"Here we go..." I cursed under my breath quickly, the perpetuating sound of heavy galloping from something very, very big filling the cavern, each rocking footstep shaking rubble loose from above. Coming into my line of sight was a hulking beast of sheeny black fur, three heads bustling about along the neckline with a spiked collar on each of them. All three heads had its own set of red eyes upon me, determinedly angry bloodlust in each of them. Cerberus, guardian of Tartarus, was heading right for me.
He reared his mighty paw back for a strike, each claw as thick as my own body, and I ducked underneath the swipe with a little bounce of my body, moving out of the way as the colossal dog's body bulldozed the area I had been just seconds before. It whirred around on its hindlegs and roared with all three heads, charging at me once more. I sidestepped the beast easily, taking in a breath and puffing out with a roar of my own, sending a steady stream of fire directly into the side of the mongrel. Cerberus simply shrugged off the intense heat with a shake of his body, spinning back around to face me, jowls raised and fangs bared. I stepped back slowly with a surprised expression.
"He is fireproof, Oddjob." Legion called out from his safety spot at the back of the tunnel. "Most monsters down here do breath fire, so Cerberus enchanted to repel it."
"You could've warned me!" I shouted back, narrowly dodging another paw swipe, this one nicking me a bit on the side, but that small nick created a nice line of green ooze down my stomach. "Is there anything else I should know about this mutt?!"
"Well," Legion drawled off at the end of his sentence, listening to the collective inside his head as I tried to not become a chew toy for Cujo x100 over here.
"We cannot speak with him, he is of dog blood, but too feral. Princess Luna owns him, though she has not been down here in a while to give him a nice scratch behind the ears, and there are several other magical enchantments upon the beast that make it nearly impossible for anything to escape Tartarus."
"Like, what kind of enchantments?!" I was cut off as the three-headed dog's foreleg caught me right in the chest, forcing the air out of my lungs and sending me tumbling across the floor. I tried to catch my breath, but it only came in little raspy puffs. I could barely hear Legion over the sound of blood rushing in my ears and dim darkness playing at the edges of my vision.
Legion listed off what affected the giant dog, but I didn't hear a word he said as the rumbling body of Cerberus came at me once more, the middle head reaching down and snapping me up in its powerful jaws. It felt like very bone in my body had been crushed by that action, and even more pressure was coming down on me as it clamped down only harder, its hot breath filling my senses.
Just before I passed out and became a bone to be buried for later, one of the side heads leaned in and sniffed me, letting out a little whine of distress at what it caught scent of. There was barking between the three heads, and the middle one dropped me roughly onto the ground, Cerberus backing away from me slowly, still whining.
I found myself lifted up my Legion, the diamond dog supporting me as we headed back to the tunnel that went down to the pits of Tartarus.
"...The taint?" I asked him through mumbled lips.
"Indeed, Oddjob. It may be a curse, but it was just a blessing then for you."
Through my jumbled vision, Legion had dragged my sorry ass through the caves and down to the bottom of Tartarus once more, dropping me onto the floor of his own little cave, the stench coming from the River Styx wafting through the air with a heavy odor.
"Blugh..." I slowly heaved myself to sitting straight up, a sore shoot of pain making its way up from my side and through my chest. I winced as the dull pain sharpened around the area that held my lungs and heart. Legion was off in the corner, silently pulling unknown supplies together and mixing them into a bowl. He returned only seconds later with gauze wrapping and a wooden bowl of pasty mush that resembled vomit more than medicine. He scoop a pawful of it out and smeared it across the gash on my side, my acidic blood and the healing paste conflicting in a hissing sizzle. The diamond dog then wrapped the gauze around me until a good layer had built up around my midsection, to which he tied it off.
"...Thanks..." I said once he was done.
"Twas nothing, Oddjob." Legion replied, returning his supplies to the corner of the cave and coming back over to plop himself down beside me.
"...I'm going to be stuck down here, aren't I?" I questioned solemnly, to which Legion nodded slowly.
"We have tried many a time to escape, but Cerberus is a very formidable creature." Legion explained. "He is much smarter than he appears, and the magic bestowed upon him by the princesses makes sure that even the most deadly of evils trapped down here would have trouble handling him."
I let out a sigh of defeat and layed down on my back slowly, as not to disrupt the bandage holding my wound. "Mind if I ask you a question, Legion?"
"Proceed."
"You told me your story...but your punishment, wasn't it a bit cruel?" My voice perked up in curiosity. From the cartoon, Celestia was a benevolent and loving ruler, one who would not dare stoop to violence or such dark deeds as Legion had explained. Just one of the many new perks of this perfect world I found myself in.
