//------------------------------//
// In Which I Start A Riot 
// Story: Not The Hero 
// by alarajrogers 
//------------------------------//

Editor’s Note:
I promised I’d try to cover what Discord said in the last chapter, but he rambles a lot. I might miss something.

The first thing is about the caribou, and where they get their magic. Because up north there isn’t any free magic, you have to generate it somehow. Reindeer generate it by being nice and making friends with everyone in Neighropa by bringing gifts to foals and things like that. Caribou use dark magic and the Element of Cruelty, and generate power in two main ways: first, they do something to make all their female children dumb and without any willpower of their own, so they grow up kind of automatically as slaves. Sacrificing their minds like that can generate as much power as sacrificing a living creature, if you do a lot of them. Also, they capture slaves from reindeer and other species. Female captives are turned into slaves; male captives are either killed, or turned female and then turned into slaves. Also, they turn some of their own guys into females and then make them slaves, and that’s how they prevent anyone from objecting to the regime or trying to overthrow it. 

The suffering of the slaves, channeled through the Element of Cruelty, is what gives the caribou all of their power. It goes to the king, which makes him as powerful as an alicorn, and then it’s distributed out from him to all of his bulls. (Caribou are called bulls and cows, not stags and does, even though they are deer.) Discord can see the lines of power going between the king and the bulls, but there were so many of them, he couldn’t see his Element or break the connections except one at a time.

Uh, I mentioned last time that they’re sex slaves, right? Pretty sure I mentioned that. Yeah, ok, I looked up my notes from last time and I did say that. Sooo let’s just not talk about that again, ok? But here’s an important fact: some of the slaves are brainwashed and accept being slaves, and they wear red collars. Others are rebellious and they wear black collars. I guess slaves who have just given up fighting even though they still hate it are also red collars, but Discord couldn’t tell them from the ones who were actually loyal to their masters.

Discord went to the caribou pretending to be their friend (sort of… actually he was kind of being a big jerk, but the kind of big jerk Discord is when he’s being friendly, not when he’s trying to ruin your life) so he could get some details about how he could defeat them. When the ones he first went to were going to bring him to the king, they were going to make reindeer slaves with black collars pull his sled, even though the slaves were shaved so they didn’t have any fur. Discord pretended he wanted them to “serve” him as blankets so he could keep them warm, because he thought black collars might turn out to be useful.

He met the king and got the guy to invite him to a feast in his honor (because one of the other chaos avatars, Mayhem, gave the caribou the Element of Cruelty, the caribou honor the Lord of Chaos as the one who made their society possible, and they can’t tell the difference between Discord and Mayhem. Also it turns out Mayhem was Discord’s father, and Discord hates him because of the terrible thing Mayhem did to Discord’s mother.) At the feast, Discord got the caribou to bring out a lot more black collars, so there were no red collars left at the feast except a brainwashed female teen dragon. They used drugged smoke to get Discord to relax and then either they used mind control magic or a side effect of the drugged smoke to make Discord forget that the caribou were his enemies. They almost tricked him into helping them take over the Crystal Empire, but they made the mistake of suggesting he could turn Anon female and make Anon his slave, and Discord didn’t want to do that because he thinks Anon is gross and also he thinks rape is awful, which honestly makes me feel a lot better about the life decisions I’ve made that ended up with me copying this entire stupid document, and I can say that because unlike Twilight, Discord either won’t ever read my copy, or he’ll laugh if he reads it and he sees that part. 

Anyway, so Discord figured out that he was being mind controlled and used his powers to break it. Then he swapped around all of the caribou’s antlers, except for the king’s, so they were on the reindeer instead. (I forgot to mention that the caribou cut off antlers and horns on their captives, and if they have wings they pluck the wings so they don’t work.) He also healed the horns on the unicorns, the wings on the pegasi and a griffin, made a yak whose forelegs had been cut down to stumps grow big wooden clubs she could walk on. And he grew back the claws on a dire wolf slave, but made them razors instead of claws.

Because all of his magic was being drained by the ley lines going into the ground, he broke one of the lines connecting the king to his bulls. That spilled magic everywhere that he could use, and also that the reindeer and the unicorns could use. The poor brainwashed dragon was fighting the other slaves, so Discord got her to greed-grow to defend her “hoard”, since the only thing she had was her “master”, the king. So she started chasing the king around trying to capture him because she wanted him. That’s… really weird and I don’t want to think about what that implies.

Then Discord used up a lot of magic by healing and freeing all the black collars in the caribou palace, and that made him use so much so fast that he passed out. Which is where we are now.




It wasn't like I wanted to lose consciousness in the middle of a fight. I remember being distantly aware that I was lying on a floor, and there was combat and chaos going on all around me. I was frantically willing myself to wake up, to move, but nothing was happening. It wasn't as if I was suffering from sleep paralysis; more like I kept fading back and forth between dreams and semi-consciousness, so I'd think I'd woken up and was taking action, and then something particularly loud near my ear would startle me back into the more wakeful state where I was aware that I was still asleep. 

This struggle lasted until severe pain in my head both woke me up and dazed me further. I managed to open my eyes. There was a caribou with antlers in front of me, using telekinesis to repeatedly smash my head into the wall. I reached for ambient magic and found there wasn't any; the line I'd torn open earlier must have sealed itself or withered, so it was no longer spilling raw magic everywhere. My own supply was still vast, but I had to concentrate to open myself up to use it or I'd bleed it out again into the drain and pass out like I just had, and you try concentrating while someone is beating a rug that happens to be your skull.

So I moaned dramatically, let my eyes roll back in my head, and went limp again, feigning unconsciousness. He slammed my head another couple of times for good measure, then used his telekinesis to pick up my supposedly helpless deadweight and lay it down on his back.

To be fair to him, he was smart enough not to leave either my head or tail too near his neck. It's just that I'm large enough that if you're a caribou, and you drape me over your back so my head and tail are dangling down on either side of you, this leaves my head, and fang, awfully close to your belly.

Not that it would have mattered much anyway. No matter where I bite a pony, the hallucinogen takes effect within half a minute. I assumed caribou would be similar, maybe a little longer due to their greater mass, and I wasn't disappointed. His sides and underbelly were armored, but not a solid piece; his underside was covered with a kind of sling of chain mail, held on by straps that went over his back, and his sides were hard bronze plates that hung down from a plate on his back. So when I suddenly twisted my neck and lifted my dangling head up under his plate armor, I found a simple woolen protective sleeve around his barrel, nowhere near as thick as my fang is long. He screamed when I jabbed it into his side, and by reflex used his magic to throw me off him. 

"Enjoy your trip," I said, grinning maliciously at the two or three of him that kept sliding back and forth and merging or separating in my vision. Yeah, he'd hit me in the head pretty hard, and I hadn't managed to heal it yet.

He tried to fire a bolt of magic at me and missed completely. At that point his knees gave way, he collapsed into a sitting position against the wall, and he started whimpering. Within seconds, he had flattened himself back against the wall. "No! Get away! I'll kill you! Don't touch me!" he started screaming at absolutely nothing. 

"Whoa, bad trip," I said, and promptly fell over and faceplanted because getting hit in the head multiple times does nothing good for a biped's balance. Most ponies see harmless, fun hallucinations, and enjoy them; my venom takes out the part of their brains that's able to even try to want to make sense of something, and without that they just lay back and watch the pretty pictures. Either it worked differently with caribou, or the magic in it was interacting badly with the dark magic the caribou got from their king. Maybe I'd have to bite a few more caribou. Purely for science, of course. Just as soon as the room stopped spinning.

There needed to be more ambient magic, I thought. While I was still lying on the floor, I grabbed the magic lines connected to a couple of caribou nearby, reinforcements who had their antlers, and tore them loose. That didn't take as much energy as it did to rip open the lines near Dainn, before they branched out and connected outward with many caribou, but it didn't release as much energy either. The unicorns and reindeer, who can't see magic the way I can and who had been frantically trying to cast all this time, unaware of the dwindling supply of magic except in the sense that their spells and strikes were getting harder and harder to do, sucked up a lot of it immediately, but that was all right. I still had my own supply. I figured I'd get up, prop myself against the wall if I was still dizzy, and go for Dainn's lines directly again.

Only, as soon as I stood up again... something wrapped around my neck and started squeezing.

In my efforts to claw it off myself I determined that it was a leather strap, and very thick, and whoever had telekinetic hold of it was very strong. It's not actually possible to kill me by strangling me – at least, enough ponies have tried it and failed that I'm pretty sure it can't be done – but while I may not need to breathe to live, tell that to my lungs. My gills flared, uselessly trying to pull in oxygen from dry air because my nose and throat weren't doing such a good job at the moment and the gills were on the other side of the thing choking me. That hurts, you know; gills exposing themselves to dry air is very painful. So is choking. Of course I was frantically trying to use my magic, but I'm pretty sure it was Dainn strangling me, or someone he'd allocated a whole boatload of power to, because in my dazed, weakened and drained state, I couldn't muster up the strength to break the telekinetic grasp. If they'd used a spell, my natural field of chaos magic would probably have disrupted it, but this was just telekinesis and to counter that, I need to actively do something.

While I was gasping and choking, something flew in my mouth, and then the choking eased up just long enough for me to suck in a deep breath, so of course by instinct I did so despite the fact that there was a substance I didn't recognize in my mouth. And of course this was a mistake. I recognized an odd, nutty flavor that reminded me of the last thing my mother ever gave me to drink, before the ritual that killed her, and I realized with a shock that they had drugs prepared for draconequui. The strange incense-like drug that had relaxed me enough that I hadn't noticed Dainn weaving a web of subtle mind control around me was one thing... but this was a sleeping drug for draconequui (I assume, since when my mom gave me the drink, I immediately got dizzy and fell asleep like she'd told me, despite the fact that my usual reaction to the command to take a nap had been to bounce on whatever I was supposed to be napping on for another hour or so with increasingly loud protestations that I wasn't even sleepy until I tired myself out and fell over.) I had no idea what it was – still don't, and it's not exactly as if I have a draconequus to ask or access to tomes of our medical literature, which I probably couldn't read anyway – but my memories of the day my tribe died have a hyper-clarity about them, since Starswirl used a spell to help me retrieve them in the first place. I recognized the taste, and the symptoms.

