Pharynx walked through the corridors of the overthrown prison. The guard’s corpses were being thrown out to be disposed of, now that the scent of decay was becoming unbearable.
He looked into each one of the dark hallways that made up the labyrinth of the building’s inner corridors. In each shadowy room, Pharynx swore he saw glimpses of events long past. Whether it was the result of his new power, or all in his own mind, he could not tell.
Passing one room, he saw the first day he ever experienced blood and death.
It was his sixth birthday. It had been a dismal day for him, knowing that he would receive no presents, and no friends would ever come to see him. Doing the only thing he knew to do, he went to his parents’ room to spend the day with them.
Pharynx watched as his younger self reached up and knocked on a large door.
“What do you want…” asked a deep voice from beyond the door.
“Dad? Is mum with you? I can’t find her?” Young Pharynx said, as he opened the door.
Pharynx looked on, as his younger self gasped at the sight of his father sitting on the edge of the bed, his hands red and dripping with fresh blood. Behind him, there was a mass of bloodied sheets and limbs sticking out from them in all directions.
“I hate to tell you this, but she died in her sleep,” the man said, feigning sadness. His voice was cold and mechanical, no emotion to be heard.
The young boy looked on, frightened and alarmed at the sight.
“Quit lookin’ at me like that. You didn’t react nearly this bad when I blew up the Hollow Shades,” he said.
As Pharynx watched, he recalled a vague memory from when he was only a few months old. When the sky lit up with fire, and screams were heard for miles around. He smirked, when he realized his father was beyond hope and redemption, even after he had his first son.
The younger Pharynx started backing away in horror at the sight. Something about the sight made the older Pharynx smile. A sort of nostalgia for his more naive days.
“Don’t you walk away from me, boy. This is something I need you to see,” his father said.
The boy tried to run, but was easily caught. Once he was, he was forced to look at the disfigured remains of his mother.
“I want you to see what’s become of your mother. I want you to know that this is what we all become. If not by another, we all end up doing it to ourselves eventually,” the man said.
Try as the boy did, he couldn’t fight the bloody hands of his father, which made Pharynx chortle quietly as he watched.
“We’re all terminal, boy. Whether we know it or not, this is what happens to us all. The worst cases are the ones who let it fester internally, and go on suffering quietly through their miserable lives. Your mother was the worst I’d ever seen.”
The younger Pharynx stared helplessly at his mutilated mother. What was left of her face seemed to be staring back at him, screaming for help, but at the same time begging for more.
“I want you to remember this: the best thing for all of humankind is to be freed from their self-inflicted sickness. All it takes is people like us…”
Pharynx mouthed along with the last seven words. The best lesson he ever remembered learning. Shaking his head, he walked past the room and continued on his way.
When he turned a corner, he was met with another surprise.
There, in the hallway, was his twelve year old self. Paying no mind to the young phantom, Pharynx kept walking. However, he found it more difficult to ignore when his next step took him back to his old classroom.
Pharynx touched his hand to the rock hung around his neck. Whatever was happening, he was growing suspicious of the power it held. However, this place held one of his dearest memories.
Taking the time to relive this bit of memory, Pharynx leaned his back against a wall and watched as his twelve year old self sat down next to another boy with black hair, and green eyes with red pupils.
“New in class?” asked the other boy.
“Yeah. So what?” young Pharynx answered.
“So nothing. I’m just welcoming someone new is all. My name’s Sombra.”
“Pharynx.”
“You shouldn’t act so standoffish, you know. A guy that looks like you is sure to be popular with girls. I’m almost jealous, actually,” Sombra chuckled, indicating his frightening appearance.
Sombra then glanced over to a girl in the front of the class.
Young Pharynx’s stomach churned at the idea. Ever since his mum was mutilated, the thought of going near a girl made him sick. Whoever this Sombra was, he was a wimp. A weakling who was only going to be a victim of the self-inflicted illness his father taught him about.
Then, an evil idea filled his mind. If Sombra were feared, he would be forced to listen to the one person he called ‘friend.’
“Sombra,” Pharynx said.
“What is it?” Sombra said, a smile on his face.
