Silence.
Complete and utter silence.
Princess Luna made her way through the barren land of her domain. The ethereal appearance of the dream realm wavered and shimmered before her eyes as she hopelessly searched for the presence of any of her subjects. She stoically searched through monstrous forests, bright and cheery beaches, abandoned cities, and even the inky blackness between stars.
Nothing.
Luna sighed as she pushed her flowing mane out of her eyes. She could feel the presence of a few dreams here and there, but she lacked the power to actually reach out and touch them. All she needed was a single dreamer she could talk to – just one. She needed to tell somepony where she was and what had happened to her.
Under normal conditions, the Lunar Princess would often search through the dreams of her subjects and enter them, either to watch them play out or to banish them from the mind of the dreamer. It was both one of her duties and her favourite pastime. Whenever she got the chance, she would try to find young fillies and colts plagued by night terrors before helping the young foals to confront their fears. It was a large part of the reason why she loved the young ones so much, after all. They made her feel needed.
Her hooves continuing to lead her down her silent and lonely path, she gravely considered the events of the past twelve hours. Her body now lay within the deepest darkest bowels of the changeling hive, confined within a cocoon that suppressed her magical power. That damnable cocoon was still restricting her powers, preventing her from reaching out to any of the myriad dreamers of Equestria.
Her thoughts whirled chaotically around inside her head. There was something that creature had told her, something that had just stuck with her. He had claimed that the changelings were what was left of the alicorns; that all the alicorns except for Celestia and Luna had somehow been transformed into those freakish bug-like mockeries.
The idea was absurd.
Luna knew that, of course she knew that, but there was just something about it that wouldn’t leave her alone. She had been there that day; she knew what she had witnessed. Her memories were a little foggy since she had been so young at the time, but that was one thing she would never forget. The sight of her mother fighting against two changelings, her glorious red mane flowing in the breeze as she fought to protect her two daughters, was as clear now as it had ever been. That had been the last time either she or Celestia had seen their mother.
But something else was wrong. Luna’s thoughts returned to the present, and she considered the current situation. The hour was late, and most ponies should be tucked away safe in their beds, quickly succumbing to a quiet night’s slumber. Yet very few ponies were actually asleep. Something must have happened to keep them awake, and Luna shuddered at the possibilities.
She had been captured, but she knew that most ponies wouldn’t realize right away if she was unable to raise the moon or the stars. Some would notice, but not enough to cause a full-scale panic on the first day. The changelings had invaded again, but Luna doubted they had enough soldiers to spread across the entire of Equestria at all, let alone in a single day. The creature that held her had claimed that there were only three hundred or so changelings. The ponies of the present day may never have seen a war in their lifetimes, but even they would rise to overthrow such an outnumbered army.
No matter how much she thought, she kept coming back to the same answer. Only two events that she could think of could spread panic so suddenly and so abruptly. The first was worrisome enough: something may have happened to her elder sister. If Celestia was incapacitated and unable to lower the sun, that would certainly cause panic across all of Equestria. Luna hoped her sister was alright, but the second possibility was even worse.
Equestria could be under attack again. While Luna had fought against many threats to her country – even being a threat herself on one occasion – she only knew of one creature with the sheer power to terrorize the entire country within such a short time. Only one. That irritating, duplicitous, obnoxious, self-centered, conceited, flamboyant, slimy snake in the grass.
“Oh, come now, Lulu,” a voice called out from behind the princess. “I hardly think such rude thoughts about you. Couldn’t you include ‘witty’ or ‘funny’ anywhere in there?”
The Princess whipped around to see the very draconequus she had been thinking about. “Discord,” she snarled, her horn sputtering weakly before dying out. “I thought I made it clear last time that you are not welcome here.” For a moment, she wondered how he could be here since he was supposed to still be imprisoned within a statue, petrified by the powers of the Elements of Harmony. She quickly threw that thought away, knowing that Discord considered the laws of reality a quaint idea. To him, reality was something that happened to others.
The spirit of chaos stood before her, a cheerful smile on his face and his eagle claw arm moving back and forth before him. Other than the malicious twinkle in his eyes, he looked as if he was simply waving to a friend he hadn’t seen in a long time. After a second, his varying limbs shifted and flexed as he stretched, groaning in relief as joints snapped and popped.
“Oh. Ohhhhh. That feels good.” He grunted as a particularly loud snap could be heard from the center of his spine before looking around at the dream realm. “It may not be the same as Equestria, but being able to move again is certainly welcome.”
