There was a gloomy donkey, who lived a gloomy life
He had three gloomy children beside his gloomy wife

He lived upon a gloomy yard and worked his gloomy trade
By digging lots of gloomy graves with just his gloomy spade

But then one gloomy evening within that gloomy yard
The donkey dug a grave so deep it dug up something hard

All clean and pale and beautiful with pretty, pearly teeth
A pair of mighty curling horns but what lay underneath?

The donkey, not so gloomy, he dug and delved and sought
But after three long nights outside, his search availed him naught

His gloomy yard was ruined and when the town awoke
Their dead were scattered ‘cross the soil, their gloomy gravestones broke

They cried and cursed and threw some stones and took his gloomy spade
They swore he’d never work again but he was not dismayed

They’d let him keep the pretty thing, he kept it by his bed
But all the while, his wife and kids were wailing for their bread

His life was gloomy once again and this he could not bear
Trapped with naught but fuss and noise, he fell into despair

Day by day his family would beg and moan and shriek
But then one night, the pretty thing at last began to speak

‘I’ve never had a friend’ it said ‘But I’d quite like to try it.
We can talk all day and night but first I’d like some quiet.’

‘Of course, my friend’, he answered, and took it to the cellar
His wife would ask ‘how long’ and ‘why’ and naught would make him tell her.

‘Your friend is making you bizarre’ she said one evening dinner
‘Tomorrow I shall sell it off to stop us getting thinner’

The gloomy, gloomy donkey sincerely disagreed
He grabbed a nearby carving knife and did a bloody deed

And when the deed was finished there was silence in the room
As cool and calm and peaceful as a pretty little tomb

A tomb made for a donkey’s friend which spoke and laughed and said
‘Go and get some sharpened knives, some meat-hooks and some thread’

‘Your life is too repetitive, that’s why it seems a trial
So be a brand new donkey with a brand new pretty style’

And so, he made himself a cloak with all the nearby hide
And wore it all about the town so glad to be outside

But in that gloomy town, it’s said, they saw his pretty cloak
They said ‘He should be locked up tight, away from gentle folk’

They took his pretty bloody cloak and then they took his friend
He cried and begged and snarled but still it came to no good end

They threw him in a gloomy cell beneath that gloomy town
The donkey could not stand the place and could not settle down

But just there in the corner of that gloomy, ugly cell
The donkey found a pretty thing...A little silver bell

A most sordid story is that of Old Bray.
Born in the small, remote and dismal lake-town of Gloambourne on the northern borders of Equestria to Burkback and Verlorn (Surname unknown), Bray was the local gravedigger. All records suggest he lived a life without any notable glee and his wife Pennygoode and their three foals brought him little joy in his life (Information suggests that their marriage was arranged by his parents). Day after day, he’d dig graves but never really be wanted at the funerals themselves. His life was repetitive and monotonous and in that dismal town, it is believed his was the most dismal life.
Until he came across the artefact that would shape his life.
The skull of Grogar the Treacherous.
How it came to be there is uncertain. After Grogar’s defeat and apparent death when his goal in ripping open the Gates of Tartarus backfired supremely, his bones were scattered all across the Known World.
So how indeed did his skull, of all things, end up in Gloambourne?
Perhaps those who scattered him wished to keep him somewhere obscure, somewhere nopony could ever imagine anything of great importance lurking.
Inversely, perhaps one among many of those charged with scattering the bones was secretly in Grogar’s service and intentionally placed it where some creature might find it.
Or perhaps there was still enough of Grogar left in his head to go seeking that creature out himself.
Regardless, Bray found the skull of the mightiest and vilest of Tambelon’s Master-Warlocks.
And from then on would follow in his hoof-steps.

