So.
I've gone back and edited some things. (Hopefully none of you are complete morons who feel the need to go back and check. As I'm fairly sure no one has been sneaking into the Grotto of Disharmony to get a quick read in, all of you are reading the version that I already edited.) You may have been wondering all this time about precisely how candid I've been and whether or not you can actually trust that anything I'm saying is true, and if it's really in character for me to go into such gory and humiliating detail while discussing matters such as the severing of my tail or my near-death in Winnie's jaws or whatnot. The answer is yes. I don't give a donut hole about what you think. But I've come to the realization that I have to write this for myself. That evidence suggests that possibly Future Discord might have no recollection of having any redeeming features whatsoever.
I knew this was a possibility. I've just re-read this entire journal and it's one of the first things I talked about, the fear that I might somehow be turned into an Evil Avatar of Pure Evilness, and forget who I truly am. I knew what happened to those poor stallions (again, having just re-read this thing, I've realized that I never actually talked about my final findings – the last I mentioned it, I was unclear as to whether the stallions disappeared or turned into mares. Well, after my conversation with poor Cheese Louise, who I'm fairly sure was actually a stallion at some point in her past that she doesn't remember anymore, I'm now quite positive Anon didn't kill them, he just sex-changed them. That's... better than the alternative, I suppose.) I knew, intellectually, what Anon's power could do. But now I know. Now I've seen my own history overwritten in the minds of the only ponies who remember, and I'm the only one left, and... maybe he only changed the universe's backstory once? Maybe he doesn't have the power to do it again, and since I was in stone at the time, I'm safe? How I would dearly love to believe that... but I don't feel safe. I don't think I'll feel safe until he's dead.
I went back and added details that I'd originally excluded on the grounds of how embarrassing they were to remember, let alone write about, because I need to remember everything. The good and the bad. I need to remember who I am, and if that includes remembering sobbing and running around like a chicken with no head while Anon's perversion of Harmony magic ate my tail... so be it. I don't have a choice. I never had a choice about any of this. I never wanted this fight in the first place.
Maybe I am writing this for somepony to read at some point in the future and figure out what's going on and what they have to do to save the world from Anon... but maybe I'm writing this so that my future self can remember who I really am.
But I'm at a loss now, because I could go back and edit and add all the embarrassing parts in, but every time I try to start writing about my encounter with Celestia, I either start to cry, or I get overwhelmed with rage and I want to rush right out and take Anon on again. Which very nearly just got me killed, again, and I know there are better strategies. I have a plan. I just have to enact it.
It's just that this—
Okay. Okay, I'm going to try something slightly different. I'm going to try being just a little bit more abstract about this so I can get through it without weeping, getting myself killed trying to murder Anon, or drinking myself into stupidity again.
I'm going to tell you a story.
Once upon a time there was a little boy who lived by himself, in the woods, minding his own business and not hurting anypony. Well, okay, sometimes he stole food from them, but it wasn't like they were exactly eager to shower him with baked goods and cheese when he asked. Besides, the faces they made when they saw that half their cart of apples was now apple cores were simply hilarious.
One day ponies decided that it was simply unacceptable to them that a creature who wasn't a pony could possibly be living a peaceful life out in the woods without being under total pony control – this was before the Everfree existed, and I'm sure you're all aware of the fetish ponies having for controlling nature – so they sent a team of pest control experts up the mountain to capture the little boy. Who had a bit of a speech impediment, due to having acquired a forked tongue on the same day he lost his family and every other member of his species, so he really hadn't had anyone to talk to since ending up with entirely new speech production equipment. Also, he'd never actually been taught how to speak pony, and the translation spells that everypony uses nowadays to speak to other sapient beings hadn't been invented yet. Still, while the boy couldn't communicate particularly well in pony language, it should have been immediately obvious that he was at the very least a speaking animal, a sapient being like ponies. Oddly, for some mysterious reason, the ponies didn't catch that. I'm sure it was just an honest misunderstanding and had nothing to do with massive hippocentrism, xenophobia, and financial incentives at all.
The little boy was sold to a circus, which was also perfectly capable of figuring out that he was a speaking being, judging from the fact that he understood their instructions well enough to do the complete and precise opposite, if it weren't for the fact that slavery was illegal and ownership of performing animals was perfectly fine. The boy made several attempts to escape his captivity, all of which resulted in beatings at the least and... well, let me put it this way, at one point they shot him in the tail with a harpoon on a chain so they could drag him back. I am far from the best at telling time but I believe he was something like eight or nine years old at the time. No one wants to hear stories of child abuse, so let's just skip forward a bit. Eventually the boy had actually become fairly good at performing – and had discovered that he'd have actually enjoyed it, quite a bit, if not for the part where he was being treated like an animal and all evidence of his sapience was being ignored, also if possibly there had been fewer beatings and more food. But the flame of freedom burns too hot to quench in some creatures' breasts, which is to say, he saw a potential opportunity to escape, he took it, he got several pony performers badly hurt in the ensuing chaos, and in response, once the circus owners recaptured him they put him in a cage to be displayed. He wasn't permitted to perform anymore; they kept him in chains, all the time. Despite the fact that at one point a veterinarian they'd had to employ to treat him had flat out told them he was sapient and should be freed or employed, with wages. But ponies are kind and harmonious and gentle stewards of all life, of course.