Pharynx gagged, hoping to never see such a jovial look again. “Sombra, at recess I wanna show you something.”
The bell went, and Pharynx watched as the classroom around him melted away to become a school hallway. His younger self, and the younger Sombra were walking down the halls. His plan had worked. After so many weeks, Sombra was well on his way to becoming like himself. He would understand the illness, and relieve people from it.
“Hi. How you doing?” Pharynx asked a boy he and Pharynx just happened to run into. Before the boy could answer, Pharynx roughly grabbed him by his collar and threw him into Sombra. “What’s your name, friend?”
“Huh?” the boy said, frightened like he was held at knifepoint.
“It’s not a trick question. I just want your name,” Pharynx said.
“Ni--Night Light!” the boy said.
“Well, Night Light: I’m Sombra, and this is my pal Pharynx,” Sombra introduced them both, before throwing Night Light to the ground.
Pharynx smiled as he watched. How he remembered that rush of euphoria the day he met Night Light. And how quickly it faded when his friend, Twilight Velvet came rushing to his rescue. How his stomach churned when he saw her holding Night Light’s hand when she helped him up from the ground, and how he quickly turned and walked away.
Feeling his stomach churn like it did that day, Pharynx quickly turned around and rushed down the halls, which had become the prison interior once more.
Using the wall to lean on, Pharynx ran as quick as he could to ease his warped innards.
The faster he ran, the more images of the past he saw spawning from the shadows. There he was at fourteen, when he broke into a house for the first time. There he was at sixteen, extorting money from his classmates. There he was at eighteen, when he and Sombra mugged Night Light and put him in the hospital.
Pharynx burst through the door of the warden’s office and opened the window that had magically repaired itself after the mysterious stone broke it. Taking many deep breaths of the outside air, Pharynx could feel his stomach ease and his head grow clearer. But, it was not to last.
“Aw, hell…” Pharynx groaned, as he watched his twenty year old self in the prison yard below.
The world outside had changed to a bird’s eye view of a street he couldn’t even recognize. He and Sombra were simply walking along, passing a bottle of malt wine between the two of them, when they heard a commotion in an alleyway nearby.
“Sounds like someone working our turf. Let’s go sort them out,” Sombra said.
He finished the last bit of the bottle and threw it against the nearby wall.
It was only a short walk, and the two of them came across the scene of a gigantic man holding what barely looked like a woman in his enormous hands.
“Put me down!!!!” the woman shrieked, as she punched and clawed at the man.
“Screw that! I’d lose an eye if I did!” the man-mountain said, before slamming the waif into a wall.
The woman yelled in pain, before she slid like water from the man’s grip, and savagely started attacking him. For someone so thin, she seemed to be able to make the massive man stagger under the sheer ferocity of her blows.
She tried picking up a piece of sheet metal to attack the man, only for her opponent to grab it and bend it like it was rubber.
The man-mountain swung his fists, deeply denting the dumpster he hit when the woman dodged.
The waif took off her own jacket, and used it to strangle her opponent. She used the full weight of her body, however little there was, to leverage her larger opponent downward.
The larger man reached his arms over his head and caught the waif by her arm, before twisting it hard.
The woman screamed, and loosed her hold on the man, before she was pushed away.
The man-mountain took the reprieve to catch his breath.
The waif nearly attacked again, until she realized they were being watched.
“Cops!” she said, not clearly seeing who was watching them.
Just the one word made the man-mountain run after her.
“They don’t know that this alley’s a dead end,” Sombra said.
“Let’s go introduce ourselves,” Pharynx said.
The two of them walked calmly through the alleys, until they caught up with the other two, who were frantically looking for a means to escape. When confronted by the two men who had been watching them, the waif and man-mountain readied to attack.
“Hi. I’m Pharynx,” Pharynx introduced himself.
“And I'm Sombra,” Sombra introduced himself.
The waif and man-mountain both stared apprehensively. Who were these two to just walk up and introduce themselves so willingly.
“Chrysalis,” the woman said.
“Name’s Tirek,” the man said next.
And like that, the image below faded, and returned to the sight of the empty prison yard.