At the time, nopony in Gloambourne knew where the skull had come from and who it belonged to.
But moments after he’d found the skull, filled with a sense of wonder and achievement he’d never felt before in his life, he began frantically digging up the rest of the graveyard, searching for more bones of this strange and fascinating creature.
He was working for three days and nights straight but could find any bone that he felt matched the skull he was keeping.
And then the townsfolk got involved.
Almost every grave in the yard had been opened and the bones and body-parts of the deceased pulled-apart and scattered about. Needless to way, the public were not pleased. They took away his spade and barred him from the graveyard. Bray, however, paid this little mind. They had not taken the skull he was keeping and this became his obsession.
However, he found little time to examine it at home as his wife berated him constantly for losing his job and income so foolishly and insisting he find some way to provide for their foals.
The only existing record of what went on in Gloambourne is from the journal of Tussock Sedge, who was Mayor at the time.
Bray took little interest in his wife’s words and Pennygoode soon had to take multiple jobs about the relatively poor town to both pay off the debt for damages his father had done to the town’s graves and put food on their table.
Having admired Pennygoode for a while, Mayor Tussock Sedge indirectly pressured Pennygoode into sleeping with him in order for him to give her husband back his job. He states in his journal that he soon deeply regretted this and tried to apologise but when Pennygoode confessed to Bray what she and the Tussock had done, Bray barely registered, too engrossed with the skull he was keeping. Out of patience and with few other immediate options available, Pennygoode essentially began prostituting herself with the Mayor, though she may have been seeing others if the debt was as bad as the journal indicates.

According to the notes, around a week later Bray woke in the middle of the night and was certain the skull was talking to him.
Seeking peace and quiet for his studies and insisting that the skull wanted the same, Bray took it down into his cellar and spent most of his time there, rarely ever leaving. Pennygoode and their children saw him only rarely, barely seeing him eat and never seeing him sleep and nothing they said to him convinced him to stop. He came to see the skull as his best and only friend.
At last, one evening, Pennygoode insisted her husband sit at the dinner table with them and told him that his obsession was destroying his family. Market day would be in two days and on that day, Pennygoode planned to sell the skull to anypony who could give a decent price. This she told Bray in a firm and frank tone.
Bray...took issue with the idea.
He said not a word. He simply reached across the table for a carving knife.
And there and then, in that gloomy little house of his, butchered his wife and foals.

Now working in a place of silence, Bray began speaking more fluently with the skull and if the legends are true, it persuaded him to fashion himself a cloak made primarily from the skins of his family who he hung on hooks in the cellar and flayed, sewing them together in a patchwork pattern. He then apparently took a walk through town in his new cloak. What he expected out of this was uncertain, maybe the skull had simply told him it would be fine.
It wasn’t.
When the townsfolk saw the specks of blood on the cloak coloured suspiciously similar to the coats of his family, they held Bray in the town square and checked on his home. Down in the cellar, they found the flayed bodies and demanded Bray be locked up in the town prison.
And to have his cloak and the goat’s skull taken away.
This, it is said, drove Bray to hysterics and his usual dull and unresponsive mood disappeared.
For days he spent all his time screaming and cursing from inside his cell.
Nopony in Gloambourne wanted to touch the cloak, spade and skull Bray had kept close so they were left locked up tight in the prison safehouse.
So, for the next few days, Bray sat in his cell and brooded, nurturing his rage, his acrimony, his foetid contempt for the world.
There was but one pony in Gloambourne who would care to speak with him.
The local constable was a middle-aged war-veteran called ‘Cheery’ Chuck Chiseljaw, an all-round pleasant individual by all accounts who’d earned a medal for saving the lives of his wounded comrades in battle and now spent time making sure the street was safe when he wasn’t at home spending his time as a loving husband and father of three.
He was a phenomenally gentle and patient stallion who, after hearing what Bray had done, sought to change him for the better. He would act almost as a counsellor and tell him that it wasn’t too late to find forgiveness in himself and among the town and never treated with Bray without a warm smile on his face.
Bray, it is said, despised him. More than any other in the town.
Chiseljaw was a perfect foil of what Bray was and always had been. Chiseljaw saw his family as a dearest gift at the end of a long life of danger and adventure rather than an uncomfortable prison that Bray had regarded his own as being.
His bright outlook and optimism drove Bray to frustration easier than ever. Chiseljaw would still try to reason with the imprisoned donkey whenever he brought him meals or a book to pass the time somehow.
None of it changed Bray’s outlook unfortunately. Or his prospects.
Something else, however, would.
Trying to tunnel out one day, Bray dug into the corner of the cell, trying to sift one of the cobblestones out of its place.
But instead of soft soil, he found buried treasure.
Something far more valuable than gold or jewels however...
A little silver bell. One that resonated with an ominous power. Like that of his precious goat skull but more focussed, more concentrated, Bray was certain that he’d tapped into something exceptionally potent and connected to his friend.
He rang it. And it somehow guided him. A call in his head resonated from beneath the cells.
Seeing a way forward, Bray would spend the first half of each night weakening each cobblestone in the cell, searching for whatever the bell tolled for and the second half putting the stones back to disguise his intentions.
In that time, he pretended to warm to Chiseljaw, spending the days in pleasant conversation with him to pass the time until night fell and he could continue his search.
At last, after twenty-seven nights, he found it.
As pale and pretty as his cranial friend.
A pastern, lower-foreleg of a sentient beast, tipped by a gnarled cloven hoof.