And then the circus was invited to perform for the king, and the king's daughter. And for some reason, when the boy was brought out in a cage to be displayed as a freak of nature, the young princess saw what nopony had been willing to see – that the creature in the cage wasn't a vicious, freakish animal, some sort of horrifying and nonsensical chimera-gone-wrong, but a child, just like her. (Slightly younger than her, actually, a fact which in later years she used to hold over the boy's head, frequently.) She demanded to be allowed to pet the creature, so the boy was pulled from his cage, in chains. The boy, naturally, decided that being in close proximity to what was obviously a very important pony was a potential avenue to get revenge on ponykind, take a hostage, maybe get free or maybe get himself killed but he was a bit beyond caring about that anymore, so he attempted to take the princess hostage. The mechanisms that kept him from using his own magic kept the magic of ponies from working well on him either. But despite that inauspicious beginning, the princess talked him down, persuaded him – despite the fact that he couldn't speak pony, or rather, by that point simply refused to, because if they weren't going to listen then what was the point anyway? – to let her go, and promised him freedom, and a home.
Then she talked her father into making this happen. I was there and to this day I do not know how that filly managed to persuade a fellow (who'd been within moments of killing the monster that threatened his baby girl) to instead purchase said monster, provide it with a bath and a large meal and a bed to sleep on, and take it in as a fosterling. I mean, I have a very good memory, and I the boy could understand pony perfectly well without being able to speak it fluently. So I remember what she said. I just don't understand why it worked.
And yet it did.
King Starfire gave me a room in the same wing of the palace as his daughters. I ate with the royal family, after Celestia persuaded me to stop raiding the kitchens, hiding the food in my room and using my magic to try to cook it. He gave me tutors, ponies who talked to me like I might possibly be a moderately intelligent being and who taught me how to speak. (I already knew how to speak, but try living on your own for four years as a small child after your tongue has mutated on you and see how well you can manage it.) I haven't admitted this to many beings, because it doesn't fit the whole concept of Lord of Chaos, but... I wanted to learn. I was desperate to know things. I wanted to know how everything worked (only partly because I wanted to take it apart); I wanted to see everywhere, meet everyone. Celestia and my tutors read me books, and I will never admit this to Twilight Sparkle while I'm alive, but... I love books. I hate trying to read them – I need to use magic to make them read themselves to me, because for some reason when I look at squiggly lines on a paper it hurts my head to try to make them resolve into meaning, probably a Chaos thing – but I love hearing them. I did torment my tutors, of course, because I had a rep to manage, and besides, they kept expecting me to wake up at a specific time of day and eat when ponies were eating and pay attention to what they wanted to teach me rather than what I wanted to learn about, but I loved them. I lived for spending time learning, and exploring. I dragged Celestia and Luna on numerous quests to ostensibly find their cutie marks (I may have pretended that a cutie mark was a thing a draconequus could get, but it wasn't as if it was even hard to persuade them). We were based out of what is now the Castle of the Two Sisters, in what was then the capital city of Equestria, Equuapolis... and occasionally we went as far as where Canterlot is now, on foot (mostly with Luna sleeping on my back, until night came, at which point she would miraculously wake up, demand all of the picnic sandwiches, and drive the two of us to keep going to wherever it was we were trying to find. Luna is a slave driver, I'll have you know.)
Starfire put up with all this. A bizarre chimera creature living with his daughters, dining with them, learning from their tutors, talking them into going on adventures for days at a time, and he accepted it. I never took that for granted. Never. Might have pretended I did, more than once, because who wants to get all emotional and sappy when you're a teenager dealing with adults? But I always knew his behavior was abnormal for a pony, and I was always grateful for how he treated me.
Everyone knew I was an absurdly powerful mage. He got Starswirl to try to train me. Starswirl knew nothing about chaos magic. He learned, though. He also learned to be less of a grumpypants. When I first met him he was very, very stern and strict and driven and almost a recluse. By the time I was done with him, he was playing pranks, traveling in time to deliver cryptic warnings to ponies, and experimenting with some really, really strange spells. I honestly think he learned as much from me as I learned from him, given how alien my magic was to anything ponies knew how to deal with. He was Starfire's right-hoof pony, the official court mage. Starfire told me I would have to take that position for Celestia, when she became Queen. I don't even understand why – Starswirl wasn't literally immortal but certainly wasn't dead when Starfire met his end – but he trusted me to do it. He trusted me to protect her, and the kingdom. And not only wasn't I related to him, I wasn't even a pony. But he didn't care.
