//------------------------------//
// Chaper 26: All or Nothing 
// Story: Death, Sacrifice, and the man in blue 
// by MrTyrannousaurusX 
//------------------------------//

Off the weather-beaten, sin-paved road of civilization, miles away from the warranted reckoning tracking his scent like a famished Bloodhound, a man walked bereft of rhyme or reason. No aim could be discerned from his stunted, heavy-footed lumbering. There wasn’t a lucid goal to be found from his sluggish shambling, each pained stride akin to pushing a family of mountains. In fact, if a label existed for this battered, begrimed shell of a murderous beast, it bore no semblances to a normal human being. Credit where it is due, when comparing a brutish killer to the incomparable Man in Blue, almost any fiend from the middle of nowhere would gain that label.

Gary Demonio wasn’t quite sure what he could call this boundless, rambling landscape where this purposeless endeavor commenced. If he tore away the filter from his mind, one that was just barely dangling above the fathoms of neglect, the truth to the matter was…he wasn’t sure of anything. Every last thought that congregated within his black oozing brain devoid of exceptions was polluted by a singular cancer. A ravenous plague that infected the fibers of their being. The surviving threads of humanity that outlasted his madness, few and far between enough on a regular basis, were contaminated. Festering in a septic mass of this sole prospect, igniting a wolfish pandemic pillaging his psyche. 

Doubt. 

Gary was poles apart from being considered a dubious man. For those who knew him during his iron-fisted bout of carnage in Roseville, he was all but allergic to the concept. Doubting anyone or anything at any time cast a constellation of hives across his burly, ironclad frame. The hellish damnation crawling across his flesh nearly bursting through his button-down. Yet, presently, as he tottered forlornly destitute of a set destination, doubt was the only thing gnawing at his brain’s wrinkled fleshy walls. Swarming the diabolical, infernal fields of brazen flame that was his mind. At least, what his all-encompassing insanity left for the buzzards and the rats. 

His outfit, the terrifyingly unique getup he lived and died fruitlessly in, was smothered by sweat’s foul battalions. A division of putrid soldiers besieged his armpits, coloring the aquamarine fabric a deep forest green. This custom was practiced by his wide back. The fabric polluted by the vile gallons of perspiration vomited from his pores. His buzzed iota of stygian hair was inundated. The sorry-excuse for a stubble engulfing his statue-esque sculpted jaw suffering the same fate. Aquamarine shirt raided by impolite squatters of coagulated mud. A belt of the soupy hazel sludge vandalized his bewildered back absent of any hints or traces of remorse for their desecration. Numerous patches and spots peppered his obliques and forearms, all dried and parched like a cheapjack homemade tattoo out of a filthy, roach-infested apartment. Gary’s work pants, greyer than any mountain face could ever dream of being, shouldered the brunt of a callous crusade. The greedy chocolate-brown mire was starved for territory and dominion, not satisfied by his upper half they barbarically annexed. 

The noirette’s legs were akin to a star-spangled night sky in human form. A silvery backdrop pricked by a myriad of unfathomably tiny dots of mud, some besting others in size and shape. Constellations of the nauseating silt marred the hardy fabric. Work boots lurching across an incessant field of barren oblivion without touch of grace, like an iron sentry’s steel boots. The male’s shoes served more as an excruciating leather prison than his bare feet’s first line of defense, shielding him from the agonizing afflictions of the outside world. Strips of dead bramble died beneath his byzantine rubber treads, cracked like the shells of degloved peanuts. Sharp lumps of shale and miniscule arrow-like rocks stood in ruin against towering odds. All the while, his fleshly soles were secure. Ensnared within a pair of rank white sweat-soaked socks, Athlete’s Foot stumbling ever-so-closer on the bloody afternoon horizon. Toes teetering dangerously on the edge of becoming a breeding ground for maddening blisters. Skin chafed like a heartless sandpaper massage. 

Languidly, with his tank of energy in hospice care tethered to a manifold of rusted oxygen tanks, Gary Demonio stuntedly ambled. The unfruitful forsaken thatch of land the bastard happened upon was not only entirely unnerving, but next to impossible to identify. After fleeing from that high-end hotel and outrunning bereaved soldiers with an tireles thirst for his viscera, the last thing he needed tossed on his plate was another mystery. Another lightning-fast barrage of questions bereft of a solid answer. More mists question marks and empty inquiries permeating his gangrene-infested mind. Enough polluted his psyche to last him a plethora of lifetimes. In fact, if he was granted another thousand years in that dark damnation, lucidity would be few and far between. 

Why was there not a single human in sight?

How was he dead for years but back?

Why were unicorns and flying horses in golden armor the authority?

And now, one more question to add to the skyscraping mountain.

Where the hell was Gary Demonio?

A multitude of clues attempted to nudge the pitiless butcher in the right direction. Confusion erected a tyrannical empire with supreme authority chugging through its winding veins. In spite of the clues trying and failing to depose it, his location was bleeding anonymity. Shrouded by a thick cloak of secrecy secreting any identifiable features.

An unending field of tan, sun-baked deceased grass housed the turquoise-dressed man. All around him, scattered haphazardly throughout the colossal reaches of dead foliage, were coal-black trees, all of them frighteningly alike. The slender scorched corpses of wood and lush foliage blighted the boundless rolling fields like devilish chicken pox. Begriming the topaz-colored ground were a plethora of forlorn reminders of a time long lost to Death’s stone-cold clutches. The grim remnants of a ghastly demise, drowned in unfaltering confidentiality, were scattered asunder across the scalped wasteland. Rangy sable limbs and branches discarded by their singed parents polka-dotted the ground. Their murky hue mirrored by its unanimated brethren. Sickly bushels of bramble had bitten the dust long ago, the exact amount of time cloudy and ill-defined. Had it been months? Years? Decades? Perhaps it was a curveball and this gargantuan exodus of all life and vigor was mere days prior. Whatever the case, the brittle, dust-choked ghosts of bushes stood unshaken. Defying the bitter, gelid breeze galloping down the endless legions of cadavers. The spirits of deceased shrubs gave a ghastly dance to the wind’s command, lifeless stygian branches mirroring its movements. Some couldn’t bear the poisonous gift of life any longer and succumbed to Death’s stony, calculating authority. Peppering the stagnant earth were a host of rotting pears, decomposition biting a gluttonous chunk from each of the illimitable supply of oval-shaped frames. 

One of the tens of hundreds of putrified fruits interspersed throughout the hideous scene was hapless. Cowering beneath the elephantine might of Gary’s boots, face-fo-face with the Grim Reaper manifested in a sole of rubber treads. Its demise inexorable and nightmarish. The rotten pear stood no chance against his foot, in spite of the nigh-fatal doses of fatigue plaguing it. It imploded in a repugnant starburst of sickly tallow-colored innards like an explosion of melted candle wax. Shreds of vomit-green flyblown flesh clung to the bottom of his boot. Orbs of pale, milky viscera dripped from his treads.

