The small, close set tiles were cool against Behemoth's forehead. Colored in muted, warm tones, they were obviously chosen for the supposed calming effect that such colors would have on the likely already nervous or stressed visitors this waiting room traditionally saw. It wasn't having the desired effect.

The room, spacious as it was, was packed. Every last seat was taken, and there was precious little standing room left. The Apple clan clustered in a corner, huddled protectively around the diminutive form of Apple Bloom. She'd been given a clean bill of health, the bruise behind her eye bandaged, she'd otherwise come through her ordeal unharmed. Physically, at any rate. She was sitting stock still, barely even acknowledging the murmurs and hushed questions of her hovering family, her eyes fixed, staring into the middle distance at something that wasn't there.

Behemoth knew that look all too well, and it pained him to see it in her eyes. It was the look of a innocent mind trying to comprehend it's first encounter with evil. The look of a child suddenly and inescapably confronted with the realization that the world wasn't as warm and loving as they'd thought. That real, true evil existed, and had taken interest.

Scootaloo was with them, Big Mac had pulled her into the family unit, weather by design or instinct putting himself between her and his family, and the main door.

A few feet down, the harmony girls, minus AJ, were clustered around Rarity. Quiet reassurances and an impressively long winded and detailed deposition of pony anatomy and modern medical techniques by Twilight having no visible effect on the distraught fashionista. She was slumped, eyes puffy and red, ringed by smudged make up, dark lines and trails of which ran down her cheeks, marring her immaculate white coat. Somehow, she still managed to be beautiful.

When she had arrived, she'd been consumed by a frenzy, shrieking for her little sister, it had taken Pinkie, Rainbow Dash and even a timely intervention by Big Mac to stop her from throwing herself through the swinging doors and into the surgery suites. She had pushed Mac back several paces, her adrenaline and fear induced strength frightening to behold, but he had bought enough time for Twilight, AJ and Fluttershy to get a hold on her. Now, she was sitting quietly, all cried out, and looking as if she'd just finished running a marathon, ragged and worn.

Behemoth took all this in in detail out of the corner of his vision, doing his best to avoid meeting the piercing green eyes that had been fixed on him over the frizzy red unrestrained mane of Apple Bloom. He knew a discussion about the darkness that Mac had seen in him earlier today was inevitable, but he was in no hurry to have it. His damn head hurt.

It was the prickling, tingling, burning, itching sensation he'd come to acquaint with the joys of a lost body part. The maddening and spastic nerve impulses as the brain refused to acknowledge that a part of its body was gone. Ghost limb syndrome, only this time, with an ear. He was glad for the diversion when the door leading farther into the hospital swung open and a doctor stepped out he didn't know, scrubs the generic pale, sea-foam green, and streaked with blood that had been haphazardly, but not quite completely wiped away.

Every head in the room swung to him, the background murmur of conversations dieing away as he made his way towards Rarity. One way or another, this marked the end of the evening. An innocent had died, and another had lived, and he had no desire to hear the details. Behemoth took advantage of this distraction and slipped out into the muggy night.

- - -

On the other side of town, across the stretches of streets as mournful as a funeral parlor, Derpy stepped out of the shower, humming happily with her frizzy mane swept up in a teetering and frankly slightly silly looking tower, wrapped in a faded blue towel. She was, not surprisingly, immune to the downcast pallor effecting the rest of town. She'd just got home from work, and after a quick shower, felt refreshed and invigorated. A sensation that departed all to quickly, as her bedroom door swung shut, and the figure that had been concealed behind stepped out, a cruel, wire thin smirk stretched like a meat wound across a narrow rodent face, under sickly, jaundiced yellow eyes.

"Hello there, cunt, remember me?"

- - -

The night was wet and heavy, moisture hanging in the air in a thin, motionless fog. It had rained for hours, a downpour that started right as the last blood fell, washing it away, finally abating just a few moments before. A graveyard silence hung over the town, the rain, or the events of this evening having chased everyone inside, the stretch of houses and shops were still, their bright colors and cheery facades diluted and dampened by the dark and the wet.

