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“If you look long enough into the void the void begins to look back through you.”

-Friedrich Nietzsche

I sat, staring at the perspiring glass before me. The droplets of condensation quickly making their ways down my hand as it grasped the bottle. I felt as if I were squeezing the life out of it. As if it were crushed and bleeding in my palm. I squeezed harder, daring myself internally to shatter it. To splinter its bones and fray its flesh. To split the barrier between what is whole and what is broken. To intermingle its blood with my own.

What is it to take a life?

It it to end something that physically was? Is it to disfigure something to the point of where you cannot, with your hardest efforts, recognize it? Is it to cease breathing? To cease the beating of a heart?

No. It is to send something forth into a state that is so radically different than what it was previously in, that you strike a terror into its very core being.

That is how you kill. It is very easy to still live, yet be dead. To exist as an empty shell. A capsule.

A vessel.

Vessels are made for the taking. Vessels are made to be inhabited. Like a nautilus in its shell, gliding effortlessly through the deeps of the sea. Vessels are for the taking.

We are but bodies. We are clung to our vessels with the utmost prejudice. We see through the vessel, we act through it, and we live through it.

How confining.

Everything being held together with string and buttons. Tiny imperfectious electrical signals and chemical sprays that define us.

Easy to alter, easy to change, easy to erase. Easy to inhabit.

I released the bottle, setting it down again on the beaten oak of the bar. I watched the water ring pool around it, and slowly migrate downwards to my seat, as if bowing to yield.

Mercy.

'Give me mercy.' it pleads.

'Have mercy.' it begs.

Mercy.

I am a giver of mercy. I am an agent of fairness and liberty. I am the relief.

I give it because all of my life, it has been taken from me. No mercy. No relief. No happiness, simply waiting.

A feeling that nipped at my mind like a winter breeze. Something that can be shielded, but never forgotten. My skull is porous, allowing all manners of terrible things through. Filtering happiness and joy like the selectively permeable object it is.

An object. A tool.

It is a tool. I am a tool. A vessel. A vehicle for will.

I stood. I searched my pocket for some kind of currency to pay for the drink, but found nothing. The bartender was talking to someone else in the corner, however, so I quickly grabbed my glasses from the bar and made my exit into the biting cold of the night.

My hands quickly found their ways into my pockets, seeking a reprieve from the frigid, brass door handle they had just wrestled.

Nights like these are inhabited by only the most cruel and pain invoking beings. Nights like these are made to cull the ones that are not strong enough to survive the wicked cruelty of the world. They are the hands that grasp death's scythe. Only heartless things have the gall to trudge around in the frozen black of night.

I searched the empty streets, and saw nothing but the fallen yellow light of street lamps on the

snow-layered pavement. I shuffled in my jacket and decided that I would rather face the frigid hate of the night rather than the hot anger of an unpaid barkeep.

I began to walk along the curb, making quick and determined steps to ensure that I was where I needed to be, when I needed to be there. I deduced that it had to be around two in the morning. The town was practically vacant siding the occasional passing car. With a brave jump from the warmth of my pockets, I threw the hood of my jacket over my head.

I had almost completely forgotten why I decided to go out tonight. It just happened to be one of those things that we do almost unwittingly. As if driven more by grand purpose than individual want.

I looked all about myself suddenly, feeling the leash of fate tighten.

It tugged me towards an alley between a nail salon and tattoo parlor. I saw my breath rise up as a cloud of smoke as I followed the beckon; my feet becoming wet from the mounds of snow that I rose over. I stepped in between the chainlink fences that divided the air conditioning units of either building and past the units themselves as I delved deeper into the alley.

The wind whipped by my face as it funneled through the dimly-lit brick enclosure before me. I walked past a dumpster and around a brick wall.

There I saw something move, shrouded in shadow and snow.

I reached for my pocket knife, holding it in my hand, just incase it were a dog and I wouldn’t be able to get away fast enough, as I slowly approached the shifting mass in the alley.

”Hello?” I inquired.

The creature stopped, and I saw a head lift up from the ground.

It appeared to be a large canine, or some kind of stray animal that I could not readily identify.

I stepped back, wanting nothing to do with it. Fate had no reason to bring me into that alley. Siding it wanting me dead.

I refused to give in, and swiftly; turned to leave.

”Stop! Who’re you? Where am I?!”

I felt a chill crawl up my spine as I turned to face the creature. It ran towards me, and I, from it.

”Hey! Stop! Stop runnin’!” , I heard it yell.

I ran, trying to make it back to the street so I could find shelter, or at least see it better.

Then I felt something impact my back, throwing me forward into a tumble. I rolled several feet on the concrete as my knife skittered away. The creature was on me in a moment, its quadruped body standing directly over me.

“Nah, I’ve got a couple’a questions that ah need answer’d. Ya hear? If ya so much as bat an eyelid, I’ll stomp you into the ground, ya hear?”

I layed on my back silently.

”Mah name’s Applejack. I’m from a farm in Equestria, and ah have not even’a slightest idea how ah’m here. This looks nothin’ like Equestria, or anywher else ah’ve been in mah life. Tell me where ah am. Can ya do that?”