Each word was a lit match pressed against the walls of his arid throat. His esophagus was a tunnel of parched sandstone leading into the catacombs of his heart. That was almost entirely the reason why this passionless grove was swallowed by silence’s salivating maw. In coalition with the uncharacteristic absence of the pestilent disembodied voice badgering his skull, it was all a recipe for deathly quietude. Perfect conditions for an even more perfect monarchy of utter and absolute soundlessness, one that would be accomplished in a flawless world. As with all iron-fisted tyrannies throughout the vast expanse of time and history, outliers never failed to exist. Gore-hungry brawlers with rebellious dispositions, pledging to bring baseless cruelty to its coda. Gary’s deprived gut was among these ferocious rebels. Defying the silence’s frigid command.

Hunger’s searing, barbed chain tied a hangman’s knot around his vacant stomach, constricting it like a lustful Anaconda seized by its primordial instincts. Arresting, dread-inducing marble-like eyes spelling two avenues to whomever happened upon its crimson path. You were either a replenishing dinner, or its heart’s desire. Pangs radiated throughout his tender bruised frame, only two nigh-cataclysmic events shouldering all responsibility. His unpredictable resurrection and the vicious double slaying of two innocent soldiers. Simply fulfilling their invigorating passion and answering their heart’s dire calls for something. More than the merciless redundancy and mundanity they were doubtlessly hagridden by. Two hapless guards, a leader and a goon. Both undeserving of the unjust fate they were involuntarily exposed to. The gloomy outcome, however, cared little for their opinions towards the matter. Inevitable starvation chewed on his vacant, deserted stomach. A sickening guttural rumble emanated from his impoverished intestines. 

Gary lumbered with leaden bones through the graveyard of sullen trees and stone-dead pears. Brain swallowed by a pot-bellied haze of drowsiness and fatigue, floating absentmindedly in his throbbing skull. Ankles impaled by white-hot fire pokers of agony with every labored stride. Some hidden iota of common sense deep within his maggot-infested heart chided him with every harrowing step. Leaping off a second-story building to escape the mob of warranted consequences was nothing short of witless. Hell, the bodiless God of Chaos, destitute of functioning extremities and an ability to become anonymous, could’ve fabricated a better plan in half the time. But yet, like everything else in the demon’s life up to that grisly milestone, it was never anyone else’s call. Gary’s word was the only opinion that harbored even a splinter of significance. Even if the second-hand judgment came from an immortal being of purported endless wisdom. 

The morning was dying at a snail’s pace, but far from discreetly. The sun’s vicious campaign of mild yet intolerable heat and vision-robbing arrows of luster were arriving at its terminus. Each convoluted maze of shadow punctuating the bronze grass would perish peacefully, strolling into the afterlife with ease. Oh, how envious the monstrous sod was of their tranquil, effortless departure. Pearls of sweat crawling down his sun-baked flesh like trails of magma. Legs crushed by cannonballs of exhaustion. Throat ravaged, chest heaving. All Gary could ever dream of in that soulless grove were a twain of prospects. A brisk death and a simple one-way conversation. Both allegedly unattainable beneath the glaring ball of molten gold, plummeting deeper into the horizon by the minute. If a random so-and-so was cast from the heavens and crash-landed smack-dab in the stock-still heart of this orchard, he’d be forgiven for assuming nature was absent. After all, a land of charred trees abandoned by the harmonious ensembles of birds and pitter-patters of squirrels was all but deserted by Mother Nature. 

Throughout Gary’s stunted, lead-footed tenure in this long extinct grove without an end, minutes groveled in the silky dirt. Slithering slower than an elderly silver-haired snail robbed of his cane. Hours melted away. The early afternoon was slipping from the orange horizon, like a broad river of whiskey running beneath the ball of fire. An arctic Autumn breeze, the concept of mercy excluded from its vocabulary, trounced the pitiful man. The only thing bearing any semblances to a punishment for his illimitable crimes and stomach-roiling sins. If the half-witted mortals populating these inadequately governed lands couldn’t parcel out justice, then Mother Nature would gladly assume their stead. Judge? Jury? Executioner? All in one. It made little difference to her. After all, before living breathing beings with the curse of unrestricted thought arrived, there was nature. Left to legislate their own policies and regulations all in barren seclusion.

Through the course of this extraneous journey, where the tracking of time swiftly became impractical, Discord said nothing. 

With all of his academic might and guessing capabilities, roughly a half-hour and some change had passed since he infiltrated the pear orchard. In other words, in a way even the mindless brutes of this world could understand, thirty minutes of unadulterated suffering. In layman’s terms, a chunk of Hell torn from the flaming dales of slag below. His attention and hideously thundering brain were faltering, like a candle’s wick in a murderous wind. One isolated tree blacker than a midnight destitute of stars. Its trunk bearing the titanic size of an Elephant’s foot. A serpentine network of gnarled ash-stained branches outreached into the melancholic molten copper sky. The limbs were contorted and maze-like akin to a family of seaweed dancing in a vigorous wave, frozen in a snapshot of time. There was a generous quantity of empty space around the trunk. The vacant lot of grass was drenched in the daunting sun’s wrathful scowl. 

It was Gary’s sweat-bathed maltreated back that greeted the ashen bark first. The coarse, craggy grit were glowing-hot spears against his enraged flesh. Teeth gnashed, fingernails threatening to excavate his palms. With as much grace as a battered, eroded forty-three-year-old killer could summon, Gary collapsed onto his rump in the rust-colored grass. The foreboding metal-grey of his work pants irreparably defaced, swiftly replaced by a bothersome silt vandalizing the durable textile. In the rear of his waistband, his haunted pistol stabbed into his lower back like a glove of thorns. Gary fished the utensil of endless destruction from his pants, dropping it by his folded feet in the dirt.

Despite the jumper cables of pain gnawing on every extremity and the sun’s grimace unceasing, Gary Demonio’s false stoicism persisted. His face pained but stony like a Japanese demon mask. The sight was enough to send a flurry of dreadful swords into a sternum, but behind the masquerade of heart-stopping terror, there was…something else. Something too human for a monster to possess. 

With every shift or movement no matter how slight or insignificant it seemed, it was enough to sanction a brutish mortar strike of abominable vulgarities. Throughout this furious squall, Discord still sat on his towering hill of silence. Willing to die on it if need be.

Gary stared with pinpoint accuracy at a miscellaneous spot in the sprawling cloudless ocean of whisky above. A marble of sweat halted on his left top eyelid, blinking it out of existence. His lungs floundered behind his ribs. The world twirled in endless circles in his strained vision. 

“D…D-Discord?” Gary rasped, every word a gang of fish hooks dragged across his flesh. His mouth lolled like a brainless drunkard with parched lips of sun-baked stone. “Y-You there?”

The male’s voice was a jerry-built mockery of its former self. Once upon a time,  whenever a stentorian roar boomed from the pit of his throat, fear blighted the hearts of all how perceived it. His words sending a ghastly volley of throat-gripping fear, laying waste to those shouldering the misfortune of residing in its crosshairs. 

