Not The Hero

by alarajrogers


The Enemy of My Enemy Is Still My Enemy

I watched as Anon jumped off Luna's back and ran to the aid of one of the pony mares who was still fighting. Reindeer weren't even in the cartoon, so I wondered if he actually knew the reindeer were female, or how to tell the difference. (Earlier in the day you could have told by who wasn't wearing clothes, but after I unleashed the accoutresprites there were a lot of naked caribou. And caribou, like most males on our planet, have sheaths, so you kind of have to study their rear ends to see what kind of equipment they have. I couldn't see Anon doing that.) I should have realized he'd come with Luna. I'd thought, because her dream got rid of him so she could be the big hero and defeat the caribou, that she wouldn't bring him with her, especially since he isn't nocturnal so she'd have had to make a special trip to wake him up and get him from Ponyville. But of course she had to go get him because of course he couldn't let someone else go be a hero on their own, without him. Oh, and predictably, as soon as he showed up to "save" her, the mare – who'd held her own through this entire long battle – somehow lost the will to fight and just cowered on the floor as Anon sliced and diced her assailant. Admittedly, this wasn't all that different from the hiding behind barricades and letting me take the brunt of all the caribou attacking that all the slaves had done earlier... except she wasn't safe behind a barricade. She'd been in the middle of combat.

It would have been nice to believe that maybe, just maybe, Anon's abilities might be blunted up here where magic is weak. I mean, I've never actually detected magic coming from him, but I was able to find faint signs of a spell on Cheese Louise Sandwich once I knew he'd been transformed, so I knew he was using magic, of some sort, not just randomly breaking the universe. But I should have known better. His magic, whatever it is, has to be more like pegasus flight magic than unicorn magic, some sort of specialized magic rather than general, and that meant he could still use it, just like the pegasi could still fly.  At least so far he didn't seem to be impairing the performance of the ponies, but give it time, I figured.

My primary concern wasn't actually with getting skewered by his overgrown table knife, though I was exhausted and really, really low on magic and so maybe that should have been more of a concern than it was. What I feared far more was that he'd somehow force me into allying with Dainn, that his belief that I am the Big Bad behind everything would overwrite my own beliefs and my memories of why this fight got started in the first place. I didn't actually know if he was that powerful – after all, I'd just spent hours fighting the damn caribou, and I didn't know if Anon really could overwrite memories of stuff that just happened. But I didn't want to find out, either. So I needed to get out ahead of this one.

I summoned cotton candy clouds, small ones, that would be attracted to the frequency of caribou mana and then rain acid. There were far, far fewer of them than there had been of any of my other chaos sprites (all of which were gone by now, which was just as well as most of Luna's forces consisted of stallions.) The idea wasn't to seriously affect the course of the battle, but to let Anon know both that I was here and that I was fighting the caribou. I didn't honestly expect that just attacking caribou with my magic would convince him, or that he'd even notice who I was attacking, but I hoped it would help me convince him, because I was absolutely terrified that if I couldn't convince him that we were on the same side in this fight, his magic would force me onto the other side. (In this case the cotton candy was deliberate. I think. I wanted something that would signal my presence to a fairly stupid human who I know thinks I use cotton candy clouds all the time.)

Sure enough, after gutting two caribou who were attacking one of the few remaining unicorn slaves (I'd say "fighting her" except that she, too, dropped and cowered as soon as Anon got close, so by the time he actually reached her they were just attacking), he saw the clouds, looked around, saw me, and headed straight for me, sword held in front of his face and body as he ran. On his world, I had seen a lot of heroes of animated movies from their equivalent of Neighpon charge through a battlefield in exactly the same way. It looked to me like it ran a serious risk of taking his own face off if he tripped, but then, his power would never allow that to happen, so I guess he could get away with it.

As he approached, I turned the ground under his feet to ice, covered with a thick layer of olive oil. His footgear was well designed, probably a Rarity special, lined with fur and with good rubber soles for traction. But no amount of traction is going to help when you're running full tilt over greasy, oiled ice. Of course he skidded.  He was supposed to fall, but he leaned forward into the skid, sliding forward. Which meant that the small piece of rubble I levitated from one of the nearby piles and dropped directly in his path, while his eyes were on me, did what I'd hoped the slippery ice would do on its own. Anon hit the rock, slipped backward, and fell on his butt.

I held out my paw toward him in a "stop right there" gesture, while there was still three pony lengths between us and I was prepared to levitate fast. "Hold up there," I said. "I'm on your side this time."

He glared at me from the floor. "Right. I'm sure you are."

"I am! Did you notice who my clouds were raining on?"

"I don't think chocolate milk is much of a weapon," he sneered.

I giggled. "You thought that was chocolate milk? Oh, I hate to disabuse you... if I didn't tell you, you might drink it! But no. It's acid. Specially formulated to eat antlers, not unicorn horns, and homing in on caribou only. You see? I'm helping!"

Anon got to his feet. "Yeah, because you're totally the kind of guy who wants to free slaves and overthrow evil. Pull the other one, Discord."

I glared at him. "You know what the most chaotic part of slavery is?"

"No, and I don't care."

"The part where the slaves rise up and throw down their masters in bloody revolution." I smirked. "I'm not here to overthrow evil. I'm here to overthrow order. The caribou society is very, very rigid, very controlled. Everyone but the king has to obey someone. No chaos in it at all."

"Except for the sex slavery!"

"What? That's not chaotic either. All the victims are female, all the masters are male. The roles are absolutely rigid and allow no deviation." I shuddered. "Disgusting. So you see, I hate these guys as much as you do—"

"I doubt that."

