The grass withered as the monster tenderly landed. He watched as the shoots crumpled and were drained of color. Gray.

Nothing could return to life after the Blight had touched it.

There were no trees on the mountaintop, and the forest below was only sparsely populated by a tentative gathering of coniferous plants. Birdsong rang from the woods. Patches of pale-faced dirt and reviving grass peeked from between the trees in the expanse of hills below, bathed in the confining light from the sun above. The Blight's eyes itched, burned, when he tried to focus on the light, and the monster could feel the sun beating down in waves of heat on his matted fur. All the vibrant colors blurred together, and they hurt, lacerating the Blight's mind and exposing all of his lightest secrets.

The monster hissed, raising a paw and clawing at his beak to show his distress. There was a ripple of movement on his shoulder blades, between the bases of his leathery wings.

A dull rustle, followed by a duller thunk, sounded from the monster's shoulder as his rider slid from her perch. "Having a little trouble there, are we?" she asked.

The Blight's batlike ears swiveled as she hobbled around to hunch before him, and the fur along the beast's spine prickled. His mistress was in the form of a crotchety old hag now, with two milky white eyes in a pair of sunken sockets and tattered rags that clung to her frail skeleton. Her form was hunched like the monster's own, and both were just as gaunt, but the woman walked with a crooked leg and grinned a toothless grin as she limped.

The Blight cracked open his maw and uttered a guttural sound of resent. Chaotic and penetrating, the sound tumbled down the mountainside, and the birds below fell silent. Pain, the monster told the woman. Bright.

She waved her hand in dismissal—"Yes, yes..."—and immediately began tracing shapes in the dirt. A moment passed, and the Blight lost interest and sat with a thump, barely taking notice as a pool of decay spread from his haunches. He looked at the crone, tested her necklace's protection spells, and then wished that they were back in the cavern.

The snows had melted; he had been forced to emerge. Why they couldn't have simply bided their time in the darkness and echoing silence as they had for sixteen years, he didn't know. But now they were out, and the monster's mistress was drawing in the dirt.

Finally, the woman stood with a crackle of her spine, and the Blight's attention was ensnared as she raised her gnarled hand to the sun. She was standing in a ring of glowing patterns. Closing one pale eye, she distorted her fingers into a strange, runic shape, muttered something, and suddenly twisted her hand.

The sun disappeared, and the world was cast into blackness.

Throughout the forest, the birdsong came to a shambling halt as the air lethargically cooled. The Blight looked around in ecstasy at the adumbral world, his ears twitching. Pinpricks of light glared down from the sky from amidst a pool of inky blackness, and the forest below was now nothing more than dark splatterings of the blackness as it dripped down. The horizon cradled the distant, pinkish moon in cruel fingers of unheralded night, and the Blight could feel that the midnight's inhabitants were glimpsing it now. They were seeing the moon, in all its sinister glory, as it hunched on the distant hilltop...

The Blight heard his mistress cackle, watched her body buckle and contort as she transformed into an impressive enchantress with flowing black robes and a pale, shadowed face. She stretched.

"Better." The beast's mistress returned to her place overlooking the woods.

The Blight huffed once more and sat back on his haunches, reveling in his freedom. He was much better suited to this shadowy vision like he had grown accustomed to in the cavern. Now that the sun was gone, the monster could comfortably stretch his wings and turn to lick his matted gray fur down.

Just as he began picking at the blood clotted on his talons, his mistress began to speak: "And thus the world falls into night, fixed forever-gloaming. That which is afraid of the light hither comes a-loping."

Suddenly, the gentle silence of the night-lit day erupted into sound. A mournful baying came from below and echoed through the heavens. The Blight's ears twitched. With a questioning thought tossed toward the enchantress, the beast got to his paws.

"My dear," his mistress said, whipping around and clamping his lower jaw in her hand, "see you not? The end-days creatures have arisen, and they shall arrive here any minute. And then, love, shall you lead them in battle against the hideously hopeful peoples of the land, and I shall become their queen of darkness!"

The Blight twisted out of her grasp, but he remained silent. His gray eyes were the only thing that moved as he studied her. The monster saw his mistress' cruel smile falter, her eyes dimming in the morbid starlight, so he quickly sheltered his mind before continuing with his train of thought.

Though he himself could not attack her, perhaps another could. Perhaps another could steal away that vexing necklace so that he could rot her.

He therefore resolved to wait through the darkness for his allies to arrive, promoting a passive pretense in the meantime.

With a squeaking yawn, the Blight ran a paw over his eyes and huffed into the enchantress' face. She reeled backward, coughing. The Blight shot her a smug look as she straightened and glared at him.

Discomfort could not be justice—there were too many victims, too many scars—but her discomfort was pleasurable.

It was a simple task, getting a monster to comply.