But now, in this personalized self-forged damnation he inscribed in the book of his wicked existence, every pathetic word was victimless. The only thing harboring any semblances to a guiltless soul he could oppress were the sprawling plethora of trees. Each somehow erect in spite of their macabre unwarranted fate. Standing like a sorrowful flock of nuns assembled around a grave, fractured irreversibly by the demise of a preacher. Coagulated into a brittle, fragile herd by the world-rocking loss. 

“Hmm?” The God of Chaos replied. His hours-long streak of silence was an eternity and a half to the bastard in turquoise. 

“You’ve been quiet for-” Agony reverberated down his esophagus, like the devil’s tune in an unending subway tunnel. Every word tightened the barbed wire necklace around his desiccated throat. “For too damn long. What’s your problem?”

“I don’t have one. I’ve just been…thinking. Nothing too out of the ordinary.”

“You not talking for more than five minutes is out of the ordinary,” Gary spoke. “What’ve you been thinking about this time? Digging through my memories again?”

“Of course not, those are far too harrowing for my taste.”

“Did I really just shock the God of Chaos? I think I deserve a fucking trophy, Discord.”

The Draconequus hummed uneasily. “I’ve been thinking about what happened back at the hotel. Flash Sentry, I believe his name was. I forgot the other.” 

“I did, too. Wasn’t that good of a fighter anyway. If I didn’t kill him, he would’ve been in five seconds on a battlefield.”

“You didn’t give him much of a chance to fight, Gary.” 

“He didn’t deserve one,” Gary muttered. “It was me or him, who gives a damn?”

Discord paused. “I just think there could’ve been a better way to handle that, that’s all. One that didn’t involve bloodshed and trouble.”

“Aren’t you the fucking God of Chaos? Isn’t this what you love? Chaos? This should be a damn circus for you.”

“There’s a fine line between what I like and you like.” Discord replied. “You and I don’t possess the same interests.” 

“You and I are plenty alike, more than you probably think.”

“What’s the fun in chaos if nopony’s alive to experience it? With nopony around, all you’re doing is just…playing, I suppose.” 

“I’m not gonna kill everything that breathes, Discord. I just need Levi.”

“Yes…Levi.” Discord responded. “And all I need is for us to get to that museum.” 

Gary stroked his neck forlornly. “How far away is it?”

“If memory serves me right…” Discord paused, gazing out of amber irises that didn’t belong to him. Scanning the rocky vista of bold orange and rolling forests. “I believe a mile or two is all we have to cover. There is a slight chance I’m wrong, however.” 

Gary’s chest constricted at the prospect. “I don’t think I got a mile or two left in me, Discord. All I got is…whereever the fuck we are.”

“This all seems familiar to me but I can’t quite put my finger on it. Was this the field I turned into candy canes way back when?”

“Is that the king of your fucking worries?” Gary grumbled, a windy garbled rasp. “I think we got a lot more important things on our hands than candy canes, Discord!”

“Maybe if you got a move on I wouldn’t have to think about candy canes!” Discord quipped, irritation bleeding from his words. “Now, come on, please. It’s the final leg of our journey.”

Light bled from the golden, flaming sky faster than the fatigued man, bankrupt of all energy and stamina, could’ve ever begun to predict. The horizon’s monstrous unflappable clutches abducted the sun, yanking the orb of fire into its ominous unseen bowels. With the sun deposed, a new order was hastily established from the ruins of the previous empire. One of utter and unbridled tenebrosity and gloom. A stygian star-spangled kingdom ruling the cosmos with a callous fist of steel. The eerie murky yonder high above his roiling head was the terrified expulsions of a galaxy-sized octopus. Frightened by colossal entities unobserved by the bare naked eye. In one titanic spew of rich ebony ink and white pinpoints, any sign that luster once resided was thoroughly erased. Meticulously and feverishly scrubbed from history’s mammoth manuscript with primal abandon. 

Now, with the occasional private performance of zealous birds trapped in the past’s sprawling collections of sights and sounds, Gary was strangled by solitude. Only three companions were welded to his side by fierce situational loyalty. A trifling rag-tag trio that dared to rival his all-encompassing depravity and abominable machinations. His pistol, the indigestible hunger deluging his roaring stomach, and Discord. The closest thing to faithful comrade in this foreign world, populated exclusively by unfathomably enraged souls. Beings who obsessively lusted for his gushing stump and stock-still visage to be framed in every circle of every town. 

After nearly ninety strenuous, back-breaking minutes, his progress was stomped into the bitter icy grass by countless hindrances. Starvation devouring each and every aspect of his being. Arid throat a stony bone-dry desert where survivors of its sweltering grasp were a fictional prospect. All of those mountainous oppositions, combined with monolithic doubt that this unholy orchard held a conclusion, spelled unquestionable ruination. For both the deserving human and the hapless chaotic magnate imprisoned in his skull.

Gary Demonio’s arduous tenure to, what he believed-slash-hoped tirelessly was, the anti-climatic finale of the desolate confining wasteland. The raven-haired monster lumbered through the decaying exhibit of death’s inevitably and inescapable nature. The war-torn pear orchard’s remorseless redundancy was barbarically dethroned. Slowly but surely hijacking all avenues of authority was the very thing that scorched grove desired. Life. Charred bark was replaced by its distant, vastly more animated cousin. Vivid, high-spirited mahogany crossed his declining bloodshot vision, lashed by arctic gung-ho gales. Spotting the vibrant grass, the furthest cry from the lifeless golden expanses at his heels, were elephantine oak trees. Their trunks and lengthy, rangy network of extremities akin to the roots to a swamp tree fabricated a canopy from the Big Dipper’s dour glare. Every hunk of merry wood was clad by a teeming sombrero of leaves, each bearing their own unique color. A vast panorama of Autumn’s highest quality shades and hues were on full unshackled display. Shades of dark cherrywood, the thickest batch of maple syrup, and a radiant golden moon were all tossed into Mother Nature’s mortar and pestle. Finely grounded into this extravagant presentation of her magnum opus. 

Like all things yielding any sort of euphoric beauty, Gary Demonio was indifferent to the alterations Fall brought in tow. Nothing on these trees could quell his ravenous hunger, nor cease the irksome fire submerging his withering throat. The bright pumpkin-colored leaves peppering the lush earth wouldn’t summon food. Distant ballads from unaccompanied owls swimming from the forest’s rank innards failed to spawn water. Unless the dastardly Man in Blue abruptly materialized from this batch of trees, his heart would remain a dormant volcano. Primed to burst at the slightest irritation.

Gary’s endless ambling was far from unaccompanied. In the deepest recesses of his mind, far from the tangible grasp of any being, an unholy creation exiled from God’s Kingdom dwelled. Crouched in the depths of his brain like a troll claiming a bridge’s underbelly, Discord rambled endlessly. His formless jaws flapped endlessly. Motormouth congested with enough gasoline to last a thousand years of incessant yakking. Truth be told, if Gary was capable of surviving that long, it was impossibly safe to assume that would plant an elephantine foot in reality. It was one question. One singular and, from a surface-level observation, meaningless inquiry that ignited the vocal explosion. 

