According to legend, and the darker pony tales told by the daring around campfires in the wilderness, Discord had held a court of madness during his reign, consisting of many mad creatures that all spread his manic glee as well as the harm of his insane and unrestrained cruelty.
The godlings of Discord's court did his bidding to spread strife and misery where they could. They defied and execrated order and stability, and did what they could to tear it down. They used inappropriate mirth, cruel tricks, random pain, and helpless horror. All but one.
The quietest and most sedate member of the court almost did not belong. It was a staid, sedate thing, of indistinct description. It did not bluster and parade before the population, did not trumpet itself as a creature of great power. It stalked along the shadows, creeping along the growing and elongated shade of eventide, hiding in the umbral corners and crevices until the night came. Then it used the most insidious weapon to spread the terror of chaos.
The truth.
The Whispering God, the quiet corrupter, never told a lie in all its existence. It never needed to. It whispered soft questions into the ears other others, and made statements of the facts that were too obvious to be denied even by those most desperate to deny them.
The truth-telling being whispered the words into the twitching ears of those teetering on the brink. One soft, verbal push later and they tumbled into the abyss, taking more with them more often than not. Its chaos was quiet, and was slow and small. But it was the purest chaos of all.
When the court of madness was swept away, during the sealing of Discord, the maddest and most vocal were the first to go. They did not get sealed in stone. The gibbering godlings were cast into Tartarus to languish forever, defeated and unable to spread their misery. All of them were sent, but one.
The quiet one, the subtle one, never made enough noise to be noticed. Its name never was spoken too loudly nor did it ever make its position known well enough to be hunted down. It crept into the shadows during the great purgation and hid, until the danger had passed.
It slipped out into a clearer, cleaner, more ordered world. It was a thing of rumor and legend, a whisper and a tale of what had once been. It was not real, so far as any pony could tell. Not anymore. Just another legend from a different and horrible time.
That suited the Whispering God well. It continued to creep along the shadows, through the threads of darkness to find receptive ears. It knew the truth, it told the truth, it would only ever speak the truth.
The horrible, horrible truth.
Mister Carrot Cake shuffled around his business and home in the dead of night. He didn't bother to put on a light, as he knew every inch of the place. He just moved through the kitchen to one of the small storage areas he had long ago covertly set up as a second sleeping area. There was a cot hidden in there, with a thin pad, and a flour bag stuffed with old kitchen towels as a pillow.
It had been another successful night, which was why he had been banished from the bedroom in the house he paid for. His success meant he would lie on the stiff padding, with the lumpy pillow, and internalize his worthlessness. It was the right thing to do. He had been informed again how useless he was.
He slowly fell onto his side, not reacting when the hard impact against the cot hammered his bruises. The nascent contusions inflicted by both his wife and... he wasn't sure of the other parties... the soreness was just starting, the broken blood vessels under his coat soon to discolor his body with a purplish tone. He would need to wear his usual beating clothes for a while.
He knew how best to deal with his situation.
His agonized body settled into the cot in the closest to comfort that he could possibly approach. The hard, unforgiving canvas, with the lumpen and solid-packed pad, was much like his wife. It appeared to be an imperfect but passable comforting space, but was hard, unsupportive and hurt him over and over.
A hoof instinctively slapped across one cheek, his own body knowing its role. His body was obedient. Subservient. He couldn't think that of his wife! His wife was supreme. She was above and beyond anything. Higher than Princess Celestia or Princess Luna. Queen. Goddess. Eros Turannos.
His mind knew it wasn't how things were supposed to go. But his mind was a traitor. A heretic from the holy path. His mind had always been a betrayer. He had so foolishly filled it with such rubbish as education and self-development. Garbage. Rot. Uselessness in the glorious servitude of the grand goddess.
He should have loafed and slacked in school, rather than getting good grades. He should have left himself an empty, ignorant shell, incapable of deep thought or rationality. He should never have joined the after school clubs and organizations, never learned how to have self-esteem and self-worth.
Knowing the lessons was an impediment. It gave his brain a chance to know it was wrong. To feel it was wrong. He knew what he had to do but didn't. His body made sure of that. His body was a faithful soldier. A prophet of the secret goddess, whatever his brain might say.