Behemoth trudged out into the street, wet cobbles clopping under hoof, more to get out from under the sharp angles of light cast from the hospital then with any destination in mind. His ear, or more accurately lack of an ear stung like a bastard as the humidity worked through the bandages. He stood there, slowly breathing the thick air, his eyes closed as he ran through the events of today for the umpteenth time, replaying each move, each strike, each second in his mind with picture perfect recollection. Even through his introspection, he heard the hospital doors swing open, and the splashing clack of approaching hoof falls. A throat was cleared as if to speak, but Behemoth preceded its words.

"I know what you're going to say, Mac. She's dead because of me. And you're right. It was my choice to make, and I made it. Weather I wanted to or not is immaterial. The choice fell to me and I made it. And now, Cheerilee is dead."

He shook his head slowly, his eyes closed. his shoulders sagged and his head drooped. Another life. Another death that shouldn't have been. Another choice he didn't want to make, but had.

"Cheerilee was right. I brought this madness back with me. It's not what I wanted, but 'want' never has counted for much."

He opened his eye, but didn't turn to face the presence he felt over his shoulder.

"She was right. If not about me, then at least about what I've done. It was terrible. Horrible. Monstrous. It was also completely necessary, Mac, you know that as well as-"

He stopped speaking as he turned, coming face to face not with his oldest friend, but instead to the slightly puzzled and more then slightly tired face of the doctor he'd seen inside. The wrong hoofed silence was broken as the doctor cleared his throat and spoke, his voice as tired as his face.

"I know you weren't speaking to me, Mr. Behemoth, but I'm afraid I have to disagree with you. You saved a lot of lives today. Half a dozen foals at least are home with their families tonight only because of those...'monstrous acts'."

The doctor stepped forward as he spoke, wiping fresh condensation from his glasses onto his scrubs as he came up to stand next to Behemoth.

"In addition, I can say with certainty, that little Sweetie Belle is still alive thanks to your quick actions. That's actually what I came out here to say, sir."

Behemoth let himself sag visibly at the news. The doctor continued.

"As far as the situation with Miss Cherilee...Cheerilee was...her injuries were...far too great. There was nothing we could do. Even if I'd had her in a surgical suite in minutes...I'm sorry, there was no way she was going to recover. I know you feel guilt for the choice that was left to you...or if not guilt, then at least responsibility, the concern that...maybe you made the wrong choice."

It might've been a trick of the light, but for a flash the doctors face changed, became...harder, more intense. He turned, catching the one golden eye.

"You didn't. You were faced with an impossible decision, sir, a decision I would wish on no living thing, and your decision saved a life."

"Sweetie Belle...she'll be in pain for several weeks, at least, and, honestly...she may never speak again...but she's alive. By all rights, she shouldn't be. Her trachea was completely severed, and there was a two millimeter nick in her left carotid artery, she'd have bled out in approximately two minutes, if someone there hadn't known how to recognize and triage an arterial breach...and that someone was you, so I've heard. You managed to suture an artery and reestablish airflow in the middle of a field, during a thunderstorm, using little more than a standard issue first aid kit."

Behemoth sighed, shaking his head, the dark locks of his mane, longer now then they'd been in years, swung beside his head.

"Yes, but, so many others, the things I did to those that..."

The doctor cut him off, his weary voice cutting through with a bit more steel then it had displayed thus far.

"As a medical professional, I cannot condone the damage you've done today. I cant even fathom it. I don't want to dwell too long on the thought that maybe...your efficiency at causing harm is somehow enhanced by some sort of medical training. The idea of that...misapplication of knowledge is...terrifying to consider. That you could know how to save lives, and cure pain, and use that skill to...do what you did."

He turned, starting back towards the bright yellow light of the hospital. He stopped one last time, with his hoof on the door, and spoke over his shoulder.

"But, as a father...as a father to a child who went to that school, who was taught by Cheerilee...all I can say is, Celestia bless you. You did Her work today, as bloody and terrible as it was, and the only thing I regret are that there aren't more like you in this world."

