Six ponies approached in the darkness, and Dim knew one of them. Seeing her, recognising her, knowing it was her, his heart lept up into his throat, almost choking him. The group approached with no protections, no defenses, nothing that Dim could detect anyway. His blood sang with strange energy and his horn burned with even stranger magic, as he was still connected to the vast pools of magic way down in the salt and the chalk.

Five of the ponies had astral auras of vivid, beautiful light, but the sixth, her aura was dimmed. It wasn’t black auroral flames like his own, but there could be no doubt that Darling Dark was deep in the darkness now. Overhead, the stars twinkled, blinking, almost like lights flashing a telegraph signal.

“Hello, Dim—”

Her voice. That voice. It made his ears burn and his heart fluttered like a bird confined in too-small a cage. Waves of regret, grief, and arousal crashed into Dim as if he was a stone on the shore of a vast ocean of ennui, polluted with the industrial runoff of angst.

“—it’s been awhile, hasn’t it?”

“Not long enough,” Dim replied in a wavering, reedy voice.

“Well, that’s rather rude.” Darling came to a halt about a dozen paces away and gave Dim a nod. “I suppose you know why I’m here. Can we please discuss this like reasonable ponies?” She raised her head, smiled, and it was obvious that she had grown a bit in the past few months. “You gave me the most confusing, most amazing orgasm I’ve ever had in my life, and then you went away. I’ve missed you, Dim.”

“The feeling is not mutual,” Dim said, lying through his teeth.

“Tsk tsk, what would your mother say?” Darling’s head tilted to one side and her silent companions spread out a little. “You caused us a lot of problems, Dim. Your little temper tantrum triggered Desire’s transmogrification into lichdom early, before she was ready to hide it. As you could imagine, that caused quite a disturbance of negative magical energy while she endured the transformation.”

“It pleases me to know that I caused my mother so much trouble,” Dim said, feeling a keen disappointment that his mother was not dead. Well, she was dead, as the case may be, but undead was a far more accurate term for her existence.

“Princess Luna, Princess Celestia, Princess Cadance, Princess Twilight, and a whole host of others came to the Dark Spire. They came in and they undid the magic that made the tower what it was. Entire sections collapsed, the dimensional pockets undone, and most of our family was killed by those treacherous, meddling alicorns. Fortunately, Desire and I have a new home.”

The crushing weight of despair almost broke Dim’s spine.

“Castle Midnight is a lovely place, Dim. It could be ours, if you want it. The place has so many secrets, Dim. The sun never shines there and the castle is covered in an eternal shroud of night. Impenetrable darkness. It’s everything and anything you could want in a home, Dim.”

“It sounds as though this Castle Midnight is infested with disgusting primitives.” Dim watched Darling’s eyes narrow and there was an immense sense of satisfaction in knowing that he had gotten under her skin. His heart was pounding now, and as if electricity and not blood was flowing through his veins. Every muscle twitched, his frogs were sweaty, and his dock had become damp with perspiration. Magic was pooling up inside of him, filling him, as if he was a vessel of flesh and blood made to hold the mysteries of the universe.

Joy and sorrow filled his being; joy for seeing his foalhood friend, and sorrow for seeing his foalhood love. Dim tried to think of more innocent times, but those were too far away now, too distant, lost in shadows, entombed in darkness. Resentment loomed like a shadow lurking in the dark recesses of his soul and he wondered, had he any choice at all? Had he ever loved Darling, or was it all just base manipulation? Never again could he be with her, not knowing, not being able to tell if he had any choice, any say in the matter.

“Come home with me, Dim, and all will be forgiven.” Darling’s voice was a pleading whisper that somehow carried loud and clear through the mist-shrouded night. Her heavy, half-closed eyelids gave her gaze a sultry, inviting appearance, and was a cue for unmistakable arousal. “My Master’s influence travels through these wretched isles. The weak-minded royals are already succumbing to His will. My Master says He will give these isles to you as a gift, should you want them, as He is aware that you consider this place home. It won’t be long now, before the disgusting primitives fall in line. The leadership on these wretched isles is ineffectual and they spend all of their time squabbling, giving my Master strength and influence.”

