Oh chaos above this hurts why am I even trying to write in this thing when I can't sit down?
Okay. That's better. I've got a cloud to sit on now. (Not cotton candy. Why why why do I pull out the damn cotton candy every time I face this bozo? I like cotton candy fine, but I despise repeating myself. This is a cloud of sunshine, and yes, I know, I'm hurt and my magic is drastically depleted and it's a lot more effort to make a cloud out of a substance inimical to cloud, like sun, but I need this. I need a reminder that when his power isn't working on me, I'm still creative, I've still got my imagination and my sense of style.) I've lost a lot of blood and a major limb, but it's growing back. But oh dear how slow it is. Yes, I know, cry you a river, when you lose a major limb yours don't regenerate at all, but you know, it's not like I haven't paid for my power. It's not like I didn't struggle to learn to control what cannot be controlled, it's not like I haven't spent most of my life being rejected by ponies for it, it's not like I didn't spend a thousand years in stone--
No. Calm. I have to stay calm. Which is usually the antithesis of what I'm going for but I've never liked letting rage or panic take over, and for some reason with two thirds of my tail missing and the pain that just won't go away, I'm not feeling the giddy humor thing right now. Oh sweet chaos I want to make him pay for this. It hurts, you cannot imagine how much this hurts. You have a tail but it's mostly a small bone with a lump of long stringy hair hanging from it. My tail's part of my body, as much as or even more than my legs. Or it was until some ass of a human took a whack at it with a sword. Words cannot describe how badly I want vengeance for this.
Which is the last thing I can afford to let myself want. If I come back gunning for revenge I'll play right into his hands. (I like that word, hands! Means a paw with extended digits and an opposable thumb, like mine. Hands hands hands. I'm writing this with my hands! Hahaha, ponies, you have hooves and your pets have paws but I have hands! Rather griffony ones, but hands nonetheless. Dear me I think I'm going into shock. I don't even want to think about how much blood I saw all over the ground.)
I've just conjured myself a plate of nice, rare dead cow meat to eat. What? It didn't come from a real cow! I conjured it! Don't give me that look, I'm an omnivore. I don't eat meat often because, well, because I don't! I don't need to bare my soul to you just because I'm writing a journal of my encounters with the damned Seventh Element of Harmony that doesn't exist. I have reasons and I don't feel like sharing them with you. The point is, no, I do not actually eat real cows, because dead cows in your mouth cannot dance the polka. This meat never actually belonged to a cow any more than the cotton candy clouds ever belonged to a cotton. I just need red meat to replenish myself right now because that is what omnivores do when approximately a third of the blood in their body ends up all over the grass and not in their bodies anymore.
I should probably not write when I'm loopy from blood loss. I'm not actually nearly as funny this way as I am when I'm in full command of myself.
I'm going to eat this and then I'm going to get some sleep and hopefully by the time I wake up most of the tail will have regrown and then I'll tell you ponies all about my big fight and how I ended up sadly separated from my tail.
THIS HURTS THIS REALLY HURTS I CANNOT GET ANY SLEEP BECAUSE I AM MISSING A TAIL I'VE TRIED HITTING MYSELF IN THE HEAD WITH ROCKS BUT THEY DIDN'T KNOCK ME UNCONSCIOUS I WANT HIM DEAD I WANT HIM DEAD I HAVE NEVER ACTUALLY WANTED TO KILL A LIVING CREATURE BEFORE I WANT TO HUMILIATE HIM AND BREAK HIS MIND AND THEN I WANT HIM DEAD WHAT IS HE DOING TO ME
I CAN'T BE LIKE THIS
I CAN'T KEEP WRITING IN ALL CAPS MY HAND IS STARTING TO HURT
BUT NOT AS BAD AS MY TAIL OW OW OW
WHY WON'T THIS STUPID THING GROW BACK! GROW BACK, TAIL! COME ON, PLEASE?
Just so you know, those wrinkly spots on the paper are not tears because I am not crying from how much this hurts. They are lemonade. I dropped my lemonade. I was fortunate that only a few drops of it got on my journal.