Gary had questioned the full extent of Discord’s crimes. Not every single detail, in spite of the insignificance or pointlessness. Just a superficial shallow explanation of his cursory yet unfathomably wide-reaching reign of chaos. But Gary Demonio didn’t deserve to receive exactly what he implored. This very well could be the universe’s punishment for his impudence and countless abhorrences. Avenging souls whose roots planted in a jovial life were brutally torn from the earth. It wasn’t often when Gary Demonio pleaded for an opportunity to crank back the clock. Wind it back as far as the stygian slender hands would grant, rid himself of this loathsome state of affairs blighting his journey.

Gary Demonio had lost what little lucid coherency the conversation garnered long ago. All he had to his repulsive name now was his number-one trusted companion stuffed in his waistband, his lust for vengeance, and a cycle of endless rambling in his skull. Blabbering endlessly about what particular lands with puzzling yet self-explanatory names he infected with his anarchy. One detail clung onto the wrinkled walls of Gary’s brain. One bemusing design choice chosen by the God of Chaos all those centuries ago. Gary was all but doubtless in his assumption that, even if he inquired the reasoning behind the bizarre configuration, he wouldn’t receive a sane answer. 

Titanic oak-brown thunderheads was the only harebrained choice that hasped his interest. Gargantuan clouds that spilled, of all things, chocolate milk from its sugary innards. A delightful drink meant to exclusively be consumed on a jovial, jubilant day. Although it was clear to the raven-haired male that societal customs bore no cumberance on Discord’s mind. He rained the tooth-rotting beverage upon a world torn asunder by his feral lust for lawlessness. 

“Oh, that reminds me of when I turned every cow in Equestria upside-down! That was the most hilarious sight, I must say, Gary. Seeing them all scoot on the top of their heads was marvelous!” Discord exclaimed, feeling no need to stifle his thunderous mirth. 

“I’m sure it was.” Grumbled Gary.

Nestled deep within the mazelike labyrinth of flourishing trees and wildlife, polluted by Kafkaesque complexity, the male happened upon a path. If no filter vandalized his maw and the truth was unconfined, Gary wasn’t entirely confident this path was a route to prosperity. Quite frankly, no matter how timidly he trekked down any course in his life, the gluttonous flames of Hell would feverishly follow. The most loyal companion in a world hijacked by betrayal and deception. 

Housed by two stately walls of bold, enforcing oak trees, their leaves like verdant mushroom clouds, was a slender dirt trail. The path was a singular runway of soupy sludge, looked down upon by the monolithic forest confining it. The boundless ocean of rich sable pen ink hurled not-so-baseless profanities and insults at the man in turquoise. Ridiculing him to no end for having caught himself in these vicious, famished throes to begin with. Scintillating stars howled with stomach-aching laughter fully at his expense, keeling over in their stygian abode. The arresting moon, the gung-ho leader of this ragtag band of cackling celestial bodies, was absurdly stoic. His crater-riddled, craggy visage emotionless like an unproductive artist’s canvas. Although, even a mortal such as Gary Demonio can see the slight tremble of a suppressed guffaw from here. Searing its pale expressionless countenance with a dour scowl as the mammoth rock crammed a chortle into the fathoms of its lung. 

Gary’s gut roared with inexorable malnutrition. A swollen tongue of flame lapped his arid throat like a thirsty dog. His head was massacred and harrowed by a battalion of ruthless agony, laying waste to his maltreated brain. Each individual ache and pain armed with a white hot-glowing fire poker to gratify their despicable muses. Time was running out. 

The male marched with lethal doses of chagrin igniting his decelerating veins. Rubber treads being absorbed by the spongy badgersome mire, only to wrench it from its abhorrent clutches. This mercilessly monotonous process was repeated more times than anyone there was able to count. Discord, too engrossed in his one-player conversation, was an invalid in that regard. Gary’s head swam far too much to do anything sans gripe and contemplate his future, slipping further from his calloused grasp by the minute. 

Every chance at salvation seemed dashed. Pitilessly tossed into an inky bottomless oblivion, where survival was a shallow and depthless prospect. All aspirations to satisfy the ravenous dog barking in his rancid heart were lost to nullity. The further Gary Demonio sauntered down that infertile path to bona fide solitude and inexorable ruin, the more weight his chances of survival lost. His spree of heavy-footed, beyond awkward ambling was miles from its terminus. The vagabond demon donning a costume of sweat-bathed, hairy human flesh lumbered through the gelatinous darkness. Stomach strangled by starvation’s herculean wolfish tentacles, its pitiful crusty wail sonorous and irksome, threatening to swim up and down the channels of trees. Throat continuing to feel like the underbelly of a weather-beaten, barnacle-encrusted pirate ship. His esophagus mercilessly keelhauled bereft of a twinge of ruth. Time shed all variations and interpretations of meaning. Heart working unpaid laborious overtime, striving to fuel his bone-dry veins with anything sans sorrow and unconquerable woes. Although, when the lush measureless brigade of oak was the hub of conversation, considering a prospect other than unconditional defeat and ruin was a comedy show. 

His gaze rose forlornly to the lusterless tartarean abyss high above his pounding cranium. The mystifying freckled sky, scaled of its luscious wig of clouds long ago, was like the visage of a colossal celestial tarantula. Each and every pale colony of bone-white stars was an eyeball. Its sole purpose in its superficial existence to provide eyesight for a sprawling, galaxy-devouring arachnid. The hivemind blind to its creator’s apex goals and desires, shackled to an alley of gluttonous dark and confidentiality. 

Perhaps that eight-legged behemoth’s droves of mindless goons were the ones who mocked him. Lazing slothful in their chairs of refined stardust, propping their unused feet upon byzantine constellations. Launching petty, elementary chortle-infused lobs of utter and irrefutable mockery. Trapping the bastard within a desirous oven of jeering, fixating his frame with white-glowing spears of callous ridicule.

Gary untethered a colossus of a sigh from the pang-ridden fleshy cage known as his lungs, working their miniscule fingers until bleached bones is all that remains. He licked the back of his bottom teeth. A gummy tidal wave of plasma pink shattering against a stark white reef. The male’s mouth was saddled by a foul encumbrance. The repugnant, stomach-roiling taste of filthy gums and plaque-ridden chompers gnawed on his tongue. But, if he was filterless and frank, he couldn’t be bothered. All that plagued the noirette’s blackened, gangrenous psyche was the flickering, dying light at the end of the tunnel. This long, murky, abhorrent tunnel. Soundless and bereft of life, occupied only by his strained pang-ridden breathing and the auditory torture of Discord’s ramblings. 

Gary stared forward. He rolled his shoulders and cocked his neck both sides, glorying in the pleasureful rumbles erupting from his aching joints. All the while, the ramshackle life-despising machine continued on. His strides robotic and interminable, agonizing and harrowing. Yet, like many things he was “forced” to do during his tenure on Earth, it was a necessary evil.

