Star Blight found her mind wandering alongside her hooves as she moved through the streets of Canterlot. She was still slightly dazed by everything. Despite her best attempts, her mind simply would not focus on any one thing.
Desperation had led her to searching for the Wishing Ruby, desperation and a good deal of fear for her own life.
Discovering the ruby was actually real had surprised her.
Discovering that the bucking God of Chaos was the Genie of the Ruby had utterly wrong-hoofed her.
Having a pleasant, if awkward, afternoon with Princess Celestia had left her feeling dirty. Not due to any kind of hostility. She just felt she had no business being almost informal to Royalty, or what essentially amounted to the God-Queen of Equestria.
Learning the rules behind the wishes she could make.
Learning Discord’s story.
Learning that her luck may not actually be luck, but the actions of spiteful ancient Alicorn.
A lot was rattling around Star Blight’s mind, and she was unsure just what to do about it.
“You could start by making a wish,”
Star Blight looked up at Discord, who was walking sideways above her. He wore an odd orange and green outfit as well, and Star felt like there was something otherworldly with said outfit. Why, she didn’t know. Just a feeling she got.
He seemed resigned to the fact that he was stuck with her. Having heard a couple of the stories of previous masters, Star imagined he wasn’t too thrilled about having to grant a new master four wishes instead of three.
And then there was the four wishes. Celestia had examined the bonds between Discord and herself for answers, and the only clear information she could garner was that an outside force, neither good or evil, had conjured the fourth wish bond.
Star shook her head and returned her attention to Discord. “If you’re reading my mind, you should know I’m not exactly in the right mind to do so at the moment,” she mumbled.
Discord scoffed. “Please, wishes made in duress are the most hilarious wishes you can make. So much potential for chaos.”
“Yes, and I imagine that would please you to no end, but the entire point of getting the wishes in the first place was to make my life easier, not harder,” Star countered.
“So let’s start there,” Discord shrugged. “I may not be able to remove it, but I can certainly alter it. Maybe invert it to give you good luck?”
“And I’m sure watching Equestria’s economy crumble due to all the money I would soon have in my possession has nothing to do with that.”
“Tch. I hate it when I wind up with smart masters,” Discord grumbled.
Star smirked to herself. She continued her walk, her mind once more thinking of everything that had happened.
---
“Ah, I see my guest has finally awakened.”
Star sat up, distantly realizing she was on a bed, and groggily looked at the source of the voice.
White fur, rainbow colored mane, amethyst eyes, gold horseshoes, a gold crown, a horn, wings…
Wait…
Horn and wings?
Star’s ability to recognize things from memory finally reconnected, and she realized she was laying in bed in front of Princess Celestia. “Princess!” she cried, scrambling to get out of bed and bow, only to wind up tangled in the blanket and falling off the bed.
A golden aura caught her before her face could painfully hit what looked like marble flooring. The blanket was gently pulled away and she was set back on the bed in a lying position.
“Please, stay in bed. You passed out and hit your head fairly hard earlier today. You shouldn’t be up.”
Star finally realized she had a headache. Or, to be more exact, a worse headache. She sighed. “Wow. I managed to pass out in front of the Princess,” she grumbled. “That’s a new one.”
Celestia giggled. “Don’t take it hard. I have seen it happen far too often before you.” She paused. “Granted, what brought you to me to begin with was new,” she admitted.
Star blinked. “What brought me to… Hey! Where’s… uh… the Genie?” she fumbled, trying to remember the name of her Genie.
Celestia smirked as something on the bedside table clattered. Star looked over to see the Wishing Ruby laying there and rattling about with a gold energy field around it. She looked back at Celestia. “Uh…” she started, unsure what to ask.
“Discord, that’s the name of your Genie-” the gem rattled harder for a moment, and Star swore she heard an angry shout. “-was being quite stubborn. I decided a timeout was needed and locked him in the gem until you woke up,” Celestia explained.
“Oh…” Star said dumbly. She blinked after a moment and looked around. “Wait… Where am I?” she asked. She didn’t recognize the room at all, though it clearly belonged to someone of either high standing or great wealth. The walls were covered in purple wallpaper that had a lot of stylized suns printed on them, and everything was made of marble. The table, the fireplace, the floor, the chairs. Everything.
