“Wakey wakey Rainbow Dash. It’s time to get moving!”
My first reaction over having everypony’s least favorite mix-and-match monster suddenly looming over me was anger, followed by a swift buck. Naturally, though, by the time my legs got there, he was gone.
“Dear me, Rainbow. One might almost think you don’t like me.” The smug smirk on Discord’s face vanished as he went on. “I’m afraid that doesn’t matter now, though. We need each other, my dear.”
“I don’t need you for anything, Discord! Just leave me alone, would you?”
Instead of wandering off like I’d hoped, Discord grabbed my head and pulled it up to his own. “That’s not true, Dash. You do need me. That is, unless you like the thought of being stuck here forever… well, for whatever ‘forever’ means now.”
“What are you talking about?” I snarled, then cringed at myself. ‘Bad move Dash, you don’t want to play his games!’
Discord’s face was disturbingly serious as he bent down over me again. “It’s quite simple, really. It seems your dear friend Twilight,” he said, spitting out Twi’s name, “has gone and gotten in over her head again. And this time, it’s even nasty enough to affect me. Look around you, my dear. Besides the two of us, who’s moving?”
Reluctantly, I did what he said. The answer to his question? Nopony was moving except me. “Discord,” I growled at him, “what have you done?!”
He held that chicken claw of his up in some kind of salute. “Not me, my dear. As I said, it’s your dear Twilight Sparkle who’s responsible for this mess. She really should know better than to play around with time magic like that.”
“Time Magic?” The words just sort of popped out of me. “That’s crazy! She said she’d never do anything like that again after that one time! What’re you really up to, you freak?”
He tried to give me that ‘sad dog eyes’ look, which is really creepy coming from him. “As much as it pains me to have to admit it, I’m completely serious. I don’t know what she was trying to do, but it seems dear Twilight managed to freeze time. And as much as I’d like to help, I can’t get things back to normal on my own.”
“Why would you even want to?”
Discord sighed and gave me a disappointed look. “Think about it, Rainbow. Do you realize how boring it’ll be to have everyone permanently frozen in time?”
That… made a strange kind of sense, coming from him. “I’m not saying I believe you, but if I did… you can obviously move around, and you got me moving. Why don’t you just go solve this little problem yourself?”
Discord snapped his claw, and in the space of an eyeblink we were outside the edge of Canterlot. He stuck his paw out and pressed it against the air. The sound it made, all sizzly like someone leaving a kabob on the fire too long, was nasty, and the black marks covering it when he took it away sealed that effect. I cringed; I couldn’t help myself.
“Canterlot’s too far gone for me. I can’t even set foot in it anymore; it’s all crystal-orderly now that nothing’s happening. I need, frankly, you. And you, my dear, need these.”
I stared at the thing he put down in front of me, a sort of clear ball filled with some kind of dirt. “What in Equestria is that?”
“That, my dear, is five hundred grains of the sands of time. Someday I might tell you what I had to go through to get them. For now, suffice it to say if you don’t have those, you’ll freeze too. And the instant you pick that ball up, the clock’s going to start ticking.”
“Ticking on what?” A really nasty thought was coming into my mind, though.
Discord verified it for me. “Each grain is one second, my dear. It’ll let you move once I drop my little protective bubble, but only until you run out of sand. After that’s done, you’ll freeze in place wherever you are, and we’ll all be out of luck.”
“I see.” I stepped over, and put my hoof on top of the ball. “GO!”
Discord froze. That’s the only way I could put it… once his little zone of chaos was gone, he was hit by the time freeze the same as everything else. I wasted a couple of seconds looking at him, then tore into Canterlot.
Do you know how big that city is? Even knowing Twi’d probably be in a lab somewhere, there were simply too many places I had to check. If anything other than me’d been moving, I’d probably have been leaving rainbooms at every major intersection as I sped my way around.
Twi wasn’t at her parents’ house, nor anywhere in the palace; those were the first two places I tried. She also wasn’t in any of the museums she kept talking about; and by the time I found that out, I’d burned about five minutes of my precious time. Seriously burned; they were sparking like embers on a fire, then disappearing.
I finally found a lab, off in the back corners of one of Canterlot’s big business blocks, with a logo I remembered seeing on some of Twi’s mail the last time I’d crashed into the library. I hit the door so fast I think it actually disintegrated around me on my way in, which was kind of cool, and sped through the hallways, the little flickers from that ball of sand eating away at my mind. Finally, with only a smidge of them left, I saw Twi, her horn touching some kind of metal ball, down a long hallway, and charged.
Five
The air in the hallway was really thick for some reason; I’m not sure why. It slowed me down, almost like it was pushing me away from the door.
Four
I finally managed to barrel past the thick air, but managed to clip my wing on the wall and started spinning. No time to correct myself.
Three
I turned my spin into an impromptu dive, flailing my legs in hopes of hitting the ball away from Twi as I went past.
Two
I could see the ball, just inches away from my hoof, and gave one final stretch–
One
I watched the last grain of sand flicker out of the ball, and my heart went out. An instant later, I felt as if I’d been hiding in the middle of a cloud when somepony thunderbucked it. Everything went bright white, and I hit the ground smoking. It took me a bit to realize that I’d done that.
When I looked up, Twi was standing straight on top of me. “Rainbow, what are you doing here? How did you get here? And why are you messing with this experiment? That was one of the most important things I’ve been working on!”
Twi turned her head and started to point her horn at that metal ball again; I panicked, and jumped on her to get her away from it. “Twi, for Celestia’s sake, don’t do it!”
“Rainbow, what has gotten into you?” I could tell she was hurt. I won’t say I didn’t care, or that it didn’t matter; it did. But I will say that, in that instant, it wasn’t important.
“I’ll explain everything, Twilight. Just please, don’t do this!”
I guess the scared look on my face was enough. “I’ll drop it for now,” Twi said, “but we’re going to have a long talk about this before the day’s over.”
Translation: I’m gonna get lectured. I’m gonna get lectured, and Twi’s gonna be mad at me. Not fun, but as a tradeoff for saving the world? Not bad, not bad at all.