It was so quiet now.
Before, the roar of the crowd had filled the air, and the searing pain of an unholy presence had tainted his mind and his thoughts. But it was quiet now, everything was calm. A sense of almost unknown serenity wrapped around his body and mind like a dark, warm blanket, shielding him from the tumult of a world in chaos and against his own failure to uphold his duty.
Duty.
What did that word even mean? What did that entail? Was he going to be punished just because he could not control a situation that had become uncontrollable? Did he ever think for a moment when he was younger that he would have the weight of the world resting on his shoulders, constantly shifting and always growing heavier? Did he ever ask to have the responsibility of making sure everyone else in the entire goddamned world was happier than he was? To bear the burden of a billion sins always weighing down on the edge of his mind?
No.
He never asked to be the modern messiah. Yet he was expected to stand strong against forces of the universe that no man had ever been able to comprehend, and to do it with a steadfast smile upon his face. And nobody asked him to face the ultimate darkness as it played his soul like a marionette. Nobody asked him if he would do these things through the kindness of his heart, but instead they forced his hand. Nobody asked him if he would fix all of their problems with a wave of his hand, they just expected him to do it out of their own sense of self-entitlement.
He wasn't a man, he wasn't a holy warrior, a guiding hand sent by some well-meaning deity. No, he was the world's puppet, dancing to the tune of an ungrateful puppetmaster. Those people out there didn't care about him. They didn't care if he suffered or if he bled. And that freak accident that happened, it nearly killed him. He knew it, he knew that the cease of his magical flow had shocked his system just as badly as going cold turkey on heroin.
And that little nightmare, or whatever it was, sure didn't help his stressed mind.
And as he cracked open his eyes to see the blank, white ceiling of the Undercity's hospital hanging over his head, he entertained a single thought: why should I take this shit anymore?
Aaron leaned up in the hospital bed, aware for the first time that not all was as silent as his nearly comatose state had led him to believe. The steady beep of an electrocardiogram came from beside his bed, and outside the door of his room he could hear nurses passing by and the chatter of medical technology in other parts of the hospital.
The machine beside his bed let out a continuous beep, flatlining as he yanked off the electrodes stuck on his skin. His feet touched the cold floor, and Aaron sat at the edge of his hospital bed for a moment, holding a hand to his forehead. Things were still foggy, but at that moment he felt a kind of energy pumping through his veins that could only be described as a half shot of adrenaline mixed and slammed down with a half a pep pill. It was not so much a bouncing energy, but rather a sense of confidence, one that could power him through several days worth of bullshit.
Standing up, he rolled his head on his shoulders, feeling the satisfying pop and crack of the joints in his neck. He wasn't going to wait around for some nurse to show up and try to shoo him back into his bed; he felt too good to just piss this day away. So he strode out of the hospital room and into the halls, his bare feet slapping against the cold tile floor.
He walked with purpose and swaggered down the halls, though he among all people in the hospital that day didn't have a single thing that he needed to do or a single place he needed to be. The Undercity's hospital was almost fuller than it had ever been, due in part to President McGoff temporarily suspending the ban on inter-species healthcare. The rooms and beds were full of ponies and other creatures, bandaged from wounds inflicted by the SWAT, coughing their lungs up from breathing too much of the tear gas, and more than a few were actually suffering from heat exhaustion and dehydration.
But he didn't care, or even bother to notice. The doctors and nurses that scurried through the hallways gave him a wide berth. He didn't know why, but when they took one look at his face, their eyes drifted to the floor and they slid over to the wall, as if they were betas in the presence of the alpha. Was it respect that cleared his way, or was it something else? Either way, he swaggered through the hospital unhindered.
Aaron walked the halls without a real purpose, finally deciding that he should probably find better clothes than the rather breezy hospital gown they stuck him in. Turning a sharp right in a fairly deserted hall, he came to a dead end corridor with a janitor leaning on his mop, his thumb flicking halfheartedly at a lighter as he tried to light the cigarette plugged in his mouth.
The janitor looked up, realizing he had been caught. "Hey uh, you ain't gonna tell anyone, are ya? I mean, I ain't gonna tell anyone that you're walking around without your nurse. Guy's gotta have his fix, right? One little smoke's not gonna kill anyone around here."
Aaron looked slowly down at the pack of cigarettes and grinned.
The janitor raised his eyebrow. "Ah, I see what you want." He flicked his wrist and the butt of a smoke popped out of his pack. "Our little secret, eh?" Without a word, Aaron swiped the whole pack from his hand, easily plugging a cigarette into the corner of his mouth.
The janitor put on an offended and angry look, but he didn't want to speak out against this weirdo. But what really shut his mouth was what came next. Aaron extended a single finger to the wall, swiping his hand down as if he was lighting a match, leaving a charred streak on the wall and lighting the cigarette of the tip of his smoldering finger.
Aaron took a deep drag, savoring the smoke, though he never smoked more than a pack in his entire life.
"Tell me," he said, leaking acrid smoke out the corners of his mouth. "What size are those shoes?"
A few short minutes later, he was once again roaming the halls, this time with a new pair of loafers and a set of scrubs he found in a closet. Flicking his spent butt into a corner, he lit another cigarette off his fingertip. And as he wandered the halls, he found himself stopped in front of a large glass window. Inside was something that was more precious to the human race than any hoard of gold or jewels. He leaned close to the window, his hot breath fogging the glass that separated him from the nursery. Several newborn children squirmed in their colored blankets, their eyes not yet open and their bodies not yet used to the world outside their mothers.
He was drawn to that room, to those children. Aaron pressed his forehead against the glass, staring in at the new and innocent life. It should have startled him, it should have shocked him, but he wanted in there . . . badly. He wanted to be in the nursery like a serpent wanted to find its way into a nest of freshly laid eggs. And this pitiful sheet of glass was the only thing standing in his way. He tapped on the glass, taunting the little infants in the nursery. And as soon as his finger touched the window, every child broke out screams and cries.
They knew something was wrong, in that way that only children can know of danger. And it only excited him. With one good punch he could be through that glass, and the snake could slither its way into the hen's nest. He grinned, chuckling under his breath at their spectacle of futilely crying for help.
"Hey!"
And with that one word, his focus was torn away from the infants, and he slowly looked up to see the sternest nurse he had ever seen in his life. She glared at him, puffing herself up like the proverbial hen guarding the nest full of her chicks.
"Visiting hours are over. You'll have to leave before I call security. And if that's a cigarette in your mouth, so help me God you're gonna be in a world of hurt!"
Staring her down like a gunslinger at high noon, the man plucked the smoke from his lips and dropped it to the floor, grinding it out under the heel of his newly acquired shoes, never breaking eye contact with the unusually stalwart nurse. Aaron turned and walked down the hallway, and the nurse took that as a sign of her victory, bustling into the nursery to try and calm each crying child.
He didn't care about being chased off, he had bigger fish to fry.
*******************************
The office was buzzing with chatter. The news that the pony protest and rally had turned into a riot, the unwarranted arrival of the entire Lazarus garrison of military police and their reaction, the extremely sudden thunderstorm that had been a little too convenient; these true stories ran alongside rumors like marathon runners. Some said that nobody had been killed, others heard from distant fourth-hand sources that the death toll was close to fifty and climbing. The woman in the corner office claimed that she heard that the entire command of the homeland branch of the military was under suspension and review while the guy by the watercooler refuted that; this was obviously an attempted coup d'etat by the Provost Marshal. The fellow who ran the mailroom heartily disagreed, it was a joint decision by the Terran Senate and the President to finally evict the unwanted parasites from Lazarus. And by the time the rumors had run through the entirety of the Undercity's bureaucracy, with so many theories and no factual updates from the surface, word of mouth had twisted the entire story into some kind of conspiracy that involved half the Terran military's commanders and a ground-force invasion by Equestria disguised as a civil rights protest.
The thunderstorm that managed to mysteriously break up the entire affair was handily discounted as nonsense.
But Anita didn't care about what she knew to be obviously fanciful rumors. She'd been one of those gossip-girl types back in the twenty-first century, and part of gossip was knowing which stories held at least a tiny grain of truth and which ones were utter crap. It was concern that kept her quiet when everyone else was clamoring for any more details after the office went on temporary lockdown.
Because unlike the rest of her coworkers, someone she knew and cared about had been up there, and there was no word on what happened to Aaron. All she could do to keep herself from worrying herself into an ulcer was to focus on her work and to try and drown out the incessant chattering around her cubicle with the scratch of her pencil on her latest report. She hadn't looked up in the past four hours, and her neck was killing her. But any small discomfort was worth not hearing all the increasingly grim rumors
"Psst! Hey, Annie-gal," her neighbor Janet said over the cubicle wall. Anita ignored her. "Anita! Little Orphan Annie!" Still no response came. "I know you can hear me!"
The tip of her pencil snapped, and Anita let out a frustrated groan. Setting her broken pencil down as calmly as she could, she straightened out for the first time in hours and turned to her friend. "What?" she said very quietly and very acidly.
"Jule and I were talking. You know, about what's happening up there." Janet poked a finger up towards the ceiling. "And we kinda figured that if anyone would know what was really going on, it might be you."
Anita was obviously confused. "Why would I know?"
"Wellllllllll, we heard that your boyfriend was up there, doing his thing, and we also had a bit of a theory that maybe you and him . . . how to say this? That you and him are . . . bonded. Like you can hear each other's thoughts or something."
"Where would you get a crazy idea like that?"
