Perhaps the greatest faculty our minds possess is the ability to cope with pain. When we are damaged, the brain can even go as far as distorting reality to protect itself from further harm. Well, at least our perception of it.
Philosophy and early speculations of psychology show us that there are Four Doors of Pain. Four defense mechanisms where the damaged mind retreats within itself; to seek refuge from the world which has hurt it so.
First is the door of sleep. Sleep offers us an escape from the world and all of its pains. Sleep marks the passing of time, and with time, most things may heal. When a person is wounded, they often fall unconscious. Same goes with emotional damage as well as physical. That’s why people often swoon or faint when hearing traumatic news. This is the first door in which our minds step through to ensure its wellbeing and recovery.
The second door is forgetting. Some wounds are too deep to heal, or too deep to heal quickly. Memories can be too painful to bear, and no amount of time can heal it. So it is submerged in our conscience, hidden behind this door. Victims of disasters often do not remember what took place, despite witnessing the whole chain of events. Thus, illustrating the mind’s ability to simply forget that which has hurt it.
The third door is insanity. There are often times where the mind is dealt such a blow, that the brain’s perception of reality itself will become warped and distorted. Restated, this occurs in instances where the world offers nothing but heartwrenching sorrow, and to escape the pain the mind reinvents reality or simply leaves it behind. This is the second most effective way that a damaged mind can distance itself from this world.
The fourth and last door is death. The final refuge. Nothing can hurt as after we are dead, or so we are told.
Sirius coughed, his tongue pushing out the remaining chunks of half digested food. He groaned as he awoke, his bed stinking of stale vomit.
He wiped the pale yellow reside off with his hoof, spitting out the bitter aftertaste. There was a sticky, burning sensation in his esophagus from the acidity of his vomit.
Sirius groaned in pain, beset by a splintering headache. He shifted from his bed, feeling the call of nature. As he slid out of the soiled sheets, he realized that the pony leaving this bed was entirely different from the pony who had first climbed in and dozed off a few hours ago.
He stumbled to the bathroom, and as he made his way to the toilet, he turned on the faucets in his sauna. He stood over the porcelain toilet and sighed in relief, enjoying the pleasant sensation after one evacuates his bladder.
Sirius knew he should be rattled, damaged, disturbed from what he had encountered in his dream, but he only felt calm. Everything seemed relative, as if nothing seemed to matter as much as it did before. He felt like there was a shroud around him, insulating him from reality.
Sirius found himself laughing hysterically. His predicament was just so amusing. Parents always told their foals that they were just nightmares, that they were just dreams. They can’t hurt you. Sirius simmered down, still chuckling. How wrong were those ponies.
The pegasus began humming to himself. He watched the water fill up the sauna, watching the water bubble and accumulate foam.
The bathroom soon started to smell like the soap they scrubbed the floors of fancy hotels with. It smelled like the beach, but with less of the briny scent of the sea. It was a cool, refreshing scent.
Water soon started to spill over the edges of the sauna, wetting his hooves. He didn’t even notice. There was such a stillness within him. He had never been so…so at peace before. It felt as if he were aloft on some cloud, nothing could hurt him from his high vantage point.
But as time passed, frothy water began to flood the floor, and he became discontent. This wasn’t just a stillness, this was death. He was in a calm void that was punctuated by occasional outbursts of irrational laughter. But there was no real happiness behind those noises issuing from his throat. It was a strange manifestation of some chemical imbalance in his brain, nothing more.
Sirius drove his head into the water. There was that rushing sound as he stayed submerged. He opened his eyes, and felt the wet pressure against his eyeballs. Little bubbles of air rushed up from his nostrils, making blooping sounds as they surfaced. He closed his eyes, resting. Soon, his lungs began to burn. He ignored it. He longed to feel something, to break the calm shroud surrounding him.
Sirius felt dizzy and whipped his head out of the water. He gasped for breath, collapsing on the floor. As he lay there, he saw the mirror on his bathroom counter.
