It had never really occurred Astral to ask this, but in hindsight, it seemed pretty important.
“Why do you look like that?”
She waited for Discord’s offended noises to die down before repeating her question again. She never really considered how odd Discord looked until she was reviewing her book on the Gods to see them in pony form.
She had also dug far back, and had yet to find any records of a ‘draconequus’ before Discord. Which meant that there was either a massive cover up going on or that the dranequi race was never real to begin with.
Discord wrapped his long tail around her body, and, with a flick, sent her flying into the air. Except suddenly the sky was the ground and the ground was the sky, so she just landed on her head, her horn sticking into the mud.
“DISCORD!”
“Sorry Lu-lu!” Discord called to his angry wife, and, snapping a talon, reverted everything back to their normal, boring condition, the only difference being Astral’s very muddy horn.
Then he turned to her, all fake smiles and giant, watery eyes. “To answer you question dearest” he said, turning everything but his head into a pony body and sitting behind a desk. “I need to have this form to limit my power?”
“What? Why would you want to limit your power? And what would that body do?”
“A-Ha! Always asking the right questions, gold star for you!”
“ . . .This is an apple- but not the point. The point is-why?”
Discord tilted his head 360 trying to think of the right analogy to get it across to his attentive student, before just shrugging and saying “okay, so the more complicated the form, the more power is used up in the background trying to keep the form up, right?”
“Right, okay, I can get that” Astral agreed, chewing on a pencil that had appeared in her hoof. “But why would you need a power limiter?”
The way discord stared at her made her think she was the crazy one. “Are you kidding? I assume you know what a Magic Overload is, right?”
Astral winced at the reminder “oh, I know it. Experienced it too.”
“Yes, well, imagine what would happen to the world if that happened to Gods.”
The very thought made Astral actually shiver as she imagined the sheer amount of destruction that would cause. Before she could say anything, however, Discord pushed on.
“Some Gods in mortal form have runes drawn into their skin, which they cover up with fur or feathers. Others split themselves between the three pony forms.”
“Wait, wait, wait” Astral’s ears perked up, as did she, intruiged. “Split themselves?”
The God looked surprised. “You didn’t know? Gods have been splitting themselves for milleania. They fragment themselves, and each fragment goes to something different. Like, I’m here but I’m also inside every single creature.”
“Ponies have chaos magic?”
“Everyone has chaos magic, Astral, you can’t have harmony without conflict.”
Astral paused for a second, trying to think, before asking “wait, wait, then why can’t we use Chaos Magic?”
“Because all creatures have an equal amount of chaos and harmony magic. But it’s easier to use harmony. Ponies who have tried to use chaos magic, like Lu-Lu, Sunset, Stygian, all of them eventually stopped using chaos magic and started doing dark magic” he shrugged, looking unbothered “dark and chaos kind of go paw in talon.”
Then his muzzle crinkled slightly in thought. “Though, Pinkie Pie seems to have an excess of chaos magic in her system. How, I’m not exactly sure, but she does.”
Astral blinked. “That’s why she doesn’t have Earth Pony Magic?”
“Yup.”
“Huh. And you didn’t tell my mom because?”
He flashed her a devious smile, all sharp teeth and humor. “I wanna see how long it’ll take her to figure out” he admitted and Astral laughed.
“Fair enough.”
There was a brief lull in the conversation, where Astral had to try and pick up the nerve to say “so, about Ebony.”
Immediately, the atmosphere in the garden dropped ten degrees. “What about her?” Discord asked, faux casual.
“Is it possible she’s got out? Or that one of her splintered parts is running about.”
“No” Discord shook his head empethically. “You don’t understand. If Ebony was nearby, I would be able to sense the dark magic. You remember how I said darkness and chaos seem to go paw in talon? I can sense her, just like I can sense Harmony.”
“But if she was using one of the other Gods magic-”
“- I would still be able to sense her because, she’s, you know, literal darkness. I can’t sense Ray, or Aethar or Kronos, but I can sense Ebony and Harmonia from a good few miles”
Discord tilted his head to down at the girl. “Astral, I’m sorry” he said “but Ebony isn’t the one doing this to you.”