The Masquerade

As Blanc was finishing his meal, he stood there contemplating how he would be able to get more prey like this, as sentient beings were by far his favorite prey. His tentacles frenzied around the remains of Fluttershy's mangled corpse, as if with a mind of their own, grossly slurping up the mess. Blanc determined that in order to obtain more prey like this pegasus, he would have to disguise himself and act like her.

"Hmmm...And so the masquerade commences..." Blanc thought to himself.

Blanc then heard a noise. He raised his head up to find that the birds in the previously silent bird houses were now waking up, stretching and getting ready to fly out to cheerfully greet their master. Sensing this was their intention, Blanc quickly took on Fluttershy's likeness, personality, and all.

"Oh, good morning, little ones!" He said in Fluttershy's soft, delicate voice.

All of the birds fluttered down to him to see eye-to-eye with what they believed was their beloved owner.

"Did you all have a pleasant sleep? I know I did!" Blanc said, quickly nodding his head with short, rapid shakes as he said this.

Blanc knew that he would most definitely have to restrain his persistent hunger around Fluttershy's animals, at least for the now, if he was to keep up with this charade, as Fluttershy has a deep, passionate love of animals. Blanc was shocked to find that she apparently loves them more than life itself, as if they were her children and she was their guardian.

The birds were singing their happy little tunes in greeting to their master, but Blanc turned in the opposite direction, looking back at them.

"Sorry, but I'm afraid I need to go attend to something for a little while. Will you all be okay here all by yourselves?" The birds all nodded wholeheartedly. A smile grew on Blanc's face. "Good, good. You all behave while I'm gone, okay?" Blanc walked out the door, shut it, then looked over towards Ponyville.

The town was still somewhat quiet, due to it still being early in the morning, and not too many people were awake at this time of day. Blanc looked back at the cottage, then reverted his gaze back towards Ponyville. He took a mental note that Fluttershy was just as her name suggested: shy. That's why she was perched so far away from the rest of the townsfolk, in relative isolation from the rest of them. She preferred the company of animals, mostly because of how cruelly she was treated when she was a child. Blanc uncovered something rather interesting and, for some reason he couldn't quite put his hoof on, he found this fact hilarious, buried deep, deep down in Fluttershy's mind:

Fluttershy was abused as a filly, by both her parents and the majority of her peers. Her parents kicked and scolded her when she had committed even the smallest and most understandable infractions, sometimes for nothing at all, in the brief time she was with them. Her classmates mocked her and sometimes even escalated it to brief, yet traumatizing physical violence. The only reason she was capable of holding on to any semblance of sanity was because she had a certain companion, Rainbow Dash.

Fluttershy, it seemed, has always had a certain admiration and love for Rainbow that extends a little beyond the rest of her friends, mostly because of her actions in fillyhood. She had provided Fluttershy with the only escape from her own personal hell during that time, but Fluttershy was too afraid to tell Rainbow about all of this weighing down on her shoulders for several reasons: fear of abandonment, even though she knew Rainbow most likely wouldn't do that, or fear that Rainbow would confront her parents and possibly end up getting hurt because of it. Rainbow already knew about the bullying at the hooves of her peers, but not the darkest and most painful part, the abuse at the hooves of her parents. So, Fluttershy kept it quiet and kept the full extent of how much she appreciated Rainbow's company veiled in the darkness of secrecy.

"Oh, Fluttershy, you poor, tormented soul...Hehehehe," Blanc said sarcastically as chuckles escaped his breath afterwards. "Well, at least it explains your meek and shy demeanor, hm?" Blanc said this as if he were actually talking to Fluttershy, whose soul was trapped within him, which looks to her like a huge realm of a vast expanse of darkness.

Blanc finally began his search for more ponies to devour as he casually walked to Ponyville whilst humming a tune from his own fillyhood.

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Twilight, awakening from sleep, arose from her bed unusually slowly today, for she had not gotten much sleep last night. She had acquired a copious amount of books from a ruin she found near the border of the Everfree Forest and Ponyville and spent a good portion of the night sorting through them multiple times in order to make sure that they were in organized stacks, with the intention of shelving them in the morning, which meant right now for her.

She glanced over to her beloved little servant, Spike, who still lay in bed, snoring quietly with his blanket slightly drooping off to the side. Twilight disliked the term "servant", because she felt it was a little too domineering for the relationship she and Spike shared. Twilight used her magic to gently place the rest of the blanket over Spike, as she will not need his service at the moment. Owlicious had just went to sleep about ten minutes or so before Twilight woke up, as he saw the soft glimmer of sunlight poking through the library.

Twilight went downstairs and saw the overly, orderly stack of books and decided to just go ahead and re-shelf all of them, as she likes to make sure everything is in absolutely perfect order. All of the books on the shelves of the library glowed with a purple aura, then were levitated out of the shelves and fell to the floor in a huge, chaotic mess. She then used her levitation to begin re-shelving all of the books, the new ones included. She already memorized where most of them went, so putting them back up wasn't nearly as big a chore as putting the new ones up was, but it still wasn't a very big problem for Twilight.