Janet shrugged. "Every single wizard story ever. Dude's like the modern Merlin, isn't he? I heard that he teleports everywhere, and that he rides a flying carpet or something."
Anita covered her face in frustration. "I've never seen him teleport anywhere. And even if he did, why would he need the carpet?" She snatched another pencil from the coffee mug near her lamp, getting back to work on her latest report. "Besides, there's no room for me in his mind." That last part was too quiet for Janet to hear, and it hurt to say.
Even when he was looking in her eyes and holding her hand, he was never truly there. Though he was close enough to feel the warmth of his body on her own, his mind was always a million miles away. There were times when she literally had to shout his name just to get him to acknowledge her presence, even if he was looking right at her. It was understandable at times, but ever since that nightmare had him thrashing in bed and screaming a name that she never heard outside of church, his aloofness had taken a darker turn.
He was agitated, shifty, constantly darting his eyes in every direction as if he was afraid of being watched. And though he didn't seem to notice in the slightest, he had bags under his eyes every day, like he was afraid to go to sleep anymore. Maybe he was afraid of letting his guard down. But whatever it was, paranoia, sleep deprivation, some kind of depression, or even the rampant post traumatic stress that plagued many humans in Lazarus, it was hurting their relationship.
And the absolute worst part of it all? He refused to talk about it. He had spoken more to Lyra than he had to her the last time she went to his house. She was trained in human psychology, and yet he didn't say a word about what was bothering him to one of the few people who might be able to help him. Anita looked down at her current case file, and realized that she had been absently staring at the blank form for the last five minutes.
Sighing to herself, she set down her pencil and tried to reorient her thoughts, to drive out the worries and the constant chatter all around her cubicle. All of this stress was pushing her towards a migraine, though she hadn't had one in months. Grabbing a few pills from the bottle in her drawer, she paused when she reached for her water bottle. Sitting next to her bottle of water was a tenacious little peace lily that she had been her gift at the office Christmas party last winter. And before her very eyes, the plant that had endured a life without sunlight and hardly any water was wilting. The single, delicate white flower with its bowl-shaped petal was curling in on itself, coming together and retracting all of its leaves.
As if it was hiding from something.
Anita felt eyes on her back, and a chill ran down her spine. She turned in her chair, and was greeted by the unsmiling face of her lover.
"Aaron!" she shouted, clasping a hand over her heart. "You startled me." She regained herself, realizing that something was amiss. "I . . . I thought you were at the rally."
"I was," he replied in a cool, low voice. "I had some time to think, and I got to thinking about you." His eyes, shot with several lines of red, drifted down from Anita's face and began to approvingly look over her every line and curve. Anita felt naked under his gaze, and she subconsciously tensed as he looked her over. "Come on, let's go for a little walk. You and me, a little time alone."
It was only after she broke herself away from his seemingly hypnotic gaze that she realized what he was wearing. "Why are you in scrubs? And what's that around your wrist?"
Aaron glanced at his left arm, noticing the wristband containing all his basic medical information. In his sojourn from his hospital bed, he had never bothered to notice it there, much less take it off. He summoned just the tiniest flow of magic to the tip of his finger, and without needing to think about a spell, the wristband turned to dust. "Nothing," he said coldly in reply.
Normally, she would just say that she was busy, that she couldn't take the time out of her schedule right this moment to accommodate him. But those eyes, just glancing into them cowed any excuse she had into submission. It was as if he was looking past her, through her, and deep down into the depths of her soul.
Can he do that? Anita asked herself. Of course not, that was preposterous. Wasn't it?
Though she still had a mound of paperwork left, she felt compelled, almost against her will, to stand. She rose slowly from her chair, feeling a kind of meekness and apprehension that she had never felt in Aaron's presence before. Though his aloofness was disheartening, he always exuded an aura of comfort and safety. But she had never felt so scrutinized and vulnerable in her entire life.
Swallowing down the lump in her throat, she looked him in the eye. He smiled to her, looping an arm around her shoulders and very harshly pulling her close.
"Let's go," he whispered to her.
By now the whole office was watching quietly. Janet was peering over the cubicle wall, but when Aaron turned his glaring gaze her way, she shrank back into her chair. And it was only after the pair had left that Janet realized she had been clutching the crucifix that hung around her neck.
***************************
"Where are we going?" Anita finally asked after several minutes of seemingly aimless wandering.
"Not important," Aaron murmured back. His eyes were set straight forward, never shifting to either side.
If it wasn't that important, Anita couldn't understand why he had to keep dragging her through the empty hallways. She made her stand, and stopped in the middle of the hall. Aaron continued a few steps, seemingly unaware. Until he peered over his shoulder.
"Why did you stop?" he asked.
Anita broadened her stance, folding her arms under her bosom and putting on her most commanding face. "If where you want to go isn't important, and if you have something to say to me, you can say it right here."
"Fine," he said quietly. Turning back towards her, he stepped very close to Anita, close enough to where she could feel the unusual heat of his body. "I wanted to take a little walk with you, that's all. Is it too much to fucking ask that I get a little alone time with my woman?" There was anger in his voice, something that Anita had never truly heard.
Anita stood her ground. "What are you talking about? We get plenty of time alone together."
"Really?" he replied sarcastically. "Every time we go anywhere together, it's in public. Every time we're together, you have to make sure there's as many people as you can possibly find hovering over our shoulders. We go out to eat, it's always a cafe with a table on the sidewalk. You come to my house, you have to have Lyra in the room with us. I want to have an evening alone with you; instead we go out to the most public bar in Lazarus."
"Aaron, please-"
"It's like you don't want to be alone with me!" He was almost shouting at that point. "Better yet, it's like you're showing me off. I feel like you're parading me around, showing me off to the whole world like a little dog that you keep in your goddamned purse. And the worst part?" He leaned even closer, looming tall over Anita. "The absolute worst part is that this little dog never even gets petted. No praise or reward for this little bitch, eh?"
Anita trembled. "Please, I never said-"
"Of course you never said anything. But I can feel it, and I don't even need to look in your mind to tell. So why don't you just put it out there in the open? Why don't you just say it?" he hissed.
"Say what! I-I don't know what you're talking about!" she stuttered.
"Am I your little dog to be showed off in public, your little fucking toy to be showed off to all the other kids and tossed in the corner when you get home? Or is it something else?"
He was only inches from her face, and she was close to tears. "Aaron, please, you're scaring me."
For the first time that day, he smiled, and he chuckled lowly. "Is that it? I scare you, don't I? The very thought of me terrifies you, doesn't it? Are you afraid of me?" He held up his hand, and the spark of magic leaped from his fingers like a green flame. "Or are you afraid of this?"
"Aaron, please," Anita practically whispered in fear. "If there's something wrong, we can talk. Please just tell what's wrong."
The flickering magic that danced around his fingers snapped out, vanishing at his own insistence. "What's wrong? What's wrong? Anita, sweetheart, there's not a damn thing wrong with me. In fact, I feel a hundred feet tall." To her visible relief, he backed a step away. "I was in the hospital not too long ago, and I had a sudden revelation, a huge epiphany that changed my life! I realized that I've been literally everyone's bitch. My entire life since we woke up has been me bending over and taking it from one person after another. Everyone in this country thinks I'm the goddamned janitor who has to clean up their messes! And you know what my epiphany was? I'm done. I renounce my faith, I'm flipping the bird to my country, and from now on I'm looking out for number one."
Anita took a careful step closer, holding her hands out in an attempt to calm him and show that she meant no harm. "Aaron, this isn't you. The Aaron I know wouldn't back away from helping someone. You're just stressed, you're just scared of all this change around you." Maintaining eye contact, she took a step closer and placed a hand over her heart. "I know, I'm frightened too. I'm frightened of this new world, and I know how you feel. But we can get over this together, if you'll just let me in. Please, Aaron, let me help you."
Her hand delicately touched his troubled cheek, and for a moment the woman almost believed that whatever had caused all of this was fading away. His hand closed around her wrist, and the red tint of rage filled his eyes.
"You think you understand what I've been through? You think that in your entire life you've felt the amount of pain I've felt in a single blinding moment of agony?!" His grip tightened around her wrist, and Anita cried out in pain. "I have died for people like you, I denied heaven for people like you, my soul was stripped of all hope and immersed in complete darkness . . ."
A stream of tears flowed down Anita's cheek. But through her tears, her eyes grew wide. "Aaron," she whimpered, "your nose. . ."
Something warm trickled by the corner of his mouth, and Aaron dabbed his finger into the stream running down his chin. And when he saw the crimson stain of blood on his own finger, his world froze. What had happened in the park, what had brought him to his knees and nearly destroyed his entire body rushed back to him in an overwhelming wave. He remembered now; it was not a dream, it was not a nightmare. All of the pain, the fear, the anger . . . him.
Aaron looked into Anita's eyes, and saw his own reflection in her glasses. A trickle of blood stained his chin like the visceral feast of a hideous beast. And within the reflection of Anita's glasses, he saw his own eyes. An endless void, scorched of any love and any life by the ravages of its own dark fires stared back at him.
And suddenly, so suddenly, it was all so clear.
"I'm sorry," he whispered, releasing Anita's hand. Anita clutched her injured hand, the bruises already starting to grow around her wrist.
He summoned as much of his magic as he was willing, and without a word to her, the very fabric of space bent around his body, and he teleported as far away as he could.
***************************************
This would be one of the most difficult days of her life.