Bray felt the glorious sense of purpose in him again. He knew what he would do as soon as he broke free of his cell.
Reassemble the one creature who had ever felt the need to speak to him beyond the boundaries of life and death.
But the bell promised much.
It taught him things known only to select few and pursued by fewer still.
The secrets his skeletal friend had perfected back during his lifetime and the several revisits he took.
The secrets of necromancy.
Not just death, not just cheating death, but controlling it. Both his own and that of others.
He begun with Chiseljaw.
And here, his cruelty truly came into play.
When Chiseljaw brought him his supper that evening, Bray waited until his back was turned then used the pastern to hit him in the back of the head and beat him half to death on the stone floor, including permanently getting rid of the smile that plagued him, smashing his jaw upon the stones until it broke, leaving it torn and hanging from one side.
He left Chiseljaw lying on the ground in a pool of his own blood and drew round him a circle on incantation using the pastern hoof.
He then rung the bell.
Chiseljaw rose. Not like a pony rising from sleep but rising as if pulled, wrenched from slumber, like some morbid puppet.
But Chiseljaw hadn’t actually died by the time the spell was cast.
He was completely under Bray’s power, but he still lived, just barely.
He still saw and felt and thought with his own mind but couldn’t react or respond to anything.
And with this, Bray was going to have quite a bit of fun.
He renamed his new slave ‘Slackjaw’ and gave him his first command. Bring him his cloak, his spade and the skull of his friend.
He then told Chiseljaw to bring him his family.
Chiseljaw’s wife was called Slippenslide, formerly quite clumsy and awkward but kind.
His first daughter was called Gigglebun, his second daughter was Cuddlecake and his infant son was named ‘Summerstart’
Bray had each one brought to him bound by their forehooves in his cell.
And, one by one, giving ‘Slackjaw’ the same knives and and hooks he’d kept in his own cellar, he had his new slave gruesomely put his own family to death.
The details of how each one died are best not put to paper but each death was designed for Bray to come up with another ironic misnaming for them one they were brought back as zombies.
‘Splittinsides’ (Due to disembowlment) ‘Gurglebun’ (Due to opened throat), ‘Funnel-Cake’ (Due to demi-decapitation) and ‘Comeapart’ (Due to dismemberment)
The sole purpose was to hurt Chiseljaw. He was still, technically alive and conscious while he was murdering his family. He could not speak to them or hesitate a moment.
And Bray felt what he felt, tapped into his psyche.
And he was pleased he felt it.
Why?
Because Chiseljaw had annoyed him.
Here we see how Bray differed from the creature that would become his master.
Grogar raised thousands from the dead but he never truly had a whole lot of individuality in mind. To him, his undead servants were simply corpses he’d made walk again, little different from animated wooden puppets.
Bray knew what a terrible force was necromancy. He knew what it did to those in his power.
And he liked being the one to deliver it.
Bray, in some ways, was worse than his master. He did not simply ignore the suffering his actions caused, there were times he gained pleasure and satisfaction from it, something it is never confirmed Grogar truly did, certainly not to a level this petty and personal.
But then of course, Bray was smaller, body, mind and soul. Grogar was born into royalty and great magical prowess and would not be satisfied unless whole cultures were wiped out by his magic. Bray, it seems, started small.
[Note: Let this be a fair warning to all who seek to gain power through evil acts. You will always start as little more than a petty bully or troublemaker and that is how you shall be remembered no matter how high you climb.
And really, do you want that?!]