A boisterous owl’s strident call exploded from the forest’s gloomy bowels.





“Whoever knew a place as dense and vibrant as this could feel so…dead.” Discord, the unhelpful god of all things chaotic, spoke in the head of Gary Demonio. It was the only string of words that exited his formless maw in…who knew how long?

It felt like hours, but even that did nothing to properly narrow it down. Anything and everything felt like hours in that rolling expanse of silent, stagnant fauna. On a more realistic and down-to-earth scale, it was roughly twenty minutes of wordless disjointed sauntering. The thankful, God-given conclusion of Discord’s unending tangent about his time as Equestria’s momentary monarch had arrived long ago. Right around the point where Gary, using his dimming consciousness to the fullest ability, noticed the absolute absence of senses. When the raven-haired male first breached the gates of this robustful wonderland of sycamore and shrubbery, all that dwelled on his internal horizon was pure and unbridled prosperity. Or, at the very least, whatever he could call the carnage-filled fairytale of revenge and slaughter that was his heart’s greatest muse. Now, as it had done numerous times throughout this strenuous odyssey, laden with the sickest of intentions, reality showed its utter indifference to the bastard’s ambitions. Gary had a quenchless appetite for success no matter the price of the path he ventured down, but the world was heartless to his plight. Standing mighty and defiant against his thirst for oppression of guiltless citizens. Refusing to adhere to his brash, stone-hearted command. 

Gary’s sanity was few and far between. Back when in the golden age of his grisly, spiteful dynasty-of-one, most men and women residing in the margins of his feasting grounds echoed that statement. Lobbing smoking fireballs of searing, soul-obliterating accusations and insults with their final breaths on the planet. A planet he blighted simply by shoving breath into his faltering lungs.

He had been called a myriad of things. Monster. Devil. A filthy piece of shit. The laundry list of vulgarities, profane enough to send a devout nun into cardiac arrest, stretched beyond infinity’s demarcations. Some were scourging and envenomed, infused with the hottest malice the human could conjure. Others were pathetic. Caterwauling like children begging for a toy at the supermarket. Pleading for their lives forlornly, terrified of whatever waited with bated breath for their inexorable arrival. Regardless of whether sorrow of disdain laced their words, Gary guffawed exuberantly. Because, at the end of the day, words were just that. Words. Not a secret weapon to flog their assailant. Not a tool to a valiant victory. And certainly not a key to survival. Just oxygen flowing from their trembling lips and quivering tear-stained chin. After all, he was the one playing with their lives like toy cars, not the other way around. In his unfathomably bleak present, perhaps those sanctimonious allegories possessed an iota of pragmatic truth. Those manic allegations sinking an elephantine anchor in unfiltered reality. After all, the textbook and universally understood definition of insanity was impossibly simple. You repeat the same action over and over again, brutalizing your psyche with the merciless drudgery, anticipating a fresh outcome each run that deviated from the last. Whether you understand the pointlessness of your actions is an entirely separate conversation. 

Gary Demonio wasn’t precisely sure he was even aware his actions were clones of one another. Throughout the lion’s share of this toilsome pilgrimage to nowhere, a modern-day rendition of the Trail of Tears, his actions teetered on the border of robotic. For what felt like a thousand years, Gary swept his sleep-deprived, bloodshot eyes left and right across the redundant landscape. His victimless glower bringing the murky stygian snaking around the armies of trees to a torrid simmer. Like an angry foreman scrutinizing an unruly work floor, Gary swung his gaze side to side. Over and over. Failure after failure. Hour after hour. Nothing changed. No matter how many pained strides or agony-riddled steps he took between each attempt, it all fed into the same pool of outcomes. He’d exhaustively analyze the limitless black, looking past every dense body of wood into the bowels of this winding glorified torture dungeon. 

The forest donned a rock-solid facade of life and luster. An insidiously deceptive masquerade to shroud the unbridled wasteland’s true uncensored colors. That was a reality Gary was almost positive a myriad of godforsaken wanderers long before him had realized. The path was a lengthy serpentine tongue of silt unraveling from the forest’s dark salivating maw. Its taste buds firing in jubilated anticipation for Gary’s inexorable fate. Unless the desolate trail fed into a vast hospitable clearing with an elongated table stationed at its heart. Upon it, a beautiful conglomerate of foods from every culture and walk of life the planet offered. Teeming cornucopias, its prismatic, nigh-sickening panorama of spirited colors vomited upon the sleek mahogany. A variegated amalgamation of fruits and vegetables, wheats and grains. All splayed out for consumption. And at the head of the unwarranted table, a sinner would laze in a golden throne. Gary Demonio. Basking in a buffet-of-one fit for a king.

Only that otherworldly euphoria of unchained lusts for grandeur only a preschooler could conjure were trapped in his thoughts. The machinations of his one and only far-famed second-in-command. His mind. That’s all Gary Demonio was now. A brigade of only three members. He, the aptly merciless head honcho. Discord, the God of Chaos and de facto compass. And his feral imagination, running amok with primal fantasies and crimson-soaked aspirations. He wasn’t entirely sure what exact purpose it served, but it was crucial nonetheless.

Beneath the scornful, judgemental eye of the blowhard moon, Gary and his ragtag governless infantry continued their haggard death march. A glorified mission of undignified suicide that, no matter the name change, harbored the same endgame. Absolute and unshakable ruin. 

Gary pressed resume on his automated default settings. Marching painfully, each footstep a harrowing nightmare he was involuntarily enduring. Swinging his vision left and right, over and over, scanning for a ticket to salvation that would never exist in this desolation. Gary’s tragic state of affairs all pointed down to one dark, caliginous avenue. Death. Nothing more, nothing less. These woods were preordained by the Norns of these wretched lands to rob him of his life. 

That was, however, until the Draconequus obliterated the silence like a cannonball to the hapless hull of a ship. Blowing a gaping, yawning mouth into the thick quietude. 

“Do you see that over there, Gary? To our left?”

“What the fuck is over to our left?”

“Look before you get snappy with me, friend.”

Gary halted. The pain rebound that lashed his scorching legs was unlike any other in his four decades of living. Hell, even catching searing bullets in his flesh and living to tell the tale was preferable. A tidal wave of black-crusted magma shattered against his bones. He winced against his will.

He swiveled his throbbing head to the left. Amidst the ruthless monotony of the limitless trees, the wall of oak like binary code in physical form, Gary saw nothing. Not a surprise and certainly not a change of pace. 

“The hell are you talking about?”

“Look again. I wouldn’t stop us for nothing.”

“I doubt that.”

Gary sighed in vexation, squinting into the abyss with furrowed brows and shrewd fatigued pupils. His patience waned. Sweeping his globes left and right across the endless hive of trees and tenebrosity, Gary emerged fruitless from his endeavor.

“Discord, I swear to-”

He stopped.