Sirius struggled to his feet and looked himself over. Everything looked the same as it had before, but there was one major difference: his eyes. There had been a light in his blue eyes, but now there was some kind of dark hysteria. It unnerved him.
Sirius suddenly felt surreal as he gazed at his reflection. It was the feeling you get after opening up a yearbook from your freshman year at high school. You’re a senior now getting ready to graduate, and you want to look at how far you’ve come in those four short years. You look over your portrait, and you can tell that you’re a completely different person now. You wonder to yourself, “Would my fourteen year old self be pleased with my eighteen year old self? Do I like the person I’ve become?”
Perhaps most ponies didn’t think so deeply, but some ponies were nostalgia junkies. Sirius realized as he stared in his reflection, that he both loved and hated the pony he had become. Despite the sacrifices he had made, the pain he had endured, he now felt raw power coursing through his veins. Sirius was the apex predator of Equestria, the top of the food chain. He could kill without regret or guilt, he no longer had any restraints. And that was power. He was actually somepony now. But he had lost something in the process, and he could feel the emptiness gnawing at him.
Ember may have left a hole where his heart was, but perhaps he could still fill it. The same sick urges that had driven him to kill mother resurfaced, maybe…maybe he could do it again. He had access to a whole populace of sleeping ponies. A whole city of potential victims he could torment and maybe even kill. Yes, that sounds fun.
Sirius looked at himself in the mirror again. “Do I like who I have become? Would my foal-self be proud to know that this was his future?”
Why am I brooding like this? Let’s go give somepony a terrible nightmare!
Sirius didn’t know who he was anymore. On impulse, he struck the mirror. The glass shattered. Broken shards of glass fell around him, and he saw a lot of crimson on his hooves.
He felt empty, save for the endorphins released by his wounds giving him a small high. It’s not that he didn’t care, but he felt nothing! His calm shroud could not be penetrated.
Sirius felt a tear in his eye. He looked at the mess of broken glass around him.
His eyes caught what appeared to be an indent in the wall behind the glass. It looked like somepony had carved out a shelf in the wall, and then had put the mirror over it.
Sirius put his hooves on the bathroom counter, sliding the pieces of glass onto the floor. He climbed up and looked at the strange items on the hidden shelf. There was a leather bound journal, a golden ring with the name “To the love of my life, Amberleaf” inscribed into the metal, and a few scraps of paper covered with words in crimson ink.
He picked up the ring first, looking it over. It was simple in design, obviously a wedding band made for a mare’s hoof.
He took up the leather bound journal then. The pages were yellowed with age, and the ink fading. This probably had been stowed away here for a very long time. Who left this stuff here?
Sirius shut off the water, avoiding the broken glass on the floor. It was a big mess in here, but that wasn’t his problem. He carried all the objects to his bed, but gagged as the scent of the old vomit assailed him.
Sirius held his breath and retreated into his walk-in closet. He slammed the door shut in the empty white room. Racks for shoes and clothes were mounted on the walls, along with built in drawers and clothes hangers. The pegasus sat down on his haunches beside an armor stand. He opened up the journal, and sneezed from the cloud of dust that was released.
Wiping his snoot with his hoof, he began reading the first journal entry. It was written in a particularly meticulous fashion, becoming of a very neat stallion. Dated from a year before Sirius’ birth, almost seventeen years ago, he began reading.
I weep as I write this. I have no one else to talk to, so I must rely on this journal for emotional release. Now, I must confess. My fellow Night Terrors and I have done terrible, terrible things for Nightmare Moon….
Sirius gasped. The stallion who wrote this had been a Night Terror as well.
I can make up a thousand excuses for my behavior, but I won’t. I must take full responsibility for my actions. I am the monster who has finally seen his own reflection. I see my sins etched into the hard creases of my face, I have beheld the ocean of atrocities I have committed dammed up behind my eyes, and I cannot hold it in any longer. I am….