Behemoth had no idea how to respond, and was saved a fumbling attempt as the doors swung shut. As they did, latching with a quiet clack, Mac was suddenly there, having apparently slipped out, unnoticed, in the doctors wake. An impressive feat of stealth given his size.

He was leaning casually against the wet stone of the hospital exterior, legs crossed, dark green eyes half hooded in normal Mac fashion. He looked calm, casually disinterested. Until you saw the intensity in those eyes. His complacency was a ruse, a clever fabrication for those who would consider him little more then an illiterate rube. Behemoth didn't suffer from any such preconceptions. He knew that the mind behind those lidded eyes didn't belong to a simple farmer. He spoke quietly, calmly, the deep thrum of his voice barely carrying the distance. He picked up the conversation that had been intended for him .

"What you did today, B, it was...prolly the worst thing I've ever seen. Never in all my years heard a living thing make the sounds that colt made as you cut at him."

Behemoth stepped towards him a few paces, closing the distance so they wouldn't be hollering this conversation across an open street.

"Mac, what you-"

"Shut up, B."

There was no anger, no heat in those words, but they also brooked no dissent. It was obvious Mac wasn't done talking.

"There's...somethin...wrong in you, B. Somethin black and twisted. Ah don know what it is, or where it came from, but I've seen glimmers n hints of it since you first came home."

He slowly shook his ponderous head.

"I just didn't know how...powerful that darkness was until today. You've managed to control it, to use it for...well...if not good, then at least for doin whats right."

He effortlessly pushed his massive, powerful form off the wall with an ease not common to his size, and stepped closer to his midnight blue companion.

"But how much longer is that gonna last? How long til you have a...fit, like that that you can't control. You were half a second from turnin on me tonight, what if it's AJ, or Fluttershy...what if it's lil Derpy that tries to stop you next time?"

"Mac, I'd never hurt them, never hurt you-"

"That's just the thing, B, YOU would never hurt them. YOU would never hurt AJ, or Derpy, or me."

He took another step forward, out from under the overhang and into the rain slicked street.

"But that wasn't you. You, weren't callin the shots today at the school. Whatever...Beast that was, whatever madness took you, how do you know you'll be able to stop it next time? Cuz we both know, there's gonna be a next time."

"The past thirteen years, I dunno what you've done, don't know where you learned to do the things you've done. I don't know because you won't damn well tell me. I wanna help you, wanna pull you back from this, but I can't help with what I don't know."

"Mac, I've told you all about my time in the-"

"No. You've told me bits an pieces, little things and all about the quiet stretches. But there are holes, great big glaring tracts of time that you wont say a peep about."

With a sharp shake of his head that brought a new bolt of focusing pain, Behemoth replied.

"Trust me, brother, you don't want to know. There are...things I've done. There's no forgiving them. Things I cant forget."

"Then why would you-"

"Because they needed to be done. They had to be. As...horrible, vile and unforgivable as they were, they needed doing."

"Why you then, huh? Why'd it have to be you doin those things?"

For the first time in what seemed to be ages, Behemoth smiled. It was not at all reassuring. There was no warmth or joy in the twist of those muscles. It was a look of resignation, of poorly disguised pain.

"If not me, then who? It had to be me, because I'm the only one who CAN do what needs doing. Others...don't have the stomach, or the knowledge or the...will, to do the things you saw today, and much worse besides. What I did might not be right, might not be on even the same plane of existence as right...but it was what was necessary. It needed doing, and I did it."

"Yeah, but-"

"No, Mac. No buts. Look at what they did. The school, the foals...Cheerilee. Gentle and kind Cherilee. The sweetest, most loving mare I...or you, have ever met. Didn't have a mean or uncaring bone in her body, and they killed her, blew her apart for...I can't even imagine why. No. I don't regret what I've done, not here and not before. I regret that there are those who are stupid enough to give me reason to do what I do, but I don't regret the doing. I'll sleep tonight, Mac, knowing full well that I did what was required. What was...needed."

Little more then a silhouette against the dark wetness, Behemoth's tone softened as he continued.