"—and besides, I'm the one who invited Luna to this party."

"So it's a trap!"

He started to lunge forward, but had forgotten about my slippery ice. Anon barely managed to keep his balance. "Thank you, Admiral Ackbar," I said. (It's a reference to a famous movie from his world. Don't ask.) "No, it's not a trap. I called in reinforcements because the slaves here were losing, and if they lose, then Order wins. The king re-establishes control, the caribou take their slaves home and punish them for trying to rise up, and everything goes on exactly the way it did before. Besides, Luna's been hankering to take out the caribou for a long time, and it's almost her birthday! I missed over a thousand of them, so I figured I needed to give her something big!" I was up in the air, so I wouldn't slip on the ice myself. Here I leaned forward, almost planning to talk directly into his face, before I remembered the sword and drew back. "Look. I hate you and I want you dead and I'm aware the feeling is entirely mutual, but if we don't do one of those villain teams up with the hero against the greater threat plots, we're both going to lose, and I'm sorry to say that you're going to lose a lot harder than me. I can teleport out of here any time I want, but Luna isn't powerful enough to do that."

"Bullshit. She teleported all of us here."

"Ask her about the North Pole and what it does to magic to be anywhere near it. Or ask any unicorn, because by now they're all feeling it." I lounged back on air. The levitation was actually a huge effort in my weakened state, but easier than hovering with wings would have been, and I couldn't let him see my weakness. "Or hey, they're busy not dying, so I'll tell you. The North Pole drags magic down into the earth. The unicorns, and the reindeer, and Luna, are all running on fumes. Luna's got more juice than any of the others, but you may have noticed she's fighting their king. And his pet dragon. And the caribou aren't impaired, because they generate their own magic from the suffering of their slaves, and channel it through their king. So he's basically as powerful as an alicorn and unlike Luna, his supply won't run out."

Anon scowled. "Why should I trust you?"

"Because! Don't take my word for it, ask any of those fine unicorn fellows you came with if maybe magic is being just a tad unresponsive? If they're struggling just a bit to pull anything out of the ether?" I put an expression of mock soliticiousness on my face. "Your little toothpick there will work just fine, but you're only one man, and unlike the Changelings, caribou are warriors. They know how to fight guys with swords. They do it all the time. And if Luna runs out of magic... well. This society is based on hatred of females, and the desire to degrade them. What do you think they think of our lovely alicorn princesses? And what do you think they'll do to one of them if they manage to defeat her?"

"I will never let that happen!"

"That's the spirit! But she's up in the air, fighting a guy on a dragon, and you've got quite a lot of caribou between you and her position. She needs magic to defend herself. And I have the unique ability of being able to break the caribou's magic free from the channels King Dainn has it trapped in, making it available to everypony who can use it."

His eyes narrowed. "And you expect me to believe you'd use it to help Luna?"

I chortled. "To help Luna? No. Not in and of herself. But to help the ponies overthrow the caribou and destroy their society utterly, plunging this entire part of the world into beautiful anarchy? Absolutely. And even with all these ponies here... the caribou have a nation. This is just the guys available to fight in this city. They've put out the call; reinforcements will be arriving from all over. If Luna and her unicorns can't use magic and the caribou can, the slave revolt will fail and the caribou will win, and I for one don't intend to let that happen. I've got too much invested in this now." I clenched a paw, my anger getting the better of me for a moment. (No, I really didn't mean to show any of my true feelings to Anon. This is the kind of thing he does.)

"You do, huh?" Abruptly Anon smirked, and lowered his sword. "You look pretty beaten up, Discord. The caribou getting the better of you? Let me guess, this thing with the magic draining into the ground affects you too."

I hadn't really expected Anon to be smart enough to pick that up. "Hardly!" I snorted. "This is just dust. A battle kicks up a lot of dust, you know!"

"Uh-huh." His smirk got bigger. "So if you've been fighting these guys... I see the cotton candy clouds. Where's the floating pies? The mutated animals? The chocolate milk? None of this seems like your kind of chaos."

I scowled at him. "Chaos has many faces. What part of ‘bloody revolution' did you not understand?"

"Yeah, the chaos of war. Got it. So in addition to being a tyrant scumbag who plays murderous games, sometimes you drop the games entirely and just turn into a killer."

"And you don't?" I landed. The levitation was getting to be untenable. The arrival of the ponies was generating some nice chaos, but I was going to have to lie still and bask in it for a bit before I could recover from everything I'd been through recently. "Listen, we're not here to be friends. Or even allies, except this one time. You don't like me, I don't like you, but neither of us like the caribou and neither of us are going to beat them if we waste our energy fighting each other. So, truce?"

"You're just going to stab me in the back when I least expect it."

"The only one of us who's done any stabbing is you," I retorted. "Besides, if you expect it all the time, then when would I have a chance?"

Anon shook his head. "There's more to this. You didn't just come up here to cause chaos. I know you've got an ulterior motive."

I smirked at him. "Maybe I do. But whether I do or don't, you still need me, or Luna... well, I don't think I need to go into any details on what will happen to her if she loses to Dainn because she ran out of magic, do I?"

"And I said, I'd protect her."

"And I said, you'd do a much better job at that if you focused on doing it and not on attacking me. You haven't even noticed that she's wearing out, have you?"

He spun around. "Shit!" Luna was, indeed, faltering against Dainn. Anon turned back to me. "If you can do something to give her more power, prove it. Do it, now."

