There Will Come A Day

by Glimglam

Omen

The red moon hung ominously in the sky.

Twilight did not understand what it meant. She had consulted her star charts, textbooks, and just about every reference on the matter of the heavenly bodies that she could find. None of them offered an explanation for the alien moon that now displayed itself proudly — almost arrogantly — to the whole of Equestria.

She turned her gaze slightly to the left, and set her eyes upon the second moon. The moon that was significantly smaller in the sky, and a bright shade of white.

The moon that she and every other pony had come to know and admire.

Luna's Moon.

Twilight was concerned. The Red Moon was close, closer than Luna’s moon had ever been before; almost quadruple the size of its counterpart. She didn’t know what it meant, and she didn’t know if it posed a real danger to Equestria. Aside from being somewhat foreboding and terrifying to a young foal's mind, it didn't seem to be actually doing very much.

Her intellectual mind had considered the possibility of some kind of impact, but considering how suddenly it had appeared, and how it hadn’t come closer in the week since it first appeared, she was confident that such a thing wasn’t going to happen. But it didn’t mean she wasn’t worried.

In the arrival of the Red Moon, a state of perpetual twilight had dawned upon Equestria—Twilight herself grimly noted the irony of her own name at this point. Ponies were anxious and afraid. Paranoia was running at an all-time high. She had heard that some were taking drastic measures, in fear of an oncoming apocalypse.

The sun would rise and fall as normal, of course, as they were still well under the command of their respective goddesses. But it did not seem to matter much; even when it wasn’t blocked out by the Red Moon, the light and warmth of the sun barely reached the ground. The days became much cooler as a result.

Twilight had sought counsel with the Royal Sisters as soon as the Red Moon made its appearance. But in all of their thousand-year-old wisdom, neither Luna nor Celestia could offer an explanation of this bizarre omen—much less advice on what to do. As much as she hated to realize this, Twilight was just as lost as they were. She had left that meeting feeling disappointed, upset, and more lost than ever.

Twilight gave the Red Moon a long, hard look. “What does it mean?” she whispered, and released a drawn-out breath. A chill ran down her back, and her wings gave a slight twitch. “What is it? Good or bad? Are we right to worried about this…?”

For the new princess, the nights were sleepless. Thoughts of virtually limitless variety tortured her in her dreams, all seeming to attempt predictions at what was to come. It reached a point where she could not handle the stress any longer; she needed to talk to someone. The princesses had been unable to reassure her, and her friends were all the way back in Ponyville, so her options were fairly limited.

A few lonely nights later, Twilight was strolling the perimeter of the Statue Garden, hoping to clear her head. While out and about, she suddenly began to hear a distinctly familiar voice in head…

“Well, well, well! Our princess is a little lost, it seems!” the voice echoed, the boisterously positive tone masking the clear undertones of mockery. “Need a map, Miss Sparkle? I’d be more than happy to provide one!”

Twilight grimaced, and threw a glare towards a nearby statue. “’I’m not in the mood, Discord,” she spat. “Go make chaos somewhere else, I’m busy.”

Sure enough, the reformed Lord of Chaos himself stuck his head out from behind the statue, feigning a look of shock. “Why, Twilight! I’m surprised! You would accuse me of causing chaos here, of all places?” A large rock floated by his head, casually defying gravity. “Such nerve!” he cackled, jabbing the rock with a claw, causing it to pop like a balloon.

The alicorn wasn’t amused in the slightest. Even though Discord had been rehabilitated for a while now, his antics still got on her nerves. Especially during times like now, when most of the Equestrian populace was in such a stir.

“I don’t have time to lecture you, Discord. Not at a time when we’re still trying to deal with—” She gestured at the Red Moon. “—figuring out why that is up there.”

Discord spared the alien moon a tired look, and he smirked. “Oh, but of course! A whole week and a half, and you’re all still in a tizzy about the sky’s newest ornament,” he observed, carelessly waving his hand in the air. “Personally, I think it really adds something to it. Ah, but then again, putting anything up there would be adding something, wouldn’t it?” He produced a single coin from the ether, and flicked it upward. “Bit in the air! Ha!”

A few moments passed, and the bit had not yet obeyed gravity and come back down. It simply kept going skyward. Discord sighed. “Well, darn. Lost another one,” he groaned, but then immediately brightened up as he conjured an entire sack of bits. “Oh well, many more where that came from!”