"Ah yes, we were wondering when you were going to ask that. We too thought that at first, in our earlier years of banishment." Legion's multiple voices took on that of one lost in thought, probably lost in many thoughts of the thousand trapped within one vessel. "But as we progressed in age and wisdom, sharpened by survival down here amongst the ancient and trapped, we began to realize something. What we had done was evil.
"We killed ponies merely for our own gain. Entire villages were ransacked and ravaged for supplies, the earth itself was overturned just so we could get our precious 'jewels'." Legion's many voices held a somewhat sickened expression as the word. "And the worst of all, we betrayed so that we could kill a betrayer." Strangely enough, a single voice called out this time, this one old and gruff, reminding me of Alamo.
"Celestia was right to do this to us. The blood of every diamond dog and pony lost is on our claws." He held up his paws, examining each strand of white fur, each line on his pawpads, each delicately sharpened claw.
"We just hope that when we die, if we ever do, we will pass onto the Great Hunt, where we will no longer be held by our past sins," The voices took on a dreamy tone. "And we will be forever free to hunt and eat as we please, our past clanmates ready to greet us joyously."
"Ah, what a cute little sob story!"
The sound of clapping echoed through the cave. Legion and I turned around to see a gangly figure of a peculiar outline standing in the mouth of the cave. I narrowed my slitted eyes at the appearance of the unwanted being.
"Discord."
"Oddy, so glad to see ya!" The spirit cackled as he stepped in, popping up a lounge chair from nowhere and promptly seating himself comfortably in it, a wooden pipe that produced bubbles in-between his lips. He took a long draw from the pipe, unleashing a stream of bubbles before speaking again.
"I have to say, you really do make the oddest of friends." He pointed at Legion, who was regarding the strange creature with a tentative glance.
"You are the Chaotic One." The diamond dog said with a hint of fear in one of the tinny voices that spoke along with the others. "You...you are supposed to be imprisoned in stone."
"Ding-ding! We have a winner here, folks!" The draconequus chuckled, holding up a tiny flag of victory, a pop of confetti raining down from the ceiling to fall on Legion, who shook it off of his coat.
"But stone doesn't really go with my eyes," He batted his eyes at us jokingly.
"What are you doing here?" I piped up, arms crossed.
"Just checking in on how you're doing, that's all." He replied nonchalantly, reclining in the chair.
"After one of your lackeys almost got me killed." I spoke through gritted fangs.
"Oh, that little mess? You actually thought I wanted you dead?" He laughed, patting me atop the head, to which I smacked his paw away. "Oh Oddy, Strife was merely there to aid in your...role here. Too bad you killed her, the mare could act up a storm, if'n ya know what I mean!" He gleefully cackled at his own joke. I only met him with a deadpan stare and anger in my eyes, or at least I tried to show it.
"You said that I had no obligations." I repeated what I could remember of the contract I agreed to when I looked up that single email so long ago.
"Did you read the rest of the contract?" He raised an eyebrow with a smirk on his face.
"...The bloody thing was a sheer wall of text. I couldn't have read all of it!"
"Too bad for you then!" Discord quipped at me. "If you had read subsection B, line 34-C, then you would have known that "If the target is thrown into Tartarus, he/she/it falls under the command of the contractor until it is seen fit to release him."
"That's...fucking jargon!"
"Oh boo-hoo, cry me a river." He got up from his chair and walked over to me, Legion backing away slowly from the spirit of disharmony's approach.
"Let me tell you a little story..." His lion's paw lashed out faster than I could even see, gripping around my face with strength that made my own small in comparison. I could feel his magic at play, slithering, twisting, working its way into my mind, working alongside the corruption already in the pit of my being. I tried to resist it, the internal clash within me against a force so ancient and powerful it had no age, but it was hopeless. His magic was what made me, and it was what was controlling me at the moment. As my vision blackened to his grinning face, something else appeared. I could see a castle. No...I could see Canterlot. I could see the royal court and everything, Princess Celestia and Princess Luna sitting side by side on their thrones.
"Once upon a time, there was a little pony named Concord..."
The princesses were laughing. My vision panned out to see a unicorn in a colorful jester's outfit, standing upright on one foreleg while balancing plates on his other legs, multi-tasking by juggling balls in the air with his magic. The face of the unicorn slightly resembled Discord's own in color and build, but it couldn't be.
"He loved his job, he truly did. making everypony smile and laugh with his tricks, his special magic. But that was mere child's play to what he could actually do."
The scene shifted to night, Concord, out of his clown outfit, was in the Canterlot library, studying stacks and stacks of tomes that seemed to be about magic.
"But the little fool," His voice tightened into something angry. "Made one vital mistake. He thought the princesses would be accepting of his magic, his talents. He was wrong."
