Chapter 2. History
“Gotta tell her…?” Celestia wondered, laying, bored, on the edge of a kitchen tap. “She’s kinda a poor ball o’ pity right now.”
“Tell her what?” Discord smirked as he slid on the layer of muck covering the work surfaces of the Canterlot cuisines, jumping off from one to another in a perfect ice-skating figure.
“That the jar she’s trying ta pry open is twice her size?” Celestia snickered. “An’ that, by the look of its inside, it’s not safe ta eat anymore.”
Passing by in a large curve, Discord chuckled, “If only she could eat.”
Grunting and moaning in despair, Diamond Tiara was hacking her wooden teeth on the lid of a rotten pickles jar. Around her mouth, the paint cracked, falling into scabs of pinkish colours.
The trio of wanderers had found the large kitchen as filthy as the surrounding rooms and towers shaping Canterlot out of a mountain pic. Everything lay silent and abandoned as if years of inactivity had washed over the castle with nopony to guard the gates, now squeaking over their rusty hinges. It was just as if everypony had just…
“… Vanished,” Discord broke the silence settling between Celestia and him.
“Uh?” Celestia rose her head, quitting her dangerous game: waving her paper-hoof below the end of the tap, preparing herself to dodge any droplet that was expected to fall.
“It’s weird, last time I focused…”
“Cause, ye can focus?” Celestia smirked.
“Stop interrupting me, will you?” Discord grumbled, crossing his arms in disbelief. “Last time I had my eyes open, I… Everything was still alive. And now? It’s just ruins and dirt… and dust…”
“Ah thought you like ta be the destructive villain?” Celestia playfully nickered.
Discord struck the ground with his left hind leg and slid away with a long, chin-toward-the-ceiling, ignoring face. After a few swift drifts and movements, he marked another trait into the murk covering the stainless steel of the furniture.
“Tadaaa!” Discord cackled, opening his arms in a gesture belonging to a showmare.
“Whatcha doin…?” Celestia asked, breaking her reverie and looking down at the draconequus. “Oh… Discord.”
In the dirt, the glass figurine of an all-powerful creature had drawn, badly, a cheerful image of Celestia’s face. Hearts and froufrou circled the smiling visage, saying words that the air would never carry.
“Drawing.” Discord beamed. “Instant mood enhancer.”
“Ye’ve watched th’carpenter too much, am’ah right?” Celestia remarked.
“I’m just curious. And I also like when you call me Discord.”
Celestia laughed meekly, and sighed, again looking away. Sadness veiled her face, casting her eyes with dark shades of grey. “Ye’ve seen it?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“The sun. It’s been hours already, an’ the sun hasn’t set or nuthing,” Celestia pointed out, looking at a vent at the top of the opposite wall. Since their waking up, the castle had remained prisoner of a grey and chiaroscuro cage of fog and grim glimmers with nothing willing to trouble such a state.
“And that… thing,” Celestia geared up, her voice slowly shrilling to a higher tone. “It nearly killed ye… us.”
“Let’s not talk about it,” Discord simply asked.
“Why?” Celestia brought forth, surprised.
“It’s… it is just that speaking of the spooky often summons it sooner than a pony wants.”
Celestia cocked her eyes in disbelief, a smile on her face. “I didn’t know th’almighty Discord was like… superstitious.”
“Big words for a peasant mouth,” Discord struck back, pinching Celestia’s paper face between his glass fingers. “Be happy I cut you out of trouble back there.”
“Puns? Again?” Celestia huffed, annoyed.
“Have you got better in stock?” Discord raised an eyebrow, a mocking grin in the corner of his lips. “Do you really have a good joke?”
“Eeyup!” Celestia countered, nodding, before she pointed her hoof toward the edge of the kitchen work station. “Right’here.”
Her royal doodle tip was aimed at Diamond Tiara, still playing on the edge of the jar lid, and next to the edge of the table tip. She rolled aside and fell with the jar. The crash came up a second later, quickly followed by a scream.
