Not to say they were zombies, but their biofields were totally compromised. Any semblance of ponyhood that they may have once had was entirely subsumed by their macabre enterprise. At first it wasn’t so bad, merely a host of monsters that poised an imminent threat to any exploration team, entirely beyond reason, each with their own specialized task. I hesitate to say they’re entirely mindless, some of them are very cunning, but the sheer amount of corruption had rendered their thought processes nearly incomprehensible. That was the good news. But as ponies explored closer to the epicenter of... whatever it was that happened here, even stranger things began to emerge. This was definitely what broke this land and sent it hurtling our way, but what was it? Nopony could know, because nopony could get close enough to find out what was in the middle of all that fallout. Temperature dropped exponentially, perhaps a last-ditch failsafe that didn’t entirely work, but it was entirely impossible to continue further without freezing solid on the spot. Even that didn’t seem to stop the creatures though, if you could call them creatures anymore. It became hard to tell where one creature started and another ended. Nothing but a twisted, writhing mass of... Pleasure is too generous a term. Whatever these creatures had been seeking ponies can speculate was pleasure, but the result ran the gamut of extremes from pleasure to horrifying pain. The thing is, there weren’t any creatures left to feel it, only the pleasure and pain. Acts of extreme bondage without reason, genital mutilation, ritual scarring, and they could hardly care that they were doing it to themselves. But mostly they engaged in sex. The outer rings had a whole economy, no an ecology based around sex. Things gave birth for the purpose of bringing more sexual energy into the world, and things consumed by subsisting on that energy, whether it was extracted from their spawn through torture, trickery, rape, or even seduction. Mostly seduction, actually. Nothing sated these creature’s bottomless appetites more than a willing victim. Friendship survives even in the harshest of places. After a number of exploration teams were... entirely lost to that realm, the princess issued an emergency soul retrieval and the entire land was nullified to protect ponykind from whatever might have caused that to happen, and also the rampaging sex demons. Demon you see is a contraction of ...