The creatures he used to exist among had this saying - “to be tearing one’s hair out”. Him, he had no hair. His corporeal body did not support that. That was an immense shame. At the moment, Bane was very much in this hair-tearing state.
Pondering on sayings of a world he never wished to return to acted as little more than feeble attempts at escapism.
“Nyaahahaaaaurgh!” his twisted purple body jerked in the air, letting out screeches of black, charred frustration. It was so maddening that even remaining in his own home plane, the dreamscape, was impossible - no concentration could be found in his raging mind. Bane was too busy figuratively tearing out his hair.
He had failed, and he had failed so miserably that not even his trickster mind could come up with a good excuse. As a matter of fact, a more telling piece of evidence was that he, the avatar of all nightmares, was concocting excuses for his dismal failure. Excuses that he would use before the comically brightly colored quadrupedal rulers of the plane that was doing so well before he decided that he knew better.
“They will all DIE now!” Bane gurgled to himself , tearing at his prolonged forehead with the weak, branchy arms springing from the tops of his shoulders, “What was I THINKING? Whaaaaaayyyyuuuaaargh!”
Her. It was all her. That stupid, stupid, stupid blue winged mare. His control, his tightly woven strings of puppetry over her uncomplicated mind, all broken through sheer stupidity. She was too dumb to live.
“No!” he choked on the ichor that flowed ever out of his body, “It was NOT that! Stupidity is DIFFERENT.”
No, no. He had spent long enough trying to come up with a way to blame it on her to know that it was simply untrue. Nothing could have been special about her - not even the lack of intelligence that was so clearly evident in these equines. What could a blue pony with a rainbow mane have that could pierce his mental pall? Nothing. It was never her.
It was him.
He could not hold that pall up.
“Yuuaaaeeeeeheeehaaaargh!” he let out another screech, gaping his maw open wider than where his stomach reached, casting peacefully dreadful shadows on the marble past the corner.
There was no getting away from this fact - Bane simply did not do a good enough job. He thought he was cut out for the task, that this bit of variety would be up to his level of mastery in this new world with its new magic, but he was wrong.
The point of the matter was, he had never had to cast truly complicated Nightmares that… were not truly Nightmares in the end. The way this energy worked, its recipients were partly transformed to realms of neverending terrors to remain there for much longer than they were truly away. In reality, their bodies would phase out, partly inaffectible, especially at the very start - and in that state, they could be moved by especially elaborate means. Not easy to do with creatures bigger in power, but definitely possible with lowly equines. That was Bane’s assumption.
He even considered the fact that their psyches were ever so much softer than any others he had encountered before. There was no other way they could taste so well - they were simply too fragile to be harmed. They would never be able to withstand even what he thought small, more than enough for a defensive use. No, they would have required precision. He, the embodiment of fear, would have to create an image where fear was to be pushed to the background. All to keep these intact. All to help preserve the land of infinite food for ages more.
He thought he could do that. No terrors. No sanity-rippling imagery that leaves one shaking for dear life. Just an easy path for their minds to follow his, and be moved along to somewhere safe so that this stupid, idiotic, brainless horde would never catch up.
And he had failed. The God of Nightmares, the Bane Elemental, could not handle a simple quiet dream.
It was either that, or these equines had some special ability, something to help them tear out of his tight webs, something so strong in its strive that not even he could repress it with all his focus - which was far beyond possibility. No, it was a complete failure.
Which made life so much more difficult for the floating purple nightmarish being as he waited till the rulers of this stupid, delicious world would visit their chambers. The one thing he wanted to have an upper hand in would have to be entrance. He would start. Not them. No, he would not give them the opportunity.
And yet, even that assuredness was sent into shambles, now that Bane had clearly heard an admirably frightening female voice yell out something that sounded alarmingly similar to his name from somewhere deep within the castle. He floated, but even without an anchor to the floors and halls of the Towers, the creature had no difficulty telling that the foundation was quite decidedly shaking from that voice alone.
“Sounds far too much like they already know...” he exhaled an echoing breath and spoke to himself, “May as well get comfortable.”
A grin erupted across the dark reaches of his conscious, having already been glued to his corporeal maw. What a wonderful sound. The anger and the rage within… Oh, if only it meant what he thought it did - he could actually start the unpleasant talk with an advantage! An advantage the poor overly emotional Princesses would give him gladly, even if it might possibly be just the slightest bit painful. It was so much more preferable to being humiliated in any more of a way than he had already concieved for this scenario.
Bane dragged a coffee table into the eerie, moonlit hallway, and floated low by it, crossing all four of his arms. They would not find him lacking a pose. That would have been simply disgraceful. This was one thing the half-equine nightmare creator knew, in a sick way, that they could never match.
They had no arms at all.
He trained his grin further.