Lyra sighed as she scribbled down another line of her withdrawal speech in her notebook, trying to word this as sensitively as she could. There were a hundred little snippets of her argument that she had to consider; dozens of people she had to apologize to, an entire nation's fears to assuage, and one little girl who would have to go a little longer without a mommy.
"No," said an ethereal voice from over her shoulder. Lyra dropped her pen and groaned in frustration, crumpling up the paper and throwing it in a trashcan that had started to overflow with her failed withdrawal speech drafts.
"What was wrong with that one?" she angrily hissed, picking up her pen with her magic and starting on a fresh page.
The ghostly orb of her legal advisor and deceased attorney ceased his unending path around the desk, facing the mare. He had taken to floating like that once they had hit dire straits, much like he had paced in his life when he needed to think. Lyra's amber eyes stared deep into the swirling depths of the pinprick of light that had come to represent the soul of Clarence Darrow, and though she complimented herself on being able to usually read his emotions and intentions, now she could see nothing but turbulence.
"It was . . . lacking," was all he said before he resumed his pacing.
"Lacking in what?" Lyra retaliated. "Lacking in boldness like the first seven? Or maybe lacking in humility like the four after that? I've jam packed this speech with every bit of sweet-humble-mare that I possible can, and it's still not good enough for you!"
The ghost stopped abruptly, the normally placid whites of his energies flaring red. "It is not me that you have to appease. It is the court, it is the media, it is the people!"
"Then tell me how!" Lyra snapped. "All you've done for the past two days is pace around and mutter to yourself. I swear, if you had feet you'd have worn a hole through the carpet by now." The ghost growled something to himself, resuming his endless track around the desk. Lyra glared at him. "That's not an answer."
Finally he stopped after two more rounds. "I have been trying to think."
"About what?"
"Ways out of this," the ghost replied, resuming his path.
"What do you mean? This is our way out. If I go in there and say that I withdraw my petition and then they toss out my case, then nobody is any better or any worse off. When I say to Chief Justice Halliburton, "Madam Chief Justice, I withdraw my case" it's all back to square one for everypony in Lazarus. Nobody wins."
"And everyone loses." Mr Darrow swooped down in front of Lyra, hovering over her latest speech to inspect her work.
Lyra sighed, leaning back into the cushiony embrace of Aaron's sparsely used office chair. She knew he was right. She knew that the moment she withdrew her case, everything would go back to the way it had been before she set hoof in Lazarus, then it would go back another ten steps. All of the progress that the ponies had made in the arenas of politics and public image, it would all lose its steam and grind to a halt. After the riot, the human populace of Lazarus would find any reason to have the ponies evicted, and without any political influence or popular power, they almost certainly would get their wish. Without a definitive legal victory, or even some kind of visible gain or agreement, there would be no follow through with the civil movement.
But she couldn't think about any reason why Clarence was so adamant about finding a way to come out on top, though there was no way to come about this except empty handed.
"You know, when you were out there looking for some kind of answers from the spirits, I read a little on you. You were the kind of person who never really lost, though you lost your fair share of court cases. Attorney for the Damned; it's a good name for you. The damned looked for you because you could always win, even if it wasn't a complete win. You'd get charges dropped, juries swapped, even declare mistrials if it meant victory."
The ghost's essence shifted from its bright white to a warier gray. "What is your point?"
Lyra leaned forward in her chair, folding her hooves together. "I'm wondering why you're still trying. Is it because you sympathize with my case, even though I'm just a talking animal to you? Or is it because you have a god breathing down your neck? Is Big Momma gonna chew your ass if you go back to her without a good report card? Or are you still helping me because you want a perfect track record?"
"What are you talking about?" the ghost replied in an agitated tone.
"You never lost a case because you always wanted to win! If you did anything short of miraculous, it would make your reputation look like crap! You're still here because you think that I'm another hard puzzle for you to solve that'll just bump up your reputation even after you've been long dead!"
The cautious gray flared an angry red. "I am not here because of some juvenile lust for achievement! I lived my life believing that there was some justice in a world that seemed so cruel; believing that a man did not have to suffer life with the injustices that his fellows laid upon him. I wanted to see a world where men received only what they deserved, not what other men desired for them." His angered red glow began to fade, as did his his volume and tone of voice. "Before even Mother Earth sent me back, I saw your people being mistreated and abused in this country, though they had done no wrong and their ancestors had paid back their debts in blood and sweat. You and your kind were not getting what they deserved; there was no justice for the four legged citizens of Terra. I am not a perfectionist, Lyra, I am merely a man who wants fairness for all people above all things."
Lyra felt inches tall. Of all the possibilities of why he continued to scratch for hope of gaining the creatures of Lazarus some kind of foothold, a pure motive had not occurred to her. From her experiences with mankind, there were no pure hearted actions; they always had an ulterior motive.
"I'm sorry," she said, her head hung low and her ears lying flat on her head in shame. "It's just-"
"You don't have to explain yourself. Many people have questioned why I defended them, even if their case and cause seemed utterly hopeless."
She could have sobbed, she could have hugged him if there was something to hug, but right now there was work to do. "I uh . . . I would like your opinion on this opening statement here." She indicated the first paragraph of her latest speech draft.
The ghost peered down at the paper, and for the first time that night she could see some kind of satisfaction in his swirling energies. "Much better," he said after several moments of scrutiny. "Though I would replace 'constituency' with 'like-minded people'."
Lyra nodded. "I knew I was using that word wrong. But I'm more concerned about this fourth paragraph here, where I address the Justices -- Clarence?" Her spectral legal counselor had gone silent. "Clarence? What's up?" She waved her hoof in front of what she believed to be his face.
"Something is wrong," the ghost murmured.
And barely a moment later, Lyra felt the tingle of magic flow through the air, but it was not coming from her, nor anyone in the house. The entire building shook as a thunderous boom! erupted from the front of the house. Lyra ducked under the desk, seeking cover from the hail of books falling from their shelves. She covered her head with her hooves, expecting the rest of the house to collapse around her or a gigantic fireball to blast through the doorway.
But no such thing came, and she carefully peeked out from under the desk. "Holy Tartarus, that was a loud one."
"A loud what?" Clarence asked from the safety of her diamond earring.
"That was a teleport spell," Lyra explained. "I could feel it in my horn. Either that was someone's first teleport ever, or whoever just teleported into the kitchen doesn't know how to make his spells quieter."
"Could it be a burglar?"
"I don't know," Lyra whispered back. Grabbing a potted plant with her magic to use as a weapon, the mare crept carefully to the door of the study. And as she reached for the handle with her teeth, another bang! came from the front of the house. But this time she could tell that it was no teleportation spell; it sounded more like furniture being thrown and smashed against the wall. She'd never heard of a burglar who completely smashed up a house, but she'd heard that star sugar junkies would break into buildings and go on a destructive rampage. Holding her potted plant close, she carefully walked down the hallway.
The crashes and bangs continued as she crept as quietly as her hooves would allow towards the dining room. Whoever was in her dining room, he obviously was in some kind of a rage. The thought crossed her mind that it might be a smarter idea to go and get help, but she dismissed that.
The mare and her improvised weapon stopped right outside the doorway to the dining room, all the noise from the room stopped. Steeling herself, Lyra pushed the dining room door open and peered inside. Her cursory glance gave her a vision of a room ravaged by a force of nature, as if a tornado had twirled from the sky and into her house, picking up anything in its way and casting it aside like a dollhouse's accoutrements. The table and its accompanying chairs were all piles of splinters pushed against the walls, the china cabinet and its contents lay shattered on the floor in a hazardous field of debris, even the light fixture hung haphazardly from the ceiling, swinging lazily from a single cord.
And in the middle of the ravaged room, sitting with his knees hugged to his chin, sat Aaron.
Lyra breathed a sign of relief, setting down her impromptu weapon. "Hey buddy," she said carefully, taking a slow step into the room. "You decide to redecorate a little?" He remained unresponsive, staring straight forward in the most introverted look that she had ever seen. Lyra edged closer. "Aaron?" For good measure, she carefully prodded him with a hoof.
He exploded into motion, scuttling away from Lyra until his back was to the wall. And when she looked upon his unobstructed face, she could only whisper the words, "By Celestia's grace . . ."
His chin was black with a stream of dried blood that had dried and crusted over. His skin was paler than any ghost she had ever seen. But what would haunt Lyra about that day the most was the look in his eyes. Shot with red, they reflected back to her an image of a primal terror, of a soul in turmoil and a mind cast into a realm of unknown eldritch horrors. It was as if he had seen a vision of war and slaughter so scarring that he reverted to the state of a wild beast, terrified by even the slightest gesture of humanity.
"Stay away from me," he finally managed to choke out of his trembling lips.
"What happened to you?" she asked quietly. She took another step closer.
"NO!" he shrieked, violently pushing himself farther away from her. "Please, I don't want to hurt you."
"You're not going to hurt me, and I'm not going to hurt you," she said comfortingly. "Now stay right there." She quickly dashed out of the room, grabbing a washcloth from the bathroom and soaking it in warm water. Within a minute, she was once again approaching him cautiously, holding her damp rag out wide with her magic. She crooned to him and shushed him like a scared foal or a wild animal, but the madness and the distance never seemed to leave his eyes as she carefully wiped away the dried blood.
She finally built up the courage to ask again, "What happened to you?"
His haunted eyes found her face, and he whispered to her, "I hurt people. People I didn't know, people I loved, people . . . that you love." His gaze grew distant, as if he was remembering some crime that he had committed. "Lyra, I need to ask you something."
