It has been a few weeks since we imprisoned the centaur known as Tirek, former prince of the Centaur-Gargoyle nation, and overall asshole that will forever rot in the deepest pit within Tartarus. Good riddance, I have to say. May he learn his lesson as he counts the specks of dust for however long his miserable life will last for.
All was not good, though. Tia pretended that I never insulted her in the first place and (mostly) went about life as she usually did. I did go through with my promise of making Luna give me a punishment for my transgressions, much to my wife's chagrin.
My precious Moon created for me, at my nagging insistence, a dream creature. Not just any ordinary dream creature, though (if those can be ordinary in the first place), but one that would create every type of dream that I asked of it. Including nightmares.
Technically, it was me giving myself a punishment with a little bit of help from my wife. That wasn’t important, though. What was important, on the other hoof, was that I had myself living through the moment that led to this punishment, again and again, to make sure something like this would never happen again. It served as a reminder that I was indeed capable of cruelty while in my regular base form.
I wasn’t infallible and I could be hurtful with my words even if I never intended to speak them in the first place. Or think them, same thing. This would serve me well to keep myself grounded and humble, I told that to myself harshly, suffering the same nightmare for what felt like an eternity each night. Sometimes I varied it up a little bit and had the dream creature make me relive my worst moments besides the one before the fight with Tirek. Like what I had done in my brief moment of insanity. Sometimes, I just made it mock me as much as possible.
Hmm. Maybe I really was a sucker for punishment and Nightmare Moon had only awakened my desire for it with the riding crop of infinite pleasure™. Regardless, I had my way and made myself suffer for every mistake I made.
Besides giving myself nightmares each and every night, I also did other things to make up for it and hopefully have Celestia forgive me for real. She certainly enjoyed the cakes and cookies I baked for her, so I hoped it was a good step in the right direction.
Luna, on the other hoof, was trying her best to stop my attempt at ‘making Tia fat’ with my delicious cooking. I have no idea where she got that idea from, honestly.
...okay, maybe I was trying a bit too hard, but I was getting desperate to earn my twin’s forgiveness! I simply had no idea what else to try. It was infuriating that Celestia pretended nothing was wrong and insisted that I had nothing to feel sorry for. I just... I never felt like she was entirely honest with me.
And honestly, I think she was avoiding me most of the time, too. She never was one to enjoy those garden parties with the nobles, but all of a sudden she couldn’t get enough of them? Puh-lease, I’m not blind. What hurt most, though, was that she sometimes didn’t even turn in for the night with Luna and me.
Lulu tried getting her to talk about it, but nothing really came out of it. Even my Moon was starting to get agitated by it and angry vampire sex with me wasn't enough to get her mind off of it. That was also something really weird... and enjoyable... that had started to happen more often.
There were also rumors spreading around that something had happened between Celestia and me. Well, between Tia, Luna, and myself, really. It wasn’t easy assuaging the fears of our servants and guards, or even the nobles. Although, with how the nobles behaved most of the time, they felt vindicated in their belief Luna and I had tried to get rid of Tia (or something equally ridiculous along those lines).
At least there was one thing that managed to uplift Celestia’s mood by quite a lot and that was the inexplicable absence of Platinum within our court and so on. Not just there but everywhere else, really. It was like she had given up on defaming us in some way or another. Our spies told us that she rarely even left her home and it was causing me a bit of concern. Not for her health or anything, although a small part of me did feel concerned because of that, but there was a rising suspicion in me that she was planning something big. Or she was getting too old to care...
Nah. That stupid old hag won't ever give up, no matter how wrinkly her face gets. Keep on dreaming, Summer.
Anyway! Whatever it was, I think those materials she has been hoarding for quite some time were finally coming to use sometime soon. I have no idea what sort of ritual needed so many rare materials that she had to acquire those ingredients for years, but it could be nothing good.
Clearly, such a ritual would have massive consequences and she honestly thought she could cast it despite the risk of it failing. The more 'cogs' you put into the machine, the less likely it will run smoothly. And that wasn't even mentioning the potential side effects, the risk of it blowing up in your face, or the ritual substituting your life force to finish casting when it ran out of juice.
Searching for evidence against her so that we could legally do something about her was a headache in and of itself. We had nothing on her and trying to go the black ops route was doomed for failure, too. Platinum was just too well fortified in her own home and I think that was partly due to the fact that she had resources that we had not. Like ancient spells of her family line that even Starswirl had no access to.
Speaking of Starswirl, he had come home from whatever confrontation he had with this Stygian completely furious. Naturally, we didn’t get a single word out of him about what had happened between them and it had me worried. He wasn’t normally this angry, even when we did our best to get on his nerves.
What can I say? We really were brats, sometimes (even as adults). Not to downplay my own part in this, but... Lulu was by far the worst. She really couldn’t keep her hooves to herself at times and she was prone to cause all kinds of pranks at the most inconvenient of times. The last time she played one on me I had pink fur for a month or so. I took it with humor... mostly.
I looked ridiculous and Luna kept making memory balls of it whenever I got rid of them. I swear, she won't ever let me live that one down.
Aside from that, Yu’la had been sleeping a lot over the winter months again. Whether that was because of her nature as an animated statue or because she was a dragon, I couldn’t say. I kept her bed nice and warm and Celestia’s phoenix stayed with her most of the time. It was delightful seeing them get along so well over the years and I was pleasantly surprised that she didn’t take on the more... mischievous... tendencies of Philomena. That bird took too much after Luna and Celestia, seriously. She was like the perfect mix of Luna’s pranking tendencies and Celestia’s ‘I have done nothing wrong’ look.
As spring came back around for a new year (the Equestrian calendar actually starts with spring and ends with the winter, it was easier that way after what happened with the wendigos and the eternal winter), I stayed in my garden a lot. Most of the time I did my work right underneath my beautiful tree while Yu’la was playing around with the animals that made it their home here.
On another pleasant note, our estrus cycle did get (marginally) more manageable like our mother had told us such a long time ago now. We weren’t entirely like depraved, sex-crazy animals anymore, but we still had a strong urge to mate with each other as often as possible. More often than not, that meant Luna and I fucking each other silly with wild, 'vanilla' lesbian sex.
I think I preferred having that kind of sex with Luna over us using my spell. Celestia, on the other hoof, was really bad at the regular lesbian variant of sex without resorting to oral sex. Not that it didn’t feel good, she just was more awkward if she was in the leading position. Besides, teasing the hell out of me was not as satisfying.
Okay, maybe it was really good, too... but it was also really frustrating. I totally (maybe not really) hate Tia for it, making me (totally not at all) love it despite my misgivings about it. I (absolutely do not) love her teasing me for hours on end. Definitely not. Nopes. Nuh-uh.
Ah, well, it wasn’t like Celestia ceased to be amazing in bed... or any other place we decided to do it. She was better at this if we did use the spell (while teasing me at every opportunity... which I definitely love... damnit) and Luna was better at it if we didn’t (thankfully without any teasing), so it balanced itself out nicely. Not that they didn't switch out who would use the spell or not, they do fuck each other without me around, but we all have our preferences.
Such as me not touching a strap-on with a ten-foot pole, for example. The spell wasn't the only thing I had a strong dislike for, I generally couldn't bring myself to stick anything but my tongue into my sisters' cunts. Lulu had her thing for BDSM and Tia... well, Tia was Tia. She did everything with equal fervor and disliked nothing. And she was practically horny all the time. So... yeah. Let's leave it at that.
I swear, sometimes I hear a faint buzz when we're sitting on our thrones and I knew Celestia was behind it. She probably enchanted something to vibrate for multiple hours, whether it was the cushion or something smaller, I couldn't tell. Knowing my sister, though, she was being very naughty right in front of our subjects. If there was one thing that turned her on more than everything else, it was exhibitionism. If she could, she probably would have me sit in her lap and use a charm to make everypony watch as she molested me.
N-not that I was fantasizing about her having her way with me while e-everypony saw me o-orgasm right in front of t-them! No, such things were reprehensible and would set the wrong kind of example, making it okay for s-siblings to... to... coerce each other into forbidden, incestuous love! I won't let that happen, not on my watch.
It would be humiliating and, and... kind of sexy, but wrong! Suns damnit, Summer. Ever since that night in the Crystal Empire, the idea of being found out kept creeping back into the foreground of my thoughts! What's wrong with you?! Do you really like to be toyed with so much you crave the ultimate humiliation there is?! Stop paying attention to Celestia's antics to corrupt you, damnit! You are better than that!
Even though it would be really sexy and make me stammer and moan as I whined needily in my sister's grasp while she nibbled on the back of my neck and rubbed my clit with a hoof...
Fuck. My twin is a succubus, there's no other explanation for how she has corrupted me so thoroughly. I was trapped in a waking nightmare of wet dream after wet dream by her design, forced to endure her sweet temptations while being unable to give in. If I did, I would have to face the consequences of such a decision. And that was exactly where she wanted me to be: torturing myself over my newest kink. Give in and be humiliated to my heart's content, or stay silent and suffer through everything my imagination could throw at me.
It was an insidious plan and I won't give her the satisfaction of breaking my resolve. Siblings shouldn't take advantage of each other like this and she knew that! She knew making incest legal would cause chaos among our ponies, so... whatever this dastardly scheme was, it is not going to work. I won't let it.
Despite my resolve, a crack was already forming in my morality. And Celestia only made it worse by encouraging our subjects to 'love freely' in herds. One good thing did come from it, I suppose, and that was the legalization to be openly gay, lesbian, and/or bisexual in a herd. Why a herd? Well... apparently the nobles ran out of arguments about 'biologic reality and the need to reproduce' when faced with Tia's fact that a herd was one big family and it shouldn't matter who takes care of the foal and how a mother got pregnant. And if that herd consisted of two couples with a mutual agreement, it was still a gerd out of friendship according to the law.
Hence, nopony could object to my wife passing the 'Herd Reformation Act' into the Equestrian Constitution, making it a basic, fundamental right for everypony. I was kinda proud my sister managed to get one over the old Unicornian noble family faction and made it basically impossible to revoke her decision without major backlash on their part. That didn't eradicate prejudice, but it laid the foundation for more acceptance to come in the future.
...and we became figureheads for the... ahem, 'rainbow' pride flag, which was basically Tia's mane colors followed by my red one on top and Luna's midnight blue at the bottom. As far as designs go... it was okay? It felt like a cheap replacement for the actual pride flag I remember from Earth, but telling that to our subjects wasn't exactly easy when they already made their mind up. So, now we have queer pastel pony pride, yay.
Ah, well, progress was progress, right? It could have looked considerably worse. Like... I don't know. Worse.