My head hurts. Wonderful. He's got me top and bottom. The head's probably dehydration and stress. I... may actually have to switch from lemonade to boring old water. Or drink a mug of conjured blood. (I do have the fang for it.)
I don't think a pony can lose as big a chunk from their body as I just have and live through it even if they're an alicorn. That was supposed to be a reassurring thought, but for some reason it's making me feel even worse.
I'm going to die. I can't do this. I lose so much of my intelligence and my creativity and my savoir faire when I'm facing him. He's going to trick me with some mindlessly obvious trick that a foal could see through, and I won't see through it because he won't let me, he'll fog my mind and make me an idiot and I'll fall for it and then he'll cut me to pieces with that damn sword and I'll die. I don't see how this ends any other way.
I've got to get the sword away from him.
I've got to stop confronting him directly. He wants me to be the villain? Fine, right now I want to be as villainous as I can be all over his flank, but there's no reason I have to be so blunt about it. Work from the shadows, do just enough to make him think I'm plotting and planning and he's going to get his big showdown eventually. Do some things that look really evil but aren't. I'll relocate some Ponyville ponies to the lost Crystal Empire where they won't be showing up for a couple of months, given that that enchantment's about to snap, and I'll leave in their place stuffed plushies of them, and Mr. Seventh Element of gaaahhh, Protection, oh it hurts my brain to even write that, will think I turned them into plushies. That evil enough for you, monkey boy?
My tail hurts so much. Do you know what kind of nerves are down there? Some of that region's an erogenous zone and he just chopped it off. Oh, my masculinity's still quite intact but the underside of my tail can be very sensitive under the right conditions except not any more until it grows back because he cut it off.
Well, except for the part that I cut off. Because the stump was glowing, and it burned, and the glow was crawling up my tail, and the piece he'd cut off was glowing and disappearing in a rain of firefly sparks and I was afraid all of me would suffer the same fate, and I tried to throw my magic at it but it was harmony magic, I couldn't make it budge and it was eating its way up my tail, so I amputated a chunk of it myself, with a perfectly chaos-compatible sword I conjured before I had time to have second thoughts about mutilating myself. Now the stump isn't glowing anymore, and I've successfully managed to get it to start growing back, but the pain. Oh chaos the pain.
How I wish I dared to get drunk.
Well. At least this just hurts like a tail that got cut in half and not like Harmony's slowly burning me alive from the tail upward. Focus on the positive, that's what I always say!
I need to get some sleep. I don't know how that's going to happen when my tail hurts so much and I don't dare take anything that might possibly impair my thinking or my judgement and my magic is so weak right now, but it has to happen because I cant fight him without a clear head. He'll take me apart. Literally.
Well, ponies, you'll all be thrilled to know that I did finally get some sleep last night (or possibly night before last, because I feel as if I might have slept an entire day), and that about half my tail has grown back, and it doesn't hurt anymore. It itches horribly, but at least the pain is mostly gone. So I have a clearer head now. And as I have reviewed this journal, I've realized what a terrible oversight I've made. I started writing this thing because I wanted ponies to know what my opponent is really, but I've never actually explained that! Dear me, it's a good thing I survived this encounter, because that would have been deeply embarrassing.
So let me tell you about how all this began, how I first encountered my enemy, what he is, and then maybe I'll get around to telling you what happened yesterday.
Over ten years ago, maybe as many as fifteen (I may have mentioned not being all that good at math, or telling time, especially when I'm stuck as a statue and can't see daylight), I felt a sudden surge of chaos right near me, so close I could almost touch it, and I felt the bonds that held me starting to snap. Not because of the chaos energy, but because the Elements of Harmony, frozen in stasis for so long, were waking up, and all they had done before they went to sleep was beginning to reset itself. I observed a little filly who'd caused that surge, powerful enough to hatch a dragon egg and force-grow the infant to nearly full size, Celestia's personal protégé, and I knew, that would be the next Element of Magic. And as I followed the threads of "destiny" (a concept I don't believe in, precisely, but there is an operating force on ponies that at least somewhat resembles destiny), I found another filly, a pegasus, who'd triggered that surge in the unicorn, somehow. And she was connected to others as well. It took a long time, but what else did I have to do? Being a stone statue doesn't really fill one's social calendar much. I traced the paths of destiny out from that pegasus and found her connected to a total of five fillies, including the one with such powerful, chaotic magic within her. Now, I complain frequently that math is unutterably tedious for me and I can't often be bothered with it, but I can count to six. I knew who my opponents would be, when my prison finally weakened enough that I could break free.
