Chapter 9
The ponies of the world cried out in fear to see the Sun and the Moon both in the sky at the same time, but it was not the first time; the god of breaking rules himself had caused an eclipse in his quest to save his love.
However, the sisters could feel the stuttering of their hearts, as the natural order fell to pieces around them. “Something is wrong,” Celestia said. “Do you feel it, sister?”
Luna nodded. “I should not be out in the daylight. We should share our time on this world, but not our time in the sky.”
The god of breaking rules laughed. “Don’t be silly! Is there a good reason you shouldn’t share time in the sky? Do either of you remember how Moon missed her sister, and Sun wanted jewels like her sister’s stars, and I gave them the gift of an eclipse, breaking the rules of night and day? This is much the same as that, and nothing to worry about!”
“No,” Celestia said. “Something is wrong, my love. I can feel it.”
Luna said, “The sun and the moon have come to a halt. They are supposed to go around the world on their own, but I can feel that they have stopped. The world will burn if they don’t move! There will never be a night again!”
“I believe we can move them ourselves,” Celestia said. “Let us try, sister! The hearts of the Sun and the Moon beat inside us; surely we have the power to move them, as once they moved themselves!”
“Yes, let’s try it!” Luna said.
The sisters reached out to the sun and the moon with their telekinesis, and the sun and the moon responded, for the sisters who had once been mortal ponies now bore the hearts of the Sun and the Moon, and so they were the Sun and the Moon. On their flanks, images of their hearts’ essences appeared as their cutie marks—the Sun on Celestia, and the Moon on Luna. Celestia was able to make the sun set, bringing the nightfall, and Luna brought the moon to the center of the sky. She then re-arranged the stars in the sky, which were the Moon’s jewels, for while she had been the wife of the Lord of the Dead, she had never had jewels or beautiful adornments.
The god of breaking rules was relieved. It had never been his goal to destroy the world, after all, and he hadn’t known that putting the hearts of the Sun and the Moon in the sisters would make the Sun and the Moon stop moving on their own.
There were many things the god of breaking rules didn’t know, after all. For sometimes, we break rules, with no understanding of the harmony that we destroy by doing so.
Then the three Fates, and Love, and Nature, all flew down, coming to see what had broken the harmony of the world and made the sun and the moon stop in place.
They looked down on the two new goddesses, horned and winged with the hearts of Sun and Moon inside them, and the Elements of Harmony in those hearts… and they were horrified.
“What have you done?” Sealer said to the god of breaking rules.
“How did you get the thread of life?” Weaver demanded.
“You stole the clay of life from me!” Nature accused.
“That mare with the heart of the Sun is the one you loved, the one who died,” Love said. “And the one with the heart of the Moon is the Lady of Dreams, who was married to the Lord of the Dead, though he could not love her. Both of them are dead, and should not be here!”
Luna snapped, “I was the wife of a god, and a goddess myself. I have every right to be in the world at nighttime.”
“But you aren’t bringing dreams,” Nature said. “You breathe like a living mare, and the blood moves in your veins.”
Spinner said, “I did not start threads for these mares.”
“Because you cut their threads, when they died!” the god of breaking rules said. “But now they are one with the Sun and the Moon, so they have threads as surely as everything does.”
“Then they are gods!” Weaver snapped. “They walk the world like mortals. Gods should live in the lands of the gods.”
“I never did,” the god of breaking rules said.
“Because you’re the god of breaking rules! They aren’t, so they should not be breaking the rules of mortals and gods!”
Nature said, “The harmony of the world has been broken. The sun and the moon no longer spin about the world on their own. The clouds cannot move or make rain. The winds have stopped. The seasons will no longer come. Hear how Sky weeps, for her harmony has been torn from her!”
And indeed, Sky was weeping. Where her eyes were, the clouds poured rain endlessly, but there was no rain anywhere else in the world. Without Sun and Moon moving about within her, Sky could not make winds, or clouds, or seasons.
The god of breaking rules called out. “Sky! Sky, stop weeping! There is a way to solve your problem!”
Sky looked at him angrily. “You have done this to me,” she said, and the rain that came down from her eyes turned to ice, making the lands underneath her face bitterly cold, so cold that Celestia and Luna, even though they were gods now, shivered. “I helped you, and I see you used my gifts to break the law of life and death, and destroy the harmony of the world!”
