So I've been thinking, if your nature is to constantly change, can you change your nature?
There's a poem I picked up somewhere, I forget where, that goes:
"You cannot go against nature
Because when you do
Go against nature
That's part of nature too"
So I'm up against a contradiction, which are normally enormous fun, but... not today. The question is, if what you are is the engine of change, can you turn that on yourself to cease to be the engine of change, and if you do, does that create a paradox? Also, realistically speaking, what are the consequences?
I can't believe I care about consequences. Maybe I have changed.
I don't want to do it anymore. I want to give it up. I want to have what "normal" creatures have in their lives, at least to the extent of the basic consistency of their own selves so they know that barring magical interference they aren't going to sell out their friends. But I hate myself for wanting this because I promised myself millennia ago I would never be ashamed of who I am and I would never let anything make me want to be "normal", because normal is boring and boring is the worst possible thing in the universe. Except that I've just found out there are worse fates. It's not exactly boring to be a traitor who nearly gets your closest friends killed (and who, let's not forget, stands around and does nothing while the first being you ever loved and a being who helped take care of you when you were sick and never did you any harm and a being who hates you now but used to look up to you as a big brother... all get thrown into Tartarus. Why, that's not boring at all. It's just completely reprehensible.)
Am I allowed to get tired of it? Why do I have no sacred principles except the principle of "never give up chaos"? I mean, if I really had no sacred principles, then giving up chaos would be an option, wouldn't it? And if I'm going to have one sacred principle, then why not two, or several? And if I hate myself for betraying my one sacred principle, but I hate myself for who I am if I don't, well...
Now I really regret blowing up my thinking tree.
I wonder sometimes if this is the end. Chaos avatars are immortal and yet every past one of them died or had something happen to them, because otherwise I wouldn't be here. I never put a lot of thought before into the contradiction of being the heir to a position that makes you immortal. If chaos avatars don't die of old age and are incredibly hard to kill, what happened to the ones before me?
Well, I actually know what happened to most of them. Mayhem: Luna's mom killed him (technically Celestia's mom too but I always think of her as Luna's mom for some reason.) Which I strongly suspect was suicide-by-pony, given what I know about his last few years and what he did. Ar: may actually still be alive, for moderate values of "life". Dragons don't commit suicide, they just go to sleep. Forever, maybe. Pan: went worldwalking, never came back. Set: got possessed by Apep, killed the lover he'd spent centuries protecting, and... no idea what happened to him after that but given that he's not still around I suspect someone killed him. And he probably let it happen, if he managed to wrestle any control back from Apep (who I strongly suspect is responsible for Nightmare Moon as well, though to be fair, pretty sure neither I nor Sombra helped matters.) Completely unaware of what happened to Eris or Loki, mostly because up until now I didn't really care. If there were any before that, I'm not sure.
None of them lasted over two millennia. Congratulations, Discord, you're the first Chaos avatar to make it this far! Yay! I should tell Pinkie, have a party. Is there a prize? What do I win?
I am starting to think I've lasted this long only because of the millennium-plus as a garden gnome.
If the essence of chaos is change, then chaos must change, but if you change who you are so you're not chaos, then you can't really represent chaos anymore. So you do something stupid, and you die. Or you more or less kill yourself, even if you use proxies to do it. And then some other poor schmuck gets the job.
But I don't want someone else to get the job because quite frankly Chaos avatars are little shits and we could end up with another Mayhem. Or Ar. I'm the only one I trust with this, but since I don't trust myself anymore...
...this is wrong, this is all wrong, I'm not supposed to be like this. I'm not supposed to be thinking this way. Doing something chaotic and stupid is what I do, I shouldn't want to give up my powers or my life because I betrayed someone. Chaos has no loyalty. I used to want to be loyal but I gave it up for Chaos because Chaos is where my first loyalty has always been, but then logically speaking because Chaos has no loyalty that should mean I can betray it if I feel like it, right? But I'm not supposed to want to. But when have I ever cared what I'm supposed to do?
Ar wanted to save the world from what she thought was the worst thing ever, and instead she set it on fire and made matters infinitely worse for a lot of the ones she wanted to protect.
Set tried for centuries to protect Ra from Apep and ended up being the one that killed him.
On the other hand Mayhem had no loyalty to anyone or anything until he got us all killed, when all of a sudden he remembered he was a draconequus and wow, did that stunt ever backfire or what? At which point he killed himself. Well, came up with an enormously stupid plan to destroy all the ponies in Equestria with a volcanic eruption combined with an inland hurricane, which led to him getting killed, but I'm pretty sure it's the same thing.
So I guess the moral of the story is, don't be loyal to anything if you're a Chaos avatar, and if there's something you're actually loyal to that you don't recognize, you'll end up destroying it and wanting to die, but hey, the same thing will happen to you if you do recognize your loyalties, so the point is, don't be loyal to anything. Or viewed from another perspective, Fluttershy's killed me by making me want to have friends. Except I can't even hate her for that, because I actually do want friends. Maybe I was better off not knowing what it felt like, because I didn't know what I was missing, but now that I do know...
I don't want to live if I have to be alone and loyal to no one and care about no one and have no one care about me, for the rest of my life, ever again. I don't want to live that way. Chaos isn't worth it. Nothing's worth it.
But because of what I am, I'm going to destroy anything I care about sooner or later. As demonstrated by the fact that I just almost did.
...I need them to stop me. I need them to make it so I can't hurt them, without passing on the mantle of Chaos to someone else. Can't keep living like this, it'll break me and I'll change and I'll do something awful because I can't stand being like this anymore and maybe I won't even care by then. Can't lose my powers, they'll go to someone else. Can't die, they'll go to someone else. Can't become something else... that's the same thing as giving it up, they'll go to someone else. Can't get the Tree to turn me to stone.
I need to make my friends do it instead.