A garden is a peaceful, boring place... not much in the way of chaos there, sadly. Disharmony was easier to come by. I'd push as much of my power out through the bonds that held me as I could to make ponies irritable around me, usually whenever I could find a large group of them. And apparently, Canterlot Gardens was the must-see place to go for foal field trips, and it's incredibly easy to make foals turn on each other. It doesn't last -- foals are very volatile -- but I didn't need lasting disharmony, I just needed quick, powerful bursts, preferably accompanied by some chaos, and one thing foals are good at is chaos. Little by little I built up a reserve of power, waiting for the day when the bonds would be weak enough that I could break them.
When I wasn't gathering my energy, I observed my opponents. It was terribly difficult, because being in stone meant that I couldn't see, and while for some reason I could hear, it's apparently not the done thing to go to the Canterlot Sculpture Gardens to gossip about fillies from Cloudsdale and Ponyville. But I could walk in dreams -- I had to be more circumspect about it after Loonie came back, but I can do it in the daytime, and ponies take naps. So I studied my opponents, learning their strengths and weaknesses, preparing a means of destroying the harmony within them and between them so utterly that no one would be able to stand against me.
And then I finally did it. I broke free. I attacked them, turning their strengths to weaknesses, turning them against themselves and against each other. I filled the world with glorious Chaos. And within about a day or so, I was in stone again. About the only possible upside to this was that the new bearers were mortal, and once one of them died there'd be a gap as the others adjusted to carrying the load, and possibly an even longer gap after they all died, so I was looking at 120 years, tops, not another millennium. But I'll admit it, I was... well, after having to wait so long after I'd already waited so long, and after I'd tasted freedom and had it snatched from me so quickly, to say I was "very unhappy" with the situation was a dire understatement.
So when my bonds broke prematurely, when I felt Harmony itself shift and twist radically under me and a massive displacement wave of transformed information hit the world's mana pool and charge my batteries, I didn't waste any time questioning it. I broke loose and promptly held a party for myself... in Zebrica. Hadn't been there in a while, and one notable thing about Zebrica, it is halfway around the world from the Elements of Harmony. Oh, you can get so much mileage out of varying patterns! Ponies get mildly annoyed if you change their colors, but if you change a zebra's color and alter the pattern of their stripes, you've just tipped over the bedrock of their whole world! Hilarity, I tell you. I had to dodge a few shamans, because a really good zebra shaman can be as dangerous as an alicorn in the right context, but it's astonishingly easy to tell a shaman from another zebra; listen for the rhyming. And if they speak at a normal speed, don't stammer, and don't miss their rhymes, then they're an experienced shaman, which meant they were getting a no-expenses-paid tour of Minos before they could pull anything out of their saddlebags and throw it at me. I might possibly also have put a few on the gambling floor of a casino in Las Pegasus. What? Ponies are generous; I'm sure one of the casino staff unicorns would have been happy to cast a cloud-walking spell on a suddenly appearing zebra so they could safely leave the casino. Most zebras have large gold earrings, so I'm sure they found something to pay for their transportation down to the ground with.
But, of course, home is where the heart is, and I love my little ponies far too much to abandon them for zebras forever. Zebras don't scream and run around in circles nearly as adorably as ponies do. And zebras are remarkably difficult to drive insane. I suppose when you don't have the magic to micromanage every little bit of nature around you, and you also have to live amongst lions as a regular thing rather than encountering manticores only on trips to exotically chaotic forests, you learn to roll with the punches. It's sometimes fun to watch them grimly trying to play parkour with chaos, desperately trying to route around obstacles and keep going on with their day, and if you discord a zebra they lose their stripes, which is funny to look at, but it does make it remarkably obvious what you've done. The idea behind making calm ponies little raging balls of fury and cowardly ponies put up their dukes is to confuse and upset the ponies around them who don't realize what's going on, thus spreading disharmony. When everyzebra can look at your target and simply ignore every last thing the poor zebra has to say because they understand that she's not feeling like herself at the moment, it lacks that certain wildfire flair that making ponies disharmonious can trigger. It's as if someone keeps moving some of your standing dominoes before the ones you tipped over get there, thus causing your lovely domino falling wave to stop short.