“Don’t be so upset. There’s a way to fix it,” the god of breaking rules said, after breaking the rule of ice so that he could keep himself, his love and his sister warm despite the icy storm. “I gave you ponies who can fly! Ask those ponies to move the clouds and the wind for you, and make the rain, and the seasons. They love you, sky, they’ll do anything for you. Give them the tasks you can’t do for yourself any longer, and they will take care of you.”
“I will ask them,” the sky said. “But I am still very angry with you! I should be able to do those things for myself, not have to rely on my pony friends!”
“And with the harmony of the world broken, the animals no longer know what to do,” Nature said angrily. “When Sky’s pegasi bring winter, the animals who you gave the gift of winter sleep to will freeze, or never wake from their slumber when spring comes. They will have a hard time finding food, or mates, or living their lives a natural way, as I intended, for you have broken the harmony of the world. Just as you were told would happen, if you broke the laws of life and death.”
“Surely there’s a way to solve that problem, too,” the god of breaking rules said.
“I have already asked ponies to help with it. Many of them turned me down. The ones you gave horns to think they are like gods, and they want nothing to do with the nature of the world. I have had to ask the ones you gave no gifts to.” She smiled thinly. “So I gave them gifts. I gave them strength and the power to call on me, to make plants grow, for you’ve broken the harmony of the world and now only when ponies call on my power can I exist properly in the world anymore.”
“Well, it sounds like the problem is solved, then,” the god of breaking rules said.
“Silence!” Nature howled at him, and in sudden fear, he was quiet. “You think that you can find a solution for every problem. Breaking a rule caused a problem? Never fear, just break another rule! That is not the way we gods built the world. You have broken everything by breaking the law of life and death.”
“We can find solutions for the problems,” Sealer said. “But the fact remains that all the problems are your fault.”
“You were warned,” Weaver said.
“I’m sorry,” Spinner said.
Love said, quietly, “All of the gods met in council when we saw what you had done, and we have decided we must punish you.”
“That doesn’t seem fair,” Celestia said, defending her love. “You know well that everything he did, he did for me, and to fulfill the promise he made to my sister while he was trying to find his way to me. How can you, Love, say it’s right to punish him, when what he did, he did for love?”
“Because my domain has limits,” Love said. “You are very new to being a god, but you will find that to maintain the world’s harmony, all of us must accept limits on our power. All but the god of breaking rules, who agreed to this when the universe was created, and then went and broke the rules he had already agreed to. Just because you love someone, does not give you the right to destroy the world as we knew it for their sake.”
“Then must we return to the land of the dead?” Luna challenged.
“No,” Weaver said. “In fact, you cannot. You are gods now, and you are the Sun and the Moon. If you were to die, the world would lose Sun and Moon and be locked in lightless darkness forever.”
“We cannot repair the harmony of the world by letting you return to the land of the dead,” Nature said. “We cannot repair it at all, in fact. We will have to rely on ponies to do the things that just a short while ago, happened on their own. And if they fail to do those things, we gods will be powerless, and the world will be destroyed.”
Celestia and Luna looked at each other, and then at the god of breaking rules. “My love… you didn’t warn me this would happen,” Celestia said, troubled.
“How was I supposed to know?” the god of breaking rules asked, desperately.
“Because we told you!” Nature thundered. “Wisdom told you! The weavers told you! I told you! Love would have told you if you’d asked, but by the time you talked to him, we had all told you and we thought you understood! When we told you that breaking the rule of life and death would destroy the harmony of the world, and bring nothing but chaos, what did you think we meant?”
“I had no idea,” the god of breaking rules said. “You never told me what that was supposed to mean. What do I know of harmony? Harmony doesn’t break the rules! Chaos does! Chaos sounded fine to me… and it still sounds okay! So Celestia and Luna will have to move the Sun and Moon themselves, so what? They are the Sun and the Moon now, so that’s to be expected! Sky and Nature will have to ask ponies to help them? Well, ponies are good and love to be helpful, so that’s not going to be a problem! The seasons and the rains won’t come unless ponies help Sky? I gave Sky ponies to help her! The animals won’t remember how to care for themselves without help? Nature, you just said you solved that problem by giving gifts to ponies so they can help you!”
