I'm an ugly mess; Tarnished

[Tarnished]

Are you not entertained?

Kingpin has, perhaps, suffered the most. He’s been wrapped with tentacles for weeks; always prying, always invasive, pulling off patches of his flesh; whenever the creature thinks the stallion might bleed out, it grows another tentacle to plug the hole and continues to carry its victim along nonchalantly through the tunnels its’ dug beneath Beqanna. His screams echo along the newly made caves, but no one can hear them; not a single soul comes to help him and he’s delirious with infection and fever when his captor finally decides it’s time to return to the surface. Spewing nonsense, spittle flying from his mouth, he rallies together all of his strength in a final effort to break free; he struggles, he kicks and he bites as the monster makes its’ tedious climb upwards, so it obliges him—sort of, by squeezing out what little life is left in him and letting him go. His heavy mangled corpse bangs dully against the walls, falling back down into darkness long before the creature ever reaches the light.

The surface of the lake starts to bubble; it’s small, at first, but then the bubbles grow larger and the water starts to spiral; before long, it’s like someone has pulled the stopper out of a bath. It rises out of the spiraling water before Zayn; hundreds of feet tall with thousands of tentacles protruding from its body. He is the first thing it sees and so he is the next victim. It doesn’t make him suffer the way it did Kingpin (though if it knew, it might have); nevertheless, his death is just as painful. Tentacles surround Zayn before he can flee and jerk him up from the ground; methodically, they begin ripping him apart piece by piece. His eyes are removed first and then his tongue and then it makes short work of the rest of him before casting the squishy, bloody remnants aside. It moves among the rest of them slowly, picking targets at random; a couple (a bay stallion and a buckskin mare) copulating at the edge of the great meadow catches its’ eye and it roars before furiously crushing them. The next, a dun stallion that cannot seem to move fast enough, is hoisted up by his back leg. Thousands of beady, yellow-gold eyes glare into the horse’s one eye before the monster swallows him whole.

Two gray mares are next; they had been grazing together peacefully before the pandemonium started. A tentacle equipped with a mouth full of sharp, barbed teeth shoots out and digs into the sides of the first gray mare; it eats into her, gnawing through her ribs and feasting hungrily on her innards. Blood gurgles out of her mouth while her companion, suddenly hysterical, tries to save her—she soon meets the same end.

A thick, blackish aura begins to emanate from the creature as it starts to shrink; down, down, down, its tentacles withdraw into its body as it begins taking the shape of a horse. The aura visibly spreads—seeking targets both far and wide, the disease takes whoever it wants without regard. Wracked with chills, shaking, puking, two stallions drop to their knees as he begins to approach them; one is chestnut, the other is black and mumbling odd things under his breath: “I told you so, I told you so.”

“What are your names?” Tarnished asks, smiling.

“L-Luus,” the chestnut replies.

“Cad…mus.”

Tarnished’s smile disappears; he attacks Cadmus first, forcing him to the ground and crushing his skull beneath his hooves. Luus is next. The chestnut stallion topples over easily and Tarnished, employing the method he’d seen wolves use when he’d watch them crack open ice to get something to drink, rises and falls repeated in a half-rear—crushing in Luus’s ribcage. Breathing heavy, the Percheron Hybrid lifts his head and screams at the sky: “It’s done, it’s done! I did it for you, Master. I did it for you.”

tarnished

( vanquish x nocturnal )

Sacrificed to Carnage;
Zayn
Limitless
Gidget
Fickle
Cruel
Luus
Cadmus
Fenton
Kingpin