“My personal quarters within the castle,” Celestia said. Star gulped at that, suddenly realizing she was in Princess Celestia’s bed. “I grew concerned when you passed out and had you tended to by my personal physician. He brought to my attention a few things you may or may not know about that we will discuss.” Celestia sighed. “But that will have to wait. First and foremost, we must discuss your ownership of the Wishing Ruby.”
“So… I am his master? He was wrong?” Star asked feeling a bit of hope.
Celestia nodded. “Yes, you are in fact Discord’s current master, and you have at your disposal four wishes to draw from. Not three, but four.”
Star blinked. “Wait, doesn’t the legend of the Genie-” the ruby on the table rattled angrily again, and she eyed it warilly for a second. “Isn’t there supposed to be three?” she asked.
Celestia nodded. “Yes. I am quite perplexed by the existence of this fourth wish. As you can imagine, power like Discord’s must not abused too much, hence the limit on the wishes. As you can also likely imagine, there are a great deal of safeguards involved that are supposed to prevent this exact thing from occuring. That none of them were triggered worries me.”
Star sank in on herself, realizing just where her luck was going. “You’re going to take him away,” she said, rather than asked.
Celestia shook her head, surprising Starlight. “I can’t. Ideally, that would be the safest option, but the moment you summoned him from the ruby, the two of you were bound in ways that are… inadvisable… to tamper with. It would be far more dangerous to try and remove your ownership of him.”
Star was relieved. For once, her luck seemed unable to take away something good that had happened to her. However, she was still tensed. If her luck gave up easily, she wouldn’t have been in the forest looking for the ruby in the first place. “So… what now?” she asked cautiously.
Celestia smiled. “The only other option I have is to make sure you are aware of the rules regarding Discord and his… situation.”
Star glanced at the ruby. “Shouldn’t he be involved then? It is him we’re talking about.”
Celestia nodded after a moment. “Very true. One moment.” Her horn ignited with gold magic, and she seemed to absorb the magic surrounding the ruby. The moment all of it was absorbed, Discord appeared in a flash of light, hands on his hips and glaring at Celestia.
“That was uncalled for,” he said pointedly.
“Consider it payback for the baked pool three thousand years ago,” Celestia responded readily.
Discord blinked, then grinned. “Oh yeah! I forgot about that. I liked that master. Very fun,” his grin grew a bit silly.
“Discord, explain the rules to her so she knows what to expect from you,” Celestia ordered the Draconequus.
“Yes, mom,” Discord grumped, crossing his arms and looking away, looking every part the impudent child.
Amusement shined in Celestia’s eyes. “Don’t make me have to tell you to clean your room as well,” she joked.
Discord tried, he really did, but he couldn’t quite stop the snort of amusement. “Heh, okay, that was funny.” he admitted. Before Celestia could respond, he turned to Star Blight with a clap of his hands. “So!” he exclaimed, startling the mare. “Rules.” He rubbed his chin as he considered how best to explain this, before non-magically snapping his fingers with an idea. “I suppose the best place the start would be a history lesson.
“As you may or may not know, my name is Discord, and I am the Spirit of Chaos and Disharmony. My job, before my imprisonment, was to promote change in the world, especially when the residents of the world were being very stubborn about not changing. To accomplish this job, I am gifted with the power of Chaos, the ability to instill change in any way I can possibly conceive. There were times when I had to cause severe changes. One of those times was the Great Heat, when the world was overrun with desert creating weather for a thousand years.” He shrugged. “Not really my best work, but it got the job done.”
“Discord,” Celestia said warningly.
Discord seemed to deflate a little. “Anyways, I got a little too full of myself about one hundred thousand years ago, a little too uncaring. Immortals generally lose the ability to care for individual mortals after a while, but we try to maintain a sense of right and wrong. I…” He hesitated.
“Discord seemed to have abandoned all semblance of morality, causing pain and suffering everywhere he went, and treating mortals as nothing more than toys that he could play with, and break, whenever he wanted. He killed a lot of ponies, and drove more to madness.” Celestia finally explained, earning a nasty glare from the Draconequus.
“Yeah… that…” he ground out. He eventually turned a calmer look to Star. “The Immortals of our worlds decided I had not only overstepped my bounds, but severely lost the plot in the process. After a long and hard fought battle…”
“He basically threw a temper tantrum when we told him he was going in timeout,” Celestia chimed in with a grin.
