EREBOS

It only took a few passing moments, a frenzy of sugar, a twirling delight of powder and crystals, to go horribly awry.

A blast of fire scorched and licked at his shoulder, at his skin, brutal, searing, singing through the thick pelt and fur of his goat coat, and he instantly cried out at the overwhelming pain burrowed, hollowed, carved, and fractured into his soul. What had been so innocent, what had beguiled and allured him into a frenzy of jubilation, had twisted and distorted into a nightmarish regime, and the tears stinging his eyes said nothing for the anguish languished and seething within his little frame. Protected, guided, and cherished, he’d never felt the crippling terror of this unholy inferno, this ancient, arcane abyss, where the world treated one as dirt, as nothing, for the sake of something else entirely. What made it worse, as he feebly stumbled through the haze of agony and terror, was that everything swirled by, awakened by the challenge, by the nuance, by the sentiments of glory and victory; his friends carried on, his herdmates advanced, and he was left with naught but an overwhelming misery. At first, as they swept by, he pleaded and begged in tiny bleats, and when only the drumming of hoofbeats, and tiny, pebbled stones flicked back his way, he ceased the melancholy calls and the segmented laments, blinked away his chaotic tears, and strived to overcome.

All he received for his efforts was a cruel, anarchic swell of frustration and anger. The once limber youth, when not mauled and maligned by burns, breathed slowly, resiliently, and struggled to put the horrific throbs behind him, locked away in some sector of his mind he didn’t need at the moment. His emotions tumbled in wild, ferocious splendor – fear and hindering became wrath, and it exploded from him in unsettling waves, for each step he made, dragging his battered frame up the mountainside, a fierce, pervading essence toiled and plunged from him (and he remembered the cool, indifferent features of his father as he massacred wolves; embraced the shallow, bitter entrails, bit back a chilling reverie). Like a sickening, unwinding, uncontrolled barbarity, he felt pieces of him erupt and funnel towards the other participants, dark, unholy, singeing and scarring, contorting and unraveling, motioning back the stitches of repose and ensuring sedition. He didn’t know what it was, and didn’t bother to mull over the vicious connections streaming, pulsing through his sudden, heartless void, only following the steps of his companions, turning right, plunging his way through the subterfuge.

[Erebos, burned, frustrated and in pain, unknowingly unleashes his dark magic (which follows along the lines of being able to manipulate another’s dark magic). He chooses right.]