So I came back home once I felt that I was fully rested, recharged and ready to go. And as soon as I was back within the borders of Equestria, I had a glorious idea. An amazing, wonderful, hilarious idea, one they'd never see coming.
I was going to do the exact same thing that I did the last time!
In retrospect... if I'd been in the habit of thinking about what I was thinking, maybe I'd have seen what was going wrong then. But it hardly matters. It might be better this way; if I'd recognized what he was doing before I'd understood how powerful he was, I might have made the mistake of trying to challenge him directly on that level. I don't think that would have ended well for me.
Still, have you any idea how humiliating it is to remember having the idea "do exactly what you did the last time with only minor changes" and remember it seeming fresh and original and deliciously unexpected? To be the Lord of Chaos, harbinger of change, spirit of disharmony, and be so unbearably dull and unimaginative as to repeat oneself, and think it would be exciting and fun? I could forgive myself for it if I'd been thinking of it as wittily ironic, perhaps a critique of the predictability of perpetual unpredictability, but no, I wasn't nearly sharp enough to think of that.
I stole the Elements of Harmony. (The spell protecting them was better this time; it had both Celestia and Luna's signatures on it, and Luna is good at traps. But when I decide to be patient and careful, I can be very, very good at disarming bombs. Stop laughing, that wasn't a joke. I actually can be patient and careful when I want to be; my problem's more with the fact that that is enormously boring, so I have to want something a lot to bother being patient or careful.) I stashed them at the Castle of the Two Sisters, hanging them back up in exactly the place they'd been when my dear, sweet nemeses found them in the first place, because "back where you began" could refer to the library where they first learned about the Elements or it could refer to the place where they first found them. (Or I could have hidden them in Celestia's castle, but that's a trifle too close.) Then I poured a big bucket of chaos all over Canterlot so that Celestia would summon the Element Bearers. (I'm lying. It was cotton candy with chocolate milk. See my frustrations up above, near where I was ranting about my tail. Or don't, because I'd kind of prefer you never read that again.)
Luna was asleep, of course, same as the last time. The last time I'd just bespelled her to stay asleep. This time I decided to have a bit of fun with her. I appeared to her in her own dreams -- where of course she's quite powerful, a dreamwalker on home turf is nothing to sneeze at, but I'm familiar with all her tricks -- and when she tried to wake herself up so she could alert her sister that I was back, then she discovered I'd bespelled her to stay asleep. So she came after me, and oh, was she ever ferocious. Pulled out all the stops. Even sent her alter ego against me, as a separate entity. It was loads of fun. Especially the part where I lured them into a lower dream level, disguising what I was doing with so much pyrotechnics, chaos, and innuendo-laden taunts at the two of them that they had no opportunity to notice how far down they were, and then spun them a completely normal, realistic, reality dream and let them wake themselves up into it. Well, let Luna wake herself up, I had no idea where Moonie went after Woona went for my bait.
See, Luna is the Princess of Dreams, and generally speaking more powerful than I am in a dreamworld, but I've spent a thousand years living in dreams I've been constructing for myself. I am much, much better than Luna at inventing a dream that feels real, because while she was able to walk all over the moon and gaze down at the world below, I had nothing but the dreams I made for myself. Now you may ask me, "But, Discord, you turn the real world into a surreal dream landscape every chance you get, why would you bother to learn how to create a realistic, orderly dream landscape?" And the answer is, if you walk in the door and there's already chaos, that's fun to watch, but it's purely a spectator sport. I am an artiste. I enjoy looking at the paintings of others, but what I truly love is to paint my own. So it is much, much more fun for me to corrupt an orderly, normal-looking world and turn it into chaos than to live in a world that's already chaos. I made reality after reality after realistic reality so I could at least pretend I was actually alive and moving around when I unleashed my havoc onto them.