The Blight merely fired a series of agonizing memories, warping a mind, and one of the larger beasts was at his command. This one was larger than the others—it stood a head taller than even the tallest amongst the writhing creatures. It was a hulking bearlike creature, though its neck was grotesquely deformed, and spikes jutted from its back.

Through the twinkling eyes of the dead and the yawning maws of beasts of the night, the enchantress stood with an expression of contentment on her face. The Blight and the Ally wove their way through the mass, occasionally stepping through a disintegrated creature. As they neared her, the Blight saw that the enchantress was watching them, and her face turned emotionless.

The screams and growls and hisses faded as the Blight felt his mistress in his mind: "Found a friend, have you?"

There were scars on the Blight's sides. Jagged white scars where neither fur nor scale grew, the byproducts of years spent learning pain and being immunized to it. The bare patches on his shoulders and front legs were melted skin where he had learned flame and how to ignore it. The missing ring of scales around his chest was now worn on the enchantress' neck, and it was that item that forbade the beast from attacking her.

He knew now, however, that he was pain. He had been bred to inflict pain and death, bred to burn the village and torture the survivors. Even in that abysmal cavern, where the enchantress had spent sixteen years cultivating a monster of destruction, he had known that her own destruction would come about because of the creature she had created. The wretched creature he was, imbued with magic and yet powerless.

The Blight stopped in front of his mistress. The Ally was circling behind her, but it flinched when a ghoul wailed.

Pain.

She understood, with prompting from another image the Blight thrust into her mind—molten rock dripping onto his shoulder blades as her orangely-lit face peered down—and immediately the enchantress adopted a reproachful look.

"You're not considering vengeance after all these years, are you? My dear, it's futile. You know that."

Vengeance.

He needed that necklace, needed to destroy her, but the protection spells... The Blight would be tossed backwards through the air like a dead rabbit if he even so much as tapped her. The necklace was what gave her power over her creation; it was the object of many spells. But these spells would not protect against the other creatures of the night—creatures like the Ally. Those were expected to steal the necklace, that she might be killed.

The enchantress sighed, her eyes darting to her left as the Blight accidentally incinerated a large lizard. "And I was hoping we could take the world over like civil beings."

And suddenly her flowing dress was flaring in the ghastly light from above, she was twisting away from the Blight, and her fingers were crackling with lightning. Beaks and fangs and eyes glittered in the light, and the world seemed silent for a transient moment as a million heads swung toward the Blight's mistress.

Then they were reeling, howling and shrieking—"The LIGHT!"—and the enchantress' lightning was flickering through the Ally's fur, through its nose and gaping mouth. The Blight looked away when tendrils of smoke crept from the Ally's eyes, and he called with his mind to the others.

They were already excited at the scent of death and the suddenness of the light. Fueling their indignant surprise with his own memories of terror, the Blight called on them to attack his mistress, and there was a sudden torrent of bodies sweeping toward the enchantress.

The Ally dropped to the ground in a charred, smoking heap, but now the enchantress was surrounded by a hundred yelping, clawing, snapping creatures of the night. Pain! they cried. Vengeance!

The Blight was silent and still as the bodies entombed his mistress, though he shuddered at the last glare she gave him. Hatred. Hatred that fueled the fear that fueled the monsters. Even as she disappeared, the Blight could sense the magic she kept around her neck, could sense the spells that she drank like water. She could not be harmed by the monsters, but if they managed to steal the necklace...

With a triumphant warble, a pale humanoid proudly thrust a claw into the air. From it dangled a collar of scales.

The Blight shrieked, and immediately there was a clearing surrounding the witch. The beast padded up to her on damaged, bloodstained feet. The humans' faces, wrought with horror, as they stared up at him. He stopped in front of his mistress, and he lowered his head to stare into her guarded eyes. A child's blood, clotting between his talons. The Blight considered mercy. The Blight considered mercy.

He was not mercy.

"Dear, you know I was only trying to help. I never meant anything by it. Pet, I love you as I'd love my own child. I was doing—"

No, the Blight interrupted. Selfish. Pain.

"Really, love, I thought I'd raised you—"

Vengeance.

"Please! Pet, please! I don't desire death, I don't—"

And then he touched his beak to her forehead.

The enchantress stared, appalled, and then the flesh on her perfect cheeks shriveled. It drooped, and her brow soon dripped over her eyes. Her jaw swung, and her ears flopped. Her skin turned gray, and her hair fell from her scalp. The Blight watched solemnly as its mistress deteriorated into a crumpled, grinning, dusty skeleton.

When the Blight turned away, the monsters were disappearing back into the forest, and he soon realized why: the moon was speeding through the stars, across the sky toward the western horizon. The monster could feel the enchantress' spells dissipating, years of magic unwinding, so soon the cursed sun would return. He had to leave with the others.

So, with one final glance at what used to be his mistress, the Blight gathered the necklace up in one paw and took to the brightening skies.

Gray skies.