The damp earth met her snout with an unwelcoming slurping sound and a rush of mild, cold, wet pain. Her body remained less than operating for a few minutes, even when her head had begun to pull itself back into bigger pieces. Or, perhaps, it was longer. Twilight Sparkle could barely tell.
She felt as if she had slept for days.
That alone was bad enough. Her forays into studies that far exceeded twenty four hours taught her that spending over ten hours asleep did bad, bad, bad things to your head and throat. This felt like that, but so much worse that there was no proper description. Unfortunately, that was not all.
Her memories of things past to such prolonged slumber were coming back. They were bad enough to make her stiff body get back up on its legs and gape its eyes around in abstract confusion.
Lost and horrified as she was, the first thing the unicorn did upon having come to complete conclusion was try to turn her head back and see if anyone needed help. Surely there would have been escapees, survivors, tens of her friends that she had become so accustomed to, fleeting the town…
Her attempts to turn her head back and yell out to be noticed ended up in a painful stumble and a prolonged vomit session during which copious amounts of purplish liquid poured out of her throat.
Perhaps to retain some control over the situation, Twilight had decided to visually examine it. That proved to be a monumentally wrong choice, as he findings were that it was floaty, steaming, and at least four times more of it had left her than could physically have fit in. This realization of the denial of basic laws of physics, biology, and anatomy, made her sick with actual vomit.
Having finished with oral excretions within ten minutes’ time, helped out immensely by her proper inner bile, Twilight was, by most means, a wet sock puppet that lacked a hoof to be mounted atop.
“Twilight Sparkle,” a voice the pony had not heard before and already sincerely wished she never would again sounded faintly in her head.
“Twilight Sparkle,” another voice repeated, higher pitched, but having the same broken patterns and disgusting, dead atmosphere about it.
“Twilight,” a voice spoke, the familiarity of which made those same similarities far more horrifying than they could have been expected to.
“Twilight…” another sounded out, and finally forced her to lock her vocal recognition off. It told her of matters beyond undesirability, but what she did was the only thing that her body physically could not do. Run.
As a haunting, titillating, rampaging melody sounded out in a voice and tone of purity that not even her wide vocabulary of Equestrian could describe, Twilight Sparkle did significantly better at running than anyone could have been expected to in her state.
When voices so much nearer, weak, panicked, frightened, and lost, sounded a “Twilight! Stop! Why are you running?” to her, she could not hear them.
It was only when she had once more collapsed under the body strain that Rarity and Applejack had added the unconscious unicorn to the group of incapable ponies they had to lead to safety. Canterlot Towers were so close, but so far away at the same time.
And the sight of the ravaged top of the Golden Oaks Library rising high up into the sky, supported now by meters of corroded metal and rotting wood, and emanating a ghastly green light out of its surviving windows only worked for the worse.
The hulking General sat on the ruins of a particularly sturdy building in the town that had, through his militia’s efforts, ceased to wrong the will of the Dead God. Its pink ornaments and decorations, turning it into a perverted mockery of a confection that the two worlds must have shared, had turned into piles of rubble covering the numerous corpses sprayed over the ground. Mysterious mists passed over the mumbling, trapped corpses. The Undying had little interest in freeing the likely mangled remains from the pink debris, and the nature of the zombifying mist was very much tertiary to him.
He sat atop the ruined store, and felt his thoughts gnaw hungrily on his decadent brain.
“My body… curdles…” His vocal chords vibrated without his intent, and his arm grabbed at the ground, bringing up a serving of pudgy blue flesh, sating the ever decomposing owner’s hunger in an automaton motion.
Such an unusual world. Such an unusual place to be in. Such a new position.
It was rare for the dead to experience major change. Death was the antithesis of change. Death was a perennial symphony of harmonic tones that no living could ever comprehend, death was the final unity that brought all within the Dead God, and him within them. Death had no time for measly change. Death was art. It was contemporary.
Life… Life was strife. Life existed in a perpetual disagreement with death. Odds in this battle seemed to, perhaps by virtue of a malicious random number engine, often favor life. It was its side that got to dictate what happened, and it was its side that was celebrated celestially.
It was life that brought him here, and forced his thoughts into this deep ponder. However unnatural it was, this was a new world, and this new world would require adaptation. A measly concept, the necessity of which only reminded of the incomplete status of the Undying’s task, but… He wondered to himself, as he sat, on how oddly exciting it all was to his lack of a soul.
Death was art, and he was a master of death. He was not an artist from the start, no, but having mastered an art, he drew a close affinity with them.
The plans and ideas that sprung into his mind as soon as it had begun to process all the little things that those sparkly, shiny souls told him, they were fresh. New. Unusual. Ink for the notes and colors for the pictures. And even now that the Dead God had been lost, his guidance no longer an option, this lack of control… it made the General so much more free in what he decided for his own symphony.
“Yes…” he gurgled, thinking the thought again. A symphony all of his own… His own Dirge.
Not to replace the Almighty Dirge, but to sound to its side. A spin-off project. A cross-over into new possibilities. He was free to create.