"I'm not seeking absolution, I'm not looking for forgiveness or understanding, brother, not even from you. All I want is...peace. I accept what I've done and the necessity of it, and if I had the chance to do it all again...I'd do it all again. I'm not trying to change what was, only what will be. I want to move on from this, and live my remaining years, however many or few they may be, in peace."

Mac's eyes widened, and he slowly shook his head. He took a step backwards, and looked away. When he spoke again, he was no longer able to meet Behemoth's eye. Behemoth's dull, copper eye.

"No remorse...you really don feel anything, after all that..."

He glanced back, out of the corner of an eye, one green again meeting one burnished copper. Both doing an admirable job of disguising the pain they each knew was there. It was Mac who had the last words.

"You saved Apple Bloom. You saved Sweetie an the rest. You ain't as far gone as you think, B. There's still a road back for you, still a life that ain't about death. You can come back from this, if you try."

He walked back to the hospital door, hesitating with a hoof on the handle just as the doctor had, he spoke his last without turning back.

"You can be better, you can beat this darkness. I don't believe the good in you is dead, not yet, but you gotta want to come back. You gotta start down that road yourself, no on else can take that first step."

With a clack that echoed through the empty streets like a cannon shot, Behemoth was, again, left alone in the night. He spoke to himself, putting thoughts to words for his own benefit, in a whisper even he could barely hear.

"Maybe...maybe you're right, brother. Maybe there is still another way to be. Maybe it isn't too late, maybe I can still-"

Mocking laughter, barely heard, interrupted the faint hope of hope. A voice not quite his, but more familiar then not, crawled up, oozing from the dark depths and recesses of his mind.

~No...there is no hope. No change. Love, peace, family, friendship...these aren't for us. These are not what we are.~

"Shut up."

While the 'other' voice clawed and scratched against the back of his eyes, for only he to hear, Behemoth's words were spoken out loud.

~We can't fight it, and shouldn't fight it. Those trivialities aren't what our life is about, no, we are a much simpler beast then that.~

"No. That's not the way it has to be."

~Steel and blood. That's all we are, that's all our life is...steel and blood.~

"I won't believe that."

~Steel and blood.~

"No, I-"

~Steel and blood.~

"Shut up, Luna damn you!"

~Steel and blood. Steel and blood. Steel and bloodandsteelandbloodandsteelandbloodandsteelandbloodand-~

A buzzing tickle just behind the ear that wasn't there anymore snapped him out of his introspection. A third voice joined the choir in his mind, luminescent and beautiful where the other was sickly and twisted.

~Get home, now!! They're coming, they're-~

The connection was cut. That had never happened before. The sudden...emptiness hit him like a sledge hammer to the sternum, he reeled, physically staggered by the snapped link. Blood trickled from nose, eye and ear. He was moving, staggering, before the screaming sensation of hollowness had even begun to abate.

Before he'd fully found his hooves, the night disappeared. Quick as a blink, the inky blackness was gone, driven into sharp edged black spears shooting back from every tree, fence post and building. Light, bright as a second sun, bloomed from the direction of town, a flash that shocked the retinas with fuzzy after images with every blink. For half a second that seemed like an hour, there was no sound, no fury, just light.

The the fury hit.

With a roaring, seismic rumble, windows shattered and cobbles buckled. Trees, heavy and sodden with caught moisture, creaked and moaned against the unnatural assault. The flash and rumble shared an epicenter, and as Behemoth stumbled and skittered, almost slipping on wet stones no longer level, his throat clenched and his stomach was heavy as lead. As the darkness reestablished itself, sending the unwelcome light retreating back towards its origin, Behemoth kept pace with the silent tidal wave of black. Within his mind, something cackled with glee.

- - -

Fire. Burning so hot and so high it was visible over the roofs and in brief glimpses of bright orange from streets away. The flames were staining the sky a dirty orange-brown, thick chugs of smoke obscuring the stars behind.