All the pain was proper. The agonized body and thoughts. The ringing insults and utter devaluation. The bucks, the slaps, the kicks, the bites. He only ended up in the hospital once, and managed to spin a convincing yarn about a convoluted but plausible bakery accident. She only visited him once. Waited for the doctors and nurses to leave the sound-tight room then berated him, insulted him for leaving her alone to run the bakery on her own when it was his job to make the money she spent on others. Then, as he was in the hospital anyhow, she left him a parting warning not to dare do it again.
He had convinced the nurse on duty he had fallen out of the bed.
He stared out into the darkness, body fighting brain again. The brain knew all, but it wasn't strong enough to fight the body. The body, the carnal fleshiness, knew where the bread and butter came from. Appearances. Seeming. He was worthless without her. Even the brain didn't fight back. After the years of other males telling him to his face, and her demanding he listen to their insults, he had no choice but to believe it.
Most nights the darkness gave him little, just nothingness at which he could stare. The inky blackness that ran on forever, and which could be banished by the tiniest sliver of light, never did more. Until the very darkness twitched, and wound suavely, languidly, around the small finger of illumination that intruded on the emptiness.
Then the darkness engaged.
The darkness whispered.
“You may trust me, though you do not know me,” the blackness around Mr. Cake whispered. “In all the time I have existed, through all the ages and across all the environments, I have been truth. I have never spoken a lie in all my existence. I cannot lie. I excoriate lies and liars. I only speak the truth.”
'It's only my mind...' Mr. Cake thought. 'A trick of the light and my own mind talking to me. I need the company...' “What kind of truth?”
The darkness was silent for a moment, but responded in the same quiet voice. “All truth, and only truth. I do not look aside, do not avoid. I see what is at the heart of all things. Seeing only what is, I tell only the real. Fact, and nothing but.”
“And you'll tell me all that?” Mr. Cake asked, humoring the voice that tickled across his ears.
“All of it, sparing not a detail,” the whisper answered. “To know is to see the world as it really is. To see the world as it is is to know the right thing to do. Yes, there is a filter through the emotions, but they are yours. They will not let you down in any situation.”
Mr. Cake's body almost threw him from the cot, to rush into the darkness. From truth. From fact. From knowing what it knew anyhow but spoken without filter or lies. “And what is the truth?”
“Your marriage was always a lie, from the beginning to now,” the small voice whispered, with a cold evenness. “She told you so when you started dating, about how she wished for your money and your clean social position. And that you knew it wasn't a lie. You said to yourself it was a lie, a strange, cold joke she would retract. You said it and said it and said it. Until the wedding night.
“The honeymoon you never took. You paid for the beautiful resort, you paid for the fun excursions she took. You were about to leave the room when she required you to leave the bed. But she didn't allow you. She demanded you stay there, to watch the nameless, unidentified stallion be with your wife. That was the first emotional pain. Making you watch, making you hear how ineffectual you were.”
Mr. Cake didn't want to respond. He shut his eyes. But found only the darkness behind his eyelids.
“That was the first time a male touched your body in a sexual way. But not the last time,” the whisper continued, ignoring or feeding on Mr. Cake's desire to hide. “He wanted only to see the size of your genitals, to make a declaration on their size, as compared to him. Held them, showed them to your wife beside his. She smiled, seeing you were not his equal. She spoke such terrible things to you, and he shoved you down and took her again.”
“It was over when we came back to Ponyville,” Mr. Cake whispered, with a tightness in his voice. “She showed her affection when customers came in. She was with me all the time in the square and at festivals. She laughed at my jokes and supported the bakery with all she could.”
“Appearances,” the whisper said slowly, drawing out the syllables, adding all the sibilance it could, Mr. Cake's ear twitching as it almost felt the brush of cold breath from the thing that was and was not there. “She hated it. Was disgusted by it. She felt herself above the lowly activity of toil. Felt herself better than you. You were not worthy of her affection, so she was sickened by having to give it to you to appease the masses.”
“But she said she loved me,” Mr. Cake lamely countered.
“She lied,” the voice declared, a rumble rolling through the whispered tone. “She lied so that the unknowing ponies of town would always smile and cheer her, and never shun her hoof or her presence. But they were lied to. Most never suspected they had been lied to. Insulted. Belittled by being the focus of her lies. She spit in their faces with her false front, grinning with glee as she betrayed them without concern. But you know that some were told the truth. She did pull the mask aside. In some situations.”