He spun around, pointing at all the ponies who had gathered around the conclave of the gods. “And look, I gave some ponies magic, that before only we gods had! They’ll find new ways to bring harmony to the world! Instead of a small number of gods doing everything that shapes the world, now there are thousands of ponies to help us! I’m sorry your harmony broke, but it sounds like we’ve solved all the problems that that caused, so why are you still so upset?”
Nature shook her head, her eyes dark with anger. “If you still cannot understand what you did wrong, there’s no point in trying to explain it,” she said. “Here is my punishment, god of breaking rules. You will wear this strange shape you earned in your journey to the Land of the Dead forever. You may never again be an alicorn.”
“Don’t be silly, that’s a rule and I’ll break it anytime I want,” the god of breaking rules said.
Nature smiled cruelly. “Not this rule. You can change what you look like from time to time, of course, that is part of your power. But in your essence, in your true form: this is what you will be until the end of time.”
“Well, so what?” the god of breaking rules said, laughing. “The way I look is because many animals gave me gifts, to help me survive when the Lord of the Dead would have me die. Do you think I’m ashamed of it? I think I look quite beautiful, to be honest! Now my very form breaks every rule of animals that there is, and it shows off the generosity of all of Nature’s creations! So if you tell me I must wear this form, I do it gladly, and I will be a demonstration of the kindness of your creatures!”
“I agree,” Celestia said bravely. “If my love must bear the scars and the changes his journey to save me brought about, forever, then those scars and changes are beautiful, for he did it for love.”
“Beautiful is perhaps a stretch,” Luna said, “but he certainly looks like a god of breaking rules should.”
Nature scowled. She didn’t appreciate the god of breaking rules’ lack of concern with the punishment she’d given him.
“We have taken your thread, god of breaking rules,” the Fates said, “and woven a dark future for you, to punish you for breaking the harmony of the world.”
“Well, it’s a good thing I don’t believe fate can affect me,” the god of breaking rules boasted. “If I have a fate, well, then that’s a rule, and I can break it!” He laughed. “Besides. My love is alive, and a goddess now who can never die, so I can never be parted from her again. What kind of dark fate could you possibly come up with that would hurt me worse than losing her did?”
The weavers scowled. The god of breaking rules was entirely too cavalier about the punishment that they were giving him.
Then Love spoke. “You lied to me.”
“Yes, but it was in the cause of love! Your cause! You should have been sympathetic to me to begin with.”
“You lied to me, and got me drunk so that I would give you a potion of lust, to use on Nature. One of my closest friends.”
“To be fair,” Nature admitted, “the potion helped, but if he’d tried to seduce me I probably wouldn’t have said no. He was handsome… then.”
Love ignored Nature. “You used me, to try to carry out this mad plan of yours. When all of us gods warned you, you couldn’t do this thing or it would destroy the harmony of the world, you just did it anyway, and you tricked me into helping you.”
The god of breaking rules laughed nervously. “Well… yes, that’s true, and I’m sorry, but I did it for love. Surely you understand?”
“And what is the worst part,” Love continued, stalking forward toward the god of breaking rules, “is that you keep using my domain to justify this! As if I made you do it! As if, because I gave you the gift of love, you were compelled to break the law of life and death! As if it’s my fault!”
“I never said it was your fault, just that I thought you could sympathize…”
“I don’t give the gift of love to gods so they can ruin the world we all built together! You chose to love a mortal—”
“I didn’t actually choose that. Aren’t you the one who chooses? Or is it random? She was just so perfect I couldn’t help but love her.”
“—and her entire life, you knew she’d die someday, but somehow it took you by surprise!”
“She was too young! If she’d died of old age—”
“Mortals die, god of breaking rules! It’s what they do! But you were shocked, that a mortal died, and you decided, you’d break the law of life and death because it doesn’t matter to you what rules you break or what the consequences are! It doesn’t matter who gets hurt! All that matters is that you get what you want!” Love was now directly in front of the god of breaking rules’ face, shouting.