"What?" She gently dabbed at his chin, clearing away a thin clot of blood.
"I need to speak to the dead man you've been hiding from me."
*************************************
It had taken nearly ten minutes for Lyra to convince the ghost of Clarence Darrow that their cover had long since been blown, and that there would be no deportations or exorcisms if he showed himself to Aaron. He was in no sort of mind to be engaging in such a delicate and precise practice anyways. By the time the mare and her attorney came back to Aaron's scene of destruction, he had begun to scrawl a picture on the dusty floor. It was little more than a poorly drawn caricature of his own face, but with horns sprouting from his head, and a pair of crude fangs protruding out of his wickedly smiling mouth.
Glancing up from his macabre drawing, he wiped it away with a wave of his hand. There was no recognition, no anger, no emotional reaction at all to seeing the ghost that had been haunting his house.
But his eyes imparted some strange energy, one that made the ghost's spectral energies tremble and shift to a wary grey. "You wished to speak with me?"
Aaron nodded slowly. "Yes," he replied quietly.
Clarence shifted nervously, not wanting to provoke or anger him. "And what is it that you wanted to speak to me about?"
Aaron's gaze drifted back down to the floor, where his finger began to lazily trace in the dust left by his outburst. "Do you remember, not so long ago, not far from here . . . something happened."
The ghost's energies soothed to a cool white. "Legion," he murmured. "You and I, we were one. The two of us, and billions of others, all in the same body. Yes, I remember. And how could I forget . . ."
"That's not all that happened." Aaron looked up from his drawing. "We became the host for something. Something dark, something cruel, something evil."
The ghost recoiled at the very hint of that foul thing. "Lucifer."
Aaron nodded once again. "And the Elements of Harmony destroyed it. The hole in our hearts was filled; love triumphed. Didn't it?" His last words were filled with doubt, and there was a hint of moisture in the corners of his eyes.
"What do you mean?" Clarence asked.
"Did harmony triumph? Please, you're from the Other Side, you have to know. You have to tell me!" Aaron snapped out his hand, grasping the flickering spirit orb and holding it as easily as he might hold a ball.
"Tell you what!" Clarence shouted, twisting and writhing in Aaron's grasp.
"Just tell me!" Aaron screamed. "Are my nightmares just bad dreams! Are my thoughts my own! Why can't I hear the gods! Why . . . why did I want to hurt the children in the nursery?" Aaron's fingers fell limply away, and the ghost found himself free. Aaron curled in on himself, a stream of tears flowing down his cheeks. "I-I didn't want to. I don't remember it all, but I hurt people. I hurt people just because . . . just because they got in my way." He peered up, finding Lyra through his tears. "I'm so sorry," he said to her. But Lyra did not reply, and her face seemed frozen in an expression of pale horror.
"By all that is holy," Clarence uttered in terror. "It's still alive in you. But-but that cannot be! The Elements struck true! I felt the taint as it was scoured away; I felt the light of creation and harmony as it flowed through all of us! Lucifer cannot have survived!"
Aaron sniffed and leaned up, finally reaching some kind of decision in his own mind. "I have to know." Standing shakily on his feet, Aaron left the dining room, returning shortly with a piece of chalk and a thick leatherbound tome. Setting down his spellbook, Aaron flipped through the pages until he came upon the page he was looking for. Clenching the chalk in his shaky fingers, he began to draw the outline of a runic circle on the floor.
Lyra, who had not said a word throughout the whole exchange, had been too disturbed by what he had said about the nursery to interrupt. But now she had to speak her mind. "Did you really? Did you really want to hurt those children? Did you want to hurt-?"
Aaron stopped his busy work, peering up at Lyra with the most guilt ridden gaze she had ever received. "I don't know. If it wanted them, I don't know that it wouldn't hurt them somehow."
After nearly fifteen minutes of some of the most careless runescripting that he had ever done, Aaron inspected his handiwork. On his dining room floor, surrounded by the debris of his sudden appearance, was a circle roughly six feet in diameter. The outer rim was inscribed with various wards and runes of both protection and alteration. Within the circle, a five-pointed star focused the inert magical flows and each point would act as the template for each of his limbs.
"That's. . . an inversion circle," Lyra murmured after several moments of inspection. An inversion circle was considered to be one of the most advanced forms of runic application, and one that was strictly monitored by the Crown of Equestria. Any kind of rune was easy to make a mistake on, but this particular combination was only useful for one thing: introspection. Literally inverting someone's consciousness from the outside and placing them inside of their own mind. But it came with its risks; some people returned from inversions mentally scarred from what they had seen in their own souls, others stayed too long and could no longer determine what was real and what was not, still others never returned at all.
"Aaron, think about what you're doing," said Lyra.
"I've thought about it enough," he replied coldly as he laid down in confines of the circle.
"Look, whatever this 'Lucifer' thing is, we can get you help! I know a bunch of really good unicorns back in Canterlot, I can get you to a doctor!"
"There's no doctor in the world that can help me!" Aaron snapped. Taking a deep breath, he calmed himself as much as he could. "There's something inside me, something evil. Do you know about Nightmare Moon?" Lyra nodded. "She was the Queen of Night, and what's inside of me was supposed to be the King of the Damned. Nightmare Moon tried to make herself queen of the world; Lucifer wanted to destroy all life. And if I can't find out how he survived and why he's here now, a lot of innocent people could suffer."
Lyra started to object, but as she thought about the implications of allowing something as devilish as Nightmare Moon run rampant, she held it back and nodded.
"Alright then. You watch the door, make sure nobody comes in here with anything that might screw up the flows." Lyra bit her lip, and nodded. "And you," he said to Clarence, "If things start looking bad, do what you can to pull me out."
"I will do my best," the ghost replied.
Having made all of his preparations and steeled his nerves as much as he could, Aaron laid down fully in the inversion circle. Taking a deep breath, he once again considered the possibilities. I could just be post-traumatic, he thought to himself. I could just be crazy. But he dismissed that; he had to know.
Summoning a strong flow of magic, he directed it through the circle of runes that lay around his body. The streams of his arcane energy were seized by the runic letters, and once primed with a small amount of his own power, they would do the rest. He took one final deep breath to calm himself as the runes began to glow with mystic lights.
Aaron rested his head at the point of the pentacle, and felt the magic of the circle seep into his body, gently caressing him into a soothing calmness. Deeper and deeper it worked its way into his body, until it grasped at the very depths of his soul. And all at once, it began. Aaron felt a sharp tug, not on his body, but on his spiritual essence. I must not fight it, he thought to himself. The pull of runes grew stronger, tugging on the center of his soul until it pained him. But he did not resist the invasive pull, and he soon realized that he could not feel his fingers, or his toes, or any part of his body for that matter.
The world began to shiver, the very fabric of reality trembling before his very eyes. And as all the world collapsed down to one single shining point of light in the ether and the mists of his own inner consciousness began to swirl around him, Aaron hoped and he prayed that he was just going crazy.
***************************
The mists parted, and the shadows began to lift. Flat on his back, Aaron stared at an empty twilight sky, one strangely devoid of stars and moons, yet giving off enough unearthly light to cast shadows in the forest around him.
Leaning up on his elbows, he surveyed the land around him. "So this is what it looks like in here," he murmured. The grass was softer than a cloud under his hand, and the trees stretched onwards towards the unseen horizon. Each tree was unique, with its own patterns of bark and shape of leaf. Some were trees that he passed by every day back before the War, others were things that he could only imagine of existing. But each and every one was spread evenly, uncrowded by its fellows.
Standing up, Aaron felt a wave of vertigo hit him, and he steadied himself before taking a cautious step forward. "Christ," he muttered as he almost fell onto his face. Struggling to stay standing, he thought about leaning against a nearby tree for support. And as soon as the thought entered his mind, his hand felt the rough bark and the solid mass of an elm. Breathing a sigh of relief, he realized that things were a little odd about this place. "Wait a minute, weren't you just over there?" he asked the tree, pointing over to a space that was now occupied by a bushy apple.
The tree did not respond. Aaron scrutinized this helpful oddity of his own mind, wondering if it was some living thing, some tiny being that made up a part of a greater whole. The leaves shook in the breeze, and they seemed to whisper comforting things to him, things that made him feel safe, things that cloaked him in a sense of serenity. The tree was speaking to him in a language that could only be understood through feeling, a language of devoted love that required no words.
Aaron looked at the rough surface of the tree's bark under his fingers, and for the first time saw what the tree wanted him to see. Under his outstretched fingers lay some kind of seam, a line of puckered bark that was about a foot long. He glanced up at the branches and the leaves, seeking some kind of sign from this mysterious entity. It communed with him, for it was a part of him, and he understood what it wanted.
Placing his hands on either side of the seam, he gently opened the division. There was no crack and shattering of bark, it parted easily, like a curtain. And cautiously he peered inside, into the mass of swirling colors on a liquid screen as they resolved.
Within the images in the bark, a woman stood on a whitewashed porch just outside the open door to her home. A quilt hung around her narrow shoulders and shielded her from the night's chill. She was a homely woman with a round face and stringy brown hair. She stood quietly on the lonesome porch, listening intently. And from the darkness of the late winter's night, a single high pitched chirp came to her. The woman smiled. "Aaron!" she called out. For a moment, he believed that she was speaking to him through the veil of time, but his certainty was quelled when he saw a child, no older than three or four, come out of the house.
