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// Chapter 6: The Kill 
// Story: Blood Moon 
// by The_Darker_Fonts 
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Clip awoke to a strange sticky warmth on his face.  He couldn’t tell the source exactly, but knew by the smell that it was blood.  He snapped awake briskly, sitting up from his lying position.  
Instead of being on soft moss or the hard stone of the cavern floor, he was still beside the road.  His head jerked around, instinctively looking to see if anypony was in the area to ensure his own safety.  Once he had determined he was completely alone besides the road -the still rising sun probably much too early of a time for ponies to be traveling- he noticed the pain.  
It wasn’t descriptive, or consistent to any area but his face and hooves.  Grimacing, he raised a hoof to his snout, feeling the sticky blood on it with his own hoof.  He ran it over his jawline and mouth gently, sharply pulling his hoof away once he felt a spike of pain on his cheekbone.  There was a wound jaggedly winding its way down his face, only a little ways away from his ear.  It was a deep cut, too, with some skin hanging loosely from the wound, stuck with dried blood.  Slowly feeling the cut’s pathway, he found it went from his right cheek down to his neck, though less deep there. 
Shaking his head to attempt to jog loose a memory of why there were the brutal marks on his face, he spotted something distinctly red on the road.  He approached it cautiously, his head still fuzzy from the forgotten events of the night.  Staring carefully at the form, he realized it was distinctly pony, despite its disfigurement.  Gulping down his emotions, he observed everything about the brutal display.
The heap was mostly still in one mauled piece, though a few larger bits of skin and smears of deep red blood were scattered across the cobbles.  The skin was flayed open, revealing stained red bones and laid bare innards, though many of them were missing.  Rib bones, bent aside for better access to the juicier portions they protected, looked much like Violet’s bones, but reddened.  A deep crimson puddle, slightly dried, surrounded the entire scene like the border to a gruesome painting.  
Clip expected to be shocked at the sight, to turn around and lose the contents of his stomachs in the bushes, but instead he stared at the bloodied remains stoically.  He craned his head down, looking for any signs to tell him who this poor soul might’ve been.  Carefully pushing aside a loose layer of skin, he found traces of fabric, and even a piece of reddened metal stuck in him.  Pushing his searching further, he searched the remains’ head, or at least, what should’ve been the head. 
There was a crushed point sticking out of the remains that could only presumably be a head.  The smashed skull looked like a jagged red clay bowl, filled with a slightly grayed pink soup.  Clip’s eyes widened when he realized he was staring at the dead pony’s brain, the mushy organ laying almost out of the skull.  He looked away briefly, panting in fear from the sight of one of his own’s gruesome remains.  Apparently seeing one of the primary organs of the dead pony finally awoke his mind to the reality of the situation.  There was a dead pony on the road, and he was the nearest living thing to it. 
Clip’s breathing hitched as he backed away, staring horrifically at the mauled figure, bile churning it’s way up his throat.  Unable to keep the torrent in, he turned and threw up in the grass near the cobbles of the road.  He gagged several times at the bitter, sweet, terrible taste in his mouth as he continued to vomit up several more lumps of orange-stained-red.  
When he finally ceased, he turned and glanced at the body out of the corner of his eye, unable to keep his gaze from it.  Who was this pony that was scattered across the road?  Why were they so brutally turned over, what were they doing here on the road, so close to Clip’s home, and why was Clip himself bleeding with his face torn?  He knew that, in order to gain any more clues to why and how, he’d have to take a closer look as to what.  With a gulp to keep whatever remained in his stomach down, he slowly approached the remains with the same caution as if it were going to attack.  
Prodding lightly at some bloodied cloth, he flipped it over to find an insignia on it, one that made his heart stop.  Two alicorns circling the sun and the moon, one white, and one blue.  The Equestrian Insignia of the Royal Sisters.  A symbol of both unity and power, and a promise for justice and protection, and in Clip’s case, a mark of fearful retribution.  He was standing idly beside one of their own soldiers’ body, and quite possibly, would be linked to the incident itself.  Clip’s breathing picked up, his heartbeat pounding loudly as he turned and looked at the bloody remains.  The remains of a soldier.