With his first five zombies in his command, he broke himself out of his cell and had the creatures murder the other two guards along with any of the prisoners within. He made sure to strangle the guards and leave as little marks as possible then, bringing them back to life with a far more powerful, concentrated form of necromancy, he made them appear still-living, merely ill or drunk or fatigued. Behind closed doors, he had these guards bring him items, information and of course new subjects, killing members of the populace behind closed doors and bringing the bodies to him at night.
Within days, he’d amassed a zombie army three-dozen strong.
On the evening ninth day, he left his prison fortress in full view of the town, the denizens of Gloambourne staring in horror at their missing friends and family shambling about protecting Bray from any attack concerned citizens attempted.
He then made his way to the gloomy graveyard where he’d once worked, brought up his spade, attached the bell to the handle of it and plunged it into the ground.
The dead rose that night.
And every life taken joined their ranks.
Bray made his way to the town hall and faced off against Mayor Tussock Sedge. The mayor drew a flintlock and asked him with a mixture of rage and despair if this was all because he took his wife from him.
Bray responded with mild confusion, asking if he was genuinely still worried about that and how he’d practically forgotten.
Tussock Sedge had only two bullets. As Bray sent his slaves forward, Tussock’s heart overtook his head and he shot Pennygoode and Chiseljaw/‘Slackjaw’. In this, he at least freed the tormented prison guard-turned-prisoner from his sub-living hell and the things Bray was making him do. But this was all. He didn’t even kill the zombified Pennygoode.
[Note: Many ponies, through influence of modern media, have likely heard of the concept that a zombie or undead creature must be struck hard in the head, enough to either separate it from the body or perforate the brain, to kill it.
This is not true for advanced necromancy where zombies are essentially dead flesh wrapped around dark magic.
Zombies may only be killed through enchanted weapons, powerful magic, extreme physical force (To the extent of destroying the body entirely) or, the most conventional method, killing the necromancer responsible or otherwise compromising the necromantic force in question.]
Tussock was seized but Bray wished his legend, and that of his master, spread across Equestria. Scraping the side of Tussock’s head with his spade and casting a curse of memory-failure, Tussock was drained of the memory of just where Gloambourne was. A backwater place such as the town would be very hard to find on any map.
And Tussock had no means to take him to the next city other than his four hooves. It would take weeks for news to reach Canterlot.
And Bray intended to move faster than that.
Tussock was sent to Canterlot and Bray took the town entirely for his own purposes.
By the end of the day, he was the only living creature in Gloambourne. He used bone dust and crystallised glass to carve a Hearthstone sigil into the town hall hearth. He then took one half of the stone and kept the other in the town hall as a teleportation device. Wherever he went and whatever he did, he would always have a safe and secret base to escape to, gather resources and plot.
Tussock Sedge, and with him news of Bray, would reach Canterlot a month later. By then, the snow was falling and Gloamhedge would be hard to find even with a map.
Tussock could not remember anything that would help the Royal Guard find Bray. He wrote the events of Gloambourne, all but the ‘where’ still burned into his mind, into his journal he’d taken with him. He handed it to a doctor who was treating him for trauma then was found the next evening having cut his own fetlocks using shards of glass from a glass of water he’d smashed.
The final page of his journal begs forgiveness from Pennygoode, Chiseljaw and all the other creatures of Gloambourne that died and were brought back at Bray’s hooves. It also asks ‘Whomever it may concern’ to stop Bray at any cost and give him what he deserves.