“Discord…” Luna warned threateningly. She had never liked seeing his ugly face in her realm even when they were young. The last time he had been here, she had trapped him in a particularly unpleasant nightmare and left him to rot for a few hours before finally letting him escape back to the physical world. While he might be far stronger than her in the outside world, this was her realm, and normally nothing could match her here.
Normally.
With her powers restricted as they were, there was very little she could actually do against him. And they both knew it. She dropped the offensive stance, knowing that he wouldn’t be interested in picking a fight. “What do you want, Discord? I doubt you came all this way for a social visit.”
“Pah, really, Luna,” he snapped his fingers. There was a sudden bright flash of light and when it faded, Discord had disappeared. Luna’s knees bent slightly as a sudden weight pressed down on her back, and looked back to see the spirit of chaos lounging between her wings. “There’s no need for such harsh words. You were always the interesting one, after all.”
With a quick shake, Luna tossed the annoying spirit away. “Yet I recall it being thou who tried to impress our sister once.” She frowned at herself as she realized what she had just said. Whenever she was stressed, Luna tended to slip back into the old style of speech.
Discord’s unpaired bat-like and pegasus wings beat as he steadied himself before dropping to the absent ground of the dream realm. Waving aside the comment, he pulled a pair of yellow-rimmed sunglasses out of seemingly nowhere before slipping them on. Pulling a martini glass out of the same place, he held the glass upside down and took a sip. “That was a long time ago. She’s changed. She’s too uptight now.”
“Having to keep all those ponies in line by herself for a millennium will tend to do that to a pony,” Luna pointed out flatly.
The Draconequus shrugged, leaning back against a palm tree that Luna could have sworn wasn’t there a moment before. “Yes, I suppose that’s true. After all, she was forced to banish a certain pony to the moon for a thousand years. That couldn’t have been good for her.”
She had seen the shot coming and yet it still hurt, the wound as fresh as ever. “Thou thinks it was any easier for her to turn one of her oldest friends to stone?” she fired back. After a few seconds of uncomfortable silence on both their parts, she turned her head away and muttered quietly into her mane. “It certainly wasn’t easy for me.”
Several more seconds passed before Luna moved next to Discord and sat beside him. Her shoulder pressed against his side as she leaned into him, feeling the comforting warmth coming from his body. “What happened to you?” she asked quietly.
“Couldn’t imagine. Being a creature of chaos and change might have something to do with it.”
“We’ve all changed,” Luna pointed out. He offered her a mug of her own, which she gratefully accepted. Taking a cautious sip of the liquid within, she reveled in the burning sensation as it passed down her throat. Even after all these years, Discord still remembered her favourite drink. Moonshine, of course.
The two immortals sat in silence for a while, each remembering the ancient times long behind them. For this one quiet moment, they were not the bitter enemies that time had made them, but old childhood friends. Back when she was just a filly Celestia had discovered the equally young spirit of chaos and had invited him into their little family. For years, it had only been the three of them, traveling the world together. Until the day everything changed…
“How long has it been since we’ve sat like this?” Luna eventually asked. Discord only shrugged, casually flipping his cup in his hand. Taking another sip of moonshine, Luna glanced over at Discord. “I’ve missed this, you know. Just quietly sitting together. After you vanished that day, we thought we would never see you again.”
“That day, huh?” Discord chuckled. The weight of the uncounted centuries he had lived through slipped into his voice, the reminiscence of ages past temporarily overwhelming the playful whimsy that normally suffused his tone. “We were so young and foolish back then. Thought we knew best, that what we were doing would change the world.”
“And then we nearly destroyed it,” Luna said, concluding his train of thought. “If the mortal ponies hadn’t stopped it, we might not be here today.”
Discord rolled his eyes at that, his voice slipping back into its normal teasing tones. “’Here today’, she says. Me providing décor for your castle’s gardens and being used as a pigeon roost – that reminds me, when I get free again, all pigeons will be wanted criminals – and you trapped by those buggy ponies. Maybe I’m just the only one not feeling the love for those mortals right now.”
Luna giggled at that, admitting that she might not have had used the best choice of words. “All right, but you know what I mean.” She lifted her glass up to him. “To old memories?”
“To old memories,” he answered, his glass meeting hers with a light tink. She immediately filled her mouth with alcohol, but he only stared into his glass before speaking. “I think we need to convince Celestia to try and destroy Equestria.” A sputtering cough told him he had timed that perfectly, and he mentally fist-pumped as the Lunar Princess choked on her drink.
After several seconds of prolonged coughing, Luna finally managed to catch her breath. Wheezing slightly, she glared over at the Spirit of Chaos. “You’re going to have to explain that one.”