Anyway, enough of that. Life kept moving on in a suspiciously quiet manner. I would have expected Platinum to make a fuss about the 'blasphemy' we committed against the sacredness of marriage or whatever, but we didn't even hear so much as a peep from her.
I'll never understand that former princess, I swear. When you think she might yet manage to sink even lower than she already did, she disappoints you and does nothing. It was unnerving, to be honest.
Ah, well. I won't cry over a gift like that. We were one step close to making this land a better place for future generations to come. Someday, discrimination will be a thing of the past. I can't wait to see that day come to fruition through our hard work.
The right to love and be yourself is a fundamental right we shouldn't have to fight over so much with the House of Lords. Perhaps it was high time we established the House of Commons so that the power dynamic shifted more in favor of the average pony instead of those with a noble heritage. I suppose that was another project we could start working on, long term.
That, and modern commodities such as better housing, plumbing, and basic rights like access to healthcare and equal rights. The main problem would be Platinum's faction trying to delay us for as long as possible, but we quite literally had agelessness on our side. They were fighting a futile battle.
One night, as we were wrapping up our work and were about to retire for the night, Starswirl came to us and told us that he might be gone for a while, stating that there was an emergency he had to take care of with his ‘colleagues’ (that were really his friends, he was just too stubborn to call them that).
As was always the case with him, we didn’t find out what it was about at all. The only thing he told us to do was to finish our assignments on time (something we struggled to do most of the time, we still had a nation to run, after all), look after his things for a while, and then he was gone. Just like that.
Clover was as displeased about his behavior as we were, the old stallion running off again to do whatever it is that he did with his ‘not-friends’. But Starswirl was kind of notorious for doing things like that, so I wasn’t really too concerned about it.
Later during that year, as I was on one of my monthly check-up tours through the forest to see how my animal friends were doing, I was visiting my first manticore friend with Yu’la, not having visited him in quite a while. And I was pleasantly surprised at what I found.
Melvin had become a parent together with his mate Martha and the little fluffy kittens were incredibly adorable. Yu’la had a lot of fun playing with them while Melvin and his significant other were watching them with pride and contentment. Seeing that I was unable to resist the temptation, I filled one of the memory balls I always had on me for such moments with this cute scene. It would have been a crime not to.
Sadly, my visit was cut short as the first droplets of water fell from the sky, the rain quickly picking up in intensity. The little cave was not big enough to house all of us for the night, so I hurried back to the castle with my darling dragon tucked in safely beneath my folded wings. She really wasn’t a fan of stormy weather. Me neither, for that matter. It was something we had in common.
As I galloped through the forest trying not to slip (which wasn't an easy feat in the Everfree), I felt a weird familiarity as I passed by a tree. A tree that, as I stared at it for a moment, I could have sworn to have passed by not too long ago in my pursuit to get back to the castle.
Sure enough, a few moments later, I saw the same tree again.
“What the...” I muttered, staring in disbelief at the gnarly tree. Using a rock in my magic, I carved a little cross into its trunk and went left, hoping beyond hope that I was just imagining things. Either I had been running around in circles, something I seriously doubted, or something else was going on. Something fishy.
And just as I came across the same tree again, I found the same cross I had carved into the tree's bark from before. Or the same tree, as the case may be. This time, I went right to ensure I wouldn’t be running around in circles and did my best to stay in a straight line.
Again, I came by the tree and I stomped angrily around the tree, trying to see if there was anything strange going on with it. But, try as I might, it was an ordinary tree (with the cross on it, true, but still like any other tree in this flying penguin of a forest). Sighing with barely suppressed rage and quite a bit of terror running rampant through me, I started to walk backward. I always kept the tree within my sight, only every once in a while looking behind me to make sure I wouldn’t bump into another tree.
This time, I didn’t find the same tree again. No... I stumbled over a root and noticed that I was outside the forest. Startled, I turned back to go through the forest again in order to find my castle and forget that this madness has ever happened, just to see that there was no forest to run back to. I wasn’t even anywhere near the Everfree Forest because, as I looked around in horror, I recognized parts of where I was.
This was impossible, I told myself as my right eyelid started to twitch madly. Utterly impossible.
I had suddenly found myself on the other side of Equestria. It would take weeks to find my way back home. Weeks!
Lightning flashed overhead as I stared down over the cliff’s edge at the crashing waves of the raging ocean. I jumped a little bit as the booming thunder rattled my bones and I tried my best to comfort the shivering bundle within my wings with calming noises, even as I myself felt too afraid to move.
This wasn’t possible, I told myself. One couldn’t simply stumble out of a forest on the other side of the country and find the forest gone in the next moment. And as I looked up, the dark pinkish clouds overhead weren’t natural, either. Blue, green, red, heck even black lightning flashed within those weirdly colored clouds as they continued to pour out their contents over the land.
Whatever was going on, I needed to find my sisters first and foremost. Glancing down at the sun necklace around my neck, I touched it and said Celestia’s name.
No flash came to take me away from where I stood.
Touching the necklace once more, this time saying Luna’s name, nothing happened. I touched it over and over again, panic starting to set in as it failed to bring me to one of my sisters each and every time.
Tears fell down from my chin as I felt the crushing realization that I couldn’t get back to my sisters. The salty liquid mixed with the oddly brown rain that smelled suspiciously of chocolate and even as I lit up my horn to teleport over to the nearest cave entrance (it was more of a rocky overhang), nothing happened.
I couldn’t even reach out to my sun as it called out to me, wanting to set over the horizon. Despair clawed at my heart as I was denied from acting upon my special talent. My Red Sun begged me to do something and I was at a loss for what I should do. The only thing that worked as intended was a light-emitting spell and telekinesis.
I stood there, utterly helpless, staring at the horizon hoping to get the sun to set before it suddenly started to move without my input. One moment, everything was bright, and the next, I was left in the dark of the night. Maybe Luna was so nice to do it for me, instead?
Sadly, that wasn’t the case as the moon set over the horizon a moment later, making way for the twin suns once more.
“This isn’t happening,” I whispered fearfully, once more finding myself in the dark stormy night. Then it was back to daytime a minute or two later as I made my way to the only shelter I could see in the distance.
I tried my best to light a campfire with the conventional method as I sat there dripping with chocolate milk of all things, but the drenched sticks I gathered refused to light up. My fiery aura, instead of warming the sticks to dry them, did nothing. The universal constant of temperature refused to acknowledge my alicorn domain of heat. Yu’la was shivering and I myself was, for once, not immune to the unnatural cold. Or the normal, natural temperature, considering I was usually exempt from that rule.
As I stayed there, shivering underneath the rocky outcropping of the 'cavern', staring out at the land, I was witness to something even stranger than pink clouds and chocolate rain with rainbow-colored lightning flashing overhead. The ground beneath us started to change, too.
Fields, forests, and lakes began to look like a bad children’s drawing and a chessboard pattern started to cover everything as far as the eye could see. As long as it was bright enough to see, anyway. I wasn't about to change my eyes to a more predatory nature as the random frequency of the day and night cycle might leave me blinded for longer than my eyes could adjust.
Even that was not spared. None of my alicorn domains seemed to be working anymore like they should and it felt so alien to me that my own sun's light was blinding to me. It was like the rules of the universe were uprooted and only a mere suggestion. And among that, gravity and direction were completely thrown out the window, substituted with 'down is where a surface is' and 'you think something is straight, but as you move, it might bend and twist like an optical illusion'.
So... with that in mind, strange things started happening. Well... stranger things, I guess. Entire land masses began to rip themselves out of the ground, starting to float there like islands in the sky as if gravity failed to adhere to certain areas. The ocean bent over itself, going up and down while the sky itself twisted around, clouds and all.
The orbit of the twin suns and the moon was all kinds of weird, too. They bounced across the heavens like bouncy balls, shot across the horizon like they were in a pinball machine, and then, they sometimes moved in stop-motion like a ticking clock. Or they moved completely normal, either sped up or in slow motion. All of it completely without rhyme or reason.
For the first time in my second life, I felt deathly afraid for my own existence. My survival was uncertain and the world around me turned into a madhouse at a carnival. Nothing made sense anymore.
Whatever was behind this, they were far more powerful than my sisters and I. Heck, they were probably more powerful than every unicorn in Equestria combined, judging by the casual display of playing ping pong with the suns and the moon.
Reality itself said fuck it and left physics crying in a corner. Nothing was as it was before and I had no idea how I was going to get back to my sisters in this chaos. Wherever they were because I doubted they were still at the castle, either. At least Yu’la was with me where I could keep her safe. Well... relatively safe, seeing that I probably couldn’t do anything to the one behind this madness.
That night (or day, it depends on which one of the heavenly bodies was up in the sky at the time), sleep didn’t come easily. And much to my dismay, there were no dreams I could comfort myself with, even if they were nightmares. That also meant Luna couldn’t reach out to me, sadly. No dreams meant she would find herself in an empty dream realm. If she even found herself in the dream realm.
On the days that it didn’t rain (let’s just call them days for now, even if it was hard to keep track of), I tried foraging for anything that might prove itself useful to Yu’la and myself. Mostly food that didn’t consist of ninety-nine percent sugar. While I’m sure Tia was having a blast right now satisfying her sweet tooth, I’d rather make sure that Yu’la and I had something healthy to eat. Or drink, for that matter.
The land wasn’t the only thing that had been changed, though. I watched buffalos in ballerina costumes dance around like nothing was wrong, saw schools of fish flying through the air as if they were still underwater, gazed upon frogs that were so massive that they could have crushed trees with their tongues, and witnessed mice chase away cats and cats chase away dogs in a surreal role reversal.
Nothing remained untouched by this utter insanity sweeping across our nation, changing just about everything that could be changed. Every time I thought I recognized something, I was proven wrong in my desperate search for my castle. There was only one thing that could (hopefully) change everything back to how it was.
We needed to find the Elements of Harmony. That also meant that we needed to find the being responsible behind all of this chaos. And before I could even do any of that, I needed to find my sisters.
Easier said than done when you couldn’t even find your way around reliably. Reality had new rules and I was woefully underprepared to make heads or tails of it all.
As I traveled across this weird caricature of Wonderland, I also bore witness to the suffering of our ponies. It was a fight for survival, nopony trusting each other to not steal their possessions or shelter. Law and order were a thing of the past in this disharmonious world that we suddenly found ourselves in.
My subjects were begging me to do something against this and I wish I could have reassured them that this would have been all over soon. The truth, though, was that I wasn’t certain it would be over anytime soon. Not in the foreseeable future, at any rate. Or ever, to be honest.
