Chapter One
Fact: She loved me.
Supporting Fact: I loved her back.
Fact Based on Opinion: We were perfect for each other in every way.
Fact: We believed that, with Princesses’ blessing, we would always be together.
Fact Supported by Observable Evidence: There are no real Gods or Goddesses.
Evidence Behind the Above Statement: The facts I was once so sure of in my life, those little things that I believed I could control and that would be true forever, ceased to be present truths. There is no control. There is no omnipotence. The self-proclaimed Goddesses of this fair world could not preserve fact, for they were deceived.
Facts became something spoken of in the past tense.
Now she’s gone, taken away from me in secret, and I’m forever cold inside.
I’m so cold…
“There is a fate worse than death,” a sultry sweet voice whispered in the dark: fragile, barely remembered words in an endless sea of black. He had awoken, shivering and damp, to the sounds of eternity when the voice returned to him. The tintinnabulation of eons chilled him to the bone, but he wasn’t quite sure why. “Do you accept it?”
The sound of falling water, a noise as old as time itself, was everywhere. The graying stallion didn’t even bother to open his eyes. He had been in this twisted place long enough now to know there was nothing to see.
Light was a distant memory now: something to yearn for.
Endless dripping. Everything… dripping away. His mortality remained intact, but his life was melting away before him. Each drop of water spilt was the death of one hope for his future… splashing against the hard stone like so many tears.
Can mountains cry?
It was in his coat: the water. It was cold, and it hurt! How long? How long had he been there?
“Th-Three…” Days? Months? Years? Millennia?! Time meant nothing in the dank, deep places of the earth. It was all mildew, stone, and stagnant air. And dripping. Dripping, dripping, dripping! Time meant nothing. He had no place to go, nowhere to be.
“Why bother with time, right? It’s not like I can just read a sundial, anyway,” traitorous thoughts within the exhausted stallion whispered. Hopelessness was knocking on the gateway to his psyche, and that was something the shivering stallion could not afford.
A fat droplet of water, laced with the gritty sediment of the mountains above, landed messily on his closed eyelid.
“Augh! That is it!” screamed the blind stallion. With a pained grunt, he lunged to his hooves, stumbling only slightly as he gained his footing on the uneven stone ground of Equestria’s harshest punishment.
Moving hurt. Hurt so much. He hadn’t moved in eons. Days? It didn’t matter. Never matter… he just had to do it. One hoof in front of the other. A muscle spasm wracked his rear legs and the grizzled unicorn nearly collapsed, back to the damp stone floor below.
He had thought there would be cells… and perhaps living company. They called it a dungeon, but in reality, this place was a grave. There was no food and way too much water. So much water: dripping. It was maddening!
Briefly, the stallion tried to recall how he’d gotten there. He remembered falling, chains, and a shrinking sliver of red-orange light. The chains had fallen from his forelegs, and were sitting in a pile next to where he’d lain before. The only reason he remembered that they were there was because of the betraying sound of water on metal. As he dredged through his memories, a headache began to form at the base of his horn, hindering further progress.
Why was it so hard to think? Goddesses, the pain! The ring! In-Inhibitor. That’s what they called it. They? Who were—
*Splash!*
Hoof on water. He’d stepped in a puddle. The stallion in the dark knew it was water, not by sight, taste, or touch, but by smell. It smelt of time without end. He didn’t need to open his eyes to double check. They would never taste the light again. He would never feel the touch of wind, nor savor the taste of grass.
There was that hopelessness again, knocking on his skull and demanding entrance into his vulnerable mind.
Trying to ignore the probing feelings of despair, the stallion slowly knelt down, careful of his twitching muscles, and took a drink. The water was dirty, but the icy liquid did much to calm his nerves and soothe his parched throat. The beaten colt lifted his head from the puddle. He knew he had to do something. There was a reason, but his head… it was so fuzzy. The memories were jumbled and it was the thing. The… the INHIBITOR on his horn. They put it on him. He had to get it off. He…
“They.” Memories came rushing back: only a trickle of information, but it was enough.
He remembered a tribunal: old mares and stallions glaring with malicious hatred… at him. Then guards, beating and laughing. Golden horseshoes and armor. How they shone in the fading sunlight of the clearing, on the way to the door.
An entrance to the deep places.
The guard who threw him in had had a blue mane and eyes of the same hue: a unicorn like him, wearing the regalia of one with the utmost authority. There had been no mercy in those laughing eyes as they flashed with sinister, green magic: the magic of a creature that has much to hide.