"Yes, Mama?" the little boy said.
"Come here, I want you to hear this." His mother opened up her quilt, bundling her young son in its warm embrace. "Now listen carefully," she whispered to him. The two sat down on the steps, and together they listened. Many moments passed, but again the trilling chirp came from far out in the night.
"What is it?" the little boy asked.
His mother smiled. "It's a spring peeper. They're the first sign of spring, and soon lots and lots of them will all sing together. Then the birds will all come back to their homes, and the daffodils will start to bloom. And then winter will finally be over."
The boy's smile was full of wonder and fascination, and together with his mother, they listened to the first signs of spring and the return of life. Aaron stared long into the long-forgotten memory, one of the happiest moments he had ever spent at his home. That night, so many centuries ago, all the worries of the world seemed to vanish as the peepers promised that the cycle of life was being renewed. There was no indifference, no sorrow, no anger, only wonder.
Aaron stepped back from the tree. "You . . . you're a memory. A damn good memory. But then, what are all these?" He peered back over his shoulder, looking at the endless expanse of other trees. Picking out another one nearby, he carefully walked over, making sure to maintain his footing, and opened the seam in that one's bark. Inside the swirling mists, the vision of a younger Aaron, though much older than the little boy from the elm, sat in a cramped little desk, half asleep during an particularly dull reading of Hemingway in an English class. "They're placeholders," he realized. "Just moments in time that I lived through." They were little more than that, simply moments of his life that had little to no significance or sentimentality. They were not good moments like the friendly elm, nor bad memories like . . . he didn't actually know, or want to know, what a horrifically bad memory looked like.
But as he looked around at all of the tens of thousands of memories, each of them calling to him in their own voice, each one tugging at his heart and tickling his curiosity, he understood why some people chose to never leave once they came to this place in their own mind. He didn't know how many hours he had simply stared past the thin veil of memory into that cold spring's night so many centuries ago. He felt the elm calling him again, and he felt it shift in his subconscious to stand once again next to him. It wanted to bond, but Aaron realized that the tree was only a small part of himself, that it was a memory of a happier time, that it was his own will desiring to live again in a world with no worries.
"No," he said, stopping the tree. "No! I . . . I want to, but I can't. There's something here that is hurting all of you, all of us! This whole place, all of you and every part of us, it'll all die unless I can stop it! I need you to help me. I need you to show me where he is."
The elm tree shivered, as if a breeze were rattling its leaves. And after a few moments, all the other leaves on all the other trees began to rattle to the same unmoving breeze. Like soldiers withdrawing their arms in an honor guard, their branches parted, revealing a clear path through the wood. Aaron glanced at the elm tree, and felt an aura of concern and sadness fall over it. With a nod to the elm, he started down the cleared trail.
He walked for what seemed like hours, though with the odd flow of time in his mind, it seemed like had trudged through that forest of dreams and memories for lifetimes. As he trudged through years of his own lifetime, he would hear things, voices from his past, snippets of places and people who were long gone.
They spoke of the moments of his life where he had known happiness, where he had felt safe and comfortable. But as he neared the trail's end, somewhere deep within the tangle near his id, the shadows of his mind began to play their tricks. From the corners of his eye Aaron would spy a fleeting shadow ducking behind the trunks of trees. They always stayed just out of sight, but he knew they were there. The trees surrounding the path had become less regal and more feral; their branches reached for his clothing like bony fingers, and their leaves were splotched with some kind of blight. The grass was no longer as soft as a cloud, now it was brown with decay, and its razor edges nearly sliced through his skin. This was a poisoned land, and the more pronounced the blight, the closer he knew he was.
Finally, the forest ended. Before Aaron stood a wrought iron fence, the metal blackened and scorched, each rod jutting up like the spear of a warrior of chaos. And beyond that barrier of twisted black iron lay a still and silent forest of gravestones, ringing a lonely hill that was topped with a grey and solemn mausoleum. A gate stood open in front of him, flanked by a pair of snarling stone gargoyles that looked ready to pounce at a moment's notice. Taking a deep breath, Aaron armored himself with the happy memories that had guided him here, knowing that they would protect him better than any steel. Without any more preparation, he stepped through the gate and into the graveyard guarded by the wicked gargoyles.
Peering around, he looked for any sign of danger. The gargoyles didn't spring to life to attack, no zombies were rising from their graves, and none of the creatures lurking in the shadows dared to show themselves.
"I expected better from you!" he shouted into the empty graveyard. Only silenced answered him. "Show yourself!"
But not all was as quiet as it appeared. Somewhere in the distance came the soft sound of metal plunging into dry dirt. Aaron began to work his way towards the sound, passing by the dusty and moss covered gravestones of unknown habitation. He noticed something as the sound grew louder and louder; not all of the graves were full. Some stood seemingly ready to receive a casket, others looked like they had been freshly exhumed, their caskets torn from the ground and ripped apart. Finally, he came to the end of the row, to one of the oldest gravestones in the cemetery. Already a hole had been dug, but whoever had dug it wasn't quite finished.
The head of a shovel poked out of the hole, flipping a load of dirt onto a pile before diving back in. Aaron's heart raced, and he knelt down to the ground as quietly as he could and kept his eyes on the grave and the gravedigger. His fingers closed around the handle of another shovel. Standing back up, he took one final breath, and peered over the lip of the hole.
The gravedigger stopped. "Oh, about damn time you showed up. Here, grab a corner and help me lift this son of a gun."
Aaron's blood ran cold, and the shovel fell from his limp fingers. Inside of the exhumed grave, with a shovel in his hands and dirt smeared across his face, was the mirror image of himself. Everything was the same: the same brown hair, the same scar under his left ear, the same faded shirt. The only difference was his eyes. They were the same border between brown and hazel, yet when he looked in them, he could himself drowning in an ocean of oily darkness.
"Or . . . not," his doppleganger said, grabbing a corner of the freshly dug up casket and lifting it to the edge of the hole. Heaving and grunting, he managed to slide the rest of the coffin out before scrambling out himself. Taking a moment to wipe his brow, the gravedigger sat down on the lid of the casket.
Aaron, pale as a ghost and trembling like a leaf in the breeze, could only utter, "W-w-who are you?"
The gravedigger grinned. "So he does speak after all. For a moment I thought you were just another one of them." He jerked his thumb over his shoulder towards an empty coffin. "You kinda caught me at a bad time here, I haven't had much time to renovate this heap. If you woulda given a little warning, I coulda spiffed up the place a bit."
Aaron regained a little bit of his color, and he asked more boldly, "Who are you?"
"Of course, how does one tidy up a cemetery? I do like the whole motif of death and gloom, and it's just so hard to find good renovators in this place. I mean, I could hang some new drapes on the mausoleum, but what would that accomplish?" the gravedigger said to himself, completely ignoring Aaron.
"Who are you!" Aaron screamed at the gravedigger, grabbing him by the collar of his shirt and lifting him bodily.
The gravedigger laughed in his face. "So weak, so pitiful. So violent, so easy," he taunted.
Aaron released his doppelganger and took a step back. Those words had come to him before, during a moment of agonizing pain and sorrow. And the monster that had spoken those words stood right in front of him. "You're him. You're . . . Lucifer."
The Demon King rolled his eyes. "Well who'd you expect, the Easter Bunny? Wait-wait-wait, I got a better way to say it!" His eyes grew wild, and Lucifer grinned like a madman. "I'm Bad Aaron, and you're Good Aaron. You're Goody Little Two-Shoes!" he said mockingly. "Little Goody Two Shoes! Little Goody Two Shoes! Little Goody Two Shoes!" he sang, adding a little dance to his already farcical routine. "Get it, Little Goody Two Shoes? Army of Darkness? Come on, you watched that movie like twelve times!" He roared in maddened laughter once more.
Aaron snarled at the monster. "I'd love to finish the scene, especially the part where I put shotgun to your chin and blow your goddamned head off!" he angrily growled.
A pitiful frown sank onto the mocking demon's face. "Awww, are you still mad about that whole 'unfathomable torments on both mind and soul' thing? Because I'm totally over it."
"I'll kill you for everything you've done to me!"
Lucifer's smile only grew wider. "So, you think you can hurt me? You think you got what it takes to bring the giant down?" He spread his arms out wide. "Come on champ, hit me with your best shot. Throw me a haymaker to the gut, conjure up that little shotgun you were just talking about and jam it right here in my pretty face. See what happens when you pull the trigger."
And Aaron did just that. He summoned a small magical flow, and though the flows were much wilder here in his own mind and using any kind of magic was dangerous, he brought up the mental image of a shotgun, a sawed-off double barrel, and pointed it right at his inner demon's nose. With rage pushing his actions, he pulled the trigger.
Lucifer took two barrels of buckshot to the face, and he was knocked back several feet. He immediately covered his ruined face with his hands, wailing and screaming with what was left of his mouth. For a moment, Aaron truly believed that he had conquered one of the greatest evils to ever walk the Earth. But Lucifer's screams of pain soon turned to laughter. Aaron's heart sank, and Lucifer sat up, his face completely unscathed.
"Did you really think it would be that easy?" the dark one asked casually. "Of course you did, you're one of those types that thinks that friendship and rainbows can stop something that has all the powers of shadow at his command."
"They did!" Aaron shouted angrily, throwing his useless weapon away. "The Elements of Harmony defeated you and all your friends! I felt you get burned out of existence, I heard your last scream, I heard you scream her name and beg for her forgiveness!"