Panicked mares and stallions, running blind from the explosive fury behind them, stampeded past Behemoth. He shoved his way through their retreating forms, and out onto the street which fronted his and Derpy's home. The street wasn't there any more. A shallow crater, wider in diameter then the street itself, had been blown into the surface. It reached down beyond the roadbed and topsoil, the explosive force finally expended against the dark grey bedrock, which had been bubbled and melted by the assault.

A glittering sea of shattered glass coated the buckled and twisted ground. Every window, lamp and light post for a hundred yards in every direction had been shattered by the brutal pressure wave, leaving the ground sparkling, burning. Each of a million million tiny mirrors catching and reflecting back the orange fury of the spreading flames. Coating the earth like snowflakes of fire.

Preceded by a sub-vocal groan, the entire street facing of the house across from Derpy's slid off, smashing into the street. The soot stained and burning facade adding its considerable cacophony to the already monstrous din of shrieks, cries, and the cracking roar of flame. Bodies were scattered, some intact, most not. Here, a limp form hanging halfway out a second story window, its mane flowing in the sucking pull that fanned the flames, the billowing strands themselves alight and burning. There, a splattered mess, akin to what might be left after stamping on a tomato, only this tomato had had bones, cracked and broken white spikes jutting up from the mush.

Behemoth took all this in in passing, his strategists mind taking stock of every singular image of death and horror, and for the second time that day, locked down and fought back the hatred that welled within him. His focus was such, that over the calamitous roar of the flames and the cries of pain and terror, he picked out the clang and scrape, the clatter and clash, the grunts and swears of a pitched battle, obscured from him by a mountain of flaming debris and the lip of the crater that was deep enough that ground water was starting to well into its bottom, mixing and swirling with the thick, dripping splatters of magical essence left behind from the psychotic fury of the blast.. He turned, galloping towards the sounds of joined battle without breaking stride.

Two Lunar Guards, as well as the aptly named Shade had been left to watch over Derpy and her home as other events unfolded. As Behemoth sped into the attacking group from behind, he saw both Guards were already down. One, at least, was very dead, a massive wound of twisted and melted cartilage and tissue in his throat and a widening puddle of blood left no doubt as to that. The blood was catching and reflecting the flames, appearing almost to be liquid fire itself. The other was down and still, but no wound was obvious.

Shade, a crisp cut shadow in defiance of the flashing light and fury around him, was holding the door way alone. Head down and wings flared, the tips of which flashed back distorted light, with a twisting gleam like that off an oil slick, his dark wing blades twisting the firelight that found them. His armor, made of the same dully reflective metal, was pitted and scored, playing mute
testimony to the fury of his stand, but it, like Shade himself, was holding.

Caught between the immovable object of Shade's defiance, and the implacable advance of Behemoths charge, the half dozen foes trying to force their way through the shattered door didn't stand a chance. Behemoth's unexpected, bone jarring impact propelled two of them forward, hit from behind with enough force to take them clean off their hooves. With a graceful twirl, One of shades blades swept across a throat, nearly taking his head clean off as his momentum tumbled his corpse past Shade, slamming into the side of Derpy's flaming home.

The other was transfixed, his motion stopped dead as a gleaming blade caught him in mid air. Pinned like an insect, the attacker went twitched and danced, as its final remaining nerve impulses jerked and faded. The perfectly weilded metal had popped his left eye, punching through the thin bone at the back of the socket and into the brain just behind. He was dead before his brain could register what had happened. Before he let that body fall, Shade had moved on, spinning past its rag doll frame and opening a sternum with a flash of steel.

In the span of a few short seconds, six more bodies had joined those already lying, six lives stamped out on less time that it takes to describe. Clear of opponents for a moment, Shade sagged, still standing but slumping a bit. Behemoth noticed the trickle of jet black fluid oozing from under Shades armor.

"Kid, you're hurt-"

"It's nothing sir, just a-"

Interrupted by a bestial roar, they turned to face a new attacker charging out of an alley a few dozen paces up the shattered road. Grey and spotted white, this latest arrival was howling like a banshee, wildly swinging a framing hammer around his head with jagged blurts of barely focused magical energy. The speckles of spittle-foam adorning his face, and the wide, unfocused manic gleam in his eyes betraying the fact that he was on something distinctly narcotic, probably hallucinogenic. He was pounding over the shattered cobbles at them as Behemoth and Shade formed up, shoulder to shoulder. He didn't make it to them.