I didn't actually have a biological father. Well, in truth, I did. I even know who he was, and met him once. (Twice, if you count the time traveling episode where he tried to kill me.) But draconequus clans had, even before the Cataclysm that killed most of us, always treated fathers as secondary. A female draconequus goes into heat, she sleeps with whoever she wants, she lays an egg, and all the fellows who slept with her give her yummy treats while she's brooding her egg because firstly, that might be their kid, and secondly, she might be interested in fooling with them just for funsies if she likes them enough, and without the estrus hormones driving her, the fact that she liked them well enough to boink them while in heat doesn't count. Her household consists of her, her kids, and probably a brother or two, who will share a household with her the way pony husbands and wives do, and care for his niece or nephew the way a pony dad would, while running off to have sexytimes with his own loose network of ladyfriends. Or she might live with her sister, or her mom, or her bestest ever buddy. We weren't all creatures of chaos in the sense that I am, but we were, once, all much more chaotic about our interpersonal relationships than ponies are. By the time I was born, there were so few of us that the entire species was considered my clan, every adult male who wasn't my uncle or older brother was theoretically a potential father, and to be honest none of them really wanted to put up with me anyway despite this fact. I can't imagine why not. I was a charming little baby.
So at the point where I met King Starfire, I had no knowledge of who my father had been or that this fact might even have ever been important – draconequui just don't put much emphasis on the concept of father. My mother was dead, my brothers were dead, my uncles were dead... I wasn't really pining for a father. It took me quite a while to figure out that some part of me had begun to see King Starfire as that. (Didn't help that my feelings toward Celestia were never brotherly, if you get my drift.)
Oh, and there's another thing. I couldn't describe what my feelings for Celestia were until puberty hit because "friend" didn't seem nearly strong enough and "sister" felt weird somehow and "object of my obsession" isn't really one word until you go through puberty, at which point it becomes the word "love". Not to be crude about it, but, well, okay, I'm going to be crude about it. I had it bad for her. The first time I ever woke up with the blankets wet and sticky from something decidedly not chocolate I was hoarding, it was because of a dream involving Celestia's tail. When I learned how pony reproduction worked, I decided I was going to father all of Celestia's foals, until it sank in that draconequui aren't biologically compatible with ponies without magical assistance and also I don't want foals. I turned all the cheese in Equuapolis (a very large city) into sculptures of Celestia. I was completely and totally obsessed with her, convinced we would be eternal soulmates, in both love and lust in that way teenagers get where the one they want for their special somepony becomes pretty much the only pony in existence. As I am completely awesome, it should go without saying that this was reciprocated on her part, but since I know most ponies have a xenophobic hatred and disgust for the bodies of beings that aren't ponies, I'll say it. She wanted me as much as I did her. In fact our first time together largely consisted of her putting the moves on me and me stalling for time, trying (and miserably failing) to hide how scared I was that we'd do this and then she wouldn't like it and she'd hate me (for the record this did not happen. Celestia was surprisingly patient with how incompetent I was my first time. Probably because it was her first time too. But practice makes perfect, they say, and we got in quite a bit of practice.)
And her father told her that she couldn't marry me, for political reasons, but she could have me for her concubine because that would keep her future husband on his toes. I am not making this up, I swear. Okay, so he never used the term "concubine", that was my contribution, but he told her that if she wanted me to go for it. Which she immediately proceeded to do. Tell you one thing about Celestia, she can be very, very decisive sometimes. (I sincerely hope Twilight Sparkle is reading this, because I do so hope the mental images of your precious perfect princess and me making the beast with two backs in her royal bedsheets are burning into your brain so deep it will go far beyond brain bleach to get them out, and may require brain hydrofluoric acid.)
He wouldn't let me go to war with him and his soldiers to fight the dragons, when it came to it, because friendly chaos isn't – I couldn't unleash the kind of chaos I'd need to win against dragons and keep it from affecting my pony comrades in arms. It apparently never occurred to him to send me alone. Celestia thought of it. My lover was willing to send me out by myself to risk my life in combat, once her father was dead and she had taken the throne (though not the title – she refused to be coronated as Queen, insisting on being a Ruling Princess)... because she trusted me, and because she needed me, but also... because I wasn't her son. I didn't find this out until after he was dead. Starfire couldn't bear to let me risk my life alone, without pony assistance, because I was the closest thing to a son he had.
