Help me out before I drown
Save me now before I give up

He still cannot face the cave.

The darkness presses against him as soon his hooves clatter over the threshold. It suffocates him, fills his nostrils of non existent blood and sweat, intermingled with fear and pain. Every time he tries to take another step he can feel the cold iron bars biting into his branded chest, can feel the panic rising from the heavy stone in his stomach.

So he stops trying and for now avoids it.

Yet it still interferes with his dreams. Like it does tonight when he lays curled up on cold sand, the freezing coastal air comforting where most would find it offensive. It’s been several days since he had last slept but now he falls into a fitful slumber, too tired to resist any longer. It starts off pleasant enough. There's a beautiful winged twilight mare whose laughter bounces off an ice maze as they each try to outsmart the other one to the finish line. He’s not sure when it changes, when the sky behind them starts to darken. Somewhere when her colorful wings turn stark white and her laughter turns to screams.

He’s back in the cell. He can hear Carnage whispering behind him as his line of sight falls on Ellyse and Dahmer, still huddled together. He had thought that when his heart had been taken from him, replaced by the glass forgery, that he wouldn’t be able to feel anything anymore. Had almost hoped that Carnage would take that from him too. Yet he feels lots of things. Anxiety, fear, but most of all anger. It still simmers deep beneath his reddish gold skin, only pushed back by the intensity of his constant panic. Every time he feels a good emotion (anything close to happiness or caring) that strange sensation returns to his crystalline heart and he immediately tries to cut off the source, afraid of what it means. Of what it can do.

It was easier to fade into his rage and fear, easier to deal with what he was familiar with instead of the unknown.

A thin crack had spread at the bottom of it, when Ellyse had stopped denying the truth. When he realized the extent of her lies and betrayal, when his heart had quite literally start to break. Perhaps if it finally fragmented completely he would die. It's not a fear of death that keeps a wall up around this fragile organ. It's the fear of feeling all that pain again, the rejection and overwhelming sadness... The fear of loving someone who would hurt him again. That was worse, that was worse than anything death could do.

He had let Ellyse go on the black sands of Tephra and yet she still lingered, still refused to leave, still haunted him. He doesn’t understand why. He desperately wants to be rid of her and yet her voice constantly floats through his dreams. Like now, as he moves from the cell to the memory that hurts him the most. “You must learn to trust me. And I, you. We have both been hurt but I’m nothing if not loyal.” The lie is so clear now, inflected in the last word in a way it had never been said when it actually happened. “I am yours if you’ll have me.”

He never had her did he? 
He had absolutely been hers but she had never truly been his. Not once.

“There is no one in this world for me but you.” Once those words had been true when they fell from his earnest lips but now he knows better. She had never belonged to him. She had never been meant for him or he for her. They had been star-crossed from the very start. It’s hard to not blame her, even harder to not blame himself. Perhaps he had always only been a stand in for Magnus, no matter how much he had tried to not be compared to him, it was always there wasn’t it? Hovering like a dark raincloud in the distance, that Ellyse had loved his father long before she claimed to love him. Hell, perhaps she had never really loved Dahmer either? It’s a thought that gives little comfort, especially in this memory where he was at his most vulnerable. When he handed over his love to her willingly, turning his blind eye to every sign that he knew was there.

From there it drifts to his twins, the children that he had failed and were lost to him. Joplin cries in the distance and he knows what’s waiting for him now. His blood drips from the clawed X, stains the sand to an even darker hue of black. Adaline is shattering as she falls from the cliff and Magnus beckons from the depths of a tumultuous ocean. It’s always the same, this nightmare. Every now and then it changes to that first time he found himself in the cell. Of the bear he fought and the sharp icicle that pierced through his breast as he took his last breath. Sometimes he dreams of murdering his father for freedom, can smell the scent of ash and charred flesh as he sees a burning Gates. As he convulses and attacks a beautiful mare with wide brown eyes, filled with pity for him.

He can’t remember the last time he dreamed well, can’t remember the last time he didn’t dream at all. He’s stuck in the endless loop of failure and heartbreak and there’s nothing he can do, his body too exhausted to even wake. The only sign of his turmoil is the shudder of scarred skin, a soft moan that isn’t forceful enough to stir the sand in front of his muzzle, the glow of his brands as they seem to burn brighter.

Ledger