I glared at him. "And how do I know you won't backstab me? This technique leaves me somewhat... vulnerable. If I concentrate on freeing magic with you right in front of me, I won't be able to defend myself."

"Fine. I give my word as the Element of Protection that I won't attack you as long as you're helping Princess Luna. But if you don't demonstrate to me that you can help her, right now..." I really did not like the grin slowly growing on his face. "You're injured, Discord. I can see it. If you can't help her, then now is the perfect time to take you out."

I sighed. "You give your word?"

"I already said I would."

He was right. I'd stopped levitating because I was too tired. If he remembered that he needed to move like a skater, not like a runner, he could have that sword in my guts in an instant, and after the failure of my ability to teleport earlier, I couldn't trust that I could teleport away. Hanging my life on the question of whether or not Anon believed he had to keep his word to me seemed like a terrible idea, though. "Keep in mind, if you kill me here, there is no one else with the power to free the magic so the ponies can use it."

"Yeah yeah, you said that already. Do it now! Unless you can't, in which case..." He drew a finger across his throat dramatically.

I wasn't particularly afraid, mainly because I was too tired to really be afraid, but I can't say I wasn't a bit nervous as I focused in on one of Dainn's magic channels. By now I'd done this enough that I could still see the real world around me – my concentration didn't have to be total – so I could keep an eye on Anon. He was tapping his foot impatiently.

One of Dainn's force bolts got through Luna's shield. She cried out and reared backward, returning fire, but weakly. The blow would heal almost instantly – there are perks to being an alicorn – but the fact that Dainn had gotten through her shield at all was a problem. Not that Anon would ever acknowledge or believe it, but I didn't want to see Luna hurt. That counterbalanced my irritation with Anon and my desire to drag my hoof on this just because I don't like being told what to do, or being threatened. Anon wasn't what was important here. So with all the strength I had left, I pulled.

I ended up snapping three of them in rapid succession. If Dainn's dragon hadn't dodged and taken one of Luna's attacks for him, Luna would probably have blasted him good – he was doubled over on the dragon's back, screaming, the entire time I was breaking the lines. Immediately unicorn horns grew brighter and their own force bolts were visibly stronger. I turned back to Anon, panting. "You see? Is that good enough for you?"

He scowled at me again. "Fine. But I'll be watching you."

At this point a caribou charged up behind him. Without even particularly looking at the guy, Anon spun around, swung his sword in a manner that should have made it fly out of his hand, and cleaved the caribou's head off like he was a half-melted chocolate bunny rabbit for a Winter Wrap-Up party.

I swallowed. Somehow I'd managed to forget exactly how dangerous Anon was; my reaction to him threatening to kill me had been more "Oh, not this again" than actual fear. "Don't you have a princess to protect?" I asked him.

"I'm watching you," he said again, and left finally, charging back into the battle.

I retreated to the edge of the room to watch the show, and stay as far away from Anon as possible. For once, though, the idiot's I Am The Hero Of The Story field effect was working in my favor. He was chivalrously defending slaves who'd fallen or who were about to fall in battle (which was all of them because they stopped fighting whenever he came near, providing him the opportunity to rescue them), providing support to Luna's troops, and murdering more caribou than I've have thought any one being could manage. Their attacks barely touched him; he dodged with such ease it made him look like a video game character being played by someone who'd played the same game hundreds of times and knew exactly what moves the game would make. The caribou had yet more reinforcements coming in, but Anon was killing nearly every caribou he encountered. As for the ponies, I'd feared that his presence might cause all of the rest of Luna's troops to suddenly collapse into helpless idiocy and need Anon to save them, but all I saw was evidence that caribou were more experienced in actual warfare than ponies, which was hardly something Anon made up. The ponies were performing about as well as you'd expect from creatures who've drilled a lot, and received training, but never actually been in real combat. Perhaps Anon's Big Hero powers didn't need to make the pony troops helpless and incompetent, as long as he got to look like a Big Hero anyway.

The chaos was restoring my strength, allowing me to heal myself. I broke a few more of Dainn's lines. By now I'd cut enough of them that the caribou were faltering slightly, though the fact that so many of them were dead or unconscious meant that the remaining magic being shared amongst the ones that were left was still almost up to their usual amounts. I decided to spend a bit of the magic I was gaining back from the chaos to heal the yak, who'd been battered until she was close to death, because I wanted to see how Anon handled a female slave who was decidedly unsexy by human standards and who was kind of a huge lumbering monster of brutal flank-kicking. Would he treat her as an enemy? Ignore her? Show the same "chivalry" toward her that he did toward the smaller, more feminine-looking slaves? (Not that the yak wasn't very sexy, by yak standards, but yak standards and human standards aren't even in the same city.)

I got no results. She healed, but she didn't wake up. Belatedly I realized she might have suffered brain damage; I can't heal that one in a creature I don't know. Either that or she was simply too exhausted to rouse even with her injuries healed. Or, Anon's powers wouldn't let her wake up and enter the battle because a female slave to be rescued had to be feminine and sexy, and the yak fighting like a berserker would break his brain. I contemplated turning one of the reindeer into a yak, but she'd still behave like a reindeer, rather than a rampaging berserker lunatic, so that really wouldn't get me the answers I wanted.