He's been dead for over two thousand years and still sometimes I hear his voice, laughing at one of my jokes, or that annoying overly patient tone he got with me when I turned a few chests' full of gems in the Royal Treasury into chests full of donuts, or what he said to me right before he went off to that final battle, the last thing I ever heard him say. I never married Celestia – wouldn't have if I could have, marriage is the ultimate triumph of orderly society over the chaos of love and I won't support it – but I consider him, at the very least, my father-in-law. Sometimes, when I'm not dwelling on the unfortunate implications of what it would mean for my relationship with Celestia... I do, truly, think of him as my father. He's certainly more of a father than the creature who actually knocked my mom up could ever have been.
Yeah, okay, those damp spots on the page aren't actually lemonade. Move along, nothing to see here.
So you may be saying at this point, "Well, Discord, it's true that you're enormously hot and I'd do you, but why should I believe that Princess Celestia ever did, when the two of you are sworn enemies? If you were lovers, how did it ever end up that she had to turn you to stone?"
Umm... mistakes were made?
It turns out that when you hate everything about the concept of government, and governing, and are ideologically opposed to any manifestation of law, order or control whatsoever, that maybe your best career path does not involve taking over Equestria and trying to rule it on behalf of your dead lover and her little sister, even if you are afraid that if you don't, the total idiots that are left behind will get all of ponykind killed by the creatures who killed them, and you. Also maybe you're not thinking your clearest right after returning yourself from the dead for the first time ever and ascending to the position of a godlike entity responsible for spreading and promoting Chaos and Disharmony so that magic will survive. Also possibly when it turns out they're not dead, maybe your response should be more like "Oh, how wonderful, you aren't dead! Yay!" and not "Well, if you hadn't run off and abandoned me I wouldn't have taken over and you totally deserve it for leaving me to think you were dead and finders keepers, I'm not giving you your ponies back."
So I have abandonment issues. Trust me, you'd have worse mental damage than that if you'd lived my life.
I've... sadly come to the conclusion that... ugh... ponies are somewhat better off under Celestia's rule than they were under mine. Don't get me wrong, first chance I get I'm still overthrowing her and Luna and taking over again, but I'm not as hung up on ideological purity as I was when I was a young fellow. I'll still let the trains run on time, mostly. Once I make sure the Elements can't be used against me ever again – this might be a challenge to pull off without actually harming the Bearers, but I'm working on it – I'll let Celestia and Luna continue to handle all the dull, boring aspects of government, instead of eliminating government completely. I'll just have a legalized veto power over anything challenging my decisions to cause chaos. And I don't think I'm going to lean as much on disharmonizing ponies as I did the last time, because, you know, been there, done that. I'll try to work out some kind of hybrid approach. I mean, I don't actually want ponies to be miserable, but I don't want them so dependent on harmony and order and boring sameness that they panic at a bunny stampede. You know, in my day, ponies could handle a hydra stampede without panicking. Running away, certainly, they did that, but they didn't panic. They were a lot better at rolling with change and adapting to circumstance than today's ponies are... but today's ponies live longer, suffer from fewer violent crimes, and have better teeth. I... admit, in some ways I like the change, now that I've had a chance to be alive and free and walking around amongst them for a while.
At the time, though... rigid class system, much stronger racial prejudices than they have today, worse xenophobia, and the fact that Celestia and Luna had just been killed (I believed) for trusting in friendship and peace and honesty. I started by trying to run things the way Celestia would have run them, but after you have to terrorize your nobles and even kill a few unicorn assassins to make the point that you are in charge and would rather not be assassinated again, you're going to fall into a pattern of dictatorship unless you shake things up, and there was no way I was willing to turn into a dictator. So I tried to introduce the joys of chaos into the lives of ponykind, which they didn't appreciate, and, well, things happened. If Celestia and Luna could have been bothered to get a message to me somehow, maybe things would have been different, but I guess I can kind of see their point that they saw me die in front of them and had no idea I could come back from the dead. (To be fair I didn't either, until it happened.) It was really just a whole lot of misunderstandings and maybe now that we've all gotten older and wiser the three of us could sit down and hash things out so that I'm in charge but I deputize anything having to do with law and order to them, and maybe we can get something going with a balance between chaos and harmony. I don't have to have everything my own way all the time. Just most things, most of the time.
Of course this is all a pipe dream because Anon's going to kill me
Of course none of this will be possible until I find a way to defeat Anon and reverse the changes he's made to our world, but I'll figure out a way to do that. Somehow.
You may possibly have guessed that I am stalling.
