//------------------------------//
// Prologue: An Enemy Exposed 
// Story: A Method to his Madness 
// by Luna-tic Scientist 
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"...so it can be seen from the data that our universe appears to have a low mass-energy compared to others outside the brane boundaries..."

Neighmann stood nervously in the presenter's entrance to the main lecture theatre in RIMS, the Royal Institute for Magic and Science. Through the gap in the curtain he could see the banked seating stalls, full of other students from the Institute; the crowd was slightly more unsettled as the current presenter started to wind down. Ponies knew that this was nearly the last presentation of the day and were eager to be off to the local pubs to celebrate or commiserate with those that had already passed this particular gauntlet.

To Neighmann they were all a rainbow sea of coloured blobs -- he knew his friends were out there, but his mind was so focused on the upcoming ordeal that the individual ponies just blurred together; the faces and marks may as well have belonged to any crowd in Equestria. All of the clades were present in roughly equal proportions: unicorns like Neighmann, as well as pegasi and the prosaically named earth ponies who made up for their lack of either horn or wings with phenomenal strength and endurance. 

"...this could be by a factor of as much as ten to the thirtieth power -- such a vast amount more than ours that it is hard to visualise, but we can try. Our universe contains our world and its moon, the sun, a collection of orbiting 'stars' -- just rocks, of course -- and, as far as we can tell, nothing else..."

A unicorn's ability to remotely manipulate dangerous material meant that those with an interest in science tended to gravitate towards chemistry or other practical field, while the other two clades’ lack of fine physical control tended to make them better theoreticians, a fact born out by the higher numbers of pegasi or earth ponies with tenure at RIMS. It was here that Neighmann was bucking the trend; his special talent was mathematics, with a particular interest in chaos theory. It was hard to find a more theoretical subject.

"...even have enough mass for it to collapse under its own weight and form some kind of gravitationally stabilised fusion reactor, and this would happen not once, but many, many times. The vast darkness would be lit by lights, but they would be so very different from our own tiny sun. Thank you, everypony, for your attention. Are there any questions?"

There were, and Neighmann removed his eye from the gap in the curtain, looking instead at the mirror-finished plaque that hung at chest height near the opening. Sitting back on his haunches he reached out to rest one hoof on the bottom edge of the metal plate. It was a tradition with graduating students, a bit of silly superstition in this modern world that nonetheless provided some comfort at a stressful time.

"The Twilight Sparkle theatre," he mumbled under his breath. Like most students Neighmann had read Professor Sparkle's biography -- with foreword by no lesser light than Princess Celestia herself -- she, despite her genius, had apparently also suffered from terrible nerves in academic situations. Knowing this, and knowing what she'd gone on to achieve in her long, productive life, did something to ease the young stallion's nervousness.

Not all students held with this tradition, of course; when he'd spoken to his alchemist friend Equilibrium about it, she'd said she had a different technique to handle the stress of public speaking.

"Oh that's easy," she'd said. "My lab is just down the corridor from the theatre; if things go really badly I know I can be back in five minutes with enough transmogrification potion to turn the whole audience into monkeys." 

Neighmann's eyes had widened at her flat tone and serious look, wondering if he should have a quiet word with her supervisor, but she only managed to hold the expression for a few seconds before bursting out laughing.

He shook his head and smiled at the memory; Equilibrium had passed her viva and would be in the audience somewhere. "'The joy of discovery is the greatest joy of all.' " He read out the quote quietly, voice steadying as the truth of the statement settled in him. "Very true, Twilight. Here's hoping the rest of the faculty agrees with you." Neighmann traced the embossed five- and six-pointed stars that had made up the long-dead scientist's mark, then lowered his hoof to gaze past the engraving to his own reflection. 

Standing up, he fussed with the drape of the black student's robes over his withers, quick touches of magic smoothing down the dark orange fur underneath the rented clothes. His horn glowed a faint orange once again, more magic pulling the slightly too large robe forward to fully uncover his own mark. Looking down at the image of the stylized abacus growing in the fur of his hip he smiled, he'd had to look it up in a history crystal before he understood what the thing represented. 

Even though his folk were farmers, they'd been delighted when his mark had appeared -- his sire had said that having somepony to handle the farm's accounts was a blessing from Luna herself. They'd been even more pleased when he'd received the scholarship to study advanced mathematics at the prestigious Canterlot Royal Institute, although they freely admitted they didn't have a clue about what he was actually doing. It was a shame that they couldn't make it to his final presentation.