To put the cherry on top of a mishappen cake, the ponies I encountered were subjected to cruel jokes that bordered on torture (like their food literally coming alive, trying to eat them instead). I did my best to help them, but even that was not enough as I often found myself in their trouble instead while they fled. It was understandable, this world was more than scary in all the wrong ways, but... sometimes, I wish I could have done without the monster murder food trying to take a bite out of me.
The first year was not even the worst of it, yet. At least, I think it had been a year (I had gone into heat once since this started, so it must be somewhere around a year-ish, I suppose). Getting back a sense of time had been hard and still was most likely inaccurate, anyway.
With each passing day, I felt more of my hope die that I would find my sisters in this mess. I stubbornly clung to the littlest spark I could keep alive within me, taking solace in the fact that Yu’la was my constant companion. She never left my side, thankfully. Wherever I went, I tried to make the lives of my ponies somehow better with the smallest things I could still offer them.
In a time like this, even food that wasn’t trying to eat you was a luxury good. Or food that didn’t consist mostly of sugar. Shelter was also something that wasn’t easy to come by, as most buildings seemingly blew over like they were made out of paper, only to spring back up a moment later as if nothing had happened in the first place.
Food and shelter weren't the only things that were difficult to get ahold of. No, there was one thing that was perhaps even more frustrating than that. That being clear water untouched by the practically omnipresent sticky substance of sugar and chocolate rain.
Keeping myself clean was a fruitless endeavor. Wasting clean water on bathing was honestly a rare commodity I gave up on a long time ago, seeing that the pink clouds up above always had a weird sense of knowing when they needed to rain to drench me from head to hoof whenever I was remotely clean.
Chocolate rain was the absolute worst thing to get drenched with, let me tell you. Being a pony had very few downsides in my opinion, but fur could be so bothersome, sometimes. And if there was one thing I hated with a passion, it was sticky fur. It managed to make me feel uncomfortable in a really disgusting way.
Out of all the things that managed to make me feel hopeless and close to the verge of crying, this was it. Not the monsters or the incomprehensible sense of direction playing tricks on my mind, nor the sugary food and the 'pranks' played on my subjects, it was my hygiene that almost made me give up and cry in a corner. I wasn't a cleanliness freak by far, but this was one of the things that frustrated me to no end.
Disgust could do a lot to dissuade one from going on, and were it not for my resolve to find my sisters, I might have succumbed to it. Hope was the only driving force that kept making me want to get up from my makeshift bed each and every day.
My regalia somehow stayed pristine, despite everything I went through. Well, almost pristine. There were a few scratches on it now and the reason behind those was perhaps the most terrifying encounter I had with a creature of chaos yet. Let’s just say, running away from a giant cupcake with sharp claws and teeth hell-bent on eating you wasn’t fun. I was afraid to leave the confines of my new 'home' for a few months after that.
Although, that would prove to be one of the more harmless encounters as I later found out. One day, as I was out scavenging, I had an interesting 'encounter' with a blue flower. At first, I thought nothing of it, thinking them to be harmless plants as I picked some fruit from the trees they were growing around. The only thing that made me mildly suspicious was the amount of pollen I shook loose from them, but I chalked that up to the local bee population being distracted by all the sugar around us.
If only I had stopped to think for a second and cleaned myself of their pollen with the last bottle of fresh water I had on hoof. Alas, I did not have the foresight to think I might have been in contact with a poisonous flower since they were rather harmless at the time.
The next day after sleeping, though... I was in for a rude awakening.
The first clue I got that something was off was my pitiful attempt to speak (or rather mumble sleepily), only to be greeted by a bubbling sound coming forth from my ‘throat’ while I tried moving my limbs to rub the sleep out of my eyes. The thing is, said limb was made of molten rock and I was sleeping in a puddle of hot glowing lava. Yu’la was on the other side of our 'shelter', staring at me in concern.
Well, I would have, too, if I found out my surrogate mother turned into a weird mix of alicorn pony and magma slime. It was... weird finding myself in such a malleable form that I felt my limbs stretch beyond their normal proportions as I tried to escape from the pool I had slept in.
And I found out I didn’t even need to breathe, as every time I tried to do that only a few bubbling sounds escaped me. I was essentially mute now, too. At least, as long as I stayed this... slimy.
Suffice to say, I was panicking. A lot. I couldn’t even cry, no tears were able to be produced in my state of liquified rock. On top of that, escaping my ‘bed’ was a difficult task that took me a few hours. Hours spent thinking I would stay like this forever as I thought whatever entity was responsible for this chaotic world had changed me, too.
And, as I was finally free of the molten pool, I found the outer layer of my ‘coat’ started to cool off enough that I got a bit more solid. Solid enough that my limbs weren’t stretching out each time I tried to move.
Once I found a lake that actually could reflect light back at me, I studied my form with dismay. I looked like the demonic child of a volcano and an alicorn. My ‘mane’ consisted of heavy black, smoky ash clouds and my eyes were a hot glowing yellow aside from an iris that was pitch black and my regalia looked like broken shackles and chains.
Instead of a tiara, or even a crown, a broken halo faded in and out of existence slightly above my head. It looked strangely captivating to me, but also left me with a foreboding feeling that shook me to my core. As if its mere existence was a bad omen.
Fallen Star was one thing, but this was another matter entirely. I had the strangest urge to burn everything to cinders and had to actively keep myself from acting upon these instincts. These 'desires' were nearly consuming my every thought, and had I less presence of mind to fight against them, I would have fallen prey to them. Whatever happened to me, this wasn’t good. Not one bit.
“My, somepony has gone supernova, hasn’t she?” a voice behind me commented with a chuckle and I whirled around to find perhaps the most... weird? looking creature my eyes had ever landed upon. “That is a fitting name, isn’t it? Supernova? What do you think?”
I stared at the mish-mash of a creature before me, looking like Yu’lon if she were male and made out of different parts of animals instead. Two different antlers sat atop the goat-like head, a single sharp tooth poking out from his lips with a white fluffy goatee on his chin. Beneath his ‘neck’, the goat-like head transitioned over to an elongated brown-furred body, ending at a scaly dragon’s tail with another white fluffy tuft of hair at the end. His left arm was that of a lion’s paw, while his right arm was an eagle’s claw, currently scratching his goatee as he grinned at me. He was floating above the ground like I had seen Yu’lon do, only he was floating a bit more upright. His hind legs were those of a goat (or donkey?) on his left side and a lizard on his right side. He also had two wings, one a bat’s and the other being that of a bird’s.
And, as he stared at me with his yellow eyes with differently sized red pupils, I shivered in fear for I felt like I stood before a god. His presence alone made me feel like a worthless ant, about to be squashed beneath one of his legs.
“Not one to talk, are you? Cat got your tongue? Or perhaps it was the slime that stole it?” he asked and I let out a squeak. He laughed uproariously, clutching his stomach (at least I think it was where his stomach was), wiping away a lone tear. “I can already tell, we’re going to have so much fun!”
“W-who are you?” I asked, my voice sounding really bubbly and, well... demonic. I stepped away from him, causing the water behind me to start steaming as it came into contact with my body. Oddly enough, I felt a mild amount of pain from that. Not from the fact that it was a liquid, but because it felt so incredibly cold.
Everything felt cold, for that matter. Like it was purposefully trying to cool me down and cause me to become rigid like a statue. Despite knowing the atmosphere around me had the same temperature as every other 'day' so far, it suddenly felt like I was thrown into the cold, dark void of space.
What... just what was I now? It didn’t make any sense. Ponies just don’t turn into weird magma slime things all of a sudden. Thinking about it, though, there was a strange sense of belonging for this form coming from within me. Like it was meant to be there all along.
For that matter, I don’t think I was a magma slime at all (or lava slime, in all actuality). Otherwise, I would have already ‘cooled down’ enough to gain solid form. There must be more to this than first glance would suggest.
Like... I dunno. Like I was partially elemental in nature. Perhaps we were wrong about alicorns since we discovered we were a mix of unicorn, pegasus, and earthpony.
I think... no, I know this must be the case. There was no doubt in my mind about it. Whatever I did to end up like this (I was rather skeptical that a plant of all things could be the sole cause of this), it gave me access to this new form of mine. First, we gained access to our darker halves, and now? I gained access to this new 'elemental' form through means that I didn’t entirely understand. Not yet, anyway.
Going back to our theory of alicorns being the perfect mix between all three pony tribes... were we even thinking correctly with that line of thought? I mean... clearly, Fallen Star was different from regular ponies. More thestral in appearance, minus the membranous wings. A predator through and through.
So, we must at least be also partially thestral then, right? But what about what I am right now? This... elemental type of pony? The only other analogy I know of that gets even close to what I am right now... are the crystal ponies. Are... are crystal ponies more than what we previously thought they were? In that case, they simply can’t be a more ‘beautiful’ version of earthponies.
Could it be that crystal ponies are elemental in nature? Nature given form... Earth given form. Or rather, crystal.
There was something like that on Azeroth, but by my sun, I just couldn’t remember what it was. I must have read about it in some book while we were over there. Something related to the old gods and a curse...
A loud clap brought me out of my thoughts, momentarily distracting me from what I had forgotten. I blinked, reminded of the odd creature in front of me. “Introductions are in order, my little Supernova. Pay attention now,” the being before me proclaimed theatrically, snickering as he said ‘order’. My previous thoughts were all but forgotten as I fidgeted uncomfortably as he threw an arm around my neck in an attempt to appear more friendly. The only thing he managed to accomplish with that was to make me tremble in fear. “I am the Lord of Chaos, Spirit of Disharmony and Disorder, the handsome version of Loki Laufeyson (green is so last season, let me tell you), gaze upon my magnificence, yadda yadda yadda, bla bla bla, schnick schnack and all that good stuff. Hmm. What else does the script say?”
He produced a thick stack of papers with only doodles on them as he skimmed through the thing, gazing over the rim of a pair of glasses he casually created out of nothing, before throwing the stack of papers away without a care in the world. The thing turned into a dozen doves or so that flew away in a frightened frenzy. He cleared his throat again, holding out his claw in greeting as he smiled down at me cheekily. “Ah, yes, my name is Discord. What a pleasure to meet you, Your Bubblyness.”
Discord, as he introduced himself as, stared at me expectantly and I hesitantly reached out my hoof to shake his claw. Though, as he took my hoof and gave it a shake, his arm popped off his body and I stared wide-eyed as the thing still held onto my hoof.
I was this close to fainting from that sight alone... I think I even saw the end of his bones poking out of that... that stub. He didn't even seem to be concerned about losing a limb, either.