I – just – this is so hard. How can I
Every time I think about what she said I
I'm sure you think I'm overreacting but you see, almost nothing hurts me personally. I'm the Lord of Chaos! If you manage to successfully insult me, and it's amusing, good show! If you do it and it's not amusing, I can laugh at you for how bad you are at coming up with insults. I don't stand on ceremony, I don't demand to be placed on a pedestal (in fact the thought of being placed on a pedestal gives me horrifying flashbacks), I don't insist on maintaining Dignity and Gravitas. If you think I'm a silly, trivial clown or a pathetic excuse for a would-be tyrant or hopelessly soft and stupid, that's fine, you can go right on thinking those things while I turn your home to gingerbread and set ten-head-long ants on it, or cast a spell on you so every time you open a door it leads to a completely random place and that includes the door you just went through. Almost everything in life is funny, if you look at it from the right perspective, and if you try to pull one of the few things that isn't funny on me, like say stabbing me in the gut with a shard of Order, well, I'm powerful enough to crush you like a bug and laugh while you cry about it. Things roll right off me like strawberry milkshake off a pegasus' wings.
This is the first time that – and it hurts because it's a lie but she believes it – and what it says about what she thinks of me now that she believes it -- and it means I'm the only one who remembers –
Okay. Okay, I'm wasting my time. I need to do this. Just, bite the wax tadpole and write.
Any minute now.
Soon as I finish fixing myself snacks. And walking the eels. And I do believe I have to dust the vestibule! There's not nearly enough dust in it.
All right, let's do this.
As I mentioned above, I'd decided to go taunt Celestia a bit, because why should she miss out on all the fun? During the time I unruled Equestria, it was one of my more entertaining pastimes – go annoy Celestia! She was so much fun to annoy.
See, even during the time period when we were, shall I say, intimate, I watched Celestia change from a fun-loving kid to a very, very serious mare. Heavy is the head that bears the crown, and when Celestia was first made Ruling Princess, there was no diarchy. Luna was her heir, not her co-ruler. I tried my best to keep her spirits up, but, well, one of the things that was bringing her down was the fact that she was sending me off to fight dragons and I kept having these, uh, episodes. I don't even know what to call them. I wasn't the chaos avatar then, just an extraordinarily powerful (not to mention sexy) chaos mage, but when I went into combat with the dragons, I was routinely using more power than I now know is safe for a mortal mage to wield, no matter how talented they are.
I'd been deemed by my fellow draconequui the Principle of Chaos before they all died. This sounds like a bigger deal than it is; a draconequus Principle is close to what a pony cutie mark is, in that it dictates how your magic works. I'm sure you've realized that most unicorns can't do anything interesting with their magic except to use telekinesis and cast spells that let them do what the picture on their rump says they should, but the unicorns who can wield the Element of Magic have cutie marks based on magic – or on objects in the sky, which somehow symbolizes magic, in some bizarre pony way – and can learn to do pretty much anything. The same was true for draconequui. I had an older brother who was the Principle of Speed; all his spells were built around going really fast. I'm sure Rainbow Dash would have thought he was awesome. My Principle, however, is Chaos – and as I mentioned earlier, chaos is magic. I'd had a connection to chaos ever since that day, one that just got stronger over time. But I was mortal, I had limits, and I kept pushing them. Routinely.
So I'd come back leaking magic, trailing stinging butterflies that came into spontaneous existence only to turn into glass snowflakes that fell up and then into marzipan keys that could unlock anything for the five seconds or so they existed, and... well, I'm informed that I kept saying things that weren't entirely rational. Such as "the world is a soap bubble, it would be so easy to pop it, don't let me pop it" and things like that. To be quite frank, I was losing my mind. I thought I knew how to control chaos, but I was a mortal chaos mage trained by a harmony mage, so obviously I didn't know what I was doing, and I was in a situation where I'd die or all the ponies I cared about would be conquered and eaten if I didn't push myself beyond safe limits. I was never much for safe limits anyway.
Anyway, I digress. So here's Celestia, barely out of her teens, still grieving for her father, trying to ride herd on a court of nobles all of whom were quite certain they knew more about how to conduct a war than she did, dealing with a sister who shouldn't have had magic at all exploring dream magic (did I mention they weren't alicorns then? They weren't alicorns then. Celestia was a unicorn, like her father; Luna was a pegasus, like her mother. Tell me this shocks you.), a coltfriend who was quite possibly going insane, a mentor who kept vanishing for weeks or months at a time (he was time traveling, but he couldn't be bothered to tell us that), and dragons who wanted to invade Equestria, take it over, and turn the ponies currently residing within into feedstock. I watched it change her. I watched her stiffen up under the weight. And after we had our little misunderstanding and I came back as the chaos avatar and she came back as an alicorn, I saw her grow harder, tougher, colder. Mostly that was my fault, I admit, but frankly I did her a favor. If I hadn't given her and Luna so much combat training, they'd never have been able to deal with creatures like Sombra and Tirek on their own.