Rushing to the border of the table, Discord and Celestia watched over a broken jar, its rotten and black content sprawled over a moving, whirling, and whinging moving shape. Perplexed, Celestia darted her head in Discord’s direction and stared incriminatingly at him. Discord replied with a tenuous shrug.
“She’s yours, not mine!”
Celestia’s blue features turned red. “What? I ain’t her mother!”
“I am not her mother too,” he accused. “And you were the one who ought to look over her!”
“What, me?” she disagreed. “Ye’re th’one who wanted to keep her!”
“No, that’s not true, and… you’re the mare: the loving mother archetype!”
Celestia would have spit and spill milk if she had just drunk some, if she could even drink.
“Ye fooking what, mate!”
Celestia’s eyes had swollen outside their orbits, biting at Discord with rage and outrage. Diamond Tiara cried out and charged under a near set of crumbled casseroles, bumping them over in a pigsty of thundering echoes of metal. Celestia and Discord, turned over and leaned over the workstation’s edge. From the pickle of jar was running a long series of minuscule hoofprints, rushing away and out of the Canterlot royal kitchens.
“Your fault!” both said simultaneous, then smashed their hoof and paw respectively onto their face.
“What Ahma gonna do with both of ya?” Celestia grunted, rubbing her forehead.
“Nurturing?” Discord supposed. “I need at bath at ten, four diner a day, ten chicken dips for teeth flossing, and…”
Celestia threw a paper tantrum, not even buggering up Discord’s glass body. A small smile on his lips, containing the laughter behind, Discord watched over Celestia’s paper-hooves folding and twisting on his chest.
“Would be so much fun in a bed,” he teased.
Celestia stopped, narrowing her eyes to a blade’s width, forcing her lips in an angry plucked face.
“I’ll find a way to break ya, piece o’glass.”
A crash echoed away down the alleyway.
“Daddy!” a distant filly’s voice called out.
Celestia smirked at Discord who looked away to mark his discontent.
“Not going to happen,” he defended, shaking his head, before jumping off the kitchen promontory.
He ran, Celestia in his stead in Diamond Tiara’s trail of wailing.
The passageways, rooms, and alcoves were completely empty, prey to the same thick fog seeping out the cracks and the same emptiness that blanketed everything under a lid of silence, deafening, zooming over. All windows had been shattered and nothing but grey could be seen outside. The few terraces that had once bore vegetal life only displayed crooked, darkened trees, which scattered, cracked, and broken branches had stopped growing toward an absent sky.
At a crossing between two large alleys, Celestia stopped, looking at the wooden pediment of a golden gate. The wall around was fissured, its painting fallen into clumps on the ground, revealing beneath a far older painting of a blazing sun. The yellow had evaporated away, giving place to a dull cream white.
“Ah know that room,” Celestia said, troubled.
Discord looked back and forth at her and the door, wondering.
“Ah think it’s… was mah room.”
Celestia was fighting against glimpse of images she had stuck in her head. The pictures, sounds, colours, and smells that were far, unreachable, unreliable. Images that definitely seemed to belong to another mare.
The gate was slightly open, a grim light filtering through the crack, and, among the defects of paint fallen before the opening appeared tiny hoofprints. Celestia entered, slowly, likely trying not to wake up a monster that only she could imagine dwelling behind the massive chunk of chiselled wood. Discord’s heart suffered from a crippling knot, a feeling of being unfazed with the environment: calm, boring, and stable. As Celestia disappeared, he looked at his paw and snapped his fingers in a vivid clack, but nothing happened.
He sighed and entered.
The room, shaped in a circle and spacious, presented one small bed in the middle and four massive bookshelves reaching the top of the impressively high round wall. The farthest wall had a massive window, not broken strangely, sporting the image of six ponies whose colours and features had washed away with time.
“Is this your room?” Discord asked grimly, feeling so little in a room so large as he walked in, his hind legs walking on what seemed to be eggshells.
“If it’d been. It ain’t anymore,” Celestia answered, looking at the bookshelves, empty.
