~Ø~
The inky blackness dissipated away to the sight of my claws dangling past my head as my legs were held suspended in the air by something very cold. I coughed out whatever it was clogging my mouth and my throat as I watched the thick liquid sprew past my lips and stained my claws with their blackness.
“...where...am I…”
Another type of liquid began to stream in a single line down the length of my left arm, reaching the black splotch from my previous cough, though the thick liquids did not mix as the redness of my blood was consumed entirely by the blackness of the supposed tar.
“...blood?...”
I followed the stream of red up to the source from which it welled, finding a knife impaled in the left of my chest where my scales had been weakest; I then became aware of the pain I was supposed to be in.
“Is someone awake down there?” I heard the voice not from its source but from the metallic halls it echoed off. “Supper ain’t gonna be served for a long while, so there ain’t no need in rushing the ingredients.”
Blood gathered into sizeable droplets at the ends of my claw, dripping past the distance that separated me from the floor into sewage gate below me, where a puddle of the same liquid poured past the wooden bars.
“...I’m not bleeding...that much…” I exhausted the rest of the energy still linger in my system to arch my back, giving me a view of my bruised lower body where I found no other part of me that bled. “...then where...is all this blood coming from?...”
My eyes dilated past the darkness and blurriness of the room to the thing closest to my hanging form, using the blue rays at the end of the long hall as my only source of light. I found then not the single source to still draining blood, but rather, its sources.
A billowing scream escaped the sore wasteland that was my throats as I recoiled away from the death next to me, though that only served to pain me and for my face to swing right into the carcass of the thing.
I had slipped inside the stomach of a cow that long since had its belly cut wide open, trying to scream as blood poured onto my eyes and into my ears and mouth. The screams became muffled by the rest of the body as I finally pulled out from its inside, blinded by death as I still swung.
“Now who is down there making all that racket!” The echo from the halls boomed into the room I inhabited as distant footsteps accompanied the sound. “I’m tryin’ to make the reopening of Sweet Apple Acres the best it can be, and I'm prepared to gut any treasured ingredients hampering such a big event.”
My mind became overloaded with such thoughts that served to weigh my body down more. Where was I? Why was I here? Who was that voice and why am I in a room of death with a knife impaled in my scales?
Such thoughts were flushed away from my mind by a primitive instinct that gave my mind the clarity it needed to survive the possible situation before me. I didn’t quite know why, but I wasn’t going to trust the voice wanting to gut me with the knife already inside me.
The same knife which my claws rose to wrap around.
I allowed myself three timely breaths: one to gather my wits, the second to prepare me for the pain, the third to give energy to the claws that began to pull back on the blade.
I screamed a pained cry once more as I watched the blood ooze out from their loosening barricade. The trembles that course through by body and pained my every bone almost caused me to lose my grip on knife’s handle, but the sounds of approaching footsteps scared me enough into fully pulling it out.
“What did I say ‘bout making noise!” I heard the voice no longer as an echo as they turned onto the hall that led into my room. “I’ll see to it that you’ll always have the need to cry, but never the mouth to do so with!”
My claws dangled above my head once more as the blood from the gash was already reaching the handle of the knife, and I knew that I had no more time to catch my breath, as the footsteps sounded closer.
Forgetting the pain of my wound as I arched my back to place my knife at the rope tying my legs together, I cut at the strands at as fast as a pace as I could handle. I heard the footsteps just at the archway of the room, trying to ignore it like how I was ignoring the edges of my vision beginning to darken.
The strands of the rope became too weak to support dangling form as they finally snapped, allowing me to fall face first into the blood-drenched wood of the sewerage, before glancing up at the thing that had entered the room.
I saw a sweet old green pony carrying a surprised expression h seeing my fallen form, who smiled in a way that twisted the definition of the word that would scare away little foals. And in her shadow, I experienced an unspeakable evil that possessed my being with its coldness at just the sight of it.
I was torn away from its influence by the wooden bars below me snapping from my impact, as I began to plummet into the depths of the darkness that awaited me below.
The discontent hum from the mare resounded alongside me down the shaft as her footsteps became distant once more, for she had gotten her wish. For, in the first time in my life that I was willing to do so willingly...
...I was unable to scream.