And then I went back down into unconsciousness again, so I didn't have much time to contemplate the implications.





The next thing I knew, I was lying across the backs of two caribou, and from the number of restraints on me, I didn't think there was anything good they were planning for me.

They had me face up, with a muzzle on and a gag bit that kept my mouth just open enough that my fang was level with the bottom of my own jaw. This would make it very, very difficult to bite anyone with it. My wings were strapped down, my wrists were tied behind my back with oversized hard leather mitts on my paws that were large enough that my frantically waving claws could barely touch, let alone scratch, the inside of them. They'd pushed my legs up so far they were in line with my body – which didn't hurt, I'm amazingly flexible and can lift my legs high enough that I can put my feet behind my back, but it was making me feel just a tad vulnerable, because they'd cuffed the dragon one, wound rope uncomfortably tight all the way down the goat leg, and run the end of the rope behind my back to tie to the cuff on the other, so I couldn't move my legs forward at all. Then they'd strapped me to two caribou with thick X-shaped straps on each caribou's back, pinning down my neck and my lower torso where my legs were tied, respectively. They'd also broken off my horns, which irritated me because my horns are very attractive and I felt light-headed without them (literally, because they're kind of heavy), but wasn't going to have any effect whatsoever on my powers.

What was going to have an effect on my powers was a necklace of rune-inscribed amulets, stones set in metal, tight around my neck. I couldn't have read the runes even if the necklace wasn't too close to my jaw for me to tilt my head around to see them, but I could feel what they were doing. My powers were bound. I couldn't muster up the tiniest little spark of telekinesis, let alone anything interestingly chaotic. Given time I could pull the thing apart magically, but it wouldn't be quick, because these were runes. I doubted I had the time.

The caribou were trotting forward in as close to perfect harmony as living creatures get, their movements perfectly synchronized with each other, which was good in the sense that if they separated from each other it would probably stretch my abdomen painfully, and bad in the sense that their perfect synchronization prevented them from separating from each other far enough they'd pull me loose from the X-straps. I didn't know where they were going with me, but I was pretty sure I didn't want to find out.

They hadn't, however, done anything to restrain my tail.

I wasn't surprised. It's hard to restrain my tail. You'd have to wind rope around it the way they did to my goat leg, and for the same reason – there's nothing much there to catch onto. Restraints usually take advantage of the bumpiness of bodies – hooves flare outward, widening so they're thicker than the leg they're attached to. Necks, dragon ankles, and wrists attached to paws like mine, extra-wide because they have opposable thumbs sticking out, are even thinner than the body part they're attached to. My goat leg's hard because my cloven hoof isn't much wider than the rest of my leg, and has no sensation aside from the ability to detect pressure from whatever I'm stepping on – pony hooves hurt if you try to tug them free of restraints that were tied tightly around their legs, but goat hooves don't. My legs aren't all that strong, though, so winding enough rope around the thing, tightly, with lots of knots, is fairly secure.

My tail is enormously strong, and tapers down smoothly. There's no place where the spot closer to the edge of my body is wider than a spot closer to the rest of me. Yes, you can tie the tail between the spikes, but that requires me to cooperate because I can fold my spikes down and make them soft any time I want to. And if you just wind lots and lots of rope around it... you're going to get coils of lots and lots of rope on the floor after I use my great physical strength to slide my tail out of all of your rope. Plus, it's covered in dragon scales, so you can't actually tie it tight enough to cut off my circulation or keep me from being able to yank it out of its bonds. So they just didn't bother to try. After all, with my magic suppressed, my body bound and all of my other natural weaponry taken out of the equation, what could I possibly do with just a tail?

Well, wrap it around a captor's leg, for starters.

He stumbled. Since my tail was firmly secured around his leg and my neck was tied down tightly on the other caribou's back, this had the effect first of pulling me so my head was catching against the center of the X-straps that held me, and secondly of yanking the caribou that my head was strapped to off-balance. He tipped sideways, and before he could right himself, I pulled.

See, that's the thing the caribou forget, when dealing with a body type like mine. My strength's in my main body, not my limbs. Tying my limbs to each other in pairs doesn't restrain my body any; the only thing doing that was the X-straps, and if I'm tied to you... you're tied to me. My attempt to double myself over didn't work, of course, and I didn't expect it to, but it did pull my Head Caribou on top of my Tail Caribou, causing both of them to fall to the ground. 

Meanwhile, I was doing the limbo. My head tilts back farther than probably any other creature on the planet; I can point it straight up, making my jaw perfectly level with the front-facing side of my neck. Or, in other words... nothing to catch onto anymore. This wouldn't have worked at all if they hadn't taken off my horn and antler, but they did. I wiggled, and used the strength of my neck to pull against the X-bonds, loosening them just enough that I could get my head partway under the crux. So when Head Caribou, cursing loudly at me, got to his feet, which he had to do first because he was on top of Tail Caribou... I pulled with my lower body, and my tail that was pinned under Tail Caribou's weight, and of course he resisted the pull, assuming I was trying to knock him over again or something, and yanked himself to his feet hard.

Thus yanking me.

My head slipped free of the X-bond. The stubs of my antler and horn were apparently a little ragged, because the caribou I was bound to bellowed as my head scraped across his back. I fell toward the ground, or rather my head did, but because of how incredibly awesome I am, I used the strength of my neck and torso to lift myself. With the gag in I couldn't bite, and with the mitts on my hands I couldn't use the claws on my fingers, but I've got some pretty sharp toe-claws on the dragon foot. I twisted so that my head was sideways right above my dragon toes, where I could use them to rake at the strap keeping my mouth from opening any further.

Unfortunately, it seemed to be leather, not rope, and the awkward positioning meant I couldn't bring my full strength to bear on it without risking ripping my face. I didn't get the gag out before the caribou who I was still tied to managed to grab my upper body with his telekinesis and tried to hold me still, as he got to his hooves. That lasted just as long as it took me to use my tail to break his leg – he really should have been focusing his telekinesis on the tail around his leg, not my body on his back. He screamed and went to his knees again. The other caribou grabbed me with his telekinesis, and without my powers I can't really counter telekinesis, but a telekinetic grip has to use force to hold on just the same as hooves do. I thrashed, wiggling my entire body as violently as I could, attempting to whip myself one way and then the other. The guard wasn't that powerful – he couldn't keep hold of me.

The moment he let go, I shot my head and upper body forward like I was flinging myself as a rope, and managed to snag my neck around his. He reared and tossed his head, trying to throw me off, but it was too late – I'd managed to hook enough of my neck around his that I could stay hooked. And then I pulled, like I was inching, lifting the middle of my body up to pull my tail and head toward each other... hard. This threw Head Caribou into Tail Caribou again, knocking them both down.

I tried to bite Head Caribou's neck, but I couldn't get any sort of angle where my fang could actually penetrate, given that with the gag in, my jaw was actually lower than it for once. What I was able to do was to pull my lower body free of the X-strap on Tail Caribou, so now I was for all intents and purposes a snake without fangs. Which doesn't sound that intimidating until you remember that a boa constrictor doesn't use fangs to kill its prey.

Tail Caribou managed to grab me in his telekinesis again and yank me off Head Caribou, who I was trying to strangle. He lifted me into the air with enough clearance that I couldn't reach either of them. Head Caribou splinted and bandaged Tail Caribou's broken leg so he could walk on it – quickly, this was a very rushed job, because I was wiggling and thrashing again – and then both of them concentrated on carrying me, overlapping their fields. They couldn't hold me still, but they could hold me up.

Up ahead, I saw a high-roofed chamber (possibly in another building, or maybe the ceiling hadn't fallen everywhere in the castle), with a very large rune circle within it, large enough that if I were in the center of it and didn't have my powers, I wouldn't be able to reach any part of the edge just by stretching. Rune circles get cranky when you break the circle with your body; a large one like that was obviously intended to use against multiple ponies at once, or large creatures.  Like myself. I didn't like any part of this, and focused on yanking my muzzle off with my toeclaw, more carefully this time. With my mouth free, I was able to reach down to where the circlet binding my power was, around my neck, and bite it, hard.

It didn't break, but my teeth must have damaged a rune or two, because some of my power came back. Not enough to turn these caribou into toads, but enough to counter their harmonized TK fields with a little disharmony. With the interference I was generating, their TK grip loosened, and I crashed to the ground.

Without wasting any time, I propelled myself forward from my tail, pushing like a spring and then springing forward, directly into Head Caribou. I dug my fang into him, but aside from making him shriek like a little foal, it didn't do anything; I must have blown my entire venom supply on the other guy. That was too bad... for Head Caribou, because it meant I had to use the rest of my teeth. I bit him around the back of the neck, used that for leverage, wrapped my own neck around his, and squeezed.

Tail Caribou tried to pull me free. I let go of Head Caribou's neck with my mouth, since I was firmly wrapped all the way around it, and grinned at Tail Caribou. "Oh, do try. Make my day. But keep in mind, you have to succeed quickly enough to keep me from breaking your friend's neck. Or, you could surrender so I don't kill your pal here."

"A caribou never surrenders!" Head Caribou choked out.

"Do be quiet, you," I said, and tightened up some more, strangling him. I looked up at Tail Caribou. "Well?"

"I will surrender," he snarled, his telekinetic grip on me releasing.

"Good, good. Now take this collar off, quickly, if you don't find the funny faces your friend is making amusing." Head Caribou, like most creatures who are getting strangled, was kind of popeyed, and flush under his coat, and making entertaining frog faces as he gasped for air.

Tail Caribou limped over, put his hooves on the golden necklace – and yanked, strangling me even as I was strangling his friend. Like I said, I don't need to breathe, but my body's used to it and it's painful when I can't, so I automatically loosened my grip on Head Caribou so I could use the back of my head to bash against Tail Caribou's face. 