“Oops, seems like I might not have screwed it on tight enough, here let me give you a hand,” he chuckled, taking his claw back from me with his other arm. I shuddered as he screwed it back on his shoulder like some kind of toy arm. It even made those squeaky noises as if it was in need of oiling. “So, you’re one of those 'princesses' the ponies around here tell me will defeat me, huh? You don't feel particularly powerful to me. Kinda pathetic, really. Now, Sleipnir, on the other claw? Mhh, he was a real stallion packing an 'Oomph!' if you get what I mean~.”
“Uhm...” I stammered, wincing away from him as he stared at me with those red glowing eyes as the surroundings around us got dark. Fear and despair clawed at my molten heart as terror flooded my entire being. He really was in a league of his own, wasn't he? He wasn't actually talking about the Sleipnir, was he?
“Well, I look forward to your attempt,” Discord shrugged and our surroundings went back to the bright day it was a moment ago. It was a bit jarring, seeing him go from that back to his carefree nature. “In the wise words of someone that I don’t remember, probably Odin that bastard, let the games begin!”
“You... you think this misery is only a game?!” I asked, snorting angrily but the self-proclaimed Lord of Chaos only snapped his fingers and was gone in a flash.
That concluded my first visit from the god-like being with the ability to alter reality itself. And by everything that was holy, I slumped to the ground as whatever constituted adrenalin within my gooey body left me, feeling the last vestiges of hope I held on fade away entirely.
I couldn’t win against something... something like that! He was on a wholly different level, bordering on eldritch horror! I was glad that my mind wasn’t ripped apart just for gazing upon his body. Thankfully he wasn’t a Thing from the Beyond or I’m sure that I wouldn't have been able to formulate coherent thoughts anymore.
It seemed the universe was once more a cruel mistress, taking even the slightest semblance of normalcy away from me, as well as my sisters for however long it takes me to find them. If I even could find them in this mess...
Was it even possible to defeat Discord? Could the Elements of Harmony even affect something on such a level of power? They had defeated the ultimate evil in the universe, but that was when they were alive. Now? Now, they might not even be enough. They certainly would be useless as long as my sisters weren’t there to wield them with me.
Luckily, there was one thing I didn’t have to worry about as I woke up the next morning and that was the fact that my body was back to normal. It seems to me that whatever had been affecting me, be it something Discord did to me or those blue flowers I had inadvertently stumbled upon, had lost its hold on me. I chalked it up to me being an alicorn, but I wasn’t entirely sure about that.
Maybe I unconsciously shifted back into my form of Summer Sol in my sleep. If I ever found it within me to put my little theory to the test (I was rather reluctant to feel that primordial need to set everything on fire again), I’m sure I could figure out how to turn back into 'Supernova', as Discord had dubbed that form so lovingly for me. It wasn’t that bad of a name, anyway. Better than something volcano-related, anyway.
So, as the days blurred (quite literally) together, I did my best to stay out of Discord’s way. Months upon months I scavenged through the oddest places and the most dangerous ones. All so that I could somehow find a landmark that told me where in the flying penguin I was.
It was driving me crazy, searching for anything that could give me a clue as to how I could find the whereabouts of my castle or that of my sisters. I had to fend off monsters every week or so, always an amalgamation of different animals that I could tell were a product of Discord’s mad reign.
His reign was a cruel one. Everywhere I went to, I only encountered more suffering than from where I had previously come from. It was breaking my heart over and over again. He didn’t even stop at ‘playing’ with ponies, the same was true for the poor griffon I found flying desperately away from the massive shark hunting her.
My gift with animals hardly ever affected the critters under the influence of Discord’s chaos magic. So, with a heavy heart, I ripped a close-by tree from the earth and... put down the shark. It was the better alternative than allowing it to devour the battered and exhausted griffon.
Greta Eagletalon, as I learned her name was, was extremely grateful for my interference and stayed with me for a couple of weeks. I nursed her back to full health, taking pity on her despite my previous misgivings about griffons. I let her accompany me until we found her homeland only because she wasn’t as conceited as the rest of her kind. But even in the Griffon Empire, as I gazed sadly upon it once we found it, the land wasn’t exempt from Discord’s influence.
In a land ruled over by a being far worse than anything I previously had the pleasure of 'negotiating' with (not that there was any negotiating with Discord, whatsoever), I found out that the majority of griffons weren't as bad as I previously made them out to be.
Sure, some of them were dicks, massive ones at that, but... so could be ponies, to be honest. One just needs to take a look at the old Unicornian noble families and they would be just as bad as the éclair-addicted moron sitting on the throne of the Griffon Empire.
Ahem! I... might still be holding onto a grudge or two with that stuffed turkey for what he tried to do, but I could also admit his ilk doesn't really represent their race as a whole. I suppose I wasn't entirely immune to racism, as much as I pretended otherwise. It was hard to swallow my pride (that's something I never thought I would have in abundance), letting go of my misgivings and 'holier-than-thou' attitude when it came down to innocent griffons who were honestly undeserving of it.
...King Éclair of Sugar-in-his-Blood still deserved everything he got, though. There was little to nothing I couldn't forgive, but I draw the line at my wives. Cross that and I will be very vindictive, regardless of my bleeding heart.
Okay, maybe, just maybe, I was a teensy, tiny little bit sorry for him. I'm not going to go out of my way to forgive him, though. I... might have gone a bit overboard with his punishment, but it's his fault, and his alone. He dug his own pit and now he has to climb out of it by himself. Whether or not he would seek help for his addiction, I couldn't say, but chances are he will choke on an éclair before he gives them up in favor of living a more healthy lifestyle.
Admittedly, I was not proud of what I had done to him, but if I had the choice to do it all over again? I'd still do it. Heck, I would feed that bastard myself with a gleeful smile and watch him get sick before force-feeding him more pastries.
I did mention I have a vindictive side if my wives were involved, right? I can't wait to do worse with Discord...
Ahem! Anyway, my new griffon friend and I parted ways as I prepared to traverse the dangers of a changed world to find my sisters in all this madness. At least I had somewhat of an idea of where I currently was.
Three years in this nightmare and I had hope again. I couldn't wait for it all to end. The light at the end of the tunnel was finally within grasping distance. Only a little bit more.
Too bad that, once I went to sleep that day, I woke up in an entirely different place. To my great relief, Yu’la was still with me so I had one less thing to worry about. Everything else was up for debate, though. Much like that time I suddenly found myself on the other side of Equestria, I now found myself on the icy peaks of the tallest mountain I had ever seen.
The view was the only thing I enjoyed about waking up in the frigid cold, cursing the fact that my fiery aura was next to useless nowadays. Yu’la snuggled herself as close to me as she could and I took to the air in an attempt to glide down to lower altitudes. That was met with total failure as the harsh winds blew me back to where I started and I heard the infernal disembodied laughter of the chaos god.
So, I began the long and arduous trek through the snow to reach the foot of the mountain. Several times I felt like my body couldn’t continue on as the icy snow clung onto my coat and I stumbled to the ground, crawling on in a desperate bid to find any kind of warmth that would stave off the threat of hypothermia. My own body heat could only keep up for so long and if Yu’la hadn’t literally been made out of jade, I fear she would have died a long time ago.
I doubt even turning into Supernova would have saved me from that coldness. If I ever figure out how to deliberately trigger that change, that is.
I swear, one day you will regret this, Discord. One day your reign will come crashing down upon your malformed body and I will be there to laugh in your face.
To make matters worse, the chocolate rain returned and I found myself in a blizzard of frozen chocolate milk. It was like Discord was testing how much the body of an alicorn could withstand before succumbing to exhaustion. I doubted something like this could ever kill me, but I wasn’t keen on risking it. Definitely not with Yu’la needing me to keep her safe.
On and on I dragged myself through the harsh weather, trying to find anything, anything at all, that might give me a reprieve and allow me to recover some of my lost strength. Alas, in this poor visibility, I didn’t think I would ever find a cave or even some trees.
“Just.. a little bit... longer,” I muttered, tiredly dragging myself forward, blinking and squinting against the damn chocolate milk blizzard raging around me. “Only a little bit... longer... just... a bit. You can... do this, Summer...”
Stumbling, I fell to the ground, shivering heavily while trying to get back on my trembling legs. A glance at my left wing told me that Yu’la was still safely tucked away and I took another unsteady step, only to fall back to the ground.
“I... ngh... I c-can’t... give... up...” I mumbled weakly while the edges of my vision started to get much darker. “N-not... mhn... not... like... this...”
My body lost the fight against Discord’s trap and I gave up. My body couldn’t continue on and the snow slowly started to bury me as I succumbed to what would probably be my last slumber. I was barely conscious enough to hear somepony, probably Discord coming to gloat, approach me. But instead of hearing snide words, I felt a pair of gentle hooves grab onto me as I lost my vision to exhaustion entirely.
As I later found out, when an alicorn is at a point that is (mostly) lethal to a regular mortal and their healing factor couldn’t keep up with the stress anymore, they fall into a sort of... 'hibernation' would be the best word for it, I suppose. I survived for much longer than any other pony could have withstood, but even then, I couldn’t keep my body working in such conditions indefinitely. Conditions that were heavily screwed up due to Discord redecorating reality like a jigsaw puzzle under the instructions of a foal.
The slumber I found myself in needed time to repair my body until it was sufficiently strong enough that I could be roused back into the waking world. So, when I arduously blinked my eyes open one day, I was surprised to find that I was in a small cottage, a little fire burning within the fireplace my ‘bed’ was right next to.
I warily looked around in tiredness, seeing next to no decorations. The whole cottage in and of itself looked more like it was a hastily constructed shack than what a home should have looked like.
The door to the outside opened so suddenly, I almost rolled right into the fireplace with my flanks. In came a tall pony entirely covered in the fur of dead animals, shutting the door behind themself as some of the snow from the outside followed them in. Yu’la flitted out from beneath their... ugh, 'clothing'... and happily flew over to me to nuzzle me as if she hadn’t seen me in ages.
I giggled slightly, glad that she was okay after what had happened out in the wilderness. The noise from my throat had the mysterious pony in shock for all but a moment before it turned into joyful relief as she took off the hood from her head. Luna stared at me and I stared right back at her, all kinds of happy feelings flooding me as I finally found one of my wives.
“You’re okay!” she exclaimed with a smile and happy tears. She glomped me, embracing me tightly in her forehooves. “I thought you would never wake!”
“I’m glad to see you, too,” I told her, pressing myself tighter against her. “How... how long have I been asleep for?”
“I... Summer, you...” Luna started to say, only to hesitate. Yu’la let out a mournful growl and I felt my heart begin to drop.
“Luna... how long?” I asked her fearfully.
