be a mountain range. Today it is an inland sea known as 'Devil's Fall'.
The battle came to an end when Tirek was detracted by a sphere of red magic impacting the side of his head and exploding like a nuclear weapon.
Only slightly bleeding, Tirek spun around to see the still wounded Discord floating in the background, Tirek's curse still taking it's toll on him. "That was for scaring my little Cruelty."
Before Tirek could rip the magic from the Chaos Spirit, he heard the sound of energy crackling and turned...just in time for the Changeling Rangers to plunge their robot's sword straight through his chest, discharging enough power to blow most giant monsters to pieces in a single blow directly into his heart.
Tirek was merely stunned, but as the giant robo pulled its sword out of his body, Tiamat, Cadence, Bahamut, and Dracozilla unleashed the most powerful attacks they could muster directly into the opened wound while Discord put at much power as he could manage into another sphere of destruction and did the same.
Tirek roared in fury and rage as his physical form was destroyed, sending him back to the dark depths of Tartarus.
All weakened from the toll the battle took on them, they politely parted ways to recover, Tirek's stolen magic returning to those it was torn from.
Made this after some discussion with Alex.
I imagine in one encounter, Tirek ate Nightmare Eclipse's magic (like Discord, her own power worked against her, as she couldn't even comprehend that being possible). In another she sent the other Nightmare Gallery (all five of them), and he just ate their magic instead and used it force his way into the Nightmare Stables, requiring them later to rebuild half of it.
Another involved her just teleporting to another galaxy, taking an atomic bomb, and dropping it on him... turns out he survived.
Then there was the time she teleported him onto Pluto and assumed she could just leave him there to freeze for eternity, she was wrong. Tirek is a good shot when he had nothing else to do with himself.
THEN there was the time she separated him from his magical essence and dropped his body in a black hole... his magical essence possessed Spike who teleport breathed his body right into the Nightmare Stables (again).
THEN THERE WAS the time she dropped him on the moon... and he manipulated the deer into helping him get back to Equestria, 'promising' that he was just interested in ruling the world, and the moon had nothing for him to conquer. Yes, he managed to convince the friggin' tree of harmony "I can't eat your magic, so there's nothing here that interests me, so I have no reason to come back here." Of course Tirek intended to blow up the moon later.
AND THEN THERE WAS the time Nightmare Eclipse trapped him in a self-contained time loop one nano-second long, resetting after each instance. She had Granfalloon hold a party she was so sure that would be the end of her troubles with him that she had "gotten rid of him" .. he literally exploded himself free.
I imagine if Tirek face the Sirens... it would result in a feedback loop between them... but Tirek would EVENTUALLY (I said EVENTUALLY, fighting against three separate wills, an three horrors that FEED on hatred, which Tirek has plenty of, it would be a LOONG time) prove that his hunger for power, was greater than theirs. The sirens are OLD, but Tirek is even older, he remembers when the sirens ancestors were dumb fish. But it would still be a surprisingly even struggle (I imagine it's been a LONG TIME since Tirek met anyone with as much apologetic greed for power as himself). Any outside meddler could easily tip the scales in either direction.
"We are all descendant from fish. It would be a simply matter to travel back in time, find the fish with your face, and put it through a Cuisinart." Egon to Peter, The Real Ghostbusters.
It's possible she BLOCKED OUT Tirek's existence except when she actually had to deal with him, since he was that speck on her perfect record she couldn't stand.
"One wonders if either realized that between the leaking Alicorn Amulet and the corrupted Elements of Chaos the Chaos Six had been forced to hold, Tirek had quite the rope to pull himself up with."
In Kingdom Hearts II, Sephiroth actually taunts Cloud the darkness in Cloud's heart will keep enabling Sepiroth to return from the world of the dead.
"In fact Spike was just barely able to save Rarigreed from having her Element stolen,Tirek's bottomless greed eclipsing hers as an ocean does a river."
THAT SO FITS!!!!!
" He would reclaim what was rightfully his."
Reminds me of when Ganondorf came knocking for the Triforce of Power back after Cia had taken it.
"At least Discord would let them live."
Depends on Tirek's mood I think. He wants something to RULE over.
I'm honestly surprised Tiamat would even SPEAK TO a dragon that had allowed itself to subjugated like a common beast of burden.
And now I know how some DC fans felt, when during of the Crisis' the Justice League threw EVERYTHING they had at Darksied, including a bullet EXPLICITLY created to kill him, and some fans STILL feeling Darksied had somehow gone down too easy.
I imagine another apocalyptic encounter VERY LATE in the cycles involved Tirek BREAKING ONE OF TIAMAT'S NECKS with his bare hands, and the two tumbling through Equus' crusts, leaving the lava demons and ice orcs feeling from them in terror. And Nightmare Eclipse eventually panics and just blows up the planet... only for Tirek to survive with the magic he's already consumed from the dragon goddess, and he flies off to find another civilization to conquer, and Eclipse rests time, which Tirek actually that time FIGHTS BACK AGAINST... I imagine none of the Nightmare Gallery having clear details of what came next... how the battle went... only for Eclipse to limp away with a broken body and a haunted look in her eyes, shape shifting to Twilight, and hugging Smarty Pants, and hiding under her bedroom covers and crying like a filly for a VERY VERY long time, leaving the timeline to just... continue... letting the rest of the universe just continue... before getting around to resetting it all.
Basically, I imagine Nightmare Eclipse's OWN ambient magic slightly increasing Tirek's punch over the while... but that might be pushing it, since I don't want it seem like Tirek was the real ultimate threat or something.
Doubt it. Which is almost sad in a way.
Mostly because they have common sense. And in a world that runs on magic, a being who eats it to become more powerful and can grow very powerful very fast is one of the biggest threats imaginable. And that is not a threat they want to deal with.
Channeling Beerus eh? (Long story short, Beerus in DBZ's Ultimate Attack is a giant energy sphere called Sphere of Destruction that looked vaguely like a sun.)
IMagine him with a Lantern Ring.