With the distinctive tang of ozone and a sudden sucking pop, Dusk Shield appeared in front of Shade and Behemoth, directly in the path of the blind charge. The over pressure of his arrival pulling and twisting the billowing smoke into spirals and whorls, clearing the air for a few yards, for a few seconds, before the smoke and fury could reestablish itself. Before it could, barely a second after his arrival, Dusk met the charge head on.

With a flicker of motion the eye couldn't quite follow, Dusk simply wasn't where he had been any longer. He'd...blinked is the closest word, blinked two feet to his left, and met the charger across the neck with an extended leg. He'd spun into it, putting his back into countering the blind rush. He stopped the much larger stallion dead in his tracks, sweeping him first up off his front legs, then off all four. His motion, smooth, practiced and fluid, continued. With a sickening crack audible over all the other noise and fury, the base of his skull and back of his neck met the cobbles first, the entire weight of his body bearing down on that small stretch of vulnerable flesh.

He hung there for a moment, his body contorted and folded over, his body forming a crude question mark, the point of which was his head, as if his broken physical form was wondering what had just happened. After a few seconds of precarious balance, he slowly slumped to the side with a whisper of his final breath.

Dusk glanced back, over his shoulder, a barely suppressed grin and a jovial twinkle in his eye made almost manic, almost psychotic by the way they caught the fire light.

"Bad manners, colts, starting the fun without me, taught you better'n that."

He squared up, setting himself to face the direction the last abbreviated attack had come from.

"Shade, with me. We'll hold em here. Behemoth, get inside, see to The Princess and your sister."

His instructions punctuated by a keening howl, reverberating from the flame and smoke choked valley of houses. It was an unnatural, ghostly wail, almost lupine in nature, and made the hair on the back of their necks stand up, an inadvertent shiver running down their spines from the trick of acoustics.

"You sure you two can handle this? Sounds like a lot of them..."

Dusk's reply came as Shade formed up next to him, legs wide, wings out, head down, ready and motionless. Another wail, closer, deeper, shaving off into separate voices above the roar of flame. Six. A dozen. Twenty. More. They poured around the head of the street, flowing like a flash flood, roaring their fury as the cobbles rattled in the face of their stampede. Dusk smiled.

"Go. We've got this."

With a final, hesitant glance, Behemoth turned, pushing his way through the charred and shattered door and into his last home. Dusk's horn, the grey of a building storm, flared and glowed, driving back the dark and the smoke with blinding, clean light. Hidden catches built along the spine of his guard armor snapped open with metallic clicks, four, eight, a dozen. Out of each slid a perfect and flawless shard of gleaming steel.

Ten inches long, and just over an inch at their widest point. Elongated diamonds, all blades and keen edges, they moved in tandem, orbiting his head like planets around a sun. Twinkling in the fire light. As one, they ceased, snapping out flat along his line of sight, each singling one out of the oncoming horde, each making adjustments of fractions of a millimeter, sighting in on soft spots, eyes, throats, the space between ribs, with laser precision.

"Alright. Lets dance."

- - -

Behemoth staggered, the heat was a physical thing, battering at him with every step. The immolation was complete. Thick, wavering tongues of flame leapt from every surface, waved gaily from curtains and table tops, danced up the banister rail, ate through walls and floors. Mane and tail singed and curled, patches of fur burned clean away in a second by a casual caress of the prolific flames. He fought down the boiling, bile black sickness that welled in his mind at the sight of everything he'd fought for going up in flames. Through monumental will, he forced down the screaming red that tried to burrow out from behind his eyes, he maintained his choke hold on control. Just.

The light and fury was complete, no dark corners or shadowed recesses remained, every inch of every room was lit by flickering radiance. The only signs of darkness were harsh physical things, silhouettes of life and motion, four of them, at the top of the stairs.