Bray, meanwhile, decided to act quickly and, still relatively incognito, headed to the nearby city of Onerous. While a towering city with much wealth and culture, it endured a dismal reputation for the corruption of its upper classes and the danger of its streets. The library there was extensive however and its attention had recently been drawn to the macabre arts concerning necromancy thanks to the infamy of its previous librarian.
Desmograf Van Hatstuandt. A stallion who would come to be known as Desmograf the Degrader.
The Van Hatstuandt pegasi family had previously been one of the middle-class families in Equestria, many of them in Onerous, who made money in the slave trade with the Ivorian Empires.
In the brief but significant period of relative lawlessness after the Civil War when a depressed Celestia shut herself off from Equestria, slavery was, while not legal, not punished and the enslaved Zebra were sold to whomever would take them. The Royal Guard would begin pursuing the buyers and dealers but it was a losing war in the shadows.
The fall of the Ivorian Empires however, after the Zebra rose in rebellion and shattered the chains that held them, swept the slave trade into the sea and plunged many families’ finances into catastrophe.
Desmograf writes in memoirs that he never liked the slave-trade but pursued a means to replace the idyllic combination of free and plentiful labour from a class barred from society.
To this end, he came up with a solution.
The dead. They are plentiful, they ask for nothing and no-one would want them anywhere except where they were useful.
He claimed that his plans to bring in unliving labour would simultaneously solve the economic crisis by developing a new source of labour; housing and agriculture problems by no longer needing graveyards; and the job shortages since ‘everypony would get a job eventually’.
And when a zombie would rot away and be unable to accomplish the tasks allotted to them, they’d simply be sent to a chamber and cremated.
He is apparently quoted, when he was tossed out of the Onerous University ‘I am not a butcher. I do not propose any killing whatsoever. This will stop killing! There will no longer be fighting over resources or markets or much else! Everything shall be provided for society by those who no longer require it! I am proposing a scheme for revolutionising labour, a dynamic new growth in an unprecedented industry! The answer to every major problem a city like ours faces and all you can do is witter on about ‘respect for the dead!’ What do they do with that respect? Does it keep them warm and fed and safe?! No! Nor does it need to! It’s the living that need respect! Wake up, ponies!!!”
Despite his setback, Desmograf began reanimating the dead in secret and putting them to use with simple tasks using a range of different devices such as electromagnetics, potions, kaleidoscopic illusions, subliminal messages and so on.
He would collect bodies from the lower cities. From the nearly dead.
Beggars, prostitutes, addicts, the deranged, the decrepit and the desperate.
They came to his study and were fed and given a drink- a quick and fairly painless poison.
Then he would begin his work.
He was found fairly quickly and arrested.
Bray, in his cloak which he’d managed to clean and press to avoid suspicion, posed as a counsellor and bribed his way into the prison to speak with Desmograf.
The two swiftly became friends and Desmograf was very eager to meet the ‘master’ Bray spoke of who had perfected bringing the dead to life and revolutionised not just labour but war with nothing but corpses.
‘It was so simple’ he claimed ‘An end to the senseless death in war...The dead can’t die!’
After a few weeks, Desmograf apparently repented and his new ‘counsellor’ promised to set him on a better path.
The two went back to their library where they opened up the restricted section and gathered masses of information relating to necromancy and the undead.
Bray soon began making regular trips to Onerous and it is all but confirmed that Desmograf would witness what had been done to Gloambourne, fascinated and full of admiration.
Magic, he determined, would finish what abstract thought and mundane invention had started.
But they knew they required greater connections and influence before they could be able to work comfortably and efficiently in Onerous.
So they began seeking out allies.
Onerous was already in a position where ponies of unscrupulous natures could manipulate the desperate masses. There were already several cults and secret societies operating in the city. Bray sought to encapsulate them all and took up private preaching in poor-houses, smoke-houses, brothels, plague-hospitals and other places of ill repute.
And each time, he brought the same message.
‘Your Princess has abandoned you. Your governors are manipulating you. Those you have been led to depend upon are deaf to your pleas as they always have been. But there is one who hears. A king above all. And his kingdom has many manors meant for those who serve him well. Neither you nor those you love shall be in danger. Any who live and choose to serve him shall live forever. And those who have spited you, cheated you, ignored you, shall be your dogs.’
Progress was slow. He was chased out of most establishments where he preached. But his words were heard and some ponies listened.
Two mares among them.
Canterelle of Cibaria was an exotic noblemare married to Onerous’ Prosecutor-General Uncifer McGaff, a fearsome and capricious stallion from one of the city’s richest families. Canterelle came to Bray seeking counsel. She was being abused by her husband who had also murdered her lover, a gentle bookshop-owner she’d known since she was young.
