//------------------------------// // Chapter Nine: Perquisition // Story: When You Were Young // by Art Inspired //------------------------------// Perquisition Celestia awoke to the sounds of nature just outside her window, but noticed something was amiss. Though she couldn’t quite put her hoof on it, she eventually came to thinking about Discord while raising the sun. Once she did, she tried eavesdropping on his dreams, only to realize there was none. Slowly realizing there was no thoughts, no dreams, no voice, nothing she usually heard in the morning, her eyes widened, and her jaw slowly dissented. She barged out of her room and ran through the halls in a frantic gallop. As she passed the daytime guardians, they all wondered what she was so upset about. Ignoring them, she swung the door of the draconequus's room open, and gasped to see his being was nowhere to be located. “Discord?” she asked, trying to find the undetectable creature. “Discord, where are you?!” The being wasn’t even in the city, but miles away in the farthest forest in all of Equestria. The Everfree Forest wasn’t the only jungle that was unexplored. The forest was known as Blackbird Woods, a mystic forest that once secured the changeling army. Now scattered, the only being that inhabited the area was Queen Chrysalis. Slowly, she sat on her deformed throne, jagged spikes rising from the dirt in various, distanced points. Discord looked around. Some feet away were trees with leaves of black and bark of grotesque green. Some were oozing black sludge from small crevices. His mind felt different now, as if some mentality was surfacing, one of a violent nature. For some reason, he also didn't care, and looked at the mare he forced himself to love. “So, this curse of mine is lifted?” The queen smiled. “You were able to give me so much of your vital love that the impossible… was possible! Yes, the spell that witch, Celestia, placed upon you is cleared and gone. You’re free of her grasp.” Discord sighed, and said, “But, why would she deliberately hurt me? I never did anything to hurt her… not recently, that is. I apologized and everything! It just doesn’t add up.” Chrysalis smiled, knowing good and well her trap had just been sprung. “As I said, she had no real emotions for you. She was merely building you up so she could crush you. It was a game she played, and you were the pawn. A simple chess piece that was never anything more than live bait she could toss away!” Discord felt his body become frail, like energy was being stolen. “It’s… not fair,” he said, buying into the mind games of the changeling. “Life is seldom fair,” the changeling claimed. “But then, this is why I helped you. You’re like me. Life has tormented you; pinned you against yourself. Now, I’ll help you reclaim your revenge.” Discord, unknowingly feeding his love to the fiend, said, “I don’t wish for revenge… all I want is friendship.” “Oh, but you have a friend right here!” Chrysalis lied, “I’ll always be with you through thick and thin.” As Discord stared at her, something grabbed his heart, tied strings around it and treated it like a simple puppet. "Y-you will...?" “You know, Discord… the devils water isn’t sweet… and you don’t have to drink right now,” the changeling chanted as she stood from her throne and strut over to the draconequus. Her hoof rubbed his chin in a teasing way. “But you can dip you hooves every once in a little while. As the queen continued enchanting her manipulation spell upon Discord, the two princesses deployed troops to all the neighboring cities and far off towns in search for the missing fiend. Through Manehatten and Ponyville, guards were stationed on lookout patrol. Throughout the days to come, they searched, but never found Celestia and Luna's friend. The princess of the day even occationally soared high in the clouds seeking out the being. She couldn’t help but feel she wasn’t looking far enough every time she flew, though. Her sister, who searched the night would often checked rural places like the Everfree Forest and Cloudsdale, only to come up with nothing at all. Returning to the palace, she glided down to her sister’s balcony and entered her room to find Celestia sitting in tears. “Oh, please don’t cry!” she said as she approached. “We will find him, and figure this mess out.” Celestia whipped the tear that hung sadly upon her cheek away with her magic, and stated, “It’ll be too late. By then, he will have been friendless for such a duration, that he’ll need another memory rehabilitation to get his mentality sorted out, and it almost didn't work the first time. If we don’t find him soon… this will be one big disaster!” Her sister sat down on the bed, and asked, “How was he able to remove the spell in the first place? I thought it was permanent.” Celestia shrugged due to her being just as baffled of the subject. It had been a week or so since his disappearance, and they still had no answers. The enigma they found themselves in just seemed to expand. “What I wish to know is why he ran away in the first place.” Celestia explained further, “He had no such reason to escape. He had everything he wanted, and more! Where could he have gone? The guards have searched everywhere, and have still found nothing! He couldn’t have gone that far… right?” Luna apologized for finding nothing and lowered the moon. As she did, she said, “We’ll find him… eventually.” Celestia agreed, and got to work with her normal agenda. Upon closing her bedroom door, she realized a guard was unaccounted for. It was the same guard that asked about Discord the night just before his disappearance. Suspicions arose in the princess’s mind, but most would ultimately be undetermined until later on, when she would be able to figure out where Discord ran off to. Answers seemed impossibly out of reach for the two royal sisters, and Discord inched closer to corruption with every waking day. His forced love for Chrysalis, a foe emotion was growing faster than wildfire. With love of any kind came power, and Chrysalis was feeding upon it ruthlessly. Everything was starting to flip, and if things didn’t come to a resolution soon, all of Canterlot would soon meet an apocalyptic fate, all thanks to queen Chrysalis.