He sat, unmoving, staring at the moon, his eyes fixated on the white orb in the sky. He was transfixed, sights set on it. Alone, he sat, awaiting a message of some kind, but none came. It was simply him, his thoughts, and the moon. Pitch stared up at the moon, shaking his head as he looked up into the night sky. "Come on, old friend…" He muttered, rolling a quarter through his fingers. No reply came, per usual. Pitch rolled his eyes in the moonlight as he rose to his feet, grabbing his quarter in his palm as he stepped down from the tree branch where he had been sitting, cloak sweeping behind him as he began walking into the shadows. His dark form melted into the blackness, before reforming in his dark cave, where moonlight shined in weakly.
Pitch sighed as he grabbed a hold of a large hunk of rock, swinging himself up onto a ledge of stone. His eyes swept around his lair, though nothing greeted him but shadows, stone stairs, and blackened ashy cages. The tunnels and caverns all around him welcomed him with an invitaition of exploration, though Pitch had walked through each of them at least once, and the many stair steps on the walls and roof all led back to the main room he sat in now. His amber eyes flitted about the room, listless and tired. He was already bored with the dreary scenery, and he had only just begun to serve out his sentence here. He raised a hand, staring at the skeletally thin fingers that he curled and uncurled, closed and opened. He had only just begun to serve his sentence, but with the years that had passed, and the millennia to come, he was more than done with the entire idea of his imprisonment. The caverns under the bed were very…. Very….
"Boring," He sighed out loud, leaning against the wall and closing his eyes in annoyance. "Very very Boring…"
He opened his eyes once more and lifted his hand lazily, black sand swirling about his finger tips. In his palm, the sand swirled, forming gruesome pictures, images of his darkest fears. In his hand, he saw the pain of children, the fear in their eyes, death, desperation, thievery. A small smile spread across his lips when the guardians formed in his hands, E. Aster Bunnymund shielding a little girl before she disappeared behind him, and the guardian looked about frantically. Cute, Pitch thought with a smirk, he's afraid of losing a child. The sand shifted in his palm again, and this time, it showed his fears. Pitch saw himself standing, children running through him with laughter and smiles on their faces, leaving him stumbling by himself. He saw images his past, but he closed his eyes angrily, trying to ignore them until he felt the sand change in his hand, seeing only a butterfly left behind.
The new image in his hand was a grainy black version of a skinny teenage boy, leaping around and shooting little bursts from the tip of his staff. Pitch narrowed his eyes angrily. The sand version of Jack Frost danced about his palm, laughing and circling a smaller version of Pitch before lunging forward and destroying the tiny Nightmare King. Pitch grunted, closing his fist around the tiny guardian and destroying the sand images there before tossing the sand into the darkness around him, closing his eyes as he listened to the grains skitter across the stone.
Jack Frost and those damn Guardians… He grunted at the thought of them, shaking his head and closing his eyes tighter. They were the reason he was trapped here, banished to his stone prison, with only moments to be above on the surface. Jack Frost, who Pitch had written off as a 'neutral party', had been the reason for his undoing. All he had wanted was belief, to be powerful again, and he had foolishly assumed that Jack would understand him and his quest for belief, and had believed that they could live in a world where the two of them ruled over all, the petty Guardians of old dead and forgotten.
A shiver ran down his spine, and Pitch closed his eyes tighter as a cold wind blew through his caves. Even here on his own he could see that cold and dark went together better than anything. He had thought about it many times he was lucky enough to be gifted with a decent nightmare; A world where he and Jack ruled, the smaller Guardian dressed in dark robes of blue and white, and Pitch dressed in all black, filling the world with cold and fear. Yet most of the time he was not blessed with dreams of Jack and himself ruling over a shaded world. Usually his dreams were more so memories of the guardians destroying him and all the fear he had worked to earn with their hope and wonder and fun. And sometimes, he was miserable enough to dream of his life before he was the ruler of fear, in the life he had lost. Pitch sighed as he hugged himself closer and drew his cloak up around him, and he shivered again as he closed his eyes tighter and tried to think of nothing at all. But as he heard the soft whineys in the distance, and the sound of sandy hooves on stone, he knew he would not be lucky enough to go this night without his dreams being over taken the Nightmares he ruled. And the Nightmare King was afraid as he drifted into a fitful and unwelcome sleep.