"Wake up."

The voice was quiet, yet insistent. It wasn't angry, or rushed. Betrayed no sense of urgency, demand or passion. It simply was. That made it all the more terrifying.

"Open your eyes."

He tried to ignore it, try to dig deeper into the dark corners of his mind and escape that damned implacable voice.

"I'm not going to repeat myself."

Still, he tried to hide, to avoid opening his eyes and confronting the voice he recognized. The speaker, however, seemed to have run out of patience. Faintly, he heard the unmistakeable scrape of metal on metal, then the world of darkness behind his lids exploded into blinding light. A deafening roar pounded through his ears, drowning out all other sound save a high pitched whine.

Slowly, the whine faded, and equally slowly, the blinding light resolved itself into sight. The first image than swam into focus was a face with close set, beady eyes the same filmy yellow at the coat surrounding them. The eyes flicked and jumped, darting back and forth in surprise, or fear. It took him a few moments to realize he was looking at his own reflection. A blue wing with black pinions came in from the side of his vision, tilting the swivel mounted circular mirror up, bringing a second figure into view.

"Almost done here, and I didn't want you to sleep through this. Lesson one. I speak, you listen. I order, you obey."

He recognized this figure as well, the large blue and black stallion that had been the focus of his life for more then six months. Tall, imposingly so, with the muscular build of someone used to wearing guard armor, scarred, one eye gone and a fifth of one wing ending in scar tissue. The marks of a long, wearing decade.

"Y-you..."

His voice was cracked and came out strangled, his mouth was dry and tacky, as if he'd slept for a long time with his mouth wide open. Behemoth was working over his head, and as more and more situational awareness trickled back into Rat Face, he came to realize that he was laid back, strapped down across legs, stomach, chest and even by a thick band across his forehead, above which, just out of sight, Behemoth was just wrapping up.

"There we are, much better."

A gleaming stainless steel device, that looked for all the world like a wide, shallow, overly complex ice cream scoop swept by across his vision. He followed it with his eyes as it moved, watching as it was upturned and some grey, fibrous and slimy wet substance was poured from it into a small bowl on a wheeled cart next to his head, the unrecognizable lump accompanied by a small amount of viscous, clear fluid. With exquisite care, Behemoth deposited the metal instrument in a tall, wide mouthed glass jar full about three quarters of the way with clear liquid, which was stained with just the slightest bit of pink. As it splashed, the scent of sterilizing alcohol wafted over to him.

"Now we can speak without having to worry about any interruptions."

"What...what was..."

"Oh, this?"

Behemoth nudged the bowl, eliciting a metallic clink and a faint liquid sloshing.

"Not really surprised you didn't recognize it. Not many would. That, my good fellow, is your Tertio Oculus Nervi Racemus."

His brow furrowed, a look of panicky confusion spreading across his face, the rat tried to speak again.

"My...my what?"

Behemoth smiled. A genuine, happy grin that brought a twinkle to his eye.

"Of course, its technical name wouldn't mean a thing to you. Let me translate. This..."

He reached over, retrieving the bowl, and bringing it over so that, even while restrained, Rat Face could see the grey glob.

"Is your third eye nerve cluster."

"What...third eye...what the fuck are you talking about?!"

He voice was returning, and it's increasing clarity made his building panic all the more obvious.

Behemoths smile faded slowly, all emotion drained away, leaving a blank slate. Dull, lifeless eyes, like a dolls eyes, reflecting back a twisted and warped version of the world.

"Illiterate foal. Fine, I'll put this as monosyllabically as possible. This is the primary nerve cluster that controls your ability to access and control magic. "

His agitation grew with the volume of his voice. Behemoth's motions, always the pinnacle of restraint and self control, became erratic.

"I can't believe this. Are you truly this ignorant? There are maybe...three beings on this entire forsaken planet that could do what I've just done. Maybe three who could surgically remove a primary nerve bundle without leaving the subject a drooling, catatonic vegetable shitting itself, or flat out dead!!!"

He spun, sweeping aside the stands and perfectly ordered trays of surgical instruments with a shattering crash, the clatter of metal tools and the tinkling of shattered glass echoing throughout the confined space.

"THREE, YOU INSIPID PEON, THREE!!"

He upended the entire rolling cart, hurling it halfway across the room, the jar of sterilization alcohol exploded, filling the room with its acrid stink.

"AND THEY WOULDN'T!! THEY WOULDN'T HAVE THE COURAGE TO EVEN TRY!!!!"