Luna swallowed thickly. “From what I can tell... you were... uhm... about... uh...” she whispered before she clammed up. She winced, reluctant to continue. “Do you really want to know..?”
“I... I don’t want to, but I need to know, Lulu,” I whispered back, fidgeting in the embrace. “Please, tell me.”
My sister bit her lip as tears came to her eyes. She hid them from me as she turned her head away, ears drooping. “About five years now,” Luna told me with a shaky breath. Her words were almost too quiet to make out, and for a moment, I thought I had misheard her.
I sat there in disbelief at what she told me. Five years?! How... that can’t be possible. And judging by how the snow looked that she had dragged in after herself, Discord was still unopposed. All that time and... and nothing changed regarding him? I... I guess I shouldn’t have been so surprised about that.
It was impossible to defeat him, wasn’t it? Not alone and... and not by mortals. We would never live in a normal world again.
“Five years...” I numbly repeated. “How... how can I sleep so long?”
“I don’t know, sister,” she told me, her voice tinged with sadness. “It was a miracle I even found you in the first place, I was out hunting for anything edible and happened to stumble upon you, half-frozen solid.”
“I... I was frozen solid?” I asked incredulously.
She rubbed her forelegs awkwardly together. “Half-frozen, as I said,” Luna said with a small nod, a frown on her muzzle. “For a moment, I even thought you had been there for much longer, were it not for the tracks you made. I... I thought you were dead, honestly.”
“Yet here I am...” I muttered, unsure of how I should feel. How could I have recovered from such a thing in the first place? It was, for all intents and purposes, seemingly impossible. I should be dead. But evidently, I was not. Were alicorns really so powerful that even severely weakened they were almost impossible to kill? Could I really not die from 'mundane' causes anymore? Was I forced to live on forever until I commit to ending my own life by any means necessary?
Just how much of what I had learned from Hope had I taken with a grain of salt?! How much had I dismissed because I didn't want to believe her..?
“I took you here with me, in the smallest hopes that you weren’t dead like I feared you were,” Luna explained and went over to put a kettle with clean water over the fire. “Had Yu’la not insisted on staying with you, I might have buried you. Summer, I thought you were dead. Your heart wasn’t beating anymore.”
For all we knew, my mortal body was dead. All that was left of me was my soul tethered to the mortal plane by my alicorn 'divinity' and the bond I shared with my Red Sun. How Yu'la knew I wasn't going to stay 'dead', I had no idea. Maybe she inherited Yu'lon's ability to sense divine beings and knew that only very special circumstances could permanently kill me. A bit of snow wasn't enough to do me in, evidently.
I sighed, shaking my head. That was a topic for another time. My darling dragon was full of surprises, wasn't she? “So, what happened then?” I asked. My sister smiled, going over to her bag and taking out a small dead rabbit much to my horror before she started to clean it out. I looked queasily at her as she was oblivious to my distress. Poor bunny...
“As you started to... thaw... your heart started beating again,” she told me as she uncaringly cut the poor rabbit up like a butcher. “It was slow at first, but it got stronger with each month that passed. You continued to sleep, though, despite appearing to be fully healed. I couldn’t even wake you with my magic.”
She added the meat to the stew she was preparing and glanced back at me, seeing my horrified look at what she had done to the rabbit. Luna rolled her eyes at me and came back over to me.
“Summer, it’s not like we haven’t eaten another living being before,” she said and I fidgeted against her as she embraced me again, reluctant to stay away from me for long. The feeling was very much mutual. “Besides, it’s the only thing I can find out here in the few moments the blizzard outside is light enough to find my way around without getting lost.”
“Have you been here all this time?” I inquired, testing my legs' strength and finding that they hadn’t atrophied at all. Or my body simply was better at recovering than a regular mortal. Perhaps I really should rethink that ‘goddess’ thing, this certainly was an eye-opener.
My sister snorted grumpily to herself, tensing up. “Yes...” she grumbled, holding me a bit tighter. I could understand her frustration, I also had almost given up on ever finding her and Tia again. Almost. “I tried making my way down to the foot of the mountain only to end back up at the top, somehow. Summer, what is going on?”
“I wish I could pretend I didn’t know, Lulu,” I sighed. “There is an... 'entity', I suppose... that bends reality to his every whim. He is far more powerful than you could possibly imagine. His name is Discord and he says he is the Lord of Chaos. Think about how we felt around Yu’lon and then you get somewhat close to how powerful he is. His body... it is the strangest thing you could ever perceive without going mad.”
“So, this Discord... he isn’t an eldritch abomination from the Void in Between, then?” she asked and I shrugged. I mean, I was sure he wasn’t but one could never be sure.
“Pah, those would never be as handsome as moi,” the voice of Discord rang out before said... whatever he was... appeared. Luna shrieked, blasting him with an overpowered lance of arcane energy and he simply snapped his fingers, changing it into a harmless swarm of butterflies. Both my sister and I stared in shock at his casual display of power, but it wasn’t entirely surprising. “Now, now, Princess. No need to be rude. You’re almost as bad as my cousin, and she has a mean temper, let me tell you. Maybe I should introduce you to her. I’m sure she would just ‘love’ to meet you.” He snickered in a sort of mean-spirited way.
“What the..?” Luna muttered before shaking her head, recomposing herself. A second later, she was standing protectively in front of me, an angry snort directed at the chaos entity before us. “What do you want?!”
“Oh, nothing too terribly important, dear Moonbutt,” he said, waving his paw nonchalantly. “I just came by to see how two of those pesky princesses were doing that are ‘supposed’ to defeat me. You are doing a terrible job so far, I have to say. I had hoped to have a little bit more fun with you. Tsk, tsk. Good fun is so hard to get these days...”
“You little..!” Luna growled and I held her back from doing something to him before he started to think he needed to actually do something to get rid of us properly. As long as he wasn’t thinking we were a threat to him, we might still find a way to defeat him.
“Ooh! It seems to me like somepony might have a little anger management problem, no?” Discord asked, grinning at my sister as we glared back at him, peeved. Not that he was concerned by our attitude. Instead of provoking my sister further, he turned to me next, studying me for a moment. "You look different, my little Supernova. Have you redecorated? I liked the old look better. Such a shame.”
My eyelid twitched at that. “What do you mean, redecorated?! I’m back to normal! And isn’t that the wrong word to describe this?” I shot back, indignantly. "You have a lot of nerve!"
“Pfft! Why use words for their intended purposes when you can get creative? You ponies get so upset over the simplest things. Language is such a beautiful thing, ever-changing, ever-adapting... how could you not change it up every once in a while?” he shrugged. “Anyway, I see you found each other! Sisters at long last reunited! Well, two out of three, at least. Good luck finding that other one, not that it will do you any good if you can’t leave the mountain. Might want to think outside of the box if you ever hope to get back to your precious sister. Or should I say, wife? Such a naughty pony, you are. Ah, well! Can’t give you more tips than that, Princess.”
“Can’t you just let us go?” I asked and he laughed like I just told him the greatest joke. He shook his head, saying something along the lines of ‘Where would be the fun in that’ and left with a snap of his fingers, his laughter lingering for a moment.
So, it seemed like we were stuck here. No wonder I never found Luna on my travels if she couldn’t escape the mountain. That left me wondering where Celestia was, all alone on her own.
Most likely also trapped somewhere from where she couldn’t escape. Discord wouldn’t have simply put Luna in a glorified prison and left Celestia and me free to do what we wanted. So there must be more to this predicament than meets the eye.
Now that I think about it, I probably would have also been stuck for eternity in the forest if I hadn’t turned around to backtrack. I could have gone on and on or I could have simply given up and stayed in the same spot, never having been able to find my way out of the forest.
There was a method to this insane chaos and I was sure we could find the ‘exit’ if we were determined enough. The obvious choice would be to go back up to the peak of the mountain and try from there. I told Luna of my thoughts and she thought they were plausible enough to give them a try.
The thing is, we couldn’t just go without a proper plan. And going down the mountain to cheat would probably be against whatever rules Discord imposed on Luna (and now on myself as well). If we wanted our freedom back from this forsaken rock of a mountain, we would need to play his game and overcome the challenge.
Suffice to say, it was a crappy game.
First things first, we need food to last us the difficult climb up the mountain, which meant... ugh, we needed to go out hunting. Luna was right, in such an environment we couldn’t simply look for vegetables or even fish. Aside from chocolate milk snow, there wasn't a lot of variety we could have chosen from that was remotely appropriate for a vegetarian diet.
I would have been fine with eating fish rather than... cute bunnies and the like. We have been eating fish since we were foals and it was widely accepted among ponies to eat those since most aquatic animals have, for the most part, no semblance of sentience. Animals of the mammal variety in Equestria were capable of (somewhat) complex thoughts and emotions, which made this more than horrible in multiple ways. Most mammals in this world could be categorized as self-aware in the (very) early stage of evolution, and if given the chance, they might start forming their own civilizations in a couple of thousand years once they leave behind their primitive origins. For now, they were still (more or less) instinct driven and unable to communicate with ponies (aside from myself, as far as I know).
Another thing we needed was something to keep us warm. Luna already had clothing for herself, but we also needed a warm place to sleep. A makeshift tent would (hopefully) keep the blizzard away from us. Maybe we might get lucky enough to get a small window of time when the weather was clear, but I didn’t count on that happening. At least, not for the whole trip.
We had to expect the worst and prepare accordingly. Anything less and we risk the same thing that happened to me. And this time, I’m not sure we would recover as easily without another pony to get us somewhere warm and safe. Evidently, we wouldn’t die, but we couldn’t start recovering if we were buried in snow.
I made a list of all the things we needed, most importantly a sled to make moving the tent and the food easier. And the firewood, for that matter. Luna told me there was a nearby forest in which she usually hunted and gathered the firewood, so that was where we would start gathering materials for our journey.
It took a few weeks until we had enough animal fur to make me sufficiently warm clothing so that I could go out and help her. I wasn’t comfortable with it, far from it, but I sucked it up and told myself it was the lesser evil. Discord needed to be stopped and this was the only way we would get one step closer to that goal.
A goal that seemed impossible to reach. The Elements of Harmony were our only hope and I stubbornly clung to the belief that they would be able to defeat him, even if a small part in the back of my mind worried that it might not be enough. Heck, we didn’t even have an idea of how to use them, either. That would be a worry for later, though. I kinda hoped we would only have to point them at him and they would do the rest for us...
Our little sled was already proving to be invaluable as we gathered as much as we could when we went foraging. We were limited to a few days in the week that we could do so, the blizzard being too harsh most of the time. For hunting, Luna mainly used traps and checked up on them when she made her trip to the forest, occasionally finding a lone animal wandering the forest. I always looked away when she killed them, unable to watch as their life left their little bodies.