"If that's all, everypony, we’ll move on."

Neighmann's eyes widened at the sudden loud voice from the theatre, then hurriedly used the polished plaque to check his pale yellow mane -- cropped short enough that it really should have been more manageable than it was -- then stood ready behind the curtain.

"Thank you. For our final presentation of the evening we have 'On location sensitive deviations from mean entropy; a complex intuitional fuzzy soft-set approach' by Mister Neighmann."

The curtain was whisked away and the young stallion trotted smartly up to the podium, cleared his throat and launched into his presentation.

"As you know, our world is governed by five fundamental forces; the strong and weak nuclear forces, electromagnetism, gravity, and, of course, magic. It has been known since Starswirl the Bearded's day that magic is able to override the other forces, and it has been suspected that even undirected magic can have some effect. What I will show you today is proof of this, which has some interesting and possibly worrying implications for health and safety policy."

Swallowing heavily, he called up his first slide on the big screen, then picked up his spellcraft pointer and started his talk in earnest. Most of it was pretty straightforward, and he felt his confidence build and his voice steady. Over the next thirty minutes he talked about the data collected from the Equestrian Office for Accident Prevention, the Royal Guard and the Office of Public Works, how he'd mapped it and used a method of his own devising to pick out subtle anomalies in the distribution of accidents, crime and maintenance problems.

After ploughing through several slides of complex mathematics, he got to the bit that would interest even those outside his own chosen field of study. The next slide showed a photograph of the city of Canterlot taken by high-flying pegasus, a number of locations highlighted with green circles.

"So after all that, what did we actually find?" he asked the crowd. "When this work started, we expected to find a correlation between the incidence of the events we were examining and areas of high magical background." The blue dot from his spellcraft pointer tracked across the photo, pausing at the marked areas. "The School for Gifted Unicorns, the Royal Institute's high energy magic building, the Fancypants corporation's spellcraft production facility, and so on."

Neighmann pulled up the next slide, overlaying the map with his processed data. The streets and buildings faded to a pale greyscale, buried under a mottled rainbow of colours. Most of the city was a dull red with the occasional patch of orange or yellow, except for those areas he'd just marked out, which were yellow-green.

"This is pretty much as we hypothesised -- areas of experimental or inexperienced magic use do show higher than normal accident rates. This is obvious, you might say -- if a foal doesn't know what he or she is doing, there are bound to be more accidents. There are, of course -- but this isn't just in the immediate area, but shifted both in time and position from the working locus." Neighmann smiled at the audience, gesturing grandly. "It also shows that the data extraction method is working."

"This is the really interesting bit." He zoomed the image out, bringing the bulk of Mount Aither-Erebos, into view. Here, to the east of the city, the colours rose up through the spectrum until they formed a patch of violet right over the location of the Royal Palace itself. The image on the slide then rotated, going from plan view to one in three dimensions. The signal over the Palace was huge compared to anywhere else in the city. A gasp ran around the auditorium.

"I know what you all may be thinking, but I'm not for one moment suggesting that their Royal Highness' are responsible for this peak in the data -- for a start, their celestial manipulations occur at great distances and would not expected to influence anything in Equestria itself." This particular statement was one suggested by his supervisor, and for once he heartily agreed with the mare. Any suggestion that the Sisters were involved in anything suspect would get shouted down by the crowd, and he'd probably be summarily ejected from the theatre.

"There are two other reasons for this conclusion. First, the locus of effect isn't actually in the Royal Palace; rather, it is half a kilometre to the west, somewhere in the grounds." Neighmann flicked the image projector's controls and moved to the next slide. He turned and watched the video play on the big screen, a cardinal sin for any presenter, but the data was fascinating even after all the times he'd seen it. 

The isometric view of Canterlot stayed the same, but the spiky 'accident plot' became blurred and rounded, the sharp peaks of the previous slide turning to low, rounded hillocks that covered multiple buildings. The mountain near the Palace had disappeared entirely. "This is the same statistical map, but is using only the oldest data. We started at 1002 anno noctis, two years after the reinstatement of Princess Luna, as these were the earliest records available to us. As I advance the video the map will change, each frame using a slightly later data set, so what you'll see is how these anomalous events are changing with time."