Taking a deep breath in a vain attempt to calm himself, he softly approached the body and bowed to it.  The poor stallion hadn’t deserved to die here.  He hadn’t deserved to be found like a mangled mess by a runaway colt, and he didn’t deserve to be left here to rot until somepony else came along.  Clip knew he had to right the wrongs here, even if he weren’t at fault.  Respect came first, though Clip presumed that he may find clues to the murder here, and his own mysterious and aching wound, if he kept looking.  
Quietly, he went to the side of the road, about fifteen paces away, and began to dig into the ground, overturning the grass and dirt.  He went to work digging a hole that would be roughly large enough for the scattered remains of the soldier.  After only a few minutes of gentle pawing, his efforts produced a whole deep enough to bury his tail.  Pushing the dirt down to thicken it and provide more hold, he turned and, as respectfully as he could, returned to the remains.  Giving them a somber look, he began trying to figure out how to drag the parts into the whole while inspecting the scene more thoroughly.  
There were broken pieces of wood, splinters of red-stained wood strangely highlighting the gray stone of the road.  An especially large splinter near the stallion’s collapsed head, about the length of Clip’s hoof, ended in bloodied metal.  A spear head.
Approaching it quickly, he bent down and tried to take in everything he could about it.  It wasn’t long or anything fancy, at least, not to him.  It was a simple diamond shaped metal tip to wood, with a sharpened and bloody tip.  Nothing special, but the very thing that had unsuccessfully defended the stallion until it was destroyed.  A few more seconds of observation revealed a small spot of fur, and while it too was coated thinly in blood, there was a very subtle hint of gray to it.  So it couldn’t be some of Clip’s.
Of course it couldn’t, he chided himself, glaring at the fur.  Why would it?  He wasn’t a killer, he wasn’t the one who’d mauled a Royal Soldier to death.  There was no way in all of the world that this could’ve been Clip’s work.  He would’ve remembered it…
But he didn’t.  He couldn’t remember the night before, why he was still out here and not safely in the warmth of his little cave, sheltered through the night from the last chilling bits of winter.  The thought, however, reminded Clip that he was supposed to be cold, that he was supposed to be at the very least slightly cold.  It was still early morning-ish, his breath puffing out in front of him, yet he felt surprisingly warm.  Confusedly, he looked over to his own midsection, finding something that made him yelp in fearful surprise. 
His entire body was covered in thick, almost woolike, scraggly gray fur.  It hung from him like a terrible gray moss wall, long enough to almost touch the ground in his breast and abdominal areas.  Shaking his head to make sure his eyes weren’t befuddling him, he felt his own mane shake and slap lightly against his head and upper neck.  Whinnying at the terrifying sensation, he reared wildly and stumbled backwards, away from the damning spear and body.  
He shook wholly, attempting not to look at himself, attempting not to see the horrible monster he was.  Stomping firmly, he felt pain in the flesh of his hooves.  The flesh of his hooves?  
Almost trance-like, Clip stared down at his hooves, deathly afraid of what he would find, what he knew he would find, but too obligingly curious to not look.  Staring down at his rough, scratched up hooves, he found the usual chitin, and sighed gratefully.  He wasn’t changing, he wasn’t becoming the monster he thought he would be, the monster of this, and he wasn’t the monster who’d killed a soldier.  Lifting his right hoof and inspecting it thankfully, staring at it like a beggar would a golden bit, he slowly rotated it over, admiring it, never having been so grateful for its normality.
Flipping it so the bottom faced him, his jaw dropped as he stared at an impossible sight.  The hard, sturdy, unbreakable chitin, was split completely into five different sections, looking like a wolf had imprinted its own paw onto the bottom of his hoof.  Choking on air, Clip stumbled dumbfoundedly onto the cobbles, ignoring the sharp pain in his jaw at stretching his wound.  
And then the truth flashed through his mind.  
Crunching, screaming, tearing, blood rushing in his heart and out of his victim, the thrill of killing, the thrill of thriving, the thrill of feasting.  It all culminated as his jaws shut firmly on his prey’s throat, ripping out his windpipe and ending the weakling's life, enjoying the thrill of killing.  The thrill of the hunt coursed through his veins, stopping his hurting, the pain, and energizing him as he savagely mauled the corpse, softening the body for the feast.