While I was focusing on the yak, Anon managed to do something downright ridiculous and impossible (yes, so what else is new?). Luna lifted him onto her back with her magic, while fighting Dainn, and he leapt from Luna's back to the back of the dragon. I thought he was going to attack Dainn from there, which would have ended wonderfully either way and I was so looking forward to it. But no. He attacked the dragon, while on her back, by hacking at one of her wings. A normal sword won't even cause a full-grown dragon to get itchy, and while the dragon was merely a young adolescent, her greed-growth had left her as fully armored as any dragon who actually lived through the hundred years it would take to get to that stage. Anon successfully hacked through the bone connecting the wing to her back, cutting it in half and making the entire wing list uselessly off her back, which made her plummet. His stupidity effect was in full force; Dainn did nothing to stop him, concentrating entirely on Luna. Having fought Dainn and his dragon earlier, I knew this wasn't normal. The guy was probably the most virulent misogynist on the planet, but he was too good of a tactician to overlook the advantage his dragon gave him, and when I'd attacked her with spells intended to confuse her, give her vertigo, or turn her wings backward, Dainn had shielded her. (Which was only possible, most likely, because with the density of the magical webs around him, he could actually sense my chaos magic incoming. Chaos magic isn't visible force bolts, so normally no one can shield against it.) Whereas when Anon started hacking at his ride's wings, Dainn completely ignored him until the dragon suddenly fell.

And then Dainn still ignored his injured dragon, using his self-levitation to continue fighting Luna, while Anon continued to attack the grounded dragon. I was watching the entire battle, not just Anon – Luna and Dainn's fight in particular interested me – but for obvious reasons I had to keep an eye on Anon. And that was how I realized, horrified, that Anon's attacks were seriously threatening her life. She'd shrugged off every attack I'd thrown at Dainn, but I knew from harsh personal experience that Anon's sword cuts through dragon scales like they're made of jelly.

I knew Anon wouldn't listen to me. So I teleported over to where Luna was fighting Dainn and got in between them, redirecting their force blasts around me. "Excuse me, can I cut in?" I said, grabbed Luna by the forehooves (she was flying in a more or less reared position, so her forehooves were up) and teleporting straight up a considerable distance, far enough that the air was thin. Alicorns can easily reach this height on their own, so she could fly back without problems, but it would take her a while and she'd be winded.

"Monster! Let me go! I knew you were lying when Anon said you'd told him you were on our side in this battle!"

"I am on your side, and you know I could do a lot worse to you than teleporting you out of a battle to have a chat," I said. "Anon's going to kill that dragon. You need to stop him! He's not going to listen to me."

"And why should I stop him?" she sneered. "Any who aid the caribou deserve their fate."

What I wanted to say was, "Because she's an enslaved, brainwashed child who's been greed-grown." What I actually said was, "Anon can't kill a dragon!"

"Oh, I am sure that he can." Below, Anon leapt out of the way of a blast of fire. Dainn, who had finally noticed his dragon in trouble, was also attacking, but using very visible lance-style force bolts that Anon dodged with ease, not the walls of force he'd directed at me.

"I know he can," I said, exasperated. "But he shouldn't." My mind formed the words "She's just a kid!" My lips actually spoke "He's supposed to be a hero!"

Horror dawned over me as I realized Anon's powers were preventing me from telling Luna why Anon shouldn't kill the enslaved dragon. Of course, Anon would feel bad about himself if he learned he was trying to slice and dice a female child who'd been enslaved and brainwashed. And Anon's powers wouldn't let me say anything that might make him uncomfortable about himself to anyone who might take it back to him.

"Sometimes the role of a hero is to kill the deserving," Luna said. Which wasn't totally out of character for Warrior Princess Luna, but Luna had never before been bloodthirsty for its own sake; if she could defeat a foe without killing them, she'd always take that option. The dragon couldn't fly anymore, and was badly wounded from Anon's attacks. He didn't need to kill her. In her own right mind, Luna would have seen this. "What devious plot do you need that dragon for, Discord? The fact that you want it spared makes me all the more certain that Anon should kill it."

"She's female," I said, trying desperately to convey the concept that the dragon was a slave, since Anon's power wouldn't let me say so outright.

"And a female who turns on her own sex to curry the favor of brutish, evil males is a traitor and deserves to share their fate."

I'd called the dragonet "Dainn's pet dragon" to Anon, being flippant as usual. I hadn't made it clear that she was a slave. And her red collar was gone, destroyed when she'd grown to massive size, so there was no visible marker that she was a slave. Anon had no respect for Spike and came from a world where humans were celebrated as heroes for killing dragons. And he was a savage, bloodthirsty waste of an existence. And I'd known all this before interacting with him.

I tried again. "Where do you think she came from? Luna, you know as well as I do what dragons up here are like!"

What I was trying to get at was that they were eggs, or younglings. Of course Luna took it wrong. "Anarchic, brutish creatures with none of the sophistication of those who live under the rule of order. I can see why you would prefer them. But why would you care for the fate of a dragon? As I recall, you have killed more than your share."

I blinked. "You remember that?"

"The wholesale slaughter of dragons at your hooves is difficult to forget."

"But let me guess, you've forgotten that I did that to save Equestria from them, haven't you."

"Am I expected to give you kudos for ‘protecting' ponies because you saw us as your own possessions and you are too selfish to share?"

I didn't want to get into the same argument with her that I'd gotten into with Celestia. It still hurt to remember how Celestia had forgotten me; I knew Luna must have too, but as long as I didn't confront her too hard about it, I wouldn't have proof shoved in my face. "Look, that dragon is not what she seems to be. If you let Anon kill her, I promise, someday you'll regret it."

"More empty threats, Discord?" she sneered.