Luna, standing opposed by three attackers. She was holding them at the second floor landing, her back to the bedrooms, keeping them at bay even as the home burned around them. A hissing, roaring crash as a section of ceiling gave way, annihilating the living room under several tons of flaming structural timber was the given sound track of this madness. The home groaned like a beast gasping its last, and with a sound like a cannon shot, a crack wide enough to put a hoof in opened along the entire length of the east wall. Flames licked out of this rent the second it opened. The fire was in the walls.

Gasping from the heat, choking and coughing from the smoke and ash, Behemoth cried out.

"Luna!!!"

The tallest of the four, lithe and graceful, snapped her head to look at him, startled turquoise eyes, beautiful even now, met his gold over the roaring hell between them. It was a momentary distraction. A moment was all the cultists needed to make the worst decision of their lives.

One of the three darted forward, catching the lunar princess across the cheek with a blow powerful enough to split it open along her regally high jaw line. A single, pure, glimmering drop of blood fell from her split cheek. Her eyes never left Behemoth, never wavered or flinched. He watched them change.

The form at the top of the stairs, long legged and sensual, changed. It grew, taking on a size all the more intimidating by the fact that it kept its terrible, terrifying beauty. Tall to begin with, now the peak of her head brushed along the ceiling, the dancing and lustrous mane darkening. It didn't burn where that sparkling carpet met flame, the flame was snuffed out, the dark, lustrous billow sapping away the heat and light. Beyond all logic, a cold wind blew through the home, causing Behemoth to shiver. Shadows, in lines and tendrils, snaked out of the deep hiding places the flame had sent them into, trailing across the room, coalescing around Her.

He watched that eye, watched as the pupil narrowed to a vertical slit, watched the light, the life, and the ever present hint of pain drain from it, replaced with a seething hatred, a deep seated madness and a fury that made the flames seem almost trivial by comparison. She smiled, lips curling back, exposing gleaming white, razor sharp teeth. A serpentine tongue flicked out between those twin rows of razors, lapping the thin trail of crimson off of her cheek, a brief flare of magical light and the wound had vanished.

Slowly, lazily, she rolled her vision back to those who had attacked her. Her laughter started low, barely heard over the flames, it grew steadily, reaching crescendo as a cackling roar that shook the home to its sundering foundation.

A glow grew around her, a swirling orb of force smothering flames, sucking floating ash and smoke into its vortex, and pulsing into a luminescent shield in front of her. The first magical pulse staggered them back, discharging with a sub-vocal *thooom!!* which stripped the wall paper from the entire upstairs hall, casting it after them like confetti, and sliced their flesh apart in dozens of small cuts. Before they could regain their balance to attack again or flee, the second wave hit.

The second pulse flayed even inch of skin from their frames, splattering it against the wall behind them in clumps and wet sheets, sizzling from the force of impact. Blood was everywhere, bare muscle moved, exposed to the air, and a high pitched, multi voiced shriek of agony and terror drowned out all other sounds. All others except Her laughter. Their collective cry way a thing awful beyond words, a wail of such extreme, unyielding agony that made it clear that there was nothing else in their universe any longer but the pain. It was not Behemoth's first time hearing that sound, yet it still turned his stomach as he looked on, mute and powerless.

The third pulse, seeming to take its time, as if she relished in their cries, burned away their flesh to the core, cooked it away to drift on the pulse like vapor thin wisps of burnt paper. Some unnatural force kept their stripped and scorched bones upright, as immaculate and clean as a doctors display, until the fourth pulse hit. Drywall and structural timber buckled and bent, a perfectly round corridor of desolation blasted down the hall, carving walls, floor and ceiling, and reducing the banister to shattered splinters and the dancing bones to swirling powder. The force of that final blast blew out the second floor wall at the end of the hall, propelling a cyclone of debris out into the sickly orange night.

For a few seconds, there was silence, the ever present flames, the cracked and split water pipes in the smashed walls, gushing like a hemorrhaging wound, the snap and crackle of live wires exposed by her magical fury. All of these things carried on without a whisper, as her eyes swung back and found him once more.

