//------------------------------// // Interlude 3 // Story: The Siren // by McPoodle //------------------------------// The front steps of the Crystal Empire Library. November 16, 513 CE, the last year of the Classical Era. Saturday morning. The crystal ponies strolling down the boulevard scattered on seeing the flaming meteor headed straight for them. But instead of crashing into the earth, the meteor stopped in midair and floated slowly down to earth, the light fading to reveal the crouched form of Discord. “Pitiful ponies!” Discord cried. “You thought you could defeat Me by blasting Me into the depths of outer space. But lo, I have returned, and you are now doomed!” He was answered by silence. “Did you hear me: Doomed! DOOMED!” A crystal pony dared to close the shutters of her front window. He had her cottage obliterated for her pains, leaving her alone standing on the now-empty plot of land. She ran. “Ha!” Discord exclaimed. “That’s more like it!” He sat down on the steps. “Now what can I do to them next?” He looked around Him and noticed the plinth in front of the library for the first time. “Hold on. What is this?” He got up and turned around, taking in the statue of a rearing Siren. He blinked once in shock. “What did they do to you?” He whispered. Then He got mad. “Who did this?!” He demanded of the hiding ponies. “Which of you did this to one of My monsters?!” Again, He got no response. He disintegrated a dozen other houses and businesses at random, sending more ponies scrambling. Then He took in the statue and figured out how its enchantment worked. “Alright, so maybe none of you knew that a living creature was trapped in here,” he projected. “But how come not a single rambunctious foal ever managed to touch her right here?” And with that He tapped the stone form of the medallion. A wave of water washed down the steps, and Sonata flopped down hard upon the plinth that had been built to keep her statue too high for any rambunctious foal to climb up and liberate her. “Ow!” she exclaimed. “Tell me who did this to you,” Discord demanded. Sonata held up a hoof. “Hold on,” she said. “I have to get my memories straightened out.” She started tapping the hoof around in the air a few moments, and then started scatting a song. It was this world’s answer to the Charleston, invented about fourteen hundred years too early. “It was that wizard!” she exclaimed at last. “Starswirl the Bearded!” “A wizard?” Discord asked, gently lifting Sonata up until her telekinesis kicked in to keep her upright. “I hate them worse than any other ponies! A bunch of them kicked me off of My own planet! Now normally, I’d completely abandon you to pursue My own agenda, but I’m not giving up a chance to get involved in some sweet anti-wizard vengeance!” He used His magic to rip yet another house off of its foundation, then plucked up the pair of ponies cowering inside. “You two!” He ordered. “Tell Me where the wizard known as Starswirl the Bearded is hiding!” “I never heard of him. Or her,” declared one of the two captive ponies. “I don’t even know who you are,” the other captive said. “What? What?! How could you not know of your Lord and Master, Discord?” The two ponies exchanged a look. “Is that perhaps an alias for somepony?” one of them asked. “Maybe he’s Princess Amore’s father,” the other pony remarked. Discord tossed the pair of crystal ponies away in disgust. He was somewhat disappointed when He didn’t hear them shatter on impact, instead groaning in pain. He saw that Sonata was floating into the building. “This is a library, a collection of pony knowledge,” Sonata explained. “I’ve been in stone for a very long time. Maybe long enough for his current address to end up in a book.” ~ ~ ~ “Answer her questions, and I might let you retain your current number of limbs,” Discord said a few minutes later, threatening the Chief Librarian. “N…nopony knows what happened to Starswirl,” the poor librarian answered. “He disappeared without a trace nearly five hundred years ago.” “Five hundred years!” Sonata exclaimed. “How long can ponies live? Can they live five hundred years?” “Princess Amore did. And still does,” the Librarian said. “Other than her, the longest recorded pony lifespan was eighty-seven years, achieved by…” Sonata and Discord tuned her out at that point. As for the librarian herself? She didn’t mind. The constant requests for facts were doing a lot to calm her down from the fright she had received at seeing the two creatures barge into her library. “Yea, but what about Stygian?” Sonata asked. “He’s a unicorn.” “Stygian?” the Librarian asked. “I’ll go check the card catalog.” She looked up at Discord. “You’ll have to stop dangling me above the open flame.” Discord, who had been roasting some unidentifiable animal part over the flame, looked over at his disembodied dragon claw, which had been holding the Librarian aloft by her tail over the same flame this whole time. “Hm? Oh, alright.” The Librarian, seeing how important this “Stygian” individual was for the lesser of the two monsters, dug back and forth through the card catalog, finding a half-dozen mis-filed cards along the way that had to be put back into their original positions. “No, sorry, no record of any Stygian. If…he?...was an associate of Starswirl, maybe they disappeared at the same time?” “You’re showing an awful lot of concern for a pony, siren,” Discord remarked darkly. “Wait, you’re a Siren?” the Librarian asked eagerly. “Yeah,” Sonata said. “We kinda eat ponies like you for breakfast.” “That’s the spirit!” cheered Discord. “Er…you’re supposed to be extinct.” Sonata sighed. Considering how many sirens the Pillars hunted down during her captivity, it didn’t surprise her that much that she was the only one left so many years later. Discord on the other hoof was furious. “What?!” he bellowed. “They were one of my most-successful monsters! I had only just finished creating them when I was booted from the planet! HOW DARE YOU!” The Librarian, who knew she was at the end of a rather long life, looked with boredom up at the face of the creature who was probably about to eat her alive. Discord, seeing this, instead blew a super-powered breath into the card catalog, scattering the little cards everywhere. “Nooooo!” the Librarian wailed in despair. Discord indulged himself in his most-epic evil laugh. Despite the fact that all He had destroyed was the rest of this pony’s afternoon. Just then there was a pounding at the locked door of the library. “Miss Cyclopedia!” came the amplified voice of a unicorn mare. “Nooo!” Miss Cyclopedia wailed once again, because Discord was slowly tearing the card for How to Get Rich Quick—the first self-help scroll in the history of Equus—into itty-bitty pieces. The door was then busted open by a blast of magical power. “Discord!” declared the alicorn-height unicorn mare behind the blast. She was light peach in color, with a long raspberry mane and tail and a set of royal regalia with a heart motif. “I’ve read the stories about You, and I’m prepared to end Your reign of terror once and—” And then Discord turned her into a rutabaga, the same color as her former mane. “Not today, Princess Root!” He declared. He looked around him expecting somecreature to laugh. None of them did. He pouted. “Alright, that storyline’s over. I’ve got a countryside to ravage. Do you want to be My sidekick?” He asked Sonata. Sonata looked around her, at a world she didn’t recognize, where the only pony, the only non-Adagio creature she had ever cared about, was either hundreds of years dead, or probably suffering some wizard-imposed fate worse than death, as she sometimes feared Aria and Adagio were doing. Were they even alive? Now she was even more depressed. “No,” she answered Discord. “I hate this. I hate all of this!” “Fine,” Discord said with a roll of His eyes. He tapped her medallion and turned her back into stone. Then He teleported the statue into an inaccessible corner of the attic. “If I hear she’s been damaged before I remember to unfreeze her, I’ll be very cross,” He warned Miss Cyclopedia. Then he turned her into a cabbage. Just for fun. That day Discord invented “discording”. Over the next week He inflicted a world without rules upon the ponies of every village he passed. One day He encountered two specimens of an entirely new type of pony: the alicorn sisters Celestia and Luna. He toyed with them for a few (subjective) years, and eventually abandoned them to their certain death. They came back with something they called “the Elements of Harmony”. Discord doubted that their toys could possibly affect Him, so He allowed them one free shot. He ended up in their statue garden.