The eve of the Summer Solstice Celebration was a beautiful day in Ponyville.
It was also a beautiful night in Ponyville.
No one was quite sure which term applied when both the sun and the moon hung in the sky, splitting Equestria down the middle between light and darkness. But most ponies had bigger concerns on their minds than the technical nomenclature of stellar phenomena. Concerns such as the sudden and rapid expansion of the Everfree Forest into their cities and homes.
Gnarled black vines with thorns like razor wire burst through dirt and cobblestone alike, growing at an astounding rate and ensnaring everything in their path. Trees, houses, ponies. Everything was fair game for the clutching tendrils. Their very presence made magic flicker and go haywire, reducing even powerful unicorns to beating back the vines with sticks like savages.
In the midst of the chaos, six ponies trotted determinedly through the madness; single-minded mares on a mission.
"Strike as far as you can from the thorns!" Twilight called out to whatever ponies they came across who were actually trying to fight back instead of just panicking. "That's where they're weakest!" Her new intuition for plant life kept feeding her information about the invading vines' strengths and weaknesses (so long as she kept considering them as a potential crafting material. It was a very springy wood, apparently, better suited for sports equipment than furniture).
Her friends helped out where they could, beating back the plants and freeing captured ponies, but with magic on the fritz and an endless tide of vegetation replacing whatever they destroyed, hope was dwindling fast.
The group twiched in near-unison as the tingle of a new ability ran through their various magically-sensitive appendages.
"Who got that one?" Twilight asked.
"It was meeee~!" Pinkie cheered.
"Anythin' immediately useful?"
"Perhaps some kind of horticultural ability?" Rarity added hopefully.
"Nope!" Pinkie replied, popping the 'p'. "But I get super duper extra good luck if I ever need to go to the hospital."
"Let's hope it doesn't come to that," Twilight said grimly. The disaster was hitting her harder than the rest. While her treebrary was mostly safe from the vines, the mismatched sky above had immediately set her anxiety bubbling over Celestia and Luna. Their following total lack of response to any of her letters twisted the anxiety into a deeply unsettled feeling. This was exactly the kind of disaster you called in a princess for, and yet she couldn't get ahold of either of them.
Which meant she had to handle things on her own.
A sudden hoof on her shoulder and a small smile helped push back the clouds of worry, if only a little. She wasn't truly on her own. Not so long as she had her friends by her side.
With that thought in mind, she steeled her determination and passed out the Elements among her friends. "Alright girls, it’s time we got some answers and we're going right to the source."
A beam of rainbow light shot from her to Fluttershy, and from her to Rarity, to Applejack, to Pinkie, to Rainbow Dash, and back to Twilight closing a circle of powerful harmonic magic. The air crackled as a whirlwind of colorful energies spun in the space between them, rising high into the sky. It reached its apex and held tantalizingly still for a moment before crashing back down like a wave, the rainbow magic disappearing as it passed the boundary of their circle, and leaving behind the interdimensional flotsam and jetsam it'd picked up.
"Winter wrap up, winter wrap up~" crooned a painfully out of tune voice from beyond the barrier of a flimsy shower curtain. A lion's paw pulled it aside as Discord, reformed (self-proclaimed) Lord of Chaos (also self-proclaimed) stepped out of the shower and wrapped a towel around his midsection.
"You know, Twilight, I do believe you're supposed to give me prior warning before firing off that little summoning spell Celestia taught you." He pulled the plug on his bathtub and the entire apparatus spiraled down the drain and out of existence. "It's common courtesy, you know. After all, you never know when you might catch me in a... compromising position. Be thankful that this time I was merely enjoying a delightful soak in the tub."
"E-Enough! Release Princess Celes—"
"Hullo," he interrupted, suddenly very interested in something. "What's all this?"