Mere nanoseconds before he would irreparably chide the notorious God of Chaos for his time-wasting impudence and ignorance, he happened upon a discovery. A world-altering, life-shifting, path-changing breakthrough in his tireless, unflappable foraging. He rubbed his buzzed pate in unbridled incredulity. His mandible on the verge of plummeting into the spongy sludge absorbing his boots below him. Partly from the modern-day buried treasure after what he thought was decades of searching. Moreso because of the unfathomable prospect that the rambling buffoon Discord was the one who sighted this paramount rarity. 

Through zig-zagging bodies of oak and sycamore like jail bars to a hellish eldritch prison, Gary Demonio saw his glorious passport to righteous salvation. About forty-something yards from the path of despair he marched upon, a faint glow rebelled against the moon’s radical all-encompassing customs. The diminutive gleam was an incandescent orange marble, levitating in the stale frigid night air. It reminded the bastard of the eye of a titanic reptile. Utilizing the drought of human characteristics as a blunt weapon of terror.  

The feeble shred of luster from a hopeful bygone time was as bleak and lifeless as Gary’s chances of survival previously were. In spite of the flare’s impotency, it illuminated the blackened logs painted by ghostly ash that was erected in a gimcrack pyramid. Resting on an eerie pillow of soot caged within a halo of smooth stones. Even with the imposing starless desert above him as a backdrop, the slender chain of smoke drifting from the pyramid’s crown was visible. Suspiciously visible to Gary Demonio. The deceased campfire tenaciously clutched its final table scraps of life animalistically, as though shielding itself from some unseen cluster of vultures. Primed and eager to tear the cadaver asunder the very instant its heart lie stock-still in perpetual slumber. 

Gary cracked his knuckles before he snaked an exalted hand to his rump, fishing his dearest comrade from his waistband. After cocking the pistol and preparing it for the habitual atrocities it regularly savored, he departed from the present-day Trail of Tears. Shattering the cycle of heart-gripping disappointment with every torturesome stride. Breaking free from the mendacious notion that eventually, perhaps even the very next footstep, he would yield some fruits from this sanity-eroding tenure. However, just as he was countless times in his ichor-stained life, he was wrong. So incredibly wrong. Except now. 

After laying waste to dead branches thick and thin and crossing strings of deer tracks, Gary Demonio sauntered into the campsite. And even that was a term he used exponentially loosely. Before him, the suspense accompanied by a traveling band of irksome crickets, was a glorified village for the homeless. The sorry-excuse for a fire, an entirely soundless rendition of a siren’s alluring call, was in dirt-poor hospice care. Sporadically peppered throughout the ramshackle encampment in no particular uniformity were two tents, each identically tattered and weather-beaten.  

The first and best kempt of the twain was a gimcrack hideaway a foot away from the campfire’s corpse nestled against a particularly towering tree. Its silky yet water-logged fabric, greener than a pond blanketed in scum, was granted an ethereal sheen in the moon’s unkind light. The tent’s structure was more bizarre than any sight he had staggered upon in his gore-stained tenure in Equestria. It was oblong and exponentially steep like a snow skier’s picturesque euphoria. Whether the aberrant oddity was an injury it shouldered throughout its poverty-stricken life or the creator’s wish was lost on Gary. An incredibly peculiar question cruelly starved of answers. A sole deviant of the repulsive vomit-green hue contaminating the jury-rigged living space was extant. Near the lofty crest, separated from the crown by paltry centimeters, was a singular sun-yellow path. Expertly sewn and melded into the sun-yellow fabric. Across from it on Gary’s left was its elegant, expertly manicured and groomed brethren. Its rich, attention-demanding mahogany hue threatening to blend with the endless wood engulfing the site. A site for…what exactly? A shrine for bounty-dodging criminals and roofless vagabonds, snagged in the morose throes of their atrocious luck? Sanctuary for those who deserved the exact opposite? Clandestine asylum for those who gripped modern civilization and all of its flaws and blunt edges in a flaming fist of disdain? Perhaps it was refuge for ponies who were incompatible with each and every one of those classes. Simply two long-time retired brothers-in-arms or tight-knit friends enjoying the unrivaled, peerless sanctity of nature and all of its bountiful contents. 

Gary’s eyelids were hauled towards the earth with the entire weight of the cosmos. His visage was a blemishless shimmering wall of passionless stone. Each and every dominant desire tearing his frame asunder was engraved in crude, vulgar carvings, trumped only by half-witted neanderthals. The primal inhumane hunger as intense as a Greek god’s punishment vehemently pummeling his stomach. His throat torched by dehydration, every word or breath like a sack of hot coals tumbling down his maw. Limbs wreathed by red glowing-hot wires of soreness and agony. His heart a rampant, berserk washing machine filled to the cusp with stones. Its janky thunderous movements and slams were discordant, yet terrifyingly synchronous.

“What do you think of my findings, Gary?” The Draconequus asked the silent golem of a man, pride bleeding from his praise-hungry words. 

An indecisive concoction of razed hopes, disappointment, and a timid dash of anger was plunged into his amber globes. He swept his inquisitive gaze-slash-scowl once more across the jerry-built dynasty of hobos. Gary loathed how much it reminded him of the fallout of his visceral sojourn in Roseville. 

Gary scoffed. The sound like sandpaper licking a hollow aluminum tube. 

“I don’t know what the hell I expected,” He croaked. “I guess I wanted a god to find me something more usable.”

“We’re in the slums of the Everfree Forest, my friend, are options are neither here nor there.” 

“The Everfree Forest? So this hellhole has a name now.”

“It’s always had a name. I figured you didn’t care enough to hear it.”

“You couldn’t be more right.” Rasped Gary.

The raven-haired sod marched to the first tent on his right-hand side. The grass encompassing the puny pouch of humanity amidst Mother Nature’s sovereignty was matted. Bashed into damp clots and clogged, enmeshed tangles by the shoes of whichever ill-starred soul was forced to accept respite here. Every step was akin to an abominable march across a field of broken glass. That same horrifically familiar hurricane of sultry slag swallowing his legs. Bones flaming, nerves like lit firecrackers. Each movement, no matter the irrelevance or puny size of it, trapped his ironclad frame in an iron maiden. Torrid smoking harpoons lining the walls of his personalized cage of nonconsensual penance. An incredibly bizarre punishment given the monolithic catalog of crimes and circumstances, the likes of which witnessed only in Greek tales of old. 

He surveyed the hermit’s paradise one final time before he spoke.

“What the hell do you think could even be here? Cigarettes and buckets of shit?” He sniffed the air, the oxygen cauterizing his esophagus. “Smells like it.”

Discord sighed, pestered. “The title ‘God of Chaos’ doesn’t mean I see the future, Gary. Premonitions aren’t my forte.”

“Oh, I’m sure it isn’t.”

Gary strode to the vomit-green tent, reaching an avid hand to the moist satin drape doorway. He slipped a trio of stony restive fingers between the drapes and tore open the right flap. How long his unflagging, fruitless voyage down Starvation Boulevard and Hell’s Lane accurately lasted had not yet fully dawned on him. Time was varnished with an easily distinguishable, infernal new meaning. Swaying on the edge of becoming Gary Demonio’s newfangled overhauled damnation. Perhaps the innards of this glorified outlaw hideout would furnish his being with the deliverance he miserably pined for, but far from deserved.

