//------------------------------//
// Chapter 16: Deliquescence 
// Story: Breakdown 
// by McPoodle 
//------------------------------//


Breakdown



Chapter 16: Deliquescence







Starry, starry night.
Paint your palette blue and gray.
Look out on a summer’s day
With eyes that know the darkness in my soul.

The lights!

The lights of the interrogation room burn into me like miniature fiery suns, piercing through my flesh and stripping it bare to expose my sins for all the world to see.

I cry out in agony, turning and writhing in vain. The empty eyes of the bloated pony corpse of Erishy open under the power of decomposition to take in my suffering.

I somehow scramble to my feet, push past the startled guards and guffawing general, to reach the safety of the hallway.

But there is no safety for one such as I. Not anymore.

Before me is Applejack, her eyes blazing red with fury. With one smooth motion, she pivots on her forehooves and bucks me right in the face, shattering my jaw.

The beating continues, endlessly, and I welcome it, as the first of my ceaseless torments for my crime of snuffing out two innocent lives in a single body.






Now I understand,
What you tried to say to me.
And how you suffered for your sanity,
And how you tried to set them free.



They would not listen, they did not know how.
Perhaps they'll listen now.


I awaken, without even enjoying the bliss of my unconsciousness, in a dumpster outside of P.A.P.A.’s secret facility. The rain, the fatal deluge that will soon overwhelm the entire world under the innocuous name of “Sandy”, is little more than a brisk pelting of water droplets on my face.

I crawl out, somehow, despite my pain, despite the arm that will not move and the foot that feels like a pulped, boneless mass.

The light! Still, it burns! I must get away, away, away.

I take the dirt path into the woods.






For they could not love you
But still your love was true.
And when no hope was left in sight,
On that starry, starry night,



You took your life, as lovers often do.
But I could've told you, Vincent,
This world was never meant for
One as beautiful as you.


I ran until I fell into this ditch, this culvert, this cesspool for human contagion. And the rain falls, and falls, and falls, but it will never remove the filth of my existence. My jaw is not broken, my arm and foot are intact, but I must be imagining those things, because I deserve every one of my injuries. I have a vision of helping the little yellow pony instead of killing her, but again, the truth I deserve is the one I have told you.

I have hurt every life I have ever touched. When presented with a miraculous new order, one that we humans could use like the power of steam, of electromagnetism, of nuclear fission, to transform and uplift our lives, I did what the worst of us have always done under the circumstances: I cursed the light, and dashed it into pieces. We superior preening intellectuals cannot truly believe in anything that does not inflate our egos, so I seized the most delicate piece of the new magic...and popped its head like a grape between my fingers.

I am unworthy of this new world which I have befouled. My life is a lie, a lie founded on the delusion that witnessing my brother’s suicide as a boy is anything less than being directly responsible for his death in the eyes of my Maker. Nothing I have done since then has extirpated myself of that act, every year since his burial a pointless delay of the inevitable.

I am here, Brother! At long last I have stopped my running! Take me to the eternal place of punishment you have built for me after all this time, whether it be Christian Hell, Greek Tartarus, or Erishkigal’s Kingdom, the place of permanent darkness where the only food is dust and the only sound is the wailing of the justly damned.

Let me absorb the endless rain that falls, until I dissolve into a primordial soup of proteins, fats, and nucleic acids.


Starry, starry night.
Portraits hung in empty halls.
Frame-less heads on nameless walls.
With eyes that watch the world and can't forget.



This tale is finished.