Behemoth was passingly aware of his hooves leaving the ground as he was drawn up to her, floating through wreathes of ash and fire as her magic manipulated him. Slamming him up against the wall at the head of the stairs with force enough to buckle the drywall and pop several of his stitches, she leaned in, razor teeth still gleaming in a rictus grin. Her whisper was cold and heavy, as cold as her breath against his neck as she leaned farther, her lips almost touching his intact ear.

"I know you, Beast..."

Her massive, armored head dipped, and her felt as well as heard her take a long, deep intake of breath, felt her muzzle at his neck as she sniffed deeply.

"And I know the darkness you carry. I can smell it's ancient presence burrowed into your heart...and another...my other...ohhhh, how deliciously tragic, three shredded souls, one shredded body..."

She leaned back, looking him in the eye, that manic smile steady as stone. The fire raged around them, the home squealing and crashing, the fire roaring, ravenously consuming everything it touched, the whole structure shuddered and groaned, the floor dropping several inches as a support beam was finally burned through, she paid it no mind.

"Let it out, Beast. Release the dark passenger you carry. Give in to it's urges, let it free...the exquisite terror, the glorious death it will bring will be...mmm...orgiastic..."

"Release it. Let go. Relish in the dark, terrible beauty you are capable of, live up to your potential, Beast."

She kissed him savagely, brutally. He felt the razor sharp shape of her teeth shoved against his mouth, tasted copper as they drew blood, blood which the serpentine and prehensile tongue lapped up eagerly. She pulled back.

"Luna."

His voice was choked to a harsh rasp by the ash and heat, as well as the magical pressure against his throat, but the words were clear.

"Luna. I know you're in there. Come back to me, beautiful. Don't lose yourself to this, not again."

Her pupils wavered and shivered, snapping back and forth between sinister verticality and their more traditional radiance. Luna's voice was caught between with the rest, wavering between the threatening timber of Nightmare and the more lovely and dulcet tones of herself as she fought it's hold.

"B-Behemoth, I...what is...ooohh...gods..."

Her recovery was stymied by the crash and rumble of three more cultists smashing their way into what was left of the first floor from outside. Her eye snapped back, the Nightmare retook control. With an annoyed growl and a casual blip of magic, she cast him aside with enough force to send him cartwheeling through the flame wreathed hole her previous display had created. She turned to face the new threat. The last Behemoth saw of her was a weeping hole tearing open in reality, a crackling orb of unnatural dark, swirling as a maelstrom around her, swallowing the light.

- - -

Rat Face stepped back, rancid breath like a compost heap coming in gasps. A grey pegasus mare, bruised and bloody from where she'd done her damnedest to fight back, was crumpled into a heap below the large second floor window. She was sobbing silently, pushing herself against the space below the window sill to get away from him. Smoke filled the room like a thick fog, and the far off crash and rumble as the house entered its death throes was diminished by the closed door to a background groan. The floor, close set wooden boards back-lit from below by vertical shafts of orange light shining up between the slats, shifted and dropped under her belly.

"Well...heh heh..."

Rat Face spoke, coughing a bit as the thickening smoke kept him from catching his breath.

"Well, that was fun...well, for me at least."

He stepped back to her, she recoiled, trying to scoot away, but there was nowhere to go. He reached down, grabbing a hank of her fizzy blond mane and yanking her tear streaked face out of the corner she'd been trying to bury it in. A squeak of pain forced out of her by his brutality.

"Funs over though, time to get to work. Ya see, you're gonna be a message, a message that's best sent when your bastard of a brother finds you dead and raped in his very own home."

He shoved her head back, smacking it into the window sill as his nub of a horn began to glow and drip with unfocused magical energy.

"It's nothing personal, ya know...but now you gotta di-"

A flicker of movement beyond the window caught his attention. A fraction of a second later, it exploded, shards of glass and splinters of broken wood slashing into the room just over Derpy's prostrate form. The last thing Rat Face saw, filled with fury and madness, an anger beyond the ability of words to portray, was a single golden eye.