Fluttershy leaned on the wall of the cave, staring blankly at the hard ground with a shard of bedrock in her hoof. She felt numb, the nightmares starting to infect her mind like poison. She just sat, her body still and hey eyes glazed over, for what seemed like hours. She was bruised, burned, and cut, and her sanity was slowly dissolving into little more than pure primal terror.
She felt Abdukar’s fur glide across hers and locked her eyes with his. “I know what you are going through, Fluttershy. The nightmares.
Burns, bruises, and cuts.” He gestured to the dried blood running down her foreleg and the scabbing scars. “You are changing, Fluttershy. It has gotten to you. You will never be the same if you stay here long enough. We need to move; I cannot say where, but something else is here, and it is not a demon. We must move if we are to find it.”
The two rose from the hard ground, Fluttershy registering shockingly little emotion while they walked toward the end of the tunnel, wincing with every step she took. When she made it to the edge of the cliff, looking at the marks from the melted rock and looking down into the thick, black smoke below, she only gave a slight grimace.
She realized that Abdukar’s words were jarringly true. She knew if she did not escape soon, she’d be finished. She had no idea what would happen to her. Would she be tortured, die again, go back to normal, or just go away completely, like the white emptiness that she was in before?
She didn’t want to think about the possibility of dying again. She just wanted to see her friends. Hell was getting to her and she knew it. She didn’t feel afraid of the things that could happen anymore. She just felt numb, not wanting death nor survival. Quite frankly, she didn’t care at all.
Just then she and Abdukar heard a screeching sort of sound. Like bats, but rabid bats. She turned to face behind her to the tunnel, instinctively slamming her body to the floor as a black cloud of bats with burning red eyes shot out, a deafening sound of screeching piercing the air and drops of blood falling into her fur and mane, staining it to discoloration. She glanced upward and saw Abdukar getting swarmed by a small group of bats.
Fluttershy felt helpless. She was pinned down by a sea of rabit hell-bats while her only friend in Hell was being devoured by some of said bats. She took a deep breath as she quickly got up and ran to her helpless friend, trying her best to keep the bats away from him, getting slashed and bitten in the process. After what seemed like hours of swatting and screaming, she had finally gotten the small group of bats to join the sea of other bats swarming out of the cave.
She turned to look a bloodied Abdukar in his feral, adrenaline-pumped eyes. “A-are you okay?!” she frantically wailed, trying to find a way to help her only friend in Hell, scared to lose him.
Abdukar replied with an unhealthy wheeze, his body sinking to the ground. He gazed up at her fearfully, as if he already knew something that she didn’t. After a long period of relative silence punctuated by his wheezes and the soft pit-pat of blood on the ground,
Abdukar finally spoke. “Fluttershy. I will be fine. Just go.”
She was terrified. She couldn’t leave her only friend and protection in Hell. That would be a suicide mission. “No! I’m not going to leave you here to die like this!” Fluttershy scrambled to lift up the giant, bloody feline before her, obviously failing. After several minutes of trying to encourage Abdukar to rise, she finally realized something.
He wasn’t breathing.
“N-no. No no no no NO!” Fluttershy wailed as she pressed her head to the now dead Abdukar’s chest. She felt tears start to run down her face, a far too familiar feeling from her trip from Equestria, to Limbo, and finally to Hell. She sat on her rump and pressed her head on his chest, feeling his rough fur brushing against hers.
She eventually fell asleep there, curled up next to Abdukar’s eerily still body as she silently sobbed, mourning the death of her friend... and blaming herself for it.