A Man in a Mare's World

"Zzz... Zzz... Zzz..."

Scorn's light breathing in the cave echoed throughout nature's chamber as the moon was slowly gliding through the night sky, stars and faraway suns twinkling alongside the giant, illuminated rock. The events hours prior to now exhausted him, willing down his mental state and pushing his limits to the point where he had to just escape.

Escape, and suffer through it alone for a while.

Keeping his back to the cave wall, he sat as he slept, donned in his usual clothing and not the spandex magical suit he usually wore. Aside from the braces on his arm and leg, this was for comfort's sake. After a while, that suit tends to scrunch and squeeze your ballsack, so it wasn't like Scorn was gonna wear it all the time. If things go well enough in this world, if he can recover from the damage done, he may be able to abandon the suit entirely, and use his magical powers without it.

For right now, however, it was best to keep his face under the facade, for safety reasons. Having anyone recognize him, most of all of them being the Royal Sisters, could spell an early disaster for his plans, and he'd have to quickly shift to being the villain just to survive.

But that all came later. Scorn needed a good night's sleep, and with this empty cave's shadowy overhang, it provided him with good cover to the next passerby that wandered through. Hell, he was practically invisible to the naked eye without some sort of light source to guide somepony along the way.

Anyways, Scorn's posture remained slumped, his chest slowly rising and falling...

That is, until he heard something in the distance that awoke him from his light sleep. It sounded like a droning siren, but made from an animal, not a machine. Hearing it loud and clear, Scorn opened an eye, turning and leaning his leg over the edge of the footing outside the cave, his shoe pressed on a rock underneath it. The direction seemed to come from somewhere near Ponyville, or moreover, the Everfree. This was odd in itself. He's been around the Everfree for years. Seven? Twelve? Doesn't matter. He's forgotten how much time has passed, and quite frankly, it didn't matter. The point was that no animal he came across in that wicked forest made a noise like that, not even a Manticore.

Staying perched on edge for a few moments, Scorn kept his eyes on the torturous greenery, narrowing his eyes as they scanned every corner and every inch of the treeline.

Nothing...

Frowning, the young human pulled himself back into the darkness of the cave, returning to his slumber. No more than a second after he assimilated back into his comforting position did another interruption startle him.

A splat made his eyes train forward inside the cave. What he saw made his blood run cold.

'Oh god... That's the...'

The guards... The ones he'd killed. One of their heads, or rather, half of it, had been dropped in front of him, blood splattering everywhere around it. Following a little stream of the same red color, he saw it go further into the cave. Blinking with uncertainty, he stood up, snapping his fingers and igniting a small flame on his finger.

He wished he didn't do that, because the second he did, he was greeted to a horrifying sight. The body parts, the corpses, the meat; ALL of it was here, strung up or laid about in various places inside the throat of the cave. There was no way Scorn did this. He wasn't a sleep walker, nor has he lost it without knowledge of it. Feeling a presence within the cave, a foreboding sense of dread, he looked all around for it, trying to find the source, but it proved difficult. It felt as if it was... everywhere, and nowhere, at the same time. Like an endless shadow...

Wait... Shadows?!

Scorn jumped back the second something lunged at him, sliding backwards as the darkness of the cave came together, crawling off the floor and walls to compress into a physical shape. Scorn wanted to slap himself. How could he not have known earlier? Where was this presence when he was sleeping in this damned cave?! Better question than that is, what is it...?

Slowly, a figure began to materialize, made from those shadows, and the shape was all-too familiar for Scorn. He had hoped it would have been somepony he didn't recognize. Hell, he'd take a dark version of the damn hyper pink one. But no, this damn shadowy abomination took the shape of the first Pony he met in this god-forsaken world.

The blue one... The one they call Luna...

Seeing her made Scorn immediately take the initiative and attack. He wasn't going back to her, and he sure as hell wasn't dying tonight. Not by her hands.

However, when he sent his magically-enhanced fist forward, he hit nothing but air.

"What the hell...?"

He felt the presence appear behind him as the shadows recollected to form the shape again. This time, the magic within materialized some kind of red armor onto the Luna lookalike.

"So disappointing..."

Scorn widened his eyes as he quickly donned his suit, using its material to protect himself from the swiftly-manifested magical shot that threw him further into the throat of the cave. Falling back into a hole, he let out a groan as he smacked into the rocks beneath his perch. As he picked himself up, he looked around as several shadows created little tantabus creatures, all looking like wisps with angered and demonic faces on them.

"You had a chance to help Equestria become great again. You were always fated to become the key, but never like this."

Scorn quickly threw one of his wires at a tantabus, only for it to go right through it and strike the wall, almost as if it were an illusion.

"My sister and I... We had tried to help you see reason, to ease you into your truth. But you ran away."

Scorn eyed the other wisps as their glow changed, almost as if they were projecting their calm aura around the cave's inner system of tunnels. When they did, the caves altogether were swallowed by darkness, and the next thing Scorn knew, he was back in the forest, on that fateful day.

"You were just a child. A blind, ignorant boy. You were as such to disobey, to compel yourself to run."

Scorn took a step back as the dark Luna figure appeared in front of him, walking towards him with a saunter in her step, as if she knew she had this 'fight' in the bag. Scorn summoned up his own magic, blasting a geyser of red, electrifying energy at her from his palm, but it had no effect. Nothing he did would so much as deter her!

"In the end, you ran off with some inferior Zebra."

He turned around as her voice came from behind, sending a punch to her face. He felt his knuckle crack under the impact of his fist hitting the cave walls. This illusion didn't eliminate his surroundings. He was still in the caves, but was seeing everything differently. He saw what SHE wanted him to witness, and used his own eyes and ears against him.

