The Withering Rose

Banishment

Young, scared, alone, and waking up on a cold, hard floor once again. After everything that had happened, all that I'd been through... Celestia had thrown me into another cell, I had trusted her and now she had revealed herself to be no different from the ones who had confined me in my home town to keep everypony else safe from me.

The only difference was that this time I would be trapped in a much larger and more intimidating prison... Tartarus.
I found myself lying in a cage, cavernous walls surrounded me and I felt truly hopeless.
I remember waking up in this frightening place and looking at my surroundings, it was clear that I was abandoned, nopony was coming to save me.

I heard shuffling behind me, turning around revealed another cage and a strange creature contained within it.
A weak and old-looking creature standing on four hooves although it clearly was not a pony. I didn't know what I was looking at then but I'd come to know it as a 'centaur'.

It looked upon a small filly, alone and afraid, with disinterest it its eyes, Tartarus was not a place for the empathetic or kind.
I suppose I was just another unimportant pony taking up space.
I attempted to communicate with the creature and received little in terms of responses.

After a while it began interacting with me more frequently, neither of us were going anywhere anytime soon, it gave us a lot of time to become familiar with each other.
His name was Tirek and I learnt plenty about his hatred of Equestria and the ponies living there.

It became clear to me that Celestia's plan had been to trap me far from the rest of the world, far enough to hopefully contain my deadly magic, her cowardice would be her downfall, if she had simply killed me instead, perhaps Equestria would have been saved.

It was hard to keep track of time in a place such as Tartarus, minutes felt like days and days felt like weeks.
I know now how long I had actually spent in that place, I just prefer not to think about it.

Tirek might have been pure evil but when you only have one other individual for company you eventually stop caring about what crimes they may or may not have committed.
Sometimes we discussed what we would do when we escaped, he seemed to think that it was inevitable while I was less hopeful.

Tartarus had the power to contain all kinds of magic that could be used by prisoners, it was a form of magic dampening like no other.
Of course, no power if infinite, the dampening rings had a limit and so did even Tartarus itself, it would just take a long time.

Years passed, I became older, taller and more powerful. As I grew, so did my cutie mark's effect, at some point I had noticed Tirek's health deteriorate, cracks forming in his grey skin as his energy declined.
The poor fool noticed what was happening and demanded that I stop using my powers on him, he didn't believe me when I told him I couldn't.
He yelled, screamed and eventually even begged for his life, it took months for the illness to overwhelm the creature and before I knew it, my only cellmate was reduced to a pile of crimson blood and dark-grey ash on the floor of his cage.

I can't say I felt bad for him, the creature wasn't exactly a hero to say the least, it was the first time I had felt fine with the death of another living creature. I'd be bored on my own but it wasn't worth getting upset about.
It was also the first time that a living creature had been affected by my powers without being in direct contact with me, the strength of this cursed cutie mark was still increasing and so was the range of its effects.

The death of Tirek made something clear to me, a feeling that I had whenever something was killed by my power. Pure energy.
I had felt it before but it had never been this intense, I didn't know it at the time but I would come to learn that the creatures affected by my power did not just crumble into nothingness, their magic and powers could be transferred to myself.
When Tirek died, I had gained a truly unique and powerful source of magic.

More years passed, the range grew even larger, I could tell when I heard creatures contained in other parts of Tartarus out of my view die one by one, their energy and magic being absorbed into me.
Eventually I began feeling the energy of creatures that were so far away that I could not even hear them suffer from the illness I had infected them with. Everything in Tartarus was dead at this point, the range must have finally reached outside of this prison.
My power had finally reached Equestria once more, even after sealing me away in this place, they were not safe.

The time had finally come, after so many years spent underground I had finally gathered enough magical energy to break out of Tartarus.
The cage wasn't able to contain me anymore and there was nothing left in this place to stop me from leaving.

The bars were destroyed easily and I calmly walked down the jagged stone steps. Eventually I found my way out and stepped into a new Equestria, it was something that I had not seen since I was a filly and it was nothing like how I remembered it being.

Equestria was dying, I had known this for a while now. I held my head high and exited Tartarus, I was finally free... and I had somepony I needed to visit, somepony I hadn't seen in a long time.