“Where are all the books?” Discord asked.
Tension pinched in his glassy heart.
“Down,” Celestia found the courage to reply as her eyes widened once they had set them onto the ground.
The marble tiles were covered with burnt, cracked, and shattered remains of thousands of pages that inestimable books had once contained. The leather covers, now closing on empty space had withered into formless brown and black masses. Somepony had performed a complete auto-da-fé. Flames had been spilled onto the shelves, now blackened and unstable. What blanketed the floor, ashes, remains, and dust had once been a treasure.
Celestia nearly shed a tear at this spectacle. Yet, she broke when she saw Diamond Tiara, sitting, slumped over before a massive shape curled up beneath the filth. The air was filled with the repetitive pokes Tiara was giving with her wooden hoof against something sturdy and disturbingly hollow. Hearing Celestia and Discord walking up to her, she turned her head. Her porcelain eyes couldn’t cry, but she exuded an aura of sadness that made both the drawn alicorn and the cast-in-glass spirit of chaos gag. Sobs without sniffs. Eyes without tears.
“I… I can’t remember,” Diamond Tiara began, her voice trembling, interrupted with short fit of maddened and raspy laughter. “I was… somewhere with ponies, mean ponies… and… then, I was alone.”
A corpse. Diamond Tiara was sitting before a decomposed corpse that had left nothing behind but a preserved set of bones and a large cracked and dry dark puddle beneath it.
Discord hugged her first and raised her head with the tip of his paw.
“Diamond Tiara, is that it?” She acquiesced silently. “I know you are hurt, we all are right now. But the castle is not safe… anymore. We must be careful. And when we find out what happened to your daddy, we… we will see. Okay?”
Diamond Tiara nodded and slipped out of Discord’s embrace, walked to Celestia and briefly hugged her. Then, she jumped up to the dusty bed and lay silent.
“Ye really think the… thing gonna chase us?” Celestia whispered, frightened.
“Maybe,” Discord said, touring around the cadaver and stated, “a pegasus.”
“Uh?”
“That pony was a Pegasus. And he, or she, was killed.”
Pushing the murk from over the bones, Discord revealed the body’s wings, then its neck. Two vertebras, greyish and filthy, showed a large gash made by something long and edgy. What had spread and splattered beneath its now desiccated hooves was simply caked blood.
“A knife?” Celestia risked to bring up.
“I can’t tell for sure.”
Looking sideway, Celestia caught something out of the ordinary. Somepony had stacked up vinyl disks next to the bedside table. Broken and reduced to dust. Whoever had wanted to burn the books had not stopped there. Her eyes wandered to the night table and to the dark round tip poking from under its frame.
The tip stroked her curiosity chord and she called Discord for help. Together, they pulled, not with its lot of difficulty, the black tip.
It was a vinyl disk, intact and dusty. It had been hidden beneath the table, the pony who had done so hoping nopony with vile intentions would find it. And it succeeded. Discord looked around and found it. Dissimulated under a shadow, a massive box displaying a massive brass horn and a tiny golden arm, a diamond at its tip. The top of the contraption showed a rotary section with a small pike in the middle. A phonograph.
“Think we should?” Celestia wondered.
Discord shrugged, “Not that I will for once go against my curiosity. Let’s try. It’s not like a record can kill.”
Together they set the vinyl on the spinner and Discord, the only one able to move the side-lever started going back and forth, his paws biting in the antique piece of wood. The phonograph burst with static, a voice slowly tuning out of the horn as its stylus stabilised on the microgrooves. The first voice to manifest itself was feminine, and by the short and repeated little breaths she suffered from, she was deeply stressed. In the background could be heard the muffled cacophony of thousands, if not dozen of thousands, of voices. She sighed.
“Are you sure we have to record this, Blueblood?” she asked, febrile. “I- I’m not sure…”
Celestia shot on her hooves, ears perking up at the words, “Ah know that voice,” she bellowed.