I swore I would never eat meat again once we were free of this infernal mountain. While ponies could eat meat, we didn’t need it. And I made sure to complain to Luna every time, getting on her nerves as much as possible about it. She understood why I did, though. She wasn’t a massive fan of how she had to acquire it, either. Or how messy it could be. Although, she had no qualms about eating meat, much to my annoyance.
It seems we had changed quite a lot since the first time we went through Starswirl’s prototype mirror and encountered that dinosaur, sparking the first argument about predator and prey between us. Luna had gotten a lot more pragmatic about it, and while I was very much against discriminating predators, I wasn’t entirely too keen to defend the standpoint that ponies were opportunistic meat-eaters, anymore.
A few months passed until our tent was finished and big enough for us to comfortably sleep in and have enough space for a little campfire to keep us warm. Obviously, the smoke had to go somewhere and we had to think with that in mind as we built our tent. Unsurprisingly, our tent turned out to be bigger than we expected because of that.
“Ready to set out?” Luna asked me and I gave a small nod. Yu’la snuggled herself against me within my clothes as we left the hut behind us, dragging our loaded sled after us.
“Let us hope my suspicions are correct,” I commented, not having to raise my voice as we had chosen a rare clear day to set out specifically for this. The suns up above us were exchanged for the moon and I did my best to ignore the cry of despair and pain from my sun, begging with an agonized scream for me to stop this madness. I wish I could have, but Discord’s magic was too powerful for me to overpower.
I had no idea why Discord was doing this and why he was doing so now of all times. Having seen his eyes, I could tell he was far older than my sisters and I (and that's counting our previous lives, too). I don’t know why, but I had this feeling that he wasn’t merely ‘playing around' for his own amusement. It felt like it was only a pretense to disguise the grander picture that I was unable to see. A cruel picture, at first glance and he would be paying dearly for it if it is the last thing I do.
Our climb up the mountain was arduous and took longer than we had initially anticipated. This was the first time I found myself wishing for a human body instead of my pony body since my rebirth. The climb would have been by far easier with a bipedal form and, while trying to maneuver narrow passages, I realized that ponies weren’t as superior in comparison to humans as I had deluded myself to believe. Just the advantage of having hands alone would have made things a lot easier for us, being able to hold onto the rocky outcroppings in order to avoid falling to our demise. Even the advantage of flight wasn’t a great help as we climbed the mountain. The air was far too thin for us to even consider flying in the first place, and that wasn't even taking the biting wind into consideration.
I suppose the way that the human body is unspecialized in most things is a blessing in itself. It grants humanity the very ability to make any place in the world their home, even if it is such an incredibly hostile place that it would make it difficult for any other creature to survive in. At least, in the way that only those that have adapted to the environment specifically would be able to survive there. Any other creature wouldn’t be able to survive in a place like that, having adapted to an entirely different environment, instead. A human doesn’t have such limitations and therefore made it their strength.
After all, humans are experts in survival. They don’t need claws or a thick coat. Their will to survive no matter what sees them through anything and that is something that literally allowed them to conquer planet Earth. Something ponies couldn’t claim to have accomplished. If we ever could.
We endured our difficulties without complaint, though. Aside from the trials that we went through due to the limitations of our own bodies, there were times when the blizzard got so bad that it actually managed to bury our tent beneath the snow. It was a good thing we had taken more supplies with us than we initially planned, just in case. Otherwise, I’m sure we would have failed in our task a long time ago.
I suppose Discord had a claw in this, too, trying to delay us for as long as he possibly could without outright resorting to killing us. Two months spent in fear and doubt had taken their toll on our supplies and if this wasn’t going to work, we wouldn’t get another chance to escape this mountain.
Every day I had my sights firmly set on the peak of the mountain, desperately hoping that I was right and it would take us away from here. Luna was as exhausted as I was, with the same small light of hope in her eyes praying for a miracle. With each day we came closer to our goal, the weather seemed to get harsher in an effort to keep us away.
But we continued on relentlessly, determined to escape. An escape that wasn’t even a certainty at that point. Although, as we gave a last push in desperation (our supplies were mostly depleted due to the delays), we finally made it and were met with a familiar sight.
Luna stood next to me and Yu’la flitted out from underneath the confines of the animal fur covering my body as the chocolate milk snow clinging on to me started to melt while we looked out at the warped ocean. The sounds of crashing waves came from beneath us as we stood near the edge of the cliff I had first found myself at during the beginning of Discord’s reign.
I shook off the animal fur, stroking it sadly. The animals that had to die because of this made a brave sacrifice, one I would never forget. As soon as I was able to dream again, there would be an eternal reminder of my sins waiting for me.
My sister helped me make a small gravestone for all the poor animals we had to kill, placing it there at the edge of the cliff while we buried the fur and tent beneath the earth as a last tribute. Luna was at least sympathetic enough to not say anything about it, honoring my wish to give each and every animal that had to give their lives for us a proper send-off.
Never in my life had I been so happy to gorge myself on confections made of ninety-nine percent sugar before this day, finally not having to rely on the flesh of animals for sustenance anymore.
We were free of one prison, but we only exchanged one for the other. As long as the world continued to stay in a state like this, we would never truly be free. This was only a false freedom, for a mad god still sat on his throne able to do whatever he wanted.
Luna and I made ourselves right at home in the little hide-out I made so long ago now. She, Yu'la, and I recovered from the ordeal of constantly freezing our flanks off and having to fear for our lives, finally able to rest easy at ‘night’ without one of us having to stay awake to tend to the fire.
Our journey was long from over, though. A month of recuperating was the only length of time we gave ourselves before we headed out to search for Celestia and our castle.
There was one big problem with that, though. We basically had no idea of where to go as we traveled through a discorded world. Everything looked different enough from five years ago that I couldn’t even tell in which direction the Griffon Empire was that I accompanied Greta to.
I dearly hope my first griffon friend was doing okay in this mess. I’d hate for her to become just another victim of this mad world. I dare not think of the numbers the final death toll will show once this nightmare is finally over. If it will ever come to an end, that is. I still had my doubts about that. It was hard to stay optimistic and believe in the Elements' ability to deal with Discord when all we faced was nothing more than suffering wherever we went.
And that suffering was just as bad now as it was then. Maybe it was even worse, to be honest. It was hard to tell when it was already pretty crappy before and Discord didn’t seem to change much in his method of chaos. Which was kind of a contradiction to what chaos was supposed to be, I absentmindedly noted as we came across the same dancing buffalos I had seen in their ballerina outfits when all of this had first started. It was mildly disturbing to see them so... nonchalant about it.
“This is even weirder seeing it with my own eyes,” Luna said, watching them uneasily as they got way too close for comfort. “And you went through this for three years without going mad, sister?”
“You get used to it, weirdly enough,” I sighed, continuing to trot on as Yu’la chirped from within my saddlebags, poking her head out while munching on a jade gemstone that we had found a small cluster of a week or so into our journey to find Celestia. I gave the little dragon a smile, shaking my head. “Don’t eat too much, darling. I doubt we will find new ones anytime soon.”
Yu’la ignored my words, however, instead burying herself back into the bags with a defiant growl. Luna snickered at the little munching noises coming from the little dragon (they even got more exaggerated in a very childish way). “You know how she gets with those, Sunny. It’s been five years since she had some, let her have them.”
“I’m just worried she will get a tummy ache,” I admitted, sighing. “I can’t say enough how grateful I am to you for looking after her, Lulu.”
Luna smiled as she nuzzled me affectionately and I leaned into it. “You worry too much,” she said. “And you don’t have to thank me for something as simple as this. She is family, after all.”
“I’m glad you think so,” I said, smiling back at her. “If only we can find our other missing family member...”
“Indeed...” Luna agreed, frowning slightly. “There aren’t even any rumors of her whereabouts. How are we supposed to find Celestia in this mess? It's like searching for a needle in a haystack if the haystack is made out of needles and the one you’re searching for isn’t even in it.”
That might as well be true, I suppose. We couldn’t even reliably navigate our way around the land without getting lost every few days or weeks. I sighed, looking sadly at my Moon. “Honestly? I’m beginning to think the only way to find her is for us to stumble into her on pure chance.”
“The universe isn’t that kind to us, sister.”
“One can hope...”
That was, after all, the only thing that still managed to give us the strength of will to go on. Sometimes it appeared so bleak that hope might as well have ceased to exist, but we continued on. We had to remain steadfast and persevere, maintaining our belief that we would someday see the world return to normal. We had to hope that the Elements of Harmony could accomplish that which we ourselves couldn’t.
To make matters worse, my knowledge of the monsters Discord had created was pitifully out of date, much to my chagrin. Luna and I had to fight off chimeras of a thousand different variations, more often than not having to run away for safety as everything we did showed next to no effect against them. Heck, even throwing trees at them only slowed them down for a few moments, at best.
Alas, months passed and we came no closer to figuring out where Celestia was. And months turned to years with no change. Neither were we able to find our sister or our castle, the only hope of defeating Discord being found in the cavern beneath it.
It was incredibly frustrating to both Luna and myself. Discord didn’t leave us alone for most of the time we traveled through this hellhole of a world, mocking us for our failure to locate our sister. The draconequus, as we learned his species was called while he gloated to us, oftentimes made us into his personal toys, enacting twisted stories that I swear he shouldn’t have been aware of in the first place. Like some of the things that we vaguely remembered from our time on Earth or even Azeroth. We had to reenact these stories for him without getting a say in it, sometimes being literally used as puppets in a puppet show of his own design. He made tons of obscure references and expected us to understand them, all the while doing his best to make our lives miserable.
He even sent us to the moon and back in a cardboard space shuttle labeled 'Apollo the 2nd' (after crossing out the eight with red paint). There even was a fake movie set as he filmed our 'adventure'.
Of course, the ass laughed his behind off as he made me stumble out of the 'spacecraft' as I was supposed to say my line and whatnot. So... now the moon had an imprint of my butt instead of my hoof on it...
I really hate that noodle dragon snake.
In the end, we somehow managed to escape his sight long enough to get lost in an underground cavern. Massive reflective crystals arranged in some kind of maze-like formation made us run into walls more often than I cared to admit. If it weren’t for the glowing mushrooms that proved to be edible, we would have long since starved to ‘kinda-sorta-ish’ death as we searched for an exit.
Those mushrooms, while edible, also had strange effects when we ate them. Some made us grow taller while others shrunk us down. I could tell that Discord was painfully making it obvious that this cavern was a reference to Wonderland and how Alice could, by consumption of certain foods, change herself in the same way. Through the Looking-Glass, indeed.