"And became this in the process."

He turned and rushed another illusion of Luna, slamming into a thin pillar of rock that was in her place and nearly falling deeper into the mountain. In his eyes, though, he was on top of the building he met Pinkie Pie at.

"H-Help..."

He turned to his left, seeing Luna with her arm morphed into some kind of shadowy protrusion, which wrapped and gripped Pinkie by her neck. He cursed at himself, shaking his head before glaring forward.

"Go to hell! I know this isn't real! You're not here!"

"Am I...?"

She dropped Pinkie over the edge into a pit of fire. Despite knowing her game, inside Scorn was freaking out. His mind wasn't able to process everything to make a strategy to deal with this foe. So, he did the first thing his instincts told him to: jump off and save Pinkie. When he took the dive, he fell for no more than two seconds before slamming, face-first, into another floor of the mountain's interior.

"I don't think you know if I'm truly here or not."

Scorn felt himself sink back into the illusion as a giant hoof, one from a f***in Minotaur, came crashing through the wall in front of him. It slammed into him and forced him backwards, but he still held his grip, digging his feet into the ground as he pushed back. Eventually, though, it became too much, and he was pushed over another edge of the caves. When he landed, he felt as if he landed on glass, as he went through a thin layer of a softer mineral. As he descended further, the illusion began to fade, and he found himself able to stop his fall. Using his chains, he gripped the sides of the tunnel going down, and threw himself into another adjacent path on his right. Laying on his side, he checked himself over for injuries...

None... He hadn't suffered any hits that would have caused him to bleed, bruise, or even get a bump. The phantom pain was there, however, which only could ever mean one thing.

'As long as she has me in her grasp, she CAN kill me. Even in her endless nightmare-scape of illusions, I can still get hurt.'

He rolled over onto his stomach, groaning as he got onto his feet.

'If I die in the dream, I die for real...'

He heard some kind of wisping force come down from where he fell. Looking up, the shadows were sweeping the walls, making him widen his eyes again and immediately jump behind the wall and sink into the dark to avoid detection by those tantabus wisps. Keeping his cool, and wrapping himself in his cloak, he waited for them to pass.

"You could have been someone we could believe in."

"!!!"

Scorn turned forward, startled that he was nose-to-nose with Luna. Blasting open the wall behind him, he flipped backwards into the downwards tunnel, gripping another ledge as the red-armored Shadow Pony glided out after him. Instead of tricking him with illusions, she went straight to firing her own torrents of energy at him, forcing him to dodge onto the wall and scale upwards for an elevated advantage. Swiping his arm up, an aerial blade made of the sparking red magic sped towards the Alicorn, which seemed to cause harm because she was taking care to avoid his attacks this time. Swerving to the side, she fired a narrow beam of black light power at Scorn, which was avoided the same way she got away from his attack. Gliding across the gap, his chains snapped down towards her shoulders, but a simple tuck and roll in the air not only deflected them, but reversed them on Scorn. He backflipped on his own weapons and threw two balls of glowing red glyphs at Luna as his feet hit the wall. Scaling upwards as Luna was distracted for a brief second, he managed to get back up to where he was dropped from, diving over the edge and shooting his wires up at her again when she came over after him.

Like before, his wires went right through her, hitting the rock wall behind her and tearing open another hole. Scorn gasped and leaped back into the cave he first encountered Luna in, the giant chunk blocking sight and path back into the makeshift arena the dark Pony threw them in. Seizing the opportunity, Scorn turned and rocketed back up towards the mouth of the cave, destroying the entrance as he came out to slow her down even further.

He can't fight her, not like this. As long as he's in that field of darkness, she can do and summon anything. Magic really was a pain in the ass when you didn't understand it...

Scorn let out a grunt as he hit the ground, sliding across dirt and splashing through the river he dunked himself into earlier in the evening. Backflipping and pushing himself out of it, he trailed through the air and touched down on the bank, looking back at the cave as the rocks fell over the entrance. For a while, nothing seemed to occur. Scorn was sure that Luna thing wouldn't give up on nabbing or killing him so easily.

'So why isn't she-'

*SPLASH-!!!*

His thoughts were cut off when the river in front of him exploded upwards, murky dirt and water spraying everywhere as Luna's shadowy arose from the depths as a cloudy mass of dust and smoke. The cloud quickly rushed Scorn, circling around him and closing the space he had. Engulfed by the haze, Scorn braced himself, feeling the wind speed pick up as he was swallowed into the grips of this... thing. Opening his eyes, the world around him now seemed dead and lifeless. The trees were either decaying or gone. The sun was nowhere to be seen, nor the moon, and the landscape itself looked as if it'd had hell spit acid rain down on it for a month straight. In other words, it was just as corrupted as his amulet. Turning his eyes up towards the sky, he could see the outer world, far from this illusion. The glaring moonlight gave him immediate hope for a way out of his nightmarish wasteland of Equestria, and he didn't hesitate to leap towards it.

The shadowy incarnation of Luna didn't have the chance to react, as she was kept occupied by ensuring the illusion stayed visible to Scorn's senses. When he broke out, she cried out in a horrific screech of protest, and compressed herself into a smaller ball of hazy smoke. Streaming herself along into the air after Scorn, she followed him back down to the ground, unprepared for him to turn and pump magic into his legs to enhance his speed. Zipping away in a blink of an eye, she fixed her attention on him and gave chase. Nothing was faster than the shadows.

And she'd be damned if her prize would get away twice in a single life.