I snapped my talon, returning her to the battle, practically on top of Anon, so he had to check himself hard to avoid hitting her. I really shouldn't have – if he hadn't been able to pull his blow in time, he might have actually killed Luna, and she didn't deserve that for being a mind-controlled victim of his power. But I was furious. And feeling just a trifle guilty, because I could have prevented this if I'd thought to tell Anon the dragon was a slave child before he started whaling on her. I don't do well with feeling guilty; it happens so rarely that I don't really know how to handle it.

I tried teleporting the dragon. No go. My abilities were weakened, dragons have a certain degree of resistance to my magic, and she was huge. I mean, I've teleported an entire hive of Changelings, twice, and that was much bigger than a single dragon, but I didn't try to do it near the North Pole. I tried teleporting Anon, but his Element of Protection seemed to get in the way. I thought about going down there and mind-controlling the dragon to revert her to her true form, so it would be obvious that she was a child. Then I thought about Anon's sword, and the caribou he'd been cutting up like butter, and I couldn't make myself do it. Hey, I've never pretended to be a self-sacrificial hero. Getting between Anon and one of his targets when he hates me and has shown himself more than willing to kill me in horrible ways to protect anyone is not my thing. Even if I'm the one who put her in danger by triggering her greed-growth and then not telling a murderous maniac that she was a kid.

And since then, I've thought of a thousand things I could have done or said that I didn't think of doing or saying at the time. It doesn't matter. It's far, far too difficult for me to alter the past, and if I can't change it then why dwell on it? Except I do.

I floated in the air, helplessly, paralyzed by my own fear, as Anon hacked a child to death. Greed growth is permanent if something isn't done to actively revert it. She didn't turn back to her true form when she was dead. She remained a giant dead dragon corpse.

Then, once she was dead, Dainn bothered to pay attention. "That was my property you've destroyed," I heard him say to Anon. "I'll make you pay for that."

Because being angry at myself just made me feel awful and being angry at Anon, while fairly normal for me, makes me feel helpless because there's nothing I can do to him directly, I decided to be angry at Dainn, who after all was the one who found her egg, enslaved her, brainwashed her, most assuredly raped her repeatedly despite the fact that she was a child, quite possibly from before the age when even the caribou are willing to start sexually abusing their own daughters, and then couldn't be bothered to protect her after bringing her into battle. I couldn't do anything to Anon, but I could hurt Dainn.

By now the number of lines was reduced to the point where I could disentangle them, moving them aside, untying them from the twisted knots they were in, and forcing several of them to split in the middle before rejoining a different line, making them thinner and easier to break. And then I started breaking them. One by one, over and over. Dainn's bulls jumped in to protect him, but any of them who were connected to him by one of the lines I broke would lose his own magic. Anon, though vastly outnumbered, had only taken a single injury – one thin bleeding line on his cheekbone, not even deep enough to scar most likely. He and Luna were having a hard time getting through Dainn's ring of protectors, though, just because there were so many of them.

I stopped when I'd broken enough of them that I could clearly see the magic of my Element of Cruelty, blazing through Dainn's body. It seemed to be on his underside someplace. Glamored for invisibility, no doubt, since I'd seen far more of his underside than I'd wanted to. And then I waited. Dainn recovered, faster than he should have, and started attacking Luna with everything he had, while Anon sliced up his troops. Despite the large quantity of magic I'd just dumped into the environment, Luna was faltering. I recognized the signs. Luna should be winning – Dainn had been fighting a lot longer than she had, so he should be paying a penalty for exhaustion, or for having to use magic to hold off exhaustion. But Anon was in the mix, so of course, Luna couldn't win on her own.

And then Anon's sword started breaking more of the magical connections.

I stared. There are only two powers in our world that have meta-magic abilities of that nature: me, and Matrisse. But the Element of Protection wasn't a shard of Matrisse; I'd have noticed. It had always felt like badly distorted Harmony, not like Order. But Harmony didn't have that kind of power.

I didn't have time to dwell on it much. Anon's attack forced Dainn to the ground. Dainn met him, sword to sword (while an exhausted Luna simply hovered in the air, doing nothing but panting), and for a while they seemed evenly matched. Except that in an actual swordfight, without Anon's powers involved, ponies (or humans, or caribou) wouldn't be trading lengthy sentences describing everything they hate about each other, because they wouldn't have enough air to do it. It was extremely repetitive, and none of it was actually particularly witty. Here's a representative sample:

DAINN: You hoof-licking cuckold! You take orders from the alicorn bitches! You aren't even worthy to be called a male!

ANON: No, true manhood means respect for women! I follow the princesses because they represent goodness and harmony! You're disgusting; I'll bet you couldn't even get a woman to fuck you if you didn't enslave them and give them no choice!

DAINN: As if it matters what a female chooses! We caribou will rise up and dominate this world, and your {sexist insult redacted} princesses will {description of degrading sexual activity redacted}!

ANON: Women deserve to be protected and loved, not abused and enslaved! As long as real men like me exist, evil like yours will never win!

This was kind of hilarious given what Anon has done to the Bearers, but then I know he thinks he's a big heroic hero who respects mares and wins their love because he's just so awesome, not because his powers are screwing with their heads. Still, I suppose I'll give him one thing: as poisonous as his fantasies have been, they could have been worse. If he'd been the kind of human man who thought like Dainn did, our world would have been much, much worse off.

They traded blows for a while. Dainn even seemed to be winning, slowly. And then, more or less exactly as I suspected, Anon managed to slice off Dainn's sword hoof, with sword in it.