He snapped away his remaining shower accessories with a snap of his claw. "My, my, my. What in the name of the Nine Tenets of Chaos have you been getting up to while I was away?" He vanished only to pop up a moment later draped around Applejack's shoulders like a feather boa. He popped off the top of her skull and peered at her brain through a jeweler's loupe. "Now that's interesting." Before she could throw him off he was gone again, flickering between the six of them and violating every rule of personal space in the book as he inspected Rarity's horn, Twilight's back, Fluttershy's teeth.
Twilight had had enough of his shenanigans. "Discord! We demand that you return the princesses and call back the Everfree's advance!"
"Me?" he asked with an offended gasp. "What makes you think I have anything to do with it? Twilight I'm reformed, or haven't you heard? All thanks to my dear friend Butterfree here." He clutched the pegasus like a teddy bear.
"Wrong one," Rainbow Dash growled into his elbow.
He dropped her and grabbed Fluttershy instead, his interest in the gag already fading. "Cutiefly, then. Whatever. Either way, the only thing I've done to your precious princesses recently is give them a stress ulcer wondering if I'm really reformed or not."
"What about these plants? It's clearly your work."
"Pish posh! Priorities, Twilight. Whatever it is that's happened to you is far more interesting than these overgrown dandelions.
A ripple of twitches went through the group as another ability made itself at home and Twilight’s eyes went as wide as saucers. “Oh… oh wow. So that’s what Applejack meant.”
Discord’s eyes flashed. "Interesting indeed. But enough about me, let's talk about you. You've had some work done since we last met and let me be the first to say that I love it. Simply divine! You must tell me where you found a hook-up for such a delightfully chaotic glow-up."
Twilight's determination, already weakened by the rush of new knowledge into her head, faltered further as it warred with her curiosity. "Wait, do you mean our new Talents? What do you know about them?"
He paused, then the draconequus' grin grew so large it stretched the sides of his head, warping his face to little more than teeth and eyes gleaming with cruel mischief. "Oho? Could it be that you don't even know what you have? Ha! Ingenious! They give you a shiny new toy but not the instruction manual! Inspired! Oh, I simply have to meet the fellow that set this up; the kind of art we could make together, why it'd blow your mindscape!"
"Hey! Stop trying to distract us!" Rainbow Dash said, scowling. "We know you're behind this; it's got your cloven hoofprints all over it."
"As much as I love your new jungle deco look, I'm afraid I can't take credit for it. I haven't done any large-scale chaos since the last time we all got together like this."
Applejack frowned as she stomped out a vine trying to steal her hat. "Ah don't buy it."
"Please, would I lie to you?"
"Yes!" said five ponies.
"Um, maybe?" added Fluttershy, a little late.
"Hmph. Only one out of six. How far the standards for friendship have fallen these days. Whatever happened to the benefit of the doubt? Innocent until proven guilty? Faith, trust, and pixie dust?"
"Um," Flutterhsy fiddled with her mane. "A little help fixing it might go a long way in proving you're not behind it."
"Hm, yes, perhaps a bit of give and take might be in order." He chuckled. "Seeing as you all seem to have made steps to embrace chaos yourselves, I suppose it's only sporting that I return the gesture. Here's a hint." His body, aside from his eyes, stretched rail thin and twisted into a paperclip-like spiral. "Have you tried following the vines back to see where they come from?"
Twilight shifted her focus from Discord to the vines themselves. They were coming from the Everfree, clearly enough, but that hardly helped. The forest covered hundreds of acres with only a few safe paths through it. Trying to find the source of the plants in there would be like trying to find a needle in a haystack.
Then again, to continue the metaphor, didn't she have something of a magnet?
As long as she thought of it in woodworking terms, her new Talent guided her not just in how to work with trees and plants, but how to find the best portion of the material to use. While the vines were all absurdly healthy (and would make excellent boomerangs or archery equipment) some parts were more ideal than others. If she tuned her thought to finding the most ideal portion of vine...
She concentrated, driving the totality of her focus into finding the best vine, the thickest and strongest piece of heartwood.
Then, like a spinning compass needle stabilizing into place, she had a heading.