As fond as these memories were to Pharynx, reviewing them so vividly was exhausting for him. He had put his head out the window to get some fresh air, but his nose was assaulted by the stench of decay when he pulled it back into the room.
Coughing loudly, he yanked the warden’s partly bloated corpse off the wall and threw it out the open window. Using his hands, he fanned the stench outward, and sat back in the warden’s chair, leaving the window open for ventilation.
He thought back to the memories he saw, and completely on his own, through no power of the stone around his neck, did he remember one last event. One that made him smile.
He was thirty-three years old at the time. He was in Sombra’s house for the first time, and met his friend’s family. Not a warm reception, for after only minutes of pleasant conversation, Pharynx took hold of both his friend’s wife and child.
“What’s it going to be, Sombra? Me? Or her?” Pharynx said, roughly holding the woman by her hair.
“Pharynx. Be reasonable. Would you really hurt the woman you loved once?” Sombra said calmly.
Pharynx recalled how his stomach churned again. How he broke his own rule, and lusted after a woman. And how in the end, he rationalized it as a way of spawning his own image. Someone to take after him, just as he did his own father.
Now, there was the image of everything that should have been his own. The six year old boy held firmly by the back of his shirt in his other hand, who was begging for help from his father.
“Dad! Help!” the boy called.
“Will you listen to that?” Pharynx asked. “This is why I told you not to love! You don’t even know how to raise a kid! He’s acting like he hasn’t had a dose of reality in his life!”
“Sombra! What’s he talking about?” the woman asked shakily, as she slowly stopped fighting Pharynx’s grip.
“You don’t know? It was me that made your husband what he is! I’m the one who made you fall in love with him! You’d never have gone for him the way he was before! And now look! Instead of picking me, the artist, you chose my creation! You shallow, twisted girl!!” Pharynx yelled, before he threw both mother and child to the floor.
The two hostages quickly scrambled over to Sombra, and took refuge in his embrace.
Pharynx looked on, fiery rage burning in his red eyes.
“I’ll make it simple: it’s me, or her,” Pharynx finished, before leaving the house.
After reminiscing for a while, Pharynx sat back in the warden’s seat, recalling how that very night, Sombra nearly strangled his wife, Ember, to death. However, he failed in eliminating her, and escaped before the police could catch him. The memory fresh in his mind, he reached for the intercom on his desk, and pressed a specific button.
“Tirek? Still there?” he asked.
He waited a moment, before the speaker on his desk crackled to life.
“What is it?” Tirek’s voice answered.
“I feel like I want to visit with Sombra for a little bit. Can you bring him by the warden’s office?”
“Will do.”
Pharynx sat back, and waited not a minute, before Sombra was led into the office by Tirek.
Tirek seemed to work a good number on Sombra’s face, which was now swollen, bruised and bloody.
“Sombra. You’re not looking so good,” Pharynx greeted his old friend.
“I would think so. I asked for Tirek’s worst,” Sombra said.
“Looks like the big guy gave you the works. So, has your quality time together made you want to rejoin?”
“Not a chance,” Sombra chortled.
“No, huh? Let me guess: still holding out for your boy to have a chance at a different life?”
Sombra didn’t answer, but Pharynx knew that he was right.
“You know, I actually saw your son today. He’s doing alright.”
“You think I’m stupid? I know you’ve been here in the prison this whole time. There’s no way you’d be able to leave for town and come back so quick,” Sombra said.
“You’d be surprised how quick the trip was,” Pharynx answered. “He was out with that girl of his. She reminds me a lot of your Ember. What do you think’s going to happen between them? Hm? What do you think?” Pharynx finished, mimicking strangling as he held the warden’s monogrammed handkerchief in his hands.
“I know what you’re hoping will happen won’t,” Sombra said. “Spike isn’t anything like us. He’s going to live happily with the people he loves. And one day, he may even end up becoming your undoing.”
Pharynx simply stared as Sombra smirked contemplatively.
“Tirek, get him out of here. I can’t stand looking at that smug face any longer,” he said.
Sombra stood up and opened the door himself, while Tirek led him away.
“This is going to be a loooong day,” Pharynx said, as he stared out the window.