The tent’s interior was as cramped as the rusted carcass of a drowned car, suffocated and marooned at the bed of a dismal lake of darkness. Twilight was crammed into every corner of the clouded jade-colored textile. Assuming a stoop Upon the inundated floor, glossy and glistening in the silvery moonlight, was a bare-bones assortment of furniture and utensils. Furniture being a term the male used extremely loosely. A white nylon sleeping bag lie unzipped and disturbed, its flap thrown to the right with unchained abandon. Crumpled in the far left corner, greedily feasted upon by the dark’s quivering jaws, was a balled-up khaki jacket. The exact style clad in a helm of secrecy from its idiosyncratic maltreatment. Perched neatly atop it like a hen shielding her eggs was a colorless cowboy hat, the left and right end of the brim curved to the midnight above. The crown was adorned with a king-sized canyon through the center akin to a sea of snow being cleaved in two. Wound around it was a velvety royal blue ribbon, contradicting the cold bile-inducing color palette envying it. 

Countless passages of braille marred his arms in the form of goosebumps. His mandible shuddered like a hingeless door in a tornado. Mother Nature commanded volley after volley of gelid, icy spears to plant themselves into the bastard. She sought vengeance for his treachery. Vowed and pledged to the earth and all those who dwelled upon it that Gary Demonio, the wolf garmented in sheep’s attire, would not see the light of the day after this one. A half-decent pilfered coat and semi-fashionable headwear would provide longed-for clemency from the wintry reckoning. Yet nothing robbed him of all of his attention like what he smoked out at the bottom-left corner of the tent. 

A small dysfunctional family of cans cowered pathetically in the dreariest corner of the lightless fabric cave. The tins, all of them empty and ransacked sans a single deviant, all skulked defenselessly in their own private pocket of darkness. Whether they were waiting with bated, dread-filled breath for the return of the tent’s ill-omened owner, or simply glorying in temporary repose was anyone’s guess. Whatever the case may be, one of those options certainly wasn’t being lassoed into a face-to-face meet-and-greet with the ultimate Equestrian evil. However, the pestilence of tragic luck looming over the camp and the bastard were alike in many ways. Both inexorable. Both unable to be negotiated with, sparing the bother of attempting to evoke clemency. Both gazing lustfully at the cans. A begrimed silver fork lazed inside a plundered orange-striped can of carrots. The fourth unsullied can was packed to the utmost with ripe strawberries. 

Gary collapsed to his knees. His primal instincts clawed out of the lunacy-riddled fortress of his blackened heart, electrifying his trembling arms with a savage flame. A fiery passion for survival he never knew he’d ever find himself rescued by. With a wild, jubilated swing of his arm, the solid scarlet mass of the sugar-packed fruit dove down his arid throat. His stomach extricated from hunger’s authoritarian governance at long last. He tossed the pillaged can backwards into the gloom-infested wilderness, wiping the ruby remnants with a jungly forearm. 

“My goodness, Gary! I haven’t seen anypony that desperate in a thousand years.”

“Shut the fuck up,” He sneered, coming back to his feet. “It’s either I look like a damn bum scrounging for food or we both lose. Your choice.”

“Not saying it was a bad thing. I thought that chug was rather impressive.”

Gary couldn’t help but smirk ever-so-slightly as he reached two hands into the tent’s innards. One seized the lily-white hat, the other snagged the sleeve of the khaki jacket. With his callous stone-hearted robbery complete, the male stood fully on his legs trapped in a never-ending furnace of anguish. The coat was large on Gary Demonio. For a man of his stature and raw primordial brawn, that statement was one used exponentially scarcely. A sentiment that sat on the brink of extinction in Gary’s vocabulary. He eased his arms into the ever-so-slightly baggy jacket. Brown stripes dawned at his bowling ball shoulders and stampeded down both sleeves, concluding at his hands. The end of the sleeve effortlessly swallowed the mid-way point of his hands and left only the flesh above his knuckles exposed. With a simple cuff of the sleeve’s ending, this irksome predicament ceased to exist. 

The raven-haired man slipped the bleached hat upon his sweat-logged scalp. It was a bit too small to gratify his narrow-minded tastes and preferences. At the end of the day, in spite of how vehemently Gary attempted to traverse around the face, he was and perhaps always will be a beggar. A groveling mangy parasite blighting this homeless pony’s kingdom with a grim drought of defenses. 

Gary strolled to the opposite side of the encampment. The campfire’s final remnants of flame wandered far beyond the margins of saving. What was once a dull yet somehow active cluster of embers upon Gary’s entrance was now a cadaverous spark. Regardless of the strength of the fire’s last moments on Earth, the oak-brown tent was untouched and unbothered. Becoming another nameless gratuitous victim of the night’s colossal stomach. 

“What do you think’s gonna be in this one?” Gary spoke, his voice ever-so-slowly reuniting with his bygone stentorian boom. “The cigarettes and shit I keep smelling?”

Gary mirrored his previous set of motions. Lowering into a slight crouch. Fingertips eased between the two drapes, nigh-invisible in the smothering twilight. He shoved the right drape to the side, all but pinning it to the moist corner. When the raven-haired man had practically bullied his way into the tent’s heart and soul, he expected a similar outcome to the one he recently received. If he was lucky, and luck was almost always disloyal and transient, he’d be granted a few more undisturbed cans of lusted provisions. Besides that, he couldn’t possibly envision in his roiling sleep-deprived psyche of what could begin to galvanize his frame. A half-empty pack of cigarettes? A pipe choked by mounds of tobacco eager to be torched? Or perhaps something else his foggy brain couldn’t conjure before that would rescue the day?

One of those things that he always desperately required and longed for was something he was nigh-incapable of placing his finger on. Making the very tip of his forked silver tongue its cursory domicile. 

Guns. 

Lots and lots of ladened, blood-hungry weaponry. Enough firepower to make a nihilist warmonger flare green with merciless jealousy. 

Splayed out across the full width of the tent horizontally was a roll of thick, sun-baked animal hide the color of beef jerky. In front of the leather unfurled roll was a forest green nylon sleeping bag, it too horizontal and facing the right side of the tent. Marbling the leather and lined up in tidy rows bleeding with uniformity were firearms. In spite of the care and modernization put into its arrangement, they weren’t marshaled in any particular order. As though an isolated hunter’s armory vomited its high-caliber contents into the tent, and the owner was abruptly saddled with the duty of making sense of it. The sprawling quantum of munition was enough to send the male’s heart into an exalted thunderous maelstrom.