“This place is a sump hole,” Dim remarked.

“Perhaps,” Darling responded, nodding her head, “but think of what you could do with this place if it were yours, Dim.”

Revulsion crawled beneath his skin like parasites and Dim found himself tempted. These isles had promise, potential, these isles just needed a strong, commanding leader. The bickering city-states could all be brought together as one united kingdom. The Grittish Isles had the potential to rival Equestria as an industrial powerhouse. There was coal and steel here, raw resources, and a tremendous pool of mysterious magic buried way down with the salt and the chalk. What kept these isles from living up to their potential was discord, strife, the inability to agree on anything at all that might benefit the Isles as a whole.

“Where two ponies stand in disagreement, my Master stands between them,” Darling said as her eyes began to roam over the standing stones. “Government bickering, bureaucracy, and prideful intolerance has given my Master immense power. Even now, we work to give Him a body so that He might return, as was promised.”

“Then what point is there for us to work together?” Dim asked. Again, he felt satisfaction when he saw Darling’s discomfort. Her eyes widened and her ears pinned back against her head in obvious bewilderment. “Wouldn’t it be better for us to fight and bicker, so that your foolish eldritch goat might draw strength? Why should we weaken him with our accord?”

Inside of his head, Dim could hear laughter, three distinct laughs that boomed between his ears. Did Princess Celestia find this funny? Did alicorns even have a sense of humour? The stars overhead seemed to twinkle in time to the chuckling he heard, going bright and dim while the peals of laughter reverberated and echoed around inside of his skull.

“Dim, there are six of us and one of you. You can’t win. Please, come along with us and make it easier on yourself.” Darling focused on Dim once more, her eyes pleading and sad. “If you don’t cooperate, Belladonna will come for you and tear away the piece of your soul that my Master needs. I don’t want that to happen.”

“What is it that you want, Darling?” Dim demanded.

The filly’s eyes narrowed and she glanced around a few times before responding, “I kinda want you to fuck me in the ass again, without warning.”

So that was what she wanted. Dim sighed, resigned to his chosen course of action. Offering no warning, Dim lobbed off a spell at one of Darling’s companions. A grinning skull that howled with laughter went streaking from his horn, bobbing through the air, and struck the pony furthest to the left.

The stallion exploded into bits of meat, hair, and bone, the largest of which was maybe the size of an Equestrian bit. Dim then vanished, teleporting away, and he began to summon as many spell protections as possible. The flashy opener was costly, as far as magic went, and Dim could feel that it had drained some of his magical reserves.

“Now there are five of you,” Dim’s voice shouted, coming from everywhere and nowhere.

“Dim, what are you doing?” Darling asked in a pleading voice while she raised a shield. All around her, Desire’s companions were panicking, and one of them, a mare, was screaming her fool head off as terror overwhelmed her.

“Fucking you in your ass, without warning.”

Dim let go of another spell, Clover’s Conflagration. The screaming mare was engulfed in flames, lightning up the night, and the remaining ponies scattered, not wanting to be burned. The mare fell to the ground, her skin melting like wax and flowing from her body in rivulets as her body fat rendered into a runny liquid. Her screams quieted, becoming gasps, then she sounded like leaves blowing in the autumn wind as her lungs were scorched from the intense heat.

“Four!” Dim barked, his voice not revealing his location.

The remaining four now had shields up, and protections were being cast. Darling had retreated a bit, and was looking all around, trying to discern Dim’s location, never once looking up. He stood above them, on a wide tree branch, little more than a shadow resting in the dark. With a nudge of his will, the illumination of the present magical bubble shields went dark, surrounding the four in globes of blinding, impenetrable darkness. Screams could be heard.

“Your magic betrays you!” Dim shouted. “This is the darkness that awaits you!”

All four of the ponies were foolish enough to lower their shield spells, and the globes of darkness vanished one by one. Dim launched a fireball into their midst, hoping to catch a few by surprise. Each of them teleported away, with two of them taking refuge behind the same standing stone, while Darling took off running through the sparse trees, and the fourth began running in circles while the world burst into flames, trying not to be consumed by them.