“The males...” Mr. Cake sighed. It was hardly a sound at all. The words drifted on the melancholy breeze and died mere inches from his lips. They reached far enough.
“Far away men, first of all...” the whisper said, with an almost apologetic tone. “Strangers. Nameless, often faceless behind masks and costumes. It amused her to be so formal in her hideousness. She treated you with such disdain. The men were allowed to humiliate you verbally, and by genital comparisons. They touched you in ways and places that shocked and pained. But it was never enough for her, was it? No, she wanted to spread her lies, her ugly lies...”
Mr. Cake's teeth grit, and he pulled into more of a fetal position. The darkness oozed into ever crevice of his new inward-pulling form, nestling in the vales of his supine form.
“Men from your home. Men you thought were friendly. That you thought were friends. Did they begin as brutes, or did she make them brutes? That question even I cannot answer for you. If you would know, ask them, or ask yourself,” the whispering darkness said, settling like a cool and comforting blanket across Mr. Cake.
“They were my friends. They were good ponies, before I got married...” Mr. Cake said, bitterness creeping into his voice, but washing out as soon as it got notable.
“All the pain and the misery, and for what? For her? She tells you that you are worthless but she keeps you. Why does she? Why?” The whispering voice asked, stroking across Mr. Cake's ears and letting its words flow like oil.
“I- I... I don't...” Mr Cake trembled, afraid of the comfort he got from the darkness. He didn't want to be comforted by the whispers. But no one had taken any interest in him in a long time, nor treated him in such a friendly manner. Even if the words hurt, he was being made to think about important things. “I don't know... I don't know...”
“You know...” the voice whispered firmly, echoing in Mr. Cake's ear.
“I don't...” Mr. Cake pitiably insisted.
“You do, but won't say. I'll say,” the voice insisted.
“No... anything but that...” Mr. Cake whimpered.
“Because your love feeds the emptiness inside her, strokes her bloated ego like a corpulent, cancerous housecat. The love you retain, like a relic long since removed from meaning, feeds the ugly monster that rests in the void that should be a heart, because it means she is perfect and wonderful. If she can mine love and devotion using only her disdain and hate, she is the winner,” the whisper said, its tone never moving from a flat relation of facts.
Mr. Cake sobbed, the hard words hitting all the harder in the unwavering whisper of the mysterious thing that surrounded him. “No... I do love her. She... loves... me...”
“Then why the others?” The whisper asked.
“She... she has... she...” Mr. Cake stammered, his wife's pre-programming starting to slip as his rote answers crashed headlong into the synthesis of all that the whisper had made him consider. “She has needs. Powerful physical needs. And it is true love to give them to her.”
The whisper almost smiled as it intoned, “You don't.”
Mr. Cake stopped moving. He stopped breathing. If his heart could have stopped beating it would have. He had considered such a thing before, but the layers of blinding and thoughtless love, as well as the shields made of disdain, had protected his mind from simple facts. Layer by later the armor had been built, of his own self-delusion and his wife's caustic hate. He'd been disallowed from realizing any real facts, forced to watch a bizarre shadow-show almost from the outside. He had to think about the outside, not the inside.
She got her pleasure, and he was there. But he didn't give it. He was an afterthought. A living punching bag that could squeak out words of live and devotion, while being physically or emotionally abused. Mounted by men he knew while his wife laughed at him. She didn't care that he didn't want it. She beat him for daring to say such a thing. All for her.
“All for her...” Mr. Cake lamely said, a last-ditch effort from his well-beaten psyche to defend the cognitive dissonance that held together his pasteboard world and papier-mâché ego. But even then, there was the smallest hint that he had some spine. The statement was also made with a tiny touch of disdain.
“All. For. Her,” the whisper repeated, increasing the venom to direct Mr. Cake's thinking.
Hate tried to find purchase in his soul. But Mr. Cake was too beaten and humiliated. Too broken. What once had been a good and happy stallion, glad to have a home and family and a job was a hollow husk. He was filled with the fetid vapors of stagnated self-loathing and sorrow. He was ironically filled with emptiness, save the toxic regrets and hopelessness.
“What do I even do?” Mr. Cake asked, more of himself than his whispering interlocutor.
“You give her what she wants, to your detriment,” the small voice said, in a caring and sympathetic tone.