The video played at a few decades a second, advancing from 1002AN to the present day at 1524AN. The data overlay slowly increased in resolution as the years rolled by, while the initially flat plot developed small humps and peaks that shifted and changed as industries and institutions moved around the city. There were a few constant features -- the School for Gifted Unicorns for one -- but these were pretty small compared to the peak in the data that was developing near the Palace. The first sign was at around the thirteen hundreds; a persistent 'hill' that gradually rose to dwarf the rest of the plot, turning into a mountain that rivalled the size of the one Canterlot was built into.

"This, then, is the other reason why Their Highnesses cannot be responsible; they and the Palace have been present for centuries, yet this signal only really appears in the last hundred years or so." Neighmann shrugged, a flex of shoulders and forelegs that came close to dislodging his rented robes. 

"Accepting that the Princesses cannot be responsible for this--" Neighmann broke off, distracted by a sudden snigger from somewhere at the back of the theatre. "--for this signal, there is only one candidate that I am aware of. Unfortunately he is only a legend." Here the Neighman stopped again, smiling weakly to his audience, as he put up a final slide. "I am still working on trying to understand the cause of the signal, and would welcome any suggestions."

On that last screen, overlaid with a list of acknowledgements, was an image of a snake-like chimera of a creature, no two limbs or body parts from the same species. A heavy, goat-like head with mismatched eyes seemed to glare out at the audience. Out of the corner of one eye Neighmann caught a glimpse of his supervisor, Calculus, closing her eyes and shaking her head in despair. Calculus had tolerated his more outlandish theories with her customary good humour, but had cautioned him not to put anything like that in his presentation. 'Don't give hostages to fortune' was one phrase she was fond of.

Neighmann, suddenly feeling nervous, nodded his head to the audience and put his pointer down. "Thank you for your attention. Are there any questions?"

After the polite hoof-stomping died away there was a moment of silence, then one of the faculty, a dappled grey older pegasus, got slowly to his hooves. Neighmann groaned inside. "Yes, Professor Haygen?" Not him, he thought, anypony but him. Haygen looked like somepony's grandfather, but that kindly muzzle hid a mind as sharp and as pitiless as a lance.

The pegasus cleared his throat. "Thank you, Mister Neighmann for a most... interesting presentation. Your final flight of fantasy notwithstanding, I'm sure the rest of the Institute are as grateful as I am that you don't think their Royal Highnesses, our sponsors, are responsible for waging a subtle campaign of terror throughout Canterlot."

Neighmann gritted his teeth at the sarcasm, ears flattening a little as some not-so-subtle laughter rippled through the audience.

"All that aside, I have a question about the method you used to deconvolute the historical data. I believe you said the technique was novel; it has not undergone a full peer review?"

"No, Professor."

"I thought as much. Would you be so kind as to go back to equation fourteen?"

Neighmann did so and, over the next twenty minutes, Haygen proceeded to pick apart the method he'd used to process the data. The one error he'd apparently made was used as a hammer, the pegasus wielding it to break the carefully balanced edifice of his years of research into a pile of disconnected fragments. By the time it was over Neighmann felt as broken as his work, stunned by the apparent flaws in theories that he'd been sure were correct. He barely heard the announcer thanking him for his efforts or the bulk of the crowd leaving the auditorium.

"Welcome to academia, Neighmann," Calculus said in a wry tone, stepping into his line of sight. "I warned you about getting too frivolous; you must have pushed all of Haygen's buttons for him to rip into you like that." The green earth pony mare reared up to give him a quick hug. "I'll admit, I didn't see it coming, but the old bastard is a genius. Take a couple of days to get your head together, then come and find me; we'll do a post-mortem and see if he's right." She glanced over her shoulder at the other pony waiting a few steps away. "Don't sweat it, we'll sort it out."

Easy for you to say, you're not the one who's just been humiliated in public, Neighmann thought bitterly. "Yes, Doctor," he said, fighting to keep his voice steady.

She nudged him on the shoulder and trotted off, allowing Equilibrium to approach. She stepped up to his side, then leaned her head against his. "I'm sorry, that must have been pretty awful. Let me help you commiserate; I know the Golden Delicious has just had a delivery from Apple Industries."

Neighmann hesitated, tempted by the two attractors of a sympathetic mare and the opportunity to get very, very drunk and forget this nasty evening. Even if I can't forget, the hangover will make it hard to think of anything at all, he thought, smiling weakly at the cream and tan unicorn mare. "You're on, Libi," he said to the alchemist, "let me just sort out all this stuff and I'll be with you." He gestured at the rented robes and started to collect his spellcraft presentation equipment.

