//------------------------------// // Chaptrer 8: Blast from the Past // Story: A Heart of Stone // by BorgiaBrony //------------------------------// A Heart of Stone Chapter 8 A few hours into his time in the stony lonesome, he listened on in horror as Luna, the great windbag she had grown to be, announced to what sounded like hordes and hordes of gleeful ponies that, “THE EVIL BEAST HATH BEEN VANQUISHED! OUR BELOVED LAND IS SAFE ONCE AGAIN!” “What was that supposed to mean?!” Discord thought to himself. All he had tried to do was make everypony laugh. Was that not clear? Did Luna not understand that? She must’ve… they all must’ve… The physical pain of being turned to stone was awful, but at least it was temporary. The memory of the day Celestia turned on him, however, stayed in his mind for the full duration of his imprisonment, playing over and over again like the worst kind of horror movie. What he did to her parents was terrible, of that there was no denying, but did she even know what they did? No announcements, no attempts to talk to him, nothing at all. Just straight to the attempted murder. Whenever his thoughts turned to her he would ask himself question after unanswerable question, flinging himself into seemingly endless bouts of self-pity. “Did she have any idea how far I came to see her again? Did she have a clue as to what I did to keep her safe? Did she know that I would have done anything for her?” Centuries passed and eventually the sorrow and pity morphed into rage and hatred toward all ponies. How dare they treat him like that? How dare they betray him after he strived for their entertainment with decades upon decades of non-stop hilarious chaos? How dare they leave him to rot as a statue after he did unspeakable things for their survival? As with the ponies, the more he thought about Celestia, the worse she became. He had shown her what it was like to have a friend, taught her life was more than just studying, and fixed her relationship with her sister before it began and THIS is how she repaid him?! “If I ever break free from this,” he thought, “she’ll pay…” As time passed, the history of his reign slipped into the stuff of legends, and ponies who would walk by his statue stopped referring to him as “Discord: Spirit of Chaos and Disharmony” (a moniker he quite liked, by the way.) Instead they said that he was a mere representation of the idea of anarchy. Because ponies thought he just another statue, they weren’t too careful about what they said. “Eww. Why would anypony sculpt something so ugly?” was always a pretty good summation of their opinions. “Fillystines,” he thought whenever they insulted him. “Obviously they wouldn’t know true beauty if it bit them on the flank. I’m an adonis.” Other than that, he really never heard anything else of interest. Equestria was so boring under the sisters; there was nothing chaotic going on at all. Yes, there was one extraordinarily entertaining incident involving Luna, “eternal night,” and something about a banishment (he never really could figure out all the details of who and where but it seemed pretty chaotic), but that was hardly worth the centuries of order that came after it. The real juicy information came a very long time afterward. It started with a lot of panic about yet another eternal night. “You know you’re getting old when you’ve lived through TWO eternal nights,” Discord mused to himself. The disorder, much to Discord’s chagrin, was short lived, as within a few hours, peace had reclaimed the land. But as he heard the joyful cries of the ponies in Canterlot, he could feel…something. A vague feeling returning in his left hoof. A few days after the unannounced anarchy, he overheard a conversation between two castle guards. “Did you hear that Princess Celestia has a sister now?” “You don’t say? Who is she?” “You didn’t hear? The story we tell our foals about the two princesses are all true. There really WAS a Nightmare Moon a thousand years ago, and she WAS the Princess’s sister. The Elements of Harmony ACTUALLY exist.” And so the dimwitted guard taught Discord all he needed to know about exactly what the cause of the eternal nights. “It seems Luna embraced the dark side. I’m going to have fun with this.” As if that weren’t helpful enough, the guard was also so kind as to expunge what had been used against Nightmare Moon after both of her little tantrums. It didn’t take long for him to put two and five together and see that these Elements of Harmony were probably the six gems he saw when the sisters imprisoned him. And most importantly, the guard (who, by this point, Discord made it a point to eventually thank for all the help with his scheming) spoke of the new bearers of the Elements: Twilight Sparkle, Fluttershy, Rarity, Applejack, Pinkie Pie, and Rainbow Dash. It wasn’t the last time he would hear these names either. For the rest of the year, he would hear these ponies’ names spoken about in Canterlot. From eliminating a dragon, to winning the Best Young Fliers Competition with a Sonic Rainboom, to ending a land dispute between buffalo and ponies, to even ruining The Grand Galloping Gala. Yes, it seemed these mares were becoming quite the celebrities. What he found most important of all during this year was that he was slowly but surely regaining feeling in his body. As the year went on and the chaos that followed these mares persisted, his nerves began to work again. By the year’s end, he found that he could almost find the strength to finally break free. “Just a little more…”  “It’s confusion!” one of the fillies angrily whispered as she walked away. “Evil!” snarled another. “Chaos!” growled the last one. “Bingo!” Discord happily thought as he felt the stone detach from his skin and begin cracking. He couldn’t help but laugh in excitement. After over a thousand years, he was finally going to be free again. The granite began falling off him in chunks, starting with his head. After untold centuries of darkness, the sunlight burned his eyes like someone poured the contents of a salt shaker into them. The fresh, cool air made him wheeze, and made it feel as if he was shoulder deep in snow. When he finally was able to move again, he fell to his knees on the ground, as his bones were still weak from over millennia of dormancy. He coughed up bits and pieces of the stone that had been lining his insides. “That was…unpleasant,” he said ironically to himself after vomiting up the last chunk of rock. For the first time since the day he was imprisoned, he looked up at the sky. It was beautiful. But something was…missing. “Purple,” he thought. “It needs more purple. But not now.” No, he needed to start small. Work his way up. Deal with the Elements first. Make sure he couldn’t be locked away again. But before he could do anything, he wanted to send a message. There was one pony who needed to know that he was back, and he knew just how to do it too. Going against all his rules about not repeating his chaos, he snapped his fingers and created massive cotton candy storm clouds, just waiting to burst with chocolate dairy drink. “Haven’t lost my touch in the least,” he said to himself as he removed his eagle claw from his body and patted himself on the back with it.  “Good luck, my little ponies,” said Celestia as she lowered her horn to twilight’s shoulder. “The fate of Equestria is in your hooves.” “Thanks, Princess,” replied Twilight Sparkle determinedly. “We won’t let you down.” Discord watched the scene from the balcony above the Elements storage room. He had to laugh a little bit. Did they really thin they could beat him? Not that it was anything personal against the young mares; it was just that he wasn’t too keen on going through that agony again. He looked down at Celestia, who was still looking around, trying to decipher where his laugh had come from. He leaped down to the ground and called over to her. “You are genuinely scared of me, aren’t you Celestia? After all our history?” She turned around to face him. “I’m not afraid of you, Discord!” she shouted triumphantly, stomping her hoof to the floor. Discord chuckled and mumbled under his breath, “You should be.” She walked over to him, horn already glowing, ready to defend herself at any moment. “What are you still doing here?" Discord reached over to her chin and lifted it to look him in the eye. “I just thought that now that the kids are gone the adults could get to discussing more important things.” She recoiled from him almost immediately, not trying in the slightest to hide her disgust. “What could I possibly have to talk about with you?” He shrugged. “You know: politics, economics, the fact that you tried to murder me, and maybe some of the stories in the tabloids.” That drove her over the edge. “You deserved everything you got, Discord! You tortured ponies for years! You killed my parents!” “Hey, hey! I didn’t do anything to those ponies that you wouldn’t have laughed at when we were young. I was just entertaining. And to be fair, your parents technically killed each-“She had smacked him in the jaw before he could finish. “You know, Celestia, the smacking me in the mouth bit is getting a little…predictable. Then again, so is everything in Equestria nowadays.” “BE QUIET!” she screamed. “NOPONY HAS EVER LIKED YOU, NOR WILL THEY EVER! YOU MAKE THEM MISERABLE AND DESTROY EVERYTHING THEY KNOW! YOU ARE A MONSTER!” He was in a bit of shock for a moment. For all his scheming and plotting, deep down, he still was debating on whether or not to actually hurt her. Until now. He clapped his hands together, locking them together, and held them close to his face. “Really, Celestia? I’m the monster? I think there are two ponies who would beg to differ.” Just then, he threw up his arms, and waved them around creating two colored vortexes: one dark black, the other a golden yellow, and from each vortex of swirling light, walked ghostly visages of King Jupiter and Queen Solara. Celestia looked at the ghostly images of her parents for a minute, dumbfounded. They looked back at her. Finally, Jupiter broke the silence. “We’re very disappointed in you, Celestia.” She was flabbergasted. “B-b-but why, father?” she stuttered out. “Haven’t I done a good job? Isn’t everypony happy?” Solara waved her horn, and from it flew a mystical cloud of smoke, which contained the image of two poor ponies shivering in the cold. “What is your explanation for this? Ponies never went without food or shelter when we were alive! Everyday YOUR subjects are out in the elements clinging to their last breaths, and what are you doing to help them?” Celestia struggled for an answer. “I-I never knew about any…the ponies have never told me…” Jupiter raised his hoof to silence her. “What about Luna? Where has she been all these years? Helping you run the kingdom we left the both of you? Standing by your side?” Solara chimed in, almost sobbing. “What did your father and I tell you before we left to find Discord?” The disheartened princess lowered her head in shame. “You told me to keep Luna safe no matter what. But you must understand. I had no choice. She was evil and I…” “You what?” asked Jupiter bitterly. “Sent her to the moon with the Elements? What did your little student and her friends do with them? They turned her back, didn’t they? Why couldn’t you do the same? What reason did you have to banish the last family you had?”By this point, Celestia stopped trying to give answers and lay on the floor clutching her head between her hooves crying her eyes out. Discord’s ghosts didn’t stop there, though. Solara bent down to her. “Do you want to know what the worst part about it is, little one? You hid him from us. When we saw that there was a chaotic monster tearing across Equestria, you said nothing. Ponies were miserable, the land was in total disarray, and we died because you kept your little friend a secret. You killed us, Celestia. It was all your fault.” After her mother had finished talking, her sobs grew louder and, starting with her tail, the color was slowly fading from her body, turning her the familiar shade of grey her parents had been the day they died. Seeing that their work had been finished, Discord waved his hands though the specters and made them dissipate into the air like clouds of multicolored dust. Of course he had been controlling them (and everything they said) the whole time. The better to hurt his enemy with. But as he looked down upon his one-time friend, he was surprised to find himself joyful. In the back of his mind, he suspected that he would feel bad exacting his revenge. That somehow he would still feel an inkling of compassion for her, but he simply didn’t. She had turned on him and locked him in the worst type of punishment he could think of; a fate worse than outright death. He had simply evened the score. Before he left for the hedge maze, he snapped his finger together and created a mini-chocolate rainstorm over Celestia’s head. “Enjoy yourself. It always was your favorite,” he whispered to her before blinking out of the castle. He was back in his cage within twenty-four hours.