Seven hundred years, the prime age of my household even as it was lost to fantasy. Seven hundred years, five hundred of them of which I had lived to see pass. I have stained the earth crimson time and time again, and I have witnessed it happen by other hands. The roses in my garden have once been vivid red only from the blood of my adversaries. My very name inspires terror where I have once walked. Yet in all of these five within seven centuries dare I say there were no things to ever grace my sight so ghastly, so dreadful, so offensive as the one transpiring in the face of Remilia Scarlet at this moment.
I had lost. I had lost, not to the equines; but my very own self.
All I saw was Gungnir. Then I saw beloved red. Then anger. Then fear.
I saw night and day. I saw health and ending. I saw bliss and glory. All of it vanished in moments. I think all was only anger at this point in time.
I remember the age of old. Not many youkai who lived to this day can in fact recall the times before the Hakurei shrine maiden’s Spell Card rules, not even the dark times graced by violence and brutality. This was the times when battle had only ended with blood covered lands whose black skies were pierced with constant howls of pain from myriads upon myriads of souls.
And yet, none of that was anything compared to what the equines had done. I had been weakened with electricity that came from the very horns of those ponies some days, while others I had been chained up to a dungeon wall and tortured so during interrogations regarding the murders I had done. At one point, one of them even snapped the bones in my fragile wings with his bare hooves, and I could’ve sworn he was grinning as he had done so.
I was repeatedly bruised, battered, and tortured by those ponies day in and day out. For how long, I didn’t know; time was but a blur for me at that point. It would seem that the god who had thrown me into this world willed my very pain as punishment for my murdering of those two ponies. I could not even begin to fathom why that was so, but something in my mind told me I was better off not wanting to know.
“Is... is something wrong?” Reimu asked, snapping me out of my stupor and sending me hurtling back to what was—I dread to say it—my current reality. I rose my head, though weakly.
“How long... did the ponies... have me?” I asked, my voice akin to a dying rat again.
“I found you after searching for weeks on end,” Reimu answered. “You need to sleep.”
Reimu was right—sleep was needed for me, taking into account the decrepit condition in which I lay. I lower my head, resting it between my front limbs. A yawn escaped my throat, and I soon closed my tired eyes, waiting for sleep to embrace me.
I was embraced on terribly short notice.