"Sure thing," she said, mock scowling at him and prodding his shoulder with one sharp hoof, "be there in fifteen minutes or I'll come looking for you."

Neighmann smiled in return, watching Equilibrium's tan tail sway hypnotically as she trotted out of the theatre.

"A stallion could do a lot worse than her."

The voice came from behind him; it was cultured, female and nopony he recognised.

"Excuse me?" he asked in a slightly annoyed tone, turning to glare at the cloaked figure who'd intruded on his conversation with Equilibrium. The newcomer was a tall and slender unicorn with fur the colour of a winter's sky, and a mane and tail that was a blue so pale it might as well have been white. The features of her face and muzzle, shrouded by the hood of the cloak she wore, were strong, definitely striking, but more handsome than beautiful. Something about her screamed aristocracy; Neighmann was sure he knew her from somewhere. A member of the Royal Court, perhaps? He didn't gallop in those circles, but you couldn't live in Canterlot without encountering the nobility.

She smiled, completely ignoring Neighmann's irritated tone. "A very interesting presentation, Doctor Neighmann."

Neighmann gave a short, bitter laugh. "I think you might be a little premature, my lady...?"

Her smile transformed into something conspiratorial and amusement danced in her eyes. "Here and now you may call me Selene." 

"Selene. Right." Neighmann rolled his eyes. So she wants to play games, does she? he thought, I'm really not in the mood for this. 

"I have a favour to ask of you. I'd be very grateful if you could spare a few minutes to go through your work with myself and a colleague. I think you may be able to shed some light on a potential problem we are having."

Neighmann's curiosity was piqued despite the vague nature of the request. It wasn't unknown for ponies going through the Institute to be picked up by those in industry, even before they graduated. Perhaps I can salvage something from this evening? he thought, spirits rising. Better not get too hammered with Libi. "Sounds interesting. Give me your details and I'll call your office tomorrow for a meeting."

Selene frowned slightly and her voice became full of iron. "I'm sorry, but that just won't do. We'd like a few minutes of your time right now."

Damn aristos, even in this day and age they expect to be obeyed. "Now? It's nearly nine o'clock!"

"We keep irregular hours. We also have some influence with the Institute and can make this worth your while."

"Fine," he grumbled. "Where is this colleague of yours?"

Selene's stern face changed to a radiant smile. "Excellent! Follow me, I have a chariot on the roof." 

Neighmann trotted after her, mind roiling with confusion and upgrading his estimate of the mystery mare's wealth and status. Chariot? Who in Tartarus still uses pony-powered vehicles? he thought. Even a pegasus would normally use a spellcraft airtruck rather than hitch himself to the yoke of a cart to move anything he couldn't lift. It's true what they say; the rich really are a different species.

The pair trotted up the wide ramp to the rooftop parking normally reserved for flying guests. Neighmann didn't consider himself an athlete in any sense of the word, but still thought he was in reasonable shape. He'd expected the slender blue unicorn to slow down as they climbed the dozen floors, but she powered on at a steady trot, leaving him more than a little winded by the time they reached the open air.

Neighmann slowed to a walk, enjoying the cool night air on his overheated body. The Institute building was tall enough that they were above all but a few others; this, combined with careful street lighting that didn't waste light upwards, meant there was little to obscure the sky. Like many students he was prone to working -- or playing -- into the small hours, and it was a bit of a habit of his to spend a few moments looking up. Tonight was unique, as were they all; the delicate, slow-shifting, patterns of the orbital debris and glowing gas perfectly complemented by a slim crescent moon. "Beautiful," he murmured, head craned back. Still nicer to call them 'stars' than 'rocks', though.

"Thank you."

Neighmann lowered his head to stare at Selene. "I meant the sky," he said, then winced. "Not that you aren't, of course!"

The mare smiled, an expression of simple joy that made her whole face light up. "I know; that's why you have my thanks. Come, your chariot awaits."

Neighmann walked slowly after her, alarm bells ringing in the back of his head. I am missing something here, he thought. Glancing at Selene he blinked, shook his head, then stared, open-mouthed. With every step she took her coat and mane grew a little darker, her legs a little longer. By the time she had reached the shadowed form of a two-pegasus chariot, she was half again his height, with fur the deep blue of the sky an hour before dawn and a mane and tail that seemed to contain little reflections of the stars themselves. He'd already fallen to his knees, body realising the truth even if his mind still didn't accept it, when 'Selene' removed her cloak.