Now her heart had heardened and she sought nothing more than grim and brutal vengeance. Not just upon Uncifer but upon both their families who had pushed her into marriage. And, if possible, a way to bring back her deceased lover.
With Bray and Desmograf’s help, Canterelle faked her death and went into hiding with the two, studying the dark arts.
Their fourth member came from the Onerous Anticipant Church of St. Morosus.
The Church of Anticipancy is an old religion in Equestria, currently not all that widespread, who see it as their primary holy duty to wait for the end times. To this end, they refuse to acknowledge anything in the world as good and instil doctrines of self-hatred and resentment. While not violent, its practices are rarely highly thought of outside of their circle and it lacks all communication with its branches, allowing its chaplains to essentially run personality cults. Chaplain Kipesnout was one such individual who had taken in wayward fillies and colts shamed in their family’s eyes and used them to take out impotent frustration out on them with birches and whips, many dying under the torments.
A nun from the Anticipant Church had escaped and run to bray asking for aid.
Her name was Euphorbia Spurge.
She promised that, if Bray put the Chaplain through the same pain he dealt upon them, she would take the word of Grogar to the church and anywhere else it would be heard.
So Bray’s underground group now, potentially, had powerful magic, access to knowledge, wealth and connections among its four members.
Now all they needed was safety.
It came in the form of Sard Nun-Bora, coming to them in, of all things, a travelling circus advertising a freakshow involving ‘Crazy Crunchbone, The Cannibal of Kulana’.
This titular cannibal was in fact a creature from the Kulan Desert, specifically what had previously been the glorious city of Maqsufan in modern-day Tamoristan. The city was run by the two-humped ‘Ostori’ camels and had made it a trade to create ‘Freaks of War’ by breeding captive races together to create abnormal hybrids to find the perfect race of soldiers. The city of Maqsufan had fallen to the gigantic Death Worms of the desert and its spawn had been scattered to the sands to fend a living alone, depending on what advantages chance had granted them.
Chance would grant the towering hybrid of horse and boar known as ‘Sard Nun-Bora’ (The Tamori word for ‘Deathly-Cold Winds) a most prestigious advantage.
Despite his great bulk, ugly appearance and cannibalistic tendencies, Sard Nun-Bora was actually of impressive intelligence and had allowed himself to be captured by a slave ship and traded to a circus freakshow as a means of getting him far away from the deserts that may have doomed him. He had silently working on his escape since his capture began. But Bray made his escape even easier and gave him a proper purpose.
Sard Nun-Bora had heard of Grogar, the great empire of Tambelon having encapsulated the camel lands many years ago. To creatures like him who did not belong anywhere but where no other creature trod, Grogar was regarded as a guardian of the freaks and savages.
Bray released Sard Nun-Bora who swiftly turned his teeth upon those that had caged him.
The hulking beast would then serve as Bray’s bodyguard, replacing the deceased Slackjaw who, though raised a fully-undead zombie, Bray had tired of.
So, together, the five put together the circus, inviting the nobility, the clergy and gentry of Onerous City and promised them ‘Magic they had never seen before nor ever would again.’
And indeed they delivered on that promise, demonstrating a perfect performance of necromancy, raising the former owners of the circus from the grave along with various corpses they’d hidden under the seats and stage.
Desmograf, Canterelle, Euphorbia and Sard Nun-Bora claimed bloody vengeance and thus became indebted to Bray. He told them of the three bells and the one-hundred and eighty-nine bones of the supreme Grogar.
He showed them the skull and they heard it speak to them.
‘Find my pieces.’ it commanded ‘Search every corner of the Known World and wring out every secret from those that still keep me separated from this veil of life. Then ring the three bells and summon my spirit to this world. Do this and you shall be my chosen. You know this to be true for I will no longer be able to depend solely on the dead in this new world of higher magic. You shall live forever as lords of my new Tambelon, reborn here in Equestria greater than ever before.’
Bray asked for nothing. He wished only to serve and know purpose.
And he knew he would have it thereafter.
His true work would begin. Onerous was left still standing but a significant section of it was closed off and quarantined. ‘Socorro Lane’ was then, and still is ruled by the dead, ghosts, zombies and ghouls shambling across the once-bustling city as the sun does not seem to touch it.
But Bray is no longer there.
He and his cohorts continued with their goal. To create not just an army of the dead but an organisation, a religion, devoted to the restoration of Grogar.
With his fellows, creatures of great skill and zero scruples, they would recover the other two bells and the many bones of their master.
The Tricodonic Order of New Tambelon, better known among modern circles as the Grogarian Host.
And the memories of their work in Post-Civil War Equestria still sends a shiver down the spines of historians to this very day..