We might have spent one or two years (or four, five, six years, I wasn’t that certain, our estrus cycle was a bit... wobbly) bumbling around in that maze, trying to figure out the layout of the maze that, as we found out, also shifts around. It was no wonder that we had a hard time trying to get out of there. Discord probably set us up to end up here, hoping we would never make it out to freedom.
By my estimations, about fifteen years must have passed since his reign started and we were no closer to ending it when this all began. His reign might even last for much longer, should we be well and truly trapped in this mirror maze.
Although, as I found myself being shaken awake from slumber by my darling dragon, there was a tiny glimmer of hope coming back to me as she presented me with a little bunny, a clock hanging from its neck. Perhaps Discord got tired of us ‘losing’ to the maze and wanted to throw us a clue as to how we could get out.
Luna, as I roused her from her own slumber, gave the bunny a death glare. She had been as fessed up about this maze as I was, and this obvious continuous mocking from Discord had been making her more irritable over the years.
“Does he really expect us to follow the rabbit?” she asked me grouchily and I shrugged, rather reluctant to distrust the cute little bunny. On one hoof, it was probably a trap (a cute trap, but a trap nonetheless) and on the other, it was the only change in who knows how long we have been stuck here, so I was inclined to just... go with it and hope for the best.
“It can’t hurt to try. We can’t get any more lost than we already are, right?” I suggested and she snorted, although she came around as I gave her a gentle nuzzle. So we told Yu’la to let go of the bunny and immediately started to follow it, not letting it leave our sight for one second.
“I swear... if we run across Alice as a pony,” Luna muttered and I giggled, trying to picture how said mare (or filly, depending on how old she would be) would look. We might even run across the Cheshire Cat, which would be totally awesome. Maybe.
On second thought, the Cheshire Cat might turn out to be a crazy monster just as bad (if not worse) than Discord. This world was already horrifying enough with one mad creature nudging things along. Or literally pulling the strings on ponies in an improvised 'puppet theater' in Discord's case (seriously, one time he got bored enough with us not following the 'script', he made Luna play as a very handsome 'prince' and me as the mute seapony maiden falling in love with each other while we flopped around like fish on land).
Anyway! As we followed the little bunny, we sometimes had to eat from the mushrooms in order to fit through the gaps in between some of the crystals. Eventually, we came upon a different section of the labyrinth we had never encountered before. Smack dab in the middle of the massive cavernous chamber was a forest, massive glowing mushrooms standing next to short, dense trees. Leaves were falling in a constant state of autumn, seemingly evaporating once they touched the ground. Every time they did, new leaves would grow on the tree's branches before they would also fall down, renewing the cycle all over again.
From within the forest, we could make out a faint sound of rushing water and a bright light peeking through the foliage that could have been mistaken for sunlight. Thinking we might be able to escape, we started to gallop toward the forest in anticipation of finally finding an exit.
What we found instead was just as relieving. It wasn’t the exit we have so desperately been hoping for, but it was just as good. Nay, even better. It was our sister.
Celestia sat at a long table, drinking from porcelain cups while simultaneously stuffing her face with one cake after another. As we got closer to her, she didn’t seem to react to our presence at all. It was like she couldn’t even see us. Feeling helpless, we called out to her in the hopes of getting through to her, but much to our dismay, she continued to eat and drink, oblivious to our presence. She hadn’t gained any weight at all from the unhealthy food the flying piggies were serving her, continuously supplying her with cakes and other confections, non-stop.
I was reminded of a dream, one Luna and I had invaded my twin on and dismissed as some kind of fantasy on her part. It wasn’t. The dream had been a vision and we never thought it could come true. Celestia had foreseen the reign of Discord and we had done nothing to prepare for it.
We had been oblivious to the danger it foreshadowed.
It was like a slap to the muzzle for both Luna and myself. We knew about this possible future and ignored the warning. Now, our sister was unresponsive and stuffing her face with baked goods while we could do nothing about it. This here, the table with the tea and cake, the muffins, brownies, and whatnot, was a tea party with no escape once you sat down at it to eat.
“Celestia...” I whimpered sadly in anguish, trying futilely to get her eyes to focus on me as I stood on the table right in front of her. “Please, my love. Can’t you hear my voice?”
No answer came from her as she levitated the fork back to her mouth, a piece of Sacher torte sitting on a plate in front of her. I tried taking it away, only for another plate to take its place a moment later, brought to the table by those infernal servants in the form of flying pigs (they looked deceptively cute with their cartoonish proportions, only to hide evil incarnate behind those falsely innocent eyes of theirs).
Luna tried to stop them from reaching the table altogether, only to notice that for every pig she held back, two more were making it past her. And as if Discord was personally taunting us, Celestia seemed to devour each pastry even faster than the last as she stared listlessly at them like a soulless puppet. For each cake, donut, and sugary treat she ate, I wept and cried for her to hear my voice, to snap out of it. I wanted my beautifully perverted wife back.
It was all for naught, though. My twin continued to eat, unresponsive to everything except her tea and cake. As long as it was on a platter in front of her (or in a cup), she would eat and drink without pause.
Haah. Her bladder must be made of reinforced iron, seriously.
We couldn’t even get her to leave the chair she sat on. She seemingly stuck to it no matter what we tried and it was a fruitless struggle to get her to stop eating the damn cake. I was ninety-nine percent sure that those were the reason why she was in the state that she was in and each day we failed to get her to snap out of it, we started to try even crazier ideas of how to get her to notice us.
Celestia, on the other hoof, remained unfazed. She didn’t even sleep, as we found out and it made it even harder for us trying to break her out of this suns-forsaken haze. Luna couldn’t command her to go to sleep, either. How does one stop someone from stuffing their face when they don’t even need to sleep and react to nothing but the sugary death on the table?
It was a futile endeavor but we didn't give up. Luna and I tried to find out from where the pigs got the cake, only to find out they literally popped into existence every few seconds from a bright shaft of light we had mistaken for sunlight. They carried trays of confections and tea to our sister like it was their only purpose in life (which, I suppose, might as well have been the case).
As time went on, Luna tried to slaughter the pigs as her frustration grew, only for them to pop up into existence even faster. I tried to use my stare on them, hoping that the intimidation effect of my gift could affect them, but they shrugged it off like it was nothing. It was almost like they weren't even alive, as much of a puppet as my twin has been reduced to.
The pigs continued on and on, shrugging off everything we threw at them like mindless drones. Despite my protests, Luna sacrificed the bunny with the clock in a rage right in front of Celestia, only for her to continue eating her apple pie after it had become covered in the poor animal’s guts and blood.
I didn’t talk to Luna for weeks after that, mourning the loss of the poor, innocent bunny. Despite my misgivings, I couldn’t stay mad at her for long, not after we had to hunt all those animals for survival reasons on the mountain before this. And… it was kinda hard to actually condemn her for getting frustrated enough to lash out at the creature that brought us here without so much as giving us an idea of how we could free our sister from her curse.
One day, just as we were about to run out of ideas (okay, let's be real here, we had run out of ideas a long time ago and were trying out random things by now on the off chance something was going to work), Luna stared at our stash of mushrooms and shrugged, placing one of them on the plate a little piggy was carrying towards Celestia.
The effect wasn’t immediate, although something was obviously happening as our sister grew slightly larger in size. I told Luna to put more of those enlarging mushrooms on the plates that the pigs brought over to my twin, noticing the faintest change in how she behaved and moved.
It was like a little bit of life returned to her eyes. As she started to tower over us, I suspected the dosage of whatever was in those cakes wasn’t enough to affect her increased size. I flew up to my twin’s muzzle, staring into those big orbs of hers with nothing but hope and anticipation.
“Sister?” I asked hesitantly, and, much to my relief, her hazy eyes stopped staring emptily ahead of her for a fraction of a second. Her ear gave a twitch. “It’s me, Summer. Your wife...”
“Sum...mer?” Celestia whispered although the volume of her voice managed to sound like she was speaking quite loudly. I smiled, nodding tearfully while telling her that I was here for her, here to rescue her. “I... Summer..? My wife?”
“Yes, your wife,” I laughed, seeing the life in her eyes start to return fully. It was a massive relief to see her like this, recognizing my voice even as the pigs uselessly piled up one plate of confections after another on the table, completely forgotten by my sister. “Let’s get you out of here, Tia.”
"I... I can go..?” she asked and I nodded, seeing the first tears fall from her face as if she had expected to remain at that table for the rest of her life. Luna offered her the other mushrooms to get her back to a reasonable size as she followed us back to the crack in the wall from where we had originally entered this chamber.
And, as she was back to her regular size and went through the crack with us, we didn’t come back out within the maze, but instead, we found ourselves back at the cliff. Always that cliff...
Seeing the sky again (even if it was all wonky and nauseatingly distorted so close to the twisting ocean), caused all of us to let out a happy laugh in relief. I dragged my sisters into a feathery embrace and we stayed there, hugging each other as we couldn't believe our luck. We were free at last from that infernal maze, breathing in fresh air again. And, most importantly, we were finally reunited with each other. Tia told us what had happened to her, thanking us profusely for setting her free.
The day the chaos began, Tia had been waiting for us at the dinner table when, instead of our chefs, a little piggy approached her with a strawberry cheesecake. Celestia didn't think much of it, finding it rather cute and adorable as it stared at her with expectant eyes. She had assumed it was some sort of hidden romantic gesture from me, so she took the cake and ate it with a flutter in her chest.
Then came the next piggy, offering her a blueberry muffin and a crystal berry tea. After that, things started to get worse for her as she automatically reached out to the chocolate chip cookies another pig served her. Before she knew what was happening, she was already eating the glazed donuts brought to her by the next piggy. On and on this went until she was a mere spectator in her own body.
The memories blurred together after a while and she had no idea when she ended up in that cave, already having retreated further into her mind as her despair and depression grew. It was only when we came along and Luna tried her idea out on a whim that she gradually noticed a change and my voice guided her back into the real world.
A world that was in desperate need of our help. Tia agreed with us that our only hope was to find the Elements of Harmony once she saw what had become of our once peaceful nation. At first, she didn’t believe us when we told her Discord was behind all of this, that he was a genuine god of chaos and mischief, finding it difficult to accept that a single creature was capable of rewriting reality on such a large scale. But as she saw him toying with our subjects while we tried to stay out of his sight (I wasn’t certain we truly managed to do so, one never knew with Discord), she couldn’t deny our claims.
