This was too much fun to write for me to wait until the rest of the chapter's ready · 10:44pm Dec 31st, 2014
In the tongue of the llamas, Wiñaypaqori, who I shall henceforth call Winnie, means “Eternal Gold”. This is because Winnie is sitting on a pile of gold that is quite literally the size of a mountain. He’s hollowed out the mountain he lives in, and has filled it with gold. The parts that aren’t gold are him; he’s the size of Ponyville. Greed makes dragons grow, and our pal the Winster has been a very, very greedy boy. If he had any interest in power within dragon society, or indeed in creating a dragon society, which he doesn’t because all he cares about is more gold, he could do so easily; dragons instinctively submit to whoever has the biggest, best hoard. In fact dragons make pilgrimages to see Winnie’s hoard and try to fight him for it all the time. Most of them aren’t serious about fighting him for it; they just want to see it, but of course being a dragon and approaching Winnie automatically makes for a fight. Some few do seriously try to challenge him. Winnie finds them crunchy and good with ketchup.
I know all this because Winnie was holding, and actively wielding, my Element of Greed. The Kraken didn’t really use the Element of Rage, it was just part of his collection of shiny things. Winnie, however, would be a perfect candidate for an Element of Greed if I had felt like handing out bearerships, which I didn’t. In order for someone to bear an Element, the avatar needs to consent. The Tree of Harmony has been known to actively withdraw its support from former Bearers it considered corrupted, and ponies – or anyone, really – can’t become Bearers unless it allows them to be. (Its standards are pretty terrible. Can you imagine, once it actually offered me Elements? Even funnier, one of them was Loyalty? But then, given that Rainbow Dash is a self-centered braggart and the last bearer of loyalty turned on her own sister, her nation, and her species itself, quite spectacularly, the Tree of Harmony doesn’t appear to be so good at picking candidates for that one.)
Likewise no one actually gets to be a true Bearer for an Element of Disharmony without my permission, and since I’ve always thought the things are kind of laughably stupid, I’ve never chosen Bearers before. However, this doesn’t prevent someone whose mind and personality resonate well with the Element from using it – I’ve seen some very interesting stunts pulled with the Element of Magic in the past, and the Elements of Disharmony are intended to grant power to individual users, so they’re even more usable by non-Bearers. And when someone uses an Element of Disharmony, this generates disharmony, and I know exactly what they’re doing. If I’m paying attention, which, when I was a statue, I most certainly was.
So I knew all about Winnie. The real question was, did he know about me? The Kraken had, and ran for it the moment I showed up, but krakens hoard for fun, not a biological compulsion like dragons have, and the Kraken wasn’t using his Element. Winnie was. So this, I thought, might very well turn into a fight.
Now you ask me, “But Discord, you are so obviously superior to pathetic dragons with your vast magical resources and cleverness and creativity in using them. How could a dragon possibly stand up to you?” I find the vote of confidence inspiring, but there was a reason I had to drive the dragons insane rather than just turning them all into small cute puppydogs. (I kind of did make something that did that, but it was a portal to another realm, which by necessity translates Equestrian species into something compatible with the other world, and I thought the idea of turning dragons into dogs was downright hilarious.)
Those of you who are extensively familiar with the foundations and theory of magical lore, including the belief systems of the ancients and how they shape magic today, would know of this (and would also be Twilight Sparkle. Hello, Twilight! Tell me, did I have a lovely funeral? Please tell me at least that Pinkie catered it!) For the rest of you, let me explain the concept of the Chthonic Elements, also called the Base Elements, the Worldly Elements or the Elements of the Fundament. These elements, unlike the Elements of Harmony, do not refer to traits carried by sapient beings, but rather to the substances that make up the world – earth, air, water, fire, and life force (which can also refer to spirit, or to magic, but raw magic, not the overly harmonic kind that Twilight uses.)
Dragons and draconic creatures are aligned with between two and four of these elements, generally. Draconequui, being wielders of magic, had air, water and magic/spirit, mostly due to the fact that this is one of the most common combinations for the Neighsian dragons we descended from. Some Neighsian dragons have fire rather than water, and a rare few have all but earth. This is because dragons aligned with earth are Neighropan dragons. Most of them carry earth, fire and air, with a rare few also carrying magic. The most fundamental difference between Neighsian and Neighropan dragons, aside from the fact that we are graceful, svelte and sexy and they are huge, clunky clods, is that we align with water and they align with earth. To the best of my knowledge no dragons align with both water and earth.
Of the five elements, four are actively chaotic. Earth… isn’t immune to chaos, exactly (although unleashing my powers on Earth would tend to cause massive earthquakes and volcanoes, so I only do it when I really need to raise islands and level mountains), but it is highly resistant to it. There’s a reason the Elements of Harmony turned me to stone, after all. Of all the chaos avatars, Ar the dragon is the only one I know of whose shape barely changed – she got three pairs of wings, and that was it. Coyote and Loki became shapeshifters, Pan the goat turned bipedal, Anansi the zebra grew another four legs, not even I know what animal Set was in the first place, and Eris the ikaros apparently transformed in much the same way I did, acquiring a lot of animal parts she hadn’t been born with. But all Ar got was extra wings. This is because the body of an earth-aligned dragon resists transformation except along the lines that it is designed for. Earth dragons can change their size, if they’re very talented, and many of them don’t grow wings until they hit adolescence, so Ar growing extra wings was something that an earth dragon’s body allowed her to do. But I can’t change a dragon into something completely different. Not without something like the magic of the differential between dimensional planes powering the transformation, anyway.