Head Caribou wasted no time slipping free from my grasp. He spun his head at me and lunged it forward, driving his antlers into me hard. One of them actually pierced my neck and started bleeding like a fountain in the courtyard of Canterlot Gardens, if that fountain was gushing blood and not water. The other one jabbed me in the ribs, which hurt but did no permanent damage. The neck injury hadn't hit anything vital per se, but I was bleeding hard enough that I was going to end up getting dizzy from it very shortly.

And I was mad, because I was hurt. So I clamped my teeth around the base of one of the antlers and chomped.

I don't have a dragon head. My teeth can't cut gems without magic, and they can't slice through the thick bone of an antler. But my neck is very strong, and I have pony jaws – very, very good at clamping onto something and not letting go. I twisted my head from side to side, rapidly, and the antler broke off.

Head Caribou screamed, and kicked me, hard enough to break ribs and send me flying across the hallway. I hit the stone wall hard enough that if I hadn't been wearing the oversized leather mitts, which cushioned the blow, I'd probably have broken an arm or a wing. It's been a long time since someone was able to toss me around like that when I don't have all my power, but, well, we're not going to get into the talking about child abuse again. Just, I know what happens to the bones of a mortal draconequus when they hit something that hard, and while I hoped I wasn't actually mortal, the rune collar was keeping me from self-healing like I normally do.

The impact did squash the mitts, though, pressing the leather against my claws. I was dazed and in a lot of pain, so it took a moment or two to realize this. Head Caribou charged at me, apparently planning on goring me again with his remaining antler. I swept his leg out from under him with my tail, and after he went down I wrapped my tail around the second antler. Antlers, like horns, radiate magic from the points, and antlers are a lot longer than horns, so it's harder for a caribou to use magic to get something off their antler than it would be for a unicorn – they have to cast down and backward, and their antlers aren't very precise anyway, and Head Caribou had only one antler. I managed to crack it before Tail Caribou grabbed me in his own magic again and started repeatedly throwing me into the wall.

I did the only thing I could do in that situation – I played dead, hoping the caribou wouldn't keep it up until the pretense became a reality. No, actually, I'm lying, that's not what I did. I doubt I could have stopped myself from screaming if I'd still been fully conscious. What I really did was cling to consciousness by a bare thread, my mind screaming at me that they were going to do something terrible to me if I blacked out completely. (It had not at all escaped my notice that the position they'd tied me in would be almost perfectly suited for, shall we say, taking advantage of me – all they'd need to do was pin down my head and tail, and put the gag and muzzle back on me. I had a fairly good idea of what they were going to try to do, given what I know caribou do to their enemies and the fact that I was being transported to a rune circle. While I didn't particularly care if they transformed me into a female version of myself, with the rune collar on I wouldn't be able to use my powers to defend myself, and the limits of my ability to defend myself with just my physical abilities were rapidly coming into view.) 

Between the blood loss, the cracked ribs, and the repeated smashing of my head into the wall, I was very, very close to being genuinely unconscious. I couldn't scream or fight back anymore, and I'd gone completely limp, and my vision had tunneled to the point where I could only see what was directly in front of my face and couldn't make out what it actually was, either. Everything had turned into blobs of color bobbing in a sea of nothing. 

But I could still hear, and I spent a thousand years once with no sense but the ability to hear, so I'm really, really good at figuring out what's going on around me with hearing alone. And I was afraid enough that adrenaline kept me from blacking out completely, so I could still think, albeit not at my usual level of superior intellect. 

After smacking my head into the stone a few more times for good measure, Tail Caribou dropped me and said to his friend, "Are you all right?"

"No, I'm not all right! That fucking bitch of a monster there broke both my antlers!" (This more or less confirmed my suspicions of their intentions, by the way. They don't refer to males as "bitches" unless they've decided to recategorize the male as a female.)

"Yeah, bitch broke my leg. But we gotta finish this, fellow. Once we drain all the magic out of this thing, King Dainn can heal our wounds – and given how hard we've fought to capture and turn it, I'm sure we'll be greatly rewarded." The sound of licking lips. "Maybe we'll even be allowed to go first. I've never had a beast so exotic, have you?"

"It's still a male, so I haven't thought about that much."

"It won't be for much longer."

Drain all the magic. This was even worse than I'd thought. I doubted they could drain all of my magic – they were probably vastly underestimating how much of it I had, since my fear of the leyline drain had kept me from using more than a fraction of it – but if they had a means of draining any of my magic, I'd probably lose two or three times as much as they drained to the leyline drain at the same time. 

Not all of my magic was impaired, because I could feel myself healing – none of the pain had abated, but my head was clearing. Like most creatures with self-healing, my brain gets the benefits first. I had to keep playing dead – I hadn't healed enough to start fighting again. But I was terrified that they'd get me to that rune circle before I was strong enough to resist, and if it drained my magic... even if I didn't lose all of it, a major magic drain hits me as hard as major blood loss. At which point I'd be genuinely helpless, and, well. Fun as it is to play that way when I have my powers and can stop things any time I want to, I had no illusions. Without my power as a safeword, a situation like that wasn't going to be nearly as much fun.

I started clawing at the leather mitts, which, as I mentioned, had been smashed. They'd been hard leather, rather round objects, almost like putting hollow balls around my hands. Taking the brunt of the impact with the wall had crushed them, so the hard leather was now right there against my claws. I scratched and pinched and pulled, frantically, as Tail Caribou lifted me with his magic and laid me out on Head Caribou's back again. They put the muzzle and gag back in because of course they did. I guess even without venom in my fang Head Caribou didn't want to risk encountering my teeth again. Wise of him. After what he and his pal had admitted they were going to do to me, I'd been planning to tear out his throat as soon as I had the strength. Push me far enough, and it's no more Mr. Nice Draconequus. 

They had me on my back again, because it'd be harder for me to deploy my mouth that way (a bit paranoid, considering they'd just gagged me, but then I had bitten Head Caribou's antler off), and so that they could see my eyes, to tell if I was waking up. The thought that I was already awake and just faking it to regain my strength hadn't entered their heads, apparently. So they strapped me down under the X-strap again, with my head dangling almost low enough to hit the ground off one side of Head Caribou and my tail definitely dragging on the ground on his other side, and marched forward, Tail Caribou limping worse than he'd been before. From the timing of the hoof clacks against the stone, it sounded like he was walking with three legs and dragging the broken one.

My vision came back into focus as we entered the room with the rune circle. Tail Caribou undid the X-straps, obviously planning to pick me up with his magic and toss me into it. But I'd torn my way through my mitts. My hands weren't free – the wrists were still tied – but they were a lot freer than they'd just been. Tail Caribou was focused on his work, and Head Caribou was looking back at him, watching him undo the straps, and neither of them were looking at my face anymore. I bent my head back far enough and my arms up high enough that my claws could reach the back of my muzzle, and tore it off again. My arms, like my legs, have over 180 degrees of rotation in either direction. Tying my wrists in back of me limited me only as much as tying them in front of me would have.

As Tail Caribou started to lift me, I dug my claws into Head Caribou's back, digging in deep. Head Caribou screamed, and tried to thrash, but I immediately whipped my neck around his again and lifted, at an angle, so I had him in a headlock and I was choking him. "Ah-ah," I said. "You drop that magic field right now or I rip out your friend's spine."

Instead of doing that, Tail Caribou decided to be a big hero, throwing all his power at me in an effort to rip me off of Head Caribou. It succeeded, too, sort of. I was bluffing about the spine thing; I hadn't gotten my claws in deep enough. So he was able to push me off, but he didn't take into account how long my body is, how strong it is, or how fast I can react when I have all my senses. As I felt him tear me free, I lashed my tail into a hook, caught Head Caribou around the head with it, lifted him into the air as Tail Caribou's TK flung me, and threw him sideways.

Directly into the rune circle.

I had enough of myself back together to see magic and patterns again. Head Caribou screamed as magic flowed over him, changing his features, but that wasn't what horrified me. What horrified me was seeing the rune circle slurp all the magic out of his body, to feed it into the web of mana lines that fed Dainn and the rest of the caribou race... in less than a second. A drain that hard and fast might actually be able to get all of my magic.

Since physics operates when my magic doesn't, equal and opposite reaction ensured that when I'd flung Head Caribou into the rune circle, I'd changed my own course so I went in more or less the opposite direction. That was actually what I'd been trying to do, as I hadn't assumed the rune circle was automatic. Tail Caribou was frozen for a moment, his face caught in an expression of shock and horror as he stared at his now-female friend. I took advantage of that moment to reach up to the rune circlet around my neck again, and with my claws in play, hooked into some of the chain links that held the gold amulets together, and pulled. 

Tail Caribou turned toward me, saw what I was doing, and blasted me – too late. The circlet binding my power tore open and fell off my neck, and I countered Tail Caribou's TK, rebounding it to blast him with his own magic. He screamed as he fell backward on his bad leg. I picked him up with my magic and tossed him into the circle, next to his friend.

It was interesting, the effects of the circle. It drained all the magic from the target, and changed their bodies to be female (I didn't know whether it was an opposite-sex spell, which would also turn females male, or a turn-to-female spell, which would have no effect on females... and I didn't have a handy female to toss into the circle to find out). But it regenerated all of their injuries. Head Caribou's antlers grew back, not like that was going to help him with his magic drained (yes, he'd turned female, just like Anon had turned Cheese Sandwich into Cheese Louise, but it became apparent fairly quickly that it didn't change his fundamental sense of self so I'm still calling him a him), and Tail Caribou's broken leg was healed. Apparently the caribou like to start off with their slaves in pristine condition. Good to know.

I sat down to rest, and used my hands to free my legs and wings after using my TK to untie my hands. The rune circlet wasn't binding my power anymore, but I still couldn't use much magic at once and my own self-healing only goes so far. Chaos doesn't heal (not well anyway); to fully heal myself I'd have to do the same thing I did to the unicorn horns, transform my injured body parts into my uninjured body parts. The chaos going on a short distance away jumped into my attention, now that I could see magic and feel disharmony again, and it was still beautiful, but all the mana lines I'd torn was empty so the unicorns and reindeer no longer had access to ambient magic to use. A few of the more powerful unicorns were trying anyway, struggling to bring up magic out of the leyline pull... but let's put it this way, Celestia and Luna have a hard time casting up here. Even down south as far as the Crystal Heart, unicorn magic would be significantly impaired if it weren't for the Crystal Heart amplifying and broadcasting harmonic magic the way Yggsdrasil used to. 