“Isn’t it obvious?” Her face said it wasn’t, so he sighed and started explaining. “Both of us tried it, and it’s done wonders for us.” Oblivious to the look of shame that momentarily appeared on her face, he continued talking. “Maybe if she let herself go a little, tried the whole evil dictator thing for a while, she would stop being such a depressing stick in the mud.”
Luna rolled her eyes at Discord’s twisted logic, deciding it was time to get things back on track as she regretfully put the empty cup aside. “You never answered my questions,” she noted, “and I doubt this is a social visit. Not after last time.”
Discord blew a raspberry at her in response, causing Luna to chuckle weakly. “I still think that was mean of you,” Discord grumbled under his breath.
Another flash of light and Discord was standing upside-down before her. Pulling a stopwatch out from behind his ear, he flipped it open and took a look at what lay within. Closing it with a satisfied smile, he tossed it over his shoulder where it promptly exploded. “Oh good, looks like I’ve still got some time left.” At the look she gave him, he explained. “I may still be trapped in that statue, but I’m still able to harness a little bit of power from the chaos going on out there.”
“What have you done, Discord?” Luna fumed, the momentary reminiscence of the past forgotten. “I know you’re responsible for that creature.” She referred to that bizarre bipedal animal that had spoken to her when she had awoken at the changeling hive.
“Me?” he responded, striking a pose of someone wrongfully accused. “Why, I’m as innocent as I was the day I was born.” A bright yellow halo appeared above him at his words, but since he was upside down, it hovered about an inch or two above one of his feet. Seeing that Luna wasn’t buying it, he shrugged and bent at the waist, grabbing the halo. Munching it like a doughnut, he flipped right side up again.
“Alright, you caught me,” he admitted. “And now, here I am. Burdened with the weight of my crimes, I turn myself over to accept my fate.” Covering his face with one arm, he held the other out to her. “Crushed under my ever-present guilt, like the spirit of your sister was crushed just hours ago, I am giving myself over to- bwahahaha! Oh, I almost got through that with a straight face.” He wiped a tear out of his eyes as he laughed.
Luna stomped a hoof at him. Something he had said had caught her attention. “What has happened to my sister?” she snarled. “What have you done?”
“Why, nothing at all,” he claimed. Luna felt a tapping on her shoulder, and turned to see Discord standing behind her. “After all,” he continued, his face only inches from hers, “you’re the reason she’s in such trouble in the first place.”
“Thy words are as empty as thy head, Discord.” She waved a hoof at the scenery around them, the appearance of the dream realm shifting and undulating before them. “I’ve been trapped by the changelings since this morning. I only just managed to reconnect myself with this world.”
“Really?” He brushed at his beard for a moment. “How odd. Well, maybe you should see it for yourself.” Another snap of his fingers and a full-length mirror suddenly stood before Luna. She saw her reflection for only a moment before it vanished and was replaced with a bizarre scene, which she could barely make out past all the static.
Shown to her in the mirror was the mighty city of clouds, Cloudsdale. While it was normally home to only pegasi, because no other ponies could stand on the clouds without magic, she saw a very different sight. Cloudsdale was packed to the brim, filled with all sorts of ponies. Other than the regular pegasi, she saw unicorns and earth ponies and… were those changelings? Before she could get a clearer look at the image, Discord rapped his knuckles against the side of the mirror, causing the scene to vanish.
“Dang thing’s on the fritz again,” he grumbled. “I think that woman conned me. Ah!” Another image appeared on the mirror. “There we go.”
This time the image shown was much clearer, showing her a great canyon. She didn’t recognize it offhoof, but the scene that played quickly blew any useless thoughts out of her mind. She saw as Celestia and Twilight Sparkle raced into the canyon, pursuing a bipedal creature much like the one she saw in the changeling hive. She clearly saw as some sort of evil poured from the creature, possessing her sister and forcing her to attack her own student.
Once the image came to its crushing conclusion with Celestia vanishing in a flash of light, Luna cocked her eyebrow at Discord. If what he had shown her was true, then the situation was as bad as she had feared. But she knew him far too well to trust anything he said. She brushed at an invisible speck of dust on her indigo coat, trying to appear unaffected by what she had seen. “An interesting spectacle,” she said coolly, her voice as icy and calm as the night itself. “And what does it have to do with Us?”
Discord huffed, obviously displeased by Luna’s lack of a reaction. “Party pooper. No cake for you.” Snapping his fingers, he banished the mirror back to wherever it had come from. “Fine, fine, let’s get down to business.” Another snap and he was wearing an obviously cheap suit that was too small for him – the suit tore at the seams a little every time he moved – and a pair of ridiculously oversized glasses that distorted his entire face.
