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// Spirit Rivalries 
// Story: Melodies of a Valorous Vagabond 
// by Smooth Tones 
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	Jace and Deus were just the tip of the iceberg as the saying goes. There was a much deeper lying evil with these spirits. Color happened to have another one with him by the name of Shade. This stallion was bad, thousands of times worse than Jace ever was. He exploited weakness, faults, guilt, anything and would destroy somepony based on it. Frankly he was good at what he did. He was able to drive wedges between us that to this day I don’t want to move around. Let me put one exceptionally bad situation out there.

We had just had a little complication with Marsh and Silver. In short, Silver had turned Marsh into a vampony and everypony was taking it differently. We all tried to be as supportive as we could and Shade took this as his chance.

“So... we’ve got a new bitey one out do we?” Shade remarked, sniffing the air around Marsh whilst flying around her. She just sat on top of a hill, staring out over the ocean. Crystal and I approached, seeing Shade’s obvious attempts to torment Marsh, and tried to get him to come at us instead. Eventually he flew down to us and began to berate the two of us. It was fine at first, but when he started to relentlessly shell Crystal, I got angry. No, I got pissed. I hit the spirit as hard as I could with my hoof, astonished that it not only made contact, but seemed to actually wound him.

The dark spirit stared at me with his cold empty eyes and said, “So that’s how you want to play then? Okay. I can play that way.” An evil grin crossed his face and he continued to stare into my eyes. I felt like I was being stabbed, but I couldn’t pull away. Little did we know that this stare greatly sped up the aging process and breaking down my “personality.” Essentially the fabric of who I was was being broken down and I didn’t even know for the longest time. It’s what turned parts of my blonde mane and tail to an almost bright white. It was, above all else, killing me.

Now obviously we found a way to reverse it, but it wasn’t pretty. We needed to fake the death of Color’s own daughter and that by no means ended well. So there’s a little look into the sick torment that is Shade. And it doesn’t end there. He LOVES to put himself where he’s most diabolic. Deus came with the greater purpose of stopping him. Part of me wants to think is Deus being in my head until the near death situation is what had Shade focused on me. There’s a reason I hate spirits. If this doesn’t make it obvious, I don’t know what will.