Being a caribou, not a human, Dainn didn't need a hoof to fight with a sword – he had magic. But instead of using his magic to grab his sword back, he screamed and staggered backward, falling to the ground and pressing the leg that had been severed up into his chest to stanch the bleeding. Anon, grinning, wound up for the death blow, but didn't deliver it. "I guess this proves which of us is the real man," he gloated. "I just wish I wasn't sworn to a warrior's code of honor. You deserve a much, much more horrible end than a quick swipe with my blade, but I could never face the mares who love me again if I torture a stallion to death, no matter how badly he deserves it. So I regret it, and you don't deserve it... but I'll make your death quick."

This whole time, Dainn had simply cowered on the ground, and none of his caribou who were still alive came to his aid. Even I had almost forgotten why I was here, more mesmerized by the battle itself (and all the ways in which it had been absurd) than by any pathway to my objectives. As soon as Anon raised the blade high, though, I remembered why I didn't want Anon to kill Dainn.

Dainn screamed. "No! Have mercy! Please!"

"What mercy did you give any of your victims?" Anon said, and since he had to refrain from killing the guy long enough to make his heroic retort, he gave me time to act.

I teleported directly behind Dainn. "Scusi!" I said. "Sorry to spoil a tender moment, but I need to borrow this fellow!"

Grabbing Dainn by the antlers, I teleported straight up again, high enough that it would take Luna some time to get up here, particularly in her exhausted state, particularly if she had a human riding on her back. Below me I dimly heard Anon flinging curses at me, but I ignored that. I flung Dainn down against nothing, holding him in place with a gravity shelf. "You have something that belongs to me," I growled.

Dainn was obviously in a great deal of pain, but he managed to snarl at me. "What you gave us cannot be taken back. It's ours now." As I'd suspected, the begging and pleading had been Anon's influence; without Anon in front of him, he faced his death with defiance and rage. Not that that was going to do him any good. Creatures who snarl in the face of death, unbowed, end up every bit as dead as the cowards who beg. If not moreso. I thought of Signi. What good had her courage done her?

"I don't think so." I could see my Element now. He'd lost enough magic that the glamor wasn't holding. It was on his body, on his lower belly, right above his penile sheath, and nothing was visibly holding it onto him. The Element of Cruelty is an amulet showing a hoof pressing a head to the ground; it had adapted to the caribou, shaping the hoof as a caribou hoof and the head as an antlerless female caribou head.

He laughed, a short, pained sound. "It's mystically bonded to the body of the caribou king. No one may touch it but my heir, and only after my death. All the work you've done here, Chaos Lord, all the betrayals you've committed, and you still lose."

"Betrayals?" I snorted. "That rune circle was old. Very old. And much, much too large to be just for caribou... but much too small to be for dragons, and there's not a lot in between. Either you were planning on going down to Giraffica near Zebrica and capturing and enslaving some male giraffes... or you built that thing for me, a long time ago. Didn't you."

"We haven't forgotten!" he snarled suddenly. "You gave us this gift! And then you sided with the alicorn bitches when we tried to invade Equestria! You betrayed us! Yes, we've planned for centuries to avenge that slight, someday, but you're the one who began it! You gave us gifts and then you turned from us!"

I laughed heartily. "You poor stupid dupe. If you weren't so vile I'd feel sorry for you." I leaned down into his face. "First of all, whatever made you think that Chaos would ever take your side? Or really, any side at all? And secondly... I never gave you anything. That was my father, you mindless moron, and I inherited his power after the mother of those alicorn ‘bitches' killed him, and frankly I just wish she'd done it sooner and more painfully. And even he didn't give you the Element of Cruelty because he approved of you. He did it because you'd keep the reindeer in check, because their power is based on worldwide Harmony."

"But... no! Our legends say—"

"Either Mayhem lied to you, which he probably did, or your legends are self-aggrandizing lies, which I'm sure they are. Or both. Both is good. I'm going with both." I held him up with my lion paw around his neck. The entire time he was trying desperately to cast, but at this close range, every time I saw magic swell in his antlers I shoved it back into the line it came from and then broke the line, and devoured all the energy released for myself. "You weren't anything to him. You weren't the special chosen ones of the Chaos Lord. You were a tool, a means to an end, and he laughed behind your back at you and your stupid fancies of male dominance, as if your philosophies haven't been slowly driving your species to extinction for two thousand years."

He managed to scowl, though the pain he was trying to suppress was obviously close to overwhelming him. "You still lose. You can't take the Amulet of Cruelty back. It's bonded to me."

I shook my head. "It's magically bonded to your skin," I said. "You caribou are such backstabbers, I'm kind of surprised you never figured out that anyone could take it just by skinning the wearer."

This wasn't actually true; I was just twisting the knife. If Anon had killed Dainn, the Element of Cruelty would have passed on to Dainn's designated heir, based on the magic the caribou had woven around it. It might even have disintegrated and reformed on whichever lucky prince was going to get the job. But no magic cast by mortals could keep me from taking control of my Element back, once it was in my hand. I dug my talons into his skin, right above the amulet, and drove in deep. He screamed. "As a dad, you should be thanking me," I said. "If I hadn't taken you away from Anon right then, he'd have killed you, and your son would have gotten the Element of Cruelty, just like you said." I ripped a wide strip of skin, muscle and viscera off his abdomen and downward. "And then I'd have had to do this to him instead of you. This way your son gets to live! Well, until Anon and the ponies get to him, anyway."

Dainn was too busy screaming to have any response to that. The strip I was ripping off widened as I pulled downward, tearing off his sheath as well. The rip stopped at his testicles, and as tempted as I was to rip them off too, the dramatic irony of castrating him was just too, too obvious. Anyone would think of it. I couldn't possibly go for such low-hanging fruit. Instead I gathered the skin in my fist, and pulled, tearing the whole thing off his body just above his testicles.