“I wanted her to be happy... but I wanted it to,” Mr. Cake sighed.
“Life can have two people happy with each other. But she doesn't want that. She wants your misery. If you ever smiled it would be the end of her,” the whisper insisted.
“She'd die if she didn't have her good reputation...” Mr. Cake mused, bloodshot eyes creaking open to cast towards a nondescript flour sack. “All the proof, the time line, the secret evidence of all she's done, neatly typed up, in an envelope, ready to be sent out to the newspaper. But... but no... I can't. Not to her.”
“Even now, even now...” the voice sighed, with a maudlin note. “Even now you can't take your own side.”
“I can't. Not that. Anything but that. Anything...” Mr. Cake groaned, hooves pressed over his eyes and head thrashing lightly on his makeshift pillow.
“Well... what have you otherwise that you can take away from her? How else can you hurt her to repay all the misery she has brought?” The whisper questioned.
Mr. Cake was again silent and still. The worthless stallion realized that he wasn't so worthless. His value was in being the valueless punching bag his wife could abuse, and who other men could use as a cheap scaffold for a tiny, timorous ego that needed easy victories in order to feel special and important. He was of immense value, a rare thing. Someone who would take the abuse.
“I have me,” Mr. Cake whispered, to himself. He was forgetting his mysterious compatriot, because his mind was beyond caring. He had been led down the primrose path, by truth alone. The truth he denied himself. He would not deny it any longer. He had allowed himself to be used. He would take away what his wife longed for, and hurt her in private.
“You are nothing... yet of inestimable value,” the blackness whispered, smoothly gliding across Mr. Cake's ears and moving almost imperceptibly towards the door into the kitchen. “Your very life is a paradox. Valueless, yet priceless. Your hideous spouse requires you, for her very existence; her cruel and immoral existence. This is the truth. I would never lie. I cannot.”
“I know it's the truth,” Mr. Cake moaned, hissing through his clenched teeth as his body curled into a fetal position.
“You know a solution. It is the truth that you know, because I cannot lie. I do not lie,” the blackness quietly intoned.
“You do not lie...” Mr. Cake repeated, in a faded and distant tone. He knew the solution. Every so often he made the attempt, but always pulled back when he felt the dim grayness and fading intruding on the corners of his perception. He want back to suffering because he could not admit to himself how truly wrong it was.
“It will not change,” the voice asserted. “She will not change. Despite all the moral pressure you put on her in the earlier days, the pleading and the appeals to a conscience she does not have, she still treated you in a manner no being should have to endure. She had a weakness. You know the weakness. You can trust the truth.”
Mr. Cake was deaf to the smooth whispers passing like the breeze across dead leaves. He didn't need the whispering shadows he half-believed were his own broken mind to tell him what the truth was. He had always known. The very first time he could have seen the police, a lawyer, or at least a friend. He had no friends any longer. His wife had strangled all his relationships by working his hooves past the bone in the bakery, earning money she spent on others. He was alone, with her. Her ready victim.
“The fading gray dimness is the border of the vale of tears,” the whisper said, as Mr. Cake opened up one of his ovens. “It is a gala night, you know. Closing the curtain on the tragedy that is her direction.”
Mr. Cake snuffed out the pilot light and twisted the handle on the oven to open the gas line all the way. The pungent odor of the gas flooded his senses as he practically pushed his whole body into the oven's gaping maw. He held back a cough and swallowed his gorge as it rose in his throat. Each long, deep breath filled his lungs with more of the odious scent, and made his head swim.
The familiar dizziness made his mind whirl, but did not make him pull away like it used to. His mind filled with facts and truth, he could only think on them, and the misery he was forced to endure, alone. The misery that was his life. A half life. A shell of a life. He wasn't obeying the demands of his sadistic pseudo-queen. Eros Turannos was being dethroned. He was casting down the beast with the sacrifice of his form.
The gray mistiness crawled along the edges of his perception, his limbs grew weak and his mind didn't so much swim as drown. A few more breaths and he would be past the point of no return, too weak and mentally wavering to pull out and shut off the gas. Even knowing that he made no move to rescue himself. He closed his eyes, and melded with the darkness behind his eyelids.
The darkness that had come watched as the truth brought the poor, victimized stallion low. It would drive such a chaotic response. The who town would react to such a shocking happening. But it was a small reaction. A new father, a stressful business, and then... too orderly, too neat.