Along with her horn, the 'unicorn' had a pair of wide wings and a patch of white on her hindquarters that matched the moon in the sky above.

"P-Princess...!" he said in a strangled whisper. After the destruction of the Crystal Empire, decades before his birth, there were exactly two winged unicorns in Equestria.

Her Royal Highness, co-ruler of Equestria, probably-immortal-not-actually-a-goddess-but-close-enough of the night, she who painted the stars and maintained the heavens, Princess Luna turned to him and smiled gently. "Please get up, my little pony. If I required your obeisance I would not have bothered with a disguise."

With a wave of her head the deep shadows around the chariot were lifted, revealing the baroque monstrosity that was Luna's private transport. Neighmann staggered to his hooves and trotted after her, shying away from the pair of ponies -- no, not ponies, chiropt -- Night Guard that stood patiently between the traces. Unlike the members of the Day Guard they did not appear identical; the Day were magically changed while in armour to be perfect clones, while the Night were an actual species unto themselves. 

In his early days of being a student he'd encountered the Night Guard; they could occasionally be seen out on the streets of Canterlot after sunset. There were far fewer of them than the white or grey Day Guard, but they made up for their reduced numbers with a visual appearance that was downright sinister. Bat-winged and with lizard scales in their dark grey fur, they were just as stoic as their daytime comrades. The nearest chiropt turned his head to stare at Neighmann, a flat expression made doubly intimidating by bright yellow eyes with cat-like slit pupils.

The young stallion shivered, remembering how the chiropt had come into being, unconsciously giving the Royal Guards a wide berth as he moved to join the Princess in the chariot, stepping up between the spikes and jagged metal that made the thing look like it was out of a horror movie. If there are any carnivorous ponies in the world, this is what they'd look like, he thought, staring at the chiropt pair, then felt slightly ill at the disgusting concept. They even had the little points of canine teeth, just visible between their lips. He'd have remained just as intimidated if one of them hadn't glanced backwards and winked.

There was no discernible signal from the Princess, but as soon as he was aboard the guards spread their wings and accelerated along the takeoff strip. A few seconds later he felt the subtle tension of pegasus flight magic extend to the body of the chariot and the iron behemoth left the roof. Because that's what they were, at the start... every single one a pegasus twisted by the Nightmare's magic.

Neighmann stared out over Canterlot city, the shadowed and ancient buildings with their curious mix of wide and narrow streets curving around the bulk of Mount Aither-Erebos. The chariot was climbing steadily, heading for the Royal palace which, at this distance, seemed to be a spun sugar confection attached halfway up the mountainside. After an uncomfortable period of silence and several false starts that earned him side-long glances from Luna, he finally worked up the courage to ask the first of many questions that had built up in his mind.

"Your Highness--" he started.

"Please," the mare said in a pained tone, "you can call me Luna while we are alone, or Princess if you must."

"Of course, your Hi- I mean Luna." First name terms with a goddess, his brain babbled, soon I will wake up and forget all this in the mother of all hangovers. "You listen to many graduate presentations?"

"My sister and I attend as many as we can. You didn't think there were so many early morning and late evening slots just to increase your levels of stress, did you?"

He'd grumbled about that with the other students, but never actually bothered to investigate why. "So you listened to all of mine?" Including the bit where Haygen spent twenty minutes proving I'm a fool, he thought.

"Yes. Your error was a subtle one and I'm not surprised it was missed. Despite that, I do believe your findings are sound."

Neighmann's heart sank. "It looks like it was obvious enough to everypony except my supervisor and I," he said glumly, hating the trace of self pity that had crept into his voice. 

The Princess glanced at him sharply. "Did I not say it was subtle and that I still had faith in your work? You may not have seen any of my research published, but know now that I have an instinct for mathematics and you should not doubt my word." Gone was the tone of gentle amusement, replaced in an instant with the same iron as before.

Neighmann cringed at that voice, ears flattening. Even more than Celestia, this was not a pony to get on the wrong side of. Fifteen hundred years after the Nightmare, the stories of what the Princess had nearly done to Equestria were still the subject of whispered conversations whenever she attended any ceremony in public. ...and besides, he thought, an 'instinct for mathematics' is probably the least of it. I'll bet she solves n-body gravitational problems in her head every night. 