Another scene shift this time it showed The pony Concord transforming several of the nobles in gathering into twisted versions of themselves, even changing the castle into a topsy-turvy funhouse. He was having great fun, but with a flick of her horn and a dash of light, Celestia had returned all to normal. Concord looked up at her confused and a tad nervous. Had he done something wrong?
"He was rejected for what he could and loved to do."
The next image in my mind showed Concord in the library once more, this time wiping off a thick grey layer of dust and age from a massive tome. There was rage and tears in his face. He opened up the book, turning to a very specific page. He began to speak, his horn glowing with dark, writhing magic that made one squirm just looking at it. The air around him began to shimmer, books lifting into the air as a whirlwind took hold of the unicorn. Despite the going-ons around him, he persisted with continuing the spell. The magic made its way down his horn and across his body, distorting it almost grotesquely. His neck and torso stretched until it was entirely serpentine with differentiating fur, his limbs torn off only to be replaced with new, bizarre ones of other animals. His horn receded into his forehead as wings began to grow out of his back. Concord laughed maniacally, an appropriate boom of thunder from behind following. He playfully demonstrating his new powers by flexing his hands, the entire library being transformed into different types of cheese. The now transformed Concord was on his back, holding his sides in laughter.
"His talent was chaos, and he became what everypony feared."
It showed Discord rampaging across Equestria, taking it over by force. Everything had been changed into the way he saw the world. Rivers ran with chocolate milk, gravity seemed pretty iffy about its job, ponies could defy the very laws that held them together, and all the while, Discord only wreaked more and more chaos.
"Or..."
The scene shifted once more. I could see Discord in his usual form before Celestia, her face twisted into a gaze of pure hatred. Discord himself appeared utterly devastated, backing away from her slowly. I saw flashes of what could have been memories, but with Discord, who knew? I could see Celestia slowly approaching a weakened, helpless figure. They were speaking with one another, laughing even. The scene then took a dramatic plunge for the worse as Discord showed Celestia what he was, what he could truly do, which had lead to the anger the sun goddess showed to him.
They fought. Celestia was clearly outmatched, and even with her sister Luna by her side, Discord could overpower them easily. He rampaged once more across Equestria in a style befitting of his personality. But...at the end, he looked weakened. He sadly gazed up, Celestia and Luna hovering over him with six unmistakable stones blasting a rainbow directly at him. He struck a pose to impress her one last time.
"Maybe old Discord was a stinged lover? Just an ugly monster before the eyes of something so beautiful."
"Or..."
Oh God make it stop. My head was reeling from the chaotic magic working its way into every fiber of my being. I thought up was down, left was right, dark was light. I wanted to scream yet I had no mouth. I wanted to rip off my very skin and throw it away. The itching, itching, itching, itching, ITCHING, itching, ItChInG, always the itching. It covered me, scritching and scratching and grinding and tearing and pulling oh I wanted to be free. I wanted to be rid of my thoughts. I just wanted to go and be free from what held me down. I let out a little giggle. Did I laugh? Or was that in my own head? Oh, the images were changing again. I liked those.
"Maybe I've always existed? Just as Celestia and Luna and other gods were there, Discord was there, from the beginning of time..."
A big empty space. Black. Nothing. Something. Hovering. Discord cackling. Something slithered in the darkness. Something moving to fight that slither. I didn't know what it was. All at once, a blast of light from somewhere holy and just. and the very antithesis of everything But the light. Oh the LIGHT. It burned, it seared, I HATED THE LIGHT.
I hate it I hate it I hate it I hate it I hate it I hate it I hate it I hate it I hate it I hate it I hate it I hate it I hate it I hate it I hate it I hate it I hate it I hate it I hate it I hate it I hate it I hate it I hate it I hate it I hate it I hate it I hate it I hate it I hate it I hate it I hate it I hate it I hate it I hate it I hate it I hate it I hate it I hate it I hate it I hate it I hate it I hate it I hate it I hate it I hate it I hate it I hate it I hate it help me I hate it I hate it I hate it I hate it I hate it I hate it I hate it I hate it I hate it I hate it I hate it I hate it I hate it I hate it I hate it I hate it I hate it I hate it I hate it I hate it I hate it I hate it I hate it I hate it I hate it I hate it I hate it I hate it I hate it I hate it I hate it I hate it I hate it I hate it I hate it I hate it I hate it I hate it I hate it I hate it I hate it
"I can be whatever I want. I am chaos, and for chaos, there is no rule, no order. And the sooner you get that through your thick little skull, the better it will be...for all of us." The spirit released his paw from me.
"How do you feel, Dismay?" He questioned.
I cracked a wicked grin. "Chaotic."