The pegasi, griffins, earth ponies and the yak (I assumed the pattern of "very large, magic focused on physical strength" I was seeing was the yak) were still in fighting form, and I could still see the dragon rampaging, trying to get to Dainn as he and a bunch of other caribou tried to revert her to her original size by pure magical force, and I had hopes that the dire wolf was still around though her patterns weren't enough different from griffins for me to make her out at this distance. Once the caribou subdued the dragon, though, it was going to be only a matter of time before they recaptured all my lovely ladies, because the caribou had free magic and the slaves did not. (Specialized magic, such as what pegasi use to control the weather or what gives earth ponies their strength, isn't affected by the pull. Only free magic, what unicorns and reindeer and caribou use to cast spells and employ distance telekinesis.)

Next to me, the caribou I'd tossed in the rune circle were shouting imprecations at me, demanding that I turn them back, calling me a traitor to malehood, et cetera. I turned and looked at them, blowing on my claws. "How strange. You two don't seem to realize that you've both just changed sides."

"I'll never betray the king!" one of them shouted. (After they were transformed, I lost track of which one had been Head and which one had been Tail.)

"So you're saying you still believe in male dominance, and that the proper destiny of anyone with a female body is to be a sex toy?" I shrugged. "To each their own. I am irresistible, after all, so I suppose it doesn't surprise me that you'd like me to have my way with you. Tell you what, do you prefer rough or gentle? I'm sensitive to your beliefs, truly, so I promise I'll do the opposite of whatever you'd prefer. Shall I pick out a sparkly red collar for you, too?"

The caribou in question went pale under his fur as he realized the implications of his transformation. I smiled at him. With lots and lots of teeth. "Oh, come on, now. You and I both know that I'm the most powerful male creature on the planet, and that therefore you, as a female, should be falling at my feet and begging to worship me. You can't have it both ways. Either you can get over here and commence with the worship... or you can recognize that the ideology of enslaving females is maybe not in your best interest right now. I don't really care which; I'm fond of sex, but I'm even more fond of chaos, unless my sex partners are really hot and I'm sorry to say, neither of you are all that."

"The king won't stand for this," he said weakly. "This isn't legitimate... I wasn't supposed to be turned into a female! I was loyal!"

"You think the king will care? Or any of your former pals?"

The other caribou spoke up, as he got to his feet. "No. No, he won't. Don't you remember when Oleg tricked Lord Vanayar into a transformation circle, enslaved him, and took his house and his slaves for himself? His Majesty just laughed about that, and when Vanayar tried to complain about it His Majesty had her personally." What he actually said was much less euphemistic than that. In fact, you can take as a given that any time I repeat dialogue from the caribou in which they could have said something obscene and crude, they probably did and I'm paraphrasing. "If you're transformed into a female, you were weak and you deserve to be female."

"But we were trying to turn this creature, on the orders of the king!"

"Doesn't matter." The more sensible caribou looked up at me. "If you're giving us the option of joining the riot you started, I'll take it."

Ah, hypocrisy and self interest. It's perfectly reasonable to believe that half the planet deserves to be degraded and used for your personal pleasure, until you're part of that half, and then all of a sudden it isn't okay anymore. On the other hand, the alternative's sheer idiocy. Who'd ever want to be a slave? Even creatures who like to play that way as a game generally have a safeword or something. Admittedly, power is an aphrodisiac and I've seen plenty of creatures overwhelmed with the desire to have me take them and do whatever I want to them, because I'm powerful – dear Queen Fantasia, recently, for starters – but generally speaking they were profoundly disappointed and tried to get me to let them go when I decided that what I wanted was to make them dress as clowns and chase them around on a unicycle, rather than taking them to my bed. No one's actually ever serious about the whole "do as you will with me", and if you're a slave, you don't get to change your mind. I've been a slave, in a circus where they treated me as an animal. It's not fun.

"Delightful. I'm sure that if you demonstrate sufficient murderous intent toward your former colleagues, the reindeer will take you in, if they win and make it home." I turned to the other one. "So what's it going to be? Join your pal there on the ladies' side of the revolution, kill your former pals before they have a chance to rape you, and win a place among the reindeer, maybe? Or stay here and wear a pretty red collar with a leash around your neck? Because after what you said about your plans for me, if you've decided to be a slave then you're going to be my slave and we can get you started with your new job duties right now." I think by now I probably don't have to point out that I was bluffing, and had no intention of doing anything sexual with any caribou, ever, but I'm going to point it out anyway. But if he said he wanted to be a slave, I really would have collared him and then tossed him into the middle of the battle, because there are actually male caribou who are so sex-obsessed they'll take time on the battlefield to rape a victim who isn't fighting back, and either he'd serve as a distraction for the more easily distracted enemy soldiers or he'd come to his senses and fight.

He scowled at me. "I won't be the slave of a monster like you. I'll fight."

"Good for you!" I re-adjusted both of their armor so it fit their new bodies better. "Come along, then. We've got chaos to make!"

"You're going the wrong way," one of them said.

I pointed at the wall I was headed toward. "Chaos. Thataway. You think I can't tell?"

"Maybe if you were flying above the keep, but the corridors don't go that way. And you're headed straight for a wall, so unless you're going to go through it—" I put my now-intangible paw through the wall and looked back at them, raising my eyebrow. "—okay then."

"Don't think I won't notice if you never show up to the fight," I said. "Or that you'll manage to cast a glamour magic powerful enough to hide the fact that you're female now."

"We can't cast glamour magics. Females can't use their horns to do magic."

"You can, actually, I just need to make sure there's some ambient magic available for you. By the time you catch up I'm sure there'll be some."

Then I went through the wall, because I was impatient, and because after being prevented from using any of my magic at all I was desperate to feel chaos flowing through my paws again. There might not have been a whole lot of ambient magic for reindeer and unicorns and transformed caribou to use, but there was a lot of chaos. 





I floated through several walls and back to the main action, where I just had to stop and stare at all the wonderful chaos like a foal who's just been dropped inside the door of the biggest candy store he's ever seen. This is probably why the dire wolf was able to rip my throat out.

As usual, I was prepared – when nothing's binding my magic, I turn myself into magic the moment I'm threatened, if not sooner, so what she actually got was a mouthful of ketchup and fuzzy mold. It hurt, but only for a split second before I was no longer genuinely corporeal. As she spat out the moldy ketchup, hacking, I resolidified. "How rude! And to think I complimented your singing!"

Hooves bucked me in the back, hard, sending me flying forward, but I forgot to fall on my face and ended up just levitating. I rolled onto my back in mid-air and sat up. My attacker was one of my shaved lady reindeer pals. The ingratitude, I tell you. "Ladies, ladies, I'm on your side! As fun as I find the senseless violence, shouldn't you be attacking caribou and not me?"

"On our side?" the wolf snarled.

"Of course you're on our side. That's why you made us serve you as blankets, and kneel to be your footstools," the reindeer said sarcastically. "I haven't been a slave for so long as to forget what males on our side actually act like, and your behavior is not it."

"So you would have preferred to march through the frozen tundra, pulling a sled, without my body heat to keep you warm? Or my magic?"

She blinked at me. "You said you wanted us to keep you warm."

"I lied. I do that a lot when I'm starting a revolution." I turned to the wolf. "And what's your problem? I even gave you a shot at Dainn!"

"You made me sing that disgusting song," she growled.

"Hey, I didn't write the lyrics. And it's not as if you or any of the caribou knew the words to 'I'm a Little Teapot.'" I leaned forward, speaking directly into her face while still levitating. "More importantly... you're a black collar. She's a black collar. All of you except the dragon are black collars. If I hadn't pretended I wanted you here to humiliate you, the caribou wouldn't have gone along with it. But I wasn't going to get a revolution started with nothing but red collars."

The reindeer scowled. "You came here to overthrow the caribou?"

"Out of the goodness of your heart," the dire wolf said. I never knew a growl could be so sarcastic.

"Yes. Out of my deep, noble, pure love of Chaos. I decided to overthrow the caribou because they're so eminently overthrow-able, with so many angry slaves embedded in their population. I'm bored! Equestria is so perfect and harmonious it makes me want to toss my cookies!" I flung some cookies into the air. "But they've got weapons that work against me, that I can't fight back against. The caribou don't. Their society might be more disharmonious, but in the end that just means more vulnerable to a really sweet rebel uprising."

The two slaves looked at each other. I sweetened the pot. "In any case, whether or not you're still mad at me about a little bit of humiliation I inflicted on you for a greater cause... you need me."

"For what, aside from the taste of your blood on my teeth?"

"Wolfy, my dear, don't posture like that. We both know my blood tasted like moldy ketchup and nearly made you upchuck your lunch. No, what you need me for is magic. Particularly you, milady." I bowed to the reindeer.

"I cannot use chaos magic."

"Don't scowl like that, your face will freeze that way. Of course you can't use chaos magic; that's a monopoly I'm keeping. But the entire reason the caribou can do magic and you can't is that there's a web of rune-engraved artificial ley lines all over this city, carrying misery and suffering to Dainn to be converted into magic, and back out again to every caribou who's sworn loyalty to him. If I break those lines, it hurts Dainn and spills raw magic out that you and all the other reindeer and unicorns here can use. Win-win!"

The two looked at each other, then back at me. "You... are the reason we had magic, briefly?"

"And I could be the reason you have more magic, less briefly. Which to be honest you're gonna need, because I am counting caribou here, and sisters, I don't like your odds." I wasn't actually counting caribou, but even someone as math-challenged as I am could tell there were a lot more caribou than there were former slaves fighting back. The problem was there were far, far more red collars than black collars because of all the sacrificed cows, and there was no way I could tell which red collars had adopted subservience out of expediency and which ones were genuinely loyal, like the dragon. So I was limited to the black collars, and all of them were prisoners brought in from outside or transformed former caribou, meaning there were a lot less of them than there were able-bodied adult male caribou, all of whom were trained warriors. 