On the far left was a nine-inch hunting knife with the sleekest ivory handle Gary had ever laid his eyes upon. It was glossy and bore an enticing sheen like white plastic, resembling nothing of the tusk it was created from. But their was zero doubt in the shared mind of Gary and Discord the pearlescent grip was the victim of callous poaching. Beside that on the right was a standard revolver with a deep walnut grip with a frame constructed entirely out of pale nickel. Adorned by engravings inlaid with scintillating iron that Gary struggled to recognize or make lucidity of. On its right was, without the tiniest morsel of doubt, the breadwinner of this vault hidden in plain sight. The glorious mother-of-pearl of the secret stockpile. 

The apple of Gary’s eye infested by a lust for heartless larceny was a magnificence double-barreled shotgun. Doubtlessly its fervent creator’s magnum opus. Its wide grain stock conceived from the slaughtered carcass of a black-spotted birch tree. The role it played prior to its unwarranted butchering was unknown. Perhaps a gentle giant in a crowdless lush clearing, or one of thousands in a dense labyrinthine forest. The lengthy extended twin barrels were fashioned from the most solid, robust iron cash could possibly acquire. Engraved crudely into the sallow butt of the shotgun was what Gary could only assume to be a motto of an adept ambitious hunter. The words “HEART=CLEAN KILL” were carved into the pale wood. On the right of the double-barrel was a gunmetal-colored Schofield revolver with a stygian wooden grip. 

Gary’s knees kissed the sodden earth once more as he lowered his weight onto the forest bed. He cradled and psycho-analyzed the shotgun in his calloused sin-stained hands. With the business end lazing in his left palm and the butt atop his right, the sling dangling loosely like a dead snake, more details and artistic additives were apparent. Highlighted by the curious moonlight. Graven into the top and sides of the twain of barrels was an illustration. Small iron birds in flight from the looks of it. The birds sporadically polka-dotted the barrel’s top half. Long winding lines drawn as gusts of wind tailed the birds, carved deep into the stainless steel. The method of draftsmanship was undeniably vulgar, its primitiveness rivaled only by neanderthals on cave walls. The sketch, however, ventured far outside the realm of crudity. Some might tack the word beautiful onto their vast corkboard of descriptions for it. Others might refer to it as abhorrent and sloppy. Labeling the image as merely the machinations of an old society-despising, banjo-expert yokel.

One word marched across the vast landscape of Gary’s mind when his irises landed upon it. It was useless. Unless the picture of paltry birds and wind yielded any sort of value to the bastard, his interest was focused elsewhere. Currently, every last ounce and drop of Gary Demonio’s attention was soldered onto the tent wall before him. Somewhere blighting the northern religion of the Everfree Forest, an amalgamation of sounds lumbered towards Gary’s short-lived secluded paradise. The snapping and slaughter of cloven hooves against branches. The empty muted crunch of geriatric leaves. The odd squeal every so often of a lantern swinging back and forth on rusted, elderly hinges. Above all that, serving as the self-appointed overlord of all sound in that general vicinity, was voices. The joyful, blissfully care-free cadence of three lifelong friends enjoying a nightly stroll. Unsuspecting and oblivious to the monster engaging in haphazard primal piracy. 

“Oh, hell!” Gary whispered. 

“Are you hearing what I’m hearing?”

“Of course I am, you dumbass!” 

Gary hastily scoured the tent for a few more seconds, seizing a small brown cloth satchel and tossing it around his left burly shoulder. The bag of aurate bullets and shotgun slugs jingled calamitously like a militarized Santa sack. Something he’d expect to find out in a miscellaneous bunker, seeking refuge from the exterior discord beneath the earth. Not in the bowels of a random hunter’s encampment miles from a hustling-and-bustling civilization, waiting with open, hospitable arms to welcome them back to humanity. 

He snagged the ivory knife and its black faux-leather scabbard and tethered it to his waist. Repeating the motion with the Schofield and its dark brown tanned leather holster. He belted it around his midsection, checking the cylinder of the revolver. Odd but far from unappreciated, all six golden dime-sized circles resided within. After slinging the custom-made shotgun around his torso, he mirrored the action. The chamber was packed full of blood-thirsty lead and pellets. He stood fully, his shark-tooth grin emanating a vile breed of grim delight and merry joy. Corners of his lips aimed to the faceless sky above like fallen forlorn angels. 

Gary’ carnage-starved leer was magnetized to the endless ranks of trees and arresting vegetation to the north. The hammering, barking heart of the undesired conundrum marched in a pair of three. Their features enveloped by a relentless haze of anonymity. On the left of the pompous, boisterous triad of hillbillies was the christened light bearer. Clenched loosely in his gloved weather-worn hoof was a slender sable metal wand, mottled with maculations of flayed paint. Sores of revolting appalling rust freckled its languishing frame. Even worlds apart from one another, amber conniving optics shredding the tenebrosity asunder, Gary knew good and well the lantern had seen better days. Imprisoned within the begrimed glass cage dangling and swinging deliriously with every careless stride was a powerful orb of radiance. As though this garish devil-may-care ensemble of hicks abducted a comet from the twilight. Burglarizing its freedom and transforming it into their personal chattel. 

Discord quailed at the uninvited torrent of barbarous prospects adulterating his psyche. 

“I’m not too keen on whatever you’re planning, my friend. These are just hunters.”

The glaring light was a captured star waving maniacally in the all-encompassing twilight. His eyes squirmed pitifully in his groggy unflappable sockets, cowering away from the glaring shrunken sun. Gary’s heart was corralled by burning chains of jubilation at the spectacle. In all reality, considering it merely a sight for sore eyes would be the overlord of all understatements. To Gary Demonio, this ignorant band of moseying cannon fodder bore uber-importance. Vastly more significant than a grievous, monstrous crime scene waiting to explode in a starburst of viscera and brain matter. This was his greatest muse. A means to galvanize his wistful contrivances, begging on their scabbed, ichor-stained hands and knees to be gratified and pleased.

And when his number-one pastime was the hub of conversation, declining its gluttonous advances was a cardinal sin. Even in his intramural hypocrisy-littered bible of morals and rigorous guidelines. 

“They’re not ‘just’ anything, they’re in my way. They could be bounty hunters for all I know. You want that?”

“Of course not, Gary, but-”

Gary caressed the sheeny smooth stock with a twitching thumb, his rapture bleeding onto the redoubtable wood. A possession far too grand for a wicked ghoul of his caliber to wield with mock valiancy. 

“Besides, I’ve been following your orders ever since I got back here. About damn time I had some fun.”

Gary stabbed the pale birchwood stock into his bulky shoulder. The baggy khaki fabric rustled. Finger stroking the sleek trigger impatiently. The hapless light bearer fastened in his crosshairs. With a final lick of his lips and a diabolical hankering for slaughter sullying his sap-colored gaze, Gary Demonio yanked the solid steel trigger.

A volley of heat-seeking pellets, almost mirroring his hunger for violence and devastation, soared towards the hillbillies. A skull-splitting eruption of world-shaking magnitude shook the kafkaesque Everfree Forest to its rotten core. 

For the first time in his countless decades of mayhem-infested existence, the god of all things anarchy and bedlam was stunned to silence. A silence swiftly razed by the bereaved roars of dolorous ponies not ready to die.