Unbroken: Rise of the Horde

Chapter One

27 years later...

Hordak froze, clutching his throat. When he tried to inhale, his windpipe sealed off. He dropped his screwdriver, and it clattered to the polished floor. The room spun, and he dropped to his knees. The clone grimaced as pain burst through his body, but he willed himself not to cry out. The flames of agony rushed throughout his whole self. Thousands of daggers plunged themselves into every bone and organ. He put his head to the cool ground and forced himself to draw in quick shallow breaths as he trembled.

After what could only have been centuries, the daggers ceased to exist. All that was left was a stormy, tense emptiness. Hordak gulped in a few more mouthfuls of stale air before rising to his feet. He laid his hand on a column for support while he recovered from the blast.

Once he was certain all had passed, he groaned and slumped into a chair. Hordak hung his head in his hands and sputtered a curse. Imp did a couple of circles above, but he knew better than to bother his master.

During his time on Etheria, the defects had been getting more frequent and worse. It didn't matter what he tried.  He attempted to rid himself from all emotion. That'd seemed to work for a while, but like everything else, it was only a temporary solution. He remade his armor, but that didn't fix anything. For five years, Hordak even recalled every encounter he had had with his big brother so that he could create a new body for himself. Whenever Prime's body began to fail him, he would simply elect another one to host his soul. Every attempt was a failure. There was no new body for Hordak, and in fact, the process probably made things worse. All the attempts had been hidden away in tinted glass vitrines, out of this site line of anyone (plus, it was slightly embarrassing how much they looked like demented Imps).

All the while, that horrible vision from the Scorpion Den was becoming true: slowly, but surely, Hordak was falling apart.

These years on Etheria had drained him of everything. The clone did not physically age, but his condition continued to grow worse with each passing year. The only solution he came with was to actually fuse his armor with his body. It was a grueling process, and every now and then it had to be adjusted.

During those times, it wasn't really the pain that bothered him, but when he looked at himself and saw what he had become. His body had slowly deteriorated. Where there was once healthy skin was now replaced by rotting or dead flesh. It started in his shoulders, but had slowly spread to his forearms, back, and legs. Those places were horrific spiderwebs of bulging veins and hauntingly dark blue flesh. He had become so bony, it didn't matter what he ate. I am hideous, he'd whimper in shame every time. The ice in his heart had long since turned to stone.

Hordak straightened up as he saw the time at the bottom corner of one of his many screens. Pushing away those dark thoughts, he knew he had to start getting ready. He smoothed back his hair, which took much longer than it should have since there was one super annoying curl that just wouldn't GO AWAY. Hordak could just imagine Horde Prime's words, "Imperfect as always."

Once the clone's hair had been properly fixed, he straightened his velvet crimson cape. It relayed his stature, but it also helped hide how thin he'd become. He groaned and cleared the desk. It was important to show a uniform and tidy appearance in front of Shadow Weaver.

That woman is creepy, he thought. Once the work space had been somewhat organized, he checked the time to see he still had about five minutes. Since there was no longer anything he could do with his hands to distract himself, he decided to think back to the first time he met his Second-in-Command.

Twenty six years ago... It was a dark night in the Fright Zone, like most. This time, the shadows had felt thicker somehow, almost like they had been alive.