The alicorn watched on incredulously as Discord fiddled around with the many coins, creating a whole tower of them. She huffed, and kicked over the tower of bits—much to the draconequus’ evident annoyance. “Adding something? It’s scaring everypony!” snapped Twilight, frustration brewing hotly. “We don’t even know what it is! Or why it’s there, or what will happen because of it!”

Discord rolled his eyes as he set to work picking up the wayward bits on the ground. “And that is supposed to be a problem?” the God of Chaos questioned, chuckling darkly. “Forgive me if I find that rather paranoid of you, Twilight… Oh, but I suppose you are the kind of pony to be prone to such feelings, aren’t you?”

Twilight took offence to that, but she wasn’t in a position to argue about it. Every minute spent speaking with him was a lost minute for potentially working out a solution, she realized. “Discord, I have no time for you,” she said with finality, and Discord’s amused smile fell away. “I have to take care of the ones I care about. Goodbye.” She turned to leave.

“Wait.”

Against her better judgment, she stopped herself. “What is it now?”

“Tell me… Have you heard of the poem, Twilight?”

Twilight jumped; his voice was now directly in her ear. Turning, she found that Discord had slithered up beside her, and his stare seemed unusually serious. “B-be more specific,” the alicorn responded, shrinking back slightly. “I’ve heard countless poems over the years. What is just one?”

Discord held her gaze for a moment before speaking. “There Will Come A Day, of course,” he said simply, before sitting down on a lawn chair he had suddenly conjured. A cup of lemonade was in his grip before Twilight could even blink, and he took a sip before continuing.

“An old poem, written by a positively batty old pony those thousand years ago. Crazy thing said that she “saw the future”, and all sorts of hogwash like that.” He suddenly howled with laughter, and wiped a tear from his eye upon composing himself. “Can you believe how crazy she was to make such a claim? I dare even say, she was even crazier than I am! Hard to believe, of course, but I speak the truth!”

“‘Hard to believe’ is right,” muttered Twilight, trailing a sour gaze from Discord to a nearby hedge. Even despite his behavior, her intellectual curiosity was piqued. “I don’t think I’ve read it, actually.”

Discord shrugged, and slipped on a pair of sunglasses as he laid back in the lawn chair. “Not that you could have, really. It was never published. Reason being? Someone stole the paper it was printed on…” He reached behind himself, and then produced a scroll of paper, winking. “…and that “someone” happened to be me, of course!”

The alicorn gaped. “You stole the—?!”

“‘Borrowed’, Miss Twilight!” he clarified quickly. “‘Borrowed’!”

“What difference does it even make?” questioned Twilight, scowling at him. “You never returned it! And this was a thousand years ago, too!” She groaned. “Ugh, you are just unbelievable…”

Discord raised an eyebrow at her, frowning. “Well, in case you may have forgotten, I had a date with a stone-cold prison not long afterward. Rather hard to return something to a crazy old mare when you’re rooted to the ground, is it not?”

Twilight bit her tongue. He did have a point. “I… suppose so,” she conceded. “Now, about that poem…”

“Why should I just tell you about this dusty old thing, when I can simply recite it?” He held up the paper, removed his sunglasses, and then put on a pair of reading glasses as he skimmed it. “Moment please, been a little while since… Ah! There we go.”

In a flash, both he and the items he had conjured vanished instantly. The courtyard began to darken very quickly, as a huge shadow seemed to draw over it. Twilight looked up, and saw the silhouette of Discord in the sky, arms outstretched in a loose embrace around the Red Moon. His voice reverberated through the air, rattling Twilight’s bones as he spoke.

Discord vanished again, and Twilight suddenly began to feel very cold. Her breath came out in a foggy mist, and snow began to fall from nowhere. With a crackling sound, the nearby pond instantly froze over as the temperature continued to plummet. The trees and hedges quickly began to die, shriveling up and becoming coated with frost. Out of nowhere, Discord appeared again—wearing skates, no less—and skirted about on the now-frozen pond as he recited the next verse.