"If he's the reason we had magic, we need to ally with him, Signi," the reindeer said. "And... he didn't molest us on the way here. He was insulting and he humiliated us but he's telling the truth; we were much warmer being forced to serve as his blankets than we would have been if the caribou had made us pull the sleigh."

The dire wolf's eyes focused on mine, a stare of challenge. I met her stare, grinning. She was the one who broke the gaze, looking down in the universal wolf acknowledgement of "yeah, I admit it, you could probably kick my rump." "I reserve judgement, but for now, I accept you as comrade," she said grudgingly.

"Great! So, comrades, you wouldn't mind watching my back here, would you? I have to concentrate to focus on breaking the mana lines, which makes me a bit less capable of noticing a caribou with a cudgel sneaking up on me."

"I am a warrior, not a guardsbitch!" Signi snarled. "I do not stand and watch; I tear out the throats of my enemies!"

"So would you mind tearing out the throat of anybull who comes after me? Pretty please with a cherry on top? Wait, you're a wolf. How about a raw, bloody steak on top?"

"Are you always so irritating?"

"What part of Spirit of Chaos and Disharmony did you miss?"

"I will defend you," the reindeer said. "I have weapons." She did. She'd obviously stolen them off some fallen caribou, because otherwise she was still shaved and completely naked. "But until you do as you've promised, I have no magic. So my fighting prowess is... limited, at the moment."

"Don't worry, your friendly neighborhood Discord will fix you right up. Just give me a moment."

I sat down, because using a lot of magic, like what I'd need to sever a line near Dainn, would drain me and make me dizzy – even with the glorious chaos of battle all around me, I was still a lot more limited than I'd like. (You may ask yourself, if I was so limited, why was I wasting my energy on silly jokes like manifesting cookies to toss in the air? And the answer is, firstly, illusions don't take all that much out of me and they weren't real cookies, and secondly... I kept forgetting. Use your magic every fifteen seconds for a thousand years and then tell me how easy it is for you to remember not to do it.) I didn't close my eyes, but I retreated into my chaos perceptions, into the patterns all around me and their wonderfully unpredictable flux and flow. I could see the lines radiating from Dainn, and the branching and re-branching they did before touching caribou. 

They were strong, thick trunk lines, unbreakable by most standards, but there's nothing in this world that chaos cannot break. It just takes time. Dainn had reinforced them, which would have been adorable coming from someone who hadn't drugged me, tricked me into thinking we were friends while I was drugged, and then tried to steal my magic when I came to my senses. It wasn't going to stop me; he'd done the magical equivalent of building a tall fence around an oak tree in hopes that that would stop a hurricane from knocking it over. Not that I was feeling much like a hurricane at the moment, but I'd feel a lot better once I broke one of those lines and drank from it like a fire hose.

The first one I broke was hard, very hard. After drinking my fill from the magic as it sprayed everywhere from the broken line, though, the next one was a lot easier. Then I went for another one after that, and I'd have gotten to four if the dragon hadn't charged at me.

They might have had better luck taking me by surprise if they'd sent a dozen caribou to overpower my protectors (despite what she'd said, Signi the wolf was, in fact, helping her pal to guard me); in the midst of so much lovely chaos I might miss the detail that a group of random dull patterns representing caribou were moving toward me amidst all the other caribou patterns. But it's hard to miss a dragon. I wanted to try to go for that last line, but as badflank as a dire wolf might be, she'd be no match for the dragon, so I snapped back to full focus to protect myself. Amazingly, Reindeer Lady and Signi were still holding the line, standing between me and the charging dragon. Signi's fur was raised so high she looked like she'd been hit by lightning and the reindeer's spear trembled slightly in her hooves, but they were still there. I snapped my fingers and put them behind me. "Thanks, gals, I'll take it from here. Go have fun," I said, and then the dragon was in my face.

"YOU HURT THIS SLAVE'S MASTER! THIS SLAVE KILLS YOU!" she boomed – large dragons are loud even when they're growling – and then fired off a huge ball of flame breath. Of course I wasn't there anymore; I was on her back.

"Yee-haw! Giddyup!" I shouted, popping reins and a bridle, with bit, into existence. I expected her to flame the bit out of existence within seconds, or bite through it, but she did neither; she threw her head back and forth trying to shake me, but didn't do anything to free herself of the bridle. After a moment I realized – she might now be a large ferocious dragon, but she'd spent her life being a sex slave. She was probably trained to not bite or flame anything that was put in her mouth.

She thrashed around for a while, charging through the fracas, throwing her head back and forth to try to throw me off, but this wasn't my first dragon rodeo and she wasn't moving nearly fast enough to have any hope of tossing me. Several caribou fired off spells at me, and a few big spenders even fired bolts of magic – most caribou can't access enough magic to feel safe doing that, but I suppose they open up the reserves when there's a battle on. I was having so much fun, I almost didn't notice the dragon racing toward a hastily constructed rune circle that a few caribou mages were hurriedly putting into place. Almost.

As she leapt for the rune circle, I leapt off of her. The caribou mages attacked me, trying to force me into the circle, first with telekinesis and then when that failed laughably they tried to teleport it to where I was, which turned out to be very, very bad for one of them because at the moment the teleport began I swapped his place with my own. The rune circle presumably was the same one my two transformed caribou pals had tried to toss me into before – not literally the same circle, but the same runes, because it had the same effect. It turned the mage female and drained all of his magic. He screamed, and then huddled in the center of the circle, assuming I guess that none of the others could go in there after him without risking their own magic and masculinity. Despite having been a caribou his entire life, he seemed to have forgotten that caribou have telekinesis. One of his former comrades levitated him out of there, ripped his clothes off him as he shrieked and begged, and chained him to what had been one of the tall torch poles. The torch had been knocked off but the pole itself was still standing.

So I switched places with him again, batted my eyes seductively at the caribou mage that had captured and tied up his former comrade. When the fellow backed up frantically, realizing a moment too late that I wasn't his intended victim, I grabbed him with my tail, gave him a big wet smooch on the cheek, and flung him toward the rune circle. Another one of the mages saved him by blasting the circle apart, breaking at least one of the runes, so when the one I'd grabbed landed, nothing happened to him. 

This gave me an idea, though. I reversed entropy on the broken rune, re-assembling it. This didn't reactivate the circle; rune circles actually do need to be circles. Remember what I said about order magic? These stupid things actually care what shape they're arranged in. But I did turn the runes into stone tiles, lifted them off the ground with my own telekinesis, assembled them into a circle, and then teleported them around a caribou who had pinned down a pegasus and was trying to break her wings. Simultaneously I turned the ground under the caribou and pegasus into a cloud, and lifted it rapidly. Clouds are solid to pegasi and griffins, intangible to almost everyone else. She was levitated up by the cloud that went right through her captor, and less than a second later the rune circle came into existence around the guy, turned him female, and drained his magic. 

Oh, I had so much fun with that thing. I was trying to avoid collateral damage; I didn't know if it could drain a yak or a griffin, because they don't have any general magic, and I was sure it'd be bad for a pony, so unless the pony was a pegasus and I could pull that stunt with the levitating cloud, I couldn't surround any of my black collars with it. But I popped it into existence around more than half a dozen caribou before somebull had the presence of mind to smash a few of the tiles. I thought about running my entropy reversal again to fix the tiles so I could keep using my toy, but then Dainn himself engaged me, which is not to say that he offered to marry me.

Dainn's a nasty customer. I used to fight Celestia and Luna, back in the day, and that was fun. Almost like a dance. There were times when they were going all-out against me, trying their best to kill me, before they'd figured out that they couldn't, and that added spice to the game – just because I don't stay dead doesn't mean I particularly like having to make my way back to the land of the living, and there's always that tiny possibility that I'd lose myself over there and never make it back. So there were real stakes involved, not like my fights with, well, anyone else. But even when they were trying to kill me, they were elegant, beautiful, their speed and grace in battle almost a poem embodied.

That... was not Dainn. He was just brutal. His magic was like a wall, if walls moved incredibly fast, and it was nothing but force. Kinetic, heat, electric... nothing exotic like a transformation spell or a reforming spell or even an attempted teleport. Just walls of energy, slamming into me. Teleporting didn't help much; he seemed to be able to generate those walls from virtually anywhere, and his ability to figure out where I'd just gone was almost as good as Winnie's had been. It didn't take me long to figure out why; he was connected to the webs of force all throughout his land, and of course they were the most tightly concentrated right around him, and being what I am I cause a disturbance in magic wherever I go. So anywhere that I teleported that was anywhere near Dainn, he'd feel me reappear before he could see me.

In Equestria, this trick wouldn't have worked either; a wall of magical force can't actually do damage to me if I've transformed myself into magic. No matter how tightly woven, all magic is made up of threads, lines of force, and there are always gaps in the weave that I can flow through. But here in the North, when I turned myself to magic I felt the drain pull on me harder than ever, trying to tear my entire essence apart and drain me into the ley lines going toward the north pole. It made me a lot weaker to turn myself into magic, because I had to expend so much energy just in holding myself together. When I was made of flesh rather than magic, though, I was breakable. Admittedly, as flexible as I am, it's hard to break me... but bruises are surprisingly easy to generate. 

Meanwhile, the dragon was back, jumping in to assist her master. She actually managed to flame me to ash, an impressive feat considering that she was a greed-grown teenager and not an ancient beast like Winnie. Technically you could even say that that killed me, because I wasn't made of magic at the time... but there was so much ambient chaos on the battlefield, it took me mere seconds to transform the ash back into a draconequus who happened to be me, incidentally healing all the bruises and contusions Dainn had left on me thus far. 

Occupying the attention of Dainn and the dragon was good for my revolution, here; they were easily the biggest single threats on the battlefield. Occupying their attention by being their punching bag, however, wasn't really how I wanted to spend my day. So I sank into the ground, transforming into magic for just moments before reconstructing the earth around me to be a small cave I could safely float in while I got my breath. 