Discord glared at her briefly. “I was trapped and dragged before a council of Immortals to be judged. I was going to be turned to stone with my awareness preserved, but after craftily arguing in my defense…”
“He begged and pleaded on his hands and knees.” Celestia was hit in the face with a cream pie that came from nowhere. She proceeded to happily lick it off.
Discord growled. “I convinced them to have me serve a community service sentence.” He shrugged at the look Star sent him. “I figured I could trick whatever poor fool set to watch me into letting me slip my chains. I hadn’t considered that I was far from their first case of an Immortal going bad, so they knew what would and would not work.”
He pointed at the gold bracelets on his arms. “Seven of the Immortals worked together to create my shackles and prison. Celestia mined, polished, and cut the ruby, Luna forged the shackles, the God of None designed the rules of my punishment, and the other four poured their magic together to work the enchantments on my shackles. Then I was shoved into a pocket dimension within the ruby I can’t change, and the ruby was tossed into a random location on the world, where I would wait for my first “master”,” he said, making air quotes with his fingers.
After a moment, he continued. “As for the rules, I am essentially bound to the same rules as a Genie of the Lamp, with extras to prevent me getting out before I should and to maintain balance. I can’t kill, I can’t bring people back from the dead, you can’t wish for more wishes, I can’t give you a limitless supply of anything, and I can’t influence the minds of others. Other than that, I grant any three wishes asked of me.”
Star frowned. “Wait, you mentioned that before. You said you would be in trouble because you essentially brought me back from the brink.”
Discord winced at the sharp look Celestia gave him. “Technically, I didn’t break the rule,” he explained quickly. “You weren’t dead, not yet. Granted, without my help, there was no doubt you would have died, but you weren’t when I healed you.”
Celestia closed her eyes and took a slow, long breath, before letting it out and looking at Discord sternly. “I won’t say anything to the others, as you did that without necessarily needing to, but I’m going to watching you closely from now on. Any more stunts like that and I will lock you away again.”
Discord sighed in relief.
“Can I make a wish now?” Star asked,
Discord shrugged again. “Sure, fire away squirt.”
Star took a moment to consider, before grabbing the ruby from the table and holding it close. “I originally wanted limitless wealth,” she said. “But you said you can’t do that…” She paused as she thought. Then something ocurred to her and she looked at Discord. “Wait, what was it you were saying about this Luna person? How do they have to do with my usual luck?”
Celestia shivered. Discord smirked at her. “You felt it too?” he asked.
Celestia nodded. “Yes… What was that?”
Discord grinned. “That, my dear, is the magical signature of your beloved sister. What you are feeling is her magic influencing the karmic fields around young Star Blight here.”
Celestia’s eyes snapped to Star, wide is dawning realization. “One of the Cursed…” she said.
“Cursed?” Star and Discord both asked.
Celestia frowned “The Cursed are the descendants of the ponies that betrayed Nightmare Moon during her war with me. Her final moments were to cast a curse on all who betrayed her and their lines. Essentially, they were doomed to live life incapable of truly succeeding, no matter how hard they tried.” She shook her head. “To find out that one of the lines survived for so long… all those ponies that suffered needlessly for their ancestor’s bravery…”
“Nightmare Moon?” Discord and Star asked together again, though Discord had a sinking feeling in his gut now.
Celestia coughed and looked away. “Nightmare Moon is my sister, Princess Luna. Suffice to say… some stuff happened and she was banished to the Moon a thousand years ago.”
“Wait, you’re saying my bad luck is because of a really old curse your sister cast on me?!” Star asked, incensed. “What the buck did I do to her!?”
Celestia sighed. “You? Nothing. You’re ancient ancestor? I’m willing to bet their soul is in pain knowing their family suffered for so long because of them. That was likely Nightmare Moon’s intention.”
Star looked at Discord. “Discord, my first wish is that you remove this curse from me and my family!” she nearly shouted.
Discord cracked his knuckles with a grin. “Ooh! A challenge for a firstie!” he said in excitement, before his hands lit up with a white aura of power. “Your wish is my command!” he declared with an echoing voice just before that power was flung at Star.
She only had enough time to widen her eyes in surprise before she was flung backwards by the impact.