Dim’s fireball was touched by his magic, and the flames were black, lightless, and seemed to swallow what little light there was from the moon and stars. The night grew darker and with a careless strike of his telekinesis, Dim struck one of the standing stones. It broke with a thunderclap, fell over, crushing the two ponies cowering behind it. They popped like pimples, spurting and spraying all over the rest of the nearby standing stones, leaving behind a visceral, blood-spattered graffiti, the written language of violence.

“And now, two.” Dim revelled in the destruction he had wrought and the presences inside of his head were no longer laughing, but silent. Unable to afford being distracted, Dim focused on his prey.

In a flash of darkness, his magic still robbing light-sources of their illumination, Dim winked from his tree branch and reappeared next to the lone, remaining unicorn that needed to be dealt with before he took on Darling. Opening his mouth, Dim sucked in wind, and then he cast a spell unique to these isles, a terrible, horrible spell crafted in the very bowels of darkness and birthed from the tainted loins of nightmares.

A banshee’s wail spilled from his mouth, rending the night with an indescribable, horrific howl that sounded as though it had reverberated up out of the Black Void at the bottom of the Abyss. The unicorn began to age, growing older, growing greyer. It withered, it shriveled up as its lifeforce bled away, its ears hearing a sound that no mortal was ever meant to hear. The eldritch scream had a small, almost insignificant area of effect for it’s lethality, but the sound carried terror in a broad radius.

Gasping, Darling’s last companion died and fell over, a dessicated husk devoid of moisture, of life.

“Darling… come out Darling… this is no time for a game of hide and seek!” Casting a spell, Dim homed in on Darling’s location. Well protected and having what he hoped was enough magic to finish the fight, he winked away to where Darling was to finish what he had started.

She was crying, whimpering, and her mascara ran down her face in dark streaks that could only be seen by the sharpest eyes in the faint light. Dim stared her down, dominating her just as he had always done, and revelling that, even now, she still submitted to him, just as she had been conditioned to do. He found her whimpers erotic, arousing, and the dark beast in the cave stirred.

“Please, don’t do this,” Darling begged. “If you won’t come away with me, let me come away with you… we can be together again… please!”

“You are spineless and weak,” Dim whispered, his aristocratic voice like two sheets of silk sliding against one another in the night. “You are a snivelling coward, Darling Dark. What would Desire say? How might she punish you for your weakness?”

Darling said nothing, but stood frozen in place, her lower lip trembling. Her eyes glimmered, reflecting tiny glittering beads of starlight in them. In this moment, she was more foal than anything, and was no longer a filly on the precipice of marehood. The words left wounds, ripping open old scabs, exposing her to memories most unpleasant.

“How should I punish you?” Dim asked.

In response, Darling’s tail flagged and lifted off to one side. Dim snorted in disgust and shook his head. His parchment paper thin lip curled back in a disgusted sneer of revulsion, and tears began to slide down Darling’s cheeks when she saw no traces of affection—no surviving love—visible in Dim’s eyes.

“I still love you,” Darling whined, her voice wavering in a pathetic pitch. “Every day I sleep and I dream of you. I wake up drenched from my memories of you and wishing you were in my bed. My nights are spent longing for you and there are times when I can feel you on my back, biting my neck… your hot breath in my mane… those were the only times anything ever made sense. Since you’ve been gone, I’ve been very confused. I feel like I have no purpose, no meaning. Give me meaning again, Dim, please… don’t make me beg.”

Dim thought of Darling’s cutie mark, a little baroque bassinet shrouded with dark curtains. This had to be terrible for her and he had no doubt that she was sincere in her suffering. So long as the proverbial crib remained empty, her life had no meaning, no purpose. She was born to serve one function—to do one thing—and she had reached the point in life where that voice of purpose was a constant, never-ending, annoying itch that could not be scratched by any other means.

“Dim, please… don’t you remember?” Darling continued, pleading. “We were young and things were still so simple. We were spooning in the nursery and you… and you… and you were so gentle with me when you took me from behind and slipped inside of me. It didn’t hurt that time, not at all, and I didn’t cry, and I got my cutie mark. Do you remember my cute-ceañera? Dark Chocolate baked a cake… she said it was too important to be left to some half-witted servant.”