She formed large lines of slowly moving books, shelving them one by one, as she read the titles of the new books she got last night. Twilight was quite surprised to find that many of them all seemed to have one author in common, the pen name simply reading, A Servant of the Universe. Many of the books had interesting titles, often dealing with the universe and all things within it.

Twilight, instantly intrigued, brought all of the books to her attention and used her magic to skim through them all simultaneously before her, briefly glancing at the words that stood out to her and the sometimes surreal and detailed pictures in the books, which were composed with only black and white colors, the black being the ink and the white being the pages themselves. The books seemed to talk about two godlike beings whose power extended far beyond that of Luna's or Celestia's. Twilight shuddered at the very thought of someone having that much power, as they are most likely capable of using the universe as a mere toy if they wanted to.

She found one amidst the books entitled The Journey Into the Maw of Tartarus. She began skimming through this one more intently than she had the others, as she has never read a book about Tartarus before. Then again, she hadn't ever read any books such as these before. This was turning out to be quite the discovery, she found.

The book described Tartarus as a cavernous realm walled with what sounds like obsidian and an unknown metal. Strewn about the place are legions upon legions of creatures, whom the author called the forsaken, screaming, sobbing, or laughing, presumably from madness, in the hellish realm. The author expressed sadness and grief at many of their plights, as not all of them deserved this, he felt. In fact, most of them didn't. The book said that they were cast down there simply because they were of no more use to their creator and their very existence shamed her, so she cast them down here. Also down there were demonic and/or evil creatures created by a shadowy being called, The Destroyer, but whom the author called, Master.

The book goes on to describe various denizens of Tartarus that the author and his colleagues personally encountered during their various trips to Tartarus. Some were centuries old, others were sent down there just recently. Amongst these denizens were the leaders of the nations before they founded Equestria: Commander Hurricane, King Platinum, and Chancellor Puddinghead, all sent down there for "crimes against not only their own race, but against their own gods". Twilight wondered with great curiosity what precisely it was that they did to earn a trip to Tartarus, but the book offered no more explanation.

Several others were briefly mentioned, but not fully described. Blanc Masque, in particular caught her eye, due to how foreign--how alien, the name sounded to her. The author apparently knew Blanc, as he talked fondly about him when he was alive until that one night where he murdered several of his most scathing critics, being an easily angered actor who was rather insecure about his acting abilities. As a result, he was now stuck in Tartarus, taken away from his life of glamour to slave away and rot in Tartarus, scarred with a constant physical reminder and rotting away from hunger, a "certain, strange kind of hunger unknown to you and me", as the author put it.

Twilight was so engrossed in this book, this one single book, that her levitation spell had long worn off and the books returned to their unorganized state of disarray, not noticing the loud sounds of books slamming onto the ground. Suddenly, she heard Spike's voice amidst her own internal voice saying the words in the book.

"Good morning, Twilight. What'cha reading?" Hearing Spike suddenly pipe up amidst the silence in the room, she let out a small yelp of surprise and slammed the book shut by impulse, internally cursing herself for losing her place in this oddly engrossing yet disturbingly macabre read.

"Oh, hello, Spike! Did you have a nice sleep?" Twilight asked with a sheepish smile and awkward chuckle, slowly coming to notice how much of a mess the library was. Spike did the same after she voiced her response.

"Wow! What's with the mess, Twi?" Spike inquired, raising an eyebrow in surprise. "I've never seen you awake with the library looking this messy."

Twilight let out another awkward chuckle and said, "Yeah, I just got really into this book I was reading and I guess I just kind of...Slipped?" Spike looked at Twilight with an odd expression, previously believing that Twilight never allowed herself to get that engrossed in a book in the middle of one of her organization sessions.

"Do you need some help?" Spike asked with a renewed smile, forgetting about the somewhat uncharacteristic behavior. But he still wondered what precisely the book was about, but was too afraid to ask for fear Twilight would go into a really long, boring, overly-detailed ramble about it.

"Oh, no thanks, I go-" Twilight was suddenly interrupted by a knock on the door. "Oh!" Twilight let out, startled by the knocking.

Twilight wanted to answer it, but she was too worried about getting the rest of the horrid mess she had created cleaned up. "Could you get that, Spike? I'm a little busy here."

"Sure!" Spike walked over to the door and opened it to reveal the familiar, yellow pegasus with long, pink hair. Fluttershy.

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Author's Note

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Hello, everyone! I'm really sorry it took me so long to write the next chapter and I sincerely apologize if this chapter is lacking, I couldn't really think of how else to forward the story without it turning into a monotonous "consume, think, consume, think, consume, think, back to Tartarus" thing for the story. I kind of thought I was rambling a little bit with the details of Tartarus in the book, but I once heard "You can never have too many details", so I was kind of torn as to what I should've done. Don't worry, the senseless violence will resume shortly, so please try to bear with me for a while, hehe.

-Nicholas