Discord grunted as he pushed on his knee-caps to stand up, “Me too,” he announced sourly.
“It’s for historical posterity,” a stallion answered, displaying a low and impassive tone, betraying the gravity of a situation both of them were deep in, “and, to be honest, I don’t think we… that you have any choice. You’re meant to be here.”
The way Blueblood had pronounced those last words sounded eerie, if not wrong, in Celestia’s ears, He seemed jealous, but also thankful.
“You’re going to save Equestria from another year of civil war.”
“How can have we fallen so low?”
No answer came as Blueblood let out a long breath first. Trumpets roared from an ‘outside’, making the horn saturate.
“Don’t worry,” Blueblood finally broke the ice. “You’ve got a large part of the aristocracy and the commons with you, and…” A long pause followed; Blueblood sounded wounded, nearly ashamed, “you have foreign approval for this.”
The mare let out a sob.
“Oh, please. Don’t cry,” Blueblood reprimanded softly. “Just there, on that balcony, destiny awaits. You don’t know how much ponies would give to be there, now.”
He apparently spoke out of personal experience.
“Okay,” the mare acquiesced, ripping a piece of tissue from a box that had to be next to her to wipe her tears. “It’s just… it went too fast.”
“If not for you, do it for everypony.”
The recorder who had once carried the vinyl shook and probably rolled toward an exit, the noise intensifying as the two ponies seemingly stepped in a gigantic stadium or esplanade overcrowded with uncountable talking ponies.
A unicorn horn lit up with magic with clacking sparks. In a few seconds, the majority of ponies shushed and a tensing silent hovered aloft through the gramophone. It lasted a full minute, buzzing softly with the low whispers of many.
“Fillies and Gentlecoalts,” the Canterlot feminine voice boomed, magically amplified, carrying across lands unknown to Celestia, Discord, and to Diamond Tiara, finally cocking her head toward the phonograph. “Mares and Stallions, Equestrians and From-afar-the-shores, thank you for coming. If you are here today, in this dire situation, it is because you have been deemed to represent in its entirety the millions of citizens of our wounded nation.” The mare breathed in. “Today was meant to be another Summer Sun Celebration, but, two years ago, the assassination of princesses Celestia and Luna left us in deep mourning and social unrest. In spite of…” Pause, again. “…Cloudsdale and Manehatten Communes, we survived those dark times. I had to make a choice. All together, we have to make a choice. With Celestia and Luna’s death, worldwide political balance has been reshuffled. Thus why I asked for help to the Empire of Kralle three months ago. A plead they answered yesterday.”
A massive contestation outburst from a side of the spectators, swears and insults could sometimes be heard, thrown vehemently at the speaking mare.
“Silence,” the mare ordered without raising her voice, “please. This is not an option, and we will all comply with this. If not, this will be the Equestria’s ruin. Our dire end.”
The mare stopped, taking a little breath in, readying herself to what was coming next.
“Equestria has stayed isolated for too long. We have lost our advances and privileges. Furthermore, the last two years had wrecked our society, economy, and moral. We must change. And thus, this is why today, to mark the end of the Great Turmoil, I, Princess Twilight Sparkle, Princess of Friendship and Magic, abolish the Equestrian Diarchy and its one thousand and six years of long and peaceful duration.” Whispers filled the air. “Today is a new opening door for all ponies of Equestria. I declare official the new Equestrian Monarchy. The civil war is now officially over and, as Regent, I declare that better days are before us.”
Claps erupted, sparking overwhelming statics in the phonograph. The record stopped a few seconds after a full standing ovation had sprawl like fire on black powder in the pony assembly. That mass of pony had indeed witnessed history scroll down before their eyes.
“Ah am... dead?”
Discord and Celestia’s stares met. But there was no time for complain. Diamond Tiara shrieked and alerted as a shadow slid in the interstice left in the door frame. A creeping laughter erupted and a chill invaded the air.
The trio made its way through the windows and stepped outside the room, hoping what was before them would not mar the troubled memories they had left.