And it gave her a target to concentrate her anger on. It gave her a goal to work towards. A need to bring Discord to justice and restore harmony to our world, just as much as Luna and I wanted to bring him down to his knees and spit him in his stupid smug mug. And I wanted him to suffer like he made my sister suffer, trapped in her own mind. He would know the horror of his own body disobeying his will, even if I have to break every single bone in his body over and over…
The self-proclaimed Lord of Chaos had managed to piss all of us off at the same time and we wouldn’t rest until we had the Elements of Harmony in our possession and used them on him. After that? Well, I have no idea what they will do to him, but I'm sure it won't be enough...
Thus, we searched. We searched and stayed as hidden as much as we could manage. We flew until we were exhausted, we fought monsters until we had to drag ourselves to safety, and we saved as many ponies as we could from every threat imaginable (and, much to our dismay, unimaginable).
We traveled and traveled, crossed mountains and rivers, braved perils nopony should… until we felt a tugging on our magic, that is. Curious as to what was calling out to us, we followed the sensation to where all of this started for us. The damn cliff.
I should have known Discord would pull something like this, making us travel all over the place and once he got bored of that, we would get drawn to the one place we never expected we should go back to. I should have known better, I suppose.
So, seeing that we were back to square one, except with skills and magic honed by experience and life-and-death situations alike, we only had one direction left to explore. A direction I never previously considered.
To go forward, one must be willing to take a step backward...
Haah… jumping off of cliffs isn't exactly my idea of 'fun'. Especially with my back turned to the frankly frighteningly steep drop. But what can I do? For some reason, I knew Discord made the puzzle of returning home for us in such a way we would never consider doing it if we were remotely sane.
Well... fuck him. I have survived this hellhole for how long now? I can't say I was exactly sound in mind after all the crazy shit I had to go through. Survival instincts? What are those? The only thing that mattered was defeating that ugly goat noodle.
One leap of faith later, we found ourselves back at the place we had longed to return to for such a long time. The Everfree Forest was a welcome sight, shining like a beacon of hope, never having looked more welcoming to us. We were finally home.
The dark forest seemingly remained unchanged. The gnarly trees gave us a certain sense of safety, despite their appearance. This forest of unparalleled danger was, in contrast to the world of Discord’s design, almost inviting in comparison.
As we flew over it, it became blatantly obvious what has been calling out to us over such a long distance. By now, the faint feeling had become an unbearably strong pull on us, demanding our presence as we came closer and closer to the source.
The sight of the Tree of Harmony has never before been as incredible and breathtaking as it was right now. Luna let out a relieved sigh, basking in its presence as we neared it.
“Here we are,” I smiled, placing a hoof on the star as I flew up to the tree with my sisters. “This is our only hope in defeating Discord. Please, let this work...”
“Are you sure the Elements of Harmony will be enough, sister?” Luna asked me a bit unsurely and I gave the tree a determined look. It has to. “We don’t know what will happen to the tree if we take them away from here.”
“Even without the Elements, the tree will remain strong enough to keep the Everfree Forest in check,” Celestia said, sounding so sure of it that I knew it had to be so. There was no way it couldn’t be so, right? “It is made of powerful magic.”
“If you’re sure,” Luna said, only marginally reassured by her words.
“We are,” I smiled, sending a bit of magic into the tree and one after another, the gemstones that made up the Elements of Harmony came free from the tree. “This has to work against Discord. We can’t afford to doubt this now, our subjects depend on us. Let us put an end to his reign.”
Two gems floated over to Luna, while another three similarly shaped ones came over to me. Celestia received one simple gemstone from one of its branches, but another came from behind the star as the bark opened to release the final Element in the form of a gemstone shaped like a magenta star.
The presence of Kindness, Generosity, and Hope had my very being filled with a renewed vigor, revitalizing me in ways I never experienced before. The same was true for Celestia and Luna as their Elements also filled them with strength.
Within the presence of those former alicorns turned powerful artifacts, I could tell that they were far more powerful than Discord could ever hope to be. My own magic was finally able to reconnect properly with my sun, flooding my body with a long-forgotten might that greeted me like an old friend.
I hadn’t realized how much of my mana pool had slowly drained away without having my sun provide more for me. I had almost used up all of my reserves over the years that I hadn’t been connected to the sun in the proper way. My 'death' had probably drained the majority of it... had I been more careless, I might have not made it.
It was as much confirmation that I was still mortal... but also not quite. I was more than that, all thanks to my bond with the Red Sun. A mortal goddess...
My overly happy sun welcomed me joyously back as I took control of her from Discord. Wounds and such were nothing more than simple scrapes now. The thrum of arcane energy wasn’t near that of the Elements, but it didn’t need to be. We stored the Elements in our saddlebags and mentally prepared ourselves for what was to come (I had to tell Yu’la that the green crystal representing Hope wasn’t a jade she could eat... that dragon, I swear).
“Ready for the final confrontation, sisters?” Celestia asked, drawing upon her magic in preparation for a powerful spell. Luna gave her a nod and I let out a hum with a smile.
It took Celestia only a single moment of concentration before she teleported us to the nearest point she sensed the Lord of Chaos at. With our might fully restored, our very beings cried out against the wrongness of what Discord did to the world and directed us to his position like a painful stab in the back of our minds.
With a flash and crack of displaced air, we appeared not too far away from the chaos god as he sat on his throne with his back to us. As we approached him, his throne turned eerily around to face us once we were close enough to him. Discord laughed with mirth, not at all put off by us seeking him out.
“Isn’t this fun, Princesses?” he chuckled, a grin perpetually etched on his muzzle. “How about a game of pin the tail on the pony?”
As he held up the tail of my twin, I stared in disbelief at the blank spot where Celestia’s should have been, bones and all. Luna was just as baffled as I was, while Celestia let out a low growl after she gasped in shock.
“No? How about...” Discord began but Celestia wasn’t having any of it.
“Playtime is over for you, Discord,” she told him while we glared up at him. The draconequus was munching without much concern from something that looked like a bag of seeds, carelessly throwing the seeds all over the place. I snorted, feeling one of my eyelids twitch as some of them bounced off of us. He totally did that on purpose.
“Oh, I doubt that, Sunbutt,” he commented, seemingly getting off on those seeds (I doubted they were 'that' good, but he was weird like that). They didn’t look like they were supposed to be edible, whatever those seeds even were. Not that he would care about something like that, I guess.
I stomped my hooves on the pink and purple tiled ground, wings flaring out in anger. “Your reign ends now, Discord,” I said with a snort. “You have caused enough suffering.”
Discord gave us a haughty smile in amusement. “My, my, you're so sure of yourselves,” he said, a skeptical look in his red pupils. “What makes you so confident about that, hmm?”
“These,” Celestia answered, levitating out her Elements while Luna and I did the same for ours. “The Elements of Harmony.”
He smirked. “So, you’ve got some shiny trinkets,” Discord retorted while rolling his eyes. “Good luck with those.”
Suddenly, I felt an uneasy feeling settle over me as he looked totally unfazed by their presence, but I didn’t let that make me falter. It was... strange the way he looked at them. As if he knew exactly what they were. Or rather, who they were.
…they had to work, I told myself. He was only playing mind games with us, there was no way he couldn’t feel the sheer power contained within those gemstones. The last remnants of the alicorn race of old. If he truly is as old as I thought he was, he must know about them, right?
So... why did I feel like he was purposefully sitting there doing nothing to stop us while we held this ultimate trump card in our grasp? Why did I feel like he knew exactly what was going to happen? There is no way he would just... stay here and do nothing. It didn’t make any sense.
Well, if there is one thing he always insisted on, it’s his unpredictableness (even though his chaos was sometimes very much predictable, to a painful degree).
One by one, the Elements started to circle us until they got so fast they were blurring together. Discord just laughed at us, finding amusement in our stern expressions as we glared up at him from where we stood. It has to work, I told myself with a shaky breath, gulping my fear back down where it belonged. Discord can’t stand against the power of the Elements of Harmony and be unaffected, it... it has to work. It just has to. Please.
A faint whisper of my sun called out to me and I noticed Luna’s moon and Celestia’s sun were doing the same to my sisters. A reassuring whisper was all I needed to shake off this fear of uncertainty that plagued me. My sun was here with me, nothing could go wrong now that I had her back. I decided to act upon my instincts, letting my sun guide me as we worked together with my sisters and their heavenly bodies, and not a moment later we stood perfectly underneath a twin solar eclipse.
Maybe Discord should have taken us seriously as the world itself made the Elements of Harmony into its voice, calling forth a vortex of rainbow-colored magic. The eclipse in the sky amplified our own power and with a single thought, we told the Elements to bring down their full might on Discord and make him unable to cause more havoc and restore reality to what it was supposed to be.
The Elements answered our call, gladly bringing down their wrath on the child playing god. Because that was what Discord was to them, a child toying with things he shouldn’t be toying with.
And, as if waking up from a bad dream, the world around us was returned to a state before Discord’s reign started, his influence over reality broken. All that remained of him was a statue forever frozen in an eternal laugh. I could still feel a faint trace of his presence, but it was so subtle one could easily miss it.
A tiny part in the back of my mind shivered as I felt like he was satisfied, happy even. I couldn’t fathom why he would feel like that, it made no sense. Puzzling over this would do me no good, though. It would only drive me crazy trying to understand the enigma that was Discord.
“It’s finally over,” I whispered, feeling afraid this was only an elaborate trick, an illusion. I slumped down to the ground as nothing happened to take this victory away from us. It was like a weight on my shoulders was lifted once I realized we had actually done it.
Discord couldn’t do anything anymore as a lawn ornament. He was defeated. We won.
As I looked around, though, I noticed that the ground underneath us had remained in the chessboard pattern. Thankfully, I could see the end of that not too far away from where we were, almost having started to panic in my confusion. This land would forever be one last reminder that Discord had, for twenty or so years, reigned over the entire world with his chaotic magic.
Magic that I was pretty sure must have been a remnant of the being that Hope and her siblings had battled. I mean... it had to be so, right? How else could he be so powerful?
But... what if it wasn’t a remnant like I thought and, instead, something else entirely? He talked about eldritch horrors as if they were beneath him, why would he talk like that if his own magic was only a remnant of the most hideous being to ‘grace’ this universe?
Anyway, worrying about this would do me no good, so I did my best to leave it be. After all... our nightmare has, at long last, ended. Now we could begin to rebuild. Why worry about things that don’t need to concern us anymore?
A faint laughter echoed from the statue and I swore I would put him in an open place within the city of Canterlot and tell every bird I could find to take a dump on him as a reminder of his failed reign. He deserved way worse than that, but it would be a start.
We will see if he still is in the mood of laughing after a thousand years trapped in his own mind, the bastard.