His fury knew no bounds.
He traced over the steps in his aching head once again in an attempt to decipher the problem. The rift continued to pulsate before him, the energies that bled feebly from it offering him access once again to a hint of the dark powers he hadn’t enjoyed in… well, he wasn’t sure how long now; after the first few centuries of imprisonment, time itself tends to seem ever more like an illusion. More to the point, his captors betrayed no hint of awareness of either its existence or of the strength it had returned to him; thus, he concluded, the problem must lay elsewhere.
He peered into the rift’s incomprehensible depths. Though he couldn’t see the strange creatures that lurked beyond it, he could quite easily sense the otherworldly magic they radiated. Convinced though he was that these entities held the key to his liberation, studying them was proving troublesome at best; there seemed to be no pattern to the number that appeared, or to the frequency with which they did so. A great deal of trial and error combined with mountains of patience had yielded to him a spell that, in theory, should not only pull some of these creatures through the rift into Equestria, but also leave them briefly susceptible to… let’s call it suggestion.
He had seized the first opportunity he’d been granted when he sensed three of the creatures lingering for an unusually long time behind the rift. Were they studying him as well? He decided it didn’t matter. Rather, what did was his certainty that this had gone off without a hitch; he remembered the resistance he felt as his quarry seemed to fight against his carefully crafted spell, like a particularly feisty bass on the end of a fishing line. However, just as he’d felt them pass through the rift… the exertion finished taking its toll. He’d staggered, watching three brilliant lights in red, green, and blue erupting from the rift and flying out of sight as he finally succumbed to exhaustion.
His rage finished subsiding as the answer came to him. He’d been too hasty, too greedy; these creatures were more resilient than he’d bargained for, and impressive though it was that he’d managed this much under the circumstances, the effort of capturing three at once had proven beyond his still meager capabilities. Where the creatures had ended up, he neither knew nor cared; they were now of no use to him, and thus irrelevant.
He would prepare the spell again, of course… and this time, he would once more tap into that enduring patience. This time, he would wait for the perfect prey - a solitary target, the most radiant he could find.
This time, the spell would work. This time, he would lay claim to what should have been his all those centuries ago.
Until then… he would wait.
Intermission 1 - End