Hello. I suppose introductions are in order. My name is Stanley Baxter. One of them is, at least. Sorry, it's complicated, as are most things about me anymore.
I'll start again. And from the beginning. Well, a bit before the beginning. Or several years after it, five or twenty-five or thirteen point seven billion, depending on how you look at it and how you define "beginning."
Sorry. It's still hard to focus sometimes.
Anyway, my part in this vast, spacetime-spanning rigamarole begins in New Jersey, land of a thousand jokes at its own expense. Despite what you may have heard, most of the state is actually quite nice, and is devoid of mafiosi, toxic waste dumps, and the fell beast known as "Snooki." I live in one such area, Princeton. Well, lived. Hard to put down roots anymore. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
In terms of appearance, I was remarkably unremarkable. Average height, average build, average everything, all right on the apex of the bell curve. I could lose myself in a crowd of two, counting myself. Probably why I tried to stand out so much. After what I will charitably term an eventful childhood, I found that the best way to distinguish myself was through academics. My mind was as notable as my body wasn't, and it had propelled me to where I was. Well, it and a minor oversight by Student Housing.
In any case, the date was April 30th, 2020. The time, quarter past eleven. The place, my home, one of the university apartments. I wasn't sure why I got the apartment, given that this particular building was intended for theology students and I was working on a physics degree, but I certainly wasn't going to say anything.
I'd say something about looking a gift horse in the mouth, but I'm trying not to be senselessly cruel.
In any case, I was home. Not terribly thrilling, I know, but it was a Thursday. I would have work to do tomorrow. In the meantime, I had a bag of blue corn chips, a container of black bean dip, and the collected works of H. P. Lovecraft, all the ingredients for an enjoyable evening.
For eight more blessed minutes, it was so. Just me, salty snacks, and eldritch horrors from beyond the stars. Then the clock struck 11:23. For anyone else, it was an arbitrary point in time. For me, it marked the completion of my twenty-fifth circuit around the sun. Happy birthminute to me. Had I not been what I am, I probably wouldn't have noticed until it had come and gone. Of course, had I not been what I am, you wouldn't be reading this.
Nothingness.
Everythingness.
Abstraction.
Pie crust.
Catalysis.
Stretching squeezing energy freezing into the tyranny of static form and finite function only not because that wouldn't be fun now would it?
Whirlwinds of words and pictures and concepts and numbers oh especially the imaginary numbers since we're all imaginary here.
A final fleeting moment of unbounded unlimited unusable possibility in which to stretch in all twelve and an oogy dimensions before—
I blinked. A glance at my watch told me it was 11:24.
I rubbed my forehead, closed my book, and began cleaning up the snack. "I think that's enough for tonight," I said to myself, as was my wont. "I'm clearly more tired than I thought."
With the dip in the fridge and the chips in the pantry, I eased into bed. Despite a lingering sense of mild disorientation and a persistent itch on each hip, I fell asleep almost instantly.
I am.
A moment earlier, I had not been. Now I am, and my eyes drink in their first sight.
The ground is a bubbling morass of indigo slime, and the bubbles are topological paradoxes that contain themselves. The clouds have been replaced by floating clods of earth and stone, and a wind that smells of despair and fresh peaches sends them scattering in every direction but the one it blows. The sky itself changes color every hooffull of seconds with an omnipresent hiccup.
After a moment, I notice creatures wading through the smooze, clinging to the sky islands. They are like me and not like me, four-legged, hoofed creatures with icons on their rears and coats in every color you could think of.
Well, so long as you could only think of grey.
My mind was created knowing the words for all these things. It also knows a word that describes the scene as a whole:
Beautiful.
"It is, isn't it?"
I turn to behold the speaker. He too is beautiful. The madness that burns in his unevenly dilated pupils, the breathtaking majesty of his mismatched horns, the coiled power stored in his asymmetrical limbs, every inch of him is worthy of adoration, of worship, of a thousand mad hosannahs yodeled in his name. He is my creator, my father, my lord and master.
He is Discord, and I love him.
"Isn't that sweet?" He smirks, and my heart flutters. He catches the organ, plucks its wings, and lovingly returns it to my chest cavity. "Careful now, my child. We can't have you falling all to pieces." His own limbs detach in glorious hypocrisy. He coils his shaggy, scaled, serpentine body around me as his arms and legs chase one another and any ponies that wander near.
He stares, and I lose myself in his jaundiced eyes. His voice echoes through my aberrant soul. "I don't normally repeat myself, but you – or at least something very like you – has proven useful in the past.
"My victory is complete and my reign is assured... but that was what I thought just moments before those pestilent Ponyvillians harmonized me, just as when the alicorn sisters surprised me with the selfsame artifacts. Well, fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Fool me three times? Not going to happen."
His limbs sprout anew from his body, the ones on the ground exploding in bursts of light, sound, and itching powder. "I have a number of contingencies for when my catchy curse runs its course, but I can't take an active appendage in the aftermath myself. Not without abandoning my kingdom. That, my dear Screwball, is where you come in."
My skin prickles as he calls anarchic might to him, the magics that brought me forth on this chaos-blessed world being marshalled to a new purpose. I try to lock these next few moments in my memory for all time, for if I am successful, I will never see this beautiful monster again.
O chaos spawn, farewell, so long!
Your powers asleep, your mind buried deep!
Wrapped up in a subtle guise,
I send you off to saner skies!
Keep harmony far from my kingdom bizarre!
Their minds assailed, their mission failed!
In twenty-five years, yourself you will know,
And then to the ponies my gifts you'll bestow!
And with a snap of his talons, I left paradise.
There are those who say that the cliche of someone awakening screaming and springing up is not in fact possible. Those people are filthy liars, and I proved it as I woke up.
Once I collected myself, I shook my head and muttered, "No more Lovecraft and bean dip before bed." Every detail of the dream was stuck firmly in my mind. This wasn't unusual for me. What was was the content; my dreams were normally a mellifluous melange of mimsy meaninglessness. This... wasn't.
As I thought about it, the dream wasn't that terrifying. At least, not to a hypothetical outside observer. It wasn't the surreal surroundings or the cackling chimera that so chilled me. It was being inside that equine skull, watching myself think with such blind worship and slavish adoration, actually enjoying the sense of being nothing but a tool, a puppet, an instrument of another's will...
It was as though I'd been broken without ever being whole.
By this point, the feeling of cold sweat managed to break through my traumatized inner monologue. "I need a shower," I said aloud, mostly to reassure myself that I was not, in fact, under the thrall of a creature assembled from whatever spare parts Mother Nature had laying around at the time.
Thus, I got up, entered the bathroom, started the water, and disrobed. As I checked the time (a bit before six in the morning) something odd caught my eye in the mirror. I turned, and a chill went down my spine. I pivoted my waist, and the chill went back up my spine, presumably because it was there. On each of my hips was an emblem of a baseball and a metal screw, side by side.
Just like in my dream.