Suddenly, the gentle snowfall began to come down in vicious quantities, completely obscuring her sight as it transformed into a blizzard in mere seconds. Just when the cold reached the point of unbearableness, everything seemed to clear away. Now, she was in a lush forest that vaguely reminded her of Whitetail Woods. Birds sang. A gentle breeze blew by. She felt oddly comforted.

But then, something unexpected happened. All at once, the sounds ceased. Birds stopped singing, and the winds stopped blowing. The leaves of the trees became deathly still. Avians of any kind were nowhere to be found. And as all of this occurred, Twilight heard Discord’s voice echo throughout the utterly silent woods.

Once again, Twilight could begin to feel the temperature change. But rather than grow colder, the exact opposite occurred. It was heating up. Quickly. She started to pant, and could already feel her coat becoming damp with sweat. The air became hazy, and the sunlight grew brighter by the second.

Shielding her eyes with her foreleg, Twilight squinted and looked up into the sky, and gaped. Fire was raining from the sky. The trees suddenly went ablaze as the falling embers touched them, and the alicorn watched on in horror as the forest around her burned into cinders. All the while, Discord narrated the next verse.

Ash only remained of the forest. The thick scent of smoke assailed Twilight’s nostrils, and made her cough and hack. The sun became blocked out by thick clouds, and as the final embers burned away to oblivion, a single drop of water landed on Twilight’s head. Perplexed, she looked into the sky, and another drop of water fell on her—this time, in her eye. Before long, a gentle rain was falling, washing away the ash and soot.

For the first time since this strange demonstration, Twilight moved forward through this scorched landscape. Rain continued to fall (if only in light quantities), and she noticed the odd burnt stump here and there; reminders of the inferno that had been here moments ago. She kept walking, and soon spotted some kind of flat stone sticking out of the ground in the distance. As she approached it, Twilight found that it was without any sort of inscription. The ground below it, however, was loose…

It was a grave. Twilight gasped noiselessly, and almost fell backwards from shock. Death, her mind realized at once. An omen of death. Darkness. Despair. Pain. She could feel her eyes begin to sting with tears. “No,” she whispered, shaking her head. “No, no, this can’t be right… No, this can’t…!”

Her speech was cut off again, as the thick gray clouds suddenly cleared away, revealing a blue sky behind them. Without ceremony, the headstone toppled over, somehow sinking into the ground and disappearing from sight. Where the loose ground was, a thick flowerbed suddenly sprouted and bloomed with remarkable speed. Grass and other plants grew all around her, overtaking the burnt remains of the forest before disappearing from sight completely.

That’s when she heard the laughter.

Looking up, Twilight saw a tender, innocent sight. Three foals were playing together in the field ahead of her, kicking a plastic ball around with carefree spirit. They reminded her very distinctly of a certain trio of fillies she also knew, even though they were clearly quite different foals. One of them stopped and waved at her, and Twilight couldn’t help but smile and wave back.

Just then, Discord’s voice returned once again, whispering the final verse of the poem in her ear.

She gasped as the God of Chaos himself appeared again in front of her, once again donning his sunglasses and taking sips of his lemonade. He spent a moment admiring his hallucinogenic handiwork, and then stared straight at Twilight, smirking. He pointed to the sky, and Twilight followed his direction. The glaring red moon still hung there, as if intently watching the world it hovered over with subtle menace.

Twilight awoke with a start, her eyes darting across what she momentarily recognized as her bedchambers, back inside the palace. She quirked her brow with confusion, and let her mouth drop open. “What…” she began to say, but stopped there. Discord worked in mysterious ways, and Twilight never understood how that creature even operated most of the time. She shook her head to clear away the thought, deciding to let it go for the time being.

She gazed out the window, and frowned. The dull scarlet glow of the Red Moon, in tandem with the white gleaming of Luna’s moon, shone through it. Twilight began to think about the “dream” she had—what was Discord trying to show her? That strange poem was just as ominous as the moon that now joined the original one in the night sky.

Deciding to go on another walk, Twilight continued to think about this matter for the greater portion of the night as she wandered the halls of the palace. Was the pony that wrote it truly gifted with foresight? Or was Discord’s rambling correct, and she was as crazy as she appeared? She was more confused now than anything. The “warning” that resided within the poem unnerved her, but it would take more than mere words on a thousand-year-old page to convince the alicorn of any upcoming apocalypse.

There would certainly come a day alright, but it wouldn’t be tomorrow.