Lucifer climbed back to his feet. "Poor, dear sweet Aaron, you don't yet realize just what you're dealing with, do you? I know what you've been thinking: how could that devilishly handsome fellow have possibly survived getting hit by a rainbow made of friendship? Look around you, what do you see?"
Aaron didn't bother to look. "A bunch of graves. Maybe an empty plot to bury you in."
Lucifer chuckled. "This is the place where you bury your emotions. A hundred graves containing a hundred memories and emotions that you pretend don't exist." The gravedigger waved his hand, and the moss on the nearest gravestones crumbled away. Carved onto the headstone that Lucifer had recently exhumed was a single word: Rage. And on the headstone next to it in the row, Lust. And beside that, Doubt.
"I didn't even have to dig very much to get that old boy out of the hole. The same was true for so many others. It took me months to gather enough strength to scrape through the dirt of your deep subconscious and weakly drink on your buried frustrations and angers. But I've grown strong on the fat of your buried emotions, Aaron. The Elements were just a setback, once I'm done digging up all of these graves, I'll be strong enough to reclaim what's rightfully mine."
"And you aren't strong enough as it is? What's holding the mighty and powerful Lucifer back?" Aaron taunted.
The table had turned, and Lucifer snarled back. Grabbing the front of his shirt, he tore it away with flourish. Underneath was a thick padlock resting on his sternum, with a pair of prismatic chains looping around his torso and binding him. Their colors constantly shifted, and Aaron could tell that they caused Lucifer no small amount of pain. "The chains of binding, cast by the Elements as they destroyed my power. They did it to Discord, but as time proved, it was only an inconvenience. Once I harness the power of all the chaotic thoughts and memories here in this little head of yours, I'll have everything I need."
"Everything you need to do what?" Aaron demanded.
Once again, Lucifer smiled with that mocking and taunting smirk. "Wouldn't you like to know. And you know what? Maybe I will tell you." Lucifer's sudden burst of movement was a blur, and within a split second he held Aaron by the shirt and stared deep into his eyes. "Take a look," he hissed. Aaron struggled. "I said LOOK!"
Aaron tried to look away, but he found that he could not. His eyes were a reflection of his own, but he felt drawn into them, and he saw his own reflected self struggling like a bug drowning in ink. He stared into the depths of his ancient enemy's soul, and the abyss stared back. He tried to break wrench Lucifer's hands away, but the blackened soul had the strength of ten men flowing through his veins. Aaron felt his own strength fade away, and the will of the Darkener seep into his body.
Lucifer released him, and Aaron stood petrified by the will of his dark mirror image. "Look at you now. Helpless, completely vulnerable to my whim. You think you're so strong. You think that you have the strength of your precious Mother on your side! And why shouldn't you? You think that your god whispers truth into your ear, she tells you that perfection is unattainable. She tells you that peace and hope and harmony are the true path. But she is wrong!" Lucifer screamed in Aaron's face. His face grew wilder, and the touch of madness crept into his eyes. "I . . . I have seen perfection, and I was born from perfection! Before your god was born, before the stars, before the universe itself, there was the Abyss. An endless plane of beautiful shadow, an eternal existence where time and the laws of matter and energy did not exist! Nothing could come together, nothing could create light. It was a universe of perfect chaos, and at the moment that your precious cosmos erupted from its singularity, perfection . . . was lost. As the universe expanded, the Abyss was set to flame, perfection was tainted by . . . order." He said the word with a shudder, as if the very concept of harmony sent chills down his spine. "First came the waves of energy. Energy turned into particles, particles turned into atoms, atoms into molecules, all producing light and heat and pain into the Abyss. By the time the first of the Star Fathers began to coalesce, the Abyss had lost too much ground to simply ignore. Before there were no boundaries, no limitations, no concept of these things! Matter and energy came as finite things, though infinite they seemed! Order marched on chaos, harmony defeated discord, and the Abyss was shattered. The Abyss, with its last dying gasps, sent shards of itself into the hated cosmos, for it knew that the embers of chaos still smoldered, and that it would only take a little breath to rekindle them."
Lucifer spun on his heels, shouting into the empty graveyard, "And we were right! The perfect chaos of the Abyss may have left us, but this flawed existence, this universe presented so many opportunities for the chaotic powers to survive! The shards of chaos waited for their opportunities, and across infinite worlds and infinite planes and infinite realities, we found our opportunities to push back! I was one such shard of chaos, floating helplessly in the ether, dreaming of the perfection that had been tainted . . . until I found it."
Aaron fought against the immobility, working both body and mind to release himself from the madman's power. But Lucifer, so engrossed in recounting his own existence, held strong. "I found a world in constant struggle, a place where the imposed balance of the gods could so easily be tipped. I saw a race of creatures, raised over millions of years to be the righteous soldiers of harmony, and I knew I had found my opportunity to strike back at harmony. I waited, and I watched. I extended my touch whenever I could, and I watched empires fall and civilization collapse because of it. I whispered into the minds of kings and priests, and I planted thoughts of anger and hatred into their hearts. And when the time came, when you and I joined in both flesh and in spirit, I inherited their anger and their fury. But I did not destroy your societies, Aaron. I made them STRONGER! Gaia made them weak, and I made them strong once again!"
"You're a liar!" Aaron managed to say through his shadow bindings. "Human beings aren't your pawns! We will never belong to you!"
Lucifer stopped his soliloquy, and turned to face Aaron. "Is that so? Tell me, who gave knowledge to Adam and Eve? Was it their loving and beneficent God? No. It was the serpent who opened their minds and gave them knowledge." Lucifer reached into the pocket of his pants, and withdrew a shiny red apple with a single bite taken out of the fruit's flesh. "Knowledge of good and evil, knowledge and power. Tell me, Aaron, who told you how to build Project Lucifer? Was it your beloved Mother? Who told you how to bring me into this world?"
Aaron felt a memory surge into his head. It was like the memory intrusions that plagued him in the waking world, but the tinge of black at the edges of his vision told him clearly that this was one of Lucifer's memories. It was a vision of himself, two thousand years earlier, bent over a twisted mass of metal and wires that would one day become mankind's deadliest weapon; a weapon that had nearly caused the extinction of all humanity. He worked without rest, and when his hands faltered, the ashen hand of Lucifer himself guided his hand and mind in completing the greatest of weapons.
His heart sank, and the juice of the apple dribbled down his chin.
"That's right. The gods would have you live in ignorance, but it was the serpent who gave you knowledge."
"You used me," Aaron said lowly. "All along, you've been using me."
"Yes," Lucifer said in a much more comforting voice. "I have used you. But I can cut the strings, and set you free. All you have to do is return the favor." A claw-like finger tapped the prismatic lock on his chest. "All you have to do is give me the one thing that every person has denied me."
For the first time, Aaron looked at the details of the lock and the shackles. The Elements of Harmony had done their work well, and each link was forged from an aspect of harmony, linking strongly with the other links to the chains forged from friendship. The lock was sturdy, sturdier than any lock Aaron had ever seen before. But it was the keyhole that made him pause.
"Love," Aaron whispered in realization as he spied the heart-shaped keyhole. "Love will set you free."
Lucifer nodded. "A day will come when the choice lies before you: the one you love, or the world. And on that day, you will break these chains, and shadow will rise from deep within you and blanket the land. You will set me free, and it will be an act of love."
"No!" Aaron growled.
Lucifer chuckled under his breath. "You know, we came so close there for a little bit. You almost loved that girl, but she was not as into you as you were into her. But she sufficed."
Aaron's jaw fell to his chest. "You. . . you tricked me into falling for Anita?!"
"Yeah. But she wasn't the one though," Lucifer replied nonchalantly. "Besides, it wasn't so hard to 'trick' you, you just need to know how to work with chaos. Let me explain. Chaos, as you so fondly know it, is the act of simplification stemming from the breakdown of complexity. Entropy is what you call it when it happens in nature. Otherwise, you call it destruction. Allow me to demonstrate the active effect of chaos." Lucifer clamped a hand on Aaron's shoulder, and the two shifted away from the graveyard and out into the forest of dreams. Aaron fell to his knees under the boughs of a familiar elm tree. "See this?" Lucifer waved a hand towards the loving elm. "Out there in the real world, this would be a collection of particles that make up atoms, atoms to molecules blah-blah-blah. Millions of cells all working together for the common good of the whole. Kinda makes you all warm and fuzzy inside when you think about it. But watch as I apply just the slightest touch of chaos."
Lucifer held out a single finger, and a tiny flame leaped out from his hand and onto the trunk of the tree. The spark quickly grew in strength as it fed on the bark of the elm.
"You know why I like fire? Because fire is simple, and it makes everything around it simple. A well placed fire can take such a wonder of harmony like a tree and reduce it to a pile of carbon." Lucifer stepped back and watched with malignant joy in his eyes as the fire climbed the trunk of the tree like a snake and began to slither amongst the branches.
But Aaron screamed, and in his head he could hear the screams of the elm as the flame of chaos burned it away. The loving memory began to fade as the fires spread. The branches of the tree shook in fear, and the leaves curled in on themselves, dying in the heat of Lucifer's spite. He wanted to leap to its aid, to smother the flames and save what he could, but Lucifer held him there and forced him to watch as one of his most beloved memories was reduced to ash.
He wept as the last dying flames flickered out.