Mr. Cake's hidden area was rifled through, until the bulging manila envelope was removed. Stuffed to the gills with photographs, medical reports, dates, times, names and descriptions of physical features that could not be denied. The envelope was helpfully addressed to the Ponyville Gazette, and had all the postage needed. Mr. Cake was prepared, but had never sent it. Just knew it was there.
The envelope swept off, borne by a tide of darkness. It vanished into the night. Mr. Cake had been a good sport about the truth. And his death was only a small bit of chaos. He deserved to be vindicated, if not for his own sake, then for the sake of stirring the pot.
Mrs. Cake wore her widow's weeds well. There was nothing and everything wrong with a shining black garment that hugged her ample figure, and revealed every curve as she cried her crocodile tears behind her masque of crepe and sorrowful words. She was so thankful that so many showed up, and she was so... curiously caustic about how her husband's act had left her along to toil in menial drudgery. But the shadow of inappropriate tone vanished amid a fresh load of sighs and false tears.
Old friends, strangled out of Carrot Cake's life, came to his graveside and quietly asked what became of him, and why he never came to them. They knew only regrets, because somehow they had lost track of him. He was always so busy, and always shepherded away from them by his wife, who kept him busy. They all regarded her with guarded pity. She played the devastated wife with too much perfection. Like it was just a role, and stirred dim memories of half-formed or cut-off conversations on indirect topics connected to Mrs. Cake.
A lot of men came to the funeral. Ponyville locals and very strange, unknown figures from out of town. They were all tight-lipped about their place of origin and more so about their connection to the fallen Mr. Cake. The only one who seemed to know and welcome them was Mrs. Cake, who whispered to them in the moments when she thought no one was looking.
No one saw her.
Except the shadows.
Later that night Mrs. Cake went to bed alone for the first time in a long time. Without her ready victim to humiliate her hung lovers were dull and gray. There was nothing to it having good sex if she couldn't also ruin someone's life. She already missed kicking and spitting on her husband, watching his feeble genitals never measure up, seeing him slink off.
The stupid, selfish fool. She had assumed he was too beaten and broken to ever dare to defy her in such a way. But he had. He had dared to kill himself and leave her to raise the squalling brats that other men had sired, and run the business that had paid for her adulterous liaisons. At least she could think on his desperate explanations for the appearance of their children and smile a bit. But it passed quickly. She'd need a new victim who could cook. She was certainly not going to work herself to death to retain the standard of living she deserved as sexual goddess.
She stare hatefully into the darkness that surrounded her, and gasped when she saw the darkness glare back.
“There is a package that was delivered to the Ponyville Gazette,” the darkness whispered, in a rumbling, sepulchral tone. “It was lost amid the shuffle and the volume of correspondence. But it will be found by the night editor and opened. Inside that are photographs of men abusing and humiliating one Carrot Cake, and his wife encouraging it. There are medical reports that can be seen in a new light. Names, dates, places, as well as very detailed descriptions of birth marks, scars and genitals that could only have come from someone observing in a manner attested to in the accounts.”
She had been shocked by the glowering darkness. Her blood grew colder and colder as the funereal whisper spoke to her, as out of the depths of a tomb. What it was saying made her imagine her world destroyed. He carefully constructed alibi of a life, burned to ashes as her true nature came to light. “N-no... you're lying. He wouldn't... he couldn't have...”
“He had the envelope. But he only held it, fondled it, like a talisman or a security blanket. To have it was enough, until he looked fixedly on the truth. But he didn't send it. I did, just to help,” the whisper said.
Mrs. Cake's world collapsed around her, like a sandcastle hit with a tidal wave. She was tumbling through the blackness as she imagined the morning headlines. She would be ruined. At best cut off from every bit of contact; her 'lovers' would turn on her, and condemn her for dragging them down with her. At worst she was staring down years and years of jail. And those same lovers would be only too happy to save their own skins testifying against her. “No... you're lying... you didn't... he didn't... it's not true.
The whispering darkness almost seemed to smile. The tone in that dark whisper surely did have a smile when it quietly said, “You may trust me, though you do not know me. In all the time I have existed, through all the ages and across all the environments, I have been truth. I have never spoken a lie in all my existence. I cannot lie. I excoriate lies and liars. I only speak the truth...”