“I see you’re very angry about this,” the god of breaking rules said, tentatively, “and I’m sorry, I never meant to make you so angry—”
“You didn’t care, though. You never care who gets angry. Who gets hurt. Who gets blamed.” Love grabbed the god of breaking rules’ elongated face. “And you think you will get away with anything you do, and nothing can possibly hurt you.”
“Breaking rules is what I do.”
“Yes. But love is not.” Love released his grip. “So I will take away your love.”
“Wait, what?” The god of breaking rules shook his head wildly. “You can’t do that! You ponies just said that Celestia can’t die!”
Celestia said, “What am I doing here?” She looked around herself in apparent confusion. “I was in the sky… wasn’t I? I thought I was in the sky… Oh, it’s nighttime. I should be on the other side of the world now…”
“No, it’s all right,” Weaver said. “You’re a pony now. You and Moon both.”
“But Moon is in the sky…” Celestia pointed with her hoof.
Luna said, “No, I’m here.”
“Did you take their memories?” the god of breaking rules asked. “You aren’t the god of memory. You can’t do that.”
“No. I’ve taken her love.” Love smiled nastily. “It was the Goddess of Wisdom who took her memories. She knew she could take nothing from you directly, for you have no wisdom. She and I agreed to do this, for gods should not remember being mortal ponies. The Lord of the Dead was wrong to do that to the Lady of Dreams, and you were wrong to do it to the Sun and Moon.”
“Who made us into ponies?” Luna asked.
“That one.” Nature gestured at the god of breaking rules. “The bringer of chaos. The destroyer of harmony.”
“No,” the god of breaking rules said. “No. Celestia—”
“That’s my name, now that I am a pony?”
“Celestia – listen to me, remember me – don’t you remember me? We loved each other.”
“I don’t,” Celestia said. “I’m sorry.”
“No,” he said again. He whirled on Love. “No. Give her back! She loved me! You have no right to take that from her!”
“Do you care that I took her love from her,” Love said, “or do you care that by doing so, I’ve taken love from you?”
“It’s the same thing! Give her back her memories!” He turned to Celestia. “Celestia, try to remember! You died, I went to the land of the dead to bring you back—”
Luna laughed unpleasantly. “That sounds like a lie. No one can come back from the land of the dead.”
Celestia said, “I’m the Sun. How could I have been dead?”
“No, you – you weren’t the Sun, I gave you the heart of the Sun when I brought you back—”
“I don’t see how that’s possible,” Celestia said politely.
“If we are gods, what are we doing here in the world?” Luna asked. “Shouldn’t we be in the land of the gods?”
“You are the Sun and the Moon. You need to remain here in the world to keep your selves in the sky moving,” Nature said.
The god of breaking rules shook his head. “No. No, this is all wrong! This can’t – Luna, you were the Lady of Dreams, remember? You were married to the Lord of the Dead, but he didn’t love you, so you wanted to return to the world of the living, too! And Celestia – you were my love! I sacrificed everything for you! I lost everything of my body but my head and torso, and had to replace all my body parts with different animals. I was imprisoned and tortured , my skull was reshaped, my eyes were damaged, all so I could find you and return you to the land of the living.”
“If that’s true, then thank you,” Celestia said. “I do appreciate all the effort you went to.”
The god of breaking rules began to weep, his golden eyes filling with tears. “Celestia. Celestia, try to remember. We loved each other. We were everything to each other. Can’t you remember?”
“I’m sorry,” Celestia said. “I do appreciate everything you’ve done, and I think I may even have some slight inklings of memory of having been a mortal pony once, but I don’t feel that way about you now. I think it would be best if you found somepony else to love.”
And as she and Luna flew away with Nature and the weavers, Love smiled, and the smile was savage and cruel. “You should not have used me and lied to me, brother,” he said. “But you thought there would never be any consequences for anything you do. Don’t bother trying to find someone else to love, either. I have taken Love away from you. You will never find friendship, or family, or the love of a special somepony, ever again.”
With that, he flew away, leaving the god of breaking rules broken and crying, in pain like he had never imagined before. This hurt far worse than being tortured by the Lord of the Dead. This hurt even worse than losing his love had. Because then he had known she was in the Elysian Fields, in paradise, and still loved him. But now he knew he was nothing to her any longer, the love she had felt for him erased as if it had never been.