There was nothing left of that memory. He remembered only that he once remembered it. He searched his mind desperately for any sign as to what this tree had been, but to no avail. It had been burned away, scoured completely from his memory. His tears fell to the ashy soil, and he heard a crackle of static from the charred stump where the elm used to stand. The flickering image of an oddly shaped tree took its place. It was not real like the others, rather, it seemed like it was acting as a stand in. Aaron reached into the memory that this newcomer presented, only to find the memories of some other man who had died thousands of years ago.
"It was you," Aaron murmured through his tears. "You've been burning away my memories. You've been erasing me . . ."
"Oh stop it, you," Lucifer said effeminately. "I only did a little bit of it. You were the one who kept trying to fill in the blanks." Lucifer again clamped his hand on Aaron's shoulder, and the pair shifted back to the graveyard. They appeared in front of the mausoleum at the top of the hill, overlooking all the graves where Aaron had buried his emotions. With a dismissive wave of his hand, Aaron found himself in control of his own body again. He fell down to his knees, where he stayed.
"Why are you doing this to me?" he said in a voice choked with sorrow.
Lucifer knelt down. "I'm cleaning your slate. Once I get rid of all those memories of love and harmony, I can begin to reshape you. Mother can teach you only what she is allowed and limited to teach you in a mortal body. She can teach you to be a great man. But I can teach you to be a god. I can teach you harness your anger, to direct your hatred and channel your fear. Through me, you can touch the Abyss and harness the powers of the time before creation. You will be chaos incarnate, a god made flesh. All will bow before us, and together, we can recreate perfection." Lucifer extended a hand, as if to help Aaron up. The young man glanced at the offered hand, and then to the monster's face. He had shed any semblance of good or fairness, now the ashen skin, the jagged teeth, and the eyes of abyssal fire stared back. "Join me. Join us."
"Join us . . ." A specter stepped out of the shadows, a tall alicorn mare with night-black fur and a flowing mane of the midnight sky.
"Join us . . ." Another creature stepped forward from the mists, a monster cobbled together from the parts of a dozen creatures. His yellow eyes carried the mark of insanity, and his crazed smile sent shivers down Aaron's spine.
"Together . . . " moaned the voices of a hundred souls rising from the graves that surrounded him. The ghosts of his anger, of his rage, sadness, hatred, violence, fear, doubt, shame, envy, greed, and despair, all the emotions he had taught himself to hide away flowed up the hill.
A hundred bony hands grasped at him, trying to pull him into the graves where Aaron had placed them. A million faces, all the wrongs of his life, stood around him, whispering to take the hand of the dark one. Aaron was drowning, and the hand of Lucifer was the only thing that could save him. There was no light anymore, no beacon to strive towards. There was only the call of the Abyss.
And as a hundred hands closed around his flesh, the tiniest voice reached through the moans of evil.
Faith, it whispered, have faith in yourself.
"A great man once said . . ." Aaron started. The ghosts of his emotions hesitated. "A great man once said, "It is better to conquer yourself than to win a thousand battles. Then the victory is yours. It cannot be taken from you, not by angels or by demons, heaven or hell." "
The fully-fledged demon king flinched. "What?"
The phantoms backed away, and Aaron stood on shaky legs, staring the monster of his nightmares in the eye. "You've always been my greatest mistake. I always thought that I could just hide my true feelings away. But now I've realized that control is more important than pretending they don't exist."
Behind Lucifer, the doors to the mausoleum shuddered, and slowly the thick stone doors swung open.
"What are you doing?!" Lucifer snarled.
"Putting you where you belong," Aaron said coldly.
Lucifer's mouth curled up in the slightest smile. "You know, you can't hurt me, but I can punish you with horrors worse than any hell." The abyss of black flame in Lucifer's eyes swelled with anger, and with a roar he tried to gouge Aaron's eyes with his claws. But before he could move, a chain shot out of the darkness of the mausoleum and wrapped around the demon's wrist. Snarling at the inconvenience, Lucifer tried again with his free hand, only to have another chain wrap around his bicep. Pulling taut, the chains began to drag him back into the depths of the crypt.
The demon king struggled against the tug of the chains against his arms. "Think about what you're doing! Nations would fall like blades of grass!" Another chain shot out of the darkness, wrapping itself around Lucifer's left ankle. Despite the mighty pull, he stayed standing. "I will burn out every memory that you love, and I will make you watch as I rape the innocence of all those you cherish!" Another chain shot out from the shadows and hooked around his right ankle. Lucifer fell to the ground, relenting to the pull of his shackles. He reached out, grasping at the door with his claws. "Please!" he pleaded. "I-I can restore your memories! I can teach how to stop death itself! Please! I . . . I-I know how your pony can win!"
The pull of the chains suddenly ceased. Lucifer breathed a slight sigh of relief, and he dragged himself to Aaron's feet. "Yes, that's right! Just one little sentence, and everything that stands against her will crumble! I'll tell you it all, just don't lock me away in there!"
"Go on," Aaron replied coldly.
Lucifer grinned. "It's all so simple, stupidly simple! Yes, I know what Mother Earth has been holding back from Liza."
"Lyra!" he angrily corrected.
"Whatever. But she's been looking in the wrong place! Yes, she's been looking in the past, when she should be looking at the present! Now get these chains off me!" Lucifer writhed in his bindings, futilely trying to tear away the chains. All of the calmness and superiority in his voice was gone, and it was replaced with fear and panic. And Aaron could almost say that Lucifer was terrified of the state he was in, bound and helpless, completely vulnerable to anyone with more power than him.
And that was it. He hated the chains and everything they represented. Strength through unity, a bond forged from chaos and quenched by harmony. He was terrified by the way they limited him, he who had been born from a place where there were no limits. Lucifer was afraid of the chains.
Aaron looked down pitifully at the creature pathetically pawing at his feet. Only moments ago it had been promising him ultimate power over magic and the universe, and now it was begging to not be put in the dark. "Sorry," he said without any shred of mercy. "But not good enough."
One final length of spiked chain shot out of the darkness, wrapping around Lucifer's throat like a steel python and violently pulling him back into the crypt. But before the doors could close, Lucifer's blackened eyes peered out from the shadows. "You will set me free! And it will be an act of love! You will choose love over the world, Aaron Patterson!"
The doors of the crypt slammed shut, and the moss fell away from the placard above the door. A placard that named this tomb as the resting place of Regret.
************************************
It was a long walk back.
He still hadn't mastered the techniques of moving around in his own mind, unlike Lucifer, who seemed to have mastered it to a disturbing degree. But it gave him time to think about what had transpired, what had been said, and what it all meant for his future.
How long had his own inner demon been tramping around in his soul? How many decisions of the past year had been his, and not some small part of Lucifer's diabolical plan? Had he been speaking the truth when he said that he was older than the universe itself? How many years of his own life had been wiped away without him noticing?
How had he survived?
After what seemed like years of walking through the forest, he came to the place where he believed he had come in. But he couldn't leave yet, he needed some time alone. Imagining a large rock in the middle of the clearing, he sat down and took his head into his hands.
"What do I do?" he whispered to himself. Lucifer was a parasite attached to him in his most vulnerable place, right down in the depths of his heart, leeching off the very emotions that made him a man. There was no fighting him, no gaining ground; Lucifer would grow stronger, while he could only grow weaker.
Aaron slapped himself, again and again, wanting to wake up in his mildewed apartment and go back to work at the local bank. He would trade away everything he owned, everything he knew just to be a post grad with crippling student loans. He wished he was back in the twenty-first century. Back when he was a loser with a cheating girlfriend, back when there were no talking animals, when there was no magic, no apocalyptic war, no Equestria. Back when he didn't believe in the devil.
And thinking back to those dull and dreary days so long ago, a thought occurred to him: is there a way out? If . . . if he somehow died, what would happen to Lucifer? Would their spirits go separate ways, perhaps his own going on to the next life and Lucifer returning to his beloved Abyss? It hardly seemed plausible. In nature, if a parasite was as deeply attached to a host as Lucifer was ingratiated to him, they usually stuck together until the very end. If so, would he carry that taint into whatever afterlife he was brought into? Would he corrupt the souls of Earth by dragging a sentient and chaotic disease into their midst? But a different thought chilled him even more: his gods might abandon him, and sentence his soul to the same damnation as Lucifer. It made sense, too much sense.
It was only after several minutes that he realized he had a gun in his hand. His thoughts had placed it there, and his sense of morality was telling him that it was the right thing to do. A virus like Lucifer, so apt to become a plague at any moment, had to be quarantined. The cold barrel of the gun found his chin, and Aaron determined that he would be the cure to his own cancer. The world would be a better place without Aaron Patterson in it.
His finger tightened around the trigger. But before he could blow away his mental essence and leave his body as a soulless shell, a hand closed around the barrel of the gun and gently guided it away. Aaron slowly turned his head and beheld the one person who could have helped the most throughout this whole ordeal. She was dressed more casually than he had ever seen her before. No gown of arcane mists cascaded down her shoulders, right now a simple blouse and jeans was the pick of her wardrobe. Her raven black hair, normally home to a million stars, was tied back in a neat ponytail. Her skin was tanned to a healthy sheen, and a few sunspots danced across her cheeks. She was even shorter than usual, coming up just a few inches shy of his own height. But as always, her polished gold irises were a dead giveaway.
"Trust me," she said quietly, "lead doesn't taste as good as you think it does."
He didn't know whether to hug her or break her jaw, and he knew that she knew that. "Why?" was all he managed to choke out.
"I have a dozen reasons. Yet I could make a thousand excuses, and both you and I know that not a single one of them would be satisfactory."