Memories flooded Dim’s mind, some of which he remembered all too well. He had vivid memories of that day, when he had spooned with her, a new experience, a new type of play, a new angle of play. It was a wondrous day, when he discovered there were other methods than mounting. They had started off slow, careful, and he had probed her depths, being the curious little colt that he was. There had been no biting, no rough sex-play. It had been slow, cautious, more of an exploration than a frantic need to satisfy an itch that he did not yet understand.

Near the end, he had clung to her, sweating, soaked, the skin of his belly sticking, clinging to her back, and with each thrust she made sounds like a warbling bird, a joyful, happy sound, now that Dim reflected upon it. Her tail had slapped against his hind legs, and her dock had wiggled against his thigh while he slid back and forth between the velvety curves of her graceful backside, with one hoof cupped against her budding teats, feeling their exquisite hardness against his frog. Beneath his hoof, he had felt himself slipping in and out of her, he could feel the bulge stretching her taut tummy, and this was now a vivid memory.

If only it was somehow possible to return to those happier times.

“Darling, I am sorry, but I must send you back to the darkness from which you were born.”

“Dim, no… don’t do this! It doesn’t need to end this way!”

“Whatever Darks are left must die. When I have slain the last, I too, shall return myself back to the dark, to the source, back to the well of wickedness from whence we Darks were drawn. Be brave, beloved sister, and let me make this journey easy for you… easy for both of us. Let me send you off to sleep so that you might know peace. Let our last moments be innocent, a loving, adoring brother tucking his little sister into bed. Goodnight, Darling.”

“NO!” Darling winked away, vanishing from one place and reappearing in another. Her eyes were wide with fear and her body trembled with terror. “No! Desire promised that you wouldn’t kill me! That you couldn’t! She said the geas on your mind would protect me!”

Geas? As Dim’s horn began to charge up, he wondered what else his mother might have done to him. “Gute Nacht, geliebte Schwester—”

“Nein, Bruder, bitte nicht!”

“Schlaf, liebe Schwester—”

“NO!” Darling shrieked, and she fired a powerful beam at Dim.

Almost sighing, Dim understood what was about to happen all too well when his own beam locked with Darling’s. A powerful swirling nexus formed, and two-toned magics mirrored one another as they both had the same eyes, the same magic. Each second was agony and his heart ripped in two with new pain, a terrible raw anguish that he had never experienced before.

For a second, he pondered letting Darling kill him. She would suffer for the rest of her life, it would hurt her like nothing else, and his own struggles would be over. Darling was strong, far stronger than he had anticipated, and it took much of his focus to hold her beam at bay. Gritting his teeth, his lip curled back as his eyes were dazzled by the brilliant light of the nexus, a light that would soon end.

It was almost over now. Inside of his head, he could hear weeping, a dangerous, terrible distraction, one that might prove fatal if he did not keep his concentration. The weeping became something more than just mere weeping, but images, confusing jumbled images that played out in his mind, obscuring his vision. Two mighty alicorn sisters, one white, one blue, locked in mortal combat, their beams colliding with terrible, horrendous majesty, the white one’s face bore an expression of grief and sorrow so profound that Dim could not comprehend it. The blue one’s face was a hideous, contorted mask of hatred and revulsion.

Reality shifted around him, and when Dim saw his sister, she wasn’t Darling, but Nightmare Moon. His drug addled brain began to play a memory, the battle of the two sisters, and it flickered in and out of focus like a film playing on a run down projector.

“LUNA! NO! STAND DOWN! DON’T MAKE ME DO THIS!”

Dɪᴇ!

“LUNA! PLEASE! STOP! IT DOESN’T HAVE TO END THIS WAY!”

Kɴᴇᴇʟ!

Dim’s head was filled with screaming, past echoes, all of them, each of them more terrible than the last. A terrible ragged pain bounced around inside of his soul as he experienced this psychic agony. His surroundings shifted, becoming a half-ruined castle. Smoke rose from hundreds of dead bodies, and flames flickered like curtains in the blowing wind.

“LUNA!”

Lᴜɴᴀ ɪs ɴᴏ ᴍᴏʀᴇ!