"M-my apologies, Princess, I didn't mean--" he stuttered.

"Do not worry; it is forgiven." Luna had the good grace to look a little embarrassed by his reaction.

Neighmann dragged his attention back to the chariot's flight path; ahead, the cantilevered bulk of the Royal Palace was looming large, mostly dark apart from a few lit balconies. Any thought that this was a light and airy structure vanished when faced with the sheer presence of the place. The chariot's course was curving around to land in the gardens a kilometre or so away from the Palace proper, heading for a patch of light amid the statues. That's an odd place to alight, he thought. "I'm to meet a statistician on your staff?" he asked.

Luna gave him a surprised look. "Staff? Of course not; we're going to talk to my sister."

===

Princess Celestia was, well, radiant. Literally. That patch of light was her, a dim radiance filled with shifting pastel hues of pink, green and lavender from her gently moving mane and tail. "Is that really necessary?" Luna muttered, quietly enough that Neighmann wasn't sure if he'd been supposed to hear it, and rolled her eyes. Waving at Neighmann to dismount the chariot, she signalled her Guards to depart, then trotted over to briefly nuzzle her sister.

"You may want to go easy on the whole 'sun goddess' thing if you want an intelligent conversation out of the good Doctor; he's had a stressful evening," she said with a frown. 

Celestia smiled back. "I don't know what you mean. Anyway, I doubt he can see as well in the dark as you can, my dear."

Luna sighed and shook her head. "Doctor Neighmann was kind enough to spare us some time to talk over his work, perhaps we should start?"

"Of course. Doctor, if you would walk with us?"

"Yes, Your Highness, it would be an honour," Neighmann said, surprised at how calm his voice sounded. He stared up at Celestia, mesmerised even as walked towards her. Like Luna, she had a unicorn's horn to go with her swan-like wings, currently folded neatly along her flanks and half covering the solar disk mark on each hip. Unlike Luna, Celestia was the blinding white of a snow field under the noon-day sun, with a mane and tail like little segments of the aurora.

"Celestia will do between the three of us, I think, otherwise it's going to get a little too formal for such a small meeting." The Day Princess smiled gently down at him, then turned to walk off between the statues, forcing him to trot to keep up with her long-legged gait. Neighmann felt like a foal again, sandwiched between these two creatures; Celestia was even taller than Luna, and the tip of his horn barely came up halfway up her chest.

"Luna shared the last part of your presentation with me. I was especially interested in the time series; tell me, did you model the data into the future?"

For his part, Neighmann had passed through shock and into the calm waters beyond. His mind had settled into that post-disaster state of detachment and was treating this as some kind of lucid dream; thinking this wasn't real was the only thing that kept him from turning into a gibbering wreck.

"Yes I did, um, Celestia," he said carefully, "but the answers were just garbage. That should have been a clue, I think, should have warned me that I'd made a mistake somewhere."

"Indulge us," Luna said.

Neighmann sighed, his voice adopting the same mechanical tones it had during Haygen's questioning. "The rate of anomalous events rises asymptotically, becoming infinite throughout the extent of the modelled area."

Celestia froze, ears flattening, then swung her head down to stare into Neighmann's eyes. "When?"

The graduate mathematician cringed at this sudden, focused attention from the undisputed co-ruler of the world. As Luna moved and organised the night sky, so Celestia made sure the sun rose on time; to see her so concerned... Wait, she's taking me seriously? he thought, head coming up and ears twisting, hunting for some indeterminate threat, what have I discovered... and if she's worried about it, what does it mean for the rest of us? "In five to ten years," he said.

"So soon," Celestia breathed.

"At least we'll have some warning, unlike last time," Luna muttered, staring off into the darkness.

The three resumed their walk, wending their way through the statue garden to some destination that Neighmann couldn't guess. He wracked his brains, trying to understand what the other two were talking about. Finally they came to a halt again, stopping in the middle of a cluster of statues. Six ponies and one... thing. The ponies were familiar to Neighmann, instantly recognisable to anypony who had even primary school knowledge of Equestrian history. 

These were the six heroes, all centuries dead, who'd used the Elements to face down the Nightmare when she'd returned from her banishment; without them the world would have only one Princess and the night would have reigned forever. He stole a glance at Luna; the Princess' face was unreadable, but somehow he knew that she was thinking of the other group of statues, the one with the same six ponies surrounding her own stone statue.

