Crippled, Beaten and Broken.

There was power flowing through his veins.

The Orb pulsing with blue light, the golden chain from which it dangled growing hot against his skin, searing the shape of their links into his flesh.

The Vendor smiling crookedly, showing off more teeth than any human being should ever have.

The convention hall spinning around him, blurring into oblivion, then the Void rising up to meet him, that black abyss staring at him.

He smiled and let himself fall.

Then he was in Equestria, with its vomit-inducing technicolored landscape and prissy, pathetic equine inhabitants. He felt the Orb’s dark power coursing through his veins, and he released pure hell upon the Gala.

He relished the screams of terror which were inevitably followed by screams of pain when the lighting from his fingers struck them.

He rained destruction down on their furry little heads and he was loving every solitary second of it.

But then those two princesses had to ruin it: they showed up and he fought them, but then, just as he was starting to get the upper hand, they cheated and used their combined magic to throw him through a wall.

That certainly out a serious damper on his day and he had to crawl into the nearest sewer entrance to get his strength back. There in the darkness he had plotted his next attack, practically giggling over all of the carnage that he was going to inflict, how he was going to make them suffer for ruining his life.

But that had all fallen away from him when They had arrived.

They had been following him, as he learned from the taunts of their Master, tracking him using the Orb. They had peeled themselves from the shadows around him and swarmed across him, their cold, vaporous bodies smothering him, restraining him, choking him.

Then they were dragging him down, down, down into the depths. Down into an eternity of torment.

He didn’t know how long it took for the living shadows to take him to their master, but it had felt like hours and minutes and no time at all at the same time.

They threw him to the ground and retreated a ways.

The ground that he lay upon was cold and as smooth as marble, but it wasn’t marble, it was a dark material that seemed to radiate burning cold.

The Orb started to glow again and he felt the energy gathering at his fingertips. He’d make the fucker who had the balls to kidnap him pay.

With a roar he lurched to his feet and summoned a ball of cracking lightning in his hand.

“All right, you motherfuckers!” he bellowed with a sneer, “Come on and try me, I dare you!”

The shadows didn’t respond, but the creature behind him did.

“My, my, my, what an impressive display.” it said in a voice that was neither male nor female, “I must say, you interest me, boy.”

He turned to hurl the lighting, but stopped when he saw it.

“Like what you see?” it asked, smiling knives at him.

He backed away, “Wh-what the fuck ARE you?!” he asked, his bravado rapidly fading.

The being chuckled, “I guess that little cartoon didn’t show you everything. But, if you must know, I am what you might call a true, pure-blooded denizen of Tartarus.”

He had blinked stupidly and, in a flash, it had crossed the room and was face-to-face with him, its shifting body shrank to match his size and the myriad tendrils and twisted appendages retracted into its gaunt trunk.

“And you, my little human, are my latest toy.”

He had lifted his hand and thrown the ball of lightning, but the being had just caught it and inserted it into a slit on what he supposed was its stomach.

It laughed, and the sound made him remember his father’s belt slapping his skin.

Then the Orb was violently ripped from around his neck and the shadows had fallen upon him, giggling like little children playing ball at recess.

He awoke to a stabbing pain in his right hand which was quickly followed by one in his right. He yelled in pain and he was met by cruel, mirthful laughter that made his gorge rise.

Then his sight returned and he saw himself facing a massive mirror with a gilded frame that depicted an orgy of creatures too horrible to describe, but the shock of that faded when he managed to fully process what had happened to him.

He was suspended five feet in the air, his limbs stretched across a rectangular metal frame that hung from thick chains. His hands and feet had been nailed to each point of the frame.

That alone was horrific enough, but the trauma that had been inflicted to his torso was far, far worse: the skin of his stomach had been peeled back to expose the muscle, the wound was held open by several barbed hooks that were attached to wires which had been wound around his body until they sliced into his flesh.

And there were maggots squirming in the wound, the sight of their gleaming white bodies writhing across his exposed dermis made him howl in pure, unfettered terror.

And that was just the first day.

The being, who had forced him to call it Master would mutilate him to the point of mortally wounding him before using its magic to heal his body, leaving raw, red scars as it did to “keep score” as it had said.

And so the days passed on into months. He had screamed until his vocal chords had snapped, been healed, and had done it all over again, being thrown into the mud after it had finished with him.

All of these passed before his eyes and he opened his mouth to scream.

But then, as if someone had hit the PAUSE button on his nightmares, the parade of horrors stopped, then dissipated as a blue light shone into the darkness, piercing it, driving it back and then engulfing him.

He whimpered and curled up as the sad, horrified face of Princess Luna swam into view, and he didn’t move from his position for many, many hours, not until the screams faded into the distance.