And then I changed my mind, for no good reason. "I was going to spare you this," I said, "and let you die with your malehood still on your body. But then I remembered what you tried to do to me."

I dismissed the gravity shelf and held him in the air by his genitals. He kicked and thrashed and screamed, trying to pull himself free, which was the worst possible thing he could have done. With all the skin I'd torn and the tiny rips it had left in the skin he still had, and my claws piercing his flesh as I gripped him... his own weight pulled him free of what my lion paw was clutching.

He fell, sans certain treasured accoutrements of his. And I watched, as gravity made intestines float out of the huge trench I'd carved down his middle, as he flailed and screamed and tried to summon magic. With my amulet in my fist, attached to the skin and flesh I'd torn off of him and no longer to his body, he had no magic to summon anymore. He didn't know how to switch over to the ambient raw magical energies I'd spilled from the web connecting him to the other caribou.

When he hit, he didn't fall on Anon. But he fell close enough that some of the blood splattered.

And then I teleported down. "Well?" I said mockingly to Anon, from well out of his reach. "Aren't you going to thank me? You wanted him to die in agony, right? And you didn't want to do it yourself!" I tossed Dainn's severed parts – the parts that weren't attached to the Element, the ones in my lion paw – down at Anon's feet. Luna, directly behind him, winced and turned her head away. "So here you go! Never say I never did anything for you!"

Anon glared at me. "Why did you want to kill him so badly? You weren't satisfied with the clean death I was going to give him? Not enough chaos and pain for you?"

"Oh, clean kills are what you're known so well for. Like you gave that poor dragon? Or tried to give to me?" I laughed. "It's all right, though, even if you don't know your manners, I know mine! Thank you so much!" I displayed my prize in my talon. "This was one of the last Elements of Disharmony I needed to collect, and I couldn't have done it without you!"

"Shit! I knew you were up to something!" Anon shouted. "Stop being such a coward and get down here, Discord! Face me!"

"Ohhh ho ho no, no, that's not how this works. I've got one more to collect and I'd be foolish to face you before then. Toodles! Let my adoring fan club know I'm sorry I couldn't take them home, but I'm leaving them in good hooves with you, Princess Luna!"

"I'll kill you, Discord!" Anon shouted, and lunged at me, but I was gone before he was anywhere near me.


Yes, I know, I know. Hey, I managed to avoid villainous monologues that give away my plans until the very end, okay?

When I got back to the Grotto, I had started shaking. I took a very, very long shower in lavender orange water (scents and tastes, not colors, though the colors were there too), as hot as I could stand it, scrubbed my thick fur with the bristliest brush I own, dipped my tail in bleach and then scrubbed that off with a rock sponge, and then soaked in a hot tub with an eyemask on, occasionally letting myself sink. The jets in a hot tub hyper-oxygenate the water; normally when I'm using gills, I can only pull in enough air to maintain semiconsciousness if I don't keep moving constantly, but in the hot tub, the air came to me.

It wasn't enough. None of it was enough. I knew what I needed, and this wasn't it. But I didn't know if I could get it, and it was dangerous to try.

That being said, I've never let danger stop me from going after what I want.

I went to my club in Manehattan as Twister, where I started letting it be known that I had a friend who was a hyperchimera, with pony, dragon and griffin in the mix, who was very interested in showing a good time to anyone who was into extreme xeno, especially an interested female. (I should probably clarify – xenophiles have their own categories and classifications. "Interracial" is the most vanilla of categories, ponies with a fetish for a different pony race. Most ponies can get this kind of lovin' anywhere they want, but there are some from conservative families who need the anonymity and discretion of a club. "Near-xeno", in my opinion, is almost equally vanilla – ponies with a thing for zebras, for instance, or donkeys. "Pony pals" are non-ponies with a taste for ponies, "griffon grabbers" are non-griffons who are into griffons, and so on. A hyperchimera is a chimera of three or more species – such as a hippogriff, who's a cross between ponies and griffins (griffins are themselves chimeras, so a hippogriff is a hyper-chimera), or of course moi. And "extreme xeno" is just what it sounds like – those who seek the most unusual of partners, such as hyperchimeras or species rarely seen in Equestria. Technically all of the Bearers would count as being extreme xenophiles, being with Anon, who's the only of his species on the planet, but I'm fairly sure Anon imposed that preference on them and it's not their normal interest.) I had a few who expressed mild interest, but the fact that I couldn't tell them ahead of time the name or species mix of my "friend" unless they agreed to meet him soured most of them.)

Then a unicorn mare covered with tattoos, some of which were etched with sparkling ink, bought me a drink. "This friend of yours," she said. "How compatible is he?" (This is a fairly vital question for a xenophile. Sex between, say, a pony and a Breezy can't involve ordinary intercourse, and for similar reasons, a pony and a full grown dragon would have issues. I, however, am compatible with ponies without having to shapeshift, and with the shapeshifting taken into account I'm compatible with anyone.)

"Perfectly compatible. A trifle on the large side where it counts, and about three times bigger than a pony in body, but he's been with many ponies I've known personally and none of them had any complaints."

