One by one, Dim laid out various items he would need upon the table. The room was dark, the window covered, so he could operate without his goggles. His whole body glistened with sweat—it poured from him in fat, glistening droplets—and it appeared as though a dreadful palsy had consumed him. This was a dangerous gambit, and he knew it. Right now, he was weak, far weaker than he was letting on, and he suffered from a damaged will.

He needed a fix.

Needed medicine.

A cure.

A small glass phial filled with foxglove extract rolled over the table until it clinked against another glass phial. Foxglove. The poison was a special blend, somewhat magical, designed to make the heart stop. There were spells that could only be cast on the verge of death, that in between state, and Dim had dabbled in a few of them. He had the poison, he had the cure, and he had the courage to go where others would not.

Dim knew poisons, he had grown up with them, and the memory of his own mother poisoning him through Darling was still a fresh scab on the surface of his mind. Love poison was vile, a toxic, almost irresistible taint. He hated his mother and her evil ways, but he admired her cleverness and skill. He pulled another glass phial from his bags and held it up to his face so he could peer into it. By the faint light of his horn, he saw that the bottle of lysergic acid diethylamide was about half empty. Or was it half full? He didn’t know. He didn’t care. It was a precious, costly material, and he was running out.

The unnamed colt sobbed, blubbering away, and was getting on Dim’s last nerve. Blackbird was trying to comfort him—or perhaps she was trying to console herself by being kind—and she stroked his neck with her talons. Gesundheit stood near the door, squinting in the near darkness, and a grim expression could be seen on his face.

“What’s the plan?” the pegasus asked.

“I suspect the mark is necromantic in origin,” Dim replied, saying each word with slow caution and care. “I will need to alter my perceptions to see it. I might be able to break the connection, if it is what I suspect it is, but first, I will need to kill myself.”

Blackbird whimpered, a distinct foalish sound of fear.

“I assume this is a temporary death?” Gesundheit made an equine sound of worry deep within his throat. “Is this necromancy?”

“I don’t know.” Dim’s reply was honest. “Maybe? Might be. Perhaps. It is dangerous to make assumptions. There is power at death’s door for those foolish enough to seek it out. To exist in that precarious state. There is a grey area between life and death.”

“I’ll keep going with my assumptions, and guess that you’ve been there? That you have pierced the veil?” Gesundheit’s ears now angled over his face. “As a druid, this bothers me—”

“Because your magic comes from life, and druids are an anathema to the undead.” Dim nodded, a slow movement, and he looked Gesundheit in the eye. “Yes. I have been there. When studying the stone circles on the Grittish Isles, I experimented in many different ways, trying to tap into the magic there.”

Gesundheit grunted.

“I found other ways to tap into the magic of the stone circles, the wells of magic built over salt and chalk,” Dim said while he closed his eyes and thought of the sensation of that magic. It was very much an intoxicating substance to him, and he longed to feel it once more. “The Grittish Isles are a lawless place outside the major cities, and little is done to stop wizards from dabbling with the forbidden arts. Like so many others, I dabbled, but only a little.” Opening his eyes, he drew in a deep, shuddering breath, wishing that he had some opium laced salts, and lamenting that he had none.

Harsh Winter had made a name for himself killing the dabblers that had gone too far.

The sweating was growing worse and Dim felt itchy all over. No doubt, the stress of the moment was getting to him, and this was bad because he would soon need to focus all of his available concentration. There was no telling what he was facing, or what danger he was about to put himself into, or how far he would have to go. Pushing past the veil was potentially dangerous, and it went without saying that failure would be fatal.

His thighs felt as though they were stewing, and his sticky, clingy scrotum felt galded.

Squirming, he peeled his scrotum away from the chaffed flesh of his thighs while he wiggled his backside around, hating the sensation of the sweat that condensed in the underside of his dock. There were no known words for how miserable he was, and there seemed to be no relief to be had. The room felt like an oven and his own sweat pooled around his hooves.

“What will happen to me?” the colt asked. “Where will I go? How will I ever be safe again? I don’t want to live looking over my shoulder for the rest of my life. Maybe it would be best if you just killed me now so—”

Blackbird slapped him hard enough to cause his head to whip around, and his neck crackled. Stunned, the colt’s head wobbled on his neck, and he mewled from the sudden pain. Gesundheit stared at Blackbird, and she stared back, daring him to say something. The sounds of dripping could be heard from where Dim was standing.

This was not Equestria.

“Was that necessary?” Gesundheit asked.

“He just asked us to kill him,” Blackbird responded. “I gave him a little pain to remind him that he’s still alive. It’s kinder than killing him, by far.”

“But was it necessary?” Gesundheit gave Blackbird an imploring stare.

“During one of my mother’s bad spells”—Blackbird paused for a moment and in the faint light, pain could be seen on her face—“my mother thought about killing herself and she mentioned this to my father. He just about slapped her beak off and he let her have it. I don’t think he was wrong for doing so.”

Gesundheit sighed, but said nothing in return.

“Before we begin, I desperately need a drink.” Dim drew in a raspy breath and tried to steel his nerves while his hind legs kicked around, trying to unkink his balls. The skin was rubbed raw and the pain was approaching a point that could only be described as blinding. What he needed was a good long soak in a tub.

Or maybe a good long sit in a creek.

Dim’s mismatched eyes, one pale pink, the other a soft amber, glimmered in the reflected light from his horn. The colt lay in the bed, whimpering a bit, but calmer after having drank a glass of dark brown ale. Blackbird sat at the head of the bed and had a thousand-yard-stare that pointed down towards the floor.