Behemoth swept back, half climbing onto the table, a wickedly curved blade grasped in his intact wing, trembling from fury. His eye was wide, distorted with madness. As he leaned down, Rat Face could feel the fever heat of Behemoth's fury radiating off of him. The voice dropped suddenly to a harsh whisper, Behemoth's lips almost pressing against his ear.

"It is art. A perfect, flawless display of surgical skill. A beautiful symphony played in flesh with the blade as my instrument. No less stunning then the works of Bach, Beethooven, or Octavia."

The trembling of the blade came to a slow cease, returning to its rock steady hold. Behemoth's rapid, almost panting breaths slowed to a more sedate rhythm. A trickle of bright red blood ran down Rat Faces neck from where the razor honed metal had pressed against his throat.

"But no. Of course you wouldn't understand that."

He leapt off the table, landing with a grace seemingly belied by his size. His voice had changed, again, suddenly and without warning. Now, he was cheerful, bright eyed and grinning. But there was something off in that eye, something wrong with that grin. A barely perceived current of darkness, running just below the surface of that glassy, copper eye.

"Of course not, you've no reason too."

He started to move about the room, drifting in and out of Rat Face's vision, fading in and out of the surrounding shadows like a grim spectre. His voice, calm and maybe even a little amused, billowed out of the dark, tumbling slowly through the air.

"Tell me, are you familiar at all with the works of Shan Yu?"

It took the restrained a few moments to find his voice. The sudden change of topic and disposition catching him off guard. His cotton dry throat struggled to form words, and he was forced to lick his lips and swallow repeatedly before he could reply.

"Sh...Shan...who?"

A light chuckle met his question, flowing from the darkness on the other side of the room from which it had last issued.

"Shan Yu. Thought of himself as a sort of...warrior poet. Wrote many volumes delving into many topics not precisely fit for polite dinner table discussion. War. Torture. The limits of equine endurance, both mental and physical. Just how far a mind or body could be pushed before it would, inevitably, break."

Behemoth let this sink in, silence filling the room the measure of which Rat Face still couldn't appraise, and spoke again from behind the table, over his head.

"Shan Yu said, 'Live with a stallion for forty years. Share his house, his meals, and speak with him on every subject. Then tie him up, and hold him over the volcano's edge, and on that day you will finally meet his true self."

Starting with the faintest glimmer of caught and reflected light, dancing and spinning, Behemoth welled out of the shadows at the foot of the table, fully in Rat Faces restrained line of sight. The glimmer was a blade, twirling and spinning through the pinions of a wing obviously accustomed to such dexterity.

"Now, I don't happen to have a volcano handy, so instead, we'll make use of this,-"

The blade stopped, held casually in a confident grip.

"- and together, you and I will go on a journey of discovery. We will travel the length of your endurance, show you pain and horror your mind wont even be able to comprehend, and then, finally, meet your true self."

Rat Face laughed. It was an ugly, hollow sound, not at all conveying the sense of confidence and bravado he'd been trying to display. The cold sweat that had appeared on his brow and the quick, darting, rodent like movements of his eyes a clear indication of his growing fear, no matter how he tried to cover it.

"Please. Don't try to sell me that garbage. You and I both know that Celestia, who's glory and voice drowns out all others, would never let you practice torture and interrogation like that."

Behemoth nodded enthusiastically. The amused smile he'd been wearing since emerging from the shadows stretching into a full blown grin.

"Yes, normally, you'd be right. Under normal circumstances, the sanction to perform anything beyond a basic verbal interrogation would take weeks, in some cases months in order to acquire, but, you see, these aren't normal circumstances, you and those foals you commanded saw to that."

His faux confidence drained away, leaving the jittery fear and trembling uncertainty of a situation that was changing too quickly for his limited mental faculties to keep pace.

"Wh-what do you mean, we didn't...I didn't..."

"Oh, don't be so modest.. You destroyed the school, destroyed my home, killed Cherilee..."

Behemoth's own smile faded, the contours of his face dropping and panning out, becoming as flat and lifeless as the eye they contained.

"Raped my little sister. Any one of those things alone would've been enough to convince me to come after you, and damned be the consequences, but you made it so much simpler. Your minions inside, the ones running interference for you in my home...they struck Princess Luna."

Rat Face's stomach dropped through the floor, all color drained from his face, adding a pallor of pale illness to his already sickly complexion.

"Oh yes. They struck royalty."

Slowly, crawling back across his face inch by slow inch, Behemoth's smile returned.

"They never could have hurt her, and were foolish to even try, but that doesn't matter. The simple fact that they were stupid enough to strike, gave me complete and total sanction to break you, to punish you in any method I can imagine...and I assure you, this isn't my...first jaunt down this road, and that I have quite the...inventive, imagination."