I saw her deal with petty warlords who thought they could use my beautiful perpetual Chaos as a cover for small dictatorships where they enslaved the ponies within. I saw her deal with opportunistic quetzalcoatls who thought chaos means never having to face the music for stealing ponies as slaves. I saw her set a raiding party of caribou on fire one time, mostly because what Luna would have done to them would have been crueler. Of course, when I was made aware of poachers attempting to take my ponies or ponies violating my Rule of Unrule, which is that no one gets to rule anything, I handled them myself, except when I felt like a really great show, when I'd arrange for Celestia or Luna to magically find out about the threat so I could watch them fight. Those mares are poetry in motion in battle, let me tell you. Also incredibly sexy. Which I'd never do anything about in Luna's case because euw, little sister, but Celestia... well. Fantasy is free, and it wasn't like I was telling her that I was still using her image in my personal-time fantasies. Well, not telling her very often, anyway. Though white coats do show the most amazing blushes.
The thing I found most delightful about watching my two dear ladies whale away on our mutual enemies (and occasionally my supposed friends, like the time another chaos mage bargained with me for power and knowledge, and I gave him some, and then I backstabbed him and sold him out to Celestia and Luna because his voice was annoying me) was the contradictory nature of their demeanor when faced with their enemies. Luna, alicorn of dreams and stars and cold moonlight, burned with fiery passion in combat. And Celestia, alicorn of the sun, was so very, very cold against those she despised, so very measured and calm and ruthless.
And then I'd show up and annoy her and she'd get so flustered and angry! Fighting dark mages who'd fought their way to the surface out of Tartarus and wanted to feed their magic with the blood of the living, she barely ruffled an eyelash against. Cold, calm, near-emotionless perfection. Fighting me, she'd yell, and paw the ground with frustration and anger, and sometimes descend to totally childish levels like using her magic to make mud pies and throw them at me when I pied her in the face. She'd turn red, and huffy, and when I teased her with particular types of innuendo she'd turn even redder, and sometimes she'd hit me. Like, with her forehoof. Sometimes I'd tickle her, and when she stopped writhing and laughing after I let her up, she'd start crying. Seriously? You lose a foreleg in combat against an Ursa Major, and you just keep fighting even as it slowly grows back, but you cry because I tickled you?
She never turned that cold face to me. Never. Oh, she tried, but I could always annoy her out of it. And when I was in stone, I watched, by walking in pony dreams, as she got even better. Harder. Stronger. Colder. She faced off against Sombra and the atrocities he committed and the things he did to Luna's heart without a ripple on her face. I knew she had nightmares about it, I knew she was terrified of many of the threats she fought, or griefstricken because she hadn't been able to save everyone, but in the dreams of the ponies who saw her, she was impeccable. Yet the moment I broke out of stone, she had a panic fit, paced around debating with herself out loud as to whether or not to wake up Luna, decided not to, called her highly trained crack team of six civilian mares barely past college age if that, and had a near-breakdown when she discovered I took the Elements. It's a point of pride with me. Tia can hide her emotions against any opponent but Nightmare Moon and me, and Moonie just made her cry a lot. She's like a perpetual motion machine of disharmony when it comes to me; the chaos roiling off her of conflicting emotions, the juicy feel of anger and fear and sadness and you know what, I'm pretty sure there's still a little lust buried in there somewhere, plus the humiliation I generally inflict on her, is so powerful she charges me up just by seeing my face. Luna's got negative emotions in her aplenty when she sees me, but not disharmonious ones – she hates me and she's angry and she wants to kill me. Negative, yes, but perfectly aligned and harmonious with each other. But Celestia...
I don't think I'm fooling myself. I'm very old, and very experienced, and I can sense emotion, and hers is raw even after a thousand years. I'm pretty certain part of Celestia still loves me. And the rest of her is utterly furious with me. And oh my, if I were talking about this under any other circumstances, I might need a cold shower by now. Why, yes, ponies feeling powerful and contradictory emotions toward moi turns me on, I'm not ashamed to admit it. Besides, she's beautiful when she's angry.
Oh, my Tia, what's he done to you? All your beautiful disharmony gone, replaced with a ceramic mask of mindless happiness and that icy cold...
Right. Stalling again.
I went to see Tia, to taunt her and annoy her. I came in when I knew she'd be getting ready for bed – her schedule, sadly, is like clockwork – and found her wearing a nightgown and reading a book. For a moment I didn't even say anything, just absorbing the sight of her. So relaxed, free of the weight that burdened her, at least for a moment. So calm and peaceful.
Really, I couldn't have resisted spoiling it even if it wasn't what I'd come here for.