7181083
Very interesting as always!

7181084
Thanks.
What do you think of Chiseljaw?

7181104
Well made, as every of your OCs.

A bit off-topic, but they could have really shown Tirek's brother directly in the show

7181115
I meant his story. How it ended.
The unfortunate fate of those he loved.

Ah well. I'm still happy with what we got and I'm glad it's inspired people.

7181177
Part Two is sort of up for question.
As far as anypony knows, Bray is still out there somewhere searching for the bones if his lord.

There came a low, billowing sound, like a tapping upon dead wood.
The corpse was laughing, cackling, writhing in hysteria.
A horde of carrion flies flew out of its mouth, eyes, nose and other orifices and swarmed Rex. In the buzzing, biting cloud, he didn't see a larger shape come down upon him.
A dragon of enormous size, dead and rotting but moving. Crashing upon him, its foreclaw pinned him to the ground upon his front.
Atop the edge of the crater he'd made, a towering blue-grey goat stood beside his semi-living servitors. The donkey with the morbid grin, the wild-haired pegasus with electric caps for ears, the sultry unicorn mare in the red robe, the young earth pony priestess with the hourglass staff and the hulking horse-boar hybrid in the spiky armour.
"Really...don't you know by now?!" the supreme necromancer threw his head back and cackled "The Dead! Don't! Die!"
Raising his staff, eight great shadows brought their casters to the ground. More undead dragons of varying shape and purpose.
Bray had been busy.
Grogar gazed down at the human who had defied him so persistently and shook his head with a sigh.
"What did you expect to find in me, Rex Epsilon? At my core?" he sneered "Just another corrupt noble or a grasping financier? I am insulted!!!" He stamped his staff upon the ground and Rex felt something beneath the soil split and a thousand dead things buried there set free.
"The first time I came to Equestria, I fought an alicorn and lived. The second time I did the same with two. This time, Mr Epsilon, I intend to face five, if not more. But I shall still survive, this I promise you." His voice grew more and more enraged "Did you imagine my legend had become redundant? That things would somehow end differently for you as they did for so many far greater than you?! I shattered the Blades of Dunholm! I trapped Gusty the Great in a tomb of her own making! I broke the Wonderbolts with their own long-dead heroes! Star-Swirl himself could not destroy me! And yet...you dare imagine yourself superior to them?!"
Vapour billowed out his nostrils in fury. Cricking his neck, he calmed himself and spoke in a disdainful tone.
"In fact, you're not even the first human I've faced. Megan the Mysterious. She was small and frightened and ignorant and alone...and yet she was better at fighting me than you were, blustering simian. At least you've ensured one good thing for yourself. And that is that I am so utterly sick of the sight of you that I'm not going to raise your corpse. I shall simply grind you to dust and scatter you to the winds!"
He gestured to his donkey who dragged his heavy spade forward, a deranged grin on his face.

His voice, in contrast to his master, was calm and quiet as he craned his head forward and spoke.
"You know...Rex, is it? I was like you once. I used to believe in the distastefulness of rulership and the baseness of the class systems...I've learnt much since then. When you take an axe to that rising, winding tree of hierarchy, it has a tendency to fall on top of you. What a curse is freedom...when it brings no comfort to the free. I remember what being free was like and do you know what happened?"
He gave a giggle that didn't sound like laughter.
"I had no idea what the blazes I was going to do with my life! Isn't that funny?"
He bent down and whispered.
"Living things need a master...even if that master doesn't even exist. Do you know why? Because the first and oldest master is in the mind. The teacher, the mentor, that which passes us the torch to light the way into the next world. And we never stop learning. So without the master, we lack the mind, do you see how that works? And then...well...we're like you."
His face twisted in disgust.
"You liked to imagine you were a fallen angel. But I'm afraid you were the opposite side of the spectrum. You were an upright ape flinging your filth in all directions! We're two of the same, you and I, except I actually had a goal in mind. A purpose. You? You were just angry at life and determined to destroy that which you could not understand. Underneath the steel shell, you're just a spoilt, scared, screaming little child..."
He raised his spade above Rex's cranium and readied to bring it down.
"And I think it's time you were put to bed!"

7181474
It's really tragic. But that's sadly how most corruption ends

7181608

7181861
Okay...I think Rex needs to properly get his head around the system before he tries to rid it from the world.
The illusion of leadership is necessary to prevent the illusion of chaos.
Next I'm working on the semi-mythological Alicorn Deity of Order and Leadership.