I can only alter the size of a dragon within a certain range, and a dragon as full of greed fulfilled as Winnie would be hard to turn into anything smaller than a house. I can take their wings, but I can’t take their fire, or their scales, and with their scales I can’t do much more than humiliate them. I’ve… I’ll admit it. I’ve killed many dragons. It was a war and I’m not sorry I did it; it was them or it was ponies, and I decided I liked ponies better. But it wasn’t easy – not just in the sense that I’m not exactly a natural born killer and snuffing out sentient lives has never been my idea of fun, but simply in terms of technical execution, it’s not easy to do. Driving them mad was both more entertaining and more accessible as a strategy, but turning a greed-grown monster dragon into a mindless frothing beast wasn’t actually likely to get me my Element any more than strolling in the front door would. I had a plan, but it wasn’t going to be easy.
The Element of Greed grants its bearer, or wielder, abilities pertaining to gaining, keeping, and defending whatever they consider most valuable, usually some sort of worldly object (gold and other forms of wealth are common, but one notable greed-wielder, a pony named Carmine Sand who lived about eight hundred years ago, stole monuments and statues… including me. I nearly did make her a bearer for that; she came very, very close to being able to free me.) It can act as a channel for some nifty spells as well. The most famous of these was probably the Midas Touch, the spell Eris placed on the Element of Greed when she made the minotaur king Midas its Bearer. The children’s stories that recount that particular piece of history soften it considerably; Midas didn’t give up his Touch in order to eat. He’d have fine-chopped vegetables mixed into a slurry with goat’s milk and poured into his mouth with a golden funnel. Actually, Midas transformed thousands of centaurs, goats and his own subjects into gold before renouncing the Element after accidentally turning his daughter. Eris, who was every bit as fond of turning sentient beings into static objects as I am, released the beings who’d been turned to gold (well, aside from those who’d already been melted down for ingots), in exchange for an entire orchard’s worth of apples that Midas had changed. You can probably guess what she did with the apples; the one she used to start a war between Minos and Tauros a century later was only one of the entertaining stunts those apples led to. Too bad Ar is probably sleeping on the rest of them, they’d be fun to play with.
Winnie would have heightened abilities pertaining to the keeping of his hoard. And since he was a mere wielder, not a true Bearer, I assumed the Element would have warped his mind, accentuating his greed to a ludicrous extent. Bearers, being duly appointed agents of Disharmony, have the ability to control the trait that their Element links them to; bearing the Element of Greed doesn’t make the bearer more greedy any more than the Element of Generosity has led Rarity to give away her house. But wielders… rarely fare so well. Carmine Sand’s obsessive need to chase after statues and monuments led eventually to Celestia’s police force finally figuring out where in the world she was, resulting in the highly disappointing outcome that I was installed back in Canterlot Gardens. And my pal Winnie had been a dragon to begin with. So most likely, negotiation was going to be off the table.
So awesome. I like that dragons have high magic resistance, and I'm terrified of the idea that Discord, rather than Starswirl, created the portal.
Makes you wonder how Celestia would have chivvied that sleeping dragon off his mountain if Fluttershy hadn't Stared him off.
So, let's break it down:
• An explanation for puppy Spike
• Fascinating magical theory
• Grab bag of mythology jokes
• Pony Carmen Sandiego
• Discord being Discord
And this is just a preview. There are times when I regret not following you from the day you made your account here. Eagerly looking forward to the full chapter.
What you did there...I see it.
Neither do the Egyptologists! XD
Where in the world is Carmine Sand?
I wanna see how Discord deals with Winnie the Pooh (which is how I will always think of him) it will either be wicked cool or hilarious. Either way, it will be epic.
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I suspect Starswirl stabilized it and placed rules around it. Starswirl probably knew more about chaos magic than any other pony, at least until Brightest Star was born (when Discord says that his apprentice tried to sacrifice him to the Outer Gods, he's talking about Brightest Star, a unicorn with a talent for chaos magic), due to having had to put up with Discord as a student. But the portal's existence in the first place is Discord's fault.
I suspect that a lack of better options is exactly why Celestia sent someone who was terrified of dragons to persuade a dragon.
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Sadly, unless she stole a time machine, six feet under somewhere. She lived eight hundred years ago.
Though "Where in Time is Carmine Sand" certainly does sound like a viable plot. :-)
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I'm shooting for both, actually.
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He drove insane or killed all the fighting-weight adults and adolescents who continued to pledge their loyalty to, and fight for, the Dragon Empire. It wasn't generational, and he did not go after children, eggs (except occasionally when dragons took pony hostages, at which point Discord on more than one occasion threatened to make it rain dragon eggs if the hostages weren't released), or any dragon who fled to South Amareica, the far north reaches of North Amareica, or in fact anywhere that wasn't the territories held by the Dragon Empire.
The dragon species -- the same dragon species he fought -- remains alive and well, but he did utterly destroy their empire as a political entity. No dragon who remained behind in the territory remained alive and sane unless they were too young to remember the Empire.
This is what happens when you use the tactic of pretending to surrender as a feint to try to kill your enemies' leaders. If it doesn't work, and they survive it, they aren't likely to accept a surrender from you ever again.
Edited to add: There are actually several dragon nations now. They fight with each other too often to be an empire, but they exist. The nations of Chilly, Auren, Argent and Draguay are established in the latest chapter of Not The Hero, being parodies of Chile, Argentina and Uruguay (Auren exists because if dragons were gonna name a country after silver, they sure as hell aren't going to miss naming a country after gold. :-)) There may be others as well that Discord hasn't told us about. There are also a lot of stateless dragons living in the northern parts of South Amareica, who essentially live in isolation from other dragons, because dragons are not highly social creatures and many of them just want to have their own lair with their own hoard and no one else bothering them.