I teleported onto her bed and laid back, arms behind my head and both hoof and paw firmly planted on the silken comforter. "Oooh, this is nice," I said. "Perks of being a princess, huh?"
She turned – and what I saw in her eyes was the one thing I had never seen in her eyes when she was looking at me. But I didn't recognize it, yet.
"Discord," she hissed, coldly, but with venom. "You dare tread in my very bedchamber?"
"Well, it wouldn't be the first time," I said.
She fired a blast of magic at me. I hadn't been expecting it, and teleported out of the way just in time. Not that she could actually have vaporized me with the solar plasma the way she'd just destroyed her bed, but it would have hurt.
"Ouch! What's got you all riled up?" I asked.
"Insolent, monstrous creature!" She cast another spell, turning her head rapidly toward a stack of scrolls, the first one of which disappeared. "I've summoned Anon to deal with you," she said, "but I am fairly sure I can occupy your attention until he arrives."
She threw a teleport shield up around her bedroom and fired three more shots at me in rapid succession. I could break the teleport shield, but Celestia was crafty, and liked to plant traps; I had a suspicion that if I simply broke the shield without unraveling it, it would rebound on me in some unpleasant way. This was really shocking me. Was she that upset that I'd held her sister prisoner for two weeks? It wasn't as if I'd harmed Luna. But it seemed like Celestia was sincerely out to kill me, and in all the fights we'd ever had, I think that happened maybe twice, both times after I did something she considered particularly egregious, though I can't be bothered to remember what so it couldn't have been too important. What had I done recently to warrant this?
"Oh, you're angry when you're beautiful," I said, in between teleports. "Was it something I said? Or is it my breath? Oh, I knew that garlic kimchee in wine sauce was a mistake!"
"Surrender, Discord, and we will return you to stone," she said, in that loud declarative voice she used to use to challenge others on a battlefield, the voice she used to tell me of the Elements the first time she used them. "Refuse, and you will die."
"What the—" Keep in mind, the whole time this conversation was taking place, she was firing bolts of magic at me, destroying her own bedroom, but she wasn't working up a sweat doing it; her attacks were methodical, fast but not panicked, powerful but not enraged. I had never seen her like this with me. Only with others. I wasn't retaliating, just getting out of the way. "Celestia, what exactly have I done to inspire such bloodlust? You never used to try to kill me!"
"You. Dare. Even. Ask." She cut off the end of each word, crisp and sharp. But while her voice certainly had decibels to it, her tone was still even. Cold. I realized then that this was the version of her that her opponents who weren't me, and weren't Luna, had always faced.
Why? I'd done nothing to deserve such hatred, I thought. Where was this coming from? Of course, I could have guessed the answer, but Anon was in Ponyville and Celestia was in Canterlot. Was there no limit to his area of effect on the ponies? I didn't want to believe he could exert such influence over her from so far away.
"Yes, actually, I do dare ask." By now I was getting angry. Celestia might be projecting cold rationality as she assaulted me, but she'd still forgotten who she was dealing with. I noted the spell to prevent me from removing her body parts, and summoned a tiny dimensional pocket – rather like a dimensional sock, actually – to put over her horn. I wasn't going to be able to get her horn off her unless I took the time to unravel the spell, but with all of her magic going into another universe, Celestia effectively had no horn. She put up her forehooves to try to rip it off, but see, a warp in space-time isn't actually a thing you can touch, even if I put an illusion on it to make it look like an orange and green striped sock. It wasn't coming off without magic.
"How dare you," she hissed. "You slaughter our father in front of us – with Luna a mere child – and wonder why I should want to destroy you?"
For a moment I was sure I hadn't heard her right. "I— what?"
"Murderer," she said, and it would have been a snarl if it had been less toneless. "How many ponies' blood is on your hands, Discord? How many did you kill in your chaotic games?"
I took a step back. This made no sense, and not in a way I liked. "I – I didn't kill ponies for fun. I didn't kill ponies at all! Celestia, the dragons killed your father, don't you remember?"
"Don't lie!" That one was a snarl. She charged me, apparently planning to gore me with her extradimensional horn – which was actually a fairly clever plan, since being outside of reality it would phase right into my body, but my natural levels of concentrated chaos could disrupt even my own spells, and it might spontaneously break down. Which would destroy her horn, but it would hurt me badly enough to disable me until Anon showed up. I barely managed to dodge out of the way. As she charged past me, I levitated, twisted and dodged away, so I was on the other side of the room.
"I'm not lying! Celestia, don't you remember?"
"I remember his blood dripping from your claws, Discord," she said. "I remember the mad grin on your face, and the sight of his flesh in your teeth. I swore then I wouldn't rest until I had stopped you, or killed you."
