D could feel the hatred inside of him burning at his skin, making him sweat, making every little thing that once would have been only noticed feel like nails on a chalkboard, shredding away at his dignity, his concentration, everything that was right with the world. Each little motion caused his eye to twitch, and he could take them all in now. The spider slinking across the wall, those god damnable birds that were constantly outside, chirping chirping, or making that sound of ruffling their feathers over and over again. The stank in the air of this hellhole that he'd been trapped in. He could feel it all building inside of him, welling deeper and deeper until it made him want to hate everything that the world was. Every tiny aspect of it he wanted to destroy, but most of all, he had one thing that he wanted to do more than anything....
... he wanted to kill.
"You've held it in for impressively long." Balthazar commented idly. In the short time that D had known him, he had known that Balthazar did not give comments lightly, or most often, at all. Had the young dhampir been in control of his senses he would have felt more of a sense of pride from the words. Now they just seemed empty, hollow, and far too loud, even though he knew that it was the volume with which Balthazar usually spoke. It was just this... test... whatever it was that Balthazar was doing to him that was making him like this. It was the lack of his ability to hunt ever, to having been stuck in this cell that was causing him to feel this way. Meanwhile Balthazar would often leave and come back smelling of sweet, wonderful animal blood.
"But it will not last, boy." Balthazar continued. "Eventually you will break, and you will experience the other side of yourself. You need to know what that other part of yourself feels like in order to control it. For until you truly face the darkness inside of yourself you remain vulnerable to it taking over your mind, and your body." Balthazar paused, and shook his head. "That, and you need to accept it as part of you. Though regrettable, no one keeps their monster locked inside of themself forever. Even without this test, you will eventually encounter it, at the worst possible time, and the consequences of it are something that you will have to live with forever."
"I am truly sorry for that." Balthazar said as he sighed, and shook his head as he left the boy, trembling and on the ground.
Desmond watched as the mirror shattered against the wall, looking at Raina, a mere shred of who she once had been. It was, Desmond realized with a saddened sigh, a rather pitiful sight to behold. While not nearly as bad as some of the tragic things he had seen, she looked so slovenly that she might have been a beggar from another time and place, where poverty was so constrictive that most would shudder to even imagine it. He could smell her blood now, thick on the air, and was somewhat saddened as well to realize that it did not hold the power over him that it once had. There had been so very much that had been robbed from her that night, Desmond just hoped that her sanity was not one of those things.