It never really fooled me unless I was actually asleep, but I got it to the point where the only reason I knew it wasn't real was that I knew I'd invented it, and knowing that, I could feel the hollowness in it. Luna would be trapped in my dream for quite some time, believing she was undergoing normal, boring life as usual. Well, as boring as life gets when there's an imaginary moi running around, but Luna wanted to believe the Bearers would quickly solve my riddle and win the day, so that's what I gave her and she fell for it.
Then I put her in a diaper, an adorable little bonnet, and the most precious little baby nightgown, alicorn sized, and put her in a rocking cradle. Celestia met with the Bearers outside her inner sanctum, and led them in to have her discussion with them -- which was also astonishingly repetitive -- and went to open the new, improved lock for the Elements. And found me inside, dressed as a nanny, rocking the cradle with Luna in it. "Shh!" I said. "Don't wake the baby!"
Well what do you know but Celestia gave out an ear-splitting screech, right after I'd warned her to be quiet, too. "Discord! What have you done with my sister???"
"As if I'd do anything to sweet wittwe Woona!" I said. "Look how adorable she is, sleeping peacefully... you know, they're so much sweeter like this than when they're awake and screaming at you. Ever wish they could just stay sleeping forever?"
In the general chorus of dismay, I heard a masculine voice, to my surprise. "Luna! You evil bastard, if you've done anything to harm her--!"
"Why does everypony think I'd hurt Luna?" I complained, teleporting out of the Elements' sanctum and into the main hall, as I sent Luna's cradle to her old bedroom in the old castle. "I would never harm that sweet little face! But you might, if you make the wrong decisions."
There was a newcomer to the group, I noticed, now that I was directly facing off against them. A male human. I confess I was quite surprised; it'd been a long, long time since I'd seen one of those, and he'd have to be a worldwalker, or have fallen through a portal, to have ended up here. Immediately I decided to link the enchantment on Luna to the male human kissing her. That joke was so obvious, it was screaming at me to be done. "This is new!" I said cheerfully, twining myself around the human. "Tia, where'd you pick this one up? Magicless Bipeds R Us? Quills and Couch Potatoes? Or is he your mail order husband?"
"He belongs to all of us!" Rarity snapped. "And if you value your life, Discord, you'll keep your paws off him!"
"Oh my! Is Generosity getting greedy again? He doesn't look like such a prize. Though I'll admit he might be an improvement over Tom."
The human glared me in the face. "Back off, Discord," he snarled, and for a moment, I was afraid. Of a human.
Let me back up a bit here and explain why this is ridiculous even by my standards.
Your average mare is about three and a half heads tall, maybe four. Your average stallion is between four and five heads. Celestia towers over most of her little ponies at six and a half heads tall. This is the height of a tall human. Humans are bipeds, so of course if Celestia rears she's a lot bigger than the human, and a normal pony rearing would be within a normal range for human height. Now, my height varies depending on how big I feel like being this minute, but if I'm not doing anything to modify it, I'm ten heads tall bipedal and about seven quad. (Counting down from my head, of course. A lot of that's in my neck.)
Humans do not have hard, strong hooves like my goat hoof. They do not have semi-flexible, powerful hooves like ponies do. They don't have hooves at all. Their hands are like mine, dextrous, attached to arms that aren't very strong in comparison to their legs, delicate and relatively weak but very, very, very useful. However, theirs don't end in claws; they end in thin keratin plates that stick out the end like someone was trying to design them with claws and just couldn't draw. These are sharp enough to do a little bit of blunt-cut damage to human skin, which has no protection on it, neither fur, feathers nor scales, but against a creature with any protection whatsoever they aren't much. Their legs are stronger than their arms, but no match for a pony's, and their feet are shaped roughly like my dragon foot, with a lot less dexterity, less balance, and no claws. They don't have a tail at all. They don't have wings. And they don't have any magic.