Sirius couldn’t read the next part. The stallion’s name had been marked out with several slashes of his quill. It continued like this:
… the terrifying leader of the crusade against the Dayborn. I thought I was at the top. I thought I was invincible. I didn’t even feel guilt, or remorse, I was completely beyond reproach. I was lost. I was my Empress’ favorite, and had spent many nights in her bed. It was known that I was her lover, but I had not known that I was the only one.
I realize my beloved is just as lost as I am, and is leading others astray just as I am. Again, I take full responsibility for both my Empress’ actions and my own, for we always acted in collaboration.
Nightmare Moon and I perfected a method of breaking the wills of our Night Terror initiates. It’s how she and I turned all those who worked for her into murderous psychopaths like us. The Empress saw to it that the practice becomes routine protocol for our instructors.
When a pony dreams, his psyche is vulnerable, his subconscious thought processes bare and exposed. An instructor with the more powerful dreamwalking ability can easily dominate the mind of the initiate, and can craft those latent subconscious thoughts to align to Nightmare Moon’s desires. It is said that the subconscious, the id, is the greatest contributor to a pony’s decision making processes. Influencing the id, or even reconstructing its motives, can achieve total control of the initiate’s mind.
Though there are exceptions.
Sirius swallowed. Having just gone through the process this stallion had developed, he could not help but feel a sense of loathing admiration towards him.
The id is the base animal desires that seek immediate gratification, and it is in contrast to the superego. It is that entity of psychic energy that poses a problem for our instructors.
For almost all ponies, the superego is weaker. It is the higher thought processes: honor, kindness, courage, the like. Most of our initiates are degenerate, animalistic creatures so the superego is almost nonexistent. But there are a few who have strong superegos, the “good” ponies with “bright” hearts.
These ponies with strong superegos have the biggest potential for dreamwalking, but would always hesitate when aligning their desires with our Empress’. That hesitation creates the seed for disloyalty, and it must be destroyed to access all that raw potential.
Where there is capacity for good, there is an equally proportionate capacity for evil. It was just a matter of breaking a pony’s superego to access that wickedness. We must reverse engineer psychological entities such as love, kindness, loyalty, through their opposites. Once their virtues become vices, then the superego will succumb to the id.
Sirius shivered. He didn’t quite understand. What had Ember done to him? She had directly attacked his superego. He had let go of his hate entity and had forgiven his mother, then why had she been able to do that?
Had Ember truly converted him into a psychopath? What if She-Sirius was still alive in him somewhere? He continued reading.
I developed this process, and its first victim had been me. I realized that the more troubled a pony was, the more effective this method of conquering his superego was. That is what led to my fiancée’s death. I killed her. She was the love of my life, and I was convinced at the time that hate was stronger than love…My lovely Amberleaf had been the first true casualty of my madness.
I miss her so much. Her removal allowed the floodgates holding back my hate to burst open. I thought it would make me more powerful, and I did terrible things as a result because I believed I was more powerful. But I was wrong. Love is the stronger of the two. It was just that I did not believe it to be so. I sacrificed all my love to gain hate, convinced that it was the only way to attain true power. I was so wrong.
As I lay in Nightmare Moon’s bed last night, having sated her and enjoying the afterglow, I saw something in her. I saw a reflection of myself in her. I was lost and broken, just like her.
I could rut with her for the rest of eternity, and I could, for I had been granted immortality, but it would never truly sate me. Sex is as physical as emotional, and I realized that the acts of lust I performed on her were hollow gestures. I had been trying so hard to fill that hole in my heart where love used to be, but lust is a poor substitute….
I’m just going in circles now. I am so lonely….
- The Stallion Behind the Mirror
Sirius wanted to sit down and digest what he had just learned, but he heard an impatient knock at his door.
Angered at the disturbance, he stormed to his door. Who is the Stallion Behind the Mirror? He thought to himself. Is he still around?
Sirius opened the apartment door and saw Ember and Darkheart standing there. He swallowed his anger, letting his calm shroud act as armor against them.
Ember grinned wolfishly. “Come now, Initiate Sirius. Your first lesson in Night Terror training awaits in the city.”