"C'mon, you don't wanna do that. You're a farmer now, you don't wanna do that shit to me..."

"Yesterday, you would've been right. Yesterday, there was nothing in my life I wanted to avoid more then this table..."

Gently, almost lovingly, he ran a wing tip over the pristine white velvet, caressing each precision tool in turn nestled as they were, each in their own little pocket.

"-these tools...it's amazing how quickly things change."

The table held Behemoth's attention, and he stood stock still in silent contemplation for a span of time immeasurable in the madness he had created, when he finally spoke again, his voice was softer, quieter, yet somehow still carried the breadth of the space. His eye never wavering from the table as he spoke the next.

"I'm tired, tired of running, tired of hiding what I really am. You see, this is what I do, this is what I've always been good at, and I'm not going to run from it anymore. You, are going to die. Horribly, slowly, and screaming. You will tell me everything I want to know, and, heh, everything else, just to make the pain stop. And it won't. Not until I chose to let it."

The blade still dancing through his grip, Behemoth returned to cleaning and repairing the destruction his earlier fit of rage had caused.

"Ok, I get it, your mad, what we did was... it was wrong, I see that now, we should've just left you alone. Listen, I'll tell you whatever you wanna know, just...let me go, you just gotta untie me, and I promise, I'll tell you whatever you wanna know."

His rapid fire, pleading delivery drew an amused chuckle from Behemoth as he cleaned.

"You know, it'd be so much simpler if I could believe you, and I'd like too, sure."

He ceased his cleaning endeavors and rose back into sight, a wet and slightly stained rag at hoof.

"I'd like to believe that anything you'd tell me wouldn't be a complete ration of shit, sure, I'd like to believe that..."

He leaned over the immobile form, which nonetheless tried to draw back from him, as if trying to squirm into the table itself.

"But I cant. You see, you'd say anything right now to avoid what you think is coming, and the reality that is so, so much worse. You'd say anything, blame anyone, and that's not what I want."

"What do you want? Name it, I've got connections, our orders came from way up, I can get you whatever you want-"

"Stop talking."

"But you wanted me to talk, I'm talking, what do you-"

"If you don't shut up, I'll be forced to hard gag you, and I'd really rather avoid that. You see, that presents a whole set of its own risks. A gag too tight might choke you, leave you drowning in your own spittle...no, I cant let you get out of this that easily."

He went back to work, this last revelation leaving Rat Face in momentary shocked silence.

"Unfortunately, talk as you might, right now I wouldn't be able to believe a word you said, you could tell me the sky is blue, and I'd have to double check just to be certain. No, we're going to have to get past the dishonesty ingrained into every facet of your being, it'll be...two or three days, I think, before I can trust a word you say..."

The restrained found his voice.

"You're not serious, you can't do this, you fucking hear me?! YOU CAN'T DO THIS, YOU KNOW WHO I ANSWER TO, ASSHOLE, YOU KNOW WHO SENT M-"

He was silenced as the stained rag, smelling and tasting strongly of cleaning agents, was shoved into his mouth, and quickly bound tight with a second wrapped around the back of his skull.

"I warned you, didn't I? I warned you to stop talking out of turn...now, where was I...oh yes."

Rat Face shot him a wicked glare, equal parts impotent fury and terror building almost to the point of bubbling over. Behemoth continued.

"You know, it's an interesting task, interrogation. Talk to anyone of the exactly five specialists in this field employed by the crown, and you'll find that every single one has their own preferred methods, their own way of doing things. Subtle differences of technique and temperament can have significant effects on both the quality and quantity of information received."

With a grunt of exertion, he righted the heavy wheeled cart that had been spun and tumbled across the room, replacing the instruments on its surface with deliberate, exacting precision.

"At the end of the day, however, there are basically three broad techniques, tried and tested over the centuries to do what we do."

"The first, and most common by far, is the application of serums, unguents, and other chemical based persuasive's. The appeal of this approach is that it is clean, clinical, and get results, in most cases, with a minimum of...long term deleterious effects."

Blade after blade, instruments beyond definition or explanation returned to their place on the cart barely within the periphery of Rat Face's vision, the sonorous voice of Behemoth rumbling from outside his cone of vision as he continued straightening up.

"They have their downsides, however. Chemical persuasion is...inconsistent. Certain groups train their agents to resist those techniques, and, as with any chemical effect, it's effectiveness can vary drastically from individual to individual, in some cases, going so far as a complete biological immunity to commonly employed serums."