“NO! PLEASE, NO! LUNA! HEAR MY VOICE!”

Lᴜɴᴀ ɪs ᴅᴇᴀᴅ, ᴡɪᴛʜᴇʀᴇᴅ ʙʏ ʏᴏᴜʀ ʟɪɢʜᴛ! Sʜᴇ ᴅɪᴇᴅ ғʀᴏᴍ ʏᴏᴜʀ ɴᴇɢʟᴇᴄᴛ, ᴄᴀʀᴇʟᴇss ᴏɴᴇ!

Dim realised that the nexus was close, too close, and he was seconds away from dying. The heat of it washed over him as if he was standing too close to a furnace. The psychic echoes were slamming into the insides of his skull, and a painful shiver rattled down his spine. His balls ached from strain, and every muscle in his body seemed as though it would tear like so much tissue paper. The strain extracted a terrible price from his teeth, which were chipping as they ground together.

Consumed by pain, driven by fear, Dim sucked the light from the magic beams, plunging him and his sister into darkness. Blinded, she screamed, and his attuned senses told him that her concentration was faltering, evidenced by her beam weakening into near-nothingness. The magic nexus spiraled away from Dim, and a peculiar sensation flowed through his body when it struck his sister.

“Luna… no… no… no! What have I done to you? No… NO! WHY CAN’T I BE PUNISHED?”

Cautious, hearing screams and wailing inside of his own head, Dim approached the broken, twisted body of his sister, whom he loved. She was still alive, though she was not long for this world. A vast pool of blood had already formed, spreading over the scorched earth. One front leg had been torn off in the impact, and Darling, a hemophiliac, would soon bleed out.

Visions of a ruined keep flickered in and out of reality around Dim. Piles of bodies, little more than ghosts, lurked in the corners of his vision. Sobbing filled his head, along with the screams, the echoes of old, and he couldn’t tell which pain was his own or belonged to the sisters. He supposed that, in the end, it didn’t matter. In this place, fueled by the strange magic of the henge, the pain of the sisters had become his own.

“Why?” Darling gasped, her voice little more than a breathy whisper.

“Because.” It was Dim’s standard response from foalhood, and he regretted his answer right away, as it made the pain, all of it, somehow even more real.

“It hurts, Dim… stop… please, make it stop.”

For a moment, Dim couldn’t tell what was real, and her words echoed in his mind, she had said them many times when he had been rough with her, when he was biting on her neck, and forcing her to submit to him. Sometimes, he had soothed her, but other times, he just kept going, knowing that she was too spineless, to weak to hold a grudge.

“It hurts so much, Dim… I feel woozy.”

“It will be over soon.”

“Dim, save me… can’t you save me?”

“No.” Dim’s jaw muscles ached and his chipped teeth had terrible electric tingles. A copper taste lingered on his tongue and all around him was the phantom evidence of Nightmare Moon’s rampage… as well as Princess Celestia’s failure. Reality was ever shifting, ever changing, leaving everything uncertain.

“Make the hurting stop, Dim… why must you hurt me?”

“I’m not wanting to hurt you,” Dim whispered, and he stared into Darling’s fading eyes. “I’m trying to punish myself. Seeing you like this… I think it might finally give me the courage to end myself. I can only hope.” He watched as Darling’s three legs flailed around in the ever-growing pool of blood that surrounded her. Inside of his head, there was screaming, wailing, and wordless cries.

Perhaps nothing was real.

“It’s dark, Dim, and I’m scared. There’s a pale pony, and he’s surrounded by shadows.”

“You’re getting what you deserve,” Dim said to Darling, his cruelty cutting into whatever passed as his soul. “Don’t worry, I’ll be along shortly to join you.”

Sobbing, Darling tried to crawl away, but failed. Her head collapsed back down into the bloody mud with a wet splat, her horn ignited for a moment, but then the faint light went out. She screamed, a weak, pathetic scream, and not long after, the light went out in her eyes. Dim watched as the last spark of life was snuffed from Darling Dark.

There was nothing left to take away and Dim was empty.

Author's Notes:

Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing left to add—but when there is nothing left to take away.