He had to get out of there.
Forward. Moving forward. That’s the ticket. The blind stallion shuffled around the puddle, tentatively feeling ahead with his horn. There had to be some way to get the metal ring off of him: to help him think more clearly. Sudden bursts of magic didn’t work, as the pain nearly knocked him unconscious, and just pulling on it with his hooves was next to impossible. It was ingrained in the fibers of his horn, and it made everything so hazy.
Why did they do it? He kept asking himself this question. Why take away his magic: his only real chance of survival? A light in the ever-present twilight of his clouded mind?
“So the darkness will be complete,” the voice, a dim memory, responded.
Over and over it mocked him: always the same.
“So the darkness will be complete.”
“…darkness…”
“…complete.”
“I’m insane,” the stallion croaked as the horrid dripping continued around him. His voice echoed back, twisted and warped, a testament to the vastness of the caverns he now called home. “YoU’re INsaNe…”
The stallion kept walking. An image of him screaming and falling to his untimely death at the bottom of a hidden pratfall soon gave him pause in his journey, however, and he readjusted his technique. Lowering his head, the tired unicorn carefully moved forward once more, his horn tapping irregularly at the stone before him as he went.
“Just like the blind ponies in Manehatten,” he mused. A dip in the floor caught his horn and his head jerked painfully. “Okay… maybe not JUST like them…”
Several more droplets of cold liquid rained down upon his already soaking fur, prompting the stallion to let loose a quiet snort and shiver spastically. Ignoring the dripping was impossible, so the stallion instead wondered when he’d encounter his first skeletons. It was inevitable, really. He couldn’t be the only pony in history to be punished this way, could he? He expected his horn to strike clattering bone at any time: any second now.
Seconds turned to hours turned to days upon days upon days. He was still walking, the ceiling was still dripping, it was still darker than the inside of a changeling’s heart, and the lone stallion was fuming. Fuming at them. It felt good to be angry again, but if he didn’t find food soon, he would no longer have the energy to feel rage.
A low gurgling sounded from the chilly unicorn’s stomach, dampening his anger.
Thoughts of daisy sandwiches, hay fries, and even garden salad, a dish he rarely touched let alone daydreamed about, danced in his head. How long had it been since his “last meal” up above? Fuzzily, he remembered that it had been in the courtyard, under the wavering light of the moon. The meal had been meager, a feast for a rabbit or a tortoise, but not nearly enough for a grown stallion sentenced to life in the dungeons.
If he’d known then what he knew now, he would have attempted to smuggle the paltry dish in with him. Honestly, a little context would have made a huge difference. LIFE in the dungeons takes on a whole different meaning when the “dungeon” happens to be a sunless, barren cavern.
“Heh... ‘life’,” the seething colt mumbled, tripping slightly as he skirted around a small spire in the stone, a stalagmite, perhaps. His throbbing horn had bumped into the ancient tower of minerals while he daydreamed, saving him a knock to the head. “Won’t be living very long down here, now will I? Not when it’s darker than Luna’s royal asshole in this Goddess-forsaken place!” The stumbling colt’s voice rose in pitch as his rant continued, burning his throat and cracking his voice, and his screaming echoes mocked him ceaselessly as he rode the euphoria of his anger back down... down to solemn defeat.
In the beginning, when his strength had been plentiful, he had howled: yelled and screamed and spat at the place high above where the door should’ve been. He’d cursed them: all of them. The Princesses, the tribunal, and the guards, but him especially. That blue-maned unicorn: the pretender who’d thrown him to his eventual demise. The wrathful convict had sworn an oath on that day. He would rise up from this place. He would see the sun again, and feel the touch of soft, green grass upon his hooves. He would find that pony, and when he did…
The magic impaired colt ground to a halt, one ear pricked up. Something was different. All thought ceased as he finally opened his eyes, straining to see something, ANYTHING new. He might as well have kept them closed. It took several moments to process what he was hearing, but when he finally realized what it was, the lone unicorn allowed himself a weary grin.
Running water amongst the incessant dripping.
Hurrying toward the sound, the eager stallion almost tripped on a small crevasse in the slick Canterhorn stone, but he didn’t care. When water ran, it went somewhere, and that somewhere often supported life. Life meant food. Food meant survival. Survival…
Well, survival meant vengeance.