With a sloshing gurgle and the scent of strong alcohol, a new jar was filled with sterilization fluid and replaced the one that had been shattered.

"Or, even worse, you could prove to be allergic to one of the components, and go into anaphylactic shock and die before any useful information could be gleaned. Now that, that'd just...well, I just couldn't risk that."

Behemoth leaned back against the table, the fact that, under his added weight it remained motionless a silent testament to the strength of its construction. The steady, fluid motion of the blade held in his wingtip almost hypnotic as he spoke.

"Another option would be the usage of psychological assault, techniques that, while not inflicting any physical trauma, break down and wear away ones mental resilience. Sleep deprivation, sensory deprivation or overload, water-boarding, and other psychologically traumatic, yet, physically harmless, interrogation techniques."

The blade stopped its geometric twirling, held still so its perfect, flawless surface caught the harsh overhead light and reflected it into a single bright bar that met Behemoth's dead eye, adding a pupil of brilliant luminescence to the milky white orb.

"But, those methods have a similar set of drawbacks to the chemicals. They can be resisted, they can be fought back against and take weeks upon weeks to bear fruit, if they ever do. Then there's the threat of irreparable psychological destruction that would unfortunately leave you in a vegetative state, impossible to get information from. As before, that possibility just isn't an acceptable risk."

He heaved himself off the table, and turned to face Rat Face again, his head haloed in brilliant light by the single overhead fluorescent bulb.

"Which leaves us with option three, my specialty. Physical persuasion. Now, to the uninitiated, it's of course known by a plethora of names, torture, being one of the more common, but that's a cheap, insulting term that pales to represent the skill, the training needed to do the things I do. No...medieval brute in a black hood with a sconce of hot pokers could do what I do, no, this takes medical precision and knowledge on par with the greatest surgeons of our time, paired with the patience, dexterity and steady hooves of a veteran watch maker. As I said before, it really is an art."

He turned away, replacing the blade, and pulling from the table a device of inexplicable construction, which strapped over his intact wing, and ended in a single, incredibly thin needle probe over a foot in length, a hum of live electrical power could be heard from the device, as it shifted and twitched with nearly microscopic adjustments.

"For instance, this, and, you're really gonna wanna hold still for this..."

With a sudden jolt of motion, the prod met the side of his head, behind the eye where the bone was thinnest. It gave way with a cracking pop Rat Face felt as well as heard. There was a prick of pain, but no worse then a booster shot. The electrical whine spooled up, grew louder, and then dispersed with a sizzle pop. Then he felt nothing from the miniscule puncture at all, his head just felt, strangely...cold.

"You see, when the body experiences enough pain, suffers enough damage, the brain will, as a defense mechanism, shut the body down, put it into a protective coma. An ingenious little bit of evolution that the mind can trigger to try and shelter itself from such ravages. My genius knowledge of neuroscience, a mastery of anatomy, and an unwavering wing skill just let me neutralize that little function with the application of a low voltage, short duration electrical shock. Now, no matter what I do to you...no matter how...wonderful the things I do to you will be, and I assure you, they will, you'll be awake and aware, for every. Single. Second."

He leaned back, a smile of immense pride displaying seemingly every tooth in his head. The electrical probe was returned to the table, and replaced with a long handled scalpel, with a long, delicately curved blade.

"See? I told you it'd be impressive. Now, lets begin in earnest, you won't be needing that anymore, besides, I like to enjoy the unmuffled fruits of my labors."

Behemoth leaned forward, bringing the blade down to flesh...then hesitated.

"I want you to understand, you have only yourself to blame for this. You CHOSE to attack my family. You CHOSE to attack the school. You CHOSE to kill Cherilee. A series of deliberate choices is what led you to my table, choices you could have walked away from at any time. You could have chosen to not destroy lives and happiness, and avoided this entirely. But you didn't. Now, there are two choices left to you, just two left in the full scope of your life, and as with those that came before, you have full control over them. One, is how many days it takes for me to finally let you die, and two, is how many pieces you are in when I finally CHOSE to let you."

The gag was removed, and Behemoth set to work.

- - -

Outside, standing silent vigil beyond the fire gutted remains of the Ponyville schoolhouse, two Lunar Guards glanced to each other uneasily, out of the corner of their eyes. They were veterans, had seen and heard, and in some cases, done, terrible things. But they'd never heard any living thing make sounds of anguish and pain like those that echoed out from within the flame blackened structure.

They remained motionless, all except their eyes, stoic in their duty, as the plastic sheeting covering the damage fluttered and flapped in the faint wind of this sunny, beautiful day, and the screams drew out longer then any being should have breath enough to issue them.