Now all he needed to do was get this old, rotting mind into new patterns, and this big, lush land would serve a perfect canvas for the imminent destruction. A perfect stage for a song of tombstones and walking dead.
If only he had Twilight Sparkle and the knowledge within her… That being, one of the horned kind, as the poor, unfortunately lacking souls of the former town denizens told him, knew it all. Easier to access than the rulers, which were a problem in its own right, and a part of something greater. Something, the fluttering keys of the colored equines in their dying spasms said, that could potentially evaporate the Undying himself. A subject of curiosity, yes…
He was almost disappointed to find out that he could never hear the music of that which would fail to destroy him. A seemingly random soul he had ripped not more than a few hours ago ended up being much more than that. It was passed down to dormant parts of his brain for analysis, but he knew for sure - it was close to Sparkle. It was unique, unusual, it was… a dash of inspiration. A measly little winged equine, but she was enough to get him into ponders. It was her slow digestion that called him to stop the command over the assault and simply sit down to think.
He had done something unusual with her. Something… unallowed. Indecent? Abnormal? Or simply never thought of before?
The Undying cast a dead glance to the gaping pit in front of what used to be the library he crashed through, familiar green winds emanating from the deep crack. His stale nerves were far from functional, but they almost felt giddiness and anxiety of awaited result. It could just be the start…
It could be so much more if he did, in the end, have Twilight Sparkle.
“Uuuugrh,” he and his stomach grumbled in unison, having circled round to the same thought yet another time.
“Guaaaaahhh,” a weak voice from below sounded out, as if rhythming with the sitting, pondering Undying.
“Grrrmmmm,” he scoffed at the insignificant corpse, and channeled himself back into his thoughts.
“Guuuurgh…” The front half of the grey pegasus mare continued to rub against his leg for approximately three hours until an undead manticore accidentally picked it up with its tail and carried it away.
Princess Luna was sitting distraught next to a communications officer, who shivered in pain and whose ears bled profusely. His eyeballs were almost extended out of their holes, and it was evident that he had suffered significant inner damage. It was much more likely than not that he was suffering from internal hemorrhaging, which made casting any sort of healing incantation a difficult option to choose - less so with how poorly she was handling the side-effects of her dream visits.
Nevertheless, that stallion had, perhaps, just saved Equestria.
He was standing right next to her as she cried out in the most horrific, earth-shattering, terrifyingly royal shriek ever recorded in Equestrian history. It was her that dealt him all those wounds, with just her voice.
If not for the care over her innocent subject whom he had, by accident, harmed, she would have stormed upstairs where Bane awaited, and done her damned best to bash that abomination’s brains out on the floor and then force it to eat them up so that she could rip them out of its stomach and set them on fire.
Seeing how the nightmarish creature was very much ethereal in base and could just have continued to operate without a functional corporeal body, that would have been a horrible mistake, and likely would have lost them not only his loyalty, but her life as well.
In this dire moment, Luna knew that she had no right to put herself in danger.
She tried to calm the officer, more mentally than not, and remained at his side. Not for too long - a medic crew arrived shortly to take him away. They attempted a check-up on her, but the snarl that came over Luna’s snout alone scared the already shaking doctors off. Even they heard the scream. It was that bad.
Luna simply had no way of restraining herself in such a way.
The situation their capital city was in. The imminent invasion of the walking dead. The visions this nightmarish creature that called itself their ally showed her. The existence of that nightmarish creature. The immense wrongness of it all. The hectic panic and fright of the reality of their choices’ narrowness. The feeling of watching a shallow grave being buried for your entire land.
The fact that in all of it, Rainbow Dash’s death was only so low in her list of troubles.
What has it come to? Luna had no verifiable answer. Luna was sick, confused, frightened, frightening, and angry. She hoped that her sister would have a way out. That there would be a moment of peace, a fleeting image of a resolution at the very least.
When she felt what could only have been Celestia unloading immense amounts of battle magic in a spot directly by her chambers, that hope choked on its own birth liquids and died.
Even though Luna teleported up as quickly and as precisely as she could, she was still too late. The communications room and teleport construction crews were most likely blown over by the winds caused by the spell, and herself, the Princess merely arrived to a disaster site faster than usual.
She watched with her jaw absently agape and her eyes glaring into space as the sickening purple body fixed its head back into place from the neck-snapped position it was in. Celestia was nearby, charred at the horn and steaming in more ways than one.
“I only wanthed to tahlk,” the insufferable entity half-cackled half-gurgled, picking up its guts and placing them back in the stomach, and grinned at the two Princesses.
Luna wondered if it was the permanent expression of this malicious outsider. If it was, it fit perfectly.
“Oh, we are going to talk,” her sister answered through magical distortion, and the three of them were taken away in a flash of blinding light.
These negotiations would not end well, Luna could tell from the start.