I saw her eyes go wide at the mention of my natural size – not the "where it counts" part but the size of my body. Some xenophiles are really, really into size difference. There are ponies who threw themselves at me simply because I was the largest sapient being they'd ever met, back in the old days. She was gorgeous herself – I'm big on ponies seeking to look unique and unusual. It's hard to tattoo a pony, because you have to shave the hair over the tattoo but if you shave it all off, then the pony ends up skin-colored on their tattoos, and most ponies do not appreciate pony skin color. But this lovely lady had found a way to perma-dye her individual coat strands to convey the same tattoo that was on her skin to the outside of her coat. She was naturally light gray with a pink mane in a tousled bob, and a cutie mark of a tattoo needle, but the images she'd drawn all over her body – and it turned out, when I talked to her, that she had done all the work herself, a feat impressive even for a unicorn because getting ink is painful and pain makes it hard to concentrate – were amazing. Some were too realistic to really appeal to me, but the stylized rendition of magical animals like phoenixes and nagas was beautifully done, probably even by pony standards and certainly by my own.

We agreed on some ground rules. I agreed that going to this meeting implied no obligation and if she wasn't interested she'd just leave, and she agreed that whether she left or stayed she wouldn't tell anyone about my "friend" and what he looked like (I was claiming this was because he was shy, and so extreme that he was afraid of ponies running from him in terror or turning away in disgust. The lovely lady, Tats Jewelstrand, and I'm totally sure that was her real name (although, knowing ponies, it might be), seemed only the more intrigued at that thought.) Then I took her to one of the back rooms, one I'd rented for the evening, and transformed.

Tats stared at me. "Were you impersonating Twister or have you been him all the time?" she asked, sounding slightly upset.

"Twister was never real. Call him my ponysona," I said. "This is who I've been under his skin, the entire time."

"You're Discord. The Spirit of Chaos."

"I am." I coiled in midair. "Which is why I needed a guarantee of discretion. There are ponies – and beings other than ponies – trying to kill me, and I'm very much afraid that if I walked in the door here in this form, there'd be a stampede."

"Probably." She stroked me gently with her telekinesis, as if trying to get more of a grasp on exactly what I'm shaped like. (All over. We hadn't gotten to anything more naughty yet.) "But that's because you've got a reputation for making ponies go crazy and causing chaos."

"A well deserved reputation, yes, but that's not what I'm here for tonight." I landed (mostly – I was still floating a bit) and took her hooves in my paws, bringing her upright, gently. She didn't resist. "Last night and this morning... the past few days... I've been... I've done and seen things I need to forget." I swallowed. "Do you think you might enjoy helping me forget them?"

She smiled. "Those griffin paws on your forelegs. Can you do anything interesting with them?"

I let go of her forehooves, lifted my paws, splayed my fingers, and played a bit of air piano for her, showing off my flexibility. "My dear, you have no idea."

"And if I ask you not to use magic on me unless I ask you to, will you respect that?"

"Under these circumstances? Absolutely." I wasn't here to cause chaos. I was here to wipe the taste of the caribou out of my brain. I needed to be reminded that sex between males and females wasn't naturally about cruelty and domination and exploitation. I needed to let a mare push me around a little, tell me how to please her and lose herself in ecstasy when I did what she wanted. I might perform magic on unwilling ponies all the time in my everyday life, but here and now, I wanted... not exactly to submit, but definitely not to dominate.

"Well then. You're pretty old and powerful, I hear. I'd love to see how that translates to what you know how to do in a bedroom." She grinned at me, running her hoof down my chest. "How does that sound?"

"Positively wonderful."

Tats was fascinated with everything about my body – she'd never had an opportunity to be with anyone remotely draconic before. There aren't any dragons at the club, and dragons aren't precisely known for xenophilia. I found her tattoos intriguing. She knew of some sensitive spots on the more griffin and pony-like parts of my anatomy that even I hadn't discovered (or possibly I just hadn't been nearly so sensitive on them before spending a thousand years in stone.) Just as nonsexual touching had been more pleasurable in my own body, I found the same was true of sex, and felt almost like I had the first night I'd been here when I'd had my first fully consensual experience since getting out of stone. I didn't skimp on treating her well, either. Maybe it was just pillow talk, but in the throes of her pleasure she told me no one had ever made her feel the way I was doing. (And I got her to agree to let me use magic, as long as I didn't do anything permanent. In fact, I got her to the point where she begged for it.)

It was satisfying, and wonderful, and eased the stress I'd been feeling since I headed north in the first place, quite pleasantly. So I really don't know why I broke down and started crying in her hooves, after we'd both been fully satiated for the night. She was startled – I'm sure nopony ever would expect a reaction like that out of me of all creatures – and she didn't quite seem to know what to do with me, but she stroked me and held me and told me she didn't know what it was but she was sure it would be all right, and that was good enough.

I coiled around her when I slept, and she snuggled against my coils like hardly any pony has ever done since Celestia. It made me regret what I had to do next.

I don't sleep straight through the night, most nights. Chaos is restless. When I woke up, I uncoiled myself, and I laid a talon on Tats' sleeping forehead, and I pushed her memory of our encounter into the realm of dreams. I can't erase a memory that's older than about 20 minutes without risking damage to other memories or the mind itself, but I can take a sleeping pony's memories and make them believe it was all a dream. I cleaned up all evidence of our encounter and I placed Tats in one of the other rooms, the rooms club members use to sleep it off when they're too drunk or too tired to trot home after the night's festivities and they don't feel like calling a cab. I tucked her into an empty bed, pulled the covers up around her and kissed her forehead. And then I teleported home.

I needed this. I needed to be touched in my own body, I needed to be enjoyed and desired in my own form. But I'm not stupid. There's nothing about a tattoo artist with a taste for extreme xeno that says she'd be untrustworthy with my secret, but there's nothing that says she'd be trustworthy either. Besides, she saw me crying, and I can't have that getting out.