//------------------------------//
// The Beast 
// Story: Clarity 
// by FallenShadow000 
//------------------------------//


I left my stepfather several weeks later as the abuse reached its peak. In one night I packed all of my things, took my cat and left the basement empty of all my possessions.

I lived with my high school friend's Mom for a few months and settled on staying with another friend out here in Grand Rapids. My stepfather and his family stalked me here, and so did the Beast.

After my roommate and I settled in, around the end of November another of our group dropped by and introduced me to MLP. The feeling I had watching the show was euphoric: The characters and their personalities, the humorous quips and references to the mature fandom made me regain just a tiny bit of my lost youth. I began to draw again, which I hadn't done in years, but something was still weighing heavily on me... I was still lazy and always fatigued, no matter how much I slept.

About a year after I initially left my stepfather, he had tracked me down several times, and had my sister start calling me to give me guilt trips and harass me. Between the time we moved in and June, around the time I left, they had called me about seven times total, and each was progressively worse than before. It always seemed to be MY fault for leaving under "cloak and dagger", but be honest: If you watched your Mom leave on civil terms and have all of her possessions destroyed, mangled and torched in return, you would likely leave with as little fanfare as possible, yes?

My roommate didn't help either: His laziness, poor attitude and apathy towards anyone but himself were equivalent to dragging a backpack of college textbooks through a field of mud in the rain.

One weekend in June, we decided to take a bus across town and visit with our other friends. We all sat down to watch "V for Vendetta". However this was one of my worse days: I could not stay awake, and fell into an uncomfortable sleep on the thin-skinned, fold out sofa bed. The TV reduced to static noise as I lulled in and out, and then became distant.

The second encounter... almost killed me. I found myself in a bramble thicket in a dead-spanning wood. I had a short sword at my side, and began to run as quickly as I could, knowing that the monster was advancing, but never hearing or seeing him. I dodged downed trees, stumps and rocks, knowing all the while he was after me.

I finally hit a dead end: A massive bramble stretch that no human could get through, lest they wanted to lose a limb. I turned to face the inevitable; time seemed to slow as the Beast  was nowhere to be seen. I almost never realized that he was in front of me as I looked up: The same faceless, shadowed entity I had encountered before. He reached a hand out, and again I was immobilized as he grasped my neck with his icy fingers, crushing my windpipe.

I knew I dropped my sword, but never heard it hit the ground. He lifted me from the ground to his eye level, or at least where it would be on a human being. All I could see was a bottomless abyss in his blank countenance until slowly a gaping, grotesquely torn maw began to form. It seemed as if he was using a nonexistent jaw to tear a hole in his clean slated head.

From this newly-formed mouth I could feel cold and awful despair... and when he spoke, I could hear the souls of the damned crying out in pain as he said:

"A time and a time's worth of evil will spill black upon this world; the Sun and the Hero, never to rise again."

I could hear a distant and vaguely familiar voice calling out... "GET OUT! GET HIM OUT!" Soon after I felt a sensation of drowning, as if water were filling my head and chest from the inside of my body. I finally snapped my eyes open sputtering and coughing. I felt a burning sensation in my nose: According to my friends it took me about half a minute to recover after being hit with a glass of cold water. I could hardly speak as I called weakly for a piece of paper, my hand on my temple. I wrote the words spoken by the demon down and handed them off to my friend Ben. The only relation he could find was a vague similarity in the Book of Revelation...