"I've got it!" she cried, "I know exactly where it's coming from!"
"Wait, that helped?" Discord asked, nearly falling out of the sky in flummoxed shock. "And here I was trying to be obnoxiously vague in a way that would only prove helpful looking back."
Twilight ignored him. "Come on, girls! It's right near Celestia and Luna's old castle!"
Their journey through the forest was, thankfully, without trouble. The native monsters were either wise enough to wait the disaster out in their dens or otherwise tied up elsewhere. There was a brief scare when it turned out the full-grown flowers of the invading vines were both ambulatory and aggressive, but a bit of teamwork was enough to put them to rest.
Soon the sextet found themselves at the edge of the gorge that kept the Castle of the Two Sisters protected from the rest of the forest. A gorge from which all the thickest and sturdiest vines grew from.
Applejack took a peek over the edge, but it was so clogged with vines she could scarcely see the bottom.
"Looks like the place, alright. But how are we supposed to get down there?"
They all jumped at the sound of a boom, a rolling crash, and the noise of an accordion wheezing.
"I found the stairs!" Pinkie's voice echoed from below.
They followed her down at more conservative speed.
The bottom of the gorge was so dense with vines that the sky above was nearly blocked out. There was almost a path between where the largest of the vines had choked out the growth of any smaller ones, but even then every step was a careful dance of weaving and balancing to avoid the myriad thorns.
It led them to a cave in the far wall and it was there that they finally found something noteworthy.
"It's a tree?" Fluttershy asked.
"A crystal tree," Twilight corrected. Her woodworking intuition didn't register it as a plant, at least. But crystals were known to exhibit many organic traits, especially in areas of particularly dense magic.
But even if one was to compare it to a tree, it didn't look like a healthy one. The crystal was dull and discolored, the branches thin and sickly. And the entire thing was strangled by the vines. They grew thickest around the base, curling and coiling over themselves into lumps and hills.
"It doesn't seem to be the source of the vines, though. Just another victim of their advance."
"Whatever it is," Applejack said, "Ah can definitely tell ya that it's broken."
That got the group's attention. "Broken?" Twilight asked. It looked intact. Dull and lackluster and overgrown, but whole.
"I second that deduction!" Pinkie added. "I got a jury-rigging Talent the other day, and I agree that whatever that thing's supposed to do, it's not doing it."
"The first one of these extra Special Talents Ah got was an intuition for repairin' things and it says the same." She considered the tree with an appraising eye. "Might be outta juice."
"Can you tell what kind it takes? I got orange and unleaded apple." Pinkie held up a pair of jugs.
"No, I mean it's outta magic."
Twilight could only watch in surprised disbelief as her friend bantered over repairing a crystal tree (which was probably some kind of ancient magical relic) like a couple of mechanic ponies trying to fix a cart.
"A good jumpstart should do it, or leastways be enough we can figure out what it does."
"But we'd need a really really strong source of magic to do it."
"This is gonna sound crazy, but hear me out: what about the Elements?"
"What?!" was Rainbow Dash's outraged shout. "Are you crazy? How are we supposed to keep Discord under control with the Elements?!"
"Actually, she may be onto something. Look." Twilight gestured to the branches of the tree where five indentations sat empty and a mark in the middle the same shape as her own Element of Magic. "I think this tree is designed to work with the Elements."
"But we need them," Rainbow Dash pressed.
"Of course we do," Pinkie said. "Nopony's saying we leave them there forever. Give Applejack and me some time—"
"—and some better parts—"
"—and we'll figure out a way to make it work without them."
"Oh. I guess that's different then."
With everyone in agreement, Twilight removed the gems from their accessories and levitated them towards the tree.
"Still feels weird giving them up..." Dash muttered.
"You'll get yours back soon enough," Applejack assured her, "Besides, we barely had them a year and we used them, four, maybe five times?"
"Yeah, good point I guess."
The tree shifted around the Elements, growing closed to seal them into place. They began to glow, one after another, brighter and brighter until the whole tree shone like the sun itself.