He lifted his head, wiping his tears away with his lion paw. He broke a few rules, and this was what they did to him? They thought he was a bringer of chaos and disharmony, just because he wanted one dead mare to live again?
They accused him of breaking the world. Well, then let them, and he would show them just how broken a world could be.
And so he broke all the rules. He broke the rule of gravity, and made houses float. He broke the rule of dimensions, and made things that were solid into things that were flat, as if made of paper. He broke the rules of day and night, over and over. He broke the rules that trees should not walk and that fish should not fly and that roads should not float. He even broke the rule that doors connect two sides equally, and made it so that a door that goes to a new place cannot return a pony to the original place.
They gave him a new name. No longer merely the god of breaking rules, they called him now the Spirit of Chaos and Disharmony, Discord. And all the gods remained angry with him, except for Sky.
Throughout all of time, Sky has been swift to anger, her rages coming quickly and fiercely, and then swift to forgive and let go, the storms of her fury dissipating quickly. Sky had been enraged when she learned how the god of breaking rules had broken the harmony of the world and made her dependent on her flying ponies, the pegasi. But the pegasi had been a gift from the god, himself. And every time she saw them and delighted in them as they flew within her, she remembered her old friend and how he had given her these ponies as a gift, breaking the rule of ponies and wings to raise them from the earth, up to join her.
So she pleaded with the weavers to show him mercy. “Do not let his future be nothing but darkness,” she said. “Punish him for what he has done and what he is doing, but do not let Love deprive him forever. There was good in him, and even his worst act, when he broke the harmony of the world, he did out of love and kindness.”
The Fates had never liked the god of breaking rules, and liked him less now that he was Discord, but all the gods love Sky, and so they heeded her words. “We will give him a choice,” they said. “He will suffer many years in loneliness, and many more years in loneliness and darkness, but a time will come that one of his children, one of your adopted ones, will offer him friendship. That pony will have the power to see the goodness that you see. And if he accepts that friendship, he will be saved. But if he turns on it and rejects that pony, then his destiny is sealed, and he will know nothing but darkness and loneliness all of his days.”
Sky agreed that this was acceptable. As cats and dogs floated past within her, barking and meowing, with kites chasing them with open maws and clacking teeth, Sky said, “Will anything be done to stop the chaos he is causing now?”
“Celestia and Luna wielded the Elements of Harmony once, to escape the land of the dead,” Sealer said. “They no longer remember that, but Harmony does. Harmony will find a way to reach out to them and restore what has been lost.”
Rock waited patiently.
It had sworn vengeance on the god of breaking rules when he pushed Rock aside with water, to gain access to the land of the dead. It had sworn it again when the Lady of Dreams had tricked the Lord of the Dead into taking the god away from Rock, after Rock had imprisoned him.
Rock was patient, implacable and unmoving.
Someday, Rock would have him again.
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Yo, it's good to see you back! To be honest this is one of the few works of yours that I'd never read, so I had a good time going through it all. It's a good AUrigin story myth??? And I really enjoyed how tonally distinct and irreverent Discord's dialogue was compared to the grandiose nature of the rest of the work. This made me happy; keep on trucking!! (as long as it makes you happy of course!)
dang, this is done. congrats!
An outstanding finale. Great work in getting everything together, and in establishing Discord’s disinterest in further connections. Aside from thinking that he could never know love again, it would mean the other gods couldn’t hurt him through those he cared about.
The mythic ambiguities are well-executed as well. And the separation between fact and fiction could be seen as a rule in its own right…
Thank you for a great read. I’ll need to go over the whole thing at some point.
Love failed to forgive, thus it broke the rule of itself. Love MUST forgive. If it does not, it's no longer love.
And thus, Love was tainted and mutated into a horrible bug pony that needed to eat love to survive. AND THAT'S HOW CHERGNELERNGS WERE MADE, ERMAHGERD!!!
Alarajrogers finished a story! And you know what that means.... Bring out the party!
https://www.soundsnap.com/tags/noise_maker
This is beautiful! So glad you've been able to finish it.
What a beautiful "just-so" story.
This has been a wonderful mythic ride. Thank you for completing it.