"That didn't happen—"
"Murderer! Liar! Monster!" She flipped up wingblades that apparently she kept stored conveniently behind the tapestry she'd nearly crashed into when she charged me, and flung them with some pretty painful accuracy at me. One of them even hit me in the shoulder. "Close your lying mouth, chaos lord, I won't listen to your poison."
"But Tia! Don't you remember our childhood together?"
"Your sick jokes amuse no one but yourself."
"No, you – This isn't just a joke! Don't you remember? I loved you!" I screamed.
She laughed, without any genuine mirth. "As if a monstrous thing like you is capable of being loved, or of loving in return."
But – she was the reason I knew I could be loved. The fact that she loved me was why it never hurt me when ponies mocked my appearance, because I like what I look like, and Celestia liked what I look like, and why should anything else matter to me? She was the reason I knew I could love. She was the reason I knew I hadn't always been a monster. Because yes, I know I'm not the good guy, I know disharmony will never be well liked by definition, I know I cause pain and I enjoy it and that makes me at least somewhat monstrous. But I've always known that that's not all that I am, that I made the choice to turn away from love and sappiness and being the "good guy", that it wasn't made for me. That I could go back, maybe, if I wanted to, which I don't, but the option exists.
I couldn't handle this. I couldn't handle the thought that she remembered nothing of our childhood together, nothing of the love we'd had once. And... I've killed some ponies, in self defense, and I've killed creatures that were not ponies, but never without regret, never with joy. I've never torn a pony apart with teeth and claws. (Or, well, anything really.) And Starfire was more of a father to me than the actual one, even if I never called him father and he never called me son.
The way she remembered him dying is the way he died. But it wasn't my teeth and claws that rent him apart, it was a dragon. And I was the one who scryed the battle and saw him die, not Celestia. And I never showed it to her, though I couldn't hide from her that the dragons ate him when they sent back his armor via dragonfire transmission and the claw scratchings in his breastplate said "DELICIOUS".
And in the end, I was the one who avenged him. I was the one who turned them to mindless animals and set them to tearing at each other in mad greed, I was the one who filled them with terror and made them dive to the bottom of lava pits, to be carried off by magma currents and stay buried for all time, I was the one who pinned them under the ocean to drown, I was the one who set mothers to eating their own eggs and then seeking out others' with an addict's desperation. So okay, yes, I was monstrous, I had blood on my paws, but it was to avenge him, not to kill him. It was to protect ponies, not murder them. And I paid for it, anyway.
"You're wrong," I said, my voice cracking, my eyes starting to burn, but I wasn't going to let her see it, I wasn't going to let her make me cry in front of her, not when Anon had made her into his puppet – not by exerting influence on her in the here and now, but by changing her memories, making her believe that I who was her first love had never been anything more than a demonic enemy to her. All the centuries we'd fought, and she'd always remembered what we once shared, and I'd known that, every time I encountered her. Every time she turned red with fury or embarrassment, every time I flustered her, humiliated her, made her laugh or cry or throw mud at me, I'd known that our love was still in there somewhere, that I mattered to her. That I could still get to her.
And it was gone. Nothing in her eyes but the same ice cold she showed all her other enemies.
The only two creatures in existence who remember my childhood, who shared it with me, and it's gone. Some of the things Luna had said made more sense now. It must have affected her too. Neither of them remembered me as anything other than a bestial killer, when I'd never been either, not to them, not to ponies. Sure, I was cruel, but I wasn't that.
I wanted to hit her, to grab her by the throat and shake her and demand that she remember, but this wasn't her fault. I couldn't shake her senses back into her. It was his. Anon's.
And she'd summoned him to come kill me.
Her teleport shield hadn't been hardened against flight. I smashed open her balcony doors, running on all fours, and took to the air. A few pegasi Royal Guards chased after me, until I gave them 2-second chicken wings – stubby little wings that couldn't fly, for two seconds. See, even now I don't kill. Even when it would be so easy to be the monster she thinks I am, the monster Anon wants me to be, because I want to smash the world and everything in it, I want to watch ponies keel over and die because damn them, why do they get to have happiness, and friends, and love, and I get nothing, and what very little I have has just been taken from me? Nothing left but my own memories, nothing to tell me that what I remember is real. What if I am nothing but a monster, what if I made up a whole fake set of memories while I was trapped in stone so I could believe that once in my life, I was loved?
No. No, I'm not going there. I already tested to make sure this is reality, I'm not going to question my own memory. I have proof of the things Anon did.
And I'm not going to let myself be a monster. I'm not going to kill ponies. I'm not going to follow his false notion of my own past, that he's forced onto Celestia and Luna somehow.
But I am going to kill him. And I'm going to go do it now.