Antumbra

by Ice Star

Chapter 6: Alive and All it Means

He stared at the chamber wall, expression emotionless and unreadable. The walls were tan, but in the cool, windowless room of his they could have passed for gray. He was thousands of years old, yet time was something Hasad could not stand.

How long did he have to wait?

Hasad was not partial to the light; it didn't matter whether it belonged to the sun or the moon, natural light was simply displeasing to the prince. When he was not lying, he avoided the light, as he sat in the dark of this unusually plain room. It made it easier for his thoughts to whisper-whisper all around him. He didn't care of their origins, as long as they told him what they wanted and of everything that could be. Each one cut into the inside of his skull like the talons of a griffin teacher raked down a chalkboard and the jangle of rusty metal.

Maybe they were his, and maybe they weren't, but to somepony like Hasad none of that mattered, nor will it ever.

...

The smile was fake. The kindness, the sincerity. Every earnest-seeming move and the ones he purposely flawed, every honest imperfection was a lie. All the laughter, the tears, every tantrum and smile from every moment of his life was false. The perfect mask was one that was chipped so you could only imagine what was below, and use false whimsy to fill in the rest.

The Hasad they all knew and loved was a lie crafted by the prince who festered behind the mask. Oh, how he has grown into that mask. It was a mask he had worn since he was a colt, but as he grew into the mask he could feel it breaking. It was not meant to fit forever, and he watched as each piece fell to the ground and shattered without even sound. Others dug into him with some sharpness and he voiced nothing about how they pained him.

His perfection was crumbling, and no physical entity, even an Alicorn or divine was perfect in itself. Something like a choice or object might be, there might even be the perfect way to solve a problem, but perfection did not exist within a creature.

He wanted to make the perfect choice, and in his warped and twisted mind it existed, buried deep somewhere just waiting for the prince to discover it in full and tear it away from whatever restraints it was bound by.

But of course, this would require a very carefully calculated moment that took time and effort to bring about.

A moment of perfection.

...

He was Nameless, at least to himself. He could not love and he did not know hate, all these centuries helped distill whatever peculiar, wholly sinister set of emotions he was born with and fashion them into something even more eldritch and and disturbing than any legend or cautionary tale of Tartarus could ever describe.

The only thing that ever broke this spell of detachment, that made him really feel anything was destruction.

He wanted to destroy everything personally. He wanted to pull everything apart brick by brick and smash it, make it nothing. He wanted to see things fall: a city crumble, a forest burn to ashes, mountains fall to dust, and much more gruesome things.

There was a maddening hunger to these desires that only grew as years passed; and living creatures found their way into all these wants, too.

He had to wait until he finally got his creation right, or else how could he accomplish anything? He needed the perfect weapon to go with the perfect plan. Failure had to be considered and eradicated along with everything else.

Yet, even that required time...

...

He has always felt nothing, for the most part. The prince loved the idea of nothing, or everything falling, everything, everypony breaking like smashed glass and being forgotten forever. The dead realms of Paradise and Tartarus were of no concern to him. He simply wanted to 'reset' the world with blood over and over again.

Hasad the Selfless was hollow, devoid of all but strange and mysterious machinations that would require the perfect magic, one that wielded the terror inside him and amplified it beyond all insanity and understanding.

He would have to perfect a new magic for this and he would, he would build it all from nothing and the result was ensured to be catastrophic. Through his lies, selfishness, and amoral ruthlessness Hasad the Nameless would buy his way to the only power that he ever desired. He just had to play his part and act like the caring big brother everypony thought him to be, the one that could feel everything, the one that eveypony believe could feel alive of all things. As long as he had been alive, that was the one the one thing he never felt and it was from there everything else followed.

He stood up, still staring at the wall with a tumultuous look in his eyes and his horn flashing with splinters of magic, the magenta crackling softly. Magic which soon swirled into the faintest traces of violet tinted with green. With cold precision Hasad silently ripped open a hole in the blanket of the world ringed in the same colors, all his special way of creating a pocket dimension, a magical feat he had been playing with, and a dull gray plain yawned back at him.

He slipped inside, sealing it behind him before he collapsed screaming.

How long did he have to wait?

Though this magic was a start. He had no idea where it came from or whose it was but it would never be a concern to him.

He would wait for the last piece of his mask to fall.

Comments

[RoyalBardofCanterlot]

Vividly disturbing.