I had to think about the long range here. I'd done Dainn some damage, but I was no closer to even finding my Element of Cruelty, let alone prying it loose from him, than I'd been. I would have thought he'd be wearing it, but I may have mentioned that caribou styles of dress and seating leave little to the imagination, and I hadn't seen it. Maybe embedded in his skin, like Greed had been in Winnie's scales? Except Winnie was centuries old and Dainn was not, and caribou skin does not work at all like dragon scales. My troops were very highly motivated, but they were wearing out – a diet nutritionally balanced for the rigors of being a sex slave doesn't actually leave a lot of energy for combat. And I myself wasn't powerful enough to tip the balance all by myself – not here, not so close to the pole. 

I needed an ace. So I wrote a letter.

"Dear Princess Luna, help, I am a unicorn slave of the caribou, my friends and I are fighting back and there's a battle but we're losing, please save us—Dreamy Star"

I had no idea what the names of any of the unicorns were. Dreamy Star was made up to catch Luna's sympathies – with a name associated with stars and dreams, she'd most likely be a moon-aligned unicorn, if she existed, which she probably didn't. (I can't rule out that any of the slaves might be named Dreamy Star, but it seemed unlikely.) It was late at night; the midnight sun still shone on the horizon, barely brighter than a particularly brilliant moon, but the real moon was high in the sky. Celestia would be asleep. And Luna is easy to enrage, especially if her anger is righteous, and Luna fantasizes about being a warrior princess once again, a great hero in her own right, dispatching evil. And Luna used to haaate the caribou, and probably still does, and I'm sure it chafes at her that Celestia's realpolitik keeps her from going into battle against them just on the principle of the thing.

I sent it to her with the unicorn version of the dragonfire spell, the one that Celestia would use to transmit letters to Spike. This was a very, very high-order spell, very difficult for all but the most powerful of unicorns to learn. It's part of dragons' native magic, so they have little trouble with it. I'm no unicorn, but I can make my magic behave just harmonically enough to fool ponies, at least if they're not studying it with the attention to detail a forensic thaumatologist would use. 

With any luck, I thought, Luna wouldn't wait for morning and the calmer, more practical mind of her sister to prevail; she'd seize the chance to be a hero herself. And she'd bring an army. Because Luna isn't stupid, and she knows the pole affects her as badly as it affects any other magic-using pony.

Then I reappeared with a case of whooping flank so bad I probably should have been in quarantine. (Ed. note: I did not get this joke. Apparently three hundred years ago Princess Celestia's push for vaccinations eliminated the disease whooping cough, and Discord missed the fact that nopony is going to have any idea what that is anymore unless they actually research it, like I had to. -ed.) I drew in a big, juicy draught of chaos, and sent it back out again in full measure. Chaos is the gift that keeps on giving, and I had a lot to give. I created swarms – literally, hundreds – of magical sprites, most of them variations on four basic types, and set them loose.

See, friendly chaos isn't. Starfire and Starswirl used to say that to me when I asked why I couldn't go out with the soldiers to fight the dragons – there were unicorn battlemages going, why not me? They told me about the concept of friendly fire, and the saying "friendly fire isn't", as in, it isn't friendly. Since it is very likely that you, my reader, are a sheltered pony who knows pretty much nothing about military terminology, "friendly fire" means arrows or magical blasts coming from your own side. Chaos has a similar problem – it doesn't discriminate between friend or foe. But over the years, I've learned tricks to help keep my chaos focused on the targets I want to go after. It was easier with dragons, who are a completely separate species. Caribou and reindeer are the same species, so I had only two distinguishing features to work with. The enemy were all male, whereas all of the slaves were at least physiologically female, and the enemy were all tuned to the web of magic that ran through Dainn, deriving their magic from that, whereas no one on my side was. 

Naturally, being the mature, restrained and tasteful draconequus that I am, I did not take the opportunity to build weapons out of rude and childish jokes about male anatomy. I also have a bridge in Manehattan that I can sell to you very affordably, and some lovely condos in the Hayseed Swamps.

My favorites were the nutcrackers. As I'm sure every pony who's ever celebrated Hearth's Warming is aware, a nutcracker is a stylized wooden pony with a jaw that can move up and down on a lever, powerful enough to crack a walnut. (They have simple tool versions as well, but what fun is that?) My nutcrackers had articulated joints and necks. They were a little taller than a newborn foal, but shaped like adult ponies. As is traditional, they were all earth ponies. And when they wandered under a caribou/reindeer or behind one, they were designed to look up and check for nuts, and if they found any, rear up, grab on with their cracking jaws, and get cracking. 

The fireflies and lightning bugs were designed to home in on the frequency of caribou magic, which meant that they'd be attracted to caribou antlers. Antlers themselves aren't sensitive, so I made the fireflies and lightning bugs attracted strongly to the base of the antlers. As you can probably guess, my fireflies and lightning bugs were not harmless, pretty bioluminescent insects, but were instead lighting up via fire and lightning. Not incredibly powerful or intense bursts of fire or electricity, admittedly, but they were landing on caribou heads, or flying straight at their eyes. (I considered using twittermites, but I couldn't make a destructive pun out of those.)

The accoutresprites were more of a giant nuisance than anything else. Where parasprites will eat any food item, unless Twilight Sparkle has reprogrammed them to eat everything that isn't food (tell me, why does that mare consider herself an enemy of chaos, again?), my accoutresprites were programmed to eat clothing, and only clothing. Slaves of the caribou are naked; caribou themselves are not. It was warm enough in the keep that being stripped naked by a swarm of adorable bugs wouldn't do any real physical harm to my opponents, but caribou think of nakedness as feminine and weak, and impose it on their slaves for exactly that reason. They never strip fully naked in public even when engaged in the public sex they're so fond of. Besides, a caribou who was distracted trying to drive off a swarm of bugs would be an open target for my rioting troops.

And the trouser snakes. Let's just say they don't like rivals, and leave the rest of their function to your imagination.

This is actually my forte, one of my more unique talents. With unicorns, animating more than 10 objects at once with spellwork is virtually impossible. Rarity can manipulate far more than that with telekinesis, but she's not performing spells. And Sombra was able to cast one single type of spell to animate far more than 10 objects at a time, as long as those objects were all black crystals growing out of solid objects or appearing in air. (Sombra is not technically a unicorn, but I count alicorns, umbra and horned seaponies as unicorns when I'm talking about their magical abilities.) Luna can get up to 10 or so individual animated sprites, and in dreams, she can pull off a lot more, but she uses a trick – instead of a thousand spells to make a thousand soldiers appear that will fight monsters in a foal's dream, she'll cast one spell that says "INSERT A THOUSAND SOLDIERS HERE, FOAL BRAIN" and the foal's brain will add the soldiers and animate them more or less independently, to the extent that the foal can imagine soldiers. 

But I'm the Master of Chaos. When I animate a magical sprite, I don't usually continue to control it. I give it some parameters that it will try to fulfill until the spell wears off, and then it'll go do those things more or less independently. My power levels allow me to animate hundreds of them (sometimes even thousands, like I did with the skeletons of my kind), and because I don't have to concentrate on controlling them, I can send them all off to do whatever it is I wanted them to do. Unicorn mages have to stand there and trade magical blasts at each other. I can put a huge number of attacks into a batch and spawn them all at once.

Due to the leyline pull, this was exhausting, so after dumping my giant can of chaos all over the battlefield, I sat down against a wall to get my breath, and watch the lovely havoc I'd just unleashed. None of the effects I'd generated could kill a caribou, but after one of my trouser snakes got hold of them they might wish they were dead, and of course a caribou trying to protect his family jewels from my nutcrackers was an easier target for a slave to attack.

And they needed the edge. The yak was down. The griffin's wings were broken. Most of the unicorns were either unconscious or huddling behind a pile of rubble, where they would blast any caribou who tried to invade their territory, but they plainly didn't have the strength for offensive maneuvers. All but one of the pegasi were still in good shape, since there are no flyers among the caribou (the flying reindeer are very heavily matriarchal, with the medic/warriors who charge onto a battlefield to rescue the fallen being almost entirely comprised of cows. No male flying reindeer would have ever joined a movement in favor of patriarchy and male dominance, not when their most important culture heroes are the Valkyrior that held off demons from Tartarus. Though they don't call it Tartarus, they call it Hel; like the lands of Underhill, there are many gates to Tartarus, scattered across the world, and they all have different names.) The earth pony seemed to have endless stamina, and I wasn't shocked – the earth has plenty of magic running through it up here. The ley lines pull the magic out of the ambient and force it underground. Signi the wolf was still tearing out the occasional throat, though more of her attacks were non-fatal damage to legs now; she might be tiring, unable to continue to leap at throats, but she was still in the game. And while many reindeer had fallen, many more were still fighting. The two caribou I'd turned were also in good fighting shape. But enough black collars were down that my remaining forces were hard pressed.

Also, Dainn had called in reinforcements from all over the city. Which meant fresh new caribou to fight my tired rebels. So if it wasn't for my several hundred animated chaos sprites, we'd probably have been up a creek.

As soon as I broke another of Dainn's magical threads, though, he focused on me – and what was worse, he focused his army on me. "The draconequus is responsible for these attacks! Take him down, and these creatures will cease to be!" This wasn't even slightly true – only Matrisse or the Tree of Harmony can take me out in a way that reverts my magic. If the caribou did manage to beat me, my sprites would have continued to run amuck. But they didn't know that – quite possibly even Dainn believed it – so they were, shall we say, inspired in their attacks on me by the belief that they'd spare themselves a visit from my nutcrackers or trouser snakes if they defeated me. Thus I ended up at the center of all the caribou mages, and quite a few of the non-mage soldiers, all trying to kill me, harm me, or restrain or drain my power.

If it weren't for the fact that I can actually split my attention in something like 50 directions I'd probably have been a goner. The mages had rune attacks that would actually work. Not all of them were as large and complex as the power drain attack, either. One had a few simple runes that caused confusion. (Generally I don't know what runes do until they activate; symbolic magic's not my thing. Causing confusion, however, is very much my thing, so I was able to tell.) Not a particularly deadly attack, but a moment of confusion on my part could have been it for me, with so many attacking me at once. There were other relatively small, simple rune spells they were trying to cast on me, none of them fatal in themselves, all of them capable of weakening me during a fight where I needed every resource I had. Dainn was in the mix as well. Because his own bulls were all around me, he couldn't use his force walls; he'd narrowed his magical attacks down to be sharp and precise, like lances, but those are much less likely to hit me, given the speed I can dodge at.