"Where were you when I needed you?" He stood from the rock, and for the first time he had to look down to see his god eye-to-eye. "Did you know?"
"There are some signs that not even those with perfect sight-"
"Stop it!" he roared in anger. "No more bullshit! No cryptic riddles! No more treating me like I'm a goddamned child!" He grabbed his god by the collar of her blouse. "Did you know!? Did you know he was alive?! Did you know that Satan was in my goddamned head?!"
There wasn't a shred of fear or anger in her look, just her seemingly infinite patience. But she slowly shook her head. "No. I didn't know. None of us knew anything was wrong until you vanished."
"Vanished?" Aaron asked. "What the hell do you mean 'vanished'?"
"Poof! Gone! Disappeared! Dropped completely off the map. One moment I felt you at the rally, the next you can't hear a word I'm saying to you, and then you disappeared entirely. It was as if you stepped outside for a smoke break and didn't tell anyone. I lost you, and . . . I don't lose people easily. He pulled the wool over my eyes and blocked your mind from mine. I couldn't see you, I couldn't hear you, I only knew that you had to be there."
Aaron was utterly distraught. "How?! How is that possible? You're supposed to know everything! You are everything!"
"And he is nothing. I know what he told you, I know what he is. Lucifer is literally a patch of sentient chaos."
Aaron reeled at that statement. He believed that Lucifer had fed as many lies as he possibly could into their little conversation. "He was. . . he was telling me the truth? Why? He's the bad guy, he's a lord of chaos, why would he possibly tell me the truth!"
Mother sighed gently. "Because he knew it would hurt you more. Lies sting, but the truth can kill. He wanted to make you feel alone, he wanted to erase all the good parts of your memory so that you would feel helpless and hopeless. Lucifer wanted to ostracize you from both the people you love and the people who love you, so that in a moment of blind desperation, you would turn to him."
The blood drained from his face as Aaron realized how close he had come to taking Lucifer's hand in his moment of desperation. How long had his demon been working away at him, chiseling away at his defenses and whispering dark instructions into his thoughts?
"Where were you?" Aaron asked much more gently. "Why couldn't you help me?"
She stood gracefully, laying her hand gently on his shoulder. "Child, you must remember, your soul is only one of trillions that I must watch over. And when Lucifer threatened you, he threatened all of my children. I could not focus my efforts solely on you because I had to stop the fallout of his survival from affecting everyone. Do you know what a wraith is?" Aaron shook his head. Mother Earth turned to an open place in the grass and waved her hand. A globe of oily darkness coalesced a few feet over the ground, and spread into a vaguely humanoid shape. It was a hole in the fabric of his mind, a vacuous void that sucked in all light. The ghastly creature let out a moan that could have sent shivers down the spine of the most bloodthirsty demon as it reached out with its skeletal hands. Aaron gazed into the abyss that this nightmarish entity embodied, and he saw his own fears and doubts reflected back, much like the darkfire voids that swirled in the eyes of Lucifer.
Mother Earth banished the apparition of the wraith with another wave of her hand.
"The moment you vanished, I screamed for you, but you could not hear me. And within a second, thousands of those shadow demons began to converge at the borders of my father's influence. We called every spirit soldier and every guardian to battle, and we managed to stave off the wraiths."
"What does this have to do with me? What does this have to do with Lucifer?"
Her polished golden eyes stared right into his own. "He called them. Lucifer sent out a call across the cosmos and summoned every wraith within eighty lightyears of Earth. The evil here in your mind sent out a call to all demons, and we were fortunate enough to intercept the worst of it, but the wraiths heard it well enough."
"He was calling his soldiers," Aaron murmured. "He wanted his armies ready for conquest." Feeling his knees grow weak, he sat down on the rock and took his head into his hands. "You should have let me do it." The gun mysteriously appeared in his hand again. He knew that she was protecting his feelings, that she was withholding information. Her warriors had gone to battle with the wraiths; how many of them never returned? Each and every spirit in the realm of the gods was a person, a unique soul that had its own hopes and feelings, and potentially millions of them had sacrificed themselves because he had been too weak to fight his own battle. The guilt of sending so many to oblivion only fed the demon within him.
"No." She lifted his chin to look in his eyes again. "Never say that. If you choose to give up on yourself, then you're letting him win. If you choose to put that gun to your head in here or out there in the real world, then you let down every man, every woman, and every child of mankind yet to be born. This has always been about more than just you, Lucifer wants you to be weak. And you're making it too easy for that bastard to hit you where it hurts! Harmony is more than just peace and love, it's knowing when to stand up and give chaos a hard look and a punch in the face. Harmony is knowing when to fight for peace and love, and not just crawling into the smallest hole you can find whenever the forces of chaos kick your ass and threaten everyone you love. Sometimes harmony means looking evil in the eye and telling it that it can go fuck itself and the horse it rode in on too!"
The gun vanished in a puff of smoke, but Aaron still was not convinced. "Harmony can't stop him. I saw what the Elements did, and it wasn't enough. He's got the chains of harmony holding him back, but he told me that my love would one day set him free."
Mother Earth grinned. "Kid, you got a lot left to learn. The Elements of Harmony don't make mistakes, especially when they're at their full strength. Sure, they could have blasted him to shadowy smithereens, but they chose not to. The Elements of Harmony spared Lucifer. And why in the flaming pit of Tartarus would they do that? I don't know! The Elements are some of the oldest orderly magic in all of existence, and if they have a plan for Lucifer, then they must have a damn good plan for his sorry hide. It may take decades for their plan to come to fruition, but it will. And when it does, everything will become clear."
He didn't know what to say. He had questioned his own faith so much that he had doubted the strength of the Elements of Harmony. Aaron almost felt the need to beg for forgiveness. "I'm . . . I'm sorry."
"Don't be. Now get out there and be the man that the world needs you to be."
It was a simple thing to undo an inversion, all one had to do was go back to the point of entry and wake up. He was only a few feet from where he had come in, but before he could go back, he looked out into the forest of his memories. The trees all seemed solemn, as if they were holding a vigil for a lost companion. Poking through the even beauty was a charred and ashen stump, once home to a beloved memory, one that he could never hope to remember. And how many more blackened stumps were hidden out there in the deep places of his mind? He sighed before he turned back.
"Hey," his god called. Aaron looked back to her, and she walked over to him, embracing him in a firm hug. "It was a cold spring evening," she whispered in his ear. "Your mother called you out onto the porch. She held you close, and together you listened to the first frogs chirp away the winter's chill. There were no worries, no cares, just you and her listening to the renewal of life." She let go of him and glanced over towards the charred stump. A little pile of ash in the center of the stump stirred, and the littlest, frailest sapling pushed through the devastation. It would never again hold the amount of sentiment and love that it once had, but it was there again, foggy and on the farthest edges of his mind. But he could remember it.
His matron smiled, and she gave him a gentle push back onto the spot where he had entered his own subconsciousness. "Remember, it's not always about the memories you've made, but the ones you have yet to make. Don't be afraid to open your heart, for though it is the key to his prison, it is his greatest fear."
Light began to fill his vision, and he felt his mental image being tugged back out and into the waking world.
*****************************
A pair of amber eyes greeted him as his own fluttered open. He could feel the warmth of Lyra's breath as she hovered over him like a mother hen watching over her brood. Her look of concern visibly lessened, but she was still far from letting her guard down.
"How long was I out?" he croaked. His throat was as dry as sandpaper, and his entire body felt cramped and sore, like he had been lying there for days and days. He expected to feel a bushy beard on his chin, and for a moment he believed he knew how Rip Van Winkle felt when he awoke from his two decade snooze in the mountains.
Lyra cocked an eyebrow. "About two minutes. Why do you ask?"
Aaron sorely leaned up, rubbing his temples gently with the heels of his palm. "It felt like years. Time was . . . different. I stood in one place for weeks on end, just looking at one memory. And then in the graveyard, everything happened so fast."
The unicorn's horn began to sparkle with her yellow-tinged magic, and a glass of water levitated towards the man in the arcane circle. He took it and drank it greedily. "So," Lyra asked cautiously. "What did you see in . . . there?"
Aaron set the empty glass down, and his eyes grew distant. "I saw what I needed to see. And I saw things that I wished I could forget." He had a haunted look in his eyes, one that would stay with him for years to come. Lyra felt pity for the man who would have to struggle for sleep every night, knowing he would dream of what he had seen in the depths of his own soul.
"It is done?" a ghostly voice said from the doorway. Clarence had taken on a shade of cautious grey, knowing what evils lay only inches away from him. Aaron peered up at the specter, and nodded slowly. "Did you see him?" Aaron bit his lip, and he nodded again.
"He's not gone, but he is locked up tight." The magi stood stiffly from his arcane circle, carefully placing one foot in front of the other as he made his way out of their devastated dining room. Just as was about to round the corner into the hallway, he stopped himself and looked back at Lyra. "He told me something. He told me that there's still hope for you, that you've just been looking in the wrong place. The key to your victory lies in the present, not the past."
And with that, Aaron trudged away to his bedroom, locking the door and summoning a bottle of hard whiskey. He knew that not even the gods could touch someone through the intoxicating veil of hard liquor. As he settled into a long night of drinking, he made a promise to himself. If love was the key to Lucifer's prison, then he would have to live a life where he could never find such a love that he was willing to sacrifice the world to save.
Lucifer was locked up tight, and he swore that night that he would throw away the key.