With a burst of concussive force that threw them off their hooves, a pulse of magic surged from the tree and sought out the roots, dissolving them away until nothing remained but an empty cave.
The Tree shone now, radiating Harmony Magic like a beacon. And amid its roots were two alicorns, slowly rousing.
Far away (but dimensionally quite near) in a door-filled chamber of crystal, a sheen of rainbow light passed across the table accompanied by the subtle sound of something unlocking.
With no observers present to witness it, the room swiftly returned to the pseudo-corporeal state it resided in when none of the Keys were engaged.
When all was said and done, Celestia and Lune teleported back to Canterlot to set the skies in order (and quell any attempt of Blueblood's to seize power in their absence) leaving the non-alicorns to walk home. Even the normally-oppressive Everfree Forest felt bright and cheerful without the overwhelming vines.
"There's only one thing left I don't understand," Twilight mused as they crossed the forest's threshold into the plains between it and Ponyville. "If the Tree of Harmony was keeping the vines in check, where did they come from and why did it fail now?"
"A very good question," Discord said as he appeared lounging on a branch above them. "One I'm afraid we may never know the answer to. Such a pity. Speaking of pities..."
He disappeared then reappeared in miniature on Rarity's back. "You seem to have returned rather de-accessorized. Bandits on the trail? Perhaps you were short of change at a toll bridge?"
"If you must know, they're gone," Rarity said, shaking him off.
"Gone? Gone? You mean those nasty little trinkets that open and close access to my extremely uncomfortable stone prison are out of the picture?"
"Only for a bit!" Rainbow Dash declared.
"And our friendship remains," Fluttershy added sternly. "And if you want to remain friends you'll stop thinking whatever it is you're thinking and help clean up."
"Fine." With the sound of a raspberry he remanifested himself in a maid's uniform. "But I don't do windows."
He raised his claw to snap himself away, but found a hoof holding him back. "Actually, before that, I was hoping I could talk to you privately for a minute. Please?"
"Fluttershy?" Dash asked with evident concern.
"It's alright," she said, "We'll just be a minute. You all head on into town."
The five remaining ponies shared a look, but quickly reached a silent agreement that if anypony could keep the draconequus under control without the Elements, it'd be Fluttershy. Still, Rainbow Dash flew backwards, watching him with suspicious intent until the path rounded a hill. Once they were alone, Discord sunk down into the earth to match his companion's eye level.
"I must say this is a surprise, even from you. What is it you want? No, wait, let me guess. A promise to not start any trouble? Some kind of confession?"
"You did make those vines, didn't you?"
"Plunderseeds, dear, you could at least use the proper name. And how dare you accuse me of such a thing. I thought we were past all these baseless slanders and accusations. Do you still think I lied to you?"
"No. I don't think you've lied once today." She gave the poleaxed Lord a small smile. "You never said you didn't make them, just that you hadn't done anything to the princesses recently."
"You're more perceptive than ponies give you credit for,” he begrudgingly admitted. “So perhaps I did make them, long ago. I'm very old, you know. Us relics can get quite forgetful. But what do you plan to do with this information, hm? Run and tattle to Twilight?"
"I was wondering if you could make another one."
"Well... yes. Easily." He reached behind her ear and pulled a large seed from nowhere.
“That’s very good, but can you make it red? With white polka dots?"
“Ha! A mere trifle."
“Can you give it teeth?"
He paused, claws prepped to snap. "I’m sorry, did you say teeth?"
“You can't?"
"I didn't say that. But why would a good upstanding pony like you want a toothy vine in clown colors?"
She smiled again. An odd sort of thing that Discord was entirely unused to being directed his way. “Just an idea I had. I think, in miniature, it might be rather cute. Would it be asking too much to make it breathe fire?"
Discord looked at her with new eyes. "Fluttershy, my dear, at the risk of falling prey to cliches, I think this may be the beginning of a beautiful friendship."