This wasn't always true; their world had magic once, but something happened to it. I have no idea what, because I don't care. On the human homeworld nothing is sapient but themselves and some sea creatures, so they got to the top of the food chain by being smarter than everything else. They're not, however, smarter than ponies (not stupider, but not smarter), and they are most assuredly not smarter than moi. And they have no physical advantages over me whatsoever. They are shorter, they are weaker, they have no tail, they can't fly, no skin protection anywhere, their hands are as good as mine but have no claws on them, neither their legs nor their feet are as strong as mine, and while they are omnivores they have a lot fewer meat-eater teeth than I do. They have some advantages over ponies, hands and height, although ponies have magic so I think humans do worse on that deal as well. They're much more aggressive than ponies, but that just makes them more fun to taunt than they'd otherwise be, considering how weak they are.
So the thought that I would be scared of a human for even the tiniest of moments, that I would back away because an omnivore predator who is substantially less impressive in the predator department than I am glared at me... it's ludicrous. And yet it happened. I backed off.
But I covered for it, chuckling. "Feisty, aren't you!" I said.
"What have you done with Luna?" he growled at me.
"I just put her to bed, of course. She needs her sleep! Stays up all night, every night, poor dear."
He lunged at me, grabbed my beard and dragged my face down to the level of his. "Give her back!"
"Of course, of course. Just as soon as you ponies solve my riddle." I grinned at him. "And you, though I suppose you're not a pony at all, are you?"
"He's a human!" Pinkie Pie said.
"He's our human, so hands off!" Applejack snarled.
"Tell him that. He's the one grabbing me." I teleported out of his grasp and up into the air. "Ready to take notes, mes amis?"
Twilight actually pulled out a notebook and started doing exactly that as I recited. "A weighty choice is yours to make, if a sleeping princess you would wake. Follow the path of twists and turns, if the Elements' place you seek to learn. Once you've returned back to the start, then wake the princess with your heart. Or seek her out without a guide, if you believe my words are lies, and trust your power and your pride that you can cause the moon to rise."
And then I delivered a garden variety maniacal laugh and left them there.
Predictably, they had an argument over whether they could trust me or not, since I'd just basically thrown down a gauntlet and said "play my game, or assume you can beat me without playing." The human was all in favor of assuming my words were lies and going and looking for Luna directly, and Rainbow Dash agreed with him, but Celestia pleaded with him to reconsider, saying that as great as his power was, it was no match for mine, not without the other elements, and that if he arrogantly assumed he could easily beat me, he might be throwing Luna's life away. This seemed a little odd to me -- Celestia really should have known I don't kill ponies and I wasn't going to start with Luna -- but it worked; the human decided that I was so childish, if he refused to play my game I would kill Luna out of spite, and that was the meaning of the riddle.
In retrospect this is bitterly laughable, that he'd call me childish. But I didn't yet know what he was, or what he was doing.
Whew! Writing is exhausting work! How does that little dragon stand doing it all the time?
Now if you'll pardon me, I need to go do something subtle, yet so blatantly obvious that my idiotic enemy will pick up on it, so he knows I haven't forgotten I'm the villain here. I do declare, when am I going to find time to actually fight him for real if I keep having to go have pointless confrontations?
I have no idea what I'm going to actually do, but I find my most creative ideas usually happen that way. All I know about what I'm going to do is this:
It has to at least look villainous.
It has to not violate any of my personal codes of conduct, such as "don't turn ponies into stone" and "don't be a complete uncreative putz".
It has to stay well away from the Element of Protection And Also Rewriting The Laws of Magic And Also Swinging Really Nasty Swords.
It has to not bore me completely.
It has to have no chance whatsoever of me ending up in stone or dead before I'm done with it. So if I'm going to go play a game with somepony, it's going to have to be completely unfair. Le sigh. Well, I'm not doing this for entertainment primarily... though if I do things that don't entertain me, I risk losing myself, since "everything I do has to be amusing" has been one of my core values for millennia.
Terribly sorry to leave you all on the edges of your seats like this, but needs must when the devil dances, or so they say. I'm off to be a bad guy for a bit! Don't worry, I'll finish telling you all about Tall, Bland and Homicidal when I get back.
Or I won't. In which case you probably already know who he is. And it's probably too late anyway.
Arrivederci!