She had been given instructions to administer the antidote should Dim find himself unable to do so, and he was trusting her, as much as it galled him. He had to trust her, and she had to trust him, and somehow, they had to play nice together. Dim was not one for playing nice with others. Not only that, he had been careless with his toys, Darling in particular.

“I knew a druid with two different coloured eyes,” Gesundheit mentioned in passing while Dim continued his final preparations. “She said she was normal until she went to the Grove. Afterwards, she started seeing stuff. Strange stuff. She’s become something of a seer.”

“Unicorn?” Dim asked, his attention diverted for a moment.

“Earth pony,” Gesundheit replied.

“Fascinating.” There was no sarcasm in Dim’s voice.

“She was a refugee from Windia.” Wings rustling against his sides, Gesundheit turned his head to look at the colt lying in the bed. He reached out and patted the frightened pony on the leg in a gesture of affectionate kindness. “She was a strange one.”

“Huh.” Hearing this, Dim found himself at a loss for words.

It was time to have a look. Every nerve in Dim’s body screamed from the tension, but there was no helping it. He summoned his wits, gathered his courage, and applied the lash to his mind. In the dark, he was the master. This was his birthright, his kingdom. He was the master of this domain. Focusing on his innate superiourity, Dim gathered his confidence until he felt he was ready to begin.

“There may be screaming.” Dim’s casual announcement did not go over well, and every other occupant in the room cringed. At the moment, Dim was nothing like the noble that he was born as, but appeared more to be a drunken, swaying, burnt out sawbones afflicted with delirium tremens that found refuge on the very outer edges of the frontier. He was no doctor, but he was about to perform a major operation, a potential extraction.

This was not Equestria.

This was a frontier, of sorts. A nowhere land populated by the brave, the foolish, the craven, and the foolhardy. In Baumhaus, Dim was the closest thing they had to alicorn royalty, and like any other dweller of the frontier, they would have to make do with what they had, even if it was substandard or dangerous.

Given his poor state of mind, Dim might’ve been remiss in remembering all of what he needed.

The lysergic acid diethylamide burned something terrible, and Dim writhed with his eyelids squeezed shut over his burning eyeballs. Before he knew it, he was smelling things with his ears and hearing things with his nose. Electricity arced over his tastebuds and his magic sense began to bleed into his other organs.

“The burning is assurance that everything is normal!” Dim screeched as he tried to force his eyelids open. “The burning lets you know it’s working!”

The first thing he saw was Blackbird, and seeing her almost blinded him. She might have been one of the blackest creatures in existence, but right now, she was one of the brightest. White-blue fire danced along every curve of her body and the flames were thickest around her feathery wings. Gesundheit was much the same, burning with the same brilliant glow. The colt in the bed shone with dark light, as black-purple flames wreathed his body.

Dim of course, burned black, and was a visible void in the darkness.

Wormlike astral projections crawled along the colt’s skin, blinking in and out of existence. Dim had never seen anything quite like it, and he struggled to keep whatever was left of his sanity intact while the lysergic acid diethylamide gained potency. He could see the mark now, it was a rotten spot of decay that stood out in sharp relief against the otherwise healthy flesh.

When Dim reached out a hoof to touch the spot, something reached out of the ulcer for him. “Shit! You have ass tentacles! Fucking ass tentacles!” He jerked his hoof away from the reaching, seeking tentacle that had emerged from the decayed patch of rotten, necrotic flesh. Dim’s sanity took another blow that no mere mortal should bear, and his mind reeled from the realisation of what he was seeing while he looked upon this spiritual infection.

His first instinct was to set everything ablaze—including himself—to bring a violent, burning end to this infection. He fought back against the urge to purge and watched as the phantom tentacle retreated back into the diseased, blistered flesh. It was quite literally a corruption of the colt’s cutie mark, which now had a defiled eldritch glow. Faint yellow lines could be seen pulsating in the swirl and stars of the mark.

Even worse, Dim understood what he was seeing. By polluting destiny, the colt could be controlled, changed, corrupted, and anywhere he went, they would know. This was evidence of the most insidious magic Dim had ever witnessed. He could hear the scent of ink in his ears, the scratching of pen against paper reverberated inside of his nostrils, and a strange pink hue filled his vision as something awoke inside of his head.

Yes, the Pink One. He could feel her inside of there, and he registered her silent horror.

Still, something about the pinkness in his mind gave him courage, it filled him with resolute determination and shored up his battered mental defenses. A bizarre calm radiated through him in waves and he felt the Pink One’s silent horror turn into a caldera of seething righteous indignance.

KILL IT, DIM! KILL IT! LISTEN TO YOUR AWAKENED NATURE! I KNOW YOU SENSE WHAT HAS AWOKEN WITHIN YOU! LASH OUT WITH RIGHTEOUS FURY AND SMITE THIS EVIL!

He and the Pink One were now in one accord, and indeed, his awakened nature was also in agreement. This… abomination had to go so the colt could be saved. It now felt as though he was underwater, and he could feel pressure pushing in from all sides, a pleasant crushing sensation that squeezed copious rivulets of sweat from his gaping pores.

The knowledge of what needed to be done was clear in his mind. “I need a mirror. Any mirror will do. Go and fetch me a mirror, and do it now.” Dim closed his eyes, squeezing them shut, anticipating that the door would open and flood the room with light.

It was Gesundheit who went racing off to do Dim’s bidding.

Author's Notes:

3:44 am.