//------------------------------//
// Alternate Chaos 
// Story: The Legendary Nicholas Flamel. The Pony. 
// by Koji 
//------------------------------//

	“Wait. I still haven’t sorted out how to work this form and have it feel natural.” The sound of flywheels and gears was cloaked by the slightly metallic voice coming from the strange stallion, Nicholas. Twilight kept her observations of him to herself, while also struggling to not yell out, ‘What in the hay do you mean, “This form?!”’ All she knew was that she needed to get away from him. 

‘I would love to take an actual look inside of that metal form. The science that must have gone into it!’ The errant thought pushed its way into her head. She pushed it back where it came from. Twilight couldn’t stand being near this pony. There was no reason for it, he seemed perfectly likeable, but his presence reminded her of something dark. Something she had put into the untouched recesses of her memory. 

Twilight turned to look at him, noticing again his mismatched eyes. That too was trying to pull that darkness into her thoughts. Those eyes didn’t have the depth of a normal creature’s. They seemed to be… Flat, as if they were carved from gemstones, but they also carried a deep wisdom with them, and a feeling of raw, uncontrolled power. The eyes looked straight into hers.

“Do I interest you?” Twilight jumped out of her thoughts, hitting the threshold of the library’s door. 

“Umm… I’m sorry for staring, but… you interest me. In a bad way. Just being near you makes me uncomfortable, but I don’t know why.” Well that was a lie. This metal pony walked through her shield as if it was air, used magic without a horn, and turned wood into a strange metallic substance. Oh yeah, he had also popped up in the middle of her library in a huge flash of light.

“If you’re disconcerted by me, then you have no reason to keep me here. I’ll leave. By the way, how can you stand this form? I think I’m going to change to something I’m more familiar with.” What did he mean by that? Nicholas’s eyes had started glowing with an indescribable light. No, his eyes weren’t emitting light, they were pulling it in. Twilight noticed something that she had passed over before. The large white stallion’s cutie mark. It was a symbol to match his eyes. The Yin-Yang shimmered. Nicholas’s whole form seemed to start rapidly blinking in and out of existence, and more light was being pulled towards his eyes. The last of the light fled into those eyes, and Twilight’s vision ceased to function.





She was blinded by the onslaught of color. Twilight hadn’t been knocked unconscious; the darkness just seemed to disappear. Where was that stallion? She couldn’t see properly, it was just a blur of colors, with splotches of light drifting across.

A coherent shape began to form in front of Twilight. The colors gave the impression of the stallion named Nicholas, but the shape was all wrong. It seemed to stretch out like a snake, but multiple other shapes were attached to it. The imprisoned memories were breaking their cage. Suddenly, Twilight’s vision cleared, and she knew what she was looking at. Or she would have, but Nicholas’s shape was much different from the one of the pure chaos that Twilight had forced herself to forget. 
While every part of Discord seemed to have been attached at random, as if by a child with a new toy, Nicholas was the opposite. The horns on his head where those of an elk, his head equine in nature, with two matching fangs seamlessly attached. His sinuous body contained a combination of different limbs, but they looked as if they were meant to be there, the foreleg and paw of a lion worked perfectly with the leg and claw of an eagle on the other side, while the wings on his back, one of a bat and one of a griffon, were as magnificent as the wings of a butterfly. His right leg and tail was of a dragon and his left leg a goat’s. All of this was coated in a dual paint of black and white, with a mane of brown.
Discord looked as well planned as an accidental nuclear explosion, but the form in front of Twilight was as perfect as Celestia herself. She knew the reason she had for being uncomfortable, and the memories of that chaos had been unlocked.

“Ah, perfect. I didn’t think that I would be able to change forms this well. Wait… what exactly did I change to?” Nicholas looked at himself with his unmatched eyes. He seemed to comprehend that this was not the form he wanted. “Hmmm…. Well the wings are there, but why do I have so many different parts? At least this seems to be easier to use than that silly horse body,” He had started jumping in place, then walking in a small circle. “Where is that idiot apprentice?”

Twilight looked around. The other pony that was with Nicholas had disappeared. Twilight thought of his fireball Cutie mark and began to panic. She had someone with a special talent for fire loose among her books. Of all the things that could happen, this was The. Worst. Possible. Thing!