This might have been a wonderful opportunity for my rebel troops to charge in and do some serious damage, since all of the caribou were either focusing on me, or focusing on protecting the ones who were focusing on me from my chaos sprites. Too bad they didn't see it that way. They all went and huddled together behind barricades – since the dragon's sudden growth had destroyed a lot of the walls and ceiling, there was rubble everywhere. I suppose it wasn't a terrible idea – they were exhausted, and if the enemy are willing to ignore you in favor of attacking the heavy hitter, taking the opportunity to bandage wounds and rest a bit was probably better for them than continuing the attack. They had no way of knowing what the pole was doing to my magic – as far as anyone here was able to see, I must have still seemed to be the godlike near-omnipotent master of chaos I usually am.

But I wasn't.

In Equestria, none of this would have tired me in the slightest, but then in Equestria I would have been able to wrap this up in moments, so there wouldn't even have been the opportunity to get tired. Here, though, every time I used my magic, I lost two or three times as much magic as I'd actually used. Every time I turned into magic I felt the pull trying to rip me apart and drag me underground. Every time I didn't turn into magic, I had to constantly dodge, because there were maybe fifty or so mages and soldiers directly attacking me. And fifty individuals all attacking one individual isn't nearly as chaotic as fifty individuals attacking twenty individuals, and since my chaos sprites can't really think for themselves, caribou being methodical about it could in fact destroy them... which also fed me less chaos than there'd been before. My source of easily reachable ambient magic was running out, so I had to draw more and more on my personal stores, and that made me vulnerable to the drain.

So I was actually getting tired.

Under normal circumstances I wouldn't have kept fighting. I'm not the sort to fight to the bitter end unless I have no choice; run away and live to fight another day, that's my motto. And the Element of Cruelty really wasn't that important. I had three Elements in play and one in hand that I hadn't assigned yet. Honestly I probably can get by with just those. There wasn't any good reason to risk my life to get this thing.

And yet for some reason I didn't want to retreat. I was angry, on a personal level, that Dainn had tried to brainwash me. Being personally angry had kept me in the fight against Winnie for longer than I'd normally have stayed, after all. But I don't think that would have been enough, either, not as I was actually getting worn out. This was just like that fight with Gilda where she wouldn't let me quit when I got tired. I don't get tired easily or often – sleepy, yes, but tiring out in the middle of a fight? That's rare. I think the last time that happened, before my battles with Anon started, was the time I fought intruders from another reality by hitting them with the sun. The sun is heavy when you pull it off course. So it's not a thing I have a lot of experience with or resistance to, and therefore, not a thing I'd normally try to push through even if I'm angry.

No, the honest truth is that I kept fighting because this felt right. This felt like the kind of fight I was meant for, not these stupid skirmishes with Anon that have nothing to do with my true purpose. Here I was, starting a slave rebellion and overthrowing an evil tyrannical government. I was causing wonderful chaos and helping those who actively sought anarchy to achieve it. My gifts are so rarely appreciated. I remember thinking during this fight that of course I'd been defeated by Harmony, because I could see now that my centuries of unrule over Equestria had been entirely the wrong thing to do. I had fought to maintain a stable state of chaos. Chaos isn't supposed to be stable! Chaos is transient, and that's part of its beauty! Sure, as soon as the dust settled the anarchy I was establishing here would give way to a new government, but I didn't have to stick around for that – I could go find another corrupt and evil tyranny to overthrow. Just because Equestria happens to have a benevolent immortal dictator doesn't mean that every other nation in the world can say the same.

I wanted to defeat Dainn and the caribou, not because I'd get my Element of Cruelty, but because I was morally opposed to everything they believed in and I desperately wanted to prove that chaos and freedom were strong enough to defeat rigid structure and tyranny. I wanted to free the slaves, all the slaves, not just the ones here but the red collars and the ones out in the outpost villages and the ones in the rest of the city, because slavery is as far from chaos as you can get. And I wanted to make sure no new slaves could be taken, and no young caribou heifers would be lobotomized anymore, and that an entire ideology based on rigidly defining living, sapient beings based on one binary categorization scheme would topple and restore complexity and variety. This was what I was for. I hadn't felt this passionate about a battle since the time I'd traveled in time back to Anugypt, after Set's death and before the coronation of the next chaos avatar, and helped Baast overthrow Anubis and free him from Apep's corruption. Maybe that particular revolution should have clued me in (or the fact that maintaining Equestria in a state of constant chaos actually bored me frequently enough that I had to go world-walking or time-traveling.) But better late than never, right?

So I kept fighting, even though I should have run away. I was getting battered, bruised and bloody, and the slaves were all still huddling behind their barricades, expecting me to defeat the caribou for them, and it wasn't going to happen. And Luna hadn't shown up yet, and I had no idea if she even would. I was staying mostly airborne, after expanding my wings, because the caribou couldn't fly, but Dainn was riding on the back of the dragon and she totally could. She hadn't had wings to clip, as an adolescent sex slave, so they'd never clipped them, and after I'd caused her to grow, the wings had popped out, and somehow now she could fly. Unlike pegasi and griffins (and draconequui), dragon flight seems to be inborn knowledge that's activated with the appearance of wings. Probably Rainbow Dash could have flown rings around her, but then Rainbow Dash probably wouldn't have had several dozen caribou all attacking her specifically. 

One of Dainn's bolts tore through me, actually ripping a hole straight through my abdomen. The force of it flung me to the ground near the barricades. I healed it without turning into magic, which meant it didn't really heal perfectly, but I felt like I was too exhausted to risk turning into magic – I might not be able to resist the pull tearing me apart, if I did. 

I could hear the slaves whispering to each other behind the barricades, wondering if I was really in as bad shape as I looked like I was. I screamed to them, "Help me!" And then immediately had to fly up again as a dozen spears got chucked my way. Rather than turning myself to magic, I turned the spears themselves into jello, so they did no damage when they hit. Except that I was tired enough that the transformation wasn't complete, so some splinters ended up lodged fairly deep in my skin. And then I had to dodge dragon flame, and I wasn't quite fast enough, so my side got badly singed. And then another spear actually managed to plant itself in my back, piercing and pinning one of my wings. I was staying up on wingpower, not magical levitation, so of course I fell.

Before I could do more than push out the spear and heal the injury, they were surrounding me. Dainn was glaring down at me from dragonback. "You betrayed us," he said. "We gave you hospitality, and you attacked us. Why?"

I shrugged. "Don't ask chaos 'why'. You usually won't understand the answer."

"A pity. I'd have liked to know why, before we kill you." His eyes narrowed. "I will grant you this much, you've proven to be far too dangerous an opponent to enslave. As valuable as your magic would have been to us, you're too formidable to leave alive."

I was so tired. I'd gotten used enough to the drain that the repeated pulls on my magic had stopped making me swoon or get dizzy some time ago, but I'd been drained so much by now I felt hollow. Realistically I probably still had more magical reserves than Twilight Sparkle does on a good day, but unicorn-level is so much lower than what I'm used to that it felt like I had almost nothing left. The thought occurred to me that if I didn't muster up the strength to do something, they might kill me. If I don't turn myself into magic, my body actually can be killed – Celestia and Luna did it twice before they figured out it wouldn't stick, and there were a couple of others as well. Also the time I did it to myself so I could go after Celestia after something I did accidentally killed her. And if I was killed here, after I'd been drained so low, I might not be able to prevent my magic from being torn from me. The entire reason I can come back from the dead and no one else can is that I'm the only creature I know of who can hold onto magic after death. If I died and then lost my magic I was fairly sure I wasn't going to come back.

If this was some sort of fictional story, I'm sure that at this dramatic moment, where I was actually facing death for once, Luna and her troops would suddenly appear and save the day, or at least provide enough of a distraction for me to do it. Unfortunately for me, I don't have the reality-warping ability of turning my life into a dramatic story. I summoned up enough strength to shield myself from most of the attacks, turning spears into corn puffs shaped like spears, making rune inscriptions into melting chocolate so most of the rune would be lost, reflecting several bolts of magic. Enough of the magic attacks did hit, though, that I ended up badly injured, more holes in me than in a Changeling's legs. I screamed, and tried to teleport, and for once in my life failed completely. I moved about three inches to the left.

Then Signi the dire wolf leapt out from behind the enclosure, snarling, and went directly for Dainn's throat, landing on the dragon's head and running along her spiny neck at Dainn, who was perched further up. She launched herself at him, and he blasted her. Dire wolves have no general magic and no real defense against it. The bolt tore her head mostly off her neck and threw her body to the rubble on the ground, where her corpse skidded over to one of the barricades, leaving a bloody smear behind her.

I'd called for help, and she was the only one who came. She gave her life, trying to protect me. No one had ever done that. I'm sure my mother would have, if she'd been faced with the choice, but she didn't die to try to save me – she died because I disrupted the ritual she was involved in. I'm sure Celestia and Luna might have, way back when, but they didn't die to save me – they ran away after I was already dead, saving themselves because they couldn't save me. Maybe King Starfire would have, but I wasn't his biological son so maybe not, and he didn't die to save me – he died fighting to save his entire nation. I was less at risk from the dragons than any of the ponies were. Maybe Starswirl would have, and there were certainly times he risked something to save me, like the time he and the earth pony with the hourglass cutie mark turned up in my time machine to rescue me when I was floating in space after hitting extradimensional invaders with the sun. (I still don't know how they got my time machine. It was still where I left it, so they must have acquired it at some other time.) But he never was in a situation where he had to risk his life for mine, so it never came up. And no one else I've met in my millennia of existence would have likely taken any risk whatsoever to save me.

When Winnie had nearly killed me, the rage had been cold, calculating, and I'd opened the floodgates on purpose, deliberately tapping the well of dark magic to fuel myself. This was nothing like that. I just lost it. I saw the only creature who'd ever risked their life to save mine die for it, tossed aside ignominiously like a dirty dishrag, and I saw red.