This, though, was something else. Another monster, but one that was supposed to be  fictional, one he'd always thought represented chaos in some metaphorical way. Serpentine, like a furry snake with four legs and a pair of wings, and a head looking like a cross between a goat and a dragon, with large, uneven, carnivore teeth. If it had been in a museum's specimen collection it would have only been kept as an example of how bored a taxidermist had been. No two limbs were from the same species; legs from bird, big cat, deer and pony, wings from a gryphon and a bat. Even the eyes didn't match. 

Gazing up at the mismatched body parts of the snake-like creature, Neighmann suddenly jumped to a wild conclusion.

"Ah ha, you're talking about Discord? But he's only a legend; I put him in my presentation as a bit of a joke, I don't really think--!" He chuckled, then fell silent as the two Princesses stared down at him, unsmiling. "Wait, you're serious?" He felt dizzy, the world falling away under his hooves.

"Did you never visit the Palace?" Celestia asked sharply, then sighed as Neighmann flinched. "Do you remember your map? This statue is at the exact centre of the anomalous data you detected."

Neighmann was silent for a few moments. "This isn't just a statue, is it?" he asked slowly.

"No," Luna said. "This is the real Discord, petrified by the Elements."

"Petrified isn't quite right, more slowed. He's effectively operating in a relativistic time frame; a tau factor of over a hundred billion." Celestia walked in circles around the monster, talking half to herself.

Neighmann struggled to remember the few details he'd researched in passing for his presentation. "The Lord of Chaos... so all the stories are true, then. He still has influence, but his power is diluted by the difference in the flow of time between us and where he is?" He did the calculation in his head; to Discord the world must move so fast that even the passing of the seasons would be invisible. Over three thousand years in the time taken to draw a breath. 

"You've heard of the Elements of Harmony, of course." Luna turned the question into a statement, her voice flat and emotionless. 

Everypony knew about the Elements, so-called 'weaponised friendship', magical tools of immense power that were said to predate Luna and Celestia. They were legendary; not least because they had been used to banish the Night Princess for the best part of a thousand years, back when she had become the Nightmare. Neighmann nodded cautiously. Even after fifteen hundred years that failure still hurts her, he thought. Some things the mind wouldn't allow to fade; probably a good thing for everypony else, as when you're that powerful your mistakes can have planetary consequences.

"Celestia and I originally used the Elements to fight Discord. It worked, after a fashion. We had wanted to destroy him, but he's too powerful. The best we could do was to hold him for a fraction of a second--"

"--but extend that second for an age, relative to our time frame." Celestia broke in, earning a slightly annoyed glance from Luna. 

Luna continued in a slightly louder voice than was strictly necessary. "The Elements have been used to hold him twice, once in the distant past when he first became corporeal, once more recently by Twilight and her friends."

Neighmann's head swam as he digested Luna's statement. Twilight Sparkle was born in 981, he thought, that's 'recent' to a Princess. How long ago was the first use? He began to get some real understanding for the true age of the beings he was talking to so casually. "It's hard to judge on only a couple of data points, but the time interval appears to be getting shorter," he said cautiously.

"Yes, we suspected something like this was happening. Discord is too powerful; he's building an immunity to the Elements," Luna said. "Until now we had no way to even guess at when he will return to our time rate; it was one of the reasons we supported your project, among others,"

"The support of the Princesses," Neighmann muttered, "no wonder all those ponies were so helpful." The level of assistance he'd been given from the various public institutes had been unprecedented; most had actually volunteered information! He'd gotten to know the colonel in charge of the Day Guard so well that he'd even been invited back to his home for a meal. Shouldn't be surprised, he thought, when you live forever you're bound to play the long game.

"What will happen if he escapes again?" Neighmann asked, gesturing at the statue with one hoof. "There are no records of that event back around the turn of the millennium."

"We didn't encourage any record keeping; there wasn't much point," Celestia said quietly. "Those events were so surreal that most took it for a hallucination. Like most things that don't fit inside our normal world view, ponies forgot it with time. All that's left is Foal's Day."

"I'd always wondered where that one came from," Neighmann said, "I'd always assumed that it was invented by one of the practical joke supply companies as a way to sell more stock. So Discord is a bit of a trickster?"

Luna laughed, a short, harsh sound completely devoid of any merriment. "He certainly has a sense of humour, although you might not find his jokes very funny. When he wakes up again he will try to eat this world. Unfortunately for us he likes to play with his food."