//------------------------------//
// AG 
// Story: Book 1 - The Behemoth came to Canterlot 
// by Equimorto 
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It did not see. It could not see, not properly at least. It sensed, that was a more appropriate way of putting it. It sensed its surroundings and the things therein, and the way it sensed those surroundings and those things could not be referred to as sight in earnest, even if it was partly performed through what had been its eyes. Back when it had been a pony. It could not remember that time, nor any time before the transformation. It could not properly remember the time after it either. Memory was not something it took on to well in the state it was in.
Not that it would have had the thoughts to comprehend its own memories, or the general capability to. It was as lacking in that department as it was in its ability to see. And much like it sensed things around it, it felt things more than thinking them. There was no complex process, no long lasting data. It was a creature of instinct, spur of the moment reactions to what was presented to it. It did not think in the way a pony does, and it could not do so in its state.
It did have one single objective moving its actions. One abstract goal it didn't fully comprehend, dictating the general direction of what it did. Something that, if it was looked at as a pony that had become something else, was alien to its nature, artefact, artificially implanted by force. However, looked at as its own creature, separate from the one it had been and overriding it, the concept became a fundamental part of it. Inseparable from it. Woven directly into its own nature, a cornerstone of everything it was.
It was an abstract thought. A weave of concepts. Too complex to pin down to a single word, far too complicated for the creature to process beyond a semiconscious kind of following, almost the same as someone following fear. It was almost vague in its multifaceted nature. But if one was to try to condense all its meaning as succinctly as possible, what was moving the creature through the wind-beaten ruins was fundamentally a thirst for violence. That violence had a target, and that target was everything that was unlike the creature itself.
It was a scream of rage and hatred, crystallised into an infectious will and a warping, malignant magical disease. It was Nightmare Moon's will and wrath made manifest into the minds and bodies of those who had followed her. Their bodies had always been vessels for her thoughts, and in her moment of almost defeated, in her moment of suffering and psychological splintering, they had become carriers of her revenge.
Her last attempt at victory. Something perhaps she herself hadn't even been planning in the first place. It was hard to tell how much of her conscious mind still remained and how in control it was, how different she was from the monsters she'd created. It was hard to tell if a difference was there at all, beyond the mere clear difference in strength. The mutants had always, after all, been the result of her own essence being infused into other ponies. Perhaps what she was within was no different from what those she altered became. Perhaps they were only a mirror of something she had hidden from herself.