Straightening a sheaf of papers that appeared in his hands and straightening his glasses, he read off the papers in a very flat nasally tone that still managed to grate against Luna’s ears. “The way things are going, it looks like that Queen Chrysalis is going to win. Celestia’s dropped out of the game, though her piece is still in play, my own piece has betrayed me, and-”
“Game?” Luna interrupted, lightning flashing in her eyes and mane. “This is naught but a game to you?”
“Of course. Just a little something to pass the time until… Well,” he chuckled darkly, “let’s say it’s all an amusement for now. But let’s keep that just between you and me.” He winked at her.
“I will see you crushed beneath my hooves, Discord!” Luna voice echoed throughout the vast emptiness of the dream realm, like the rumble of thunder heard across a mighty ocean. “I should have convinced Celestia to destroy you when we had the chance! Be assured, I will not make that mistake again!”
Discord rolled his eyes before consulting the paperwork again. “Such melodrama. But back to what I was saying. This brings us to you. The game’s coming to a close, and you haven’t had a chance to play. Now I thought to myself ‘Discord, your handsomeness, that just doesn’t seem fair! Old Luna deserves a chance to play too.’ And I am nothing if not willing to share my toys.”
Another flash of white and Luna stumbled back, her ears flattening against her skull. The glasses, cheap suit, and paper had all vanished. Instead, Discord held a glowing orb. It shined brightly, as brightly as the stars, and looked to be made out of light itself. Luna knew what it was. How could she not? It was what she had been looking for.
It was a dream.
If she touched it, she would be able to talk to the dreamer. She would be able to tell them what had happened to her, and find out what had happened to her sister. Her hoof moved, involuntarily reaching out for it before she could control herself.
Discord smirked at her, the light cast by the dream gleaming off his single oversized tooth. “Pretty, isn’t it? I’ve pumped some of my own chaos magic into it. You’ll be able to reach into it, even as weak as you are. Oh, but that’s not the best part. This poor little dreamer will be able to sense your location! He’s just the thing you need for someone to find you tucked away deep within the hive of those changelings.”
Taking an unsteady step towards the glowing dream, Luna cautiously reached out to it. Stopping before her hoof brushed against it, she stepped away from it and the smiling apparition holding it out to her. “It’s never this simple with you, Discord. You’re as likely to do something out of the goodness of your heart as my sister’s current student is likely to take the road of her predecessor.”
He laughed, casually tossing the dream from hand to hand. “I remember watching that. Celestia really messed up there. Well, you don’t have to play. It would be much less fun, but I can respect your choice. And I’m sure there’s no need to worry. I’m sure that Chrysalis just loves foals.” Disappearing with that final parting shot, the dream fell to the ground, rolling to a stop directly before her hooves.
Alone again, Luna stared down at the brightly glowing sphere, considering Discord’s words. She knew he was probably lying – no, he was definitely lying – but what he had said at the end rung true. If there was a way to end the threat to Canterlot, she would have to take it, no matter the risk. But she would have to be careful. Discord implied that this entire thing was a distraction, something to keep everyone out of his way. She would need to stay aware, and keep watch for any possible hints to his true intentions.
If she was going to be able to help anyone, she wouldn’t be able to just sit back and watch. She needed to get free. Bending down, she briefly brushed her muzzle against the dream, inhaling as she got a feeling of what type of pony Discord had chosen for her champion. Her eyes widened as she realized what kind of pony she was dealing with and she staggered back, landing heavily on her flank.
“No,” she breathed, her wild-eyed stare boring into the dream. The light started pulsating in time with her heartbeat, slowly moving towards her as she tried to scoot away from it. “Not him.” She looked up at the wavering sky of the astral plane, her eyes pleading at for something to arrive and help her. “Why would you do this, Discord?” she whispered to the ethereal wind.
To her surprise, a dark chuckle echoed on the ethereal wind, seeing to wrap her in its malevolence as the serpent’s voice whispered into her ear. “Because I know it hurts you.”
Luna shuddered as the last flickering remnants of Discord faded, the vile snake returning to his stone prison. Having used up the power he had obtained from the chaos and conflicts that had occurred around Ponyville and Canterlot, he was no longer able to reach outside of the binds that sealed him.
The dream sat in front of Luna, staring up at her like an apple of temptation. Luna stared down at the dream, one hoof slowly stretching towards it. Discord knew exactly how to make her squirm. If she asked this pony for his help and he got hurt, Luna knew she would never forgive herself. She also knew she had no other choice.
Solidifying her will and her heart, Luna dove headlong into the young colt’s dream. For her sake, and the sake of Equestria as a whole, she would ask a young foal to willingly throw himself into the manticore’s den. And she would forever hate herself for it.