I was just enough in control of myself that the volcano that erupted directly under Dainn and his dragon didn't spit lava out in the direction of the slaves behind the makeshift barriers. 

Several of the caribou who had been ranged around me died instantly, screaming as they were engulfed by lava. The dragon sank like, well, like a pony who can't swim dropped in a swimming pool. Ponies are naturally buoyant in water, and dragons are naturally buoyant in lava, but that didn't mean she wouldn't sink, it just meant she'd bob back up to the top in moments. Moments that hopefully would engulf and kill the caribou riding her. Lava can't kill Celestia (I've seen dragons try), but it's not because she's an alicorn, it's because she's specifically the alicorn of the Sun, and you can't burn her no matter how much heat you generate. Alicorn-level beings don't naturally have the ability to resist lava. 

Unfortunately, what Dainn did have was the ability to self-levitate. This is a rare skill among unicorns, and I've never understood why – surely, if you were surrounded by pegasi and you didn't have wings, you'd try to use magic to fly instead? But then, I was born with both wings and magic, so I suppose I can't really comprehend. He leapt off the dragon's back and flew up into the air, outrunning the gouts of lava spurting out of the top of the volcano. As is usual with volcanos, the air itself was turning foul, but because I had friendlies to worry about, I turned the sulfur and other noxious gases into clouds of perfume – very, very annoying, but the only creature whose sense of smell had been good enough that the perfume could have impaired her had just died, and perfume won't kill anypony. Or anydeer, either. 

I started throwing things at him. Things like napalm pie and molten tar balls and miniature glass tornados. He dodged, of course. The dragon came back up, sputtering, and shook herself, sending lava spraying all over. The reindeer and unicorns behind the barriers managed to block any of the lava from landing on the troops sheltering back there, but not all of the caribou were as quick. She didn't even seem to notice, immediately taking flight to join her master. I didn't hold back. Dragons are physically much tougher than caribou. None of the things I was throwing at Dainn could kill or even seriously hurt a dragon; a napalm pie is no more of a problem to a dragon than a banana cream one would have been, and while I have torn dragons apart with glass storms, I'd made the glass super-dense lead crystal and spun the tornados at near-sonic speed. I wasn't doing that here. 

Dainn shouted at me, as he threw bolts of force back at me, "You granted us our power! You gave us the gift that made caribou society possible! Why do you turn on us now?"

I was beyond even pretending to make sense. "He had no right!" I screamed back. "It's mine, mine! He had no right to give you my things!" Of course Mayhem had had the right, because he'd been the chaos avatar when he'd handed over the Element of Cruelty. But apparently when I'm driven over the edge by rage and no longer have any kind of filter on my mouth, I have daddy issues. Good to know.

"Who had no right?"

"He was a foul, disgusting rapist and so are you! Of course he liked you, but I have no respect for you! I killed him, and I'll see you dead!" I was 2 when Mayhem committed suicide by pony. I obviously didn't kill him, except metaphorically; he knew I would exist, due to the time travel incident, and he knew that my existence as chaos avatar meant he was dead. So he told me, laughing, that now that he knew, he just wouldn't have a child. I'd cease to exist and he'd never die. Yet here I am, existing, and he's dead. He created me so that he could die. I don't think I was thinking clearly enough to have such a sophisticated chain of symbolism in my head, though; I think I was irrational enough that in that moment I actually believed I had killed Mayhem by becoming the chaos avatar, or maybe by being born. I'm not sure, honestly.

"Who are you talking about?"

"“͒̈́ͤ̌g̞̖̬ͅI̪̝̼̱͌̈̿̏ͤ̿ͅv̞̰̥̞̟̳̺̎ͬ̋̚E̓͂̋ ̣ͫ̓͆Ĩ͒̾̉ͬ̂̚t̜̎̅̔ͮ͑̑ͦ ̥̺͉̙̤̐͋͂͌͛̀͂T̙̲̠̐ȯ ̩ͦM͈͙̪̩̯͕͌E̗ ̪̳̹̠̹͋̃o͇̊ͥ̍ͯ̽̇̚r̮̗̝̣͔ͩ͂ ̞̱̼̟̽ͧ̍́̐ͅĨ͉͓̿͆ͣ̚’̣̬͈̘͎̹ͥ̾͛̏ͩͦL͉ͤ͑̄ͫ͗̃L̜̯̳͔̻̗̺ͭ ̭̳̼̼̝̀ͥ͌ͣ̿͐ͭr̅I̩̰̝̦̹͑̋ͯ̿ͅp̻̓̓̍̽͑̉ ̝̦͍͊ͫ͌͗͆̄İ͂͒̊ͭ͌̀t͇̯ͥͭ̀ͦ͛͑ ̗̹͖̬̻͉͌o̪̝̳F̙̖͈̗̙̱͌ͮ̈́͐f̙̼̭̣̙͗̑ͫ̓̄̐ ̜͐ͫͩͫY̳͒o͕̎u̪̿̍̉R͙̄̓ͯͯ̿̍̄ ̜̗c̪͕ͮO̻̠̦ͫ̇͗̇́̒r̈̇̋ͪ̃p̠̹͓̼͕͉̉̄s͉̲͙̹̱͈̓̓Eͪ͑ͪ̊͊̚ͅ!̙̗̞͎̐̽͆ͩ̀͐ͯͅ”̳͉͎̝ͪ̊̃̈́ͦͦ

Behind me, the caribou mages froze over the volcano. The rebels finally decided to join the party again, now that the volcano had decimated the ranks of the caribou. After the attacks from my chaos sprites, the caribou still alive and fighting were greatly weakened... but this didn't matter, because reinforcements for the caribou had arrived. I flung buckets of burning oil and made the sky rain knives down on them, which took some of them out, but they were fresh troops with access to magic, and every time I turned my attention away from Dainn and his dragon to focus on the caribou soldiers, I got hurt. 

Rationally, the cause had just turned hopeless. With reinforcements in the mix and me riding on one last wave of rage, burning myself out, there wasn't any realistic chance of us winning anymore. I didn't care. If I killed Dainn, or weakened him enough to break his protective spells and find the Element of Cruelty, I won anyway, even if all the slaves died in battle. None of them seemed inclined to surrender, anyway. Any who'd have been so inclined would probably have been broken into red collars a long time ago. Once Dainn had gone into the air, I'd figured out from the way the web of magic shifted that yes, the Element was on his person... somewhere. I'd get it off him or die trying.

And then the sky went dim.

I looked up. The moon was blocked by a black mass, rapidly descending. Even in the dim lighting provided by the moon and the midnight sun, I was very quickly able to make out that that was a mass of ponies.

There were maybe a couple of hundred thestrals. I didn't know Luna even had that many in her guard. There were dark-coated pegasi (or pegasi wearing Guard armor that glamoured them to look dark-coated.) There were unicorns in Guard armor, some solar, some lunar, riding on clouds being towed by pegasi – so at least some of them were battlemages with cloudwalking spells. There were earth ponies in harnesses, being carried by two pegasi at once. And at the front of the pack, of course, was Luna. With a funny-looking pink blob, like a balloon, bobbing somewhere above her back, but I assumed that was some kind of magic weapon.

Dainn took advantage of my distraction. He flung a chain at me that wound around my body and tightened, too fast and hard for me to use my own magic to fend it off. Every bone below the middle of my neck shattered, and what felt like almost all of them drove themselves into my lungs, except for the ones that were stabbing my innards in other locations. I fell. Facing death from blood loss, major trauma and asphyxiation, I turned myself to magic and let the chains fall through me, but I'd burned so much energy in my rage, I barely had the strength to hold myself together. When I turned myself back, I was done, at least for the moment. I lay against a pile of rubble, without the strength to make myself do anything else.

But by this point, I didn't need to do anything else. Not just yet.

"CARIBOU!" Luna shouted, and I hope I am getting the Royal Canterlot Voice across here by the size of the print. (Ed. note: No, sorry, I sized it down to normal capital letters to fit on the page better. Discord was taking up about half a page with every line of Princess Luna's. -ed) "YOU CRAVEN, MONSTROUS BEASTS, FILIACIDAL CREATURES, AFFRONT TO NATURE, HARMONY AND ALL GOODNESS IN THE UNIVERSE! TOO LONG HAVE WE ALLOWED YOU TO EXIST, A BLOT OF FOULNESS ON THE GLORIOUS HARMONY OF OUR WORLD! NO MORE! TODAY, YOU END! THUS SPEAKS LUNA, DIARCH OF EQUESTRIA, PRINCESS OF DARKNESS, NIGHT AND WAR!"

That got everyone's attention.

A ragged cheer went up from the surviving, conscious slaves, but it wasn't loud enough to drown the cacophony of misogynistic jeering from the caribou. From the clouds they rode on, several unicorns fired missiles, downward. An object flung with great force by magic will travel downward with much greater speed and force than if it's just dropped, and it looked as if the things they were throwing were explosives, because there were some really nice booms when they hit. Already the chaos was perking me up, restoring me like rain does a wilted flower. 

The unicorns wouldn't have much magic to work with down here – they were probably drawing on their personal stores, and that wasn't going to last. So as a token of my gratitude for the gift of chaos, I used what little strength I had left to grab at another one of Dainn's lines and snap it. He screamed and fell, but the dragon caught him easily. The reindeer and unicorns down here were energized, though, their morale improved by Luna's arrival and now ambient magic made available for them to use. 

Then Luna – who was deflecting all the magical attacks flung at her with contemptuous ease, though I knew she had to have started to feel the drain too – descended far enough that I could see what was on her back. I slapped myself on the forehead, felt the situation needed a few more facepalms, and slapped myself a few more times, then banged my head on the rubble. But only once, because that hurt.

That hadn't been a pink balloon. That had been the head of Anon, who was bundled in dark winter gear. Inexplicably, he didn't have a hat, but his hair was dark, so when he'd been high in the sky all I'd been able to make out against the blackness (and Luna's head in the way) had been his pale pink face. 

Of course Anon was here to save the day and "protect" Luna. Of course.

This day just couldn't get any better, could it.